Blog Crawl: My Life is an Open Book

Today, we have a special post for you, the next entry in a series of posts by bloggers across the globe organized by Dallas-based interior designer and blogger hello, splendor. To read more posts in this series, check out the official hello, splendor Blog Crawl roster and schedule here. Thanks to Jill of The Someday Blog for passing the torch to us and head over to The Paper Anniversary Blog tomorrow for the next post in the series.

The assignment:
Interpret as you will...
"My Life is an Open Book"

The Author:
The Setting:
The Characters:
The Plot:
The Twist:

And the response from Dolan....

As everyone should know already, I don’t go in for candy coatings. That’s not to say I’m not prone to my fair share of tender sunset moments, but I seek to divert myself from the vapid glamour-mag style barbie blogs. The main reason: I don’t relate. When I first moved to Chicago, I slept on a pile of clothes and quilts for the first month partially because I was broke, but also because I just liked the aesthetic of making a different shaped bed every day. Some people think that sounds gross or weird, but it changes your point of view when you start on the ground every day. Last Monday I turned 33 and already I’ve accomplished many things I never thought I could. I’ve managed to snag a beautiful and supportive wife and have had the fortune of selling artwork to a ton of very loyal clients. I even bought a fishing boat. But like a true Libra, I’ve always reflected on both sides of the coin. While I’ve been running the art race out here in Chicago, I’ve missed some things I didn’t want to: my sister grew up, my nephews are doing the same, and my grandmother passed silently away while I was selling artwork on the street somewhere. Through our lives, we make trade-offs and sometimes we have to stand away from ourselves to see the full picture, or in my case, the full painting. In my view, every experience in life, everything we see, and hear, and taste piles up in a giant cupboard in our heads and there are days when we have to clean out the cupboard and take stock. On the days I do that, I end up with stories. So here’s a story for you. I’ve left out the images because I think the story is visual enough without them. Enjoy…

Barnstadt and Marigold: Days Beginning

Barnstadt caught the catfish. His right hand was crippled, bent like a petrified birds foot, and he wound the line tightly around this appendage wrapped in burlap- so as not to dig deeply into his flesh. His hands were no longer like twins. He pulled with his left on the twine. Before all of this the line was tied to a tree branch, a finger thick green branch, a branch that could bend and fight the weight of the fish without breaking. The young branch, the green branch, dipped and nodded its neck when the fish ate the bait that was tied to the hook at the end of the twine-line.

This place where he was standing was not a new place. It was an old and religious place, painted with chips of washing machine green tucked under a blanket of clay and pine needles, beneath his feet earthworms sped past collembola thrusting through the dank meaty muddirt, past sowbugs rolling like armadillos, past square nails rusted to bent bolts, shaving hollow places in the earth where the wood that held them was now long gone. Further down into the ground there were bodies here. Once bulky and gravity-challenged dead weights of human things posing problems to people like Barnstadt, now the bones made neat stacks of white that paled in the underlight night world where the worms hung out and hummed whale songs through the marrowless caverns.

Clods of earth caved as a thumping, grinding weight came from above. Barnstadt was crushing out a cigarette that had been spit from his chapped lips. There was a little coal that was still burning by his boot foot, and a miniature pennant of smoke whispered up snakelike along his leg and disappeared into the day. A shake and a twist and a splash, a bird rattle, a snake sliding under a log. A folk radio station played a young and felonious bluegrass whine from the dashboard into a biscuit trucks interior, where it echoed and then died before the door was opened and a heavy metal cooler was pulled heavy-handedly to the edge of the trucks back bumper. The lid opened with a sucking sound and released a smell. Barnstadt thought about summer and hay and a friend and a calendar with a picture of a horse running through a Colorado river. He threw the fish into the cooler where it thumped against the icy interior until it resigned with a frozen brain, its heart still pumping blood, keeping it fresh.

Standing thirty feet away from this scene you would see a box truck with the words Hon is its, painted over, maybe three or four times. Rewind twenty years and the truck side would read Hone iscui s. Rewind 22 years and the truck side would read Honey Biscuits. The truck was a senior-sad truck, and most of the other things about the truck could be found anywhere on a truck of the same age. The painting on the side was unique because it was hand painted , and the image of the biscuit now looked like a dripping aborted sand dollar. The rust from the screws that held the truck together drew attention to the screw holes, and looked like a collection of cake sprinkles melting on warm icing. Someone had attempted to shoot a bull’s-eye in the biscuit with a rifle , had missed , and accidently dotted the ‘I’ below the biscuit picture. But this is not really important. This is all just commercials playing, bathroom breaks during the movie.

