Reflections in ripple pond

When I look back on what little bit of my short life I can remember, one of the only decisions I would most certainly change is one time when I grabbed a handful of front brake instead of clutch. It was more reaction than decision, but when viewed in relation to the vast number of quite possibly not quite perfect decisions, the fact that's at the top is curious. However, with that bike out of my life, I was probably better off. I was about to sell it, which may have been handy, but maybe the lesson about brakes will come in handy someday. Maybe I'll tell the boy about it and it'll save his life.
I'd be pretty happy if the afterlife was an examination of our life on earth but with the ability to see the outcome of each different decision we could have made, it's impact on us and those around us. Also how other's decisions affected our life could be analyzed. Then, after we've exhausted each possibility, we get to return to life in a new body and have another go at it--and this time, we don't wreck the bike.

Habits

I'm to that age where I've been doing some things longer than I haven't been doing them. A decade seems so long when you're young. I'm still young. Graduated college ten years ago. What has happened since was for a time quite a hard ride to hang on to, but now it's settled down into a more normal situation. I've given up the youthful ambition to an abnormal life. Its just a show march to the end now, hopefully with some high points along the way. This may not be the end of the world, but I can see it from here.
If you could see the future would you want to? If you could wake up tomorrow and know the rest of your life? The losses, the low points, the high points, the end moment?
Sometimes I feel surrounded by the spirits of the ones that have died already, and sometimes the spirits of those still alive, just far away. Some days it's like a cloud around me, other days it's like a cloak.
At any rate, getting older is mostly boring. I've seen a lot of what can happen. What's the point I wonder? It's not so hopeless to pull the trigger on a brain drain, but it certainly does make you want to absorb each tiny second of joy as it passes you by. However, simultaneously, my feet are weighted down by a severe case of the ho-hums. I suppose all this is normal. The ability to think for oneself can be such a drag.
It's weird to think of how long you've known someone. Say you meet when you were fourteen. Now you're thirty one. When you met them it was so exciting and fresh. Now you've known them longer than you haven't known them. You grow accustomed to new habits, like a new neighborhood, a new house to zig zag through in the dark and find the cups without a light, a new liquor store with new local beer.
You can give up so much of yourself so swiftly without even noticing. The statue of future you, built by your teenage self, slowly eroded and chipped away to only the iron core in a mere fifteen years. Added to, surely, in unseen ways, and chipped away at, surrendered, for the concept of the common good, until you're not even sure what you started out as, what you are now or how exactly you got here.
And here we sit. Idly wondering, curious, not entirely concerned, just intrigued. The farther down the rabbit hole we fall, the less we recognize! The more you experience the more you realize you'll never comprehend.
At any rate, it's different. The situation itself is not different than it ever was, just the prism through which you view it has been modified, as will it continue to be. In the end it's a chair in the sun by a window.

Wine would help

It doesn't always have to be in focus to get the picture.

Sometimes I wish I was a burning newspaper ember floating from a burn barrel out on the farm.  As I drift above the cornfield, almost above the peak of the barn, I would look below and see spread below me, a magical sight.  Stretched the length of the garden like pumpkins on the vine are visions of myself at different stages in my storied life.  Like a museum exhibit the display marks the progression of my character.  By nurture and surroundings I meld and mold, sometimes matching my surroundings and sometimes flying directly against their cold stony cliff faces.

In my mind there's a photograph, a collection of snapshots, of who i saw myself as at different times of my life.  none of them are me now but is that disappointing or is it a revelation? or is it both?  it could be merely a current misconception of myself.  is it a calling to be more and do more?  or is it just a twitch of the brain, a flashforward of a thought from years back, come to prick my current brain awake from its slumberous state?  the great beast awakens, stumbling around on sleeping legs, searching for a pawhold in the inky blackness of the cave.  it wanders toward the deep blue of early, early dawn barely illuminating the entrance.  the smell of pines reminds the beast where it lay its head and the events of the previous night come back slowly like puzzle pieces falling through a lava lamp and landing more or less in the proper order.  the wind sings an early morning hymn of welcome through the boughs above, and the beast looks about for a brook barely hinted at by the smell of wetness and a recollection of damp feet.  The brook must not be very deep.  There is much to do today; or is there anything at all?  the list is fluid, much like the brook; the perception is the viewer's alone.

