Peppers and onions

Can you look at the situation and discern the reasons that cause it be difficult? Are they reasons that have fixes that are logical, and could you possibly apply those fixes with more experience, more knowledge? Then it's worth your effort, and your main adversary is your own need to be perfect, to be acknowledged, to be Lisa Simpson. To be born already knowing everything and the accolades that go along with it. Where has that gotten you before, and why the change? Is that an expectation you apply to absolutely anyone else in your life? To be content with your best effort and to have more mental space for the other parts of your existence. Not to assume that it's impossible because you find it hard. But to recognize that if it's humanly possible, you can do it too. That to the day it was three months ago that you decided to put your faith entirely in yourself and your ability, and plunge into the unknown. What was the goal? A simpler life. To be where you're most comfortable. To not be pulled so much, by all of those hands reaching and beseeching -- to not be expected to fix their life. You're doing it. You just have to stay the course, to hold fast.

There are so many similar moments that I can vaguely recall, but the hardness fades with time and all you remember is the feeling of victory. As though that was inevitable -- of course it wasn't -- how many never even made it to the black helmet?  How quickly you forget. I remember distinctly, though, climbing up an extension ladder with all of the gear and sucking air and with a chainsaw in my right hand, I don't know but you just have to sort of pray to God when you're in that situation. There's no real way to hang on and balance well aside from divine intervention, and then there's a roof ladder to shimmy over to when you get to the top. Somehow I didn't fall and once positioned the senior firefighter was the one who's never invited anywhere anymore but still sucks around not understanding (or maybe understanding) that his shit personality is what got him uninvited. So you're up on this roof, smoke showing, chainsaw in hand, precariously trying to keep balance on this roof ladder using just your feet in these ridiculous boots, and this is the guy directing you. If you can do that, and make the roof cut, and then also extricate yourself and your tools, what exactly are you worried about? Listen, this is just part of the process. What would you tell her? Find the part of this that you can act on, that you can change, and focus your efforts there. The rest of it you have to find a way to release. You deserve a life and a good one. Hold fast.

Fortuna Major

If life transcends death,
then I will seek for you there.
If not, then there too.

Lucas McCain Would Be Splitting Heads

Sometimes I just feel so small and soft. Like I don't want to participate anymore, in any of this. I just want to stay where it's comfortable with the people who are comfortable and check out of this game that forces you to feign interest and dedication as though any of it matters anyhow. Twenty years? It is a pestilence. Like an imposter faking my way to some distant and elusive horizon and only when I reach it will I find safety. Sometimes I feel like a corpse. Always though, in my vision of that place, she is there. I can continue, knowing that. God, if any of my prayers have answers, I hope You hear that one.

It wasn't the thing that she said it was. It's upsetting and also terrifying that it can be summed up as easily as that. It took two days. Two days and for eleven years their lives torn asunder. There are a lot of things that I want to say, to a lot of people, but the thought at the end of that line that really makes me prostrate is that it doesn't buy them any additional years. It doesn't get us football nights in the shop back. It doesn't get them a romantic retiree month on vacation in places like Sanibel. When she won't even go to Granville Ohio what can you do? An entire life lived like that. The hardest part about being an adult is that you can't fix any of it. Only live your own life as an example. And the invitation that is always open. It's never too late, to begin again. To forge ahead with the life that brings you joy. It can be reached so simply. 

Empathy without end is a malady. A poison. Life is hard for all of us, and we all have to choose our hard. When you allow a child to make demands, do what they want, have nothing to be responsible for, you are choosing that they will experience their hard later.  You are deciding that they won't have any hard as a child when it's relatively easy, and it will be incumbent upon them to figure it out as an adult, hopefully without entering the criminal justice system. The two worst things for a child are to never get what they want, and to always get what they want. There are a hundred million shades of grey in between the two states. At the root of each: responsibility, love, tempered disappointment, work. And yet she takes a punch to the eye and calls it empathy, and casts aspersions upon the one who would save her. What other course is there, but to leave? Zeus: rain on the plains and the fields of Athens.....

все ещё

The night endured without a breath or a whisper. I was already six feet underground when the time came to leave; dead and buried, last of my grace spoiled by the invective required to close the casket lid. The funeral lasted the entire weekend, no eulogy -- just a change of course mentally followed by resolute action. We cannot be such strangers to ourselves. 

She appeared with their faces on the screen and it elicited a roiling vitriol in the core of me. It was an autonomic response that I instantly felt both ashamed of and justified in. The tangled webs we weave. I thought, this is no longer about empathy because a million other possibilities have existed between then and now, and yet here we are. Screen dark and mic off I had told her that we were still finishing dinner, that the call was opened just as a formality in order to let everyone in, to begin without me, I would be there shortly. It had been a week of meetings already and I was at the table with Dan, mid-sentence and mid-meal. But, they persisted. The questioning and beseeching and then whispering when an answer didn't come, and then my name, over and over. It's no longer about empathy, it's the pageantry of it all. And of course it became impossible to ignore, a zero sum game that ends with two sides in the negative and the one with all the chips has long since left the table, and behind closed doors (maybe even your own closed doors) you're a monster for seeing it that way.  So a short meal turned into an uncomfortable invitation into a world that I shamefully find irritating but that also makes me insurmountably sad. In the same way that thinking about a dog named Ranger in Prescott Arizona makes me sad. Death by a thousand cuts. 

A seed was planted and a weed appeared. Sometimes your vision just isn't the thing that comes to fruition and I would tell you to focus on the parts that you can control and let go of the rest if that didn't end in a sad and solitary loneliest leaving. You can gnash your teeth and claw and scratch and some boulders will never budge. A prayer, a supplication to someday understand and find peace with it. And that when you rise from the grave in order to begin anew, there will exist clarity and grace. 

