Another Rerun

Oh no. Not again!? (this is yet another Facebook complaint) I had a few good hours this morning. Now I'm crashing and falling apart, again. For the last sixteen years I can not get this body to work! So frustrating! Today I've just about had enough! Most days I smile and pretend and keep my crying to myself. Facebook. Isn't it the place where you fuss and complain and where you make the scroller stop and break the Tenth Commandment? (crinkling into mush on the keyboard) But I have stuff to do, which has turned into a three ring binder full. I hate lying down. I've already seen this rerun! Guess I didn't learn what I was suppose to learn; having to take this test yet again. I was gonna be somebody. It wasn't suppose to go this way. I had other plans. So hard to type this complaint. So I'm a Wha-Wha Dagnabit!!! oh, What a world....What a world.....

Brain Damaged

Oh...well...if you think you're doing okay I doubt it. I can come rescue you with.....I don't know what. As for me. As for me. How am I doing? Don't think so well... uh... well.... Feel crowded. A kind of crowding in which all my parts ache and surround me. Where my head is in a state of collapse. Me, the spirit me, is living underneath a heavy crushing mound of suffocating dirt. Meh..... My guts wrap tight, forcing me to lean forward so often. It is exhausting. It drains away my mojo. That stuff that's like the electrons of a battery. I become useless. Another reason I don't come here (to this blog) often. Dehydration, a constant fight. Should have brain damage by now. Maybe I do. How would I know?

Jerry Seinfeld, The MailBox & Me

I have been unable to sleep through the night. Haunted by many things. The many projects we've chosen for this house. The computer projects I've wanted to do. The bills. The truck. The overwhelming need to write. This woke Rose too; somehow she could hear my thoughts. So she went to craigslist to find me a job: this: and this hit me pretty hard; not pretty; absolutely. It is a most painful hit. It might have had something to do with yesterday. No, wait. It does have something to do with yesterday. Otherwise, how could I be mistaken. I mean, what was that? Yesterday? It began for me at an 8:30ish wake up. It jumped right into the plan to go to a yard sale in Phoenix. A yard sale we went to years ago. A yard sale from which I can only remember how we procured some five thousand magazines. So anyway. I got a show. Then.... Why am I telling this story about yesterday. Because yesterday turned out to be a bummer. We could title the day: 'The Mail Box' In which a boxed up package for Beaverton went into the shoot without paid postage. Although. My Zenith radio from 1951 arrived. It was quite beautiful. *said with four syllables like you would say, theatrical* Although again. The burger was pretty good. So I gave my problem also to Rose. Explaining how I am overwhelmed by all that must be done. Still, I don't think she understands. I was going to write it out in an essay. I said as much in an email. Also. During my time of unsleep I watched Howard Stern interview Seinfeld. In that interview Jerry said a few things that revealed who he was and how he works. Most disturbing to me. I wanna beat my head in with this keyboard. Oh. Really? You want me to...? Well if you want to know what I'm talking about I'm not going to explain it. You can watch it yourself. Here. Watch it yourself: the YouTube of the interview. Then there's Rousseaux Brasseur. In the blog he's writing for his wife he talks about the distance, the way in which he is unable to empathize with his wife and her tortures. I think also of my wife; her tortures of having to deal with me. You see, I am wondering about her empathies about me. Mainly because I barely understand myself as it is. The way things have messed me up. The ups and downs of where I'm at. How I'm thinking of telling him some of how she's feeling. But then. I am not so sure I could easily explain it. That's where that essay would have come in handy. Then to answer all that comes along Seinfeld. He addresses the limits when it comes to the mess I'm pondering all night. Now note that it is 5:24 in the am. And so it hit me. All this. And I hate myself for it. All this. What in the world am I going to do now? Seinfeld said that if he stopped working he would send a bullet into his mouth. He doesn't mess around thinking about it, talking about it, not doing it. He would say just get off your butt and get to work. Jerry said another interesting thing in the YouTube, at 32:29, he says, "Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you're comfortable with...that's marriage, it's kids, it's work, it's exercise, it's not eating the food you want to eat. Find the torture you're comfortable with and you'll do well." So here's where I'm at. I don't know. I feel like I should talk about it. With my self. Not with anyone else. This self talk. Unlike a joke maker a story maker works things out with more words. ...or... is that true...I ask...because what about John Carver. He wrote big stories with few words. Part of the problem I am having is the too many projects. And the direction we're running is all over the map. I feel like we're not staying on the road, or at least one road until it's destined end; rather we are trying out all the roads; uncontrollably mind you. And it's frustrating the heck out of me. Why can't we just work on one thing at a time. Why can't we forget the projects that are too far from here. Put them in the way ahead list. They'll be there when we can get done with more immediate needful projects. So then. What is the next action. To list, in words, on paper, or here in Evernote/IQTEll? or Dropbox or what ever man, all the projects and to-tos that need doing. I want to see them all laying out in front of my eyes. Then. How do we break them down into daily manageable actionable outlineable items. Otherwise. You see. I have these grand walls walling me in. They are also exasperatingly frustrating; leaving me always confused and stuck in waste deep quicksand, and I can't get out. I strain daily to break free and break forward but there are these chains pulling me back. How in the world do I break free? Another thought. I hate myself (disregard any extremes. this is a measurement) over my writing. But I fear if I continue down this sad road my measure of self-hate will increase in multiples. So. Maybe I should listen to Jerry and stop talking about it.

