Haunted Alphabet Soup
I am writing this less than a week after Anthony Bourdain's suicide, which was on June 8th, 2018. It has been sad for everyone and everyone wants to help suicidal people and to understand, or not understand how he could do it. I have been thinking in my own mind, in my own head only, of a giant metaphor for the world being a large, immovable ball of shit. Flowers grow from this shit, and they are beautiful.Some people just try to get rid of the shit or tell people to stop shitting so much, while constantly contributing to the giant immovable ball themselves. We all do. Some people wallow in it and call it home. Some recognize the beauty that comes from the shit that is the world, or more accurately the people in it, or perhaps more or perhaps less acurately, the chaos that comes from a large amount of intelligent, yet violent, willful people living in close proximity to each other and with the terrible, beautiful ability of imagining things and remembering things and learning. So we buzz at the flowers and say "Look at the beauty that comes from the terribleness or the chaos or the dark reckless passion," or whatever it is that you would like to call it. Some people can just no longer stand the smell.
I was going to say more about flowers and roots. I was going to say something more. I was always going to say or finish saying something but I did not. I was going to right a play about a fat kid swimming with his shirt on. I was that fat kid. I swam with my shirt on and now I just don't swim. I was skinny at one point. I was anemic. I fell through a spiderman floating ring at a muddy lake when I was 4. I am not afraid of water. It was shallow, but I fell through and did some kind of twirling, flipping thing where I saw sky, then water, sky again, then water. I breathed in during the water times and not the sky times. I blacked out a little- I don't know how much I died, if any. If at all. I don't know if that counts. My mom took me home and put me directly in the bath tub so I would not be afraid of the water. It worked. I like the water. I like swimming. I am not afraid. Though it left some wetness in my brain.
This is the part of the story where I talk about someone else.
Tuskaloosa was a one-armed indian chief. He was called the black warrior because he was dark I guess. Dark and big and scary to De Soto's men, but they still cut off his arm and the Battle of Mabilia. It got cut off by a guy who is not even named because it just kind of happened in a tent all of a sudden because the natives tried to trick the spaniards with a surprise attack. This was after Tuskaloosa was made to show the spaniards around and had gotten a pair of new red boots from them for his troubles. Mabilia was burned to the ground for the treachery and Tuskaloosa died and was buried, one-armed. Tuscaloosa is a town in Alabama named after him. The Black Warrior river was named after him too, and it runs through western Alabama. I am from Alabama, but near a different river and this is not about me. L was born just outside the town and near that river. K was born in a completely different place but also near a river. It doesn't matter which one, because Black Warrior is where L and K found an arm bone. If we are being honest, and we should be always, it wasn't on the river. It was in some muddy little creek that only a few people care to know the name of and nobody knows the names of those people. But it was near the Black Warrior. It was near enough.
The University of Alabama calls Tuscaloosa home and their football team is nicknamed The Crimson Tide, which brings to mind pictures of some sort of bloody water, which a severed arm may be found in, but river's don't have tides. This is simply because they aren't big enough.
K's father was a preacher, sometimes called a minister, but never a pastor. A pastor was something different from a different kind of church. A church where they didn't believe in a full emersive baptism, or that you could just say some sort of prayer or some shit. Pastor's did give you the full experience of God's drowning. How could someone be washed clean of all those muddy sins with just a sprinkling or some words. You had to go into the water, be buried, then raised up out of it. You had to drip and shiver with your wet shirt clinging to your fat right there in front of the whole congregation. K decided to do this at age 8, which was pretty early, but Hell was a scary thought and K was thought to be mature, innocent, not rebellious, not sneaky, not twisted or malevolent, but not good. Not in the heart, where you were supposed to be good. And so K was washed out of fear and sat in a pew in one church or the other for the next 7 years and drowned.