Stereotypes Of Fermina

Because I miss persons, lack who I imagined myself to be in their orbit, or more inherently have this mental nagging void when not contemplating them because my mind has evolved along wayward paths distancing exponentially with the wander of time, I leave for myself faux breadcrumbs upon which I know I’ll stumble, opportunities for associations which do not actually exist, but whose nature or vague borders allow my lips’ corners to indent towards squinted, wrinkling eyes to drink from the drips of sorta quenches in this otherwise oasis-less valley I’ve carved for ease of eventual next steps towards the reality of extinction.

During decades after losing access to my friend Donna, I would build my livejournal friends’ feed with a woman who look so like her that it allowed me to sketch for my walls surrogates for photos of my once-upon universe-center with semblances to greet me with the memory of her smiles that once upon a moment were birthed purely for added accent while she would gaze upon my face.

I even maintained at least tangent relationships with workplace colleagues, found business purposes for overlap or allowed myself to be an open path for mentorship, for no reason other than that their voice, their face, some aspect of their giggle, reminded me of someones who no longer are in my bubble of existence.

There are many Fermina’s in the world, but only two for me, one the character of a novel that became the usernamesake of a unique woman who changed much about the very essence of me and my orientation to myselves.  I’ve begun in the distance of more than a decade likely begun to attribute to her aspects of life not hers at all.  A person (always hard to know if anyone online is actually the gender identified) who I’ve added to follow in Tumblr has nothing to do with anything in my normal world nor my normal choices for those whose posts I might follow, except that (s)he posts under “Fermina” and so each time something shows up under this name, it makes me think of my long-ago connection.

This new Fermina, based on her posts, is a lover of colors and more particularly a lover of architecture, filling her feed with various old buildings and houses and street scenes from around the world, almost always with blatant broadsides of pinks or blues or stark red walls, often with windowsills or doorways draped in flowers.  I have come to convince myself that the long-ago Fermina, too, probably is a lover or old buildings, a person like me who stops amid moving crowds along sidewalks because an archway is so becoming that it may as well have been a live nude model upon a pedestal outside of a coffee shop.

And so much did that Fermina of my memories love art and artists (and poets) that these vibrant colors are too, surely, something she might adore and share in posts were this new person actually her.

Too, I do get random smiles because, in allowing myself to believe the lie that this is my own true memory providing me visual daily communications, there are the actual random posts of lovely naked women that I do feel certain my once-upon one-sided adoration would have shared specifically to make my day.

The stumble-upon thing here is that I’m blatantly aware when I allow myself to breathe is I always know even in my conscious scrolling mind that this Fermina is not that Fermina, that there are surely hundreds if not thousands of Fermina’s given how popular was that novel and novelist.  However, I am now unclear how much this self-imposed psychological trickery may be imbedded in my subconscious approach to life, in fact am befuddled and a bit underwhelmed with myself when I discover how I may have built multiple houses with walls constructed of attempts to grasp and live within memories, how much I’ve lost the ability to be truly objective.

I no longer have any confidence that I am reacting to life’s daily stimuli with an open mind and free will, but instead may now be wallowing in a web of established anchors, of preferences for manufactured a sense of analytical evolution that masks lessons I’ve never digested, existence that never were realities but nonetheless are the only molds my mind can accommodate, reruns of the only round holes I could even imagine lubricating with my square soul.

Time Passages

Much of the disorientation that plagues my path is the lack of a cohesive, consistent feel to the passage of time. The older I get, the less granular the ability to measure the distance between seconds and days and years and decades becomes so of-the-moment of landmarks existing both in starkness and varying shades of fade.

Lying in bed, trying not be arise and start my Monday, glances at the clock which has only occupied 4 minutes felt like an hour of trying to shut out the sunlight behind clenched eyes and always wandering thoughts.

I was curious to research through my emails to figure out how long it had been since I last saw my primary care doctor, dentist, or even my eye doctor. Because I am organized, even if linearly discombobulated, it wasn’t difficult to realize it’s been since 08/15/2012 and 08/21/2012 for all those things. So I sent myself an email at work from myself at home to remember to schedule those things because for an old man, that’s far too long between health check-ups.