Getting Stuff Done / Hak5 / Everything

When you have physical troubles and their assortment of accompanying pains and misery it is hard to do just about anything and everything. I have this essay I'm trying to write for a friend. It takes some research. It takes some being gentle with the wording. It is taking too long. When your body does not work it takes away much more than normal functions, it removes the ability to use the brain. Writing an essay is right up my alley. It is one of those things that should be easy for me. But the difficulties are not your normal writer's block. They are the kinds of blocks that parallel or result from exhaustion or impairment. There are those moments I can function. Too often though, I use those chances to work on something mundane. Or I might go to an event. Like last night. I just had to go meet the star of Hak5. I did pretty good at first. But soon I had to push myself to the limit. I did my best at pretending, smiling, talking, and looking like an idiot because I could barely function. Finally, I had give up and leave before I fell on the bar room floor to froth about. And somehow, I made it home to frothed about during the last few hours. Now, finally, by what is it (?) 2:30 in the morning, my pains have reduced to allow me to say my thing. What has followed by my experiences with a body of trouble are my failings to complete simple tasks, and of achieving a place of unreliability. Physical problems are far more than just about being sick. They about messing up just about anything and everything.

Trying To Understand An Eternal Moment

Rose was gone from me, 250 miles. Too far for me to consider. There was a lostness I noticed. Something...trying to put my finger on it. The feeling or thought was: what if she had passed from this earth; was she really gone from me; is this what it would be like. It was only a few days but it stood as an eternal moment. It also made me wonder if I had known her at all, since I was in an eternal moment. What if I couldn't see her face, in my mind. How could I have forgotten her touch so quickly. It was as if she had been gone for a long time and I was having trouble recalling her touch; her lips against my lips; her embrace; the fun-lovingness she is. I was trying to remember her as if she had been gone for a long while. Is this what it would be like? Through my physical problems I have learned patience. I have learned to be still for hours, months. I have learned to want little; to do without; to let go of all I think I need; to be content with nothing. To have the Lord only. I wonder if that had something to do with it: the horrified feeling that I might be able to endure until I meet her again, though it could conceivably be decades for waiting. This depressed me from all angles of view. Looking down at myself I did not like what I saw. Depressed to not have her with me even though she was gone for a short few days. And now. The distance of time since her return and it is as if she had never left me; now sleeping in the room next to me. This thought of the eternal moment. She was gone for three days, gone for forever.

