Month the Nineteenth

9.25.24 A few days late to the party

With the sun back in an air sign we see the air grow colder, grow damp. There is so much change in this season, it is a wonder any of us ever make it through Libra with our faculties intact. Certainly I have not always done so, but I seem to be on track to do it this year. A shot in the arm to the good today, and now the return of beauty in those cute sunglasses looking at me through the windshield of that highlander she will surely drive until it dies. And then to tell me that it makes her happy to see my car in the driveway. And then come to find out it is her nineteenth wedding anniversary. What a day. 

There is a siren screaming in the distance, growing nearer every second as the forces of order show up to fight the chaos. Maybe a fire by the sounds of it, but as long as everyone is safe in my circles it is of little concern. I want to fall asleep and be out for a year, though not really, do not want to wish away a year of health. I want to wake up tomorrow and watch Tara get dressed and then go back to sleep for an hour or two. It is sad right now for me for some reason. The mood, that is. Maybe it is the sad music, maybe it is the way it gets dark earlier and earlier. Maybe it is something else. I don’t want to be sad though, so I will find a way out of the depression.

There is so much to be joyful for, it is strange to feel sad. I don’t know why I have down moods so often. Depression is an old familiar companion, an erstwhile traveler with me on this journey through the years. It is not so bad most of the time, but some days it is crushing and bears down on me with the weight of a thousand bowling balls, threatening to crush my happiness into the boards of the alley. I am not so bad as I was a few minutes ago, maybe due to the kissing of my love and maybe due to a change in the soundtrack. I think it is a little bit of both.

I am glad that today has reached this terminus of snuggling and warmth. That I no longer need to weather alone the hours that make up the working day for her. Of course, she just ran to the store, but that affords me the ability and the time to type out these inane meanderings lest I never contribute again to this diary. This utterly vacant typing that brings me to this moment, alive and mostly well as Jason Isbell sings about searching hard for an answer. I am not reaching for the harder stuff though, happy to drink beer and watch the light filter through the giant walnut trees just up the road. There is so much to be happy about Richard, remember that even when you can’t see the sun.

I wish I did not need so much coaching, that it was just easy for me to be whole. I wish that I need not struggle on days that seem to stretch for aeons from dawn until dusk. And dusk approaching fast, as I think about love and how it can be so elusive and then at other times the only thing you can see. I think about the threat of a nuclear intervention in Ukraine, about the war raging in Lebanon. Beirut burning nightly as the warplanes drop their death down upon a people mostly innocent and sleeping like babes. I wish this was not the way of the world but there has been war almost my entire life and I’m getting to the point where I don’t expect anything else. I don’t believe, as I caught myself saying in one of last years entries, that it helps all that much. And I not exactly a pacifist as I said in what was probably just a clever turn of phrase, if not how I was feeling at that moment. Who knows what I am feeling at any moment but me?

I don’t even know how I’m feeling right now. I woke up feeling sick but now I am mostly tired and not so unwell as I thought I might be given the way I felt when I opened my eyes. I think I am grateful for that, actually know I am, even if gratitude seems a stretch when the demon of depression is sitting on your shoulders. Legs splayed out around your head it threatens to constrict your windpipe and drive the very light from your eyes. I think I am happy, as best as I am able to be today.

If I don’t sound sure it’s because I am not. As these little insects buzz all around me, as the speaker plays a hopeful and sad song out into the evening air, as the sun seeks its rest around the curve of the horizon, I think it’s okay. I think it’s all okay and it’s going to be okay. I don’t want to think about the contingencies where it isn’t any more. I have wasted a lot of time and energy, fretted a lot over things that I cannot control. I am happy to be mostly past that if it does show up sometimes in my wayward thoughts. I think that it is enough to make it to the end of every day. And this one not over yet, just getting to the good bits of shared warmth and skin on skin. I want to make the moments like those last forever, but know of course that they cannot. That everything is fleeting as anything else, and it just slips away when you try to hold it too tightly.

So I keep a loose grip on the seven iron that delivered my third to last shot to 18 feet today. It is good to go out with a par, it is good to have love in your life even if it is so good that it terrifies you that someday you might have to go without it. It makes me sad just to think of life without her, but surely our mortality will catch up to us and if I am lucky and go first I can’t even grapple with what that would mean for her. And that is to say nothing of the six cigarettes I smoked today. I threw the pack away but that is also a waste of money that could be spent on her. On flowers, or on wine, or on a nice dinner where I don’t pass out right after. I want to be the perfect man even though I know I can’t be: no one is that good.

I am happy to be here, at the dollhouse, in the yard, or rather on the patio watching the day grow shorter and the shadows grow longer, listening to the squeak of my bare feet across the outdoor rug draped beneath this patio furniture. I am happy to be anywhere even if there is still a touch of the blues, and the mosquitos are starting to appear. I want to be right here when she gets back and not a trifle sadder and hopefully a good sight happier when I see her roll back into the drive. Is this the inanity I warned of? The endless talking about love and wondering if we can ever get enough to be satisfied. All the hours of the day don’t seem enough time even if I didn’t have to share her at all with anyone else. If that is obsession I concede it because my baby told me darling if you can’t get a pardon better get a parole. I told her I’d be out by the morning when the sun is dawning and the money rolls.

The Felice Brothers, ladies and gentleman. A song about a rhapsodic love affair, and yes this one too loves me tenderly. As the jets fly by overhead and I wonder what I am doing here, earthbound and blue and wondering still if these sad feelings will ever leave me alone for more than a few days. It was so hard to be apart from her for four days I can only imagine what it would be like to have to never see her again. I am happy that I do not yet have to face down any semblance of that. I am happy that she will be returning to me shortly with snacks and drinks and that smiling face that makes all my troubles seem trivial.

That is as good a place as any to leave this off, a rambling start to Libra season is all I can manage. Happy sad, happy sad, and something else too though I can’t put my finger precisely on the way I feel. This world makes me want to cry on almost a daily basis. Why God, Why?! Can’t you be a better force, or is the problem that you don’t exist in the capacity that has the power to change the world. I don’t have the answers, I don’t know what to make of anything that I’ve written. I want only to pass a few hours in the company of the one who makes me happiest, and then to sleep beside her in the little bed that has held us up so many happy nights, and a few not so happy. I like happiness but there is no guarantee that you will have so much as another iota of it. And I just hoping to make it to tomorrow, to make it into the next day with my faculties intact and my heart still beating. That is all you can ask for at times, and though this wasn’t a bad day necessarily it still leaves me feeling a bit empty towards the end, as if, almost, I had done something wrong.

That is all, I think, and though I haven’t done anything wrong, I still long to shake the feeling from my head like droplets of water that will fall to the concrete and splatter into oblivion. Oblivion sounds nice, but I opt instead for sentience, opt instead to know myself and my love and my family and my friends though I wonder how many I even have left. I guess I am lucky to have any at all, and lucky to have my life after some of the places I have been. I’m glad I never killed myself, at this moment, even if some days still feel hard. It is a good thing to be alive, and I will never take it for granted again. There, the gratitude I hoped for earlier, there, the hope that this day might turn out all right after all.

I love you all a lot, but some of you take the cake for most loved. You know who you are, and I will kiss your feet and your lips and your other, unmentionable places, and then tomorrow will be a better day than today.

TTFN.

