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No one must know my terrible secret...

House of Noh!

Saturday, May 14, 2005

Taking stock of my life on a Saturday morning, sort of cloudy and rainy outside, and I didn’t really have enough coffee to satisfy the extravagant and insatiable lusts of Mr. Coffee’s filter basket last night so I had to supplement the grounds with some bancha tea, and some gingko leaves, and some roobois pellets or whatever they are - this is the kind of thing my grandma would do during the Depression, except she would use dried chickory root, or grass clippings, and then she’d eat fucking cabbage fried in lard exclusively for the next four years ‘cept for when she, or her younger brother Jack, who joined the navy, could steal a chicken.

I’ve mentioned my grandma before. I know I know, many times. But to summarize - she’s the one who lives in the HUD senior peoples’ housing; the building (and I’m sort of fascinated with it), looking at the city from Westnedge Hill, that makes up the skyline of Kalamazoo. Other than the HUD building, during the summer from that vantage point when there are leaves on the trees, the valley looks the same way it did when “kalamazoo” meant the way river gravel looks when seen through the clear water of a stream rushing over the top of it.

“Hey Grandma! Is that guy still peeing in the hallways?”

“Now he’s pooping in the elevators! Nobody saw him do it, but there were human feces in the elevator. Who else could it be?”

(days later)

“Hey Grandma! Is that guy still pooping in the elevator?”

“No. We got rid of him!” (cackling)

BTW, by “We,” my Grandma means a group of old ladies who meet in the old rec room, and now that bingo has been cancelled due to lack of government funding, have nothing to do but conspire. I hear about their plans sometimes. Sometimes their plans are good, but sometimes their plans are a bit, well…. crazy. Like, I’m pretty sure once they had a plan to capture a half-chicken, half person. First of all, the whole premise of the existence of a half chicken, half person was a bit crazy. But most crazy of all, was these old ladies’ plan to take one on. I bet even Bruce Fucking Lee would have trouble fighting a half human, half chicken beast. And you should see these old ladies, some of which are seriously infirm.

Anyway, I’m not sure exactly how they did it, but they got rid of that guy who was pooping in the elevators. (don’t tell anybody, but I suspect that the plans of my Grandma’s gang were probably more correlative than causative of the elevator pooper’s departure from their building) And the way my Grandma said it – I could tell those old ladies don’t take feces in their elevator lightly. I almost feel sorry for the guy. I mean, maybe he just really had to go? Or maybe the elevator was stuck? And really, isn’t being able to poop in weird places a valuable skill? I once had a friend who tried to poop in a pizza box, but he couldn’t do it.

Oh yeah, so here I am, drinking my adulterated coffee, taking stock of my life. On the back of my hand is a faint note I scribbled there last night. It refers to this huge, 4’ by 8’ pizza delivery map laminated to a big board I found last night behind the Domino’s Pizza that has a back entrance on the alley behind my place. It’s a big, old, aged map of my neighborhood with all the streets and sub-neighborhoods divided into pizza zones and delivery quadrants. The note on my hand reads, “get map under cover of darkness.”

That huge map is still down there in the alley, I just got up and checked, then walked back to this computer. But it is no longer dark. And the note on my hand is so faint now, the next time I wash my hands it’ll probably be gone for good.