Tuesday, July 3, 2007

A Menagerie Of Something Ancient



For many years I had a quiet crush on Tyler. He was confident, as I remember him. He called me kiddo, even though we were the same age, which is something that to this day, still makes me flutter in that short of breath sense of the word. He had a buzz cut and his parents had quite a bit of dough. As far as I knew, his father owned some sort of company. Tyler's parents had a tennis court and a gigantic trampoline. For a seven-year old, Tyler was kind of an asshole. Not a bully, no. Just an asshole. Nonetheless, Tyler always had gaggles of kids at his house, playing with his fanciful expensive toys, and gracefully launching each other into orbit on the trampoline. I was often part of this selfish guilty crew, bashfully smiling and nodding when Tyler over stepped his bounds, when he subtly attacked our families, hair styles, clothes, et cetera. His parents were never around. I don't suppose anyone from the neighborhood even knew what they looked like. Tyler had an older brother, Logan. He didn't really talk to us. Logan would sit, teenaged and bruiting and beautiful in the tree-fort in the backyard and watch us play. His eyes lacks a certain connect. He could and would stare through you, a hundred miles away, watching something more ancient than we saw, lingering on the horizon of Golden Valley. Logan killed himself at age nineteen. It was the first time in my life I knew this to happen. Nobody went over there anymore. We tried not to look when we biked past the backyard menagerie of playthings and goods. No one wanted to see a glimpse of what sent Logan over the edge.

9 comments:

Lyndall-O said...

I really love these pictures. These houses are alien to me. Where I come from neighborhoods look different.

you don't write here anymore?

erin said...

Almost every girl I've met (including myself) has had such an adoration for the nickname "kiddo". It feels like the kind of innocence you used to have only when you were young, when you could wake up on Saturday morning and you had no tasks, nothing to do, but play... it's a comfortable nickname.

Hmm.

qqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq said...

Kendra Grant Malone,

I fell asleep at my job.
I work in a fire tower.
I watch for fires.

I had a dream of a story.
And my dream told me to tell you.

Once there was a man who cried only two tears, but purchased a 40 oz of Bud Light so he could move fast.
At the time the sun was very hot, and TTB said to himself, "I'll go and see what the problem is." As he hopped along toward Sun, he found is getting hotter every day.
"The only thing on earth that doesn't burn," said TTB, "is cactus." So he made a house of cactus to stay in during the day, and he traveled only at night.
When he came to the east, he rose early in the morning and ran toward the place where Sun should appear. He saw the ground boiling and knew that Sun was ready to come up. TTB stopped, cried two tears, drank a beer and sat down.
When Sun was about halfway out of the earth, TTB threw an empty can at it. His first can hit and killed Sun. TTB stood over the corpse and cried: "The white part of your eye will be the clouds." And it was.
"The black part of your eye will be the sky."
And it was.
"Your kidney will be a star,your liver the moon, and your heart the dark."
And they were.
Then TTB said to Sun, "You will never be too hot again, for now you are only a big star."
Sun has never been too hot since, and after that day...no man, woman or child have been born to the same horrid fate as TTB, no one cries for everything anymore.

You, Tao Lin, everyone...
you are like Sun.
You are growing hot.
TTB hates global climate change.

Crying for you, two and proud,
TTB

Kendra Grant Malone said...

omg you are scary

LL said...

hey, i like all of everything i've seen of your writing, the poems on we heart four things were great. right now i'm going to say 'where are you blogging?', but in a minute i'm going to search more and probably find out.

Anonymous said...

I FEELS DAMN GOOD! HA HA HA HAA!!!!
TTB! TTB! TTB!

Jim K. said...

like it, like it

daryl said...

TTB, i remember that day
i was drinking beer
forging steel
using the sun as my forge
and the mountains as my anvil
then you put the sun out
i had to smith a shovel
and dig to the center of the earth
and use the earth's geothermal heat to heat my steel
and pound it into the stars you see
and all steel and precious metals now found on earth
TTB is of the heavens
Daryl is of the earth
forging for you

arrielle_p said...

Nice place. So great to live in a home like that.

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