No, Seriously, I'm Awake

Necessity is the mother of invention.

At least that what's they say (though it makes no sense why anyone would think it's a necessity to pay for tap water bottled by Pepsi).

Improving D+ grades in Religion 101, though, can be seen as a necessity -- that is, if you want to justify your existence at the university in hopes of one day filing like cattle across a stage to get a replica of a piece of paper that somehow is supposed to legitimize you as a likely productive member of society.

Part of the perception of command of a subject, it seems, is that a student not sleep through an entire class and, especially, not a series of classes.

The test be damned. It seems that, unlike the high school psychology teacher, the amount a student sleeps in a college religion class goes a long way to judging how much a student knows about fundamentalism. As if being sleepy is an insult to the pursuit of knowledge.

Where were those eyelid stickers when we needed them most?

Think of it: Stickers, resembling as realistically as possible a pair of open, attentive eyes. Pick your color: Blue, brown, green, hazel, albino.

They could be applied to the closed eyelid, engineered with such precision that the perception of on-taskness could be so convincing that the student never appears to blink.

Their usefulness would spill over into the post-graduate world, full of worker drones resting in adjustable chairs of boardroom boredom for whom corporate buzzwords are lullabies.

Yes, eyelid stickers. Shattering the persecution of the tired masses once and for all.

Living Dead In The Mayonnaise Jar

So rare it is that we remember a dream from 25 years ago.

So vividly, that is.

I was 5.

The menacing older boys were more skeletons than children. Their eyes bulged like some kind of living dead. They wailed and contorted in the white muck of a large mayonnaise jar. If you stuck your hand in the jar, it sucked you in.

With them.

They called you. You had no choice. You plunged your hand in. You couldn't leave. You became them.

My Dad sold mayonnaise.

---




Man shot three times on Plowden Road

"Columbia police responded to a shooting in a parking lot on Plowden Road at 9:55 p.m. Thursday.

According to the incident report, the suspect asked the victim for drugs. When the victim responded that he didn’t have any and turned to walk away, the man pulled out a silver pistol, took the victim’s wallet and shot him three times.

A witness saw the man flee in a burgundy vehicle."

---

I was 3 when I almost died.

I remember. Not like they say you remember being so small in some suspect, abstract way, but the kind of lucid, inevitable remembering, if only for means of future survival.

I remember the tornado that ripped through and shifted the foundation of our flimsy home. The orange, crackling sky. The attacking atmosphere. My Dad wearing a thin cowboy hat.

I remember falling out of the car at 45 mph onto the roadside. I landed onto a sand patch. I remember looking into some stranger's bathroom mirror, scratched and bleeding, and my Mom telling me to stop crying, because I wasn't really hurt that bad.

I remember my Grandma's big green bed spinning. Then, lying in the back of a car, on the verge of unconsciousness, not knowing where I was going but knowing I was going somewhere fast and desperately. I was, apparently, supposed to die at the hospital as I faded in and out of consciousness and my back stiffened from days of battling meningicoccal spinal meningitis.

Later, after the meningitis, Mom would demand a first-floor apartment in the government projects -- Columbia Gardens, on Plowden Road -- so I wouldn't have to climb the stairs.




The window air-conditioners sagged and labored, dripping with condensation. Weeds grew from the spaces between the sidewalks. The wooden staircases were splintered, unpainted and unprotected from the elements. The hallway mailbox -- labeled 19-F -- was broken open, abandoned for a mailbox complex in plainer view.

A guy got stabbed, I heard. The girl in that apartment over there got "raked," a horrible vision, as I imagined it, of some poor girl's face being scraped with a metal garden tool.

After a weekend away, Mom and I walked in the door to a semi-circle of spent matches on the floor. I heard the air rush into her lungs. Someone had stolen the stereo. A guy a few doors down.

We walked around the neighborhood after midnight during the summers between elementary school. A man in the shadows asked me and my friend if we wanted to buy cocaine. We told my stepdad. He and the maintenance man rushed out the door and hunted him. The guy ran around the corner and they followed after him. A gunshot rang out. The guy dropped. The cops came. Lucky he shot skyward.

Junior had white, crusty, oozing impetigo because his mom never bathed him. I got it on my earlobe. We all got it.

Aaron and I walked down to the Magic Market to buy comic books for 60 cents.




My first was "Alpha Flight" #1. That Canadian superhero team with the surly French-Canadian twins who could fly fast. One of them was schizophrenic, the other stuggling to come out of the closet.

We watched "G.I. Joe" and "He-Man" and "Transformers" every afternoon. Aaron lived upstairs. That always seemed so much more ... safe.

We set off smoke bombs and shined flashlights into the smoke to mimic lightsabers.

His mom's car was riddled with bullet holes from a BB gun. He didn't know why her car.

We "patrolled" on our bikes like "CHiPs," side by side, protecting the neighborhood. We couldn't stop somebody from cutting the chain and stealing my bike from the back porch.

I got beat down on the bus on the way to S. Kilbourne Elementary School on Halloween morning.

We jumped on dirty mattresses laid outside the dumpsters. Sometimes we crawled inside the dumpsters to see what we could find. They always had a smell of rotten fruit and rusted iron.




The runoff drain was like an exotic river. We splashed in the green algae. We rubbed our fingers over the metal of the train track, smooth as glass. Older boys stole the track ties and oversized nails and built a clubhouse. They were gods. A clubhouse that couldn't be torn down.

Across the train tracks, across the green toxic river, across the airport runway just beyond the fence of our backyard, the lights of Williams-Brice Stadium illuminated the sky. This is where the University of South Carolina Gamecocks played football.

The stadium lights always looked like some kind of roller coaster. You could hear the occasional roar. That's where "our team" played. The lights were a beacon signifying that something greater was happening just over the horizon.

---

I would graduate from that university. I would scream with primal abandon and angry love inside that stadium, with the occasional glances to the place from where I would wonder what went on inside this gladiatorial colisseum.

Every time I go, I pass by my home. It is both a shortcut and a neverending attempt to make sense of the world and all its chaos.

The buildings are decayed, hollowed out, air conditioners sagging through taped windows and disheveled blinds. Somehow they're not much different than they were when I left them at age 11 and didn't look back until I had a child of my own.

A rusty pole sticks out of the ground in the backyard. There used to be a basketball goal attached to that pole. Grass has grown where the court made of dirt used to be.




The eyes of the children have a blankness to them. A resignation. A wary distrust of a strange visitor.

Plowden Road. Columbia Gardens. Apartment 19-F.

A melancholy jewel, a cursed diamond.

It is no longer home.

I'm sorry you got shot, man.

Ach Ees, Daiy

For only a short time do we live in a world truly of our own creation. Not just living in that world, but unconscious of our insulated reality.

Unspoiled. Young. Speechless yet speaking.

We who have mastered the necessary tools of communication hear words we don't understand.

Are they even words?

Does it matter?

This is the language of a human being yet to comprehend the concept of words. A language saturated with vowels grounded by deliberate, harsh consonants.

Because we do not understand it doesn't dismiss its relevance as a language all its own.

We struggle to comprehend because we are limited by convention.

But he is not. Every invented word has its useful meaning, irregardless of the expectations imposed on him.

One day, order and compromise will prune out invention. His unique world -- and his unique language -- will be lost. He will struggle, like us, to commune once again with it.

Until then, he speaks the tongue of a world with its own laws.

There are none.

Anyway

Every now and then, there comes a time when it's best if we don't share ourselves.

Best that we don't express ideas, because doing so means that we are adding yet another layer to the persona that we create for each, distinct person we try to gain a new understanding with.

There are only so many people we can be.

We lose ourselves this way. This explaining. This ruse of self-awareness.

"Anyway." "It's complicated." "Let's talk about it later." "I don't know."

True words of wisdom.