Stitches and Salt

  He saw her at a distance, the one - the only one- who that broke his heart so many years ago.  She had always been beautiful.  Now, there was an aura of maturity and refinement that seemed to flow from her.  On top of that, there was that radiance that belongs solely to new mothers.
  Just seeing her was enough to cause heavy sweating.
  She hadn't noticed him yet.  Maybe she wouldn't.  That would be for the best, really.
  But fate had different intentions.
  Their eyes met and he felt his stomach turn inside out.  The sweating intensified.
  "John?" she called out with a grin on her face.  The sound of her voice was like having stitches pulled out.  "Oh my gosh, it's been so long!"
  Any hope of escape vanished.  There was no avoiding it, he'd have to talk to her now.
  "Er, wow Jess, you look great," he managed to stammer out.  What a stupid thing to say.  Now she was going to know for sure that he still wasn't over her.  He became aware of the waves of sweat flowing from him.  Which, incidentally, caused him to sweat even more.  If Hell exists, this must be it.
  Jess had pulled her shopping cart closer.  She let out a laugh, the kind that John had always suspected was forced.  Stitches pulled, salt added to the wound.
  "You don't look too bad yourself," she said, looking him up and down. Great, now she was lying to make him feel better.  He caught a whiff of vanilla.  Even after all these years, she still used the same brand of lotion.  It was like reliving the Original Heartbreak all over again.  Stitches ripped, salt rubbed in vigorously, stabbed with knife, repeat.
  The baby, presumably a girl given the red ribbon wrapped around her bald little head, turned to face John.  There was a look that conveyed pity and disgust.  She had looked into the depths of his soul and knew him for the failure he was.
  "How old is she?" John asked.  Anything to get out of that tractor beam gaze of judgment.
  "My little angel just had her first birthday last week." Jess was looking at the baby, who was still quiet and fixated on John, with pride.  He couldn't deny that it was a cute baby, even if it unsettled him with that all knowing stare.  "What about you?  What have you been up to?"
  "Oh, you know, life," he answered.  There was no way he could tell her the truth.  That he was an antisocial loser working minimum wage odd jobs while still living with his parents.  That multiple nights a week he had dreams about the two of them living the life they were destined to live.  That he had crafted a shrine made entirely out of objects he had kept from their relationship hidden in the back of his closet.  That he actually believed one day she would come to the realization that they were meant for each other.  That he had a sincere belief that she could never be happy if he wasn't in her life.  That the sight of her with a baby was enough to send him plunging into suicidal depression.  That hers were the only pair of breasts he had ever seen in real life.  That they were burned forever into his memory.  That he hadn't even held another girl's hand, let alone be intimate with one, since she had "lost the spark."  What was that supposed to mean anyway?  How the hell do you lose a spark at eighteen years of age?
  "Can you believe our reunion is just a couple of months away?"  Jess asked.
  John wiped some of the sweat from his forehead.  There was a sense of imminent vomiting coming.  "That's crazy," he said.
  "My husband is going to Chicago for a business trip that weekend, so it looks like I'll be going by myself."  She still had that graceful way of running her hand through her hair.  Though this time John got the impression she was just showing off that huge rock on her finger.  "Are you bringing your significant other?"  Innocent enough question, but the casualness with which she assumed he had a partner was unsettling.
  Stitches.  Salt.  Knife.
  Fuck.  What was he going to do now?  He couldn't tell her how he really felt.  Not here in the dairy aisle.  Not when he was sweating enough to fill a small lake.  How could she be so oblivious to it?  There was no choice but to lie.

Where I was six years ago

It's hard to imagine what the nurse could have been thinking when I shot up out of bed, grabbing her arms and screaming frantically at her, "I have to go back.  I wasn't supposed to leave.  Take me back to the island."  As my mother related later, the nurse calmly told me that I had just had a kidney transplant and was in the hospital and needed to relax.  After some more back and forth, I eventually passed out again.

What a crazy day the first of April, 2008 was for me and my family.  It had started with a simple phone call around 10 that morning.  It was a number I didn't recognize, but knew from the area code that is was local.  Imagine my surprise when it was the transplant team, telling me there was a kidney and I was up as a backup.  Being April Fool's Day, my parents were skeptical, to put it nicely.  But after handing Mom the phone so she could hear for herself it was the transplant team, it didn't take long before we were off.  

