Epistle. To: Lady Kimono Clan

Woke up in a fog to a silent room. Soft airbrushed light. A question like where am I was easy enough to come by. But I really could not answer it. The body has its opinions. Vapor dreams. Medicinal scripts. Some pain was to be expected the discharge orders said. The body has its opinions. Like Fat Boy Slim singing Right Here Right Now. Not that I was listening to it at the time but I remembered it and it came into my head with as much reason as anything does not long after you open your eyes. Small bird songs like mementos drifted through windows. Streams of information. Things that aren't available to occupy right now. The way shadows from the morning lay upside down and floated on a low ceiling as they also drifted through the windows. The body has its opinion and wants to float upon a ceiling. Magazine quality shadows I need to write that down but I don't move. Smothered by desires or whatever else that shows. I like the word necessity. There's a day spinning somewhere but it's not here. Just the effects. I can sense it outside like the beginnings of color in the sky. I can't make it there because I can't move so I bring up music. Hence the discharge orders come to  mind. Chinese ink shadows on the ceiling that seem centuries old in the telling. The race car driver who in an interview on television last night said he got crashed. A phone downstairs that rings and rings and climbs up the stairs crashing the atmosphere of the house with finally a voice message. Of course I'm here and of course I can't come to the phone right now because... I need to fill in the blanks. I'm a monster to look at. But does that me a monster? Children on the street point at me. Some giggle. Some just stare back at me with little heads twisted around and smoke rings forming where their mouths should be. They must know something. I must know something. And sometimes I laugh back. And that seems to scare them. Doesn't confusion begin in clarity? Yesterday I offered some fresh tomatoes to a group of passerby's walking past the house. I doubt whether they might have even noticed me until I said,  here want some. They looked at me, then looked at the tomatoes, and back at me and said no thanks. They were good ripe tomatoes. The plants were growing in plain view in the garden boxes along the driveway. Killer plants - tall bushy healthy green bursting with fruit. The nurse and I planted them as a celebration after another recent surgery, this one to go after the hot dog cart shrapnel in my head. Unfortunately some of it may have to stay in there permanently. Stay tuned for details. But I felt totally left out when the passerby's refused the tomatoes. Who doesn't want a fresh picked tomato on a glorious August evening? Why do anything? Why even ask why? Apparently they did not understand what a necessity it is to give something away. To make an offering. To present a gift. How about some flowers I asked? Take a rose. Zinnias. Brown eyes. But no luck there either. They turned and walked away, leaving me with my ambitions unsettled and due for another time. Here's my worry. The whole time thing. It's almost like I have too much of it to do anything with it. All I have is time. What happens when I heal? When my knees have been replaced with plastic gadgets... and there's a tree branch of steel in my spine to keep me from walking like an ape... and a face that I once knew by heart in a mirror has to be reconstructed by a factory of surgeons and replaced with a digital lift from old passport photos ... I was on vacation once and was walking around on the last evening and thinking like some lonesome romantic fool searching the earth. Thinking about... and then having to go home the next day... Yea I know, of all things... And all that preponderance and importance that goes with being away for a time and having some money to throw around and carry on upon an evening's walkabout.  A number of galleries in town were closed and that surprised me. Given the weather was doing well within season and the atmosphere was caught between a warm day and a cool night I had hoped to skip through the night without even a thought. But no. I did have a pleasurable moment out on the pier watching the sun go down. Twilight yellows that bend the eyes beyond what there is to look at.  Dusky pink grays going succulent through the calm bay water. Sitting on a bench with a small boy and his father and the kid was tearing the last of a sad looking take out hamburger into little pieces and tossing it underhand like crazy to a gang of seagulls. Yea yea he said! Weren't you hungry? No no he said! The boats coming back to the harbor docked at their moorings with their running lights on against a slowly enveloping dark that literally came out of the air and it was like watching some mechanical sense of belonging come to be. It's a big ocean out there I said to the kid. And that enough settled things. I thought so what. An unbroken chain of days with all there is to show for it and all that remains to never have, I'll treat myself to a sit down meal at some pricey joint and be spot on content to lose track and imagine time moving in and out like old tides do past brown seaweed high water marks on the sand and then collect them back in a wave and start over. So I walked along... found a restaurant... and it seemed there was nothing so rewarding that broke down the limits of responsibility like going home or eating overpriced seafood as much as there was just sitting down for a meal at an outdoor table. Ah, the nectar and the night. A kind of tall combustible illusion that if you step inside will give you in return a tender voltage. After ten minutes I didn't have a menu. Not even a drink order. No one came around. Like I wasn't even there in the first place.

Epistle. To: Berlin Film Actress

So the nurse asked, can't we get the sunlight out of our eyes?  I need to be somewhere else. Like where I asked? I don't know she said. A big shade tree maybe. An awning over a picnic table in the backyard. So it's like a parallel world I asked? Not so much she said. I like the sunset but it's too hot to sit against. Yea I said but you work inside. Afterward don't you want to get outside and have a blast? Sure she said all that's great but I'm sweating and being hit by radiation. Can't we retreat? And I thought that's always been difficult to do. What I need is to have a sense that I've done something and then leave it at that. But to go backwards throws me. Where's that? It's not even memory lane - which is different -  because memory was a shape onto itself and comes to surface when you think about it. Once in remembrance there can be rightfully no turning back. Okay I said let's retreat. It's not like we're doing bikinis anyway. The nurse looked back at me. Whoa. Sometimes I feel default looking at a landscape. As though the whole account of life circled around - in pattern - in question - and in turn you felt stupid about it. But that's just the way it goes. It probably isn't that way really. Like where the footpath path cuts through the trees and comes to the water there was a small white shoe, a kid's shoe, and it was stuck on a piece of driftwood that was wedged between the rocks. Like it was there as something waiting to be found after it was lost. Waiting - but not really. It's we who invent the waiting. Not the shoe. But it really looked like it was waiting, to be found, or even lost all over again. Small white shoe on driftwood.. beauty as a kind of problem... far from perfect and far from harm. And in the nurse's eyes was the landscape reflected back at me. The fading sky with the long warming glare of the sunlight as a star gone in colors. The water with that light upon it almost like burning an oil on the waves. And the the trees in the park making those longed for awnings on a summer evening. What would a cardiologist say if this were a flipped over comic book universe? That I was having another heart attack, only now it was in reverse?  And what happens in this other universe was you get to evade the past and escape the future and stop the crazy wave action of time. You stand with the plants of the world and listen to the blood flow. But that seemed like asking for a cosmic credit. A good run but slippery. So we had a meal in retreat beneath a quiet old tree pruned many times over the years by faithful minimum wage parks and recreation department hands and whose branches were lopsided and not quite right to behold but were beautiful to watch and take in underneath. Fried chicken and cornbread from an old family recipe the nurse had in mind but was non-electronic to the extreme. If you wanted a copy to print out there was none to have. You had to drive north toward Canada and retrieve it from whomever was talking it then and giving it away like archival words passed around some long fire. The nurse said if you want this you need to go along. And so I did. The family looked at me like I was a creature somewhere detained between dreams. Alas I said and limped into the gathering. I met your cousin sometime after I died. Between hypodermic needles and ginger ale and the stormy effects of once being crushed. She's a tough ass. But she's also a blessing and as lovely as a small round stone that sits in the palm of your hand without clutching it. An aunt hit me with a fly swatter told me not to curse. I gave a younger brother a red painting. We had coffee and biscuits and drove off to dogs barking and chasing themselves and little kids imitating my monster walk across the gravel driveway. Back at the picnic we had local grown fennel and red onion slaw from the dreadlocks and banjo kids turning over dirt by the river into food and trying to make a decent business in the process. It was like farmer's market in the morning and then magic tricks in the evening. What it takes to have a meal. Maybe somewhere in a place we haven't yet discovered myth turns into a common object. Somewhere among the rest of us and our polarized selves we all just show up. And the pills were like tiny silhouettes to hide behind. Like having a rose tattoo on your shoulder that you only looked at in the mirror when you were twisted around. And yea I know, the brain chemistry should be there, like some two thousand year old asian vase that works in someone's home and doesn't line up on a museum wall. But I don't have that. I'm from a material culture. And so live within the great yelp of trade offs. What else to do but savor? Lovely August. Someone to have walk beside my own personal limp. Someone to unbuckle my braces. Oh to slump down on the grass and fall over the way a bad wind up toy might collapse when the spring goes loose.  The trouble always lies in what happens next. That's what gets to me I said to the nurse. What she asked? Well what are the days like? Here she said and handed me her cell phone. Call someone.

Epistle. To: Mercy Hunt

It was like two o'clock in the morning when I was startled awake. It was an old feeling and that shook the sleep from my head and started to thread needle points into my spine. I recognized it like some nasty troll come back from the dark territories looking for some place to intimidate and I regretted immediately having the nerve endings to see it and to internalize it. The room was crowded. I was stark naked alone but everything else was there squatting on my head.  Can't lie still. Can't run away. Can't tell the truth and can't tell a lie. Can't do anything quiet. Except fall.  Fall and twist through overheated synapses that pressurize on contact and build beyond control. Need Escape would be an apt here. Get me out is all your brain can shout but it was too late for that.  I was having a dream. I had to dive underneath the water. I had to fetch something down there or to meet someone below the surface. And before I knew it - wham - there was electricity running through me like I was a wire.  I limped outside and ran my eyes against the stars. Overhead the night sky was beautiful and catching and took you away to beautiful ends the way it does and overlays you in the drunken asides of songs. Down below however there was a different equal sign. Do you try and convince yourself hey this is all just in my head? When what's happening amounts to your body being squeezed and atomized and you think wait a minute I'm disappearing? Perhaps my greatest fear would be losing a sense of humor that I've had since birth. If I can't laugh then  I can't be serious. And it's not for a lack of maintenance! I could sit on the back porch forever. Like some exercise in extreme sitting and watch the world turn and go away and have it not miss me as though there was the sky and this was the face of a mountain. But I like to participate. I like to be somewhere. I like to have attention. Even if desires lose out to a moment in time - and what you have is all this shit surrounded by futility - ah the fucking life of it! - the point as I was seeing it last night was this total freaky moment. How do you pull back from something that's in your head but is not necessarily your thoughts? And I had this weird image sitting on the porch. It was a calculation. Which in itself was strange. But here it is. There are only fourteen weekends in a summer... Now whose idea was that? And those weekends go fast. So fast enough you're scared if you look at them squarely.  

