Extradition

Kid Gloves is not contesting Extradition to a Texas court. He is medicated. This entire ordeal happens from a customs arrest to a Los Angeles jail cell. It falls unlovingly right into the paranoid expectations of a schizophrenic who believes whole heartedly that the Bell does indeed toll for him. Has his loving family now become his enemy? "Positively", he states that he seeks resolution. His articulate mannerisms, I can only hope, will bring him a decent/luke warm judgement. The trick with the courts is to play or not to play the mental health card. It's logical to assume that the courts are educated about mental health issues. I doubt though, that they will be less than medieval in their handling of his case... Why? Well... For starters... Prisons BANK and Prisons are private industries that benefit from handling the mysterious and free radicals that society chooses not to be civil to and progressively treat.

I make no excuses. I don't think that my brother makes them either. I wish I could tell him how fucked up I thought things were, if it didn't mean he would scratch his eyes out to escape through them.

Woe be gone

Kid Gloves was arrested at the Los Angeles airport yesterday entering the country. Suckage.

Current Biggest fear

That......


That... All my scrambling to make decent reasons for hanging in there (reasons that I know are total bullshit) won't convince you to stick around... and that you will look at me with your sunken and intelligent eyes and say, "sounds good, sis. ha ha" And then two days later, the phone will ring.

Cheaper Minutes

My closest family members are all in Australia right now. There's some decidedly heavy family shit going down currently, and I haven't really sorted it all out... That's for starters.

I have a calling card that I use. I can dial the 32 digit number to reach my little brother with my eyes closed and my fingertips sawed off. The calling card costs me $40 bucks every time it recharges for about 400 state to state minutes. When I call Australia, 40 bucks gets me about 30  minutes. I know there's all kinds of ways to get around this charge, but I'm not going to join the phone circus to do that. Mapping out times and locating "cheaper minutes" and planning "talking time" with people I'd rather call whenever the fuck I feel like it, doesn't appeal to me.

If I run out of time, I usually get disconnected after the computer voiced lady tells me, " You have one minute of call time left." I'm the only person in the conversation who can hear this, and I always have to give 30 seconds to find the best place to cut them off and tell them that we have about 30 seconds of the issued and approved 60 seconds left to wrap it up. To tie the loose ends into unforgettable knots.

Normally, this happens at super fucking wrong times. Well, maybe it's actually the perfect time, I don't know. Take this for example. A couple of days ago, I called Australia and everyone was getting ready to make a drive out to Boreen Point. Its a place that my family crawls back through generations. There's tons of stingrays from what I can remember. It was lush, and full of mystery at night. It smelled of rotten fruit, which made the fresh fruit taste all the sweeter.

The drive to Boreen Point was on a long and winding road where you'd hardly encounter any other car for miles on end. When you did see a car, you strained as they got closer to try and make them out. In the blink of an eye... size them up.

There has never been one instance when a car came at mine, with only a painted line separating us, that I didn't seriously count down to death and prepare to see the flashing images of my life Usher me to my final exit. It's like there's never any possibility other than a collision in my head on any highway.

My mother says that they are going to visit my Grandfather's grave and she tries to run right into the next punch as if it's a roll and I detect my mother tripping over her lips gumming out the words "grandfather" or "dad" interchangeably, but that's because her tongue has had absolutely zero practice saying them to me. My patriarchs have always been concepts.

So, I wasn't completely shocked when my mother said they were going to stop by "Dad's" grave during the trip. Normal enough, if you always knew your grandfather even had a grave, which would imply he had a death, and that people in my family knew there was a cause of death and that there was a man who they had all loved at one time or another who just passed on, and he was physically lowered into the Earth by someone who probably got paid to keep books on shit like that, and was anyone even fucking there? Were you ever planning to share that with me? I never ask for details, and that's probably why half of my childhood memories are dreams and not legacies. I don't blame my mother because it causes her pain like no other to talk about it. But it is significant to note that the memory of my grandfather, and how he means anything to me, is based off of a totally different understanding of the past. I'll be 34 in a couple of months. Maybe you could send me a photograph to round out my collection to ten. Sure. I'll trade it for a painting. What would you like? I'll see what I can do, and then you will see too.

It took me about 5 seconds to hear about an overnight grave and process my feelings about just learning it. Then the operator said, "You have one minute of talk time left."

I was always told my grandfather lost his mind while fighting with the Light Brigade during WWII in Papua New Guinea. Fair enough. He comes home. I am told he talked to light bulbs while I sat on his lap, so I don't know if we ever connected. No one seems to think so. Then, he ups and leaves his wife and 5 kids. End of story.

