Tuesday, November 13, 2007

My Morning Sickness

These days
we open our eyes
Sunlit room
open window
The soft light of the laptop screen
still open from the last life
when you fell asleep
still thinking of Japan

But morning feels like dying
and morning is like mourning
everything you've lost
forgotten beneath time
like dust beneath the bed
and broken watches in sock drawers.

We can't move
because movement admits that time exists
and if time exists then so does distance
and if distance exists so do oceans
and if oceans are real then we are far apart.

And we are.
The tragedy of reality
is that while we daydreamed
it all became true.

And i watch
i watch as she falls asleep
14 hours away
slips into darkness
faint light of her laptop screen
faint light of me
just makes her nose and cheek bones visible.

i softly whisper as she sleeps
everything i need her to know

Guilt
because i have so much
to live for
yet all i do is die
each morning
until i completely fade
each night

Monday, October 15, 2007

Not My Religion

I went to a huge church last Sunday. It was brand new with seating 3 levels high. In the nose bleed sections were mounted LCD monitors so you could still see the pastor. There was an elevator, parking attendants, stage lights, and full surround sound.

The lesson series that the pastor had chosen to kick off the start of the new building with was the first chapters of Genesis. The lights dimmed and all the screens lit up. It starts up with the famous Venetian sculpture of man and woman. Man with curly locks of stone and washboard stomach. Woman with the voluptuous curves that were the predecessors of modern ideas of female sexuality.

Classical music plays for twenty seconds. They stand next to an apple tree.

Then it switches over to Kanye West's "Gold digger." Photoshopped clothes and jewelery appear on both Adam and Eve. Eve is holding a red apple. A Emerald Tree Python pokes his head out from behind the tree. A red H3 Hummer pulls up.

I makes me laugh at how the interpretation of Christianity has changed. I had friends who would refer to Jesus as their boyfriend. I laughed at that with Greg. We were fairly certain that Christ's relationship to us extends a little deeper and a little differently than the male-female conception of it. And if that theological view point stands true then what about the men of the world. Do we don rainbow shirts and start talking about how we can't wait to get to heaven to skip hand-in-hand with our "bf..." Jesus. Or is Jesus our homeboy like I've seen so many bumper stickers advertise. We just kick it wit Christtt in da afta life... Or we'll sit on some porch smoking stogies and we'll say, "Hey Jesus, did you really turn water into wine." And Jesus will say, "Heck ya." And we'll say, "YeeeHaw!"

This is my problem. This is so superficial. And I'm not claiming to not be. I'm bothered by this in myself more than anyone. I love how Facebook now has this little religion category. You can write whatever you want in there. But when it boils down to it we're just using words.

I remember in Sunday school the teacher would ask me.
"Matthew, do you believe in God?"
I'd reply, "YES!"
The teacher would respond, "Why?"
I'd shrug. "Because he believes in me, and we are not meant to live in of ourselves, we were made incomplete and we need God to complete ourselves."
"Ummm...."
Then one of the other kids would raise their hand.
"Yes," the teacher would point to them.
"Because...so we can go to Heaven!!!"
And the teacher would smile and I would know the answers that my parents told me and the answers that church wanted were often two different things.

Yet the Sunday school theology continues. We want to go to heaven to kick it with our other "Christian" friends and God the Father and Jesus the Son. You never really want to hang out with the Holy Ghost. He's like a third wheel or the ugly friend that you acknowledge but never talk to.

The fact of the matter is we know little to nothing about what life past this will be like. We know a little bit of it. The little bit we know is not enough to make me want it. For me Heaven has always only been the better of two options. I'm sure if I knew the whole thing I'd think differently. But we only know some, and it's like only knowing part of an address or only the first six numbers of a phone number (area code included). You have an idea, a general vicinity.

But we take our own beliefs to be utter truth. I hate that.

But what will you do? Christianity has been an evolving thing since the very start. As long as there are sheep there will be people following Sunday school teachers for their entire lives. As long as there are individuals there will be people over thinking it.

Jared asked me what life is. I told him, "Life is distracting yourself from the fact that you are dying." Part of me believes that.

Part of me still believes that idea of Jesus drinking beer with me watching Entourage and eating peanuts.

Part of me accepts that we are never complete, that my answer when I was six was right.

There are all these parts of me, some conflicting, some agreeing, some rending apart. We are all just parts and pieces of what we don't understand.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

My Apology

I met a toy man with a broken nose
He said that forgiveness was the way to
Survive silent stings of remorse that patter through the twilight
Because night and day collide
like daydreams and sparrows with clean windows

We sit and spew feverish poetry at fraudulent paces
to outweigh the guilt that we share
For bombing a home in Afghanistan
and buying gasoline for camel slaughter.
We grasp the clutch and leave exhaust fumes to compete with cigarette smoke
and stare at burning prairie.
Ooooooh. Fire. Me like fire. Me make fire. Me burn trees. Me kill meat. Me cook pig. Me burn big.

Breathe in the oysters. Straight from the can,
a homeless man eats breakfastlunchanddinner, while you wait for your whites to dry.
Public
Laundry
Mat
Don’t stare. Don’t.
Don’t, oh God! Don’t say a word! Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!
Maybe he’ll leave, maybe he’ll leave
maybe I’ll go buy him some fried rice and laugh when he can’t use chopsticks

I’m shooting a .45 into the dark
and maybe I’ll hit that rapist that waits in apartments for single young women
Maybe I’ll hit that unborn baby.
Yeah.
Kill that unwanted brat.
Maybe the mother, or the father.
No.
I’ll aim for whoever pulled the plug on Terri Shivo
And miss
Because I got distracted by my right to choose.

We fly across pink clouds of fire with F-15’s racing across superheated tension.
We’ve got tone, we’ve got lock.
Fire! Fire! Fire!
And a mother weeps for her son, crushed beneath the rubble and politics from an land an ocean away,
and Janet has a husband buried beneath Twin Towers of sorrow
and children cry for parents who never left work

White crosses and all the names on the Vietnam Memorial can’t remind us that the casualties of war are the casualties
we look at the president’s reputation
we look at Euros
we look at the Dow Jones
I want blood
I want revenge
I want answers
I want my Nikes
I want ESPN
I want my George Foreman grill

America. Don’t you understand I’m great?
We don’t need you.
You like war. You like pain.
You like Ted Turner

America. What have I made you?
I’m following the yellow brick road, but it’s running red
red with agony
I sip battery acid and talk through stumbling syllables about how many mega pixels my conscience can recall.
I’m seeing bodies like a broken record player
Skip-skipping on an endless loop
Drifting through the daydreams of deception
Passion, love, hate, envy, battleships and suicide bombers
I’ll show you what’s in the hearts of man.
White noise static.

Sign father faith and free your fragmented mind.
Take it back.
Jehovah witnesses are knocking down my door,
Buddha’s selling incense in the parking lot.
Shiva’s selling karma to my niece
Father Patrick communes with the alter boy

NO!

I believe the right things for the wrong reasons.
Because you said so, because you said so.
And the reason is slipping away.
And the reason is a gun and the trench coat mafia asking:
Do you believe in God.
And the reason is Lori Hacking’s missing body.
And the reason is Elian hiding in the closet.
And the reason is nailing my convictions to a cross that we won’t look at until the blood’s been cleaned off.
And reason cannot coexist with modern man
It’s born between the pages of fiction
look under fantasy.

God?
God.
God?
God!
The older I grow the further away you seem
I know you’re there
Peaking over my shoulder as I sip spirits and sing sweetly in this young girl’s ear
Smiling when Luke and I sneaked over to the neighbor’s house
to shovel that old lady’s ice
The cynic in me counts the contradictions that lead intellect to disbelief
On mortal terms I stand my ground
Shaking because the ground is holy.
I don’t understand, but I still can believe.
And that flies in everything
I can believe.
Finding faith means losing religion,
Losing reason,
Losing logic, and due thought
While watching the sun slip behind tears of a child
I’ll look for a chance to reach out and touch you
But my doubt will only grasp air

I met a toy man with a broken heart
He said that forgiveness was the only way to survive
I’m one big apology.

