Thu, 19 May 2005

Owen And Rissa
Owen’s mom has been really weird lately because she thinks maybe she’s getting into bondage, but Owen thinks really she just wants to become an escape artist. He was telling her about Houdini and how there’s no way what Houdini did was a sin against God, no way. This settled her quite a bit and the two of them worked on the harnessing designs until I came in and tried to explain to Owen my idea that the cross was really a means of preventing the bodily ascension of Christ, only the Roman guards who placed him on the cross really were Christians at heart and this is why he was crucified through the palms and feet instead of the wrists and ankles, as was standard operating procedure, and thus all the religious iconography and tales of bleeding stigmata are perfectly accurate, and then Owen’s mom got all freaked out again.

Speaking of Jesus, this was November First, which three years ago became Angel Day, where the spawn of Cedar Valley Conglomerated Church dressed their children in tinfoil haloes and old worn linens and marched them door to door to sing hymns and hand out toothbrushes. Vermin. Three of these mewling rugrats were at the door, singing a self-scripted hymn entitled "Proper Dental Attitude" when Owen invited them in and hacked them to little bits.

Owen wants me to tell you that’s not really true; he didn’t really hack any children up. We did slip them some Pixie-Stix and Mexican Skull Candy, though, and I’d like to think they’re currently bouncing around their minivans, tweaking on their belated sugar rush.

Owen was double-fisting cans of Original Scent today; there were special guests on their way, and the entire building had to be antiseptic’d for fear of the “musical entertainment and guests” coming down with some foul sickness. Kids in short-pants were standing around the entryway, sucking on lollipops handed out by a orange-vested and befez’d Shriner, and the employees were meddling just outside, smoking and debating over the day’s entertainments. An off-duty checked closets and supply rooms for threat and suspicious activity; finding none, he blew a wolf-whistle and the roadies entered, pushing flat black amps like monoliths. The preparations went on until just past lunch, at which point a large hairy man wearing as much gold as clothing (I’ll leave it to you to decide which way that scale sways) sweeps the area with a beeping box. The large hairy man decides, after listening to the beeping for ten minutes that the room doesn’t have “proper geometry” and that the sheer sonic force of a Cthulhu’s Fishermen show would destroy the building and everyone in it. The roadies, apparently used to this, begin to haul the equipment back out to the parking lot, the Shriner sighs and gives the remaining box of lollipops to a little boy in lederhosen, and we’re all subjected to the “backup entertainment” — Kathy from Rent N Putt (across the street, in Dowager Park) belting out Karen Carpenter emo-faves, all broken on her need to scream the high notes. Owen started thinking about maybe finding room in his schedule for that heroin habit he’s been planning for a year and shooed the kids away, back to the park, the entertainment over.

It’s Saturday, which means Owen has to baby-sit his cousin Shelly’s new baby. Well, *has to* isn’t necessarily accurate: it’s more his being less opposed to child-cleaning than the other potential applicants and the Gordon situation (that’s his nephew’s name, well, not Gordon Situation, which is a bit too nuevo-wavo for a three month old) neatly absolves him of looking for Saturday night entertainment. Getting to kick back in the deviously comfortable recliner, whip up formula and watch hours of satellite-delivered schlock films, unfortunately, eventually leads to self-introspection of the sort that wakes owen up at three am later that night, all itchy to fix his life and right all his wrongs. Gordon provides a solid and trustworthy oracle for future-plotting questions, a talcum powder and spit-up smelling magic eight ball.

“So Gordo, Beastmaster or Prom Night II?”

“agaph.”

“Beastmaster it is. The babies…I can see through their eyes…Okay, real question. This thing with me and school. So I’m trying to figure out what I’m gonna do after I grow up, which I was thinking I was gonna try to Section Eight out of in my basement but I’m kinda bored with that and it’s not getting me any chicks. And I don’t wanna clean up people’s shit forever. And I don’t think anybody’s gonna pay me to hang out and be cool, so I have to do this stupid school thing again. And It’s gonna eat up more of my life, and I’m gonna be here that much longer, and it means I have to go out and be a human. Which I’m kinda so-so at. I think that’s what’s bugging me. So you’ve been human for a few months now; is it cool or overrated?”

“apf. aaaaaaaaaa ah phft.”

“Yeah, maybe. But you still get to shit in your pants, so I’m gonna take that with…man, Mark Singer rules.”

“aialpff.”

Owen can skip rocks off the surface of the lake back behind his farm like a motherfucker. He hasn’t done it for a couple years, since the night he came back here, drunk, looking to find the place where his child-years fort was. There’s been no wind all day; earlier in the week there were terrible thunderstorms which pulled up trees down the road, but that front’s blown itself out, and now the lake is broken only by algae clusters and lillypads. Owen can hit the far shore, given the right-shaped rock, but all he’s found today is pebbles. Three skips is the best you can get with pebbles like this. Owen wishes he had a reason for feeling like he does. Some great catastrophe, some infinite loss. It’s essentially just another day, nothing particularly wrong, actually fairly good, as these things go. Most of the life things are taken care of, the papers signed, the i’s dotted, the t’s crossed. Everybody seems pretty well taken care of. Even the biologicals seem well, no vomiting all week, no illness, good food. Maybe these things don’t have reasons, answers. Maybe there’s no explaining b by means of a. Back during the drought, Miller put up barbed-wire across the diameter of the lake to keep his cows out of the access. Miller doesn’t bring his cows down this way anymore, not with the lake, not now that he can set them to graze out by the highway, but that fence is still there, sinking down about twenty feet out, coming back up about twenty feet from the far shore. Owen can hit the posts on the far fence with the small stones, three skips, every time. Every single time.

Owen’s family was so poor when they were young that his mother used to bind her children’s feet with duct tape so as to squeeze a couple more months of use from their shoes. That’s why he walks like that. Never would have guessed, huh?

There’s freighters leaving every two hours from the harbor, down the Mississippi, you can stow for ten bucks or a bottle of cheap bourbon, get down to St. Louis, where Owen has a couple friends farming pot and salvaging scrap from foreclosed farms. From there it’d be a two-day all-night burn straight across, over the mountains, to the ocean. Easiest thing in the world.

There were a gaggle of children in angel’s costumes today, tinfoil haloes and gossamer wings. Like it was supposed to mean something, or something.
(12:10.05.19.2005) [/alpha/owenrissa] #