Nick Cave and Warren Ellis

 

Table for one in the function room

Two Bloody Marys with Tito's, please. And some coffee. And some breakfast too. Maybe a little lunch while I'm at it. Hell, let's do it all at once. 

That's how I did it and then went home to plan the second half of the day but fell asleep for a couple of hours and before you know it it was dark. I was on the phone with a stranger who was doing all the talking when she started saying something about checking off boxes and I started feeling queasy then told her really peace of mind was all I wanted and I was probably not following the program she seemed to be and then my battery quit because now I was outside walking in the cold night air and the timing was just about perfect. 

The moon and stars were so bright and untroubled above me. My shadow just winked and gave me a nod.

He is signaling me through the flames

I dreamed my brother and dead step-father were painting and remodeling rooms.

Before I knew it, they had finished three.

There were lots of colors, hanging tapestries, a bohemian vibe.

My brother said, "I know. Aren't our lives already impressive enough?"

Ferlinghetti, the poet who lived a long life and did not die by his own hand said, 

"If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic."

He is on the other side of the flames staring hard, willing me to raise my eyes - I can feel it.

I'd like to be able to look up, stare hard back, and transmit resolute solidarity.

But I am here getting my ass kicked by the ordinary -

Having to get out of bed, keeping gas in my car, getting to work on time. 

Grind

The assignment is temporary but without a definite end date. Already, it's a grind. Drive, work, drive, sleep. Be grateful for the work, I tell myself. For the check. This is how most of us live. 

I'm soft after some time away from it. The bright sun is shining on my way in, hinting at Spring, and a bright moon lights the way home. 

A lady far away, facing hard times yet again, tells me I've probably been hurt badly and am therefore scared to be in love again. It's not the love, beautiful sister, it's the carnage. 

Elephants

Morning arrived quickly after a solid seven hours of sleep. I woke up one minute before the alarm and about 30 minutes before dawn. 

The elephant in the room with me is a half a million dead people in the country. Many of them would still be breathing if not for the misinformation campaign waged against them. I read a headline about a California variant before going to bed last night. The headline titillated by promising this one is even more virulent, more deadly and more vaccine resistant. Bigger, stronger, faster. Part of me has been vaccinated against media hype. Part of me has stopped taking in new mis/information. Part of me fell asleep thinking this thing really is intent on killing us all.

The poet, Ferlinghetti, died yesterday at 101. Receptive for all those years.

Mundane domestic

I let the truck remain stuck and sideways in the driveway overnight. You want to be stubborn and look ridiculous? Fine. Make a freaking night of it, I said. 

Sometime during the night a ruckus in the kitchen woke me. A mouse. I have these new plastic traps that kill more efficiently than the old wood and wire ones did. This time it failed however, catching the mouse by a single leg. I dispatched it with a cement dumbbell, feeling like a callous bastard, and went back to bed.

There were dreams I can't remember and anxiety. When morning came, I observed the gravitational pull into my bed and against my eyelids was at least twice that of the rest of the planet. 

The truck was still out there. Just take it in stride. I dressed and went out, taking with me from the steps two exaggerating welcome mats. I shoveled the snow out of the area in front and behind, placed the mats under the back tires, and made my first attempt. The back wheels spun. I got out to see why I wasn't going anywhere. One of the welcome mats had been thrown 20 feet to the rear and torn in two. 

That's what? Another 25 bucks? I jammed the two halves back under the tire. The rubber one on the other side had held up better, probably because it didn't talk any shit like the other one. "Welcome". 

I rocked the truck forward and back, forward and back, forward and back, turning the wheel a little to the right each time it inched forward. Soon the truck was free and pointed North/South in the driveway. 

The truck was blushing a little. I didn't say a goddamn word.

