Sunday, April 11, 2010

Sideways Motion In The Middle

THERE's one really mean-spirited crazy woman in the neighborhood, all decked out like a frantic church-goer in crosses and crucifixes who loves to rifle through our free box and who, unconscious of her own actions, loves to verbally abuse people but ends every tirade with the website of the evangelical organization that she somehow supports: holylove.org.

SHE came in the store today because it was pissing rain so we haul the free box in. I have to say she emanates a pathetic, angry negativity that at once I want to make go away while at the same time I abhor the conditions that made her so crazy and angry in the first place. Within five minutes she had suggested to a young girl in line she read a book about rape, because "that's what this world has in store for her", and ended this, of course, with the almost ironic tag: "holylove.org."

AND then I saw a two year girl in the rain, on her knees, bawling and choking on tears for almost twenty minutes while the woman she was with, also sobbing, tried to make her calm down. She didn't calm down; she wailed and railed and everybody looked and commented and the rain came down and my stomach knotted up from something sour I hate earlier in the day.

AND the plaza in Warsaw where all the Polish citizens gathered to mourn the deaths of their leaders looked like something out of a dream.

I listen
to "minimalists" a lot lately, people like Arvo Part and Gorecki (sic) -- so-called "sacred minimalists" -- a harrowing backdrop of choral repetition is good for words to come up, makes the moment swell like a funeral march, or the slap of water against a sad, old cliff.

I feel caught in a web of trying, caught and flailing and haggling with my own motives, and remembering only one alibi which I would prefer to keep secret. An alibi I can hoist up when all goes sour and grim, and say: at least this makes the days digestible.

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