The scream, wail, and thump.
a tear flows, audibly scraping and scratching down my stone cheeks; ears thrum and my face is awash. In a sigh, my face tingles and courses in a flush of heat. Anger and sadness wash out. Floating before me in a steam, only to return as I inhale.
the scream, wail, and thump.
momentary respite from the lashing and flogging,
a layer of frost appearing after a warm breath, the numbness returns.
apathy slackens the muscles, sluicing away all emotion, an all too customary ablution in my cubicle of unwanted, yet comfortable loathing.
Brain Fodder
The rubbing on my cranium, an embryo shifting and turning; gestating and growing, my brain has become fodder for the ideas of the throbbing that skulks to the other side of my head, bedding down for the long winter that is night. Sibilance in my head masks the conspirators coming to the front as independent thought and then flees of into the night, lost.
Blank and staring, the balls of my hands melted in place, I type without letters and the digits are missing, a caul over my mouth, scabbed and sealed, but my eyes are glued open wide and my ears filter out no decibel.
bURN&bLEED
I wanted to write before the responsibility block I am experiencing turns into writer’s block. In a funk. Financial issues are slowly coming to a head, and my wife and I are avoiding responsibility. For once, I would like to act and not think of the consequences. To do something and not worry about it, analyze it, break it down, and justify everything. Sometimes I just want things to go away. Not everyone, just all the things that make this life suck.
It is so easy to blame. Blame, however comes with guilt. Guilt for knowing you are wrong while wanting to suffer someone else the same. To make them look into the mirror and hate what they see, to loath their own existence and bloody their knuckles and fingers smashing their reflection…too scared to harm themselves.
The life and love we create have nothing to do with us, ourselves, as individuals. The life and love we live are mere manifestations of who we want to be. We marry who we love, but we also marry who we wish we could be, and we love what we create, but we create who we wanted to be. We put leashes on both wanting to protect, but we restrain and hold back.
The mirror is smashed because I know I can never be who they are, who they will be. The mirror is smashed because the knuckles need to bleed and burn. The mirror is smashed because life is foreign and domestic. To live, I need to burn. To live I need to bleed.
Bleed and burn and live.
Pride
Mornings can be hectic. While the boys are getting ready for their day, I am trying to gain momentum for mine. Moods vary from snippy to happy. Yesterday, mine went from snippy to happy with one simple action.
My six and a half-year old wanted breakfast, so I mumbled that he should make it. My almost three year old wanted breakfast as well and I told him to tell his brother. I told the older of the two to make breakfast for both of them and went about my business.
My kind-hearted six and a half year old
I came back to the dining room to my six year old asking for help with the jelly; he had made his little brother’s sandwich first.
So often, unselfish acts go unnoticed. I kissed my son on the head and told him how proud I was of him.
Fidgety, the harbinger of ill mojo
I feel pain, man. I feel it.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t walk around all day all “doom and gloom” (although I might be susceptible to the run-of the-mill end of the world scenario). Whether it’s a song or the rush of the right combination to all my senses, I feel it. These aren’t mood swings (I know mood swings…just ask my wife and ex-girlfriends…I put PMS to shame); something washes over me, following a sense of something or someone else in the room. Fidgety and itchy, I blurt out or twitch in shutters that are that are funny most of the time (they occur other times, not just in times of dread). Maybe it is just me feeling that there’s bad shit in the air (aside from the normal shit in the air…I do live in farm country), I get tense, and then the very same shit hits the fan (as a result, all fans are off unless in immediate use).
It would be easy to say it’s because of the medication, but I understand all too well that there are adjustment periods, peaks, and plateaus. Fever-induced rants, unearthing long-gone proclivities and tingles that chill the bones to ice. Funny-house, nausea inducing, wobbling walks, careening into walls.
These “washes” almost feel as though a bucket of viscous anxiety or sorrow is poured onto my head, running down my body as slow as sap from a tree.
A Reason to stay awake: Attack of Chinese Slash Orig posted April 20, 2011
For reasons you will soon discover, I have been sitting on this one. This weird, even for me.
Okay. I usually have a great deal of difficulty sleeping. The actual reason is beside the point; either I don’t give myself enough time, or it’s not deep enough. Well, if i keep having dreams like this, I may opt for the sleepless-zombie dad persona.
