02Apr / 2014

Der Traumpolizist

You are whining in your sleep. I pat your head and you stop.

At breakfast I ask you about the dream.

You tell me: powerlessness and loss, violation and theft, paralysis and loss of voice. Weakness, hopelessness and fear. Exhaustion and failure.

Every living thing must have dreams like this. Especially after a week like the one we just had. Fear of this disease or that, fear of going broke, fear of getting old and having nothing. Fear of cancer in me, or — a thousand times worse — fear of cancer in a 16 year old boy.

But then yesterday the reprieve: alles okay. Everybody healthy for now. Sometimes the universe just wants to give you a good scare.

Tonight I will be the dream police. I will find the robbers and get back your purse.

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21Mar / 2014

Shroud

Don’t forget to have her check you for… says Odin’s wife.

Yeah, yeah, says Odin, who is going to the dermatologist.

Odin is used to waiting a long time at doctors, so he is a little surprised by the speed at which things transpire this time.

Do you have time to check me for… he asks the doctor after spending less than a single article in an obsolete magazine in the waiting room.

Sure, she says. He gets undressed and she looks him over. A mirror takes him by surprise and he resolves to work out more and eat less.

Nothing he had worried about was anything to worry about, she says, But this here, now. It should go immediately. You want an appointment or shall we do it now?

Um, says Odin. Now, I guess.

Let me show it to you, enlarged on the monitor.

Odin looks at it, feeling like a character in an H.P. Lovecraft story gazing upon an Old One nestled down amidst belly hairs enlarged to two-by-fours.

Yeah, let’s do it now, he says, with increased vigor.

Back onto the table, shave, shot, cookie-cutter, stitch, stitch, bandaid and he’s standing up again looking at the hygienic paper cover the doctor had unrolled over the table before plopping him down. It looks like the Shroud of Turin, a little crumpled, with a sweat stain the size and shape of a medium-to-large man and, down by the feet, a bunch of black fuzz.

Apparently Odin’s socks today are lintier than average.

Or: the Effects of Fear-Induced Perspiration on Lint Adhesion, thinks Odin.

I always thought it was just a mole, thinks Odin. But it was something else. Something… eldritch and ancient.

In this fashion, Odin will go about cheering himself up.

The doctor gives him an an appointment to have the stitches out on April first. Upon hearing the date, tasteless prank after prank begin scrolling through Odin’s brain.

Nothing he could ever really do, but still. He is thankful for the distraction, it keeps him from thinking about the linty, sweaty paper, and about the tiny, ancient thing.

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18Mar / 2014

Halfway up a tree

Odin is halfway up a tree. It is a big tree. An ancient tree on an ancient, stony mountain, one of many in a grove.

A grove of Yggdrasils.

Odin is halfway up this one Yggdrasil of many. He looks down and thinks: fuck. He is so high up he would die a dozen times if he fell, so he keeps climbing.

But the tree is so gigantic he can’t see the top. And to be honest, Odin is scared. So he starts climbing back down. He doesn’t climb long before he notices a branch hangs over a plateau of grey stone. He climbs out along the branch and dismounts to the stony earth, to his great relief.

He wakes up and there is an angry red scratch on the top of his wrist he assumes he got roughhousing with the cat the night before.

At breakfast he tells his wife about being stuck halfway up an ancient tree. Did the fire department come and get you, she asks.

At lunch he walks to the coffee store and buys a kilo of coffee. Odin can never remember if he wants a kilo or half a kilo and always buys a kilo and notices afterward it is more than he wanted, he should have bought half a kilo.

He looks forward to smelling it when he gets home.

On the way to the coffee store, he saw the grey crow standing by the bench, watching him, so he buys peanuts and a sandwich. When he gets back to the bench, a German woman is parking her car nearby and the crows keep away until she finishes, waiting high up in the trees.

When she finishes and gets out of her car and walks away, two men walk past, carrying advertising from door to door. After they pass, a man walks by with a white dog on a leash. Three boys walk past on their way home from school. Several cars. A man on blue bicycle.

But then the crows come. First the black one, then the grey one.

The black one is eating a sandwich. Then Odin throws him some peanuts. It sets down the sandwich, takes the peanuts, hides them, then comes back for the sandwich.

The grey one does the same thing, except it hides pieces of sandwich too.

Odin guesses rats come at night and feast, and the next day the crows are all, WTF? But maybe not. Instincts are things that worked in the past, right?

“I am your life.” When he dreams, Odin asks his dreams what they mean. The tree said it was his life. Looking up dream symbol information online, a lot of sites say trees are the personality, or the self, or the life, or connections; all things Odin has been thinking about.

What say the slain?

Sometimes life is relentless. It is like the giant shark bending the bars of your shark cage. It is like the monster in the movies that can’t be killed, climbing back in through the window after you lock the door on it. Like an army of zombies surrounding your house. Like whack-a-mole. Like a salesman. Like an infestation of moles. Like ants. Like a tree full of birds, watching your every move.

What does it want?

