Seven

It was,
a number of heaven and science and astrology and of snapping you out of it. How far, do you think, she would ask you, does a life have to break? Pretty far, buddy. I mean far.

This dogged determination and in the end it being totally out of your control anyway. When we get older, some of us, we get wiser and we start to realize and understand what we can and can't change. Helping her move out of her crappy apartment and there is a general squalor about the place and smell of strange foreign foods left out too long and the Chinese characters on all of the packages and 5.99 bottle of Kamchatka on the breakfast table and how that used to be my life, too. And the lengths you go to cover it up.

Well,
hot summer sun and barely laid plans. Irritation anger aggression. And how much wiser one becomes without the mantle of idealism. Some human beings, they just suck. I mean, simply. And there is just nothing you can do about that. And so you go, and you keep being somebody who doesn't suck, and you find other people who don't suck, too. And that's what you build your life around. And a fuck-all to anyone who makes you feel like you need to do anything other than that.

The Two Kinds of Change.

She gave you a shard of glass for your birthday, submerged into a vein, shaky and deep the awful little thing. And when discovered -- a gasp for air in a vacuum and that sinking down-going to some bottomless night that has no morning. Maybe, the last birthday. We were discussing risk factors in my assessment class and I thought, there must be this insatiable will to live. And now? That murky crud in the vessels like something that must exist only in the most harrowing of Hollywood back alleys. Like late summer sun on decomposing beer bottles and the smell of cooking paregoric wafting its way over and the inescapability of I Will Never Get Better, Only Worse. It gets harder and harder to remember any parallel. Maybe there never was one, and that's the point.

Tari and Thor will be here tomorrow and we got the last bit of the new floor laid in the guest room last night. It's amazing how different the space looks. The littlest beginnings can stack up and up and up and each plank goes down and you get further and further from the thing you had when you first started. Board by board. But you have to set about to do it (what I would have told you in 2006, Priest Point Park.) And it's amazing, the vantage point, once that last board goes down. And how you ever were satisfied with it, before.