Category: personal

Is there such a thing as a blessed ride on the swings?

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

For the past few years I have been going to bed so early it’s a problem. I’m missing time with my family, and I’m waking up at 3AM local time for no reason other than I went to bed at 8:30 the night before and I’m a person who does best on 7 hours of sleep.

Why is this interesting?  Because lately I’ve been trying to stay awake longer. So after dinner I walk to a local park and ride on the swings until I can’t bear it, then walk home. this is a peculiar aim, given my tendency to get motion sickness from, like, every conveyance I’m not piloting myself. The big swings at the amusement park? Big ol’ yuck (don’t ask me about the pirate ship, me hearties.)

At any rate, there I was, walking across the park at dusk. As I neared the swings I noticed a woman with a rolling walker, doing laps around the playground with the determination of someone told by their doctor to “use it or lose it to amputation.” Someone struggling to stay active in a world that seems bent on her senescence.

With a smile I passed her to claim a swing, where I sat facing the sunset, pumping my legs, riding aloft on a drum and bass playlist that never fails to energize me. I don’t count it a good go on the swings unless I see over the crossbar. One of my characters whose book has yet to be published wrote a poem about swings. In it he writes:

One day you will let go

At the top of the arch of the swing

In spite of the lake and the cliffs and the sky and the steel

You will let go and she will be there

To catch you

I always swing until I see the sky above the crossbar. It was no different tonight, as I leaned into each swoop of the parabola, kicking my legs to arc higher, squinting into the cotton candy summer sunset. Wanting the wind in my hair, I tossed aside my hat, and as the woman with the walker bent to retrieve it I told her to leave it be, that I didn’t mind, that I’d come back to it.

She circled me again, two or three times, before she brought her walker over to the handicapped swing. Then got on the swing and swung along with me.

Was this something she did all the time?  Or did my swinging somehow give her permission? I couldn’t have asked.  My heart was too full.  From her complexion I might guess she wasn’t born in my country, but to say a word about what we were doing felt wholly unnecessary. We swung, me kicking myself as high as I dared, her reclined in a seat made for comfort, made for those to whom swinging might otherwise be a luxury, an impossibility.

When she’d had her fill of the swing, she resumed her circuit round me. When she reached my fallen hat, she bent to pick it up, then tossed it to me.

I just about caught it.

a minor procedure

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

she asks the ages of my children

(one day apart and six years

something to talk about while their fingers are inside me)

The funny thing is, I wasn’t actually sick when I let doctors make a hole in me and take something away. Minor surgery, of the sort on reality shows, and so I was awake for the procedure. Let me say, does surrealism ever make a heck of a lot more sense. Speaking with someone who’s in the midst of prying open your skin is a singular experience, and one that evokes more body horror than I like on a Monday morning.

And I’d just posted that poem On Convalescence, not considering the fact that I was about to experience it.  I was mainly thinking of an essay by Woolf, quoted in Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose as an example of a perfectly valid run-on sentence.  Writing on illness, on its relative absence from the novels of her time despite all the ways that sickness and recovery impinge on our psychic and physical selves, Woolf’s rambling thoughts follow an indirect path ending at ourselves, the first and last locus of one’s consciousness, the very place where one experiences illness and convalescence.

I wasn’t sick. I was only on holiday (see below), but I have the work ethic of a consumptive viscount and a moral opposition to hustle culture, so I haven’t obliged myself to post much of anything in the last two weeks.  Add to that being still in a bit of a cocoon from my peculiar spring and from two years of you-know-what, and y’all going to have to bear with me.

Memories of a gallery

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Making meaning. Can that be a calling?

scribe

conduit

fingers blindly falling

vomiting poetry

verse coming out of my ears

words from my hands

words made of fears

that nothing ever will ever be

enough

we know it’s tough

we know

below

and to the left

of the main figure

the artist has hidden a self-portrait

reflected upside down in the bowl of that one spoon

laid beside the sugar

painted so well you expect to see yourself

(2022)

[Working through some personal goals in a journal, I wrote the first four lines unconsciously. Once I noticed, the rest became inevitable.]

rescue

~ Will Forrest ~ 1 Comment

when things become impossible

come find me

I won’t fix the things

I will take you and run

laughing

hand in hand

through the long green meadow past the woods

toward summer

(2022)

Why I say I’m ‘ruined’

an overhead view of the night sky through a twisting rocky canyon
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Never not new. Never not the stranger. The kid from overseas who looks normal but speaks weird.  The unbaptized kid at the Catholic school, mouthing liturgy at morning mass because I’ve never heard it before (and imagine the brass of my parents to have straight up lied to the superintendent to get me a placement.) The one with weird hair. The nerd. The suck-up (I never, because if you’re a clever and quiet student, the teachers will suck up to you.) 

The drop-out.

But it’s not a bad thing. None of these are bad things. I don’t put much faith in categories like bad/good, which seem firm and logical but are wholly subjective. It is, as one says, as it is.  This is what happened, and it cannot be changed.

So then why do I say these events I describe ‘ruined’ me?  Ruining implies a pristine state that can be defiled. To say a woman is ‘ruined’ used to (and in many cases still does) mean that she fucked before her wedding day.  Ruined cities litter the earth, relics of human ambition, testaments to mortality’s deft hand and the way that all things end.  Was I ever whole? Pristine? Or was that bit about Original Sin saying something else? 

We are all stardust, strung together in fragile molecular webs that break and heal and break and heal and break until they cannot heal.  No wonder we die, for surely it becomes too much, this being alive, this always being given things to touch and lose and want and find.  We die and become stardust again. Is that the ruin?  My too clear seeing of these webs, my fervent need to say “look, do you see the glory woven through it all?”

I believed in other worlds.  All these things were proof.  These moments, these shifts, these odd exposures I call the things that ruined me.  Evidence that other worlds were real and that you could go to them. That nothing I saw around me had to be the way it was. That the future was full of more than the present could hold.

Is it the future yet?

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 6: A pack of Chippendales playing cards

a muscular man's bare torso reflected in a shadowy mirror
~ Will Forrest ~ 1 Comment

Not only because it was fifty-two images of nearly naked men, but because I stole it from my mother’s sock drawer and brought it to school to show my schoolmates.  If I could have only stayed that popular when I changed schools the following year…I might not be writing this sardonic internet commentary about the fleetingness of fame and my propensity for causing trouble.

I got away with it that time, and returned the cards to my mother’s drawer.  It’s so long ago, but there are faint memories of creeping into her room to revisit the cards.  Much of a muchness, fifty-two oiled torsos, numerous thighs, and in the centre of each, a satin or leather-clad implication of what men were really like.   

I knew so few men in those days. My parents had separated and my father lived overseas. My mother didn’t date and had a modest social circle, and so my interactions with adult men were limited to teachers.  Growing up, attraction and response were a muddle.  I was almost always surprised when someone kissed me. I almost always chose to kiss them back.  

There’s a specific absence in my upbringing.  When others were being warned off sex, being taught it was vile, evil, degrading, dangerous, I learned nothing.  This hasn’t harmed me over the long term, though I have made some spectacularly bad decisions.  People who learn to fear sex also make bad decisions, and hate themselves while doing so.  Between the two, I know what I’d choose.

In case of emergency, fill glass

~ Will Forrest ~ 1 Comment

If you have a rich inner dialog , one of those voices is probably the bartender.  Allow them to delight your many selves with one of the following recipes, crafted to unpick the neural knots of decades of compulsive overstimulation.  Choose from:

The Civil Service

Black tea with a side of buttered toast.  May be served continually and at any time throughout the day as required to maintain decorum

The Ersatz

Steamed milk with instant decaf to provide the experience of a latte made with high-grade espresso, but without interfering with your meds

The Sidestep

Literally any drink that will effectively distract you from craving alcohol

(All recipes by The Fixer, some fairly insignificant rights reserved)

A brief argument in favour of exuberance

the night sky ablaze with stars
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

There is no future

without our feet dancing it into being

hips slide and a universe arises

spiraling through

leaving a trail of glory

There is no future

times slinks animal-like

no thicker than skin

a thread stretching between us

There is no future

be glad there was never a future

only freedom

coldly inexhaustible

a stone in the palm of your hand

begging to be thrown

(2022)

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 5: A copy of Fetish Times

closeup of a woman's back, tied with hemp shibari ropes
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

There was that time I was coming down after a semi-licit rave at a downtown ballet studio.  I’d only just met the woman whose apartment we were in, though she knew some of my friends. It must have been spring, for the room was full of sunlight.

The woman was a dominatrix. Messily beautiful, twice my age. I am quite sure that if she tried to fuck me I would have said yes. Instead I read the magazine Fetish Times.

It was 1994. The internet was barely a word. No smartphones, no cameras, no 3.5 million search results and nothing to Google it from (sorry Netscape, you did your best.) We still called it cyberpunk, for fuck’s sake.  Then adolescent me picked up one of western culture’s strangest artefacts and the bottom dropped out of the world. Thanks to the imprinting effects of psychedelics, there was no coming back.

I was appalled. I read it cover to cover. No one noticed. They talked about San Francisco in the 1980s, about tweakers on roller-skates and failed revolutions. I read about…stuff.

Why do we want it so weird? Who told me to ask my first lover to pour hot wax on me, the third time I ever had sex?  That was before I’d seen the magazine. He asked what I wanted and that’s what I wanted.  We were barely dating. I just went to his house to fuck. To smoke hash. To read his mind-bendingly seditious books and fantasise about changing the world.

Am I ready?

Are you?