nanowrimo 2005
This was written in the context of NanoWrimo (National Novel Writing Month) 2005. The goal is wto write a 50,000 words novel during th emonth of November. In 2005, I abandoned early, life taking its toll.
nanowrimo 2005…
i signed up. why not?! so now i’m wracking my brain, not rereading what i’ve written here last year, getting ready for the november marathon. i like the butt kick effect. i write well (in the quantity sense anyway) under pressure. so. see ya in november.
chapter one.
“that damn squirrel is at it again. i can hear it, gnawing on the plastic bucket for the birdfeed. stupid squirrel. stupid me - i started feeding the birds too early. now i have to wait until the damn squirrel hibernates of whatever they do, half-hibernate or something. stupid squirrel. fuzzy rat. stupid me. fuzzy thinking. it’s fat, too, i don’t know why it doesn’t stop. i hit the window and rattle the blinds to scare him off but he knows i can’t hurt him. i’ll have to call the neighbor boy again for him to shoo that nasty rodent away. i’ll do that.”
that was his last letter. the single page was torn near the bottom and he only sent me the bottom part. it’s not signed and he never explained why he tore the paper or why he thought it so important to tell me about the birdfeed-eating squirrel. and i don’t think any of his neighbors had sons young enough to be called boys. he was a strange man living in strange obsessions. but aren’t we all? just because i personally choose not to be haunted publicly by my own illusions doesn’t mean they’re not hanging around like spirits around me and perhaps if you saw me in the back corner of some smoky bar with the dim light just right and the pool table’s green sheen between us and my hand on my dusty glass and my eyes on the clean liquid, perhaps if you looked above me and around me you could see them hovering and spinning, trying to get my neurons to misfire and my hand to reach for the gun, thin wispy gray half-translucent shapes of doom. but perhaps not. most people would simply see a barfly, someone dressed to fit the part, shoulders hunched, a grim grin, dirt and an aura of don’t come hither. who’s to know really what people see. it has always fascinated me how little i know of how others perceive things. i’ve never been somebody else! d’uh, of course not, right? but how can i pretend to know what others feel and think just from my little single stupid experience? just because we all do it doesn’t make it sane to me. just because there seems to be no other solution just now doesn’t mean we’re right. in fact when it comes to human i assume they’re wrong most of the time. because i am. so we’re back to it. i have very little scientific insight but whatever little bit i have tells me that any observation on humans taken from my own, single human point of view, is necessarily flawed. and since we each have nothing else to go on beyond cold observation, it stems that most of what we assume others to know or think or feel or want and all their why’s are necessarily flawed and just plain wrong.
all this to say that others frighten me. well, i think they should frighten anybody in their right mind but who am i to judge what a right mind is, whether i have one, and what others should do. all i know is, they scare me. just like pretty much everything does but if you stop at that, if you - no, i - if i stop to think about all that scares me or could if i thought about it, i probably wouldn’t leave this apartment much. and in fact, i don’t. leave this apartment much. but it’s not because of all that i think about that induces fear. i have my own reasons, which you don’t know about because you’re not me. see what i mean? things can get complicated when you - i - want to be exact. and i don’t even know why i want to be exact because nobody else seems to care about exactitude anymore, not the kings ruling nations, not school teachers teaching, not pupils misbehaving. i care. but in this as in everything i may be alone. which is the ultimate fear of others, i guess - the fear that there are no others. i think about deserted islands sometimes. then i wonder who’d deliver my groceries. i think about the end of the world, if i was left all alone the infamous day after. i’ve decided i’d start walking south before the winter came. because there’d be no power, right, and all the cars would be wherever they were when it - whatever it was - hit and the roads would be blocked with cadaver-filled hunks of metal and i guess the smell would be horrible so perhaps i’d keep the highway at a safe distance but i’d follow it because it goes south and knows the country better than i do. i think if i was that alone i’d want to be somewhere nice. perhaps near the equator, somewhere where i imagine coconuts to fall from the sky at my feet and lobsters to hop out of the sea on my plate, already boiled and crimson. and when i’ve gone over it all in my mind, i realize how ridiculous it is to think about why i’d be the only survivor. and also, i realize i don’t know how to crack a coconut open.
