Month the Twenty-Twoothe

12.23.24 Vacation

Or at least a couple days of it. There is no end in sight to the working, I don’t think, but that is probably for the better. Or at least the best if not the better. Maybe I didn’t have that quite right. Maybe I am spinning my wheels, as I was the other night trying to capture the mood of a moving dream. And who knows if the five hundred words I got down are accurate. To the mood of the thing, that is. Which was heavy and somber, as if someone had died. I still think that there is no cure for dreaming, and that maybe that is the reason we are alive. Maybe not, maybe it is the other, more obvious, simpler things like being good to your fellow humans and trying to make sense of why we are here with so little (or perhaps so much, contradictory) guidance as to why we are here and what we are supposed to be doing since we are.

I think that there is too much static, too much conflicting info out there. I think too that there are a lot of things that make sense to me, and many more that do not. I will not waste your time delineating them here. I know that I am happy, or almost happy. I could do with more money. I am a little stressed about money right now, if I’m being honest. I may have spent outside my means to make this Christmas holiday special. But I don’t regret that, if it is, as I said, a little stressful. I just hope everyone is appreciative of the things that I got them. That they love them as much as I loved picking them out. I hope I hope that the stars fall and the oceans empty, but that is a story for another day.

Where are we going to, L&G, can’t we all just see that there is too little joy in the world, and celebrate the joy when it comes. Like when your lady takes her first bite of ravioli and it washes away the stress of having had her pipes freeze. Or maybe it was not so dramatic as that. Maybe the joy crept in little by little, inkling by inkling until the return to the house that had running water again set everything back in its place. I think this may have been the case. I think I think I think. How much thinking can one man do? How much wondering about the state of the world? Is my musing going to make much difference, can’t I just accept my insignificance and move on into the world with what courage I can muster? Or is that too much to ask?

Asking for a friend, but what would you think of a family photo in which everyone was naked? I don’t know many families that I’d like to see that of. So that’s what I told him. And I told him too that if he was going to do that he had better not distribute it too widely. Maybe put it on the mantle and destroy any copies.

Imagine, Imagine, that you are on a plane. High above the earth, looking down at rolling fields and highways between them. At the endless horizon around you. Nothing but blue sky, the clouds have been banished. I am there, with you, in the seat beside. But I cannot see as well. I need you to tell me what you see. I am lost without your eyes, I declare. I cut the shit. I am not lost. I am found in your arms. Even if they are at your sides and not yet wrapped around me. We are strangers but something tells you we met in another life. I don’t believe in other lives. I just believe in now, and know myself to be found with the little wildflower tattooed near your elbow. I think of the future that we will not share, for the engine fails just about a minute after I realize myself found, and then another engine, and then we are going down. You reach over and hug me and I take note of the tattoo. It is the only thing left to do.

That was a vignette about an airplane. I think it wasn’t very good. But I have reached a phase where I don’t think much of what I do is very good. It seems like I am just persisting for the sake of it. Writing so that I produce words. And that little bit about an airplane that crashes. What a cliché. It even made it onto a bright eyes record. And I just a super fan, a man apart from himself, apart from all others as the eyes of the world look down upon him knowing that he will wrestle with his fate and even do things to prolong his time on this earth. There will be endless raptures surrounding him but he will be blind to them all. What has happened to me? I used to be such a burning example. Now I am a stranger to myself, I know not what passions move me as I sit here to record them. There is no telling what has transpired to make me so complacent.

I guess at least I am trying. At least I am making an effort to record the vicissitudes of mood that sway me on a given day. Or maybe I am more stable, not any longer enticed by the allure of enlightenment, not catching thrills as I make my way through the days. Not looking back but ever forward into the nebulous and carefree future. The future where all will be taken care of and we’ll retire to endless happiness. Or maybe it will be all pain. Probably a little bit of each, if history serves to tell us. Probably there will be happiness and pain both. It always seems to go that way, don’t it? I think that it do. I think that I do. Is a couple of words I’m going to say before the year is out. Hopefully. That is all I have for now, I’m going to try to write some fiction. Some sad boi shit. Some endless happiness…

TTFN,

Dick

12.27.24 Restless

Days like today make you question everything. When you are coming out of your skin to try to do anything. The fiction project stalled. The book you are reading so dense and abstract as to be inimitable. And I reading often to try and inspire new prose. It is a slow day in paradise, with rain falling down to melt the snow. I have my second coffee of the day as afternoon comes on and sit listening to the boys in the band. The band from across the street. Literally. I haven’t written anything of any quality in months. No, it has just been this diatribe. This rambling to fill up space on the page. Though Tara has enjoyed them. They are glimpses into my head I suppose.

