Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Ohio Revisited as a Flemish Belgian Imposter Just Directly South of the Most Southern Tip of Canada


Exhausted after closing at work - laying on the floor in front of a TV in a house with no furniture - propped up with pillows and pilled up watching The Vampires of teendom: Edward and Bella...Rosalie and Emmett ....Alice and Jasper....Esme and Carlisle - Characters from Stephenie Meyers Twilight books brought to life on the big screen by Catherine Hardwicke in remarkable understated ways that corporate Hollywood could never comprehend. Sort of like True Blood from HBO for high schoolers and adults like me who want to remember something better than our own dull and miserable past lives in the time of youth.

I miss Anne Rice and her Southern grandieur, grace and polite society - her literary history and knowlege of art history - at least in print. That Stephenie Meyers does makes Vampire stories much less gratuitous excuses for blood and gore as a metaphor for our planetary ecologically consuming human selves . But the other "supporting cast" characters from Twilight wether in the book or the film intrigue me more than the plot dominating Vampiric forms of Scarlet and Rhett as Bella and Edward.

That movie Twilight I must have seen in the cinema ten times... Like when a boy I must have seen the film The Lost Boys at least 25 times during matinees of loneliness.

Tired of this alone-ness, these Twilight DVDeez go better with klonopin king pins in a solid state lonely life, lived out on an existential road trip to nowhere.

Super paver parking lots - trapped in retaildom - Dreaming of Arab North Africa and on towards Easter-wards...

Having seen Twilight so many times with Ben - hanging out tonight with Rusty the black dog as such - it's like someone - anyone, human or non-human, are curled up here too on the floor - farting like that darned dog.

Catherine Hardwicke understands the Twilight Vampires like no one else could or will - perhaps even better than their creater Stephenie Meyer.


If you got a man or wo-man in your life named Khaleb or Khalil or Khadeja then my advice would be:
Hold tight to that Khaleb you won't regret it. Vivian Vivance Kalebz or not keep him closer to you than your own hearts beat.

My only pal Benoit is a good buddy bender friend of the discarded animals lives like mine - it is like he has a psychic power to find discarded lives of field mouses, cats, dogs and people like me. People like Ben for all their self abusing bad habits go to heaven for their animal charities.

See you Ben around the bend, like in the blog Baghdad Burning, "where hearts can heal and souls can mend". Ben. Bender. Bendahar from Kumar....

All I look forward to are the visits to the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW) to visit my sister Margo (or to see or hear or read you buddy Ben or dear reader if you even exist)....

Rusting and broken down neon signs along the roadside of the old Ohio high ways and free ways all cluttered with wildlife roadkill and garbage - discarded - former life forms that we all were - if we can just admit that everything we want and desire are already in this big Universe now in the past tense. At least in the West.

... Betty Butterfield and the Scientologists or the Buddhists - I've seen it all on Youtube! Seen it a hundred times to keep myself laughing when I have no reason for laughter or a smile. Google it - Youtube it - Betty Butterfield -Forget it - car insurance and the community meetings... super paver, meaningless, cosmic, existential, parkinglots to nowhere...
....read.... ....write... ...recite...

Nowhereville or is it Ghettoville or is it that Bronte Villette or did I loose my heart to Bruxelles mon amour back in Belgique and old, really old and forgotten Flanders - Vlaanderen - from the south of Hollandia and into the north of what is now France. Miscellaneous Flemish dialects of the Old Dutch language mixed up en Francais Belgique Bruxeloises....

Back in Brussels there is a museum with a room full of ornaments in the shape of hearts. My heart is nailed there to the wall also.

Pharmaceutical electronic driven to distraction and subsequent life, now replete with an Ohio emptiness - alone in my aloneness. In this prison nation I care for no one anymore. Even though I don't want to, or forget how to, care.

Even though my pal Benoit - there is nothing he can do or say to help make a difference in me or our collapsed world.

But its the laughter and stories he seems to pull out of a magicians hat that keep me holding on...

Yeh, I guess I've been a psychological, emotional, psychic vampire mess for everyone who knows me, one way or another, including through this here blogette to nowhere.

Some of my getting back in touch with myself has been in those long belabored bloggetry of personal essays to you dear reader.

I suppose if/when I get a boy/girl/(or both-tranny-lol) - friend then I'll stop needing companionship. Elusive and non-existant companionship at present in my empty (literally and figuratively) home life. Life lived off the floor keeps me humble and connected to the mother Earth.

But, whatever, I deal with things stoically now - learning how from my sister self surviving in her personal Palestine in Marysville, Ohio in prison incarceration.

....But that house in Brussels that was once home - all nine feet wide of it with five floors - under terra cotta roof tiles and red brick and all just endless wooden stairsteps - my friends there in the neighborhood, the dogs, my being so easily replaced as it were, the things of mine from before all that which were shipped over from Ohio; things accumulated during those long years in Brussels or things I accumulated abroad - or even say charcoal drawings from college art school days - that all ended up over there - never guessing in a million years I'd be back to Ohio - I guess until all of that is dealt with - as if it could be dealt with - I just feel lost and without family or tribe or clan or place or purpose or language - like you, dear reader, if there is one at all - you are all that is stuck with me - which is better than the alternative of....

...being ignored... negative attention Oscar Wilde once said is better than no attention.

I don't want to apologize for writing too much - I do it to survive mentally and I though we were having a good time. I was at least I thought I was. But, yeh, I am always happy when I see the rare comment post on this here blog. I do though feel sorry for anyone who reads me and gets into my self torturing brain to read...

Americans here are generally so much more so literally and figuratively embracing than Europeans and everyone in Belgium who all to easily accept the inevitable detachments in life with a sturdy sadness. So it makes it hard to be that way with myself - that now foreign, collective and material past, still in Villette, as my old self back in Bru-town. Confined now to memories and non-existance.

Forgotten by Belgians with disregard that is considered polite.
Keep your drama, mama said, to yourself.

I really don't like being American again: Me and my past Euro-Belgian-Moroccan Muslim life are in such vastly different realities and time zones and cultures - Like I have separated into the ultimate Geminoid contradiction where both of us have changed in ways the other doesn't know or that we wouldn't recognize ourself in the ourselves - That it makes holding on impossible. Maybe i should stop trying to understand the Salvadore Dali persistant Pesistance of Memory.

My Flemish pal Wannes just in says "in life these little tragedies happens in between the big tragedies"...

So I just try to understand Wannes' logic about these things...I really have been wanting for two years from someone from over there to arrive here and find out who and what I am (and what I am not) in this post relationship void. A void to avoid in life.

Relationships should not end like this in excommunication or dislocation.

I wish I could just face all that I am not now - and be cool with it - I've adjusted to it. But I am a fraction of what I once was in Belgium as a Belgian-American - here or in Belgium. Maybe I don't want to see all that. I can't say that I blame anyone for not wanting to be remembering me back there - back then as such. I still try to live in the past because things on some level were better than this Ohio Revisited life - a life here as a discarded human being in a literally discarded and disregarded part of the world.

I used to spend a lot of time with my dogs in old town Brussels named Buddy and Sagan both like me from Ohio - it is hard just having to ignore them - to have to forget them back in Belgium in another home and hope they forget me and the many days and ways we spent together over so many years and miles or kilometers and dog walks along the canals of Brussels.

I try to just think in terms of not owning things: Animals or material possessions. Not because I want to but because I have to in Buddhist like ways - detach from all that or go insane trying to hold on to something like mercury - the Geminoid quick silver that cannot be held in your hand that is so poisonous. I try to think of animals as having a home or a place "in a family" - being a part of a family - not owned. Nothing stays the same - So I just hope those dogs have a place as I know and trust they do - even if I can't be with them throughout their lives. The only consolation in going back recently to De Hague, in not going onto Brussels, was that I thought it better that the dogs not see me briefly. I don't want to think about any of this any more - it all yields so much grief of things now out of my hands.

