|
The Carnival Of Misery before/after The Carnival of Misery I was awoken out of a deep slumber sometime after noon last sunday by the shrill of the telephone. My first instinct was to not answer the fucker, as is my normal impulse, but something inside of me said, "Sunday morning, only people you know, and know well call. Answer the phone." So I lurched out of bed and plunged zombie like towards the phone. "Huh-hullo?" I said groggily, the sleep still apparent in my voice. "Hey, is xidhsof--- there?" "What? No." The answering machine went off, trilling its mournful message, shrieking in a cacaphony of feedback and unappreciated noise. "No, can I take a message?" "Oh, just tell him Amy called." Amy, the neurotic newyorker. The one I sat with at the bar as she basically had a nervous breakdown, meanwhile managing to insult me and everyone in the area. Nice girl, hadda' admire her moxy. She even got my number that night. She didn't call after a few days, so I figured for some reason she trashed my name around the social circle with which she traveles for the capital it gained and left it at that. But no, here she was again, calling. We chatted for a bit, and she made some noise about wanting to talk to me, how it was something above the ordinary bar banter, even going so far as to say I was the "coolest boy she'd met here,", which, considering her opinion of the area, wasn't much in the first place. I was suitably charming for just having woken out of dreamland, making jokes about not going to church-I mean, mosque, and never since spending time in the Tora Bora region, which is provincial, and perhaps a bit racist, but people laugh. She asked if we could do coffee or some sort of barbeque at her friend's house out in the sticks. I acquiesced, because, really, I will agree to anything if I just wake up and am forced to make conversation. I really need to reign that in. Get ahold of it. Somehow get my arms around that by altering my patterns somehow. Because at some point it'll bite me in the ass. Someone will ask me for a really poorly chosen imposition, and I'll blithely agree, just as so long as said persecutor lets me go back to sleep. So I ended up going to a barbeque in the sticks, brooding about it all day, finding all sorts of reasons not to go, fascination in minutae, quite the time to trim my nails, reorganizemy desk top, clean things. One bit of good, the only bit of good, that came out of this whole hideous affair was that my sunday walk/drive became once again sacrosanct. It is again my standing plan, and an anchor to my week. Its good to have rituals, as long as their your own and hurt nobody. I saw a storm in the offing, hanging over where I was headed, so I made out for the appointed place, windows down, blaring 'the clash' on the car stereo, praying to God for strength and courage, openly moaning about not wanting to go, but sensing this girl needs a friend really badly, so pitching in and doing my part. Should I explain my relationship with God? Or does it fall out of scope of this? Put away for another day. Proselytizing put on hold, evangelicalisim sounding more like the rushing falls of niagra embarassment, believe what you want to believe, approach your spirituality however you can, according to your needs, but, for heaven's sake, don't bum anyone out with it. And I pulled up to the house as everyone filed out. Amy spied me and said, "OH MY GAWD, I CAN'T BELIEVE HE CAME!" Which was less than encouraging, especially in light of the revelation she gave just before hanging up the phone about "putting the kibosh on me to the rest of the group for the better part of two weeks". I told her I didn't care what anyone thinks, and, for the most part, its true. Why would I care what you think should I not know you? There are a lot of mixed up fuckers out there, and its all I can do to hold my thoughts together, taking someone else's into account on the basis of triviality like how I dress of socially deport myself just ain't my concern. Another girl came up to the window of my car. "We're going to ride the rides at the festival. Park and come with us." My instinct was to leave. I should have listened. I piled into the back of a black blazer, a new one, pressed up against the crazy new yorker and threw my arm around her, as we were packed tight three across. I got a jolt of adrenaline getting in, being close to girls is always a little kick unless you've already been close to that girl many times before, and sometimes even then, sometimes especially then, but also because I've given up masturbation for awhile, just to see how it treats me, how my behaviors change. We pulled in and parkd in the dusty parking lot next to the highway, some farmers with some tractors doing something entirely strange with their tractors and some sort of sled which totally eclipsed my understanding, which was later revealed to me to be a tractor pull, insanely boring to me, but the epitome of heartland culture, farmers sitting around rapt watching the engines roar and the weight of the sled increase geometrically. Greeted by the sight of a pony, standing next to a pile of its own feces, bound tightly to a horse trailer with drooping head and sad eyes. He wanted nothing to do with us, or me, and I eyed him with obivous sadness, calling out to the others, "He's so sad! He's so bummed! Lookit' his eyes, you can see!" and the crazy newyorker looking, but not seeming to understand, none of them really, I don't think. I wanted to set him free, but didn't know what to do. Walking up to the pony rides, beautiful ponies, sad looking, cowed, spirits broken, tehtered straight from the bridle in their mouths to an metal arm bar, a spoke on a wheel, load the kids up on the ponies and they walked in a circle, everyone of the ponies looking horribly sad and depressed, the sight a nasty jolt to my soul. I averted my eyes