Only my head feels empty and I feel sad. Not terrible sad, not crying sad, just blue and wishing that I could focus better than I can. This is helping I suppose. This typing out of sequential words. And I just a link in a sequence that stretches from the first human to the last. If I bear a child, that is. That would continue the chain. And who knows when it will end. There are so many tear-stained nights, cum-stained sheets. And no children, not yet. Will that give me the purpose my life sometimes seems to be lacking? Or am I lacking in purpose at all? Isn’t it really that I have too much time and not enough focus. Maybe an adderall would help me, maybe a zoloft would cure my ills. Maybe I do not need anything but I can’t remember the last tobacco cigarette I had. It has been these little hemp guys, which are still addicting even if there is no nicotine. I am addicted to the act of smoking. And that is okay, for now.

For you see I am not perfect, I have my vices, I have my ailments. I struggle with the side effects of my medication, of which restlessness is the primary intrusion. It is this that drives me to smoke, to fill up the day in that way. I don’t know if these herbal cigarettes are better or worse or the same, but I am definitely smoking fewer than I was of the tobacco kind. So I will take the minor victory and soldier on through the days that don’t always hold so much joy as I wish they did.

You see on the slow days it seems like there are just too many hours. I wish that I had worked this morning instead of tonight, that seems to be a more tenable schedule for me. When I have the whole day to myself then there are vices that tempt me. Like the smokes. But I have put down pot, haven’t gotten high since my last uncomfortable trip up the flagpole. And everyone liked their Christmas gifts. So I feel somewhat accomplished even if I am avoiding dealing with the financials of all that spending. I need to move money around but I feel scared for unknown reasons to even look at the apps that allow me to do it at the touch of a button. Why does money terrify me, why don’t I understand money? Why does it rear up out of the future like a demon I need to slay? Why can’t I just have enough? Enough forever? Why can’t somebody like my books? Buy one of them?

Enough whining Richard, there are people literally sleeping in their cars and on the street. Enough is a relative term. And you have enough. Wishing you had more is pretty much par for the course though, ain’t it? We want to shower those we love with gifts. Want to drink nice wine, want to have nice dinners. Want to get married and have children and all of those things are quite expensive. Still, it is nice to have food and shelter. And a little disposable income too. It is a nice thing to be alive at all. Every time I sit to write in here I am overcome with gratitude. Maybe that is the whole point of this missive. To remind me that things are not so bad as they seem when you sit in front of the fiction project and write one sentence that you hate. When you read one chapter from your new book and wonder why you are reading such a vapid and anonymous tale.

There is so much beauty and so little truth in the world. We quest for both knowing that there will never be an end to the questing. We must seek and find what we wish to know, we must live and be known and find ourselves always wondering about how many people in the world live as well. So many ways of living, so many ideas, and we none the wiser for having had them. I wish I could wrap my head around how big this world is, with every human head containing a different world. Seven billion worlds or so and I without a clue as to what I’m doing here. Just trying to spread love and not succumb to the facets of hatred that seem to multiply all around me. Indeed I am a lover and not a fighter, mostly my fights are with myself. With my own stupidity, with my own inertias, with my own laziness and incompetence. It seems such an effort at times just to be. And I guess that is my burden, one I bear as happily as I can manage. Maybe it is a function of my mental illness, maybe it is just my nature. I think that there are worse things I could be suffering from. For instance I am not any longer paranoid. I am just swimming through the days trying to fill them up as productively as possible. Trying to make light of the dark, damp heaviness that presses in upon my mentation.

Is it simply depression that I struggle with? It might be, but it is an erstwhile companion on this journey and I will not give up on myself so easily. Malaise is a factor in every day, and I seem particularly disposed to struggle with it. Some days I long to be a melody, drifting in a suspended moment in time, and maybe the long arc of my life is something similar if viewed from the right perspective. But from here it can be drudgery, from here it feels like work. And while I am not outright work-averse I am hoping that I can focus on the joy more than my tendency to fixate on the sorrow. With these wings I will own my magic and soar on to the next thing. And the next thing after that. Maybe we will even have a rocket to the sun someday, though that sounds very sweaty and not all that pleasant. I hope that I can do better tomorrow, for today is feeling kind of like a bust. At least I got this out, at least not nothing came out of this doldrumy day. Hey now, don’t be sad, at least there wasn’t an airstrike nearby, or something else truly lamentable.

