cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Landscape of Death and a Pint Glass in Hand Why did I stand up in that blind that day? How did Simon get up and walk? I suppose that if you live in one place long enough it'll all turn into a landscape full of ghosts sooner or later. Every day on my way to lunch I walk past the spot where that kid fell backwards off the window ledge, onto the bricked-over street below while I nursed a pint of beer at the cafe next door. I can still hear the sound of him clipping a table at the Hamilton's cafe just before he hit the ground. It was a freshly set table, waiting for guests who had not yet sat down. Plates and silverware and gleaming upside-down glasses all placed just so. Suddenly shattered; the table it's self broken into several parts. A lovely summer's evening turned inside out. Casual diners and drinkers suddenly sober, unsure of how to behave with their fellows following the sight of a young man's random, violent death. Do you expound on your own personal philosophy of life after death? Some bullshit concoction of half-understood Buddism and faithless Christianity? Or go all out and lay the bare, hopeless emotion on the table in front of co-workers and nameless boyfriends of acquaintances who had just popped in for a quick drink at your table? How much is too much? Face it; nobody is getting laid afterwards no matter what is said. Today I snagged a decent parking spot. Right by the old coal tower where some gutterpunk OD'ed on heroin a while back and where Cr@ig Nordenson shot those 2 kids. I've been thinking about them lately. Especially Katie, the 16 year old girl. I met her father at the scene of the crime a couple of days after she was murdered. His maroon minivan was still running while he walked around and animatedly pointed out who was standing where and how each shot happened. I stood in front of a coagulated pool of her blood on a dirt pathway as dusk turned into night and her father began to sob. This was where Katie was shot through the head on her knees. This was that blood that her heart pumped out through her shattered skull before giving up. Nothing distant or remote about any of it. Sometimes I think about leaving flowers there. She was real. She was a real human being who was forced to her knees and someone I knew shot her in the head and then I stood there, staring at her blood with her father beside me. It's not a fucking amusement park. All kids, mostly. Including the likable homeless gutter punk with his equally homeless dog who died with a needle in his arm a few yards from where Craig did his killing. Them and Lee, a friendly drug-dealer who was killed in a car accident along with his girlfriend close by. Lee who was 21 when I was 16 and who bought me my first bottles of really good beer. It was a bottle of Bell's Pale Ale that he'd gotten for me that has always stood out in my mind. The man who I knew nothing about that was shot in the head while sitting in his car in front of a Cuban restaurant a few blocks up the street from me not long ago. I wasn't there for that, but I think of it every time I pass by. Some sort of dispute regarding cocaine, I'm told. It's a whole landscape of death for me, downtown is. I can't hate it, since so much of my life that was good is wrapped up in these same blocks. The malt shop where I met my wife. The old second run theater where I had my first 'regular' job. The former Woolworths where we played capture the flag as teenagers and somehow never got thrown out. All of these murders and accidents are things I've been over in this and my previous diary before. Yeah, I'm repeating myself. But this is in fact a diary and by definition the appropriate place for such indulgence. I don't have a 'why.' And who says there is one? Why Katie gets suddenly shot in the head but I don't and neither does Craig. Christopher Reeve fell from a horse and then lay in a hospital bed a mile from where I sit where he was told he would never walk again. Which in fact was the case. Yet Simon was paralyzed and then one day there was a simple, sudden miracle and now he's fine. There's no sense to any of it. Who lives and who dies. Who gets a miracle and who dies of an infected bed sore. The most that I can do is to be grateful for my miracles, remember to lay those flowers and raise a pint glass now and then. Preferably filled with Bell's pale ale. 2:30 pm - January 24, 2008 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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