The day Jim and Reid went crazy

While we were home for Thanksgiving, my dad told a story about some crazy stuff that two of his younger brothers once did when they were maybe five or six. My dad has eight siblings, four brothers and four sisters. Two of those brothers were very close growing up, like twins but not twins. They had their own language. They used to call me “Schmeg.” They would never tell anyone what their language meant.

One time someone went into the basement to find that everything–the floor, the walls, the television, etc.–had been PAINTED with white interior paint, by Reid and Jim, the two brothers I mentioned earlier. My grandma was beside herself, and she and as many of the other seven siblings as they could round up came downstairs to try and clean up this paint before it dried and permanently ruined everything (I picture this sterile, white room, like something out of 2001, but it was probably a lot messier).

In the confusion, Jim and Reid slipped upstairs and proceeded to enact other kinds of mayhem, unbeknownst to the rest of the family, who were scraping paint. At some point one of girls went upstairs to use the bathroom or something and shouted down, and the rest of them rushed up to find stuff that was ten times nuttier than some paint.

In these days, with nine kids and a husband to feed, my grandma bought food in some quantity: large packs of hamburger, boxes of five dozen eggs at a time, several pounds of butter. Jim and Reid had taken the sticks of butter and stuck one on each of these hooks on the mantle, usually reserved for stockings hung by the chimney with care. The mailman came in and said, “Do you know that there’s all this meat out here?” They had emptied the freezer of all the packages of meat and hamburger and had neatly placed one in the center of each sidewalk square in front of the house, thawing. The family found Jim and Reid in the backyard, with what used to be a box of five dozen eggs, that they were gleefully flinging over the fence, not a care in the world.

a little more time.

The other morning I think my neighbor caught me topless through my dining room, his kitchen window. I thought our blinds were closed when I was walking to the kitchen wearing my pj bottoms, but one was open. They’ve moved out now. Probably not because of my toplessness. I’m looking over through the same windows now. The hall light in their apartment is on and it’s all empty. I feel sad about their empty little apartment. Incidentally, if anybody wants it, it’s a nice 2-bedroom up here in the R-Park, cheap. Great landlord. Empty and sad right now. Needs some people. And you might occasionally catch me in stages of partial undress, if someone leaves the blinds open.

It’s 11:17 already. 11:18. November 13, almost 14. Monday almost. I need a little more time. It’s been such a weekend. A weekend on the end of a fall that I pretty much missed on the end of a juggernaut of a summer. And so on. I pretty much missed my favorite season. I won’t dwell on that too much. I get so thankful sometimes that it’s a little much, like I can’t look straight at you, I might cry on your shoes or run away. What a weekend. What a life. Thank you. YOU. and all of you.

11:26. 11:27.

rage

Wednesday night, I came home, and then Ben came home and told me that someone had broken our front door. (So it happened after I came home but before Ben did.) That’s how he put it, that someone had broken it, like they did it on purpose. The next time I passed I checked it out, and there it was: a sun of shatter right about at the bottom of your ribcage, with gorgeous long beams shearing up to the left corner and down to the bottom. The front door of our building is made out of glass and has a bar across the middle on the outside, a bar that crosses the epicenter of the shatter pattern, so whatever hit it probably hit it from the inside. Right about at the level of your fist at close range, was the first thing I thought, and the next thing I thought was, whose fist in this building is the most likely? But what was I assuming, really? It’s also the same level of your elbow if you happened to be slipping backwards into the door, or about where your hand might brace if you were falling and trying to catch yourself against the glass. Or a baseball. Or any number of things.

But your first thought was probably the right one. Someone probably hit the door on purpose. That’s the most likely explanation, really.

But I don’t want to choose an answer just because it’s likely. I don’t want to choose an answer at all. I don’t want to have thoughts like that. When I see evidence of rage I want the…the strength? I don’t know. Whatever it is, whatever it takes to believe in something finer, to leave the possibility open.

Fragments

“Jesus calls us, planks and all, to do some great work.”

*

I already miss you. I already crave the place where we will never be parted. But it brings no comfort to us yet.

*

If you can’t speak it, can you write it? Paint it? Paint me? Can you draw it to me? Can you draw me to it? Please.
Please.

*

“I have to admit, this is my first intercultural worship experience. And I felt at home.”
“I know what you mean!You being here is like, before I was eating some really great chili, and I was like, man, this is some fucking great chili, but now you’re here, and it’s like someone put some cheese on the chili, and now I’m like, SHIT, I’m never eating chili without cheese again!”
“Well, I think you all were pretty cheesy before I got here.”

