MFG – “As he put the dusty cardboard box onto the passenger seat of his pickup, Roger yelled, “Hey, Louie. Once you’ve finished the kitchen, get your fat ass down into the basement and clear it out. We need to be done by 4:30, or Bart will have a shit fit. He is already pissed about that window you broke at the store yesterday.” Roger took a final drag on his Marlboro and threw it to the ground. “I’ll be ‘you know where’ if you need me. And I don’t want any calls unless you find the fucking Mona Lisa in this shack.” Roger was a house rat. He cleaned out residences for lawyers so they could be sold to close out estates. Roger was allowed to keep anything he found.”
MFG – “They don’t understand reality anymore so they seek succor in the depths of despair and hallucination.”
MFG – “I can’t seem to remember to forget you.” “I keep forgetting to remember you.” “If you ever leave me, I want to go with you.”
Flannery O’Connor, a terrifying truism in Wise Blood: “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.”
From “OBLIVION” by David Foster Wallace. “What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”
I took my pills tonight; those damn synthetic replacements for my body’s failures. Or did I? It has become so routine that I am constantly wrestling with whether I have already ingested the critters or am just going on a memory of a previous rote meal.
Every night the need to take them crashes into my sleepy mind as I careen toward bed and I make the detour into our bathroom, a shrine to designer genes, yet still a hollow space where sounds grow larger at each rebound until they disappear into the plasma of existence. That room is the opposite of the cocoon of sleep.
The Halloween-colored pills sit waiting in groups in their pre-fab plastic barracks, each platoon ready to serve for one day. The specter of them, their shields glinting under the bright sink-side light, is a reminder of how imperfect I am, how I have come closer to not being. As I reach for them, my fingers stall for a moment as I find myself asking, “What if I turn around, leave them in their huts, abandon their promise? What would be the first clue to arise? Dizziness? Itching? Nausea? Nothing?” I take them, snuffing out the what-ifs, the gamble.
The light switch falls and the images of me ingesting the pills become just burn marks in my brain, like after a look into the sun. I meander toward the bed and my dis-ease begins.
What would I do with my remaining finite time once earning money, burnishing my reputation, and the other wasting-time things that make up ninety percent of my waking hours are recognized for what they are? Travel to exotic places: Zanzibar, Bhutan, the Galapagos? Make love to a young woman again? (Can I get that impersonal, that mercenary, again?) Try those few drugs I missed during my ‘lost’ years? Go out of control?
From Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, by Annie Dillard (1974)
“I know that art is edges.” p. 29
“Hands curl up like leaves.” p. 31
From Letter to a Hostage by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1943)
“Thus, if I draw myself into a partisan passion, I am liable to forget that life has no meaning unless it serves a spiritual truth.” p. 51 (see
entire pages 50 and 51)
From Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard (1977)
“There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom.” p. 62
mgeisser
