Breezes Unhurled

Something made him mad.  I assume it was something hidden deep, he certainly didn't have any tells, that is, he never told us what it was directly, just lots of shouting.  Turns out we only caught the one-foot waves from the deeper Tsunami.  When his wife turned herself in for blowing his chest out she was blacker and bluer than one of those endangered Japanese monkeys, and she had half a pool stick stuck in the side of her thigh.

When Kevin's older brother asked her about it later he said "she smiled like my Vegas Aunt."

This memory wafts in over breakfast, hot oatmeal and hardboiled eggs.  I like my eggs sliced evenly.  Kevin is there, reading up on this inexhaustible spectacle of a president.  I want desperately to be out of the country.  I had finished work at 3 in the morning.  All day one big long strategic assault on my senses, like a sloth boxing Mayweather, and to drive home without a horizon meant that at three I usually fell into bed.  But today I had looked at the tablet - not sure why - seen the numerous unread emails and texts of the last day - and about an hour into them I looked up feeling that only seconds had passed and decided to make breakfast instead of sleep, remembering having been told as a child that there was nowhere that God couldn't see you and hoping it wasn't true, thinking God was like my little sister who one constantly suspected of sneaking up on you but if you could only distract her with her shows for long enough you could tiptoe out and escape to a secret place. 

A cold morning.

"Wanna go fishing?" Kevin gives an alchemic smile.

"I don't know nothing bout no ichthyology."  A flock of birds showers out of the woods, followed closely by a hawk. 

"If your father never did you won't either."  I think about all the people I've chased out of my life, accidentally and on purpose. Out our windows crammed with paint jars low clouds crowd out the higher clouds, a mad mosh pit in the sky. The sun had yet to even take the stage. 

"What was that guy's name," I asked.

"Who, Ted," guessed Kevin, referring to the guy who vanished after the first round of layoffs.

"No, that guy from the Horseshoe, the one that died." 

"Dunno, why?  My brother would know.  I wonder whatever happened to Ted."

"Could be almost anywhere by now."

We run out of coffee so we squinch into my Mazda. I stash the carton of Pall Malls into the glove box so Kevin can swing his bony popping ligaments into the low seat, and we coast in neutral down the hill to the Starbucks while a guy on public radio reads out the names of fake-sounding soviet era government bureaus.  "The Central Reserve of non-Existent Premises," he intones. 

The wind howls as I park, three wide open spaces out front saving me from having to parallel. I miss the organic democracy of parking in unmarked gravel lots.  

That nutty aroma inside is so dense I feel diminished by it.  The smallish early crowd bridging all the gaps between the Americas, anglo and hispanic, black and white, rich and poor.  An old man by the window shares a table with the two small school-aged girls, imperfectly prim little pixies, puckering his whiskered cheeks to whistle at the rising cup of steam.  A woman is talking to her friend on the phone.  I crane my head seeing that she is older than she sounds.  Ahead of us in line, a short dark man in African vestments orders something, thick, like his accent.

"Manolo" a barista barks, placing a drink on the counter.  An old hunchback nun clutching her knuckles into fists emerges from the restroom.  Red and white flashing lights appear down the street before the sirens can be heard.  An ambulance rears past around the corner.  "Carmen!"  the barista calls.

We take our coffee to go and after I have drunk it I go directly to sleep, Kevin to work, I wake myself an hour later with my snores, I open my eyes and continue to dream, feeling that old electric fervor, the  rootless angry howl.  The apartment is mine all day so I forage in the fridge and walk around naked, seeing this new version of myself in multiple reflections and remembering how it used to look, the original incarnation, the ole' band lineup as it were.   Are there connections between who that person was and who I am now?  I used to be a guy trying to live in a mythical construct and now I'm a guy obsessed with destroying that myth.  My gut had broadened and my chest sagged, I still had my hair but the lines had all changed, standing up as tall as I could I thrust my hips a bit. So like, you know, well yeah.

I hold my breath.  Take a hot shower until the manic panic subsides and my palms are wrinkled.  As I towel off my phone buzzes.  The day takes a whole 'nother direction.

