I stand clear of
but near brush
that sweeps the water’s
edge.
Before me,
a gentle,
narrowing pool
floated with strange flowers
dissolves into waiting reeds
that claim the shallows
of a not-so-far-off,
final shore.

During my remaining
while this dusk,
I’ll witness each
petalled smile
to guess
which colour might
offend
or which appeases
approaching night.
I cannot for a moment be
free as these lillies.
I pause alone,
they drift alone.
Of course,
that fact displeases me.

“Zo – leaf your troubls outzite n c’mon in!” sang Joel Grey as he portrayed the cabaret’s Master of Ceremonies. Zo. It is so. After yesterday’s eerie, wild quiet and calm of a disastrous U.S. presidential election season’s end…we may best decide to visit ‘Le Cabaret’ awhile. The man we should forget, the one we need ignore, spoke loud and clear and early in the morning. He twitted a tweet. (I like that only such a twit would tweet) There will be no true and fair or reasoned resolution to the contest that lasted forever. The bad guys are at the gates, there is little we can do now. It is done.

What we can do is be civil, in spite of incivility. We can be kind, in spite of ourselves, in spite of our deepest desire to be otherwise at this moment. We can exercise our right and duty to live freely and responsibly. We can tirelessly recycle, we can plant trees, we can move away from fossil fuels, we can stop buying stuff from companies that dump poisons into the atmosphere. We can do this by ourselves, in defiance of the corporations and governments. We can disregard the fear, the oppression that is to come in the next few weeks, months, years. We can shut off the television and drain the life force out of Fox News. That is still possible.

In spite of the chaos and indignity imposed upon us by the world we live in or the people who think they run it: we can laugh, drink, dance, debauch…ha. We can still get married if we are gay and living in the U.S.A. We can still have an abortion if that is necessary. (The end of such freedoms as a woman’s choice or a gay couple being able to get married will take a little time to accomplish) We can still drive down the street while black. (we will get arrested or shot but we can still do it, I recommend we do so with courage) We can be happy and live as ourselves, as who we are.

The end is in motion and it appears to be a world-wide sort of phenomena. Covid is a timely allegory, a warning from the universe? All end-time scenarios are possible. The end-times are likely. We must keep in mind that It will take some time to destroy what humans have gained in the last few millennia. Still true is that our ignominous end isn’t certain, just likely. Miracles can happen. While we wait on a big one, lets get into the spirit of life!

Zo!

‘Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome…’appy to see you, strengeairs….” When the big black armoured vehicles come to stomp us, we can have a smile on our faces!

In the spirit I have now spelled out, I am hopeful that I can finally abandon excessive self-criticism. We don’t have time to allow that sort of luxury. There are plenty of bad guys/gals/Donald’s to take care of beating us up. Those ones are poised and ready.

Piss on ’em. I have fun writing, I enjoy it. I love to sing. I can learn to enjoy what I am able to convince my piano to do. I can happily approach being everyone’s somewhat silly old Granddad. I can build my lop-sided birdhouses and just forget that they don’t line up, aren’t colourful enough, expose the poor birds to the elements. Ha. I can always work on improving my writing, singing, playing. Yeah. I can also just do it, regardless. I am always acutely aware of the limitations I am filled with and I can forget about them. If my minor skills embarrass you, you are free to look away. Have a colourful and magnificent Wednesday! I intend to do so.

(psssst…btw, there are really nice looking young fellows here at the office today. mmmmm)

Success

I am thinking about my mother this morning. As a result of Covid and the resulting restrictions, Mom faded away, disappeared. We had no opportunity to guide her on the way. We didn’t get the chance to visit her in the care facility and sit by her bedside to help her count the remaining heartbeats. Her death didn’t make the news. No heads of state sent good wishes. We (and the unpaid credit card company) are the only ones who know she is gone. The rich and famous, the powerul, the important, were quite busy that day. None of them had time to notice because they were all doing the right thing, improving themselves and the world, making a difference.

I have held a horror my entire adult life of ending up like Mom. I wanted more from life than dying in a state-run facility with no family around. I have done what I could to avoid that. I tried to keep a good job, I paid my bills, I voted, I made a somewhat futile attempt to grow up and be mature. In my attempts to be a better person, I berated myself often and thoroughly for my human weakness and limits. I tried twice at achieving a close family without high quality results. Regardless my effort, I was not totally successful at changing into a different person. Not all the way. There are still times I see Mom and my inglorious past in my bad habits, my unhealthy living and I worry.

