Took myself out for a waffle and a walk in the cemetery. And you?

New Year's Eve is one of those holidays that almost always makes me feel worse. Like a Spring Break town. The herd. A Barnum and Bailey hustle culminating in a massive letdown of vomit, rape, arrests and broken glass. A mindless marking of time between chapters of a rolling disaster. Woo!

Cook for yourself

They were holding hands and praying at the table in Cracker Barrel. The woman behind me was talking loudly about 666 and some meaning she had gleaned from recent events. I was just waiting for a smothered hamburger steak and the end of this mess. 

Leon

Leon is the name of their new dog rescued from the shelter on his last day. Approximately eleven pounds of attachment-disordered terrier mutt. My youngest is getting to know him. They are getting to know each other. Both are already better for it. I can see it.

I did some cleaning in the kitchen tonight

Tonight I'd rather read Bob Dylan's lyrics than listen to him sing them. You know what I mean? Maybe you don't. I mean why should you?

Frank Zappa tells me, "there's no way to delay that trouble coming everyday." I do understand that, Frank. Yes, I truly do. 

Omicron took a chunk out of the staff schedule today and it's only just starting to roll. May it mean ten days of solid rest for those affected and nothing more. 

Christmas morning

Christmas allowed me to make it to the ER just as the rain was starting and would soon freeze. One is manic, running through the neighborhood breaking things. One is shaking hard in alcohol withdrawal (she's not yet thirty and nearly dead of it). The other would just like a break from his life. I talk to them, then I talk to the doctor, then I drive to the office and type it all up. And then I go to my ex-wife's house where our children have assembled and I get to see them all together among our gifts, happy for awhile.

Christmas Eve

I went to work for a few hours. One of them was suffering badly and could not say what was wrong. Yes, we should send her to the hospital even though it's against her will. She would not go for us, or for the medics, but the police officer moved her along using only necessary force, gentle enough, respectful. These holidays, the historical wounds of families. I stopped to buy some cards on the way home. Then I stayed in and quiet.

Some memories stirred. 

I remembered being in your house. Your bedroom. Your kitchen. The laundry room. Your spaces without you in them but filled with your essence. Your effort, a part of you, to keep them clean and cheerful. I liked to wash your clothes there and to help you make the bed.

My friend Ian. Tall, freckled, red-haired. He was an adopted boy. He had wounds he didn't speak about, I think. Something that was eating him too.

I love you, I'd say now.

Already

Christmas again. I'm pretty far from you, but you're right here beside me. Alright, I'll try. Christ. 

Hell

Hell, he told me, is simply the absence of God.

Its other face

It came up tonight all golden. As yellow and as round as the sun. Profound and articulate in its ascent. There should have been music or absolute silence to accompany it. The sound of an ever-rising wind. 

There's a great deal of time we merely wile away. There's some time we actually curse. We wish it never happened. We'd burn it if we could. 

But maybe there was a little precious time. Time you wished would never end. When you're in that kind of time, you want only more of it. Any other kind of time seems unbearable. 

You can call that kind of time love.

Cold Moon

I saw it rise last night - white and round and full. Wisps of black clouds blew across its face. There was a certain ferocity to it despite its stillness. It continued to rise as the clouds disappeared and the temperature dropped until it dominated everything.

Nice talking with you

We're talking at 3AM, and lucky to be, because twelve hours earlier he was dead in the back of a local transit authority bus. Narcan is a wonderful drug but it has a fault. For instance, it allows the subject to leap directly from death back into a life where the subject has dedicated oneself to the pursuit of the substance that killed him. What's often missing is the felt awareness that one was dead. That shit-scared feeling/understanding of going over the precipice and into the void. Perhaps part of the rescue protocol should be to take some photos or a minute of video to show the person later when things settle down. 

"Hey man, this is you, dead. See? Your lips are blue. You're all floppy and shit. What do you think of that?" 

Skoll

Yes, the drunken Norwegian's advice (Never Get Excited), becomes truer and on many different levels as I get closer now to the age he was then. What is an old love to you now? Someone who keeps you warm or costs you money or gives you pain? No, none of these things. A faded memory and nothing else. Soon to be gone forever into nothing. Just like you. 

Someone's terrible problem

When I'm not feeling well, everything is tainted. I'd better start with that qualification. 

It's the week before Christmas in New England at 6o degrees and it feels more like May. 

"Wooo!" exclaims the biker with his feet splayed out to both sides. 

Yeah, "Wooo," I'm thinking. 

"Wooo" as in: Gee, I'm Having A Blast ?

Or "Wooo" as in: Here Come the Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse ?

There's a man and a woman gesticulating as though possessed and screaming at one another in a gas station parking lot. It costs me nearly 40 bucks to fill the tank. Inflation. Suffocation.

The moon is blurred by clouds as the sun starts to sink. I'm thinking that I don't want to say that it's been a long time since I felt much for Christmas, because that's not entirely true, but I am more than a little sick of the repetition of seasonal marketing, a little more than sick of riding this wheel. 

I was dreaming in a chair today. It was a work dream. Someone's terrible problem.

First world problem

I got the third Moderna shot about 24 hours ago because I live in a country where I'm lucky enough to have it provided for me and my health insurance plan covers the cost; because  I work in health care; because I don't want to kill my family and because if we ever hope to get a handle on this virus we have to vaccinate the world's human population. That includes us. 

I woke up feeling fine. No side effects at all, I thought. A cinch. Now I'm shivering under the covers and ready to crash at 6pm after an achy, low-grade-fever, tired afternoon at work. It ain't that fun, but it ain't that much. 

You can do it too. 

Again

Something woke me early today - around 4 - and I don't know what. Whatever it is wouldn't allow me to go back to sleep. Now, it's the routine.

If you are reading this, I hope you will see the film "C'mon, C'mon". I also hope you will recommend it to everyone you know. Thank you.

Good morning, Sunshine

Waking after a long sleep to rain where there would ordinarily be snow. If there were an ordinary. 

News of devastating tornadoes in Kentucky, somewhere between fifty and one hundred killed overnight. News of a truckload of Central American migrants flipped over on the road with so many of them asphyxiated in each other. News of many people trapped in a collapsed Amazon warehouse while trying to ship your Christmas.

We are just trying to keep our little worlds together as the big one slides away beneath us.

Remembering the witch who told me we have to let the old one die and prepare for the birth of the new.

Merry and bright

Snow tires for her car will cost more than $700. You can't tell her to try to get by without them. Christmas too, on top of the regular bills. December is a drag.

Loop

That sweet girl has died. That sweet dead girl. Another one. 

Today was hard and gray here and, at dusk, the first snow began. It's snow cold outside. It's that kind of cold. 

My head has run on a loop today. The bad decider. You thinned the ranks alright. Yes, you did. 

Shamefaced and sick of how it works.

Didn't get far

Not sick but neither am I right. I'm a lower case "n" but not stocky and low like most of them but small  and hollow with a fragile shell. I got up alright but faded from there and left work early assuming I'm sickening. Fell into bed before 5 pm and slept solid right off the bat. It's raining now. I should get up and eat something. I should go back to sleep. That feeling in my head has shifted. There is a clear spot there behind my eyes now where before it was all humming static and heavy fuzz. 

Everybody else is dancing on Tik Tok, right? Everyone's vacationing at the Southern Most Point. The majority are probably on Carnival Cruises. The others are out there making all the money in the world. I let the world go ahead and shrink down around me and now I'm wearing it like a fat guy wears an old t-shirt, half his belly exposed. Screw it, I'm staying in. 

No go

Other people do influence the flow of words. Even if it's just a trickle of junk when you're alone in your mental landscape, it comes spontaneously and it's your own. When other people get involved, you start looking at it too closely, overthinking it. The flow gets diverted by their perceptions, mixes with their commentary. You get a headache. Someone's dammed the crick. You don't want to write anything.

Turmoil

Stasis, the science teacher taught, is what all things are moving toward. What do you call that impulse inside that shakes it all up again the instant you arrive?

Where am I?

In the dream, two young women are singing a karaoke duet. The song is catchy but kind of sad with a lyric about dying young. I am standing among a small crowd of backpackers and our large packs pretending to dance to amuse the group. We are standing in line waiting to order cooking fuel and food. There is a hostel of some kind. Bunk beds. I hang my towel to dry. There is a breeze. There is camaraderie. I feel good here.

First prompt: Take a line from a Robert Bly poem and let it be the opening of your story.

And I said to myself, "What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?'

Well sir, I replied. I've watched said garden overrun by briars, brambles and bittersweet.

My boots tread the frozen crust of it now. I'm collecting dried sharp and clinging burs along my pant legs.

Yes, you charged me with the burden of cultivation without realizing that I'd already devoted myself - my energies, my will - to the three-pronged discipline of the dispirited. 

My spiritual practice - rumination, procrastination, hibernation. 

Your garden, Sir, will have to wait for Spring. Just the same as us all.

Robert Bly poses a question that doesn't help me get back to sleep

By 8 PM, I could not stay awake. And by 3 AM I seem to have lost my ability to sleep entirely. 

I heard from an old friend tonight about a writer's group we talked about me possibly joining back in the Spring. Maybe it's time for that now. They could use some new blood, but am I even that anymore - tired, dulled, antisocial, uninspired? Groups are hard for me and something I turn away from most of the time even when I feel good.

The first writing prompt is to begin a story with a line from a Robert Bly poem. He recently died, Mr. Bly. I tried reading him a few times over the years but couldn't feel it. Maybe I'll try again. Why not? It's nearly 4 AM.

And I said to myself, "What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?"

