Day one 1,367

The town sprawled out from itself; flat land surrounded on the outskirts by cotton and hey fields. Its name came from someone who found themselves in the inverted mesa, maybe even a ground zero of an explosion of some kind of past civilizations. Its body of land was intersected by a creeks of ten miles that snaked its way behind some of the biggest and most luxurious homes of the town while also curving into abandoned lots with tree lines blocking off the properties. From the car rides you took daily you know that tree line meant running water, tadpoles in the spring and fat toads in the summertime. The clean clear water which ran from a spring your father took you to see once after a long slosh against the moving water, jeans rolled up over knees and at one point chest deep and arms raised with the glimmering sunlight cutting laser lines between the spaces of the pecan tree leaves above. The spring somehow magically muttering from one small muddy hole up that endless gentle incline, clear, clean and undulating all that time from perhaps years and years ago. The wonder of life is this. How things just exist on their own accord without you knowing about it. That one day you do find out, your world does then become a very magical place. It will begin to become your life’s work to find all these beginnings, to have grace in the notion that all things will come to an end. Summer Breeze by Seals and Croft. You are sitting in the hot back seat of the 1970s model Plymouth in polyester shorts and itchy lime green tube top, nothing actually filling it in. Flat chest of 6 year old, knees perpetually skinned and bruised. Even to this day you are always in such a hurry you bump and scratch on every surface you come in contact with. You are a continuous body and soul in various states of healing processes. Now its late morning and swinging feet in pink plastic flip flops kick the back of the driver’s seat, burgundy vinyl sticks to the sweaty stubs of chubby legs. Mother sewed those shorts, blue with white pattern clusters of flowers that stretch out unrecognizable over the baby fat you still carry. Baby Fat, Baby Fat.. It is very hard for her to find clothes to fit you at this age so she goes to the fabric shops to buy scraps of fabric to sew into basic (very) shorts and pants. This is the fabric store you plunge your short arms into the bins of buttons to feel the cool plastic discs glide between your fingers. You stand and play quietly with the sensation of what wind chimes must feel like when they tingle. The style of the day dictates that everything you wear for the first 10 years of your life is polyester and tight. You have no choice in the matter. Money is tight and you wear what you are given, but what you really want is a T-shirt with the Bee Gees on it, with your name in iron on fuzzy orange letters on the back. Hey look, there she is! How clever for her to have her name on her shirt! I was wondering where that great kid was! I could be famous like little Janet Jackson doing her Mae West impression. I had gumption and cuteness. I had moxie. But I didn’t have the clothes that matched that. Always in the car, always on the move, first you go to the grocery store You hoist a plastic crate with empties into the slot and the lady behind the counter gives you a quarter and dime and a nickel. . A nickel in a box gets you a Brachs candy, coconut chocolate is your favorite. Mom picks ground beef in the family size packs, dried beans, milk, cottage cheese, iceberg lettuce, tomato, a glass liter of Coke, marshmallow chocolate cookies, captain crunch (peanut butter flavor), black olives and tins of sardines. Next to the Quesada’s. Baby Ida calls you Anna Lisa and you don’t know why. The Quesada family is girls girls girls, and you don’t know quite how many because you can’t count that high. The back bedroom that they all share is really a TV room, entertainment den with a sunken area and at the back of the continuous room almost a stage where two of the beds are. There are clothes, shoes and bras everywhere. The girls range from maybe 13 to 18, all teenagers and even Baby Ida isn’t a baby and that confuses you as well. Their mom had tough leathery brown almost red skin, pock marked with acne scars. She doesn’t scare you because she is kind and sweeps you up in her thick tortilla slapping hands and meat cutting arms and makes you feel warm. You can remember her from when you were an infant you think. She soaped your baby fat in the kitchen sink and powdered and diapered you as you were her own. You mother worked nights then, your father rarely home from his truck driving job, and when he was he was asleep. Mrs Quesada made your fideos and your beans with extra juice because it was good for your tummy. The trees in the backyard are oak. The leaves always shimmer and glide in the sunlight and wind. There is a tiny playhouse in the back yard, a tiny tudor house painted white with pink trim. It only has two built in seats and a window to look out of. You love this house and beg Baby Ida to let you stay outside alone when she has grown bored of 6 year old imagination play. She leaves you and you begin to make tacos out of oak leaves and grass. Carful on your imagined comal, its hot and you will burn the tips of your fingers like mama does if you are not careful. Look mama, I found a pajarito. In cupped hands I pad into the kitchen with baby bird. I open my hands and the bird breaks free and flies dumbly into the walls. Mother screams and I begin to cry..I want my baby back, why did she go away? Daddy runs into the kitchen and begins to try and shoo away the bird out the open back door. It flies behind the stove and I begin to wail. The bird will burn to death and it’s my fault. Mother picks me up and takes me away from the kitchen..I cry myself till I exhaust to sleep. It’s the ride across the neighborhood back home. Into the yellow kitchen with the yellow phone, yellow and white vinyl seats and formica table. Baloney sandwiches with mustard on white bread. Purple Koolaid and corn chips. Back outside is your own playhouse, on stilts, tudor top covered with shingles that your dad built just for you. Small brown chairs and a menagerie of stuffed animals, a Rangers ball cap, a table with puzzles and a coffee can filled with broken crayons. Your life is food, over abundance and love. Your father works long hours and stays away for days. You are poor but don’t know it because they give you everything you need and you want for nothing. It is their plan to make you feel this security they never had as children, and have already succeeded in preventing you from knowing work at an early age by picking fruit or cotton. They are constant in their battle to make your life better than theirs, and later in the year you will move from this house to a better larger one in a safer neighborhood that will allow you to go to a better school than you would be doomed to living on the other side of those tracks. Everything you have ever known about home and your life will change. You will have your own slice of that creek running behind your own home. You will have an acre of land to dig up rocks in and run through as fast as your chubby little legs will carry you.