The thing I often forget is, y’see…she wasn’t evil, she was just ordinary. She made mistakes. She made big, important mistakes. She made errors that caused her unnecessary suffering. She made mistakes that affected her life in big ways and our lives, as her children. Those mistakes bled out into the community. The phone bills unpaid, the unkempt household all had an effect. She was an outsider and not well respected around our little town. Once, one of our neighbours called her ‘a wacky woman’ in the most dismissive of tones. She said that to my brother, without regard. People weren’t very kind. All of the flung mud and cast aspersion, eclipsed Mom’s other side.

She had good qualities and many of them but she was a woman who spent most of her life profoundly depressed (not suicidal – there is a huge difference). She was, at times, a shade schizophrenic. She sometimes saw the world in a different way than the world truly was. Sadly, she missed an awful lot of the common joys. She made incorrect assumptions, assessments of others and that led her to keep to herself, with few friends. In part, that reticence did turn opinions. The world outside her window was against her a little. It was, indeed, often a bad place. She was treated inhumanely at times but the forces of evil were not as much against her as she thought. As it goes for most of us, the world outside actually didn’t notice her that much. Yes, she could have been and done much much more. She could have had a more pleasant everything. She could have been more than she was. Coulda, woulda, shoulda… but living was not a complete waste.

My mother suffered greatly and lived gently. She didn’t gobble the world and puff away down the street in a giant SUV with plastic bags full of consumer goods blowing out the back windows. She never howled at a Trump rally and never, ever would have done. She didn’t demand anything. She was fair. She held a deep respect for art and literature, music. She held not one ounce of prejudice or intolerance for others. She didn’t hate, not even the folks who were sometimes so very bad to her. She read widely, eagerly and constantly. She encouraged her children to do the same and we all do, we all did. She did things for herself and did the best she could with what she had.

I have my own ideas about how my Mom came to be who she was. From her tales of the grand past, I learned that the grandmother my mom adored as a young girl was a pivotal figure for her. The two of them had a wonderful bond. They went walking in the woods together, they chatted, they avoided the mess of the 1930’s by stepping outside it onto and into the wonderful world of my great-uncles’s farm. My great grandmother treated my mom as a special person when none other did so. Great Grandmother, almost single-handedly, noticed Mom. My mother’s parents and siblings did not. There was not enough space in the worries of their days to pay the right kind of attention to her when she was growing. They weren’t able to do so. The result was, Mom didn’t get enough of this or that, the whatever it is a person needs to come up straight and strong. She was a bent little tree from the very beginning.

No one in my mother’s history is to blame for any willful crime. It was a different social time. They did what they thought was best. They followed the dictates of the time they were in without particular malice. We have since learned that a ‘seen and not heard’ distant childrearing is not a good thing. I think it’s possible we have since learned how to better meet the needs of growing children. I think the majority of folk here in the lonesome crowded west have learned to talk to and notice their children. Maybe there are some who have let children run amok but I am not convinced it is a majority, are you?

In my mother’s time, no one had enough energy left over from the concerns of the great depression and the great wars to give a thought for her. No one did except her beloved grandmother. Then, at the nadir of the Great Depression, in the middle of all the hoo-ra, my great grandmother died. It was catastrophic for Mom. That word is easy to say, people say things like that all the time. Folks say things like that in an off-hand and unconsidered manner about mundane, minor problems. A number of folks do not understand what a catastrophy is. I say that about my Mom’s loss of her best friend and it was completely true, no hyperbole.

Adding to the misery and loss Mom felt at losing a dear friend, confidante and co-conspirator was the awful way the death got handled. In those days, whether it was a fact of not enough money or just a social custom, persons were not universally disposed of by a funeral home. My great grandmother lay in the parlor for several days of starting to stink before she was buried. That image burned into my mother and stayed. You might imagine that a young child would have all sorts of confusion and hurt faced with such a situation. No one noticed Mom’s suffering. She was seen and not heard, she was as invisible as the rug folks walked across every day. No one sat down with her to explain and comfort her and that was her end. I have to believe that she ended right there at her beginning.

By the time I came around, Mother was limping pretty badly through life. She had no direction and knew little about how to care for or love herself. She was in her second shot-gun marriage and had a couple of very young children that she had no idea how to care for. Aware that any future, any private plan for her life was canceled, she was done. She was toast. Then, not long after, when we were five noisy kids and playing at teen-age, my Dad divorced her. She became a forty-ish and still good-looking, vital human being with five children and a mortgage and no life skills, no prospects. What was she to do?

She was to surprise everyone. At a very crucial, make it or simply break time, at that point of push becoming shove, she dug into secretarial school at the Jackson Business College and grabbed a reliable trade. Can you imagine what that took for her to do? How huge the meagre success really was? She was able to draw aside the curtain of her pain and survive, if only for a minimum wage moment. In spite of everything, every negative bit of self-doubt…she survived.