And in the cave--nothing.  Outside the cave--everything.  How did the beast arrive here, and does it matter?  From where did the feeling of a need to move on arise?  Is it a valid feeling?  Should it be acted upon?  Until the answer is clear, what should be done?
A quiet, ominous sound from nearby bushes confirms the answer.  The enemy is too close and the time to flee has fleetingly flown.  Now is the time to stand, fight, deliver, conquer.
I'm slowly forgetting all the things that used to make me real.  Once up on a time there was a mighty large rock, halfway up a hillside on the northwest side.  Upon this rock's face were carved the characteristics of Luke:  hard working, hard living, yet with an eye and an ear for the beautiful.   An amphibian of unnatural skill and ability, I have melded and molded to match my current surroundings, yet the slimy weak Mid-American Spotted-Belly Salamander has not forgotten his inner Twin-Tailed Shark Face Mountain Lizard soul.  Is this growing up?  How do you hold on to that flame without burning your fingers?

That sneaky feeling

I get that strange feeling of being watched.  I drive through your neighborhood every day and I think you know it.  I think you know when.  Maybe not every day, but some days you see me.  You're out running errands, coming back from school, going to drop something off perhaps, or grab groceries for dinner and you look up and see my truck go by.  I don't know what you think about when this happens.  I don't know if you smile, frown; maybe look away.  I don't know if you laugh at how I put my hand on the steering wheel.  I wonder if you compare my old truck to the other, nicer cars surrounding me.  Maybe you think back on the friendship we had, the laughs we shared, the connections made.

I don't.  I just keep on driving.

The Drive To Work

On my way to work this morning, I remembered a shirt I saw in Breckenridge once.  I was enjoying the margarita happy hour at a downstairs taco bar on a Tuesday night when in walks a young, dreadlocked dirty hippie guy wearing a tshirt that said  POOR UGLY HAPPY.  Someone said it was an unofficial ski club or something, most likely a naturally occurring reaction to the common insurgence of RICH PRETTY SAD TEXANS.  I shouldn’t say that.  Colorado mountain folk generally cast a gloomy eye upon the visiting vacationers that come in and support the wintertime economy.  I’m not sure why this happens, I just picked up the vibe whie living and working in the small mountain communities.  Its almost as if they resent the Texans for their ability to vacation and have fun, yet forget it’s the very lifeblood of their existence; even in the summertime when the lifties and bartenders switch to their warm-weather income of landscaping and carpentering—it’s the Texas gold that turns the economic wheels. 

                But I digress.  It’s the paint on the walls of the taco bar I meant to converse with you about.  As I remember, the stairway down into the house of taco was narrow, wooden and sported the typical low ceiling of old basement stairs.  The walls were adorned with a refreshingly not-chain-restaurant variety of castoff memorabilia, the cast-aside bits of a 100-year old high-altitude resort town that after a requisite amount of time stir a certain feeling of nostalgia, of the good old days, when life was easy and cares were few.  Behind this first layer of wallcovering was the the second-a bright, sunshiny paint typical of what American restaurant owners use when trying to remind the dining public of a more southern exposure.  Yellow, orange, maybe green the walls, with a 48-inch-high wainscoting topped by a shy chair rail.  The stairs deposited the arriving guest at the corner of a cramped, weathered, beaten L-shaped bar, seating for 6 or 8, tops, backed by a busy barman in a dishwashing apron with a surprisingly trimmed beard (for a young hippie) and a small chalkboard touting the night’s drink specials.  In my opinion all drinks are special, and all gainfully employed, happy hippies are also a pleasure to be around, so I sat myself down and ordered up two margaritas and a plate of tacos.

                I’m not here to rehash some downstairs fish tacos and a mediocre margarita drunk that ended up with me waist-deep in a snowbank after jumping some lady’s backalley fence, however.  I wanted to tell you about Bub’s Café, a 7-2 breakfast joint at the Midwest’s ground zero for arts and design, the very epicenter of sky-pointed noses, the nucleus of the disposable income  jetset of the Grain Belt—Carmel, Indiana.  Bub’s Café does not have drink specials, nor do the employ hippies—they don’t even have a downstairs.  However, they DO have brightly colored walls.  I think this hidden memory, this faint, alcohol-fuzzed flashback from a long ago pub crawl on a Tuesday, has offered me a glimpse into how the brain functions.  Like a half-dead man crawling through the desert, parched with thirst yet still remembering the basic functions and machinations of life, my brain could have reacted to the pleasant memories associated with that little bar over a thousand miles away that I only patronized for a couple hours of a busy, busy life, and that could be why I love having breakfast at Bub’s.

