Alright, I'll try to pretend I don't know that fire follows extreme heat and drought. I'll do my best to stop seeing the blue sky in my mind's eye blackened for weeks with smoke.
Let's go buy another AC! How about an SUV?
I don't think we can even begin to conceive of what it will take to save us. If we survive, it'll be an accident.
Walking through the dusk into a brewing thunderstorm, I could feel it's energy and I just wanted to keep going.
Nature, man.
It was another hot day. I was productive and, for the most part, stuck to my plan. At lunch, I walked for an hour with my pack and was thoroughly drenched within 15 minutes. I let my thoughts go while still paying attention to the cars and trucks coming at me, the drivers of which were not paying attention to me at all. You've got to be a little nuts, or have no other option, to walk on the shoulder of the road these days. I was thinking that if nip bottles had a five cent deposit, like plastic bottles and aluminum cans do in this state, I could have probably financed a college education with what I've seen in the ditches along this road over the last 20 years.
The snakes must be hatching. I found two short slim ones dead within 10 feet of each other, And then a car-crushed box turtle. The horseflies are starting to come out and circling madly but not yet biting. Soon though. They're absolute kamikazes with a life span of about two weeks and a balls out, live-fast-die-young mentality. They need a blood meal in order to reproduce and they waste no time getting after it. They've evolved to understand that landing between your shoulder blades, or in the center of your lower back, or on your nose just under your glasses will give them the greatest chance of success. They bite your head and face knowing that the blood's right there and you'll probably knock yourself out trying to stop them - one of their sinister pleasures.
When I got closer to home, sweat pooled in the lenses of my glasses when I looked down at the ground. I discovered a little green hummingbird on the side of the road that must have collided with traffic. I think it was my guy. I didn't see him or his lady all afternoon.
That was a blow. I mean, I felt it. We had a long standing relationship, he and I.
What used to be something like a lawn is now a meadow. The milkweed are producing fruit that draw the butterflies. The first of the wild flowers in the patch I planted are flowering. And tonight, as I made my way to the front door in the dark, there are fireflies. They say fireflies are disappearing because humans don't let it get dark enough for them to thrive anymore.
Well, that may be so. But it's a regular firefly disco tonight on this homestead, I'll tell ya.
It was a hot one and I managed to get done some of the things I set out to do. One thing I did not set out to do, however, was to go to that Brazilian place for lupper and eat a mountain of sirloin, spicy pork sausage and lamb along with a few side dishes, a caipirinha and a beer. But I took the liberty of doing it anyway.
That came after an hour's walk on a hot day under my pack through well kept residential neighborhoods reminiscent of my early childhood. Modest houses built close together transformed into proud homes with gardens, flagstone walks and trimmed hedges by working people who made good on the dream.
People watering and pruning things did double-takes when they noticed me, an alien, hiking through. I waved without looking. Just pretend your invisible.
When I walk, I feel myself in relation to other things and to other people. When I'm walking, the words start to trickle and sometimes flow. My music. If I ever pray, I do it this way.
I was overcome by the sinking iron head exhaustion again this afternoon. Just getting up from a two or thee hour nap at 6 PM. My head is still trying to pull me down. I think I'll go try to work for a few hours.
Later.
I went out to work for a while and realized again how sad people make me.
Tonight there was a little road rage incident. The angry fellow was behind me in an oversized pickup truck as I slowed to stop at a red light. He hit his high beams and swung his wheel left and right menacingly. What a big scary beast!
He ended up pulling up beside me at the red light. A backwards baseball cap type guy - young, early twenties. The truck is too big for him.
I ask him what the problem is.
He tells me I could have beat the light if I hurried.
"I'm a cop," I tell him.
"I'm not fucking scared," he replies.
"That's good."
The next thing I know he's looking down at me from the cab of his oversized pickup with a wad of large bills in his hands. He's spreading them out for me, making sure I can see them all. He's got an uncertain smile on his face. His eyes are vacant.