9.26.24 5:55 or Anxiety will not rule me

I don’t know that it was a better day than yesterday. Called into work for the second time in my tenure at this job, this time because of vomiting. My mom said it was because I was anxious. I’m doing my best and I feel alright now, if a little sad. I just want to be held, to be safe, to not be anxious. Because today was a very high anxiety day. I even took a klonopin it got so bad. Now I am waiting for Tara to return from a wine tour and sitting here watching the bugs flit around my ankles. Socks and slippers, sweats. This has been a rough day, L&G, and I don’t know if tomorrow will be any better.

I was thinking about old big bones earlier, that demon from my past who to hear everyone tell it played games with me and got me into all sorts of headspaces that were maladaptive, to quote the prevailing psychiatric literature. I want to sleep, I want to be awake, I want to feel better. When one feels badly it consumes all rational thought, it blots out every attempt at sanity and keeps you locked in a cycle of uncomfortable tingling, and today it seems, even vomiting. I threw up four times, all told, and who’s to say why. I think maybe it was a combination of food eaten and nerves and even possibly a virus. I want to forget about today and have it be tomorrow. Or rather I would rather end today well and set tomorrow up for success. There are still a few hours left to salvage this day, and I think it wholly possible. Life’s mistakes, and am I one of them?

It seems sometimes that it is all going to come crashing down around me. Everything I’ve built, every last bit of stability I’ve wrestled from my disease a foundation of sand that an earthquake scatters like an ounce of semtex. I think I am going to be okay, after the morning’s spiral, after the morning’s tears. I feel hollow and empty (probably because my stomach is devoid of food after the emesis) and able to look out at the street without fear. I wish that I didn’t have so much fear. That the rabbit was not with me at every moment. I think it would be better for me if I weren’t so afraid. It just seems like a waste of energy to think about those things, and if they are to be then likely I will have little agency. I am happy now to be upright and vertical, even if cigarettes have been with me today. I am sorry to have smoked them but I felt like I needed to. I might need another one right now.

Bad days and good days, that is what they always say about those of us who are ill and I with a chronic and invisible illness. I wonder what people would think of me if they knew how I struggled just to get through the days. I think I need a therapist, but having fired Bill I don’t know where to find one. There is so much good in me, I need to remember that, and hold to it, and keep up the pattern of making good decisions for myself. It is hard to navigate society, I am learning, and learning also that I seem to have an extra hard time doing so. I just want a vacation, a permanent vacation where I can just write and love and eat and drink and be merry. To be free of the need to eke out a meagre living tending bar. Soon enough, with any luck, that will be a reality.

The fawns are in the yard next door, watching me through the cedars. I need to eat something but don’t want to order it. A pizza sounds good but so does being in the arms of the one I love. So does a lobotomy at this moment. What distress I dealt with earlier, and all about next to nothing. With the assurance of my attorneys (parents) that everything is alright. Why do I fear as inevitable what is an outside chance at best. There is so much bad in this world it feels infectious sometimes, that you might have some of it spill over onto your life and stain the sheets like those curried noodles I dropped yesterday. I don’t want to get drunk, I don’t want to get stoned. Only want to sit and grapple with the couple hours I have to kill, maybe as many as three. Who knows what this evening holds, but I am happy to have made it through the worst parts of my day (curled up around the porcelain throne retching) intact or mostly so.

I love you all, I’m sorry not to be a better, more congruent specimen for the future people to reckon with. Maybe I just need to exercise, need to meditate, need to spend some time by myself. For now I have that last bit, so I will set aside the mirror and look up at the sunlight once again dying in the walnuts up the street. The grapevines draped over the elm tree that grows up on the edge of the double lot. Sunlight in trees, that is the thing to focus on. I want to know why I struggle so but I think the reason is that my mind is complex and a bit damaged, even if I have been able to work through most of the worst bits most of the time.

Thank you to those of you who helped me today, you know who you are. Thank you mother thank you father, thank you holy holy holy. Everything is holy, from asshole to tooth, toenail to tree trunk. I wish to recognize that every moment I am living. There are so many good things and good people and for that I am grateful. Gratitude, the practice that makes us happy. I am grateful for Tara, for my parents, for the few friends that remain. I love you, I’m sorry I can’t always seem to figure it out on my own.

TTFN.

Dickie

9.27.24 Caught the plague

Ah yes, the endless rhinovirus drama, the quarantine and the isolation. Who knows when I will be able to rejoin the living, walking humans. Of course by all of that I mean that I have contracted COVID, and will be taking a couple days to recover. I would like to be well, of course, but at least I get a brief respite from the working world. It is enough to be alive and not spiraling as I was yesterday. I am happy to be removed from the mood that gripped me and seemed to shake the foundations of my sanity.

But here today it is a beautiful day and I am stuck here at home. Happy to be on the back porch looking out at the sun in the maples. Afternoon, and I just the passenger. As usual it seems, and at ease today in contrast to yesterday. I guess I was thinking that the better day would be coming, and I was right, if off on the timing. Better late than never, I suppose. Everything is good, I am safe, I am going upwards and onwards into the brilliant future. It is even better than I imagined, truly, and I am glad that my symptoms are mild and that I get to sit here and enjoy the sunshine.

It is a beautiful thing to exist at all, at least on the days that come when you don’t just want to dissolve. Those days are not quite suicidal but in fact something different, something like strife or longing for anything but where you are. It is all you can do on such days to make it to the end of the line, to pile up another benign adjective in the sentences that seem to be hardening as you watch them grow. I am glad that I don’t have to feel that way today.

That there is light at the end of the tunnel. That the tunnel isn’t closing in. That is all, abbreviated verbiage helps keep the lights on. We must not die, we must live forever in our love. And that is what I wish for myself on this day. To make it to the end of the working day for her and to the soup that will hopefully fill me up with soul food, and drive away whatever remains of the blues. Kiss me misty, I’m going to need an iv before long.

TTFN.

9.29.24 Another day, another fever

Where am I going that I don’t know what I’m going to do, how I’m going to feel like I’m enough, how I can get over this dubious self-esteem that makes me feel like I’m not enough? Nothing like being sick to make you doubt your abilities, your worthiness. Nothing like being sick to make you feel like you can’t satisfy the people you love in the way you want to. It is a bum rap to have covid in this day and age, to make you feel like even though you are doing the responsible thing and trying not to expose anyone unnecessarily that you should have been powering through and going to work and placing no burden on anyone else.

I have not felt so inadequate in a long time. Like I have let everyone down in a critical way, that I am not providing for my lover in the way that I need to. I don’t even think that’s true, but I just can’t escape the feeling that it is. It is a curse of being a man, I suppose, to feel that you always must be strong and without flaws and without weakness of any kind. And here I am, sick and feeling weak for not powering through. I love Tara, but I wonder if I am enough. I wonder if I can keep her happy for years and years because it has only been a few months. And while I have succeeded in that timeline it is daunting to think about making it stretch for years or even decades like I would like to. It is strange to have met the first person who has made you feel complete and wondering if you can return the favor.

She says I do, and maybe that should be enough. I must trust her to be honest about her needs being met if I am ever to make a go of marriage or child-rearing. I must, I must. There are so many times in my life when I have had trouble trusting other people’s assertions I am enough, and maybe that is a personal problem. No, surely it is a personal problem, it doesn’t apply to anyone else. Just yesterday I had a panic that she was with another man despite there being no indication at all that she was. I am a sad and wayward case of a man, I wish I were better despite the constant assurances from all around that I am good, even great at being a human. I just always long to be perfect, and when I’m not perfect to my own impossible standard I worry that everyone I love will leave me all by my lonesome in confirmation of my own failures. I wish I was different, at times, but that is just the way I am.

