Playing Publicly

Been playing music publicly since Santa Fe.  Once I returned to Bloomington, despite the huge difference between Hoosiers and the people of The Land of Enchantment, I simply floated around playing music (and feeling pretty foolish!) until I became as accustomed to playing in my home town (these days) as I was in Santa Fe.  AND, became as recognized by the locals as I was in Santa Fe.  It's been lovely.  Though, people in Indiana (even Bloomington) DONT want folks on the sidewalk performing.  Even if you don't accept tips, they call you a panhandler.  I have been harassed a bit.  I tell myself to be pleased that I have not been outright abused, generally.  And that I should be pleased folks like the music.  To say the least, I am pleased and delighted by the folks of our odd Hoosier town. 

It's been a big delight sharing with people of every description.... music makes a man seem a warm apparition of sensible delight.  I have been slow to appreciate the social rewards, spiritual rewards and other sorts of rewards the disguise proffers me.  Joy is not so terrible, I suppose.

In any case... it's nice to share a bit.  I shall try to remember that.

Holdin'

Holdin'

(play song)

Sittin' in your very own chair

Theres probably a very nice moon up there

But right now, Lord, I really

Need that roof

I've takin my share of

The good and the bad

Still got the scars

From some awful blows

I'm still sittin, but

Sometimes it's time to go

Sitiin' near somebody

That needs my ear

They been watching my

Disaster, now, for years

But they're closer than the blood

In the veins of the folks 

Who left me

Reachin' for the simple things

That any man might need

Driftin' from the fact that 

My heart's controlled by greed

I guess a losers got to do

The very thing he wishes

He doesn't need

Cookin' for this crowd of folks

Who'd rather be alone

Asking after every broken

Soul I've ever known

Praying while some smiling

Fool spins some cherries 

Into Gold... Baby that's a fortune, sure

One I've never known

Holdin' in the middle of the night

The hand of  you, honey,

Cus' you crossed my mind

Why'd you whisper in my ear

The sort of thing some folks never hear

Why'd you whisper in my ear

The sort of thing some folks never hear

You'd be surprised the non-sense I'll endure

Just to have my baby near

You'd be surprised how much I don't 

Deserve you dear

Holdin'

Holdin'

Holdin'

Holdin'

Near the Graveyard Where Chestnuts are Gone

River valley farm fields

Early spring time

Cus' you can't help but stare

You drown the engine 

To the soft purr of barely goin'

Hardly anyone wants to get somewhere

In this place nobody knows

You broke my heart when we were

Barely grown

But baby somehow I could see

So I begged you not to leave 

One day, honey, could we lay

Beneath the stones?

Hand in hand, down the street 

Once again, around the bend

Sometimes these days you simply 

Turn to me and grin

We're too damn old to need to 

Pay someone to watch a babe

So our joints can creak us all the way

To our same old place for a date

I know I'll never be as good

As you were dreamin'

One day you could be in love 

But the stars are stuck in 

The same damn constellation

As when we fought in Paris

As when we kissed in Louisville

I'm sorry you're on the ground here 

With me... instead of far above

You broke my heart, love

When we were barely grown

But baby, somehow I could see

So I begged you not to leave

One day, love, could we lay

Beneath the stones

Your Mamma used to look

At me and sigh

She knew that she had nothin' much

To worry with this guy

I guess she asked you why you were

Willing to waste your beauty 

On a fool

Man it took a long long time

To prove the cruel

Way I begged you home

You broke my heart, love

When we were barely grown

But baby, somehow I could see

So I begged you not to leave

One day, love, could we lay

Beneath the stones

Guess I'll finish my water

Honey, you done with your wine?

We'll take the long way home

Near the graveyard where Chestnuts are gone

You know I love it when you scream

Big ole kiss... from the same

Son of a Bitch,

Who couldn't fool you in his dreams

The woods is reachin'

Straight over the road

Through the winter trees

We can see the fog on the gravestones

Somehow I got to spend a little time in this life

With a stranger who one day was called my wife

We'll be there soon, but hon, not alone

You broke my heart, love

When we were barely grown

But baby, somehow I could see

So I begged you not to leave

One day, love, we will lay

Beneath the stones

You broke my heart, love

When we were barely grown

But baby, somehow I could see

So I begged you not to leave

One day, love, we will lay

Beneath the stones

"Have not" Ain't a Grammer I Can Hew To

It would surprise most people little that there exist opportunities in the land of opportunity.  Perhaps it would surprise a person born in the US that under different circumstances they would regard being in the US and living the life of a struggling normal US citizen as a benefit worthy of some effort.  Until I lived in a town bisected by the Rio Grande, I had a habit of saying, "I know which side of the river I am on."  I turns out that my habit made some sense philosophically, but geographically was ignorant.

This, it turns out, is a useful door, as narratives go, to the purpose of my typing today.  Number one, happily, opportunities exist.  Number two, not so happily, ignorance of universal rights and spiritual grace can pollute and degrade even the most earnest individuals spirit... rendering, someone gesturing at beautiful light falling on all of us, into a canny survivalist with dreams barely discernable from a grindstone.

Cute discussions of people in the US often treat numbers and physical descriptions of people like they are Stanley tools: practical and symbolic devices which will get a job done.  It seems a barely noticable side step from grand concepts like "majority rule" to step into a flatland of spreadsheets showing who is being ruled and to what extent they will rule.... live... establish the morays of culture delightful and humanely unpredictable.  Running the numbers, unlike running the bulls, is no paradigm of unruly ecstasy.  Running the numbers is more like running blood, running sweat and tears running down faces of beings who share what I have always been allowed to enjoy... but, have been nearly broken due to an awareness of a range of mountains soaring proudly between the travels of people in their valley and the sun.  Shadowed by an otherwise beautiful display, the conventional world rockin in the USA, you know the profane and sacred fact of our Western emergence:  random actors, groups of unusual dissent, churches of conventional and conservative souls with an open door to the most foolishly living people passing through. The range of mountains between the sun and shadowed valley, cast their shadow due to a subtle lack of reason.  The sun is ius naturale; natural light.  The sun belongs to the whole of terra firmas activities which depend on any phenomena that occur above absolute zero.  For the happy alternate universe where everything is at absolute zero... ius naturale can be treated as over exposure indeed.  However, our hands probe in the entrails of the principles of natural light.  Holding a fading Geranium blossom we inhale the musk of the leaves pressing one between two fingers and bewildered simultaneously by the cardinal optics and the airborne hydrocarbons.  For what purpose this?  One flower can do that.  Men do not bear flowers.  Men do not open the genetic machinery and truly reach the foreman level of engineer with the simplest of plants machinery.  Men depend as desperately upon the tissue of a cell wall as the rubiks cube of a cells genes.  Every part of every plant and animal is held in the gentle hands of some creator.  Call the creator whomever you wish.  She/He/It--- Our Father, tangle with the simplest of creation.  Tumbling from the phenomenology of the spinning planets and patient urgency of the Sun's Hydrogen is a wreath running through everything, everyone and all.  Through the sink to clean your dishes, just as through the glass that holds your mold brewed beer, just as through the pipes that are there by necessity, just as in the Pond where you only cast for orange gold.  The scales and quick anxiety of the fish hold natural light... your hands move with no more thought than the blood in your aorta.  It has simply been the practice of man to amble toward a target of natural life and register surprise with the aid of a ruler.  What is nice to tell your friends, need not be thoughtful to the wreathe of our temperate networked realm.  The circles come off our fishermans cast lure, in the plane of the ponds surface a nod to the fishermans unerring tendency to avoid depressing shadowed valleys.  Circles like the Earth describes, but with an odd way of every part of the circles being related to every other part of the circle, even as the parts travel and broaden the circle--- hewing to a fixed speed, distance and shape.  Just a cast of the lure, might say the fisherman, "what's the point... they ain't biting today."

Opportunity.  Some say it knocks.  Any scene can be seen by a vast diversity of perspectives.  Take your face.  Maybe you have never much enjoyed a mirror.  Maybe you enjoy mirrors too much.  Perhaps you think you are old... odd.... ugly.... or you have lost a morphological equity that when you hadn't lost it you appreciated hardly at all.  Then again, maybe you just think you are God's gift to the human race... and kittens and puppies too.  Good for you.

Next time you stand in font of your bathroom mirror.  Whatever you think of the mortal you see on that flat apparatus, do me a favor.  Take your index finger and hold it up to the stranger that is the part of you you never chose.  Sign, not the bird, but the wait a minute index finger universal gesture.  And, whether the mirror is conveinently fogged, or crystal clear, touch your reflection lightly.  Once, then again.  First you held your finger up to get the attention of this chariot for your soul.  So much on our mind!  This is no joke.  First ask for some permission.  Then, touch that bodily reservoir of natural lights phenomenons.  Phenomenology.  Lovely word. In short, in a word "phenomenal."  Why say I this?  Because there is so very much you do not need to take trouble learning about that reflection.  True, it, the reflection is pretty close to a description of the tempting neighborhood in a good school district called [your name] Heights.  And true, you know a lot about that saint/ sinner, scoundrel, ect.  That being who deserves privacy as much as anyone.  Either a locked door and some private concerns or the Saint/Sinner might simply jump off a cliff.  It is nothing to be embarrassed about.  We need a little distance from the prying eyes and hand cupped ears of the (why call it this?) nosy.  Eyes ears and noses!  Well, in that mirror are yours.  But, really, who cares what you got there.  What is there is describable, sure, to some extent by science... and to a broader, intrusive and frequently pathology generating extent, is described by the Stanley tools I mentioned at the beginning of this torture session.  You know, societies aesthetics and the zeitgeist of valuation, independent of humble logic.  "She's Hot" is a statement meant for accord.  An instrument for power and spell casting.  Rarely is the statement "I'm Hot" made in the bathroom where you stand there with your index finger against the strange newtonian physics of your avatar.  "I'm hot" generates no accord, except in instances where the dynamics are being monitored by social rules coloring straight through the lines which are usually a common boundary between people and the rutting animal.  In a sense, of course, in America and in the heart and mind of a practical citizen, its nice to know you are hot.  Most folks could never know or bother with such a thing.  It none the less happens in the narratives which we keep our Stanley tools within and ready.  As pathologies go in the grip of man, it is deserving of some attention, sure, but as the normal people of the world say, "big deal."

