(Park, as in 'idling, motor running, polluting atmosphere without making any progress or going anywhere) (Which you probably already knew that)
My reading glasses, when I can locate a pair, seem always to be extraordinarily smeary, as though I store them in a glass of molten wax when they're not under something.
I no longer need to leave the bathroom faucet dripping. The cat is dead.
I need to call my friends in Pennsylvania -- the ones I'm always afraid I'll get a call about, saying they're dead -- to tell them that the cat is dead.
I'm wondering if the cheap honey I bought at the supermarket (because the Google map to the farm store was completely misleading), is actually honey, or just some oil byproduct imported from some foreign country, and liberally laced with corn syrup to make it palatable. This wouldn't be such a concern for me, if (a) this honey were still in the supermarket, aisle four, near the peanut butter, and (b) I hadn't sneakily resumed using honey in my morning coffee, which I used to do all the time, until about four years ago, when I saw my mother again for the first time in decades, and realized that, all along, she hadn't really cared about me in even the tiniest bit, and now she's dead too.
I certainly will miss the cat more.
In fact, as John decided that we should have Buster the Dead Cat cremated, once he was actually dead, and as Buster the Dead Cat was only outside on his own recognizance one time in his entire life, and didn't particularly enjoy that experience, as the outside is so freakin' big, and there's no dish of cat food, or handy dripping bathroom faucet to drink from, it doesn't really make much sense to bury him there, I'm contemplating a brief return foray into the entrancing world of glass blowing, to make an urn for his ashes, and all the cat hair I gathered, more or less unintentionally, in a bowl in the same bathroom as the dripping faucet, because while he had his head almost upside-down, drinking, I would brush him, over and over again, loving his red hair.... I'm kind of torn between a cobalt blue urn, or one in Roma red -- cobalt is kind of a no-brainer, but has nothing to do with a red cat, and Roma red is so delicious, even though it can tend to blow out unevenly. Plus I want the urn to have a blown foot, and I suck at blown feet, and they're virtually impossible to do alone anyway, so who am I going to get to assist me, so I can make a container for the ashes of a dead cat that used to drink out of the bathroom sink?
It's always something.
Glass. Glass feet. Glass bottles. Fake 'outsider art' dolls, made with glass wine bottles as the body, with gnarled wooden extremities and knotted cloth heads, which I can leave outdoors for a while so they look really crappy, and then take them to some flea market and wait until an antique dealer gets a load of them, and then I can sell them for tens of thousands of dollars, and make a bogus video of the artist him/herself (I wonder who can play the part? I wonder...), talking all ungrammatic-like, about how tough it is to get yer wife to crochet them doll laigs, when she's layin' there, a-dyin' of some durn sickness or t'other... Much more interesting than, say, faking Vermeers, and I still can't believe that art experts of any discipline could have accepted those bloated, suffocating paintings of Jesus and his followers at Emmaus as real Vermeers... And, could I go to prison for passing my own art off as the art of someone I'm just pretending to be? But I still make all the stuff anyway? Maybe I should make a few dozen dolls first, and pull the fake wool over a few antique-frenzied eyes, before I worry too much about legal niceties...?
Even though I've tried to convince myself that it's too late, that they chose someone else, that I blew the call-back audition, I'm nevertheless waiting for a call from the theater company in Somerset NJ, offering me the opportunity once more to play Judge Turpin in their February production of 'Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street'. Even though they've already picked someone else. And it's after noon on a Sunday, three days after the call-backs, and who's going to be calling people now, and besides, the other guy was so much creepier, in the best possible way... As I was putting myself through this particular wringer yet again yesterday, I think I realized that, of all the creative ventures in which I've involved myself, I think I feel the most genuinely grounded and entitled as an actor -- it still strikes me as unnervingly weird, that I actually know how to blow glass -- that skill seems as divorced from real life as would be the ability to levitate. If I could. Levitate, that is.
I bought yet another box cutter two days ago -- this, despite the fact that I have at least eight others, hiding in obviously clever and unexpected places around the house, and because I actually need to cut... some boxes! I also bought a pack of replacement blades, which it makes me feel especially clever, because I made sure I bought the blades that would fit the knife, instead of exactly the wrong blades instead, which I would never bother to return, thus giving the new box cutter something else under which to hide itself. I rarely if ever replace razor knife blades -- I worry about what to do with the old one -- surely some careless garbage man will have forgotten to wear his gloves that day, and cut himself, and get blood poisoning, and die in about six hours, leaving behind a stunned young pregnant widow and three school-aged children who will have to wear clothes they steal from dumpsters at the mall.... The responsibilities are endless. I also think that blades should really, by rights, last forever, and it's a sin to be wasteful, isn't it?
But now I'm ready to throw caution to the wind (plus, with over 150 lb of wax at my fingertips, I can easily create a dulling sheath for the dead blade, thus relieving me of the terrible guilt, plus I could never remember those kids' birthdays anyhow...), and change blades freely. As long as I can find the right screw driver, to open the knife, so the blade is accessible. And so it goes.
(Now, a moment of silence, while I pick at myself and think about all the things I'd really like to write about, but don't, because I don't think it would be such a good idea. I wonder if I could come up with a mental equivalent of wax, in which I could embed what I think are such inappropriate or unpleasant thoughts, so I could both rid myself of them, and avoid the risk of shocking or alienating or otherwise upsetting anyone who might read them. It's a terrible burden, being responsible for.... you.
I should probably eat something for lunch. I had a swiss cheese sandwich earlier, but I'm feeling empty again.
I hate feeling hunger, but I also seem to believe, on some deep level, that being hungry is a good thing -- that it's virtuous, in the sense of being anti-gluttony, and also, I think it reminds me of feelings I had as a helpless, nonverbal, but definitely non-silent baby. I think my mother was onl occasionally interested in me -- there's a photo of me, before I could walk, and I'm on the floor with a scattered deck of cards, and my sense is that for my mother, it would have been a toss-up, most of the time, as to whether she'd rather feed me, or play solitaire. So, feeling hungry seems, somehow, to feel like the necessary precursor to being taken care of -- and the hungrier I get, the more imminent is that attention I crave. Of course, when I was so depressed a few months ago, I kept on feeling hungry, and kept on feeling hungry, and kept on, until I had lost almost 30 lb, and really, no one ever showed up. Of course, I didn't stand around screaming either, like I probably did before I could walk. The squeaky wheel sometimes getting greased, depending on how big it is, and where the mechanic might have gotten to.
I think I might want to be done, for now. My mind seems to be wanting to wander toward wondering where I've stashed all my crochet needles, as I think I want to start making the preliminary rough sketches of my first bogus glass bottle doll, while only half-watching what I hope will be old black-and-white movies from the 30's, on TCM. Or, failing that, some grisly true-crime police procedural -- the tensions feel familiar, with the advantage that, unlike real life, in TV shows, they have to come up with the answers in under an hour. There are details and events and questions lurking behind my own personal and ancient tensions and mysteries, of which I may never become aware, or to which I may never discover the answers.
Maybe, with this idea not an uncommon one in my mental repertoire, next time I'll write about my version of heaven. Stranger things have happened, and certainly stranger things have been thought of.
Now I wonder if, instead of crocheting twine onto a wine bottle, I shouldn't drive out westward, and see if I can't find that farm, and buy some genuine honey. Before all their bees are dead.
© Walter Zimmerman 2014
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