And in my head generally I knew I needed to schedule these things, but had a reminder, so wasn’t too worried. After all, seems like that was just a few weeks ago. However, when I glanced today at that self-sent reminder, it wasn’t in the last month or so. Fuck, I’d sent that to myself back on 12/16/2017…..somehow 8 fucking months has flown by since I realized from my research that 5 fucking years had flown by.

More importantly, meaning what I tend to think about moreso, is the stairstep of orientation that must be occurring for others relative to years fluttering. For instance, I first joined LiveJournal as my real/family-based original account on 05/14/2000. My second journal, Pather, intended more as a diary, away from those I knew in my daily life, was created 10/18/2000 and shortly thereafter the online “friends” I interacted with persons quite younger than myself, persons born nearer my highschool graduation year than the neighborhood of my own 1962, folks in the early stages of 20’ish who in varying moments were unhappy, betrayed, intrigued, beguiled or tickled to learn that a 38-year-old man would need find souls who might interconnect in the randomness of the internet.

I suppose to beautiful women in their early-to-mid-20s, I must have (and likely still) seem like the online version of the creepy old man at the club. Like what the fuck is he doing hanging around here?

Thing is, there are now human beings old enough to vote who had not been birthed when I started my weirdness of existence online. Imagine that. So, well, many of those women I adored (and a couple of whom I truly loved) are now migrating to my then age.

One such woman, a wondrous writer who is now married and last I knew teaching English at college, and who has now migrated to Tumblr and no longer appears active in LJ, posted a lovely in-the-moment candid photo of herself, wondering how she was suddenly 34 years old.

My adorations, the sureness of Jayme and the sadness of Heather, both born in 1980, quite literally will each turn 38 during this November, essentially my own age when I found my tangent real life did not contain persons with whom I needed find an inherent connection, or at least no interactions and conversations where one could truly express the honesty of one’s core (even if initially behind a mask of falseness, or perhaps simply my often-ahead-of-the-curve creation as a catfisher).

Mostly I wonder if now that time has run fleeting beneath their own paths, if now that they are at similar aged moments of self-clarity within this larger uncontrollable world, if they might consider with greater empathy the person that I was, and really moreso if they’ve come to realize I was always myself, that those intertwining conversations and shared brain waves, contained the same trueness of me as much as it did themselves, that we are within ourselves the constant of our each “me”, and that these puzzle-pieces of us would meld just as cohesively, even if our edges have frayed and worn.

In fact, maybe the reality is we’d fit even more adeptly, smooth as the waves of life have flowed frictionful across our varied wanders.

Alternate Universes and how to survive them

It’s been an interesting week of putting on what was only ever meant to be my faux-minister uniform, the mental arch support of those that run tangent to me.  It is the thing about the electoral college that has driven me crazy since my first vote for a presidential election in 1980 when I cast my ballot for John Anderson, passionately, knowing at 18 both that living in Tennessee largely would cause my individual proclamation meaningless in what has become a bloodbath of republican red.

Okay, not a bloodbath, but I liked the literary illusion.

Anyway, it is the weirdness of working around Ph.D.’s in the biological sciences, and by extension many of the master’s degreed administrative support accountants and project managers that within this state so mired in this party that the democrats don’t waste a dime traveling here – poor investment of campaign dollars after a losing cause.  I’ve never understood in the modern age when it’s unnecessary to rely on the few rich guys in town to travel and cast a cumulative ballot (at their choosing) on behalf of a gaggle of us – it’s not really up to the dudes who own horses and buggies in the modern age.  It is inherently un-American in the manner most American’s expect things to be representative that a person in Ohio has more influence than myself.

And in this island of quasi-intellectuals people have migrated to me since Wednesday at work, often under the guise of some random question or seeking of my near two decades of expertise that could easily have been relayed by email or phone, because they are internally afloat, distraught, simply lost.

