Hermetically Sealed

I was standing at the back windows today at work waiting on the microwave to finish blasting my dish of noodles and sauce into a crispy oblivion when I noticed for the first time a sweet little patch of trees that is standing almost dead-center in a field behind my workplace.

They were the kind of trees where I imagined I could take long lunches on a blanket brought from home, idly sipping tea in a thermos and turning the pages of a witty novel. Or maybe this is where I would steel my back against scratchy bark and sketch out the remainig two seasons of a “Girl for all seasons” set of paintings Im thinking up. Or maybe I would cross my legs all zen-like and open my hands to the wind, meditating on someting beautiful.

I had pressed my forehead against the glass before I even realized it and left a little rounded spot full of makeup.  I have the exact tree already picked out and I know just the blanket to bring. I wonder if I will do what I have done so many other times when I have felt the pull of solace within the self and instead of diving in, will find someone to talk to over a greasy lunch table or remember a call to a utility company that I need to make. It’s funny how the pull is so strong and yet so weak. Or perhaps my pushback has a force of its own.

The trees call. Something creative looms. She will either drop a nugget on me from those branches like a pile of bird shit or she will send me into a nap where I will dream up the most wonderful things. Either way, the makeup spot was my first pilgrimmage. Tomorrow, the sidewalk.

* thin polka-dot nightgown

* Aztec Fire herbal tea

* huge teacup with “Virgoe” misspelling

* hair in bun

* achy knees

* content

I was in a wreck Saturday night with a dear friend of mine. It was a small one and luckily, nobody was hurt.

We had been out shopping for most of the day and were on our way down Maumelle Blvd when something that looked like a cat crept out into the road. It was about a foot long and appeared to have a rather long tail that was crooked high into the air.  We were traveling at about 45 when my friend, who was driving, saw it and she slowed down to try to avoid hitting it.

It’s true what they say about car accidents. About how you hear the screech of the tires before the crunch of metal and glass shattering and how the body doesn’t have time to react to what will surely be something that will break bones or stretch tendons into ugly lengths. There is not time. Just the screeching and then the crunch. Just the hard, fast forward motion and a hard thunderclap of stop.

When we slowed, a woman behind us who was apparently speeding and following too close slammed on her brakes before crashing into us. There was no time for her either, just the screech and then the crash. I wonder if she closed her eyes before the impact. I did.

When we pulled off the road to assess the damage, my friend jumped out of the truck and ran ahead to see if the woman was ok. I sat in shock for probably a full three or four minutes before I moved. When I finally found the strength to move, I opened the door and rolled out into the street, barely catching my own weight on two jelly legs. I looked to the back of  the truck and saw a rogue piece of glass laying gently on the bumper. I was afraid to walk all the way to the back and see what else had broken.

The woman was shrieking. There was a child in the back seat. I wasnt bleeding. The cops were coming.

It was all just flashes at that point. My friend walking back to the truck to look for papers. The blue lights of the cop car. My dress flapping in the heated breeze.

I stumbled to the back of the truck and surveyed the damage. It was surprisingly little for how hard the impact had been. Just at that time, the cop came by with a ticket book and I happened to spy out of the corner of my eye a moving object in the grass. It wasnt a cat whose life we had spared by almost killing ourselves and 2 other people, but a GIANT loggerhead snapping turtle. The motherfucker had the NERVE to walk its ass to our side of the road and was now happily observing the carnage from the safety of a lush grassy knoll. Bastard.

I imagined it laughing maniacally as it watched the humans scramble back and forth over papers and blue lights. I plotted his death when the sky all of the sudden opened up and spewed forth a guffaw of the fattest rain I have ever seen to date. We stood there for a moment, eye to eye, and I mouthed an acidic “fuck you” to it before returning to the safety of the truck.

We didnt get a ticket but we drove away in relative silence, still shaken from what could have happened. It’s strange how the “might have happened” moments will lay on your shoulder like a wet blanket, whispering in your ear ever so sweetly but with pure evil “You were almost road pizza, mother fucker.”

