I pace without purpose through our farmer’s market, dodging strollers, past the flowers and the vegetation and the fermentation. There is no one today with a clipboard and a question to ask me.
I stop into MorningsNights for iced liquid, saying hello to A, D and E.
A man is outside who looks like, plays left-handed like, has his hair bound up with a scarf like, sounds like, spot-on Jimi Hendrix. He is playing nothing but rare shit, while white girls wince and pass by. I drop a bill into his cup. He smiles and motions me to wait: “hold on, man. A song, a song.” He plays rarer shit, and I can see my appreciation glinting in his eye.
Sitting on his usual brick wall is the middle-aged Christ in clean, loose black, handsomely bearded. Nag Champa: two for five, with a free holder. I drive home, the car filling with the easy calm of new incense.
A moment to breathe: Achievement Unlocked
I am now forty-five, a weathered but unsure halfway point. There remains a world I haven’t touched, and things not yet seen, and I agonize over what I’ve missed and slept through. I’ve done a few things, so few, and it will never be enough.
- I have sat in a jacuzzi with raindrops falling, listening to distant sirens and the roars of Bourbon Street.
- I have watched the sun set over the Pacific, and the sun’s first rays over Texan plains.
- I have eaten monkfish liver, rattlesnake, and alligator.
- I have dug a trench.
I
- I have written detailed reviews for two hundred and seventy-five restaurants.
- I have ridden an elephant.
- I have driven home in tears, having left a cat behind in death.
- I have performed Shakespeare on the Ahmanson stage.
am
- I have worked on plumbing in a mortuary, with a cadaver in repose behind me.
- I have obtained a degree.
- I have smoked a cigar on a treehouse balcony in Jamaica, listening to raindrops mutter on tree leaves.
- I have fed apples to an Indian rhinoceros.
waiting
- I have written a novel and a novelette.
- I have gripped my woman’s hands while she was in the throes of labor.
- I have explored an abandoned cemetery.
- I have watched a heartfelt performance of Madonna’s “Rain” at a drag cabaret.
for
- I have had second-degree sunburns on my torso.
- I have walked down the aisle of five weddings that were not my own.
- I have stayed awake for four and a half days.
- I have run an entire pizza kitchen by myself.
my
- I have listened to a bugler play “Taps” for my father.
- I have driven a truck that reached 302,000 miles.
- I have operated a spotlight for bands playing in Sunset Boulevard clubs.
- I have lived through an earthquake which destroyed our neighborhood.
life
- I have danced with strangers in darkened clubs.
- I have ridden in a helicopter.
- I have sat in a chair and had needles stab color into my skin.
- I have fought and caught a thirty-pound tuna.
to
- I have once worked every day for thirty-three days.
- I have watched a Navaho dance with redstone monuments behind her, and felt bitterness.
- I have ridden a bicycle over the Golden Gate bridge.
- I have waited in a recovery room for hours while the woman I love lay in pain.
start
- I have sung songs into a microphone, in front of people.
- I have reclined on a blanket in a grassy cemetery and watched a movie projected onto a mausoleum.
- I have been stung by a wasp and a bumblebee.
- I have swum under the ocean’s surface with fishes of yellow and blue, and heard the song of whales in the distance.
There is so much yet to do. I need Bianca to be with me for everything remaining.
nevver:
- Seigneur-terraces (French)
Coffee shop dwellers who sit at tables a long time but spend little money.
- Ya’arburnee (Arabic)
This word is the hopeful declaration that you will die before someone you love deeply, because you cannot stand to live without them. Literally, may you bury me.
- Schlimazel (Yiddish)
Someone prone to bad luck. Yiddish distinguishes between the schlemiel and schlimazel, whose fates would probably be grouped under those of the klutz in other languages. The schlemiel is the traditional maladroit, who spills his coffee; the schlimazel is the one on whom it’s spilled.
- Packesel (German)
The packesel is the person who’s stuck carrying everyone else’s bags on a trip. Literally, a burro.
- L’esprit de l’escalier (French)
Literally, stairwell wit—a too-late retort thought of only after departure.
- Hygge (Danish)
Denmark’s mantra, hygge is the pleasant, genial, and intimate feeling associated with sitting around a fire in the winter with close friends.
- Spesenritter (German)
Literally, an expense knight. You’ve probably dined with a spesenritter before, the type who shows off by paying the bill on the company’s expense account.
- Cavoli Riscaldati (Italian)
The result of attempting to revive an unworkable relationship. Literally, reheated cabbage.
- Bilita Mpash (Bantu)
An amazing, pleasant dream. Not just a “good” dream; the opposite of a nightmare.
- Litost (Czech)
Milan Kundera described the emotion as “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.”
- Murr-ma (Waigman, language of Australia)
To walk alongside the water while searching for something with your feet.
Metal Floss
“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”
My brain still performs a melodramatic little swoon (replete with arm draped over brow and Victorian-era couch in readiness underneath) when faced with the idea that someone, somewhere, chose something I wrote out of a collection of others. It gives me hope that I’ll get more words between the covers of a book, like in Bianca’s hoodie pocket above.
(Do those books have my words in them? Oh, no, no. That’s a couple of Hemingways and a Ginsberg, freshly purchased from a stall at our local farmer’s market.)
I’ve updated the Published Works page, as if to prove it to myself.
I am scheduled to have two wisdom teeth evicted tomorrow, by force, and am feeling apprehensive about it.
More than apprehensive. Such a procedure typically uses general anesthesia, which is a fairly common thing to be phobic about, but which I have never in my adult life experienced.
A secret truth about this shell I inhabit: I have a poor memory, and an abject fear of memory loss. This is probably why I never developed the habit of drinking myself into a stupor, and have to date never in my life really been drunk. The worst of all possible results of aging would be to lose myself to dementia or Alzheimer’s.
Perhaps related to this, I possess a strong desire not to “miss out” on something: nights out, laughter, life experiences, food, play, sex.
Anesthesia, in all its cold professionalism, taps into all this. For a time, it is an utter removal from the world, unlike sleep, unlike sickness, with no memories and no dreams. I have unreasoning fears of risk and loss, of returning with something missing from myself, or something switched off, or something awakened.
All this shouldn’t happen, of course. Standard procedure, very common, well-trained staff, sign here, count down from one hundred, medication for when I am returned to the world groggy and sickened.
I just do not like being at the total mercy of substance.
I have too much yet to do.
“Kakorrhaphiophobia: The fear of failure or defeat.”
Life is in layers. Death, too.
This is why ghosts appear behind you, or before you, in the mirror, against the far wall where handprints glow.
(Filmmakers understand this.)
Ghosts do not manifest by your side, do not walk next to you. They cannot.
Worlds can be slid into sideways, in fact must be; life and death must be entered, or exited. A threshold is not a threshold if you can pass it by.
(You remember how dimensions work: we see and measure space in three, we understand two as a plane, we know that one dimension is a line.)
The fact that life and death work this way, at least for us, is what drives humans mad, for we can move along life (which we view as time) only in one dimension… and not even one, for we cannot move in two directions along that one, pale line.
Forward, only.
Not even one dimension.
The trick is to make the distance ahead very long, indeed.
