The Unbearable Bobness of Being

At Night You May Hear the Clackety Clacking of Aluminum Ingot Filled Ghost Trains Bringin a Shine to the Thunderous Fist of America's Fury

Last Friday, I rushed from Rainytown to the Valley of the Beautiful Spokanes where my 17 year old was getting an emergency appendectomy. I got there a couple hours after and he was sitting up and gabbing in his room and everything came out dandy. That weekend plus the prior week all added up equalled a lot of stress for me. So how do I handle stress? Well, lots of ways and some are actually productive!

I went for a Sunday walk down on the Centennial Trail, a paved asphalt ribbon from Anchorage, Alaska to Trenton, New Jersey winding along rivers all the way. In our neck of the woods that would be the Spokane River.  So I got out on a kinda sunny, kinda blue sky day, it was cold and crisp yet strangely chilly except in the sunshine when it was more warmish, and the trail was essentially under snow. But that's fine because it was packed down by hundreds of prior hikers and plus I had on my Merrell Polar Tec Winter Boots.

I always enjoy the Centennial Trail down in the Mirabeau area of the Valley of the Beautiful Spokanes, as I've been going there since I was a teenager, mostly to drink and smoke and break shit, it used to be a remarkable graveyard of old cars and freezers, but that was before they enjoined the once dirt road of neerdowells and stoners to the mondo grand and trans-continental artery of the Centennial Trail. I actually once camped overnight with a girlfriend in my 65 VW microbus on a hill above the river and got rudely interrupted  in flagrante delicto by a Sheriff's Deputy asking why we were overnighting there. When I explained we were both out of our heads on angel dust and formadehyde cigarettes and we were staying put rather than pillage and loot "stop n rob" convenience stores with our unstoppable strength of 10 men, he said "well, you can't camp here, so leave in the morning." That's how special this place is to me!

So while hiking I came across this majestic bridge (see pic below). This is the historic Evergreen Spur Bridge #38. Burlington-Northern Pacific Union Railways uses it still. It was built back in the 40s as a spur to haul aluminum from Kaiser Aluminum for use in the war effort, they made cheap and light bombers out of aluminum, they called them "Kaiser Bombers" they were so famous. 

Anyhow, a few years ago the railroad company was gonna demolish this magnificent specimen of a Pre-War Rust Expansion Joint Girder Spanner bridge. They used to build a lot of these to move war munitions and cows but most have been removed. Not this one! The Valley of the Beautiful Spokanes Port Township Authority formed a Bridge Preservation District and sold bonds to save it. They used to take grade school kids on field trips down here to see the bridge and draw pictures of it and send post cards around the world to show what a fantastic bridge we had here. The field trips ended, tragically, when a 3rd grader from Sunrise Elementary got his arm tore off by a pitbull being run off leash by some gangsta. 

Speaking of which, I have this theory that there are so many pitbulls bred now that we've passed the tipping point of pitbulls. And that whenever I go on a hike in an area that is public and accessible to exurban and suburban neighborhoods that I expect to see at least one (1) pitbull. I will say on this hike there was nobody on the trail at all on the outbound. When I came back the FIRST PERSON I SAW, some tall, thin woman, had guess what? What do you think she had? Had running OFF THE LEASH? Why yes! A pitbull. God, I'm so tempted to buy a heater to strap on my hip just for pitbulls. I fricking hate them on my hikes.

Well, there you have it. My stress reduction and bridge appreciation hike. It was lovely. 

What do you do for stress reduction that one might call "healthy"?



Evergreen Spur Bridge #38. The graffiti script is gangsta code for "We love this bridge and wish it a long, resonant future of magic and wonder" (Photo taken by Blackberry Storm)

The Silence of the Stalls

I had a rare and always disturbing close encounter with Toilet Paper Man in the bathroom stalls at work yesterday. Toilet Paper Man has some OCDish thing with toilet paper where you can hear him constantly pulling off pieces of TP and doing something with them, not sure what but it makes a weird skritching kind of sound.  The aftermath, as I discovered later that day on a very unusual second run to the can, is a toilet jammed full of TP. I don't think that's the point though, just playing with it and dropping it, but something kinda obsessive-compulsive handwashingesque.

Speaking of work restrooms and I know you weren't, do you ever have the experience of finishing up a rather aromatic movement and as you are getting to leave the confines of the stall you hear coworkers come in and find yourself paralyzed and unable to exit the stall out of a neurotic hang up over refusing to be associated with the odor?

