Am I Turning Into My Stepmother?

Hoping for the kind of winter
that solves all my problems
as a still and frigid silence
might
tempt
by it’s very remoteness
me, no, not tempt, intrigue,
in my reading chair by fireside
beneath wide yellowed lampshade

Sunrise serate_^^^

_^^^ed by the mountaintop, rays

that catch The morning

dew, or is it frost?

Nixon?  History is introspective, my blocked right nasal passage is the Bradley Amendment. Where there should be a scent of pine smoke, Albert Camus called what is autumn “a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”  It is unseasonably cloudy all day and the sun does us a quick solid in the evening by flashing his Kool Aid grin for twenty minutes or so, a flashlight underneath the covers, a reminder.  A taunt.  Otherwise, it’s darkness. 

Dark days all the way up.  You down?

I am.

After work there are legitimate bright moments of the day.  

Like when I think it would be a good idea to fly to Bali, live in a shack eating mangos and bananas all day, underlining passages of The Glass Bead Game on the beach. 

I think this still.  A brief visit without consequences.

Scratching at her eye with her knuckle, her sleeve, her wrist- like love in the time of schlera she’s my talk buddy.  Some folks have F**k buddies.  I have a talk buddy, and let it be known, because she’ll tell you if I don’t first, Sharon can talk.  Tangled personal stories that shift like surreal sands.

Snacks? Sure! Then the lament for the last banana. We catch up on the cooling weather as an afterthought, as people do.  Music and art.  We talked about growing up listening to Dashboard Confessional and John Mayer, soft rock to mold hormonal mid-aught-us into cold cynical Tinder dwelling 2018-us. The deeper truths of HBO, The Good Place: Will Veronica Mars’ walk-on Cheers role last for all eternity? Who knows.

We talk Andy Warhol, Sharon's favorite, with his two drawers a year full of garbage, and the Allegheny River, the idea of Turner more than Turners themselves then, Sharon says, she has to go.  I too am leaving, soon, I say. A lie.

She scratches at her eye mote,

Let us pause at this question for a moment and review the story so far.  Pull the plug from the punk for a moment, because when I do get around to answering, when it was all over, just me and my subscriptions and prescriptions reading the Cosmo quiz “Am I Turning Into My Step-Mother” in a one-room studio on the surface of the sun, I am interrupted from cementing the answer into writing, and this has been over a week ago.  The story so far goes like this:  It’s gotten colder, and a friend drops in to visit, drops a modest bombshell as she’s leaving and sets my mind back reeling whilst real alone.

Did you ever try building a skyscraper on a foundation of explosives?

Why yes.  I think about Bali, someplace warm with wet greens and rich browns, like a Turner, and I think about going to the gym.

Ever try building a skyscraper on a foundation of explosives? 

Who hasn’t?  I think about conversing, the rotary cog of monologue that spins in turn the larger dial of dialogue.  The mind within, thinking, what’s the mental image that this other person is creating of me while I am yepping and uh huhing and oh no you didn’t.  Oh no, I didn’t, O-NO-U-DIDN’T, that’s just an example. I was recapping.  My acute memory ain’t too cute. The what it was, where you were and who you were with during, or shortly after some imbibement of substance, becomes perhaps what I try to focus on in answer to the question left hanging, and I think about the time I was sleeping on a hammock in Mason City, writing frgmnts and being kinda shiftless, hoping our mutual friends would drop your name so it could take my breath away. 

Fridays were filled with all the possibilities then, all the radio stations playing great songs, all the biggest juiciest burgers are suddenly affordably with-in reach, and so many people call that I can’t even answer them all.  It’s enough to make a Thursday-residing bohemian weep.   And Saturdays are a tall smooth drink of water too.  Only, not water.  Scratch that.  Hold the water, as it were, and split my temples why don’t you?  Shit. Suddenly it’s Sunday.  Preacher says that all good things come from God. “It’s in the Bible,” says he.  Can’t argue with that.

dmm’s counter argument: An infinite God, by definition infinite, means that all bad things come from Him, too.

Preacher Says: “There are no bad things to an infinite God.  All things are good things.”

dmm’s countered argument, concessing: “Perspective, being everything, okay yes.”

Did you ever try building a skyscraper on a foundation of explosives?

Is it setting yourself up for failure if your aim is ruin?  Wouldn’t we all be much happier if we would get used to disappointment.  Anyway, enough craning necks at the chem-trails of time.  Our word of the day is TORSCHLUSSPANIK (German) - The feeling that time is passing and the chance to do things is slipping away. Literally it means 'gate-closing panic'.

SuppleSextusCinString: You know

SuppleSextusCinString: One nice thing about having kids

Auto response from DMsqdMn17: count the words; drown the haze; pierce the clouds above; laze 'g

SuppleSextusCinString: is you can watch their faces as you play

SuppleSextusCinString: Weezer for the first time

What’s your perspective? I am a slave to my own experiences.  The bottle offers nothing except a joke so dry the punchline kills you.  I like Tschaikovsky’s Swan Lake but the vital promise of Schubert’s Unfinished is better.  Winter will soon be upon us.  Thround telephone lines and ever barer trees the wind flicks it in, weightlessly, and I keep my own ineffective counsel, a tragic character in a comedy, like a cat watching an airplane.   

History is introspective, a sunset casts its restive spotlight upon the mountain peaks, the sun getting lower, the light getting higher, until all is left to God’s nights of bleeding cold.

Did you ever try building a skyscraper on a foundation of explosives?

Fuck it. I call her back.

“Assuming that great sex potentially means great love is setting yourself up for unnecessary disappointment.”  Pause.  Breathe.  Did you remember to say hello? Fuck it. “Too many people, in my opinion, cut post coital bliss short.”

“Too many people” she asked.

“Yeah.  Well, me, for short.”

“That’s what she said” she said.

A relationship is like an outfit, it’s about contrasting colors, shades of intention, and complimentary fabrics. Sex, love, and compatibility don’t always come as a package.  Especially with tripwire personalities like ours.  Anyway it was good to get that off my chest.

“If you talk all the time about something you stop knowing anything about it.”

-          Kazim Ali

Good for Sharon, falling in love. 
Bright side: It’s great to fall in love
Dark Side: Even love doesn’t indicate long-term compatibility. 

Time, it had transpired, was of the essence.
Time, the very attar of the Rose,
Was running out. 

o    James Merrill

People fail that test all the time, scratched in the back by the mocking speculations of hope.  Little does she know, the key’s under the mat.