Chills, Spills and other things. Roads to now. Are you here?

I felt the sun’s virtually as unabated heat in the white sandy beaches of the Florida  panhandle and the smell that permeated that area from a nearby Paper Mill.   It’s sickly sweet smell hung in a florid sky and the aftertaste of scallops made me feel nauseous and trapped.

The Frozen Rainbow.

 

I guess things happen for a reason and behind the doors of our dreams are cryptic answers too complicated to comprehend.  Especially for a child.   The Northern Lights breathed a luminous landscape in the night skies and the cold winds were a knife with a lethal cut.

Sad moments made the frosty chills breathtakingly painful and unforgettable.  The lonely heart of my many nightmares both real and dreamt cascaded over me,  sealed by the ice and recorded in fragments of memories.

The Rainbows here were made of AU with Santa’s helpers nearby,  ready to conference with that white-bearded Totem handing out candy and coal.

I was lost one day in a row of sleepy trailers which billowed out smoke from wood-stove fires and dangerous old space heaters which either warmed us or ignited other kinds of fire.

My Journey seemed to have no end.   With a runny nose and rubber boots I languished in this maze,   seeking out some answers from a random neighbor.    This story somewhere between a dream and my fear of being permanently lost.   The smoldering ruins of a fragmented world.   Like elevators in towering skyscrapers chased by Gremlins and the free fall of a damaged psyche trying to make amends for being hurt.   To be hurt less or no more.

Life always seemed to be changing.   Starting over again and again with the approach of a train, a car or a bus,  we were Gypsy’s not long for anywhere.  And each mode of transportation offered Rockwell scenes,  with pop tarts,  Corn Chips,  Sandwiches and Koolaid.

 

Texas was the land of tumbleweeds, tornadoes and tacos,   where watermelon festivals and PTA meetings and Open Houses happened in a school with disagreeable teachers and paddles with holes in them strategically located in plain site.

At our home in Burkburnett we had a storm cellar and one day a boy who is a few years older than us wanted to show us younger kids something.   He showed his ass (literally).    Getting upon a large electrical spool inside the storm cellar, he showed us his wares,  so-to-speak.   Or the lack thereof.  (underwear).   I had to be careful with that term.   LOL.

Now as far as his crime,  it was not his own but the influences around him.  Probably at home or somewhere else.  Nothing wrong with the human body,  especially the coming of age stuff.

When you’re an adult and violate the vulnerability of your kid or someone else’s,  you set in motion a disaster.   Roles are confused with adult behavior in a life whose coming of age is thwarted for a time.

   Anger bleeds with wounds so deep you fail to thrive.  Your life is bits and pieces and crashing bells.   You cry silent tears of rage and people getting too close makes you want to fly away to a place no one else can land.   You dream of leaving on a train like the Box Car Children or in a clean space station dressed in white where angels cannot find.  You dream of stories where you are the hero and you can control the volume and the brightness.

Sad songs make you happy because at least they are real and the clouds and the dark skies are a kind of revenge,  control over the storms.    You cheer the rain and people wonder at your skills to know but what they do not know,  that these are your sanctuary.    Snow Days are a thrill, a hedge against consensus. A road painted in white,  radios calling it a day.

One night you wander in your dreams, falling down to the Earth and walking back to the camper where you hung out.   The next morning your bleeding hand started to heal and the following night you punch out a window.    Your dreams and your reality clash and the rebel yell resounds.    Heart beating to rhythms unheard cloaked in allegory.

The ending of a story with buildings punctuating the end.   Times will never be the same.   Love?  Happiness?  Your own shame,  mix in a vortex of purple and green hues.   The Cowboy left bleeding in the sand,  his hand no longer the fastest,  the mask going gray along with the retreating clouds.  The wary veteran reporter no longer finds a smiley face but a dearth of wisdom and the prickly thorns of conscience.

 

My two cats are my sentinels and they know the sounds to make with purrs laced with loyalty and a home where a home might not be.   A car,  an alley or a truck stop day room,  your car at least has your friend.

She Fell in Love. Can’t be help responsible!

Back in 1974,  I was a kid,   only 18 years and probably was witness in some way to a date rape.   It sure felt like it because as I was leaving out the dorm that night,  guys were pulling a train on a teen girl and some guy asked me if I wanted to have ‘some.’   I said, “no.”   And besides,  the choice of words haunts me too as well as the whimpering that went along with her disorientation.

I was so naive but a part of my soul has been tortured to this very day.   If I knew then what I know now,   I might have gone postal because I cannot imagine a crime worse than that.     You see,   she was drunk and whimpering.   Damnit.   That really pisses me off.  No girl asks for ‘it.’   Not for that.

