Eve

Christmas Eve. Every time I hear those words I imagine a scantily-clad Eve in a Santa cap, booties and a red micro-mini-skirt. No one ever talks of Christmas Adam though. Wouldn't it have sucked in paradise to not have Christmas? I couldn't imagine growing up as little Adam and not experiencing the bliss of holiday suspense, of waking up before dawn wanting nothing but to open presents.

Soon we will take a trip to the airport to pickup a good friend from Vancouver and then off to wine country we'll go. We've rented a house for the festivities, equipped with a jacuzzi and a pool, a beautiful kitchen and all the trappings of polished modernity. There will be wine and merriment; music making; sumptuous feasts prepared by our chef de partie, Mr. Terry D; story telling and laughter.

There are moments lately when I want to write, yet when I do, each letter turns into a struggle. How this happens I'm not sure, but it frustrates me beyond belief. Early on, when I first started writing, things happened naturally and with ease - but no longer. Some people say that you need to stop thinking, just write; censor yourself later. Knowing this doesn't help me though, and I critique every word to the point of stilted strangulation. Yes, the first step is awareness, realizing you have a problem, but overcoming this problem is another story entirely. In fact, knowing you have a problem potentially makes things worse because you begin to distrust yourself. Security in your ability is crucial as a writer; it is where confidence comes from. By my own standards a degree of confidence has been lost - I have become more self critical and my writing has suffered. Letters fall from my mind in little constipated clumps. Unending indecision prevails, unraveling the narrative. Exorcism is what I need.

I trust the ghost of Christmas future
will handle everything.

More

Yesterday was my last day at work. It still seems surreal that I'm no longer with the company. It's been seven years. I started as a box cutter, receiving shipping goods at one of their most popular retail stores, and after three years and a series of promotions I found myself doing software QA on one of their most prestigious teams. I doubt there exists another employee who's had a similar trajectory. In fact I'm sure of it. I'm jobless until January. It's a strange feeling, floaty, like that weightless feeling when a roller coaster slowly rolls over the summit. There's the exhilaration too, the excitement of starting anew. I've wiped clean a seven year sand mandala that I thought I might be working on for another three years. And perhaps I could have. But at what cost? There comes a point where you have to ask yourself what you want more of - time or money.

It's really easy to make the wrong choice. In truth, we're encouraged to. We will sacrifice our most vital asset for security and comfort. We are inclined to let our emotions run away with us, chasing more security and more comfort; the more we have, the more we have to lose. A terrible cycle perpetuated by fear. 

Hoarders, all of us.

Rains on Me

I haven't written anything in a while. Well, that's sort of true. There are things I've written but haven't published. It's been a hectic couple of weeks. All of my time has been bogarted. I should change my name to Humphrey. If only I could have my very own Lauren Bacall. There's a girl I know that comes close, but she's spoken for. Funny how often that happens. It's made me realize how hard it is for relationships to take flight. Reality, governed by gravity, is more unforgiving than imagination. Love, however, is a bit more precocious and begins flapping its fledgling wings at the slightest hint of possibility. But to take flight with another requires tremendous coordination, trust, timing. In love the odds are stacked against us, always. It is why we cling to that which is tender and deep. When we feel it, really feel it, something inside us hums; makes music of our blood. It's as though a circuit has been made complete and all the world becomes a soft and lilting song. 

The rain here has been incessant. Curtains of it fall in the dark. And also throughout the day. It is for the best though, because of the drought. The rain heals the grass and the trees, restores reservoirs. There is something romantic about it. It's the closest thing to love that thirst can know. Nurturing and indiscriminate, the sky gives itself to the land in a beautifully suicidal surrender, gathering in splattered puddles and pools dreaming of spring, waiting to be reincarnated as a blade of grass, a small mushroom or a colorful flower. 

This is how the world will be
everywhere I go it rains on me
forty monkeys drowning in a boiling sea
everywhere I go it rains on me
I went down into the valley to pray
everywhere I go it rains on me
I got drunk and I stayed all day
everywhere I go it rains on me

everywhere I go
everywhere I go
everywhere I go
it rains on me

All god's chilluns can't you see
everywhere I go it rains on me
Louie Lista and Marchese
everywhere I go it rains on me
Robert Sheehan and Paul Body
everywhere I go it rains on me
I went down to Argyle
I went down to Dix
everywhere I go it rains on me
to get my powders and to get my fix
everywhere I go it rains on me

everywhere I go
everywhere I go
everywhere I go
it rains on me

everywhere I go
everywhere I go
everywhere I go

Tom Waits

Change

Big choices are always accompanied by a creeping feeling of doubt, of discomfort, and fear. And also excitement, wonder, the rushing winds of fortune tossing you skyward like a coin. Then, earthbound, tumbling and terminal, the dizzying vicissitudes of fate reach a final verdict. 

Heads or tails?

Rippling possibility swells outward and incites change, buoyancy, creates peaks and valleys. Some ripples form perfect concentric circles and, spreading, they make still larger, previously unanticipated patterns. The entire surface, all of its delicate liquid topography, is affected by even the most subtle movement.  

Smell of Rain

I'd somehow forgotten the smell of rain. Here it never rains long enough to pick up that "wet city" smell. Raindrops fall percussively, in rapid taps and patters. Everything shines, glistens, sweats. Looking out my window, at the smoky skies, I have no way of telling what time it is. The little drops somehow distort time, make it deeper, more liquid. There's also something restorative, calming, and nurturing that happens to the psyche when it rains. Lush green limbs and leafy ferns sprout out from the soul. Mud inside veins softens and earthworms wriggle through chocolate hearts. Everything washes away; dirt drowns, puddles wink. Cars pass by and hiss at the silence. I'm met with a memory of something I can't remember. I see it through a wet windshield, truth smeared and stretched across it like blurred light. The window opens and the cold wind rushes in, leaping up at me like an excited dog. It tingles. I breathe it in and smile. In my nose, at the ends of short hairs, a gentle yet curious dew gathers, sparkling in the dark like diamonds.