*crickets*

Oh come on! I'm not the only one for chrissakes. But yeah, it's definitely a showstopper for me. It's no better if there are others in the stalls, I still won't come out until the standers leave, no strength in numbers, no hiding behind the smoke screen. I feel an actual sense of relief when I make it to the sinks and no one has entered. I figure if someone walks in and I'm at the sink that despite the hideous malodor floating like a vile fogbank drifted in from a rotting ghost hulk-ship, I can't be definitively associated with it. One can't prove that I hadn't only been a stander and was washing up and some sitter had bombed the room and already departed.

I deeply admire those who have  highly entrained elimination systems permitting them lives of never having to unload solids at work. There is a school of thought, perhaps rooted in another work age when workers were tired of the man and fought back, that one should only do this on company time, that one should hold it until one is on the clock forcing  the man to pay for it. Personally, I don't hold to that rather mercenary set of bowel habits. I mean, sure, it's kinda cool to think one is being paid to do it. Yet, as we plunge into this catastrophic failure of our national economy, one may wonder how long it will be until sit downs at work will be eliminated or severely reduced as budget cutting exercises.  Who knows.  Perhaps we will get ration cards to get punched each time we go. I may just be full of shit on this. I don't know.

Do you have humiliating public restroom habits? What are they? Have you ever tried to change?

No Larry Craig jokes were used in the making of this blog.

Climbing up Mt. Wednesday!

Every workday is like a mountain to climb and you get to the top (or nearly so) and you see, oh hey, there's another fucking mountain. Then the next work day you climb that mountain, let's call it Mt. Tuesday, and then you get to the top of Mt. Tuesday and you see Mt. Wednesday of the Workalayan Mt Range and you go "oh shit, there's another one" and you climb the next and so on and so forth. Until finallly, you summit Mt. Friday and you are all 'hell yeah, that does it" and then you stumble off the peak. You are so excited that you don't properly disconnect your crampons and sheath your ice axe and all those gleaming brightly colored carabiners jangle in the thin icy air as you tumble down the ice fields and glaciers and features with French names like coulouirs and crevasses and you fall into the weekend beaten, bruised and broken and you get TWO WHOLE DAYS to recover which you attempt to do by drinking vast amounts of alcohol mixed with fruit drinks or in a barley based brew and you get all sick each morning and take fistfulls of ibuprofen melting your kidneys a bit and you don't get half the shit done you said you would and you are forgetful about at least one (1) thing important to someone you love and you get some really bad diarrhea from undercooked pork chops and before you know it you're back at that Workalayan Mt. Range thinking oh what the hell here we go again.

That is the Way of the Pessimist. The Optimist, on the other hand, believes it happens exactly the same way except he believes that on the peak of each mountain is unicorn shit full of diamonds and gold and that even though he never finds it that is only because unicorns are rare and magical creatures and that he sure wants to be the one up there when the unicorn has finally passed on by leaving a big dump for him.

Are you generally an optimist or pessimist in life? If I told you which one lives the longest and has the best relationships and generally is happiest would that matter or would you just think I was bullshitting  you?

Landing Biplanes in the Day

So, I dreamt last night that I was laying in this field of green grass, maybe it was a park or a really big backyard, and I was laying there next to a childhood friend and I was maybe 7 or 8 and we were gazing up at the sky and I said "Billy, what does that giant floating dragon trailing that army of sky-trolls armed with clubs and broken pieces of hope and obsidian look like to you?" And Billy sighed and picked his nose and said "clouds."

Just kidding. No dream recall this morning. But as I typed that for an easy laugh, an easy sort of comic "turning the expectation around and surprising the reader at the end" I realized that it was kind of true. Not exactly true in terms of an accurate recounting of some actual event but more true to the spirit of what a weird little kid I was with my imagination. And it was an imagination. I lived in a fantasy world in my head well into my teen years. I'd create stories and events and populate them with all kinds of people, the proportion of pneumatic and promiscuous women increasing near exponentially in my post-pubertal daydreaming constructs. I was usually the hero or the anti-hero, sometimes the victim of some dreadfully unfair and violent or cruel act, beaten down and abused but always rising out of the smoking hole of injustice to exact a terrible revenge. I often had military type adventures as a young lad, leading armies of soldiers or bands of cowboys or, post-Tolkien, elves and dwarves.

When I was in the 3rd or 4th grade my teacher was convinced I was hearing impaired. I was sent to the audiologist for testing. My hearing was normal. She was certain I was nearly deaf because she would call on me in class and I would not respond. Well, it was because I was lost in daydreams. I still struggle with this autistic-like tendency to space out and go tripping the mind fantastic, although not so much true fantasies anymore but just engagements in god knows what reality-based whimsy or escape.

