ADVIL LIQUIGELS: DON'T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT THEM.

I've changed my first swimsuit post pics to more anonymous but still relevant pics to keep it seminonimous here, as that gives me the liberty to relate events like what will follow. I've also added a couple of extra pics since I hear that my derriere has fans ;)

So on to explaining this post's title. Our office hosted another deposition this afternoon. The day had already been pretty trying. Everything seemed to be going fine the first half hour or so; the door to the conference room where the depo was taking place was closed, but soon I could hear muffled but louder voices. Almost an hour later, the defense counsel bursts out, nearly slamming the conference room door in CC's face, who's following close behind yelling "WHAT THE FUCK do you mean by THAT?"

Defense counsel swings the front door open, turns back and glares at CC. His green eyes are bloodshot; then he locks them on me for a split second -- I can only describe that look as homicidal -- before tearing out the front door without closing it. At this point he's muttering tortured incomprehensible curses, and then he stops by the front desk lobby. The part-time student behind the desk staring at him has gone bloodless white. Defense counsel proceeds to swing his metal briefcase across the lobby, straight at a glass "sculpture" displayed on an iron tripod; it resembles (or resembled) a 3-foot in diameter burnt pizza. The burnt pizza sculpture shatters, the sound echoing. Heads pop out of offices around the lobby.

CC is at our still-open door; I think she mouthed "oh shit." Our big guy runs out of his office at this point, stepping between CC and defense counsel. "STOP RIGHT THERE" he booms to defense counsel, who's breathing like he's running a marathon in his head, eyes locked to where his briefcase lies on shards of thick glass across the floor.

Two security guards were at the lobby entrance now, but the big guy waved them off after snapping his cell phone shut. Big guy walked toward the defense counsel slowly saying "Come with me, come." And defense counsel followed, as the big guy's cell rang and he answered. From his replies I gather it was defense counsel's firm. The seconds between when defense counsel unlocked his eyes from his briefcase-missile till when he followed the big guy out the building seemed like minutes to me, and to CC and everyone else there I'm sure.

Maintenance was called to clean up the mess; after an admin from another office commented that "I reported that damned glass thing as an earthquake hazard last safety meeting -- guess it's a moot point now."

And defense counsel...well, the man's father is the pastor of a church in a neighboring county flock-full of important or self-important members of its community. Up to now, this guy was one of those people Jim Heynen seems to be be writing about in the poem which follows.

At the end of the day, as CC rifled through her bag and I handed her the Advils from mine and she took them wordlessly and swallowed them sans water, the Beatles song "Nowhere Man" played on the lobby system. Serendipity or what, what to call it? Defense counsel was so shiny happy clean, one of those guys you just can't imagine having more than the one-dimensional life of upper middle class yuppiefied "godliness," as perhaps his pastor father would call it. And this happens.

Anyway, been a long day and evening, so with renewed gratefulness for my relative freedom and for a family that didn't groom me for a staged life, I afix here Heynen's poem, which I copied by hand word for word in one of my "good" journals when I first read it in contemporary American poetry. And the youtube of the Beatles song. Good night, good morning, or good day now.

The Clean People, by Jim Heynen, from A Suitable Church [1981]

The clean people worry me.
Wherever they go, I face the glare
of their immaculate smiles,
their polished demeanor
declaring the good life of order.
Where is the smudged message of grief,
the scuff-marks of pain?
With all the dirt in the world,
who got theirs?

I think I am one
and take my place with the soiled.
We are the others
who cannot balance budgets,
nor wear white to our weddings.
Our garb is the haggard
will to survive.
Our language is the mono-
syllabics of dust.
Disorderly, vagrant,
we make our salacious way,
staining the world as we go.
We sing of flesh and the earth,

while they,
haloed in the absence of filth,
must live near God,
their heavenly songs
lodged in the unmarred
keyboards of their grins.
Here they come now,
their clean mouths open,
spilling light as they go.