thee istsfor manity reader

Wretched Hypnopompia

This morning I woke up with an angry welt on my left temple. I had a bad night’s sleep, that much is obvious. Which is odd as I’ve sleeping rather well lately.

Eris, on the other hand, sleeps poorly. Her snoring is like the rasp of the grim reaper as he inhales your dying breath. Sleep can be wretched in our bed.

And now, I have this welt and a jagged headache to boot.

I wondered for some torpid minutes about my dreams, but I couldn’t recall having dreamt again about falling through sharp crystals in the cold gloriole encrusted sky; or the one about swimming with large pelagic fish, none of them threatening, in the warm sargasso flow; nor was there the recurrence of the dream where I urinate off the edge of Uhuru Peak, only to find myself in bed in a puddle of my own urine — this dream recurs once every decade, and I now I certainly believe that I will drown sometime in the future in a pool of my own piss.

So I’m spending the hour before Eris wakes wondering about last night’s disturbing sleep, and about what awaits us all in the near future — it’s possibly nearer for me than her, but not too distant for any of us in any case. A pandemic? A war? The zombie apocalypse?

I still have some dozen colostomy bags the hospice nurse left here during mother’s decline — to that place where we dissipate before we disappear completely. I use these bags as disposable ice packs. I have one bound around my left temple now from the blow I took last night in my sleep. The headache won’t abate.

Anyway, here I sit unable to think or eat. I can’t eat because I’m having a colonoscopy later today and I’ve been ordered to fast. And I’ve been trying to write something reasonable in my journal, while my head pounds and my stomach groans. It’s damn near impossible.

My psychiatrist suggested that I keep this journal. I don’t think it helps much of anything. She plies me with pills to insure my level mood. She wants me within my “window of tolerance.” She says I have to be less intractable around others.

“If not an altogether more pleasant misanthrope?” I tell her.

But now I’m unable to write anything meaningful because Eris is half awake and wandering about the house. And this headache is cleaving my corpus callosum.

She’s now in the kitchen, filling yet another colostomy bag with ice. She’s complaining that her right wrist hurts and that her hand is swollen. She’s using the remaining gauze tape from the lancing of my thigh pustules to bind the colostomy ice bag to her knuckles.

Oh, what a wretched hypnopompia.

“There is a great deal to be learned from programs, courses, and teachers. But I suggest working equally hard, throughout your life, at learning new things on your own, from whatever sources seem most useful to you.”

— Lydia Davis

On My Sixteenth Birthday

When my estranged father offers to drop acid with me, I start to believe his story.

“I was driving my bus over the I-195 bridge.”

He draws an arc in the air.

“The bus was full of passengers when the acid kicked in.”

He drops his arm, sharp as a T-rule.

“I didn’t think I’d make it across the bridge. The world shifted: the bay now behind me; the bus lifted into the sky — horizontal planes became vertical.”

He floats his right fist off his left forearm.

“We, the bus, everything, drifting off into space.”

He smiles.

“The first time you do it, it should be with someone you trust. Open your hand.”

“You have a lot of people who aren’t good at writing yet telling you what to change about the way that you’re writing… It’s a lot of mediocrity feeding on itself. So you better be radical, and you better hate everyone. Not that I did personally, but that I had to if I was going to protect the thing in me that I knew I wanted to grow.”

— Ottessa Moshfegh

found in ICA Miami elevator.

Burn the Witch

(from 30 Stories in 30 Songs)

He sat eating what he thought was the best chicken noodle soup he’d ever had.  It was chock full of carrots, translucent slivers of onions, noodles, and hearty chunks of chicken. 

“This is exquisite,” he told the waitress when she came to refill his water glass.  “And this is a small bowl?!  Unbelievable, this is a meal.”  It really was the best soup he’d ever had, he wrote in his journal.

