Rain in the pipe

Now the rain has come 

This smear of time

Slipping vaguely forward

Already to another sleep 

DFW

Breakfast in the airport again, but I felt much older this time. Once I met a girl there. We were drinking early in the morning, along with a crowd of other people,  while waiting for our flights. We noticed each other from across the bar. She was tall with black eyes. Nothing happened. She left earlier than I did after another shared glance or two. When I'd paid, I made my way to the gate, and saw her standing there against the wall waiting for the same flight as me. A big smile spread across her face while she blushed and looked down at the floor. 

I like remembering that moment. 

Going to bed

I guess I've wrapped up what I need to for work here. Bought a souvenir western shirt and some exotic jerky for the lads. Tomorrow, early, I fly out. This evening I drove around the Red River area in Arkansas. Ashdown has a paper mill, lots of logs trucks rolling through, a big beautiful lake outside of town, and an apartment court in which the apartments are free standing railroad cars. One is flying a confederate flag. It was pleasant driving through there. 

Sunday notes

6:20 A.M. and I'm up with the birds. Cracker Barrel is within walking distance and it opens in half an hour. That's the plan. Breakfast. Work to do today. 

Fentanyl has found its way to Texarkana. Two come in within 30 minutes of each other unresponsive. Little pale blue pill. Meth has some stiff competition here now. 

Fat Jack's for oysters and gumbo. 

Something like a depression.

That's about it

Even traveling I find myself avoiding people. Not really out of any conscious health concerns, I just don't really want to be around them. This morning, when I woke up, I made a plan to pay a visit to Fat Jack's tonight. I did not do that. My day consisted of a short workout in the hotel gym, going out for a sub-par muffuletta for breakfast, followed by a butter roll and coffee with chicory at a donut place run by a Cambodian family. It appears that Cambodians have cornered the donut business in Texas. The kids and the parents worked together to meet the demands of a continuous morning rush through the drive-thru and at the counter. I thought they seemed to be looking warily over the top of their masks. I had to listen hard to both accents, the customers and the proprietors, in order to understand them. It often took some time and several repetitions for them to understand each other. The proprietors wore masks. Most of the customers didn't. Donuts are only 75 cents. You've got to sell a whole lot of those to make a living. I liked the place, that family, and the way they worked together so well. After that, I audited some more medical records for a couple of hours. Then I took a seven mile walk around a lake, ate some BBQ, and retired to my room to read and just be quiet. 

Friday notes

I have honored my commitment thus far and have not been out there at night drunkenly shouting Motorhead songs at an audience of unhappy strangers. I am auditing medical records. I am trying to stay focused. I did eat a delicious Southern meal at Mother Kelly's Home Cooking which included fried pork chop, mac and cheese, collard greens, and hot water corn bread, but I haven't eaten up the whole town like I used to want to do. This morning, at first light, I was working dutifully at my computer. The sound of birds rose with the sun. They tempted me more. 

I walked along the edge of a swamp last evening and saw a part of a white-tailed deer that would rather not have been seen. I thought of snakes, so looked them up later. Arkansas supports many varieties including the venomous copperhead, cottonmouth, coral snake, and three varieties of rattlers. I'll watch my step or maybe stick to the sidewalk.

Thursday and moving

Yesterday I couldn't focus so I redeemed myself this morning by getting up at 3 A.M. reading over the policies and training handouts I couldn't comprehend yesterday and making edits, making a plan for the day, and spending 30 minute doing moderate exercise in the hotel gym. People on my floor are putting their bagged trash out in the hallway. My neighbor's has been there almost as long as I've been here and it's ripe. The rooms aren't being cleaned, I imagine because of Covid. I'm sure I neglected to read some kind of Covid housekeeping update. Don't care about the room, but the rotting fruit smell being removed would certainly enhance my enjoyment of this experience. Dripping sweat now as I productively produce this post and get chilled by the AC. Hopefully, I'll have something more noteworthy to write about later. It's humid and rainy this morning. 