People who read me here often expect me to do something more with my writing. To write stories and novels and all that. Well, one of the reasons I'm not very prolific that way is writing is often incredibly difficult for me, not once I get going I'm very fast and crank out a lotta words, but the very act of extracting thoughts from deep inside the bowels of my castle in the usually comfy warm sitting rooms and libraries and dragging them out kicking and grunting and wailing into the light can be an enormous struggle and a chore. I think, in the past, I went too deep inside and stayed there too long.  I live mostly in the material world now, and the ghosts in my machine are faint if not entirely silent anymore, but these bricks. These damn bricks are high and strongly mortared. The moat is deep and full of crocodiles. But the drawbridge does work once in awhile.

I had a friend in the fourth grade at Jefferson Elementary in Pullman Wa. named Tom. He was an incredibly unique friend in that he would play every recess with me in imaginative role playing games we'd invent. We'd wander lost in these games all over the large schoolyard. I don't remember many specifics anymore, and I only hung with him half the school year because we moved to Bellevue that spring, but I do remember a few games like walking around  imagining we were alive in the time of dinosaurs perhaps we went back on a time machine or something.

Only once do I recall we didn't play some sort of imagination game, we wandered over by the basketball courts where he wanted to shoot hoops with some of the other kids. I stood there dumbfounded, wondering why anyone would rather throw a stupid basketball up at a high rim than pretend they were Vikings invading an Irish fortress or soldiers taking a machine gun nest.

I remember the last time we played together before I moved, we were downed World War I biplane pilots. Shot out of the air but alive. We wandered lost over a dangerous terrain behind enemy territory.  It was our last game.  I never found another pilot to fly with me like him. The biplanes never soared out from behind my eyes after that day.

But on some days, when I'm lost in thought, often during less than stimulating activities, I'll hear a faint chop-chop-chopchop and a pop of a backfire as the old bird tries to fire up.  I don't know if I can fly it anymore but it is comforting in a weird way to know it's still on that field near that shadowy German forest where I crashlanded it a long time ago. Still full of bulletholes I'm sure.

I'm Coming to Realize, with a Chilling and Loathsome Horror, that 2009 is Already a Hideous and Furious Year

I'm not gonna take up smoking in 2009!

To all of you suffering from "happy guilt" because 2008 didn't suck shit for you. Fuck you. But hey, 2009 is gonna rock for everyone! I just know it is.

So, it is heretofore resolved therein:

I'm gonna write a screenplay and sell it for mid-high six figures in 2009.
I'm gonna find a love that makes the angels cry with envy.
I'm gonna lose 30 pounds of stupid dead pizza fat and gain 10 pounds of ripped, hard spiritual muscle.
I'm never gonna watch another episode of the execrably stupid "Real Chance for Love" when home on weekends in my family room surfing on my laptop once this one that is on right now is over.
I'm gonna take at least one multi-day canoe camping trip this summer and again face my fears by camping deep in Grizzly bear country but I might not stay up all night by a campfire shining my Petzl constantly into the dark silhouetted woods.
I'm gonna exercise something somehow on some kinda schedule sometimes.
I'm gonna invent a new urban/suburban/exurban slang word for the kids to say to replace "bling" maybe something like "scrap" (Shiny CRAP). "Yo, dog, dat scrap is fly, yo."

Oh that's enough for now. I'm already feeling overwhelmed and desperate like I can't possibly do all this. God. I can't believe how much 2009 sucks.

3,987 Ways to Cry

There aren’t that many things that piss me off. Well, in the interests of accuracy and full disclosure, there are precisely 3,987 things that piss me off and while that may not meet the conventional definition of the phrase “aren’t that many things” I must confess it’s a significantly reduced aggregation from prior incarnations of the metrics of my pissoffedness.  It is, perhaps, a positive negative effect of the mellowing of my ageing.  Yet again, I feel myself textually perched on a teeter totter of self examination and sarcasm, not sure which way to drop.  But let us save such endless navel gazing for a future entry or ten.

