Jagged Vacance

It always takes place in the cemetary. This time I knew they were in there, small apartment like a pine box there were padlocks on the storage units in front and the cars were in there, like a mobile impound. I had Linus and Rex was loose and more than anything I just didn't want him to come out and see me. And later my father and I were standing atop a peak in one of the clearings on High Divide, and I could see for miles, miles, miles. The juxtaposition of the two places, how fear can creep into your heart. The absolute lifetimes that exist between events like that, how you don't even notice their passing. There is this one specific moment that I remember with you, we were lying on our backs in the park behind the Vine Street house and we were talking about us just buying the place, it was one of those perfect Ohio autumn days crisp yellow leaves against the sapphire blue of the sky and I could see for miles, miles, miles. It is the only time I remember from that period of my life in which I felt we could be something more than isolated alcoholics. Those moments come all the time now and easily, the ones that fill you with hope for the future and promise and the deep knowledge of being loved. That you really don't have to go through life alone. And to think back to that girl in the grass how many Septembers ago, it makes me want to cradle her up and love her so strongly because of the road she doesn't know exists. But that she makes it, to know how that chapter ends! And I want that for you, too. But it will always seem impossible until you get there, and you just need the will to muscle through and how rock-bottom sad it is that that is what keeps you away from it. The glory.

The Pride of Cleveland

He was fat. Well, to be fair, they were all fat, but he was the slovenly kind of fat that makes you imagine that his car is packed with papers and fast food wrappers and that if you were to get into said car after the offer of a ride, it would take five to ten minutes of moving the aforementioned papers and wrappers around before there would be enough space for a seat. And they were all Cleveland firemen and it made me glad I didn't actually live in Cleveland, apart from the other obvious reasons. He was thirteen months pregnant and as he lost his breath pacing the floor of the front of our classroom, I wondered if they made SCBA waist belts big enough to accommodate the girth. He spoke in a very peculiar language of half-sentences with tangential interjections peppered throughout like machine gun fire, the sum total of which made it nearly impossible to determine if there was a linear aspect to any of the instruction he was attempting to give, or if he was the kind of person who needed to get everything out, all at once, and the brain just couldn't keep up. Or keep track. When he spoke it was as if we were all invited to participate in his very disorganized and foreign internal world.

It was only our second lab with him, and my hope that the instruction would improve after the nervousness of the first session were quickly being put asunder. He was furiously scratching an equation onto the whiteboard. The paper in front of me on the desk said "medical math for paramedics," and I had stopped after the first three problems. This was the point at which he realized that no one in class had understood his preliminary instruction on the subject, and that further explanation was necessary. And probably, for many of us, it was the point at which we realized that any further explanation would be of positively no use.

"See, you can't just blindly plug numbers into these things," he mused to no one in particular as he plugged numbers into the equation he had just written. "That's why I teach you two ways," we all just looked at each other, "so you can figure out what works best for you. Now, the best way to do it is to work backwards see," I had no idea where the numbers were coming from that he was using, "now you know that the proper drip rate is 45gtts." I had scrunched my face up in the hope that squinting would make it all clear -- so much so that my eyes hurt. I didn't fix my face in time and he looked at me and chuckled, and started the whole cycle again, with a different problem. I had already decided that google would be my teacher for this particular skill and I cringed when I remembered that this was the guy who would be teaching us IV skills. And I immediately said a prayer for the first three to four victim....patients that I will be starting IVs on.