Replica

The two black plastic guns, except for the orange caps on the muzzles, look real. I saw them laid out on the coffee table along with brass knuckles and a switchblade knife. The silhouettes of those guns glimpsed in the dark parking lot behind the station in the hands of someone who threatened to kill you and your co-workers the night before tips the balance of the situation.  

Cold

 

English muffin

Snow out there. The sound of the furnace in the basement. The tinkling of chimes. 

The smell of coffee would be the perfect compliment. Along with the smell of bacon. And of maple.

I imagine a woman, warm in her pajamas, quietly close to me. Happy.

It's then that it starts to hurt.

It's been a while since I've eaten an English muffin hot from the toaster spread across with Irish butter. 

Let's just dream about that.

A place just off the highway

The first snow fell today taking turns with the rain. Gray skies, wet black roads, bare trees - the perfect backdrop for a depression. We talked about it. About how we're prone to it and about how we manage to cope. Sleep has been my refuge. I tried to make the case that maybe I'm responding to some biological order. Going dormant during a period of plague and madness makes some sense. Seeking treatment makes sense too though, you're right. Everyone's there now, we guess. Depressed. Seeking the cure. 

The state of the world.

That thing in you that takes a pin to every inflated balloon spoke up this morning. Maybe she only bought you that jacket to make you more presentable and a little less embarrassing to be seen with. I told it to shut the hell up. I choose to believe. 

Milepost

All of us together for the first time in a long time. A relaxed day of family. All of us older and seeming to have advanced individually to our next respective developmental stage. This life isn't forever. It's just for a little while.

We had dinner in the barn. The temperature was in the upper forties. My oldest boy was quietly shivering in a sweatshirt. I gave him the blue down jacket you bought me at Eddie Bauer that one winter day we spent in Boston together. You said I needed "a proper jacket." An act of love, I thought to myself and smiled inside. 

I gave that jacket to my son today. It hurt a little bit to let it go. But I let it go. 

Commuter

Although it's long, I enjoy the drive through the countryside to the town in which I work. Tonight there was a bobcat in my headlights on the return near the Quabbin. 

For awhile, I thought I should move out there for convenience and to shorten my work day but I've had second thoughts since then. The townspeople seem entirely white and worried, finicky and entitled. I feel a different sort of distance from them than the sort of distance I feel from the inhabitants of the town I currently sleep in. There's a strange dryness to the place. 

Like most places - maybe all places - they're at their best when you're passing through.

Again

 Then it's suddenly Thanksgiving. I'm never ready for holidays.

Not very far

I make a list for the day. By the time I prepared a meal (for one, which is basically opening a container and pressing a couple of buttons on the microwave), pay the bills, do the laundry, and buy some spiked eggnog for the holiday I want to go back to bed. I'm finishing the last chapter of a book now and distractedly looking at tents on line that can deal effectively with the problem of hypothetical condensation.

No groove at all

Anxiety makes for a lousy bedmate. 

Up and out before dawn to manage a perceived crisis which had grown to the point of involving higher echelons of management and losing all sense of proportion. It resolved itself in a few hours without incident.

A good outcome followed by coffee and a waffle and ham steak in a diner. A boring conservative is talking to his wife. Sour complainer. "Let's go Bran-don," he chants, smiling smugly, seeming to thinking himself part of a club. 

I'm not interested. Almost every time I enter any place these days I immediately regret it and leave as quickly as possible. 

All day there's been that washed out feeling I get when my nights are messed with. There's another one on its way.

Range

I crossed the river tonight, its surface sparkling silver under the light of the rising-golden-warmer-than-it should-be-at-this-time-of-year-full-moon. Fool's moon. I wanted to stop and walk along its bank to feel the evening come quietly down around me. I wanted to, but I didn't, even though I knew it will likely be the last such evening for a long, long, long season. 

Sometimes you're forced to make choices. Sometimes there are no good choices to be made. Like if you made the choice to pee in your travel mug, covertly, sitting in your car on a residential street early in the morning in Holyoke, Massachusetts for example. You might consider that it's hard to maintain your dignity once you've committed to that choice. And you'd likely be right, but you'd also proceed. And then you might find yourself driving out of there, glancing around discretely, regaining just a little bit of class by not dumping the contents of your travel mug until you're a few miles away, by yourself, stopped for a red light at an intersection without a crosswalk so no one's going to have to walk through your business. 

You might also find yourself making a note to yourself not to just rinse the travel mug tonight but to make good use of some hot water and dish soap. 

You might find yourself in a situation like that. You never know. 

Crossroads

We leapt together, from different directions, into a corner booth and a moonlit parking lot. Remind yourself to feel your life.

Incompatible

You sound depressed

Isn't everybody? 

No, I'm not at all depressed

Well, I'm glad to hear that

Not yours, his

He's a Scorpio and starting to read up on his astrology. 

One horoscope predicted that he'd meet his soulmate at the age of 17. That's next year. He's feeling the magnitude of that specificity. I can see the brightness of hope in his face.

My heart tries to break quietly.

Car shamed

I dreamed I was trading in my high-mileage car. As it happens, Nick Cave was there, in the the car lot, at the same time, and he wanted to buy my car. He made the decision without really looking it. The cracked plastic bumpers, front and rear. The two missing hub caps. The pushed in rusted fender. The tree-dented roof. The rejection sticker on the windshield.

I felt compelled to tell him that it sputters and hesitates climbing hills and during acceleration. The floor is covered in dried leaves and pine needles. I have a dirt driveway, I confessed. It hasn't been vacuumed in a year at least. And then I noticed his wife was there too. The beige seats are all stained, I explained. Beige was a bad choice of colors for an interior, even though I didn't have a choice. 

Let me have it detailed first. Let me take it to a mechanic.

Low

Compassion fatigue is a real thing. It's a kind of secondary trauma. A draining of the empathy battery that can result in one no longer being accessible to others. Divorce is a consequence. Estrangement from one's children is too. Dissolving friendships. Isolation. 

Tonight there was a moment - a span of moments - in which every ordinary human sight or sound was sickening. I had this thought again, this place I escape to, of just walking away from it all. Walking and not stopping until I run out of land or no longer can. 

A pilgrimage begins by leaving.

Child proof

A bottle and a half of Tylenol to make a point. Maybe you're right though, maybe now she'll take you seriously.

Kettle

Here's the thing. If you come in and tell a young clinician you intentionally haven't eaten in several days, that your recent medication change has caused you to experience persistent suicidal thoughts, and that yesterday you were planning to write a suicide note, you're probably not going home with your boyfriend. That's how it works. Risk management. It's tricky and far from perfect, this business of suicide prevention. It often means differing opinions, consulting with a psychiatrist who doesn't even see the person, and someone being told they have to do something they don't want to do. Someone often ends up angry. I'm waking up with the leftovers of that mess. Paul and Art are singing, "Blessed are the spat upon, vagabonds, ratted on. Oh Lord, why have you forsaken me?" And as I put the kettle on to heat the water for my caffeine and head toward the shower, Sting promises to send an SOS to the world. On my behalf?

Or is that for someone else? No matter, we'll all need one sooner or later. The sound of the kettle boiling.

Maybe

Up from the dumps at work after a couple of good interviews and close-to-hirings. The work gets easier when there are people willing to do it. It's dark so early now. A one bedroom condo in an old multi-story building in a blighted section of a city a lot closer to work is on my mind. A move might be in order.

Silver

They talk a lot about the full moon and the timing of government checks, but after many years of doing this I still can't predict with any reliability when they will come out and when they will stay put. 

Last night, I'd anticipated a busy one so positioned myself in a hotel parking lot not far from the hospital. I spent nine hours of an eight hour shift inside an insulated sweatshirt underneath a poncho liner drifting in and out of sleep reclined in my driver's seat. The river fog moved in and a hard frost silvered every surface. Twenty-five degrees. I started the car periodically, ran the heat, and played the radio. It was a local college station without a DJ, just someone's play list without interruption. Most every song was one I'd never heard before and the hotel parking looked stilled and filled with cars featuring license plates from other states making me remember, not very long ago, living in hotels and eating on an expense account. I felt some variety of loneliness there with the memories of those people and places now relegated to the past. No one came to the hospital in need of what I do. 

In the morning, I stopped into a diner on my way home. A young father - big as a bull - his slight wife and their three small children. He snarled at the little girl for unintentionally making contact with her plate of scrambled eggs with the sleeve of her coat. She goes still, stares, her body rigid. My own body knows that feeling, remembers, hates. I pay and leave. 

When it's time to go, there are many things so often repeated that I will be smiling wide to escape. The things I'll have trouble letting go of will be the things I never really knew.

Twenty percent down

 In my dream, your daughter and I had become friends. She had grown since the las time I'd seen her sitting in a shopping cart. She had an easy natural smile that warmed and lifted me. We were outside looking at a piece of property. A small house with a couple of out buildings. One had a chicken wire enclosure beside it. I imagined raising chickens again. We were both happy at the thought of becoming neighbors.

The horror you read about in your twenties

What a horror Zoom is. This is the first time I've ever spent three consecutive days being distracted by the presence of my own face while trying to pay attention to others. 

You're a weird one for certain. 

What kind of expression is that on your face? What the hell is going on with your hairline? When did the pepper leave for good? You don't really have eyebrows. The circles under your eyes and those lines make you look sick. Are you sick? Your color sucks. Your teeth aren't anything close to white either. The shape of your face has changed - for the worse. Remember when it had features? 

You're a case study in entropy.

Bust

Worked from home today - the first of 3 days of training on Zoom - while the whole world seems to be gathering in their local ERs. I'm being asked for an accounting but am not there to know. Stay home. No one there wants you to come, believe me. The helpers have grown helpless. There is nowhere to send you. Everything is at capacity and beyond.

