There was a day not unlike this one, it occurred to me this morning as I was leaving the grocery store with a smile on my face,
nearly 3 years and twice as many lifetimes ago,
when a girl with long dead hair (soon to be short) and I went to the farmers market on a rare wet and not unpleasant day when neither of us had to work, and we bought mushrooms and held hands through the glittery dew of spiderways as the sun finally came through the clouds over the buildings that we walked past imagining we might one day live in together.
Once, another time, I was in the cemetery outside of the town where she told me you grew up.
It was surreal for a number of reasons, I was holding a box of lunchables and a monster, for one, and also at that precise moment a funeral procession drove past, stamping the cold sting of middlewestern wind into my face in their wake, the air itself all small town main street, , no not main street... what's the street behind main street America? Parallel to it, but sketchier, closer to the tracks, you know the one I'm talking about… Beside me a bulldozer clawing away at what appeared to be an old elks lodge. Insolvent wallpaper walls crumbling as I stood there munching on lunchables and almost crying for the cold.
In the night I would lean against the sturdy of her back-
-she would hold herself warm by the light like trying to try
and then trying to try to be, to be let go, to be
this was all the past.
The Rashomon effect
is the effect of the subjectivity of perception on recollection,
by which
observers of an event produce
substantially different
but equally plausible
accounts of it.
Now am all out of focus, like the number when the young lovers sing their first-flirting song in an old Hollywood musical.
At the community college where I slum I tell my young teen disciples that we can make things more or less real depending on how we fixate/avert our attention(s).
When we were 22 my girl and I decided to adopt.
I adopted a drinking problem. She adopted 20 pounds.
One time the seagulls stared at me. I was regarding la mer. When lit up I remembered the soft skin on the inside of her arm. That day I wore black, a heavy hoody, back then I wore black every day. My potential in light saddened me. I slunk at the thought of levity. Happiness is hazardry to a guy like me.
Are guys like me?
Few are inspired.
Few act like themselves.
Few are natural.
Cut short the cigarett--. My yearning singes. Cough, the wind, the wind. Gray swaths cover everything. I shall pay you the humane compliment of not beginning at the beginning. How could I? How irksome was that initial joy? What pleasure begot the first of first pains? Was there a beginning? Such is my infinite regress.
Irksome, joy.
my girlfriend used to say
that I was one person in person
and then I would be somebody else over the phone
I would deny it, pathetically. She looked skeptical and righteous.
Telling the truth now, honestly, I was myself over the phone and I was trying to be somebody I was not when I was with her, in person.
All that was too much work.
-And whaddaya call this?
-A blog, so far.
Life's clicking by.
I call this
simultaneous portrayal of something that has receded into the abyss of time and something that is still emerging
I've got some new stories in the pipeline that are getting great reviews in my mind. The reviews come in the form of secret whispers between my leftsidelying dreams and me, and also sometimes
I scribble milkstains in the margins and then stack them in the dusty archives which I call postpreview. My fingernails are bitten down to keep out the dirt. Today I bought three nice new pens at the grocery store.
When I type in my phone number to get credit towards gas, they can thank me, as they do at the end of a purchase, by name.
“Have a wonderful day Mr. Masktman.”
(I'm sorry. We would have accepted "Easier, nicer, or better")
Maybe someday everything will feel like as much work as trying to convince myself that I was happy in that miserable relationship with that beautiful conniving genius of a woman, but until then
the days are pretty easy.
I am confident that the leaves will come back in the trees, and new subdivisions that I loathe will stubbornly pop up all over the branch roadways of this great nation.
Soon we’ll buy a house in one and share it with a toddler who likes to write on the walls and that kind girl with long hair and the easy smile who habitually makes beds and sweeps the tile, and hopefully it will be within walking-or-biking-distance to where I work so I don't get fat. Then at the end of the day I will triumphantly return home and recline in my deep-sunken chair by the lamplight with a bourbon room-temperature and A Moveable Feast and slowly save enough money from each paycheck to buy an island in the Hudson Bay and retire there.
Remember when people could work 30 years and then retire?
I sing my boy a song,
My heart says no leaving
no leaving says my heart
my heart says no leaving
no leaving says my heart
, and she listens in the doorwell, well...
At night her body brings my body what my brain cannot provide. I dream of film stills from Turner Classic Movies, painted over as canvas, by Bob Ross or the Group of Seven or somebody who paints with thick brush strokes. Somebody who has wings like Icarus and flies away when the painting is complete and I am there, a camera, watching him go off into the sunset, like Apollo, while in the foreground a still life with iris hat painting, bursting out of the seams of its canvas.
In last night’s dream, I taught myself how to fly. The ground was slushy and slipperly and uphill so it was slow at first but then I turned around and I took off.
Soon I was soaring and I was wearing corduroy, so I could feel the wind against the rivets of my legs. I landed on the roof of a building in my home-and-native town where there was a cheerful old man with long dead hair in a Santa Fe wool sweater who I was surprised to meet, because I recognized him from the Apollonian painting and I told him this and he told me that this must be the end, and he took my hand and we drank six or twelve or eighteen beers together and threw the bottles in the snow and fell on our faces and laughed until we were little kids and the big brown bell rang indicating that recess was over, and inside was whirring a warm coil radiator, waiting for us to drape our snow-smattered cold wet hats and mittens all over it and learn some more before we went home for another day, or maybe a weekend, maybe a weekend, I don't know. I did know, but sometime this morning, it seems that I forgot.
Labels: dead hair, farmers market, love is the sea, moribund pescetarians, Regardez la mer, springtime is for lovers, suckHeart of Gold, The Red Garland Muneficence, To like Tallahassee, Tulsa time
