Month the Eighteenth

8.23.24 Delayed Gratification

Frome whence the darkness came I banish my fear. It is in admitting we are afraid that we are able to go beyond fear, to the place where there is only the cheerful optimism and the calm stoicism of knowing that there is no reason to be quaking despite the dreary state of the world, the spectres of national politics and global war and who knows what other calamities are waiting in the wings. There is nothing to be done about them, there is nothing to be done about any of the big picture things. Here in my little world I am smiling and in love and oh so happy. I will go and pound pavement and get all sweaty and then I will eat lunch and bring a coffee to the beauty who brings the smile to my face.

What a joy to be smiling, to be happy as the summer wanes and not headed to a hellish nightscape of hospitals and paranoia, of ripping cigarettes and being afraid to leave the house. I want to cry I am so happy, so grateful that I have a future after all I have been through. There has been hell in the past, and there has been not so much heaven as to offset the hell. Instead, here I am in the earth realm, on this planet that is spinning through space at unimaginable speeds and I just one man in the race of humanity…there is no telling what will become of me but I want to do my best to make sure that I make an impact of some kind. See better what I can become and be that, do my damndest to continue this line of unbroken humanity that stretches back how many tens of thousands of years.

That is to say have a child, or two, and raise them with a woman I love dearly. What a change from just such a short time ago when I was searching for a way out of what I knew so desperately that I did not want. It is hard that she may someday read that, but I must tell the truth here, the ever shifting truth of my person. I am happy that the truth this summer is not so radical as last year. That I am not obsessed with God, trying to figure out all the things that bring the spiritual into the limelight…all the answers are not so important as the realization that you are here and you are free to act. That you are free to be happy and give love and receive love and try to effect positive change in this world, even if it is just brightening someone’s day every once in a while.

There is no limit to what we can accomplish, or rather that is not literally true, but inspirational rhetoric intended here to illuminate that the limits we place on ourselves are mostly artificial and not the real limits. I want to write a book about a girl who runs away to join the carnival. I want to finish my book about immortality, to finish my book about film. But not today, today is for this, is for exercise, is for silliness and maybe even a smooch from the lady. It is another beautiful summer day if a bit cool for things like going to the beach. But who has time for that, any of that when one must work in the late afternoon. Must ply the waters of the bartop for tips that will hopefully pay my way for another week or so. It is not my favorite occupation, this surely takes the cake for that. To sit and wade in the shallows of my mind or dive deep to the places where the ideas are sometimes a little scary and far out. I hope you appreciate both iterations of this text, as I am not fully in control of which it will be.

Where was I going with that? I can’t say, but not necessarily because I do not know. I am just here to think about the joy of the moment, the present moment when I am feeling at peace. Like Tara said I look when I am sleeping, and that that peace is contagious. There have been a lot of people encouraging peace over the years, and I am happy to lend my voice to that chorus. I am happy to do a lot of things, and I hope that someday this is read in the context that the world right now is a scary place but within our little worlds we are proving every moment that government is not greater than God. The force of what is, in that context. We are still living productive lives, most of us, though what that productivity is worth were humanity to vanish tomorrow might not be a question worth asking.

I think I’m going to get on with my day, leaving you here with my inane meandering thoughts. There have been so many dark days this last twelve months that I am due for a run of happiness. This here sentence is a prayer that it keeps going, that there is no cessation to the nights I can spend snuggled up with the one I love most dearly. For I love many, but there is now a separation between that love and the beloved, the one beloved who makes me tingle at the thought of her fingers on my neck. Who makes me smile at the very thought of seeing her face. Who though she stresses about me leaving her for a younger woman should know that her being older is among the most attractive things about her. Should know that she is perfect for me, no matter what the future brings.

Goodnight, L&G. Though it is still technically morning this day’s entry could come to you at any time. That is the beauty of words, is that they arrive in their own time, both in composition and consumption. I am just happy that I have fingers to type, that I have something, if little, to say. I long to have my picture taken, I long to settle down. I long for not so many things anymore, but the things I long for are important and achievable. I’m glad if you have borne with me all this time, for a year and a half almost, of all of this directionless meandering text. I hope I do not bore you, that the inside of my brain is as pretty as she tells me my face is. I don’t know about all that, but I think that if you can see that life is excellent at times, and that even the bad times serve a purpose in the grand comedy of a life then I will have accomplished what I set out to do. Thank you if you have read this far, I will try to mix it up in the future without straying too far from this as measurement of the moments that comprise a life. It is a diary after all.

TTFN.

