Dear (_____)

Dear beloved domesticated felines,

Coexisting with you takes a lot of effort and time.  More so than dogs and our aqueous friends.  More so than our avian and reptilian friends.  Less so than people, by orders of magnitude.  To this day, I do declare, that human intimate level connection nearly impossible over extended periods of time for some unfortunate people (myself included), bringing your kind into our lives.  A lot of effort and time and understanding brings us together in ways the thought of making you into a glove liner or hat, or a good few days of meals and key chain ornaments rarely comes to mind; please do not be offended when I kick you out from under the blankets beside my naked body when I peek underneath to see if the beat of my heart has lulled you to sleep and you drowsily blink up, nostrils flared, and pour two shotgun blasts of kitty boogers into my sleepy eyed face.

I don't hate you any more or like you any less, but please don't come back until you've finished clearing your sinuses, darling.

with love,

your cuddleboo

Birthday

Thinking about everything that may or may not be coming your way.  Thinking about everything you have left behind.  Everything you pretend to leave behind.  Everything, born new, you try to make and force people to think you've grown beyond.  You haven't. ?Yoiu are ertarded,-=  /You are retarded.  You have grown and changed, but what you are is still thoroughly flawed.  You did not pass "go."   You fought for it.  Triumphed even.  You did not pass inspection.  I am pissed and in love.
I do not invoke accents.  It bleecx.  It bleeds.  Remind a self that I am just like you.  Horatio!  /
I feel horribly deaf.  Root for.  Poesis.  Root for Poe. Sunrise is a /default.  One eye.  Bumper, crumple, zone5.





///The Postal Service - "We Will Become Silhouettes (remastered)"

Supermarkets

I know shopping is not supposed to be difficult.  You park, you go in, you get what you need, you get in line, you get out.  Simple.  Easy.  Everything is different again.  The boxes of toasters were fine where they were.  What does a cube of pillows next to a cube of mingled tupperware and stamped artisanal pepper shakers supposed to mean?  I should buy some hats.  The jeans are just as good, if not better at Goodwill.  If the mouse pads are in the photography department I will cry inside for a few minutes.  There has to be a way to predict market fluctuations on the price of Nerf assault weapons.  I cannot play Cribbage on a sheet of paper again, I'm better than that, you're better than that!  Grow up!  Let's build one.  That's a lot of holes to drill.  Not too many.  I love customer service, but the air is impossibly dry.  Uniforms and no tinted glasses and no facial hair and no headphones or earplugs or even earmuffs to help abate the halls echoing and that idle siren public address system.  I was bound to be fired, and then quit, and then quit, and then simply stop going, and then be fired the final time I gave it a run.  Breathing it sounds like a gale through a mesa canyon.  The taste is hospital and hostile with so many confused and irritated and little kid lungs sucking and blowing.  Draped cobwebs full of ants.  I do not understand why the lights have to be so.  The air pressure is all wrong.  Leaving is expulsion from a mouth of a fossil, still throbbing with life, and ages dead.  I head home with a few bags of things I've torn off of its sides and tips and joints, maybe a truck bed's worth now and then to help me survive in my wilderness and it's over.  Bang, boom, piece of cake.  I hate shopping.  It is incredibly difficult and staying calm is key.  Throw in too many people and the math begins "do I really, absolutely, need?"




///Moderat - "Sick With It"

That Instant

Your 58-year-old neighbor is on his sixth paragraph of your conversation about his new girlfriend and you can feel the pulse deep inside of him wishing he were gay because everything he has described about her is essentially you with the exception of genital make up and you notice on paragraph eight that you are biting your own lip and the conversation should've ended seven paragraphs and a sentence ago with "...doing great, it is indeed a beautiful afternoon."

That Instant

you realize you've had the sniffles since last August and the weather is probably not about to stabilize any time soon and it is not unrealistic to think (with allergy seasons still pending) it may roll straight on through until Christmas lights are back up.

Dear (_____)

Dear doorknobs,

We've had an on and off relationship.  I've torn the pockets out of my jeans on you.  That was not nice.  You've made me look a fool when I've shown up with the wrong set of keys or no keys at all.  You're okay though.  It's my own fault.

I realized today that the reason my shoulder joint was feeling achy was because, instead of using you for what you were put there for, I was disengaging you and then shoulder checking the door open, no matter the door, the situation, or the where.  That's my fault.  I was so used to my right hand and wrist having problems gripping and twisting from smashing it into surfaces with little give too many times that I got so used to using other body parts to operate doors that it felt normal and right.  That's on me.

