Yesterday I had multitudes, today mirages in the desert. 

We have to write a lyric essay for my Creative Nonwriting class (which I will still call, despite it actually being “Essay Writing”, which, yeah, but is sounds too much like Freshman Composition, which is not quite right).  Now what is a lyric essay, I wondered?  Would I have to find words to match with “hippopotamus”?  Would I have to find some event in my life that would warrant me being able to use “hippopotamus” in an essay? 

One concept of the lyric essay is that it does not follow a straight narrative path.  According to the textbook, the essays “favor fragmentation and imagery: they use white space and juxtaposition as structural elements.”  There are also different forms of lyric essays, including the prose poem; the collage; the braided essay (the essay can wander to and fro, play in the traffic, but it has to come back to the same place--it must have a spine to make it stand); the “hermit crab” essay, which the authors made up to basically say you could use any form to write your essay in, whether it be a recipe, a to-do list; an address book. 

So I sat down the other day, in the long gap between taking a Journalism test and getting into the Programming lab, and wrote down all my different ideas and/or possible forms.

1. Google map directions -- covering the time between when I was first kicked out of my parents’ home until I joined the Air Force, touching upon the directionless way I felt during that time and the almost inevitable mistakes I made.  This would have included what I still think of as one of the funniest “first time” stories I’ve ever know.  I had to cut this one soon after I started writing it, because the directions (unless I cheated on them) would just take too much space. 
2. To-do list -- to-do lists are a huge part of my life.  And yet I couldn’t think of any essay subject to work into this.
3. Snapshots -- this, I guess, would be the collage one.  I wanted to show moments in my life in which death was there or nearby.  This was, surprisingly to me, the one I ended up writing.  I was not enthusiastic about it, but the topic and form (which changed somewhat as I wrote it) worked well together.
4. People watching -- I thought about this while I was sitting and trying to figure out what I wanted to write about, and I would find myself watching people as they go by, just observing their habits, dress, etc.  I could have done something with it, but right now all I can think of is cliche stuff.
5. iTunes shuffle - this is just like one of those things you see on FaceBook every once in a while and you have to hit shuffle on your iPod and put whatever song comes up into some slot (“Song You Marry To”, “Song on Your Deathbed”, etc.).  Somewhat interesting, but nothing that would in any way be elevated beyond a FaceBook type of note.
6. I thought I would like to write something about seeing through my eyes, about all the issues I have with my sight, all my phobias about my eyes.  I think this would be something good, but I have to turn something in by Thursday, and while I have the spine for this, I just don’t have the rest of the skeleton to attach to it.
7. Christmas list -- I love Christmas, but love doesn’t mean you can do something just because you wanna.
8. Summer trip - I actually thought about this while thinking of another, because one event in there (the third on my list) occurred during this trip.  Again, something wonderful to write, but right now no substance to it that I could write about.
9. Word a Day calendar -- I have a love of language, and thought of a way to work that in.  I could have done it (I ended up doing something similar with the snapshot essay, except I ended up using colors instead of words).
10. Essay only using song lyrics -- this just would have taken too much research and time.  Especially if I wrote an essay in which I used names (in the essay I did write, I mention two girls I had crushes on in elementary school, Dawn Milam and Melinda Wampach--never gonna find those in song lyrics.
11. Stand-up routine -- I think I was getting punch-drunk by this point.  I don’t really see how this would be different from a regular essay, except maybe more dick jokes.
12. Cave -- I thought of doing something with the parts of a cave, but this one is just a form in search of a story, and it wasn’t there at this time.
13. Child’s nursery rhyme - yep, punch-drunk.
14. Movie review -- I was just thinking I would have to actually do one of these for my Journalism class, so it was natural to think about it.

Of all of these, I whittled it down to Google maps, snapshots, and eyes.  I have already written snapshots.  I need to do another edit, because some of the intent of what I wanted to write changed as I wrote it, but I think it is pretty good form.  I started the Google map one, and I think it could be good, but our essays are supposed to be five pages or less, and, quite honestly, I would probably have five pages of just directions, not including what I would add (I was looking forward to this, since I would write it in second person and frame all the sentences as instructions.  Ah, well).  The eye one would also have been good framing, but no picture. 