8.24.24 Glamorama

The better you look, the more you see. Only that turned out to be a crock of shit in that one, as herr Victor could not see the ruination coming his way in the novel’s first movement. But this is not a lit review, this is an exploration of all the things that cross my mind, and this afternoon the Glamorama universe is fresh at the top. I have never read Easton Ellis before and I must admit I like his style. Deliberately unhinged, I would say, in the best possible way. Of course I saw American Psycho but that was ages ago and I was too numb to find it as disturbing as it was. A couple days ago I watched part of Rules of Attraction, it was pretty good. Strange, that I have ambitions to write books that are in no way like that. That inimitable style that he has developed over the years.

I think I am happy as I sit here smelling street corn and debating a high noon. I need to go to work in a little while but it seems a long way off even though it is less than an hour. I wish I did not have to go, that I could sit at the typer and call that a workday, but unfortunately if I wish to make ends meet I must go be a pretty face. With any luck it will be over before I realize it, and I will be home to crawl into bed with Tara and prepare to go back in the morning and do it all over again. The working life seems to never end, but maybe there is an end in sight.

I mean, there has to be a break coming. I know it. I can feel it. I know the work is good and even if this project amounts to a whole lot of nothing there will still be others. I’ve written five books for chrissake, that has to count for something. Maybe even one of them is good. Maybe good, I muse, if not groundbreaking. Or maybe even groundbreaking, maybe something has come out of me that is unique enough and palatable enough to the general public that it will even sell. I almost wrote ‘smell’ because the scents coming out of the pans on the stove are making my stomach growl. I know I know I know I can be a success.

And yet I sit here and ply the inanities, the wishful thinking about what could be hoping somehow that there is a way other than endless query letters to make it in the world of letters. Maybe, maybe not, there are some potential contacts who maybe could help. And in the meantime I try to write every day, maybe even will get back into fiction, that slippery minx of a genre that so many books come out under even though most of them cannot be any good. Or maybe they are all good and my taste is distorted by too much lit fic. By too much satire, by too much poetry. I know that books can make you feel and I hope someday that people tell me that mine do to them. It is hard to be a bartender when the only thing you have wanted to be since you were twenty is a writer.

And of course I am a writer. Writers write, it is their defining characteristic, and I am writing now even if it is only on the topic of writing and my frustrations with publishing. They will persist until I have a book that sells. Or maybe not, maybe my fascination with the artistic set, with writers and poets as main characters will fall flat in the light of the public eye. It does seem a little near to me that the characters and I have so much in common. Though of course there was the book about the cult, the Organization of Superior Mothers. Maybe I will even get around to writing Kristine someday, or maybe I will pick up where I left off on the USC piece, or the Snake Tattoo one. Maybe I will embark on the one where the girl runs off to join the carnival, or sort of join the carnival, though I don’t know what perspective to tell it from yet.

There are endless possibilities, as Tara said as I asked her what I should write about today. Of course I ended up with this, so who knows what that means. Does it matter what it means? Does it have to mean anything? Can’t this just be what it is? Isn’t that the whole point of the Grasshopper Diary? That the grasshopper (me) explores himself on a given day and maybe someday people will enjoy reading about what was happening on all these days that are probably numbering into the hundreds by now. That it will follow me for twelve years like a reality tv show about the inside of my brain. Of course the inside of my brain is all neurons and ganglia and ionic channels, dopamine and serotonin and norepinephrine and I can’t for the life of me remember the last neurotransmitter. It is not so important I guess. 

But I am having a good day, having read over eighty pages and sat while Tara mowed the lawn in an approximation of what domestic life might look like. I know I know I should mow the lawn but gender roles be damned but it’s her house and she enjoys it. And I lost an hour in the world of Victor Moss and Chloe Byrnes and Alison Poole and Lauren Hynde and Damien Nutch Ross. If I spelled all those names right it will be a miracle, but I am enthralled with the magical surrealism of that ‘90s New York fantasy that at the end there turned slightly violent (I am not at the end, to be clear) and just a touch disturbing as the world came crashing down around Victor.

I hope the world does not come crashing down around me, as it is always capable of doing. I don’t know that the world can be capable, but certainly ruin or even death are always on the table when we enter the world. I just heard today about a man with terminal lung cancer at 39. If such things don’t make you want to put out your cigarette then I don’t know what will. I have had three today, only one of which was good, mind you. So maybe I am making progress. Certainly I am smoking less. With any persistence soon maybe I will be smoking not at all. I have quit once before, I shall do so again. The same tired rigmarole in here about the struggle; about the cravings and the habit and the urge to control fire with your mouth. With the nicotine withdrawal and the ache that drives your nerves crazy. Of course the patches help, as does alcohol, though sometimes too that makes you want one. I want to live practically forever though, so I must end the habit that has defined so much of my identity for almost a decade.

