I worked late and ate dinner sitting at the bar of a restaurant that happened to be along my route home. I was sending e-mails back and forth to someone about work. The bartender told me the two men who just left were lucky because they were about to catch a flight to Miami. I imagined brightly dressed, surgically enhanced, people dancing, posing, smiling slyly like wolves in an outdoor courtyard.
I'd only want to get out of there. Send me instead to Bethel, to Texarkana, to San Angelo...
The music provided a medium and a stage to communicate my feelings for you. "Feelings" is far too weak a word. That's only an approximation. The tide, the quake, the eruption, the tsunami, the tornado. And after, a scene of impossibly wide devastation. But also this: An opening. A sacrifice. A softening. Something warm and luminous radiating outward. Ascendence.
Waking from a good sleep in a fair mood to make black coffee and one of my famous single ingredient breakfasts. This time it's comprised of breakfast sausage links on the verge of spoiling in the refrigerator. Maybe all I need to feel pretty good is constant battering and a situation with a less than negligible chance of emerging victorious. I cooked all the sausages and ate half while watching an English chef eat his way down the Mekong River on my laptop. This morning he's in Penang. Georgetown. I was there at 19. The government had an absolute zero tolerance policy for drugs and they were hanging three Australians. We drank in a hotel bar with European journalists, there to cover the story, and argued about American imperialism. There was a dark eyed French one. I hoped we might meet later that night. We did not. There were signs posted on fences around that area depicting a uniformed man shooting an unarmed, non-conforming man with a rifle. I could not read the words but understood that I should not climb any fences there. I was young, befuddled, enthralled, and fully engaged. I could have gone on like that until the world swallowed me whole.
People notice your shaking hands now and again. They think you're upset, or maybe an alcoholic in withdrawal. You're probably not cut out to be a brain surgeon, to crimp blasting caps, or to thread needles. You met a psychiatrist once who had something similar. Essential tremors he called them. Yeah, that's probably it.
I think today is your birthday and also the Lunar New Year. Well, here's a slice of crepe cake (nah, two slices) and a little red envelope with a crisp high-denomination green bill inside. I wish you health, prosperity and longevity, old friend of my heart.
Apply all those incredibly sensible Japanese principles immediately. All of them. The circumstances of your life call for it. And they call loudly. Self control, common sense, non-reactivity - that's kind of the gist of it. I wish I could remember their names.
Arugama and Ikigai are two.
Dreams.
The first one woke me up at 10:15 pm. I was trying to sleep in a hotel room. Someone yelled with alarm. I began to realize I was being crushed by something like dense memory foam that was rapidly filling the room from ceiling to floor. It was unbelievably swift, heavy and unyielding. Before I could fully grasp what was happening, it was over.
By morning, I had apparently worked out whatever internal conflict was going on.
At 4:45 am, I was in a car with friends who were joking about male underwear. My friends were of the imaginary dream variety. A young woman was telling a young man he needed an underwear upgrade. They were comedically arguing about the right time and place to wear certain kinds. I was the old guy delivering the punch line: Fruit of The Looms are always appropriate for any milieu. Some kind of sit com.
I have to get my car inspected this month. The exhaust is loud. It's burning oil. I'm all but certain it's not going to pass.
As I drove to the shop, one in which the mechanics want to see us make it to half-a-million miles together, I heard a gospel music program on the radio. The singers sang, "Our God is a lonesome God". I know that's not the lyric, but that's what I heard. More than once.
A man at the laundromat asked me if he'd seen me recently at a high school basketball game. No sir, I said. You've got a local doppelgänger, he informed me. I carried my basket of freshly washed and dried clothes back to the shop.
The diagnostic machine failed my car on four counts, plus two worn front tires and a few burned out bulbs. Most of the trouble is coming from the exhaust. I'll take a day off work tomorrow when the mechanic's on duty and bring it back in to see if we can continue together as a pair. The way things have been going lately, I'm not so sure about that.
Fate. What if you thought of it that way and simply charged ahead? Maybe that's what you're doing. What is done cannot be undone. What is written cannot be erased. Seems like a better alternative to doubt and anxiety right about now, n'est ce pas?
There's one. Back in quickly, pull forward, back up, slightly forward, and stop. Lock it.
Happiness does not wait. The waiter told you she'd left a note on the table while you were still looking for a parking space. Something unexpectedly drops out inside you. You realize all at once that every friend you've ever known across a lifetime is no longer in your life. You wonder if you are a broken thing while standing in a restaurant beside a young waiter. Defective.
The waiter reminds you that enlightenment is disillusionment. Clarity. That what you see before you now, who you are in this moment, is closer to true than when you walked in here a minute ago harboring romantic notions. You leave him a tip of your own without ever sitting down.
Outside, even the night is cold and distant. It holds you tightly none-the-less but completely without feeling. After a mile of this, you are only a ghost or maybe something even less substantial. You never did make it to Paris, did you?
It was the beginning of the '90s. I was broke and very thin. Jenny gave me two flannel shirts which she herself had worn. She was tall and the shirts were big on her. When she held me, I could feel her against the length of my entire body. I stayed in love with her much longer than she was in love with me though. It's safe to say that I was obsessed with her which is not at all a safe way to be. I kept the shirts after she'd gone and suffered hard in them. To wear them was to invoke her presence. I wore those shirts until they disintegrated which somehow occurred before I did.
A few minutes ago, I woke up thinking about those shirts.
I'm quite sure that all her boxes are checked, but her face on the screen seemed joyless. So strange that we were once in each other's proximity. I felt it there for a moment but I don't think she did.
Charles Simic died yesterday. Someone posted his last written poem. It was fewer than ten words. I tried to find it again when I got home from work last night, feeling greyed and psychologically clubbed, to post here but I failed. He told his little boat to take care. They were offshore together, and he knew he wouldn't be returning.
Off a cliff into a deep slumber for four or so hours. Waking from one of those nonsense dreams in which I had driven a vehicle somewhere impossible to get out of. It's a classic, like those math class dreams in which you forgot that you have an exam and then realize you forgot to go to class for the entire semester too.
Cook something, you said. In the freezer was a pork loin. Can't remember how long ago I put it in there. Place it on a plate. Read the cooking instructions. It's been years since I've used the oven. Cut it in half. Brown it in olive oil in my little frying pan one half at a time. Preheat the oven. Find a tray from the toaster oven that ought to work just fine for oven safe cookwear. Half an hour at 350. Over season to taste. Consume in its entirety. Skip the side dishes. Pair with red wine drunk from a jar.
"Therefore, all the things around you will be armed against you, to deny you, to give you pain, and therefore to reduce you to solitude."
Many years have passed since I first read and quoted that passage. Nothing else has ever been so true.