First stop was at the hospital's lab.  There's a large amount of blood tests needed to ensure that you're a match.  And some of them take a few hours, so we spent a lot of the day waiting.  After getting blood drawn, I went to see one of the nephrologists (kidney specialist)  for a physical.  While I was here, I noticed that one of my fellow dialysis patients had also received the call.  She had been waiting for this moment for longer than I had and it felt weird and wrong to be up for this before her.  So during the physical, I told the doctor that I'd rather she get it for the aforementioned reason.  The doctor broke out in a huge grin and was silent for a few seconds before saying, "You didn't hear?  There are two kidneys and both of you are getting one."

The year and a half prior to this had been the most difficult, trying time of my life.  Few things could be worse than a kidney failure diagnosis.  Especially if you had been completely healthy beforehand.  I think I've written about this period in a different blog, but it's probably something I'll revisit later.  So hearing the doctor say that was like nothing I'd ever felt before.  I'm not eloquent enough to give it proper form.

After getting the all clear from the doctor, it was back to the waiting game.  I had called a few close friends to tell them about it.  (Incidentally, one such friend I had talked to the previous night about how frustrating it all had been.  There's a process involved with getting on the transplant list, but once that's done, it's all waiting.  Seriously, all you can do is wait.)  We -meaning my family- were taken to my room and told that my surgery would happen immediately after my other dialysis patient had had hers.

In the meantime, I decided to watch the last few episodes of season three of Lost.  Funny enough, the very instant the finale was finished, they came for me.  Emotionally, I was still somewhat in shock.  Things were rapidly changing and my life would once again get flipped over.  I went through a myriad of emotions as they were wheeling my bed through to the operating room.  The OR itself was cold and full of personnel garbed in white.  They moved me to the operating table and one of the individuals introduced himself as the anesthesiologist and tried to tell me about what drugs he was going to be pumping through me, but I was distracted.  On a counter against one of the walls, there was a styrofoam container and the surgeon was pulling something out of it.  From my vantage point, it looked like a large plastic sandwich bag filled with fluid that could have been blood and a roughly fist sized mass of tissue.  Which was, of course, a kidney.  That was the last thing I saw before they placed a mask over my mouth.

Some hours later, back in my room, I woke up and made a somewhat hilarious scene with my nurse, as was chronicled in the first paragraph.  What a crazy end to a crazy day.  Here I am, six years later, and with no complications from the transplant.  There have been some hiccups here and there, but any potential issue was caught and addressed early by an extremely talented and dedicated team of doctors and nurses.  To say they have my gratitude would be the understatement of the year.  

A (Narcissistic) Confession

I have a confession to make.  Well, several really, but for the sake of this topic, I'll stick to the one.  I have a compulsive urge to correct people.  Specifically when they've misinterpreted something or are just flat out wrong and/or contradictory in their beliefs.  (IE "I believe in the sanctity of life.  I believe that all lazy people should die.")  My desire to correct people on these points have led to a number of rifts with people I once had great (or decent) relationships with.  In hindsight, some of those people were fucking assholes and I'm better off without them.

Is it immature?  Certainly.  Is it worth the time and energy expended?  Certainly not.  So then, why?  Why do I keep going through these fruitless endeavors?  It's not for validation (or at least, I don't think so).  It isn't going to change that individual's views.  Because really, when has someone ever admitted to being wrong on twitter or facebook?  I've got one theory about it though.  I do it out of a sense of mass self-loathing.  Depression and an atmosphere of ignorance about it helped foster those feelings.  It's hard for someone that doesn't have depression to understand what its like.  I realize that's a rather banal and somewhat trite statement, but that doesn't mean it lacks truth.  

Regardless, over the past few years, I've come to recognize the aforementioned flaw as something to improve upon.  Maybe the best way to describe it is like an internal game of tug of war.  Sometimes I'm doing good, sometimes it's all I can do to avoid that giant puddle of mud.  

This is the point in which I considered deleting all of this because it sounds the incoherent ramblings of a late twenty something male narcissist.  Maybe it is.

Recently though, I've become more willing to open up to people and let them see the inner workings of my (disturbed?) mind.  (No, really, if you knew half of the things I laugh about, you'd think there was something seriously wrong with me.)  