I try to explain to them that, thing is, though, until it is changed – these are the rules.  I, personally, think the protests ridiculous and disingenuous.   Had she won by electoral votes, and lost the popular vote, I am somewhat certain those same people carrying “not my president” signs would NOT have said, “Oh, dudes and dudettes, although we technically won, he got the most people voting for him so she should really just concede to him and to the will of the people.”

So I find those people, emotionally devastated as they may be, full of shit.  It is what it is, horrible as it is- and anything but acceptance of the valid results is itself a blatant slap in the face of the very democracy you claim to be so enamored to own.  For my co-workers, who have not done more (that they’ve mentioned) than hosting Move-On living room grief sessions with talk of digging in and spreading the word in the mid-terms and beyond. Without my having mentioned necessarily my political leanings, which as an accountant and middle management old guard might be reasonably uncertain, has been nothing but assumed by everyone that I was not on the winning side.

And here’s one thing that makes me smile:  that people who’ve come to know me through interactions and my specific calls to action within our organization’s hierarchy and implementations, that people think of me as a reasonable, fair, liberal and even libertarian leaning. It’s nice when people “get you” inherently.

But I also say to them that we’ll survive it.  To a fairly similar degree, I felt this way when Gore congratulated George W.  The reason I voted for Gore, by the way, is often what leads my ballot box:  I’d prefer to have the more intelligent person behind the steering wheel, even if I often disagree with them.  But Gore, what I loved about his was that he didn’t just study or cruise briefings on issues or complexities – he’d research them exhaustively and write a fucking book. And that’s the part I found myself trying to ease people through this week, the reality that we had a pretty stupid guy in charge for 8 years prior to Barrack, so we’ll just hang our heads, improve our local small worlds and the lives we individually touch as best we can amid what we can daily tolerate, and the time will actually fly by, at least for old assholes like me.

One former employee of mine, who I guided and trained to become my peer in title/position had sent me an email that became a string between us because she felt horrible she’d not done more to prevent this outcome, how she had voted but with the recent birth of a child that’s had a few medical issues, and having been promoted to the overwhelming role that is our now equal jobs in different departments, she’d just failed her ideals and beliefs.  Although she’s never admitted so to me, nor I to her having been her boss historically, that she’d told her husband that they maybe needed to move to Colorado or someplace where marijuana was legal because she needed to enter an alternate universe to escape this nightmare.  I replied that I’d taken a different approach and asked my guy if he could find some strong smoke that would hurl me back to real reality because I was pretty sure she and I had landed in the alternate reality.

I’ve also shared with her this one silver lining, the only one I can thus far find:

We have this generic thing that presumably people tell their kids, that if you try hard enough, anyone can be president.  I’d heard an interesting fact on NPR that makes sense, but which I never conceptualized before, that prior to the current president-elect, no one has ever been president that wasn’t either in the military and/or a politician.  And, you know, the majority of Americans have not been in the military (that’s like, what, 1.5% of the population or something?), and certainly far fewer have been elected to political positions.  And I’ve, personally, never been in the military and vehemently avoided even the outside chance of being drafted. And, really, I’ve never thought about being a politician.

So, we do walk away with this one consolation, that we no longer are in the position of lying to our offspring or students when we suggest to them that they might grow up to lead this country, and we can proclaim this to our deepest convictions because we’ve seen it happen in our lifetimes.

It is true that any asshole can be elected president.  Absolutely anyone.

r2–d2:

Another bird by (Angélica Vis) 

The world is unnecessarily small and coincidental, making the search for connectivity both frustrating and ultimately silly. 

tsunamiwavesurfing:

Habits with Force

This miniscule tangent leaps of moments, mimicking predecessor days, are really all I’m constructed of anymore.  There is comfort, really, almost seemingly life’s goal, achievement, to make these wanders of every day, or rather every corresponding Saturday-to-Saturday and Tuesday-to-Tuesday in that work sevenths are distinct in map, timing and flow from weekend potentials.

