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WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME You me and everything. A collection of autobiographic short stories, essays, and poetic reflections by Thom Kudla

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Page 1: An Excerpt from What My Brain Told Me - s3.amazonaws.com from... · It made me remember everything I didn’t do. ... “I would’ve preferred that you say your brain told you

WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME

Youmeand

everything.

A collection of autobiographic short stories, essays, and poetic reflections by Thom Kudla

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Copyright © 2008 by Thom KudlaAll Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of AmericaPublished by LuLu

ISBN-13: 978-1-4357-2054-1

Designed by Brad WicklundProofreader: Kathryn Williams

This is a work of fiction. Though inspired by the author’s own life, including the people and events he has encountered, this book should be treated as fictitious. Any references to actual names, people, places, events, and things should be treated as

coincidental or otherwise inconsequential.

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WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME

“This is the great private problem of man: death as the loss of self. But what is this self ? It is the sum of everything we remember. Thus, what terrifies us about

death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past. Forgetting is a form of death ever present within life.”

– Milan Kundera

I first considered my own mortality as a 10-year-old standing

next to a stop sign, waiting for the school bus early one morning. The

sun sleepily draped itself in clouds just above the horizon. I grabbed

the pole of the stop sign and repelled myself backwards and forwards,

side to side, between arms, preoccupied with grandiose deliberation

upon mortal recognition and spiritual revelation. Seemingly contrary

to this, I had a good childhood. I just liked to think more, that’s all.

Of course, thinking isn’t always a good thing. As a child, I celebrated

thought with each curious gaze and innocent question. Life was so

much more fun that way. As an adolescent, I revered thought with

every academic venture and poetic adventure. I was deeper than the

rest. My motto became, “There is no greater freedom than that of

thought,” because I had yet to be set free by love and because I liked

the presumed intellectual sophistication of the placement of the word

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vi WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME

“that” in such a mantra. And, finally, as an adult, I regretted thought. It

made me anticipate what could go wrong at any moment. It burned my

brain until my body could no longer function. It made me remember

everything I didn’t do. I didn’t ask that bubbly brunette out on a date

during high school. She always liked talking about ideas. I bet now

she’s married to an artist like me. An artist like me. I didn’t continue

playing basketball in high school. I could have gotten in better shape. I

could’ve maybe even gotten an athletic scholarship to college or, at the

least, I would’ve had a healthy reason to stop thinking. But these stories

are not about what could have been great during my first 25 years of

life – these stories are about what was unforgettable.

It was so very odd. I was an imbecilic runt for the longest

time and then, without any warning or hints to growth or other such

foreshadowing, I became who I am today. I suppose neurologically

there is some explanation for me crying because I was unable to add

single digits one day and being able to complete multiplication tables in

the fastest time in my class the next, or me struggling to speak one day

and being capable of complex sentence structures in dramatic orations

the next. Regardless, I like to think there was something spiritual behind

it – some divine spark. I think it was like that first divine gust when God

breathed life into all of us. I think I was dead until the day I discovered

intellect. It’s mostly sad and pathetic, though, because it took me a little

more than a decade to cultivate and later control an intelligence higher

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WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME vii

than that of a certified idiot. They always said late-bloomer. I don’t know

much about that. I do know I focus on fictional realities and spiritual

planes beyond that of this world more often than most, and I cherish

every moment to which I can ascribe such meaningful profundities.

Interestingly enough, before my intellect had even begun to

develop exceptionally, my parents would always ask me how I had

answers to certain questions, or how I knew odd things, or why I was

asking specific questions, and my response was always the same: My

brain told me.

“Why do I have to go to school tomorrow?”

“Who told you to ask that question?”

“My brain told me.”

“Well, your brain needs to grow bigger so it doesn’t have

to ask questions like that anymore. That’s why you have to go to

school tomorrow.”

“There’s no Santa Claus.”

“How do you know that?”

“My brain told me.”

“Did you have fun at school today?”

“School was shitty.”

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viii WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME

“Where’d you learn that word?”

“My brain told me.”

“We’re having macaroni for dinner tonight.”

“Oh yeah? Who told you that?”

“My brain told me.”

“Do you like your class at the church?”

“Hell no.”

“Where’d you learn that word?”

“Sunday school.”

“I would’ve preferred that you say your brain told you.”

“OK, my brain told me about ‘hell.’”

Awhile back, I started writing personal stories as gifts for people.

At that time, I was fully cognizant of the fact that my memory wasn’t

always accurate. What my brain told me to write always seemed to differ

from what actually happened. And yet writing these stories – some

more fictional than others – has helped me remember the people, the

places, and the times that comprise who I am. I decided to write about

some of my favorite moments in life up to this point because I never

want to forget any of this, because I want something to look back on

during my dying days to remind me of the life I’ve lived well and the

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WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME ix

world with which I’ve been blessed. I want to show my gratitude to

those who have inspired both me and these stories. Most importantly, I

want to share myself with the rest of the world through this memorial

of, and tribute to, my most youthful years. And so I present to you what

my brain told me. Hopefully, my brain recollected what matters most

and filled in the rest with the best of its excited imagination.

“Thom, who are you, really?”

“I am what my brain told me.”

– Thom Kudla, 2008

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LEGACY

“I just want to talk about a good father. … Men need examples and that’s not holy men – all of us are helped by examples. But it does seem that as men we feel better when other men show us that they are man enough to do whatever it is that we have hesitancy in doing. … So it would certainly be a fair question, on this Father’s Day, to ask, ‘What do you know about a good father?’ Now, when I say ‘father,’ I am

speaking of one who is the guardian or biological male in your life, who takes you out with them, who teaches you and gives you the instructions to follow. … A good father

is more than one who provides shelter, food and body coverage.” – Pastor Williams

My dad was always so strong. I hadn’t seen any weakness in

him, from the steadiness of his arm as he caulked our home’s side

door to the booming commands of his voice as he told me how to

throw a football. He was Hercules to me; he was Einstein to me. He

was some sort of superhero capable of extreme feats of strength and

intellect, simultaneously, never hindered, never faltering. Serious issues

would arise, like our friend’s bout with a brain tumor or my grandma’s

death, and my mom would be a nervous wreck while my sisters would

be disillusioned, but he would sit there, hands behind head, chuckling

– unfazed, unworried, resilient. I admired this strong foundation for

our family, this pillar of stability and security. (Of course, it wasn’t

until much later that I realized his way of coping with nervousness led

to those curious grins and chortles.) Whenever my sisters or I brought

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10 WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME

home positive school reports, he always pointed to the side of his

slightly disproportionate head, eyes and mouth wide with glory, telling

us we were lucky to have inherited his “superior intellect.” He was my

intellectual role model in that sense, though it did take me quite some

time to see beyond the lack of dynamics and liberalism in the books

he read. His stoicism kept me calm, even when I knew in the back

of my mind that repressing emotions was ultimately unhealthy. When

he told me to ask girls on dates, I said I wasn’t interested, but he kept

encouraging me, egging me on like a peer. I took this social criticism

seriously until his brother told me what a failure at flirting my father

had been. That was fine, though, because he was still all-powerful in my

mind. He was all these things to me. And I often thought he believed

the same things about himself, especially when I caught him flexing

forcefully in front of mirrors or furiously flipping through the pages of

dense readings. Then, when I was 14, I realized that he was vulnerable,

that he was human like the rest of us, that he also suffered from the fatal

conditions of this life.

What he left me – other than the obsessive self-consciousness

and the precocious intelligences, or the photographs of joyless smiles

and the memories of insecurities scintillating off the basketball court

with each awkward dribble, or even the money for a college education in

a poor man’s field – was that scar on my fingerprint, that little black dot

surfacing from my right index finger’s soft pad as if having been pricked

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LEGACY 11

by a sharp pencil. That was the most important thing my father left me

with. And I could not have asked for anything more profound.

The day before the surgery, my dad guided me through a tour of

our house. He showed me what I had never seen; he showed me what

I had seen numerous times but never considered. There was no energy

in the house, at least other than our pet dog whose stubby tail wagged

in syncopation with her pulsing tongue. Everyone else maintained grim

lethargy. My mom kept silent as she balanced her checkbook. Dusty

yellow light reflected from the silver chain of her glasses. Her lips jutted

out from her plain and flat face in pouted pretense. She didn’t seem to

be thinking hard about numbers and accounting. She also didn’t seem

to be mad or displeased with anyone. I assumed she was thinking what

I was thinking: what was to happen the next day on the operating table.

We hadn’t any legitimate conclusion to what we were intellectualizing at

that moment, but my dad seemed to know exactly what was to happen.

“Sure,” he’d say, “this may be that cognitive distortion, that

fortune-teller error, but I think there’s good probability for this to

occur.” Cognitive psychology had not given him a better way of dealing

with life. It seemed to simply provide him with new labels for things he

had always thought about.

He had it all planned out. He left the door to the basement open,

allowing darkness to pervade our earthy family room. This darkness

from below, from where my dad had gone and remained, overtook

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12 WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME

what little light of the vibrant sun that accidentally slipped through the

motley-shaded browns of our family room’s blinds. My father would

not allow clear skies today. In the same vehement voice I had grown to

take comfort in, he asked me to join him downstairs, suggesting there

were a few new lifting exercises for me to consider on the weight bench

down there. I looked to my mom’s tired eyes, their focus and emotion

emptied onto the figures of her receipts like tears upon cold shoulders.

Was she composed? Or disinterested? Or both? I had not the time to

consider such things. My dog’s eyes were playful, hopping from each

corner of her vision in anticipation of the next comforting pat on her

bushy head. Comfort.

My dad persisted. I didn’t want to hesitate any longer. Besides,

I had insisted since middle school that I was a serious lifter. So I walked

down into the darkness of the basement, with each footstep seeing more

light of the lonely bulb dangling from the ceiling. Upon looking down

on the third to last step, I realized for the first time that the bluish-gray

basement stairs had no vertical panels between each rung. I was bound

to lose balance with such a lack of light, but it hadn’t happened all those

times before. What allowed me to walk up and down that unfinished

stairwell without troubles and without ever noticing how unsafe it was?

As my shoeless feet touched the cement basement floor, contorting to

accommodate the rough and rocky clumps of its crumbling surface, I

saw the answer to my question in the sole thread of gray hair dwelling

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LEGACY 13

just above my dad’s watery eyes, irises sinking below wrinkling lids.

“What exercises have you been doing lately?” he asked, drained

and throaty.

The musty air filled my lungs with yellowish book chapters,

moth-ridden clothing, and long-since deceased ant exoskeletons. The

basement was never this unsettling. It was difficult for me to breathe

out fresh words describing my upper body work when I felt my airways

disintegrating into the dankness of the basement. With my mind failing

me, I reached for a red and black dumbbell hoping that my body would

at least remember. Some curls. Some reverse curls.

“Okay, good, good, that’s real good,” my dad said, such improper

phrasing for a distinguished professional. “Did you think to try this

one?” My dad then spread his body across the bench, his head nearly

off the edge, as he held the bell with both hands. He moved it back-

and-forth from behind his head to his neck back to eye-level. He had

shown it to me before, but for some reason I felt compelled to act as if

I had never seen him, or anyone else for that matter, show me such an

exercise. As he continued lifting, he offered more directives. “In order

for this lift to be most effective, you’d need to load up the bell with a

lot more weight.” He stopped lifting, put the dumbbell softly onto

the ground, and then he reached for the bar with jagged rust scattered

across its weights on each end. “I’m sure you’ve been using this to

bench press,” he said, noticing my approving nod. “I know that’s my

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14 WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME

personal favorite lift. But you have to keep in mind that the lower body

needs a workout too. This bar can help you with that.”

“Deep knee bends? Toe raises?”

“Yup, those are both good. There are others you can do at

the gym, but for the basement, those two are your best bets.” Silence.

Reflective silence. He got lost for a second in the weight, his entire

demeanor immovable and satisfied as he watched me nervously move

the bar to where I wanted it on the bench. He scratched the top of his

head and lifted himself to alertness with a contemplative gaze at the small

uncovered window at the very top of the brick wall in front of him. “Let

me show you some important things that you’re gonna have to know some

day.” I knew there had to have been something else. As though giving

a lecture, my father explained himself. “I’m going to show you all the

things I do around the house in case the surgery tomorrow prevents me

from completing such tasks.” His tense index finger constantly pushing

glasses farther against his face contrasted with the monotony, and the cold

robotics of his voice accentuated his bookishness. He walked under the

same stairs I feared losing step over and placed a small flashlight between

his teeth. The light shined upon the item below the stairs but above his

head as he reached his hand up. From far away, it looked to me like he

was about to catch a butterfly on a sunny spring day. He grabbed onto

something with his left hand and, with his right hand, motioned for me

to walk over next to him. My mind still on insects and other wildlife

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LEGACY 15

creatures, I thought for a brief moment that the cylinder containing a swirl

of fiber-like mesh was some sort of beehive or bird nest. Upon seeing

the flashlight’s beam reflect from the transparent plastic surface of the

cylinder and upon noticing a black pipe’s continuous tubing interrupted

by the “nest,” I realized that it had something to do with plumbing. “This

is the water filter,” my dad said, showing the cylinder to me as if it were

a specimen in a hands-on science class. Always teaching. “You’re gonna

want to change this about once a year or, if the water starts tasting or

smelling sulfuric or metallic, more often depending. You can buy this

stuff at home improvement stores. It’s real easy to install.” He motioned

to imply that the carbon filter can be slipped in and out of the plastic

cylinder with ease. Then he decided to get Socratic. “Do you know what

the purpose of filtering is?”

“Uh, to filter out the bad stuff in water.”

He laughed under his breath. “Sure, it filters out ‘bad stuff ’

like chlorine and other bad tastes and smells, purifying the water.

But there are filters for many things. Here’s another example.” My

dad walked to the massive metal rectangle by the nearest wall. It had

a large rumpled tube flapping out of its side like an accordion made

of foil. He pulled a screwdriver out of his shirt’s pocket protector,

unscrewed the corners of one of the sides of this metal box, and

then proceeded to lift out a thin screen of blue fuzz. “This is a

furnace filter. It does a similar thing, but with air instead. It catches

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16 WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME

dust, microbes, fungi, some gas, and all kinda other nasties in this

electrostatic filter so that the air and heat we get across the house

is fresh and good enough for us. This is washable and permanent.

You should clean it every 3 months. I have instructions right here if

you ever need them.” He handed me a short booklet from the tiny

wooden table near the furnace. I shook his offer off with my hand,

overwhelmed with the thought of having these new responsibilities

as of that day. He put the filter and cover back on the furnace. He

dragged his feet toward a strange metal box imbedded in that same

wall. “This,” he began, swiveling the door of the box open with

dramatic and drawn-out control, “is the load center where all the

circuit breakers are. Doing the wrong thing with this stuff could be

a catastrophe, so I suggest you consult an electrician.” I cracked a

smile and shook my head in disappointment. “But, if you have guts

like I do, then you’ll figure out which breaker is assigned to which

outlets and from there you’ll turn it off or on to reset the circuit and

solve your problem.”

I caught a glance of the inside of the load center’s door, and

it had all the information I needed pasted right on there. He then

closed it quickly. I didn’t tell him that he made it sound like a more

difficult and impressive achievement than it really was. I’m not quite

sure why I didn’t tell him that. It just seemed appropriate to keep my

mouth shut. Once back upstairs, though, I felt a bit more talkative.

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LEGACY 17

“How do you feel about the actual air conditioning and

heating interface?”

“The thermostat?”

“Yes,” my dad confirmed, pride in me, his son, seeming more

like jealousy.

“I got a good handle on it.”

“This is a newer one. I may need to show you a few tricks with it.”

I followed him to the thermostat where he began showing

me certain new features in this particular thermostat. My sister, still

in her comfortable sleeping attire, a Nirvana T-shirt and baggy gray

pajama pants, approached me with her hands up in the air and her head

shrugged out over her neck. As he “worked the interface,” my sister

asked him what he was doing. I explained in the exact same words he

used to explain himself to me.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “The surgeon seems really confident.

I don’t know where you’re coming from here, Dad.” My mom yelled

something in an enthusiastic tone, some incredible bit of gossip she

just heard on ET. I figured it was her way of getting my sister off my

dad’s case. I wasn’t really sure why she wanted to do that. Maybe he did

need to hear how ridiculous he was being. Regardless, something did

hit him, because he started fumbling through the thermostat’s controls

with nervous uncertainty. His frustration revealed itself in sweat traced

on the digital screen of the thermostat and a face reddened with what I

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18 WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME

imagined to be a dooming sense of failure.

“Well, this is brand new,” he said, “so I’m not sure I know all

the new features of this thermostat. There’s an instruction manual in

the kitchen drawer under the microwave that you can look at if you

ever need to.” He didn’t seem as threatened by this lack of knowledge.

From that point forward, he put forth a lot less effort in the tour.

“You’ve been doing lawn work for me more often in the past

few years than I’ve been doing. I’m guessing you don’t need my expert

advice regarding that.”

I tried to bring back my father the teacher. “Any advice would

be great, Dad. I’ve spent years doing things the wrong way before in my

past. Maybe you know things I don’t.”

“I taught you everything I know. At least about mowing, that is.”

I wanted so desperately to ask him what he knew about other

things that he didn’t tell me or what he knew about other things that he

never planned to ever tell me. I wanted to know why he thought it was

so important for me to go through this tour with him. Did he really

think he was going to die on the operating table? Or be paralyzed? Or

watch the cancer eat away at his throat until it reached a fatal peak in his

lymph nodes? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe all of those things.

“You already know how to handle the ash pit and the fireplace,

but how about chopping wood for the fires during the wintertime?”

I heard him singing “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” at

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LEGACY 19

that moment, a tune he would gruffly attempt to make harmonious

during many Christmas Eves when we would listen to the fire crackle,

smell my mom’s pumpkin pie bake in the oven, and watch Jimmy Stewart

listen to angels getting wings. No, it was not winter yet. It was not that

dead season of skeletal trees and hibernating creatures and migratory

birds. It was still spring, a hopeful time of blossoming flowers, fresh

breezes, and soothing lively sunlight. It wasn’t his time to go. It couldn’t

have been. “Dad, I don’t think I need to know how to do that, but I still

want you to show me.”

A subtle closed-mouth smile. “Here we go then. It’s important

to wear gloves, heavy gloves like these because, after all, when touching

wood, especially fairly untreated and uncut wood, you never know when

your hand might get a splinter or something worse. I keep most of the

wood in the backyard, near the swamp on the blue tarp. You can call the

lumber company from Aurora about getting more of that wood, should

you need to.” He placed thick yellow gloves on his hands, made of a

fabric petrified enough to seem almost furry. In the garage, the gasoline

lit my nostrils on fire with sensory memories of stops at gas stations

on long family road trips. Numerous lawn care tools hung on iron wall

hooks near the long aluminum ladder. Some shiny and clean; others

rusty and dirty. Some with finely polished wooden handles; others with

chipped-away wooden poles. Hedgers, hacksaws, and other unsafe adult

tools were scattered amongst basketballs, hula hoops, Frisbees, soccer

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20 WHAT MY BRAIN TOLD ME

balls, and a Radio Flyer wagon. He lifted an axe from the corner of the

cluttered garage. “I use this axe to break down the logs both to make

transporting them into the house easier and also to make stacking them

in the fireplace a lot more safe and sturdy. Here. Check out this axe.”

He handed me the axe. Its top-heaviness caught me off guard. For so

long I had thought it took more force from the person to use an axe,

but in actuality it seemed then to me that all I had to do was have the

strength to lift the axe and then let gravity do the rest. I was looking

forward to chopping up firewood. My dad took the axe back, probably

feeling a bit concerned with the way I was holding it so loosely in my

hands, letting it swing in small movements like a pendulum. “Could

you go around back and bring me some logs so we can both take a few

swings at this?”

This was to be a great father-son moment, no doubt. Considering

how great this was, I scurried to the backyard and searched for the biggest

log I could find. I avoided the ones with moss. When I found one large

enough without moss, I didn’t notice the shattered edges creating small

splinters of wood jutting out at different points. A prick of pain hit my

right index finger like a dot of blood being extracted onto a diabetic’s

glucose test strip. I saw a slight sliver stuck in the pad of my finger. I

tried to get it out myself, doing everything from pushing against my skin

to sucking on my finger, but nothing seemed to work. So I went to my

dad for guidance.

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LEGACY 21

“Oh, you forgot the first rule: Wear gloves!” he said with a smirk.

“It’s fine. Just an accident. No problem.” He went inside and brought

out some kind of manicure tool that I wasn’t quite sure of and popped

out the splinter. “That’ll probably leave some sort of mark like that.

Maybe even for the rest of your life.”

“Just from that splinter?”

“Possibly. But you know what?” I raised my head in expectancy.

“Sometimes things like that remain to remind us that no one’s perfect.”

It didn’t really make sense to me at the time, but he was right.

I saw him so vulnerable at that time in his life. It was sad and almost

pathetic. It was also beautiful in a way, this strong and powerful and

heroic figure in my life becoming tender and in need of reassurance,

in need of an affirmation of all the typical, common, crucial things he

had done for his family each day. It was less that he was preparing me

to become “the man of the house” – to me, he had become human.

And I no longer had an unattainable ideal to seek. And, for once, I

could make mistakes and never have to think that in doing so I was

so completely unlike my father the “superhero” and unworthy of his

presumed superiority. After that surgery, whenever he looked in the

mirror to flex like he used to, he would see a large scar across his neck.

During those moments, I would point with my once splinter-afflicted

finger and simply say, “Nobody’s perfect, Dad.”