unsettling things i will never forget
our lives are shaped by
our nightmares, not love but the
things we must not love.
there are some overly obvious things that i'm not going to include on this list, the towers falling, pictures of battlefields and concentration camps, neighborhoods after floods and tornadoes and riots and earthquakes, i'm not going to talk about those. you know about those. these are unsettling things that I will never forget. just me. i don't know why i want to talk about them now. i guess sooner or later one has to talk about everything.
1. i was watching sesame street one day when i was much too old to be watching sesame street, i think i was in high school. the scene was of a family of beings with human bodies and weimaraner heads standing around a picnic table on the outdoor deck of a house surrounded by pine trees. there was some sort of quiet instrumental music playing in the background under the voice of the narrator, who i am convinced was jeff goldblum. after a bit i realized the weimapeople were acting out "goldilocks and the three bears," and eventually the family left the table and a weimaperson with a blonde banana-curl wig came onto the scene, going to each bowl as tradition dictates. i remember with terrifying clarity jeff goldblum saying, "the second bowl of porridge was fruity, fragrantly fruity," as goldilocks moved her slender-fingered person hands from the bowl to her face, where her floppy dog tongue rolled over her spoon. i thought to myself that if i had a child who was exposed to something like that i would sue pbs right into the ground, and then my brain sent me into a dissociative state to protect me. i can not look weimaraners in the eye.
2. when i was about fourteen i was walking with a friend near the catholic church in the center of my town. we saw a squirrel sitting on a lawn pretty close to us. we watched it for a while and cooed a little about how cute it was, and then we started to walk away. just then the squirrel ran right in front of us and into the street, where it was immediately pulverized by a car that never even slowed down. the sound that we heard at the instant of impact was unlike any other sound i've heard. it was moist and solid and huge and finite, it existed independently of everything involved in its creation. i had the feeling that it should have echoed, but there was more nothing after it than there had been before. we stood very still on that sidewalk for what felt like an incredibly long time, and after we started moving again we didn't talk about what we had seen.
3. "splash" came out when i was about seven and i developed a most obsessive mermaid fixation. my parents found a vhs of a cartoon version of hans christian andersen's "the little mermaid" and were pretty pleased with themselves when they presented it to me. understand that neither of them had ever heard the story, and it ain't no disney hogwash. here is the ultimate abbreviation: the mermaid's best friend is a dolphin. he helps her out, she gets her legs, she lives with the prince for a few months, he marries some other chick, the mermaid dissolves into foam, the end. the final scene is of the little dolphin swimming frantically through the ocean, crying and calling out the mermaid's name. i sobbed and sobbed until i couldn't breathe and for three more hours after that, and off and on for about a week even after that. it's still the saddest story i've ever heard, but i understand it now. not that that helps or anything.
4. at the first veterinary hospital i worked at we got a call that someone was bringing in their dog as an emergency because it had been hit by a truck. when they arrived the dog was sitting up in the back of their pickup and we thought it might not be so bad, but when we got closer we saw that his face had split all the way down the middle and was hanging off of his head. we sedated him and brought him inside to the surgery table to get a better look at him. the impact had cracked his skull, and under his skin his brain had come completely outside of it and was wedged between the scalp and the bone. after he'd been euthanized the doctor helped me sew his face back together, and i cleaned the blood off of it with hydrogen peroxide so his owners could look at him when they said good-bye.
5. "requiem for a dream"
6. my first pet to ever die was a hamster named pumpkin. he didn't have any food or water in his cage when i found him dead and i was sure that i had killed him, and i probably had. i couldn't handle it at all. i put him into a little cardboard box with some shavings so my father could bury him, but then i snapped and took him up to my room and hid him. i kept him for a week and checked on him periodically to see if he had been resurrected, and ultimately my parents had to sneak in while i was at school and follow the smell.
7. my first cat was an outdoor cat, and she killed and devoured a vast number of small woodland creatures, and we didn't know anything about cat health, and she didn't get to the doctor all that often.... one day i was in my bedroom with her and she threw up, and when i went to clean it up i saw that the puddle was filled with thin white worms, and the worms were moving around, reaching their blind and horrible wormy heads up into the air towards me. i flushed the whole hideous mess down the toilet, but when i told my mother about it she accused me of being high. so the next time the cat yakked i gathered up all the worms in a paper towel and brought them to her. she said nothing, but the cat saw a doctor within the week.
8. i watched a special on ocular surgery. the patient was awake and his eyelids were clamped open "clockwork orange" style. the doctor took a needle and stuck it into the center of the patient's eye. the needle contained a very thin lens all rolled up into a tight little cylinder, and when the doctor pressed down on the plunger of the syringe the lens shot into the patient's eye and sprang open like an umbrella. awake, mind you. wide awake.
9. there was the time george w. bush was theoretically elected president of the united states two terms in a row and everyone who knew it shouldn't have happened just threw up their hands and quit for a while.
10. there is a version of the infomercial for the ronco rotisserie cooker that is dubbed into spanish. ron and his enthusiastic friend walk from machine to machine, and each one contains a different meat spinning defeatedly on its spit, all shiny and sweaty with its own delicious oils. at one point the infomercial zooms in on a cooker filled with dozens of different kinds of sausages, and the effect of the concentric circles, the sausages turning on their rods that are turning on their wheel, combined with the musical lilt of the spanish spiel, is utterly mesmerizing. by the time you realize it's making you nauseous, it's impossible to turn away.
i need to stop this. maybe i'll write an "unsettling things 2" somewhere down the line. god knows there's no shortage of them. for now, pretty baby and i must say good-night. take care, darlings, and if you have a horrible vision burning a hole in the back of your consciousness, know that you can tell me anything.
our nightmares, not love but the
things we must not love.
there are some overly obvious things that i'm not going to include on this list, the towers falling, pictures of battlefields and concentration camps, neighborhoods after floods and tornadoes and riots and earthquakes, i'm not going to talk about those. you know about those. these are unsettling things that I will never forget. just me. i don't know why i want to talk about them now. i guess sooner or later one has to talk about everything.
