so the volvo's dead and my little sojourn back to FL drained enough money out of my bank account so that it's too deflated for a good used car. yesterday was a logistical nightmare, w/ mom having to show two apartments and mel w/ her gaggle of gammerstang friends rampaging in silk shoes through the kitchen and basement all day.
work's been fine, Bigs's glad to have me back from what i can tell ('the Nile ibis clack their beaks in welcome' accompanied by a hearty back slap), but i've been trapped in an eddy that this guy opened up on miami ave. w/ a law on eponymy and his own law pilfered from arnold jabbers.
me and N were sitting sipping thick drinks from cut glass at the part of the bar the tender leans on when there's nothing to wipe or pour, hashing out a hypothetical on shortcuts as definitive character markers. as Nadine's saying 'but the crux, the fulcrum on this epistemological see-saw, isn't the sine qua non, it's the degree of seeing or sawing, since everyone has eyes and a memory...' this guy, resembling the erudite gruffness of the lit prof that taught me ennui in Orlando, ambles up and says 'missy, the angle makes not a bit of difference if the fulcrum's crumbled' and buys us both an alabaster hourglass (gin, peach juice, a hint of goldschlager and redbull) and starts telling us he'd read a similar debate, in some abstruse journal taken w/ the solipsism of the socratic method, when he was attending semiotics symposia in Estonia in the 90s. and he cited this law of eponymy (and to whom it's attributed i've cogently forgotten) that states 'no discovery is named after it's discovery' and told us about amerigo vespucci and the hindu origin of arabic numbers.
i have to montage over the meat since i've got to pick up Mel from school in a bit, so we're riffing, Nadine renamed herself Music, the guy became Fred, we watched gold flakes waft around our hourglasses like glyphs signing something prelogos, and
we called ourselves discovery's, revealed by our parents but named as separate things, but then we went on to define our discoveries in more narrow and narrow cuts, giving us a plenitude of existential explorers who had no time to name us, nor would they give us theirs.
and what it comes down to now, is a sense of homage, like some thanks given back to the discoverer for not lording his/her name over it and for some reason my mind at that moment snapped to Bigs and his multifarious faceted character, and the shortcuts he took that i'd never seen and who pointed them to him and how, if at all, can i find these same sages, squatting at a crossroads under a gibbous moon just talking about their own myths.
and now i'm driving into one of mine, w/ Nadine's benevloently loaned Kia, public high school.
welcome matt out
mercredi 24 mars 2010
lundi 22 mars 2010
hiatus
a little more than a month and a half has passed since i lamented my beardless face, and it was a doozy.
three nights after i posted last i got thrown from the truck (like it was a bronco or something, seriously, wagging its ass up and down like it couldn't stand being roped by hands) when Lugs tried to avoid a possum he thought was his old lady's dog, that'd been missing for a week or so. turns out it wasn't, and turns out we didn't miss it either since the Mamajamma Clams (our truck, when we have a say) swerves like a break-dancing amputee. it looks cool but you know some pains coming afterwards. and so i hair-line fractured both my wrists after tracing an elegant arc through the half-lit 30th st. (we were around Runnymede and Dawnwood Forest and Carol Heights, though i didn't even finish out Runnymede, let alone the other two, after Gerry came begrudgingly in his car to take me to the ER) and got some weeks off of work per the doc at Carillon.
i got splinted up and stayed around home for a few days until i felt ennui growing over me like moss on any side of a ridge-line tree and decided to do something.
so i went to a bar where (it was 4 in the afternoon, so i was flirting w/ judgment there, but once i started flirting w/ the waitress) i met Nadine, about 28, pert, a bit worn, but w/ a mouth on her like stravinsky on a maple-wood xylophone: the jagged syrup she pours out is balm and burn alike, but i'm getting ahead of myself.
i was the only (conscious) guy in there and she looked bored too and when she brought peanuts over to me we started chatting, then talking, the bonding, something like a valence electron searching out an element to corrupt or adjust (depending on the perspective).
yadda courtship yadda yadda drinks yadda yadda she lives in a sweet pad decorated a la Robert Smith and the Gummybears yadda yadda family in FL and bam,
i'm convalescing on South Beach clean-shaven b/c Nadine's got a certain pull to her that indicates no moves towards whips and their sound-barrier-breaking arcs. so far.
so i spent two serene weeks there and got back a few days ago, giving me some time to ponder the vicissitudes of that vacation before the doc took off my odd air casts today.
so as it seems i'm going back to work tonight, though i've been fattened and pampered during this well-paid sinecure (injured on the job w/ a democrat in view of the washington monument? hello duffed lucre) and am trying to get myself ready for my bloodless slaughter at Bigs' hands tonight.
he somehow copped my phone number from the office and texted me insults ('to keep you one your russian ballerina's toes; those shits are mangled like your shoes had rabies') intermittently, a nice reminder of home trickling in b/n cleaning sand out of every odd crevice and cooking spartan meals in Nadine's uncle's half-abandoned apartment.
a note on it: it's nestled not far from 29th st and logistics for the beach were easier than selling umbrellas on a London sidewalk. it's small, one bedroom, a decent kitchen (under-stocked, as N averred, when she first slipped on an apron and made the best damn cookies - those kind - i'd ever had) and a balcony where we'd sit out next to the potted ferns and smoke cigarettes while she'd tell me about young life in Brooklyn ('why'd you come down to roanoke of all places?' 'there're more lassos in the city than you'd think' is all i got, for now), toking furtively in central park, the nomenclature of bums, rooftop soirees and basement shindigs, and i told her about my failed journalism stint in Orlando, familial difficulties and analyses, the way light breaks over the Blue Ridges when you know you're the only one awake for 20 miles, general stuff. when we arrived the fridge had two six packs of Sam Adams in it, a bottle of Jameson on top of it, and a note saying 'just clean up w/e happens, logical or not. love, uncle farnsworth.' she said it's not his real name, but he adopted it after his first ex-wife called him pedantic and it stuck. so that first night was glorious.
one night when we were in a bar on miami ave., some dude came up to me
ah nuts. i gotta go look at the volvo b/c it's snorthing something milky out of the tailpipe (that's fallen once since i've been back; need new screw mounts, things are rusty as medusa's sex life) and mom still refuses to take her in.
more soon.
welcome matt out
three nights after i posted last i got thrown from the truck (like it was a bronco or something, seriously, wagging its ass up and down like it couldn't stand being roped by hands) when Lugs tried to avoid a possum he thought was his old lady's dog, that'd been missing for a week or so. turns out it wasn't, and turns out we didn't miss it either since the Mamajamma Clams (our truck, when we have a say) swerves like a break-dancing amputee. it looks cool but you know some pains coming afterwards. and so i hair-line fractured both my wrists after tracing an elegant arc through the half-lit 30th st. (we were around Runnymede and Dawnwood Forest and Carol Heights, though i didn't even finish out Runnymede, let alone the other two, after Gerry came begrudgingly in his car to take me to the ER) and got some weeks off of work per the doc at Carillon.
i got splinted up and stayed around home for a few days until i felt ennui growing over me like moss on any side of a ridge-line tree and decided to do something.
so i went to a bar where (it was 4 in the afternoon, so i was flirting w/ judgment there, but once i started flirting w/ the waitress) i met Nadine, about 28, pert, a bit worn, but w/ a mouth on her like stravinsky on a maple-wood xylophone: the jagged syrup she pours out is balm and burn alike, but i'm getting ahead of myself.
