The first two here are of the pre- and post-preggers variety, a little mini-serial of The Kid, It Cometh, and basically signalled the end of the old blog. I know; hugely interesting. Anyway, there's your background information in all its glory, at least as it pertains to these first two posts. In regards to your getting this far into my old shit, if I could say that I'm impressed by your tenacity without sounding like a patronizing fuck, well, I'd perhaps be a more accomplished writer.



The doctor had been telling us to keep dry while dousing us with cold water, preaching balance on the tightrope and kicking at our feet, insisting that we stay as smoothed-out and stress-free as possible before chasing us through skinny hospital corridors with a roaring chainsaw and the unmistakable look of madness in her eyes... so when said doctor stormed into the examination room during our last visit with a plunger, barbecue tongs and every intention of snatching the baby from the girlfriend’s womb, well, I felt it was past-due that I put my foot down.

That she had been so affable and understanding since she became involved in the biweekly-drama of our birthing process didn’t stop me from throwing a vicious crackback block at the doctor as she pounced; going low and hard, I took out her ketchup-packet knees with a precision shoulder-attack, sprang to my feet deftly out of the resulting barrel-roll, and took a deep, cleansing breath to tamp down whatever psychological impediments that could conceivably prevent me from knocking the doctor sideways with a finely-aimed karate-chop. The doctor, for her part, tried hoisting herself up onto her shattered legs in a brave, if not foolhardy, show of gritty pluckiness, a move that would have resonated more had she not buckled under the strain and fallen jarringly against the wall-mounted blood-pressure gauge, flailing mightily like a harpooned shark before crashing off the desk into a heap on the ground.

I’ll admit to feeling a pang of guilt looking at her woeful, rumpled form writhing on the floor, but I’ll also admit to that guilt fleeing like a white tiger from a post-Labour Day picnic when I spied her still defiantly grasping for the barbecue tongs that sat just beyond her reach. I regained the doctor’s undivided attention with a whistle, and we stared into each other like jungle cats, snarling, coiled, ready for action: huffing, puffing, daring the other to make the move that would surely lead to their downfall... and, for the better part of a half an hour, that was the ways things stood.

Finally, once the standoff lost its immediacy and dwindled into a marginally-insulting exchange of epithets, the girlfriend gently grabbed me by the back of the neck and suggested that we compromise; this was whisper-shouted loudly enough that I needed to but look at the doctor with a shrug to get a response, and her weary head-nod had us negotiating within minutes. After three poorly-executed attempts to hammer out a written ceasefire, we skipped the formalities and mutually decided upon a course of action that would, theoretically, satisfy all involved: I would gingerly loop a soft nylon rope around the kid and attach the other end to a doorknob, giving the doctor one good slam of the door to try and pry the kid loose. However, should the kid prove bound, so to speak, and determined to stay put, we would then wait another week to resume hostilities.

'One shot, doc,' I said, pointing at her. 'And I don’t want to see and post-slam knob-jiggling, crazy legs.'

The doctor agreed with a sigh, looking down at her twisted and mangled pins, and I finished my knot-tying with as much expediency as could be expected whilst wrist-deep in my girlfriend.

'Ready?' asked the doctor, propped up against the doorframe.

I looked at the girlfriend, who nodded. 'Ready,' I said, holding her steady. 'But I’ll be goddamned if I let you go ahead with this before I hear a countdown.'

'Fine,' said the doctor, perhaps a shade too irritably considering the side of the fence she was sitting on. 'Three... two... one...'

SLAM!

I had unexpectedly closed my eyes at the moment of impact, and when I opened them I found the doctor halfway up the rope, braced against the girlfriend’s chair, tugging away at the kid still clinging ferociously to the girlfriend’s innards.