Epistle. To: Wolstonecraft

Thanks. Despite what you warn me about about -  the cumbersome shell of the heart - what more can I do? I let fantasies of liberation get to me and the more I want the more there is to want till it becomes a kind of game. The little voice in the back of my head says be content with the way things are. The weird voice in the back of my head says what happens when the clock starts winding and then you lose out? I joke with the nurse about moving in together. She's here so often we could be a unit. But she doesn't see it that way other than me mentioning it and she thinking it a joke. But we're already kind of dating I said to her. Dating she said? What dating? Well we've gone to the movies I said and we've gone out to stores to buy things. And that's your definition of dating she said? No I said it's not like a definition. What then she said? More like a distraction I said. I like the look in your eyes, the way it can suddenly make me forget what day it is. She trained those queen sized lids on me and said that's nice but I'm not an escape plan. And I said but I don't want to come up empty. Who wants to settle for only the concept? Things should just materialize. That would be cool she said. Like a perpetuating mystery box don't you think I said? So she said, adjusting the bleach solution in the syringe as she prepared to change a bandage, let's suppose you were hungry and wanted a meal. Am I the hot dog? Or am I the grill?  Maybe dating is the wrong way to put it I said. So what is it she said? I thought about it. Hot dogs are about the easiest things to cook she said. She was right. Hot dogs were fucking simple. I then had a flash - as I got a needle full of that bleach solution straight into an open gash in my sternum - die bacteria die! - that not only are we just made from parts and leftovers that some process in life deemed us to be but there's also a world where you try and balance loneliness and companionship as though they were the the twin motors of the daily forage outward and back. If I were displaced in a song that would be a comfort. But I am not. I can't believe it fully or at least I fool myself into thinking that way but, really, you do have to ask, what purpose did dying serve? Time to begin again? And so as what? Another repository for aches and pains? A time sink that gathers information over the years and as a consequence gives out advice? And what's the answer to dating someone? How do you do that or not and come away so everyone feels clean? And so I continued and said to the nurse while it may seem at these unfortunate times that life as we know it is an action calamity squeezed between something like an endurance of a faith in breathing and a grudge match to simply and purposely hold on wouldn't you like to imagine we could be the stopper in the excess that totally wears us down? The nurse looked at me and packed some freshly opened gauze into the hole but didn't say anything. Why keep it dull I said? But she kept looking at me. She was like someone who went to a party in a good mood and would never allow all those otherwise bridges of language - like drunks yelling over the music -  or the fabled sweet nothings of sex come ons in her ears - to tie herself up in the head contrary-wise. She was able to look into the future about herself. And be clear. She was like cicadas calling out beneath a hot summer air that one day the whole air changes when you hear it but also you understand it's been that way for a very long time. And that was scary in the sense because you could count on it. It was also I'm afraid to admit way alluring. I'm trying to develop desirable points of view. If I have another life to live and if death has graced me that way then I want in. But I don't know if it's too late. And so I said I walked over to the park this afternoon. No she said you didn't. Her expression changed and she shook her big sad eyes across my face. No I said sensing her disappointment it wasn't like that at all. I need to get out I said. I found no trouble. I did nothing wrong. Try and see this I said. Paddle boards like the latest fad were out on the lake in clumsy happy numbers all nervous and almost experimental and looking stupid for lack of skills with people falling off them and getting back on board beneath a sterling light hitting the water. Soccer balls skimmed across the grass like they do each weekend in a pick up game and people on the sidelines shouted and had fried chicken and clandestine cold beer. Young bodies in bathing suits that fit them like stars exploding in desperate time were stretched out on the rocks soaking up the cancer and vitamin D in the sun. Mindless hedonistic and turned on from old reptile dreams. And I guess being in the surroundings indicates an involvement whether it's here or nothing else. I had all the pills I needed to elevate the mood and yes I did grab a beer from a chummy soccer fan. And somewhere between the soccer game played back and forth on the ground and the water played into the coves on small hot winds I yelled hey check it out I'm back from back from the dead! What more was there to want? A fucking tax credit for being alive? I see it the nurse said. The seven o'clock bells rang out upon the evening. Some rain last night but the garden needed it. The lilies have gone away for the year and just that alone to think about, the way you might lose a quality, marks a calender as subjective and makes you wonder where the damage is. But the brown eyes have muscle now in the space cleared by the lilies. It's a plan like that. All I did was plant it in motion and waited to see what happened. Do you like bonfire parties the nurse asked?  

Epistle. To: Wollstonecraft

My horoscope said -  you must outwit the riddle. Not solve the riddle. But outwit it. And that's catchy but where does it leave you?  Are you still at it? Did you still play both sides? Maybe in the heart of things you might redo my chart? As for things now I'm escaping a bad night outside. It's raining and blowing against the windows in downpours and knots of wind pound against the house like something large and simplified trying to crash through the walls. I'm hiding on the inside in a dimmed room with a single lamp burning like some old torch lit up in the halls of darkness. It's late and I have a familiar feeling. Where you can't fall asleep for trying so you try and bother someone else and try and talk to them. Where you stay marginally awake at a loss until early morning and as you're about to fall asleep in the early morning you stop and you say to yourself wait a minute don't I usually wake up in the early morning? Thunder rolls across the skylights shaking dust off the blinds. Lightening flashes ride the clouds in herds of electricity. Everything lets go with a storm. Don't you think? The way the world sometimes appears to look back at you. Sometimes it's all so great and you feel so alive that you must fail, correct errors, repeat the process to ensure your feet are still lovingly planted above ground. Sometimes you look into the night sky and what you find staring back is ridicule. Like a vast silence telling in credits but no dialogue - hey yo you be small. Do you think the world has a brain? I mean a collective one. I guess it's like breathing. A bunch of thoughts gathered up and let loose like a manner of sorts plotting on how to get even. Each day I try and extend my reach. I try to walk further. The punch list that's never complete! But when I look out the window I'm faced with geometries of memory and what those sensations are and how they run deeper than just filling in the hours. You were important. Perhaps you still are. All that spook work you did must have made you some enemies worth nothing. Remember how that president's wife would never let the president even take a nap without looking at the chart? Central America? Banking deregulation? The hot line to Russia? Nothing happened higher up like that without first consulting the charts that you built on the stars. And so, are you hiding tonight? We're not the same. We never were. I was a fool and you never were. Maybe I'm just scared and would like someone else to take up the job and be afraid for me. (!) I just finished reading a post by some guy who's taking a year off to bicycle around, in order to have a "radically local life." I just saw Jane Eyre with the nurse. Tell me your tale of woe Rochester asked her. Woe she replied? Sir she said, I have no tale of woe. Ah Miss Eyre, Rochester said, behind a smokescreen of cigar rising in his face and a tumbler glass of shadowy alcohol brought to his lips, we all have a tale of woe. I try but suddenly the whole thing goes off into the past and I feel stupid looking at it like I've been left behind. Should I just leave the deal alone? How's that possible though? The way we're made inside. If it's written in the stars?  And this is more complex than I ever gave it credit for being. I guess I'm not sure what I should do - so when you tell me I have extra DNA to scatter about what does that mean? The hospital mechanics want to put me back together - but even if they get on with their best laid plans of mice and men - I will never be the same. Who would I be - I mean who can I be - if I don't have my old body to live within? It's an attraction for sure. The whole body thing. I remember I always felt safe when we talked about things walking around together after school. I remember setting a book on your thigh and I remember you picking up that book and hitting me with it broadside across my head. I remember how it was your face would change and shift by how long or short the daylight was falling on your face. At times it was soft and craving. Other times it was cut wicked and angular and seemed to have it all and what that said was don't ask for more. Ah. But is this just me? Or the wind and the rain. Or the moon that isn't there.

