My Gutless Life

I Repeat Myself

2012-01-15T00:04:00.001-08:00

This is why I must possibly write. I have this flaw of repeating myself. Whether it is a nice thing or a mean thing or any thing at all, I have this problem with repeating it two or three times. Each time is a little different, a slight angle from the other. It is as if I was not heard--the feeling or fear of having not gotten my point across. So I have to say it again. Almost, it may be a habit, unstoppable. Because, often, I perceive my recipient’s acknowledgment of my statement. Not just the normal head raise and lower or some “yes, I understand. very interesting.” Still, I am compelled to say the thing again.
This happened tonight. I said a thing, my thing, my irritation, my anger over a little thing. The answer came forth from the other. It was a good answer. But still, I proceeded as if I had not heard. (this is also a useful set of dialogs or communications for a person not all there and who cannot communicate. A bad salesman, a lousy lawyer, the worst kind of boss.)
But what I am say is, why, asking myself why, and how do I fix me? Can I fix me? What does it all mean? And then, in a moment of laying myself down on the bed it happened. The thought came into my little head. Is this not what a writer does? Repeat their words again and again as drafts and drafts after drafts, trying to say a thing over and over until they say it right? That is exactly what I do (this exactness of a realization overcomes me as I write this down) when I repeat myself to someone in person. I am rehearsing and then trying it again in another way and until the sentence that finally comes out is the one I wished I had at the start...only, I have screwed up the recipient. This is not nice.
I also have to had to write this down before I would certainly forget it. Sometime I repeat in draft to draft draft again and until I figure it out...all out loud because I did not bother to write it down during the thought’s first event.

A Skewed and Tinkered Collection With Will Self

2011-09-21T22:13:00.001-07:00

I don’t know where to begin to describe the objects of my writing room. I want to call it my writing room.

I don’t know what literary equivalent I would hope to model here. For the room gets dusty, as the evidential table fan and it’s filled and clogged grate; the strewn paper and notebooks that pile on like Autumn’s front lawn; a terminal moraine tat of slurry across the crowded room. Built high are cascades of topple-ready books on the floor, that crowd my chair, and the books on every surface--columns deep and gaging.

One side of the room is covered in shelving. They stand as the only organized fashion of the place. And at the center, a queen, unmade, fitted sheet always unfit for it’s assigned, rather ideal place.

The desk, corner desk, with shelving and build for a computer. It was a gift; a hand-me-down. It is filled, as every surface should--with junk, a bowl of change, business cards, unplaced photos, envelopes, my stapler and office tools, dusty printer, computer, and my wall of prescription pills.

All these, here, disposable all. They crowd. They comfort. They confuse. They are Stone Aged ax handles.
Now I do not think of myself a collector. To collect. It might seem to me an acknowledgment of some defeat; a substitute for emptiness. But these books. We have gathered them all over our married lives. It is a relationship with these things. These books. Maybe this is nerdish, perhaps adulterous, almost religious. . . I am a keeper of these symbols; they have been arranged and ordered and rearranged as numbered as the books themselves. Sometimes they are left stacked and unordered for a remoteness, a magic uncertainty, a hidden treasure. On the wall, they stand as they should; alphabetized for their significance, their stance, their proximity and relative names to another, as if Boyle and Bellow or Wallace and Woolf should have somehow known the other.

These books. They are transactions for a date to come, a date I may not live to meet them at. But stand by me, I have willed them.

Just some Melancholy thoughts

2011-02-20T15:31:00.000-08:00

Another bad run-through today. Hard to do anything when your full of numbing hammer strikes from the inside; deck screws and finish nails in the leg; a cobblestone stretch of Crohn's; and now a headache from scrunching up of my face.
So what do you do? Pop a handful of pain killers, lay around, watch the Daytona 500, and get all depressed and feeling sorry for yourself because you're useless. Well, except for poking around on my computer once in a while.
But it got me to thinking about melancholy. Melancholy is a title that has achieved favorable recognition. It has the sound of loft; the outward marquee of a badge proudly worn on one's breast, having received high esteem. It is a brilliant darkness, often found in those of genius, the rest of us might pursue and emulate. But with the stardom of this one word phrase, it seems to have lost its color--its darkened gray shadows--to me, and in untasting flavor. Somewhere away from me is its meaning, its brief attempt at general theory into one general word--meaning of sorrows--reaching smallness now and only, when such things are far more grand in its vanquish of so many.

