samoyeddogs

March 26, 2013.  Mad Journal.  For the mad, by the mad.  Let’s review.  There’s no tooth fairy.  Your experience is worth nothing.  You’re not special, and everything isn’t going to be okay.  And if someone could help you, wouldn’t they have shown up by now?  So forget it.  There’s no magic wand, no words and no mercy.  And the skin on your elbows is peeling in the aftermath.  Whenever you think things can’t get any worse you open another door and there’s a new staircase, leading down.  You think:  If I get through this nothing will ever bother me again.  But there’s no end to this.  You’re locked in a hard-scrabble existence you never imagined in any of your fantasies.  The difference this time is you don’t know how to fix it.  There’s no situation, no cliché, no correct number of servings of fruits and vegetables that can save you.  You’ve been outed and you’re a loser.  It’s hard.  There’s no grace.  Grace got deported.

So go ahead.  Go through the motions.  Pretend.  Act like nothing’s happened.  You’re still you, right?  Even if it’s not the you you wanted.  You hoo!  It’s still you!  Hello!  You’re still beautiful.  You’re a thing of beauty.  Don’t worry about it.

Take the air.  It’s not a bad day.  Yesterday you survived a four hour briefing and, in spite of everything, today is a good day to be alive.  One more day.  Just one more day and you can fix this thing.  Give yourself a chance.  Renew that library book.  Don’t go into debt to the library.  They’ll come and beat your head in.  Librarians are hard people.  Take it easy.

March 29.  Good Friday.  What’s good about it?  Just about everything.  You nix going out except for groceries and now are in process of soothing the spirit with a nice cheese soufflé you’ve got on the bubble.  The skin is peeling off your hands and you are battling back with deluxe hand cream to combat the dryness.  This goop’s got everything in it except morphine.  The fingers love it.

So the clock rolls and you head into your dumb-ass job.  You are buoyed, somewhat, by the thought that each time you do this it’s one less time you will have to do this.  That’s philosophy for you.  Take a picture.  You’re on the two to nine-thirty and it passes without incident.  No shootings, no stabbings, no grab and dash artistry, no ignorant peasantry out to light your fuse.  The peasants, it seems, have taken the night off.  Good for them. You get through.  Back home the scab about the size of a dime on your lower back the last month finally peels off.  You did nothing wrong and it doesn’t matter.

March 30.  Easter Sunday.  I find a car under the straw of my Easter basket after taking all the candy eggs and little chocolate bunnies out.  But this isn’t a dream of my childhood, is it?  A little plastic car, two-tone, orange body, black roof, just what I wanted.  What ever happened to that car?  There always used to be some sort of additional little treat under the straw of your own, personal Easter basket Easter morning.  If you were lucky.  If you’d been good.

Mad Journal.  March 15, 2013. “For Brutus, only, overcame himself.  And no man else hath honour by his death.”  Did you say you had 18 rejections, ape?  That’s tragic.  Tell you what.  Why don’t you get back to us when it’s 180?  Maybe we can look into it.  The whole world’s in a terrible state of crisis, ape.  If it’s 18 it’s 18.  If it was a youth and not simply a record of your failure rate it wouldn’t even be able to vote yet!  So overcome, my simian friend.  Overcome!  You know what?  Maybe “Wilderness Park” ain’t so hot.  Maybe it’s not all you’re cracking it up to be.  Maybe it’s a disorganized, criminal mess and you don’t have the stones, like a real cop, to do anything about it.  Maybe you’re out there in that park of yours, yourself, lost.

March 16, 2013.  That’s right.  Mad Journal.  Upper deck.  Home office.  Five PM.  Get out of here.  A bit of breeze is rattling the glass in the railing outside there as I enter these immortal words.

I remember hearing that sound the first time I came here when we were looking at the place, that kind of lonely, lost sound, perfect for melancholics, that little rattle rattle rattle, like a lost ghost.  Because except for the distant sound of traffic on the bridge going downtown, this is a quiet place, which is why you can hear that.  And pretty private too.  And that must have been why we moved in.

The suite was an estate sale and the owner had ended his own life right here in this upstairs bedroom, apparently.  We never, uh, made too many enquiries, but that was the story.  Downstairs that afternoon I remember there wasn’t much furniture in the suite.  Most of it had already been moved out.  There were two large, framed paintings on the small living room’s walls.  One was a print of “Scotland Forever” and I can’t remember what the other one was. I think it was a naval theme, HMS Victory or some such.  I remember feeling proud of myself that I knew that print was a print of “Scotland Forever” and also that the original had been painted many years after the scene it depicts, the charge of the “Scots Greys” at the battle of Waterloo (June 18, 1815), and that a woman had painted it, which has always struck me and probably a great lot of other people down the long years, as remarkable, considering the era, and that the original was much larger than this print.  That’s right.  The sun never sets.

The dead guy had been in his forties or so and lived alone.  You see what happens when you start to think about things, when something triggers a memory?  Do we get that we get it, mein apen?  We are sentient, living beings and we remember. Sometimes memory is all we have, which isn’t much when you’re stuck here, day after day after year trying to understand and I mean understand.  And what you understand is that, ultimately, there is no understanding.  There just is, and isn’t.  And it can get painful beating yourself up over it.  So stop that.