I sometimes show a good neighbor Witch my writing here - she is astonished - floored even by my writing ability. I like the things she sees in what I write that I cannot see. It's not writing I consider I am doing - it is called surviving this brain and body and society and modernity of soul-less-ness and nowhere-ism.

I see my sister Margo tomorrow. Going to the Ohio Reformatory for Women - the old ORW - it is hard for her to comprehend me now or my previous life's decade abroad. Margo can't even endure car rides to the world outside ORW just to the medical clinic at the Ohio State University which she is occassionally taken to like a lab rat. Because she lives in such a small non-automotive world in confines of a locked down convent like community that covers less acres than what people without cars can easily walk - imagine that for three decades - So being in the prison transport van to drive into Columbus makes her terribly car sick - whole years can go by and she won't be in an automotive van, so the effect is something the rest of us can't imagine - extreme car sickness. Imagine what that means for everything else in the world outside ORW since time for her stopped in 1977. Time Suspended like Time was Suspended for Palestine in 1948 - waiting with lives defined by razor wire and concrete control. She can't go on a long walk without getting dizzy because there is no long distance except in circles within all that razor wire control, locked down, over populated, prison community. To think about her or my life now, it induces grief. Just grief that is to the core - to the bone - to the flesh of this souls mortal coil that I am entombed by until death stuck with a brain that won't leave me alone. As if that brain were some Alien implants brain without a mercy for its symbiotic host showing me the world I live in from a foreigners point of view.

Like when I think about Brussels it induces grief. People do not come out to the sticks of Ghettoville, Central, Ohio where I now live - it is hard - people do not walk by - there are not even sidewalks - and the house is set far back from the street. Then what is close - the neighbors to the east and the west - my kitchen window looks into to theirs - in the summer we can talk to each other through open windows for a laugh or over hear each others conversations even if we don't want to. My neighbor to the west where the bedroom window looks into their bathroom and bedroom windows - we keep these windows shut for privacy and mutual respect.

When I look around the strange and empty and foreign house I live in - my clutter piles must provide some comfort - if everything was in order - I'd remember what I don't have here that was left like a refugee in Belgium.
If all that materiality from my past life were here that would be worse - Then I'd really feel trapped here. No going back.

I guess I should just return my Belgian passport and ID for it sadly won't get used anytime soon now.

My life now plays out on a retail dance floor of a stage, like a cheap version of Belgian Art groups like Damaged goods, her holiness of dance mother Anna Theresa deKeersmaaker and that immense woman from the Need Company - The best Belgian Diva since I don't know when Tin Tin's only female character. Then there is also my fellow American Meg Stuart or Stewart... Willem Dafoe from the Wooster Group days performing at the Kaaitheater and it's studios - my life played out like some student work at P.A.R.T.S., stage life like Rosas dancers. Jan de Corte and Siegred and Tooneelhuis. Not to mention Toona and the marionettes. Or Arno and other local Bru-town celebs like that flakey Christophe Coppens the mad hatter of Brussels... my life was suffocatingly fabulous compared to this present spartan monk like solitude - stage performance without an audience. In a land with no Art funding or public concept of Art.

I wish you knew - dear reader - but if you did - I would be ashamed.
The people I do encounter here are the lost souls of post United States American ghetto life - They are not always people you want to speak to for you see the frightening and wild and feral look in their eyes.

And yet I want you to see, to see what you would approve of in my self determination of a life. It is just nothing to write home about.

I just don't have relationships and exchanges so I suffocate anyone who will listen or read me - like old people do. When I look into my minds crystal ball... I see... through the fog of pollution and Ohio haze:

I see hard work loneliness and a road ahead of indeterminate length that ends in death with not much else by way of distraction.

