Woodland Sketches I

When the moon is full and the energy in the air is only potential, the fox swathes the stars with her tail.  Like a hand moving against the current of a softly flowing stream, it pulls and drags the atmosphere into smooth vortices.  Each twitch of the tail is fluid, rolling satisfaction as vertebrae slide across cartilage.  There are no hunters.  No prey and no world to hunt them in. There is a hill, there is the moon, and there is the fox contemplating the peace.

Fairies

She walks in the door and the fairies in her smile are hidden behind a tongue tasting bitterness.  There is a cat smell, thick and stale like a cloud of wet spores.  She’s in good spirits until walking into the house.  The front door: threshold of negativity.
     She plops her backpack on the kitchen table.  Lights dim and flicker above her head when she walks near.  Faulty electricity.  In the bathroom a pipe breaks through the soft wall and sprays her in the face.  Shrieking, cursing, she shoves toilet paper rolls into the hole and curses the prior tenants and the plumbers.  Negligence and winter freezes are a frustrating duo.
     She hears yelling.
     The stairs jut into the second floor and creak when her feet lick their carpet coated sweetness.  Light squeezes through the crack in the slightly opened door and she pushes it open with a gentle word and soft knock.  Its squeak covers the track and derails a train of frustration, collapsing and sliding into a joyous greeting.  The fairies in their mouths beat on porcelain bars and she hears ivory happiness chain down painful insinuations.  She says hello, how are you, that’s great, nice to see you again.  Each word a gag in her throat.  Spit in her eye.
     Well-practiced, they all keep their jaws closed tight, because fairies always say the things that are most difficult for us to hear.

Bubbles

I was nine years old when I first noticed the bubble.  I pushed my hand against it and it yielded but didn’t move.  Like the inside of a balloon.  It was nice then.  Things I didn’t need coming in didn’t.  The bubble held me close.  It was the inside of that womb most call the “Bigger Picture”.  A way of allowing my feeble kid mind to process a vast and endless reality.

                What we see is so small.  Minute the like light refracting through suds of soap.  We see it, and then it changes.  Watch it swirl about the surface like an oil stain.  These paradoxical things keep recurring inside each other.  There’s some natural logic to why soap and oil don’t mix well: they think they’re the same thing.

I played in my patch of grass, or my sandbox.  My bubble let in the people I would call ‘friend’ and they probably had bubbles too but I couldn’t see them.  It’s important to feel special, but not too special.  The bubble knew this.  It wouldn’t have wanted me to think I was unique in that sense.

                I played soccer, and my bubble made my mother my coach.  I was unphased.  I knew my bubble didn’t want anything from me.  It knew that it didn’t mean anything to me.  It was just there, like when you take off your pants and there’s your genitals.  That was my bubble.  A part of the bland congruity of things I believed to be my own.

                Bubbles laugh.  Did you know that?  The trick is reminding yourself that the bubble is laughing with you.  Whatever that means.  You can only run with somebody if they’re running too.  Nothing can laugh with you unless you’re laughing.  Explanations are just things said so your feelings won't get hurt.  “How expensive is your shame?” they ask.

                As I grew older, so did the bubble.  I grew and it grew.  In cunning and in size.  And smarts.  Can’t forget those.  My bubble did something special.  It started to take control.  It convinced me, once I believed something was real, that it wasn’t. That’s when I started to think my bubble wasn’t really mine.

                But there it was.  Constantly reminding me that it had to be.  Fingerprints cast through a prism; a holographic projection of myself into a world I couldn’t believe in because I believed so much.  It tried to mask itself by shrinking until it was a thin film over my skin.  I tried not to feel filtered, but  of course I did.  Sometimes I wonder what the bubble’s beef with beliefs and convictions is.

                When I was 16, I saw my bubble emerge as noticeable limitation for the first time.  I woke up one day feeling good about myself.  I went outside and took a whiff of the morning, nocturnal chill giving way to the warmth of a budding day.  There was the inspiring egg of the world, waiting for me hatch it.  I stepped through the front door and that familiar, swirling, rainbow globe saran-wrapped me away from the beauty like a chunk of meatloaf.

                You know who kisses another man’s ring and then rips off his hand with his teeth?  I do.  Now all I’m looking for is the right pin.

Woodland Sketches IV

     Once there was a pig who wore a teddy bear suit so the world would not respond to his shame. Where the bear's snout would have protruded was his pink face, and his little hooves eked out where there should have been paws like a porcine Indian chief. The pig was never dishonest about his nature, but his repulsiveness was overlooked by the comedy his life had become. Devouring food and never bathing, the pig was disgusting even for others of his kind, yet he was loved by all.

