Pretty Awful

Still reeling from the calamitous horribility of last night's Bob Dylan concert, Carmen chooses instead to quietly celebrate his own bearable, semi-sucktastic creativity.  White people love thinking they're creative.  All CP can ask is that if you judge, make it of the poisonous, in-head judgment variety (things you say about people as soon as they leave a room).  This was inspired by Tool and Andrea.

Parabolas

     See the man on his knees in the morning. Feel the autumn air against his neck, his backyard’s hard topsoil pressing back through his jeans. Hear the dropped leaf-blower and its roaring mechanic drone. Respond to the unconscious jolt of fear, the man’s hand’s movement to his chest, as if pledging fast frightened allegiance to some collapsing empire, how his features go lax, droop from his skull for a moment before snapping back rigid and twisting and contorting in observance of the dead stillness in him where movement has always been, always and forever. Look at the day reflected in his eyes. Watch him slowly pitch onto the grass, the way the wind gets captured in his college-aged son’s abandoned batting cage, the pockets of air that balloon out of the mesh netting and flatten and bulge out again. Listen to the un-blown leaves crunch and fracture under the man. Realize what is going on.
     Try to fathom the grisly tempest silently raging in the man, as cries escape his dry mouth as sighs, as his forehead rubs a patch of dirt, as browning blades of grass tickle his cheek, as the leaf-blower continues to brashly hum only a foot away. Imagine. Imagine being intimately aware of how the man’s wife sleeps like the disintegrating dead. Imagine snot oozing from your left nostril and being unable to even sniffle because the stricture is that astounding. Imagine knowing that the man’s son had taken a day trip to NYC with his girlfriend of seven-months to see Young Frankenstein on Broadway. Imagine knowing this and hating musicals. Imagine an astringent wave moving through your entire body and not leaving, imagine that awful sensation bogging down in your heart of hearts and saying, “Not this time. I am here to stay.” Imagine regret filling you like false ichor, stinging as it flowed from head to toe, screaming madly as it went. Imagine that.
     Scan the backyard. Take in its covered, kidney-shaped swimming pool, the eggshell paint peeling from the perimeter fence, the colossal, spectral batting cage, storage shed, the tireless tire-swing and the sad fallen faded tire sinking into the earth. Watch as his piebald puppy, not yet a year-old or fully housetrained and secretly loathed by the man for its yappy bark and propensity to shit in his slippers, comes tearing through the newly installed flap in the backdoor. Remember what it’s like to be happy to see someone you can’t stand. Fight hope as it wells up in the man like young dumb love as the dog scampers across the deck and yard, barking the whole way, and circles the downed man once, twice, coming in and out of the man’s lurid vision. Discern how the leaf-blower’s howl drowns out the puppy’s yelping. Halt as the dog comes to a sudden stop, surveying the man, its nose moist and eyes black, and try to make out the whimpers that even the man cannot hear, because of the leaf-blower and a surging gust of wind that whistles in his ears and pelts his eyes with desiccated earth.
      Pray with the man as the leaves twist and cartwheel over the patchy grass. Pray despite your doubts. Pray for the man, with the man.
      Pretend to be unaware that at the exact moment the man’s knees hit the ground his wife drifts out of a dream and stretches making snow angels in the sheets and sits up and groggily wipes her eyes and puts on her glasses and waddles to the master bathroom. Take solace in knowing that the man couldn’t fully hear the hot water heater churn to life as his wife turned on their two-headed shower. Know that although the man had lusted for women at his work and entertained fantasies of said women, and that he had accepted that his attraction to his wife had waned with age, and that he had, on occasion, resented his wife for reasons that he now sees as petty, senseless in respect to the reverence she showed him, know that the man’s face grows hot and red in the cold in pure and searing want of his wife. Know that the man wants nothing more than for her to be warm and cuddled in their marital bed, gliding happily through dreams of better years. Hope with the man that someone else will find him, knowing that that will never happen. A pinecone falls from a tree and lands without a sound.
     Whimper with the puppy as it pulls with all its tiny might on the fabric of the man’s windbreaker. See the futility with the man and puppy, and with furious calm resolve with fate, as the man does. Seize up the last, the absolutely and truly last, vestiges of strength left, and see the man dig his nails into dirt, to grab the ground as if to give it a good shaking, and see how he slowly rises from the ground, his forehead shedding dirt clots as he moves into a push-up position, and see his legs work decrepitly for footing, see a vein explode over his pale temple, see his arms tremble, see his gritting teeth, and see him flop over, collapsing onto his back and letting all the air pour out of him. See the puppy run back towards the house. See the seamless wall of sky, with the man.
     Accept painstaking reality. Be proud and humble in your surrender. Un-tether everything. Let your paltry angers leave you like body heat. Cling fast to your memories. Remember. Accept.
     Follow the dog back through the flap and the kitchen and the den and into the bedroom. Nudge open the steam-breathing bathroom door. Bark endlessly. Arouse suspicions in the man’s soaking wife. Look at the man’s aged, naked wife with telling eyes.
      Come back to the man. Ignore the knowledge of his wife and the shower and the dog and be there with the man. Study the man’s face, its pallor, how pain slowly flows out of his features, how his blinks seem increasingly deliberate and mindful, how his hand falls away from his chest and darts out and grabs the handle of the leaf-blower. Struggle with the man to pull the howling device near, to wrap the cord around his shaking wrist, to begin to, literally inch by inch, begin to bundle the snaking cord. Cheer him on. Wait. See the cord shorten and tighten and tighten and go taught and rise slightly off the grass. Celebrate as the plug flies from the storage shed’s outlet with a pop. Hear the silence.
      Tend to the barking puppy as the wife wraps a towel around herself. Follow them back through the house, through the bedroom and the den and then past the kitchen. Go wild with the dog on the cool tile. Sadly observe the wife grab the puppy’s choke chain, how she leads him across the kitchen, gently as she can, and how she steers him into the laundry room and locks him in with the toddler gate. Wonder if she makes anything out in the laundry room’s tiny window.
     See the man on his back. Listen to his slowing breath. Feel the jagged rise and fall of his chest. Taste the spit he struggles to swallow. Brush the dirt from his hirsute knuckles. Suck up a lungful of the November day. Watch a formation of birds fly by, way up there, in a V. Let a breeze blow over his face, gently, with just enough force to dislodge a leaf from a tree, and watch with the man as the leaf eases down towards the earth, riding the soft curves of its descent, gradually, quietly, beautifully. Watch it as it goes.