There are these photographs of Indians I like to look at. Brazen, hard faces looking far past some old camera. I think the Indians were stronger than the people that conquered them. They might be stronger than most of the people currently living on the planet. I wonder that sometimes, about the generations that came before that were stronger somehow. Men whose muscles were iron, with courage more tempered than the steel in their swords. I measure myself against them and feel a strangeness imagining myself more like them. A spartan worded man with eyes glimmering full of knowledge and wisdom. A spirit of resolve. At home within myself. I think I’m close to that last one. I feel that way a lot, but I’m comfortable with a make-up far from the brave Indians I imagine when I see those pictures. I wonder what they felt when they ran their hands across tree bark and watched the sun slowly rise above the hills, shedding golden mist.
Ralph had been gone for several days. He never told anyone he was going but I’d noticed that he had been distracted a few days before. He’d only half listened to conversations, sitting in a chair pushed more toward the corner than usual, his face turned to the wall, tracing cracks spidering along the plaster. He came back a few days later and I found him pacing around his room. “Look here,” he said, slapping a notebook down on the table. “Right here.” There were lines of a song leading into pages of some story that began and ended in the stars and opening up heaven in-between. “Ralph,” I said, “this is real good.” “Yeah, I figured,” he said. “You should take it. Turn it into a book probably.”
“Ha, I don’t know. This is real untouchable stuff.”
“Jooooseph. Joooooseph.” He said, folding his arms across his chest to imitate me. “Forget it then, lets get some lunch or something.”
I got behind the wheel, and we found a station playing classical music, I wondered aloud if the trees were feeling the sheer magnificence of today. Ralph had a plaintive smile on his face, and I could feel his mind come and go like heat lightning on a summer’s night.
I knew a girl for a while that liked to laugh at her own tragedies. The more hopeless her situation the more laughter that sparkled out of her like cataracts splintering over dark rock. She played piano well enough to fill the room up pretty well and never tied her long brown hair back. She let it spill out like notes. There was a night, car parked next to a lake that she was telling me some of those secret lover’s things when a police-car pulled in behind us. I let her talk to the guy, noticing the way he liked being close to her too. He could feel the energy behind her voice and maybe played with the idea of feeling her browned Italian skin pressed up close. Lips like a mother’s touch. He asked her if she was alright and I watched her place her hand on his arm and say, “Yes, thank-you officer.” He left us there and she laughed about the whole thing and her laughter was a sign all its own. I didn’t let her press herself close for awhile. I Listened to her tell me about a boy that used to live down the street. How he taught her things about music and love and rejection. She laughed part of the time and I could see that laughter was the way that she kept from crying. I held her close then and we pretended we were lovers again. She talked about the dinners she wanted to make me and I said we could take a walk every night, watch the sun set again and again. Before I left she held me close, digging her face into my shoulder, and I could tell I wouldn’t see her again. On the drive home I could feel her laughter coursing over the stones in myself.
I guess I could go blind. Or at least half-blind. There for a while there were flashes, little xerox machine lights going back and forth somewhere in my eye. Once an hour and sometimes every few minutes. The left eye in rebellion is one of those slaps in the face from the body, a reminder that no matter what kind of hard work is put into making the body strong, it can’t last. Won’t last in fact. It feels, too often, that there are too many things beyond my control. Like dreams of fifty foot waves rising above the highway or a past that goes on being untouchable. Without my eyes I would listen to stories more often and would play music, but softly, to spare my hearing.
I don’t think I’m going to go blind. Not now. I don’t need to go blind. I need to see the world a little longer now that I’m seeing without illusions casting their shadows across things that are sometimes more beautiful shadowed, sometimes less so. There’s a pool I like to swim in, mostly because you can float on your back and look up at the glass ceiling above. All the concentric circles bisected by steel with its perfect circle in the middle. I found out that a guy I know swims in that pool three times a week. I said, “I love the glass ceiling there. I really like going on my back to look at it.”
“The glass ceiling?” he said, “In the pool?” He hadn’t ever seen it. Hadn’t noticed something that had made me feel so much inward peace at the end of my swims as I looked up at that circle and imagined it looking back at me. I kind of doubt my friend has even bothered to look up even after I told him about it.
I wonder how many people are already blind in a way.
“What’s it like being thirty?” said the girl. She had on black tights and a grey dress and sat beside the young man on a park bench in the heart of the city. They were pressed close together for warmth in the cool night.
“Oh, I mean, it’s good. I feel great. But I guess the funny thing is that I probably should have felt this way a long time ago.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well. Ok. The thing is, there was all this time that I was stressing myself out about the strangest things. Or at least, things that shouldn’t have stressed me out. Like paying rent.”
“Yeah, I could see that. Like you’ve experienced things now and you know generally how things will go.” said the girl.
“Right. I kinda know how they’ll go,” said the man. “I guess the only thing is I feel like I should have done more up to now, and I never should have been worried about things like paying rent. I had a friend that said to me a few years back that I should do whatever I most loved. That I should try to do the thing that I would do if I there was nothing to stop me from succeeding. It’s taken a long time for me to try to do that.”
“What is that exactly?” the girl said.
The man thought of all the kinds of things that people say in these situations and realized he had used them all before. He needed to be able to tell her, as best as he was able, only things that were very true.
