Lookin’ for Trouble

Lookin’ for Trouble, originally uploaded by Christopher Rauch.

This non-prose world, called unreal by the rulers of this age, but real to people of faith, is the world entered by the mystic, the contemplative, the visionary, the prophet, the poet…For the modern man, truth…is arrived through prose…not intuition, not imagination, not wonder, not awe, not worship, not reverence, not trust, not faith. – Brian D. McLaren.

I tried to read ” A Generous Orthodoxy” years ago as a denominational Christian. I’ve always thought too much, so my days in mainstream Religianity were numbered. I have a reading problem. Books are my crack. I’ve haven’t pawned anything to buy books…yet, but it could happen. In spite of this proclivity, I could not finish Brian’s attempt to reconcile ecumenism with doctrine in a major world religion that has fractured into myriad fragments, with much disagreement and (in the past…right?) bitterness. He was just too blasphemous. That much openmindedness was an antidote to faith, seemed to be the underlying sentiment in my little church. Brian wanted me to entertain the notion that my faith might have a few errors in it, and that when I disagreed with your theology, that you might have a point. My tiny Kentuckian congregation had some firm boundaries about stuff like this, even though one of our cliche’s was “Don’t check your brains at the door”. I did like the fact that McLaren wears out parentheses. Perhaps we are distantly related. When I shelved “Orthodoxy” I didn’t realize how arid the landscape was becoming…
Now, after a little time in the desert, I find him MUCH easier to swallow. (It’s because you have apostasized, Brother! The Corinthians have turned you over to SATAN!). So my inner mystic (we all have one… it’s kinda like an inner butthead. I have one of those, too.) tells me “Your pastor just referred to that heretic you’re re-reading…and for five or six years you have not lost that book. It must be a sign!”
The question is (After all, Jesus performed a sign or two, and then went on to say wanting a sign wasn’t cricket.),” By looking for writing on the interior sky, am I guilty of wanting to be the star of my own story? Or am I disappointed that my life seems to be unimportant in this Grand Epic, and simply hungering for a more significant role?”
I gotta go to work. Unfortunately the mule is in the ditch, and these musing will have to go in my inner “Drafts” folder. Who knows when I’ll get around to cleaning that up?

Yeah, I know.

Yeah, I know., originally uploaded by Christopher Rauch.

    
     Suzie, my bitch (lol. It cracks me up to type that.) who usually sleeps diagonal to me on the left side, wandered in and out of the whelping area I prepared for her (a few towels, a couple old sleeping bags in the closet of Kelsie’s old room) earlier this week. She’s done that for the last few of nights, but last night she was unusually agitated. She woke me up about 1:30, and I figured she was in labor. I got threw down my good sleeping bag next to the whelping area, and that calmed her down quite a bit. She’s a daddy’s girl. I fired up the laptop and started re-listening to a podcast. every time I would drift away, Suzie would whimper, roll around, or simply lick my face, nostrils, and closed eyes, until I defended myself. I got a little coleman led lantern and the turning it on revealed that Suzie’s vagina was REALLY funny lookin’. It was swollen (I’ve seen a couple swollen vaginas. This was different.), and looked somehow… too long. 
So I touched it ( I know, ewwww!), it was a LOT harder than any other  vagina I’ve ever touched. I began speculate and imagine that this is what a canine vagina would look like if it had a puppy in it.
     Guess what?
     I was right!  It  spit out a little water balloon that ruptured into what looked like a wet guinea pig in a condom. And since then we have been having puppies. Six  Seven of ‘em in five hours. and she’s getting that look again…

Beg for it.

Beg for it., originally uploaded by Christopher Rauch.

     I rolled out of bed while the little hand was still on the four this morning, and strapped on my sneakers and went out for a run.

     For yards.

     And yards.

     Maybe three hundred of them.

