Category: Uncategorized

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8/3/23

So many of them. Everywhere. Little lines of brown terror sticks, seemingly far more harmless than an ant based on size and calm demeanor and deceptively weak thin frame that hovers so effortlessly in the wind. Yet their bug beaks, or whatever you call the needle at the top of their heads, are prepared to stab and drain you, making your body inflame with an itch that cannot be unitched until another finds its way into a spot in your pants that was supposedly protected but wasn’t. Two, three… I don’t know… maybe twenty two are stalking my flesh at the moment. They like me best. I should be flattered. My husband? My children? Their blood is repulsive to them. Apparently. They avoid them like how a four year old with food texture sensitivity avoids mashed potatoes, jam, and applesauce (not together, as who could blame the kid for being repulsed by that?)

I sprayed Deet all over myself this morning hoping to repel my personal vampire army, but all I did was give myself a minutely higher risk of cancer and allow these bugs to laugh at my attempt to ward them off. “Oh, you think we will be repelled by a little Deet, do you, well we will show you by injecting our venmon in three or seventeen delicate overlapping spots on the inside of your left pinky, so that later, while your family is enjoying a lovely hike and laughing at something actually funny you will be scouring the landscape for any object spiky and sharp enough to remove the entirety of your finger while simultaneously pondering where you will obtain a bucket of ice and calculating the distance to the nearest hospital so your finger can be reattached as soon as the nice doctors remove the itch juice from it and give you a birthing mother’s or maybe an addict’s dose of fentanyl so you can recover and forget about this whole itch incident and have fond memories of the otherwise lovely itchless vacation. And this moment. This otherwise perfect, beautiful moment. Alone. Just you and wild. Ok, you and one guy who got up early to take a picture of the waterfall you’re also walking towards. But mostly, just you. When you’re happiest. Alone. But amongst everything. The rapids. The sky. Memories of the stars. Everything.

The sounds of raging river rush in the distance, somewhere beyond the brush. You’ve been told bears and mountain lions don’t inhabit this park, but you are weary. You were also told the Deet would give you cancer but keep the mosquitos at bay. Well, your inner thigh is inflamed as much as your left and now right pinky, and you don’t trust much of anyone anymore, which really hasn’t changed anything since you never trusted anyone since ever or at least since you can remember. Like waterfalls and rivers, people are shifty. Everything seems the same as it goes from one spot to the next, but it never is. The wind or a rock or sand as it dominos from rushing water makes it all different. Always different.

It is precisely 6:30 in the morning and for a person who is precisely never precise that is precisely perfect for pondering pinky predators and the persistence of psychopathy amongst particular and in particular people particularly. Humans. Particular humans. Particular peculiarities like how psychiatrists and psychologists, and psychics even, spend their whole lives convincing us that there is some sort of normal we ought to be. Happy.

As if an existence where the only inevitable is death of ourselves and our loved ones, and the best possible outcome is dying “peacefully” in our sleep, ought to translate to the status quo of our state to be — happy? Sure, we have it better than most, for those of us who do, and there are plenty of joyous and wonderful things in life to enjoy and celebrate and love and cherish, like a four year old refusing to eat mashed potatoes and jam and applesauce, not together, or the moment after you itch three overlapping bug bites so vigorously that while your pinky does actually not fall off it does offer a sensation that is much like the intense moment before an orgasm when everything inside you burns and tingles and rushes through you and pain and everything else shifts like a river or waterfall into a new formation that only you know about. Perhaps mosquitos, and the things that hurt us most, exist to remind us how to feel something, good bad or otherwise, and that’s important. Too easy to feel numb. Which is maybe not a bad way of existing, but why bother then. Trees seem to exist that way and they are fine, but they also, as far as we know, have no knowledge of death, and even if they did it would be so far out in the future they wouldn’t need to worry much about it. Sure, they might be cut down and used as someone’s dining table, but would they even notice? I sure as hell would notice if someone decided to cut me down and use me as their dining table. Though, perhaps I would be happier with that outcome. Being useful is the closest thing to happiness that I’ve felt in a long time. These mosquitos find me useful. Need me, even. Something about my blood in particular. It’s nice to feel needed. Not so nice to feel welts of histamine reactions forming on my forehead and toe and ankle and another on my thigh and somehow a forth on my left pinky. Same spot.

