Fitful night’s sleep, an emptiness to the morning. Sometimes I wake up thinking too much, I suspect I’m processing dreams I don’t remember; it’s a bit like your ego and Id having a conversation in front of you in some language you don’t speak.
At the risk of using words that only approximate meaning, that hold connotations either positive or negative; I didn’t leave part of my soul in the Columbia gorge, I left part of the song my soul sings. I’m not making a theological statement here; it’s just that I need the sheet music to be whole here. I shouldn’t need the sheet music, I should know this song, I mean I do, just not here.
Sure, it’s probably not the hereness of here so much as the not thereness of here. A certain kind of guy obsesses over what he can’t have; I’m not that guy. The thing is I could have it, in a heartbeat, and if I meant things in a theological sense, that would be a serious moral dilemma; If the choice is one or the other which is the proper moral course, to feed one’s own soul or someone else’s? It seems like it should, in a theological sense, be obvious. I’m not sure it is. It’s not that a theological doctrine means anything to me, you know, I live as an atheist but suspect there is some purpose to all this. It’s sort of a reverse Pascal’s wager.
The first time I heard Pascal’s wager I imagined a single cell cartoon, like Gary Larson, the word balloon of the puffy Pascal is laying out his wager and God from high above has a word balloon that says “Dude, I can totally hear you.” The god in either testament of that one book doesn’t seem like a ‘Fake it ‘til you make it’ kind of guy.
But, you know, nothing to do with theology. I could have gone with the even sappier ‘I left not my heart in the Columbia gorge, but the song my heart sings’ same kind of smoke and mirrors, different angle. Somehow Me and Bobby McGee got wrapped up as the soundtrack to this morning’s thoughts. It’s a pretty depressing song, I mean the upshot is he lost his girlfriend and now he doesn’t give a shit. Um, unless you’re listening to Janis and then switch the genders around.
But, you know, the chorus fits what I’m feeling. When you quit giving a shit you can pretty much do what you want. It’s not a good idea, but it’s an idea. The same way you sometimes wish you lost your shit (e.g. blew your cool, out of your motherfucking mind, crazy, nuts, insane) so that you didn’t have to explain why you are doing whatever you want to, it’s obvious. It’s the secular version of the theological moral dilemma of whose soul to nourish.
Because, yeah, it’s not about me. I’m positive my sub-conscious doesn’t even know what not-about-me means, for that matter my sub conscious is probably convinced it is me. So whatever I dream at night lingers and likely floats west towards the twenty four bar solo my soul sings. I’m not bitching about obligations and I’m sure as hell not looking for the pat on the head and the “Good human, have a taco” or even less sure as hell “Oh you poor lost puppy”, though I am a good human and a poor lost puppy, I’m good and god-damned aware, this is my fucking narrative.
I’m saying I’ve made new bonds, cords, attractions and fealty. I don’t really know what the hell a soul is but I think one should have a whole set in their repartee if they expect to get a paying gig. And a good soul singer should be able to work with any band, right? It’s a poor musician that blames his axe.
I reckon all the soul stuff in this entry means my head has demanded a change of venue. Heads always think they are in charge, a word to the guys in the audience …? When the half-naked chick is putting on her robe and saying, with her back to you, “You intellectualize too much” she’s saying “Get out of your head fucktard” I’m not sure what a guy means when he says that shit, but it can’t be good. It’s a not seeing forest and trees thing though. If you’re in your own head nothing up there is going to tell you that perhaps it isn’t such a good idea.
It makes the idea of a heart and a soul pretty damn invaluable. It’s at least as important to sort out your bits and pieces into Heart, Head, and Soul piles as it is to sort out your baseball cards by team or year and your books by genre or alphabetized or, you know, whatever. I’m hardly an order freak or the enemy of chaos; I’m just saying those few minutes a year you feel like being self-aware shouldn’t be wasted separating wheat from chaff. If you spend most of the year doing that, um, get out of your fucking head.
Wow lookee that. Two pages of smoke without so much as rubbing two sticks together. Grandwhelp, by this time next week, will be waking on the second floor of my son’s house, the fog retreating past his window, the woods, the bubbling creek, and beyond, lurking in the fog, the majestic Mt. Hood and close cropped St. Helens. It’s a much kinder thought than; he won’t be here. It also has something to do, in a practical way, with me being out here; it’s how I want kinship ties to work between me and mine. You help them what need it. That my son is going to happily take his sister’s boy as his own for the better part of three months is pretty damn special. It’s not a response to an urgent need, it’s not an emergency, it’s an act of love.
I don’t know that fathers, sons, daughter, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews don’t treat each other this way all the time in this modern age, you just don’t hear about it often. Human interest stories in the seriously skewed media and what passes for media on line, are usually a response to a crisis. When the media is part of the polarizing effect everything becomes partisan. Hmmm, no, not bitching, just saying I don’t know whether the family is any more or less fractured than it’s ever been during my lifetime in my corner of the world. It’s easy to suspect it’s more fractured, I have nothing to base that on but I suspect if I looked for studies that’s the direction they’d lean, ignoring altogether they don’t have a sample group from whenever it was the study believes was the last time the family wasn’t fractured.
I just mean I’ll miss the little monster and, later, his mother, and one more piece of that music, that soul song, will be back in the place that taught my soul to sing.
‘What’d ya do with all the money, dawg?’
‘What money?’
‘The money your mom gave you for singing lessons.’
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