handling industrially

The sign on the white work van in the parking lot said "Industrial Handling" in black letters. Duly noted. I entered the Shopping Temple (i.e., mall) at the Lord & Taylor entrance and strolled through the aisles, passing through invisible clouds of fragrances pour homme, pour femme, pour vous, pour moi, pour anyone. Without being asked for a passport or visa, I passed from the spice-, herb-, mineral-, and floral-infused fragrance domains into a new country, The Land of Emollients. Behold a liquid arsenal of softening secrete agents; salves, balms, potions, lotions, creams. A festival of mollificaring, appeasing, pacifying, soothing. Just the word, emollient, softening its surrounding syllables. A haven of healing for those of us marred by Industrial Handling. Those of us man[gender-neutral]handled, scarred, scratched, or atrophied into scaly, itchy Walking Wounded. We the thick-skinned survivors of industrial-scale emotional, perhaps even physical, handling, more accurately, mishandling. We the escapees out from under the thumb of verbal racks and industrial-strength conveyors of caustic charm. And who among us has not qualified at one time or another as a candidate for  the Legion de Malhonneur? Sure, maybe we naively or hopefully enlisted for our manufactured misery. Some of us stumbled into the 55-gallon drum of acidic animosity or arid indifference, slowly leaking. So be it. We paid the cost of Industrial Handling, didn't we? A cost too dear. But for now we welcome with open arms (and hands, legs, faces, necks, you-name-it) every variety, brand, and concoction of moisturizing healing; every texture, thickness, consistency, and volume of unguent; all and every extreme unction, to anoint our sickness. And theirs, too; the Industrial Handlers. I stopped. I asked two ladies in waiting at the counter in The Land of Emollients for a sample. Your most excellent and edifying elixir, please. They knew right away. No hesitation or forethought. This is it. The taller of the two Emollient Ambassadors (she with chestnut hair and deep brown eyes) placed a small tube, 0.5 oz. / 15 g, in my left hand. I curled my fingers around the tube, made a slight bow, and turned around. I exited the store. The white work van was gone. Frisson accomplished. 

between the brackets [closed captions]

indistinct radio chatter

footsteps approaching

crowd jeering 

inaudible

engine running

clears throat

plate clattering

chuckles softly

elevator dings

voices murmuring

birds chirping

explosion

applause

overlapping conversation

footsteps receding

clock chimes

whimpers

sighs

gunshot

Angela cooing

crowd cheering

door opens

gasps

sirens wailing

Serena crying out in pain

clamoring

airhorn blaring

grunts

breathes heavily

door closes

Handmaids laugh

horse whinnies

helicopter whirring

belt rustling

exhales

sobbing

all chuckle

scoffs

crows cawing

sniffling

paper rustling

cattle prod buzzes

rapid ticking

buckle clanking

Aunt Lydia laughs

pigeons cooing

knocking on door

belting continues

Janine humming

Angela gurgling

Angela gurgling throughout

Janine laughing

church bells ring

'Rain Sometimes' playing

water flowing

laughs
 
 

The Clementine Chronicles, continued

Murder on the Disorient Express

Dramatis Personae:

OldWhiteGuy stereotypical converted-loft dweller, goatee-adorned; spectacles-wearer; enough head hair to comb except on the sides owing to stylist's shorning the week preceding; 5'10"; 169 pounds; blue jeans; blue T-shirt; blue-green-purple flannel shirt not tucked in; fragrance: Luna Rossa by Prada; Euphoria by Calvin Klein deodorant; unshaven for several days

Three Ravens pecking at unseen morsels on the roadway or bickering on the chain-link fence or telephone wires

DismemberedClementine* Jackson Pollocked (except for color; goldenrod-clementine-flesh yellow-orange backgrounded by burnt umber wetted, ergo Mark Rothko'ed except for the scatteredness; picture a spherical descent bursting onto the concrete, tossed from an upper-story window; motive and perp, unknown) into 22 segments and/or fragments of said segments, on the sidewalk [see below] by the side exit of the brick former knitting mill; a splayed and still glistening ink-blottish stain artistically placed on the snow-bereft sidewalk as a place setting or as a result of the Capital Citrus Murder (CCM)
*cf. The Laughorist blog post of 2 December 2018

DismemberedClementine Peeled Skin (absent, nowhere to be seen; unknown if peeled in one fell swoop or not)

DeadFish (scales on; head attached; accusatory cyclops-ish eye; absent corpse, nowhere to be seen; cf. The Laughorist blog post of 2 February 2019)

62.8 CCM Suspects (40 apartments, average of 1.5 residents in each minus 1.0 LaughoristDweller [a.k.a. OldWhiteGuy], plus 3.8 happenstance, random street-cred pedestrians) 

Ghosts of Bob Marley & The Wailers

Scene 1: 

Enter OldWhiteGuy, exits building, turns right, spots DismemberedClementine (rest in pieces, R.I.P.), halts, retreats, pivots left, inspects crime scene, counts segments, makes mental notes, turns right again, walks on ice- and snow-ridden sidewalk to car

OldWhiteGuy (posing as Hamlet Lear) (sotto voce): "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the skin!"

