a conversation

I visited with the Future last night actually this morning very early as the sky was convulsing and disgorging water and light and maxed-out bass line like a low rider at a stop light on the wrong side of town looking for souls to steal.

The Future offered up advice amidst the artillery and trotted out thoughtful cognoscenti from behind the veil of random illuminations, fleeting though they were but nevertheless compelling. Time that great equalizer, is easing on and there is no turning back.

I awoke in a reflected bath having said nothing in return.

only lumins

Ever have that feeling of seeing yourself coming around the corner at you walking away at the same time? I had one pass me by with a wave twice in as many seconds a minute ago pulling a Category 5 behind it for an hour the other day.
Saw my new photo ID swipe card for work this afternoon. Compared it to the current one, one that is about 15 years old. New one is about 3 months old. Just got it.
I recognized the shirt I was wearing and remembered when I bought it 15 years ago. I also saw what was in my eyes then and remembered why I bought that shirt. It was a long time ago when my house burned.
I recognized the shirt I was wearing 3 months ago. I also saw what is in my eyes now.
I seemed older in the older picture.

grinding the fires

Today is one of those days that lives right here between the books, between rain, between the loads of laundry, between cigarettes, between the getting my game on for Monday morning in the traffic infested thunderstorm, between arriving soaking wet to a cluttered desk full of ghosts from last week still unresolved, with issues that bore me and still just waiting and between me and my immersion in rural mindset that balances like a fine time piece, embraces with it's solitude and shields from a world cold and violent and between meals I languish here undisturbed between the days.

The air is squeaking sweetrinsed clean, it's rowdier zephyrs corralled bedded down for the night still stirring a leaf there and daylight's rheostat angling down, gravitationally challenged. TV off I resting. This the best of times of all if at all is being one of these days to relish because a little relish goes a long ways in these the best of times of all.

The depth of my resolve to finish an otherwise unremarkable career is increasing quickly. It's become a jumping from way high; no turning back. I can see the end and wonder what beginning I face as the future looms at high speed causing me Doppler effected shift excitations but the question still remaining though, is it doable can I both retire and remain too happy too at the same time in a redundant sorta way too (?)

The rhumb line

So I steer a loxodromic cut away from this setting phase of Now, pursued not by hellish hounds but by the very doubts that drive me into nocturnal lucubration, stretching within my grasp the evolutionary Expressionism lurking vestigial. The snide calculus has failed to predict this untrodden mud uprisen to beckon unto me the cerebral precision and gleeful stance with exactitude of rage for which I have full incubus. This is so. The anterior movement of mind is preponderant as time vacuums me closer to my lugubrious kismet. As such, a rising star will reign and I will allow the syntax of my days to cure.

bayonets

Somewhere a man, probably Uncle Babboo, promised Yasmeen and her brother Ahmed a sweet American fried pie in apple or cherry, their choice if they would ride with him on an errand in the old Toyota. Along the way they stopped and picked up Mo, a friend of Babboo's so he could help Babboo with a large package. It was a nice day, not too hot and promising a superb drive. The children were excited at the prospects of escaping their abusive unemployed father or at least he seemed unemployed but the explosions across town after which he would come home flush with pockets of gold coins seemed to indicate otherwise and their pathetic excuse for a mother who cowed under her veil in a dark corner her entire life unless of course their father wanted some and then she would produce another child to wander the streets several years later.
It was a glorious Praise God to be out in the fresh light of day kind of a day. The kids were happy. Uncle Babboo and Mo talked of grown up things the way grown ups do; in Code.
After much driving and jostling, promises of fried pies soon, Uncle Babboo finally stopped the car and he and his friend Mo got out and ran away. Yasmeen and Ahmed looked at each other the way curious siblings do and wondered. Someone was approaching and asking something. Yasmeen being the eldest, sat up in the backseat and tried to hear what this nice person was saying while whispering to Ahmed to be quiet.

The old Toyota started to expand, very slowly at first with a tearing sound the way sheet metal sounds when it tears very slowly before you can actually hear the tearing sound and a flash of light that was so slow that blinking several times fast would still not see it come and go and the drenching warmth that popped and snapped gave way to numbing cold and darkness and silence, compressing the puzzled yelps in a nanosecond. Then it stopped.

