caveat emptor

Animal Myths

Sigh was, long ago, the Goddess of Comfort. It was the endlessness of human yearning that changed her into what she is today. In the end she could only stretch herself thin enough be a few soft breaths for each person, your shoulders settling a little and your mind coming briefly to rest in the moment of your longing, the small comfort of temporary acceptance and surrender flitting like a breeze over your spine and out between your lips. When Sigh escapes your body she kisses you on your briefly closed eyelids. It's not total comfort, but it's something.

What sweet fiction, gods and goddesses bent toward humanity with love and compassion. Just last week I saw a rabbit hunkered in the grass beside my office building and I wondered, not for the first time, why we came down from the trees and the simpler concerns of that animal life. All this running around, organizing, transporting, servicing and systematizing that we do these days is self-inflicted. We've chosen this path as a species. We made up all this commotion and complication and now we're all caught up in it. Why did we do it? Can we ever go back? And as we reimagine the world as something more than animal and vegetable, we dream up these gods and goddesses looking down over us, loving us, making it rain and shine and comforting us when it all becomes too much.

In the next life, after you die, you are a small creature hunkered down in the simple grass. Don't fuck it up this time.

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

The One About Bears

You have to be careful because there might be bears in your house or office. Bears have been known to jump from coffee cups and kill people right in the middle of an important project status update meeting. People often make the mistake of thinking that they are safe from bears because they are sitting on an airplane in Business Class 30,000 feet in the air watching a movie that features Zack Galifianakis, but bears could be anywhere. Your best friend might be a bear who's just pretending to be your friend while waiting for the perfect opportunity to eat your face off. Those earrings you bought might be bears. That cheese Danish? Grizzly. Those new, fancy underwear? Polar bear. Koala. Panda. Sabre-toothed bear. Dragon bear. They're all around you. Flying machine gun bears. You cannot be too careful. BEARS!

Hello friends. Please be careful.

Later. Love.

On Eating Outside

People always want to sit outdoors at restaurants when the weather is nice, to sit out in nature with the animals and plants and eat some of them in front of the rest of them. I do not enjoy this as much as everyone else does. I'd rather sit inside where they don't let the wind and the bugs and the birds in. There are many reasons for this, not least of which is that I, unlike most of you, actually understand bird speech. And it's awful. Birds are all either inane or vulgar and disgusting. If they're not boasting in disturbing detail about their latest sexual escapades then they're arguing about reality television. I don't want to hear, while eating my sandwich or salad, exactly how she moved it when he hit that. I'd rather be free to ponder something more edifying than American Idol or The Voice or the show that has the name I think all reality shows should have, The Biggest Loser. So, next time you invite me to eat somewhere, please don't say, "Oh, it's so beautiful today. Want to sit outside?" If you do, I'll smile and say, "Sure" as my soul slowly dies a little more inside. Or outside, as it were.

Hello, friends. I trust you're well.

Later. Love.

Still

Life is still about the same for me here. Snails still crawl slowly over the moist stones. I still spend most mornings in the coffee shop. Time still moves only forward. I still like to write these silly lines, though I don't do so as regularly as I did for several years. Summer still creeps up ominously in the late spring, foreboding sweat and breathless heat in the Texas oven afternoon. I'm working a different job position for almost a week now, Chief Architect. The Fates continue to take direction from the stars, though we largely ignore both these days, being driven primarily by the ding of the calendar reminder. The truth is still hiding in the shadows, hoping never to be found. Love still excites and wounds and thrills and heals. Birds flying overhead are posing for portraits painted on the ground by the noontime sun. Night still falls like sweet relief, like coming home to sleep, perchance to dream.

Hello, friends. I hope you're still well.

Later. Love.

Ages

We were young and did not know that everything we did would be life changing, butterflies flapping our wings unaware of the staggering consequences. None of us really expected the future to arrive. We were trying to burn all the life we had in that one day, that one weekend, that one everything night. We never guessed how much life was inside us, how endless things would be, on and on and on. "Right now," we cried wordlessly. "Right now is as close to eternity as we'll ever get. It begins and ends here."

