Stonemason Blues

On the shore of a personal ocean, black stones of the past clutched in hands scraped raw. The palms ache. The back, the legs, tremble to support all the weight. Gravity fills the bones, pouring from a heart overflowing from the rains of memory. Saltwater washes over bare feet sinking into the sand from the current. The stones are heavy. Heavier than physics would seem to allow. Dark matter denser than blood and iron carried so far, so far.

A journey of decades led to stumbling down this path ending on the strand. Years of confused struggle against things rarely understood crystallizing in a vitreous, drawn out slice of infinity. Time gels and breathing slows. Tears may well but do not fall. Life thickens. Ghosts whisper in the back of the head. They win, sometimes, in their efforts to coerce the mind into believing it will never be whole. They speak occasionally of hearts forever sundered. Deep in a cold night of the soul, victory against such slanderous propaganda seems unattainable. Why would it not? Belief and stamina once led a verdant existence in the valley of the soul. Now there is desert.

Drought happens in life. Rivers shift in their channels, rain ceases to fall, clouds become precious memory. To be human is to know a sere existence upon enduring loneliness as a rule rather than an exception. In the mirror maze of the heart there is no mystery to this loneliness. It is in the world, like gravity.

What is the seeker to do? The soul cannot sustain this constant cycle of wandering and returning with nothing but stones of experience. To build a shelter from them would be to take up residence in longing and bitterness. Terrible feng shui to be sure. The advantage to such housebuilding is that at least the shelter would be a known quantity. No guesswork, no fevered wondering at where one would lay one's head to get out of the weather.

The waves continue their liquid caress of the shore. Listening closely to their sibilance arising from sheets of water gliding over sand the heart may hear voices, offering encouragement or warning is difficult to ascertain. On the beach for miles in each direction no one is visible. No one to turn to, except perhaps figures in the mist whose advice may be as ephemeral as their presence. The questions to be answered, of course, are of what to do with these stones. Throw them in the ocean to let the tides carry them away and out of memory? Or find a green, quiet place to lay them down as a foundation of experience upon which to build a new life?

The head and the heart debate these questions at the edge the world, watching the tide recede.  They will have their answer soon, turning over and over the stones in the hands.

You Are Born of Dark Matter

Notes from the desk. The evening is cool and comfortable here in this cottage by the sea. Something from the archives unearthed this weekend. It would have been better written in ink on scratchy paper, but here it is. A missive written for someone else by someone else (figuratively speaking). It was strangely comforting, and surprisingly illuminatory in perspective for the person who read it today. Text has been altered slightly from the original.

---

Mothers, fathers, they all know the singular anguish of their offspring crying out in a time of hurt. It is in the bones, the blood, the DNA. We cannot help but feel we must do something, knowing full well that in some events, the pain is not ours to assume but only for the child to endure. It is an unavoidable fact of existence in this universe.

To watch the suffering of a child is a most peculiar pain. The burden is magnified in knowing some of that hurt arises from the interior of the mind. We can see the distress, we can perhaps imagine a bit of it, but we cannot simply find a switch to turn it off.

We grieve for your struggle to cast off a past that has been unkind to your inner peace. Thoughts of unworthiness, of blackness, circling in the mind like hamsters caught in an iron wheel. We see the thorn bushes of anxiety prick and tear at the skin of your soul. We understand and hold our breath, wishing fervently for the thicket to part and for you to stumble free.

On those days when the curtain descends and the voices inside hiss and moan to defame you, slander your self-worth, we have heard you call out. You have shown us your pain. You have told of your fears that you are nothing and undeserving of the kindnesses you have been offered. It is as if gravity itself has reached inside of us all and wrapped our hearts in a crushing grip.

But know this, child. You are not unworthy. You are not unloved. The demons that seek to lead you astray are woefully misguided in their attempts to make you believe such lies. What you face may affect your personhood, but it does not define your personhood. To deal with a mind bent on eating you alive along with a body that rebels against you does not disqualify you from being a human worthy of love.

Never forget that you are loved. You are you, and what you are is beautiful. You are born of dark matter, child, without which the universe cannot exist. Remember too that the universe exists in light.

Highwire Over the Black

8:13 PM. Notes from the cell. A mid-winter night's nightmare. I tell you now this is not a "feel good" essay.

That which troubles my sleep, and my waking hours. I am tightrope walking over a scar of infinite black below. The curiousness of the activity stems from not comprehending how it came to be. My mind is not expansive enough, yet. 

On one side of this chasm lies a carnivale of connection and affection which I crave. On the other lies a fortress, built of the stones of bitterness, into which my heart wishes to retreat. All the while, my feet shuffle gingerly over the wire. The wind of desperation tests my balance.

Move forward, move back, it matters not. Any choice involves a fall. The blackness of mistrust threatens to swallow me whole should I slip. It threatens to swallow me should I stand still. Paralyzed, cold, frantic. Mistrust seeps into every feeling, every thought. This is no way to have a life.

Paradoxically it also feels like being backed into a corner. Two walls, floor, a low ceiling all closing in. There is no wind, only a thickening atmosphere. Left with nothing but desperation to figure out who to trust, as there is none towards others or myself. The unofficial motto for the Disunited States of Me: “In Pain We Trust”.

Snow is falling as I write this. I see the fat flakes hurtling to the ground. On the radio, The Jayhawks croon “You shouldn’t hide your colors” to which a bitter chuckle escapes my lips. Shouldn’t hide my colors? Noble, it might seem. Courageous, perhaps. I let my colors fly because I believed those things to be true. My reward was to watch while the heart to which mine had pledged allegiance cut down my mast and set the flag ablaze. Glory ending in ashes and rubble.

My soul is neither coroner nor archaeologist, but it finds itself sifting through the blackened debris that surrounds it. Fragments of a life. Bits and pieces tattooed with words barely visible through traces of smoke and charred edges. It is painful, this performing of forensics on the shattered remains of one's own heart.

