I went on facebook tonight. Not 'real' facebook cuz my account is disintegrated so it's not like I had a year's worth of alerts to wade through or anything. Just googled my name and found an old account. Surely I made it when I got locked out my main cuz who remembers passwords...honestly. You don't have to answer that, it's rhetorical.
Friend suggestions, ha! Uncle Wesley on my mom's side. BOONIE! I guess they call him that because he was Wesley Jr and his 6 siblings couldn't pronounce 'Junior' so...'Bunior', then 'Boonie' was birthed. A pic of a 60-something-year-old man with his arms around the waists of two wax figure Jezebel Hollywood whores. Classic.
Cousin Dan. 'Benson' as he goes by with friends, apparently, like his father did. I actually like seeing that they call him that. Big dude, not muscle-big. Prematurely bald. Tuba player. Always a beverage in his hand, not always alky. Never got to know Dan very well but he was always happy. Works at Wal-Mart and owns a condo in Kenwood with his twin brothers, Steve & Dave...who also work...at Wal-Mart. I ran into him one morning in 2013 buying produce after painting my kitchen yellow. With yellow paint on my forehead.
Auntie Dilly! We hadn't spoken since I became a Trump fan and the use of the word 'egomaniac' was uttered enough times to get a block. She had a stent put in her heart in Clearwater, Florida, while she was visiting my guncles. Gay-uncles. Jock & Duane. They've been married in every state you can legally get married in and be homosexual. Anywho, hard living for Dilly. Asthmatic yet harboring so many cats that Hoarders would be pitied for lack of felines. Lived on a working farm, ton of hay around, that has to help. She worked at the University I went to and interned at. It was awkward hearing from another young intern that Dilly had proudly announced to her co-workers that she'd slept with eighty-eight men (at the time). Some of them she didn't know what color their hair was because 'they never took their hats off.' What gentlemen. Have some respect.
Young 2nd cousins I knew til they were about 5, all girls. No boys erupted from the loins of my cousins, thank God. Outdoorsy girls who mean it, the kind who save up their cash from summer jobs in high school and buy a camper and instead of going to tech college, travel the country and post woodsy pics on Instagram. Car selfies. I truly hate a car selfie. Those reprehensible pics with cat noses and bunny ears. Eyeliner that goes on and on and on into one's hairline.
Dead dogs I used to know in the background of family photos. Christmas plates with winter skating scenes I've eaten on at least 25 times. I miss spritz cookies on Christmas morning so badly...don't get me wrong, I could make those myself at any time. But there was a certain specialness to mom making them, in her apron, warming up the dough in her palms, pressing cookies out on baking sheets with her tongue firmly squeezed between her lips, something I gave her so much shit for as a teenager. Spritz and cocoa. And those cookies you stick a Hershey Kiss in the middle of. They weren't my favorite, unless they were fresh out of the oven. I found it arduous to bite into a now-hardered Hershey Kiss with a cookie around it. You might as well have just handed me a cookie and a Hershey Kiss at that point. I don't know why I'm capitolizing Hershey Kiss, if you must know. This is not an ad for them :) Should have capitolized 'Spritz' due to the love and respect I have for them but doing it the one time was actually satisfying. Kind of like a tic where you have to do something a certain number of times on one side of your body and then the other side til it's even. A goal of mine is to make such good spritz cookies that when I present them to a human being with a mouth they respond to my recipe as if they were reacting to hearing Eva Cassidy's 'Over the Rainbow' for the first time.
Bryan used to message me when he was drunk. We had a first date and moved in together. Literally. He used to tell me every time he received any sort of kudos at work after we broke up, any time a girl found him cute while he was out socializing, who at work he fucked...'did I tell you I fucked Terri?' Wow...really?...Ok...good for you? I don't...sure. I didn't know who he was trying to convince of his greatness, him or me. Just, constant self-glorification. He was about 5'2, maybe that was it? I don't know, different things make people tick, right? His mom had died of a fall paired with Lupus in a matter of months in 2017. His dad then took his own life in their garage on Valentine's Day not 4 months later. He didn't know how to live life nor did he wish to, without her. Bryan would repeat himself, being drunk and all. When you quit drinking that stuff is annoying to see in other people. One of the mornings after a lengthy session of him vomitting out every thought that came to his mind I sent him a facebook request for $250 for 'Therapy' and have been blocked ever since. These little things. I tried very hard to let him off easy, he always tried returning to me. He didn't know how to tell me he loved me til it was wayyyy past late o'clock. Found myself marveling at how easy it was to get rid of him in the end. The shit you remember about people. Typing that felt like such an asshole thing to do. I felt so justified in that. It was the repetition. The drunken repetition. YOU'VE ALREADY TOLD ME THIS ONE HUNDRED TIMES. DO YOU REMEMBER? AM I HERE? DO I EXIST? What is my purpose in your life, Sir...?...please...pray tell. He has since found someone shorter than himself and is obsessed with dead dogs and hairless cats. Like a lot.