     Jesus. The pain was remarkable. I did this the day before yesterday, I went out for a bit of exercise before daylight and decided to run a little bit. I jogged almost to a particular tree on the way to the park. When I approached I was beginning to get winded and said to myself, “I’ll make it to the tree tommorrow, and then go a little further than that on subsequent days, until I regain the ass and legs and lungs I had ten years ago.” I really don’t speak to myself that clearly, but you get the gist. After running the first day, running the second morning was out of the question.
     Just walking was something I had been taking for granted. I simply couldn’t get out of the house before before daylight, and I would just like to get to the point where I look just a leetle better before I run primetime, for an audience.

     But I got my ass up and out there this morning. I don’t wanna screw around about this. Poor physical health is a guaranteed shitty old age, and you will arrive suddenly, surprised the horizon you’ve been watching approach for years is now in your face, like these last couple of sentences.

     Oops.

     Sorry. I was in self-motivation mode. Talking sweet to me is generally not a great policy until after the job is done. I do need affirmation, but you need to shame or embarrass me a little to get me off my ass. It’s my Asian roots, coupled with my western sense of entitlement.

     Anyway, I get to the tree, and I’m nervous. My chest is tight, each breath seems devoid of oxygen. My knees are competing to see who can scream submission the loudest (We are your bitches! Please stop this!). I wonder if running during the late morning is a better idea…at least someone might see the beached whale flopping about in the throes of a heart attack ( is that a pain?…shooting down my left arm?…WTF? OMFG!) and as Wycleff asks Mary J. Blige…please call 911.

     I think jogging and running, are bad for you. The impact on the knees, that is. Inertia, and the fact that we live so much longer then naturally selected for suggest that we break from nature a little. Especially after middle age*. Running is the is the ideal exercise in terms of body maintnence from a design perspective, but progress has enabled us to outlive the warranty on our knees, so really, I guess old farts like me need to ride bikes and swim.

     Or Nordic Trac, which is low impact on the knees.

     And hey, that’s cool. I get it.

     But running is still the ideal exercise, and from an evolutionary standpoint, running keeps you alive in the whole “Catch food, don’t be food” system. Running is nature’s fitness test. In simplest terms, if you can’t run, you die. I want to be able to pass nature’s fitness test. I will do the biking, hiking, aerobic thing as well, but I wanna be able to run. I haven’t figured out how far this needs to be, but right now… after about half a mile I can look to my left and see a dark figure pacing me, lookin’ like Gandalf in a hoodie with a big sickle, and that aint good enough.
    Not for me.
  
     now, you do not have to run…

     Hell, you don’t even have to exercise at all.

     Have another bon bon.

    But my spidey sense is tingling. I add my observation of the the lives of old folks who had a few bad habits to what I learn about the rythyms of growth and deterioration in the human lifespan, and my Ideas of what needs to happen politically in the world if we are going to eradicate poverty, and what will probably happen instead on account of human nature, and I realize:

1. If I don’t get on the ball about some significant changes in my lifestyle, I will have a poor quality of life when I am at my most helpless.
2. This will be followed by a painful death.
3. At my age, It’s right around the corner, If I don’t quit screwing around. In case you haven’t noticed, time is picking up speed.

     Stanley, in one of his series (The Path Principle, maybe) talks about praying for God to tune him into potential trainwrecks so that he can avoid them…The ol’ “Lord, keep me from screwing myself through ignorance or inactivity.” prayer.

     I have had flashes of insight, and seen where that prayer was answered when I never prayed it. We can probably all look back and see places where we are grateful we chose a particular direction at a fork in the road. Hopefully this will be one of those times for me, as I look back. My father died early because he made some poor cardiovascular choices. He left when he had stewardship of greater resources than ever before. His potential to impact the world for good was greater than it had ever been, and he left at a time when I really needed my father. All of this could have been otherwise if he had picked differently at a couple forks.

* And hey…for those of you who have trouble with the concept…if you don’t expect to double your age before you die….IT’S AFTER MIDDLE AGE!

