Betsy Jo Lundquist

5th Period

    The lunch ladies weren't your mothers, they told you so by committee, via a laminated sign that hung on the pallid yellow tiled wall.  Interaction, microscopic interaction seemed to tell a different story. These uncanny rituals are probably what deemed a disclaimer to be read in the line before your transaction began. As it did she'd look you in the eye and think "God, you've really chunked up this year", at least that was what her little grunt seemed to say. That could have just been a grunt of exhaustion; but in all fairness your mother grunts the same way because you've exhausted her. She always has and always will, there's no helping it, you're exhausting. It also could have been a grunt of faint guilt, which led seamlessly to her next rote task; taking the ice cream scooper just used to plop a ball of mashed potatoes on your pumpkin orange Melmac tray; then using it's outer edge to make an indentation which would serve as a reservoir for nuclear yellow chicken flavor gravy speckled heavily with black pepper flakes. Of all the world's wonderful things which simultaneously elicit strange love and guilty aversion, florescent  school gravy yet holds its place in your top 20 list.

    She then filled in the crater to over flowing. In the same swipe of her wrist she doused something chicken fried in the neighboring "star attraction" compartment. She sighed so lightly; as a whisper to herself; and then used her latex gloved hand to grab a carton of milk and place it at the top right hand corner of your tray. Sure, this could easily be read as Freudian in some overzealous usage. You had just come to the point in your life that 90% of your thoughts seemed overzealously Freudian; fortunately this would eventually pass sometime before you hit 40. Chances are though, that lunch lady Beth didn't think of things in a Freudian light. She was probably just as reductive, but, likely through a different set of archetypes functioning in a similar yet less sexually charged way. After all, she did seem the practical type; but maybe that was just the hair net speaking for her. Uniforms often say things they don't mean at all, or don't quite mean; just like you about three weeks into any given relationship. Fortunately, both of these tendencies maintain appearances, which, for the most part serve the greater good.

     Beth would then take a deep breath, decide that it was all down to you what you wanted to make of yourself; it wasn't her responsibility, this much the sign had already told you. She handed you your tray and gave you a big pleasant smile. Barb then took your money, and you were off; out into the world with a half pint of milk to ease the transition of being weaned. Not five minutes later, you received a great shock. It was something that Ben had said, not sure what now. It was either a joke about a hamster, or a joke about Hamster's mother; quite possibly both.  All of a sudden, the 3/4 of a carton of milk that you'd greedily gulped in one go came in forceful stinging streams out of your nostrils.  As it splattered all over your lap, the table, the bench and the linoleum flooring, you knew something had changed. You rushed to the lunch counter and picked up a huge wad of napkins out of the dispenser. Beth and Barb followed your journey with their eyes, full of an attentive disapproval. It doesn't matter though, it was then that you realized that you could tidy up after yourself now. You could take care of the massive mess you'd just made of yourself and the world around you. The sign had told you up front that this would be expected of you, and it was starting to sink in now, like a massive puddle of nose milk into a wad of napkins.


Press Your Luck


   "I'm really worried about my cat. He just lays around all day sleeping and looking bored, I think he's really depressed. Anyhow, I'm afraid to leave him alone for fear of what he'll do to himself. Sorry again that I can't make it." Steve ended the e-mail there and against better judgment in the wider sense of the term; which is not to say his own better judgment; he sent it. At least he was offering an excuse, a reason for not showing up to a lunch meeting with Dennis from the board of trustees at a foundation that was interested in funding his research. He could have just ditched it, and tried to reschedule this with no excuse, but instead he opted to make the effort of making an excuse. Sadly, a very flip and hostile one. He found it impossible, excruciating really, to simply show up when his anxieties got the best of him. Once they had, he found it equally unpalatable not to dress up his hostilities in a real gem of a horrendous excuse. It was, as he saw it, a form of seduction. One refined and completely lost on all save for a very few with an extraordinarily rare sensibility. Or, so the justification went.
   
