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beccatoriaSo, being at a slight loss for what to do, being far too full of malted soy bean milk, and being generally shameless as this is my blog and dammit, whereelse can I be shameless? I figure I might as well post this.
My reasons being a) if I keep posting bits of writing and then, 24 hours later, cringing about what I've unleashed onto the internet, it may keep me focussed on finishing and improving my stuff, and b) why the hell not?
The most beautiful thing I ever saw was on television. The most beautiful thing I ever saw was on a beach, but it was thousands of miles away and years ago, so I saw it in my living room, on the TV screen. It was a whale, and it was dying.
All around it were people. And what I mean when I say people is the same thing I mean when I say cats, or birds, or bugs. Next to this twenty meter long whale they were just a mass of critters running around with buckets - neon plastic buckets like you use to make sand castles - slapping water against its blue-grey skin. This beached creature, half on its side, mouth half open, teeth as big as my head, half alive.
If it had been something smaller, I wouldn't remember it this way. If it was a gorilla or a dog, I would remember a bunch of persons. After an oil-slick, I remember a white-haired man and a skinny girl combing black gunk out of a seagull's feathers. The people, they get descriptors, the bird is just a bird. It takes a hell of a lot to break out of that face-centric view, to notice the whale and not the human, to make yourself small and insignificant and crushable. We build so many barriers, until we think we're apart from it, the world. It's only when tornados hit and whales beach that you start to see how ludicrous the illusion is. That we're any safer or smarter than anything else.
This whale was smart. He understood, even though we're about similar as wood and salami when it comes to ways of thinking. At first, maybe he was scared; had heard stories about the way we hunt. In the end, though, he must have known we were trying to help him. Not for any reason, just so he wouldn't die.
The one time I've seen humans as a species, we weren't screwing things up. Maybe all we need is something larger than us, something frightening, something too big to understand. We forget to run around putting everything back into drawers.
The whale died. It was crushed by its own weight. And we ran around like idiots with a plan that was never going to work. We ran around like small, overwhelmed idiots, and I think the whale knew.
There's this pressure, to be better than everything else because once we invented fire. But here, we were weightless, like a whale in the ocean.
Like I was, for a while, when I dreamt I was a river and not a girl.
It's the feeling I try to find, as I leave the house. My mother, still as ice, holding out a bowl of cereal. Toby, the tiniest gap between his lips, as he watches me back through the kitchen door.
Out on the tarmac of our driveway, I start to run. I try to be the river, not the debris in it. To know where I'm going instead of getting washed-up someplace along the way. Where I end up beached is, the truck.
*
The second time I went to visit my grandparents I was thirteen. I went with my dad, in a rusted green automobile that broke down once on the freeway, once at a gas station and once four miles of dusty track from the ranch. I rolled down every single window in the car and sat diagonal, with my feet hanging over the passenger door. My mom was on the front porch, looking thin as her cigarette, her cheeks hollowed from sucking in smoke and all the things she wasn't going to say. One of those things being, "Good luck and come back soon."
"Don't hang your legs out of the car, baby," was the last thing she said to me, as we pulled away.
"Don't hang your legs out of the car, baby," my dad echoed as we rounded the corner at the end of our block.
I hung my legs out of the car across the borders of two states, and when we broke down that last time, I climbed through the window space instead of opening the door.
Dad said, "It's not far from here, baby, come on." He kissed my head, and I said not a word, and we stumped off into the dusty dusk. At this point I barely came up to his shoulder. I could have still been ten. Everyone was growing except me. Walking up the track, getting dirt stuck to the soles of my feet, under this endless expanse of sky, I might actually have been shrinking.
"Put your shoes on, Jeannie."
I didn't.
"Put your shoes on, Jeannie. What will your grandparents think?"
"That I'm a good for nothing, dragged-up, filthy little beggar."
"You're not helping, sweetheart."
"They'll never like how we look, Dad. I don't see why we're here."
He didn't answer.
I said, "I'd kill for a cigarette."
He said, "Liar. And your mother's quitting. Soon as we get back."
I said, "*They* don't know that."
"Baby, they don't hate her."
