ghosts in the wind

"[RE: Balance/equilibrium] If I ever get a tattoo I think it would have to be something like that. Something that represented growth, balance, something fundamental. Nothing specific seems appropriate, my life isn't really about specifics anymore." – D., in an email exchange today regarding risk.

stentorian • \sten-TOR-ee-un\ • adjective
: extremely loud

It started happening at the most random and inappropriate times – his right ear would feel like it was stuffed with cotton. Soon after, the noise would start. It wasn't quite a 'ringing' so much as it was the aural equivalent of a stick-pin being driven into his eardrum – metallic, shrill, constant, pointed. His grandmother said he was hearing banshees, but he waited several weeks and nobody he knew kicked the bucket, so he just chalked it up to all those nights spent without earplugs next to the right front speaker with his elbows digging into the splintering wood of the stage. He couldn't remember all the bands he'd seen, the number of nights he'd knocked back a couple of vodka gimlets – that bar had gone so far past familiar that it was invisible.

"We all have to do stupid things," he said to his doctor, who scowled disapprovingly as she confirmed that yes, indeed, he had tinnitus. "It's not like I'm jumping off of buildings looking for thrills, you know?"

The doctor wagged her head back and forth. She looked down at her pocket PC and finally slipped it into her coat. "I think it's a generational thing."

"Hardly," he said. "People do stupid things all the time. I'm sure you see the results constantly."

Her mouth twitched upward. "There was a little girl in here the other day who put a lima bean up her nose. Five years old, maybe."

"See?" he said. "Curiosity. You keep doing things that hurt because the benefit outweighs the painful part. Like, you know how the Egyptians believed the gods would weigh the heart versus the feather to determine where the soul went after death?"

"Why didn't you wear earplugs?" she asked.

"Oh, I put toilet paper in my ears, and sometimes I did wear real earplugs – the good silicone kind. It's just … there's something about coming home buzzing from a few drinks when you've seen this band that you really love and they've played a few of your favorite songs if not all of them, the songs you lie in bed listening to when you're by yourself, the songs that get their hooks in you, and your head feels all foggy and you know you've damaged your hearing because the girl you're with is talking to you and you want to pay attention to her but she sounds like she's talking through her scarf … I don't know. It's not that it reminds you that you're alive so much as it reminds you that you're vulnerable."

She didn't say anything. Her pocket PC beeped from the folds of her coat. She removed it, tapped the stylus a couple of times, and looked up at him. "Will you wear earplugs from now on?"

He shrugged. "Probably. I don't want to go completely deaf. Then I'd lose my capacity to hear the music I was there for in the first place."

The smile came easier to her face this time. "Exactly my point. You can live dangerously and still guard the things you love."

all tensed up

acceptation • \ak-sep-TAY-shun\ • noun
1 : acceptance; especially : favorable reception or approval
*2 : a generally accepted meaning of a word or understanding of a concept

There was nothing to do but hit pause while she waited at the lip of his desk, one hip jutted out (no balance), arms crossed in front of her. She rubbed her elbows. She coiled a strand of hair around one finger. She realized how much she was shifting and turned her attention away from her body to the usual shit on the walls of his office – family photos, photos with important people, kids' drawings – the universal museum of the mundane. (Her own desk had a stack of CDs on it and also an innocuous potted plant, the seedling for which had come from her childhood home. We drag our loved ones around with us.)

He turned the page. She bit her lip and turned away from his flat chin and furrowed brows.

"It's good, Laura. It's good." (This, she figured, was why she had a job. If he could articulate himself properly, if he could express anything meaningful, he wouldn't need a speechwriter. What did 'good' mean? Acceptable? Excellent? Inspired? Useful? Why did he use her name? Was it readymade?)

She nodded. Her smile was tight. He didn't seem to notice. For a politician, he was really terrible at noticing body language. He'd bullied his way through to this point, shoving his genial, likeable way through obstacles instead of moving the puzzle-pieces delicately aside to get what he wanted. He'd been popular in high school. The quality that made him so adored was that he should have been arrogant, should have brandished his considerable privilege, but that those concepts didn't even occur to him.

He took a swig of his water. She shifted her weight to the other hip as if she was carrying a child.