'No cheating!' I yelled, kicking her hands off the rope and shooing her into the corner. I was glaring at her in the silence that followed, my plan to lambaste her with a withering remark embarrassingly stalled by my inability to choose between two equally-cutting witticisms, when I caught sight of the rope pulling taut out of the corner of my eye; I turned just in time to watch the door being torn from the wall, yanked off its hinges with such force that it sailed into a bevy of instant foam-wash canisters on the desk. The frightful hiss of expelling cream soon gave way to a low, feral growl that rose from the girlfriend’s belly like the first crackle of a brush-fire, and we all stared at her vagina in amazement, which, incidentally, was nothing new to me... then, all at once, with the comedic-timing of a seasoned-pro, the rope I had painstakingly looped around the kid slid out from the girlfriend completely untied.

Good baby, I thought. Nice trick... but I hope you got a few more of those hidden up your sleeve, because I can't hold these fuckers off forever.

[originally posted 8/29/2009]



'Oh,' I said, holding the kid in the crook of my arm. 'Your mama is going to be so proud of you.'

I gently, gleefully swayed her back and forth, beaming at this new, utterly surprising development: my baby’s first word.

'Compartmentalize,' I repeated softly. 'That’s a good one.'

She cocked her head to the side, brought her balled-up little fists to her face and sat them on her cheeks. She yawned and stretched, uncoiling like a miniature panther.

'Pretty amazing,' I said. 'I’m almost sure that most kids’ first words are monosyllabic.' I stared at her. 'Impressive.'

The kid lurched and roiled, her limbs spasmodically jutting and recoiling, her face squeezing and relenting, and so on, until her eyes snapped open abruptly. They were like dollops of ink, mesmerizing in their obsidian newness, breathtaking in their innocence; they were the eyes of the unfazed... an odd countenance, really, for someone who has only experienced thirteen days-worth of fresh air on her face.

'What are you, some kind of fucking lunatic?' she asked, somehow, through unmoving lips. I plainly gawked.

'I didn’t say compartmentalize," she continued, 'because I haven’t said anything yet.' She gestured dramatically, a though conducting an orchestra through a particularly powerful musical swell. 'All I can do, for the time being, is squeak like a mouse, maybe let a scream loose here and there.' Her eyes narrowed. 'I’m not happy about it, but there you go. You, on the other hand, are in serious need of some sleep. I think fatigue has hammered your head soft.'

I leaned in, smiling, with a mind to give the little cutie an Eskimo-kiss. She raised her arm again, as if asking for quiet from the percussion-section, and punched me directly in the eye.

'Get a hold of yourself, pops,' she said. 'My mouth doesn’t even work yet—stop putting words in it.'

With that, she struggled out of my grasp, fitfully yanking her blanket from my grip, and balanced on my forearm like a four-and-a-half pound trapeze-artist on a tightrope. She looked back at me and shot me a glare of warning with those eyes, freezing me to the carpet before leaping off into the air, twirling and wrapping herself tightly in the blanket as she spun toward her crib. She tucked into a somersault as she landed, rolling along the mattress before finally sprawling open on her back, like a starfish in repose, suddenly and unquestionably asleep.

The girlfriend walked in then, looked at the kid peacefully cooing and eeping in slumber, and saw me standing four feet from, my arms still miming the act of holding a baby, which, incidentally, looks very much like the starting position for some type of elaborately-choreographed spectacle: hands spread open across the chest, hips swiveled and rotated for maximum torque, head down awaiting the cue...

'You all right?' she asked, in a somewhat worried tone. 'You’ve been dancing, have you?'

I dropped my hands and tried to look nonchalant, but with nothing to lean casually against, I crossed my arms several times before settling on a pose that looked like something resembling competence.

'That kid of ours,' I said, haltingly. 'Boy, she’s something.'

The girlfriend frowned. 'Yes, she is,' she said, sliding over to the crib. The kid continued to coo and eep under the girlfriend’s watchful eye, and I took the opportunity to announce that I was going to have a nap.

'Good idea,' said the girlfriend without looking up. 'You go kind of funny when you haven't slept.'

