Tonight’s jam with my imaginary bandmates…

Home – where you can hold your hands together all you please
Won’t erase the tender tidings you endured
You’re just another family member on their knees
Just a social work statistic out the door
They beat against the tender sightings of your soul
With all those pretty little hammers of control
Where they are tonight well you will never know
But I swear that I will find them now
More – it’s more than just a simple question of decay
More than all those fists than beat into your door
It’s more than all the shrinks that told you you’re okay
It’s more than anything that I have waited for
They beat against the tender sightings of your soul
With all those pretty little hammers of control
And if they even can remember I don’t know
But I swear that they’ll remember now
Home – it’s just another word you’ll always push away
Just a memory you wear outside your clothes
And it will burn down into cinders and some day
They will burrow down to their parental holes
They beat against the tender sightings of your soul
With all those pretty little hammers of control
And if they’ve ever paid a price well I don’t know
But I swear that they will pay one now

I’m surrounded by bald women with beards. One stares down at the floor, her eyes expressionless, her feet tapping out a distress signal in an indecipherable code. Another is absent-mindedly twisting the hair on her chin into a braid while rocking back and forth in her seat. Another is mumbling something to herself about not being able to find her children. The entire waiting room is full of worn out souls slumping on worn out sofas. I’ve got a few minutes to kill while Glenn meets with his psychiatrist. Usually he’s in and out within fifteen minutes, a new prescription in hand. It’s early yet this morning, and last night’s dream is still impressed upon my mind like fresh bootprints in the snow. I remember it in vivid detail because I woke up last night right in the middle of the synaptic fireworks, startled awake by the slam of a door and a booming voice. It was Glenn heading out to the patio for one of his late-night nicotine fixes. As usual he was engaged in an animated, audible conversation with himself, I suspect in an effort to conduct the chorus of voices that seem to pester him night and day. I’ve spent so many nights in places like this that even someone screaming out “Satan is Lord!” at the top of their lungs can seem as innocuous as birds chirping. As soon as “It’s only Glenn” registered somewhere in my brain, I quickly sunk back into sleep.

The image that awaited my mind’s eye was both shocking and puzzling. I was witnessing some kind of perverse medical procedure that seemed also to be a sex act of sorts. I’m watching the thing from a safe distance, like a medical student through an observation window. A woman is lying on the operating table, her grossly oversized veins and arteries visible through translucent skin. She lies on her side, curled up, like a fetus in utero. A male figure in a white coat is standing above her. With a scalpel he makes a small incision on the top part of her ear, then he opens his coat and pulls out his penis, as if it were just another surgical implement. He somehow melds the tip of his penis to the freshly exposed vein on the woman’s ear. A steady flow of semen is drawn into the woman. It is sucked in gently, in undulating waves that are in perfect rhythm with the woman’s breathing. She lies motionless, except for the steady transfusion of semen, which she seems to be drinking in eagerly. The action is reminiscent of a fetus receiving nourishment through the umbilical cord, yet what I’m witnessing seems decidedly unnatural and obscene. The woman seems to be getting off on the transfusion. She quivers in subtle waves of ecstasy. Soon the transfusion is complete — she is full. The male figure, still melded to the woman, then leans over and makes another slit with his scalpel, this time near the woman’s ankle. Semen spills out of the fresh incision with each new in-breath as the woman takes in more and more from the male. The smell of semen mixes synaesthetically with a gurgling sound, like the air-filled sucks of a just emptied milk shake. I gaze upon all this in complete horror, not so much at the perversity of the act itself, but because the act represents some kind of betrayal. A very deep betrayal.

Back in the waiting room, the bearded woman who’s been mumbling to herself suddenly bursts out with a loud groan. My thoughts jump to Brenda. She called as I was heading out the door this morning. She’ll meet me at 1pm tomorrow so that I can orient her to the ins and outs of the group home. Before hanging up she said, “See you then!” — as if the meeting will be strictly professional and seeing me will be no big deal. She’ll be working the Wednesday-through-Friday shift to cover for Ted, the manager of the facility. She’ll sleep in the very bed where I dream my terrible dreams every week. We’ve both been in this line of work for several years now. While in graduate school we worked for an agency that ran residential facilities all over the San Francisco Bay Area, and every once in a while it happened that Brenda would directly follow my shift at one of the group homes. These were the only times when I didn’t need to wash the bedding for the next staff person. It was convenient to be spared the chore, but it meant something more. She preferred that the sheets smelled like me.