I met a toy man with a broken soul
He said,
“We all fall apart.”

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

My Sunset

I say, "I love you forever."

I say, "I've loved you forever. Even before I knew it."

This is not because I know with the utmost certainty that this love will last past the redwood forests and outlast granite tombstones, but because it is what I hope. That is what love is, based upon hope. That is who I am, human in the most inexcusable definition of my kind.

Hope is humanity. It is what nations are built upon and great men rise upon. It is rags to riches. It searches for passage across great bodies of water. It survives the concentration camp. It outlasts famine and drought. We raise our children upon it, a staple like cold cereal and milk. It is the changing seasons and the revolution of the earth around the sun, and the moon around the earth, and the earth about her axis. This is more exact than science and more indefinable than God or gods or ghosts and missing links. It is getting halfway through a book knowing that Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy will be together. The poets of the nations are right.
Hope
will
not
die.

***

The sky here stretches past sight and imagination. I'm alone. The sun sets behind clouds and beneath the sea casting red and pink across the horizon and splashing the sky with sea blue colors. The maritime tones linger long past the sunset.

I am alone. Only my camera is with me to record what words cannot describe. The sound of gulls and the white crests of waves are the only thing I hear.

She made me promise to live longer than herself. Even at the beginning we know that there will be an end. And yet we still go on like ships through fog near rocky shores. Lead, log, and lookout, yet this is no small matter of mathematics.

I adjust the iso setting with the fading light. Hold my breath to keep my hands steady for the slower shutter speed.

How can I hope when I know all will end? We are like fading sunsets, not two are ever the same and brief before they are gone forever beneath the sea. Only fiction is happily-ever-after and this is no fairytale that we pursue.

Hope is no foundation. It will fight no battles for me. It will not feed me. It will not make us live forever. Nations fall. Seas dry up. Children grow old and cynical. The earth grows old. Each night the sun falls beneath the horizon.

Yet I say, "I love you forever, I've always loved you. Before I knew it. Before I knew you. Before and after time fades into oblivion. Twice as much as yesterday, the same increase as each day since past."

I hope defy time, science, prescience, quantum relativity, and death. Yet what am I is restricted by humanity, the very thing that feeds my ambitions.

"I love you. This is more than hope."

Tomorrow. I'll capture another sunset before it too disappears forever.

We are like the sun that falls beneath the sea. It is the same sun as the day before, but not the same. We live in such a brief moment, but I cannot help but think her beautiful.

All we have is cynical hope. Foolish hope. Because we know we are hopeless.

Someday perhaps I will keep that promise I made. Sit on a beach alone. Watch one more sunset. Look back without regret. And happy because even time spent hoping love will last a lifetime when I know it will not last more than sixty years, was worth every second spent.

I love you more than all the suns that rest beneath the sea.

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

My Road to Damascus

It is 7:22 on a Thursday night and I’m brokering my first drug deal. The air is cool with fall. The sky is hidden by the clouds in one glowing gray mass. I’ve just left work and I’m on my phone driving home through the Midwest suburbia, the branches of oak and maple trees transform the streets into tunnels populated by gray squirrels and sparrows. My hands should be shaking. My voice should be rattled. My heart should be racing. I flip on the lights as the sky dims.

Dave laughs out loud. He’s a big hairy mutt. He admits it. His penis is Polish, his hair color Native American, and his skeletal structure is that of a 6’5” Asian, he tells me. There’s a full color tattoo of a leaf-tailed gecko creeping down his arm. He works construction during the day and is a bouncer at The Purple Pig at night. He’s also my boss at Scaly Dave’s Herp Shack. He’s Dave. The shack is his.
Dave laughs out loud. This is the first job I’ve had that keeps beer in the back for its employees. He’s laughing because I’m awkward, and because today I’m asking Lucas for marijuana and shrooms. Lucas tells me he has two-five of weed in his personal stash, but the town is dry. It has been for a while he adds vaguely, hesitantly, like he doesn’t trust me. Lucas has long hair and wears clothes from thrift stores. He has a girlfriend who looks like a cracked out Twiggy. I never remember her name, but she’s like a shadow that I barely notice but is always there.
I know Lucas is a stoner as well as he knows I am not. I know Lucas’s girlfriend is a stoner. Dave knows too. Lucas doesn’t hold an actual position at the store. He comes by to help out with the leopard geckos now and then. He doesn’t work because he’s a full time stoner. So me asking Lucas for weed is more than a little absurd. Maybe he’s telling me the truth. Maybe the town is dry. Maybe he doesn’t want to give it to me because he knows I don’t smoke, inject, snort, or lick. I could turn him in, there is always the inherent risk of the stoner life. I could be a cop. Or a bastard. Or both. He might not want me and my naivety haunting his conscience; some stoners are very moral, I’ve known more than a few. Our motives are our own and we don’t know each other. The town is dry, he says. Dave laughs at me.

I’ve never been offered drugs. Not for lack of opportunity, most likely it is a lack of charity . Experienced stoners look at me, through me, past me and I don’t exist. I’m sitting on a porch with my on-again-off-again girlfriend. There are three stoners facing us, all hammered, and one joint between the five of us. Kristin introduced me, and they know I don’t smoke without asking. It’s the dripping discomfort, the grimace as I inhale the secondhand smoke, the neatness of my haircut, and the labels on my clothes. A girl is standing behind them. She is dressed in all black with darkly dyed hair against pale skin and a glowing neon green necklace. “Shrooms,” is all she whispered when we walked past her, she’s standing on her tiptoes. Her lips were wet and her eyes held that distant gaze of post-sex euphoria. For her it wasn’t night, she wasn’t standing on the edge of a balcony, she wasn’t in Kansas, she wasn’t alive, she wasn’t dead; she lifted her hand upwards, palms open, reaching.
The joint goes from Stoner A to Stoner B. He offers it to Kristin. She shakes her head. Stoner B laughs; he has a shaved head and doesn’t like me because Kristin’s hand is somewhere in my shirt, massaging my stomach. The joint goes back to A and then to C and back to A. It’s an intricate game of keep away, a complicated monkey in the middle and I’m the chimp.
Kristin really is a beautiful mingling of French and Sweedish decent. She’s Swedish from the waist up, pale and curvaceous; and French from the waist down, long and slender, but boring. Blonde hair hangs past her shoulder blades and is as smooth like a stream, blue eyes, and skin stretched tight against her generous breasts; Stoner B blows envy through his lips. I imagine that I might be able to accidentally get high from the fumes. It wouldn’t be my fault then. Right? I could ask for a tug, but I cannot ask.
“Is this your boyfriend?” Stoner A asks Kristin.
She smiles as if she knows a secret. “Are you my boyfriend, Matt?”
I watch the smoke drifting upwards to the stars and the heaven that the hallucinating shroom-girl is reaching for. “When I feel like it.”
Her hand grows cold. Kristin takes me home.

“It’s creatine.” I’m back seven years, a freshman in the Corbin Independent School System. I’m watching Bram shaking his bottle, skim milk and a scoopful or two of a purple powder. He’s my height, but he’s huge where I am not. In the weight room, with the baseball team, I’m with the other skinny slack-jawed all natural kids watching Bram pile on the forty-five pound plates. His chest alone can lift almost three hundred pounds of laminated iron, where my arms quake and I hiss and spit fighting with a buck seventy-five.
“COME ON SHOELINE!” he roars in a bull voice at me on circuit day. I’m stumbling on the hurdles. Bram used to be me I’m told. Small, weak, crying, vomiting in the trashcan, and I’m supposed to become the new Bram. He’s sweating too. But he’s sweating Arnold Schwarzenegger sweat with the light of utter thrill in his eyes. He should be wielding a mace or battleaxe on some medieval battle field. I can see him hammering his foes with some sort of crude blunt object and using severed ears to decorate his shield. My sweat drips into my eyes and mixes with tears, I lick it off my lips and taste salt.
“Two inches on your arms, three on your calves,” the football players want me to put on helmets and pads and carry their football into enemy territory. Bram does it every Friday night; he plays both football and baseball. It’s the cries of the town drunk with passion, seas of red and white fans, the gods of school spirit envy us. And Bram is Achilles, beautiful mortal who clashes with titans. They measure me up and tell me how much larger I need to be; “An inch or two on my neck, two on the quads, and four around the chest.” Bram did it. I can do it. I’ve cheated on tests. I’ve cheated on friends. Why can’t I swallow this grape flavored drink? All I see of Friday night fame is from a sea of red and white, watching Bram’s lighting show on earth.

