NB [Nota Bene]:
When I first began this blog, I stopped.
Abruptly.
Why?
Because I simply could not deal with the
emotions
raging through my psyche.
It took several years of dancing
with the notion
of writing
“Autumn of the Species”
before I could return to the project.
That was several months ago ...
This piece,
“Rage”
is the first, & dominating, entry
from that raw beginning.
~jwl / 2019 0404
Holidays and birthdays are the worst. Although just about any other day can be equally depressing. All it takes is an unchaperoned thought, a minor memory that triggers a landslide into the caboose of some better forgotten abuse. And then you’re entrained, rattling along some memorial track.
But, holidays and birthdays. What used to be signposts, monuments of expectation sprinkled through the year, days to which, as children we always looked forward, days of congress among cousins, aunts and uncles, the surviving grandparent, and others … are now impossibilities that would require both an act of Congress and, likely, the national guard wielding pepper spray, sticks and shields.
Whereas Christmas was celebrated in the present, that anxious unwrapping of some mysterious hopefully expected gift, now that same helliday is warped in memories better left forgotten, wrapped in anxiety about what can never be healed but maybe, at best, annealed into a stronger blade, mokume, with which to slice into the moment to create a clean presence unlittered with the cans and old shoes that trail behind each day, wedding heart and mind, litanies of abuse, a profane bloody fouled putrid red caboose.
Yes, you read that right. Correct. I hate holidays, birthdays, memories. I have jettisoned all connection with members of family, dismembered all relationships with lying former wives and that throng of women once considered, “lovers.” Sister, brother, father, mother, son. I speak to no one.
As I said (screamed, rather) once, at the conclusion of one particularly ugly mugging, as I ran away with the exquisitely wrought knife that had been stabbed into my back. A blade that cut so sharp that I never felt or understood until it was much too late, a blade encrusted with the intoxicating dazzle of diamonds, pearls of manipulation that had grown from tiny irritants, grains of untrue sands … until finally I’d been sliced nearly in half, divided against myself, running forward merely to keep my corpse together, and to counter-balance the weight of that enormous slicing … I ran, running, speeding towards an ill-defined future of transformative transfusions, a gamut of alcohol and dope, ran, laughing, a maniacal giggle, a moron entombed in a coffin built for running.
Furtive. Scanning for anything hopeful, a thing funny to say, I exclaimed racing away in a large nameless circle, a man-piece on that perverse board game, life, of which Monopoly™ is but a pale misrepresentation, “Ha-ha, I got your knife.”
I did not pass go. I did not collect two hundred. I went back into my life. I searched for my wife. Or, I went back to work, returned home with the money, paid our bills and (every night) got back into bed with my life. And every morning I donned my armor, went out like a knight, back to the slaughter for what I believed was right.
Except one day, he was cut out off himself. Excised. Like a tax, the burlap busting with my bullion slashed open and the tacitly agreed coin of the unreal realm splattered my blood down the steps and into the pure streets of greed. And as he lay there, dying to himself, there was a waft of memory, a whiff of something done to please… “mother?”
Yes. Then. “I got it. I understand.” Finally. There is little to look forward to. And much regret. One moves forward as quickly as possible. Running to escape the label of “walking wounded” running to get nowhere from every-insufferable-where-else. Running to avoid the candles and the cake. And that dead man, me, got up and ran, single-handedly honoring all truth, beauty, fealty and obligation. Then we ran, a ferociously brave egg, shell and sell and yoked to jokes, into the hard coded light of a difference engine. Years of training. Another pair of tracks expanding into the future, while narrowing into the past, both ways sharpened by the knife edge knife end of infinitive pointlessness. We are all doomed.
Until, finally, running is no option. And you turn around and look the past in the face. Push away the cake the candles, the wrappings the glitter. Balloons bursting with methane. Grasping the moment to glimpse what is no longer real. To obtain a shred of what is called, “sane” knowing (gladly) that nothing ever was as it seemed, as it was sold, really, truly, the same. But shame.
To finally turn and think, “Life is the bitch. Oh, yes I have your knives in me. Let me be your voodoo doll. Thank you for that. For these pearls of inestimable wisdom. Oh, and Happy Birthday, bitch!” But unable to even say it, unable to utter in childish sing-song voice “Ha-ha, ha-ha-ha, I’ve got your kn-ife!”
It is, or becomes, as the unlettered so often say, “A mute point.”
~jwl
https://www.jonwarrenlentz.com
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2014 0626, 0714 & 2019 0404