4:15 p.m. It's raining, it's pouring, and on the streets the rats and gangbangers are roaring, illumined by flashes of lightning like a camera strobe. In a mild panic I left all the lights on (a total of four, count 'em four lights to light me to bed and death); and just now I've discovered that the huge wooden door that leads to my burrow has been splintered off its hinges. Now normally I would think that somehow the rain had made the wood swell and inhale deeply of the rain like some fossilised lumberjack breathing very deeply; but the metal gate just outside the front door and the entryway, the gate has changed shape as well. The deadbolt is twisted and pitted, leaving it unbudgeable within its hole; it looks like someone has tried to pry the gate off with a crowbar. This worries me somewhat. Actually this freaks the shit out of me. Since coincidentally my CD player has been taken out of my car, and my car has been gutted like an electronic fish as well, I think it highly probable that this same enterprising ragamuffin, refugee from Horatio Alger and Herbert Selby Jr. alike, took it upon himself to transform my gate and door into this ugly Alexander Caldwell mobile. Since I was actually, you know, inside the house lacksadaisically listening to NPR and writing poems and reading Diaryland incessantly and all that, I wonder what would happen if that young Willy Loman and I actually met -- he with crowbar in hand and capitalistic hunger in his eye, and me with my Bugle Boy jeans set fashionably around my ankles. Remind me to write a play about this, Diary, if I'm not bludgeoned to death tonight.

So it's raining and I'm reduced to getting out of my place by crawling out of the window, like an Attic Greek. I keep calling Stephanie and getting a busy signal and pressing redial, although I'm not sure exactly why -- so she can tell me what an idiot I am? No, of course not, I just need some reassurance that I'm not actually being targeted by some September 11 cabal. I'm playing Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas in an attempt to introduce some unseasonable levity and childlikeness in the oppressively damp air.

...you know what? It's actually working.


ADDENDUM. Okay, when I was even littler than I am now, I would set up alarms for the boogeyman, the angel of death and the tooth fairy when I would have to go to sleep. Think Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear, think Rube Goldberg. I would lean a baseball bat gingerly against the door, so that when my supernatural assailant would slowly ooze his way through the crack he would cause the bat to (fig a.) fall, hitting (fig. b) my cat Snackerz squarely on the tail, causing Snackerz to awaken and leap three (fig. c) metres into the air, flipping the lightswitch (fig. c-2) which pulled the string attached to my Darth Vader nightlite (fig. c-3), causing Darth Vader to shriek "THE FORCE IS STRONG IN THIS ONE!" and vibrate, which would shake my Taco Bell Flintstones glass (fig. c-4) off of his adamantium pate and shatter on the ground, waking me up. This worked very well, though after several hundred shattered Flintstones drinking glasses and a number of cats successively named Snackerz, my custodians put an end to caution and invention and enjoined me to go ahead and leave with whatever childhood intruder would so care to visit me. Anyway, I've now jury-rigged a more streamlined version of my childhood alarums-- though, strangely, it still relies rather heavily on breaking glasses and on Snackerz.

the Funny Show

agriculture poem

my life in the ghost of Bush

time-lapsed (part 1)

unreconciled

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Images are taken without permission from the fine and trusting folks at Folk Arts of Poland; please purchase something from them. Background music stolen without permission from Epitonic, Basta Music, and just about everywhere else my unscrupulous hands could grab something. No rights reserved.

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