Survive is a good, accurate word but survive isn’t often regarded as the success it can truly be. The general opinion of our social world draws a marked line between ‘survive’ and ‘success’. Maybe because survive doesn’t include happy or fulfilled or wealthy or influential, it isn’t regarded as enough. Survive is one thing, to earn respect another. Survive doesn’t even include gaining your self-respect for some folks. For some folks like Mom. She wasn’t able to celebrate her accomplishment because it was not outwardly astounding. Her major life achievement paled before the expectations of others. Those are the same expectations of herself that she had internalized. Many, many of us do. When I am at my most Mom-like, that is what I do.

For women like her, in the time I was growing up, choices were pretty limited. Having a serious lack of a sense of self-worth added heavier weight to the fact that women were generally not respected or equal in society. My Mom was trying to live, trying to go along down the way, hobbled and with nearly every road blocked. Her personal history was a further setback. Born out of her growing up, the choices she made in her life weren’t the best. Those choices left her in a sort of underworld. Being a woman made her further second class. All of that beat her down pretty well and she suffered a long while.

Her ultimate success came because she did stand up when the standing was necessary. At the last lingering long second — she came through. She held a job steadily, eked out a living without any help. She retired with a miniscule pension but she survived. Her retirement years were spent careening from one financial disaster to another with something like aplomb. She was used to it, knew how to deal and saved her concerns for the latest Bookmobile Perry Mason novel or the knit-one, pearl two and handwork creativity that were an equal background to her life. Most folk would cluck their tongues, sadly thinking what a waste of potential. I know I did. I did for a long while. Not so much any more. I look back now at the tremendous success of her life.

Today, as I struggle with the fact that I have reached my 70’s and have not come to some grand place in life, that I am turning out like Mom, I have to see my Mom’s time on earth clearly. She suffered from her own hand and from circumstance, certainly, but she succeeded by her own hand as well. Her success was real. Because of her abiding love for hand work, knitting, sewing, crochet…because of her abiding love for and enjoyment of literature… because she accepted her life and drew from it what she could, she never spent a bored moment of retirement. She was sometimes unhappy, she gained an awful lot of weight, she never really conquered mental illness but she worked around it. She was a grand success after all. There was at least one time when she stood up at the last, long, lingering moment and did what she had to do. She saved herself and found a full, rich life.

So, It’s okay kids. You don’t have to agonize when you find yourself unable to be who you thought you should be or do what you thought you should. It is okay to sing badly, drink too much, write stupid poems, wolf down the ice cream sometimes. We slip. Shit happens. Sure, try to do better. Aim where you will. It is always worthwhile to try. Best not to agonize over the faults and failures, though. I don’t say so as a means of excusing our personal culpability. Everyone has a history. It’s just that (life) will be what it will be. The faults and failures cannot be avoided. Keep in mind, no matter what, at the last, long, lingering second….you will be successful, by someone’s measure. It might as well be you who does the correct measuring.

No matter how rightly we live, how much effort and skill we put into it, we aren’t guaranteed anything remotely like love, romance, fulfillment, happiness, wealth, position… it doesn’t go our way, it goes as it goes. We each have our own hurdles and we trip up. That it should mean our lives aren’t worthwhile or successful is goofy thinking. We can keep a-goin’ with things as they are and work around it. We will. We don’t need to told how or be shown by ourselves or others. We can’t use guilt, recrimination as punishment. We all have an excuse. We have the biggest and best excuse. We are human. Yes, in spite of the Dr. Phil’s and the Jordan Petersen’s of the world, We should get a medal for showing up. That means something. We don’t have to think about doing the right thing at the right time, it’s kind of automatic. Things are ok. It’s all good. Chillax, the province is low on anti-depressants and booze is expensive. Ice cream, however…remains cheap.

Creativity

This morning, I received something in the mail that made me smile. It was a gift and the gift made me think that there is hope for the future. It is only slightly likely that I was exaggerating. It is only a little bit possible that I overemphasized the ramifications of this little gift but… receiving it caused me to pause. I started to think: people can be very creative, the creativity will save us, heal us, repair everything. We will have a fixed world. I think we can repair our personal selves with creative thinking, too. I saw my own subconscious mind at work being creative.

Today, waiting in my mailbox, was a letter hand-addressed to the space where I live. The message was not addressed to me, personally. It was addressed to ‘Our Neighbour’ and that put me off at first. After I read through the first sentence, I understood why it was addressed in that manner. It dawned to me after the salutation that this was a message of comfort and courage from the Seventh Day Adventist group. My intitial dismay that it wasn’t a completely personal letter melted away. I realized that was a good thing. I knew that the letter writer had not done an internet search and trolled my personal information. They had simply run down a list of addresses and mailed out their quota of contacts. It seems that Covid has restricted the movement of the evangelists and they cannot attend your home, personally. They apologized for this and I easily forgave them.

