It's not further funny
or anything like that
not being salty or feeling less than,
cause I'm probably not...
probably,
Sure we all got friends, i got friends, i also got butt sweat.
demons, or monsters, or other things aren't other things.
they are just me and you
and all the sad shit we do.
there is no more time for all of this,
unless of course, i wake up a little earlier,
but I'm having a really hard time
more an more and more
making up reasons for me
to stop doing what I'm doing.
doing it faster,
to stop doing it faster,
it isn't a process anymore.
my guess is I'd be past that.

Suicide Note

When I was six, I went on a summer hike with my parents.  My mother, being no more than four and a half feet tall and weakened with typhus, walked slower than my father and I.  My father suggested we walk ahead and meet her on the way back and that's what we did.  We walked through prairies that led into forests, forests that lead into marshes and over streams in bowed bridges.  We were offered a little sip of every climate in a midwestern summer's repertoire.  It hailed, it rained, the wind dried us, the sun revealed itself as we stepped into a hilly field of plants that looked like living hay and there were two rainbows on the way back.

I don't remember the rest of the night.  My father told me what happened, and of course I have always believed him.  First he found her necklace, a frayed plain braid of hemp, and he thought we had somehow missed her; she had perhaps gotten off the path to relieve herself just as we should have intercepted her.  He picked up the necklace in order that he could return it to her.  He turned around the way we had come and shouted her name.  "Martha!"

The cry came behind us.  Just around the next turn in the road, there she was.  Her hand lay at his feet and for a moment he could not unlock his gaze from it.  Every bone of her hand was visible; her palm winged away from it like the cover of a wet dictionary opened to dry, doomed to curving pages and blotched pronunciation keys.  The cries continued ten yards further down the path.  He caught up to her and tried to kiss her, but kept losing her lips in the mangled tears of her face while ceaseless bleeding drowned her features and muddied her hair.  My father said she was barely recognizable as a human at all, and hardly as the woman he had chosen to partner with in his voyage through the gray corridors of this thousand-leveled condominium building called life.

We had been poor.  I had eaten with my father when he chose not to sell the foodstamps, my mother when she allowed herself to eat, and my neighbors whenever I could.  But the day after we returned from the hike, my father prepared me a feast: spaghetti and meatballs with a vanilla shake.  No meal has ever seemed to fit into my tummy so perfectly as that one.  It seemed at the time that it had taken weeks to digest, that the meal had been so rich as to protect me from the grief and trauma that should have seized my every molecule.  I was protected by a forcefield, a magical product of the chemical interaction between spaghetti, meatball, milkshake, and stomach acid.

The grief did come later, my father was institutionalized and later killed by the very leukemia he had spent so many years trying to fight during his tenure as chief resident at Brownsville Regional Hospital.  I was raised by our neighbors, the Fitzes, and I just felt comfortable enough to accept this as my last name in the past year.

I had never had a milkshake since that day.  I always thought wistfully that no milkshake could really be as good as the one that had possibly saved me from perpetual shock.  However, I had brought a date to the malt shop and though I desired a banana split, she wanted us to share a milkshake with two straws.  She smiled at me and I was helpless to refrain from indulging her.

I had spat the first sip into her face before even realizing I had tasted it.  I had been both right and wrong about the milkshake: it was even better than the milkshake of my youth's nightmares and dreams, and yet what disturbed me was that it bared no resemblance to what I recalled the taste of that decades-old milkshake to be.

My date left immediately, not knowing that I had granted her what was perhaps the greatest favor in her life.  I had spared her future intimate moments with a man who had eaten his own mother and taken it for a milkshake.  Father, you cruel bastard.  We must have survived on her meat for weeks while you traded our foodstamps for Mad Dog and Marb Reds.  Motherloaf, Mother in a blanket, Mother and cream cheese.  I was so stupid.  It was mother all the time in my stomach, enriching my blood, cursing my fate.

And now I stand forty feet above the shark tank.  Perhaps some of my spirit will be absorbed into their veins as my mothers was into mine.  Perhaps there might even be a little of her blood left in me for them to taste.  This is the end.

Sincerely,

Vance J. Doorson

P.S. - I didn't mean the end of the letter. I meant my life.

Facebook Profile of Mayor Schutzstaffel, the guy who likes breakfast

Sex: Breakfast

Birthday: Breakfast Day, 1988

Hometown: Eggwich, IA

Religious Views: Eating breakfast is like cumming in God at the start of every morning

Relationship Status: Breakfast

Interested in: Breakfast

Looking for: Breakfast

Personal Information

Activities: Breakfasting and egg whisking and sausage steaming and pulp grinding and toast crisping and and bacon licking and and receipt filing and and coconut hauling and and Kix smearing and coffee straining and and and and and and and and fart knocking and gracefulness

Favorite Music: The sound of smelling pancakes in the AM.

Favorite TV Shows: The Egg-Ventures of Olly the Omelette and his Pet Gummy Bear Smitty (Seasons 3 and 8)

Favorite Movies: Ernest Saves Breakfast, Earnest Scared Breakfast, Ernest Goes to Breakfast

Favorite Books: Incan Sandies: The Sandy Breakfasts of the Lima-Area 12^th Century Incas.  (only funny if Incan and Pecan rhymed, which they didn’t)

Favorite Quotations:

“Breakfast is a dish best served constantly, without interruption for bowel movement or sleep or respiration.”

“Walk softly but carry a big whisk.”

“The simplest explanation is usually breakfast.”

“You know you a sweet little lovemaker, foxy eggy.”

“You can lead a pancake to syrup and you can make it delicious.”

About Me:

B is for big old cakes of totally fuckable pancakes

R is for rifling through the thrift store, looking for deals on eggs

E is for each day is a chance to swallow two loaves of french toast

A is for a Pall Mall cigarette while the potatoes are cooking

K is for kissing delicately the soft shivering center of a danish

F is for 4 as in I like to eat breakfast fourever

A is the Alps, the Mecca of breakfast & for “ASS” as in breakfASSt

S is for safe sex

T is for trying to be the best damn fuckface I can be

O is for an outstanding breakfast, which I eat every day

What does that spell?...

If you speak Spanish, then you know this is the Hispanic translation of the Anglos’ “breakfast.”

LET'S GET MILKFACED AND HUM LIKE RABBITS

Ooh Pooh Pah Doo

Just want to tell you 'bout-a Ooh Pooh Pah Doo
Well you know it's just the most, Yes Ooh Pooh Pah Do-oo
Ah tell me baby it's the most
'Cause I won't stop tryin' 'til I create a disturbance in your mind

Well, well, well, well, I'm gon' create a disturbance in your mind
I'm gon' create a disturbance
Oh yeah-eah-eah, ah baby, ah baby
Ah baby don't you know it's in your mind
It goes Yoh-Oh-oh-Oh-oh-Oh-oh-Oh-oh

Hear me, hear me, hear me, hear me, hear me, hear me
There's a little blue bell that's a ringin' in your ear
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding
Well there's a little blue bell
Baby don't you know it's' in your ear
It goes ding-ding-ding, ding-ding-ding-ding ding-ding-ding-ding

Well, well, well, Ooh Pooh Pah Do
I won't stop tryin' till I create disturbances in your mind

You can hear the difficulty, the too-careful sloppy precision.  You can almost see his fingers, racing against time, and sliding to the next chord in the nick of it.  Every move is liking throwing a shovel of coal and you can see his fingers getting sore, thin, trembly.  But he hits it on time every time while sweat licks the strings and hisses into vapor.