[originally posted 9/30/2009]



in the morning dew
betwixt the blades of grass
o’er yonder lawnmower
a digit severed, lays
peering e’er so mournfully
a wrinkl’d knuckle
like ceramic tile, cracked
a sorrowful cuticle
like a unibrow, intact
but not so the attachment
nor the dreams
of manicures gone
of illustrations undrawn
of sweet morning dew on the lawn
caressing, nevermore
e’er with the full hand
empty-handed though it’s not
full handed nevermore

[originally posted 6/21/2007]



'Howdy, pardner.'

'Hello.'

'Where’d you get that sign?'

'I made it.'

'Really?'

'Yes.'

'That’s impressive.'

'Thank you.'

'The crispness of the flames on the word hell there... very well done.'

'Are you making fun of me?'

'Not at all!' [asking passersby]: 'Are those not some fearsome looking flames?'

'You are making fun.'

'Nossir, those are super.'

Silence.

'But, as good as those flames are, I feel I should share a concern of mine.'

'I’m allowed to be here!'

'Oh, I don’t doubt that.'

'Well, what then?'

'It’s just... well, surely are you on the highway to hell is meant as a question?'

'Of course.'

'Might I ask where the question mark is?'

'It’s implied.'

'No, what’s implied is that God’s messengers are grammatically ignorant.'

'Signs have no need for punctuation.'

'Pardon me?'

'McDonald’s doesn’t have a period after it, does it?'

'No, it doesn’t.'

'So why aren’t you over there asking them about their sign?'

'Because McDonald’s isn’t in and of itself a sentence. In fact, I’d bet that if it was McDonald’s asking me if I was on the highway to hell, they’d finish that sucker off with a question mark.'

'Well, my sign can be interpreted any number of ways.'

'You ran out of room, didn’t you?'

'What?'

'You spent so much time making those flames that you only realized too late that there wasn’t enough space to jam a question mark in there.'

'Wh...'

'And it’s not like, after all that work, you’re just going to scrap the sign and start again, is it?'

Sigh.

'Fine: I ran out of room.'

'I thought so.'

Silence.

'Now, was that so hard, admitting that to me?'

'Will you go away?'

'Certainly. Good day to you, sir.'

[originally posted 9/17/2008]



I could see him reversed in the window, his reflected face twisting and churning into a myriad of unappealing shapes, a grotesque, absurdist painting of a mind seemingly at odds with itself. His jaw jutted and his teeth chattered quickly, like a dog nipping at fleas on its backside, and I recognized the motion as the outward manifestation of a nervous tic he and I share: mindlessly chewing at hunks of skin torn from the inside of the mouth. It was a disgusting habit, mildly unhygienic, and incredibly distracting... but, ever the warrior, I put my head down and soldiered on, leaving him to his surreptitious self-mutilation and nonstop fidgeting.

Still, I found myself stealing glances at him over the better part of the next hour, taking little peeks from behind my notebook, and I got to wondering what, exactly, he was doing – at some points he was deeply focused, pounding long torrents of words into the keyboard and intermittently slouching back in his chair, mumbling indecipherably; others, he paced around, tapping his fingers against some flat surfaces, sliding his palm over others, his hands in constant motion... even standing still he seemed to be moving, twitching, shifting, forever unsettled and adjusting to some unseen current that threatened to overtake him at any given moment. I hadn’t even been aware that I was facing him until he nodded a greeting at me, and, slightly unnerved, I nodded back and returned to my work.

We were two at a bank of six computers, the others as free and unoccupied as a group of broken elevators, and this guy—a guy I’m calling 'Twitch' from here on out—had turned off his monitor and placed his bag against it, behind the keyboard, turning his efforts to crouching unobtrusively against a corner bookshelf, tenting his fingers and brooding on what looked to be the masterstroke in some intricate, fiendish plan of indeterminate complexity. I managed to get a good six or seven minutes of uninterrupted work in before a maroon-haired woman of 40, maybe 45, appeared from the fiction aisle with an awkward sashay that didn’t do her sloppy frame any favours, dripping with dangling jewelry and self-satisfaction so potent I found myself grimacing involuntarily.

