April 2006
Antiseptic
Diseased I am.Full of holes I am.
On a clear day you can see right through to the other side of me. It’s sunny and it’s full of blue. One of the few colours I wonder if I have been even partially robbed of and I do regret that loss somewhat. Irony is, I will never really know. You can only imagine what you have never seen, only wonder at what it might be like.
On the other side.
There are pianos crashing like waves, breathing in and out of the spaces between, rabid in their hunger. I can almost hear them if I shut out the everything else, but the everything else is not a fan of being shut out, so it only bangs on the door all the louder.
You taste like red now. All blood and anger. All rage and little room left for much else other than learning the finer arts of ducking and covering.
Under the desk with me. And you. And all of us.
When I close my eyes and imagine me, it all looks so very different. I can barely recognize myself, because in there, I am much bigger than I look out here. In there, in my minds eye, I have something that looks like I know what I am talking about.
Out here, I just come off as crazy most of the time.
Either that or simply wrong.
There are so many ways to put together words. Most of the time though they come out all crossways and awkward, not even a fraction of what we had in our heads. Most of the time we find ourselves twenty minutes later trying to put together the pieces of the words that we thought we had and wondering why we couldn’t say it that way minutes earlier.
If we could be honest, what devastation would we bring in the name of our own salvation?
Unimaginable I’m sure.
You can’t get back what is lost, and sometimes you have to let go.
That’s never been my strong suit.
If I ever had one to begin with.
But it certainly wasn’t that.
Cleaning Up The Dead
We have many families in this life. It’s a hard name to earn, but once you have it, it becomes yours and it’s not something that easily fades. I suspect that it never does, but if you lose it, it more simply greys into a scar that you look at and think, “Hey, I remember that”, and miss it with that heavy feeling that settles in on your chest when you know that you fucked it up, but it really couldn’t have gone any other way.
You know what I’m talking about, that inevitability of death.
The death of all of us, the death of all things.
I have noticed recently that I have a lot of scars on me. I was getting out of the shower a few days ago when it occurred to me that if I should ever befall a fate where I lose my head, I should be reasonably easy to identify by all of the scars on me. They all have their own unique stories.
My legs are particularly bad. Too many falls. One in particular left the better part of my shin permanently grey. Anyone who knows the Campers Village story will be more than able to pick my headless corpse out of a lineup I think.
But as we all do, I have some scars that don’t show, and would do a mortician or medical examiner no good whatsoever in determining exactly who I am.
Funny how memories stick with you.
At the exact moment that I wrote that sentence I was drawn back to the days when I used to bury people for a living.
Someone has to, and I needed a job at the time.
There are many stories that came out of that little space of experience, some only told in detail after a good bottle of wine or two, but there is one that I will share with you now.
The burial of homeless people always struck me as odd.
Again, someone has to bury them. You can’t just leave them about the streets, more respectable people would trip all over them and we can’t have that now can we?
So when one of them died, the funeral home that I worked for would take them in and give them a decent burial. And a suit and a shave if need be. When I said earlier that it struck me as odd, I said that because it always seemed to be a case of too little too late.
Nonetheless, one day I found myself responsible for cleaning up what was left of a particular homeless gentleman. I don’t know what he died of, any number of things I imagine, but he was dead and someone had to clean him up and I was the one who had to do it. I don’t know why I remember him of all the people I almost met while working there, but I do, and will for quite a while I imagine.
When cleaning up the dead, it’s always best to use as much antiseptic as possible. You never know what might be lingering.
Wanna know what’s weird?
Shaving the face of dead man. Every instinct tells you to be careful, because your own face you know, but a strangers you should be careful of as you don’t know the territory and you could cut them.
As if they would bleed.
Make sense of that and I’ll give you a dollar.
He was an old guy. From Saskatchewan originally as I recall. Skinny as all hell. If you imagine a typical old guy with big lines running all across his face and then take off a couple of pounds you’ll get close to what I’m talking about.
He did have a dignity to him though. Hard to explain, and I doubt if I could, but there was a sense of history on the mans face, and one had no choice but to respect that.
That’s it, the end of that story. No point really, but for some reason that rant reminded me of shaving the face of a dead homeless man.
Somewhere out there is a family that I used to be a part of. I’m not anymore. Some people would say that’s ok because it wasn’t my first family, which I still by and large have and am grateful for all of the bits that I still can call mine, but I still miss this other family.
I am starting to very much doubt that I will ever see any of them again, despite my best wishes.
There is a chaos in life that comes up around us all. It swarms and squeezes and wraps and there isn’t much in the way of dodging it for any length of time. It’s inevitable,
When cleaning up the dead, it’s always best to use as much antiseptic as possible. You never know what might be lingering.
Let Me On FOX...
I have a new idea for a TV show, and it’s pretty much a total winner.
Reality TV. Now I know that we haven’t talked about it in a while, but I’ve been thinking lately, so bear with me…
When you boil it all down to what it is, reality TV is nothing more than taking ordinary people and making them feel like they are or should be exceptional.
Kind of cruel to some thinking, but we haven’t time for concerns of cruelty anymore.
That’s the windup, here’s the pitch.
I want to produce a show called “Make You Famous”.
Here’s the idea.
You go across the country (because every good reality TV show does that) and you put ads in local papers and run an open casting call.
And what is the casting call for you ask?
Well nothing really, nothing but the fact that whoever comes out should be well prepared to convince my panel of three semi celebrity judges that they should be made famous.
I don’t care what the reason is, but it should be a good one that has the promise of some marketability.
So you have all of these people come out and try to convince you why they should be famous, and you just know you’re going to end up with and infinite amount of b-roll material. I mean, all of these reality TV shows out there are limiting themselves to a genre, best singer, best model, best inventor, etc.
To hell with it, open the floodgates and let the waters roll.
And the prize?
Well it’s quite simple. The winner will be made famous.
A massive marketing campaign lets say 60 million dollars goes towards making the winner famous. I’m talking radio ads, Newspaper ads, the whole kit and kaboodle.
The advertising revenue from a show that runs a whole year looking for the person who most deserves to be made famous will make that look like chump change. You make these casting calls huge, and you more or less guarantee that you will have an audience tuning in week after week in order to see whether or not they will be the ones to be made famous.
Now just to be clear, if I see this show on TV anytime soon, I’ll be suing the asses off of who ever is responsible, cause this little golden goose is all mine.
Luck Didn't Leave A Comment...
“It seemed like a good idea at the time, but you know that judgement isn’t what it used to be…
You never really know when it’s your turn.
Well bad news kids, the joke of it all is that it’s your turn now. Seven times all the things that you wanted, just so that you could end up watching them fall apart.
Well there’s no such thing as guarantees but I promise you one thing…
You’ll nevever see it coming and it has absolutely nothing to do with luck. She left the building a while ago, and Luck?
Luck didn’t leave a comment.”