Out on the wire, nothing stays still. Thoughts, feelings. The pulse in the veins even contributes its own instability, a constant challenge to the act of standing still. Staring into the tea mug I watch the trembles of my hands translate into ripples over the mahogany liquid. Closing my eyes, I dive in, surfacing on the wire again. The sun is peeking through the clouds. But I am still there suspended over the void. Connection seems so close, if only I could believe. 

The fortress may be cold and dark but it has thick walls. Walls that deflect pain and rejection, behind which sleep might be possible. The carnival is bright and warm but in the past I have paid dearly for the cost of a ticket. A ticket which did nothing to prevent the despair of rejection. So it is I am paralyzed on the wire. My colors are mute and hidden. It is only a matter of time before I fall. The question is, which way?

Cup Runneth Dry: A Biji for December

A soul withered and dessicated. The wind a blade dragging across the heart deep in its winter of discontent. There is much to be said if little breath in the lungs with which to say it. To pour out the contents of the soul is Sisyphean in execution. There is no receiver, no longer motivation to do it, when the soil is barren and infertile.

---

What if, amongst those 99 Problems, one of them turned out to be a bitch?

---

Another occurrence of the dream. You know the one, coming to in a dim corridor, baseball bat in hand, surrounded by shelf after shelf of pottery and ceramics. Plates. Bowls. Cups. Especially cups. As far as the eye can see in the red-tinged glow suffusing the air. The cups inspire anger, blind hatred, blackening the vision with the need to destroy everything within the arc of the bat. It is not enough to merely knock the cups off the shelves, they must be destroyed. Ground into dust, if possible. But the bat will have to do. Dead run into the red fulgency, bat whirring like a helicopter rotor, the cups explode off the shelves in a tintinnabulation of porcelain destruction. Swinging, swinging, an animal roaring bursting from the chest as cup after cup falls to the murderous ministrations of ash and anger. Exhaustion sets in. Rest seems a distant memory. The corridor seems infinite, dissolving only in the alarm-induced cold sweat of another day to be endured. On the bedside stand lies a single shard of pottery, warm, stained with blood.

---

There arrives a point in the sidereal journey when the heart collapses under the weight of grief. This point is a singularity of lost love, fear, despair that grows like weeds where nothing else will. Wasteland of the soul made barren by giving all, giving everything, until the day it realized the giving was for naught.

---

We’ve all heard of the “Parable of the Boiled Frog” in which a frog is immersed in a pot of water so gradually heated that it dies before it realizes it is being boiled. Why don’t we ever hear of a “Frozen Frog”, which perhaps could be the opposite parable? And if parable can become metaphor, the heart is a frog, its temperature raised or lowered by the capricious ministrations of another’s cruelty and deceit. The end result is walking death, without the humor of a zombie apocalypse.

---

Nothing like a little patch of black ice to wake you up. Black ice is a harsh teacher, but you learn lessons real quick. It has the virtue of efficiency.

---

The red wolf. Canis rufus. One of the most endangered mammals in North America. Somewhere between 50 to 200 alive today. Climate change appears to be implicated in their decline, along with the usual human fuckery involving animals. No word available on whether red wolves taste like chicken.

---

It loads the dishes into the washer.
It dries its hands on a damp towel.
It pours itself a glass of tea.
It feels good to have done its chores.
It weeps to endure the solitary evening.

---

An unexpected occurrence of grace. The cat greets you at the door, meowing and purring. When you pick it up, it snuggles against your chin. Gentle head boops and vigorous rubbing of chin to chin, as the cat revels in the scratchiness of a warm beard. If only all pleasures in life were so simple and spontaneous.

---

Have you ever listened to sleet falling into still water? An ethereal hissing, precious and restorative. You must sit still.

---

"Trying not to walk crooked while this anchor's dropped.

But I been out on them choppy waves and it's hard to say where this land begins and that water stops, 

I got sea legs

I got sea legs

I got sea legs." 

(From "Sea Legs" by Run the Jewels). 

Yeah, that's it. I got sea legs.

Et Tu, Amor? (Sensory Deprivation)

Long ago I read somewhere something like to be writer one has to deal in hard truths, discomfort, and things that make one cringe and squirm. Honesty of feeling is paramount in what goes on the page. Credibility is at stake. I know this. I have written about some things that made me squirm and cringe. I understand this need for honesty. Honesty has been on my mind overly much these days, a byproduct of emotional turmoil and loss. Here is a little hard truth I need to purge. I want love to bleed.

My cup may brim full of cynicism and bile, but love is an asshole. An asshole with inexhaustible resources to keep reminding my heart of that fact. Omnia vincit amor (“Love conquers all,”) wrote Virgil in his Eclogue X. I believed him, once upon a time, but in a very different fashion. That has changed. Love may conquer all as a creator, but this time it conquered me as a destroyer.

In my time of writing I have spilled much ink, digital and physical, in defense of love. How it can sustain you. How it ties one to others and allows growth, security, desire. Now I am seeing I have no faith anymore in my own hype. There is a limit to the numbers of heartbreaks I can take. It is most maddening that we have no way to hold love accountable for its transgressions.

Love lied to me. Not once, not twice, but three goddamn times in my adult life it flattered to deceive, pulled me down a path I believed led to a cure for loneliness and pain, a fountain of belonging. Love betrayed me. It smiled the entire time, every time, with every twist of the knife. So begins the stripping away of the senses that give juice to life.

Betrayal by love disturbs touch. Heat, cold, rough, smooth: all that is tactile carries with it at least a little irritation. Even the absence of sensation creates its own peculiar pain. The hands mourn the loss of a lover's hip, the mouth the lover's lips. There is perhaps nothing so generative of heartache than the void within one's grasp. To reach out in the night and feel nothing but space and sheets is agony realized to a degree bordering on obscenity.

Love as a pillager can ruin a good music library. All those great songs, and so many become unlistenable now. Listening is either a reminder of how good love was or how searing its absence. It is a small percentage of songs left that I can or want to hear without hitting skip. Raw emotion, anger, frustration working itself out in the screaming of lyrics that speak to all of those things festering in a heart exploding along the scars and fault lines. Most importantly, a verbal catharsis to help numb the lonely helplessness if only the sound did not hurt so much.

