2022

I won't miss you. You meant very little to me in the end and that lack of meaning is all that I'm a little sad about if I'm even sad at all. I drifted further from shore this year. Out of earshot and beyond the reach of the lights. I watched closely the process of decay and decline. Studied how the world forgets. How one man forgets and is forgotten. Also what he remembers. I went a year without touching and it changed my understanding. I won't miss you. I'm neither colder or warmer for having known you. We passed through each other. That's all.

Less and less likely

I went out there. Gave it a go. Tried it on for size. I didn't fit it and so came home early.

Work day

5:30 A.M. and rising after good sleep. I'm facing a strange mountain that's growing higher by the day. Its faces are increasingly steep. The mountain itself is equal parts mudslide, avalanche and volcanic eruption. You can feel the earth moving under your feet. Climbing it is ill advised, and yet...

Wonderful World

 

Milepost

A Christmas Chinese lunch with the kids - they who are no longer children. It feels good to slow down and to be conscious of their presence, here, together. After, we went to the house and watched It's A Wonderful Life together. Can you believe that movie was made nearly 80 years ago? My God. James Stewart had this screechy voice that I don't remember from the last time I watched it, however long ago that was. Is it true to say that I was someone else then? 

I met a man today, an ordinary man suffering ordinary problems, and I shook his hand. Eighteen years ago, I wanted to murder him. Today, I felt nothing more than a human hand grasping mine. No hatred. No sense of being wronged. Is it true to say that I am someone else now?

It's the season of children's dreams, of winter ghosts and mileposts nearly drifted over with snow.

Christmas eve this year

I ate breakfast this morning in a diner feeling thankful that it was open on Christmas Eve. I thanked the hostess for being here. She smiled. Things were going well until the sometimes annoying owner became annoying with his sideways political commentary. 

I found myself getting that flat, grim feeling I get when a situation has to be either exited or endured. I wasn't finished eating yet so I put on my don't-talk-to-me face and endured.

I've unplugged from a lot of people and things that have caused me annoyance over the last few years. If you're going to take that course of action, I'd recommend replacing whatever you unplug from with something else. Preferably something that brings you joy. Otherwise, you're left with a lot of silence and just your self. And that can be pretty annoying too.

Rain instead of snow

A good looking kid with a fresh haircut, and she, a beautiful woman. They're obviously related, but in what way? Mother and son? Brother and sister? Aunt and nephew? I ate my dinner alone while discretely watching them eat theirs. I was dreaming there for a minute. She glanced at me and then away. Away. I felt that part. And then I walked out into the rain. 

Repeat

When the sun set on Saturday, I said I'd soak in all the sleep the night had to offer and then did so.

Desire

It was a Friday night, and what I desired most was just to crawl into bed, alone, and to stay there.

Something about the dusk and the Christmas lights on the houses

"You're so serious," people frequently said to the boy. They usually said it in such a way that he began to believe there was something wrong with him. That maybe he should be something other than what he was. I think it would have been nice if the boy had asked the commentators if they'd ever lost something elemental. Because that's where serious begins. That's when he became a real boy in a cartoon world. 

'

V

 V. 

That's as far as I go. All that I show. For me to know. 

This was the first white morning of the year and, as it happened, the morning after the arrival of my new black shoes. They're grippy. I tried them out in the new snow. 

The day commenced on time, in darkness, with the making of my bed and it was just barely light when I arrived at my workplace. And work there I did, well into the next darkness, while all the people looked to be so fragile and endangered. 

Perilous is the road. Tender are its travelers. I loved them all then, but silently, and from a distance. 

V.  I told that to myself. The first letter in a new way. The leaf nearly turning. I tried it on for size and it fit. 

December 4

To Whom It May Concern, 

The emissary you sent? That masked priest with the shifty eyes? Yeah, I just wanted to let you know that I made him. 

Was he hurrying in the stairwell because he was rushing off to administer The Last Rites to an expiring patient or perhaps to hear someone's final confession? Or was he trying to put some distance between himself and the briefcase bomb he left outside my office door several floors above?

Do you see what I'm getting at? 

You can't ever be certain when it comes to the motivations of others. It's nice to think people are just going about doing their assigned work and not something sinister. It's nice, but it's probably not true. Around here, I will henceforth assume there's a bomb in that briefcase.

Later, I dined in Worcester. A small group of people were talking about something dull at the top of their voices heavily accented in the local dialect. That sound, for me, is a dagger wrapped in 40- grit sandpaper slowly thrust into my ear. That complaining tone. The harshness. God bless 'em. 

I returned alone to an empty house that was free of improvised munitions, spies, assassins, unhappy women, and was glad for the silence. 

I'm not wrong to avoid you.

Sincerely,

Last one

Snakes.

It's actually a little 

Sad, really.

Over 

And

Out.

Anchored

Went in early to work to check on things after a holiday weekend, to attend a much-too-early meeting and to catch up on a few outstanding to-dos. The reality of things didn't take long to depress me and, by noon,  I was yawning frequently and ready for bed. There were still things to tend to though and another long meeting to attend. I somehow managed to neglect most of the things I'd come in to confront today. 

Stopped at a laundromat on the way home that featured a restaurant and bar across the street. I stuffed a weeks worth of clothes into a single washer, dropped the quarters into the slot and set the controls. I crossed the street, not without peril, and ordered myself a michelada. This made me feel a little better but not half as good as the Latino family I saw on television in eyes-rolled-back euphoria after biting into Pop Tarts. They were levitating in a state of total delight. Unrealistic expectations, yo. 

I can't get there from here. 

Sick or something

The distances between myself and others grew ever wider until my only contact with them was imaginary if not entirely forgotten. Your social distancing was a mere technicality.

Family holiday

Growing, aging, balding, greying, forgetting, repeating, remembering and laughing - we get together and count heads. They've changed - the velocity of change having quickened - but they all remain. We celebrate that with food and drink and stories and we leave later hoping the next time we do this the numbers will have increased or remained the same and not be fewer.

Would be

There was a woman walking on the bridge over the turnpike. She was silhouetted black against the sky as the sun set. I wanted to see you that way, bundled in your long winter coat with its fur-lined hood. I wanted to see you walking that way and to know it was you by your profile and by the way that you walked. That would have been enough.

Hey, Gringo

I bought some booze tonight to bring to the upcoming family holiday gathering. None of us remaining are alcoholics as far as I can tell. A jug of bold red, some Old New England Eggnog, and a bottle of Bacardi Coquito. Coquito, as I understand it, is a Puerto Rican holiday beverage. It's rum based and coconut flavored. The best stuff, I've heard, is homemade and often gifted to friends and loved ones. I've never received a gift of coquito, until tonight, when I bought myself a little. It's nice. 

Brass

The witch told me that the woman I should be looking out for is blonde. I told her that blondes had never really been my type. That is why things are the way they are for you, she said. 

Stand up eight

The first snow fell here last night. My shoes, on the walk to the car, neglected to inform me that they'd just decided to be skis instead of shoes thereby not allowing me the time I would require to transform from a walker into a skier. I had just enough time to evolve into a faller though. I went down hard in a cloud of curse words. Time for some new shoes, I guess. There's no tread left on those soles at all. Things wear down eventually. They certainly do. 

No Deal

We were both facing our own financial difficulties as a consequence of divorce. Once, while she was worrying aloud about her particular circumstances - something she did not often do with me - I said something about us being partners and being able to work through it together. She spit that idea out the moment it entered her mouth. No! She was better at math than I was. She thought in economic terms. I thought in terms of endurance - carrying the load, inching forward, trying to make the best of it.  I just wanted to be with her, really. She was into maximization though. She had a will to change her circumstances and she did so. I haven't seen her since.

Thank you for your service

 

Veteran's Day

Veteran's Day. They gave me a free haircut at a place I stumbled into while not expecting a free haircut and I left appreciative. I put the pack on my back later and headed out into the remnants of a humid tropical storm for three miles up over the power lines. 

Happy Veteran's Day!, the young woman who cut my hair had said. I don't think it's that kind of holiday, I thought but didn't say back to her. 

I watched a You Tube video featuring a former soldier who'd unintentionally blown a boy's head off with a shotgun in Iraq while breaching a door. After coming home, a few years deep in the abyss of heroin addiction, a stint in prison, lots of therapy and the birth of his own son (now about the same age as the boy he killed), he can finally talk about what he did. 

Don't say, Happy Veterans Day! like you're at a child's birthday party. And don't ask what he did to earn that free haircut.

Neighbors

I was thinking while walking that this block looked like one on which I might actually be able to afford to live. The rats were out walking too. I saw three in the span of two blocks and could hear more. Maybe it's the sudden drop in temperature that had them bustling so just after dark. Shepard Street, Brighton.

Rest In Peace, Mimi Parker.

 

The Obsessed

 

Mr. Lonely

 

The real sun is rising while mine begins to set

It's dawn and something is talking to me through the screen from the back yard. It's not often you can leave your slider open all night in Massachusetts during the month of November. It sounds like a crow or raven. A rolling sound in the throat. An interrogative. I don't know, brother. I don't know. 

Thank you for  the extra hour of sleep. I spent it dreaming about eating pizza with people I didn't know and and appreciating ballads sung by Bobby Vinton with one of them. I woke up thinking about how ABC managed to perpetrate a freudian slip that insulted the entire Indigenous world and how I'll likely never marry again. 

Friday night, I went out to listen to a band play. It was a weird night. Saturday was spent recovering. My ears are still ringing. I woke up Saturday feeling outside of it all. Like there's nothing for me here. That feeling stayed all day and was  confirmed by everything I saw on the internet.