I took a walk during my procrastination attack yesterday and found myself meeting Jesus in the trees. They'd cut the jungle back and built a Stations of The Cross circuit among the cedars. It's an apparently well-funded Catholic hospital that invests in it's ambience and spirit. There were robins there and turtles sunning along the banks of a man made pond. The sun was shining. 

Five or six

How many times do you have to visit a place before the reality of it opens itself to you? 

At first it's kind of a fantasy - equal parts preconceived notions and sensory impressions. It's got the glossy feel of a tour book. Not all the images are pleasant but they're all snapshots. A glimpse. Something you drove past. A "Have a blessed day" and a smile at the drive-thru. A wild man, solid black, walking through the grass.

If you are someone who bothers to look outward beyond your screens, maybe just a few images will come to define your entire experience, for better or for worse. Maybe you laugh at the place for being so backwards or sneer at it for being too politically correct. The same is true of the people you interact with, if you bother to interact with them at all. One, or a very few, define the whole of your conception of the place. You make judgements. 

Arkansas is like this or like that. The people here are like this or like that. 

Each time it becomes clearer that there is no clarity at all. It's like this. And like that. And like something you never imagined before. 

Propagandist on the radio bemoans the persecution of that poor baker who won't bake cakes for queer folk. Right winger dressed up as god. This stuff never stops down here. 

Back

I was the only one in my three-seated row on the flight from Boston to Dallas-Fort Worth this morning. There used to rarely be even a single open seat on that route before Covid hit. I'm in Texarkana in my hotel room with the AC going now. It's in the mid-seventies outside, but that sun is hot, like it does here. Things are greening up, purple blossoming trees. The grackles are doing their thing. I got happy seeing those birds again. They're hard-knock creatures but they look kind of classy in their dinner jacket and tails. It's in how you carry yourself. No sleep last night. Gonna get a couple hours now on good hotel pillows. 

Anhedonia

 

Lingering effects

The dream woke me earlier then I'd planned to get up. The guy was insufferable. I told my friend to staple him while I held his arms, so he did. A number of times. That didn't shut him up or satisfy my desire to kill him.

Later, I read about the recent suicide of the CEO of Texas Roadhouse who had been dealing with the lingering effects of Covid-19. The effects included tinnitus. 

Recently, I worked with a man dealing with the same condition. His desperation had exhausted his family and he finally checked himself into a psychiatric hospital because the tinnitus was more than he could bear. There's no treatment for tinnitus. We treated the anxiety. Tried to encourage him to keep going. Said it was probably temporary. But we didn't really know. 

One of my eyes is turning red. It's not conjunctivitis. 

I tried to drown the man in my dream, but the water was too deep. There was no bottom to hold him against. I woke to the sound of tearing paper. Again and again.

Spring

Today was one of those occasional March miracles. Sunny and almost 70 degrees. Perfect. I had breakfast with my youngest at a sugar shack on the Eastern bank of the Connecticut River. Real maple syrup on a waffle, maple butter, good chewy bacon and strong coffee. We walked along the river after. Its surface was glass with not so much as a ripple for as far as I could see. Nesting birds moved about in the trees. Robins, cardinals. A sparrow singing for a love interest. 

He saw his dog off to the hereafter last week. The crazy little terrier who always picked up a shoe and took off running when I came into the house. He used to chew my hand to ribbons when he was just a little guy. The poor guy had lost his sight over the last few months and was wasting with cancer. They'd been keeping him hydrated intravenously for the past week. He stopped eating and drinking and finally didn't want to take the IV anymore. They knew he'd had enough. 

He's waiting for the dog's ashes to come home now. They decided to have him cremated, rather than buried near the house, so he could come along with them if they were ever to move. 

I walked in the woods again, on my own, in the later afternoon. A porcupine slept beside a babbling brook soothed by the sound of its gently spoken language.

Glad to be moving on

The bamboo is thoroughly dried out and probably dead. The snake plant doesn't really need anything from me, thank goodness. Just a little water every week or month or whenever. The plants have been my readiness-for-a-relationship litmus test. 

They're both still here, but that's probably only because they have roots instead of feet. I can't really say they're thriving - certainly not the bamboo - but I did give them the only window that catches the sun.