Getting back to my original point, I try to pick my battles better these days.  Not for the sake of argument, but to promote a higher level of discourse and critical thinking.  That matters.  It matters even in the mundane, average day of a mundane, average person.  

The Nature of Holes

Sometimes life can be tricky.  Oh hell, what am I saying?  Life is always tricky.

One day, I'm sitting at the top of the world.  I had everything I had ever wanted.  There was a future I believed in.  The next day, things began spiraling out of control.  Within just a few days, I went from being at the top of Everest to a hole in Death Valley.  But that hole had some benefits.  I learned a lot of things in that hole about myself and about other people.  A support system that I believed in turned their backs on me and started throwing rocks.  Another group spat on me, like I had chosen to fall in this hole that I couldn't get out of yet.  One sat off to the side, unsure of how to help.  My honest friends tried to help in a more positive way.  Eventually, things turned around and, with some help, I was able to climb my way out of that hole.

Things were going smoothly for a time.  I wasn't on Everest nor did I really want to be again, but life was getting better.  Then life gave me a new hand and try as I might, there wasn't much I could do with it.  The ground itself opened up beneath my feet and I was back in that hole again.  This time, it felt deeper.  I tried climbing out of it myself, but just couldn't do it.  My support team was up there, cheering me on.  But there were people that unintentionally undermined my efforts to climb out of this hole.  They would tell me things like "The hole doesn't exist.  It's all in your mind.  Stay positive and stop being so lazy."  More than anything, that made me mad.  I wanted to get out and shove these idiots into the hole to show them it was real and not so easy to get out of as they thought.  There was another group.  Every time something a rope would come down, they would come along and cut it, telling me "You have to get out of this alone.  Needing help is for the weak, and the weak don't belong in the world."

Anger and disappointment began swelling up in me.  Sure, these people wanted to help, in their own bizarre and ineffective way, but they didn't know they were causing more harm than good.  Soon, I started blocking out anyone who came by my hole.  I just couldn't take it anymore.  I'd plug my ears or shout profanities at them.  Why they couldn't just leave me in my damn hole was beyond me.  The hole had become my home.  The rest of the world was beyond me and I was perfectly okay with that.  I started to blame a few people for my current predicament, even though I knew that it wasn't their fault.

Over time, I began to look deeper into the hole and made an interesting discovery.  Buried in it were dreams, dreams that were either dead or dying.  Not just any dreams though, they were mine.  A great yearning for the better days washed over me and I lay in that pool of a dead future.  There was no guarantee that things would ever be that good again.  At least I had my memories of those halcyon days to keep me company.

After a time, the hole began to feel too small to accommodate me anymore.  The walls were steep and high and offered no good footholds for climbing.  I tried to anyway.  Many times I tried, and many times I would end up on my ass with bloody hands and feet.  As it turns out, I'm still here, at the bottom of my hole, and I'm still trying to climb my way out of it.  Each day brings me a little closer to the top and a little closer to a new future.  But I'm only human.  Discouragement and past failures are tough demons to exorcise.  They like to taunt and pick at me when I make my climb.  Some times, I listen.  Most of the time, I can tune them out.  In the overall scheme of things, they aren't important and despite their efforts, I will make it out.  I will make it out, and I will create a new future for myself.  There might be more holes down the line, but I've already made it out of one and I'm making progress on the second one, so it doesn't really matter.

Ultimately, the point of this story is to remind you, the reader, that there are many people out there struggling in their own holes.  You want to help and that is great.  But you can only help those who want the help.  Not everyone is at a point in their relationship with their hole that they want out yet.  All you can do topside is to wait it out.  Trying to help at the wrong time can cause more hurt than it does healing.  Lastly, be careful how you word things.  A comment made with the best of intentions has often had the opposite of its intended effect.

Grove

Grove was a typical town in the rural American West.  Except that Mayor Vicks had just shot and killed Sheriffs Micheals and Markson.

"What are you gonna do about replacing them?" asked the local preacher, a Reverend Milner.

"I'm gonna appoint that Augustus fella and that Ozric fella," Vicks answered without giving much thought to his answer.

"Augustus, the cattle thief?" Doc Lewis gave the mayor a look of concern.  "And the village idiot?  You sure you want to make those two sheriffs?  Aren't there more capable men out here that are more deserving and, quite frankly, respectable?"

