[Lexington, Kentucky] New age music obnoxiously seeps into my brain like lead into blood. The synthesized bird chirps and the fog of cigarette smoke settle over me with all the subtlety of a wet sneeze. The morning has been weighed, measured, and found wanting. Staring at a fat beam of sunshine illuminating a blizzard of dust particles, it occurs to me that this is what I’ve been breathing in all along. A moment later, the clumsy stomp of a passerby sends a wave of vibration rolling across the floorboards, up through the couch and into my asshole. Perhaps these are things that should not be noticed, or at least not written down.
Nothing. Strike one hundred seventy five thousand. Okay, one more pitch — this time I’ll tear the leather off the ball:
Who cares if it’s the tundra or the temple floor? Either way, it’s a place to fall to pieces. Who cares if it’s memory or pure invention? Either way, it’s a candy-coated rat turd.
[Later] I’m sitting on a tree stump at the park. Kids are playing, running around like dogs off the leash. Their parents are walking around the perimeter, getting their laps in and trying not to look embarrassed when their dogs stop to take a dump or sniff a passerby’s crotch. A guy, maybe fifty-five or sixty, has quickened his pace to a jog, moving with all the grace of a coat rack tumbling down a flight of stairs. It’s painful to watch him. It’s like he’s been dipped in cement and is seconds away from becoming a living statue. Another guy is showing off his pet iguana, although it could be an armadillo or an alligator for all I can tell. What ever it is, the guy is clearly loving the attention he’s getting.
It’s Saturday, and I’m in a funk. The sun is nice though, and I like the way that little boy told his Dad about how he never dreamed he would see an iguana in person. So it’s an iguana.
Walking toward the park I thought about all the times I used to stroll up and down Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, and before that, Haight Street in San Francisco. Does it really matter where I am?
Changing pens from black to blue, I take a moment to catch my breath. A crowd has gathered around the iguana now, and his master has launched into an undoubtedly well-rehearsed lecture. Sitting slumped on a stump, my ass starts to ache and I sink a little deeper into my funk. I don’t know what would have to happen right now for me to feel happy or alive, I know only that I’m powerless to make it happen. There are no zen fireworks as a reward for this realization, however, so I can only assume I’ve missed the mark again.
Strike one hundred seventy five thousand and one. Trying not to try. Struggling to let go. Being Bob over and over again. A broken record of a bad song. Time to pull the pl…
I would not have shredded my journals if I had written in them the way you did.
I also wish there were more fireworks. More acknowledgment when I did the right thing. It’s one thing I wish I’d known as a kid/adolescent: That when you’re an adult you have to make your own encouragement.