If life turns out perfectly and I launch a profitable writing career, marry the woman who feels like a once in a lifetime love, spend many happy years making her smile, give her children that will change my whole perspective on what is important, die of old age in my nineties, then I will look back on this day with a smile and wonder why my neuroses were so strong when I was in my mid-thirties with everything to lose. You see I have spent so many years of my life spinning through thoughts of having sold my soul, of being compromised on a spiritual level that ensured that worldly success was anything but guaranteed. God surely wanted to punish me, was the way I felt, and my mild troubles with the law, my endless relationship troubles…all of it just God’s way of showing me who’s boss.

And yet now, in the absence of God, or in His abstention from punishing me, there are only the worldly forces, that, while scary, are not as scary as going to hell. Maybe I will go to hell yet, but I am hoping that the heavenly planet Earth awaits me in the future. Of course, no guarantee. Everything is tenuous at best, and I just a passenger on this journey to the end of the line, making choices (like smoking five cigarettes this morning) that will affect where the end of the line is. I look into the sun pouring in through the shade and think that maybe I just need to relax. To realize that I am a good person and a good citizen and if the world is going to hell in a handbasket maybe I don’t need to be along for the ride.

There is so much beauty in the world, it just seems like such a waste to have to regard it from a prison cell. For that is one of my greatest fears, going to prison. I have struggled so much in my life that wasting any time behind bars seems like it would be enough to make one want to cry. I want to live out my life in freedom, as a testament to freedom, as a cry for freedom raging in the depths of the darkest dystopian night! And this not yet a dystopia, thank God, that healthy American expletive. I long to sleep beside my love for many years to come, to bring her babies that will give her a second lease on parenthood, and me the first lease. I long for so many things, to be honest. But mostly to be free, to be happy, to be loved.

And I am those things. Here’s a little prayer that it continues, to no god in particular. Just to the universe that has proven its indifference over and over. I long for many things, but greatest of them all is love. And that my worst fears will not be confirmed. That I will continue as a citizen of this great nation that has always been great, for all its faults, DT be damned. I want to write another book from the comfort of my home. I want to smile every morning when I wake up and watch Tara get dressed. I want to fall asleep before her every night so she can match my breathing and so fall asleep. Or maybe not every night. Occasionally I would like to be the last to sleep. Just for the sake of variety.

Life is good, even if I do have innumerable worries. I just want to continue this trend of being okay, of making good decisions for myself. It is not so bad as my worst fears. I am safe, I am loved, I am happy, and that is enough. I love the world even if it is cruel at times. I think that there is a lot left for me to do in this life, and I am glad to be afforded the opportunity. Thank you, all who have helped me along the way to this point, it is not such a bad place to be. I’m grateful for every second on this journey.

TTFN,

Dickie

10.1.24 Sleepless in Seattle

Seahawks last night fell to the Lions, and that is a good thing for Detroit I suppose. I am tired but not sleepy, and that is an interesting thing. I am at the coffee shop at the moment listening to their soundtrack, which is downbeat and spooky, and it makes me happy. Watching the girl behind the counter pour milk into a thermos also makes me happy for whatever reason. I don’t know where I am going with this but there is a lot of ground to cover. I hope that everything turns out all right.

It will, of course, or at least I think it will. Still in the back of my mind the thought of prosecution, and beyond that persecution. I am torn up about the state of the world, but I am doing my best not to let it get me down. There are model steamships on the wall and I have a bagel on the way, and I am drinking coffee and thinking about Tara, and how amazing even a half hour with her can be. It is a glorious thing to have something to lose sometimes. It is a glorious thing to be in love. It is a glorious thing to be sitting with a mouth full of cream cheese smeared bagel tamping down the ever present urge to vomit. Not that it is truly ever present, but sometimes in the morning I feel sick to my stomach. No way of knowing the cause.

Now, with poppy seeds in my teeth and coffee on my breath I begin into the next paragraph, the next iteration of what I am thinking at the moment, and truth be told my mind is gloriously empty. Glory, glory! And all of it for naught. For what is glory but the adulation of the humans, and that a loaded gun, for the knife is most always double edged. What makes you a hero to some will make you a villain to others, is what I mean. Surely I have written things that will label me a hero or a villain to the right crowd. And surely I too have said that I make no claims to what has been written. It is just an outpouring of soul, which is a force of nature and not something I am in control of, to be honest.

But that is enough for now, I have a date in a few minutes, and must be on my way. Will smoke my last cigarette and kick it out the window of the car on my way to my destination. I will make it my last one. The last in the last pack, I must be committed to doing so, and must extend my life beyond the grave like these plastic spiders that haunt the fake webs above my head. That doesn’t make a lot of sense but how much of this does, really? I think you get the gist by now, that I am a crazy person with a lot of insane ideas and a lot of meandering thoughts about what it means to be in any given moment. We must reach for authentic presence, to quote Trungpa, and live our lives as the version of ourselves that is the most us.

I think I will run, to my love, to a bonus little while in the morning while the traffic streams all around on its way to school. I am glad I don’t have to go to school anymore, for this is my school, this wandering through the hallways of mind that curve and diverge and never seem to end up anywhere coherent. But that is enough! I love my mind, my beautiful mind as Tara calls it, though frightening as it can be it is not always what I would call beautiful. I love this world, for all its faults. It is a beautiful place to be born into, and a wonderful, literally, place to inhabit. I love you too, by the way, and I hope you have a swell day.

TTFN.

10.7.24 War for a year

It has been a year of war in the Middle East, hasn’t it? And how many years of war in the Ukraine? I can’t keep track of all the conflicts in the world, as I think there are a number smoldering in Africa as well…and I think that since I got my passport back I will go somewhere other than a warzone, will travel somewhere warm and peaceful and get my fill of sunshine and dry air. It is a strange world we live in and I am happy with it most of the time…when I’m not freaking out that is.

For freak outs happen, and I get scared and dream terrible things coming for me, sometimes literally in dreams and sometimes just in the waking hours when the imagination gets the better of me and I find myself worried about things that are unlikely to happen, though I suppose not totally impossible. It is selfish and cruel for me to feel that way, even if most of the cruelty is inflicted on my own self. I guess that’s what I mean by selfish in that context. Tara says I am the most selfless person she knows and though I don’t believe her it is nice to hear. It is nice to hear all the praises coming out of her mouth, coming to bless me with their kindness.

There are so many possibilities that I see for the future, and I want to enjoy it no matter what happens. Last night I dreamt that Tara had her bare ass pressed up against her ex’s face. It was a sickening moment of intimacy that made me get out of bed and smoke a cigarette in my underwear in the rain. Now all the cigarettes are gone and I look forward to putting them away, as I have said I would do so many times. They aren’t as good as they used to be, don’t seem so necessary to break up the long days that seem so persistently coming as the calendar moves forward. Here’s a prayer to Whomever that they keep coming.

I think that if I could spend my days doing anything it would be writing, and reading, and not ‘rithmatic. I do enough of that at my day job, though in truth a computer does most of the work for me at this point. Maybe soon enough I will have a little baby to cuddle and hold close to make my world bright and cheerful. Optimism for the future is in fashion this season, even if we seem to be careening off a cliff in the political arena. Even if I fear so many things about the future, and not only for myself, but for all the people who stand to lose in the coming years. Together maybe we can get around the craziness that may be coming. Together maybe we can find a way to make sense of all this madness. I wish I knew what I could do, wish there was anything I could do to avert what may be coming.