Work life balance

My neurology, and that of my car, made a partial recovery since last I wrote with no more intervention than a good night's rest. Neither of us are a hundred percent, but we're both pretty high-mileage at this point. The goal isn't perfect health, only to muster the will to continue. 

Last night I tried to sleep in the car in the hospital parking lot under the sound of heavy rain after a concert during which I sweat through all of my clothes. An older guy dancing alone in a costumed crowd. 

Later I'm awakened at intervals to talk on the phone with a psychotic college freshman - just 17 and away from his parents for the first time, trying to open himself to the college experience; to see a homeless man with blackened fingers wrapped in soiled gauze who only cries and cannot tell me anything I need to know in order to help him; to sort through a platoon of inebriated students - sleeping, crying, looking at me expectantly or desperately on stretchers in the hall. None are frolicking. 

It's 4 AM on Halloween, and the Attending asks if I wouldn't mind taking a few drunk kids with me on my way out. "Only the weirdos are out at this time of night, he says. "And that's us, buddy."

The ocean and a teaspoon

That feeling in my head came down late this afternoon. A certain type of sudden exhaustion. Is this what they call brain fog? I don't know but it sucks. 

Work has been mostly running around trying to prevent something stupid from happening. 

My car started behaving strangely this morning. I made it to an Auto Zone and replaced the 99.9% dead battery. That didn't take care of it all. Into the shop again tomorrow.

Kind of drained. Nothing much to say. No desire to write.

Fall does this to me

I dreamed about you on some back channel of my mind this morning. I almost didn't remember, and when I did, in not much detail. I was talking to your sister. She was telling me how beautiful you were, as though I didn't know that. I offered to empty a large cart filled with recyclables for her. It would have taken several minutes at the dumpster. I remember hoping and dreading at once that you might arrive while I was working there. 

In another story, I had taken a bus from Lowell to San Diego and then a train a little further north to San Juan Capistrano where the swallows are said to be. I had vague directions from there, so I walked up into the hills, trying to thumb a ride, carrying an ALICE pack and a seabag on my back. You drove by me on your way home from work. It was awkward there for awhile. I don't know what I'd expected, only what I'd hoped. You told me heroin was like being in love. And you missed it now like a lover. 

I walked back down out of those hills with the heavy bags and boarded a bus to Seattle. Now I was ready to leave.

Good

My boy came over to spend the night. I made up his bed, cleaned the mirror and the sink, filled the dishwasher and ran them through, and bought some cereal and milk for breakfast. It's good to have him here.

Night shift

He wouldn't get out of the car. The police knew he had guns in there. He'd sent text messages to a former friend saying he was going to kill himself. Then he drove to a secluded undisclosed location. It took them awhile to find him. 

After some time, he came out of the car. By now there were a lot of police there and they had their guns trained on him. Then he went back inside the car where the guns were. He did this twice - coming out and going back in. Each time he did, it raised the level of tension and the perception of threat among the police. They remained patient. Disciplined. 

Once he'd surrendered, they didn't beat him. The officers found a loaded handgun on the passenger seat with a round chambered and ready to fire. There was a shotgun in the driver's compartment rigged with its butt braced against the floor and the muzzle aimed at about face level with a load of tactical buckshot in the chamber. 

He didn't kill himself. And they didn't kill him. 

Time

Today my youngest turns sixteen. In the yard, one of the wild flowers I seeded in the Spring stands nearly seven feet tall. Thursday, the people I worked with were trying to deal with an out of control teenager. They called me to come and assist, basically threatening the boy with the image of a large male. When I arrived the boy said, smirking, "They said you were tall".

Stranger

People come to this place because it's safe. I've got to remember that and keep it that way.

Gary Paulsen passed away and it made me remember this Norwegian in Alaska.

Back then, I'd take a lot of people to and from the bars - which closed only momentarily - at forty below zero in Fairbanks. There was one older Norwegian gentleman who'd sometimes make conversation on the return trip, after he'd been sufficiently lubricated. "Never get excited," he'd advise me. I wasn't so good at avoiding that particular pitfall back then. That's probably why he saw fit to tell me that every single time we met.

A rebuttal, a reminder...

 "Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let your self sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."

Louise Eldrich, The Painted Drum

Juice

A bright moon and a colder night tonight. The first frost hasn't nipped us here yet. I ran across two coyotes at different points along the road clearly visible in the moon's silver light. 

Gordon Lightfoot sang beautifully on my car radio about an old love. He said something like if time could heal this wound, he'd remove the threads so he could bleed a little more. I pretend I don't know what that means. There is a part in the song where he describes how it felt to walk with her. Soaring strings. They can sound silly or sappy to some people, I guess. But when you're in love, they come close to capturing the feeling of that thing your heart does. I can almost remember. 

I was in the city for a little while tonight and it made me feel old and out of synch with the places that were once familiar. They tested my battery at the oil change place today. It's pretty much depleted, the man said.

 

Yo vivo solo

A breeze has risen. This week the leaves began to come down in earnest. You can see bare branches and trunks in some places. There'll be a solemnity to things soon. 

She was bored so took a walk to Wal-Mart. You thought you recognized her. 

Her boyfriend, the man she lives with, is married. An immigration thing, she tells me. He's helping a Guatemalan. He calls pretty soon to check on her. "I'm fucking bored," she says. 

She calls the colored leaves flowers. Says her English isn't too good. She's a little restless. When we say goodbye, we shake hands. Mucho gusto. Hers is cool and a little wet. Heroin, I'm thinking. 

It's a grey town with few prospects.

Diminishing

I used to be able to sleep in my car for a couple of hours between night and day jobs and remain somewhat functional. It didn't always work. I bounced off a guard rail while momentarily dozing on a highway on ramp. I totaled my car, distracted by a woman walking by, crashing into the rear end of a Suburban. I often looked rather wrinkled and disheveled. But I did this for years in order to make ends almost meet. 

I work a few additional overnight hours now and seem to need 24 hours of continuous sleep to get right. It's discouraging, but I guess it helps to mark the passage of time. Like the women walking by are less distracting now too.

Sensitive

Left in the dark through river valley fog to talk with a woman about archangels and demons, magic in nature, solitude, ancient religions and a father's betrayal. She said she was sensitive to energy and thanked me for mine being calm. Green stars moving through the trees and winds whipping up around her. There are worlds inside of worlds and much beyond our understanding.

Decaf someone said

The anger thing is real and maybe too often misplaced. It's not very helpful at work most of the time. Maybe you should do something about that.

Plan of the day

The guy writes some very affecting songs, but apparently that particular aptitude doesn't automatically credential one as a good human being. 

Stay to yourself and let others be. It's better that way. Live quietly. 

Don't tease what's smoldering into flame. Flame consumes. That's just the nature of fire. You can't be mad about it. Sure it illuminates, heats, but only briefly. Its true purpose is consumption. To leave everything ash, burned black. 

Look out the window. Breathe. Don't get attached. Let go and fall away. Practice for death. The only moment - after birth - that really matters, or so I've read.

"You got a lot of heart," the man in the movie says to me. "Maybe too much." 

Or maybe you don't have enough. Who's that talking now?

Hey, maybe today you ought to throw what's left of that weeks old rotisserie chicken into the woods for the wild things. What do you think? 

Muster up.

They're going to close Maury's. The signboard in there is the same one, I believe, they had when my father took me there as a boy of four or five or six. 

He was tall and handsome and slim. He could sing and he was funny. But I don't remember ever hearing him sing. Those are things others told me about him. He called me tiger and carried me on his shoulders at least once because I saw a photograph depicting that scene. 

Grinders. I remember the white paper they were rolled in and the smell of cold cuts and raw onions. 

Fifty years ago. A pizza we made together also photographed. Cottage cheese sprinkled heavily with black pepper. Black Label beer bottles. You grew thinner, distant, yellow. Meaner, but I like to think that was not intentional and just once. You were the first man to hit me in the face, by the way. 

Funny, the things that stay. 

Never promised me

I was reminded of you while preparing food today. That is to say, I was dipping a piece of apple into a jar of peanut butter. I thought about enjoying simple pleasures like that with you. Fully enjoying them. Of course, in the background (sometimes it came to the fore) was always the fear of impending and inevitable loss. 

I remembered distinctly that feeling I'd get sometimes, when we were out in a public place, that you were looking over my shoulder at whoever was walking in. You told me that was just my insecurities. I knew it was more than that but I didn't want to. That awful feeling that you were always on the lookout for a better deal. 

And, of course, you were.

Rain Tree Crow

 

Doings

Work has been busy and hobbled by low staffing, weary and increasingly demoralized staff, and a lack of shared basic assumptions about the work. As a result, I'm often walking around with urgency feeling a particular kind of anger ignite internally. That fire propels me through the day. When I get home, I have something to eat, maybe I take a few minutes to straighten up a portion of my neglected and disordered  house, but then I'm in bed. I read a few pages in a book and then I'm off to sleep. I'm thankful that sleeping is something I usually do well. I wake up at 6 AM on work days, take a shower, dress and hit the road. There's about four hours of driving daily. 

Today, I'm off. Without the anger to propel me, I feel hollow and without a clear purpose even though I'm relieved to not have to go in. 

Today it's a flu shot for the boy, lunch, listening to the new song my daughter wrote and an overdue oil change. Maybe a trip to the laundromat for a little added spice.

How it is now

Ever present, but in a different way now. Like a portrait hanging on one of the walls of my home. I don't look at it intentionally every day, but I know it's there. I am always aware of it. I may not be consciously thinking about it but neither do ever I forget it. It's in the background of my self. Every day. An integral part of me. Sometimes I look at it deeply and I remember well.

