The great-painful part of frostbite—when the bends and limbs start coming back to life.  

The side effects are very very close to being over, if they are not already gone completely. On my walk from the bus to my work building in the mornings I can feel myself actually reacting to things and sounds around me, including the music coming through the headphones, the air, the people, the crosswalks. Pardon the obvious oddity to this sentence, but I am feeling the most that I’ve felt in a very very long time.  

I’m thankful to not be hunched over the toilet in the mornings anymore, and my stomach pains are pretty much gone. The itchy skin, the vertigo—both are gone. I’m done. The nagging little feeling of forgetting something nightly is gone too. When a nightmare is over the waking up begins. I can’t believe I did it, but I did it. Anti-depressants deserve their own level of hell in Dante’s Inferno. 

My sister and I had an interesting phone conversation last night. We talked a lot about mom, and we talked about how far gone she is now—as in removed from our daily lives and whatnot. I guess I never gave much thought to how much her stroke impacted her mental state(my mom had a stroke in her early thirties, when I was in fifth grade). I guess I only thought about the physical things that happened—her weight gain, the loss of feeling on one side of the body, how she had to learn to walk again and eat again via mouth instead of tube. I never thought of the mental toll, never “took it into consideration.”  Now I am. It doesn’t change much about anything, but it does tie some things together that perhaps needed connecting. I’m sure to be chewing on it for a few days, at the very least, and writing about it. 

Speaking of writing, my sister offered to do the artwork for the book I’m working on. I wish I could rightly express to her how honored I am to have her be a part of it. She is an amazing artist. Hearing her say that made my night.

I just had a funny little moment. I might spend the next few days scribbling crazy away trying to capture exactly what that was, what it felt like. All I can say is I’m alone and listening to “Being Cool” by Kimya Dawson and I felt the biggest suckerpunch of empathy for others, way moreso than the usual–this wasn’t usual. To be honest I think it’s one of those side effects to growing up. I guess it just hit me that we’re all really trying, and with so many different efforts smashing against one another in this world, it’s no wonder there are stems of aggravation, stumps of ego, petals of decision seizures. No wonder we are so hopeful about dust and so dismissive of lungs, and so heavy on the make up and so reliant on a couple stupid sentences.

I’m gonna go ahead and site the Kimya Dawson song on this one. Here is the song “Being Cool”

Here are the lyrics:

is new york city really like a graveyard they all ask me
and i say well it was last week but man that was in the past
see i stopped going to the places where the people act so nasty
and pretentious ’cause i’m happy sitting with my friends in sidewalk singing songs

and some people are still standing in the way of where i’m going
so i say please excuse me, step aside, or keep on moving
and i guess they sensed that my momentum meant that i was winning
but i’m only just beginning and i’d rather go with friends than go alone

and some people grab my hands and some people grab my shirt
some people race ahead to see if they can get there first
some people stay behind ’cause they’ve got something else in mind
whatever you decide if you are true to you you’re gonna be alright

like akida he’s a father now he is in love with amber
their baby’s name is skyler he’s a baby of the summer
i wonder as i wander if i’ll ever settle down
or if every day i’ll take my roots uprooted en route to another town

i was sitting on a couch somewhere watching vh-1
when i found out that bruce springsteen is his mother’s only son
i’m my mother’s only daughter and we were both born to run
even he says it’s amazing raising babies in the place where you come from

but i am a rock tumbler i’ve got rocks inside my head
and just because they come out shining doesn’t mean that they are diamonds
and i guess that my worst nightmare is your very favorite bar
when i’m worth my weight in shale and slate i’ll know that i’m a super duper star

i’ll be a great big ball of burning gas and i’ll be sitting on my big fat ass
sipping cristal light beside a plastic wading pool
and the next day i’ll be somewhere else part of me will hate myself
part of me will know deep down that i am pretty cool
the part of me that knows i never cared for being cool
the part of me that knows i never cared for being cool
the part of me that knows i never cared for being cool

When I was a kid I had a fear of railroad spikes, the loose and rusty ones just laying in wait for skull punctures and freak accidents. As a broken family we took five mile walks in the evening and a third of that followed rails. Mom found a strange, handwritten song/poem called “In the Long Run,” and I remember kicking gravel around to myself while she read it to a made up beat. We fed sugar cubes and apple slices to a jumping horse named Joker, and we pumped water from the well in the cemetary. The scenes were backed by evenings and the dog chased after joggers.

I threw up on the sidewalk in front of the high school, waiting for my sister’s last bell to ring. I had just been slapped with suspension and my mother was in the hospital. I think we were going to see her. She was coming home soon to stay in a hospital bed in the living room and we fed her Ensure through a tube in the stomach for about a month. I watched her go from wheelchair to walker to cane to nothing. CC&7s again like nothing ever happened, back to the horsetrack placing bets on the names your daughters liked.

Now that I’m getting older I see that I only knew her as young, and unphased, and we picked her up from the bar in Cincinnati a couple times and stayed up knowing she wasn’t coming home. I dressed myself for school and blatantly sucked at it. There were Sports Illustrated models in their bikinis on the fridge and seven layer salads, and lemon to lighten the hair–hours and hours in the sun.

Brand new bike still boxed and not built yet, trophies, the winter clothes, the toys and paperwork. All gone, erased from storage in a move of ego revenge. All of our shit just gone. My dad bought me the bike you asshole. Your sons were spoiled brats and your exwife a mystery woman with red hair in front of a split level. His parents lived too close to the airport–the walls shook when a flight tumbled over. You made my sister iron your shirts in the morning before work and you left us alone for days and you were the idiot with a bowling ball. Nobody liked you and everything about me rejoiced when you left. You hit my mother and threw plants. A recall from the stepfather factory.

