death and these dumb memories of it / hey! i am in oklahoma city!

the reason i try to write every day is because when i wait a few days everything gets so backed up and starts to become one big jumbled mess in my mind. even though nothing really happened in the past couple of days. the hardest is for where to start, do i just act as if the few days where nothing really happened didnt really happen at all and then i have this two day void in my life as if those days were just as good as two days dead?

well, thats a good enough start i guess. i dont know very many dead people. earlier on this trip i learned that the girl i went to prom with is dead. we were never very close and there was no reason that the knowledge of her not being alive anymore should provoke any type of emotional response. when i was in high school some kid committed suicide. i didnt know him very well, but i felt bad about it. he was a popular kid and i remember thinking that popularity or perceived success in life does not automatically quell the things that work inside a person.

and then there was my grandmother. i think she died in 1995, she was the closest person to me that has died in my life and she is the reason i am here in oklahoma city right now. my grandmother, mary conner (aka "the lady in the red hat") was a softball mogul. i dont really know what that means, but she was instrumental in making girls softball a thing in the state of indiana and some say that she had a

the softball hall of fame

hand getting it into the olympics. i havent found any mention of this, but i believe it because it is a good story to tell.

when i was younger, 8 years old to 11 years old maybe, i would go with my mom and my grandmother to oklahoma city every year for the national girls softball tournament. my grandmother was a mover and a shaker, my mom was her back up and i, i was a batboy. although i dont have very many memories from this time i do think these were good times. i have written before about how i was the forgotten child, i was made fun of alot, and i had really poor self-esteem. confidence was not a word that registered with me.

but, these traits were most obvious when i was in my normal arena and specifically around my brother. these summer trips to oklahoma were the beginning of an awakening for me. even at this young age i knew that i wasnt happy about my life and something needed to change, at the time i am sure i expected that someone else would change things for me and in a way that is what happened. here i am, an overweight and shy little boy thrown onto a field to chase bats for young fit girls between the ages of 12 and 17. they thought i was cute, not cute in that they wanted to get with me, but how awkward i was.

i became "friends" with some of these girls and started hanging out with them in the hotel and away from the field, it was a major confidence boost. i assumed that these were just very outgoing, caring young ladies but i think i had a devil-may-care attitude even when i was a small boy, i have never had much to lose in life so taking things to the extreme edges and testing the boundaries have never been out of the question. i had a secret life in these week long summer trips that i would take with my mom and my grandmother and this awakening was just what i needed.

not that it translated much into my regular life, coming home i was still the same shy little boy, but now i had a secret. not just a secret but the knowledge of a secret self. i started to develop the idea that things would be better there, rather than here...instead of standing up and making what you want for yourself wherever you are. and i guess i started to get the idea that i could always run away to someplace new and make things work. i have spent many years trying to overcome this; but, although i know things there are the same as things here, i am still tempted to just pick up and go wherever there is for that initial burst of change, the flavor filled first few months.

anyway, all that talk is too much about life, and i am supposed to be talking about death. eventually i became more aware of my attraction to girls and got to an age where i was more apt to act on it however long a shot it would be. and so my position on these summer vacations was taken over by my little sister. that bitch (i am kidding). life would go on as normal for me (normal being unhappy about life, unsure of myself and unaware of the power of change that i possessed) for the next few years until i got another chance to spread my wings away from where i grew up. this was the trip i took to europe in the summer of 1996.

but before this happened, my grandmother died. i dont remember when, i think it was 1994, i dont remember how i heard about it or really anything. all i know is how my dad feels about funerals and death. and, by extension, how i feel about funerals and death: not worth it. i dont have a strong belief system, i dont think that something better happens to a persons body or soul after they die, i just think that people go into a wooden box and then a concrete box and then get covered by some dirt while people around cry and pray.

i know, it is a shitty outlook, but i have no reason to think otherwise. and so, when my grandmother died, i didnt want to go to the funeral. at the time i wasnt looking back on my sweet summer vacations with her, surrounded by a bunch of young girls that wanted to show me the way of the woman, i was probably just thinking that this would be an afternoon that i wouldnt be able to play nintendo and i was not happy about that. but i got dressed in a kid suit, and went to the adult funeral home and listened to some people speak. i milled about, i think i went outside to smoke cigarettes (i know, what a bad kid - and what bad parents!) and i was confronted with my cousin ezra.