It's tongue in cheek, the Mr. Lonely thing. Nothing's in earnest, or honest. It's a prank. It''s ironic. It'''s sarcastic. Which means it comes from someone hopelessly lost, terrified and adrift. 

I was watching a band play. Old grey wizened biker dudes playing heavy guitar-driven stuff. They've been at it for almost 50 years. Admirable and still ferocious. I was standing close to the front, dancing in place, trying to show my appreciation. You see, a show like this in a small room requires reciprocity for the desired transformation to take place. When the band puts out, you move to show your appreciation. That's your part in the process. You don't hold your phone up and document a moment that you'll never actually look at again for the sake of posting to gain momentary cool. That's not why we're here. It's a sort of atheist's communion for a relatively small group of people. 

Some youngster attacked me from behind. Grabbed me around the legs below the knees and pile drove me into the stage and kept driving. Somehow we ended up on the floor against which I held his head and punched it once. He came up smiling, so I'm pretty sure he was ok, but he simmered down a little after that. I'm not the guy who punches people at shows though. That's not me. My ears are still  ringing too. 

What's old is new

Old angers remain and surface in my dreams. The old ones give birth to new ones. You'd think that after all this time I'd be able to let it go. But you'd be wrong.

November things

I'm graced with the opportunity to participate in both the sunrise and the sunset along with bare black skeletal trees silhouetted against vivid skylines in the East and in the West. It feels good. 

Technicolor

Life has returned in my dreams. Maybe you only fully realize you've been in a depression once you've climbed out of it. At this rate, life might soon be returning to my waking life. It's been a long, deep, dry several years. 

Sunday drive to God knows where

Between Williamsburg and Conway through the burnished red and orange hills, steep green slopes, old cow barns, along the Mill River, he practiced his driving today with burgeoning confidence.

Sturdy

An afternoon of pampering for my higher than high mileage car. An oil change, head light bulb replacement, new wiper blades, an interior vacuum, and a hot water wash and wax. The man at the garage says he's never seen a Hyundai go this far. Half-a-million miles is the goal. Stay with me, Darlin'. 

Better

It's been a week alright. You wanted full engagement. You wanted to lose that permanent feeling of drowsiness. And so it seems you have. For now. Now, you're standing in there at home plate while 100 pitchers throw their favorite stingers all at the same time. It's a job and then some. So be it. Cuts are still being made. People whose names I finally learned yesterday are gone today. The ground is shaky and the ceiling seems to be sagging and I'm afraid to lean against the walls, but that's the work. Do with what you have. They keep coming in. During the week, sleep's become a problem because my brain is trying to solve it. Last night, Friday night, I walked around Alston and Brighton after work. All the restaurants jammed with brilliant Chinese kids from Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Boston College, far from home and finding their way. I did that ghost thing I do and was content with that. On the drive back to Worcester, I was tempted to go out again, but instead I yawned all the way home and was in bed by 9:30. I slept for at least ten hours. This morning the trees are just about bare. The last phase of Autumn begins. I'm drinking coffee and listening to a crow. Not bad at all. 

Salt fish fried rice

Hey. Salt fish fried rice. And then, I was walking the streets at night. I'd been dabbling in magic. Sidewalks of wet leaves in many colors. The city's brook ran clear with real water, not that summertime grey stuff laced with motor oil and garnished by shopping carts, as the trees along its bank held on for as long as they as they could to their thinning golden leaves. I would sit with you here on my lap on the bench at the bus stop, both of us not crying, not speaking, all the time knowing that your bus will come very soon and then it will go away again (with you on it). It's that kind of night. Girls playing night soccer through illuminated fog arranged in a straight spirited row along the sideline shouting encouragements in ponytails and braids. Maybe you thought I was going somewhere dirty with that, but I wasn't. It was humid and pleasant and dark and foggy and Fall. I'd been dabbling in magic. The leaves were wet and ablaze with color. The Amazon drivers were gassing up their trucks before parking them for the night. The display rack in the convenience store featured Mexican snack cakes and made me remember West Texas with feeling. When I walk like this, I usually stop muttering curses and mumbling complaints after awhile. I start to feel better about things. I said goodbye to her there not in her place and creaked and groaned my oars which in turn rowed my boat out into the deeper fog and left behind any sense of direction at all. Finally. I was out there walking the streets at night. I'd been dabbling in magic. 

Seventeen

If you lose a parent when you are very young, but old enough to know loss, and you later find yourself with children of your own, you may experience the weight of a nearly constant and not-entirely-irrational fear that you will die while they are still young. My youngest child turns 17 tomorrow. It's as though the finish line just appeared in the middle distance. I think I can make it. 

First North American Hot Dog

Staying out til 4 A.M. with a carload of sudden friends when you're in your mid-fifties is no easy feat and will demand of you significant recovery time. But what the hell, do it anyway.

One conundrum among many

There are three thousand acute psychiatric treatment beds in the state. Demand for these beds is frequently higher than the supply. The overage end up stuck in Emergency Departments for days or even weeks. What's worse is that something like one third of those three thousand beds can't be filled due to a lack of staff. 

Hustle

When you're living in a house of cards, you can fear the wind every day or you can curse yourself for having taken up residence so hastily or you can just take it a day at a time and see what the hell happens next. 

Christ, American-Style

A god that gets credit for your touchdown or your home sale or your vanity-plated Audi but won't own up to the rest of this shit is no god of mine, friendo.

Week

A week of regulators, early mornings, hurrying up and waiting, falling into bed as soon as I get home, and anxiety that did nothing at all to influence the outcome. Now, onto the next. 

October afternoons

Yes, I think I am feeling some life today. 

We drove North into Vermont yesterday. His palms still sweat when he gets out on the highway but his driving skills and confidence are growing. We drove through colored leaves and mountains, dairy farms and apple orchards. We bought leaf-shaped maple sugar candy, garlic pickles, chocolate cake and mulled cider. 

Today, I took a short walk down and up the hill along the power lines wearing a pack. I did my laundry. I sat outside in my overgrown yard and watched the white clouds sail by overhead. Tried to read Ferlinghetti's travel journals but couldn't focus for more than a single entry. Sounds of chickadees, a distant woodchuck, shaded crickets. They've always been friends of mine, those crickets. Fall, as it always does, is moving too fast. More than half gone already.

I don't remember ever sitting in a chair out there before today. Not once in twenty years.

Throughout the dark months...

 

Mix Tapes

October, as it gets colder. Memories stirring. Colored leaves and wind. You said the room I rented was a monk's cell. I thought I'd probably die there. I played my sad music for you and you played yours for me. Listening for your scratching. We kissed in the harsh wind, my hands inside your black winter coat for the first time. Staggered by holiness, expecting to be taken up, but allowed/condemned to stay. We drank iced tea from the carton, ate chocolate and ice cream, upon my mattress on the floor. So rich, without money. Because I was parched and starving, I soaked you in through every pore, devoured you entirely. My Spirit's eyes fluttered - a bird having crashed into a window - and took flight again. Glorious soaring heights and then, of course, the fall that should, but doesn't quite, ever kill you. Not completely.

Only for a moment

I got out of the car just in time to see the full moon emerge from the clouds running across her silver face just having heard about a friend's misfortune. You tell yourself again that you are only falling through this place and that nothing is fixed. Keep going. Get comfortable with the uncomfortable

Earlier, I walked across a set of railroad tracks. Looking up, I saw a beautiful woman in a tiny glass office look up from her computer at exactly the same time. Our eyes met. I was stunned. We waved to each other. I touched my heart, where I felt her, and then I looked away. 

Self control was the plan

One perceived crisis after another today. Maybe not the best day to take on 22 hours of not eating as part of an intermittent fast, but what the hell. I made it to the cafeteria before it closed and grabbed a pre-made sandwich, chips and a slice of lemon merengue pie. The girl at the register only charged me for the sandwich. 

"I love sweets," she said. "Go ahead and get you some more lemon merengue. I have to throw it all away tonight."

She directed me to take it all - four slices - and even provided me a paper grocery bag to cover my gluttony. I went back to my office and inhaled it all except the fourth piece of that good, good lemon merengue pie. Self-control.

Fall

An October day and an October sunset. The day never made it out of the 40's and I spent a few hours walking 8 miles in the woods. I've been up that same trail so many times now, but each one is different. It's been a while. I've forgotten how poetry starts to roll in your mind as your body tunes into your surroundings.

Friday night I crashed your party

You could probably hear her three states away. Saw us all as serpents. We were flat-footed, walked right into it, giving her something to fight against. There's still a lot we don't do well. So much more to learn. Still pretty barbaric if you look at it (or find yourself on the other end of the relationship).

Talked Boston bands with a couple of younger guys at a bar where I ate for the first time today. The bar tender was a good one and she soothed me with medicinal beverages. 

Later, back in Worcester, I sang a song and then danced with a drunk lady and then some young smart ass made a comment to her about dancing with her Dad. I told him I was probably his Dad too and then the two of us playfully bumped flanks to Uptown Funk for a minute. 

Let it

Old friends. A breath of life. A walk along city streets on a mild September night. A knowing glance from the bus stop bench. Recognition. Conversation with a stranger. An understanding. The driver driving home tonight is not the same as the driver driving to work this morning.