I don’t know how I feel about this essay form.  I’m going to do a second draft, turn it in for review, and then do another draft for final turn-in, and we will see.

Blood flowed.  Metal met bone.  Fists connected.  I sat on the living room couch, a Playstation controller in my hands, commanding lives beneath my thumb pads.  The wrestler I was puppeteering would in June of that year, after killing his wife and before committing suicide, murder his son.  On that last, I had him beat by five months.
    My wife Missa is a nurse.  As is my mother, my sister, my grandmother, an assortment of aunts.  I don’t like hospitals myself.  Walking down the hallways of one, I felt like the soundtrack of a horror movie was playing a drunken symphony of whooshes, beeps, and whispers, and that I was an actor in that movie.  I know death was behind every door, and I still went through them, ignoring the audience’s catcalls.  This hospital was no different.  Only upon reflection do all the clues click to me.  The pause in the nurse’s speech after she first tried to get the heartbeat.  The change in rooms to perform an ultrasound.  Her need to get the doctor, leaving us behind to stare at a screen of silent static.  The doctor passed his decree through a mixture of goop and stillness, then floated to other rooms.
    The doctor suggested a dilation and curettage.  Missa had seen one during her nursing clinicals and resisted the idea.  There were other approaches considered safer, but this was a military hospital and was several steps behind those in the civilian world.  Missa talked to the nurse on the phone and was told the doctor would prescribe Misoprostol, often used for ulcer prevention, but also for inducing labor or abortion.  Two out of three ain’t bad.
    Misoprostol can be self-administered.  My wife did not foresee any problem with doing this at home.  The only thing I needed to do, she said, was to insert the Misoprostol, as it would be difficult for her to do.  She put a dark towel on the bed and a white disposable pad on top of it.  She lay on top of them  The pills were tiny, no bigger than the allergy pills I often forget to take.  I lubricated two of my fingers and inserted the pills with a fishhook motion, like a wrestler cheating out of the referee’s view.
    “What now?” I asked.
    “We wait.”
    I stood silently, listening to San Antonio snow whisper goodbye like a Dali clock off the roof.  Missa explained the process could take a while, so I should find something to occupy myself.  I asked her if she wanted anything--perhaps some cake from my stepdaughter’s birthday the previous day.  Celebrating had been muted, so there was plenty of cake remaining.  Missa passed on the offer.  I went into the living room and powered on the Playstation.  Beating somebody up sounded good to me.
    I performed my medical procedure at ten minutes to three in the afternoon.  The rejection of a nearly three-month-old fetus is a muted and mocking form of labor, like hearing a favorite song played by untalented and bored children.  Instead of doctors and nurses, there is only a hapless husband, taking sabbaticals from smashing people in the head with a metal chair to see if there is any help he can provide.  There was not. There was no room of eager relatives looking up at every swoosh of the door; there were only empty chairs and a telephone to be ignored.  This empty labor lasted five hours and at the end, there was no crying from a stretching baby covered in blood and what appeared to be congealed bacon grease.  There was only a tiny pinkish creature, some cross between a tadpole and a Spielbergian alien.
    My wife called me into the room, and I saw the small blob, a bullseye on the dark blue of the towel and the whiteness of the pad.  There was surprisingly little blood.  I looked at the small form.  It was barely half the length of my thumb.  A fetus at eleven weeks has formed some recognizable features--it was recognizable as human, but it appeared to be a human drawn by a talented toddler.  The arms and legs were discernible, but there was a tone to them that I could only think of as tabula rasa.  Those arms would not freckle.  The mouth was a tiny line, as if at the last second someone thought to draw a smile on its features.  The eyes were drops of blue ballpoint pen stains.  The gender was indistinguishable, but my wife insisted it was a boy.  His name was Dane Xavier.
