week 25: thanksgiving

november

yeah.

so tonight i sat in a pew and a stool.

i prayed half-heartedly and drew, in much the same way that i ended up doing on the stool.

now if you have ever tried doing anything other than drinking at a bar, i recommend that you try.

try reading a book, or writing, or drawing, or do a crossword puzzle....

I guarantee that you will find no peace, these solitary activities are a magnet for interruption.

no, you want to be left alone in a bar... stare, stare intently into your drink and make no attempt to look elsewhere

thanksgiving

so every year around this time of year i get sick, and it had been since.

my father did something, perhaps the best thing that he ever did for me back in, '92, '93?

i was a freshman in higschool.

he decided to shoot himself in the head.


it taught me what it was to be left behind, without a note or a reason.

i nearly failed my freshman heath class because i scratched out, on the final,

suicide is a permanent solution to a:

a) gossip
b) sunburn
c) temporary problem

the answer was "c" but i wrote in dying of aids isnt really temporary is it

i was sent to the principal, freshman year and already singled out

now

through stories he told us kids during the car rides back and forth, he made it obvious (in hindsight), still as the disease took over, and later, i saw at fourteen, the extent of my fathers ailments, through his medical records, ironically the only things his family chose to return to his children.

(in those files i also found polaroid photos of his ex lover, nude... at 13-14 kinda earthshaking, i burned them all along with a letter, a letter that i would write for five years on the anniversary of his death... the night we got the new was the first night i tasted coffee, and laid down on a fairly busy road and willed a car to crush me, laughing at his demise all the way.)

sorry

in those medical records i saw why


and later as people who know him decided that i was old enough or that he was dead long enough began to fill in the cracks

and why became more apparent

and it scared me because i knew he wanted me to live with him

and i almost did

and i wonder if he would have taken me with him, he did show me the gun once, a tiny 9mm.

i think he might have

so why is this thanksgiving?

it was on some years his birthday

it was, after the divorce, his holiday, with his family

mom got easter
dad got thanksgiving

this year is hard

every one is,

i forget and then get sick and remember, oh yeah its november


and then i remember:

thanksgiving