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Author Topic: Stream of Consciousness  (Read 45594 times)
ER
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The sleep of reasoner breeds monsters. (sic)


« Reply #75 on: November 09, 2017, 09:10:55 AM »

at a memorial service one night about sixteen years ago, around the same time I met the deceptively deep pretty boy I later married to my father’s amused disbelief, I was home after graduating from college, actually, hilariously, living in my childhood house again after four years away, babysitting for my cousin and not doing much else despite having a college degree, all the while mired in this self-disgusted celibacy I’d taken on that set the clock back half a decade and more, I heard John Cooper Clarke spout out his brilliantly obscene chant-poem Evidently Chickentown

clean version here ----> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4zv_vVEjks

and I got cold chills, and not just because it was the dirty version where he doesn’t say “bloody,” and the word he chooses instead he makes use of to the point it loses all vulgarity and becomes a rhythmic sound, forced air in its purest form

or because I was hearing it played straight off Napster there at the memorial service in a confining overcrowded basement that was vaguely redolent of vomit, second on a playlist that began with Billy Corgan's cover of Stevie Nicks’s Landslide, which filled me with longing and made me feel like my breath had been sucked out all because time itself so cruelly moved in only one direction cursing us to remember with longing what we could never ever revisit

it was because that beat, that cadence, that march within the filthy language John Cooper Clarke was spewing in his Lancashire accent was poetry at its most Whitman-like roar of sheer God-less, lawless, future-proof liberation from all sanity, the only sane reaction, it said, to an insane world, cynicism elevated to pragmatism, give up or fight or do your own thing but the system, the world, other people, it’s all even crazier than you, it said

and for all I know I may have been the only person there in that freezing cold basement not on acid, it was passed around, I know, tiny tabs smaller than a baby fingernail, with stars printed on them and perforated edges, me the reliable designated driver, oh, jeez, from to Leatherette to Heatherette the go-to one for responsibility in every realm save three, get us home, Ellie, that’s all we ask, but I swear that screamed-out poem made me trip for a moment at least as intensely as anyone else there that creepy, chemical-enhanced night, just wham, like this light was in my head for a minute, some sort of higher plane experience of the sort Buddhists claim music and chanting are able to do to you, like a rush of euphoria that barely lasted but staggered me it was so real, just so strongly real, ASMR on overdrive times a million, like out of body, out of mind, out of soul, that strong, just for a moment, though I’m not sure why.

the memorial, though, was for this kid I barely knew but several of my friends were close to, I’d shaken hands with him, ridden in a car with him, gotten him and his boyfriend de jour a Mountain Dew out of a cooler one summer day when it was 100 degrees and the air seemed to bend it was so hot, and that was about it between us, this artist and singer who died taking a nap while his mom was fixing him dinner, really sad, malformed heart, finite number of beats reached early, not even out of college, nobody’s fault, the same guy I wrote about in here a while ago, whose grave we later visited in a group, trespassing in the cemetery long after visiting hours and later had another weird night, right there in that same half-finished suburban basement as the memorial service, actually, some species of collective hallucination that was contagious

or the manifestation of an unhappy ghost, though I lean toward hysterical hallucination. I still felt it, that much is true, this cloud of sadness, sadness, sadness, pressing cold and strong against and into me, into us all, like someone who died young and suddenly might feel, a confused soul unsure where his sleeping dreams ended and the next world began

IS THIS REAL AM I REALLY DEAD

making one girl wail and cry and leaving me just feeling like WHOA inside

but anyway, there that night, weeks before the ghost, the night of the memorial service, just me and thirty near-strangers mostly from the same high school, not mine, four or five years past graduation, I got into a conversation with a moderately drunk someone never seen before or since outside the bathroom door as he was holding his girlfriend’s spangly fuchsia-hued purse, a ridiculous object I can only assume was some gay designer’s revenge on women in general, while his girlfriend in turn held her puking friend’s hair, and above the music and indelicate sound of booze-powered hurling he was claiming Family Ties, that bridesmaid of Must-See TV, had been the last innocent show on the air

and I said well, maybe Seventh Heaven was and it was still on then in 2001, and he said no, Seventh Heaven is not that innocent, it at least covers the rough stuff, incest, drugs, self-mutilation, it just does it by showing it's bad and that it can be resisted, and I thought that was true, Seventh Heaven may have been goody but it wasn’t wimpy so maybe Family Ties was the last innocent show on TV, since as bad as it ever got on there concerned some oily perv named Uncle Al who was shown hugging Mallory a little longer than she wanted him to at a media event. The dad was too pacifistic to kick Uncle Al’s ass for it, so blah, no respect for you there, Steven Keaton, since sometimes a punch in the mouth is the Lingua franca of the situation, and someone pawing your underage daughter is one of them

anyway I've also mentioned before, in here, I mean, how when I was little I'd watch Family Ties before bed, 8:30 Thursdays, right after Cosby, which I didn’t usually tune in for, mostly because everyone else did and I tried not to be a lemming, not yet comprehending how that was letting others dictate to me by reverse snobbery the way twenty million ‘90s teens wearing Grunge were all being equally unique, and it got under my skin that it never seemed to show the Keaton family's upstairs

i know it didn't exit, the set was just the set, okay, yes, but it still became this unshakable issue that it never (that I ever saw) showed that part of the house. I wish I could forget how much that bugged young me, but I can’t forget that (or much of anything, ever) and it was a nails on a chalkboard issue with me, some strange affront to my not quite blueprint-built brain which I couldn’t dispel. They had bedrooms and bathrooms and hallways the Keaton bunch went off to, Alex had a bust of President Nixon by his bed and yet…we were barred from coming up there

why?

