The Swing of the Pendulum

When I was around thirteen years old my younger brother and I got into a skirmish over chores. We came from a family of four children and our parents made up a system of rotating cleaning duties. One day you had sweeping, the next vacuuming, one day the counters and the next the dishes; something we children considered choreographed slavery.The dishes were the worst. The output of dirty dishes on certain days would be equivalent to a family twice our size. Days like these would have us slaving away in the kitchen for hours which is a lifetime to a child when all you have as a backdrop is the sounding laughter of your siblings watching cartoons in the room adjacent.

Because of this the dishes were usually done in haste without any real attention being paid to cleanliness. So to ensure quality workmanship, our parents implemented a rule: If there was found one dirty dish within the load of "clean" dishes you would have dish duty again that day and everyday thereafter until the entire load came out clean.

As usual with children, we found ways to work around this new rule. Early in the morning, we would run down to do our a spot check of the dish load before they could be inspected by any higher authority(our parents) or foe (a sibling) and put whatever dirty dishes that were found in the sink with the stack of new dirty dishes without being caught.

I got caught.
As I stood over the load I caught a figure stalking me from the corner of my eye. My brother stood not six feet behind me watching, unaware I was tracking his every move from the oven door’s reflection. I gathered what his plan was. He was going to let me finish my scan then confront me with the dirty dishes I found, saving the trouble of having to look himself. In my hand I held the sole imperfect piece from the load: A wooden spoon with some spaghetti sauce encrusted on it. With stealth, I very carefully slipped the handle of the wooden spoon into the waist of my pajama bottoms and covered the rest of it over with my shirt. When I felt sure that it was securely in place and would not fall through, I stood straight and walked away with a smug smile and a healthy good morning to my brother. He rushed past me over to the dishwasher to make a second more thorough search. As he passed his line of vision got snagged at my stomach. He stopped and turned to face me. It was a big spoon and only half was in my waist. The top end flayed forward with each step I took, looking like a small fist forcing its way out of my stomach. For a moment we both stood considering my abdominal protrusion; then I bolted.

I hadn't any set area of refuge in mind, I didn't have time to think of one. So, I went anywhere, everywhere. Through the dining room, into the den, out the window into the front yard, down the street, back up the street, through the woods dividing our yard from the neighbors, into their garage, through their kitchen, out into their backyard, into our backyard, back into our kitchen and down into our garage.Our house was built on the incline of a hill and situated on a platform of sorts. Our garage was a cove constructed on the side of the house below the main foundation. Since the house sat on top of the hill we would have to go "downstairs" into the garage. As soon as I reached the last step down I understood I had made a grave error. I had planned to hit the garage door switch very quickly and escape into the backyard and into the woods. The Appalachian trail ran somewhere through there and I had been meaning to travel.
But the button was a dud, I learned later that it had broken the night before. I did not have time to open the door manually as my brother was directly behind me. I realized after a couple of times rushing around and between our family’s dual minivans that I had nowhere to go. I couldn't run around the cars forever and giving that my brothers was so close my stamina wasn’t going to last much longer. I could not make it back up the stairs as I was too winded. He was close, his outstretched fingers flicked against the collar of my shirt. I was facing certain defeat.

No. It wasn't even about the spoon anymore. This snarling beast behind me was a predator and I had a will to live. It was here, at this moment, that I experienced what few people ever experience in the entire stretch of their lives.
Doubt, inhibition and logic shed from me like a silk slip falling to my ankles.
It was this way or no way at all. I had nothing to lose. I made one last lap around the cars and dashed up the stairs. I lost momentum immediately and felt my brother’s fingers establishing a firm grip on my shirt collar.

Still, the man in my head weighing the logistics and calculating my odds gave up all hope and with one quick sweep of his hands threw all the formulas and papers onto the floor and jumping onto the desk, screamed "JUST RUN!!"

