To Do List 2015

 Plugging it in here, to make me accountable.

Gonna Make Friends With Some Rocks
Vazquez Rocks
Palm Springs

Gonna Make Friends With Some Trees
Tahoe
Muir Woods
Yosemite
Sequoia National Forest

Gonna Stay Friends With The Ocean, Pacific To Be Specific
Crystal Cove
Coronado
El Matador
Catalina
Sonoma Coast
Baker Beach
Carmel

Gonna Stay Friends With Some Friends
Seattle
Maui

Five Days (A Warm Up)

This happened about a year and a half ago, early January, when I still worked on Saturdays.   After work, I stopped by the gym, and right before I stepped into the shower, my youngest brother, Daniel, called.

“Hey man, you coming home soon?”
“Yeah, just getting showered.  Do you need anything?”

“No, no.  Just shower and come home.”

“Okay.”

Showering at the gym is a somber affair, bare feet on mosaic tile, and standing aside for the hot water to get started.  It wasn’t uncommon for Daniel to call, so I didn’t think much of it.  While toweling off, I got another phone call.
“Hey, man, you should come home.  Dad is acting all weird and drunk but he didn’t drink anything.”

And I remember thinking, “Oh, he’s had a stroke.”

It turns out my dad had his stroke WHILE driving the car, with my mom and youngest brother as passengers.  He suddenly began driving erratically, and decided to go all the way to the farthest lane, a lane he had no business in. My mom, sensing what was going on, ordered him to pull over.  Instead of pulling over, he REVERSED the car.  No one was hurt, but my dad was quickly promoted to worst driver in the family.

When they got home that afternoon, pulled the whole, “No, no, I’m fine.  Just tired. . .what’s. . .what going on?” act and it wasn’t until the following day he was admitted to the hospital , where they proclaimed, “Yes, it was, in fact, a stroke.”  He spent the following night at the hospital, under observation.  Monday night, he came home, and we thought that was that.

It was three am when I heard the repetitive thunking sound outside my bedroom window.  Not the awkward thunking of a skull against a headboard when a couple hasn’t quite coordinated their sex life, but something more malicious. It went on for minutes, and there was some muffled talking, maybe some yelling, then silence.  Because I have the survival instinct of someone in a horror movie, I definitely wanted to know what was going on.  Craning my neck to look out my window, I saw nothing but the empty lot next to our house.

I thought maybe my parents’ room would have had a better view. 

A few months earlier, my mom had a complete hip replacement.  After the surgery, she hadn’t been able to walk for three months and there was a huge wound on her side from where the doctor opened her up, chiseled away at the bone, and inserted a metal ball-and-joint.  She told me somewhere in the middle of the operation, the anesthesia began to wear out, and she awoke to the sound of her bones cracking before a vigilant nurse decided to put her under again.

As a result of the surgery, my mom slept in a complicated way, pillows and limbs making shadowy, unnatural structures.  There were various pill bottles at her bedside, like silent gnomes praying to some terrible god.  Nevertheless, I clambered onto the wooden bed frame and tried to look outside.  She woke up.  

“What’re you doing?”
“There’s someone outside!  I think I’m gonna go out to look.”

“What?!  Just go to bed.  We can look in the morning.”
“Okay.”

I hopped off, and went back to my room, waited about 15 minutes and went outside.

It was dark, and the neighborhood was still asleep.  I walked onto the road, the cold asphalt hurt my bare feet.  My dad’s car was a mess of dirt and broken glass.  A rock had been smashed through the mirrors, and it looked like the same person had tried to do the same to all the windows.

Not wanting to be the only victim in the oncoming tragic slaying, I went to grab brother #2.  Groggy and confused we walked back to the street.  Looking around we viewed the damage, but figured there was nothing we could to until the sun came out.  It was 3:45am, and trashed front yards could keep. 

Suddenly, a white van down slowly on our street, it turned on the cul-de-sac, then slowed down in front of our house.  Its slowly turning wheels were our heartbeats.  Illuminated by the light of our garage, Gabriel and I must have shared one of those brother-sister psychic moments, “When it comes down to it, will we be able to kill someone?”

A woman, portly and bespectacled, someone you would see at church, stepped out.  “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, my son did all of this.”

The story she told was this:  She had been recently hospitalized for a broken leg, and had to get corrective surgery.  During that time, her adult son hadn’t been taking his medications.  She was hospitalized for a few days, and when she came home earlier that evening, he had already gone missing.  He had apparently been terrorizing the entire neighborhood.  They were already working with the police, and they would happily take care of the damage to the car, and don’t tell your dad, we wouldn’t want any more stress to happen to him.  By the way, in addition to damaging the car, my son also stole some stuff.

All through this exposition, the son in question paced back and forth, griping a stone.