ezra was adopted into the family, maybe a year or two older than me, and he was crying. i couldnt comprehend, i looked at him and put my hand on his shoulder and he asked me why i wasnt crying - i think i told him that the grief hadnt hit me yet (more probably, i said something like i dont know, or nothing at all, who - at 14 - knows that grief can be suspended, seriously). but really i just wanted to get away from him. i didnt feel anything. i didnt feel love for my grandmother, aside from the summer vacations we werent really that close, i didnt feel sad that she was dead and i would never see her again. i felt nervous, all around me people were crying and showing grief, and i was just waiting for more people to notice that i wasnt feeling anything and for them to be mad at me.

so i walked away. i walked down the alley for awhile and came back later. i willed myself to cry and to feel bad about this situation, but i just couldnt do it. this was my first taste of my lack of emotion, my first taste of my more realistic and analytical temperament rather than an emotional temperament. and then i proceeded to go through the majority of the rest of my life not feeling emotion. it has gotten me into plenty of trouble in relationships, for sure, but it also helped a good deal when i was working with protest movements and in other stressful situations.

but then i got into this real good relationship that kept going for a long time and emily was much more emotional than i was, through our years together we helped each other level out a bit. she would sit me down and keep me talking until she got to what my emotional depth was, what i was really feeling and while i never really liked these conversations they helped me become a much more rounded person, she helped me to feel more like a person. and i am pretty grateful for that.

and then came the next funeral. fast forward at least a dozen years, i am in portland, living with emily at the mississippi co-op and we are out on a walk. i receive a phone call from one of the people that we live with that one of our cats was just run over and is now dead. at the time i was calm and collected, i didnt want to let emily know because she would burst into tears and become an emotional

my cat friend, warren

mess, my calculating nature knew that this would only worsen the situation. i used business like words over the phone and we continued our walk. but i couldnt handle it anymore, i couldnt walk and talk with emily letting her know that our little cat friend, warren, was now dead.

and so i told her, and she proceeded to breakdown. i was still calm, everything was okay, it was just a dead cat. i called our friends back and asked them to come pick us up - we wouldnt make the walk back. during the wait for the ride and the ride back i was comforting her, but i was like a stone wall. i was determined to treat this as just a bump in the road of life. we got back to the house and all of the people we lived with that were home at the time, were out on the front steps in various states of grief and i was still okay. we walked into the door and towards the back porch where our cat friends body was. and this was when i lost it.

i had never cried so hard in my life, right now, typing this years later i am still overcome with emotion over this death - crying in some dumb coffee shop in oklahoma city. emily was petting warren's lifeless body but i didnt want to touch him, that would make it more real. he was such a good and loving cat but to feel his cold body and not have it respond to my touch would be way too much. we sat there crying over his body for awhile and then we had to do something. i got a shovel from the back and we went back out front. i dug a deep hole next to the front steps, crying the whole time, right in the middle of the hops where warren liked to lay.

then we put his body in there and covered it up. later that night our other cat friend, olympia, ripped out a number of her claws as a way to show her emotion over losing her brother. all sad things. its strange, when i started writing this, i had no intention of writing about warrens death. i was only thinking about people that died and i was going to write just about my disaffection with death, but then i remembered this and it all came pouring out. more well roundedness, i guess.

and so, to commemorate my grandmother i came to oklahoma city. because here there is the softball hall of fame where she was inducted, posthumously. when i got to the hall of fame i immediately recognized that this was also the place i would come as a child. this field and the sculptures, so i walked around the grounds for a good while, taking it all in. then i went to the hall of fame itself, i was under orders from my mom to take a picture of my grandmothers plaque, but the hall of fame was closed for remodeling. fortunately there wasnt anyone around, so i just slipped into the museum area that was under construction, i found where the hall of famers had their plaques but hers wasnt there.

i assume it was becasue of the place being under construction. i went ahead and walked around the place more and then i left there for good. thanks for all the childhood memories.

oklahoma capitol building

after this i headed to the state capitol building. i cannot write enough about how i like these places, i ditched some metal in the truck and then went on in through the security gates. i had to wait a few minutes for the tour to start, so i milled about the second floor and eventually jumped on the hour long tour. the mot interesting thing about this capitol building is that it was drawn up to have a dome, but when it was being constructed they ran out of money for it so they just capped it without a dome, just a regular roof. it probably looked very silly. but then, in 2001, the push to bring the building to its full glory decided to ask for funding to finally build the dome. with money mostly from private donors, the $22 million for the dome construction was raised and the work started. the result of this is a nice dome and inside there are inscriptions of multi-national corporation like "monsanto" and "general motors." crazy.

now i am done here in okc, probably forever. so long!