“Sit, Ubu, sit! Good dog!”

it was just something pre-tween me had to live with, an obsession that made no sense to anyone else, something that weirded out the one teacher I told about it, and she was old enough to have thought she’d heard everything, but my quirk passed, the show went off the air in 1989, I found other things to perplex and madden me, like what is outside the universe, why did I like Quantum Leap so much, and if new water is not being created on Earth, how many people had previously drank the liquid in my glass before I did? (I still wonder about that.)

and maybe that toughened me up, my disappointment about Family Ties that led to understanding that “there was nothing there to see” because when Pulp Fiction came around in 1994 and everyone was all like

"What's in the briefcase, man? What’s in that briefcase? Is it Marcellus’ soul, man, is it? Hey, El, what’s in the briefcase, do ya think?"

well I was at peace knowing nothing was really in the briefcase, it had no answer, it was clearly a golden, glowing McGuffin, and I let it go with Zen-like grace. (Or, truthfully I wasn’t able to see Pulp Fiction in 1994, got chucked from the multiplex for trying, too young for an R-rated flick, a ten-buck bribe availed me nothing, but I did see it in 1995, and had my episode of unruffled wisdom then amid my turbulent year, 1995 seeming a different universe from innocent 1994.)

likewise with Trainspotting, a fine, fine movie that makes you appreciate clean restrooms, I had this feeling the title meant nothing, and though I listened to many theories come and go my senior year in high school when everyone was heading to the indy cinema near the region’s biggest college to see it, I felt it was another thing that was just supposed to kick up dust and nothing else, that the word “Trainspotting” was only a word, no definition. Turns out I was correct, Irvine Welsh admitted it when the depressing Trainspotting 2 thudded in theaters last year, finally saying that it was never anything, the word trainspotting was just his puff of brain dust to stir the curiosity. (From across time I heard a million ‘90s people screaming in agony at the shock of truth.)

so think about this, all right, if you choose to (since free will must be maintained and I won’t force you), given those examples of the illusion of depth, like quiet dark closets being mistaken for elongated hallways, how likely do you think it is that much of history beyond the big motivations like food and sex and comfort, much of the resultant innovation, not just philosophy but a lot of the rest, has been underwritten by the effort to solve a mystery that was never truly there in the first place?
« Last Edit: November 09, 2017, 04:22:42 PM by ER » Logged

What does not kill me makes me stranger.
indianasmith
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A good bad movie is like popcorn for the soul!


« Reply #76 on: November 09, 2017, 10:57:42 PM »

at a memorial service one night about sixteen years ago, around the same time I met the deceptively deep pretty boy I later married to my father’s amused disbelief, I was home after graduating from college, actually, hilariously, living in my childhood house again after four years away, babysitting for my cousin and not doing much else despite having a college degree, all the while mired in this self-disgusted celibacy I’d taken on that set the clock back half a decade and more, I heard John Cooper Clarke spout out his brilliantly obscene chant-poem Evidently Chickentown

clean version here ----> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4zv_vVEjks

and I got cold chills, and not just because it was the dirty version where he doesn’t say “bloody,” and the word he chooses instead he makes use of to the point it loses all vulgarity and becomes a rhythmic sound, forced air in its purest form

or because I was hearing it played straight off Napster there at the memorial service in a confining overcrowded basement that was vaguely redolent of vomit, second on a playlist that began with Billy Corgan's cover of Stevie Nicks’s Landslide, which filled me with longing and made me feel like my breath had been sucked out all because time itself so cruelly moved in only one direction cursing us to remember with longing what we could never ever revisit

it was because that beat, that cadence, that march within the filthy language John Cooper Clarke was spewing in his Lancashire accent was poetry at its most Whitman-like roar of sheer God-less, lawless, future-proof liberation from all sanity, the only sane reaction, it said, to an insane world, cynicism elevated to pragmatism, give up or fight or do your own thing but the system, the world, other people, it’s all even crazier than you, it said

and for all I know I may have been the only person there in that freezing cold basement not on acid, it was passed around, I know, tiny tabs smaller than a baby fingernail, with stars printed on them and perforated edges, me the reliable designated driver, oh, jeez, from to Leatherette to Heatherette the go-to one for responsibility in every realm save three, get us home, Ellie, that’s all we ask, but I swear that screamed-out poem made me trip for a moment at least as intensely as anyone else there that creepy, chemical-enhanced night, just wham, like this light was in my head for a minute, some sort of higher plane experience of the sort Buddhists claim music and chanting are able to do to you, like a rush of euphoria that barely lasted but staggered me it was so real, just so strongly real, ASMR on overdrive times a million, like out of body, out of mind, out of soul, that strong, just for a moment, though I’m not sure why.

