Dashboard

Broken glass and a torn screen in the door are signs that maybe the little shack in the middle of nowhere isn't all sunshine and dandylions, and the scattered dust leaves streaks and trails that could be from the frantic movements of a victim fending off a tall man with a knife, or they could be from the shackles dragged here by the already dead.  Sharp grating inside and cold blades outside are a cruel betrayal, because it was never meant to be this way.  But betrayal is a bit of a theme in this place, where there have been more drug deals gone bad than even in the apartment with the missing owner in town.  Twists and knots rake the once untattered brown cord of history that the shack throws across the void that is.  What nobody knows is the builder is still alive, and now he's just praying for someone to give him a lighter so he can cauterize the wound and stop the fraying then and there, before it continues.  Then maybe he'll grab his tools and put new pastel-colored shutters on the place, or maybe he'll just grab his kerosine and burn it all to the ground.

Her Path

Old Bill Yoder's wife died last September. It wasn't much of a surprise - folks had been saying she was slipping for years. There was no specific cause of death; she just went to bed one Saturday night and didn't get up for church in the morning.

Yesterday Bill went about his business as usual. He let the donkey out to run around, milked the cows and left a message on his son who lives in Baltimore's answering machine. After lunch he pulled his tattered plaid coat back on and went outside to chop wood for the fireplace. His bones ached a little with the cold, but he was used to it. He was just thankful for the misty cool he always called "Mississippi weather." It could be a lot worse in Indiana in February.

He dropped his axe twice while chopping wood, and the second time he didn't pick it up. Instead he sat down on a tree stump and looked wistfully down the hill at the path his wife always took through the woods when she needed a think. Bill hadn't set foot on that path all winter. Sometimes he'd wonder if she was down there, walking and waiting for the spring. Sometimes he almost went for a walk, but he always decided at the last minute to let it be. It was his wife's path, not his.

Bill sighed and slowly stood back up, feeling the creaking in his joints. He loaded the wood into the rusty wheelbarrow that used to be green and pushed it back to the front porch.

After a meager supper and two more messages on his son's answer machine, Bill sat down to watch the History Channel. He liked the History Channel because he was seventy and he got to see things that happened when he was nine. At seven-thirty he shuffled to his room and went to bed. He usually stayed up a little later, but he hadn't been to church since Christmas Eve and he wanted to make sure he got up in time to make the fifteen minute drive.

Today is Sunday, but Old Bill Yoder didn't get up for church this morning. Instead he went for a walk on the path through the woods. His wife was there, just like he knew she'd be.

The Cabin

Fresh prints scrunch in the crystalline white layer behind her, new since last night and gently caressing the rolling hills beyond and draping the skeletal trees in its cool embrace. Her lungs are a blazing inferno as she pumps her legs, kicking up plumes of snow like bullets from a misaimed machine gun pittering around her feet, and for a moment she imagines that she's a secret agent whose cover has been blown before she remembers that she doesn't have to imagine at all. Ten paces in the gnarled grasp of a root reaches up and snags her boot, sending her tumbling into the wet like an injured snow angel. She rolls onto her back, feeling the harsh bite of the frost on her face and hands, and summons up all of her inner pain into a shrill scream that would make harpies and banshees quake and flee. She screams unknown curses for forgotten infidelities. She screams hidden pain from the endless assault from all sides, from those who seek to teach her, from those who seek to help her, from those who are blind from their own masturbatory concerns, from the wire she uses to make real all the unplaceable atrocities in the bright red reminder against her pale skin. She screams until her already frozen lungs fail and collapse within her, and her throat feels like she swallowed the glass she put her fist through yesterday.

The sharp smack of the cabin door rings out in the world behind her, and he runs to her, the knight in shining armor but without coat or shoes, his dirty blond hair whipping in the shrill wind. He throws himself to the ground beside her, wrapping his arms around her in a physically awkward, really perfect embrace, hugging her hard because he's trying to let everything melt from her into him. She wishes she could cry but she can't, so she lies silently in his arms for a while, letting the cold chase away the adrenaline until she stands and limps back with him, hoping he is fooled into thinking he helped, ready (only not) for another day just like yesterday.