I pulled out this really long stem of grass from the roadside, tried to stretch it between my thumbs, play it like a reed. When it split, I dropped it and said, "You're wrong."
Dad looked at me.
"About the cigarettes. She'll never quit."
*
The second time I left my grandparents' house, I left in the truck. It was parked up near one of the cowsheds. Five years earlier it was the cattle that stampeded there.
Two years later it ocurred to me, maybe my father was the one who hit first. I heard the crashing in the kitchen, saw him come out with a split lip. My grandmother's hands on my shoulders; I could feel the fear in them, the fingertips fluttering like her heart. It failed the next year. I never quite got over the feeling that I broke it when I pulled free and went running out of the house, after my father, towards the cowshed where the animals would never settle. Spooked, Grandpa said, because they could smell history.
The truck was reddish, but that might have been the caked-on mud. It had a flatbed and two seats in the cab and an AM radio that looked like an electrical hazard. When my father bundled me into the shotgun seat, the keys were already in the ignition. This shuddering, metallic accident waiting to be driven cross-country to the furthest part of the ranch, or get revved up to all hell by a farmhand in an impromptu derby.
I hung my legs out the window, pressed the ball of my foot against the wing mirror like a stirrup, feeling like a cowboy.
My grandfather stayed in the house. My grandmother was stood on the front stoop. Dad slowed down a fraction. "Jeanette," she said. "Darling, at least put your seatbelt on."
"She can sit anyway she goddamned wants," my father yelled. His foot hit the accelerator and everything behind us was hidden by the dustcloud.
I felt righteous. Powerful. It was like playing hookie from school or lying about my homework, like we beat the system, me and my dad. It was when I turned to look at him, and saw the blood streaking down his chin and staining his shirt-collar, that I realised if I asked myself why we'd come here, I'd have no answers. The light was slanted at us through the driver's window. My father was silhouetted against the emptiness of the plains. Before it dried up and crusted black, the blood reflected ruby in the sun. It was like my mother's favourite pair of earrings, it was like a dying coal.
"Why did we come here?" I asked. What I meant was, why do you keep coming back? Or maybe, why did you bring me this time?
"I thought," he started.
I thought of all the ways he could end that sentence. I couldn't think of a single one that would mean a damn.
Toodles.
My reasons being a) if I keep posting bits of writing and then, 24 hours later, cringing about what I've unleashed onto the internet, it may keep me focussed on finishing and improving my stuff, and b) why the hell not?
The most beautiful thing I ever saw was on television. The most beautiful thing I ever saw was on a beach, but it was thousands of miles away and years ago, so I saw it in my living room, on the TV screen. It was a whale, and it was dying.
All around it were people. And what I mean when I say people is the same thing I mean when I say cats, or birds, or bugs. Next to this twenty meter long whale they were just a mass of critters running around with buckets - neon plastic buckets like you use to make sand castles - slapping water against its blue-grey skin. This beached creature, half on its side, mouth half open, teeth as big as my head, half alive.
If it had been something smaller, I wouldn't remember it this way. If it was a gorilla or a dog, I would remember a bunch of persons. After an oil-slick, I remember a white-haired man and a skinny girl combing black gunk out of a seagull's feathers. The people, they get descriptors, the bird is just a bird. It takes a hell of a lot to break out of that face-centric view, to notice the whale and not the human, to make yourself small and insignificant and crushable. We build so many barriers, until we think we're apart from it, the world. It's only when tornados hit and whales beach that you start to see how ludicrous the illusion is. That we're any safer or smarter than anything else.
This whale was smart. He understood, even though we're about similar as wood and salami when it comes to ways of thinking. At first, maybe he was scared; had heard stories about the way we hunt. In the end, though, he must have known we were trying to help him. Not for any reason, just so he wouldn't die.
The one time I've seen humans as a species, we weren't screwing things up. Maybe all we need is something larger than us, something frightening, something too big to understand. We forget to run around putting everything back into drawers.
The whale died. It was crushed by its own weight. And we ran around like idiots with a plan that was never going to work. We ran around like small, overwhelmed idiots, and I think the whale knew.
There's this pressure, to be better than everything else because once we invented fire. But here, we were weightless, like a whale in the ocean.
Like I was, for a while, when I dreamt I was a river and not a girl.
