caveat emptor

What I Want

If someone asked you the question, "What do you want?" could you answer it? Do you know what you want?

Because I don't. Well, I might. I asked myself, and I didn't know. I really didn't. For the past twenty-one years, you see, I was along for the ride with a competent, intelligent (and beautiful) woman who had a plan for what we wanted out of life and I didn't know all the details but I was happy to just go with it because she was smarter and she had ideas and I really hadn't thought about it. But then she got cancer and then she died. And now I feel like all the momentum she built up is dissipating and I'm coasting to a stop, which isn’t good. I'm only 41 years old, after all. I plan to live to be 200 (at least), so 94% of my life is still in front of me. (I think. I'm no math expert.) So now I have to decide what I want in life. And I don't know. But I've been thinking about it and I'm starting to get some ideas.

1. I want my children to grow and develop independent, autonomous lives, so that their potential to thrive is not bounded by mine, so that they can continue to thrive after my inevitable death, and so that I can enjoy, once they're grown, an independent, autonomous life that I have never known.
2. Regarding material possessions I want a life that is small and simple enough that I can fully inhabit it, that I can fully understand it, that I can afford it without extravagances of money, that I can use and care for it properly, consisting of things characterized by efficacy, sustainability, reliability and beauty.
3. I want to continue learning all my life, focusing on knowledge, skill and wisdom that increases the happiness and well-being of everyone in my life, including me.
4. I want to pass my days in a healthy balance of working, spending time alone in self-improvement and relaxation and spending time with other people in love, service, fun and peace.

That’s what I’ve got so far. And I know I need more, and I need specifics, but it’s a start. I’m okay with it.

Hello, friends. I hope you’re well.

Later. Love.

Enough, For Now

Outside under the warm blue the scattered trees shading the sidewalk and peering up over the low shop roofs are fidgeting about a fitful, hot breeze. A few grackles and one male cardinal light on the brick edge of the vegan café across the street, just above a parked El Camino with a wheelchair in the bed. It is early September, the first free weekend after finishing a sunup-to-sundown, seven-days-a-week work project that lasted a little over two months. I am trying to remember what I used to do with myself. I’ve already eaten breakfast, browsed social networks over a cappuccino on the leather chair at the coffee shop and now I’ve moved on to the sturdy wooden table and a hot cup of Irish breakfast tea, staring out the front window at the lazy, early Sunday afternoon street, typing my thoughts onto the recently blank screen, blank for months now.

My life, for as long as I can remember, has been an exercise in uprooting and transplanting, taking root, growing, then uprooting again. From the meadows of youth to farmland of manhood. From the tended garden of religion to the wilderness of doubt. And now from the shade of her lifelong companionship to the arid exposure of her death and departure. You have to keep finding ways to survive in new climes, snaking new roots to find new water in strange soil. There is virtue in all earth, the same sun shines down, goodness follows familiar patterns and the waste of all you’ve lost mixes into the loam, feeding you bitter nutrients yielding strength you never wanted to need.

My teacup is empty, a few more dollars spent on fleeting pleasure, the kind you can buy. The birds have all flown and the shadows have shifted to the east, always moving east as shadows do outdoors. Lou Reed sings about Rock and Roll, how it saved her life, whoever she was. I want to tell you how I feel, but first I want to feel some way that makes a better tale. For now it is enough to recount the birds and the sky, a metaphor for growth and loss, a drink and a chair, a song and a street. For now it is enough just to say, “Hello.” I am still here, and I’m trying to figure out why.

Hello, friends. I hope you’re well.

Later. Love.

How Houses Grow

A house takes no note when the inhabitant leaves for the last time. However elegant or civilized humans might consider the structure, a house does not differentiate itself from the external world. A house is just a complex arrangement of materials, participating, like everything else, in the dance of elements, creatures and the shifting firmament. A house in neither eternal nor impregnable. The outside will not stay outside. Insects will patiently wheedle their way in. Water will search for the smallest cracks and expand them. Ice, heat and wind will swell, shrink and buffet the edifice. Minerals in the soil will react with and decay the foundation. Beams will fall out of level and plumb. Angles will skew. Joints will weaken. An empty house, unmaintained by human ambition and optimism, will eventually sag and fall. We think it looks sad, abandoned, empty. This, however, is life for inanimate objects. This is the way where there is no will. It is not sad, it’s progress, growth. A house, left to its own devices, will turn back into an empty field. The wind, water and creatures will carry away the detritus. It takes great patience to see the end result, but it’s beautiful in its own way. Come out of your house and settle on the lawn. Watch the show.