"You got money!"
"I got more than enough money to buy that piece of shit you're driving"
"Gimme ten bucks for it."
"You're no cop. They make more than you do."
I felt badly after. The kid looked like such an innocent and empty vessel.
More people seem to call me sir on this side of the Apocalypse now that my hair's turned another color. Including the young lady who I covered for tonight while she used the men's room because the ladies' was a single-seater and occupied.
"Sir, thank you for being a good dude by watching the door for me," she said.
"Of course. What kind of man would I be otherwise?"
She smiled unabashedly.
That wouldn't have happened if I was a younger man. Harmless has its perks, I guess.
A full moon and the atypical experience of being the life of the party. I think I might just be in a band now.
The alarm wakes me while I'm dreaming one of those dreams you don't immediately want to wake from. A library, a fifteen-hundred page philosophical tome, a lively discussion with a mentor and friend who comes to join you. You are glad to see each other. In his eyes you see humor, unconditional positive regard, and enduring friendship. It feels good to be together. Waking from a dream like that hurts because whoever that was in your dream doesn't exist in your life. You don't have a friendship like that. You don't actually have any active friendships at all, come to think of it.
Two red-tail hawks were circling overhead as I walked with the rain pending.
Skreeee...
Hello! Yes, I recognize you too.
Too hot and humid for sleeping most of the night. Normally the summer here brings two or three nights in which an air conditioner feels necessary. We have surpassed that in the first three weeks of June this year. There's no doubt about the heat rising. It's not Chinese trickery.
I've yet to put the air conditioner in the window. I resist the notion. Austerity. The strange pleasures of self-denial. I like the sound of the fan and the way it moves the air, even if it can't actually cool it. I don't like the hours of half-sleep, or no sleep, and the worries that rise up out of the mattress though.
A Father's Day dinner with my two young adult children. They are waiting for me at the table with a bouquet of flowers.
We enjoyed an outdoor Indian meal at the same restaurant their mother and I came to on a date 27 years ago this month. The restaurant is located right behind the church we were eventually married in.
We aren't married anymore. Things didn't go according to plan, such as it was.
There was a lot of pain, for all of us. Pain that never should have been. And yet here we are sitting and eating together on Father's Day many years later. Talking to each other. Laughing. Arguing. A family.
Driving home on a hot summer evening with hardly anyone else on the road, it takes some time to identify this feeling I feel.
I think it's peace.
I would have been happy to rise early with you and to feed and water the chickens while you are in the shower. But there are no chickens here. There is no shower with you below making ready for your day. Somehow the scene broadcasts your quiet determination, productive and efficient.
But that scene is in my head and not in my house. I sleep more. I let the morning slip past while dreaming of traveling and feeling uneasy.
Finally, I sit up and read the last remaining chapters in a book about a German on a pilgrimage. So many of the cultural references are European, of course, and go over my head. I've traveled little there and that little was many years ago. I speak only one language.
But what I do have is the willingness to get lost.
This is the second such book I've read lately. The first was by a Canadian making the same holy walk. He annoyed me too.
Walk alone, I tell myself and then wonder what the book I'd write after would read like without the drama of human interaction. First I've got to write it. First I've got to get there and walk. First I've got to get up and out of this bed.
For no reason I could decipher, late in the afternoon, still hours before sunset, my head became a heavy iron ball which my neck would no longer support. I laid it down on the bed and it sank down through two pillows and half way through the mattress too. I felt like I was still descending. I think I kind of died there for a little while or something.
Yes, I tend to lean toward doom and gloom. It's an orientation. You see the world not as it is, but as you are. Or so I've been told.
My youngest flew out of state this week. It was going to be his second time in the air so he's still pretty anxious about the prospect. I texted him while his phone was on airplane mode wishing him a good trip. He replied when they landed. The flight wasn't too bad. Except for the moron who had to be forcibly removed for refusing to wear a mask. I'm sure that incident did a great deal to assuage his anxiety.