i was the only (conscious) guy in there and she looked bored too and when she brought peanuts over to me we started chatting, then talking, the bonding, something like a valence electron searching out an element to corrupt or adjust (depending on the perspective).
yadda courtship yadda yadda drinks yadda yadda she lives in a sweet pad decorated a la Robert Smith and the Gummybears yadda yadda family in FL and bam,
i'm convalescing on South Beach clean-shaven b/c Nadine's got a certain pull to her that indicates no moves towards whips and their sound-barrier-breaking arcs. so far.
so i spent two serene weeks there and got back a few days ago, giving me some time to ponder the vicissitudes of that vacation before the doc took off my odd air casts today.
so as it seems i'm going back to work tonight, though i've been fattened and pampered during this well-paid sinecure (injured on the job w/ a democrat in view of the washington monument? hello duffed lucre) and am trying to get myself ready for my bloodless slaughter at Bigs' hands tonight.
he somehow copped my phone number from the office and texted me insults ('to keep you one your russian ballerina's toes; those shits are mangled like your shoes had rabies') intermittently, a nice reminder of home trickling in b/n cleaning sand out of every odd crevice and cooking spartan meals in Nadine's uncle's half-abandoned apartment.
a note on it: it's nestled not far from 29th st and logistics for the beach were easier than selling umbrellas on a London sidewalk. it's small, one bedroom, a decent kitchen (under-stocked, as N averred, when she first slipped on an apron and made the best damn cookies - those kind - i'd ever had) and a balcony where we'd sit out next to the potted ferns and smoke cigarettes while she'd tell me about young life in Brooklyn ('why'd you come down to roanoke of all places?' 'there're more lassos in the city than you'd think' is all i got, for now), toking furtively in central park, the nomenclature of bums, rooftop soirees and basement shindigs, and i told her about my failed journalism stint in Orlando, familial difficulties and analyses, the way light breaks over the Blue Ridges when you know you're the only one awake for 20 miles, general stuff. when we arrived the fridge had two six packs of Sam Adams in it, a bottle of Jameson on top of it, and a note saying 'just clean up w/e happens, logical or not. love, uncle farnsworth.' she said it's not his real name, but he adopted it after his first ex-wife called him pedantic and it stuck. so that first night was glorious.
one night when we were in a bar on miami ave., some dude came up to me
ah nuts. i gotta go look at the volvo b/c it's snorthing something milky out of the tailpipe (that's fallen once since i've been back; need new screw mounts, things are rusty as medusa's sex life) and mom still refuses to take her in.
more soon.
welcome matt out
lundi 8 février 2010
generica in the face of arcana
Welcome welcome I'm the carny barker from a little town called nowhere, and I think you might've been there before, with cold feet and a cold nose and eyes closed against the oblivion seeping from its half-eaved collapsible houses.
Now that my beard is gone, my thoughts are a bit more rampant, running a gamut of bullshit and signifying that Bigs' been encouraging, though his elocutional skill when it comes to insults is pretty much unsurpassable without a thesaurus, a mythology handbook and a pop-culture rag mag in hand. And my hands are either gripping the bar ("the ossified pube of Cleopatra herself, aspy and raspy on the morning's unfurling themselves like a standard flag Marx Marvelous wanted to take into battle" as Bigs once said; I'm going to have to start keeping a catalogue, or at least a tape recorder) or fluttering spasmodically to my naked, though florid-smelling, face. But the canvas on the gloves is fustian ("yo momma's prom dress from the Spanish inquisition was rougher than Dre Bly's career outside the backfield") and rarely consoles my nude jaw.
Bigs, of course, gives me a modicum of shit about it, and tries to coerce Lugsy into prattling too, but the man's as gentle as beakless mother hen free-ranging through April, though he does know how to wrestle an apology out of someone w/ a few apposite aspersions. We three've become somewhat of a team, which is natural considering we're always doing the runs together, but our dynamic's more fluid and unchecked, unlike Phoebe and whoever's obliged to be w/ her that specific night. Not that she's a bad person, but man she's got a tongue on her like an irradiated anaconda tearing the Amazon a few new tributaries. And she doesn't hold herself back. She paints it like she sees it ("that bitch thought Humanism was a diet"; "Leanardo'd envy her eyes for etching the starkest lineaments from a portrait muddled like the cesspool yo parents found you in") but uses a steel-wire intead of horsehair brush. Gerry made some passing remark under his breath as she was heading out, something about the merits of feminism for a woman like her (there'd been a prior argument, or really, more a confrontation, about smoke breaks) and she whirled around, her elbows and shoulders and every angle about her ("she's as voluptuous as a Calder mobile, but w/ more irrational axes pinwheeling about") poised and focus like a peregrine fixed on a crippled fieldmouse, and basically spat "and ain't it a good thing yer sister threaded you in here 'cuz her husband got mo' sway here than a bitch in heat?"
Bigs Lugsy and me, and Harry and Zeke, who were fumbling around in the back of the bay, but Phoebe said it loud enough the whole population of caterwauling cats just wiping the day from their whiskers took up her cadence a minute later, like to died. We looked like blowfish poked w/ sushi knives we were trying so hard not to bust out. We got on the road quick as a pissed sphinx ("fast as Dedalus pushing his nephew down the stairs 'cuz he was gonna get more patronage, the pussy of the Roman age" and somehow, he's never pedantic or sententious; I haven't yet, but I need to buy this man a beer b/c he's a rolodex of arcana).
Other than that, life's been a drunk junior at a house party, pretty easy, but a bit embarassing at times, and slopppy but that's more the job itself than anything else. The embarassment arises from just having to live at home still, where since I'm basically indisposed w/ gathering garbage and bringing the aroma of moribund restaurants and the streets' system of amor, I haven't been able to help out as much as I was before (though that's an overstatement). The Volvo's still obstreperous as a lycanthrope in gibbous throes, but she's easily assuaged w/ some tinkering w/ the spark plugs. A short fix, I know, b/c I think it's symptomatic of some faulty wires but there doesn't seem to be enough time for mom to drop her off for a few diagnostic days. Now that I'm getting some money though (and honestly, it's not too bad paying of a job; no tech salary stuff, but I can save a pile taller than Babel while living at home) I might be able to invest in a decent car. I dunno, it's all speculation, but this is the only place where I can do it, the blog that is, since if I were to get a car I'd want it to be a surprise for mom and Mel so I can't tell them, and I don't have friends outside of my colleagues, and I'm not really sure if I wanna bounce financial worries and soucis off of them.
I like the idea in principle though, Welcome Matt shoring up the family in times of need. We all need to feel needed, but not needy. Ugh, generic as Wal-Mart aspirin or a beardless man.
Welcome Matt out
Now that my beard is gone, my thoughts are a bit more rampant, running a gamut of bullshit and signifying that Bigs' been encouraging, though his elocutional skill when it comes to insults is pretty much unsurpassable without a thesaurus, a mythology handbook and a pop-culture rag mag in hand. And my hands are either gripping the bar ("the ossified pube of Cleopatra herself, aspy and raspy on the morning's unfurling themselves like a standard flag Marx Marvelous wanted to take into battle" as Bigs once said; I'm going to have to start keeping a catalogue, or at least a tape recorder) or fluttering spasmodically to my naked, though florid-smelling, face. But the canvas on the gloves is fustian ("yo momma's prom dress from the Spanish inquisition was rougher than Dre Bly's career outside the backfield") and rarely consoles my nude jaw.
