Thu, 19 May 2005

conversations
“It’s fucked up . I kept thinking to myself, that whole time, that I needed to put everything else aside and not be fucked up anymore. And that was good for me, I think, but it just now hit me — I’m not fucked up anymore. I can actually deal with things. I keep scheduling my life on brain-damage time: stay up at night so as not to have to deal with people, keep your goals short-term and reasonable, trust simplicity, relish stability, cope. Good things, generally. But I don’t need that anymore, not now, I’m not brain-damaged or stupid or fucked up. I have to stop being such a fucking victim, start being honest, stop being safe.”

“Yeah. I mean, that’s good, it’s good, but. And don’t get me the wrong way, but I’ve heard this speech from you before. And you do okay, for a little bit, but you end up being you again. Which isn’t bad, but it’s not this, this thing you keep talking about. It’s all bursts and crashes with you.”

“So I think then, what I need to do, I create a situation where it’s impossible to be me anymore.”

“Yeah, but what does that actually entail?”

“I’m not sure. It’s a process. That’s the beauty part.”

….

“I don’t listen to music anymore. I just noticed that.”

“Like you don’t go hunt up obscure shit.”

“No, no. I mean like anything. Nothing at all. I tried to listen to Ligetti today and after about a minute i just had to turn it off. And you know, I love Ligetti. So I tried all sorts of things. I put on Can and Sarah Vaughan and Nurse With Wound and Fridge and Prince and Monolake and nothing, I mean nothing, sounded like something I wanted to listen to. I’m beginning to suspect I just don’t want to hear anything.”

“Well, that’s not good.”

“Yeah, no shit.”

“Maybe it’s a cutting yourself off thing.”

“Well, that’s obvious. I mean, look at me. I’m a mess. I’m cheerleading my getting out of bed in the morning. But this, well.”

“Indeed. I think you should go into hiding.”

“You think?”

“Oh, fuck yes. Absolutely.”

“Of course, you’re a corpse.”

“That doesn’t invalidate a good idea.”

….

“So you’re saying they tried to impeach you?”

“Hell, they snagged me on a couple things.”

“And they’re still in office?”

“Yes sir. Nothing I can do about it.”

“Pigshit! Fire the fuckers, Bill! Punk those fuckers like I did Primakov and Stepashin! Kill ‘em all! Like Ubu!”

“Who? Who is Ubu?”

“Very sad, Bill, you do not know. I wrote essay all about in my new book ‘The Duma Can Suck My Red Cock: Boris’s List of People In History He Wishes He Could Have Fired By Boris Yeltsin’. You really should look into it. Plenty of time you’ll have, sitting in the hotel room waiting for the little woman to come back from the campaign, ha ha!”

“Screw you, Badanov, this is my ticket out.”

“Oh Bill. So sad, so sad you do not know how to flush your conscience down the toilet.”

“Just like the ruble, huh.”

“Very much fuck you.”

….

“In fact, in order to have your complete trust as your Docktor, I’ll agree to treat you likewise.”

“As a docktor, you mean.”

“Indeed.”

“But what good is this newfound professionalism if we don’t have a patient?”

“Oh, but we’re both patients as well. At the same time. That’s the beauty.”

“If you say so. Have you seen my vibra-saw?”

….

"Every time I open my mouth a turd falls out."

“You know what I really want? It’s like, like you and I have known each other since we were little kids. And you’ve been there for me every time something has happened, and you’ve always been the person I talk to. And that sucks, because it’s like I don’t even need to talk now, it’s like you alraedy know what I’m gonna say, and so what’s the point of me even, y’know, even being here? What I really want, really, is to be able to suprise you, to toally come from out of nowhere and just totally fucking blindside you. I want you to lay in bed at night and wonder just what the hell is going on with me, what I’m thinking, where I’m going. I want you to take absolutely nothing for granted with me. I want you to wonder about me. That’s what I want.”

“Yeah, okay, fine. I don’t know you. Who even knows what you’re gonna do, even, because you’re just so crazy. Batton down the hatches, boys.”

“You’re not listening to me!”