All that he surveys

Brighton, Beacon Hill, Brookline...I'm walking again. The Franciscans abandoned, or were driven out of, their fortress and it's been converted to or torn down to make way for luxury condos. The former cathedral is the showroom and sales office for the development. Young wealthy people are living there now. They walk dogs alone talking uninhibitedly on invisible phones airing their grievances. They wheel their trash out to the curb. What do they do that earns such money? Five wild turkeys walk in single file along the sidewalk at dusk. I give way to them and nod. There are way too many Audis in Beacon Hill. Have you ever noticed when someone makes what could be called a "dick move" in congested rush hour traffic, that person is frequently driving an Audi? I have. I've made a study of it. I eat Spanish tapas for dinner. Tonight feels pretty good to me. As it gets dark, I look for an unattended garage to sleep in. 

Stranger tonight

After work, I found myself in the midst of one of the first cool and blustery evenings and so I took a walk through Brighton and Alston and down Commonwealth Ave past foreign students in winter coats and Aerosmith's old apartment where they lived together in the 1970's and down to Boston University. Wild times, I'd guess, for the lads of Aerosmith. Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n Roll before any real money rolled in. There are kids trying to live there now paying rents upwards of $2,000 a month and seemingly having a lot less fun. I noticed some of the women walking too. Sex and all that, it's just a passing phase after all, I think. Enjoy it while you can and then let it go. Phasing it out and walking along here, a stranger. 

Eric in The Evening

I don't know what he looked like but he had just about the perfect voice for radio. He could be found down there at the low end of the dial (WGBH 89.7 fm), where a lot of mysterious good things were revealed to me in my teen years. He hosted a jazz show for many years. I was not an avid listener, but he was a fixture. Spinning the dial or pushing the buttons, I'd stop when I recognized his voice to listen to what he had to say, or to play. He was a reassurance. A certainty. A late night ally to my spirit.

One night in something like 1990, I tuned him in on my clock radio while reading late at night for a college class. I heard sadness in his voice. He said that his show had been cancelled and that this was his last one. 

I called the station impulsively. It was after 1 A.M. Eric answered the phone. I tried to tell him what his show, no - his voice, no - his presence had meant to me. He thanked me, I don't remember what we said to each other, but we stayed on the phone for a couple of minutes together. I could tell he was crying. And I was feeling like we were all about to lose something real from late in the night that shouldn't ever be lost. 

I don't know what happened, but his show was somehow saved. And he remained out there in the wee hours, tending a small warm light in the vast darkness, until last night. I heard today that Eric Jackson passed away, and I'm feeling like we lost something real from late in the night that shouldn't ever be lost. 

September changes some things but not everything

This kind of morning is among the best. Cool enough to require blankets but not cold enough to allow for snow. Better still is to have the time not just to linger here but to stay. I'd make toast, spread with maple butter, and coffee and bring them to you here. We'd talk and laugh and love and sleep again, and my only worry would be knowing there was an end to it. Still, after all this time, there is no one else I want to be here with.

How come?

Well, because I'm up at 4:30 and in bed by 9 after a long day of full engagement and turnpike driving. Just don't feel like it lately, I guess. I'll get back to it at some point.

Yeah, I'm up

It's good to see him taking an interest, taking initiative, caring about something. It's hard to be in the world. It's hard to face what we must. It's sad to see these changes happening so rapidly. It's good to be alive. To stand in the raw wind. To feel something acutely.

Fire

The West, through its selfless incineration, has been so gracious as to bless us in the East with a glorious sunset and moonrise this evening. A slowly sinking orange-glowing-fire-globe surrounded by varying shades of pink stretching the length of the horizon. Another globe, similar in color but much colder, ascends silently. They are visible in the sky at the same time. Something's going on alright.

Kin

It was pretty quiet in there. 

I'll sit at the bar and have an early dinner, I thought. Before I could order though, the male portion of the older couple at the bar starts talking in that amplified voice people seem to feel obligated to use when talking to strangers in a public place. He's asking the two men who just sat down between us what kind of dog they have. Small talk of the most generic variety ensues. 

I think people resort to this to establish commonality with each other. It's nonthreatening to them. Reassuring even. To me, it's a knitting needle in the eardrum. Please, say something weird. Go berserk. Snarl. Cough up a blood clot. Burst into tears. Anything but more of this. 

I grimace and turn on my negative vibe machine. After a few minutes, the chatter wanes and the couple leave. I take credit for it silently. 

It's purgatory to me. It's an indeterminate sentence on death row. I look around for something or someone I can relate to. There's a young guy in a Slipknot shirt singing acoustic numbers. He's no help. I choke down my  food and leave. 

As I'm driving out of there, I see a lone car in a parking lot with its headlights left on. Thank you.

4:30 A.M.

She advised that I view the situation with excitement, like a freshman on his first day at a new school. I woke up before the alarm at 4:30 AM. It's very quiet. 

Bjork told me that if we don't grow outwards towards love, we grow inwards towards destruction. I feel that.

Job

An hour-and-a-half in each direction on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Not so bad. There's good radio for at least half the trip. Boston College's WZBC almost always does me right. I find the early morning programming especially gratifying most of the time. The job itself is what it always is: trying to support people who do difficult work without enough resources or thank yous while at the same time trying to ensure that the work is done well. The work is actually vulnerable people in very tough situations. 

If that makes sense

The witch reaffirms the nagging voice inside that's been telling me to take care of some fundamental things. She is confident that the direction I've taken is the right one. This news is good. It's hot where she is, hotter than usual, and bone dry. The earth, she says. Revere her.

Years have passed but still sometimes when I lay down on my side to sleep I remember what it felt like to have you sleeping here close beside me. How perfect. Holy.

Sunday morning

In my dreams, things worked themselves out. I manufactured a satisfactory ending. Free to move on unencumbered now. I'd like to drive West.

Trust the DJ in your head

 

Just a box and the check. Thanks.

The Fed Ex driver was head-banging while driving straight into the setting sun. 

I took my self out to lunch today in the town where I work and marveled at how uncomfortable and out of place I felt. I repeated the process, fifty miles away, when it was time for dinner, in the town in which I live, and got the same results only more intense. There's a common denominator here. 

You'd think, after living in silence a good part of the time, that the human voice and what people have to say might sound inviting and intriguing. It doesn't.

Quiet

That first hint of Fall is always destabilizing. I guess I just wanted to be quiet. Tonight, I open the sliders, listen to the crickets, and enjoy the lower humidity. September. 

2:51 A.M.

This is my last planned weekend of on-call crisis work. Though, as always, I will do what I must. It's 2:51 AM, and I'm not sleeping. I've got another week of driving through the bucolic boundary lands between Central and Western Massachusetts. I've enjoyed that drive twice daily for a little over a year now. Three hours a day driving through woods, farms, winding rivers, and a storied reservoir and watershed. Past the bakery she liked so well and their buttery French pastries. Cheese danish. Something made with local pears. I'll exchange all that for the Massachusetts Turnpike and the commute into and out of Boston. Change is good though. Just turn the page. 

Rec

In my imagination, there's this bar I go to every once in a while when I feel like going out into the world. It's got a good juke box; there's live music now and then; the bartenders are competent, good humored and nice to look at; and the patrons are interesting. It must be a conglomeration of places I've been in my life. The point is though, I don't have such a place in my waking life and am reminded of that fact every time I try to go out - which has become increasingly less frequent over time.

A few evenings ago, I chose a Mexican place in a white college town in close proximity to a laundromat where a machine washed my clothes. I ordered a mezcal margarita with salt - which was good - although I'm no expert. The bartender was one of those people who do not seem to realize how loud they are. This is judgmental of me, I know, but it's a peeve of mine. Worse than loud was the small talk. Typical, but the kind you'd hear between people who are already acquainted with each other. We weren't. Two Xs.

There were three other people sitting at the bar. The woman to my right was a camp counselor stopping in for dinner after work. She was ok with me. The other two were a man and woman about my age talking to each other with a couple of stools between them. 

The woman was showing pictures or video on her phone of apparent paranormal activity in her home. She was petite with a bright smile, lively eyes, and a lot of energy. Attractive, with an occasional glance my way. She talked a continuous stream. She jumped from the paranormal to a new romantic interest. A gentleman with money she'd met at a jazz performance. She talked about his money a little too long and in a little too much detail. What she really wanted though, was a man who would engage her. The more she talked, the less engaged I became. 

The man was compact and lean. He appeared kind of stingy and cruel. He talked about his properties, his money, the idea of living on a cruise ship for a year and subletting his cabin for certain legs of the trip during which he'd prefer to explore other countries.

I ran with that idea for a while, but a cruise ship is jam-packed with people and, for me, that would get old inside of 24 hours. When I'd stopped day dreaming about sunrises and sunsets on the ocean, I tuned back into the conversation. 

He was talking about student loan forgiveness and how kids were missing out on the lesson about the value of hard work by having them so easily forgiven. He suggested that many of these same kids were, at least slightly, overweight due to the general lack of hard work in their lives. His solution was to put them on elliptical trainers connected to the power grid and to have them pay their loans back in that way. 

I wished a friend of mine a happy birthday recently on social media. We haven't seen each other in years. She said she hoped I wasn't becoming too much of a curmudgeon as I aged. I think I've still got some room to grow.

3:24 A.M.

But we sure had a good time

when we started way back when. 

Morning walks and bedroom talks,

Oh, how I loved you then.

Jim Croce stands up from somewhere in my sleeping head and leaves me with that as I wake and rise to pee. There's this feeling of devastation for a moment, and I'm one-hundred years old. The faces and names blurred and almost gone. An Etch-A-Sketch and one good shake.

Buddha doesn't need air conditioning

The room was humid and uncomfortably warm. An old hospital building. Institutional with generations of Catholic silence built into it. 

He told me the caller didn't have a close relationship with the Catholic Church, but it's something the dying man would want. 

