E) & e

All things are every thing
All places are everywhere
 

 

Luigio_5extus: this one is an important one, eh?

DMsqdMn17: yeah.
Luigio_5extus: am i going to be in it?
DMsqdMn17: you're important too.  I think.

What's really important was what I was wondering as I sat out on the porch looking out over the sleepy lights of the midmorning bay.  Late at night the lights move and shake.  Trains roar and cars blink, planes descend and ascend in mesmerizing flight patterns all, people moving mysterious over the farthest flings of this fathomless continent towards unseen destinies.  But in the nitetime we swallow the parenthesis of darkness as a flavor, which tells our brains it is quiet and still and peaceful.  Although one must really wait until midmorning when everyone settles into a kind of negotiated siesta.  I smoke and observe this silence through a tiny cloud of tiny bugs that hover about our flowered bushes in a kind of regal dance to the god of speckled sun which shines through the myriad clouds like the light of a projectionists reel, playing out this movie of the world on the surface of the quiet earth.  Get yer popcorn.

 

What’s really important

The Dude came out before she came up.  Before her car rumbled around the bend and parked and waited a sad beat before bearing her out just as the sun came through and everything in the world was gold and goodsmelling and tinged with the reverberation of some distant prehistoric perfection now coming into its fullest and utmost intended glory.  But first, the Dude emerged from the house, and lit a smoke and said well.
"Well," I added, "what?"
"You work today?"
"Yeah. You?"
"Yp.  But I doughwanna go."
"It's what pays the bills," I pointed out.
"Barely," he said.  I knew he would say barely before he said it.  Sometimes you know what will happen before it happens.  Barely.

 

We stared out over the sleeping houses swaying slightly in their dreamsong of better tomorrows, and then he went in and I poured myself a drink into the tumbler and heard a car around the bend and it was hers and it was her, a sweet song on the radio, and there she was. 

Love is love's refrain

"Howdo!" hailed I.  "What am I walking into?" she cooed. Voice like butter.  Smiling with outright joy, the kind that creation intended only for children or those who don't know better.  Skinny Goddess, your heaven shines on you.  Up the steps and into the opposing chair.  Our lives are a series of opposing chairs.
"Oh, just trying to write," I said.  Alas a lie.  An escaped truth anyway.  My computer was in the Dude's lair, and without it I claimed, I could not write.  I told this to the Dude when I popped my head through his door acrack, and he stared up at me, gun drawn, "Whaddaya huh?"  "I can't write without my computer, how long do you think it'll be?”  A voice behind him on one of 4 monitors, "From mah cold dead fingers, yee haw." Here we are in Dude country.  Pirate flag on the wall, recessed speakers blaring music fit to mimic a dogfight waged on cymbals and drums.  A RPG taking up the whole of Moniter Beta, gunfire flacking away at amazingly lifelike corpses whilst some commander issues vaguely militaristic order barks between rounds.  A real voice or a computer?  What’s the difference?

"Here," the Dude said, "use mine," and he handed me a laptop I'd never seen before.  Apparently one of his.

But I couldn't use that laptop because, although it had the internet, and I claimed I couldn't write without the internet, I also couldn't write with the internet.  Who could blame me, all this porn to surf!  And none of my own documents saved therein to divert me!  If my laptop were fixed and I had it in my possession, I told myself I could write, but I knew that I wouldn’t write.  I would open my documents, tell the tale in bits and pieces, ever more garbled and terse, sporadically lay out an acrostic turf of field notes, open O’Hara for inspiration, and then turn exhausted to a browser filled with tasteless tasteful nudes and try to find God.

 

and I have lost what is always everywhere

-O’Hara

 

My God was a 17 year old girl named e who was not a God and was not 17 anymore and was not named e.  Don’t question my religion.  I had a copy of her journals and I used it like scripture, a divine influence to steer this life I am blindly leading and feel less lost because I was following someone.  "luke told me that men find it impossible to be with me once they fall in love with me, because loving me means seeing a huge sadness, and once they realize they can't fix it, they duck out because its just too sad. i think this is lame and very false, but perhaps a little comforting."

