Nietzsche and Love
Insane, large, turquoise eyes that did a double take and fixed on me. Long, long coal hair all around them. She was dressed in dark shades of blue, black, dark green. The eyes were claws sinking into my guts. I buckled in there. Everything quivered. I had never felt such a punch. The eyes were drilling into my back. I could feel them. I shoved the carts into place and wrapped the rope around my palm and elbow, watching her walk. She glanced at me and kept moving, her high black boots pushing the earth back. An old man caught up to her. I knew it was her father. She looked back again then her father said something to her and they were walking and talking.
Out there was mine. She was mine. She was my girl. She was different from the rest of them. I stalled. Butterflies in my stomach crashed into each other, fell, and dissolved in the acid, screaming. They were nearing his car. My feet were glued to the floor. A voice in my throat said take it, take it, take it.
A finger snapped in my head, and I blurred myself in between her and her father. He looked at me and kept walking. She stopped. I couldn’t recall what I said to her. The moment went around me in waves. The car pulled out. In my hand was a part of a torn pink envelope with her name and number. I placed it in a tomb of my memory and sealed the tomb with the blood of her years. I could not believe what had happened to me. I could not stand the hypocrisy in my head. Nietzsche fell over a tombstone and died. I was in love.
That night I cleared my throat twenty times and dialed the number. It was late. Everyone was in bed. Each ring was a paintbrush up and down my chest. She answered.
Excerpt from “Perfect Strangers” (2012)
I left immediately after my grandfather's funeral. I heard peoples stares. Saw their thoughts. "Disrespectful." "Ungrateful."
Maybe they are right.
I knew I couldn't be around them. All the mourners. Taking me by the hand. Telling me how much he loved me. I already know all of this.
It doesn't help. It doesn't matter.
Truth is, I loved my grandfather. More than anyone. He raised me me after my own father left, his son. But I let him down in the end. My guilt driving me to pack my bags before the funeral even started. Keys in hand before he had been lowered the full six feet.
Blindly staring at the road. Eyes stinging from held back tears, just now beginning to spill over. Finally I'm forced to pull aside. Giving in now that I'm finally alone.
Tap, tap, tap...
“The Biggest Taboo” (2011) - Prose Three
While slightly different, this example nonetheless connects with the previous case in that a person you know/love/trust is informing you of what (s)he believes was an authentic experience. In one case, the experience was remembering a past life; in the other case it was seeing rain outside. The gray area of this binary of human experience ranges from concrete physical perception to what so-called mystics call the “depths of consciousness”—the “transpersonal” experiences constituted by perceptions of more than just (ordinary and physical) sensation, emotion, and thought. How do we interpret or make sense of a seemingly intelligent, sensible, honest human being who claims ability to have an out-of-body experience at will, for instance? The experience and general claim that this individual communicates definitely falls significantly outside any sort of societal norm. Yet, what does such abnormality mean?
My Coffee & Book Shop
(Still in progress)
New dreams coming forward. Greeting me like old friends, letting me know they've always been waiting for me. Waiting to make their presence known.
I want it to be cozy, for people to come in and the first thing they so is breath in as deep as they can, to suck in as much vanilla and musty tinted air as possible. Upon release, a smile creeps up on their faces, telling me that a part of them feels like they just came home.
I want there to be big, giant mugs. No cheap styrofoam cups with flimsy cardboard wrapped around them. I want everything served in big colorful mugs, with steam curling softly up as they are grasped by hands of people absorbed in conversation or caught between pages.
I want the young and the old to come in and get lost while sitting still. To peruse the shelves and forget the world. I want them to be transported to other worlds.
Pressure
We were bouncing around. It made sense in the way only a dream could. One moment driving, the next at a water park. But it wasn't a water park. We were together. Which was nice.
We were with his family. But it wasn't his family.
We were all in the water, but I don't remember being wet. All of a sudden his brother, who wasn't his brother, gave me a ring. Diamonds surrounding a big stone that was pink and green. It was hideous and I loved it. I wasn't confused as to why his brother had proposed for him.