how to open a coconut, easy version. first, hold the coconut over a bowl in one hand so that the coconut’s midriff rests in the middle of my palm, with the tip on one hand and the eyes on the other. then, whack the coconut with the back or blunt side of a cleaver a few times all around the center until it cracks open into two halves. third, catch the juice in the bowl.
i didn’t know coconuts had midriffs, tips or eyes. i think i’d better buy a few and try to figure out the nut’s body parts before anything too final happens and i’m stuck starving surrounded by coconuts. i must also remember, when i start walking, to bring a meat cleaver and a bowl. the meat cleaver might come in handy too. in my fantasy, the whatever that hits the planet only kills humans, and then only humans who aren’t me. i figured it would be more interesting for me that way. with animals i mean. and without my death adding to the billions of others.
his last letter. now that i think of it, he was the only one i knew who still wrote letters. people now write emails or don’t write at all which honestly for most of them is already too much, lost as they appear when i utter the word grammar, mouth agape and eyes drooling with pus. and when i think that i feel very old, older than he was perhaps, older than he felt no doubt, old because i am putting myself on the old pedestal of those elders who know best. but really if language and expression does not have to be precise or exact anymore, perhaps i am the one who is wrong and perhaps this new plasticity will be good for all in the long run. perhaps language should not be precisely formed but precisely felt and perhaps muted tones and subtle variations on vague themes are what people need to express themselves now, perhaps everything is now so vague and undiscernible that precision would not do to describe their world. perhaps smudges of mixed colors express what they have at their core better than the fine scripts of my youth - and when do we really ever get passed youth? never, as far as i can tell. i hang on to it desperately, to everything it has meant once and still could mean today, to every shred of knowledge i had gathered and adhered to, to every little inkling of a feeling, as if youth had made it fresh and new and whole and, well, true. as if all that, youth and dream and my fingers’ close tight grip on it all could be anything but an illusion. but illusions hang back if you hold them too near and they can become a most welcome companion on roads that seem like those is cheap horror movies, with black trees swinging their boughs and bright green eyes of unseen creatures flashing and vanishing and winds howling through the dying flesh of hanged men and birds cawing with a taste for bloody limbs torn and fallen to the ground. with a good enough illusion by your side you can go through those woods and come back out on the other side, or perhaps a third side, since the paths in there seem misleading, whether they take you where you wanted to go or where, really, you should be. and the illusion knows to take you to where you should go, and if you listened it would be easy but you think you have your own answers so you trudge on, but unbeknownst to you, you will still end up in precisely the ditch you deserved, the one that you can follow to come out ahead in the end. through the grime, the illusion will take you, but if your fingers are strong enough and your grip is relentless and you are able to abandon your will by the side of the road as you should, then it will raise you again to heights you had never imagined. and if, like me, you suffer from uncontrollable unquenchable unusable vertigo, well, hang on, because you’ll need to get down somehow, and by your own means. one way to do that is to give it all up, open your fingers wide, let it go, and let yourself fall. i guess you could climb down as well. but if you can you don’t know vertigo. vertigo fights with the illusion, and really that’s all there is to life - a fight between vertigo and illusion, and the winner takes all, all that is and was you, and all you ever will be. but again, such is only my own story. when i look into eyes as i walk to places, definitely keeping myself at the bottom of the valley and my fingers wide and empty, i see nothing to reflect my own path or my own vertigo. i see windows turned to the inside, some with shutters closed tight and securely locked, others without, but no mirror, no indication that the other is my brother, my kin, my flesh. brain waves are apparently confined to the cranium. well sometimes i wish for a hole in that box, a tiny hole perhaps, but enough to get the light in and enough to reach out into other cerebral homes. when i was nine i tried to punch the hole in myself. that got me sent away for a while, sent away to people who only wanted what was best for me and only wanted to help and if i’d only stay still and listen i’d see they were doing all this for me and if i’d just shut up and listen i’d see their love and understanding. when i shut up and looked into their boarded-up shutters, i knew i was really alone. not that they were lying, mind you, they really thought they could should would help, but they were not me and it was as clear to me as if a star had shone bright enough to cut through all the hospital floors above me, through the concrete and the patients’ bodies and the bed and vials and electronic equipment and pill bottles and gowns and sickly green surfaces. they were not me. they wanted to get inside my head too, but not to let the light in, no, just so they could understand the other. i understood that