Thu, 19 May 2005

The Candles Will Blow Themselves Out
We split up over the cereal. I’d been sent to the supermarket in order to buy food and drink for the evening’s party, both of us dead-set on continuing our entertaining the small nebula of friends we’d gathered, showing off the rug she’d bought for a song back home in Vancouver over the holidays. She’d left the brand of wine and type of cheese foolishly up to me, but made particular emphasis on my getting enough strawberries. She’d learned how to make this soft chocolate thing and was certain chocolate and strawberries would put our edgy friends at ease, sauce licked from fingertips and all. While at the market, wandering around in a blur as an excuse to spend as much time out of the house as possible, I saw a few bruised-looking boxes of Jack Catastrophe cereal on the clearance shelf, next to unlabeled cans of mystery vegetables and orphaned children’s toys for unobserved birthdays. Jack Catastrophe was a children’s show I used to watch as a youth religiously every Saturday and later, in syndication, after coming home from janitorial work at six in the morning, syndicated on the small Mason City channel, in which gunslinger Jack Catastrophe had his thumbs sliced by a gang of fugitives, which drove him well over the edge of acceptable society, resulting in institutionalization, phlebotomy, electropathy and the isolation box. While in the box, Jack begins to imagine a series of gallant adventures in which God assists his righteous cleansing of the wild west by providing an angel disguised as a doctor who can heal any wound. Jack becomes a one-man wrecking crew with the good doctor’s help, running through walls and leaping from trains and playing chicken with stagecoaches. As the episodes went on, it became unclear whether or not these delusions were entirely fictitious or if one of the doctors actually was bringing Jack out to do profoundly life-threatening crimefighting. I’m not sure how the series ended; apparently the actor who played Jack Catastrophe became convinced of the reality of his role and was killed jumping from one limo to another on the way to his thirtieth birthday party and the show was immediately pulled from most markets, including Mason City, while the marketing juggernaut chugged to a halt.

This would be the last time I would see a box of Catastrophe Flakes, I thought. He looked out over the supermarket, pistols in his fists and the unhinged grin of someone who would never ever die. I tired to remember how many years it’d been since I first watched this show, tried to remember the actor’s name. It was all slipping away from me. The cereal must have been tucked away in some hidden corner where the clerks never bother to go, fallen behind toilet paper or detergent.

When I told her I had spent all the party money buying twelve boxes of stale cereal she sighed, began calling people to inform them the party was off, and started packing.

That was when I started thinking about going back on my medication.
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #