Watering hole

They gave me two strong and sweet Mai-Tais in an IV bag. I thought that was a nice touch. I shared a laugh with a couple of alcoholic trumpsters (ok, probable trumpsters) about it. When I looked at their faces, I saw ugly bleeding through. Immediately I didn't care about peacemaking or unifying the country. You know, I was thinking today that I've fairly frequently talked about community as though it were a good thing. Something desirable. I've sometimes felt a certain envy for people who seemed to have a strong sense of it. But when it's really came down to it, I've usually passed on the opportunity to be part of any. Sometimes you have to get together with people to make something happen, to achieve a goal. After that though, I'll take my leave. Just let me be, here on the outskirts of town, to finish off this strong and sweet transfusion. 

Gym

The gym is a place I haven't visited in some time. They've got it wired pretty tightly in accordance with state infection control guidelines. The direction of travel is mapped out on the floor with arrows. Two out of three cardio machines, arranged in long rows, are marked closed with signage. Everyone is wearing a mask. I myself adhere to mask protocol. I believe masks are at least partially effective in controlling the rate of infection and that it's my duty to wear one in public places. I am not yet able to run very far wearing one however. 

Cold Friday

Yeah, this one was squandered. The Wolf Moon brought in the cold last night. Probably didn't make it to ten degrees today. I put seed and suet out for the birds, returned a book to Amazon, flitted back and forth between one idea and another and didn't get much accomplished. All day I had the sensation of being lowered on a rope though. That's odd. Now I'm listening to a Russian post-punk playlist on Spotify that seems like the perfect soundtrack for the descent. 

Go where it takes you

The doors to the patient rooms on that particular floor are closed and marked with signs warning the few who enter to take the proper precautions - mask, gloves, gown, booties and face shield. I tell the nurses who I am and why I'm there. There happens to be an empty room I can inventory. One of the nurses shows me the way. "Covid?", I ask. "Yup", she says. "Lucky you", I say.  She laughs. This is their every day. It has been for a year now. It's been a week since I received the second dose of the Moderna vaccine. The rash on my hands seems to be fading. They're already saying we'll need a booster for the even more virulent and deadly South African variant. Last night, when I was out walking, some words appeared in my head. It wasn't a voice, just the words. Love that is freely given is never lost. Right on, I said. I've really come to enjoy those walks. 

Hungry like the wolf

The Wolf Moon is filling out and showing through the cloud cover up there. I walked a few miles tonight in the safe and dreary subdivisions and cul de sacs. Each home very separate, individuated, built on one acre lots. Two or three basic models. Many of the homeowners have made improvements - landscaping, sheds, pools. The dream, I guess. Thinking like this leaves me bleak. The moon through the tree branches though.

Maybe it's best not to read your Chinese horoscope

It was mid-afternoon and the sky was grey. There was no wind. It was cold but not painfully so. Twenties, by the feel of it. I dressed in hiking boots and socks, running pants, technical moisture wicking shirt, covered with a wicking t-shirt, followed by a wicking zip-up hoodie, a worn out down vest handmade by my deceased uncle strangely sent to me at Christmas time by his widow - my aunt, a pair of light gloves with grippy rubberized palms, and a watch cap. My plan was to head south on the trail, walk for an hour and a half, and then turn around. Maybe seven and a half or eight miles total. Snow started to fall about ten minutes out. After about an hour, I entered a section of the trail I wasn't familiar with. A cathedral of towering, red-barked evergreens. What are they, hemlocks? I'll have to look it up. I walked along the edge of a frozen swamp, the ground white with new powdery snow. My hat was crusted with a frozen sweat-snow mix. My glasses kept fogging up due to the ongoing clash between the cold air, my exhaled carbon dioxide and forehead sweat happening immediately in front of my face. The trail came upon a frozen brook down inside a deep cut. The trail sloped steeply down to the brook and rose steeply up on the other side. Everything was covered in new powder. I looked for a route across the mostly frozen stream and, finding one, stepped with my left foot onto what I thought was a flat stone. It was in fact wet ice covered in an inch of new slippery snow. My foot, rapidly followed by the other one,  flew out in front of me. I remember seeing my left arm flying up in a rear diagonal direction and thinking that it didn't look like it was attached to my body. That's not good, I knew. When I landed, I came to the conclusion that my arm was broken in two places - somewhere near the elbow and then around my thumb or the heel of my hand. I got to my feet and staggered up the steep embankment on the other side. When I got to the top of the hill, I leaned against a big tree to regroup. I took my foggy glasses off and jammed them into my dead uncle's vest pocket. I spent a few minutes assessing the damage. Everything was movable in all the appropriate directions albeit painfully, there were no protrusions, obvious swelling or discoloration. I could feel no actual breaks in the bones. But it hurt and I felt defeated and deflated. It was cold and snow was beginning to pile up on me. There was a distant house through the trees. I thought about approaching the house, with snot leaking from one nostril and tears in my eyes, asking the occupant if they could call my Mommy for me. I hurt myself... Instead, I ate the energy bar I brought along and that bucked me up enough to keep going. My plan was to take the road home once the trail opened upon it because it was a more direct route than the trail. The falling snow brought dusk earlier than expected, and I wasn't really sure about the condition of my arm. When I arrived at the road, I was frustrated to realize I didn't know which way. My phone! They've got an app for that! I opened it up and found the little Google Maps icon. The snow fell upon the screen as I entered my address. I saw that it was 1.5 miles from where I was standing but, before I could determine in which direction, the screen went dark. I don't know if it was the cold or the snow it didn't like, but it had provided all the service it felt like providing. I decided on a right turn and walked for about half a mile trying to recognize something. I was pretty sure I knew the name of the road I was on just not exactly where i was upon it. Finally, I came upon a pond I recognized and realized I needed to turn around. I felt for my glasses inside my dead uncle's vest pocket. They were neither present or accounted for. I checked all of my pockets, my face, my head, under my hat. I found a hand-sized hole in the bottom of the pocket of the hand made vest. Cursing all things, I started to retrace my steps. It was getting close to dark now. Another inch of snow had fallen. My tracks on the road had already been covered. I walked all the way back to the creek where I'd broken myself. No sign of them. Not a sound. I remembered the tall straight evergreen that supported me when I wanted to call my Mommy. That's where I'd taken them off. I squatted beside that kind tree and scanned the snow, leaves, twigs and branches. There they were. Face down, arms folded in, lenses filled with snow, resigned to death by exposure. I tucked them into my pants pocket where they'd be warm and made the rest of the journey home without incident arriving just a little after dark. The Chinese horoscope for 2021 I read yesterday warned me not to travel because I'd likely have an accident. Check. Done. Next...

Lunar

Today I stumbled upon my Chinese horoscope for 2021. Someone's predicting a rugged year for Fire Horses. Save your money because things are about to get much tougher for you, and don't travel because you'll likely have an accident, oh yeah, and prepare to work your ass off - days, nights, and weekends - or find another line of work, and do it soon. The outcome could go either way. Damn, so much for the general vague and happy nonsense everyone wants to hear.

A fair Sunday

Retuned to normal now, except for the poison ivy looking rash on hands and wrists, and feeling like I'm suited in spiritual armor against the evolving bug. Contact with all three of the kids today. I shopped for vegetables in a store I always wanted to show you back then. Found out they grind their own almonds into almond butter there and felt a twist of regret. I wish I'd known this then. It would have given me great pleasure to bring you some. What a treat a tablespoon of almond butter was to you in those lean days. Your birthday recently happened again. I hope you were treated to a nice dessert or two. Home alone and quiet now, feeling healthier and finding myself soon thinking about the Camino again. I do some reading of blogs and websites. I make the mistake of watching a few You Tube videos which seem to me to shrink and package the whole experience into a consumable portion. This I don't need. Let me imagine it freely and on my own. I don't want your walls, parameters, fences, packaging. Let my own feet walk the road and let them ache if they must. Let me see those Spanish vistas with my own new eyes.

A pandemic brunch without Brazilian jazz or bored and sickly-thin models as waitstaff in a place I'd rather not be but am and should probably try to appreciate more