     When the pig came home and disrobed he would drink himself into a stupor, cut the feces from where his asshole scraped against the polyester lining of the suit, and retire to his room where he dwelt in the shit that was his real self, crying himself to sleep, consumed by cowardice.

The Best European Mattresses

     "This budget stuff: it just isn't that hard to do!" he says.  His friend nods in agreement.  "I tell you, when my wife and I went and talked about getting a new mattress I was saying, 'Woah', what's wrong with the one we got?  She says, 'Nothin.  if all you're trying to do is sleep on your side with your back to me every night.  I'm gonna git me a good night's sleep if you ain't gonna help me do it.'"  The sound of liquid in his sinuses snorting up into his brain.

     "Well, what'd you do?" his friend asked.

     "I drink a beer, watch some TV, and now since we got that direct deposit the wife's been garnishing my wages and next thing I know she's spending all her time in the bedroom."

     The two of them sit and grunt disapproval at the more common quandaries of of married life.  Kids?  Fuck the sticky little bastards.  Them and their power rangers and legos.  And these new fangled video game machines are gonna rot their brains.  Little retards don't even know how to hook a fish or start a campfire or fight.  Crack the beer.  Slurp.  Me? I got her a necklace she'll never wear for our anniversary.  We had reservations but turns out she doesn't like Chinese so we ended up at happy hour down at the Senor Tacos down the street.

     They peel open the McDonald's bag and procure a couple of cheeseburgers our of its papery depths.  Wet munching and ruffling knapkins and pass the ketchup packets please, thank you.  Finally:

     "So what kinda mattress'd she get?"

     "Mattress? Ha!" Chunks of synthetic bread come splurting out his mouth.  "She bought one o them fancy sex dolls they make in Europe.  'Parently you can get em all custom ordered to look like your husband or some lover you'd like.  Creepy thing doesn't look anything like me."

     "What's it look like."

     "Our son."

Embers

     Sometimes, people just want to get the fuck out.  They don't want to sit around and wait for things to get better.  They don't want to deal with how bad things still are.  They don't want to work hard and make a better person out of themselves or their lives.  It's hard to say what takes more strength: staying in a place that doesn't seem like anything else other than backwards, or leaving that place behind you, nothing but a freshly emptied bank account, a few clothes, and a full gas tank in a busted ass car headed for the junkyard nearest to wherever it finally craps out.
     Those are the thoughts that burn away in his mind--a hot bed of coals incinerating ideas like thin, wet sticks sizzling away until they curl like groping fingers and the last gasp of moisture puffs off into the air.  They say that in older times there was someone who would take the embers of a fire and keep them for days in envelopes of lichen or moss.  During the times where we were more nomadic.  Apparently, you can keep a coal hot for several days when it's wrapped up.  You'll need something that will smolder and keep the fire within hot without actually getting the flames up and going.  He can imagine somebody who knows the secret of fire.  This fire keeper is the only one in the tribe who knows how to pass the flame from place to place, and on his back there is a smoking fuse where the fire rests.  The fire keeper is the leader.  Only he can keep the fire going.  Without him, the tribe is as good as dead.
     Nowadays, we think of ourselves as fire keepers.  People whose lives are so essential to the good of man that we must light our fires everywhere.  Somewhere, deep inside ourselves, we know that the truth tells a different story.  We are those twigs, still growing, sometimes always premature.  Mankind is the fire keeper, our mind and hearts all together are the bed of coals, the lifeblood of our community.  Our displeasure, angst, and impatience are the hands that throw us into the embers.  Fifteen minutes of fame, two or three minutes of flame.
     He examines the anathema of his existence and screams silently in his chest.  The world floats on and from the flotsam vermin rise and assign worth to the beautiful and necessary.  Take the pine beetle, chewing proud trees and suckimg the sap from between their rings; drying them up and suffocating them.  Massive husks of wood sitting around like used toothpicks are about all that's left behind.  If you look into them you can see the little trails they've made.  Curvy, cuneiform carvings of hunger undying. It's no wonder that he feels sad, because it is the nature of all vermin to act under bloated impulses of need.  Ironic though, that if we allowed nature to take its usual course--and forests could set themselves aflame--that the beetle problem would disappear back into the placid balance of nature.  Those trees that get eaten up would instead have their moments in flame and light up the sky.  They would fill it with destinies fortunate enough to realized.  But even still, they do just that.  As statistics and sob stories; as dreams so new their death is hardly more than infanticide.
     This boy, he s sees this.  He sees it and feels like running, but his legs seize up beneath him.  Impotence roots his femurs into his pelvis.  This road--the one in his imagination--looms before him like the spindly fingers of a poltergeist.  On either side of this road he sees death or anonymity, or worse: exploitation and ultimately, failure.  He gnashes his hand desperately.  Grinding his teeth and breathing sharp and angry through his nose.  Still, he looks ahead.
     He looks ahead and takes a single step.
     In the Somewhere that humans don't frequent, a sapling pierces the ashen layer of a freshly burnt forest and sprouts a single leaf.