The Prophet

The dazzling blue flashes stab to the back of my brain with swords sharper than steel, the "ker-chicks" and "ca-chuffs" filling the void around me as I stand patiently waiting the camera to do the spiffy three-sixty swirl that the director loves so much and the lights to come on behind me, silhouetting my figure and making it seem as if I'm some sort of angel sent to berate you for your crimes against God.  But I lost my wings long ago in a hideous battle with myself (there were machetes and chainsaws), and now I stand center-stage to unwelcome applause and unmerited attention wondering, pardonnez mon français, exactly what the fuck I'm supposed to make of it all.  Somewhere out there a woman hikes up her skirt a little too high, and a man holds up his fist and shouts that the revolution is here while the bloated stick-limbed children clamber out of their dung huts, their spindly fingers grasping for food that only Santa Claus can bring and Donner and Blitzen died in a tragic sleigh accident so there goes that hope.  But here I am, alone, fully clothed and utterly uninteresting, hoping that if I try real hard I can sink into the polished woodwork of the stage and pretend that it was meant for someone else all along.

A Secret Place

Somewhere between the bending birch and the murky creek is a soul I once befriended, nameless in the air of the golden wood but well known to every one of the birds that make their homes here, sheltered well from the cats that creep out only after dark and unaware that there is ever a star or a cloud.  I wonder aloud why it is that the seeds carried on the wind denote a presence long since forgotten, but celebrate that there is such a buzz as the one that drifts into my window even now.  The gentle rhythm and molasses clock put me at ease despite the race that's starting just outside my door, and for now I can lay back and become nothing more than somebody's whisper.

Gabriel

The thunderclouds roll in only after the alarm has ceased, the shrill piercing gone and the birds at ease and ready to be snatched up by the tall man in the dark cloak who watches us all with the worst of intentions.  She saw everything despite the failed eyes, spoke words meant precisely for each mortal ear on which they fell, and there could be no denying the waves that lapped merrily in celebration of something beyond all word and feeling.  She was, after all, an angel, and now she's home again.

Crickside

Collections of thoughts on shuffle mode float through my head like drunken hornets, knowing not who they are or where they came from or where they're going but knowing full well that they want to sting me until I'm numb from the pain. I wish they would; numb me, that is, for the sporradic jabs of their stingers aren't doing me any good here tonight. The desk light isn't the sun and the serendipitous ventures of the moon just don't compare to the cool summer breeze that finds me sitting on a fallen tree over the river, watching people go by in kayaks and wishing like hell I were born five hundred years from now in either direction. A pointless wish from a dreamy little boy, a boy who's beginning to think manhood is a lie.

Of Penguins and Polar Bears

The still betrays me, dancing across the pavement and obvious now to myself, watching as I am from the rough wooden tower that is guarded by bears and overlooks a crystal clear lake that you wouldn't think could survive this much pollution.  Yet again I've torn the leaves from a perfectly good tree, but if only they hadn't caught my eye with stars the size of my head then I could be smiling and having tea with penguins and polar bears, who have never shared a home yet unite in their frigid reception that does no good to my Birkenstocks and Lipton.  One day the aurora will sparkle again and there will be no hole in the ice through which to plunge, and maybe the music on the sheet will translate into something with meaning.  Meanwhile, I've nothing but the rain and a piano part that makes me wish I were in a bar, serenading me into yesterday's forever.