I'll take it

A hello on the street turned my head and made me remember that I am alive. A haircut that went fairly well. A well-assembled tuna melt for lunch in a diner. Jaws clenched again because I'm back in management and responsible for the performance of others and unable to find enough of them to just show up and do the work. I have a beautiful, if relatively long, drive in and back. The foliage on the hillside is mingled with fog, black shiny crows, wet horses in profile silhouetted. It's neither good or bad. It's just what there is to suffer and to enjoy for the moment.

Golden October

The crowd at the fair put a damper on my good time. Sapped me. Luckily, we'd had a few good hours together - two of them and a friend and I. The third and his girlfriend had been up very late and they took the morning to sleep in together. Good on ye. 

She's singing again. I'm so glad for that. I'm hoping next Sunday to go and listen. It's been a long time since I sat in a church just to listen. I'd get hung up in trying to ignore the people I annoyed myself with making up stories about, but the music of the choir - hearing her voice distinctly within it - made it worthwhile. An expression of spirit. That's the thing worthy of praise and worship. Not the Alleged, imbued with all of our hopes and fears, who never bothers to pick up the phone. 

Seventeen is a hard place to be. I sit beside her gurney in the hallway and listen. She took the pills after doing her research and texted out to the world after swallowing a few. She's alive now, but doesn't know if she wants to be, and crying. All of her relationships have broken. She thinks it's because of the burden she's placed upon them. They all blame her for being sad. 

"Everyone leaves," she says. 

It's 5 AM and I've only slept for a few minutes in a chair. I am listening for much longer than I used to listen in similar situations. Yes, everyone leaves. 

For a moment, I want to be a boy her age who tells her that he never will and then never does. She becomes happy again. And she knows that the boy really loves her. Then her life goes on, making sense and being something she can actually live. 

She needs safety now. All I have to offer her is my ear and a hospital.

Barker

The man running the overpriced hydro-massage station asked me what my shirt said. 

Neurosis, I told him. It's a band.

That's a big problem these days, he said. People don't know how to get on with their lives. 

Big E

Tomorrow morning I'm going to the Eastern States Exhibition with all the kids along with one's friend and another's girlfriend. It's a Fall fair. Plenty of good things to eat and a day of just being able to be in their company. 

Back to work

The first cold morning and it's dark at 6 AM. It might be below 40 out there, I'm not sure. A long sleep after a long day. It got busy. There was friction. In crisis there are often conflicting agendas. In one case, an autistic man, overwhelmed and escalated. The caller wanted us to take him away using force. I said no. The police and one of ours were involved. They were patient, moved slowly if at all, called me frequently. It took two hours but no force was used. That, at least, was good. Now it's time to go back.

Who was that?

I was telling a once frequently told story today. The actual event the story was based on happened more than 30 years ago and it had been a few years since I'd had occasion to tell it. At the end, I felt like I'd told a lie. I hadn't, but it felt like I had. I guess I'm just not that guy anymore. 

Catalyst

She cut about five pounds of it off of his head and then taught him how to condition and brush it. I watched him listening shyly. There was no money in the meter out in front. Lacking 25 cents will cost you 25 dollars. He was happy with his look which he checked in the mirror as we exited. Picture day is next week. Not many of those left for him. He's thinking about looking into community college now. And then there's this thing, just sort of hanging there in my head, not yet metabolized. It's going to change everything for him too. 

Listen

You hear about something that changed everything for her long ago. Now it changes everything for you.

Pain in the neck

Yes, I will likely buy one of those neck recliners. It feels less suicidal than those traction rigs you hang up over the top of your door. Sometimes you don't have to just live with it.

I had been talking to someone who'd suggested I learn a particular skill in order to win/earn/achieve the affection and admiration of a particular woman. Nah, I concluded. I'm too old for that. In other words, I'm unwilling. Find a young one who'll jump through those hoops. No more ordeals. Not for me. 

I'm just fine over here.

Moonlit

The light from the Harvest Moon wakes me at midnight. The air is cold out there tonight. A friend talked to me about meeting in the future - maybe in four months or seven months or eleven months. Sure, I said.

Some distant future in which anything could happen. 

You don't seem very excited. Well, it's been a long time since I pinned my hopes on another. That doesn't sound very positive. If it happens, it happens. You're so negative. Sure, I said.

Half a Sunday

Squandering a day off. You know you're wasting time when you wake up during a mundane dream. Boredom, bleakness, something like a depression. All the things you were going to do. Outside, the bees are still active on the goldenrod which is browning, and it's been awhile since you've seen a hummingbird. Perhaps they've moved South. Laundry, breakfast, coffee, a long walk in the woods, a job application left unfinished - there's still time for some of these. Not a total loss. 

Unusual

The new job is more engaging. I'm no longer permanently drowsy. Now it's heartburn and tension headaches. I still fall asleep as soon as I get home though. Already, It's dark in the morning at my departure and dark in the evening upon my return. 

Stark terror on the telephone this morning. A friend calls from out of the past. He is sorry to tell me that my brother has died in his sleep. He is crying. What? I say. What? What?

He keeps talking. My mind has seized. The world is upside down. What? I realize asking that question over and over is not obtaining any more clarity for me. Tell me the name of the person you are talking about, I think I said. When he did, it was not the name of my brother. I started breathing again.

But it was the name of his brother. He misdialed in calling me thinking he was calling his second brother. For less than a second I felt relief, but his grief was right there, too heavy and new for me to distance myself from. His world had turned upside down with me looking in.

Wondering

When it's finished, you feel ashamed. Automatically. Wouldn't it make better sense to feel that before it even starts? Does this happen only to Catholics?

A guy without them dreams of friends

In the dream, I was with three friends. Two of us were climbing a high ladder made from broccoli. The other two were completing some paperwork and would join us later. We were laughing and joking. There was the scent of raw broccoli and cauliflower about. It felt good to be there. And with them.

Still here

The shiniest black crow tears at a road-killed squirrel and a doe crosses the road in front of me. The leaves dry and change color seemingly by the minute. This is the season when you can't help but feel the passage of time acutely. Everything's slipping away from you. But you've seen a few of these by now, haven't you?

September half-moon

He's still not feeling well but he was hungry for chicken tikka masala, which I read as a good sign, and dropped an order off at his place. He texted later that he could actually taste it - slightly. He was more talkative and in a better mood today. He looked strong.

On the way back home, I stopped at a Cracker Barrel and ordered the fried chicken. I would have enjoyed it if not for the man about six feet away from me who was positioned in such a way that he seemed to be staring at the side of my chewing head. This annoyed me. In fact most everything human in that place annoyed me. 

Apparently I wasn't alone in that. The two ladies working the registers were giggling. The one taking care of me said she couldn't think straight. I told her the woman next to her was obviously jamming her signal. She told me she was always doing that. 

She said they'd been laughing because this young lady, who was now taking care of me, had been venting. "These ding-dang-diddly customers!" she'd said.

We three laughed and each of us said ding-dang-diddly, or some slight variation of that, aloud.

My grin faded slowly as I walked out of the restaurant. By the time I'd reached the parking lot it was gone without a trace. A half-moon had risen over the Comfort Inn. I wrote a little country lyric.

I'd like to spend tonight with you in the Comfort Inn

Dar-lin, my worried mind could use some comfortin'

The night felt pleasant. Inside the car, the radio played New Age ambient piano music. Nostalgia. September. It's what the Fall always does to you. 

Are you lonely? 

It was a female's voice, vaguely, from somewhere inside my head. She had a pat response built into the question, I could tell, so I didn't answer her directly.

Being around people only makes it more acute, I told her. 

There've been a few with whom it wasn't like that but, when I feel like this, it hurts too much to remember them.

This one's on my mind this morning

 

Tracer

He's feeling pretty lousy, tracing it back to his girlfriend's boss who opted not to get vaccinated and who came to work with symptoms. 

We suffer the stupid.

Positive

The news leads to disappointment. Missing the first tournament of the season. Tryouts for the volleyball team too. Not to mention a week of classes. 

All the testing sites are booked for days. There are rumors of the campus being overrun. 

They say the vaccinated get less sick if they're infected. I'm hoping that holds true.

Test anxiety

A sore throat and the sniffles evolved into shivering and a fever today. He's living off campus, but eating in the dining hall, attending classes, playing a varsity sport. It'd be good to have an answer quickly. Tomorrow we go for a rapid test as soon as the doors of the Urgent Care open. Appointments for testing are booked out for days in advance.

September remember

A scramble to hire with some positive results today. No longer drowsy all the time, at least not until I get home. Still have no idea where to fit a life into this time. September's happening now. Try not to miss it. 

Just a Tuesday

I got too busy at work to eat so took a break at about 3 in the afternoon to go and get a poke bowl a couple of blocks down the street. 

There was a little girl there, about four, dressed in a skirt and wearing a mask. She had a homemade cardboard sword wrapped in shiny aluminum foil which she tucked down inside her waistband and crept toward me under the tables. 

She drew the sword, but instead of attacking, decided to show it off. She showed me the special button she'd drawn on the handle in blue ink. If you press it, she said, "ZZZZHHHHHHHH!". She stiffened and vibrated as though electrocuted. 

There was another gizmo higher up on the blade that would apparently shoot me way up up into the sky. She was beautiful, a marvel, and I wanted everything to always be alright for her. She made me think of your daughter, who might look a lot like her. And, if she's anything like you, have a similar spirit. 

On the way home I caught a glimpse of the blackest, shiniest black bear prone in the bed of a pick-up truck. 

And then this song from the 80's came on, She's a Maniac. Those sacred times. A Tijuana disco on a series of Sunday afternoons. I would meet Irma Lopez there. She taught deaf children. She spoke almost no English and I almost no Spanish. Sometimes it was only the two of us and the DJ in there and we danced to everything he played all afternoon. I couldn't really dance at most other times, but I always could with Irma. We found moments of absolute freedom in that club made of mirrors. We held nothing back. When it was time to go, she hugged me so tightly, happy. That dancing was everything. Nothing more needed to occur.

