Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Ernie Borderman - A Pointless Novel, Page 1
Ernie Borderman was a lonely man.
He lived alone in a small one bedroom apartment on West 83rd. During the week Ernie worked at the Newport meatpackers down about a block from his home. He was a butcher there, and he hated his job with a passion. It wasn't the thought of defiling the innocent beasts day after day that gave Ernie such a hatred for his job, nor was it the bloody mess that it left on him that he seemed to be forever trying to clean, nor was it even his obnoxious co-workers, who were forever amusing themselves with a crude running commentary of the women they'd take and how. It was none of this. What bothered Ernie was the meat itself.
Over seven years of working at the meat-packers Ernie had come to regard the smell and sight of the cuts of meat with disgust, so much so that he had been forced to alter his own diet quite dramatically, and had become a vegetarian some five years before. This was a problem at times, for the owner of the plant, a rotund man named Sonny who had taught Ernie the trade when he was only two months out of high school (at his mother’s insistence, as she had forseen that her son would never set the world on fire with his intellect), was continually bestowing on Ernie his generosity through a variety of cuts of meat.
Summer sausage, head cheese, sirloin tips, lamb chops and one christmas, a full size roasted pig. Ernie received it all, and he would thank his boss kindly, all the while muttering curses under his breath.
It would have been irksome enough to Ernie, being a vegetarian, to receive the meat as gifts. But recently this practice had escalated as the old butcher had taken it into his head, for reasons unknown to Ernie, that the meat could be substituted for wage. And so this was often the case. Not that the old man was cheating Ernie; its true that the meat that Ernie would bring home with him would often, in pure face value, be more than double his wage. But this was little consolation to a vegetarian who could now hardly stand the sight of the fruits of his labour.
Thursday, February 19, 2004
I have this dream that comes to me every so often. I can say that its always quite the same in every instance, though I can't say what exactly an instance of it is. I always wake up after that dream in a simlar state, for I know that I have been told by the stranger those words that do escape me. And for a brief moment, after I regain consciousness but before the knowledge of the dream has slipped away, I feel the greatest sensation of contentment. But it all passes in time.
So James Joyce tried to elevate meaning by putting so much into a single line that it might burst into a life of its own. I see where you hail from I think. You first have to scrape away all mud and dirt to start again anew.
Truth = Beauty or Beauty = Truth. Which comes first?
My favorite line by Bob Dylan, plastered on a coriander cubicle next to a sharpened quote from C~ and a black and white picture of K~ (who also strangely enough looks a little like an elf): 'and every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coals. Pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul...'
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Run-on Sentences
If it so happens that I find inside the walls of my home a bee that has managed its way through a tiny crack or wedge in the door or window sill, I can never bring myself to kill the creature (as would so easily be the case if I was inclined), but instead I prefer to go to the trouble of taking a glass and a single piece of paper and to wait for the bee to tire and land and sit reasonably still before I stealthily place the glass over the poor fellow and slide the piece of paper below.
It is from this position that I can take the bee back outside. For it was no fault of his own that he has mistaken my house for something entirely different. And who am I to play god?
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
A somber mood pervaded through-out the congregation. The faces of the fellows mirrored the drizzly, clouded morning that hung outside. Those that were left that is. Who was left had barely slept the night before, unable to stand the restless angst of their beds. Some had walked the hallways nervously, others took to the bottle in a dimly lit kitchen, others to the streets in an angry stupor.
The new Reverend could sense the anxiety in the hall. A lump grew in his throat as he panned his eyes over theirs. As he stood at his pulpit he tried to calm his fearing mind. He damned himself, that his mind again was running wild across his unconscious, turning up demons and ghouls that the reverend would have preferred to have let be. But still he could not shake the sense of an angry mob. The angry mob of the night before. The angry mob of who was left. For the first time he reflected on the past week with a hint of regret.
The congregation did look upon the new Reverend with distaste, but it truly was no fault of his. For though he would castigate his deficiancies without mercy, there was nothing particularly wrong with him, save perhaps for his seemingly poor choice of opportunities. He was, by his own admission, quite a nothing of a man. He languished at his somewhat advanced age unmarried, though there were no laws that had prohibited him from taking a wife. He had looked, but there were no takers. Being not a particularly attractive man, nor a particularly rich man, nor for that matter a particularly interesting man, he offered little to lure a woman. At the pulpit he stood unassumingly, so in contrast to the man he had replaced as to be almost comical, commanding little in the way of respect from those to whom he spoke, sometimes even invoking a chuckle or a look to the sky among one of the young ushers at the rear of the hall. Whereas the old Reverend was strong, and had held in his voice an expectation to which the congregation would follow, the new Reverend's voice was meek, and though he tried to disguise its tendency by using a microphone, the effect was not the desired one, and instead it only emphasized the timidity.
He had spoken these words for such a time that they had now no meaning to him. He thought likely that there was an irony in that, but one that he had no appreciation of. Was it a sign of doubt? He wanted to believe that it was not. Wasn't his disinterest to be expected, as it would be for any man who has been involved in the same monotony for a long time. His love had grown tired and old, and it no longer carried the spark it once did. His was much like a marriage. More darkly conceived, it was as most everything as time passes, and limitations become more clearly discernible, and dreams become more blurred.
His thoughts distracted him from his sermon, he heard his own voice trail off. He found himself, for a moment, staring emptily at the open entrance opposite him, the morning sun shining in, illuminating the main aisle. The congregation began to shuffle and murmer, and he quickly tried to regain his composure. But the damage had been done. As he continued on with his monologue, he scolded himself for such an outburst. He sighed, and the congregation acquiesed, and all regretted softly that the former Reverend had passed.
Monday, February 02, 2004
Don't forget where you are. Don't forget where you stand. Because its easy to forget. The newspapers won't remind you. They're too busy with the details.
Look around. Look behind you. What do you see? You see a whole lot of change. Big change. Remember, it was only 200 years ago, give or take a few, that God died.
So if you're wondering why you're so screwed up, and why nothing makes any sense, and everything makes you nauseous, and how sometimes even the thought of not making sense makes you nauseous, just remember where you are. And since we're all here, in this same place, on this uneasy footing where nothing is quite real and everything that worked in the past no longer applies, we may as well just accept it, and maybe think a bit about it, and see if we cna figure out how to get ourselves out of this mess.
But take some solace of your screwedupedness, that its really not that much of a surprise.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
