Run in the rain

It's raining this morning when you wake up at 4:30 AM as planned and then reset the alarm for 5:00 AM so you can return to your strange dreams and then again to 5:30 AM when the threat of impending shame finally kicks you out of bed. It's 20 degrees colder this morning - low 40's, dark and raining when you get to the trailhead. You wear a light jacket, your glasses, you decide to bring a flashlight, start your timer and head out for a thirty minute run. Within the first five, you can feel that you haven't run in four or five days. You've forgotten how to breathe. When you hit the fifteen minute mark - the turn around point - you are soaked through to the skin, blind from rain-streaked and breath-fogged glasses, and already seeing things due to the tricks the bouncing circle of light in front of you plays. You take off the glasses and put them in your pocket. You turn off the flashlight. A vast improvement. You decide it is a metaphor for letting go and trusting the process. You like to let your mind run when you're out here. You think about this girl and how she realized she had magical powers when she was with you (maybe she always knew). She practiced that magic on you a little. Stretched and tried her wings. And you, you stopped analyzing and observing and allowed yourself to be mystified completely. Surrender. You were also thinking about how a human body goes from a state of equilibrium to distress very quickly if the environmental conditions aren't favorable. The rain keeps coming despite your shivering. Nature doesn't care if you can't see well enough to stay on the trail. Nature has an indecipherable plan, I don't doubt that, but what it doesn't have is compassion. I'm amazed for a moment that we humans are capable of it. That we ourselves generated it as an antidote to our own cruel nature. We learn to give it because we, ourselves, are so desperately in need of it. A Palestinian cries, "Why are they killing us?" in perfect harmony with an Israeli crying the same words.

Something off kilter out there

The dry leaves were falling from the trees at a faster rate and the outside temperature was at least 70 degrees and climbing when I walked out of my front door in the morning. I startled a large, ragged hawk from a treetop and wondered if it had killed the rabbit I was talking to for awhile there at dusk. When I spoke to it, the rabbit stopped and seemed to be listening to me. This happened several times. I haven't seen it lately. I went out to the mall and noticed an increased police presence. There was a shooting at the local college the night before that resulted in the cancellation of all homecoming activities this weekend. The mall annoyed me. I had the strange experience of not knowing what most of the things I was looking at in the stores were. There was a wall covered in band t-shirts, and I recognized less than half of them. I found the costume number-one-son was looking for, purchased it, and delivered it. I got to hang out for a couple of hours with number-two-son before he had to go to work. He's pretty sure scratch tickets are not the road to financial security and wants to learn about mutual funds. I drove home later and talked myself out of going for a run because it was dark so I went out for Mexican food instead in this town that's felt wrong to me, in my stomach, since childhood. There was a trump parade there a couple of years ago. I sat at the bar. Almost immediately the asshole sitting next to me, an older white man, leans over and makes a crack about how great it is to have a bartender who speaks English for a change. I don't know exactly what I said in response but it had some f-bombs in it, and he got the message that we were not on the same team. He turned away. What was jarring to me about it was just how automatically he assumed I was like him. Again, I seem to be getting the message to just stay home. 

Saturday plans

Weekend. I've got to go in search of some items for number one son's halloween costume. He's an adult, part of my programming says with a sneer. He's living life and having fun, the rest of me says with a smile and relief. 

Running and gunning under the Hunter's Moon

We're this: simmering murder, bottomless greed, vast ignorance and voracious appetite restrained by fear, if at all, with a desperate desire to escape ourselves by consuming each other. 

I am not separate, but I don't want to be this.

Felt a little better about things walking in the woods this evening. Hunter's Moon rising. That is until I walked up through the state Wildlife Management Area and saw spent shotgun shells scattered around the dirt road. Grouse feathers. Pheasant too. Crushed paper coffee cups. Crisscrossed four-wheel-drive tracks in the hardened mud gave the field a look of desecration. A dead partridge draped across a branch. More ugly.

Wednesday, I think.

Waking in the dark - it's quiet inside and out. Asking the same question the poet did. Is this loneliness or freedom? Hungry. Let's get up, eh?

Bleak? Not quite. Bleak is blank with an emotion of some sort attached to it. I'm not doing that. My soul isn't draining away. It's just quiet. It doesn't hurt. 