He's dead already, really. The machine is providing only the mechanics of life. 

It had taken some doing for this man with the wooden beads on his wrist to find a priest willing to go to the bedside and perform the Last Rites so the family might let him go. It was not even remotely a part of his job.

"I'm a Buddhist," he said. "I will pray for them."

He looked me in the eye and said that all the people have become angry. He unfurled and raised his middle finger. 

"They'll show this to you," he said. "And all you can do is look at the ground or they will attack you. Maybe they'll shoot you."

"Not me," I said. 

"Not me too," he smiled sadly. 

Health

He was wearing a bracelet of brown wooden beads while he slowly guided me through my health screening. My blood had enough oxygen in it; my temperature was neither too low or too high; I could read the smallest line of print without too much trouble (except for that 3, or was it an 8?); my blood pressure was the textbook 120 over 80. 

He took a phone call while jotting down notes in my record. He put the call on speaker. He and another man were speaking a different language together. He gave the other man a telephone number. For a Catholic priest, I gathered. For someone on life support. 

1:14 A.M.

Sleep runs from you on a night like this. You close your eyes but the semi-dreams you have are nonsensicle and tinged with low grade anxiety. You want to get started. You'd like to avoid it all. 

8:46 P.M.

I can't see the Northern Lights from here. When I could see them, they sometimes made me lonely because there was no one there to see them with me. Lonelier than that, however, was the way it felt seeing them with someone who didn't experience them the way I did. What was pretty close to perfect were the moments when there was nothing but the cold air, the eternal night sky, and those crackling beautiful ribbons of shimmering light and me forgetting myself entirely. Remember those.

Redeemer

A flock of wild turkeys crossed the road in front of me this evening. Two hens led two different groups of young ones across while another adult acted as the crossing guard staring down the cars and not leaving the middle of the road until the last of the sprinting stragglers had made it safely across. I felt better. Have you noticed the leaves on the maples are starting to turn?

Moonlighter

I heard the phone ring in my dream about an hour before it started ringing in my life. They all lined up through the night, each with his/her own conundrum. I tried to figure out a safe next step and to get him/her to buy into the idea. After the talking and writing were finished, I had an hour and a half to sleep on a mat on the floor of my office. My dreams had a lot of activity in them. One of them featured lions. When it was time to get up, I washed my face in the sink, wet and combed down a couple of cowlicks, then walked down the street for coffee and a deluxe breakfast sandwich at Cumbie's. 

I accept you

Four days in a row in the gym. This body does not work the same as the one I walked into the gym with during the last short period of motivation (whenever that was). Humbling is the process of getting older. Humbling indeed. 

9:00 A.M.

What a difference lower humidity and ten degrees makes to one's mindset. This, right here, is the way I like it. Clerk, please include that in your transcriptions. Thank you.

I started looking for a place to live closer to the new job. Half-a-million might get me an old one bedroom condo. At this rate, I'll likely be able to make that move sometime in the latter quarter of my next life. It's good to have a plan though.

8:04 P.M. and mildly annoyed

I was just thinking about this feeling of revulsion I get lately in my guts when I hear people talking about gratitude. Did you write in your gratitude journal today? 

I'm a cranky old bastard. 

Mindful. Yeah, that's another one. Manifesting is one more. And these aren't the only ones.

But you know what? You do you (that's one I loathe too). 

And here's the funny thing about the concepts represented by these words that cause me such dyspepsia, I'm basically on board with them. They're generally good things. I encourage them.

It's the words leaving the mouths of others and their impact on my eardrum, I think. It's the way we operate. It's our lack of depth. Or maybe just mine. Who gets this annoyed over words anyway?

I mean, who does that?

2:06 A.M.

A lot has happened since I saw you last. It's freaking hot for one thing. The world is drying up, burning down, and tipping over under the weight of newly risen viruses and far too many angry, crazy, greedy people. We might be too dumb and too small to save it after all. We might not even want to. They say there's been some good TV, though I haven't seen much of it. I'm older. Grayer. My body's changing at a faster rate. Just like the Earth. I can't relate to today's pop music at all. They're taking pictures of things I cannot comprehend out there in deep, deep, deep space. My kids have grown into adults. I've settled into being alone and can't imagine it otherwise. I was just now remembering walking around the block with you and your dogs and it seemed like a fairy tale.

Morning

A long sleep with the fan. There's a change underway. I'm leaving again to begin again somewhere else again.

Refrescos

 

Chip

Sometimes, when you're pale, lethargic and de-conditioned, you might find yourself feeling a little timid, a little squeamish, about getting out there on a humid summer morning and walking. Before you know it, you're drenched and before much longer you are experiencing the chafe of saturated cotton against your tender areas - feet, crotch, nipples. Horseflies circle your head madly. The road you walk is not heavily traveled but you cannot help but notice that, without fail, whenever you walk around that particular bend where the road has no shoulder, there's traffic's coming at you from both ways. There you are on the narrow curve side by side with two vehicles traveling in opposite directions. One of them frequently seems to be a semi. You can start to take it personally after awhile. A narcissistic injury. But then the compressed chipmunk on the road with it eyes popped out provides some perspective. It reminds you, if grotesquely, to shut the hell up and enjoy your miserable life. 

What you do with time

If you don't watch TV, what do you do? I was kind of stumped. I don't know, really. Work, drive, sleep too much, write this stuff sometimes, read a little, see my son. That's about it. 

This morning, I noticed the heavy cement bowl of the bird bath had been knocked off its pedestal. Maybe the bear came through again. Or those demon-screamer raccoons. When I got home this evening, I went back there to fix it. 

Something was moving underneath. A mammal. I wasn't sure if it was sheltering under there or if the bowl had toppled over onto it. I got a long pry bar out of the basement and lifted the edge. A juvenile raccoon trying to but unable to move its limbs or head. Eyes were blinking and glistening. It's back must have been broken. I lifted the bowl completely off of it to give it room to flee. Wild things are freaking wild, so I thought maybe it'll recover with its circulation returning. I debated ending its suffering with a downward strike of the heavy bar for a moment. I talked to it. Give it a little time, I thought, and went back in the house. It died on its own a few minutes later. 

Teenagers raising a little hell on a hot summer night. Bet his parents are worried sick. 

Course

Ask. And so it has come into being. Well what do you know?

The last month of summer - until it all becomes summer - and on fire too.

August. That's all I've got to say on the subject. The wheel is turning. 

Disenchanted tiki town

He would have been sitting at the end of a hotel bar quietly preparing himself to take a vow of silence after ordering his next Mai-Tai if the demotivated motivational speaker could have afforded to stay at the sort of hotels that had a bar in them, but this was not at all the case.

I took a walk to clear my head

Something to chew on. Something to think about. I feel no need to hurry. No need to jump. You let me know what you can do and then I'll decide. 

A valve cover gasket replacement claimed most of my day off yesterday. Now, the car will better hold its oil (I had to add three quarts last week). I walked eleven miles, with no elevation gain or loss, down a humid path along the floor of the Pioneer Valley while they were working. The sun burned my face and my heel blistered due to a disintegrating low-quality cotton sock. The staff at the shop still shake their collective head at the accumulated miles on that car. Half a million is the goal, I tell them. Half a mil. 

And my oldest boy, at the same time, was sleeping heavily in Boston while surgeons corrected something inside his heart which required the freezing of tissue and remote viewing. He came through it well. A little loopy, a little sore, but alive and well. He'll be back to his athletics soon. Something inside of me uncoiled.

Meanwhile, I'm living somewhere else simultaneously. A parallel life. A hot arid landscape with a river running through town. Starry nights and occasional cool shadows. A house of quiet laughter and frequent kissing. A place where it feels good to be me. If I'm not living there right now at the same time as I'm living here, well, that means I'm missing it. And that's just too sad to think about.

Would you like fries with that, Mike?

Mike Tyson snatched a Nashville-hot chicken sandwich off my tray and took a bite out of it. It was an instance of bullying. Of public humiliation. My anger required that I put the tray down and address him. I knew that wasn't wise, or good for me, but I didn't care. I reacted. 

This was a dream, of course, though I do enjoy a spicy chicken sandwich now and then. A lesson regarding the self-destructive power of anger or something along those lines. Got it. Thanks, Universe.

Not much of a fight

Fasted cardio or another half hour of sleep? No contest. 

Alright

Some of the still-green horse chestnuts have begun to fall in the driveway and the goldenrod just started flowering today back there in my untended jungle of a yard. Time's getting away from you, say the chestnuts. Bees and wasps like us anyway, says the goldenrod, even though you think of us as weeds. Hey babies, I'm good with whatever. Thanks for being here. 

Bar

From standing still forever to unreal acceleration, perceived now in retrospect. Yeah, you're not him anymore. You're this. Leave a tip to get a smile. Prepare for courtesy, discounting, and invisibility. 

Thunder coming

There are still the dark-eyed girls of Texas. A thread offering to take you elsewhere, should you take it up and follow it down. But you're so good at writing unhappy endings that you cook one up before the trip has a fighting chance to begin.

Student driver

He's learning to drive. It's a hot summer day. We rode the loop around a nearly deserted college campus for almost two hours. He's been a passenger in four distinct car accidents during his short lifetime. Driving is something he wants to learn to do well. It's a little daunting though, given his experience, but he doesn't say that. We'll ride the loop for as long as he likes.

A once over in the kitchen

Put the dishes in the dishwasher and throw the moldy buns out the back door and into the jungle that was once a backyard. Feed the crows, make habitat for Monarchs, fuck order and civilization. Monkeypox is pretty much on the doorstep anyway. 