Where was I going with that? Oh yes, that I want a family and a long and happy life that doesn’t end in a debilitating illness or even a deadly one. I want to live forever, though not truly forever. I must stop the tobacco, must value my own life so highly that I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize it. It is a form of self-care that has been so hard to practice in my endless depressive moods, though they are not anhedonic anymore and for that I am grateful. I am grateful for so many things, not least of all Tara and the joy that she brings to my days. Even when we argue or disagree I would rather fight with her than sit at my house alone. I am burying the darkness in the bright light of the sun that streams down in the yard onto the lawn chairs and the freshly cut grass. On the trees and the bedframe that leans above the recently severed (and then repaired) gas line. I am hungry and must eat before I go to work, that much is certain. I might even have another noon, might even smoke a bowl. Probably not though, there is no reason to get too silly.

If all my days could be like this one I would be satisfied, a Saturday spent managing myself better than getting drunk and lonely and having conversations with people I shouldn’t. It was a point of contention, the crux of an argument in bed last night, but today we are all smiles and I must admit that if I did anything wrong she at least has the grace to forgive me. It is all I can do to do better, and that I will do, will satisfy my lust for anything to relieve the anxiety and restlessness (haldol) of being alone on a full day when the itch for anything, for cigarettes and wine and company of anyone, some anyone to fill up the space of an empty day when the malaise seems to set in and my buoyancy drops and I begin to sink into depression and substance abuse. Or maybe substance use, but when one is causing oneself problems it is a fine and at times blurry line.

That is all for today, for I must eat and run and then come back to sleep beneath the warm covers with a warm body beside me. That will be a joy, a great joy at the end of a long work day. It is a welcome relief from sterile sheets and an empty bed. And the girls know we are dating, the daughters, that is, and seem to be okay with it, or at least pretending to be. I am happy with the direction my life is heading, and that is more than I could say for a long time. So I will leave you with this: what if everything you ever wanted was as simple as being yourself? What if all you had to do was exist and someone could love you for exactly who you are? Never having to pretend, never having to conceal, never having to do anything but give love.

That is my wish for all of you, but I know that many of you will never know such joy. It seems that not all are so lucky, that many find themselves mired, as I once was, in relationships that do not give the fulfillment necessary to be happy. But if you can find it, hold it close, it is more precious than the world’s second biggest diamond that is making headlines on the internet. I am done, I am tired, I am a teensy bit drunk or at least softened by the alcohol. And preparing to go, to be a smiling face for seven hours or so.

TTFN,

Dick

8.29.24 Thursday

Ah what a week. Worked on my day off yesterday because a small child was having trouble breathing, and I don’t feel so bad about that even if I did miss spending the evening as I intended: a nice dinner and some time reading my first novel aloud to my love. But that is behind me, it is a new day, a scheduled day, and after a shot in the arm I will have some time before work. I wonder what it is I should do. Maybe I will drive to Charlevoix and read, as that has proven a pleasant diversion for me recently. I like the way it feels to be drinking again the words of great writers and trying to learn from the way they compose. It feels like a necessary part of the work.

Of course I have to leave soon, sooner than I wish I did. I want to be able to sit and write for hours every day as if it were my day job. I want it to be my livelihood as well as a practice that I try to strengthen each week though certainly currently maybe I am not being quite so diligent as I should be. But who is to say what should be? I am not always the best judge of that, as I am not the best judge of many things. There are so many things to judge and we are not fit, though some of us are judges and others decide that they are able to know what is right for another. There is no way of telling, is there, what another should do, for we do not have the pieces of their psyche that contribute to the way they make decisions.

I don’t know where this is going, the summer wanes, the official end to the social season being this weekend but of course the astronomical season holds on for a few weeks longer, just past Tara’s birthday when I will have to figure out what to get her as a gift, will have to figure out how to celebrate a milestone that she dreads with each encroaching hour. And this my first year with her, really only four months in, and already talk of marriage and children. There is no time like the present I suppose, and if that seems hasty then fuck right off, sometimes you just know what you want and if you both want the same thing and that thing promises to make you happy then take the leap of faith into the vast and unknowable future and see what comes of what you think it should be. There are no guarantees of anything, except maybe death, and to fulfill the cliché, taxes, and I have said this often but when you care so much for someone that it changes the way you see everything that is a pretty good sign that what you have is something special and you should cherish it and commit to it and see where it takes you.