A slight breeze carries away the smoke, the plastique's primordial bark had reverberated back up the long narrow alleys to sleep at doorsteps of the living leaving the old Toyota behind now split open exposing it's charred contents in the middle of the street, the nice person sprawled nearby without a face.

"Everything's a matter of taste," said the Devil as he helped himself to another forkful of roast infant.

That's why they call it work.

I haven't had any fun all week crunching the aforementioned numbers. Paused awhile this afternoon to chat with a co-worker who was pursuing the same inane dead-end as I. He was worked into a lather. I suddenly didn't feel so put upon. "You too huh," I drawled his way. He had that look. "Why in the hell are we the only ones still making little ones outa big ones?" he hissed, referring to several others who were blithely going about their business doing something else. He rattled off a status report they had posted with the boss and could not understand how they could be finished already. I couldn't either for that matter. Hmmm, something afoot here. I thought about it and realized that with all this effort, we were actually doing what we were supposed to be doing; turning out a correct data base for this job. I looked at him and said "Well, look on the bright side, the boss wants this done right and we're making it right. That's why we're being subjected to this. Dingdong doesn't have the time to give it back to the perpetrators and we're It." He looked at me like I just strolled up out of the ocean bone-dry. Then he thanked me. For the next 15 minutes I kept him in stitches until he called it a day and went home then I found a stopping point myself about 30 minutes later and logged out recalling that briefly a little while ago several of us were just chuckling amongst ourselves easing up getting a little oxygen making ourselves feel better it was a good note to end on for a Tuesday...

Work, bah! I'm still not having any fun yet.

...sharpest string in the drawer.

I was crunching some numbers today, filling in a spreadsheet, running through a bunch of calculations that screamed at me for more typo's. They were hungry and not getting enough, making it too easy for me. Kept me constantly checking and rechecking my entries straining my eyes getting confused back tracking to recheck and forgetting where I was and starting over going "oh yeah" I already did that one and checking it off only to start on the next line and going through the routine again inverting numbers and backing and retyping over and over again.
I'm a line drawer, an illustrator, a colorist, a writer. I didn't sign on for bean counting. Oh yeah, technology has really developed this process. Yeah, just what geekdom wants. Numbers. Yeah, that's it. 4 of the last 26 years I have been pounded as a round peg into a square hole daily. I'm tired. I dunno. Maybe time to retire from the govt. job. They don't care anyway. I've watched most of my career go down the shitter when They decided They wanted me to do my job differently 4 years ago. Our product went away. It's now under construction. Younger employees are hired and they move on within a few months. The old hands are slowly retiring. Decades of experience are sliding out the door. Nobody cares. Politics has become more important than the product more important than the trench dwellers that work all day to make Them look good more important than a twinkling dew-laden pasture at sunrise, the mourning doves cooing.

I hate my job. Working in a cubicle in a filthy building with filthy air conditioning filters for people who only have their own asses in their best interest is driving me mad. So what else is new.

I figured this out all by myself.
Does that make me a pretty fart smeller or what?

Ode to a Warrior

I talked to my friend's widow today. She is not so sad now but her heart weighs heavy. Her husband of 31 years still bumps into things after the lights go out. He limped away from a head-on collision 2 years ago this month with only a broken kneecap. He was not at fault. He was victimized at random by a criminal. Their paths crossed in space/time.
I talked to my friend a week after the wreck and we laughed at his situation. He said he might get used to this being "waited on hand and foot" shit while he was recovering. He was in exceptionally high spirits. We were best friends. I never got mad at him. Maybe I should have.

He dropped out of high school in '68 and joined the Airborne. I thought he was nuts. He wanted to jump into some stinking jungle. He wanted something better than moping around the old hometown with nothing to do when there were serious guns to shoot and planes to fall out of. He wanted to fly. He wanted to wear camouflage and sneak around. I told him he was crazy and could get very killed.

He injured himself in jump school so the Army being the Army, made him Infantry and introduced him to his mistress; the M-60 machine gun. My friend was a large apparition. He wore a size 14 jungle boot. They called him Lurch and put him in recon so he still got to sneak around in camouflage. He spent the early morning hours of his 19th birthday hosing down a tree line from the skid of an inbound slick, having the time of his life.

I was with him the night before he left for Vietnam. I later joined the Navy to avoid going where my friend had gone but I ended up there anyway, killing by proxy from the deck of an aircraft carrier. My friend came home hardened, like a concrete bunker. He came home scarred and decorated for valor, introverted, but he came home.