When the ox steps on your foot

That Chinese horoscope, the one that told me about the year to come, tried to warn me. Don't travel because you'll probably have an accident. Straight forward, no metaphors. Just like that. So I took a hike down a new section of trail and busted my ass on some hidden ice. Now I've got this clicky elbow. The horoscope also warned that things were about to get expensive. My car's in the shop with a working subtotal of $900 in repairs. I got the rented pick-up with the useless rear-wheel-drive stuck sideways in my icy driveway. Then I burst into my house cursing and noticed an unpleasant odor the source of which I could not at first identify. It's the bathrooms - both of them. The septic system is apparently backing up. Fate you might call it. Well, only a little more than ten months to go. 

Woke with this in mind

 

Anti-muse

I live in this reality. This one right over here. Right, I know you can't see it. And that's alright with me because yours is a bit hazy to me too. 

You've got an awful lot of preconditions and expectations, as is your right, but I'm daunted, frankly.  Uninspired. I don't think I'm willing to climb that mountain for your temporary amusement. I think I'm finished with trials of endurance in the service of fickle affections.

I don't need you. And you probably just need something to do.

All this talk about deserving and not settling makes me queasy. Press on then, go forth. I'm just going to walk at my own pace, if you don't mind. 

And I'll clean the silverware on my pant leg if I feel like it. 

No one really cheats death, but sometimes she's willing to look the other way.

The windshield wipers began to slow down while I was on the highway. The warning light for the ABS braking system came on. I lost the power steering. All the remaining warning lights lit up. I made it to the exit, through the traffic light and into a truck stop before the car stopped running. An electrical failure. Probably I'll need a new alternator, I was thinking. I called AAA for a tow. I called Jimmy's shop and asked if I could have it brought in. I called work and told them I wasn't going to make it. I called an Uber. 

The Uber driver was a Brazilian man who talked with me through the entire ride. He maintained steady eye contact in the rearview mirror while driving. We talked about many things including cultural differences. He observed that here, most people stay in their own box and don't talk to each other much. That's me. He said his wife's parents drive him crazy - she's an American - because they talk only about the stock market. He said it's easier to buy things here, but the people are often not as friendly or social as they are in Brazil. We don't seem to spend our time here enjoying life. Maybe it's the weather. In Brazil, he said, there's 11 months of summer. He lived in the UK for a few years too and said the people there were terrible. 

My friend at the shop let me know that in addition to the alternator I'll need a ball joint and tie rod ends on the front end. In fact, he told me, he can't let me drive it in this condition. The ball joint was actually falling out. He said if that had occurred at high speed the wheel would have come off and I'd have likely rolled the car. My morning and evening drives - 3 hours - are mostly highway driving at 75 to 80 miles per hour. He said he couldn't take it if anyone else he knew died. Three men we grew up with, our age,  have died since the last time we spoke less than six months ago. One had heart problems and got Covid-19. Another guy, strong as an ox, even when we were kids, had a sudden massive heart attack. I don't know what happened to the third. 

Sometimes a breakdown is a blessing. 

Question

I feel a distinct and disproportionate physical revulsion when I see a woman smoking a cigar. Why? I'll never know for sure, I suppose. But that feeling of disgust is nothing compared to the one that comes over me when I see or hear about the doings of Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Much is foul in the world. It's difficult to rank vile, rotten putrification, but he's got to be in the top or bottom tier. Whichever is slimiest. 

Why do I live here again?

The drive in the morning to my place of work takes about an hour and a half. The traffic and the weather have aligned with my intention enough to keep the experience a positive one so far. The route is new enough that I can still see it. When I arrive, I must take my own temperature and log it in the binder along with my name, the date and the time in red ink. 

The anxious man, the addicted woman, the girl who communicates in suicidal threats. A volatile young woman wearing a t-shirt that says THOU SHALL NOT TRY ME is waiting for her hearing. We all talk to each other in passing. 

Driving home last night, I had to stop for gas in a neighboring town. The young woman inside the convenience store had her hair down and her mask on, but I recognized her eyes. She recognized me too and told me she quit the drive-thru where I sometimes get my morning coffee. She said it was over some drama that happened there. She said one of the regulars told her she should kill herself because she filled his cup about an inch higher than he preferred. 

There's a particular kind of suffocation that takes place in these small towns. It's happening right now.