I know I am a crazy person, surely the fact that I must leave in eighteen minutes to go get a shot of antipsychotic in my deltoid is a testament to that fact. But I am not insane, not truly, not totally. I have a normal range of functioning almost all the time, living and caring and smiling and laughing and sometimes crying when the moods strike their various chords. It is nice to not feel like the medication is holding me back from experiencing life like I once did. How many days did I waste in self-imposed misery thinking that if I could only get free of the drug then I would feel again? How many feelings did I fail to notice as they flitted across the mind, feeling as I did that I was incapable of feeling? Distracted by self-pity I was flailing around in madness, trying to make sense of the world that a combination of psychedelics and bad friends inculcated into my worldview, a mysterious knot of associations that still sometimes plague me late at night as they did last night when I confessed one of my deepest fears to Tara.

It is a delusion, it is not the case that everyone but me is going to live forever and I will miss out on the eternity that the early education in Catholicism promised me, the afterlife that only makes sense to me if we get to experience it here on Earth, in these bodies. I think that that is all a trip and we certainly are going to die, and likely sooner than we want to. I have not had a cigarette today however and that is progress. We are not going to buy any more, they have begun to disgust us, and I understand what Paul meant when he said he regretted every one he ever smoked. Of course there were many good, many satisfying ones, but if we had never smoked them we would never have fostered the addiction that surely took a good number of years off of my life. But what is done is done, and with any luck by finally cutting them out I can stem the bleeding and live a lot more good years with the woman who has made me feel more satisfied than I could ever imagine.

The hour I must leave grows near and this is only a thousand words but there are no restrictions on what I should write, there are no word count requirements, no limits either. They can be as long or as short as I want, and for that I am grateful. How do you write a story that is only two thousand words? That seems so daunting to say anything in that little space. I am long winded, I admit, but that is no fault of mine. My work moves in slow exposition, developing characters in the accretion of details that eventually leaves a picture if it does not conclude neatly. I think a little bit of mess is good for fiction, the lack of closure being something that contributes to the unsettling effect of a story that is itself a portrait of human endeavor. For that is what all my stories are, a portrait of the world as I see it or want to see it, the world as it is and as I wish it were. There are no limits to what I wish it were, because the imagination is a limitless, boundless jungle gym of small children playing and maybe someday I will have children who will play on jungle gyms and make me smile until they fall and skin their knees and then paternal instincts will take over and I will become the consoler of maladies.

I love this life and I will not be cutting out early, will not be taking an exit until one is forced upon me. There is so much joy inherent in being in love, and I am happy to be in that state. May my past haunt me no more than it must, and may the future be bright and merry, may there be little sadness for a long time, may the light at the end of the tunnel remain forestalled by the vivacity with which we approach our living, and may the vices that threaten to shorten our spans be nothing that we can’t put down. No more cigarettes, no more weed. Let us be happy and let us live long. May that be the thing that all of us strive for, knowing of course that we have little control of when the end will come for us. It is coming, rest assured, and count it as a blessing that you do not have to see the coming centuries. They will surely be brutal and contrived and there is likely to be strife and hardship for many. I intend to live abroad and have a small family that hopefully will be happy and healthy and grow into productive citizens of the world, which is the only thing I strive to be. I love you all so much and I hope you can find some happiness, today, on the day you read this no matter when that may be. The beauty of words is traveling through time and I am leaving a record no matter how insignificant the other portions of my life seem to me at this juncture, and that is enough for now.

TTFN.

8.30.24 The Weekend of the Day of Labor

It is a race, against the battery life that will render me dead in the water because I cannot find the charger that I know lurks somewhere in this dollhouse. The dollhouse I hope to someday occupy with the one who makes my heart shimmer as if it were an oil sheen on a puddle on a bustling street. The day is grey again and I got a parking ticket but I have already paid it and there is no foul there for me, no harm done I will just have to be a little more diligent with paying the meters going forward in order that I save myself some dough. I wish that I did not have to go to work in a few hours but there is no avoiding that livelihood though I have a day off tomorrow that I will spend on the links and at the lake, doing family things and probably wishing that I was alone with Tara in this little dollhouse where I write to you now.

Oh what joy to think that I have love in my life, love that seems likely to stand the test of time and hopefully wind up under the category of ‘til death do we part…’ I think I am going to go the distance with this one, hope that there will be no catastrophe that leaves me heartbroken and alone, hope that the feeling I get when I see her face stays with me every single time. There are no limits to love, I am discovering, and there are no limits to what you will do for one who so stirs you that your values and desires are something completely else than they were even a few months ago. It is refreshing, truly to care so much for another that you would drop everything to help them if they needed you, that you wish to see them be the mother of your children. That is something new for me, and I think I have said similar things in here before, but I cannot, will not get over this novelty, for it is important, both to me and also generally because this new feeling is perhaps the most substantial thing I have ever felt.

