I left home and found my way to St. Michael's where I sat for a time in front of Our Lady. She was in her blue grotto, stamping out a serpent with her eyes downcast and a plastic rosary dangling from her left wrist. A small fence enclosed her, the top railing of which was encircled with fake plastic roses, faded from the sunlight and snow, and these ruffled in the wind. I sat there a while and saw a beetle on the concrete between me and the statue of Christ's mother and I watched it as it scurried back and forth, crossing and recrossing that stretch of poured stone on some errand which cannot be understood. Later, a butterfly passed and it seemed a fitting herald so I left Mary and resumed my walk.
I made my way to the old Mat-Maid creamery in the middle of Palmer and I explored the grounds for a time and found this burnt out trailer. On the inside, something the photo doesn't capture, there is a poster imploring workers to practice safe labor habits because, presumably, the workers have children at home and they would appreciate not being an orphan. The poster had a man holding a child and both wore hardhats of the yellow variety.
Last week (or so, I don't recall) I was out and I found two pigeons hanging out in the ice rink (now defunct) of the Church of God and I stopped and accosted them for being there. Whence they'd come? They had no business here. Go, find the Raven and tell him to come see me. Then, also at the creamery, near what I supposed was a grain elevator or some other large narrow building, I heard wing flaps and looked up to see several pigeons studying me from one of the railings on the staircase that went up the building's side. They flew off and I looked down to find a solitary egg.
I went on, spent some time sitting in a dugout of the local ball fields where I was disappointed to find no graffiti of any sort. Not one single drawn penis. Then I went out and laid in the outfield and considered how in the next field over there were high school girls practicing softball and engaging in all manner of bizarre behaviors. After, I rose and made my way to the coffee house and fortified myself against the madness.
Cigar, because when you look and act homeless and spend much of the day muttering to yourself as you go around town looking for the Raven and when you find him you speak to him aloud you might as well fit the crazed vagrant persona completely.
The sky changed. Then there was hail but before that, as I walked to the Alehouse where the strange Mexican man runs the bar and has bad teeth and expounds to all the patrons about whatever he thinks they might like or about how he grew up in California or Mexico or about global warming or basketball, I saw this sign. It's a useless sign. It faces away from the road and does not stand at any intersection. Some sort of cosmic advice or something.
Transcendence here on the door. At the Alehouse I had a beer and waited for Andrea to get off work and had a phone conversation with Gavin about all the big questions in life and I told him that I had no answers and that no one does and you have to figure things out for yourself and that to do less than that was to cheapen things.
Carreta de huesos. Later, about 830 after a dinner of roasted vegetables and chicken, I left the apartment so that Andrea could do some yoga in solitude and I walked down to the river where the old railroad tracks run and I hollered obscenities to the stream bed and felt something like, as terrible as things are with life in general, peace or resignation or some sort of other thing that comes from walking and watching the world and realized that everything is exactly as it should be and cannot be anything else but the way it has become.