But that is enough about the terrifying realities that we face in this country. Enough about my persistent fears of a nightmarish hellscape in America. And both sides preaching stability and prosperity. Maybe someone will deliver, and everything I fear will be unfounded and it will all be okay. Send it up, another prayer. I don’t even know who I am praying to, maybe that we have something like agency at all and it isn’t a deterministic universe that is just a film strip running over a lightbulb sending up images onto the world. I think it is all going to be okay, even if I fear that they will come to take me away in handcuffs almost every day. Of course I don’t break the law, but not breaking the law is not always enough, as we have seen many innocent people prosecuted and even put to death for things they didn’t do. And yet I keep the faith, the faith in the rightness of what I do and in the justness of the universe, laugh that that is.

I am out of coffee and think I will go get more, cutting short this whiney missive about “OH the world is so unjust” when of course it is, it is run by humans and humans are flawed and we must do what we can to alleviate suffering along the way as we race towards the graves that are surely at the end of the line. Though they say there are pills that can reverse aging, who would be able to afford it? Would we even want it if we could? What would be the side effects? Considering the side effects of every other medication I’ve ever taken, who can even imagine how horrific the cost of reversing the body’s natural processes. If that’s not just a clickbait headline that I keep seeing…I think there are too many bad things in the world to want to live forever.

That is where my head is at on this cool October morning a year on from the attacks that started what might be the conflict that defines the decade, if the first year of fighting (if it can really be called that) is any indication. Here’s hoping for peace on Earth but hope is cheap even if it is necessary to get us through the hard times. And so many hard times for so many, at home and abroad. If there is a God He is an asshole and not a very good manager of His humans. Or maybe we just don’t understand Him because he has a different perception of time than we do, or maybe He does not exist other than in the minds of men. There is always what is, that is for certain, and I will try to deal more with what is than with what may be, as that is where I tend to run into trouble, as that is where fear takes over and the light at the end of the tunnel grows near, in the sense of death or at least the death of hope. There it is again, hope, which I said was cheap but think is more necessary than that; here’s hoping we see a period of sanity and stability no matter who wins in a month or so. Here’s hoping that we can make it out of this alive.

Here’s a little prayer that I get to sleep next to the woman I love for decades to come, that I get to marry her and give her two children, a boy and a girl, and that we get to raise them in relative luxury for years and years and that everyone is healthy. Don’t let us get sick, don’t let us get old, or rather let us get old without getting sick so we can enjoy the fruits of our labor. This little labor here, these entries I fear say nothing of import, nothing that adds to the great force of what is in a meaningful way, is all I can manage this morning. I hope that whenever you read this I have at least one of the children I prayed for just a moment ago. I hope someday you read this, that this missive is not just an echo in a vacuum here between me and the computer screen. You write to be read, and it’s about damn time I reach my audience.

TTFN.

Dick

10.9.24 Better golf, shakier mood

I don’t know why I had such a nervous day, such a day paralyzed by the fear that the person I want to give my everything was holding onto past partners even though there was no reason to think that. I guess I just get insecure sometimes and I think that everyone else must have something better to offer than what I do. My own fears of unworthiness trumping the love I saw pouring from her eyes when she met me in the parking lot for a couple of squeezes and a couple of kisses. I think I feel better now but I guess it comes in waves, waves that crash over me and leave me soaked in sweat though I did not cave in after the dentist and buy a pack of cigarettes. On my second patch today (the other one came off so I could shower) but I haven’t smoked one in two days, and then I only had one. Maybe it will truly be my last.

I think that there is nothing to fear, nothing that should shake my confidence. Communicating clearly about things when they are bothering me is something that should cause my confidence to grow, shouldn’t it? Many people are content to sweep it under the rug and move on with their fears eating away at them until they bubble over in unrelated outbursts that cause more problems than if they had just been honest that they were afraid. I’m happy to be alive and well, to be seeing my baby in just an hour or so, to give her a hug and a kiss and say I’m sorry to which she will say “don’t be sorry, I’m glad you can come to me when you’re feeling weird or uncomfortable…” or something to that effect. I know that I am safe, and that I am loved, and I think maybe this love could go the distance to the finish line, be all I ever dreamed of. Certainly I have never felt this way before, including the insecurity about past lovers, lovers between her husband and me…and the fact that they are still married should give me pause, maybe, or maybe not, as they were separated for a long time before I entered the picture…

I don’t know what to think about it all, honestly. I don’t love that there were others, but I’m not mad, don’t have any right to be mad. I just feel weird hearing about it sometimes, and probably that is on me. I want to be totally secure, totally madly secure in this love that I don’t feel good enough to sustain sometimes. That I’m not enough, that I’m not worthy, hangs over my thoughts and my mind like a heavy shroud. I think it is a longstanding issue, something I have dealt with for a long time. I want to be enough, I want to be worthy. I want to feel it without someone having to tell me. I want to be the man I know I can be, to be the man who I don’t hate looking back at me in the mirror.

But alas, there is so much doubt, so much uncertainty. It has only been a few months and though we have talked about the future there is so much that could change between now and then. And she getting a promotion, this should be a day to celebrate! I wish I was not such a pessimist, did not always feel threatened by the beauty that makes her so attractive to the men who are attracted to her. She’s beautiful and sexy and sexual and for whatever reason it makes me feel like she won’t choose me even though she shows me day in and day out that she does choose me, that I’m the one she wants. I just want to be so sure that I don’t have to worry, and know that she will always have options if she doesn’t want me for some reason. And then there has been the mild ED that I sometimes experience, when I’m tired or drunk or hungover…I worry about that even though this morning she finished and I did not…I guess I just need to relax and let everything be what it is. Maybe then I will be able to see that I am loved and important and that I don’t need to fear the men in her past.

I think that I’m going to cut this short…there is too much vulnerability in this entry to continue it. I know everything is fine, that I don’t need to worry, as she assures me I don’t…I think it is just my nature to feel like that I’m not going to fulfill someone else’s needs, like I’m going to fall short in some important thing and lose out on the best thing that has ever happened to me. Because this love is the best thing in my life to date. The ability to just relax into her arms at the end of a long day and feel like I’m at home. Home, is where I wanna be, I wanna feel like it is real when I am there, and I want it to last forever. Now nothing lasts forever, I’m sure of that, but I want to see decades of this love flourish in the bright sun of the north. I love her so much it makes me hurt sometimes, and I’m sorry for that only because love should be a joy and not a sorrow…And if the sorrows are small and manageable and able to be talked out and forgotten by the time the workday ends then that is a good thing. I do not feel sorrow now, just a resting anxiety at not being in her presence, not being able to close the book on the things that were bothering me this morning. It is enough to be alive and well on this Wednesday in the beginning of October. It is enough to feel so intensely that you are afraid to lose the beautiful thing that you have. That is where I end up right now at the end of my golf day, at the end of my freakout. 

Goodnight sweet prince, that monkey on my back that makes me feel insecure. I will throw him off someday, will get to the point that I can just bask in the love that pours over me much in the way the anxiety comes in waves. I just want to be well, to be happy, to be healthy, to be free. And to be in love, to share the love I feel and receive the one I feel in return. That is enough for me, I think it will all be okay. We are streaming on towards another year, and we are going to see what it brings. Maybe I will get married, maybe we will conceive a child. Maybe, maybe. I would love to see those outcomes, it would make me feel much more settled to have things locked down. Like I wouldn’t have to hold down the beauty whose beauty is so apparent to so many other men. So many other suitors, and I guess I have my share of interest as well. We must just be secure, must just be confident that there are no others and that we can believe them when they tell us that. I am happy to be going there now, happy that I get to kiss and hold the only person who has ever made me feel terrified to lose them.