I dreamed of an emaciated wolf with a long hook-shaped lower jaw this morning stalking deer twice its size in my backyard. It had a single pup howling in the grass right outside my door, tipping over backwards as it raised it's head in full howl. The deer weren't overly concerned. 

I got a haircut yesterday in sort of a tough guy barbershop in a small city I don't know very well. It was dank with weed smell, and three of the five barbers talked incessantly, and not to each other, or to anyone else I could identify. Cocaine or meth or some other variety of amphetamine, I'm guessing. The one that spent half an hour cutting my hair had a single ear bud in his ear. He answered a phone call. Told me it was someone telling him it was his turn in Scrabble. 

I didn't make any conversation.

A few minute later my barber says to no one, "Yeah, a bungalow. I want one. I don't know what one is, but I want it."

I couldn't help but lol.

"I'm 45,"  he said to me. "I can't workout like I used to and I'm losing weight. People keep asking me if I'm sick. I'm not sick! Just let me get old by myself. Fuck."

"Do I look sick to you?" he asks. 

He's looking me square in the face pulling one lower eyelid down low. His eye looks both wild and burned out. His cheeks are hollow. 

"Nothing a bungalow won't fix," I answer. 

We laugh. 

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

Spring requires the sacrifice of its frontline fanatics. Maniacs and their super-charged circuitry, psychotic breakers in the first year of medical school, kamikaze-drug-eaters and speakers of the primary process, pummeled idealists, those who self-crucify for their screaming taboo desires, and so many more. 

Call it the careening of progress, the bloody fangs of nature, an apocalypse in full bloom. We are just a swirl of blowing leaves with ideas. We are a bloody fucking parasitic mess. A planetary skin disease. Often contemptible, frequently loathsome, sometimes endearing. 

Always worthy of love and in need of mercy. 

Redeemable? 

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

You've had many names. Einstein said something about intelligence being the ability to adapt. Remembering your intelligence, your energy and your strength now.

I felt you around here last night - in the atmosphere. 

What if I say to you that I feel your true name but cannot speak it?  The name god gave you - Nature, the Universe - before your parents and this human form. 

What if I told you I saw you running with horses? 

Or shining in the sky?

Spring requires the sacrifice of its frontline fanatics. 

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

The past month has been sedentary and it's made me fatter and weaker. I walked in the sun today for a couple of hours through the bare silent kingdom of oaks. I heard the startled chirp of a chipmunk. I saw the tail end of a porcupine who hid from me under a pine bough thinking,  if I can't see you, you can't see me. So I pretended not to. It was nearly silent out there and restorative. I felt sane when I walked out of the woods and into the field. There were two teenagers there. One was operating a metal detector, and both looked a little alarmed to see me there. They call this area Treasure Valley. 

"We're looking for the treasure," one boy said. 

"It's a big valley, " I said. 

The valley is the treasure, boys. That's what I should have said. 

Friday

Yesterday, I purchased and installed new premium windshield wiper blades and felt like a man. Of course, I struggled with them for 10 or 20 minutes in the rain first, and a passerby gave me a useful tip. But I persevered, didn't break anything, and didn't end up bleeding. 

It didn't snow last night as predicted. Or if it did it, it didn't stick. March is a tricky month here, buffeting us between sunny 70 degree dreams and sub-zero blizzards that dump two feet of snow. Don't get comfortable is the message. Wait a little longer. March always felt very Catholic to me. April too. 

I woke up around 2 A.M. again  thinking about unfinished details I need to take care of today, my last day on this job. I'll miss the people there. It's a good place to work. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. Impermanence gives it value. All things passing away.  

The work

The young social worker calls what we do "slash and burn social work". It's not the practice you'd choose, but it's what the situation allows. We're spread too thin to do all that should be done. Scrambling to cover the bare essentials. The really good ones somehow manage not to let this show. 