Exchange messages with a friend moving south today. She has regrets. So do I, and a lot of what ifs too. I should have kissed her on the pier under the street light in the fog in accordance with my day dream. I wish her well. This thing we have to do here in this place is so hard. 

I listened to a clip of Henry talking after one of his spoken word shows. His voice is familiar. A remote presence in my life since my teen years. A one-sided friendship. Hearing his voice grounds me, lends me something familiar, pulls me out of this alien space. 

I wrote to him years ago. He wrote back recommending I read Hubert Selby Jr. and John Fante, which I did. Selby hurt me deeply. Some of the darkest and most tender writing I've ever read. Song of the Silent Snow - a collection of short stories was my starting point. Then it was Last Exit to Brooklyn. Unless you're ready for a real trip to Hell avoid The Room and Requiem for a Dream. He does it well and beautifully, but "bleak" is a sunny day picnic in the park compared to the places he takes you.  

Anyway, Henry said he still writes every day. Hearing that re-ignited a small spark in me to continue. Even if it's going nowhere. Continuing matters, though I can't always say why.

Taking my own advice, I go outside as the sun is beginning to rise to experience the morning air. This changes my mind immediately. My senses awaken. The gentle light, the scent of the leaves, the feel of the cool air on my face, the sound of a bird. Just get out the door. Just get out of the bed. Just get out of the room. Just get out of your head. 

Eighteen

Today my youngest child turns 18. He has managed to survive his childhood during a particularly challenging time on the planet. I'm proud of him. 

I can also feel my own shoulders dropping a little bit. If you're a person who lost a parent as a young child, maybe you can relate to the fear one feels that he/she will die prematurely and leave their own children alone and unprotected in the world. Today we cross an imaginary finish line.

Swindle

Woke up after a night filled with lots of dreams with an aching back from being supine too long after yesterday's excessive lay-around. Today is sunny and, despite it being only in the 50's, you can feel the strength of the sun. Appointments today. And soon a run/walk on the trails while the last of the colors still hang on the trees. 

You know, maybe that's it. Maybe you won't ever love that way again. What you used to crave is more like just an idea now. Satisfying it has become unsatisfactory.

You made it outside in the late afternoon and ran/walked 13.1 miles along an abandoned railroad line. Your feet don't like you now, but you're ready for sleep. 

Maybe Mañana

A sleepy day spent in the house and alone. I kicked myself a few times for wasting an Autumn day and for not going outside at all. 

Mañana. Don't worry. 

Row

Further from shore.

I went back to the city where I used to work to attend a send off for a young person I supervised. There were three other people there. I drank four cocktails. It was nice to see them. I like those three people. But as I listened to them talk, I realized how glad I am not to live in that world anymore. 

The sunlight glinting on the water makes me squint, and I can barely distinguish the distant shoreline. This small skiff, two oars, a folded sail, and myself. 

As I pull evenly against the oars, I keep seeing two snapshots through my mind's eye. One is a soaring eagle viewed from high above. My spirit remembers what it means and even how to do it. The second one is an image of your stern unsmiling face. This one catches in my spirit's throat, I guess you could say. I cannot alter or dismiss it.

I wish I could restore your lightness. Only now do I understand how precious it was.

Odd pieces of old furniture

Moved a pickup truck load of mismatched furniture from my mother's house to her new apartment with an old friend from high school. We worked in the fields together through those years while other kids went to the beach. We joined the Marines to escape the fields and our respective abusive father figures. Parris Island wasn't all that nice to us either. We haven't seen much of each other in the 40 years since then. We both married, have three grown children and are now divorced. We both resolved not to treat our children the way our father's treated us. There have been other struggles too, but we both agreed that we are better now for having gone through them and come out the other side. We talked about the ways people find each other. The way we recognize those psychologically similar to us in a world of strangers.

That which no longer serves you

Boy, do I hear that said frequently. I keep encountering the notion that Autumn is the season for naturally letting go of those things which no longer serve us. Dead leaves falling away, you know? For me, Autumn has always been a time for memory and nostalgia. A time of general yearning and of missing people and things that have fallen from my tree. 