 

She was a tiny thing, I should not have ever noticed her, but she was wearing big baggy corduroy pants with bright clown colored patches all over them, and an edwardian vest over her ripped yellow T-Shirt.  She carried big thick unlined notebooks and beneath tangled curls of hair wrote straight lines in colours like: "i adore sunshine so fucking much. i am so unbelievably elated about the entire everything!"  And she was 17, and is perpetually 17 in this religion that I have created, so that when I begin to question the meaning of things the answers that scriptures give me are the answers of a 17 year old, and I accept them like I did when I was 17.  Now all my High School emo Drama club antics seem cliché, the same kinds of things that everyone went through and everyone that age is still going through, but when you were that young you couldn’t see that larger picture and everything you were fighting for and against was a life or death struggle that is yours and yours alone to wage and e says: "i think that as much as it hurts, its ok to give love and love and more love- even if you don't feel it coming back."

 

Luigio_5extus: i need advice.

DMsqdMn17: We all need advice.

Luigio_5extus: its this girl named E—----

DMsqdMn17: There’s always a girl.  They’re always named E—----.

Luigio_5extus: in a way i'm lazy and i don’t get out much but she is very unvicelike.  she goes out.  in a way she's very good.  but there’s this road that i feel like i'm supposed to be on, and this me that i'm supposed to be who is social at night and seeing people.  she is good for now, but not for who i want to be in the future

DMsqdMn17: Hey man, it’s like Shakespeare once said…

Luigio_5extus: we eat kings?

DMsqdMn17: We eat kings at the Paris of the Prairie

DMsqdMn17: You probably won’t get that.

 

There was a time before the girl was close, when she was distant.  I am talking about the girl now.  Not the God.  The Goddess.  The girl who is now distant, now that she is close.  But when she was distant, we were close.  And in that time I am remembering how I immediately dismissed her without a second thought.  She was younger then.  Cliché.  But she was young, and thin and I tracked her nervous eyes and loved that she had straightened her hair, and wondered what it would feel like to cup my hand around her ropey muscled white arm.  I am remembering burning, going out for a smoke and shivering under a patchwork sky that made me sad, seeing grass in sidewalk cracks and envying their humble resilience.  A time, when later I came to associate everything good in the world with the thought of her face, the crack of her voice.  When I knew how many laughs she had.  Could navigate the knots in her spine in my dreams.  Thought of the skin along the inside of her leg, or that soft spot at the top of her neck, as the holiest of holy heavens.

I felt it then.  I felt it and I hung onto that feeling to make up for a lack of having felt it for a long time.  I hung on too long, not long enough… I hung on.  You know how if you hit a tuning fork up against  something soft, or dull and it will only clang, not unpleasantly but a far cry from when you tap it against something hard and it’ll reverberate both deep and high, two notes, an octave apart, ringing perfectly and then subsiding into the infinite realm of perfection. 

 

Remember that old philosophy question

about whether existence precedes essence?

I like to think about that in love. 

 

I have been with girls and felt no deep emotional resonance whatsoever, although I like them.  But those girls who I felt the most deeply connected with have by and large been, themselves, deeply rooted to some sort of drug-fuelled abyss.  I crave the kind of person.  My heart is it in.  The kind of person who craves nothingness, which begs the question of emotional disingeniousness, which I am least worthy to even ask because  I can’t love anyone who's not stoned because I don't connect, and I’m too stoned myself to connect to anyone who’s not stoned.  What does it say about me that I have only really felt love when that love's recipient is periodically incapable of facing everyday existence without a little leaf, pill or powder?

 

Luigio_5extus: if truth is the lure, humans are fishes

DMsqdMn17: ?

Luigio_5extus: lotsa white bones in 'em eaten-up dishes

DMsqdMn17: What's that even mean?

