Fruit, then Death

Cantaloupes are lovely orbs of pleasure and death, holding on to gilded softness until they are hurled at someone’s orbiting skull in the middle of a fight late at night in their apartment when the only thing in reach is the semi-softening fruit kept on the counter. (The knife block is several steps away, and something is needed more for the dramatic effect rather than a puncture wound in the pancreas). Listen to the thup that it makes as it hits the head right on the head; instead of cantaloupe bits spraying this way and that, it falls to the floor in perfect symmetry, simple halves flashing their orange flesh, dotted with mold. Their head will be fine; the cantaloupe, on the other hand, looks past its prime.

helen's campaign office

Helened Part 2

You may remember the obstruction: a boy from Korea with Asperger's trying to train (and set up a campaign office) for Helen, our cat. I wish I had a scanner that could scan with higher resolution, but maybe you'll be able to read some of this, especially if you double-click on the image. You can see how he sees and retains advertising and what he sees on the news and tries to synthesize it to make sense of his world. Here's "Helen's NEW TReaSURY of movie, helen at 'Catch Movie' is make sense by helen can make"... 

my favorite lines: 

- stop tormenting of helen! Jobs? no!

- alone? helen package send golden stars, you got chip!

- helen don't have coin! 

- no matters begained! 

Never Love In Syndey

Stray sidereal material wipes out Wendy’s in Sydney. Luckier than Lindy, waitress and witness, Cindy from Windy City, survives eleventh hour meteor shower on managerial smoke break. Later etches epitaph in graphite: Amur, my cook and kitchen paramour, my laughing neophyte, you lost your life to starlight more solid than ethereal.

Accounts

Library fines were holding him back. He was positively addicted to books. The fines were lower than the rates on his credit cards but that didn’t make him feel much better. They added up. And up and up and up. Video rental stores got rid of the fines if you complained enough, but not libraries. Libraries were tough. They knew him by name when he went in their now, the pretty librarian, the sassy librarian, the music librarian. He wondered what nicknames they had for him. There were lots of people he hadn’t paid back, in many ways, but only the library really bothered him, because it was stable.

Blackbirds and trying to be like Craig

From the roof, I can see the sea. Where the blue of the sky hangs over water during the day, there is a black deep as a hole in the night, something I wish I could reach through to the other side even though I know there won’t be anything else there until I have created it. Some days I want to reach anyway.
Those are the days when I can’t seem to move past the fact that I ate a sandwich for breakfast and then stared at the blank white space for an hour, for two hours, for three until the page started to swim like it already had the words trapped within it. Why couldn’t I find the right ones? They were already there somewhere.
When we had picnics in the part, my mother would pretend to scare away the ants because I was always so afraid of them. That stayed with me. Sometimes I cannot create anything because I am nervous there is a whole line of ants marching up and down the wall behind my head and I can’t see them only because I am not looking.
With my eyes closed, I can still smell the salt that drips from the air. I constantly feel like I am covered in a layer of it, but the sensation does not bother me as it once did. Instead of showering constantly, in a series of attempts to stay clear and focus on things besides the physicalness of me in the chair feeling coated in salt, I pretend that it doesn’t matter.
Like it doesn’t matter that I haven’t been able to get out these words before. Even though the message has been in my head for months and I keep trying and keep ending up nowhere or lost or lost in the middle of nowhere.
I like it best, even I am lost while driving my car, to find illegal places to make u-turns. Better, busy places where I can make three-point turns. This way, even though I am lost, I feel like I have accomplished something by getting away with it.
I always used to get caught. But once I started being less obvious, I got away with a lot more. It was a nice feeling.
The most used key on the board is the delete. Uncreating is almost as good as actually creating. I am saving the world from all the crap that it doesn’t need to see. So even if the page is blank at the end of the day, I’ve accomplished the filling of it and the erasing of what was making it full. That’s nearly like accomplishing two things when I set out only for one.
I used to spend a lot more time on the roof. Especially at night, when I could sneak up there without anyone knowing. I was allowed up there, if only because there was no one to stop me. But something about being up there, that much closer to the sky, without anyone really being able to pinpoint where I was made me feel free.
Someone once gave me a sleeve of cds that were nothing but mix upon mix of Elliott Smith songs. I liked each one better than the last until the last one. Then I started to feel sad and thought about the way he had killed himself and wondered if the person who had given me the cds was trying to tell me something either about myself or about herself. I never asked; actually, I never saw her again.
The things I keep coming back to are this same file in the computer, the way the salt clings to me and the air, the ants my mother is no longer here to scare off, fear itself, and the way the delete key has started to wear away in the middle from all the times I’v

Weep Holes

The man fixing my windows was a boat-builder until his fingers curled up and his arms got too weak to portage on dry land. Now he’s taking apart my sash, plaining the edges, hammering a thin sheet of steel that whistles in the air before he anchors it to the wood.

Boatbuilding, he says, is a hard business.

He explains the mechanics of the window, how the sills and the frames are made at the same time and mounted as one piece. It’s always best to keep the original parts together. You can rebuild, he says, but it it’ll never be the same.

When I ask him where he lives he says, “forty miles from here.”

My grandparent’s house was built by a boat-builder. You would see the floor if you tried to look in the mirror hanging on the dining room wall. My grandmother swore there was a keel running through the center of the house.

Don’t ever let the rot spread from the sills.

When he looks outside he sees the brick upon brick of my neighbor’s house, old oak trees in the yard, the swing-set my children don’t use any more, a six-foot tall fence. Lake Michigan is just beyond here, but too far off to see.

Don't ever get a bend in your keel or you'll never sail straight again.

We don’t have a basement. When it rains in the spring I sometimes imagine my house coming loose off its moorings and drifting away from here, leaving the neighbors, the trees, the swing-set and the fence far behind.

Well aren’t you lucky, he says.

He shoves his screwdriver into a hole under the storm window, leans over and blows the dust away. Not many houses have them, he explains. You've got weep holes so nothing can build up. You've got a steady source of escape.

 He wasn't talking about the house.