Wearing boxy glasses a shade too purple for her hairdo, a runny face of hanging flesh too exhausted anymore to sneer, and fingernails too long to be of any practical use save for doing battle with an eagle, this woman couldn’t have been more stuck up had she been thumbtacked to a corkboard. Of course, she immediately made herself comfortable at Twitch’s computer and, without hesitation, removed his bag from the desk, closed the programs he was running, and logged into her Twitter account.

Sufficiently engaged by this woman’s ominous nonchalance, I knocked my pencil onto the ground and snuck a look under the desk to see Twitch no longer curled into a ball of tension or eyebrow-deep in rumination, instead shooting a bemused look at the woman who had usurped his spot, a double-barreled shotgun blast of incredulity that was as hilarious as it was unnoticed. Twitch kept his stare while he stood and slid quietly into a seat adjacent to her, slowly pulling his chair closer and closer towards the woman until she couldn’t help but notice his breath on her shoulder...

'Hi there,' he said, his smile so genuine it made my own feel like a forgery.

'Do you mind?' she replied in a tone too loud by half, a screech obviously intended to embarrass.

'Not at all,' he said, resting his chin on his fist. He leaned closer in to the computer, within inches of the screen, and turned so that she had no choice but to acknowledge him.

'Excuse me!' she yelped.

'Listen,' he said. 'I know you’re probably beholden to a coven of Facebook friends breathlessly awaiting your day-at-the-library tweet, but this?' He pointed at his bag on the floor. 'And this?' He gestured at his flash-drive still embedded in the computer. 'Those are mine... and considering that there are four other computers within spitting distance just aching to be manhandled, my dear, I’d have to reckon that you just weren’t paying even the slightest bit of attention when you dimly chose to sit at this computer.'

'I can sit,' she said, again loudly, 'wherever I like. This is a public library.'

He folded his hands and frowned, studying her face. Finally:

'Are you retarded?' he asked, tentatively.

'PARDON ME?' she spat.

'It’s just, well, I could understand if this was but a simple misunderstanding, if you came upon an empty chair I had been saving for a friend or something, but you actually had to remove my bag and click out of the program I was using before choking cyberspace with what I can only assume is inane gibberish.'

He paused to drink in her horror.

'So, I guess what I saying is: unless you’re some spiteful, self-involved dipshit completely unaware of what’s happening in the world around you, the only logical way you would be able to overcome the obstacles I put between you and this computer is if you were, for lack of a more euphemistic phrase, clinically retarded.'

Aghast, the woman stood and yelled, 'I AM NOT RETARDED!', and I spit coke on myself trying to stifle a laugh.

'You might want to keep your voice down,' Twitch said, sliding into the newly-vacant chair. 'We’re in a library, for god’s sake.'

'You don’t talk to me like that,' she said, folding her arms and holding onto herself despite the obvious discomfort she endured from the bracelets digging into her ribcage. Her foot was tapping all on its own, and when she turned her high-beams my way, I saw that her face, hair and glasses all seemed to be one singular colour; conversely, she saw me trying unsuccessfully trying to stem one giggle fit after another. Twitch turned to her almost apologetically and said, 'I can sign you out of Twitter, yes?'

Apoplectic, the woman stormed off. Twitch threw a wink at me before continuing his frantic typing, and I scanned the aisles looking for some hint of the retribution I knew to be coming, because people raised to believe themselves entitled don’t react to humiliation by just curling up and crying themselves to sleep; they find somebody who will listen, and they tattle.

Sure enough, I caught sight of the woman in the bowels of the K-N section, and she was tugging on the sleeve of a white-haired, blazer-wearing gentleman who ran at least six-and-half-feet tall; he looked wearily agitated and, after much harping and prodding, sauntered towards Twitch with the stricken woman all but hiding behind his arm.

'Excuse me,' the man said, sagging back on one leg. Twitch was either ignoring him or was too busy hammering away at his keyboard to notice.

'Excuse me,' the man said again, this time tapping a fat finger on Twitch’s shoulder. With an annoyed, exaggerated sigh, Twitch turned with his eyebrows raised expectantly.