    We had a baby blanket we were never going to use.  Missa cut a small section out of it and put the fetus on one side of it, folded it over, and folded it over again.  She put the blanket into a sandwich bag.  I watched my wife perform all this with cool efficiency.  She worked in a hospice and often caught a final breath.  Before Dane, I had seen one dead person in a casket. 
    We discussed what to do.   Missa wanted to cremate.  I wasn’t positive, but I couldn’t think of what else to do--flush it down the toilet, bury it in the backyard.  There seemed no good solution.  It was late at night, and we had to wait to go to the funeral home, so the fetus went into the closet with shoes, shirts, pants, and boxes of papered history.  Missa said there wouldn’t be any issue with decomposition, which was beneficial as our daughters didn’t have to see the sandwich bag in the freezer.  We put the bag on a high shelf the dog couldn’t reach.
    The person we talked to at the funeral home said it would cost fifty dollars for cremation.  I wrote the check, and Missa took the bag out of her purse like a packed lunch.  A few days later we were given an urn the size of a closed fist.  It was put on our dresser, next to a box my wife had put together, like a time capsule, with baby socks, sonograms, the pregnancy test.  This is your life for the pre-birth crowd.  The check was never cashed.
    The average temperature for cremation is between 1600 and 1800 degrees Fahrenheit.  It takes approximately two to three hours to cremate a human body.  A person who weighed 150 pounds would be completely cremated at roughly the rate of a pound a minute.  It would only take a second or two for Dane.
    How do you mourn what never was?  The collected ashes on my dresser are a person with whom I never interacted, never shared a pizza, never tossed a ball.   He would never come hesitantly from school, stuttering to explain a bad grade or a black eye.  He would never experience a first kiss.  There would be no bones to break, no casts to sign.  He was a world of not, a life of never. 
    We held our own memorial service and moved on.  The world asks how everything is, and you say fine.  Never mind waking up at three in the morning to a wife’s sobbing and the comfort that can not be provided. 
    Life is a highway, notable automobile spokesman Tom Cochrane told us, and we drove on.  One passenger gets dropped off, and another gets picked up.  Five months later, with no plan or intent, Missa became pregnant again.  It was a pregnancy on eggshells, fought together against hardhearted doctors, bleeding frights, and that question of what if, what if.  Tatiana Annaliese was born in February of 2008.  As with the previous pregnancy, my wife refused to entertain the idea of naming our child Reese’s Peanut Butter Cutlip.
    Soon after Tatiana’s first birthday I deployed for six months.  I had spent large blocks of time away from my oldest daughter before, including a period during 1996 in which I was sent to Las Vegas and Italy, and moved my permanent base from Germany to Nebraska, necessitating my mother to keep her for nearly eight months.  Besides missing my kid, it didn’t worry me.  It did now.  Tatiana would experience so much I would not witness, and there was so much I could not protect her from.  I hadn’t thought about that when I was twenty-six.
    But, in the morning, after I walked from work under the sharp Qatari sun, I would sleep and dream that Tatiana in her crib on a previous day was being watched by Dane.  Monsters in the closet would stay away, because he would not let them by.  In my dream he was an adult.  I could never see his face, but I could see his sharp blue eyes, his mother’s eyes, and I knew that he would be there for Tatiana in a way I was never able to be for him.