What holds me back? “Do you ever hit it?” It’s my friend Josh asking, or Ghram, or my boss Dave, or my cousin.
“You party in college don’t you?” Josh is fat, rude, vulgar, fifteen, and wants to know. He suffers from the syndrome of parents who could never say no, in a society where restrictions are the limitations that keep our children from corruption.
“No. I don’t hit it.”
Josh is surprised. He looks disappointed. I’ve failed him as a role model.
“You smoke?” I don’t want to know.
“Yes.” He lives in New York. Should I be surprised? No, I just feel depressed, like a toy taken from the attic that can’t interact with the modern imagination. I’m tired, archaic. Put me in the museum and let me collect dust like I’m supposed to.

“It’s religion isn’t it.” Josh is telling me. He knows me somehow. He’s a good-natured boulder of a man, sweet because he is to slow to be cruel and too lazy to change. I’m not sure where his head ends and his neck begins. He works at the pet store and lives with Dave and Dave’s wife Alison, sucking from Dave’s calf like a leach, drawing out a meager existence. It’s what they all say, because religion is their enemy. Not just any religion. Not Buddhism, or Hinduism, or Sikhism, or Taoism, or Shinto, or Bushido, but my religion or more accurately what they think my religion is. What is more thrilling than to have God against you?
“Yes.” I lie. I answer his assumption with false conviction, and wonder if it is for his sake or mine. I am a liar. Holden Caulfield would scream his goddamn head off at my phoniness.

My roommate’s name is Bloon, and he reads his bible every day. He is an amazing young man. He has a kind heart and a rudimentary grasp on the fundamentals of his faith. We entered each other’s lives at the right time. My sophomore year of high school, my family completes another migration. For the first time we find ourselves on the other side of the muddy Mississippi. I miss Kentucky, and Friday night football, and even Bram. Kansas is in the throes of winter when I arrive. The snow is piled up on the sides of the road. I have never seen snow like this; I have never seen so much snow. It blankets the ground like a blank canvas. I think of Hemingway and “Hills like White Elephants.” I see my future on their backs, stationary herds lining the roads; my moving tires splash the modern mud on their darkening backs. I hate Kansas. I hate my future, and fate, and predestination. I don’t hate God, but I don’t like God.
It is because Bloon so nice that we become friends. This is his best quality, and his worst headache, he cannot say no. He is always there for a ride, or to pay for lunch, or to take Kristin to my prom because I asked Lauren . And he spends hours in the bible. He reads it, prays with it, and I swear I’ve seen him asleep on it; or trying to learn through osmosis. The youth pastor in high school tells us that Bloon had one of the most serving hearts he has ever encountered; he confides with Bloon and others that I am the most disrespectful. It is the yin and the yang. We are set up on stage to be foils, but we mistake each other for brothers first.
His devotion is a lake with no river, as mine is a trickle of faith. The fervor, that at times impresses me, disappears. After a retreat or missions trip, or listening to an evangelical motivational speaker he is full of conviction.
It is a Thursday night, Bloon comes home from Navigators and accuses me and Jare of not putting forth effort into religion. This is a common occurrence. We ignore him usually. Bloon is Jare’s younger brother. Jare is tall and lanky, with fine wispy hair, and a concave chest. Bloon is tall and lanky, with fine wispy hair, and a concave chest that is further accentuated by his horrible posture. Both are stubborn. As Sunday draws near every week we wait for Bloon, and lately I’ve put a Buddha statue on my desk. The fat little man stares at Bloon all day. I acquired Buddha from a store that sells incense and Bob Marley tee-shirts. Buddha only costs you 994 for a pocket sized version, which is very convenient if you don’t have a shrine, or any intentions of making a shrine. I started taking him to class on test days. Bloon threw Buddha the other day when Jare and I told him we were converting. I told Bloon that Jesus wouldn’t have thrown my Buddha, he disagreed.

There are numerous names for him at our house. Bloon is to his face. Behind his back we call him The Hobbit, The Gimp , and The Hermit. His secret names, he earns by living within a 5 x 5 area around his desk. The only time spent away from the room is in the half-bath that we allow him to have.
Most of us grew out of acne when we graduated. Bloon’s too Charlie Brownish, and his acne stalks him. The harder he fights it the worse it gets, the more he worries about it, the more time he spends in the bathroom. It’s MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, trade out the fission and fusion for blackheads and whiteheads, firming cream and Benzoyl Peroxide.
In last year’s apartment, with only one bathroom, I relieved myself on the tree outside regularly. It became habit. I’d even urinate on the tree in the dead of winter in my shorts with no shoes on, and realize when I got back inside that he’d gone home for the weekend. He gets his own half-bath at the new house to medicate. I call it primping , Bloon hates that. From the bathroom he tells me I care too much about how I look as I pull on my Express jeans over my Calvin Klein’s. Personally, I believe that the acne breeds in his bathroom. It clings to the walls, pools on the floor, and oozes back up the drain waiting for its next victim. I went into his bathroom once. He never cleans it. He cuts his hair almost daily; a mound of fur or hair huddles in the corner like an oversized rodent disintegrating from the chemicals. I never enter barefoot.
He was christened Bloon in August of ’05. The brain waves and the voice box rarely seem to be able broadcast and receive on the same frequency. Whole sentences, ideas, and theories will be flung out unexplainable and untouchable. Jare and Tay come in and announce his new name. It was at dinner, over BBQ ribs and soiled napkins, Bloon was in the middle of a story when he stumbled on the word Balloon, ruined it, and cast his own fate. I don’t like it, because it is a bit mean, a bit cruel, but Bloon is indifferent, he wouldn’t say if he cared.
So he tells us to come to his church, a church that everyone has boycotted for the past two year. I don’t like it because it is one of those churches that is large and wants to get larger, and their lust for growth has caused them to lose their sincerity, and the theological points that the pastor makes each Sunday are trite and tasteless. They use movie clips to illustrate points—tying The Matrix with worldly illusions and The Bourne Identity with shepherds and lost sheep—and you’ll be stuck singing the same chorus on the same three chords for fifteen minutes. The battle is the same every Sunday morning:

Excerpt from Sunday Morning Wars:

Bloon: Are you going to church?

Matt: No.

Jare: No.

Bloon: Why not, man? Come on, you need to come.

Matt: In that case, fuck no.

Jare: I turned Buddhist with Shu, remember?

Matt (Shu): That’s right! We have temple.

Bloon: Shut up.

So…

Are you guys coming?

Chorus: No!


If Bloon asked us if we were going to “a” church we might not be so cruel. We visit different churches, find faults in all of them, and laugh at their pride. I laugh at the search for “church homes.” Shouldn’t you be able to find God anywhere; shouldn’t he be able to find you anywhere? Is there some secret spiritual-Geiger counter on the black market? Someone is doing something wrong and I can’t blame God. I’ve never seen him do something wrong. I see Catholic priests rework the job description of “altar boy,” and the fat southern preacher at First Baptist spends a month on the atrocities of abortion, before having an affair. Somehow he forgot small towns have no secrets, and abortions will find their way home. We talk about it in Mrs. Kinsel’s World Civilization; we whisper it between downs on Friday night.
There’s a man named Isaac. I found God at his church. I saw it in him. I heard Jesus in Isaac’s quavering voice as he pleaded with us to forgive him for being so fake and so horrible, but he’s laughing now, he’s smiling, because he’s been forgiven. And it is a matter of humility that most of the people who christen themselves with the brand of Christendom do not have. And without humility we are just radicals, screaming and claiming something not rightfully ours. I weep with Issac inside because he gives everything he has and everyone is taking and it makes him glad, but we’re all greedy. With one hand we take and with the other we slip our knife into Isaac’s good intentions.