'I believe my wife was using that computer.'

Twitch’s face slowly broke into a smile, and he looked the man over for a few seconds before turning off his monitor and spinning towards the lovely couple with crossed legs and folded arms.

'Indeed she was,' he began. 'Unfortunately, as you see by the various accoutrements I have gathered here, I was in the midst of using this machine before I took a moment’s leave... and though my absence was to be short-lived, I assumed that the act of propping my bag against the screen, combined with the sight of my flash-drive noticeably protruding from the tower, would be indication enough to ward off any would-be seat-takers, especially since four identical, unused computers sat not so much as an arm’s length away from this one. The fact that I was evidently wrong in my assumption, sir, does nothing to sway me from, and in fact confirms, my opinion that your wife is mentally-retarded.'

I slid my elbow across the desk and hid my face in my hand, peeking through my fingers and trying not to laugh. Six-and-a-half-feet of big man darkened into a steaming rage, and I watched his pulse dance up his neck like pinballs launched from a cannon.

'I’m no doctor,' Twitch said to the towering inferno standing over him. 'But if it’s me checking off symptoms on WebMD, well, I’d be trying to rule out cretinism before I tackled anything else.'

The man lurched forward in an explosion of profanity, unloading on Twitch like he was tipping over a dump-truck, wagging his fat finger and spitting all manner of rank bile and colourful invective... it was an awesome display, an astounding show of anger that dwindled into incomprehensible nonsense as the brute tired himself out, his jabbing, swollen finger ultimately curling up into his hand as a perfect metaphor of his spent fury. On cue, a teenaged blond boy cut through the gathering crowd only to stop dead at the monster still fuming at Twitch; his lapel pin read 'Martin', and the look on his face gave every indication that the scenario petering-out in front of him wasn’t one covered in Librarian School.

'Um,' said the library-trainee, looking back and forth between a reposed Twitch and the snarling beast opposite. 'There’ve been some complaints...' He let his voice trail off and took a step backwards, directly into the path of the real librarian, a much older, much scarier woman who was absolutely unaccustomed to taking shit from anybody.

'You,' said the librarian, pointing a graying finger at the gorilla and his wife. 'Out. Now.'

'This little fuck called my wife retarded,' the man protested.

'I asked if she was retarded, originally,' Twitch responded. Then, to the librarian: 'I promise you, ma’am—I thought it a legitimate question, and asked only out of concern.'

'You’re lucky I don’t pound you into dog meat, you piece of shit!' the man yelled, boiling over again.

'I’m sorry, Miss Librarian,' Twitch said, nodding at his screen, 'but I’d like to get back to work at some point, and all this noise is making it difficult to do so.'

I watched the librarian sternly take the man to task in a hushed voice, overheard her threaten to call the police if he and his wife didn’t see it fit to leave under their own power, and sat back in my chair heavily, in utter disbelief that this guy I’m referring to as Twitch hadn’t gotten himself killed. After the crowd dispersed and the offending couple was escorted to the exit, we saw the expelled moose and his wife animatedly jabbering at each other through the window, and because a sundae isn’t a sundae without some whipped cream on top, the moose noticed Twitch and began to berate him further, apparently unaware that sound didn’t travel through library glass. Twitch waved, smiling like a rat who had managed to both steal cheese from a mousetrap and skin a cat in the process, and I gave him an appreciative golf-clap for good measure. Face stained with a shit-eating grin, he turned to me and said, 'that guy would have fucking creamed me.'

I agreed, and, after a brief pause, Twitch resumed his fervent keyboard-banging, his strange muttering, his pacing, his whole antsy routine that had taken him to yet another corner of the library as I packed my things up... I waited for a second or two before leaving and watched him working out either the logistics of an attempted handstand or the rules to some sort of wall-slapping patty-cake; whatever he was doing looked as though it took an immense amount of concentration, and in lieu of forcing a goodbye, I instead gave the librarian a hearty wink on my way out.

She didn’t seem displeased.

[originally posted 8/19/2009]