Hello, friends. I trust you are well.

Later. Love.

On Night

Earth rolls me away from the sun and night, the shadow sunlight casts with the planet, deepens the blue of the sky until it is almost black, so close to black that, like with two single dress socks that might comprise a matching pair, you give up trying to tell the difference. Night creatures feel the respite from the heat that had been so unrelenting in the day and begin to stir in the cool darkling air, energized with empowering anonymity. And the people feel it too, new excitement jittering in their nerves as they brush against one another, mingling in the crowded sidewalk bar under the deepening dusk, the waking of the stars. It’s cool this evening, a vanishing blessing that, in a few weeks, will be gone. The city will swelter even at midnight, even just before dawn, no relief until the brief autumn arrives late. Even in those hot months, evening has a kind of magic, sweaty though it be. Here, on the dark side of the earth, we fight off sleep and try, yawning, to stretch the evening out, to enjoy as much of it as possible. This is how I am, anyway. This is how we feel, dusky people, night people. If I could be  another kind of animal, I would be nocturnal. My big, wide eyes would dilate to see as deeply into the peaceful gloom as possible. I’d move silent as a spirit through the shadows, watching the lights wink out in windows all over town.

Hello, friends. I trust you’re well.

Later. Love.

Often Small

Most of life is light, small, simple. A good meal or a brief conversation can define a day. Once in a while someone heaves a great stone into our tiny pond and we are reminded of profundity and depth until the waves settle back to ripples and the the ripples radiate out, smoothing back into calm. On rare occasion something changes us forever, but then that energy diffuses and momentum gives way to inertia as we slip back into a groove of small duties, minor inconveniences, little triumphs, the quiet pulsating of this rhythm of joy and sorrow, coming and going, eating and sleeping, talking and watching. Life is so slight most days that if you don't pay careful attention you might miss it.

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

A Slow Leak of Potential

Morning arrives like a reliable friend that you don’t always enjoy as much as you once did but you still appreciate out of a sense of loyalty and the soft, easy comfort of familiarity. I’ve always, however, been suspicious of comfort and anxious about routine. What if some other way is the better way? What if I’m wasting the little time I have? I’m not sure why I worry so about it. I doubt it is given to me to save the world. Surely you’d know it if you were the Messiah. If not, then the system is too flawed, doomed. Thoughts like these, fitful but shallow, bedevil my coffee and oatmeal time. Sitting alone with my thoughts, my breakfast, and this blinking cursor cursing at me. I love to be alone, though the word looks sinister these days in a way I never noticed before. A lone man sits alone, typing “alone” into his word processor. Solitude has always represented for me the potential to squander the opportunity to be productive, and I am, above all things, interested in being a producer more than in being a consumer. (No offense intended to everyone else’s products.) These days production has slowed, however. Being alone has mostly been an exercise in breathing, in blinking, in expecting to get started soon. It’s alright, though. I won’t worry too much about it. I have solitude to spare, to burn, to squander. There’s always tomorrow and the promise of newfound resolve, time well spent, productivity. In the movies they represent silence with crickets. That’s not silence, though. That’s crickets. Silence is much quieter.

Hello, friends. I trust you’re well.

Later. Love.

Something. Something. I Don't Know.

Maybe I should go back to school, something to fill my time. I could study math. Math has always been a weakness of mine. I wonder if knowing math would change my personality in some way. Maybe I'm not meant to know math. Maybe knowing math would drive me insane. I don't want to play games. I know that. I cannot stand the wasted potential and energy that games represent to me. I want to produce something or to learn something. I don't want to get into television shows or play games or take up some crafty hobby that produces things no one needs. Maybe I could get really into fitness, with abs and whatnot. I could spend all my time jogging or biking or climbing to the top of things the hard way. I'm done with romance and intimacy of the sexual sort. It's just so complicated and fraught with stress, insecurity and compromise. I've had the love of my life and it was enough, I think. Also I don't want religion or empty socializing. I'm not interested in traveling, all that time and money just to see things and places that are so far away from your life and your people and then you come home and here you are again. I want to write, but I have no inspiration right now. Maybe I could throw myself into art or Do-It-Yourself home improvement. If I take up cooking I'll get fatter and my diabetes will kill me, unless I took up really healthy cooking, which doesn't sound like fun. Maybe I could secrete thin strands of silk from glands around my mouth and wrap myself into a tight, giant cocoon and wait patiently to see what comes out after all the metamorphosis and whatnot. It might be a monster, though, like something from a bad Gojira movie. I don't know. Something. Something else. Something. Maybe I'll study math. Maybe I'll grow wings and learn to fly. That would be fun. For a while.

