2 posts tagged “white”
Today was weird. And when I mean weird, I mean really weird. When reality sinks in, when you think you've got nothing, you become psychic, telepathic, and shameless.
These two days have been weird. Longer, stretched thinly across the daylight and faint day-time moon. That giant rock. Every minute lasts.
For some reason, I think of Ali as Jred and I are traversing the campus. And then there he was, that broad bearded Muslim, grinning happily as he approaches me. I tell him, genuinely, "I was just thinking of you." He tells me he is catching up on school work before going to work work. Everyone here is catching up to work before they really go to work-- pursuing. I am.
I go to the DMV today. Mr. and Mrs. Anyone fill the rows of chairs built for an endured stay. Every Anyone is disgruntled. Of course, OF COURSE, a baby is balling. A cop tells the 20-some-year-old mother he will get the child a clipboard to play with. The cop hands her a standard issue clipboard with a standard issue pen to match. She marches past.
I sit calmly undisturbed as one dude sits and cheers people on. Go, A077! GOOD LUCK, YOU CAN DO IT. I get no such encouragement when the robot voice beckons. It has been like twenty minutes, he's probably gone, back into his own world "apart" from mine. I saunter up to the desk where a black lady glares at me. Her glasses focus the beam of disdain and burn me. Before I say anything, I notice this kid, probably about my age, with his sunken, time-tried mother. He is bitching the employee out, exclaiming to his mother that they don't understand. Someone calls and he walks away, leaving his mother to deal with it. I watch him pass with his velvet-padded sandals and swishing gym pants, his baggy shirt and a lack of sun where his sunglasses, which rest atop his crown, once were.
Turning to the lady in front of me, I shake my head and remember a sentiment Malcom X expresses when traveling to Europe for the first time-- Americans act like they're doing eachother some favor by not interacting humanely. Or humanly, he says. Like ignoring the fact that we are all peers.
I ask the lady how she is, because I actually care, and we get off to a great start. I know I have done the right thing when, after my assessment, she tries to help me get my birth certificate. "There's a place by Willow Lawn that can do it," she points through walls. "You can ride the bus there," she says in response to "I don't have a car."
Why do they even need a piece of paper? Am I not proof enough of my birth?
So I have a running date with Jred and Basshead. It is too hot outside and Basshead has been on adderall for two days and just vaporized. We decide we will bike. Before I walk home to get my bike, I stop in Pleasant's Hardware to buy a crowbar(for crushing zombie skulls) and gold spray paint(to paint the Dino Rider.
I learn the bike belongs to a crackhead, which adds more points to the dangerous factor. Thanks Mills. And, of course, I forgot the spray paint.
At Belle Isle I am hanging out with Basshead, Jred, Graham, Rock, and GrapeJuice. We're on Dead Rock, where all the delinquents go. I am gulping down wine from Basshead's "Just Be Yoga" water bottle when I hear some shrieks and yelps from behind me. Too much is going on in my world for me to care. Until Graham "Irwin" Wilson walks over with a water moccasin or cottonmouth dangling from two pinched fingers. Everyone claims differently as to the nature of the snake. After it bit him. Blood seeping from his hand, several people insist that he go to the hospital. It was A RIVER SNAKE! EVEN IF IT IS NOT POISONOUS, IT WAS IN THE JAMES. IT CAN'T BE GOOD. Everyone was saying something about it. IT HAD A DIAMOND HEAD. We discuss the nature of the snake only after Graham tosses the thing. Sailing through the air, head over tail and straight as a dowel rod, the creature splashes into the current, gone from our ability to classify.
The sun pushes on us and Basshead cries, "WE SHOULD HAVE EXAMINED IT MORE CLOSELY!"
Concern settles as Graham's drunk ass gets too pissed or worried or whatever to hear any more of it. He isn't going to a hospital, and now I wonder what happened to him.
In any case, my crowning achievement of the day was riding my bike up that huge hill from Belle Isle, Tredegar or 5th, or whatever. Jred and I are pushing ourselves, him on his old BMX bike and me on the Dino Rider. To our left, a procession of about twenty middle to old aged, affluent looking men filter through a gate, down the hill ON SEGWAYS! Sweating profusely, I yell, "AHH I LOVE PHYSICAL ACTIVITY. IT FEELS SO GOOD TO MOVE MY BODY." For a split second their looks make me feel like a dick. But, whatever, they're being lazy. I guess trying to make them feel bad for having fun is wrong of me. But, honestly, I don't feel bad about it. They just don't know.
