Crazed notes found on the northbound Cascades train that was the third leg of my journey home. Seemed appropriate for the "{PIC}" designator I had inserted into the text as a reminder of where I was going with this. I couldn't decide if this was a novel outline or, as Nick put it, "a life plan". Either way, it's one of those things that you find that are the briefest of cigarette pulls of illumination of a face in an otherwise gloomy alleyway, as if you could see everything of the smoker's existence in that one flash, time present, past, future. For myself, I couldn't decide whether the script was tragic or comedic or scornful or empathetic. In that way, I suppose, that author had at once failed and succeeded in engaging his reader. The train conductor ignored the open sheet yet picked up the slim rectangular and yellow boarding pass left by a departed passenger on the seat next as he passed among his rounds. Something, something metaphor.
02APR-07APR2019 - Week 4
The return to work and Lenten sobriety was a welcome embrace after the near psychotic break feared and barely held at bay from the failed assault into Portland. The first day I was on benzo-flight stress-exhaustion hangover autopilot of disagreement. Sleep that night was less than ideal and in the morning of the second day, after A took Uly to daycare, I lay awake in the silent house and listened to my guts churn and roil (borborygmi, for Dan if he's reading), a disgustingly present memento mori. I rose and biked down to the cafe where there were the open carrying veterans at their morning coffees and the advance scouts of the tourist season crowding up the aisles where I must walk.
Later, A and I would have a conversation about our differences in opinion about the tourist pilot fishes. Agree to disagree indeed. I thought about cursing their journey, pointing out their sins, and wishing them ill, cancerous lesions, heartbreak, malaise, suffering of the highest order, yet I refrained. Probably should go to confession about that regardless of my withholding those invections.
Today I arose at a strange hour after troubled dreams of love and love unrequited and death and absurdity and music and terror and terror and terror. I had the day free from PTSD guy and I decided to get fucking busy. A went downtown to work and for a "meeting" and Uly and I motored for home improvement digs and yardwork things and it bore us to Wasilla proper which was right trash as she is wont to be. I saw a former student at the Lowes where we stopped for potted crotons and ficus and South African succulents. He, the student, lamented the waste of his life Job Corps had been. I refrained from indicating his common denominator in that waste. Uly said hello. We shopped.
At home there was, sans A, activity. I repotted and potted plants and rearranged and thoroughly peeved the kitties. Then came a garage tidying. Car detailing. A car wash about which Uly said, "I'm going to have to tell Mama about this!". Police call. Hanging basket seeding. A returned and we ambled to a garage sale, defunct in the chill wind of April and turning breakup skies of gray and blue and gray and blue and white and eagles thermaling over the roadway in pursuit of food or mates or both. Back home, we cobbled pizzas (With kale. Wait, kale?) and ate and read stories. Uly went to bed. A persisted some venture, yet retreated and left me and the fat orange bastard cat to our mountain without and the tunes within and the tubes withal. Blame naught. Lean in.
I have failed in my Lenten aspirations.
No comments:
Post a Comment