Amid The Dust Of The Mounded Years

2010-11-13T10:38:00.000-08:00

They continued on through the fallen pear orchard and saw a flock of ducks rise at their

approach. And as this memory recedes away, it becomes less fictitious in the recalling
excavations. Those boys are returning as I speak, as I type; those moments those days of my brother and me; they are still riding.
“I want to go home.” said Steve.
“Go home? Why?” David, as the older, more brave, brother with its overbearing color and tone.
“Can we just go home. I’m tired.”
David felt guilty at his condescension. He remembered that first day their Mom and Dad
brought Steve home. This was the best friend he had asked for. “Okay, we have been here for a long time. I think I’m tired too.”
When they started for home, David grinned at how they had rode to the far end of the fallen and torn orchard in measures of randomness, in and out and woven and carried wherever the trails went.
At a curve in the trail, the road appeared next to them. A car drove past with a ragged man looking out the window at them, with tired eyes, unswept hair, and the shine of his car.
They kicked forward their legs and cranked their peddles and dredged the dirt beneath the wheels in a hurried pace to get home, while the sun went away and they could feel the row of mountains and their shadows grow large across the valley.
Fun feared urgings tickled their backs and they laughed wearily at each other, looking up with creased faces, heat stricken by the hard play of the afternoon. And they could feel the day melting away, making a relic of itself, for them to remember no more that they had wandered through those fields--until today.
They rode, immobile as it seemed. Never fast enough to get home before the charred
darkness caught them. With a hurried chase they wound through the trails--it
occurred to David that they might ride the road around and back home. But they were tied to this path and no other way could be gotten, down past the rows of gray and black bones--of upturned trees, and the tottering of weed and grass and shallow waters waiting in discarded places.
Oh, but this was their fun. Just like when they were young, running to their beds as soon as the door closed them in their beds and the darkness with its hidden creatures make their hidden appearances. And they laughed in fear at the night and their flight.
This night, David wasn’t lucky, downing his bike and his knee into the rocks and dirt and what lay beneath. The bike lay gouged into his side, not enough to penetrate his skin, enough to bruise and bite the sides of his bones. For a moment he lay there, waiting for the pain to arrive. He cursed the ground.
Steve, close behind stopped with little able to do or to help, but rather than leaving him there he offered help.
“No, you go on home. I will be home. Just let me sit here for a while.”
Steve took to the suggestion and went on home without him.
And David lay there, with his pain in his legs and the tiredness of it climbing on to his skin and producing a sweat like the sweat of the day. All was silent but the grass and distant cars driving and the hum of tires on pavement. He sat, crouched and wrecked in the foliage, and he knew no one would see him. No one would know he was there. He lay his back down on the sweetness of the hard turf; he was a half mile away. If he sat up, he could see the road to the house. Laying down he could turn his eyes and see the old building standing there like some dead observer of the orchards. He wondered if anything or anyone was inside, peering out of the dark windows, looking after him. And the clouds turned above him, watching them move about, playing while the sunshine was away...this he wondered. Do the cloud billow in a different fashion during the night? Do they race or do they sleep?
Sketched in the distance he could see the tops of the houses. He thought of how the
people inside of all the houses were comfortable and warm. They were probably sitting in their comfortable couches, drinking sweet drinks and watching television while he, he sat here in the dirt, without hope but to get up off the ground and get home. This is what happened in the thoughts in his mind while the pain receded from his body, and he would be able to get up and go.
He sat up, looked around him. He did not want to leave this quietness that was frightening and peaceful. He told himself that there was really nothing out there that would hurt him, harm him. He heard an angry dog bark. It sounded like it was in this same field he now sat in. Dogs can smell things, smell people. It could soon find him. If it came, he would have to make friends with it or die.
Yet he did not want to leave. He would put his head down and sleep right where he lay. He put his head down upon a clump of tall grass, like a threaded pillow. He smelled the wind coming by. He could smell the flavors off the grass and the rotting shallow pond not far. He could hear his breath, breathing. What if he could die here. Right now. This wouldn’t be so bad. Not such a bad place to die. They might not find him for days. Oh but his brother would know where to find him. Would he say? Or would he keep it all a secret mystery for everyone to solve. Maybe his brother would be afraid to return to the field if he knew his brother was dead.
That would be okay. David understood. Dead bodies are creepy. That is what they would find when they had looked everywhere but there in the field. It would be months before anyone would come across his body.
It may have been an hour when the fears of the lonely field made him jump up and on to his bike. He had to get home.