    Now, a sort of dirty relief set over him. He felt crippled and weird but at least now he didn't have to bare this in public, or in front of a total stranger. He sat up straight in his chair and made a long stretch of his torso and his arms skyward as far as he could manage as he let out a deep yawn. He got up from the kitchen table and shuffled over to the sink and filled the kettle. Steve had been so excited about the possibility of this funding for over a month now, so excited that it made him feel sick, so excited that he didn't know what to do about . So, now it was time to do something excruciatingly mundane, and then progress in that fashion until the day was spent. He cleaned out the gunk from underneath his fingernails with his other fingernails as he waited for the kettle to boil, and let the almost imperceptible mass of it fall onto the kitchen floor. The kettle boiled, he made a cup of tea and a cup-o-soup in fast succession. He used the brewing time to think about doing laundry, to think about sweeping up, to think about calling someone to fix the leaking faucet in the bathroom.  He ate the cup-o-soup at the kitchen table, while the cat sat on the table across from him, watching him eat and purring loudly while making that cat face that looks as close to a smile as anything.

    Steve moved into the living room and sat on the sofa, thought about more mundane household tasks he could do for another 5 minutes or so before finally flipping on the TV after not finding the momentum to do otherwise. He surfed over to a midday marathon of episodes of Press Your Luck that were now well over 25 years old on Game Show Network. After 45 minutes of thinking how sleepy he was, tolerating cartoon "Whammies" ,ads for scooters and life insurance, he decided to take a nap. For another 5 minutes he contemplated moving to his bedroom before ultimately just tipping over on the sofa and resting his head on a hard armrest padded by his coat. He left the TV on, and as he drifted off he wondered how he would manage to get to sleep with badly singing cartoon game show mascots.

    Some indeterminate time later, he awoke to the sound of the buzzer, the door buzzer being pressed now, not one pressed 27 years ago echoing through rebroadcast spurred by questionable nostalgia. In the space of a minute that still felt like the endless abyss of sleep, Steve tried to work out if he was going to get up and answer it or not, it would probably just stop if he gave it another second or two. In that case it may not be worth standing up at all, and who knows how long they had been ringing it anyhow. He couldn't pinpoint the second at which he decided to get up, to answer the door, but he soon found himself talking into the intercom. "Who's there?" "Dennis Reardon..... from Yucca Trust, we were supposed to have lunch today". He paused, "You got my message......... right?" "Yeah, I understand you couldn't make it so I thought I'd just come meet you here instead. Can I come up?" He didn't have enough time to think, to keep this from happening, so he simply said yes and buzzed Dennis up.

    Thrown for a loop he now realized that he may betray himself with the state of his apartment. He searched it with quick eyes, wondering how not to betray the facade he'd built for himself. A facade, hastily constructed a bit every day. Had it been a physical thing, a manifestation of his efforts, it would have constructed out of cardboard from appliance boxes, yellow duct tape, a few zip ties for decoration, and pages out of back issues of The Economist also used as decoration in places but mostly utilized to obscure the places where thing like FRAGILE and THIS END UP were marked. For some doubtful reason; probably really a matter of style and not content; he'd have left sections saying TEAM LIFT showing.  He lived in a 5th floor walk up, so he had some time to do damage control before Dennis could make it to his doorstep. He threw all bits of anything that were trash and that may as well be trash away, stacked all papers, magazines and books, chucked all the dirty clothes on the living room floor into his bedroom closet and flushed the toilet. The cat was blissfully sleeping on his back in a beam of sunlight near the window. He scooped him up quickly and was going to chuck him onto his bed. Due to the abrupt manner in which he had been woken up, the cat went from looking blissful to looking dazed and seemed to be working out if he should be pissed off at Steve or simply frightened.  It was decided to keep the now stunned and troubled looking "Whiskey" draping off his forearm until he opened the door.

    When he opened the door, Dennis gave him a look of concern which was greatly colored by the exhaustion of climbing 5 flights of steep stairs. After exchanging very basic greetings, Steve put Whiskey down in the other room and offered Dennis a glass of water. What Steve did not and would not know is that he was benefiting from a benefit of doubt extended to him on behalf of someone else entirely. Several months ago, something horrible had happened at Dennis' sister's house. Her marmalade colored cat named "Hamburg Harry" had been found hanging by the white nylon window shade cord. When she discovered him, nearly dead, hanging unconscious, her other cat "Pony" was standing on hind legs, batting his body very gently with his paw and curiously watching his body swing very slightly with his tail less than an inch from touching the floor at the lowest point of the swing. He was quickly cut down, resuscitated and rushed to the vet. He survived, made what qualified for a remarkable recovery yet he was not quite the same as before.

