A Tangible Weltering of Intangible Clouds

My first summer here involved going swimming in a city pool.  Took my nephew, not my phone.  Extremely late August, the scalding blue sky frosted by frenetic clouds and surfacing my ears at each tap of the wall at the end of a lap the cottonwood trees down the seep outside the fence loudly whispered asemic secrets.  “7 – 8 – 9”

My nephew brought his gaming tablet.  He sits upside down over three chairs, for all I know having beaten thirteen levels in the past half hour.  I asked him how he sat like that.
    "My body ain't your body old man."

    Two video game levels in a long term relationship are considering becoming homeowners together and are therefore window shopping for houses online.

This blog is about the elements of the city as it lives in your memory.  The heightened awareness of nights spent in new surroundings.  The slow dissolution of constituent elements into new compounds, the chemistry of age, the burning flames of passion, how else can things as yet unimagined arrive?

The first spring here involved a climb in the mountains east of town.  Forgot my phone and had to go back for it, the petaled clouds like one of those robust and compensatory floral arrangements that your grandmother kept on her table after Grampa died.
"18– 19 – 20"

I hang onto the cliffface by my eyelids and hope to God my life grip isn't done-in by all this sweat just as a cool wind from the south rushes in.  Makes you wonder.

This blog is about the time the hungry sun went out to eat.  He wore his sharp creased crayon yellow radials and announced to the people that he would eat them.  “I will roast you into morsels, bake you into cookies and eat you” the sun said.  The sun was an egg.  The earth was flour and the cities were like raisins.

A warm morning in June.  Two initiates to the ancient secret rites of adolescent rebellion.  After a hot climax the girl asks if that was what he thought it would be like.  The boy's mind is beyond borders, a long way off language.  His heart beats like gunfire, settling into a warrior’s rhythm and each lilting salvo fights off the old anxiety holding his chest hostage.  The unnervering unsteadiness, like seeing yourself in strangers Tinder photos, like watching the Dodgers hit a double while not spilling any relish on your new blue shirt, the rustling traffic of sunlight through leaves.

This blog is a how-to manual about the destruction of love.  As it was or love as we thought it would be.  How we bake our loves up into cookies, take two ideas of love, add flour and sugar and wait 25 minutes at 350 degrees then line them up on the counter and serve them on a platter to your au courant guests.

Train 1: What are you writing Ray?
Train 2: Words.
Train 1: What kinda words Ray?
Train 2 (Ray, apparently): It’s a series of stories I’ve been working on actually, about Arizona.
Train 1: Really?  I have not ever been to Arizona
Ray: I’ll obviate that for you. This story’s about about a rodeo guy, and the cowgirl who loves him, and a dust storm.  It’s about losing someone and wanting to get them back.
Train 1: I didn’t know you knew anything about rodeos
Ray: I went to a rodeo once and it was very chaotic.  I am trying to thrust the chaos of that experience into the structure of this story.
Train 1: Do stories work that way?
Ray: I don’t know yet.  But I think relationships do.
Train 1: Is it a happy ending?
Ray, [reading]:  ‘I don't want love if it means I can't go home,’ she said.
At a certain number of laps it’s my preference to count backward, say 25 again, then go back down through "24– 23 – 22..." It’s a nice natural way to unwind without building to a climactic peak, and, bonus!, if I absentmindedly forget where I am on the second pass through the numbers I can start going forward again, unless by some logic more exercise could hurt me.

Rope up all your problems under an awning of institutional darkness.  Destroy the logic of progress
Destroy the merchandise.
My urge for destruction has been stolen and replaced with an exact replica, yours now for three easy payments of $19.95.

This blog is about two ducks giving themselves over entirely to instinct.  Many people don’t know this but ducks live very ordered, rational lives.  The first duck was named Ted.  Once, at the end of a long breathless flight, when they were circling a lake up in the north country, Ted dared the second duck, named Chris, to divebomb it.  “Descend more rapidly than you ever have before mi amigo” Said Ted.
Chris didn’t need to be asked twice.  Though the wind rushed robustly against his beak he tucked in his wings and careened down, a feathered meteor.  Upon hitting the surface of the water he exploded into a cacophony of quacks and down.  Ted took his time to descend and saw that there was absolutely nothing left of his friend.  This is a blog about destruction in the name of progress.
But what progress is there?

