Home of the Soul Cookie

The return of questions from the Friday Five.

1. If you had all the money in the world and could choose to own anything, what you would get and why?

My own amusement park, a kickass one with:

• roller coasters
• immersive, state-of-the-art video games
• the world’s best (and craziest) mini-golf courses
• go-karts
• a reconfigurable human-scale maze
• an IMAX-sized cineplex
• a world-class performance hall/venue

Why would I want my own amusement park?

For my own amusement, of course.

Skydiving.

As I discovered earlier this year when I did the bungee swing thing at Great America, I still have a healthy respect for gravity and the solidness of terra firma.

Nonetheless, I still intend to throw myself “out of a perfectly good airplane,” as my mom has put it, at some point.

I could mention Chien and Shanna, the dachshunds my parents had had since before I was born, but they were never really mine.

That honor went to Kinky, a cat we found in the park one day when I was four or five. He was so named because of a double ninety-degree bend in the end of his tail.

He was, definitively, my cat. I could get away with so much with him, far more than anyone else in my family could, stuff like wearing him as a shawl. (Kitties, as it turns out, don’t really dig that sort of activity.)

He was a good cat. I miss him.

Scotland.

I would be summer: Not as light and bouncy as springtime, nor as crisp and waning as autumn, nor as cold and still as winter, summer is the season of heat, of activity, of joie de vivre.

Poe’s “Haunted” (from her album of the same name) is a song of stirring, beautiful complexity, both lyrically and musically. It reminisces and it looks forward. Regret and hope and earnest examination all cavort about its stanzas.

It is, in short, a good approximation of what I would be as a song.

“Haunted”
by Poe

Ba da pa pa ba da pa pa…

Come here
Pretty please
Can you tell me where I am
You won’t you say something
I need to get my bearings
I’m lost
And the shadows keep on changing

And I’m haunted
By the lives that I have loved
And actions I have hated
I’m haunted
By the lives that wove the web
Inside my haunted head

Ba da pa pa ba da pa pa…

Don’t cry,
There’s always a way
Here in November in this house of leaves
We’ll pray
Please, I know it’s hard to believe
To see a perfect forest
Through so many splintered trees
You and me
And these shadows keep on changing

And I’m haunted
By the lives that I have loved
And actions I have hated
I’m haunted
By the promises I’ve made
And others I have broken
I’m haunted
By the lives that wove the web
Inside my haunted head

Hallways… always

I’ll always want you
I’ll always need you
I’ll always love you

And I will always miss you

Ba da pa pa ba da pa pa…

Come here
No I won’t say please
One more look at the ghost
Before I’m gonna make it leave
Come here
I’ve got the pieces here
Time to gather up the splinters
Build a casket for my tears

I’m haunted
(By the lives that I have loved)
I’m haunted
(By the promises I’ve made)
I’m haunted
By the hallways in this tiny room
The echos there of me and you
The voices that are carrying this tune

Ba da pa pa…

Father: What is it Annie?

Daughter: You think I’ll cry? I won’t cry!
My heart will break before I cry!
I will go mad.

Of the divorcé
  on the occasion of what would have been
    his tenth wedding anniversary:

I am a shell,
  hollow,
    walking and talking as if I were a real boy.

Wounds I thought healed are opened anew,
  a feast for the vultures,
    by my spirals of lamentation.

Grief and bitterness and loneliness have taken root
  in the home and hearth of the heart
    where love and joy once dwelt.

I flail about, discordant,
  a pilgrim in search of an acceptance
    I won’t even grant myself.

And of she who once loved me
  (or loved me not, I haven’t the petals to tell)
    I wonder what has become.

With breaths alternating twixt sighs and sobs,
  laughter and curses, empathy and bile,
    I madly dance upon the razor edge of the three-fold law.

My psychosis, my mental Brigadoon,
  is that this is all just fodder for the middle act,
    the turning point that’ll drive it all to resolution.

But there’s no snappy closing, no convenient wrap-up,
  no music to take us out to commercial:
    just “stay tuned for the ongoing story.”

Man Cleared to Remove Wife’s Feeding Tube

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. - A judge gave Terri Schiavo’s husband permission to remove the brain-damaged woman’s feeding tube in three weeks, handing him a victory in his effort to carry out what he says were his wife’s wishes not to be kept alive artificially.

Good.

