it was all starting to happen, had been happening for some time (from ‘five days…’)
and what more could happen would have been something else if not for her toothless grin. gum drop we called her because she would smile at the slightest thing that was just too fast to recognize. whenever we thought her all figured out, she’d spit out some rapid garbled pieces of wisdom and we, in return, would garble nonsense.
weren’t we the ones who were supposed to be teaching her something? done up in pigtails that shot up from her skull, she looked like an alien bunny in a one-sy inches long of her toes. the best would be the apple bites, that were always too monstrous but somehow, with cheeks packed, her lips could pucker tight to keep from chewing out loud.
this is life with her, between diaper changes and sleep, this infant turning to child.
Category Archives: general
i was once told insane
i’ve said, written this, time and again, how a friend of mine, while in the midst of working through what he believed were some severe issues, had read a batch of my writing, some of the strong experimental stuff i had been writing just before i met up with Blitz, he said to me, with a bit of a gleam in his eye, “how does it feel to be insane?”
and although much of the passion is gone, i can still see it now and then, that madness to writing, or rather that madness i like in myself when i am writing mad things.
and i think that’s what i’d like all the time, that kind of automatic freefall, moving it along more and more off center, immediate imagination, disregard for waking logic, synaptic semantic roulette. but, i also feel that there has to be a catalog of this life i am living, detailing my life somewhere to be remember somewhen and hopefully some other someone than myself.
is the writing itself enough of a marker. can it be thin enough to see what life was happening?
when had there
when had there been a time when all the cliches were new?
when had there been a time when every word we thought was clever and fresh and never spoken before?
prowling the night like cats, lion kings on a quest stalking the streets, hopping trains. children old enough to envision just the edges of a future.
and now, mired in the present, disentangling myself from a future that i no longer look forward to, fearing it, wedging a foot between its chin and neck, holding it at bay.
i look at my daughter and i can see my youth all over again and sometimes, especially when she does one other thing she had never done before, sometimes it’s more than well worth it.
order of preference
when they’re first born, they’re miracles, needy, noisy fragile little miracles of flesh. nervous and scared to be alive.
then they grow a little, flap their limbs, learn to turn over, listen to the nervous world that is suddenly around them.
soon they start grabbing things and pull themselves along. up they go, up, up and away, knocking down everything in their stumbling path.
little pets they become to whom you teach stupid tricks. clap your hands, say mommy, say daddy, please and thank you, come here, no, no, that’s garbage, that’s daddy’s, that mommy’s and so on and so on.
you chase them just to keep them from growing up any faster.
affair chronology
i had decided to commit my life to writing when i was 20. i had a good teacher at the time, a very guru-like relationship that healed and broke all sorts of things.
i met my future wife towards the end of it and struggled through a graduate school whose politics overwhelmed me. i learned more about things i did not need to know, and with my passion bent, writing became a chore i abadoned.
i keep coming back to it however like a reluctant lover to his mistress and i thwart her everytime. i visit briefly, get my fill, plant a kiss and i am gone for months at a time. she is no longer an easy addiction i can afford.
expecting him although at the time
the problem is that writing takes time. It takes a toll. It isn’t just a stream of brilliance, effortless and meaningful, although for some reason, always in hindsight of course, I remember it differently. But seriously, that’s the number one problem with writing; it takes time: it takes time to do, it steals time away from living to do it well. While writing you cannot live (shamelessly maligning Blanchot here), but in order to write you have to live sometime (i.e. ‘Write what you know…’). And I hate it taking me away from this distraction of a life I am living.
A funny little man showed up my door today. I had been expecting him although at the time, I had completely forgotten. A little old man was at my door and I knew he was Jewish before looking at him because his name had all the right vowels and hiccuping consonants that Jewish names sometimes have. And when I opened the door, my mother was peaking through the shutters whispering, ‘Who is that man?’ And he shuffled in muttering his name, asking which way he could go in, either up the stairs to our apartment or into my parent’s home. I pointed into my parent’s kitchen and he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘well that’s as good place as any.’
He was going to give me a ‘paramedical’ exam: draw a little blood, take my blood pressure, ask for a urine sample. It was for the life insurance policy I had taken out, given that my wife and I were going to soon be buying a home. He set up his tools, a cardboard box of plastic paraphernalia, a pair of rubber gloves, a cup and a smaller cardboard box with postage. No little black bag, no chit-chat, nothing to drink thank you. He asked for my arm and he handled it rather weakly, not out of embarrassment or even that he couldn’t manhandle my arm into the position he needed it to take my blood pressure, but rather he resigned to some unknown fact about the situation that I was not privy to. He noted my BP (120/70, not bad at all), then fiddled around with the short nosed needle and the vials he was going to hook up to it. He asked me to make a fist repeatedly, he tightened the tourniquet, tapped the inside of my elbow just like they do in those old WWII movies. And I don’t know why I remember it that way, but it seems that this tired old man in front me, sticking a shunt of a needle into what was obviously not a vein, was somehow connected to that time, even if he would have been just a boy.
He didn’t talk, just sighed as he snapped off one vial and snapped in the next. And when he was done with drawing blood from my not-vein, he asked me to put my finger on the hole as hard as I could and even took the finger of my other hand to show me where the hole was. Meantime he took little bar code stickers off of my application I guess and labeled each vial. Then he fiddled with the urine cup, which turned out had one little nip on its edge, like a spout and handed it to me and placed two other bar coded vials into it. ‘If you don’t mind,’ he said, as if it was all obvious, which I guess, it must have been. I had been nervous during the whole time that I wouldn’t be able to ‘perform’ this part of the show, as the old man was drawing blood I tried figure out where my bladder would be at.