need, that drive, but i also understood that my exposed cerebellum would only show them some of themselves, as they were simply only ready to get more understanding about themselves, though they were going about it in a strange way - to me, anyway - and were somewhat deluded. deluded is what they called me, too. i was glad. it was better than what they called that other kid, the one who had bitten off his mother’s nose in her sleep. i saw her too, once, when she came to visit him. i was half hoping to see a gaping hole in her face and i wondered whether that opening had helped her understand everything better, but they had already reworked her face to give her a new one and she had something serving as a nose, although i did not dare to ask whether it was prosthetic or something they had cooked together using old flesh and fat from her left buttock. in any case at some point they dismissed me as a lost cause and i was glad that they had a label for me that allowed me to go back home and eat ants in peace again in the very back of the rose garden, behind the little half-thrown down stone wall that my friend’s mother’s aunt had once wanted to have sex on with that tall elegant stranger she had brought home as a medal. of course they had no idea i was anywhere around or she would have liked the privacy of the gazebo better. or perhaps not. she seemed, even to me then, as a generally fucked up person. but then again, who am i to talk? see, i understand the youth’s point - sometimes language, precise as it was designed to be, is a trap, and i want to talk about me and i end up speaking about you, an undefined, undeniable you, and then i finish up by making judgements about other people’s brain waves in a way that is completely ridiculous and contrary to my belief that i only can know myself, and not very well at that. language and habits thereof can cloud reality and that is why perhaps the young have it all right, and should be left alone to create a language more suitable for these fluxing days.
the butcher came today. not that he’s ever butchered anything, but he likes to think that he could if he really wanted to. poor guy. what an ambition. anyway. he wanted to give me a package, and as is his habit, it was wrapped just like a piece of meat, in greasy kraft paper and tied with string. says he doesn’t believe in doing things halfway and i bit my cheek because all he ever does is only done halfway through, but we’ve had this discussion many times before and i was not in the mood to lay it all out on him again. he says he likes the idea of being a butcher for real. he likes blood, he likes the status it would give him, because when people see him they just see some guy but if he was a butcher then people would exclaim: “oh, here comes the butcher!”. right. he couldn’t have picked hockey player or movie star like everybody else, no. he wants some status but not fame or anything that would bring on too much responsibility. he likes the idea of wearing a white smock only to dye it with spatters of blood. he likes thinking about how much time he’d spend in the freezer between the hung carcasses, and he especially likes to imagine people imagining him sitting there surrounded by freshly massacred hunks of animals. he thinks it gives him an edge, he thinks people would respect and fear him at once, while now he only gets some fear and a lot of pity. it’s sad, i guess, but we each have this one life to live and i refuse to spend mine pitying a weird sad overgrown child. i like his company mind you. when he’s not going on and on about his future and completely imaginary career and lifestyle (yes, apparently, being a butcher is more than a job, more than a career, more than a vocation - he calls it a lifestyle. but don’t ask me what that lifestyles involves - i’ve asked once, and his eyes just glazed over, he looked over my should, way past the window and anything he could see from it and smiled an idiot’s smile. he remained like that for a few minutes and i never got an answer) he’s good company. well perhaps not what others would call good, but he’s the kind of company i like to have - not too talkative, not too demanding, and leaves early. i don’t have to feed him, and he fetches his own glass of water from the kitchen - what more could i ask for? somebody sane? please. if we lived in a village the butcher would probably be its idiot, but he’s far from stupid, his delusions put aside. and who am i to call them delusions anyway? just because there’s no way in hell he’ll ever take any real step towards butchering, just because he rambles and then forgets to speak so lost is he in his own mind’s fields and prairies, it’s not really my place to say he’s chosen a wrong path. for all i know all paths are equal. i am not even sure what that means. equal how? to be equal, or good, or bad, they would have to be judged at some point - christians say at the end, but christians can eat my steamed atheist turds - and i have no intention to judge or to allow myself to be judged. of course it comes back to language again because to me it’s obvious that i can say he’s deluded and know at the same time that i am not judging him. he could say i have delusions too and i just might agree with him. words sometimes are too clunky to decipher my thoughts. when i live, i do not use words. i see with my mind’s eye as you might say and words would only overburden me. i need them too of course, but they betray and frustrate me endlessly. i second-guess every syllable until they merge and melt away right behind my eyes, and then the words are okay by me again and we dance another one. slowly.