Somewhere, right now, a baby's brain is receiving signals she cannot understand, trying to make sense of it all, the rough softness of this breast against her lips and tongue, the warmth of milk in her mouth, the trail of milk running cool down her cheek, pressed close to belly and wrapped in arms, the breathy whisper of words in a language she does not speak, the blur of light and motion, the jerking pull of swaying and flexing arms and legs she cannot yet control. She begins to create ideas she will eventually think of as goodness and pain, joy and sadness, mother, intimacy, constraint, love, independence, milk.

When you're old time moves past you so quickly that it is like a constant breeze out of the future, blowing into the past, and you feel the chill of it. This is why old people wear sweaters. It's true. Ask science.

Hello, friends. I trust you're well.

Later. Love.

The Song That Knows the Score

Verse 1:
This is the first verse
It might introduce an idea
Or possible a girl
This is the first verse (first verse)
It must establish the groove

Chorus:
As the chorus
I repeat myself
When the music stops
There is only me
Strip me down and lay me bare
And you will see
That though I am alone
I am not afraid

Verse 2:
This is the second verse
We don't expect much from it
It is free to simply be
Remember that idea from the first verse?
Remember that girl?

Chorus:
As the chorus
I repeat myself
When the music stops
There is only me
I am free to move against
Images you have of me
I am doomed to freedom
Just like everyone else

Bridge:
I close my eyes
When I want to stop seeing
I close my eyes
When I don't see you

Verse 3:
This is the third verse
It is shorter, more to the point

Chorus:
As the chorus
I repeat myself
When the music stops
There is only me
I cannot remember
Where I hoped to go
I cannot imagine
Where I may have been

Repeat Chorus:
As the chorus
I repeat myself
When the music stops
There is only me
I could paint a picture
You would recognize
If I named the picture
You would understand

The End

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

There is Also Me

Whatever I do, wherever I go, whoever I am at the moment, there is always also somewhere me, the real me, deep underneath it all. Once you strip away this temporal detritus, the occasional distraction of some particular situation any given moment, something is left. Pain and joy are fleeting. Sadness or mirth is a state, not a substance. You aren't made of it. Skin and bone and muscle and tissue turn to dust. Stripped free from all of these things that are not me there is me. And I'm smiling.

Hello, friends. I'm glad I'm, and I'm also glad you're.

Later. Love.

Metropolitan Nightmare After Having Stopped the Meds

She had just taken a sip of her cappuccino, setting the cup back in the saucer with a ceramic clink, and was flipping back the hair blown into her face by a sudden, cold gust whipping between the tall buildings and along the sidewalk where she sat in front of the small café, when she first spotted it among the crowded pedestrians a block and a half away. Her heart clenched in her chest and her hands gripped, white-knuckled, the rough, matte black aluminum handles of her chair. Even from that far away she could sense that it was looking directly at her, that it was coming for her. Somehow, although everyone else was moving past it at what looked like a normal speed, it was striding in purposeful slow motion, big floppy shoes slapping silently against the concrete sidewalk, red, menacing grin painted against the white grease paint of that soulless face, those empty eyes whose malice could not be disguised even by the most cheerful makeup. A lump rose in her throat and terror paralyzed her where she sat watching it push out from the crowd and step off the curb into the street in a beeline for her, the hula hoop under its oversized polka-dotted suit bouncing maddeningly slowly with zany foreboding as it approached. Her mouth moved in wordless horror, as helpless to scream as her body was to flee. No one seemed to notice it. Was it real? Was she just dreaming? Was it happening again, like before when they took her to the hospital? Her mind howled with too many questions, too many fears. And still it came, balloon animal dangling limply from one hand, giant yellow daisy on its ridiculous lapel, aura of wickedness permeating the air all around. Flop. Flop. Flop. Closer. Bounce bounce. Closer.