But it went alright, almost too well, and as I was handing him the urine samples, I noticed he had already taken off his gloves. ‘Is that it?’ I asked. ‘Yes, yes,’ he got up and shuffled into his coat on the way out, ‘stay well…’ And the little man who I had been expecting but forgotten was gone with all my blood and piss in a box to be dropped off at the nearest post office.
remember the story
I once wrote a whole story out of thin air right here. right on a things like this, it was called, what was it called. I was sitting at my father’s shop, the autobody shop, there answering phones, I forget why, I don’t know if he wasn’t well or not, and that’s something I should remember because it could account for the type of story I wrote of revolution and language and torture and love. I think you could call it those things. it did get published after all and someone out there remembers it even though I don’t remember the name right now, it might have been “then” but no, that’s another story and I worked on that one I think, I don’t even remember, but it seems a lot of them write themselves, just sort of pour out, but that’s romance. sure there lots of stops and gaps and pondering with the pen to the lip and all that, but a rhythm was there from the start and this story I was first writing about, the one I wrote in my father’s autobody shop, that one I clearly remember as just coming out and going and going. like it was already there. there’s editing afterwards of course but that’s to be expected, I’ve always understood that part of it, the tinkering because you can’t ever really leave it alone. but I remember that there wasn’t much to do with it, considering the story it told and where it was, and I remember deeply being in awe of it, that it came from someplace I could not yet know, nor would I ever know.
come up with anything
the point is can you come up with anything in an hour, a half hour, in a minute? Can you come up with something worth writing, saying, in so much time. Can you come up with anything? Can you come up for air? Are you drowning? Can you come up for air?
I breathe and you leave. Our daughter turns in the night between us, careful, careful, each of us on edge, furthest away from each other with her between us. She turns in the night, one side to the next, arms out stretched, whisper fingers raking the air. Looking, grasping in the dark. Are you there mommy? Are you there daddy? She tosses and turns, scratch, scratch a back here, scratch, lightly, lightly, a face there. She tosses and turns, fitfully, throwing fits from side to side, restless and I cannot sleep any longer on this edge.
Scratch scratch. Scratch scratch. I’d like to be done with this. Is this all there is? It’s all seemed very dark, one long dark night punctuated with short bitter streaks of daylight. One year done, another four to go. I miss the sun. I miss you. The disconnect is profound and sharp in relief that I cannot find any relief any where.
suddenly dark I am hearing this
this come suddenly am I mourning in the dark
to hear you, here, over and over, you here you
suddenly dark I am hearing this, this over here
over hearing one breath too many, too winded
wind along windows, over and over, pushing the frames
and I have to stop, I can no longer be this, over and over
do you hear me, no longer this here in the dark
suddenly one breath too many
I’ve forgotten something and I don’t know quite what it is, I know it’s missing been missing for some time and although I cannot trace the beginnings of it I am sure it’s been growing for some time this forgetting, this leaving of something, some things, some thing vital, my vitals behind, along the floor, further back into the dark and I cannot see it despite the daughter I have brought in to this world, despite the woman who must love me desperately and patiently I cannot see it for them, to make sense of this, of what I am becoming.
I have always feared the night and the passage of time. I sat huddled against my window sill overlooking the highway on nights just like this, hot still humid the sounds of cars jetting across the on ramp and I listened to Pink Floyd and classic rock that spoke to me and sometime I would even make tapes and I cringe at the things I might have said. And sometimes I cried for the child I had been but somehow I remember that being mostly during the winter, where there was no air and only cold frozen. And the nights then were incredibly longer than they are now and there were such interesting things on TV: I have and will always have a love affair with the television, from Hawaii Five-Oh to Columbo to Kolchack the Night Stalker and the Prisoner. Nowadays there isn’t much late night watching that interests me; I don’t know if it’s me or the times.
this strange lightness
this strange darkness in life…
The truth is there isn’t any more darkness in my life: it is buoyant, light, strong.
I have a wife, I have a child, I have what seems to be career more so than a job. Outside of purchasing a home, it cannot really get better than this. But buying a home brings up a certain fears about job security and financial comfort, i.e. if I lost my job, could we keep the house afloat on Mari’s salary and if so, more than likely so, then for how long? The idea of unemployment, still sore in my memory from 2001, is too scary, too visceral and feels far too likely.
Still however I am afraid of growing up and it’s happening faster: first child has already arrived and then the next and who knows maybe another, and at some point I will have to begin to look older at the very least, my youth has to start to abandon me. All I see right now is a new crop of grays, but still slight. My friend Mike has lost his hair and shaves his head now, as does Pete the Foot and even Watersport Pete show signs of wear around his skull. Still thick head full of hair, no deep lines embedding themselves, no hardening or leathering of the skin. The weight sure but that’s more of a sign of excess than age.
I haven’t been remembering my dreams of late: with a job like this I wrestle myself into and out of sleep, there is little to remember in the exhaustion. And I’ve started hitting the gym again, although with a different purpose in mind. More set on losing pounds than pressing weight. Running now for the last two weeks six days a week, 2 plus miles at a time. I work with free weights three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Fridays while running around the nearby park the other days. The progress I’m making surprises me and encourages me. I’m trying, trying to build the health I’ve taken away through over eating and smoking.
And the writing, save for a few ghost sentences here and there, the segment of an idea, the piece of something not broken exactly, but definitely not a piece of something larger, is entirely gone. I don’t know if it’s a question of discipline but I can’t seem to break through or go on in any sort of prolonged manner. There’s a spark or two, but then that’s it, nothing sustaining or maybe sustainable? Not a good idea in any of them. Or like I wrote somewhere else, “I get bored” and lose interest.
But what if the problem is not the idea, or finding a fresh idea, but rather, the impatience in taking the time to build something better than a gimmick?