    A fair presentation of the facts, the circumstances surrounding Hamburg Harry's "accident", pointed the finger squarely at one suspect; yet this is not how the truth was constructed in the household and by those emotionally invested and connected to the family. He had in fact, been hung by Dennis' 8 year old nephew Levi, who was known to be troubled. What the family could not admit was quite how troubled he was, and as much as they could admit they simply hoped would pass. Slowly and in ever increasingly unrealistic waves, a story was constructed. Hamburg Harry became a very troubled cat, a smart and tortured creature who had intended to end his own life. Sure, there were massive gaps of basic reasoning in this version of events, but it stuck because it simply had to. It was true that Hamburg Harry was able to open most doors, he'd figured out the mechanics of that one. But, he probably hadn't seen enough old movies with dramatic executions by hanging to understand the concept fully. He would no longer sleep in Levi's room, he cowered when the boy tried to pet him or pick him up, and on many occasions he ran out of the room when Levi entered. 

    Levi had already been put in counseling, but as the incident of Hamburg Harry's near death by hanging was never attributed to him, it was never mentioned to the counselor. His mother on several occasions thought of mentioning it, but was held back by the sick feeling it gave her. He drew the cat again and again and again, sometimes as a cartoon angel, but never in a pose of duress. His fixation with the cat was never questioned so the coverup remained in tact. Dennis had heard all about this, and as he visited his sister's home often, he knew enough that he did not want to know. He became as culpable in maintaining the kitty cat suicide attempt theory as anyone. It was for this reason, that when Steve sent his flippant and outrageous cancellation excuse, that he took it seriously. It did indeed serve a serious purpose, feeding his resolve that Hamburg Harry was depressed, and that this sort of thing was possible; and now it seemed a bit more common than one would have imagined. It had filled him with a spike of shock and relief, and then a deep sympathy for Steve. Where other financial officers would have simply been disgusted and denied funding, he pressed ahead and turned up at Steve's home.

    When Steve returned from the kitchen, he handed Dennis a glass of water. He had poured himself one too, not for thirst, but as a prop to occupy his mouth and keep him from needing to say anything to start with. There was a long silence, a silence only compromised by the gulping of water. Steve sat down on the sofa next to Dennis and finally said "So sorry about today. What do you need to know?". Through his preoccupation Dennis had half forgotten what it was they needed to discuss, finally it came to his mind and he jumped a bit with a start. "Oh, just the budget, just need to go over it with you. That's all." This wasn't the entirely true intent of the meeting, he was meant to assess whether or not Steve was a flake. Contingent on an acceptable flake rating, he was then meant to make the decision to grant or deny funding. All the evidence was in saying he was, really a marvel of a mess. In meaning to prove this point through ongoing self defeating behaviors, he'd unwittingly spiked a wave of rampant paternalism in the representative of his potential patron. This was all happening too fast, he was too confused and still drowsy to throw anything else at him to derail this deal.
 
   Steve fished the budget he'd drawn up out of a pile of magazines, food delivery leaflets and old bank statements. He handed it to Dennis who looked it over very quickly. He anxiously nodded his head, put the paper in a folder and said "Yep, looks good. We'll get that out to you by the end of the week." He held out his hand for a handshake, Steve looked at it oddly, suspiciously, but ultimately extended his too. As they shook hands, Dennis rested his other hand on Steve's wrist, looked at him with heavy earnest eyes and told him "I'm so sorry that you're going through this, my sister is having the same problem and I know it's very difficult...emotionally. Get help in if you need it, ok? Just let me know and we can add it to the budget. No questions asked." Steve felt like Dennis had just seen straight into his soul, like he saw everything that was wrong with him, that he saw him as the massive wreck he was. "Ok.....thanks, I'll do that." Dennis gave one last hearty shake to Steve's hand and a big generous smile that made his dewy eyes twinkle. They walked to the door, Steve showed him out and said thank you and goodbye. As he closed the door behind him, he began to shake and hyperventilate, trying desperately to steady himself, wondering what on earth had just happened.


The Complete Tumbleweed (to date)

Tumbleweed Pt 1: Dome Like a Sky

    Swells of dust moved across the plains like an earthworm who can't seem to decide if it prefers the air or the earth. Punctuated only by shards of broken deep brown bottles, ties off of bread bags and slightly more playful but still urgent tumbleweeds. Rex wandered among them, for the most part seeming undisturbed by the coarse dry dirt pelting his face and somehow making its way into his closed mouth. A mound of it formed at his feet, swallowed him up to his neck, and then moved right on past him.