Jare and I are sitting in the back. The church is in the gym of a Christian school. We’re late arrivals, and more than likely soon to be early departures. Its two Sundays before we boycott Bloon’s church.
The pastor tells us a story. “So we wanted to go to the basketball game.” Jare and I are sipping on mochachinos, listening him speak. He sounds falsely enthusiastic, like a telemarketer who’s excited to be selling magazine subscriptions to Home and Garden. He continues, his voice is nasal and always sounds complaining; “But we didn’t have tickets.” My phone starts to vibrate.
“Hello,” I keep my voice down. Jare is snickering.
“So we went to the game and figured we’d buy some off the scalpers.”
“I’m in church actually. Yes. No. Tonight?” People are starting to stare.
“The guy wanted seventy-five, but my friend, he Jewed him down to fifty.” The preacher’s words escape before we notice. Amplified by the speakers, it bounces off the hardwood floors, the chairs; it rebounds off the backboards, dribbles on the rim, and slam-dunks our attention.
I hang up. Even Jared looks surprised. It’s funny. It’s damn funny. It’s shocking though. I’m shocked. Jare is shocked. The pastor looks a little unsettled, but no apologies; he pauses for a moment with a ripple running through the congregation, but finishes his story and his sermon. Jare and I come back the following week to see if he’d apologize. He didn’t.
An abortion warrants an apology. I look back and see the fat southern preacher sobbing and slobbering his confession, asking for forgiveness, wailing like a baby. It’s the converse of rebirth. He crawls back into the womb of the world. Sympathy and stone is etched in the faces of the congregation. He’s jobless, homeless, professionless, townless. I believe he is sorry.
Racial slip ups are not permissible, and there are six million dead Jew’s who’d probably agree. And it’s casting stones to criticize. I see my transgressions piled up beside me, but I don’t bury them. I don’t sweep them aside with an uncomfortable pause as if they never happened, I’d apologize.

Bloon bitches to us when he has enough energy. And I spit back at him. I don’t understand. He doesn’t understand. I tell him I can find God in a sunset, and he never looks up from the red letters. I say I want to be a conservationist. He says he’d laugh at me for wasting my time. He tells me to be less Korean and embrace American culture because it is “the best.” I want to break his hawkish nose and tell him about Native Americans and Japanese internment camps .
He goes to a retreat at a Colorado resort; I work a job downtown to meet poor people where I meet Mario who’s from Venezuela. It’s a tough job on an assembly line. My fancy high school diploma, my college classes, they add up to nothing here. I feel ridiculous because I slow everyone down. But Mario guides me through each station. He’s twenty-two, fatherless, and fascinated by what I can tell him about the rainforest where he came from. He tells me about insanity in his family history, an uncle who went mad and wouldn’t stop raving shouting expletives and random words in English and Spanish. He’s afraid that the madness could infect him. I tell him I go to school, that I study English, I don’t really drink, I don’t smoke weed, the only tobacco product I touch is a cigar, and the little poison arrow frogs he used to see in Venezuela are called Dentrobates azureus.
Mario thinks I’m cool. I’m “a smart motherfucker,” but I’m cool because I’m not “conceited,” I exist right there next to him throwing boxes onto the skids and labeling them for the forklift drivers. I wish Stoners A, B, and C could hear him.
Jesus spent time with the blue collared workers. He went away to the mountains and didn’t go white water rafting. He didn’t eat for forty days, and he got to meet Satan . I scoff. I laugh when Bloon says he’s going to Ireland on a mission trip and that I should go too. There are kids starving here. There are beaten mothers in Kansas City, whose sons and daughters scrape out a life I’ve seen, but still can’t understand. Why do we need to spend fifteen hundred to find lost souls? I’ll give you five bucks for gas and I’ll take you to some lost souls right now.

So when Jare tells me that he wanted some shrooms I say, “I’ll make some calls.” He needs to relax, he can’t relax. I know shrooms will be difficult, but weed will be easy. Jare is not a stoner. Jare has an open mind. He’s smoked weed five, maybe six, times before, bumming off some buddies back home who I know only as background voices in late night drunk calls.
Lucas was being a prick. I call Ghram after I leave The Herp Shack. He tells me twenty for seven grams and a dollar for delivery. He’d have to look around for shrooms first before he could get a price quote. Dry town my ass.
“I don’t know if I want seven grams.” Jare’s voice is breaking up; my reception is lousy in this town. Its 7:30 and I’m sitting at a red light behind an oversized pickup.
“The price is twenty for seven. It’s a good price.”
“I’m not sure,’ says Jare.
Neither am I.

I’m standing in front of Scaly Dave’s Herp Shack. Dave has me selling hotdog lunches and raffle tickets. Five dollars gets you a hotdog, a bag of chips, a Pepsi, and five chances to win a fifty-five gallon aquarium. The store has its own cult following, our die hard customers who know Dave by name. One mismatched family group that consists of fat old lady with yellow teeth, a reasonably attractive overly thin girl, and a man in his late twenties with short hair and a black tee-shirt that says “John 3:16.” They come at eleven, and again at one, and a final time around three. They buy over a dozen lunches, some sixty raffle tickets, and three leopard geckos. Dave watches them leave for the final time. He’s eating a hot dog.
“John 3:16,” he says. “What the hell does that mean?”
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. That whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” I’m trail off, whispering behind him.
“What?” Dave turns to look at me.
I’m sheepish, I shouldn’t be. “John 3:16, it’s a verse from one of the Gospels. John’s I think.”
“You know that?”
Doesn’t everybody, I think to myself. “Sunday school, Dave.”
“That’s crazy.”
What isn’t?

“So how’s your walk going?” No build up, Bloon can’t ask you how your day was, but when it comes down to religion he’s blunt as hell. The boldness is admirable, but I never respect it from him. I don’t respect a twenty-one year old who’s on diversion, evaded arrest, and still claims that it was the cops fault. It involved New Year’s Eve, a girl, a state line, and mace. He doesn’t want to talk about it, but I saw the video tape. It wasn’t the cop’s fault. It was the cop’s fault that he got away. It was the cop’s fault that his parents didn’t leaving their party early to pick him up at the police station. There is a point where you have to accept ownership of your own life. And we all have lapses, but I claim my mistakes, I don’t blame girls, or cops, or eight hour work days, or the position of the moon.
I don’t respect his friends who are, “Really cool,” who get bored and spend afternoons and nights on sprees inspired by Grand Theft Auto. Our collection of street signs is confiscated at the beginning of the year because we left it the carport, visible from the street. I liked the “3-Way” sign; the “4-Way” was even better, but more daunting to live up to. They never came back for the buoy that they said was a federal offense. I never saw the video of the intersection on fire, but Jare says three cop cars, an ambulance, and a fire truck showed up, their personal best showing so far. I yelled at them for tearing down the windmill, because I like the way they stand alone in open fields, proving that the wind keeps them company. For fun they tally their estimates. Generous counts put the damage at $10,000 within the last four years.
I answer Bloon’s question after some thought. I’m not sure though, because our cool friends, Bloon, Jare, and I are all from the same church. I’m confused on what my walk is supposed to look like. I’m frustrated at fraudulent faith that is folded up and put aside in deliberated destruction.
“I tend to make my own rules. I live by my own code of morality.” I tell him, and I pause, because I know he wants me to admit how little attention I give to religion. “It’s between me and God.” I don’t leave him room to talk, I suffocate him in silence.

