Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Daybreak.
Last night I dreamt that I was driving in a snow storm, and when I opened my eyes I was staring at the muted sun coming through the hotel room's curtains.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Kelly and the Atheist
Friday, January 12, 2007
Amanda and the Tree
Amanda climbed higher still. She had only climbed this high a few times before, when she was younger. The last time she had, she had fallen very far. Tree was mad at her for climbing so high, but it helped her. It told her that she had broken her ankle, and that she would need to stay on the ground and rest until it healed. Tree gave her fruit when she needed it and Monkey brought her water when she was thirsty and Bird kept her company when she was lonely, and after many days she could climb again, which was good. Amanda hated being on the ground. It was always cold and wet and some times, when the wind was really loud, the rains splashed in her face and made her clothes wet and made her skin shiver, and some times the whole world lit up with light and then there was a loud crash, louder then even when Monkey screams at Bird for stealing his food. When she was with Tree, she never got wet, and the world never lit up as bright, and the crashes were never as bright, and she was never as scared. And some times, when she did get scared, she would wrap her arms around him and he would give her fruit, and Monkey and Bird would come sit with her, and Tree would tell her stories of what happened before the water started falling.
Tonight the rain was falling very hard, and the dark sky some times became very bright, and all around her some times was very loud. Amanda wanted Tree to tell her a story. That’s why Amanda climbed higher. She got to where Monkey was and sat down near him. Monkey smiled at her, and she smiled back, and then Bird came over and greeted both of them with a short song. Amanda hugged tree, and told her that she was scared, and wanted to hear a story, if Tree would tell one.
Tree began his story like he always did.
There were other people like you, he told her. Before the rains. You would live together in families. And there were others like you too, Bird. Enough of you to fill the skies with flight and song. And you, Monkey, there were many like you, who would laugh and play together and lay out in the sun.
What’s the Sun? Amanda asked, like she had so many times before.
The Sun, said Tree, was bright and warm.
Was it like a hug? Amanda asked. Monkey laughed, and bird sang, but Tree only thought for a moment before answering.
The Sun was like a hug, he said. But it was more than that. It kept things going. And it had a sister, called the Moon. The Moon wasn’t bright like her brother, but she was very beautiful and would come out at night and dance and fill even the darkest times with light. And then there were the Stars.
Amanda always liked hearing about the Stars the most.
The stars were all of the dreams that you could ever dream, Amanda, said Tree. Before the rain came, when people went to sleep, they would go places they had never been and see things they had never seen. Every time some one closed their eyes a star would come and take them away.
Amanda smiled. She didn’t know what “away” meant, but when Tree said it, it sounded mysterious, like the time she tried to carry one of his big leaves over her head out into the rains. Tree had stopped her and was mad and didn’t give her any fruit for a week. He said the rains were dangerous now. But some times, when she was sure Tree wasn’t looking, Amanda still took a step into the rains, and wondered what “away” was like.
Tree finished his story and the rains began to slow. Monkey crawled into Amanda’s arms and she held him close as Bird began to sing them a sleep song.
As she closed her eyes, Amanda let herself wonder if some day she would be able to see one of the Stars, and let it take her “away”.
A smile spread across her face, and then Amanda slept a dreamless sleep.
Tonight the rain was falling very hard, and the dark sky some times became very bright, and all around her some times was very loud. Amanda wanted Tree to tell her a story. That’s why Amanda climbed higher. She got to where Monkey was and sat down near him. Monkey smiled at her, and she smiled back, and then Bird came over and greeted both of them with a short song. Amanda hugged tree, and told her that she was scared, and wanted to hear a story, if Tree would tell one.
Tree began his story like he always did.
There were other people like you, he told her. Before the rains. You would live together in families. And there were others like you too, Bird. Enough of you to fill the skies with flight and song. And you, Monkey, there were many like you, who would laugh and play together and lay out in the sun.
What’s the Sun? Amanda asked, like she had so many times before.
The Sun, said Tree, was bright and warm.
