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.
jeudi 28 janvier 2010
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
mercredi 13 janvier 2010
Thinking about names
So I'm still not sure how this blog thing works, like, if you're supposed to post every day, every few hours (like some of those inane idiots on twitter-equipped iphones tweeting like buzzards over a possum carcass), or only when things happen. That's why I've let a little time slip itself between now and my first stellar blog, stellar only because I've named it so. I wonder how girls named Precious feel, and if their parents were trying to head something off at the pass....
For some reason I started thinking about this girl Precious, who I went to high school with and haven't seen since. Her dad left her mom about the same time mine did, around 5th grade ('96ish for those of you in different academic tracks), and they lived out near Mill Mountain park, not far from the Carillion, where her mom pulled doubles as a nurse. I don't remember what she did, but it was probably a bit of everything because every time you'd see her her face was drawn tight as a Navajo drum, sallow from jogging in soft-soled shoes through dawn lit shifts, up and down hallways smelling like they were sprayed with antiseptic and contrived home-iness (the smell always stuck with me after I spent a week there in 8th grade, getting over strong strep and mom's quiet hysterics).
Precious, unlike her mother, was plump, and not in a euphemism kind of way, just plump. Some kids called her 'muffin-top' or 'jelly-roll morton' after they discovered cruelty and how good it sounded in cracked adolescent voices, and though I never joined in, I never said anything. I didn't think she deserved that teasing, but, honestly, I didn't care. I was too focused trying to keep my jaw up and my boner down whenever Dee Anne Nelson strutted by like a timid doe in heat. I realize that's a bit contradictory, strutting and timid, but my head wasn't screwed on straight, and that's all it thought about, screwing straight, so my metaphorical prowess was lacking. But Precious, back to Precious.
She wasn't ugly, take a few loaves off of her and she'd've been downright attractive, but she had all the confidence of a hungover draft-dodger at a VFW barbeque and she exuded it, like the anti-matter of confidence, sending waves of it over you as she scurried past between knots of chattering kids leaning on lockers and generally impeding traffic. Or at least, I felt those waves. But, of course, I never said anything to her, except maybe 'here's that pencil you dropped in Halada's class' or 'did you study last night' to which she would respond with the appropriate demure nod or shake of the head.
And I wonder if she ever felt her name, not like holding it, though now I can see her writing it on a strip of papyrus or rice paper or something exotic and filmy like that and then holding it up to whatever light's around, letting the shadow of it fall into her eyes. I don't know why I'm thinking about this right now, but I am, and that's what this blog is for, a repository for my current thoughts, no matter how mundane, maudlin or myriad they might be. But really, I wonder if Precious ever felt the quality her parents named her after, if by linking her forever to that adjective they pushed her far away from it, some law of nominal inverse polarity or something like that.
Do letters obey thermodynamic laws in our minds? Too deep. Back to the subject.
Can names turn out to be curses, our parents' intentions mutating into the opposite of what they initially thought? Because Precious sure as hell never looked like she felt precious, exuding all the agonizing meekness of a neurotic mouse and trying not to let anyone know it. One time, I saw someone try to talk to Precious, some sophomore when we were juniors, who was a second string JV running back but according to rumors a nice guy, the kind who shook your hand strong no matter what side of the scoreboard you were on, and I heard later he wanted to know what she was doing that weekend, some party or other he or a friend was throwing and they wanted to pad it with people or maybe he just wanted to be a gentleman to this girl he'd seen pushing a hazy aura of invisibility through the halls, and she mumbled she had to go to Richmond with her mom to a great aunt or something or other and brushed past him like he was a one-eyed bible salesman.
Now, I didn't hear any of this, all of it was recounted in the locker room later via the canal system of teammates' little brothers and gossips in pads, but I saw it and it happened in a twist of an ear and watching Precious walk away you would've thought she'd just had someone give her Science homework instead of an opportunity to put herself out there and see what her name could be.
