Ode to Converse

People wondered why we didn’t work
What happened
When it seemed we were a perfect fit
Our pro list outweighed the cons

How to explain the intangible discomfort
The puzzle that fit but was jarring to the eye
The plaid and polka dots and stripes all vying for attention
Within a dusty slate

Like wearing rented bowling shoes
They don’t fit quite right
They smell a bit funny
They look a bit tacky
You have to tread carefully
Because it’s easy to slip and fall

Like the most beautifully sexy pair of heels
That were too tight and hurt with the first step
Like the ungainly weatherproof boots
That smothered you from the elements
Like the cozy slippers, filthy and fungal
That you knew needed to be discarded

Nothing could satisfactorily cover the naked foot
And I didn’t realize it until I found Converse to comfort me.

July 28, 2013 0

The Breakdown of the Breakup

The reasons were numerous and ludicrous. They tried to talk it out calmly, but logic was not welcome here. There- an argument that made no sense. There- a request too disgusting to dignify with a response. On the one hand everything fit. They looked right. They fit just right. They were already traveling side by side. Why not join in other elemental ways? On the other hand, she was strung way too tightly, he was a pig. She was looking to slip into sophistication. He was looking to live out a real life porno.

Sometimes there is no middle ground when what you’re looking for isn’t even on the same plane. How they didn’t see this coming, nobody knew. Their volatility was obvious to even a casual bystander. Every day at lunch, they bantered at the pizza place on the square, scorching wit paired with playing footsie under the table. Sparks flew. Curses abounded. It was all very entertaining. But there was a brittle edge that belied the ease of the relationship.

She was a rookie in the corporate world, taking in her surroundings. He was a shark, swimming and feeding and fucking with no conscience. Their appeal originally had to be proximity. Too many hours in the office. You pass a decorated cake often enough, you’ll want a piece even if you’re more the pie type. They would soon find they weren’t even made of the same stuff; she was a German Chocolate cake, with several ingredients and complicated timing. He was a bear claw- a fried piece of dough with sweet icing and fierce appearance. OK. Enough with the bakery analogies.

Somehow, their wildly different backgrounds and cultures had been overlooked at the outset. They were dazzled by the sleek, new models they found in each other. The new car smell was intoxicating, so to speak. Before getting into vehicular metaphors, we can just come to an understanding that all was new and glorious and exciting, as it always is in the beginning. What was surprising in this case was the speed at which their “love” imploded. There is an acceptable trajectory and this was like a fast-moving comet.

Can too many metaphors spoil a saucy tale?

So back to the breakup. She wanted to see this through, give it a shot, at least have a last hurrah. He wanted to do things to her that made her gag. Someday maybe she’d have regrets, but she was still young enough to be shocked. Someday he’s find someone he wouldn’t want to use as a foul toy, but he was too jaded at that point in time to have any focus.

So there was yelling. Pushing. Nudity. Shock. Sleep. Accusations. Jokes. Incredulity. Leering. Magnetism. Ten states of matter that mixed and proved combustible to this couple. They would later only have flashes of memory of their time together. How they walked through the city, quickly and in step with each other. How they shared a few quiet moments in the elevator. How they ate in companionable silence and danced in a darkened club. How they moved together. Looked to each other. Like shards stuck in amber, those few moments will last longer than either of them would admit.

July 22, 2013 0

Stay Hungry

So hungry. She put her sunglasses on and adjusted her cap as she walked across the parking lot. She chose a large shopping cart and headed into the grocery store. She could still taste her last meal on her tongue… a little salty. Mmmm. Maybe something sweet would be nice now. Something small. A little morsel. She turned down the candy aisle. There was a little girl picking out a bag of lollipops. That looked good. She was young, tender. Her parents were nowhere in sight.

No! Not in the middle of the afternoon! She couldn’t do this again!

She took a bag of marshmallows, smiled at the girl and kept walking. She felt herself growing warm with anger, thankful to still feel something. That meant the change was not complete yet. Damn him! Here she was, stuck in this small town, lured by his charm. The few nights they spent together, the “love bites” she still word under her turtleneck, all were still fresh and where was he? What was he for that matter? She needed answers. Her afternoons at the library had not turned up much; just some fables and fairy tales involving the undead. But she felt so alive! How could she be dying? Colors were brighter, taste tangier; smells were sharper, sounds clearer, touch, more intense. Other than being cold all the time, she felt very much alive, in a heightened sense, like the time she tried smoking dope in college.

