Your body is probably being cleaned by someone right now, or it's laying on cold aluminum with a white blanket tucking you in for looks. It's only called bathing when you are still breathing. If a medical examiner wasn't in the same village, then maybe your jaw was tied shut when it locked up 2 minutes after you passed. Your face was strangely no longer yours- losing waves of microscopic patina in a tsunami of violence and saying goodbye in a way that I don't think you would have approved of.
They are scrubbing you with loofahs and alcohol, and then they are drying you off with hospital blue- tight woven towels which they have used on body after body before you- which will be laundered and thrown back into the circuit tomorrow after your hard skin has been released to family.
Maybe they are being gentle with you since your death. Maybe they aren't. If they liked you, I imagine a lengthy and beautiful ceremony- where they gingerly turn you and treat your genitals with dignity and sponge them with some kind of rich bitch salve, as if your now dead eyes could still see and your heart could still pump blood into your brain hard enough to make you shame them for taking short cuts with the final shower of your life- and only using 99 cent store vaseline to slick your unkempt hair back.
With a spirit squinting dead-like through eyes that shine no more, let me ask you... would using old roses from someone else's sad goodbye offend you after all you have been or would you laugh and thank us in death for treating you to your own funeral with limited funds?
Does it matter how they handle your flesh when you are dead?
I didn't wait hungrily for you, grandfather, to come home to us from my makeshift backwoods crib, bored and wanting to learn- like my father did. I didn't watch you scrub the kangaroo blood from your elbows in a gasoline tub out back. I didn't smell the whiskey on your breath when you threw me up in the air and telepathically conveyed that you loved me in some way. I never heard you sing the song you loved the most.
I took a nap today. I stopped by a party and saw old friends and strangers who looked like old friends doing the same shit that old friends did, but they were stand-ins in a dream. It was raining and I was fucking around with some umbrellas in a mud room, trying to figure out if I should even be at the party. The juke box had this one song that I had to play though, even if I knew I should be getting the hell out of there... Everyone was an asshole. Everyone was wasted. Everyone was on their own path. I became frustrated and left after making sure there would be no violence because of me. I left there with one regret. I never made it to the song.
You were there though, in monumental fashion for the first time, and I rowed you out into a night tide with my daughter. You made me leave you both there in the waves, and I had to find the strength in my despair to make it back to land without dying in my grief.
I assume that I made it back in a pitching midnight madness.
I wish you could have heard the song that I loved the most, before you had died.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
A couple of weeks ago, I watched about 5 episodes of the documentary series "Hoarders." First I watched it alone, and then one morning, Electra hung out with me and we watched it together. I was a little hesitant about her seeing it, because she is so young and because the content of the show is actually very disturbing. At least to me.
Hoarders takes you into a world of 3 million people in the United States who suffer from the obsession and mental illness of hoarding. They are people that you bump into at the grocery store or flea market, who seem to be HAPPY about the fact that they are shopping and finding deals and accumulating things that they may or may not ever use. In most cases, they never use what they buy. Sometimes they buy several cases of perishable items and put them somewhere handy- for when they need it. They also save garbage, afraid that if they were to throw anything away, it will somehow curse them. To throw away the pie your mother gave you two years ago is very much like stepping on your mother's back.
Small pathways are cut through the debris piles of their homes in a horrific representation of what they do every day. What they do everyday, is try to reason away all of their problems by collecting everything that falls into their path. Good as prey you are if you live with them.
One woman explained it like this. One reason why she was a hoarder, was because when she was a little girl, her father was the garbage man. She was ridiculed and harassed in grade school by other children because her father was the garbage man. She would go home after a long day of torture in the learning of all things worldly- to discover her father loading more found objects onto their plot. She went from one to the other, day in and day out for about ten years at least...
Who wouldn't be a hoarder after that?
The alternative is to be someone who is obsessive compulsive.
Have you ever seen this behavior? Do you know anyone who can't leave their house, because it takes them 3 hours to complete the ritual they are committed to by mental illness.. Their goal? To take a shit without getting feces on their hand while they wipe their ass. If all goes well, they can leave their house within the next two hours, if they didn't get shit on their hand. Sometimes, their houses are so sterile and clinical that no life should be allowed to exist there at all if they had their way. The most insane example of a sterile and completely whitewashed home I saw, belonged to a gay man who had been the victim of some kind of unspeakable abuse as a child. You wouldn't just think he was clean and worthy if you went into his home. You would be looking for the exit and denying your thoughts.
Ironically, both hoarders and OCD people suffered the same affliction. They were never made to feel worthy, an eternity after they themselves had been victims.
I can be both. I can find sentiment in every scrap of every crappy inch of my day- just to hold on to something. I can also over-analyze every stain on the muddied ragged pulse of the "sinless" Universe around me... and SO discard it in fear, awe or ignorance... and repeat - by either throwing away or saving ALL I ever do. Balance is as balance can measure. You follow?
Today, Electra climbed in bed to wake me up, and asked me if she could look at the shoe box under my bed of my grandmother's possessions. She is a grandmother I met once as a baby, and that was the last time we met. My daughter knows her as I do, from this box of trinkets, of depressingly personal and average artifacts that you have tried to draw the energy of a matriarchal bloodline's soul from... who's voice once rang clearly through your skull.
I think Electra took something magnetic from her great grandmother's box today. I don't know what it was, because even though this box is so important to me that I keep it, and I keep it in the original condition that I received it in.. I let her take it.
