Photo by Samantha Carlson[/add_caption_link]
i have arthritis in my heart. i have heart-thritis. or i just have heart disease and there is nothing poetic about it. or i’m lying and there is something poetic about it and it’s as obnoxious as a person who says, “no,” when somebody on the bus offers him a paper crane. i have whatever you call it when you want to title your column: “now hiring- spiders” because you really do have a problem with these flying ants in your apartment, they live for two hours and then shit their pants when they die, and it’s not really a bother to clean up, you have the lysol wipes, the apron, the six iron, but it makes you think of your own death– especially when you’ve finished cleaning, and you take a break from carrying carcasses to brush your teeth or change what pants you are wearing, and by the time you get back to where the ants were coming from there’s a whole window full of them, like bees without hexagons, in a dying and wandering chaos.
then you remember you can just fucking buy some spiders from somebody on the internet, maybe with the money you make off of selling your flying ant carcasses. somebody will want to trade, probably, and isn’t it that kind of a craigslist post that people like? i’m pretty sure if you make a career out of putting stuff like that on craigslist, you’ll go to heaven forever and get some weird stuff people want to trade you for along the way.
obviously, this is what i want out of my youth.
and i imagine that’s really the saddest part of having a laptop: it reminds you that there are many people out there, but it isn’t a person. i bet there’s such thing as a sexual attachment to the laptop. why did HP make me name mine? why did I name it Raskolnikov? what is wrong with a person who sells spiders on the internet?
nothing. nothing at all is wrong or objectionable.
i didn’t used to be this kind of a person– i used to be able to enjoy a paper crane, especially when given to me by a child, just for what it was. no thoughts of the paper crane and of of-paper-cranes. i used to remember every day to bite the fat on my bicep because it is secretly the least sensitive part on the human body. please realize that when i tell you about the bicep, i am trusting in your discretion. i am trusting you, because you are trustworthy. you are responsible and by no stretch of the imagination feckless. if on your tombstone your family put “FRECKLED” i would sneak into the graveyard in the middle of the night, dig up your corpse and hold your hand and together we’d fix it to say “FECKLESS,” because then it would be even more true. we’d do it together.
i mean, maybe i would. i just don’t know if i’ve got it in me anymore. you get tired and stop caring about how small the crane is and how difficult it must have been for a stranger to put all those tiny folds together and how much like jesus they have to be to just give it to some deadbeat waiting in line for an iced coffee some farmer in mexico got paid half a cent for. actually i don’t mean to insinuate that you get tired. i wouldn’t presume that. actually, are you tired? you can go to bed. don’t worry about it. you’ve got work soon, yeah? take a nap. one of us has to bring that bacon home, and christ knows how far from employable i am in these pajamas. he didn’t have a job in his early twenties.
thirties, whatever.
this one time in high school i was getting coffee for the science department. there was this group of old men who hung out at the coffee place, construction workers, never saw them constructing anything– they watched me go in and out with a tower of boiling lava every wednesday. one time one of them asked me, point blank, if i was good at anything or did anything special. i had to go because the coffee was getting cold, so i said, “i make paper frogs.” that’s a lie. i can’t make a paper frog any better than the next son of a bitch.
he told me to make a paper frog for them, right there. i said, “no, i forget, i dunno, i do it on the weekends.”
this is why i chose the engish major at the university of massachusetts amherst: after i walked out, i was feeling like a piece of shit, so i thought of them looking at each other as i walked away, saying, “Now what the hell ya suppose is eatin’ them two guys?”