We decompressed together over the years, rode motorcycles and fished unlikely spots, drank our share of beer. Then he got married and followed his dreams. We had been friends since the 8th grade. He would only talk to me about his combat. He said nobody outside of his unit would understand what he had gone through but he said I did. He talked of the noise, the smell of fresh blood and spilled brains, of smoke, the screaming, the taste of fear like an old car key, the ringing in his ears, of the urge to shit. There are men alive today because of him. I've met a couple. He was a man with heart, a man with courage and compassion, a true hero. I was humbled and honored to be his friend. We called each other Mel just for fun.

When I talked to him last, we laughed and made plans to get together during the coming summer. He and his wife were going to be in town and somewhere there were cold ones with our names on them.

The next day I talked to my friend's father-in-law long distance. My friend had thrown a clot and collapsed in a parking lot somewhere. The ambulance was late but they found him. They had to restrain him because he only wanted to go home. He was fine he said. The medics said otherwise and ran hot, lighting up the traffic.

He died a few hours later.

When I got off the phone to my friend's father-in-law, I wept like a child.

Sometimes, I still do.

He was my best friend. He was a warrior with a heart of gold.

78 years

Today is my mother's birthday. She probably doesn't remember. My father died in 2002. So did my mother. Her body still walks around, talks with others, eats, sleeps, pretends to read, pretends to know. Her mind however left on the last train out. She has become a child. The roles have reversed. The day before my father died, he told me to take care of her. I have done the best I can.
Watching my mother devolve has been very depressing. I have fought it. Depression was not going to take me. A revelation came to me but it wasn't free. I have lost some connections with certain family members. This is my life after all. I am sober now. I cannot reason with drunkenness either in myself or others. It is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
I sent my mother roses for her birthday. I didn't talk to my brother. He's been drinking. I cannot reason with him. He lets my mother drink. Her meds say not to. She is clinically depressed. She is miserable. Today is her birthday.

tears for Allah

I apologize.

They aren't supposed to act this way; so much hate and rage.

No. The killing. Hearts and minds beaten into submission. Caked blood beneath the broken fingernails of History's sad progeny, all about the taking, always the taking. Never the giving, the tender mercy shown within the lamp of God.

No, just rot of death, of dreams left out too long, broken by violence. Only silence greets me now. No murmurs of concurrence, nothing ... A still water waiting to be plumbed.

They don't understand what they do. They are impoverished and will die alone. I will not miss them.

I apologize.

...oh the little darlings...

It recently came to my attention that the 20 somepin' generation, with their heads firmly entrenched within certain dark cavities, was thinking their joyful noise was the "True Path" to salvation and redemption, if indeed one considers text-messaging, streaming video, MP3 racket on a cell phone and garage bands from Hell as forms of "True Path" salvation and redemption. With the lack of a military draft to keep them up nights in cold sweat worrying about ballistics, trajectories, crushing pressure wave fluctuations, singing fragments of hot steel, smells from beyond the imagination and responsibilities away from the Peter Pan World of NeverEverEver Land, these offspring from parents younger than I just plain scare me sober. They need epiphany in their lives to reveal the talent, if there is any. They're the ones that need to be scared. The poor dears.

Now I say recently came to my attention but this has been going on a little longer than that. Since as far back as I can remember I've been paying attention not that you'd notice. I remember all too well the rolling of eyeballs and snorts of disgust when Mick and the boys first visited my father's house in the form of street wise poly-rhythms on the old Motorola. John and Paul followed and the pointed zippered boots had to be hidden and worn only when certain parental units were not present.

"Farfuckingout!" I gleamed, ensconced in dreams of being a rock and roll star just like on the radio instead of going to school and actually learning something useful.

But alas, I have aged well as the saying goes and my allotment of tolerance has grown exponentially, my taste in artistry improved to the point that the crabgrass growing out of the entertainment district, calling itself music and posing as profound is so much easier to ignore now. Soon enough SxSW will go away and all the refugees, the hawkers of "The Next Big Thing", the litterers and overhung will head out to the highway to wherever the hell they come from and I can relax in the traffic that's fucked up instead of the traffic that's really fucked up.

Okay, call me old-fashioned but you can call me long distance. If you have a complaint, please press 3 now...