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

On Being Ambiance

Speakers blaring a music to which you cannot dance, you do not have the moves. Young beauties speaking a seductive banter you cannot understand, you do not have the words. Standing there out of context, bewildered and awkwardly juxtaposed. Would that this were just a temporary situation in which you find yourself, a place that you could leave quickly through the relief of a nearby door. This, however, is life, the entire world around you, and you cannot escape. You did not come here. You just stayed put, keeping to yourself, and they surrounded you with all of this. You recognize the dirt beneath you and the blue sky above, but everything else is so other, so strange, so you just stare out at this courtyard, these party lights at night, these thronging, throbbing, thrashing bodies thrilled in the throes of celebration. Sometimes rain still falls like grace from heaven and you feel it running through the locks that are your leaves and down the neck that is your trunk, a mercy of cool familiarity from a life you forget more each day, one spent peering out over what was this beautiful field, swaying in the evening breeze off the water, indigenous to everything you saw. Somewhere a saxophone blares and palms slap a rhumba beat from tight drumheads. You close whatever are your eyes and concentrate on the warm moisture around your deep, old, damnable roots.

Hello, friends. You're well, I trust. I certainly hope it's true.

Later. Love.

Personal Eternities

She died once for a few minutes. She's convinced she saw the afterlife, but she doesn't like to talk about it. After they brought her back she was a more quiet person, a bit withdrawn, distant. "I don't think she came all the way back," her ex-husband once said. So much of the time, these days, she stares at nothing specific halfway between here and far away and she hums a song no one can place though everyone's sure they've heard it before somewhere.

The rest of us are a dream someone is having. She's someone else, not you and not me. We're just a part of her dream. If she notices us she can make us do anything she wants, so let's stay in the background, in the shadows. Let's pretend to be free in someone else's dream. Let's imagine she'll never wake up, that we get to have our own forever in this world, the most real world we'll ever know. We can raise a family or discover a continent. We'll hum lullabies and plot our escape. We'll set out in a tiny boat into the vast ocean of her memory and find a home where we can stay, forgotten.

She found herself in an endless train station, sitting on a bench. A familiar song was playing from somewhere. And there were others, more than she could count, all waiting patiently, waiting for a train. "When is the train coming?" she asked the kind-looking man beside her. "No one knows," he replied with a smile. The woman sitting just past him leaned forward and caught her eye. "New here?" the woman asked. "Yes," she replied, and then she asked "When was the last train?" The man and woman glanced at one another briefly and then the woman replied, "As far as anyone can remember, there has never been a train." Then she opened her eyes back in the hospital room. The doctors had brought her back.

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

The Creature That Feels All the Feelings in the World

Walking slowly along a winding dirt road in cow pasture country, drainage ditches and barbed wire fences snaking along beside the road on both sides, he concentrates in silence upon the dryness of mouth, sticky against his tongue and teeth. There is water in his shoulder bag, but he's being cautious. He's always being cautious in his way, like his father taught him. When old farm trucks pass by they give him wide berth, but none have stopped to offer him a ride. Maybe his Mexican skin is too dark for their tastes. Maybe they are just being cautious in their ways, like their fathers taught them. It's the kind of warm afternoon that lends a surreal quality to the clicking whir of cicadas and the fitful flitting of dragonflies. Butterflies wander from wildflower to wildflower under the watchful kind eyes of light brown dairy cows chewing eternally as they ponder the philosophy of the fields. The rough crunch of rocks over the hill just behind tells of the farm truck approaching. Caution wells up in his muscles and down into his flexing fingers.

Deep down in the darkest depths of the ocean, the creature that feels all the feelings in the world vibrates softly to soothe itself in the cold press of so much water. The bliss of joy and the sting of sorrow wash and slash over it in violent waves and it undulates unevenly, trying to feel it all. Fear and anger and envy and true love, betrayal and pride, hope and despair, the creature's tentacles claw at the soft mud and wave in the fronds of strange deep water plants. It is the last of its kind, possibly the only one ever. For as long as it can remember it has been here, confused and enlightened and completely alone in its dark communion with every soul and mind everywhere on the planet.

"They's sandwiches in that bag," the old farmer says lippy around his tooth. His skin is like wadded butcher paper, wrinkled more than you can imagine, Caucasian browned by the worker sun. "I make 'em case I get hungry. I ain't said they're good, but there they are if you're hungry."

"Thank you," he says. He's not hungry, but he was taught to accept food when it was offered. He opens the bag and fishes out a half sandwich in a plastic bag, baloney and mayo on white bread cut diagonally. Not his favorite, but it was fine.