    He found himself slightly irritated, shaking the sand from his shirt, his pants. It had found its way; not everywhere; but into strange and unlikely crevices. Rex stuck his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled it out full of sand, bag ties in faded shades of blue and orange, a matchbook, and a used tissue. He thought for a second and realized that he could only account for the tissue having been there before. He had also sworn that this pocket had contained a bridle rosette made of thick domed glass and nickel silver with a picture of The Pharaoh's Horses which had presumably been cut out of a magazine sandwiched in-between them. There was no good reason for it to have been there, no good reason for Rex to own it, as he didn't own a horse nor did he have any designs on owning one. This artifact had no history for Rex, no family tie, and in fact he didn't know how he had come by it. Its function had been reduced to being flipped nervously and continuously by Rex's right hand. In fact, he never thought about where it came from, and likely had never noticed it until he became dependent on the nervous ritual of rolling it between his fingertips and feeling the surface of the glass and the nickel buckle alternating rubbing against the hollow of his palm.  He found it curious that it was no longer in this; his right pocket; which he secretly, vaguely, but with utter conviction thought to be the rosette's spiritual home.

    Rex proceeded to calmly check every pocket or possible hiding place on his body, though quite irrationally filtering the sand through his fingers in a fine and gingerly fashion. The rosette was quite large, and there was really no missing the weight or feel of it, Rex knew that better than anyone. It was if in leaving him the physicality of the thing became muted and abstracted, so much that it may well be contained in a grain of sand, that his ritual relationship with it was what gave it real weight, size and form. Distress set into his heart, a sharp sinking, followed by a sharp desperation.  This was not a desperation of action, but an abstract overwhelming need for the terror of this separation to be over. He started to imagine the thing, floating through a strange un-locatable, ever moving parade of sand. The sands rolling it just as ritually as he did, only more fluidly, yet less lovingly.

    Strange to say, he never really looked at the thing much, it belonged in his pocket and that was essentially that. But on the few occasions on which he had, he had noticed the picture, he knew he had seen the same picture as an oak framed print in both the livestock exchange lobby and his Uncle Harrison's stairwell.  The version in the livestock exchange had a large spot of foxing on the muzzle of the horse in the foreground, Uncle Harrison's print had been a unsettling cyanotype version, although it was quite cleanly preserved. Rex thought of what he held in his pocket to have been a combination of these two examples that lived in the unveiled world outside of it, that is as a cyanotype with one browned spot on the muzzle of the horse in the foreground. This is the image that rolled through the sands, tortured looking blue horses rearing their muscular necks defiantly against it, as it tousled their manes.

    The sand snake that moved around him was now at a low slung trickle, every now and then covering up to the steel toes on his boots; not deep enough to hide the rosette, he thought. But he was quite convinced that what he saw off in the distance was the monster that had consumed it. A quarter mile or so away, giant swells of sand undulated, mostly black in the darkness but with some highlights from the clear bright moon above the storm. Telephone poles shot up amidst it, like masts of ships obscured by the rolling waves. The sky was purple and curiously green, the moon was surrounded by an iridescent rainbow corona. Rex looked at the moon, and thought he saw himself in it, as a sort of out of body experience. He saw himself floating above the swells, and looking at them with the same morose longing permanently transfixed on the face of the moon. He thought about how the moon always seems to stare at the earth with such a pathetic, hopeless deep longing; and how this is a longing which could never be satiated aside from some cataclysmic event. Even though he realized that his chances were rather better than the moon's for his reunion, he still thought of it in possible terms of cataclysm.

    Why didn't the sand monster just overwhelm him and shove the rosette down his throat in one last, vaguely poetic act? Or maybe more specifically poetic in shoving bread ties and sand (or maybe just sand) into every orifice (or maybe just his throat) and suffocating him, but graciously returning the rosette to his right pocket, where it rightfully belonged? Was this really too much to ask? It wasn't as if he was asking to survive; Rex knew you can only ask for so much in life, and he felt that perhaps, this would have been too much. He pictured the sand rolling off his lifeless body, revealing an iridescent rainbow corona around his dour face stuffed with sand, his body posed as a martyr with one hand in the right pocket of his buckskin jacket and the left hand raised to the level of his shoulder making a delicate yet powerful gesture like those that Christ makes on prayer cards. Really, was this too much to ask?