We’re in the old football stadium. My toes fell off thirty minutes ago; I’m blowing on my hands to keep up the circulation. The sun took his heat with him when he dipped behind the horizon. Selfish bastard. The man on the stage builds a cross. He throws out handfuls of gold chain links; they represent the bondage that sin once held us in. Come to the cross. Come to the cross and trade your sins for a link and start a new life. Our sins are written down on a note card. I’ll need a couple stacks, but all I have is one. One note card to condense all of my sins, I couldn’t even fit the table of contents on a note card. I guess that they just want a summary. This is a stupid idea.
Bloon prods me. I’m supposed to get up and go down to the cross and the stage and get my gold link. He gets up and leaves. I’m still sitting, note card in my left hand, pencil in my right. The average person has to hear the message seven times before they accept Christ. Where did I learn that? Which church? What pastor? Where do they get their facts? Daniel and Brice take their sin-cards down. I’m still sitting. There’s the obligation to follow the crowd. But I want to leave. I want to get up in front of everyone and show them that I don’t need to nail my note card to the cross that the curly-haired man just made to find redemption. Doesn’t everyone see? It’s just a metaphor; I want to scream at the top of my lungs. This will do nothing for your soul! And we need physical acts to equate spiritual meaning, but I’m feeling angry, like the biggest guilt trip has been offered to us all and we’re gladly apologizing.
I scribble on my card. I get up and walk down. There’s a little voice screaming in me. I like my sin. It’s not that I enjoy being sinful. It’s a burden, but somehow there’s a uniqueness that’s me that’s tied to my sin. It’s not something that I’d show my parents, or enter into a talent show. It’s rancid, disgusting, ugly, and not something I’d hang above the mantle; but it’s mine. Like my brother’s baseball hat, our mother wants to wash it and he refuses because it is his messy hat. He was with it every step of the way as it became torn, worn, and caked in salt. I reason with this voice, it might be a demon, it may be me. The contents of my card are inconsequential, but the principles are tearing me apart. I hand my sins to a girl who passes it to the stage to be nailed to the cross. I feel sick. There are no more gold links left, first come first serve. I come back empty handed as usual. Bloon is waiting. He puts his hand on my shoulder. I want to punch him, but it’s my fault.

Love the sinner not the sin. And I know that sin is of this world and our end design is not meant for this world. But yet here I am. Living, breathing, sinning. I paint paintings for Ben and Betty in the nursing home with one hand; and throw a high school sophomore into the lockers with my other. With one voice I sing, “I’ve got a river of life flowing out of me,” and another tells Bloon to, “Fuck off.” The duality of my existence is remarkable. And I straddle the line between that which is right and Godly and that which I do not wish to release, and I don’t understand. Fence straddler. Fake. Hypocrite. There’s a line from a song by the Christian folk group Caedmon’s Call, “This world has nothing for me, and this world has everything. All that I could want, and nothing that I need.” I remembered that line after hearing it once. I’ll remember it forever.
The funny thing is how easily I slip into different social spheres, the heathen and the Christian. And somehow I don’t see them as being very far apart. What they described at First Baptist as a chasm that only The Cross could bridge seems to only be puddle with the water’s glassy reflection hiding its depth and danger.

My brother’s are young and at the age where what I do matters. I don’t do drugs for Jesus. I want them to keep open minds. It’s okay to know how to operate a 9mm, how to talk your way out of a speeding ticket, and how to let a girl down easy. It’s okay to not know the difference between a bong and a beer bong. It’s okay to hold open the door, give your seat to little old ladies, and ask the girl in the corner if she’d like to dance. Listen to your mother, roll in the grass, be home before midnight. It’s okay to question why you should believe what the man at the pulpit would ask you to believe, but you have to be smart, smarter than him, not more knowledgeable, but more inquisitive. And stop. Read the red letters, watch the red sunsets.

Stoners and saints, they’re both looking for salvation, in a leather bound book or in a seven gram bag. The town is dry, as dry as its people going through the motions of finding nothing but grape juice and stale bread . And they eat it, and it can get them high, but in the end it turns to ash in their mouths; because they want religion, when I need flesh and blood. And I feel a movement behind me. It could be only the wind, but it might be angry generation after generation, with compounded fury from centuries of lies. And we cry for salvation because we’re afraid. I’m scared of Isaac, potheads, hard drinkers, Polish penises, back alley abortions, cretin, girls, collapsing windmills, and cold Christians who don’t conduct current. Because I’m one of them; I’ve felt the power behind this elusive faith. It is terrible and peaceful, wonderful and painful, but even the pain is wonderful. Duality isn’t something I understand, so I confuse myself. My vision is too sharp to step out with blind faith, so I rock on my heels, eventually I’ll fall forward or backwards it doesn’t matter because the direction is down when I need to go up.

I’m back in the car. The sky is still gray. I could make some more calls. There’s more than one stoner in my phone. But somehow I’m tired. I let it drop, my cell phone bounces around in the passenger seat. Jare lets it drop. I never make the purchase. It’s not religion. It might be my conscience, my brothers’ innocence, Bloon’s relentlessness, Isaac’s quavering voice, my future, my past. It might be Jesus.


I’m back in the car. It’s starting to rain. My windshield wiper blades are smearing the water, blurring my line of sight. Somehow I think about the disciple Paul ; before he was Paul he was Saul. I’m driving home and all I can think about is Saul on the road to Damascus. This is crazy. Why must we all be blind before we see? My heart is racing, my voice is choking, and my hands are shaking. I can hardly see the road.

Saturday, August 4, 2007

My Cicada Killer

I’m ten and Luke is five. We use trashcan lids to shield our bodies, broken brooms and sun bleached branches for swords. Back and forth we fight beneath the orange trees, overripe fruit draws rats at night and wasps during the day. Luke spins, shifts his shield to his back and blocks a downward cut from my katana, he stabs upward. I shift back, duck beneath a low hanging branch full of thorns. Luke jumps after me, he throws his shield in front of him covering fallen fruit and rolls over it. I swing down.

Ten years later.
We run.
We cross fallen trees that span streams of clear cold water. It’s a game of tag and no one is ever it, we simply run because the air fills our lungs and the sun breaks through the canopy. We run because we have legs. Two trees are growing together. They look the same age, seeds fallen from the same tree half a century ago. Luke runs straight at them, veers slightly to the left tree, jumps with one foot he kicks the trunk and twists around to reach the lowest hanging branch on the right tree. He swings up and scales the oak until the branches will not bear his lithe form. I can jump higher than him, I don’t need fancy acrobatics. We peak through leaves at blue sky, it is so close now.

The smell of sticky fruit fills the air. Luke sees my branch swinging down, he slides to the right, his thrust is blocked harmlessly by my shield. We circle each other in the shade of our citrus trees. Luke charges, he flicks his long slender branch, there is an audible crunch of the cicada killer that he just dispatched. Cicada killers are hornets on steroids. They are large, black with red trim, but unlike hornets they fly solo, and killing one brings no repercussions.

We hardly ever fight. Luke is beating me with one hand in fooseball. I take the fooseball off the table and throw it at him. He’s five feet from me. He catches it effortlessly. I run in case he throws it back because I know I cannot repeat that feat.

I come home from college. I’m drinking orange juice. Luke comes down the stairs, he tosses me some leather and we head outside. I’ve been out of baseball for five years, but I impress myself, the velocities of our throws are even. Ten minutes. I realize that Luke is throwing with his left hand.
“My accuracy is getting pretty good,” Luke says.
“Really?”
Luke takes the glove off his right hand, “Left knee,” he calls out, and the ball is rocketed at my left knee. He puts his glove back on and I throw the ball back at him. “Right shoulder,” he says next.

We wait for our burgers. This is the first time he’s visited me by himself.
“I don’t love it anymore,” he says.
“No?”
“The pressure,” he shakes his head.
“Hmmm.”
“Every time the ball is hit at me I’m thinking, don’t f up don’t f up don’t f up.”
“Remember the last year I played?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought that same thing, that’s why I sucked, but remember summer ball?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t give a shit about it, I just had fun eh? I jumped over a friggin fence.”
“Ha, yeah that was quite a catch.”
“My point is,” I sip ice water, “don’t get so worked up. I know that pressure doesn’t go away or anything, but just play the game. You have the gift, a talent. Don’t waste it by not enjoying it.”
“It’s a job now. It’s my ticket to a free ride through college.”
“わかな。” (wa-ka-na)
“What?”
“What do you want to do now?”
We talk about how he mentors the younger shortstops on the team. I can imagine how he must have reached god status in their eyes by now. He tells me that he wants to coach someday. I tell him how impressed I am by his writing. He asks me how to improve.

