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.