in shame and disgust, humans by far the cruelest of all the animals, the thoughtlessness and depravity sometimes astounding, in what they do to animals, and each other. Either I'm too sensitive, or just born at the wrong time. I keep waiting for barbarism to choke and die on its own stupidity and humanity to wake up as if from a nasty nightmare, and recognize the rights of other people, and the values of simple kindness and respect, but it never happens. Somethings are necessary, weighted against the necessary needs of society. Somethings are not. In a just world, I could have risen up in righteous fury and freed the slave creatures, but this is not. Not yet, fool am I for hoping so. We wandered on and Amy convinced me to ride a ride with her, much against my wishes. A pallor hung over the place, from the greedy sad faces of the carnies, floating into this position of life, beaten and refused, education lost and failed them, now into such fate as they now portend, a side show of awful humanity. Amy said I was being judgemental, that she had heard a story of a man with no legs who worked at a carnival, was thrilled to be productive and useful somehow, that people chose this life, but I disagreed. The carnival was an empty maw of misery, and it chose people. 'Something happened to these people, in their pasts, way out and away, and they ended up here,' I said. She ended up agreeing with me, relenting for a change, but adding, 'Yeah, but if I thought about it all, and just let it hit me, I'd curl up into the fetal position and just shake.' Which is true, maybe she does have a soul, but it also rings true of girls who have found me, and trying to see things my way, try to partner, and then 'cheer me up' or 'make me look on the bright side', and Augean task, especially since I've realized the first great truth of life is that life is a life of sorrow. No way around that. Entropy rules, sadness is everywhere. Coming to terms with that is key. But we were walkin', came across a petting zoo. Disgust riddled my bones. Animals fighting and standing on each other, in their own filth, stinking and sad looking, some babies just trying to get along, not realizing the hell they've been brought into, wobbly goat legs, butting heads with sibling goat, fresh with energy for life, thinking its a blast, not seeing the other animals with disturbing twitches, mottled fur and hanging heads. Twitches of illness, twitches of disease, something, something horribly wrong, making me want to retch. White trash children gathered around, getting bitten by the animals, their mothers complaining to uncomprhending and uncaring carnies, all carnies wearing aqua shirts, getting nowhere, no response, all horrible, all horrible, the animals with bowed heads, the lama sitting and twitching, a young camel spritly walking around the cage, looking for handouts, all the sad eyes of the beasts seemingly saying to me of release, of freedom from misery, singing volumes of sadness in a low note of dolor. The carnies working hard to get me to spend my dollars, not getting very far, the only way to win is to not play, working some guy in the group over for five, ten , fiteen dollars on some bait and switch simple minded play to win a large stuffed animal for his poorly complected girl, nice girl, I lean over to her, 'Its such a scam', 'Should we tell him?' she says, 'No, he'll figure it out'. Raising the rancor of the carnies` at the toilet game. "Throw three rolls into the toilet seat, win a prize." He hands a guy a taped roll of toilet paper. "Ever seen one of these before?" he asks. "A toilet seat?" I ask. And the carnie is taken aback and angry, barely able to make out the sentence, wanting to shout me down and cuss at me, but not yet, can't, wants the money, sputtering something about the game or the taped roll of toilet paper and that he "figured everyone in the civilized world had seen a toilet seat before," stuttering badly on the word 'civilized', perhaps wanting to say 'western', but unable to wrap his thoughts around it, "No, I've never seen a toilet seat." I say and wander off, with a gesture that allows him to continue his con. I wander to see amy petting a horribly malnourished little bunny, the girls throwing ping pong balls at fishbowls to win little fish that have sat in their bags of water all day, knowing they'll be dead soon, all the negativity adding up. And the coup de' gras. Making me think of High School English Literature, and the Journals of John Peypes. Mideaval man, recorded his life of the time, speaking offhandedly about his matters, a window into another world, even though, really it was only a scant few hundreds of years, nothing much in the wider perspective of time, and how he went down to the bar, ate his lunch and casually watched the 'bear fights,', bears chained to a pole, sometimes maimed to make the odds a bit more even, and then set upon by packs of dogs, the betting surrounding victors and numbers of dead. And peeyps just watching it casually, sitting there with his food, like it was television, the easy inconsideration of medieval brutality, I saw the 'Mouse Game'. Clearly a rat, rather large one, sitting in the middle of a spinning wheel, under a colander, wheel is spun, cover lifted, bets made upon which hole the rat runs into for cover. Pure revulsion. Not necessarily feeling sorry for the rat, but for the people. For us all. How hideous and disgusting, in just about every sense of the world. (I'm sure there's a bad joke to be made, especially at the simple minded nature of that for entertainment, and the low quality of it all, but damned if I want to think of this experience any more) I made exhasperated bad noise, and we left, walking by the tractor pull. As we walked I spied a female carnie holding an infant baby, her own. The misery was oppressive to me, and I felt strangely alone in it.
|