She said to meet her at Caruso's at noon and I didn't protest.  Since the breakup we've been crawling toward better things, is what I tell myself.  But what things?  The inner sky is still overcast, it might snow.  

I pass the Horseshoe there alongside the freeway and see a rowdy guy I know from work braced cowboy style out front, what did we even see in that place?  He's a salesman, the nasty pushy type that I despise, I watch the road and hope he doesn't see me but I fantasize that he does see me and the next time he comes up to talk to me I can let some of my hatred toward him boil out.  That'd be a good way to get fired.  I'm all hot air.  The man on the radio said "In ancient Egypt, the servants of the Pharaohs were coated with honey so that the flies would not disturb the rulers themselves."  I switch it off.  The tires roar across asphalt, like crinkling cotton balls in my ears.

I don't see her car and so it feels conspicuous walking into Caruso's, like she's going to pull up behind me, but when I turn around to look she's gone.  What I had wanted was to be her slick secret, a cavernous tunnel into which she could disappear, but she burrowed down and then didn't like it,  she cut me deep, coming up for air and in the process uncovering my insides, I'd been bleeding ever since.  Less cavernous than gaping, less slick than sickly. People like me who hide their problems until they can find no solution except to kill their darlings probably shouldn't be allowed to procreate.  Maybe that's why I pushed them away.  I thought about Trish.  I often do, though we were only together for a short time.  You can never control the thoughts, never prepare for them, they rush in unimpeded, I open the door to the restaurant accompanied by a gale, a loud chime rings.  Be right with you.  I think about her when they interrupt the music at the grocery store to announce a sale, when I'm dialing a client's phone number at work.   Two please, two minutes ‘hun.  I think about Claire, that sweet secluded girl I wooed relentlessly but couldn't figure out how to give any pleasure so I gave up and got mine instead, twice, before she blew away too.

A woman's hand on my shoulder.  Hi.  Nicetoseeyou.  We sit by the window where its slightly secluded but cold.

"Things are good, nice... odd, I guess.”

“Be more specific,” she says.  Her voice has a texture I could wrap myself up in.

She wears glasses because she'd “slept with these contacts in, again.” Her face looking older in glasses, not old, more adult, elongated.  I stretch my legs until they hit the metal bar under the table. I resist the urge to reach across the table and remove her glasses, rub my knuckles against her temple.  I also resist the urge to jam a fork through my dorsal filaments whilst simultaneously pulling away from the table at a sprint, instantly ripping my hand into a Y. 

We order tea and water.  Real big spenders.  She asks some pointed questions, trying to show concern, I think, trying so hard not to look at me askance, that sad emphatic skepticism, that I feel bad for her feeling bad for me.  Why are we even here?

“And how’s your family?”

“My Uncle Russell died,” I say.

She arranges the packets of sugar and sweetener, each in amongst its own kind, bottom to bottom, top to top.  “I’m sorry.  I just…”

We let it hang there.  The waitress returns with our drinks and we drink them.  She checks her phone, giving it more attention than it deserves.  Just like me.

It's been a year," she says at last.  No wonder she asked to meet me.  "I just thought, I didn't want you being too hard on yourself.  There's no formula to this, no spec sheet, it's just, it's hard enough to let yourself love anyone, flaws and all, and then to have all these layers of the past holding you back every day.  I just...”

"Layers," I repeat.  A hint of burning bread wafts in from the kitchen, like a piano with the A^b out of tune.

“Do you know what I mean?”

I nod without looking at her, almost smelling the perfume, or imagining I smell it, her transparent reflection in the window says that this is hard for her.  I should have known.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m okay.  Are you okay?”

"I’m empty as a pocket."

"Who said that?"

"I dunno,” I say, “I might’ve come up with it myself.  Y’know, I am pretty clever."

"Paul Simon," she says, putting her phone back in her purse.

She has to go.  Rather than cavil about the bill I say goodbye.  We don’t hug.  I don’t get up.  I watch her.  I watch a young woman walk in, with tan legs, and when she scooches into her chair across the room her skirt flashes up a bit and my heart leaps at the bareness of the upper thigh.  I blush, imagining the regions I cannot see, all flayed and warped into torrid sexual positions and I laugh out loud at what a joke I have become.  When does it all stop?