And so now I'm wondering what my name's doing to me, if it's pushing me away from what it means, and I don't mean my real name, but my nickname, Welcome Matt, which, if you know me, came up one house party in February when mom and Mel were at Regionals because Mel'd qualified with her 400 relay team and I couldn't go watch her weep on the podium because she'd pulled her hammy as the anchor trying to catch the Louisa county phenom burning up the asphalt like she'd stolen her flats because I'd had some test in Chemistry, which I was a wink away from failing, and I threw a small party that blew up since Roanoke has little to offer the underage crowd and word travels like syphillis through a Mexican brothel and I kept letting everyone in, telling them to get comfortable, make themselves at home because Paul made the first round of rum and cokes and we played a raucous game of Kings that put a lampshade on my head which I didn't take off and had to excuse with hospitality and Jimmy started calling me Welcome Matt when the whiskey got to his creative powers and it stuck like feet did to my kitchen floor the next morning, pulling up after only so much applied pressure until the next step.
And so I hope I'm still hospitable, even to a fault, though I never wanna see mom's face like I did that Tuesday morning when she helped Mel limp into the house to see me and Paul and Jimmy and Dave vigorously mopping in turns, giggling ourselves into the loopy lucidity of our hangover, bewildered out of it by mom's bellowing, because it's better to be welcoming than to be remote. This isn't saying anything against Precious, since everyone's got their reasons and personalities, but I think it says something about accepting what's given, and trying to work with it.
But God knows I can't go with this given situation, unemployment, for much longer. I guess some things shouldn't be tolerated.
Welcome Matt out
For some reason I started thinking about this girl Precious, who I went to high school with and haven't seen since. Her dad left her mom about the same time mine did, around 5th grade ('96ish for those of you in different academic tracks), and they lived out near Mill Mountain park, not far from the Carillion, where her mom pulled doubles as a nurse. I don't remember what she did, but it was probably a bit of everything because every time you'd see her her face was drawn tight as a Navajo drum, sallow from jogging in soft-soled shoes through dawn lit shifts, up and down hallways smelling like they were sprayed with antiseptic and contrived home-iness (the smell always stuck with me after I spent a week there in 8th grade, getting over strong strep and mom's quiet hysterics).
Precious, unlike her mother, was plump, and not in a euphemism kind of way, just plump. Some kids called her 'muffin-top' or 'jelly-roll morton' after they discovered cruelty and how good it sounded in cracked adolescent voices, and though I never joined in, I never said anything. I didn't think she deserved that teasing, but, honestly, I didn't care. I was too focused trying to keep my jaw up and my boner down whenever Dee Anne Nelson strutted by like a timid doe in heat. I realize that's a bit contradictory, strutting and timid, but my head wasn't screwed on straight, and that's all it thought about, screwing straight, so my metaphorical prowess was lacking. But Precious, back to Precious.
She wasn't ugly, take a few loaves off of her and she'd've been downright attractive, but she had all the confidence of a hungover draft-dodger at a VFW barbeque and she exuded it, like the anti-matter of confidence, sending waves of it over you as she scurried past between knots of chattering kids leaning on lockers and generally impeding traffic. Or at least, I felt those waves. But, of course, I never said anything to her, except maybe 'here's that pencil you dropped in Halada's class' or 'did you study last night' to which she would respond with the appropriate demure nod or shake of the head.
And I wonder if she ever felt her name, not like holding it, though now I can see her writing it on a strip of papyrus or rice paper or something exotic and filmy like that and then holding it up to whatever light's around, letting the shadow of it fall into her eyes. I don't know why I'm thinking about this right now, but I am, and that's what this blog is for, a repository for my current thoughts, no matter how mundane, maudlin or myriad they might be. But really, I wonder if Precious ever felt the quality her parents named her after, if by linking her forever to that adjective they pushed her far away from it, some law of nominal inverse polarity or something like that.
Do letters obey thermodynamic laws in our minds? Too deep. Back to the subject.
Can names turn out to be curses, our parents' intentions mutating into the opposite of what they initially thought? Because Precious sure as hell never looked like she felt precious, exuding all the agonizing meekness of a neurotic mouse and trying not to let anyone know it. One time, I saw someone try to talk to Precious, some sophomore when we were juniors, who was a second string JV running back but according to rumors a nice guy, the kind who shook your hand strong no matter what side of the scoreboard you were on, and I heard later he wanted to know what she was doing that weekend, some party or other he or a friend was throwing and they wanted to pad it with people or maybe he just wanted to be a gentleman to this girl he'd seen pushing a hazy aura of invisibility through the halls, and she mumbled she had to go to Richmond with her mom to a great aunt or something or other and brushed past him like he was a one-eyed bible salesman.
