The sniper

I haven’t written in a long time. It used to be apart of me, when I’d wake up my hand would get to moving and stretching, knowing it was about to go to work. My hands don’t move like that anymore. I felt for so long that I didn’t know enough to write about nothing, but no one and everyone can say that. Maybe it just depends on how settled you are with yourself. For so long I stepped away from everything to get a better look, to focus my eyes as if everything above and below, no matter the distance was out of focus. That was all in my head. I tried to find the world through others, and books, and Hemingway, and Steinbeck. Escape to a better world, even though each world was the same, just a different view - perhaps, similar when juxtaposed. I wanted something besides sitting. I wanted standing. I wanted solitude instead of kids falling over my legs and each other, dirty and loud. I wanted loud, but in a drastically motivating way, and in my own voice. I wanted my rubber soles worn down, with rocks from mountains and blades of grass from valleys embedded in the tread. Now I want here, I want now, I want her, I want peace, I want war, I want scripture, I want booze, I want sonnets, I want brevity, I want energy, I want inertia, I want Steinbeck, I want Hemingway, I want to need, not want.

I heard in the military they trained snipers to never look at their target for too long through there scope because a person could feel when they were being watched and become paranoid. Begin to observe with keen eyes or bolt and the mission would fail. A man can sometimes feel that they are being watched through a scope at all times. Is this unhealthy? Conceited? A sense of religion? It doesn’t matter as long as my hands are full of dirt and calloused. As long as my hands where strong, with veins as thick as garden hoses, pumping blood and working, building, creating, praying. As long as my mind was strong enough before the final blow to curse my hands for laziness if they cramped. This could be it, my mind would relay to the responding fibers in my fingertips by synapses, pushing them to hold her tighter, dig deeper in the ground and know what has been done there, what blood has been spilt there, what bones are deeper still, to rub the softest peach with the backside of the hand and be grateful. All this before the sniper decides no more. That you have learned your lesson. That your hands have never rested.

What I am now

I take a breath as if it’s my last and follow two girls out the front door of the church with my cousin lagging behind me. I wonder what they all felt after what we had just seen. I squint through the shade trees at the sun and know that today is today and nothing else. There were many days before this and there will be many days after. I walk faster to catch up to them and hear the girls speaking a strange language with a peculiar accent. I decide I need to know where they are from. I need to take a hold of this day, not it to me.
Inside the church thousands of monk bones are odorless and unlike what I had imagined. I lean in and my finger passes through the column of chicken wire to touch a hip bone in a pile of hip bones and wonder how in the hell I ever found this sacred chamber.
This crypt called the Capuchini Bone Chapel displays the bones of over four-thousand monks under the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini in Rome. The church is located just off the beaten path of tourist attractions on Via Veneto near Piazza Barbarini, and even if this macabre display was in the middle of a Piazza many tourist would still avoid it. Some of these monks that donated their remains as an ancient, religious sacrament to the church are still wearing their dark, brown robes. The robes, an itchy color of a dark, strong coffee makes you realize the name cappuccino came from these Capuchin monks, now with their skeletal hands wired together in a praying stance.
My cousin stands next to me, mouth wide open, needing to say something but the disturbing scene with a hint of reverence steals his words. Even if you could talk in this place, all that are here do not utter a sound. I look up to the ceiling and bones are designed into flowing patterns surrounding a cluster of other bones that hang down in a ball of wire. A gruesome chandelier with small lights flickering from within.
A frame on the wall is made of ribs with a delicate design from smaller, finger length bones, within the frame. Everything but the concrete floor and walls are bone, which are a dark, greasy brown, as if the bodies were burned at a low heat to turn everything but the bone into ash.
The sign at the entrance in many different languages asks all to refrain from taking pictures, but I pull my cousin in between me and the woman near the door and begin to take pictures. The side walls of wire are filling with skulls surrounding a lying monk in the center. Still in it’s robe the friar is positioned as if in a coffin, as if to remind us of death while staring straight in its face. On the back wall are three monks bowing with hands wired together. Then I notice the ground, that could have been an ancient battlefield with the many remains unmoved and left for all to view.
Two girls ahead of us see me taking pictures and pull a disposable camera from their bag and try to do the same. They use our model of one stands guard, the other snaps away. I click another and hear voices from home.
“Monk bones … bullshhh …” they would say as I pull out a photo of exhibit A – a column of aging skulls, resembling something from a cheesy horror film. But in real life, here in this instant, I am lost in the empty holes where a set of eyes once were and a life flashes before you. The world swells and shrinks as time spirals. Your life is a blip in the universe. You see someone looking into your empty holes centuries later and so on. Then something brings you back into your own skin.
The girls camera clicks and the flash goes off, sending a ball of light into the chamber and down the narrow hallway. The woman doesn’t notice and the girls giggle nervously. I didn’t want them to blow my cover as the Italian woman would no doubt yell and run us out for disturbing the viewers and the remains integrity and its obvious susceptibility to light.
What is revealed to me is there are six crypts. First, the Crypt of the Resurrection with a picture of Jesus shown raising Lazarus from the dead, and framed with various human skeletons.
The second is The Mass Chapel, to celebrate Mass, but it does not contain bones. It does however contain an altar piece where Jesus and Mary exhort St. Felix of Cantalice, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Anthony of Padua to free souls from Purgatory. There is also the heart of Maria Felice Peretti, the grand-niece of Pope Sixtus V, preserved here at her request. This Chapel also contains the tomb of the Papal Zouaves who died defending the Papal States at the battle of Porta Pia.
The next crypts are obvious to every viewer. The Crypt of the Skulls, then of the Pelvises, then of the Leg Bones and Thigh Bones.
The final crypt holds Three skeletons. The center skeleton is enclosed in an oval, the symbol of life coming to birth. In its right hand a scythe is held, a symbol of death which cuts down everyone as if they are grass in a field. In its left hand a scale is held to symbolize the good and evil deeds weighed by God when the human soul is judged.
I move closer to the crypt to read a sign written in five languages. The girls ahead of us have stopped taking pictures and are staring at the scales, and scythe, and the sign. I lean in to see what it says. It reads:
"What you are now we used to be, what we are now you will be."

Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again

a pimp was killed in a phone booth near the door of ernestine and hazels. they say upstairs used to be a brothel where Ray Charles shot heroin. this writing is at the bottom of the sagging stairs where an apparition of a working girl leads him up to a private room with a van gogh painting in the hallway. now its where russ's office is and a crab trap is on the wall. he says you gotta have a crab trap in a whorehouse.

what a tremendous and frightening time the 50s & 60s must have been.

sun studios is a magical place. almost like emerald city. folks creating music out of thin air and you feel what God felt in those first seven days. johnny cash used a dollar bill to muffle the strings of a guitar to mimic a snare drum because percussion used to be unheard of on the radio. elvis stood on an X in the floor not far from this guitar when he recorded his first song. bob dylan came in years later, kissed the X, and walked out.

Godspeed

We hadn’t talked in a year. Hadn’t seen each other in two. But the world as small as it is held hands with fate and decided to put us in the same room together.
I was alone and didn’t mind. She was alone and seemed indifferent. Then our eyes cut to each other and neither engaged.
What was to be said? Everything comes to an end – nothing lasts forever. That’s why I never got a dog. Just another thing to lose.
The next thing I knew a pack of Camels were being pushed down the bar in front of me and she was in the chair next to me.
“No thanks,” I said.
“I figured you still didn’t smoke,” she said.
“Some things change,” I said.
“Some things don’t,” she shot back, then she hugged me.
There was nothing between us. Nothing from the past, nothing in the future. We were content in just being. Maybe that was worse than anything.
“You didn’t make it to Daniels birthday bash,” she said between blowing smoke at the yellow ceiling.
“When was it,” I asked.
“Tonight.”
“So you missed it too?”
“No, I’m here and there at the same time.”
I used to love her quick wit until it was pointed at me.
I don’t respond as I had learned from many lessons before. Her words can dig a grave, and I learned not to give her a shovel to speed up the process.
“I liked the guy, but not that much,” I said, paying no attention to her response.
She put her cigarette out under the bar and crushed the butt into the ashtray. She always used to do this. Anytime I saw someone with black on the thigh of their jeans I knew she was around. It was also my cue to leave, for fear of letting memories fill me up, only to be deflated shortly after.
After my senses have almost shut down, here she was. Next to me. Lighting another Camel Turkish Gold and drinking Hornsby’s.
“See, some things never change,” I said looking straight ahead and sloshing my drink at her same choice of vices from years ago.
“Good memory,” she says.
I fight everything in me that wants to rehash all the good times. I’ve learned that brain cells cling and divulge positive memories, 99.9 percent more than negative memories. I stop myself and search out the negatives. I take another drink.
“So, how ya been?” I asked her.
“Don’t act like that,” she said.
“Act like What?”
“Act like you care.”
It’s a trap I tell myself. She’s try to make me the bad guy. She’s trying to point everything wrong that ever happened to us at me. I still remember her telling me I didn’t understand her. That was why it was over.
The opposite was true. I cared for her so much that she didn’t get under my skin – she was born there. She had always been apart of me and filled that spot in my rib cage God had broken off to create her. That was His wish. I thought it was mine, but she didn’t believe.
“Sometimes someone just needs to feel wanted,” she told me. “I’m sorry that what we had ended, but that’s all it was. I just needed for someone to want me. To smile at me.”
I got up and walked to the jukebox. I flipped through the albums but the titles and artists were a blur. I put in a dollar and punched in four numbers. Then flipped a few more, then punched in four more. Then flipped more and without thinking I punched in the last four digits of her phone number – 5480.
I can’t believe I still remember.
I walked slowly back to my chair and looked up. She was gone. But her Camels were still there with a piece of paper stuffed in the plastic outer wrapping. I pulled it out and it said:
Tit Milk Emporium.
I cracked a smile. This sounded familiar, but I tried not to care. My days of cat and mouse were over. Especially when this cat turned out to be a lioness with teeth bared.
A song begins to play on the jukebox:

she lifts her skirt up to her knees,
walks through the garden rows with her bare feet, laughing.
i never learned to count my blessings,
i choose instead to dwell in my disasters.
i walk on down a hill,
through grass, grown tall and brown
and still its hard somehow to let go of my pain.
on past the busted back of that old and rusted cadillac
that sinks into this field, collecting rain.
will i always feel this way?
so empty, so estranged

well i looked my demons in the eyes,
laid bare my chest, said do your best, destroy me.
you see, i've been to hell and back so many times,
i must admit you kind of bore me.
there's a lot of things that can kill a man,
there's a lot of ways to die,
listen, some already did that walked beside me.
there's alot of things i don't understand,
why so many people lie.
its the hurt i hide inside that fuels the fire inside me.
will i always feel this way?
so empty, so estranged

Then, all of a sudden I realized what her note meant. I got up and walked to the bathroom. The heavy wooden door seemed locked but I shoved it harder and it slammed open. I walked to the farthest stall and slowly pushed open the door. It’s empty and written in White Out on the black wall above the toilet read: Tit Milk Emporium.
I took a deep breath and exhaled.
“WHY would a mouse run into the lions mouth?” I said out loud to myself.
“Maybe death is warmer and more familiar than life,” said a voice. Then I turned and saw the bait as she slid into view and into the stall. Then she locked the door behind her.
It didn’t take long until everything we were wearing was on the floor. The heat rose and everything went numb. I pushed my hands through my hair and it was drenched. She was still sitting on my lap when she reached down into the pile of clothes and pulled out another pack of cigarettes and lit one. I took it out of her hand and gave it a long pull. Then I turned around and wrote on the wall with the burning ashes: The Milk is never free.

I put on my clothes and walked back into the bar.
Then the bartender asked me if I wanted another drink. I nodded. He handed me a Beam and Coke and ask if I needed anything else.
I closed my eyes and smelled my collar. I could still smell her over the putrid mess from the bathroom floor when my last song came over the jukebox. I wondered to myself what would come from her number. And then it began:

Who's seen jezebel?
She was born to be the woman i would know
And hold like the breeze
Half as tight as both our eyes closed

Who's seen jezebel?
She went walking where the cedars line the road
Her blouse on the ground
Where the dogs were hungry, roaming

Saying, "wait, we swear
We'll love you more and wholly
Jezebel, it's we, we that you are for
Only"

Who's seen jezebel?
She was born to be the woman we could blame
Make me a beast half as brave
I'd be the same

Who's seen jezebel?
She was gone before i ever got to say
"lay here my love
You're the only shape i'll pray to, jezebel"

Who's seen jezebel?
Will the mountain last as long as i can wait
Wait like the dawn
How it aches to meet the day

Who's seen jezebel?
She was certainly the spark for all i've done
The window was wide
She could see the dogs come running

Saying, "wait, we swear
We'll love you more and wholly
Jezebel, it's we, we that you are for
Only"

