caveat emptor

The Sun Comes to Breakfast

The sun came through the window and sat down at the breakfast table, melting all the butter and staining the tablecloth. I tried to ignore him, but the sun cleared his throat and began to redden my sleepy eyelids. “Good morning, sun,” I said finally.

“It is good,” he observed, “and you’re welcome for that.”

By this point the carpet and curtains in the breakfast nook were beginning to singe and sputter into flame. “You’re going to burn the place down,” I said. “You already melted the butter.”

“Do you realize what an honor this is?” the sun asked. “Do you have any idea how many people worship me?”

“What do you want?” The tablecloth burst into flame.

“A story,” the sun said. “I want to hear a story.”

“Can I get back with you?” The curtains ignited and burned quickly upward to blacken the walls and ceiling.

“It doesn’t have to be true,” the sun continued. “But I have to be the main character.”

“Ok. Fine. I’ll get it to you later.”

“What’s it going to be about?”

“I don’t know.” The sun just sat there, whistling and waiting. I jumped up and ran to the kitchen for the fire extinguisher.  “Could you please leave? You’re burning down my house!”

“And the title will be…?”

“The Sun Comes to Breakfast! That’s what I’ll call it. Now, go!” I screamed, spraying the extinguisher wildly around the room.

He floated toward the window to leave. “That’s a terrible title,” he said, and then he was gone.

“Asshole,” I said, ending the story.

Hello, friends. I hope you’re well.

Later. Love.

Of Art and Love

Sometimes my drawing eyes take over and I see you as a series of curves. Whenever this vision materializes I want to feel that soft tremble of the pencil graphite tracing over the subtle roughness of the paper, reifying the stroke my mind imagines. I want to trace the sweeping arc from your temple along your hairline past your ear and down your jawline to the tip of your chin. Then I’ll add the straight line of your brow, parallel to the imaginary horizon. Then, just below that, curving downward, the top of your almond eye. These are enough, these three marks. These are you. I would recognize them anywhere. Everything else is just embellishment for the benefit of those who know you less intimately.

It’s a grey, foggy, wet day outside. This should help local firefighters with the nightmare of wildfires all around. For me the cool, moist air on my skin is a reprieve, more like the world my people come from. Speaking of love, the poet Margaret Atwood once said, “How do we know it isn’t what goes on at the cool debaucheries of slugs under damp pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-seedlings nosing their tough snouts up among the lettuces, they shout it. Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising their glittering knives in salute.” I think of these words often when the weather is gloriously grey and cool and my foggy spirit comes more fully alive.

I thought of love today, by the way, as ribbons of energy snaking invisibly out from my heart and across the writhing atmosphere weaving among the tangled love of others and then down again into the hearts of those scattered loved ones I claim around the world. I imagine these cords grow faint and still over time, but never lose their essential strength. They snap taught and throb when love and remembrance stir. They connect us across the damnable gaps that separate us. It’s just a metaphor for something more lovely, a series of curves on this paper that you might recognize. Margaret Atwood said of love, “It’s a single vowel in this metallic silence, a mouth that says O again and again in wonder and pain, a breath, a finger grip on a cliffside. You can hold on or let go.”

Hello, friends. I’m glad you are.

Later. Love.

Night Flying

I knew it was a dream when we stepped outside barefoot onto the shocking green of the grass and, with nothing more than a tightening of the muscles in our gut, a visceral drawing away from the constancy of firmament and gravity, we rose from the afternoon earth and willed ourselves, as if there were nothing remarkable in it, upward and forward toward and through the moist, warm clouds. I cannot remember where imagined urgency was leading us, but I remember how startlingly mundane and familiar that flight felt, the nostalgia in the scent of sky rushing by, as though it were something from my childhood, the muscle memory of small flexing and straining to adjust trajectory and speed. Some part of my being has flown more times than I can imagine, thinks nothing of this meandering blaze across the heavens, wind streaming through my shirt collar and across the skin of my chest and back, currents of cold shooting through the warm dampness of a sky about to storm. Tonight, when you dream, watch for the shadow of my dream dancing jaggedly across the broken flatness of your terrain. I’m up there, imagining some urgency over the distant horizon. Feel free to join me, if you can catch up. It’s easy. It’s all in the core, in the muscles of the abdomen, like this. See?

Hello, friends. I hope you’re well.

Later. Love.

Visitation While Erecting a Birdbath

A few months ago I ripped out some of the bushes in my front flower bed. There were just too many of them, endless tracks of prickly ivy bushes. It was a vast wilderness and it required frequent, annoying trimming. So, I ripped several bushes out from the back. This reduced the ivy volume to a manageable level and also provided an easement for accessing the remaining ivy to perform maintenance. It was win/win. Except, of course, that it left an unsightly gap between the remaining bushes and the house, so it was a win/win/lose. “We’ll put something there,” I said. That was, as I indicated at the opening, months ago.

Since spring weather arrived, the area behind the bushes has been a thriving weed garden. Last Sunday, therefore, I decided to do something about it. My Susan and I, therefore, visited a couple of giant home and garden stores operated by a couple of evil mega-corporations you’ve probably seen on television. We returned with weed matting, weed matting pins, a new garden hose, a storage reel for said hose, seven bags of river rocks of the “fucking heavy” variety and the pedestal and basin of a greenish-bluish, ceramic-glazed birdbath. Then I set about installing all of it.

The plan was: weed the area, rake the area, level the area, cut, lay and pin the weed mat, cover the weed mat with the river rocks, erect the bird bath, install the hose reel, install the hose, fill the birdbath, feel a fleeting sense of satisfaction and worth.

It was as I sat in the dirt and prickly, dried ivy leaves communing with the slimy slugs and creepy, crawly bug-things that I first realized Chuck, my old friend, the gnome that lives in my back yard, was sitting there beside me. He didn’t say anything, he just sat half watching, half staring past everything into… who knows what.