 

But date rape characterizations are nothing new and for the longest time just generally accepted.   In the movie ‘Animal House’  the guy was contemplating having sex with a passed out underage girl.    Did she ask for it?  NO! Does it happen?   Hell ya!   Is it any wonder so many women want to spread the pain around.

Going a few years into my adult life,   I had a girl friend and she was given a roofie.    The net effect according to her,  was she never felt the same about anything!    Date-raped by her boss at the mall.   She and I went through hell afterwards and my anger @ jerkoffs intensifies.    My girlfriend was only pieces of ceramic,   like Humpty-Dumpty,  those pieces can’t always be fixed.

I suffer too,  knowing that seedy men with seditious desires lay in wait,   like Jack The Ripper or the Boston Strangler.   In these instances the pain is far worse than death.    It is a slow blood-letting of one’s spirit and sense of control.    We had great times and every once in awhile we would talk.

From her bosses abuse of her,  of us really,   she went on a self-destructive binge with an older guy who was a criminal.   Arrested for a crack ball and spending time in prison,   he seemed to like finding young victims.   Her sister said he liked to read magazines like ‘Barely Legal’ and ’18’.      Yeah one of those!    One day her sister gave me a journal she had written and she had talked to her sister about the parasite she was with and how she missed me and my steady decisions and what would I do in a particular situation.   She said I am the guy that returns the shopping cart.    For awhile I was miffed by that but then got the gist of what she was trying to express.     She also got a disease from this miscreant,   Herpes!

(She fell in love in the first place)))

For some reason these words tick me off.    An otherwise innocent girl and not perfect by any  means,   paid the price for both of you and you both should be ashamed.     And I harbor guilt for not being able to protect her from the smarmy underbelly of the beast that lurks with a touch of wind and a wiff of illicit drugs.

If her mom had not been a prostitute and subjected her to so much,   she might have been able to cry on her shoulders.    She could have  told her Mom what he said and did  and your Mom would turn away.   Flushed with anger and disappointment,  words she heard once upon a time. Now reverberating like a song that plays over and over on a music box.   The ballerina fell suddenly and her porcelain dreams laid like a million shards of what ifs.

So let’s examine some of the dubious comments made by men and boys and mostly they are one and the same.     Your high school heroes and high society icons flickered as capriciously as the stories of high school football players and date rapes.   The bottom-line being the reputation of the boys and a girl who was allegedly asking for it.    She was collateral damage in the game of cat and mouse.

He gave you wine or drugs and told you it was okay.    He promised you everything to dance in the sheets and tomorrow he denies that he even knew you or the things you said,  you couldn’t have meant,  if you did say them….

Their friends and influences probably had mixed emotions about the destruction,   from the boss to the drug abusing narcissist whose real romance is a synthetic cesspool of misery.   Both now share in a common malady with excuses and no care for the damage they were doing.

What once was a fairy tale happiness transmogrified into a hellish world of missed chances.   Where lightning does strike over and over again(in the same place) and the pain still flows,  if even now to more or less a trickle.     In the video above  Boy Meets Girl they dance and sing with a love that we all want and yet finally,  even they play a requiem to a love gone strange.     To me,   as I worked in the media in Tampa,   the song was a fresh time.   A promise.   Together with Paula Abdul’s ‘Straight up’,  it seemed life had spectacular promise,  even after a lost preemie and the mother who ran off for a decade and a half with our daughter.

But life has second chances even if those chances require some modifications to retrofit them to make them work.    I do remember what my daughter said about her 16th birthday and how much she loved me.   That that was her best birthday ever.   This after being lost to me from her early post natal days to about fifteen years later.    Still,   I would NOT change things too much because what if we never rediscovered that and that is why the blog about ‘Ten Years a Single Mother’  and her kids love for her touches my heart.   Kids get the connections and their love is pure if they are loved.

The theme of this entire post is what are we going to do.    Rather than just complain about the pain,  how can we fix a thing?   You,   I and many others have lived on both sides of the track and nothing……  nothing gets fixed by complaining.    We need to put people first because a warm place and a hot dinner matters.

To the abuse of women,  children and the vulnerable,   you and I can change the world.    I have a few things going now.    One is to get Emotional Support Animals and Service Pets for people who need them.    Let’s teach men and society in general how to treat a lady and your kids.    We need to focus on identifying potential abuse and treat the family not a case number but take care of it as a village.  With compassion.    No tolerance policies does not heal a family.    Making rules is what politicians do.   Why do we punish people like Aileen Wuornos the way we do?   Why not find out where at-risk people are and help?   That gives us all a better chance of surviving the obstacles in life.

From murderers to offenders of all kinds,   punishment is the easy part,   preventing tragedies can happen and should happen.    That takes  more than a Breathalyzer and seeing if you can walk a straight line.    How much better will this world be with solutions and not grandstanding politicians and other nabobs using the moment for  personal gain.

