The Doogie Howser - 03/24/11

(daily top 10/intentions for my tomorrow, but not necessarily "daily")
#1: Felt crazy tonight - crazy from two months of house arrest due to health, too long in the same incubation chamber, not enough world soaked in by my eyes, not enough foreign smells and sounds and splashes of realities outside my own to feel right. It sounded like airplanes rolling upon us in some sort of formation, and I went outside and it was wind and weather with an ominous but good feeling coming towards us. My wife followed me outside because you could feel it, and I think she could feel me being crazy too and was worried I might wander off in deliriums. I wanted to just run out in the yard and throw my arms up and scream at the skies, loud as fuck, for ever, but didn't, because I could feel her feeling me feeling crazy, and man, the woman has done so much to take care of things around here while I've been hurt the past two months - feeding hogs she is afraid of, taking care of ragged chicken fencing and coop structures that are fine-tuned with my half-assed precision, stacking wood and building fires... all while still doing what she would've been doing anyways. The last thing I wanted to do was scare her worse. So I figured I'd drag the drop cord from the front porch out to the camper, plug in the power strip, and sit out in the camper trailer tonight, listen to the rain, let the music blare through my brain... fuck it, you know. #2: I am comfortable in this camper trailer, more so than most people probably would be. There's a leather chair we inherited from somewhere, a component stereo system, then a table with a couple of factory bench chairs with cushions that make you ass hurt like a movie theater seat from 1989. Beyond that, there's not much room in the camper trailer as it's stuffed with things not necessary enough to be unpacked in the house proper. But I have lived in trailers more than once in my life, and it is a psychology that I am comfortable with, in fact feel good about at times. #3: People often make fun of trailers or the people who live in them, but there's some serious psychological factors to living in a trailer. First off, it's a narrow life, so when the halls are covered in framed pictures, like my grandma's trailer was - and still is, as my aunt and her two boys sort of took it over once my grandmother died of breast cancer a few years back. Being my dad had already died, my sisters and me were part of the group that could inherit what my grandma had owned, but we all signed our rights over to my one uncle with the best credit because he was the only one who could get a personal loan to pay off the debt on everything so that we could keep the land and my aunt and her kids wouldn't get kicked out of the trailer. #4: When I was a teenager and my parents split up, my dad moved into a trailer down the road from my mom, so I would bounce between places as convenient for my teenagerly lifestyle. My room at my dad's was tiny, and we had no heat there for a while, so we slept in all our clothes with winter jackets on. We had no dryer either, so we'd wash our clothes and hang them on the line and they'd just freeze and hang there for two weeks until there was a warm day. When that commercial came on the TV about the little girl getting bundled up and her mom putting her to bed and it being an ad for broke people who can't afford heat, we'd laugh at it. I sold weed a little back then, and would keep my weed there so that my mom wouldn't worry about it, and one time sold a bag to a dude at the other end of the county, like a half ounce maybe, who then turned around and sold an eighth to my dad. I thought it funny how far that little bit of weed travelled and the money exchanged just to get fifteen feet around a couple of faux wood paneled walls no more than an eighth of an inch thick. #5: I also lived in Lindy Hamlet's Trailer Park in Hampden-Sydney, Virginia, and the guy next to the trailer I shared with a dude would always beat his wife and yell at his dog. Oddly enough, when playing horseshoes with "Pops" and the other dudes in the trailer park, they talked shit about the guy yelling at his dog but not beating his wife. I mean, you could tell they didn't like anything about the dude, but what happens outside the 1/4 inch walls with the dog on a chain is public, what happens behind the walls, regardless of hearing it, I guess that's still private. #6: One time playing horseshoes with those dudes, Pops son was there, and I was on man. We played $20 a game and I whooped them, partnering with the dude in the trailer two over from us who had twins that we always thought were named Jesse and James. Pops son wanted to play me one-on-one, for $20. We did, I beat him. He wanted another one, $5 per ringer thrown to the winner. We did, I threw four ringers and a point. Pops' son was pissed, but impressed. Me and the dude with the twins who we thought were named Jesse and James went back to his trailer and smoked a fat joint and I had an extra bottle of Beam back at my trailer, so I got it, and we got thoroughly fucked up, taking Sunday night far enough into Sunday morning that I contemplated just not going to bed, but decided to anyways as a two-hour nap while stone cold fucked up would probably do me more good than a pot of coffee. #7: Behind my dad's trailer back then, we also had a pop-up camper that I would hang out in and wrote some of my first zines in actually. It was my first personal studio I guess, which is probably why I still love having my camper trailer, no matter how crooked and fucked up it is. When my dad couldn't afford his rent on the trailer anymore (he was small engine fixing shit for the landlord there for a while, but I think the dude ran out of charity machines to get my dad to twist wrenches on), he moved the pop-up camper behind my grandma's trailer, and lived there for the most part, though he also found a woman to hang with that he stayed at a lot of times. My uncle Ricky ended up shooting himself in the head behind the pop-up camper (dad was at that woman's house), so once the cops were done with their shit the next day, my two-step grandfather Bob burned the pop-up camper up. No one wanted to see it anymore. #8: When I was a kid, Bob would go to the country store and take me with, which meant I would stand around looking at shit for like two hours while these old dudes would sit around and talk about a whole lot of nothing. I liked when people came in to get meat cut because they had an actual meat locker with curing hams and deer meat and all types of shit, and you could get pork chops cut on the spot or bologna sliced as thick as your thumb if you wanted it. I remember when my dad was fixing lawn mowers for the landlord, we'd go to the country store and get a couple pounds of bologna from them on credit, which was a little spiral notebook under the counter. We also got fresh duck eggs from old ass Ms. Pugh, whose son was in jail and was good friends with my dad, because we'd move things around the house for her or whatever. My dad also would bring home the welfare cheese and butter from the woman he was seeing. Good times man. My dad could cook up a helluva good breakfast, usually for dinner. #9: Not sure why I care to share all this shit. I was reading Deer Hunting With Jesus in the camper trailer as I had started it a month ago but it got buried on the couch underneath a pile of clean laundry. Our washing machine had been broke, so I think we kinda kept that pile of laundry on the couch to pick through for what we needed to feel like we'd never have to go to the laundromat again, because the laundromat sucks. Most of them do at least. I had ordered the parts, but like I said, been hurt and can't do shit. My wife and I fixed it last weekend though, me kinda getting her pointed in the right way, but her doing it with her own two hands - replaced the coupler and the clutch, because if the coupler's been wasted for long enough - like our's was - the clutch is usually shot too, which means it'll stop agitating completely. Took us an hour and a half, but we got it done, me doing nothing but picking out the right socket drives and helping her with anything she couldn't figure out, which wasn't much. Like I said, she's been doing it all. #10: Anyways, when we started tying up the laundry's loose ends with our newly working old washing machine, my center child found my book, so I started reading it again, like tonight. But then "Simple Man" by Lynyrd Skynyrd came on my gaypod and I kinda felt like writing this instead of reading that. That's basically why I don't read anything too much. So yeah, I'm sitting in my camper trailer on a leather chair with a pilfered laptop on top of my actual lap, and I did this instead. In the time I wrote this, various other songs came on, but now it's somehow shuffled itself back to "Tuesday's Gone" and I am still feeling crazy but not so much but goddamn man, I need something to break for me. But I should probably go inside and have my wife repack my fucking oozing wound in my side with gauze before she falls asleep from exhaustion and has to get up tomorrow to do it all again.