SHOW ME

light and shadows

I wrote this in June and finally decided to post it. Some will be offended; If you’re delicate, you might want to skip it.

I feel emptied out.

This is a good starting point if I am plugged into inspiration, but if I am, I can’t sense it. So spill another and another word onto cheaply lined pages and see what happens.

These must be some of the oldest trees in the valley. Liberty Park, with its circular jogging path and duckpond and junkies, pushing discarded strollers packed and piled with odd items. Necessary items, one would hope. There’s a guy with three carts. He pushes two for several hundred yards, walks back and gets the third, continues in this fashion around the track, which, because it’s a circle, has no destination. His things are stacked impossibly high, precarious as I would guess his life to be.

A tweaker, self-involved as tweakers are, executes intricate Olivia Newton-John moves on a pair of rollerblades, jamming out to imaginary music as I watch from this odd, government-issue picnic table made entirely of cement and write things in my Dollar Tree notebook, 100 sheets (feuilles!), stylized floral cover with actual stitched bindery.

Sun pops over the massive trees and immediately I go from a little chilly to too warm. It’s only 8:30. Will that be my excuse (this time) to bail on my writing? It doesn’t take much. I’m weak; undisciplined, a constant theme throughout my life.

A young hipster. Beard, baseball cap, shorts, flip-flops, one kettlebell held high, right arm extended in bizarre salute (fitness Nazi?), bored-looking. The very picture of discipline, he looks like an idiot -I judge but he seems unconcerned about how he looks- one foot in front of the other, plodding along the footpath.

There’s pain that comes with the awareness that my bearings run perpendicular to everything happening in this place at this early hour, echoed in the way I’ve situated myself relative to the park’s circular running/jogging/biking path. My accoutrements: cigarettes and iced Americano. Smokers are a dying breed. It’s not cool anymore. Everyone vapes now. Smoking is not allowed in the park. I figure I’m far enough off the running path, so I pretend to not know this and do it anyway.

Graffiti on graffiti on graffiti over a dozen layers of beige-ish paint. Industrial grade. I picture it stored in sad, five-gallon buckets in the chain-link fenced yard of the parks department, whatever was left over from this or that park improvement project, mixed into a soulless non-color and slopped on uncarefully by a city employee who cannot be fired. A table never cleaned, just painted over and over and over.

I can no longer ignore the latest words scrawled in Sharpie on the table’s surface:

“Someon [sic] save me. I am so [redacted] scared of what lives beneath my own skin It craves the blood of others.“

I feel sad for this stranger. They sat here and wrote that, I sit here and write this. It craves the blood of others. Terrified. Probably drugs.

Another author, much larger letters, all caps, no punctuation. It should be menacing but something about the way the letters are drawn, it only seems earnest and naive: “SHOW ME YOUR TITTIES NOW RUB YOUR PUSSY”

I’ve had occasional thoughts that would be just as jarring, although it’s been a few years since they were x-rated. I don’t get to decide the thoughts that I have, it turns out. They show up, like the weather. Somehow, I mostly manage to keep them to myself.

These messages will be an awkward moment for some young family’s picnic, when the child’s question is asked, it will be too late to explain. The pussy’s out of the bag and now the fried chicken doesn’t quite taste right. The young wife will suspiciously eye her innocent husband as though he exercised bad judgment when he picked this table. “Someon” should take care to paint over this filth.

Awkward.

Years ago, in my twenties, I took a date to the zoo. It was innocent. It was romantic.

I was hopeful.

The timing of things made us the unwitting audience to a spectacular display of motive force and fluid dynamics. The ostrich was pissing - it was like a firehose, unbelievable, and impossible to pretend not to notice, which is exactly what I tried to do. She was transfixed. Mood ruined.

SHOW ME YOUR FEELINGS NOW HOLD MY HAND.

Ashamed and embarrassed.

If I hadn’t taken myself so seriously in that moment, if I had been smooth, I could’ve said something witty and diffused the tension. I have always been painfully insecure and I didn’t handle it well. There was no second date.

An ostrich, of all God’s creatures. I don’t know, I’d never thought about it, but I would have imagined something more… delicate. It was shocking.

Someon save me. From you, from myself.

A middle-aged woman with cumbersome breasts (SHOW ME YOUR TITTIES) on crutches has made a complete circuit of the park as I’ve sat here. That kind of drive is alien to me. Impressive. I want to ask her questions: why the crutches? Are you walking to or away from something? Are you happy? Hopeful? Scared? Desperate?

Does it crave the blood of others?

Desert sun beating down now, making this exercise uncomfortable. Where is my ambition? A question without an answer. When I don’t have to push myself, I don’t, and this is why the park go-getters and I exist in orthogonal dimensions. I’ve never been like them and it’s a little late to start.

I may have more in common with the broken miscreants who scratched out their desperation on these picnic tables. I’ve been that guy. Drug-addled and lost. I’m not anymore, though I still feel like an outsider at times. Not “normal.”

I’m okay with that.

Where’s my Sharpie…?