Maybe I am just crazy, too hasty and it will all come crashing down around me in a few years but there are flowers on the counter that she brought me right when I was waking up and there are no cigarettes in the house and I am not in any hurry to buy some. There is weed but even that smoke sounds like no good, like something that will only set me paranoid and spinning and less happy than I would be if I abstained. So abstention is the play, and even if I dip into the noons there will be sobriety in the sense of a sound mind though as I started this paragraph maybe I am intoxicated by this new love affair, though it is not so new as all that, being four months old and growing stronger all the time. The bond that has formed with this new beauty, this sweet soul with whom I am choosing to share all my spare time even to the exclusion of some good friends.

That is a touch regrettable, for I miss them and want to see them too but between work and wanting to be curled up in bed next to the warm, lean body that so excites me in so many ways there seems to be little time for anyone else. Maybe that is a toxic aspect to what is proving every day to be a beautiful thing, a beautiful and glorious union of persons who just care and want to see the other happy. Even the wasp on the window seems to want to see us happy, as it is not bothering me in the slightest, spinning in circles on the pane and rubbing its feet together in some ritual to which I am not privy. And the coffee is cold and the pears in the bowl are turning colours to indicate their ripeness. I am happy, I think, and that must count for something.

It counts for most everything for me. There is nothing I would rather be than happy and my practice of happiness keeps the muscle growing stronger and makes it easier and easier all the time. While the bottom could surely still fall out for one reason or another there is still the possibility that this is it: that which I was always waiting for without realizing precisely what I was waiting for. This is why we say keep the faith, I suppose, the precarious nature of all things in time, things that could slip away like the sands of an hourglass, through an aperture and into another chamber where they are bound by gravity into never coming back. What is the line, ‘glued to the table?’

I think though that though the time is ever slipping away, making us older with each moment and thus closer to the end that will be the separation I so dread even though in all likelihood it is a long ways off, there will be plenty of warm nights and tender mornings, more afternoons spent sitting in the sun watching the shadows grow longer. I hope so anyways, hope that there is no shortage even though as Paul Bowles put it so eloquently there are a limited number of times you will have any experience again, and that number is much smaller both than you think and than you want it to be. I can’t remember the quote or the example that he used but if I can have all the time in the world I would spend most of it trying to make her smile. That is how I know that I am in love, that I know what I want to do with my life. Make her smile, make her laugh, make her moan and whine and squeal in those most intimate moments when it is just the two of us naked as we came. Maybe that is more than you wanted to know, but this is an example of not quarreling with your voices, when you think of something write it down because you don’t want to fight the way you actually feel, especially when it comes to the artistic direction that your work will take.

For there are things that are better left unsaid but sometimes it is the right thing to do to say them. It is in the same vein as that line in that Hozier song about there being no right way. And I don’t want someone new, only the same person who has put a smile on my face every day since I met her. I hope that there are many smiley days to come, that there are many late nights and early mornings and warm afternoons and that even when the weather turns cold we can bed down and snuggle up against said cold and pass the time touching and laughing and maybe even reading to each other aloud. Maybe someday I will even make a sideline in audible royalties on recordings of me reading my own books, as I believe Neil Gaiman did. Now I am no Neil Gaiman, in many ways different than that genius, but I like my work I am rediscovering, having not visited with it in quite a while. It is solid if not brilliant and that is enough for a first novel. 

It has been a long time since I have worked on fiction. I know I have talked a fair amount in here about getting back into it, but the truth is there is not so much need to produce more as there is to put what I have already written out in the world. People need to see the inside of my brain, whether it is volume one of this piece or whether it is Parable of the Believers or whether it is OSM: Elena or whether it is Nature Mort or even Poems Mostly Not About God. There, five books, not so bad for thirteen years of writing, to say nothing of all the archival stuff that is locked in a hard drive that I have only just regained access to. I want people to read them, because what good is a book collecting dust in its author’s personal files?

It is no good, as someone told me long ago, you write to be read, and if you are read widely you are successful in your writing whether you are panned by the critics or the public or both or whether you collect accolades like they are low hanging fruit. The first step of course is finding a way to publish anything at all, and with any luck the work will sell too. Again, the caprices of the book buying public are unpredictable but it is all you can do to make work you think is good and put it out there in the world, and I would feel myself to be a success if I could cross that threshold.