I am eight and Luke is three. He sits angry at the ball field. This is the genesis. This is where his passion ignites. He watches me bumble about on the clay, awkward, uncoordinated, more apt to chase a dragonfly than catch a fly ball. He runs with this. I’ve seen my brother silence angry sports parents on both baselines with his acrobatics. I’ve seen him defy gravity and time. I watched him take line drives to the chest without so much as a grimace. Once he turned a triple play. Once he stole home off a right handed pitcher. Once he looked angrily at a kid who just hit a stand up double and scared him right off the base. There is this aura of self assurance. I robbed a home run once. Fifteen years of playing and that was my greatest moment, my one moment. I was pretty proud, but I’m more proud of him. Are our younger brothers not projections of ourselves? And I realize no, they are not. And our mother wonders where Luke gains his intensity.

Luke swings his sword at my eyes. I bring my shield up to guard them. He touches the garbage can lid with the lightest kiss from his wooden blade, spins and swings low, slaps my shins, and then it’s up with the point. He stops, the smooth branch barely touching my stomach.

I get emails now. Luke sends me short stories; poems. He makes the mistake of ending stories for happy endings. I teach him that not all endings are happy, but they can all teach us something. He rewrites, resends. It’s good stuff. Better than anything I ever wrote at his age. I wonder where this new creativity comes from, and I wonder if, like baseball, he will someday far surpass me in this also. And I am so proud.

I’ve hardly touched my burger, the waitress has already cleared Luke’s table setting.
“I’ve been reading your stuff.”
I laugh, I’ve been leaving it around hoping he would find it. “Really?”
“Yeah. I was cleaning your room the other day and I found some of your old stuff too.”
“Ha, yes, some of that stuff is pretty glib.”
“Yeah.” He looks at my plate, “You gonna get a box?”
I flag a waitress down.
“I’ll eat that later,” he winks at me.

My Mistaken Identity

I got mistaken for being Vietnamese the other day. Yuuki and I went to Mr. Goodcents. Aggiville was crowded, people milling about in their cars like cows off pasture. I parked in a handicap parking spot, I still have a handicap pass through the month of April as I rehabilitate my reconstructed left knee.
A man in a white SUV called out.
“Are you handicapped?”
“Yep.”
Yuuk and I kept walking to Goodcents.
“I’m calling the cops.”
I looked back. The man was red in the face. It looked like he was sun burnt, or drunk.
“I have the paperwork,” I reassured him.
The SUV inched past us silently.
It was a good fifty feet ahead of us before the rummy faced man leaned over his silent passenger and said, “We should have never let the Vietnamese into this country!”

I was a little mad, and a little amused.
I thought about how satisfying it would have been to put a couple .50 caliber rounds through the suspension of his vehicle.
And I thought, “Well, I’m not really Vietnamese, but it was probably the first Asiatic nationality that he could think of.”
I wondered if maybe he lost a father or relative in the Vietnam war.
I thought, “The native Americans probably think something similar to that.”
I thought of Sherman Alexie.
Karma.
It took him an extra fifty feet of pavement and that was the best thing he could yell at me.

He’s lucky he didn’t park next to Goodcents when I came out. I was with Yuuki, so I wouldn’t have keyed KKK into his white SUV in front of her, probably. But I was seriously considering calling Gil and Dave and maybe Mike and a couple other guys from Fort Riley, and then we’d comb Aggiville for his car and when we found it we wouldn’t burn it or blow it up, but we would probably rotate it so it was parked on its roof instead of its wheels. That would make me laugh.

The sad thing isn’t that he was ignorant and inconsiderate. The sad thing was that one man, with one act, for an instant could make me hate white people. A couple hundred white friends, white parents, and for a moment I hated white people. And in reality I didn’t hate all white people. I hated all white people like him.

I thought about Luke. I wondered if he has ever faced something like that. I kind of wish he never has to, maybe I can work something out with God where I can be the only Schuellein boy who has to face down anything like that ever.

And I feel so out of place here sometimes. Like I don’t belong in America. Like my train of thought runs a different course. Like I have no attachment to the land. Any land.

It took me while to stop being angry. I haven’t dealt with anything like that for a while.

“Fuck you.”
I’m folding laundry in a laundry mat the middle of the day on Saturday. There are some exchange students from Pakistan. I like how exchange students dress. There was one who was wearing a steel blue shirt with writing wrapping around it on the left side in a different language. Their entire conversation was in a different tongue. The only English that I heard from them was a “fu” directed at some white guys dressed like Realworld extras who sat in front of the Laundry mat taunting them before they went to lunch.

Again I thought something about the Art of Gamman, enduring all with quite grace and honor. I asked Yuuki about it, she looked me in the eyes, "It makes us strong."
I never bother folding my whites.

Monday, July 23, 2007

My Shooting Stars

The city lights dwindle in the distance. The polluted white ambiance softly pulses. The sky is streaked with long fibrous clouds that diffuse the half-moon’s light and break up constellations. We’re driving down a gravel road, the clock reads ten past midnight.

My thoughts are morbid. With the darkness covering the road ahead and blanketing the road behind all I can help to think of is this investigative news report I saw when I was three. It was about some guy who hunted down a bunch of people riding around on four-wheelers with a 12-gauge shotgun. It was sort of a monumental thing for me to see. It made me fear man. I was afraid when I went to bed that night and dreamed nightmares of men in trucker hats and heavy boots running after me and my feet getting stuck in the mud when I tried to cross the river. When my parents forbid me from riding four-wheelers they told me they were dangerous. "I KNOW!" was the response in my head.

I think about how it would be horrible for a maniac to be haunting these dusty roads with a hammer and soft step. What if he got her and I got away? Drifts through my mind. Well, you’d be crushed of course, but after enough tears and Jack Daniel Cokes you might pull through. It is a stupid idea though, because any maniac would have to make his way past my lifeless body before touching her.

I rock the steering wheel rhythmically with the road, avoiding rough patches and large rocks. There is going to be a meteor shower tonight. She was very excited when we left. But clouds blot out the stars and a cold heartless wind blows down hope.

Fact: Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus.
Fact: Seung-Hui Cho majored in English.
Fact: Seung-Hui Cho was South Korean

My roommate asked me if needed to worry about me the other day. Sounded a little insensitive to me. Just a logical progression of thought for him.

The road dips low, she breathes in softly, but audibly. Down. Down. Down. I wonder and marvel at the differences that make people good and others killers. I struggle with attachment, or detachment. I constantly try to drive the people I love away. And maybe it has something to do about being an orphan, and being abandoned by the people who are supposed to love you the most.

Sometimes she cries when I say things I should not because I’m feeling things I should not. I suffer silence with guilt; wondering why we say things we know we should not.

My parents say I grew up before I came to America. At 18 months I set foot in America, out ate my parents at a Thanksgiving dinner, and learned my first American word on the car ride home from the airport. By four I spoke in complete sentences, addressed my parent’s church on several occasions, and made an excellent wise man from “orient are” one year and shepherd the next in the Christmas pageant (I always volunteered to be Joseph and never understood why I never was). By six I buried a younger brother, cursed God’s name, became an older brother again, and read half of The Boxcar Children series on my own.

I’m searching. I know this spot where sand meets water and monarchs come in the fall migration to kiss the sand in long sips and will sponge salt off your skin if you stay still. But it’s night. And the gravel road is dark and long, but we drive; until turned away by a no trespassing sign and I admit we’re lost. I pull off the road onto a plateau were the grass has been blown flat by the sweeping winds. We lie on the car and stare at the sky looking for shooting stars behind threads of wispy clouds.

I laughed the other day at silly smiling girl in a tampon commercial. I laughed at capitalism and lies of marketing departments. I bet that commercial was shot mid-month.