Love

love, originally uploaded by Christopher Rauch.

Suzie is pregnant as can be. I am amazed she doesn’t squirt puppies out with every step. She has been extra needy, underfoot a lot, and prone to lick your face without warning. Debbie makes no attempt to moderate Soozer’s behavior… she just sits there and takes it.

Email puppies@christopherrauch.com to reserve yours today!

Hopefully Soozers was a little picky, and Daddy was a handsome dog.

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Blood Drive

Blood Drive, originally uploaded by Christopher Rauch.

     I gave blood for the first time in high school as a sophomore in ’84. Needles held no fear for me, the ex Allergy Shot Poster Child, and the novelty of being excused from school to be bussed to the rec department is one of my last memories before being asked to sever my relationship with the Houston County Board of Education. Since then, I have given blood many times. Things are a little different now, They no longer use the blue juice to see if your blood sinks, checking for enough iron. Nowadays they use a device that looks more like a blood sugar monitor. Another thing that is different is the prevalence of  invisible death, 2 diseases  that will kill you, and that you can only catch by exchanging essences with another human. There is also some brain eating disease connected somehow to spending more than three months in England, and/or  having used a certain pituitary growth hormone. It doesn’t seem to make sense to me. The Red Cross site gives some fascinating historical information and some interesting statistics:

• 1pint of blood can save three lives
• Every two seconds, someone needs a transfusion
• In the United States, five million people a year need blood.
• Less than 38 percent of the population can give blood.
• Some blood components have a shelf life of only 5 days

     This poses some interesting logistics issues, further complicated by the fact that not all blood is the same, you can’t just suck out some blood from donor 1 and shoot it into recipient 2. This can kill people. The Red Cross has got a big job, and I’m sure I don’t know the half of it, but I wonder about the boundaries, if they are a reflection of politics and marketing as much as genuine safety. If you’ve had a recent tattoo, ever shot dope without paying a doctor to a assist or ever been intimate with someone else’s penis, while possessing one of your own, they would like you to remain a part of the 62% of the population that is ineligible. This is statistics at work. Each donor’s blood is tested for infectious diseases at one of the Red Cross’s five national laboratories. and I would like to think that they are effective. Could we not increase the amount of available blood while decreasing the amount of labor and resources need to obtain it by relaxing these guidelines a little?
     Being in the system, I have received 2 phone calls and 2 glossy, very nicely appointed mailers letting me know about this last Tuesday’s blood drive.  That stuff is expensive. I wonder if the eligible population was larger, could the Red Cross spend less on marketing, and shift some of those resources to something else? Perhaps establishing caches of disaster supplies near heliports, would be a good idea, as Arod in San Francisco suggested in a recent post. A more efficient disaster response could conceivably reduce violent crime in disaster areas, which would possibly have a slight mitigating impact on blood requirements. I don’t really know the answers to any of these questions, but from a stewardship perspective are we minimalizing our blood supply out of fear for public opinion on Red Cross safety measures or are the disease scanning protocols not as effective as one would hope, and do the risk categories provide a little statistical cushion needed to keep transfusion recipients from dropping like flies from AIDS and Hep C?
     Has fear been a factor in setting these guidelines? I wonder.

I haven’t got all day, originally uploaded by Christopher Rauch.

My Baby with The Baby

 

      I really love this shot of Debbie. It slipped through the cracks. Baby’s got a facebook (finally), so I’m going through the archives…

     It’s good to see a little light at the end of the tunnel. I haven’t been able to write or photograph with anything approaching a level of healthy discipline, but the quarter is almost over. I did get a few unusual shots, by happenstance yesterday, and I really want to scroll the nasty story down the page a little. I noticed someone from Middle Ga.  viewed it 15 times yesterday, and nobody does that. It felt a little stalky.