How Long Have I Been Away?

2010-10-15T15:01:00.001-07:00

Right now I feel my skull descending against the heel of my hand and I listen to the unending drone of the I. V. pump issuing fluid into my veins, mixing with the blood, carrying my blood through my cursed body.

This is where I sit now, the Infusion Services part of the hospital, where most patients come for their chemo treatment--a club of patients, here, in which I feel I am an invading impostor, pretending to be sick. Yet, my problems are real, and need some sort of explanation, because there is no name for my little problem, nor title, only misunderstood, even by my personal doctor.

This morning, when I walked in here, everything that is wrong with me, is wrong with me. This leg straining under David Smith’s overturned log truck. These unrecognizable intestines. They are compressed from within, in varieties of sections like a dozen overused prophylactics, braided together in places and shanked in rubber bands and stretched out to Size Flabby in other places. These guts, they plead with an effort to prolapse, to perforate, to surface and I am so often reaching over for a fetal coexistence with it. I am in a stupor of dreams and shaking because of a lack of the simple water in my head and in my heart because these alien intestines refuse to absorb and I feel not awake or I am as a drunkard, here, and all things looks dusted and shimmering, a crowd to my brain cells crushing in to strangle even these, my thoughts.

To myself I argued with resistance, to take another tablet, maybe fifteen, of these narcotics. I have waited long and in fear of the dependence it has brought me, my anxiety’s thirst, or my pain’s dominance. I can distinguish both and separate fools these are, competing, shouting. One hammering never to dullness. The other really is like an anxiety with voice. I can feel it in my muscles and tendons, aching, I hear it. And for some strange reason it crawls down my back and into the tissues of my buttocks to pick me up and walk me along and down the vinyl covering of this reclining chair. And I ask my buttocks, why he thinks he needs these narcotics. Isn’t it enough that my guts above you are in need and that leg below you? And my head aches to give its complaint to all the other parts. And so I finally give in to all the noise of pain.

Still here, now calmed, pain dampened. Always, I am confronted by the background sounds of this hospital I’ve long lived in; this second home I’ve returned to, all my years. Next to my head is the familiar running of the I. V. pump. Its music plays on in a never ending set of two notes with an unusual time signature of 3/3; one quarter A Sharp, followed by a whole note in some low C. I have asked myself why it is a comforting sound. I do not know why I am comforted by this, this genre of Industrial Rock(?) Maybe it means I am still on, still working, still Rockin’. Today it will play until I am refilled. Today I am here for a three hour song. At other times I’ve been here for a week of this music--three times this year.

Still here, and more sounds. I can listen to the murmur of talk near and in the halls and discussions of vital life sustaining decisions shared and the trivial things of lunch or planet. Somewhere is a television playing. Always, the acoustics of hospital hallways can bounce a show out of one room, down the hall, and into my room and underneath from under the bed. Sometimes I will close my eyes and listen to the show in progress, my ears rubbernecking the floor, decoding the echo of voices and song. This morning I can make out a show with incessant voices, funneled, exacting syllables in which a male voice is barking every word. I think it is from a different time. The laughing is different; newer somehow; more like a laugh of novelty rather than today’s laughter of jaded and expected boredom. I must conclude we are watching a television comedy from the 50s.

Still here, now two bottles of I. V. Fluid. I mentioned to my I. V. Therapist, “I didn’t know I have been unconscious this whole time.” I am think of the past week, maybe three. Have I really been this dehydrated? It always amazes me how dehydration creeps up from behind and snatches from you your life force. How long have I been away?

Under Light and Shade.

2010-10-13T15:48:00.000-07:00

My Rose, my Wife. She has today suggested threats of leaving me; unless, every day, I put the junk I write out there. And since I am still obsessed with her, such dread is a gun to my left temple, “Okay, okay, I’ll do it. Hey, don’t push that thing. It hurts.”

