The Typewriter Loves You

Huck

So...I'm going to Chattanooga to see Huck this weekend. Whatever.

Pumpkin Leaves

Sitting on top of our pile of leaves, I look at mom and say, "Just don't fall in or you'll get all gooey, mom. The Evil One will eat you."

"Jules, watch out where you point that finger. You don't wanna poke the Evil One's eye out."

Mom and I have always talked about how most of the leaves we rake into a huge pile sorta make this huge pumpkin looking thing 'cause the leaves are mostly orange. For a while now, we've been joking around about how once you've carved a face into a pumpkin, you've created only a mere image of the Evil One.

When I was little, my mom would sing me "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" as she would hold an orange leaf gently in her hand. She'd scrape some dirt up from the ground with her other hand and would place the leaf in the little scarfed out hole. With her arm crowning my forehead, she'd then go on to tell me how this little orange leaf is like a seed and will grow into a pumpkin. I guess this worked on me 'cause the leaf was orange just like the pumpkin. Mom would go out and buy this huge pumpkin and when she picked me up from daycare the next day, she'd convince me that the pumpkin had already grown that big.

She'd tell me, "Jules, we'll soon be able to eat it and carve evil faces in it and scare off any kids that come on our porch to get candy. Then you'll get to eat all the Twix you want!"

Post-Stroke Depression

"Son, can you pass me my glass next to the candle?"

I know very well what happened with my dad's whole conversion from guardian father to drunk stresser. My dad used to be star quarterback for the Tar Heels when he was in college. When I was 13...4 years ago...my dad was driving me in his Ford hatchback down this back country road and had a severe case of a stroke and the car flew into a fence post. All I really remember, there was this man shepherding his sheep in the field nearby. I ran up to him and scared his sheep away, but of course he knew whatever it was deserved the attention. I remember wishing my father would die right there and this man would take his spot. Someone would actually attend my soccer games.

I don't really remember much else. On the tube, Doug Ross always looks at his patient and treats it like it's something that happened to his father. "Strokes cause a rapid loss of brain cells and most people who suffer from stroke often struggle with post stroke depression. My dad's inability to function like a normal human being left him with a seemingly eternal symptom of post stroke depression, rather than a temporal symptom."

"Yeah dad, here you go."

Of course he won't be able to put the glass back where it was, because its contents could intoxicate a blue whale.

I always think, there isn't much dialogue between the two of us. I always think, he'd probably be able to break my back if his wasn't already broken.

Rainy

I Miss You

I was bored the other night.

Garden Personality

Someone at my old church (Grace Center), once told me that we all have our own gardens in Heaven. I believe this very much so. I believe that our gardens are all different because they contain what we each, individually, love. For example, I love Cran-Apple and Grizzly Bear's music and Sallow trees and overcast skies; therefore, I think that my garden will always be rainy and there will be huge Sallow trees with cranberries and apples being picked and tossed into a waterfall of Cran-apple magic and there will be this reverbed piano and vibrating clarinet embracing you as you enter my garden (kind of the same way a camera will tower over two armies fighting in a movie and then pan down abruptly to the miltary captain, fighting on the front line).

I think we will learn to love each other more in Heaven. I don't think we will enter Heaven and immediately be perfect and all-loving. Like, I think it will take people just the right amount of time to become perfect. I think we will enter Heaven and then be around people who have been living in Heaven for hundreds of years and we'll see how perfect they are, and we'll be thinking, "How and when do I get to be like that?" I'll see my great-great-grandmother and she'll be smiling even more than she did when she was on Earth and I'll ask her how she is this way. She'll look at me and say, "Take this flower to God and lay it at His feet. Take a moment to weep at His feet. God will wipe your face dry and He will dub your head with a sword and redeem you and grant you the perfection you deserve."

I think we will also become perfect in Heaven once we see how beautiful everyone's gardens are. We will become perfect once we are able to oppose the judgmental perceptions we had of each other when we were on Earth, because we are now in Heaven sharing stories and dwelling in each other's beautifully therapeutic gardens. I can't wait for my judgmental perceptions to be shot to Hell.

Like, I picture myself entering my dear friend, Elias's garden (we seem to not like each other's music very much at all), but in Heaven I will enter his garden and hear the music how Elias hears it, as really good music, that may be beautiful. I feel that in Heaven, there is no music that you love more than another form of music, it is all beautiful to you, just as God doesn't overhear one worshipper above another worshipper because everyone is on the same beautiful key to Him. The voice-cracks actually sound really good to Him.