"Warm," the old farmer says. "Caliente," he adds, with a strong accent and a wink. "I know a little Spanish. My daddy could talk Spanish. Learned it workin' the harvest down near the border."

It isn't really correct, but he smiles at the old farmer and nods. The truck passes roughly over the dirt road heading for the small town just ahead. He chews slowly on a bit of the sandwich. It is August 1974.

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

Reflections on a Lustful Glance as Witnessed by the Ghost of 1973

Laughing, she stops, stooping to adjust the strap of her sandal, to get a handle on her attire, admire her stoop, stopping to pull the leather up with her finger, linger to fiddle with the little band near the buckle and chuckle at some private humor, some funny rumor. The ghost of 1973 watches you watch her, smoking unfiltered Turkish cigarettes and sipping lukewarm instant coffee from a chipped snifter, powdery grounds swirling visible at the bottom of the bulbous vessel. Sandal woman's never known, not having grown as you did less wealthy, the healthy desperation of boredom stoked invention, choked intention, a dearth of resources, broke mirth, no recourses, as her dress grips to press hips that sway like taunting, lips that shine like haunting, flaunting that careless air, devil may care, god knows where she's off to without you, she's not about you, bored by the lust of your seeing, shaking off the dust of your being. And the ghost of 1973 just sighs knowingly at it all, all sideburns and flowing sleeves, that old familiar swagger for the door and out into the anachronism evening, silence falling for that brief, unbearable instant as the song changes, the song remains the same.

Hello, friends. I trust you're well.

Later. Love.

Visualized Away

When the lines and waves of the pulsating music visualizer move outward from the center of the screen toward the edges it gives the illusion of forward motion through a science fiction wonderland, traveling deep into more mystical and interesting places in the universe. This is all an illusion. You're sitting in front of a computer screen, staring into a music program visualizer. The interesting parts of the universe is still very, very far away, farther away each second if science is to be trusted. It's okay, though. Your pets still love you in that way that pets love. Your favorite TV shows can still be downloaded from the Internet. Mortality is still your friend, though not your best friend.

Cosmologists and theoretical physicists are now speculating that the oldest black holes in the universe might predate the Big Bang. They might not have been participants in the violent birth of everything we consider our universe. They are leftovers from previous universes. I wonder if those universes were better or worse than ours. I wonder if those black holes miss their universes or if they've come to accept us, our Johnny-Come-Lately cosmos. I guess there's no use worrying too much about it. It might not even be true, like all science. Even the physicists who postulated the notion are only theoretical. Maybe they don't really exist, or maybe they just aren't really physicists. Maybe they're actually drugstore soda jerks. Maybe they'll give us a strawberry malted and a winning smile. Who knows? Science confuses me.

My music program visualizer has now taken me to the edge of the known cosmos and we are about to strike out for an alternative reality. Black holes older than the universe watch unimpressed as we cross the threshold. They've seen things, man. You don't even know. They've seen things you cannot imagine. Sit at the event horizon and ask them questions and you'll never believe what you hear. It will blow your Johnny-Come-Lately mind, friend. Don't look for me, though. I'm riding this visualizer out of here. I'm gone. Where we're going, pets don't even have television. Amen.