I don't have every object memorized that she could have run with, because I am afraid to disturb this box of artifacts and equally afraid to keep the box under my bed and take no risk with airing and scattering it's contents. It means so much to me and equally so little that I cannot face either sentence.
What does this box mean to my daughter?
We all live under a microscope, regardless of how it pays off.
I read to my daughter- the fairy tales that my mother read to me. I saved or recollected them and she and I repeat them together. Sometimes, she brings home the capture of one I have forgotten or a new one, which I fully embrace.. and sometimes I choke it trying to memorialize it.
And so we hoard.
Hoarders takes you into a world of 3 million people in the United States who suffer from the obsession and mental illness of hoarding. They are people that you bump into at the grocery store or flea market, who seem to be HAPPY about the fact that they are shopping and finding deals and accumulating things that they may or may not ever use. In most cases, they never use what they buy. Sometimes they buy several cases of perishable items and put them somewhere handy- for when they need it. They also save garbage, afraid that if they were to throw anything away, it will somehow curse them. To throw away the pie your mother gave you two years ago is very much like stepping on your mother's back.
Small pathways are cut through the debris piles of their homes in a horrific representation of what they do every day. What they do everyday, is try to reason away all of their problems by collecting everything that falls into their path. Good as prey you are if you live with them.
One woman explained it like this. One reason why she was a hoarder, was because when she was a little girl, her father was the garbage man. She was ridiculed and harassed in grade school by other children because her father was the garbage man. She would go home after a long day of torture in the learning of all things worldly- to discover her father loading more found objects onto their plot. She went from one to the other, day in and day out for about ten years at least...
Who wouldn't be a hoarder after that?
The alternative is to be someone who is obsessive compulsive.
Have you ever seen this behavior? Do you know anyone who can't leave their house, because it takes them 3 hours to complete the ritual they are committed to by mental illness.. Their goal? To take a shit without getting feces on their hand while they wipe their ass. If all goes well, they can leave their house within the next two hours, if they didn't get shit on their hand. Sometimes, their houses are so sterile and clinical that no life should be allowed to exist there at all if they had their way. The most insane example of a sterile and completely whitewashed home I saw, belonged to a gay man who had been the victim of some kind of unspeakable abuse as a child. You wouldn't just think he was clean and worthy if you went into his home. You would be looking for the exit and denying your thoughts.
Ironically, both hoarders and OCD people suffered the same affliction. They were never made to feel worthy, an eternity after they themselves had been victims.
I can be both. I can find sentiment in every scrap of every crappy inch of my day- just to hold on to something. I can also over-analyze every stain on the muddied ragged pulse of the "sinless" Universe around me... and SO discard it in fear, awe or ignorance... and repeat - by either throwing away or saving ALL I ever do. Balance is as balance can measure. You follow?
Today, Electra climbed in bed to wake me up, and asked me if she could look at the shoe box under my bed of my grandmother's possessions. She is a grandmother I met once as a baby, and that was the last time we met. My daughter knows her as I do, from this box of trinkets, of depressingly personal and average artifacts that you have tried to draw the energy of a matriarchal bloodline's soul from... who's voice once rang clearly through your skull.
I think Electra took something magnetic from her great grandmother's box today. I don't know what it was, because even though this box is so important to me that I keep it, and I keep it in the original condition that I received it in.. I let her take it.
I don't have every object memorized that she could have run with, because I am afraid to disturb this box of artifacts and equally afraid to keep the box under my bed and take no risk with airing and scattering it's contents. It means so much to me and equally so little that I cannot face either sentence.
What does this box mean to my daughter?
We all live under a microscope, regardless of how it pays off.
I read to my daughter- the fairy tales that my mother read to me. I saved or recollected them and she and I repeat them together. Sometimes, she brings home the capture of one I have forgotten or a new one, which I fully embrace.. and sometimes I choke it trying to memorialize it.
And so we hoard.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
dear cousin. fight season is on hold... you're bored....
How about... get wasted, jerk off into a puddle and then cap it off with a torrent of self reflective tears in the back seat of your hot rod?
hahaha. just kidding.
hahaha. just kidding.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Careful
Your tread is as delicate as a factory needle and your wise guidance is as bloodless as every other man's attempt at conquering his dreams without ego.
Careful.
Careful.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Dear Child
I am afraid to write. The tapping of these keys will surely wake you.
Tomorrow I will see my daughter.
I have been like a prisoner that no one cares to hear the pains of.
I am a bad mother to allow separation at all.
I am the Earth and the depression of the sky is my dutifully accepted failure
while the night is my scrambling apology.
Microwave your puppies in my dream time.
Destroy lives with the flip of a wrist and have your heart broken over endless knees.
Love.
Just let me love you as your mother and all will be right.
I have destroyed myself in every way, on every night since you said goodbye
And tomorrow, I get to make it right.
Tomorrow I will see my daughter.
I have been like a prisoner that no one cares to hear the pains of.
I am a bad mother to allow separation at all.
I am the Earth and the depression of the sky is my dutifully accepted failure
while the night is my scrambling apology.
Microwave your puppies in my dream time.
Destroy lives with the flip of a wrist and have your heart broken over endless knees.
Love.
Just let me love you as your mother and all will be right.
I have destroyed myself in every way, on every night since you said goodbye
And tomorrow, I get to make it right.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
