Yesterday was the last day as a Literary pauper and shit, wow, still deflated. It's like I thought I was getting in the ring with Mini Me and it turned out to be Mike Tyson in his prime. I think that my soul is shaped like a clogged basin because spirtually I'm beginning to drain. I wrote a beautiful story for my screenwriting class (worked seven hours on it) and the story for some reason didn't post. I was composing on a cyber-filter titled BlackBoard and I wasn't able to copy and past the Blackboard Document to MS WORD to save it. While I was tryin', however, the story dissipated--was yanked from beneath the unsuspecting grasp of my fingertips, like a Vegas magician yanking a cloth from under a glass of milk.
I wasn't even attached to the story until three hours later when I sat down to pelt it out again and the words all of a sudden decided to book a cruise and head south for the season. I couldn't even scribe a petty postcard image. No foreign stamps. No having a Great time! No wish you were here. No nuthin. Just static blurbs.
So I hoofed the mile back to Uncle Mike's asylum where he chewed me out and told me that perhaps the concourse had snatched it away from me because of either 1.) ego or two 2.) the scene I wrote where a young altar boy is raped by the priest in front of the statue of the Virgin Mary and then forced to confess his "sin" to the same priest afterwards.
I was pretty pissed (maybe I just lost the story b/c Bradley has an incompetent server). Mike just wants me to write solely baha'i books, which of course, I would love to do only I can't right now for various reason, primarily being my Christ-fearing mother would be more supportive of her son if he were writing a fire-safety manual for gay Cub scout leaders rather than "blasphemously"taking spiritual dictation from something she cannot understand.
Oh well. Dropped a class so know I only have 12 hours a week, a HUGE turgid academic senior project being one of them. Went upstairs and, after watching my middle-aged neighbor give me her own version of Bloggality (She had to have known her shades were drawn--she's been baking me cookies) Uncle Mike called me downstairs and we had a long talk. When I asked him for advice at school he retorted a question back into my face.
"What did Ceasar say?"
"What?"
"What did Ceasar say?"
David (nonplussed): Pizza! Pizza!
Uncle Mike : NO!!!!! "Divide and Conquer."
So I charted out my itinerary. Six hours for writing screenplays Mon-Wed-Fri. Tues and Thurs is reserved for senior project. The reading for my other two classes are conducted a week ahead. I'm still working the graveyard shift until Nov 1st., but that will give me a little extra-cash to save up.
Perhaps loosing something valuable is not all that bad. My very Christ-abiding (socialogically naive, Republican Kowtowing, high-school act vanishing) parents were married five years before I was born. My mom is a VERY spiritual, but in Christ-cowering sense. She gets up every morning and prays and annotates and highlights her dog-earred bible. ALL she's ever wanted for her son was to have him, "Be like David in the bible and have good Christian friends." The irony in this is that when I was getting handjobs from highschool teachers Mama and Papa bear didn't know how to handle it.
Anyway, Mom was pregnant once before she had me. Parents were really excited, you know "gift from God," and everything. About three months after mom went public with her pregnancy my aunt in town became pregnant. Everyone was rejoicing and buying baby clothes and erecting cribs until one morning mom woke up and locked herself in the bathroom and started to cry. Everything came out from between her knees. The nursery was half-finished and mom had miscarried. Three months after the slated birth of their child, my aunt gave birth to a healthy girl.
(There's a touching scene concerning this story. When my father's skin was copper from the chemo and he was on his deathbed, eveyone in our family was telling him who he was going to see in Heaven. My sister beth rubbed my father's feet and told him that he was going to be with a child he had never met.)
Spiritual, God-fearing mom who'd harbored a pretty shitty life anyway (hardcore alcolic father) said that that was the one time in her life that she had trouble praying. She found a verse in the bible that said something like, "....I will still praise thee," only she couldn't then because obviously she felt a certain spiritual void not having a child while my cousin Amanda was being coddled around the Thanksgiving table.
The irony is that mom and dad got pregnant almost immediately after the miscarriage. The result being, yeah, mom gave birth to a crazy, once long haired writer.
I don't feel bad bloggin' about this. Five Christmasses ago, (I was drunk) I was reading late at night by the spangle of the Christmas tree and went to move some books. Out from the center of the books fell a spiral noetbook with the words PRAYER LOG eteched on top. Curious I opened it up. I found that my mom had each page dated, going back till about 1994. Each page was also categorized into two sections: Requests and Praises. While my sister's seemed to get al the "Praises" Mom's maladroit borderline-basketcase son was subject to a stampede of Requests. Mom prayed that I would find "Good Christian friends," she prayed that I would quit smoking and drinking as much as I did, she prayed that I would join the Christian cadres on campus, she prayed that I would be "Pure,".....and geezus, I'm reading this thinking BITCH.....never once when all the sexual-molestation shit was going on did you even consider allowing me to switch schools. Never once did you ask what I want to do with my life, never once did you tell me that you would support me, never once did you take me ouit for a college visit.
....ahhhh, nothin' like reading the mother's makeshift blogg.
Mom and I are still working on our rapport. I'm sure the moment my book/stories sell she'll whip-out the picture of me as a two-year beating on my father's Smith-Corona, the ironic caption ...maybe I'll be a writer someday. It's fine. I love my mom very much and I'm convinced (psychologically) that when I went through a three year period only "dating" females between the ages of thirty-three and forty-five, I was subconciously trying to get something back from my mother that was lost.
....after all, if your not occasionally lost, how can you ever expect someone to find you.
1 comment:
THANKS CIARA! Write , write, write!!! Keep writing yourself! My story finally inched back to me last night, and gave me an additional three pages!!!
Thank you so much for reading, dearest friend...
A boy named David
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