“I love you l love you I love you...” I breathed into her ear as I came.
Her breath had slowed...
Both of us were done.
For years we had messed around, but this was the first time we had had sex... And in a way that used every aspect of the right-angled couch that sprawled along her one-thousand-square-foot basement...
It was supposed to be bad... Everyone we knew told us it would be. But it was like seeing the Fourth of July from the Point (which I would do much later and find analogous) in San Diego: fireworks everywhere... Unable to see it all, everything happening too quickly... The moment over before it began...
Ten years later more than made up for it.
I called her, drunk; I had had a dream in which she was killed.
It was 4 a.m. She picked up on the second ring:
“Calvin! I’ve been trying to reach you for two weeks!”
“Why? Are you OK? You’re not hurt are you?”
“No... I had this weird dream.”
“I had one too. Just now.”
“Are you OK?”
“Good, now.
“So how have you been in the ten years since we last talked to each other?”
Sunday, October 5, 2008
It Could [Have] Be[en] Sweet
(Please begin playing the Portishead selection below.)
Stereotypically, I developed a huge crush on her because she pushed me away for so long and that crush went away as soon as we slept together.
So many idiots make the mistake of waiting to sleep together. Get it fucking the fuck out of the way. The first time is horrible. You hardly even want to be naked with the person.
And christ, being told that sex was to be "something special between us" -- at our age (thirty-ish) -- was just laughable.
At thirty you damn-well-better know that all sex is is two people getting off together. Trying to make it something else corrupts the act itself and the people who buy into the idea that it's more than what it is.
...After a full month we were finally fucking and it was awkward and bad, despite the athleticism involved. I came three times, trying my best to remember each picture in the Kama Sutra.
It was nothing but a goddam performance piece... She was too loud to be believed... Then, anyway. If it had been weeks ago I would have bought it. I would have loved it. I would have joined in. ...At that time her wailing, and my belief in its contrivance, almost made me limp. I practically had to close my eyes and think of England...
All this despite the fact I had nothing but admiration for her only minutes ago. She was too like me for me to not love her (which is the more honest way of saying that we had a lot in common and I loved her because). We had already started communicating just by looking certain ways at each other.
...Naturally, after we finally had sex, that fascination with one another turned into the love one has for a sibling. And the third time we were screwing it was almost as weird as having sex with a goddam relative (I'll point out, here, that I come from a family of all [hetero] boys and unattractive cousins).
I began to think of how we were missing Aqua Teen,* and became sure she was thinking the same thing. So I pinned her knees by her ears and came within minutes, playing "Common People"** in my head to drown out the screaming of my name.
Then we lay on the bed, naked, sweaty, exhausted, the room stinking of vaginal and seminal fluid. I grabbed the remote from the floor.
The box flickered on and I was relieved to discover I had caught the last few minutes of Aqua Teen.
She curled herself around me, sighed loudly into my ear "Mmm god aren't you so glad we waited!"
She held me everywhere with all her limbs and kissed me on my face, neck and chest while I watched television, using her pillow to prop up my head.
Within thirty minutes she had put her clothes on and we lay next to each other, not touching, staring at and laughing at the television together.
*Aqua Teen Hunger Force (number one in the hood, G): see Adult Swim listings, Cartoon Channel after-hours
**Pulp
Stereotypically, I developed a huge crush on her because she pushed me away for so long and that crush went away as soon as we slept together.
So many idiots make the mistake of waiting to sleep together. Get it fucking the fuck out of the way. The first time is horrible. You hardly even want to be naked with the person.
And christ, being told that sex was to be "something special between us" -- at our age (thirty-ish) -- was just laughable.
At thirty you damn-well-better know that all sex is is two people getting off together. Trying to make it something else corrupts the act itself and the people who buy into the idea that it's more than what it is.
...After a full month we were finally fucking and it was awkward and bad, despite the athleticism involved. I came three times, trying my best to remember each picture in the Kama Sutra.