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

Endless Possibilities Mostly Eschewed on a Regular Basis

You could, in this society, eat just about anything you want at any given time. You could go right now, were you so inclined, and find a triple decker hamburger of Elk, Ostrich and Buffalo. It's out there. You could have an octopus salad with cinnamon and sugar encrusted roasted walnuts and endive. You could have a flounder stuffed with a smaller flounder stuffed with crab salad. You could have the whole thing battered and deep fried with a side of jicama and mango onion rings. It's true. You could find it and put it in your mouth and say, "Mmmm. Tasty." or "Icky. No good. Blergh." We live in a society where you can eat almost everything. As for me, I'm having a cup of coffee and a small bowl of oatmeal with dried fruit and a nut medley. I eat this for breakfast almost every day. It seems like a sensible thing to eat, and also I like it. I'm not a health nut or anything, though I do try to consider my mortality when I eat… sometimes. I was awakened to the slackness of my health and fitness routine last night when I showed up, all dressed up to work out, at my local gym. I walked like a fitness veteran up to the counter and held out my membership card. The young man looked at me like I had tried to hand him a "Vote for Truman" pamphlet. "We haven't used those for about five months," he said. He instructed me to enter my phone number on the provided pin pad and scan my fingerprint on the provided biometric scanner. I put my antique barcode-encoded membership card back into my wallet and submitted to his new powerful sorcery, a primitive old man scared in this strange, foreign world of youth and magic. I began to doubt all my technology after that. I felt as if the iPhone with which I had planned to listen to music were a victrola or, at best, a portable 8-track cassette player. I was certain that, had I the confidence to look around at the younger, more beautiful people, they would all have some new space-age, robotic music devices pumping better music directly into their larger, superior brains. You can go and buy all this technology in our society. There's no limit to what you can consume. You could get a cerebral-interfaced YouTube jack implanted directly into your shades. You could get it all with a side of android French fries. I thought about all of this while I was sweating on the exercise bike and the treadmill, stopping occasionally to flip over the wax-pressed records on my antique music-box. And now I'm sitting here typing this out to you, sipping my coffee to the heavy, metallic pounding of the keys, bars and sorts of my typewriter, my empty oatmeal bowl encrusting with dried starch and oat dregs as the sun burns over the horizon in the window on my left. I could be anywhere eating, drinking and doing anything, but here I am, like every day. I've been here for years. Why stop now?

Hello, friends. I trust you're well.

Later. Love.

Restless Memories of Sun

Perhaps it is much to be admired, an amazing thing, that I never, as a young man, set myself on fire out of sheer restlessness. I’ve spent more long, hot, Texas summer afternoons than you can imagine staring nothingness unblinking in the eye, daring it to flinch first. When the rains don’t come and the mown grass withers yellow in the scorching sun and the ground dries so that deep cracks form, the dust of dirt and decay settles lightly on everything and kicks up little acrid puffs that muddy with grit the sweat of your bare legs as you walk from this nowhere to that, looking for relief. It was those afternoons, I think, that filled my inner paradise with the grey and thunder of welcome storms, the breeze edgy with the threat of tempest, chaos roiling and building overhead between you and the hateful sun, preparing to tear apart this restless sweltering town. Not that you relish destruction, just that lost in nothing you learn to welcome anything, everything, any given something. I’ve never been struck by lightning, but not for lack of trying. Looking back now at that longing, sweaty, silent boy, I wonder how he survived. I wonder what that dry place did to him. If I could go back in time to do something for him, though, I wouldn’t. I never want to go back there again.

Hello, friends. I hope you’re well.

Later. Love.

Freedom Takes a Stroll

Walking along the sidewalk in some unfamiliar suburban neighborhood across the street from a lovely, manicured park vivid with spring blossoming as evening deepened around them he was sharply overcome, apropos of nothing he could discern, with the feeling that they, he and she, could start from this lovely, strange place and, leaving behind entirely all that had come before, set out for any place in life they wanted to go. Suddenly, for no reason, everything was equally possible and the path they’d been traveling to this point betrayed nothing to recommend it as worthy to keep.

“Do you like these?” she asked, startling from his epiphany.

“What?”

“These wisteria mounds? Do you like them?” She had stopped and was cupping a pendulous purple blossom from a twisting viny bush covered in such blooms.

Unfocused, he considered the space near and just past the purple petals, unable to bring the expansive condition of his mind to bear upon so specific a thing as this simple flower. A few seconds of silence sighed away as he tried to retain some sure grasp on this slipping revelation of freedom.

“Do you like them?” she asked again, ducking her head slightly into his line of sight, trying to claim his attention.

He shook the remnants of his revolutionary new worldview off to evaporate in the dusky breeze and focused his gaze on the familiar excitement of her deep green almond eyes. “I love them,” he said, though he couldn’t remember exactly what she had asked.

“My grandmother had a glorious, huge mound of wisteria just outside her front door,” she said. “You couldn’t come or go without smelling it.”

“Did you ever think that we could do anything?” he asked suddenly out of the fading vitality of his epiphany. “That we could go anywhere and do anything?”