    Rex sat down in the shallow sands. He took the matches from his pocket and lit one, holding it under his fingertips and feeling the sting of heat, and the pain afterwards as he blankly stared off at the sands rolling further and further away from him. He knew that the number of matches in the pack was finite to say the least, but for now the ritual of this was as close to heaven as he was going to get.    




Tumbleweed Pt 2: The Odyssey


    Rex walked across a dry dusty path, flattened into existence by an unknown quantity of years of occasional traffic by pick ups and combines. It was the only sign of them now, but it could be argued that the lengths of barbed wire fences and a faded tin sign prohibiting hunting spoke of them too, though not quite as equally. The path wasn't completely dry and dusty, it did have patches of varying sizes of quickly drying and cracking mud, some of which had a white clouded quality to the uppermost of their skins. He swaggered along it with a stilted rhythm, he had strained his back and played it off with the coolness of the oft crippled cowboy, where pain becomes a vague character of menace. 

           Rex cut across a slightly raised stretch of land, covered in sagebrush strewn with the intestines of cassette tapes flittering in the ever so slight breeze. It was littered with tabs off pop cans, little bits of faded safety orange clay pigeons, spent royal purple shell casings with gold colored ends. It was all paleolithic trash as far as he could see it. Despite all good sound knowledge to the contrary, as far as he was concerned, no one had been here for thousands upon thousands of years. Rex had himself been just here, yesterday, the day before that, every day for the last month aside from the day it had rained. But he still saw it as if he himself had never been here; this was some sort of a stage for the effect of de-ja-vu, it exists in the abyss and all time has collapsed upon itself here. 

    He walked over to his favorite rock and lowered himself onto it.  It was low slung and almost completely flat, it had discolorations that looked like petroglyphs of some nameless primitive beast, and this made it seem spiritual to Rex. He sat with his legs splayed out and his feet flat on the ground, his knees rising above half of his torso. Sure, he'd been here before, but it felt brand new, but comfortably and eerily familiar at the same time; he swore that he'd seen it in a dream before, but really it was just a convoluted memory of the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the bit with the monkeys and the big black monolith. Powerful nonetheless. He sighed and took a flattened pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, drew one out and lit it with a slightly more deep mournful sigh.

    Rex came here to meditate on semi local features, raises and depressions of land defining the break of the horizon that were a good mile off. He saw them as the body of Ruby, tumbling in a solid action across the plains. Her arched back with it's visible protruding vertebrae, one small breast at the top of the deeply cut trench of her belly, a large aquiline nose protruding from the ground above which ( or rather to the left of) a small clump of trees made up her eyebrows, and further left a larger clump which made her hair. Maybe her hair on a bad day, yet, when she had been at her worst he had always put more effort into romanticizing her; making this all the more meaningful for him. He had seen Walker's tit's on the drive up, which consist of one eroding bluff on each side of the road, one fairly larger than the other. But this hadn't given him any pause; they had been monument to a passing, light curiosity from a more innocent time, the equivalent of a Rococo folly really. A carefree romp before the dire sacredness of getting your head lopped off.

    Phlegm rose in his throat, he held onto it for a second, refining it and mulling it over before projecting it towards the ground. He missed and hit the inside edge of his boot instead. He looked at it clinging and then slowly sliding off, and decided that he had spat on himself intentionally, that really, he had done everything to himself. And, in fact he believed this, but he also believed that some grand romantic engine of fate was pushing him to do this; that his role as the self defeating longing romantic was cast by something big and ever present; but that this something was only faintly tangible to an extreme and rare sensitivity. Rex didn't want to possess this sensitivity as he did, which was very faintly, but he wanted to posses it more more more, so much, clear as day every single day; or he didn't want it at all.

    He stared blankly at Ruby's nose, and realized that he had forgotten what she really looked like; this was it now, what she looked like now. Rex thought about crying, that he would probably like to cry. It seemed right enough. No one would see him; the dogs were back in the truck sleeping; but he decided that he felt stupid enough for holding onto things this long, for letting it come to this. Crying wouldn't make it any better, although he knew precious little could make it any worse. His blank stare remained but he began to chew his lower lip and rub his thighs.  It's not that he hadn't cried over this whole mess, he'd cried day and night for a period of time that seems like a passed eternity. He asked himself how long this had been going on for. As he precisely counted back the months, the days, really down to the hour; he decided he didn't know how long it had been, it may have been forever. 

