Unfolding That Which Is Between Us

Unfolding that which is between us is like unfolding a Michigan grocery store. Unfolding Saturday like unfolding Nicolas Cage. But I don’t want to do that. Do you?

Good. It’s not even Saturday. It’s just the thought of it that makes me dance to another boxcar.

Things have been feeling rather sad, lately, gay and sad, like a rockabilly competition in Slovakia.

In your youth you’re a spirited mountain brook tumbling down the mountainside in a heedless spray. But in old age you’re a swamp. Things bubble up and glow blue in a nebula of haze and fireflies. The memories are often sweet, comforting oases of time in a world that made sense and everything was topsy-turvy but still had a solid foundation, a gold standard, a still functional constitution and bill of rights. You knew where you stood. Even when things got shaky with tear gas and bullhorns. Not like now. It’s like living in a world of methane hoping nobody lights a match. The value of the dollar erodes by the minute. There are multiple wars that are a constant suck on the treasury. Nothing goes to the streets and bridges. Nothing goes to the homeless.

The memories are important because they provide reference points. People read. They went to coffeehouses and sat at tables with the local weeklies and paperback novels and cappuccino meditations. They exhibited courtesies. They had a clear sense of right and wrong. They apologized.

Today was very pleasant and sunny, a mild day in mid-May. R and I went for a run by Lake Union. We were humming along just fine when a young man whizzed by on an e-skateboard within inches of me in the pedestrian lane. I could easily have been severely injured, if not killed. I yelled at him to get into the bicycle lane, and he causally raised his arm & flipped me off. I ran faster. I wanted to ring the asshole’s neck. R pointed out that he was a lot bigger than me, and considering my age, it would not go well for me. But when you’re filled with rage it’s amazing what you can do. It’s like having a superpower. The guy kept going and that was that. I calmed down. I could see myself slamming the guy in the stomach and going to jail. That gave me some relief. That asshole wasn’t worth jailtime. I think my flare up was due, in part, to a frustration. Earlier that morning, while having my coffee, I began reading an article titled “Our Humdrum Dystopia” in an online magazine. The article began by describing the number of electric bikes and monowheels and e-skateboards plaguing New York City, the incredible speeds at which people ride them, “indifferent to life, theirs and ours,” either for the sheer maniacal fun of it, or the need to maximize profit. Who knows why these A-holes take such chances. It’s like Mad Max. What’s going on? Is it the screens, the constant mindless scrolling? Is it the apotheosis of money as God to which all must sacrifice their principles and authenticity as human beings? I only got two paragraphs into the article and hit a paywall. A fee. We’ve already got enough fees. The other articles weren’t that interesting, so subscribing for that one article didn’t make sense. I let it go, but not without feeling frustrated. I wondered what direction the author was going to take it.

If one feels like mooing one should moo. But one should do it with a stride of compelling insouciance. I feel a parable coming on. Let us shine as we assemble and compare our cuts of the pie. The parabolic pie. The perpetual hole at the center of things pie. The pi of pie. And carpenters and hems. The pie of hems. The pie of hymns. The pie of you. The pie of us all.

I finally got to liking that Stones song from December, 1967, “2000 Light Years From Home.” It was one of the better songs on that infernal record, it just wasn’t in the Stone’s DNA to dally with the prettier and utopian side of psychedelia, even in satire. They never mocked the flower children. They seem humored by them. Their hearts were elsewhere. When they returned to their senses and did Beggars Banquet that sweet dream had evaporated. It had always seemed vapory. Too ethereal to get any traction in this old world. Many years would pass, whole decades, before I’d get a shot at hearing that weird space-age song again on YouTube. It starts with a bouquet of otherworldly tones, someone hammering a preternatural piano, followed by some sinister bass chords. Watts kicks in – bam! - & launches us into space. All you want to do is drift. Dissolve into stars & drift. And then it ends with a whoosh and a groan and a pounding drum and you’re back at the panel, spinning, reaching for a dial, & a map of the Dandelion Puffball Nebula.   

Steve Buscemi was punched – hard – by someone, for no apparent reason, while he was walking in New York City. There was no evidence it was personal. People have begun punching people. Arbitrarily. Why? Because they’re mad at our species, at homo sapiens, for fucking up so badly? For being such selfish bags of bone and sewage? I don’t know. I’m spit balling.

I loved Buscemi in Ghost Town. A sad sack with a keen sense of the sublime, especially when it came to the blues.

I hear water running through the pipes. R watering her flowers, fuchsia and dahlia and hellebore. Sweet alyssum, which the bees like, and a rose, from Texas. She has a tough time watering. The soil is hydrophobic. She waters strategically, trying to create conditions in which the water can penetrate and percolate through the dirt. Water as rhetoric, persuasion by saturation.

And it continues. It’s what things do. The things that exist. The things that don’t exist continue, too. But only as ideas. Whispers. Ghostly presences. The darkness of closets. And the clothes that hang in them, awaiting a body to fill out the contours, and bring them into the world.