Delusions

A stupid setting in my brain gets me to believing that Prince and I would have been compatible lovers. I’ve had a couple of “encounters” with known musicians. One guy almost got up to my apartment, but I had another guy living here and had promised to make him dinner, so it didn’t happen.

I believe that something like this could have happened with Prince. My girl, also a huge Prince fan, says, “Keep hallucinating.” Ha! It’s part of my pain now – that he would have been accessible but now he’s not here.

He was four years older than me, just like a couple of my boyfriends growing up and some of the dudes who were interested in me back then – those photos of Prince in the 70s with that blow-out ‘fro — they remind me of the brothers from my neighborhood. There were a few of those short guys in our neighborhood – like Prince – and they were mackin’ hard. I know those short guys like that – they can be slick as hell. Prince evolved from that brother-from-the-hood style, but it remained part of his swagger.

Because he was fearless, he did what he wanted to do and everybody was cool with it. I was heavily influenced by rock ‘n roll later in high school so I was ready for Prince on that level. We also probably had some of the same wild ideas about sex.

In reality, he dated mixed, light-skinned, and white women, which I don’t have issue with. But would I have been his type? Paha! Not to mention he was well beyond those crazy days that I hallucinate about — see where this is going.

This lover that I’ve concocted from the Prince persona does not exist, which makes it an interesting study. It’s a figment of my imagination.

More will be revealed. Thus far, I’ve thought about the difficulties certain people in the industry have with personal relationships, icons particularly. I’ve done some dime store psychology on the Prince situation. What compelled him and why? What fueled his fire? – oh but my God he was hot as hell. Check out his “Head” video from ’86 — or when Mel B interviewed him at Paisley Park and he’s in complete “bedroom voice” (I got agitated just typing that).

All that hotness exploding out into the stratosphere might cost you crucial elements on a terrestrial level, just saying. This is the energy from him that’s reverberating here causing my delusions, I’m sure. So, we’ll see how this thing plays out. Thank y’all for listening — oh but for real – my phone’s ringing just now — and my ring tone — the Prince wail from “Do Me Baby.”

The Norm of Evil

I told my neighbor once that I want to be Kathleen when I grow up. “Oh really!” He said, looking at me sideways. Though we love her, she has a reputation for being — mean. Kathleen’s old, 87, and lives two floors down from me. She never married and rides her bike everyday. I gave her the bike helmet my dad bought me fifteen years ago. I was too vain to wear it. She still uses it. She’s feisty, independent and has a foul-mouth. She’s pretty with a pixie cut, sharply-defined chin and clear eyes. Kathleen came from Ireland in the ‘50s and has a slight brogue. When I’m running to and from like most people, she’s ambling along the street with Molly Malone, the tiny dog she named after a prostitute. “Oh hurry, hurry, hurry! — It’ll be the death of you, dear!” She’ll screech after me, her way of expressing the slight she feels when “we youngins” don’t have time to shoot the shit with her.

Her voice sweeps up in cadence at the end of her biting observations. I found her “observations” at one time quaint and refreshing. “Ooohhh what a little cunt that one is!” She’d say referring to the old French woman Hélène who lived in this building. I sort of agreed with that observation, but later decided that Kathleen had too many “observations” about people and that perhaps I didn’t want to be like her. She was too damn mean.

On her way to church, she told me about the woman she took to emergency one night. “Oh, Sandee she’s ab-solutely looney tunes! I picked her up and she was dripping in jewels as if she were going to the ball – when we were just going to the fucking emergency room.” The woman happened to have just walked by. Kathleen more or less talked about her in front of her face. “That’s not nice, Kathleen,” I said.

Another time she said she hated the banality, “Have a nice day.” I told her that we could use it as a euphemism for “fuck off and die.” So then I’d see her while I was rushing in and out the way she hates and I’d say in passing “Have a nice daaay!”

