Monday, October 29, 2007

Some people build their own houses

So, I thought it would be a good idea. I sold my old house in the city. It had nice features and good cabinets to hold my sweet nutrients, but I thought it was very old. I mean, one day I was walking around upstairs and when I went downstairs to put my socks on, their was dust on my feet. I looked at a cobweb and said that this was enough. Piles of dead flies, geez.
I held an auction in the fall. There were four people and a sheriff in attendance. The whole house with a crapload of old posessions and portraits of my ancestors went for like a hundred thousand bucks. My neighbors were there. I hated my neighbors. They were all very old. They mowed their lawns in jogging suits and hearing aids. They loved each other, too. I think they were all jealous of my house.
It rained on my neighbors, my old house, and all of those freaks who wanted it. It rained on me too, but I think it got the dust off of me.

So, I went out in the dead of winter to a hill in the woods. I'm not sure who owned the property, but they probably lived far away. I looked around at the huge trees and moss and animals. It was nice since they were all dead or cold. It would be easier that way.
I took the hundred thousand dollars and bought a saw, some nails, and a hammer. It was really hard to cut the trees since their insides were frozen, but if I waited until about six in the evening, they would be soft enough to make some progress.
The very first thing I did was to clear every old thing off of my hill. I cut down every tree and pulled up the stumps with my bare fingers. I used the claw end of my hammer to scrape up ever piece of grass and every stretch of moss. I killed all of the bugs and animals that came through.
One time in kids' school, they told me that the stars we see are actually very old. I almost threw up. I know that teacher was a liar. She was young, but I still think she lived with her great-grandma or something.
I think I almost died that winter. I coughed blood from December until February. One time, I slipped on a patch of ice and fell off my roof. I don't know how long I was knocked out because no one keeps track of me. My hands bled every day and I still have no feeling in the soles of my feet. It was all worth it. In the first week of March, I decided that I could go into my house. I had built the outside of my house first, so that the inside would be as new as possible.
I think that this was the best time of my life. I hung every wall with ingenuity and precision. The corners stuck in my mind and the edges were confrontational. I cherished every nail and could feel each blow of the hammer. The sound of the pounding was the sound of my heart and I think I cried more than I spoke during that time. I held each piece of board close to me and laid up against it when it was pressed to the studs. From March to the middle of April, I was in love. For the first time in my life, I realized that this new home was the place I was built to inhabit.
The second half of Spring found me making forays into the nearby town. I opened a small practice and was seeing patients for the first time in years. I could stand looking at their rashes and old faces because I knew my happiness was waiting in the blackness of the forest. I even made some friends.
I met you on June first. You were kind and could speak more than anyone I had ever met. I listened and you spoke. Your face was the only one that God ever made by hand. I knew it because it was the only new one I had ever seen.
The day after I met you was the day that I hung the las wall of my new house. I was in such a good mood that I decided to play a little joke that I had read on a comic. I put construction clothes on a new skeleton and lay it to rest behind my wall. I smiled when I nailed the wall to the studs.
When I went to bed I wondered whose skeleton I bought. I had dreams about it too. I dreamt you were old and stained and living inside my walls. I hated you. Why had you aged? You were the only good one ever made. Didn't God care about the good things? But, you were in my house. My house could not age. Neither God nor weather could touch the inviolate youth of my dwelling. It stood bulwark strong against disease, time, Einstein, Nietzsche, Darwin, and St. John. They would surely break upon it like wind on it's facade. I woke with the surety of my own ceiling above me.
I saw you the next day and asked you to come to my house. You said okay.
We got there and quickly ate dinner. We spoke.
"I like your house."
"Thank you."
"The walls look new. I wish I could live in a place like this."
"You can stay here if you like it."
"I would like that. I would like most of all to grow old with you."
Little white explosions dotted my field of vision. I thought I might fall over. I probably vomited. I wish my mind could throw up things that made it sick. I'm not sure what happened after that, but I know you left in a hurry and I slept in the attic that night.
I woke up the next two days, but I could not move. I tried, but each time my brain sent a signal to my arms, my arms sent a message back in a language that my brain could not understand. My conscious mind tried to mediate for me, but I mostly just cried. I cried and called it a liar. I didn't want to ever hear my conscious mind again, which is sort of a funny thing to think. If we are one unit, how can we tell ourselves things. When I realized that I realized that part of me was old. I saw that my conscious mind was the part of me that I had got from old people who decided things about our sound pictures and thought rules and I was furious that it had snuck by me for so long.
I did what I had to do. I called my mind out. My id, ego, and superego. They appeared before me in stark contrast. My psychology professors were all liars. My id was not some idiot baby. It was a man with a beard and tangled hair with broken glasses and a dirty coat. My Superego was not some sunday school teacher or judge, she was holding the id's hand and stroking his shoulder, she wore a kind dress and had nice hair. My ego was the true horror. It was a gross caricature and amalgam of my parents, my school, and my country. It drooled and bled and smelled like death. I raised up off of my floor. I raised my hammer and began to beat the beast. I drove nails into the thing and pulled the decaying flesh off of it with the claw of my hammer. The distrubed result of a child's attempt to reconcile conflicting desires, my ego was the one pinning me to the floor. Rationalizing and ignoring, pleading and hiding it strangled me. I tore and tore at the animal until I had torn every piece of flesh from its body. Inside was the prank I had hidden between the walls.
"Joke's on you," it muttered and smiled.
"Uncle Leon?" I embraced the empty frame, cracking a few ribs.
"You little freak. Don't you know you're acting retarded?"
"Uncle, I told you. We don't talk like that anymore."
"Sorry, bud. Hey, what's with all this new stuff?"
"I built it because I hated you."
"Ha! Well, you're certainly a poor carpenter."
"Well screw you, Leon."
So, basically Leon and I moved to Greenwich Village. He's a poet and I opened a free clinic. I guess I still think about you once and a while. I throw up a little sometimes. We go to protests and stuff, but he's really into anime, so we're always watching some weird cartoon with subtitles. He says the dubbed stuff is gay. I tell him he's a freaking plastic skeleton. Then, he turns to me. Opens his bony jaws, and in a raspy voice with dog's breath says:

"Happy Halloween, you butt-munch."


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I think I just spent an hour writing that. I feel better. At first, I just thought it would be funny to write a tell-tale heart story about a guy who builds a skeleton into his walls. Then I think I just started to throw in some half metaphors. It might be about my first two years of college, but I wouldn't look for too much meaning in it. It wasn't meant to mean anything. Then, It was getting really old, so I made it into a halloween thing. I might be retarded.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I like the last line.

Willard Cupp, RN said...

yeah, that story was pretty much on crack. i would usually delete something like that the very next day, but i let it survive. the last line is definitely a jewel.

Anonymous said...

Here's what you should do:

Print it out. Half kill it with a red pen, then revive it back to life by rewriting it. It will be so thankful, it'll do whatever you ask.

Sometimes.

It's got crazy potential.

Willard Cupp, RN said...

maybe i will reshape it over christmas or something. at least i haven't deleted it yet. now if i could write something even half as retarded in the form of song lyrics...

Anonymous said...

Good words.