*

The teakettle whistled. Then the doorbell buzzed. Then the wind blew something over and it smashed. Each time you jumped up to take care of it. As the rest of us talked, I heard you sweeping up shards of glass in the bathroom, and I felt like you were sweeping up shards of me, toenails, snips and balls of hair, peels of skin, broken pieces of me turned to glass, and I thought, My goodness, is it always going to be like this? I wonder when he’s going to get tired of it?

*

Needing to take your own advice. Needing to hear the truth you speak to other people. Are you starting to see it yet? Are you starting to see the beauty growing in you, the beautiful you growing?
He is growing it.
It is being done. He said so; do you believe him?

A heaven worth while.

*

You say you can’t have me missing you.
Who would I be if I didn’t miss you?
Who would I be if I didn’t cry?

*

“Daddy, if I wasn’t me, who would I be?”
“Well, you’d be someone else.”

*

“If I could show you anything,
I would show you what you do for your friends.”

*

I went to bed and burrowed into you, and you folded over me, and I pushed deeper into your warm spice like I was looking for something, like I could hide myself in you, like the onion-layers of heaven.

familiar routes

Drove home to Detroit this weekend, separate from benjyman (he drove the truck, and I drove the car, so that we could leave the truck in Michigan with my dad to get sold, where trucks are better loved and not ticketed and taxed more for just existing). The sun dropped amazingly fast. I took my secret route, LSD past all the museums, down to 41, all the way down to Indiana before I got onto the 90. I know I just posted an entry asking for new music suggestions, but fall (fall, fotw, fall) is a time when I cycle through the few things I know by heart, and just let them go back to track 1. “Left and Leaving” by The Weakerthans. Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I just found this in-between spot in my voice, kind of an undiscovered vocal cord, where I can yell real high where I couldn’t before like Karen O in that one song, “Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick time you take IT!”

I listened to “Seven’s Travels” by Atmosphere because I thought it would wake me up, and when it didn’t–it never does–I called E instead, deciding that talking on the phone was slightly less dangerous than the risk of falling asleep on the road. And talking is the best way to keep me awake. He was at the LAN center killin’ Nazis, but laid down arms for a li’l bit to talk to me. Being on the road, I ended up talking about getting out of Dodge, about these weird flashes of fantasy I get sometimes of getting in the car, buying a ticket and vanishing, and how in certain moments that idea is so overpoweringly seductive. And how hard I find it to explain that it has nothing to do with wanting to leave B, you see. It’s an impulse that I get from time to time for a split second, and I can’t explain it. It’s just that sometimes a picture flashes in my mind of myself in a foreign marketplace, in some landscape, and that thought liberates and excites me so deeply, and my next thought (like the moment when a dream becomes a nightmare), is noticing that I am alone in that place.

E pointed out to me that the only time I’ve traveled abroad was when I was alone, when I was single. Now I have benjyman, now is the time to make a new picture, a new memory. And he’s right, and I do; I want to see everything, I want to do everything, and I want to do it with B. I have a hard time not feeling guilty for panicking sometimes, for the solitude I crave and call by other names. I felt a lot better. I laughed so much, I laughed so much.

I passed Kalamazoo and wondered if it would feel like it did. It did.

We hung up, and I started to get sleepy again almost immediately. I called C, and silently thanked God that I can talk to Memphis or Chicago or fucking whomever I want while I’m blazing down I-94 in the dark. Can’t wait until B has a phone. He was out at a show. We talked about the entry where I wrote about Jesus and someone like me talking on a back porch. He said he’d wanted to comment, but felt it would have trivialized the subject matter, something like, “I think it’s really cool that Jesus says, ‘dude.’” I told him that would have been the perfect comment, and that that interchange was the seed of the whole piece, and that I realized that I was trying to get at the humanity of Jesus, that Jesus got tired, Jesus got thirsty, Jesus needed time to himself. The part of him that crouched on the beach and cooked fish for his disciples (with nail-scars on his hands) who were pulling their boat up on the shore bewildered and frightened, who didn’t know what to expect after his death, and now here he was alive, and then they sat around the fire and ate together, and that was the first thing they did. The man who was also God, the expressed word of God, this eternal force, who had just been killed and resurrected from the dead, saw eating a meal together with his friends as a priority. This might be my favorite scene ever. If I could be present for any event, it might be this one.

I also told him that the voice and personality of Jesus in this poem was maybe 40% inspired by him, and conversations we’d had during his last visit. He responded, “I saw that, but I didn’t want to presume.”

There was pumpkin pie in the fridge when I got in. When B arrived, I put a bite of pie in his mouth and me in his arms. This man. This man.