Was it like a hug? Amanda asked. Monkey laughed, and bird sang, but Tree only thought for a moment before answering.
The Sun was like a hug, he said. But it was more than that. It kept things going. And it had a sister, called the Moon. The Moon wasn’t bright like her brother, but she was very beautiful and would come out at night and dance and fill even the darkest times with light. And then there were the Stars.
Amanda always liked hearing about the Stars the most.
The stars were all of the dreams that you could ever dream, Amanda, said Tree. Before the rain came, when people went to sleep, they would go places they had never been and see things they had never seen. Every time some one closed their eyes a star would come and take them away.
Amanda smiled. She didn’t know what “away” meant, but when Tree said it, it sounded mysterious, like the time she tried to carry one of his big leaves over her head out into the rains. Tree had stopped her and was mad and didn’t give her any fruit for a week. He said the rains were dangerous now. But some times, when she was sure Tree wasn’t looking, Amanda still took a step into the rains, and wondered what “away” was like.
Tree finished his story and the rains began to slow. Monkey crawled into Amanda’s arms and she held him close as Bird began to sing them a sleep song.
As she closed her eyes, Amanda let herself wonder if some day she would be able to see one of the Stars, and let it take her “away”.
A smile spread across her face, and then Amanda slept a dreamless sleep.
What's With That Evan Kid?
I still remember when Evan died. I didn’t know his last name, and I really didn’t know him, but his memory is something I think I’ll carry with me until forever.
Evan sat behind me in home room in high school, and a few rows forward and to the right of me in math. We never really talked, and I don’t think that he was the kind of kid who had a lot of friends. His hair looked like a hospital mop, his eyes were always tired, and his clothes looked like they were mostly second hand buys, or at best hand-me-downs from an older brother he may or may not have had.
“So, what’s with that Evan kid?” Callie would ask at lunch some times. And if some one asked me to describe him in a single sentence, that would probably be what I could tell them.
What’s with that Evan kid?
Our high school wasn’t all that big really. Maybe six hundred students in all. It was a typical inner city high school, I expect. The students were a pretty typical cross section of middle American races, classes, and creeds, though the student body was a little more liberal and a little more Hmong than I bet other schools were. The hallways were always horribly lit, so by third period we’d often find ourselves ready to doze off. At our ten year reunion, actually, I remember Barbara Rush, who was just finishing her doctorate in applied psychology, told us that she was doing her thesis on the effects of indoor lighting on teenage development.
“It’s amazing, really,” she said, “that more high schoolers don’t wind up offing themselves. We’re only just now starting to collect human data, you know, but from the studies of rats and rodents and even some small primates we’re starting to see just how prolonged exposure to low intensity lighting can severely alter attitude, eating habits, and sleep patterns. All typical causes of clinical depression.” She sounded so excited as she continued to cite medical journals none of us had ever heard of and drop names none of us really cared about. None of us had the heart to tell that she was boring us to tears, so we all breathed a sigh of relief when we realized that she was wrapping up. “I guess what I’m trying to say,” she told us, almost orgasmic after having put her research into words, “is that prolonged exposure to low intensity lighting, combined with the changes in the hormone levels that occur in the high school demographic, leads to an emotional distress very similar to the already established Seasonal Affective Disorder, only the effects some times are magnitudes higher.”
“Fascinating.” Jon said flatly as he another long drink.
So, what’s with that Evan kid?
Maybe it was the lighting. Maybe it wasn’t. The point is that on the morning of March thirteenth, 1989, Evan woke up and decided he wasn’t going to go to school. Instead, he took a knife from the kitchen, walked into his closet, shut the door, and slit his wrists.
I’m not sure how I found out about it. It was a few days after the fact though, I remember that much. And I remember being so angry that I stormed out of school, walked straight to my car, and slammed the door shut. You have to remember that this was taking place before Columbine and all of that, so walking in and out of the front doors of a public high school was no real big deal. At any rate, I sat there in my car in silence just being angry. At first, I thought I was mad at the school. Why didn’t they make an announcement? Then I thought I was mad at myself, for just not being there. But that didn’t last long. I wasn’t one of the kids who teased him or anything. In fact, no one really teased him. He was just kind of there, an oddity for us to observe and debate. “What’s with that Evan kid?”