Do not think the palate escapes the collateral damage of losing love. Oh, no, taste suffers its own degradations. Brightness and sweet fade from the tongue. Savory turns to sour, ashes in the back of the throat. If taste remains it is bitter metallic. To sometimes eat alone by benign circumstance is a fact of existence, easily endured. To eat alone because of banishment from the table of the heart is an exercise in catered despair. Forget about cooking for joy. Stirring the pot with a broken heart is mere pragmatic numbness. The soul may be in limbo, but the belly has its own agenda. When they quarrel, hunger often wins at the cost of inner peace.

With love's loss, the eyes offend us but common sense lobbies hard to not pluck them out. Much business of life still depends on seeing in spite of the searing reminders of what we once had. Who knew that a photograph could pass as a branding iron? What terrible hooks in the heart are pulled at passing glances of social media feeds and photographs! They lie in ambush, these frozen memories of a life once well lived. Turn the page, scroll down left or right, none of it matters. Our eyes collide with the now fractured landmarks of a shared history that was more good than bad.

The heart swears that it recalls the scent of love yet it is the nose that does the work. The gentle aromas of existence, sunlight on a lover's skin combined with rumpled cotton and sweat. Pheromones aloft in the kitchen sensed over the aroma of dinner, teased out with a nuzzle to the neck. Exhalations and inhalations of a nightcap's departure in that time-stopping moment before the consummation of a goodnight kiss. Even the humble nose deals with loss when hearts disassociate.

Someone once told me that love is never the wrong answer. For years, I subscribed to that theology. I was a True Believer. It felt good, it felt right. But I woke up one morning after a few weeks alone again and decided my name was Thomas. The stigmata haven't changed my mind. Maybe because the stigmata are in my palms and I know the source of the pain.

You may think I wish to banish love from my life. No, I want to interrogate it. I want to cuff it to the table in the Box, break it down masterfully like Detective Frank Pembleton did to those perps on Homicide: Life on the Street. I want love to sob into its fist and tell me what horrid excuse it has for killing my heart. Of course, love is not guilty of murder, because I'm still alive. Fraud is another matter, and love is guilty as fuck.

Water-silver, Flow For Me

Blood and muscle seem aggressively prosaic in consideration of matters of the heart. It seems impossible such a lump of flesh could carry, could withstand the currents that flow between one heart to another. Protein seems an inadequate medium for the task of withstanding binding and intertwining the precious elements of souls in concert. Certainly it gives no impression of suitability when those souls get sucked in to the dark that is distance, drift, and dissolution.

Metal, now there is a different story. Ah, what would one gain with a heart of metal? Endurance at the cost of romance? Resilience in the face of soul pain, a refined ability to withstand hammer blows to the psyche? Metal becomes attractive when the grasping at straws in vain hope of keeping the thing together. Even as one watches the rust creep over the surface. Seeing the stress cracks form as the "hellishness of life" grips a flimsy heart in its merciless hands and bends it back and forth. Inevitable, the breaks that form with their sawtooth edges and searing heat.

Metal versus flesh. Perhaps the best course is a combination of the two. The only element that come to mind is mercury. Heavy, liquid, toxic under the wrong conditions even as its fluidity allows it to adapt and flow over the rocks in a river of life. Do you not see the miracle of love as a pool of shimmering silver collected under the sun and moon, flowing from the invisible truth and into the invisible truth? We all have dipped our hands in that pool, once or twice or many times while ignoring the impossibility of controlling what we gather. Our hands our poorly suited to the task.

What of magnetic fields, or cosmic forces of strange action at a distance? This emotion we call love is one way, if somewhat incomplete, of exerting control. Our mercury hearts can only be shaped by its funneling through the channels of love. Plasma fields, magnets, gravity, our hearts subjected to them all. Hope provides fuel, elation the energy, and belief that the forge of love will achieve the successful enjoining of another mercury with ours.

It happens, sometimes. The universe may be insensate to the messiness of the heart's business, but its laws do not forbid the possibility. That crystal clear day where the mind and the body and the soul wake up with that second sine wave pulsing through them. The light from within shows the form of the heart. Picture this form of water-silver in resplendent argentine glory against the absence of light, the fuliginous wilderness of life without shared love. Shimmering beauty held in place by forces we sense but do not truly understand. For what would true understanding bring us in that case?

The universe is full of forces inimical to the propagation of love, this we know. The gravity of emotions, the drifts, the rifts that develops over time as our attention gets diverted by the mundanities and tragedies of existence. Sometimes these forces bend the heart or even torment it to the point where the mind's eye watches it flow into every nook and cranny where pain and loneliness have not taken up residence. For the fortunate the heart of water-silver gradually reorganizes itself. The shape is reattained, equilibrium reached. A benefit of like finding like and remaining close enough that integration is always possible.

Emotional physics often works to the negative, often to our sorrow. Pain, loss, even simple carelessness can in concert create forces too great for anything to withstand.  A heart orbiting the sun of love, a planet of rock and dirt, neither is better able to resist a supernova even if they see it coming from a long way off in space and time.

It happens. The explosion, slow or fast. The superheated plasma of emotion, the gravity of pain and disintegration reach out across the vacuum of non-love to explode the heart. And we watch it happen as the force pushes us out of ourselves. We float and spin helplessly into a black speckled with millions of pieces of what used to give us life. In those moments we no longer trust gravity, or love, to bring them all back together. In the interstellar black of loss we lunge and grasp, frantic to cup our hands around the water-silver talisman of belonging we once knew. We gather it, one small drop at a time.

Magpie Tales 248: Raveling

Bond of Union, 1956, by M. C. Escher, via Magpie Tales

No one warned us our love would be covalent, 

sometimes corrosive, often explosive

burning bright twining around hearts

built for comfort not for speed

whirling so fast making time run backwards

mirrors held up to each other reflective

refractive actinic addictive as gold

spinning tendrils so fine the pain unnoticed

until the sun burned out and we in the dark

howling with sweet misery of the raveling

The Little Boy Who Mattered

The little boy was found on a beach, naked, alone and sick. So sick he just sat there and panted. He was surrounded by a group of onlookers, none of whom wanted to take him home. To touch him could mean signing one's own death warrant. No one wanted to risk it.

