Sunday, December 2, 2012

Chapter 19 Part 2 : The Synthesis of Ant hills

Back to Chapter 19 Part 1

573
Baseball season came with Ashley’s signature.  Numeric seating arrangements were similar; one me and standard three to six-pack attendance from the Ashley contingent. 

At the last game, I brought Penelope my brother Tim’s old baseball bag to hold Penelope’s equipment.  I promised to get Penelope a purple sports drink.  Penelope expected the brew over water given her mother’s concession-stand version of American pastime rituals.  Before I could even find a seat Ashley rushed in and brought Penelope a Gatorade.  Ben was out playing first base coach.  Two minutes later Lacey was in the dugout “fixing” Penelope’s socks.

I asked Ashley to step back after Penelope headed out to the field.  I told Ashley about my promise to Penelope.  Ashley said, “My only concern is Penelope,” in a fine print attorney-proofed maternal-indemnity statement.

I told Ashley I felt sorry for her if she kept looking at the trees.  Ashley never saw the big picture of how her acts to reduce my role in Penelope’s life were an insult and diminish Penelope.  We each are a mixture of our parental DNA.  By insulting the DNA via one of our parents it is tantamount to a psychological declaration that a person should not exist. 

I never bought the drink.  I did not want Penelope to be the kid with two bottles, subconsciously having to pick between her mother and father in marketed-electrolyte liquid form.  Pure Idiocracy, “Brawndo, the thirst mutilator, it’s got what plants crave.” 

After the game the parents stood around for the coach to speak.  Ben started walking into the dugout to get my brother’s old bat bag.  Penelope stepped to retrieve the sack.  Ashley spoke a foot in front of my mouth, “Dad’s going to get it for you.”  This was Penelope’s life, split in one sentence.

Dark forest, baseball games were one tree.  Sadness sat like a cup of water on my counter that I chose not to drink.  Despair existed naturally; part of what makes this planet, these bodies inhabitable.  The choice was to drink simultaneous life and death in a flaccid taste.  Pessimism is not always exaggerated wolf-cries; sometimes it’s a partner for perspicuity.

574
No human contact I encountered satiated the thirst.  I was aging into a much older man, bearded with squiggly protruding gray hairs.  My muscles were exhausted.  I spent my hours in an Antarctica malaise.  I ached for nourishment from what I was more certain than not was an extinct organism.  Sometimes I wanted to pray to God to send help, some margin for error.  I wanted a reprieve from mandatory.  My people migrated without me.

Nottoway for me was like putting a swamp crawfish on an isle of Arctic puffins.  Adaption was too slow, the red glared on the white, vulnerable.  I needed out, but chose.  I was allergic to the flock culture.  Everyone knows everyone. 

Always talking about their kids, harems of babies, whoring parents in talk-vomit of manufactured selfish-purpose purported as God’s.  Dance teams, county fairs, church, field trips, little-leagues, birthday parties, Christmas formed a rural bulimia of meals with everyone in everyone’s business with nothing better to think beyond a pickup truck capacity.  Volume set on rabble, everything is dripping spew.  I am parched for isolation.  I am immersed in peripheral conversations moaning unnoticed like a ghost unable to leave. 

How was your holiday?  How is that baby?  How is it going?  How has it been?  How is your mamma doing?  How is cousin Eddie?  How is Ms. Joan?  How did that surgery go?  We’re praying.  Where is Brucy at?  Not to be confused with Big Paw Bruce or Broussard or Bruce the third.  Oh, John Bruce is in rehab for blowing up his double-wide batching meth on a gas stove.  Bobby Bruce is in Iraq.  Bobby Sue was sleeping with Bobby Jim.  Bobby Jill is marrying Bobby Bobby.  We’re praying.  Nothing changes, just more babies, more meals, more prayers, more vomit.  

Drink the simple syrup: Genesis, what was, will be, troths, cattle guards, Cracker Barrel truck stop souvenirs, pews like dominoes, check, double check the black dots stay inside the white rectangle, flag tattoos and crucifix lawn ornaments, the wretch is pandemic.  The omnipresent vomit is skin epoxy.  Jazz got homogenized by Toby Keith kickass and the zombie cult of Dale Earnhardt.  Fuckers want to tattoo a three on me.  (Bleeeeha!)  I have not said a word!

