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Thursday, October 3, 2013

Secrets of preambulatory displacements..

excerpt of 77 minute track of "the Higher Elevation recordings of August 2013"

Opal Marie Petty was 16 yrs old in 1934 when she began to see a dark lurking man mocking her and winding scrub weed around his neck outside of her window. Her God fearing parents were persuaded by the Doctor to have her institutionalized when she began digging her own grave in the Texas dirt with a butcher knife. She was packed up with a simple red dotted dress and sent into the mental hospitals which during the Depression Era meant that conditions were grim, meager, desperate- patients slept on concrete floors and tended each others needs since the staff were cruel and far between. Opal's custodial care in treatment of her mental illness consisted of 35 years of work in the hospital laundry where she earned $2 a week. Eventually 51 years passed and Opal's sister took to concern and fought the state of Texas for release. In the passing of time that was to follow, Opal recovered as well as could and took an interest in making clothes for the 6 dolls she bought with the earnings from the hospital laundry and treated them as her babies she never had due to forced sterilization. She began to play the piano and took delight in choosing colors with which to paint her fingernails and then she died on a fine, reckless spring day in the month of march in the year of someones Lord, 2005.

2 comments:

  1. Absolutely brilliant. The back looped tape with the middle eastern sounds and then that voice which i swear is saying something about sperm, frosted sperm i thought, is just spectacular.

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  2. I also wish I had known of Opal.Marie Petty. Her tale is the stuff I like to post on my blog.

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