Juneuary

Many things happened in the month of June this year.  Most of them fall into the category of "bag of dicks."  The two things at the top of this column include my getting a head injury and my father attempting suicide.

It's July now.  Do we talk about these things or do we simply move on?  I have come to believe, in the course of this last month, that humans count time so meticulously in order to maintain the sense of progress, or at least progression.  Mondays are miserable and horrible but expire suddenly at midnight, when we can  become optimistic for the future, until humpday when we must mourn until Thursday, which is nearly the weekend.  Almost a month ago, I awoke on the cement floor in the kitchen in a puddle of blood. Not only am I fine now, but that was almost a month ago.

There are, of course, those things that happen that stick with you in an "always" kind of way.  There are those things that happen that will always be immediately present to you, hinting in an ethereal Einsteinian way that, were it not for "time," all things would happen now.  All things might, in fact, be happening now, but we merely regard them as vignettes, a slide-show of pictures already taken and laid out for perusal.  

When I was three years old, my father found me playing with a gun in our living room.  It was an antique, unloaded but potentially operational, sitting next to the family photographs gathering dust.  He became incensed, very concerned suddenly that his habit of leaving guns lying around the house might be at odds with being the father of a small child.  His response was to load the weapon with a plug of toilet paper and a charge of gunpowder and have me, little three year old me, discharge the weapon into the bathroom (in laymen's terms: BANG!).  Therefore, technically, the first time I fired a gun I was three years old.  I remember this moment vividly.  I could draw you a picture of the bathroom in the intensity of my dilated eyes.  I remember being a small child, scared and crying, knowing what guns are for with a sudden intensity that was vividly effective, like knowing what knives are for, or hot stoves, or fists.

The cop called me the day after my head injury.  I was lying on the couch reading a book, having a little trouble concentrating, on some mild painkillers.  She wasn't very clear about what had just happened.  It occurs to me now that I should write the police and tell them they should outsource the breaking of bad news to people who don't suck at it, or potentially practice it a little amongst themselves.  It would be preferable, perhaps, not to use terms like "chickened out."  It might be best to open with "everyone is okay now."  

My dad fired a hole through two walls and a door with a single shot.  The first round was intended to verify that the weapon was operational, the second was intended for his head.  He only fired the first round and then went to get help.  My dad has had six strokes over the course of the last four years and is now scarcely capable of speech.  He forms a few complete sentences a day, and is otherwise largely incomprehensible.  Given a moment to reflect, it's not difficult to comprehend why the man might want to top himself.  Nonetheless I have irrational emotional responses.

I saw him last week and heard myself ask if he was mad at me.  Why would he be?  Do I delude myself into believing I am an entirely rational person?  He said no, clearly surprised.  Why would he be mad at me?

My partner went to collect the gun after my father was hauled off to the VA mental ward in the ambulance.  It sat in a locked box within a locked box in the basement for a couple weeks.  I saw my dad.  I cried irrationally.  Everything was fine.  Nobody was hurt.  A day more passed and I got properly drunk and opened the cases.  It's a five-shooter, a smith and wesson .357 magnum.  Pro series.  With a new grip, the kind with a laser sight in it.  Obvious questions cascade through my mind.  Why would he buy such a nice gun?  Who sold a gun to a man that can't talk?  Why would you need a laser sight if your intent was to put the barrel in your mouth?

I did not ask these questions of my father today.  It was our first time hanging out since his "attempt."  I drove him out to the Evergreen Aviation Museum and we looked at airplanes and spacecraft.  He used to be an aircraft electrician before he retired.  He worked for over twenty years on military planes as a civil servant.  He pointed out one of the aircraft he used to rewire, the F4-C.  He asked me if I remembered sitting in the cockpit as a wee kid.  I don't.  We toured the gun museum.

My partner later asked my dad what he thought of the gun museum and he said his fascination with guns had dissipated recently.  He stated it simply and clearly, one of his articulate sentences for the day.