With your finger against that mirror, you are not going to actually experience as alluring an experience and useful a lesson as we always wish for when we imagine a reflection.  The believing of seeing is just that. The content of such an encounter as the inspection of your reflection, is surely as close to an exciting zero as possible, to the curious mind.  Provided you were to set aside the sad facts of what we generally make of ourselves, you might play a little game with that image in the mirror and brook some inquiry into what the image, after all, is an image of.  You might learn that the chariot of the soul, which while hardly being the whole description of the body of one's self, is a hell of a canvas.  Oddly enough, even the leaders of agreed upon knowledge... Scientists, forget interesting details when they scale their investigations of the orgin of the reflection you have just removed your finger from.  You only need touch it twice or so.  And, I don't mean the orgins, as in Creation.  I just mean what the body is.  Who the body is.  Just as surely as a pizza could never come to your door if all you told the employee at the pizza joint was your preference for pepporoni and extra cheese, then hung up to wait while rolling your eyes that things could ever take so long for a damn peporonni pizza... the pizzeria needs to know something about you.  True, when your stomach rumbles and your mouth waters, and a wad of cash has miraculously avoided the reality TV of the terrible economy, it really isn't the greatest time of week, day or circumstance to get real real talky and figure stuff out... but, none the less, one of the strange facts of life that has nothing so much to do with the birds and bees, is the fact that in the modern world you got longitude and latitude and you got you.  You always gotta tell someone where you at.  You can't check the movie listings, swipe a credit card, call your Mother on Mother's Day or savor what could coincidentally being considered pretty savory without saying somehow, to some thing or some one, "right here.  Not there."  Your adress.  A specific thing.  If you get a number wrong, that is going to destroy the whole shebang.  So we become accustomed to simply providing our address with every phone call, donut purchase, and job application. Sometimes autonomically, sometimes with the tongue.  But all the time.  It is a fact of life.

    For probably strange leftover sacred concepts of our physical selves, we are less comfortable looking at our avatar in the bathroom mirror and coming to any kind of "natural" conclusion with any sort of honest inquiry.  One of the first frustrations attending our reflection, is the seeming fact that one's reflection is of one's self.  There, in the mirror, in my case is one man.  A somewhat skeletal, bald very slightly pot bellied once upon a time blond, but now red bearded middle aged individual.  Props go to modern genetics since looking in the mirror I know I can be called a homo sapien, or have a sample of my blood sent to a lab to determine what I am.  One name, human is shorter than homo-sapien, which is far shorter than the labs very very long genetic reading of my blood.  However, there is a problem when we look at that individual and call him a species.  For there are in the genes something you never guess in the single man standing in the mirrors frame.  Ancient lifeforms have their genes in all human genetics.  Some of the lifeforms were illnesses.  Some of them lived in human cells as collaborative lifeforms who's habitat was a human body cell.  Eventually, the single celled creatures, with their own DNA became part of the whole shebang.  So mitocondria, with their own DNA, to this day are simply composed through the bodily lumberyard of human history and where mitocondria once had their choice of creatures to reside within, for humans, a fraction of that ancient organism where once it lived in independence, today it's a huge part of our power over the realm.  Respiration would be impossible without creatures created seperate from human kind.  What we were when we combined with mitochondria is an extremely interesting question to think about.... but the list is long.  And we have this mirror to consider... right?

    So, amongst the easy mistakes to make is to consider the single, white, bald, bearded skin and bone male an individual of singular qualities, independent from the taxidermist prey.  The avatar of the reflection does not so easily tell the fuller story.  The subject is a bit of a long winded tale.  Eventually a realization occurs where you feel you are questioning harmless assumptions and rewriting some hard won truths.  It's true you tell your friend over coffee, "I was never good in school.  I could care less who I am.  I just wanna have some fun."  Completely fair.  I think you are unlikely to have read this far should that be the breadthe of your curiosity.

    Outside of your cells, but inside the frame of the mirror our so called individual has an identity that also includes a few other species.   Sometimes the viruses hidded in our DNA and old single celled creatures comprise a physical fact of our physical cells... literally WHAT we are.  Other times creatures simply enjoy the giant canvass... for the least artistic reasons imaginable.  Your face, every face, enjoys between six and ten small animals that live in your eyebrows, ears, nostils, hairline and in your mouth.  Some of these animals could never be seen by the human eye.  Others are simply small enough to defy simple measures of identification.  The armpits, groin, areas of privation and excretion and the feet have dozens of lifeforms which feed off the shedding and exothermic heat of the human organism.  The fungus on the feet, and bacteria in the pits and cracks and crevices provide a competitive environment which is not friendly to more malicious micro organisms.  Changes in PH and aromatic compounds inside and on the surface of an adult human are part of the elaborate mechanism to evolution over the millions of years humans have grown in complexity.  In truth, as you might have garnered already, we cannot be described with much accuracy, and to an intelligent observers taste by the contents of our DNA.  While DNA is a fabulous phenomenon that, as a binary language carries certain binary facts through our past and into our descendents and future in a manner suprising to find in the flesh of lifeforms--- the asset of our DNA in some ways is more a tillable realm in the cells of we species, where, like the difference between a few yards of soil into which the roots of corn grows and the kernals displayed in the produce department...  a lifeform or two or three must intersect with the groceries eventuality and the soils harbor of entropies sirens.  So much to do.  In the same sense, where DNA has been given the heraldry by the default devisors of the natural history of human beings, it is a stunning portion of our bodies.. as beautiful and elegantly vulnerable a part of us as we got------ but, we are protected by and attended to in the company of and owe great respect for the things that crawl on us but are hardly noticed within, or without.  I probably, as a six foot slender man have seven to nine pounds of micro organisms in my gastro intestinal tract.  While it is true that I had to pick those "bugs" up after my mom delivered me, it is without doubt that I would neither be a man with my name nor survive for any length of time here... on Earth, without the three quarter trillion within me and the one  quarter trillion upon me.  Andy Coffey, as his reflection might not always reveal is a miraculous collection of sometimes more cells with no human DNA, than the cells with human DNA.  Most of the time the community of me, might not rule with executive skills granted to the majority.  Though it would be hard to determine the extent to which sensorily affective substances and health rewarding processes are provided and driven and rewarded to me or destroyed due to my ignorance... ect.  There are well known rules that suggest our diets should be as we have for so so long known not the conventional American one.  When you consider that our food is processed partially by billions of organisms... transforming what we eat into something as seperate from our food sources as imaginable.  The realm of true phenomenon in the colony and community of a man or womans self hood is a far cry from tired traditional views driven by fear and those Stanley tools I mentioned at the begining.  

So, that's a good start.  I was intending to discuss more on the subject of natural light and law.  Those subjects are what caused me to begin.  However, the person in my mirror is ultimately who people mean when they say my name.  Entralled by the phenomenon of self hood, I forget continuously my miraculous community.  Saying things like, "I enjoy being alone!" it is easy for me to forget how hard it really is to ever be alone.  My reflection might reveal a middle aged bald guy, but my body is a miraculous wonderland none the less.  I'll be tapping the mirror twice when I can manage to forget the tools of power and remember instead the gifts curiosity can square with my shame. 

Carl Isaacson's new book, The Innovators, begins with a chapter on Ada Lovelace.  I learned about Ada years ago and was Gobsmacked by learning of her origins and influence, all those years ago, as a founding parent of information science.  Isaacson seems like he's got himself another book that is hard to ignore.  Ada Lovelace sits at the top of the cover of The Innovators. Apparently, Isaacson's daughter introduced him to the subject of Ada, years ago.  This is for all the girls out there who have told me over the years what they're, "not good at.". Sorry, looks, girls, like your good at just about it all.

Quicker Than Usual (as opposed to dead)

Well....  anyone who wonders where I've been should be congratulated.  Most of the time I have had this blog (between four and five years) I've kept my subject matter on the abstract side of the balance... which, given the feedback I have received, is certainly going to continue. That said, I feel that this blog is a fine way to communicate certain personal views during this particular slice of my life.  I've made an incredible friend, found freakish tools in the creative toolbox (the one, that is, that we all might access if our ignorance should be breached) and came to realize I have a tendency to worry far, far too much about serving people and the commonweal in general instead of enjoying some fun things that only happen to amount to great times and vast resources.  Ahhh... the mandates of privilege ought be ignored    !

I live now in  Santa Fe, New Mexico.  I made the decision extremely recently due to an amazing human being who lives in the proximity of Santa Fe.  As you may remember, my parents live in New Mexico.  They are the central reason for my not being in Indiana (which I will always visit and love immensely.)   It is, to my shock, quite interesting what a difference between Santa Fe and Albuquerque New Mexico's ecology and weather there is.  Geology, tree varieties, and animal life follow very strange rules around here.  The dictates of the "desert," alpine run off and atmospheric fluid dynamics are simply nothing remotely analogous to a Mid-West sort of typicality.  You can drive a hell of a long time out of Indianapolis and more or less know what to expect.  Don't try that around here.  It's a great deal of fun as long as you don't mind sounding like a small child more or less all the time.  Wonder Bread might be nearly out of business... the garden variety wonder seems to be thriving.  My in-joke on the subject of wonder is stretched between the poles of my brain surgery (1.25 years ago) and a possibly real... though debatable mental illness which drags in my stead (and heart and head): a somewhat continuous  joy which cannot be explained by personal accomplishment or good fortune.  Don't try it at home--- share it with friends--- write best-sellers on said subject.  Somewhat better head problem then the garden variety bi-polarism.

In the interest of not using this post to sprinkle absurd self celebrating (or desecrating) personal crap ala Facebook et. al.   I a going to finish up with one last thing.

Had a conversation with a musical genius today.  He wants my help for reasons that probably don't square with me (even were my dreams to be real.)  He blew my mind and has given me a somewhat new paradigm involving a percentage of my reasons for being alive.  No big deal?  That's about as Facebooky as I'm willing to get.

More later... if you can believe it.

 











      

The Mind Puts An End To This Play

Could have been dreaming
Could have been down
Out with a feeling
Off with this crown

Oh, that fortune believed me
In the sun and the hay
Where the mind of a woman
Puts an end to the play.

That beautiful object
Still sitting where it's always set
At least twice as much, twice
As the other guy gets

It pretty and fine
Has the features you know
Though its up sitting high
Don't a guy reach too low?

Lord, I could still be dreaming
Could still remain bound
By the heat of the question,
"Boy--- hows that girl you found?"

Oh, I tell them I'm fine
The moons still up to it's things
And talk to myself
Where I once only dreamed

Looking deep to the ceiling
In the black room at night
And conjuring feelings
Of her face in my mind

Could have been dreaming
Could have been down
Out with a feeling
Off with this crown

Oh, that fortune believed me
In the sun and the hay
Where the mind of a woman
Put an end to the play.

The sweet child in line
Stretches the group to the last
And who in the front
Doesn't slow those too fast?

It's strange to have seen
The gorgeous, intelligent and fine
But turn to hold joy
Far away from her mind.

It's strange to have seen
The gorgeous, intelligent and fine
But turn to hold joy
Far away from her mind.

