CAST: of characters

October 6, 2024

EROS HOTEL

Desk Clerk/Gatekeper

1. St. Augustine/with ghost of Euripides
2. Richard III
3. Menno Simons
4. Catherine the Great
5. Ludwig Van Beethoven
6. Queen Victoria
7. Sigmund Freud/with Richard Dehmel
8. Samuel Beckett

Augustine is working on a story for you!

I WANT TO DRIVE MY CAR

September 25, 2024

DREAM

This is still kind of loopy but I’ll put it in my dreams section on my website.

Last night I dreamed of forgetting my car. I was driving and needed to park quickly.
The parking lot changing from U of M to the downtown flat lots while I went to meetings.
I overstayed my welcome the tough guys came and towed my green Studebaker to their central parking compound. Not happy, I had the phone number and called.
I went to the compound and it seems the visit, only one or two, in real life had an impact. The tough guys as I’ll call them, were not interested in helping me at all, calling forth their manager, who suggested with a significant payment well over the usual compound fees I could get my car in time to get to the airport where I wanted to go in a hurry or they would give me a ride in my own car and keep it safe in their compound. Gullible to a fault sure drive me to the airport.
I was in Minneapolis for a professional development event for writers. Returning, landin, back in Winnipeg I called for my car and the compound said they didn’t have it. Likely somebody stole it. WTF, what do you mean, “likely it was stolen.”
“Happens here all the time.” I’m on my way, and I expect to retrieve my car at the government approved rates for parking tickets and such.
Do what you want, but you’ll be wasting your time. I take a cab who I asked to wait but insists on collecting its fare, and then high-tails it out of there. Not a pleasant neighborhood, for sure. I see what I think is my green Studebaker and go into the compound office all huffy and puffy. “I’d like my car please.”
“Yeah, about that we don’t have your car
“I can see it in the lot without its doors.”
“Oh, that. It’s not your car. Did your car have doors?”
“Yes, of course I could drive it.
“See, not your car.”
“Should I call the police?
I don’t know what you should do. I would suggest leaving as your best choice.

After muttering a number of profanities, I turned and walked out into the lot, and tried to make a phone call. But there was no, I mean NO cell phone service thereabouts, at all! walk away afraid in the dark until I find service, call for a cab
Two possible endings; One I walk to the green Studebaker get in on the driver’s side throw my carry-on into the back seat and try my spare key. It starts, I go, leaving with no doors on the car. The second is I try to retrieve the car but have no way to get it started and not ready to drive it without doors. So I walk away afraid of the dark, until I come into the light and cell service.

IMAGINATIONS

September 21, 2024

I’m opening a new page in or from the pain room, called “Imaginations.” Being in the  moment  is natural but often claimed by pedestrian thinkers. We are, we humans, in the moment such is our nature. The IMAGINATIONS latch old too the idea that we disabled folks can imagine a moment taking us from our beds and chairs into the world of our imaginations. I have been waiting for the right moment to sew these together, but fuck it, now it’s as good as anytime to be in my imagined moments. I will try to keep these to their own page with “pain room” as the parent page. My imagination can do only so much, as pain is clobbering me now from my hands to my shoulders and neck. So this is a place to start.

WAKING SLOW ~

Corporal Ivy opens his eyes, blinks, and sees Blake’s “Glad Day,” painted on the ceiling. “That’s me,” says he once and again. What a fine figure of a man am I! The fan has been running intermittently all night, but steady since the morning bell. The room smells like it is above the Hero’s Hotel bar in Boundary Creek, Manitoba. The room smells like a dentist’s office more precisely, which is what it was, once upon a time, before the hotel’s sale to the Administration, and the occupancy of Corporal Ivy.

“Iris,” he says, “my meds and water please.” The wheelchair wide door to the pain room opens admitting Iris who drifts in and stops at bedside. “Shall I serve?” “Always,” says the crippled naked man, pleased at the progress of automated service since the Rumba, no the Roomba, it was, had diddled around his feet. He liked the sound of the name enough to buy stock. He was fond of the sound of small electric motors, though nothing beat a gas mower for the lawn outside. That was one of his harvested sounds, collected by one of the homecare workers, handy with recording devices.

He had neither a Roomba, now, nor feet for it to diddle around. Both his legs were amputated below the knee following an industrial accident, a photo shoot actually, which had been his occupation until his preoccupation with focus caused him to drop sixteen feet. He was surprised that he landed upright like his cat, until his ankles shattered. “Fucking useless hardhat!” he exclaimed, the witnesses later testified, and tossing it away with nothing between him and the concrete when he started to wobble, fainted and fell on his face. “Oh shit,” said the forklift operator, “not my fault.” “Oh shit,” said the shift super, “more paperwork.” Memories got a little hazy at this point, what with the screaming and bleeding and blaming and hiding, the lights falling from the scaffolding after it had stopped the fork lift operator from running over Mr. Unfocused on the floor.

Iris opened the bedside fridge to the bedside water, juice and milk. She placed a clean cold glass on a cork lined serving tray, filled it from a pitcher of filtered cold water sourced from the springs in Marchand Manitoba, placing it on a hospital style table swinging over the bed when convenient. She opened his night table drawer, preparing his oral medications.

Corporal was thirsty, drank harshly and took his seven different pills, some psychotropic, some for physical pain. He clicked his stereo remote currently programmed for Beethoven string quartets. The bed was programmed with his seven favourite positions including one that actually stretched him backwards and lowered his head. Wished they could reprogram my back, riddled with osteoarthritis, bad cartilage genetics causing degenerative disc disease. Collapsing on his nerves.

This part of the day, did not vary, until he lay back to wait for the meds to kick in and reduce his pain levels to allow for the zip to the loo, and a ritual bath. “Let’s have Greece,” he said settling back with his legs spread, under a thin top sheet with a fan blowing over him. He had access to envirocams all over the world, but chose seven for the year 2027. He imagined he might change things up in 2028.

The ceiling screen filled with images of Kanakai Beach, virtually deserted, on the Island of Salamis, close to the cave of Euripides writing the Tragedy of Oedipus.