Book Review - The Road by Cormac Mccarthy

The Road by Cormac Mccarthy was a good book. The fact that it won the Pulitzer prize isn’t a huge shocker as it manages to paint a very vivid and desperate post-apocalyptic world without any of the sci-fi side dishes that take a book from the literature shelf to the sci-fi shelf. The nameless main characters, a father and son, travel through the barren landscape always looking for a caches of canned food and heading towards t he south suspecting that things are better there. Cannibals, hunger, and dreams of the past slow their way. I’ve not read anything else by Mccarthy as of yet and have been told that most of his work is beautiful in poetic, but in this book, his word craft personifies the bleakness of the reality he created. While I’ve said the following to many, few have agreed with me, but his writing style reminds me of Ernest Hemingway very much. The vividness while still being frugal with his words and the dialogue t lacking most of the "he saids" and comments on emotion being the two strongest examples of this. Overall a great book, that did take the route less expected in the final couple of pages. Overall, a great read, but then I suppose the Pulitzer Prize people, Oprah and all of the rest of the world have come to that conclusion already.

ER Visit - I wasn't Even Stoned

Rules are safety. If there are no lines to color in, your picture will most likely suck. Crossing the street at the cross walk keeps you from getting killed. Walk however the fuck you want, but do it in the cross walk. This is my life, this is my credo. There is nothing as soothing as going through a system. Some people hate it, I embrace it.
This has never been so clear to me as it was the night before last. I had been feeling sick all day. In fact, I have been feeling like shit for a week or better. Not in a specific way, there have been some specific symptoms and all, but for the most part I just feel like dog shit. My girlfriend is sick. My sister and father are sick. Half my work is sick. SO it stands to reason, that I am sick. But I must be dying, right? Anyway, so I’m feeling like shit and feeling bad about life in a general way, I’m pretty stressed. I can’t seem to find solutions, but only more problems. I can’t concentrate on anyone of them long enough to work through it: the dishwasher, should I go back to school (by go back I mean enter college for the first time), I need to plant hte flower bulbs, why has my hand been numb for six months? If I tell the doctor she’ll want me to do an MRI, I’m sure I have at least one herniated disk that means back surgery, I can’t afford that, but I sure am sick of the numbness in my hand, I want to get my girl’s friends car fixed. What I need to finish the fence, I need to cover the back porch, why did I start smoking again...
Shit like that. I know it does no good to sit and worry without looking for solutions, but still. So I’m sitting in my chair and my chest starts hurting. It’s about 7:30 PM. I try to ignore it. I had an EKG six months ago and I’m fine. But it feels funny. It’s a weird pulsing kind of pain, it’s lower and more to the left of my normal pain that is apparently a result of heart burn. So I sit there and try to play video games. I skip smoking any weed, because I know it will make it all worse. So, I sit. It hurts. Why does it heart like that? Fuck. I’m fine, I know I’m fine. This is going to be nothing.
It gets on to be about bed time. I go to bed. I can’t sleep. It hurts to bad. Why the fuck does it feel like that? So I try sitting on the couch. My lady won’t sleep because I’m freaking out. I sit on the edge of the bed. It’s about 11:00. I can’t breath now. I feel like I can’t take a deep breath. I feel like I’m hyperventilating.
I try calling a doctor friend, but he never answers the phone. He only calls to confirm the latest scoop that he’s heard about me. Then I call like a jack ass for six months without him returning a call... but I digress.
According to the Internet, I have every single symptoms of chest pain. There is no choice, I have to go to the Emergency Room. Lucky for me, I live like two blocks from it.
So we drive there. I’m apologizing the whole time. I know this is just another panic attack, but it feels so weird and I don’t want to die. I’m a fat guy, twenty-eight years old or not, I don’t fuck with chest pain. So we go to the ER and walk in. There’s a little desk, we have to stand behind a yellow line.
"Do you need to be seen today?" A girl who’s probably like 19, has two facial peiricings, and is wearing pajamas. They weren’t scrubs, they were pajamas.
"Yeah." I mumble from behind the yellow line. She asks what’s wrong with me. For a moment, I believe she cares, I want to tell her about the dishwasher, the broken BMW, my numb hand and everything else, but I remember that I just need to stick to the issue at hand. "I’m having some chest pain."
"Follow me." She says. I start to feel safe. There’s a procedure for chest pain and I don’t have to wait in line just yet. She takes my vitals. Then I’m led else where and she starts putting stickers on me. She reaches under my shirt and doesn’t have me take it off. I don’t know if this awkward or if I should be grateful. I’m not the sexiest dude when I’m shirtless, so maybe it’s better if I die with it on. I almost forget about my chest pain, I’m here for some test now. She hooks a bunch of wires to the stickers. She turns on a machine for about 30 seconds prints something and then disconnects. This all feels so routine. It feels so safe. I feel better. My lady is crying. She thinks I’m going to die. I smile a bit because I know that I won’t die now; I’m in a system. Systems rarely fail.
