Posts tagged: life
Guilty. I brought you some pear & gorgonzola slices with crumbled walnuts because I think you are adorable but I am much too chickenshit/flat broke to ask you out.
Instead I will feed you over the next few weeks & maybe someday when I work up that nerve you will be inclined to find my proposition tasteful.
More likely: I will continue to be much too unavailable emotionally & physically because that sort of thing is getting easier every day. Eventually that ship will sail & I shall reflect for a moment in time how foolish & stubborn I was in my silence.
I am a monk in Emergency Department scrubs.
I am at the mercy of my teachers again for thirteen months in January.
I am insane for thinking someone may be interested in sharing this nightmarish schedule with me.
Still I strain at the joints & rivets.
Slowly, ponderously, against the current
I am turning this thing
this life
in a better direction.
A cruel coincidence, a joke the solar system has played on us this week; doses of gamma waves as you are just finishing up your whole-brain radiation binge. Our stellar benefactor bends the ionosphere with its supercharged energy bombardment. An unholy heat wave the entire family can enjoy.
I carried you up the stairs. So weak & small you are in my arms. How you wither like a lone tree on the prairie, how beautiful your eyes are up close. We were never good friends but we were always family. I would tell you how hard I am working to pay your bills, to keep your kids fed. Demand acknowledgement for the burden I have undertaken with your illness.
But I am not the boy I used to be. I am a collection of particles & elements & electrons that recognizes how hard it is for you to merely walk a few feet. It is a glad burden I carry for you. The sweat of our toils will nourish the earth we pace waiting for redemption. Let us be unashamed in tilling the fields of sickness together & pull a wonderful harvest from these wretched rows of suffering.
& know that you suffer needlessly if you are near death, my friends. Pain & fear only exist while you are alive. It is our selfishness that holds us back from realizing our potential. Once that moment in history ends you will be free. We are so much more than human. We are literally elemental.
Someday you will be an apple, or a tree, or a pig. Perhaps some sort of dust floating through the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Water vapor on a clear day over California. Breath in the lungs of a newborn.
It is not reincarnation. It is not magic.
It is simply a matter of time.
The Most Astounding Fact (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
Last Saturday the girlfriend lady went to rehab in California. She flew west with conviction a day after calling me at four in the morning (drunk) to call it quits. The pills, the booze, the ganja… I didn’t have any idea how sick she was.
I guess I’ve been busy. Reluctant to trust other people. The cheating didn’t help, but my perception of sexuality has grown to exclude jealousy. Should I have recognized it as a symptom? It doesn’t matter.
The ER was packed the night before she left. I walked outside to hear something besides the code alarms & there was a nurse standing by the bushes.
Crying softly, letting her pain out in muted gasps & sour tears. Of that I was jealous. I would have given anything to cry.
My phone rang, I spoke to her carefully. She was drunk again. Telling me she wanted to change, that she had to go right now. That she loved me.
I am clinical. Composed. Stoic. Nothing damages my calm.
If that nurse had not been standing so closely by
I would have thrown up in the bushes.
Her mom gave me the address yesterday. Some place south of Los Angeles. How do I even begin to write?
What do I write?
Dearest,
You reside in my mind as I have always known you: a disturbance in the night, sleeping in beside the fireplace, breakfasts for you & your morning eyes when I was just getting home from work. Cigarette smoke perfume & gin in a dimly lit jazz club. Making music in your basement, a suggestive outfit, that sexy laugh. The vibrato in your voice humming at the base of my frequency range. How warmly your skin would glow in the candles while I held you as we talked.
As I look back, I wonder how much time I spent with the real you. Curiosity compels me to explore the days you woke up intoxicated from the night before. To examine whether or not there was an honest exchange of ideas or some drunken fuckery convenient to your emotional needs at the time. I am sorry to say these things to you because for each ounce it hurts me I know the real pain will happen on the receiving end. My frustration is that we have become acquainted without taking the time to figure each other out. Had I known you better, had I known the extent of your desperation… perhaps something could have been arranged sooner. I was unaware of the fullness of your suffering & for that I am sorry.
I am alone in my sadness, attempting to come to terms with greater forces than I. Certainly you feel that way too: like a shifting tide has come to sweep you under. Like you will emerge raw & scraped on distant shores far from anyone you used to know.
So maybe we are alone together. I think that is why we get along so well. I leave you alone with your bottles, you leave me with my melancholy. Where we meet is electricity & imagination beyond a scope either of us is willing to admit. Where we meet is a beautiful place & I have been trying to remember how that feels every day since you embarked on your journey.