My roommates tell me that I’m not that Asian. And I think I’ve finally realized what it is. I don’t adhere to the stereotype of Asian ethnicity that popular culture has ingrained in their minds. But my hair is dark, my eyes are slanted, my skin is smooth; I eat with chopsticks, cook rice and noodles daily, and watch Korean soaps. I’m stuck between feeling grateful that they’ve learned to look at me beyond a stereotype, and lightly offended because I am proud of who I am.

She shivers. The night is cool and I wrap an arm around her. She can’t stop shaking. I wish we could see shooting stars.

My Painted Ceiling

In that instant I wanted them all to be true. All the clichés, all the tear jerking love stories, all the fairytales and legends that end with horse rides, sunsets, famous kisses, and happily-ever-afters. All of the things that made me gag, I wanted them to all be true.
When I was alone, in life before all of this, I embraced sadness because there is something haunting and beautiful about a damned hero dying, Juliet plunging the crease into her broken heart, Jet Li’s ghost dancing for a blind girl who is still smiling. But there is nothing in this world that is as beautiful as this.
Lying on our sides watching the tears run from one eye into another and then through and onto the mattress, we whisper, “I’m so happy,” while laughing at the irony and sniffing.

And there it is. A perfect thought. Since the garden and the forbidden fruit debacle there has been a constant shortage of perfect thoughts. Michelangelo was thought to have had one while painting a ceiling, Newton also while drowsing under a fruit tree, and it is a certainty that the person who invented pants was superbly blessed. I’ve been looking. Under rocks, across prairies and beaches, in sanctuaries and graveyards, nursing homes, soup kitchens, diners, wine bottles, beer bottles, ketchup bottles, above the clouds, beneath the water’s surface, and under the cushion of the couch. And there it is.

All loss is sad. They are little deaths that lack the finality and distance that comes with a coffin. The separation between two distances, be it the width of rice paper or the span of an ocean, stretches on forever when you cannot cross it.

Here we are. In Kansas City International Airport, it took forever to check in. We hold each other; both right shoulders wet with tears.
Why is this so hard?
And I realize that she means more than the world to me. It is an interesting feeling, waiting to watch love fly away. I wish ten minutes would last forever. Then I wish that three minutes would last for ten. Then it is time to go.
She gets in line.
We hug.
We kiss.
We say good bye.
We say, “I love you.”
Then I turn and walk away.
Then I turn around and run back to her grab her and hold her again.
People pass.
You don’t care.
Nothing matters except this moment.
We can’t stop crying.
We cry enough for a lifetime.
People pass.
I don’t care.

Now she’s gone.

We are still lying on the mattress.
I’m still crying and she looks at me and asks, “What’s wrong?”
I whisper back, “You are my perfect thought.”

My tears could last forever.

The sun is trying to break through the clouds. I'm singing the same song I sang to her on the way out to the airport.

"You are my sunshine,
My only sunshine,
You make me happy,
When skies are gray,
You'll never know dear,
How much I love you,"

And for an instant the sun's rays illuminate my face. I laugh at the timing. But it is for only an instant and the clouds tuck it back away.

"Please don't take my sunshine away."

Saturday, July 14, 2007

My Skinned Knees

I’m standing next to the trash can. My left hand is over my right, pressing down. Blood drips more slowly now into the trash that consists mostly of used mulch and snake skins. Vince is to my right, staring at the python that glares up at him through the lid of the container. Lucas is in front of me, also staring at the snake.
“Can you pass me some paper towel,” I say in my normal quite voice. Neither of them hears me though. I try again this time louder and directed at Vince. Lucas still doesn’t move, Vince goes into the incubation room and returns with a square piece of paper towel that he’s folding. He holds it out.
I always forget how sticky blood is. My hand was slick when I first grabbed it, but not I pull it away and it’s like flesh on couch that has one of those clear plastic protecting covers on it. I take the paper towel. The veins now free of the pressure for an instant resume their bleeding; the blood again starts to swell beneath the skin of my hand. I clamp the paper towel down and push hard.
“Do you guys think you can handle it from here?” I ask Lucas.
Lucas laughs finally, “I think Vince can handle it from here.”
“Okay, I’m going to go clean this up.” I wave my hands.

I know a lot of people that get jittery around blood, or open wounds, or pain. I’ve never really had that problem. When I learned to ride a bike I did it on a steep hill in front of my house. We lived at the foot of the mountains in West Virginia at the time. I got used to bleeding after awhile. My mom would dress the scrapes, disinfect the cuts, kiss the bruises. It was part of learning. I accepted it. It didn’t faze me.
West Virginia was a dangerous time for me. I was in first grade and out to prove that I was man enough to take on the world.
I caught every animal I could get my hands on. I raced every kid during recess. I went toe-to-toe with the fat kids on the seesaws, and to this day wonder what genius and bitter femme-Nazi ever invented such a dangerous playground apparatus. I jumped into a wall once and tore an inch long gash in my elbow on the dull side of a nail and forwent stitches because I wanted to go ride my bike. You learn early on that part of life, part of living, is getting hurt to remember what feeling is.

I’m back in Manhattan, Kansas for the weekend. I work at a local pet store that deals with exotic reptiles, or herps as they are called in the hobby. Rachel is working there with me. She’s our newest employee, she still comes to me with every question she has, but she’s learning, and she’s interested so I don’t mind. Lucas doesn’t work with us, but he’s over at the breeding facility spraying the snake racks down for mites. When I say breeding facility I’m talking about an office space that used to be a nursery for preschoolers. There’s still a badly done welcome sign painted in purple on the front door. Across the hallway is a property management office whose owners aren’t exactly thrilled about their new neighbors and the smells that come with a couple thousand reptiles and the additional insects and rodents that are raised to feed them. The snake racks are basically a series of plastic drawers slid into a metal frame and they range in size similar to that which you’d keep your socks in to ones that morgues use to keep bodies cool. I have a couple of snakes over in the facility. Lucas comes into the pet store which is only a two minute walk away from the breeding facility.
“Is your snake nice?” Lucas asks me.
“I’ve never had a problem with her, she did bite this one guy, but not hard.” My snake that he’s talking about is an eight foot carpet python. It is a beautiful snake, slender for her length, with a head the size of a fist. Her body is black with yellow spots and stripes. I picked her up from a kid in Virginia, when he shipped them he made three mistakes. First he used USPS, which forbids live snakes to be shipped through their services. Second, he didn’t package them correctly, no insulation. Third, he used very old packaging material; he tied the snakes up in old frayed pillow cases and put them in an old box. The snakes escaped in Topeka, and he’s lucky the office people who recaptured them didn’t decide to pursue legal action. When I went to get the snakes they made me pose with them holding it while they took pictures with us.
“Well, I’m cleaning them down for mites,” says Lucas, “if you get a free second I’d appreciate some help taking her out.”
“Sure, no problem.”

I was a freshman in high school and new to Corbin, Kentucky. My neighbor was a senior in ROTC and an avid fisherman. He invited me to come trout fishing with him and a retired army colonel. I was having no lucky in my first freshwater fishing experience, and starting to get bored of watching David and the colonel real in fish after fish.
It was a sudden jerk that yanked my head forward, David stood in front of me looking confused at the lack of a lure at the end of his line.
It was a rooster tail. It’s a small metal lure with a feather at the base with a three pronged hook, a metal shaft with a spinner on it that sparkles as it encounters drag through the water. David wandered my direction while casting into the current, he wandered too close.
I was wearing a hat, which of course the hood went straight through, the barb is pronged so that it is nearly impossible to remove without tearing a chunk of flesh out with it and it is as deep as it can go in the small space between my skin and skull.
The colonel is playing with the hook in the back of my head.
“Well, Matt…I can’t pull it out without creating a much larger hole,” he tells me.
I raise my eyebrows, but he can’t see the gesture. “Just yank it out.”
He first asks if any of us are carrying a knife. None of us are, ironically, our knives are on the other side of the river, which was fordable an hour ago, but we are trapped on the other side because we are beneath a dam and the dam is letting water out raising the icy water level. The colonel offers another option. “Well Matt, I can cut a small incision with another fish hook where the barb is, it will hurt, but it will minimize the damage.”
“Go for it.”
None of us have lighters, so we have to pick the hook that looks the most sterile, and he carefully slices down till he finds the barb and slowly pulls it out. I don’t make a sound.
I start the next school year with two people who respect me.