But tomorrow is a new day, and by 1pm I’ll be sure that every sheet, blanket and towel is washed thoroughly, folded neatly, and put away in the closet. Not an eyelash will be left behind. I’ll have the clients’ medications prepared in advance, just like I do for Ted every week, and the staff bathroom will be spotless. Like always, I’ll scrub the bowl thoroughly with a brush, get down on my hands and knees to clean the floor, and even wipe down the mirror above the sink, whether it needs it or not. Ted tells me I’m a godsend, his right-hand man, the best he’s ever worked with, although I feel like I’m merely doing what any half-way competent, considerate human being would do. Of course, when I’m handed the baton on Monday mornings the place is always a mess. The current weekend staff person just drops by the group home to pass out medication and to make sure no one has committed suicide, then she drives back to her own home to take care of her personal business. The clients tell me she hardly ever spends the night with them, but rather heads home unannounced at about midnight, stealthily returning back at 5am, just in case Ted calls or drops by unexpectedly. The guy she replaced used to take money from the clients’ petty cash fund to pay for his lunches, and haircuts, and twelve-packs of Bud Light. The woman before him got caught having sex with one of the clients and immediately resigned without notice. That’s when I took the reigns, and I was stuck on that dreaded weekend shift for an entire year before sliding over to the coveted Monday-through-Wednesday slot. “People come and go” I was told early on, “but if you hang around long enough you’ll get your opportunity.”

Yeah. People come and people go. And one thing about me is that I can wait with the patience of a mountain slowly rising out of the earth. I can wait forever, if need be, in order to get what I want. Trouble is, I can’t seem to figure out exactly what it is that I want right now. Sometimes I wonder if a part of me—the lion’s share, apparently—doesn’t want to know.

Glenn is ready to roll. He slips his new prescription into his shirt pocket. I close my notebook, cap my pen, and we head out for the pharmacy. As I fumble around in my pockets for the keys to the van, I realize in a mild state of panic that they’re nowhere to be found. Bursting back through the waiting room doors I almost collide with one of the bearded bald women. She doesn’t seem to be startled in the least, and without altering expression she reaches out and hands me the keys. I say “Thanks so much” and “I was scared I had lost them.” I wait for a response, but sensing none is forthcoming, I flash her a smile, nod my head and bow slightly in gratitude, then spin back around toward the door. My back now turned to her, I hear in a low voice, “I’m scared too.” I quickly turn back around but she’s already headed back toward the sofa. My heart drops like a bird suddenly turned to stone, and before I can think a thought a nurse appears and calls out a woman’s name. “Zoey Richardson….”. The woman who handed me my keys answers the call with a slight lift of her head, walks over to meet the nurse and then disappears around the corner.

Glenn rouses me from my trance with a tap on the shoulder and says “We better get going Hal, I gotta get these meds and then get to Mama’s house before she tries to pull them weeds up herself.”

Still in daze, I gave him a blank look.

“You got the keys, right?” he says, nudging me with his elbow. “Then what are you waiting for?”

Beautifuller things by Isaac Dust

Close your eyes
Think of nothing
Shut your mouth
Tell me something
Lift me up
High as the sun
I’ll never come down

Take your time
Don’t you waste it
Hurry up
Almost taste it
Open up
Wide as the sky
And never shut down

Don’t shut me down
Don’t shut me down
I’m tired
I’ll tear my heart out
Yeah I’ll tear my heart out

Holding on by Isaac Dust

All I wished for has come true
Now I’m waiting, for what, I don’t know
Simple questions leave me paralized
Hell if I know, but maybe…

Put your hand in mine…

Little brother, how I miss you
The things you’d tell me without making a sound
I just want one more glimpse, just one more breakthrough
Right where I left you, holding on…

Put your hand in mine…

Face down in the dirty street
Feel the rhythm of your feet
Ten days since you walked away
I have not missed a beat

Little one hang in there by Isaac Dust

Away from here (Little one hang in there)
[Written by Brian Hall]

You were brought into this world unknowing
as innocent as you ever would be
and I’m fearful of the changes you must go through
’cause soon we all must face reality

Who’s gonna be your father figure
now that daddy’s not around
and who’s gonna hold your lovely mother
who’s gonna pick her up when she gets down

So little one hang in there
for the light is shining brighter on the other side
please know that I care
and if I could I’d take you for a ride
away from here
far away from here

Life does not come with how to instructions
Looks like we’ll have to make out on our own
Sometimes we don’t find out that we are lost
until we’ve traveled a thousand miles from home

So little one hang in there
for the light is shining brighter on the other side
please know that I care
and if I could I’d take you for a ride
away from here
far away from here

The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over. We are all guilty of crime, the great crime of not living life to the full. But we are all potentially free. We can stop thinking of what we have failed to do and do whatever lies within our power. What these powers that are in us may be no one has truly dared to imagine. That they are infinite we will realize the day we admit to ourselves that imagination is everything. Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything God-like about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.