Never.  It never stops.  The ego, the pent-up anger, the wandering eyes, the bottomless lust - all together they just might be the breath of life, inhale, exhale, what else is there?

I thought we'd been doing a good job of being inconspicuous but now I suspect that I was wrong.  Too many eyes are looking at not me.  I wish I was a chameleon.

Carrying myself out into the fresh air like breezes unhurled.  Walking back to the car I cast no shadows.  Better get some more sleep before I go back to work.  The sky is a glaucous dome.  Maybe I’ll stop by the Horseshoe.  My stomach gurgles like a man trapped at the bottom of a well.  “There’s no escaping.”  I say.

What was that guy’s name?  It’ll come to me.

Navigating Woodland

“There's no heaven, just a big blue sky”

– Rhett Miller

 

There's no good reason to feel all alone looking out the window.  The house is to the gills.  It’s a three bedroom, and we’ve got six in here. Looking out the window, back against the wall, I feel all alone anyway.  The morning light is distant, hazy, as if asking “why commit to this?”

The vast eastbound valley tong of this great western city perdurable beneath me.  Downstairs I can hear them breathing.  The roommate stole grumbly off to work shortly before dawn and I’ve been up since, the lights off, off and on examining the smiling pictures of his family on the wall thinking, as a design choice, why do we do this?

The junk he carried

I sleep around, fail abjectly to learn anything, sneak smokes behind the dumpster at the office park.  Here we call this Thursday – Saturday.  My soul is on fire so who needs lights on?  I’m up here on the second floor of our rickety house on top of the hill with morningwood like a fucking lighthouse but I wasn’t masturbating, because my emotions were in that weird soupy non-lubricious primordial phase that sometimes happens when I’m hungover and lonely and feeling self-righteous and hungry and guilty and tired all at the same time.  Instead I pussyfooted for the kitchen, down the creaking steps and through the front room where Lopez (from work) snored vibrantly on the futon.  He’s been in residence for over a week now.

Eggos and the last of the non-wrinked blueberries.  Phone pulses in my pocket and I hear the girls coming up the steps, we have a century-old pine out front that hides the quiet ones, so, not Bascombe and Clover. Bascombe is a townie, and along with her girlfriend Clover newly homeless (two months now).  Clover is a good person who came to me asking for the spare room which we didn’t have, so I gave them mine.   That was last week. 

Outside they laugh like wild animals. 

“I was already halfway in his car before I realized he wasn’t my uber driver,” Clover laughs, streaming in the door with grocery bags lavished on both arms. Bascombe behind her, laughing, with two arm loads of her own.

“Whaddaya wan from me?” Lopez asketh from under his pillow.

Clover apologizes for waking him.

“I want you to be reincarnated as a smartwatch.” I say.

“Siri, find me a new roommate."

Bascombe laughs again, “Siri, find me a brilliant comeback.”

Innately iffy, as I am about people my age who don’t seem to be experiencing the same level of existential anxiety as me, I initially had a hard time with her.  Her green streaked hair in braids that hung down on either side of her head, just cresting the shoulders of her portrait of Baudelaire teeshirt.  She has terrible skin, occasional reefer stank, no qualms at all discussing her aversion to shaving any body hair, and one of if not the worst tattoo I have ever seen on her forearm of the bear from Ted drinking a bottle of Bud. I think I get it though.  There’s simply nothing I have that’s of any interest to her. At all.  Unless I am having a good time.  We get along pretty well despite her taking the piss out of me more than once already with some pretty surefire owns. It’s all about letting go, not being so serious.

Her cheeks flush as she unloads groceries and I ask what's this all about. 

“We went out and bought groceries for you guys.”

“And now we’re going to make you breakfast.”

