self as cartoon (with red head)

There is an excellent representation of the apartment on 1738 West Alabama I described a while back. Go ahead and check out the latest post by Cake on her blog http://whistlingleafblower.blogspot.com. As a line drawing, I think I look pretty good.

found journal entry (april 25, 1992)

(on a ferry from Ireland to France)

All this water -- it makes me nervous. The way we move is like being sick. It's like reading a boring book. I look at the words and read them without understanding until at least the third or fourth time; my eyes drift, make circles, get tired. I squint.

Allow the major portion of your attention to sail through the waters of all sensory perception while existing as the same body in time and space, but you will not be easily located unless you understand the map.

It's not like traveling on a train or bus because there is no solid ground on which the vehicle moves. Water is soft and confuses its vesel, which tries to read it as solid ground. Here, we are cutting into that space which cannot be claimed because it is soft. Sort of like air, but with boats.

There is more of an attempt at an illusion. Your mind tries to convince you of the sureness of the body of water. Air does not offer that illusion.

Dizzy feelings are fun when you are a child because they are a new way of perceiving things. Later in life, you learn how to get sick off of this alteration in perception because it interferes with what you have established as normal. You can no longer enjoy the sensations because you've moved past the stage of fascination.

A straight line is no longer a straight line.

i think of persephone (don't you?)

There's a pomegranate tree in the back yard, bearing fruit.

What a huge surprise to look up and see something hanging, like an apple, from a tangled mess of what has looked like, for the past two years, knotted vines and trash trees. Melanie is the one who identified it as a pomegranate and, since then, Hank has clipped the vines away from the tree, and now we can see it in all of its glory. The fruit has only partially ripened, with ruby red stripes running from its base toward about half-way up the fruit, and we wonder if it might not ever come to edible fruition. But everytime I see it, I feel, what? -- interested. And as a result I've become more interested in all of the plant life in the back, including the potted citranella, the jade plant, the carribean hot pepper plant (off of which I recently picked and cooked one of its firey fruits), and the other weird looking plants that I cannot identify, but which are definitely in conversation with one another.

Out back, there is a garage with a wooden garage apartment above it where our neighbor, a poet named Eddie, lives. To the right, there is a fenced off area that the original owners used to keep their dogs in, and now is a small, heavily shaded plot of dirt. I've been using the back corner of the area as a composting site for all of the vegetable waste I generate (which is lots, when you're a vegetarian who actually eats vegetables), but nothing grows in this weird little rectangle of earth, most likely because it is surrounded by pecan trees that drop their inedible nuts all over the place.

Two of the trees that throw shade in the back are in love with each other. I noticed it right away, when we first looked at the apartment before we moved in. They lean into each other, as if the one tree came up behind the other and gave him a hug, or caught him in his arms as he was about to fall backwards. They seem very happy, although I wonder if they might not be jealous of the two other trees, also in love (although not as noticeable to the untrained eye), who have given each other lots of space, but stretch upwards together in a magnificent way, touching only at the top.

The duplex we live in has all kinds of vines on the property, including the scary looking ones that choke the trees and grow along the neighbor's short fence on the east side of the house, as well as the ones I really like -- the fine-looking skinny ones that make a soft lace over the windows out front. In the morning, the sun comes through these vines, bathing the room in a sleepy spring green, and at night, when cars turn around at our dead end, their headlights catch the vines and make the most incredible shadows on the wall. (I know, vines are bad for buildings, but remember we rent, not own, this place.)

When Hank cut down the ropy vine from the east side of the property, he discovered some thriving garlic that out old neighbors must have planted, and I snipped their spicy sprouts and chopped them into the marinade I made for last night's tofu and broccoli stir-fry. Hank broke off a large lavender and pink flower and its circular jade green petals from the cluster of wild looking overgrowth near the pomegranate tree. It looks really groovy in this brown glass vase I have.

I recently explained to a new mother that I believed that when plants feel threatened, they grow fruit as one last ditch effort to somehow survive, which, to my mind, would explain the pomegranate -- the vine was choking it so the tree had to make fruit before it went to seed. I thought this was common knowledge (and I don't know if it really is true), but the new mother seemed surprised, and then took a long look at her beautiful baby girl.

Johnny, that's no way to write a blog entry

No longer a K*mart, the building behind which a crew of like-minded outcasts and I spent the marjority of our pre-teen and early-teenage years is now a Target. Nearby, there's now a Wal*mart. Gone is the Shop Rite where I bagged groceries, cleaned the tops of refrigerators, shoveled congealing garbage from the loading docks, and put away the produce as a teenager. Delran has supersized its strip malls.

And that's okay, as long as, down the highway, the trucker motels still advertise mirrored ceilings and waterbeds. Although, as my younger sister pointed out, they are less the destination for adolescent deflowerings and more locations to house wards of the state.

Because Renee asked: In the early-1980s, when my grandfather moved in with my family, my parents decided to convert half of our garage into a little room where my Poppop lived (I'm tired of writing "my grandfather" -- I'll call him by which I knew him, although I think it smacks of Northeast Philly shanty Irish). My parents realized that Poppop, in his early-80s, was done with apartment living when some peculiar behavior (his percolating coffee maker melted onto the electric burner, some car crashes) indicated that it might be a good idea for alternate arrangements.

I was ten when Poppop moved in, and he consistently called me "Johnny," which is the name of his son, my uncle. It was the kind of thing I really didn't know how to begin to correct. I think there were a few attempts to remind him that I was going by Charles (my mother: "No, Dad, that's your Grandson, Charles!"), and he occasionally remembered ("J--, J--, Charles . . .") but, in the end, Johnny it was. He was, after all, a man in his eighties.