Lakeisha Smolke and I threw Kurt Anderson's new $40 gym shoes away in the classroom trash can in 3rd grade. I know the cost of the shoes because our parents each had to pay half. I guess at the end of class we didn't realize after we'd done it that the janitor would then come and DISPOSE OF the shoes...didn't even occur to us. And I don't remember why we did it. He pissed us both of enough for it to happen somehow. He's a gay doctor now in California. We got into a fight over a plastic ring my dentist gave me in kindergarten. He also hooked his snowsuit belt into mine on the bus when we were 200 feet away from my driveway and I remember thinking that I was going to be trapped on the bus forever because now I'm stuck to this person physically. Not taking into account that I didn't have to stand up and make my way to the front of the bus in order for the bus driver to know that he has a stop here. He's had this stop every single weekday since September. The things kids think are life-threatening.
Opening a bag of tiny marshmallows with my teeth at my aunt and uncle's house (Benson's parents) at Dilly's 2nd wedding reception and swallowing a little piece of the plastic. I gravely realized my fate after the fact. I was going to die. I spent the night not enjoying a moment of the festivities, trying to figure out how to tell my parents I was going to die. And why. I did this also when after pretending to smoke a stick that I'd sucked the sucker off of in front of my grandmother and she told me I was going to die because of it because I was smoking. I walked home and watched my dad planting a tree on the side of the driveway. Once again trying to devise a way to break the news to him. I was always dying of something. Once I was lying on my grandparent's couch feeling my heartbeat while everyone else was asleep. Wide awake, probably 2-3 am. And then listening so hard to it that I lost the heartbeat and thought my heart had stopped beating. Again, needing to go to my grandmother's bedroom to tell her...I was going to die. So I was going to stand up, walk to another room, speak to a human being...and tell them that my heart had stopped beating. You can't make this stuff up. It's funny NOW but at the time these were serious concerns.
My fear of death was ever-present. I remember thinking about the concept of 'eternity' after dying...forever...what is forever? Too big a concept for an 8-year-old. Ran to the bathroom to puke over it while I watched Gather 'Round. Those amazing charcoal drawings...Read once in the world atlas a nice little history and future of the planet earth starting with fuzzy beginnings and ending in boiling seas and the sun exploding. That was not a good night. Although walking out into the living room where people were living normal lives and not knowing the secrets yet of the end of the world was comforting right away. Just act normal. That's a long time away. You probably won't be there for it anyways. You'll be dead! I snorted pepper with my cousin Trisha a couple years later and talked about how her red could be my blue and we'd never really know...and we could both be 'right'. And again, I brought up 'forever' and ended up launching into both a sneezing fit and a grand maul panic attack. I'm sure I have some form of bulemia but based in nervousness/anxiety and situations that cause complete pandemonium within me. Watching A Current Affair with Maury Povich reporting on Whitley Streiber's 'Communion' and seeing the cover of the book and losing my entire mind. Christmas Day, I was wearing this cute peach outfit and cool gray slouch boots with metallic chains on them. But I was about 10 so I was at a stage where if I wore something that fit me I felt fat. I remember that run down the hallway in the trailer to puke. Everything was a heart-attack. Everything was dramatic. And I shared nothing with adults about any of this.
I don't care who's listening to me anymore. I don't care if no one is. I don't care if only I am. I don't care if only God is. I'm speaking. I don't want to form anyone's opinions or use flowery language to move someone. People are who they are. I am who I am. Starry, starry night.
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frameless heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch this world and can't forget
Like the strangers that you've met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
A silver thorn of bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow
Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they're not listening still
Perhaps they never will
