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

from one of the Vickers’s old cabins, a colic compound for horses and mules, 90% alcohol, and Gordon’s gin.

Today I managed to get up the guts again to get on stage. This time I was helped by four other guys, who kindly offered to let me be in their group, even though the groups were at first limited to four.

Today’s exercise was, I’m given to understand, a classic improv exercise. Yes, it’s true, I’ve been living under a rock that didn’t allow comedy to penetrate. Then again, I guess nothing gets through a rock. Dang.

To wit:

We stood on the bare stage. Black stage. Black walls. A few odds and ends of flats, today painted black with silver streaks that were perhaps clouds or something.

The class, or audience, if you will, yelled out a word. Each person of the group was in charge of one word, for example, my word was ‘cannibalism,’ yelled out by my teacher.

I then launched into an explanation of cannibalism, how it didn’t exist, as we understood it, but rather, like many notions of other cultures, was a creation of some white 19th century English aristocrats, who, on one of their many trips into the jungle, got hungry, and were forced to eat one of their own. Rather than admit what they had done, they blamed it on the indigenous people’s of wherever they happened to be.

“It all happened so fast, it was uncanny! And poor Al, if only we had a convenient -ism we could hang this on. Wait, Canny, AL, ism? Cannibalism. It’s perfect! And the name is sort of a tribute to our dear departed tasty friend Al.”

I wasn’t nearly so articulate when talking.

After I rambled about cannibalism for a while, I stood back, at which point, someone yelled, SCENE! and we had to do a scene with cannibalism as its source. Or some part of what I had said during my rambling as its source.

Due to the genius of my cohorts, I survived, and I think there was even some laughter out there, but the experience is so frightening on one level, and then in addition to do well it seems it’s best to have a blank mind, that I remember little of what happened while on stage.

I do remember pretending to use a dart gun to blow darts at my other stage partners.

Which turned out to be filled with sugar. Which meant that one person was even better to eat, except that person had diabetes.

During our time on stage we also dealt with the origins of gargling. Walruses, and had to deal with the word shenanigans. Which is a pain of a word for improv. Believe you me.

***

Which all brings me to the word of the day, also props out to David for talking to me while I mumbled this word into existence: sufferment.

(Of course, it’s already a word, but at the time, I didn’t know that.)

As in, the act of suffering, only more immediate.

And for some reason, a bit Southern in its reach.

“Oh Lord, that child is such a sufferment to me in my old age, whatever shall I do?”

Then we talked about peppermints, and David mentioned how he had always wondered about saltymints, and then I decided that the word of the day could also be a category of mints, suffer-mints. Suffermints?

“You look like a happy chap, care for a suffermint?”
“Why yes, I was feeling pretty good there for a minute.”
“Well, we can’t have that, can we?”
All laugh.

And there was a suggestion of sacra-mints.

The line of mints is endless.

By the time I arrived at Uncle Stephen’s it was clear that grandmother’s concerns about him burning down the back-forty were not going to come true.

He sat by his fire and burning at its center was the last of a hollow tree he had cut down.

I had seen the tree as a row of cut pieces behind his house for my entire life.

Now, the last piece burned.

“Pull up a seat,” Uncle Stephen said, and pointed at one of his cracking lawn chairs.

The remaining section of tree contained the fire and its center was bright red, the heat burning my face.

When I scooted the chair away from the fire, its legs grooved the soft ground. Grandmother’s concern about Uncle Stephen setting the property alight was needless, as it had been drizzling all day.

The misty rain fell down and met the rising smoke.

I sat down.

Uncle Stephen flipped opened the cooler, and inside, beside the usual cokes, was a bag of ice and a bottle of Jack Daniels. I took a coke.

We watched the fire.

Twilight crept on, the fire cooking our fronts, the night cooling our backs, and depending on the direction of the wind, the rain dampening our clothes, which then dried in the heat from the blaze.

Uncle Stephen had been told by his radiologist that he was dying. His neurosurgeon said the opposite.
The second opinion had had no helpful opinion.
The third opinion had had no helpful opinion.
Uncle Stephen was back to the first two, and was spending his days wondering.

I had never seen Uncle Stephen drink before, but he was using the same jelly jar he used for his cokes.
The rain fell on us, and we drank.

The fire popped, and in turn, that sound was broken by the drag of ice cubes against Uncle Stephen’s glass.

“Did you bring them?” Uncle Stephen said.

From my backpack, I pulled out the box of envelopes. One corner of the box had been repaired with masking tape.

The tape cracked off the box, but it left its stickiness behind. I thought, if I were Uncle Stephen, I would know what to do with that information, how the tape, the repairing agent, is gone, useless, but the failed attempt of the repair, the nasty stickiness, remains.

“You ready?” Uncle Stephen said.

“No,” I said.

He shook his glass, and made himself another drink. The moon had risen. Grandmother would be worried. She would be wondering whether or not to call the fire department.

“What you said about unconditional love,” I said.

