Month the Thirty-Third

11.24.25 Nearly 4 O’clock on a Monday

It is one of those days, another one of those days when the skin seems to crawl in its jonesing for a smoke. But we will be strong and forget how we used to cope with this feeling. Instead we will have a high noon (sip it slowly, Richard) and a glass of water to quell the shakes. We will look at the cedar trees in the neighboring yard and smile at the way they have not shed their robes as all their deciduous fellows. There it is, the repetition of old tropes. Repeating and repeating myself all over again for the benefit of Mr. Kite (There will be no show tonight, no trampolines!)! I look to the sky and see the clouds not yet ready to burst into rain, as it is too warm for snow. I smile, I smile, I smile. That is all for that thread.

So I string up another, through the eye of the needle and think about all the books in the graveyards of things I was going to write. Things that were sure to make my mark as a brilliant novelist. Jury’s still out on that. If the damned thing even went to trial. I don’t know man, I think maybe some days are better than others, and that if I could string together a few hundred more good ones into the middle of next year I might for once in my life consider myself satisfied. Tell that to the troupe of grackles that have taken up residence in the big maple in the front yard. Tell that to the finches that I see out this window.

The more I think about it (LIFE) the less I think I’ve got it all figured out. It continues to defy my expectations in that it hasn’t altogether been a total catastrophe. Something deep inside me thinks that’s what I deserve, and I continue to defy the manifestor’s guide to making what is true inside you reflected in the outside world. That is to say that life is pretty good, all told, and I think it might (fingers crossed) even continue to be so. I flip the switch and the electric light comes pouring from the ceiling, a warm orangish tone that reminds me of the president’s skin. Or rather my skin, the skin on my hands reminds me of that. I don’t know, it’s all going pretty much hunky dory and that is scary because it seems like bad things have to happen to balance out the good.

Maybe that is an error of thinking. Maybe bad things don’t have to dominate the news cycle (the Richard cycle). It can be peaches and cream for longer than a little bit, I suppose, we can feast in the midst of the famine that seems at all times to be threatening. I see a feather drifting by the window and wonder if it is someone’s cat who is doing the feasting.

The world continues to defy me, continues to tilt ever so slightly in my favor. I count myself lucky to have such a slant, and worry that I will jinx it by saying it out loud. No matter, jinxes are not the way of the world. The way of the world is indifference to the whims of man, it is the blithe sensibility of the man who knows nothing about anything of pleasure or pain. It is the jeering from the gallery coupled with the schizophrenic’s feeling that every conversation going on around is centered on them. It is the way of the world to laugh at our follies and call us mad for having them, all the while tempting us with the next round of desires baked up halfway and then left out to dry in the sunlight streaming in through the window.

I do not know where I was going with that. I am suffering from a persistent pronoia, which has nothing to do with my pronouns (he/him, for the record). I am suffering because I do not expect this faith in the universe to last. I see aliens peeking out from beyond their ribbons of light. I see them coming to take me away, lest I be witness to the great unveiling. I bear witness that I do not falsely witness the witless surrender of my fellow man to conspiracy theories. I see your pie chart and raise you a nickel.

We look out at the day and wonder where went the waifish days of our youth. We think of the oil changes we have not yet gotten and think we better be getting on with it. That we better make haste and get the damned thing done. I look up at the ceiling lights and wonder why I have been so ignorant of all that came before. As if, as if.

Instead we pay tribute with our blood and with our tears, with the subtle and incontrovertible evidentiary record that ties us karmically to whatever is coming next. We look out at the cedars, and thank the Lord (what is) that they do not shed their leaves. We look to the refrigerator and thank it for its service. That is all for today I think, and tomorrow is a new and twice as long day (new and improved, I suppose). Thanks for that, scheduling Gods.

TTFN,

Richard.

12.1.25 Almost exactly one week on

The days pile on, endless repetitions, little evolution, and only the scattered pleasures left to give our lives meaning. I read from my book and wonder how I have been so small. How I have let my brain wither into the shriveled thing that only longs for a couple of things, the mass of matter between my ears be it white or grey I do not know and I look to the snow beginning to fall and am glad that I have travelled all I will be travelling for this week. That there is no distant land calling my name and that I can be satisfied with my own home, for the old glass of wine that sits with me now, commiserating companion as the afternoon gets on into evening, as I wait for my darling to come home and free me from my ever present loneliness.