Epistle. To: Bernadette Wild Garden

Started the red paintings last week. It felt like there was nothing to start with other than what I knew. And if there were lonesome perspectives to have, then trying to bridge what you know, with something yet not made, then starting with what you know turns around and looks back at you like a solitary confinement.  I feel like a ghost. Like I've been dead and now am walking around dead. Wait - that's a zombie. And I don't want to be a zombie. I want to be a ghost. I want that special knowledge that comes afterward. Like after something goes wrong you have this weird understanding. Like when you see a car wreck or a train wreck or a drunk wreck, don't you have this immediate sense?  Doesn't it feel like seeing it has now made it your own?  Human nature becomes drawn to killer apps like that. Why we look. Why we speak out later on. Why? We're on the further end of process.  Hearing voices in the windows when you stare out in the street. The corner chair in a room where a spider web keeps appearing after the nurse ran through the room with a vacuum. And the crows that drop into the garden like airborne thugs with shiny feathers and who land for a moment and do nothing else but inhabit a freakish brief time and then lift off back into the air without a sound either coming or going. I want to paint everything red and that's the problem. It's the color. There's too much of it. It's hard to paint that color. You need a toe hold in the land of forever and that's a bastard to get. And I don't have that.  It's equally as difficult not to paint that color. But if I don't paint that color then what? Will I be left? And if so where would I be left?  Maybe it's like this. Maybe the color red is on to something. But what though? I don't have that answer. I don't know where it is. I want to locate something. And in return have that something locate me. I have this rush to get into an ethers of dreams. An ether of practical day long opportunities. An ether that wont stop. What I fear is I will be left behind to roost. Like watching a dragonfly hover in the warm humid air above a set of green plastic lawn chairs... then longing for that motion... where that motion appears as a stop in visual time... There used to be a body out in the world that once belonged to me and now that body has long been gone. And it's best to remember here, reverie should never be mistaken for nostalgia. What's in the past is just so. Like any amazement that happened to you. Why sift through that dust? What's the popularity there? If you have an idea you need to make that idea stand up and sing and that won't happen yesterday just because you thought it up yesterday. Ideas don't wait for us to get an act together.  The overall feelings we hunt for  - like where did that body go - where do we pause and stand tall in the shit stream - or whatever else we want  - take those into account and what I find is that the image of ourselves we need in that face of time running away is not important. That image counts less than the details. And once fired those details bring a money shot but thank goodness they settle back down and then bring out a tired old truth for inspection - that we can't make anything happen again. The nurse was just here. I was talking with her about red paintings. And she said any stage of life was just another label that didn't pay as well as the one before did. Why keep it dull she said? She sighed and tossed me a dish towel. Part of my occupational therapy is to catch things in motion and then put them away. I'm getting better at it. Though sometimes that quick response and coordination reflex I'm to build upon leaves me somewhere ajar in the brain and that's another place to deal with. On occasion I miss the dish towel.
    

Epistle. To: Lady Kimono Clan

Perhaps there are no suitable answers to build upon. Perhaps it's just an intellectual curiosity that happens to be strange and gets appreciated each day like the sunlight over the trees. Or how remarkably similar we can feel from one day to the next without even thinking about it. Did we make it that way? Is it built in? Maybe it was just the tortured infected springtime and the glacial pace of recovery that now governs my days. How long does it take to be well? Isn't that a stupid question to even ask? However when that distance of loneliness shows on occasion and begins tossing its weight around and there's no place to hide because it knows where you are, I'm frankly afraid of it, and am conversely, drawn to it like a small bit of magnetic ore. How does it settle in? A chilly ghost-like presence. Now-  here's a niche market to visit - a porn site dedicated to warm ghosts! Yea not only would we show up but there also might be a party! Usually though I look about and see change as the culprit. Which is like a panic attack whistling past and I worry full well that I'll be the one around to live through the change. I mean I accept change. It's the currency formed from all life on the one planet we know about. How do you trade with anything else? Let's face it - the world is in charge! Shifting viewpoints. High tides/ low tides. Storm days/ calm days. Sweet dreams/ drunks singing outside the windows in the dead-night. The stuff of nature grows between and like the fortune cookie fortune said opportunity knocks so pay attention. But there's all these grubby little fears that for one moment show up and just as quickly leave and undermine and fuck up my day. It's like I'm being chased and the only thing I can do to get away from them is to move away and step on that thought - even if that thought and the stepping away were irrational - looking at it and being scared shitless from nothing to speak of -  but also to get the fuck out and to move away physically from it like a yelp from adapt or die like a herd of beasts might do seeing a fire break out across the water hole and begin to spread across the old savannas of consciousness. Do you document it and leave it go and say these are twisted behaviors? Where's the serotonin levels? But in truth - and you do know me - like a warm ghost site! - alas why don't you friend me? - I do prefer an orderly scheme to the way things work. I maintain a time. A practical. A spiritual. An outlook or a leveling throughout the sunrise/sunset thing. I don't even know what that means. And I don't care what it means. And I don't care what it means to anyone else. Where it comes down to is a question. Being scared? Or not being scared? I walk past a yard in the neighborhoods every day. And there's a wagon or cart-like toy in that yard that never moves. It's a peculiar point of interest and I'm drawn to staring at it. How do you look at it? That toy I mean. Maybe it's just flotsam and jetsam. Who's out there to play with it? And if it was just left there, where it is, day after day, no one moving it, how come was it left alone? For me it's been that way for over a half-century and counting.

Epistle. To: Mercy Hunt

When I got home that evening not only was I trashed but the nurse was waiting up for me and was livid. What a total pain in the ass she said... and I said something like well anger doesn't suit you.. and she said what the fuck do you know anyway? It was at that point - and it was a low point -  it hit me like I was drunk dialing through an address book and no one else was around to pick up the receiver on the other end and that's like a terrific lonely feeling to have when you're drunk and want to talk and it seems the rest of the world is not around and so pretty soon you get the hint to just shut up. But! To sail away like the hundreds of boats did on the lake after the fireworks were over I said and their running lights slowly erased into the nighttime like candle wicks run out of wax and left to burn and to eventually dissolve. How could you do this she asked? Hearing her shout made my ears throb. All I did was go out I said. Look at you she said! I guess it was true. I did look like a mess. My bandages were unravelling and stunk like beer. I was covered in food stains. What a meal I said! And apparently I had wandered into the lake. The boats I said the boats! The soft casts beneath the leg braces were soaked, and what was inside those casts, like a pair of scared up legs dreaming of dance videos to come, would start to mold and rot if not taken apart and cleaned and have the system put back together immediately. And someone apparently took the liberty to place two ice creams cones - apparently chocolate and strawberry - impale them actually on the upright spikes of the metal halo holding my head up - and while it was probably a fun thing to do at the time but all the ice cream did was melt and run down over my shoulders like tributaries from a larger erosion. I didn't mean anything I said. But what that meant I wasn't sure I said. Can you not mean anything if you've already been out there and done it and then have to think about it afterward I asked? For lack of a better definition what I saw in response to my questions was both the living beauty of anger in its fine amplitudes of righteousness shot back through me like a sledgehammer but also what was there was the stasis of that anger and where it cannot go without doing more harm than already having it. Look at you she said. I wish you were not my problem she said. Ah. I can't tell you how much I imagined it earlier and how much a relief it was to be home then later on.

