Collusion: Part XXX

Circle. Moon. Earth. Symbolic of an extraterrestrial sort of intelligence. Thought patters run in them. All sustainable systems burn in cycles. Perhaps the incidents that come to have the most meaning in our lives are those moments when a tangent forces the end of a cycle… and then enacts permanently bonded change. A mother gives birth. Your dog gets hit by a truck as you look on. You remember exactly the moment when… she broke your heart.

But which patterns are healthy ones? It’s hard to tell sometimes.

I have to share reader, that I find writing be a little tangent for me. I can almost hear a bottle cap pop when I begin. Though really Im never precisely certain what Ill be pouring one day to the next. Water? Or Sweet Tea? Blackberry wine? Or Jack? Or Pepsi? To some degree or another. Who cares? I’m dumping shit out.

As I have to some degree waxed nostalgic of a late… I’ll follow this path for a time. As I have mentioned before I was quite a voracious reader as a child. The tiny dusty white library was in St. Matthews. A short drive into town would bring me within reach of the thing that I craved most. Knowledge. It felt more intimate than the sort of statistics that you rattle off when you’re trying to be impressive though. It felt like I could leave the dirt roads and wet heat and soy bean fields beneath me and I could float up and up… To every which way but back down. 

The librarians were a mysterious thing to me. Most of the were nearly fallen into their tombs with age, and their accents were all something Mayberry. I had heard their names many times, but that always slipped my mind when Mom would take us by the place. I was rather a shy child. And you know, there’s nothing at all wrong with that. I suppose at the time I was uncomfortably aware of it though. I always wondered what others thought of me.

My Mother was very scrupulous of what she allowed me to check out from the library. She understood that books are just as dangerous as a loaded gun in the night stand. Perhaps more so. Books are tangents also. The books that we had laying around the house had been read and re read and I arrived at the feeling of curiosity about what other books might have to say. I had first thought that all the reading in our little white library might be only more of the same as what we had at home. Or that the books in the little white library would be a reflection of the building itself. That they would be sinless… sturdy… dusty. This was not so. I’d sooner vote republican.

I chose the books that I brought up to the counter judiciously. Weighing carefully the likely hood that Mom would read the spine, or not be over fond of the cover… and tell me to put it back. I didn’t really understand why should would find some in poorer taste than others… but who can say why, at that age mothers do what they do. Mothers are arbitrary.

Along and Along as we made more trips to and from the little white library I noticed that mom was paying less attention to the books I picked out. She would perhaps be using the computers, or talking with a librarian. And then of course there was John and Beth to be concerned about. I saw an opportunity to use less discretion in my selections… and so I decided to do just that. It was as much fun as throwing glitter.

I was a stealthy thing though. Hmmmm yes. I would pick two or so boring books that I knew Mom would find appropriate… and then slide something in between them. Whichever one I found most intriguing. The one that I would read thirstily and blithely ignore the others. Once I found a treasure trove of a read in Anne Rice’s ‘The Witching Hour.’ So adeptly sensuous. So filled with over wrought emotion. Fantastical tales about witchcraft. And… And women. And shockingly vivid vampires… and sex. There were so many things I thought I understood about the story when I read them. Rice painted. She worked for those words and that story. This little boy thought she was some sort of genius of the criminal mastermind variety.

There were other books too. There was one titled ‘speak.’ It was by some somebody that I cant remember. In it I was introduced to a 9^th grade girl. Something was very wrong with her… but I couldn’t tell what. This girl didn’t pray or go to church or anything. She cried often, and hardly spoke to anyone at school. She cut herself sometimes. Turns out though it made sense by the end of the book. She had been raped by one of her peers in a broom closet at school. The closing scenes were fantastic! She fought the boy, with his wanton and filthy desires… he was chocking her… and he pushed her head hard into a mirror. It broke. As the fight moved to the floor she snatched a shard of the thing and stabbed that horrible boy in the neck. And ya know? Good for her! I wanted to give her a hug…

I drank up Tolkien. All the way to the Silmarillion. Which didn’t make a lick of sense until I read it again. It was an intoxicating story of … well a sort of retelling of the Greek myths with name changes.

Dickenson. Shakespeare. Blake. Emmerson. Shelly. Some Bible.

I replicated this process innumerable times. I longed to feel… beyond. And so I did. Each new story began something. The marks that those books left on me are permanent.

I wonder if I still have anything that’s due.