Halt

I've lost interest in writing, at least temporarily. Whenever I try to write my mind just grinds to a halt.

So fuck it.

I Wasn't Expecting It

It was a cold winter morning in New York City. We ventured out to get a snack and some hot chocolate at the Dunkin Donuts on East Houston street, a few blocks from her apartment.

We arrived and found other people had the same idea. Sitting at the grey and purple table was a bearded, homeless man with the air of a ruined mall Santa. His eyes met mine and I smiled at him briefly before she squeezed my hand, gently reminding me to figure out what I wanted. I looked up at the donuts, torn between a French cruller and a Boston creme. Someone yelled out: "Irish. Hey, Irish." I looked over my shoulder and saw the man getting up and coming towards me. "You got that red in your beard Irish, what's your name; my name's Jimmy Duffy."

We were next in line with a few people already behind us. I wanted to be polite and not dismiss him, but she was pulling me forward toward the counter. I reached into my pocket, handed her a ten dollar bill and told her get me a Boston creme. She narrowed her eyes at me and continued to the counter.

I shook Jimmy's hand and introduced myself. Something about him reminded me of my father. He told me I had a beautiful girlfriend, that I reminded him of his nephew. He switched course and said: "It's cold and I'm hungry. Can you help me out man? Anything. I'm just trying to get something warm." Again I reached into my pocket, knowing I had another bill in there, but unsure whether it was a one or a five. I'd made up my mind that even if it was a five I was fine parting with it. Sure, I said, and a wrinkled Lincoln was placed into his hand. Astonished, he looked at the bill and then up at me and said, "a five? Holy! I can't believe it." His eyes began to get shiny. She appeared at my side with our donuts and drinks. "You believe this guy," he asked her, "he gave me a five."

He was a bloated scarecrow of a man, stuffed full of faded newspaper and loss. He stood for a moment unsure of what to do. Then, overcome with gratitude, he pulled me in and hugged me. When he did, the string that held up his pants untied itself and came slipping down, revealing his filthy underwear and dirty legs. They were a reddish purple, as though they'd been out in the cold too long. So here I am, my girlfriend looking at me while I stand clasped against a pantless, homeless Jimmy Duffy in the middle of a Dunkin Donuts. He's weeping in my arms, calling me a sonofabitch and kissing my cheek, staggering in small steps like a drunken ballerina while his sweatpants made fabric handcuffs around his ankles. "I'm sorry," he said, bending down to try and pick them up, "I wasn't expecting it."

Neither was I.

Sunburned

The sun rises. The sun sets. But it never does, actually. It is the earth's heavenly movement that creates this illusion; one of nature's greatest and most repeated magic tricks. When I lived in New York I used to drive to the water to see the sun set. I had to, or else buildings would be in my way. In that city concrete and cement tower over trees. I would drive alone, in my father's white Chevy Malibu, accompanied only by the car-stereo and the coming dark. Standing outside the door with the radio gently humming, the fading light warm against my skin, a soft orange vanishing where the sea met the sky, I would watch and think about something akin to infinity; hoping that concealed in the last glimmering sunbeam I might find some secret truth. The thought of extinction would sometimes visit me, usually while imagining time unfolding a few billions of years into the future, at the point when our sun collapses. Stars die, some of them peacefully, with resignation, and others violently, with explosive finality: one last super-luminous lament.

There was beauty in this. The notion that everything was unified by life and death and time made me feel I was part of some cosmic expansion and collapse, like the respiration of an interstellar lung. For as long as I can remember, the setting sun had always been a paradox to me: in between day and night, light and dark, birth and death. The moment hangs on the horizon with all the ephemeral tenacity and light of a human life. When it was cloudy, especially during autumn and winter months, the sky took on a different, more contemplative tone. Painted in the colors of fallen leaves, in lustrous yellows, fresh rust and vibrant burgundy, the white of the sky looked to be draped by a tablecloth set aside for Thanksgiving dinner.

One day, a friend had come along to accompany me. It was in the summer, sometime in July. The humidity in New York in July can be brutal. It stirs something inside that's immediately sticky and intemperate, almost amphibious; attracts flies. So we sat by the water, with the brusque dusk, stalked by swarming gnats and far off fireflies, waiting for the night. We'd bought a six-pack of Mike's Hard Iced Tea, the preferred choice for two sixteen-year-old boys who were still transitioning from soda to beer, and we twisted off the tops. The adult in me would like to think we kept the empty bottles in the cardboard case when we'd finished them, but the youth in me suspects we chucked them into the water to destroy the evidence (should we be accosted by a passing cop). After a few drinks we'd start to get philosophical and talk about the future, try to figure out what it all meant. We tried to imagine where we'd be, what we'd do with our lives, whether we'd still be friends. The future stretched out as long as the horizon, and as deep. There were never any answers though, only shadows, glimpses, intimations.

Once, driving on a deserted road, enclosed on each side by overhanging trees, we'd seen a ghost. We reminisced and wondered what might happen when we die. The idea of nothing was troubling; something, doubly. Leaving, there was always the feeling that I'd learned something; something swirling and vast. It was as though a piece of the sun had been buried behind my eyes.

Sometimes, if I blink just right, I can still see the imprint of a fiery green ghost drifting down the backs of my eyelids.