Bigs, of course, gives me a modicum of shit about it, and tries to coerce Lugsy into prattling too, but the man's as gentle as beakless mother hen free-ranging through April, though he does know how to wrestle an apology out of someone w/ a few apposite aspersions. We three've become somewhat of a team, which is natural considering we're always doing the runs together, but our dynamic's more fluid and unchecked, unlike Phoebe and whoever's obliged to be w/ her that specific night. Not that she's a bad person, but man she's got a tongue on her like an irradiated anaconda tearing the Amazon a few new tributaries. And she doesn't hold herself back. She paints it like she sees it ("that bitch thought Humanism was a diet"; "Leanardo'd envy her eyes for etching the starkest lineaments from a portrait muddled like the cesspool yo parents found you in") but uses a steel-wire intead of horsehair brush. Gerry made some passing remark under his breath as she was heading out, something about the merits of feminism for a woman like her (there'd been a prior argument, or really, more a confrontation, about smoke breaks) and she whirled around, her elbows and shoulders and every angle about her ("she's as voluptuous as a Calder mobile, but w/ more irrational axes pinwheeling about") poised and focus like a peregrine fixed on a crippled fieldmouse, and basically spat "and ain't it a good thing yer sister threaded you in here 'cuz her husband got mo' sway here than a bitch in heat?"
Bigs Lugsy and me, and Harry and Zeke, who were fumbling around in the back of the bay, but Phoebe said it loud enough the whole population of caterwauling cats just wiping the day from their whiskers took up her cadence a minute later, like to died. We looked like blowfish poked w/ sushi knives we were trying so hard not to bust out. We got on the road quick as a pissed sphinx ("fast as Dedalus pushing his nephew down the stairs 'cuz he was gonna get more patronage, the pussy of the Roman age" and somehow, he's never pedantic or sententious; I haven't yet, but I need to buy this man a beer b/c he's a rolodex of arcana).
Other than that, life's been a drunk junior at a house party, pretty easy, but a bit embarassing at times, and slopppy but that's more the job itself than anything else. The embarassment arises from just having to live at home still, where since I'm basically indisposed w/ gathering garbage and bringing the aroma of moribund restaurants and the streets' system of amor, I haven't been able to help out as much as I was before (though that's an overstatement). The Volvo's still obstreperous as a lycanthrope in gibbous throes, but she's easily assuaged w/ some tinkering w/ the spark plugs. A short fix, I know, b/c I think it's symptomatic of some faulty wires but there doesn't seem to be enough time for mom to drop her off for a few diagnostic days. Now that I'm getting some money though (and honestly, it's not too bad paying of a job; no tech salary stuff, but I can save a pile taller than Babel while living at home) I might be able to invest in a decent car. I dunno, it's all speculation, but this is the only place where I can do it, the blog that is, since if I were to get a car I'd want it to be a surprise for mom and Mel so I can't tell them, and I don't have friends outside of my colleagues, and I'm not really sure if I wanna bounce financial worries and soucis off of them.
I like the idea in principle though, Welcome Matt shoring up the family in times of need. We all need to feel needed, but not needy. Ugh, generic as Wal-Mart aspirin or a beardless man.
Welcome Matt out
mercredi 3 février 2010
the worn paraphenelia of existence
So it's been nearly a week since my last post. Sorry to all you avid readers (Fremton and Reardon really, since I have a feeling my friends haven't been keeping up on my petty cogitations). But, now that I mention it to myself, and for some reason I haven't really done so up until now, where are my friends? I've been back from FL for almost three months now and they've been elusive as penitent arsonists in a town built on match factories. Granted, I'm a reticent motherfucker w/o the drop of whiskey or insult swimming through me, but I've made overtures that at least a syphillitic Beethoven wouldn't be disgusted by (Bigs sometimes brings headphones plugged into Bach sonatas or Dvorak concertos, not as easy to share as his flask, which is like Santa in an ice age, but it still makes its rounds as we ride and jostle along to Lugsy's minute swerves [he's got a soft spot for varmints and vermin big as a cesspool in a paper mill's ribcage]). I got a few responses, lame as bipartisanship, but overall Dave and Jimmy don't seem to want to reestablish contact, as if I were some errant satellite just off the orbital vector of Roanoke social scenery and the computational adjustments don't warrant the input of labor. I could say bitterness is the stem of this - the root being the inevitable dissolution high school won't allow and college barely stanches - since my ineffectual sojourn in sun-drenched locales, living near bombshells so active you need three inches of kevlar just to talk to them, was equivalent to me meeting Mao and persuading him to drop the Red façade while they stayed home and fulminated w/ McCarthy's cabal. In this simile history would bear me out, but in reality it will expose the skeleton of these snubs, since the flesh of my time in FL amounts to little more than a motheaten shroud.
And I think I might have an idea, actually. Before I left for FL, around late-July, I was seeing Maggie Nquyen off and on; she was like an oscillating fan and I was the sweating body too lazy to get up and change the setting, sweating profusely in an armchair, waiting vehemently for the gradual breeze to come sweeping over, all so I wouldn't have to move. She was the best friend of Jimmy's ex-girlfriend, Melanie Schwartz, or so it still seemed, though I'm about as astute as an autistic kid in Key Club when it comes to these. Jimmy and Mel left w/e they'd had in the gutter of Campbell St., outside of Awful Arthur's, after a dispute about his billiard's etiquette, which was really a dispute about her eyes' wandering tendencies, which was really a dispute about whether or not they had any motions to keep going through b/c theirs was a decoy relationship in the pond where all those other fish swim. Or some such metaphor, but either way, Jimmy, after three days of Jim Beam freedom, found the motions he'd stashed away somewhere, and went through them alone enough to think that they weren't motions anymore but actually self-inspired actions. He yearned and mooned and went lycanthropic on us when a skirt was short enough to remind him of Mel's knees (never those odd knobbled deals, he said) and we wouldn't follow the skirt through its tracks in conversation. He even went Cusackian, holding Dierks Bentley over his head hung into the lulls of his drawl, but to a closed curtain.
So when I hung out w/ Maggie in a social environment (Campbell and its general area) the proximity of her to Mel and the general tininess of Roanoke conspired to raise memories and possibilities in Jim-o's head. There was a specific instance where this went wrong, over Texas Toast and thin pints at Texas Tavern, but I don't remember what brought it on. Maggie was sitting next to me, wearing something pastel-y that kinda ate up the hardness in your eyes, and I was next to Jimmy who was next to Dave who was next to Katie Luger (no idea what she was doing there; a random Dave conquest if I ever saw one, and I have, and have had to 'clean up' after them, which, if you know Dave, involves finding her her intimates and consoling her enough to get her out of the house b/c Dave's already left six hours earlier to wander his endorphins away like unwanted puppies) who was next to Penny Drake; it was a circular table kinda deal, and we'd all gotten beer and some nibble-shit and Jim-o had his head on a swivel all evening, looking at each barstool like it was salivating, or at each window like it threatened him and Penny said something about expecting something and Jimmy didn't answer b/c he was staring down Deco lamp shade hanging over a trio of high school teachers (they had the aura like cowboys or Marines do) and Maggie said something snidely, cutely (I'm still waiting for a breeze but I don't know how to ask for it in winter) cutting and Jim-o snapped back like the lube on his ball-bearings drained out and snarled, said something out of Gran Torino and I put my hand real quick on his chest and he held my eyes like Christ's testicles and I held his like 6 year old IOUs and he got up and left.