On cue, Joel shuffles in from his room.  “Summa say sombout breakfast?”  He’s been here the longest so the master bedroom is his and his alone.  Pretty soon he’ll pull me aside about having “the talk” with some of our freeloaders so in the meantime breakfast was, I had to admit, a fantastic idea to keep the mechanisms of shared accommodation smoothly oiled, and so we males settle in around the table while the females cook— and yes I am aware of the non-21^st century optics of what I just said — fight me — it is how it is.

After eating one feels less mad, more awake.  Truism blecht. Throughout the meal everyone is curiuosly chipper, the way consisting on sleep deprivation makes everyone slightly electrically giddy.  Remembering that my phone had pulsed earlier, I look at it briefly and find the answer.  “We’re going to Woodland," I announce, surprising even myself, "who’s coming?”

It’s all about letting go, not being so serious.  I saw a snap that she was there and decided to go.

So we pack up the dog and headed out, Lopez and I.  His brother lives close by there so he offered to split gas and I didn’t even have to ask.  The road spills beneath us remarkably swiftly, which I do not remark upon until we stop to switch seats and fill up at a station in Fairfield, propping my forehead on the window and watching a eagle or some such big bird-of-prey make his loping eternal symbols on high, keeping keen heed of his impossible-to-fathom dominion. How do birds see so well?  Almost two hours in and the radio starts to the repeat the same love songs with lotsa synth, leaving a milky residue in my mouth so we flip it off and Lopez discourtheth about California Fescue (festuca californica) “the reason it’s the most heat and drought tolerant is because it develops a deep root system to get water from way down,”  a lot of uninspiring dribble, but I decide right then that Lopez isn’t so bad while I check my messages.

Lopez seems to be a good person, just going through some serious shit right now. He’s very keen on local history, spending more time than anyone I know at the library, collecting books, making notes, crying over non-existent emails. So when he dropped me off in front of the Cinemark I wished him sincere good luck and shook his hand then he and the dog proceeded on to crash at his brother's place with their dog and his sister-in-law, and I wiped his sweat from my palm onto my jeans and walked around Woodland for the half the day remaining.

Tired male author tropes I already know I am going to be unable to avoid: essay describing thoughts while walking in nature. nostalgia trip bit about girls in college guess the third shitty trope I reuse over and over and win $300!

A good alley

Good to see my breath coming out.  Thick conical cloud bursts, the hints of a winter wind probably paring the temperature down below freezing, but in the sun where I relish the tinge of warmth on my earlobes it's a tolerably pleasant 40 degrees. Turn the corner and things get real quiet real fast.  The developers maze of houses is all well and good until you get overwhelmed by the scale of them when you’re on foot, with nothing but lint to knit deep within your pockets to keep you feeling grounded. Down an alley there's a feeling of secrecy that I appreciate, hedged in as it is on both sides and running discreetly as it does between the backyards that nobody seemed to be out and about in.  A dog barks, sparking a hitherto hidden web of barkers.  A guy in a bronco pulls into his drive beneath a plump red maple, just getting off work?  He waves.  On the bigger road I am overcome by the lingering sentimental touches on otherwise neglected commercial real estate.  The paint scraps of a sunset, or sunrise.  A six digit number to call with inquiries, the seventh long faded away.  Tufts of weeds in the cracks, inaccessible to the Samaritan weedpicker like me behind a warped chain link. I fight back waking dreams of sleeping in a dry ditches turned muddy in past lives. It's good to walk, to see the world at a pace apace with my thoughts. Thinking for instance how the colors all seem off today.  Even the grass in the school park seems hues of brownish gray.  Metal carvings on the guardposts of Boy, Girl, Basketball, Bike Rack, maybe not that last one.  I have been through this town about a handful of times and combing through it as I do I never fail to discover new nooks to spend a few contented hours in, restaurants, street corners. It's part of why I wanted to walk.

A young man approaches me and asks "where are you aiming at?" And really, where am I aiming at?  Yes, good point sonny!  I cannot say anything so I go past him and see the eternal flocks of pigeons, their tiny pointillist spots making  huge shapes on the sky! A padded blue/white facemask lying crumpled on the ground.  “I’m in trouble."  He is following me, saying in a formal voice "can you help me get back home?”