Of course it is not so bad as that. I do not weep all the time for having to entertain myself. For who could be more entertaining than oneself? I remember reading that somewhere but can’t place it. Did I write it? Did some great sage like the one who stares back from the lengthy and dense tome I do not seek to ever emulate write it and pass it on to me in the form of a snappy quotation that I have internalized without having a source that remains. The afternoon grows stale as yesterday’s rolls, and as afternoons do the light begins to fade and we see the reddening of the horizon from the corner of the yard. If you think that this means we are in for good weather you are sorely mistaken. Already the flakes that will bury us have begun to fall, already the next onslaught of this winter comes!

Wish me luck, wish me health, wish me laughter as the days grow shorter and shorter for another few weeks, wish me brighter days beyond that, with literal light to pour through our lives and kiss our skin into darker shades. The things that come to us as important are very few, and not much of these lives matter too much in the final accounting. How were you to the people around you? Certainly a question they will not be asking at the life review is how much money did you earn. Or maybe they will, maybe we are living under God as Capitalist™. Who is to say what questions they will be asking at the life review, how will we know when we have forgotten all the previous life reviews. What will we say about the friends who have fallen by the wayside? What will we say about the people who have died to bring us to this point?

And what do I even mean by that? What does it mean that I dance the same steps whenever music comes to move me? Is it a habit of the creature that I am that drives me into those funky rhythms that come with driving back beats and thumping bass alike? Do we see the relief of the gallery when they see that I will sit back in my chair and groove no more on the wooden floorboards that stare back at me, relieved of the pressure that comes with my footfalls? In the end it will not matter how much we danced, or how much we sang. The will measure us by how we are remembered and few will remember anything about us. I know because I remember little of the people I have known that have died. I know this for the fact that it is.

So live well, enjoy your time. It is short and getting shorter. You might not live through the night, you might not live through the week. The month is an even more distant target and yet you must plan as if you will make it to one hundred or more. There are few things surer in life than that we will die, and yet it remains a nebulous end point to our stories. We do not know when the hour of the son’s return will be, do we? So we live our lives as if we will live forever, bartering our time with drinking and drugging, with fast driving and persistent thoughts of ending it ourself. It is easy to dream of a life beyond the grave and another thing entirely to have it come true. As a firm believer that this life is it for us, that the few things that matter only do so to us, I think that we must value whatever makes sense to us, and not worry so much about our legacy or what the world thinks of us.

I say this as a relative failure. As a man who has not accomplished yet what he set out to do. There is still time for me, but for now I have not achieved very many of my goals. Is there any hope that my life will not have been wasted when the final accounting comes in? I have written books, and that is something. Hopefully they do not die with me in a drawer. Hopefully I achieve the relative immortality available to those of us born into the anthropocene. Hopefully we do not extinct ourselves. Hopefully things carry on as they have for thousands of years, and humanity carries on into the vast and unknowable future with the persistence that has brought us to the pinnacle of complex life as we know it. There is hope, there is always hope.

So we carry ourselves with all the pride of a yankee doodle dandy, we wait for the end that will carry us on into the void, we try to smile, more at least than we did yesterday. Of course the days are not up and up and up into greater and greater happiness, but rather a staggered, climbing on sand sort of back and forth maybe getting nowhere sort of progress. I just try to enjoy what I can, and try to make others smile as I do not place too much importance on my own happiness, so long as I can bring it to others. It is a trifle to be unhappy. It is a trifle to waste your life. Nothing matters so much when we pass on, or so those of us who don’t believe in an afterlife tell ourselves to make the sleeping at night thing a little easier. Kiss me misty, I am happy to carry on without your input. I will forever retire to the Elysian fields a hero if you allow me. And maybe I will end up a nobody and the thing I was born to do will be fulfilled.

I do not know, but I do care. I care a lot about how things turn out. I care that those I love have as many years of happiness as they can. I care that…oh who am I kidding. The world passes by around me and I go on unseeing. What good is the day’s work when you can’t add something to the world? I care not what happens, just have it be fun, please.

TTFN,

Richard