Okay. Joey Macintyre was doing a guest appearance on Beverly Hills 90210. I apparently missed the first three-quarters of the episode, because I saw Brian Austin Green’s character (pre-Megan Fox, pre-weight set) walking down the steps from an apartment complex ( a brown wood and tan brick, multi-unit apartment complex [4-8 on either side of an open stair well] atop the slope) carrying a saxophone, toward Joey who was sitting at a bus stop. They exchanged some words, Green apologizing to Macintyre; they exchanged awkward glances as Green handed the sax to Macintyre. I must have flipped the channel and flipped it back because the show had already gone into a cinematic ending, Macintyre saying something profound to Green and riding off on the bus, his head stuck out the window, wind blowing in his face with his eyes closed, smiling with some 90210ish song playing. I shut the TV off in disgust. I had been watching it in my childhood home on Drake St. on the old console TV (doubled as a table, with the ornate, raised sides on top and the one push-button channel changer on the front that, when you pressed it, made a mechanic whirring sound)
Next, I was at a bus top and saw Slash walking toward me while I was talking to someone I was trying to impress; I was excessively jovial. I laughed and told the person that Slash, who was shuffling like the stereotypical Chinese guy in the old movies set during the San Francisco gold rush (his hands tucked in the opposite sleeves of the robe). Slash paid me no mind and took a seat in the bus stop. There was a bus stop, but no street; just a long sloping sidewalk that ended (or began, depends on you POV).
That’s it.
The phone number for an Aldi store is more difficult to find than the White House’s Orig posted July 20, 2011
Okay. I’m not going to pretend there is an audience out there waiting my every word, but I realized I have had the same blog post up for at least a month now.
“Are you a writer or a ‘writer’?” Lately, I have been feeling like the latter, stuck in the world of red lines and first and second readings of term papers, resumes, and the occasional masterpiece of a dissertation. I realize that I have been letting everyone else do the typing.
About a month ago, my wife went grocery shopping at Aldi in Iowa City. Love the store, love the prices, it’s a regular blast. Well, when the cashier unknowingly keyed in $20 more than she actually paid,my wife was inadvertently short-changed.
“No problem,” I said. The next day I decided to call to tell them about the mistake. Upon commencement of the search for their phone number, I realized it was not listed in the phone book. “No problem,” I said to myself, “I should have looked on the web in the first place.” Three search engines and a couple of diversions into the lives of celebrities, I realized that I was not going to find the phone number to that particular Aldi store. The only number I could find was the one for their corporate office. I called, left a message for the district manager, and was called back that same day. I was shocked and pleased; she checked into it and called me back the same day to tell me that the cashier realized he was off $20 and that they would send a check our way.
When my brain is not in slumber mode as it was today, I think. Most of the time, it’s about dumb stuff. But this time, I thought how smart that is for a store like Aldi to route all their inquiries to the head office. It’s like when the parent gets hold of their kid’s cell phone and answers it to find out what the hell he/she is up to. They are able to handle, I would think, the vast majority of complaints themselves. Customer is pissed off because they waited too long in line or they were over charged on their lettuce, they get home and pick up the phone or, if they are like me, get online to send them a scathing e-mail. They can’t find a phone number or an e-mail address and, even if that pisses them off, they are at least defusing over their over-priced lettuce. So, by the time they come to the conclusion that they need to call the head honchos, they are faced with a decision to call or not to call; to complain/inform, or to just let it go.
Maybe they just neglected to put local phone numbers up and this is not some genius deflective-diffusive effort to calm people down or to get customers off their back.
Either way, this all reminds me that we still haven’t received the 20 bucks.
Peace, Ryan Dunn Orig. posted June 24, 2011
Ryan Dunn’s death (and that of his friend), has floored me. I know he made some bad decisions that night, and I do not condone drunk driving or reckless driving/ speeding, but that does not mean he or his friend deserved to die. I loved these guys and thought Dunn seemed like such a sincerely nice guy who just wanted to make people laugh. When my son asks about it, I use it as a teachable moment. I tell him that “the man who got in the car accident and died (that’s how my son refers to him) made some bad decisions about drinking and driving and speeding, but the man was very nice and was loved by friends, family, and a lot of other people and will be missed. It is very sad.”