"Sorry man," I pat my pockets for extra emphasis.  The look on his face is non-committal but I feel a huge cavity puncture in the bridge my breath-in breath-out consciousness was spanning over the chasm of unhappiness.  As a student who finds psychology, what is the word, recondite, I chose not to look too deep inside.  But I am actively aware of the love I feel for this city, previously only experienced as infatuation, and so I was glad to come up here, walk around, make a spirited entrance in a few hours, maybe — some food first — when the kid is gone I sit down beneath a slim tree in a parking lot, rearranging some bark mulch as a means to legitimize my presence in this wholly unholy place, steal a smoke to jar my soul a bit.

 

I guess you should know that I am here because, well my sugar-sweet temptation is to say she's my girlfriend of moment but that’s not fair.  She’s my girlfriend, has been for a while now, and to place a time constraint on the title, even an open-ended one like that just isn’t honest.  I hope it’ll work.  I drop little hints about the future and togetherness, including at dinner late last month. 

           “I thought we were just having a good time,” she said.  I agreed that we were. Ruminating to myself that it’s been a 'good time' that’s gone on for almost seventeen balmy, mostly frictionless months now, and I start to dissolve from the inside out, a kind of paralysis provoked from want of a stable definition, however she surprise invited me to her cousins’ wedding this past weekend, and he and his fiancé, now wife, dated for ten years before they made anything official, I guess, so I started to ease off.  Maybe it's a family thing, or a generational one.

St_rb_cks

Into the coffee shop that shall not be named for a chair. Inexplicably He Stopped Loving Her Today playing on the stereo.  A midsized young woman with a wondrously sparkling coif of shoulder-length curls took my order and my name.  "Just chai? Howsabouta muffin?’ she asks.

"I’ll just have something quick. I should be on my way."

"No rush. Stay awhile."

Ashamed to look straight at her I keep my fixed eyes burrowed on the hole in my left shoe instead.  She reminds me of Rachel, a girl who long ago never got a text back before decamping to Pittsburgh.  When I looked her up online it seemed that she'd taken up with an abuser and it aged her.  She'd also shaved her head, which didn't help.

Anyway the similarities are there, sparking multiple what-ifs, what if the conclusion is, I dread, we are all just bones and dust and crushing hard or falling in love is pure double fantasy, a vainglorious pursuit of obsolescence, like that quarter spiral at the children's museum. But we have to do it don't we?  If you don’t follow the forbidden fruit the forbidden fruit follows you.

I watch her take orders, filling vessels, swirling steaming hot liquids together, weighing the abstract emotional calculus that compels we, strange human animals, to stay with some of our own and leave others, remember that time on the lakeshore in Chicago, the insouciant bravado of teenages by blurry fireside.

Each moment has a way of yielding to the next. She is popping plastic lids on cardboard cups and the next thing I know she is standing over me, wet rag in hand asking “is everything okay? Can I get you anything else?”  She has California Fry like an old tin record recording of the surfer fairy.  No thanks, I say, I hate being sold things, I didn't say.


Spun around for good

I escape into the evening light, dissolving into the tendril avenues of this fair city for what reason I am not entirely sure.  I've been casting about through these neighborhoods all afternoon that all look alike until they don't.  Here we are. Someday all this will be gone, burned or decayed or, who knows, soon I will too.  I stand up straight as I stroll up to the door.

After a day thrilling adventure, it’s best to relax with cats, but I have a dog, and he's not here (he's with Lopez) but I also have a girlfriend — don't start —  life is about making do.  We made do.  She gave me a warm kiss on the lips, smelling clean, sultry, and brushing a stray coppery eyelash from my cheek with the kind of tenderness I would have reserved for… I’m not sure…I guess I have a real lacking of tenderness in me these days.  Her hands feel good.

"What a pleasant surprise," she says. Her clothes, still suitcase creased, hang from the folding chair by the card table.  Her cellphone blinks on the tchotchke cabinet.

"I hate being sold things," I say.

"I'm not selling."

"So that means yr buying?"

"How much?"

"How much you got?"