To live in a poor part of town in the capital of a country, Liberia, that by many measures is also poor, is perhaps difficulty enough to forge a life. To be placed in a "holding" facility because you are sick, that is doubly difficult. To know that the "holding" facility is not really a care facility, it is to get you off the streets because no one knows what to do with you, is an exercise in cruelty.

It was a miracle and a mystery that the little boy, ten years old by local accounts, managed to get out of the facility the night before it was attacked by an agitated mob who forced a number of the victims to flee the facility. The little boy ended up on the beach where he was found last Wednesday, and witnessed by a pair of photographers covering the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. He had no clothes. He was deathly ill. No one wanted to touch him. 

Someone brought the little boy some clothes, but he was so weak he could not get the shirt over his head. The photographers gave some local women pairs of latex gloves, and the women helped the boy get the shirt on. But still, no one knew what to do with him. Understandably, they did not want to risk catching Ebola, assuming that was the affliction upon the boy.

Later, he was somehow moved to a nearby alleyway. He lay upon a sheet of cast-off cardboard, crumpled in a heap. So ill he could not move. People apparently walked by, eyeing the boy, but for a long time no one moved to help. Under the circumstances, maybe they felt all had been done that could be done.

The boy lay dying. One of the photographers, David Gilkey, took the boy's picture, later saying that the situation was an "evil Catch-22". A better phrase perhaps cannot be found to describe what they witnessed there in that alley. People want to help but they don't know what to do. They do not want to risk getting sick themselves.

By some turn of events, a neighbor took the boy to a local hospital where they had some facility to care for a person sick with Ebola. Fortune turned slightly. There was word that the boy was improving, news that was of no small import in a region so hard hit by a modern plague. Maybe the universe was not such a hard case after all.

But we know different. On August 21st the other photographer, John Moore, spoke with the boy's aunt. She herself and her children were checking into a clinic because they suspected they had contracted the Ebola virus. She told the photographer that the little boy had died of Ebola, as had his mother before him. An unsurprising outcome given the circumstances, we tell ourselves and shrug. 

I told myself the same thing. I could not insulate myself from the effects. I heard the news while driving down the highway in air-conditioned comfort, thousands of miles away from a lonely and sick little boy who died because no one could do enough. I tightened my grip on the steering wheel, choking down the lump in my throat. It is not hard to imagine that he perhaps had no one to mourn his passing. I did not curse the universe, because I know better. I know the futility of such endeavors from direct experience of the worst it has to offer. 

Later, I saw the picture of him in the alley. He had on the red shirt someone had brought him. He was sick, so sick, and I hope he did not die alone. His name was Saah Exco, and he was a little boy who mattered.

Foundry

The Elders released him into the multiverse with fanfare and deep blessings. They sent him forth to become a Creator, just as they had in their own millennia. The formation of stars, new whorls of dust marked his entrance. They noted the spontaneous appearance of sentient life in more than one system. Such a miraculous occurrence had not happened in eons. The Elders marveled at this omen, and wished him well on his new existence.

What they did not do is warn him of the sacrifices he would be required to make, if he was to fulfill his destiny among the fabric of Creation. There was no talk of the pieces of himself he would lose in creating stars, molding planets, blooming life. They did not tell him of the pain. All for the best, the Elders agreed, relying in wisdom that was older than anyone knew.

Pain would speak for itself. Among a field of carbon and proto-stars, in a small galaxy born of his first efforts, he knew loss. It blinded him for a thousand years. What he thought would be a double star of unsurpassed beauty turned into a neutron star orbiting a black hole. He was unprepared for the ferocity of their gravity. They screamed in x-rays, gamma radiation howls mauling the fabric of existence. They lasted only a few beats of his cosmic heart before he lashed out to end their misery.

Among a cloud of diamonds the size of moons, he wept. The pain was beyond imagining. If a creature of energy, of dark matter and light, could be said to have nerves, his were stretched across the infinite. Background radiation, the hiss of hydrogen were rasps across the fibers of his being. He took refuge in the heart of a white dwarf, the spinning of which camouflaged the sound of his suffering.

The Elders watched from afar. From a cocoon of hydrogen gas and ionized iron tinged with copper, they nodded what passed for heads, murmuring to themselves but offering no counsel to their suffering son. They could not. They would not. Such advances would undermine everything they sought to teach. The propagation of the multiverse depended on the understanding at a molecular level of the cost of creation.

His heart bled. Star systems coalesced. Planets came forth from the terrible fires of agony. He let himself slide down a gravity well into the heart of a black hole. White hole of rebirth and a new layer of the cosmos lay before him. Fingers the size of galactic whorls reached out to collect dark matter, light matter, all that became clay under his caresses.

Moon and planets and star systems lay in regal opalescence on the blood-soaked canvas of what could only be called his mind. Energy, diaphanous and pure, yet fragile like the collateral creatures that sometimes came to existence on what they called planets. He would not know 'planets' or 'blue' or 'heart' as they. He was energy. He was Universe and Being, spanning eons and the distance between the Big Bang and the nothingness at the edge of creation.

Still, the ache of shattering loss haunted him. After so many millions of years like hours he felt drained. Too many fragments of himself scattered across the layers of the multiverse. He felt he could give no more. Weariness demanded he rest. Sleep frightened him, from his need of of it and the grinding anxiety of wondering if he would ever awake from it. But he gave in. The upper atmosphere of a gas giant served as blanket. A flock of moons, large and small, served as distraction to lull him into a sleep of ten million years.

In sleep, there were dreams. Solar flares become demons become lovers. In his dreams, he was potter, surgeon and blacksmith. He wielded tools measured in light years. Light grew within him, suffused him bore him out on interstellar winds until he knew not his measure. Something stirred in his core. A metallic brightness filled him with increasing heat. He laughed, and stars were born.

