ICYMI, Part V

“There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes [tigers] and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planisphere where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.”

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities-

***

“Are you guys hiring? I have a laptop now.”

“Oh nice! No, we are not hiring atm.”

There have been many conversations between myself and my ex-wife since 2009 that have ended just as abruptly, all the while maintaining the gris gris/charismatic exchange that mutually validates our whimsical, desperate escape plans, and the residual consequences of  impulsive nature gone to shit. 

I hope you favor intense eye contact.
I hope you don't mind ungarnered suggestions, blunt truths on both sides of coincidence. We can speak plainly and not feel attacked as we are apt to do in moments of passionate discourse. 

There's a violet casket lid with 666s adorning an upside down cross on a skate deck. It is my heart, my core, my gang. It’s easy for me to claim affiliations with my shadow overseeing the scope of my futile resistance to change. I've been known to ignore better advice and smash my own head repeatedly against the announce desk. We're not selling, this is one stiff headbutt after another. 

***

I'll be real and say, I mentioned the interview with iris to Lindsey, because I miss how fluid our conversation flowed before we fucked and fucked everything up. It was 2009 when I first heard her voice over the now defunct MySpace poetry group: 10k Poets. Headed by a meth addicted manipulator from the Seattle area and someone whose name I use only in familiar circles, 10k was a conglomeration of poets/writers from across the country who gathered via blogtalkradio.com and shared their work over flip phones and dated laptops. Pantifesto’s Porntastic Phunhouse (Lindsey’s former pseudonym) was quickly ⅓ of my favorite authors on the program and I found her sense of humor to be very on par with my own, as I am clearly not sardonic or observant of how the world affects my fluctuating perspectives. 

After a 6 month vacation at Taylor County Detention Center for unpaid child support, I had reverted to the infantile concept that poetry was my only way of escaping the golfball filled cemeteries of Willowtown Hill. If I couldn’t physically surpass the limits of such a small town, I could project my voice far enough to find something kindred past the wailing of coyotes in the holler at night. I'd sit on my parents back deck, the moon hitting the screen door low enough to make my feet look as if they were carried by someone else, someone much bigger and with more bravado. Sometimes, while engaged in the program, I could contain myself from drinking ALL of my dad’s beer, listening to the likes of Newamba Flamingo, Jeff Sibley, Yossarian Hunter and many others whose poems, stories, and fealty tipped the can from going completely empty…

***

FM: Do you think your life would've been easier if we hadn't met?

La Lintzi: I’ll get to work on that. 

After a few days of no reply, I became insecure that she was going to say yes, and all the discomfort from 2020 would return within an instant. 

You know, don't sweat it. Maybe this interview isn't a good idea. 

I'll stop bothering you. Take care 

LL: One cell got fired and it’s been just me while the new guy gets trained. It’s been exhausting so, just because I was not available does not mean I don’t want to do it.  

Word.

LL: I’m off on Friday, may have some time tomorrow, if that is ok. I need to get up early, and I think the interview will be great but don’t want to get into a conversation about it before bed. Don’t trip, I think you will like what I write. I am literally the only dedicated person for the whole fucking help desk

Have a good night. 

When she finally answers the question, I do my best not to take offense/reaffirm my suspicions. 

LL:  “Do you think your life would have been better if we never met?”

Why is the answer to this “simple” open-ended question so long? 

You wanna know what would have given me a different life?

Different parents, maybe.

In this version of the simulation, it is what it is 

In the second half of the race to 100 years old I’ve realized that I’m the only one that is going to give myself a better life. 

I can only work with the elements that were already painted on the canvas with the existing palette.  

Some reincarnationists explain that our souls choose our parents before we are born. The lessons we learn from our chosen families are to help us eventually incarnate into the highest versions of ourselves. 

Others explain everything as karma.  

At this time, I subscribe to something in between. After all, who can explain the destiny of babies who are conceived to become premium jerky for the elites? 

Given the same early duress, I have recently identified multiple points along the journey where way before meeting you I could have made things easier for myself instead of more difficult. 

i.e.: I could have chosen to live with my father in the Chicago area instead of allowing my 8 year-old self  old self to be manipulated by my mother’s unhinged desire to move to Aurora, Colorado to join a pentecostal cult. 

If I stayed in the Chicago area with my original dad I wouldn’t have C-PTSD from religious trauma and getting molested, and the daddy issues might be different. IE: Mom said he was gonna kill us in a drunk driving accident but he’s never even been arrested. The important thing is I wouldn’t have changed schools every 2-3 years. Besides, her driving is so terrifying that one day the cops came to the door looking for the driver of the red Chrysler convertible. One only has to look at the profile picture on her iphone to know what kind of person she is. She accidentally set it as a screenshot of her oxycodone rx. 

We’ll never know what would happen if I wasn’t adopted by my new dad. If any post-production edits were possible in this simulation I would not have been a teen mom.

No matter how stupid those ROTC uniforms were or how little interest I had in bearing arms, I would have joined for the free room/board and the GI college bill. 

Obviously, as a result I would have instead become a CIA agent who speaks 7 languages. (The recruiter said that based on my top 1% pre-asvap scores I’d be slated for intel work) ) Not sure how many people I might have killed or how much abuse/harassment I would have received as a woman in the military. It’s quite possible in that outcome I would merely end up a homeless lady vet with severe PTSD.

Another way given the same parents that I may have had a better life, is if I became the whore that my mom and new dad always said I was. I would have charged a lot of money.

I now realize that--even if one of the reasons mom said my dad didn’t love me was because he refused to pay for me to have jaw reduction surgery when I was 9--- I was going to become smoking hot in my late teens. 

When it was too late to become the whore my mom always said I was , even months before we got married I still could have become a golddigger. Remember the nuclear physicist in Los Angeles?  He was ready to give me a car and an apartment, but I knew I wanted to push him off a sailboat but he didn’t die until 15 years later in an act of random violence. I’d never have to work another day in my life again if I had chosen that route. 

But if I did that, I would just be affirming my mother’s whore narrative so here we are back to where I blame her and Rob for all of my misfortune. 

No regrets, without all I would have never become the emotionally disturbed person who called herself Pantifesto’s Pornastic Phunhouse on MySpace where I was encouraged to do open-mics. All of this led me to you and all the bunch of adventures that you forget sometimes that I never wanted to end.