It's July fourth now.  My throat feels raw and swollen.  My lymph glands feel like they're incubating eggs.  I still hope to see fireworks, but it may be from the back lawn.  I was going to write my blog more regularly, like weekly, since I had emerged from the depths of relative despair and felt like writing.  Perhaps I should write weekly anyway, regardless of the despair.  If this is my life, this is my life.  Waiting for the storm to clear is getting boring.

dreams and demons

Last night I dreamt I was roller skating and I got on the freeway.  It was a very vivid and intense dream, and it became more so as I picked up speed.  I heard once that if you realize you are dreaming and you want to remain in the lucid dream, you should look at your hands right away.  The more you focus on some relatively inconsequential detail, the more grounded you become in the reality of the dream.  This helps keep you from waking with the sudden adrenaline associated with the realization that you are dreaming.  I suspect this is why the dream became more intense as I merged with traffic and began going downhill, so fast that I had to shift to one skate.  I couldn't stop, and I had to wrap my other leg around to maintain balance.  I was keeping pace with traffic due to the decline, and for some reason, I was wearing hotpants.  I realized that if I hit a rock, my body would flay out over the asphalt, and that would be the end of me, but there was nothing much to be done about it.
Today in my waking life, I passed out and hit my head.  There are details surrounding this event and they may or may not be relevant.  I woke up in a puddle of my own blood and I walked into the next room where eight or nine people I work with were having a meeting.  Between the blood puddle and the door, I managed to keep my shit together, but the second everyone started freaking out about what a bloody mess I was, well, it was on and I was all hyperventilating and stuff.  It was interesting being surrounded by a group of people who are accustomed to working together.  One of them got me water and one got me orange juice and one wiped the blood off me and one wiped the blood off the floor and one stood there in case something else needed to be done.  One called zoomcare and one went to get a paper bag for me to breathe into.  I pretty much just freaked out until one commanded me to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth.
The gash in my head is above the hairline and when the doctor looked at it, she decided it was best to braid it closed, as opposed to stapling or stitching it.  So I have a blood-soaked braid in my hair, which is pretty much the hippest coolest thing that's ever happened.
This is sarcasm.
I listened to a radio show (radiolab) one time about language, and how we basically have great difficulty thinking about things for which we have no words.  Was it Habermas who said language is the house of the mind?  It fascinated me.  Clearly there's a chicken and the egg thing operative here, in that we can't have developed the word first before some semblance of the concept.  I started thinking about how languages are dying all the time as cultures are quashed.  What words are we losing as these languages die?  Surely there are unique words that are already gone, whole concepts and ways of thinking we might never find again.  I started thinking about this, and I googled a list of words that only exist in one language.  I knew it was the kind of list that someone had already compiled, but that it might be difficult to find.  I tried "schadenfreude list unique words."
Schadenfreude is a German word for the pleasure derived at the expense of other's misfortune.  I had a conversation with a German friend about how Americans are totally fascinated by this word.  I have a theory for this.  For one thing, I think that Americans have this concept and it's mega-prevalent in our culture, but nonetheless we have no English word for it.  So when we hear this word, we get all excited that it exists.  Also, I think there's a certain schadenfreude in finding out that it's a German word, because how unfortunate for the Germans to be the ones to claim and name such a concept; poor bastards.
Is there a word for laughing at one's own misfortune?
I feel a little foggy today.  I suspect my sentence structure reflects this.
There's another German word on the list.  Torschlusspanik, the fear of diminishing opportunities as one ages.  Also very prevalent in American culture, we like to name existential crises and number them along a fictitious timeline according to which we die in our late eighties or early nineties (quarter-life crisis, mid-life crisis...).  I think it's a cop-out that we label our existential misgivings with this kind of word, betraying a false sense of being somehow entitled to a solid eighty years or so.  I prefer the German here, stark, direct, lacking guarantee that you will definitely die of old age.  Yet this word hasn't caught on in quite the same way.
My grandmother died at 86. She was the last of her friends to die.  She had her children and her grandchildren and her great grand-children, but everyone older than she was had passed.  She would talk about it, how strangely lonely it was.  It seems to me the most vicious and horrible way to die, old age.
My father has had six strokes and is 69 now.  For about four years, he has been completely certain that he will die in three months time.  This makes it very difficult to make any plans with him.  I can't convince him to get a dog.  He won't sign a lease.  He's a pain in the ass.
I saw that movie Krull when I was a kid and was totally caught up by the conversation about the cyclops knowing when he would die.  Would I give up an eye to know when I was going to die?  Dude, totally.  I'm much more afraid of wasting my life than I am of death.  And the idea here, obviously, is that some kind of calculation could be performed with regards to life remaining and tedium of tasks acceptable.  If you know you're going to die tomorrow, you don't stand in line at the bank.  You don't do your taxes.  You don't watch movies you've already seen before.  You go skydiving.  You spend all your money on a big party for all your friends.  You watch the fucking sunset.
It was the anniversary of my mother's death today.  She died twenty one years ago.  I was eight.  My dad woke me up in the morning and drove me out until there was some greenery on the side of the road, because he seemed to feel like some semblance of nature was required scenery to break the news.  He walked me out next to a tree, the traffic sounds still audible, freeway in sight.  He told me my mom had died and then drove me home as I sobbed inconsolably in the passenger seat.  I suspect that if he thought this part through, he may have opted for the backyard.  I remember being mystified by the beautiful weather that day.  How could it be sunny?  Didn't the sky know what had happened?  Was the world really going to continue as if everything was the same?
Yes.  Every world but mine.