I sometimes go to the diner closest to home on the weekends for a late breakfast. I usually go alone and don't speak to anyone except the waitress. Tito's in a Bloody Mary, which is really a liquid salad, if you think about it, smooths my edges after awhile. But when I look around and listen I cannot help but always ask the same question. What the hell am I doing here? Not in this restaurant but the larger here. Not in this life or this world - smaller than that. I mean this particular geographical locality. I am within 25 miles of where I was born and raised. These should be my people. But I so often experience them as ugly, foreign and antagonistic to my being. Maybe that's why my favorite movies as a kid had to do with prisoners and prisoners of war - The Great Escape, Papillion, Cool Hand Luke, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, Escape From Alcatraz. Or tormented, homicidal loners - Death Wish, Taxi Driver. Suicide was something I got to know up close and early. At first, I was intimidated - horrified. It's scary looking to say the least. Awesome, in the true sense of the word. We had all kinds of debates, she and I. Especially about the morality of such a choice. It's my life, I said. If it sucks and I can't fix it and I know it's not going to get any better,  then it's my right to end it. True, Suicide said, but your life is more than simply your own life. You are connected, whether you can feel those connections or not. I couldn't argue with that after thinking it over. Suicide - such a clinical term - finally showed me a face that neither horrified me, wanted to push me off the cliff or tried to seduce me. Let's call her Vanessa. She showed me an image of a lighted emergency exit sign in a darkened theater when I was barely a teenager. I've thought about her every time I've seen a movie since. She appeared to me looking like Our Lady of Guadalupe, even though my brand of Catholicism was the Irish and French-Canadian kind. I understood her to mean that she is always there, that there is always a way out. And knowing this, I haven't had to use that door. She became mercy, no longer horror. And knowing there was mercy, I stopped debating and had her name tattooed upon me. Later, her point about being connected was proven to me by people I loved making that decision. I guess Vanessa didn't show them the sign. Part of me died with them. Part of all of us does when this choice is made, I believe. But, I digress. I was thinking about living here and why I do. Well, I own a house here (I should say, I carry a mortgage on my back). I am within a reasonable distance of what's left of the family I was born to, later transplanted into and, even later, assisted in creating. That's the main reason. And I like the four distinct seasons. Even the episodes of brutality Winter brings which make you appreciate and long for being warm, comfortable, and safe. I need contrast. I need to appreciate presence by suffering absence. Finally, I like the woods here. Every day they change. And every day that I'm out there in them I become a little more aware, however dimly, of how everything is truly related.

Ugh

Moderna, you manufactured quite a hangover. I shivered with chills and fever all night, ached everywhere when I got up to walk to the bathroom, have a constricting band around my head, and broke out with a weird rash on the palms of my hands today. Let's hope that's a lively immune response kicking in. Friends in the West have told me they're getting the Pfizer one with what sounds like fewer side effects. Either way, the only way to beat this thing is to vaccinate as many of us as quickly as possible. Do it. 

Manifest

The second dose of the Moderna vaccine early this morning. Feels like I got my ass kicked - tired, aching joints, headache, general malaise. Medical malaise is time limited and therefor different from existential malaise, but it's still not too much fun. 

Yesterday I listened to the inauguration ceremony in my driveway on the car radio. While poems were recited, songs were being sung, and speeches were being read, I was trying to push back the thought of a sudden explosion or bursts of gunfire in the background. I did it, and it didn't happen. See?

If only we're brave enough to be it.

An American poet arrived upon the scene 

of anxiety, division, and trepidation and then

she power washed a coat of slime off of 

the entire Nation.

Vitality?

I took a slog through the woods this afternoon while the flurries were flying. Carrying rocks, marching up hills, performing other exercises. Two weeks ago doing that nearly wiped me out. I was thinking maybe Covid had damaged my cardio vascular system or something. When I arrived back home I was feeling very good. I let the sweat dry and then cooked up a big pot of greens and a couple of turkey burgers. The greens were sauteed in chicken broth mixed up with chopped mushrooms, garlic and scallions. I don't normally do a lot of sauteeing. I wolfed it all down and stood up from the table smiling. At what, I have no idea.

Pilgrim

Today's a holiday - MLK Day - and I don't have to work. Last evening, I made a plan to be up and out the door by 6:30 AM for a ten mile walk up the trail. I resurrected a dream while walking out there over the last few days to walk a pilgrim's road in Spain - El Camino De Santiago - if the pandemic spares me. So my body needs conditioning. I'd imagined myself in Spain, up and out before the crowd, so I could watch the sun rise on the trail. I let the thought carry me away and couldn't sleep. So I stayed up rereading Henry Miller until maybe 2 AM waiting for drowsiness and day dreaming of Spain. It's nearly 9 AM now, a late start for a pilgrim, but still timely enough for a dreamer.

Like this

After a night of rain, the brown woods flecked with white patches of snow seemed an entirely different place. I saw a brown hawk launch, fly low, and disappear among the trees. And a brown doe with white tail raised, perfectly blended with it's surroundings, gracefully and noiselessly run from me. The brooks were swollen with clean running water. Another day without speaking or being spoken to. I wanted to stay.

