Human Failures

It has been less than 24 hours since Josh posted anything on his Human Failures and Worthless Men Blog.

And my psychic powers tell me its been only 2 minutes since he's rolled his eyes dismissively at something.

What a doll.

My teeth!

I keep having dreams where my teeth disintigrate. It is seriously disturbing. In my dream a couple nights ago my teeth were decaying very rapidly and I was looking at an old woman with fake teeth, thinking I would never be able to have them.


On a related note, I am a huge slacker.

The Miseducation of Dollar Bill

Writing is, at its best, a form of deep meditation.

Lynda Barry told this anticdote about a friend of hers who went back to look at all his dairies from highschool, excited by all the revelation they would bring, and found instead that they were simply pages and pages of emotion. That kind of writing only serves to make the reader sick.

But there is something to it, still.
There is something to be said for that noxious spewing of emotion that clutters up pages and pages of pubecent loose leaf. It may be self indulgent and revolting, but it is raw and unapologetic, and it pleases the one person that writing is supposed to please in the first place: the author (and maybe the author's nosey best friend.)

I wanted to write a kind of involved example, but I wonder if I would be able to forge that kind of thing...it would seem to go against the point I am trying to make, anyway.


Instead, here is a very short story:


When I woke up in his room that first morning, I was afraid because it was pitch black and I thought I was dead.
But after a moment my eyes adjusted and I realized I was just in his basement bedroom, which had no windows.

Through the darkness, he suggested that we eat at a nearby diner for breakfast and I agreed.
The soft sounds of cars driving through puddles, drifted in from outside.
I asked him for a plastic bag to put over my coat.


At the diner we sat in a booth by the window.
He ordered two eggs on a long roll.
We smoked cigarettes and I ordered a cup of tea.

Outside the sky was getting lighter. It would stop raining soon.
His foot hit my leg as he shifted his weight under the table.
Neither of us acknowledged it.

My Dad

My dad is sleeping in a bed in the backroom of the small house. I pull a chair up to his bed and sit and watch him.
His chest moves up and down in a short, slow rhythm, slightly out of sync.
The room hums along. I trace patterns in the carpet and rub them out.
Fluffy cotton pillows prop him up like he’s on display. Zoe’s stuffed animals surround his hospice bed as if in solidarity. I reach out and gently put my hand over his. His fingers are rough, the skin callused, tough and cracked, but his hand is still thin, delicate.
I lift his palm, rub my fingers over his.

Liam is alone in the other room, watching TV. Ellen is in the bedroom putting Zoe to sleep. They haven’t been married very long but Ellen has been the one to take care of him these past eight months.
A week ago they went to the beach together, my father, Zoe and Ellen. Liam and I didn’t go with them. Too busy, or maybe just didn’t feel like it, I guess.
Even though I wasn’t there the image of them on the beach is still very strong: my father drifting in the ocean, weak enough to be pulled out by the gentlest tide, yet still able to keep his head above water.
He doesn’t care about anyone out there, even with his new family watching him expectantly from the shore. He looks in the direction of deeper waters, grey eyes reflecting the colorless sky, rising and falling in the waves like a jellyfish.


Out in the cold I watched him, years ago, through the branches of a pine tree, as he hammered nails into the roof of our neighbor’s house.
Liam and I waited for him there, under the glowing Christmas lights strung up like stars. It was raining and cold and Liam and I huddle together. I imagined I was a homeless refugee, just barely able to survive. I put my hand up close to the lights for their little warmth. I pulled a blue one too my eye and stared straight into it.
I was tired of waiting for my dad, but when I asked he said he’s almost done.
When he came to get us Liam ran out from under the trees protective branches, trying to scare him. My dad picked him up and hoisted him into the air. “A wise guy eh?” my dad said to Liam, smiling, his eyes obscured by the rain and fog clouding his glasses. I emerge from the tree and follow them to the car.

Time is a mere shutter of the eye. I know how time deceives life into thinking linearly, but I’m a well-read girl. I know time a whirlpool, and the things that get sucked under will eventually resurface, only with the full knowledge that they will be drowned again.
In my dad’s small house, time is etched in the dark corners of the room as he lifts his eyelids slowly and looks at me. His look is urgent, for a moment, but then falls back to sleep, his breath a tiny creak, backed up behind an indestructible dam.
He is too long for the bed. His cold feet stick out at the base in salutation. The blankets fall slack around the bed but I do not disturb them.
I get up and put my ear to his chest. A faint beat struggles to be heard.

During the summer at my dad’s house, it was often hard to sleep. Usually it was because my brother was a chronic bed wetter, but other times because it was just too hot. One night I woke my dad up and we went outside. He wrapped me in a sheet between his arms.
Everything was dark around us the sky a deep clear blue littered with stars. We took peaches from my dad’s trees and drown them in whole milk. I took a bite and juice ran over my chin into the base of my neck.
I wrapped myself closer to him. Looking up at the stars my dad told me about the universe, what stars are and what war is. I pictured World War One, what he told me was the last war between kings. I played with the dark hairs growing along his arm and shifted my legs. His jagged toenails scrapped my shin.

The universe goes on forever, he said. I looked at the sky. Forever. I must think of god or heaven, the unbelievable things I learn in school. But this smallness of life is real. Wrapped in a blue blanket on a porch in the night, my father and I are tenaciously small.

I stare into the darkness at the fireflies blinking through the trees, illuminating impossible shapes as the steady moan of the bullfrog pulls the forest down from the height of its decay, and the world converges in the warmth behind me.