It's the feeling I try to find, as I leave the house. My mother, still as ice, holding out a bowl of cereal. Toby, the tiniest gap between his lips, as he watches me back through the kitchen door.
Out on the tarmac of our driveway, I start to run. I try to be the river, not the debris in it. To know where I'm going instead of getting washed-up someplace along the way. Where I end up beached is, the truck.
*
The second time I went to visit my grandparents I was thirteen. I went with my dad, in a rusted green automobile that broke down once on the freeway, once at a gas station and once four miles of dusty track from the ranch. I rolled down every single window in the car and sat diagonal, with my feet hanging over the passenger door. My mom was on the front porch, looking thin as her cigarette, her cheeks hollowed from sucking in smoke and all the things she wasn't going to say. One of those things being, "Good luck and come back soon."
"Don't hang your legs out of the car, baby," was the last thing she said to me, as we pulled away.
"Don't hang your legs out of the car, baby," my dad echoed as we rounded the corner at the end of our block.
I hung my legs out of the car across the borders of two states, and when we broke down that last time, I climbed through the window space instead of opening the door.
Dad said, "It's not far from here, baby, come on." He kissed my head, and I said not a word, and we stumped off into the dusty dusk. At this point I barely came up to his shoulder. I could have still been ten. Everyone was growing except me. Walking up the track, getting dirt stuck to the soles of my feet, under this endless expanse of sky, I might actually have been shrinking.
"Put your shoes on, Jeannie."
I didn't.
"Put your shoes on, Jeannie. What will your grandparents think?"
"That I'm a good for nothing, dragged-up, filthy little beggar."
"You're not helping, sweetheart."
"They'll never like how we look, Dad. I don't see why we're here."
He didn't answer.
I said, "I'd kill for a cigarette."
He said, "Liar. And your mother's quitting. Soon as we get back."
I said, "*They* don't know that."
"Baby, they don't hate her."
I pulled out this really long stem of grass from the roadside, tried to stretch it between my thumbs, play it like a reed. When it split, I dropped it and said, "You're wrong."
Dad looked at me.
"About the cigarettes. She'll never quit."
*
The second time I left my grandparents' house, I left in the truck. It was parked up near one of the cowsheds. Five years earlier it was the cattle that stampeded there.
Two years later it ocurred to me, maybe my father was the one who hit first. I heard the crashing in the kitchen, saw him come out with a split lip. My grandmother's hands on my shoulders; I could feel the fear in them, the fingertips fluttering like her heart. It failed the next year. I never quite got over the feeling that I broke it when I pulled free and went running out of the house, after my father, towards the cowshed where the animals would never settle. Spooked, Grandpa said, because they could smell history.
The truck was reddish, but that might have been the caked-on mud. It had a flatbed and two seats in the cab and an AM radio that looked like an electrical hazard. When my father bundled me into the shotgun seat, the keys were already in the ignition. This shuddering, metallic accident waiting to be driven cross-country to the furthest part of the ranch, or get revved up to all hell by a farmhand in an impromptu derby.
I hung my legs out the window, pressed the ball of my foot against the wing mirror like a stirrup, feeling like a cowboy.
My grandfather stayed in the house. My grandmother was stood on the front stoop. Dad slowed down a fraction. "Jeanette," she said. "Darling, at least put your seatbelt on."
"She can sit anyway she goddamned wants," my father yelled. His foot hit the accelerator and everything behind us was hidden by the dustcloud.
I felt righteous. Powerful. It was like playing hookie from school or lying about my homework, like we beat the system, me and my dad. It was when I turned to look at him, and saw the blood streaking down his chin and staining his shirt-collar, that I realised if I asked myself why we'd come here, I'd have no answers. The light was slanted at us through the driver's window. My father was silhouetted against the emptiness of the plains. Before it dried up and crusted black, the blood reflected ruby in the sun. It was like my mother's favourite pair of earrings, it was like a dying coal.
"Why did we come here?" I asked. What I meant was, why do you keep coming back? Or maybe, why did you bring me this time?
"I thought," he started.
I thought of all the ways he could end that sentence. I couldn't think of a single one that would mean a damn.
Toodles.