The Tranquility Of Pain

How do I return? Often, I return. To go back. To the pain. To the profoundness that it was. What was it? Did I pay attention? To there, the place, the destruction, the moments. No, these words are shallow. How do I capture? Those moments of my worst. Is it a comfort zone? Who am I to separate from it? Do I urge it back, to return to it each time? Do I desire the sickness? So that I might be taken back there? Back into the comfort of the misery, to capture again that tranquil place of pain, where I am brought again back to nothing and its miserable rest and its truth.

Outside Akron

A while back I was layin' there in my sorry state; my wife next to me. She asked if there was anything she could do. Well. As you know. That's always a hard one: there really isn't much anyone can do for you. So I replied as Dr. Chumley: (found the text) There's a cottage camp just outside Akron - in a grove of maple trees - green - cool - beautiful. I'd go there with a pretty woman. (that would be my Rosalie, my wife) A strange woman -- a quiet woman. (my wife actually happens to be quite level-headed--a reason I originally fell for her) I wouldn't even want to know her name (I just told you her name) -- while I would be just - Mr. Smith. Then I would send out for cold beer. No. [no whiskey...gives me heartburn] Then I would tell her things. Things that I've never told to anyone. Things that are locked - deep in here. (COUGHS) And as I talked to her, I would want her to hold out a soft white hand and say 'Poor thing. You poor, poor thing.' [For how long would you want this to go on, Doctor?] Two weeks. ... That's not asking for much, is it?

It Takes Guts

Five months after graduating High School I decided to enlist in the Army. I decided I would be like my hero, my uncle, who flew aircraft in the Army for four decades. I decided I would try my limits, to be all I can be, to see if I was tough enough, to reach for my breaking point. All it took was fifteen minutes with my recruiting officer for him to tell me I didn't have the guts.

What is the purpose of this Blog anyways?

I had this idea of blogging (complaining) my physical problems. Don't quite know how. This blog has been sparse. I don't know how to make the right words to make me seen. Don't really want to be seen. It's not really about me. I have had about enough of me. But what I see in myself is a story. A representation of many who cannot speak. And while some might perceive my notes as all-about-me, they are not. I just happen to know my story better. Sure, it's a way to deal with my own problems. But if I can, in some way, help some one else deal with their pain, or the pains of their loved one, then I have succeeded. Sometimes it is best to let the language pour out all at once. It may look like a mess, but it is as raw as the truth of pain. Here is some such poured out pain: *, I am sorry, I guess I was not clear, too brief, too implied (misunderstood). I've had a lifetime of my own physical problems. I suppose, that as these years have gone by I have reached a point of some sort of numb sarcastic laughter at myself...some kind of crazy-out-of-my-mind kind of laughter maybe. Through the years I have become so familiar with the pains that they have become my intimate friends. Sometimes I imagine I'm held in some cage and strapped into some medieval torture rack. So all that stuff comes out when talking to other bodily tortured people...because I am assuming they understand. I try to not talk about it to other, more healthy people, about my trouble. A number of times I've told of my pains to the wrong people. I have mentioned my troubles in the form of apology, which comes from guilt, which comes from the wish I could be of some use. The responses were sometimes snide, always judgmental, (I'm quoting real quotes) "You're just making it all up", "You're not really sick", You just want attention", "You have no faith", "You must have sinned", All these things I've told myself already...there are a few other[s] which I have forgotten, which means I must be learning to forgive. And so I was referring to *'s 'no clue' comment. I know that one. I don't know the particular torture rack he's in, nor yours. But I can assume the psychology going on: a problem that is harder to deal with than the actual physical problem. And so I'm harder enough on myself without someone else joining in. And so I see your sensitivity shouting out. I know your sensitivity. I want to strike out with mine too often...often at myself. Too many scars. I am so sorry. We must be gentle, and kind. Like when I had those, particularly kind, nurses turn me over in the hospital bed; taking their time; sometimes five minutes just to turn to the other side...with quiet voice, lots of pillows to hold you in place, all the wires and tubes set right, the lighting just right, a fan to keep you cool...and all the response you can give is a grunt.

