the words are in a crowd and
their faces are falling off.
the words are nondescript and
fuck each other without creating context.
the words no longer breed and
are no longer ideas' bastard seed.
the words are like murdered,
like murdered, um, baby birds.
can I have a new language. this one is herd.
15.4.08
collector
and so,
a hole.
that you dig
to get your prescription filled.
might as well
build a tower longside,
with the dirt
and the stones that you mined.
a hole.
that you dig
to get your prescription filled.
might as well
build a tower longside,
with the dirt
and the stones that you mined.
17.3.08
Absentminded
There was a system in place in my elementary school designed to reward and punish behavior among the younger kids. It seemed so well established to all of us that we never really questioned it; in fact I don't recall that it was ever made fodder for jokes, even after we had all developed our sense of irony. It was simple: gold slips for good behavior, pink for bad. Get enough pink slips and you were officially in trouble. Gold slips could be exchanged on Fridays in between classes for the kind of stuff you'd get for losing at the state fair or for putting a quarter in a red metal vending machine. There wasn't much variety in either the prizes or the kids who would show up in line every week. These were the kids who would grinningly wait for Down Syndrome Robin's wandering playground path to coincide with the Absentminded Recess Monitor's strict rectangle, knowing all the while that a gold ticket was certain to be generated. The ticket system was entirely based on the faculty and staff's subjective judgments of our behavior, and all of them were wise to this scam except for the Absentminded one, who either didn't care or didn't remember, and so would generate dozens more gold tickets than the rest. Down Syndrome Robin was a perfect mark because he was always tipping over in the sand or getting upset. Some of these kids, having figured out how this worked, did it for years, seemingly unable to get bored of the pencils, erasers, and pencil accessories that were available each Friday. There was nothing good that you had to save up for.
Pink slips didn't add up to much either. I suspect that they were more of a red herring than anything else. Maybe they were just there so that the faculty could adopt the blameless manner of the parking officer instead of constantly being forced into the role of ombudsman. Most of us avoided them at all cost anyway- there was something about being jotted down by name along side a date and a phrase like "stuck gum on wall" that seemed dangerous. I wasn't much for obvious disciplinary problems at this age, so I never found out what happened. Anyway, all it took to keep me within the guidelines of acceptable behavior was the shadow of parental involvement, and I assumed that the pink slips would eventually coincide with my parents. I only ever got them for one reason, until the powers that were took away super bouncy balls as a gold slip prize. I suspect this managerial decision was to correct the only behavior problem on my otherwise sterling record. They were just so damn bouncy. It was impossible to resist winging them down the halls or at the corners of the classroom. The little spheres of dense rubber were why I started sitting in the back corners of class, too: whenever the teacher turned their back or was at an angle where the activity was undetectable, I'd have a couple of clandestine bounces. Eventually, though, I'd feel the pressure build and I'd have to let loose, cracking my hand like a whip to give the ball a wild and unpredictable spin. Even though this action was tantamount to getting myself in trouble and handing my toy over to the teacher forever, I couldn't resist the couple precious seconds of pandemonium offered by the ball. Soon each teacher's contraband drawer was littered with them, and no one would give me gold slips except for the Absentminded Recess Monitor.
My friend Travis and I came up with a lazy little scheme that we would play out twice a week for her to keep us supplied with free bouncy balls. It involved a swan dive off of the playground balance beam, a painful landing, and an extremely helpful passerby. We'd trade off roles, and actually, we had a lot of fun with it, experimenting with different and always more impressive prat falls off of a variety of playground equipment. We were good; it was a sure thing.
The week that I went in as usual to trade in my gold slips for bouncy balls and bouncy balls had inexplicably disappeared from the table of prizes must have been tragic in some small way. I don't remember. It was a small school; there must have been something else dominating my limited attentions that week. Nevertheless, they were gone, and so was my discipline problem. I don't know how long the pink and gold slip system lasted either; it was only for the first, second, and third graders. I can imagine some parents in our relatively liberal district thinking the system a bit too overt an example of conditioning.