Meridian

The things that become cliches are the things that are true, and expected, and that's why they're cliche -- you take them for granted and when they're gone they rend your heart. You can't control anyone else's choices and those choices don't even have to necessarily make sense. She could bash her brain in lead three lambs to slaughter lead them to your doorstep steal your life and your breath and still she is the one who will be invited to accompany you to the hospital gift shop. Like a fire in the distance, I can see but I can't help. 

It'll never be like that again, and you avoid the thought, you gnash your teeth and you absolutely don't think about what it'll be like when that thought is a resolute structure made of concrete. Because, because because because. It's at its worst, I think, on nights like tonight. The nights that carry that ineffable electric current that comes with autumn, the promise that comes with the harvest and how do you not take stock and self reflect? A night just like tonight. She would come over at midnight and the speaker that Nana burned with her cigarette would talk about Dresden and maybe that's why I have so many dreams about that house around the corner. How will you make your relationship different? Can you. Screaming your name as you walk away down the hall and eighty years old alone, like starting college by yourself but without the promise of a future that you dictate. I never thought I'd see a parallel between the story of you and I, yet here we are. In the dream there is always a pool in the backyard that I'm excited about but that needs an almost overwhelming amount of work. The water is murky and there are things swimming in it that would search for my neck with seeking tentacles would work their way under my toenails, the stuff of nightmares. My task, in the dream, is to set about their removal. To make the water clear again. I find solace in knowing that there are people in the house who, like me, don't belong to it, but that will help. A single minded purpose. Before I wake up I see blue water in my mind and beautiful, languorous summer days. A dream within a dream. How fitting that the pool is the central figure, and the ones who are there to help me deal with it.

We just do what we can with what we're given. Sometimes it works out for our best, sometimes it doesn't. In both cases, life goes on. You find a way to be OK with it. In the body, when one sense or ability weakens or dies, others get stronger to compensate. I think the same is true of relationships. There has been lamenting this summer, and a gnashing of teeth. But, there has also been celebration and kinship and appreciation and fun. I'm sure it's true of both camps. You choose your comfort, and your normal. I go to sleep looking forward to each morning, knowing that I've chosen right for myself. I just hope that you feel the same, and that if you don't, that you see a way out -- a way to the calm, clear water that's possible with some honest evaluation and some work. 

Inch Off My Nose.

I hope I'm not wasting this. Late summer sun streaming through the window every vein illuminated every wrinkle, we usually age well, I thought, in spite of the vices. Our vices. My vice. I hedge my bets against a bonfire and a 4 AM bedtime. I drink water and take vitamins. The way we justify things.

We were talking about the old days and it's so impossible to fully put yourself back there. I remember though, I remember! Roasted sweet potatoes and onions and those chicken snacks and a bottle of red before it was done. It's weird that it existed and also that it doesn't still and how things can be so perfect but also so temporary. We will be eighty, probably, and both remember those days but never speak of them. Sometimes you outgrow things for no other reason than that the plot has to progress. You take what you can get -- a hot afternoon made cool by the water, a turtle with no pressing engagements or charges, a silent supplication that this could always be so. A momentary promise to let go of the rage that prevents it.

A small scar that I pick at sometimes, a rushing effulgence at the exsanguination. Evergreen, that place out in the woods, Kevin and his band (not that Kevin), Jon, Euclidus, that night in the stairwell and the art walk, how I couldn't protect you nor did you need it, Elliot, Rugby, Nick, everything, everything. Tuna. That there's not enough whiskey to decide if that dream means he's trying to comfort me or I'm trying to comfort myself. That's the beautiful part, though, right? That you don't know. That you're just stuck here, trying to squeeze out as much beauty and meaning as you can until the answer is laid plain in front of you. And to hope that when you get there you weren't too far off. Or lonely.

The Air Up There

To not be afraid so much. It is amazing, probably, the parallels between lives that could be drawn by fear and shame and guilt and all of those nasty little things hiding someplace down deep and dark, the parallels that we will never see nor admit to for fear of being exposed for the imperfect human beings that we are. Lives that will remain solitary and resolute. I will remember more readily not to mark the progress made by the number of boulders moved.

To be honest more quickly, even when you know that the advice which has been solicited is not really wanted. A no where a yes once lived without so much even as a second thought. An end to auto-pilot.

A goal is arrived at by a series of small steps. Anne and I sat on varnished oak under the late afternoon Athens sun streaming through floor to ceiling ballet studio windows when Shoshana said (how could I have ever taken anything from a woman with a name that preposterous?) sometimes you have to go down in order to go up.

It's late and he presses his nose into my sleeve, little paws grasping tugging holding. I wonder sometimes, especially when his eyes are closed and those little legs are working, do Tuna and Rex talk to him? Maybe he's seen Rugby. Sometimes he barks and looks and there's nothing there but the feeling of a friend and fuck if it's not too much to think about the possibility of seeing them again. If I could choose ten other people to ride out the rest of this existence with, half of them would be dogs. About a week after we lost Rex I had this dream about a tall office type building in the downtown area of a beautiful city. I didn't know why I was trying to get in there but I was pressing the buzzer like my life depended on it. They came out, both of them, and without speaking let me know that I couldn't come in because the place wasn't for me and that they had limited time but that they were OK and together and that they loved me. And I scritched their ears and rolled around on the ground with them and I woke up with tears on my face but knowing that my friend was there, just waiting. Just, to be the human who can live up to that. That they will hold the gate open when I get there.