That is all for now, TTFN.

Richard

10.10.24 Another day, another turmoil

Not that today’s turmoil is as personal as yesterday’s, not feeling insecure, having talked it out as best as we could before the cold medicine kicked in and somebody who shall remain nameless conked out. It is usually I who falls asleep mid-sentence, so it was strange to be up and wondering if…well I’m not sure I was wondering exactly, just trying to manage the anxiety that was a forest fire yesterday. I am glad my nerves have settled somewhat, that I am not a nervous wreck over things that are not relevant like I was yesterday. And yet when you have anxiety it is much easier said than done to banish it, and of course I do not fear the reaper, nor fear the past that Tara has, for it is past and not future, and if things go awry then so be it but I won’t spend my whole time with her insecure about someone she knew months ago.

I am wishing that I didn’t have to wait so long to see her today, that the time apart did not have to happen at all. I know that is mildly obsessive, but I have a boring day of no work and all play that will surely make me a dull boy if I do not find a way to shake off the doldrums of the afternoon. You see, these days are so long, stretch from the morning to the evening and I wonder how I would manage if I didn’t need to work. I don’t know that I would take to productive habits, there is only so much you can write in a day, only so much you can read. And things like running take up an hour here or there, but they too fall short of filling up the whole day. And so we turn to drink. To the simple, available vices that set up the evening for me falling asleep early and hard.

Of course I will find things to do, I will get coffee six times, will look around at the world and find something beautiful to admire. Maybe I will take a long walk. Maybe I will finish another book. Maybe I will spin a record, maybe I will sleep. But I doubt it, once I’m up there is no rest to be had, and I have been up for a while. I need to bring Tara some food, but I must wait for the sprinkler guys to leave. I want to be the perfect partner, and sometimes that is hard to do. Sometimes I actually do fall short of perfect, fall short even of excellent, though I suppose not too often. I just want to be the best I can be, for me, for her, for all the others who see me move in the world. If I struggle with self-esteem it is only because I was bullied as a child. But who cares about that, that was ages ago. Now I am strong and alive and able to navigate the challenges of adulthood even when like yesterday they knock me off my center and send me spinning through the day feeling as if something is terribly wrong.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of good and plenty of bad in my life. But I like to think that the good much outweighs the bad. And that if I focus on it, on the good, that is, I can find something like happiness, where I don’t feel insecure or unworthy, and I can flourish in that space between the emptiness that threatens to drown every moment as senseless and useless and dead. I think I would be fine if I didn’t work, on second consideration. Maybe I could even be a stay at home dad someday, wouldn’t that be a sweet gig? Wouldn’t it be a wonder to get to bond with your first born child in that way. I think maybe that is a goal of mine, to get to experience the little wee one if and when he or she comes to us and grows up big and strong and free. I have lost the thread of this entry, and so I am going to go, I just wanted to say something today because yesterday was such a shitshow. Thank god I’ve moved beyond that, and into this, which is much more pleasant and makes me feel like maybe I can figure out how to exist in this world, something I sometimes struggle with. 

That is enough rambling for today, or at least for now. Maybe later I will come back to this if I feel I had something to say. Maybe later I will find the space to say what I meant, instead of only wandering through the margins here with these inane thoughts. I think I didn’t need to say anything either yesterday or today, and instead there are two entries that say a lot about me, maybe more than I should’ve shared. I know that I am honest in here, and that is a great strength of this piece, so that is what I’m doing and if it seems boring and lame and there is no point in continuing then let me know and I’ll give you the middle finger and type something with the remaining nine fingers and so it will continue to grow even when it is just a journal about how I struggle. On that note I have not had a cigarette since maybe Tuesday morning. I can’t even remember when it was, and for that I am grateful. Now to get Tara a sandwich, and to go for a run. I love you all a lot, but none of you as much as her. I didn’t need to say that, but I did, because I felt it. That’s all you can do sometimes.

TTFN,

Dick

10.14.24 Stable this year

It has been a strange day, for reasons I will not elucidate here. Let it be known that people have a way of sharing confidential information, it seems, and that seems a violation of their professional code of ethics, if not the law. I’m not going to say anything more, and probably not going to make an issue of it, even though I could. I don’t want to blow up anyone else’s life, not for personal gain or otherwise. I am not a believer in punishment, strictly speaking, and though perhaps what was possibly done was wrong, I don’t think that there were any serious consequences on my end, and that is all that matters to me. Live and let live, bygones and all that. It really makes no difference to me, it is just disappointing that someone would share so readily what surely amounts to confidential information.

That’s enough about that though, today is a momentous day. Meeting the soon to be ex-husband this evening, which hopefully won’t be too tumultuous. I think it matters that he like me, or at least thinks I’m okay, since with any luck we’ll be tangentially involved for many years to come. Assuming all parties stay healthy and there are no major falling outs in the coming months or years. I just want everyone to get along, in true Rodney King fashion. Am I hurt that my information is available if you ask the right person? Yes, yes I am, but what can I do?  Other than sue and ruin a life and maybe drive a wedge between this family that is already more than a little bit fractured. I don’t want to do that, don’t want to make waves any more than I already am.

You see it is not my place to judge people. Jesus got that right at least, let he without sin cast the first stone. And I no exception to imperfection, just a man with some issues that sometimes rear up and turn ugly. I don’t want to cause ugliness in someone else’s life, as I know how unpleasant it can be to experience first hand. There is so much room for forgiveness in this world, of people who we don’t know or that we do, and I want to be an example of that for the world. For anyone who might ever look up to me. Be that Tara’s daughters, be that any children I might have, be that any adult who thinks of me as someone good enough to imitate. I think that if the world was more forgiving it would be a better place, Jesus got that right too. Turn the other cheek, forgive and forget, etc…that is the world I want to live in, not the one where so called Christians believe in tax cuts for the ultrarich, criminalized abortion, deporting refugees, and in a government that provides no social services. One where childcare should be left to grandparents in every case. How many kids do you know whose grandparents couldn’t? How many kids do you know whose grandparents are dead?

It is a sad state of the world that the people who claim to follow Jesus of Nazareth use him primarily to assume a moral superiority over the rest of us. If you believe that he was Christ and died to redeem us, then you should also recognize that he was basically a socialist. Feed the sick and needy, be your brother’s keeper, forgive even those who crucified him because “they know not what they do…” Does that sound like tough on crime? From one who was put to death as a criminal at the behest of the conservative religious factions at the time? Would the Christian right in America be remembered as Pharisees and Sadducees if Jesus were to come back? I posit that they would, even at the risk of being crucified for saying so. Dogma is no way to live your life, and when your dogma conveniently supports exploiting marginalized peoples I think you should take a serious look at yourself if you call yourself a Christian. Maybe that is going too far, but Jesus was known to cavort with prostitutes, people who would have needed abortions at a higher rate than the average population. Jesus recruited not one but two tax collectors as apostles (if I’m not mistaken), which doesn’t exactly gibe with “no tax on tips”.  Maybe I am out of line, but I think the “Christian” majority is way out of line to be espousing the politics they are. What happened to love thy neighbor as thyself?

