Cam (Scott’s sister): Hey, douchbag, I can hardly read your stupid cartoon.
Scott: Oh…uh
[Scott posts another copy]
Scott: Sorry readers.
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Home > Monthly Archives: April 2016
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The night it pulls, or does it proffer? A ladder of streetlamps climbs uptown to a window. A sash a sill a hand belongs to Jacob.
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Hey, Scott Keener here, still squatting on Jim’s site. So, I’ve posted a new cartoon, below, more recent this time, with a different title, mostly because I got tired of explaining to people that the name “Bumbops” didn’t haven’t any meaning, really, and that I had just made it up out of the blue. It certainly didn’t have anything to do with bopping anybody in the bum, like some people (cough…Cam) kept saying. Although I guess everything has a sexual meaning if you dig hard enough. Freud and all. But I meant it to have no meaning, which is harder than having some obscure significance. Everybody’s always looking for the hidden meaning in everything.
So I made this cartoon about getting these tattoos and that part happened. But the part about them being dedicated to motor oil and auto parts I made up. Same thing with the punchline with the clam diggers, naturally. The unsettling thing about the dream was that it really did seem like something that I would do. I had that sinking, gawdawful feeling that I had gone and done something really stupid again, and now the next days, weeks, months, years would be dedicated to living with this new, hard reality.
Yeah, I’ve gotten tattoos that later on I’ve realized are kind of stupid. But mostly the regret comes from the things that I’ve done or didn’t do to other people, the stuff I said or didn’t say. When I’m saying goodnight to my son Mack on FaceTime instead of being in the same room with him, when his mom passes me off to Mack without a single word, its like a tattoo I can’t have removed, an embarrassing and hurt-filled stain that I carry around with me all the time. The people who know me see it. I see it. Maybe everybody can.
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Jacob waits
with coiled intention.
My rival,
my friend.
I push through sheets
through sheets
to him
and find only shadow.
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OK, SLK is in the house. Scott Lou Keener. Copyright. Buzzing off of post softball beers and feeling OK about the preceding day. Drew a cartoon. Plus, the Mighty Mites beat a bunch of duffers who clearly skipped little league for piano lessons or something. And yes, I have to admit that being able to drop the ball centerfield on top of the Asian girl with her glove on the wrong hand still brings back some glimmers of self-admiration. Triple. And I made some nice grabs at shortstop. And down to Miller’s on Main where the UVA douche bags were out in force. Fast forward. Here is me drinking straight out of a pitcher of MGD and I think I’d better go before I set myself up for a hellacious Monday.
And back here, to a kitchenette overlooking a duck pond. Only no ducks! Ah, but if you close your eyes, you can picture yourself anywhere. Open them up and there is all the ordinary just waiting for you. Kitchen table cluttered with drawing stuff. Sparse fridge. Socks drawing on a chair (don’t ask me why). And the creeping feelings you got to keep down until bed. Things not to think about. Like why you got to hammer the ball at a girl that clearly cannot catch it? I know her. Her name is Lynne and I think I could call her tomorrow and say sorry, but that would sound slightly creepy or like a come on, or both. A creepy come on. And then I think maybe that’s probably why I wailed the ball at her. Because I like her, and smashing a softball at a woman is the 34-year-old version of putting gum in her hair.
And the cartoon isn’t all that great. The drawing is clumsy. It doesn’t say what I was trying say, not really. Loneliness isn’t a lunchtime. It’s a gas. It’s radon leaking up through the ground into everything until it sticks in all your cells. Maybe carbon monoxide is a better metaphor. But it doesn’t matter, because I can’t seem to push these thoughts to perfection, and all my attempts spoil in a day or two. Go bad like a bowl of fruit. I think I’ve got it only to come back a week later and find it all wilted mess. Fuck, and now I’m thinking about that girl, Lynne.
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Before I was Stephen I was Steve. Even earlier: Stevie. A baby, a boy, an abnegation_ I was A pigeon who declared himself endangered.
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Budapest, Hungary. February, 2016.
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Greensboro, Thirty-three years they held me from your too-short days, your portions still rare in creation— the gravel snap, the smell of bacon, the country roads winding the hillsides heavy with leaf smell. Here I am, shuffling fool, left the car door open To read with fingers the crumpled mask of a hickory. This Braille of messages only a captive can read: You are free! In the night, the silence is deep and old, empty of the cough and grouse of the prison pod. And I keep the window open where the neighborhood dogs call one to the other. In mudrooms or carports or patios at the end of leashes, they strain against the pull of night. And I am with them, I feel their need. Morning is the lush voyage from bedroom to breakfast, eggs and grits, the cold, dewed grass at dawn, the unaccountable explorer’s freedom to amble down to the road and stop to talk to a woman. We are driving downtown now. To its in-between-ness, to the old overlaid by new, like the Jefferson Standard topped by the Jefferson Pilot, How freedom is restlessness, and restlessness is change— Everything rendered different, not better, and down on the streets, the storefronts, I do not know them; their marquees offer services I cannot picture. Then we pass the Woolworth’s, a hydrant, an elm I remember, and the years are on me like fever— The earthly sense of being from a place and then the nearness of that place. The push and pull of it, moving inside my body, nearly broken by waiting, but not altogether broken, It’s vestal cells still alive and now altogether open— They breathe the soap and grit and fry cook odors of this Southern city. I bring in worlds of it. It marks me— The midday traffic mutters (amiably) on Martin Luther King, A crew cutted toddler stumble steps behind his gram, Fatty freshets of barbeque waft from a storefront, A woman in cornrows hips against the bus stop. I hear country, gospel, hip-hop— snatches from shops and cars, glinting, hopeful of the many, so many trails of freedom. Are all these gifts yours, Greensboro? Is this your homecoming? Or is this profligate Earth, again, returning to its child some portion of what was denied him? An earthly paradise? Well, no. There are still prisons out here, war, illness, fear, injustice. But here, now, in these days, these few days of expanding, there is only us, Greensboro, the sober blue dome of your sky, your trees in first leaf, azaleas flushed with spring, and here— The motley aisles of a grocery store, where a man like me can live this electric, this angelic feeling of standing in line with a Coke and a bag of chips that he picked out for himself and will buy with his damned own money.
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