"You really have to tone it down for middle America," he said. She wondered if he knew which Kansas City they were going to, or even if he knew there were two of them.

She nodded, gently. "Really, you have to tone it down all the time."

The words swam, carefully chosen, in the saliva beneath her tongue. She was always swallowing. Words gurgled in her stomach. Words gave her an ulcer. Words made her nervous. This is why she'd never be on the podium, awake and aware. Sometimes she had nightmares: she'd be giving one of her carefully crafted five-point four-minute missives instead of Albert. She'd be on that stage and it would be creaking beneath her and she'd flip the page and realize she was naked. She hated her brain then: too obvious. The universal museum of the mundane, flashing here and there in her neural net. We drag our fears around with us.

fall into disorder

yen • \YEN\ noun
: a strong desire or propensity : longing; also : urge, craving

Etymology note from m-w.com:

The first meaning of "yen" was an intense craving for opium. The late 19th-century English term evolved from the Cantonese "yīn-yáhn," which itself combines "yīn," meaning "opium," and "yáhn," meaning "craving." In English, the Chinese syllables were transformed to "yen-yen" and ultimately abbreviated to simply "yen." Eventually, "yen" was generalized to the more innocuous meaning of "a strong desire," and the link to drug cravings was lost.

The boy taught me to shoot between my toes. (That way I could still wear short sleeves.)

The walk home was half a block. Spring was in full bloom but it bounced off my skin. Fists uncurled. All this from a poppy-seed. Erase. Erase. Go back. Go out. Go numb. Go. Go. Gone.

Crumple on the bedspread, barely adolescent, blotchy skin holding together bone and sinew, all angles, barely blood and only electricity. I just wanted to trick myself into thinking, for a moment, I was somewhere safe, somewhere I didn't have to be vigilant.

No-hearted. Couldn't feel the empty space beneath my sternum. Awake or asleep? Slowed-down. If only someone would gather up all the pieces?

We want to make heroes. We want a moral at the end of the tunnel. We want to say you are to blame. We want to turn our heads demurely and say no, darling, it's me. It's all me. We want black and white, resolution, simplification. Here there is only a reflection of light from a star millions of miles away.

election day

(Note from thee author: today's word-of-the-day provides absolutely no inspiration, so here is a snippet from the novel that I promised myself I'd write once I got back to the wild woolly Midwest. Woolly! Anyway.)

Beginning in November, piles of paper came in through the mailslot and puddled on the floor. They mingled insouciantly with the Christmas cards. Each flyer was essentially the same – a high-school-yearbook-style photo of each candidate and big block lettering (slogans: VOTE NO/YES ON PROPOSITION WHATEVER; I'M WORKING FOR YOU!; and so on).

"Who the hell are these people?" Elena waved a sheaf of glossy, probably empty promises at her mother, who snagged the pile and began sifting through.

"You know, I've lived in this town for forty-three years and I can't recognize a single one of these fools." Karen's forehead creased further. "Except for this guy. Upper management at the factory. They painted an oil portrait of him and it hung in the hallway for a while."

"Good management?" Elena shrugged and leaned forward on the counter. (She knew her mother's answer and mouthed it when it came: "No such thing.")

Karen rose from her seat. "You need these?" she said to her daughter. "For a school project, maybe?" 

Elena shook her head, mute. She could see the look on her mother's face and she wished she hadn't wound her up so tight. Karen's lips were a flat line, her pupils dilated, nostrils flared. She was very far away. 

"It doesn't make any fucking difference." The flyers hit the bottom of the garbage with a heavy thud. Down the ladder in an instant: from the company of sparkly holiday greetings in embossed envelopes with calligraphed writing to orange peels, microwave-dinner boxes, tuna cans, eggshells, some kind of brown goo. "That's the secret, Len. That's what the college kids are missing. That's what everyone's missing. It doesn't make any fucking difference."

Karen tightened the belt on her bathrobe, twisted her mouth (some sad smile), and pattered out of the room. Elena suddenly realized her mother had been wearing variations on the same bathrobe for as long as she could remember; always royal-blue, always terry-cloth, ditched before the sleeves started to fray if possible. (It doesn't make any fucking difference.) So many things. Christmas cards at the end of January, election flyers, worn-out robes, piles of garbage. (It doesn't make any fucking difference.) Rotting bones and on and on. No conclusion. The wicked rested just fine sometimes; it was the weary that worked the night shift, no matter what they had a heartful of.