The heat grew. Soporific pleasure slowly transformed into a gnawing pain. He grunted, contracting around the ball of light and pain consuming his insides. His consciousness flickered in and out in a rapid coruscation through so many layers of the universe he lost his bearings.

He screamed. Stars expanded, planets burned. Galaxies reversed their spins. He thought he might die, if energy could be said to have the same failing as mortal flesh. The stars went out, then he awoke.

Yellow-white sunlight warmed his face. It streamed through a large window, eight panes of wavy glass in heavy wood sashes. The striped cotton of the armchair in which he lay was cobalt and white, pure white that reminded him of galactic whorls he once knew, upon which he once fed. Through the glass he could see a wooded valley floored with grass the color of emeralds. He knew that once, too, as the heart of stars. He was not alone.

There was a heaviness in his arms. He cast his gaze downward, shocked by what he was holding. It was a child. A girl child, from the looks of her. It sighed and breathed softly in its sleep. He felt his limbs become heavy, as if he were wearing sodden clothing. A smile stole over his face, and his momentary panic transformed into languid peacefulness. The girl opened her eyes. She studied his face, seeming puzzled but unafraid. She smiled back.

He knew then that he would no longer roam the multiverse, fashioning planets, stars and galaxies out of primordial flux. He would know pain, it was true. But he would know love. He was human now, and the stuff of life was in his heart, his arms and in eyes of purest blue.

Obsolete

Jonas felt his hands getting numb. Too much driving with a balky heater left the cab of the truck warm only in name. The truck, like the man, was getting old. With age came the pains that took up residence in the bones. They waxed and waned, but never quite left. Good news that always made Jonas grin was that he owned both the truck and his bones. Nobody but God could take them away from him now. The old man had no idea that God was thinking the same thing.


Jee-sus, I don't wanna die alone, 
Jesus, oh, Jesus, I don't wanna die alone,
My love wasn't true,
Now all I have is you...

The words spilled, tinny and faint, from the radio on the dash. Jonas sucked in a lungful of cold Nebraska air to say "No, sir, Mr. Cash I don't wanna die alone neither. Nothin' good to come of that, I reckon." Highway 26 stretched out under the dead January sky. The snow stuck to the windshield had the glow of pearly ashes. The wipers had gone on strike miles back, working in fits and starts. Jonas thought he might stop soon to brush the glass clean.

He drove on, drifting into a daze. The truck stayed straight. Not hard to do out here where the flatness was damn near end all and be all. No traffic for what seemed like hours, unless the snow snakes whipping across the road counted. Not much in the way of animals except for the rare bird or two that telegraphed across the sky. He thought he saw an antelope, once, but it was too far away to be sure.

The featureless gray of the clouds made a riddle of time. The light came from everywhere and nowhere but it did seem to be getting fainter. His belly grumbled, as if to confirm his suspicions about the lateness of the day. There was a thermos jammed into the passenger side seat, wedged in the crease between the back and the upright. It was half-full of tepid coffee leftover from the last century when he had left his trailer, perhaps for good. The only food in the truck was half a cheese sandwich and a almost new box of beef jerky laying on the dash.

Jonas. sighed and belched. The sandwich, entombed in a crumbled paper bag along with a crushed empty beer can, lay down on the opposite floor board. He could not reach it without ducking so far down he would lose sight of the road. The thought of it made him really tired. He surprised himself at how lazy he felt. Unusual for a man that had near wrecked his body working hard, hard, for most of his adult life.

The ache in his knees and wrists never let him forget. But he had to eat something. The plains stretched out for miles around him, empty, lonely, with no signs of hospitality anywhere in sight. It could hours, or never, until he might find a place to stop, get warm and fill his belly. Resignation wheezed out between his chapped lips. He reached out for the beef jerky. Setting the box on the seat beside him, Jonas slid one of the strips out of the pack, fumbling with the plastic wrap.

The jerky filled his mouth, salt mixing with grease and a low tang of rough chilies. The meat was blood warm from having sat on the defroster. The warmth momentarily threw the old man, reminding him too much of a punch to the mouth he took one night long ago, in a bar the name of which had faded from memory. Blood and two teeth, shiny on the winter gravel and looking garish in the neon of the sign. He grinned and laughed to dispel the ghosts. "Hell, man," he cackled, "that fella's fist looked ten time worse!" His voice got swallowed up by the close air.

He swallowed hard. It was getting dark. Crinkles on the horizon told him that Wyoming was getting close. Or was it Colorado? Smile collapsed from his face, and sadness took its place. He knew now he had lost track of where he was, and sure as hell was not turning around.

Light drained from the sky. Wind buffeted the weathered truck, shoving it gently from side to side in the lane. Jonas cut on his lights and sent up a prayer. Miles ahead, the temperature was dropping further. The clouds unfolded into rain. Night fell, and with it black ice lay claim to the road.

Queasy Piñata

Today's attempt at writing has its roots in grandeur, and probably its end in mediocrity. My ambitions outstrip my ability, all because my head feels like a piñata. This is a source of great distress for me. I had grand plans and a good idea last night, but no time or energy to write it out. The backup plan was to write the kernel of the idea down in one of my handy-dandy little notebooks, then turn out the light for some sleep.

Except for one little detail. My bedside notebook had gone AWOL. Not in the drawer, not on the nightstand, not even on the floor beside the bed. I told myself that I would remember in the morning, but you can guess how well that turned out.

Upon awakening this morning I found myself in possession of a low-grade headache. It started in the base of my skull and wrapped itself around the left side of my brain, edging its way into the frontal lobe. Manageable in the morning, by late afternoon it would balloon into quite a whopper. Like someone was beating it with a stick.

A fine sandwich for lunch had no effect on it. Pain medicine? Pffft. My go-to solution of taking a nap was of no help. In fact, when I arose from the nap, my head felt even worse. The throbbing in the piñata bobbing around on the top of my neck made me slightly nauseated.

Nauseated, not nauseous. I use that word deliberately. 