I like that I park in the same spot in my work garage daily, not that I merit something reserved, but because I park two levels above what my portion of rush-hour-arrivers begin to fill, arriving myself at a near-empty 10th floor.  I awake, I brush my teeth, read prior days’ newspapers or prior months’ Rolling Stone during my constitution, or the Nashville Scene free magazine that I routinely pick up at Krogers, using its utility as a table across the grate of the shopping cart’s child seat as a place to organize my coupons (I typically save 10% on my shopping, enough to cover the sales tax).  I empty the litter boxes of the now-nine cats that we’ve inherited as strays brought home by my daughters dating back to my now eldest Frosty’s 6-week old discovery some 16 years ago (and he was probably the 6th cat over my 33-1/3 year marriage, others having further back passed away, the eldest at 19).  I give Frosty his morning thyroid and blood pressure medicine, and then split a cat of canned cat food amongst them all (dry cat food stays out all day long).  I get a bit stoned, waking-and-baking (when I have such product in stock), even on workdays…perhaps nowadays especially then, take my shower and dress, and drive the same 40-mile one-way trip to my employer, and later in the p.m. back home again.

Not just with the drive, but certainly that example’s things well, but my life is essentially on auto-pilot, with an adeption for short-term deviations (like caring for my dad after his pacemaker surgery, like taking Monday off to cart my 76-year-old mother to her oncologist for results of weeks of bad blood tests, to receive the happy news that she does not have the feared bone cancer, though she’s to have labs quarterly for 2 years to confirm the non-diagnosis).

And I guess this routine, this rote path is acceptable.

Really the point of this, though, is to say that I have ingrained at some subconscious level other habits I cannot quit, things I really didn’t comprehend were occurring.

One of my favorite songs by Mark Knopfler is from his “Sailing to Philadelphia” CD, “Prairie Wedding”.  It speaks of a lonely man who finds a bride through correspondence, who he’s never met prior to her arrival by train to become his wife, but who so earnestly and obviously fell in love with his sad sack self from the honest emotions within those shared letters, fell in love from the tangle of words alone.  This is how love at first sight surely is conjured, by a preface of minds dancing before light is reflected between one and another.

Though the moment passed, shockingly nearing 15 years ago, love that I unearthed within this place still brings me happiness, even at an uncommunicative but harmlessly accepted overlapping distance of mutual nonchalance.

I realized that, as was true in the first flood of moments, there is no greater gift I receive in life than periodic pictures of her, always thrilled for her advances in life, and beaming stupidly proud at her creation of life.  I think, besides the intimacy of sketching her for the sake of my wanting familiarize myself with her incremental everything, the value of photos was not unlike computer programs built to measure and gauge multiple photos of varying angles of historic figures to build a 3-D model, that habitual digestion of her visually has tattooed the section of my brain that in prehistoric times was constant background surveying the landscape and approaching crevices for carnivores, or even the hint of their lurk.   For years, years, though waning to passing random weeks or months before I’ve realize time has faded along, I once looked at varying photos of her daily.  Daily.  Well, even now, in the background of my redundant daily padding within my home are hanging framed sketches of her (and others, of course) that I may not directly even look upon, but which my subconscious mind tolls away sculpting that virtual-clay-model of her.

The point is, I think I did this both purposefully and now incidentally because, having never met her in the flesh, having never even spoken to her by phone, a fear exists that would devastate me to my core that should we cross paths randomly, that I might not recognize her at all.

This is, subliminally at least, part of the thrill of happening across more current pictures of her, that as this 1-½ decades passes and she ages as do we all, my memory banks are editing and storing and probably predicting future course of her subtle changes in beauty and maturity.

All of which is to say, quite unexpectedly, upon Tumblr, completely not identified nor in any way connectable to her current or former life at all, and with the environment of the photo (the props, if you will) making zero sense in relation to what actually very little I know of her supposed life, meaning it probably isn’t her but instead some doppelganger, it made me smile, made me happy, made my day when I saw this picture of her.

At least, I think it’s her.  It looks like her. The dangle of the wispy dark hair, the shapes of the tips of her fingers, that purse of the lips, the comfort with her body seating splayed upon random depths of thought in layers of crumpling papers tactically evolving across the floor.  It surely is the woman I’ve never met for whom my blog-only love continues, content within its habitual distance of never with a side order of treasured memories of emotions.

