I Sometimes Wonder…
And lots of other times . . . I don’t.
I sometimes wonder… when I fight off ruminations about sex and/or my team losing, and myriad more, moronic loops, what I should be thinking about and focused upon; you know, great thoughts, big shit, huge humongous piles of excremental enormousness and shit. This morning the line came to me: my job in life is to find the perfect words for… Everything and Every. Fuckin. Thing. That oughta keep me busy enough to fill my final days. And it sure as shit fills the shit part of this scatological dreamscape.
Interruptions
At Times
I.
There are times when we have to face the truth about ourselves. Facing both the best and worst. Ego integrity is the core component on the path to wisdom and as such, can’t be avoided in this work we’re trying/doing. Interruptions when I’m trying to write drive me crazy.
In truth, I could live in a cardboard box or a drainage pipe — I swear I could live under a bridge, eating off the fat of the land and all — I could live in some little shit-box studio apartment with roaches and mice and a guy named Buddy in the next-door room yelling at the faded wallpaper on 107 degree August days as flies buzz against the filthy city window glass out of which my view would be a flat cinder block wall, paint-chipped and rutted. Just so long as I could keep writing, I could live ANYWHERE, and I would,simply to avoid being interrupted while writing.
But here’s the deal. I’ve been more than lucky but also VERY fuckin’ lucky. I live in a very nice home with lots of space and a swimming pool and a beautiful woman I love making me breakfast and dinner and drinking with me, pretty much every day. And sometimes she annoyingly interrupts my work. Like just now as Patti hollered down to me. Interrupting me AGAIN this morning, yelling down the stairs, for the second or third time today as I sit here trying to write. I was initially annoyed, as in thinking but thankfully not saying aloud, “What the fuck is it NOW!?”
Then she told me that the lab results from her recent annual wellness check-up had finally arrived, and she’s perfect, or at least “good” in everything, liver function, kidney function, all those function matters. This is great news because we are both 74 years old. And every annual wellness visit portends as great a likelihood of a death sentence as a clean bill of health.
My annoyance quickly went from thinking about all the horrible places I could put up with simply to do this work I love in order to avoid interruptions, to gratitude and thanks for wonderful news.
This house, Her place and our place, with the pool set at 86 degrees and the view, all the way over to Idaho, and our clean designer sheets on that new mattress — I think I’ll stick around even though she interrupts me sometimes — Thank goodness!
Once in awhile, I remember where I’ve been for these last 30 years. NOT suffering. NOT in some tortured place, but in rooms where Patti and I have loved and lived and, looks like, we’re gonna have more time to keep doing so.
Ego integrity demands ownership of both the best and the worst of ourselves. The good news is that this gets a bit easier as we get older and as you grasp the truth that both warm sunlight and the shadows cast while standing in that sunlight, have their own value and place.
II.
Sighing to the green bough of a houseplant, an old wash basin filled with dried flowers (decorative) — sighing to the pricey Persian carpet, the wall, a light switch, the stone fireplace, the hum of the air conditioner — I am drinking ice water — sighing softly to the sunlight divided by leveler blinds, the sound of birds at the birdfeeder outside — the newspaper, my shoes, the fabric of the couch the fabric of this life with its trade-offs — good deals, admittedly, yes, very good deals — yet I find myself sighing sometimes, just the same —
III.
Bottom line: Be wary of any self-anointed Antifa-radical with his own swimming pool, especially a guy who seems to sigh an awful lot.
Sundowners?! Did You Say Sundowners?!
Okay fellow boomers, let’s be honest . . . even if it hurts a little
Awakening Early
Sometimes at 3 a.m. I wake-up and lie in the dark trying to shut my mind off.
I think various thoughts, myriad feelings, partly in control, largely still in the grip of some dream-mood worming its way through my brain into mind and spirit centers.
I begin a kind of mantra, a silent chant, an atheist’s Rosary to quiet my spirit and calm my anxiety. Until, eventually, convinced I haven’t slept a wink, I glance at the clock five minutes later only to see that now: it’s 5:48, almost time for coffee and for writing. And for starting my next day/night cycle until the next 3 a.m.
Early in the Morning…
…and by early I mean in the middle of the night, awakening from deep sleep, stumbling towards the toilet to pee, more than half-asleep, most of my thoughts are like those of a very dumb adult or an ignorant child, often limited to some verse or chorus of a song, maybe a Beatles tune I first heard fifty years ago. And when I crawl back into bed and close my eyes a bit too awake to recapture that deep sleep I’d had before all this excitement. I start to think of brilliant poems I could write if I hopped up and wrote, which I never do.
I finally fall back to sleep. And when I wake-up for good a few hours later, all I’ve got left is this poem. Welcome to the winter of my dis-incontinence, which may or may not be a word but welcome to it nonetheless.
Photo by Lina Loos on Unsplash