the memorial, though, was for this kid I barely knew but several of my friends were close to, I’d shaken hands with him, ridden in a car with him, gotten him and his boyfriend de jour a Mountain Dew out of a cooler one summer day when it was 100 degrees and the air seemed to bend it was so hot, and that was about it between us, this artist and singer who died taking a nap while his mom was fixing him dinner, really sad, malformed heart, finite number of beats reached early, not even out of college, nobody’s fault, the same guy I wrote about in here a while ago, whose grave we later visited in a group, trespassing in the cemetery long after visiting hours and later had another weird night, right there in that same half-finished suburban basement as the memorial service, actually, some species of collective hallucination that was contagious

or the manifestation of an unhappy ghost, though I lean toward hysterical hallucination. I still felt it, that much is true, this cloud of sadness, sadness, sadness, pressing cold and strong against and into me, into us all, like someone who died young and suddenly might feel, a confused soul unsure where his sleeping dreams ended and the next world began

IS THIS REAL AM I REALLY DEAD

making one girl wail and cry and leaving me just feeling like WHOA inside

but anyway, there that night, weeks before the ghost, the night of the memorial service, just me and thirty near-strangers mostly from the same high school, not mine, four or five years past graduation, I got into a conversation with a moderately drunk someone never seen before or since outside the bathroom door as he was holding his girlfriend’s spangly fuchsia-hued purse, a ridiculous object I can only assume was some gay designer’s revenge on women in general, while his girlfriend in turn held her puking friend’s hair, and above the music and indelicate sound of booze-powered hurling he was claiming Family Ties, that bridesmaid of Must-See TV, had been the last innocent show on the air

and I said well, maybe Seventh Heaven was and it was still on then in 2001, and he said no, Seventh Heaven is not that innocent, it at least covers the rough stuff, incest, drugs, self-mutilation, it just does it by showing it's bad and that it can be resisted, and I thought that was true, Seventh Heaven may have been goody but it wasn’t wimpy so maybe Family Ties was the last innocent show on TV, since as bad as it ever got on there concerned some oily perv named Uncle Al who was shown hugging Mallory a little longer than she wanted him to at a media event. The dad was too pacifistic to kick Uncle Al’s ass for it, so blah, no respect for you there, Steven Keaton, since sometimes a punch in the mouth is the Lingua franca of the situation, and someone pawing your underage daughter is one of them

anyway I've also mentioned before, in here, I mean, how when I was little I'd watch Family Ties before bed, 8:30 Thursdays, right after Cosby, which I didn’t usually tune in for, mostly because everyone else did and I tried not to be a lemming, not yet comprehending how that was letting others dictate to me by reverse snobbery the way twenty million ‘90s teens wearing Grunge were all being equally unique, and it got under my skin that it never seemed to show the Keaton family's upstairs

i know it didn't exit, the set was just the set, okay, yes, but it still became this unshakable issue that it never (that I ever saw) showed that part of the house. I wish I could forget how much that bugged young me, but I can’t forget that (or much of anything, ever) and it was a nails on a chalkboard issue with me, some strange affront to my not quite blueprint-built brain which I couldn’t dispel. They had bedrooms and bathrooms and hallways the Keaton bunch went off to, Alex had a bust of President Nixon by his bed and yet…we were barred from coming up there

why?

“Sit, Ubu, sit! Good dog!”

it was just something pre-tween me had to live with, an obsession that made no sense to anyone else, something that weirded out the one teacher I told about it, and she was old enough to have thought she’d heard everything, but my quirk passed, the show went off the air in 1989, I found other things to perplex and madden me, like what is outside the universe, why did I like Quantum Leap so much, and if new water is not being created on Earth, how many people had previously drank the liquid in my glass before I did? (I still wonder about that.)

and maybe that toughened me up, my disappointment about Family Ties that led to understanding that “there was nothing there to see” because when Pulp Fiction came around in 1994 and everyone was all like

"What's in the briefcase, man? What’s in that briefcase? Is it Marcellus’ soul, man, is it? Hey, El, what’s in the briefcase, do ya think?"

well I was at peace knowing nothing was really in the briefcase, it had no answer, it was clearly a golden, glowing McGuffin, and I let it go with Zen-like grace. (Or, truthfully I wasn’t able to see Pulp Fiction in 1994, got chucked from the multiplex for trying, too young for an R-rated flick, a ten-buck bribe availed me nothing, but I did see it in 1995, and had my episode of unruffled wisdom then amid my turbulent year, 1995 seeming a different universe from innocent 1994.)

likewise with Trainspotting, a fine, fine movie that makes you appreciate clean restrooms, I had this feeling the title meant nothing, and though I listened to many theories come and go my senior year in high school when everyone was heading to the indy cinema near the region’s biggest college to see it, I felt it was another thing that was just supposed to kick up dust and nothing else, that the word “Trainspotting” was only a word, no definition. Turns out I was correct, Irvine Welsh admitted it when the depressing Trainspotting 2 thudded in theaters last year, finally saying that it was never anything, the word trainspotting was just his puff of brain dust to stir the curiosity. (From across time I heard a million ‘90s people screaming in agony at the shock of truth.)

so think about this, all right, if you choose to (since free will must be maintained and I won’t force you), given those examples of the illusion of depth, like quiet dark closets being mistaken for elongated hallways, how likely do you think it is that much of history beyond the big motivations like food and sex and comfort, much of the resultant innovation, not just philosophy but a lot of the rest, has been underwritten by the effort to solve a mystery that was never truly there in the first place?