That was a stunning bit of creativity from those particular followers of Christ. They did not call on the government to fix a problem, they didn’t fly in the face of rules, they didn’t gather in protest, they smashed not one single window, they didn’t call in the television cavalry. They just went about their business in a new way. I smiled at their ability to ‘work around’ the situation we are in. I knew instantly that if ‘they’ can, we can, I can. Our falling apart world is not at it’s end…not for a while. The collapse is urging us to find other routes, other ways of getting from A to B. ‘A’ being entrance and ‘B’ the exit.

Before I opened my mailbox, I had been agonizing through the endless loop analysis of a dream I had. It was an unpleasant dream. It was unpleasant in part because I hadn’t dreamed of the gorgeous Simon. Sigh. He hadn’t leaned over and given me the willing and eager kiss I imagine I desire. The dream did not feature his entirely fit self in the too-tight but just right clothing. No, my dream was from another part of a personal universe. It was a music and art involved dream. I had yet another ‘don’t measure up’ dream. I had another ‘why are you here and why are you speaking’ dream.

I dreamed that I had been tapped at random for making announcements to the audience before a symphony concert. They asked ‘little ol’ me’ to introduce the concert! They didn’t have any one else and saw me, lurking in the shadows backstage. “Hey, can you read this? The whole thing is on the ipad. It will be easy. Anyone could do it.” “Sure,” I said, in that way I have of happily diving in to a perceived spotlight – even when the spotlight should be for someone else. …even when it isn’t exactly a spotlight. It is a thing I do, knowing full well what I am doing but denying that fact to my conscious self.

So, I marched forward to the microphone stand. I was ready to go! Here was my moment at last! “Here begins my fifteen minutes!” The instant I began reading from the perfectly well-lit and legible screen, things fell apart. First the ipad window collapsed and I had to excuse myself while I searched through to find the document again. I huuumed, hemmmmed and hawwwed to the best of my ability. It wasn’t pretty. As I struggled to find some framework for remarks, I filled in the space with my usual decent-sounding bullshit. I kept the air full of words and feverishly flipped through the device, looking for the text I should have been reading. After putting several minutes effort into what should have been a moment or two’s explanation, I gave up. I was losing the audience and had to close as best I could. I did do some quick thinking and included a call-out to the concert master and the symphony staff. Then, I excused myself and quit the stage. “Whew,” I gasped to myself, thinking I had pulled at least something off.

As I struggled through my haze of frustration to the wings, a young girl there hissed at me. “What? not a mention of my solo? Why did they have you speak?” She stomped off into the dark of the backstage, leaving me flopping around like a half dead fish, full with self-loathing at my failure to measure up.

That element of my dream was ruminating this morning. A feeling of self-loathing was what I struggled with as I opened my letter-gift from The Seventh Day Adventist Company Crew. Reading through the first sentences and realizing what it was, how remarkable and clever a thing to do, I relaxed. My head cleared and I could see that my difficult dream had been an explanation. I had reached into the box of creativity and pulled out an enlightening journey through the day previous. A bit of cleverness on my own part. It was a method of explaining my horrible day, in a somewhat comical, gentle way that I could understand.

I dreamed what I did because I had been deeply upset by the Zoom chorus seminar of yesterday evening. It was a sort of homecoming with lots of people I have sung with and for in the past. At one point in the evening, we broke up into section groups for special learning that addressed the methods and means peculiar to a voice type. At the close of our section meeting I misunderstood a request for a summation from our group leader. I thought he was speaking to me, he was not. His query had been directed at someone else named Robert. I spoke up and tried to bullshit my way through, having no idea what he wanted as a take away. I didn’t realize until he acknowledged my response with, “Ah, yes, of course, thank you, the other Robert.” I immediately cringed as he then requested a response from a Robert I hadn’t noticed.

This music fellow is absolutely brilliant and has had a career in singing since he was quite young. He impresses me in a thousand ways. I did not know he would be attending our chorus event and the moment his face came into view in our Zoom world, I felt old feelings of complete inadequacy. At the moment, I didn’t recognize them, I just felt uneasy, uncomfortable, bad. During the days this guy was directing us, I felt a lot of tension if we had opportunity to speak together privately. At each such time, I could feel a strong sense of his ‘tolerating’ rather that ‘inviting’ my prescence in the chorus. In fact, he often avoided my approaches to conversation. I know I have no real skill or knowledge but I try to fit in as best I can and I try to have conversations about music with those who impress me. I want them to like me. The dynamic I felt in his case was one of, “Oh, hi Robert…uh, excuse me a moment.” I assumed it was because he didn’t want to labour through a conversation…that I had nothing of value to offer.

