Swans and Kant

 

We took the shoreline first, we usually take the shoreline to finish. I didn’t have a dog in the fight, I was just trying to get the boys out of the house as they were at peak riot before seven thirty in the morning. It was MLK day 2021, deep in the throes of the CoronaVirus pandemic. Getting them out of the house, even if for an hour, helps calm them a little, makes bedtime a little easier if they’ve been on their feet for at least a little while. As I said, we took the shoreline first. Goddard park is a great walk. One always has the shore for a good vista but there is also the path that glides and meanders between a forest dense enough to cut out a good deal of the human noise we probably aren’t adapted for yet and unknowingly makes us crazy. There have been days where after a walk at Goddard, the boys, usually riotous at seven thirty in the morning and cacophonous the other waking hours, are dare I say it, calm and serene. It is low tide and I am frigid; I tuck my nose inside my coat and I can feel how cold it is. I breathe inside my coat for as long as I can as the wind drills us on the shoreline. It is so early and our direction means we’re getting no sun. The boys are impervious to the cold. Julian has taken his gloves off for better rock skipping. Julian finds the sole of a shoe. Avery is carrying sticks...for protection. We reach the rocks and ah, sunlight hits me. The bite of the wind is softened. The star a mere ninety-three million miles away warms my Irish nose and reminds me, there can be warmth. The rocks are the informal half-way point. At low tide the rocks jut out to where, traversing them, one can feel in the middle of the bay. Not for me today; looking at the water makes me shiver. I let the boys linger though I am cold and my Raynauds has my hands and feet stinging. I let them be boys and they are gloriously boys. Loud, active, gregarious, with elan to burn...and they burn it and it powers them: on the rocks, off the rocks, karate pose, stick fight!, on the rocks again, off the rocks again. I can’t help myself so I get some pictures; they are too glorious not to take pictures. But the wind drilling me for a half-hour is all I can tolerate so I say it is time to head back. The walk back is through the woods, a reprieve from the wind. We know this path well. The leaves soften the walk and the noise is dampened. Funny how the noise of a forest, isn’t called noise, doesn’t feel like noise. Perception. There is no noumenal realm. Plus Kant died from eating a wheel of cheese. I tell the boys we should try to be quiet as we near the pond. There have been days we spotted a Heron at the back of the pond. The pond sits just about seventy-five yards from the shoreline at low tide. It is surrounded by trees but a nice path has been beaten around most of its near-acre size. We do not see the Heron but I tell the boys there are swans back there. Two, white dollops of feathered mashed potatoes somehow floating on the water. I have never given swans much thought. Near the zoo, there are swan-shaped paddle boats the boys have enjoyed and my calves have not. Who really thinks about swans? Maybe Kant did. We round the corner and I point out to Avery that someone has dropped some seed for birds. He lingers, noticing the birds, and appreciating how close he is to them. Nuthatches mostly. Julian is ahead of me, Julian will always be ahead of me, and he’s talking about something I can’t quite make out because Avery is in my ear about wanting a small, cute bird for a pet. I tell him, “My sister had a cockatiel,” when I am alerted to the sound of a jeep or some vehicle driving through this forest. Impossible. How in the world did someone get a vehicle back here? I think. The birds scatter at the sound of this vehicle rumbling toward us. I try to locate the source and my ears point me to the center of the pond, but...it is not a vehicle. It is the sound of the two swans, pelting the surface of the pond to take flight. I realize these swans are huge; their wings must be seven feet or more from tip to tip and those wings are beating the pond like a drum. Bam bam bam, like an old Dodge motor with perhaps a rod knocking. Huge birds. We are rapt. All attention on them as they finally get off the water and the old Dodge turns into a wind turbine, their long strong wings forcing a loud, dare I say cacophonous whooomph with every flap. Quickly, loudly they flap in order to rise over the surrounding maples and sumacs. They do, the dollops of white, quintessential orange beaks, and jet-black eyes, rise above and are gone. But not forgotten. Julian and I look at each other in amazement. Julian is speechless. “That was cool,” I riotously yell. I am thinking about swans. Swans have been perceived, not in some cold, mathematical, taxonomical, noumenal realm but in a phenomenal realm, where sounds startle you and sights dazzle you, and the smell from a wheel of cheese overtakes you.