Collusion: Part XXVII

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. What a curious phrase. Are we to suspect that all Romans behave in roughly the same manner? Are we to emulate these toga wearing hive- minds only when we can amass the small fortune which it now requires to make the pilgrimage to Rome? Is it meant to suggest that what happens in Rome, like things that happen in Las Vegas, stay in Rome? I can't be certain. I do not know the origin of the phrase. But like most things that become cliche phraseology, I am certain that there is some sliver of wisdom down deep in its origins... and that should we wander down the old paths to Rome, we would surely find the thing that inspired such a phrase and we would doubtless agree with the wisdom at its root.

And why do I mention? Well you see. In a sense, Bob Jones is... as I had come to see it, Rome. With architecture no less idiomatic and a populace no less united. I came to see as well that I, like Caesar... in forging a relationship with X, had made new and dangerous enemies in the Senate... and soon by degrees they would join and make a calculated effort to end me. The floor of the Senate however would look remarkably like the Dean of Men's office, and the little daggers that my former friends the Senate would make use of... were short but no less quick little tongues. Sharp. Wet with truth... with one simple desire. My blood. Et tu Jesus? Et tu? 

As that small little coven of my friends washed frenetically through their own irrelevant schedules summer was at the front of everyone's mind. Expulsion was happening at a rate that might have alarmed me had I not experienced it's reality in the years past. Like pop corn that you cook on the stove... one might draw a correlation between the ambient heat of the burning season change and a witless students demise.
I couldn't make it to a recital. I didn't really have time to meet them for lunch. I couldn't have been less interested in their final project for Interior Design 101... Congratulations, you have successfully furnished a dolls house. Certainly this means you were born to win? I could feel it in the looks that I got. Those friends that I was unwittingly making into the ghouls from an espionage film. As I think on it though, I wasn't making them into anything at all. My decisions were simply the catalyst... the one true chemical, the acid that would burn away the charming tarnish of their exteriors and leave them bright and shining... and... a vulgar sort of ugly.

Melodie was taking a class with me called "Story Telling," the main goal of which I think was for her to eventually ensnare me firmly in the vice like grip of the lips of her vagina. A concept which had all the appeal of being thrown down a flight of steps. We spent hours non the less, in a large conference room high up on the third floor of the Gustafson Fine Arts Center. The room looked like the kind of place where you might be called in to do a presentation on global warming or some other mind numbing pig shit.

MC: "I know, but do you think my interpretation of the witches voice might be a little too... scratchy?"
ME: ... I was responding to a text from X and could hardly remember what story she was referencing. Oh.. right Hansel and Gretel. "Uh... well. I thought it was fairly accurate. I mean... I was really convinced that you sounded like a witch." M took this as a compliment, and I'm afraid did not get the sense that I could have been remotely back handed.
MC: "The only thing is... I don't want to go hoarse. If I talk like that for too long.... Maybe I just need to bring a bottle of water to class." She chewed the end of a ball point... distressed.
I've been rather straight forward in my descriptions of Melodie, in the interest of honesty. To be fair, she was unflappably kind to me and I had begun to think about our little practice times as sort of vacation. Up here in the conference room I was mercifully free from prying questions and suspicious member of the Senate. Namely, Ami Jasperson, Eric Inafuku, Christine Dodd, Raymond Swope, Louretta and David Landon... and arguably Tim Johnson. These people are as real as oxygen, and at the time seemed just as dangerous as trying to live without it.

MC: "Joshie! Im just nervous about all of this! I mean, I can talk... you know that! (laughing) But I want to really move people... ya know?"
ME: "You are moving though... Like, I think in a sense.... the goal should be to disappear... and let the story tell itself... right?"
MC: She gave momentary thought to this and then gushed... "You're so right Joshie. I hadn't even thought about it like that."

The conversation bore on... and I was looking forward to getting back to my room and jogging to the Field House for a run on the rubber track up stairs there. Mel started putting away her note books and binders into her big snake skin bag. I noticed she wasn't chitting away like she usually was. I asked her what was on her mind...
She pranced on those ubiquitous black stilettos of hers over to the head of the long dark wood table at the center of the room and firmly gripped the edge of the table as if to brace herself.
She ran her nails through her shiny long hair and tossed it back looking me dead in the eye.
MC: "Well, you know joshie... how you're really my best friend in the whole world. I mean we spend pretty much a lot of time together every day. There's no one that I've been quite so fond of in a while."
ME: "Well I feel the same about you Melly..." I hadn't a clue where she was going...
MC: "Well... seeing that you're not dating anymore... ya know and Im glad about that. That silly Christine was just no good for you..." She was smiling with just a hint of malice...
ME: "Well... that's true..."
MC: "I was just.... I think that there's something between us... Ya know?"
ME: ".... .... (blink) like... the table?"
She laughed at this. Rather cloyingly.
ME: "I guess I don't really see what you mean..."
MC: "There's something really sweet about you! And you're so clever and funny... I've started to have a crush on you... (hair toss) and... I just know you feel it to!"
ME: "I... I. (I was at a loss) I really guess I don't feel the same way. I am... Flattered, that you could feel that way about me, and honored even... but I don't think I can return the sentiment."

