Restless night’s sleep. I told myself it was too early to wake up, and yet when I insisted on being awake it was like eight. For the past week the sun rise has been streaming through my eastern window. It’s dull and gray, gloaming gray, out there even now at nine.
I remember sitting at the computer in my little shack in felony flats, Clackamas, marking the season in entries, the quality of light filtering through the patio door, the dew on the dogs muzzle, whether the magnolia tree was in bloom, bare, or covering my yard like a shroud. Often the mornings were gray and I’d call it an Oregon gray.
This far east I realize that doesn’t mean anything. The gray that curled around the magnolia tree, that clung to Herschel;s whiskers, was a soft gray, a narcotic gray, a nodding gray like things will be alright, or, if not, at least they won’t trouble us, not today. The gray outside my window now is an absence of other colors, it’s a gray hole, it says nothing will be alright but possibly things won’t get worse than this.
I don’t really give a shit about the weather, but I do always think of the quality of air. Not like a hypochondriac, I don’t think about the breathing quality, well, not often, I use the air to fix my place on earth. Hmmmm, I suppose that too is like barking at the fence, it’s either something you do or it isn’t. I’m not suggesting the way I do things is any better or any more enlightened, just that some things I do aree either evident or not and if not --- it’s ok.
Ennui and inertia. It’s that kind of gray. That’s my place in the world this morning. Not only do I not care if anyone knows what that means, sometimes I’d rather I didn’t. At some point in our lives we settle, in general, on a way of looking at the world, and I don’t mean showing all the square pegs into square holes, I mean more of a design, given this condition the peg goes there, given that condition just leave the peg where it’s fallen. Sure, some people really need the pegs in holes, some really need them not to be holes. I’m just saying at some point we divvy up what affects us and what doesn’t, what is beneath our contempt, eye with our contempt and above our contempt. I suspect it’s not ever worth trying to convince anyone to share that view. Surprizingly many do, or parts of it. I guess that’s not so surprizingy, we are pretty much hard wired for many things.
I suppose this is part of the running dialogue from the previous entry (previous might not mean much on the box, the list runs differently) and I could have started this Monday. It’s not really all about the nicotine level, though, if I might, for a moment, I seem to be very adept at creating flavors and precise nicotine levels.
If I had to be completely honest and narrow down a single root it’d be the same one that’s been bothering me since I got here; what next? I’m not a big plan kind of guy, I mean I don’t have a map, or maybe I do, but it’s wadded under the seat and damp with coffee and crumbs from donuts so long gone they can’t even be rightfully considered donut crumbs any longer. Hows that for theology? The body of the donut dies and obscures the maps of the future? No? You haven’t tried the eucharist yet; it’s got coconut crumbs.
So, given that I’m not a plan guy it’s even more disturbing to be disturbed by that question. I mean if there were phases to my “mission” here, I’m pretty sure at least one was just ticked off, um, checked off, completed. I describe things in a very subjective way, not always my own subjectivity. It’s a warning to them what sympathize with my, ah, shit. I don’t always sympathize with it. It’s not anywhere near as sad or frightening that my father is in a retirement home as I thought it would be, it’s kinder, brighter, cleaner, and also more of a clusterfuck. The sad and frightening part has nothing to do with events themselves or even death, that crow shaped shadow over every living beings picnic. It has more to do with the absence of joy, not mine, not even something I could put a finger on and say I miss.
People regret shit when an important figure in their lives die, even more so when they think the figure was supposed to be more important or less or some arbitrary degree of importance that they, the person, or they, the figure, failed to measure up properly too. People regret not having a chance to say I love you or I hate you or How’s the Fish? What do you think of House Bill 18-4? Or whatever shit people regret after the fact but don’t think of before the fact. For me it’s simple; my father has no joy. He eats, he sleeps, he shits. I know, you’ve come home after a hard days work, sometime when the kids were still in shorts, the spouse smiled to see you, the dog raised his head, and you focused on the dog, waking up from a nap and looking from you to the food bowl and thought “Must be nice, eating, sleeping, shitting all day.” Yeah, no.
My dad isn’t unhappier at the home than he was at home. Happy isn’t really an applicable standard. It means I can’t even regret anything empirical, I also can’t remember very many things throughout the course of his life that made him happy; they all involved music. He’s indifferent to it now. Sure, sometimes he’ll sing a fragment of a song, and, like the memory of a ghost, echo, follow the chorus down through the corridor of the echo. Shit, I don’t know. Yes, some phase of what might have been a mission plan has been checked off and it doesn’t affect anything.
I suppose I could be fretting my own end as I witness all this. I’m not, not really. I mean like you I’d just as soon not die suffocating or suffer some long illness and like me you sort of want to be aware of the stages of your own life (and there’s the rub, nobody is suggesting my dad is dying or not any sooner than he was last year or the year before). Maybe in a very real and very stupid sense I figure there is no ‘after this’ that everything is always in the process of going out with a whimper and those stupid little crumbs stuck to the wadded up map are not the soul of donuts, they are the husk of donut hubris.
Fuck me running.
I don’t have a solid reason for typing that or giving it its own paragraph, but it seemed appropriate or appropriately inappropriate. The phrase doesn’t mean anything, it’s a broadly diffused statement of dissatisfaction, an impossible task with no good outcome; there is no 440 dash club, no sex merit badge, if you managed to pull it off at all the best possible outcome would be having disabused yourself of the phrase. Nobody has being fucked running on their bucket list. In a few years bucket list will quietly slip from the lexicon into obscurity. Yet, there it is. Alone, a single sentence paragraph and you know exactly what I mean;
Fuck me running.
Hmmmmm. I guess I could keep going indefinitely here. I think it’s probably healthier to do something else, though I feel a bit compelled to try to decrypt bits and pieces of the last two entries.
I write an entry in terms of, I don’t know, how it plays? Yes, let’s go with how it plays. In a generalized sort of way my entire perceptions are towards how it plays, yet, I don’t need an audience. To tie my father into this, he did, does, an audience is paramount. I just mean I’m more prone to say the Con Trail looks like a snake eating that cloud that looks like a bunny than I am to think in terms of fossil fuels or jet turbines, and, too, I am more prone to notice that the con trail is in my sky because details … well, they play better. If we are going to agree, for the sake of argument, that we all have a constant narration going on in our heads, my narration is very specific to how I prefer the world to be narrated. It’s an important distinction, broken down it means I am aware of the narration and I have certain demands of it. The person who sees the con trail and thinks of turbines and fossil fuels makes certain demands of their narration, the person who misses the con trail altogether may not even be aware that there is a narration or that if there is that he/she has any control over it at all.
Sometimes as people get closer to me they remark on the way I perceive things, often to my face, it comes out as a compliment. I’m not suggesting the way I perceive things is praiseworthy, unique or common and denigration worthy. The purpose of keeping a journal in my mind is to explore that voice and see if it goes somewhere interesting or, years later, if it went somewhere. Whether a con trail looked like a snake eating a cloud bunny in 2004 is Irrelevant to me, that I perceive a world of predator and prey might be relevant, that I was looking at the sky at that moment and not the tree line might be relevant, or, and more to the point, as relevant as anything else. Especially if it all ends eating and sleeping and shitting in some clean well lit room.
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