You can use moss as carpet in makeshift barbie doll apartments–vertical shoeboxes for showers and Jem dolls for boyfriends, a slow dance with arms extended in daydreams of elbow bends. Tasseled pillows were come rescue me chambers and couches were boats where I piled up all my belongings and floated alone playing cliffhanger with the upper body. A ball and a fence–I hit one against the other over and over until out the bottom bent and grass stepped aside for smooth streaks in the dirt from repeated placement. Knocked baby apples off tree branches practicing chip shots; avoiding the neighbor Don and his small talk, running the rust flakes off the chain and across the palm–the mark of been there, imagined that. There was nothing like avoiding the tomato plants and getting her attention; a squint of approval and confusion from a lawnchair in the sun.

Quiet Riot singer Kevin DuBrow was found dead in his Las Vegas home on November 25. The singer had recently celebrated his 52nd birthday in New Orleans. Quiet Riot drummer Frankie Banali confirmed DuBrow’s death in a statement e-mailed to Spain’s ‘The Metal Circus.’

“I can’t even find the words to say. Please respect my privacy as I mourn the passing and honor the memory of my dearest friend Kevin DuBrow,” he wrote.

Kelly Garni, the Riot’s bassist, also posted a message on the web confirming the death. “I ask this to all of you not only for myself but for other friends and family. I ask that no one here offer any speculation or opinions, theories or other things that could be construed as negative or, and I’m sorry for this, even sympathetic, right at this immediate time,” said Garni. “I am already within hours of this having to deal with untrue rumors and speculation and that only adds fuel to that.”

Details about the cause of death are not immediately available. Garni added that he would inform fans of details when the information was available.

Now I’m not a huge Quiet Riot fan or anything, but I did see them live back in 2000, in Middletown Ohio at a little bar called Zodiacs(god knows what the place is called now).  There were a lot of mullets and a lot of cheap beer, and they cut out after playing only four songs, blaming “electrical problems.”

(whistle)
January 2005
This therapist and I
Call upon the strength and spirit of
The synchronized swimmers
To help survive in the
Ocean of my crying that we’re drifting in
There,
little pink EAT MEs
In a rattle that
Shrink me to keyhole size
Living in the looking glass wise
Crackin my way through
Tea parties with the brand new calmness
That chaos can’t hang with
I’m the one steeping jokes
With nonsensical punchlines
Motorboat trickle to hum’s death

It only takes a moment
To change a smirk to sneer
A world out of your hands now
Backseat betty zombie with the
Sporadic outlashes to prove it
I don’t mind upholstery for sharpening
But freckled backs are a bit more satisfying

Spot a light
Never stepped in
Swing the noose around its shape
Outline and whip a wrist to snap it back
We only ever owned whatever we lost
we can say we gripped it
like confident gearshifters
sliding hands on thigh now and then a little higher
blowing yellows and praising yield signs
splitting define with definite like it’s
abandoned poker coins on coffee T’s needing pockets
to rest their powdered wigs and gods we trust in
inablers with tinted windshields
inherited courtesy the sheriff auctions
faked bidding like champions and bought them
often just another tickmark on the height wall
holding your breath during weigh-in,
the pitter-pat of old habits thrumming through the cilia in ‘lobes
charts and docs scattered between fields and rest stops
welcome centers and hit&run carcasses

and everywhere i go i will split
if necessary at a shudder of the moment’s notice
this paralyzed my chemicals
and I stopped caring
everything the color of tepid
no challenges to be seen except getting past
the fuzz–
my entire self rimmed with it like
oversized margarita glasses
I begged to those with diplomas and licenses
“fix it so i can feel again”
get me off the fucking nothing train
I missed understanding what I meant to say
I missed not cutting people off to fumble over
understudy sentences with main ideas of nonsense
what ever it is I tried to run from to begin with is what I missed
I missed feeling like I was living instead of just
going through or making motions that were not mine
but were you see, since motions made

pretend
in a pill
there was a world sudden offered
in fourteen days you can get
hooked for life
your decisions will be made underwater
your pleasure will be a misdemeanor fog
you will not know what you knew
the self will take a job on some dock
airbrushing t-shirts for tourists
the self will perfect the two-toned asterik
at the end of two-syllable names,
the self will learn how to make a heart in 3-d
but will never remember how to truly tell if one beats
because these things are buried
cells and soot and stomach and thought
daft and done certain a body fought

a milligram war once swallowed nightly

Took the Greyhound back to Pittsburgh today–the city looked beautiful in the weak November sun as we came out of the tunnel. My fever broke last night around 3am, hours before my dad took me to the bus stop, but just in time. At least I’m not throwing up anymore.

The cabdriver was a really nice lady–extra nice once she realized how much I had just tipped her. I tip a bit heavy and I don’t apologize about it–she brought me home. I mean, to where I’m currently living. It does not feel like home. Nothing feels like that word anymore.

Except scratching phrases and sentences on scrap and on the interior walls of brain when no pen calms the clutches, saved Word documents and aging receipts(”no not trash keep that”). So I will keep writing. No matter how confused I get, no matter how miserable I may feel, I will keep scribbling everything that comes to me. I owe one more thing to myself, and that’s a shot at truly, truly,seeing what I can do with what I have to give. After that? Gloves off and I can quit. Til then, tunnel vision on the page, on my hand, on the pen and whatever comes out of it.

Woke up this morning to a present: stomach virus has made it’s rounds to me, haha. Let’s just hope I stop puking before I get on the Greyhound tomorrow morning.

Now back to sleep because I feel like shit.