(photo source: stories.com via share from everythingyoulovetohate)

the disinclination towards dementia

 As I zoom well-beyond my half-century point of wander, over time, as a background sorta thing, I worried that my brain would hurtle towards being lost. 

 I never cared for crossword puzzles, which for years were touted as a way for older people to avoid losing mental agility, so I knew I’d never take them up later in life.  And there are now companies selling apps and stuff that are likewise purporting to keep old people’s minds sharp (though my wife and children have the newest whatevers, I still refuse to own a smart phone myself and carry a hand-me-down 2003 flip phone that was once Jordan’s, so apps are not-applicable for me).

 Recently on NPR (my most commonplace source of information) studies had found all of this to be bogus, neither crossword puzzles nor fancy games, so that was a bit of a relief.  But really, what I thought for a long time was that I may be keeping my synapsis in check because I spend my life constantly trying to solve the mystery of people, of interactions and intentions and the driving force behind other brilliant minds.

 And to that end, since these are my preferred playthings, it makes me quite giddy when unexpectedly someone cares enough to throw some Sherlock-Holmes-level curve ball my way.  Makes me just smile and laugh quietly in my office because it is something new, something unexpected, something difficult to trace and dissect.   A fun puzzle.

 Thrilling, really.  A gift from the gods.

 From my American Heritage hardback dictionary that lives beside my hardback equally-ancient thesaurus on my workplace shelves:

 Zippy, adj – Full of energy, lively.

Beta, noun (so many possibilities):  1 The second letter of the Greek alphabet; 2 second item in series or system of classification; 3 Mathematical measure of the sensitivity of the rates of return on the market; 4 <i> Phys.</i> A beta particle; 5 <i> Chem.</i> a. The second position from a designated carbon atom in an organic molecule at which an atom or a radical may be substituted; b. An isometric variation of a chemical compound.

 Other interesting facts, vaguely recalled from a different NPR program, are that one quite northern version of a back-capped chickadee will burrow itself into the cracks of a tree or log, often with other birds, and essentially shut down its body temperature dramatically to 14 degrees Fahrenheit and essentially hibernate to ride out a hard winter’s night.  Other times, it may simply perch contentedly upon an outstretched palm and contemplate the hand that attempts feed it.

 Which is to say, “Thank you for this gift upon a Friday”

May I wander?

During the fairly distant centennially measured pasts, the difference really is that destruction and cruelty in the areas beyond one’s daily travels were simply unknown.  Oh, decades beyond incidents, perhaps, minstrels would pass through one’s moments of life with fictionalized escapades that mimicked likely happenings afar, but they rarely seemed more vivid than the concert of performance in the moment and perhaps a few harrowing dreams peppered with those instances upon a temporary stage, dissipating over a few months’ passing.

In the now, there is a knowing, an instantaneous and unavoidable reality of vivid realization imbedded more deeply than any portrayal glossing over gore.  Constancy of unavoidable realizations that the non-fiction supersedes fairy tales in the longevity and intensity of nightmares because it becomes the day’s, every day’s, instagram of simplistic certainty.

If one were to wonder what unfathomable reaches exist within human cruelty and emptiness of empathy, in what was quaintly described as the dark ages, it would take years of scholarly and sometimes abstinent decades of concentration within an educational isolation of unique and rare opportunity to acquire the comprehension of depth possible from souls set upon the earth.   Even then, through a myriad of mentors and subsequent debates and philosophizing would one age to perhaps become vaguely enlightened on the edges of human potential, both of achievement and degradation of other wanderers of the earth.

But now, it’s just another of multiple moments within every day’s dawning that we broadcast to one and another our garrison of slicing sociopathic constancy.  Unavoidable to even the eyes too blurry and the ears too deafened by muffled screams do we view our neighbors mirroring too often semblances of ourselves.

Tired we’ve so grown of hearing of the basest among us becoming celebrities of chaos that if a tiny handheld screen of an unbalanced hamster upon a piano can save us from reality that we gratefully disengage and sigh with blinders upon any hint of our peripheral vision.