A vibration, a voice within my sternum murmured, "You can do this."
It was a statement. It was a fact. It was a truth, I believed it.

"You can do this." it said into my ear, this time louder. Fours steps left.
My brothers fingers gained firm hold around the back of my neck and then it came:
A deafening shout blasting through me.
"YOU CAN DO THIS!!! "

It was me. I screamed this out loud without even being aware of it, and it happened. I felt what can only be described as the palm of a hand on my back just below my shoulder blades and I was pushed, propelled with velocity beyond that of my physical capacity, beyond anything I've ever experienced with my body to date. I whooshed over the remainder of the steps, through the door and turning in a whirlwind, slammed it shut on my brother’s face.

I lay panting on the kitchen floor as I listened to him scream and shout, banging on the door with his fist still clutching the strip of fabric that was my torn collar.

Although I understand the actual circumstance does not weigh much with gravity, I beg you not make light of it. For one moment in my life I was supernatural. I had read about this before. I believed it to be the same force that, after the horrific crash, made the already injured mother lift the car to save her child pinned underneath.

Am I being self-indulgent? Is this just the delusional exaggeration of a run of the mill adrenaline surge?
I see your raised eyebrow but I cannot bow my head. True the situation may have been on superficial side, still it was what it was. I cannot deny that this day existed. I cannot deny it's truth.

As I lay catching my breath on the cool tile of the kitchen floor a transformation occurred. I became a believer. What was before only a muscle dormant in atrophic paralysis now was alive and available. In the many tumultuous years since those burgeoning moments this phrase has matured into a desperate mantra.

You can do this, You can do this.

I repeat it out loud, under my breath, all day everyday. With each step, You can do this, You can do this. With each passing car, You can do this, You can do this.What can I do? Very little. Wake up, step out of bed, shower, get dressed, inhale, exhale, eat, go back to sleep.

I repeat it out loud, under my breath, all day everyday. With each step, You can do this, You can do this. With each passing car, You can do this, You can do this.
What can I do? Very little.
Wake up, step out of bed, shower, get dressed, inhale, exhale, eat, go back to sleep, and even this takes every bit of my will.

I have come to rely on this supernatural force for all of these things. It is this that keeps me inhaling and exhaling, this that pulls my left foot out, my right in front of it and then my left again, until I make my way home and into my bed then up again the next morning.

You can do this, You can do this, You can do this, with each revolution of my bloodstream. It is the surgeon on my chest aborting all other means, hand laid over hand, desperately pumping my weak heart manually. If this force were to stop so would the steps I take, the beat of my heart and eventually, my breath.

It stopped for Solomon.
Not to long ago my friend Solomon hung himself from the rafters in the garage of his mother's house. He hung himself and his mother found him.

Allow me to enlighten you to the plight of this . He was smart, too smart, gifted or so his warped family cooed. He knew so much that he couldn't be taught anything. It left him tortured, restless, incompetent.

Solomon was so much of a trendsetter I half-expected a slew of copycat hipster suicides to follow in his wake. He was beautiful. The mans beauty was well known and celebrated. He stood at 6'3, with olive skin. His hair was black or maybe a real dark chestnut; and it was curly, curly like Cupid. He had these huge dark eyes, just as dark as his hair, but with a penetrating depth and hedged by eyelashes as long and thick as a push broom's bristles. A direct stare from this man would leave the most stoic of people shifting in their seats, staring at their feet, feeling the need to apologize but not knowing why.

This man had a presence overpowering anyone in a 100 foot radius. I used to live in an area of Los Angeles where celebrity-life abounded. I worked at an office located at a private airport and witnessed celebrity sightings all the time, noteworthy ones. But very few had the presence that this public school educated, college drop-out drifter had. When he stepped into a room the effect would be immediate. Faces would pull toward him as if by strings attached to their chins. It was magnetic. At first it would be subtle, just a casual glance, then conversations would trail away, words dissipating into silence as the speakers turned their heads full around to follow the stranger. Even later, when he was seated, surrendering to their curiosity people would check back, craning their necks with puzzled looks, annoyed their attention was being drawn unwillingly, as if by brute force, toward the dark man in the corner.