I can't wait to be proved wrong.

Bloody Nail Quick

I used to always sit on our back porch and smoke cigarettes when I couldn't sleep. I'd take trips from my typewriter to smoking to typing to smoking. This one time, I was sitting on the back porch and all of a sudden I saw out of my peripheral vision, an orange flash to my right. My dad had come out to smoke before going to work. It was like 5 am and my dad had just woken up to go to work. He never wakes up on the right side of the bed. The right side of the bed may come once he gets off from work after organizing all the files he needed to place that day and maybe if he got a raise or something. So this morning, particularly, he woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

"You have school tomorrow, boy," he says.

"I know dad. I can't sleep."

"You think smoking's gonna help? Don't pick up my habits, son, smokin's bad fer ya."

"I know dad, I'm actually quitting, but smoking really does help me fall asleep. It sorta relaxes me, dad."

My dad, the super defensive man that he is, thinks that I am giving myself a pat on the back when I say,

"I'm actually quitting.", as if to say, "Well, at least I'm not smoking first thing in the morning before I jet off to a job I hate more than sin."

My dad just tries to act like he really knows the real version of what I'm saying. Well dad, there is no other version. I'm saying what I mean, you old man.

So, like I said, my dad's super defensive. He looks down at me, his eyes a little whiter and brighter than normal - the moon's glow bouncing off his beaty eyes, and he says,

"And I can't quit!? Psh. Son, have you any idea the miserable depths I go fer ya? I smoke the fag cos it's the only thing that will calm me down. I'm so stressed out because you are sent to a prestigious f*cked up school that makes our utilities hard to pay for, our food barely payable. We're joe's in a shack because of your education program. But what, you f*ck it up and stay up all night."

With each of those sentences, he would draw a little closer to me. And while close enough to lick my ear, he says,

"I am paying for you to be a dumbass in a classroom!"

He grips two of his fingers and plugs them in my nose and pulls my frightened face inches closer to his, and with an impulsive second of frustration within him, he decides to spit in my face. Something you'd see in a movie.

I pull myself away and look at him in disbelief.

"Are you f*cking kidding me, dad!"

He then slams the door behind me and locks it. He locks me out of the house. I'm sitting there with a bloody waterfall dripping out of my nose and saliva plastered all over my face, thinking, "What kind of father does such a thing."

I remember walking out on the back porch when I woke up the next morning for school, like a couple hours later, and seeing a Jim Beam bottle by the back door. So, he had been drunk the whole time. But who really can drink so much to become a drunk satan? I don't think alcohol can do anything worse to anyone other than my dad.

So even now, as mom and I sit on top of the pile of leaves behind the back porch, I bite my nails too close to the quick and bleed all down my fingers. I'm just nervous that maybe my dad decides to come back tonight and drink his Beam awkwardly behind me as I smoke my cigarette.

Mom's Hiding in the Leaves

Do you ever write just to feel like you are the most poetic person on the planet? I just ripped the paper out from the typewriter and it says, "The apple's heart is eaten and the seed is spitten as I bury myself in the snow underneath the old orchard tree." What does that even mean? I had been reading this Robert Frost poem called, "After Apple Picking", right before I wrote that sentence and it kinda bleeded over into my writing.

Mom's whistling for Todd, our 5 month-old Newfoundland similar to the one in Hook, to come inside, so I leave my room to greet him at the back door.

Todd's at the back door giving mom some wet chin slobbers and mom's still in her nightgown from her afternoon nap. Of course, I'm in my boxers and it's just a perfect coincidence for us to smoke together on the back porch and talk about how much earlier the leaves are changing colors in comparison to last year.

Our neighbors are probably thinking, "Why, oh why, are they sitting on their back porch in their nighties?"

Mom and I are probably thinking, "Suck it neighbors, we will do as we please."

My mom and I will try to rake up a big enough pile of leaves to where Hide and Seek can actually be a challenge. Mom will hide, humorously, as deep enough in the leaves that I mistake her for the ground when I jump on the pile and dig for her. I'll occasionally feel what I think is a stick in the pile and then 30 seconds later, I realize that stick was her arm. She's a champ at the game. She takes it, hilariously, very seriously.

Leaflet Spine

It is kind of similar
to the way my back's composure shifts.

There will be a toddler
who's experiencing fall for the first time.
He'll break the spine, accidentally.