A young man describes his anxiety to me. He's nauseous. He knows not where it comes from, as the world wobbles and spins madly under him, and I want everything to once again always be alright for him too. 

Regional differences

Because you can't just leave someone there alone, the shift becomes an 18 hour one. Most of it is quiet waiting, trying to stay awake, wondering what's in the mind of the light sleepers up and down throughout the night. Some of it is dealing with an asshole who calls frequently to threaten your life with a Louisville slugger. It's a hotline, he figures, they have to pick up the phone and put up with my shit. I'm a little unhinged myself, friend, you're thinking. I just might enjoy making your acquaintance too. He's mentally ill, the ladies who work there say, and they let him give voice to this abuse on a regular basis with professional tolerance and personal disregard. He feeds on the tolerance. 

On the nightshift

The basic ethos is if you can't staff it, you work it. I wasn't anticipating a double shift on a holiday weekend with the second of those being an unexpected overnight though. 

Many years ago, during my full time, unpaid graduate internship, I took a part time job in a program just like this working overnight shifts. I worked alone and was told I could write my thesis on the program's computer as long as I was available to the clients if they woke up. Most slept through the night. Some did not. 

One night, after typing for several hours, I found myself delirious in the last two hours of the shift. The sun hadn't risen yet and it became nearly impossible to keep my eyes open. My eyes kept rolling up into my head. I drifted in and out of semi-dream states. I tried to focus - slapped my own face, splashed cold water, when outside in January without a coat, drank gallons of coffee - but that last stretch of the shift was brutal. I leaned back in the office chair and closed my eyes. Sleep overwhelmed me. 

WAKE UP! a voice in my head said sharply not two minutes into my involuntary slumber. 

My eyes snapped open. A naked man was standing within two feet of me. He was painted from his hairline to his toes with black shoe polish. I rocketed backward in the chair and nearly tipped over. He turned - the back side of his body was not painted with black shoe polish - and walked out the front door into the frigid pre-dawn ice and snow. 

I wonder what tonight has in store.  

No way to start a holiday

An SUV laid upside down in the middle of the highway. Its top was crushed. Clothes and trash were strewn along the roadside for maybe one hundred feet. No other damaged vehicles were in sight. The state troopers had the highway blocked just a few feet from the wreck and detoured all of us commuters onto the exit ramp. The fire department was on scene but not working. The medics arrived a few minutes later. They weren't in any hurry. I could feel death before I saw the responders. I don't know if anyone actually died or if I just imagined it. 

Irene

 

After the rains

The Ware and Connecticut Rivers are wider and deeper than they were yesterday. For the moment, we here are fortunate and safe. Forces are in motion though. They won't stop just because the holiday weekend's nearly here, but you can be easily forgiven for thinking so after such a perfect day, sunny and 70 degrees with a gentle breeze and no humidity. September has often been sweet to us here, tentative tender flesh and bone. 

Pink

No, I will not sign the paper. 

The man is experimenting with chemicals and facing off with himself. One self reaches out and touches the other. He can feel both parties because he is both parties. One reportedly wants to kill the other. This is a conundrum for him. Also for his wife.

It's raining cats and dogs. He is running through the woods with a flashlight and a machete. Let's hope he does not come upon a dog walker. I'd suggest not consuming the stuff you imagine as synthetic marijuana which you manufactured in your basement. The real and natural stuff is legal and available on every other block in this area. It might make you hungry, silly, or stupid but it's probably not going to take you to the place you're currently visiting.  

Around six inches of rain is predicted to fall here in the next 24 hours. Meanwhile, the people continue coming together and falling apart. 

I can't wait

 

Ordinary

 It's his first day of school and I get to drive him in. My new job allows for more regular contact beyond the weekends. My shoulder aches a little after the Tetanus, Diptheria, Pertussis booster. There's Flu and the Covid booster to remember to get too. Shaking myself out of excess sleep and resisting the urge to go back under for half an hour. Anxiety about increased demand for a program and no staff on the schedule to accommodate it. 

Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back

Welcome back to management in the nonprofit sector where making ends meet is as challenging as the work itself. I've got positions to fill and no resumes. I guess I know where I'll be for the foreseeable future.

Had you turned right

I could have lived there with your dark eyes and your good humor out beyond the windmills in that town beside the river and its eternally wandering longhorns. You're so much younger though. The people would have snickered and called me your gringo padre or something. But sometimes I can see it in my mind, you and your happy boy, and it's nice. 

Cars and stuff

This denial thing. I do it with my health and with everything else too. It works like this. You notice something's not quite right but you get distracted or you have other things to worry about so you put the thing aside and continue on. Later, you notice something is definitely not right but you don't have time or money to deal with it right now and it's probably not that bad anyway. Then you realize something is certainly wrong but even then you keep going, if the situation allows, until sooner or later it doesn't. 

In this case, it's my car. There's been this god-awful sound coming from the right wheel getting worse over the last couple of weeks. I'm driving at least 100 miles daily to and from a new job with no real time to take it to the shop. I'm thinking it's the brakes. I'm going to need pads, rotors, calipers. Man, I waited too long again. But worn brakes don't make that churning sound, they make a grinding sound. So today - a day off - I got up early and was waiting at the shop when it opened. 

Yes, your rear brakes need to be replaced they told me. What about the noise in the front, I ask. They go back to take a look, drive it around the block, and call me back later. We've got some bad news, the guy says. And I'm amazed you even made it here. You'd better come and see this. 

I walk back to the garage from the coffee shop up the road. The car is on the lift. He shakes the wheel with is hands. It's very wobbly. He said he doesn't know how it didn't come off while I was driving. The wheel bearings are completely shot. 

I've got almost 350,000 miles on this car. Three warning lights have been permanently on for probably a year. I failed inspection - something about the Check Engine light and emissions - probably a sensor needs replacing someone told me. My sticker says "R". A tree fell on it last week denting the roof and breaking the windshield. Someone is going to meet me Wednesday at my place of work to replace that. That is, if it's out of surgery by then. 

If it was a dog, the mechanic/veterinarian would be having a frank discussion with me about quality of life at this point. 350,000 miles, Buddy, I'd tell him. Do you have any idea what that means? For as long as there's life in that critter, we're gonna go on rolling together. Here's to a half a million miles!

So now I've got a rental that seems to cost me more than it should. It features a backup camera. The steering wheel vibrates when I drift even the slightest bit. And I can't figure out the radio. 

They wouldn't let me sleep in the garage tonight. I'm not even a car guy, but 350,000 miles? You'd best believe in that. 

Lemonaid

The man said that both of them should by rights be dead. One got shot close to the groin, in the femoral artery where you bleed out very quickly. A fast acting police officer with a tourniquet flat out saved his life. The other was saved by his teeth which sacrificed themselves for him. He was reportedly shot directly in the mouth at close range. The bullet travelled around his teeth and decided to exit through his cheek instead of laying waste to his brain stem. If you have to get shot in a public restroom, that just might be the way to go. 

Someday

Every morning I offer myself the opportunity to take a morning walk before the sun rises. And every morning I politely decline and choose another half hour of sleep. 

Why you dirty rotten...

I no longer have to contend with congested highways on my morning and evening commute. Now it's just back roads with slow drivers, road construction, oversize trucks and farm vehicles. However, I think venting my angst through a steady monologue of curses while driving has become an integral part of my routine. Let's call it radical self-care. Bubble baths don't work for everyone.

The scent of cherries

Everything is trauma now - individual and intergenerational. Did you know that they researched this idea by conditioning rats to fear the smell of cherries? Yup. And wouldn't you know it? Subsequent generations of rats were born with the fear of that particular scent without experiencing any conditioning at all. The son truly bears the weight of the sins of the father. On and on and on and on. Until we heal. Think about that for a second and then give us about a millennium or so to work our shit out.

Big box

Someone once said something like, "violence is the tragic expression of unmet needs." Someone else chased two kids into the store's bathroom just beyond Customer Service and shot them both - one in the face. I went in there to piss the following evening and, except for a couple of buzzing flies, it was very clean. You'd never think that something like that happened in there.

We thought we lived in this bubble of safety, the lady said.

Company

Here now comes the wind. 

I started the morning in a garage as an addition to a circle of mostly men preparing to work through an impending hurricane and it's near-future aftermath while trying to come to terms with the recent on the job electrocution of a coworker. 

I'm there for support. No one uses it though. Working men - nobody talks, at least not very often. By the look of some of the blearier eyes, they've found other ways to cope. 

One of the supervisors says a prayer aloud. He's asking God to bless these men about to face the storm and to bless the young man in the hospital, burned now inside and out, and his young family and the hands of the doctors and the nurses who are taking care of him. This brings a few involuntary tears to some. The door at least has been opened. 

On the way home, there's a run on the liquor store. Two drunk men are marveling about the ass on the woman who just walked out with a gallon of pink wine. I must have missed it. One of them spills a pocket full of change on the floor. He lets me go ahead of him and I pay for my purchase. 

Slow and steady, he tells me. Yes indeed, I respond. 

Je suis

So there's a Frenchman reportedly making his way up the coast. 

Henri, mon ami, please don't drop any trees on my house or my car or me or my family s'il vous plait. 

Ca va aller?

Merci beaucoup.

Rock on, kid

And bless that boy walking along the road in his black framed glasses with a little smile on his face. He's got music in his head, I can see that. He's better for it and so are we. Thanks, kid. 