575
Attempts at professional therapy were useless.  After a few sessions my windows and writing were better consorts and my HMO quit covering it in month two after a corporate plan change.

Sometimes I talked to my father.  We got on the history of Catholic priests.  Dad told me celibacy started in the 1200’s with European property rights disputes with the church and progeny, the sons of priests.  No meat on Fridays started with Italy’s rotting fish by the end of the week that needed to be sold.

My father wished his annual retreats to Manresa could be his own religion.  My dad thought, “Why can’t the Catholic church be this?”  I think he loved sitting quietly alone in contemplative meditation like in a deer stand.

What if there is no hotel concierge St. Peter?  What if God does not judge, no culpability good or bad?  Everyone is left to the same conclusion or re-entry or re-start.  All this is irrelevant, immaterial.  Justice thirst is nonsense.  Humans obsess over why.  Would we still abide?  Would we be kind to one another for an inherent rational?  What is victory?

When did I break?  Was I born broken, teeth, divorce, abortion, Christ?  Sometimes the question was like egg.  Was it the yolk or the shell?  Was this rancid from inception on the inside shielded away from the awful causation of the fetor-inducing sun to spread the scent amongst the populace?  Or did the face to the cement, the heart out the chest through the Dutch door, the child to the vacuum tube, and the silence shatter the shell to open a lovely truth that only darkness could illuminate?  Who sees the beauty of the darkness?

576
When I still went to church with Penelope, every week the congregation was asked to pray for the parish’s capital campaign.  I would not pray to God for the collective will to pay money to a religion to fund a building or a pedophile’s lawsuit.  I did that by my own volition.  I also refused to take a tax deduction when I did on principle.  No B.C. on insurance coverage, but Viagra’s ok.  Holy-ordered penises outlaw sodomites in a panoply of Biblical high-ground.

Pope Benedict XVI claimed priests were weak in immoral times of the 1960’s and 1970’s.  Priests were in the sway of people’s golden-calf debauchery and blamed the priest’s habitation in the little boy’s sphincters on lax times.  According to him pedophilia only counts “if a child is under a decade.”  

Cough, more conservative.  Cough more Latin.  Cough, fuck you Vatican two!  Do the de-evolution baby!  When is a priest going to chant in a dead language lift his dress and moon the congregation with a Gregorian, “Habitas Testicas?”  The Catholic Church had lost me.  House was laughing.

577
I would see Ashley’s Ben tucked in her pocket at church, sometimes with his arm over Penelope.  There was very little of the Beatles Rubber Soul, “Run for Your Life” in me.  I felt sorry for Ben.  Edmond Dantès’ eczema itch be dammed.

I will never know when Ben’s penis first slipped inside Ashley’s vagina.  The location of genitalia is such a silly preoccupation.  Who follows who, who was who’s first; it is just a trite maze of evolution.  Maybe Ben is one of Ashley’s former guilts that she used to berate herself to Jesus for engaging in whatever whenever too young was too young.  Emotional betrayal trumps physical anyway.

Credulity is an impish mystical hermit hiding behind conjecture chasing naked truth to crannies of contemplation.  Lies can be anywhere and nowhere befuddling a man’s mind.  The pondered lie could be but a blip compared to the awe-aching truth one wishes they never discovered and so too the inverse.  This was my twelve-year hunger strike in year three waiting for Penelope to go to college.  No scabs here. 

578
I thought of Halloween in 2010.  Penelope dressed as Scooby Doo and went trick or treating with Ashley and Ben as Velma and Shaggy on October thirty-first.  A week before I took Penelope-Doo to “Boo at the Audubon Zoo” in New Orleans with me dressed as Freddie.  Elyse never desired to fashion into Daphne.

I watched so many Scooby Doo cartoons with Penelope on the weekends.  I was reminded of what most kids over the age of sixteen observe and I called “The Pentagon of Scooby Doo Sexual Frustration.”  Velma has lesbian urges for Daphne.  Daphne wants to be ravaged by Freddie.  Freddie wants to hump Shaggy.  Shaggy wants to bestiality it down with Scooby.  Scooby just wants to eat Scooby Snacks and have fun.  Nobody wants to fuck Velma.  (I can’t be the only one to see this.) 

In the end for Ashley there was a penis in a vagina.  People are afraid to admit some things are about sex and sex’s coursing power.  Certainly sex is a symptom of underlying fractures in divorce, but sex does bear an animalistic dominion.  This was not just about parenting, or who I am, or what I did or what Ashley did. 