Another Eve--- Another Eve My Love

Three years ago I sat staring at a similar screen to this one before me tonight.  I was reeling a bit from a conversation I had had with my parents in the previous week.  While talking to them I followed a common arc of my nature and described in somewhat ecstatic and slightly odd language the glowing quality of the world around me.  At one point I melded two simultaneous themes of my Winter: the long tail in the production of Plastic and the nearly catastrophic, yet abundant offers of the generative world which seems itself, judge and jury, to conclude that we're living in a party.  With plastic hats?  I shouldn't congratulate myself that I didn't mention the plastic hats.  For, my soliloquy went on a bit long and fairly strange even for a Shakespeare, whom I am clearly not.  I was staring at an arbor with my cellphone at my ear and staring at the underside of a woody vine sprouting the beginning of what I would hopefully tend as I had for a few years.  Originally, years past, I had been paid to trim the thing.  From that day I stared up, standing beneath, but wanting exactly what I had: understanding.  My posture and bearing and place in the world were generative.  Generative of my children; generative of Love; generative of the circumstances that proscribe the dreamworld of my imagination.  At least seven full books on plastics and their organic origins, their peculiar structures so reliant on surface tension (only the second time in my life I encountered, reading of the surface tension in polymeric phenomena, a child-like wonder about surface tension.  The previous time was as a true child encountering the surface of water in a cylinder.  Took me years to realize the forces implicit in what touches.  If I had a Geni.....  if only, I could touch the lamp!)

That morning, speaking what was three years and a week or so ago, I simply celebrated the blessing of my parents riotous intelligence and curiosity.  At one point, none-the-less, one of them was forced to admit aloud that it might be a case where I would not stop talking. I smiled at this.  I'd been accused, like many young men, of a great deal worse.  Besides! What had brought my torrent, my Johnsonville Flood to the earpiece in their ear was something more than nonsense.  Something from the book filled shelves that are my preferred domain.  Not a shelter from the world as it is, but, a formally quiet place that burrows to any location in the known Universe.  Probative... protected... primary to the philosophy that remains placental to our perspectives.  Not dinner table conversation.  Staring at the sprouting wooden vine I had so many times clipped for the elderly friend I now lived with... I realized I'd become reliant on the generosity of my favorite people on Earth, so I might sprout with the probative torrent that remains a secret gift from the small town library.  In the shame of losing it I smiled.  In what Temple can I share the generative?

And so it was---- three years ago this evening I was thinking about that.  Thinking and waiting for a subject to rise to my heart, not so much my brain.  I stared at the screen and fingered with the cursor on the screen the timestamp that sits at the top right hand corner.  To finger the face of a temporal idol seemed appropriate to the spaces in my soul just then.  Not entirely intentionally I clicked upon the time face that read 10:34 PM.  Clicked, as always, and now: tonight.  Click right now that face that says 9:27 PM and read a menu below, headed: "Tuesday, March 20, 2012" as well as a few other administrative concerns.  Three years ago, seeing that date, wow!  It's the Eve of Spring.  It's the Eve of Spring!!!  Is this my favorite evening in the year?  Spring is without doubt my favorite season.  Like the drive you took to your lovers home.  Regardless of what happens in the end.  The pavement that accepts the burden of your modern, metal steed is a view to a set of difficult questions and unspoken hopes until the day that it's a path you will never take again... or the day when it becomes your direction home.  Methinks the two might sing in different keys.  The Eve of Spring is the end indeed to the Gardens of Space... the unicellular, striving communities we used to be.  Flowers for the cemetery that holds those creatures who lived toward the gift we hold in our lungs and sigh: respiration.  The winter winks of beauties like these.  A conceit that explains how the grass might indeed be blessed by God.  Waves of grain indeed.  But, only beyond the Eve of Spring.

And so it is---- tonight I smile back to that night three years ago this evening.  That Spring brought me, indeed, my garden again.  My beloved work.  Some wonderful friends.  Some slow Mid-Western travels of dense humidity and firefly beauty.

The day... when the wincing, waiting of a woman ends as she smiles at and with her man.

Two hours of Winter and one minute remain, my friend.

What Day it is Can Sometimes Matter...

December 3 is the International Day for People with Disabilities.  There are no people on Earth who are not aware of the importance to love and support those who depend upon the able bodied for an extraordinary spirit.  More of us then we often realize simply stand beside the people we know who cannot stand easily at all.  You might sometimes ask, "How is it going?" You might even answer their questions first.

A day for others will place you on a footpath that is unmistakably "Spiritual."  Funny how often it's breakfast, lunch or dinner as well.

Be well today... whichever you are.  The supposedly normal, or the technically disabled. All of you sit beside of beautiful light that only reaches to the recent past.  We, whole and broken, are the real world.

Be well.

Domain/ Hope/ Intention (With Ada)

The sound of the oars against the ring-bolts of the fourteen foot boat reminded Ada that she'd let go of them.  How thoroughly she'd looked anticipating a sight of this water.  How glad she'd been to see it finally.  The first two days it had blown her past clear away… but now, she could not help but admit it was more than water, the sea, but she could not see beyond that.  She wasn't even a dimple on the surface of this areola. Not a dimple.  Not an afterthought, not a consultation.  Just a wrinkled up piece of litter, perhaps.  Though, yes, she knew the whispers of its sentience.  She did not believe that it was dead.  Ada feared that she was.

Was it far to the horizon?  Ten miles? Twenty?  There was a circle that she had fantasized about.  Saraheim had said she needed to cast a circle, and Ada had little notion how to do that.  The flatlands were full of hicks who might no longer hang her from a tree, but she could not bear to bid them hello or goodbye.  "Good riddance" was her mantra to the certitude of the land.  Goodbye and good-day to the world.

And, it was gone.

Ada stuck her hand in the warm embrace of that penetrating, probative god of salt, mystery and terrifying patience.  She was reminded in the distracted manner of a school-girl by a window, of a hand she'd embraced a long time ago.  Emilio.  "Nothing to say, about him," she'd answered to Saraheim's inevitable questions.  

"Nothing?" Saraheim had answered quietly in shock as much as exasperation.  

Ada had held his hand.  As Emilio's fingers softly slid into her own she had sighed and looked at him startled by the sound she was making.  It embarrassed her and she'd laughed.  Emilio looked at her with the awkward questions of inexperience in his eyes.  She thought she'd embarrassed him.  She could not tell Saraheim, the jay-walking tantrum of appetite and satiety, this.  So, she simply waited her out.  Here, in this empty boat, in the limpest grip of this water she felt the strange perils  she'd ignored all her life, as keenly as her efforts at concealment had meant them dull.  

Ada drew her hand from the water, looked at the horizon and chuckled at her weakness and poor imitation of the willful persons she'd always envied.  

"Second fiddle to the living, Saraheim?" she asked aloud.  Looking at the water dripping down the oar she now gripped, she knew that what she did not know then-- she'd never forget.

Old women, she supposed, in any case shouldn't dally too long on the subject of little boys.  She hoped so.

Domain/ Hope/ Intention (With Arachnid)

The light of the sun runs through the sieve of the sky and slams in myriad short blasts of violence into particles of dust that are the size--- if you can believe this--- of the color blue.  The size of the color blue?  Let's just say it's true--- they are not the size of the color red.

The remainder of the sunlight continues to the terminus of its prior (or current, rather) self--- and sprouts wings as some relative of itself.  A trivial quantity heats the air itself--- especially its water vapor--- which causes the patch of air to become a balloon without its parachute--- unbounded it rises, catching a few carrion birds along the way.

As it reaches the edge of the ceiling of the troposphere it spreads, attempting to remain in its habitat of choice, but with the support of such an engine as the sun, it breaks into the rarified cold atmosphere anyhow.

Eventually the air becomes extremely cold, and water vapor forms around dust creating hail.  The hail becomes heavier than the air and begins to fall, pulling air along with it.  The cold mass of air eventually achieves an enormous velocity and hurtles toward the ground, a rather disasterous atmospheric animal.  It hits a carefully tended woods with quiet paths all around it, and snaps a hundred trees, some of them two to three feet in girth, like twigs none-the-less.  The limbs, leaves, twigs, and trunks lie in a wet ruin throughout the evening.  In the morning there is an absence of the usual chatter of songbirds and the call of a dozen or so raptors but, from the broken darkness of the many fallen trees, a spider creeps from a shadow and climbs up the skinned trunk of a tree.  The smooth dead wood runs thirty feet high and the spider climbs, pausing at intervals and where another fallen tree's dying branches touch another tree, the weaver begins her nine inch orb.  By the time the risen sun penetrates the disordered woods, the orb is completed, the weaver sentinel at it's center.  From the chaos of violent attention from the sun crawled the undistracted intention of an unintelligent spider.  Broken things darned with protein filament?

From Poland, With Love

Sometime around the time I was in high-school I had sardines for the first time.  I'm guessing, for no particular reason, that it would have been the Aleesi brand... given the ubiquity of that Italian maker of kitchen hardware, coffee stuff, and (esp. in America) foodstuffs, popular in mid-western supermarkets.  I was a particular fan, at the time and for years, of their sesame breadsticks.  One day I bought my own sesame seeds and roasted them myself with homemade dough.  That was the end of that.

I think what inspired the sardines was a peculiar moment in For Your Eyes Only, the '80's James Bond flick.  Sean Connery was about the only thing good in the ridiculous movie.  Was Rutuer Hauer in it?  If so, he would have played some Eastern European, Iron Curtain pantiwaist (sic.).... so, who cares?  It was a bad movie, but, had a period of, to a kid, boring exposition, where James opens up a gleaming briefcase, and within it is all manner of canned delights, including caviar (Beluga, surely.)  In any case, I eventually would eat caviar now and then with my adventurous family, but not sardines.  Why?  I'm guessing that the ubiquity and frank fishiness of sardines has prejudiced us against them (in canned form) since they were first caught to become the ancestor to Ketchup and the growingly popular Asian/ Eurasian fish sauces.  I certainly don't remember being fed them even once by my Mom.  Had she fed them to me, I am certain I would have eaten them habitually while working on the farms of my young adulthood.  I never did, however, because they slowly grew on me, after, I think, remembering that Sean Connery moment... and fantisizing about having my own [brief]case of delights.  In search of delights I came across sardines.

Occasionally a girlfriend and I would share a sardine sandwich, which, indeed, is an intriguingly "whole food" looking thing, with its silver skin glinting against sprouts, tomato, horseradish and caper.  Sort of a poor mans Lox and Bagel.  And a healthy mans too.  With their high fat content (esp. when packed in Soy/ Olive oils) of the exact sort recommended to us these days, and complete protein... in a small, recyclable aseptic container, they are indeed, a hell of an alternative to a Pepsi.  And, they cost less then a Pepsi!  Go figure.