Education is the key to everything.   Not just laws but helping people be better people.    Not projecting how good we are,  but how good we can all be,  if we just try.   Ghettos are going nowhere and neither are the homeless,  the drug users and other kinds of abusers.   Let’s get this done and stop maligning others.    The old speck and the log thing.

 

 

Detroit. The Real Decay. Ourselves?

“The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable in contemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization …”
Ellen Glasgow

Think about it.    We have a form of pornography that is almost passe.   It is a horrible sin to show a nude butt or breasts but we let psycho-social imagery of young girls provocatively dressed and then brutally assaulted and maybe beheaded or otherwise violated.

We yawn if someone is brutally murdered.   And then talk about sexual deviance and ignore the greater sexual smut.    It is…   misogyny.    It depicts nubile young women as sexual objects and then murder them in a frenetic bloody massacre.    We then try to figure out why children and young people become so perplexed.   A sociopath sees a target rich environment and apologists make every excuse for that aberrant behavior.

When the truly horrific happens,  we were far too busy talking about help,  charity and sponsorship.    Where were we when a poor bullied child is sobbing and sitting on a floor in the middle of the school?   Do we call it teen angst or do we analyse the problem and get that confused person some help?

Then stories like Casey Anthony (talk about a sociopath) or Tanya Harding happen,  or Tiger Woods,  OJ Simpson and The Fish that Stole Pittsburgh and when we can’t get enough of the slanderous,  especially the sexual,   we go even further and become transfixed over the almost cult-like feel of one of these scandals.

At the same time,  sexual and physical abuse go unchecked.   We moralize,  we rant and we talk about justice and let the poor bugger die of exposure  to the cold because we were too busy with Foxy Knoxie Amanda Knox.

Yet do we try to understand and fix the root of the problem?   Do we get the person convicted of sexual deviancy a way to get better?   Or do we release these people back into the mainstream to do what they do?

Where has mercy and love gone?  We talk of no tolerance but we arrest a kid using a banana as a gun and missing that AK-47.   Teens mug and kill a feeble 90 year old and then spend weeks on a questionable murder,  in a time with potentially sociopathic cops, charlatan evangelists and parents more eager to settle out of court than helping the victim.

People say there are no rehabilitating murderers and sexual predators and yet we leave unstable people to roam the streets and they don’t even need a gun to cause a lot of heartbreak.    What do we do for the victim and why the victimizer did it in the first place?   Many times the perpetrator was hurt in the same way.   If we are consistent we realize a huge problem.    That easy fixes usually are Hollywood fantasies.

As soon as the hype dies down,  the victims are virtually forgotten by the media.   Trayvon Martin is still dead.   The poor old 90 year was yesterday’s news.   Media has become a breeding ground for narcissistic and delusional circus freaks.   They exploit the story and then do absolutely nothing.   The killer continues to kill and the sexual deviant continues his or her deviancy.

No solutions, no ideas of when some relief may come and just waiting for a chance to editorialize even more.

Seeing Nancy Grace huff and puff about the latest scandal or crime,  one gets the feeling that these crimes are the highlight of their day.

That we can talk about tolerance (or the lack of) for opposing ideas even if they are in the majority.   Wrong will always be wrong but we lack the courage to call wrong wrong and right is really right.

Stormy Heart Serenade – Damages

My dream –  25 January 2015

The day was one of those humid but unremarkable days with the exception of a forecast that included inclement weather.

I was standing outside a warehouse with three friends and we were discussing the forecast with the sunny blue skies and a light wind.  I gave my take on the situation being a Meteorologist.   In effect saying,  You cannot tell by the clear skies what’s going to happen during the afternoon and early evening”.

Sure to form by late morning the first little towers of cotton seemed to gather as the heat poured energy from below.  Like a pot of boiling water the change became more noticeable as the air liquefied into mad rivulets of upward vertical motion.

Marci told me that she needed to get out of the bamy skies as the humidity hung like a soggy blanket,  making the hot more miserable.

We found our way into an empty warehouse,  where we found a fairly sturdy set of walls and a heavy steel door.   Apparently,  we weren’t the only ones with that idea.   The fact it was ventilated made it a prime place to hide.

The room was not really that spacious so one got the feeling of being like an animal caught in a snare.  Claustrophobia seemed to seize us both at the same time and we left the relative safety for the open air and a less confined place.

The wind began to swirl with a passion as the heat climbed up towards the fast growing clouds.  In the distance were lines of Cumulonimbus Clouds.   Like a gathering army of angry and mischievous Gremlins. By late afternoon,  the ominous looking clouds fattened with sharp spikes of light shooting out in all directions with the accompanying claps of thunder and their reverberations.  The party was getting into full swing.

