That Instant

You come face to face with your loss of dexterity and you know you will never get it back.

That Instant

you remember you left your spare pack of smokes on your desk and run over the cost/benefit analysis of running back up to your apartment versus going on an evening walk without them before closing and locking the door.

Move Town

I get so caught up with making the people around me things as a way of saying thanks and payment that I forget to make myself- to do what I want to do because I owe my existence, my here and now, to those people by a currency that will never translate because they don't know fully what they helped me reach escape velocity away from what I saw as an insurmountable margin and I don't view it as penance or clinging to the past or misplaced.  I see it as a continuous consciousness of how tenuous life can be and a ten four toward how the smallest gesture, the smallest show of what someone outside of a relationship might see as pity pence or enabling weakness can actually be a point and moment where you've helped someone's life turn a corner.  It's burdensome to think about and it takes a piece out of myself to do it, but everyone is thanked out of reflex and I feel more comfortable in my own skin, helpless and power filled at once, when I have taken the time to let them know the fact that I am still alive now is not by chance or the grace of a supreme being and is by their taking their time to pitch a penny or several thousand into my hat.  To fool yourself into thinking you've done it by yourself or by chance or by blessing or sheer hard work grind is something I want to make sure I never do.  So maybe it is an anchor.  Maybe it is an unnecessary sacrifice and can be framed as a guilt or a confirmation of sin and imperfection.  A penance.  I don't see it that way and will never come around to that frame of mind.  So much of life is decisions and whether it suits me or not a lot of those decisions happen outside of myself.  I accept that.  So please, accept my outside decision to thank you and the universe outside of myself that you have had a hand, direct and indirectly, in forming.

Once we're clear of that, we can shift focus back to fantasy lands and dreamscapes.  There isn't much more distance to cover and I am happy for that.  Excited for that.  There are times when I feel like every other word is about some future date when the resources are at their correct levels and processes have synchronized and the planets have lined up into something close to a grand cross and if I am twenty minutes in to 5th Element while listening to acid jazz with my heaphones in my key tray and I've already consulted my little sister and am suitably numb mouthed from too many cigarettes and just the right amount to dissuade me from running to the gas station to purchase more and the moon is a waning gibbous on a clear night with rain in the forecast for early before the sun comes up with the option to sit outside with a fire at any point prior barring the anything prior to the immediate because it did not rain the day through at work, where I box myself in to unrealistic expectations as a way to never have to actually execute anything.  If you never pull the trigger, you never have to learn whether or not there is more to learn about what you want to do.  Whatever you have conceptualized is its best and most perfect form.  You never have to translate.  I wanted to have children.  I can have children.  Meet my family!  It's almost like every idea is that part of you other people talk about and love, but if they ever did meet you, the rest of you, they'd screw their nose up and rub their squished shut eyes like they just saw an apple snap loose from a twig and fall up to disappear into the sky.

I get very caught up, but I have not forgotten my own needs.  It eats me out from the inside, but I never forget the gnaw and the sound of it and the feel of it, the blood cough taste of it, nose running, water eyed mechanics of it.  They scream at me.  I'm moving forward as fast as I can.  I swear, I am.  The days disappear swiftly.  The nights are restless, strapped to a mattress.  Fear lurks in corners.  Cats ask questions.  Notes are taken on walls and skin and misnamed folders.  Bite a lower lip and squeal from the top of the foothills of the mountain range, the clouds ahead of the temperature front doing strange things above the peaks and the ground bellowing thunder lake swells and strikes days distant, birds moving town in brunch sky above.  Sip.  Nod.  Please pass the olives.  Cross a leg and scribble onward.



///Sylvan Esso - "Uncatena"

Dear (_____)

Dear Union Pig and Chicken,

Please do better.  Or continue to do the same, I suppose.  Either way, it's fairly clear you're smoke house food and bar is not for my kind.  My friend sitting across from me cussed at the television because the Pirates game was on and a bull shit call happened, and the manager came out of the Pirate's dugout and was clearly mouthing "no, no, no, that is bull shit" on live television several times over, and my friends exact words were "ah, that's bull shit" on the loud side and we went back to our conversation about the idiosyncrasies of baseballs rules.  Your wait staffer went out of their way to admonish him with widened and upset eyes that cursing was not for the bar area or U, P, & C, unless we were in the back room playing adventure bingo.  The staffer kept on as though about to ask us to leave.

We got a "to go" order and were only waiting for a half pound of brisket to arrive in a paper bag while we shared a cider from a can.  The hell, UPC?  It was 9:30.  You close at Ten.  Everyone upstairs was talking loudly.  We were sitting at a table four feet away from the bar because that's where your waiter sat us after I let him know we just wanted a drink while we waited for my"to go."
Was it our beards?  Was it our clothes?  The single swear word?  Among all adult clientele, at a bar, while everyone else was drinking?  Why the glaring?  Why the threatening posture?  Why did your staffer feel like they had to say "swearing is not for out here, is that clear" before taking our drink order of a single can of beer and a pair of waters and repeating the question when we asked if we can order and move on?

No smoking? fine.  Everyone understands that.  No screaming and shouting profanity enough to paint the walls?  Sure, no one wants to hear that while they're eating or trying to relax.  Threatening denial of service for a remark about a game on the televisions at a bar of all places that is damn near empty I visited to have a drink and grab a little over priced grub in exchange for a tip and live sports for twenty minutes?  I'm confused.

Please do better.  Or continue to do the same, I suppose.  Either way, it's fairly clear there's a kind of person you do not want as a customer in East Liberty and my friend and I are they.  In retrospect, it's not that disappointing.  I feel a little goofy now, not realizing and reading from the interior decor, the folks populating a few of the bar stools and a booth, and our initial interaction, that your place is not the place for us.

Thanks anyway?

You Do You

That Instant

you are watching porn with a friend and you both nerd out like eight-year-olds opening a new pack of Magic cards when you simultaneously notice the set has a copy of Super Mario All-Stars on its bookshelf.