I'm waiting for the day sardines exceed their absurd envelope of awesomeness and become known by people beyond the super-foodie world, which has a long standing appreciation of such foodstuffs.  Most of the sardines I get are packed in Poland, from vessels fishing I couldn't say where; Sardinia?  I've had them packed in the Middle East, Russia, Poland, and China.  Rarely ever, if in fact even once, in the U.S.  I don't think we experience the sardine in our oceans much.  Perhaps they detest our capitalistic excesses.

I don't eat them every day, since it goes without saying that they are fish from a polluted and somewhat disgusting ocean: while their mercury level is low, it is hardly non-existent.  Also: they are a delicacy,. meant to be enjoyed, on an intriguing time frame: popped open like a convenience, but savored like a thing of beauty.

A few rules:  Don't be fooled by the snake oil salesmen who would have you believe they fish with gilded fishing nets.  The ocean is an unbounded salty body, which, while far from homogeneous, is none-the-less neither organic, nor conventional.  It's just the ocean.  Fish are fish. If you must pay three dollars for sardines, go ahead... eat one third my take.  But I'll have you know that the fanciest variety available at the specialty stores will never beat my $1 oil packed variety with hot sauce and capers.  I make fun of my housemate Richie for buying his "organic line-caught" sardines at our local fancy swag food shop... organic fish?  He agrees, but finds the lively packaging perhaps a sort of status symbol... who knows?

Lastly, today I was peeling back the pop-top of my sardines, at lunch time, in the midst of an irritatingly endless scraping session on an exterior paint job.  The house is, perhaps, 100 years old.  The paint job prior to the last was lead paint, so even now, we must take extraordinary measures against inhalation and the spread of drop paint chips.  This costs us enormously in poly-ethelene plastic and canvass drop cloths, since you can't simply re-use a drop cloth filled with lead dust.  The face masks make the mild early summer heat feel worse, and the sunshine was not much appreciated.  When I'm this grumpy, somethings wrong.  I guessed that I was hungry.  So I walked some distance to the Music Library ( the house was not open) and washed my hands and face, and walked back.  I opened up the tin of sardines with its pop-top (I don't wear flip-flops, Mr. Buffett and fans.)  Inside were only four of the fish (the fancy sardine companies make hilarious distinctions amongst their various price-point levels of sardine loveliness.  Their are "two layer" cans.  And "three layer" cans.  I don't know what else is offered since I refuse to imagine ANY sardine being "value added."  However!  Mother nature had a small gift for me. I noticed a billowing girdle of roe, within each fishes body in the can and gasped a bit.  Beach Cliff, the grocery store brand I buy, can also be found at the Dollar Central.  So I was literally eating Dollar Store smoked fish roe.  "One and One Half Layer."

It is sometimes important to note a distinction.

Delicious.

An Eddy in this Sometime Crick

I've been fairly busy lately.  Despite this, my job sometimes requires me to spend an hour or two, or even a half day in a state of suspended animation.  Waiting for someone else to do what should have already been done.  I've always enjoyed this, provided I'm not starving or going completely broke or something.  There are always things to do other than work.  And to smell the daisies requires, sometimes, a bit of attention distracted from the ennobled tasks of our civilization.  Have you ever told someone, when asked what you did today, "smelled the daisies?"  If you have, A: good for you.  And B: you know it takes a bit of courage.

It isn't, however, courage in me... I more or less was born this way.  I'll never forget when I was but a child at 12 years old in summer camp, I'd steal off from structured activities, "clinics", to spend time alone, reading in the woods, or hey, sitting at a picnic bench, in the middle of an open field. The wind on my face, and the smell of clover (smells like honey on the breeze, right?  Clover Honey, at least.)  I never got caught... given the times, few adults were much worried at our YMCA camp as to a 12 year-olds safety.  I knew, as did most of society around me, that bad things could happen... but very infrequently were likely to.   That conclusion, however, was hardly an accident.  Super bad things happened to my family and myself at times throughout my childhood.  It was a discipline fostered by my parents:  to imagine the world as indifferent to my suffering, and (this is so incredibly important to my life) danger toward me as particular.  NOT in the parlance of more and more journalists recently: structural.  There was no organized effort to hurt me as a kid.  There is no such thing today.  There never has been.  There never will be. And, best of all, there virtually cannot be.  Especially if I think carefully about my actions, and alliances.

None of this is meant to be metaphorical or political whatsoever.  It just amazes me, that's all.  I am my parents age, more or less back then, now.  Many of my friends have children who are the age I was then, now.  I hear all the time about all the child molesters and thugs and rapists and boogiemen who are out to snatch their kids away from a summer camp, ect.  Don't get me wrong... I suppose I have some issues about leaving the kids with a charismatic religious figure with the presumption, "what could go wrong?"  But to see these children today, where an encounter with a random arena of their own devising being something of a tactical impossibility... it's clear as a bell to me what this is doing to the person they will become.  With plenty of exceptions, people often seem to grow into an expectation of an organized and controllable life:  where consequences are sequestered to a fairy land of exquisite presumptions.  That these same presumptions can have nothing to do with actual consequences to actual life is nobodies concern.  The one way this is comforting to me is my memory of my parents having serious trouble with almost exactly the same thing in our happy little leafy suburb while I was growing up.  Despite the ugliness of some aspects of my parents childhood, they knew that there was something honest about the odor of the real world:  and the "good cheer" of the suburbs, like a giant spritzer, casting a wide rain of Febreze all over a happy burg, seemed to them
queerly dischordant with what they simultaneously hated about their pasts, and seemed strangely attracted to.  Is that not the odd appeal of suffering?  Especially in hindsight and at some distance?

I do the same thing, more or less.  I have memories of incredible hardships I have endured (and I must say, earned, in my case) and they are oftentimes good memories.  I not only don't trust their goodness, but suspect that there is an underside to my nature that, while hardly provisioning me in the expedition of life with a fortune, none-the-less is as resilient as butyl-rubber, and therefore, simply takes the sleights of my past experience as motivating: like a cup of coffee takes its over active molecules for nothing but the sustaining heat of its cheery nature.  An odd, and overdeveloped metaphor, but there it is.  My point being, obviously, that I greatly prefer fooling myself about the specific details of my life.  The underlying machinery of the roller coaster might be nothing but rusty metal... but the ride is what this man is thrilled by.  Just listen to how manipulative that statement really is.  The ride.  Is it possible to dismiss that as haokum?  Well, of course.  It is an unsupportable bunch of mystical bull.  I'm just a wandering fool. There is no ride.  My hardships were due to poor decision making and childish risk taking.  I also preferred to not pay my elders with the helpful gift of my attentions.  Any surprise I ended up a hero of the trashbin, resplendent in rags:  friend to all who were not there?  Nabokov asks memory to speak.  I'm almost certain memory would be, should I invite her closer, a hell of a crappy choice in friends.  Perhaps I ought, in light of this, provide her a funeral service in celebration of, get this, my own life.  Such are the privileges of embodied metaphor.  I wouldn't do it to YOU, reader.  Promise.

Which, given the utterly unreliable mechanics of narrative brings me around to White Oak cemetery, at the side of which I stood, my head cocked like a silly dog, seven days ago.  It is a plot of land one block over from where I sit, on the north west end of the center of Bloomington.  This section of town was filled with workers mixed in race; predominantly trades-people and factory laborers.  Many of the houses from here and down the rail line toward Illinois (a short distance toward that state, I mean) are almost comically small.  And occupied at a rate that Atlanta and Phoenix would envy.  Gee, I wonder why.

Why it is called White Oak I couldn't say.  I suppose there are some white oaks around.  I don't really know what one looks like.  Mostly,  it seems Bloomington is filled with the red and pin oaks.  The latter, I believe, being virtually a domestic, given the vagaries of its range: hewing close to us, like rats and pigeons.  Harder to find in the dark brambly havens of deer and muskrat.  But White Oak?  It's probably heaving above my roof as I speak, weighing in on when to give it up, given last nights howling winds.  All the seven or eight hundred trees that have blown over in the last few months in Bloomington are riddled while whole and alive, on the inside with their Grim Reaper: mold.  The snap like toothpicks in shear winds, and even sometimes lesser howling.  My imaginary white oak figures when the going gets tough....  But I, typical human, am thinking hard on bigger things.

In any case, planted with small sweetgum trees near 7th, (thirsty, annoying, messy things, if you ask me) and running about the corner of that street and Adams, bounded on the North by the old Illinois line, the cemetery gets it share of traffic: cars, whizzing down eighth to avoid the dogleg that the city planners created when they divirted Kirkwood (5th street) into a boulevard that inexplicably, to the newcomer in town, becomes W. Third.

The reason for the dodge, which the newcomer is so busy driving, and probably texting, that they might not notice, is that White Oak became superseded by Rose Hill Cemetery, which sits, you guessed it, straight in the path of progress West, of Bloomington.  Rose Hill was built, in the 19th Century, when like Indiana itself, it was the West.  Now, it's an oddly quiet center to the ceaseless shuttling of the quick: whilst long lived trees fall down amongst the slow erosion of big names once of a time, but, yes, right here still.  One of the last of the large trees there has finally fallen down, my friend Shannon tells me.  In heaven, we will buy tickets to such things, but here, dear fellow mortal, we compose chainsaw elegy.  I can hear them singing, each to each.

Oddly enough, a week ago, I inspected most of the graves at White Oak. The small cemetery gets more traffic than the big one, strangely enough, because it is on the rail line, and the indigents, homeless, and time-shorn lovers of place and process (like me) find rights-of-way abutting cemeteries precisely the sort of places to make our passing. 

I wonder if little Minnie, the two year old I stared down upon, buried at the cemetery, likes the setting as much as I.  A modern adolescent would say, "there are so many things wrong with that question." A college student might say any number if things, of course, but sure to include, "her soul is not in that field."  But a certain number of us, when asked at the right moment, especially in the light of the moon would simply redden with emotion not meant for the light of day, and sink to the depths where men and women go to die with the matters that once composed the meaning of their lives: down with the ship/ off to the old folks home.  Yeah, Minnie, I DO think you are there.  I do.  And frankly, I have to laugh at the curdle of feeling that this inspires in the living, yes.... for hon, what do I know, which you have not had chance yet to even begin the telling?

We were a long time gone already when we yelped our first salute. Long, long times on either side of our life. My first  and lasts are fixed, but pardon me here for just a moment, these mundane passages for Minnie.  And she was hardly alone there.