It was nothing but a goddam performance piece... She was too loud to be believed... Then, anyway. If it had been weeks ago I would have bought it. I would have loved it. I would have joined in. ...At that time her wailing, and my belief in its contrivance, almost made me limp. I practically had to close my eyes and think of England...
All this despite the fact I had nothing but admiration for her only minutes ago. She was too like me for me to not love her (which is the more honest way of saying that we had a lot in common and I loved her because). We had already started communicating just by looking certain ways at each other.
...Naturally, after we finally had sex, that fascination with one another turned into the love one has for a sibling. And the third time we were screwing it was almost as weird as having sex with a goddam relative (I'll point out, here, that I come from a family of all [hetero] boys and unattractive cousins).
I began to think of how we were missing Aqua Teen,* and became sure she was thinking the same thing. So I pinned her knees by her ears and came within minutes, playing "Common People"** in my head to drown out the screaming of my name.
Then we lay on the bed, naked, sweaty, exhausted, the room stinking of vaginal and seminal fluid. I grabbed the remote from the floor.
The box flickered on and I was relieved to discover I had caught the last few minutes of Aqua Teen.
She curled herself around me, sighed loudly into my ear "Mmm god aren't you so glad we waited!"
She held me everywhere with all her limbs and kissed me on my face, neck and chest while I watched television, using her pillow to prop up my head.
Within thirty minutes she had put her clothes on and we lay next to each other, not touching, staring at and laughing at the television together.
*Aqua Teen Hunger Force (number one in the hood, G): see Adult Swim listings, Cartoon Channel after-hours
**Pulp
Only God Can Make A Rainbow
[I know the proper saying is "...tree." The reason I modified it will become clear.]
I was sent an e-mail that had a bunch of cool pictures of rock formations that looked like animals. After the pictures was this plea: to take ONE MINUTE to say the lord's prayer, to not be ashamed of your love for god, and to show it by passing the chain e-mail along.
My response to the sender:
[The creation of every formation is] explicable by natural phenomena. Cool though.
I take this e-mail as an attempt to illustrate that god is the creator of all things, and only god could make the rocks, etc look the way they do. And that its creation is beautiful.
The flip side being: If god is the creator of all things we must also give ONE MINUTE to god for the Holocaust.
We can't just give god credit for the beautiful things; it has to be given credit for everything. Otherwise it is not god because it is not all-powerful.
One can make an argument that god is unknowable, and all the evil that is done is done for a purpose only god can understand; the beauty must be taken with the horror. And one cannot lay blame for evil on free will -- on people choosing to do evil -- because mankind was created in god's image and likeness.
Further, just as people are capable of wrong, so is god. A reading of the Old Testament (Torah, Hebrew Bible) shows that god is capable of error -- it admits to erring on a few occasions (oops! Hundreds of thousands dead!). Ergo, he is not all-knowing. God endorses wholesale slaughter of entire cities and the men, women and children within them. It endorses slavery. On and on.
God made a rainbow, and rainbows are beautiful things. Before it made that, though, it wiped out almost every single living thing on earth, without remorse. The people drowned to death -- one of the worst ways to go.
The foundation of my life is, irrefutably, my parents, and I give thanks to them for my life. I don't have god's genes.
And you'll excuse me for being ashamed of a mass-murderer. I'm ashamed of Ted Bundy, and he killed far fewer people than god ever did.
You can choose to divorce the Old Testament (Torah, Hebrew Bible) from the New Testament, but then you are not following the god of Jesus, the Jew, who gathered followers through his superior understanding and (strict) interpretation of the Torah.
Either god has done it all or he has done nothing. We can't pick and choose.
To quickly sum things up and give you the short version of the argument against the existence of the Christian god:
1. If evil exists and God is omniscient, then God knows about it.
2. If God knows about evil and is omnibenevolent, then he wants to prevent it.
3. If God wants to prevent evil and is omnipotent, then he can prevent it.
4. Therefore, if God is omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent, then evil should not exist.
The Christian god is defined as being omniscient, omnibenevolent and omnipotent. He is everywhere, he is all-good, he is all-powerful. But he cannot be all these things if evil exists, which it does.