The Beginning

I've heard it said there are only two important times in a man's life: when he leaves home, and when he returns.  I've also heard it said the most important possession, the very source of wealth, is friendship. 

The best part of my story is it started with no compunction of starting a story; no plan, no goal, not even a glimmer of knowledge there was a story about to start.  I merely left home, one foot in front of the other (probably the left foot) and off I walked, into the wild blue yonder, never to return for more than a day, for ten short years.  Ten years of the minutes taking hours to pass, the hours taking months, but the years taking mere seconds. 

Here we are, on the other end (hopefully!) at rest.  A rolling stone tends to continue rolling, until it collects so much moss it comes to a position of rest, propped up against weariness and a woman.  Sometimes when the wind blow the moss is ruffled.  Sometimes an animal adjusts its travel pattern to come and sniff the base of the stone, but the stone sits.  How it got here is no mystery if broken into little bits, but a complete mystery if one observes the larger canvas. 

At the end of all this wandering, covered inn moss, leaning up against the base of what I imagine is a white maple tree in the midst of a forest, partway up a hillside with a deer trail close by its side, is a very thoughtful, memoryful, contemplative stone.  Is its worldview different than the other stones around it?  Well perhaps.  The stones in the creek are smooth and clean on their topsides, and occasionally if they get rolled over, they get cleaned on their bottomside.  Some of the stones are underground.  No more need be said about them. So, there are a lot of stones, with a lot of worldviews.  Here is mine, and here is from whence it came.

You are probably apprised of the general timeline, the places I came to a position of rest, and the places I rolled right on by.  Some of them are forgotten, some remain but a dim memory, and some are exceedingly vivid.  The I-don't-want-to-talk-to-you version is as follows:

"Well, I went to one college, didn't like it, so I went to another one.  After I graduated, I went to Denver, worked several different jobs, ended up in the mountains, moved around some more, and then decided to move home."

The other version, the one I like a lot more, is this:  "Did I ever tell you about the time I got pulled out of the snow in the middle of nowhere by an oil field welder who then showed me back to civilization?" or "Did I ever tell you about the time in Apache Junction when I jumped a tweeker's concrete wall and got a cactus spine stuck under my fingernail?  No? What about the time I was on the rough side of Aurora, Colorado and was the only white guy at the quinciniera?"  Did I tell you about smoking cigarettes on the roof with two lesbians after a hard night of long island iced teas while two ferrets played grab-ass in the bedroom?  Did I tell you about telling the District Attorney I was majoring in women after his daughter brought me home for the weekend? HAAAAHAHAHAHAHA yea I bet I skipped that story!

Its all real.  It all happened.  I can't make it up.  Hours and hours of stories--it'd be even more if we got a couple guys around that could remember the parts I forgot.  I don't even know where to start.

We could start in the fall of the year.  I think it was 2007.  Early elk season was about to start in Colorado.  That typically wouldn't mean anything, since I don't hunt (but I do love elk meat). It DOES matter though, because where I was working, and at that point thereby living, was accessed by a private road through seven gates, each denoting the beginning or end of someone's property, and one of the someones made his money helping rich men who couldn't do it on their own kill elk.  So, I had to leave before it would spook the elk and disrupt the hunt.  I know right--not your typical rush hour on the 405.  So, I packed my gear and left about 2:30.  Sure wish I would have grabbed my Harley on the way out but you never know, that could have changed the course of history had I done so.  I was encouraged to leave for several reasons, let's just say for now it was good for a number of people, and we all thought it was a great idea; except for the guy I almost killed that morning, he was probably clueless. 

At any rate, a couple days later I was thousands of miles from any live elk, living in a FEMA trailer three blocks from a private beach on the Gulf of Mexico.  I was only there for about three weeks, living the high life with some hippies, until I drove 30 hours round trip to a memorable (in no good way) Thanksgiving getogether in Washington, D.C, after which I sallied-ho on toward Houston for two weeks before winging across the big ocean that swallowed a city to the desert oasis of Dubai-but only for a day or two.  Then it was Baghdad for a few days, Tikrit for two weeks, and then on up to Kirkuk, Iraq-home sweet home for 8 months.  Yea, that happened.  In fact, that's where this blog started!  Yup, Kirkuk.  At a computer in a metal box hidden behind 15-foot-tall concrete barriers, protected by two overworked air conditioners that ran 24/7 from March to October.  Of course, silly me, (this was before I learned about desert heat in Apache Junction) I arrived in the desert on New Years Eve, and froze my scrawny white ass off.  I had not heeded the kind words of the oil magnates in Houston who advised me to bring warm clothing. 

