Once a friend of mine gave me a card with Snoopy on it, rewinding a VCR. When life is hard, the card said, don't you wish you could hit rewind? Tempting as the sentiment might seem, I don't. And neither would Snoopy -- where would he get his angst for his stories? He needs that fuel to keep charging against the endless rejections, the misery of the editing process, and the chorus of critics (particularly Lucy) that haunt his creative efforts. Today is made of yesterday, like a dye that bleeds and colors everything.
For the past few months, there's been an American flag trapped in the tree outside my home office. It has gotten increasingly ragged through the winter weather and it's too high in the tree for anyone to reach. I would have thought it would have fallen apart or got swept away by now, but it's still there, dirty and battered. One of my friends mentioned that it's a great metaphor for our country's troubles. That's a little too obvious for me. A lovely child I know says that bags caught in trees are actually men pretending to be bags. So the flag could be a man that nobody can reach that's losing little bits and pieces of himself every day. One day there won't be enough of him left to tell what he was, but I'll remember. I never saw him whole, but I didn't need to. Had he not been trapped in pretending he was a flag, I would not have been able to watch him all these months and know him, perhaps not how he was, but how he wanted to be.
Michelle's Spell of the Day
"The more I write, the more the silence seems to be eating away at me." C.K. Williams
Cocktail Hour
Drinking poetry collection suggestion: Love Poems Anne Sexton
Benedictions and Maledictions
Rest in peace, Johnny S. of the The Sopranos!
11 comments:
You always have some great lines in your pieces. "today is made of yesterday..." resonates.
We had a guy hanging battered like a bloody flag in my movie, "Cleaver," Michelle. I think Tony Soprano has read too much autobiography into my movie. It's really a combination of "The Godfather" and "Edward Scissorhands." One day I was thinking about Scissorhands and I thought why not make it a cleaver instead of scissors? And the rest, as they say, is history. And,yes, I did resent my cousin Carmela's insinuations about who was whom in the film. And my little girl was christened and that ended the episode on a good note. Also, RIP Johnny Sack.
Welcome to the chop shop!
As you know, Michelle, I died in incarceration yesterday. But there are a few things I'd like to say. First, to my beloved(even though overweight wife)I love you dearly honey and we will meet again in eternity. Now the world will know that ours was an addictive relationship. I was addicted to cigarettes and you were addicted to Cheezits. But we loved each other dearly. When I was on my death bed, dying of lung cancer, you cleaned my slippers and offered me a cigarette. We'll meet again in eternity my dearest! And thank you for all your support of myself and the Sopranos, Michelle.
That fat pig Tony Soprano will never insult me or my gang again. After all I'm really a Leonardo, not a Leotardo. They fucked me and my family over on Ellis Island. From now on nobody fucks with Phil Leotardo, er, Leonardo!
Hey, Michelle, that photo gives a whole new meaning to "The Lord of the Rings," if you know what I mean.
A man, turned to a bag, turned into a flag, stuck in a tree weathering and falling to pieces bit by bit, never known as what he was only by what he has become and is becoming.
God and myself can only know how strongly we relate to that. No one I know now, knows the Walking man as he was, not in the days when shouldering an 80 pound hiking pack and moving around the country, or being almost washed overboard in a hurricane but catching hold of a bollard with his unbroken arm, to the nights of drinking and bar fights and the night his ankle got stomped and broken all the way through the joint.
Fighting all the doctors words that said he would never get full range of motion in either joint back but forced them until he did. To the days of fixing 2500 cars a year.
The days when he hung proudly on the staff of life that had been given him until the ropes broke and he went flying off to a new destiny of being caught, imprisoned in the branches of a tree, losing his color slowly but surely having the stitches that made him whole come apart in the high winds.
Yet just proudly being there not hating what he had become but rather just watching the world as it moved below him in his new place and finding that it had been a hell of a time when he flew proudly representing something special in this world; Freedom.
And even now being more than just man turned into a bag, turned into an American flag. Something turned into color in someones world for them to also see and think about and waiting for its final end.
No I don't think that flag would want to rewind one moment of its personal history either.
Great post, m! It could be two posts.
Each paragraph stands alone as a kick ass little prose poem, especially the second. Call it "Pieces of a man"--sweet title, huh?. No excess roses and happy kittens in this one--no grouch today, either--just truth from the mouths of babes.
Let all of the voices speak freely, you never know which one holds the truth!
Gotta go. I got two blondes in white cotton panties and a bag of cheeseburgers burnin' me up. I feel my temperature risin'.
Thankyouverymuch...
CajunQueen
URule
thisCity
thisSadDay
inAmerica
isMadeofYesterdays
tomorrow
FoxlyLadyD
Salute2Thee
OMightyIsisam
OShazammmm
R2C2!!!!!
If only that Adam Sandler movie "Click" were more thought out, I'd say it resembled your sentiments.
I've been a fan of your blog for a while now. I was originally turned on ... to the blog that is, by an old student of yours. Anyway, I've never left a comment and wanted to do so because I usually read it at work and to say the very least, it helps break the monotony of work. You have wit and insight and a certain vulnerability, that together make for quite a blog. I dig your sense of language ... do you read a lot of lit crit? Barthes and such? So, yeah .. thanks for such provocative entries.
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