 

The girl was different from all of them.  She was clean.  Always clean, and therefore in that equation I was dirty.  Always dirty.  She took issue with my smoking, loved talking to me when I was high unless she knew that I was high and then she took issue with that too.  Not the knowing, the high.  When I was not around she assumed I was banging other women as a matter of course, what else would I ostensibly be doing, the dirty one, than banging other women, and if she was ever banging other men I never knew or thought to ask.  She was clean.  Why would she bang other men?

Such a diverse polemic I constitutionally establish in my relationships.  With the girl, I was my own deep end because she was the light.  And maybe that’s why we fought, because I could never really see myself as the darkness… (does darkness see itself as darkness?)… nor could I really forgive her for loving me.  I was perpetually prepared to forgive her for not loving me, but she never let that happen, even though I was perpetually prepared for that eventuality.  Still am.

 

EFFLORESCENCE n. Do not for a moment consider that

your having long since left school absolves you from the responsibility

for remembering, and distinguishing between, the meanings of this word

and its host of friends and relatives. Now concentrate.

Efflorescence: flowering or (in chemistry) crystallization.

Effervescence: bubbling. Deliquescence: liquefaction.

Inflorescence: floral structure of a plant.

Infloration: inflorescence. Defloration: dehymenization.

Defervescence: reduction in heat or fever.

Refervescence: resurgence of heat or fever.

Sorry; there’s no refloration.

-Peter Bowler

 

I was reading e when the other dude asked me about how things were going with the girl.  Not believing the midnight texts' I'm pregnant I told him we were just friends.

"Vertical or horizontal?" he asked.  A joke I didn't get until later.  Actually, it wasn’t much of a joke.  He went back inside.  My phone buzzed again, I lit another cigarette and in the white smoke I remembered a time when I had gone to see e.  As many years ago as miles, several snowy hours drive in my Dad’s beat up conversation van, a 17 year old kid seeks an audience with a Goddess high in the misnomered Green Mountains, in the age before cell phones.  I got to the town, and it was only a bleep on the map.  A few sharp bends in the road at the bottom of a steepled valley, school just getting out, and no where to park the monstrosity, until, just out of town I found a Mobil and parked it, badly, went inside to use the payphone, but there was no answer.  I had come all this way in vain.

I drove off, back around the sleek slushy corners, and up the hill to the high school where I imagined she had been earlier in the day, probably broke out around noon, maybe returned if they were doing something which interested her.  The athletes trampsed around the snowy fields.  Little curly brains in big hockey padded shoulders thumped their bass amps and cocked off to the rink, somewhere. I felt lost.  I drove back down into the valley.  Parked and smoked a cigarette, shivering myself into realized existence.  The air was gray with exhaust and smoke, and the sky looked cold, ready to crack open and drop somemore wintry ash on us.  All the world one colour.  I went inside the quickstop and tried the phone again.  Still no answer.  Turned around, and there she was, or was she?  Buying pills at the counter.  Looked like her.  Swishy nylon snowmobile jacket unzippered beneath what appeared to be a bearskin shall.  Her hair in knots.

"Hey," said I, whispered, more like.  Hadn't spoke in hours.  Days.  Years.  Ever.

"Oh hey. You ready?"

"I didn’t know where… I just tried…"

"Hop in, let's go, " she said.

"But I'm driv—"  If she heard me she didn't care.  "I guess it's okay there," I resigned, looking forlornly at the enormous van, taking up three spaces, ass half in the road.  I tried not to think about how I would explain a ticket, let alone pay for one.  e spun her car out and into the road.  I held onto the Oh Shit Handle and off we went into the wilderness, too fast down bumpy roads walled by snow.  She grabbed a CD and popped in the cassette adapter.  It kept skipping so I held the player with my other hand.  It gave me something to think about other than her reckless driving.  Where the hell were we?  It was getting dark.  She lit a cigarette.  Soon we were at her house.