     So here goes with a little photographic filler: 

                                                                     

     This was shot at the same firestation I took Colin too a few months ago, I’d never seen a fire truck stretched out, so to speak…

     This guy is a friend of mine from school, and this was shot very casually, but I think it’s a striking photo, I was pleased.

The History club also had a guy drop by in an old top hat and give a presentation on Sidney Lanier, a poet and musician from Macon

My First Fiction. This One is Pretty Dirty.

This One is Pretty Dirty., originally uploaded by Christopher Rauch.

     Sorry.
     I kinda had to write it that way. It’s offensive.
     Twice I have posted schoolwork here on the ol’ blog. The comparison of Dunbar’s Mask with President Carter’s World was for English 102. I was actually impressed with both poems. It seems at some point, I have lost some of my hatred of poetry.The Homosexuality Post, I originally wrote for English 101. It is by far the most viewed post on my blog. There is no close second. This will be my third posted assignment. I believe it is  the first fiction I have written. Both my previous papers were A’s but this last one has the highest numeric grade I have ever gotten, which is amazing. In the days following Aunt Judy’s death, I was immobilized, unable to accomplish much, so this was written in the space a couple hours under an enormous feeling of pressure, without my usual visit to an English tutor to proofread my grammar, which is a little bad, since I am a high school dropout. The rush also forced me to finish before I could smooth some of the rough edges of the plot. I printed this thing less than 15 minutes before it was due. It takes 7 minutes to drive to this class.
     Robert Browning has a poem called Porphria’s Lover about a man that strangles his lover with her hair so (I speculate) that her love, for him which he is insecure about, will be frozen into eternity. Yep. Pretty sick stuff . The murder of his woman is a theme Browning uses in more than one poem,..hmmm. I wonder If he resented the fact that his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (“How do I love thee…”), was more highly regarded.

     My last writing assignment was to tell this story from Porphyria’s perspective, which posed some interesting problems for me. 

1. Browning has his victims cheeks blush after death. How do I do that?
2. Much of the poem takes place after the murder. How does Porphryia witness it?
3. What kind of backstory is needed to account for the shocking sequence of events?

     
     Porphyria’s lover can be read here, It’s not very long. I am mildly amazed that this is literature, but then I look at the Bible and there is some pretty disturbing stuff in there, too. My paper is a little more graphic then the Bible. I would never write any feminine first person story (remember, I don’t think I’ve ever written a “story” ) unprompted, so this stretched me and possibly the writing sux.  Browning’s poem is hellaciously shocking. 

     My own story is probably more shocking, and  a LOT sicker. Not everyone should read it. I am slightly dismayed it sprang from my head.

     Didja get that?  In my story the motive for Porphyria’s murder is her promiscuity, a dysfunction resulting from being sexually abused by her father. The story also contains sex and violence. Together…  in an unusually nasty way (at least I think it’s unusual. We don’t do any of this stuff over here…). So consider yourself warned. Fairly.
    

Chris Rauch

ENG 202

12 August 2009

As Long as I Can Remember

I. Up the Hill

I run full tilt up the path in the rain, my boots throwing up handfuls of water. Each step displaces sheets of glass and flings them upward where they unweave into tiny diamonds, glittering in the light of the moon. They seem to float, keeping pace with me as my lungs suck fire from the frigid evening air. Slowly, they drift to the rear as I overtake the jewels my hurried progress has cast before me. I curse the weather, the transportation, and the opium. I curse my brokenness, and my inability to forget the man I was with before I married his best friend. I curse my inability to stay away from him. I‘ve acted like a stupid slut all my life, I think. 
“And what does that make you?” the voice in my head asks….

II. Aside

 I’ve had a little voice inside me for as long as I can remember. The voice doesn’t like me much. I can’t remember the voice ever liking me, but I noticed after getting married the voice sounded just like my husband, Jim. 

And my husband Bill.

As a matter of fact, The Voice sounds like whichever husband I’m on at the time. Whichever husband I’m married to, I mean. I’ve been married to 5, but I’ve been on considerably more than that (Hopefully, I’ve never been on yours, but it wouldn’t surprise me). I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember.