What he couldn’t work out is just what kind of regional spin on this dish he was having. He was accustomed to having some lime with his chicken soup in tropical climes, but it was the chicken that was unusual.  It was darker than usual, even for dark meat, and a bit tougher, but quite tasty because it had been marinated so well and it had become one with the other ingredients; it seemed as if the chicken had spent the perfect amount of time stewing in the soup.  It was fantastic, this “sopa de pollo grimalkina.”

“¿Señorita, por favor,” he intoned in his best studied Spanish, “que tipo de pollo es este?”

The young waitress stood mute, staring at him as if he’d said something offensive.

“Señorita…”

She ran into the kitchen.  After a some time there were some raised voices, and a pleasant looking man came out to speak with him.  He repositioned his pants, pulling them up by his belt over his rounded stomach.  He wiped the sweat from his bald pate and ran the hands through the hair on the sides of his head.

“Señor, is everything all right with your lunch?”

“Yes, yes.  The soup is outstanding, but I think the young lady misunderstood.  I merely want to know what type of chicken this is.  Is it a rooster?  Is it a feral island species?  What is it?”

“Well, señor, thank you.  But this is a family recipe, a secret recipe that we just can’t share.  The cook, my wife, would not allow me back into the conjugal bed if she knew I told you.  It is her special recipe.”

“I see, so her family’s name must have been Grimalkina, yes?”

“Ah… um… yes, of course.  I will tell her you enjoy it very much.  I will have my daughter bring you a mojito, on the house, as you say.”

“Well, thank you.”

The man returned to the kitchen, and within a minute the young woman returned with the drink.  Quite strong, he thought.  Having the strongest mojito ever, he wrote in his journal.  This will get me shit-faced in this heat.

Upon finishing his lunch he asked to speak to the man again, and thanked him for the drink anew, and added, “compliments to the chef, tell your wife she made the best soup I have ever tasted.”

As he left, he stopped a few steps away from the restaurant in the street.  This was a “paladar” after all, he reviewed to himself; this is their home.  I bet if I looked around out back I can find the coop and see the chickens, maybe a picture with my phone…

He crept up the side of the house, walking gingerly around the boxes and buckets.  The thick pink and red hibiscus shrubs provided cover from a direct sight-line from the kitchen.  At the back of the yard he found no coop or chicken cages.  There was an odd corrugated metal garbage can that seemed ancient below a mango tree.  Some odd tufts spread around the base of the tree.  As he came nearer he shuddered, his stomach seemed to need to float out of his body through his chest.

He felt dizzy as he stood among these tufts and realized it was fur.  Fur in different colors.  He felt repulsed as he took the sticky garbage lid from the can.  He began to retch and eventually began to vomit into the can.  He vomited on what was clearly half a dozen carcasses.  Dogs?  No, Cats.

Am I swooning? he thought.  As he fell he saw the three of them coming out of the back of the house.  The man had a cleaver, his daughter had a carving knife, and the other woman, an imposing block of a human being, had a tenderizing mallet and a large pot in hands.  The last thing he heard was the tinny strains of Radiohead’s “Burn the Witch” coming from some distance.  He could not reconcile this, not here, not now.

They’re witches, he thought.  He reached for his phone, but swatted at the air instead.  He stared at the solitary stratocumulus tacked to the sky.  He felt a searing sensation reticulating sharply out from his chest, as the three heads blotted out the sky.

“This is why writing workshops can be a little dangerous, it should be said; even the teachers or leaders of such workshops can be a little dangerous; this is why most of your learning should be on your own. Other people are often very sure that their opinions and their judgments are correct.”
— Lydia Davis, Essays

Disappearer

I make people disappear. Someone has to do it. The pay is just that good. Haven’t you ever wondered where all the people that disappear mysteriously go? I do too. I wonder where the kids and women — it’s mostly kids and women, there’s occasionally a man requested, but it’s mostly kids and women of a certain age they want. So I know the first part of the answer to that question of where they go. I’m one of the men responsible for taking them, we are legion. Someone has to be responsible for handling these people first. But where they end up after I pass them along? That’s as much as a mystery to me as it is to you. I wonder. I have my ideas about it.