Fourth graders were not rewarded, unless you count non-punishment as a reward. An even simpler system was put in place, which we called the Wall. Acting up would earn you a recess-long sentence with your back to it. Acting up again would turn you one hundred eighty degrees. This punishment had no risk of parental involvement, but it was boring. Again, Absentminded was a great help. She'd forget where on the wall she had sentenced you to stand. This prompted wary wind sprints along the wall whenever she turned her back. Eventually this turned into a more violent mode of racing with whoever was in the lead occasionally diving to the sand to trip any close followers and send them flying. With the brick wall inches to one's left, and the constant risk of Absentminded turning her attention back to her detainees, the game was dangerous and fun when played properly. Travis and I played it all that year before his parents' divorce moved him to a different school district and we both survived the activity with only minor scratches.
One of the times I became a little less boy and a little more man was when I was told by a friend of my father's that Absentminded Recess Lady had been in a motorcycle accident when she was younger and it had damaged her brain in some subtle way. The accident had killed her husband and it was generally looked upon as a piece of good samaritanship that she had been given the job at the school. It took me a moment to process this, but then I had to laugh like hell, because I knew about all the fun that she was worth, and how we all ricochet around at angles so weird they seem random.
Pink slips didn't add up to much either. I suspect that they were more of a red herring than anything else. Maybe they were just there so that the faculty could adopt the blameless manner of the parking officer instead of constantly being forced into the role of ombudsman. Most of us avoided them at all cost anyway- there was something about being jotted down by name along side a date and a phrase like "stuck gum on wall" that seemed dangerous. I wasn't much for obvious disciplinary problems at this age, so I never found out what happened. Anyway, all it took to keep me within the guidelines of acceptable behavior was the shadow of parental involvement, and I assumed that the pink slips would eventually coincide with my parents. I only ever got them for one reason, until the powers that were took away super bouncy balls as a gold slip prize. I suspect this managerial decision was to correct the only behavior problem on my otherwise sterling record. They were just so damn bouncy. It was impossible to resist winging them down the halls or at the corners of the classroom. The little spheres of dense rubber were why I started sitting in the back corners of class, too: whenever the teacher turned their back or was at an angle where the activity was undetectable, I'd have a couple of clandestine bounces. Eventually, though, I'd feel the pressure build and I'd have to let loose, cracking my hand like a whip to give the ball a wild and unpredictable spin. Even though this action was tantamount to getting myself in trouble and handing my toy over to the teacher forever, I couldn't resist the couple precious seconds of pandemonium offered by the ball. Soon each teacher's contraband drawer was littered with them, and no one would give me gold slips except for the Absentminded Recess Monitor.
My friend Travis and I came up with a lazy little scheme that we would play out twice a week for her to keep us supplied with free bouncy balls. It involved a swan dive off of the playground balance beam, a painful landing, and an extremely helpful passerby. We'd trade off roles, and actually, we had a lot of fun with it, experimenting with different and always more impressive prat falls off of a variety of playground equipment. We were good; it was a sure thing.
The week that I went in as usual to trade in my gold slips for bouncy balls and bouncy balls had inexplicably disappeared from the table of prizes must have been tragic in some small way. I don't remember. It was a small school; there must have been something else dominating my limited attentions that week. Nevertheless, they were gone, and so was my discipline problem. I don't know how long the pink and gold slip system lasted either; it was only for the first, second, and third graders. I can imagine some parents in our relatively liberal district thinking the system a bit too overt an example of conditioning.
Fourth graders were not rewarded, unless you count non-punishment as a reward. An even simpler system was put in place, which we called the Wall. Acting up would earn you a recess-long sentence with your back to it. Acting up again would turn you one hundred eighty degrees. This punishment had no risk of parental involvement, but it was boring. Again, Absentminded was a great help. She'd forget where on the wall she had sentenced you to stand. This prompted wary wind sprints along the wall whenever she turned her back. Eventually this turned into a more violent mode of racing with whoever was in the lead occasionally diving to the sand to trip any close followers and send them flying. With the brick wall inches to one's left, and the constant risk of Absentminded turning her attention back to her detainees, the game was dangerous and fun when played properly. Travis and I played it all that year before his parents' divorce moved him to a different school district and we both survived the activity with only minor scratches.