Home is far from here

Sad waters

Waters

Reading and emotionally revisitng an episode from more than 30 years ago has stirred and muddied my waters. When we involve ourselves with others, we truly become ghosts in their stories. While at the same time we are living out our own stories with the other as a ghost in ours. Our lives are seemingly separate, painfully so when you're trying to get closer, but they are already invisibly and permanently intertwined. This becomes evident after the relationship is terminated. We are part of each other now, more than just a ghost to be dressed up and projected upon, but we are also that. I am all alone now, except for the dishwasher's churning and the furnace's burning, but I feel myself as part of You (plural, as people, but singular, as in the same ghost) spread across several places. I am quiet here now, trying to feel you.

Anyone's ghost

A crow calls from somewhere

Waking up disoriented and in the context of you. You, as in the Other - the one I had to kill myself to know. I haven't been in this place for awhile. I lived in here acutely for several years, eventhough we actually spent only a few months together, and then visited, like a ghost, too often for many years after that. From despair to flight to a new and deeper, more pervasive desolation than I'd ever known before. Mythical. How I loved and hated then. How I burned. I was so often hungry and cold in those days. Acute. The rooming house days. I learned to listen for your scratching at the door. Learned to sense you through walls. Your beauty, the warmth of your body, passion - such a contrast to that stark city of winter. Your Spanish eyes and what they did to me. Rescue. Respite, for a while. The absolute decadence of drinking sweetened iced tea and eating ice cream together on my mattress. Mickey's bus of white and blue. He drove us in the service of love. The supreme act of kindness, care, love in the roast beef and cream cheese sandwich you made for me. I was restored at once. Beyond restored - made anew. You made me want to live too. You heightened my senses beyond the point of unbearable. And you lasted, eventhough you didn't stay, for such a long time. Even now.

Red

I checked the mailbox for evidence of the red stove, but it was not in there. Then I started thinking about what might have become of it. Had I unknowingly discarded it, being used mostly to junk mail? Was there a thief in the postal service? I started reading a third book simultaneously when I got back inside the house. This one is fiction. I haven't spoken to anyone, or been spoken to by anyone, in three days now so, when I'm reading, I can really hear the characters' voices. So far there are three. One I know from the radio. One is from memory. And the last is spontaneous. I started remembering things while reading, like a television being on in the background. She was crying silently with the covers pulled all the way up under her chin. And she was staring at me in a meaningful way that I could not yet comprehend. Hurt maybe, terribly injured, like I'd failed to understand something critical. Like I'd forgotten our Golden Aniversary. I drew the covers down slowly in order to get closer to her. She didn't protest. Her pain glared angry and red and horrbile in the form of hundreds of scratches inflicted with something pointed or edged all the way from her throat down to her feet. I was not prepared for that - sickened, useless, wounded, angry. Always angry then. Anger covered for everything. This time angry because it was the body of my love defiled. My body. My love. I understood in a dizzy sickness that we were both doomed. We had the same sentence. But now, look at all the years that have come and gone! See? We're fine. Outside my window I perceive two crimson smudges on a branch. Cardinals, vaguely, without my glasses.

Sampson's Pebble

That's about it

Two walks again today for a total of 7.1 miles into the Kingdom of Oaks. My turnaround point was Sampson's Pebble, a glacial erratic on the top of a hill. Coming upon it in the quiet of these woods is a wonder. Until you see the spray paint. Ain't it funny how mankind can kind of sense the sacred in things but can't resist the temptation to piss on it? Someone painted the Yin and Yang symbol on there. A philosopher. Balance. Beauty and Shit. I noticed the trumpster neighbor back there in his secluded compound digging with an excavator today. Maybe he's digging in. Building a bunker. Fending off the libs who will soon be attacking with well-funded public education, accessible health care, fair wages, and ready access to the right to vote. Batten down the hatches, motherfucker. Shitbird's being impeached again.

Not too bad

I started the day doing this breathing exercise meant to free me of oxidative stress by turning my chemistry basic. At least that's my limited understanding of the practice so far. I don't know if it did that but I did have more energy today. My head was clearer. I felt alert and pretty positive all day. Went walking in the woods twice for a total of six and a half miles and I felt pretty glad to be out there. Something's shifted. I'd like to say I'm out of the rut, but I believe in the jinx. So, you know.