Inside it was cold.  She took off her coat and asked me if I wanted a drink.  I was 17.  I was 5.  I was awestruck.  She made herself a screwdriver with the liquor under the counter, and then another, which she drank as I walked around the house.  Her parents weren’t home.  She had little to say.  I had less.

 

Imagine your fathers’ hands.  This isn’t a story about hands, but do me the favor of tangential embellishment so I don’t have to tell it yet.  Do your hands look like your father’s hands.  What about your father’s hands when you were born?  My father’s fingers were thick, and calloused all over.  His wrists were wide and hairy.  I don’t have my father’s wrists.  Maybe when he was my age he had wrists like mine but I will never know.

 

I had forgotten that my phone had buzzed when I called, just hoping to shoot the shit with the girl far away.  How are you?  What’s goin' on?

"Are you fucking serious?"

"What?"

 

I'll always remember those snowy roads in the impending dark.  Too fast, and I don't know where she's going. 

 

So she was pregnant.  The tests all said.  I was silent and I was far far away and then I needed to be there and so I was there.  An appointment on Thursday.  Okay.  The next day I bought her flowers.  Or should have.  I like to think I bought her flowers.  I know I bought a book on the way home from work on what expectant fathers should do.

               

                Isn't it funny how the unimportant things sneak up on you?  No wait, that’s not funny that’s tragic.  It's funny how the important things sneak up and ambush you, like love and accidents. Who said that?

My hands didn’t shake when I smoked and I talked to her, things were going to be okay.  This could work I told her, believing myself.  Words are powerful that way.  You believe them if you say them.  Things were going to be okay.  An appointment on Thursday.  And we talked all night, and Thursday morning her appointment was postponed until Monday, and life snuck up on me.

 

                I imagine the life that was cut short.  A little escapologist from the start.  Like his Dad, getting out of uncomfortable things.  Black hair, many cornered flesh, all elbows and knees, threaded in that bending rope of flesh.  A sashcord around his wet skin, umbilical of the drowned, shrouded in the hood of a woman we both could have loved longer, and I see him stretching out of there, screaming ululation like rumours of wildfire through a crowd.  Bloodlines, the sinews of life, flush with wails of lament and joy, all wrapped up. 

 

                When Sunday came I did not call.  And Monday, I sat and smoked in the sun, wondering what's really important.  Wondering if my fathers' hands shook like this.  Reading e, God to man, Holy of Holies.  Spell, sky, prayer, wrist, funny, "i mean. maybe funny isn't the right word.
it just gets into my head. that perhaps forever and ever the people i meet seem to love me for things i do, for how i act, and that he'll forever be the only one who got in from the inside. its hard to tell if i'm being crazy or i'm being strong.
i guess if you think something is worth fighting for you have to fight for it until you can't
or don't want to.

i guess.

i'm fucking exhausted. i want a thunderstorm."

 

Sometimes you know what will happen before it happens.  Barely.

 

I didn’t call.  She called.  I put down my book and burned and smoked.  My God, I could say nothing.  It was finished.  It had never begun.

 

There were three of us then in that play.  The girl, the boy, the muse.  And the one who was not to be one and really there were only us two, the one who was and the one who was never to be and really there was just one.  Me.  And all the world was bit players without lines in this scene, which a director in a beret continued to shoot again and again, cut, action, again, again, covering different angles.  How selfish.  I imagine him filming just my hands as they slide away from hers, out of that delicate and symbolic lock of fingers and promises and into my pocket where I have stashed my fire and what I burn.  And I burn it, and the camera follows my hands, and they shake slightly, for they will never write this story, and they will never pull that wet baby up and hold it and know that it is, and it is me.  And she was never there.  And we were never to be.  And e was never worshipped and this story was never written and I’m going to go outside now and smoke another cigarette and think about what is really important.

 

Soon the sun will come out, and then I will sleep with the rest of the world.  But in the meantime it gets brighter and brighter.  And if you think of the saddest, sweetest song, know that when I hear it, I think of you.  Come over.