There was a silence, and I felt intuitively that I had somehow wounded her. errrrr. uh.

MC: "You're sure... there's like... nothing there? Nothing at all?"
ME: "Yeah... Im sorry... but yeah."

I left the room without ceremony. Congratulations Medlin. Look what you've done. Yet another log on the fire. Yet another sharp knife. At least, I thought as I started my run, when you're on the floor bleeding out... you'll simply have to roll your head to the side to see your own blood pooling ironically around the heels of her gorgeous shoes. 

Collusion: Part XVIII

Hours and hours of painting. Days of it. Another day, another trip to Columbia. Another Mountain Dew, and another pack of miniature chocolate donuts. Columbia is a dirty industrial city that has stretched and grown faster than the city planners had allowed for. Its state house is surrounded by tall hundred year old black palmetto trees. They look like spiny coconut trees and give the old downtown area the appeal of an old-south inspired dime novel. In the middle of all that nostalgia is the city library. A big gray cinder block looking building all pieced together with enormous slabs of mirrored glass. The other buildings in the city are a similarly ill patched together assortment of modern architecture, antebellum estates, and suburbs filled with cookie cutter houses made out of red and brown brick that seemed so perfectly adorable to baby boomers. I always felt like a tourist on these painting expeditions. The kind of cheap tourist that doesn't buy key chains or post cards.... but perhaps the occasional Zero bar and a diet Pepsi.

At the end of the work day I never wanted anything but to return home and shower gobs of paint spatter off and practice piano. There was plenty of pressure to return to school in the fall with a good head start on my new fall repertoire line up. And I would practice too... I just never felt quite satisfied with what I was accomplishing on a daily basis. It's difficult to work in sweltering heat every day and then force new muscle memory from a weary cerebellum. But I would do what I could. If dandelions can grow through cracks in sidewalks, then I could most certainly memorize a Mozart sonata. Tom Grimble and everyone else who had anything to say on the matter had made it painfully clear to me that sophomore year would be the year that would decide if I could stay a piano performance major. Sophomore Check was the platform that I would pass in order to continue study in my major. I imagined that it would take place in a very dark room. Black walls, black ceilings, one spot light... the judges draped in black.... hoods and pale faces and you probably wouldn't be able to see their eyes. If my performance pleased the gods, then they would allow my continued study. If not... they would require that I bring forward my academic torch and extinguish it. That or if i met disapproval they would perhaps begin a chant of sorts and then bash in my skull with a conch shell.
I spent my free time taking all the pains necessary to memorize my Bach. A prelude and fugue that i was working on. Layers of melodic lines. Delicately sewn together. Twisting and undulating. Dancing around and behind one another. Doing their routine with formality, sophistication and old-world gracefulness. Sometimes on the drive to Columbia I would trace out the patterns of the music on my thy... hearing the expected corresponding sounds in my head all the while. 

Every night before falling off to sleep I would pray my little prayer.
"God, make me stronger and faster. Make me sin less and make me sharp like a knife. Help me whittle away at myself until there's nothing left that isn't perfect."

The rest of the summer melted away like ice-cream on tarmac. I thought how different times where now than they had been.
I was eleven and John was nine. Beth was just seven or so. We would spend those summer days, not working and saving... but we had built little kingdoms in the woods behind our house. We would rake away the pine-straw and thick leaf layer that blanketed the floor of the woods. All the cast away leaves from seasons past. Hundreds of yards of little trails that snaked away into the wood, far away from our house. There were seven or eight acres and we took advantage of each one. And we would find twine, and lash together fallen limbs... so heavy that it sometimes took the both of us to lift and tie it off to a standing tree. We made little wigwams. We raked away the leaf floors of our forest homes. We almost never wore shoes. We would spend hours and hours gathering sour weeds from a nearby field and bundling them together with the twine. Hanging each small parcel upside down from the branched roof of our imaginary homes. We would develop pretend personalities.We would gather ripe scuppernogs and save them for the impending winter. Or the hard under-ripe green ones... we would gather and sling-shot them at one another... or pelt them at waring tribes of saber-tooth tigers that had wandered into our territory to eat our livestock and pillage our stores of weeds. You must be very careful not to attack a tiger without help. At least take Mini along. She was our fat old golden lab... and she was not afraid of tigers in the least. We grew up with the woods all around us... we all ran fast and climbed high, high up into the arms of the holly trees, who's smooth brown skin looked just like ours.