The power of presence: an unseen cloud of magnetic energy shrouding him, subtly demanding the attention of anyone within his vicinity so that you had only the choice to look his way or wonder over the sudden sprout of goose pimples on your skin.

I often wonder of what happened to this cloud, his presence, when he died. Did it too die immediately upon his expire or did it linger for a while, straying just a bit, drifting, leaving a trail through the house for his mother to find?

Did it know she was coming? Did it anticipate the sound of steps leading up the path, hovering, waiting to be the first prickle of uneasiness to welcome her as she entered an unnaturally quiet house? Beckoning her deeper through the halls as she called out to see if he was home. Leading her playfully, cold-heartedly, by the chin, tickling her clavicle, hooking into that maternal ESP and reeling her directly to the door where the rest of the cloud hovered in a stagnant fog around the silhouette of her son's body rocking gently at the end of a rope.


This presence, this unseen influence, is what most likely played a large part in inviting the large amount of people who attended his funeral. People everywhere. All of them holding onto each other, crying 'Why? Why?' This struck me as a little odd, this question. I had never asked it myself. I had no need to ask why he did it. Even when they told me his passing came from his own hands, I never had the impulse to ask why. No one who knew Solomon would have to ask why. True, by nature the word would seep its way from a shocked frontal lobe down to the throat and from there to the tongue but die on your lips because it would only take this amount time to realize that you had already known this was going to happen. Any person who knew Solomon would have no need to demand an explanation. But you, dear reader, did not know him so I will tell you why.

Solomon’s shoulders hung low and dead years before his body would. As physically beautiful as he was, the weight of the world was very apparent on him. Some might say that the answer is as simple as the mono-syllabic question that begs it.
He couldn't do this.

Solomon made an informed and logical, albeit detached, decision opting for the temporary pain of death by asphyxiation via rope so he did not have to bear the excruciating pain of asphyxiation via hopelessness.

Hopelessness: a leading cause of death among today's generation, easily transmittable and heavily contagious. A close examination of this generation will leave you terminal. You will see a generation bereft of humanity. A generation whose number one purpose is to convince everyone of who is fat is who is beautiful of who is rich, of who is destitute, of who is socially infallible, of who is not good enough of who will never be good enough: you.

A generation taught to act as a pack of vicious social cannibals. People are praised and petted and then torn apart and devoured at the first sign of weakness, be it monetary, mental, emotional or physical.

A generation of sensory overload; flashing lights, thumping basses. Anything can be considered music as long as the front man exhibits enough forced eccentricity to market.

A generation of cheap tricks. A generation convincing you that something is wrong. Ask your doctor! Ask your doctor!Voice over: Serious side effects include vomiting, diarrhea, loss of vision, impotence, infertility, suicidal tendencies, running amok about town with an axe.

A generation only doing what has already been done, just fucking it up, wrapping it in shiny cellophane and calling it a remix. A generation glittering and fabulous, covered in jewels and furs, stuck in the muck of their own shit and refusing to move.

Last night I fell asleep while watching TV and had a dream. A pendulum stood suspended high in the air, swinging to and fro over an infinitely huge television screen. With each swing the channel flickered and switched increasing in speed faster and faster in succession until the screen became a pulsing strobe and the pendulum lay fixed, clicking in the top corner.

Fade to black: A stage, a stool and a man.
Who is this man? Is it you, Solomon? What is he doing? Talking? Just talking? How can this be entertaining? Talking. Just talking. About what? Love, life, right, wrong. About an animal breathing, beating, tearing at the walls of its den behind your left rib cage.
About basics. Because excess is exactly excess.
About bringing it back, all the way back.
Back to charcoal and saffron rather than photoshop.
Back to a live voice rather than a pitch machine.
Back to real flames rather than a flapping sheet of silk.