and suddenly i am compelled to write again

Some things happened recently.  What were the things?  How were they different from other things?  It is hard to begin to say.  Suddenly I want to write again.
Yesterday I woke up in the middle of the night and plodded upstairs into the bathroom to wee.  I turned the light on and went in and closed the door behind me.  I sat down and looked over at the door.  A shadow passed.  It looked like the light under the door flickered.  My eyes playing tricks on me?  I stood up and felt like something brushed against my feet.  And then I saw it, and I screamed.  If you know me, you know the scream I screamed.  It is the scream I make when I drop a spoon, not a knife.  It's the scream that errupts out of me as I try to suppress it simultaneously, saying to myself this is not screamworthy.  It sounds a lot like a mouse.  I know this because as I was screaming and running around the bathroom, so too was the mouse screaming and running around the bathroom, both locked in and doing our frightened little dance.  All I can say is it's a good thing I had already wee'd.
I thought as I was standing on the edge of the bathtub that maybe I should leave the mouse in the bathroom, since it clearly could not get out.  Maybe I could open the door quickly and rush out, and it would somehow be easier to trap it in this smaller enclosed space.  But the door was on the other side of the mouse, and I feel in the depths of my soul that the mouse and I both knew this was not actually going to happen.
I leaned over and opened the door, because I was always going to open the door.  I did it because rather than be trapped in a very small space with a diseased rodent, I would prefer to be in a slightly larger space.  These calculations, they are strictly emotional.  Reason is a lie we like to tell ourselves as if it differentiates us from the other animals.
If I could unzip myself into multiple versions and wander off to have alternate lives, I would spend one of those lives in the wilderness with the wild things.  I would touch base with civilization as little as possible, for coffee and socks and duct tape.  And in this alternate reality, I would not scream my little scream at the mice.  I would live in a fire tower or keep food in buckets, and if I saw a mouse I would say hey you.  Hey you.
In another life I study linguistics and learn sign languages and create a universal sign language like esperanto, only it would be way more awesome.  Because if you were speaking to someone who could hear, but couldn't understand your language, you could communicate effectively while teaching your own language.  And they could do the same with you.  You would be able to teach and learn a language while communicating effectively.
In another life I would learn to program computers and create a website that allows people to share resources like a dispersed library.  You could check out your neighbor's hammer, and your neighbor could give you a five star rating for returning it in good working order.  I would spend my whole life designing websites to share resources and refining them.
In another life I would only write.  I would write constantly unless reading.  I would write everywhere on everything, in bathroom stalls and in other people's books.  I would write so often and so effectively I would make a living doing it, and my vocabulary would never shrink, my skills get rusty, my habits fail me.  I would never break my heart and stop writing as if diseased and broken in a way I could scarcely have imagined before.
In some life, I have a dog and I teach children.  Mysteriously I don't long for alternate realities, because everyone I know is kind and good, I have the distinct sense that the world is getting better, and I never forget to brush my teeth.
Meanwhile, in the one life I really live, there is a mouse in my house.  We are aware of eachother.  I tell myself that some day soon I will catch it, but time is against me and in the midst of my procrastination, the mouse has gotten bigger.