Today is Tatiana’s birthday.  She’s three, an occasion that we’ve decided to celebrate by performing unique gymnastic acts that scare the snot out of her mother.

She handled her cake much better than she did last year.  She blew out the candle okay, although the first few times she tried she really did little more than spit on it.  Last year she decided the best way to put out the candle was with her fingers.  That didn’t really hurt her, but she freaked out when all of us yelled at the same time.

I’ve thought several times about getting a job, even though I am going to school full time.  But, since I am getting my retirement pay and a housing stipend (in addition to whatever Missa earns working), I have decided to take advantage of the time I do have.  I am gone for a large portion of the day Monday through Thursday (I only have one class on Friday), but it still leaves me enough time to spend with her.  I don’t have to worry about any military exercises, TDYs, or, thank goodness, deployments.  I also don’t have to worry about being called in to work to do something my my civilian “boss” who is getting paid three or four times what I am getting paid, to do something he should know how to do (he didn’t--after reaching the point at which you can retire, stuff like that will make you).

So I get to take advantage of it.  Unlike the four or five months before, this last month or so I have not been the first person she sees when she wakes up (which entails her popping out of bed and sneaking in the hallway to see if you can see her), but I do get to come home to her excitedly jump around that I’m here.  I’m also the A number 1 drink-getter, an honor that loses its luster after the five-thousandth time she walks by her sister and mother to hold a cup out to me and say “woookwat” (chocolate).  I’m also in the enviable position of being her gymnastic equipment every time I go by her.  She holds her hands out to me, then climbs with her feet up me, until she is standing on my shoulders.  She then drops down and throws her head back, with her legs wrapped around my neck, so that she is hanging upside down in front of me.  Then she lets her feet go, so that I have to catch her by the legs before she drops to the floor.  The routine is completed when I arc her over my head and catch her by the armpits, so that we are essentially back to back.  She loves this.  My wife, as I pointed out before, practically drops a load.

I have three years of GI Bill to use.  I may need to, at some point, get a job, depending on circumstances, but until I’m happy with this existence, with watching my little Tater with a frosting buzz doing spin after spin after spin (face plant) after spin.

This morning, on the way to school, I stopped for a bite at Hardee’s.  It was a quarter to seven, and my first class didn’t start until eight, but I left early to ensure I got there in time and also because, although there is a bus system on campus, I prefer to walk to class.  At least, I think, I am getting some exercise, and even if it doesn’t appear to be doing anything for the size of my stomach, I will have some well-toned calf muscles (all my classes are in a close cluster of buildings, but the nearest parking lot is probably about half a mile away and is a severely uphill journey).

I sat near a window still dandruffy with last week’s snow and looked outside as I bit into my sourdough breakfast sandwich.  The sky was a purple ululation, and I thought of a poem I had written probably eighteen years ago.  There was no purple in the poem, no wailing clouds, but somehow the poem leaped immediately to mind (there is painting mentioned in the poem, so there’s that).  Maybe it was the perfect melding of inconsequential things that form something full of consequence.  I was in a Hardee’s, which is where I first worked and also where I first met my ex-wife, who the poem is peripherally about.  Although it’s not really, somehow.  Now I’m not sure, but that probably explains why I gave poetry up as something I would never do much beyond playing Chopsticks on, so to speak.

Here’s the poem, in one of its later revisions.  The original is lost somewhere in a computer gravesite.  I believe the original was probably its best form.

***

For Alicia by the ocean’s edge,
where misted waves melt in black
sand, among bleeding white rocks
and dead fish.
Under a glutton moon
I slept, beneath the pier,
while brine lapped at my face
like that dog I bought you last year.

For Alicia, whose painted toes dangle
in the water,
I wrote a poem in the sand
with my toe, calloused and red.
The tide swallowed my words
and etched them across the beach,
like your streak-splatter paintings
I never understood.

***

There was more after that, but mostly it was the result of a professor trying to make more of a poem that what it was (not that I think poems can’t be made better, but, again, I realize I do not have the stuff of a poet, and this was best as it was, red hot from the pen).

I found myself needing to find the poem today.  Not exactly sure why.  However, tonight I searched for it.  Like the transitive connection from Hardee’s window to eighteen-year-old poem, my search made me feel like I was wandering in a life-size version of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. 

I guess I have to explain.  Both my wife and I pack rats, although in different ways and of different things.  There have been times when our two powers combined have made things difficult (like my search tonight).  I have almost everything I have written over the last twenty years.  I also have every card or letter that I’ve received over that time (just remember that if you want to get snippy with me; I can go back two decades and use your words against you).  Unfortunately my stories, poems, cards and letters are no longer as organized as they were years ago, so I didn’t know exactly where they were.