Vicks turned to the doctor and looked at him like a man would look at an ant.  "Lewis, I'm the Mayor here.  What I say goes, is that understood?"

Doc Lewis shrugged his shoulders.  "All I'm saying is that those two aren't particularly sheriff material and I think most of the town would agree with me."

"Tough shit," Vicks said.  "I'm the mayor, you're the doctor.  I don't run around telling you how to do your job, so I'd expect the same kind of respect from you."  He walked away to christen his new choices for sheriff.

Reverend Milner clapped a hand on the doctor's shoulder.  "I understand your concerns Doc."  Lewis, staunch atheist, was surprised by this show of support from the man he had had several arguments with during the course of his tenure as doctor of Grove.  "Those two are going to be trouble."

Within a matter of days, the reverend's prophecy was fulfilled.  High on the authority given to them, Augustus and Ozric treated the other townsfolk with derision and scorn.  A rancher complained to the mayor that his youngest daughter had been raped by the two sheriffs and they had stolen two of his horses.  The owner of the saloon pleaded with the mayor after they ransacked his supply of liquor.  More atrocities were committed by these men than could be recorded in the annals of Grove's history.  The two man took whatever they desired of everyone and demanded respect from the townsfolk.  After a raid on a ranch a couple of miles out of the town from a rogue group of Apache, the lawmen refused to form a posse and give chase.  Fed up with this, Doc Lewis arranged for a town meeting at the town's church.

Doc addressed the crowd that composed the vast majority of the town.  "It's time we get a new mayor.  Obviously Vicks isn't going to do anything about the problems he's created by anointing these fools sheriffs."  The crowd cheered in assent.  Vicks stood in the back of the church, giving off an attitude of indifference toward the growing displeasure drifting his way from the town.

Then the unthinkable happened.  Augustus walked straight up to Doc Lewis and stood within inches of his face.  "You don't like me much, do you doctor?"

Lewis looked down into his eyes.  "No, I reckon I don't.  You're a cattle thief and a disgrace to this town.  You've made us the laughingstock of everything west of the Mississippi."

Augustus nodded and started to walk backwards.  "If that's the way you feel, so be it."  With a flurry of motion faster than the eyes of most of those gathered, he drew his gun and shot the doctor between his eyes.  Doc Lewis didn't even have the chance to look surprised as he dropped dead on the church floor.

The crowd began screaming and running towards the exits.  They realized they were stuck with these two bullies as sheriffs indefinitely.  Reverend Milner stood aghast over the body of the doctor.

"Murder!  In the very house of God and before a hundred witnesses.  Hell and damnation await you, Augustus!" he cried.  

The sheriff gave him a quizzical look.  "You telling me I'm not already in Hell?" he asked before he brought his pistol back up and aimed at Milner's head.  Milner looked up towards the ceiling, ready for the embrace of God he knew with certainty he would soon feel with his imminent death at the hands of a madman made sheriff.  Augustus sneezed and holstered his pistol.  "Too bad you didn't shit and piss yourself.  That's what I was hoping for."  He walked out of the church.

Later that night, in a drunken stupor, Ozric knocked over his lamp and was soon lost in a blaze of fire.  The fire spread through the town quickly, as if spurred on by the vengeful spirit of Doc Lewis.  Augustus fled into the countryside as soon as he realized the town would be consumed by the flames.  Every house in the town burnt to the ground and in the end, only Reverend Milner and Mayor Vicks were left alive, surrounded by the ashes of Grove and its citizens.

Vicks looked at Milner with clear desperation in his eyes.  "What am I going to do now?" he asked.

Milner laughed.  "If I were you, I'd start digging.  The blood of an entire town is on your hands because your head was swollen with pride.  At least you'll have one of your idiot sheriffs to keep you company in Hell."  He left the mayor in the midst of the town and walked in the direction the sun would soon rise from.

Of Writers and Strippers

It's been a long time since I've shared any thoughts via blogging, but I keep intending to.  The truth of the matter is that I'm the world's worst (or best if you want to be optimistic) procrastinator.  Well, hopefully, I can work on fixing that.  One step at a time.  Maybe tomorrow I'll start.  All jokes aside, here are some reflections I had yesterday.