This is where my imagination apparently created other pieces of who I thought my grandfather was. Don't worry. This won't take long. I "dreamed" I was walking on a sandy beach and came upon a hut. To enter you had to pass through a wall of hanging beads. The floor was sand. My grandfather sat there, and I walked to him and I think we hugged. What we felt can't be reclaimed and won't be dismissed by someone else's account.

I thought that was a memory until I asked my mother about it and she seemed kind of freaked out and said it must have been a dream. So, no telling there. There is of course the obvious, my grandfather stopped by my sleeping body on his way to hell. That's where all sick people go right? I can't think of any religion that ever truly did a fucking thing to Crush War. It's your job to sway me that's for sure, you believers.

There was never in my whole life a mention of a funeral or a place or whatever. I always assumed our family had a sadness because he just left and no one ever knew what became of him. I am starting to put the pieces together though, and I guess I can understand. Loving someone with severe mental illness is sad when you are helpless to heal them when they are around and crushed when they are gone without your helplessness even, and there was so much lacking from what you could communicate and share. That was ten seconds into the thirty seconds left.

I told my mom, time was running out. I asked her if he smoked. She knew the brand "Avatar" or something apparently no longer available. I asked her to leave a pouch of it on his grave. It seemed to surprise her that I wanted to do that... maybe because I had never offered or asked to give something to commemorate my grandfather's "passing".... maybe because I didn't know there was a fucking grave to begin with.

She said yes no problem and we would talk again soon and she loved me and my brother loved me and my step father loved me and would I kiss my child from them all etc. etc.

It's possible that if I tell my mother I never knew there was a grave, she will reference how I live in my own head because she must have told me the only three times I wasn't paying attention. I think my argument would likely be, a grandfather should be burned into your soul and not something you could maybe have remembered wrong or dreamt. Need more information please. I'll work on the processing, but I can't promise that I can handle my attitude.

Don't worry pops. You're in here.

Brown Paper Dog

It's so nice to be able to open the window. It's been another long winter. Etc. Etc.

Big City Lights I

When I went to Brooklyn, I stayed with my glorious fag of an actor friend. He shared an elevator sized 2 bedroom apartment with a guy he had nothing in common with and barely knew. He said I couldn't be in the place alone because of house rules. I would have to leave when he left for work. I could ride the subway into Manhattan and walk around. So I did.

I walked around for twenty-four hours.

Alot can happen in 24 hours.

Just five minutes please!

My daughter is driving me crazy.

There's 24 people on the island right now. Several boats have been going through to pick up pot gear for fishing. Boats are heading North of the Pass into the Bering Sea for a brief Herring season. I used to work on a boat during herring. I had to pull out 20 or so random fish from a haul and snap their backs in half, record whether they were male or female and how much they weighed. Nasty. Float planes flew overhead radioing coordinates for fish schools to boats below.

A boat at the city dock made an announcement on the VHF radio. We all communicate here by radio as much as phone. They said, "This is the fishing vessel______. We have a bonfire going on the beach north of the city dock. We have refreshments (likely beer unless they also have chick tracts and koolaid). We have good music. Hospitality is a wonderful thing. Come and join us. Share your stories with us."

That kind of invitation is pretty rare. A few years ago, this fisherman named Snakey Pete (Snakey as in Delerium Tremons from acute alcohol poisoning) called me on the radio to tell me he loved me or something like that. I told him to have another drink.

I made the guys on the boat an mp3 mixed cd and sent it down with my husband.

I took the next two weeks off of work. I'm lucky I have so much paid leave accrued. I can take long breaks every couple of months. How do people do it everywhere else? Not too much drama workwise this month. Just burned out on caring.

I sent my little brother a loaded ipod. He was really happy about it. He also said the similarities to what songs were about and his own mind freaked him out. That sucked. Hopefully I didn't send him down the rabbit hole. What else am I supposed to do? Mash peas for him and talk about clouds?

I haven't been able to paint in forever. No painting with a toddler. No sense even trying.

The sun is up until midnight and she thinks it's much earlier. She rebels when I try to get her to sleep. She's full of sentences this week though.

I've been working at the library here as the sole librarian. The library hasn't been open since I opened it a year ago. I had to take a hiatus because my kid would have been destroying all the books and smearing feces about. It's good to be back in there. It's good to have actually digested a book after going so long without reading. Baby steps.

I'm glad summer is here. I like the change in scenery. I am not crazy about the rush of traffic and all of the generic questions people passing through ask. I just avoid them. I must seem like a neurotic housewife.