Tomorrow will be a brighter day I hope, and the one after that brighter still. Though probably there will be some black days mixed in with the good ones, and I will have to ride out the bad feelings. I am used to all of this and it still catches me unprepared. Today is not even black, only mildly grey, and not even staticky at that. It is just bland, and blah, and I am ready for some sort of excitement, which I guess my work day will have to provide. Enough of the rambunctious antics youngling, we are going up the mountain to the place where the springs run clear. Up and up and up until we can go up no more. I wish you could come with me, but alas, the party is full. No room at the inn.

TTFN,

Dick

1.2.25 The first of many

New year, same old me. There is a beautiful sorrow deep within my breast, as well as some phlegm within my lungs. There is snow on the ground and more in the air, and I am done with work for a few days. Thank the heavens for all of it, for everything that matters to me and that it is still extant on this Thursday when it all could have imploded righteously into a black hole produced by otherworldly processes. I think maybe that is a bit far-fetched, but I am tired still, and wishing for something to distract myself from the fact that I still have a bit more time to kill. A bit more time away from my baby, that is, that torturous passage through the hours when you wish you could be somewhere else. Is this another one of those?

There has been good wine had, there has been good company, and there have been hours spent in new employment, even if the employment is not strictly new. I think that if I was going to put a label on this day I would call it middling. Did not make much money, but also not no money. Did not sleep as much as I would’ve liked, but then again I slept more than enough. I smoked a handful of cigarettes, killing my new year’s eve pack, which was the first in quite a long time, and I am not buying another. I think I may go get some more wine after this and go from there into the evening where the promise of a kiss and a squeeze stands to make everything better. There are simple pleasures to be had everywhere, it seems, and though my book is held hostage by a thirteen year old I may read some yet tonight, assuming I can keep my eyes open as I could not yesterday.

For it was a late night to ring in the new year, and an early night on the first day fully in the new calendar. Maybe we will see the rise of a despot, maybe none of the alarmist things will be true, and I in no position to weigh in on that. Certainly a lot of people are scared, and some with good reason. I think that I am happy, and that if all continues to go the way it’s going, I will continue to be happy in this new year. Who knows anything about that though. I think it is good to have love in your life, and good to be relatively sober and solvent. I think that there is no telling what the future holds, and if you can hold onto the things that make you happy that is probably all you can do. I think I have said a number of things to that effect before, and perhaps this is the same old repetitious garbage that this year has been composed of. Here we are in capricorn season and I have scarcely had a new idea in months.

Still it was nice to see family over the holidays, and nice to see friends too. If I could have one wish it would be that I remain free to make my own way in the world. That I have a fighting chance to hit the big time and make something of these little molehills that I have fashioned from the inside of my brains. This pouring out of the inner world onto the page, this accumulation of life and wonder that has left me so stupefied as the world presses in and threatens to become indubitable. Of course it has always been such, even when we doubted. Always reality pressed in and persuaded us that we would have to deal with it. I think that if there was too much doubt maybe the world would be safer than if there was too much belief. But who knows, there were a number of Christmas movies that suggested that the opposite was true.

But who believes in what is the question I always find myself asking, and what are they going to do about it was the next one. I am just a man who has a lot of fear bouncing around inside of him all the time. A lot of unfounded fear, I hope, and hopefully the coming year will make that apparent. Maybe it will fulfill all my fears, but hopefully not. Hope, hope, hope, faith and love, but to what and for whom? I have fidelity and love for the one who is dearest to me. And for my family, and my friends. I think that that is all I can manage for now. Here in the center of this fear stricken wheel that spins and spins and then sometimes comes to rest only to start up again on a whim. There is no lasting relief, no guarantee and no assurance can make me totally at peace. What a strange inner world to be residing in. And I must rise above the ashes and into the future that beckons me to be the best I can be. For what more can a man ask of himself?

In truth there is nothing and we must hope and pray that nothing bad happens to send half the world up in arms against the other half. I hope that nothing bad happens to anyone I love today. And tomorrow, and the next day ad infinitum. There are innumerable calamities that could befall any of us basically at any time. And my fears make them seem real. Perhaps it is a facet of my disease, the bipolar disorder that makes terror a reality and an unshakeable one at that. I wish I could just feel totally at ease, oblivious to the great swatch of history unfolding and being etched by the scribes in their towers of ivory and ebony. That my enemies in the world would all leave me alone, if I even have enemies left to write about. Maybe the world is moving on around me and I will be left behind.