From an office you could see lines of storms systems.  These Mesoscale systems snarled and marched onward with high winds and low pressure that popped your ears and engendered a primal fear.  Soon sirens blared as the culmination of physics manifested in an eerie calm.     Bluish black clouds ragged with pent up rage acquiesced to nothing.

Buildings shook as they do when heavy ordnance releases it’s fury.   With the rise in air currents came the chattering of old roof tops that graced structures with uncertainty,  threatened to be peeled back or just collapsing with fatigue.  We saw a woman on a phone as the curtain of night started to drape itself about and the luminous light and sound show intensified bringing an increased sense of dread.

We wandered about and around the phone lady and soon she feel self aware and struck out to find another place. Marci and I,  decided to hole up in this semi-private space,  waiting for the current round of chaos to abate.         The last round of storms left us shaking.   To the left of us was a window which was heavily armored and I assured my consort that we were safe.   Suddenly like a bomb exploding,  a wash of red covered the window,  a human stain with no doubt,  all was not well.

As we found another spot that seemed safe,  a room that looked like a classroom and filled with people, I had some bad feelings here,  even more than any that I had spent time in and my suspicions were born out.   With another lull in this never-ending parade of severe weather and the threatening sounds of crashing glass and gales of wind unseating rooftops we found an office across the street.

 

This one office struck my fancy as I saw a bay window front to a store and office warehouse.   Me and my friend sat in two of the chairs practically inert and watch debris flash by in an instant.   Only slightly more safe was this place and keeping that in mind,  I went into the warehouse with Marci in toe.  There were a lot of beautiful furnishings all handmade with the middle of the room sporting a table with chesire-acting cat sitting quietly in a chair next to that table.   She knowingly acknowledged me in this strange sanctuary conspicuously absent of people.

Walking back outside the carnage was obvious.   The scenery changes were not limited to buildings as dumpsters of debris,  seemingly human powdered the landscape and the aftermath of solitary suffering.

 

Code Blue Goodbye – Building a Mystery

The careworn strings of the Golden Harp

pinged and softly uttered silent tunes.

While a man hacked in his own second hand smoke

his ruddy fingers stained with history

pushed aside his last beer.

 

The whir of the fans and the stale fog of ale

covered the bar in a misty layer of melancholic dew.

Their problems lurked like angry trolls at a feast

and the bridge that creaked and moaned with

never a  holiday, sighed at the slow approach

of another broken man.

 

The man with his plans nears the crossing

and the clocks chime in a foreboding resonance.

wearily warning as the bell struck decisively.

His watch seemed to have shrunk and the once supple

arms now wilted and wrinkled,  protest implacably.

 

Assented to a journey to a place he did not want to go.

The cold Coliseum stood hauntingly bare.

 

In the eyes of someone who knew him less,

they may suppose a lot of things about him

and his well-traveled highway

but death is a period in a long paragraph

filled with memorials soon enough forgotten.

 

As he entered the bridge the troll grunted

and the vapors collected in the sky

and swallowed that passing man.

Stay In Touch my Friend – Crying for Me.

I was happy that I found you old friend.
It was great to hear your voice again.
Like a thousand years had come and gone
and I seldom looked behind me to notice

Amazingly I remember I called you and
hearing your voice as I did
in my youth and you treated me with
the same respect. Like a sentence
abruptly aborted and finished in warp time

You were a mentor, a friend and a musical muse,
you were my teacher teaching and
we clarified our memories in rarefied air.

I felt a breeze blow by one day,
as autumn leaves prepared to nest
and rest upon the earth.

Like impatient tenants going back home
for the winter they met the ground,
their lives like fodder for angry rakes
as winter was finally near,

and in-spite of your troubles, you seemed to thrive,
telling me this was the highlight of your day
when I called you each morning.

In a somber moment Leukemia was playing it’s
somber song and it’s death sentence hit like a gavel.
With no chance for an appeal
I felt your heart grow weaker and your
long life go slack.

but the harp was more insistent now.
with strains of comfort to aid your weary heart,
The skies stretched forth and down.

Like a rope or a chain that came loose
and your ship began to float dreamily by.

It was quite obvious that heaven’s gates
blew open, like a gale at sea
and the cares of this world could no longer
hold you

I saw death’s whirlpool up ahead.
I knew the end was close, I heard it
in the crashing waves, I heard it
in your voice.

Each day you were insistent,
telling me how you loved me,
your now raspy voice conceding.

When that call came, from your family
and mentioned your name. I asked how you
are doing and she said, “She was so sorry”,
my friend has passed away.

“To be certain – outside of belief in the sovereignty of God, we contend that true holiness in thought and in behavior cannot be wrought. The firmer the persuasion, the greater the consequent sanctification.”
The Desert Sun excerpt.