I walked back down to where he was so he could put it on my finger. He laughed, pulling a different ring out of his pocket.
According to the laws of physics, this ring didn't work. According to my dream, it did.
Thick and silver, the diamond couldn't be seen until released from a spring latch. You pressed down. Released. Then a panel moved aside and the diamond setting came up.
It was weird.
I preferred the pink and green one.
It was all very anti climactic.
I tried to take a picture. I had to post it. That's what the protocol is now, right? He proposes. You post. Have to see the ring, it's all anyone is interested in.
As I try to angle my phone just right, I look in the screen and watch as the diamond begins to shrink. I pull the phone away and it returns to normal. I repeat.
It wasn't ready for societies pressure.
The Maul
The fucking mall. Look. The plan was to find a hat, but I decided on the way to hit up a place down the road and make an appointment to get a keyless entry installed in the Element. Let me say something about that midnight pearl beauty: It's magic. Black and clean. Black magic. Wait, here comes the first coursing of the vodka. The buzz.
STOP DRINKING IN THE DAY. YOU ARE NOTHING SPECIAL.
Here's the problem. I have an old, faded, green and white Vans foam trucker cap. Now: though I am racist (?) against hipsters, I use this foam trucker hat to protect my newly shaven skull when I pedal my bike around the beach. I needed a hat, bottom line. I got sidetracked by the Tokyo in this mall. No shit. A full-on section dedicated to the culture, and operated by it. It's amazing, a Japanese food court that leads into a Japanese grocery store, a big one. I perused the labels on the cellophane-wrapped fried fish frozen in the rictus of death, their little crisp bodies and expressions forever caught in decayed capture. I glanced at a label, something about fried milkfish.
SWITCH TO PRESENT TENSE, DRUNK ASS:
I look around, and my blood runs excited when I realize I'm the only white man in the store. I've never been overseas, but I wonder if this is any indication of how it must feel. I walk around like a giant. I haven't mentioned yet that I have a new hat, $28 dollars. A black Oakley cap I am wearing backwards, (is it backward, asshole?) while I sit in the Rainforest Cafe in the motherfucking mall and put away another vodka double. Disney. Mall. Feed the corruption. But there's no division anymore. The world is one big ball of connected everything, no matter how hard the artists try. I sit here, 300 good yards away from mini-Tokyo, drunk in the mall, charming a heavy bartender into stronger drinks, ignoring calls from the car place down the road because I'm an hour late to my appointment.
I order another double.
She reminds me of Natalie from The Facts of Life.
I came here to buy a fucking hat.
An Early Rust (Breath Upon A Burn intro.)
My father moved in a whore and her son when I was at work. My clothes were folded behind the couch. I saw their suitcases. They were in the kitchen talking. I walked into my room, sat on the bed and looked around at his things. My father walked by and looked at me. I asked him what had happened. He threw me disgust. I walked into the kitchen where they stood. She was a fat brunette, high hair and a glittering dress, her fat feet crammed into pumps. Her face was whiskey and batter and trade. Her son was a skinny, long hair in the back and wired on speed. My father walked in.
“Jeff. This is your new family. Billie and Brett.”
She gave me a slimy nod. Her son tilted his head back and stared me down. I looked at my hands, walked into the bathroom and ran the water. My palms were bloodied from a spill on my bike riding home from work, working double shifts to save for a car. My father rushed in and slammed the door. In the mirror he asked me why I was being so rude. I kept washing my hands. He asked me again. Through the mirror I could see that he had been up for days. I could see that he had just met her at the bar, and I could see him moving their suitcases up the staircase into our apartment. To my left on the counter I saw a clear vanity bag containing make-up, hair brushes and a small glass pipe. I looked back to the sink. He caught the side of my head with a solid right. It echoed in my skull and left my ear ringing. The hit knocked me into the wall. I resumed washing my hands. He told me that this is the way life was, that if I didn’t like it, to pack my shit and get out. He closed the door quietly. I collapsed to the floor and held my ear with both hands, coming up with blood on my palm. The pain was incredible. I washed the ear, walked back into the bedroom and sat on the bed. It occurred to me that this would be the way it was. I walked into the bathroom and grabbed up my things. In the living room I saw her chopping lines of cocaine on the coffee table. They watched the blade and nothing else. I sat back on the bed and began putting the things my father had missed into one of my pillowcases.