But if "evil" is really "good" -- a necessary part of god's giving mankind free will, etc -- then there is no point in worshiping such an entity, for why kneel to something that allows us to suffer? That makes us suffer?
And if the devil causes evil, then god is not omnipotent, for he cannot defeat the devil. If god chooses not to defeat the devil, then he is not omnibenevolent. If god is unaware of the devil, then he is not omniscient.
Sorry to belabor the subject. I added this last piece because I needed to address specifically Christian conceptions of god, and not just the god of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible/Torah, who was undoubtedly evil (commanding the rape of 32,000 women from one city, for just one example).
Still, to not-love the god of the Old Testament is to not-love the god of Jesus, the Jew.
And to love the god of the Old Testament is to love a dictator/fascist who commanded the slaughter of hundreds of thousands, the rape of hundreds of thousands, the enslavement of hundreds of thousands, to love a being that did not frown upon the incest committed by Abraham's (the patriarch of Judeo-Christianity) daughters, and on and on.
Personally, I'm incredibly relieved that such a god does not exist.
Motivation
History has taught us that pain can make anyone do anything...
I was walking the two miles home from J’s at, what I found out when I arrived home, was about eight a.m. on a Thursday.
I kept to the side of the road, freezing...
I woke up at J’s half-covered in a blanket, the XBox controller still in my hand. I must have passed out while navigating some goddam menu the console makes players go through. Leave it to Microsoft to make accessing a game as fun and easy as typing in a proper MS-DOS command.
The first thing I noticed, before opening my eyes and realizing where I was, was the extreme pain in my head. ...The same pain that's there every morning. I soon found that I was sitting upright... Still locked in the position I likely had been in when I first went to sleep.
Then the anxiety hit. And then I noticed I was shivering, and that J must have moved from the couch he had passed out on to his bedroom. For a minute I surrounded myself in the blanket I had -- made a cocoon out of it -- and laid on the couch he had occupied. I learned that leather likes to maintain its temperature, and that if it was going to warm up, it was going to have to steal from me heat I wasn’t producing.
My morning panic attack forced me into action. I don’t know why I thought it would be possible for me to go back to sleep under any circumstances. My drugs were back home; my pill-box was empty. I hadn’t planned on staying the night, and so I hadn’t brought my morning pills.
I needed ten milligrams of OxyContin and two or three milligrams of Klonopin immediately.
I searched J’s entire first floor for a phone. All I found were chargers for cordless devices I couldn't locate. ...I couldn’t be rude and wake J up so he could drive me home, so I decided to check to see if the weather was nice enough for me to walk home in.
...I had lied to myself, because I began walking down his driveway and up the road as fast as I could as soon as I stepped outside. I had known I was going to walk home even before I stepped out the door.
At least it wasn’t raining. However, whatever the temperature was, I felt if it was a few degrees lower I would have been able to see my breath.
...I tightened the ankle straps on my sandals to try to avoid getting blisters. ...This also locked in the gravel that already had crept beneath my feet. ...I couldn't make myself stop to shake out the pebbles because I couldn't suffer a drug-free moment I could avoid.
The sun was a murderer. It focused all of its rays on my right eye, where my daily migraines emanate from. I zipped up my jacket to my chin, put on the winter hat I had worn the night before, even though it had been about sixty degrees the day before. I wondered why I was so cold, both that morning and the night before, when the the level of magnesium in small tubes indicated I had no reason to be.
It passed the time as I walked up the big hill.
A car passed and I realized I was on the Walk of Shame, and I hadn’t even gotten laid the night before. And for the first time in my life I actually found it shameful to be walking home early in the morning in the same clothes I had worn the day before, freezing and disheveled. On all previous walks like this one I had been coming back from having sex, which I could never understand anyone being ashamed of.
