Evil Cat of Hell

life's a bitch, isn't it?

I'm having one of those weeks where I want to retreat back into my bed, back into a childhood I never had--one where somebody actually brings me things like hot mugs of tea.
No, I'm not sick. Just tired.

I'm tired of making an effort, tired of being nice, tired of being patient. I'm tired of drinking and partying, and I'm equally tired of being constructive. I'm tired of making the effort to be attractive, and I'm tired of feeling unattractive.

I wish I was six years old again.

baggage

Today I convinced Jacques to go through his luggage, which has been ignored since the accident. Mostly I was hoping that he'd find a stash of money he had vaguely alluded to, because I have spent about 150 dollars at the pinche overpriced Whole Foods and I am running low on funds. But I also thought it might be a good idea for him to surround himself with familiar things.

There was something profoundly sad about watching Jacques go through his things. Many of the bags had been packed for the rafting trip he took up the grand canyon just before the accident. They were full of things like rain pants and camping saws--things he won't be needing. He looked at some the things with bewilderment and others with exasperation, as though the bags had been packed by someone else--someone now impossibly far away.

Hello from La Jolla

It's green here in La Jolla and feels like spring despite, or perhaps because of, this morning's rain. There are all kinds of weird plants growing everywhere--I keep thinking how excited Povertyrich would be about the foliage, but then again, I kinda am to. This is your fault, Povertyrich. I now geek out over fucking plants. Fuck. But get this--today I counted like six varieties of palm, and there are strange succulents and blooming jade trees, and the air smells like wet Eucalyptus.  La Jolla is a two-sided coin, though. Pestialent wealthy suburban sprawl on one hand, beautiful gardens and a breathtaking coastline on the other.
I am here to take care of my godfather, Jacques, who is recovering from a head injury.
I swear to god there is nothing stranger than being in an isolated, somewhat unfamiliar environment with someone who is not quite all there. I went through this last spring when my uncle died and I went down to Oregon to take care of my grandmother, who has very little short term memory. In a way, this scenario feels very similar. Like my grandmother, Jacques is quite lucid and still has a sharp sense of humor that catches me by surprise. Like my grandmother, he is distinctly and touchingly grateful that I am here. Like my grandmother, he has an acute and intelligent ability to understand and grieve for the loss of his autonomy.
Today his friend Peter (who Jacques and I are staying with) took Jacques out to the bluff overlooking the ocean. He walked for part of the trip, but let us wheel him for more than half of the way. Partially, I sensed, out of apathy.
He talks constantly about his predicament. While I am happy that he is so lucid (he is doing much much better than I had anticipated) it is hard to listen to him repeat himself when he gets melancholy about his inability to walk, think clearly, or pay for his 300,000 dollars worth of medical bills (no insurance).
What am I supposed to say, 'yeah, but you could be dead. You could be a vegetable. I thought you were.'?
I do say that. I say it over and over again. But then I feel like an ass. Because you know what? Having a head injury and 300,000 dollars worth of medical bills sucks, no matter how you spin it. All I can do is try to impart to him how utterly relieved and grateful I am that he is still himself in so many ways.
The thing about life is that it CAN make you feel grateful for brain damage and 300,000 dollars worth of medical bills. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that things could be worse.

Appreciate your fucking life

My godfather Jacques is coming out of a coma in a hospital in San Diego. They say he can recognize people, but doesn't make much sense when he talks. They don't know if he will ever recover completely. I was hoping that the tragedy would ease up this year--that maybe losing three people I cared about last year was enough of a toll for awhile.

I have always had contempt for those people who lost their faith in God just because someone close to them died unexpectedly. It's so self-centered, right? To be able to look around and other people's suffering and still believe that the world is a beautiful place ruled by a force of good, but then as soon as something shitty happens to you, you're cursing the heavens.

I refuse to lose my faith that the world is a beautiful place on many levels (to clarify, I'm not talking about God in my own life, just making an analogy). But I think I had begun to forget that life is ruthless and that tragedy is inevitable.

So if you are having a shitty day, if you feel depressed, if you feel dissatisfied, please take a moment. Because it can get a whole hell of a lot worse. And it will.

The people who irritate you today, may be gone tomorrow. And, trust me, that's not always a good thing.

I think appreciating what we have in life is the finest art form we can aspire to. And I'd like to get there before I run out of things to appreciate.

word to ya mothah

I was recently reading some intellectual speculation about how our minds work, whether or not we actually think in words. I realized that a lot of the time I think in blog posts. Even when I'm going through one of my longish phases of being a woefully lazy blogger, I think in blog posts. How did I think before I started blogging? As far as I can figure it, I thought in e-mails, letters, journal entries, letters to the editor, fan mail to John Prine, Tom Waits and Steve Earl, and interviews with imaginary journalists. (What are my greatest inspirations? It's hard to say...I have a great appreciation for the work of John Bellairs...) Before that even, I thought in bad teenage poetry or conversations I wished I was cool enough to have. I still think in all of those formats to some degree. I  do have thoughts that are wordless, but if I linger on something for more than a second or so, the words begin to creep in, whispering balefully.