In my search for this one poem I found many other embarrassing poems (“poems”?  Well, no, not really, more like Henry Rollinsish bon mots that essentialy were “my father is a dick and let me explain that graphically” and “I’m lonely”).  I found cards and letters that highlighted my short marriage and the subsequent divorce, plus my exhausting and futile effort to make the mother of my child be a part of her life.  I found letters that slowly and decisively led up to an eyeblink of a relationship I should not have gotten into .  No letter exists to commemorate the death of that relationship, but there exists somewhere an e-mail that spills some liquor on its grave.  All that remains is my nickname.

I have two letters and a card from my friend Cory.  In the first letter he writes me from his deployment to Italy.  He told me about the awesome food he was eating and the great hotel he was in, and he enclosed some money to pay his phone bill (I can’t remember, but I assume I paid it, since he didn’t kick my ass later).  The card is for Christmas.  There is not a date on it, so I can’t say for sure what year it is from, but probably not 1995, since that is when I received the last letter from him.  I bought his computer from him before he separated, and he had a problem with my check, so he was checking in with me on it (I got the money to him).  He wrote about the troubles he was having with the Air Force, both with getting his household goods and with them saying they overpaid him and they would like his money back.  “Hope things are going to rough for you, Scott.  Don’t party too hard and have a joyous holiday season.”  He signed his name and wrote his address then included a P.S.: “Have you talked to Sarah recently?”  I had.  We met her as she was working at a snack bar during one of our exercises.  She was a colonel’s daughter, eighteen, and a high school senior.  We flirted with her outrageously and for some reason kept calling her “Susie Q”, borne from an original name mistake.  I called her house and asked if Susan was there.  Of course not.  I hung up and then realized my mistake, screwed up some courage, and called her back, explaining my mistake.  We dated for six weeks.  We had broken up (she had) after my squadron’s Christmas party.  She was eighteen.  I was 25, a single parent.  Of course we broke up.  I called Cory and talked about the money, letting him know it was getting to him that week, and I talked about what went down with Sarah.  I was going TDY to Las Vegas for three weeks in February and then to Italy myself for three months before I moved back to the states.  Things work out that way.  I knew about Las Vegas when I talked to Cory, but not Italy.  I don’t remember the last words we said on the phone, so I guess it’s going to be “have you talked to Sarah recently?”.  We got off the phone, I closed the book on Sarah and put that relationship to gather dustily with others.  A blanket of snow brushed one year to the next and life moved on.  Nine months later, Cory killed himself.

I look at these papers, these poems, stories, cards, letters, scraps of a life five, ten, fifteen, twenty years down the road.  There is a small part of me, a very small part, that wants to put all of these in a cardboard box, take them outside, and fire them up in the burn pit, to watch ashes battle with snow.  There’s also a small part of me that wants to strap a backpack on and walk the world like Kwai Chang Caine.  Both of these would be a mistake.  Maybe releasing the past, letting the footprints on the beach be washed away, would be good.  Maybe a clean slate is good, as the cliche suggests.  But in the pain, embarrassment, fright, disappointment of memories, there is also beauty and strength and wonder, hidden like a flower in the hand of a small child.

I didn’t think I would have trouble adjusting to being a civilian.  I thought that I would get out, put the military behind me, and move on with my life.  And, in part, that is what I have done.

Interestingly enough, it’s the small things with which I am having trouble adjusting.  I’ll be quite honest, I hated wearing the uniform, especially blues.  But it was something I got used to, and I knew what I had to wear what day--blues on Monday and ABUs the rest of the week (or when deployed, just straight ABUs, with the occasional gas mask for exercises).  Now I have to make choices.  That sucks.  If it was up to me, I would probably wear the same things again and again, which might explain why one of my Pawleys Island T-shirts sort of reads Pa  ys   la   .

