Nobody reminds me

Nobody reminds me of anything. I had something to say but then I forgot it. Oh yes, I remember now. I am eating meat loaf. Few words could be more meaningful. Dash is calling me from his toy telephone. I don't understand a word he says. It's big like a 1980's car phone. Yesterday driving home from work I wondered: Do ants have noses or don't they like to fuck? It's a long drive home and the radio reception is awful. Candlewood Lake was black and blue with evening coming down. I wondered how KC's day went at the high school. Not teaching but observing. When I get home she reminds me of something that I'm so thankful for but now I don't remember what it was. The best writing often contains an unsurpassable attention to detail. A strong memory is helpful. This reminds me of Jack Kerouac. I used to drink with him. It was just before I stopped. No, it was just before I went mad. He plunged me in and then he saved me. The pages were yellow and it made me sneeze, but it was alright. Please allow me to introduce myself. I am nobody who will remind you of anything. They took me to the hospital. It was a garden of wandering minds. There was an old woman in a wheelchair who sang “God bless my underwear” followed by words I couldn't make out, her verses punctuated with “fuck” and “shit” and “assholes.” There was a twenty-something, very masculine-looking gay Hispanic man with the saddest eyes I'll ever see who had tried to kill himself by drinking cleaning products, I don't remember what exactly, to get away from his family. There was a surly but friendly overweight redhead who used to be a thin, sane psychiatric nurse until she was attacked by a patient; she had been stabbed by many things, syringes, I never got the full story. She had just had a spinal tap when I met her, or maybe she was just about to go for one. She taught me how to play spades. A few days before I left, a young Hispanic woman with slashed wrists arrived. The older manic-depressive woman who had stopped taking her Lithium, or maybe it was that it had stopped working, called her “a real spitfire,” so I learned a new word that day. I don't know why but she was crazy about me: not the older manic-depressive, whose name I think I remember was June, the young Hispanic. I would have gladly fled the country with June had she been forty years younger and shown the same kind of interest. For a few days I had a roommate who practiced karate; he was a veteran who had been stationed in Beirut where he lost some friends. He was from Michigan originally and liked to tell me about how that was the headquarters for so many of our national chains. The craziest of us was this middle-aged woman with a broken arm. We all called her The Debutante, the way she wandered so lightly around, head tilted back over her tall, bony frame, nose to the stars that weren't there. At one point she threatened to kill the redhead. One day when I was sitting in the lounge she came in and sat across from me. I wasn't looking at her but I could feel her attention. “So you're one of those, too,” she said. After a pause I did look at her. “Some send and some receive,” she said. Then she smiled and left the room, leaving me here.