I’ve been trying hard to write. How? By writing. It’s a bright day here in Mid Michigan, looks as much like April as it does November; barren trees, wet farmland. I wandered out into the sticks as I did when I was younger.
The flash below will sound more like hobo theology but it’s more inspired by a sense of aimlessness, a lack of purpose. I might have been nine, maybe ten, when the house woke late in the evening. The cops had called, they had my brother somewhere not to far east from here. Him and some friends were sleeping under a truck near the railroad tracks. My folks had to pick him up.
Later he told me he had hopped a train and didn’t know how to get back. He had told my folks his friends car broke down, and they didn’t ask about sleeping under a truck. You could infer all sorts of things from the story, god knows I have, but what struck me most as I was driving the backroads, was how difficult it was to explain my upbringing.
Sometime during the first three weeks before we got married Sunny and I had an argument. I can’t remember the details, but the jist was she thought I was over-priviliged, too well loved, spoiled, rich. I tried pointing out she grew up in a fancier and more cloistered suburb than I did, which might have been the last rational thing I said.
Boredom is the easiest way to explain it, but it’s too easy. You’d have to be in the car with me today, listening to tunes and seeing the countryside preparing to sleep (I saw a gaggle of Canadian geese eating grass near a pond) to sort of feel how nothing is easy except for momentum. Or you’d have to know my brother, a man much less likely than I to be sleeping under a truck. Stoic isn’t just a way of life, a virtue or vice, an attribute, it’s an environment — anything there is to bitch about falls on you.
I didn’t capture that in the flash. I didn’t capture how lost I feel (in an existential way) and I used easy concepts, concepts so easy that the associations with them obscure the idea I didn’t quite get across anyhow.
One of the things that’s freeing about not having an audience here is not feeling obliged to pander; I can be sappy, low brow, goofy, illiterate … it doesn’t matter. I could go on a spree of leaving notes and get the obligatory notes back. I am reading some of you and some at random. My prosebox reflects my life, today at least. Aimless and isolated. Whoa, I’m just saying, not complaining, and I don’t expect it to stay this way. Today has been a good day. If I were trying to drum up anxiety it’d be for the things I haven’t done tomorrow.
There’s blood on your hat and flies buzzing round your neck and you smell like piss and gunpowder, and you walk into the Diner on Every Rd and Jolly and ask for service but they won’t give you none. You kick up some dust in the parking lot find me sitting on a stone smoking a hand rolled.
“You gotta another one of those?”
“Not yet,” I says and I hand you my pouch and a dirty pack of zig zags.
You tip your hat and any other time of year rainwater would spill down.
“Got a light?” you ask and I think of all those things I heard growing up; ‘Want me to smoke it for you too?’ ‘Need a kick in the chest to get it started?’ but I just hand you some matches, dirty white cover, big red thank you on the back, three crumbly red sulpher heads on three crumbly cardboard sticks.
“Kinda like God is.” You say.
“What? Who is?”
And you spread your arms to the dusty lot, the gray diner, the sky and blow a slow stream of smoke.
“Hows that?” I ask, though I suspect his meaning, I’ve got half a smoke in me and then I’m gone.
“How, now that’s a fine question, it’s measurable, has weight. Like how is a baby born? Starts with some fucking, a sperm finds a fertile egg, cells split, the son of bitch gets big and when he’s big enough the moma’s body starts shoving him out into a cold world, air, and other peoples kids. Yep that’s how a baby is born.”
I put out my smoke on my boot heel thank him for the lesson and ask for my pouch back, he hands me a rolled smoke and strikes the second match.
“Where is a baby born? Wherever the mom is. What is it? Mammal. Who? Some kid, he’ll get a name, some clothes, an identification and other shit. But why? Why is the god question.”
“Unless you don’t believe in him.”
“The baby or god? Neither one depends on your belief to exist.”
“Can I get my tobacco pouch back?”
You roll it in your fingers, caressing the soft leather.
I take another pull, you know how to roll.
“Just because you believe in him doesn’t mean he exists either, not god or baby”
“Exactly right. I’m not saying I know the answer to why, not the god question why, but yeah, it doesn’t make any difference if I don’t believe or do. You got kids?”
I roll not anymore around my tongue and say “Not yet.”
“Them what do, and they swear they’ll never say this, but they always do, answer the thousandth ‘Why?’ with ‘Because I said so.’”
“Ok, and …?”
You hand me back the pouch and take off before I can. A train whistle is blowing in the distance and you walk for the tracks. I look back at the Diner and the sun is in my eyes and you are gone behind a mirage of water. I pull my hat down over my eyes, lean into the rock and fall into a dream.
In this dream the snow is deep and my train is pulling into Fargo, I hop off and find a fire. You are sitting on an old drum, hand me some soup and a factory rolled.
“God?” I ask.
“Sort of, sure, why not,” you say, “ not what you were expecting?”
I shrugged and try to tell you I was only dreaming.
“You don’t believe because I’m not all that nice, because if I were all that powerful I’m be eating something better somewhere warmer, right?”
I shrug again “ I never said I don’t believe in god, just never said I did.”
“How’s the soup?”
“It’s good.”
“Maybe I’m not God, you’re dreaming in the parking lot of the Diner, but the soup that could be god, just enough to keep you going no more no less. Shit, I don’t know, but the question is why?”
When I woke up you were gone, maybe even more gone, and I felt aimless. Not the kind of aimless that makes a man want to give himself to preaching, the kind of aimless that has a man wondering exactly where he took the wrong turn. Some folks blame god for letting them stray, me, maybe, think that wrong turn might be god; even the most orthodox zealots get more questions than answers from their beliefs, or, I’m thinking, they should. Me I say a little prayer when I hear that lonesome whistle blow; I ask god, if he sees fit, to keep my boots whole, my kids safe and if at all possible for that last match to light when I need it. It’s not exactly belief or faith but it occupies my time.
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