There is no whip of a starred X flag whispering of sins past proudly marched along streets; no echo of gunshot off the badge of a blue uniform piercing an eardrum; no slices through spinal cords beneath a bowed head spraying red across the horizon; no exit of relief as the singing vagabonds dismantle their passion play to move on with the season’s change to share new exaggerated sleeping plot lines to the next town’s innocents of mere hints of transplanted memories from hostiles long ago.

(Photo: by MysteriousFairy ~ 2005)

White Silence

(fiction, by me, finished 06/30/13)

(((Story Idea – 2005’ish, based on a photo by Mysterious Fairy:  Write story about a woman whose personality or expressive nature is determined by the mask she wears upon her lips.  – note, initial few paragraphs lifted from Chapter Beth in “Book of Me”)))

It is in the mirror of my dreams that I live this life of days.  I blur my morning moments wandering radio waves; my afternoons downing coffee having long ago lost interest in the aroma; my evenings in drunken drowned haze that dissipates with annoying efficiency; my dive towards sleep escorted along bound short stories imagined by Guy de Maupassant absorbing that realization of the world never really changing along the path of humans, having this unenlighten me amid depression of how insignificantly small my place in line must surely be.

I found my filling of unwork moments at work in smoke breaks and conversations amid cancer.  I did then have some of my closest friends in those fireholes of specified spots outside the building, beneath the hearse canopy, seated on benches or standing for ladies who might puff into the breeze.  Over those two decades reaching back to my high school youth and ending eventually two years subsequent to the above spanned time, I told more secrets to listening eyes, learned more depth of detailed life from comrades in ash, than I have managed to scrap anywhere in my real world subsequent to the pursuit of health.  I think, in many ways, this became for me the evolution of online life while seeking to unthinkabout work amid the chaos of employment days, my smoke breaks built of both absorption and sharing, dissemination of self.

If history allows apologies from my faded memory, I believe the first time I saw her lips migrate around a tobacco filter was a Kool, mentholated mayhem most commonly consumed by the intermingling black colleagues, other high school attendees.  I’ve little doubt Beth’s applied glisten upon lips was immersed in some flavor of berries or bananas, though circumstances of those odd days never gave birth to any scenarios for me to investigate the nature of that moisture absorbed by the spongy foam only pretending to keep cancer at bay from the fire dangling between her nonchalant fingertips in the cafeteria alley wind.

Years later, when our paths re-crossed, moments and moments of life and spouses and young children later, she wore a smart knee-length woolen skirt and short-waisted jacket of checkered blue, arms crossed in defiance of the winter wind of our hospital’s break area (smoking and the perception of such allowed outdoors only) for our 5-minute huff between mutually-conducted meetings with long-term, expensive, patient’s families - she as the degree’d social worker growing weary and emotionally worn from now years of finding futility in both the systems and the prism of concepts of one’s loved ones when the chips splinter and rust, myself the accountant offering financial outcomes of various levels of familial adoration or disinterest.

Then, in that cold, was a harsh, deep mauve-towards-purple lipstick, thick and purposeful and immediately tattooing for life the now-non-menthal Marlboro Lights 100’s we both happened upon.  I’ve forgotten now what job her husband consumed in those days, but for the purpose of dogpaddling financially I know Beth was working part-time weekends at some Mall department store for two reasons - one because she insisted on professional attire, perhaps jaded by the perception of peers at some earlier public service position with Metro, so she worked where she shopped for discounts on her wardrobe, and additional food for the family table of three. 

And for cigarette money because her life was apparently overwhelming enough without having a not-guilty out in arguments over the financial burden of a method of sanity found in the outdoor stolen seconds at work, worth skipping lunch just as we’d done in high school save perhaps a diet coke can with an angled bendie straw that likewise shared an instant ring twinned to her cigarette’s seesaw to her rounded wrapping tongue, this fierce hinted-purple mask upon her lips making its eternal mark upon the remnants of her world.

I left no such similar memory of myself, well other than literal DNA, upon my own stubs crumpled in a rush to escape the chill and enter another sad measure of another family’s moments I could not control.