i love my job

i wake in the night with a rumble in my gut and a soulless sense of wandering and that feeling that grabs you down in the diaphragm in your belly and says nothing but security is a lie you tell yourself anytime you might believe it but really all you know for sure is you're gonna die someday.

the things that warm me from this kind of bone cold chill are few. One of these is a simple truth as fragile as any other, and hints that my type A persona is a deep and abiding trait if any is:

I love my job.

That is all.

mom

My coworker, who also lost her mother at an early age, recommended a book to me and lent me her copy. It's called Motherless Daughters and I have finally begun to read it, crying intermittently. Every now and then I have to put down the book and sniffle for a minute or two before continuing.
A couple thoughts occur to me here. One is that this may or may not be appropriate blogging material. I just got a facebook account and have realized that it is not an appropriate forum for seemingly any quality of meaningful interaction, with the possible exception of party organizing. As an adamant sagitarian, I see this as a meaningful interaction. But any expression of genuine emotional or intellectual import is confined to a meager word count and has the aura of being taboo.
Why, now, as I'm losing my father, am I compelled to mourn my mother? When I actually write the question out the answer seems obvious. I am not eagerly anticipating the sense of being alone. But I am anticipating it, and in this anticipation I find myself missing the dead. Where is my dog? Where is my grandmother? Where is my mom?
The other thought that occurs to me is that this process is boring. I can eye it with a kind of intellectualized repose and say, yes, this makes sense. This is quite probably the part in the story where this occurs. But can't I skip ahead to the good part? I can't explain this any further. It seems like the dull and obvious truth of my tumultuous emotion. I can't possibly imagine why I'd write a long sad blog entry.
This is a blog entry about my mother, or what is left of her as such, which is to say my memories. This is one.
This one is about the time we went shoe shopping and I wanted a pair of shoes just like the ones I was wearing. Always this is how this story went. I have several memories of shoe shopping with my mother. She was always the one to take me shoe shopping. Always I wanted a pair of shoes just like the ones I was wearing, only bigger and newer. I only actually got my wish once, because we shopped at a shoe store that stocked new styles continuously at discount prices. I wanted pink shoes, but there was always an entire aisle of pink shoes. I liked velcro, and was especially fond of the shoes with the little lights in the soles.
My mother was very patient with me. She would put the shoe on my foot and push down on the toe. She would make me wiggle my toes. She would tell me to walk around the store. She would tell me to jump up and down. It would take a long time, this process. It always felt like a big deal.
One time we were in a hurry, and I was being a hellion, and was making a lot of noise and skipping around the store. How old was I? Six? Seven? Five? My mother kept threatening to give me a spanking. She kept threatening to take me outside and give me a spanking right then and there. But we both knew she had never ever hit me, and I ignored her. She threatened to do this all the time. And as I came skipping around the aisle she swatted my bottom, very lightly, as if there were a mosquito she was trying to kill. As if she didn't really want to kill it. And I burst out crying at exactly the same moment as she burst out crying, and we were both crying and holding eachother there next to the pink shoes. And she said she'd never do it again, and she was sorry, and I said I was sorry and we cried.
I remember the last time we went shoe shopping, because we came home and my mother discovered that I could fit into her shoes. My mom had tiny feet, smaller than size five, and I could almost walk in them comfortably. For some entirely unfathomable reason, this made my mother cry, which I thought was very funny and sad. I told her not to cry and I hugged her.

my new favorite artist

Aaron's niece has just recently turned four and is now a real little person. She is drawing real things now and had me label one of them for her. It is on the refrigerator and it goes like this: Supercat is getting the jelly bagel before it falls into the river!
She likes exclamation points.
That is all.