    The sun began to set over the horizon, it was beautiful and he couldn't help but notice it. Beauty was no longer a small treat to be savored, it had become a faint sense of what hope was like, but not one that he let himself connect with unchecked, it had to be viewed through some distorting sensibility. This was probably for the best in this case, as a young Rex had been told that staring at the sun can blind you. He stared off to the side of it, past the horizon, but not "at" the sun directly. For a moment he thought he saw something, the difference between distraction and transcendence; between nothingness and emptiness. The present solidified ever so slightly, the past became ever so slightly smaller and less solid, the future as had been desired did so too. Rex saw this, and he tried to grasp it, he almost did but he never touched it. It was miles away, over the horizon of Ruby's body, his arms are really only so long.



Tumbleweed Pt 3: The Quickening


     Rex looked out at the plains, all the grasses had just turned from gold to green, and although the world was damp from torrential rains, he could hardly reconcile this with the hot, dry brightness of the wide, clear blue skies. He dug his heels into the soil, somewhere between dust and mud, and felt the dampness from plants neither categorizable as weed or non weed soaking uncomfortably through the seat of his jeans. It occurred to him that categories were not something especially native to this landscape, desire and the undesirable just melded into one reality; and he didn't especially find that the lack of the centrifuge that separated out these two elsewhere (in towns, in cities or even tidy homestead plots in the countryside) was anything he longed for.

    Arcs of grasshoppers shot around him in all directions, and at all heights greater than 6" and less than 4'. It was the kind of sight to see that only makes any sense as a whole, no grasshopper really distinguished itself as lead hopper. For that reason it struck him that the whole dance of it could be looked upon as really poorly choreographed; or as he preferred to see it now; as really amazingly well choreographed, absolutely seamless.  As the performance died down; for a short intermission between acts 91 and 92; Rex was distracted briefly by the need to scratch in order to relieve the creeping vacuum seal of dampness between the ground, a layer of denim, a layer of cotton underpants, and his skin itself. He could have focused on the irritation, which would have caused him to scratch only more and more, thus causing a worse irritation; but Rex really wasn't in the mood for such an exertion of bother. Distractions were lost on him at the moment; so he simply broke the seal between the layers and went back to staring at the plains ahead of him.

    Most everything was so very green, not green like grasses on intentional lawns, but sort of a brightness of an array of greens not found in hues of Easter basket grasses. Jutting out from the clumping masses of colonies of sage, sager, sage-iest, he saw the bare rock face of the side of a bluff. Two sides of it really, and he knew automatically three counting the one hidden from sight; the other side ramped upward from the ground gradually becoming the top of the bluff  and was covered in the same carpet of grasses. The exposed rock was this very light bleached grey color, lighter than the blue of the sky, far lighter than the greens of the ground. There was something sort of uncanny about it at first glance, and when this struck Rex he cocked his head attentively to one side, pursed and twisted his mouth with the corner gathered upward towards the sky as if it were on a pulled thread puckered towards his ear.

    A mass of big puffy white clouds drifted over his head, causing a slight darkening to the brightness of the sky directly under the clouds, and of course the ground directly under that. It had always amazed Rex how on bright days on the plains, the shadows caused by clouds had such a solid object like quality to them, with clearly defined edges and such an utter lack of any sense of dispersion. But, right now he was still oddly struck by the bluff. After giving himself a minute to absorb the full weight of his quizzical head tilt, he lowered the imagined puckered thread between his ear and the corner of his mouth, and straightened out his head. Now looking directly at the bluff, after what was probably a few seconds or minutes or something, he began to recognize where knew it from.

    Rex often had these odd dreams where he was encased in a tomb cut of rock in the landscape like this, and, upon exiting the tomb he was met by his father. For some disturbing reason, his father was always Sean Connery in dreams like this, and he then needed to take his remains home to be near to him for awhile. These dreams brought up all manner of unpleasantly odd questions and associations. Why was his father Sean Connery? Clearly, it wasn't meant to be his actual father, but was it an archetypal father? Or some odd archetypal father representing an aspect of ego? He supposed that the distinction between the two wasn't really all that necessary. All the same that the why-fors that would cause this to take form as Sean Connery made him wonder who on earth he was inside.