Here’s my angle on things: Last night took its time with me. I laid here so tired and in pain, so full of thought. At Two in the am I gave in to one of those Phenergan. Works great for nausea, but it also puts you to sleep for too long. Somewhere, I slept. I did awake at times--when Rose got up. I told her I would rise with her, to do anything she needed. I then, I think, heard her say I should go back to sleep, to which I said, I’m sorry, to which she told me to not be sorry, with an insistence she was sure of. I was back to sleep in seconds.

Into the morning and afternoon I slept; waking for moments of drink and pee. Regretful of the time, I came to life and it was somewhere around three in the afternoon.

When later my Rose came home to rush through the packaging and card-writing campaign for Joe--our cool friend in Eureka--to get it on a truck by night. At the Post Office, they told Rose that for ten bucks it would get there the day after Joe’s birthday; for thirty they could guarantee that it would arrive the day after Joe’s birthday.

This was also the subject of sleepless thought. Rose had written a letter that pushes the envelope and out. What was once unknown has now been revealed. But what has been shown? What has not been told? Words and their telling can sound off in a multiple of tones in a single sentence. If it is not exact or the declination off by a degree, the target gets missed.
When the words are put down and sent away, not yet to be read but apart from the one who, in pain, writes it; how can we know the immediate response--how the reader’s eyes can transform one reflection of static motion into the same but different light. Or the muscles of their face configure in their own defined terms, communicating phases and phrases they themselves do not know...

...And I lost it at configure. That full-on jaded thought faded when I walked away. Later. Now. I picked up this put down, the paragraph ending in, know... now, maybe three hours later. I don’t know if it is gone or if it is retrievable. This tells me I must remain, entangled to the notion I was writing. To drop it and run to anything else is to perform harm, to warp the reflection, make what was to be into some other thing, now not the same; flogged, crippled, deformed... what was first whole and lovely of itself become something new, of its own beauty, where the flaws cease to be flaws, become a perfection all its own and ought to be. And now I look at it. It is sitting there under light and shade.

Concerning the Almond vs Daly dispute

2010-05-24T21:47:00.000-07:00

Hi, David here again.

Concerning the Almond vs Daly dispute. Didn’t I see that in an episode of . . . ?

It is a problem of relativity.

I, sacrilegiously, worship Rush–the Rock band. My wife does not. She still likes me; so, she’s going with me to a Rush concert.

I write. I try to write. I write crap–mostly. My wife, she (seems to) like it; so, she’s pointing a gun to my head right now, saying, ‘Write!’ Is she right? Is she crazy? I don’t know, but I think it’s loaded this time.

It’s all magic to me, maybe a miracle. It does not matter if I like it or not.

In my relative mind, there are only ten authors who have the true author-ity to critique another’s work. And they’re all dead.

Concerning the Almond vs Daly dispute. They should just kiss and makeup.

The link to what I'm talking about: The Nervous Breakdown

When Our Soldiers Came Home

2010-05-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

It is lost now, misting away,
away from my existence in that day
when the soldiers came home--
Our soldiers came home.
Now, my rememberance,
My record of them is growing fictional,
and the pixels of their pictures fall away
in the sorrows of mine own heart.

Don't Do Drugs

2010-04-30T20:46:00.000-07:00

Recently, for the purpose of seeming intelligent, I posted this to my Facebook wall:

"I found a better [than NASA's] construction graphic. It is fully clickable."

Link: USA Today

Later that day Bill Shears--Author of KiTE--sent me a private message. I'm guessing his purpose was to avoid causing me embarrassment.

Bill Shears at 2:41pm

"That's the same one as in the Kite page from April 12.

My reply:

David E. Vincent at 9:10am

I have conducted an analysis.

My records indicate that I was having a bad day.

The desperation protocol required that I send down a few too many pain killers. Now the usual lag-time estimate for dispersal of the chemical substance is 20 to 30 minutes. This lag-time correlates to the time of discovering the page; during which time, I was experiencing brainial dysfunction and intoxication while operating this equipment. (graph not included)

It's all here. The computer log and my paper logs: 'My Body Book' and my 'Daily Log' of what I do each hour, and the history of Firefox.

So then, my concluding report is titled: 'I'm Stupid.'