That is enough about that, the sun is shining and I am at the bottom of my second beer. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid on the box. And no end in sight to the maladies. I long to live in a world where everyone can be happy, but I know it is not to be. I long to see my name up there in 8.5x11” mimeograph, I long to see my firstborn child take their first steps, to say their first words…I long for so many things but mostly for stability, to never have to go back to a hospital and suffer through that raving loneliness in solitude broken only by the other unwell people with whom you can spend time. And in those times nothing but time. Now the time grows short, the hour grows near. And I much the same as when I woke up this morning. At peace, out of cigarettes, ready for whatever the day has to offer. I love this life even when it tries me, and I hope that anyone else who does too has a good day today.

There is a lot of animosity that I think unnecessary, and I want to make that clear. People do stupid shit, sometimes people get hurt as a result, but I don’t think every offense needs to be punished. I opened with that and I am sticking by it. Maybe it is because I have suffered some punishment in my life, both incidental and deliberate, that I don’t think that it really solves anything. And yet it is the way of the world, and to a certain degree I must accept that, and try to live within it. I just think that people make mistakes, and do things they shouldn’t, probably every one of us every day, to a certain extent. Sometimes those things are egregious and cause great harm to others, and perhaps in those cases punishment is necessary. People can’t just rewind and not be hurt, people can’t unfire a gun and be less dead. And then, yes, I think perhaps punishment is necessary. But not for every little thing. Let forgiveness and rehabilitation lead the way, help people to be better, don’t throw their lives away. That’s my two cents.

I think it is time for me to move on with my day, to move on to the late afternoon where I am free of all these considerations. Where I can just idle and let the hours pass easily and with no regard for anything besides the peaceful, easy feeling that resides inside my gut. Creatively blocked, as Brooke told me on Friday? I think not. Surely I could be more creative, could be working on actual prose rather than just journaling here, but the diary grows, and the narrative grows more nuanced and complex with every entry. A portrait of the artist as a young man. A portrait of the madman when he is sane. A portrait of a man with purpose and direction, if he is a little off the mark at times. And maybe not even that. Maybe just free with his mind, and free in it as well. That is enough, as I am so fond of saying, enough of everything, for now,

TTFN,

Dickie

10.20.24 A morning for reflection

When one feels that one has done something wrong it can be enough to eat you alive from the inside. Guilt that threatens to drown out every shred of good feeling. But today that is not the case, today is a day for rejoicing, six months and one day of knowing my beloved, six whole months of my life being better than it was before. I miss her, as she is downstate for soccer…I would have gone to watch but alas had a work meeting right smack in the middle of the day, on a Sunday no less…it is the hazards of the service industry to have to work all days of the week, I suppose. With any luck I can break into something else, can get out of the schedule of late nights that keeps me so often from being where I want to be, can get out of the work where one day before the work week begins I do not even have my full schedule for the week. But that is just poor management, I suppose, or who knows why we don’t know when we are supposed to work as the week grows nigh…I am tired of missing out on things that I want to do because of work, but maybe I am being a trifle overdramatic. I still get plenty of time with the one I love.

I am trying to keep it together, trying to keep myself on the rails. Rolling down the track towards the evening when I can do better than the sleepy-head I was last night, our actual six months. I shouldn’t have been so tired, it was preventable, really. But that is yesterday, there is only today with which to do better. And I miss that beautiful woman dearly as she streams on towards Rockford and a soccer game and then who knows what else they will do down there, lunch maybe, and then back on the road towards us so we can go to dinner with my grandmother, our inspiration that 594 months is a possible contingency. That’s our new goal, that much time together, close to fifty years, as it turns out. Here’s a little prayer we both live and are healthy that long. I haven’t had a cigarette in almost seven days, so that is something, and in fact I have been without nicotine for five whole days as well. The quaking of my nerves has subsided and I think that I will stay away from that convenient, if stinky, vice.

It is a cool morning, a cool October morning like so many others and I wish that I could…well I wish a lot of things but none of them so much relevant. What is not to be is none of my concern, there is only the force of what is—God, in some definitions—and I have about an hour before I have to leave for my meeting, and I am drinking coffee and typing here. It is not such a bad day even if I am not exactly where I would like to be. I guess you can’t always get what you want, and that that is just the way of the world. Today’s wants just seemed achievable, I guess, and so it seems disappointing to not be able to have them. And to be missing so dearly the object of desire and love, it is a typical feeling for me, as it seems I miss her viscerally all the time we are apart. It can be hard to extricate those feelings from the other anxieties, and I wonder if it is a symptom of a codependence. It may be, but I do not care, so enamored am I with her, truly the best person I know.

Maybe that praise is too high, maybe she is not the best person I know, but I am quite sure that I admire her strength and independence enormously, and she has proven to be enormously caring and sweet, and a great mother to boot. A total package, truly, and one I am lucky to be a party to. Lucky to get to call mine, lucky to get to be hers. To show her day in and day out what it means to me to be so lucky…to feel so intensely all the emotions that come with being so deeply in love. I don’t remember feeling so deeply in all the other relationships I have had. I don’t remember feeling so deeply at all. It is a revelation, it is a joy, and sometimes a sorrow, on the worst days. But all the feelings are valid, and they remind me that I am alive, which is the thing I desire most, to continue living, to continue to experience everything that this life has to offer me.

Is this a boring entry? Maybe. I do not care for consequences, do not care for praise. I just write what feels right on a given day. There is no arc, no progression, other than the passage of time. The passage of time that brings me from elation to depression and back again so many times. Sadness like an old familiar fellow, joy like an ever-new surprise. Is that how I’ve been conditioned, to feel that sorrow is more familiar than joy? I think maybe that it is, but that could always change. There are so many good things looming on the horizon, so many beautiful possibilities. Marriage, family, and the ever deepening sense of love. What more could a man dream of, other than perhaps to make it as a writer. To be free from the menial labor that makes me feel inadequate in the face of the newly minted interior designer that I call my partner and my love. I just want to have a profession more than a job, I suppose, and that is not such an unreasonable thing to desire.

I love this life, I love that I have love in it, that I have a place to sleep, and food to eat. I love that I have transportation, I love that I have access to wine, and coffee…it is a beautiful thing to be grateful, even if it is hard sometimes to see around the inconveniences. Even if it is hard sometimes to appreciate everything you have. But we are so lucky, so incredibly lucky to live in the modern world, with our communication devices that can connect us with anyone anywhere anytime almost. I am happy today, or trying to be. That is all I can manage at this moment, when my longing seems to know no bounds. It is alright, it is fine, it is okay. It is better than okay, the absence only makes the heart grow fonder as we have heard so many times. Sometimes is all I feel up to now. But this is one of those times. So I will jump in the shower and get ready to make the commute to my meeting. And then I will wait for Tara to return. Island to island, stream to stream. There has to be something more than this anxious feeling. But I do not know, I do not know…

TTFN,

Dick

10.20.24 Disquiet and I alone at home

The endless musings of the man who finds himself alone, what would the world be without them? As we write to pass time and not to distract from our misery—for who sees misery here?—waiting for lovers to return home from adventures we wish we could’ve attended…there are so many days with which we are blessed in our idling, wishing always that there was something more to do, something more to say, something to feel other than the creeping anxiety that curdles the bloodstream as it passes through our vacant hours. There is a malaise afoot, that is for certain…it comes and stays and there is nothing we can do but wait it out, wait for the ending of the discomfort, the disquiet of the nerves that is so commonplace and yet still dubbed maladaptive. 