It's A Shame

 Joyce Carol Oates Masterclass Writing Assignment

 

4.  Write a story about an unsolved mystery in your life. Use Joyce’s phrase “An unsolved mystery is a thorn in the heart” as your first line. Then, in an entirely new paragraph, begin explaining the mystery while keeping the first line in mind.

An unsolved mystery is a thorn in the heart. 

 

Why I can’t bring myself to like myself is a thorn in my heart. I even tell people, “I’m a decent person,” as if to remind them, but it’s really to remind me. I don’t know how this came to be. Well, other than growing up poor, and internalizing the poverty and equating it with character failure and moral worth. So maybe it’s more of a riddle. Disliking myself (hate is such a strong word) is why the words of an adjunct professor, Andrew Stypinski, have stayed with me all these years (30 yrs): If you don’t love yourself, you can’t love anyone else - there’s no analogy to draw from. This thorn has impacted my relationships (no friends to speak of at the age of 50), a troubled marriage, and parenting that won’t win any awards, or even honorable mention. So there’s a thorn, or maybe it’s a switch-blade, or the Conan Sword in my heart but I guess I’m lying when I tell you there is this big unsolved mystery. There isn’t. My early life (Freud was right about so much shit), my parents, my surroundings, my choices, my zeitgeist, my biology, my culture, my nature, my nurture, my wiring, my education, my lack of education, my intelligence, my lack of intelligence, my experiences, my being a late bloomer (as in weighing 95 lbs in the ninth grade late bloomer), my early sexual experiences, my lack of early sexual experiences (see late bloomer info above), my cramped childhood household (eight people in a two bedroom ONE bathroom home) my potty training, my living thirty yards from an interstate highway, my contracting scabies as a kid, my parents’ and uncles’ and brother’s alcoholism, and my goddamn self are the reason(s) I dislike myself - this shit isn’t a mystery or a riddle or a limerick or an amusing anecdote, to paraphrase George Carlin, it’s a shame.

Among The Conifers

 

Point A to Point B. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. From poor to rich. But unless you suffer from Alzheimer’s, you never forget. Never forget you were poor. You can walk all around your ritzy neighborhood; five-bedroom three car garage homes, with decorative stone paths, scaped lots the size of a football field, nestled in the enormous conifers. You can. But you know they’re dangerous. Those people you knew. You know what their capable of. You know that if you ever cross paths with them, decorative stone or not, they will immediately recognize all you have to lose, and pounce on it. They will threaten you and your family, nestled in among the conifers. They’ll seize on how much you have to lose. They’ll threaten to hurt your wife and kids. You know they will. They’ll abuse your fear and never stop. Which is why you can never go back. You can never see them as human, never respect them as more than animals. On sight you should kill them. On sight. Six hundred miles separates you from them. Six hundred miles and thirty years. But they’ll recognize you. Feel you, and all that money. But you too, you feel you, poor, out of place, among the conifers.

Thanksgiving in October

Celebrated Thanksgiving in October. Thanks Rona. Nothing says Turkey and Mashed Taters like Monday off for Indigenous People's day. All snark aside, I'm thankful that my fam and I are healthy in what is shaping up to be a pretty shitty 2020. And weeeeee're back with the snark. I missed snark; after, let's count em', 20 words. Not bad for me.

I've missed you too blog, but I've been quarantined and parentined without enough booze-filled canteens. Plus I'm teaching three courses and taking one and blah blah blah, only 24 hours in a day. 

Can I tell you that running in the dark at 5am blows? I can. I did. It does. Don't do it. This Monday the entire run was in the dark. 

Which brings me to where I am in life, having recently celebrated a half century of life/existence: 

IN. THE. DARK.

But I know there's light. 

It's gotta be around here somewhere.

"Here boy! 

(whistle sound) 

Gotta be around here somewhere."

I'm alive enough to keep looking...and for that I'm thankful...in October.