One of the times I became a little less boy and a little more man was when I was told by a friend of my father's that Absentminded Recess Lady had been in a motorcycle accident when she was younger and it had damaged her brain in some subtle way. The accident had killed her husband and it was generally looked upon as a piece of good samaritanship that she had been given the job at the school. It took me a moment to process this, but then I had to laugh like hell, because I knew about all the fun that she was worth, and how we all ricochet around at angles so weird they seem random.
3.3.08
another fine way to be bitten by spiders
Keith's head seemed to be swelling, rapidly and painfully. Then it popped and he woke up and his head still seemed to be swelling, not rapidly but with a more certain pain. He was on his back and he was looking a few inches to the left of the sun. The dream he had been having had already trickled away. He tried to remember by closing his eyes, but the pain coming from his head and face had replaced it all, except for a blurring woman's face. And a thicket of some kind. And a small animal of some kind, maybe a bird. And a conical object. An ice cream cone? he thought. No, a torch. Yeah, a wooden torch. God damn I want an ice cream cone, he thought. And so it was that the last strands of the dream faded and were replaced by the information of the morning.
It wasn't the amnesia or the headache that was bothering him. He was used to the amnesia and the headache because he drank a lot. He thought of the amount of alcohol he drank as "a lot". A bystander would probably marvel at how skilled Keith had become at walking the thin line between drunk and dead, but Keith had developed this skill without noticing. He didn't realize that if he somehow managed to stretch his blackout across the rim of one more pint of beer or shot of whiskey one night, his liver would give up trying to purify him and he would piss blood in his sleep until his blood was all gone. His subconcious managed to pull the switch and shut him off and save him every night. But conciously he just thought of it as "a lot".
Keith's right hand was on something hard and rough and he thought that he was in the gutter for a moment until he realized that it was warm, too, and then he recognized the feeling of stubble on a woman's calf. He reached his other hand up toward his temples with the thought of maybe rubbing away enough of the pain to sit up and examine his conquest but before it got there it was blocked by a pile of something sticky. He brushed it aside and it plopped off the side of the mattress. Since Keith took vomit as a fact of life, he didn't think anything like "great, another bar floozy threw up on me in her sleep". But he might have; it wasn't a unique occurence.
In fact nothing about this morning was unique until Keith had rubbed his eyes and temples a little bit and sat up and groaned out a dry 'wuuuuhh'. In doing so, his hand automatically moved toward his left jean pocket where he kept his cigarettes and patted his thigh there. The resulting jolt of pain was enough to make his eyes fly open and send his sodden brain into adrenalin overdrive, which for Keith was a mode of functioning roughly equivalent to normal. He quickly ascertained the situation in this order: 1) there is a giant and extremely painful swelling on my naked left thigh. 2) I am losing a lot of blood from a twin hole in its center. 3) My left hand is covered with tiny spiders and several hundred are crawling in all directions from the softball-sized egg-sac-thing that I thought was vomit. His brain took in all of this and considered it while his mouth opened and quivered and he made small gasping sounds and held his hand up in front of him. Then, like an egg timer, his brain had a course of action worked out for him and he let out a shriek.
This was enough to get the woman next to him to turn over, sit up, and look at him. She blinked twice and shrieked, too. By the time the next moment was over she had turned perpendicular to Keith and pedaled her feet, pushing the bedding away from her and sliding up to a standing position against the wall in one frantic motion. This motion was enough to send the sitting Keith slowly tipping back and over and off the mattress. He had stiffened and was stuck in the sitting position with his hand a foot in front of his face. As his left shoulder headed toward the ground, his eyes changed to a deeper focus and he considered the naked thighs, torso, and finally face of his guest before his vision moved quickly across the torn-open ceiling and finally landed on the pulpy, red egg sac and a view across the wooden floor of the room.