Never let it be said that I cannot learn something new. As someone who aspires to be a writer, I am always on the lookout for new words and word-related knowledge. Recently, it became illuminated for me the difference between 'nauseated' and 'nauseous'. Shocking, I know, that I did not know the shading between those two siblings.

Simplifying a bit, but it turns out, that to be 'nauseated' means to be feeling sick to the stomach, i.e. inclined to vomit. 'Nauseous', on the other hand, means to cause feelings of nausea, i.e. something revolting or physically disturbing. 

A very fine line, would you say? Me, too. Admittedly the latest dictionaries seem to indicate that over time, the usage of 'nauseous' to mean the feeling of sickness rather than the cause of sickness has become so commonplace that the two words are near interchangeable. So for years, I had been saying "I feel nauseous" when what I really meant was "I feel nauseated". 

The realization made me nauseated. Heehee.

So when I sat down to write today, trying to think through the fog of fatigue, forgetfulness and headache, the only thing looping through this weird brain of mine was a riff on the new thing I learned. That is about as good as it was going to get, seeing as I lost another essay idea to the void.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, left me a little...nauseated. 

Beseech the Stars

Aislinge sat still as stone while the gale blew itself out around him. Waves pounded the dark basalt at the base of high cliff, liquid iron hammering out the fury of Manannán. The cold and the wet troubled Aislinge little. It was the vision dissolving into foggy memory that concerned him. Never in his life had he conceived of something so terrible as what had woken him up, crying out. He leaned slightly into the wind, wondering at what had brought him here to pray for starlight.

He had sat upright, leaping like a stag and yelping. Sweat runneled his face, mixing with the cool rain that was seeping in through the tiny opening in the wall that served as window. The weather beaten board that was meant to cover the hole at night had fallen out, blown away by the violence of the wind. Aislinge had bellowed an oath wrought by fear and his pounding heart. The dream-vision still blazed in his mind, filling him with sadness and dread. He had been walking by the sea watching the sun dip to the horizon.

Then the stars went out, one by one. Candles in the wind gone swiftly. The sky had gone deep blue, then black, leaving him stranded amongst the gorse. His limbs were locked in fear brought on by his inability to see anything except a faint glow where the sun might have gone down. He marveled at the black, shaking with terror yet unable to move.

Move he must, the shaman told himself. Wind was blowing strong from the sea. Its howl was unearthly, overlaid with what Aislinge's panic stricken mind took to be the doleful moan of banshees or dire wolves. The sound turned his bowels to ice water, and he forced his limbs to move. He turned into the wind with its mineral tang filling his lungs. He reckoned if he could make it to the sea, he could follow the cliff back to his stone hut to await the morning.

The wolf-wind raised its pitch, bringing with it stinging rain that felt like pebbles on his skin. The blackness wrapped itself around him. He could not shake the feeling that the night had replaced the tattered cloak he wore. The sodden fabric was gelatinous on his leaden limbs. The sound of the waves reached his ears while the salt aroma intensified. He reckoned it would not be far now.

Howls. The hiss of rain and breakers. Aislinge imagined he saw a glimmer of phosphorescence where the sea should be. He smiled, a bolus of hope bubbling up in his heart. There it was, he just knew it. He moved forward with a prayer of thanks on his lips, and stepped out into nothingness. Plummeting through the wet obsidian night, at first he was too shocked to scream. But he sensed the wet rocks below, and the knowledge of what was surely violent death flayed open his throat with a scream that pierced the earth.

Aislinge sat upright on the side of the slab he called a bed. The memory of impact was bleeding away. He looked about the hut. The storm cursed and growled still. By the light of dying embers, he could see that the board was missing from his window. The hole itself a darker black smudge in the stone wall, through which no light could be seen. He gasped. Surely his dream could not be true The stars, they could not have gone out. This could not be.

Still, he knew what he must do. He fumbled about in the dim hut, finding a small clay lantern and his walking stick. He filled the lantern with warmstone and the greenish fungus he had discovered, the kind that gave light but no warmth. He decided to leave his fire box behind. It would not last long and its meager warmth would be no match for the force of the gale. Wrapping his cloak up tight, he stepped from the hut with a deep breath to scent the sea. The wind seemed to lessen its force, perhaps a good sign as he walked.

The sound of breakers. Sea spray he could taste. The wind curled about him, caressing and cajoling. To his tortured imagination the hiss and groan of the waves sounded like selkies calling out from the water. The voices and the waves grew louder as he neared the cliff edge. This time he would not fall.

One step. Two steps. Three steps, his aching foot hovering over a blackness that differed in texture from the sod over which had walked. Ailsinge stopped and knelt down. He could feel a hard edge of stone where the cliff met the sky. The sky itself appeared to be mottled black. The rain had slowed to almost nothing, and even the wind seemed to be cooperating. Below, the waves continued their assault on the rocks. In his mind's eye he could see the breakers curl to fling up their manes of spray. He smiled at the memory.

Aislinge pulled himself forward to the cliff edge. The wet stone prodded him hard in the haunches even through the wool. The lantern he set down carefully. It cast a small pool of greenish light, feeble against the night, but giving him a measure of hope as he began his vigil. He looked up at the sky and emptied his mind to wait.

The stars, they would come back. He would wait for their glow.

---

In memory of the Bear and the Butterfly

View from a Gurney

There ain't much dignity in a backless gown and anesthesia, no siree. About the best you can say of it is that you have the blessing of unconsciousness for a spell, until one wakes up and comes back to the world. When it happened to me earlier this month, my first coherent thought was: I hope no one can see my junk.

Because naturally the first thing one should be worried about after being knocked out and "worked on" is how strangers might judge one's 'nards.

Not surprising given the amount of pain killers coursing through my system, I suppose. My modesty concerns arose from the confusion I felt over not being sure if there were blankets over my legs. I could not quite raise my head yet, and my eyes---when they opened at all---could not focus enough. I managed to perceive dimly enough that the recovery room I was in was busy, noisy and crowded.