Epistle. To: Berlin Film Actress

I looked up, from an otherwise Sunday evening - ah - the standard repertoire time invented - the welcome but cumbersome newspaper, the generous wine that has yet to disagree with me, a blue sky like the color of home above with summer clouds rolling across - and there were several fat neighborhood cats walking through the gardens, like they were suspicious, like they knew something else. I watched them for a while. But how long is that in the moments that a cat takes in? Damned if I knew. But the day before was something else. I skipped out on everything. And without knowing why I ended up in atmospheres. Earlier that day the nurse rushed off to deal with a family squabble. Some blood-kin fire for sure that had to be put out and could not be put out without her jumping in a car immediately and driving hours toward Canada. And then once there, waving some black art words through the air like a spell, the family would calm down. The nurse would look around. Peace on earth. Someone in the backdrop as a cousin would pick up a fiddle and start to to play. That was a sign things were good. Soon after, armed with fresh bread and venison meat, the nurse would immediately hop in the car and drive back down from near Canada. At least this was how she explained this whole thing to me. Will you be all right she asked? I didn't know really. I mean I've always taken it this way or another that I will be all right. The nurse said she had to go. And I totally liked that about her. Always a definite in the blank space about what leaving meant.  I could call the emergency number to get help if I needed etc. But she was worried. And when she said that, dare I say it, when I heard it, she was worried, well that little number pulled a heart string. Oh I know. I remember what it was like. To have worry. And to be worried. Weren't those the days! But really it serves notice as such, one evening doesn't change anything. Even if something drastic happened, the next day all the other wheels keep spinning. However, back to that evening. With the nurse gone and me uncovered for a few hours I went downtown to watch the fireworks. Probably not the smartest thing to do - but hey - look who we're dealing with. Ever have those feelings where you felt like a vocabulary word looking for the right definition to fix itself onto you? So I tried these: jaunt - stroll - tramp - ramble. None of them fit. But I wanted them to. And that's the way it goes.  One way or another I saw those words across horizons and streets and traffic as I imagined them in play. But that was more for the gray matter you understand. Now - I've been out for walks. But not for long times. And am sorry to admit it but I have been back to surgery. But that evening was different. I left the pattern. Different. Forget average. Place - as I saw it -  became inspirational -  and not just another whereabouts to pass through on the way back home. It's always good to get out of the house! People though continue to look at me. Something about the bandages I suppose and the metal halo holding my head in place. And the leg braces - like totally bad limps - make me machine wise but human dull, in that I can't bend to get things going but need to swing everything from the hips for motion. I overheard a doc one time in the recovery room. He said by the time this guy's done he'll have enough new parts inside to be a monster! Perhaps there's something there. Eventually I will have to live up to this. Like some fucked up grown up thing! But the air that evening I tell you was soft warm July like sweetness done up in planetary mechanisms and then laid back down on you like a fine coating. Place. Sure there were weirdos running about waving tiny flags and sparklers like they were masturbating in the land of the free. And what can you do about the lonesome gradualism that has more flags on trash bags sponsoring auto dealerships with dead history heros and a toothy gal with naked shoulders in the home of the brave? I mean there's always a risk going out in public. But this was like reckoning square into the optimism of the american century in localized portions. Harley riders with gnarly hair streaming like contrails above the exhaust pipes of their bikes. Rolling american thunder one gal yelled. Skull bones accurately needled and other assorted personal information tattoos like love and fuck you on large cubist biceps. I wandered across a parking lot where gray hairs sat in circled lawn chairs smoking dope in rainbow shirts against running mouth skateboards and missing cats stapled onto utility poles. I wandered into a backyard. Citizens rallied around beer can oratories like this were the rainbow and not a constitution promise. Kids ran through the  fading daylight with berries shortcakes and cream making a mess in their wake and having a total fun doing it. More flags. Someone with a suggestive barbeque apron and a cartoon hat pored me an umbrella drink and said here motherfucker happy fourth! Honey his wife said I don't know what it is about these kids but they all seem to keep getting younger. Wasn't that the point? For the old melting pot to keep stirred?  Somewhere we belong. Even if we blow the chances - even if everyone was a child from a war  - even if the oracle was not in at the moment but will be with you shortly - somewhere we belong. Fellowship maybe or even some kind of frenzy. I told the backyard hosts thanks for the drink but I needed to move on but would like to be back some day and maybe hang out. Honey she said - and this seemed reasonable- that the umbrella drinks apparently don't stop at one but move forward into mysteries like prime numbers - the last time I saw you I said nothing at all which means the last time I saw you I did not see you at all. I had no idea what she meant but that was fine with me. I was out on the street limping wild. Day lilies shot up in from cracks in pavements. Boat lights on the lake were rolling in a sudden breeze and extending the darkness like fireflies might across a hilly field. Driver's licenses and passports and social numbers - nobody I knew - but all this documentation I was somehow related to by dint of birth - and making us a country tangled in the holiday life for now and just as gone tomorrow as any sunflower or some railroad tree. But isn't that the best part? I made it down to the waterfront tents which was thrilling but was however a big mistake. I walked along the food vender aisle. Wanting nothing but that was just another feeling to have. High on meds because I had to trust something. Wanting everything because that's the way it is as the sky galvanized the evening clouds like a print from the factories of watercolor dreams. I heard crowds call out for hamburgers sizzling. French fries so deep in the fat they left marks on the air once taken out of the basket and tossed onto a little paper boat. Some guy said I gotta have me at one of them corn dogs. Pizza slices below tidings of elysium tomato sauces - middle eastern salads like refugees from the arab spring - tofu milkshakes that were really good if you added the chocolate syrup and a splash of the hot sauce from the nearby taco mania cart. Maybe I was hungry. Or was just lost in the love of digression as the sign of life. It's hard to tell. But I really couldn't eat/walk/think at the same time. Those are like harebrained things enough to do on a good day. And then it was dark and the concert band shut up thankfully after an eternity of cover tunes and boom went the night up in a single high liner to get the crowd teased. Amazing what explosions do for the attention span. Who's paying for this someone asked? Her companion added - like someone trying to be sly but who ends looking stupid for it -  I even don't like fireworks. Boom. Boom. Smoke. Multi-hued light like a birth of a universe and if you watch those science channels this was pretty close. Two young neighborhood scenesters stood next to each other and were texting one another standing basically in the same footprint about what was happening a thousand yards above them. And laughing I guess cosmically. Boom. We love loud. The companion said there goes our freedoms up in smoke... Don't you think that's funny he asked? She didn't say anything, just sat there looking up at the sky like anyone you might forget. Maybe she was still worried over the cost. I mean how do you except to impress a date with a hoary line like freedoms going up in smoke? First of all there are no freedoms I said and so what. And second I said why don't you just buck up and enjoy a night out. But I suspect I said this is some sort of internal life you're sharing with the rest of us out here in the open. And third I said - but he cut me off before I might finish- both of us secluded in shadowy environs -  and he said excuse me. With some expression I imagined was supposed to flash anger like some wounded animal in its own head defending itself but was de facto lost in the long sad backwash like some shut down anus in evolution and was trying to fight it and trying to live up to it but truthfully in a stare down the hormones failed and he was just another guy on the way to fucking up his date and did not know how to get out of a failed chimpanzee stance.  Liberal astonishment was practically glued over his face. And that wasn't a pretty sight to look back at believe me. There were rockets crashing up into the sky as stage lights and crashing into the one that was just fired a moment before like some antidote to loneliness. Someone else was too drunk to find his cup holder and was urinating onto a milkweed plant in a neoclassical male pose like a statue in front of a bank building and sure enough losing ground fell over onto the grass trying to grab nothing for support and his friends all took out their phones and made sure this life was captured and preserved.  The companion said excuse me. Like he was polite to the ends of the earth but he never meant it. Like some dumb shit. Dumb shit. I thought fuck this - your middle aged ponytail that you still wear as hair despite the icky dome sweat on your forehead. The  crow's feet at the ends of your eyes just because you've been around the block more than once and you now think because you've been around that block that now that block owes you something in return. The pea bright green overalls you're wearing like no natural color this side of some near extinct amazon lizard and without a shirt underneath like you don't have flabby man breasts all wedged out of the straps like some totally bad burlesque act. And really I didn't know what else to say after I said that, so, I said excuse me? Boom. More smoke and light. The crowd went ooooohhh... releasing a collective breath into the night that would hold us together for as long as a a rocket show...  after that we're back on our own... and the companion threw a beer into my face. Maybe the umbrella drinks made me too happy. Maybe I was mobbed in excess of passion. I'd like to think I was taken off like a doomed romantic and didn't care what happened next but really I was too old for any of that. I looked around and saw a woman in huge dreadlocks with bunting tied in her hair wearing face paint and balanced on a unicycle. In the smoke and light show that flashed off on/ off on/ she looked like a gunpowder zombie dancing on a single wheel. But now I had beer dripping all over me. But hey -  doesn't that happen anyway - over the long course of many an american holiday? A neighborhood scenester come over and said, dude that was way harsh. And I didn't stop to think if he meant me or the companion. Namely postcards from the grave. And he said that beer sucks. Here he said have one of these. I took the can and drank it in a gulp as though this were a creation myth and I had just ripped off a fig leaf and was now all butt-assed power and left just as embarrassed. Maybe I was a monster. A ghost story who when inflamed kills someone at festivals. An effortless kung fu movie swipe in the dark. But - drifted over the ages - through magic - cave paintings - alchemy - centuries of it building and plugged into the bones throughout - all the fears to stand beyond how we get thrown around and as a result how to be something known and nothing more -  DNA science to explain a leg up on having a beer thrown in your face - even if I were the agent of contagion and hit the prompt button on the companion's nervous breakdown - the assorted head devices like mercy or paranoia or revenge - how to live each day getting fucked over in the world by forces and strangers - I wanted nothing more than an immediate frame of reference. And that was to live to fear nothing. And then to live again to tell about it. Like a Blind Faith lyric - I'm wasted... and can't find my way home...

.