Chapter 2

In the fall of my sixteenth year I was all knee scrapes and hairspray. Eighty-nine cent lipstick from the drugstore counter where the boy who wore glasses stole passes and gave me chocolate bars free of charge, he wore a white lab coat and kept extra copies of nude photos gathered from the photo lab.
 ‘Can you believe they bring their film to the drugstore for these things? Disgusssting!” He laughs and hands me a picture of a chunky brunette in nude colored granny panties and reinforced cross your heart bra. He backside dribbles out of the bottom of the slick curdling fabric as she turns at the waist to face the camera. One bra strap slipping over her round shoulder, he hand splayed over herface, dishwater blond waterfall of tired hair that must smell of strawberry suave shampoo, the kind that costs 99 cents in aisle twelve. Behind her the over exposed light shone on the wood panel wall, a bouquet of wilting flowers tacked up with faded ribbons and a poster of a robust Anna Nicole Smith in Guess jeans.  A cheap princess white dresser overflowing with perfume bottles and others baubles of distractions fill the right side of the cut off room. You just know that trailer had gold green shag carpet and somewhere there were cigarette holes dotting down to the woven base to the creaking floor. It could have been a neighbor. Knowing her, it probably was.

Chapter 1

In small towns everything is wicked. The forests are the playgrounds for the lost. Everyone knows your name and makes up stories that will follow you the rest of your life unless you break away from the shadowy fingers of the overgrown trees and the unsheathed wheat in the fields that people forgot. I watch the old sheds and barn house dilapidate over seasons of neglect until they were bulldozed over for track homes and municipal parking lots. When it rained the creek beds would swell up in spring pregnancy floating it's flotsam of broken swing sets and beer bottle wishes. I rode my bike in the dark overgrown tree canopy roads, one side destitute, the other disgusting with over indulgence. I sang into those nights trying to call for a companion and sometime one would join me galloping with paws and whiskers joining my caterwaul melodies. But still small towns are wicked, they make you pine for them when you are old, never leaving a trace behind of what they once were so you think you must have only dreamed it as so.

birthday

oh beer. oh dear. every year you get the best of me i turn into the worst of me and i'm just now getting back to normal. back then i'd call richard and moan and cringe and swear i'd never drink another drop again. or i'd call texaho, and we'd shrug and say that's just the way it is. this time.. pretty bad. but at least everyone is so kind. i don't want to go back to that bar again. thats all i'm saying.

more rain, more parties. people i don't know, social akward moments, and no extra beer to drink. its a hard thing to be aroung people. constant reminder that i have diareah of the mouth. we say strange things like it's commonplace. i don't have to time to keep myself from offending anyone. life is short and i'm about 40 years in.