Placebo

Tending toward worst case scenarios, I've been bothered by a raised mole on my shoulder that seemed to evolve from a regular old freckle over the summer. A voice inside hisses - you're probably going to die from a highly treatable skin cancer because you avoided being seen for so long. Today I went to an Urgent Care where the very young Physician's Assistant told me the mole was still brown and shaped ok. Cancer is apparently black and patterned in a certain recognizable way. She of course wouldn't make an actual judgement but recommended I find a dermatologist to be on the safe side. That's probably all I need to quiet the voices for now. 

Friday the 13th

Ran errands today - breakfast, mail pick up, banking, haircut, coffee, shopping, and clams for a late lunch. I saw a few anxious faces, more than a few bored and not very courteous service workers, a professional ghost hunter, and a guy drunk on plastic cups of Bud Light at 4 PM. I didn't make any friends today. The car radio's news featured an entertaining blend of mindless banal trivia and extreme apocalyptic horror. It's Friday the 13th under a lunar eclipse. Keep your head down.

Look forward not back, I'm told

My living room isn't living, actually, and no one else has lived in it for quite some time. 

There's a couch there underneath a shapeless slip cover that a former roommate left behind. When moving it to clean the floor, I found evidence that mice had taken up residence within. Whether or not they are current tenants, I cannot say, but they've lived in there sometime in the last ten years. There's a corner TV cabinet built to house an old analog television with a screen no larger than 24 inches, I'd guess. I bought it unfinished at a mill store, and my then wife and I stained it together. I remember feeling proud and accomplished for buying, with cash, a piece of our very own furniture and doing some work on it with my own hands to make it a part of our home. It serves no purpose now, except to fill space, and I don't yet know what to do about it. There's a carpet that my then wife bought at some point during the last 20 years. It still looks alright, but I decided recently that I need to make some physical changes in order to get some life energy flowing in and through this place so today I rolled it up and with it all that history like a corpse now awaiting illicit disposal. Then there's the dust and mildew infested rattan blinds over the picture window. That needs to go. There's an old bedspread hanging over the second picture window that allows me to walk to the shower in a state of undress without the neighbors involvement. It's unsightly - the hanging bedspread - but provides a certain crack house utility. I may need a consultant to help me replace those. The number of options for window treatments these days is bewildering. There's a disconnected big screen TV that my youngest son lobbied my now ex-wife for. She wasn't using it and we needed something to watch movies on when he came over. He'll be turning 18 in a couple of weeks. There's a faux leather couch and chair that her parents bought us years ago, shaming me in the process, which my former shitty roommate's shitty little dog ruined. I solved that problem by purchasing beige Italian slip covers. I'll keep those two "pieces" for the time being because people like to have something to sit on and someday there could be people in here. 

Those are the items that comprise my living room as of today. Now I've got to decide what to give away and what to junk. I burned a sofa and love seat in my backyard once many years ago which my then in-laws had forced upon us. We had no room for them so they turned green while stored in the damp basement. The blaze created treetop high flames and a plume of thick black smoke visible for miles around. The orange-green furnishings burned for quite sometime after I doused them in accelerant to overpower the moisture they were saturated with and to express my moral outrage. Don't tread on me! I won't likely do that this time. Now it's the expense of a dumpster, or a couple of men and a truck, or recruiting some help versus wrecking my back dragging it all out to the street and posting a FREE sign. And then there's the matter of revisiting and letting go of all that history from back when the living room was still alive. 

As I was waking up

She said she liked his freckles. Something about that left him as stunned and speechless as a punch in the face. He didn't know how to respond as her words, her voice, travelled the length of his nerves deep into the extremities of him. Like sunshine or rain seeping down inside. The start of a warming of what had been frozen. The beginning of an opening of what had been tightly closed.

Chat

Indigenous People's Day. Out with the old and in with the older. I posted a thought or two about the meaning of the day on Facebook (an unqualified opinion no one asked for, admittedly). The post elicited various comments. Everyone's got a point of view. I didn't react to any of them. But it gave me a lot to chew on. We are, at the very least, a complex skin disease upon this planet.