The Adversary

The gun lies there in the dirt, matte and maniacal and begging for an enemy, but there are only victims here, half-hidden in the murky shadows of eyelashes and silently screaming for a voice because I've become all too good at tuning them out. But I have my own quest, gun and bullets and all, and I can't be bothered with the stifled moans of the already dying because if I move an inch I'll join them swirling down into the event horizon of eternal blackness. I was knighted once by someone who didn't matter and given a quest of my very own, but what becomes of the knight when the quest proves impossible and his only purpose becomes existence itself? Does he push futilely onward for king and honor, or is it long since time to put up the armor and rejoin the bleached and bland reality of second choices and forever regrets?

Candles

There's something more than what I see.  Something beneath the surface, a place that exists somewhere between wakefulness and dreams.  A world set against the color red I see when I close my eyes and look towards a light, a world of shadows and truths... a layer somewhere between my heart and my mind, where feelings and words blend together into an inexplicable mixture that even I can't decipher when I look it over.

Why am I here?  Why are we here?  Life is the ultimate in circular reasoning... we have life so that we may help others with their life, yet they have life for the same reason... we have life to enjoy it, but that doesn't explain its purpose in the first place.  The answer's there, somewhere... written in a language nobody speaks and hidden in the intricate designs of every leaf of every tree, and translatable only in a flame, where if you look long and hard enough you can see the bridge... you just can't see how to cross it.

Cake.  That's what I call it sometimes... life is frosting, but beneath it somewhere there's a cake... a cake we never really get to enjoy, though we get a hint of a taste in those rare instances when there's such a connection between us and the world around us that we can almost hear music; the soundtrack to our life that almost singlehandedly gives it meaning, though we still don't know what.

I've abused every cliche in an effort to find it.  I've run into the empty field at night and screamed myself hoarse at the unanswering stars, I've prayed and prayed to God for an answer, I've wished on every shooting star and every eyelash, longing with a tortured self I don't even recognize to have my eyes opened to something else.

You know what I mean?

Unspeakable

I stand alone in the dawn on a field of rolling hills with flowers and bugs and cold and I wish it could have stayed like this forever instead of fifteen minutes, but soon the sun will be up and everything will be painfully clear and I'll run and run and try to improve the time but I'll only end up exhausted and worn out and waiting for another night to fall so I can see clearly the fox who skirts the edges of my life with a smirk, seeing nothing but my failures and inadequacies, my sins and ignorances, my attacks and betrayals. To him there is no me, there is only what is wrong with me, and his eyes look more and more like mine every time I see him. I wonder how long it'll be before the sun goes behind the clouds forever and the eternal dusk will set in; the world lingering on the edge of blackness, flirting with the dark and toying with the sentiments of all those who fear to walk in the night. I stand alone in the dawn on a field that isn't here, looking out at the hills that don't exist and wishing with every ounce of my being that this world will emerge from the flickering candle and replace the one I don't want, because in all truth there never was a dawn, and there never will be.

Addendum: 1970

Eleven years later. Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.

An equation: 40,000 dead young men = 3,000 tons of bone and flesh, 124,000 pounds of brain matter, 50,000 gallons of blood, 1,840,000 years of life that will never be lived, 100,000 children who will never be born. (The last we can afford: there are too many starving children in the world already.)

Do we scream in the night when it touches our dreams? No. We don't dream about it because we don't think about it; we don't think about it because we don't care about it. We are much more interested in law and order, so that American streets may be made safe while we transform those of Vietnam into flowing sewers of blood which we replenish each year by forcing our sons to choose between a prison cell here or a coffin there. "Every time I look at the flag, my eyes fill with tears." Mine too.

If the dead mean nothing to us (except on Memorial Day weekend when the national freeway is clotted with surfers, swimmers, skiers, picnickers, campers, hunters, fishers, footballers, beer-busters), what of our 300,000 wounded? Does anyone know where they are? How they feel? How many arms, legs, ears, noses, mouths, faces, penises they've lost? How many are deaf or dumb or blind or all three? How many are single or double or triple or quadruple amputees? How many will remain immobile for the rest of their days? How many hang on as decerebrated vegetables quietly breathing their lives away in small, dark, secret rooms?