1. i was watching sesame street one day when i was much too old to be watching sesame street, i think i was in high school. the scene was of a family of beings with human bodies and weimaraner heads standing around a picnic table on the outdoor deck of a house surrounded by pine trees. there was some sort of quiet instrumental music playing in the background under the voice of the narrator, who i am convinced was jeff goldblum. after a bit i realized the weimapeople were acting out "goldilocks and the three bears," and eventually the family left the table and a weimaperson with a blonde banana-curl wig came onto the scene, going to each bowl as tradition dictates. i remember with terrifying clarity jeff goldblum saying, "the second bowl of porridge was fruity, fragrantly fruity," as goldilocks moved her slender-fingered person hands from the bowl to her face, where her floppy dog tongue rolled over her spoon. i thought to myself that if i had a child who was exposed to something like that i would sue pbs right into the ground, and then my brain sent me into a dissociative state to protect me. i can not look weimaraners in the eye.
2. when i was about fourteen i was walking with a friend near the catholic church in the center of my town. we saw a squirrel sitting on a lawn pretty close to us. we watched it for a while and cooed a little about how cute it was, and then we started to walk away. just then the squirrel ran right in front of us and into the street, where it was immediately pulverized by a car that never even slowed down. the sound that we heard at the instant of impact was unlike any other sound i've heard. it was moist and solid and huge and finite, it existed independently of everything involved in its creation. i had the feeling that it should have echoed, but there was more nothing after it than there had been before. we stood very still on that sidewalk for what felt like an incredibly long time, and after we started moving again we didn't talk about what we had seen.
3. "splash" came out when i was about seven and i developed a most obsessive mermaid fixation. my parents found a vhs of a cartoon version of hans christian andersen's "the little mermaid" and were pretty pleased with themselves when they presented it to me. understand that neither of them had ever heard the story, and it ain't no disney hogwash. here is the ultimate abbreviation: the mermaid's best friend is a dolphin. he helps her out, she gets her legs, she lives with the prince for a few months, he marries some other chick, the mermaid dissolves into foam, the end. the final scene is of the little dolphin swimming frantically through the ocean, crying and calling out the mermaid's name. i sobbed and sobbed until i couldn't breathe and for three more hours after that, and off and on for about a week even after that. it's still the saddest story i've ever heard, but i understand it now. not that that helps or anything.
4. at the first veterinary hospital i worked at we got a call that someone was bringing in their dog as an emergency because it had been hit by a truck. when they arrived the dog was sitting up in the back of their pickup and we thought it might not be so bad, but when we got closer we saw that his face had split all the way down the middle and was hanging off of his head. we sedated him and brought him inside to the surgery table to get a better look at him. the impact had cracked his skull, and under his skin his brain had come completely outside of it and was wedged between the scalp and the bone. after he'd been euthanized the doctor helped me sew his face back together, and i cleaned the blood off of it with hydrogen peroxide so his owners could look at him when they said good-bye.
5. "requiem for a dream"
6. my first pet to ever die was a hamster named pumpkin. he didn't have any food or water in his cage when i found him dead and i was sure that i had killed him, and i probably had. i couldn't handle it at all. i put him into a little cardboard box with some shavings so my father could bury him, but then i snapped and took him up to my room and hid him. i kept him for a week and checked on him periodically to see if he had been resurrected, and ultimately my parents had to sneak in while i was at school and follow the smell.
7. my first cat was an outdoor cat, and she killed and devoured a vast number of small woodland creatures, and we didn't know anything about cat health, and she didn't get to the doctor all that often.... one day i was in my bedroom with her and she threw up, and when i went to clean it up i saw that the puddle was filled with thin white worms, and the worms were moving around, reaching their blind and horrible wormy heads up into the air towards me. i flushed the whole hideous mess down the toilet, but when i told my mother about it she accused me of being high. so the next time the cat yakked i gathered up all the worms in a paper towel and brought them to her. she said nothing, but the cat saw a doctor within the week.
8. i watched a special on ocular surgery. the patient was awake and his eyelids were clamped open "clockwork orange" style. the doctor took a needle and stuck it into the center of the patient's eye. the needle contained a very thin lens all rolled up into a tight little cylinder, and when the doctor pressed down on the plunger of the syringe the lens shot into the patient's eye and sprang open like an umbrella. awake, mind you. wide awake.
9. there was the time george w. bush was theoretically elected president of the united states two terms in a row and everyone who knew it shouldn't have happened just threw up their hands and quit for a while.
10. there is a version of the infomercial for the ronco rotisserie cooker that is dubbed into spanish. ron and his enthusiastic friend walk from machine to machine, and each one contains a different meat spinning defeatedly on its spit, all shiny and sweaty with its own delicious oils. at one point the infomercial zooms in on a cooker filled with dozens of different kinds of sausages, and the effect of the concentric circles, the sausages turning on their rods that are turning on their wheel, combined with the musical lilt of the spanish spiel, is utterly mesmerizing. by the time you realize it's making you nauseous, it's impossible to turn away.
i need to stop this. maybe i'll write an "unsettling things 2" somewhere down the line. god knows there's no shortage of them. for now, pretty baby and i must say good-night. take care, darlings, and if you have a horrible vision burning a hole in the back of your consciousness, know that you can tell me anything.
Labels: confessional, phobias
posted by juniper pearl @ 10:41 PM
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