“That’s because I don’t have the slightest fucking idea what you’re talking about! I happen to like the fact that I know you, that I can trust you, that you’re someone I can count on. I’m sorry if I’m holding you back or something by being your friend. Maybe you’ve outgrown me, or something, I don’t know…”

“No! Why are you such a fucking martyr? Why is every simple thing just an excuse for you to fuck up?”

“What?”

“I didn’t…I’m not saying this right…”

“Yeah, well, it’s always nice to talk to you, take care, hope everything works out for you, don’t take any wooden nickels.”

“Dammit, no, just wait a second, don’t run away from me.”

….

“I am very worried about you. I think you are sad. Everything you write makes me sad. It makes everybody sad.”

“I won’t write anymore.”

“That would make me sad.”

“I don’t want to make people sad.”

“Then don’t be sad.”

“I’m not sad.”

“I think you’re lying. that makes me sad.”

“Okay. I am sad.”

“Your being sad makes me sad.”

“What should I do?”

“I wish you had your shit together. If you have to ask me what to do, you’re still fucked up. That makes me sad.”

“There is no right answer to this, is there?”

“There is no answer at all.”

….

“I don’t much see what good having a kid is if you’re not willing to train him to be a miner. He’s not going to be that small for much longer.”

“He a miner, he got no strength to do his chores. He’s useless to us then. I didn’t pass his little deformed body through my womanly flower just to have him wasting the best of his energies not even contributing to the upkeep of this household.”

“But wife, love of my life and my loins, that’s what the punishing rod is for. You can’t let the children of today off just because they were born into an age of vice and depravity; that’s how they end up in those street gangs.”

“But that’s how we did that first child, and by the time her spine broke there wasn’t enough of her left to feed the dogs. You remember that, boy?”

“Why do you guys always have to be so weird when I have friends over? And they don’t think you’re cool, you know, you’re just embarassing. God. Why don’t you go watch a documentary or something?”

“You see what I mean, husband? That’s the kind of talk they learn in the mines. A couple months digging sulfur and all they want to do is curse your name while they drink bourbon from the mouths of whores. Better we put him in the bag and throw him in the river.”

“Hush, wife, there’s witnesses about.”

“Would you PLEASE just get OUT of my ROOM, PLEASE?”

….

I saw her at goodwill today. I was browsing vinyl and she was looking for sweaters, it being near-fall. I asked her how the painting was going and she told me she didn’t do any of that crap anymore, decided it was time to leave all that college-wannabe-artist bullshit in the past.

“Yeah,” I nodded.

When she asked me what she was doing now, I told her I was a baker. Which I was, at one point. I told her she was stupid not to be painting anymore, and she shrugged.

“If you keep having imaginary conversations with people and emailing them off, people will think you’re a psycho,” she told me.

“I’m not a psycho. I’m a writer.”

“Whatever,” she said.

….

“It’s suggestive of an inner conflict.”

“Oh stop it, it is not.”

“No, really. You’ve been like this, throwing up, migranes, forever. I think it’s your body telling you about keeping things inside.”

“So you’ve been reading Cosmo again.”

“Seriously, i think maybe that’s part of it.”

“Where’s Pookah? Did you let her in?”

“Listen, we need to talk about this. It’s not getting any better, and-”

“Do we have any more water?”

“Don’t just-”

“What do you buy when you go to the grocer?”

“I’m-”

“Pookah? Pookah?”

….

“I’m sick of listening to you whine about this. Either you do it and get it over with or you shut up about it and go on with your life. It’s fucking absurd.”

“You just don’t think I’ll do it.”

“Listen, I don’t care. Either way. Just cut out all this ridiculous melodrama, you’re cheapening it. You should just wake up one morning, bathe yourself, look out at the sunrise, and do it. And if you don’t do it, then no one will know, and it’ll be over.”

….

“Well, proper and complete blueprint drawn up, you don’t even really need to erect the building. Always a compromise, son.”

“You’re kidding me. You’re pulling my leg.”

“Listen, you will remember later in life the majesty of this plan, this plan we designed. To make some ramshackle betrayal of that plan will be to tarnish your memory forever. I can’t have such a thing on my conscience.”

“I told everybody. ‘Kick-assingest treehouse ever’, I said. ‘We’ll have pizza and pop and everything’. Is what i said.”