My unsettling dream this morning had been my subconscious mind explaining why I felt so awful after the Zoom meeting. At the time, I didn’t know why I felt so bad. I only knew I was extremely uncomfortable. The mind is a smart boy and can lay things out for you in a way that you can understand and accept. Sometimes, it can be an amusing view, one that wakes you with it’s humour. That does happen, just like getting an amusing letter from the Seventh Day Adventists. Sometimes, it is more painful and less funny. Sometimes, you wake concerned and worrying what the dream meant. That was today for me. Receiving the letter helped unlock the dream. I saw the Adventist’s creativity and the humour of it. Seeing that, I drew a parallel to my dream. It was mind being creative and teaching. When I knew that, I was able to look at myself and dispel a bit of the horrible ‘not measuring up’ feeling that yesterday left me with. I felt awful because of my misunderstanding, my misreading of a remark, my doing my best and not succeeding the way I hoped. Understanding that and that my inner self had revealed the whole scene in ways I could evaluate at arms length helped. Cleverness, creativity really gets you around an obstacle.

We are going to be okay. Folks are already finding amusing ways to go forward into the unknown Covid world and continue doing and being and living. The Adventist letter was one evidence. Others are the clever things that suffice as a mask in public. Lots of humourous things going on there. At the beginning of this, I watched as folks lined up to attend WalMart in a profusion of mask inventions. The recent ‘we have had enough’ feelings are surrender to rigidity, to a need for things to be as they used to be. I surrendered last night to the familiar and clung to the feelings I have had in the past. It wasn’t necessary, it was painful and a waste of time. Rigidity and a lack of cleverness brought my old thinking habits forward last night and gave me a few hours absolute grief. Rigidity and the lack of cleverness are at the root of the angry discussions going on now about losing our freedom. The letter from the Adventists proved that we can be creative and carry on with life. I saw that letter and relaxed, laughed and came to an understanding of my own bad self. When I realized that I didn’t do anything yesterday except make a mistake, have a misunderstanding, that it meant nothing about my value as a singer or human being, it was a lot easier to let the whole thing drift away. I can pick my soul up, dust off the negatives of the past and carry on in a new way. Ha. Now, I can just say ‘Ooooooops’ and on we go. No biggie.

I am seated and ready to type. Bagel in hand, tea at the ready. Another day in the universe? Ya. The U.S. Presidential election is finally only days away. For a brief moment on November 3rd, it will be over, one way or another. The sad thing is that as soon as one cycle closes there, another begins in earnest. Still, If we are extremely lucky, there will be a peaceful transition to another government, the Republican party will be left in disarray and a bit of sanity, rationality will return. That is only a possibility if we are extremely lucky. I am hesitant to believe that any such peaceful transition will occur. Too many people are too angry and too divided, there are too many guns held by the public…etc. I just don’t see peace as an option, now.

That said, there are no guarantees. There are no promises. There are no options. Once we are born into this thing we are now in, we have only the sort of life that is available to us, when it is available. Each has our own way. At any given moment, some will enjoy, some will endure, some will suffer but we will live until we don’t. Life goes on until it doesn’t anymore. It must be true that if there IS, then, there ISN’T. There must be no time, if there is time. The evidence provided so far would indicate that for every beginning, there is an end. For any down, there is an up. For each thing that is old, there is a new thing. For each boy, there is a girl. For each white pussycat, there is black pussycat. Also, and very important, for each polar, yin and yang opposite, there is a grey area between. The grey area is the misunderstood part. The grey area is huge. The grey area is full of hermaphrodites, homosexuals, faith healers, mediums, U.F.O’s, believers in this or that and a ton of things that don’t make sense. Quarks? Quarks with charm? Shroedinger cats? Being in two places at once? Ya.

If Earth and universe began with a big bang, Earth and universe will likely collapse. ‘To everything, there is a season’. At least, I believe that is so. I have seen springs and winters. I have seen laughter, tears. I have seen the live birth of at least four species of creature. I believe I was born, the evidence points to that as fact but I don’t remember it. I believe that I have some time left to live. I believe I will die. I believe we (precious earth and plants and creatures) have some time left before the general collapse. How much time there is before something bad happens or before the general collapse or before the disappearence or before the Rapture…that is uncertain. That such things as collapses and deaths will occur is certain. I have the evidence of my senses. I have felt cold and warm. Mine eyes have seen the ending and the beginning of some creatures and plants and people’s lives. I was witness to the moment my Dad passed into history, I was there when my brother-in-law tipped out of the wheelbarrow, I played Andre Rieu on my mobile phone for my dear mother-in-law as the battery of her consciousness was dying. I also planted five trees this year and took a cutting from my Antherium, successfully.