I think that if I could be anywhere right now I would be right here. I think I am a touch sad that I couldn’t road trip to soccer this morning, but as afternoon makes its stretches, as the squirrels munch on walnuts in the backyard, as the music box plays a familiar song…there are many worse places I could be, at work, for one, and I’m glad that I’m not there, that I don’t have to delay my rendezvous with Tara. Oh what a joy it will be to take her in my arms and put my lips against hers…full, unbridled kisses with just the right amount of tongue…perhaps that is more than you needed to know, but in fact I do not care. This is a place for unfettered honesty, for telling the whole truth even if it makes others uncomfortable at times. And now she on her way north, even without a text to me, I will try to not take that personally.

It is easy to get caught up in every single slight. It is everything that could be done, it is everything that we wish would be done for us. Here we are sitting on the back porch listening to a beautiful song, here we are on the back porch thinking that this new race of youths are equal parts God-fearing and Godless. Never more God than in the Godless crowd. We must hold still and take in the sound of the wind sweeping leaves across the concrete. Must take in the ashtray full of cigarettes smoked what seems a long time ago, as it has been a while since I have had one. That is a blessing, I am not resigned from all things and so smoking myself to death. Instead I am seeking 594 months of happiness, 49.5 years of happiness. It seems a lot to ask but who knows! Certainly not this guy, who can see only trees though it is rumored there is a forest there…

I wish for an expeditious passing of the next three hours or so. I wish for safe passage for the road warriors streaming up US highway 131. I wish that I didn’t feel the need to wish for things whenever I felt a mild discomfort. I’m sure that I feel better than I did on Thursday, and better than I felt yesterday even. Anxiety is an old nemesis, and one that does not relent when the winds of disquiet are blowing. Disquiet, disquiet, disquiet. The clamor of the nerves, the quaking of the synapses, the illusion that something is seriously wrong even when everything is going A-okay. And I writing my second entry today, as if I had something to say. To say that my work meeting today was uneventful is asinine. To say that my brief conversation with Isaac could’ve gone better belies only that perhaps he still has not forgiven me for some of the things I’ve done. Maybe there is more to the story and the leaves turning colors out in the yard could instead be telling me what it is. That sounds like the dream of someone who has been smoking some sort of funny thing…

There’s a lot going on in the world, that much I’m sure of. Be it war, elections, strikes, you name it. It is all conspiring to cause our society problems in this year of someone’s Lord 2024. I don’t know what to think anymore. I think I will curl up and hide beneath the blankets tonight when it comes time to settle in for the night. Here’s a prayer there is no catastrophe between then and here, that everyone travels safely and there is nothing to mourn. I think I mourn in advance when I have anxiety. Fret for things that will never be as my nerves threaten to shake me like a baby until I collapse from the lack of relief…there is something happening here and I do not know what it is, I do not know why I must think these thoughts, why I must worry that she was serious when she said I was lucky I was cute. Oh lordy lord, I think if I weren’t cute I maybe would no longer be alive, would maybe be on the pile of suicides that lives in the deepest darkest directories of hell’s library. What am I even saying, I should only say that I am a long way from offing myself at this moment.

There is so much I would like to see, so many futures I long for. It does not seem prudent to abbreviate your time when you want to see it all. When everything in the world speaks to you as an opportunity for a new experience. When you look up at the sun and see the face of the giver of life. When you look up at the moon and see the cause of the tides. And I in the tides of mind, the endless shifting sands of my psyche that brings me here to this disquiet where I am trying not to drink too much on this dull afternoon where the music serves as the only distraction from the banal whiling of the hours. If only there were someone to talk to. If only there were someone to hold. If only, if only, the wishes and buts of a thousand merry christmases. And I alone here at home looking at the fallen leaves thinking that maybe that is something I could attend to. And yet, and yet, there are so many of them and only one of me. I am not a squirrel picking up acorns to weather a winter. I am just a man who suffers from anxiety, from disquiet of the nerves, from malaise of the mood, from inability to appreciate the vastness of the sky above him.

If there are people on the street fretting about real problems, I do not envy them, nor fault them, nor anything them. They may as well not exist to me, being out of sight and so out of mind. Here on the back porch I have a beer to temper my nerves. Here on the back porch I sing this silent song, this song of longing and hope, this song of angst, of pain. This song is all I have, and it is enough for me here, today. The endless rapture of producing, even when that produced says little if anything at all. I rejoice that the word count grows larger, that you are still reading (though there is no guarantee of that), that I still exist to write. If I am neurotic at times and lacking in confidences that I should have it is only because I am a weak man, and a man who does not know his own worth. A man who cannot see himself as the tallest tree in the forest. Not that I am that, truthfully. I am an average tree, if a tree at all. More probably a shrubbery, or a houseplant. Something finicky that cannot survive long if not tended to carefully.

That is how I feel, for I have been struggling with all sorts of imaginary demons. And then inject some bad behaviour on my end. And then some careless words. It is no wonder I have been stressed out, that I have been worried everything will come crashing down around me. That is always my fear, it seems. That the good things can’t last because why would they? Everything always goes to shit eventually, and if I can’t heal then what good am I? What good is anything in the face of death, in the face of the Godless night staring down with its seemingly infinite pinpricks of light. The incisions in the crystal sphere. Alas, ungodly terror, alas, the neuroses of the formerly sane man. There are so many things wrong with this world, and there are so many reasons to enjoy it and keep living. I want to go on living for a long time, to make it to 600 months, a hundred times as long as I have known the woman with whom I want to spend what seems all my time…that is a lot to ask, but I am not asking, only hoping, praying to no god that somehow our bodies hold out that long and we continue to grow our happiness and joy in the interim.

That seems like enough for this verbose day, this day of words that stretch from one horizon to the other as if it was the verbiage that caused the time to pass. The incantation itself the thing causing the hours to fall off of the clock. As if it required you to speak in order that it advance! What a world that would be, if we could prolong our time with silence. Certainly mutes would live forever! And I would be doomed to forty years. Who knows if I’m not already. I think that this is too much, like my wayward fascinations do not entertain so much as distract from the ever present knife edge that is the instant of becoming. Surely you would be better off watching an icicle melt in the dead of winter, sun beating down from the sky on the frozen water dangling from the eaves. Surely you would be better lying down in the grass and praying to whatever God you worship that you need to have another chance, another opportunity for advancement of whatever design is your current pet project.

Where was I going, where am I going now? Is there any hope that we can find ourselves where we want to be? I’m thinking there is hope of that, for me, today. But who knows, really? We may be like the chipmunk scurrying across the driveway, away from the house where it seems he has taken some sort of refuge. And I no refugee, but a man in his best blue shirt looking up at the clouds in the sky and thinking them a part of the sky, not an obstruction. The stars still beyond though it too bright to see them. And I so far gone down the path of gratitude that there is nowhere I can stomach to look but up, and then down, if only to make sure that the Earth is still turning beneath my feet.

TTFN,

Dickie

10.21.24 How many days will this grow?

It is all a cycle, a cyclical feeling that ebbs and flows and leaves us so often wondering just what it is we are feeling at any given moment. So close as to be a mystery, a denser mystery than a distant one, truly. I think I’m going to take everything I say in here with a salted caramel. Which is to say several degrees of incredulity. Which is to say that I don’t know if anything I say holds weight of any kind, if it means anything at all. Is this all for nothing, is this all just me passing time, trying to pass off my loneliness, my lonesome afternoons as something like art, or at the very least productivity? But then again I am not so lonely. Just alone, just staring up at the sky, with its few clouds today, with its clear blue expanse of endless light…it is a beautiful thing to be alive.