Yesterday she had the sweetest demeanor. I hadn’t seen her in a while. I hugged her. I know she needs love. She just gets on my nerves with that negativity shit – to the point where I avoided her last summer. She said, “I don’t know why I’m so happy all the time now.” There was a trembling vulnerability about her. We talked. “I was even humming earlier – that’s not me — for God’s sake Sandee, I think I’m going senile!” She said. Before I finished laughing she asked if I had planned to freeze my eggs, switching the subject quickly the way old people do often because of the ticking clock. “I hate eggs,” I told her. “These eggs.” She pointed to her stomach. “Hell no. I hate kids – I mean I don’t hate kids, I just never thought I needed any,” I said. Perhaps she was advising me on the regrets of not seizing time.

As we departed, she told me that I was the second person who’d hugged her that day. Finally, she said she got a diagnosis from the doctor. She had dyscrasia, she explained. But she said she felt healthier than a horse. “I’m ill,” she said, however. She didn’t look the least bit. I told her to please call or come up anytime – she has my keys. “Get a second opinion,” I advised. She was so pretty, small and delicate, possibly the side-effect of the news. It was a definite departure from her norm of evil.

Auntie Sandee on the Ass of Death

From “Last Tango in Paris”: “You’re alone…you won’t be able to be free of that feeling of being alone until you look death right in the face…until you go right up into the ass of death…”

Someone told me, “Oh you want a husband!  No, no — you don’t want to die alone!”  The most alone I’ve ever been was when I was with someone;  there was a person who represented an idea that I shouldn’t be alone, yet I was, so it became a mockery, which is even more painful.  Doesn’t matter how compatible to me they were.

You’re going to die alone even if you die with a roomful of people.  You’re born alone.  You die alone, just the same as your experience in this existence is only yours and no one else can fit inside of it and prescribe a course of living for you based on that existence.  Twins are born together.  But are they experiencing the exact same thing together as if they were in one skin?  This last part reminded me of something my sweet Kyle had written a bit back.

But I don’t know — maybe this would be possible in a higher state of consciousness.  So maybe we can die with people.  Maybe our energy can merge and float off into the ether, made up of different chemical compounds of course since the energy transforms, and we go back into the “essence” together.  Scientists say when we die, there is energy that doesn’t, so maybe.  Wouldn’t that be nice? Humans just have a tendency of making pretty metaphors of things — as we speak in colors — consisting of heaven and angels, etc.

It doesn’t matter to me if I die in my room by myself or if there are people surrounding me — I think that would be worse, to be fading away, leaving all of these grieving loved ones behind.  Maybe.

I had the flu many years ago.  I lie on the sofa for three days.  I didn’t have enough strength to open the convertible bed.  I thought, “I’m going to die here,” and it was very matter-of-fact, no fear.  At that time I saw easily how simple it is to die, how easy it would be to just leave.  I had no sentimentality about loved ones, nothing.

No matter whether you die with people or not, being alone is something you have to deal with by yourself.  Having another person, or a body around you all the time isn’t the cure for loneliness.  There’s some space inside yourself that you alone have to deal with.

This had been a building full of widows when I moved here years ago.  I’m sure they all thought their husbands would be around so that they could “die together.”  Ha!

Death

I wasn’t going to mention the Metro-North tragedy initially, because you can’t run from death.  Not really.  I did finally mention it on Facebook because of some compelling coincidences.  I didn’t want to give it special attention, because focusing on the details of the incident wouldn’t help to remind me that death is happening, and it’s not as big a thing as we make it out to be. When my father died I was reborn into this idea.  Paradoxically, I had to go through a few complex changes to come to this simple conclusion.  I try living harder and more truthfully because of this.  I want to be more fleshed out and connected to everything around me.

Yah I’d like to think that I could sustain this idea.  We’ll see how full of shit I am in the end though.  In my isolated existence, disconnected from the whole, death becomes a melodrama, and the mere particle of my human life becomes lionized, disproportionate to the calming reality.  Well, shit – I hope it’s calming.  I really hate the idea of holding onto life, holding onto things…

Cemeterial Musings

I eat tofu, walnuts, steamed vegetables and quinoa for lunch and dinner.  I never take vitamins because doctors have told me that it isn’t necessary as long as you eat the right foods.  I was washing my hands after every handshake.  I opened doors with the sleeve of my sweater and stood three feet away from sick people.  So why should I be sick?  I was taking precaution against getting sick while working two jobs – I was trying to help my immune system.  It didn’t work.