Back. Back. All the way. Bring it all back.
Books. Written words on paper made from pressed wood. Music. Instruments made of wood, strings, brass and wind.

The pendulum has been lodged in this position for too long. I wake up sweating, out of breath, excited. I calculate my odds: I exist. I am alive. I must have a counterpart. I must. And if there are two of us then there must be three. I do not believe that I am alone. So I'll send out a distress call, a sonar signal vibrating through the flutter of these pages.

We need to stop. Think. Simplify. We need to go back. We are wedged. We are working hard, to make life easier, portable. We are running, exhausting ourselves going nowhere fast with the only thing showing for it being our drooping shoulders, weighed down and dead. We are at such a loss we have nothing to lose. We can do this. Let the man calculating our odds fling all of the logistics and formulas onto the floor, jump on the table and scream, YOU CAN DO THIS.
People will hear. Ears will perk up, spines will tingle and they will be drawn as if by the sheer magnetism of our ever enlarging cloud of collective energy. They will be drawn through the muck and shit of the pill-popping, pitch manipulating, cocktail schmoozing masses making money make everything, makes everything easier, makes everything good, makes good schools makes good job makes success makes a hot wife makes good hookers makes divorce makes child support makes a generation of charts and graphs and target markets, a generation sex sells, sells sex, sell sex, sell it.

We can do this. We can dislodge ourselves with one collective heave. Actually, fuck the collective. If you don't help I can do it myself. I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. Whether you are involved are not it is going to happen. But you are out there because if I am out here someone else is too. We just need one good thrust, a helping hand against our backs. It will come if we call and once it does we will be supernatural. For I can already hear a mummer which will soon be a shout which will soon be an involuntary scream and no longer a mantra but a battle cry and no longer the swing of the pendulum but the swing of an axe as we put one foot down and then the next and take one breath and then a next to do this we can do this we can do this we can!

A Night Sky

I can read minds. I can. You do not believe me? Well then, I will show you. See the young woman stepping on? She has her eye on the young man in the blue hat over there, the one reading his paper. He has not noticed her yet. She has decided to take the available seat next to him. Oh, but it just was taken. So, she will stand in front of him then, holding the bar above their heads instead. She has decided to let herself lurch ahead just a bit once the train jolts to a start, letting their knees touch only a brush. He will look up and she will catch his eyes and hold them captive the way she knows how to do. Watch. There, it worked. He is caught and he stands, offering her his seat. Conversation ensues, exactly as she had planned.

She is not the only one. See the woman sitting across from us. She is not asleep, he is only resting, but still she is dreaming. You can see her eyelids fluttering. Track the bulge of her eyeballs moving to and fro behind the thick coat of blue eye shadow. Her fake lashes tremble sporadically, sifting blue residue onto her cheeks.

This is what she is dreaming:
In her head is a pond, iced over, frozen solid, concealed within a thick forest of evergreens, a winter wonderland. The entire landscape is made up in shades of blue, everything is glittering with ice and snow. Three people are in this dream. A man and woman; star crossed lovers, dancing on the ice, and a pair eyes within the forest watching them. Two of the people are her. She is the woman dancing on the ice and the eyes watching. She is falling deeper into the dream, teetering on the brink sleep. See how her heavy chin falls into itself, doubling until there is no jawline, only a mass of neck, a dimple and then lips.

The woman dancing on the ice is a person whom she has never been. She has been overweight since she was a little child. The woman gliding on the ice is slender as a rose and just as statuesque. Ah, a pirouette. She spins, looking toward the sky with one arm swept gracefully behind her and the other raised high toward the heavens. Her hand positioned as if she were accepting the hand of God. She spins with such fluidity, like a silk ribbon caught in an updraft. So fast, her form begins to resemble that of a tulip. The handsome lover encircles her, protecting his flower. At length, he grows lonely and wraps his arm around her waist, pulling her out of spin and into him. They stare into each other’s eyes, they kiss passionately. Look, outside she is smiling. From her view behind the ice bejeweled branches she watches through tears, both sad that it is not her that is being loved and elated that it is.