I think perhaps it would have been Beth about whom I first correlated the mask upon her lips with the mood and path of her days, Beth who’d unknowingly sparked my need to fill bored sections of my brain with an internal tracking and pattern perception of the lips amid moments of women in my day and their correlation.  I went into this mode without preconceptions.  I’d known my light bulb of Beth far too long, though with a measurable and admitted gap midstream, to harbor a narrow view of her as some stereotype, or rather really slightly filled file folder that we (by necessity) turn so many of our human interactions into daily to simply survive, to respect them by glimpsing and storing some minutia should we happen upon them again during our somedays, but nothing more.

No, because it began with my sudden acquisition, the melt into my empathy some second of scanning between her eyes and her lips as she regaled some life’s story, I understood the influence of the lipstick’s tint.  I say I went into this without a theory, only really this absolute certainty that there was certainty in this relationship of who she became (or was) on a given day. 

I was unsure of the causality, of the direction even of such a thing.

Was she subconsciously picking a color relative to her waking mood? Was it more indirect, her attitude towards the day reflected by her wardrobe selection and the color of the lipstick a false-carrot byproduct of simply matching her attire?  Were there conspiracies within the cosmetic industry where even more odd byproducts of other manufacturing hand-me-down’s being purposefully chemical added by some evil overlord of Revlon for the soul intent of controlling women and transvestites and goth punk rockers into planned drones?  Were not the black lipstick of those renegades of depression literal proof of the very correlation of applied color and emotional state of mind?

Although, yes, it started with Beth and, although, yes, I do ponder her often, wonder what has evolved for her world I lost a grasp upon decades ago, it wasn’t hers that cemented this hypothesis’ reality.  That belonged to Amanda.  That glue of connectivity lived and stained in the white lipstick she adorned for the world.  It was she that silenced them all.

Much as I suppose most people would like to embellish the stories to our children of how we met their other parent, to help build fairy tales of mystery that hold true to the format of meaning and romance we’d been taught since our own childhoods, I would like to suggest that I first met Amanda through some mutual reach for a hardback book in a tiny claustrophobic store, or rescuing a damsel short of a few pennies at the beach-side bar for her 4^th longneck bud as really any excuse born to say some fumbled words at a beauty.

But instead I simply met Amanda through a website of shared blogs.  In my spare moments from life I would sketch from the photographs of models because I had no models of my own, and it was in the infancy of her career that I adored her poses (understandably as much the credit to the photographers as to her ownership of being a subject to any variety of inspired artists.  And she wrote words, sometimes about her life, but like my own blog also with spurts of ancient memories turned into poems or fictional short stories and hints at prophecies.  And she liked what she became from my #2 pencil and sketchpad. And as I did with her mind and her beauty, she attempted reconcile my own blog rambles with whatever opinion she’d developed of the type of person that would produce my particular outcomes of art.

So when she skyrocketed only moments in time, mere years later, upon fashion magazines, in advertisements of weekly chronicles amid stories of celebrities and sports icons, I was even more mesmerized to be even vaguely, tangentially touching, owning in my own way upon my walls the pieces of her soul I’d documented in lead and a sketchpad, someone now influencing a generation.  Or a subset of a generation.

I’m unsure the money involved, something that was never mentioned in her blog, when she became the chosen one, the contracted model exclusively for the solid white chalk dense and meringue-thick application when the next fashion craze was created in corporate boardrooms, but it layered upon her lips to blend in with her pale skin to create an eruption of wanton compliance among the masses.  Her image, from every angle, in every setting of the world, became pages and pages of glossy print.

I do not claim to have viewed every one, though since the same short is replicated in a given month within most periodicals, I suspect I experience them en masse.  Though I have no stories from my childhood of cute shoplifting of penny candy or subsequent beatings by parents and confessions to uncaring store clerks, I did - every time - rip the page of her photographs from any magazine I happened up, in doctor’s offices, in car repair waiting rooms, in the lobbies of hotels at which I was no guest but merely passing purposefully by.