Contrast

The artificial sooth of Dilaudid coats my mind in feelings of warmth and whisper and diversions; enough to carry away, for a little while, my intestines and left leg. And though giving in to these worrisome and addict-able cures of discomfort bring out the red flags, I will thank God for their invention. And then here I wait. In a moment the orders will be given and I will drink the milkshake understood as a contrast. Afterwards I will be placed in another picture-taking machine through which we will see what picture the contrast has painted; the path every meal follows and the curves both narrow and wide; and the obstructions sure to be uncovered.
The sunlight is shinning through for a moment here, only, on this place of the sick. I penciled this into a notebook, in an x-ray room, during an eight and a half hour follow-through (that means they followed the glowing liquid from my stomach all the way down to the place where you clench for roller coaster rides), (all that time and that's minus my Colon), February 16, 2009.

Morning Wake

It is little after three am. I woke with a wince and a groan and this body and leg and gut; they pelted me with pains. In a dash I turned on the light to search for a pill. Turned on the light and saw from the far reaches of my eye, my Rose, lying there next to me, faced to the light. I winced and groaned again, to myself. Darn it I woke her again. And at a time when waking her leaves her awake. She returns not to her sleep. And I. I will fade soon under the influence of this pill I took. I wince and groan at the unfairness. No not any unfairness attended to me. The unfairness to my wife, who I love, who I dreamt of all night, who I loved in the dreams I dreamt all night.

My Bone

The pain in me, in my leg, in my bone. What is this pain in my leg? I began around at 5:30am to 6pm. It is now 8 o'clock. The pain is immense. It gathers to it attentions I would be having elsewhere. My breath thickens. My eyes roll.

Always Sorry

I try to keep my crying to myself. Doesn't do much good if I say, I try to keep my crying to myself; because, it sounds just like I'm crying out loud. Maybe I should be writing this in caps so you can hear the LOUD part or link this to some youtube of a crying baby. Baby. Is that what I am? A big baby? Maybe so. Maybe we are all a bunch of babies. We have our degrees and those subjective pain numbers we try to go by. And then we always see some story of someone else who's got is worse. The internet is where we can find the worser horror stories, and I think that if I read those stories, my pain will shrink a little--not. Baby maybe. But isn't it fascinating how little the physical becomes under these psychological dealings that become much more grand. As a man I have the DNA that says I should be at a job for 8 to ten hours. But my wife has to do that. She leaves for work every morning. I stay home to do the household chores...which doesn't bother me. I do them. It's my role. I can do them. No. I can't do them when I'm being tortured. So get to feel bad about that too. I give her repetitions of 'Sorry'--she tells me she doesn't want to hear it. I guess 'Sorry' is not really for the other. We say it to ourselves, not a 'Sorry' in a nice tone but in self-beratement. In our Western World of working hard and getting things done and having a clean and arranged house and car and... we who are stomped down by our own bodies, we feel as if we have become some lesser person who can't get it together, who can't get healing, who don't have enough faith, who are doing this on purpose because we are lazy and thus good for nothing. Once-in-a-while we all have someone or a friend try to help by telling us all the ways we just need to get it together. And boy does it hurt. And boy do we want to hurt them back. But notice, as you replay their mean words (how many times have you?), in your head, you find that it's all the same stuff you've been telling yourself the whole time. Guess it hurts more because they have only confirmed what you've been saying to yourself anyways. It all seems true at times: crying like a big baby; until, your body is run through that torture device again. And again you are reminded that you really do have some problems and pain. That it ain't all just in your head. That even trying to type this is difficult when the levers on my rack are being pulled right now. So there's my belly aching and blather for today. I will try to keep the rest of my crying to myself the rest of the day.

