Disillusionment

Today was difficult.

I was stationed in the PICU again this morning, but I spent most of my time down at the Burn Unit. I didn't deal very well with the Burn Unit yesterday, and today was really no better, though I was completely decked out in PPG (personal protective gear) the entire time, which was, initially, exciting. 

Then I walked into a patient's room.

I didn't know whether I wanted to puke or cry. Both, probably. There were about seven of us crammed into that tiny little room at one point - two doctors, a few nurses, an RT guy, some residents, and me. I watched the nurses change the dressings on the five-year-old girl with third-degree burns on 80% of her body for about a half hour. I lasted alright when they started off bandaging her legs, but then they got to the hands, and all I wanted to do was scream, shout anything to drown out that little girl's wordless cries of pain. I couldn't take watching her anymore.

And then, of course, they decided to intubate her.

I stayed through all that too. 

The whole thing left me rather shaken. Sitting here, though, I can take a step back and think. What did I expect to find when I decided to go work at a hospital? Happiness? Who am I kidding? People only end up in hospitals if things have gone wrong. There's no happiness there. We just all act like there is. If we don't, we'd all go insane. It's seeing the kids that's the worst, though. Little kids, brought to this place by their parents in the hope that they will emerge all better. Little kids, hit by cars, stricken by some rare illness, the poor children of plain ill luck. The sad thing is, we don't send them home all better. Something hidden always remains. Psychological, social, physical. It'll always be there. And we can't ever fix it. 

Just pretend we did.

Words as Art

I like to use my hands.

Perhaps this can be attributed to my early years in Saturday morning art class. We'd spend each month studying a different genra of art, from still life to wire sculptures, from oil pastels to pottery. All of this was run out of a kind woman's little house by a park where the leaves changed dramatically every fall. I still distinctly remember making the turn onto her street and being just blasted by the sheer color of the trees. We don't get very much of that in Southern California.

I started these lessons when I was very small - I think it was around the same time that I started playing piano. I told myself that I'd grow up to be an author who illustrated her own books. How grand would that be? So I sketched away, HB, 2B, 6B, stringy erasers, abstract art, my first watercolor, a bloated mess of purples and browns. I was so proud of it, though. Every completed work on a canvas that was almost as tall as I was, every masterpiece painted and hot-glued together. 

All of it was my own work, and all of it was tangible. With writing, one has to strain to see, to feel the words and the shape they were meant to take. It was a different form of art, one I loved just the same, but one that, at times, took far too much effort.

I once crafted a snail from clay. I squished the body flat with my thumbs and coiled a separate piece of clay for the shell, just like I'd watched my grandmother make noodles. I had some spare time, so I crafted a little duck and a little snowman and stuck it onto the snail's back. After it was fired but before the glaze was added, I painted my snail a pale sort of pink with a green shell.

It came back to me the next Saturday glossy and smooth, never mind the lumps in the clay. It was something I'd made. Something beautiful.

When I grew older, my parents set aside my love for art, wrapped it up tight in a carboard box, and stuck it on a shelf in the garage alongside my love for life. Art was a child's fancy, they said. I would never make a living from fooling around with paint and clay. I remember the day my mother came to pick me up from my last art lesson. I cried.

And so it was that I learned to lose myself in words. Thankfully, my lessons in letters and stories and books continued because those, at least, could be considered useful to my future well-being. It wasn't until many years later that music became another panacea for my increasing distrust of the world. Now these two are my constants.

I've had my flings, though. First it was crocheting. I crocheted stable blankets for my plastic horses, all in the same pale blue. Then I dabbled in acrylics for a bit, forever painting the same landscape but never quite recreating it. Then I sewed. That didn't last too long, but at least now I can sew buttons and create buttonholes without my mother's worrisome assistance. Then I dabbled in jewelry. Tiger Tail wire, crimps, tiny round-nose pliers and chain-nose pliers, seed beads galore. It was something grand to see it all completed. It always was.

Maybe I have too much nervous energy. Or maybe I've just been reading too much Freud. 

Either way, I still write. By hand. Which recently nearly drove my latest English teacher to tears. There's something that just disappears when I stare at a flickering screen and tap tap tap away. Everything becomes so impersonal. There's no character to the shape of the words, just a mass of uniformity that's more than just a little frightening. I guess I'm just saying that there's less art to typing than there is to writing, though the words may be the same. What are words but art?

Showers and Stuff

When I'm in the shower, I tend to do everything loudly. I sing loudly. I talk loudly. I scream loudly. I even think loudly. For some reason, I am under the impression that when the shower is on, no one on this great planet Earth can make out what I'm saying over the drum of hot water.

I get strange ideas in the shower sometimes. Usually, these strange ideas turn into strange stories that I'm quite fond of never finishing. Once, I was inspired by a twenty-minute steaming session to turn my Vicodin-inspired dream about a giant powder-breathing, purple-and-yellow sea horse with wings into a short story that somehow slipped through the cracks of my remarkably efficient filing system of Throw It In A Crate And Stack It Because There Is No Floorspace Left. What I gained from that experience, however, was a valuable piece of knowledge: stuff one does while half-lucid typically turns out less than half lucid.  The ratio's a bit screwy.

I did gain a great deal from my adventures with Vicodin, though, namely that crying hysterically while not on Vicodin will lead an equally hysterical mother to shove strong opioids down my throat. I'm pretty sure that none of this valuable information has stuck in my porous excuse for a brain, however, because Vicodin and steamy, lonely showers aside, I have yet to find a cure for my debilitating Short-Story-Writing  Syndrome. It's some kind of bug.that sometimes seems more symbiotic than parasitic - it gets hard to tell the difference. Sometimes, it doesn't even take a shower to launch rabid ideas into my brain that strike with all the power of John Henry's bulging biceps but twenty pages later disappear without the faintest whiff of a plot.

It's a miserable existence, dreaming up wonderful worlds and people to mold and watch grow and develop before the inevitable sudden return to reality that sees one's imagination whisp away. Can I not grasp them with a tighter clasp? Poe I am not, but that doesn't mean I can't be downright gloomy just as he was.

It's A New Age, America

Now I remember why I hate driving with my family. But it's the Fourth of July, so I have to be patriotic in spirit and forgiving of heart.

But I'm really neither. So you'll  just have to settle for reading a story that isn't really true.

There is a man at the end of my street who rides a bicycle. Every time I see him, he has this white polo and baseball cap on. He rides very slowly, as if he has never before seen the trees around him through his tinted glasses. He never smiles, never waves, even when acknowledged. He's a lot like the angry man I saw that fine Sunday morning.

A friend who lives down the street across from The Bicycle Man says that he sometimes drops off fresh fruit. My friend appears to be under the impression that The Bicycle/Fruit Man is a friendly human being.

I beg to differ. This is a suspicious man doing suspicious things. I mean, who even rides a bicycle around anymore? Who's got time to do that? And fresh fruit? What!? Fresh fruit is stuff that the cavemen survived on. Excuse me, but we're living comfortably with our GMO's and other processed foods. I could never survive without my hot dogs.

The Bicycle/Fruit Man is a menace to society. We must report him to the police immediately so he can face the proper consequences for existing as a Old-Fashioned Human Being.

It's a new age, America.