She took off her glasses and turned into the aisle with chips and pretzels. Maybe people would see her bloodshot eyes and just think she was stoned and not a zombie shopping for a snack.

Don’t look at me and judge my choices, she thought as she put several bags of chips in the cart on top of the cases of soda. We all have to survive. She hurried past the fish and poultry and honed in on the smell of blood. The butcher was grinding some meat behind the counter. She stood there a little too long, feeling the drool pooling in her mouth. God, that smells good, she thought. I’m so damn hungry!

Throwing some fresh meat in her cart, she walked past the pharmacy, bumping into an old man with a cane. So easy, she thought. He was slow, seemed confused. Ah, but he weighed nothing. Not very nourishing. No! Not here at the grocery store! But where? Where else could she shop for the food she most wanted? Where else could she go without people judging her choices?

She drove the car loaded with sugar and salty snacks and drove to the old trailer outside of town. Maybe he’d come back today. Maybe he could help her or at least explain what was happening to her. Yeah, and maybe she’d finally have a good hair day. Or maybe her mother would stop trying to set her up with friends’ single sons.

She was putting the last of the food away when he walked in the door, dragging a cooler on the ground. He was smiling and looking a little less grey than when she had last seen him. He smiled at her and said “Happy Birthday and Merry Christmas.” Then he opened the cooler, which she then noticed had a hospital logo printed on its side. Oooooh, God. The smell was even better than a Thanksgiving dinner.

Blood, marrow, brains… he had brought her the world. Better than diamonds.

April 23, 2013 2

Hidden on the Hard Drive

He awoke to what looked like orange rinds on the inside of his eyelids. Bright sunshine was trying to squeeze through. His eyes were still closed, but his slight headache assured him he was indeed awake. Where he was was another kettle of fish. He was almost afraid to open his eyes. Every time he awoke, the locale was so jarringly different. He somewhat enjoyed waking up on the pirate ship, a half-clad wench plastered up against him on the narrow bunk. The rolling of the boat was remarkably realistic. The sights and sounds were graphically excellent too. Almost as good as the crisp scenery of the Middle East war scene he found himself in one morning. Some of the worst visuals but the best sensations upon waking had to have been the porno. He wanted to wake up with two women servicing him every day. But that was not to be. He didn’t seem to have a choice. Not since he had fallen into his computer.

This story sounds absurd, I know, but I assure you every word is true. My boyfriend is lost to a computer, and not metaphorically like he spends too much time working or playing, but he actually physically disappeared. I know roughly where he is because somehow we are able to communicate via messaging. He sounds rather confused and not at all like himself anymore. I can’t say I blame him after living virtually for over a month.

The way this transpired is really beside the point. With much typing and figuring between us, the best we can guess is that whatever happened can be traced back to the freak electrical storm we had shortly after that asteroid came close to the earth’s atmosphere recently. (I know, such a cliché, but what can you do?)

Since that night when he never came to bed and I woke up alone, he has had some unsettling and interesting adventures! His first foray on our laptop was to find himself in the midst of a racing game. He woke up in an idling racecar, ready to go at the starting line. At the signal, the cars on either side of him took off. He sat a moment, decided it must be a dream, and hit the accelerator. With the first hard turn, his body slammed into the car’s side and he thought it odd to have any feeling in a dream. He somehow finished the race, somewhere in the second heat. Getting out of the car, he felt wetness on his cheek. He swiped and saw blood. Blood? And it hurt! He walked over to another driver, tried to formulate a clear question in his mind but really, what could he say? “Is this a dream?” sounded lame in his head. And even though what he could see and hear looked real, something was missing. Someone handed him a cloth to wipe his face. Someone else handed him a bottle of something to drink. He brought it to his nose to determine what it was. There was brown liquid with bubbles in the bottle but there was no smell. He gingerly took a sip. No taste.

