Cormorant Recessional

 

They tried not to confront each others' eyes, and wet their lips instead sipping from beer steins or sparkles of wine, all drolly dolled up in their black finery, the heavy mood in the room a kind of melancholy musk. Autumn, already a time of recession, now met with these mourners majestic with their muted, timorous voices, waiting for the booze to kick in.

Ramal texted her boo

The hardest people to love are the ones who need it the most. God knows it's hard. Sorry, just a momentary lapse into honesty, one shouldn't say these things. Pretend you didn't hear that. Like my Dad. Not really hard of hearing but not at all interesting in being baited by things he does not want to hear nor respond to. My inhibition's showing, it's October. The summer shields are down, now is a time of cooling, shrinking, ebbing, descending, darkening – of preparation for the challenges of winter.

Ramal texted her boo

Cynical as the reticent theologian, Father McKearney bumming a smoke behind the bar dumpster on this bitterly cold brink of night, the light in his hand turning to ash. An hieratic character he butt uncharacteristically he's truculent and not a little drunk, slurringly musing “perhaps if I embark on a recitation it won't torment me so,” and so he dolefully quotes some Ezekiel, “The Lord God proclaims to these bones: I am about to put breath in you” then he stumbles and bumps his knuckle, drawing a sap of blood, mumbles “wash that away” as he flings open the door for another round. The sounds inside shoot out, an emerging raucousness, less an orthodox reflection than a manifest biblical paradigm: life itself is a parable, a walk down a fabled path into the deep dark forest, and there in the night we can feel what lurks, desperate and snarling, just there in the shadows, ready to pounce.

Ramal texted her boo

History is unstable, entropic, and honestly everything is ending all the time, not just right now. Time is simply the exchange rate between Destruction and Creation, it's a bear market, and Mankind was nice but it was so last season. Call me fatalistic- but when we all lost whatever tenuous grip we had on normal routines last year we fell from the scaffolding that that daily rhythm provided. No routine meant more time to think and I've been thinking about existence—the fleetingness of time, Montaigne was preoccupied by the inadequacy of his own knowledge, but the implication is that all knowledge falls short of truth. We are mortal. We are alone.

Ramal and her boo took off together around 8:30 in his Camaro.

 I was in the process of leaving until closing, when I left, and without my phone or any cards or cash for fare I walked back to the hotel. About 5 miles waiting for the sun to grace us with it's presence. It takes a lot longer now, the sun. The nights are longer, you can feel the inexorable withdrawal of energy as our northern hemisphere retreats, by degrees into the caliginous night, smoky from so many dying fires, the stars above, each cascading off like hollow pangs into the rising tide of darkness. Life's but a slow suspension into death, exhalation part of the same process of inhalation within each breath.