I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who composes pretentious mental epistles about gum on the sidewalk. But sometimes I start to feel like Fred Fuckin' Savage, or, more accurately, the adult who did the voice overs for the wonder years. On these occasions I begin to wish that I was one one of those deep, zen types who can comprehend without commenting.

By the way, although I am writing this in my boss's basement, I composed it while waiting in the rain for the bus yesterday.

At least I'm staying entertained. Any thoughts on the subject?

summer in a suburb, America 2007

Even Redmond looks impossibly beautiful today, the fir trees and cedars almost prehistoric in their greenness, the roses glowing, overexposed in the bright summer light. I never think of Redmond as pretty, but I suppose it is. Today it looks idylic and almost impossibly serene. Maybe that's just because I'm reading The Kite Runner, which takes place in Afghanistan. The other day on NPR I heard this story about Iraqi women being raped, left for dead, and then killed by their own families for the dishoner. Sometimes I feel so lucky it makes me sad.

Sometimes a great notion

I complain a lot about my family. It makes me feel bad to hang out with them because I feel like an outsider. I am like the eccentric city slicker cousin who descends for the evening bearing gifts of arugula and existentialism. My cousin Ark always makes me feel like a character in one of those cheesy 'home for the holidays' type movies that I love. I get to be the gay, alcoholic cousin from New York. Now of course I'm not gay or from New York, but you know what I mean. My cousins all have each other-they are real relations-sisters. Whereas I am just the crazy cousin. It wouldn't really matter except for the fact that they are really the only family that I have.
Hanging out with my cousin's place in Mapleton for a week sounded like a nightmare. Not because I hate my family, but because I hate Mapleton, Oregon. Okay maybe I don't hate it...but it is certainly not a place that has ever made me feel comfortable, and I spent a pretty good portion of my life there. Let's put it in Sometimes A Great Notion terms: Mapleton is Wakonda (quite literally, actually) and I am Leiland.
Mapleton reminds me of white socks and chew spit, green grass and bad skin. If anything is keeping that town together, it's probably Aqua Net hairspray. I'm not saying it's all bad...Mapleton is also a sluggish green river and classic rock on summer afternoons...but sometimes classic rock will only get you so far.
Why was I going to spend a week in Mapleton? My Uncle Bill died, as I mentioned earlier. I would learn more gruesome and disturbing details about his death during the surreal time I spent squatting in an empty house with my 94 year old grandmother.
My Aunt had been taking care of my grandmother, but is now in a wheelchair, so my grandmother had no place to go. She could have stayed with my cousin, but Ark was worried that it would be too traumatic---her house is crazy and hectic, and also inhabited by her schizophrenic mother, who gives my grandmother the creeps (she once attacked my grandmother with a hot iron). My cousin cleans a rental house to make extra cash. It's a time share or something. So she decided that my grandmother and I should stay there...She assured me that it was highly unlikely that a renter would show up during the week.
This is how my grandmother and I came to be staying in a huge, damp, empty ranch style home, replete with peeling wallpaper and the original 70's draperies. Luckily it was sunny some of the time, so I could walk my grandmother out to watch the river. The picture above is a picture of the hill above the river---very quintessentially Mapleton. Did I mention that there's a touch of Twin Peaks to the place?
I am by nature a paranoid place, so staying in a house we were not supposed to be staying in was highly nerve racking. I'd get up in the morning and pad around obsessively cleaning and straightening. I think that I had some idea that if they showed up and all of our stuff was hidden, I could pretend that I was just stopping in to do some cleaning task as a favor to Ark. I'm not sure how I would have explained the 94 year old woman sleeping with a stuffed tiger in one of the bed rooms. Anyway, I am getting tired of writing, so I will take a break for some pictures and add to this later.