“I guess,” said the man, “that the degree is what I’ve wanted to do. It’s not music. I thought I wanted that for so long and I still love it, but I guess I’m wanting to do something responsible. You know, something I can keep doing when I’m older. I could never see myself as a drummer for a band when I’m sixty you know?”
“Well. That’s good then.” The girl examined the man’s face carefully. “Is that everything?” she asked while gently digging her elbow into the man’s side.”
“No. It’s not all,” he said, leaning in to kiss the blushing girl.
One hot day in July I played home run derby in a backyard pool in Kentucky. My first girlfriend was there running out of the house in a bikini and the sound of her laughter trickled out like a waterfall. Her friend ran out of the house, a block of ice in her hands. My first girlfriend met my eyes as she ran toward me. She was a heaven of long brown hair and dark eyes. Skin gleamed and flashed against the sky. My first girlfriend tackled me and held me on the ground while a block of ice was held against my back. The day wore on in innocence with lemonade and grilled hotdogs and a round of home run derby. For some reason i was the only person able to hit a home run. I hit a home run every time at bat. My first girlfriend eagerly swung the bat but never really connected very well. After my fourth home run my first girlfriend rolled her eyes and made a huffing noise. I hit home run after home run and swam the bases with unhindered joy.
The only thing I was really hitting out of the park was my chance at having a lasting relationship with my first girlfriend. I think my first girlfriend liked me because she thought she could hold me down with ease, call every shot. After the home run derby she stopped flashing her eyes at me and the summer had nothing left to give me but the heat lingering deep into the night.
saving-wild-at-heart asked: Nutella girl is a true story ? :P
real as coca-cola.
The air was crisp. Sitting there, outside the education building at the university. I looked up a lot. At the trees. The sky. The top rack of the drinks where they keep orange juice for a buck .75.
I thought about the day and was sort of glad about it. Explained that, no, I don’t want Nutella, even though both of you girls are very pretty. The Nutella girls were much prettier than the 5 hour energy drink girls. The five hour energy drink company probably doesn’t have the same sort of marketing budget as Nutella.
I told the 5 hour energy drink girls, “No, I don’t want your poison.” To which one of the girls replied, “Like I havn’t heard that before.”
The Nutella girls described the similarity between peanut butter and Nutella. I feel like the comparison is sort of thin, but maybe it works pretty well. “Do you eat peanut butter,” they asked in a way that didn’t require an answer. “Nutella is kind of like peanut butter,” the girl with the dimpled chin and ringletted
blonde hair rehearsed. I wondered if Nutella was also like the sea at the last light of day, somewhere much further south than Indiana, with the dimpled chin girl kneading lotion onto my back and running to the cabana for another round of drinks. If I had told them I moved into an apartment and there were four jars
of peanut butter stocked in the shelves. No one’s peanut butter. Like having a private supermarket, rows of Nutella spilling into dreams, an ocean of Nutella to drown into on the bow of some sinking Titanic. The two girls smiled, rows and rows of pearl all lined up. The first rule of a dealer is never to cut into the supply. “So, would you like a sample. You can have a lot of samples.” Both of the girls with handfuls, soap dispensers over-brimming with Nutella.
I took a drink of Orange Juice and fantasized deeper. Halloween bagfuls of rich dark chocolate to cover my flesh. To fill the baptistry, some great awakening of chocolate slathered bodies. Together the girls probably weighed about 215. Goodbye forever I thought. “Yeah, no Nutella for me, but thanks for talking about it.” “Yeah thanks for talking,” and they pursued their $12 dollar an hour jobs pimping Nutella around college campuses. Probably not much different ethically than posing for Playboy.
I noticed the clouds and how one looked like a chocolate Easter bunny with a bite taken out of its paw.
One day is just as good as the next. But is it as good as the days before? There’s no way to know that really. No one has some sort of scale or grid to chart it out. Maybe I should devise a grid. You’ll have to go out a point on the x axis for every chance encounter you had with someone that had an overall positive affect, one direction back for every negative one. Emotional, psychological and social values will plot to the x axis. The y axis will be oriented toward things having to do with career, school, technical abilities and skills. Advancing positively in one of these areas will correspond to the moving up of a point on the y axis. I suppose the daily charting won’t be as helpful as the weekly charting. There are only so many points one can move in 24 hours, but a week, there’s a lot of time there. Lots of things can affect the movement across the scale. Although, when it comes down to it, if I was asked if its better to not have the dots move at all or to just rest in place, I’m not prepared to answer that really. What if the dots are moving the wrong direction? What if moving up on the y axis causes me to plummet on x? There are some questions that no one can answer for you.
Lots of people find arrowheads all over the place. Arrowheads in the forest and arrowheads on the farm. I’ve seen large collections. I guess some of those arrowheads must have found their mark somewhere in the dark halls of the past. It’s one thing to find an arrowhead, half sunk in the ground, unmoved for a couple hundred years, it would be another to be shot at with one. To run with a cold feeling in the stomach and then be struck. To lay bleeding on the ground until a wild figure collects another scalp. it sort of changes the way you think about collecting arrowheads. I mean, I don’t think that people in Afghanistan go around collecting empty bullet rounds, categorizing them by gauge. I’d say most people wish there were no bullet rounds to find.