Epistle. To: Mercy Hunt

I like to think maybe I beat it. Beat it at its own game even. I like to think I acted randomly. Down through the years and all that. Not so much from something personal, but something more like looking around and trying to decipher it. Like algebra class. Remember Mister Z and how earnest the man was?  Oh the chalk lines dragged across one's nerves! Algebra class -  like all the rest that we sat through - back in the dreaded school years of being developed for the coming phase of life where we would be all stuck later on as adults. And it was also like spades working against you when trying to fit in was more important than something like having a second thought about it.  But the one good thing from algebra class - other than of course having you as a text-mate to cheat from!  - was getting credit for trying to solve the problem. Even if you didn't arrive at the correct answer in the back of the book you did get marks for your scratch-work in the side columns for pursing the damn thing etc. But it made me wonder. Pursing problems and all that. Ah. The grand scheme in the nature game. The one that doesn't like a vacuum. But to get you up to speed here's what happened. I was riding my bicycle along the Onion Avenues north to south when I got t-boned at Main and the hot dog cart by another bicycle. Some wild and crazy guy flying down Main east to west hit me broad side and sent me into orbit south east to north west. I remember being forced off my seat into a kind of suspended air and flying through some eternal moment in the books. It being totally beautiful to become air born. Like the stuff from where dreams are made. Only now I appeared capable beyond the abstract. I was flying through the air. And I guess somewhere it registered that right now I was in the air - forced against my wishes - but really wasn't that a pedestrian thing we all fear? In the air I flew-  breath taking - gonad tightening - above the curb-scape - a small city intersection with hip hop boys holding skateboards like instruments and music apps stuck in their heads and tourists in bad shorts sweating for ice cream cones. Bare chested hard hat laborers dug in the filth of ongoing asphalt repaving to make the streets simpler to negotiate. I was flying above land. I was a mammal with stock options and a coupon for a free car wash in the next month. And now whoa. A bird's eye of things below more defined than any gods might be since they were already there in the air and that's why they were gods to begin with and not mammals flying through the air.  I was making my own dream. Could this get any better? The beautiful stuff lasted for a few seconds until I slammed head first into the metal sides of the hot dog cart. With impact enough to geyser steamed wieners and the relish trays up into a fountain and then back down in a sticky sweet protein filled mess onto the heads of a group of city councilors out for a break from budget negotiations. When I woke up I was a room. Whoa. Where did the air go? This was not a place where the gods hung out! And maybe waking up wasn't a clear enough description. Had I come around to what? It was explained to me. There was a pause in the manufactured breathing tubes stuck down my throat and into my nostrils where I volunteered something like my own breath and then opened my eyes. This wasn't anyplace to be I thought again and I knew it immediately. Like if you've ever sat down to a poker table and looking around you if you don't see a sucker at the table than brother you're it. Machines were all around and it was like being lost inside the workings of a mechanical forest that stretched to the door frame and then wrapped back toward me around the walls. White whispers spoken beyond a pall of understanding and needle ports rising out of me. Welcome back some gal said looking down into my eyes. Don't even think about moving she added. What was next I thought? Was I going to be told that I was doing fine? You're not doing so well she said. I tried to talk. But I had no voice on the outside. All I had were sounds on the inside. They were like shouts no one heard but me and they filled my ears with equal mixtures of fear and curiosity like a balance point not arrived yet. If I texted I might say WTF? But I don't. All I have is a landline that the telecommunications company of origin keeps embarrassingly updating to the 21st Century until they get rid of me and all the other landline users. I tried to raise my hand. Hoping for the odd calligraphy gesture that by a simple physical act was meant to communicate a need from within and write thoughts upon the air to be viewed. But the bed held onto me. The gal kept looking down at me. I kept looking out. Through something. I was looking out through something. You were dead the gal said. Huh? When the EMT's finally pulled your head from the hot dog cart you had a seizure and went into cardiac arrest and then you bought the farm. Huh? That means you died. Huh? Technically you were gone for a minute and forty-nine seconds. Huh? They put the paddles to you and that banged your heart around and that got you kick started back up. You were quite the mess when they brought you in. Now you're here. Suddenly it was clear. I was in a hospital room. Either that or now I was still dreaming. Either way I thought I'm screwed. But who was this gal? Did she text? And if so did I now have to get an app? Cue the neurons. What can I say? But I liked the way she talked. I liked how it was. I wanted to hear more how it was she sounded. Dead? Well wasn't that the shit... And a thought I then had was - am I still dead and this was just a memory? Cool I thought. Maybe I'm in the Twilight Zone? A syndicated television re-run. Like the one at the bus station. How many time have I see that one? After the Rod Serling introduction some guy with baggage checks his whereabouts but it's pretty clear he's just another invisibility left in the aisles among confused passengers and bad fares and inept schedules heading off into forever - which was really his life repeating again and again - without really knowing anything different because you get off one bus and get on another beneath the big time clocks and black and white postings for tickets. But what if that wasn't it? Maybe I was in the future. The old piss smelling bus station where thieves share the night was no longer there. Instead confused passengers bad fares inept schedules were installed as the old same template but this time around was posted onto a brand new off the drawing board federal grant designed multi-modal-user-transit- sender and the exits hummed like illuminations with different cites imprinted virtually upon the air in brilliant smart phone colors. But wouldn't it be in the end the same old invisibility to contend with? So nonetheless I felt stuck. The fucking present. I couldn't talk. I couldn't move. And naturally I wanted out. Here's the program the gal said. Severe facial lacerations. Collapsed vertebrae. Broken sternum. Your knees look like dog meat. And here's the kicker. There's a piece of the hot dog cart stuck inside your head that can't be removed at this time. There's too much swelling in there to get a clear shot at it she said. And with situations like this there's always the risk of hemorrhage where even if the surgery were a success well if you bleed too much afterward then your brain might blow up she said and so she said there's no point at this time putting you through all that. Plus she said who you need to do the operation is at this moment wind surfing off the coast of Oregon and who if I do read the e-mails correctly won't be back until the last gust calms down. Realistically she said  he'll be back in the office in nine days. It's a problem with professionals she said. Especially the brain surgeons. They get away from the lasers and the scalpels and turn into nature boys. My job here she said is to care for you. I do have to inform you that while you are in the hospital there's always the possibility for infection. Bacteria aren't exactly the easiest creatures to catch she said. She looked down on me with big leafy eyes that seemed like elements on her face. I wanted to say whoa. I wanted to say I can't talk back but I will look up into those greenstone rims and herbal-like corneas until the turn of the century faded away. I wanted to say majestic. I wanted to say this is a fucking nightmare. I wanted to say but what happened to my bicycle? Relax she said and hit a button on an IV port. It's cocktail hours she said. And oh she said. The You Tube with you and the hot dog cart that went viral.        

Epistle. To: Wollstonecraft

How to know what to want, like happiness maybe, or even avoiding pain, is trouble enough. But when confronted by choices like eight different toasters or six different blenders it feels completely default-like to say oh they're all the same. Shouldn't you make a choice regardless? Was it good enough to toss out the extremes? Eliminate the cheapest model and the most expensive at the same time? And if doing so, then what was left? A bow to the way of the bargain hunting samurai taking up a solid intellectual position in the middle? But let's think about it - while half the world starves each night for lack of food or clean water or decent shelter there are eight different toaster variations to choose from. Just for burning bread muffins and bagels to be toped with something that melts and satisfies another whole list of cravings to have. Naturally any rationale can slip out of hand. Looking around just one store, in just one town, one could blow off a whole afternoon and become trapped by exploring the promises of all the gadgets in sight for sale. I needed a toaster. My old one from like fifteen years had shit the bed. But looking at all the toasters had a sudden and an almost violently pleasurable affect upon me. With all this in sight I scanned around and tried my best to stay defensive but truthfully when left to ponder on acres of merchandise and acres of mind I now wanted a toaster. I wanted wide settings. I wanted profanely cheap looking digital readouts. I said to the woman across the aisle -  who studied a large stainless dough mixing bowl with industrial paddles as though she were realizing she now needed to feed multitudes - can you believe this. Perhaps my scars made her uncomfortable. She said nothing in return and quietly made her way off past the vacuum food processing machines and chop-a-matic devices that accordingly turn any meal into a party. Were it not perverse I would say this was magic. I was landed somewhere I had not intended to be. And so feeling the drug-like benefits of shopping I moved laterally to the blenders. I didn't need a blender. Nor did I want one. But I was now certain something different would happen despite what I thought about it. Ah - twelve speeds - crush fruit ice alcohol - the smoothie of unrealized dreams - cocktails like dragonflies hovering in warm summer air - the deeper stuff requires some work even if money does make us strange - and the play on rule was here in effect so I had to continue this with dignity and purpose in a fucked-up world or else leave the store entirely. I've had plenty of toasters in my life and not many regrets about them. But never a blender. And that recognition struck me as odd. I asked the nurse how can I let this go? The nurse looked over the blenders, going over each one with a precision touch that was her fingertips at work in the world. Do you really want more junk in your life she asked? I knew she was right. But that wasn't the point. Look I said. When we were younger all this never crossed the radar. We used to run around like something wildness gave bones to. Clones of time really but believing we were mystics. And maybe we were. Out looking for experience. Longing for great unstated eagerness to haul us away. The nurse held up a blender. Yes I saw it. Like it was a trophy. Or some admittable evidence in court. And so you're trading this she asked? By now I was trying hard to really want a blender. I was trying to come away clean like the air does after a good rain. To do what you think. No I said. There's not much left to trade. Then buy a blender she said. But I didn't really believe it. That was just talk. And I told her so. So she asked? No I said it's like this -  I seem better when I remember. Sure the nurse said, putting one blender back and then picking  up another to inspect, it's all over too soon. Now I wanted everything. I wanted memories as crazy as the fake flowers bursting over in aisle 9. I wanted crappy home appliances that locked me up in retail chains of bliss and let me in on how to  make food like celebrity endorsements showed how. I wanted the sunlight falling outside across the parking lot like a huge dying star slicing suburban cars in two with shadows. I wanted to hear the nurse say again yes she would come by tomorrow while it was still a beautiful spring afternoon today and we were out driving and listening to play lists and throwing debit cards to the wind. Because the future was there - just this side of a lie and just on the other side of honesty -

Epistle. To: Bernadette Wild Garden

I remember it was mid-January and on into what appear culturally to us most as long bleak days lost in winter. The holiday season was over. Color was gone from front porches and no one felt like getting together for dinner. Why everyone needs a break mid-January remains an odd quantum equation. But nonetheless, looking around one evening I saw the day stretching. Dozens and dozens and dozens of crows heading across the sky flew off above the windows like a single crazed motion. A black winged rodeo. A folk lore anthology refers to multiplies or crows as: a murder of crows.  But who or what was riding that stirrup? Not that I saw where they came from. Or even where they were going. Suddenly they filled the sky in the window. What to do but  step outdoors... be closer to what was happening above as though I were somehow kin to it all along. Snow began falling. Falling in mists at first and then heavy flurries and soon after there was a storm whirling around. And it was below zero cold which made it seem so easy. This was the time - to have one foot outside in the snow like weary mammals looking into the cold and dark and the other indoors in the pipe line heat of our urbanite hermitage - for vegetables cooked in a stew like winter demands - dark bread with sweet butter fat - alcohol spirits that chase troubles out the door but never solve them - but no one was around. But looking it up later on the weather channel what intuition said was a gimme was confirmed with information from satellites. The days were growing longer, if only by seconds. Why count? Ah, but that's the thing. Time - the life long habit we make - being in the drift of forever - starts taking an express. What to do then? The calender day may be longer. But the further out we go the more that calender day runs out! I remember walking on the frozen lake one evening and you said I don't know if I'll be coming home soon. The crunch of snow underfoot - clean sounding - direct - and the more you walked the more you needed to hear that sound - as though snow underfoot spoke for the world and was not simply another silence in winter. The sunlight had long settled beyond the white nests of the high Adirondack peaks. A fishing shanty began to glow behind a dirty plastic window in a gas lantern but otherwise the other ice holes were vacated for the night. Yea there were stars that formed. But that's all. Way out light in the distance. But today - like a fulcrum - remembrance springs eternal - one self as its called though we should constantly doubt it - is impossible - without today and the reverie - they both have to be somewhere in the same place for us to exist - so forgetting about the present today I painted over an old painting. And I had a sudden feeling or maybe an exchange of feelings that I was erasing some part of the past. In a way that was probably so. But was it the painting - or the times - that is memory - associated with the painting? Again what? A sort of perky melancholy in the abstract that held a breath of life to itself? Or was it literally something I would never see again? Frankly what I needed were the materials more - the physical fact that was the canvas and the already built up surface with layers of paint - than I required the image on the canvas despite the sentiment or even the technical value involved. And outside the snow was falling. A fine light snow covering up the old crust. And maybe what I was doing was also snowing. Covering up a storm of record with something different. Maybe the new painting will be called the snow of attraction. But that sounds too stupid to do. But anyway I was relived. Like I was no longer someplace else but present. In the studio. With music on. A pot of soup cooking in the house. Watching the snow fantastic falling in pressures and twilight lost in the build up.            