In the future, with a good and healed hand, I will make better and more use of you.  My shoulder will knit now that I'm not banging on it and my entrances to domiciles and businesses will be much more appropriate instead of sounding like a police raid.

Thank you for being there.  You are deeply and newly appreciated.

Lovingly yours,

injury prone

Stand Up Act 12

Stand Up Act 11

Dysfunctional weather is becoming unbearable.  Life is unbelievably unpredictable at its root.  People are the problem.  You can wake up to a fabulous morning and have a wonderful shower and your pets were so well behaved through the morning hygiene routine they've actually made you a fresh sunny side egg on dry toast with a light coffee and a teaspoon of jam with three crackers and a pinch of parsley from the window box.  You can head down to your car where you inexplicably have more gas than you did the night before when you parked it and your mailbox has five dollars in it because why the hell not.  Your watch is five minutes fast, but you're ten minutes ahead of schedule anyway driving down to the metro station to take the train into town because suburban life is where you're at and the sun is beaming right above and slightly to your right along the drive, but clouds are providing enough shade to turn that eyebrow searing ball into a calendar photograph of light and deeper blues like an angel just mowed the sky and crystals of fresh cut sunshine are filling the nostrils of your eyes.  Your parking space is taken, but there's an entire row of empty spaces right at the metro entrance and you glide on in

and slam your hand in your own door and drop your phone and crack the screen.  The year long train pass you just bought is still at home thirty minutes away tucked in your wallet and the teller at the ticket booth inside the station is occupied outside of the booth talking with a police officer to a homeless man who appears to be shouting about how he has a right to sit in the station if he's bought a ticket if he isn't sleeping so you have to squeeze through the turnstile behind another guy who enjoys it a little too much and keeps standing way too close to you on the platform while you wait for the train to come, glancing at you sideways just long enough for you to feel it every time you glance away and you consider, hand throbbing, to turn back and go home before you realize your car keys are not in your pocket.  Which is about when the guy with the baby strapped to his chest and the double wide stroller sidles up to you just in time for the train to arrive and one of his three little mouths to immediately begin wailing with just too little time for you to try to sidle away and hopefully get a more favorable car, but you've hesitated a little too long, with a single step back, to allow a massive crush of other downtown hats to clog the train's entrance and with standing room only your tie gets stuck in a teenager's lattice of straps covering their high country winter-pacolypse knapsack and a cloud of fast-food hash, bacon, and cheese burps.

Just like that, a perfect day, a perfectly normal day goes straight to hell because life is unpredictable and people are the problem.  People are the problem including yourself.  That's fine.  I can deal with that.  I'm an adult and all of the years of dealing with family members and friends and sometimes enemies and strangers and acquaintances has lead me to a place in life where sharing a bus bench with someone who has the worst body odor I have ever had the pleasure of quaffing actually does not phase me so much as it brings me to a place of curiosity.  Is that odor being generated by dark magic?  Were they hexed in another life or did they run over a gypsy in a night of drunken driving a week before and the gypsy's son is still learning how to cast curses and the best he could manage was a stink hex?  How many days do you have to skip showering to reach an all star level of odor like that?  I've had my streaks, but hot damn that stink is transcendent.  Why are you on a bus right now?  I should've walked.  Why didn't I leave earlier so I could walk?  It's only 6 miles.

I can deal with the unpredictability of life due to people.  It's unavoidable.  If you don't get in your own way, someone else eventually will try to, whether they intend to or not.  What I cannot deal with is dysfunctional weather.  Global warming is completely screwing up my life.  Not, you know, in the sense that I have to move because my beach front shack is slowly being swallowed by the sea or out of season hurricanes have destroyed my high rise condos or winter flooding ate my car, but in the sense that I have no idea what to wear or what the hell to do in what order.  Gardening is a big part of my life.  It keeps me calm.  It keeps me peaceful.  I never have moments while gardening where I want to grab a plant by its collar and strangle it with the fabric of its own shirt until its eyes bulge out of its head and then drag it to an open window and hurl into the busy freeway below and cup an ear for the thud and splash.  I've never had the urge to shout at a plant until my vocal cords rupture and blood fires out of my nose and mouth and paints a wall canvas.  Gardening is a wonderful and peaceful and calming elemental thing.  Sliding my fingers through soil and plucking weeds, and wonderful quiet conversation while the wind whispers and maybe a little rain dots us all while the sun shines and we can laugh and smile at each other, but not with this backwards weather running all over everything.