There is a link to Jackass/Dickhouse with photos and what not. It also has some pretty heartfelt tributes.
- Ryan Dunn and Jeff Tremaine
Oh yeah…Roger Ebert is an asshole!
’nuff said.
Peace, Fluffy one (my wife’s nickname for him).
You will be missed.
Tom
Foreshadow Prev. posted: August 6, 2011
Pouting. Yelling and pouting. Monster headache, pouting, and yelling…and more pouting.
Wednesday night, I had the shits and a migraine. I thought that was obvious to my wife. Thought. When she went to bed, leaving me with the kids to put to bed, I felt a little slighted. So, I YELLED at her; told her she was avoiding the kids.
Thursday came and went, us avoiding each other like we’d been married almost thirty years, not almost ten. Still had a lesser version of the head ache, with slight jabs in the back of my left eye. Friday came, and I was still pissed at her. I thought, at the very least and the issue aside, she should have been pissed that I had yelled at her. But, avoiding is her forte (her whole family has been avoiding her to some degree since her mom’s death), I had found out I had been replaced as the person covering the city council and school board meetings (massive miscommunication, apparently), called and told her about it. I took a stress pill, fixed the kids some lunch and went to bed. Concern? Caring? A ‘What’s Up?’
Nothing. The fact that I sleep should be enough of a clue, much less the sleeping three times a day.
Something hovering right out of reach. Sorrow. Dissatisfaction. All covered in a shell of dogged weariness. A perpetual frown does gravity a favor with my face, drawing down the corners of my mouth.
Statistic…sadistic…scaristic…scar…tissue
Health and other pointless endeavors (Prev. Published August. 2011)
I’m not sure how to write about this. I have been feeling off for about a few weeks. Starting this summer, my wife’s assistant manager had walked out, leaving the brunt of uncovered shifts and all other responsibilities to either her or those employees she trusts. Totally unprepared for daddy daycare, the Wii or their imaginations, and each other have been my boys’ best friends.
Feeling off. Right When it gets bad, I find myself slipping from feeling blue, to cynical, to apathetic, self-loathing, fulfilling the sense that I can’t get anything done. “See, you can’t get anything done because you’re broken.” The kids’ issues (aside from the feeding and basic care) get put to the way side, every inquiry treated like an infraction upon my precious time.
For lack of a better term, I have been down in the dumps. But that usually means it is so much more than that, doesn’t it? When I am experiencing depression, there are certain things that may or may not occur.
Morose and sluggish, I go through the motions and wonder why everything is in chaos. Things are in chaos or a mess. Feeling that mirrors the sludge and muck on the inside, I get down on myself because I have all this time and I should be able to get more done than the basics, right? At the very least, not pour what’s on the inside onto everyone else. I should be able to get the dishes done, meals made, dining room clean, kids entertained, ants eradicated, and my jobs…sorry, JOB done. Right? So why can’t I. I’ll feel overwhelmed, but still looking for stuff to do because something always needs to be done. With three kids and me a “stay-at-home,” there has to be something to do…always. This is anything from always at the computer waiting for proofreading jobs, or staring blankly at the screen waiting for a story to flow from my fingertips (best case scenarios, a get a proofing job or I have inspiration…you’re looking at the latter).
When at rest, I sometimes have surges of nerves. This can only be illustrated as short pulses of adrenaline, a twinge of muscles. I will feel light headed, like I just laid down to a fermenting hangover (I haven’t gotten drunk in so long, I consider myself a non-drinker). My heart races walking up/down the stairs.
My emotions are stifled, coming through sporadically.
I feel like there is a void inside me.
Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress.com. After you read this, you should delete and write your own post, with a new title above. Or hit Add New on the left (of the admin dashboard) to start a fresh post.
Here are some suggestions for your first post.
- You can find new ideas for what to blog about by reading the Daily Post.
- Add PressThis to your browser. It creates a new blog post for you about any interesting page you read on the web.
- Make some changes to this page, and then hit preview on the right. You can always preview any post or edit it before you share it to the world.
The Brain of hawkdad73 