So, in the sunlight (the perfect, yellow, warm, life giving, carcinogenic sunshine, that is) I took my hours pleasure that Saturday, a week ago in White Oak.  I had not known much in my hurried former moments near at hand.  I guess I thought I should go out and meet my neighbors, but the rest of  the quick were down at Market getting good weight and marveling at the riot this side of entropy.  Just as in Summer camp, I went to the quiet place and stood before graves marked, where the marble wasn't illegible or supine: Born 1778; Died 1804.  A body beneath my feet that old I usually imagine to be of the peoples my State was named for.  They are obviously in state everywhere.  We are baffled by the pattern of their fluid culture: unbounded by a curiosity of magnitudes: the very small thrown out, inconsequential, trending on the infinite.  They, therefore, have melded with the very stuff of our soils: but a dark stain on the red clay wall of our well.  Only slowly melding with us: unnoticed, unreal, uncatalogued, unimportant.  Even Minnie is at least a monument next to that smear of trace minerals that The Old Souls leave still with us.  But, on the bright side, their remains give off very little radioactivity these days.  So, if you made whiskey with them, by accident, the government wouldn't allow you to sell it, by regulation:  only the properly radioactive alcohol (made, in other words, of recently living stuff) can be sold.  They have a Geiger counter, and per regulation, use it, before sale.  This prevents alcohol being made for consumption, in America, with petroleum distillates, or some such thing.  And... if you have a Geiger counter, you can check the sleight remains and dark smudges that you occasionally find in our mineral Glacial/ eroded oceanic moraine, here in Indiana.  A lack of beeping and you might be communing with a stranger indeed. I'm tempted by an old Geiger counter for sale for seventy bucks down across from the Kroger on Second.  They call it, I kid you not, the Ghetto Kroger. 

My friend Brennan disappeared two weeks ago.  I took a few days for me to hear that his Mom was sick and possibly ailing.  She, in fact, did die, which saddened me considerably, given my awareness of his closeness to her (she lived here.)  Additionally, I  had only just met her, a few weeks back.  She had seemed nearly as twinkling and in humor as her son, who walks a hell of a tightrope wherever you string it.  She, apparently, was a somewhat liberated woman back in the day, and any ropes meant for her today, she had craftily braided into something decorative, oftentimes presented to the world through her children, or on the porch of her small home, which I had sat in a car outside of from time to time.  She was and remains, in short, a person who took these prosaic materials of our curious life, and made them something, which to her, surrounded and nested her within a meaning personal and otherwise.  All of that energy remains.  I was standing outside her house yesterday, having just seen Brennan for the first time in weeks (at his store.)  After work I went by to say hello, and prior to going to a meeting together, we went to water his Mom's plants/ intentions/ gifts to the world/ burdens/ celebrations.... you get the picture.  The dog also needed some attention.  My prejudice being what it is, I summarily thrust my way into the garden to attempt to find a hydrant and water the flowerpots.  In and amidst the thick probity of perennials and other signs of life, on tops of facts of life, on top of sheer dirty tricks of life, I failed to locate the, now obviously vanishingly unimportant form of even a hose.  I called out to the dog walker for help.  He told me that the hydrant was where it would normally be, which is beneath a good chunk of sequestered carbon dioxide, glowing menacing green.  I parted the vegetation, beaming a bee square in the face and gained purchase on the giver of life's elixir.  Piece of cake!

Standing beneath a behemoth fir tree, and before some Neo-Classical arborvitae, I wondered at the house and garden of Brennan's late mother while watering, looking for all the neighborhood like a bum peeing
in that saintly woman's Zinnias. Careful not to encourage the plants too much, I turned off the water, which, went about as well as turning it on, and while waiting for the dog to bring Brennan back, I snooped around the property.  His Mom was a champion finder of valuable stuff, and the yard had little grace notes of her canny capabilities all over it.  Most of the stuff was beneath the celebration of this particular season, but, some was not.  I looked at the stuff that was not.

Ducking beneath Spaceship Fir Tree, I went around the side of the house to see if the Earth really did continue back there, and sure enough, even some of the small house did as well, in the spectral light of that Gymnosperm.  Along the foundation wall (not leaking!) of the house ran a ladder, which my criminal mind noticed, to its pride, and my shame was unlocked , and I smiled at the prospect of ripping anyone like Brennan and his Mom off.  Such is the manner in which rather effective phantoms, or Banshees are born.  Then I noticed that upon the ladder was what looked like some very oddly colored squirrels.  Upon closer inspection the squirrels turned out to be small kittens, three of them, one white, the others who knows.  One of them darted into a hole exactly the size of their bodies, small but not tiny.  I walked to the front of the house and garden, and saw Brennan coming out of the front door.  "Hey," I said, "did your mom have cats?"

"Yeah," he said, "she has one in the house." At least, he said something like that.

"Well," I said, "she's got kittens living in the crawlspace.  Do you suppose she was feeding them?"

Ever the investigator of aesthetic appeal he asked me, "long or short haired?"

I gave him a look that forms one part of the basis for our friendship.  It wasn't flattering to either of us.

"Do you honestly think I know how long their hair was?  I thought they were rats for Chirstsake!" I pleasantly suggested.

His endurance of my over reaction was the sort of look he often gets while enduring noise coming from my direction.  He was, no doubt, weighing something toward a rate I can't fathom.  We both were smiling.  Kittens are after all, a smiling variety of vermin.

"I'll need to catch them somehow. Do you know how to trap them?" he said, eventually.

"You're on your own there, buddy.  By the way, who planted those arborvitae, your Mom?"


"You mean the pine tree? That was our first Christmas tree, twenty-four years ago." he said.

I didn't mean the tree.  Though, given what he'd just told me, I had trouble emoting much that was intelligent.

"I guess we should be glad you didn't plant six of them, huh?" I said, more in wonder, looking up at the thing, then anything.

He gave me the gift of his laughter.  I guess I'm partial to people who are tolerant.

While driving to a meeting, I asked Brennan a little more about the last two weeks, and with great calm and very much out of character, he slowly related some of the details of the passing of his mother.  He told me that they had wanted to bury her in Kokomo (I think) but that the expense was somewhat crushing, and given all the other things that needed doing they had settled on a place in town.

"And where is she buried?" I asked him.

"We buried her in White Oak, " he said.

I am obviously off today, given the length of this post.  When I have finished typing these words, and attended to some people who asked my attention, I am going to go where I have never been  asked for anything.  But, it will in some senses not be a return.  For the sod is turned over, and some ashes have been placed upon a deliberate spot particular to no soul who still commands the difficult carriage of our burdens, and our gratitude.  To the shade of some trees I will step... their shadows soon enough their own resting place.  And to the edge of a grave not yet marked even by a stone from her children, the vernal green that followed her will be gone: but return.  I will stand there with her, and Minnie, and with the others in White Oak.  Only paces from my home, and but a few from my habits.  I know nothing of their place and time to which I too must return.  But I will stand there none-the-less for a friend, and myself, and from those habits, apart again, as ever, in summer camp; in half of life.

(This is for Brennan, who I told, "I hadn't realized how much I care about you." when he returned.  Such cognizance need not be repeated. And also for Harlequin, who has her own realms, shorn from this half.  To return, Harlequin, as the grieving are often asked, is, I think, an unfair request, given the unity of life and of death.  We are shorn, yes, but the world is united.  I can not be human and with Minnie and all the rest.  With grief, I believe connections are none-the-less made.  We owe no-one a return, a birth, or an innocence.  Thanks for your friendship. And your honesty.  I suppose it is sad, to say nothing of dicey, to make so plain a case, as is my habit, for the beauty of pain.  But there it is.)

The Unbearable Lightness of Ancestory

It doesn't matter to whom the viscera go, but rather whom holds that quill which might dribble the ink of record.  To the far from pacific, to say nothing of rested, in Heaven, this sad burden of History has passed to the hands of their children: us.  As with most things inherited: beauty, health, wealth, intelligence... the gifted can hold readily their privilege, but make of mockery of its use.  A rich man will spend a dollar in pleasure no more readily than he will stroke his fancy clothes, like a pet, all weekend.  He can be forgiven what he has forgotten: he lives in the base of his brain.  A thousand dollar palace of withdrawl: only to return when, Jesus willing, his thrill is gone.  How sharp the stony floor of the beach, where, the ecstatic comber plays.  How heavy the ectoplasmic hand of his ancestors: yet his excuse is at hand, for father, mother, grandmother, uncle; soon, he will be dead like you.

There the monolith of innocence.  No touch to crumble it's mortar.  No mark, even, of the craftsman, or woman.  Simply the blank cry of hunger, the curdling scream of abandonment.  How we sophists smile as we remember a time when we could look away from the edifice of our making: our grizzled sculpture scraped with  paw marks of atonement.  Do we stand, so marked, to any account?  From the eye of science we're but vessels/ from the eye of religion the serfs of both king and our nature/ from the eye of our experience we dance through the silent questions of our bodies constant song.  "How are you doing?" to another.  Awaiting an answer from the self. 

With What Will You Ice My (Piece Of) Cake

Oh, shiver me timbers and pull my leg
It wouldn't be hard, you know
I once met a woman who told me, "Hey,"
You can't have a girl for the gold.

You can make all your millions
And lay Thee down,
To a rest only innocents take
But a beau shouldn't hope for another round
For your loves just the ice on the cake!"

I could tell she meant well... after a spell
Where I heard only cruelty and shame
All the earthly pursuits ("like Hell!")
I despised,
There was something from her I might gain.
Ha! There was something from her I might gain..

I'd been living a life of Riley and Gin
Where I'd open my eye to the day...
Hell had no fancy for the bed I laid in,
But a friend in this man in its way
Yeah, a friend in this man, in its way.

Oh, I guess I'm still in, or counting out
For my plans are anything but laid
It's a bat to the face and a hand so sour
To be hoping for things from a maid
It's a piecemeal job (if you're paid!)

Now please don't be cruel, if I remember you
As the one who had these things to say
Life has it's way, from the red to the blue
From the beggar to fool, from the beggar to fool.
And Death has its way with Whom?
Amd Death its way with Whom?

There are yards filled with men,
So much better than Sin,
And the daisies and granite too
Though a whistlers haste, is a waste, just a waste

For it takes more than observing
Beneath the heavenly pages
 More than observing is due
 Lest the rock and the weeds request their wages
And shake down a widow or two
And shake down the very few;.

Lest the rock and the weeds request their wages
And shake down a widow or two
And shake down the very few.

Move Over Gentile

  (No joke, some of my best friends are gentiles....)

If bacon could straighten the wandering Jew
Whilst Euclid spins like a pig on a spit
For, I noticed the sidewalk won't give him his due
Since it curves around obstacles... trees.. to wit;

Some say that hunger brings out the tiger in you
Others give lovely and profound advice
Some only love life when they've had a few
Then measure but, once; and cut, oddly, twice.

If taken by odds that you think aren't your due
You might take to praying to God for a bit
The diaphanous hanging warmth of your blues
Blown 'bout by Grace no man can inherit

Once shaken with shame, on this path curlicued
The Classics in shambles... the libraries dump...
By the grave with a veiled but broad daylit widow
Who's head held up high, above shoulders that slump

Ask her, though veil there obscures her eyes,
"Is this a loved one, beneath the old weathered stone?
Whom do you honor with your dress and your guise?
Does the savor of life follow the host?"

