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.