It's A Bloody Life

I have read a smidgen of response to 'Blood Meridian', a book I'm sure has been religiously deconstructed. So I’m sure this has already been hashed over: (I read the book, how-long-ago(?!) and this morning: the simple overarching tale: The protagonist in Blood Meridian named 'the kid', is another everyman or woman on their/our path through this Bloody life.
But like so much literature I read, and people, and even us Christians, we grasp for some implied and unsatisfying solution in some tucked paragraph of a book, of life or sport or mall-bought item or bottle or two million other distractions from our own Bloody lives... and so trip over the redemption we search for: Jesus. Then. It is there when my face is in the dirt that I am reminded to call of Him. And when I do, in spite of me and my reasonings and my messes and my troubles, I am amazed and humbled when I am consumed by His Spirit--so peaceful, so loving, so melting, so touchable, so refreshing, like a cleansing whiskey for the soul times two thousand, He makes all else and the fool I am seem temporal and nothing and all I know is Christ and Him crucified.   

I Repeat Myself

This is why I must possibly write. I have this flaw of repeating myself. Whether it is a nice thing or a mean thing or any thing at all, I have this problem with repeating it two or three times. Each time is a little different, a slight angle from the other. It is as if I was not heard--the feeling or fear of having not gotten my point across. So I have to say it again. Almost, it may be a habit, unstoppable. Because, often, I perceive my recipient’s acknowledgment of my statement. Not just the normal head raise and lower or some “yes, I understand. very interesting.” Still, I am compelled to say the thing again. This happened tonight. I said a thing, my thing, my irritation, my anger over a little thing. The answer came forth from the other. It was a good answer. But still, I proceeded as if I had not heard. (this is also a useful set of dialogs or communications for a person not all there and who cannot communicate. A bad salesman, a lousy lawyer, the worst kind of boss.) But what I am say is, why, asking myself why, and how do I fix me? Can I fix me? What does it all mean? And then, in a moment of laying myself down on the bed it happened. The thought came into my little head. Is this not what a writer does? Repeat their words again and again as drafts and drafts after drafts, trying to say a thing over and over until they say it right? That is exactly what I do (this exactness of a realization overcomes me as I write this down) when I repeat myself to someone in person. I am rehearsing and then trying it again in another way and until the sentence that finally comes out is the one I wished I had at the start...only, I have screwed up the recipient. This is not nice. I also have had to write this down before I would certainly forget it. Sometime I repeat in draft to draft draft again and until I figure it out...all out loud because I did not bother to write it down during the thought’s first event.

A Skewed and Tinkered Collection With Will Self

I don’t know where to begin to describe the objects of my writing room. I want to call it my writing room.

I don’t know what literary equivalent I would hope to model here. For the room gets dusty, as the evidential table fan and it’s filled and clogged grate; the strewn paper and notebooks that pile on like Autumn’s front lawn; a terminal moraine tat of slurry across the crowded room. Built high are cascades of topple-ready books on the floor, that crowd my chair, and the books on every surface--columns deep and gaging.

One side of the room is covered in shelving. They stand as the only organized fashion of the place. And at the center, a queen, unmade, fitted sheet always unfit for it’s assigned, rather ideal place.

The desk, corner desk, with shelving and build for a computer. It was a gift; a hand-me-down. It is filled, as every surface should--with junk, a bowl of change, business cards, unplaced photos, envelopes, my stapler and office tools, dusty printer, computer, and my wall of prescription pills.