"I’m going to take you to a triage nurse and go show this to a doctor." I’m in the system. If I start dying right here, I know that they have a flow sheet for that as well. It feels good, like there is no chance of chaos. I know that’s bullshit, the law firm I work for has sued this hospital so many times for malpractice.
The triage nurse is ugly. Not in a specific way, just in general. There is nothing attractive about her and her face is saggy, her skin rough, and her upper lip has an implication of a moustache. I hate her. She ask me questions, the same ones I’ve already been asked. Rate my pain 0-10, how frequent, is it sharp, dull, or what? The girl with the facial piercing comes back and hands her the EKG printout and says the doctor says its fine. I feel relieved, but now I start to worry that perhaps my lung is collapsing, or perhaps a stroke, maybe a blood clot (is that the same as a stroke). My lady pokes me and says "that’s good."
I get shuffled out to a little tiny cubicle in a row of three. This is where the paperwork gets done. The girl in it is fat. She didn’t look as old and tired as the triage nurse, but she is still fat. She has cleavage pouring out of a pink wife beater and big necklaces falling into her boob canyon. She’s trashy, but nice. She reminds me of the kind of girl who thought she was a gangster chick when she was younger. I didn’t look at her nails, but I’m sure she had fake ones. In between checking me in, she is arguing with some other lady about why she clocked out and is still working. The other lady didn’t want to just leave the patient sitting there.
I go to a waiting room. There’s a few people sitting. There is one who’s bleeding from the hand, but not much. He’s young with his mother. There’s another couple people sitting staring. We all have our bracelets, most of us have our support system with us. A loud girl appears from somewhere walking in the hall, she’s wearing her pajamas and she is walking in a way that suggest that she thinks her flabby, cheap pajama clad ass is nice. She is either talking loudly to herself "People are fucking stupid." or talking on a cell phone head set. I make a point of not validating her existence by looking up. I hope she dies. She keeps walking about. She is with the man quietly hiding behind the fish tank waiting to be called. She is a big trashy middle finger being held up at respectable society. I hate her so much. We read newspapers and wait. Trashy girl and her sister spill coffee and are told to clean it up. They buy salted nuts after borrowing money from the man behind the fish tank. He suggest she get a job. She says "I have a job, it’s called taking care of you; cleaning your dirty drawers." The man falls silent. I don’t think he wants to discuss his underwear in public with a stupid loud girl. I’m not sure if he’s her dad, boyfriend, or what. I’m sure he hates her. Stupid girl wants people to notice her. Luckily, everyone refuses to. She wanders off.
I get called and put in a room. More stickers are stuck to me. The ones from the EKG are still there. I guess that’s so they can hook me back up faster if I need one quickly. This makes me feel safe. Now there are just three or four new stickers with snaps on them. They are for a heart monitor. A little thing is clipped to my finger. A blood pressure cuff is put on. I feel safe wrapped up in all my monitors. If there is something wrong. They will know.
The new nurse is nice. She’s a pretty black girl in purple scrubs. She seems to barely notice I’m alive and I like that. She’s not worried about me. My girlfriend is tired. I try to get her to go home and I’ll call her when I’m done, but she says no. We wait. We are next to a blanket warmer. People come in and get blankets. An EMT tells us it’s a good way to meet people. I wonder if he would have said that if I was in more distress.
There is a man on the other side of the wall and curtain from me. I’m not sure what his deal is, but he’s grunting. I decide that he has a kidney stone he is passing. I base this on nothing.
Eventually, a doctor comes in. He talks to me. Tells me that I have a viral infection and that’s what made my chest hurt and I got myself worked up and I hyperventilated. He’s going to give me a chest x-ray "to make sure nothing else is going on." I don’t know what this means, but I don’t ask. He tells me to quit smoking or this could become all too routine and eventually it will be something real. I haven’t smoked cigarettes since. He gives me pills to calm me down. My girl friend looks at me, as if to say, I told you to take those earlier. I wouldn’t though, because I didn’t want to die in my sleep.
I don’t see the doctor again. The x-ray guy comes in. I like him. He’s super nice. I think he might have been stoned. Maybe super tired. He gives my x-ray. I start playing with the monitor thing clipped to my finger. I find that if I squeeze it, I can make the line go flat on the monitor. I do that for a while. The nice nurse comes back. She tells me I can go home. I get ready and we leave.
I’m all slurry and happy with the pills. I go home and sleep. My chest still hurts.