Hidden beneath the black fine worked fabric
Through the trick of the light, and tradition too
The eyes of this loved one, turn to your own
And given the voice, the mouth, too, you assume.

"There were stretches, I guess, where I was sometimes unhappy,
Where I hated, at times, who he was, what he'd been...
But, there was joy, and there were moments, circumscribed by our marriage
That gave an address of the person I'd been.

His name was... it's still strange to say that,
Charles L. Cohen, when I took the name,
And it's safe to say, from this grave where I've sat,
Many times I've realized I'd do it again."

Her gloved hand rose, to the edge of her veil,
When the voice therein had finished her words
As she lifted what hid a West Russian face,
I felt my own take a slight pinkish turn.

"We wait all our lives, for things, young man.
Things of the world, recommended and forbidden.
And I wait yet again; do you understand?
But, not for the things that I've already been given."

I looked at her still, silent, form for awhile,
Somewhat speechless, ashamed? I couldn't be certain;
Perhaps, like a monkey, I gave her a smile,
Oh, she beamed back at me, of that be assured.

We turned our sweet mirth to Charles old stone,
I had no desire to ask after its years,
And I took her hand, as we stood there alone,
Some distance from shame, and let fall some tears..

Even The Clever Ought to Do Some Things

In the course of my advice taking, especially where I am expected to share, it is frequently pointed out that I trend toward intellectualization, and, moreover, that such a trend is, fair to middling, not a great strategy in life.  Honestly, I never regarded that as very likely the truth.  And,while I'm confident that a resolution to such questions are some distance from the human collective capacity at understanding, still, there are interesting ways to consider that damage caused and, more specifically, the damage I continue to cause, by intellectualization of, what in the end, is very likely to be stuff meant for the sacred; untouched by human minds.

Who doesn't wish to touch what they are intstructed not to?  But once touched, who considers the value of the same unaltered?  We, by the very nature of our being, sully what we wish to remain pristine: and moreover, complain at the rate (slow) the debauchery takes.... given the consequent lack of benefit to our collective coffers (economy.)  This view is unlikely to be arugued against by a clearheaded observer, but remains unutterable in the company of common sense.  Sunlight must be expended in the creation of energy... no matter how much you might which to bottle it.  Even on a cloudy day.

What is less romantic than intellectualization?  Your lady calls you (these days) while you drive home.  Once you get there, from the sound of her voice you can expect certain (surprise) lovely feelings.  It can't always be this way... so, no fool, you have the rational response.  While smiling, you move toward the refrigerator... while smiling she takes you to bed.  While smiling, later, you remove your leg from her twisted limbs. While smiling she forces you to lay victim to a backrub.  While moaning at the fact that this can't be the same life you, now, distantly recall sometimes sucks, you somehow manage to fumble at some kind of reciprocation to her talented removal of all pain in your short, harsh existence.  She looks deep into your eyes, and a very slight glassiness developing, as if she's just remembered that nothing, including very much yourselves, stays the same, she says, "how bout some beer and a movie... and please, sweetheart, smoke a cigarette.  Two or three won't kill you, and its drives me wild."  You're looking at her, wondering at her.  You reply, "By all means, I'll take you up on that offer, sweetie.  You'll have to excuse me, however, for the sheer sense of astonishment that I feel, when I consider, as I have been this entire evening, that you are bound for nothing more, in the end, then heat death." 

The look, as is entirely appropriate, she gives, is probably less elegant than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but, unquestionably promises a great deal more, in terms of human affairs and actual living, then any discourse on entropy could ever, ever, ever promise. Yet, here we are, Lord.

Electrons (basically elegantly "supposed" concepts) do a great deal of stuff, as they make their way from the chloroplasts of plants and find their way to your girlfriends face.  But that doesn't mean she is joking, when she extorts that molested sunshine to tell you, "you probably shouldn't talk when I'm enjoying myself.  There's a sort of square of the distance relationship there."  Harsh.... but hey, they say in some Arab cultures women are the repositories of shame and consequence. In my culture they are thoroughfares of electrons taking the scenic route.  And do we men know it?  Go to jail.  Hang out on a ship of (generally recognized as) fools.  The VIP electrons you encounter there will pretend they're Nutrinos.

All the same... cleverness and amusement can only distance a dyed in the wool fool for so long.  Eventually he will question the nature of coitus en flagrante.  Which is not exactly a first person sort of thing.  Though it should be?  She nods.  Then... she shakes her head so sadly.  "Your mouth is a journey some thoughts shouldn't take."

It's nothing personal, honey, my thinking.  "Oh," she replies, the word containing so very much meaning that you just forgot about the promise of robots, forever.  Ray Kurzweil appears between you and says, magic being nothing less then technology yet developed, "you know, Andy, all this relationship needs, is a dash of nano-technnology, given the trends..."  She politely, charmingly, and skillfully asks Mr. Kurzweil to leave.  Then, when you ask if you should go as well, she turns, places her oddly smooth, attractive feet on the floorboards (which, are anything, but classicaly definable as "attractive."  Only the human perceptual frame can allow the foot to be nothing less than a foot.) Her back is as you imagine.  But her back is also real.  She says, "I flipped a coin in my head." You ask, "why did you do that."  She says, "He came up first."  

On your way to your home in the car, while driving, you remember her back, and assume it hasn't changed.  But, four years later you will have trouble recalling her entire appearance.  Which, will do wonders for your hard faught attempt to never metion to your new love, that four year old day, which your new love wouldn't guess in a million years to gift you with, the requieted, back rub, film and booze and cigarettes, part.  Which is fine.  You've willed a new kind of bovine attentiveness toward women, which, outside of certain sparkling exceptions, where you both are chatting like schoolgirls, works far better than Cartesian curiosity (to say nothing of detachment.)

Of course, shockingly, none of this has a thing at all to do with girls.  They are as subject to the ravages of philosophical objectivication as men.  It's just, your friends gift you with silences... the women are body snatched.  One disturbs more than the other.  Though, it could be argued, that it's frankly disturbing for a grown woman to explain what a bore is to a bore.  It's isn't exactly ice cream beneath a high intensity discharge light.  On a hot summer night.

Beside excellent advice as to how you might make your ankles seem bulkier (with big socks) the Second Law of Thermodynamics is impractical.  My legs would pass on a woman.  And women DO pass on them.  Then, like some strange foreigner straight off the boat, a woman comes along and wants to conspire with you to confuse people as to the outside diameter of your, what, femur? Tibia?  "It matters?" she says.  Reminding you of how much you like listening to her talk to her mother.  What is that strange muscularity of the human voice, Hal?  Sing me a song Hal.  Sing it like you used to.  Very funny the robot doesn't say.  Very very funny, mean human.

She reads these very words.... this one.... and this one... and this. And despite the fact that you, meaning me, regard.... this... as somewhat amusing, she gives you an empty looks, then squares her jaw and says, "You know, Andy... not so differently than my German mother, I have an affection for the stuff that is tangible, the stuff that is real.  You might regard your bank balance as an abstraction, I regard it as the most reliable of bedrock.  It is not my intention to mine it.  I appreciate it, like Hillary might, 'because it's there.'  Or rather, as sometimes is the case, 'because it's [not].  That the balance on the screen is made of electrons, reminds me of the sound of my Daddy's heart, when my ear lies on his chest. His heart, like the electrons, is not for me.  But it's so reliable, Andy.  You know what I mean?  Only rarely does the fungus leave the lichen.  Only when it is no longer needed.  You see how much less reliable my presence in your life seems when I talk this way?"  I nod, and say, "I hear you loud and clear, but just now I need to read about lichen."  "And listen to the song "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" she implies with that bizarrely expressive fury.  And I didn't even spurn her.  Formally.

Only a fool wouldn't be frustrated.  I sent a friend of mine, a therapist in a sense, a long early draft of my still unperfected essay/ blogpost "Nightmares For Sawyers", and he never responded to it.  Most people regard lengthy expressions of contemplative minds, a sort of, unvarnished good.  Extremely experienced social workers and psycologists are far more interested in normative behavior.  "Nightmare For Sawyers" is probably going to one day be a somewhat foundational essay in a collection I'll put together from this blog, about ecology, and congnitive implications in my/our consideration of the "natural" world and the more pedestrian one (questions of artificial unity and division.)  All that my friend wanted was a garden variety letter from me, about a garden variety foundation.  Love thrives on bricks and mortar.  No sonnet could outdo news of your homefire burning.  In such a light, the poet is the tawdry guy who earned his reputation.  Luckily, History regards the dead as somewhat necessarily so.  And once in the "proper" condition, History can make space that need not include all the details of your County Courthouse Platbook.  But while your alive, that Platbook will tell a dull tale that amounts to a path more likely to include the smile of a maid.  Shakespeare be damned.

As is the case with both Hal's song (in 2001) and Bogie's song (in Casablanca) the question comes down to "fundamentals applying" and the impermenence of existence. Will it be the "bicycle" or the "carriage"?  You better be a better singer, in somewhat better condition then Hal, should you wish Daisy to mistake your bicycle chariot for a fundamental thing, upon application.  She may, and properly so if she's a smart woman, apply your query to file thirteen. 

The last thing in the world required in even this pedestrian circumstance is some kind of intellectualization.  Any fixation of circumstance to the firmament of "understanding" must include some serious practical footwork. Outside that, your dreaming. 

It's funny, but, despite my fears, at times, I'm not dreaming.  This exercise, while for any number of real and imagined women, friends, family and yes, you, dear reader, is not a dream.  It's an exploration of the insanity implied my routine cognitive iteration.  At some point you step off and say, "all right." I know certain things, and they apply to certain things.  The danger is to go for knowing when doing is much better.  I have suffered plenty of times an ignorance of that fact.  However, my humor, here, so inexpertly applied, is meant to review for myself, and hopefully, you, that yeah, I'm a work in progress, but I deserve the life which includes attention to the basics, but also the gifts of the poets embrace. 

And I promise to consider the square of the distance, dear.


"No community can be truly had, where there is not space for the intolerable to abide."  ----I forget who said this, but it's a key theme of my annoyingly thoughtful friend, Jim.

What My People Call A Plaza

Growing up a white kid from the suburbs afforded me a lot of opportunities, and pleasures.  I ran in the woods.  I ran in my neighbors yards.  I ran on the sidewalks of my town as well.  Living in a small town, traffic wasn't too bad, and sometimes there were no sidewalks.  But that was ok, since there were very few cars, and most of the time I was in a residential neighborhood where nobody ever walked except for recreation.