All these, here, disposable all. They crowd. They comfort. They confuse. They are Stone Aged ax handles.
Now I do not think of myself a collector. To collect. It might seem to me an acknowledgment of some defeat; a substitute for emptiness. But these books. We have gathered them all over our married lives. It is a relationship with these things. These books. Maybe this is nerdish, perhaps adulterous, almost religious. . . I am a keeper of these symbols; they have been arranged and ordered and rearranged as numbered as the books themselves. Sometimes they are left stacked and unordered for a remoteness, a magic uncertainty, a hidden treasure. On the wall, they stand as they should; alphabetized for their significance, their stance, their proximity and relative names to another, as if Boyle and Bellow or Wallace and Woolf should have somehow known the other.

These books. They are transactions for a date to come, a date I may not live to meet them at. But stand by me, I have willed them.

Just some Melancholy thoughts

Another bad run-through today. Hard to do anything when your full of numbing hammer strikes from the inside; deck screws and finish nails in the leg; a cobblestone stretch of Crohn's; and now a headache from scrunching up of my face. 
So what do you do? Pop a handful of pain killers, lay around, watch the Daytona 500, and get all depressed and feeling sorry for yourself because you're useless. Well, except for poking around on my computer once in a while.
But it got me to thinking about melancholy. Melancholy is a title that has achieved favorable recognition. It has the sound of loft; the outward marquee of a badge proudly worn on one's breast, having received high esteem. It is a brilliant darkness, often found in those of genius, the rest of us might pursue and emulate. But with the stardom of this one word phrase, it seems to have lost its color--its darkened gray shadows--to me, and in untasting flavor. Somewhere away from me is its meaning, its brief attempt at general theory into one general word--meaning of sorrows--reaching smallness now and only, when such things are far more grand in its vanquish of so many.

Amid The Dust Of The Mounded Years

They continued on through the fallen pear orchard and saw a flock of ducks rise at their

approach. And as this memory recedes away, it becomes less fictitious in the recalling
excavations. Those boys are returning as I speak, as I type; those moments those days of my brother and me; they are still riding.
“I want to go home.” said Steve.
“Go home? Why?” David, as the older, more brave, brother with its overbearing color and tone.
“Can we just go home. I’m tired.”
David felt guilty at his condescension. He remembered that first day their Mom and Dad
brought Steve home. This was the best friend he had asked for. “Okay, we have been here for a long time. I think I’m tired too.”
When they started for home, David grinned at how they had rode to the far end of the fallen and torn orchard in measures of randomness, in and out and woven and carried wherever the trails went.
At a curve in the trail, the road appeared next to them. A car drove past with a ragged man looking out the window at them, with tired eyes, unswept hair, and the shine of his car.
They kicked forward their legs and cranked their pedals and dredged the dirt beneath the wheels in a hurried pace to get home, while the sun went away and they could feel the row of mountains and their shadows grow large across the valley.
Fun feared urgings tickled their backs and they laughed wearily at each other, looking up with creased faces, heat stricken by the hard play of the afternoon. And they could feel the day melting away, making a relic of itself, for them to remember no more that they had wandered through those fields--until today.
They rode, immobile as it seemed. Never fast enough to get home before the charred
darkness caught them. With a hurried chase they wound through the trails--it
occurred to David that they might ride the road around and back home. But they were tied to this path and no other way could be gotten, down past the rows of gray and black bones--of upturned trees, and the tottering of weed and grass and shallow waters waiting in discarded places.
Oh, but this was their fun. Just like when they were young, running to their beds as soon as the door closed them in their beds and the darkness with its hidden creatures make their hidden appearances. And they laughed in fear at the night and their flight.
This night, David wasn’t lucky, downing his bike and his knee into the rocks and dirt and what lay beneath. The bike lay gouged into his side, not enough to penetrate his skin, enough to bruise and bite the sides of his bones. For a moment he lay there, waiting for the pain to arrive. He cursed the ground.
Steve, close behind stopped with little able to do or to help, but rather than leaving him there he offered help.
“No, you go on home. I will be home. Just let me sit here for a while.”
Steve took to the suggestion and went on home without him.
And David lay there, with his pain in his legs and the tiredness of it climbing on to his skin and producing a sweat like the sweat of the day. All was silent but the grass and distant cars driving and the hum of tires on pavement. He sat, crouched and wrecked in the foliage, and he knew no one would see him. No one would know he was there. He lay his back down on the sweetness of the hard turf; he was a half mile away. If he sat up, he could see the road to the house. Laying down he could turn his eyes and see the old building standing there like some dead observer of the orchards. He wondered if anything or anyone was inside, peering out of the dark windows, looking after him. And the clouds turned above him, watching them move about, playing while the sunshine was away...this he wondered. Do the cloud billow in a different fashion during the night? Do they race or do they sleep?
Sketched in the distance he could see the tops of the houses. He thought of how the
people inside of all the houses were comfortable and warm. They were probably sitting in their comfortable couches, drinking sweet drinks and watching television while he, he sat here in the dirt, without hope but to get up off the ground and get home. This is what happened in the thoughts in his mind while the pain receded from his body, and he would be able to get up and go.
He sat up, looked around him. He did not want to leave this quietness that was frightening and peaceful. He told himself that there was really nothing out there that would hurt him, harm him. He heard an angry dog bark. It sounded like it was in this same field he now sat in. Dogs can smell things, smell people. It could soon find him. If it came, he would have to make friends with it or die.
Yet he did not want to leave. He would put his head down and sleep right where he lay. He put his head down upon a clump of tall grass, like a threaded pillow. He smelled the wind coming by. He could smell the flavors off the grass and the rotting shallow pond not far. He could hear his breath, breathing. What if he could die here. Right now. This wouldn’t be so bad. Not such a bad place to die. They might not find him for days. Oh but his brother would know where to find him. Would he say? Or would he keep it all a secret mystery for everyone to solve. Maybe his brother would be afraid to return to the field if he knew his brother was dead.
That would be okay. David understood. Dead bodies are creepy. That is what they would find when they had looked everywhere but there in the field. It would be months before anyone would come across his body.
It may have been an hour when the fears of the lonely field made him jump up and on to his bike. He had to get home.