We resolved it, him staring at the ground like a choirboy w/ fundraiser chocolate in his mouth, the next day, and I saw him sporadically the last week before I left, and he gave a fervent toast, fermented by nostalgia and strong gin, at my going away party, but w/ the near six months in between that and now I think he's convinced himself and Dave and Paul and Steve that the reason I put my hand over his heart wasn't for some sort of chivalric respect thing, but some deeper seated thing, or maybe that I never took them seriously and that's why I dipped to FL to try my hand in junk writing and fruit picking. I dunno, but it's something I'm just beginning to think about.
But either way, work is good, Phoebe's softened a bit (she's been smoking 3 instead of 2 and a half packs a day) and Gerry still runs the show like a dwarf in a two ring two bit circus touring Iowa in harvest season. Maybe Bigs can give me some insight. Maybe we could hang out, though we don't really do that, garbagemen that is; we don't really have time to hang out w/ anyone. Maybe I'm thinking way too much about this b/c all I've been thinking about is how to sort out the worn paraphanelia of daily existence.
And I think I might have an idea, actually. Before I left for FL, around late-July, I was seeing Maggie Nquyen off and on; she was like an oscillating fan and I was the sweating body too lazy to get up and change the setting, sweating profusely in an armchair, waiting vehemently for the gradual breeze to come sweeping over, all so I wouldn't have to move. She was the best friend of Jimmy's ex-girlfriend, Melanie Schwartz, or so it still seemed, though I'm about as astute as an autistic kid in Key Club when it comes to these. Jimmy and Mel left w/e they'd had in the gutter of Campbell St., outside of Awful Arthur's, after a dispute about his billiard's etiquette, which was really a dispute about her eyes' wandering tendencies, which was really a dispute about whether or not they had any motions to keep going through b/c theirs was a decoy relationship in the pond where all those other fish swim. Or some such metaphor, but either way, Jimmy, after three days of Jim Beam freedom, found the motions he'd stashed away somewhere, and went through them alone enough to think that they weren't motions anymore but actually self-inspired actions. He yearned and mooned and went lycanthropic on us when a skirt was short enough to remind him of Mel's knees (never those odd knobbled deals, he said) and we wouldn't follow the skirt through its tracks in conversation. He even went Cusackian, holding Dierks Bentley over his head hung into the lulls of his drawl, but to a closed curtain.
So when I hung out w/ Maggie in a social environment (Campbell and its general area) the proximity of her to Mel and the general tininess of Roanoke conspired to raise memories and possibilities in Jim-o's head. There was a specific instance where this went wrong, over Texas Toast and thin pints at Texas Tavern, but I don't remember what brought it on. Maggie was sitting next to me, wearing something pastel-y that kinda ate up the hardness in your eyes, and I was next to Jimmy who was next to Dave who was next to Katie Luger (no idea what she was doing there; a random Dave conquest if I ever saw one, and I have, and have had to 'clean up' after them, which, if you know Dave, involves finding her her intimates and consoling her enough to get her out of the house b/c Dave's already left six hours earlier to wander his endorphins away like unwanted puppies) who was next to Penny Drake; it was a circular table kinda deal, and we'd all gotten beer and some nibble-shit and Jim-o had his head on a swivel all evening, looking at each barstool like it was salivating, or at each window like it threatened him and Penny said something about expecting something and Jimmy didn't answer b/c he was staring down Deco lamp shade hanging over a trio of high school teachers (they had the aura like cowboys or Marines do) and Maggie said something snidely, cutely (I'm still waiting for a breeze but I don't know how to ask for it in winter) cutting and Jim-o snapped back like the lube on his ball-bearings drained out and snarled, said something out of Gran Torino and I put my hand real quick on his chest and he held my eyes like Christ's testicles and I held his like 6 year old IOUs and he got up and left.
We resolved it, him staring at the ground like a choirboy w/ fundraiser chocolate in his mouth, the next day, and I saw him sporadically the last week before I left, and he gave a fervent toast, fermented by nostalgia and strong gin, at my going away party, but w/ the near six months in between that and now I think he's convinced himself and Dave and Paul and Steve that the reason I put my hand over his heart wasn't for some sort of chivalric respect thing, but some deeper seated thing, or maybe that I never took them seriously and that's why I dipped to FL to try my hand in junk writing and fruit picking. I dunno, but it's something I'm just beginning to think about.
But either way, work is good, Phoebe's softened a bit (she's been smoking 3 instead of 2 and a half packs a day) and Gerry still runs the show like a dwarf in a two ring two bit circus touring Iowa in harvest season. Maybe Bigs can give me some insight. Maybe we could hang out, though we don't really do that, garbagemen that is; we don't really have time to hang out w/ anyone. Maybe I'm thinking way too much about this b/c all I've been thinking about is how to sort out the worn paraphanelia of daily existence.
jeudi 28 janvier 2010
...cont'd...
Ok so here goes the inadvertant part 2 of employment etc.:
so I left off starting to describe Bigs, acorn-head with a vocabulary the size of a head of cattle at a conglomerated dude ranch, to abbreviate the man into a small set of clauses. Santa's only got one Claus but it's supplemented by all the carols and songs and secular hymns written for him, otherwise he'd probably demand his due set of multiple expository clauses. Yeah, this is kinda the way me and Bigs talk now, riffing off each other on the back of the juddering truck when we're not preoccupied with lateral gusts and overturned trash cans. He likes to say that we're 'probing the anus of language to see what kind of shit we can dislodge.' His eloquence is a motley thing.
But I guess you guys don't really need a play-by-play breakdown of all my first-day bumbles so I'll sum up, use apposite adjectives to lasso the past out of its dynamism. I met Bigs, we had a cigarette as he broke down the politics of the facility (or 'the malodorous hydra' as he calls it) - Gerry's a cantankerous hermit, Marvin and Sudsy are his pets (always getting dumpster duty, the cushiest run around since you don't even have to leave the stale-smoke rank cab to do your job, unless some random bum, of which we have few in Roanoke, or a family of cats, have made a cozy niche out of torn bags of garbage), Phoebe's a sweetheart when she's smoking, but otherwise curt as her sharp face, Ned's best to be stayed away from because he drags you into debates like a Norseman's wife on mushroom tea, Lugsy's better behind the wheel than behind the truck, etc. - and then we hopped on the back of Lugsy's rig. I got a look at the cab, an old pink-haired troll impaled with a barbie's leg hanging from the rearview, the smell of old french fries hiding out under the seats like Kosovar fugitives in Milosevic heydays. I fell once and bruised my dignity but Bigs chuckled, the only man to make the word a heaving reality in such a succinct burst of breath, and said 'even the Queen of Sheba got her period' and deftly pulled out a small flask from inside his vest, unscrewed it w/ his thumb and handed it to me after a judicious snort. After six curbside stops I got the hang of fitting the bulky plastic containers to the jerky jaws and the night passed uneventfully, me and Bigs trading anecdotes like bad cards in a tight game of stud, or at least on my side that's how I felt, his were fluid as June drizzles off a tent flap. This was a man who had campfire ash ground into his bones and knows how to make some mean beans that make forested squats all the easier to bear. He went to high school in Newport News, Denbigh I think, and did pretty well, starting tight end varsity, soccer star, men's choir, the whole achiever shebang, and 'matriculated like a deformed chock in a tight biscuit joint' at Missouri, where he 'went polymath on their constricted asses,' studying anything - carpentry, the sociolinguistics of modern honduras, salsa dancing, linear algebra, decadent poetry - and dropping out after three years b/c 'the enmity grew like a beanstalk on Mircale-Gro, and it was being poured from both horizons.' He didn't bring the flask out often, which I respect. How he ended up in Roanoke I still haven't divined; he's elusive as a wounded bobcat smelling cordite when it comes to certain subjects, that I've prodded but only enough to see his initial reaction; bobcats can be a bitch when riled.