A look at history shows that we are in the best of times and in the worst of times. Charles Dickens was a very wise man when he spelled that out. We have far-reaching powers, we are frozen and ineffective. There are fewer destructive totalitarian governments, we can travel to other planets, we have marvelous medicines, we live longer than before, we are richer. annnnd…we can, on a whim, destroy the earth – burn it and everything on it to cinders, nearly overnight. We have within our grasp, the ability to change the decaying earth to a paradise or banish paradise forever. We have within our souls, the ability, the capacity to understand and forgive. We are filled with the base human emotions and hates. We can unite, compromise, share. We can ignore, put ourselves before others, oppress. We can bring governments to a more sustainable and civilized level. We can choose Donald Trump. It is possible and impossible. There is a grey area between likely and unlikely where hope lies. Hope lives and breathes with the impossible things. Hope exists with the things that don’t make sense.

The Latte is flowing at the office today. Ha. The boys are here. Yesterday, it was an all-girl crew and they were working even harder than today’s mixed crew. The fellow known as Simon is very fit, very friendly. His is a perfect v shape and there are very well defined muscles showing through that tight grey t-shirt. He is hairy in ways that young men aren’t anymore. His face is always clean shaven but arms are delicious and lightly furred. A few dark, coiled threads at the neck of his shirt hint seductively at the prize beneath. I have been suspicious that fellows shave where they never would have before. Do you wonder? Maybe they wax? Maybe Brazilian? I wonder about Simon. He chatted through the window one day and I learned he is a bit of an amateur musician, too. Small world. He has a nice personality and doesn’t seem like one of those demanding straight guys at all. I expect that if I were to suggest something impure, he would laugh and gently decline, feeling flattered. Maybe he would blush? He would go home to his young lady friend and brag just a little bit I suppose.

Jorge is an even sweeter dispositioned young lad but his bum is a bit female/round and he has a little teensy bit of flab on his lazy body. His polished star is that he does have an awful nice haircut versus Simon and the ‘perenially, just ever so scruff look’. Jorge fits in with the ‘odd bod’ customer day today. Where Simon has a perfect V that maybe could be seen as a little overmuch… it is TOO well defined and his bum is very flat… Jorge is another matter. He is a pretty down to earth, ordinary sort. His jeans are held up by being tight around the hip. They aren’t tight at his waist (as is the fashion) but they aren’t in danger of sliding down. He is pear-shaped in an inverted V. The pants legs are very tight and it must be hard to get in or out of the damn things. I bet he has to lay on the bed and pull hard. Hahah. I wonder if he needs help getting them off?

Odd customer bod day has spread. There was one fellow with no socks on and very thin legs. His pants were rolled too high and the combination of skinny legs, torso and bare skin made me worry that he would catch cold. He does have a mask on and furry hair so I guess he will be allright. He is, also, too young for me to go over and inquire without a police escort. Mr. Normal just arrived. He is average height and ectomorph. Big feet though…really big. A high wind would not unsteady him. If his baggy jeans fall the rest of the way down (as they threaten to do), we will send you more detailed and intimate information. I will maintain vigilance and catch you later, kids…

Behind the gun today. A late start (which bothers the dickens out of me) and a hurried bit of being overwhelmed have put me out of sync with my world. I see boogey-men and women surrounding me. It is a real chore to keep moving and not allow myself to be angry when the ordinariness of day catches me. The ordinariness of that fellow with the unrestrained, over exciteable dog… you know the one. That fellow and his dog who just step out in front of a moving vehicle, assuming it will be able to stop in time. After I survive passing him and move on, then the woman who parked too close to me waits impatiently while I try to rock my car out of the space she wedged me into. The honks, the stares, the long lines – all of it a tragedy on an otherwise beautiful day like this. Sigh.

‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings…’ We are not fated? Our day is made by our own hand? Yes, my ability (or inability) to climb out of the ugly box is my salvation (or destruction). Is that our test as humans? All of us? That we should suffer to carry on without having a fully satisfactory violent scene at least once per day? Ah yes. We can’t blame it on God or the man and his dog. Equally, we can’t simply flow with it, believing the scene is willed and bash our vehicle repeatedly into the offender vehicle. Damn.

The truth is, were I to pause a moment, today is a beautiful day. They all are. Even the days of full arthritic pain or the death of a loved one are gorgeous days. How far out of the beauty I allow myself to be distracted is up to me. The human part is that, sometimes… a person just can’t separate from the prevailing emotion. That’s okay, too. Part of the no-plan perfection? I wrote a poem about perfection yesterday. It wasn’t perfect. Ha.