Forty-two.
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"I shall smite you in the nostrils with a rod of iron, and wax your spleen with Efferdent!!"
ER
B-Movie Kraken
*****

Karma: 1754
Posts: 13424


The sleep of reasoner breeds monsters. (sic)


« Reply #77 on: November 13, 2017, 02:17:24 PM »

Every year about this time I send off a birthday present to Jackie, for three years my university roommate, and like it has become one of the rituals that support the foundation of our relationship, my husband always asks, "Ellie*, how many more years are you going to send a present to someone you haven't lived with in a generation?" (*Because very few people call me Evelyn.)

I'll always answer, "At least a year past when she sends me one."

Then I'll mention how she is so kind as to give me a birthday present that's separate from a Christmas present, not doing as most people do and combining them to save time and money.

I'll also remind him I was living in my car at the start of school and that she did rescue me from homelessness, and he'll say (as he does every year, like there's a script for this) it was only "homeless-lite," since I could have ended it at any time with a phone call to any of several people.

And I'll say, "Yes, but she didn't know that. She thought I was destitute and yet she took me in, so it was still a good deed."

He'll kick back, "You didn't even live with her that last year you were up there."

And I'll say, "Well excuse her for not wanting to live with her new husband."

His curiosity mollified, he'll throw in, "I guess it's nice you two send each other presents but it still seems anachronistic."

And then the topic will wind down and one of us will start up with a new subject for conversation, but this or a close variation of it has been going on this time of year since roughly 2003.
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What does not kill me makes me stranger.
Alex
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Posts: 12603



« Reply #78 on: November 13, 2017, 02:58:38 PM »

Every year about this time I send off a birthday present to Jackie, for three years my university roommate, and like it has become one of the rituals that support the foundation of our relationship, my husband always asks, "Ellie*, how many more years are you going to send a present to someone you haven't lived with in a generation?" (*Because very few people call me Evelyn.)

I'll always answer, "At least a year past when she sends me one."

Then I'll mention how she is so kind as to give me a birthday present that's separate from a Christmas present, not doing as most people do and combining them to save time and money.

I'll also remind him I was living in my car at the start of school and that she did rescue me from homelessness, and he'll say (as he does every year, like there's a script for this) it was only "homeless-lite," since I could have ended it at any time with a phone call to any of several people.

And I'll say, "Yes, but she didn't know that. She thought I was destitute and yet she took me in, so it was still a good deed."

He'll kick back, "You didn't even live with her that last year you were up there."

And I'll say, "Well excuse her for not wanting to live with her new husband."

His curiosity mollified, he'll throw in, "I guess it's nice you two send each other presents but it still seems anachronistic."

And then the topic will wind down and one of us will start up with a new subject for conversation, but this or a close variation of it has been going on this time of year since roughly 2003.

Record the conversation the next time it starts the just start playing it each time it comes up after that.
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But do you understand That none of this will matter Nothing can take your pain away
ER
B-Movie Kraken
*****

Karma: 1754
Posts: 13424


The sleep of reasoner breeds monsters. (sic)


« Reply #79 on: November 13, 2017, 08:52:35 PM »

Every year about this time I send off a birthday present to Jackie, for three years my university roommate, and like it has become one of the rituals that support the foundation of our relationship, my husband always asks, "Ellie*, how many more years are you going to send a present to someone you haven't lived with in a generation?" (*Because very few people call me Evelyn.)

I'll always answer, "At least a year past when she sends me one."

Then I'll mention how she is so kind as to give me a birthday present that's separate from a Christmas present, not doing as most people do and combining them to save time and money.

I'll also remind him I was living in my car at the start of school and that she did rescue me from homelessness, and he'll say (as he does every year, like there's a script for this) it was only "homeless-lite," since I could have ended it at any time with a phone call to any of several people.

And I'll say, "Yes, but she didn't know that. She thought I was destitute and yet she took me in, so it was still a good deed."

He'll kick back, "You didn't even live with her that last year you were up there."

And I'll say, "Well excuse her for not wanting to live with her new husband."

His curiosity mollified, he'll throw in, "I guess it's nice you two send each other presents but it still seems anachronistic."

And then the topic will wind down and one of us will start up with a new subject for conversation, but this or a close variation of it has been going on this time of year since roughly 2003.

Record the conversation the next time it starts the just start playing it each time it comes up after that.

I should...
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What does not kill me makes me stranger.
ER
B-Movie Kraken
*****

Karma: 1754
Posts: 13424


The sleep of reasoner breeds monsters. (sic)


« Reply #80 on: November 16, 2017, 10:46:26 AM »

If you guys thought I could write a lot when I was healthy and well, wait to you see how wordy I get now that I am a lowly shut-in cripple…

A few mornings ago I woke up and my lower right back was throbbing. It hurt so much in the night I realized it’d made my dreams all weird and dinosaur-filled. I kept trying to think what I'd done to cause this and I couldn't come up with anything.