Around midnight we'd finished our neighborhoods, mainly Glen Cove and Darnwood Forest, though w/ a bit of overlap into more central Roanoke, for some jurisdictional reason yet to be elucidated, and pulled snortingly into the 'hydra's' bay, Lugsy making an audible comical groan as he eased the air brakes down. I called Mom and she groggily said 'walk' b/c ultimately it's not that far from home, as I think I mentioned earlier, but after hanging precariously from a slippery metal bar and wreathed in the smells of a city that reveals itself through its refuse, trash and verb, it's hard to gather all the energy necessary to bear your own physical and olfactory weight. Lugsy ended up giving me a ride home, having heard my dejected 'fuck' slip out after I hung up my phone, and he me and Bigs, who lives four or five doors down from Lugsy near Electric, dawdled about smoking joints as Lugsy knitted a laconic route through the somnolent streets, the only lights sodium or orange, streetlights forever lit and our cherries blazing w/ the heavy inhales of tuberculosis pulling tight drafts from the inchoate world. they've been giving me rides every night now, which is sweet. I'm learning the parlance and honing my raconteurial skills, though it's really only by the whetstone of Bigs since Lugsy contributes his driving prowess and a few lunchbox moments or truncated insight. Bigs calls him 'the stoic Lothario of a lake district in drought.' I'm thinking of calling him 'Hephaestus's nudge.'
A toddler's body was found in the landfill near Avendale yesterday, a kid not even three years old; Phoebe's pretty distraught b/c he lived on the around and near Morningside that she did around the time he disappeared. The implications are colossal. We had a cigarette last night, before the hydra loosed its hulking vertebrae into the night dark w/ dread and possibility, and I referenced it, soft as a papercut from a w2, and she cringed and swooped in front of me and stared into me, not even my eyes but my whole self it felt like, not saying a thing, her eyes burning like a California brushfire not sure whether to flow into the city's arteries of trees and bushes or to hang back and lick at the fringe. I think she opted for the latter b/c I still have but one asshole, and when she backed down a bit she said 'there ain't nothing you know about kids thrown in garbage, specially if you wasn't the one that moved that can into the cherrypicker' and kinda meekly dropped her butt and her eyes w/ it, quickly squishing them both out w/ her boot and when I saw her later that night, and Vic who was on back w/ her and Harry who was driving, we noticed she was as if in a trance. Not the Vegas hypnotist kinda trance where you bark like a castrated whelp, but the profound self-inflicted kind where the eyes look like the skullcrusher on a trench knife b/c the blades been pointed to the back of the head, either to excise w/e metastatic transgression was born and germinated there or for some more grave, mental self-flagellation thing. Either way, when I see her next, I'm gonna be treading like Indy in a snake pit.
So yeah, it's 6am now and Mel's up rustling beauty from her makeup kit in the bathroom. Tonight was relatively late, got done around 3 b/c Marvin and Sudsy were cocking around on dumpster duty, holding us up since Gerry likes to have everyone back in before checking out because 'man is a horde animal led by a chief' and Gerry loves the idea of being a potbellied chief, eking ritual out of the smallest group rally. He may have been gruff in the 'interview' but he got more voluble when he saw I was now part of the team, not wanting to waste his words on an unvetted tyro. But yeah, so I'm off to pull a blanket of sun over myself and doze into noonish.
Welcome Matt out.
so I left off starting to describe Bigs, acorn-head with a vocabulary the size of a head of cattle at a conglomerated dude ranch, to abbreviate the man into a small set of clauses. Santa's only got one Claus but it's supplemented by all the carols and songs and secular hymns written for him, otherwise he'd probably demand his due set of multiple expository clauses. Yeah, this is kinda the way me and Bigs talk now, riffing off each other on the back of the juddering truck when we're not preoccupied with lateral gusts and overturned trash cans. He likes to say that we're 'probing the anus of language to see what kind of shit we can dislodge.' His eloquence is a motley thing.
But I guess you guys don't really need a play-by-play breakdown of all my first-day bumbles so I'll sum up, use apposite adjectives to lasso the past out of its dynamism. I met Bigs, we had a cigarette as he broke down the politics of the facility (or 'the malodorous hydra' as he calls it) - Gerry's a cantankerous hermit, Marvin and Sudsy are his pets (always getting dumpster duty, the cushiest run around since you don't even have to leave the stale-smoke rank cab to do your job, unless some random bum, of which we have few in Roanoke, or a family of cats, have made a cozy niche out of torn bags of garbage), Phoebe's a sweetheart when she's smoking, but otherwise curt as her sharp face, Ned's best to be stayed away from because he drags you into debates like a Norseman's wife on mushroom tea, Lugsy's better behind the wheel than behind the truck, etc. - and then we hopped on the back of Lugsy's rig. I got a look at the cab, an old pink-haired troll impaled with a barbie's leg hanging from the rearview, the smell of old french fries hiding out under the seats like Kosovar fugitives in Milosevic heydays. I fell once and bruised my dignity but Bigs chuckled, the only man to make the word a heaving reality in such a succinct burst of breath, and said 'even the Queen of Sheba got her period' and deftly pulled out a small flask from inside his vest, unscrewed it w/ his thumb and handed it to me after a judicious snort. After six curbside stops I got the hang of fitting the bulky plastic containers to the jerky jaws and the night passed uneventfully, me and Bigs trading anecdotes like bad cards in a tight game of stud, or at least on my side that's how I felt, his were fluid as June drizzles off a tent flap. This was a man who had campfire ash ground into his bones and knows how to make some mean beans that make forested squats all the easier to bear. He went to high school in Newport News, Denbigh I think, and did pretty well, starting tight end varsity, soccer star, men's choir, the whole achiever shebang, and 'matriculated like a deformed chock in a tight biscuit joint' at Missouri, where he 'went polymath on their constricted asses,' studying anything - carpentry, the sociolinguistics of modern honduras, salsa dancing, linear algebra, decadent poetry - and dropping out after three years b/c 'the enmity grew like a beanstalk on Mircale-Gro, and it was being poured from both horizons.' He didn't bring the flask out often, which I respect. How he ended up in Roanoke I still haven't divined; he's elusive as a wounded bobcat smelling cordite when it comes to certain subjects, that I've prodded but only enough to see his initial reaction; bobcats can be a bitch when riled.
Around midnight we'd finished our neighborhoods, mainly Glen Cove and Darnwood Forest, though w/ a bit of overlap into more central Roanoke, for some jurisdictional reason yet to be elucidated, and pulled snortingly into the 'hydra's' bay, Lugsy making an audible comical groan as he eased the air brakes down. I called Mom and she groggily said 'walk' b/c ultimately it's not that far from home, as I think I mentioned earlier, but after hanging precariously from a slippery metal bar and wreathed in the smells of a city that reveals itself through its refuse, trash and verb, it's hard to gather all the energy necessary to bear your own physical and olfactory weight. Lugsy ended up giving me a ride home, having heard my dejected 'fuck' slip out after I hung up my phone, and he me and Bigs, who lives four or five doors down from Lugsy near Electric, dawdled about smoking joints as Lugsy knitted a laconic route through the somnolent streets, the only lights sodium or orange, streetlights forever lit and our cherries blazing w/ the heavy inhales of tuberculosis pulling tight drafts from the inchoate world. they've been giving me rides every night now, which is sweet. I'm learning the parlance and honing my raconteurial skills, though it's really only by the whetstone of Bigs since Lugsy contributes his driving prowess and a few lunchbox moments or truncated insight. Bigs calls him 'the stoic Lothario of a lake district in drought.' I'm thinking of calling him 'Hephaestus's nudge.'