There is no telling what this year will bring but I am busy making plans in spite of all that. Some of them might even bear fruit and with any doubt the catastrophic disruptions of my life that I fear in my weaker moments might not come to bear. There is so much beauty that there is no room left for truth. And I just a water bearing soul, chopping wood and carrying the wet stuff up the mountain as injustice rages around in my imaginings of the world. What is a world without justice, but who gets to decide what is just. Is that up to God? Is that up to us? Can any of us really be fit to judge? I think I would like to make it to the end of the day without anything bad happening, and maybe even to the end of next week. And maybe to the end of the year, and even to the end of my life, which could be as soon as tomorrow, so who knows?

I love you all so very much, I’m sorry that I am in a fearful mood, more so for myself than for anyone else, as I am the primary victim of such a thing. And I will not play the victim, but will pull myself up by my bootstraps and go get a bottle of wine so that we have something to enjoy tonight, my baby and me. I must admit it did not make me feel better to put these thoughts down today, as it often does, but that is not too much of a bother. It is just another day in the life, and the life of pi is a book I have not read. Nor even seen the movie adaptation. Ever since the watermelon rotted out on the front porch I haven’t been able to differentiate between pumpkins and other kinds of fruit. That’s what we call a joke to sign off for now.

TTFN.

1.3.25 What to think of all this?

I must admit that as I pass the midpoint of my thirty-fourth year I am baffled by this world. By its vastness, akin to the mystery of the stars of which we orbit only a minor, truly tiny one; by the uncertainty of a future that could be ripped out from under you at any moment by any of many forces beyond your control; by the incongruity of the life lived thus far. Of course I have written of my madness, the madness that stole from me my twenties, but I don’t too often mention explicitly that it haunts me every day, that on some of those days I feel like I would answer the oft asked mental health query, “Have you felt like you wanted to go to sleep and never wake up?” in the affirmative. Today is one of those days, when the spectres of past delusions crowd near to me as I wait for my love to finish up her workday. Delusions that feature coalescences of names, of persons I have known, of song lyrics and movie lines and the unshakeable feeling that my life is dictated from above, and that all lives end in ruination.

Maybe there is some truth to that, as the reaper comes for all of us, or at least so far that is the case. Sometimes I fear that those days might be numbered but I may not live to see the era of eternal youth that my Catholic upbringing, mingled with the thinking that an afterlife beyond the grave cannot be a thing that came on later, when the faculties of reason were more fully formed, or perhaps, when they, in adulthood, became more stilted and bound to this material existence. It does not truly bother me to die, if I’m being honest, but it is a fear that the one I love will be forced to move beyond me and find another with whom to spend eternity. I have thought a lot about eternity, and about missing out on it, though in truth probably we will all be blessed with death. Oh I shiver at the thought of her choosing a vampiric (not necessarily bloodsucking, or cursed, but blessed eternal youth) outcome for herself even if it meant leaving me behind. To join a traveling circus of freaks who galavant across the centuries while we mortals toil and die. Oh what a curse it would be to me to lose her even to death, to cancer or heart attack or any of the other common scourges that grace our century. To lose her to the supernatural, or to my own death before death was cured only to have her find love again, in my fantasies always in the arms of the only man I’ve ever known who has felt like an enemy.

To what degree this enmity exists only in my own mind is unknown to me. I do not know if he even thinks of me anymore. With any luck I have slipped his mind entirely. But still the fear persists.

I have written some of fear in here. It is a near constant companion for me, of going to prison and being so left behind—despite the reasoning that I have done and continue to do nothing wrong in the eyes of the law—as utopia and dystopia blossom in eternity on opposite sides of the prison fence. Or that it will be death that takes me from this world and leaves her behind to find another as she found me. One who will prove to be the love of the near-infinite lifetime of relative, scientifically backed immortality while I was just a precursor on such things. I fear to be insignificant in the final accounting, I suppose, and that is a natural fear compounded by the many many psychoses that have wracked my brain over the years. Where am I going with this? What did I set out here to prove?

I think it is that I am but a man, and a scared man at that. But in being scared we find the necessity of being brave, of seizing each moment of each day even when it feels that if we went to sleep tonight and never woke up that would be the blessing. I shudder to think of how the passive suicide itch has been with me for years, at times taking the acute, center stage action of a demand from the Lord God Himself that I take my own life. That the devil has my soul and that I will end a ruined man tortured by his own spiritual compromise has long been a theme of my psychoses, though when they come on strongest, in mania, I am often riding so high that it seems that I am God Himself in the center of the stage and also up in the rafters pulling on the marionette strings that drive all the action around me as well.

