w i n t e r
indeed, a comfortable rock
Getting back to the roots. Not a day goes by I don't wish the world were smaller, or easier to navigate, get across. Not a day goes by that I'm not thankful it is so damn big.
On a clear night from my backporch I can see plenty of stars and even a couple planets. I suspect most folks can, but around 11:00 p.m. if I walk straight out into the back yard and look up about 60 degrees I can see the big dipper and Orion's belt. To the right and another 45 degrees up is the little dipper and to its left about 90 degrees is the moon.
I miss the circle window, but I've taken to sitting on the back porch. Generally late at night when I'm looking at the stars, smoking that last cigarette, pulling on the filter with my yeasty tongue from three or four beers, I begin to really miss the feeling I have during the day when the world is small and tolerable; for at night the world grows exponentially.
I sit and wonder why the world is so big and why it seems the moments when I most want to be somewhere else time themselves so well with the moments when I can only be where I am. It's a rather helpless feeling and not an altogether good one to have just before bed, but like water, my mind will go where it wants to.
I'll sit and think about when I was younger and then I'll skip that, playing only the soundtrack. Everything fit for John Hughes. The Furs, The Smiths, The Bunnymen, The Housmartains...okay maybe not them but they are part of the soundtrack. It seems the events don't matter. I've reached that point I always dreaded about my parents.
Very little new music.
I'm stuck in the past, in what touched and formed me. In the artists that were the sounding boards and the record sleeves that were the solace for all my angst. It seems the only thing changing is the angst, but the music never changes.
Sure, there are a few new bands I like and get on with okay, but only because they remind me of the other bands that already guard my emotions. Or rather trigger them.
heart of darkness
Like Conrad's use of the frame within a frame, I am the unknown. I am the indispensable narrator sitting on the deck of a wary ship waiting for the tide to change so I can put to sea with the teller of stories. And like Marlowe's story of ivory, I too see the waste, the irony, the pathetic struggle within it all to unveil and confront a certain darkness that wraps itself around all our hearts showing us what we all know to be true and yet cannot find the words to say.
And it is not a barrier imposed by language, it goes deeper than that to the very feeling itself, for how can one put into words the emotion behind a lifetime of feeling and expect anyone to make sense of it in 5k or a short phamplet ending with the lines, "Exterminate all the brutes".
So we each listen to our soundtracks. We quote them. We try to live them, live up to them, for somehow they, using music and words, can break the spell that language cannot alone overcome. What strikes fear into the hearts of the natives is not the rifles and screams, but the long sustained breath of steam, let loose by a man and a string tied to a boat whistle. The biceps tense, the knuckles turn white, and the whistle blows. And I sit late at night by the rail line listening to that whistle. Thinking about the greasy conductor and his cramped space in the diesel engine he drives. The floor covered in empty chips bags and soda cans, bubble gum stuck in the diamond plate steel. The only clean part on the whole train, the smooth silver undersides of the wheels, heating up the track as they click by on dark winter nights like this one.
All part of the soundtrack.
a different world than my parents knew
The world I've got has more than its share of oddities. I can see you live on T.V. I can talk to you on the phone, across continents. I can buy most everything I need and never have to leave the house, but I can't have a drink with you until the slow miles are crossed. The long miles. The hard miles.
Until projects are finished and money is saved. Until time is found.
The things that hold us back seem nothing until placed together, then sometimes I think it's a wonder we ever had any time at all.
But that's only the size of it talking. It's getting out and blanking out the stars. It's saying 2,500 feet of runway is just not enough. It forces my head to turn and watch the planes leaving. It puts my house in their flight paths and serves me drinks in my dreams inside the fuselage of a wide bodied jet bound for the otherside of it.
It.
It's there during dinner on the T.V. It's in my books. It's in the questions of friends. How big does it get?!?
And just as fast it goes away, lost in the hustle of yet another day. Another commute. Another few miles walked, and some more time spent waiting.
Spent waiting for the sun to set and the chill to creep under the window sash. Spent waiting for the furnace to click and the brief exhalation of cold air from the basement thrown through the vents in all my rooms.
Spent waiting for the inspiration I'll be without for one more day.
Spent waiting for the impossible.
That's the rub.
You can't do anything while waiting for the impossible.
You have to somehow realize it isn't.
You lay on warm rocks in the sun and watch the ripples on the water continue all the way across the lake without interruption and you know then there is hope. That even so much as walking on the surface of this earth is enough to make it move, if even just a fraction, move it does.
And we all cause that. Together. Never apart in that regard.
And knowing that may just be enough.
goodnight 1.3.00