A toddler's body was found in the landfill near Avendale yesterday, a kid not even three years old; Phoebe's pretty distraught b/c he lived on the around and near Morningside that she did around the time he disappeared. The implications are colossal. We had a cigarette last night, before the hydra loosed its hulking vertebrae into the night dark w/ dread and possibility, and I referenced it, soft as a papercut from a w2, and she cringed and swooped in front of me and stared into me, not even my eyes but my whole self it felt like, not saying a thing, her eyes burning like a California brushfire not sure whether to flow into the city's arteries of trees and bushes or to hang back and lick at the fringe. I think she opted for the latter b/c I still have but one asshole, and when she backed down a bit she said 'there ain't nothing you know about kids thrown in garbage, specially if you wasn't the one that moved that can into the cherrypicker' and kinda meekly dropped her butt and her eyes w/ it, quickly squishing them both out w/ her boot and when I saw her later that night, and Vic who was on back w/ her and Harry who was driving, we noticed she was as if in a trance. Not the Vegas hypnotist kinda trance where you bark like a castrated whelp, but the profound self-inflicted kind where the eyes look like the skullcrusher on a trench knife b/c the blades been pointed to the back of the head, either to excise w/e metastatic transgression was born and germinated there or for some more grave, mental self-flagellation thing. Either way, when I see her next, I'm gonna be treading like Indy in a snake pit.
So yeah, it's 6am now and Mel's up rustling beauty from her makeup kit in the bathroom. Tonight was relatively late, got done around 3 b/c Marvin and Sudsy were cocking around on dumpster duty, holding us up since Gerry likes to have everyone back in before checking out because 'man is a horde animal led by a chief' and Gerry loves the idea of being a potbellied chief, eking ritual out of the smallest group rally. He may have been gruff in the 'interview' but he got more voluble when he saw I was now part of the team, not wanting to waste his words on an unvetted tyro. But yeah, so I'm off to pull a blanket of sun over myself and doze into noonish.
Welcome Matt out.
mardi 26 janvier 2010
Employment and its accompaniment
So first off I apologize for the week lull in my writing, but life's been crazy as an epileptic mountain goat searching for footholds on K2. Oh, and, this particular mountain goat has lost the preternatural suction that aids he and his fellows to defy the dictates of gravity.
You might notice my diction is a bit loftier. I don't know how it happened so fast, but it's due to my new co-worker (that's right, I have a co-worker, the direct result of having a job, which I will get to soon). He's got more words squirrelled away in his acorn-shaped head than John Denver's got master tracks, or more than Gehry's got half-crumpled sketches stowed in his cramped hands, waiting to be brought out by the write impetus. And i guess I was kinda like this too, filled with words waiting to be elicited by the right inspiration, like Scarlett Johansson's mirror, saving all its quicksilver properties so it can justly reflect her radiance (yeah, I'm a sucker, but what can I say). I guess I'm getting at the dormant principles of existence, the ones that wait to counteract and/or complement, but this is getting ahead of myself.
The job:
So as I said last time I'd promised Mom that I'd be going to the unemployment office last Tuesday. Well, I did, because otherwise I'd have no place to be writing this blog since she's been getting antsy as a honey picnic and less patient than a rabid badger. So I went, walking through the steely gray cold, humming Alan Jackson because my venomous hatred for him was the only thing to keep me warm. Mel always plays "I Still Like Bologna" and belts it out, whipping the tender silence like a recalcitrant kid whining about their love of bologna and their desire to not eat brussels sprouts or some such healthy veggie. But yeah.
So I walk in to a fluourescent slap that feels like eggs injected with neon crack rocks. The smell was disinfected with a hint of degraded milk stuck in someone's mug. I didn't gag, but I started humming louder, moving on to Virginia Coalition. The woman behind the window-paned desk, maybe a few years older than me and the most attractive homunculus I've seen encased in polycarbonate shutters, recognized the tune and cracked a smile that shone like God's polychrome covenant with Moses, because dental hygienists seemed to have been avoiding her mouth as if it were a vacuum for stainless steel tools and any expertise gleaned from the two years of training they underwent.
But, short story long, she took a bit more pity on my shivering shuffling frame and, after asking me for obligatory paperwork (work experience, education, a small bit of medical history that was at best tangentially pertinent), she put it near the top of the stack, which was all of four or five more requests for employment consideration, but, as she told me, the 'pickin's is slayum' so that small shift could, and most likely did, make all the difference. Up until I'd handed my paperwork in, I hadn't looked around me, burying my nose and attention into the grim-colored papers as if I were burying my past failures in it with the spade of the borrowed grainy pen.When I did look up, I looked back down immediately because who was posted up in the sliver-shadowed corner, somehoe immune to the searing glow of the industrial lights, but Jake Malthus, the lobotomized linebacker from cross town, scarfing his fingernails and probing the wall next to him with beady eyes. We'd scuffled junior year after a post-whistle tackle, obviously malicious, like the glint in the sky's eye during a summer storm, that nearly kept my head in the helmet six yards away. He's a lugnut, as my dad used to say, good for tightening the situation into an unbearable torque. He made me think about the Volvo steaming on 81 with me and Mom one day when we were coming back from Salem after meeting her cowboy boyfriend's bow-legged swagger at a rodeo in the convention center, him too cool to get out of the car to scan the engine's problems unraveling in angry steam. He's the situation, not those involved. But, short story long, he sneered at me, I glanced down to check the set of the pen's tossed earth and finally rainbow-smile said all was good and someone would talk to me soon.
Two days of what could be called apprehension if apprehension were soap operas and more public access tv teasing the dawn til it could take it no longer (this time it was more vapid talk show than bizarre avant-garde pantomime). Mom was off my back, finding the kitchen floor more comfortable and cooking me her mac n' cheese with bits of burger. Then I get a call from Waste Management, curt and telling me to 'report' to their innocuous facility on Kirk St. at 8pm that night (Friday), relatively close to home. So I had Mom, jittery with dormant excitement pulled out of her by cascades of green lights poking holes in the evening's boredom, drop me off and told her I'd call her when I needed to be picked up, because I had no idea how this thing was going to work. She handed me a paper bag of Little Debbie snacks and egg salad sandwiches that she'd stashed behind her seat so I wouldn't know she'd been thinking so heavily and sweetly about this. The look on her face was what Lee wore into Richmond, full of reticent adoration and the fear that senile elephants noticing their forgetfulness feel on the wrong way to ancient watering holes.
I go in through a rolltop door and head for the one dim lit office lodged in the corner like a clutch of snake eggs and meet Gerry, my new boss. He looked me up and down like a cattle trader in the Dakotas and said 'd'you know how to lift shit?' the question mark being my addition because there was no inquisition in his voice. This is how he talks, implying the nature of the conversation with context and not intonation, as if someone removed that function from him when they took his left pinky finger. (I don't know how to ask about this so I figure time will give me the question, but devoid of intonation because to talk with Gerry is to eventually adopt his tone, the dormant desire to speak efficiently elicited by his execution.) Of course, I said yeah, having been a dead-lift master in the weight room, stacking plates like IHOP pancakes after a wrestling tourney. Then he said 'you don't want that beard, all sorts a shit'll get stuck in it' and I said alright, tomorrow it'll be gone and then he handed me a jumpsuit he pulled from a file cabinet drawer next to his spartan desk, shoving himself out of the chair as if they were lovers and he had no desire to be far enough from it that he couldn't feel the squeaks it made even when he wasn't in it, like it was yearning for his unbeltable girth.
