I Care, But Hell Damns Without Regard

And so, the die is cast. For Chapter seven of Rabbit Rue has begun. Don’t bother clicking the previous link, that chapter doesn’t exist until May 11th, while today is April still.

I just pounded out five pages while drinking Whisky and watching episodes of Firefly I acquired from Target. I couldn’t help it, and I somehow wish I could stop, stop observing, eliminate my endlessly infinite capacity for over-analysis, and simply describe my story. But I can’t, and seriously, I hope nobody would ask such a thing. I’d cease, if I could. But I’m now caught inextricably within a web beyond comprehension, a world both wrought by my fevered mind, and beyond any precedence I could generate.

The scenery has outgrown my involvement. Alas, I’m merely a carrier, a convenient wordsmith, and as soon as my creativity is exhausted, it shall progress to the next. Fortunately for me, as illustrated by my past of ridiculous and mundane examples of unlikely force, I’m inexhaustible. I don’t claim this lightly, but if you’d wandered discarded wreckage in a breezy night, boards and ruins collapsed and forgotten in a field across an airforce base, teased into tasting buttercups like reasonable folk, you’d know. There’s a magic, a writhing reality encompassing our own, where flowers really taste like butter, and a pile of wood sporting nails and glimmering glass shimmers in the twilight, defines the world.

I write for myself, that kid who wandered aimlessly in the haphazard debris, crawling through steep gorges where snow and slush are discarded by plows, filled with salt several feet deep, and plows live forging towering sculptures of teetering adventure. That’s my past, an unavoidable and seductive world. I wish, beyond any expression within understanding, to escape such simplicity. Those trailer-parks, both squalid and removed from the universe you know, but boasting proximity to worlds infinitely more inviting and enveloping than I could express. It’s a past lost forever, one I mourn with tears born of children digging into windswept fortresses of packed snow, covered in salvaged particle-board and ingenuity, where dreams still meant something.

You don’t feel that semblance. The knowledge that a few planks of wood crammed into a storage shed, made into a fortress, protected by ingenious trappings securing a door in mud and technique. That a mattress, dank with mildew, provided an escape in that same refuge, without stolen carpeting, embodied by a second storey lofted above by dangerous and equally required two-by-fours. It was a lifetime away, and yet remains sadly remembered by souls eager to relinquish such imagery to consumption and the fires of an unforgiving sun, drinking memories in stark brightness, and laying waste upon the past, as it bleaches color from drawings and illustration alike.

I hate time. Beyond that, I hate life: daring to push and force my life beyond adventure and excitement, into adulthood where a shed is mere storage, a field containing the bleached bones of a collapsed house, a junkyard. I mourn for the abandoned vehicles in my Grandmother’s yard, no longer derelicts utilized into spaceships and pressed into duty of a child’s imagination. I mourn it all, as an adult, yearning to find in games and escape into imagery long beyond knowledge. I know I’ve failed, yet even when I’m lost, that memory, of those lost souls who preceded me, the few who know the deep snows while waiting for a schoolbus when most would enjoy languishing in nature’s fury, I’ve given hope. I’ve spoken where they’ll be forever silent, proved entrepid where circumstance forgets. I’m the chaff, and yet, I refuse to succumb to my past.

And so I shall survive. Even when my past of easily summarized wandering among insipid dreams is decanted into trappings of childhood, I shall persist. I’ve lost my way, and you don’t care. But I know my roots, and regardless of how I’ve progressed, they define me, beyond my frenzied attempts to show my newfound sophistication, or implied education. I am my past, something I fail to escape and strive to embrace. I’m trailer trash, and I’ve a story to tell. Lest you forget the words, I’d remind you of the reading. I wish I could redefine my life, become my heart’s desire, the vision I’ve held from my first memory to the very being tapping out these sentiments. I was once unencumbered by rage, or even mere assumption; a mere child desiring nothing more than understanding, helping where I was needed.

I used to pet cows, as they flicked their ears in annoyance at flies nettling them, beyond the electric fences and cud-chewing largess, I witnessed. I used to press sheets of fresh gum, planks of dry utility, to large black ants, as if I were doing them a favor. Sure I crushed them, stupidly assuming I provided what they sought, and when I knew the truth, I wept heavy tears of mourning. One upon a time, I’d never hurt even an ant, and now, like everyone before me, I’ve succumbed to banal and inevitable utility. Get along, live another day, survive, beyond the names people call you in their ignorance. I’m a writer, and with these musings, I wish, knowing my past, for a simpler time I personally knew, even if by the magic of childish ignorance.

Be confused. Please, spend some time thinking of this meandering composite, without direction, and yet indicative of a child who once opened a door to his trailer, a door that hung above a missing staircase, and fiddled with the latching mechanism, because that door wasn’t meant to be opened; it was on the wrong side, you see, no stairway led down, and the fact it opened required immediate, and equally confusing remedy. Why would they build such a door, something that wouldn’t close, wouldn’t latch, allowing such tantalizing view to the neighbors who only wanted their laundry to dry. That door near the washing machine, paying worthless observation over a five-foot-drop, until the landlord bothered to fix the break, jam the shutter once again.

I’ve my past. I hate it, and wonder why nobody cares. But I know everyone has their demons, long lost visions in youth, cities unconquered, wishes unfulfilled. We give up so much, to embrace responsibility. I for one, would forget everything, for even a tiny sliver, of my tumultuous past, even knowing the implicit loss, the complications incurred. I wish to forget, and live my past, because remembering is far worse.