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

Erogance

Damn the better us we're waiting to be. Who needs those assholes? If I could paint the perfect you it would look exactly like you look today. Everything I paint is amazing. Everything you say is like gospel. There is no potential that could be a better us than we are. Build a monument to how me I am. I will burn an offering to your perfect you.

Do you remember how excited you were – like a child with a long-anticipated birthday gift – when you first unwrapped your lover? Did you fold up the paper and save the ribbon, placing them neatly on the bureau? Did you ravage into the gift, wrapping paper flying to settle strewn across the furniture? For me, there is no better gift. Wrap her up and give her to me again and again. I am never disappointed with what I uncover. It's always just what I wanted.

I mean no offense to anyone else when I proclaim us better than most, almost certainly the best. You more than compensate for any flaws some might imagine I have, and if you have faults then I've never found them as far as I can remember when you're this close to me, so close I can feel you breathing. If they want to be better they should watch and learn. Just not now. They should go away now.

Hello, friends. I trust you're well.

Later. Love.

Life and Death: A Literary Review

Life is a story about everything that ever happens. We are both the characters and the authors. Sometimes, in telling life, we slip from prose to poetry. Sometimes we live things for which our language has no words and we must use symbols, metaphors and images. Did you ever wonder who reads it?

Death is a long, epic poem about human mortality and we all eventually join in the recitation, adding our own emphasis and accent to the collective voice. It is beautiful and tragic, in mourning and in long awaited peace.

If we ran the text of life through analysis, I think we would find – once we eliminated all the noise – that we mostly just say "you" and "me," "please" and "thank you," "hello" and "goodbye."

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

Homo Heteros

Sometimes I see people, slender people specifically, and I cannot imagine being so small. I've never been so compact, walking around with stork legs, folding and unfolding like a beach chair, reaching out to grasp with tree-branch arms. I'm built like a pile of soft boulders. It would take fewer steps to turn me into a sea lion than to turn me into whatever these people are. Convex to their concave. One leg of my jeans could be a dress for this woman, if you took it in some. This dude could wear my hatband as a belt. If I were a scientist and I discovered all of us here in this coffee shop, I'd classify us into several species. Homo Potamus. Homo Anorexus. Homo Plasticus. Homo Musculus. Homo Pilates. I don't know. We're all very different is my point. Especially you. And me.

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

Bears

All the love you feel in your life becomes a bear on the big mountain. The bears relax and play on the mountainside as long as you live. They are brown, black, white, reddish brown or any bear color you can imagine. They start out as cubs and then grow as you feel love throughout your life. Many of the oldest are large, almost like elephants. Some never get very big. All the other bears feel a special affection for these, making sure they are fed and cared for. When you die your bear turns suddenly and runs as fast as it can up the mountain – all the other bears roaring in encouragement – lumbering breathlessly toward the bright light at the summit, excited to see what he or she will see. We're all bears on the big mountain, people, living together, waiting to run that final climb.

Hello, friends. I hope your bear grows today.

Later. Love.

What's Your Point?

Last night, while thinking, I had a thought. (I hate it when this happens.) Here is the thought: Humans are existentially troubled by pointlessness, it vexes us. We really need to believe that there is a point, a reason, a purpose, a meaning to life. The idea of some sort of afterlife fate that is shaped by what we do in this life is not only a crowd control mechanism employed by the powerful, it is also a common comfort for the continual pangs of pointlessness. But what if you don't subscribe to any of those notions? From whence, then, your point?

Most animals, as far as I can tell, seem to find the mechanics of life, the activity of staying alive, purpose enough. Animals seem content with this. I can only assume that our human imagination, the ability to posit worlds that aren't really there or to rearrange in our mind the world that is, leads us to some sense that real purpose must transcend this material world. Staying alive is too easy for us to be a purpose, a point. We've been there. We've done that. If we've already mastered the meaning of life, what's left?