I stop into a bar for a beer and then a cocktail after work. The place doesn't work for me. I'm remembering a primarily Mexican joint in San Angelo, Texas where I had a few beers and was party to some good talk and real laughs with strangers while waiting there for a girl. 

I walk back to my car and stop into a store that sells wine and cheese and craft beer and very precious small-batch condiments. There was a salesman in there talking too loud introducing wines to various hipsters. Do they still call them that? Anyway, he kept using the word structured to describe some aspect of the wine he was hawking. 

In my head, I approached him saying, "Young man, if you say the word structured one more time, I am going to gut you right here with a trench knife."

I'm not well, and it's right and proper that I live alone. 

Driving home I was thinking about my first two or three years of school and how I don't have many memories of those years. From kindergarten, I remember the teacher leading us in a song. The lyrics might have been a mix of English and maybe German-tinged nonsense. 

"My hunts by my sides, my teacher dear..."

And I remember being partners with a girl named Diane Avery. Her hands were warm and it felt nice to hold one when we walked to and from school. I felt happy when we held hands. She seemed like she always felt happy. She had freckles on her cheeks and she wore her hair in dark braids. I think walking with her was my favorite thing about that year. 

I got in trouble for stealing erasers and other stuff the following year. And I was afraid to use the bathroom at school. I remember knocking and knocking on the front door of our house after running all the way up the street having to pee and not being able to hold on any longer. That feeling of defeat. 

Like there was no help anywhere. 

----------------------------------------

And by the way, Mr. President? I forget stuff too if I don't make a list (in order of priority). For example:

    1.     Evacuate American government employees, contractors and other civilians.

    2.     Evacuate all the Afghans, and their families, who provided assistance to our military operations.

    3.     Notify the Afghan government and military, and our military allies, that we're leaving pretty soon.

    4.     Have a planned, orderly change of command ceremony filled with gratitude and encouragement. 

    5.     Finally, when everything seems somewhat buttoned up, withdraw our troops. 

It's very important to remember to start at the TOP of the list.

Don't want to

Felt the humidity arrive in the middle of the night along with what's left of the tropical storm. Rain is on the menu today. Now, somehow, I have to get out of this bed. 

Last evening, while driving home along quiet backroads, I saw cows grazing along a green hillside. There were freshly mowed hay fields and a long stand of sunflowers on the river bank all facing the sinking sun. The corn stood green and tall. I felt that urge I used to get when I needed to show you something beautiful.

This morning the rain on the drive in feels kind of sinister. Flood rain. Let's hope it eases up.

Captured

I'll always love you for capturing that feeling so plainly and exactly with your words - basking in romance.

                    

You said it in humor, but that's exactly what I was doing. I think I'll always love you for many other reasons too.

Things we do and don't do

The discouraging part for me is how selfish so many of them seem. Narcissistic. Expecting a certain outcome instantly. Consumers. Hardly even slowing down before they're off to the next thing. They talk too damn much. They come to simplistic conclusions, sum it all up, take a selfie, write a review. They feel entitled. They don't listen. They don't show respect. 

And I stew in anger judging them while the world burns down around us.

Boy

In the dream your oldest boy is still young. He is enjoying eating an ice cream sundae and you are enjoying watching him do so. He is telling you all the things he likes about it and you (the lucid part of you) are feeling guilty because not enough of these conversations actually occurred. Later, you put him to bed. He has a mild sore throat and a light cough. You fear Covid and cover him with an extra blanket. 

Sunday morning waking up

Broken sleep and lots of dreams. It's as though some sort of internal reordering was taking shape. Most of the dreams are just beyond remembering. One had to do with you and a realignment between us. It was good to see you again. 

Later, I take a ride to mail the bills and go to the bank. I stop at a place for lunch and am annoyed by the bartender who appears bland and inattentive like the repetitive contemporary pop playing overhead is bland. There's nothing holding me back is exactly right, my Disney Channel friend. What the fuck am I doing here? 

The guy next to me is talking sports and Keno monotone in the local dialect. I hear clocks ticking in my head -the seconds are like hours- and see tallies of an eternity of days scratched into cement walls. I spent my early childhood less than half a mile from here. I still feel imprisoned by ordinary life here. I still only want out.

Meanwhile, Kabul falls to the Taliban. I think about what it must be like to be an American veteran of that war who lost friends or limbs or innocence there; or an Afghan interpreter or government official who drank the Kool-Aid about change and human rights, democratic values and modernization; or a girl in school with ambition, intelligence and hope for the future wondering what does all this mean. You are stuck in traffic with your family fleeing the city to god knows where now. America is again the giant bumbling oaf of hubris and destruction leaving those who assisted it to face their fate alone.

I take my laundry to town and read about herbal medicine while the machines are doing their work. Sometime recently, when I wasn't paying attention, things changed. The leaves on the the maples in the swamp and the poison ivy along the roadside are going red. Dusk is falling at 7:15 pm. 

The heat remains, but Summer is slipping away.

The fan made it possible

The night moved along its course from just a little too hot to sleep to comfortable with the fan pointed directly at me. I imagined us talking in the dark comfortably. Slowly and sleepily. When it was time to return to sleep, you leaned your body lightly against me. My hand was on your hip, in my imagination.

Someone was recently talking about death doulas. A person to be there, with and for you, when it's time to leave this world. And then I recalled this imprinted image of you on top of me. You looked long into my eyes. It felt as though we were seeing each other for the first time. There was magic in your face, and the white ceiling above you gave way to a black sky filled with brilliant stars. I felt ready to leave this world then, to become a part of the stars, with you so close to me like that, making all things align somehow perfectly.

It seems impossible for a connection like that to no longer be. Such significance. I could live the rest of my days sustained by just that memory. But it was only a moment falling through space among an infinitude of other tumbling moments flashing into being and then going dark.

Long enough

We tire, I guess, of emergencies and escape to wherever we can until our own personal one comes to claim us.

Driving home from work tonight I surprised myself by saying aloud, "I hope you found what you wanted." I remember when that was peace of mind.

Show me how

I'm trying to remember how a life fits into time and what one does with it. Drive, work, drive, sleep. Dates - I've got a few but I don't really want them. 

There's a thunderstorm on top of me here right now. I'm gonna go for a walk. 

I took a walk through warm soup and got straight into a cold shower when I returned. I'm a little more awake now that it's time for bed. 

A friend and former co-worker calls from a Texas hospital. She's part of the executive leadership and is a week deep in 20 hour days because they're overrun with Covid cases. She's asking me questions about staffing regulations which they are no longer able to comply with. She doesn't know my position in the company was eliminated a month ago. I tell her what she's already doing is the best course of action. 

You can only do the best you can with what you have to work with. 

For your consideration

Have you considered the fact that your air conditioner warms the planet while it cools your bedroom?

Have you considered the possibility that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis sold flood damaged cars as new before he sold his jaundiced soul to Satan?

Tabula rasa

The last several books I read were memoirs written by people who made the same journey on foot I hope to make one day and also write about. So far, I haven't liked any of them for long. Not the books, I mean the people. I imagine walking along beside them but not too far. 

I'd certainly end up walking alone out there - more or less by choice - but not because I did not want for a companion. 

Remembering a therapeutic conversation I overheard yesterday. The person in the client role gave a summary of her week. She emphasized an episode during which she snapped at a friend on the telephone and hung up on him abruptly. A few minutes later she realized this was a patterned response of hers, and she decided she didn't want to be stuck in that pattern anymore. She called her friend back and apologized, not only for this episode, but for every time that she'd behaved this way toward him in the past. 

The person in the therapist role said he wanted to issue her a challenge for homework. The assignment was to write down, in detail, exactly what she'd like her life to look like. I rolled my eyes internally.

That assignment came to mind several times today. Each time it came up, I gave it a few seconds of thought before escaping into some other distraction. Each time I drew a blank. 

People person

He told me I had a good ear after our first long talk. He'd come to the program directly from prison where he'd spent the majority of his adult life. He said for the first couple of weeks he stayed in the upstairs bathroom, even ate his meals sitting on the toilet, because it was about the same size as the cell he'd spent so many years in. He couldn't be in a large room with other people. He told me someone needs to write a book on how to deinstitutionalize one's mind. 

He came back to the program today looking for the collared shirt he'd left behind to wear to court tomorrow morning. He's picked up another minor charge. He can't blend in this town. He's marked by the color of his skin. He called me big brother today. I'm hoping they don't lock him up again. That place is a fucking magnet.

I saw my youngest boy walking through town with a group of his friends while driving tonight. I smiled the whole way home.

In a restaurant, the Chinese waiter went to great lengths to explain the fish dish I'd ordered without really knowing what it was. It's Cantonese, he let me know, and then listed all the ingredients and how they were prepared. When I appeared to be enjoying the dish, he looked very proud. That made me smile too. 

This particular town has more than its share of anxiety, gummy smiles, allergies, sensitivities, special orders and complaints. I'm trying to keep smiling anyway. 

Maybe it's because I'm a step child, but I've never felt entitled to anything. And even though we look alike, you don't feel at all like my people.

Sunday passed

Sunday passed. The desire to sleep was my most noteworthy feeling today. I did laundry and the dishes, paid a bill, filled the hummingbird feeder, wiped down the tub and the toilet, emptied the refrigerator of rotting food and took two naps. I read a couple of chapters in a book about a woman and her walk along the Road of Saint James. That seemed like something I'd be doing myself any day now just a few weeks ago. Change came and now that possibility seems remote. There's an owl out there tonight that makes me remember the wild antics of the two I heard two weeks ago now during the ceremony. I remember  the singing of the shaman and her son. Now, it's time for integration. Integration and sleep. 