A few minutes passed. Feeling of a sort gradually returning to my cold limbs. Thankfully not so much that I could have felt the necessary violence inflicted upon my lower right belly, but just enough that I then felt the blankets on my legs. I carried on a conversation of sorts with the care nurse responsible for overseeing my groggy self. I do not recall what we talked about but I do remember making her laugh.

Hopefully not by uncorking some relatively harmless but embarrassing personal anecdote, but what are you going to do?

More minutes passed. Awareness began to increase as I could now keep my eyes open for more than two seconds. The sounds of the place began to sink in. Beeping machines. Moans from the other recovering souls coming out of surgery. The incredible range and depth of noises produced by humans in pain and under stress was mind-boggling. It was a testament to the effectiveness of the medications administered to me that I was not bothered very much by some of what I heard.

I was not bothered much by the sight of inert bodies being wheeled in and out of the room, either. That is, until the "new guy" was brought in directly across the aisle from where I lay. The poor gent had some sort of stomach surgery. He was hooked up to more tubes and wires than I was by far, including the dreaded stomach tube. That sort of thing gives me a case of the yammering fantods to merely think about, much less see it in real life.

And there it was, big as day, and in my field of vision. I could not get up to walk away. Even my options to turn my head were limited. I did the best I could, and tried to look every where but there. It proved nearly impossible.

I kept my eyes closed a bit, but the constant noise and questions kept making them pop open. I had to answer questions from my nurse, and I could not shut out the dialogue transpiring between the stomach patient and his nurse. I tried not to look, but lawd, it was the proverbial train wreck.

I saw things that, while not earth-shattering, are for most purposes better left unseen. The poor fellow was in a lot of discomfort, and I know he wanted that tube gone, gone, gone. After seeing it in action, I wanted it gone, too. Or me out the door.

Maybe it was the pain medications, or maybe it is just that I have gained a better grip on empathy as I have gotten older, but either way I felt pity and sympathy for that patient. I watched him wince and groan while the nurses and doctors did their thing. I tried not to look at the tube and its contents as it too fulfilled its purpose. But it was then I had a revelation.

Laying on my own gurney, afloat on a raft of opiates, I felt kinship to the people around me, the sick, the damaged, and the healthy charged with their care. The difference between those in pain and those managing that pain is only a matter of fortune and degree. I set aside my discomfort and reveled in the humanity of it all.

On the Realization of Having Gone Off the Path

April 14th, 4:39 PM. A sudden jerking awake, a popping of the bubble. Good lord, man, what happened?

It is not an exaggeration to say I had an abrupt moment of clarity, this morning, between slipping in and out of naps. Clarity accompanied by the gasp of knowing that there seems to be a lot undone in recent days. The lack of "productivity" in my life always creates a tension with which I find it hard to cope. I was disappointed that I have written and photographed almost nothing since March 23rd. Also, somewhat anxious.

What makes this absurdly funny is that I had no official deadlines or production schedules in that time.

Life is what happens when you make other plans...to be clear, I had a near week long visit with my daughter at the beginning of the month, followed closely by surgery (due to the events mentioned HEARnia), the recovery time I knew full well would set me back by keeping me off my feet. Even so I remained optimistic that while reclining in bed or on the couch I would still be working the keyboards and maybe even getting a jump on the Next Great American Novel. I thought I would bounce back in a snap, not unlike I did the first time I had a similar operation nearly 30 years gone.

Boy, was I ever mistaken. The surgery was just over 4 days ago, I was home the afternoon it took place, but it wasn't until now, a relatively nice Sunday afternoon, that I felt energetic and focused enough to sit down and write. Anything. Anything at all. In hindsight, I am astounded I managed to communicate to the extent I did during the last week. Even that was thanks to the miracle of the Interwebs and social media. The combined effects of surgery, anesthesia, pain medications and the fact I've been a few more years around the sun rendered me exhausted, loopy and beyond caring (too much) about typos. The smart phone was a boon, allowing me to at least dabble in the world beyond my shoulders between bouts of sudden-onset napping and just plain goofball fuzziness. I also managed to stay connected to loved ones, far and near.

My plans for literary excellence, or even increased output, were busted. It made me antsy, even as I drifted off to snooze and comprehensively map the insides of my eyelids. A curious battle between the need to rest (which really was the right way) and this need to fulfill my creative, productive urge. It felt good to rest, but laced with a ribbon of panic that golden opportunities were slipping away from me.

It's a good thing that I have people in my life who care deeply for me, for my well-being. I may have received some good-natured teasing over some typos and the loopiness I indulged in, but I also received good advice and care. Priceless, indeed. The core of the advice I needed to hear, is that my body is telling me what it needs, and I would do well to listen. No sense in trying to bang out a collection of short stories if all it does is land me right back in the care of physicians.

Having said all that, I think it's time to wrap it up. I getting weary again, the body is achy. I have some more meditations I'd like to offer to you, dear readers, based on my "from-gurney-observations" I collected whilst in the recovery room. Minor epiphanies and gratitudes, if I may. Those will wait a bit longer, after a nap and maybe some ice cream.

Echoes and Ricochets

It wasn't the two sets of strangers' fingers digging into my groin that brought tears to my eyes. It was a heart attack what did it. A heart attack that does not belong to me, but in some guise feels as if it had.

I was standing in the exam room, after the obligatory Q & A with the surgeon and the medical student who accompanied her. I had been asked more than once if it was okay for the student to be there, and if she could also participate in the exam. As I long ago shed most of my squeamishness when it comes to medical exams, I told them I had no problem with it. The way I see it, we all have to start somewhere, and how else is anyone going to learn this stuff?

So there I was, two people I had met for the first time only minutes ago, poking and prodding my groin to identify that what we were looking at was indeed a hernia. (It was. Yay, me.) They pushed somewhat hard, and it was moderately uncomfortable, but endurable in the name of medical education. I winced.

What was really working on my mind was not inguinal distress (fancy talk for "groin pain"), it was history. The student had asked a series of pre-exam questions relating to my medical history and that of my family, and she asked what proved to be the sharp question. Sharp, pointy, like a syringe needle.

"Do you have any siblings?"

There was a moment of silence, broken only by murmurs from the hall. Always, there is this dislocation when I have to decide between "have" and "had".


