In my arm there is a garden hose.
It rolls around like a race track.
They take their shovels and they push down on it till we hear the pop
and then the gush push gush push push gush and the blood is in the tube and ready to travel.
In my arm at the crook of my arm there is a mound of dirt.
Bulbous skin and tissue and a vein running through to the garden hose.
I touch this place and I can feel the fevered gush gush whoosh whoosh as the blood flows through the garden hose.
I sit and contemplate all of this with my feet dangling
My toes covered with the socks my daughter got
Don't wear shoes no more, no reason to. Got know where to walk gonna roll there instead.
Yea i'm rollin' me another one my friend
Rolln' me another one.
I have gotten very used to this up at three in the morning and doing three hour power naps during the day with the last being from midnight to three in the morning.
I am able to get a lot done. I can paint, write and play my guitar and not be interrupted by anyone.
I can see this schedule working for me once I am out of here too.
This journey, this path that has been chosen for me, ah it's been such a struggle at times but I see the rewards from it now. This has given me a completely different view of this earth and where I fit into it all.
I know the path of consciousness now and it's a beautiful endeavor.
One of the residents died tonight. It's interesting how not only do the other residents get used to people dying the nurses and aides also get used to it.
One of the aides came in and gave me a twelve pack of caffeine free cherry diet Pepsi. Apparently the woman that died tonight had like thirty cases of it in her closet and the young woman that came in to do whatever your next of kin do when they call them and she didn't want anything that was in the closet or the room. So they were just handing it out. As bad as pop is for you caffeine free cherry diet Pepsi could have been one of the causes of death.
It's six twenty one and my roommate is over on his side grunting and wrestling with what or whomever he wrestles with and I can smell that smell again of him changing his diaper and using the urinal. I don't care how long you are in a situation like this there is no way that some of this becomes normal or you get used to it. You don't get used to it.
Man it's sad that now I remember the days on Middle Pike with such fond emotions. When I was there I didn't really give it much thought. The place was just were we lived, played and worked.
As little boys dad built us two enormous sand boxes around two trees in the yard and Paul, Thad and I played farming in there every day for many years and we had the sand boxes there until we left.
We had this wild yellow cat that showed up one day and we just took it in and fed it. It stayed outside for the most part but would come inside on occasion.
We we got ready to leave to go to our new house that was just built on Kilbury Huber the old yellow cat went under the house and would not come out and no matter what we did we couldn't get it. We finally left the cat there. He knew where his home was and he knew what to do. I guess.
Dad built our new home for mom. The Amish built it and frankly they did a shitty job. The floors all cracked because the foundation and the basement sank and the house became slightly twisted. From the onset mom and dad were always shelling out more money to fix the basement leaks and the twist of the house. They actually came out and put large metal screws into the walls of the basement with steel cable that ran out into the yard and was buried in the ground to pull the walls out some so that the god damn basement walls wouldn't fall in and have the house cave in.
It was a good home, I guess. I was a teenager and I was angry and ready to rebel. My dad was a man that was confused over his future and broken because of his past and we clashed for about three years until I ran like a bandit out of the back door.
My life has always been rebelling against something. After dad it was our government and country in general. I was the empirical hippy. I was a protestor and a stoner flower child but the rage and anger inside of me that was a gift from my father burned so deeply into my soul and I had to fight so hard to keep my being at a state of peacefulness.
Ironically today it's like sliding into a cosy shirt. I am completely comfortable with the hippy that I am. I believe in peace and love and spirit. I know that when John died it really tore me apart. I became enraged and was ready to tear the system down. My life took such an unbelievable turn at that point. I lost everything over the next three years.
I found myself alone and crazy drunk in Columbus, Ohio living in a one bedroom apartment that cost a hundred and fifty a month. I was hooked up with crazy women and was drinking myself to death and destruction. Ah yes we used to look back at those days on Northwood avenue with fond recollection. It was a dangerous and terrible time in that little apartment in the middle of the tremendous city of Columbus, Ohio.
I have these moments when I remember something from the past and I just can't get it in my head if it's right. I have gone from being a very large man to almost dying and weighing 160 to now being at a wonderfully perfect weight of about 193.
I am convinced that my top top weight was around 360 and I was able to get that down to around 340 and stayed there till I got sick when I dropped clear down to 160 and then as I said balanced. There is however that thing that goes on in my brain that says, oh your top weight was 270 and I know that isn't right.
The mind does not relay correct information when dealing with memories. It's just impossible to call those times back up and feel the sensations of what really happened. It's really quite frustrating and it's also why all the guru's babble about staying in the now because the past lies to us and the future is a fantasy. The now is real. As real as it gets.
I lifted weights all through high school and became really well built and actually was very good at lifting. My coach had me working towards moving into the Olympic training after high school. Of course that changed directions when I got into a fight with him. He was also one of the football coaches.
I'm blind in the left eye so why my father pushed me to play sports is beyond me. Football I was always getting clipped on the left side if I carried the ball. Baseball I never knew how close or how far the ball was to me if I was trying to catch it and basket ball was a perspective issue also.