Now, I didn't hear any of this, all of it was recounted in the locker room later via the canal system of teammates' little brothers and gossips in pads, but I saw it and it happened in a twist of an ear and watching Precious walk away you would've thought she'd just had someone give her Science homework instead of an opportunity to put herself out there and see what her name could be.
And so now I'm wondering what my name's doing to me, if it's pushing me away from what it means, and I don't mean my real name, but my nickname, Welcome Matt, which, if you know me, came up one house party in February when mom and Mel were at Regionals because Mel'd qualified with her 400 relay team and I couldn't go watch her weep on the podium because she'd pulled her hammy as the anchor trying to catch the Louisa county phenom burning up the asphalt like she'd stolen her flats because I'd had some test in Chemistry, which I was a wink away from failing, and I threw a small party that blew up since Roanoke has little to offer the underage crowd and word travels like syphillis through a Mexican brothel and I kept letting everyone in, telling them to get comfortable, make themselves at home because Paul made the first round of rum and cokes and we played a raucous game of Kings that put a lampshade on my head which I didn't take off and had to excuse with hospitality and Jimmy started calling me Welcome Matt when the whiskey got to his creative powers and it stuck like feet did to my kitchen floor the next morning, pulling up after only so much applied pressure until the next step.
And so I hope I'm still hospitable, even to a fault, though I never wanna see mom's face like I did that Tuesday morning when she helped Mel limp into the house to see me and Paul and Jimmy and Dave vigorously mopping in turns, giggling ourselves into the loopy lucidity of our hangover, bewildered out of it by mom's bellowing, because it's better to be welcoming than to be remote. This isn't saying anything against Precious, since everyone's got their reasons and personalities, but I think it says something about accepting what's given, and trying to work with it.
But God knows I can't go with this given situation, unemployment, for much longer. I guess some things shouldn't be tolerated.
Welcome Matt out
lundi 11 janvier 2010
The first step in cleaning is through the doorframe
So welcome to the inaugurable blog of Star Maps of Roanoke. I don't really know why I chose to name my blog this, since there are never any celebreties here except maybe a random Iraqi architect supposedly huge in her own world since she was drunk and rambling like a half-squashed polecat searching for a reststop first-aid on 81, but I guess it comes out of the same reason why I decided to write this blog in the first place: boredom, the vacuum left by excitement when it moves to sunnier climates.
Since moving home (and for those of you who don't know, yes, I've moved home because the Orlando economy gave me nothing but fruit-picking jobs in humid groves where English was more used to a cueball than a larynx) I haven't done anything. Ok, I exaggerate a bit, I've read through all my old papers from school and re-reamed the professor's comments in sharpie and I've organized the garage and (still tiny) attic into what seems a good system of order, though I didn't make a list or coding system so it could all just fall apart if/when Christmas comes around and we forget how I put everything. I've also tinkered with the Volvo (the old Chrysler was junked soon after I got home, its gaskets swiss cheesed through and the oil that leaked into and then burned under the pistons finally took its final toll), reinforcing the jerry-rigged muffler bracket I worked on last Christmas break and generally detailing it since for some reason the Swede's know how to make a sturdy, all-be-it quirky, powertrain. Something to do with jets I guess, though I haven't heard anything about their Air Force capabilities since I dunno when.
But besides that I haven't done much, to get back to my original thought, so I decided to start this little mind-dump where I can unload all the junk of my days and odd thoughts and maybe organize my head a bit better to deal with this ridiculous ennui (boredom, for those of you who don't know; I learned it, weirdly enough, when I was down in FL, talking to a balding guy in glasses at Paddy McGee's in Winter Park, where I lived near UCF campus because it wasn't too bad a rent and the chicks man, the chicks, who started a conversation after I bought a Guinness because no one else was, all of 'em springing for craptastic Bud's and Miller's, and it came up he was a lit prof and I talked about how bored I was, being between odd jobs I was picking up since the band I was supposed to write for broke up as soon as I got there, and he called it 'ennui').