She raised her eyebrows slightly and tipped her head subtly sideways. “Well…,” she began, but she didn’t say any more.

“I mean, we could…,” he continued, stammering a bit. “We’re not bound by anything. Anything is possible. We could set from here and go anywhere.”

“We’re supposed to be at my sister’s at eight,” she said, smiling. “So, we’re bound by that, right? I mean, we said we’d be there. We couldn’t just not show up.”

“Well, sure,” he said. “That’s not what I’m saying. I mean…”

“No, I get it.”

“You do?”

“Sure,” she said. “We’re not on the path we’re on because we have to be. We’re on this path because we chose it freely, right? We’re just where we want to be. It’s nice to think about it like that.”

Was that right? He wondered to himself if that was the same thing he’d been feeling. It didn’t feel like the same thing, though it sounded pretty close. “I wonder…,” he started, but he decided not to continue. He was wondering why freedom implied change to him. Why couldn’t he see the freedom in where he was now, what he was doing. “That’s right,” he said. “Do you ever think about that?”

“Sure. All the time.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “We should get going.”

Hello, friends. I hope you’re well.

Later. Love.

Wanderer’s Song

Once in ships we glorious came, or by land bridge walking ancient weary the dawning population of so wild a new world future far from the graveyard soil of ancestral homes. “No,” he chuckled softly, elderly creaking in his boundless whisper smile, “Death is always ahead, cannot be left behind.” We are all on a journey to the grave, however distant it might be. The new life ahead is not yours, though you run scrambling to strange unexplored heights while strength and the fading light holds. Once, forsaking where we knew, we journeyed foolish and brave to where we did not know only to plant our seeds in soil once foreign and water its nascent life with the tears of our own demise. This is your home now, wild and hostile for you to tame, to build hereon a city worthy to be fled by tomorrow’s restless mortals adventuring outward for a savage young wilderness to accept their inevitable bones. I give this place to you my child. Be not satisfied herein. Some may be the constant mountain, content to stand forever a landmark for travelers on the road, but we are the discontent wind.

Hello, friends. I hope you’re well.

Later. Love.

News from Allgood. Most Important.

Sitting on the stone bench in the idyllic front garden arbor, I gloried in the damp cool of the morning and in the sight of the Birdwings silently lighting on and darting from the Jasmine blossoms. I wasn't typically the sort to glory in things, but the peaceful beauty of this place forced my hand. I gloried against my will.

A well-worn footpath in the grass led from the lovely little arbor up the sloping lawn toward the house, a massive, gleaming white, Colonial edifice hedged all around with rose-vine lattices and immaculately trimmed Hawthorns. I watched the side door, whose porch steps rose from the end of the path, for the familiar sight of Thom Allgood shambling out in that mirthful rush with which he always carried himself. I had come to the arbor this morning at seven thirty because he had something important to tell me.

"Important news. Most important. Must speak to you. Arbor. Half-past seven. Your Thom." That's all the note had said. I couldn't imagine what this "important news" ("most important") might be, but I knew not to get too anxious or excited. Thom was never on time, despite his constant rush, and his news was never terribly important.

Just a few feet in front of the bench where I sat grew a massive Tillawink, Mother Allgood's greatest pride in the world. It was majestic, I had to admit, with it's topmost spiral vines draping down like Goldilocks and fiery red winkblooms pulsing mildly to attract bees, and eat them. In the crook of the forked trunk lay a fat spider dragon, sleeping through the cold night and morning to wake in the heat of the day and scour the leafpods for bloombugs. With a son like Thom, Mother Allgood was lucky to have this rare, awesome Tillawink. A woman needed something, after all.

A slam of the screen broke the Tillawink's spell and I glanced up quickly to see the shamble begin. His red-cheeked rush was especially exuberant, and he had a paper in his hand, waving it toward me in unbridled excitement. He was saying something to me as he came, but I couldn't hear him at all from here. I scooted over on the bench to make room for him and waited for the news. "Most important," I whispered to myself. "Most important."

Hello, friends. I hope you’re well.

Later. Love.

(originally posted 08/13/2008)