In my twenties and thirties, I rarely got sick.  I had the immune system of an Olympian. Then five years ago I started getting a couple of colds a year, which I think might have been because of my hormones shifting.  This last year I didn’t have a cold except now and I’m sure it’s because of the stress of learning a new job and not sleeping, fuck the fact that I was eating very healthily.  Now I’m just pissed and I’m in the pity pot.

It’s Halloween and I wasn’t even able to invite anyone over because I’m sick.  This is the first Halloween in a couple of years I didn’t do anything special.  I have to go to works tomorrow – yes “works” – I’m going to my gallery job, then I have to do two tours at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.  My jobs are great and I feel settled in at the cemetery now, but I suppose it is strenuous.

I usually never buy cold medicine, but I have some now – people at work told me to get Airborne.  I also have Robitussin and Echinacea.  At the cemetery, I have to be hearty to do two 1.5 mile tours, check people in, light kerosene lanterns and direct traffic, so it’s necessary.  Because of these two jobs however I wasn’t able to plan to celebrate Halloween except for decorating my apartment and purchasing a new set of purple creature horns which I wore during my tour yesterday.  A couple of people complimented me on them and I think I looked sexy but I had no takers, oh well.  This year I thought I might be the “Henry:  The Portrait of a Serial Killer” character for Halloween and walk in the Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village, but I didn’t have time to buy the male wig or the extermination can.  Henry had a distinctive walk.  It would have been great to walk like that in a parade.

So I’ll just sign off now and prepare to watch Fright Night and eat some of the Halloween candy that I bought for the trick-or-treaters who usually don’t come anyway except those couple of times. I wait for them every year like Linus waits for the Great Pumpkin.  And since none of my measures to prevent illness worked, I’m eating Chinese food for dinner, bleh.  On the plus side I guess is that I think I lost weight from working in the cemetery — Happy Halloween!

No mama, I don’t want to go to hell!

Does anyone know if I could have unwittingly made a pact with the devil by singing a snippet of a refrain in a death metal song produced by Satanists?  I just wondered.

Quite a few years back I bought albums by Deicide and Morbid Angel.  A few years later, I was influenced by what people said about vibrations and such, bad ones, so I got superstitious and threw them away.  And silly me I didn’t know they were Satanists.

On my Pandora radio station the few songs they play by Satanists I really like.  Without me knowing who the artists are at first — if I hear the song from another room, I’m thinking wow that song’s tight!  And it turns out to be devil worshippers.  I guess that’s the way the devil works — his shit is always tight.  For those who don’t know, he’s all about appearances and the corporeal.

I’m not a devil worshipper.  I happen to have an unconventional relationship with God–it’s personal.  I’m an observer of life and all its elements.  I like to face them.  When I was nine I wrote a story examining the mystery of death and God and Satan.  This is just me.

They had this monk in Italy who sang metal.  He was old as shit too.  Reminded me of me.

So I don’t like the devil.  I just hoped I didn’t make an unwitting pact because I sang to this Deicide song that has a very infectious chorus.  I’ll bet most people would have a hard time not singing this one.  The chorus sounds like little demons waving their hands to and fro in the air while singing.  It’s so cute.  I used to do my leg lifts to it before I threw it out.  But it comes on my Pandora from time to time.  I still sing the chorus though.  I guess I realize in the back of my mind that if I had made a pact with the devil, my life would be a hell of a lot better than this.  Doesn’t the devil give you everything you want?  Hahaha!

The Life

My father and I went to a funeral where the minister berated us.  He told us all that we only came to church for funerals and holidays.  He shouted bible passages at us and said little about the dearly departed.  My father sat two rows behind me.  I had floated around saying hello to people and was sitting next to a long-lost cousin when the service started.  Did the…minister just say that we were going to…hell?  I had to look back to see dad’s reaction.  He raised a brow in suppressed glee with a hint of a smile.  I looked back again and saw him gleaming.