On that note I am going to step away from this meandering letter to myself and draft an email to a publisher that would be a dream to place a book with. And the query for not one but two related (actually twin) novels, though very different in form. The twin stars of a binary system, spinning through space with at least one planet in tow, and perhaps with more that will form as the years go by. In other news I haven’t had a cigarette in over forty-eight hours, so maybe there will be many years left with which to produce more work that can earn me renown or at least some income if all goes according to plan.

That is all for now, there is little day remaining before I must ready myself to commute to the next town to sling wine beer and cocktails for a few hours. Tomorrow is for golf and for lake life, and that is a better use of a day than the aforementioned slinging. I am happy though, that there is so much to be happy about in my life. That I am doing better with the mental health stuff and that everyone seems to be happy for my happiness. That is the greatest joy in my life, or maybe second greatest I suppose. So I smile, and type, and smile and type, and smile…I love you all so much,

TTFN,

Richard

9.5.24 It has been a few days

I ran today, for the first time in almost a week, as I had my first cigarette (and then two more) in a similar interval. And truthfully the cigarette was yesterday, or two of them were, and one this morning before I threw out the pack and now I am back on the wagon of no more smokes. It is easier said than done but then again not so hard to do, I don’t think, as I sit here alone in the dollhouse staring at the nailpolish and the tea kettle and the flowers that though they look a trifle sad for the time they have spent in the vase make me happy that they exist and that they are mine. I want to do everything right but of course there is not a right way, only the way of following the heart and mine has led me right here to where I sit in the late morning feeling somewhat tired but also refreshed for having pounded some pavement and showered and shaved and dressed and gotten my second coffee of the day.

That is a long sentence, as I am sentencing myself to a long time here at the keys, thinking about my growling stomach and the absence that is making my heart fonder, making my emotions swoon (can emotions swoon?) as I sit here wishing I had some company. Wishing for the company of a certain lady with whom I probably would spend most if not all of my time if I could. To the point that the girls said something about me being here every night. Oh well, I cannot please all, and we will move slower on girl weeks, as they are becoming known, for their feelings are important and divorce must be hard on the young folk and I don’t want to rub their faces in it or pretend to be their dad. I am nobody’s dad at this juncture and that is a blessing as it means a clean slate from which to start a family if that turns out to be what we choose.

I think it is likely, but who am I to say, there are so many variables and I just along for the ride even if I get into the driver’s seat of fatherhood. Tara says I will be a great dad, and I believe her, because she has no reason to lie to me, and because she has seen three kids grow into teenagers (and one of them beyond the teen years!) and I don’t know what I’m doing but I am in love and I am happier than I have ever been even if the times when I miss her eat at my insides much like the feeling of too much coffee, which also might be a contributing factor. I don’t know, truly, what to think about all this. It is joy, and it is a touch of pain as if to remind how sweet the joy of watching her get dressed in the morning as I lie curled up in the blankets wishing for some water and that she didn’t have to go to work and that I didn’t have to go to work in the evening and at least that we were on the same schedule so we didn’t have to feel like we are squeezing in every minute that we can because we don’t know when the next decent block of time will come…but that is the reality of the moment, and that is all we have for now, and it is enough.

I wish to say that for all my extolling the virtues of this new love affair there is a slight reservation that maybe we are moving too fast, that maybe, just maybe this is all just so new and exciting because it is new and not because of a real and hopefully permanent connection. But I do not think that is the case, it seems that we have an earnest bond and that we are in each other’s lives with a purpose: to bring happiness and joy and perhaps most importantly meaning, though I suppose she has the last from her children and I the only one who needs meaning in my life. But I am finding it, in her arms, in the way she looked at me through the car window this morning as I dropped off nail polish remover to her that she had forgotten in her race out the door to get to work. The one that saw me smoking the third cigarette on my way to the day’s first coffee.

I don’t know where I’m going in my life but I’m happy to be going anywhere at all. There is no guarantee of a continued existence, as I have said many times, and I count myself lucky every minute I remain among the living. I wish for fifty more years, as many of them with my love at my side as the fates dictate. I wish that it could go on forever but of course not literally forever because that is far too long but for a long time, please, if you are there God have pity on us and allow us our little flourishing love, allow us all the time we want with each other even though I suspect that on my end it will never be enough. That I will always want her there to save me from my own loneliness, my insistent sadness that drew her to me in the first place. Who knows what would have happened had I not skipped out on that shift and gone for a vodka martini all those Fridays ago. We would be living in a different world and I doubt that either of us would be so happy.