Some things just end, do not work out.  Humans are meant to move on without having this grand why to connect the dots of decision trees and one to one outcomes.  God has not a fucking Canon-compelled dominion over adultery or human love.  Sometimes metaphysics takes a backseat to dick, vagina and a white-tiger clitoris. 

579
Ashley wanted another set of balls to hang on the rack above her bed, some dangly-dice Nottoway-pair.  Ashley got her a bald Nottoway supplicant on a leash.  Ashley preferred an inefficacious man with no aspirations to ever leave Nottoway or on his own.  Ashley found another Tulane graduate of my approximate height and weight.  Apparently Ben is soft spoken and played Magic cards and sang Counting Crows songs.

Ashley went into her own “who is sitting there across the street” life and slipped this convenient-invitation into her mail slot absent of postage.  Ben was still living with his mother on a farm road named after his grandfather.  Ben’s father is a man I only saw once drinking alone at the bar in O’Malley’s restaurant when Ashley said hello to him the night we celebrated the sale of our Katrina house.  Ben was a thirty-something that could have gone anywhere and yet he anchored to this Bates-motel town living with his mother and his dog in the woods.  The marketing campaign is just easier to sell with me as a tyrant ogre.

Oh these lives, these twisted-empathetic worm-coiled engines we fuel daily, pumping out tiny replicated experiences in explanations to others as if we understand a God-damn thing!  This trifle of a man I saw years ago innocuously alphabetically-assigned seated next to me in an entrepreneurial management course, his last name a letter over from mine, right there in H.G. Wells-machine semantics praying for editable fiction.

Ashley did not even need to change her three-lettered married stationary.  “Just go back in time and get together then.  Fuck, suck, lick, engage, and leave me out from the inception.  Say no to the Dragon’s Den.  Despise my shitty poetry, speak up.  Obliterate Penelope from potential existence and have your own daughter.”

The lipstick lettered belly was corroded with Chinese toy lead paint.  Ben was a golf caddy.  His seed was in Ashley’s womb now like a decade-ticking M18 claymore.

Ashley was making sure the real Ben, Ashley and me, never met.  Everyday I faced my Nottoway presence that neither Ashley nor I wanted, because Penelope did not know.  Penelope did not deserve the pain of knowing why. 

I would not release the daily phoenix that died in me at sunset like some transgendered swan lake.  Every wire shook upon its flight into one more day of facing my Green Day “East Jesus Nowhere.”  Maybe some day after we danced at sixteen in July or fourteen in between, but not until Penelope’s innocence breathed its long breath past deciphered Santa Claus secret identities, not until first kisses were made in normal adolescent hormone adventures.  Penelope deserved the illusion.

580
My life was a synthesis of anthills.  The indifference mounted.  I dictated an accumulated pile of words like a stenograph tape printed into spirals and tomes.  The legions of words were heavy like a recycling cancerous mass in a distended gullet.  The thoughts of regurgitated self-identity laid me in a corner of writing, writing, writing.  The real world was not this.  My syllables were full of lymphoma and tumors I wanted to vomit.

The real world was a Roman realm of doing.  I was so Greek.  My empire was in bankruptcy, trying to trade poetry for wheat.  I was starving to brush my fingers over the shafts populating the fields as the gossip in the grain rose up to stimulate the tangible.  I was afraid to stare into the sun, into its love.  The equities of prayer were all around me.  My own inequities rendered me blind. 

Who was going to understand the ant hill I had created for myself?  All these tunnels, un-hatch-able eggs and transported dirt, particles one by one intricately remembered were baubles of hours I wanted to expunge, yet had no surface to forget into a mound.  Sometimes, I just waited for the nuclear war, the fire from the sky to burn the pile.

My written rants were exercises in extermination; God damn poetry.
I am a man kicking over my ant hill catacomb city.  Destroy it with freedom, a liberated fortress.  Despots stripped of authority.  I abandon regard for their pinchers.  Fuck that.  I am an American old-school football soccer-style Mike Lansford barefoot kicker ramming past these dead saints.  Feast on my death-row metatarsal dessert!