The movie itself featured Barnstadt, re-baiting his hook. He took out a cloth bag from somewhere in the novel that was his coat hanging on his shoulders. A button popped, a zipper unzipped, a hand entered. The folded pages of wool and flannel; the hand found the cloth bag and retrieved it, pulling it out into the oxygen. The bag look like it was prepared to give a speech. It cleared its throat, coughed up a thing that was chunky and square, and the speech ended. The cloth bag was put back on page 39 of the flannel and wool novel. (a nod to Brautigan) The thing that was chunky and square was held like a prohibition relic in Barnstadt’s chunky hand. Barnstadt had cut his chunk from the shape of a deer in the grass by the side of a road. The shape of the deer was now being changed into the shape of the grass and the ground. It was being sculpted (subtractively) by twenty seven members of one family of Silpha, who were being helped by sister species of Nicrophrus, who were digging deeply in an attempt to choreograph the body’s burial. “Bury the body, flesh sextons, flesh sextons can bury better than buttered biscuits.” They sang and feasted on the deer body-minus a few carrion chunks, stolen by the hands of a man intent on catching a fish. The thing that was chunky and square and was now found out to be part of a deer body, was pushed onto the sharp point of the hook, and was tossed into the water. The string twine line sunk slowly into the dark green water-cream and disappeared like a penny sinking into cement, like a face in the fog. The bait reached the bottom, and looked around, emitting a cloud of stink and slime into its surroundings. It did this release thing because it had to, as protection but also like perfumes and pheromones. It was marking its territory in the water. It saw not much as it looked around. It missed the rest of its deer body friend, and longed to be buried as well. It made up a secret curse in its head and spelled out omens in the murky dark water. It put a spell on a caddis fly larva, and turned it into a razor blade. .it commanded the razor blade to cut it free, but the spell was broken as the caddis fly sneezed and was confused. And so the deer meat waited for the catfish. It had seen the earlier fish, and was waiting for the relatives and the fish search party, the catfish who searched with taste buds and tongues.

All of a sudden, the deer flesh bait was pulled back into the real oxygen world, Barnstadt jerked the line and the bait waved its swinging self from the pendulum point of the rod tip , swinging close by Barnstadt’s side. He was finished with his fishing, an impatient urge now pulled on his entrails. The bait was gruffly plucked and ripped from its impaled position, Barnstadt wiping his hands on the grass and roots near his boot, flinging the piece into the murk where it plopped and sank again into the water mud-mire, light now as a feather it fell and just out of sight was sucked into the inner jaws of a rock-bass, a redeye, striped face bronze and brown plump being, darting out from a secret underwater ledge and returned to its place there, chomping on the specimen, and little bits floating through its gill-rakers and sitting then undisturbed eating and satisfied. Barnstadt’s boots made preliminary fossil prints in the mud clay grass area near the creek in leaving, and the earthworms that had now surfaced were smashed between boot tread and were separating themselves in escape attempts, some leaving with half bodies squirting entrails, remembering the harsh upper earth reasons to remain underground.

Fast forward found Barnstadt driving the box truck through a semi-road-way past thorn thickets and rhododendron, between redbuds and sycamore and sugar maple and eastern hemlock and bracken fern and jewelweed and Indian pipe and hidden lady’s slipper , wet weeds and fringe forest flora, and in his head was a humming, or was it a buzzing, too busy driving to reveal its real origin, which finally flew out the window crack, a buttery bush bee stuck in the nap and crawling ivy locks of his matted hair. The bee retreated once loose and on its windy way out the window back to its flower haven by the streamside where its legs puffed with pistil placed pollen.

In the rear-view mirror Barnstadt saw the trucks interior in reverse and upside down as his rods and cones tried desperately to flip the picture, he whacked the side of his skull with the butt of his palm, and the image was shocked into place and became more appropriate to the rest of the surrounding surreality. He was on his way to another place.

Marigold made a cake, ate it all, waited in the kitchen and placed chocolate fingertips on a lap steel guitar leaning shinning against a Formica countertop which had sparkly boomerang shapes swimming around in its flat horizontal shape. What Marigold waited for was an inspirational moment in time. She waited for warm weather so she could pitch her face upwards towards the warmth of the sun shinning down and receive its vitamins and mysterious creative inspirations. These dark rainy snowy cold and windy days were long scratches on her inside prison walls, and she marked the last scratch every five days in a connect-four line diagonally across the rest as she waited, wounded by desolate days and deep depressions of human spirit. Marigold waited for a feeling that she knew would come, that she knew was far away, a feeling that was like a giant life preserver bobbing just out of reach on a stormy sea, like a glint of a distant windshield approaching a lost soul wandering in the desert. She opened her mouth a little bit, enough to let her tongue muscle slide out and lick a salty tear that was making its way to the edge of her face. She tasted the salt, and thought about the overflowing jar in her head from which the tear had been pushed out. The jar was full, and little drops escaped over the edge in no formal fashion, in odd moments of reflection or during daydreams. This was no smashing glass emotional momentum, but a slow weight that hung like the proverbial avian around her soft neck. She had earlier been plucking feathers from this bird, preparing to roast it, eat it, and embrace whatever it contained, but had grown lackadaisical in her efforts and had let the idea slip away, and so the feathers had reattached themselves and the bird was again complete and seemed now heavier and more distracting. The story she had been writing was ridiculous and headed in the opposite direction of success, and so she left Barnstadt and his adventures alone on the woodsy road and began writing about her constant misery. She had decided to abandon the idea of writing in the first person, and so here she was, looking in again on herself and trying to write away from herself. She decided to make another cake and so she stopped writing.