From deep, deep in the cotton-pickin' red clay'd piney woods o' east Texas, I bring you the tales of my sister Bethzilla, hideous freakin' white trash welfare-cheatin' pill-popping, bowl-smoking, vodka-swilling redneck swamp thing what done crawled up out of the danged boggy bottoms of Uncertain, Texas and also of Momma, a transplanted, dirt-floored, rice paddy, hand-raised Cajun girl from the south Texas depression era. Take a look see. Go ahead, lookee.
Never try to burn poison ivy out. Never add it to a burn pile. The smoke carries the poison and can damage lung tissue leading to a long hospital stay or even death.
When the fight begins within himself, a man's worth something. ---Robert Browning
A pine tree fell on my mother's east Texas house here in Marshall a few years back. The damage was extensive. My mother's house is surrounded by 100-foot-tall pine trees. Some of them lean towards the house ominously.
My mother eyes these pines with much suspicion. If they'll do it once, they'll do it again. That's just what kind of mean-spirited plants these big old pine trees are. You can't trust them. Everybody knows that. Ask any of the old ladies down at the bingo hall. They'll tell you. A pine tree is good for nothing except getting hit by lightning and falling on your house.
Every time my mother leaves the house, she scurries as quickly as a 78 year-old can go, from the front door to the car, hoping they won't be paying attention and miss their chance to squash her.
And now she's got me doing it. Evil pines. I've got my eye on you.
Marshall is the wood paneled den we kids didn't go in because it was for old people and old people things: trophies, deer heads and 8 by 10 framed glossies of long dead folk, a place tired people rested, a place of senseless beauty and clay-colored leather, runcible, bruised and somehow oily; playing there wasn't only taboo, it was out of place.
Marshall smells of pine, cedar coveralls and rubbing alcohol. Driving through downtown is like walking across the creaky hardwood floor of an abandoned church: it makes you want to pass through quietly out of respect for the ghosts and those who pine for them.
I lope over the sunburned brick past the labyrinth of boarded-up buildings and unfathomable motives, stop, sniff the air and detect no scent of fevered passion or aroused welcome.
My tumor operation was a success. Listen with your headphone sound turned up and you'll hear the echo of the hole in my head. No more brain surgery for me, though (pictures available upon request). The V.A. doctors peeled my face half off. Now they have me wearing a head wrap that looks like a 1930s toothache commercial (from print ads).
I spent the last few days in a V.A. bed getting Valentines cards from high school kids, active duty Army soldiers, Shreveport civic organizations and Legionnaires. Oh, and some Mardi Gras partiers (the parade was just outside my hospital room window).
15 minutes after being discharged tonight, I was jumping out of a moving truck on IH20 headed to Marshall screaming bloody murder and curses at an 84 year-old evangelist.
The V.A. gave me a musical bong to take home. They call it an anti-static valved holding chamber, the AeroChamber Plus® ZStat™ with FLOWSIGnal® for use with my metered dose inhaler, but basically its a government issue musical bong. I play it 4 times a day.
And now my head/face is lopsided. I told one of my nurses during a percoset stupor that this is NOT the face I came in with. She cackled like only Louisianans can do.
My surgeons, Dr Yu and Dr Can (no sh*t and I think they are coital) came in and bragged that my tumor was deeply involved in ALL my facial nerve clusters and paratid gland and that they enjoyed the intriguing challenge of rerouting my wiring. I guess they get extra points for challenging stuff. They seemed happy.
I told them that what they do is so above my ability to comprehend that its like magic. Ill bet THAT made them horny. Ill bet they went off and humped like rabbits, singing We are the magic makers, who do the voodoo of the 21st century!
Ill bet they did..in their own way, I mean.
The truck-jumping incident on Interstate 20 is a whole other story. Ill bet I looked funny limping along the side of a dark Louisiana freeway all bandaged up like a car wreck survivor who had jumped out of an ambulance. Nobody picked me up. Bastards! People are bastards.
(click pic) MARSHALL POLICE DEPARTMENT DILDOPHOBIC: WHO WOULD'VE GUESSED?
I periodically check the police blotter sections of The Marshall News Messenger (in my hometown of Marshall, Texas) and The San Antonio Light (hometown of my university) to see what crimes my high school and college cohorts are committing.
My college peers mostly commit suicide and suicidal acts (suicidal acts like becoming mid-level HMO insurance company managers--brrrr! I wonder what kind of special ring of hell is being reserved for them!?).
The best high school police blotter item was when one of my high school peers was arrested for transporting sex toys across the county line (it's illegal to transport dildos in and out of Marshall, a law I think the limp dick males of Marshall passed in self defense).
You think I'm joking or exaggerating about the Barney Fifeness of the Marshall police department, but they're the guys who recently stopped me from mowing my own mother's lawn (lawnmowing in progress, city statute unknown) remember!?
Apparently, I am not the only person who monitors the crimes of my ex schoolmates:
My sister spends 3 hours at the local library trying to get a library card using every form of identification known to man except for a Texas driver's license.
There's a crazy Indian in my head. He lives in aHapi-headed canopic jarin mylingual g. I think he got in there way back when I was a child living inFry Canyon, Utah. What an Ohio Shawnee medicine man was doing way out there in the badlands of Utah, I'll never know. I was there because my dad was a uranium prospector.
Bukowskihad his Chinasky. I have my Sees The Stars.
“Sees The Stars” is my Desertwalker native Indian personality. His full name is "Sees The Stars Naked", but you can call him "Sees". He keeps pulling me out into the desert.
Sees, abandoned at birth, was raised by right wing bears. Sensing his natural instinct for sniffing out a conspiracy, they taught him "The Way of the Trap." At age twelve, with a belt full of trapper scalps, he began to make his way in the world as “Sees The Stars”, Desertwalker of The Bear Clan.