Pills to make us happy. Normal. Numb. A whole damn industry. Mosquito repellent. Marketing. Marketers. Mosquitos won’t stop. They can’t. It’s in their blood. And mine. They can’t stop drinking my blood and I can’t stop them from making me their meal, no matter how much Off I spray on my limbs and the parts pushing out from them or the layers upon layers I wear to protect all the pale pink underneath. They will find their way into my even pinker sweatpants and feast on my pasty pastry-to-them pink pink pink thighs and other pink matters. The rivers can’t stop changing changing. I don’t know about pills. Or people being happy. Or not being psychopaths. Sociopaths anyway. Maybe the lucky few who don’t have a running inner monologue. I read they exist. How? Well, they might actually be happy. Some kind of accidental Buddhists. Just existing. Is that really a thing? Or maybe dementia, considered a horror, is actually the best way of being human. I don’t know. If all the good, bad, or otherwise could wipe away so that you only knew the moment, as long as you forgot you were forgetting fast enough you would forget it and find other fascinations to fixate on, wouldn’t that be best? Or, is it all better when you feel the tingle that burns and draws all of your attention to your now-bleeding inner thigh that has sustained more injury than your previously thrice-bitten pinky due to your vigorous scratching of it through your sweatpants that clearly offer no protection from you or the mosquitoes despite being fucking sweatpants? Well.

That’s all anything we feel is. Isn’t it. A little pinch. Some reaction. The itch after. The memory of it. Painful and/or pleasant. Some secret desire for turbulence on a cross-pacific flight to break up the monotony. To make your heart race. To wonder, is this it? No. Of course not. Life goes on. Usually. And if it doesn’t then you wouldn’t have much time to ponder that, though longer than you would if you died peacefully in your sleep.

But you don’t really want the plane to fall from the sky as you pray for the first time in your life since childhood at least for real and hope that something might save you even though you know you can’t control your fate and no God can cease the end of your existence however it may happen it will happen. Unless you were to end it yourself. Which some people do. Understandably so. But it’s better to be bitten by mosquitos and ponder the ways you might cut off and reattach your left pinky and at this point also your left leg and perhaps the top-right quadrant of your forehead. All coming off. Right now. To feel. That itch. You could have locked yourself in a safe room and waited. Isn’t that life. Waiting. Morning and night and winter and summer happen. Everything just happens. It’s not bad or good or otherwise. It just is. Sometimes things are funny. Actually they often are. Always. What isn’t funny? Humor is when things seem one way but actually are another and you laugh the moment you recognize the contradiction. Life is a big joke. The more you exist the more comedic it becomes. Tragedy is a given. Comedy is a mindset. But really it’s one in the same.

The mosquitos know this best.

Maybe they are happy. The dullest and simplest of us have the best chance of finding some kind of sustainable bliss. Unaware of all the things internal and external marching us and the world to exctinction, and all the subtle and not so subtle deviant deviations along the way. Blind trust that things will work out the way they ought to and everyone except the corner-case criminal or corrupt capitalist is in it with the best intention. All the blood is yours for the taking and those being bled won’t mind or notice. That’s the non corrupt and/or criminals, should you not be following. The bugs. Simple bugs. No idea they will leave you with self-imposed wounds due to a copywriters under-paid and over-promising. To believe or not to believe. Care or not to care. Flow in and out of it all like a river so you somehow know you are a river and yet also think maybe you’ve never been a river maybe you are actually a mirage of one in a dessert where everyone is laughing at you or with you or no one actually notices you. Does it matter anyway. No. But you aren’t a bug. You are a person. A person with an insatiable inner monologue and a lack of ability to believe in some superpower that makes things good or bad or otherwise. So, you suffer. That’s comedy.