"Yes, one brother. Deceased."
"What did he die of, what did it?"
"He died suddenly, of a massive heart attack."
(concerned look) 
"I'm so sorry."
"It took us all by surprise. Thank you."

We then segued into a general discussion, away from non-physical aches. Procedures and concerns and recovery times allowed me to step back from the edge of the canyon that had  opened up in my head. Shortly after this exchange I was asked to stand so they could conduct the physical exam I mentioned earlier. The pain on the nerve endings acted as cover for the pain I felt in my heart and head, a peculiar ache caused by the loss of something that cannot be replaced. Subconsciously I think I was grateful for the physical hurt as a distraction. Exam concluded, I tugged up my undies, tucked in the shirt, and sat down to conclude the visit. Surgery and soon is for the best, we agreed, and I would let them know as soon as I figured out what to do. I left the office, got into my car and began the drive home. 

The canyon opened up again, right there in the middle of a busy street. Memories of my brother flooded my head, and I nearly swooned. I sobbed, briefly. What to do with the shards of the past that deafen and sting when I least expect them? Sitting confused and helpless there at the stoplight, I wondered. I had the sensation that someone was in the passenger seat; and maybe, just maybe, my brother's ghost smiled and said "Duck and cover yer ears, bro, duck and cover yer ears."

It was just like him to say it. I ducked, I covered, I held him close as the echoes and ricochets faded away.

Taking Fire

Winter light of lapis and polished sterling flooded the room through the paired windows. The stone around the openings flared outward into the room, magnifying the illumination to make the infirmary cell much brighter than Rāhula would have imagined. He was grateful, prayers of thanks going up every morning when the sun slipped into his room.

The old monk lay still, his eyes tracking the progress of snow finches across the flagstone patio outside the window. His bed had been pushed close to the window to afford a view out. The weight of the blankets and bandages served as warm anchors. But it was the pain in his skin that acted as biggest shackle. Rāhula's eyes twitched in time with the hopping birds, his racing mind considering that the pain was simply another attachment. The task, he thought, was to consume the horrible ache before it consumed him.

The smell of gasoline lingered as a phantom haunt in his nostrils. Blinding sunlight and the horrified screams of passers-by kaleidoscoped across his memory. He gritted his teeth. Tears surged, searing his dry eyes. Rapid blinks cleared his vision. The snow finches snapped into sharp focus.

Rāhula smiled, a reflex action at odds with his will, but felt good. Watching the finches peck at the black scatterings of nyjer seeds on the snow, Rāhula decided then that he would never again set himself afire for anyone. Not the government, not the news, not even himself.

Broken Voids

December 14th, 10:27 PM. Vile headache from parsing news of the latest horrific gun violence tragedy. Rain falls, and thoughts of bed beckon me.

---

There comes a time where the left and the right, the liberal and the conservative, the 'must-control' and the 'cowboy militia' crowd simply must cease to talk, blather and yell.

They simply must be silent...unless they want to join us devastated human beings in a scream of volcanic anguish that surely could be heard at the edges of the universe.

Now is not the time to squabble about the deadly tools that usurp our hearts with broken voids. Now is the time for considered reflection, to fill those voids with love.

Third Time the Hammerfall

August 8, 2012. Hot day, heated heart. Summer should not be the season for grief.

The argentine light of a Kansas City midday pouring down on the giant shuttlecocks on the lawn at the Nelson Atkins Museum, and I immediately think of my Big Bro. I think of the three-year old canyon in my heart, gouged into the terra cotta of my soul. The heat and the light make the sculptures shimmer before my eyes. At least, I tell myself that is the cause as I try not to think too closely about his absence from this earth, on this the eve of the third anniversary of his passing.

I think of giant racquets in the hands of us as young men, ten meters tall and blithely unaware of the power we had as we strode the mountains of our youth. We used to laugh at the words 'badminton' and 'shuttlecock', our teenage brains caught up in a naive naughtiness. Nothing that we could not make a juvenile joke of, that is certain.

I stood still for a few minutes out there on the heat shimmer and dry grass. I was watching my daughter amble slowly down the stone walkway, lost in her own thoughts on a lazy summer afternoon. I felt a tremor of joy seeing my link to the future; I felt a chill breath of wind, shifting my gaze down the lawn where something moved. It was a breeze that rippled the grass, would that make sense? My Occam's Razor solution to the alternative of seeing my brother's ghost out there by there sculptures.

Yeah, that must be it. It was only a breeze. That's the official story.

But me, I know better. My brother and I, we were giants again playing games under the sun, with a mighty backhand swing fading into the light.

Divided by Zero (Pt. 2)

A man always falls back 
on what he knows best in a crisis
What happens when the crisis is all he knows?
A fresh Hell doubled, black and molten
washed away my feeble claims to knowledge

This time there was warning of sorts
raven morning shattered by phone calls
to wake the mummies we had become
suffocating sleepwalk into our clothes
through a wormhole into actinic pain

A swallows' breath of time we believed
this golden sun might attain perfect fusion
So wrong, its core burned out, air frozen,
I awoke staggering on a trail of tears
falling back into a box containing the sun

~In memoriam of him, half of my first light
August 8, 2012

---
The line in bold is from Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. It makes one wonder what do we really know best?

Divided by Zero (Pt. 1)

The world will little note, nor long remember
what we said, did and cried there
But our hearts will never forget this life,
delicate china, tiny-pink, but not a doll
to be set aside and out of mind

Even the sun seemed reticent to shine
on broken hearts and bleeding souls
Shine it did, now and then, on faltering steps,
shaking hands and the small black hole
metastasizing at the center of our universe

Gravity drew me in, shaking hands grasping
a collapsar in casket form, miniature Taj Mahal
as reluctant gift to the gaping earth
Gravity fragmenting my porcelain heart
caught ever in the orbit of her new sun

~In memoriam of her, half of my first light
July 22, 2012

---
The line in bold is from Lincoln's 'Gettysburg Address.' A different memorial of course, but the sentiment struck hard on my heart.