In this bar, the owner is always present. He's basically a one man show at night. He tends the bar, makes artful drinks using all kinds of fruit and does the cooking. During the day he operates a landscaping business. He's always busy. He's also very generous. I noticed his face though, several times throughout the night, devoid of expression. I want to say his expression is joyless. He's probably just exhausted. The guy works his ass off. But I see him sitting on that stool and I cannot help but interpret the blank look on his face as a sort of resignation to despair.
Two couples come in together - one male and one female. I say hello and ask them if they're going to sing. They say they're thinking about it. I encourage them to. I'm talking now, which is something I have not done in several days, and it feels pretty good. I'm expansive even. I introduce myself and learn their names. I offer to buy them drinks and put in a plug for the bartender's unusual artistry. Two shots of Patron (this makes the bartender smirk - I got Cuervo, like you'd even know the difference), a Corona with lime, and one "surprise me". The surprise is a sweetly flavored mojito with a garnish of berries.
The ladies have the same first name. They also have similar tattoos on their arms. They look to me like they could be sisters. "She's my wife," one says proudly. They smile openly. I like them instantly. They're proud and celebratory and high on this moment. And yet, I'm thinking, they'll still have to figure out how to live with each other across the years when this high dissipates and the victory of their same sex marriage becomes routine. I'm celebrating with them but I'm feeling this creeping dread too.
One of the young men is very drunk. He's looking at me a certain way. His partner sees this and is amused, probably because of the age difference of approximately 30 years. Toward the end of the evening, the young man sits beside me. He is too drunk to say very much coherently. He's in worse shape than his friends. I see alcoholism and wish I'd never bought him the drink. His friends seem to see only party time. He tells me he's glad that I'm having a good time too.
Meanwhile, I'm doing couples therapy with the man and woman beside me. They're in their late 40s and they went to high school together. They recently ran into each other again by chance and started dating. It's her birthday. When he goes to the bathroom, she asks me if I want to date her. I observe that this guy seems to really like her. She likes him too, but he only texts, and then not very often, and he never calls despite her telling him to. Later, when she goes to the bathroom, I tell the guy to call her once a day for awhile. He says she wants more from me than he's capable of giving right now. They get closer throughout the evening. He starts touching her more often, talking to her privately. She films him singing. He and I sing Tennessee Whisky together. At closing time, they're happy and leave together but the seeds of their destruction have already been sewn.
I notice that my friend out West has texted to tell me she could use a fan. She says she could literally fry an egg on her living room floor. It's hotter than it's supposed to be across the American West. Far drier too. Drier than it's been in 1,200 years and having to support an ever-expanding human population. Do you see what I see?
The bouncer says he doesn't date. I tell him he's wiser for it.
I don't date either but I don't feel very wise.
It feels good to walk in the dark city street sometime after 2 A.M. even while knowing that the explosion you fear is already happening.
Like a drunk in a midnight choir, I tried tonight - in my way - to be free. Buying drinks, making temporary friends, singing karaoke. The owner, cook and bartender looked sad and remote. The couple beside me used me for counseling. He never calls. She expects too much. He looked like a young Tom Hanks. She was a six foot blonde. I told them they should cut it out and make it work.
I sang to you in this place more than once long ago. A lesson was learned: no matter how in love you think you are, don't attempt Sade.
I did my thing on a treadmill tonight without a mask in a public gym. Most people were no longer wearing them in there. It appeared wrong to me on some level, some sort of breakdown, like drunken group sex or something. I'm the guy with the garlic burps no longer filtered.