It still ached so much Monday I stayed home from work (my one-time nearly father in law sent me flowers, huh) as I limped hunched over through the day and had a wretched night's sleep, about three hours of lying there trying not to breathe too hard. Then on Tuesday I figured I'd go in to work anyway, what the heck, it was going to hurt wherever I was so I might as well make some money and spoil a few interns with little kindnesses like making sure they had a magazine to hold over their heads when they walked three blocks in the freezing rain to get the mail at the post office. (I’m so nice to them.)

I hate taking drugs but I gave in and downed some Tylenol, and after that I could almost believe I was better, since the pain went from a spasming “God kill me now” throb to a low ache. I got everything done that I needed to do, but when it came time to leave I could not stand up. Just....couldn't. I laughed because it was so absurd that I, who have always been gifted with fluidity of movement, speed, even, a tennis player, a PE minor, briefly an exercise instructor when my friend was on maternity leave, kept falling back in the chair. It didn't even hurt that much since I was still drugged up on three Tylenol, but it was like my back wouldn't do what it was supposed to do, as if the signals were not getting through.

“Maybe terrorists have released polio,” my boss suggested, earning him The Look.

I gave in and called my husband and asked him to come get me, so he left where he was and brought our children with him, I guess thinking we'd all go out to eat, but, no, I was genuinely in a fix.

I finally did walk around before he got there but I wasn't up to driving myself. He wanted me to go to the emergency room and I said no, but agreed I would go to a massage therapist, so we went, me feeling like a proper jerk for dragging the children out for all this, but I hobbled in, trying not to let on how much pain I was actually feeling as the meds wore off, not wanting to freak the children out, my oldest being especially prone to worrying about everyone and everything, including whether dust mites have feelings.

“More than math teachers, honey.”

The massage started and hurt like crazy truth be told, but I thought maybe it was doing something too. Then she stopped abruptly and said, "You have this...knot..." (she stumbled past the word tumor) "...above your right kidney."

I was like, "Say what???"

So my husband came in and pressed down on the spot she showed him (which felt like getting jammed with a piece of rebar) and he said in a peculiar tone, "You've got this lump there the size of a super ball."

I thought, definitely not good.

He and my daughter prevailed on me to go to the emergency room (for the record I hate going to doctors) where they tortured me by pressing in on my back (“Stop and I’ll tell you everything!”) and said, huh, yeah, that's something, something seems to be there, maybe a cyst or maybe just where your back is healing an injury and forming a hard place for protection. Have you done heavy lifting or vigorous exercise lately?

No, and nah. Just my usual activities and exercise.

The doctor asked what my usual exercises were and I listed what I do and the doctor said, "That's a lot for almost forty."

That made me feel good til I contemplated the almost forty part. How did I get to be thirty-eight, anyway, when my game plan was to die at twenty-nine? Day by day age had crept up on me, granting wisdom but salting the wounds of time’s cruel lash.

So the nurse made me wear one of those inhuman open-backed gowns with a flower print on it, and there I lay on this cot while a closed-circuit TV played Vivaldi and showed calming skies and waterfalls, just like the death part in Soylent Green with its horrid final revelation:

“Soylent Green, it’s made from….beets!”

As the clock ticked I contemplated the odds that someone had died while wearing the gown I was in, and felt sure lots of people had probably given up the ghost on the cot I was lying on. Then I thought about what a bum deal that in the same year my husband was going to suffer the loss of two women he loved, me and the '90s chick from California he used to bang before my time, and what my funeral was going to be like, bagpipes and Thanatopsis, I hoped.  Spring Grove, or somewhere else? Closed casket, since I never did like being looked down upon. Comfortable shoes were a must. And I’d want to give one of my daughters my wedding ring and be buried in my 1990s engagement ring. Boy would my mother in law have a field day griping about that!

Her: “I told you that mongrel b***h always loved him better than you!”

My husband: “Well, I dunno, she dumped him more times than she did me, so I guess I won.”

(Private joke, I digress…)

I wondered if my godson's grandmother would smile a bit when she heard the news of my untimely passing, since she's held a deep grudge against me for twenty years, though oddly for all the wrong reasons.

I questioned if the first man I almost married was up there in Heaven, eternally twenty-five and banging some hot prom queen, and if so would he give me the time o' day once I got to the afterlife?

"Sorry, Evelyn, you aren’t twenty anymore. You’ve had three kids, and I mean, ummm…"

"f**k you, Brian, where’s Oscar Wilde to write me a witty comeback?"

Then I wondered which evil fiend among the many who'd step forward to console him for his loss my husband would marry on down the road, and would this monster give all my books away and try to make my children call her mom?

(Nurse! Barf bag!)

Adrenaline rush time, Celtic rage, and I started getting mad about it and I believe I would have gotten up and walked out to yell at my husband for his awful future second wife if I could have just reached my clothes or been able to take a step without moving like a sloth.

Finally, about 9:30 the staff came back in, spread on this icky mint-colored gel they’d obviously just taken out of a freezer and did an ultrasound on my lower back....and said they couldn't find anything.