Let me go on record now: If I’m ever completely vegetative, with no reasonable chance of ever coming out of it, don’t keep me hooked up to the machines. Keep me from being a brain-dead, artificially-autonomic lump of flesh in some hospice somewhere.

If I’m not coming back, don’t prevent me from moving on.

In the meantime, the woman’s parents, who want her kept alive, are expected to ask another court to block the order from taking effect.

The judge wrote that he was no longer comfortable granting delays in the long-running family feud, which has been going on for nearly seven years and has been waged in every level of Florida’s court system. He said the case must end.

Of course, no story even parenthetically about assisted suicide would be complete without the Catholic Church weighing in:

“If Mr. Schiavo legally succeeded in provoking the death of his wife, this would not only be tragic in itself, but it would be a serious step toward legally approving euthanasia in the United States,” Cardinal Renato Martino, the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, told Vatican Radio on Thursday.

Glad to see Those Who Know What’s Best For Us hard at work.

Then again, this is the church whose leader, in his recent pre-tracheotomy days, compared abortion to the Holocaust.

Marker… speed… ACTION! http://www.fridayfive.org/

1. If your life were a movie, what would the title be?
The Truth in Shadows

2. What songs would be on the soundtrack?

“Bring Me to Life” performed by Evanescence
“Cross My Heart” performed by Eighth Wonder
“The Distance” performed by Cake
“Hazy Shade of Winter” performed by the Bangles
“I Touch Myself” performed by Divinyls
“In the Car” performed by Barenaked Ladies
“Kiss Me” performed by Sixpence None the Richer
“Magic” performed by Olivia Newton-John
“One Caress” performed by Depeche Mode
“One Night in Bangkok” performed by Murray Head
“Particle Man” performed by They Might Be Giants
“Skin” performed by Oingo Boingo
“Thankyou” performed by Dido
“Walk on the Ocean” performed by Toad the Wet Sprocket
“When You’re Strange” performed by Echo and the Bunnymen

And a special bonus track:
“Particle Man [Disneyland tram version]” by Kevin and Scott

3. Would it be a live-action film or animated? Why?
Since it’d be a dialogue-heavy, special effects-light flick, it would be better constructed as a live-action picture.

4. Casting: who would play you, members of your family, friends, etc?
Difficult. Difficult at best.

Me: Zach Braff or Jerry O’Connell
Mom: Angelica Huston
Dad: Rob Reiner
Sister: Anna Paquin
The Ex: never seen, just referred to (à la Maris on “Frasier”)
Jason: John Cusack
Kris: Robin Wright Penn
Amber: herself!
Troll: Horatio Sanz
Noelle: Julia Stiles
Scott: Tobey Maguire
Amy: Gillian Anderson

5. Describe the movie preview/trailer.
It’ll probably have two trailers, one serious, one silly. Here’s what might pass for the silly one (if you’re drunk enough):

     ANNOUNCER (v.o)
IN THE BEGINNING, GOD CREATED
HEAVEN AND EARTH...

     SFX
BIG FLASH OF LIGHT!
Reveal the Earth,
                  lush,
floating in space.

     ANNOUNCER (v.o)
...AND SAW THAT IT WAS GOOD.

The camera ZOOMS IN to the Earth,
stopping at the GARDEN OF EDEN.

     ANNOUNCER (v.o)
ON THE SIXTH DAY, GOD CREATED
MAN IN HIS OWN IMAGE...

     SFX
POOF! ADAM pops into being.

     ANNOUNCER (v.o)
...AND WAS PLEASED.

     ANNOUNCER (v.o, cont.)
SOME TIME LATER...

Cut to KEVIN,
  headphones on,
    eyes closed,
      head bopping,
        dancing/flailing to music
        that we can't hear.

     KEVIN (singing)
CROSS MY HEART, HOPE TO DIE,
MAY LIGHTNING STRIKE ME IF
I'M TELLIN' A LIE...

     ANNOUNCER (v.o)
...HE WAS ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL.

Rapid cuts between scenes from the movie
as the voiceover continues.

     ANNOUNCER (v.o)
FROM THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT
YOU FROM JUSTIN TO KELLY,
TROLL 2, AND MANOS, THE
HANDS OF FATE COMES
A COMING OF AGE STORY...
     (beat)
...WITH A FEW SCREWS LOOSE.