Use your imagination. Dream your own purpose. Make up your own point. Just, you know, don't poke me with it. I'm just trying to survive over here.

Hello, friends. I hope you're pursuing your own purpose.

Later. Love.

Against Conceptual Calliopes and Acting Thereupon

When I was younger I would posit positions and then build upon them in all directions the positing of connections with other positions like building blocks or dominoes. Often the final construct was beautiful. It was always mostly useless, but it was often beautiful. When you show your masterpiece of thought to someone and they lay bare with lucid efficiency the flaws in the construct, it's uncomfortable, painful even. The accumulation of these lessons can manifest as maturity and wisdom in a sufficiently healthy psyche. Of the building up of combinations of possibilities there is no end. One should not confuse possibility with truth, however. The more complicated the construct of multiplying uncertainties, the less likely that it is the answer. The ability to posit is more important than any particular application thereof. This matters because a proper respect for the dubious certainty of your pet theory for society will keep you from launching crusades, forming armed militias, causing collateral damage. Let's just posit one thing at a time. Let's talk about it. Let's weigh the pros and cons. Let's not get carried away. Have a cup of coffee. Sit here for a while. Put down the Kalashnikov.

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

A Metaphor in Which Life is a Road and Uncertainty is a Fog

Uncertainty is a dense fog that has settled over the road that is a metaphor for my life. I cannot see what is coming, not very far ahead. This is a simple metaphor to understand, of course. I can see this evening, tickets to a show with my Susan. I can see vague outlines of employment surrounding me, this occupation in which I find myself. I know birthdays and holidays are up ahead, the rhythm of regular things unchanged in spite of it all. I cannot see where this road leads, however. I cannot see the horizon, what lies between here and there. How long will we walk it together? When does it fork up ahead? I want to send out a scout, but that's where the metaphor breaks down. It's not a road, it's life. It's not a fog, it's uncertainty. Of course, we're all drifting in uncertainty, but I'm not even sure what the goal is anymore. Get healthy. Be financially stable. Be the source of help and support. And what else? Write? I've lost the words for now. Maybe they'll come back. Teach? I always thought I might, but I wonder if I have the energy to do something so new, to start over, to succeed again from the bottom up. It doesn't matter, I suppose. I've been able to eek out contentment at least wherever I've found myself in this life. I'll still have that talent when the time comes. Maybe all I need to know are the next few steps, the now, the day's work, this evening's show, a little sleep tonight. Maybe that's enough for a guy like me on a road like this, metaphorically speaking.

I'll try, I will, to write posts that sound less like sighs. I really want to. Bear with me, if you will.

Hello, friends. I trust you're well.

Later. Love.

Changes are afoot. Give them a hand.

They've redecorated my coffee shop. New paint. New tables. New chairs. New art. Gone the odd contraption on the ceiling above where my table used to be. It's a different table now, facing a different direction. I'm sitting across the room. The comfy chairs are newer, cleaner, a little smaller. The tabletops are square, not round. Same floor. Same ceiling. Same swirly, Seussian vent hood over the espresso machine. Same hanging light fixtures that never hang perfectly still, always stirring slightly at the whim of some ghost, the ghost of some whim, a movement of air or earth, the subtlest of sways that you have to watch closely to see. And I have. I've seen it and now I cannot but see it. Moving the least a moving thing can. Never still. Moving still. The people have all been painted and rearranged, except me. I do not change. I am timeless. (This is a recent development.) Outside the summer is slowly relenting, though not gone yet. In here it's a different place, made up of a lot of the same things and a few new ones. I wonder if they found my imagination or my soul while they were redecorating. I've mislaid them somewhere. This place is a good candidate. I've spent a goodly amount of time here. Maybe I'll glance in the dumpster on the way to my car, just in case. Do they have a lost and found here? You'd think I'd know, but so many things have changed. I like the new chairs better. Don't tell the old chairs, though. They've supported me through so much.

Hello, friends. I hope you're... well, I'm not sure. Happy, I suppose. Or at least content.

Later. Love.

Settling

"What would you do if someone offered you the opportunity to do anything you want?"

"Politely decline."

"What?"

I just chuckled a little and sipped my coffee.

"Seriously, though, what would you do?"

"I don't know. Honestly, I think politely declining is what I might do. That feels like the best response to me."

