Artemis Drifting

Just because she tippietoes, doesn't mean she's a creepin'.

t-what.

February 25th, 2009 Posted in Journal
Feb, 25 2009
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I have twelve foot ceilings because a huge and scary dinosaur has chased me all my life.

Without me knowing, he contacted my real estate broker and secured enough space for him to be comfortable. Furthermore, I believe the dinosaur ordered the mirrors atop my ten foot doors. After all, there’s nothing more embarrassing than lumbering outside with a chunk of my hair and scalp wedged between incisor and canine.

I’d bet he’s probably unsettled with my move, after all, during our Tom and Jerry escapades he had plenty of room. Out in the alabama sky, he had all the head room in the world to hunt me from house to house.

I also have a large suspicion that this dinosaur suffers from dissociative identity disorder. As I have not been gobbled up yet, his greatest and most successful effort has been to make me hurry to every destination. I could be heading to the market or stumbling for a midnight pee, but I assure you – I’ll be moving at a steady clip. So in conclusion, he may have been trying to trim the fat rather than plump me up.

Does anyone know therapists that can possibly help dinosaurs that believe they’re enjoying steady enjoyment as my personal trainer?

I say dinosaurs, plurally, because I am positive at one point I had one wedge into an abandoned refrigerator box. And anyone reading this knows that once you’re within the boundaries of a refrigerator box, only your mother and a dinosaur can get past that cardboard fortress.

Additionally, it wasn’t my mother. The occupant had carrion breath, and I know without a doubt my mom is a religious brusher. While these dinosaurs may have been chasing me, I have not yet found a rinsing cup fitted for scaly beasts missing opposable thumbs.

All I am saying is this, what did I ever do to be pursued by these guys? Maybe I need to break my concerns down into bullet points. All great men solve problems by making lists.

- I have not willfully mocked dinosaurs or made gigantic omelets. I also have never left a glass of water out to tempt them to stomp around me to watch the ripples go. Never encourage the ego of a dinosaur. These are basic guidelines we all know.

-How could I have possibly not only attracted dinosaurs, but a pack of them bent on simply making me run from point A to point B?

-Is it possible for dinosaurs to inherit or make infectious this habit of chasing me down? Could either one of these theories explain how it went from just one tyrannosaurus rex to several, all with the same fixation?

I’m concerned.

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Otis.

February 24th, 2009 Posted in Journal, Snippets
Feb, 24 2009
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Absurdity once again strikes, needling me in the back of the head when I’m positive it’s cold enough outside to reassure me that reality is some serious business.

Not that I’m saying having my nose frozen is a good indicator that we’re not our own illusion, but the helplessness we suffer over the involuntary nose dripping does give pause to one’s confidence in our own control over bodily functions.

I think of the way I titter at permanent markings – the wobbly inked tattoos, grossly stretched piercings and keloid scars of enraged youths.  Doubtlessly, these people confront their decorations every day – whether by mirror, rolling up a sleeve or the second-look-head-snap of a gawker.  

What do I got?  Hypocritical hoops.  Twin bands of metal that wrap around my all too large left ear, capture beads securing them from any spontaneous itch to remove.  One, to love – the other to contain love.  The steel has become fingers in my lifebloods stream, doing what they can to slow the furious rush down just a knot or two.

But the most important reminder is the triangle of twisted white flesh at the base of my thumb, the raised blemish that has been with me for over thirteen years.  The day Otis died, when my flustered parents did all they could to shield me from his mangled body, all my concentration – truly – was on the last thing he ever gave me.  It was a gouge from his dew claw, where he jumped up onto my hips and danced with his thick mottled paw pads between my naked bony feet.  I went to push him down and then away in disgust once his eagerness left my skin split and blood running.

He was gone when the wound was still raw and angry.  He was rotting, his fat fuzzy belly distending and straining as my cut knitted and scabbed.  So I began to scratch, like I could sink my own hands into Alabama red clay and rescue him from the worms.  I pulled at the scab, I traded neosporin for lemon juice and salt.  As the maggots found their way around the deflating orbs of his eyes, skating across the foggy lenses – my cut filled with the sap of scar tissue.

Otis, the absurdity is this.  I did so much, and so little, to remember you – but in the end, the very process that consumed you and I fought to never forget will take me too.  I will become a viscous puddle of cells, and maybe, one day, the wound no one will want to disappear.