October Skies

The skies have been nice lately. I don’t know if It’s just that I am looking up more than normal, or if it is just me getting excited to having something other than the blank blue canvas of the summer sky to look at, or if the skies really have been more dynamic of late. Whatever the case, they have been nice. Big billowy clouds erupting from the horizon and holding over the fields of ripening pumpkins and the flatter clouds of evening breaking apart in the oarnge sky.
I like this time of the year. It feels like youth to me. It reminds me of 1998. I think in 1998 it may have been the first time I walked outside and smelled the smell of leaves and ice water and said "This is what October smells like." It was also 1998 when I really began to wake up as a human and experience life without the filter of parental dogma. Not in the sense that there was a dramatic parting from my parents or anything else, but I think it was then that I saw the cracks in their surface and their humanity shone through. I think that I loved them all the more for it, but I realized that they could be fundamentally wrong and instead of forces they became people.
I like driving around Orting and the rural remnants of this area to look at fields of corn and pumpkins and the general buzz of agricultural harvest time. It’s nice to see places where food is still plucked from the ground or a tree. It’s easy to forget that it doesn’t just spring up from watered bins in the produce section.
I suppose the beauty of October and my fondness for it is also a kind of deep breath before November. November marks the beginning of my yearly tradition (now spanning a decade) of self imposed torture. If October is when I bath in the warm sun of nostalgia, November is it’s twilight, where I begin to count the regrets and measure my life in failures and unaccomplished goals. I start to see moments in the past where with just a little bit of insight, I could have changed my reality. I like to sit and let my wander about what would have changed, like in the Butterfly Effect. I know it’s’ all useless, but it’s a masochistic ritual that I need to go through. It will all peak in early December, when I will have allowed myself to sink far enough into a hole of self loathing, regret and self pity, that I’ll be able to convince myself that I’ve paid my pittance for the year and then go back to life.
I really like October. I’m building fence right now. I’m glad I’m not doing it in the sun or heat. A sunny October day with some wind is the best time to work outside. Moving keeps you warm and the wind knocking the leaves around adds for a little drama. The fence is looking good and is almost done. I think I’ll build the last significant run of it this weekend. I like knowing that I’m building the barrier between my home and the rest of the world that will sit for the next twenty years or so. That’s wild. Twenty years. When was I allowed to start thinking in those kind of time spans.

My life update for my non-existant readers.