Mom keeps hassling me to get out and get a job (what's new, right? God, every kid's hearing that same mantra, another word I learned from that bald guy, whose name I can't, and probably never will, remember, unless this blog serves to clear out some space and dust out the cobwebs where that set of syllables is caught and struggling like a tar-babied rabbit) and I'm thinking about it, but I just can't get it in me to mosey over to unemployment where tall Bantu-Somali emigres jabber quietly and jostle oddly and men in beards scraggly as New River weeds after a harsh spring melt doze in hard plastic chairs. Really, I have nothing against these guys, since I've never met them nor probably will I, until I get my 'lazy broke ass printed with the couch's pattern,' as Mom says in here more heated moments, to that place, but I don't feel like walking (since Mom's out doing errands until Mel gets done with winter track practice) all the way to Valley View through a 'wind chill advisory' to grovel to some fat woman chafing to get out of her small chair and put her curlers in and sink into a stupor in front of Pat Sajak or Brent (kilo)Watts' dim, if even there, smile.
Didn't mean for this to take such a pessimistic turn, I planned on being chipper and spritely to welcome this new endeavor to the cybersphere, but I guess it's just a snapshot of my mindset, and, to end on a simple maxim, 'better out,' here, on the blog, that is, 'than in,' or, simmering in my bored mind, boarding itself up against the gale-force excitement of menial labor, waiting to boil over onto the dinner table like an overly unwatched pot.
A better blog next time, I promise, and thanks for reading.
Welcome Matt out.
Since moving home (and for those of you who don't know, yes, I've moved home because the Orlando economy gave me nothing but fruit-picking jobs in humid groves where English was more used to a cueball than a larynx) I haven't done anything. Ok, I exaggerate a bit, I've read through all my old papers from school and re-reamed the professor's comments in sharpie and I've organized the garage and (still tiny) attic into what seems a good system of order, though I didn't make a list or coding system so it could all just fall apart if/when Christmas comes around and we forget how I put everything. I've also tinkered with the Volvo (the old Chrysler was junked soon after I got home, its gaskets swiss cheesed through and the oil that leaked into and then burned under the pistons finally took its final toll), reinforcing the jerry-rigged muffler bracket I worked on last Christmas break and generally detailing it since for some reason the Swede's know how to make a sturdy, all-be-it quirky, powertrain. Something to do with jets I guess, though I haven't heard anything about their Air Force capabilities since I dunno when.
But besides that I haven't done much, to get back to my original thought, so I decided to start this little mind-dump where I can unload all the junk of my days and odd thoughts and maybe organize my head a bit better to deal with this ridiculous ennui (boredom, for those of you who don't know; I learned it, weirdly enough, when I was down in FL, talking to a balding guy in glasses at Paddy McGee's in Winter Park, where I lived near UCF campus because it wasn't too bad a rent and the chicks man, the chicks, who started a conversation after I bought a Guinness because no one else was, all of 'em springing for craptastic Bud's and Miller's, and it came up he was a lit prof and I talked about how bored I was, being between odd jobs I was picking up since the band I was supposed to write for broke up as soon as I got there, and he called it 'ennui').
Mom keeps hassling me to get out and get a job (what's new, right? God, every kid's hearing that same mantra, another word I learned from that bald guy, whose name I can't, and probably never will, remember, unless this blog serves to clear out some space and dust out the cobwebs where that set of syllables is caught and struggling like a tar-babied rabbit) and I'm thinking about it, but I just can't get it in me to mosey over to unemployment where tall Bantu-Somali emigres jabber quietly and jostle oddly and men in beards scraggly as New River weeds after a harsh spring melt doze in hard plastic chairs. Really, I have nothing against these guys, since I've never met them nor probably will I, until I get my 'lazy broke ass printed with the couch's pattern,' as Mom says in here more heated moments, to that place, but I don't feel like walking (since Mom's out doing errands until Mel gets done with winter track practice) all the way to Valley View through a 'wind chill advisory' to grovel to some fat woman chafing to get out of her small chair and put her curlers in and sink into a stupor in front of Pat Sajak or Brent (kilo)Watts' dim, if even there, smile.
Didn't mean for this to take such a pessimistic turn, I planned on being chipper and spritely to welcome this new endeavor to the cybersphere, but I guess it's just a snapshot of my mindset, and, to end on a simple maxim, 'better out,' here, on the blog, that is, 'than in,' or, simmering in my bored mind, boarding itself up against the gale-force excitement of menial labor, waiting to boil over onto the dinner table like an overly unwatched pot.
A better blog next time, I promise, and thanks for reading.
Welcome Matt out.
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