That is why I dream of travelling across Arab North Africa - from Morocco across the Atlas mountains on to Algeria and Tunisia and over and across to Libya and into Egypt - across the Sinai to Medinah and Makkah - south to Sana'a and Taizz and Aden and Mukallah - eastward into Oman and Muscat - over to Dubai and the multi-colored desert sands of the UAE - stopping in Qatar and Bahrain and Kuwait City before checking out old Damascus or bullet riddled Beruit and on into what remains of once grand and humane Palestine. Across Jordans dreamlands and tranversing Iraq and into Iran over land to Afghanistan - to see - really see for myself - what is going on and where. To find the Khyber Pass and make my way back to Multan and without missing stops in Peshawar and Quetta - passing somehow via airplane through Baku in Azerbaijan or wandering around Kazakstan.

Really it's all a trip to go on to never return from.
Dreams like this are how I hold on.

When I dream of travelling like this I want to be captured by Yemeni tribes men - held ransom for government money as a human collateral of a tool of negotiation - except that is a dream of mine - they would never get me to leave their tribal village so I wouldn't be of much use.

Being truely free means being willing and able to die at any moment in time - even if most of the time - there is no reason in doing so - living or dying. But until everything including my pulse can be lost - I can't live.

Ohio is a nightmare trap sort of place. Run by an Oligarchy of merciless self serving Capitalists who care nothing for Ohio or its remarkable history or its once beautiful land and ecology - to say nothing of the weird modern people now stuck here who have no work, no healthcare, no where to walk to, nowhere to drive to and nothing much to do but drink liquor, smoke cannabiss to bliss themselves out with - get caught up in Crystal Meth, Crack or the Heroin hills surrounding central Ohio's flatness....

One begins to wonder if we don't have Al Qaeda and the Taliban all wrong. To places filled with urban ghetto warfare - or anarchy in Moghadishu or post Soviet/American Afghanistani tribes, lost in the vacuum of all that confusion, by Western and Soviet meddling - for all their primitive applications of Islam - those forces, however primitive, might bring stability for people. I'm not so sure we can blame them for the harm the US or old Soviet or present day China induces, ironically, for the free markets of Capitalism. Wether its the Somalian coast guard being branded pirates so that the West can dump toxic waste in their territorial waters or so that China can fish all the fish out of those waters while Somalians on the land have no food and water and not much governance left.

And G-ville, Ohio - or Detroit City - despairing lives and parkinglots to nowhere might eventually need some of that Taliban bearded chic to restore order because the greed of American styled consumerist human commodification of lives lived as human resources for Capitalism isn't going to build inner city towns and gardens for food much less flowers and trees.

I'd move to Afghanistan or the SWAT area of Pakistan in a heartbeat. I'd move to Sharjah if I could get a job there. Dubai - I'd rather be a retail slave laborer there than here in Nowhereville, Ohio...

All that is left for me here is my sister self locked up for good without end in a womens "reformatory" with no chance for release even after three decades and still going - how does someone locked up like a Palestinian for six decades re-emerge into a strange, super fast changing, technologically advancing, mercilessly fast, for a Capitalists world based on shameless, self serving, greed? Explain to me this womens reformatory reform process then, exactly - Ohio. My life is locked up there too with all those women - like all those broken families and people and children in Gaza.

Despite all my built in life contradictions to it - Islam - is the only way out of this prison planet lifestyle in this here decadent and declining and self and annoyingly righteous West. What do you do when you find that the rainbow of the rainbow flag takes your life on a ride full circle? There aren't no red or silver shoes to take you back to Kansas because Kansas is a McWal-Mart-ers super paver Chinese owned parkinglot to a boarded up store front.

So much for the amber waves of grain and endless mind boggling vast prairies under big blue sky with little fluffy Orb like clouds...

3 comments:

Michaela & Joe said...

my mom always said we treat our "pets" like children and pay for it with their short lives.
having no children of my own i can not see any other option.

Matthew Crouch said...

you're the best mom anyway!

Anonymous said...

I found a solution: unleash the power of the holy ghost and take a magic carpet ride on the febreeze superhighway; It leads to the rivers of ultra gleem and the lakes of lemon chlorine bleach alternative. There you will find the town of FORKS:
population 3175. Joyce will be waiting for you down at Queets River with a double-plate of magic cobbler and a large cherry coke, no ice!