An update for anyone who reads this on a regular basis (as if).
I got engaged, I’m pretty stoked about that. It’s weird to think that I’m gong to married. It was weird, there was kind of an explosion of engagements/getting married amongst my extended group of friends here recently. I guess that’s what happens when you get to be around 30.
I still hate my job and have tried to think of several ways to not do it. The problem is, they are paying me too much to quit. Stupid reason, I know, but my girlfriend is in massage school and until she finishes, I’m the only income in the house and we’re kind of living off of her savings too.
I feel more and more isolated from the world every day. I have a couple friends who I see. My other friends have either abandoned me or I’ve abandoned them. I guess some are just geographic stuff and the small fact that I’m more and more less inclined to leave my house. My hermit friend and I exchange letters and talk on some Saturday nights (when he plugs in his phone, because he is drunk enough to face the world).
I’m building a fence at home. The worse part about it is, I’m totally stoked about it. I’ve not fished much all year. Maybe the past two years. I don’t really love fishing alone and it’s just not working out with most of my fishing friends.
I feel like life is in a huge state of flux. Where everything is being wrung out so what is important can stay. I suppose periodic catharsis is good for the soul.
I’ve not been writing.
My computer at home is broken.
As of this morning, of our three cars, we have one that is working.
Our dog is in the vet for the second consective day because she ate an entire rack of rib bones.
I smoked cigarettes for the first time in like 4 months last night. I’m worried that my girlfriend is going to keep smoking.
I’m worried our dog is going to die.
I’m supposed to build 90 feet of fence this weekend.
Fuckin’ shit.

Dry Run for My Assasination

Today I foresaw my own death. Not in a dream or premonition, but rather in a practice run of my assassination. I was driving a route that I have driven two times a day for several years. Jordan Jacobs (my co-consipiritor and steer roping protege) was with me as is the norm. We were driving down 5th Street and had just past my alma mater, Walker Highschool (previously Puyallup Alternative School), when suddenly the unmistakable noise of something hit my windshield and instantly a ding and slight crack formed in the lower driver’s side corner of my windshield . Immediately I took note of a flat black, Chevrolet Blazer roaring past us in the other direction. There was no car in front of us to have thrown a rock from it’s tires. I instantly scanned for Czech kids who are notorious for throwing rocks and apples. None were to be seen. As we turned right onto Valley Avenue the shock had faded, the anger was setting in. It was agreed that neither of us saw a rock or anything else. Aliens again? Doubtful. Not on a Friday morning. No this was something more, something deadly and evil. Upon closer inspection of the ding, we noted a small perfect circle in the nucleolus of the ding. A BB! Someone had trained a gun on us and fired a BB. But why?
Jordan and I are, of course, the heads of the ruling party of the Puyallup criminal underworld. But no one had dared ever threaten our lives and certainly never on our own turf. This was an unprecedented breach of criminal conduct. But we were within hundreds of feet of the Sumner border. Yes, they wanted to run back across the border to hide in the filth of their own township. Jordan jumped to accuse the Miltonese. It’s a ballsy move for those hicks, but then I’m not writing off any possibilities. Nomadic Tacomese? Couldn’t be. We were totally off their radar. The Edgewoodian? Fifeish? That intersection is really a cross roads.
As I type this warning/memoir/confession, I realize that the Valley Avenue Market (a mini market with an apartment on the second floor) had a direct line of fire. Again I must wonder why? I know through my sources that a family of Vietnamese orphans own and run that joint. The Kim family. Charlie being the oldest and lead of the family. I’ve never crossed paths with these folks in the past, that I am aware of, but then life is long and my enemies are many.
I thought for a moment that perhaps Jordan was the target. That boy has systematically caused himself to be the most hated man in all of the towns that surround the haven of Puyallup.. No the point of impact was in front of me. This was no spring loaded Daisy pea shooter either. No, I am sure this involved a CO2 cartridge or minimally a pump action rifle. This was bad. These sophisticated bastards were clearly getting their timing down, perfecting their approach. It makes sense that the trajectory of the BB would be arched. It’s not quite as powerful as a thirty-ought-six, which they will certainly use to do the final deed. Even with the cross hairs fixed firmly on my head, the BB would have hit below the intended target.
Again I come back to wondering who they were. Would they off me and finish off Jacobs for the hell of it? Could this have been orchestrated by Jordan himself? Leaving him to rule alone. Never, he wouldn’t do that. We’ve been in some tight scrapes (my mind immediately goes to the incident at the Rose Café, but that’s for another day) before and he could have thrown me under the bus a thousand other times. No, what good is a double head lama with one dead head?
This is bad. Really bad. I must take immediate measure to ensure our safety. Beef up security measures and all that. Put my ear to the street, see what my informants come up with. Those homeless freaks have their finger up the ass of this city and nothing passes without their knowledge.
This is bad man. No good at all. I won’t give up our patrols of the route. Never!
Wait a minute. A poop smear of co-worker of ours, Coco, followed months ago. He saw us leave and trailed us. He’s always been envious of our influence. Not to mention Jordan’s interactions with his hearts desire. That’s it! The bastard is out on a cruise and he got some of his brainwashed cronies from Cult (Champion Center of Satan) to do us in while he was gone. He’s becoming the towns lovable retard for of late. He’s a regular at so many sandwich and coffee joints that Jacobs and I have ignored. The sneaky son of bitch. When his attempts to poison us with his fecal matter failed and he was too cowardly to challenge to hand to hand combat(but who could blame him, Jordan’s skills with the rope and dagger are unparalleled and I am fatal with several instruments of death), he got one of his insane Satanist cohorts involved. Maybe several of them.
This takes it to a whole other level. Satanist, especially organized ones, are viscous. Their blind obedience to their leaders is unmatched even by the GOP. Measures will be taken. We know our enemy now and we can defeat this. I’ll call in the Catholics maybe the Baptists if things get real nasty.