And I drew them all, filled thumbtacked edge to edge the walls of may garage with her image, over and over, and those white undefined massive lips.  I added only one additional media to my pencil and paper interpretations - something to whiten Amanda’s lips in my sketch.  I sometimes used old thickening bottles of liquid paper that had amassed in work storage cabinets in prior years that simply no one used anymore.  I used white acrylic paint.  I eventually simply bought a tube of her brand and applied it directly, hoping to not need explain the lipstick if discovered by my wife or children.

It took fewer years for this white shade, with competing brands likewise jumping bandwagon, to be the exclusive fixture passing me upon busy sidewalks, down long hallways at work, than it had taken Amanda to rise from a viable written blog that filled my head as well as my eye’s appetite to being the most recognized face upon the communicative portion of the planet.

But she never wrote anymore, stopped updating her blog because it was discovered by the masses and overwhelmed, too public to be the sorta-public pleas she’d previously played for the limited audience world of which I’d been a member of that minimal sets of orbits she’d insisted she adored.

At least, that was my first thought.  But, again, I’d forgotten by then that the purpose of research and theorems is to not preconceive, to not close ones mind to other possibilities.

See, those people, those other women I pass upon my day’s wander, those women all wearing white plastered across their lips - they all only remind me of her, of Amanda.  I lost my daughters in a crowd on minimal density because though they were waving frantically at me to follow along, I saw only a sea of Amanda.  I could no longer remember my wife’s name because even in her sleep her lips retain their bleach of white and I am too awestruck to sleep knowing that suddenly I am that close to Amanda, a fixture in my world that I’d never before personally met.

I cannot recall, so thrilled am I nightly, so lost am I daily, and so unsure how to reconcile this unending, unrested flow, when I last slept.  It is too unnerving, to realize she is everywhere, is everyone.  Perhaps I last slept when I was shocked to discover that I was almost completed with my last attempted sketch, was literally at the point of filling in the paper plump protruding mouth’s outline with my tube of white lipstick and, maybe because I’d not touched its tip to the paper, realized the ripped magazine photo I’d spent hours replicating in my own finger’s voice was not a photo of Amanda at all, but some impostor for some competing brand’s attempt to become her. And I’d helped confirm their marketing’s belief if I, who now surely knew the nuances of her profile prolifically could be so foolish.

Thing is, what I discovered late in my research managed within my brain’s constant computing is that it is this lipstick, this white mask is silencing her mood her words her interactions even with me, my original contemplation birthed as truth.

I confirmed this when swimming through the downtown tides of replicas of her, of other women wearing the appearance of Amanda, realized that none of them speak to me, none says a word.  The chain of that lipstick upon the ownership of freewill whitewashes even the ability to interact with me.  It is not that there are thoughts unspoken - instead there are no longer thoughts, only replications, redundancies likewise mimicking Amanda’s slavery of silence. 

This is why I must begin removing lips, of eviscerating the white silence, to free her soul to speak to me again.  But this requires practice, much like the years of dedication to my pencil upon my sketchpad, before I can attempt to free and perfect Amanda.  For my medical school I have managed with exacto knife to remove the white lipstick from all of my sketches of her, have experienced angles and leans upon ladder and sweat seeping into my blinking eyes as I concentrated and completed this project over the last few months. 

And they are all free, all able to be seen fresh and unencumbered by silence.  Because they do each contain and preserve moments of her soul, I pray that this has provided Amanda some peripheral relief.  If she can just hang on, just allow me to hone my skills, just perhaps a few weeks more.  There are redundancies of her everywhere, opportunities to advance my technique, to fulfill my residency.

If Amanda can just not scream until I arrive.

Once upon a time I fell into adoration of a woman of purposeful long distance.  She sent to me her love, I mailed to her the first version of my printed poetry book.  I included within this dried flowers, a lock of my hair as DNA proof of my existence, and I allowed a few tears from my soul to fall onto the final page and run which I outlined and described in yet more prose.  Subsequently, appropriately she learned to abhor me, but for a moment in time although we never met, never spoke beyond IM’s, within this universe we belonged to one and another.  This photo is one of my greatest treasures.