Epistle. To: Lady Kimono Clan

Been over two months since I've had a proper shower. Pesky wound and all that. What you can do though with a sponge bath and dumping a pot of water over your head! The silver lining thing and all that. And each time I run that wash cloth around like some flag of surrender I think about swimming in the lake. After a day on land - isn't it usually fucked up or some otherwise arrangement - don't know why that is but that seems the nature on land - when you dive in and splash suddenly it's like things be gone. Maybe it's the floating body ripe for discovery. How the word buoyancy stands out like a second thought. The complete way - a Taoist sensibility -  water takes the feet out from under us and gives us fear of drowning-  but once over that - water becomes the  world -  waves to negotiate and sunlit reflections. And I know all that is dreamy. But that's what I'm thinking about despite all the tricky footwork. To be caught up in a dream. And not the dream getting caught up. So let the world fold us over. What would the point be having a life anyway? Remember the floating grave sites? And the trail maps? Pot luck for the dead with free music! Those were the days when distribution mattered. Old school paper clues. When you could throw announcements from the backs of trucks at people and everyone got it. Anyway there's not much real swimming these days. Unless you count walking outside the door into another rainstorm underneath a massive gray sky. The nurse said maybe there's a cloud in your future. I miss barbecues I said. I miss the innocent visions that go along with a plate of potato salad and sweet pickles and green beans. Green beans are mostly tasteless the nurse said until you kill them with salt.  I'll make them Italian style for you I said. Par-steam them and then soaked in ice water to retain their color and then patted dry and sauteed in olive oil with garlic until they darken. Turn off the heat before you think you need to and don't burn them to a crisp. Served with noodles quickly shaded from a bath in a light red sauce. Black and green olives scattered about for accent and tang. Hard wicked sharp cheese in peels. And bread. The gods have ovens I said. And they bake bread. Unfortunately though - forget the legends - someone has to make it - bread does not drop out of the sky. The nurse said I thought M&M's were the food of the gods. Well they are I said. But the gods do dabble about. And I'm not sure about the cloud and all that. Or even the future if you want to try and put a mark on it. But the nurse asked do the gods dabble about with paintings? Why so I wondered? Look at that cardinal in that tree she said. That would make a painting. And it was there - or there it was - like a heartbeat outside the window. This was not a recognizable time to quit I suggested. You can rest later she said. I'm always afraid that I'll just stand around empty handed. Forever taking leave... stop she said. And she was right. Being around her made me feel that way. Like what comes to the good -  or the bad - who knows - was measured all around in strange doses. Do some red paintings she said. And there was the cardinal - like song itself in the heavies and a rush of color in damp overcast -  hanging on a branch against the willow's creamy green leaves. And it was a red concentrated to imagine and to conflict, like a spiritual energy that flipped itself inside out and was now visible in eyes beak and wings. Forget that idea over a sunny day she said. This was getting to be a habit and one I should give up enjoying. Since time -  in the cliche-  heals all wounds-  and that in turn meant I lost the nurse. But we all lose. If there's a given then that's it. But I've found no less in the extremes. Being a fool in love did make you a sitting target. But why not just go out and lose? I don't really know - was it simpler that way? Loss. Making things with your hands and then placing them within the viewfinder of the world. But what happens afterwards is something that has frightened me from the beginning. When loss is celebrated different expectations arise in sets and take on a pattern because you're now the record of fact for others to see. Why does it have to be that complicated the nurse asked? Just do some red paintings. The last show was fine and she added you made cash.          

Epistle. To: Berlin Film Actress

The old magazines had to go. As did some fucking old catalogues that I never bought anything from anyway. And books that now seemed worth more in trade at a used book store than they were for the ideas I once wanted from them or any memories I took off their pages. And there was a CD with a band's label but with no music on it when played, like that was the story on that. What you find when you move a bookcase from its place on the floor was not only dust from the last century and many dead bugs but also the obvious question - why has this stuff been kept around for so long? Maybe it was a zen riddle. Who never gets off the ground? Something aloud but with no answer. The answer being the form in question but the form in question requires you to have a take at it without ever coming around to it etc. So what you have is no answer worth printing. Dirt caught in spider webs. Monologues in shadows. Endless loops so what you end up doing is clean the bookcase. Odd though to see all the old magazines and catalogues with your name on it. And I thought what's it been like to be apart from that name? Was this like fumbling across some garage version of Gone With The Wind? Frankly I don't give a damn! But I know that's not it. But I also know I'm not like that Russian money guy who spends millions on a calender year in the hope he codes his DNA for future use after he dies. What for? So he can live again? To hear him tell it once he's gone there's an evolutionary right for him - to stay on as an idea - because he can afford to do so -  and more importantly he said there was someone else in the business willing to take his money and tell him yes sir of course and more so in the gross vernacular they were willing to grease his jizz. Maybe. But I also know what happened when I saw that name. Funny isn't it how buying something can seem like a ticket to a thought. Just as it's impossible to have only one direction home. What I guess I'm trying to do is to not mistake one thing for another, trying not to misplace reverie with nostalgia, and so stand on my own and not so much with a willingness to stand apart. And stuff like that was never but linear even in a practical way. So I look at an old book. And then outside the kitchen window two cardinals build a nest in the rose arbor. One reminds me about walking in the mountains, alive and young, steering the world through emptiness and all that. The other I simply stare at.    
      

Epistle. To: Wollstonecraft

Hummingbird speed would be cool. As though you held different parts and those parts were different types of scales that entered in and out. And when you look at hummingbirds it's like why hold onto a branch? A refresher course in the finer arts of empty thinking. How would you paint a hummingbird I asked the nurse? A few scratchy lines like a blur? Are you using a solid ground or not she wanted to know? I didn't know and that threw me. So I asked do you think birds have any idea about breakfast? Oh birds completely understand about breakfast she said and laughed. Besides she said what can happen overnight? She had fine gray green eyes which made them easy to look into and then feel lost without regrets. The thing is you settle in for a time and then it changes. Much of the day these days is spent in idleness - taken from an old Chinese world view - a lazybones word for a spiritual posture - and from there one can only ask further questions. When the sunlight  is out I do a good imitation of the lizard king routine and sit in a plastic chair on the deck sipping a ginger ale for a thrill. Face up to the radiation and getting a dose to warm the blood in springtime after a long fucked up winter. Do you imagine falling asleep is medicine? And the lake is way high over normal stages. And I read that for every foot of lake water above flood level it takes twenty days for that extra foot of water to drain down and go away. Naturally I have water down in the basement which I cannot do anything about. The lake is like two feet higher than what it should be. And when I get out on that deck chair and have a couple of pain meds - to lose that sorrowful blueprint left post-surgical - and then nod off - like Marge does in the front seat of the land rover  in Who'll Stop the Rain as the agents and the husband she left close in - she left whatever it was she had behind - both for the Vietnam heroin she now loves and the anti-hero Ray who provides it - but whom she still wants is still the question - what is it that she wants? -  everything - she wants the dope the husband the lover - but then the agents close in - and I open my eyes suddenly and I'm like two feet higher too! The nurse said well don't expect so much. But I said if you can't believe in movies what then? The nurse had wavy auburn hair that shook down in curls around her shoulders and was like the color of a flower pot you might pick up at a tag sale for a song. But I said why not believe in the miraculous overnight? Why not forget about time as a marker? Because the nurse said you need to toughen up. And that is not magic. It's day after day she said. And when she said that something hit. It was Friday the 13th. I had an opening that night. A swank retail establishment where a painting was altogether another consumer good up for sale. And did I need a payday!  Life was filled with chances we never take anyway - hanging on thin air waiting for us to recognize - so I asked her. Would you like to come along? It seemed innocent enough- but hey nothing really is -  and I think she understood that. Maybe I just feared. Where does the love come from? Where does anything like help come from when you're no longer hurt and don't always spend the waking moments so to speak looking over your shoulder? Maybe I simply wanted to walk into an evening with someone else as a look or a combination. The nurse said I have my doubts. Yea it's funny that way I said.    

Epistle. To: Bernadette Wild Garden

Went to the movies yesterday afternoon. Got lost for a couple hours in take away fictions and big sound systems. And walked there in a rainstorm which seems the course for the earth locally the past few days. We've become a citizenry of umbrella wearers. Water piled up at street intersections. The storm drains in the city - a facet of civil engineering if not politics - were not exactly in the best shape.  For the most part they were placed at higher grades than the streets themselves. And it doesn't take a genius to see the problem here. The rain once it collected downhill from the university heights behaved like rivers in floods will do and sought their own gravity. As such with no adequate drainage pattern the rain storm heaved in directions back around corners where it came from and sloshed over curbs where if you were a pedestrian with a short legged dog the dog would be swimming on its leash. Design is a good thing when it works. But was this actually thought out? It was like standing in awe- watching the water hit the rim of the storm drains and then go around every which way but down like crazy. And it was a good sized crowd for a matinee and suddenly in the dim light finding a seat in that movie going mingling while feeling alone I had this slap in the head. Almost like I was trying to impress myself. Lazy and sanguine and walking in the rain. Inflated intentions even. But the hiss you hear are simply your thoughts evaporating into the air. If this were a bar scene and whomever was pouring the drinks and then having to listen the bartender character might say yea, whatever, now drink up and go home. We look for thrills. We look for love. Instead the dull drift of life runs amok around the storm drains! And settled into the movie house. Ah the quiet between the ears implicit while the eyes were stranded in images. And really that's not too much to expect is it? But like the song says - if it's not asking too much - that whole mental clearinghouse never got off the ground. Trouble was sitting in the seats in front of me. A couple of over the hill nimrods. It was like they were harpooning better days now that their salad days were about over and as such wanted everyone else to know. And at a freaky volume. Were they trying to blow out the neon exit signs?  Checking their phones and then yelling gossip from one seat to the next that was personal enough to not amount to shit among strangers. Checking their watches and then arguing data. Presence it seemed was their paramour. Chain swallowing a box of twizzlers and a tub of popcorn while worried out loud over the calories in a diet soda? Yelling out wrong answers to the trivia quiz before the feature. And then yelling oh damn it I should've gotten that one!  Like that might have changed anything. And I do know. They were just having fun. But even so. Remember as a kid doing stunts in the playground and yelling to whatever disinterested adult who had surveying duty at the time look at me! If there were questions of silence - like in a movie house - they filled it with enormity. And if I could read minds - which I can't - I might want a box of twizzlers. Even so it went - through the feature - chomp - phone buzz - loud satisfaction - oh look there's a train crash!    