I am armored in solace!  The black army of words plots in evolutionary cartography.  Scurry off in an instinctual chemically-driven brain to the queen.  How can you bring her sustenance, a sacrifice for the colony?  I set these millions of legs loose.  I liberate loneliness incarnate.  I un-weld these boilermaker shackle musts.!

Climb me nude.  I stand as sculpture with un-paralyzed arms free-willed to swing.  Your venom is null to granite-skin, of cracking mineral veins.  I am flexible, human, and soft as woman soft.  I am Iocane-immune to you!  I am a Mr. Dread Pirate Roberts! 

Go tell Sister Prejean there is no blazing leather-strap throne here to kill, to show those who killed that man that killing is wrong.  I set you free.  This vaccine can be released.  Vengeance dies on this vine.  Sage Francis says, “Got to love the li(f)e.” 

I am in rehabilitation as a self-analysis junkie.  Flush those white-powder words.  I could rest in love without a Sahara of supporting documentation; a Gobi of explanation of why this does or should exist. 

I can finally learn to just be; to live in that slivered intention of vanishing now dancing boastful clarity of action, not voice, not thought, but indeterminable aesthetic doing.  I will thrust this butterfly stroke for air and grasp with two hands side or not.  I will cull this water behind me in symmetrical synchronized force.  I will live in the intoxicating moment of breathing. 

The rise to be joyous is an escaped convict from registered offender status.  I do not remember the last time I was excited, where life felt innocent or exuberant.  The mud is caked.  Laughter is counter-weighted.  Memories are vampires.  The coffin is no regeneration chamber.  Soccer games, Thanksgivings, airplanes, meatloaf, picture frames, waltzes, progeny: all of it is poison, spoiled in tainted context.  I have no Mr. Miagi/Tarrantino-Bride fingers for self-developed solutions at the moment. 

Retiree’s walk in to get their taxes done from playing golf.  These flashy pursuits of retired treasure troves, free time to spend.  I ask myself with who, to do what, with me alone.  This love is all but a sham.  I have no love. 

I am void.  I see Boomers exiting this rodent maze corporate vat.  Sage Francis pointed out the water-lunged imagery of “lol.”  I see a man drowning.  Mogadishu, Beirut, Los Angeles, Tripoli, shoot these frail dreams.  Always could be worse, when in doubt do good.

581
I wanted to get out, to date, or to find some social outlet, a garbage can to propel vomit.  Anchor ironies chained my ankles in bulging links.  I had a daughter bolted to an Indian town zoom in three times to get to push-pin on a Google map.  My logistics cackled and regimented my opportunities like puzzle-piece concrete.  I chose.  Damn us all!

I felt a woman without a child would resent the trade off of having to move here.  No part of me desired a woman to compromise her self to meet my inequities.  I could not break her into pieces to fit her through my Alice door.

A woman with child was so often half-piloting the same moored ship, marooned in some city isle.  Even if I appeared as this North Star, I was impossible to navigate towards.  That for which I ask, was exactly that which I could not give in return.  I was a man with a hand full of fool’s gold bargaining for fresh water with mirage-illusion castaway women in a parallel archipelago.  These iceberg-logistical hypocrisies stranded me in the frozen fires in which I would continue to burn until my frost-bitten fingers truncated pruned to the ground due to lack of use.

Maybe I was someone’s needle in a haystack of medical waste.  I felt submerged with viral AIDS acupuncture and polio pinpricks.  Who’s putting their hand in here?

I wanted someone to perceive me as indelible.  I had no idea what it felt like to be missed, to have the inclination a woman had after thoughts that she contemplated, “Shit, I fucked that up” upon my exit.  I had no concept of being pursued or a batting average for reciprocated communication with something higher than a point zero prefix.

I had the logistical life of a forty-year-old man, wanting to find a thirty-year-old peer without daddy issues.  I was a fear-filled platypus fuck.  I had to expunge the emotional shrapnel.  I bit into my skin to tear out the metallic from the viable until there was nothing left spreading this sickness.

I am a coward.  I am not brave the way I dream the thinkers I aspire to emulate appear.  I have done nothing and in most concrete-boot stoic mirror-confessions believe I will die having done nothing.  Even if I did not have casket-shackles on my choices, I wonder if I would be brave enough to face this world. 

I know nothing of this world.  I am inside painted bullshit cave walls barking blindly about God, government, and relationships.  It is all bullshit.  I know nothing.  I am the pied piper of fraudulent undertones, metaphors and slunk-down hypocrisies of a man dying alone in the passenger seat of his own existence pretending originality.