One Itch For Another

He’d gotten poison ivy during the pandemic of 2020. He’d always been especially sensitive to poison ivy ever since he and his younger brother got it as kids, leafing around for baseballs at a new-to-them practice spot. They both had to see a doctor because of their inability to stop scratching and because it spread to their face, near their mouths. Then again in his thirties, just cleaning up the yard of the tiny apartment he rented, he’d touched just enough to have it spread like a wildfire over his body to the point where the “physician” at the urgent care gasped not so conspicuously at this sight of his back. He missed a wedding and had to have a steroid treatment Mark McGwire would have been proud of. Ever since then he’d taken great care to be covered head to toe whenever he knew he would be venturing beyond a lawn. He was covered head to toe, including gloves and hat, when he walked through the woods of Goddard park in Rhode Island, as the Corona Virus pandemic was sweeping the globe. Still, the ivy found him, somehow someway. Whenever his pants lifted oh so slightly, it would reach out and swipe at his ankles, straining for the slightest touch of a hair or a tap tap of the lateral malleolus. It wanted to strangle his ankles but all it could do was reach, reeeaaacccch for a chance to poison him in the nanosecond when his skin was vulnerable. Vulnerable he was; and despite a shower upon return, in the morning—had he scratched himself in his sleep—he was covered with the will-crushing itchy oil. Not the best time to have to see a doctor, when the world is swept up in a pandemic, the proportions of which have shut down both the biggest city and the biggest economy in the world. As makeshift hospitals are being built in abandoned parking lots by the National Guard, car companies are shutting down production to make ventilators to help people survive, and every health professional from here to the tropics has to wear a hazmat suit 24/7, this guy is going to go to the hospital for poison ivy?

Yep.

Who has two thumbs and can’t take a shower because the itch nearly drains him of his will to live? 

Yep.

Off to his doctor he went. And just like last time, the doctor almost passed out when he took off his shirt. Covered in red bumps and purplish slashes of skin that made it look like he’d been burned or sliced with venom. Streaks and bruises and welts deformed his skin, making him hideous to take in, even for a moment. None of that mattered to him; he gave no thought to how he looked, not one. The itch burned him up so much he wanted to die to be rid of it. He nearly did. The doctor prescribed the toughest ointment made and he got a 55 gallon drum of it and was covered in mere hours. He’d also gotten another dose of steroids to speed the healing. It did nothing. Just the next morning, he suffered with an itch so strong it made him contemplate a life without skin. Corona virus meant nothing to him, nothing. The itch owned him and drove him to the emergency room before six a.m. The intake person gaped at him, the spread now up through the collar of a loose shirt, climbing his chin, reaching for his ears, like a red skinfire driving up his body. He was admitted for poison ivy during a pandemic. Let that sink in. He didn’t have cancer, a broken bone, his carotid artery wasn’t cut, he hadn’t been shot, he itched. But he wore the mask and he could see the look of horror in their eyes as they fumbled to try to help him without touching him. A pandemic known for its social distancing doesn’t help a guy with poison ivy lesions covering his body like some fucked up tattoo. What could they do though? More ointment? More steroids? This shit was swallowing him, gulping him down starting at his ankles and shoving him down the poison ivy gullet, itch by itch. He was in tears when the last doctor looked at him, before they decided to induce a coma. The logic being, you can’t itch when you’re in a coma and if you can’t itch, you can’t spread it and more importantly, you can’t suffer. And he was suffering. Anyone telling you the itch from poison ivy isn’t suffering can rot in hell. He was in hell as that itch tore at him and his mind. Nothing else mattered. Who goes to the emergency room during the pandemic of the twenty-first century, if they aren’t suffering. But as the medically induced coma took hold, the itch faded away, like wisps of clouds that dissipate to blue sky, along with his consciousness.