Now, releasing each other from their embrace, they glide side by side. With one swift scoop, he lifts her high above his head. She soars, splicing through the winter air. He is supporting her by just one flattened palm at her midsection. He will not let her fall. He loves her. She trusts him. She feels the cold air rushing at her. Look down at her arm, she has goosepimples. The she that is watching from behind the trees cannot take the beautiful scene for much longer. Look, a tear. She will wake up now. She has let herself float too far into her daydream. She brushes away the tear.
This is her stop, so she must go.

Another then. The man at my left, standing at the door across from us. He is very handsome, is he not? Yes, very handsome indeed. Tall, relaxed, rugged. Our eyes are not the only ones on the train directed at him and he knows this. He wears an expensive coat, long, black cashmere, leather gloves and a scarf hanging stylishly from around his neck. He has a charming smile on his face. His shirt collar is unbuttoned so that you can see his sculpted pillar of a neck flare out into his collarbone. A very nice neck, a neck that demands to be touched.

This man is on his way home. He is very anxious to get there. At home he has two women. Both are young, barely twenty, fair skinned, blonde, between 5'4 and 5'7 with small breast and small feet. One is in bound and gagged in a trunk three feet long and two feet wide. She has laid there in ten hour intervals for a week and a half straight. The other is in a crawlspace above the top of the master bedroom closet. She is dead. When he gets home he will rape them both, the dead one too. The dead one first. He is leaving tomorrow. He is bored and restless and must move onto the next town. The girl who is alive now will not be by ten AM tomorrow morning.

Let us get off here. Yes, I know this is not our stop. We can catch the next train but it is best not be to be in too close of a proximity to someone like this.

What do you mean, stop him? What can I do? I know no more than what I see in his head. No address, no names, nothing. Would you like to follow him and become his next victim? I saw a number and it was 16. Would you like to become number 17? Life is good and life is bad. I can only observe. I cannot interfere. Do not be so sad. Forget what I said about him. What do I know? It could have been all his imagination anyway. I am wrong sometimes.

Here, here is a happy one. See the old man by stairs leaning on his cane? Aged and withered with a long white beard and hair sticking out of everywhere; nose, ears, warts. Everywhere but on the top of his head. You want to know what he is thinking of right now? Flying. That crookety old body of his soaring between skyscrapers, tap dancing off lamppost, paddling himself through the air with his cane in an invisible airborne canoe. Silly thing. Yes, laugh. It is funny. Although he is old, he is just as young as you in heart.

The train has been delayed. We can walk if you’d like. I think we only have a couple of blocks to go and it is not so cold out. Come, let us walk.

Aah! Fresh air! The beautiful sky so black and clear you can almost see the earths reflection in it. This right here above our heads is the answer to the trick of my trade. The human mind is a night sky infinitely spliced by beam after beam of thought at the speed of light, an infinite grid of illuminating manifestations. When I stand in a crowd it is not the chattering cacophony of a congregation of birds in a tree that I hear. The human minds manufactures and processes thought in such high volume and at such a rate of speed that a crowd of people is the deafening thunder of a hundred thousand waterfalls. A gale force rush of daydreams, of wishes, of chants of the days tasks, of corporate rigmarole, of wails and weeping, of angry shouts and screams, of music. Oh, the music I hear! Violins, flutes and pianos. Operas, symphonies and jazz! Lots of jazz. You will always know when the music in their head is jazz by the shoes that are tapping their imaginary bass drum or snare.

What? Do not tell me you are tired already. An old woman like me, wearing you out? Come on, we only have a couple of blocks to go.