Her college applications were due soon. (DO YOU THINK THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES? IF YOU COULD MEET ANY HISTORICAL FIGURE, WHO WOULD YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?) (It didn't make any fucking difference.) 

soda pop rip-off

catchpole • \KATCH-poal\ • noun
: a sheriff's deputy; especially : one who makes arrests for failure to pay a debt

Katie reached under the diner table, into her bag. Her phone was buzzing brightly against her ankle through all that fabric: UNKNOWN NUMBER. (Big lie. She knew who it was.) She tapped a button on the side and the buzzing stopped.

Her boyfriend stopped pushing the gluey traces of his eggs (over-easy, spackled with pepper) around his plate for a few seconds. "Phone call?"

"Yeah." She gave him no other information, and after a few moments he pushed his hair back from his forehead like a horse flicking its forelock out of its eyes and she'd figured he'd forget all about it. "I'll be right back," she said, standing and swinging her bag over her shoulder. Her body was aimed already toward the narrow, mint-green hallway that contained a few ugly art-school-requirement half-assed silkscreened posters (FOR SALE!) and ended in the restroom.

He nodded, she bent down and kissed his cheek, she smiled as if nothing was wrong.

In the bathroom she took a long time washing her hands and looking into the smeary mirror. Nothing remarkable. Yellowy teeth (coffee, nicotine). Slightly crooked nose. Pimple to the left of her mouth. A few light brown strands of hair escaping from her ponytail. Pretty hazel eyes, what her friend Allie inappropriately called "exotic white-girl eyes." She wondered exactly when the state had gotten rid of debtor's prison and whether it would reappear again when the credit companies (ONE MISSED CALL: UNKNOWN NUMBER) and Wackenhut or someone else with a huge contract got together and realized that hey, they could probably make more money. She'd be the first one tarred and feathered and pilloried? Nah. There had to be people worse off, people with families who had to make big decisions about health insurance and putting food on the table.

She ran her tongue over her teeth (one had been pushed out of line by her wisdom teeth coming in and she'd never gotten it fixed) and thought of the litany of bills she had to pay. Rent, car insurance, mechanic's bill (seven installments). School loan for her worthless degree, a degree that only caused prospective employers to ask what a smart girl like her was doing asking for a job like this (at which she only shrugged and smiled and repeated "I'm a hard worker" with her fingers crossed in her lap where the balding interviewer couldn't see them). The suburbs were the only place she could afford to live these days, and downtown was the only place to work if she didn't want to do retail, which she didn't. The city had dropped their transit authority subsidy and now there were things happening like a bus that ran up a one-way street but not down its corresponding parallel.

Credit payment. DSL. Cell phone. Gym membership. The bills sat unopened. She felt guilty about them but would feel worse, she figured, if she opened them and knew the size of things. Pandora's business-class envelope (hope already gone, only monsters now).

She'd borrowed against her credit card again for new work clothes since she'd been written up for wearing things that were too small and had holes. She'd taken out an extra forty bucks and now she was spending it on brunch because she wanted an excuse to see her boyfriend. It was just forty dollars. Where did it go in two days? Her mom on the other end of the phone said KATHERINE ANN YOUR CREDIT IS RUINED! and Katie thought who cares because I'm never going to be able to buy a house anyway.

There was a run in her stockings. She pinched her sides. Was she getting fat? Maybe she'd lose weight in debtor's prison. Wouldn't it be nice to just work off that debt? At least she'd get three meals a day and she wouldn't have to wake up sick and sad every morning (I'll get up in five minutes, she would say to herself, at least the clock says 7:08 now) and think about her bosses who she hated and the people who called for them, who she also hated, and how to keep her hate from seeping out into her Professional Phone Voice and how it was warm under the blankets and very cold outside of them especially on the creaky hardwood floor. Her eyes felt swollen as if she had been crying all night, though she'd slept pretty soundly.