We hit a slow spot at the store so I leave Rachel and go to the breeding facility. We have large plastic bins out, and I pull my snake out without a problem. There is a second snake in the tub though; nine foot carpet python, who I’ve handled before without any problems.
I truly believe that snakes and other animals can sense confidence. There is a small snake at the pet store that I’ve sold twice now, and it has been brought back both times. The snake was always a little feisty, striking at the glass whenever you passed in front of it. I was bored last spring though so I pulled it out, and started to handle it whenever I was bored. The snake calmed down, for me at least. I never had a problem with her. I took her to my French class and gave a presentation about keeping snakes as pets to the class. The last people to bring her back was a young couple. The wife said that she loved the snake, and the snake never gave her problems. They guy said that he was a little nervous of her and that she always acted like she would strike him. I pulled the snake out. She curled up on my hand. I looked at them. The wife just rolled her eyes, the husband stammered and insisted on the viciousness of the snake. When he opened his mouth she struck in his direction.

I reached in and grabbed the python. He was fine as I began to pull him out. Then I watched as he moved his head and started to smell the back of my right hand. I knew what was going to happen next. He opened his mouth, I twisted my hand away from the gaping maw. I was able to keep him from getting my whole hand, but he got six teeth into the back of my hand. His top and bottom jaw lined up almost perfectly with two of the largest veins that run across my hand. He drew his body around my wrist and started to squeeze. My hand swelled. I grabbed his head with my other hand. Lucas grabbed his body. I twisted the head and the teeth out of my hand, and we stowed the snake into the bin. I felt something drip onto my toe. Blood ran down my hand and dripped from my finger tips. I grabbed it with my left hand and pressed hard, blood squirted and spilled everywhere. I walked to the trash can.

Rachel look a little freaked out when I walked into the store with red hands.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, I got tagged.”
I went to the sink and washed my hand off with cool water. I doused it with alcohol. The bleeding still hadn’t stopped. Two veins had been punctured. I found the med kit above the sink while blood slowly dripped into the sink and splashed in bright red patterns. I used a combination of adhesive bandage stitches and some super glue to close the puncture points. I covered them all with band aids.

It is something you learn when you learn to ride your bike, when you fall out of your first tree, when you catch your first bumblebee. You are going to get hurt. Part of living is painful, and if you know what to look for then you can anticipate what’s going to happen. I know that I will occasionally get bitten handling large snakes. I knew that that carpet python was hungry as soon as he pressed his nose against my skin. I knew I was going to get bitten. I didn’t have to go help Lucas do his job, but that’s what we do when friends ask us for help. And we’ll get hurt sometimes. For a long time I’ve not been the one to step in and take the hit, because I never understood how to value relationships. It took a long time for me to recognize I was wrong.

I know it’s a crappy metaphor: comparing emotional investment with getting bitten by a nine foot snake and bleeding similes into a trashcan while I apply pressure and deeper meaning to stem the flow of blood.

When we can see something is going to hurt we prepare ourselves. And then we can handle it without completely losing it. Some people are just good at thinking on their toes. I can lose a pint of blood and not bat an eye as long as I now how to keep it from getting worse. I can tear my ACL and just shrug and say, yeah, I need some help to my car. I don’t consider these things to be strengths, merely the ability to function with focus in an emotionally detached state.

I cried every day for two weeks last month. I still tear up occasionally. The first thing I think about when I wake up is always Yuuki. The last thought I have before I fall asleep is her as well. I’ve never felt so strong.

It is a topsy-turvy world that I’ve discovered. And I struggle against years of floating adrift, to stay anchored to this idea of an adventure and trial that I’ve already made my mind to pursue. So I forgo the snakes now, they’ve never scared me, they hardly raise my pulse, but terrified I still struggle to grasp the terms of my new convictions.

I watched a show where a scientist was trying to catch every species of crocodile in the world, 23 different species. Deep in Borneo he found one of the rarest in the world hiding under some roots that had extended into the water. He tried to use his noose pole, but the vines were too thick. Without hesitating he got out of his boat, slipped between the vines and grabbed the animal barehanded. When you know what you want you forgo even your life, leave the boat, roll up your sleeves, and hold on hard.

My Rice Paper

Spring is here. Pollen secrets its way between conversations so much that we stop saying, “God bless you.” The sky today is blue, photoshop quality. There is a crispness, a sharp intake of air that chills and refreshes and reminds you of horses thundering wild and free across a tall grass landscape in a land that has never seen a civilized man. I hope I never become a civilized man.

I used to have these sensations this time of year. Like a voice. A softly growing tremble that has its roots within some primeval source that originates in the depths of the human soul and reverberates through the span of every restless thought I’ve ever had. And I’d run across the Konza prarie. And I’d scream. And the wind was the one thing that would comfort me. I’d look down from atop a hill, bronzed, breathless, arms spread, surveying the trail behind and the rocky paths ahead. In reality I guess I was lonely in some way. Or missing something, or locked with the knowledge that I was not complete. I don’t know if girls can relate to this, maybe only after menopause. There is some caged spirit that is not me yet defines me more clearly than a resume. Maybe it is just the inner self attempting to escape the decorum of a preconceived notions of how life is meant to be.

Tonight I am sitting alone on a Friday night. I sip sake and eat squid and rice watching Tivo-ed episodes of Scrubs and The Office. [I really am getting tired of David Spade commercials] This isn’t where I have to be. The night has dropped quickly over the spring day. Sometimes I think that I can only write in two moods. It is like sorrow leads me to the page, and anger sharpens my words. So I write either angry or sad or some emotion in the middle.

“The distance between the deepest of human emotions is no greater than the thickness of rice paper, the deepest love and the bitterest hate, it is the weakness of the heart, it is our most formidable enemy.”


I wake up at 6:23 this morning. In bed, I’m watching the clock record the minutes until Yuuki leaves for the airport. I haven’t been getting much sleep lately. I want to fall back asleep, sleep in until the sun fills my room and the chickadees court each other in the tree outside my window. I lay in bed. A little black box sits idle. Its contents consist of a pair of cufflinks that I promised to give Yuuki yesterday to wear with her French cuffed shirt in England. She’ll only be gone a week. We never managed to make our way back to my apartment so I never got them to her. 6:38. It is just like her to buy a French cuffed shirt and not have any cufflinks. I laugh. Reach out from the covers and take the box, check the jewelry inside. The metal is cold. 6:47. I throw back the covers, grab a fleece, my keys, run out the door.

6:48
6:49
6:50
6:51 Red light.
6:52
6:53 Stop-sign.
6:54
6:55… Yuuki’s phone rings.

“Hello?” she answers.
“It’s me.”
“Oh, hi!”
“I forgot to give you something.”
“Oh?”“The cufflinks.”
“Oh. It’s okay.”
“Well, I’m bringing them to you.”
“Oh. Where are you?”



“Are you here?”



“Yes.”I felt rather foolish. I really didn’t know what to say. Aside from the facts that she already knew. [Je t’adore. Je elle adore]

6:57. She is in my arms again.

7:04. I am back in my car, heading back to my apartment singing John Denver.

9:05 (pm). I sit slowly sipping sake from a green glass bottle. That voice that links me to my primordial self has departed. A new resident claims ownership in his stead. It soars. it sinks. it survives on the countenance of another’s wish. It swims and wallows and slips into the solace that only sleep can pretend to impersonate. Yet unlike sleep where dreams linger only faintly in the subconscious, this burns hotter the more I try to change the subject.

And I have to stop writing. Because despite being alone and lonely on a Friday night, a smile grows in the little places that should be filled with smiles before they age and harden. And happiness makes the writing glib, but I’d rather never pen another word than give up my greatest weakness.

I love all the seasons, but for now this one most of all.
 
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