You wake up at 2:30 AM wondering what the hell to do about the young man with psychosis and four fentanyl overdoses in a year. He hates psychiatric drugs and loves the illicit ones. He'll take anything and everything he can get accept the ones that reduce the power of his delusional thinking. His premature death seems a certainty. You can go through the motions and send him on to a substance use disorder treatment program. On paper, that plan is plausible enough. But you know sobriety is the last thing he wants; his psychosis will single him out among the others and make it nearly impossible to attend to what's happening in the groups; and he can walk out of there at will. It shifts the responsibility for him - the liability for what will become of him - elsewhere, but it's bullshit. He'll get out of the cab and never walk through those doors. You know it. 

He's your case. He's in your head. He's one of many. None are easy fixes. All are unique. Some have nothing to start with. You do what you can for them at a sprint. One leaves, another arrives.

Robins

Robins on brown grass. A welcome sight before sunset. The girl told me it wasn't the living part of her she wanted to kill. It was the rest of her. She said, I don't know if you understand that. Yes, I do. 

Inventory

All personal items must be surrendered upon admission for safety's sake. They're searched and inventoried by the staff then stored and returned to the patient at discharge. Sometimes these personal items tell a story. Sometimes the story requires some imagination. 

The bag contained one man's dress shoe, a dozen eggs, and a claw hammer. 

I'm an introvert. Ok?

Listening to a radio program yesterday on the way home from a visit with my kids. Two people with vocal fry were talking about the need to transition more slowly from Covid isolation back into normal interaction. The guest was advocating for a space to process our communal grief. One of them brought up the ad I've seen recently featuring an orgiastic pile of young, naked, skinny people tonguing one another hungrily. A metaphor, apparently, for our yearning to return to normal interaction (and then some). 

I do not share these feelings, and it's more than just me being put off by the fact that vocal fry has overrun national public radio. The guest said she thought we needed to slow down the process of getting back to normal and find a way to process our grief together. 

My own sense of isolation blossomed in that moment. I felt repelled by the use of that word together. I didn't feel any sort of kinship with these two people talking. I didn't want to go back to the normal I imagined when they talked about it - quickly or slowly. And I certainly didn't want to do it together. 

Even if I was young and model thin, you wouldn't find me in that bacchanalian heap of revelers. Communing is a nice idea. I'll be fine over here just thinking about it. 

It's been a long time

Jenny, the alarm this morning interrupted a dream of you. It was mostly mundane and half non-sensical, but I could feel your presence and it's effect on me. You bought a building. I think it was going to be an outpatient psychotherapy office. For the time being though, it was vacant. You were planning to post signage. Shane's, it said. 

Then there was some sort of community area. A few people were gathering there in the evening to watch a movie or TV show. You and I arrived separately. We were all going to watch the movie laying or sitting on the hard floor. I had a sleeping bag or a blanket. You didn't. I was imagining the possibility of coming into accidental physical contact with you during the course of the movie. Maybe my finger tips would touch your hair without moving at all or your foot would come to rest against my leg. While I was hoping like that, you warned me that you'd probably steal my blanket.

Solo

At work, I'm witnessing the fallout of two marriages. Two couples making each other unbelievably miserable over half a lifetime. I walk out of there feeling lucky and on the right path. Maybe there isn't that much to cheer about, but there isn't that much to suffer either. Whatever madness, ugliness, cruelty or passive aggression I deal with is mine and my own damn fault. 

The Doc is also single. We talk for a couple of minutes about marriage, divorce, the single life. He's a few years out ahead of me and has been single for several years longer than I. The divorce was brutal - we agree on that - painful, soul crushing, and very difficult to recover from. Marriage - with children - made sense though. He says he's happy being single now. Marrying again, especially the contractual part of it, is about as attractive as polio.

He's old school, but he acknowledged that marriage seems to be becoming obsolete. People aren't having children as much;  it's become possible and easy to connect with people all over the world; women are increasingly economically independent. There's no reason to marry. 

Part of me wanted to argue against that idea. There's love, I wanted to say. A free choice. That place you've made with another person that feels like home. The place you want to be more than any other place.

I have relative peace, but I don't have that. 