My thoughts occupied me as I walked as fast as I could, head down against that bastard in the center of our solar system. The pain blared in my head like bad music trying to get Noriega out of a church and into an American prison... My panic attack forced me on.
Eventually, finally, I could see my house.
I pictured the two brown bottles... My Oxy and Klonopin, waiting for me on the coffee table next to my bed and its four blankets and comforter. Not close enough...
The sun hit my eye and I grabbed my head as though it had been pierced with an arrow... A person driving by in an SUV at the same moment probably thought a wheel had kicked a pebble in my face. Whoever it was didn't stop.
...Down the driveway, through doors, my pills were on their way to my stomach. I buried myself beneath my blankets and began to feel warm as I waited for them to kick in. As I did I thought of the fact that a large percent of the population in the Eastern time zone was beginning its workday. If the person in the SUV though he/she may have blinded or otherwise injured me, he/she couldn't stop because he/she was late for work... But the person likely didn't notice me at all because his/her mind already was there.
I envied whoever it was as I lay in the dark, twisted up in my blankets.
Standard-Current Short Story
The fireworks finale! The expectation before!
A description of what happened in the sky pre-finale. The description-length is dictated by the word count sought by the publication you hope to appear in.
Since you just saw the display being described, you can relate to it.
Something before, during or after the events described set off a memory for the narrator, or the events themselves now turn into something else on a sentence.
An ambiguous sentence. Or a sentence that nails the events above to a cross. A sentence meant to be a revelation. A sentence that, were it the first one, would have made what you just read not worth reading.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Waiting for Godot
I call her after I drink the fifth of Stoli to a certain level.
She doesn't notice I'm drunk or that I continue to get more so.
Her: "My ex is stalking me..."
Her, later:
"I think he's gotten over it..."
Me: "The last thing you want is for him to get over it. The last thing you want is for anyone to get over anything. You need power over everyone. That power turns the crank that juts out of your back."
(I don't know if I just came up with that or if I'm reiterating it.)
Later, me:
"The fact remains that if he showed up at your door and said he'd really try this time, you'd take him back. You love the fat, small-dicked fucker because he's broken... And it isn't that you want to fix him: You love playing with the pieces."
"You think I'm incapable of loving someone who isn't fucked up?"
"You know you are."
The conversation goes on until I find myself sinking too far into self-loathing.
...I need her.
I must love playing with the pieces...
And I must be shattered for her to listen to me...
The realization scares me as it did the first time and I beg off the phone quickly with a limp excuse.
We'll talk when the bottle of Stoli gets to the proper level.
Maybe the next time I call she'll have some other guy. And then I'll hear about all the ways in which he's inadequate, and mesmerizing because.
Then maybe her ex will begin stalking her in an obvious manner, out of jealousy.
Then maybe they'll get back together.
She doesn't notice I'm drunk or that I continue to get more so.
Her: "My ex is stalking me..."
Her, later:
"I think he's gotten over it..."
Me: "The last thing you want is for him to get over it. The last thing you want is for anyone to get over anything. You need power over everyone. That power turns the crank that juts out of your back."
(I don't know if I just came up with that or if I'm reiterating it.)
Later, me:
"The fact remains that if he showed up at your door and said he'd really try this time, you'd take him back. You love the fat, small-dicked fucker because he's broken... And it isn't that you want to fix him: You love playing with the pieces."
"You think I'm incapable of loving someone who isn't fucked up?"
"You know you are."
The conversation goes on until I find myself sinking too far into self-loathing.
...I need her.
I must love playing with the pieces...
And I must be shattered for her to listen to me...
The realization scares me as it did the first time and I beg off the phone quickly with a limp excuse.
We'll talk when the bottle of Stoli gets to the proper level.
Maybe the next time I call she'll have some other guy. And then I'll hear about all the ways in which he's inadequate, and mesmerizing because.
Then maybe her ex will begin stalking her in an obvious manner, out of jealousy.
Then maybe they'll get back together.
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