Thirty years ago, I was working with Indians, and some of the elders talked about the inevitable consequences of the white man's market-driven way of life in which the natural world (the only world, the real world) is treated as a consumable resource and greed is considered a virtue. 

One of those consequences would be the Earth releasing viruses, new and old. Another would be a deep and pervasive spiritual sickness across the world. Are we there yet? 

What if the Earth is alive, self-regulating, oriented toward stasis like other living beings are?  What if it inherently knows what's making it sick and has a plan to wipe it out? 

I'm writing this while procrastinating a trip to the gym which seems less than significant the more I think about it. 

AC or not

At work, I get to enjoy the luxury of air conditioning. That is to say, I attempt to stay cool on a rapidly warming planet by increasing, incrementally, the rate of planetary warming for the sake of my individual cooling. At home, I try to avoid such a significant contribution by using only a fan. On nights like this, it becomes a challenge. "Challenge" is one of those words privileged people get to use. Like air conditioning.

Who asked you?

Like frogs in a not-so-slowly (anymore) warming water pot. The Northern Hemisphere is setting records. Smolder, sizzle, burn. There's a dark eyed lady in Texas celebrating a birthday. And instead of that, I've got the shitty work-related gossip machine, which I'll fictionalize here, like I do with most of what I write. A kernel of fact mixed with a sprinkle of bullshit to make a snapshot of something sad or ugly, beautiful or absurd. 

Karmic visitation

Oh, Karma, ye be swift. I'll no longer gloat about the quality of my sleep when I have it. All the factors that combined to delight me the night before last kept their distance last night. Ugh.

Pressed into this mattress

Once in a great while the combined factors of ambient temperature, air currents set in motion by the fan, sheet feel and dream quality make waking up nearly impossible. They create a place in which you want to stay. How rare is that?

One to another

An older man presses the top of his head against the torso of his son who lies motionless upon the restraint bed. He is praying for him. He is trying to will life back into him. The younger man has only silent tears. 

Two stories

They're both going to kill themselves, they said. The nurse jokes disgustedly that they'd eaten everything the hospital kitchen had on hand. They'd been living in a tent together without food and it was far enough from town that getting his methadone took more effort than he could sustain too. He thought a fentanyl overdose was a neater solution, but that nearly left her without the new name she'd been after. The new name was supposed to sever her attachment with the old one and all of its related horrors.

Let's go

It's morning, a Saturday. I'm not working so I thought I'd sleep in. A single knock on my bedroom door woke me around 7:30 AM. There was no one there. I knew that. I live alone. At around 8:30 AM, it was a quiet whistle. Obviously I'm neglecting something. Ok, I'm up. 

I've got those potato rolls, sliced ham, and black olives. I've got some eggs too. Yeah, I'm going to lightly toast one of those rolls, fry an egg, slap some ham in the pan for a couple of minutes and assemble a sandwich. You liked the yolks nice and runny. I'll bet you still do. I remember how making you one of those for the road in the morning made me feel. I'll bet it still would.

What about the country? 

     Yeah. 

What about the planet? 

     I know (vaguely). I do.

Why don't we turn everything off and just be as quiet and as still as we possibly can for a good long while? See if it helps. 

I ate the sandwich. I'm a little out of practice. It was drier than it should have been, had less flavor. It was sustenance though. Not bad at all. 

I remembered while I was eating it how everything seemed to turn on all at once back then. All my senses were suddenly sharper. I was ravenously hungry and everything was delicious. I felt desire, pleasure in being alive. Every moment was worthy of worship and praise. Even the smallest of pleasures were royal and decadent. Unless of course there was trouble, and then all that brightness and pleasure transformed instantly into darkness and pain and in the same proportions with the same unbelievable intensity. 

A meme let me know today that I was trauma bonded. Whatever. Can't a guy just enjoy making a girl a sandwich? Must everything be a diagnosis?

Affirmative

He left a comment - You need some joy. Word, I replied. Maybe I should order myself a couple of those Marriott hotel pillows.

Hey buddy

When friends appear in my dreams they're usually amalgamations. Not entirely themselves but a blend of characteristics of people I've known at different points in my life. They're doing ordinary things like making arrangements to go to the rifle range because they let their qualification lapse for 35 years or so.

Ordinary

I guess today was Thursday and I got some things I needed to do done. That's a good feeling. My car needed oil, stalling rounding corners, poured in a quart at the supermarket where I paid a higher price for a rotisserie chicken, potato rolls, black olives. sliced ham, cottage cheese and macaroons than your regular fella with a store card in his possession. Stop tryna track me, yo. Just let me exist, fool. Where the hell is Clifford at anyway?

Dannie, Dani, Danny

I don't know how she spells it, but I like it. She said her heart would have hurt if she let me leave after serving me a mixed drink devoid of one of its essential ingredients (and it wasn't the booze). I never would have known if she hadn't said anything. A Gin Tea minus the tea. It was my second. The gin was there alright and it remedied my apparent vitamin deficiency. She made me another - on the house. She's a Cancer, you see. Integrity, baby, born straight into her. There's hope for us after all, and there's an imaginary Wednesday evening port-of-call in the world for me. 

The musty post office lobby took me back

The bumper sticker in front of me read, My Other Car is Crippling Anxiety. I involuntarily blew moisture out of nose and mouth. I started listening to Shirley MacLain walk the Camino on my phone. Her historical romance novel dreams with incredibly detailed and coherent plot lines kind of lost me somewhere. Who am I to judge, with my paucity of dreams? Tomorrow, things should become clearer. There will be choices to make. Maybe there's a solution other than the simple one of one over the other that could work out well for me. That last part of that last sentence should be a consideration.

Quality of life

A few hours of half-sleep on the floor in my office, wet my hair down in the staff bathroom sink, find breakfast at the Cumberland Farms and begin my day. Feels alright.

Ceremony

I embarked on a certain trajectory a year ago this month. Since then I've managed to stay mostly on course. Lately though I've become aware of a distant call. Now, the call is becoming more persistent. I think it's time again.

Alright

Bullshit.

You'd do it again

you know you would

headlong and thunderstruck

eyes closed, stupid smile

not caring where 

(or if) 

you land. 

If I was to write another draft

It's different now, the way you'd do it, if you did it at all. 

There's much you'd walk away from so much sooner now. 

Take it or leave it? I'll be going then. No more bursting into flame.

Not in anger, not out of heartache, just for the sake of my relative peace. 

There's so much to suffer already without suffering in love. 

Marking time

Work went longer than usual, felt worse. I could feel something rising all day. Something unaddressed, as though no one was driving. I got involved later in the day. Bad things happen when no one's driving. Sorted it but not to anyone's satisfaction.

After, shopped for dinner at the co-op feeling annoyed. This is not my home. These are not my people. Drove the hour and a half back to my shelter, ate some of the food, crawled into bed and slept long. Now, this.

Divisible by six

Six years now and you're still alive. 

Unlike those six parade-goers in Illinois. The scene there strewn with baby strollers, baseball caps, sippy cups and soiled American flags. And nothing like the sixty bullets fired into that young fleeing unarmed black man by white police in Ohio. You've felt Ohio before. Like honey bees, once fired, bullets lose their stingers in the bodies of their targets and die, their sinister purpose realized. 

You see? It can always get worse. 

Six years of half-living, of waiting, of wondering how love could leave the world so finally.

Fragrant

Doing on-call work overnight ruins my weekends but it gives me the experience of driving alone through the countryside in the middle of the night when only the animals are moving and of listening to the earliest birds and smelling the dawning good morning.

You'd better have one

Like the others, this day slipped by quicker than I could get a grip on it. Slippery as a fish. I got together with my three kids for a seafood feast to celebrate a birthday. All of them are maturing before my eyes. And me - greying, shrinking, fading - but with a little bit of humor and fuck-you-too in the mix. It was a pleasure. 

The hostess who sat us at our table was beautiful and probably younger than my daughter (the oldest). She flashed a quick smile toward the eldest of my two sons (the tallest). He was acting too cool to reciprocate, I think, or maybe he didn't notice. But I had this feeling for a second, however absurd, of being passed over. Forlorn, I believe, is apt. But with a little bit of humor and fuck-you-too in the mix. 

Iron and rust

Me and Mike Tyson are turning 56. Deal with it. We're Cancers, alright? Sensitivity.

What's good?

I'm deciding. Another change? Letting go is getting easier and easier. One day I will walk away beyond these horizons.

Back a little

What ship you on?  

I heard an echo of a voice say that as I was falling asleep. I was eighteen then or maybe freshly turned nineteen. I'm lost in the years tonight with a birthday approaching. 

I was in another small city for a conference today where I worked in the more recent past. I couldn't remember how many years ago it was. I saw people from my professional past and visited with them a little. A hug (such a strange feeling). One of them I did not recognize at first. It took me some rewinding.

I stopped for an early dinner at a Korean place I frequented for lunch when I worked nearby. The owner used to call me Superman. I saw her there today along with the same waitress. They looked much the same, except for the streaks of silver in their hair and a few more lines in their faces, sitting there making dumplings together. 

She didn't call me Superman today. Paunchy and white-haired now, unrecognizable, or maybe it's just that my glasses are different. 

Yeah, that's probably it. 

Well...

You need to start something new today, my horoscope said this morning. A few hours later a call came in extending an invitation. 

No beach

One of those take a day off because you've got use-or-lose vacation time days. I'd worked the night before, so almost the entire thing went to sleep. Waking up now in something like grateful regret. 

Hot night

It's a little too hot to fall sleep and also a precarious time of year for young animals.