“On my death bed, you in tears, all how we should never have built the treehouse. Imagine the moment. Focus on the details. The color of the eyeliner tainting your mother’s tears, wailing in the hallway. You want this?”

“Steve Divitz’s treehouse. With a slide and everything. We rode our bikes down it once and Kev nearly got brain damaged. We’ll have to keep doing it if I don’t get a safe place to play. And I’ll do it, too.”

“The locus for your first adolescent gropings, the center of your later shame. Stains and apologies. Treehouses since time began are nothing but parent-sanctioned fuck bunkers. I have to keep to a modicum of respectability.”

“Stop creeping me out, Dad. Steve and I will have to be gay lovers so as to grant me treehouse time. The affection I didn’t get at home I’ll just have to find out on the mean streets of Twin Pine Terrace. I’ve got Springer on the phone as we speak.”

“You and your little hump buddies do whatever experimenting you will, but not in the cedars I planted myself, mister. And I can’t in any decency permit these high-powered rock cannons. The least of my parental duties is not building the child weapons. I have the handbook in the den.”

“You get a den and I get to sit in the compost heap shoving eggshells into my mouth. That hardly seems conscionable.”

“How about I just buy you a new bike?”

“Deal.”

….

[Crappy Chef, CF IA, 1:38 am Monday October 11 1999 ce.]

“What is that?”

“That I’m reading?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a book of essays. It’s pretty good.”

“Are you a teacher? Or something?”

“No. I’m a lumberjack.”

“And you’re okay, right?”

“No, seriously, I’m a lumberjack.”

“Not a lot of deep woods around here for lumberjacking.”

“Not anymore there ain’t.”

“Oh, so what has a tree ever done to you, anyway?”

“You must not be familiar with the folklore of my people. Trees are infamous for reaching in the windows of homes and pulling babies from their sleep, smashing their skulls on their trunks and laughing to themselves knowing nobody would ever suspect a tree. Well, I suspected the trees. And I exacted a dire vengeance for their murderous arborial ways.”

“Yeah, okay. What-ever. Do you have any more cream?”

….

“So I started praying again.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. It’s kinda weird.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah, I’m praying to have less patience and compassion and understanding. I’m praying to become hard and small and tired.”

“You don’t say. Wait, but that’s crazy.”

“Why is that crazy?”

“Why would you want to be those things?”

“Because I’m tired of praying for things I’m never going to have.”

“Shit. We’re almost there.”

“Run this stopsign. Just go. Nobody’s coming.”

“Nobody’s coming?”

“Go. Run it.”

“She’s still there?”

“No, no. She’s sleeping. Fuckin’ go, already.”

“Is she breathing?”

“Of course she’s breathing. Stop being all, like, a bigger thing about it.”

“What?”

“Like ‘woo-hoo, what a big adventure’.”

“I’m just driving the car, okay.”

“Go! Go through that!”

“Shut up!”

“Did you get at that?”

“Which that?”

“There, you gotta, jesus, you gotta stop and go that way, this is all around the neighborhood just to get to the highway and then to the hospital.”

“I’m not going back, if that’s what you’re saying.”

“Go back! It’s like half a minute!”

“Forget it, we’re going, it’ll be quicker.”

“You should probably talk to her, keep her awake.”

“No, you should talk to her. I don’t even fucking know her.”

“Fuck that. Do that shit at my party. I’m amazed I’m even here.”

“Well I’m driving the car, and that’s all I can do. So you better do something.”

“Shut up. Just stop talking already.”

“Fine.”

“Fine, whatever.”

“Fine.”

“You can’t even get to the hospital from here.”

“Fuck you.”

….

“Well yeah of course you would think that.”

“Because you’re just like that.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know that’s not what I meant. You’re just trying to turn this into a.”

“No. That’s just.”

“Of course not. Look, all I’m saying is that sometimes it’s just a bit much, just all at once, and you never really explain or, like, so like yesterday, when you.”

“No! No, just listen, what I mean is that you came up and then.”

“Right.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Listen, you obviously don’t want to talk to me, so maybe you should just.”
(12:06.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #