See Ay Tay

The past is a thing. It’s a noun. It’s about where or when. So it could be a place or a time. I guess it could be both too. It’s easier to see how it’s a time. “Back then” being a point in time, something before now. It’s harder to see how it’s a place. “We were driving on the highway and we passed Sally and Dave driving their DeLorean.” That point back there in the past when we passed Dave and Sally. Still feels like a when. Or how about “Where’s the gas station? Well you drive toward the center of town and just past the yellow dog on the corner you make the first left.” There it is, that point just past the yellow dog.

Passed, on the other hand, is a tense of a verb; the past tense to be specific.

Marbles McGill sat on a stool by the door of the bar his brother and uncle owned and thought about grammar. The stool was the one the bouncer sat on when there was a big game on and the place got maybe a little crowded and rowdy. A few times a week that was.  The bouncer, Dennis Hanlon, wasn’t a permanent employee of the McGill family, so it wasn’t Dennis’ stool, as it were, he was just someone hired from time to time on an as-needed basis (i.e. night of the big game) which Dennis didn’t mind. He was what some might call a free-spirit, though not Dennis because that phrase would sound a little “faggy” to him. Dennis lifted weights at the gym and this led to odd jobs here and there which you would understand if you saw Dennis, say, walking down the street, imposing enough in street clothes even in the winter. If you saw him actually working out at the gym and saw how he attracted or repelled, depending on the person, it would be easy to see how a subset of those people (both the attracted and the repelled) would experience a moment of clarity, like “hey you know that thing that I needed done? This fucking guy would be perfect.” Those kinds of things tended to, more often than not, pay well and well enough for Dennis to not have to work regular.

Marbles was the opposite. Not “non-descript” as much as unpleasant enough to look at as to make people want to look away and never look again and to then go through whatever mental exercise might be required to wipe the memory of what they had seen permanently away. There was a copious amount of dandruff and warts, the largest of which protruded enough above his right temple that it might even be thought to be a horn if you stopped to consider but no one ever did because, you know, all your brain power would soon be at work eliminating all traces of Marbles from your mind. When Marbles looked in the mirror he saw on his own face a cross section of all the worst features of every McGill he had ever seen. Like Uncle Charles’ fat and exploded nose, with both burst blood vessels and a trench down the center that divided the purple flesh into two meaty pork loins. Then there were Granny Didi’s earlobes, two thick white clothes-lined blankets flapping in the wind, second cousin Mike’s caterpillar eyebrows and Autie Lucy’s corncob teeth. On and on it went. Marbles, instead spent a lot of time thinking on the theory that he should at least have his wits about him.

"Do we say something?"  She winced and looked straight at him.  He could tell she was really nervous.  Either that or the subject just distressed her very generally.  He was more worried than she was.  He just hid it better,

"He owes us, no doubt about it," this made her nod in agreement, "but I just don't think he realizes."

"It's two thousand dollars.  Donald, two thousand!"  There was an unattractive glisten of sweat on her upper lip.  In another circumstance he might've liked it but he didn't like this, her desperation. He me

fünf

Pete sits, his laptop unfolded across his thighs, one leg crossing the other, hating the patrons of the Main St. Starbucks, resenting them and their lazy, mundane convictions, their Europeanized coffee orders, their windbreakers and bicycle shorts, their sporty loafers.  He shortly turned that same burning eye of antipathy to his own image reflected in the gleaming copper of the espresso machine.  His face widened and simultaneously lengthened there, like in a funhouse mirror, his complexion yellowing.  He bared his teeth and a small girl in black tights and pink sandals with blinking LED lights implanted in the straps giggled but then frowned with uncertainty when he shifted his gaze to her.  

"Fuck you, you little shit," he thought.  

The door hung open an extra beat and a gust of too-cold-for-April air sapped away any cored warmth he had stored in the folds of his jacket and down in the coffee stained upholstery of the cushioned chair he sank into with his "venti americano" blending into the purple and green leaves of the jungle pattern like a bloated jaguar left out in the bleaching sun of some equatorial tropic.  A blond wraithlike man held the door for a trio of post-workout suburban 40-someodd's bellying their leotards up to the glass-encased fat-free pastries.  He grinned seemingly without context or judgement and stepped in and off to the side, out of the way of all the other customers in the store, either ordering or waiting for delivery, and had the appearance of taking in the entire scene all at once, including Pete, and indeed centering on him as he pulled a wooden chair to his side and sat.  

"We're going to have to slow down if there's ever going to be any hope I think," he says out the side of his mouth, not making any eye contact, his head sweeping from side to side smiling in a stylized expression of wonder, Pete presumed, at the whole human condition.  

"I'm sorry?" Pete blurts in reply.  Getting a closer look at the younger man's skin he is distracted by what seems to be a discernible constellation in the man's acne scars. Is it Taurus?  Hercules?  

FORE!!

The beaver is nocturnal, which is somehow really cool to me, and semi-aquatic.  One might imagine the beaver taking issue with that one way or another. 

"I love the water," he might say, "just not all the time.  And you should see me swim.  Oo-doggie I'm a swimmer.  Better than you are."

Of course I can only conceive of a beaver with a contrary nature, competitive, and not just because he's a rodent (rodents of course being all about getting whatever they can grab, whenever they can grab it.) But more because they seem stubborn in their industry.  Or that the industry makes them stubborn, and unsentimental and not given maybe over to "flights of fancy."  Thus it follows that I'm presupposing that the rest of the world is sentimental and prone to screwing around in an unserious manner, and therefore a nuisance to the beaver.  

Beavers are, of course, known for building dams and canals and fashioning a home and in around them.  The natural instinct, you see, is to impede and take over in order to settle down.  Also, when frightened, the slap their tails on the muddy banks of a stream or a river.  Amazing, those tails--one imagines them leathery and slick from the beaver natural oils, oils often harvested as an additive in perfumes--wide spatulas, an almost perfect tool for beaver-work, and yet stuck on to the beaver's ass, counter-point to the task at hand. Then again, it's hard to get inside the mind of a beaver.  The sense of direction, back to front and left to right must have evolved in such a way as to make head and tail work interdependant and independent simultaneously.  Talk about a split personality.

Beavers belong to the genus "Castor" though I find no obvious connection to Greek mythology and certainly not a constellation in their nature and personality.  Castor oil though, yes absolutely.  

TRAYS

It's a ghost….Jesus fucking Christ.

"You have a talent for dialogue but not you know like lofty concepts," that's what I thought he said.  That's when the sun came out in the way it sometimes does on like a really rainy day.  You know, like unnaturally in a way. Like it bleeds through the clouds and intrudes on the gloom.  Not that you wanted or liked the gloom but like on a really rainy day you get accustomed to it--you get used to the barometer'ed headache and the nausea that comes along with it. And the neighbor walks his dog in the misty rain and the dog shits on the curb and everyone just keeps moving like the turd will somehow dissolve in the moistured air.

"A talent for dialogue.  Maybe someone will hire you to write dialogue."

The ghost in on heroin.  The ghost is all hopped on the aitch.  Look at him lurching and bumping into the furniture.  A lamp teeters and the little chain under the shade makes a gentle tinkling noise like the tiny river of rainwater in the downspout if you really were able to listen closely.  The ghost mumbles indistinctly and exhales some greenish vapor that makes you drowsy.  You gotta be careful.  I whispered in the ear of the ghost which is not an easy thing to do because you can't really make out the ghost's features, not all the way.  You have to use your imagination and then just start talking, really low.  I say "remember the back porch, remember the endless walk in the woods?  We're still there walking…there's a dead dog there in the leaves, like a brown rotting log with a stomach full of maggots."  That makes the ghost's lips pull back like sardines on a white subway tile mosaic of teeth.  The lurching stops.

2.

He is lanky and blond.  His hair is a disturbance of flames, a grease-fire that water might only make worse.  Better to throw a damp cloth over it and he does, pulling up the purple hoodie and tightening the strings turning his face into a pale, pimpled moon with a blond and orange fu manchu.  He bares his own teeth at his reflection in the gas station's bathroom mirror and shifts his feet in the brown puddle of melted snow, rock salt and pee-splash there on the stone floor half-covered by fraying beer-box cardboard.