He told me to put it on and go meet Bigs near the bay door.
Bigs ain't big, but in comparison to his head his body's big as a constipated bear unused to not hibernating. He's jovial without a trace of sarcasm, the kind of manner a good professor gives off on the second day of class when all the no shows and intimidated freshmen have given up. That's to say, he sized me up too, but more like a Traditional Black College interviewer, cutting through the bullshit of handouts and swagger.
Shit.
So now it's almost five am and I've gotta get to WM at 6pm tonight, so I gotta get me some sleep otherwise I'll be as lethargic as an unsunned gila monster in an Arizona coldsnap.
I'll continue this soon, but suffice it to say for now that Bigs is a man with the aesthetics of a hermit and the mind of an extinct Greek.
Welcome Matt out.
You might notice my diction is a bit loftier. I don't know how it happened so fast, but it's due to my new co-worker (that's right, I have a co-worker, the direct result of having a job, which I will get to soon). He's got more words squirrelled away in his acorn-shaped head than John Denver's got master tracks, or more than Gehry's got half-crumpled sketches stowed in his cramped hands, waiting to be brought out by the write impetus. And i guess I was kinda like this too, filled with words waiting to be elicited by the right inspiration, like Scarlett Johansson's mirror, saving all its quicksilver properties so it can justly reflect her radiance (yeah, I'm a sucker, but what can I say). I guess I'm getting at the dormant principles of existence, the ones that wait to counteract and/or complement, but this is getting ahead of myself.
The job:
So as I said last time I'd promised Mom that I'd be going to the unemployment office last Tuesday. Well, I did, because otherwise I'd have no place to be writing this blog since she's been getting antsy as a honey picnic and less patient than a rabid badger. So I went, walking through the steely gray cold, humming Alan Jackson because my venomous hatred for him was the only thing to keep me warm. Mel always plays "I Still Like Bologna" and belts it out, whipping the tender silence like a recalcitrant kid whining about their love of bologna and their desire to not eat brussels sprouts or some such healthy veggie. But yeah.
So I walk in to a fluourescent slap that feels like eggs injected with neon crack rocks. The smell was disinfected with a hint of degraded milk stuck in someone's mug. I didn't gag, but I started humming louder, moving on to Virginia Coalition. The woman behind the window-paned desk, maybe a few years older than me and the most attractive homunculus I've seen encased in polycarbonate shutters, recognized the tune and cracked a smile that shone like God's polychrome covenant with Moses, because dental hygienists seemed to have been avoiding her mouth as if it were a vacuum for stainless steel tools and any expertise gleaned from the two years of training they underwent.
But, short story long, she took a bit more pity on my shivering shuffling frame and, after asking me for obligatory paperwork (work experience, education, a small bit of medical history that was at best tangentially pertinent), she put it near the top of the stack, which was all of four or five more requests for employment consideration, but, as she told me, the 'pickin's is slayum' so that small shift could, and most likely did, make all the difference. Up until I'd handed my paperwork in, I hadn't looked around me, burying my nose and attention into the grim-colored papers as if I were burying my past failures in it with the spade of the borrowed grainy pen.When I did look up, I looked back down immediately because who was posted up in the sliver-shadowed corner, somehoe immune to the searing glow of the industrial lights, but Jake Malthus, the lobotomized linebacker from cross town, scarfing his fingernails and probing the wall next to him with beady eyes. We'd scuffled junior year after a post-whistle tackle, obviously malicious, like the glint in the sky's eye during a summer storm, that nearly kept my head in the helmet six yards away. He's a lugnut, as my dad used to say, good for tightening the situation into an unbearable torque. He made me think about the Volvo steaming on 81 with me and Mom one day when we were coming back from Salem after meeting her cowboy boyfriend's bow-legged swagger at a rodeo in the convention center, him too cool to get out of the car to scan the engine's problems unraveling in angry steam. He's the situation, not those involved. But, short story long, he sneered at me, I glanced down to check the set of the pen's tossed earth and finally rainbow-smile said all was good and someone would talk to me soon.
Two days of what could be called apprehension if apprehension were soap operas and more public access tv teasing the dawn til it could take it no longer (this time it was more vapid talk show than bizarre avant-garde pantomime). Mom was off my back, finding the kitchen floor more comfortable and cooking me her mac n' cheese with bits of burger. Then I get a call from Waste Management, curt and telling me to 'report' to their innocuous facility on Kirk St. at 8pm that night (Friday), relatively close to home. So I had Mom, jittery with dormant excitement pulled out of her by cascades of green lights poking holes in the evening's boredom, drop me off and told her I'd call her when I needed to be picked up, because I had no idea how this thing was going to work. She handed me a paper bag of Little Debbie snacks and egg salad sandwiches that she'd stashed behind her seat so I wouldn't know she'd been thinking so heavily and sweetly about this. The look on her face was what Lee wore into Richmond, full of reticent adoration and the fear that senile elephants noticing their forgetfulness feel on the wrong way to ancient watering holes.
I go in through a rolltop door and head for the one dim lit office lodged in the corner like a clutch of snake eggs and meet Gerry, my new boss. He looked me up and down like a cattle trader in the Dakotas and said 'd'you know how to lift shit?' the question mark being my addition because there was no inquisition in his voice. This is how he talks, implying the nature of the conversation with context and not intonation, as if someone removed that function from him when they took his left pinky finger. (I don't know how to ask about this so I figure time will give me the question, but devoid of intonation because to talk with Gerry is to eventually adopt his tone, the dormant desire to speak efficiently elicited by his execution.) Of course, I said yeah, having been a dead-lift master in the weight room, stacking plates like IHOP pancakes after a wrestling tourney. Then he said 'you don't want that beard, all sorts a shit'll get stuck in it' and I said alright, tomorrow it'll be gone and then he handed me a jumpsuit he pulled from a file cabinet drawer next to his spartan desk, shoving himself out of the chair as if they were lovers and he had no desire to be far enough from it that he couldn't feel the squeaks it made even when he wasn't in it, like it was yearning for his unbeltable girth.
He told me to put it on and go meet Bigs near the bay door.
Bigs ain't big, but in comparison to his head his body's big as a constipated bear unused to not hibernating. He's jovial without a trace of sarcasm, the kind of manner a good professor gives off on the second day of class when all the no shows and intimidated freshmen have given up. That's to say, he sized me up too, but more like a Traditional Black College interviewer, cutting through the bullshit of handouts and swagger.
Shit.
So now it's almost five am and I've gotta get to WM at 6pm tonight, so I gotta get me some sleep otherwise I'll be as lethargic as an unsunned gila monster in an Arizona coldsnap.
I'll continue this soon, but suffice it to say for now that Bigs is a man with the aesthetics of a hermit and the mind of an extinct Greek.
Welcome Matt out.
lundi 18 janvier 2010
Emptying my empty head
Hey all, whoever you may be at this point.
It's been a few days and my head's feeling a bit cluttered with too much empty space so I figured that meant it was time for me to inject this void into a series of sentences to see what happens. I had planned on sitting down to do this last night, but Mel monopolized the computer for longer than it would take a blind man to teach a deaf man how to change a flat tire. and for those of you who remember me with my sticker-bright laptop from school, it's now 'the most expensive paperweight' i own (citation attributed to Mickey F., the epigramaster) since Mel's gerbil somehow clotted a thick bunch of its fur in the fan outlet. This happened some weeks ago and I didn't have insurance on it because who needs insurance on a laptop when your sister's gerbil has a gnaw-proof cage? But I'm getting bitter, so moving on...