So, like this: "Oh, hey! Good morning, Johnny!" "Johnny, did you take out the garbage?" "Johnny, I'll be at Grandparents Day tomorrow at your school." "Johnny, turn down the radio." "Johnny, have you seen my teeth?"

Get it?

I'm not sure about everyone else's grandfather, but mine was an aging, drinking man who smoked a lot of cigars. I felt a sense of awe around him, but never that cuddly grandfather feeling that gets described in Hallmark cards, although I loved him, dearly. Poppop was also a die-hard Irish Catholic. Both my parents were working, and when my sisters and I would get home from Saint Charles Borromeo grade school, we'd find Poppop smoking a cigar, praying the rosary, gazing out our front window: "Oh, hello, Johnny. How was school?" He dressed in a button up shirt, bow tie, slacks, and a jacket every day of his life, even when it was a sweltering summer Sunday. Going to mass was very imporant for him. (I'm sure he must have been proud of my stint as an altar boy.)

There were these Sundays when he'd get up at 5am for mass at 11:15am, and prepare for services. At 6am he'd start to call out for my mother, asking if it wasn't true that we'd be late for church, and how much longer we'd be. (Perhaps this explains my mother's own reaction formation, perpetual late-comer she has always been.) Coming into the kitchen, where we'd find a fully clothed cane-tapping man with an annoyed look on his face, we'd ask Poppop if he had at least had any breakfast? some cereal? toast? orange juice -- anything? His reply was always the same: "I'll be fine. I had a nice glass of tepid water about an hour ago."

The Glass of Tepid Water remark was great for a number of reasons: it signified an everyday belief in the practice of Catholic martyrdom on a local level (no, really, I'll be just fine, here, suffering) and it resonates along the generations of my grandfather's children (in terms of what is now called passive-aggressive behavior) and a postmodern twist in its final incarnation of what my siblings and I understand as communication along the lines of sly, hyper-aware meta-commentary that restores folkloric value to what might be seen as quotidian teasing.

Or so I'd like to believe.

first ghost (and granny creeps)

I dreamed last night that Stephen Beard (pronounced "Bay-yurd") came into my grandfather's room. The dream was short. Nothing happened, he just stood there and looked at me. Stephen was the boy who lived across the street who had orange hair and freckles. He was enormous (not fat, but what you might call big-boned -- much larger than the other kids, and held back a few times in grade school). The neighborhood girls called him Moose. I was afraid of him and tried to walk in the opposite direction or not go outside when I'd see him. He shot himself, and died, in the garage behind his house when we were teenagers.

I know, morbid.

The other thing is that there is that there is this doll in my grandfather's room.

My grandfather (a master story-teller) made up stories for my mother and her siblings when they were kids and later, when my sisters and my cousins and I were kids, told them to us. The characters were named Blackie and Whitey, taken from the black and white dogs that appeared on the label of a brand of Scotch he was (quite) fond of drinking. Blackie and Whitey (in my mind they were fully racialized) spent a lot of time running from a character named Granny Creeps, an old woman who lived in the woods. She caged and tortured children for a living. I remember being on long car rides with my grandfather, and he'd point out the window to some dense trees: "Back in there -- that's where she lives, kids."

At some point, my Great Uncle Tom (my grandfather's brother) made a Granny Creeps doll. When I hold her to her full height, she reaches the bottom of my rib cage, which makes her about five and a half feet in length. She is stuffed, like a huge sock doll, but built to realistic little-old-lady proportions. Her head is weird, thin and flat, about the size of a medium pizza, but more football-shaped. It's made out of some kind of plaster that is painted pink and white, but it has cracked and faded over the years, so the wrinkles around her eyes, mouth, and chin appear even more exaggerated. Her face is painted on, and she has heavily lidded eyes and a mole on her left cheek. There is grey and black yarn that has been glued to the head, which is tied in the back into a bun. One of the strands of yarn has detached, and hangs like a dreadlock to her shoulder. There is a bobby-pin that pretends to hold back one side of the hair. Two gold hoops hang from either side of the head, even there are no ears. She wears muslin [sp?] bloomers, and a greenish-black dress decorated with tiny gold flowers, topped with ancient-looking lace at the neck, and held in place by an amber brooch. Her hands are cartoonish, like pink mittens. Her legs are covered by a dark plaid hose, and her feet are black pointed cloth boots with three white buttons on each one. The dress comes down to about her knees. She can sit upright, cross her legs, and fold her arms. As I write this, she is sitting next to me.

I should get a digital camera.

there's a ghost in (that) home (watching you without me)

I'm headed back to the house on Borton Mill Court for the weekend. Off the Route 130, a couple of blocks back from the K*Mart, the Arby's, the McDonald's, the Taco Bell, and the high school I attended in Delran, New Jersey, where I spent my formative years. My father turns 60 soon (the same age, weirdly, to me, as the recently deceased Syd Barrett and our, unfortunately, very much alive asshole of a president).

This will be a small family reunion and gathering that culminates in my father's wish to go with all of us (my sisters, my mom, my nieces) to the Philadelphia Zoo on Saturday. The excursion is a nostalgic reenactment of the time, when I was in the fourth grade, that my dad took my sisters and me out of school and into Philly for the day to battle a severe case of what he called his Spring Fever.

I will be staying, for the first two nights, in the room where my grandfather lived (and died) in the 1980s. (The room I grew up in, alas, was long ago transformed, first, into a storage room, and now serves as a kind of "office". But still, on the wall next to where my bed used to be, I will find the small message: "Why, God?" I carved it there in a moment of adolescent fright.)

Every time I sleep in my grandfather's old bed, I dream about ghosts. I'm ready.