the depahted

he rode a pale horse and his name was death, and hell followed with him. -johnny cash
this is my life this is my mistake
celery... celery invented pets that she didn't have, only to kill them off. she would dig holes in her backyard only to fill them in later, bawling her eyes out over the freshly turned earth for a pet she never had that had never died.
when i was I don't know... fourteen, i thought I had super powers... that I could see the future. there was a path that ran along side our house, a bike path... freshly paved and i knew a man was going to die there unless I prevented it. he is going to go walking and have a heart attack and I was the only one that was that was going to able to prevent it. I was grounded at the time, but i ran out of the house anyways crying and I took my bike and went to that bike path. there was a man... and he was walking and i rode up to him on my bicycle and said hi looking anxiously into his face. i have seen death, not back then... but later, and there is a smell... it smells of amaretto and rotten fruit. the smell is unmistakable. when you smell it you know the person is gone.. twenty- one grams lighter... done. they are gone and somewhere else. he looked at me and said hello back, and riding along side him for a minute, waiting for him to drop dead i asked tentatively "no, but how do you feel?" he walked on... down the bike path after giving me a strange look.
celery and bob waited waited on the corner of the intersection tonight... again. Waiting for the accident that he was only able to prevent. bob, "slew... my name was slew." celery turned to bob wiping her ratty bangs off her forehead. "slew... hey godot, the whole donnie darko moment... blah, blah, blah..."
bob wasn't listening, watching the lights change, he stared off into space willing what was supposed to happen, to happen so they could go home. "why don't you just blow me because you're acting like my fucking girlfriend right now." bob said, wiping a wet sleeve across his runny nose.

part two: or thanks ang-n-oli for the inspired t-shirt

journals are the saddest sort of friends- celery
act one/: scene two
after three days without sleep you can hear voices in running water. have you ever wondered what they would say?
this is your future. welcome to it. it begins now... no wait... now, no now.
no, no, no, no, no listen...
bob swayed as he finished off a bottle of vitamins, b6.
gnashing his teeth violently. little bits of vitamin spraying every where as he spoke.
proprioception is our sixth sense. The continuous but unconscious sensory flow from the movable parts of the body: muscle, tendons, joints. Their position to me and motion are continuously monitored and adjusted by my brain. without it you become disembodied, like a freshly pithed frog.
celery chewed on the split ends of her hair. what is that from? she whispered. is this my mind? is this my mind? is this my mind?
The vitamin craze of the nineties with the health faddists overdosing on pyridoxine, poisoning themselves. a generation of power walking zombies.
your body is dead, not real... not yours
this is the rest of your life welcome to it.
celery -12 fEb 07 - This body doesn't feel like me- this doesn't feel right. The constant fucking and eating. it's so habitual you know? maybe you do. Everything is so dull, pale, so bleached. there is no beginning... no end just a long laborious middle. one of those sort of "if I was a mind reader i would know what I was thinking" sort of things. last night, bob wanted to get something to eat so we went for a walk to get some... (end part two)

jay-n-liz

this is my life this is my mistake...
colin: blah blah blah
me: no no no... let me read it on your fucking blog
this is me drunk, this is me at my most honest.
jay and liz are talking girl shop in the kitchen right now...
liz: well what if she is????
jay: you should come over for a spectacular freak out... I have gained a new found love for darts... come on liz you should play darts with me
liz: I took my contacts out
jay: just aim for the big circle... come on liz you should... look at me i'm awesome two bulls-eyes

crawfish etuofee, eh too fee... eh too fyeh

ken, a retired chemistry teacher from new hampshire, "is this a rave?".
"no" and I shove a bottle of beer in his hand and take a drink from mine. club brasil on frenchman street has a half a high school marching band on stage. misty, who asked me if I needed anything from the bar comes back with a cup for ken. "here drink this too." I say handing the plastic cup to ken. He does not complain and drinks both, god bless him. this is not my scene. I feel old in this place. i have an old soul. misty and andrew from the o.c. who have watched the show, i asked, are standing watching the band. They enjoy music, it's their passion and have taken ken and i around to these amazing bars with live bands. soul sucking jazz, i didn't even think I liked jazz, and then we ended up here... their favorite band is dave matthews which makes me feel quietly superior.
john wilks booth, his real name, talks about st. bernard parish. the water rose six feet in the space of a half hour. some of the fire fighters from the parish come in and talk about what happened. they were abandoned. the national guard was occupied at the super dome. people broke into the boat storage warehouse and took the boats. they rescued each other. they swam out their kitchen windows. they broke into the crawl space in their house and dragged their mother in law and sister up in there with them and then sat on the roof for four days waiting to be rescued.
Many people did not have flood insurance. the insurance company would pay to replace to the roof. one of the kids from americorp gets dysentery. we all find this funny, comical. "what is dysentery anyways?" one of the americorp kids said he felt sick and had a headache. "that's dysentery?" in the oregon trail game people were always dropping dead from that shit. you didn't have time to shoot two squirrels without little peggy sue dropping dead from dysentery. i fantasize about my own death: you guys go on without me... i'd only slow you down handing over my ryobi power drill with rechargeable battery pac... I got the... I got the dysentery.
i listen to npr on the way home. it seems to be the only radio station i can find. If I ever post a personal ad on the chicago reader i can put my radio is tuned to npr. i am interesting and intelligent... love me now. they talked about how president bush did not mention katrina or rebuilding the gulf coast and how some people were upset about his state of the union speech. by the end of the week, we have moved on to mudding. mudding is, surprised again, what i call spackle... and does not wash out of clothes. i enjoy walking around with these huge spots of mud on my jacket and jeans, like i'm out there doing things... look at me.
mike from project hope, not to be confused with camp hope which sounded ominous at first but is actually a very nice place has been here for the last seven months. first he was gutting houses and now rebuilding. he hasn't shaved since he got down here and is a hippy, his word not mine, he is working for free and is living on the kindness of the community.
everyone helps each other, it is a very blue collar neighborhood. an electrician who live down the street rewires his neighbor's house who is a carpenter, or knows something about carpentry. hopper, the carpenter, in turn, comes into this man's house and puts up braces and jacks, and raises this guy's roof to where it was before the storm surge hit. the force of the water moved brick houses down the street. this house leans awkwardly to the left. hopper begins turning the jack and the roof begins to groan. we're all underneath the center beam holding it above our heads in place. hopper pauses for a second and tells us to take a look around and plan our escape route if the roof decides to go, we laugh and then nervously look around. I reposition myself closer to the door this time and he starts cranking the jack again.