40. fuck. i still haven't written a novel. and i haven't really been anywhere. its times like this i try to think like a george harrison song. why are people so strange? why does living have to be so hard. i love my husband. i don't know how i'd make it thru the slipperly steps of these social constructs. mad swirl was insanity. the curmudgeon attacked me verbally and drowned in his solitude as i can back to him with a counter attack. i dont even look at him in the face. thursday the drunken bday fiasco. innapropriate behavior abound. too many beers. too much anxiety drowning in the heavy hop pint glasses. music. drums..drums drums.. jelously and insecurity.. more beers. friday a wash. saturday sober akwardness and amy winehouse hairdo. anglofied partyness. my brown can't get down. today family time, walking the pulga that smells like roasted corn and sounds like poppers hitting the ashphalt. i shoulda bought some shoes. sandwiches and long rides back home..i burned dinner but everyone thought it was good. the hours are ticking away and i have to go back to work again. these past four days off i remembered who i was again and i liked it, even if i am just really fucked up after all. happy birthday to me.

high and low

listening to music non stop. have to do something about the extreme highs and lows. wandering in and out of dream states. not sure if its the meds or the lack of or just a janky mental state. chalk up all three.
impatient. uneasy. walking with a slight limp. lost some weight, nothing to worry about. probably just the poverty diet we keep. i feel strangely compelled to go to ash wednesday mass. to feel the ash on my forehead like when i was a child. catholic bindi. i make plans just to break them. i have dreams just to document the strange familiar feeling I get just having them. the towns and cities constructed out of brain synapses and memory overloads. when I drive i feel like i'll reach the end of my dream life if i go in repetitve paths. there is a familiar road i take that reminds me of the left over cans of vegetables that were left in the fridge after my mother died. we cried and threw them in the trash. everything has been scrubbed away. as if nothing ever happened. i hold on to things forever. once they are gone i'm one day closer to death. listening to music non stop. i have to do something about the extreme highs and lows.

dream

we packed up the car, boxes and papers. we are always on the move, driving the highways of texas in the dead of night, barefoot and windows open to the star studded sky. my feet on the dashboard an some static radio station trying to slice the night with it's mysterious messages..somewhere in a small building someone is pumping vinyl into the airwaves, smoked cigarettes and stale cups of coffee. your hair is down and the wind is whipping it around your shoulders. we are finally free. you and me on the road to nowhere.

that was nice, now tell me how this makes any kind of difference.

What has happened since we last spoke. Closed the shop, lost my house, moved into a postage stamp apartment with no bedroom, sleeping on a broken futon, started a new corporate gig at part time hours and lost contact with almost everyone I talk to since October of last year. I'm sure i'm missing some things.. but that is the gist of it. Now instead of this flowery poetry type depression thing i've got this full on uncontrollable feeling of malaise and disatisfaction with things. People. Ideals. Everything fails me, or do I fail it? Do I get a big fat 'F' on life because I couldn't hack it in the real world, the real 'im in charge now' world or do we chalk it up to experience and have a good laugh at it when the toilet tank top breaks or we buy cheap food with stamps. I thought I'd be able to hack this shit, but really I'm just going thru the motions. Part time work keeps me busy and not thinking. But when i'm thinking, oh holy hell the thoughts we have.. WE the brain and I in constant battle. Oh and the boredom. No more socialite drinks and chats, no free tickets or invitations and not even Friends that I can really see. It's just me and my Klonopin against the world. Nodding off is fun but I can't dream anymore. I don't think I'm doing what I'm suppossed to be doing right now, but the bills are getting paid. Oh the resentment. Against who or what I'm not sure if but anyone but myself. I get high and nod off to incredible thoughts of walking realisations. I was not committed. I was not on the ball. I let it slide thru my fingertips. I got caught up in my own bad vibes and juju and could not accept success in any form. Now I fight a daily battle with this otherworld I woke up into. My boss is almost 20 years younger than me. And I can't do shit right for him. It's all very pathetic. I owe people lots of money, but I work 20 hours a week. I don't have anything to spare. What little I have I spend on my kid as some kind of apology for putting her thru all this shit. I'm not even writing anymore. Who cares? Who CARES? WHO CARES?