Here is what is pissing me off this morning. I have been observing, with some deep trepidation and gut curdling fear, the rapid growth of a volcanic cone on Mt. Krapatoa, our kitchen garbage can.  The proud spawn of my loins, or is that the spawn of my proud loins, are building a mountain of garbage one  pepsi can (no, we don’t recycle here as we believe recycling is the behavioral and social pre-determinants of a metal-world where robots can reproduce themselves to the endless horror of future enslaved generations) taquito box, large fountain soda cup, mess coffee filter at a time.  And yes, I have contributed to the mountain, yet I didn’t not cause the mountain’s snow crap to grow over the lip of the can, which is, of course, the demarcation point of a full to overfull TAKETHEGARBAGEOUTKID elevation.

My lads have been instructed, cajoled, demanded, requested, begged, insisted, coached, incentivized, astrally projected, thundered, and whined to take out the trash when it hits the Scrapinot Line. And sometimes, perhaps they do. One never notices when ones kids do the right thing, we are too wired by the Puritanical Christian parenting ethic to overfocus on catching kids being “bad” because that is what God is doing to all of us than catching them being good. I know some of you are better than that and please feel free to brag in the comments section how you aren’t like me and I’ll try and try not to delete your comments for making me look so lame.

Anyhow, this latest mountain is certainly not in the Himalayan league of some past creations, mountains of garbage that seem to defy the very laws of gravity physics, of surface tensions, of compactability quotients. My kiddos have built incredible teetering peaks of debris, some that one almost wishes to drench in a plastic preservative and mount on a single sheet of gleaming chrome steel (or alternatively, and perhaps thematically more congruently, a broken piece of rusted auto fender) and use as the centerpiece in some art exhibit made of and illuminating the wasteful consumption of American society.

So, in my ever present lust for the bright side of life, the optimistic weltanschauung that so prepossesses and colors my writing here, I must interject that when I had to add some trash to this craggy alp of rubbish a bit earlier this morning,  I was most pleased and delighted that it was quite compactable as it was rather loosely constructed, and I’ve now crammed it down to just a slight mound surmounting the Scrapinot Line, and while it will be a laborious and frustrating extraction from the plastic white kitchen garbage can mother earth construct, and undoubtedly whichever boy I corral to do this might mutter a bit about my compacting techniques, at least nothing fell on the floor!  Oh yes, as I deliver my lecture on overfilling the trashcan, at least one of my sons, who loves to employ logic and reasoning in witty and cutting retorts, may suggest that I could have just as easily as him taken the garbage out to the garage and I will summon up some daddish reply (e.g. “because I SAID so”) the simple fact is I have not taken the garbage out of this house since April 12, 2005, having long ago relegated that task to my youthful charges who need to learn about life by the doing, as I always say.

What kind of household tasks do you avoid and delegate so as to make your kids grow up resentful and angry of a world (or parent) that dumps crap jobs on them?

 

This is your first cup of coffee of the rest of your life

You stare at your coffee cup this morning. It is mostly white with square 2 X 2 inch graphics, one on each side - the graphics are NASCAR graphics with a directive “Start your engines” (high octane caffeinoline engines!) and a yellow race car at the bottom of the graphic. The yellow race car is presented in a ¾ view with a sort of halo effect shadowing it that may suggest it is going really fast and its engine is definitely started. Above the car is half a circular dashboard gauge, it has calibrated lines along the top diameter and they are equidistant but include no actual metrics, like numbers or identifiers like “RPM” or “MPH.” So, who knows.You think it's probably a tachometer.

In your NASCAR - Start your  engines cup this morning is the first cup from the first pot of some ground Starbucks French Roast you picked up at a Safeway. Your cup is presently about 2/3rds full. The coffee is weaker than you  normally brew because the bag of Starbucks French Roast was nearly empty. You find weak Starbucks French Roast to not give you the typical first cup of enjoyment enjoyment. But you drink it anyhow because it is at least the first cup of wake up - you need to start your engine.

You look at the yellow NASCAR car and you wonder when you received this cup, because you are 110% certain it was a gift as you are no NASCAR fan and would not purposely buy yourself a NASCAR cup not even to be ironic. A Christmas gift you are almost entirely certain. But from who? You have two sons that once upon a million years ago were into Hot Wheels and shit like that, them? Probably not. So, you ponder this for awhile identifying the usual suspects, briefly assessing (more like “screening") for motives and opportunities but none fit until in a fit of logic you ask yourself “who buys me coffee cups for gifts almost to the exclusion of anyone else in the population of potential coffee cup gift buyers?” and you think MOM.