After I dropped out of college and moved back to my home town, I quickly came to realize that I more or less could not afford to live there.  Rent was more expensive than I wished.  And opportunities mostly presented themselves outside of the suburbs... in town.  So eventually, for a lot of different reasons, I got a job delivering pizza and managing a pizza joint at the corner of Westlane (71st street) and Michigan Rd.  Also known as 421, Martin Luther King, and Northwestern Ave.  A historically interesting corner of Marion County, Metro Indianapolis. 

This corner was a place I had grown up driving past, and being in the near vicinity to.  There was a child care Kiddie College just a block or so away. A number of stores, and dry cleaners, some of which my family continued to use for nearly twenty years (more or less my entire childhood.) And, most of all, for this story, the grocery store, on the corner, that anchored a thirty year old shopping strip, called Westlane Shopping Center. It was a corner I was extremely familiar with... especially from running errands for my parents.  And yet, it was always a place I had visited by car.  To this day, I have never visited it in any other way.  And yet, as I came to discover, working at a pizza place on this prominent corner of my part of town.... many, many people in that neighborhood did not own a car.  They used public transport, or walked, wherever they had their business.

As I settled into my job delivering pizza to the neighborhood, I relished learning more about the geography of that part of my hometown: the Northwest corner of Indianapolis.  For one thing... for all the times I had driven my vehicle south on Michigan or Zionsville Road... once I got to 71st and Michigan, I really didn't know so well where the rest of the landmarks in town were.  It didn't really occur to me, immediately, that St. Vincent's Hospital was more or less a few city blocks away on 86 St. down Harcourt Rd.  It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that "short cut" out.  Even though every map of the area had the same black and colored lines connecting the hospital to my new workplace.  The map in my head, as I was to learn and be somewhat philosophically curious about, did not comport with the map on paper and, perhaps most of all, the roads themselves.  As you might guess, I am naturally bad with geographical situational awareness, and this new job of knowing the best route through an area I naturally had a poor abstract concept of (on multiple levels) amounted to a very interesting puzzle for a hilariously long time for Mr. Coffey.

In a sense, I simply pretended that I belonged in a job that I was naturally bad at.  And worked in a neighborhood that was a bit rougher than any I'd ever spent more than just a few minutes in.  The combination fascinated me.

Perhaps the third day I worked at the pizza joint, a new 17 year old kid, named Scott came in the door looking for a job.  He called out the name of Jaykita, a girl who worked there making pizza's and answering the phones.  Jay exclaimed, "hey!" and ran around the counter in an obvious act of familiarity and reconnection.  Being new, and knowing neither of them, I just  kept to myself. But, as it turned out, Jay and Scott knew each other from school and Church. But, neither had seen each other recently, since Scott had been in jail.  Now that he'd been released, Scott was looking for a job.  Within a few days he began working at the pizza joint.  And a few days after that, the manager asked me if I'd give him a ride home, down 71st to a somewhat bad apartment complex called Timber Falls.  "Sure," I told my manager.  "As long as he don't mind holding the pizza's while I deliver them first." 
"No problem," said Scott generously, "no problem at all."
So, while delivering the pizza's, and with Scott in the car, I asked him if he'd mind just sitting there, while I ran in each building with the pizza, and left the car still running.  "Where else am I gonna go?" he asked. 
As if to answer the question while I drove to the next house, Scott told me, "Say, this is a nice ride.  Olds Cutlass Sierra... where'd you get this car?" 
"Well," I told him, "unfortunately my Grandma died.  I guess I was given a good deal on her car. I payed a few thousand for it... I guess it was worth about five or six at the time.  I got a really good deal from her estate." 
"Yeah, this car is beautiful," said Scott.
Not wanting to seem like a spoiled brat... I just gave him my most convincing "yeah" I could.
"In fact," said Scott, "I'd be tempted to steal this car if it wasn't yours. But, I wouldn't steal your car, man."
We both laughed... "glad to hear that Scott."
I pulled into his neighborhood, waving at the superfluous guard at the shack at it's entrance.  It was not only the one neighborhood with a guard who controlled access to the parking lot---  it was also one of the most dangerous neighborhoods and one of the more expensive section 8 neighborhoods.  The guard was a way to confuse people into spending more on a worse place to live.  You'd call this irony, if it were in any sense different than simple greed. 

All of this was between 6.6 and 7 miles from my childhood home.  A remarkable statistic, which provided no little shame to my heart and mind over the years. 
And that was how I met Scott.  It became a ritual to take him home... and it became a welcome sight to see him walk in for a pizza to take home to his Mom, or more likely... to take to a girl.  He had a fast smile, and a clever way of including everyone in his orbit.  He was tough, but easy on others... and he didn't seem to be up to anything too terrible these days... though he was always, like most people I worked around at the joint, up to something.
The years passed and I came and went from the pizza place to work on a farm and start a cleaning service.  On and off I worked for the pizza joint for two and a half years.  Finally, I found myself one November without a car, home or job.  I was twenty-three years old and had mined everyone in my life clean of ore... and I was more or less at my wits end.  My car had broken down in a more or less safe place.. so I could sleep in it until it got too cold.  But, I needed a job to make money for somewhere to live and eat.  I needed a solution to my circumstance.
One day I called the old pizza joint, thinking they probably had no jobs available, and one of the guys I used to work with there, John, was working and answered the phone.
"Hey, Andy, how are you?" he said in his utterly confident way. 
"Hey John, I'm all right.  What are you up to these days, delivering pizza?" I asked, figuring he'd make fun of me for asking such an obvious question.
"No, man, I'm the General Manager these days."
"Your kidding! What would you say if I told you I needed a job?"
"I'd say that's why your calling me," he said.
We laughed.
"Yeah, you know. It is." 

The next day I had my uniform, a place to live, and a vehicle to drive.  I would be working from 9 AM to 2:30 AM every day, with overtime.  Within a week I would make more money than I'd made in the previous month and a half.  I made nearly a thousand dollars a week.  Long hours, overtime and tips.

John was doing a fantastic job running the place.  It's numbers had grown enormously over what I had seen in previous years.  I had managed the place a little and knew enough that I could see his delivery times had been whittled down to the very edge of what physics and municipal law (and perhaps a bit of poor judgment) could allow.  In short: the times were fast.

This resulted in low return calls... happy customers... hot pizza's... and more money.  Drivers could expect on a six hour shift to make between $50-70 in tips.  Plus minimum wage.  And... I was clocking thirty plus hours in overtime per week.  My checks were grotesquely large... I had no time off, but with Christmas coming I didn't care.  My phone call to John meant I could tow my Grandma's old car to Scott's and ask how much he wanted for it.  He gave me a poker face and the car a pass.  I paid for its disposal at a metals facility.

By the following late February I had an apartment, near by, was off the streets and had been promoted to the assistant manager of the place.  More or less, I closed it down every night with shift managers.  I worked five days a week, and had two days off.  I still made great money, plus occasional extras in tips, ect.

I did notice, unfortunately, that John had a new girlfriend who was sixteen years old.  I felt like I should at least be civil, since John didn't seem to understand what I was talking about when I said the words, "statutory rape."  I am not proud that I didn't walk away at the moment I learned of the relationship.

He hired his new squeeze, of course.  And one day while we were opening the restaurant, she ran to the bathroom in a manner that gave a person the sense that she had to get sick.  I looked at John, "you simply gotta tell me, now, that she might have the flu."
John smiled broadly, perhaps with even a tinge of pink in his cheeks, "no.  I think she's pregnant."
"From one of her other boyfriends, right?" I said.
He guffawed.  "No, Andy. I think we're gonna have a kid."
"Let's not get the cart before the horse, here, old man.  She just had breakfast.  Now the breakfast is in the toilet.  Your other women had something like ten kids over the last twenty years.. and now, your picking out names?"
"I'm pretty excited," he said, as Nadia exited the bathroom. 
"You ok?" I asked her.  I knew that such a question was patently ridiculous in the neighborhood I was in, under the circumstances which she seemed to accept, and given she probably still had a bit of her breakfast to clean off her lips.
"Yeah," she said, "morning sickness sucks."
I don't know what the look on my face was exactly just then... but it was the same look that makes my friends laugh today... when all you can do, is agree exponentially.

A few days later I was exiting my car and John walked out of the pizza place toward me, with huge tears in his eyes.  "Nadia bled out today," he said, throwing his arms around me.
Feeling the shuddering and heartfelt sobs that were coming from my totally screwed up friend made me confused as hell.  But, somehow, I patted his back, and kept my sense that the world was sometimes an exceedingly balanced place to myself. 
"There, there," I remember thinking, "surely one of your other twelve known children's birthdays is coming up soon.  Look out for quality time."  He was really sobbing. 
"Your my best friend, Andy."
"Well.... thanks, John. I'm sorry about Nadia.  Mother Nature just sometimes spares one heartbreak with another. But that doesn't make it easy."
The rest of the day I felt like the biggest jerk in history, and therefore was completely unprepared or aware of what far more important things had entered my head and ears over the previous months.  I'm almost always as stupid as I need to be.

The next day was pay day, and as per usual I walked the length of the strip center to the grocery store (the pizza joint was on the far end) to use my bank, which was within it.  Depositing my check, and feeling sort of amazed for the thousandth time that I was being paid so much to do so little, I was walking back toward the store, on the sidewalk in front of a CVS, when I saw Scott walking my way.  Scott, in the intervening years had cleaned up his act.  He looked wonderful, clean and stylish... like only the gals and guys in that neighborhood could pull off.  Not in my wildest honky dreams was I ever going to walk down the street looking as good as Scott on his average day. His hair corn-rowed and his shoes a few paychecks down.  His walk, which portrayed a canny awareness mixed with a stoic toughness, either of which would have simply been lies had I the ability to transmit them in my gait (I didn't and don't.  I carried a baseball bat, when delivering in those neighborhoods.  When a nice customer would see the bat, upon which I rested their pizza, and inevitably asked, "what's that for?"  I always replied, "to beat people up with, Maam.  Perhaps you noticed the size of my wrists?"  Generally the person would either frown in disapproval, or laugh.  Both couldn't decipher my meaning.  And both were successful in creating their own.
I was mugged four times at gunpoint, and shot at once, over those two and one-half years.  Fifty or sixty times I was approached where I saw a man look at the bat in my hands (a large, expensive softball bat, and a 24" Maglight on my belt) and turn and walk away.  I usually called out, "Where I come from we always say Howdy!"  I'm ashamed to admit I fantasized about being attacked... and acted this out a few times.  Then again, sometimes before you knew what had happened, someone was flossing your teeth with a Glock.) 
Countless people I never saw none-the-less never approached because of the bat and my changed bearing as I became used to being attacked. 
There was also the unpleasant business of getting myself out of trouble at the bar with John.  The less said about that the better.  It was probably a good thing that I never saw any family or friends in those years.  Sometimes I looked pretty crazy.  I'd forget I had a busted lip or black eye, or bruises on my arms and face, and I'd go to Wal-Mart or worse, the Mall.  I'd look at some kid in the store aisle as I passed a family walking to get some motor oil or what have you.  The Mom would grab her kid away from me, as if I were a wild animal. As a confirmed member of white middle class suburban heaven... I could do nothing but laugh at such an action by a good parent.  These days it doesn't strike me as nearly so funny.

