mother.

My mother has always worked. Even before I was born, and while she carried me, she worked right up until her pregnancy. When I was seven years old she lost her job at a department store and went to work as a receptionist for an insurance company. Her boss's name was Phillip Lore and at 55 years of age he had survived two heart attacks and still ate like nobody's business. Three times a day my mother is sent to get him food. First, in the morning, she goes to Dover's and orders him three bow tie glazed donuts and a large coffee with extra cream and sugar. At noon, he takes two cheeseburgers with maple glazed bacon and a large basket of french fries from the pub, which is two city blocks away and finally for dinner he orders a steak, black and blue, from the diner which is located conveniently across the street and slathers it in ketchup.

It wasn't until his second heart attack that he stopped ordering french friends with his cheeseburgers, but I guess that is the only thing that has changed. Or so mother tells me.

Yesterday, at 6 pm sharp, when mother usually arrives home, she told me that Mr. Lore had a special visitor around 2 pm and they had her go out to get a bottle of scotch and some cigars from Saul's Liquor. When she arrived back Mr. Lore was standing in the door of his office red faced and screaming at the visitor, a bald thin man, and telling him that he ought to take his lies and deviance elsewhere! This she found was rather shocking, because usually Mr. Lore never takes that tone of voice with anyone but her or his secretary, May Finn.

May is a young blonde girl who constantly passes off her file duties to my mother, which is illegal, or so mother says. She says that May spends most of her days pretending to organize the supply cabinet and making phone calls to strange men and various girlfriends. When Mr. Lore comes out of the office she resumes fumbling with things on her desk or flipping through files and Mr. Lore pats her on the head or shoulders and tells her how wonderful the files look and what a darling girl she is. Sometimes he even compliments her dress and has her stand up and spin around, just so he can see every inch of her.

Of course he never asks mother to do this, only May. Mother is much too old, or so she says, but that doesn't stop him from making the occasional pass no way! One day while mother was returning files to his office while he wasn't there, he entered behind her and placed a hand right there on her behind. She jerked up and sent the papers in files flying all over the room! Mr. Lore started screaming immediately and his large red face grew redder and his double chin started to quiver as he bellowed out how nervous and scatter brained mother is!

What a terrible man he can be, sometimes, that Mr. Lore. Always getting so mad at mother and sending her to the back room. The back room is an old file room that escapes the heat and air conditioning, and he especially likes sending mother back there during the summer. The file room has all the old insurance claims in it, and there isn't anything that needs to be done back there ever, it is just used as a sort of punishment. Mr. Lore says it is to remind mother of how lucky she is to have a nice big desk with plenty of room to breathe. So every time she drops a file in front of him, or messes up his lunch order she has to go clean back there. Sometimes it takes hours, other times Mr. Lore will call her back up to the desk sooner but usually he just waits until she has finished dusting and organizing.

The first time mother was sent to the back file room she came home crying. Her pin curls had gone limp and she wasn't wearing any lipstick. The hem of her skirt was trimmed in soot and dust and her face was flushed, but you could tell that beneath all the red she was pale as the belly of a fish and feeling quit ill. Startled, I asked her what was wrong, and then when I heard how he sent her back there to that wretched room well I almost had a heart attack myself! I told mother that she needed to quit and find a different job but she only wept and told me if only I knew it wasn't that easy.

A Really Precious Story.

"I was born with a sickness in my head. I have to pour thoughts like tea, coffee and all the other suburban delicacies that your average Midwestern twenty year old will guzzle down their gullet, without care. not to think of where it came from, how it was made or if it will hurt my body ten, twenty years from now. it doesn't matter. just whatever it is, please let it get me a little high.

let it have something. an extra. a plus. a prize. a token. that something more that keeps you coming back, and gets you up on the very first hit or sip.

the first time i knew i had the sickness was in elementary school. the writing award that got passed around the class revolved around me only, really. it wasn't that anything that i wrote was good, obviously. it was just that i seemed to enjoy it to a much greater degree than the rest of my snot picking peers.

my relationship with my peers has and always will be just that: They pick their noses, and I watch. I just watch and see you acting bizarre, but it isn't really bizarre to anyone else because all the rest of the people are following suit in the very same behavior that can only be chalked up to human nature, and what a foul disgusting thing that can so often be.

i've watched a lot of things happen. i've watched people being abused, people having sex, i've seen body parts and enough shit and piss in the world to choke the herds of civilization and leave this piece, this disgusting boulder in the galaxy, an empty stinking pit of nothingness.

i've seen beauty, i've felt good and been so high I thought for a moment I was living the life that every advertisement has told me that I should be. Yeah, I've been there. I'm just a human too, I guess. It would be a fault of mine to say that I am different or special. There are plenty of people out there, just like me, who don't really participate in life. They just aren't making a spectacle of it, like I am. They are eating their T.V. dinners and jerking off to pornography and doing all the things that humans usually do.. well, I suppose there is art, beauty, music and all of that. But what is art but scribbles? What is music but noise? It is all just a cheap thrill, a little something to make the ride seem like less of a pass through the bowels of an infected bovine.

Is there meaning to be found in anything once you've gone that far off from your fellow man, to the point where you can only observe them? much like a scientist staring into a petri dish at the aborted fetus of a rat; at that point, what else is there to do but shoot it up and see what turns black and falls off first.."
-Letters from an open wound.