A short and sweaty walk under the pack after a lapse. I've gained back the ten pounds I lost in the Spring by being my usual distractible self. Follow-through doesn't come naturally. The greenery out there was higher and thicker this time. There's a red tail hawk nesting somewhere along the power lines. It gives a skreee of warning or of protest and follows me, watching from above, until I turn left into the trees. Before I do, I meet two cottontail rabbits hiding in a shaded portion of switchback. They give me ground reluctantly and then only a few feet at a time. Maybe they're hiding from the hawk. The air is thick and sweet with the scent of sweet fern which smells to me like misery and a prison camp. Some old guy saw me covered in poison ivy blisters as a kid and told my step-father that sweet fern steeped into a tea and applied as a topical would dry it right up. It didn't do a damn thing. But we gathered it up and made tea every time I got a case, which was several times a year, for years. I didn't find out until I was an adult that a cortisone injection would have gotten rid of it in a matter or days. That would have meant going to a doctor. Strangely enough, I stopped getting poison ivy like that the year I left home. The walk is a strenuous and sweaty one today. On the way back out, I run into the same cottontails on the switchback and the hawk which follows me out along the power lines. I'd like to lose about thirty pounds I'm thinking. I want to feel lighter.
Sure, I'll take a survey.
Gave them a little more insight into how to further saturate and penetrate the consumer mind. They paid me two bucks for my time and trouble.
I'd like to do something clean. You know what I mean?
That person becomes your central point of reference. Home.
Everywhere you go and everything you do is in relation to that reference point. Your route back to it is continuously recalculated throughout the day. The route back is your central concern, no matter what else is happening. Simultaneously though, there's a second central concern. And one day, in an act of self-fulfillment, the second concern comes to be. Not to be, actually. The central point of reference can no longer be located on your GPS. There's no route back.
Homeless is the new state of being. Sure, you're housed (let's not be dramatic), but one place is now as good as any other. As no good, actually. You don't need a GPS or continuous recalculation. You don't have to concern yourself with the possibility of it not being there when you get back. It's a relief, really.
But sometimes when you wake up, in darkness or in daylight, or when you lay down to sleep, your internal eye scans the horizon for a central point of reference, and you remember yet again that there isn't one. You sink a little. That feeling can ruin your day.
I spent a few minutes talking with someone I had to talk with at work today. I was glad for the interaction to be over. I was glad to then walk across the parking lot, to get into my car, and to drive away. I was glad there was no one waiting for me in the place I was driving to.
There isn't anyone I want to do that with anymore.
How unbelievably egotistical that sounds. What you really get is a fucking snarl.
Tease it apart and find that what you think of as "intimacy" is actually an adhesion to the very sick portion of another person's pathology. They're healthier now without that connection to you.
And what are you?
I'm committed to your lightheartedness. I'll see myself out.
I guess I'll go into the city this evening and have myself another Cajun boil with shrimp. They know my order there. It's almost always the same. The owner, who also tends the bar, sometimes comes over to make small talk. A Chinese family business. They work hard. It's the closest thing I have to a routine, going there just about once a week.
A Mai Tai and a Modelo. Shrimp, boiled potatoes and a piece of an ear of corn in the house's Special Juicy sauce, medium spice, please. Sometimes, if I'm hungry, I'll add sausage too.
Families eat there. Couples. Birthday parties. Dates. Once I got a little drunk and paid for a young couple's meal on the sly. They had a baby of about two with them who executed some of the most piercing cries I've ever heard.
I don't know if anybody thinks anything about me always eating there alone, but I feel kind of free.
It's too early for dog days. The strawberries have been here for more than a week now and will likely be gone before I remember to get some. I become mildly anxious and hopeless thinking about the short seasons of things. Maybe it's best just to abstain altogether.
It doesn't take too long for your butt to start hurting in a kayak, but it's nice out there on a gentle river, especially when you're just drifting silently downstream steering with your paddle. The sounds of an occasional bird, the breeze, cool water droplets. Your son is sitting in front of you. It took a little while to find some kind of harmony in the boat. You're looking at the back of his head now wondering what he thinks.
"I am a golfer." Reading that depresses me.