I work alone on my end…

“The most regretful people on earth, are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
— Mary Oliver

Whig Man

Millard Fillmore greeted me on my laptop today
He was the featured article on Wikipedia today
He was the last Whig to serve as president
He seemed to have a wig on in “Fillmore in 1849”
The Brady daguerreotype
He looks a man run down as Vice President
He later ran as a nativist
A secret Know Nothing
Up from poverty
In with widow Caroline
(I did acid with Caroline)
Out with ink
And a stroke
Of compromise
And fugitive slavery
Palavering after Johnson
The impeached
Compromiser of compromises

” I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged, damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.”

— MAY SARTON

Pandemic Haiku

Febrile and tranquil

He submits to the sickness

He gives up the fight

“Avoid the world, it’s just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.”

— Jack Kerouac

110 Words

Even if it’s just a few desultorily drawn up words at the end of the world, on the butt end of pandemics… Why are we here anyway? What does it really matter? Well, we spend our lives constructing meaning out of meaningless things, and when we are bereft of these meaningless things we are unhappy and feel we have been robbed of something. But what if the something never meant anything… then why? All I have to do is write toward the number 100, and then that suffices for this exercise, and then I’m ten words short, then six, then two… then three over… then that’s enough at 110 words…

“I tell my students what I tell myself, write every day, even if it’s only a few lines, an image, a funny rhyme, a snatch of overheard conversation. All this is like chopped vegetables for the soup pot or witches cauldron of poems.”

— Dorianne Laux

His One Consolation

“Heh,” she says. “Heh!”

He doesn’t say much of anything. His hands are tied, but not his feet — so it’s easy for him to get up walk to the kitchen and use the scissors with a backwards grasp to cut himself free of his hand restraints while she is doing her make up. Instead of surprising her with an all out assault, he walks out into the sunshine and walks away toward the police station a mile down the road. But she strikes him down with her new car. Her car  is really more of an assault SUV — she’s certainly using it in this manner — and she quickly disposes of him. His body a mangled mess caught under the chassis. His one consolation as he was crushed , then mashed, was that he fouled up her new transmission.

“We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
— Henry James

Buzzards on Parade

The twelfth day of the month was Copperhead Wednesday. Serpentine was the look we were going for. Beatific upper register notes is what Maria was reaching for: Ta da la ta da la dao, was what she sang to a supper club of adoring mengeese eyeing a pair of lady rattlesnakes. Midnight. Thursday morning. Applause. Thunderous.

Savorous twistings of moonglow hairs into chignons and much dispensing with shoes and underthings. There was nothing like a cobra line dance to make it libertine-free and parsimonious-lite.

I, the author, heard someone order a chocolate stout. “Not served here,” was the reply. Vehement — something akin to buzzards on parade: wing-wide convection current surfing loafers — something free, not imagined, not paid for, not patented and surely made to disappoint.

Asseverations to “live fully and create in the midst of the desert” notwithstanding, Maria went home alone.

“I think the advice I wish I had learned is that there are agony days and hate days and days you just can’t turn off that “writer” voice in your head. Sometimes, you really don’t know why you’re doing this—but you keep doing it. And I think if that’s how you feel: The having to do it, that inner drive, then you ARE a writer, and then the rest is just the details of refining and homing your skills.”

— Anna Davies

My name is a wall

I’m changing my name.  Like most of us I had no hand in choosing my name, but unlike many of you my name pays homage to a bad man, and my association with him has come to an end.  Oh, it doesn’t really matter that he was a violent man, responsible for the murder-suicide that took my dear mother from me.  I’m quite a violent man myself.  Violence is always with me at the peripheries of my consciousness.  Waiting.  Always coiled and ready to strike.  Anyway, I don’t wish to dwell on that — his violence or mine — I won’t mention it again.  I’m sorry now that I did say anything.  I want to rid myself of his name because it lacks a certain euphony:

X X.

In my mind it strikes a timbre most foul.  

“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.”
— Lord Byron