rabbit

So my Uncle Bill died. My uncle Bill was a hard core alcoholic. He had a genius level IQ (160) and was an amazing mechanic, artist, and jeweler. He was a brilliant eccentric. On good days he reminded me of a Tom Waits character, maybe a non lethal weapons expert. I have a hard time dealing with the world sometimes (it makes me anxious and depressed) but my uncles were worse. Bill was one of those people who were too sensitive to really ever be okay. Not sensitive in the 'wussy, I'll cry if you hurt me kind of way', but sensitive in the larger sense of the word. As Aldous Huxley pointed out so astutely, our perception of reality is muted by a series of filters. Some people have more filters, or better filters, or stronger filters. It is these filters that allow us to go about our daily lives without being struck down by the enormity of human suffering, or the ridiculousness of seemingly mundane details. People who aren't able to filter out life as well often try to deaden their senses in some way or another. With Bill it was drinking. He drank a lot and he was a bad drunk. For the last ten years or so he'd been on and off, sober and drunk. Awhile back a doctor told him he'd die if he didn't stop, and he was pretty good for a couple of years. Recently my Aunt had an accident and had to stay in the hospital for a week. She says the stress of it drove Bill back to drinking. The other night he went out into the woods drunk and didn't come back. They don't know what happened to him. They think maybe he fell and hit is head on the metal railing of the bridge near their house, or that maybe he died of exposure. My aunt couldn't go out looking for him, because she was in a wheelchair.
Now my grandmother has lost 3 out of 4 sons, and I really wonder how things got so sad with my family. It's like everything that happens to my family is sad anymore. My aunt was taking care of my grandmother, but she can't anymore, because of the accident. So now me and my cousin have to figure something out. My grandmother doesn't want to stay at my cousin's house during the day, because my cousin's mom, Gloria, is there, and she is schizophrenic and my grandmother can't get away from her. And my other cousin is still in jail.....I mean seriously, who the fuck comes up with this shit? Faulkner? Now my cousin Ark is stuck trying to take care of her two kids, her grandmother, and her mom, not to mention trying to deal with her kids' crazy methhead dad, and her brother's girlfriend and his kids (the ones that haven't been taken away by family services, that is).
Anyway, I'm going down to Oregon for a week to try to help her and to hang out with my grandmother, but we don't have any long term solution to this problem.
Ark's dad Andy died about five years ago. He died of cancer, but he didn't tell anyone. Maybe he knew they couldn't afford it, or maybe he just wanted to have some last years with his girls still happy. He self medicated with dog antibiotics. This was a year after my dad died.
Today I am thinking about 3 little boys in Ohio in the 1940's. They had a big stone house surrounded by woods and fields. They were great friends. They spend every summer camping in Michigan (their dad was a professor so he had the summers off). They called Bill  'Rabbit'.
I am also thinking about how things were when Ark and I were kids. They had already turned a little sad then (Andy's wife turned out to be crazy and Bill drank too much and everyone was a little poor and a lot dysfunctional) but I remember long lazy summer afternoons....the blues blaring on old speakers...and us kids playing in the creek, drinking out of houses, grinning with blue teeth from all the blackberries.
I want to know how and why things got so sad. And why they stayed that way.

a rainy monday night at liberty street

The rain comes down, streaking the windows, which are fogged with candlelight. Outside things are pushing their way up through the wet, heavy ground, and the trees burn with sap the way we burn, Saturday nights, with whiskey. Tonight we just drink wine, cheap old Charles Shaw, and not too much of it, because we know that tomorrow will be like today was: long and gray and endless.
Cornelius is cleaning the kitchen, making inroads against the monumental mess we left behind yesterday. He listens to old blues and folk records on the little portable record player, and clangs pots and pans. Povertyrich is still at work, sitting at the dining room table, occasionally laughing at the names of immigrants from overseas. We were all gone at work at least 10 hours today, but he has 450 unopened messages to contend with.
I sit in the big blue armchair in vague solidarity to all the work going on around me, and read about the Civil War-about brother fighting brother, and pride, misty valleys home to the fallen, coastal forts, Scott's anaconda, and hanged men in Tennessee. Occasionally I pause to watch the fish swimming in Meyer's tank and wonder about things.

rats and the synthesis of ideas

For someone who claims to have anti-social tendencies, I am a social person. What, you haven't noticed? I don't actually have a problem being alone; in fact, I enjoy spending time on my own and am pretty adept at keeping myself amused. However, I am easily distracted by my friends and so I don't spend as  time on my creative projects as I should. I often wish that I had talents that worked better as a collaborative effort, so that I could spend time with other people while simultaneously creating something. Like if I was a rock star, you know? That would be cool. The great thing about blogging is that it's kind of like that. Like being a rock star, no. But the give and take, and being able to bounce ideas off other people is so much more appealing to me than the awful pressure of a blank page and the unsatisfying feeling that no one will ever read what I write. It's true, too. I have boxes of stories that no one has ever read. So blogging offers me a way to interact while simultaneously actually writing. The writing may not be all that great sometimes  (this post would be an example of that phenomena) but at least it's something. Anyway, my point is: thanks for the long and thoughtful comment , Kristen.
Oh yeah and here's the pictures of the rat candles that I promised:

Oh yeah, and  if you want a run-down on the real live rat saga at liberty houseCornelius  has an update. There is also cool stuff on the super punk rock blog about our garden.