In my head, it translates to something like - I am perfectly happy with the prescribed entertainment package. I am serving a life sentence of dull repetition.
My response is, "My home is wildly neglected. I don't make any plans."
That should do it.
Someone I fell out with a while ago over timing and words said she'd message me more recently and didn't. That's alright. Seems to happen a lot, relatively speaking, these little falling outs with people I don't really know. Oh well, you say, and walk away.
I'm up early. The tick bite itches. Today my son gets his second dose of the vaccine. I need a shower and to get on the road. The heat is coming.
Leadership. When there's a vacuum there, bad goes to worse and then tragedy strikes. The best thing that could come from tragedy is a waking up, a call to action, and a period of rebuilding which is often a slow and steep climb. The worst thing - I can think of right now at least - is a string of these tragedies and a massive turnover all at once.
Maintenance, that's what the housekeeper told me. He's right.
Two of the kids sent me pictures today from a time when they and I were much younger. I remembered something of what I felt like then and have trouble tracing the route from there to here. The feeling that I'm left with is a sick one. At least there are photos though. Proof.
We were on this train. It was night time and moving fast. I got up to stretch my legs and to use the bathroom. Between the cars - the wheels' heavy clanking, the wind, the exciting smell of foreign air. I must have fallen. I didn't jump, I swear.
I just fell.
At work, I checked in with some of the staff who were showing signs of distress. One of the patients had seriously hurt two nurses who were out with head injuries. A nurse walked me through the unit to get a feel for it. The patient was left to pace the hall wrapped in a blanket, talking to himself, apparently focused on elsewhere. They had a lot to say, the staff. The system, as we all know, is broken.
When I got home, the pillows I purchased to save my ailing neck were on the doorstep. I took them inside, used a scissor to cut through the tape on the outer box, and saw that there was a second box within. I noticed then that I had that disproportionate tiredness, the physically heavy kind, so I cast the inner box aside, undressed and went directly to bed.
I dreamed of flying into a city on a helicopter as part of a military unit. We were standing on the skids and I was trying not to think about falling. We flew low through the downtown streets just above the roofs of the the cars. It was a training mission, but the civilians were unaware and did not understand our presence. As we disembarked and began patrolling through the streets, some of them panicked.
The enemy weren't uniformed military. They were interwoven into the civilian population. Instead of killing them, my job was to identify and count them as we pushed through the city. I told the first two people we encountered they were dead and they smiled slyly. They knew that I knew who they were. And I knew with absolute certainty.
And then we were searching a house filled with women and girls who were lined up to interview for jobs. It was a brothel, or soon to be one, opening in anticipation of the presence of an occupying force. Us.
I was counting them. They were the enemy too. In different circumstances, we'd be killing them now. When I reached thirty, my absolute certainty started to feel less absolute.
I was watering the flowers out there, standing in the uncut grass, looking around at the various groups of plants whose names I do not know. I don't mow it anymore. It's a meadow now. I'm waiting for the flowers to bloom and the bees to come and to feel like I can actually do something to counter the disappearance of life. As I'm thinking like that, a deer tick is burying its head in my thigh. That's the kicker: we all gotta eat. Too bad it's each other.
The most colorful dreams seem to occur after hitting snooze. A few minutes ago the female singer of a Cambodian band, heavy on the reverb, sang me a song in which a mother sarcastically scolded an adult child in Khmer. Suffering is free, was the basic English translation.
I suppose this was in reference to my aching neck which at this point has gone forward with the filing of a formal grievance against me for neglecting its well-being and fostering a hostile work environment. My pillows are flat and have been for years now. I've done some research. I've even put a few in my Amazon shopping cart, but I've been trying to avoid spending the money.
An early morning performance from a Khmer rock band posing as a nagging mother was all it took. I'm ordering two types of new pillow this morning.
And no, neither one of them is made by that that seditionist kook with the Just For Men hair coloring.