How Long Have I Been Away?

Right now I feel my skull descending against the heel of my hand and I listen to the unending drone of the I. V. pump issuing fluid into my veins, mixing with the blood, carrying my blood through my cursed body.

This is where I sit now, the Infusion Services part of the hospital, where most patients come for their chemo treatment--a club of patients, here, in which I feel I am an invading impostor, pretending to be sick. Yet, my problems are real, and need some sort of explanation, because there is no name for my little problem, nor title, only misunderstood, even by my personal doctor.

This morning, when I walked in here, everything that is wrong with me, is wrong with me. This leg straining under David Smith’s overturned log truck. These unrecognizable intestines. They are compressed from within, in varieties of sections like a dozen overused prophylactics, braided together in places and shanked in rubber bands and stretched out to Size Flabby in other places. These guts, they plead with an effort to prolapse, to perforate, to surface and I am so often reaching over for a fetal coexistence with it. I am in a stupor of dreams and shaking because of a lack of the simple water in my head and in my heart because these alien intestines refuse to absorb and I feel not awake or I am as a drunkard, here, and all things looks dusted and shimmering, a crowd to my brain cells crushing in to strangle even these, my thoughts.

To myself I argued with resistance, to take another tablet, maybe fifteen, of these narcotics. I have waited long and in fear of the dependence it has brought me, my anxiety’s thirst, or my pain’s dominance. I can distinguish both and separate fools these are, competing, shouting. One hammering never to dullness. The other really is like an anxiety with voice. I can feel it in my muscles and tendons, aching, I hear it. And for some strange reason it crawls down my back and into the tissues of my buttocks to pick me up and walk me along and down the vinyl covering of this reclining chair. And I ask my buttocks, why he thinks he needs these narcotics. Isn’t it enough that my guts above you are in need and that leg below you? And my head aches to give its complaint to all the other parts. And so I finally give in to all the noise of pain.

