(no subject)
03.07.04
I told her love spring and I hate spring, I hate the burgeoning life, the rich greens, and the way it makes me feel so full of life. She asks why. I am driven to near-mad euphoria as the warm weather makes my blood rage with desire, desire insatiable. Desire rejected.
All day my head is full of energy sapping concentration robbing static and my body charged with restless energy. I eat, I drink, we clean. One of the kids howls with indignation as the other has something, some trinket, that the howler wants. I'm unable to fold laundry for more than 5 minutes at time, boiling with restless energy, I get up walk to the other room, sit down, get up, walk back and start folding - I'm into the worst part of the pile, a dense ball of children's socks and underwear, a jumble of small things impossible to fold quickly - and my wife is mad. My wife is mad. I get up, walk into the other room, sit down, get up, go back and fold. I think back to those adolescent nights I thought long gone when I would lie in bed, fully awake with nowhere to go and nobody to talk to and feeling a need to do something.
It's time to go shopping for the week. Stupidly, I wait until late in the afternoon, until the Sunday evening rush. My last nerves are gnawed away by nausea. It's the kind of nausea that I get when my body is craving something, but this was something unknown to me. I ate, drank, tried to soothe a rancorous stomach. It was the nausea of restless energy, unspent and building up in me. The last place I need to be is shopping, jostled by the inconsiderate crowds. I go shopping during the Sunday late afternoon rush.
Time contracts and I begin to notice more things around me. The thug in the parking lot sitting low in his seat primer and gold buick, black bandana low across his forehead, covering his eyebrows staring at me and my black bandana, worn to keep the hair out of my eyes. Someone yells an insult, a challenge and briefly I think it him; please, not now, not today. I am not in the mood to turn my other cheek in somebody goes so far as to get in my way, but I know that the nausea will suck all my strength out of me, leaving folding legs that will not support me. But it's not him and the malevolence fades quickly from my eyes. Driving again, looking in the mirror at all the people reading the bumper stickers on the car:
"It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber."
"Don't pray in my school and I won't think your church."
"Invest in America: buy a congressman."
"Affordable healthcare begins with breastfeeding."
"My other car is a bicycle." (technically, this is no longer true.)
Etc.
The door frame begins to vibrate with a severely loud bass line, I crank up my classical and look over just in time to see the sun glint off cherry-copper hair of a latina beauty as she leans over to stroke the shaved head of the driver. They drive a powerful car called "Avenger." Besides the beauty in the hair, the only impression I am left with is that she is the type of woman that those jewelry store commercials talk about and that he is the type of guy the jewelry commercials are aimed at. Nadir approaching.
At this point, you're thinking I'm a WWII era warplane (a P-51 mustang if you will), my engine is shot through and belching smoke, and that the pilot is about to jump out. You think I'm breaking down. No.
I'm on the freeway now, wild of mind and spinning and that most desperate thought begins: I am a mote, I am pointless, I am not the all-knowing all-seeing wellspring of life, I will not ever be anything more than what I am. A fit of self abnegation, I've had these before, almost always when driving. Then comes the sudden awareness of everyone on the road around me. The primacy of self, the very absurd belief that we all deserve to have these gas guzzling monsters to take us hither and yon, that we are special, each and everyone. Here we are, lemmings in deadly cages, living lives pointless and futile, destroying so much along the way. We are un-needed, un-wanted, completely interchangeable empty lives. Here I am one man in the midst of thousands like me, trying to make sense of the feeling that I do not belong now and here, trying to explain to nobody in particular what it is I need to make me feel whole.
This is a jumble, nowhere near as clear as it was when I had the thoughts. I apologize. Bear with me.
I've only gone a mile or three and now the sinking dread gives way to something cool and very calm. This is not a race to bottom I think. I know what I want. I want to toil under the sweet stinking sun. I want to go back to that time when being alive, raising off spring, living, dying, was all the meaning I needed. We've gone far beyond the stressors our bodies evolved to handle. I want to smash clocks and stand in green fields at dawn. Work should have tangible, necessary results. I want my work to be living, the process of living. The nausea was now hunger. The hunger would be taken care of by a hunk of asiago cheese.
I'm tired and I'm losing the train of thought here. I'd try summary, but it wouldn't work. What I should really do is not post and continue to slash, add, and otherwise edit. My best work is work that I have edited, re-worked, edited, etc. I was going somewhere with all this. So, forgive me. I could not sleep and I just wanted to write something tonight.
More than anything, what I want now and have wanted all day is to be on top of the bed, intertwined, tangled with my nude wife in a sweaty, breathless post-coital jumble, feeling nothing but goosebumps as the warm spring air blows over us.