Uncle Stephen leaned back into his chair and stuck his legs out in front of himself.

His legs steamed in the heat.

He gestured up into the smoke.

“You can see the moon reflected in the smoke, as the smoke passes through the tree branches,” Uncle Stephen said.

I followed the smoke as it wound through the branches, and saw the moon, as if the smoke were a screen.

I watched the moon on thickened air.

“In that unconditional love, you’re doing all the sacrificing,” I said. I held the sides of box. I had been thinking about this all night.

At school my her and her boy were no longer sitting together at lunch. But that was all I knew. Maybe all I wanted to know.

Uncle Stephen picked up a stick and dragged it across the ground, manipulating one leaf into the fire.

“You’re not thinking it through,” Uncle Stephen said.

Of all the common ways he chided me, that one bugged me the most.

“Let’s say, one day while I’m away from home, she reads through my journals. These journals she knows are private. The past, whatever, it doesn’t matter, but she’s looking for something.” Uncle Stephen said.

I thought of computers. E-mail. No e-mail when Uncle Stephen was dating. Of what it would mean to read someone’s journal. The opening of a book. Handwriting. It seemed like everyone I knew had poked around in their person’s e-mails. Their Facebook sites, the mySpaces, the blogs. Searching for what? Is it OK to break trust to find broken trust? Is there a way to glue it all back together?

“Do I not love her because she broke my trust?” Uncle Stephen said.

“That would be fair,” I said.

“Honesty. Fairness,” Uncle Stephen said, “Great ideas.”

“If you forgave her,” I said, “then you’re doing the sacrificing and she still dumps you for whatever reason?”

“Slow down,” Uncle Stephen said.

“If I love her unconditionally, then that means I have to forgive her, true, but if she were loving me the same way, then she would forgive me. Whether for the same faults or different ones, it wouldn’t matter.”

“Everybody sacrifices?” I said.

Uncle Stephen nodded towards the box.

“Yeah,” Uncle Stephen said, “throw them in.”

I looked down at the box of envelopes, and then at the fire that was the heat of an entire tree. While I had been studying the constitution, Uncle Stephen had been out in the rain, rolling the logs into the fire.

Burning.

Uncle Stephen had told me to bring them, and I had known what he was going to do. Or ask me to do. Maybe he couldn’t do it alone.
One unknown on an M.R.I. One bright spot in the smoky heaven of his brain.

I thought I might screw it up, one of the few direct things that Uncle Stephen had ever asked of me, but no, I tossed the box and it landed in the center of the flames, and then it was burning.

We both followed a few of the ashes as they sailed into the tree, their edges searing red against the night sky. But they all faded before they had gone far. And the pieces were dime sized. We weren’t going to set the world on fire.

“She didn’t love you,” I said.

“Shit,” Uncle Stephen said, “of course she did.”

“How do you know?” I said, “if she wouldn’t look past, whatever.”

Uncle Stephen drained his jelly jar.

“There were a lot of whatevers,” Uncle Stephen said, “and besides, she told me she loved me.”

“She told you?” I said.

“Yes.”

“And you believed her because you loved her unconditionally, so you had to trust her,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Damn.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Uncle Stephen said.

Then he changed the subject, and I let him.

On the way home, I thought of what it means to lie. How I had never lied to him before, as far as I knew.

Maybe he had been done with the letters, but I wasn’t. I had kept the rest of the I Miss You letters, filling the original box with a set of grandmother’s old tax returns stuffed into her envelopes.

I hoped that whatever had prompted him to give them to me in the first place, justified me, somehow.

I hoped that he was able to watch the ashes rise and feel some weight lift from him.

A weight wrapped in one of my old T-shirts and now hidden under my bed.

Each one of his letters to her a secret, now, of mine.

Between Uncle Stephen and myself. And whoever she was. Or had been.
Pages after pages of omissions. And secrets.

I couldn’t bare to destroy anything of his, even something that wasn’t for me, and by her rights, perhaps I should not have seen.

Who owns the words, once the letter is sealed?

The dot had gotten to me too, its shining where there should be no mark, where light was never meant to be.

OK.

This file is sort of large, even as an .mp3, it’s around 3mb, so only click if you’re prepared for that sort of commitment.

Whether or not this one is really done, I’m moving on. Well, the whole class is moving on, and I figure I better follow. I think my next project will be amplified spaces. The empty spaces, their digital hiss, amplified and then filtered/altered/layered.

Something.

Click for the February 2008 Mix of Bounces and Feeds.

Oh, and warning, it starts out quietly, so don’t turn it up. Use Kwoya’s first “bounces and feeds” as a volume reference.

I was going to sleep.

Had closed my eyes, thinking of nothing but school-work, some math problem, some something that was so not her when I heard her voice calling my name and I was awake and she wasn’t there and my heart was pounding.

I felt under the bed for the box and pulled it out.

In the darkness, I opened the box, feeling the way the cardboard had softened over the years.

I was putting the letters back as I opened them, so I felt along the opened edges, the torn ones, for the first one unopened.

