Northward Midget

Tag: separation

  • The Final Cut

    Through the fish-eyed lens of tear-stained eyes, I can barely define the shape of this moment in time.

    And far from flying high in clear blue skies, I’m spiraling down to the hole in the ground where I hide.

    If you negotiate the mine-fields of my mind …

    … and if you beat the dogs and cheat the cold electronic eye …

    … and if you make it past the shotguns in the hall?

    Dial the combination.

    Open the priest-hole.

    And, if I’m in, I’ll tell ya.

    There’s a kid who had a big hallucination — making love to girls in magazines.

    He wonders if you’re sleeping with your new-found faith.  Could anybody love him … or is it just a crazy dream?

    And … if I showed you my dark side, would you still hold me tonight?

    And … if I opened my heart to you — and showed you my weak side — what would you do?

    […]

    Would you take the children away, and leave me alone?

    Would you smile in re-assurance as you whispered down the phone?

    Would you send me packing …

    … or would you take me home?

    I thought I oughta bare my naked feelings.

    I thought I oughta tear the curtain down.

    I held the blade in trembling hands, prepared to make it, but —

    Just then the phone rang.

    I never had the nerve to make the final cut.

    I’m going to bed now, calm and cool.  This is not a cry for help.  It’s just the only song to which I know all the lyrics by heart, and which I sing pitch-perfectly every seventh-or-so time I go out to smoke, and which probably annoys the hell out of my neighbors and the happy couples engaging in clandestine nocturnal carnal rendezvouz in the park.

    Do not call the cops.  Do not have their standard issues kicking in my door.  Let me relax, where maniacs don’t blow holes in sad men by remote control.

    Where everyone has recourse to the law.

    And no-one takes the children anymore.

    No-one takes the children anymore.

     

  • The Verdict

    Opposing counsel accused me of being an alcohol and marijuana abuser.  How did she come up with any marijuana abuse?  Apparently she subpoenaed ECMC.  Can they do that?  Isn’t there some kind of doctor-client privilege?  Oh well.  In any case, I was presented in quite an unflattering way.

    So, I arrive at nine-twentysomething and the hearing finally commences at sometime after noon.   All this after (a) having my fucking Droid lose its GPS connection, (b) driving around the labyrinthine streets of downtown Buffalo for far too long, (c) waiting in line at the security checkpoint for ten minutes, (d) finding the court part has been moved, (e) the absence of our law guardian (lawyer for the children) the first two times we were called, and (f) fuck Justice.

    Some very cute young ladies in the waiting room, though.  Gotta check Craigslist for any “missed connections.”

    So, we go in.  Petitioner’s attorney begins with a brush wet with malignant accusations.  I get my turn, and have no idea what to say, so I begin to refute her allegations.

    Long story shortened, I could not in good conscience consent to the petition, as it consists of harmless incidents inflated grossly into what could be construed as dangerous intentions.  Thus, the judge ordered what I presume to be the “fact finding hearing” in July.

    Another month separated from my daughters.

    Again: I do not know if my daughters even know I am alive, and every day gone by makes them wonder if I still care.

    I was, at least, respectful to the court.

    The judge provided an order for assignment of counsel.   As I am (now) giving roughly half of my gross income to the exish, I cannot afford an attorney.   However, on paper, I do not qualify to be assigned one.

    Thus, I continue pro-se, representing myself.

    I hope the exish realizes what she’s doing to her daughters.  She must.  She must know this.  She must know they miss me.

    They need me.

    I did sneak in an “inadvertent” reference to her as “Ms Haze” a la “Lolita.”  Maybe she got it.

    In any case, now I wait until July.

    Of course, if you find yourself in this manner of situation, and you can afford an attorney, by all means get one immediately.

    Me?  I’m stuck with telling the truth.

    And that doesn’t go over all that well with Lady Justice.

  • Fuck You

    All of you.

    All your fear.

    I lie, inasmuch as I don’t know the truth.  Inasmuch as everything I say is some dialogue of script I’ve written moments before, seconds before, split microframes of life before speaking it.  And I mean it.  At the time.  But it all fades.  Truth is ephemeral.  It’s a whisper misheard and repeated with mutations and twisted with prerogatives and turned into hateful resentment.

    I’m drinking now, and I’m posting publicly.  Now, I know this is the wrong thing to do.  I know this is what caused some … some person to … to cause me to be committed to a mental hospital.

    But I won’t stop.  I can’t stop.  We can’t stop.  None of us.

    Just say it.  Do it.  Act what you feel.

    What’s more true than the words and motions queuing up in your frontal lobes, waiting to be spilled upon the world?  If they don’t understand, fine.  If they don’t understand and don’t try, it’s a pity.  If they don’t understand and don’t care, then fuck them all to Hell.

    Years ago.

    What if she’d been honest?  What if, instead of skirting around her real feelings, hiding behind some ludicrous fear, what if she’d told me how she felt?  Because, honestly, and truly, I had no fucking idea.  I didn’t know.  I couldn’t understand.  She’d try to explain, sometimes, and I’d listen, intently, trying — but it was all gibberish.  We were speaking different languages.

    There’s only one language we all understand, and that’s the rage and tears that spill from an honest heart.

    Fuck you all and fuck God.  What kind of world is this, where we can’t communicate?  Babel was never dismantled.  It was never finished as a vain, clever gedankenexperiment by a smug watchmaker of a God.  It persists, and none of us can relate to each other.  Our fears, our pain.  They can’t be quantified or qualified.  They’re boolean values.

    We are afraid and we hurt.

    And instead of trying to fix it?  We go on to someone else.  We think they’re different.  We think they understand us.  But they’re the same beneath a different shade of paint.  We’ll get tired of them.  We’ll find some flaw.  We’ll hate them as much as we hate the man we left, or the woman we left — the person we couldn’t stand to even try to be with anymore.

    Some goddamned cunt looked me in the eye over her bifocals at CPEP and said she had never considered suicide.  Never.  Never in her life had she just wanted to turn it all off.  Deluded, or a fucking willful liar.  She must have been a doctor, a doctor of the mind, a mesmeristic witch pretending to know how people tick.  Had she never looked at herself?  How can she even be real?  Just another slug sliming her way across the illusory manicured lawns of this putrid Earth?

    Is someone going to call the police?  Is someone going to say this poor man needs help?  That he’s in a crisis?  That he’s a bad father?  That he doesn’t deserve to live but he wants to die so you should put him in a cage?

    Fuck you all.

    Every Christ-fucking one of you.