Private Eye

When we stepped out on to the porch we stepped into a world of ice, white sky, and creaking branches. We heard the world breathing. Sight had become a vestigial appendage. We sensed the world's dimensions by echo-location. In the weeks since the first ice storm we'd had two more. Limbs and twigs cluttered streets and anyone with any sense avoided walking under trees.

I told the Eye we'd better consider crawling to get from A to B, but Eye scoffed, pointing to his Vibram soled boots with an arch finger. Fine, I said. We'll chance it. Don't come cryin' to me if your ass breaks.

I thought maybe the thing to do was find a cache of sand somewhere and strew it ahead as we bestrode the sidewalks and parking lots of Amberlack, but that good idea was faulted with the lack of a known cache of sand.

Eye and I were pursuant of a very small and bent over old lady who had taken off from her senior apartment the day before and hadn't been seen since. It was feared she'd slipped, and possibly hit her head, or simply couldn't get up, and thus was in danger of death by freezing. However, there was hope; she was known for her persistent attempts to escape from her daughter-in-law's well meant supervised habitation to a senior center in Avram Heights. It had, as we knew, because the old lady told us each time we apprehended her, a pool table, where a cute little asian man smiled at her as he banked his shots, his white socks shining love at her flower heart. So she said. We didn't share this with Norma. We had a bread-buttering routine, a cycle, a round, a ritual, one of many among a constellation of regular escapes and apprehensions.

We found the senior village a rich well of minor troubles. It was our specialty.

When I had Time and Hope

I used to be the kind of person who got excited about things—secretly, so as not to play the fool out loud—the kind of person who had ideas, who thought, “this time, it’s all going to turn out right!”

I had exclamation points in my thoughts, roses of hope blooming in my chest, a vision of how happiness was possible if you only just glittered, gestured, hummed in exactly the right way so as to alter the universe’s nasty tendency toward imprisonment.

Was it the universe that was so dead set against I or anyone, really, ever having a moment’s rest from worry?

If things were all right, how long could it last? If things were bad, was there any hope? Would hope’s emissary slip past without my noticing? Could I keep my eyes peeled and all my senses alert for the magic animal, the force to be harnessed?

Even awash in gloom, I clung to the dim glimmer of time’s expanse. “Not now,” I mumbled, in a barely audible voice, grey with exhaustion, “but someday. There’s still time.”

I wonder whether or how much any of this has to do with my beginnings, the stories that first formed when I tried to explain to myself why things were as they were. I came up with reasons, and then, to make myself feel a little more secure, I gave myself the power to alter the facts to make them fit better.

I was of a temperament to want to fix things. Maybe it was just the discomfort of being there when someone was in pain.

Bipolar disorder, aka manic depression, runs in my mother’s family. My Auntie Sandra was the first I knew of to stand on the corner in her pajamas cursing passers by.

My Uncle Nate had an eye tattooed on the back of his left elbow. It was supposed to keep him safe from harm by scaring off any bad luck that might try to sneak up on him. He’d gotten it in the Navy, possibly from one of his mates, since the eye was the sort a child of a certain age draws, with a perfectly round pupil resting in a perfectly symmetrical pair of arcs, and fringed all around with evenly spaced eyelashes. “I kept seein’ Uncle Nate’s elbow comin’ at me,” Auntie Sandra said, with a mild, medicated smile. Her once brilliant blue eyes were washed out from thorazine to an almost colorless yellow-grey.

Auntie Sandra took me to the store in downtown Calumet, using a shortcut. “We used to go this way when we skipped school, smoking cigarettes and wearing red lipstick,” she said. She gave me some makeup she wasn’t using any more.

I knew, or at least suspected, that she was trying to make me feel like a human being, part of the world. But it was impossible for me to feel like a part of the world. As far as I knew, that had always been the case. It wasn’t that I wanted to be apart, it was that I could see everything from the outside. How I longed to swim in experience, riding emotions from wave to wave, graceful and nearly effortless. I imagined other people weren’t in such a state of exile as I was, though you’d think the opposite would be true, that I’d assume everyone was in the same boat as I. But I observed that nearly everyone I came across inhabited themselves with ease.

On Being Painted Over

I have lived many dreams-come-true in my life, which is an accomplishment, after all. Let me say that up front, so as to remind myself of the fact. Dreams can be lived. What you long to find you will find.

What I am is an arrow, a beam of light. My eyes aim. My mind aims. My interest and attention aim. I am an instrument that measures my perceptions against my desires.

What is an animal but a perceptual device? A window for a god to look through. An idea, caught in the ether and unable to take form, rides the life of a bird, a girl, a snake, searches for it's chance to exist.

The world of forms is a world of windows and ideas. A world of passages.

What is an animal but an alimentary tube, with a mouth on one end, asshole on the other? A slave to necessity. Equipped with senses designed to promote survival. Prodded constantly to move, to get, to have, to let go. Tricked into reproduction, or not. Life promotes life, after all, without favorites. Let us celebrate the embroidery of the plain facts with pleasures and inventions.