Now, I sometimes think that maybe that’s why I was angry. He took something away from us we didn’t even know we had. That probably sounds selfish, and it might not even be true, but most likely, at that moment, the real person I was mad at was Evan.
Regardless, I eventually calmed down enough to turn the keys in the ignition and get onto the road. I had no idea where I was going at first, but as soon as I saw the flower shop, I knew that I was exactly where I wanted to be.
I hurried inside and bought a single red rose. That was when my anger climaxed. Everything after that was falling action.
I drove myself back to school feeling a lot calmer. It was noon, and math class would be starting in a little bit. Again, I had no problem walking through the doors, but I got a few odd looks and blank stares carrying a single rose with me through the halls. Some girls laughed or hid blushes behind text books, probably wondering which lucky girl they were for.
Once I got into Miss McNye’s room everyone was already seated at the same desks, never formally assigned to them, mind you, that they had been sitting in all year. Evan’s desk was empty. Miss McNye was late, as usual.
Now, if this were a tear jerking, Oscar winning, coming of age, high budget Hollywood production, the room’s conversation would slowly fade out and the heads on each one of my classmates would have slowly turned to me. But no one stopped talking, and no one noticed me at all. Which was a good thing, really. I didn’t want to have to explain anything to any one. I set the flower down on top of the empty desk and took up my seat at the exact moment our teacher walked in, filling the room instantly with the smell of her lunch, which for Miss McNye was always half of a pack of cigarettes, unfiltered.
We all opened up our texts books to the page she told us to, but gradually, people started shifting uneasily. Something had changed, and ever so slowly people began to realize that something had happened. Or maybe was happening. Over the course of a few minutes, everyone’s eyes had shifted from our teacher, who was scribbling frantic triangles and cosines on the green black board, to Evan’s old desk and the single rose.
It’s hard to describe what the mood in the room was just then, but I’ll give it a try, because it’s important. It was like Evan wasn’t really ever gone. The rose did a perfect job of filling in for him by just being there. It sat there, quietly, exactly like him. The stem, crooked like an old man’s finger, proper it up in just the wrong way. The petals were already beginning to wilt. Even the way it was oriented on the desk made it look awkward and uncomfortable. And we soaked all of this in for most of the class.
Then minutes before the bell would ring, it all happened in reverse. We let it go. And things were back to normal again. Picking up conversations left an hour ago, we all filed out of the room, into the low intensity lighting, and off to our next classes. And I still remember, so vividly, lunch the next day, when Callie, plunking her red lunch tray down, opening her milk, and tossing strands of hair from her face, looked around our table and asked us,
“So, what’s with that Evan kid?”
Evan sat behind me in home room in high school, and a few rows forward and to the right of me in math. We never really talked, and I don’t think that he was the kind of kid who had a lot of friends. His hair looked like a hospital mop, his eyes were always tired, and his clothes looked like they were mostly second hand buys, or at best hand-me-downs from an older brother he may or may not have had.
“So, what’s with that Evan kid?” Callie would ask at lunch some times. And if some one asked me to describe him in a single sentence, that would probably be what I could tell them.
What’s with that Evan kid?
Our high school wasn’t all that big really. Maybe six hundred students in all. It was a typical inner city high school, I expect. The students were a pretty typical cross section of middle American races, classes, and creeds, though the student body was a little more liberal and a little more Hmong than I bet other schools were. The hallways were always horribly lit, so by third period we’d often find ourselves ready to doze off. At our ten year reunion, actually, I remember Barbara Rush, who was just finishing her doctorate in applied psychology, told us that she was doing her thesis on the effects of indoor lighting on teenage development.