Over the next couple of days he toggled back and forth from the races to the pirate ship. He found some way to communicate with me, which I still don’t understand. He messaged me that he had played a relaxing game of solitaire and a terrifying game of pinball (he said he felt like Indiana Jones running from giant metal balls in the game). We could not figure out how to predict where he would land next. He tried thinking of where he’d like to be and hope to wake up there in the morning. That did not work. I was afraid to mess with any of the laptop’s settings so I just kept it plugged in and let it go to sleep mode when I wasn’t sitting in front of it until my eyes were dry and my head hurt. Sometimes I could make him out in the game, sometimes not. I had an easier time picking him out when he was in a game I knew well. I got nervous with the racing game, as I didn’t know the different possible outcomes.

After a couple of weeks of standing by and feeling helpless, we decided I should start experimenting with the laptop. I started slowly, carefully, by waiting until he was in a game I knew well: the hidden object game. I selected him as my avatar and watched as he got through the first levels of the game. When it came to the first mini-game, I slowly moved and clicked the mouse. It worked. I had picked him up and moved him where I wanted. I clicked and rolled and maneuvered him through the rest of the game. I sat for hours, feeling closer to him than I had in a long time. I wondered at how he felt. Relieved? Angry? Hungry? Tired? Confused? What was next? I had to wait until he could get to wherever he went to message me.

That happened two days later. He was glad I could move him around because that meant there was some control but it was unsettling too for the same reason. He was not hurt or hungry. He said it still felt like a dream most of the time. Except for when we chatted. That was the only time he felt real. We were closer than we had ever been but we couldn’t touch or even really see each other.

He suggested I start trying to open specific programs to see if he would land in the ones I chose. So I decided to try solitaire, as that seemed harmless and he had been in that game already. He joked that I could just as well choose the porno. I tried to look at the bright side that he still maintained a good sense of humor.

So I opened solitaire. I clicked on settings. I looked at the card backing choices. There he was. I selected him and began to play. We got through the game, satisfied that we had a little more control. But how did he get from place to place on his own? The answer came to me when I was in the shower.

I was thinking of the order of the games he had turned up in from the beginning. I realized he was being placed in programs in the order that they had been downloaded by date. This was interesting, to be sure, but what was the next step? How did we get him home? Was he to be stuck in this Quantum Leap/Tron universe forever? Did he still want to come home? I had been angry and worried at his disappearance and now felt bewildered at our situation. It had been over a month, but with little sleep and not much food, and the stress of the unknown, I felt I was going to crack and soon. Something had to be done.

I had seen enough movies – Back to the Future, Peggy Sue Got Married, Star Trek, Wizard of Oz – to know that there were lots of possibilities we could try. But waiting for another freak electrical storm or some supernatural event was probably not the most practical approach. So I researched. Googled. Primarily virtual technology and electricity. Some of the information I found was beyond my understanding but I found many tidbits (bytes?) very interesting. To make a possibly long and boring story shorter and possibly nonsensical, after hitting up Google and Amazon and PayPal, I had at my fingertips several apparatuses (apparati?) that I could use to generate electrical pulses, record information, and copy and save the data. I can’t explain what actually occurred that night it all came together. You could picture a sort of Frankenstein’s laboratory, replete with sights and sounds that were impressive, but you’d be pretty far off. It was actually me in a tee shirt and underwear, sitting on the floor with a sort-of generator, laptop, black data recorder thingy and some other stuff that lit up and hummed. After much button pushing and pacing and waiting for downloads… somehow, honest to Pete, it worked. We were together again!

I found myself looking into his familiar warm eyes and we grabbed each other and kissed long and hard. It had worked! He spun me around in a hug and we laughed and kissed again. I could still hear a hum and I could see lights flashing. But something was missing. I stepped back from him for a moment. I looked around and realized I was not looking at our apartment. I quickly kissed him again. We realized at the same time what was missing: there was no taste to our kiss. As we looked around together, I asked him where we were. He sighed, smiled shakily and said that it looked like we were in a space ship. And we should buckle up. We were about to be called upon to shoot at some asteroids hurtling towards the Earth.