i had a new patient referred to me last week and it’s hard to stop thinking about her case. she’s in her late twenties, living the life of a decent tree hugger, bulgur, hemp seeds, granola, lentils, the whole thing. doesn’t drink. and her liver is finished. strangest thing. there’s no pathology, no disease, virus, bacteria, nothing - she has the liver of someone who spent her life drinking heavily, but she doesn’t, hasn’t, won’t. and it when they told her at the hospital that she had the liver of a fifty-year old alcoholic that she had the panic attack that eventually led her to me. us. the office, whatever. she just went beserk and wailed and screamed and lashed out and was sweating and she told me she couldn’t even see, she was so far gone. her words, not mine. anyway. it turns out she has had a traumatic childhood, with a violent father who beat her and her mother and was generally threatening and abusive in all possible ways - women’s magazines have dealt with that kind of shit so much that i don’t even need to get into it and people can imagine what i’m talkign about. or anyway they think they can and they have all sorts of images popping up in their minds, but of course they can’t truly understand. it’s impossible to understand from outside. even victims can’t truly, really, explain how it feels because when they’re in it they cope somehow and think this is all normal - it becomes normal. and then once they’re out and healing they usually block a lot of memories - they need to forget and far be it from me to call this unhealthy. but once they’re truly out they can’t explain it. they know how it felt, they know the knot of terror and anguish and guilt and depression, the pit of despair, the feeling of always being stretched because their fight or flight response is trigger happy, the exhaustion of always being on gard. so she had that kind of childhood that books and articles try to dissect and explain and never can really and that makes ladies cry as they read the latest child locked in a closet novel. and she did get out and she did block a lot of it out. and now i’d say and she’d say she’s pretty much healed from it all. only growing up that way is a dangerous thing, since we all tend to go back, to run even towards what we know, and all that she’s forgotten could become reality again if she let it happen. patterns she called it. she was very self-aware and knew that that was always a danger. she refused to drink much alcohol, even, having read all the statistics about children of alcoholic parents - not that these are very near the mark, but hey, if they manage to steer a few kids away from a lifetime of misery, loneliness, bitterness and liver disease, you know… just my two cents. in any case, not drinking was a choice for her. so was living a super healthy lifestyle - the kind that you read about, again, in women’s magazines, the kind that makes you scratch your head and wonder how the hell people manage to live like that - not that it’s bad or unhealthy - on the contrary, it’s so extremely healthy that you have to wonder where anyone can find the time and energy to devote to mundane issues such as food or hobbies. in any case, a very stable and nice young lady, with an old disgusting liver. another choice she’d made was to cut all ties to her father once she got out of that bad situation with him. she didn’t even know where he lived or where he worked - if at all, work not being too much of a habit of his. as far as she knew, she had vanished for him too - he had no other family to link her to him, and she had taken a few steps to be hard to find, should he ever try. like i said, she seems rather smart and aware. but her story eventually got weird. i hadn’t even mentioned the panick attack, or the reason that brought her to my office yet, but i was about to. we’d already gone over past traumas, and now i wanted to know what was going on right then and there - not that i’d use that language with my patients - but i had paused, and was picking my words carefully and silently when she took her glasses off and started to cry. she was not wailing, just silently allowing tears to run down her cheeks. and then she said: “when i was ten years old, my eyesight went nearly as bad as my father’s.” after that her crying got more intense and it was a few minutes before she was able to continue.