Enter Ghosts of Bob Marley & The Wailers singing: "One love, one heart... Let's get together and feel all right... Hear the children cryin'; give thanks and praise to the Lord ... Is there a place for the hopeless sinner who has hurt all mankind just to save his soul? One love, one heart ... Let's get together and feel all right!"

Exeunt Omnes

particulate matters

before the next step pavement sparkles a starry day constellation advancing with each footfall between tire tracks imprinting transit blaring snow islanded coal wet dry wet trumpeting clarion sun white melt Rorschachs but you roadway glitter diamonds pixels pinpricks flame pinnacles piercing into my eyes where have you been all my life

letting go

the missing step at the top of the stairs

the nobody at the other end of having a catch

a call that doesn't come

an unrung bell

a cup unfull

unrumpled sheets, undented mattress

the text unreply absent the notification chime

the her-completed sentences unbegun

weighed against

the oaken firm footing

southpaw sailing toss leather bound

incoming incantations

clarion trumpeting presence

sonorously sounding

overbrimming nectar

gale force bacchanalia

gonging anagrams of U and I

subject predicate object desire

holding on for dear life

Vaticanated Mystery

You know how colors in the modern world are adorned with evocative, picturesque, poetic names? I wish I had that job, naming colors. Take yellow. Bumblebee lemon banana peach corn cream Tuscan sun butterscotch canary gold daffodil mustard dandelion pineapple blond(e) trombone eggnog flaxen. And so on. Hold that thought. I exited my building from the side door by the stairway between the first and second floors. I walked up a small set of stairs to ground level, to traverse a snow-covered sidewalk. The snow had both melted and been packed down. I turned left, the roadway to my right, and spied yellow somethings littering the snowscape. I had seen these a day or two earlier and did not pay them much mind. This time I stopped and picked up one of these adornments. Who put them there. What are they, these yellow dispatches from elsewhere. How did they get to their seemingly random positions in the snow. They looked like peelings, of paper or plastic. Picking one up, I concluded it was a paint chip. A morsel of yellow paint, separated from the object it had adhered to. I stopped. Turned around. From whence I just walked, near the building, I saw half a dozen yellow bollards that surrounded and protected a utilities box. The yellow bollards alert drivers and prevent an accidental crash into the electrical utilities, causing danger and mayhem. However, the bollards were not quite yellow, not uniformly. Bits of yellow paint had flaked off, exposing steel-gray. Hence, the paint chips in the snow. Or so it seems, lacking more or better evidence. A mystery lingers: how did the yellow paint chips become airborne and land on the snowy sidewalk and adjoining landscape. Wind. Hard to believe. Even a fierce wind. Wouldn't other damage be evident. Placed by human hands. Doubtful. Who would go through the trouble. Ever see the flag of the city-state called Vatican City. Yellow and white bands. This sheds absolutely no light on answers to the aforementioned questions about the paint chips. (I could be wrong. Maybe plastic shavings, not paint. Perhaps enamel or some sort of coating, clearly not weather-resistant, or the bollards would not exhibit exposed portions as if zoo lions or tigers were using the bollards as scratching posts.) New colors: bollard vaticanate sneeze pee popcorn kernel caramelite bunion callous fartish strawstrewn toothstained maltanned sweated toasted oolong dentured custard flame sunsplashed parchment nicotined diapered lamped earwax caution amberesque . . . 
 

something fishy

Exiting my Nissan Sentra, I walked on the crunchy snow in the parking lot. I like that squeaky, stiff, yet hard rubbery sound when the snow is packed and the temperatures are frigid. Reminds me of a dentist putting a filling into a cavity. Though it is after 10 p.m., the lot is brightly lit. Security cameras are strategically placed in a corner and on the sides. Wait. Stop. Rewind. Step back. Is that a fish? It is. A dead fish, mouth and one eye open on its side, scales silvery in the January moonlight. Bloodied in the middle as if shot. The nearest body of water, a lake, is a mile away. This Surprise Fish Presence (SFP) sparks a gazillion questions, some you are already formulating, others being fished from the open air of my imagination. Aside from the obvious how and why it got to this spot, there's the who placed it and was it by accident or on purpose. Was it a coded "sleep wit da fishes" warning? To whom? Not likely me. It wasn't snoozing near my car and its apparitional appearance preceded my parking in this spot anyway. I suppose someone could have gone to the regional market (we don't have a fish market as New York, Boston, Tokyo, San Francisco, and Omaha has have), bought a bass or perch or whatever my Piscean Poseur is, and dropped it, tossed it, placed it, planted it. Maybe it's performance art. I do not know the answer to any of these questions or to any of a myriad queries associated with this Neptunian Mystery. This terrestrial sighting, um, spawned a stinging array of additional questions upon finding the SFP gone two days later. Gone as if never having put in an unannounced, uncamouflaged cameo in the first place. This bothers me more. Did I dream or delusionally fantasize the Unidentified Fishy Observation (UFO)? I did not. It was there. I have no corroborating evidence, no cellphone photo. My observation is evidence-based reality, or reality-based evidence. It was there, staring at my two eyes with its dead-pan unmonocoled cyclops of a visage (other eye peering blindly into the icy snowpack). I was there, and so was one dead unfake fish. It was. Believe me.