I said, "Nothing?"

"No, nothing that we see. Everything looks fine. You're just a wimp, I guess."

(They may not have said that last part.)

I was relieved, but the mystery remained, why was I in pain and what was it they felt near my kidney, you know? (I bent my arm into crazy angles trying to feel this myself and couldn't.)

“What did it feel like?” I asked my husband in the car coming home.

“Like aliens had sneaked in and subcutaneously implanted a rubber ball.”

So the last two days I’ve been taking it easy and shirking all my duties, and have been so lazy I’ve actually gotten my five-year-old to let the dog out and bring me the TV remote, and all I can figure is one among my activities, hiking, running on the treadmill, helping stack firewood, carrying my sleeping son upstairs, whatever, tore a muscle and it has formed a knot there as sometimes happens during healing of a muscular injury, and lo and behold it seems I am not invincible after all and one or more of my undertakings was too much for me.

Me, who used to run 5 1/2 minute miles and play three five-set matches on a Saturday. Me, who used to like to jump flat-footed onto benches next to the sidewalk and then leap down again without breaking stride. Me...relegated to invalid status, as lame as Mr. Smallweed in Bleak House. The shame is horrific.

Yes, it is dismally depressing, though I am about 75% better today compared to Monday, so soon I’ll be able to find and destroy that second wife, the hussy who would have tried to take over my kids.

I’ll know her when I see her....
« Last Edit: November 16, 2017, 10:54:57 AM by ER » Logged

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« Reply #81 on: November 16, 2017, 12:08:24 PM »

Ever had a muscle pop slightly out of place? Sounds like it could have been that. I gets trapped between some other muscles causing strange lumps and is intensely painful but one they slip back into their normal positions the pain fades after a few days.

Anyway, glad you are on the mend.

Here is one thought for you though. With all changes to marriage laws and so forth, how do you know it would be a woman your husband would marry in that situation? He could be so inconsolable and find you irreplaceable by any other woman he ends up in the arms of man.

Thats about as good an attempt as I can do at making you feel better just now. Hope it helped, or at least gave you a smile.

Failing that I'll take the "Now I can't stop imagining my husband making out with a man everytime I close my eyes" nightmares.
« Last Edit: November 16, 2017, 03:19:10 PM by Dark Alex » Logged

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« Reply #82 on: November 16, 2017, 05:18:09 PM »

I think you're right, Alex, I think that's what it is, like a torn or slipped muscle. Remarkably painful!
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« Reply #83 on: November 16, 2017, 06:43:48 PM »

Get better soon, my friend!!!
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« Reply #84 on: November 17, 2017, 04:59:04 PM »

Stream 1)

One day some time back I was sitting watching the news. A bunch of people from the Middle East were upset with the UK and the USA and were doing their standard thing of burning the flags of those countries.

It got me to thinking. Every time they are upset with the west this is what they do.

Where the hell do they get these flags from? Is there a chain of stores all over the region selling various flags? If so do they make them out of specially flammable materials? Why do they think that burning a flag makes any difference to the country they are offended by? I mean if you want to hurt another country try organising a boycott of all its imported goods. Pretty sure that would have much more of an effect.

Its not something that has ever bothered me and I thought even it was a bit of a mix of patheticness and comedy.

Anyway, some weeks later I was over visiting Kristi while we were still going out and I happened to mention about this to her. It surprised me just how upset she got over her flag being burned. I mean to me, a flag is something I might fight under but other than "Oh look there is our flag, patrol is on the right route. Keep heading to it and we get home" it doesn't especially mean anything to me. After all I didn't design it (if I did it would be a lot cooler, with dragons (because dragons improve everything) and sparkly (well because women tend to like sparkly things and I am all for equality), I didn't vote for it. I just happened to be born in a country that uses that one. I could have been born under a different one just as easily. I certainly don't fight for it. I fight because I get paid pretty well for it. When I first joined up I did have feelings about going to fight for Queen and country, but I've since came to the realisation that while I love my country I really don't much care for most of the people that live in it and I am just trying to protect the minority that I do care about. Some times when I have a boss that I find inspirational, then I'll fight for them (most of them tend to be SNCO's (sergeants, chief techs, flight sergeants or warrant officers). Very few commissioned officers are able to win my loyalty in the same way. In fact I can only think of one. Quite frankly though, if everyone else on the planet was wiped out beyond the people I like, I don't think there would be enough left to repopulate the earth without inbreeding becoming a problem within a few generations.

An ex girlfriend (Bev) once accussed me of trying to save the world all by myself. She was wrong about that (as she was about many things about me, but thats another story, and one I don't know if I'll ever tell here). All I am fighting for is the parts of it I care about. If as a by-product this helps other people, well good for them.

It also gets me why people think that a flag touching the ground is someone a disgrace or insult to it. Personally if my blood is good enough to touch the ground, then I can't see why a flag shouldn't be treated the same. Or maybe people are saying their flag isn't good enough to touch the earth of their country? It really is something I don't understand. I just think its wrong that a symbol can be viewed as being more important than the people who have fought for it. Still, I know plenty other people think differently about this and that's their choice. Just because I don't get it doesn't make it wrong or right.

