Stuff about Things or things about stuff in Normal entries

Was in a hilltop village They gambled for my clothes I bargained for salvation and they gimme a lethal dose I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn “Come in,” she said “I’ll give you shelter from the storm” --- Bob Dylan

Yeah it’s like that boys and girls. I wrote an entry yesterday; I didn’t post it anywhere. It’s tattooed on the inside of my skull. Wait, no, I don’t mean that quite so melodramatically and I sure don’t mean that literally. As a tangent by metaphor; I recently bought two goofy t-shirts very cheap, but to get free shipping I had to get a few framed posters. Seeing as I am already bound by water with the two Kangawa’s, and I have Nighthawks and Café’ at night, I chose Starry Night and this photo of a smiling Tibetan girl in a straw hat that looks professional enough to be Annie Leibovitz if she did commoners or Ansel Adams if he did people. That’s the tangent; the metaphor is that I haven’t ever gotten a tattoo because you can’t take it off your wall when you get tired of it. Extended the tangential metaphor to the analogy, if I had tattoo’s in my skull they would be so dense you couldn’t tell one from the other.

I think of them more as barbs in the memory, things that bite and take hold, can’t simply be pulled out like a thistle. My very simple life sometimes gets pretty damn complicated. I had rice for dinner, my first meal of the day, the other day and my mom said “Like a monk”. I thought she might be reading my thoughts, took me a moment to realize she meant my eating habits. I was loathe to tell her about the stash of twizzlers, which hardly count as food, but certainly must be a no-no for a monk.

To keep from being too cryptic I find myself in correspondence, though staggered and stiff, with Sunny and my attorney’s office as I recently signed and affidavit saying I hadn’t a clue where she was, is, will be. Though I live in the geographical center of passive aggressive, Sunny seems to have taken it to an art form.

Other things happen too. All the time. Long about the crack of 1637ish Rene Descartes, an obvious decadent and debauched westerner, said in his book called something like Discourses on method, Cogito ergo sum; I think therefore I am. . One wonders what was tattooed on his skull. The brain is a suspect organ, by and far the least humble, most narcissist, conceited and self-centered organ. You’d never hear the liver say “I filter poison therefore I am.” Wherein lies the flaw in Descartes thinking, there needs to be objective proof, and at the risk of being crude; I shit therefore I am. Unlike thinking, shitting involves processing something objective, something external (or at one time external) making twizzlers a more important piece of grand philosophy that wacky old Descartes. Twizzlers are not an abstraction, well, unless you go all physics on me and insist it’s all the same matter and in theory doesn’t exist in the sense we think it does.

All I really mean is that among the things that happen all the time that rarely make it into blogs, journals, scraps of all the wasted thinking therefore I aming that wind up posted everywhere, shit is conspicuously excluded unless there is a surfeit or dearth of it. Yet, the healthy mammal rarely skips a day expelling the waste the body can’t use. I’ll brook no shit jokes; not how full of it I might be, not ‘dawg are you saying everything is shit?’ --- I would have done those myself were I fixing to brook em n shit.

I wrote Sunnys sister on Facebook. Last winter she felt compelled by guilt to outline the story of Levi’s death, trying hard to get me to get sunny to tell it, but that wasn’t happening. The whole conversation ended with her being angry like I was pumping her for information. I just asked how she was doing and asked if it was ok to say hi, because my asking was charming and cute and funny, and we did not mention her sister at all. I like this sister, I like her kids (though one far better than the other two) and dislike her pig-eyed bastard of a husband, which really is neither here nor there. Ok, it might be there, but there is a long way away. A large part of that family’s family dynamic is to have horrible fights, develop factions, be mean for a while and then make up with drunken hugs and promises of famial fealty. My place in it is weird, and although I’ve been a part of that dynamic it’s been without active participation. I can count on one hand the times I’ve said things that can’t be unsaid, things I didn’t mean to say out loud but meant just the same. And so I’ve wavered between the shit list and the therefore I am list based on whose side who thought I was on. If I really ever had to pick a side, nine times out of ten it would be this sister’s side. She’s a kind, compassionate, strong person and only goes nutty when she drinks too much or has had it up to here. Usually it takes a combination of both.

And so if I maintain contact with bits and pieces of Sunny’s family, she’ll be the one. Sunny was hoping her and I could be friends. Assuming she hadn’t sold the house I raised my kids in and bought junk with the cash, killed my dog and “misplaced the other one”, lost all the shit she promised to send (most of which I treated like I do when I loan a book, knowing the strong possibility of never seeing it again and being ok with that) and other sundry misdeeds to my person, I’m not sure how a friendship with this sort of geographical distance and emails every four months can really be considered a friendship with developing. As long as she doesn’t show up on my doorstep she can define our relationship anyway she wants; if I spent my time disabusing people of their semantic delusions I wouldn’t have time to get around to the stuff I feel guilty about not doing. Or, you know, important stuff like sending entries into the ether.

I don’t expect that once the divorce goes through that she’ll be any more or less in contact or have anything to say that’ll crack me up, inspire or anger. Which is kind of a shame. Although for the life of me I can’t remember why the hell I married the seahag or even ever liking her that much, I remember why I married Sunny and I remember having loved her. She was creative and brilliant and funny and inspirational and hungered for knowledge and wisdom and other things Descartes probably would have approved of. Must of that has shriveled up and died inside her, or, possibly, I’m not longer privy to it; either case doesn’t bode well for friendship. The Sunny I married would be a great friend to have, I mean as long as you didn’t expect things. But her compartments have always been simple; us and them. To some degree or the other we all sort of do that. If she can still put things together, a dubious proposition at best, I’m now one of them. She certainly is. A primary difference being the whole Us and Them thing is obvious to me, she seems to think everyone she’s ever met is dying for her presence and return into their lives. I think it’s important to her psyche to think I am her friend, perhaps that I yearn for her. Once the divorce goes through she can think that all she wants, every four months or so I’ll return her semi-annual email with something not unkind. However, until it goes through, she seems to be passively ducking it, which means, to my therefore I am, she’s still selling my house, killing my dogs, losing my shit.

I moved to type something meaningless and trite like ‘Such is life’. But no, I’ve established that proof of existence is shit, and so “Such is shit” and the trite bumper sticker version, paraphrased for my own purposes “Shit is happening”.

And I’m spent.

And so are you.

Nothing but a chicken wing.