I am losing my memory

I am noticing that my childhood is leaving me slowly, the many memories I once had fading. What do I remember of being a child anymore? It's a strange feeling having the sense of my lifetime dwindling, even as I'm living it, like a candle burning from both ends.

I've long recognized that I remember much more of my childhood than most other people. For a long time I felt this was one of those unspoken but definitive characteristics by which people are classified. I imagined that for those who could not remember their childhood, their conscious memory is of being relatively adult. They recall having popped into existence, say age ten, and charging forth into the world to create a destiny for themselves. This is how I imagine the experience. I can't be sure. But I have polled people throughout my life, friends and acquaintances, and have noticed that those of us who recall those many long years at the whim of the giants surrounding us--we are different. It's not that we have lived longer in a sense or are more experienced per se, but we recall being so utterly helpless that we used to poke ourselves in the eye. It's almost like a memory of an entirely alternate existence. When I see a baby with red eyeballs from poking itself in the eye accidentally, I don't think, oh looky wooky it's a little pumpkin; I think: you poor bastard. That sucks.

The introduction into human existence is one of prolonged inability and powerlessness, a struggle for mastery even of the muscles in one's arm. And after this introduction, the story which begins to unfold is of such a different quality that it is almost a completely different story. Or, at least, one would like to believe this is so. It has occurred to me before that most people don't remember their childhood because of a compulsion to suppress it, and they've blocked it out. Or perhaps it simply seems so irrelevant because it's so divorced from the realities of daily life that one forgets it, like algebra. Sure there are those people who remember algebra and insist that it's useful in their daily lives, but for the rest of us who have dutifully forgotten it, this is a rumor told by eighth-grade teachers. It's a lie perpetuated by the minority of people for whom the math of daily living might mean something, the people for whom eighth grade was relevant.

I remember being prelinguistic and understanding a good bit of what adults said. I remember my mother had a friend with a baby boy, and she would bring him over and we would 'play.' I hated him. I hate hate hated him. He would chase me and I would crawl as fast as I possibly could, with him trailing after me, and when he would catch me he would pull my hair until I screamed and screamed, and then the adults would come running, wondering what might possibly have happened. Trapped in my inarticulate state, I would cry and cry. I would look at him and wonder if he knew I hated him. One day, it occured to me to pull his hair back. It's strange what a grandiose leap this was. Of course I was caught, and my mother was shamed, but none of this mattered to me in the slightest. The hateful boy went away. It was wonderful. I remember other discoveries as startling and amazing.

When it was time to take baby pictures, and my parents would dress me up and take me to the mall, and some lady would have funny little puppets and toys to rattle, and as soon as I forgot and smiled, she would take a picture and the bright light would scare me and hurt my eyes, and I would start screaming and crying. And then she would hold up the toy to take another picture, and I would look at her with total incredulity, like really? You think I'm going to fall for that again? And then she would switch toys, and I would be amazed by the new one. And then I realized, she's just using different toys for the same evil purpose! Don't be fooled by the new shiny object! The flash will still come and hurt your eyes! Don't smile, look away look away--

I remember the epic long hours in preschool, trying to kill boredom. What happens if you eat sand? What happens if you run around in circles really fast? What happens if you punch little Billy in the face? I remember talking to a stranger and the teacher yelling at me, and the stranger and I both turned to the teacher and yelled back at the same time. He's on the other side of a fence. What's he going to do?

And that one evil daycare teacher that caught me stealing a piece of tape, and her cop boyfriend was coming in to talk to us that day anyway, so she lied to me and told me he was coming to arrest me and take me away. And he came and talked about how cops are nice to little kids and they're around to help, and told us that prisoners don't really eat bread and water. And then she told him what she had said to me, and how I'd cried and cried, and he told her that was a horrible thing to do and he broke up with her. And I was like, snap. Take that. Oh wait, I still have to see you every freakin day.

What memories have I forgotten? Which ones have already passed into the ether? When you forget them all, do you breed?

I had a conversation about childhood memories with a friend who could dimly recall his own birth and we discussed the one truly blessed thing about having had a terrible childhood, which is that everything else is pretty awesome by comparison. Any day, no matter how bad, I can always think, at least I'm not two years old. That sucked.