Stuff about things in Normal entries

Morning coffee klatch with my mom is over, and if I planned my days here I’d be figuring out what I was going to do or already out doing it. I cruised prosebox to see who all is there, as in the new batch of huddling yearning masses with the same old story as though they were discovering a new land. That’s a little tiresome but it also gives the place that pioneer feeling. I read one or two favorites that pop up on the home page, which, I imagine will change with greater frequency in the months ahead.

It’s almost impossible for me to do that on OD, I sort through ghosts and long lists. It’s not always a very good idea. It’s better to wait until later when I remember I have a copious amount of drugs through a pain here or there, let the drug change my chemistry a bit and just start pecking out whatever comes to mind. Hmmm, I type not pecking, I meant it more as alliteration, it’s more like my fingers tick across the keys, I prefer a crunchy keyboard, I prefer them to make sounds, it’s been a very long time since that was necessary. I learned to type on a manual and then the school had a class with a room full of IBM Selectric’s, mostly the students were stoners or kids who hadn’t heretofore learned to type.

People who have never used a manual typewriter think that whole ‘Hemmingway stood to type like he was angry and fighting’ thing was some sort of affectation. Yeah, no, I did that before I knew that Hemmingway had, I needed the leverage, I was a light kid and short, I needed my forearms and shoulders to hit the keys hard enough, certain letters would punch through the paper if it were the onion skin or 30 bond or lighter paper. Onion skin was easier to “antique” burn the edges and hold the rest about a foot and a half above the flame and it would yellow. If you were writing a poem for a girl it looked, I don’t know, older, more grown up, well, that was the theory.

Yes, I understand that a modern keyboard takes a light touch. When I claim to be a computer guy it’s either from the years I’ve spent doing this and know DOS commands or, my only real talent, is that I know hardware. I haven’t owned a factory made computer in almost two decades and the ones I did own I bought used, fixed so they ran right and gave away to friends and family. One of Rimbaud’s famous poems, and I think it’s from a season in hell and not the drunken boat, begins with “I have the hands of my gaulish forbears, inept at the flaying of beasts …” If y’all look that up and it’s not verbatim it’s because I’m doing it from memory of a translation. Those are the kind of hands I have sans the Gaul, I can’t fix many things except computers. I’m not particularly good with code. I know hardware and peripherals. I still want my keyboard to sound like a typewriter.

Aww shit, I skipped over something I should probably go back to. I am prescribed the same drugs in a larger dosage and with greater frequency that they found in Heath Ledger when he died. Like Heath, they are legal prescriptions. His doctor wasn’t sued; it was a light weight dose. Like Heath, my prescriptions are legitimate. The salient point of returning to this is that yes, I am a little bit stoned when I write an entry or a flash. I’m not Edgar Allen Poe or Lewis Carroll stoned, but I’m a little stoned. Neither Heath nor I were trying to get stoned or he would have had more in his system (in fact it was probably his lack of any built up tolerance that killed him) and I would have had the dosage increased at least once in the past five years. Poe and Carroll were seriously stoned. Um, high-school typing class I didn’t have a prescription for anything. I did really like the jazz percussion sound of typing with bells going off at random intervals though.

I mean when I showed up. Which wasn’t really all that damn often. I don’t recall why I formally dropped out, I mean why I bothered going to the vice principal, perhaps one had to in those days, sort of the drop out equivalent of being an emancipated minor, or maybe I just was being a smart ass. The vice principal was surprised to see me. I assume because it was always the same few kids through a revolving door. He argued that I had a high GPA (he had to look at the file) and hmmmed and ahhed, or, you know, hemmed and hawed, got to the attendance records. Still he tried talking me out of dropping out with all the reasons grown-ups always have about jobs and other shit. I had a friend waiting in the lobby to see him. A year or two later he told me he was there to drop out and the vice principal accused him of being influenced by me. It was just one of those coincidences that we chose the same day and the same means. It’s those kinds of coincidences that make you think there are no such things as coincidences, and whereas I talk about being an upright citizen in the past tense, my friend is still an upright citizen. The vice principal was mistaken.

Ok, I’m not sure my friend finished college either, might even have dropped out for the same reason I did, though I think he had other reasons. I had a second kid on the way; I needed to quit farting around. I think, though he has a kid my son’s age, that he just couldn’t sit still long enough, though, perhaps he did finish college. I was in touch with him less than five years ago, among all the catching-up stories none were about college or high school. I want to say the last time I actually saw the guy was in anchorage in 77, but he might have been in town when I got married in 80. This town where I sit typing now on something flat and black that doesn’t even look like it should make words. Most of my friends from this town were there, even ones who’d been gone as long as I. One came back from California where he was studying to be a Luthier. We jammed together, me on a tenor sax, him on an electric guitar he had made with a mother of pearl and garnet rose twining up the frets, someone else on bass and the anarchist on, I think, another handmade instrument, a mandolin I think. To be fair I was the groom and had had a lot to drink. We sounded good though and it was both a wedding reception and a going away party. Most of us there were going away or had already gone and were back just for the occasion. I’d been somewhere in-between for years by then.

I mean I didn’t run away from home, I walked and then thumbed, and walked or thumbed back. One of the few people who wasn’t enchanted by those tales was the first girlfriend I had after the separation of the union in the above paragraph. She figured something must have been terribly wrong at home, didn’t buy the idea that I just had restless feet. She had done something similar though it was just between the little isolated Pacific Rim town she was from into the big bad city of Portland. She had trouble at home. She had a thing for bad boys. Not the kind of bad boy I was but the kind that wears a wife beater and puts headers on his muscle car and always has grease under his nails. I really liked her just the same.

It wasn’t my parents’ home I kept leaving; it was where it was and still is located. Yes, there are many fine things to say about Michigan as a geographical location, and it’s a person of small imagination or a sour disposition that can’t find beauty if he or she looks hard enough for it, and so that’s why I say restless and not bored or bitch about mid-Michigan (though it’s bitch-worthy). It wasn’t worth arguing the point with her and she had a nice way of stating an opinion and though there were things we did not agree on we never had a real fight. I really liked her. We broke up daily for about a year. Right after sex, sometimes breaking up three or four times a night, sometimes waking one another up to break up. I really liked her. Often someone had to leave before the kids woke up, every now and again the kids would have a “sleep over” sometimes the exs would have both set of kids. The whole thing was impossible but I really liked her.

Huh. Makes me want to go somewhere else. It’s a place I should not let me go. I guess if I were to pretend to have sage advice about relationships; don’t hold them too loose and really don’t hold them too tight. If you don’t think about it your grasp goes to the right grip automatically. Sometimes that’s not a forever thing, but it doesn’t always end in tears. Yeah, I don’t have sage advice. But I think, in general, and in most things worth talking about the whole too loose/too tight thing is probably worth keeping in mind. After all it’s only life, not worth taking too seriously or throwing out carelessly; the one will age you quickly and the other won’t age you at all, you don’t have to rush to the grave it’s already rushing to you, and you can’t sweat the grave because it’s coming no matter how hard you wring your hands and fret.

Ah shit. I should have dropped a pill first, no?