Invocation

Today I invoke the thousand names of the Imperfect God, I, bone-weary now, dog-tired, absent of fire -- She healing nothing, a broken statue in a razed courtyard, no comfort save a question in her Gaze, no hand outstretched merely lifted in a pensive Mould, a strewn fabric of decomposing lies, a Poem blasted into vague allegory.

Source: Wikimedia Commons CC BY 4.0, "Park City Utah Historical Wood Cabin," by D. Ramey Logan

Far away the trumpets bleat with diminishing Fury.  What whispers did you bring, disguised as dark echoes of a dead paradise?  What promises did you break so you could claim none ever existed?  Was it reckless, was it the rock founded by your personal ideations, your Remus and Romulus?  Did it save you like you expected?  Did it civilize your heart?

You introduced these vessels, rough-hewn, carved from an emergent rock face.  A frenzied artisan at work, burning to convey what was already known a thousand other ways, but each new iteration distinct nonetheless.  The dexterity, sourced from your own veins, the images graven and overpowering, you were your own instrument and your own ideal.

Now the cabin is noiseless and disturbing, like a serenity taken too far.  Something that could be a bird skips across the water, catching nothing.  Then it begins, the branches scratch against the roof, the breeze flutters the curtains with a gentle caress.  I hear your name muffled within the old millwork, not a ghost so much as a trapped memory.

I am looking for you there.  This name, Floating in the mist now.  How long should I give chase?  What is too soon?  What is too late?

Answer me.

Should I Stay?

Should I stay?  My left cheekbone is throbbing and the kids need to eat something.  Should I stay?  Your mother doesn't know anything and she cries when I close the door.  Should I stay?  The car needs new tires and the heater hose is ruptured.  Should I stay?  The doctor's office keeps asking about my next appointment.  Should I stay?  The refrigerator knocks and hums late at night; the neighbor's kids argue and then roar off in their old truck.

This silence is all my own.  The dirty kitchen table is my pillow now, I'm so afraid to lie in that bed.  I rest my face, too tired to fight sleep again, but when I do, my left cheekbone still hurts.  Why do I hurt?  Where did I think I was going?

Maybe I should just stay.

Note: I wrote this for a friendly contest a few weeks ago.  The topic was the title of this post, and the first thing that came to my mind was that Good Friday when I was eighteen and I walked home from work to find that my dad had beaten up my mom.  She was sitting on the sofa when I walked in.  The metal frames of her glasses had been twisted from the blows; she kept twirling them in her hand like a foreign object suddenly discovered.  She had bruising redness on her face, and when she looked at me, I saw a strange combination of resignation and contempt.

I always wondered why she stayed.  When this contest idea came up, I figured I'd try to supply an answer myself.  I didn't go all out on this piece.  It flitted like a shadow in my mind, and I didn't even want to catch it, much less hold on to it and examine what that ugly little creature actually was.

On My Recent DM to Anastasia

Funny story...

So Second and Charles is basically the same type of operation as Half Price Books.

Used books, records, games, etc. A repository of social artifacts for all things geek.

Now we geeks, we are a curious lot. We have no real social live, we live in our own constructs, and we are picky about who we relate to well.

One thing we are NOT is stupid.

And last week they opened a Second and Charles here in my town and I don't ask for much...

I don't ask the government to donate clothes to my mammy...

If our country goes to war I won't read the fine print or whine to my Congressman, I will go like a man...

I don't ask for much.

But ONE THING I DO EXPECT...

Is that Second and Charles refrain from hiring morons who have the IQ of a piece of furniture.

So I'm at the cash register with my selections and this waif of a Taylor Swift refugee asks me, "Did you find everything okay?"

And in truth, I had not. So I deigned to tell her so.

Mar 7Sent

I said to this young lass with the eyes of a gerbil, "Where do you keep your fiction-writing books?"

And she says, "What do you mean?"

And I said, "Your books about writing fiction."

Mar 7Sent

She says, glancing over my shoulder directly behind, "Well, our Fiction books are right over there..." and she points -- she POINTS -- with that lilting smile like she's revealing some huge secret to a total dumbass who didn't happen to notice the collection of popular fiction titles that are about seven or eight rows deep as you walk in.

Mar 7Sent

So I bear down on her with the furrowed brow of a patron so incensed he can barely keep down the avocado on the nachos he had earlier, and I intoned with the gravitas of William Conrad in "The Killers," "Those are original works of fiction written by authors. I mean how-to books on writing."

Mar 7Sent

And she just shakes her head. She shakes her head and glances away with a curious smile like she's just encountered a western terrapin with four eyes.

So I say, "No? What does that head shake 'no' mean?"

And she says, "We don't have books like that."

WE DON'T HAVE BOOKS LIKE THAT!!!!

So I now straighten my back, like the detective who was listening to the narrator's tale in Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, and I clear my throat slightly so that she will note the deeper timbre in my vocal chords...and I say...

Mar 7Sent

"All right. So you're telling me that if someone brings in William Zinsser's 'On Writing,' or Strunk and White's 'The Elements of Style,' or fuck it, maybe even Stephen King's 'Secret Windows,' you're not going to buy it? Because I'm sure you would buy those books. What I'm asking is -- " and here I lean in as if I'm a Motocross racer leaning in to a tight curve that must be the size of that pea brain of hers...

" -- WHERE would you put such books? Would you literally chuck them into the trash, or would you actually buy them and stuff them into, oh, personal growth back there? Next to Deepak Chopra and Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul?"

Now, dear Anastasia, I am a tolerant man...

I endured several months of Hillary Clinton and her lies, after all.

Mar 7Sent

But by this time we were two soldiers on a battlefield, this waif and I, armed to the teeth, one presumably much better prepared than the other, and we traded looks that communicated in the flash of an instant a clearly understood condition, that one of us would live, and one of us would die...we understood that Fate had arranged every event in our lives just to bring us to this point on that evening...

And just then, the touch-screen signature pad beeped with my approval block for the credit card purchase. I signed, she thanked me without even looking at me, and we walked away.

Disaster and bloodshed avoided for another day.

And that's how I spent my summer vacation.

Mar 7Sent

Omg

I'm dying

Mar 7

How did you keep your hands from clenching down on her throat and never letting go?

 

Mar 7

A steely resolve to never go to prison and run into my pappy.