My mental circus, inside and out.

remembering

What has happened to my memory?  I can't remember anything! I can't even remember yesterday.  I'm already turning into a dotty old lady.  No wonder dotty old ladies are happy.  Forgetting is bliss.

Posted by: EmmaPele at September 29, 2005 19:29 | link | comments (1)

life

I sit down to write a eulogy for my brother, to be delivered in the high school auditorium tomorrow at noon.  But instead, I study a recipe for roasted peppers with goat cheese, black olives, and an orange, a reminder of a time when things were not so bad with M, and he cooked, blackening the peppers, laying them out in careful patterns, exhibiting one of his more endearing qualities of nurturing.  I dreamed last night of holding P's warm cock in my hand, a very still dream, like petting our old cat, Mollie, who still sometimes imagines that she is a stalker of birds, slinking around like she's a mighty panther.  The sun is shining, a cold wind is blowing through dry leaves, and I think I should do one of the classic Buddhist meditations on the body, to train for mindfulness.  All these things I think of instead of this eulogy, as if I want to write of life instead, in its most sensual, imaginative presence. 

Posted by: EmmaPele at September 23, 2005 21:45 | link | comments (1)

The Tao of Pooh

Yesterday, I was beginning to feel like Timon of Athens storming off to his cave:

Timon will to the woods; where he shall find
The unkindest beast more kinder than mankind.

But the stars are back in alignment today with the return of P, who suffers from clinical depression and is on a downturn.  "Dearest  P", I said, "you must get some kind of help this time."  

And because he is British,  I said, "It is wonderful to have you back even if you are all Eyor-like right now." 

 "Yes," he said, "floating on my back in an eddy." 

"You  have me," I said, "but who did Eyor have available, Piglet?

"Well, I do recall he was jumped on by Tigger . . .  or rather, 'bounced.  Now there's a euphemism if I ever heard one."

And for some strange reason, we were both greatly cheered.  It's interesting that the Danes, when they're around someone who is moping, say, "Don't be a Soren."   That's a reference to Soren Kirkegaard who was a very gloomy old philosopher.

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at September 21, 2005 08:17 | link | comments (1)

The Mudville Right

My father attends the arraignment in Mudville.  He sees Casey, the murderer of his son.  "There was nothing about this Casey that I could be angry about. I had hoped for a scruffy, smelly gangster.  But he was just an ordinary guy who looked scared as hell."

Now here is the perversity.  My brother-in-law, Ray,  is a crazy man on the scale of David Koresh.   A tall, dark lout, he imagines himself a messiah, and has started his own religion by producing seven children to be his acolytes.  They are carefully home schooled by my sister so as not to get any *ideas.*  It is doubtful that Ray could convert any strangers with his lunatic ramblings, a combination of provincial paranoia about the local government and an increasingly literal interpretation of the BIble.  So he had to create his own Christian army, which includes my cow-like sister Jean. 

As soon as Ray heard about my brother's death, he set about on a course to prove somehow that it was Dave's fault.  His probable motivation is to demonstrate that Dave's death was God's punishment because he was gay.   Ray's zeal led him to immediately drive down to study the crash site where he determined that Casey was innocent because he could have easily missed the warnings for the stop sign because of weeds and a misleadingly placed driveway.  So my father had to go down to the accident site himself to see if this were true, and thus had to witness the 43 feet of skid marks, the symbol of my brother's death burned into the asphalt.  

Then Ray tried another tack.  It must have been the pens and pencils in my brother's front pocket that pierced his  lungs and heart.  After all, Dave was a teacher (another category of person that Ray loathes), and even worst, a science teacher, so he must have had some pens in his pocket protector, right?  Ray decided to spin out this tale in front of Maud, who showed signs of extreme stress at hearing this.  And of course, it was absurd.  Dave, in fact, had had a lycra bike shirt on.  But it was once again up to my poor father to rise to Dave's defense against this absurdity. 

How I hate the Christian right.  Manipulative arrogant self-aggrandizing fucking narrow-minded bastards.  My sister says, "Hush.  Attention is just what they want." 

Posted by: EmmaPele at September 20, 2005 09:07 | link | comments

No joy in Mudville

This man who killed my brother.  I know very little about him.   I have a sense of him, as if in a dream.  I know that he is 26.  That he was driving with a suspended license and fictitious plates.  It's highly probable he had DUIs on his record. A bad boy.  I've known many, even dated some in my own youth, when we all lived on the knife edge of poverty and despair.   His name is Casey.  Was he named for the poem?  "And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,/But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out."   Mudville--a good name for a run-down city in Bush's Amerika.

So Casey is 26, and now faces ten years sentence for aggravated vehicular homicide.  Flo was surprised.  "But doesn't aggravated mean that you intentionally kill somebody with your vehicle?"  I suppose it means that he intentionally went out and drove knowing that he was death on wheels.  But strangely, I feel no anger towards him.  At least not yet.  If I think of him, I will have to think about my brother's head going through the passenger window of Casey's van.

It is not surprising that M would take this moment to make an appearance.  A few days before my brother's death, I received an email from him that three boxes of my things would be arriving.  Two did arrive.  Books that I'd already forgotten. Some clothes, neatly folded. Who did the folding, I wondered.

Posted by: EmmaPele at September 19, 2005 20:49 | link | comments