11-9-11

It’s easy to have something to say when you’re down.  That’s really the only time I have had much of anything worth reading if you ask me.  And I’ll tell you what, when I’ve got something to say I make sure it gets said, although most of it turns out to be a meditation rather than something explicit.  But why is that?  I suppose the overt answer is that when I’m not down I don’t feel like what I have to say has any strength behind it.  The Voice speaks clearly when there isn’t shit else to get in its way beside misery and self-deprecation.

                But I suppose also that when I’m “up” I don’t find anything to talk about.  Suddenly, a veil falls in front of my eyes like a mystical fallacy.  I’m seeing through the world as “I’ve always seen it”, and so there isn’t anything to talk about.  It’s as though my happiness itself is a shroud of ignorance, a pattern of behavior that predates my developed consciousness.  Imbedded in that happiness is a program, a lesson I’ve learned over and over again: happiness is something to be cherished, not questioned.

                I find myself questioning things all the time.  Most of them tend to be morose, deeply philosophical, musical or artistic, but never strictly positive. Why?  I mean to get to what I was saying before it doesn’t surprise me that I don’t write when I’m happy.  When my life is wrought with despair, and the way back to the surface where the equilibrium dwells can’t be found, I kneel down in the dark pit of my awareness and scream, “WHY?!”  But when I am happy, I am happy and stupid and carefree and my concern for whether or not it will stick around is somewhere else, having a beer with sadness until happiness walks through the door of the Emotion Saloon.

                Sadness, anger, gloom, all of these make pensive company. It is said that it is easier to negate the value of something than it is to explain why it has any value in the first place.  Happiness is a demanding partner, sadness is a partner in crime.

                What are the demands of happiness?  What does it look for in a friend?  Why is it so hard to please to keep it around?  Even better, what does happiness have to say that is meaningful, and more-or-less free of high fructose corn syrup?

                Happiness demands attention, but not the kind of seething tide that attracts the others.  No, happiness demands simply that you acknowledge its presence in the room regularly.  That it is here, and you know that, seems to be enough for it.  At least on one level.  It also seems to sit and wait with a smug look on its face.  It’s a face that asks a question you cannot speak.  The kinds of questions that you know are being asked, and that you avoid answering by saying, “What?” with a snarled lip and a half-hearted chuckle.  It just is.

                The face asks if you know where it came from.  It asks if you know why it is there, or what you did to get it to walk through the door.  It asks you why you are worth being around.  And I think that many of us, myself especially included, stop and can’t express why we are worth it.  We don’t know why we feel its presence or what we did to make it feel welcome.  And so, with a smile, it gets up, and leaves, and the moments between its exit and the other’s entrance are a void that nobody remembers.  It is the stasis of thought and emotion, like a space between spaces, where nothing but it in itself can be said to exist.

                I can’t honestly say that I know for sure what that place is.  Maybe the reason why this whole piece is a figurative question, drawn out liberally to appease the ghost of Dickens peering over my shoulder, is because I am in this moment, this zone of being.  Maybe this whole piece is a reporting from the land of in-between feelings.  And maybe that’s also the reason why I suddenly feel like this whole thing has drastically moved off topic from what I was originally thinking about. 

Because I don’t feel happy right now, but neither do I feel sad.  I don’t feel content and I don’t feel wretched.  I feel overstuffed because of the hot wings I gorged myself on earlier.  I feel worried about all the things I feel that I have to do, but that aren’t actually a problem because my capability to get them done far exceeds the amount of faith I have in myself.  I feel trapped within the nexus of feeling, or else in the maelstrom of it.  Like a leaf being blown around in a hurricane—sometimes in the arms, sometimes the eye, but always concerned only with the fact that the ground is something I don’t want to rest on.

I don’t think it’s necessary to be down in order to say something meaningful.  I think it’s more important to know where you are, and to be able to say whatever you feel from that moment.  To imagine yourself in an environment that reflects your thoughts and feelings of the now, and to mold a replica of that place out of the tools you have and have developed.  Then, when happiness is in the room, you have a way of asking it unaskable questions in response to its unanswerable ones.  Maybe then, it’ll stick around for longer, and maybe, if you’re lucky, it’ll even stay in the room with you when your sadness comes for an extended visit.