The first winter here involved sneezing nonstop for about five weeks, the absence of clouds making the hoary hours shuffle past, here is a sick poet repulsed by the constitutional laziness of natural phenomenon, kind of, as if all the earth is quietly gasping for breath, choking on a  chicken bone, no one can hear a sound.

The girl kisses the boy on the mouth and asks if the boy thinks she is pretty.
An hour later he scratches his dog behind its ears. Weeks later he is at the clinic down by the cultural center.  "Is it curable, doc?"

A city that lives in your memory goes out jogging with the childhood home that you barely remember.  The remembrance of your college dorm DM’s you, soliciting your recollections of summer camp "U up?  Wanna get a drink or something?"
"17– 17 – uh, – 17?"

Two cargo ships in the harbor discuss their respective pasts and preferences.  It’s a blind date and they are trying to determine if they have any long term compatibility.

Ship 1: What’s your favorite Denzel movie?
Ship 2: How long have you owned what you are wearing?
Ship 1: Is it pronounced Caribbean or Caribbean?

Mid-way up the western slope there is an umber forest encased in mists, spring flowers highlight the beauty of fucking up and seeking forgiveness.  A wrinkled woman wakes early to find fresh flowers on her doorstep, he must have plucked them from the garden. She puts them gingerly, carefully, in a garbage bag.  Time to start again.  Dark coffee and humor
"Mince words?  No. I mince garlic."

The rodeo cowboy in the story  fights back twigs and blackbirds, snow and ghost horses, his greying beard seems to be a lovelorn calculation but it is accidental, incidental to the story writ large.  He enters the town and walks right in to the sheriff's office where the sherrif sits behind a black desk, his black boots as dark as extinguished lanterns, his deputy nodding by rote behind him.  "I figure someone's gunna hafta leave this town." The deputy plays with a silver coin, looking at the cowboy as if he knew how this would end. 

This blog is about decisions and calculations made through weeping.  It's about going to new places, the foreign land of the future, the raucous birdsong of the past outside the window, such terrifying cries.  "I'm too scared to go back to sleep" she says, going back to sleep.
"12– 11 – 10"

The second autumn here involved an involuntary trip to Mazatlan.  The sense of leaving home was strange, unexpected, and mostly mitigated by the smaller of the two suitcases, both phones, business and personal tucked into my breast pocket.  It was late-term August, one could feel the cramped birthing pains of September, a deep ache, the steep descent from the jungle of clouds to the jungles of Sinaloa.

The satiated sun fills the earth with his passions and then empties the sky of its stars and starlings, cooing doves and bundtcake clouds. The sun writes a blog entitled Destroy Cosmology and then cracks a beer and allows dusk to delve down and extend his dark grace across the faint milky night before the lights come on.  A dream then, a whisper to women:  half the month will be inky the other conjectural facets of faith.
"5– 4 – 4 – 3"

I wander the town without a goal, noting historical points of interest.  Who decided that 1619 should bear any echoing resemblance to 1719, or 2019?  The centuries are arbitrary. Nothing is funny."The enemy is with us," says a native man in a foreign tongue.  Yes.  This is something we can laugh about, a cobwebbed generation or so from now.

One wonders what stories rivers tell each other.  A river longs to be with the ones who know what it's like at the shining edge of life, and to hang out with them for a little while.  This river was the color of roses.  I follow for a while, ask probing questions, go further, keep my ears open. 

Two rivers, after flirting and flattering for years, have decided to give it a go and get together.  "No strings attached," says the first river.  "Where I come from I am a queen," says the second river, "no strings attached never means no strings attached."  The first river's throat clogs with silt and he remembers the kings he has seen as he washed away at their graves.  This could work, he thinks mindlessly, gushing, yes, his waters violenting crushing hers, conjuring together a new way.