I'm just going to cut the chase here and put aside any kind of pretentious bullshittery.  Writing is so vastly and incredibly difficult for me to do.  In one sense, I feel like a stripper.  For the ignorant among us, a stripper's job is to get naked for complete strangers.  Writing is a similar experience, but at the same time, almost completely different.  With what I write, I'm peeling off layer after layer of the "clothes" of my personality.  When I write, I put everything into it.  Every piece I have written (and many of those I have thrown out or burned because I have massive self confidence issues with what I write (a point in which I'll get to eventually here)) contains everything I am.  And I mean capital E Everything.  My hopes, my dreams, my fears, my failures, my successes, my secrets, my beliefs, my philosophies, my scars, my loves, my hates, my envies, my prides.  All of that (and likely, more which I failed to remember to mention) goes into it.  And that's a huge part of why I have so much trouble writing.  It can get taxing extremely quickly.  (And to all the writing or English majors/degree holders flipping their biscuits over how many adverbs I've been using and how rakishly amateurish this monologue is, well, fuck off. This isn't for you, this is for me.)  I write because that is the best way I have of expressing myself.  It's entirely of a private nature and because of the nakedness of what I reveal about myself, I'm mortified of sharing what I write with others.  (To the extent that the the people who have read any pieces I've written can be counted on one hand.)  The second half of that fear is that there is a large part of me that feels grossly inadequate about what I write.  That my works reek of immaturity and awkwardness.  There's a feeling of mass inferiority after finishing reading something like Ulysses or One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Works that are just so immensely complex and are really and truly crafted by geniuses.  How could I possibly write anything that comes close to a single page of such works?  Daily I struggle with those feelings of inferiority.  Because those are precisely the types of works I want to write.  There's nothing wrong with escapism literature and I'll gladly admit that I'm an avid fan of (some) science fiction and fantasy, however even among those writers, I feel dwarfed.  I guess what I'm trying to get at here, as ineloquent yet genuine as it is, is that writing is the ultimate form of isolation.  All we ever are is alone.  But that's not entirely a bad thing.  Because there are billions of us, and we are all alone, but we are all alone together. (I promise that if I ever find the original owner of that quote, I'll provide them credit for it.)

Finally, I'd like to thank the cute girl at the bus stop I met today.  (And let me again apologize for my toxic Funyun breath fumes, in the off chance you happen to read this.)  Even with the briefest of exchanges and the most common of small talk, you've managed to reignite a fire within me that I have been trying for many, many years to raise from the dying coals of the deepest cave of my soul.  "Everything happens for a reason."  Those words you spoke are words I've spent countless nights pondering over while I battled (and frequently lost to) insomnia.  Maybe I'll never strike it big, maybe I'll never write something as massive and impressive as Infinite Jest or Gravity's Rainbow, but the scant words we shared today have been enough to fill me up with enough energy and inspiration to give it everything I have.  Thank you.  We may never see each other again, but you've managed to turn me from an "aspiring" novelist to an Aspiring Novelist.

As for you, the readers of this blog post, you are welcome to join me in this journey.  It will likely be a long and arduous journey full of highs, lows and dull, boring landscapes.  You are my witnesses here and I fully expect you to hold me accountable.  Because there will be times when I'm gonna need a kick or a shoulder to walk on.  So, I cannot make it without your help.  Your comments and criticisms will be more appreciated than you may ever realize.  Thank you for taking time out of your day to read this and allowing me to share some of my most personal thoughts with you.  

Reflections on a Wildfire

A grassfire blazes in northeast Oklahoma.  Ash falls to the earth like snow.  Smoke can be seen on the horizon.  What little bit of sunlight manages to pierce through the smoke obscures the area in an eerie orange haze.  The wind carries just a little extra heat and brings a faint smell of dry grass burning.  It's difficult to accurately gauge how close it is.  Or even which way the flames are moving.  People from nearby towns look out their windows and gaze toward the cloud of smoke.  There's an ominous knot in the stomachs of some of them as they feel the fire crawling their way.  Destruction in its most primal and ferocious state.  Fire is natures great destroyer.  For thousands of years, mankind has tried, with little success, to master its power.  But it refuses to be tamed.

Just how did this incarnation of the Great Destroyer come into being on this August afternoon?  Was it gross negligence, a bizarre accident, or worse, malicious arson?