The Superego and the Id

Better

The neighbor with the three Trump signs posted on the trees lining the road seems to have taken them down. Maybe there's a snapping out of it point in self-delusion. Or maybe he's just going back underground. The ugly American has his day on the world stage - all narcissism, ignorance, self-induced psychosis and pride. Meanwhile, I'm taking walks in the woods and signing petitions to impeach a weak and shitty conman playing at being the devil. Belichick says he isn't having it either.

Advice

You tell him what we can do is keep our heads screwed on tight while the others are losing theirs.

Something from those days

Visitation

Visitation. You appeared in my dream last night. It was a writer's award ceremony of some kind, and you were to be honored there in some way. The place was crowded, and I didn't want to be there, but I wanted to see if I could catch a glimpse of you. I took a position along the railing on the second floor so that I might better survey the lobby below. I looked for you. It had been many years since we'd seen each other. The last time was at your book signing, when your first novel came out. I was excited standing in line waiting to see you. You looked very much the novelist - composed but intriguing. When I got in front of you, you smiled and stood up from your signing table and we embraced. You said, "It's you." I said, "You did it." Now, I am searching the crowd for you. As I look down directly in front of me, you look up. Our eyes meet and we recognize each other instantly. You are wearing a silver gown. Your hair is different. But your eyes are the same dark Spanish eyes I fell in love with when you were just eighteen.

The electric angel of Breezy Bend

Parents

We talk about the FAFSA and the tuition bill without fighting. We talk about each of the 3 kids with a little laughter. We share updates of our respective elderly aunt and uncle who are both now hospitalized with Covid-19. We couch our worries for the future in humor. Healing happens. At least to some degree. At some point, you get on with things.

Who are we now?

Cold mill

The hammer decided to miss the boy who was already stunned by the hatred in the eyes of its thrower. Merciful hammer. The mills, abandoned, falling in upon themselves. Cold brick and heavy beams. That smell of machine oil and the cold - unrelenting, unfeeling, unending. You thought everything existed just to break you.

Missed connection

For a long time after, I looked for your car in my driveway when arriving home at night. I'd check the area for sign. Tire tracks, partial footprints, a letter in the mailbox, a note between the screen and front doors. I was always disappointed, but my eyes still had to check. This morning I found these tracks in the new snow on my doorstep. They're tiny, delicate, belonging perhaps to a chicadee. She seemed to have come right to my door. I felt a pang of guilt for having never replaced the broken doorbell.

Every place a memory. Everyone a ghost.

Sunset on the Ouachita. West Monroe, Louisiana. Some other time.

.
 

Kansas came to mind

All I can remember of Kansas 

Is flat fields of high corn on going

Under a darkening low bruise-green sky 

Threatening supernatural violence

While I sweat thickly through the stagnant humidity

Windows down but no air moving not even at 70 miles per hour

And bug spatter nearly an inch deep on the windshield

It felt like a place you'd better run through

Dirty little virus

 

A New Year's walk with a German

New Year's Day is for the optimists. A day for well wishing, resolutions, and hope for better days to come. An interesting day to run into Arthur Schopenhauer, a long gone German philosopher known for his pessimism, to be sure. 

But run into him I did. And he told me happiness was something that exists inside the moment in which pain is relieved as we walked briskly up the hill along the power lines. He made me consider the year to come and two significant events on the near horizon - regime change and large scale Covid-19 vaccination. I hoped most of us would experience that precious moment of relief this year with its intrinsic happiness. 

Arthur went on to say something along the lines of happiness occurs somewhere between pain and boredom. Those are the two places he believed we spend most of our time. It's just a transition and it's relative, he told me. You can't keep it.

He spat on the ground after he'd said that in what seemed like bitterness. I got the feeling Arthur felt this whole thing was ultimately not worth the boredom and the pain. He'd been through some pretty dark shit himself, and I could understand how his experiences might color his world. I wanted to counter his argument with something though.

Arthur, what happens to us when we die?

We rot. Our so called spirt? Of that I cannot be certain, he admitted.

Right, I said. We cannot know how, or even if, this life resolves in any meaningful way, my long suffering friend. But while we suffer our pain and boredom, can we not at least author a story that helps us to live? And if we can do that, can we not write one of great beauty? 

Humph, remarked Schopenhauer, stumbling over a fallen pine bough. Knock yourself out, hot shot. Shit.