Weird though. Was she in a big rush and just assumed you loved NASCAR? Was it the car and she thought oh you love cars! Which is true. But it is a bit presumptuous for your mom to just assume you love NASCAR. Which you don’t. Well, when you were a boy you were ok with the weekend NASCAR races on TV and you liked Richard Petty and he was kind of the only round track hero you remember. You read a book, a biography you think probably not an autobiography (which is what all auto racers should write, you chuckle) about Richard Petty in junior high. Well, not about when Richard Petty was in junior high, but when you were in junior high. You checked it out of the Bowdish Junior High library and found his story kind of inspiring and noisy. But you did not carry your early adolescent interest in NASCAR into adulthood and totally don’t get the whole fan craze over NASCAR*. Grown women positively lust for these motor heads and grown men get in fist swinging bar fights over their faves. Well, you don’t know if they do for actuals, but you think it’s probably quite possible particularly in the bible belt. You remember once seeing a black Dodge Ram pickup (of course) with a sticker on its tinted rear window that said: Fans Against Gordon, but the FAG was big and bold and the ans gainst ordon were really small.

Your coffee is nearly drained you are really wet starting your engine this morning.  The yellow car, it bugs you.  It looks mostly like a Nissan 300 ZXYSX series which you know ain’t no NASCAR, man, thems  are American mades. What kind of car is this yellow car? You actually ask that with your self talk voice, you say it almost loudly in your head - what kind of car is this yellow car? Then you have the weirdest thought, you think what if I, right this very second, suffered a cerebro-vascular accident, an incredibly rare type maybe never before observed in the Annals of Neurology, and it locked your mind in the very question - what kind of car is this yellow car?

The rest of your life, you imagine, you wander around asking only that, what kind of car is this yellow car? And  you lose your job, your marriage, your kids, you lose everything because you cannot function in this world if all you think about is what kind of car is this yellow car (on this coffee cup you are constantly showing everyone).

Sometimes you get punched, laughed at, walked away from, sadly patted on your shoulder and told I’m so sorry, fake answered “oh that’s a 94 Chevy Citation - Dale Earnhardt Jr. Model!", kicked in the shins, told to shut the fuck UP about the fucking yellow fuck car fucker, your wallet stolen, hugged, your hand shook, ignored, and maybe one day, to add insult to injury, someone takes your NASCAR yellow car cup from you out of malice, frustration, misplaced helper responses, etc, and now you don’t even have your visual prompt anymore and as weird as you seemed with it, without it you are off the track weird. You are stuck on a permanent pit stop without a pit crew.

You’ve drank all your first cup of enjoyment NASCAR start your engines yellow race car of mystery cup of coffee.  Whoa, you think. That was definitely a bit of the old imagination skidding across the race track that only turns left, the proto-NASCAR course of course.  Then you walk upstairs to refill your go juice and you,  because you are so like this, scan your other coffee cups for interesting ones to have a cerebro-vascular accident while pondering and you see a very festive birthday themed cup with red, yellow, green, blue balloons and candles and the phrase “No more birthdays, just the parties” and you think well, that’s the cup to have when the big brain lock hits and you would wander with a big smile on your face asking “hey, where’s the party?” to everyone and every once in awhile you would find yourself at a cool party and you  could just keep saying “hey, where’s the party?” and peeps would just think you were really drunk.

*You completely missed the whole Dale Earnhardt thing - he of the anti-hero motif, the bad assed car swiping mustachioed buttkicker. You know something really horrid about him, though. Not long after he died in that tragic wreck you were in an AOL IM with someone who claimed she was a trauma nurse in Daytona and was on duty when they brought poor Dale in and she types to you:

Nurse: His eyes had blown out of his head from the collision.

You: Shit. That's horrible.

Nurse: Oh he died instantly.

You: Still.

On Overthinking Kind of Everything

Let’s say you sit down across from me on an overstuffed black leather sofa, perhaps covered with a Pendleton blanket of red and green geometric American Indian designs folded lengthwise and carefully set upon the top of the sofa back, and in front of us is a deeply lacquered, almost painfully glossy, coffee table circa 1976 or so I’d guess because of the burned wood effects that I always hated, particularly on a too darkly stained pine. I’m not going to comment on my thoughts about this table as to its age or representativeness of 1970s furniture as you might have a deep attachment to this table, perhaps it was your first coffee table from your first marriage or maybe it was only a yard sale pickup back in the 80s when suburbanites were tossing these things as they were going for chrome steel and glass back then. 