    Of course, there were also the strong biblical associations with the whole scene that added more clues but also more weirdness to sort through. First, there were the atmospheric memories that came with this. Rex always automatically reverted to his childhood belief that any place or person from the bible smelt like a combination of flannel board, a faulty gas stove, long damp concrete, cheap amber colored glue with a tilted pink rubber bottle tip and the smell of a perfectly sweet heavyset elderly woman sweating profusely through cheap black, all polyester slacks. So, Rex's tomb "smelt" like this in these dreams, which, was of course unsettling and plenty to get past of its own accord. But, wait, was Sean Connery making a cameo as God in his dream? Ah, surely not, that just seems like a really odd casting choice even for a dream. Yeah, ego aspect of mind to be sorted through and destroyed, that had to be it. Right? For one thing Connery was always wearing a kilt in this dream, so maybe it was sort of a Highlander thing where he gets his head cut off. Yeah, that seemed reasonable enough; his constructed ideal self was always good with a dart gun, better with charming baddies with unfortunately sexualized names into bed and surviving unreasonable auto/ boat/ what-have you chases. Rex had never come close to being that Rex, which he realized was likely for the best; it seemed a bit too exhausting just to watch someone else pretend to be that. And frankly, some of the lines he'd have to pull out, well they'd just make him cringe to say them out loud.

    The clouds and their solid-ish shadows gently drifted out of the path of the bright dry boiling sun. Rex's eyes gazed halfway upwards towards it, the other half closed, his eyelids slightly flickering to automatically shield him from the intensity of the light. He stood up and pulled the layers of damp fabric as far as he possibly could away from his ass cheeks, and walked off towards his truck thinking that he'd likely head off to get a Slurpee from 7-11; hopefully Mountain Dew, but if that was out of order, blueberry.


Tumbleweed Pt 4: Juanita


    Rex had driven something like 8 aimless hours and now found himself at the Apache Valley Great Sand Dunes. The air was dry, the day bright and boiling. Not another living creature was anywhere in sight; not even the expected few kids on mushrooms who thought this place sounded like a good idea. He strolled along quickly with his right eye squinting as if it had just chugged a glass of grapefruit juice, his left somehow not bothered was yet wide open. The air had been still, then suddenly the winds picked up and the sand beneath his feet quickly shifted. After a windy minute, he found his feet buried completely in the sands. Without so much as a sound decision, Rex continued to walk, but ceased to lift his feet. He slowly slid them through the weighty sands ahead of him, despite the fact that this was jarring and awkward. The stunted motion crept downwards from his heart, and then upwards to his head. It may well have been mapped as an energy flow chart in any one of many new agey what not to do to help yourself manuals.

    The sands ahead of him made him think of cartoon mirages. Jugs of water and turkey legs for someone like Popeye, maybe a tarted up girl bunny for Bugs. He thought very briefly as to what his mirage would be, and decided on an iconic favorite swimming pool. This seemed too easy, and perhaps, impersonal. He thought a little longer, lingering on the idea of a mirage, and this made him think of Juanita. He'd met her some time ago, and their paths did not run parallel for as long as he'd have liked after they'd crossed. She was an Inuit ventriloquist with a miraculously beautiful scar cut across her right cheek. She was not quite a mirage, she was flesh and blood to be sure, but she was not much for a show of depth either. She was something like a poorly developed character in a film about either a bohemian circus or a ship of the damned. His mind's eye drew the parameter of a swimming pool, but still thinking about Juanita, he found he could no longer visualize the depth of the pool, nor the water. What really escaped him about Juanita occurred to him now, in a sharp epiphany delivered as a bad metaphor.  A bad metaphor because it was clumsy, funny and completely unromantic; but a very good metaphor because it was apt and concise.  Juanita was like a swimming pool, with a cover which had been drawn over for far too many seasons. Her depth and joy was not known, only strongly alluded to by a strong sense and an as yet un-comprehended knowledge of the pool underneath.