Then I pulled it from the box and lay on my back, the envelope pressed to my chest.

It was no use. I turned on the light.

Envelope number 4.

I ripped. I even tore the paper inside.

Today I found a doodle. A short sweetness we shared.
Or that you left for me to discover in love
found instead in loss.

I sat up. Pulled on my pants and shoes and coat. It was past ten.

On the way out of the house I grabbed my fuzzy hat.

Then I was out, walking head down, pushing my feet so that each breath hit me as I moved.

“Bull-shit,” I said. Then I said it again. Each foot step.

Bull. Step. Shit. Step.

I jammed my hands into my pockets. I wished I had put on a shirt.

By the time I got to Uncle Stephen’s I was out of breath.

I was raising my hand to knock when he spoke, and I thought I was going to die, he frightened me so much my breath stopped and the ocean sounded in my ears.

“Bull shit?” Uncle Stephen said.

He was on his porch in the shadow cast by the moon.

“Jesus Christ.” I said.

He was sitting with his legs curled up. Wearing his own fuzzy hat. An almost twin to mine. But no coat. His arms were pale in the moonlight, and his feet were bare.

When I had caught my breath, I said, “Aren’t you cold?”

“Sure,” Uncle Stephen said.

He pointed up at the stars.

And as always at his house on clear nights, the stars were stinging in their brightness. Pin pricks by the acupuncture of God, Uncle Stephen had once said.

“Bull shit?” Uncle Stephen said.

I sat down.

“Did you love her?” I said.

“Unconditionally,” Uncle Stephen said.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“I loved her as I found her. No more. No less. Everything,” Uncle Stephen said.

“And she loved you?” I said.

“Sure,” Uncle Stephen said.

“Unconditionally?” I said.

“No,” Uncle Stephen said, “She needed me to be things I wasn’t.”

“Like what?”

“Pick a thing. Any thing. Something more than this sick man on his porch at night.”

“You loved her, even though she didn’t love all of you?”

“Yes.”

“She left because you couldn’t change those things?”

“Yes.”

“You wouldn’t have changed her, so that she accepted you as you are?”

“Then, she wouldn’t have been the person I loved,” Uncle Stephen said.

“You loved even the parts of her that forced her to leave you.”

“That’s the unconditional part.” Uncle Stephen said.

“But she didn’t love you unconditionally,” I said.

“That wasn’t her way of loving,” Uncle Stephen said, “You can’t help who you love, it seems, no matter how right or wrong, and you don’t have to accept every love.”

“But you would’ve accepted her?” I said.

“Now we’re in circles, but yes, that’s what unconditional means,” Uncle Stephen said.

“It’s all bull-shit,” I said.

“Sit down,” Uncle Stephen said. Despite the fact that his ribs were showing through his thin T-shirt, and his pale arms prickled with the cold, his voice still had the edge. I sat down.

He waived at the sky bristling above us.

“Stars,” Uncle Stephen said, “she was like them. A brilliant thing. Of life. Our small joke was that she was a kite too, a star on a string.”

“Look at them all,” Uncle Stephen said. And the same edge was there but even without the command I was searching the stars, imagining him with that string of what? Fire? Electricity? What knot do you use on a star?

“Are they bull-shit?” Uncle Stephen said.

I shook my head. Was I up there? Or down here? Was my her up there? Did I love her?

“We all love the way we love,” Uncle Stephen said, “that’s the way it goes.”

“What happens to the string?” I said.

From my her to me.

From Uncle Stephen’s her to him.

The line an atom thick but so strong as to break time and curve space all the while burning and surviving the burning to mark us. All.
Cross our hearts and hope to die.

“That,” Uncle Stephen said, “is the question, isn’t it?”

Rich parents are using the same technology Hollywood uses to map star’s faces to computer generated personalities, or avatars, to create characters in the latest killer application of 3-d technology: computerized parenting that sounds (and now looks) just like the actual parent.

Many times, a babysitter will be faced with a spoiled brat who uses the argument of, “My mother never makes me go to bed at nine” at which point the exasperated babysitter is forced to allow the child to say up late and eat far too many chips in a can.

No longer. !

Now, with the flick of a mouse, the babysitter can call up the image of the mother saying, “No!” or any of several thousand other negative expressions, such as, “It’s no wonder you don’t have any friends!” and my favorite, “Drop Dead!”

Of course, the father is still the stricter of the two parents, rarely seen on screen and instead hinted at by the mother, “Wait until your father gets back from Sudan where he’s making very important oil deals!”

The father is scanned mainly as entertainment for the babysitter, who is attracted to older men, and will, of course, eventually replace the mother in real and artificial life.

That’s why soon, we’ll all be scanned at key moments in our lives, so that our personal avatars can be given as gifts or curses or hostages to each other.

Been dumped by some lousy guy?

Use the latest hack!

“Hey Jenny, wanna see my ex beat the crap out of himself?”

We All Can’t Wait.