Throughout my years in Carrboro, NC, I could be found – at first quite frequently and then later from time to time – reading, writing and ruminating at the Open Eye Café. It’s where I had my first ever cup of coffee – believe it or not at the age of thirty! I remember well that first cup. Kara – a friend of mine to this day – expressed to me her curiosity that I spent so much time in a coffee shop and yet had never ordered anything but juice and cookies. She insisted I try some coffee, widely regarded as the finest in the area. It was impossible to refuse a free cup of coffee from a girl with dimples, and so I chugged it down as if it were chocolate milk on a summer day. Kara looked at me as if I had lost my mind, explaining to me that coffee was a beverage meant to be sipped and savored. Perhaps it was the unpleasant associations I had made between coffee and my parents’ heavy smoking throughout my childhood, but for whatever reason I had always regarded coffee drinking as a pointless, disgusting habit. I also had assumed (wrongly) that the caffeine buzz was approximately equivalent to a can of Coke or Pepsi, which to me was undetectable. Within a minute or two of downing that first cup I asked for a refill, which I also threw back in a few quick gulps. Then it happened. I began to talk, and talk, and talk, as if I had just been released from a decade in solitary confinement. Suddenly I found myself engaging with staff and patrons alike, people I had seen a hundred times before, yet with whom I had not – until now – exchanged more than the occasional furtive glance. I was beyond buzzed. I was downright high. For the next several months I used coffee like most people use recreational drugs, as a way to ring in the weekend or as a social lubricant. It took about a year for me to become an everyday drinker, then about another year to move from one cup to two a day. Although I no longer get quite the thrill I used to get from my two cups of Joe, I still enjoy my coffee thoroughly, even reverentially at times. And I can still be found from time to time in a local coffee shop. Presently I’m camped out at Milagro in Las Cruces, NM. It’s becoming my new Open Eye. More than ten years have passed since Kara got me hooked on the magic bean. She eventually married an affable chap named Andy, and they just had a baby. Robert Harman – a.k.a. The King of Carrboro, The Colonel, The Mayor of Open Eye – was hit by a car and killed this summer, right after I moved to NM. It’s weird how time does what it does. It’s strange how this place – Milagro – is so familiar, so much like the Open Eye. The cute baristas. The hipsters hiding behind books and laptops. I’m still here, reading the same books, thinking the same thoughts, drifting down the same stream. I’m wearing a beard these days, flecks of gray betraying the baby face underneath. My cup is empty. The first refill is free.

The biggest deal of 2011 has been without a doubt the move from North Carolina to New Mexico. We’re talking HUGE. I circled in a holding pattern for a good two years longer than I expected as my wife made the transition from graduate student to employed academic. We could have landed anywhere. We were very close to moving to Portland (Oregon), but we also could have wound up in Kalamazoo (Michigan), Bar Harbor (Maine), Mexico City, or any number of other places. At first I pretended to be more excited about Las Cruces that I really was. I mean, it’s so deserty here. Daddy likes his green. And there’s no discernible music scene, and it’s ever so far from family, etc. But the place grew on me right away, and today Las Cruces and I fully consummated our relationship when at long last I set foot upon the mighty Organ Mountains, which I have been admiring from a distance for the past four months.

Dripping Springs is right up the road from our house, but for whatever reason my wife and I didn’t make the trip until this morning. It was unusually cloudy, and much to our delight it even began snowing as we ascended the main trail. The photos below don’t even begin to capture the majesty of this place, what with all the clouds and my cheap-ass camera. And it’s hard for me to capture in words the quality of happiness I felt as I breathed in the cool mountain air and gazed at the various peaks and stared at the three deer we came across and, most of all, as I considered how grateful I am to have landed in one piece, in this particular place, with this particular person by my side.

The wings of possibility are stretched wide over me once again, and this time I am ready. I am willing. To surrender to the breath of the wind.

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