Maybe that is just me being a sap, as I have been wont to do since this movement in my soul that keeps me on my toes, that keeps me guessing just what I will feel next, what release from anxiety and pain, release that has me breaking out in a smile, that has me laughing, actually. Oh that we have had lives before this, that we have seen others and fucked others and loved others, but neither of us like this, to hear us tell it. It is different when you can look at a person and love everything that you have seen so far, when you can be excited for all that you have yet to see even if it is likely that all of it will not be lovely. That there is sure to be a piece here and there that brings something other than joy and happiness. We are human, after all, the both of us, and we must accept that neither of us can be truly truly perfect for the other as we seem to mostly be now. And that when we fight we don’t reach the level of what she considers a fight seems to me a bit alarming as I am made sad that she dealt with such anger and even violence. That is so foreign to me, I am so soft, so gentle, I guess anyways, as I just get sad when we disagree and anger is a distant dream that I dare not dream.

It is all fine, it is all fine. And I’m not just telling myself that, I truly mean it. I just want to continue to fulfill all the things that she needs, and many more than that that she wants, for that is how I am in relationships and that is what I feel is right. What more can I bring to the table than to do what I feel is right, after all? Isn’t that the thing that should always be our guiding principle, to be true to self? I try and try and often succeed even though sometimes I fall short of my own impossibly high standards. It is a gift and a curse to be me, as I suspect it is to be anyone. And I am happy to bear the mixed blessing into the future and to continue to make smile the blonde beauty that was the last thing I saw last night and the first thing I saw this morning. The more days like that I get, the happier I will be, I think, and that is a simple joy that I will never take for granted. Bless,

TTFN,

Dick

9.10.24 Is it a rabbit or is it a hare?

Fear and courage, I intend to be less afraid and then burn the fire of fear at both ends and must sleep to stem the quaking. Death comes for the Dalai Lama. As she will come for us all. Lady death, the femme fatale styled after scarlet in Pulp. I am doing my best and it seems it is not good enough. Did I have to? There is nothing wrong however, as I sit and type and watch the birds and rodents. Freudian slips everywhere. I am empty, ravenous.

Epigenetics interests me. I guess I could make a career out of that. Who says I only need to be a writer. What a strange conundrum. God’s creatures, great and small, together on this earth, with god as the sun, I think, in this case. Lots of definitions, a conundrum with which I am relatively obsessed. Stupefied by and guided by simultaneously, the thinking about all that is and all that cannot be. No God but god, and onwards into the sunny and magnanimous future. Coughing up the phlegm of how many thousands of cigarettes. I must stop controlling fire with my mouth.

I will miss it, but I have not had a cigarette since Sunday, and it is Tuesday, and though the dogs are barking and the neighbors garden. I am in need of a shower, but I think it can wait until tomorrow. The squirrels are still playing territorial tag and I am still sitting here in the shade of the cedars and watching the crows soar in their direct lines, listening to the traffic on the street and the distant bleating of the train horn. A songbird raises itself above the neighbor’s roof, red shingles and peeling white paint. Tar stick solenoid. Convenient Christianity with a capital C.

This is tiresome today, like piling sand. The professionals use machines, as I struggle with my own mortality and the frail happiness that at times I possess. Camp games. Green Glass Doors. Where are we going if not into that green light. The trees, the grass, the strawberry and the cactus which would not be able to come except that it is hatted. And Scalloped. And there are some green shutters over there, awaiting to become a door. I am ready for this day to be evening, to be reunited with the only person I wanted to see. And yet, and yet, as my battery dies and I flee for greener pastures. For groceries and other supplies. Sorry, I will stop. Shit. Again.

If I could want one thing out of this week it would be that I make it to next week without a catastrophe. Without having anything in common with Hemingway. Even the nobel to which I aspired when I was six seems a distant dream. First one must continue to write, to take every spare minute and fashion letters from the chaos that rages inside their brain. I am happy to say that it looks like I will achieve my goal. That I will continue to exist for at least a week longer.

If you can believe it, it is Tuesday once again!

Dick

9.18.24 The most important day of Virgo season

Ah yes the earthly tides and me with a bruised member from a bit too raucous a celebratory union last night. Maybe that is more than you needed to know, maybe, but I do not care. It is Tara’s 40(!!!)th birthday today and I am happy that we will be celebrating 39 forever. It is a gift to get older, I think, but I am not a woman, and do not possess an advantage (if it can be called that) in years spent on this earth over my partner (is it too soon to call us that?). I hope I can make it to forty. I hope we get forty years together. We were listening to that song last night and it’s dastardly sad, a real tear-jerker there on the stereo. I do not know what it is I seek to accomplish with this entry, but I am happy that we get to celebrate the one I love today and that with any luck I will not have broken my penis and am just a little bit sore.