I heard the whore whisper to her son to come talk to me. He walked in and stood over me while I sat on the bed. He nodded down to me and curled his lip back.
“What the fuck are you doing in here?”
He was sweaty junk. His lower jaw orbited his skull, and his eyes were disgusting. My father and the whore appeared in the doorway, and my father smiled. In his smile I saw terrible things. The whore yelled at her kid.
“Brett! That is no way to treat your new brother!”
He ignored her and twitched, “I asked you a question, faggot.”
I looked at my father. He told me I had to fight my own battles. Her son nudged my shin with the toe of his sneaker.
“Get out of my room.”
My father laughed. He said that if he were me he’d get out of the room before Brett taught me a lesson. I asked him if he’d lost his mind. He was unresponsive. Her son flipped his fingertips against my sore ear and told me to get out again. I stood up and punched him in the teeth. A few slipped back. He fell into the closet doors, and they fell off their tracks. It was loud. My father came for me. I ducked him and her son was up, hand over bloody mouth. He had tears in his eyes. My father had fallen behind the side of the bed. He was grumbling threats, and trying to stand.
I caught her son with a left this time, in the throat. He fell back into the closet and screamed like a girl. His mother came at me in a blind rage. I kicked her hard in the crotch. She stumbled back and dropped in the hallway. I felt a hand on my shoulder spin me around, a flash of meaty knuckles and my lights were turned out.
I woke up hours later. My head was pounding. It was dark in my room. I was under the covers with my shoes off. It occurred to me in the dark that I had turned seventeen the day before. I sat up and walked into the bathroom. The place was pitch black. I flipped the light on.
The whole area above my eyebrows and down to the center of my nose was dark blue and kidney shaped, like a dark birthmark. My neck was stiff. I touched the bruise. Shockwaves of pain rolled around my head. There was the clear vanity bag to my left. In a cup in the medicine cabinet sat a plastic cup with dentures at the bottom. I walked into my room and put my shoes on.
Through the bathroom light I could hear them passed out in the living room, down from days of speed. I watched the room from the doorway. My belongings were no longer packed behind the couch. In the bathroom I lifted the dentures from the cup and crushed them under my heel, returning the crumbs back into the cup. They floated there. I closed the medicine cabinet.
Out in the living room I stepped over my father on the floor. The other two were sharing the couch. She was sleeping on top of her son. I was heading across the street to the store for aspirin. Outside sat my belongings in a duffel bag next to my bike. I wondered why they hadn’t been stolen. We didn’t exactly live in the hills. I closed the door. My father jumped up and locked the deadbolt.
I wheeled the bag on my bike across the street. The Sun was coming up behind the supermarket. I placed my bike and my bag next to a register and found a bottle of aspirin and a jug of water, a candy bar, some medicated cream and a box of gauze. When I went to pay my wallet was empty. I had three weeks’ pay in there. Both of my pockets were empty. The lady at the counter asked me what happened to my face. I told her I had just been mugged. She pointed out that my tooth was chipped in half. I felt it. My upper lip was swollen and my front tooth was chipped. Since she’d mentioned it, it hurt to breathe in. I left the store empty. My sister lived six miles west, in a worse part of town. It was still hot in Phoenix. October meant nothing. The bag was without straps, and I had to stop every few blocks to balance it on the frame. I walked my things to her house.
She was at work and the kids were in school. She had three kids from three separate marriages, living in a two bedroom duplex in Glendale. I didn’t want to walk into her work looking like I did. I hopped her fence and fell asleep under the trampoline.