Later as we grew into teenagers.... our fantasy play time evolved. It became more violent and less forgiving. We replaced our wigwams with bunkers built strong and solid out of wood scavenged from the saw mill. And in place of the spears we had fashioned to fend off raiders from opposition tribes, we bought slick black semi-automatic paintball guns, with load hoppers that held enough ammo to last you through an hour of heavy fire. There were bunkers here and there dotted in the woods and two in the grassy field in front of the house. Three or four friends of equal age to us would come over and we'd split into teams. Objects of the game play changed. At times the objective might be to capture a flag from the opposing team. John and I were nearly never on the same team. The other kids considered us equivalent marksmen and it would be more than a little un-fair. Beth played sometimes.... but I'm sure it had a lot more to do with romance and the neighbor boys then winning a violent game of 'who's the alpha male?'. My Dad played along too... being short and round he found shelter mostly at ground-level or in one of the bunkers. Dad was a crack shot though and could light a match with a shot from 50 yards. I was deeply emotionally invested in these games and had secretly loosened the CO2 valve on my gun. This increased my range of fire by about 30 yards and left ugly bruises on my fallen opponents. During game play I would pull out a tiny octagonal wrench and quickly adjust gas pressure from "ok, i'm hit." to "I blacked out and my spleen is leaking." The other kids hated me for this, but I always managed to pull out the tiny wrench and re-adjust the pressure back to something a little more normal, so that I couldn't be accused of un-ethical game play. During these games, I would often be named a team captain and be responsible for organizing a defensive strategy. Poor marksmen and short or fat kids would remain close to base to pick their noses and over heat in all the armored clothing they were wearing. Lean fast running kids would run quickly well outside of the legally decided limits of decided game play and creep stealthily behind the enemy base. The fact that this strategy was not immediately obvious to the other members of my team was exquisitely painful, and I couldn't help but morn the fact that the rest of my team mates were clearly cave dwellers. Didn't anyone ever watch Alias? You know... where Sidney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) suits up in black leather and dies her hair bubble-gum pink in some tragic public restroom to avenge a fallen comrade who was gunned down on a mission in Uruguay? Christ! What a woman! .... None of my team mates had the drive to discover the accepted uses for a television.

I was usually responsible for these long winded runs across the field of play.... I would dart panther-like behind large trees. Bunker to bunker. On this day my brother was the opposing team leader and was responsible for slaughtering everyone else on my team except me. It was nearly a hung game seeing as he and I were the only players left. I was the last to stay close to the bunker where our flag was hidden. It was close to dusk and I was hiding behind a very large felled tree. I was waiting for John's approach. I would let him get within 10 feet of my hiding place and then easily snipe him. I listened intently and slowed my breaths so that I could be absolutely silent. He walked with purpose and without fear. He assumed that I would be using my limited resources to search for the opposing flag, and followed a little ATV trail directly towards me. Closer. A little closer. Come on.... He stopped for a second... fifteen feet from me and looked around. Perhaps sensing impending danger. I silently propped my gun on the tree... put my brother in my cross hairs and fired. (TWUP!) A neon green ball rocketed out the barrel of my gun and plastered across John's protective visor...

"AAAAH!" he yelled surprised.... and shot back at my tree in retaliation.
"You can't shoot people at point blank range! You're an idiot!" He screamed at me enraged. "You're gonna hurt some body!! What's wrong with you?"
I packed up my things and walked emotionless back to the house.
"Whatever. You lost." I said as I walked past him.

Untitled.

Five hours a day,

That's the way,

A week to lift the spirit,

Sit in Green or Red or Blue, 

That gum, you must not chew it.

This way that, 

Don't wear a hat,

Please "Get in the building."

Sing with the rest, 

and you'll be blessed,

Your morals need the gilding. 

Please, please come in, 

and let's be friends, 

Fear God. Give us your money.

And laugh and laugh at all our jokes,

Though they're not all that funny.

Fundraiser for the Christian right...

Loan us your bleedin' pennies.

It's a spectacle of majesty, 

Are not our splendors many?

Save your lofty rhetoric,

I'll wait until you live it, 

The ushers reek of razor-speak,

Push and demand and pivot.

Believe! Believe! and 

Follow us to metal euthanasia!

No thanks....

I'm good.

I'll see ya.