See across the street, the café? In the corner table, the redheaded young woman looking out of the window? She is waiting for her lover. She is thinking of him right now. See the discreet smile on her face? She is deaf. Her lover is a pianist. After they make love, she lays naked on his concert grand curled up like a kitten with her cheek pressed against the laminated wood. She lays quiet as he plays for her, feeling the vibrations amble through her body. If she were made to choose, she would not know which she preferred making love to the most, the man or his piano.

Oh, you want to pick one now? Okay, go ahead, be my guest. Who? Which one?
Her, with the orange scarf? Okay. She is thinking about death, a death which is imminent, hers. She has cancer. It will not be too long now. Yes, she is aware of this otherwise, I could not know, now could I?

This is what is in her head:

She is sitting on a bench by a pond in a park. She is alone. She sits patiently with her hands folded in her lap. She is blindfolded. Suddenly, the bench on which she sits lifts into the air steadily as if supported by a crane. She floats at head level making her way from the pond, out of the park and into the main street of town. Little by little, people are opening their windows and looking through the doors at her floating down their street. They all recognize her as someone they know and love and run out to meet her. People stream out from everywhere, hoards of people cheering and shouting. She is a celebrity. They reach up to touch her hand. Although she is blindfolded she greets everyone back, laughing, feeling for them, identifying every person in the crowd by sound orby the touch. She knows them all. They are her friends, they are her family. The seat gains in speed but the crowd runs faster, anxious to stay as close as possible to her until they no longer can keep up.

An older couple, a man and a woman, appear through the hoard. The crowd splits letting them up to the front with a series of happy pats on the back and cheered encouragement. The couple catch up to the bench, waving her down, shouting her name. The female of the couple strongly resembles a matured and aged version of the dying woman. They run up to the suspended seat. You can tell from the way that the young woman’s head perks when she hears the voices of the older couple calling her name that these people hold a special position. Her brow furrows and her mouth crumples into a cry as she follows their voices, feeling around for their hands reaching out to hers, clasping onto to them. They hold the back of her hands against their cheeks and kiss them. She reaches down kissing their hands back. When they no longer can keep up, they let go but hold onto each other, summoning all of their aging might to keep up with her.

Next, the crowd splits again, this time letting through a young adult male with a baby. The seat gains in speed and height but her young husband runs at full speed, until he is at the head of the crowd, the only person still able to keep up. He catches up to her and lifts their infant child over his head up to its mothers hands for a last touch. Her outstreached hands search for and at last find her infant child. With trembling fingers she delicately outlines the child’s face, shoulders and arms all the way to its small palm, tracing its tiny fingers. When her young husband can no longer keep his speed with the child raised high, he lowers the baby and grabs hold of her hand, laying it against his face, against his mouth kissing it passionately. She lifts again. She leans all the way over the side of the bench and gives his head one last loving stroke around his face and through his hair, and she is out of reach.

The crowd still runs underneath her calling out Goodbyes and Good lucks, I love you’s and We’ll see you soons. No one is sad. Everyone is happy and cheering her name, even her family. If anyone is crying, they cry only out of happiness. This her death. She will not be afraid when it comes.


Here we are. Home sweet home. Thank you, young man, I can carry the rest from here. You are as chivalrous as they come. I would offer what little I have for your kindness but I can already see that you will not accept it. A far cry from what you had in mind intentionally. I wouldn’t of had much to take anyway. Yes, I knew. I read minds, I told you. A changed young man from here on out now, aren’t you? I bet. Either way, you are a good soul. That was what I saw when I first looked at you, a withered plant with healthy roots. No, there is no need to apologize. What have you done? Nothing. You walked an old lady home, carrying her groceries. There is no crime against being a gentleman. I trust you. You are good. If I did not see good in you I would not have asked you for help. Now off with you, go home to your family. I am sure your mother is worried sick. I will not forget your kindness and I can see already that you will not soon forget me. Thank you and goodbye.