April 19, 2013 4

Eternal Shine of a Haunted Mind

Like setting up shop in a haunted house. That’s what he said he felt when he was plugged in to my thoughts. Well, it was his own fault for choosing the Eternal Shine of the Mind option rather than the Eternal Shine of the Ass option. He could have had squeaky clean rear instead of a mind cluttered with disturbing ideas.

The problem wasn’t the technology. As usual, the man just couldn’t leave well enough alone and follow directions. He had to follow his own way. And that led him to my cobwebbed-brain. Scientists found you couldn’t completely erase memories or ideas (trying to ease the pain of trauma victims unfortunately turned them into Cuckoo’s Nest zombies). But you could “scrub them clean” and alter their content. The tricky part was inserting ideas that wouldn’t further upset the patient. Scientists found that scientists weren’t very good at coming up with soothing thoughts. Long story short, after researching, they began tapping into storytellers for ideas that could soothe or inspire.

That’s where I came in. I had the unfortunate talent of being able to write treacle for greeting card companies. I could churn out that crap like there was no tomorrow. Need a pick-me-up for when you’re sick? Missing a deceased pet? Got a new job? Having a baby? Proud of letting another driver pull ahead of you in traffic? I had the perfect words to put in a card for the occasion. So eventually I was tapped by the Eternal Shining Bodies scientists.

I supplied the teams with ideas of picnics and clouds and carousels. Then I met him. He was a charmer. (Like a snake charmer, now that I think about it). He was on the R & D team, looking into the possibility or inserting edgier ideas into willing subjects, the hopes being high for future filmmakers and authors to cut away from the mediocre offerings of Hollywood. But before long, edgier ideas became harder to come by. He found from our late night excursions my predilection for the dark, disturbed, deranged. (Don’t ask. This is not that kind of story.) He wanted to know first-hand what it was like to have that kind of mental edge. So we hooked up over some wires and some electrodes and some other stuff that’s not that important here and we opened a link between us. I saw mental images that would have been right at home in 1950’s Levittown. He saw things that could have existed on Elm Street (as in Nightmare, get it?).

There was a snafu with the electrodes and when we logged off, we found we were still connected. And not in a loving, mushy way of feeling joined with another soul but in a spooky, annoying way. I didn’t want to know how often he wanted to grab himself or how he wanted to know the number of marshmallows he could fit in his mouth at once. He didn’t want to know… well, do I really have to share my dark thoughts here? Can’t you just imagine a few? Remember, this story started with his comment about my brain being like a musty attic. Or something like that.

So my ideas sold, movies grew more textured and there were novels that read like literary snuff films. My deranged thoughts were in high demand with an ever-growing segment of the patient population. Not just creative bohemians but white collar workers who wanted a glimpse at danger without putting themselves at risk. What started as an elite group who could afford the high test thoughts (and coincidentally they were the same people with the largest space for rent mentally) became an addiction for those who dabbled. They wanted dark. Odd. Scary. Otherwordly. Little romances about vampires and adventures about wizards weren’t enough of an escape for many.

So I toiled and wallowed a bit on the dark side. Funny how keeping myself in a dark place mentally was so easy and how it actually helped me lighten up in my real life, recall my dormant sense of humor. But that was hard for him to take. He really liked his version of Pleasantville. Being connected to me brought him success yes but also to a place he felt left him adrift. He once told me that he couldn’t get the image out of his head of walking through a never-ending corridor with flames at his back preventing turning around but with rushing water coming straight for him, threatening to drown him. He said he got that feeling every time he was near me. Not exactly roses and endearments a woman waits to hear.

We thought physical distance would help sever our bond. We parted briefly but were brought back together by forces stronger than any fiction. Our senses dulled by distance, we could still read each other’s thoughts from across the state. I no longer knew his every thought but I knew when he felt anger or fear or arousal. He knew when I felt joy or despair. There ultimately came a day when our wayward thoughts led us rushing back to each other, speeding on the highways in the blustery early spring. It may sound completely absurd, but our cars barreled toward each other. I could see through his eyes the landscape rushing by. He could see my view of his oncoming car. We smashed into each other and melded and fused in as many metal, grisly pieces as you can imagine. But our conjoined thoughts… they’re still there, in the ether. You may pick up on them sometimes when you have an odd thought or get scared on a sunny day.