Charge

Human interaction is important, possibly necessary and - under the right circumstances - potentially rejuvenating. This I must not forget. And for this, I am grateful. 

The voodoo that we do

Texas has apparently been nominated the seventh New England state. Actually, it's quite a bit warmer here in New England for the moment. I'm worried about some people down there and feel like I should be there helping them. At least shivering with them. This morning started out icy, at just barely 32 degrees, and I took care to shuffle down the driveway, so as not misalign my other arm, down to my completely ice-glazed, high-mileage, Korean chariot. It warmed a few degrees and became less hazardous as I descended from the highlands and made my way to work. The car's radio told me that some people - I imagine them as the propagandists for the Apocalypse - are blaming the failure of the hungry Texas grid on wind power and renewable energy when in the real reality the power plants that went off line were primarily coal and natural gas fed. Rattling death's heads, on and on and on. At work, a lot of people were anxious to leave after being locked in for a long weekend so it was a bit of a sprint to get them out. The toxicity of a particular personality revealed itself over the course of a few hours making me glad - as I am most of the time - to be just passing through. A capricious decision turned someone's day from an I'm-going-home-today-! kind of a day to an I'm-staying-here-against-my-will-why?-because-we-said-so kind of day. All in a day's work. Oppression is the grout and the glue. We know better than you do. 

Art and the artist

Twenty something years ago, I went to a show to see a performer from a band I liked playing in his acoustic side project. I'd been introduced to the original band by a friend of mine. We bonded over the ominous music and the desolate lyrics. We could both relate. It resonated. A few years later, my friend made the decision to hang himself. I hadn't seen him for two or three years by then but learned after his death that we'd been living in the same town. He'd been battling mental illness. His father told me he'd sometimes see me on the street and hide because he didn't want me to see him like that. His father told me he'd looked up to me. I felt responsible for his death. Not for causing it, but for failing to prevent it. I remembered us listening to this band together. In retrospect, it was like getting together to drink arsenic laced tea regularly in small accumulating doses. Goddamn the sun, we'd say in solidarity. Goddamn the sun. I also blamed the performer, who is on the stage in front of me now. The music he's playing is lighter than what my friend and I ingested together, and he's got a sort of old-time Americana gestalt about him now. I'm listening critically and remembering his other band and how it was a bleak soundtrack to my friend and I getting together. The abject hopelessness in some of the lyrics. We both felt it. My friend felt it even more acutely. I don't think he had the mechanism that allows you to feel something but to hold it out and slightly away from you and to see it as art - a metaphor - and draw sustenance from it. For him, it was a direct assault resulting in injury. The injuries compounded until they murdered him. After the show, I bought one of his CDs. The performer made himself available to meet people and sign merchandise. I asked him if he would sign my CD. "For Jim," I said. I told him that Jim had loved one of his songs in particular. I also told him that he'd hung himself. My heart was beating harder. He was speaking calmly. His eyes were on the words he was writing with a black sharpie. He said he hoped his music had helped him. I told him I didn't think it had. 

Hey, wait for me. On second thought, go ahead.

I took a late afternoon nap yesterday and woke up feeling hollow and emptied out with a sort of thin fog inside. It was like the circus had packed up and left without me while I slept. All that remained were the muddy tracks of tires, shoes, and animals and a little scattered hay. It persists this morning, that emptiness, and my elbow still isn't proper. I bought a big jar of local honey yesterday and some Yak Trax, the diamond kind, so I can stay on my feet the next time I'm out in the woods. Maybe that would clear this feeling.

I was the only lone valentine in the restaurant tonight. They set two roses in a vase on the table for me. I ordered a beer and a Mai Tai together and drank them both. A couple in their early twenties was seated at a table just beyond the perimeter of my six-foot-safety-zone. They spoke to each other for a moment and then retreated to their respective phones. This saddened me for a few minutes. But then my dinner arrived and I didn't give a damn anymore. I ate in peace - enjoying the food, the drink, the lack of tension, and the total absence of the anxiety that comes with trying to meet or exceed another's unspoken expectations. It may look a little awkward eating alone in a restaurant on St. Valentine's Day, but it feels pretty fucking good. 

