Sunday, May 31, 2009

Reflection (Retard continued)

His wife walked in. “What is she barking about?”

“This is so funny, you have to see this.” His wife waited impatiently, wondering what he could possibly be doing. He held out a hand mirror in front of the dog and she turned away from it. “She’s afraid of her own reflection.”

“Oh my God. She thinks it’s another dog.”

“Or she has some serious insecurities.” He kept the mirror in front of her so she couldn’t pass through the hallway and she suddenly began jumping around and barking at it.

“Ok she’s had enough.”

“Wait I want to see if she eventually figures out it’s her reflection.”

“You’re scaring her.”

“I’m helping her to overcome her fear.” He moved in closer and started petting her. “Come here retard. Look it’s you. It’s ok puppy.”

“Ok, she’s still scared. You can stop now.”

“She’ll figure it out eventually.”

“Maybe she can’t figure it out and you’re just traumatizing her for no reason.”

“Then I'm saving her from your spankings, because from now on when she gets into the trash you can just pull out the mirror.” He suddenly ran in the other room and came back with tape and the big plastic jar.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Taping the mirror to the inside of her helmet.”

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Clockwork

There is an emotion that I don’t have a word for. Sometimes I describe it as emptiness or meaninglessness but that’s not what it really is. It's the feeling that you are not in control of your life, that your surroundings are sucking you in, making you a part of something that is not you, dictating the way you must behave, and destroying your soul in the process. You aren’t free. You are a slave, a cog, constantly being hammered and reshaped from the outside, constantly being destroyed and rebuilt one piece at a time. And you fight to hold on to what you were, despite the fact that all those things that comprise you were once hammered into you too, by your genes, by your parents, by some form of input that is beyond our control. So some of us go with the flow, like water taking on whatever form the earth demands of us, and some of us will take on the world to preserve ourselves, all the while never realizing that there is no self. We do not exist except as a part of something bigger, which neither cares about us nor is even aware of our existence. We can try to step outside ourselves, we can try to escape our genes, our upbringing, our needs, our wants, but even the desire to escape was put into us by the same force which drives everything. We can’t step outside the world because there is nowhere else to go. There is only what is. And we are a part of that whether we like it or not.

I feel this emotion several times every day. I feel it when someone talks to me and I’m obligated to respond within a narrow range of options. I feel it when I’m forced to figure out a way to continue to eat. I feel it when I’m surrounded by people and know that I must compromise a part of myself if I’m to connect with them. I feel it when I want the impossible. I feel it in my stomach and my throat. I feel it in my body telling me not to feed it, and trying to reject whatever I force into my mouth. I feel it in my heavy head and my heavy eyes. It is all heavy. Always.

Friday, May 29, 2009

The Beach

He had thought her too beautiful and cheery to have anything to do with an awkward character like himself, but he was working up the courage to ask anyway when suddenly a middle aged man, squat, with a thick neck, and a dumb voice, rushed in to talk to her. He couldn’t hear any of their conversation except the end.

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

This world makes no sense, he thought to himself, grabbing his backpack, paying for the meal, and saying nothing more than “thank you.”

He was always drawn to the ocean. As a child people thought he was strange because he would just sit there in an apparent trance while everyone else sought cover from the storms. But the more violent the ocean became the stronger it pulled him in. His parents thought it was the beauty of it that called to him, and he did find it beautiful, but for the same reason he found it terrifying. It was vast, unending, deep and dark and random, without purpose, without care, without love.

The wind blew in hard and cold as he sat silently watching the sun set, his blank gaze only interrupted for a moment when an old couple approached him and told him how peaceful he looked.

“The beauty is almost overwhelming isn’t it?”

He told them yes and smiled, because he didn’t want to spoil the moment for them. But what he really saw was that the only thing that made the beauty was the ugliness from which it emerged. He saw the beach, beaten smooth over billions of years, the rocks crashing and breaking each other over and over again. He saw the beautiful women jogging by and he knew their beauty arose out of millions of years of beings struggling and dying and slaughtering each other. He saw the kids play fighting. It will become real soon enough, he thought.


The sun went down, the sky went dark, and the pitch black fog came rolling in from across the ocean. He rolled up his pant legs and carried his shoes as he waded through the tide pools on the long trek across the beach. Ahead sirens cut through the night, and men in wet suits with lights attached to their head rode around on jet skis, occasionally diving under water in search of something. Probably a body, he thought, as he looked down and saw the flashing illumination of bugs dispersing at his feet.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Toilet Mouth (Retard continued)

“She’s drinking from the toilet again.”

“It’s a free country babe.”

“Not when she drips it all over the carpet and licks me with her toilet mouth. Don’t you see a contradiction in giving her people food, treating her like a person, then making her drink from the toilet?”

“Don’t you see a contradiction in keeping dogs in the house when there's people sleeping in the street?”

“Why do you always do that?”

“What?”

“You know what.”

Monday, May 4, 2009

In the Dark

We stumble blindly through the darkness of life, occasionally reaching out for something to grasp onto, mostly catching nothing but air. Every now and then our hands bump into something, and we grab it and hold on tight, hoping it's something solid, but later discovering it is just another person, reaching out in the same darkness, hoping for the same solid foundation to guide them home. And once the initial disappointment fades, and we come to grips with the fact that we are still in the dark without a guide, we realize that what we found was better than a solid foundation. We are lost, but we are not alone.