Know that old saw about how life is stranger than fiction? I usually consider myself immune from that, or I have for the past few years. No one says life is more fucked up than fiction because in fiction there are aliens and monsters and the world ends every time you turn around. There is an old saw, I should cite the source, but I don’t remember; Tragedy is when I stub my toe, Comedy is when you take a spill and break your leg.
I had a sort of complicated weekend. Some of which won’t make this entry. For a few days I was babysitting a power pumping ancient short legged, short haired dog. I wrote an entry with pictures and either prosebox was acting weird or no matter how many times I checked the code I couldn’t get the pictures posted; it’s possible that photobucket was acting weird; it is a “new format”.
Oh, fucking new formats; my fucking iPhone wanted to upgrade itself to the OS7 and so I let it and I have to figure out which bubbly cartoony thing is the function I want now.
Doc had found something weird to roll around in and I had a series of photos and a narrative about playing cops and robbers and how doc was over acting getting shot. Other weird shit happened.
Yesterday I cleaned up the nervous ancient dog piddle and talcum and washed sheets and stuff. That entailed moving my bed a bit. Middle of last night I woke up needing to pee. The space between bed and world was different than it usually is in the dark and I fell, smacking my good knee and whacking my head hard enough to make cartoon lights (no, not tweety birds or firecrackers, but you know, that bright sort of red tinged bang of impact. I can’t possibly be the only one who sees that, right?). I was very aware of my consciousness, and though I’d rather go to a morgue than an ER I was prepared to very honestly answer “No, I did not lose consciousness”.
I’m a bit hobbled though, I mean my hurts.
None of that is stranger than fiction, well, not my fiction, which, with all due humility, lists towards strangeward. Also, I am compelled, with all due juvenility to point out; I just said doo(due) twice now, heh, due due. Stranger shit happened in the middle of that, the sort of thing I won’t mention because I don’t talk about other people’s business, I mean people I like, or who have done me no wrong and would prefer their business not be talked about. I do (heh, doo) gossip like a motherfucker or talk about people acting the fool all the time.
For my part in the oddness I refer to a story I’ve told before that has only one piece that is exactly the same. For those who don’t know it takes 2mg of Ativan and at least 2 of Xanax for me to get sleep; it’s part of why I don’t remember my dreams’, Ativan is part of the surgery cocktail that keeps you from remember the trauma of surgery whether you are out cold or not. Without all those sleep drugs I can’t sleep long enough for REM, so either way I don’t dream.
Anyhow, several years ago on Christmas eve, some Christmas when it was just Herschel and I at home, I had taken my pills and Hersch and I were snuggled under a blanket on the La-Z-Boy watching the traditional Christmas High Plains Drifter waiting for the drugs to kick in when the phone rings. Instead of inventing dialogue (my knee is swollen enough to prohibit creative invention) the upshot is that Sunny is being chased through the woods by her drunken sister (oh, though she didn’t mention it, sunny was drunk too) and her mom, her ride, passed out drunk, and would I come rescue her before her sister kills her. My first thought was “Then your ghost can come back to the farm and wreck revenge and say things like ‘what’dja say your name was?’ ‘I didn’t’”
I put a loose leash on a sleepy Hersch, got into the rig and went to a gas station as the mighty mighty jeep was traumatized by Jackson Browne and running on empty. I fill up the tank, go to pay, and the guy tells me my card is declined. To shorten that part of the story, he keeps my Driver’s License as collateral and gives me a cup of coffee and beef Jerky for Hersch on the house.
The sister’s farm is an hour by freeway and then at least a half hour upwards at maybe a six, seven percent grade, half of which is dirt. I have a lead foot too, so time and distance mean a bit different thing to me. There is a thick fog, a very thick fog at river level that gets much thicker as we climb. The coffee barely puts a dent in the Ativan and Xanax and Herschel, for some reason known only to him, howls the whole way, even around beef jerky, which is like howling with a lisp. So I get up to the farm, blind, a howling Herschel, no driver’s license, and Sunny, her sister and her mom are all standing in the driveway yelling at each other, and my presence seems to calm everyone down enough to get sunny and her mom into her mom’s car and I follow them back down the mountain. Oh. I guess that makes two things similar.
I understand why my presence calms things down when I’m trying. I’m trained or rather my natural skills were augmented with training. It’s very obvious that if you maintain a calm tone of voice people naturally try to match it, that’s easy to train, it’s the how to use it, how to fuel the desire to calmness in someone that takes either very advanced training or some inherent skill. I don’t understand why I can calm down an angry group just by showing up and asking ‘what’s up?’ One of Sunnys great conceits has always been that she has magical powers and I have some mixture of dumb luck and intellectual theory, which is neither here nor there and will be less so in a week or so.
I’ve been on this sleep cocktail for a very long time without needing more or needing to stop it, on purpose, because I ‘should’ be able to sleep naturally. The way it works is more like I can give myself permission to sleep and the drugs are strong enough to allow it. I can also not give permission. Though it’s difficult to explain, it is a battle, will versus pharmaceuticals, will being a mixture of mental exertion and body memory of gross insomnia.
Years later, I am much more sympathetic to the sister than to sunny or her mom and today I’d be moved to tell the sister where sunny was in the woods and ask what caliber she was packing. Nobody ever did tell me what the fight was about, Sunny suggested Herschel and I were somehow denigrated, I believe that was supposed to make me believe the sister was a raging lunatic and sunny was protecting my honor. What would have helped me the most was the truth. No one was concerned enough about my drugged ass sans driver’s license and with a howling pit bull in cottony fog racing up a mountain on Christmas Eve to tell me the real tale.
I am not telling you the real tale either, I’m using one almost a decade old to allude to current events, the only common thread being me on heavy sleeping meds performing a good deed. I had enlightened self-interest in both scenarios.
Like the previous week I haven’t been ignoring y’all on purpose, it’s just that life is stranger than fiction. Good fiction needs to set up a series of conflicts and resolutions building to primary conflict; the denouement doesn’t have to resolve the conflict but it does have to end the tale. Real life has the same sort of thing which is what your second, fifth, eleventh and sophomore teachers all meant by write what you know. It just is that in real life the denouement isn’t done in the first person.
I should probably cross post, right?
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