She was on the computer last night forever, thrilled about not having to do anything today except go to a light afternoon practice since her and her relay team smoked the best offerings of four counties (Botetourt, Craig, Montgomery and Franklin, all hanging their heads in unlaurelled shame) on Saturday and their coach thinks they should keep their 'glutes loose' as she apparently says.
I've seen this woman maybe five times since Mel's been on the team and she's got the chassis of sterile Chevy (and by that I mean she's slim as steamed okra but nowhere near as limp) but the eyes of a drifter, like they search you for what you can offer in the shortest amount of time; when you're done providing for them they won't discard you like half-nibbled corncobs because they can use them for liquor distillation later. She's got that economical glint in her, pushing anything between her slender hands to the most efficient useful point. And yeah, I've thought hard about banging her, but that's for a different type of blog.
I guess keeping your glutes loose means sitting on them for as long as possible because Mel irritated the shit out of me last night jabbering away like a widowed magpie living in the tree across from a turkey buzzard, and the typing noise was even worse. I tried to watch TV, but it was public access, infomercials or dogooders in bad ties spluttering about salvation or Haiti. A basic buffet of misguided capitalism, though some of the public access shows were oddly enthralling in their lighting techniques and subject matter.
One was a guy in his 30s, dressed like a peasant from 19th century Russia, which is really just coarse shapeless garments spattered with mud; his face is what made it 19th century Russia, contorted into a scowl of agony and contempt when some offstage voice yelled 'TSAR!' like a battle cry. On the bottom right hand of the screen, in a childishly curly font, was written '19th Century Russian Peasant Contemplates Humanism.' The four minutes or so I spent on the channel were made up mainly of the 30ish dude's face going through a different series of faces, all generally based on pain or strife or poverty, and all changed when the offscreen voice yelled 'TSAR!' The lighting wasn't spectacular, but it captured the subtle differences in the guys face, because his faces were minute reconfigurations of the ones he'd just previously done, like he was testing the capacity and elasticity of a specific series of muscles in different areas of his face. I changed the channel after he dropped to his knees grinning and patted mud the color of straw, and probably with the same texture, around him as if burying himself slowly. This was after the voice shouted something unintelligible, but obviously different than 'TSAR;' maybe 'disputin' or 'gas proven,' I couldn't make it out.
But yeah, so that four second bit stuck in my head and gave me some weird dreams that I only remember in snippets, and only really when something not totally related to the dreams' subjects reminds me of them. Like when I was talking about Mel's coach earlier, I remembered, vaguely, me being chased by her around an asphalt track that surrounded all of Roanoke and we were giants and in some sort of contest. Then with the mud the color of straw, I remember, still vaguely, looking at a pot boiling over with it, covering the tile floor with a slippery yellowish goop. Then mom came in a started sweeping it with a straw broom, the kind you see next to pineboard porches where the rocking chairs are all missing at least one back slat, that melted into the goop.
Normally I don't remember my dreams, even in little bits like this. I think my head has too little to distract itself from itself. I promised mom I'd amble over to the unemployment office tomorrow to see what they might have to offer. She's been riding me like a roan through Indian country, and I can't very well buck her off without going to the place that makes me most skittish so I'm going. Tomorrow though. I've got my own agenda (even though MLK gave me an excuse today).
Welcome Matt out
It's been a few days and my head's feeling a bit cluttered with too much empty space so I figured that meant it was time for me to inject this void into a series of sentences to see what happens. I had planned on sitting down to do this last night, but Mel monopolized the computer for longer than it would take a blind man to teach a deaf man how to change a flat tire. and for those of you who remember me with my sticker-bright laptop from school, it's now 'the most expensive paperweight' i own (citation attributed to Mickey F., the epigramaster) since Mel's gerbil somehow clotted a thick bunch of its fur in the fan outlet. This happened some weeks ago and I didn't have insurance on it because who needs insurance on a laptop when your sister's gerbil has a gnaw-proof cage? But I'm getting bitter, so moving on...
She was on the computer last night forever, thrilled about not having to do anything today except go to a light afternoon practice since her and her relay team smoked the best offerings of four counties (Botetourt, Craig, Montgomery and Franklin, all hanging their heads in unlaurelled shame) on Saturday and their coach thinks they should keep their 'glutes loose' as she apparently says.
I've seen this woman maybe five times since Mel's been on the team and she's got the chassis of sterile Chevy (and by that I mean she's slim as steamed okra but nowhere near as limp) but the eyes of a drifter, like they search you for what you can offer in the shortest amount of time; when you're done providing for them they won't discard you like half-nibbled corncobs because they can use them for liquor distillation later. She's got that economical glint in her, pushing anything between her slender hands to the most efficient useful point. And yeah, I've thought hard about banging her, but that's for a different type of blog.
I guess keeping your glutes loose means sitting on them for as long as possible because Mel irritated the shit out of me last night jabbering away like a widowed magpie living in the tree across from a turkey buzzard, and the typing noise was even worse. I tried to watch TV, but it was public access, infomercials or dogooders in bad ties spluttering about salvation or Haiti. A basic buffet of misguided capitalism, though some of the public access shows were oddly enthralling in their lighting techniques and subject matter.
One was a guy in his 30s, dressed like a peasant from 19th century Russia, which is really just coarse shapeless garments spattered with mud; his face is what made it 19th century Russia, contorted into a scowl of agony and contempt when some offstage voice yelled 'TSAR!' like a battle cry. On the bottom right hand of the screen, in a childishly curly font, was written '19th Century Russian Peasant Contemplates Humanism.' The four minutes or so I spent on the channel were made up mainly of the 30ish dude's face going through a different series of faces, all generally based on pain or strife or poverty, and all changed when the offscreen voice yelled 'TSAR!' The lighting wasn't spectacular, but it captured the subtle differences in the guys face, because his faces were minute reconfigurations of the ones he'd just previously done, like he was testing the capacity and elasticity of a specific series of muscles in different areas of his face. I changed the channel after he dropped to his knees grinning and patted mud the color of straw, and probably with the same texture, around him as if burying himself slowly. This was after the voice shouted something unintelligible, but obviously different than 'TSAR;' maybe 'disputin' or 'gas proven,' I couldn't make it out.
But yeah, so that four second bit stuck in my head and gave me some weird dreams that I only remember in snippets, and only really when something not totally related to the dreams' subjects reminds me of them. Like when I was talking about Mel's coach earlier, I remembered, vaguely, me being chased by her around an asphalt track that surrounded all of Roanoke and we were giants and in some sort of contest. Then with the mud the color of straw, I remember, still vaguely, looking at a pot boiling over with it, covering the tile floor with a slippery yellowish goop. Then mom came in a started sweeping it with a straw broom, the kind you see next to pineboard porches where the rocking chairs are all missing at least one back slat, that melted into the goop.
Normally I don't remember my dreams, even in little bits like this. I think my head has too little to distract itself from itself. I promised mom I'd amble over to the unemployment office tomorrow to see what they might have to offer. She's been riding me like a roan through Indian country, and I can't very well buck her off without going to the place that makes me most skittish so I'm going. Tomorrow though. I've got my own agenda (even though MLK gave me an excuse today).
Welcome Matt out
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