Write the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Army and Navy Hospitals, the Director of Medical Sciences at the National Library of Medicine, the Veterans Administration, the Office of the Surgeon General - and be surprised by what you don't learn--One agency reports 726 admissions "for amputation services" since January, 1965. Another reports 3,011 amputees since the beginning of the fiscal year 1968. The rest is silence.

The Annual Report of the Surgeon General: Medical Statistics of the Untied States Army ceased publication in 1954. The Library of Congress reports that the Army Office of the Surgeon General for Medical Statistics "does not have figures on single or multiple amputees." Either the government doesn't think them important or, in the words of a researcher for one of the national television networks, "the military itself, while sure of how many tons of bombs it has dropped, is unsure of how many legs and arms its men have lost."

If there are no concrete figures, at least we are beginning to get comparative ones. Proportionately, Vietnam has given us eight times as many paralytics as World War II, three times as many totally disabled, 35% more amputees. Senator Cranston of California concludes that out of every hundred army veterans receiving compensation for wounds received in action in Vietnam, 12.4% are totally disabled. Totally.

But exactly how many hundreds or thousands of the dead-while-living does that give us? We don't know. We don't ask. We turn away from them; we avert the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, face. "Why should I look, it wasn't my fault, was it?" It was, of course, but no matter. Time presses. Death waits even for us. We have a dream to pursue, the whitest white hope of them all, and we must follow and find it before the light fails.

So long, losers. God bless. Take care. We'll be seeing you.

-Donald Trumbo. Published as an addendum to the 1959 introduction to the novel Johnny Got His Gun.

Unrequited

I am once again flipping through the tall man's script, searching fruitlessly for the character that will be me just as soon as he takes off the hat and glasses.  I am the priest, driving frantically to return my secret love to her wedding, for I am also the high school sweetheart who's mom thinks he's gay but in all actuality just can't get past the flashing yellow sign pointing out the detour that I have no interest in taking because I know the way.  Things are different under an African sun, iluminating the keyboard and the paper in bright shades of white that fade away after dusk, and it is here that I see more clearly the glimmer of goldfish darting in the transparent waters of the pond, easily identifiable but somehow not marked in my guidebook.

The Predator

There should be rain tonight, it feels like.  The air outside is a predator, still and waiting outside my window for me to stand up from my chair so it can hit me with some emotion I haven't quite placed, like a murmur in my malfunctioning heart that tells me things I shouldn't know.  A frown and a laugh are all I have to offer, wondering just where the words come from and whether I was on to something when I knocked on that door, looking for the vocalist who was singing so beautifully in her sleep.

There it is again; that whisper... or is it a hum?  Somehow it says to me that something's not done, or something's not right.  Somewhere out there a man cries himself to sleep with a bottle of whiskey and a torn picture of what he'll never have.  And here I am, locked alone in the quiet and helpless to help... hopeless to hope.  Doomed to sleep and forget it all, turning instead to my own desires.

7th and King

There's a filthy diner on the corner of 7th and King.
The sort of place you can sit in and smoke and nobody says a thing because nobody who gives a damn has ever set foot there.
You know, the people who get all antsy when they're standing behind you in the convenience store when you're buying a pack of Camels but then they hop in their Toyota Camry and drive back to their home on Sycamore Lane or some other place with a naturey name where all the houses look alike and the neighbor is the nice woman who sometimes bakes cookies, not the guy who got hauled away by the cops last night.

The folks at the diner know full well what it's like to have a cigarette for their Sunday night meal. Sometimes they come in and order a cup of coffee and sit there for a smoke or two, or maybe as long as the waitress will refill their joe without giving them dirty looks.
They sit there and stare out the window onto the cruddy narrow street watching the guy selling fake watches or bootleg DVD's or some shit like that, but they see it special.

The window of this shit-hole diner shows something Sycamore Lane will never know. Maybe it's the grime and soot and smog from years of not being washed, or the chinks where someone shot it up with a pellet gun, but the stuff outside looks different.
There's something else there that nobody else sees. They just stand out there and look at the diner and say someone should call code enforcement, or second hand smoke kills too.