Work stuff

The temporary assignment has become a grind with three hours on the road every day and a steady stream of distressed people we lock in, medicate, and move on in rapid fire fashion. The bed is filled as soon as I empty it. The outpatient resources are swamped, so my daily nightmare is trying to assemble some kind of support system for people discharging back into the circumstances that made them sick in the first place. It can feel futile. But I'm generalizing and being dramatic. You can still make some kind of difference by connecting with the person. People do find some relief. You just have to prioritize doing so somewhere in between all the documentation and the million mostly fruitless phone calls. 

I've reclaimed five of the ten pounds I'd recently lost and pretty much stopped my walking during the week. Drive, work, drive, sleep. I could do better if I was motivated, but there is something to be said for going slower. 

The night before last, traffic onto the highway was blocked after a dog walker spotted a body in the river. Snow and ice melt revelation. Turns out it was a guy who leapt off a bridge to evade the police last Fall in a city several miles upriver. 

I'll be off to Texarkana for a week or two to train the staff in the ER there soon. Looking forward to a little motion. Vaccinated and ready to go forth, with a mask and minimal contact of course. The minimal contact part has become easy. 

A thought for gods

The past year has been a majority solitary existence. I realized during that time that I am small. That I ultimately have no control. That this life is but one in a vast ocean of lives being lost and gained every second. I'm insignificant. This isn't news, but it's become felt knowledge on a different level. 

A small man, almost entirely powerless among mysterious forces, walks the earth with eyes wide in awe and wonder, terror and disgust. He gives names to things. Assigns value. Creates a pantheon of gods. This morning I am aware of two of them:

Covid-19, the Destroyer of worlds.

Sleep, the Protector of minds.

Who are you?

He spent most of his days braced for bad news. It's just who I am, he thought, my disposition. This orientation was as baked in as his sexual one, and that one wasn't doing him a lot of good either. 

Let's see what the morning brings

Walking in the morning is usually good for starting the blood and the words flowing inside me. It often elevates my mood. Often but not always. 

This morning I was walking the horseshoe subdivision and noticing all the ADT security signs in front of the houses. A warning to the lazy, welfare-slurping, drug-addled city folk that our bedroom community and it's fruit are not for you to pluck. I was thinking I'd make my own sign - Protected by ASTS (Ain't Shit To Steal). 

And then I saw him burst into the kitchen yelling. Who knows why, but that's not love in his eyes. His sleeves are rolled up above thick sunburned wrists and forearms. His right fist is clenched and low, almost to the floor, as if about to throw the haymaker that'll teach you good and dead. He shuffles forward menacingly. In front of him is a woman and a boy of maybe 10. 

A little longer

Spent half a day today trying to find a psychiatrist for a man who believes he needs one badly. I could hear his shallow breathing on the phone, a quiver in his voice, his panic rising. Very few are taking new referrals. This Covid, man, he said. It really fucked everything up. My whole life has unraveled in three months. Everything that used to be routine is now impossible.

The man I met in turbulence over Texas last year - survivor of cancer, a cheating spouse, a divorce, and now the loss of his father's generation of the family to Covid announces that he has been wrestling with suicide lately. That dark place where everyone believes they are the only one. What saved him was an old friend coming to him for help with his own suicidal thoughts. It's not so strange.

My son called me tonight - of his own volition. He let me know he's feeling better today. I think I've just had too much winter, he said. We talked about how it's going to warm up this week. About how it'll be important to get outside and let the sun shine on your face.

Walk it off

Everything is amazing these days. 

But the youngest says he doesn't feel any emotions at all. Everything's gone on a little too long, I agree with him. But Spring's coming, and this virus will eventually be tamed. But I get you, man. Keep going. He likes a director called Christopher Nolan now. And he's watching all of his movies systematically. I thank the amazing he's got that.

My daughter is 23 today and trying to keep her soul

     The gift she'd like from us is just a singing bowl

All of my dishes have been rinsed and scoured this morning after communing in filth in my sink for far too long. The dishwasher, filled to capacity, is expected to right things. Set it and forget it. A benevolent god who takes care of everything. Amazing. 

I'm going for a walk. A 10,000 step expectation. Past white windows of privilege, Fox programming, bitter communion. A sickly witness. 

What doesn't kill you just makes you crazier, Mr. Cave sings to me.