Late last night I saw a tiny skunk in the middle of the road. It managed to find its way across. But this morning there was a perfect raccoon, in miniature, laying dead along the roadside open-mouthed. Not a hundred yards from there, a little fawn. Oh no, you think, and feel badly because you can't do anything that's going to make any difference to them. Further along, a morning runner pushes the corpse of a porcupine out of the middle of the road with a stick.

By 6 AM, the cows were already grazing. They stood bunched in close proximity. Before 8 AM, they were laying in the shade spaced the same way. Steam was beginning to rise out of the valley under the already hot sun.

Set the controls for the heart of the sun

 

Set the controls

While my clothes, sheets and towels were spinning in the dryers, I walked out behind the laundromat to a picnic table on the edge of an overgrown field. The sun was strong and high and the afternoon was hot enough to make you sweat a little just sitting there. 

I unbuttoned my shirt, tipped my head back, and pointed my pallor toward the sun. It shone down red and hostile against my eyelids. A silent simmering anger seemingly building now at an increasing rate. 

Mister Sun, Sun, Mister Golden Sun, please shine down on me...

We sang that song in safety and happiness to them while they were babies and we played at being adults. But I feel its light and heat on my skin with a sort of creeping dread now. It's become difficult to imagine a future under this sun that's something other than char and smoke.

Read or listen to Louise Erdrich

I'm slow to adopt new technologies. For instance, I think it's wrong to watch movies or listen to music on a phone. It seems disrespectful to the experience of film and music somehow. Cheapening. I feel the same way about audio books. 

But I have a long commute featuring miles of broken-up car radio reception, so I thought I'd give them a try. I listened to two works of non-fiction first and almost cancelled my subscription. The human voice is both glorious and tedious. I discovered that tedium is bottomless. The readers were more than I could bear. And the writing didn't hold my attention. I found myself in a state of unfocused annoyance. Not exactly the therapeutic experience I was looking for.

That is until I listened to The Night Watchman written and read by Louise Erdrich. Her voice is nuanced and can embody multiple characters. I could listen to that voice almost any time. She's a storyteller, in the Native way, through and through. The detailed heart-wrenching accuracy of her writing grabbed me immediately.

I'm not a literary critic. I don't have the vocabulary, the skillset, or the audacity. But she writes so you can smell, see, hear and - most importantly - feel it all. I hope to read more of her in book form soon with my hands and my eyes. But in the meantime, I will listen to everything she's created. 

Tom Waits is credited with having said, "I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things." There is so much of that in these. 

The way it is

My paycheck hits the bank. The bills are on the table. The problem: there's less paycheck than there are bills. Striving for balance lately, and for mental health, I tried working less. Between forty and fifty hours a week. I slept more and better during the last pay period. My mood improved. But I can't make it doing it that way.

Fifty-three dollars to fill my Hyundai's tank this evening. The one with the worsening seizure disorder. The car alarm occasionally sounds for no good reason. Its voice is clear, loud and shrill. This morning it happened right out in front of the police station. The one in which I'd just had a meeting with the chief. When it happens I turn the key through all of its positions, crank the steering wheel, shift up and down, open and close the door (from the inside and the outside), jump out, put the key in the door lock turn it both ways and take it out, and jump back in. I do these things furiously and feverishly, in no particular order, usually yelling a continuous stream of curses at the same time. When at last it stops, I don't know which if any of my actions resolved it. It's better to think of it as a seizure disorder. Just let it run its course. Don't freak out. 

I stopped for a poor dinner at a Country Pride Restaurant in a truckstop near the Massachusetts -Connecticut border. It was fairly busy. The people in the booths mostly looked miserable. There was a round table with six deaf people signing and lip reading. Theirs was the only animated table. 

I sat at the counter. There was only one waitress working. She wasn't happy. And one cook. He wasn't either. The food tasted exactly that way, but you can't really complain. 

The TV news let us know that the Supreme Court had taken a constitutional right away from the larger half of the American people. Had taken away a constitutional right. Whatever they were thinking, it didn't register on the truck driver's faces. No one talked about it. Every few minutes an automated announcement  sounded overhead. Driver number 197, shower number six is ready for you.

I stopped to eat at a truckstop because I wanted to feel like I was traveling. It felt as though the whole thing sat atop a mudslide just about to commence.

You should really talk to somebody

He didn't like being left on a gurney in the hallway in the ER and he liked it even less on the other side of the locked door. He didn't like the mechanical way the staff went about their work with him. The way they took away his clothes, making him disrobe right there with them looking on citing policy when he complained. He didn't like that they threatened to insert a catheter when he couldn't provide a urine sample on command. He didn't like the way they said they needed his blood without bothering to tell him why. He didn't like that he'd been held against his will for many hours with no one telling him what was going on when he'd originally come in voluntarily looking for help. Basically, he just didn't like the whole experience of getting help. Sheesh.

It's not easy being you either

Baby cottontails along the side of the road. A mother turkey teaches her featherless squad how to forage in a sheltered yard. A sprinting coyote crosses my path.

Better run through the jungle

Monday began at midnight with anxious people seeking hospitalization. Faith, I guess. And then a couple of hours of strange dreams and not much sleep at all on a cot in an office. And then a regular day of work that went well enough. The drive home under bright strong sun. Dump the compost rotting on the counter. Something ate the wild flowers. The yard's gone entirely to jungle. Like the country. Political ads promising civil war. Ratchet up the dread, go ahead. A half-assed meal and then I'm into bed well before dark. 

Perspective

In retrospect, you can see that the reason you took it as hard as you did was because you understood it was the last time you were ever going to love that way.

Regular stuff

Saturday oil change because it seems to do the trick when my car stalls out making sharp turns which it started to do again yesterday. It makes a certain dry knocking sound. A straining sound. Oil, it whispers to me, old and creaky and parched. Then it's a haircut for the youngest and his wild mane. And then a few hours at work to cover a gap because we're short handed in this inflated economy at nearly full employment. It's one of those jobs people used to interview for and, during the interview, you'd ask them why they want this job and they'd always say because I want to help people. It's been many years since I heard a candidate say that in an interview. I bought a locally sourced strawberry rhubarb pie last night, ate a quarter of it, and went to bed at 8 pm. 

Jailbreak

It was clear to me she was the leader. A great brown cow with hard determined eyes. She walked with her head low and forward. Eyes fixed straight ahead. The rest of the herd - a couple of smaller cows and about twenty calves - followed, packed in tight together and moving like a single body. They'd managed to stop two lanes of traffic in the town's main intersection. I don't know where they came from or where she was leading them, but there was something righteous and revolutionary about the great brown cow's attitude. 

I remembered a story I'd heard about what happens when the time comes for the farmer to separate the calves from their mothers. How they both cry out in agony and grief often for days after the fact. I'm pretty sure that this brown cow had decided she wasn't having any of that this year. 

The cops followed at a safe distance in a single car. 

On the way home, I got tired of listening to Ethan Hawke on benzedrine reading The Dharma Bums on my phone. Tired of the words and tired of the sound of his voice. That's not to say I dislike him or his voice or the book. I just found myself a little tired of them. 

I tried listening again a little later and pretty quickly became sick of it. Tired and sick are two different things entirely. I'd recommend stopping when you're tired. Give it a rest. Don't make yourself sick.

Rising

We all got together for the screening of a short film tonight. He played the lead. He'd invested six months of work way way outside his comfort zone. It was pretty great. The director had a vision and saw it through. The editing was great. And he was incredibly well-suited for the character he portrayed. The Dreamer. A rising star. 

Driving home alone, I felt good. The great golden moon rose up over the trees.

Clarify

So what shall it be? Buy an expensive hat? Begin anew somewhere else? Take a year off to go for a ten thousand mile walk?

Space

Make some coffee. I've got laundry to do. Make a smoothie - oatmeal, almond milk, banana, wild blueberries and whey. I've got to get up the trail today. 

The sun's out. Change your headspace. 

I watched a video depicting a charging grizzly bear. It wasn't one of those bluff charges. It was coming down a mountainside like a freight train. I felt one of those moments in which I had absolutely no idea what to do. Those happen sometimes. You could run, hide,"fight", or freeze. You could surrender. You could do jumping jacks, eat an entire chocolate cake or dance a samba. Whatever you chose, if you could even choose, the outcome would likely be about the same. 

Turns out, there were no bears on the trail at all. Just horseflies, circling like wolves, bouncing off my head, trying to take a bite out of my crown for the whole nine miles. No hat, no bug dope - just accept what's there. You wanted to be alone with your thoughts. Maybe that was them.

Fence

It doesn't taste good to me all of a sudden. But that bad taste gradually left my mouth over the course of the day. It left my mouth but not my memory. 

Push

And the push.

Almost

The road sounds good. Looks good. North or South? I'm feeling the pull.

Strawberry season

Self-control. 

If you wait long enough, the thing that's eating you alive right now will be drained of all its power. Or it will gradually transform into something much less significant at the very least. Or it'll be overshadowed by more emergent concerns. Anyway, however it happens, that thing will ultimately lose its teeth and, along with them, its power over you. 

Tonight I had a flash of memory while I was getting ready for sleep. I woke up to find you here, standing at the foot of my bed at 3 AM. 

There's still some power in that one.

Getting my steps

Walking in the park after work for the exercise. It's hot. The splash park is open. Little kids, pre-school age, dash about screaming through the spray. A woman regards me with angry suspicion. Adult males can't look at children playing as they're walking by. It's wrong. Suddenly I'm John Wayne Gacy sweating through my makeup listening to the slapping of my clown shoes on the bike path beating a hasty retreat. 