Scribbles

The gentle pitter-patter of the rain reminds me that no child of mine ill ever face this darkness, for the guns are all locked up in the chest with the broken hinges that I can never quite get open. And my wife can go ahead and run away with the man in the dark suit who comes to the door babbling meaningless things about biology and accounting for the sins he never did understand. But he and I both know no man with a beard can ever be trusted, and the melodious trinket in his pocket should be at the bottom of the river as sure as mine should be in the belly of a fish, all ready to be served at the banquet that is never going to happen.

Change the channel

I seem to remember a time when every night of the week yielded a prime-time show I deemed worth watching. Nowadays a combination of being less entranced with the boob tube, the cancellation or "natural" end of all the good shows, and the (convenient) shuffle of all my favorites to the same days of the week (Law & Order: SVU and House are both on Tuesdays) have cut down on my brain melting (besides, The O.C. isn't on this summer).

When I do turn on the TV, though, I confess I do a bit of channel Jujitsu (not to be confused with Jungle Kung Fu): I slide onto the couch after the evening news and pick my favorite show or channel, confining myself to NBC and CBS when FOX is doing the local news. Then as the other two networks start in on the news, I either retire or go back to FOX for some Cheers. So yes, I do take pains to avoid watching the news, but I have an excuse: I read the New York Times.

Until the end of the week, I'm the Peace Minister at my home church. I'm admittedly not very good at it, but one thing I have managed to do is talk to a few youth groups and a camp about everything from conscientious objection to current events. I've been getting a sinking feeling that nobody knows what's going on in the world all summer; my worst fears were realized when, in the midst of an all-out Israeli invasion of Lebanon (which, I confirmed tonight, does indeed make the airwaves), a three-member youth group was able to name only Iraq and "somewhere in Ireland" as conflict zones.

And then I have friends, my age, who out and say they don't care. This is the problem in America. It's not the gays, it's not our warmongering (okay, that's a problem too), it's not obesity (see above). It's that Americans are simply out of touch with everything that's happening in the world. Maybe that's why the terrorists hate us. They don't hate our freedom, they hate our unbelievable ignorance and apathy towards the unimaginable suffering that's going on all around us. We're all part of this world. I'm not asking you to go save children in Africa; if everyone did that, nobody could have sold me the speaker system I bought today. But the least you can do is pick up a newspaper and at least know things are happening, if not all the gritty details. Here's an idea: Every day, go to the New York Times website (www.nytimes.com) and read just their headline news. Maybe even just the first article on the page. But for God's sake, don't sit in a cave with your fingers in your ears.

A Thousand Monkeys…

"We've all heard it said that a thousand monkeys banging on a thousand keyboards could eventually produce a masterpiece. Thanks to the internet, we now know this not to be true."

That's a quote I read once, but I must confess I forget the origin. At any rate, I once again have a more solid web presence than can be offered by such outlets as Xanga and LiveJournal. The fact that my name is a URL probably lends some undeserved credibility, which I will be sure to exploit as much as possible in my contributions to cyberspace. Or, to use the term Al Gore may or may not have coined, the information superhighway.

Anyway, I'll cut to the chase. This is my real entrance into the "blogosphere" (Xanga doesn't count), and my attempt to put some true effort and (occasionally) professionalism into my writing. This URL was originally to be a full-fledged website, but when I examined the blog feature of my host I discovered that this really better suits my needs. I've also included a couple extra pages: The Quotes, which will bring great joy to my Facebook fans, and Writing, where you'll (eventually) find my more publish-worthy works.

Anyway, here I am, and here you are. Let's bake a cake.

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My host, by the way, is 1&1, and based on my experience so far I highly recommend them as a powerful, easy and inexpensive service if you're looking to create an online presence of your own. As you can see I plugged them in my navigation bar.