Rita

 

A loss to all the world

Less than two weeks ago I had a visit from an elder, a teacher of mine, who has been dead for several years. He had told me something about myself many years ago that was absolutely accurate. He pointed out for me something I needed to heal from. That particular thing had been trying to strangle me all of my life, so it wasn't news to me, but he could see it clearly. I think he came by to visit recently to let me know that maybe I was finally making some headway. He smiled. 

Today I learned about the death of the last of the elders who taught me back then - Rita. She was one of the world's Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers. I read the news in a message on my phone while eating dinner in a restaurant. Tears ran down my face. I've always choked up and started to cry when speaking of her. It's been that way for more than 25 years now. Rita was a healer. The closest thing to light a human being could be.

She worked on me once. Standing behind me as I sat in a chair, she was moving something inside of me around without actually touching me. I could feel it. She began to sing. One long note, softly, and it just broke me. I started to cry. I shook and sobbed. I wept. Something I had not done in a very long time, if I ever had. When it was over, I felt as though a ton had been lifted off of me. 

"I think maybe you needed that," she said. There was such warmth in her face.

Friday

July, here, was cool and wet after the hottest June in history. August has begun with a string of fine sleeping nights. I'm not gloating. I don't assume we're going to be ok. I know others are suffering terribly. Change, at a rate we cannot even comprehend, is upon us now. It's already Friday.

Better to sleep

I've split the days into equal parts sleep and wakefulness. Waking just now, I'm grateful not to be Andrew Cuomo (to the extent that I'm not). I remember the young woman behind the bar at a pizza restaurant rattled by an older man who asked her for her phone number embarrassing her in front of the whole place. Worse than that, she was already dreading the parking lot after her shift. The darkness. 

Different

The whole thing is different now. New people, new surroundings, and a new sense of purpose. 

I'm feeling alright. 

Does this mean there's nothing left to write about?

Transmuted

She spent some time with me with the intention of restoring me. It's true, I'd been diminished. I told her I'd come here because I could feel the world dying and needed to know what I could do to prevent it. You can let it go, she told me. Let it die and be glad because so much here needs to pass away. Then be present to help facilitate the birth of a new world. 

Affirmative

Someone told me tonight that I seemed healthier then they'd seen me in a while. 

I am. 

Recuperating not hibernating

That thing overtook me again yesterday. 

Fatigue, exhaustion or whatever. It always feels the same - hollow, weak and like there's an impenetrable tangle of tumbleweeds in my brain. I took to my bed some time in the afternoon and didn't come back out until this morning. I got a lot of sleep. 

Of course, now I feel shaky and weak, but at least that tangle has cleared. For awhile I thought this was a side effect of laziness and inactivity, that if I just picked up the pace I'd adapt and it would clear. Now, I'm wondering if it's a lingering Covid effect or maybe Lyme disease. Well, I guess if you live long enough, eventually you catch a case. 

The male hummingbird is making passes by the window. The feeder has gone dry and he's letting me know.

Home, James.

I can no longer function well enough on inadequate sleep. Getting home last night was a challenge. Nodding off at the wheel momentarily while dreaming of crossing the center line into an oncoming family's minivan while they're on their way to the beach. My head snaps up, eyes scared wide. The next time it's a kid on a bicycle riding along the shoulder while I'm drifting and the sound of his impact. Dangerous. Don't do that. 

Reflection

You've got fibromyalgia and a little bit of a hangover. The humid rainy morning makes your joints ache and every movement hurt. Your job is to keep the place clean. 

Looking back on it now, you remember hearing a crash which you didn't really think twice about because there's always doors slamming in that suite of offices. And then a little later, come to think of it, you were vacuuming the stairwell and you saw these shod feet sticking out from under a desk through the window. It registered as unusual, but you thought maybe the guy was plugging something in or fiddling with some connection under there. 

You remember these things while lying sleepless beside the knowledge of what you now know. 

It didn't occur to you then that the man in the shoes had tipped over in his chair while experiencing cardiac arrest. Your coworkers found him about an hour and a half later. They initiated a code, called 911, started CPR, produced three AEDs and affixed the pads of one to his torso. But the man was already cold and purple. Blood had pooled under his head and in his mouth. The paramedics couldn't get him back either.

And now this morning, knowing what you now know, you are wondering if things might have gone differently had you investigated that crash you assumed was a slamming door. You can't understand why you didn't go and check out why those feet were protruding from under the desk. Your coworkers, who did chest compressions on their friend for 20 minutes can't understand why you didn't either.

One conversation at a time, I see a story taking shape. Your coworker died suddenly and tragically - likely due to a massive heart attack - in your workplace on an early morning in the midst of another mundane work day. That's one version. The other version, the one you're trying hard not to tell yourself now, is that your coworker died suddenly and tragically - likely from a massive heart attack - in your workplace on an early morning in the midst of another mundane work day, and it was my fault.

Oriented

It's great to no longer be caught in inertia's sticky web. The heavy strands dragged me down through the mattress and made it seem impossible to stand. A thick fog settled down over me and pressed me flat. I lived that way for the better part of five years.

Let's not think of it as wasted life. Let's think of it as a coma. A state in which all activity had to cease in order for the soul to heal. In my coma, I dreamed of the past believing I still lived there and might yet again.

As I began to stir, the healer spoke. That time has passed. Matter of factly, firmly, gently. It was not the first time I'd heard those words, but this time I accepted them as true. 

And when I had awoken fully I saw that I'd grown older.

Right now, I'd like to be sleeping. It's almost 1 A.M. and my alarm is set for 3:15. I've got to go to a factory this morning  in which someone died during the course of his or her daily work. My job will be to remain awake and to support those who remain alive. 

I am thinking forward this morning.

Low

It seems impossible not to drop into a lower vibration the moment I encounter another car on the road. I'm suddenly a steady stream of curses and name calling, elevated blood pressure and clenched teeth. What's the point of this? My perceived enemies don't suffer any damage that I can discern. It's only me sitting there stewing in frustration. It's time to start playing audio books on my phone, I reckon. 

Departure

I left the mountain top with all of my personal property having been packed away and hauled along. My ruminations have ceased. Before leaving, I offered my long hibernation to the fire. My inertia. The flames accepted and consumed it ravenously. Cremation. From the ash, a man - now walking forward - assembled himself.

While we are still alive

She's in her 80's now. She has travelled with her son and two young apprentices the three thousand miles from Columbia to bring the medicine to us. On little sleep, they worked through two nights in the rain to administer the sacrament, to watch over us, and to sing us through the journey. The magnitude of their generosity broke open my heart. 

"My love," she said. And then she showed me.

A good and regular day

I completed my list again today. Tomorrow it's car repairs, human resources paperwork, a Zoom interview,  and a drive back to New Hampshire for a weekend of ceremony. I feel something building.

Gig economics

Busy and forgot to write yesterday. 

Went to work to provide support to the co-workers in the wake of a suicide. A very talkative, social person. Had friends from all walks of life. Always willing to help. Knew something about everything and fashioned this knowledge into a story designed to help you with whatever your problem was. Always willing to take on more. Always, the first concern was for the other. No one could believe it was this person who is no longer with us. 

NH

I responded to a request for help today and something told me to bring a shovel. The drive up through northern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire was hazy. The haze is actually smoke from the wildfires in the burning West more than three thousand miles away. No one seemed alarmed. 

At the retreat center, there was a young man about to begin digging a trench in the stony New Hampshire soil with a pick and grub axe. He was certainly glad to see me and my shovel arrive. Well within the hour I had sweat through my clothes and the fact that I am 55 and not 25 was made perfectly clear to me. Still, the work felt good, in an unpleasant sort of way, and was much appreciated. I sweat through a leather wallet too and made soggy the paper social security card that I've been carrying since I was 14. 

On the return trip, I stopped at a country store in order to address my depletion. My hands were cramping holding the steering wheel. I'd sweat out all my salt. Gatorade, water, celery, hummus, a block of smoked extra-sharp and local cheddar, and a whoopie pie. I ate and drank a portion of it at a picnic table while looking out across rolling rocky green fields at the distant mountains through the smoke. There was no one around except me, the storekeeper inside, and the purple finches at the window feeder. Serenity despite the duress.

Motion

The changes continue. I made a list this morning and, after a few unproductive hours of spinning and avoidance, I got into it and knocked off every item and then some. Miraculously, the mighty tree that fell toward my house didn't damage the roof or the wall or the picture window. The treetop is leaning against the edge of the roof and extending up over the top. I started cutting it up today. I also applied for per diem work in a couple of places. And I made a decision to accept a full time position out in the western part of the state. I feel like maybe I'm breaking through. Like maybe this stagnation is ending.

Here comes another one (if a sinkhole doesn't swallow us first)

An unexpected week of cutting ties and thinking in possible new directions while the rest of the world drowns or burns or continues producing, consuming, and disposing of more and more things that never go away. I'm looking for an upside here. I'm shopping for houses with inflated prices. House hunting, like shopping flea markets or thrift stores, depresses me. Ghosts. Traces of other lives. Histories. Stains. Smells. And then there's what to do with this one. Too many things happening at once. I've got to find a starting point and just begin. The first step leads to the second and so on. You know? 

This feeling you have that you think of as falling might just as well be flying.

Why not change everything?

I popped my head up into the attic in order to take the next step in the damage assessment process. I could see no branches coming through the roof, no daylight, no water streaming in. All good signs. Tomorrow I hope to ascend to the roof and start removing the interloping tree top. 

I was looking out the sliding screen door at the rain this evening and apparently disturbed the resident black bear slinking noiselessly across the overgrown yard and vanishing into the trees. I'll miss that part of this place when I move from here. The possibility is becoming more real by the hour. 