"How much you want?"

Outside the sun is setting and there's no way to hide it.  Tomorrow it will be back again, or more accurately we'll spin around, orbit, from darkness to light, to darkness to light.  I am glad I am inside, glad I made my way here, to this house, which feels for the moment anyway like home.

Wn Ng 19

Something tells me this is going to be the best year ever, said no one over the age of 15. 
 - way to scumble an introduction - 
Hey! It's true
- why dwell in the cruel trench of reality -
The internets are full of it.  Muckraking so persistent that eyes burn all the way down to my throat.
- woah, slow down.  Point being: diversify the content- 
Said lots of guys who smell like freshly opened boxes of Vans sneakers.
- well try again -

This New Year’s day evening I was chilling at home watching Magnum and taking tokes notes during commercials to fill the weird existential void, which is, admittedly, what commercials are for, but I hate being sold things.

Better?
-better- 
Outside the cats were frozen in Siberia, so 1980’s Hawaii seemed like the kind of summer vacation I skipped this year in order to work harder.  Yes, murders were occurring.  Be jealous that my vicarious vacations are more interesting than your real ones.  What is a vacation without death?
-easy big fella-

My notes consisted of doodles of pretty girls and myself as Magnum, complete with Tigers cap and mustache.  As I am not an artist, this was not going well, and obvious directions to steer the restless night energy were not apparent.
-look elsewhere-
 Lopez and Peggy where also there.
-oh good, yer not alone.  you are alone too much man-

They‘re friends from work. More were expected, none had shown by midnight and we were feeling too chill to move.
       “I try to save money,” sayeth Lopez, “by not drinking, not smoking, not going out not—"
       “Not being at all interesting” I inter erupted.  Lopez said sure.  “Sure means no.  Sur means sea.  Si means yes.  Si si, see, she sells seashells by the sur shore.”
-where 'ya goin' with this, Tex?-
I’m bored.  So bored.  So sue me.

       “Sure.  So,” continueth Lopez, “I was gonna say, before you so surely inter erupted me, that I try to save money by not drinking, smoking, or going out, and here at your place I don’t have to pay any cash at all to do all three.”
       “So long as you think of this place like home.”
       “True.  You did say, ‘make yourself at home’.”
Peggy said she admired Magnum's short shorts.

An ex-girlfriend (who has recently taken up Tinder again) texted me that she'd matched with a) lots of guys b) one of my other ex girlfriends and c) a very fetching golden retriever.  What an powerful punch of an ego boost that text was.
-sarcasm?-

Magnum blundered around talking to himself (and his Ferrari) and eventually he figured it all out and I blundered into the kitchen talking to myself about capitalism and unplanned pregnancies and shuffled the bottles on the bar around and eventually settled for a tumbler of gin. 
-it was mint to be-

Don’t you start in on that now too!

When I came back out Peggy and Lopez had taken up the PS4 controls.  Peggy was describing the character she would play.

       "The machine is at your fingertips," declareth Lopez.  I decided to lie down.  There can only be two players.

-the system mandates its own binary narrative and calls it choice-

Disappointed more people didn’t show. An acute wave of self-pity, feeling suddenly sick, and starving. I wanted to write a long tearful text to my nephew about how bad life is, text my ex with thirst, text my friends who didn’t come, text cc all I WANT TO BE HAPPY AND HELD and the plenary frission of urges culminated in the closing of eyes and a dream about impressing the paratroopers by riding a motorcycle out of the back of an airplane.

-one would think a little altercentric subconscious intrusion would do you good-

No luck.  In my sleep I had texted "My house is a homeless shelter" to Amanda.  She hadn’t responded.  Not likely even her number any more. 

-what’s that even mean???-

I stumbled out as the morning sun was painting bright pastels across the skyline and found Lopez and Peggy still there, on the couch where I’d left them.  Lopez was vaguely pontificating in a monotone, Peggy said good morning and asked if she could let the cats in.

       “Yeah, you want us should let your cats in?” asketh Lopez.  “They’re freezing.  Why are they even outside?”

"They're not my cats." 

-ha!-