"I look fucking homeless."  He's not.

1.

Pete looked out across the snow covered field to the stream's edge where, hidden among the close-gathered pine trunks, the beaver worked the bank, its thick, damp torso rocking and laboring at something hidden from the line of sight afforded by the dilapidated bird blind.

The blind had been erected by the previous owner, a novelist of considerable fame.  Or more accurately the novelist had had it erected by a pair of handymen from the largely defunct upstate village several miles down the road.  That part had been mentioned to him third hand, as most things were in town especially to the likes of Pete, that is, just another outsider as far as they were concerned, handyman's wife to Willy, the owner of the awful diner, who then brought it up to the realtor while Pete was intentionally within earshot.  

The beaver seemed to be making repairs.  It was moving a large branch that was stuck at one end in the driving current of the stream, and the frothy mud that accumulated there. The rodent would not give up.  It kept pushing and testing different angles.

Pete sat in the blind to smoke, not to bird watch.  He wouldn't know a gull from a goldfinch though he could probably tell the difference at least.  He hunkered down low and exhaled the smoke straight out the top of the blind like a chimney and regarded the beaver through a crack in the wall.  The novelist had left a stool, which now supported his propped feet, and a variety of strewn garbage.  Pete had found fast food wrappers and used tissues and pornography torn from magazines among the leaves and dirt drifted on the floor of the blind in the several seasons since the novelist had left the house and its property, not intending to sell, but being forced to eventually by the shifting fortunes of the publishing industry and the general decline of the reading public--a decline he documented and lamented variously, preaching to the choir as it were, in all of the loftier literary periodicals.

Pete had the desire to set in all on fire.  He wondered what the beaver would make of that.  He decided at almost the same time that the beaver would move along pretty quickly not wanting to be in the vicinity of any fire in the woods; good instinct that. This made the idea of a fire much less palatable to Pete, not because he was any nature lover but more because he respected the beaver's general operating principles and envied them even, and the least he could do was not upset a creature that was, for the time being, making something of and for himself, as opposed to smoking idly halfway up a tree.  

He stood and dropped the cigarette amid the trash.  He spat and then nudged the butt into the saliva and clotted snot and then ground the whole mess beneath his boot feeling confident that nothing would catch flame for the time being.

The beaver hunkered its body but nosed the air, his eyes scanning wildly catching the scent and sound of Pete lumbering down the ladder of nailed 2-by-4 sections on the maple trunk, and scampered into some well-hidden warren when Pete's boots hit the leaves.  Pete's knees buckled slightly and he groaned at the twinge of pain.

When You're Falling

"What super power would you want to have?"

"I'd like to be able to fly."

To see things from above or a distance; perspective is wanted.  Perspective is wasted on the old.  It's like you get a little dollop in your tin slop bucket once a month.  It's up to you to take your dollops and dry them in the occasional sunlight through the bars and sew them together with strands from your mattress.  There's an urge always to bolt them down to fend off the gnawing ever-present pangs.

When I get the inevitable question again and again from those in the know I want to be able to say "yes I have started painting again."

The canvas lies stretched on the sofa in the way of someone who maybe sought to sit but for the moment I was not worrying.  Sometimes I would fret about the spiderweb rivulets in the glass panes or the dust on the windows, or the cracks in the plaster; but right now with the snow falling lightly outside and bubbling water in the fish tank I could regard the placement and blankness of the canvas with little enough anxiety to consider loading the brush up with paint and slathering the greedy canvas.

I just now started painting again and soon will fill up the glass and drink and paint and paint and drink until, in fading light and through one squinted eye, I will keep brushing and slicing and watching the image bleed like thick red blood out the jugular vein of the muses neck.  And awaken the next morning my tongue a lustrous bile carpet and a throbbing regret a singing dentist's drill in my mind, at least having painted.  At the very least having painted.