“It’s amazing, really,” she said, “that more high schoolers don’t wind up offing themselves. We’re only just now starting to collect human data, you know, but from the studies of rats and rodents and even some small primates we’re starting to see just how prolonged exposure to low intensity lighting can severely alter attitude, eating habits, and sleep patterns. All typical causes of clinical depression.” She sounded so excited as she continued to cite medical journals none of us had ever heard of and drop names none of us really cared about. None of us had the heart to tell that she was boring us to tears, so we all breathed a sigh of relief when we realized that she was wrapping up. “I guess what I’m trying to say,” she told us, almost orgasmic after having put her research into words, “is that prolonged exposure to low intensity lighting, combined with the changes in the hormone levels that occur in the high school demographic, leads to an emotional distress very similar to the already established Seasonal Affective Disorder, only the effects some times are magnitudes higher.”
“Fascinating.” Jon said flatly as he another long drink.
So, what’s with that Evan kid?
Maybe it was the lighting. Maybe it wasn’t. The point is that on the morning of March thirteenth, 1989, Evan woke up and decided he wasn’t going to go to school. Instead, he took a knife from the kitchen, walked into his closet, shut the door, and slit his wrists.
I’m not sure how I found out about it. It was a few days after the fact though, I remember that much. And I remember being so angry that I stormed out of school, walked straight to my car, and slammed the door shut. You have to remember that this was taking place before Columbine and all of that, so walking in and out of the front doors of a public high school was no real big deal. At any rate, I sat there in my car in silence just being angry. At first, I thought I was mad at the school. Why didn’t they make an announcement? Then I thought I was mad at myself, for just not being there. But that didn’t last long. I wasn’t one of the kids who teased him or anything. In fact, no one really teased him. He was just kind of there, an oddity for us to observe and debate. “What’s with that Evan kid?”
Now, I sometimes think that maybe that’s why I was angry. He took something away from us we didn’t even know we had. That probably sounds selfish, and it might not even be true, but most likely, at that moment, the real person I was mad at was Evan.
Regardless, I eventually calmed down enough to turn the keys in the ignition and get onto the road. I had no idea where I was going at first, but as soon as I saw the flower shop, I knew that I was exactly where I wanted to be.
I hurried inside and bought a single red rose. That was when my anger climaxed. Everything after that was falling action.
I drove myself back to school feeling a lot calmer. It was noon, and math class would be starting in a little bit. Again, I had no problem walking through the doors, but I got a few odd looks and blank stares carrying a single rose with me through the halls. Some girls laughed or hid blushes behind text books, probably wondering which lucky girl they were for.
Once I got into Miss McNye’s room everyone was already seated at the same desks, never formally assigned to them, mind you, that they had been sitting in all year. Evan’s desk was empty. Miss McNye was late, as usual.
Now, if this were a tear jerking, Oscar winning, coming of age, high budget Hollywood production, the room’s conversation would slowly fade out and the heads on each one of my classmates would have slowly turned to me. But no one stopped talking, and no one noticed me at all. Which was a good thing, really. I didn’t want to have to explain anything to any one. I set the flower down on top of the empty desk and took up my seat at the exact moment our teacher walked in, filling the room instantly with the smell of her lunch, which for Miss McNye was always half of a pack of cigarettes, unfiltered.
We all opened up our texts books to the page she told us to, but gradually, people started shifting uneasily. Something had changed, and ever so slowly people began to realize that something had happened. Or maybe was happening. Over the course of a few minutes, everyone’s eyes had shifted from our teacher, who was scribbling frantic triangles and cosines on the green black board, to Evan’s old desk and the single rose.
It’s hard to describe what the mood in the room was just then, but I’ll give it a try, because it’s important. It was like Evan wasn’t really ever gone. The rose did a perfect job of filling in for him by just being there. It sat there, quietly, exactly like him. The stem, crooked like an old man’s finger, proper it up in just the wrong way. The petals were already beginning to wilt. Even the way it was oriented on the desk made it look awkward and uncomfortable. And we soaked all of this in for most of the class.