The page actually came from you. I was surprised when I went through the browser's history. I didn't bother to count but I went to hundreds of pages that day. What's interesting and everyone talks about is how each link takes them off on another bunny trail. A flow chart of one day would cover an entire wall.

I also keep a list of stuff I'm looking for but have not yet tracked down. Internet searching is a rather sophisticated process, since results are often less than good.

Hey, that's a pretty long excuse.

Hope you're having a good day.

Bill Shears at 2:35pm
Good enough. It's over.

Hey I figured it was something like that. What good drugs! But look at it from my angle. I couldn't very well say, 'Hey that's the same page, are you drugged?!"

In any case, sounds like a gutless blog post. Did you link that site up to the networked blogs app on FB yet?

David E. Vincent April 30 at 2:47

Next time, (it's one of them laws) you have my permission to post to my wall and ask, "Man, are you on drugs?" And, depending on the situation, you would be within your rights to end it with an interrobang.

I have not linked my blog site. I'm scared. It's like, ~~getting caught with my pants down, while in that glass elevator at the mall~~....hey, bet that'd get me posted. Well, okay.

Here is a link to my wife's Myspace blog. My writing doesn't approach her skill in writing. The example I'll mention is her short blog titled, 'The Hypnotic Power of Motion'.

So now you can know that her and me both, are holding guns to each one's head.

Bill Shears at 2:50pm

Will do. Thanks.

First Memory

2010-04-28T23:11:00.001-07:00

     My first memory is of pain. I was, I think, only two years old. I try to recall, but get only an impression of a blurred face, my nurse, injecting another heavy dose of some pain killer. She emptied the syringe into my bottom right cheek, unsheathed the metal knife, gave my sting a few pats, then secured the rail of my hospital crib. Only now, while I try to bring up this memory, I remember that she turned out the lights and closed the door behind her.

     Now whatever that drug was, it had no affect. The pain in my remaining intestines grew to such a extreme that in an attempt to escape the pain, I began to rock the crib and scream out knowing that the door was closed. After a while I thought my nurse was unable to hear my cries for help, and when no one came, I realized that the intent of closing my door had been to muffle the noise from their ears. Then I realized I was alone, that I was not able to depend on anyone.

     Still, the torture increased and my only comfort was not just to rock myself, but to throw myself back and forth with enough force to drag my crib across the room and into the corner.
In those moments and the hundreds of painful episodes to come, Jesus walked in with his loving presence. When you are two years old, you come with very few preconceived beliefs or ideas about anything. All I knew was pain and no one was coming to help. And without my asking, He walked in. I just knew he was there. I knew who he was. I don't know how I knew, but he was so real, so obvious, so loving, so comforting and so much better than any remedy.

     After a time against the wall, it was over, and the pleasure of the absence of pain filled me. I looked out the window beside me, looked at the blue and the clouds of the sky, felt the quiet of the room.

     Sometime later, two nurses came running in. And when they found me in the corner of the room, they gloried in what I had done, having never before witnessed such a feat. And at the sound of their astonishment, I forgot about the pain and smiled with a certain pride in what I had accomplished. It quickly became the talk of the floor, and I couldn't wait to tell my dad and mom.

Of Roosters and Linux and Monster and Emptiness

2010-04-22T21:46:00.000-07:00

     This morning, when the first wake came to my eyes and my Rose stirred for what to wear, when the coffee's brew rattled its grounds and the roosters of traffic crowed and the early whispers of the sun shown in, I awoke and reached out to my Rose in the room.

     This morning, when my hands held coffee and a Monster, when my son and I talked of Linux and php and AMD and security, and after, found failure, when I looked at the pages of Facebook and gmail and Matt Drudge and NPR, I began my climb down into my own crowded room of despair.

     The afternoon, when I read about writing down words and football and bloggers and finished my Monster and coffee and water, when discussions of cliché and syntax and God-Haters filled my thoughts, there was little room left for thoughts my own.

     This afternoon, when I turned open the shades and put on a new sweater, when picking up this page and pencil and how to, I then wandered from room to room to the back yard and in, in search of a place of belonging, some place to begin.

     This evening, when reaching the end of my wander, it has been found and the weariness of all else spins away from me; then it is when I find an emptiness, both needful and sad, I awake, here, and there is little to be said.