Medicina

I want to return to that place. The music and the medicine took me there. A luminous room. The light was of another world. An assemblage of beings seated at a long table. I could not see their faces, but I could feel their single universal intention. The engine of the world. I kept returning to the music. The sound of pure love. How I long to sing that way.

Don't give up the ship

The kids make enigmatic statements on social media platforms and the state police respond to the house in the middle of the night jarring the parents out of whatever sense of safety they once had. It's a stage, you think, and who can resist that sort of performance? Or is it something one does for the reassurance? My friends really do care about me. But then, how does that affect a friendship - your eternal goodbye in the form of a dm sent out of the blue? You said you love me and goodbye? 

Do any of us really need a another jolt? Another breakdown? Another grizzly act of calculated malice in a classroom on Facebook live? Another teen found hanging in the closet amongst her summer clothes? 

No, we don't. 

Yes, it is all too much. 

So let's not do anything to add to it. Shall we?

Do your best

Burned a vacation day sitting in my mechanic's waiting area again sending overly terse work e-mails and approving the medical procedures necessary to earn my high-mileage vehicle a state inspection sticker which I've managed to avoid getting for eleven months resulting in several meetings with regional town and state police officers. 

I feel an affinity for this vehicle. I respect its loyalty and do my best to reciprocate it. Loyalty is a word that'll be dropped from the lexicon for good any day now. A quaint notion to be jettisoned in time.

That's about fifteen hundred dollars I've invested in the past month and the last time I'll do so. I resign myself to this grim decision here and now. Tires, brakes and oil changes - sure, that's just regular maintenance - of course I'll do that. 

I had hours to sit and think and agonize and work out the particulars of the Do Not Resuscitate order while my car was out there raised up on the lift, under anesthesia, dreaming something beautiful.

Stop sooner

It's too late to try and mask your frustration. He's seen it. And that somehow feeds it. 

Squirrel

Most of the length of the grey squirrel's body appeared pressed flat. Yet it continued its progress across the road using only the muscles of its arms and shoulders. Its head and neck strained forward. Its tail seemed undisturbed. Its face registered no pain. No despair. I could see only its will to go on.

The way the second half of the night went

There was a dwarfish horse in my headlights out in the dark oak forest eating grass along the side of the road. Escaped but not on the run, thinking twice about the decision now. The woman who didn't know what to do with herself left the ER about ten minutes before I could get there so I spent the rest of the night falling through various phases of sleep in my car parked in the driveway of my former wife's house. I woke to the lightening sky and gradually building bird song. I texted my son to let him know I had arrived to pick him up for school.

At a red light

Check in with your memories and find that what's still there are the best parts and the worst parts. High - maybe highest - among them is the way it felt when you got into bed together to sleep. How you could feel her so sweetly drifting beside you. Once, she told you that she trusted you. During those moments, you could tell it was true. Bliss is not a word you get to use very often.

Walk

A little silver shower tinkles down upon my day dreams of 100 mile ultra-marathons and hiking across the continent. I walk for an hour up a gently sloping sidewalk in old running shoes and find myself breathing harder within five minutes of setting out. Oh yeah, humility. I almost forgot. You have to start all over again. Again.

Elantra

I took the day off - a use or lose personal day - after working some of the overnight shift this morning. I dedicated half the day and one thousand dollars to life-extending surgery for my Korean battle wagon. There are 366,000 miles on it now. All of the mechanics noticed it. Some laughed. One nodded with respect. Until the end of the trail, I tell them. Together, we endure.

Sure

Attachment is the cause of all suffering, Buddha's meme says. I can dig it and I have nothing to add.

An elder told me once that there's really only two kinds of medicine - laughter and tears. I can see that point of view, have tasted both, been healed (to some extent) by both too. 

A philosopher proposed that time and silence are the cure for everything. And that is exactly the explanation I'll use regarding my whereabouts of the last six years should anyone ask.

Yes, we can

Empty hollow flat and false - your American thoughts and prayers. Your God should wipe you out. I can't help but think it.

I sat in the car with my son before school. The car radio talked about the most recent school shooting. He was eating a cider donut and getting ready to take a standardized test. We listened to the report in the early morning just like we did the one about the Buffalo supermarket shooting the week before last. Neither one of us said anything. 

He seemed to find within himself a way to continue. I guess I did the same. Falling, but forward. 

Good guys with guns have bad days too

I'd been living in a hotel and working there for a couple of months by then. The headline of the local paper said this particular town was about to become a sanctuary city. Wow, I thought. These people are more progressive than they look. I read on. It wasn't becoming a sanctuary city for asylum seekers but for the unborn. Yeah, that was more consistent with what I was seeing. 

Everyone, basically, owned a gun there. Many carried one every day. Just like putting on your shoes. 

There was a shooting during a church service during my time there. The shooter and two parishioners were killed. The man on the radio chalked it up to the quick thinking and decisive action taken by one of the armed parishoners which prevented a real massacre from taking place. That and a clean headshot, the man said.  

Twenty-one, today, died attending elementary school down there. Another man with a gun was having a bad day. 

Shame should break our fucking backs.

Mental Media Mason-Dixon

"Thanks, Joe" said the man as he hung the nozzle back on the gas pump. He was white with a goatee and aviator style sunglasses. Kind of angry looking. One of the Fox brethren, I thought, after I realized what was going on. I could have told him that gas prices are up around the world, but I'm pretty sure that would not have provided a moment of enlightenment.

Ponderosa

The kitchen floor is a torn and filthy vinyl sheet. It was put in place as a temporary measure something like 15 years ago. Whenever I see it, I wonder why I'm still here. I drove into Worcester tonight for fried chicken and beer. I've driven up and walked down those streets so many times often wondering why it is  I'm still here. And now it's hotter than it's supposed to be, getting dark, and a thunderstorm is rising up.

I was thinking about that time my marriage disintegrated and how I decided to train for a hundred mile race as a way to cope with it all. When race day came, it was very hot and far away and after twelve hours of running and slogging I hadn't peed despite consuming lots of water and electrolytes at every opportunity. My hands swelled up. I became preoccupied with the notion that my kidneys were shutting down. I thought about quitting when and if I made it to the half-way point. Something in me didn't want to do that despite my kidneys complaints, my terribly aching feet and my twitching cramping legs. I will die out here before I quit, I said to myself. Once I had permission to die, I felt lighter and I was soon able to pee again. They were right, I needed to let go. 

I was remembering that sick, broken, physically tapped out feeling tonight. How hard it was to stand up from the chair I'd fallen into beyond the finish line, how my urine was more brown than yellow, how difficult it was to walk back to my hotel room less than a mile away, and how lying in bed offered no relief due to the cramping in my calves that lasted all night. 

There was no one there to celebrate my achievement with. I remember the scent of ponderosa pine and a whole new kind of loneliness. 

I was driving tonight thinking that maybe it's time to do something like that again.

Thematic

I have, until recently, rejected listening to audio books on my phone. I think it's primarily due to the sound of the human voice in my particular ears. To the fact that I find most of them tolerable only in small doses most of the time. I'm also averse to listening or watching entertainment content on a telephone for some reason. I'm also not a fan of the word "content" either.

Anyway, I purchased a subscription to an audio book service, made a few selections, and started listening during the three to four hours a day I'm in the car. I'm in the middle of the third book now. It occurred to me yesterday that I might be sending myself a message through my only semi-conscious book choices. 

The books have had a lot to do with self-overcoming, with endurance, and with living alone. 

Business as usual

There were 55 people in the ER yesterday and only a handful for behavioral health reasons. It's not a big city ER. I keep hearing people talking about the pandemic in the past tense. We're funny creatures. 

Mindfullness

Above the monitor there was a patch of clear blue sky. A carpenter bee, I think, was working diligently just outside the window. Higher in my field of view, barn swallows wheeled around crazily in singles and pairs. Above them, two hawks circled, gliding gracefully on currents of air. On the monitor, people talked about suicide. Efforts made to prevent it. How to cope with its aftermath. It was a quiet day in my office watching all of that taking place. When I emerged, there were two teenagers waiting in the ER after not quite getting it done. Thank goodness.

On the breeze

Lilacs, I smelled them on the breeze today. An instant hit. A moment of all-natural euphoria. One small part of the magic inherent in the world. Love. Memory. You once wrote in an early Spring goodbye that you were sorry we didn't make it to the lilacs together. But we did, sweet girl. We made it. 

Taper

She sends a text in the middle of the night saying that you had something to do with two of her dreams last night. It's an act of kindness, you figure. She did it because she understands you think you've disappeared from the world.

One hundred percent

He tested positive this morning. Of the five of us, he'd been the last remaining hold out. He looked pale and tired when I got home from work watching A Clockwork Orange on the couch.

Heat in the kitchen

It was one of the first hot days here with temperatures in at least the middle 80's. This morning he tried to adjust the inside temperature by messing with the thermostat maybe not realizing there is no central air conditioning in this house. We went out for breakfast. We took a trip to Lowe's to purchase a fan for his bedroom and a hummingbird feeder. When we returned, it felt much hotter in the house than it was outside in the sun. What gives? I took a look at the thermostat. The needle was pegged at 90 degrees - the absolute maximum end of the scale. The actual indoor temperature was probably hotter. The furnace was blasting (with heating oil at about 5 bucks a gallon and the tank now probably empty). What the hell did you do? He wilted. He'd been trying to turn it down and instead turned it up as high as it would go. He was ashamed. He sheepishly went to work on bis Biology homework while I, sweating, attacked the dishes in the kitchen sink, put the new feeder together and mixed a batch of sugar-water while mutterring to myself. The hummingbird showed up about an hour after I stuck the feeder on the kitchen window. That's about how long it took me to make the thermostat incident into a joke. And then we moved on.