It is a path you do not have to travel by yourself. Know that the tracks are worn deep into the dirt of your road by many before you. That it anticipates the traffic of further generations. You have taken a step into the unknown. Fear will accompany this adventure. It is not your only companion, so lean on the others who seek to see you well.
Count me among those legions of supporters. People who love you & are hurt deeply by your absence. Those who understand your predicament, who applaud your sense of responsibility. Count me in.
Ardently,
Samuel
Took my National Registry cognitive examination on Saturday.
Freaked out all weekend waiting for results.
Discovered an hour ago that I am officially certified to provide healthcare in the United States of Murka.
Kickass. Time to catch up on some sleep.
with D minor.
I’ve been out with a lady a couple of times this week to investigate whether she would make a suitable sexual partner. Here are my findings:
- She is attracted to tall, feeble-minded men with poor manners.
- Is under the impression that four-inch stilettos should be factored into the height equation, as she is perpetually equipped with such.
- Violence is an important quality in a relationship, the more choking the better.
- Cheating is equally acceptable, especially if homes are wrecked in the process.
- Drinking yourself to the point of liver failure every time you are presented with alcohol is how you win at the bar.
- My personal favorite: she’s “ethnically observant”, which I gather is a euphemism for “tragically ignorant” or “fraught with overt racial prejudice”.
In her defense, she is rather well-read. Not to mention physically attractive. A few of the above are absolute boner killing dealbreakers though. I do not care how nicely your dimensions fit with my definition of beauty should your soul be a barren place.
Other news: We gradumicated last night, which was awesome. Even more awesome = a slideshow of pictures where I crouch over mannequins, magnificently bearded, in a Where’s Waldo?esque shirt. I was awarded the honor of “Most likely to end up on reality TV” & provided with a Littman lightweight stethoscope, something I now have two of. We were all issued cute Res-Q-Me tools for breaking car windows & cutting seatbelts. There was cake.
Then karaoke. & booze. Fill in the blanks.
I suppose I should get a job now. Taking an 8 hour security guard class on New Year’s Eve, getting my pistol permit on the 21st… I figure if I grab all sorts of qualifications I can land a position doing something in this soul-sucking state. Supposedly Sikorksy is hiring EMTs with gun permits for “police” positions which pay 80k, more than enough cash to finance my desire to volunteer overseas part of each year. You sit in a booth & wave to people all day. C’mon, what a sweet deal.
The fire department is hiring too…but they get around 1000 applications, so the chances are pretty slim I’ll be selected for New Haven’s rescue team. Should February pass without decent work I’ll be moving on.
Suggestions, as always, are welcome. Especially if you know someplace I can work for room & board.
Hugh Aldersey-Williams (Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements)
… and continued:
“Oxidation betrays the march of time and the inevitable triumph of entropy. The gas gives life, and in doing so brings death closer.”
(via jtotheizzoe)
I have emerged from illness intact once again. The sinus infection going around Occupy New Haven did not spare me her horrors. Attributing this to the fact that I am the only medic at our protest & thereby have touched just about everybody else who is sick I am unsurprised by the results. It has been cold sleeping out of doors, we are learning to adapt to new bacteria & living conditions.
This weekend past was spent at Occupy Philadelphia. Between 800 & a thousand people congregated at city hall in the heart of the financial district. A ten piece band with two MCs hooked up to a power source (mostly solar, with some draw from the building itself) deafened the doubting masses in the roundabout. It was a beautiful sight to behold. Slug let me sleep in his tent as the homeless spilled into the subway system below the street. Humor was widely available: I picked up a Tips for Preventing Sexual Assault pamphlet: it advised me that the most effective way to do that was to simply not assault anybody. The occupiers will likely be evicted next month to make way for a new ice skating rink upon the ground where they have pitched their tents. Meanwhile the city closed 8 schools this week due to budget cuts.
I was able to spend time with my brother & mama dukes in between clinical time riding with New Haven Fire & assisting in the Yale/St. Raphael’s ERs. So much trauma. So much blood. This business I have engaged myself in does not bode well for clean boots. My nausea at the sights & smells has subsided… I have held arterial blood inside someone with my own hands. I fully comprehend the power of what we do now.
Just a quick journal entry, life remains busy & mostly without electrical power. Saying hello & sending love to you all. If you’re in town stop by the medical tent at the Green. I’ve got Omega-3 gummy worms.
…So I started collecting my hair, nails and skin so I could pick the best mushrooms to become Infinity Mushrooms, to recognise and eat my body after I die.
Personal photo
