Further Adventures of Gile Steele
So, there he was at the hospital exactly a year later at the same time, same place having the same procedure performed, by the same doctor, in the same room, next to the nurse’s station where a year earlier several factors came together in the middle of the night causing an unexpected event to occur after his nurse gave him a tiny pain pill to alleviate the fiercest, most relentless pain of his life … then told him the next little pill would NOT be due for another four hours … (four fucking hours?)! What was he to do?
After the nurse left his room he thought about what had just happened then, in a drug and pain induced brain fog pulled the tubes from his left arm and, using the food cart as a walker made a half assed attempt to escape the hospital for some unknown reason.
From that point forward the “real” world fell away was rearranged, reconstructed and put back together again when the strange figure of a man appeared moving down a darkened hallway away from the nurses station, at two a.m. looking very determined, pushing a food cart, wearing black shorts, t-shirt and a pair of white TED hose, where he stopped and was seen telling two nurses, a CNA, a security guy (with arms crossed over golfing shirt … NOT proving that he was a bad ass), that he had every right to leave the hospital if he wanted to.
Soon after the exchange he returned to his room and fell asleep on a lounger that gave great comfort even though it didn’t take the pain away, after the charge nurse downstairs (an Air Force Academy graduate) convinced him it would be better if he DID return to his room.
And so, he did.
As to the significance of the occasion? He told me, “When an unexpected event occurs, you get startled out of your senses and if you’re lucky when this happens, unusual forces from all over the place join together, making all kinds of sparks and new connections and shit that gyrates, that sends light out crossing other paths, pinging, making, striking all colors never seen, crossing, drawn from people normally grazing grass turned brown, bored, lonely jolted awake by something worth seeing having never seen before!”
I loved the way he described it.
“Most of the time we steer ourselves along on rigidly separate flight paths,” he said.
“We are all far flung variables of differing spectrum with varying degrees of heat that would NEVER have crossed paths, becoming heat/light broken/arcing/tapping new rhythms, twisting smoke like colors never seen before, sparks and brief waves of light thrown into the void of all their dark spaces, the light of “being” allowed to exist if but for a moment, during the event that ends with people usually returning to their grazing.”
“They go back to their separate flight paths but with fundamental change. Maybe startlingly singular unexpected conflagrations of attraction coming together such as these, reach into our genome level based on intensity, the genome makes a recording of the event using stripes and numbers, the recordings are a measure of intensity. They’re probably color coded constantly building, writing their own individual formulas, reflections of time and light twisting, building, building intent to reach some point in time to ‘build out’, anxious to accomplish the task or just doing what’s necessary to move about?”
“A recording of events totaling itself within the endless array of neural connections it has been branching off and growing, we see evolution as a result.”
I must have looked perplexed so he explained, “Everybody every day has experiences that impact and startle them awake, that affect them on a fundamental level. A split second after surprise comes the relief of being safe. We laugh in relief that we are still alive. People love to be scared at least momentarily. It’s what we call ”funny” hahaha” … it’s a part of the primal instinct not to get eaten called, self preservation.”
“War is the most powerful experience bringing about change. Self preservation reduced to it’s fundamental opposition, boiled down to black hole level. But war is no laughing matter.”
He loved the absurd humor of these startling, suddenly wide awake situations producing laughter in relief, the sight of people’s faces, the startled first time behavior, the wide eyed, surprised looks, a brief return to childhood face, a re-creation of the 16 year old smile, faces dripping smooth then frozen in time with white teeth and sparkling eyes, adding color, filling in a few of the voids within, awareness boiled down, distilled and rendered into pure unadulterated laughter.”
He joked, “The opposite of war? Haha ha ha ha …!”
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So … you and Coney made two … right?
Slush keeps ya’ from bein’ in a rush … if
…. so, the TSA guys were Cuban or whatever and we were having this bullshit conversation yukking it up about knives and shoe bombs. Everyone was Latino and they looked at me all askance probably surprised since white people are such tight asses. Maybe they were surprised they found one who didn’t really give a shit about walking around keagling all day.
Kurt Struble Writing 
This is one of my favorite pieces not just because it describes what childbirth might be like but, I think it’s beautifully written. I like how it flows and trips along with cadence and sound.
Hey! I can comment about my own work can’t I? It wasn’t even ‘Me’ who wrote the thing. I remember it well. “I felt a slight glow on the pads of my fingers a kind of pulsing and I began to stroke the keys and it felt like my digits were being guided by Aphrodite herself.”
Not quite. More like, my inner roulette wheel spinning words and with the luck of the draw I was able to catch a few every once in a while.
Anyway. BIRTH! The most significant event of our lives! (And, at such a young age!) After all being born into this fucked up world is no easy job. It’s true! Ask any new born kid!
Birth! It’s the door we step through to gain entry into this place with its good and bad and every increment in between, evil and good and all the polar opposites that are the price we pay for living on a planet with a North and South Pole. Shit!
Then, there’s the mistakes we make! Think about how many concussions you’ve given yourself after slapping your self in the forehead saying, “You dumb shit!” Or, I coulda’ had a V8 but with the can.
But that’s life! Right?
The never ending parade that cascades before us, our journey through light with density that we are contained within and can exist in along with other beings just like us and we like them; plants and animals, trees and birds and all those finials from biology no species better or worse we think we are the high ideal but, all we’ve ever done is destroy things.
Yet, BIRTH continues.
Perhaps we judge our lives by how significantly apart we grow from the newborn child’s ultimate experience; the outside and the inside world coming face on with each other at birth, a double brightness, a kind of symbiotic relationship with light given/taken in/returned/then, given back in a never ending cycle.
Just like love and marriage. Right? Except, you can’t have one without the other.
Or, on the abstract level, seen in its entire and completely different and absurd light and really hard to understand level; if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it is there a noise?
THAT’S ONE FOR THE AGES ISN’T IT REXI?. Fuck yes! There’s NOISE because there’s SOUND because the WHOLE PLACE heard the tree fall by the birds and the other trees and the lichen and the bear who was rubbing his butt when the tree fell. Jeez. What a ridiculous posit that, if a human being wasn’t present there MIGHT NOT be no sound. That’s kind of pre infantile thinking isn’t it? Oh? It’s not important? Good.
(That, and the angels dancing on the heads of pins discussion always gets me. Sooooo interesting. Someone should put THAT posit on a post it note and file it in the floor file.)
I think that every day it’s possible that at some point in time when time is the right time and the stars and all that other crap fit together just right I could find myself in the ‘real’ world behind all of the facades of daily life. We need those facades but they can be all consuming!
To suddenly experience the revery of speechless awe at the world around us. We all KNOW that other place is here, waiting to be experienced. Is that desire what keeps us going?
I think that, as life moves along we judge the degrees of success with our lives by the baseline of CHILDBIRTH. Which brings us back to the poem.
The words in that poem flowed through my fingers with such DELIGHT!
Wull … it’s ok to comment on my own work isn’t it? Actually, I don’t even know who wrote this piece remember? I was just the postman. Check out the post, “When I Was Born.” I hope you like it as much as I do. Au’revoir.