Senile Puppet of God

I was at the doctor’s office about six months ago. I was there because I was convinced that I was having heart problems. In reality, I was having acid reflux, panic attacks, and a case of being stoned too much. My doc had listed to my heart and given me an EKG and told me that everything seemed fine. She wanted some labs run and it was while I sitting on a bench in a hall way waiting to be called in for them to take my blood. I felt a hand on my leg and I looked over to see a pair of bright blue eyes contrasted by pale, wrinkled skin and thin, frizzy, silver hair look at me.
"You’re just a little boy." She said. It was as though she read my mind, I was sitting on that bench truly believing that if I lived to see 30 it would be a miracle. The lady then began talking to a nurse and showing her obvious dementia. I don’t know what to feel about that whole thing, but it feels significant, like God was giving me shout. I still think that I’m dying and still not convinced that I won’t die tomorrow, but it’s nice to know that I was offered a little reassurance.

Death and Universe Soup

Is dying like falling asleep or waking up? I can see it both ways. Like, our souls are the real beings and our lives are just dreams. It kind of makes sense when you think about things like DNA, Dinosaurs and plate tectonics. Maybe this universe was imagined by my soul. Maybe its dream is some way of communicating something to itself that its conscious mind is failing to see. What would it be? I heard that they mathematically figured out that beyond our universe is other universes, they say it has to be that way, that we’re just a noodle floating in universe soup (2+2 = universe soup). So what is the broth? Sometimes I think theat they are relying on numbers a bit too much. Then I suppose it doesn’t matter, but still I think about it. Imagine inhabiting the broth universe and walking around and seeing all these other noodle universes floating in your own. I wonder if one could see in, or if the noodles are opaque. Most noodles are. Maybe the broth is where souls live and the noodles are just their dreams. Maybe when you wake up, you're just a floating, glowing jelly fish bobbing around in the universe broth making noodles when you sleep. Maybe all the other jelly fish dream themselves into the noodles too. But maybe this is it? Maybe when we die, we really do just fall asleep and never wake up. I don’t know if that’s comforting or not. I guess it all depends on how tired you are. So then are ghosts just sleep walkers?