Kali's Campgrounds

Eloise

2006-07-17T13:35:00.000-07:00

She had told me that “it’s about something serious,” three days after Eloise had died, but I felt she’d been courteous enough to give me that time for feeding my anger, so in a way, I forgave her. It seemed to match, anyway; I’d bought the plot a year ago. Susan thought I was being morbid, “again,” she told me. Franklin wanted to embalm her, but even I thought that was ridiculous. Eloise didn’t care, after all: she was dead, and as pleasantly indifferent as dead dogs can be. I wasn’t comfortable with keeping her in the freezer, but we needed to meet Franklin halfway in the matter. Mother was completely against the idea, but it wasn’t her dog, I reminded her.

“Besides that, mother, I’m an adult.” Which wasn’t true, of course, in all reality. She still did the laundry sometimes. But I wanted things done my way in my apartment, for once. Seems normal to me, really, to bury the family pet nearby. Maybe the headstone was a bit much.

“Eloise will like it,” Franklin told me the afternoon we shopped for the wretched thing. He’d brought Susan along. He’d fallen in love with for the fifth time since she ran into him in New York. She was taking film classes there, sleeping with up and coming directors: he found her intriguing. I never much cared for the green hair.

“Of course she would have.” Susan had a habit of cleaning her nails when he was upset.

I tossed out the vat Cold Stone Creamery had given me in exchange for half my wallet. No one can eat that much saturated fat. “Sure. I bet you she will.” I felt sick dealing with him and his sentimental insistences. Maybe that’s what Susan fell for, but I’m putting my money on our apartment instead. It’s a nice apartment, though the landlord hates dogs. Susan was living with us now. I guess things work out in the end for the majority.

“It’s just that, you know: I loved the fuckbag.” Franklin had a habit of cursing when he was upset. I guess we all developed habits in accordance to his mood swings. I had a habit of feeding Eloise more on those days. I supposed I’d get a rabbit. Name it Roots after the Canadian brand: mix things up.

“Who’s going to bury her?”

“Don’t they do that for you? I thought that came with the package.”
“Yeah, I suppose you’re right.” I was lying, of course. They’d offered it in the package, plot and burial services, but it seemed over much for a dog. I’d declined. Still, it didn’t seem right to mention that we’d have to do it ourselves, especially when they’d worked up such forlorn. I’d know I’d be doing it myself, anyway.

2006-07-06T18:17:00.000-07:00

Jason Ambler: highschool professor of post world war one history, failed poet, and married man of thirty five years. I am the titles I've given myself in this small nowhere Iowa, and respect has been enough to keep me floating since Beth and I moved here, fifteen years ago. The world was all I wanted as a boy: Moroccan women, grand castles and drab Edinburgh at my finger tips to write about and muse on, to drink to as drunken poets can--when they're successful. But I never went to Morocco, never plowed through Russian streets nor visited Egyptian tombs. I never wrote good poetry, either, though I suppose that's where it began rather than a side note. I teach, as so many other men my age, because I could not bring myself to leave the school yard and grow up, at last, and because I love history--I do. But I was never meant to be a married man, had no intention to wash dishes next to a plumpening woman who weeds her garden in sweatpants and watches the home shopping channel. I still want to be something else, really, but weighed in B papers and test correction, here I sit on our old, cat hair coated couch, another washed up fourty-something in his boxers, a cigarette and a glass of beer my only exotics.

Back to Dashboard

2006-07-04T11:02:00.000-07:00

Perhaps this explosion pieces together the parts of my personality that don't alliterate as well, but I'm tired of constant reinvention. Legs crossed and hippie slung, dyed and pierced and bellowing, bellied like a prize pig again. This is the part where I add in a sigh. I'd like college, now, and fewer writing prompts for pounding out sunburnt poetry. Maybe my dog by my side and pistachio gelato. Waxed hair and walmart watch, Anthropology and Reefs on foot I've my moleskin and my future to consider, but this is overwhelming. I wish it would rain. Sewanee would be lovely wet, I think, all roughened stone and bell towers. I want it to be spring, so I could stare at daffodils, but then I remember that I wouldn't stare if they were blooming, bright: I'd be sitting here, or a place like here, pattering in muted unison with the electronic smell of modern monkeys and fresh printer paper.

Right Wall and Ceiling Axel Grease

2006-07-03T16:23:00.000-07:00

Kids self mutilate these days and curse like eager puppies. People are too busy proving just how complicated they are to notice their own life experience go by, and blades of grass come in and out of this frame, footstep to footstep. We keep trying. Meanwhile, someone sits in a cubicle somewhere and proves that we, who sit elsewhere, accomplishing nothing but musings, are commercially unacceptable. It's days like these that cigarettes and skin cancer come to mind like saturated fats, the ideas seeping into my gut and coagulating there. I'd like to prove myself wrong, and maybe learn to appreciate modern art, but all these things just seem like another twenty percent of my daily two-thousand calorie intake allowance. So it goes.

--Mec

We begin again.

2006-06-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

This is my little way of saying "fuck online journals!"

By getting one.

Another one.

But mind you: it won't be just any journal! I'll actually have shit to say this time around, and I promise that it will be interesting.