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…

France

Sometimes when I’m anxious about the future, I think about what I have right now, plenty of food, an apartment, a job, clothes, friends, family.  I believe then that I’m completely taken care of.  All I have is now.  Read some zen.  They say that. Tomorrow doesn’t exist, nor does yesterday.  But it’s hard to live in the moment sometimes when there’s so much emphasis on planning the future.  There’s much to do to prepare for the future that would suit you best.  Right?  I also have to deprogram myself from notions in this culture that cause me to have anxiety about my status.

Fuck your gd status.  I have a cousin who broke the mold to do some wild things, after having owned a successful business for years.  Oh why oh why couldn’t I do something like that? — Because you, you’re me, that’s why – oh don’t be confused audience, see, I’m me talking to me, that’s all – I’m also talking to you, just having a conversation with me in front of you.

But like I say, I have food.  The café at the botanical garden where I work gives employees food they haven’t sold.  Everything they make has cheese in it which sucks. However the seductive qualities of cheese helps customers believe that the sandwiches are worth twenty-four dollars and ninety-nine cents.  At times my refrigerator is filled with cheese laden cuisine — quinoa with cheese, couscous with cheese, feta dates and herb salad, tuna and cheese, cheese snack bowls, mozzarella and tomato sandwiches.

I hate not taking free food.  If you eat cheese everyday will you die?  No silly heads – I know we’ll die die.  But I mean like, will I die sooner?  Is eating cheese everyday bad?  Don’t the French eat cheese everyday with wine and cigarettes?  Will I survive the next anxiety attack about my future?  Do you think I should move to France?

Fallen Angel

People comment on my author status on face book.  I’m an author all right, ‘the mad author of anguish’ I am.  This quote is from Sticky Fingaz of Onyx.  This phrase from another one of their songs ran through my mind like a loop the other day:  “Ahh, I hate your fuckin’ guts, and I hope that you die.  Sticky Fingaz, the name, and my life is a lie’, cause I’m havin’ a bad day, so stay out of my way…”  How many of us relate to this on a crummy ass day, huh?

I won’t insert these Onyx videos because my friend who lived in the shittiest of neighborhoods with rampant gun fire and rats running riot said that the video scared her.

But I’ve got a lovely song to temper all that filthy rank.  Le Clown reminded me of King Crimson in an earlier comment.

Here’s their “Fallen Angel” song.  The fallen angel could be the Devil.  Or it could be me in all my unchecked grandiosity – hahaha!  When I was 19, I used to get pissy stinking drunk with my boyfriend.  I would cry lugubriously and this song might be my background music while I mused over being oh so lonely and oh so misunderstood – bahahahaha!  

Nut Job

I bought a “humane” mouse trap a couple of weeks ago, a metal box with holes on either side and a handle.  You slide the top open to put food in.   The mouse goes in and triggers a mechanism that traps him.  For each of the three days prior to my purchase three baby mice visited.  I trapped each of them in a shoe box and let them loose in the woods.  Years ago I trapped a mouse on a glue trap.  He was on there bleeding, squeaking — I cried all day, swearing never to kill another mouse.  The next one who came I fed.

After that third baby mouse a couple of weeks ago, when I decided to get the trap, I didn’t see any more.  The contraption made me  nervous.  I feared hearing the clacking noise caused by the mouse getting trapped inside.  I checked, peering into the holes every day — or I’d kick it.  Days went by and and no mice.

Last night at 4am I heard skittering, clacking, scraping.  It was a mouse in the box.  It frantically scratched, scraped and clacked, desperately trying to get out.  I let it go on.  I wasn’t going to the woods at 4am to let it out.  It disturbed me emotionally so when I slept, I dreamed of holding the mousetrap, a larger version, with a dog inside, frantically butting at the top of the box.  I could see its head.  I was on the train taking it somewhere to release it.   There was another dream with two mice and some other kind of creature in the box.

I woke up preparing to free the mouse.  I sank inside, thinking of it in that small space with the bits of bread with peanut butter I had put in there.  (I tear up typing this part.)  He was hungry, so it was a logical place for him to be.  He had no idea he’d be trapped.  I shook the box lightly to make sure he was in there.  He poked his nose into one of the holes.  He was in there.

Across the street I placed the metal box on the dirt, turned the box sideways and slid the top off.  After a couple of seconds, I  told it to go, go, be free, run.  Finally it scampered up the hill through the dirt, its tail trailing behind.  I breathed out and headed back, thinking that the trap was not humane at all as the thing is in there terrified.

Should I just let the little bastards run around here until they die in the walls or find their way to another apartment?  After work I came home and looked out the window at the woods.  Where is the mouse now, I wondered.  What is he eating?

This is the last time I offer to help an old bitch down the steps!

She was hunched over, frail and carried a cane.  At the edge of the steps about to walk down she looked so teeny, susceptible to an unhealthy tumble.  “Sure you don’t want to take the elevator, Methuselah?”  I said.  “No, no, I’ll be fine,” she warbled.   That lying wrinkly twat!  I’d seen her before.  We’d had the loveliest of chats — she’s 200 years old, she is, and had some stories to tell from the days of yore, as you might imagine.  But the last time I recall she had taken the elevator, as I had suggested.

Well, I just couldn’t see it, her getting down those stairs in one piece.  I ran to aid her.  “I’ll help you — here,” I said offering my arm.  “Well, I could just hold the banister,” she said.  But it was two miles away from where we stood in the center of the steps.  “Here, let me,” I said again.  “Oh, o-okay,” she warbled taking my arm, and blibbity, bop, clop, cloppity, clack, crack – we both fell!  “Oh, oh, I told you I wanted to hold the banister,” she bleated – “You meant well, but you don’t know how to hold a person,” she scolded.  What the — why, I orta!  We finally got her old ass up off the steps, she went to her car and drove away.

From here on end, any half-dead, dried up raisins I see who need help crossing the street, or stepping off the bus can kiss my ass!  And I’ll be good goddamed if you get my seat on the bus – no, no, I’ll continue to do this – so people can see how magnanimous I am.  But other than that I mean well, but I just don’t know how to hold a person — so fuck off and die!

What kinds of checks do you fancy?

 

Why would I want to order checks with flowers, balloons or pink pussy cats on them? These checks are going to people who harass me for money every month!  Some of them hike up their interest rates when they feel like it, and as we speak they’re trying to figure out new ways to screw me.

“Well, would you like your name and address printed on your checks Ma’am?”

“Shit naaww!  Why do I want to make it easy for these motherfuckers to find me?  Let ‘em look me up in the goddamned filing cabinet – make ‘em work!  Listen, print me up these checks, black with skulls and crossbones on them, and in the area where my name and address is supposed to go, put Die Motherfucker Diiiieee-yah!”