The Thing I Feared Is Upon Me

My grandfather on my mother's side kept a pistol underneath his pillow and one in his truck at all times. When he was riding around the back streets of Granbury, Texas, he would brandish it out the window and yell, Does anyone want to take Charlie on? Anyone? No one, shockingly, wanted to take on a drunk, violent fiftysomething guy with firearms. During the times I was left in his and my grandmother's care (and those times were few as I was good at faking stomach ailments to get out of visits), he'd ride around throwing glass beer bottles on the side of the road and yell, Motherfucker! as they hit the ground and shattered. The people who weren't terrified to utter his name said he was quite a character, the only assessment that seemed neutral. Behind closed doors, I heard someone once call him a rattlesnake, a hanging offense had he hearing enough to comprehend. All that hard living had left him partially deaf.

My mother, while terrified of her father, loved rattlesnakes. She saw nothing strange about having them as pets or freezing them for decorations. The decorations served as a tremendous source of income -- they were very popular in Texas about the time everyone was hanging up photographs of oil derricks at sunset in their homes. That, I thought, was some fucked up shit, the snakes and ugly oil derrick shots. I vowed that after I left the house, I would never deal in snakes again. I was wrong, of course. You run away from things to find that they are you in the end. Why else would you have to run? The last time I saw a rattlesnake in the wild, I thought the world had stopped and for a moment it had. The thing I feared is upon me, I thought, and smiled. I clutched my chest so hard that I left claw marks right near my heart.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Lies began to coil in my heart and call it home." Raymond Carver, "Wenas Ridge"

Break from weekend drinking book suggestion: The Glass House by Jeanette Walls

Benedictions and Maledictions

Today's poem was written by the late Hank D. Ballenger, Poet Laureate of Mineral Wells High School (I kid you not, that was his official title during and after high school)

First published in Pearl:

Out With An Ex-Girlfriend

"What you and I need
is a good woman . . .
Well, a bad woman.
Here's to a woman
good at being bad."

I agree with her
and offer a toast
to professional
heartbreakers. "Amen.
No more amateurs."

The rules are simple:
No talking about
the ones we're with now
but no being nice
about ones before.

I'm not really sure
why the two of us
do this to ourselves,
this session of Truth
and Consequences.

I asked her one time.
She bought us two shots.
And said, "Well hell, Hank,
I'd marry you, if
I weren't so damn queer."