It wants to give you another chance. It wants to give you exactly what you need. It wants to help you be more like you.

That would be so cool, it thinks.

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12Mar / 2014

Edgar Allan Poe and The Season of the Tortoise Dish

Edgar Allan Poe wakes from fitful sleep his eyes burning and swollen. He looks at the alarm clock but can’t focus his eyes and can’t find his glasses. He dresses and goes downstairs and looks at the clock in the kitchen which says two in the morning. Upstairs his wife is coughing. He looks for laudanum but they’re all out of laudanum.

A red cat rubs up against his pantleg, covering it with hair. Edgar Allan Poe opens the door and lets out the cat. In accordance with the Law of Preservation of Red Cats, the other red cat comes in and demands food. Edgar Allan Poe goes back into the kitchen to get cat food because even though it’s too early if he gives the cat food it might let him sleep. If he doesn’t, it won’t.

In the kitchen, he steps into the tortoise dish.

These are the facts of the tortoise dish: it is too warm for the tortoise to hibernate, but too cold for the tortoise to spend all day outside. So the tortoise lives in the kitchen. That’s why there is a tortoise dish in the kitchen. The tortoise dish is full of water. The tortoise drinks from the dish, and walks through it before having a bowel movement.

Of the three nasty things you can do with the tortoise dish, stepping into it turns out to be the least nasty, as it spills the least water. The second-worst is to kick it by accident, which spills more water. The worst is to step on the side, which flips it over and empties it out, throwing algae-and-worse-filled-water a long distance.

Edgar Allan Poe goes back to bed, but the cat he let out is meowing so he lets it back in.

In this manner, he fails to fall back to sleep.

His alarm goes off at 4.30. He gets up, feeds the cats, eats breakfast, makes a cup of coffee and his wife asks him to take out the garbage.

He goes around the house gathering the residual waste from all the half-filled garbage cans into a single garbage can. When he empties out the bathroom garbage can, something remains stuck to the rim of the bin. He looks closer. It is a sanitary napkin.

He sighs, and reaches to take it, but his wife is walking past and plucks it off and drops it into the other garbage can.

Edgar Allan Poe gathers residual waste from the rest of the bins in the house. He goes outside and empties it all into the large garbage can. The sanitary napkin is stuck to the rim of the small garbage can again. Edgar Allan Poe says, It’s the Tell-Tale Sanitary Napkin, or something. He plucks it off, and throws it away and returns to the house.

He opens the cabinet to get cat treats to lure a cat out of the living room, and kicks the tortoise dish.

Edgar Allan Poe drives his daughter to town on his way to work.

It’s beautiful isn’t it, he says. The weather. Like a new season. Too warm to be winter, too crisp in the mornings to be summer. They should invent a new season.

Dad, dad, dad, says his daughter.

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11Mar / 2014

Stuck in stone

It is a beautiful early spring day, so Odin sticks to the shady side of the street, because he is still not done taking meds that make his skin super-sensitive to sunlight. He talks to his wife on his mobile phone and laughs and crows follow him half the way to the tobacco shop where he buys his lottery tickets.

A crow flies past with a beakful of what looks like moss.

Pasta salad at the deli, and some peanuts. He makes it all the way back to the office, though, without encountering any hungry corvids.

But the day is too sunny, too bright to worry about crows.

Wander far, Huginn and Muninn.

What say the slain?

I was encased in stone all my life. Closed up in granite like a cursed jinn. What are the advantages of being trapped in rock?

You are safe and can’t be touched.

What are the disadvantages of being trapped in stone?

You are blind and deaf. You can’t dance or sing or taste your food. You can’t kiss anyone, or feel it when they touch you, or hold them when they are sad.

How do you get out of stone?

What say the hanged?

Look at me here, swinging in the sun, my shadow dancing with the dogs.

Maybe I looked at the moon too much.

But at least I was outside.

Maybe I ran through the brush at night or chased bees or scared people with my shadow.

But I was alive, what was I supposed to do?

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06Mar / 2014

Schrödinger’s everything

Odin stops at a cash machine to see if his new card works with his old PIN. It does. He gets fresh lottery tickets at the tobacco shop and it costs nearly nothing because one of the previous ones won minimal amounts. He decides to get something meaty at the store and on the way there, waiting for a light, existence unfolds for him.

But it’s not so much the world reveals itself to him as he finally understands why he never understands anything.

He can see too many options.

How can you be sure of knowledge if it’s not perfect?

How can you know anything if you don’t know everything.

It goes like this: he is thinking about a story he read that he liked a lot and trying to remember if it told anything or if it showed everything. Because on the one hand, the “show don’t tell” maxim for writing is ideological (and, like any ideology, used to manipulate more than you might suspect although not everyone totally agrees), and on the other he found the story satisfying and on the other he is thinking about writing a story that works even though it tells a lot and is ideological about it.