Here’s the rub about being in a medically induced coma during the pandemic of the twenty-first century: you aren’t exactly priority number one, or one thousand. So when he came to, two months later, he was itch free but now suffered from kettle drum pangs of hunger punching through his stomach. He didn’t even know he was down to one hundred and twenty five pounds, from his usual one seventy five. Technology meant no bed sores but it would have been little in comparison to his hunger pain.
“Eat this,” a female voice told him, a white tube like a garter snake now dangling in front of his face. Hearing the word eat was music to his ears but when he tried to lift his arm, it was as if free will had left him—asked him, “Where’s my money Jack?—because it wouldn’t go. When he looked down at it, as if looking at it would make it work, it just nervous-shook a little. His other arm did the same thing. Before he could say I can’t, the tube top was ripped off and the sweet liquid/yogurt was in his mouth and the pleasure of food and nutrition dropped his weak arms to the bed as tears pebbled from his eyes. “You’ll have to be brought along slowly,” the female voice told him. He knew the voice was female but what he saw in his hazy periphery was something like an industrial, futuristic hazmat suit and an even more futuristic head wrap with mirrored goggles hovering over him, reflecting his wan self. When the tube was emptied and the feeling of nutrition spreading from within, she said, “I’ll come back.” He followed the figure with his eyes as she moved back to step on something and lower the bed. A gentle whirring noise filed from underneath as the beige ceiling began to roll into view. The legs of the hazmat suit scraped together and heavy boots clopped the floor and she was gone. It was the beige ceiling and sounds. It was a date. But the heavy petting only started when he realized that he was not in a hazmat suit and he was not in some futuristic bubble-wrapped hospital room with bells and whistles and beeps beeping and monitors monitoring, free from whatever virus it was that was churning up deaths when he was induced. The what-ifs began to split, like cells, from one to two and two to four...and fuuuuuck, he’d traded one itch for another.

But She Can Still Hear

I tried your national pride

Spent every cent till I quit for lent

Dabbled in your meritocracy

Till I realized the hidden fees

Of privilege and more privilege

Which only drove me out to the ledge

Suicidal from poverty that you can’t even pin on me

Poor people need to stop being poor

Need to boot strap for all their more more more

Remodeled kitchens and country club memberships

Ivy league tuitions and never sweating a twenty percent tip

I even tried your Christianity

Till I realized those hidden fees

Wouldn’t trade hating all those other others for my sanity

Wouldn’t embrace your misogyny with arms open

Couldn’t swallow your homophobia, despite all that hopin’

And praying to an anthropomorphic god more jealous than I

Just can’t abide, slide, explain away

My conscience, like war, what is it good for?