I didn’t cry at my father’s funeral. At my father’s funeral there was just a headshot of him that my step mother blew up.  Dad had been cremated.  The life behind his eyes leapt out at us from the photo.

People got up to pay tribute to dad — one advertised his business between the tribute.  Why not pitch a sale to all of the grieving potential customers?  I looked at dad’s gleaming eyes in the photo and stifled laughter.  What would dad say to this?  Dad had a sly sense of humor but would also have compassion for the absurd need of this poor soul.

I also don’t know how he would have liked the song that a lady from the church had sung.  For my taste it was too sweet and generic.  But as you know I’m a weirdo.   I looked at dad’s picture during the song.  While he would have appreciated it, he gleamed impishly at me from the photo.   I would have chosen “Spill the Wine” by Eric Burdon and War.  The fantastical lyrics remind me of him.  The group also had a grimy sensibility like my dad.  My sister cried during this lady’s sentimental song.  My sister and I were the first ones out of the church after the funeral.  “I can’t be-lieve you cried during that song,” I said.  She looked at me with her tear-streaked face and we burst out laughing, standing at the top of the church steps.

While dad was in a coma I cried walking down the street – in the middle of talking to people.  I always thought that if my father died, I would just drop dead.  How would I live?  No one would ever love me like this again.  I used to hear him in my inner-ear while he was still alive, just calling “Sandee.  Sandee.”  There was a black hole now.

I had prayed while he was in a coma.  I guess it worked because after the initial mourning, I felt spiritually revitalized.  They say people born under the sign of Scorpio experience renewal upon death.  Interesting, because it happened to me.  Aside from that, one day the thought came to me, If dad died, it can’t be a bad thing.

I don’t want to hurt you, I just want to kill you

I wrote this inspired by the Cannibal Corpse phrase above:

You violated.  And you’ll know how big a mistake you made when I’m done.  You’ll be a bleating peasant, on your knees.  I’ll rip the meat from your arms with my teeth and pull out your hair strand by strand.  I’ll tie you with wire, smash your toes with a mallet and have rats nestle with you in a tub filled with bloody piss.  I’ll pull out all of your teeth and dangle you from the 50^th floor.  You’ll be fired from your job because your boss will believe every lie that I tell him about you.  I think of killing you in ways where you’ll live for a week before you die. You’ll want death.  But I won’t do it – you’ll die on your own from the torture.  I’ll cry with you then snatch my hand away and laugh at the snot on your face.  In that dimming light you will regret.

Lurch

Lurch was the first death metal artist.  Mortician sounds suspiciously like him — and here I thought they originated the incomprehensible hardcore ditty.  They were influenced by Lurch!

Check out Lurch:

Did you see me in there doing the Watusi?  So you’re not easily fooled — it isn’t me.  I just relate to Wednesday.  When the first Addam’s Family movie came out, three people said I reminded them of her, with her adorable blasé morbidity and light musings on death.

I understand that people can’t take my elevator music.  I listen to death metal as background music, dinner music, romantic music – it relaxes me.  But for those who dare, check out similarities between Lurch and Mortician.

While they don’t rock the harpsichord like Lurch, I like the driving, inexorable rhythm of this song.  Mortician usually opens with a snippet from a grade Z horror movie before getting into their industrial juggernaut.  I see haute couture models stomping the runway to this — it’s avant garde fashion show music!  If you don’t listen to it, take my word, Mortician was, like, totally inspired by Lurch:

I black out — come to…transformed.

 

You cut yourself, and I relieve the deep, metallic flow of blood with my mouth.  That ancient taste permeates my tongue.  I breathe deeply in to gather it – more.  I wait before an electric wave carries me — my mouth slides lightly over your arm, to your lips.  Taste!   Your salty blood on my tongue.  Isolated senses push my muscles, again!  Again.  Without permission.  I black out — come to…transformed.  Fused, we take our time to speak and the moistness between us evaporates into the continuum of time.

And now this — aw, it’s only a minute, 42 seconds — it’s an accompaniment to my poem — just don’t look up the lyrics!