And the rich got richer and nobody could do anything about it and all the money got exchanged for Prada bags or obscure records depending on your particular set of status symbols because you had to feel important somehow, right? Didn't you deserve it? Don't you deserve a break TODAY? And the machine kept running and kept eating people alive and occasionally spitting out an arm or a leg onto the stockroom floor because the Company did the bare-minimum of the maintenance required (the expense reports for the current fiscal year needed to be lean and mean) and somewhere one of the Supervisors sat in first class on the way to Puerto Vallarta and the ground below looked like circuitry and the Supervisor opened her Skymall catalog and thought Oh I could really use a hedgehog bootbrush for the door so the kids don't track mud in and she picked up the white phone and far below/far away Katie smiled at herself in the bathroom mirror with pinched lips and thought about how if she didn't buy groceries this week maybe the calls would stop and whether she had enough pasta in the cabinet. She closed the door to the bathroom – a line had developed outside. "Sorry," she said, quietly, her head down.

braindead

slugabed • \SLUG-uh-bed\ • noun
: a person who stays in bed after the usual or proper time to get up; broadly : sluggard

Henry refused to crack his eyelids open even the slightest bit, even though his head was starting to hurt (from the thinness of the atmosphere outside the warm density of the coverlets). He could feel blood vessels constricting, his body punishing him for his laziness.

Sarah's body (containing her soul or not; what a false division!) lay inert half a foot away.  She'd often end up at the foot of the bed or turned around but this night she'd lain dead. They'd gone to sleep coiled around one another like snails, but would separate and settle, solute and solvent, as the night went on. Sleep was inherently selfish.  They both twisted at the ends of poorly constructed ropes – wound-up twined and half-digested daily patterns, psychological garbage.

Henry, frowning at the bright light leaking through the blinds, flopped onto his side. His body in this position brought back automatic memories of hiding from his mother on Sunday mornings, avoiding church – "I didn't hear you call, I was DEAD asleep, I swear!" – more the clatter, rustle, scent of the memory than anything else. He wondered if someday those memories would disappear entirely, subsumed by more immediate and useful tactile concerns, or whether he was just reinforcing a hollow shell, remembering what may or may not have happened. He swore he could smell bacon-grease and hear the dim hum of the classical radio his father insisted on. His family, like all families of the fifties, had pretensions.

Sarah was hissing through her mouth in her sleep, damp and deflating. Despite this, he could press his fingers along the map of her arm, making broad white dents in her skin that disappeared just as quickly, close his eyes against the headache, and think of her body moving under his. It was funny what was attractive now that he knew her so well and couldn't conjure up any media-beauty out of some mysterious abstraction. There was charm in even the most disgusting habits. Somewhere he'd shifted from loving her particularities to loving her wholeness. He wasn't sure how that had happened and didn't want to think about it.

At some point he'd have to admit to himself that he was awake, but now was not the time. He pulled the blankets back up, all nestling and warm, all kept-away, all never-you-mind, all protected against the winter that was beginning to melt and retreat from its salty crust on the dirty windowpanes of their apartment. 

Home. A map to home. If he slit his eyes just-so the headache crept back. Pushing back his cuticles without thinking about it: he didn't have to make meaning out of everything, did he? 

go to your own for whatever turns you on

orchidaceous • \or-kuh-DAY-shus\ adjective
1 : of, relating to, or resembling the orchids
*2 : showy, ostentatious

Hate at first sight! Quite possible. Less complicated than the inverse, though bloody-rooted, a mandrake of sorts. There she was, standing in the break room, chattering with a couple of indulgent coworkers, laughing too loud when they'd crack jokes but not really listening. There's this kind of body-language shorthand that social convention allows for – the expectant pause, the tilt of the head, his expression straining not to look too clever or proud but Look what I've brought you!

It's not just that she was blonde and snub-nosed and everything my five-year-old self had picked up on as being Real and Beautiful while my own barely-formed pointy, dark features and hard-to-pronounce last name were Deviant and Wrong. Jealousy is finite. This kind of hate went on and on and on as she slapped his elbow gently oh! and it wasn't that she was flirting with someone I was interested in (I wasn't) or that it was good old fashioned social-raw female competition.

It wasn't that I'd just catch my image. I would wait for it to emerge from subway-car windows, sepia-toned, high cheekbones, fat mouth: yes.