My money’s on the table and my bet’s on man

But not on uncle sam

He took me out back behind the shed years ago

His nudie mags and cheap alceehol he did show

But when I passed out he took his turn

And now my life is a slow burn

Down to the ashes of the cigarettes causing cancer

And the opioids that can’t kill the pain I cause her

Lady justice I mean

She’s blind you know, so they robbed her

But she can still hear

Bell Did It

“I thing I drang too mush,” he slurred. “I think we all...drank...too much,” he offered between dry heaves. Stone was currently puking in the toilet and Bell was puking in the sink. ‘In’ being a relative term because both of them were missing their respective targets in different ways, with Bell ricocheting Taco Bell infused vomit all over the vanity—shit-colored specks dotting the mirror like tiny spitballs, while Stone, so drunk he could barely see, puking directly onto the floor in front of the toilet despite both hands holding onto the bowl so tight one would have thought he was hanging on for life. What wasn’t known to any of the drunks but Stone was that with every heave of his ho, shit was filling his size 38 underwear. Even Fraternity bathrooms get cleaned up at some point. Not usually by the rich trouser stains that soil them up to waste level, but still. But the hosts of the “party” where Stone is shitting his pants, obliteratingly drunk as well, have no idea what they are in for. Cleaning vomit out of a bathroom is easy enough with 800 rolls of paper towels and some version of a mop. Windex can clean a mirror no problem, even if it is specked with burrito vomit. And my god, back in those days, everyone had Clorox on hand. In a few hours, Stone will raise his head off that bathroom floor, his right cheek will suction out of his own quesadilla and beer vomit, with his brain pounding with cement fists to escape his skull “LET ME OUT LET ME OUT!!!” His sandy-blond hair littered with cheese, almost-caramelized onion, and digested hamburger meat the FDA didn’t inspect, will not bother him an iota. He’s got to get his pants off. His undies are full of shit. He can feel it, worse he can smell it, even over the stench of vomit from two different people who ate the same awful food and drank the same cheap beer and shot the Jager shots till their bodies rebelled convulsion style. Always one of superior hand eye coordination—he once struck out 17 batters in a 21 out game—Stone, still jarringly drunk, was able to somehow stand, remain standing, and get his pants off, without falling into the vomit covered floor. This was a feat. Not a 17 strikeout feat but a feat nonetheless. All that remained was the shit-filled underwear. And the stench. The stench of a gyro and beer, more beer than gyro but still two large gyros, lunch digested defecation, now two hours old, steaming and accumulating foulness in his fruit of the looms. “Oh, ahh, grrbb,” he whispered in the dark. It was dark but he could see the toilet—a beautiful red rose nightlight illuminating his salvation. Hand now on the wall steadying him, he slid the other under the waistband, pulled out and crouched in drunkpain/discombobulation until one leg was out and the undies dropped to the floor, heavy with chocolatey, bulbous feces. A shit he’d never shat before. “Oh, gulln, dehu,” he exhaled with delight and relief, the stench now further from his nose. He looked down and his drunken, blood-red eyes glowed hot upon sight of it. “Toy he vehumi,” he mumbled. He carefully got the other leg out of the underwear. As carefully as an 8 shots of Jager man can. There, drunk, in the bathroom, donned in white ankle socks and a Cleveland Indians t-shirt, penis shriveled and cold, he knew what he had to do. Get rid of the evidence. No one could know he shit his pants. He may have been drunk but he wasn’t stupid. And that red rose nightlight, haloed the bowl in an aura of peace he hadn’t experienced since his first hand job from Tara Weaver back in 84. But, he hadn’t packed any underwear. He had one pair for the weekend. They packed light back then. He couldn’t just toss them like a used condom after a romp in the pool shed with Christie Langham back in 87. With his brain still pounding to get out of his skull, he was somehow able to fire up the circuits and have a thought. In the glow of the itty nightlight he reasoned that he could swirl his poop-heavy underwear in the eddy of the flushed toilet. The undies, smeared and replete with ungodly feces, could be salvaged—a veritable washing machine in front of him. He creaked down to the undies on the floor, one hand against the wall for support, and grabbed a non-shit smeared portion of waistband with two desperate fingers. “Oill degallum,” gurgled from his throat as he rose, undies held as far away as possible, in hopes of not vomiting again. Now all he had to do was flush. But the lever was on the other side. Shit, he’d have to move. The inches may well have been miles in his condition. Jager burps with every quarter-inch flat-foot shuffle, he got close enough to flush, after ten minutes of shuffle stop brace, shuffle stop brace. Finally, left hand on the silver that would ignite his resurrection, and clean his drawers, he flushed in the glow of the rose nightlight. Before he could appreciate the moment, he realized he had to bend. “Digh forkeylop,” he blurted as all the pain of hangover collapsed into his body in one fell swoop. He missed it, he missed the flush, he couldn’t bend. Throb after throb after pulse after pulse of pain ramrodded his brain. “Safuotip brojjew!” Agonizing and yearning to be lifeless, he watched the eddy go wasted, the gurgles a rueful reminder of his bender. He waited in pain. There have never existed a longer two minutes in the history of the universe. This time he would bend first, then flush. He may have been drunk and hungover, holding shit-filled underwear, but he was still drunk and hungover with a plan to bend then flush. He bent, he flushed, then lowered the soiled mess down into the eddy to watch it be cleansed and rid of his waste. But the swirl, the swirl was like Niagara fucking Falls and it ripped the undies from his hand -give me those!- and gurgled and burgled them down the hole, as tears began to fill his eyes. Just until he saw the water begin to come back up the hole, and up and up, higher and higher, then panic filled his drunken bloodshot eyes and his heart as the dirty water rose over the bowl and onto the floor in waves of brown with bits of brown and his toes were suddenly ice cold. Not remotely sober, he realized he’d gotten rid of the evidence and left the bathroom as if returning to a nap after a mid-morning sesh with Angie Hermann back in 92, found a pair of sweatpants in his bag and passed out on the bag, feet still wet.

The next morning (near noon actually) there was a tremendous hungover uproar outside the bathroom. As if happening upon a mystery he’d been privy to all along, feces caked to his inner thighs, bag of Doritos already in his hand, fingers and lips already orange, he said, “Oh that. Bell did that.”