scores of witness: 2010

I am currently working on a zine with my girlfriend. the idea is for me to write a few short essays about whatever I want, and she will illustrate them. right now I'm in the writing stage. here is a thing I wrote for the magazine but I don't think I'll put it in because it is too depressing.

After we got home from grandma’s funeral, my dad told me he had found a card she apparently intended to mail to me but never did. She had written the address to my mom’s house, where I was living when I was 15, in nearly illegible script on the front of the envelope. The address was also wrong. The front of the card depicts a smiling cartoon dog flying a kite through a cloud. In a simplistic child-like font, it says “Grandson, you’re such a joy!” The inside of the card says “Mischief, giggles, fun and love – Grandson, that’s what you’re made of! Have a fun filled Easter!”It made me think of the time I spent living in her small house with my brother and dad. This was right before the family was forced to put her in a nursing home since she had mentally and physically deteriorated to the point of requiring constant care which we couldn’t provide because of our jobs. She would fall down a lot. I once woke up and walked into the living room to find her sitting on the couch like she always did, but with dirt and leaves all over her hair and the right side of her face, which was also bleeding. She had gone out into the patio to sit and somehow taken a spill as she was getting out of her lawn chair. Stuff like that happened pretty frequently. I wrapped her arms in bandages countless times. Her skin was like paper, it tore easily. She would brush up against a door knob or something on the way to her bedroom and her skin would be pulled right off, there would be blood everywhere. She had also long lost the ability to prepare her own meals and we had to make them for her, which really wasn’t a big deal but it was weird considering the memories I had of her doing the same for me when I was a kid. She couldn’t clothe herself either, though none of us had the guts to help her in that department, I’m embarrassed to say. She would sometimes come out of her room with her adult diaper on the outside of her pants or her shirt on backwards. We just kind of stifled our laughter in those times, too afraid to address how truly sad and disturbing it was to see the mind of someone we loved and who loved us disintegrate like that. To make matters worse, we were all very rude to her. My dad was clearly troubled by and deeply resented the situation and was so condescending to her most of the time it made me wince. We were all frustrated with having to see what was happening and annoyed that she would ask us the same questions over and over again and do irrational things because of her Alzheimer’s. On one of my first solo CDs, I included as a hidden track a recording of an argument my grandma and I had. She had come into my room while I was recording a demo of a new song and asked me the model of the old organ she had inherited from her dead sister which I kept next to my bed. She claimed she was going to run an ad in the paper for it to try to sell it. She was unemployed and so was my dad. We were buying groceries with her social security check and had absolutely no money to spend on an ad in the paper for an organ that no one would want anyway. She knew this and was being totally crazy. I told her so and incidentally recorded the discussion which followed. Listening to it later, I couldn’t believe what an ungrateful little shit I sound like. Granted I was like 16, but I was still being a rude bastard. During the argument, I offered her $1 for the organ. What a smart ass. My grandma and I would argue all the time because I had grown impatient with living with her. Perhaps the very last cognizant memories she had before she completely lost her ability to communicate were of her family being terrible to her because they hated their lives. I went with my dad to visit her in the nursing home a few months before she died. I hadn’t seen her in years. She looked like a corpse. People should not live as long as she did. She could barely talk to me but I focused on her all of the ten or fifteen minutes I was there because I felt guilty. She asked me questions the answers of which I know she knew at some point but she had forgotten everything. She still cried because she knew who I was and she loved me and it meant a lot to her to see me. The last thing I told her was that I would be coming to the nursing home to visit every week. I never did that. I don’t know if she was aware of it. At her funeral, there were pictures of her as a teenager and we were all surprised to see how pretty she was. My brother wore his Airman’s formal dress uniform and I wore a $10 collared shirt from Wal Mart I had bought the night before and my work pants, which were covered in grease. I felt like an ass. My grandmother died in a place called a nursing home where people send other people to die out of sight. She was kept alive probably much longer than she should have been because every month is another paycheck for those facilities. Nature is what killed my grandma, but it is man which robbed her of her chance at a dignified death. People are a total bummer sometimes.

Friday, May 28, 2010

scores of witness is dead

Sunday, February 28, 2010

every song I've ever made

Friday, February 12, 2010

sad story

Saturday, January 2, 2010

the lost turfwar song

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