s u m m e r
strepto
The car door hung open and the red panel light outlined an ankle. Fog rolled over and around the first stories of the houses lining Bellemeade. Old run down shacks, mill houses. The first property snatched up by slum lords and the last you'd want to live in. Piano keys spill out across the street mixed with wire and felt hammers. Beer bottles roll in the gutter and I turn up my collar.
I can see the light down the street, second balcony. A blue light with no shade next to a screen held together with duct tape. I'm almost there though I can hardly believe I've bothered to show up. I promised, I know, but if I had every night back that I'd given away for promises I'd add years to my life. Seems being tackled drunk on the floor just isn't what it used to be. The card tricks are exposed for what they are. The flash paper is sold out. The pink winks are gone and all that is left is a can of PBR in my jacket pocket, and it ain't even full.
I've been reading a book on tracking. Shadows in the dust, up turned stones, bent weeds and the like and I start to notice things in the street that tell me what lies ahead, but you don't need to be a tracker to tell what kind of place I'm about to walk into. It's just that I keep thinking of this one line the author says, "When someone moves something in your home you notice. When someone moves something in the woods, I notice."
And I start to think about tracking memories and the misplaced logic that we feel when we try to justify stuff like loneliness and anxiety and worry. How the more attention we pay it the more it takes control. How the more we add logical steps to our worry the more we rule out any other possibility. We think it logical, but it ain't.
It's got nothing remotely close to logic in it.
I clear my throat on that one.
See, worry don't do anybody any good and it only extends the possibilities outward. The negative ones, I should make that clear. Just the negative. You never hear about people worrying for the good of it. For the fun of it. No one relishes the ball in their stomach...do they?
I stop for a second and take a pull off the PBR. Tonight is the first night I can see my breath and the can is cold. I catch goosebumps off the third degree burn on my wrist and it lets me know there is life down there, growing its way back.
That's good.
Up two flights and in the door, my thoughts drowned out by a dozen conversations. And in this way my night will end.
goodnight 10.7.99