And haircuts.  Again, I thought, yay, I’m out, long hair in a ponytail or something, but I discovered I can’t stand my hair too long.  But I also can’t stand to pay 15 bucks for something I used to get for less than seven dollars (and which generally is a pretty simple haircut to do).  My wife has cut my hair a couple of times and done a decent job, but as she has pointed out, I have frustrating hair, with cowlicks multiplying like Tribbles.

I also have a problem with shaving.  I tried the full beard (about 10 percent of the way to a full ZZ Top), and that wasn’t working.  Then I tried the goatee, and that wasn’t working (plus my wife has fought any facial hair I had).  I did the clean-shaven thing a few weeks ago, and I rediscovered that I hate shaving.  Right now, I’m thinking shave it once a week, and the rest of the time just let it grow out.

But...I get to be a part of my daughter’s life every day.  I get to go to school and learn new things.  I get to have my own home, without being concerned that in a few years I might have to move again. I get to wear an earring again (and yet, even after being retired for about five months, I still haven’t). 

I don’t have to worry about writing Enlisted Performance Reports, satanic documents that disrupt and harangue the very English language.  I don’t have to listen to some fatass, four-star-ass-kissing Captain threaten everybody on my shift with an Article 15 if something gets screwed up.  I don’t have to work with (#name redacted#).

But I really wish I could figure out what to do with my facial hair.  Fu manchu?

I watched the below video today.  I think the young man says all that needs to be said about children living with same-sex parents.



To me, the arguments against same-sex marriage make very little sense.

There is the argument that they are against the word of the Bible.  I am not a religious person, but I have respect for people who are.  However, I don’t take much stock in people who take so much stock in the Bible.  It makes some sense as a guidebook, but very little as a rulebook.  After all, in the same book that is often used against homosexuality, it is said that the blind, lame, or those who are dwarves cannot approach the alter of God.

I also believe that the Bible was written by man, as were many other religious books.  Whether or not these men received word from God, I believe that each writer has put his own spin on things.  There is also the fact that many of the high points of the Bible are, as pointed out by Joseph Campbell, variations of stories that have been passed on long before the birth of Christ.

But to take the religious out of it, let’s look at some of the other protests against same-sex marriage.  The first thing to look at is the very definition of marriage, which is commonly seen as union between a man and a woman.  Some people, suck as the Family Research Council, say that it is for producing children.  They answer many questions on their web site about some protestations that might be brought against this, but I don’t think they are really sufficient.   They declare that procreation is the significant factor, and that if it were not for procreation, then there would be very little people who would even want the government to interfere in our affairs.  I guess you could ask somebody that when they are not allowed to see their partner of 30 years as they are dying, because they are not “family”.

By the way, when it comes to definitions and how we need to adhere to them--”decimate” used to mean to execute one out of every 10, but that is no longer so, and I have to say I find that desecration of Latin worse than what some want to do with “marriage”. 

One of the more laughable protests brought up by the FRC (or as I lovingly like to call them, the Fucking Retarded Cocksuckers...or Cunnilinguists, dependent on their gender), is that homosexual marriages would lead to children being without a mother and a father, which is ABSOLUTELY necessary.  I think Mr. Wahls provided a counterargument to that, but let me also add something of my own.  I have a mother and a father.  The first 15 years of my life I probably saw my father less than three years total, and that is counting the first two years in which my parents still lived together.  The next ten years I did not see him at all and had one short 15-minute phone conversation with him.  The last 15 years--nothing.  I know he’s alive, but that’s all I know.  Having a father did nothing for me.

It is not specifically mentioned on their web site, but it appears based on what they write that they would prefer a child to come from Darva Conger and Rick Rockwell or Britney Spears and Jason Alexander than from a stable homosexual relationship (which, according to their statistics, is unlikely to happen--it’s more likely a homosexual father will rape his child, do drugs, cheat on his spouse, and die of AIDS than be a stable parent).  I could take some of the fight against homosexual marriage if it was coincided with a fight against frivolous marriages.  But it’s not.

I was going to touch on Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell, but now I’m too pissed to even get into it.  I think I’m gonna go beat up some straights instead.