I think that if I could do anything with my days it would look somewhat like this moment. Music, coffee, words. It would be nice to have some company I suppose. Tara’s company, to be honest. To get to reach out and touch her leg when I feel a pang of loneliness. Or maybe loneliness isn’t the right word. Maybe none of these words are right, maybe I am a failure as a wordsmith, a stringer together only of fraudulent letters and never getting to the truth which we so ardently desire of our writers. Surely there must be a glimmer of honesty, if not truth, in these words.

Last night I had strange dreams. It seems to be that way often, unsettling dreams that leave me feeling restless as the day comes on and I must face the walking world. It makes me a trifle sad, makes me a trifle spent. I think if I could dream pleasant things every night I would struggle less with depression. Though who is to say if I am struggling, if it is not anxiety that is the bigger bear, the bigger imposition on my waking hours. I think I do not know, as I do not know so many things, as I do not know what I would do if I had to face each day alone, as I had to not so long ago. I would survive of course, but would not be as happy as I am to wake beside the blonde beauty who makes it all feel worth it. All the struggle, all the pain. Worth it because in her love I find myself renewed, because in her eyes I see myself smiling.

That is all we really want to do, isn’t it? To smile and brighten each other’s days? To make better what would have been worse in the absence of the other’s light. The divine light of humanity, our souls speaking to each other as if they had a secret language of their own. And I just a passenger on this ride to the grave, this ride that will take me so far as I can stand, this ride that will take me to the place where as of now I dare not even dream. There can’t be anything after death, it must just be the end of the line, or at least so I hope. That there is no division into heaven and hell, that there is no reincarnation that keeps us bound to the wheel of becoming without an iota of relief for the weary ten thousand lifetimes old soul. Can’t we just die, can’t it just be the end?

Only, I don’t want it to end. Only want it to stretch out forever so I never have to let go of the joy that is but six months old…the joy that hopefully will bring me a son, and a daughter. That will blunt the damage done to my mind by myself, the self inflicted pain that seems to bubble over during these downtimes. These times of idleness, when there are only so many words I can write, only so many words I can read. These times should be a rejoicing but boredom being the burden that it is I find myself wearier for having nothing to do. And I have cleaned out the fridge, and have piled the mail all around the counters. The checks for my father, the political mailings, the newspapers with their meagre content. If I could spend a lifetime with nothing to distract me from the present and its strange and vacuous becoming other than the written word, I think I would be happy. I think that if I could see Tara every morning as she wakes up and goes to the shower in order that she be ready for work, or even better, if she just showered to get clean in order that we spend time together—if there was no need for working, that is. That would be a dream, and one that might someday even be achievable.

But alas I am lazy in querying, have not cast a wide enough net to land an agent who could advance my writing career. For that is all I could see as a way out of the nine to five. I see no other way than to sell books, to make a splash on the world stage and maybe even earn some financial security…one can dream, certainly, even if it seems distant. Who knows, maybe I will hear something from any of the few that have things on their desks. But maybe I should dedicate my days off this week to querying far and wide. Should make a spreadsheet to keep track, should query multiple projects, cast a net that will at the very least get me a request for more material, a barrier I have yet to break through…

It’s okay though, it’s all okay. I have love in my life, and I have food and shelter, I have this, this pursuit of something like knowledge, at the very least self-knowledge…as if that was a worthier pursuit than knowledge of others…I think that that is enough of this for today, that you have heard my whispering in my inner ear and have thought me either a bore or insane. That you have thought of me only as a vehicle for strange passions that truly are so ordinary in a 33 year old man that there is not even a need to comment. I think that that would be okay, but I do not know if I am ordinary, as most 33 year olds do not record their every passing thought in this way. They do not record anything at all, but simply live their lives by principles that are foreign to me for not knowing what they are. Am I unique, or run of the mill? Am I anything worth writing about? I must believe that I am, or else all of these words exist for nothing more than filling up the days. Would that not be a worthy pursuit if it were the case? That is something that only time can tell us, isn’t it? I hope you have enjoyed this season of rambling, this libra season less mad than the last one. A scale, a balance. Something I have always been trying to find.

TTFN,

Dick

10.22.24 One last day

Try as we might we cannot escape our humanity, as if that was a pillar of our being that separated us from the animal world. No, it is a sense of frailty that separates us from the gods, who we do not even any longer believe in as governing bodies of this world instead ruled by the chaos of butterflies’ wings, by the irregular variations in the tides. And the plants wilting for lack of rain and the changing of the seasons, the leaves fallen down on the ground, the few flowers hanging on to their summer sense of freshness. And then the auroras in the sky each night, the angry sun a million miles away that shines down now on this little secluded spot where I can ply the waters of my mind, can sail across the vast and incomparable wastes that compose my psyche.

Perhaps that is to be a little bit dramatic, maybe that depiction of my mind as a wasteland is lifted from some book I have read, as seems to be the source of so many of my fancies…there is also the vast experience of the lived, not to be confused with the living, for their experiences are unknowable by nature of being present, and not past. No it is only the reflection on what has happened that can bring us meaning, and of course we can only glean meaning based on what we understand. The leaps into new ideas are so infrequent as to almost be negligible in the accounting for what it is we think, what grows in the arid wastelands between the familiar oases of what we know for certain. Like that we must die, that we must have companionship to feel fulfilled, that without some kind of meaningful work this life feels like a prison of hours. These things and so many others, watering holes where not only we but the animals who carry our emotional burdens can drink and so be refreshed and ready to slog on through the next emptiness before we have the idea that will be our liberation, or so we like to think when it races, electric, across the frontal lobe and gives the impression of being unique to all human kind.

That is to say that ideas come to us at times that feel that no other human has ever had them, improbable as such a thing is. I have been struck with ideas that feel unique, some of them have even ended up in here. And yet I know that surely most anything ever thought has been thought ten thousand times, that the beauty of our collective intelligence is the ability to share knowledge, is the ability to think in concert with each other. Not to be confused with the group mind, but just the coincidence of ideas, the fact that there is very little new in this world, an enormously comforting or an enormously distressing idea depending on what you are regarding.

Maybe the new, the AI’s of this world, the self-driving cars, the future that is coming whether we like it or not, is not what we should worry about so much as all the old patterns, the racism and bigotry that have roots going back to Egypt at least, if the bible is to be believed. Who knows, I do not know what to fear, and so for the moment I am outside of fear, outside of the realm where the crippling view of the future, of a future less free, is omnipresent. No here on this porch, with the election that so distressed me in July just two weeks away, I feel not a shred of fear. What happens at the top will not ruin the bottom for us, for it is on the bottom that we dwell, or near the bottom anyways, at least nearer to the bottom than the top.

And I with love in my life, as I have been repeating and repeating this month. That means more to me than a million presidents. Is that selfish? Maybe, but I have the luxury of being able not to care, for whatever that is worth. I think that I will go lie down and let libra season die, let the scales come to rest with my heart lighter than a feather. Anubis welcomes me to the western lands, where there are no more cigarettes, where neuroses are a distant and bygone fancy, and security in the things you value is the status quo. I think that I am crazy, that I have been mired in wasteland in my mind for what seems like a year, if not longer. I think that I need help to get myself back on track, that I need a push to jump from a cliff, as that young runaway was pushed in that creepy movie yesterday. What strange days, what strange October days and stranger October nights. The leaves, the leaves and their crinkling as they tumble across the drive. I listen to that sound and I feel alive, feel that this season is rightly one for renewal. Renewal of self, of body and of spirit. That is all I desire at the moment, that is all I need, and with that I retire to the afternoon, to the shower and the cleanliness that will wash me of all the silt of yesterday.

TTFN,

Richard