Health

Waiting for a call from the guy that asks about my consumption of health care every few months as part of a national health care access survey. Yes, Dr. Denial is still my primary care physician. No, I don't feel like having my height, weight and blood pressure measured twice a year constitutes health care (although it seems to be all that's necessary to generate a bill, that and a provider's glance). And a physician that doesn't look me in the eye in the four minutes s/he's in the room does nothing to engender a healing response. Sorry, you're just not that good. So that's my excuse. The phone call comes in. He's got to ask all the questions verbatim despite the fact that I told him up front I've received no health care of any sort in the last six month - except for the vaccination x 2 at work. It's an easy fifty bucks for saying "nope" until it sounds like gibberish. What the hell. 

Lunar

It's the Lunar New Year so I stopped at the Chinese run, Louisiana-style, seafood restaurant on the way home. I handed a red envelope to the lady tending bar in her mask and wished her a happy new year. She said she thought maybe I'd stopped coming. She and her husband are the owners, and they and their kids work all the time to keep it afloat. It's been a hard year, but they're still at it. Eating there alone made me remember the Texas Cajun and its full house of oil field workers and take-no-shit-at-all waitresses and thinking about a dark eyed girl I hoped might be in the hospital cafeteria at lunch tomorrow. 

Something new and something remembered

All was good enough on the first day of my new assignment. Rush hour traffic seems to be almost back to what it was a year ago costing me two hours of life which I probably would have squandered anyway just to get home. Kombucha tea though. That's what's going to be the difference maker. My mind is made up. I've got to get up early tomorrow morning and it's going to be down in the single digits. It'll look like those beautiful cold mornings before dawn doing your fasted cardio walk together under the shimmering moon and stars with your mittened hand in mine. 

Update

Dropping into yet another hospital tomorrow on temporary assignment. Looking forward to it. Change is good. Variety in one's work is also good. Predictability is overrated. The impeachment is rolling. Strong voices are being heard. Truths are being spoken. Are we able to discern them?

Space

Yesterday, I went out for a little while just to go to the gym and was pretty quickly overwhelmed while changing channels on the car radio. After so much silence you really notice the sped-up chatter of commercials. It's like they're blasting garbage into your mind with a pressure washer. And then on public radio - the alternative to commercial-crammed-junk-air - which I'm generally a fan of, there's this over-delivered message of unity. We are alone in this together. The message was transmitted with a professional presenter's articulation and inflection. The calculated emotional delivery made it fall flat and sappy, at least to my ears. But I was already sick now with sales pitches and branding and I felt a great deal more alone than when I was good and alone inside my silent house. Get out of here! I turned it off on the way home and watched the round orange sun setting down through a leafless oak forest with a pristine white carpet of snow beneath it. I felt a claustrophobia of some kind rising. 

Visitor

Did I feel your presence last night? I think so. It felt refreshing and familiar. It brought a quiet joy. Like a beautiful bird settling on a branch, each of us recognizing the other. A moment together and then she flew away. I'm not grasping or pining today, but it was good to feel you.

Catching up

The oldest two are employed again. While the youngest is all caught up in school and feeling more positive about it. He's looking forward to the Super Bowl tonight and ice cream cake. It's been a hard week for him otherwise. One of his friends lost his father, a young guy in his 40s, to a sudden heart attack. And Covid took his great uncle - the first Covid death in the family. It was real to him before, but now he's got a reason to hate it. 