Although, when the revolution comes (on that glorious day (extra karma for the first person who gets that reference)) everyone who doesn't agree with me is going to be the first up against the wall (that reference is too easy for karma). And that's not just about flags. Especially you lot out there who don't have the same favourite colour as me!

Stream 2)

Music has always been really important to me, be it the songs I listened to on the radio before I was old enough to go to school, watching Top of the Pops (how we got music in the UK before MTV), or when I was old enough to get a job and start buying my own music (first album was Appitite For Destruction by Guns N Roses, then The Razors Edge by AC/DC, followed by Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden).

I've always liked to keep my distance from other people and personal stereos were a big help there. I could just stick them on, walk along and ignore the rest of the world. In fact the only time I haven't minded being part of a crowd is when I am at a gig, standing front and centre up against the barrier in a mosh pit. Until I met Kristi I never met anyone or done anything that made me feel better than how I feel when I am there, not love, sex, alcohol or drugs (although my experiences with drugs were much more limited than my peers. I've always had this thing about not becoming addicted to something).

It doesn't matter how bad things are out in the real world, when I am hearing live music nothing else matters and it feels like I am floating in a world made up just of music. I can close my eyes and just slip away into it.

Sometimes the music doesn't even have to be live for it to just take over. Like the time I was on guard at 4am and 'Jump' by Van Halen came on the radio and I got caught by the guard commander playing guitar, only with a rifle, or when I was down the gym on a running machine and didn't realise I was singing Rob Zombie's 'Super Charger Heaven' out loud. Its just as well my singing voice has been compared to someone famous. Freddy Krueger. Alas despite my love of music I couldn't carry a tune if you put it in suitcase and regardless of my 40 years of trying to learn how, I am still unable to whistle a tune. The other day I ended up singing the song 'Neverending Story'. I got as far as "The Neverending Story aaaahaaahaaaaaaahhhhaaahahh" before Ryan was begging me to stop.

Hmm, currently I know three people called Ryan. If I meet one more I am going to have to start giving them nicknames just like the Dave's.

Anyway, back to music. As an example of my musical talent when I used to be a roadie one of the bands I worked for needed someone to play a tamborene of a song and they asked me to do it. So the first night I got up on stage and beat that thing for all it was worth.

The second night I noticed the cymbols had been removed from the tamborene.

On the third night the skin had been removed as well, thus allowing me to possibly be the only person in the world who has ever played a wooden hoop in a thrash metal band.

It still amazes me to this day that I was viewed as the responsible one when we went on tour. If the story of what happened with the video camera (no, its not what you are thinking, damn but you lot have dirty minds) was more widely known I'd never have made it to be a road manager. Or the time I had a jury rig a power supply to two electric guitars through a single socket. It worked, but if the guitarists got too close (like Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons trading lines) then electricity arced from one guitarist to the other, or indeed the time I smashed the lead guitarists ribs in with my boots (this is quite a long story, but it involves a drug overdose and giving CPR to him and he was sick while I was doing mouth to mouth. When he'd recovered I told him that if he ever did drugs again he wouldn't need to worry about an OD, I'd kill him myself. I walked into his dressing room on another tour and caught him popping a couple of pills. I ran over, punched him to the ground and then started stamping on his chest. The rest of the band pulled me off him and it turned out he'd been taking a couple of asprin for a headache. I put that one down to tough love and I am sure the fractured cheekbone and broken ribs taught him a lesson he'll never forget. Not to mention the rest of the tour had to be cancelled. Never did work with that band though for some reason...).
« Last Edit: November 17, 2017, 05:03:07 PM by Dark Alex » Logged

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ER
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The sleep of reasoner breeds monsters. (sic)


« Reply #85 on: November 18, 2017, 08:42:46 AM »

Alex, Mr. Mash, the janitor guy on On You Being Served used to talk about the glorious day when the revolutions comes. Am I in the right neighborhood?
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ER
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The sleep of reasoner breeds monsters. (sic)


« Reply #86 on: November 18, 2017, 09:35:48 AM »

It’s good to be alive.

Since except for a few twinges I am finally more or less better after my recent back pain (though still no closer to figuring out what it was all about) I took a solitary walk in the woods today amid the cloud-smothered dawn, hearing the world wake up and feeling the energy that is always there, if you let your spirit open to it. The soil smelled richly damp, the few dry leaves the oaks still hold rattled above me, the scuttling noises of squirrels doing their quirky little dances, the deer flashing their white tails like ghosts between the thickets, it was all part of the glory. All just another day in these woods that five generations of my family have known, that I once fought a years-long legal battle to keep when my grandfather left them to me and someone else, not even in my family, really, tried to take them away.

I don’t know if there is anyplace I love more.

It’s disturbingly warm out right now, humid, spring-like, storms are forecast for the afternoon, some "strong to severe" as the meteorologists say in their precisely-worded language, and in the part of the world where I live nature’s inclemencies can be more than just an inconvenience. Right now the wind has begun to hiss, swatting the tallest tree branches, swaying them, leaving me to wonder what will come crashing down sometime between now and the stillness of sunset, assuming it reaches its projected "gusts of up to forty miles an hour" today and doesn't spawn anything worse, as sometimes happens, even in November.