Sometimes it appears easier to hide in this no-face, nowhere abandoning opportunity to try, to sit in this library and not in the yard, to just drive home as a commuter college kid and wonder, “What does everyone else do on outskirts of this higher learning?”  “Where do these young professionals parade and discuss to dance beat tempos of having the funds to let go?”  I snubbed the folly of contemplated bravery to imbibe praying for the glory of chance encounters in the sheathed shadow of New Orleans bars stuffed with ghosts. 

Piss, eat, shit, sleep, work.  The Nottoway rural pubs had pickup trucks lining the block and Brandine’s flopping out doorways.  The Nottoway stench hovered over my clothing like I was a denizen of a stockyard splattered with mush-fed antibodies.  I was smothered by the proximity of that which I was so ill-mated slathered with this bovine cologne.

I was six and then thirty-six, the Oreo cream of this middle did not come with the cookie.  I am a fraud holding on to the pant legs of loves.  None approached plainly in my direction requesting my patronage.  I am absent friends.  I realize the pittance sliver of significance I hold in any of their lives.  I am naked, broken, and infinitely alone.  Love is an investment of our accumulated sum of choices funded into another.  We trade lumps.  My pile was a rancid egg; all the world had to offer was chocolate and mint.

I made my lump.  I was and am addicted to being alone.  Alone is my crucible.  Nottoway or New Orleans the beast will track me like Dracula.  I am Renfield gorging on solitude like spiders.  Ashley knew.  Elyse grew to know, even if she could not decipher why.  Therapy was feckless. 

Any human relationship I will ever have threatens that.  By the natural dynamics of pair bonding, my lover becomes my adversary by standing between me and my addiction.  I will thrash in protest to sabotage contact to retain my solitude.  It is an endless struggle between the safety and pains of loneliness.  My child is dead from this.  I wronged Elyse from this.  I damned my debate to an echo.

I act like a threatened animal.  If I spend too much time with others I go through withdrawals.  I become angry, disgruntled, and combative.  Alone is my drug.  I tried to detoxify.  I was not there yet.  I did not want the pitfalls of my demons to rope me in fear.  Insomnia cackled at my frailty.

582
I thought about Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences: logical-mathematical, spatial, linguistic, bodily- kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, musical, and naturalistic.  I felt like a moron.  I was logical at times.  I was mired in intrapersonal sludge.  Linguistically I blabbered to myself fairly well.  I gave myself two out of eight.  I was no artist, no athlete, no musician, no hunter, and lowest of all no other human being and I had ever seemed to understand each other.  I am an idiot in a tiered cake of stupidity.  All I can do is choose to accept or move towards better, no complaints.



583
I became a cafeteria-Catholic on a hunger strike of the fast-food side-dish accoutrements except for the main course bicep muscle meat that God exists independent of this circus Golden Corral sideshow.  I left even the lamb shank Jesus at the serving table. 

All I put on my plate now is God as a simple raw steak tartare slab.  I use no utensils, just my “what I have left teeth” to sink into God’s sinew.  Even on March Fridays I sit nude in my dining room, ass follicles smashed against a yellow chair with two hands on God’s flesh soaking in stares, sharing what I can. 

I learned to love myself.  Letting go was loving me.  The lens of Nottoway-land as an Ashley proprietary stomping-ground ended.  That skeletal-view was no longer tattooed on my biceps and calves transfiguring the support structure of my cadaver into flaccid painted abrasions of dampened muscle soaked numb.  That was no death with dignity.  I choose to say these words, to be here for Penelope and to be here for me. 

“I love me here or anywhere,” and in that thought I found breathing holes for this leopard seal.  To ask any woman to love this hydrurga without reserving my own oxygen supply was mutual suicide.  I could not ask the Elyse’s of this world to walk the minefield of my hypocrisies I would not traverse myself. 

Amputate these limbs if you have to, but these words are my stamping steps.  I will not immolate into a cinder of disaster alone.  I will march because I am home in this body, this soul of sinew and skin.  This flawed flesh-bag is my own impregnable kingdom.  I am the magistrate of my own vindicated autonomy.  Hail, hail, I blow the wind that avails these sails!  Howl, howl, how!

To Chapter 20 

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