There are signs, shown to me daily. I can see them or not. It is myself, speaking from the depths of consciousness? I started working on a book about signs and got lost, I wasn’t sure how to tell the page what I was thinking, how to describe it. The signs can be as simple as a spilled drink, urging me to pay attention or as complicated as the woman at the end of the row of tables. She is obese and holds herself as though she felt uncomfortable. She doesn’t look happy and is trudging through eating a large sandwich. Occasionally, she raises her voice in a drowning sigh and I can hear her negativity. I am knowing, in my heart, that this person is the epitome of ‘garbage in – garbage out’. I am thinking she is a sign sent to me. My emotional approach to this day results from the garbage I swallow – I am poisoning myself with unrealistic expectation. I am not feeding myself properly with liberal doses of forgiveness. Okay.

I eat too much and of the wrong thing – from time to time. I spend too much and desire too much – from time to time. I drink too much of the right things – from time to time. I am trapped by the limitations placed on me by life and circumstance – from time to time. I dream of another place – from time to time and I aim my little boat there by doing my work – from time to time. Everything is okay – from time to time. Voila!

The beautiful day is revealed to me – from time to time.

Birth Anniversary Number 70

My fingers are rapidly twisting, now. The arthritis seems to be taking a faster pace, moving the smaller bones around. A combination of twisty fingers and crepe paper skin make me nearly unrecognizable to myself. Sigh. The joint problems have been with me a while and aren’t that big a deal, really. I am used to the stiffness, pain. The other signs of passing time are with me, too. For example, my hair has been grey so long that I don’t remember it brown anymore. Old photos are always a bit of shock to me. “Who is that guy?” The changes don’t deeply concern me. I am not saddened or chagrined or regretful or bitter at advancing age. I am not vain. I am not focused on believing in my own beauty. I am not demanding the mirror respond to my liking. I am just not ready to fully embrace today.

I was having fun, after all. I did not know that, then. I know that now. Being young was very nice, regardless the times and circumstances, regardless the anxieties, the poor choices, the obstinacy. It was good. Looking back, I see that. Yes, I am as any other human – I don’t fully realize and value the present. And, like every other lucky human, I have experienced time enough to look back and say, “Hey, you should have kept on and followed the dream. It was just around the corner and you were feeling fine!” There are many things I might have done, but I don’t regret that. I am become aware, at this late date, how none of that matters a whit. First, it is far too late to turn back, second, we can’t turn back. We are locked in this thing, what ever it may be or become. “We are Stardust …billion year old carbon….” and just like Joni Mitchell, we will end in a cycle of decay, to spin down slowly and fade away or explode one day. All of our work and building comes to nothing. We are (most of us) pre-grandmas and pre-grandpas with the rocking chair still in it’s shipping container.

Personally, I have begun tearing at the rocking chair packaging, cursing the little plastic pellets that stick to every bloody thing. I am not ready to set the thing up just yet, but I have an idea how it goes together. I can feel it in my joints.

There was no final
puff and gone.
Awareness played at tag along
to wake in this articulated bed,
bright lights and physicians
swimming overhead.
“Wow! You almost bought it,”
an unseen someone said.

I gasped in thought, “Not quite bought?”
..to learn a mortgage unpaid still
on my imagined space under the low hill.
With free movement frozen by tubes and wires,
leaving desire’s last world harmed me dearly.
It seems that when you ‘buy the farm’,
it’s only successful …nearly.
“Hey!” to The Doctor I say,
“Your alarm is beeping clearly.”

You have: a murder of crows, a flock of seagulls, a shrewdness of apes, an obstinacy of buffalo, a clowder of cats, a fluffle of bunnies, a mob of cattle.. I have: a mess of dishes.

I have been eating my way through the pandemic and the U.S. election campaign. I have a mess of dishes and an abundance of extra weight. My hard-fought battle with fading beauty is a shambles, a loss. My clothes don’t fit. My knees hurt, my back hurts, I have acid reflux again. I can’t sleep because of restless leg syndrome. I am irritable and there is not enough cherry pie to see us all through this worry, all the fretting, all the fear of future. Perhaps, there is enough gin? The drugs, the food ease the distractions, the craziness. I eat too much, I drink too much. I have been upset, tight, tense, worried. I know these things and I look up from my temporary desk. I gaze onto the masked crowd and wonder what they can be thinking. Are they equally askew?

