miscellaneous pathology: January 2004 Archives

"you're not one of those people who are afraid of high places, are you?"

she asks me this as i'm swinging the second leg over the windowsill and dropping softly to the roof below, a nice flat bit of roof a good 4 feet wide at least.

"up until last year i couldn't even stand on a chair. i would edge along second floor apartment balconies as close to pressed up against the wall as possible, because it felt like i was getting sucked over the edge."

she grabs my hand to steady me, "i didn't know!"

i gently pull away, tell her i'm fine, no way to express just how good this is, this standing here on the first roof of my whole life, picking up the two errant window screens and (as instructed) tossing them onto the patio below.

i'm surprised i hadn't told her, i've certainly recounted the story countless times, how i conquered my fears of heights and spiders by climbing up on furniture with my camera. now, when i say conquer, i don't mean conquer like clobber, crush, lick, master, overcome, prevail, surmount, trample underfoot, trash, or vanquish, not like that. no, my story has more of a conquistador vibe: travel to undiscovered lands, glance around nervously, claim some shit i have absolutely no right to, run home. sit around talking long shit about my journey to the cobwebs and beyond. and boring the living snot out of anyone who would sit still looking like they might be listening.

it's gonna be even worse now. i've been on a roof.

so you know, when you're driving along & doing ... i dunno, something, *not* picking your nose, but something involving some vigorous hand-related activity in the vicinity your face, something like maybe rubbing your itchy nose (externally) & you accidentally jam a finger right up your nose & it happens to be one of the ones with the actual fingernails & it hurts like a mofo & so then you're driving along sniffling with your eyes watering like mad hoping your nose is just running & not actually bleeding, thinking damn why is everything a metaphor for my life?

yeah.

so there was rammstein. there were the four boys playing PS2, by committee apparently, loud to be heard over the game itself, which was way too loud. just not loud enough to drown out the sound fucking rammstein taking themselves way, way too seriously. overlooking the fundamental absurdity of everything in general & teutonic manic industrious industrial march metal in particular. i considered being amused by the irony of it all but that would mean thinking & i was fading fast

my captors continued to torment me, using one of the most lethal psychological attacks ever invented: being a room full of small boys. i mean, it catches you by surprise, again & again, you look at their shiny little faces & think, oh, it can't be that bad, sure a little annoying, but harmless. oh yeah they're real harmless. oh. yeah. shiny happy faces holding your MIND in their grubby little hands because they are that special kind of annoying that wears you down in the most remorseless relentless manner imaginable oh don't let this happen to you run run while there's still time
i cracked, man, i mean i lost it, dude. there i was with some pudding & a doll arm with a hand eye stuck to an ex bottle of glitterpolish & some pudding. ok not stuck to the pudding so much as stuck in the pudding.

butterscotch.

conversing with a six year old:
kid: what kind of games did you like?
me: oh, monopoly, clue, stuff like that.
kid: on playstation?
me: no, we didn't have playstations.
kid: on computers?
me: we didn't have computers.
me: we didn't have video games, we didn't have computers, we didn't have cable tv. we had three channels and we had to get them with an antenna on the roof. sometimes we couldn't get them.
kid: ... what did you do?
me: we read books.
kid: oh. i guess you were really smart.
me: yeah ...