I'm on the tundra in a sharp September wind kissing a girl with such warmth in her eyes. I'm standing beside a Mexican girl in a white dress and a wreath of flowers in her hair. I'm walking toward a woman in a fur coat waiting under the light on a pier with my heart racing. I'm writing love letters to someone far away who's kept a space inside for me, as I do for her, through all these years. I'm remembering a girl, a sort of paradise, before we were married and the egg cracked and bled out in my hands.

I'm watching you walking away from me eternally.

Launderer

The laundromat is kind of like a trip to the casino. A run of luck means I come out with all the clothes I came in with cleaned and dried. Sometimes there's even an extra sock or a strange pair of underpants. Chance is a major factor.  That's the hook. Risk, adrenaline, compulsion, action - the cycle plays out every week. Sometimes, like last week, I stagger out of there with five worn-only-once white t-shirts reduced in size by twenty five percent. And once in a while a forgotten pen in a pocket decides to rearrange the color scheme of my week's work wardrobe. Players don't always win, but you know they alway play. And, baby, I just gotta play.

Visitor

This morning there was a bobcat sitting at the base of a tree beside your dog's grave. I watched it for about 15 minutes. It was still resting there when I left for work. The expired chicken breasts I put out with the compost a few days ago are probably what brought her to the area. But something about her made me think she understood there was something special about that spot. 

That scene again

The cursor is blinking there in the top left corner. I stare at it and feel what it feels like now. 

Like a cold room. Like the bland smell of new paint drying. Like white lace curtains hanging in the windows. Like a shotgun in the living room. Like an Easter morning suicide. While the others are away at church. The kids will discover the mess you made. It's so quiet here now. Witchcraft silence. Spells in the woodwork. Olde New England horror. Stifled. There's a scream locked inside of everything here. The red painted windows in the barn. The still spruce. Still sparse and cold and bruised. Everything aches here. Silence watches you suffer. All eyes and no feeling. 

Spring has been detained. It won't be coming this time. Not for you. 

That's a scene, but not my scene. A memory, a could have been. 

I'm just here now getting ready to go to work.

The story of where you came from

You were in a beautifully illustrated children's book. I found myself imagining a few scenes during my morning commute yesterday.

In the first one, wild horses are running through tall green grass across a wide sweep of plain. You are running among them, just as wild. Your thick black mane is shining in the sunlight. 

You apparently live entirely outdoors in this place. On this great plain between a tall mountain range, a lake whose distant shore cannot be seen, and a dark and massive evergreen forest. You sleep in a plush pile of foxes, coyotes and wolves. Birds come to rest in your hair. 

There appear to be no adults in this place. And you appear to be the only human being at all. If you are, in fact, even a human being. The sounds you make are mostly animal sounds. Roars and screeches, squirrel chatter, neighs and brays, and peels of delighted laughter. 

March roars in

The lion of early March roared throughout the night. The temperature dropped 40 degrees, and the wind rose and stayed all night scattering my trash cans in the driveway. I slept again like a dead man with nothing to look forward to cursed with the urge to pee three or four times because of a prostate that won't stick to the program. There was a dream of a black haired woman but it wasn't anyone I knew. Then someone casually and momentarily rested their hand on my hip while we put barbells away. A coach or someone. Human touch. Bonding, reassuring, encouraging. The feeling stuck with me.

Gray

After a long time in bed, I'm waking to rain. I abandoned the plan to get up early, go for a walk, do the dishes. I'm gray today, so far at least. Unanswered phone calls. Closed my account on the dating site. It's been an exercise in learning all the things I don't want - which is useful knowledge, I guess. Another week of work. Of possibility, you add, trying to challenge an apocalyptic attitude.

At the tail end of the day, I stop for gas in the town I live in (for no good reason at all) and decide on dinner in the tavern over a sandwich at home. The bartender takes my order. She looks lovely in her mask because it accentuates those dark glittering eyes. It's always the eyes that do me in. I'm cool with masks. But I'm not done in this time, just here for steak tips and rice with a salad and a couple of drinks. To her I'm just some old guy, not quite familiar, but familiar enough for a foundational humorous exchange. 

The regulars in this place depress me. With some regularity.