have you found jesus? he's hiding behind the couch

driving through mississippi listening to tupelo honey on a radio station broadcasting from get this... tupelo. now mind you i thought the new england patriots were from the wonderful state of new england. 'sigh' the quaint state. why would a professional football team create a fictitious state and then pretend to come from there??? it just doesn't make sense. i stayed and lived in st bernard parish population 20,000 down from 76,000. one of the levees broke a street down from where we are working on, daniel's house, installing sheet rock and insulation and then eventually mud. sheet rock i found out is just dry wall, like kleenex is a kind of facial tissue. I make a lot of unnecessary holes in daniel's sheet rock. I try to make my mistakes while daniel is not around. as a doctor the one thing you're trained not to say... 'oops'. most of the day daniel is at work, he's a welder and mercifully not a carpenter. seventeen months after the hurricane he still live in his fema trailer behind his house. about every fifth house has one of these trailers in front or on the side of a home the rest of the homes are left deserted rotting from the inside. daniel's trailer is a sort of all plastic rv camper, think small. think tiny. It smells exactly like my parent's neighbor's house. this fact drives me insane. that smell reminds me of leather couches and baby sitting and all the cherry coca- cola and cable television i could want. i want to ask daniel if it's some kind of plug in or scent strip or something. i get bit by a spider, several times, and my hand swells up to this size of a medium grape fruit. the brown recluse spider they tell us in orientation is the cousin to the black widow. it will not kill you but the third day is very bad they tell us... very bad. I am popping benadryl tablets like bright pink tic tacs thinking if i was dying i think i would know it, it would hurt a lot more. my hand would fall off first or something... then again it is only day two. shit

the big easy mac

i'm leaving tomorrow for new orleans... nah ahleans... norleans... nah-lens
the conversation i had not two minutes ago with the "camp hope" lady who answered the phone (camp hope is the place I'll be living at for two weeks and then I'll just commute to the habitat for humanity work site by car)
chlwap: camp hope
me: hey, my name is Sir Henry Oglepants I did all of this online so I was just checking, I was looking at your guys website and there's an orientation that sunday before work on monday.
chlwap: That's right, so you need to get here before five on sunday and make sure to bring an extra blanket and some warm clothes. You're probably going to need a jacket. It's kind of cold down here.
me: that's okay i'm from chicago...
chwalp: the group from Minnesota whose here is bitching about the cold... we don't have heat.

11 jAn 2007

I think woody allen said it best: life is full of loneliness, misery, and suffering and it's all over much too soon
act one/ scene one:
Celery was laying on the floor in the living room sucking a Peach menthol ciggarette, and bob was in the bathroom with several dried makers in the sink and his shirt up over his head. She shouted down the hallway "what are you doing in there?" Bob inspecting a red flair, looked into the mirror and began filling the dark circle that was six inches down and to the left of one his nipples. "I'm giving myself a third nipple." Turning his attention back to what was going on in the bathroom he finished up and satisfied with the results spoke to no one in particular "I am a freak. I'm damaged goods."
Celery took a cracked coffee mug and swirling the last of its contents of cough syrup and coca cola drank it in three mouthfuls. "Okay whatever, just don't be beating off in my sink- because you never rinse out the bowl and I don't want your man juice all over my fake marble counter top." Bob stumbled out of the bathroom with a fistful of markers working his stained t-shirt back over his head. "Here you go, I cleaned up with this. You might want to wash it in bleach and then burn it" throwing a yellow dishtowel in celery's direction, bob marched to the kitched and came back a few second later with a crumpled paper bag which after popping off the remaining marker’s caps with his teeth dropped into the bag and inhaled deeply. Celery curled the ends of her mouth into a smile “Here you go you little nancy you dropped this” holding up the rag “and by the way I have at least, I’d say… two std’s that you haven’t even heard of, so I’m not worried.”
The apartment was like all apartments anonymous, badly lit, smelling of over ripe bananas wrapped in wet newspapers, filled with lead paint chips. “They called it the devil’s dandruff” celery whispered to herself, pulling a white chip of the wall the size and shape of a silver dollar and popped it into her mouth. “so did you want to get something to eat?” Celery pulled herself up to a sitting position “I don’t know it sounds kind of over rated.” Bob grabbed his coat off the ground by the door and spinning around twice managed to find his keys under a pile of dirty clothes and a burnt phone book “Come on, it could be an adventure.” Celery pulled on her shoes and after tying the laces together shuffled to the door. The door closed behind them, but wasn’t locked and they walked out on to the street and into a torrential downpour, celery with her laces tied together shuffling after bob. (end scene one)