So too is how lonely we can be in a world chalk full of people. The mosquitos aren’t lonely. They seem just fine on their own. In it for themselves. Competing for every drop of blood. Luckily there is enough to go around. But for us humans there isn’t. Or at least most don’t want to share. Everyone is out for blood. For their blood. And/or etc. Passing on our life after our life ceases. For what? I don’t know. Our biology drives us and we don’t have much choice or do we. Choice to believe and just go with the flow and trust there will always be blood to suck when we need it and no one will mind the itch, we aren’t even actually aware of the repercussions of whatever it is we’ve done. We move on to the next piece of flesh. Perhaps going back to the first if it happens to be available and we are ravenous and thirsty. It doesn’t matter. Nothing does. Despite it all seeming like it does, more than anything. That’s comedy. Life. It all is.

Sleep somehow becomes the best part of living at some point. Maybe it always was. Thoughts spin for a bit. I don’t count sheep despite trying to make it a habit. But eventually spinning thoughts and thinking of sex and sex and sex my thoughts spin themselves to sleep. Everything goes dark. Dreams happen, I assume. I don’t remember them usually. Sometimes I do. Always running away from something or saving someone or being saved. I never remember the good parts. But I feel. I think. I think there were good parts. Sometimes.

It’s too easy to forget that life too.

I try hard to hold onto the moments I want to remember but they fade as quickly as the others. Not just moments but people. Those so close to us that for a while we aren’t sure where we start and end as two distinct individuals. Fucking mobius strips of connectivity. Mornings, some mornings, waking up and studying a face and knowing it so well and at night going to sleep with our eyes closing on a dimple or freckle or tilt of lip that isn’t ours, and studying it so precisely that if a forensic artist were to ask us to detail every milimeter we could easily detail the geography of each pore with such accuracy the outcome of the sketch would be a beyond photorealistic. And yet a year or two or ten go by and those memories and people fade too. It’s hard when you don’t want them too. A gift when you do. Better to be able to forget than to remember everything. Everyone. The happiest do the best job of forgetting. The past lives in a cemetery visited on anniversaries annually for a while until you forget about that too. Inevitably something reminds even the simplest of us of lost friends and lovers — an actor on television baking a pizza pie, a whiff of a particular cheap cologne or perfume that would be nauseating if not for its nose-talgic nostalgia, the way the sun and everything else below it above the horizon reflects off a lake, a hotel room with a chair nearly identical to one you christened with a close friend who became closer so close so fucking close that one night (or was it morning?), a form of a stranger walking away from you with a particular swagger that you know them so well, and yet you don’t, you never did, but you did, and all of the sudden all the memories and smells and tastes and smiles and pores come rushing back flooding you with memories you wish you never had but you are also so glad you had them. That’s comedy.

It’s also quite comedic that for a girl (well into the age checkout clerks refer to her as “ma’am” — have a nice day ma’am! can I help you ma’am — but still defiantly and definitely referring to herself as a “girl” and expecting she is still not a day over 20) who seems to constantly be debating one decision or idea or another, such as if she ought to stop referring to herself as a girl, she really has no idea what she wants in life other than everything and nothing at all. She feels duped by all the Disney films and romantic comedies and pornographies secretly downloaded throughout adolescence from shady characters asking A/S/L in IRC chat rooms and on random websites that made her promise she was over 18 which she did with despite being actually 14 at most — that informed her of how love and lust should be, and made her crave all of it with such immense hunger that she was afraid of herself. Afraid more, perhaps, of actually getting what she wanted beyond how much she wanted it. The mosquitos never question these things. They just take what they want and move on.

It is remarkable how slow life goes until it speeds up and is nearly gone. The greatest joke of all. As is learning that no matter how much you want something, if it doesn’t exist it can’t magically appear. Life provides two paths, with infinite variations, but the paths are one, security and stability and what we know repeated in some fashion, or two, something unknown that every turn leaves you unsure of your footing and wondering where you are. We always choose the wrong one because there is no right one. Or maybe it’s the right one because, well, I know you follow. You’ve gotten this far. But you and I know it doesn’t matter in the end.