Four something on a gray Thursday afternoon, humid, warm, gray, like a mouse fetus on seconal. Huh. I used that in some poem I wrote when hitchhiking through the panhandle of Texas. The poem was probably rubbish, the description probably accurate. As accurate as someone who has never been a mouse fetus nor used seconal before can be. It’s odd how some mammals are born without being fully developed and seconal as a class of drugs is still very much around. I imagine being pink and blind with fine gray hairs, stoned and too fucking hot under a fat mommy mouse.
Texas probably smelled of sage at the time, the part of East Lansing I drove through smelled of dogwood, I think. Sometimes the shrink says insightful things, even when he’s just summarizing a stretch of my own rambling, a quality that has kept me out of voluntary therapy for most of my life. I can’t even remember exactly what he said but it had something to do estrangement from my own hometown.
It’s been a week of disconnects with the GF, so, by 330 I was hungry and tired of waiting to hear back from her, restless and feeling yucky, so I drove around residential East Lansing. Thunder is now rumbling outside of my window. The mouse fetus is crashing and needs another hit of seconal. Maybe that was the smell of the town, anticipation of ozone and pollen.
I drove past houses where childhood friends used to live, many looking the same as they ever were. It’s a familiar and strange feeling. I think the shrink accurately summarized, it was me that was imprecise. Driving past where someone used to live has a high lonesome feeling to it, but mostly I’m angry at the changes to this town. Or angry at the circumstances that force me to confront. I think the town is being grossly mismanaged. The neighborhoods, though, not so much.
I keep thinking about my daughters wedding and driving to Oregon. Since our reaquaintence the GF and I have had this little joke that is only about fifty percent joke; that visiting our beloved geography would keep us from ever returning. I forget why fifty percent of that was funny, perhaps because people generally aren’t that rash? It’s not even one percent a joke right at this moment.
The GF is still holding out a small notion that she might want to join me. I don’t think that will happen. Leaving her here is probably the best incentive to come back. I love my mom and no matter how much I minimize out of anger or resenting being here by using words like duty and obligation, I’m here as much out of love, less rational more powerful. I’m not sure how helpful I am though. Yeah, no. I am not going to recreate all the internal deliberations. The idea of staying in Oregon is damn compelling though.
When I was hitch-hiking through the panhandle of Texas the time I wrote that poem (as opposed to the several other times — highway ten is the best interstate for winter travel in the continental US) I had forever in front of me, and aimless meandering, power aimless meandering, had a certain poetic irony to it. Granted mouse fetus and seconal is not really the makings of a great poem, I’ve always been better at the vision than the execution. The irony is self-explanatory, or it is in hindsight. From my current POV it’s damn self-explanatory, self-explanatory as a motherfucker. At the time irony was fuzzy.
By the time I head towards the wedding I’ll have been here four years. I spent the better part of four years hitch-hiking, it felt like ten years getting through the panhandle, but really just 24 hours. Every. Fucking. Time. Four years in your teens is a lot different than four years in your fifties. In my teens I would climb the mountain to a high lonesome aerie, stand on the precipice and stare off into the abyss. That’s mostly flowery language, but I did do shit like that, sort of. Now the abyss is encroaching on me.
I’m not paraphrasing Huxley. I’m just comparing the child’s eyes to the old man’s eyes. I know I’m not that old, but Christ, some days I feel that old and Christ, too, knows, how fucking immortal I was when I went out of my way to find abyss’s.
The thunder is really rolling now, like a drunk guy with four fuzzy tipped sticks in front of a row of copper drums. I’m crunchy and old and I drove by houses filled with subjective emptiness. People live in them; houses aren’t boarded up here, just business. People live in them and create their own memories, love, life, death and sorrow and all the things that people do and feel that leave footprints along the neural network. They just aren’t my people or my memories. It’s ok. Four years as a teenager traveling through places my footprints hadn’t been but someone elses footprints littered the brush. I understand the seasons; literal ones, seasons of the heart and seasons of the feet. I understood too, long ago, that I would understand such things in a different way.
Melancholy. Sad. It’s ok, emotions that people have and I am a people. Confessing this to the GF she said I should talk to the shrink about it. I did but more as a way to talk about the GF. I didn’t tell him any more or any less than I tell you. She is a very private person and in some areas with just cause. In specific areas so am I, though seventeen years of online journaling would seem to suggest the opposite of private. Yeah. In Seventeen years the things I haven’t said have remained consistently unsaid.
I’m still not sure after the better part of three and a half years what it is the GF sees in me. I think that’s a bear best left unpoked. At least for the forseeable present. Also, I’m afraid if the banks of that river are broached a flood of things best contained will ravish the land. Fuck, not only did I mix metaphors (well, how would you breech the banks of a bear?) but I was being grossly dramatic. Otherwise I’d have hit a nerve worth exploring. My concern of the flood is not a concern of full disclosure, it’s a concern of overwhelming thunder.
Ok, I wasn’t all too coherent when I began now I’m rambling aimlessly and cryptic, an ok look for sixteen, untoward for 56. I’m pretty fond of you prosebox fuckers.
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