Category Archives: shards

March 17, 2018 · 7:55 pm

rocky raccoon

ROCKY RACCOON

Was Jesus a woman? The mother of God? Something’s torn down the fences in my mind and got me thinking like this.

Fences make good neighbors. A frosty reception when you cross the property line from one part of your mind into another, armed with a picnic basket full of grenades. Grandmother Wolf took a bum rap. Little Red Riding Hood was out to get her.

Do you see what I mean? No? It doesn’t matter. Step aside or get trampled. No time to say hello, goodbye–hello? Damn,she hung up. If you think you’re confused now, keep reading.

I’m the stenographer of instinct, an Asian bride to take home to your Presbyterian family. At first they won’t like me, but once I do my table dance and slip into your father’s lap, their feelings will become mixed.

“She’s not all that bad,” dad will say.

“Hell, she can sleep in my room,” says little brother.

“That woman cannot stay the night in my home!” says mom.

Sister Jane slips her a note that says meet me behind the garage after midnight.

***

You check the bi-line of this story, and it’s a man’s name. So how can I be an Asian war bride? Who said there was a war on?

Life is full of riddles. Life is riddled with questions. Life is like a heart that keeps pounding long after it’s been sliced out of the body. I’m a mild-mannered reporter who every time he steps into a phone booth turns into Superman. It’s not a personality transfer, it’s just a job. The voices in my head say Asian bride, and I jot the words down.

***

I like my job. Once I punch in I’m free to do as I please. It’s punching out that brings the roof down.

Rocky Raccoon decks his foe halfway through round ten. He turns in little circles ring center, one gloved fist raised in triumph. The crowd goes wild, and inside Rocky’s head a tornado of pain rips out fences. His father goes twirling by with an Asian girl on his lap, and Rocky’s fist floats down in a wave.

It feels like there should be more to this story, but there isn’t.

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March 15, 2018 · 7:36 pm

schizophrenia / take 2

SCHIZOPHRENIA / Take 2

Days on end. Rubric cubes for the quick hand, the nimble mind. Lusty boys on the playground, waiting for the bell to ring. A demanding muse, whiplashing through your days. The ticking clock in a digital world. The heart-stopper, dressed up like candy. Baby steps into an ominous future. Resistance hampers the journey.

Don’t give up your trade secrets to the rabble. Sit still, watch the wind blow. The wind is invisible, but it moves things.

Cry freedom. Sleep alone, walk alone, sing the high notes when the baritone falters. Move on cat’s feet, pounce, disappear.

Morning light. New day dawning. A sudden realization is the end of the journey. The return of the native. Here he comes, wandering up the lane a changed man. He left with a steamer trunk and an entourage and returns with a knapsack. The dogs sniff the air and then rush off to greet him.

He opens his knapsack and out fly butterflies and strange wonders. Reluctantly, we wave from a distance.

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March 11, 2018 · 6:05 pm

rtt

RTT

“Every passing moment is a sign from God…”–
Rip T. von Torntrousen

Who was RTT? Perhaps past tense is inappropriate. Perhaps he’s still around. In Germany, most likely, but maybe L.A. It might even be he’s not a person but a group of persons. A punk band singing in German. It’s all the rage. There’s not a language on earth better suited to the soul of punk.

But that doesn’t fit the quote. I’m being sidetracked. That might even be Rip’s intention, to get my head spinning in many wrong directions.

How is it Rip knows so much about me and I know so little about him? In fact, everything I know about him is conjecture. Could it be he doesn’t exist? But then where does the quote come from?

This is probably something I should have kept to myself, but once I get started I feel a strong obligation to push on and fire whatever comes tumbling out straight into cyber space. I’ve made a tiny inroad into cyber space that one day may change the world. This is my faith. My conviction. My god.

The quote was scrawled longhand on a scrap of paper and left under my windshield wiper. It was there when I came out of Organize Noise where I’d just collected on some consignment books. I read the quote and then sensed a presence beside me. It was a three-legged dog, looking up at me with soft brown eyes. I reached down and stroked the dog’s back. When I looked up again, a man missing all of one leg and one arm was preparing to get into his car. He had a crutch on the car’s roof. He shot a piercing look my way, snatched up the crutch, threw it in the car and then slipped behind the wheel. He put on his signal light and pulled into traffic. When I looked down again, the dog was gone. I drove up to this hill, and in spite of the severe cold, began writing.

A police officer just walked by. Police officers don’t walk around this town, not even through the business district, which places this cop in the same oddity ball park as the dog and the man with the crutch, the note itself; he turned after he’d passed my car and walked backwards for a few steps, looking me straight in the eye; then he turned forward again and trudged off through the snow.

It could be he thinks I’m RTT.

It could be he’s RTT.

It could be that before the last light fades from the winter sky, everything will become clear.

I’ll sit here another few minutes and see if that happens.