She'd mastered the impression of beauty, too. When I picked her apart the way I picked myself apart she was no more perfect, but she knew how to draw out her eyes and mouth and wear clothes that flattered her figure. She was older than I was but I knew she'd been practicing. I wondered if she noticed me the way I noticed her. No gaze slid in my direction as I plodded over to the refrigerator and removed the barely-palatable microwave meal I'd brought to save money. (Turkey like mashed-up pasteboard. Look at that picture on the front! Advertising.)

I unwrapped the meal and stared at it through the plastic wrap. Soon, that wrap would be beaded with condensation. Swallow it and let it be done with.

I glanced back to her and leaned against the counter. Got my reflection again as I was punching in the appropriate time; greyscale in the microwave glass. At least my hair was behaving.
"Ooh," she was saying, "I have a story just like that!" Of course she did. Of course. It all came back to her. Around and around in a feedback loop. This is why we would have to collide eventually (or collude, though the thought made my throat fill with bile).
The microwave hummed and finally beeped at me. I felt the hatred dull slightly; I didn't have enough energy for it.

We play the same games. We package it up over and over again. Of course I was sick of her sick of me. Little birds cocking their heads like they're listening but they don't understand our language. Chitter-chatter.

Do you hate me for admitting this?

Do you admire my honesty?

Do you have a story like this? Show me so I don't feel so guilty. I'm waiting for the curtain to rise on your puppet-show. I'm in the audience in the front row. I can't promise you I'll pay attention the whole time.

greedy bastards

devious • \DEE-vee-us\ • adjective
*1 : deviating from a straight line : roundabout
2 : behaving wrongly : errant
3 : tricky, cunning; also : deceptive

There are a million ways to justify lying.

"Oh," I/you could say, crossing your ankles and leaning back in your chair, fixing your/my accuser with a critical and/or a lofty gaze: "but right and wrong are such mutable things, so truthfully they don't exist." (We'd be equally correct and full of shit.)

Or: "I did what I had to do to survive." This kind of stare reflecting that anger – feral. (And so the evil born of ignorance persists. Blame is not the point.)

Or: "I was trying to spare your feelings." (Heart in the right place, head in the wrong – assumed weakness on the other's part a gross mistake. The weakness lives in you/me, in the cave beneath our sternums. Sometimes I/you feel a tiny bird-goblin-claw scratching.)

There are some lies that seem harmless. Those little ones leave the tongue and spin in the wind like helicopter-seeds. Could they come home? Will they continue their trajectory, continuing to hit nothing, as time stretches? What is the sanctity of a small life, a life cupped in two hands, and where is the slippage? How do the boundaries cross? Can we see outside ourselves?

We are all guilty and all innocent, depending on the angle at which the camera took us or the particular night we're trying to sleep and can't. We lie rustling fretfully at the ripping-up paper-edge of rest. Lie and lie down. The lay of the land; the lie of the landowner. Moebius said: even the simplest things twist.

turn to the rain and the wind

phlegmatic • \fleg-MAT-ik\ • adjective
1 : resembling, consisting of, or producing the humor phlegm
*2 : having or showing a slow and stolid temperament

The walk from the subway had been the same for the last thirty-odd years. Sometimes he varied his path – north a block on this street, then east a few blocks, just so the scenery would wash a little differently. It all got him to the same place at approximately the same time. Even if he wanted to get lost, he couldn't. There was no minotaur at the heart. He needed no yarn. Some would have found it comforting, some claustrophobic. He had no particular tug in either direction.

This morning he leaned into the storm, all six feet two inches, all broad shoulders and squared-off jaw. His edges had eroded somewhat over time from the sharp planes of teenagerhood into the curved, elephantine structure that was his present. He leaned into the salt, into the silt, into the barrage of ice-pellets. A few feet to his left, he watched a small girl wince against the wind, her bird-bones clenched, her furry jacket-hood drawn tight over her face.

We all survive in our own ways, he thought.

Keep walking. Keep going. Keep moving. Shelter only a few blocks away; then this will be past. I will walk into that lobby and shake my umbrella away from the others and it will be like every other morning.

He held his rough hand with its stubby fingers out into the frozen air and contemplated its redness as he walked.

These hands hold and build. This is all I have. Somewhere down beneath that iceberg there's ocean.

That was comforting.