zaziel
Now. Then. Previous. Next. Random. Ernst. Fallen. Crush. Notes&Quotes. Profile. Rings.
I'tr�m breit vula�oz�o ye spalla ei�tlin nel�ffnes pieqi aummit su berwegr'ra'ao.

Indication

Sunday, Mar. 30, 2003 -
Ap�sl�min ida corbalanyrtne 'ls�o rohl'daathi�m v� nen�a iroyss�rd.

A ghost from my past has returned to haunt me. Haunted may be too strong a word, but if I said "a ghost from my past has returned to hang out with me" it wouldn't sound as snappy, would it? But then again he's not really a ghost, in fact, he looks more like an angel, what little I can see of him. He has wings.

Confused? The atheistical skeptic is talking about seeing ghosts and angels?

Yeah, well..."ghost" and "angel" are just indicia for this thing that has no name. Maybe I should give it a name, like Irving or Frank or Brefeldia Maxima, something more cheery, more domesticated than "the thing beating itself bloody against its cage".

Except he doesn't bleed. At least, I don't see any blood. And I don't know if he's a he. He seems to be male, like angels are male, cloaked in a human form without any need or desire or purpose to be human.

Or maybe he seems to be male because he is me, or a part of me.

Okay, enough with the cryptic blather.

At the age of thirteen, I managed to pick up two pathogens that almost killed me, the first with meningitis, the second with botulism. And as the mater tells it, I also suffered through a bout of mono in the aftermath, but my dad and my gran'dad didn't remember it that way. Rashomon-like, they each have their own version. For example, my gran'dad told me it was bad peaches that gave me the botulism while my parents said it was yoghurt.* How do I remember it? Imperfectly, to say the least. My memories of that time are scrambled and tenuous; many slipped away before they were half-made. Eight months of my life are as uncertain and implausible as dreams. I lapsed into a coma twice, or so I've been told. A lot of what I went through seems like it happened to someone else, because my memories are riddled with holes partly filled by what other people have remembered.

I was a boy genius before I got sick. Not a total mutant braniac with an off-the-chart IQ, but I was smart enough to have finished my sophomore year of high school at the age of thirteen. After my illness, I was suddenly a lot dumber. I felt like the genius still existed within me, but I no longer had access to him. The familiar pathways through my brain seemed blocked or wiped out. Whole big chunks of knowledge were unavailable to me. When I returned to school, I had to take freshman courses again. I had to take a course in remedial math that covered stuff I knew I had learned before high school. It was a struggle, but I eventually managed to gain back most of what I had lost (although math was never easy after that.) I also gained plenty of frustration, and from somewhere in my altered brain I fomented a rage so uncharacteristic of me that my parents began to doubt my sanity. I was a completely different boy. I had become a mere mortal, and in some ways, more mere than most. I had lost fifty-five pounds. A cheerful, chunky, apple-cheeked boy nicknamed "Butch" had been melted down to sullen, pale-faced waif. Except I was fast becoming too much of an asshole to be waif-like. I was fully launched into puberty, which helped like pouring gasoline on a fire. Then a growth spurt shot me up to nearly six feet tall. I might've become your classic gawky, gangly nerd, except I was too pretty. And definitely too much of an asshole.

The meningitis had left me with tinnitus and eyes that were hypersensitive to light. I had to wear shades all the time, and when I became tired, which was often, my eyesight blurred. I was afraid of becoming deaf or blind or both.

The doctors kept telling my parents how lucky I was. Very little brain damage. The scarring was barely visible. One doctor said he saw no indications of damage.

Yeah, right.

(What a bunch of comedians.)

And then... it got better.**

Eventually the tinnitis disappeared, although when I'm really tired and stressed, I still hear a sound like rushing water in my ears. Maybe I'm still a little sensitive to bright light, but hey, this is sunny southern California--we all wear shades to cut the glare. It took me a few years to stop being a jerk, but I proved the doctors right. I was lucky. I kept running into people who always turned me around into the right direction. I graduated high school at the age of 16 as a recovering member of Assholes Anonymous. And if I had any lingering ambitions to be a lout, the California Penal Institute of Higher Learning squashed that.

So what does all this have to do with Irving F. Brefeldia Maxima? My ghost angel?

Brefeldia Max first manifested himself to me when I was 13, during the discontent of my convalescence. It's hard to tell exactly what he is, it's easier to say what he's not. He is not a vision or a hallucination or a daydream. I think of him as an imaged metaphor; he comes when that wordless part of me needs to express my frustration, without defining it, without voicing it. He only appears when I am exasperated with my own shortcomings. He is always blurred because he is always in motion, fast as a hummingbird's wing, flinging himself back and forth within his cage. He is the size of a swallow. His cage is the size of a swallow's sarcophagus. He always appears in the air to the right of me, at eye-level.

He stopped coming around for a while, it's been years, but he started turning up again 'bout a month after I banged my head. Oddly enough, I am not unhappy to see him. He is, after all, an old friend. And he's trying to tell me something. I appreciate that.

~

* I've told people, for the hell of it, that I got botulism from skin-popping heroin, or from a bad batch of peyote tea.


** She turned me into a newt!

<~>
Ap�sl�min ida corbalan� 'lse nesgla ugar�-cham sa cru ogrulho bat�oltha al�mv�sde.

last eleven:

Resurrection - Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Arts and Letters -
Friday, June 17, 2005
Domestic Obsessions -
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
The Kindness of Strangers -
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
Gone -
Saturday, April 2, 2005
Coming Back, Little By Little -
Saturday, April 2, 2005
Effing Around -
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Explicably Yours -
Wednesday, February 9, 2005
Things Too Innumerable To Mention -
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Mr. Armstrong -
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
The Pope in Our Kitchen -
Saturday, October 2, 2004



<- Z @ D ->

Sa r'ji�o oss�vel meninonceiv �o poshik m�'�nch uscantebatahla o�r musiu o�r muiko.
Copyright � 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 by gcs

This site is best viewed at 1024 by 768 pixels, or 1152 by 864 pixels, with fonts
Times New Roman, Verdana, Book Antiqua and QuantasBroadLight. Click HERE
to add this diary to your list of favorites.































([