I am no longer tolerant of the cold of my Midwestern heritage. Spoiled by the relative warmth of the American Southwest, the cold is an invader, a threat.
But when I was a child, I relished going out into the snow. I would stand as far up the snow-covered driveway as possible, bright red plastic boat sled pulled to my chest, and run towards the back yard. I’d launch myself into the air, land with a crunch in the snow, and slide at great speed down the slope of the yard towards the woods, seeing how long I could stay on before having to throw myself out of the way of the oncoming briars.
Then I would lie there and let the thick, perfect silence fill my ears like frozen cotton. The sky was an empty grey, unfinished. Only my puffs of breath hinted that the world existed at all.
Tags: history
At the end of the day, “sanity” just means that you agree with everyone else, you approve of the arbitrary status quo. But I don’t. It’s like being on a rollercoaster, that weird thrill of having the ground just fall away, the whole world drop like a spinning plate and you realize you’ve never been standing on it. The rational machine is whirring away, doing its job to make sense of the data. It churns out rational explanations, perfect bricks of logic coming off a conveyor belt. It will happily slit its wrists with Occam’s razor.
A few years ago a scar mysteriously appeared on my right arm. It was the rune Raidho, backwards. I showed this to people and they immediately began weaving incredible theories which they defended as a logical explanation. One friend explained that I must have gotten drunk some time back in college and as a gag one of my friends decided to carve the rune into my arm. I somehow forgot about it until I saw the scar almost a decade later. His mind recoiled at the thought of something just appearing from nowhere, which it had.
My therapist studied the scar very intently. I presented my theory about a demon leaving my body and he suggested that it left the scar as a mark of its passage. This seemed a more reasonable explanation than the drunk college night scenario.
The scar has been fading gradually over the years. Only the long back of the R is visible. What, don’t *your* scars disappear too?
So I don’t really have a use for your status quo. I shouldn’t have to apologize for the things I have witnessed, for the damage done to me. There should have been real help. Not the doctors trying to sell me some drug.
Tags: history, reft
Cathy and I sell the house and I see her for the last time.
I get my nipple pierced.
Tags: Cathy, history
The world is changed. Everyone is dimmer.
Tags: history
I visit Dave in Seattle with Ryan and Laura.
I win the Alibi’s Short Short Fiction contest with the story “The Numbers Game.”
Tags: history, writing
Cathy leaves me.
I buy an SUV, a black 1998 Isuzu Rodeo.
I move to an apartment (3320 Wyoming NE, Apt 4307, 87111) and begin dealing with the divorce.
Tags: Cathy, history
Cathy and I have a huge falling out at the Attorney Locate company Christmas party.
Tags: Cathy, history
My grandmother, Pearl Hjerpe, dies. She was 93. This is my first experience with a close family member dying. All of my other grandparents were dead before I was born.
Tags: history
We have a reunion with our college friends at our house in Albuquerque.
Tags: college, history