So, walking back to the store... in the somewhat safer circumstances of no longer working in the streets, I was in a great mood that day.  Money lining my pockets. My expenses low.  Hardened by my experiences, and made far more safe by my promotion.  I didn't know what I was going to do with myself eventually... but for the time being they were planning on just giving me the store, and giving John another poor performer, in an even larger market, to turn around.  We were certainly running huge numbers. Sometimes hundreds of pizza's catered before lunch even started.  When a driver couldn't make it, John and I would both pocket fifty bucks from the gratuity, before the store would even open.  We were minting money... on a Tuesday morning. 

Like I said, I looked up and there's old Sugar Man himself, Scott.  "Hey Scott. How are you on this fine, fine Friday afternoon?"
"Oh, I'm okay," said Scott, looking over my right shoulder and turning as if to check for bad business at his five o'clock. He wouldn't make my gaze.
"Great," I said, "I guess I'll see you in a bit, at the store. You work tonight?"
"Naw," he said, "I got stuff to do, and I'm not scheduled." He said most of this while walking away. Something was wrong.
Scott had been going to the most prominent local Baptist Church.  He'd given himself fully to the Church's activities, and programs. And, as should be the case, he found the values in his fellow parishoners to be worthy of emulation.  He'd been doing a great job with that, and seemed to be thriving. I stood there a little worried, from his tone, that something was throwing his game off.  I really cared about him, and wanted him to be OK.  I was rooting for this guy I'd met straight out of jail.  He had never stolen my car.  In many ways, his story had stolen my heart, however.
On his way back, Scott looked up, and his mien was not that of an old friend.  "Still here?" he said, without smiling.
"Yeah, man. You've got me worried about you," I said.
"Worried about me?" he said, somewhat accusingly.  "Andy, I'm  worried about you.  Aren't you?"
"No. I'm not. Why are you worried?" I asked.
"I'm worried that you don't seem to have a problem with John's behavior as long as he still gives you your money," said Scott.
"Do you think he's stealing, Scott?" I asked, genuinely interested.
"No, you fool," he said, disgusted. "I don't know why I'm wasting my time talking to you.  Can't you see he's screwing his help?"
"Well... sure, he shouldn't have hired Nadia. That's unethical.  I'm pretty sure the corporation is more in love with their numbers then they would be proving something in a court of law.  But that's just my sense of things."
"Naw, Andy, they're not going to need no court of law," he said, looking out over the pine trees above Westlane Laundermat.
"Well," I said, "I agree... I'm mean, Scott, look around."
"That's what you need to do," he said, looking straight in my eyes. "You know the truth, but you aren't paying any attention. I used to respect you. But you are putting your friendship ahead of the right thing here.  He's got you fooled.  And a smart guy, Andy, who acts like a fool?  What do you call that?"
"Well fine, Scott. I'm a fool then.  What else is going on? Is he stealing?"
"He might be stealing, but I'm not gonna worry about any of that.  He's screwing everyone, Andy. Everyone! Everyone under twenty-five and female.  That's how he does the schedule, man. That's how they get their hours. You didn't know this."
I was having, I admitted, a bit of trouble focusing just then.  My heart growing with gratitude toward this wonderful, tough, smart man; I felt like an idiot. And my wallet was starting to feel thinner (though truthfully, also a bit familiar).  I spoke to John about the allegations.  He agreed and he denied. But mostly he just seemed bored by the conversation.  It didn't concern him.  It was merely about him.

I called my regional and district managers.   I told them that I was aware that I had been working for a sexist and fairly conservative corporation since the beginning, but I had to ask if they were aware that their star manager in the area was having trouble keeping his ink pen in the modern style.
"What do you mean by that," said the dumber of the two.
"Well, Terry," I asked him, "when's the last time you dipped your nib?  I hope you're recording this conversation.  Your star manager, John, has been screwing his employees.  This has come to my attention, and I'm sorta figuring you already knew.  Then again, I had been sorta paying less attention then I should have.. so.  I'm going to help you transfer in a new guy, but after what these girls have been through, and given that in the society I live in today they have no other real choices... I think the ethical thing would be for me to train the new guy, and leave within the month."
And that's more or less what happened.  I went and worked for minimum wage in my home town. I had always thought it would be great to work in my home town at this job that had been so dangerous, at 71st St.  But, when I got into the actual job in my home town, across from all the old familiar buildings... I just had lost any desire to be associated with the job or company.  Within a few weeks I quit.  I had three hundred dollars in my pocket. I went to a few organic farms and tried to get a job. They laughed.  They didn't know or need me.    So, with a rental car I couldn't pay for, and enough cash to make it for less then a week, I drove to Bloomington. I told myself I'd moved.  I had visited a few weeks before on a cool May day.  Once enough rain fell over my cheeks, I felt just the slightest bit clean for the first time in a few years.  Even if I had to sleep beneath the Hostas ( which, the first day I was there, I saw pushing their leaf mould straight off the ground) I would sleep better than I had in months. 
I moved to Bloomington and slept in my car for about thirty-five days.  I met some new friends and got an apartment and a job within two months.  I'd settled in with a girl within fourteen months. I felt slightly sick of, but incapable of leaving my new home town within two years.  That's when I knew I'd found my place.  And I don't think it was raining that day.

Two years after I moved to Bloomington, I was returning to Indianapolis to visit my therapist and an old friend of mine in Broad Ripple.  My usual route to Broad Ripple was over 71st St. past Michigan Rd to Meridian. Mostly for old times sake. I still love Pike Township from New Augusta to Meridian Hills.  Memories of childhood and the playing of softball with bad guys heads in the hood, seems fresher than fresh when you've spent a few years around your average well behaved cat from Bloomington. I couldn't even fathom a black eye.  And hey, just the other day a woman saw me playing with her kid and asked me if I was married.  I didn't ask her why she didn't worry about her child's safety around me.  I was glad she noticed how much I love kids.  I was glad I noticed how much I loved kids.

Anyhow, I went to see my therapist, Jim, and then went and had dinner and spent the night on my old buddy Daniel's couch.  The next morning we went for coffee and scones at the local coffee shop, and I took off, retracing my route back toward my past... toward 71st and Michigan. Noticing that my gas was a bit low for the short trip back to Bloomington, I pulled into the Shell gas station that remains where I used to work for those years... and have driven past my whole life. 

While pumping my gas I looked around me.. like everyone pumping gas.  I looked over at the window where I once knew all the attendants names: they were thankfully on to greener pastures... I hoped.  And I looked to where the public phones were, and noticed, given that someone was on the phone, they obviously, unlike in prosperous Bloomington, got some usage.  The man on the phone hung up and turned around.  I felt a strange sensation of extreme joy, and a haunting fear.  It was Scott. My old friend who straightened me out.  Who never would have stolen my Olds.  Who looked odd.  Then again, he was squinting at me as well.
"Yeah, man.  I haven't got any hair left... it's Andy, Scott.  I'm uglier than ever."
"Andy... holy.. Andy how you doin..." he called out to me, and walking toward me, I could see he had a pronounced limp.
"I'm OK, man... not making the kind of money I used to in Nap Town. Bloomington is wage slave heaven, and I'm a baker making very little.  But I'm happy, and have a decent girl.  Things have been worse... as I'm sure you recall."
"Uh," Scott smiled, showing an extremely gapped-toothed and worn smile,"you were all right..."
"Scott," I said, "I wanted to thank you when I left.  I never had your phone number.. and when I came back they'd moved the store to Georgetown Rd.  I went there and no one had ever heard of you.  It's Scott Brinks, right?  Brinks?"
"Yeah," he said, trailing a little at the wonder of my remembering.  We were both surprised. "Brinks. Scott Brinks."
"Are you doing OK, Scott? You still with pastor Jim, and his troublemaking brothers?  It was Boys to Men back then... right?  What is it, Jars to Clay these days, coming to see your famous Church in Indy?  Trust me, they aren't going to Zionsville."
"Oh, they might be going there, Andy.  We're all Christians in the eyes of God."
"I guess I'm as arrogant as ever," I said, in remorse.
Scott laughed, "we're all of that in His eyes as well!"
I smiled, a wave of sadness rushing over me. "God, it's good to see your face."
"You too." he said.
"You know, I'm not a very busy man. Can I give you a ride... can I buy you a coffee or something."
Scott got a somewhat startled look, and gave a sidelong glance, then said, "I got somewhere to be... but I'll see you again."
As always, when it is brought to my attention that someone else isn't feeling exactly as I am, it startled me.  He had been being nice.  I had been warming up.  He'd been being polite.
"Oh, yeah," I said, "of course.  Thanks for talking to me.  You were like... I don't know, my Virgil to this place, Scott.  It would have been impossible to come here, without you. And in the end... you were the reason I left with some of myself intact. "
"You always had something nice to say," Scott smiled sadly, " that I couldn't make sense of.  You got rid of that car--- the Olds?"
"Yeah... you wouldn't buy it from me." I said.
"Yeah!" he cried, "you brought that broken down piece of junk and tried to leave it at my house."
"Well..." I said, defensively, "outside of my Uncle's best friend, you were its biggest fan. Besides, I owed you."
"For what?"
"For not stealing it sooner."
We laughed.  I did what pathetic memory of our old handshake remained in my stupid honky arm... and gripped his hand, looking into his tired smiling eyes.  "Good to see you."
"Yeah, man.  Take care."
In his face, and his limp, as he walked away I could see his exhaustion.  Only a few iterations away from what should have had happened to me.  And frankly, given my nature, he probably had made it far longer than I ever would have.  Who knew?
My heart sank, as I got in that car, and turned away from his figure, as he continued down Westlane, on the apron of the street where the pedestrians in that neighborhood walked.  There was no sidewalk. Just a flat graded gutter for errant vehicles, plowed snow, and slowly eroding men.

Six months later, another old friend, Jaykita ran into me at the grocery at Westlane Plaza.  We laughed about funny memories.. and I asked her why Scott was limping when I had seen him that Spring.  Jaykita looked at me strangely, "Scott... Andy; he's died." 

He overdosed two months prior.

Knowing that some people can construct a rationale for his demise that could none the less endure my cultures perspectives: it gives me strength to listen sometimes to this heart that he helped to better shape.  And it helps me realize that nobody is half as good as they think... nor half as deserving of any fate that is the going wage.