And now, the money shot: show the title:
"THE TRUTH IN SHADOWS"

At wicca class earlier this week our teacher read our “medicine cards,” essentially a tarot-like deck and process which calls upon Native American mythology and beliefs. Before I descibe “what the cards told me,” let me back up and give you some background.

In an earlier post, I mentioned “The Long Winter” without really explaining it. As some of you may have guessed, the Long Winter was the winter of 1998-1999, when I separated from my wife and moved into a tiny little mountain cabin in the forested areas outrside Chico (California, where the ex and I had been living with her mom and stepdad).

It would not be an exaggeration to say that that winter tested my will to survive; hell, it pretty well tested my will to live. The woman I loved with all my heart and soul, and with whom I’d envisioned a grand life (success in our careers, kids, growing old together) told me one day that

1. she didn’t love me, and
2. wasn’t sure she’d ever loved me.

It was the utter destruction of all that I believed to be true. (This was the relationship where I finally understood the truth in Sonnet 116.)

So a lot of what I’ve been dealing with in the last couple of years - issues of identity, security, and confidence - have been exacerbated by the “death” of my previous life.

(And that’s what it felt like after the separation: Like I was in mourning, like my wife had died and been replaced by some pod-person simulacrum that I didn’t know, so deftly had she hidden and so suddenly had she revealed her actual feelings.)

So fast forward to recent months as I’m hazarding little baby steps toward expanding the “concept of me,” stuff like realizing I’m adult enough to drink responsibly and intuiting that my scientific paradigm could coexist with spirituality (like Spock said, “Logic is the beginning of wisdom… not the end.”)

And so one of the things I’m trying to remain more open to are divinitory tools. Still not sure that the messages are coming from some Power From Beyond, but that’s less important than the lessons we, ourselves, take from what we discover. (Kind of a microcosm that way.)

So back to earlier this week.

In the drawing of the medicine cards, you pull seven cards to discover what totemic animals are there to guide you along your path. Here’s what I drew:

1. Turtle
2. Frog
3. Moose
4. Snake
5. Buffalo
6. Bat
7. Ant

Okay, I hear you ask, but what does it mean? Glad you asked.

The significance of the meaning of the Moose card is not lost on me. What surprised me for a moment was the recurrance of the rebirth motif between the Snake and Bat cards. I hadn’t expected those sorts of responses, but they’re dead on. I really am emerging from being emotionally, spirtually, and creatively dead, in to a whole new uncharted realm.

So maybe there is something to “the cards” after all.

Or maybe there’s just something to me.

I’ve been back on the “who am i/why am i here” kick lately, accompanied by a funk more intense than anything I’ve felt since my separation.

This past Saturday was particularly bad. At 3:30 in the afternoon on a bright and cheerful sunny Saturday I was curled up in a quasi-fetal position on the family room floor of Jason and Kris’ house, crying. Even now, I’m not really sure what I was crying about.

I remember wishing I had someone there to hold me.

It didn’t help that I was sleep-deprived (the cats, now locked in my room 24/7, spent most of the night trying to force open the door in painfully loud fashions), or that my early-afternoon RPG session went badly (if an hour and a half of uninspired and uninspiring nonsequiters can be considered bad). In that moment, though, I couldn’t figure out a reason for me being.

(Being what? Just being, existing.)

I finally fell asleep, and after a particularly positive Sunday night, didn’t think about it again until yesterday at lunch:

Remember that scene in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams’ character leads his students to the trophies and artifacts of past students? Carpe diem. Seize the day. I’m not sure I remember how.

It’s like I walk around all day in a gray fog, numb to the world. I smile and make my little pleasantries, do my little monkeyboy dance, and the void grows.

I tread water, without hope, attracting despair like so many hungry sharks with my flailing.

I exist without true, unfettered joy. I’m happy, sure, and stuff amuses me and I laugh. But I find it difficult to point to something within my soul that isn’t somehow twinged with regret or anger or embarrassment.

And then the horrifying thought occurred to me: What if this is all I am because this is all I can be?

Fuck.

I don’t believe that.

I can’t believe that.

But it’s there, waiting just off-screen. An emotional wolf, waiting for me to falter so it can hamstring me and move in for the kill. And like a wolf it’s crafty, biding its time.

I need to soldier on. Keep going until I move back up the hierarchy of needs.

I felt “self-actualized” a long time ago. I want to be so again.