Still here, now calmed, pain dampened. Always, I am confronted by the background sounds of this hospital I’ve long lived in; this second home I’ve returned to, all my years. Next to my head is the familiar running of the I. V. pump. Its music plays on in a never ending set of two notes with an unusual time signature of 3/3; one quarter A Sharp, followed by a whole note in some low C. I have asked myself why it is a comforting sound. I do not know why I am comforted by this, this genre of Industrial Rock(?) Maybe it means I am still on, still working, still Rockin’. Today it will play until I am refilled. Today I am here for a three hour song. At other times I’ve been here for a week of this music--three times this year.

Still here, and more sounds. I can listen to the murmur of talk near and in the halls and discussions of vital life sustaining decisions shared and the trivial things of lunch or planet. Somewhere is a television playing. Always, the acoustics of hospital hallways can bounce a show out of one room, down the hall, and into my room and underneath from under the bed. Sometimes I will close my eyes and listen to the show in progress, my ears rubbernecking the floor, decoding the echo of voices and song. This morning I can make out a show with incessant voices, funneled, exacting syllables in which a male voice is barking every word. I think it is from a different time. The laughing is different; newer somehow; more like a laugh of novelty rather than today’s laughter of jaded and expected boredom. I must conclude we are watching a television comedy from the 50s.

Still here, now two bottles of I. V. Fluid. I mentioned to my I. V. Therapist, “I didn’t know I have been unconscious this whole time.” I am think of the past week, maybe three. Have I really been this dehydrated? It always amazes me how dehydration creeps up from behind and snatches from you your life force. How long have I been away?

 

Under Light and Shade.

 
My Rose, my Wife. She has today suggested threats of leaving me; unless, every day, I put the junk I write out there. And since I am still obsessed with her, such dread is a gun to my left temple, “Okay, okay, I’ll do it. Hey, don’t push that thing. It hurts.”

Here’s my angle on things: Last night took its time with me. I laid here so tired and in pain, so full of thought. At Two in the am I gave in to one of those Phenergan. Works great for nausea, but it also puts you to sleep for too long. Somewhere, I slept. I did awake at times--when Rose got up. I told her I would rise with her, to do anything she needed. I then, I think, heard her say I should go back to sleep, to which I said, I’m sorry, to which she told me to not be sorry, with an insistence she was sure of. I was back to sleep in seconds.

Into the morning and afternoon I slept; waking for moments of drink and pee. Regretful of the time, I came to life and it was somewhere around three in the afternoon.

When later my Rose came home to rush through the packaging and card-writing campaign for Joe--our cool friend in Eureka--to get it on a truck by night. At the Post Office, they told Rose that for ten bucks it would get there the day after Joe’s birthday; for thirty they could guarantee that it would arrive the day after Joe’s birthday.

This was also the subject of sleepless thought. Rose had written a letter that pushes the envelope and out. What was once unknown has now been revealed. But what has been shown? What has not been told? Words and their telling can sound off in a multiple of tones in a single sentence. If it is not exact or the declination off by a degree, the target gets missed.
When the words are put down and sent away, not yet to be read but apart from the one who, in pain, writes it; how can we know the immediate response--how the reader’s eyes can transform one reflection of static motion into the same but different light. Or the muscles of their face configure in their own defined terms, communicating phases and phrases they themselves do not know...

...And I lost it at configure. That full-on jaded thought faded when I walked away. Later. Now. I picked up this put down, the paragraph ending in, know... now, maybe three hours later. I don’t know if it is gone or if it is retrievable. This tells me I must remain, entangled to the notion I was writing. To drop it and run to anything else is to perform harm, to warp the reflection, make what was to be into some other thing, now not the same; flogged, crippled, deformed... what was first whole and lovely of itself become something new, of its own beauty, where the flaws cease to be flaws, become a perfection all its own and ought to be. And now I look at it. It is sitting there under light and shade.