Low down skank-a-doo

It was a day of realignment. Three hours of getting my fascia re-sculpted and learning how to breathe into different areas of my body. Then a long slow drive to Brooklyn in traffic and intermittent rain. Then a few hours spent with my brother talking about matters of the spirit and walking around Williamsburg with its top to bottom graffiti and watching the esteemed 73-year-old, Mr. Lee Ving, with his band FEAR, rip it up in glorious fashion. He's at the tail end of a national tour playing shows every night. I couldn't resist the dance floor and had myself a good purifying sweat while somehow managing not to be crushed in the process. My back's a little worse for wear this morning but look at Lee, damn it. Just look at him. Then I drove home in less traffic among Connecticut's  Saturday night apocalypse drivers, high at 100 mph, trailing atmospheric green vapor. A friend texted from far away saying she's gotten over her fear of driving in the mountains. How's your love life, my brother asked me. Solo, I said. You ok with that? Partially, I said. I'm partially ok with that.

Step

Morning. I'm going to rent a car this morning then go and try something different before driving to NYC. Something that's supposed to be good for me. I received this message back in August - crystal clear - regarding how experiences and emotions (violence, hatred, anger, grief, loss, pain, fear) have become woven into my muscle tissue and are the source of this tension and pain in my body. I saw that maybe my purpose was not just to absorb pain in the world and to carry it. Maybe there's a way to release it, to put it down, but I was not given any answers for how to do that. Well, there was one answer. Terminal exhalation. I'm still trying to understand exactly what that means. So before that last breath, I'm going to try something else. Something new.

Ash tray

I'm slow to move today. Prolonging sleep with anxious dreams and revelations of the parts of me I'd like to remain unexpressed. The seasonal scent of the woods beckons. Run a few miles today. Don't burn another one. I started to imagine what my house would look like if I were a smoker and my squandered days cigarette butts. I'd also advise you to skip the extra cheese on your pizza if you've lost the ability to digest it properly because it'll doubtless delay you getting out the door in the morning and, before you can tie your running shoes, the rain will start to fall in earnest hastening the colored leaves coming down and your favorite season passing away and yielding too soon to winter. Yielding to winter too soon. Winter will wash over you again and at the end of it you will either emerge or you won't. And then your bed starts talking sweet again. She's so hard to leave. I seduced you, she said. It's true, you never wanted to be a step-child so you morphed into an orphan and now you can't even teach your boys to fish. Envy. I wish I had. I wish I was. Hot black hatred smolders underneath. So tenderly. Let me touch you without words. Don't look at me. Just let me. Let me touch you with only words. There are really just a handfull of moments worth revisiting back there anyway. That is if you decide to commit to living here and looking forward instead of sleeping here and dreaming back. The ghost of dim corners. The one who keeps the cemetery flowers fresh. I remember that time on San Clemente Island, a hot summer day where the fog burned away  all at once, when Ian and I stripped down to underwear and got sunburned into purple paralysis. The palest two in the unit. Someone took a picture. Some people spend their days sad because they want to be loved and aren't. Or at least that is what they believe. Some people spend their days happy and sad because they love and no one knows it or can feel it. I'd say be the latter, if there’s only two kinds and you're spoiled for choice. At least it's active. It's still raining now. I'm going to run in the woods anyway, while my favorite season still is.

Activity

That good smell of autumn leaves. Red ones, having just recently parted with the maples in the swamp. Five miles walking on dirt roads and across the damn at dusk. This is the perfect time for such things here.

Pass

Not that well today. A work day but I managed nothing else. Tired and vaguely ill or something. Cancelled my plan to go into Cambridge to see Mutiny in Heaven, The Birthday Party documentary, which I'd been looking forward to. I e-mailed the theater today and told them to keep the money but sell the seat. There's not that much I want to do out there right now. 

Work

I met the rising sun in the corn field this morning already soaked with dew. My hands, back, joints and muscles grind unsteadily aching from just one single day of farm work yesterday. What so may of us think of as work today hardly qualifies when compared to this. Labor. The real thing. Remember those who must do it every day and on whom we entirely depend.

Who turned out the lights?

A full day of farm work today. My body remembered how to do it all, 40 years later, but not how to metabolize it properly. Let's just say I'm not feeling like partying tonight.