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March 10, 2018 · 4:30 pm

a jellyfish as the key to awareness

A JELLYFISH AS THE KEY TO AWARENESS

Think of the Void as a pan layered with corn kernels sitting on a cold stove burner. Don’t get hung up on where the kernels and pan came from, leave alone the burner on which the pan sits. Okay then, think of the pan and the kernels in it as the universe afloat with inert matter (the kernels) before the dawn of awareness. It’s hard, isn’t it, trying to think about how things were before awareness? Well, do your best.

Then the heat gets turned on. Try not to think about how that happened. Just try to visualize the kernels as they begin to dance around in the pan, then explode and fluff out. This is the point at which chemistry mutates into biology. Biology is the midwife of awareness.

The next thing you know, the planet earth is a globe of sloshing ocean filled with jellyfish, spinning around the sun. There’s one jellyfish that begins to sense something beyond the water it swims in, senses the sun, and it propels itself to the surface.

By this time the ocean is rimmed with sand, and the jellyfish gets washed up on a beach. It lies there, aware now of ocean and beach and the blazing sun. By the time the jellyfish grows appendages, the beaches are lined with jungle. The jellyfish hobbles into the jungle on its appendages and waits for other jellyfish to reach shore. When they do, it eats them.

One night the jellyfish sees its reflection in a moonlit pool of water. This is where self-awareness comes into play. It begins to look for another jellyfish to mate with. –the roots of over-population.

The next thing you know, the jellyfish is in a space capsule heading for Jupiter. It’s a long way from home, our jellyfish, drifting further and further from cosmic awareness, which is the heat that first started the kernels popping.

A little further on the jellyfish wilts like a rose in a vase on the mantel of nothingness, and things go back to where they started.

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· 4:24 pm

squirrel maimers

SQUIRREL MAIMERS

An old injury has come back to haunt me, a shadow of its old self. When I lower my head (to read a letter or check out the latest stain on the rug), it doesn’t want to come up again. An act of will has to step in and lend a hand to what should be a reflex action. My head comes up slowly in ripples of pain.

Forty years ago I knew this ex-Marine who used to sit in a second-story window and with a pellet gun maim squirrels that scurried across the back lawn of his Palo Alto home. One night at a party I told him what I thought of his squirrel-maiming pastime, and he said, “What are you going to do about it?” So I pushed him backwards over a chair.

He was a tournament wrestler and a football lineman, and he came up off the floor and threw his shoulder into my mid-section. He ran me across the room into the wall and knocked the wind out of me, and before I could get it back he had me on the floor with my head in a scissor lock. I could hear things snapping and cracking.

For weeks afterward I couldn’t move my head without daggers of pain shooting through my neck.

Twenty years ago that pain came back with a new twist to it, so that if I tried to stand up, I collapsed – each and every time. My friends carried me in to a neurosurgeon who told me after a twenty minute examination that if I wasn’t operated on immediately, I’d be permanently paralyzed down my left side within six months, and it so happened that he had an opening that very afternoon. “Get me out of here,” I said. “I’ll opt for spontaneous healing.”

The world is full of squirrel maimers, and this business with my neck is one of many scars I carry from pushing them backwards over chairs.

Ever since I tore up the high-school soccer field on my Harley at the age of 17, I’ve been known as a trouble maker.

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March 8, 2018 · 1:47 pm

profile of a man with raw nerve endings in a world of lizards

PROFILE OF A MAN WITH RAW NERVE ENDINGS IN A WORLD OF LIZARDS

Being Samoan with a splash of black blood didn’t help things. It saddled him with a hardwire profile–in the lizard world a Samoan with a splash of black blood is that and nothing more. No room for nuances. No room for feelings and thoughts and idle dreams. Easy-come sex if female, someone to keep away from your daughters if male–that was the ceiling on differentiation. A low ceiling, like the one in Being John Malkovich.

“I’ve got blisters on my fingers!” Boy, did that one ring a bell. Resonate in the storm center of his brain. Flash through his nervous system like heat lightning. Each and every day, day after day, year after year the explosions went off, hundreds of thousands of them. His up days were torqued with pain that he finessed into ecstasy; on his down days simply breathing was close to impossible. But he did it.

He was in his late 30s before he recognized his true brotherhood. It had nothing to do with race or sex or the geo-political maze he was trapped in. It had to do with the ferocious, relentless pain between his ears. The brotherhood felt this pain, and the rest of the world didn’t. It was that cut and dry.

The pain was there regardless of circumstance. A paraplegic in the brotherhood felt it, a doctor or street bum or clergyman. The pain made simple tasks overwhelming. It made fluff-ball happiness, that was second nature to the lizards, a trigger for deep depression.

The lizards couldn’t see the pain, but they registered his struggle and they scoffed. “Get a grip!” said the lizards. “Eat less meat, take up jogging, pull yourself up by your bootstraps…”

It took him a long time to break through the iron wall of stereotypes and recognize the brotherhood, and longer still to recognize that the brotherhood was invisible to the lizards. It was only then that he saw that in a truly no-way-out situation, his kind persevered, while the lizards came unglued. He saw that the kingdom of heaven belonged to the brotherhood, and he longed for judgment day when the tables turned and the lizards fell like wheat under the scythe of revelation.

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