Im a little stiff and sore today but pretty thankful that I am not in a hospital recovering from something terrible. My friend had a good attitude about her truck and just said “It can be fixed”. The other lady was driving a car that was 3-weeks old and still had the paper tags and took the brunt of the impact, crashing in the entire front left quarter-panel and destroying the hood, front bumper, and light assembly.

It’s good to have a reminder about wearing seatbelts (we were) and idiots who will ride your ass even if they are carrying their own children (unrestrained) with them. I’m glad its over.

I was sitting here at work this morning at my very corporate job at my very coroporate desk and was thinking about hearing the creepy “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by 80′s hairband “Warrant” on the way in this morning. I then heard an old favorite that has it’s own creep-factor: “Hysteria” by Def Leppard followed by Faith No More’s “Epic”.

So now I have busted out my iPod and searched for all-things-80′s and have discovered, much to my chagrin, that there isn’t one single song by Def Leppard on my iPod! Blasphemy!

I settled for a “Power Ballads Goldvol. 1″ (Janie Lane would roll over in his….well, he’s not dead yet but you get the picture) and am now happily jamming away to “Love Hurts” by Nazareth.

Im thinking about being in Junior High the year that Sebastian Bach tornadoed through the radio with his banshee-like wails and wild hair slashing paths in the air over the microphone. The way Axl Rose broke out his badass bandanas and snake-danced his way across the stage to “Paradise City”.  The time that Ozzy chewed the head off of a bat and stood scowling on stage above a terrified and rabid audience.

I was 12 and believed them when they screamed “We are the YOUTH GONE WILD!” and “We’re going off the rails on a CRAZY TRAIN!” I bobbed my head along with them in the quiet isolation of my room. I had a little red walkman that gobbled batteries like a hungry dog and I spent my allowance trying to keep up with my addiction to the headphones.

They were my hope then. My escape from the desperate little field where I lived among broken down cars and a very, very ignorant step-father. I used to pretend I was a rodeo queen as I straddled the butane tank beside our house with the headphones shoved onto my head, hands held high in the air as Kip Winger pined away for someone who was “Only seventeen, but she’s old enough for me”. I didn’t know then that the very thing he was singing about was the very thing that was trapping me in the life that I so desperately wanted to escape. So for years I ran to the butane tank, or ran to my room, or ran in my head. The gasoline was the music. Heavily leaded and highly-octaned by Ozzy and Axl and Janie and Lita and Kip and Alice.

Sebastian Bach has now appeared on “Celebrity Fit Club” and Axl Rose has had so much plastic surgery that he’s almost unrecognizeable and Ozzy Osborne is doing commercials for Samsung and World of Warcraft.

I could write something incredibly angsty about the veil being lifted on these people. Maybe something magical and sad about how my “Gods” are now old and sold out. But I wont. Because people change. Priority changes. Life changes.

*MY* life changed with their help. I believed that more was out there because they told me it was. So here we all are many years later – me and Axl and Ozzy and Sebastian and I still recognize them when I turn my iPod up real loud to drown out the droning of people here at work. I recognize their power and their love for the long guitar solo. I recognize waif-life boys in loudly-colored spandex. I recognize all of that when the music takes me back to that time, but I bet….just bet…that they don’t quite recognize me.

40 hours a week, it works
56 hours a week, it sleeps
7 hours a week, it eats
Sometimes it is in traffic
Sometimes in line,
sometimes in the tub.

It processes food and feelings,
it breaths and shits,
it tries desperately to connect
across the lanes,
through the windows,
on paper,
on the screen.

It grays and wrinkles,
the mind and heart wilt,
ultimately, it is alone,
in the beginning
and in the end.

It goes out the way it comes in,
crying and scared,
or shaking and angry,
either way, it goes out
and it is not a magic birthday candle:
it does not re-light.

At some point,
it goes in the ground,
in the sea,
up in the air as ash,
It becomes memory,
or maybe it is just gone.

There are no applause,
no red velvet curtains to close.
The theatre of life empty.
No period.
No darkness.
No light.
And in an instant,
we are gone,
and the line moves up to fill the gap,
an endless droning,
an emotionless march,
lemmings jumping,
one by one,
into the big nothing.

aw 01/20/2010