A vague dream still counts as a dream

This morning was already hot. Native asparagus and lilacs in full bloom. I stood outside my place of work and looked down the street. Everything was greener. Leaves unfurling. I thought I'd like to just start walking and maybe keep it up for a year or so.

The last of my favorite things

 Sleep, the healer, spent the long night restoring and realigning me,

Nowhere else to go

I took myself to a movie last night - the worldwide premier - about a singer, writer, artist, father, husband trying to live through the grief of the loss of a son in his teens. There were only seven of us in the theater and that hurt me a little bit. This singer and his songs have been a significant part of my life for nearly 35 years. What saddened me more was that he had another son in Australia from a prior marriage, in his early 30's, who died tragically just a few days ago. Just before the premier of a documentary about how his father survived a world-shattering loss. 

"It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That's the deal. That's the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable."

At the end of the film he said that he was happy. Happy in the sense that he had found meaning in being alive and in other people. That made me sadder still, knowing what we know now. 

After, I was too tired to drive home and I was on-call. So I parked in the lot of a neighboring Walmart, tipped the seat back, and went to sleep. No one bothered me and I slept fairly well. At 5:30 AM they called me in to see a Vietnam veteran, sober now, who had gone to the ER to sleep.

There is nowhere else to go, he said.

Wednesday alright

And now another Wednesday has come and gone. Another turn in the barrel. The same well-worn dynamics take shape and play out. Something needs to heal. Something re-done differently. Don't sit so close to the fire, son. 

Signs and signifiers

I've seen three bald eagles in as many days. Not a common site around here. The hummingbird met me at the kitchen window this afternoon. First sighting. 

Outing

I got a chance to watch him play in a tournament today. He's just finished his third year of college this week. In the third game, a smiling girl on the sidelines held a large poster covered in photographs of him. He played like he was on fire in that one. It did me good to see him so alive. So unselfconsciously joyful.

Enough

Falling into some kind of work, sleep, work, sleep rhythm during which the sleep is broken but the portions I manage to get are long enough to be somewhat rejuvenating. Even though I'm sleeping less, that heavy drowsy feeling isn't constantly pulling down on me. Good riddance. For now, this is life. Be content.

Nature's still there

It's time for the hummingbirds though I've not seen any around yet. Bumble bees have been hard at work here for at least a week. I read somewhere that bird flu is going around (among birds), and that it's a bad idea to put feeders or baths out just now. I'll hold off then. I saw a river otter run through my backyard this morning. That's a first.  I'm a good ways from any river and not all that close to the nearest lake. Wanted to ask him where he was coming from but he looked to be in a rush.

Up toward the dream two rungs at a time

A brilliant young woman achieving well ahead of schedule carrying her immigrants parents' anxieties and hopes comes to this small room in which the bed is bolted to the floor in the middle of the night for temporary refuge. There's so much to deal with. Finals, four jobs, moving across the country, coming out to her family, racism, familial trauma, whatever you call this thing that's happening to this country right now, a pandemic, and an unfolding world war on a rapidly dying planet. She doesn't know if she wants to live anymore.

Let go, they said

Part of what made it so difficult was knowing in my bones this would never happen again. 

Affirmation

Your hull is dented all to hell but it's not pierced. So...

Go figure

I fell blissfully asleep on the couch with my head resting in the lap of what turned out to be a Portuguese Man 0' War.

Going

The days have been passing faster lately. Something has shifted a little. I'm in some kind of motion. No longer stuck to the floor or sealed up in my bed. Let's see where this goes.

Some things

Morning horses out there on greening fields. The guy at the Honey Farms sells me on a Power Ball quick-pick. 450 Million, he tells me. You'd get a nice chunk of that too, I reply. You could fix this place up or leave it all behind. Leave it all behind, he laughs. Later, a cow is scratching her face on a fence post just a few feet away from where a young man lost his life crashing his car into a tree while running from the police. My son decided to join the stage crew and my daughter released a new song that I need to listen to right now. 

Sleep, donuts, friends

Extra sleep. I deposited two or three surplus hours in my account for a rainy day. An old friend appeared in my dream. Sam. We were working in a hospital together. I brought donuts. We were being goofballs. 

I find it sad that friendships made across the span of my life are still intact internally even though the friends are no longer a part of my waking life. Makes me wonder what would have been had we stayed in touch. Something else to regret the loss of.

Blame it on my youth

 

Gratitude

Thank you for calling. I could really use the money. 

Thank you for not calling. I really needed the sleep.

Hermano

 

Sometimes a friend has to be a little cruel in order to be your friend

I don't think my mind has ever really understood that it's supposed to be working for me. The bastard is strictly freelance. 

This morning it cooked up and served me a dream about you. I hope to forget the details quickly, and will not mention them here, but suffice to say you demonstrated, in several different ways, that you are not the girl I thought you were or hoped you might be. There was a time when that dream would have been lethal to me. 

This morning the dream was unpleasant, disgusting even, but it didn't really hurt all that much. You'd simply become someone I no longer knew and didn't want to be around. That's all. Seeing you there, I felt regret and wished that things could be otherwise, but I also felt a strong urge to go somewhere else.

My mind - my faithless employee - took something I'd idealized for so long and debased it five or six different ways in the course of three or four minutes. Remarkable. But it wasn't mocking me, not torturing me. It was simply showing me.

When I woke up, my first thought was - how could you do this to me? But now I realize its intention was to tear the Band-Aid off and push me forward once and for all. To remove the last of the scales from my inner eyes. To set me free. 

You're a weird son-of-a-bitch, Senor Mente. But thank you for having the best interest of the company at heart.

Order

Sometimes, after a long sleep, my brain feels the way one of those Zen gardens looks. Such a difference from the smoldering chaos I laid down with. It stays that way until I mess it up again. Which doesn't take long at all. 

Before work called

The water in the pool was a deep dark blue - the color of Ty-D-Bol. Jim Morrison, the long dead lead singer of The Doors, was standing poolside. He called my name out loud. The song Not to Touch The Earth was playing. He knew I liked that one so he danced a little bit for emphasis. It was as though he was dedicating the song to me. I danced back, to show my appreciation, high up on the slope above the pool. I felt a rush of joy run through me and had to restrain myself from running down and leaping into the strange liquid's container. I realized, when I woke up, that I'd almost forgotten that feeling entirely.

Nice to meet you

She's still working from home. You see her for the first time via Zoom. She seems to blossom - her smile - to come to life. She is happy to be seen. Happy to be discovered. I think my face turned red and I likely smiled with too much enthusiasm which is to say I probably appeared insane.

Worcester

There was something jarring about the first time I saw the electronic sign on Main Street. Garish.

BASIC CREMATION $1595

But now it just feels demystifying. Practical. If you haven't had to deal with it yourself, you wondered. I know I did. Now I know. It's within reach. Just a few bucks a paycheck for not that long at all.

Taxes

Oh good, it's still morning. I'm planning to do my taxes today - Easter Sunday. I should be celebrating the resurrection with marshmallow peeps and creme eggs and chocolate bunnies and jelly beans nestled in green plastic grass, but I'm on my own today. Yesterday was family day - mother, three siblings, a brother-in-law, two children. We talked family history and the general decline of the world as we usually do. Always finding a way to end on a hopeful note or with wry humor. Despair's not why we get together, after all. I cannot help but counter stories of my step-father on these occasions with tales of mistreatment. Even now, at the age of fifty-five. Remember how he used to lay down in the grass with his arm across his face for five minute naps during the farm's crazy work pace in the summers? Yeah, and remember that time he threw a claw hammer at me because I wasn't working fast enough? My mother maintains her high spirits better than I do. She always has. With church and the Hallmark Channel and selective memory and a big orange cat and her siblings and her granddaughters. It's a real skill. I've not managed, myself, to keep beliefs intact or to allow a dream to live without dissection or negation. Last night I dreamed a woman's touch. Sitting behind me, not quite fully formed, she came over me like a shadow. Only the suggestion of a touch. The sensation imagined and savored.

South Dakota

I spent a night on top of the butte. A wind rose up and frightened me because I was on the highest point in any direction for as far as I could see in the light of the moon and stars. The wind died down after I calmed myself, and I could hear the buffalo snorting and grunting down on the plain below. I guess I'd gone there hoping for a vision. It had been a sacred place for Frank Fools Crow and for Crazy Horse. A thought rose up and frightened me because I felt in my body that I was being stalked by a mountain lion. My fear died down after I'd calmed myself and trusted in my prayer. A moment came in which I felt something like the flapping of large wings right above and behind my head. 

Jesus? Nah, he ain't been in.

All the rest is just doing time, the older of the two men said. Understand?

Well, here's to time then, the younger one said raising a shot glass. He's trying to. At least a little.

Aagh, you don't know. The older one drank it down then tried to shake the thing out of his head.

Good Friday, the bartender said. Round of redemption on the house. 

She poured them each another.

The young man smiled at her with his entire face. 

The old one, with just the corners of his eyes. 

Late night caller

I was still waking up unhappily

Someone was screaming into the phone

In high shrill hysterics

Impossible to comprehend at first

Before I could formulate a response

I saw a black and white motion picture image

A man in fedora and overcoat

Slapping that frenzied face

Get a hold of yourself, man.

Clipped and stoic sounding, not cruel - a favor really

Just to help bring you back down here into your shoes

After all, we're all on the verge of a complete freak out, brother

In spite of it all, the spontaneous internal film noir gave me a chuckle