And he is standing at a light and thinking about telling, like, “we were unhappy because we were poor, or at least I was unhappy” and then he thinks, actually, the only way he ever had a chance to understand anything about people was for them to tell him something because showing — the entire world is always showing you everything, sometimes honestly, sometimes accidentally, sometimes it’s misleading or it lies and you never know which. And Odin never had the feeling that he understood anything, ever, because possible explanations and scenarios spawned in his mind faster than he could evaluate them, fractalling off each other like fever hallucinations you might get peeking in on a grown up party when you’re a sick little kid and supposed to be in your room getting well.

Everything is always Schrödinger’s cat, all the time, for Odin.

How is showing supposed to do you any damned good when so much more can be shown than can be processed or understood with any certainty or confidence, when the meaning of what is shown is so plastic and malleable and speculative, and when, at the same time, showing one thing obscures a dozen more?

It’s not much of an epiphany, but you take what you get.

Odin buys something meaty, but the only crows he sees on the way back to the office are way high up on the weather vane on the steeply part of some big house, or way up in the air, or in the crown of a distant tree.

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28Feb / 2014

Lunacy

It is the new moon, or thereabouts. Maybe it was yesterday. That wouldn’t surprise Odin. The new moon affects Odin more strongly than the full moon. Also, it’s stealthy. With the full moon, at least you can see the full moon and prepare yourself. You forget about the new moon.

The new moon makes Odin stupid, and he was stupid yesterday. Yesterday was Thursday. The day before that was Wednesday, and Odin was stupid then, too.

The only reason, for example, the only reason Odin didn’t get a ticket yesterday is, the police officer was… I don’t know why. No idea why Odin didn’t get a ticket, but the police officer just warned him. Odin wanted to buy him donuts he was so grateful.

And Wednesday. Odin was out of it, that is, unable to recognize situations in time and avoid them.

Such as: he sat on one of four seats opposite the doors on the street car. Never sit there. Those are the first seats. That’s where crazy people sit, for example.

Of course, crazy people sit everywhere.

Odin sat opposite the doors. At the next stop, all the average people got off but for one young man to Odin’s right. A very wide man got on and sat on the two seats to Odin’s left. Then at the stop after that, an even wider man got on; wider but shorter, with a huge head, small eyes and mouth. In a high voice he asked if he could sit on one of the seats, which were full. The young man to Odin’s right got up to let the guy sit so you had four seats, two occupied by the large man on the left, two by the corpulent large headed man on the right, and Odin squished in between.

The man on the left was looking for something in his back pack, which was beside Odin, and the man on the right was looking for something in the back pocket of his (the man’s) jeans. That is, there was a lot of squirming going on.

Odin thought, I deserve this for not reacting fast enough.

The man to Odin’s right had a caretaker he kept asking where they were; and the man kept showing him a map on his smart phone.

All of them were going to the terminal station, it turned out, where Odin got off, took a passport photo of himself in a photo booth and got yelled at by his wife for making her wait. Odin pointed out that it was still five minutes before the time they had agreed to meet, but that did not help.

So because of things like this, when a cat woke Odin early Friday morning, he did not fight to fall back to sleep. He meditated, and stretched, and wrote and started his day feeling human, if a little sleepy.

The new moon must be waxing, he thought. He did not feel as acutely stupid.

On his lunch break he went to a fabric store and bought black-out cloth. He took public transportation there and avoided uncomfortable situations and found most passengers delightful.

He also found the fabric store delightful in its plain-ness. Just bolt after bolt of fabric and sales clerks running around. One greeted him politely, he greeted her politely back and told her what he wanted and she sent him to the basement.

My childhood, it reminds me of my childhood, Odin thought. The plain functionality. The lack of any intention to delight you into buying more than you wanted was delightful.

The saleswoman in the cellar was from Africa. She gave Odin a choice between velvet, genuine black-out cloth, and another fabric she said another photographer had purchased and hadn’t worked. The velvet looked the prettiest, but the black-out cloth kept giving her shocks so he got that.

You have to like fabric that fights back.

On his way back to the office Odin got some Chinese takeout.

He was going to eat it in the office, but as he walked by the bench someone cawed at him and he was like, I know that caw. So he sat down and all three crows appeared.

He threw a piece of chicken to Muninn, the black one, and Muninn was like, whoa, dude! and Odin was like, sorry, shoulda warned you, it’s still hot. Didn’t realize it’d still be hot.

Then he threw a piece of chicken to Grey #2 but it landed too close and Grey #2 wouldn’t approach that close so Odin had to throw a few more.

In the end, the crows got most of the chicken, or almost half, and Odin had most of the rice and sauce.

That’s why Odin is so sleepy.

What say the slain?

Time travel is real, it’s a thing we all do, recalling the dreams of our child when she was small, or observing the salesclerk at the Kurdish fruit stand and noticing that his hair is grey and remembering when it was black and he’s the same guy but he’s not.

Just like all of us other time travellers.

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Metamorphosism

Category Archives: Metamorphosism

Der Traumpolizist

Shroud

Halfway up a tree

Edgar Allan Poe and The Season of the Tortoise Dish

Stuck in stone

Schrödinger’s everything

Lunacy