He furrowed his forehead. "Dude, that's pathetic."

"Is it?" It was a sincere question.

"Hey look, I gotta go. Talk to you soon."

I nodded and he stood and took off. I sat there and sipped my coffee. I'm still sitting there.

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

Unjust Lament

As evening blossoms full I sit sleepy and wonder what will become of me. I am tired in all the ways that a first-world man grown fat on too much ease and comfort can be weary, all those bleary-eyed exhaustions that do not compensate the soul with the mercy of accomplishment or atonement. I'm not sure when all my insides fell out but I'm empty like a beggar's hand, hollow like the penultimate matryoshka, the smallest having been lost long ago in the move. It is almost less than I can bear, this life, and I want to scream in pain but only sighs come out, each quieter than the last, as though my nothingness even were fading away. I am a lucky man, possessed of everything a happy soul needs. This placebo anguish, howling in thunderous silence, is my autoimmune disease, attacking all my joys and blessings as though they were invaders, doing its best to protect me from my own good health and pleasure. My desert is lush and green and I wade through it with lips parched. Soon dehydration will overwhelm my shambling shell and, swooning, I'll fall and drown.

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

The Things They Never Warned You About

All the things they never warned you about, as far as you can remember, are meeting today across town planning how they're going to torment you in the next fiscal quarter. They're meeting in a well-appointed conference salon in an upscale hotel. There are glass pitchers of ice water on each table, condensation building on the smooth, sweeping curves of the pitcher until each drop swells in mass beyond the tenuous grip of this negotiation of inertia, friction and viscosity and snakes, gathering other drops along the way, down the pitcher and into the black, silk napkin folded and placed for just such an occasion. I'm not allowed to tell you what all these things have planned for you, since these are things they never warned you about. I'm them too, after all. We all are, except you, of course. Don't worry, though. It's not going to be that bad. You can take it. You always do. If it makes you feel any better, remember that there is no fate, no doom. There is no reaper, grim or otherwise. There is no judgment day or punishment. There is only this gentle rhythm of inhaling and exhaling for as long as it lasts. And after that? No one knows. Some might tell you they know, but they're only guessing, as far as I know.

Hello, friends. I hope you're well.

Later. Love.

Alone and Accidental?

It's a thing I think about from time to time, the possibility that we might be the only living things ever in the universe. What if we are just an isolated coincidence? Imagine it: There has never been life before and there will never be life again. One day some planetary cataclysm will wipe us out for good and that will be it. No more life. Ever. I can't decide how that makes me feel. Lonely? Insignificant? Important? Lucky? I don't know. Maybe it's not true, of course. Maybe the spaceships start arriving tomorrow. Maybe there are gods and spirits and aliens and wonderful beings we've never imagined, or horrible monsters even our nightmares never dreamed. Maybe we were put here by distant cousins who are on their way back. Maybe pointed eared scientists with green skin (or not) are approaching cautiously. Maybe Klaatu barada nikto and whatnot. I don't know. But what if? Suppose it's just us, just a temporary anomaly. That's cool, right? I guess it is. Seems a little sad, though.

Hello, friends. I'm glad to be here with you.

Later. Love.

This is What We Are, Like it or Not

You could have been born a rock or a drop of water. You could have been a sea cucumber or a parking meter. Would that have been better, I wonder, to be a cucumber cucumbing along the bottom of the briny sea? It's not a choice that's given you, what you're going to be when you're born. By the time you have a chooser the choice has been made and there you are, a radio antenna in the middle of a corn field in Indiana with nothing but flat plains and corn as far as the eye can see, not that you have eyes, mind you. If you could have chosen, what would you have been? A Galapagos Tortoise? That would be a good choice, I think. A grommet? I don't really even know what that is. Maybe that would be ok. Grommets are probably important for something. It's nice to be important, or so I've heard. I wouldn't want to be a toilet or an orthodontic retainer. I wouldn't want to be a star-nosed mole. I find their noses too creepy, and, although they do have vestigial eyes, they can see no better than a radio tower. How do I feel about having been born me? I don't know. It's ok. It would be been cool to be able to fly, I suppose, but I also enjoy writing. Probably there are no flying species that write. It's ok, then. How about you? Are you content to be you? Would you rather be something else? A dragonfly? A hubcap? Jelly beans?

Hello, friends. I'm glad you're you, for what it's worth.

Later. Love.