overcome the fatal leaning towards expressiveness

here is a story of j's. joe and jane live together below the poverty line in half a house that is barely up to code. joe is a female to male schizophrenic transexual....wait, maybe that should be transexual schizophrenic... yes, that one.... jane, his lesbian partner, has severe rheumatoid arthritis and is in the decline stages of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. jane's son justin is 19 and lives with joe and jane. justin's friends john, josh and jessie flop at the house whenever they need booze, drugs or shelter...mazlow's basics minus two...justin's former girlfriend jennifer often brings their infant daughter( julia) by for visits....two dogs and six cats share the house ...one of the cats is feral. his name is spike, of course. jane used to have a bird but found it was just too much...
joe drove to the humane society and got a pet rat. he named the rat pixie. pixie is a stupid rat. this is an important detail. joe and jane have conflicting sleep schedules. this is an important detail. jane is exhausted by mid -evening when joe usually smokes a joint and takes some E. joe passes out and hours later wakes up in a panic screaming for jane to find pixie. jane squeezes her swollen fingers inside a hole in the couch and gets pixie...just like that. she can think like a rat i guess and figures pixie is stupid enough to get trapped inside the couch. pixie races around in the delirious dance of an ex-con. jane does some screaming of her own pixie is your rat what the hell were you thinking... tottering under my own skin and bones ...jane can't be doing this shite...ok so they understand each other. another day another night ....justin, josh, john, jessie and joe smoke some joints and take some E. more hours later josh's stoner moans of horror wrench jane out of sleep and drag her to the bedroom door jane he says spike's caught a really big mouse...i don't know, man....
jane shovels pixie's guts and carcass into a garbage bag and sobs hersslf back into some kind of agony induced coma I can't be doing this shite. joe ventures out and brings back more essentials you know how it is, man, you run out ya gotta get more... hey...he says to jane i got us another pixie...

j is just after i and what is between noise and i .... pain and madness...or everyday life

4 comments:

Jon said...

Fatal for sure, yet for me this is expressive as hell...

the writing here is stunning... cutting and cruel at times...

the run-on sentences and the un-punctuated breaks create such a sharp tone... the mockery of it...

I also like all the detail (the important ones about the rat and sleeping habits too ;)... the schizophrenia and the transexual played into the idea that I took up in the post above (a story's ambition and the palimpsest)... one thing is not always what it seems, nor what we expect it to be... that things can be overwritten???

again... beautifully written even if this isn't a beautiful scene and seems more like a kind of dark torturous jumble of j's and pixies...

human being said...

a jay is sitting on the peak of the Maslow's pyramid... all fastened up by a thick rope... calling out to all the j's:

- hey pals... why don't you join me?... it's so fun up here... i crawled all the way up... it was so easy... the trick is that i moved on just like i'm crawling on a horizontal line... enjoying every dot of it...

- every dot of it... every dot of it... every dot of it...

is this the voice of j's or jay's own voice echoing back?

Harlequin said...

thanks for these ongoing reflections and reflexions and recursions... all that. this was a spooky piece for me...and so much of it is real...dark torturous jumble it is... that is such a good compression...and the beak of mazlow... an image to hang onto..
will continue to read ... getting out of this beckett paragraph ( !) is so far so tough...

human being said...

wow Harlequin... you are a real harlequin... saying a lot in a few words..

loved 'beak of mazlow'
:D