Well, after enough of the bullshit of living a life where every day is exactly the same for 8 months straight, I moved on back to the good ole USofA and went back to building luxury cabins for uber-rich folk.  Except, SURPRISE!  A couple of them got too greedy somewhere along the course of time, and the damn housing bubble floated alllll the way up to the crystal chandelier, pressed itself gently upon on of the green, eco-friendly, long-lasting, low-sodium, natural-light halogen lightbulbs and burst, sprinkling all those dancing and carousing under it with teeny tiny flakes of shimmering sadness, confusion and loss.  What that means is, I made a phone call, got a job, packed my truck AGAIN and headed off through the frozen Rockies AGAIN to a new job in a new town AGAIN.  This time on the other end so to speak of the oil business.  Where before I had been working as a contractor for the United States Government to protect our grandchildren's ability to get oil from the Iraqis (under the auspices of protecting the right to democracy for some shepherds from some mean asshole in the desert on the other side of the world) I now worked as the watchful eyes and ears of the man pulling the oil from Mother Earth right here in 'Merica.  The snake has its tail in its mouth.

To be continued.  I'm hungry.

Yellow

He stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame.

"Come here," he said quietly.  She got up, her eyes never leaving his, and walked over to him from behind the table, as if her feet were gliding, guided by angels. He reached out with one hand, his fingertip on the back of her earlobe, making her yellow earring catch the light and sparkle.  His fingertips brushed her neck and she shivered.

He smiled.

~~~~~

The sunlight crept up his body slowly.  The cool breeze off the ocean had stiffened his muscles overnight.  He awoke slowly, hitching himself over in the hammock so he could enjoy the view as he awoke.  The dream faded slowly from his mind, meshing with the view before him as he adapted to the world of the awake once again.

He could almost see her, walking slowly along the golden beach, the morning sun playing on her yellow hair, the breeze tugging her skirt like an eager laughing child.  The palm trees swayed gently as if her passing disturbed their slumber. The air smelled of salt, of the wet fishing nets, and if he breathed deeply enough, the smell of her hair wet from an early-morning swim.

~~~~~~~~~~~

He wasn't sure where the dream came from.  He was certain he'd had it before--it had that feeling of familiarity, like walking into a house you've been in years before; you feel as though you've been there before, but you're not sure where things are exactly.  You wander down the hallway confident the living room lies before you, but you know not whether its to the right or the left.  You find a set of stairs, and know that at the top, there is a hallway, with a bedroom to the right and the left, and another at the end, but you don't know how you know this.  That's what the dream felt like.  He knew the girl, she felt very familiar, but he never saw her face.  He knew the feeling of her eyes upon his, and sometimes the desire to feel her pressed against him woke him with a start.  Someday, someday.  She, this mystery woman; she was what kept him on the road all these years.  Ever searching, ever moving, ever curious to cross the next hill or round the next curve--maybe she was there, hitch-hiking for a gallon of gas or serving pie at a roadside restaurant.

He told himself he was a wanderer, that it was his nature, his duty.  The more the dream came to visit him however, he began to wonder.  Was there a certain amount of mileage to cover in order to finally see her face?  Did he have to walk into a set number of strange places before he got to see what she looked like, to feel her eyes upon him, to know it was her?

~~~~

Kicking his feet over the edge of the hammock, he shuffled into his flip flops and stood for the first time that day.  Taking a looong stretch, moaning aloud and scratching his sides, he looked around.  A path appeared to his left, turning behind him and heading away from the beach.  Seeing no one, he relieved himself on the side of a coconut tree and then ambled up the path toward town.  The bar was surely closed this early in the day, given the nature of its peak hours, but he remembered seeing a restaurant a few doors down.

The smell of frying fish and the noise of familiar conversation guided his feet.  The place was on his left, under a swinging yellow sign depicting a gull gliding over the waves with a sunrise in the background.  "Morning Glory," he muttered aloud--"sure hope the food lives up to the billing!" Ducking through the built-for-natives doorway, he paused to let his eyes adjust.  It was then he saw her.