Thu, 19 May 2005

Why Don’t You Go Fuck Yourself
You could tell I had been taking sleeping pills and drinking because it took me such a long time to tell you how this time I really truly was gonna kill myself and there was nothing you could do about it. You had just fallen in love with a young minister, and you felt your love for him to connect you to a god you could believe in by proxy, and thus the thin paper-sack thud of your heartbeat tried to swell with sympathy and joy for the self-righteous hours of contemplation as to how to protect yourself you had to keep yourself away from me, I had forced your hand, you tried and tried but there’s only so far one can go, and you started in on this line early, maybe too tired for the crying jag you usually nestled down into after accepting the charges. I was into the standard bit, the the only pride you can have is that the universe had to work to crush you, that the prime mover had to turn off the assembly line to find your broken body on the ground and smash it with its own hands instead of the regulation hammer, you know, some shit like that, when you started in on this how you couldn’t bear to listen to my last words and hung up the phone.

Then your preacherman answered, so as to give me a stern talking to, I thought of something I said back when I lived in Iowa City, and I’ll never forget it: “Let me tell you how it is I’m gonna go about fucking your wife.” The reason I’ll never forget that is almost immediately after I became the endpoint for a series of head and body blows, all of which I had coming, was why I fell back and let it happen. I thought about saying it to the rev, but it didn’t make any sense, and in the five minutes it took me to figure this out he had managed to say all sorts of unsaintly things as to my character and hung up again, and there’s only so many times in a day a person can take being hung up on, so I went to the Goodwill and bought a couple steak knives and sat on the curb trying to look unbalanced but nobody would look at me, like I wasn’t even there.

So now that I’ve fucked up your life forever, now that none of your friends can look you in the eye again, now that you had to buy new sheets and new carpeting and new drapes and new silverware just to stay in your own home, now that you’ve finish the last round of injections and checkups, now that you have to drive twelve miles across town because the local grocer won’t sell to you anymore, now that the cops have reduced their prowls down your street to twice a night, now that your fingernails are growing back in, now that you’ve found at least three of your rings in the display cases of local pawn shops, now that you’re starting to think maybe you can get off the cigarettes and amphetamines and actually get a night’s sleep in peace, now that you can walk across the bathroom floor without having to watch each step, now that you’re no longer afraid to check your answering machine, now that the children at the bus stop no longer scream witch and throw pinecones and are content to run away and hide in Eltzlen’s garage, now that you’ve nearly paid off all the bad checks and missed bills, now that you can hold something in your hand and not fear for letting it go, now we should talk about when I’m gonna get my fucking records back.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #