New Year's Eve

It's never been one of my particular favorites, but after work I went and bought myself a good looking western shirt and entertained the thought of going out to ring in the new year, maybe even find myself a kiss at the end of the countdown. Never have been one for crowds or woooos, and when you combine the two, well, that's pretty much hell for me.

I took a short nap. It's 9 PM. What now?

Well, I went out after all. Crossroads. When I first arrived in Big Spring, someone told me that was a good place to go to get stabbed. As it turns out, it's also a pretty good place to be on New Year's Eve. They didn't let me sing Ace of Spades, but that's ok. Black, brown and a little bit of white - lots of dancing and no problems. Glad I went.

Everything is more than just one thing. 

Basking, I guess you'd say.

There have been many things along the way that I wished I could have shown you. Things I wanted you to hear and see and feel with me. I miss laughing with you still and remember it well. Laughing with someone else isn't the same. But what I miss most is that feeling of brimming over with something warm whenever you were close at hand.

Not much to say about it

Not too far from here
Outside Forth Worth in a place called
White Settlement
Two parishioners didn't make it home from church
They didn't make it to the hospital either
I didn't leave the room today until dinner
And then couldn't find much that was good to eat
Or to pass the time with
No one walks the streets here
I did for a few blocks in the old downtown
And I ran into two distinct black cats
Neither crossed my path
And stars

Day O' Work

I'll tell you what occurred.  I walked out the damn hotel into the balmy morning parking lot and seven or eight of those orphaned cats jumped me out of pure malice, scuffed my shoes, and shredded my damn sweater. I started the car and drove down and around the block to the Starbucks that's still novel enough in this town to always have a line. It takes those youngsters about 15 minutes to make a drink. Three of us came to the crossroads at the same time. I was fixing to turn left into the parking lot. Someone else wanted to pull out and turn right. And the transgressing third pickup preventing us both from rightfully doing exactly as we intended was stopped cold, not signaling any intentions whatsoever, when it was supposed to be going straight forward. The passenger in that particularly honry vehicle saw fit to point at me just then. Of course, I immediately shot the tip of his index finger off right through the dang windshield of my rental car leaving him with a startled O for a mouth. Sure the windshield's covered by the insurance policy, I'm in Texas. That freed things up a little, and the offending vehicle moved ahead and out of the dang path of progress.

The purple-haired girl at the counter inside said, "Good mornin', Greg".

I said good morning back, knowing all the while my name wasn't Greg, fingering the pistol in my pocket.

"Do you know, Freya, that mariachi music fills me with a dizzy sense of surreality and alcoholic dread ?"

"No, sir. I did not know that."

"Let's go ahead and keep it that way."

"Yes, sir. You have a blessed mornin', sir. "

Outside, I notice again that there are no crows here. There's no consolation for me in that fact. I'm thinking it's the freaking fracking and that sickly smell of burning natural gas all the damn time. The grackles that survive here move like post apocalyptic marauders. They'll probably be waiting for me tomorrow morning. 

Let go of desire: no grasping, no yearning, no attachment.

After a long sleep, I'm back to work in Big Spring.

There were a few notable events on the return trip. The first flight featured a crew of two physically beautiful female flight attendants in the main cabin. One didn't smile at all, and the other smiled a lot, though not really at anyone  It was as though she were smiling for a camera or acting in a stage production. The smiling one called all the women "babe" and didn't acknowledge me at all. The unsmiling one hit my sleeping kneecap squarely, twice, with the beverage cart and she didn't acknowledge me either.

In Dallas-Fort Worth, I squandered a couple of hours in a small roped-off bar. The bartender was a small person with a big voice. Her name is Edna. Edna asked me to pay for my beer as soon as it landed. She went on to tell me a story, at the top of her voice, about how many people don't pay for their drinks in airports. The difference comes out of her pocket at the end of her shift. On Christmas Eve, she had to make up $43. This hurts when you're making less than three dollars an hour. She told me she tracked one woman down, followed her on to her flight mad as hell, told the flight crew she wasn't getting off until the woman paid. The flight crew backed her up, gave the woman the option to pay or leave the plane with the police. She paid.

One of Edna's customers finished his beer and headed out. He passed behind me and half-whispered "She's louder than my dad, and he's 80 and stone deaf".  She saw him, didn't hear what he said, but she looked down anyway, apparently stung, knowing it had been about her.

I told Edna I'd be her undercover back-up and started scanning the remaining customers. She made a guy leave $20 on the bar when he went to the bathroom. I assured him she'd tackle him if he got any ideas about not leaving it.

A young woman walked up to my side of the bar. Attractive, fit - she had the choice of two stools, one beside the good looking younger man who had since returned from the bathroom to find his $20 still on the bar, or the one beside me. She chose the one beside me. A voice told me it's because I looked like the safer option. Harmless. I sunk a little.

She's spent Christmas in Dallas with her brother and his kids and was on her way home back to Kansas. She'd studied dance and then taught it to little girls. I liked that. Then she got an offer to  come out to California to work for the Hyatt hotel chain. A series of promotions took her from Palm Springs to Miami to San Antonio. Last year she decided she was going to take what she'd learned and do her own thing. She bought a bar in her Kansas hometown, in a historic building, and learned a lot about carpentry in the process. It's running pretty well now, they're getting ready to expand by adding a restaurant. Their peak time is during the pheasant season. Kaycee is her name. She's 29. I told her I hope she'd find time to teach little girls to dance again, and bid her good luck. We shook hands, and I felt a small ache as I walked away to my gate.

On the next leg of the trip, I was upgraded to first class. It was only a one hour flight, but they still managed to get three drinks and two snacks into me. I felt self-conscious drinking and eating while the ones looking at the back of my head with envy and hatred went without. The flight attendant was a tall, hilarious, twenty year old. Smart, quick, very funny and courageous - I recommended she give stand up comedy a try. That was a short flight, and I was almost sorry to leave.

I found my way to the rental car, drove East through the oil fields and the smell of burning natural gas, stopped for dinner at the Texas Cajun, checked in with one of the waitresses whose Dad had a stroke a couple of weeks ago, joked a little with two of the others, and headed off to bed alone. Which seemed appropriate.

Winter Night

We're in that short span of days between Christmas and New Year's Eve when I received your message, shortly after having given up hope, six years ago. I went without expectation. A little later I was holding your purse, gloves, hat and winter coat outside the rest room. Later still, I involuntarily kissed the top of your head. You were a little drunk by then, and I already understood that I was hopeless.

Folky

Ceremonial

The injection is given to nearly all of them, no matter
Sad, psychotic, addicted, manic, hopeless, traumatized, poor -
Trapped
And they accept it

I see a blackened glass jar inverted
Let's call it the world
For now

The story of the baby Jesus is told to the children at the altar of an affluent Episcopalian parish
Jesus and Mary were chosen by God, she tells them, and they were people without a lot of money
They were poor people, and God chose them to bring Jesus into the world to save us
And they accept it

It's dark in the jar, hard to breathe
I'm ashamed and
Trying hard not to scream

The last Jedi is up there on the screen now, she's fighting the darkness - both
Inside and out, the odds are impossible of course, while we chew our popcorn
Ultimately she triumphs, after enduring heavy sacrifices, but we win in the end
And they accept it

I fall asleep while she's climbing around inside the hulk of the Death Star
Sickly in need of a new story
These no longer heal or nourish

Christmas Eve Again

Texted with someone this morning half a world away, floating in a salt lake, immersed in a different culture without the North American commercial emphasis around Christmas. Said it felt refreshing. The simple joy of being together.

Tonight in a Chinese restaurant with my three no longer children, marveling at the people they are becoming. Grateful for the opportunity.

Travel Day

Travel day
No pre check
Annoyance
Then the girl with the backpack
Smelled like hard drinking
Had no ID
Hispanics, she said,
Even though I'm half, I don't speak it
A tragedy happened to me...
Twice
I've got to get out of Texas
It's her first time flying
Scared
Going home to Washington
Crying
I need to see my little boy
Raped
Talking to me
An older woman on
Her way to Alaska
Walks up and hugs her
Without hesitation gives
What I couldn't

Don't Mind Me

Walking uphill, the paved loop in the state park,
sunshine, quiet, 70 degrees,
my head is clearing, my lungs laboring, my mood improving
and then, off to the left, a snapshot.

Two women in sunglasses, one reaching the back of her hand
toward the other's hair as though to stroke it lovingly, they see me
and freeze, her hand drops, expressionless faces look off to nowhere.

It's ok, I want to say.
I can see you love her.
I'm really not that guy.

Sleep it Off

More down hearted than I imagined
over the political affiliations of people
I share history and experience with, felt
earlier that maybe I needed a night out
to blow off steam, but now just staying
put after steak and shrimp at the Texas Cajun.

But then I return to thinking of someone I
felt so close to - I ignored her politics and
she never challenged mine. If we had continued
together, what would it be like now?

I Spit On Their Agony

My daughter kind of enigmatically warned me
not to get caught in "the hotel limbo".  It's been a month
now, and I haven't even turned on the TV in here.
Tonight, I got to feeling a little confined, the air conditioning
coming on and shutting off, that repeating pattern of
sounds starting to bore into me, so I pressed the button on the remote
and the TV fired up with channel after channel of nothing I wanted
anything to do with until black and white Anthony Quinn as
Zorba the Greek.

I guess I've never watched that movie all the way through. The orthodox townspeople
are twitching and snarling with blood lust, surrounding a long haired beauty in black.
Who is she? An adulteress, I'm guessing, and I just know they're going to stone her.
And what about the dead guy those glaring men carry on their shoulders, who is he?
The husband, wronged, who threw himself into the sea, I'll wager. Their brother.
Anyway, they eventually cut her throat despite brave Zorba's attempt to defend her.
Because a village has it's way of doing things, and you just don't want to buck that.

I'm going out to eat another bad meal prepared by distracted teenagers.
Not much of the food here has been much good, and I'm considering not eating
at all next month. So on to the Desert Flower, where I had such a good time a month ago.
But it's not there this time, that good time, it's fucking comedy night.
How much comedy can one small high desert town sustain?
I'm not feeling it at all, the people start looking to me like Zorba's psychotic villagers,
and I know it's time to go.

Out in the street
someone makes a big noise gunning his engine.
Wow, that car's almost flying -
for about two blocks.

So We Are Not Swallowed By It

I can see you

hurting there.
I want you to

know that.
I can't tell you

what to do but
I hope you go on.

Marie

Early to Bed

Take a young intelligent beautiful girl
who has been punched and choked unconscious
for a couple of years by the father of her child and put
her on antipsychotic medication because she's afraid to leave
the house, hears voices at night telling her ugly things, and has
terrifying nightmares.

This fucking place: you can't get a therapist to save your life,
but you can buy an AR-15 quick as you please.

I'm skipping the comedy show down at the hotel tonight.

And invisible Jesus, he is all around being trusted in and hoped upon,
but he won't pick up the fucking phone.

And the hotel bar is full of men, oil field stereotypes - the only woman
is the bartender, and she's even more sick of looking at you assholes
than I am.

So buy the suicidal guy a little kitty litter to grease the skids,
and pick up the check for the young couple sitting close in
the Mexican place, stroking each other's hands,
as high as colorful kites
on love.

Slow down, the greeter told me twice today, it ain't worth it.

I Wanted to Write Something Nicer

Maybe I'm getting sick,
the vicarious hopelessness of the man
and the conclusion that we came to,
the fracked fields and the poison water
injected back into the ground -
twice, in different towns, I heard women
say "oil man" today with what sounded
to me like desire, you can't help the economics
of desire, it's just nature, or programming, or fuck it,
and I can't help wanting to set fire to it all.
Leaving the restaurant where I was caught
muttering to myself more than once, I interrupted
a scavenging stray cat making his rounds,
we were going in the same direction so I threw
a bacon cheddar summer sausage out
the window of the van, and he
probably felt assaulted

Dumb

One of those questions came up today
you don't want to have to try to answer
because every possible response is
absolutely unsatisfactory.

Keep going, you want to say,
maybe it will change
because
everything is always changing.

But it's
his pain,
and not
yours.

87 North

Woke up a little late and chose North as the direction of the day - up RT 87 to Lubbock.

Lamesa is where the fracked gas and oil fields give way to cotton fields and life returns to the land.

I met a Cambodian-American couple with a donut and kolache business there.

Sam told me about Cambodia, about how the same crooked people have held power for 40 years, about how China is building a military base there, about the exodus of Cambodians who have learned other ways of thinking and want to return to Cambodia and change things.

He's counting on Donald Trump to protect them from the Chinese.
Obama's face was too nice, Sam said.
"Trump's face looks mean and ugly," said Sam, "China is afraid of him".
"Trump don't play," he said.

And I was politely smiling, shaking my head a little.
I am not so sure he's got your best interest at heart, my friend.

Lubbock was quiet on Sunday morning. I saw Buddy Holly Boulevard and two blocks of bail bonds places where it intersected Main. A freight train loading at the the cotton gyn. Empty streets. Full church parking lots.

I drove around the low houses in the subdivisions, Texas Tech, a mall overrun with Christmas shoppers from far and wide, and I had to contend with traffic as the afternoon progressed.

Just a city. And me, only a ghost. 

Before You Get Too Proud

There's a pair of dachunds in this town,
I used to see them in the morning,
working a circuit of dumpsters.
The female was heavy with puppies.
It got a little cold, and I haven't seen them since.

Almost every time I look out a window
in this town, I see cats stalking vacant lots,
sleeping in the beds of pickups,
moving like the wild things
they've learned to be again

Many of the people who talk
to me in this town, tell me of
horrors, sickness, suffering
they've never gotten help with because
they've been left out there too.

Shallow Breathing

Solitary user on the multi use trail
All was quiet for the hour but the wind
And the drumming of quail wings
At the top of the hill
There were doves there and smaller birds
Organized into stealthy bands
Giving little away when they moved
But a noiseless flash of motion

I've been half-thinking a thought
For a couple of weeks now about
The desert out there
That great open space
And how I tried not to see
Those long running fences
Or understand that it's ultimately
All fenced in

Regular

Thursday night at the Desert Flower
Is a very very good time, but I'm tired
After 10 hours of scrambling.

Watched the moon rise, bought some groceries,
Stopped for tacos, stayed all to myself tonight.
I'll be in my rented bed soon. 

Power

Jose walks into the bar in shorts on a cold night for West Texas. His left leg looks to be titanium.

He's got a boxer's nose, scarring on his cheekbones and forehead. The look in his eye is hard when our eyes meet. I offer to buy him a beer, but she just poured him one.

Before long he's crying, telling me the story of his legs. Apologizing for acting like a bitch.

He lost one, and the doctors who performed the amputation said he was going to lose the other one too. But an Indian doctor approached him later and whispered, "We are going to save your leg".

The first group of doctors kept on with the same negative prognosis, and the Indian doctor kept countering it, quiety but persistently. And Jose came to believe him.

Jose cried tonight to a stranger with gratitude for the doctor in San Antonio who saved his leg.

That's what health care should be able to do.

That's what I should be able to do. 

Friend

Exhausted by the sound of the human voice and with air travel delays, I resigned myself to the last leg of the trip to West Texas wondering how I could dissociate completely for the next hour and a half. Instead, the man beside me turned out to be open hearted, long suffering, and still full of hope and faith. Younger than me by several years, he had survived more, overcome more, and as a result, deeply understood each day of his life as a gift. He stays busy, his eyes are open, he wrings all the life he can out of each day. They aren't promised.

He understands this better than most, and as we talked about how we move forward in our lives, the airplane began to shake. The shaking escalated to sudden falling and rising. The girl in the seat behind us squealed. We two laughed quietly together - the experience of turbulence - the words we were speaking to each other put to the test. We looked out the window and saw only clouds as the plane rattled and jerked. He said life is exactly like this - turbulence and zero visibility - but we keep going forward nonetheless. Faith he called it. Determination, I said.

There is healing in the world, he tells me, God is good. Don't ever give up on yourself.

By The Time I Get To Phoenix

Oh, Magoo! You've done it again.

Always have been scatterbrained and distractable. I have a hard time staying focused. I'm someone who should make checklists, but that requires organization, motivation and routine. I do not enjoy routine. Boring. Feels like a prison cell, smells like paint.

Anyway just to keep things from getting monotonous, I got up at 2:30AM for a 6:30 AM flight, packed the few things I unpacked on Saturday morning, and was on my way. I drove the hour to the garage I park in, was happy to find a space inside, opened the back door to remove my backpack and tiny suit case and found the suitcase absent without leave. The tiny suitcase was at home, sleeping on the couch, just where I'd packed it.

This of course would cause me to miss my flight. I called the wonderful people at the airline. Someone answered the phone. He informed me that for no extra cost, I could fly stand by, but each of the three remaining flights to Dallas today were overbooked, making my chances of getting aboard skinnier than slim. He could reroute me through Phoenix though, and I'd arrive in West Texas about 8 hours later than planned, and it would cost me about 500 additional dollars.

Can't really charge the company for my mistake, so I opted to burn some frequent flyer miles. They gladly accepted fifty thousand of them. Now I am on my way to Phoenix where I will have a long lay over and likely end up drunk.

An old white guy can't have a Chinese houseboy with a braid and buck teeth today without being horrible, but someone like Charlie - who ran around with frantic devotion saving Mr. Magoo from the consequences of his own actions - would probably do me a lot of good.

Shift

He asked me this morning what I'd do with a million dollars, and I gave it to him straight. I didn't tell him that I keep a current detailed contingency plan for any huge unplanned influx of cash that may befall me. I update it nearly daily.

He told me he'd put aside money for college, pay off the mortgages, wipe out his siblings' student loans, sock away a bit for his mom and for me, and if there was any left, put a little toward his retirement.

He also made his bed without being asked.

Happy 70th Birthday to Mr. Tom Waits.

