Markers. Ants. Tectonics. X. & Pain. & Illness.

So thanks to the most excellent Guido and Melinda, we have a small film to be seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baVDhLuh0WI

I wrote the soundtrack, except for the high pitched warning feedback noise, which was part of the school’s attempt to use their warning system.

Arlene found out about Eric and Jean at the opening for the San Francisco Alternative Art League And Co-Operative Functions function where we all had to have our best foot forward because our funded lives depended on those fuckheads from the S.F.A.A.L.C.O.F who had to approve our designs and initiatives and concepts and actuality and reason for existing and so we were under a dungeon’s load of pressure and because Arlene was our star she went last with all of us gathered in the room that she shared with Eric that was too tiny for all of us to press into but she said that it was essential and we rolled our eyes but without her we’d have been out on the street because she was as high profile as a tree-sitter and so we pressed sweating into her room and she shut off the lights and turned on the ultra-violets she had borrowed from the San Francisco Police Department’s photography lab and there were these tracks glowing dots up the walls and over the ceilings and through the sheet and blankets of the twin bed she and Eric slept in and Arlene said that for weeks she had put a line of finely crushed vitamins at the edges of her room for the cockroaches to stumble through and track fluorescent paths criss-crossesed brilliant over and about and Arlene lifted her arm and on her own skin were the marks from the tiny feet and we all looked at Eric and he was lit too and as we followed the glittering paths we noticed Jean speckled trying to cover herself by crossing her arms over her chest but then Eric went to her and put his arms around her and Arlene sparked alone while Eric and Jean were matched as roads leaping creases on folded maps.

My cousin Pat and I used to ramble all around our part of the Mississippi backwoods on Honda three wheelers (until those were outlawed as vehicles inherently unsafe to drive).

One of the dirt roads we explored was very little used and went through acres of Weyerhaeuser timber land. Miles of pine trees on every side and a very rutted road and then, a tiny graveyard, which I think is the Montevista Cemetery.

My house is in the Fame Community, near Eupora, Mississippi, and when people would come and visit me, Mississippi people used to country living, they would often say, “Wow, you really do live out in the sticks don’t you?”

The graveyard where this stone stands is another order of middle of nowhere.

Especially once Weyerhaeuser logged the timber, because then it was a tiny graveyard surrounded by barren fields that looked for all the world as if the atomic bomb had been dropped, as the few remaining trees were flattened and pressed to the ground.

But what caught my eye on this stone was its inscription, which I doubt you can read from the photograph so I’ll reprint it:
“Children, prepare to meet me in Heaven.”

She was 23 years old. She had more than one child, judging by the “children” part, and I’m not quite sure how to take her final message.

Why would they need to prepare to meet their mother in Heaven? Why not:
“Children rejoice to meet me in Heaven.”
or
“Children, we’ll meet again in Heaven.”

Something about the way it’s phrased has me thinking:
“Children, get your act together, because when you meet me in Heaven, you’re going to wish you had stayed on Earth.”

Maybe there was a limit to the number of words she could have on her message, and she would have left a much longer message if she had the money, or maybe her husband had to choose it, and didn’t quite know what to say (although that’s even more disturbing, as a message from the father: “Children, prepare to meet your mother because I’m going home right now and whacking you all into bits with the wood axe.”

Or I’m making more of it than I should.

The most poignant aspect of the graveyard is the number of graves that are marked only with small pieces of sandstone.

I’ve done a bit of asking around to find out why this graveyard in this place, and from what I can gather, there used to be a church, or a small town, nearby. Now, there’s nothing but the graveyard.

Before Eric Arlene dated Bobby who had lost one grant after he burned his list but he was sure his eyes were changing color and got a new grant to document the hue shift so he built a special light balanced photo booth and used a calibrated digital camera made for medical and police work that dated and stamped and encrypted with anti-tamper algorithms the data so that he could prove the captured image of his iris was secure on the way to the color corrected computer monitors and printers run with pigmented ink bought all of one batch so as to be consistent from print to print to last for the entire year of pictures of his left eye-ball and it was all going better than the list had and was much quieter and Bobby had lots of free time to clean up around the warehouse and even learned to cook a few dishes not based on pasta and he found a gallery willing to house the prints so as he finished each one it went up with the proper lights voltage monitored and filtered and he had nearly three month’s worth of prints when he started vomiting blood and went to the doctor and learned that he was going to die and that’s when the arguments started between him and Arlene because he wanted to donate his eyes to her and have the left one placed in a fridge with a see through eye-ball sized door so that she could finish the series and then he could’ve completed at least one thing in his life and her screaming there are so many things wrong with that statement and he begged her and vomited and meanwhile kept up the pictures and I’d drop by the gallery on my way to the yogurt store and then Bobby died and was cremated with both of his eyes and the gallery hosted his wake where we didn’t look at the months of one eye but at all of the wall’s white space.

Bobby told me that while we were in school he knocked a girl up but where he found the time I don’t know because he was writing his list on his Royal manual typewriter one word carriage return another word carriage return pages of what Bobby referred to as related with what Bobby referred to as a happening with what Bobby referred to as a constant living goddamn performance always typing so you could only get him to take a break when he’d written eleven pages of ‘hungry’ so sure he was thin in those days but I’ve always had a thing for guys with jutting hip bones and it must’ve been that time I got pissed that he wouldn’t quit his list even after he’d learned about this Dennis guy in Chicago who’d been doing the same thing only with an Underwood and was already up to sixty thousand pages with no repeated words and so I’d suggested to Bobby that maybe the list had already been done and he got real pissy and I ended up for a week at Joan’s sleeping on her couch blissed without the constant clack of the typewriter and that must’ve been when he snuck off and nailed some whore and by the time I came back he had been burning his list for days videotaping the black smoke rising into the sky burning every page even though Bobby claimed his list was more honest than that Dennis’s list because of how Dennis’s list didn’t repeat and what kind of honest list didn’t repeat but Bobby’d been stuck on the word pan for nearly thirty pages and so I figured he was burning his list as a failure but maybe it was guilt or because he somehow knew that he was going to be a father and he didn’t want to be known as the second list guy.