I was getting the shit beat out of me in football practice when my weight lifting coach who was also a football coach was yelling at me and calling me handicapped, ironically. I finally got fed up with it and told him to go fuck himself and took my helmet off and threw it at him. Well I was closer to him than I thought, because I don't have any depth perception, remember, and my helmet hit him in the face and broke his nose and, subsequently he tried to kill me and not only was that the end of football but also my weight lifting.
This was pretty much the pattern that took place when I was playing sports. At an indoor baseball practice a freshman swung at a ball and let go of the bat and it went through a group of us and hit me in the right eye which meant for about a week I was blind. The coach, a different coach, they must all be the same, started yelling that I was a handicap and a danger on the team and I was calling him a motherfucker and heading for the showers. Like I said a pattern. The coaches were assholes and I was a rebellious angry teenager.
One of the most iconic examples of just how completely screwed up our family was how angry my dad would get at my girlfriend at the time who became my first wife. My mom and dad were always at odds with her mother and the way they “pampered” me.
Maggie didn't care if I played sports. She would rather I didn't participate and that was enough for me. Maggie and I had a very strenuous schedule of exercise and working out. We didn't have time for trivial high school games. The little Catholic girl taught this farm boy some amazing things. Like love, compassion, passion and gentle reminders of how beautiful life is.
The final straw happened when I was driving Maggie's car home at night and driving in to pick her up in the morning when I was still living at home.
My mom and dad's vehicles broke down and my dad convinced my mother to take my girlfriend's car without my permission or Maggie's permission and would take my dad to work while I slept. Dad worked third shift. My little brother Jacob would go with them and mom would stop on the way back at White Castle for her and Jacob.
Well this went on for a long time and finally something happened where mom didn't get back at home in time and when she did I had already had to call Maggie and say I didn't know where the car was with my mom and my youngest brother. Maggie's mom was furious. It was embarrassing to me.
Maggie and her mother were well off. They were thought of as one of the rich families in Plain City. My family was not thought of that way. We were part of the industrial revolution families because my dad was a factory worker and we were farmers which was the majority of families in that area. Maggie and her mother were alone, well when I first met her Maggie's grandmother was also still alive. Maggie's dad had died of pneumonia at an early age. When she was fifteen. Probably had a lot to do with Maggie running into my arms. I ran into hers to escape my family and she ran into mine to try and figure out the death of her dad. The first seven years of our dating and marriage were absolutely perfect. I will never have anything that comes close to those early years with my Maggie, my wife, Sunflower, my daughter and the house on 375 South Gay Street in Plain City, Ohio. God damn I miss those times.
I don't know if it's the case but life seemed so much simpler then. I had a perfect direction and a perfect life except for my job at O. M. Scotts and Sons in Marysville, Ohio. I hated that job. I loved the money I made but man I hated working there. Scotts would eventually be the downfall of my marriage. Well that and drugs and alcohol and especially third shift.
I am sitting on the edge of the bed with my curtain pulled all the way so it's like being in a big tent with my wheelchair, guitar and a lot of my art work in here with me and a couple tables and no one from the outside world can see me. They have to pull the curtains back to reveal whatever I am doing at the moment. I am sitting here typing away about the memories. I am trying desperately to pull from my mind the real images of the past and not the icons that my mind thinks I can handle. See the mind will do whatever is necessary to protect itself which means if the mind thinks one of my memories will be hurtful it will paint the recollection a different color to make it more pleasing and safer. There are moments however when a clearer picture is available. The last few days have been one of those moments. I don't know why. I'm just going with the flow.
A place like this, in the early hours of the morning, when no one is around, when you are completely alone you have the opportunity to reflect on everything that has happened that brought you to this place. For me it is all that has happened in my life that brought me to a place of such self-abuse through not taking care of myself and the way I lived and my diet, to finally going down from feeding my workaholic-ism and all the other negative things going on. The two near death experiences and the recovery which brings me to here and now when is where I belong but it's important sometimes to look back at what got me to here. I obviously am speaking in circular terms here trying to justify stepping out of the now and playing in the history playground.
I can't change anything that happened and a lot of it I wouldn't change at all. I have learned so many lessons from this karmic path that I have been on and especially the last year and a half of it. I have been humbled and brought back to a place where I was when I was a young man. I loved nature and I loved expressing myself with art and music. I was a happy guy for a while. That is what I want to bring back to the now is that feeling I had when I was happy, when I was in love, in love with Maggie and in love with life. In love with my beautiful little baby daughter and in love with the opportunity to be a married man with a family, a little house in a small town oh it's time to let it all go isn't it.
There's a tube in my arm like a garden hose. They push their shovels into it until we hear the pop
Pop
pop
gush gush gush
goes the blood flowing through the garden hose to the tubes attached
so they can clean me up
clean me out.
Pop gush push gush
Oh I think I'll sleep and dream.
cool peace
hippy mike
love
spirit
cool uber groovy cool