Then minutes before the bell would ring, it all happened in reverse. We let it go. And things were back to normal again. Picking up conversations left an hour ago, we all filed out of the room, into the low intensity lighting, and off to our next classes. And I still remember, so vividly, lunch the next day, when Callie, plunking her red lunch tray down, opening her milk, and tossing strands of hair from her face, looked around our table and asked us,
“So, what’s with that Evan kid?”
transcript of a coffee shop conversation, prepared by: me
and he said “after seeing my wife give birth, I had no question about who was the stronger sex” (laughs)
(laughs)
“they talk about the work, what they do at the work, the history of the work”
“that’s nice that you get that background, it makes it a little more real”
“it’s interesting when you think back, centuries ago with women…” (lowers
“you know, the whole transformation”
“yeah, yeah.”
“you can succeed and you know, okay, blah blah blah, there are so many risks. So… that’s just, it’s kinda hard. But um..”
“it’s hard to start”
“yeah, especially because it could mean the loss of your child”
“I appreciate you listening to my worries”
(chuckle)
“as I said, definitely call me or email, whatever’s convenient for you”
(laughs)
“they talk about the work, what they do at the work, the history of the work”
“that’s nice that you get that background, it makes it a little more real”
“it’s interesting when you think back, centuries ago with women…” (lowers
“you know, the whole transformation”
“yeah, yeah.”
“you can succeed and you know, okay, blah blah blah, there are so many risks. So… that’s just, it’s kinda hard. But um..”
“it’s hard to start”
“yeah, especially because it could mean the loss of your child”
“I appreciate you listening to my worries”
(chuckle)
“as I said, definitely call me or email, whatever’s convenient for you”
type: modernism, inspiration: airplane + virginia woolf
I at the window, another at the aisle, he heaved up to us, sweat streaming down his forehead, his bulk trembling with the shortness of his breath, shirt creased and damp, is this seat taken, here in the middle? Our eyes screamed no, couldn’t he read our eyes screaming no, but we supposed he had to sit somewhere, cordially, oh, no, no, by all means and we looked at each other with despair as he heaved into the seat, thick sausage fingers clasping at the seat belt buckle, billowing elbows overflowing into my arm, all I can think about is the sweaty creases and that liquid trickle down the grey fluffy sideburns, my arm and leg scream in protest at every collision of his meaty arm and leg.
Briefly I glance out the window, the white clouds billowing underneath, and my mind flashes in fear, briefly, whatifisuddenlywentbackintimebeforeairplanesandthisairplanei’minthereforecrashestothegroundduetonothavingbeeninventedyet? Time travel, I am traveling time in my book which coincides with the travel of my airplane, almost too closely, maybe the airplane will crash after all I’m in a time before airplanes, it surely will crash.
How to sleep, how to sleep with meaty armbones and legbones and my elbows crunched up against my ribs with my boxed snack on my lap my legs are getting cramped but they recoil in horror at those hamhocks meaty legbones. Spotted grey-darkness when the fringed-lid hath closed, i think of someone and immediately my mind says rules of engagement, rules of engagement in response to my analysis of our interactions and I find that phrase oddly suiting, am pleased with myself, repeat it a few more times for good measure, oh yes, definitely, rules of engagement, we have several.
Briefly I glance out the window, the white clouds billowing underneath, and my mind flashes in fear, briefly, whatifisuddenlywentbackintimebeforeairplanesandthisairplanei’minthereforecrashestothegroundduetonothavingbeeninventedyet? Time travel, I am traveling time in my book which coincides with the travel of my airplane, almost too closely, maybe the airplane will crash after all I’m in a time before airplanes, it surely will crash.
How to sleep, how to sleep with meaty armbones and legbones and my elbows crunched up against my ribs with my boxed snack on my lap my legs are getting cramped but they recoil in horror at those hamhocks meaty legbones. Spotted grey-darkness when the fringed-lid hath closed, i think of someone and immediately my mind says rules of engagement, rules of engagement in response to my analysis of our interactions and I find that phrase oddly suiting, am pleased with myself, repeat it a few more times for good measure, oh yes, definitely, rules of engagement, we have several.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)