By the time I reach the top of the hill, I am heaving. I have worked for something, earned it. It does feel good.
At work, someone says they sat two people. I hear them say three, and tell them. They say, "I was thinking three, because three people just left. . . Get out of my head." I ride home from work on the Dino Rider. A piece falls off and clicks on the ground, bouncing. I am one step closer to dying on this thing.
EDIT: I did go back to the hardware store and get spray paint. The Dino Rider is now the Golden POS or, The Ram Rider, as my college uses the same colors and are known as the Rams.
Nothing is as difficult as the decision to answer or ignore incoming calls. For me at least, it had been this way my whole life. Until recently, a new path flattened the hazy overgrowth around me, and I was set in forward motion to an unknown destination.
It started about three months ago. I was at a party with some friends, a college somewhere northwest of where I am now. It is pretty hazy. All I remember is drinking my fourteenth beer and then blood-- blood everywhere. Something had broken, some sort of glass structure. I didn't fully understand what, but I knew it had been my fault. In earnest, I gathered the splinters with my hands, some piercing my skin. Blood poured out on tile flooring and two silhouettes told me it was okay, and to stop.
I didn't stop.
Blood kept pouring until my hands were red, and someone grabbed me by the shoulder, picking me up and hustling me to the bathroom. In my beer-full dream, I wept as someone picked little shards from my palm.
"I'm worthless," I told the person, and believed it.
The person helping me was my friend, Parson. He reassured me I wasn't worthless, that I was worth something, but I persisted.
"I'm a horrible waste," I kept saying, "A horrible piece of shit, worthless, worthless, worthless."
No, he would tell me, you are my best friend. Whether that was true or not was the least of my concerns. What happened next is most important. After cleaning out my wounds, Parson left to tend to what I later heard was a broken hookah. By "tend to," I mean he paid the guy for it. He was going to sell it to us anyway. But now it was broken. A false, empty purchase, like the day I was birthed to my parents, I had in my head.
Parson was full of money. He drove a nice car that he had replaced after totaling his first. He paid for the damages, but it was ultimately with the backing of his mother, a banker, that pulled him through. On the other hand, there is me, alone in the bathroom with only a sad, depressed version of myself, filling myself with horrible thoughts.
I look down at the ripples in the toilette. My tears are falling in with the rest of the waste. I'm Poor, my drunk version told me. I'm Poor and I'll Never Amount to Anything. My Girlfriend Won't Love Me. My Parents Have Abandoned Me. None of it true, except for right now. I reach in my pocket to grab my phone. To talk with God or who knows, but I grab my phone. It fumbles from my pocket and hand, spins through the air and splashes right into the middle of the toilette. Water spills up onto my leg, and this is the grain of rice that tips the scale. I actually begin crying.
I bend to fish my phone out and reach for some towels. Parson comes back and walks me out. The rest is a blur. All I remember is crying for what seemed like an hour while some girl desperately tried to study in the far corner. I must have been in some study hall. The study desks, four linked desks, looked like swastikas from above, up on the stairs.
Somehow Parson managed to drive us back-- a two hour drive-- somewhat drunk. He asked me questions all the way back, wondering how to contact my girlfriend and tell her I was in bad shape. He called people to message her online since he couldn't get in contact with them.
God, she was fucking worried the next day. She felt waste.
Waste is something unneeded. Like worrying about nothing, she would tell me. Like wasting your worry, your feelings expecting something much, much worse than just a sad, sad drunk. But expectations narrow your reality-- which is why dropping my phone in a toilette was a blessing. My view-screen is permanently fucked up. I could break my two year contract with those miser-y bastards and get a new one, but this is a sign. A sign to answer every call. My view screen is white. Just white. A harsh, clinical whiteness. And I have no fucking clue as to who is calling me. As to what is coming my way. So I let it come. I accept everything.
Sometimes I let it stay.
And sometimes I let it go.