So on this table you place with your right hand a large, juicy strawberry, maybe a Shuksan or a Rainier, definitely a June bearer since it is mid June and that is what everybody is picking now at the U-picks up in Greenbluff and Otis Orchards, and around this delicious appearing strawberry you slowly and carefully ring it with pebbles, pebbles that appear to be ocean or river pebbles, the kind that are very smooth and kind of different shades of gray and grayish-blue when dry but definitely more interesting when wet, which is why we often pick them up from the wet sand even though we know this one marbled green and orange pebble isn’t going to appear so luminescent and, frankly, even green and orange after about 15 minutes in one’s pocket, and one may even find it remarkable how green and orange can become grayish upon drying. It’s like the ocean smooths them and holds the color to them in a water suspension,  a type of color dominion, but once removed from its watery womb, the ocean, or even the river, keeps the beauty behind. One may even wonder why something as vast and godawful powerful as an ocean needs to be so selfish and possessive when it comes to colorful pebbles, and I even think this would be an interesting question to get your opinion on, but it feels kind of premature as you continue to almost delicately, using your long forefinger and thumb, set each in place.

You’ve ringed the strawberry with the pebbles and you look up at me. You smile a Mona Lisa smile and wait. I sit back a bit and feel my eyes automatically roll up and to the left (accessing remembered images) and then I look at you, just below your eyes, maybe your nose, and say

It represents seeds, the strawberry is the only fruit with external seeds, the pebbles are seeds.

You only look back with your Mona Lisa smile and slowly turn your head side to side in the non-verbal messaging code of no.

Well, perhaps the pebbles and strawberry are symbolic of a certain earth bound solidity or even solidarity, they are both of the soil and both underground and above.

Mona Lisa again signals nope.

You mean it’s possibly as mundane as shape? That the pebbles and strawberry are similar, well, I don’t know, maybe some of these pebbles, the more asymmetrical ones are, although they all look pretty symmetrical, some are oval-ish., but none look triangular-ish. No, I don’t think it’s a shape thing is it?

You turn slowly to your right and straighten out part of the blanket on the top of the back of the sofa, and it didn’t even look wrinkled.

It is the wheel, the wheel of creation, of life, maybe not a medicine wheel, it’s not right for that, but some more generic wheel, and the strawberry is the hub, the food as connector and turner, because the hub spins freely attached to the axle, if there is an axle, but the strawberry is where the wheel turns. Life giving and sustaining.

You look bored. Your eyes do not vector to any particular direction to signify what sort of cortical processing you are engaging but sort of go in a half circle, a politely restrained (or ambivalent) eye roll.

I am not good at riddles, I never was, not as a kid doing the silly riddles in Weekly Readers or as an adult where - well, actually I can’t think of ever doing riddles as an adult, maybe in some videogames once upon a time when I had the hand eye speed and coordination to play videogames, which pretty much left me at 40 something, in a highly frustrating bout of trying to get past this one level in a WWII fighter game, it was level 7 or something and involved flying fighters at very high altitudes over the ocean and trying to protect a US Naval fleet from Japanese fighters and fighter bombers and I could never clear the sky of them before they wiped out the fleet. That was exactly the last time I played video games with any kind of regularity or intent, I have maybe dabbled, such as with my youngest son on HALO last winter, where he alternated between being incredibly patient and kind with me to being very impatient when my character kept getting lost or couldn’t keep up with his. His character was like a battle hardened Special Forces soldier and mine was quite the facsimile (in terms of skillful killing) of a cub scout on his first day hike.

You can see I am at a loss and am accessing old memories of videogames and riddle failures and you are engaged by a certain kindness and empathy and decide to end this charade.

It’s a fucking strawberry you tell me, and you pick it up and shove it in my mouth. And it’s a damn good one. Juicy, sweet and fresh. Juice trickles down my chin. I leave it for awhile.

On Learning to Quit Remembering So Much

Sometimes when I walk on wet leaves covering walks and smell the weird sweet rotten smell of autumn I think these are the best memories - playing in leafy parks, in warm jackets, with footballs  - and sometimes when the first snowfall whitewashes everything and hides the grime and imperfections of the world, I think these are the best memories - snowball fights and sledding and dragging on a smoke on the porch of a gray and blue tiny first home I rented when I was 20 with those Ponderosa pine hills behind me and I could hardly taste the smoke for the cold, clean air - and sometimes when I walk through the leaves to work or drive past snow berms on mountain passes I think once upon a time these weren't even memories, they were experienced unbound from all that. Is it better that way? There are these dynamic tensions from the balance of being there then and being here and being now and being here now. Or maybe it's about being then-here-there-now. Most of the time I am on auto-pilot and I'm unsure that is the best way to fly.