That's Why

First, a flight that included a Harvard Business School student with zero respect for a fellow traveler's sleep (one diagnostic indication of bad character), then transitioning to temps in the 30s and snow, then the car started without a problem after two weeks in a garage, and the tire with the bent rim still had air in it, but my driveway at 3 AM was covered by a foot and a half of snow and significantly more than that where the plow had packed it in, then while shoveling to make room for my car and to get to my bed, I thought to myself why the hell did I come back here for two stupid days?

And then early this afternoon, I saw my youngest boy looking taller as he walked out of his house. We ate a meal, he got a flu shot, I got a haircut, we swapped some stories, jokes and laughs, watched a movie and everything was right.

Before it Fades

Snapshot in my head of a tall girl in an airport
standing with her back against the wall,
she has beautiful black eyes, and when our
eyes meet she looks down but smiles big.

I walk right up to her and she puts her arms around my neck
and we kiss for days right there against that wall in the main
corridor of a very busy international airport, we were drinking
in the morning and first noticed each other from across the bar.

Some of this story is true.

Thanks, John Wade

Flight

A coworker was annoyed because I never pick up the phone when he calls. Somehow I shut my ringer off inadvertently, so he demanded my phone and programmed the various sounds to notify me of calls, e-mails, text messages, and scheduled events. Today I sent an e-mail, and as it launched, I was surprised by the sound of the alert tone known as Note. That's the one that used to announce you. My body felt the same visceral reaction it did back then. It's been years.

What a sound that was. A symphony in a single note. 

Scale

Two weeks in the same hotel room, the same small town. I apply the pain scale to myself and can't come up with a number. I start out thinking maybe I'm unwell, but there's no acute sadness, physical pain, happiness or anything really. A day and then another day. Riding the elevator down to the lobby, I guess I'm lucky to have these days free of anguish. They are not to be taken for granted.

You don't have to look far to understand that. The hotel bartender mops when it's slow. She's got to clean the area herself. She works another job at the state hospital during the day. She tells me about her son's friend, a kid who hung himself behind the church, over a slight from a girl he loved they suppose. The girl cried at his funeral - probably what the dead boy hoped he'd see - but in a month she had a new boyfriend, and the dead boy didn't see that either. She tells her son this story so he understands that dead is for keeps. 

Desert Thoughts

Now I have these desert scenes in my head. Maybe I could live there, about 25 miles outside a border town, with the wind, the space, and the mountains. Maybe, over time, I'd get to know a coyote well enough to throw bones to. Maybe we'd study each other in the near distance and wonder what happened.

The sign at the entrance says this was once a Comanche crossroads. They describe the Comanches as bandits, slavers, and murderers and the Texans (the white ones I'm guessing), stretched thin by the Civil War, are quite obviously the good guys who had to endure these abuses. I wasn't there. I'm just taking a walk.

I am walking up one of the few hills in Big Spring on the paved loop trail around the state park at dusk. I come alongside another walker who slips into conversation with me as though we had been talking right along. She says her husband has been dead for a few years now. Her first boyfriend and best friend, they married in high school when she got pregnant. He quit school, got his GED, and went to work. They had almost 40 years married and happy when he died suddenly - right in front of her - of a massive heart attack. Very quietly she tells me that she felt so helpless. For a moment, I can feel that.

Dreams and Gasoline

Toward Fort Stockton

Put fifty dollars in the tank yesterday and headed southwest with the border and the Rio Grande in mind. Back down I-20 West to Monahans and the Sand Hills National Park feeling eager to get beyond where I had already been.

The dunes were white and the wind blew strong forcing me to squint while I walked up and down watching the sand rippling in waves across. On the wind, I heard traces of children screaming and laughing. A few were sliding the steep slopes on rented saucers, the ones we used in snow where I come from. I added this to the list of things to show my own kids, something we will do together, and I will hear them laugh with the same joy as these.

And then I remember that my children are grown, or nearly so. A wind gust slaps my face with a blast of fine sand. I remember, right then, when I believed both you and I were both horses, even though I knew it wasn't really true, but believing is so much better than math.

Too much of that kind of thinking so I head for the truck, and then the two of us head for Fort Stockton.

There are oil fields all the way out there. Such a huge part of West Texas looks like a Frankenstein monster threaded and run through with pipelines, tanks, pumps, drilling rigs, flares burning off gas
and a particular nauseating subtle stench surrounds it all.

I listened to two men speculate about what happens when you pump oil and gas out of the ground. One said the cavities immediately fill again, with what substance and from what source, I don't know. The other said the cavities result in sink holes. Empty spaces just under the crust that eventually give way to a yawning abyss. I imagine this whole basin dropping underneath me while driving 80 miles an hour.

Driving past RV parks and a man camp of trailer homes arranged in long rows, I notice a place called the I Don't Care Bar and Grill.