I laugh aloud at the thought of you all someday reading that, now that I am no longer publishing these to the internet in a fairly live fashion. Now that they will suffer the delays of being made into a book, years from the terminus of my fingers on this keyboard, tapping out the rhythms that will form the orderly succession of letters that brings meaning to your eyes, eventually. Of course there is not a guarantee that anyone will ever read this, now that I am not preaching to my following of thirty or so readers. And here I am talking about a readership that no longer exists, and the lack of public viewing of these things is a relief and I don’t have to hold back as much as there is enough of a delay between writing this and it being read that I can say more frankly what it is I want to say.

So onwards into the honesty, into the comely future that I hope is awaiting me, awaiting me and my love and any children borne from our union. Of course maybe there will be none, and maybe tragedy will befall us and that forty years I was wishing for will be greatly abbreviated. I could die today, or tomorrow. Or Saturday. She could do the same. Memento Mori, they say, but I prefer to remember life, to remember the beautiful mess that greets me every day when the sun rises and I open my eyes. We slide across the calendar, adding weeks to the past forgetting (almost) that there are a finite number of weeks to be had, that the supermoon of yesterday doesn’t come around all that often, and that there are only so many more occasions to see it within the frame of your lifetime. So take it down off the wall and go outside and look up at the sky!

I am itchy but the pain is not so bad when I sit still, and though there are bottles of wine on the bookshelf they are all empty—trophies more than anything else, and we will add another one tonight as my visa bill grows larger and larger until it eats up all of my last paycheck between that and the other bills. But I suppose I don’t owe for another month, and truly I haven’t spent so much, and it is a birthday so we must consider that a little extra to celebrate a momentous day, the first I have had occasion to know in the life of the wonderful woman who I hope someday to call my wife.

Maybe it is too soon to be saying things like that, but our ability to talk through things and grow, to be totally honest even about the uncomfortable things in our past or present, is astonishing and has helped me feel so close to the one whom I awoke beside this morning. Whom I hope to awake beside most all of the days for the rest of my life, beside, alongside, against, kissing, holding, feeling close to. Those things and so much more, it is the best part of the day to lay down beside her and fall asleep knowing that she is right there, a bastion of peace in this world where pagers explode in an operation of great creativity and equal depravity. What is becoming of the world I used to love?

In truth it is much the same as it has always been. I am not a subscriber to the fact that it has gone downhill, though the state of American politics does make a case for that I suppose. Still, by and large this is the same world it has always been, despite the radical changes in connectivity and the availability of information. It is better now surely, now that we can reach the other side of the globe mostly instantly through the network of fiber optic cables I read recently were the subject of sabotage from one of our Eastern Enemies™. Who knows if anything is happening that will shake the foundations of our comfortable little first-world bubble? Can we be sure of anything we see on the news, truly?

And so in this media-saturated world I turn away from the tubes and instead look out the window to the birch tree swaying in the gentle breeze, to the squirrels and rabbits and the occasional blue jay. I see this all and the grass growing up all around and I imagine that it really is okay. And then that sentiment becomes real, and I know that this world is cruel and unusual at times but mostly okay and I try to stay in my lane and enjoy what I can because if you focus on the tragedy all the time you will surely drive yourself mad, and not in a good way. Ah this, my seventh day of seven in a row at the old jobsite, and then a weekend on an island in a stream. Well in a river, or a lake, or something. I’m not 100% on the geography, if I’m being honest. I think that there is something to be said for getting away even if I will be missing the lovely sharing of the bed with the one whose company means everything to me.

It is nearly time for more coffee, and to pack for the weekend. Surely I have bored you to death with this ramble on what I hope will be the happiest day of the year despite the tears that were shed and wetted my face this morning as I held on tight to the dear one who was struggling with the fact of forty years. So long and farewell to this entry, it has been good to sit and stare at the blankness within, to wrestle with the becoming imminent of my thoughts and feelings in the way that only setting them down in words can ensure. I hope you have not been too bored by my ramblings, and that you were not too upset by the mentioning of my penis. I do have one, of course, being amab (and still identifying as male, by the way). It is gone, I will mention it no more. I will go get another coffee and greet the day that is becoming later with each passing moment. If I don’t act now there will be no time left. So onwards, outwards, into the brave blue afternoon with a sidecar of fajitas for lunch. Did you need to read any of that? I think not, but you did if you are reading this. It goes on and on and on and what does it even say? That is the beauty: that it says much with little need to say anything.

TTFN.