Because where we live the sky can’t always be trusted. The sky, cruel as well as kind, tries to hurt you.

Our woods, though, it could survive almost anything, and likely has, since it’s very old, ancient, even. Because of its geography, slanted topography giving way to steep hillside, it lacks those venerable trees that reach cloud-ward, gravity and geometry’s unyielding angles, taking their toll before old growth is ever achieved, but it is a virgin forest all the same, its cycles of seeding, maturity and death, then an afterlife in the loam, bark decaying to soil, have repeated over and over for half a thousand human generations.

We know for a fact that Shawnee Indians used to camp here on the tallest hillside that looks down at the local river valley, and though that sounds long ago to us, 250 years, to the forest they would have been late-comers.

A group of friendly Mormons once told me they think this place may actually have been a Book of Mormon site: how about that? They tried to make a case that the advanced Hopewell of 2,000 years ago, who, like the Shawnee we know were here, literally HERE, coincided perfectly with the Lamanites of which their faith tells.

Before the historical tribes, though, even before the dubious Lamanites, who knows. It’s believed the first people to be here in these hills above the fertile river valley came trailing the glaciers' retreat as the ice age, which never actually ended, began its patient trek north where it remains even now in the land of permafrost tundras. Cougars used to be here, bears, sloths, wolves, even, far enough back mammoths, since we have the distinction of residing almost literally where the half-mile high glaciers stopped their southern advance, before reversing as the mysteries of climate caused their alteration, their runoff flooding downward with gravity, feeding a river even more ancient than this woods, creating boulder-dotted gullys we used to climb down into as children, and which my children like to do today. So mammoths used to graze here beside the ice, feeding on the meadow flowers that dotted the pseudo-tundra that was once….right here. I like to imagine what they smelled like, and how their trumpeting calls must have sounded.

Weird as it sounds, I love them, even though they’re long, long gone.

So from a human perspective, the woods has "always" been here, never logged, never developed, through millennia, possibly 13,000 years old, and sometimes I think it has many secrets, that it knows things that have gone on. I’m sure across the century of centuries of its life span lovers have met here, feuds were fought, deals made, rituals enacted, skies watched, sacrifices undertaken, ordeals endured, storms, fires, almost certainly murders. If there are such things as ghosts, surely ghosts have been here too, floating in the mists, recalling life, perhaps always cold, cold, cold in death. At least that’s how I always imagined them as a child, spending nights here with my grandparents, hearing stories, sitting up alone and sleepless staring out the windows into the woods, imagining I saw things, telling myself I did.

I can tell you from my own humble vantage point, a mere speck in the time it has known, odd events have come to pass within the woods we are so silly as call “ours.”

For instance there are disappearances associated with our woods, probably natural, almost certainly natural, but, shrug, my mind spins what it will. A few years ago my daughter, then about six, wanted a cat, so we got her one, and since the little cat had four white paws, my child announced she was named Miss Sparkly Feet.

Cute don't you think?

Miss Sparkly Feet was quiet, even for her kind, tolerant but not markedly affectionate, and one day….she simply vanished. Poof. Gone. We looked but never found her. Unremarkable, I suppose, cats being cats, but we never found any trace, any clue, any sign of predatory violence, just...into the woods she apparently went, and in the woods she stayed forever. One of life’s small mysteries.

This summer our beagle, Ernie, a rescue dog, sweet but admittedly not anyone’s favorite compared to our lab, Chocolate, likewise took one of his walkabouts into the woods, something he did many times in the eight years we had him, only this time…well.

Yes, coyotes roam here. Yes, things happen. No, I don’t truly think the woods ate our pets whole, consuming them in some Sabbath of the Soil, or believe they slipped through some portal and wound up sharing the environs with stone age hunter gatherers, but who am I to say they didn’t? Makes a more bearable explanation than the pair winding up coyote dung.

But our woods, it’s a cool place. It dresses up with each season and rewards us for the love we give it. It has memories everywhere I look, of special times and people I’ve known, who lived here too. It whispers and hints and plays games, and likes to remind me that it’s been here for a very long time.

It’s the most remarkable place I know.

« Last Edit: November 18, 2017, 09:42:29 AM by ER » Logged

What does not kill me makes me stranger.
Alex
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« Reply #87 on: November 18, 2017, 09:53:01 AM »

Alex, Mr. Mash, the janitor guy on On You Being Served used to talk about the glorious day when the revolutions comes. Am I in the right neighborhood?

If by right neighbourhood you mean British TV then yes, but I am afraid that is not the show I was thinking about, although I will give you a point of karma for getting a reference that I didn't remember despite having watched that show as a child.
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indianasmith
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« Reply #88 on: November 18, 2017, 11:22:58 AM »

That was pure prose poetry, ER!  Magnificent!
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316zombie
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« Reply #89 on: November 19, 2017, 10:36:58 PM »

That made me feel good til I contemplated the almost forty part. How did I get to be thirty-eight, anyway, when my game plan was to die at twenty-nine? Day by day age had crept up on me, granting wisdom but salting the wounds of time’s cruel lash.
written by ER

  the same way i ended up 56 when i planned being dead at 25.
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