Is it going to snow?  Who the hell knows.  Is it going to freeze tomorrow?  Who the hell knows.  I love sleeping.  Do I try to fall asleep with the windows open or closed?  Is the air temperature going to feel like the actual temperature or should I account for the wind kicking up to gale force speeds for absolutely no reason at all around 2 A.M. and wake me up in a hot sweat underneath too many blankets and then freeze my skin right through to the muscle as soon as I swing the blankets away to dry my body sized wet spot on my mattress.  Do I shower again at 2 A.M. or do I wait an hour and itch and scratch wind blown dry skin all night because I fell asleep again before remembering to close the windows and pull the blankets up tight?  Sleep has gone right down the tubes because even if the windows are closed and the right number of blankets and under sheets are in place there is still the very very good chance that the thermostat is set to the wrong number because it snowed the previous morning, warmed through the day, and then dropped again in the evening, but did not get cold enough to require the use of hot forced air to remain comfortable and now hot air is blasting all over my face and my lips are drying out like Sponge Bob underneath a heat lamp.  What is going on, planet Earth?

I'm getting old.  I've got back problems, man.  My hip hasn't been right for nearly half a year now.  You would think that I would know when the weather is about to start doing strange things simply by putting a stethoscope to my knee and a tuning fork on my elbow and turning around three times.  I should know when a miniature Nor' Easter is on the way down my street simply from all of the accumulated aches and bumps and "shoulda gone to the doctor, but still can't really afford it"s I've sucked up over the years.  I'm getting old, but I'm not old yet so I'm still learning how to listen to all the tiny little signals that hint at things like walking with a hobble all day because the gummy tissues in my ankle are going to be swollen all day because that's just what they do when it's going to be cold and rainy and there's nothing you can do about it except try to smooth it out into a young man's confident strut or at least hope that's what it looks like when people see me from across the street.  I'm a young old person so I don't have the practice yet and with weather spinning every which way I have no clue how I'm going to feel throughout the day or if I'll need to have the pain killers in my night stand for when I wake up or if I'll need four shots before bed to stay asleep because something bizarre is happening outside my window and stabbing knife edge pain will wake me up at some point during the evening without liquor blanketing my nerve endings.

I may not necessarily need stability from people.  Asking for stability from people is a lot like asking a dog to not bark.  Ever.  It may be able to shut up for a while, maybe most of  a day, maybe even a few days straight, but at some point its going to have that dream where a squirrel falls out of a tree and lands dead in its face and they'll lock eyes for a moment to figure out who will make the first move while John Wu doves rise from the long grass and samurai flick wisteria flower petals tumble through the breeze and it will bark so loud it wakes both of you up from a pleasant mid-afternoon nap.  What I do need is stability from nature.  I need to be able to know that I can hang up a jacket or put away a pair of pants or hang up my boots and blankets without fear of some ridiculous blizz-nado howling through the middle of my street at some unreasonable hour after a fine afternoon at the basketball court and catching pneumonia in my sleep.

"Why are you late for work today?"  Well, I left my windows open to listen to the first crickets of the Spring and a thin layer of frost covered my apartment and all of my joint and back injuries from the last four years flared up at once and when I woke up my face was stuck to my pillow with snot and I couldn't get out of bed for half an hour because of shooting pain throughout my body.  I took a good long bath with some Epsom salts and by then I was about an hour late so when I walked out to my car in a jacket and sweatshirt and gloves and scarf I got about halfway there before I started sweating bullets because it was on its way to a high of 65 so I had to walk back up to my apartment and change into something I wouldn't completely sweat through by the time I got here because I haven't showered in two days because its impossible for me to tell when to shower specifically because I never know if it will be a waste of water because I may sweat out a few gallons in my sleep and my pits still stink despite the bath so I had to make sure I wouldn't smell too bad by the time I arrived, because with my nose stuff up the way it is, I can only assume based on the length of time... "the day's half over, go home!"

Come on, nature!  Get it together.  This trickle down effect of dysfunction breeding dysfunction into my life is a no go.  Figure out what you want to do and let me know so I can get things in order in my own life and at least rely on the fact that it will be hot in Summer, cold in Winter, chilly in fall, and crisp in Spring.  Enough with this spin the wheel of seasons nonsense.  I can't get anything done when I have to keep changing things around to accommodate you.