Wormy Dog Blues

Harper was standing on the street corner talking to two other men when I pulled up.
I guess they were being released from county the same time as Harper. He shook their hands and jumped in my car. For a few seconds we just looked at each other not saying a word. He was a ghost from Wormy Dogs past.
A lot of things go through your head when your friend has gone missing for 12 hours.
Visions of him dead in a field of ragweed crossed my mind, but I’d hoped he’d left the bar with a woman and stayed the night with her. Trading a venereal disease for death would have been a smiling alternative, as long as I could see my friend again.
He was always the emotional one, but now as he’s buckling up in the passenger seat of my car I put my hand on his shoulder and squeeze.
“It’s good to see you man,” I say. “I didn’t know where you were.”
His story was one I’d never heard. It was one reserved for drug addicts, thieves, and rapists – criminals. Now it was a verse from familiar lips.
The night before The Eli Young Band was playing at Wormy Dog Saloon and we had decided to go. A normal Friday night as far as a group of twenty-something’s were concerned. Dancing, drinking, and finally dropping at Harold’s house nearby was the plan. But in the midst of the show, with his dancing partner mid-twirl, Harper decided to leave the party for some air. (This has become an ongoing joke that we will someday warn our kids about. It’ll start like this; “Kids … never, never, ever, ever … go outside for fresh air. I’m just warning you now.”)
So sitting on the curb minding his own and smoking a cigarette, a cop approached Harper with questions. How much have you been drinking, how is your night, etc. In ‘cop speak’ that means I don’t care what you are saying, I’m going to smell you and watch your eyes, and in the meantime try to find out how big of a threat you are to humanity.
Somehow Harper took these questions to mean stand up, and that’s when he felt a baton across his forehead (I know this because the next day there was a knot and a red line there).
The cop had taken his standing up as an offensive threat and cracked Harper over the head. Worried, Harper wobbled straight to the brick wall and put his hands up. Now in shock, Harper told the cop he wasn’t fighting back and surrendered in every way his altered mind could think of.
Then the cop pushed him against the wall, cuffed him, and threw him into a paddy wagon crammed with others taken from us too soon.
Our party continued inside with no thought to the happenings outside these reverberating walls, thick with the sounds of Eli Young.
Harper’s walls on the other hand were cramped and cold. Then he began asking the reasons for the altercation and why he was attacked for standing. The only answer he could get was if you continue to ask questions you are going to the county jail instead of the drunk tank.
The differences in these two are the difference in a few hours and a day. Both are cold and miserable, but county lasts longer. The only good thing about county is when you are released, there is bar around the corner that will give you a free shot and beer if you had the proper markings on your hand from being processed and booked. Much like cattle as they are branded, so are the markings of the penal system.

While Harper was being placed in a large holding cell before being booked, I was pushing my car out of the drive thru line at Sonic after it ran out of gas.
Luckily a gas station was across the street, and luckily the workers had a gas can to loan me, so I filled up the can, transferred the gas to my car and I was off again.
That was not the case for Harper.
The next morning I had made many calls to Harper but none were answered or returned. Other calls to friends revealed he had not stayed with anyone we knew of and no one had seen him. That one, notorious phone call an actor makes in the movies never happened.
After riding down the road to 4th St. and Classen and taken into a bland, ten story, brick building, Harper was sitting on the floor while being handcuffed to a long metal bar above his head. So were all the others from the holding cell.
From there, all the men were lined up and strip-searched, one by one. Harper didn’t elaborate on these precious moments, and instead skipped to his personal cell, which was being kept warm for him by two ‘redneck guys’ as Harper referred to them. They had been keeping the cell warm for a year – one for failing to pay child support, the other for outstanding warrants.
The second, and younger of the two, was caught was after a high-speed chase in which the driver was killed after running off the road. Redneck two survived and was jailed after the warrants were discovered.
After the campfire chat and learning of each other’s plight, not one, but both men took horrible smelling craps, as Harper described it.
“They had been eating prison food for a year. What do you think it smelled like,” Harper told me.
The toilet was also in the middle of the cell, in full view. Conversations didn’t stop when one went to the bathroom. Harper cussed the younger of the two for the top bunk and told them, “If either one of you touch me, I’ll knock your faces off.”
Harper slept with both eyes open that night. Not because he had no pillow and a scratchy wool blanket to keep him warm, but because the threat of being willy’d was a possibility.
The next day around 4 p.m. I got a call from Harper while I was worried and watching a matinee at the dollar movie to keep my mind off what could be happening or what had happened to my friend. I left halfway through the movie to pick Harper up.
I bought Harper a burger and took him back to my place where he ate and I played George Strait on the guitar. Harper cried as I sang this song:

I still feel 25,
most of the time.
I still raise a little Cain with the boys.
Honky tonk and pretty woman.
Lord I'm still right there with them.
Singing above the crowd and the noise.
Sometimes I feel like Jesse James,
Still trying to make a name.
Knowing nothings gonna change what I am.
I was a young troubadour,
when I rode in on a song.
and I'll be an old troubadour,
when I'm gone.
Well, The truth about a mirror,
It's that a damn old mirror.
Don't really tell the whole truth,
It don't show what's deep inside.
Oh read between the lines,
it's really no reflection of my youth.
I was a young troubadour,
when I rode in on a song.
and I'll be an old troubadour,
when I'm gone.
I'll be an old troubadour,
when I'm gone.

Oil=Death .... Ideas are more powerful than guns .... Benjamin Franklin was a bon vivant

Things I like to do:

– Watch movies on my laptop in my bed covered up. The key is getting the laptop to balance on a pillow (For my neck and theater-esque perspective) while a glass of water balances on the windowsill on the other side of me.
I've sent my resume to Barnum & Bailey, but I've received no word.

– Play my latest accompaniment, a small piano the size of a backpack. Setting a candle on its top with wax drooling down its backside, I tap the keys for a sinister tone, yet it’s uplifting as it reminds me of the kid from Charlie Brown. I have no blanket, but I have taken to treating the piano as a pet. It’s cheaper than the pet deposit I’d have to lay down and the look on my friend’s faces when I say, “Piano, play nice with guitar.” Or “PIANO, I bet you haven’t moved from that spot all day! Why don’t you clean something or get some fresh air, you look like crap.”

– Burn mix cd’s for any and every occasion. Concerts call for a personal greatest hits mix from that particular artist, road trips call for various up beat stuff, a solo ride back home always deserves some beat your center console songs, as well as a few to think on.
Good beats to beat to, and not in a dirty way. I'll gonna stop writing beat now.

– Listen to This American Life. I’ve found that in any conversation I can call on a TAL episode that relates with the topic, which usually changes the subject to rabid raccoons or how carbon monoxide poisoning is the root of most ghosts stories, but are always well received.

– Wake up early on weekends. To some this is time to sleep in, but for me, it’s my time –not work time – and I vowed long ago to use my time awake and active and productive.
And by active and productive I mean go to garage sales, if weather permits, and try to keep movies watched to alcoholic beverages consumed at an equal number.

Honk if you’re horrendously swell at ignoring road signs

I don’t know about anyone else, but I get pissed when I’m driving and someone honks at me.
This has been a reoccurring situation a lot lately and I’m trying to pull the pieces of this mystery together and solve some shit.
My driving hasn’t altered. I still drive like my dad. I fly when I have nowhere to go and casually drive the speed limit when I’m late.
So what is the difference, why is everyone honking at me when I’m driving home after work?
It usually happens on a certain corner with a certain light. I’m turning left, traffic backs up, and all hell breaks loose.
“I’M TURNING LEFT … THERE IS NO TURNING LANE … WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO, PULL INTO ONCOMING TRAFFIC!??!” I always yell into my rear view mirror at the truck grill behind me, while I have my arms up like the Y guy in the YMCA dance.
I vent to friends and they change the subject cause, come on, someone honked at you, flip them off and move on. But that’s the deal. I can’t flip someone off cause I always think it is an old man or lady that is a grandmother or grandfather to someone. I wouldn’t want someone making the universal jerking off sign to my granny, and I don’t want to be that guy that did it to someone else’s granny. Or be there when they ask they grand kids, “what does this mean when someone gestures at you like they are stroking a cats tail? Or peeling a banana with one hand?”
Awkward.
But recently I returned to the scene of the honk. Maybe I missed a sign that says, ‘honk if you love garage sales’, in which case I would have, or ‘honk if you like the guys Honda in front of you’, which I would totally get.
Instead I found a modest sign at the top of the light pole that read ‘No Left Turns’.
I’ve been turning left after work for about six months, why haven’t I noticed this? And why has everyone else noticed it BUT me?
Next time I’m honking at who ever it is holding up traffic by turning left at 36th and Walker, granny or not!