This will not happen. Good night.
I told her love spring and I hate spring, I hate the burgeoning life, the rich greens, and the way it makes me feel so full of life. She asks why. I am driven to near-mad euphoria as the warm weather makes my blood rage with desire, desire insatiable. Desire rejected.
All day my head is full of energy sapping concentration robbing static and my body charged with restless energy. I eat, I drink, we clean. One of the kids howls with indignation as the other has something, some trinket, that the howler wants. I'm unable to fold laundry for more than 5 minutes at time, boiling with restless energy, I get up walk to the other room, sit down, get up, walk back and start folding - I'm into the worst part of the pile, a dense ball of children's socks and underwear, a jumble of small things impossible to fold quickly - and my wife is mad. My wife is mad. I get up, walk into the other room, sit down, get up, go back and fold. I think back to those adolescent nights I thought long gone when I would lie in bed, fully awake with nowhere to go and nobody to talk to and feeling a need to do something.
It's time to go shopping for the week. Stupidly, I wait until late in the afternoon, until the Sunday evening rush. My last nerves are gnawed away by nausea. It's the kind of nausea that I get when my body is craving something, but this was something unknown to me. I ate, drank, tried to soothe a rancorous stomach. It was the nausea of restless energy, unspent and building up in me. The last place I need to be is shopping, jostled by the inconsiderate crowds. I go shopping during the Sunday late afternoon rush.
Time contracts and I begin to notice more things around me. The thug in the parking lot sitting low in his seat primer and gold buick, black bandana low across his forehead, covering his eyebrows staring at me and my black bandana, worn to keep the hair out of my eyes. Someone yells an insult, a challenge and briefly I think it him; please, not now, not today. I am not in the mood to turn my other cheek in somebody goes so far as to get in my way, but I know that the nausea will suck all my strength out of me, leaving folding legs that will not support me. But it's not him and the malevolence fades quickly from my eyes. Driving again, looking in the mirror at all the people reading the bumper stickers on the car:
"It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber."
"Don't pray in my school and I won't think your church."
"Invest in America: buy a congressman."
"Affordable healthcare begins with breastfeeding."
"My other car is a bicycle." (technically, this is no longer true.)
Etc.
The door frame begins to vibrate with a severely loud bass line, I crank up my classical and look over just in time to see the sun glint off cherry-copper hair of a latina beauty as she leans over to stroke the shaved head of the driver. They drive a powerful car called "Avenger." Besides the beauty in the hair, the only impression I am left with is that she is the type of woman that those jewelry store commercials talk about and that he is the type of guy the jewelry commercials are aimed at. Nadir approaching.
At this point, you're thinking I'm a WWII era warplane (a P-51 mustang if you will), my engine is shot through and belching smoke, and that the pilot is about to jump out. You think I'm breaking down. No.
I'm on the freeway now, wild of mind and spinning and that most desperate thought begins: I am a mote, I am pointless, I am not the all-knowing all-seeing wellspring of life, I will not ever be anything more than what I am. A fit of self abnegation, I've had these before, almost always when driving. Then comes the sudden awareness of everyone on the road around me. The primacy of self, the very absurd belief that we all deserve to have these gas guzzling monsters to take us hither and yon, that we are special, each and everyone. Here we are, lemmings in deadly cages, living lives pointless and futile, destroying so much along the way. We are un-needed, un-wanted, completely interchangeable empty lives. Here I am one man in the midst of thousands like me, trying to make sense of the feeling that I do not belong now and here, trying to explain to nobody in particular what it is I need to make me feel whole.
This is a jumble, nowhere near as clear as it was when I had the thoughts. I apologize. Bear with me.
I've only gone a mile or three and now the sinking dread gives way to something cool and very calm. This is not a race to bottom I think. I know what I want. I want to toil under the sweet stinking sun. I want to go back to that time when being alive, raising off spring, living, dying, was all the meaning I needed. We've gone far beyond the stressors our bodies evolved to handle. I want to smash clocks and stand in green fields at dawn. Work should have tangible, necessary results. I want my work to be living, the process of living. The nausea was now hunger. The hunger would be taken care of by a hunk of asiago cheese.
I'm tired and I'm losing the train of thought here. I'd try summary, but it wouldn't work. What I should really do is not post and continue to slash, add, and otherwise edit. My best work is work that I have edited, re-worked, edited, etc. I was going somewhere with all this. So, forgive me. I could not sleep and I just wanted to write something tonight.
More than anything, what I want now and have wanted all day is to be on top of the bed, intertwined, tangled with my nude wife in a sweaty, breathless post-coital jumble, feeling nothing but goosebumps as the warm spring air blows over us.
This will not happen. Good night.