Of all my husbands Ted  was different. The Voice never sounded like Ted. For seven years of heaven, The Voice did not sound like the man I was married too. For seven years, The Voice sounded like my father, not my husband, not the man I was trying to love. I really liked that, and I knew I wanted to keep this one.

I leave husbands. It’s what I do. I leave mine, I leave yours. I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember. I go away. I go home to my father’s, and I never come back. I came back to Ted, though… Again, and again. What can I say? He was just different. Finally, Ted left me. Brokenhearted. Older. Wiser. Out of patience, tears, time, and money, the one husband I couldn’t bring myself to stay away from became the One That Got Away.

Now, two husbands later, I lope around the bend, and see Ted’s cottage bathed in swirling luminescence. I am amazed at the clarity of my night vision. Tonight, I resolve to tell him that I have married again. Some strange alchemy occurs as the wisps of opium float over the sea of adrenaline that surges through my veins, spiking at the thought he will be able to resist me, this time…that I am simply too broken to make this happen, that he will send me away.

III. Around the Bend

My heart beats an impossibly sluggish  metronome that sets the slow-motion pace of my pumping arms and legs. Even the law of gravity kneels to this magic, and I see suspended droplets (rain? splash?) in exquisite detail. Each is a tiny little world, a mirrored sphere reflecting the night sky, where  the Moon is alternately shrouded and revealed by wind whipped clouds with burgeoning  rapidity, punctuated by flashes of lightning. My thoughts gather speed  to match the wind I hear in the treetops, The husbandvoice is silent as we both observe the unlit windows. The Chimney mouth is mute, empty of smoke. Noiselessly, I push open the door, and see him, the love of my life, sitting in the cold anguished dark of a single candle. My eyes take in the room – the dying embers of the fire, the extinguished lamp. I am hours late. 
Again.
Has he been brooding all this time?

IV. In the Cottage

I move to the hearth. As I pass by Ted, my fingertips brush the meerschaum on the table at his side and note its lack of heat. He probably has not smoked since the fire went out.  I grab a few pieces of kindling and begin rebuilding the fire. As I work, I hear the occasional, sizzle as stray drips fall from my hands onto the coals. I know I cause his silence and dejection. Tonight, I am the source of his pain, not the pipe at his side. Tonight is my last chance, I think as I rebuild the fire, and warmth and light trickle into the room. Tonight is my last chance, and I will throw it away, like I always have. The Fathervoice mumbles a few choice comments.

My task completed, I stand and strip off my sodden outer garments, conscious of the heat radiating from the fireplace, my cheeks…and my sex. It’s unnerving, this lack of speech. I am terrified it is over.  I sit next to him. My voice breaks in synchronicity with my with my heart as I say his name and he doesn’t answer. Galvanized, I murmur love and endearment, as I unlace, rearrange, adjust. I half rise, swinging around to face him. Some trick of the flickering light keeps his eyes in shadow, denying me their message. My tears begin. I smile and I draw his arms around me, his face down to the juncture of my neck and shoulder. I murmur love and apologies through my tears, pleading, repeating old, worn promises . I grow desperate, hungering for a response, waiting, and wanting so badly.

V. Love and Death

It seems hours before he begans to move around me. I feel the arm I placed around my waist come to life, hardening and tightening,  pulling my skirt up on my thighs as the fingers of his other hand tangle in my hair, pulling me back as I sink to my knees in front of him.  He eases forward, expressionless.  He joins me on the floor in front of his chair,  pulling my head back cruelly, and burying his lips against my throat as his free hand continue the work of opening my bodice,  burrowing past layers, roaming over nipples harder than gravel.
My breath catches, quickens. He begins  sliding warm, callused fingers along one inner thigh to my center, pulling whimpers and sobs from within me.

“You don’t love me.” I felt his lips move against my throat.

