Category: Diary

A whale bone not unlike the one in my recurring dream.

I guess there comes a time in every person’s life in which you find yourself with no friends to call after midnight. I mean, I’ve got friends that live from coast to coast, and some even in farther lands, that will not answer the phone at 2 AM. I guess I need some friends in southeast asian islands, because that seems where my internal time zone is firmly planted in recent weeks. Asian whorehouses and guys dealing contraband western CDs and shit like that. I don’t really know what the deal is, but I just can’t seem to get a good night’s sleep even though I work a 9-to-5. Just as everyone else has start to spill back in from the streets of this lonely city, I seem ready to spill out. I make a call at 11 PM that keeps me in for awhile, but sooner or later those with kids and the wife and the dog, and 12 cats have to go to bed. There’s way too many mouths to feed in the morning, and for me it’s just the one, and I probably don’t feed it near enough, even though my gut might tell a different story.

I guess even as I have grown up, I haven’t really grown up too much. I rail against the bed and bath still. I do like feeling rested, and the clean feeling after bathing, it’s just the process that gets me down. Kind of like eating as of late as well. I like not being hungry, but the food finding and the consequent eating just doesn’t seem to appeal.

My therapist keeps telling me that these are all things that point toward a deep depression. He’s really a brilliant guy. I think he has read at least half of the books on the Self-Help Psychology shelf at the local Barnes & Noble. He even wrote a book about adolescent angst and depression entitled Mommy? Are You Listening to Me, Mommy?: Adolescent Angst & Depression, in which he goes into great detail about how most of the deviant behavior of children these days points to an underlying “angst and depression” that the contemporary adolescent feels, and that in turn points to the common feelings of abandonment that said adolescent feels upon beginning the transition into young adulthood. I haven’t read the book yet (all of the above was derived from reading the flap as I fell asleep one night) but I will just as soon as I have read Ulysses, the Bible and Don Quixote from cover to cover again. I am sure it really is an outstanding book, but back to the point.

My therapist says that my problems with growing up point to a depression (I am taking the medication in case you reading this, guy!), and I believe he is right because every time I make a call at 2AM and don’t get an answer, or even worse, get a groggy response on the other end, I do indeed fall into a depression that keeps me up for a while pondering all of the little things about myself that I don’t like, and reassuring myself that they are indeed issues by the fact that no body wants to talk to me. Everything from belly button lint to toenail fungus come under the mental knife. I lay awake listening to the morning birds, spanish speaking voices arriving on the job site next door, the sounds of cars cranking to warm and thaw the frost… the city coming to life. Then, and only then, do I drift off to dream the recurring dream of a whale bone descending.

Teddy Roosevelt on horse not disimilar from one ridden at Ann Marie’s 13th birday party.

My first kiss was with a redneck, non-catholic girl named Ann-Marie who lived in a ramshackled old farm house off of Wake Forest Highway between my house and my grandmother’s if you went the long way. It was her birthday, and although she was turning 13 and I was only 11, we were in the same grade together at Oak Grove Elementary School.

She was the biggest fan then, and probably forever, that the artist (formerly?) known as Prince ever had. It was because of her that I bought the Purple Rain album, the first time. And because of her that I searched out, in the dictionaires that came with the World Book Encyclopedia, the precise definition of ‘masturbation’ after listening to and reading the lyrics in the liner notes of Darlin Nikki. It was all downhill from there. It was also because of her that I bought the heinous purple sheen bookbag that plagued me for the better part of my 5th and 6th grade years.

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Mural in high school cafeteria near the scene of the incident.

Yesterday afternoon, on my way home from the office, a Salvation Army truck almost sent me shuffling off this mortal coil, as I turned the corner from 10th onto Monroe and started to cross the railroad tracks where I have never seen a train, just down the street from where Jeremy used to live, and across the street from the high school where I can hear the band playing on Friday nights during home football games, and sometimes on afternoons, if I cut out of work early to go home and sit on the porch to wait for the snails to come out on damp nights.

Still photo from film Waking the Dead

I can’t seem to handle adult emotions anymore. I swear it’s the truth. The older I get, the less I seem to be able to handle these things. Job pressure, romantic strife, friends coming and going, some even dying. When I was younger, all I wanted was to be old, or at least, to adopt the mantle of elderly men. I wore cardigans (still do, come to think of it), support socks, sansabelt trousers…

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Evolutionarily, snails have developed their shells due to their proclivity for tarrying on wet, slippery, vertical surfaces.

Out on my porch this morning, still waking up to get to the office, there were snails stuck to the concrete pillars that serve to hold up the latticed fence. It rained last night, and the preceding 24 hours come to think of it. But at some point the temperature turned colder and the rain began to stop and now these snails are just stuck, wilted, to the concrete pillars there. A couple have even fallen off paralyzed to the 2x6s that make up the floor. Strange thing is, I have seen this happen before. In fact it has been happening more and more as of late, and I know that I will get back in from the office today, another rainy one, and not a snail will remain.

Bobble-headed shriner not present at parade.

Today was Veterans Day and in front of my office building where there has been a constant stream of anti-war-in-Iraq protestors of late, there was a parade. JROTC to WWII vets, and vietnam broken-down helicopters, and a bouncing motorcycle, and Yaarab Temple clowns in a modified Winnebago, a team that marched in all the way from the North Georgia foothills, and during a smoke break from Marines.com I found myself hypnotized by it all, as did several other hundred that I believe could never have suspected what was going on outside and got similarly hooked into the whole thing. The whole world really does love a parade I guess. Even a Veterans Day parade.