Today’s group at the office are unique as any. Two young fellows (probably teen-age yet?) are ordering their special drinks and waiting patiently in the correct area. They are wearing masks and speaking quietly to each other. (I don’t think my relatives will appreciate the following observations so they are welcome to skip the next couple of sentences and save themselves the dismayed, judgemental reactions.) These two youngsters are strapping, though one is perhaps overweight. He isn’t far off the scale of healthy structure, however, he is just a big fella. This larger of the two is wearing loose, stretchy material shorts and obviously nothing else under. His ‘equipment’ is quite large and easily visible. He really should wear underwear in order to contain the distracting bounce. The bounce is akin to a train wreck and I find it impossible to look away. Hmmm. Should I approach and inform? Perhaps not. The other fellow is equally intriquing. He raised his arms in a broad stretch (he is quite tall and could almost touch the ceiling) and his t-shirt lifted, revealing the band of his bright red and silk-like underwear. They are both pussycat-like and living in the moment, they are just being. They are both in a warm pool of sun. Je suis curieux/jaune… I consider the possiblities, the positions. I smile at the consideration. It is a good image even though it is something to resist, my believing that desire can be naughty or evil somehow, that there is a proscribed right way to be and a wrong way to be.

So funny. The being human is a hard job. Darn that Eve and Adam! If they hadn’t eaten fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we wouldn’t have to notice and speculate on each other’s dangly bits, full of worry that we are being naughty or bad. We wouldn’t have to fear the random imperfectness of everything. Now, in the same way that Snow White was slipped into a coma, we are slipped into conscious awareness of our nakedness, of goodness and badness. Even under the fig leaf of fabric, our nakedness entices.

Perhaps apples are the problem? Don’t know. I do sense that the other lifeforms who share this planet don’t fear the loss of living or the loss of perfection through their waking moments. I do know that the little creatures don’t peer surreptitiously at each other’s magic parts and worry that they are being nasty or doing something wrong. The lovely beasts just sniff and hump the willing and are done with it. Some dance around a bit and wave their feathers or build intricate structures and some don’t. Some race away through the water with potential partners following behind, attempting to be firstest with the mostest and some don’t. The one truth that fits all is that the beasts just do and desire and don’t fret about it. They embrace what is random. They accept what is.

Is it shrewd of the apes to just live and accept who/what/where they are and what happens? My gut response is: yes. We humans have built incredible castles of right and wrong that obscure what is real and will stand out in the end. We deny. We think we can do better with life. We believe we can build perfection, safety, eternity, peace…that war can be prevented, bad politicians, unpleasant social interactions or deadly disease avoided. It’s a noble effort, of course. It isn’t possible always.

We obfuscate and complicate what is easy to understand if we would just leave it alone and swing with it. How much less stressful if we accepted things as they are? If we left life alone to do it’s magic without a judgement call? If we relaxed and accepted that the flow is perfect, neither good nor bad however the flow goes. How much easier, less intense, less worrisome our desires become if we accept them. Acceptance requires a lot less effort. Living would be easier if we didn’t spend life in futile, desperate attempts to avoid death. We don’t accept the processes of life for what they are: life and death and hunger and satiation. Just things that are pieces of the whole. The tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil was only a source of worry.

With all of our apple knowledge, we witness that perfection has a form. It is life and man and woman and progeny. Trouble is, we can see that life has an end. We call It death. We think death is bad, evil, painful. We think life is good, delightful, to be defended. We fear death, so deny it, delay it, put it off at every turn. For myriad reasons, we think life is good so attempt to refine, perfect, prolong it. The denying of death makes death the harder to endure. It is going to happen no matter the number of cures or surgeries or the dedicated healthy lifestyle. The lusting for life makes the living more complicated. Searching for perfection, we deny the real. We reject what is different, that sometimes a person is brought to life without a body part or that sometimes a person veers off the procreation path with another sort of desire.

The univese expands but it’s stars, it’s living things die and collapse, drawing everything in toward tinyness. From that tinyness is probably another bang of bigness, of randomness and life again. I say probably, I say maybe because I don’t know. My observation of the circuituousness of nature gives me that Idea. I only know what I can see, that we elaborate the yin and yang, the male and female, the yes and no, the one plus one equals three that exists. We overvalue the Barbie and Ken, the Joseph and Mary, the God and Satan because we don’t like things to be out of order. We want randomness to be set aside. We want to always feel good, look good, be good. That wouldn’t be a possibility. Randomness is essential to the whole, I think. You can’t have a perfect circle if no wobbly ones exist. You can’t have life if death is absent. You can’t have straight if nobody is gay. You can’t have love if there is no losing love. You can’t have peace and tranquility without war and upset. You can’t have today without yesterday and tomorrow.

So. I sit down with my tea and I don’t worry today. I ogle, I sniff and think about humping. I eat my bagel in the moment, not thinking about pooping later. Later is later and will come when and how it does.