By this time, Linda had already rocketed over him and across the bedroom of the squat. She had a single thought on her mind and it was of shoes: finding some, putting them on, being safe from the seemingly endless flow of spiders that was spreading like a blanket over Keith's head. None of the spiders had made it across the bed to her, she saw. In four seconds, she was mostly dressed and sprinting down the stairs and outside. In five seconds she had quit drinking. She wasn't the kind of girl that went to roofless squats with guys like Keith. It had been a rough night.
Keith had a single thought on his mind, too: he was happy, because it seemed he had fucked Linda. Linda would occasionally appear at one of his regular places and though he hadn't spoken to her before last night, he had wanted to fuck her for a long time.
It wasn't the amnesia or the headache that was bothering him. He was used to the amnesia and the headache because he drank a lot. He thought of the amount of alcohol he drank as "a lot". A bystander would probably marvel at how skilled Keith had become at walking the thin line between drunk and dead, but Keith had developed this skill without noticing. He didn't realize that if he somehow managed to stretch his blackout across the rim of one more pint of beer or shot of whiskey one night, his liver would give up trying to purify him and he would piss blood in his sleep until his blood was all gone. His subconcious managed to pull the switch and shut him off and save him every night. But conciously he just thought of it as "a lot".
Keith's right hand was on something hard and rough and he thought that he was in the gutter for a moment until he realized that it was warm, too, and then he recognized the feeling of stubble on a woman's calf. He reached his other hand up toward his temples with the thought of maybe rubbing away enough of the pain to sit up and examine his conquest but before it got there it was blocked by a pile of something sticky. He brushed it aside and it plopped off the side of the mattress. Since Keith took vomit as a fact of life, he didn't think anything like "great, another bar floozy threw up on me in her sleep". But he might have; it wasn't a unique occurence.
In fact nothing about this morning was unique until Keith had rubbed his eyes and temples a little bit and sat up and groaned out a dry 'wuuuuhh'. In doing so, his hand automatically moved toward his left jean pocket where he kept his cigarettes and patted his thigh there. The resulting jolt of pain was enough to make his eyes fly open and send his sodden brain into adrenalin overdrive, which for Keith was a mode of functioning roughly equivalent to normal. He quickly ascertained the situation in this order: 1) there is a giant and extremely painful swelling on my naked left thigh. 2) I am losing a lot of blood from a twin hole in its center. 3) My left hand is covered with tiny spiders and several hundred are crawling in all directions from the softball-sized egg-sac-thing that I thought was vomit. His brain took in all of this and considered it while his mouth opened and quivered and he made small gasping sounds and held his hand up in front of him. Then, like an egg timer, his brain had a course of action worked out for him and he let out a shriek.
This was enough to get the woman next to him to turn over, sit up, and look at him. She blinked twice and shrieked, too. By the time the next moment was over she had turned perpendicular to Keith and pedaled her feet, pushing the bedding away from her and sliding up to a standing position against the wall in one frantic motion. This motion was enough to send the sitting Keith slowly tipping back and over and off the mattress. He had stiffened and was stuck in the sitting position with his hand a foot in front of his face. As his left shoulder headed toward the ground, his eyes changed to a deeper focus and he considered the naked thighs, torso, and finally face of his guest before his vision moved quickly across the torn-open ceiling and finally landed on the pulpy, red egg sac and a view across the wooden floor of the room.
By this time, Linda had already rocketed over him and across the bedroom of the squat. She had a single thought on her mind and it was of shoes: finding some, putting them on, being safe from the seemingly endless flow of spiders that was spreading like a blanket over Keith's head. None of the spiders had made it across the bed to her, she saw. In four seconds, she was mostly dressed and sprinting down the stairs and outside. In five seconds she had quit drinking. She wasn't the kind of girl that went to roofless squats with guys like Keith. It had been a rough night.
Keith had a single thought on his mind, too: he was happy, because it seemed he had fucked Linda. Linda would occasionally appear at one of his regular places and though he hadn't spoken to her before last night, he had wanted to fuck her for a long time.
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