Goldish silences

I sat at a table with three women who approximated past coworkers. One of them said something subtly disparaging about a fourth coworker who was not present. "I know her," I said. "She's a good person." This caused a brief felt silence among the group. I'd unintentionally caused the speaker a minor loss of face. She recovered quickly by deciding not to get defensive and by offering me a ride. I wanted to decline, but I knew that doing so would be, in effect, like landing a second blow. Tedium. I don't even want to be here. And then I was in another scene. A man, younger than me and anxious, was telling me about a feeling of malaise he was experiencing. He was going to see his doctor, he said, to be tested for low T. He needed to find a cause for his perceived illness and a definitive cure. I wanted to reassure him. I wanted to tell him that there's really no way of narrowing it down to one definitive cause and that any treatment is really just a shot in the dark. Just go through it, I wanted to tell him. Don't worry so much about the outcome. I was thinking of telling him that things just happen. And that what we expect the trajectory of our lives to be is usually wildly different from what we actually live. I wanted to tell him that I too had plans - which didn't include falling in a hole for four or five years - but that's what happened. You deal with it. That's all. It's ok. Adjust your expectations and press on. I think I told him my age. He said knowing that just made him more anxious. I should keep my mouth shut. 

I felt like Michael Jackson

I dreamed I'd won the lottery recently.  The next morning, I bought myself a Power Ball ticket. The following evening, they conducted the drawing. At that moment, I won the lottery. Four dollars. Follow your dreams, even if you have to use a magnifying glass. 

ER

My arm still aches after falling on the ice last week. The emergency department I was working in yesterday was designed to accommodate four people in psychiatric crisis with any overflow going into standard medical emergency department rooms. All the rooms were occupied yesterday, and the hallways were lined with patients. Many of them are adolescents waiting for inpatient psychiatric placement. This time of year, between the holidays and the end of the school year, always produces a large number of kids in crisis. This year seems worse. Covid outbreaks have been sporadically blocking access to some psychiatric units causing tremendous backups in emergency departments. Opiate overdose deaths have been through the roof too. This used to be my world, my problem to address, although I had little if any power to make anything move. Every morning I would come in and start pushing in some direction though, wondering why the hell it was so difficult to get people what they need in the richest country in the world. 

Stew

I dreamed I'd won the lottery. All of the numbers in the exact order. The final figure hadn't yet been tabulated, but it was many millions. Each time I woke during the night I'd remind myself not to lose the ticket. I'd remind myself not to forget that I'd won, and that everything was going to be better than alright soon. Just don't tell anyone. I also dreamed I'd driven a car up a mountain to its rocky summit. Somehow I'd lost the road. Now I'm on the summit, the descent is incredibly steep, and there is absolutely no way to drive a car down. What goes up, can't get down. I also dreamed of riding in a car with a member of the royal family, and this young guy, who I was somehow responsible for, was driving. He was driving at highway speeds through some sort of construction site which also had no discernible road. I tried not to call the driver out in front of the dignitary on board, hoping he knew what he was doing and thinking that maybe I was being too cautious. But he didn't know what he was doing, and I finally had to yell at him causing him to hit the breaks in time to just barely avert disaster. I also dreamed that my younger siblings were destroying a playhouse. Physically they were adults, but their personalities were those of young children. One of my sisters nearly hit me with a thrown panel from the roof. There were other dreams too, but I forgot them while I was writing this. The lottery ticket is nowhere to be found.

Norming

The lady said I made her feel normal. By contrast, I suppose. It's an honor to be of service. 

Flat

The storm is still blowing through. All day wind and snow. Just before dusk I saw four pairs of cardinals working at the feeders. I filled them twice today. Lots of activity. Cold and hard for the birds and squirrels, for everything, out there. I haven't gone out to shovel at all yet and am feeling pretty flat. A very young person, without too much history, told me recently that I needed to let go of all attachments. She said this in earnest. I remember having those thoughts too when they seemed like new thoughts. It made some sense to me then as at least a theoretical way to avoid suffering. But it also seemed like we were talking about the process of dying - letting go of everything and falling away into nothingness. What I felt though, was that the meaning in life came from significant attachment. Someone you connected at the level of the soul with and then held fast to forever. Come what may. I for you. That was living. Accepting all the joy and pain that came with the sacrament and sacrifice of attachment. I was earnest too. Today I felt unattached. I saw memories as though falling from a skyscraper noticing details of the rooms and their inhabitants as I passed.