Sometimes it happens

Suit and tie this morning. Polish on the shoes. It was a hot and sticky one, so I changed into the outfit in a convenience store bathroom when I'd gotten closer to my interview. Casual Friday - the CEO was in jeans. An hour interview became two. I liked, and shared, a lot of the ideas we discussed. It was about another hour's drive home. When I arrived, they'd already extended me an offer. 

You said what now?

Thursday, I remind myself. 

There's a tree on my house. A man wants to charge me $650 to remove only the part of that tree that's atop the house from the roof to the ground. I told that man to get bent. I will remove what I can of the trespassing tree from my roof and live in harmony with the rest. Peace out.

The situation is evolving

When the bottom drops out, it means a great deal when someone reaches out to you. Everything looks different when you realize you have options. I put the suit in the cleaners, got a hair cut, bought a couple of better fitting shirts, and got back out there and started interviewing. 

Mine's just one

Spiritually, I'm with the disenchanted young people of China who have decided to lie flat. I feel inclined to do the same, but there are other people counting on me. It's time for new ventures. 

Yesterday, I found myself thinking that if we get any more rain the trees near my house could fall. When I woke up this morning, I found one laying across my backstairs having missed the house by mere centimeters. This is the second time that's occurred. 

California burns again, a billion sea creatures have boiled in their habitat, the Gulf of Mexico is on fire, Siberia's permafrost is proving to be only semi-perma, the Alaska salmon run is the slowest it's been in many years and can no longer feed the people who rely on it. It's a time of change. No one is immune. 

Thanks

And then suddenly there is a change.

Burnt one

Nothing at all. You?

No, I didn't.

Nope.

Not one damn thing.

Mezcal memory

Not that I'm any kind of expert, but mezcal has a distinctive vibe to it. It alters me uniquely. Today, I found myself remembering along a different frequency a photograph of you taken many years ago. You were 19 years old then and we'd known each other for about six months. Plenty long enough for me to have gone crazy. 

You'd moved to the Cape for the summer, found a job in a kind of fancy brick oven pizza place on the main drag, and a room in a rooming house. The owners of the restaurant were a bi-racial couple in their early 30's. He seemed mellow, sensible and even tempered. She was a flame. They were pregnant and planned to have an all natural home birth which turned out to consist of her walking out into a field alone, squatting down and delivering sans assistance. He cooked the placenta in a cast iron frying pan with onions and ate it in order to be an integral part of things. 

There was this photo of you looking out the window of that restaurant taken from outside. You seemed unaware of being photographed. I spent a lot of jealous energy wondering who took that photo that summer. Your face was so beautiful, but when you showed it to me, my heart immediately sank. We were a part of each other by then. In each other's chemistry. But I could see no trace of my presence in your eyes. You were looking out and forward. You seemed hungry and anticipating. Meanwhile, I'd been looking in and backward, toward memories of you. 

I remember a man named David frequently sitting in that place. He wore all his clothes at once. They probably called him a schizophrenic, but to us then he was a sort of holy man. A shaman. I knew he wasn't there for the free coffee and water you gave him. He was there for you, just as I was. He was there to watch you move about the room, doing your work, hoping you'd look our way with your dark Spanish eyes and the gift of your smile. 

He spoke to you gently. His voice was soft and high. 

Jennifer, he'd say. So young. So pretty.

He said it with the same ache.

Imagining Astoria

Thinking about taking a trip into the city with my son. We'll take the train into Pennsylvania Station.

He'll be thrilled to know Good Fellas was filmed in the streets of Astoria. He wants to see The Museum of The Moving Image there. Maybe we'll look for DeNiro in Tribeca too. And walk Chinatown and Little Italy. Roosevelt Avenue. Climb the stairs of the Empire State Building. Sit on a bench in Central Park. Ride the subway out to Flushing. Eat all kinds of things. New York's a fine city to walk around in. 

It's about time we did something like a vacation

While you were out

A tropical storm moves up the coast looking for me. 

I've been on edge today with apocalyptic thoughts.  Might have been something to do with a news story I read about some of my favorite edible mollusks being boiled alive in the shallows of the northern Pacific Ocean generating a mysterious stench along the beaches of British Columbia. 

The cascade effect.

I believe I can feel in my body that this could (is) happen(ing) much faster than they said it might (will). 

That last statement was made while attempting to exercise great restraint. No one wants to be made nervous. May cooler heads prevail, eh?

Not what you see but how

Thinking about perceiving people. 

Usually I do so with doubt - some degree of skepticism, a measure of distance, even complete distrust sometimes. 

Other times it's with empathy. I feel some of what I think you're feeling. But there's often a certain kind of distance built into it. 

In certain circumstances, like when I'm traveling and have been alone and quiet for some time, people become visible and within arm's reach. I can talk to them, laugh, drink, dance, maybe even confide in them. It's real, but it's somehow even more temporal than the rest of life. There's a level of risk to it, but a certain kind of safety built into it too. A scene in a movie. A short chapter in a novel.

Remembering a moment when I perceived another person with complete openness, total acceptance, and no distance at all. That person had really done nothing to earn or deserve my trust. But it occurred nonetheless.

I can't remember how that moment happened. Is it a trick of memory? The rose colored glasses of self-preserving cognition? 

It doesn't seem possible now. 

Interaction

It was dusk and I was executing a three point turn on a dead end street. There was a cat sitting upright on the edge of the road not moving a muscle as I backed closer to it. The cat had a peculiar expression on its face. I began thinking that cat looks kind of spaced out when something very fast darted out of the grass. It was a rat this cat must have been stalking before I showed up. The rat saw the approach of my car and the flash of red brake lights as the only diversion it would likely be granted so it made a break for it. The cat hardly moved. Just a single precision lighting-fast lunge and the rat was in it's jaws. The cat scampered away with its entire tiny-tiger-killing-machine-body looking completely satisfied.

Sex

The woman in my dream sat close to me. She was teaching me how to do something on a computer. When she spoke, she did so softly, and I could feel her words on my skin. A gentle exhalation. Less than half a breath, lightly, through a single nostril and into my ear.

Five years

I met a man a few years older than I the other night whose anxiety and heartbreak were clearly visible. I called it before we even spoke. Turns out he was involved with a younger woman and she was involved with even younger men. 

He's paying her bills and eating his heart out when she doesn't come home at night. Yeah, he's letting her stay with him too. She throws him a bone when he's at the end of his rope in order to keep the gravy flowing I'm supposing. 

We commiserated about this sort of thing for awhile. We sang a song together.

It was really his vanity that had taken a shot, I think. He said they'd been together for 15 years. He told me I should see her - she's absolutely beautiful.  And then he showed me photos of himself on his phone - professional headshots, press coverage, accolades. He talked about the things he owned, the money he'd made. Losing her, I think, was a trophy off his shelf. 

Okay. This guy will be just fine. All he's got to do is find (or purchase) another adoring (or convincing) groupie. 

I told him he ought to move her out and let her go. Unless, of course, he was ok with the current arrangement. He didn't want to hear that so I shut up about it. Nobody listens when they're in that state of mind. 

Give it time, friend. Like five years. At least five years. 

I hear fireworks out there right now. Some small town's finale. 

Next day

Another night of karaoke, high spirits, and temporary friend making. That's twice in a month, I'd better pace myself. This hangover seconds that. 

My memory of last night starts to return in fragments.

There was the singing of a duet with brokenhearted Don, a charter boat captain and sometimes commercial actor. I think we did alright. 

Then, later, I danced to Selena with the occupants of the multiethnic table beside me. 

Then, when the place was drunk and full, just before closing time, I sang Ace Of Spades. I got a lot of fist bumps after. A young lady told me I was the performer of the night. I was feeling good.

Went outside to get air and a young man followed me out to have a smoke. He told me that I'd killed it. Within the first minute of talking, we recognized each other as marines. He more recently than I. He'd fought in Fallujah. I'd never gone to war. We had some experiences in common despite the time gap between our hitches and in no time we were laughing our asses off. 

"Come drink with me," he said. 

We walked down toward the seedier end of the street. Before we'd travelled a block, a man ran past us with a look of terror upon his face. I had the impression he didn't see us as he ran past as though he was running in a nightmare. 

"You okay, man?" I said automatically.

"Best if you don't talk to them," my new friend said gently.

Two men followed close behind him, walking fast, toward us. I saw one of them stick a handgun in the back of his pants.

"Dude on the right is packing," I warned.

And then we were intermingled.

"Hi," I said to the man in the hood with the gun.

"S'up," he said while walking by and not shooting me.

And then we're at the bar.  

My friend says, "Hey bro, this place is kinda ghetto. You ok with that?"

I say, "You're with a grey haired white boy in a cowboy shirt. You ok with that?"

Last call. Drunk people trying to order Bud Lights in cans from the overwhelmed bartender. No one looks very happy. I play The Doors on the jukebox - Break On Through To the Other Side. 

My friend introduces me to a friend of his from high school. I do a double-take because the guy looks a lot like the recently deceased rapper, DMX. He's been in some trouble, sounds like he might have a TBI, but he tells me he stands back up every time he falls down. My friend introduces me around as an older marine, and I'm given momentary respect. 

I go stand at the bar to get DMX a Bud Light. A man comes up behind me and asks what am I doing here. He wants to know if I've got a girlfriend or a wife with me. I'm beyond all that, I tell him. He says he's got a husband at home, but he's a ho. He tells me his name and I tell him mine. I tell him he's got a serial killer's name. He tells me not to be nervous if I wake up in the morning and find him in my shower. We laugh. 

Think it over, he says, it's really just a spectrum. 

My combat veteran friend tells me this is where he's from. He says these people were his friends once and, no matter what they're like now, they'll always be his friends. You stand up for that shit, he says. That's what combat teaches you.