“I’m clearing this area,” I said eventually, donning gloves to tug at a snaking vine of thorns that was weaving through the leaves of the remaining ivy bushes. They were the wrong sorts of gloves, brown cloth, and I got a few scratches from the longer thorns. I hadn’t been able to find my leather gloves. “I’m putting stones and a birdbath in here.”

He didn’t say anything, or give any sign that he had heard. Instead, he kicked off his boots somehow – tricky since they had been fully laced – and, with a funny, quick hand gesture, conjured his pipe, already lit, from the air. He tapped the bowl a couple of times and then placed the bit in between his lips and inhaled a deep draw of… whatever it was.

“We got enough small river rocks to cover this area,” I went on.

“From what river?” he asked.

“From a store,” I replied. He said nothing, so I continued. “We thought a birdbath would look nice here.”

“A bath for birds?”

“Well… yes. I mean, it’s a perch they can light on. It has water they can drink or use to clean or cool themselves. Also, it’s like a decoration, like a potted plant or a statue or a garden gnome or…” I stopped suddenly, realizing what I’d just said.

“I think I’ve seen them,” he said, giving no sign that I’d offended him. Then he fell silent again and I continued working at the weeds and leaves.

“A buzzard was telling me there have been fires around. I’ve seen the smoke. Have you seen them?” he said after a few minutes.

“The fires? No, but I’ve heard about them, and I’ve seen the smoke. We need rain.”

“The clouds are having an argument with the local trees,” he said. “It’s an old argument. They get into it again from time to time. Pretty bad this time.”

“What’s it about?”

He shrugged, “Everything. Everything and nothing. After so much time, who remembers? The argument is just about itself at this point. That’s what happens eventually. The wind whispers to trees about the clouds and to the clouds about the trees.” He stopped and offered me the bit of his pipe. “Smoke?”

I hesitated briefly, wondering what the hell he even smoked. We’d never talked about it. Then I shrugged mentally and reached for it, “Sure.”

“Better not,” he said, and he snatched it back and stuck it back between his teeth. “You’re young yet.”

“Oh. Right,” I said.

Then we talked more about the trees and the clouds and the birds and at length about some conversations he’d had with a local bat. In the end, when the birdbath was installed, I think he liked it. It’s hard to tell with him, but he sat on the edge of it with his feet in the cool water and seemed content. It’s always like no time has passed whenever I see him, though it had been more than a year. I’d hate to think what life might be like if he did not exist, if we’d never met.

Hello, friends. I trust you’re well.

Later. Love.

Set to Shuffle

Here among the crowd that includes the man wearing the blue wolf T-shirt without irony and the man dressed like a cowboy because that’s what he is, I am listening to Talking Heads music because it shuffled up in my iTunes, not because I consciously chose it for this moment. The woman at the coffee counter is wearing nursing scrubs because she is a nurse. The gentleman sitting at the blindingly-sunny-at-this-hour window table is not pretending to be a bald, scrawny, hipster geek with black Polo glasses, frayed jeans and Birkenstocks. His phone is not playing at being an Android. Now Tom Petty is singing Learning to Fly through my earbuds and a no-shit honest-to-goodness soldier kid in desert camouflage is waiting for a white chocolate mocha latte. The grizzly man who looks homeless but who actually, as I’ve discovered by covertly watching, walks over every day from a nearby motel where he must live has, accompanied by Simon and Garfunkel’s The Boxer, gotten a large black coffee and departed. Now Joi’s The Holy Side thumps and wails at me while I watch reflections of sunlight from passing cars dance like apparitions across the ceiling and walls. There’s something, I suspect, to be said about the dramatic shadows and highlights cast about by so extreme an angle of so bright a light source as the morning sun, perched on the horizon like a place you might drive to if you had the time. Willie Nelson tells me he’s Crazy as the array of perfectly beautifully mundane people pass though, a parade of stark reality just stopping by for coffee, not staying long. Old Paul and his crackpot religion sits squinting into that same sun outside, hoping someone will light beside him and listen to his bullshit and tell him it’s interesting. The sky is still hazy with the residue of recent wildfires, too little rain and too much wind. A woman who was once a girl with whom I went to high school is waiting for a drink. I don’t remember her name. She still looks a lot like herself. Someone is grinding coffee and I love that smell. David Bowie is modulating through China Girl, now crooning, now purring, now growling, all the while laughing through the words. Feeling as though I’ve said enough, listened to enough of this random progression of notes and words. 867530ni-ee-i-ine (867530ni-ee-i-ine).

Hello, friends. I trust you’re well.

Later. Love.

A Plea for Forgiveness, Pathetic But Sincere

Pardon me, if you would be so generous, my everyday unforgiveable offenses, like passing eternities with eyes averted, drawn away into banalities and smaller duties in spite of a life so beautiful, wonders whirring by blurred, unnoticed, never recounted because the witness was not watching. Forgive me if only for grace, since there is no justification for waking so distant from one so close you will touch her if you aren’t careful, brush in leaving against the source of this ubiquitous gravity of intimacy that draws you always toward, pulls you more weakly than the strong force of so many sub-significant particles that leave you wan with the sad pallor of redshift as you achieve escape velocity. There can be no restitution for so many songs left unsung, words left unwritten, unsaid, inspirations fading to ghosts in the rapid decay of memory unremembered. We must pardon one another for atrocities of inaction, a genocide of days, the sickening aftermath of this civil war our actions wage against our intentions. Let us not mistake one another for better creatures and thereby withhold the mercy our flaws require. In rare moments of respite, let us love ferociously lest we forfeit what we might have for the sake of what we’ve lost.

Hello, friends. I hope you’re well.

Later. Love.