Epistle. To: Lady Kimono Clan

Don't you always want a little extra when you go and get the mail? Old school mail that is. The snail version. Hand delivered by someone walking in the neighborhoods. Something that's a complete surprise? Something otherwise tremendous that might be there amidst the usual junk and bills? Maybe that's a problem. Each day trying to imagine what could be there even though you know the odds are against it. Maybe that's a problem. But some item arriving from outside that you did not expect. But if it's there it's like a crazy hope to flush out the day. Maybe a postcard. Or some super coupon with your name on it and as you hold it in your hands just the touch of it is such that whatever else happens from that moment on you'll be enlivened by having it. Maybe for kicks - because that's what we're talking about - I'll put some cash in an envelope and mail it back to myself so one afternoon when I look and it's there I bingo and prove illusion is the truest behavior we have. Isn't release a consequence from having? Today I got this halcyon sounding letter asking me as a citizen to participate, "for pay", in a five hour project to evaluate presentations from a real lawsuit. The intention etc. is to come to a decision etc. in a project "where virtually everyone who has participated reports them to be extremely interesting, enjoyable, and worthwhile." Light lunch and refreshments were to be served. First I thought what were they serving and second what were they paying?  Light lunch seemed to a euphemism for meaning they're going to pull the buffet table away quickly and so in a pack of hungry fake litigants who needs that?  What does it mean  if you can't go for seconds and snag up some rolls or carrot sticks for the next day? Also I needed no expertise or qualifications. And they're paying for that! I did need to be able to listen and have a willingness to be fair. Well that's gonna cost extra! The money was okay but not great. You want my loyalty then there  should at least be a choice. Burger and fries and beverage preferably with malt. Crispy crab cakes and a hefty garden salad with fresh made croutons and a lemon squeeze. Grilled fish with couscous and bitter greens or killer stir fry with the onions just caramelized and those delicate spring rolls or those tiger rolls with hots and cream cheese or way deep fried egg rolls with a sweet sour tamari or blast your sinus mustard dipping sauce and not from jars bought by the carton at Home Despot. I'm not trying to be difficult. This just seemed like a weird professional exercise in trolling. In that you're supposed to be satisfied for the chance for having kicked in your two cents worth? Except to imply that having your own brain was something special but we know about that!  Don't get me wrong. But didn't we all get one? And wasn't this having a brain business just a credit anyway? I mean what do we have? We're living onward in an evolving world and a success at it because we're both dumb and smart simultaneously. That can't be a bad thing. It's kept us alive for millions of years. I showed the letter to the nurse. And she said well you're not going out of the house for that long anyway! And there it was. But she did have this idea. Tell them you'll do it for free she said. What's the point? Maybe they wont bother you she said. But what about the lunch I asked? You're not eating that much anyway she replied. I'll make you dinner some evening I said. And as soon as I said it I could tell the whole thing sounded coded. Like all the mathematics people behind the scenes use to drive all the social networks to bear fruit and that you on the receiving end never know the depths of the system you're using. She laughed. There wasn't the time. She had too many clients etc. But I said it's nothing really too bad to have your head in the clouds. That's how we are. Last night I said. What she said doing that great thing with her touch to a line of packing gauze soaked in bleach. A crater in the emotions maybe. Don't be silly she said. No I said I was lying in bed reading and listening to the music that seemed right in the windows upstairs but was drifting outdoors across the city and traveling from downtown. I thought about going. She frowned. Yea I know I said. But what if there were never another time? What if there were never another chance to go downtown on a Friday night? So what she said. What did you miss? A crowd beer and food vendors? Yea I said something like that. I felt left out. A portfolio of sighs. Sad thing she said. I don't want to be a ghost. Like hanging out in some former version. Earlier I said I watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Maybe like in the movie I was now a replica grown from some weird bubbling pod and the old body was nowhere in sight! But you know as long as there was music playing in the windows and as long as I didn't close those windows I was safe from being taken over and I knew that. But it really is tough to say at those moments tomorrow comes and forever in those moments you still doubt what you just said.                  

Epistle. To: Wollstonecraft

It was like something out of Hitchcock almost if what happened weren't so literal. I was walking down the street minding my own business - right here I know you're skeptical - but that's how those movie lines get off the ground! - when a crow dive bombed me from a maple tree. A dozen other crows were up in the tree and making noise enough like some experimental sound band gearing up for a show. What emotions do crows have? Were they pissed off? Or just sonic? And what do you do if a crow hits you in the head? I kept thinking about the dumb guy at the gas station. In the movie. He's like totally unaware but that's his part. He's like huh and then drops the match and then blows up in a fireball. I should have had one of those new cop cameras mounted on my shoulder. Captures things like transgressions and assaults and drunk knuckleheads in real time all of which flails a point and helps with litigation down the road. But also on the underside of things happening there's a giving up of random indefinite space for the finite lens. If it's on film it has to be so, right? The courts of the future will hear your case on You Tube! Who would believe me? Who would believe that a crow tried to hit me in the head? And yelling at a crow was foolish. But I did it anyway. Because it felt like the right thing to do. I wonder if the shoulder cameras are tuned for the natural outbursts of R-rated language? You fucking crow! And after this potentially explosive You Tube incident, the other crows were up in the tree going on with the noise. As a metaphor if not overworked yea they were hanging on a limb and laughing at me or at least checking the film credits. At least the rains had stopped and the afternoon was there to be had if you wanted it in these flood stricken times. But it's been like that. Lately the days have been less than reliable than reading about them in the forecast. What good's a daily newspaper if the captions we're given can't even get the weather close? Yea it's a difficult science. But so are the fucking crows! I have a friend whose family has a farm deep in time in the Catskills. His cousins shoot crows the way someone else might pull weeds. And they've been doing it for centuries. Not that it's like that at all here. If I tried to shoot a crow I'd get the whole thing backwards and end up shooting myself. I have nothing against crows. I just don't want to be hit in the head by one. So I kept yelling at the crow. Trying maybe to reason with it. What is up? But I got no answer. Didn't seem to work. They kept on laughing. Maybe I should give my friend's cousins a shout and start a range war. Maybe if I had my shoulder mounted cop camera - attached on me like what a parrot (?) - I document this and place it somewhere in the halls of evidence against crows. And they don't fly off. And I stand there looking up for a while. Like they're trying to figure out if I'm related to Tippi Hedron...  Maybe sun. Maybe not. Maybe rain. Maybe not. Didn't this happen just like this last week? And so what you do is you wait around waiting for rain. Isn't it curious why we don't wait for sunlight? Because the way everyone talks it's the rain. That's the pause. A woman later at the park said oh this is just awful... a series of tough looking clouds moved in across the sky... thunder in contrasting light that sounds like a bad plan to be out in the open... but then nothing happens and the clouds are blown on and away... like some existential joke because you can see more clouds gathered up further away in posses of atmospheres and threats to become. Was it a question or not?  My response is to wear sunglasses all the time.

Epistle. To: Berlin Film Actress

Coffee. Ah. Dark bitter liquid made from parts new morning with demolished night. How it takes hold and then makes you up and before you know it you've slipped from a yawn into something like a smile the gods might flash. Second cup. Now you can think. Past stations narrow as love and hearing the landscape worker across the street starting his car. With no rain in the sky the sky fills up with a tired faraway light that enters the windows through broken clouds. I'd like to think it advantageous to run from dreams and leave them hanging but that would appear an impossible thing to do. Who runs the racket anyway when your eyes are closed and the grid of what's possible can sometimes paint you into a corner?  Spider webs caught before the light and etched with dew between the brown limbs of the rose thorns. The trees leaf out like old silent characters tuned to some invisible wire reaching across the earth in hemispheres and on a cue we don't know yet deeply enough about they break dirt according to what season is facing where. The nurse yesterday said man you have a lot of movies! She was looking at a pile on the desk that a friend dropped off the yesterday before. They pass the time between our appointments I said. Or rather they create a flush to live within, an anti-time, a couple hours where not much else matters. Wow John Woo she said. Ballet I said. Gunplay and a hyper-crowded Hong Kong introspection with as many cigarettes smoked as bullets are fired and family or business ties that doom the hero to logic and somebody else always lies dying and somebody else always does the talking. John Woo she said. Yea I said. Then it was all saintly professional hands at work, stuffing a bleached soaked gauze inside the damn hole and then patching me up for another day for another go round. Thanks aren't enough to offer I said. She was too smart to say it's just my job. She took my vitals and filled me out on her laptop and dumped all the necessary medical shit into the waste can. Ah. Where's time when you most need it? But she would be back. As long as I had a wound like a small pet attached to my sternum she would be back. And we've gotten to it already like a correspondence because she doesn't even call to schedule. She just shows up and I'm ready. Too bad things don't really exist. Too bad she had a job and I was just a client. Maybe she had a husband but I didn't see any ring. Maybe she had a boyfriend she didn't talk much about. Maybe she was gay and that would be the total hole in the fence that surrounds us. None of it mattered.  I needed to get somewhere and she was trained to help me. But still. Who doesn't imagine when someone else looks inside you and sees the flaws that aren't healed? It's what you remember I said. Like counting on any thousands of locations where you might be. What she said. You need to climb through to some other side and maybe I don't know what but maybe run away and be someplace else and maybe be somebody else. She sanitized her hands for the last time from a squirt bottle that made the day bed room smell like a death vapor for germs. Germs I  said - when I hear that word - it's like that routine from a Three Stooges comedy where the guy goes nuts when he hears the words Niagara Falls and loses it like he's hypnotized or something - sorry I said. What I remember I said was looking out over the rooftops of the hospital. I touched the window. I wanted out. I was locked in a climate controlled room. In a building where there were climate controlled rooms were the sole option. Where scores of machines beep in the dark like small frogs calling in some fertile night air - the incessant clatter and bang from carts being wheeled around crowded halls and crashing into whatever happens to be in the way in a crowded hall - toilets flushing at all hours no matter what time it is - the IV stands like guardian angles assigned to everyone as a kind of personal help only digital numbers and green lights to live by watching over restless laments and bad television shows  and the stunned beds of those waiting on the cusp to leave this shit behind one way or another - I'll see you tomorrow she said.