Unloaded from the van were things I hadn’t noticed missing, Daniel’s bike, some toys, baby Jesus from the ornamental manager scene in from our front yard.  Baby Jesus was basically a plaster picture mounted upon a stake.  At about four in the morning, a woman and her under-medicated stood in front of me, armed with what was basically a vampire slayer.  “He must have known that Jesus will bring him through this trial.”  A gem of helpfulness emerged from Gabriel, “He can keep him, if he wants.

As they had an impromptu prayer circle in our front yard, Gabriel and I decided we should probably take down their license plate number, in case we all ended up dead in the morning.  When they finally drove away, we squinted into the darkness, but couldn’t make anything out.

The next day wasn’t spectacular; I arranged to have the following day off, to get the car repaired.  On the phone, the woman was cordial and I was blessed many times.

The car was fixed without a hitch, and I used it to pick Daniel up from grade school.  While we drove down the beach road leading to our house, I saw a naked man hanging onto a fence, his skin a deep and smooth and even brown.  He was yelling at the sky.

“Hey, Daniel, did you see the naked man?”

“What naked man?  There wasn’t a naked man.  You’re a liar.”
“There was definitely a naked man.  Want me to turn around?”

“Fine, turn around.”

We drove by in silence, and this time, the naked man on the fence was on the passenger side.  The sunlight shone off his buttocks as he yelled obscenities. 

“There’s totally a naked man!”
“I told you so!”

And now, we were headed the opposite way from home.  Once again, we had to turn around.  By now the man was growing a crowd.  I pulled off to the side, and called the police.

“Hi, I’m in Waiehu. . .”
“Is this about the naked man?”

I had just begun to describe our location, when three squad cars arrived, and the operator breathed a sigh of relief when I relayed this.  I could hear the police trying to coax the man off the fence. 

While we were still parked by the side of the road, Gabriel pulled up next to us, “Did you see the naked man?”

That night, I saw lights in the creek behind our house.   Probably drugs, I figured.  But I was tired and it was only Wednesday.

The cat's out of the bag.

Big crowds of people make me skittish.  Skittish is probably not the right word, but I can’t think of anything that succinctly describes the flesh crawling feeling that potentially being jostled by strangers fills me with.  Skittish is the cat you want to pet, but runs away from you.   What I feel is the very specific urge to dig my nails into my flesh and rip my skin off.  Or that my skin is all hot and raw and each time someone touches me, or comes close to touching me, I’m set on fire.  It's like everyone is centipedes.  You know that sickly, prickly feeling when a centipede crawls across your bare flesh?  It's like everyone is a centipede and I can feel them under my skin, their clamouring thoughts crawling around the inside of my skull and across my eyeballs.

Stupidly enough, I often find myself in places that can’t help be densely populated.  For example, I’m writing this from LAX.  Albeit, a moderately quiet corner of LAX, but there are still enough people here to cause some serious trouble if a zombie outbreak occurred.  Despite being steely and grey, I don’t think this airport would be a very effect zombie shelter or container.  The tension is already high enough that we’re almost tearing out each other’s throats, and most everyone is sleep deprived enough to pass off as undead. 

Last Sunday found me at Bay to Breakers, in SF.  It’s a party spanning several miles, masquerading as a foot race.  I’m sure there are actual runners, but by the time we go there, public urination was the modus operandi.  I went with some friends.  And we entered a throng of sweat, glitter, and possibly urine soaked people. 

I have the best friends anyone could ever ask for. I’m sure if I had told them, “I don’t know how I’ll deal with large crowds,” they would have understood.  But. . .

Explaining that you have a food allergy is pretty easy.  Explaining dietary restrictions is easy.  Explaining that you’re not too sure how you’ll react to a massive crowd isn’t gluten sensitivity.    “I don’t know, depending on how I feel that day, I might be okay, or I might just want to curl up in a ball and try not to die,” isn’t something that usually comes up in polite conversation and will probably not get you invited to the next thing people are planning together.  And I want these people to like me and being around them is fun, usually regardless of the situation. 

 I don’t care too much for the half-dressed/naked throngs of people, though.   I must have gone from cautiously optimistic to bubbling homicide in about 45 minutes flat.   Oddly enough, being smashed up against some man’s flaccid, sunburnt penis is not nearly as traumatizing as some bleary drunk girl, hugging you and getting her sweaty body glitter all over you. 

I don’t know when this started.  I can’t think of one singular event that made me think, “No more of this.  Let’s stick to small crowds, preferably people you know.”  Was it the clubbing?  Was it the sweltering streets of Hong Kong and Manila?  Or maybe everyone has a quota of people they can rub up against without feeling like they’re about to cry, and I just reached mine early on? 

I’d like to think that these large, hive-mind organisms known as crowds are just friends waiting to be made. . .but maybe next time.  And maybe after several showers.