    What Rex was shown when he looked at her was a garish novelty, a two dimensional presentation that was clearly not anything fantastic. It was just a little pleasantly ridiculous.  So many seasons passed her, without some degree of care. It would be damp in her part of the globe, and a blanket of leaves had settled on the pool cover, they were damp, mouldering decaying and slimy.  A slimy, gorgeous, sublimely scarred Inuit ventriloquist. It does sound interesting, but without what Rex really wanted to know about her surfacing in lively bubbling springs, this was not nearly interesting enough. It was simply a pathetic waste of affect slapped on something far better than a cautiously constructed version of Juanita was and could ever be. When they'd met, he had such an uncanny sense of something huge and wonderful hidden in the depths of her. His sense of it was so very strong that he greatly mistook the amount of concealment she shrouded it in. Rex had long held a sort of begrudging but steady faith in the strength of the human spirit to rise up against the oppression of the ego, that what was so strongly sensed in her was strong enough in and of itself to accomplish this. He didn't know now, as he slogged forward a bit more, still sunk into the sands. He no longer knew if he could carry on believing and trusting that what lay beneath could and would do this.

    Who knew anyhow, what exactly was under there? He didn't, but he knew it was amazing, oh-so-good and oh-so-worthwhile. He knew that if he knew this, his love could never be distracted or divided. He knew this, but he also knew that he did not know her; but he acutely and achingly sensed what it would mean to know her. Did he love her? No, not now, she was all show. She was, as it were, not worth loving, but this is not to say she was in any sense unlovable. Nothing could be further from the truth that stuck in his heart like a thorn pierced through a post it note that simply read "DUH!".  The very sight of her had tacked that in immediately.  He wondered what she would do when her act stopped being cute and novel, when a bat of her eyelashes or a masterfully thrown voice simply became impotent. Would she sweep off the leaf slime and retract the cover following the grand resolve of an epic epiphany? Or would she simply throw an new soulless novelty into the mix? He could sort of picture her with a peg leg; maybe she'd actually chew her own leg off in order to get out of taking on the depth she already possessed. Rex realized that she would really look a bit cool with an old fashioned peg leg. But these things grow regrettable and old very soon like a tattoo of a cartoon character, it's really not worth it.  

    He realized that, OK, in all fairness there is more than likely some pretty horrendous shit down there, under the pool tarpaulin. Electric eels, maybe a few not so handsome fish, maybe even some of those weird looking ones who manage to have fish fang overbites, maybe there were nutria in there too. But, really, beaver rats would have drowned by now. And fishing out a dead bloated rodent out of your soul is really not an appealing thing to contemplate, but it seems far preferable to leaving it there. You'd have to feel a bit stinky and septic inside for that right? Everything else she could simply kill or make peace with; being shocked by yourself isn't really all that bad. It just isn't particularly pleasant. Anyhow, Juanita seemed to be of a steady enough constitution to handle such a harrowing task.

    Rex knew it wasn't really all that simple, but at the same time it seemed necessary if not worthwhile. He had himself dove into his depths years ago. It had been precipitated by a strange macho reaction to the cowardice of his ego in expressing something simple and true. He had found himself in a wrestling match which had lasted a long and particularly exhausting breadth of time which he could no longer contemplate. He had pitted the ego of his machismo against the cowardice of his ego, things are often said to be paradoxical at best at that level. Eventually it was a battle that ended in a sort of murder/ suicide; or less brutally and more eternally and universally elegantly expressed as an Ouroboros.  Rex still felt conflict within himself, he felt it deeply, but, he also felt its resolution even if he did not understand where either began or ended.  He also would, with little or no rhythm separating thoughts, consider this battle to have been the most wonderful and amazing thing which could have possibly happened to him, and an incredibly hideous and painful wreck that he wishes had never happened. There was absolutely no way to polarize his feeling about it, so he simply had given up on the futility of reaching some sort of reasonable viewpoint that didn't seem to swallow its own tail. One thing he could settle on was that he was glad that he did not love Juanita, but, at the same time he was acutely aware of the deep sadness he felt in not being able to see what he sensed; in not knowing why he surely would love her beyond all reason.

    The sun had in time traveled from the apex he had found it here to now being behind him, his eyes both now wide open, the dunes still bright and white. He found himself aware and ready to take one last survey of the dunes and head back home. Rex picked his feet up out of the sands that buried them and placed them on top of the ground. His pace, now unfettered,  quickened as he walked away from the sun as it prepared to set.