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Barn.

February 23rd, 2009 Posted in Rants, Short Stories, Snippets
Feb, 23 2009
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Beautiful boys have a way of making even the ugly things they do bearable by the adorable symmetry of their smile.

My science teacher had a fondness for injured wildlife — all but bunnies that is, and if you have any familiarity with trying to save baby wild rabbits, you’d know why.  A student had brought in an injured barn owl that my teacher had taken great pains to bring to full health.  I remember peeking over the tattered rim of the cardboard box, smelling the pungent scraps of trashed blankets that how now become its bedding.  It was a beautiful animal, but I was at the age where I still refused to be star struck by even the simplest of pleasures in life.

When it came time to release the owl, our class trooped out across the soccer field and around the newly steam-rolled tennis courts.  The outskirts of my campus led deep into the woods, and there honestly wasn’t a better spot to release the animal that the students could appreciate it without having to buss’em out to the wild yonder.  Frankly, we were already there.

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BLOCK.

February 22nd, 2009 Posted in Rants, Short Stories, Snippets
Feb, 22 2009
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When most children are palm wet with excitement at penning their own name and learning to corral their jerky little movements into BIG BLOCK LETTERS – I really hated it.

Hello, have a piece of me.

It seemed to say.

I hate personalizing things.  I break into a cold sweat at personal gifts.  I’m not an ancient egyptian reborn, I assure you, but for awhile I did not think I could handle the fingers and toes of my well intentioned friends.

I left most of my journals unsigned, more than a fair lot of my poems untitled, and arguably all of them hidden for the duration of the rash that came after creation.  I made and then itched and was absolutely not well enough to deal with the repercussions to my big ol’ mouth.  

I can tell you one thing, writing the poem about the bloodied all-seeing Jesus on the cross who is severely disappointed in you and YOU and YOU was something my sixth grade teacher caught the rash on.  Maybe it was about the gore.  Or even the tender care given to the way gore-flesh flutters in a healthy downward stream of blood like watercress.  Either way, it was bad news.

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What’s an apologetic?

February 20th, 2009 Posted in Journal, Rants, Snippets
Feb, 20 2009
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Dear Whosawhatsis,

I would like to write about a few things that have occurred to me that I’ve overlooked.  Or ignored.  The latter is far more likely.

So I’m thinkin’.  There’s quite a few people I don’t communicate with on the sole principle that they’ve gone and pissed off the few people I care about.  Well, some of them have done a little more then pissin’ on absorbent berber.  That’s asides the point.  I don’t talk to them out of the bloody rule in the south that you don’t go buddying up to knuckleheads that have reamed your kinfolk.  

It’s a rough realization knowing that behavior can be likened to sheets of metal pounded in over storm windows during a hurricane.  We do an awful lot to keep our honor intact.  I walk away the instant I feel someone’s looking down their nose at me, or curling their lip in some smarmy gear-up for a ‘verbose bashin’.  

Then I’m partway down the sidewalk with my pride, honor and dignity and I’m struck still by the frozen smile of the maid halfway down the stairs to a stately home.  The homeowner is irate, slinging insults in such a way that they were her embodied frustrations slimed up into little leeches.  Really  no other way to put it, the lady had a bad day and she was flickin’ leeches at the maid holding about fifty pounds of laundry on her way out to figure out how she was going to get the merlot stains out of those 500 thread monstrosities. 

She damn well stood there.  Smiling.  Listening to the ranting, raving, her eyelashes not even fluttering when the sticky bodies of pent up bitterness bounced off her weathered cheeks.  I’m thinking, if I was there, I’d be up those stairs feeding the lady that premium manure she more than likely insists on ordering for her goofy looking porch plants.

But you know what?  I don’t got nothing to lose.

That worker does.  She’s smilin’ because she’s ten times braver then I am.  She’s a hundred times more patient than I.  All she’s got to do is smile, lower her eyes and get into her car that don’t got more then 10k left on it’s sputtering corpse.  Because you know what?  She’s taking that pay check home.  Her kid is going to get lunches at school, her bills are going to get paid and they won’t be eating out of the bean-crock for another week.  

So I’m sitting here and thinkin’ guys .. I’m coming to the conclusion I don’t really know what honor or dignity is.  I don’t know.  

And I’m willing to bet, you don’t either.

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