chapter nineteen.

my little pudgy guy was walking with a friend today. i ended up not sleeping at night, and so i was up to see him walk to school, and i saw him, walking with a taller skinnier kid who didn't seem very interested in the story pudgy seemed so pleased to tell. no matter, i'm happy he seemed happy, and i'm happy he wasn't alone for once. and his pants weren't tucked in his socks, and his fly was up, his hat on his head - he was just having a good day. go pudgy! (i'm perfectly aware that seeing someone for fifteen seconds sometimes twice a day does not grant me access to their inner turnmoil, and that it's more than likely pudgy did not have a perfect day, or even a good one. but it improves my day to think of him as happy. poor little pudgy!)

yeah so i didn't sleep. i figure i'm starting to balance off the twenty-four hour sleep thing. the boyfriend was snoring again. my brain was running twelve hundred miles an hour. or something. i don't quite know how long a mile goes, given that i was raised with the metric system. still, let's say my brain was racing, and i couldn,t stop thinking about a million things that did not belong in my head as i was lying down in warm comfortable sheets, next to my man, at four twenty in the morning. actually i don't know what time it was, since i don't have a clock, but i like the number four twenty. what i do know is that i saw the light slowly grow and engulf the room, and i was awake during the entire sun dance, as it went up and my spirits sank.

it's not quite pleasant to have insomnia. not that bad anyway. because all night as i lie there worrying or getting excited or making up stories and reliving parts of my day, my week, my life, i also worry about the fact that i'm not sleeping. and that doesn't help me to fall asleep. and i worry about the next day, when i know i'll feel like a zombie but i won't quite be able to nap either, and i'll just walk around the house feeling sorry for myself, all day. if i'm lucky something will happen to piss me off and then my energy level will go up for a little short while. so as i lie there i worry not only about lying there but also about the upcoming days, and how not being asleep right now is screwing the entire week to come, and then i feel anger and frustration and shame and dread and guilt. and none of these feelings are conducive to sleep. so i guess i'm my own worse enemy. that, or i've started to raise insomnia to the state of an art form. yippee.

sometimes when that happens i get up and i try to watch movies, or to read, or to work out so i tire my body out. but my body already is tired - it's my mind that just won't quit. i tried reading the income tax act. it ended up making me laugh, but that was probably because it was so boring it made me think it would read much better with acid. and it did. but i didn't read much of it anyway. or rather, all that i saw and read in there had relatively little to do with taxation law. i tried watching the purchasing channel, with its informercials for vertical roasting and miracle grills and the biggest fake stones you'll ever see. that too made me laugh. but then i realized it was a lot more sad and pathetic than finny, and i switched to the channel that shows pictures and descriptions of children who have disappeared. some have been gone for twenty years, and they show a picture from way back, when the child was two years old, and then they show an artist's rendition of what the kid would look like now. those images always puzzle me. i've changed so much since i was a child, i really doubt anyone could have known how i would age. well, okay, i lost an eye, and that nobody could guess. but more than that - i could have become a gym bug, or a fat freak, and that would have changed the way my face is shaped, over decades. anyway, i always wonder how close the drawing is to reality. i guess few people ever find out, because i imagine few people find their lost or kidnapped children twenty years down the line (and when they do, why oh why do they sign to give rights to their stories to some crappy made for tv movie?). so i was wondering if i could send a picture of me as a child and see what they would come up with. or something. except that i have very few pictures of myself as a child. actually, i have none. my sister has a few. our parents weren't exactly typical parents who take snpashots of their offspring at every turn. and even though they did once in a while, they were not the kind to think that their offspring's portrait was oh so precious. basically, most of the pictures of me have been destroyed in various accidents, voluntary or not.

when i was a kid, my father told me to blow saliva bubbles with my lips when i was on the toilet taking a shit and had nothing to do (apparently magazines were not in vogue as bathroom reading materials at the time). he also told me i used too much toilet paper. he said two sheets was enough for a pee. he was very involved in my bathroom life. fucker. when i was sixteen, i took enough laxatives to incapacitate a water buffalo. then i shit all over his sheets and pillow, and i made the bed again. i left a load in some of his shoes too. then i gathered my meager belongings and i left the place never to return. i hitch hiked to the city, and took a bus from there. my sister had already left home, but she was still in touch with our father, so she told me all about the screaming and the cursing of my name. as if he hadn't deserved it, and worse. apparently the smell was overpowering and stayed in the house for weeks too. well, what i didn't know was that he wasn't coming home the next day as i thought, but a week later. so i gather my little prank got seven days to simmer. good for him.

i don't even know what my father looks like. i know that stuff happened. i can remember it, but his face stays a blur, even in happy memories. i burnt all the pictures of him i later found in my stuff. not that there were many. i also burnt all the pictures where you could see something of his. his shoes behind me as a toddler. his hand on my sister's shoulder. all gone. well there's something artificially comforting about destroying photographs, given that someone somwhere may still have the negatives. but still - what matters is not that he has stopped existing, but that he does not exist for me in my life in any way whatsoever. well, genes excepted.

i used to dream i was adopted and my parents didn't want to tell me. it's a common thing for children, i guess. except that most children, if it really happened, would feel a huge loss, a huge insecurity. well if i had prayed, i would have prayed for that. and if new parents, real parents had come, i would have left with them in a hurry and without a look back. i didn't pray. my sister did. our grand-mother would drag us to church most sunday mornings and although it was a nice break from our sordid lives, it was also excrutiatingly long and boring. and i never liked my grand-mother to begin with. she spawned my father, and apples and trees, it seems, are somehow related...? yeah. so we'd be stuck in church with her, and she was an old lady who smelled like an old lady, dressed like an old lady, acted like an old lady and cared, like only old ladies do, a lot more about appearances of morals than about anything else. and every week the basket for donations would pass and my sister and i would watch it come with big round envious eyes - we had never had that much money at home - and my grand-mother would give us each a dollar, but she would make sure we put it in, for god, she said, for his works, and we put it in because we had to. and i thought god was fucking lucky to get all that money, when the most i had ever had to myself was a quarter, and i had to wear my sister's old clothes, which were really our cousin's old clothes, and we never saw anything worth anything, other than that fucking collection basket. i thought god didn't need money - since he was everywhere, he could just pick pockets like my brother or scare the hell out of any rich pilgrim and shake him out. my grand-mother replied to that with a slap on the back of my head.

at school too they rammed it in, about jesus and mary and the evil judas and the holy ghost (cool, i thought: a ghost! but no...). and i yawned and i drew other stuff, not jesus curing lazarus but a round of goblins dancing around a bonfire, not his thorny crown but a meadow filled with evil looking flowers. and the religion teachers, ne after the other, discovered my head filled with filth and hated me. and i hated them back. and i was told that i was ofeending god and i would say yeah well god is a jackass and god offended me first. that usually got me sent to the principal's office, but i didn't mind because he knew my parents and he never called them to rat me out - not since the one time he did and i ended up missing school to attend my own surgery - and he gave me chocolate and we talked and he understood my point of view about god and all that crap. he just said i should listen and be polite, that i didn't have to believe or fake it. i think he was the first cool adult i met.

he committed suicide the year i went to high school. not that it's related to me at all. i just mean, he died, he killed himself, and i was crushed. but it wasn't about me at all, it was all about him.