“Oh, baby, I do!” I moan, soaring through the skies as I kneel on the floor, the pain in my scalp intensifying with my desire. He twists my hair into a cable, his fingers dance upward between my labia with virtuosity, playing a sonata on my clitoris. I surge upward toward my crest, and feel the cable of my hair pulled around my throat working between his lips and my skin as orgasms flood my senses…once, twice, and a third time. With each strangling jerk of my hair twining around my neck, I come again, dimly aware I can no longer get air, that my love withholds breath and life as I struggle weakly, his fingers slowing, and his flat cold eyes boring into mine.  

“You don’t love me.” Now he sounds like Daddy! 
As the world grows dark, and I slip from it, I feel Ted’s fingers twitch one last time, And I think he even touches me like Daddy!  and with this the veil is torn from memory, the images flooding back into my awareness.  I hear Daddy murmur love and apologies through my tears and pleading,  as he repeats old, worn promises.
I hear my heart stop beating, and I see nothing.

VI. Epilogue

I observe from by the window, as Ted’s screaming shatters the night, drowning out the last remnants of the storm. I look down at myself and nothing is there.
I know what I have become. 
I feel tired despair, and the weight of life wasted as I find myself once again in the room listening to the labored breathing of my lover. I cry out. There is no sound. I cry louder, nothing. I watch in horror as Ted draws his knife and lay s the edge against his throat. I shout with everything I have, and he seems to react. I pour myself out, I tell him I love him, I forgive him, I understand. With each utterance, his eyes seem to open wider, the windows of his soul torn open as he searches for the source of haunting.  Finally I can see the man I know  and realize the madness has left him, though he believes himself still in its grip. The blade glitters one last time as he slices himself from ear to ear, and the blood fountains out in powerful spurts. Dropping the knife, Ted bends over, bathing my corpse in blood, loosening the hair from my neck. He lifts me in his arms, and takes his seat, his lips smearing blood and tears on my cheeks, a strange sigh coming from the sliced trachea.

Ted arranges my corpse in his lap, his heart slowing, his blood no longer pumping with the original force, but welling down his chest in a rhythmic ebb and flow. He places my head on his shoulder, and I watch the flow of blood trickle away to nothing as the light in his eyes goes out.

I sit (stand? float?) with our corpses. I see that I left my wedding ring on. Oops.

Ted never comes. His soul has gone elsewhere. People come. They close our eyes, They clean up our mess. Time passes. I find I cannot leave. No matter how many walls I walk through, I’m still in this room, waiting for Ted.  I’ve been here for as long as I can remember.

.

.

A joke…

Bewilderment, originally uploaded by Christopher Rauch.

  
   My blog addiction is screaming for release, and I’ve just reread Faith and Doubt by John Ortberg.  All of his stuff that I have come across is wonderfully thought provoking, and blogworthy, but I am behind schedule on soo many levels, so I will leave you with what Ortberg calls a “Cartesian Joke” :

Descartes walks into a bar. The Bartender asks “A shot of whiskey?” Descartes replies “I think not…” and poof, he disappears.

     So there. I think this is pretty funny, and I gotta go.

     The picture of Lil’ Lily tickles me because in the Big one, you can see Debbie reflected in her eyeballs.
     Uh-huh. Dats what I’m talkin’ ’bout…and BTW, I got puppies coming. Go ahead and email your intentions…- we can arrange a meeting in a few weeks so you can pick your’s up.
     Please. 8D

Etremely Rare

Etremely Rare, originally uploaded by Christopher Rauch.

     We get a few snowflakes every winter here, in Middle Georgia. The appearance of a little snow is a happy little occasion. Accumulation is kinda remarkable. This morning, there was frozen white stuff on top of the asphalt. We don’t get that much. I just saw a clump of snow slip off my roof and fall to the freakin’ ground past my window, like something from a movie.
     I bet Blood Mountain is incredible.