Epistle. To: Wollstonecraft

Ah finally a springtime afternoon to have. Radical sunlight and a fine breeze. Easy walking weather and so that's it, up one street and down another, like not actually caring about anything or I imagine what it might be like being timeless if that were something we might ever know. People around tend to their small gardens as in a fever, fussing over designs for stone footsteps and arrangements of new bought flowers, you might think it all was a manner like in a grand English landscape and not a precious bit of earth turned over at the end of a lawn on Catherine Street. Moving slow like some clumsy monster on the loose and having first steps. If this ever was just a taste of life then give me more. But can you appreciate anywhere present unless you've been someplace else in the past? What is that accord that has us to remember? When I contrast - this walking about - with being held in a hospital room just last week- the experience seems to travel from one to the other and back around as though these moments were partners in bed together and pain and pleasure were united for all the influence. Like waking up in the recovery room and suddenly playing over what the knock-out doc said about the anesthesia he would administer - we're going to put you to sleep etc. - but no that was a medical sleight of hand - and I told him so -  no what you're going to do is place me inside a chemically induced coma so let's just do it like that. Alas nobody listens! To digress is to live in the first place! And woke up - really the stuff is fantastic for taking a load off your head - and was attached to so much hardware it was difficult to find either place or time in the most basic decent sense.  EKG machine - blood pressure cuff - oxygen lines in the nose - oxygen meter taped to left index finger - a pair of tubes wrapped around my legs that on rhythm every few minutes would inflate and squeeze my legs   for blood flow like hands belonging to some fiend - even still had the surgical cap on - everybody looks terrible in those anyway - and what was like a ton of blankets smothering the instinct to be up and away - And of course the IV where streams of synthetic dope ran down from the headwaters of a computer terminal and gathered in my blood and like clockwork once a button was pushed washed me away time and again. I tried to imagine I was in a crime movie. And soon other members of the gang would burst into the hospital, overpower my captors, and spring me out to the door to a waiting ambulance that had been stolen for the occasion. Sometimes it all seems so literal. That you are trapped in a space until something better comes along. Ah. This walking about. A pretty foolproof system. Clouds building from the north. Cleaning the garage on Howard. Demolition of a garage on Hayward. A woman weeding her flower bed with tools scattered on the sidewalk, and a red wheelbarrow - so much depends on it - in the way. Certain obstacles for me in the slow bound lane. Kinds of expressions or even a joy for her. It's the differences which unite us. She looked up at my sunglasses and ski pole tapping the sidewalk and said oh I'm sorry I didn't realize you couldn't see. That's how it goes. The misunderstood. The beautiful. I'll just step around this stuff I said. There was a small musical device she was listening to in the tulips. And a dog who looked up at me and I swear he winked.

Epistle. To Bernadette Wild Garden

All day long these big big winds slammed against whatever was in the way. That may sound stupid but there has to be resistance. And sustained like that. Looking across the lake was like staring into a continual white out from the park over to NY state. Amazing the trees don't break off. An old question: how can something you can't see become so dominant? Relentless as a thought out of control. Apple blossoms fly through the streets and cover parked cars like a snowfall. Blue recycling bins roll in numbers like tumbleweeds in a ghost town. Another old thought: there's trouble here. Even put in some temporary stakes for the tomato plants for the day so they'd wouldn't blow up over and away. Thin bamboo pieces with twist ties.  I'd put the real stakes in the ground but but I couldn't hammer them far enough without maybe like blowing out my stitches on the inside. Talk about a mess! And consequences! Thought about it. But then had a picture in my head what it would be like and so was voted down. Democracy of the body in action. Wound over mind. And maybe it was settling for less just to plant a row of beans and a row of beets? Not really. Though did almost lose the seeds to the wind when I opened the package! Each time I bend over to do something it's as though I've taken something into account and then have to sign a registry. And each time that happens there's a little dance step-like motion, a more refined position in recoil that says hello don't do this. Ah - it's like the nurse said - your body does not want to lie to you. It's the expectations that get us and in the end make us fools. But if it wasn't going to rain then fuck it. There was a time to get something in the ground and this was it. Alas - as ever - I do seem incapable to learn even the simplest points of the day. The tiny motions that go with dropping a line of seeds into the dirt can bring about a kind of anatomical dope slap that when all's said and done you have no control over. If you're going to play with fire as they say there will be disquiet and pain afterwards unless you're agile enough to get out of the way.  But does that makes us tragic? Romantic even? Or as I implied just plain stupid? Probably speaking I settle for a taste from all three. Yea I know. Be like the trees. Bend but don't break and all that. But I'm not a tree. I'm a relatively  average circumstance processing mammal with a geared up nervous system. And I'm not sure about any of it. But you can't blame me if everything happens at once.

Epistle. To: Lady Kimono Clan

It's like a base urban legend - yea I know you all live at the foot of a mountain and conduct operations from there - and it does matter where you live and what you make - yea I know you love the  country and the trees with blossoms and the old roads that have been there since time became a blink - but those landscape paintings you sent - I felt kind of wonderfully lost looking at them. Maybe I was even there  where they came from and was tucked inside them somehow like being at a movie and alone in the dark but still with a feeling all encompassed. But you can't make something from nothing. There's no mystery in creation. Even if the gods are going to pat us on the back, isn't that because the gods recognize we all already belong to a long line of thieves and characters whose cash words have always been well let's bend the truth a little. The good trick is finding it. Accidents - there are materials at hand - we enjoy getting our hands dirty - a sideways glance at the marvelous even - and even though living remains as burdensome as ever it remains deep and satisfying to poke around outdoors - all the stuff we need is right there without us. And that should be like a telling point in the mystery. Everybody else lives so far away. And it's not like they are required at the moment or anything like that. But they just live far away.      

Epistle. To: Berlin Film Actress

Yea of course the rapture didn't happen either. And after all that advertising.  How do you face down the end of the world anyway? Despite the advance publicity - and ahem a world wide following of millions  - yet here we are as the world keeps right on going. Did you ever think that maybe god is laughing? Or even the text we're presented with is nothing but laughter? It was a bad enough movie back in the day. Maybe Mimi Rogers was just trying to get over the break up with Tom Cruise? Forget that business with the white horse with wings as the jail breaks down... I'm glad to call in and say that the tulips are fine and am having a meal with fresh asparagus from my neighbor's backyard garden. There's nothing to do about it. Wouldn't heaven just confuse you anyway? Why believe in hell other than a sick bedtime story to scare the pants off you and so you developed a fondness for horror movies later on? And as ever - tempting the fateful strings of this life - I scratched around in the garden yesterday. Took a pain med and fuck it let's see what happened later. A lovely hot spring afternoon. Slowly, back and forth, a zen-like rake though by no means was this an attempt to establish credentials. What I really wanted to happen was to go deeper. With a shovel. Turn upside down what was the low dirt in the vegetable box and move it up closer into the air. But it didn't happen that way. For obvious reasons. I keep reminding myself.  Even though I dislike having a self to be reminded about, it's still fun to do it! And pushing the surface back and forth was work plenty. It's still the wound and all that. I try and do stuff before a calamity sets in. An experience really. A fall back moment where engagement stops and a little wire in the brain sends out a warning signal that begins to echo oh-oh in the ears. This is like being reminded what a fool it is to have a body. And speaking honestly - well maybe just this side of a lie - wouldn't want to fall into a habit one way or the other - but having a thought about the evening was enough to have me stop. Pain in the future is a big enough suck anyway. If this were a spy thriller there would be coded language to decipher and it would read abort mission. Not that I'll ever get the girl in this script but hey! But hey - despite fear of the future - and the future does not exist but it is here anyway like a twister puzzle in the back pages of a comic - what was happening was so entirely pleasant. The sunlight - the dirt - the pain med - someone across the street was strumming a guitar - figuring out for later which plant goes where and so on - was like being swept into a lost afternoon - was like having shangri-la tossed at your feet - well maybe for only an hour or so just this side of honestly. That's the problem and the beauty. Even though living was as burdensome as ever it was I can say it was deeply satisfying to be poking around outdoors. A sideways glance at the marvelous even.