Of course I am not God. No one person can be God. Not even Jesus, though I could be crucified for saying that out loud. Maybe not even all of us together are worthy of the title, and this is something that comes to me accompanied by a pressing and solemn sadness. That even the sum of all humans, even leaving alone the very evil or very wicked, can be what we have dreamed to be our steward, who lurks in the corners of our imaginations sending messages from beyond time that if we follow them too closely accrue into a madness worthy of a sage philosopher king. What does that even mean, Richard? What are you hinting at, you who has long since left behind the notion that God is something more than the force of what is? The reality of circumstance is impersonal, as in the zen doctrines about isness. And yet there are these glimmers of something more that seem to be born in the depths of our fear and our uncertainty over what the future holds. And so we hold to the idea that someone must be guiding these times, that Christ will return to save us from the beasts that haunt this apocalyptic time in which we are living. Where bombs and rockets fly on Christmas day, where a week later civilian safe-zones are bombed.

And the still scarier thought that someone could take it upon themselves to enact the Christian Apocalypse; that the book of Revelation could be enacted, with men (and only evil men would wish to assume such a mantle, men being of course in this instance gender-neutral) as the arbiters of the Last Judgment. Where would I fall on this spectrum? Would I be among the saved able to live out eternity with my beloved on my arm? Would my dear dear family fall on the same side of the fence? Would we be separated into haves and have nots of a kind not seen in all the history of this world, with some in a land of infinite plenty and others either dead or imprisoned in the fires of hell? I have always tried to be good for goodness’ sake, not out of fear, but not completely immune to it either. Hell is a reality for many on this Earth as it is every moment, and if someone took it upon themselves to set aside a portion for foxes, so to speak, it could be even more systematically implemented than it already is. And what monster but Christ would set himself up to judge in such a way? Merciful and kind, my ass.

I do not mean to blaspheme, only to let you into the world that is pressing in on me this Friday, the third of January in the year of our Lord 2025. The Millennium is upon us, and a quarter gone, at that. Or rather the first century of the millennium. It gets so confusing when in my mind some humans will live ten thousand years and others a mere seventy. And I on a path to be closer to the latter figure. And no guarantee that the former is but a pipe dream that is scary only if I am to be left out of it. I don’t want to live forever, but I don’t want to be on the losing side of the war for my soul.

For this is a question of souls, of love and pride and engaged on a plane where there is no room for hate. I want to hold my love’s hand, Tara’s hand, as she passes on into whatever lies beyond the grave. And maybe there she will find herself bound to her first husband, even if I (should I become the second) may prove to be better for her in this earthly realm. But more likely she will return to the stardust that she was before she started to grow in the uterus of her mother, Theresa. Mother Theresa, oh how I long to make you laugh again, how I long to make your daughter smile, and to bear with her a child that will be no king, no emperor, but just another man like his father who will likely struggle to make sense of the senseless violence that rages in this world of worlds. This one and only Earth where it seems like ruination is the only thing awaiting us.

But maybe that is not the right tact. Maybe it is better to know the joy we have and build upon it. To have faith not in God but in the future. That the future holds for us good things, and that we will be healthy and sound of mind when they come to greet us. Certainly the present is so good that my fears of losing it in the future bring a sizeable distress. The geese flying overhead (though it is January) harbingers of the Devil at large in the world, threatening all of us who have the courage to step outside of the province of God. And of course God, what is, is for the moment Good, but as It has been bad before it stands to reason that it could be so again. And then there are all the human fears, the fears that I will lose what I love, that what I love will choose another (perhaps more painful even than the outright, permanent loss guaranteed in death), that I or those I love won’t be invited to the party that here in the heavenly planets we desire more than anything else.

And of course the climate is in dire straits, the political scene more divided and polarized than perhaps ever before; on the ground though, where God (what is) is greater than government, we see that there is much in the way of clean water, that there still are crops fit to feed the masses, or at least those among them who can stomach the high price of groceries. Just because the world is at war, and because the future is not guaranteed, need we suffer in the present to wonder what will become of this mysterious world? Maybe if we place our faith in ourselves, our abilities to be brave and face up to injustice and all its numerous wiles, maybe just then we will arrive at the grave looking back at a life where there were very few days when we wanted to go to sleep and never wake up. Just because it would be easy doesn’t mean it would be right. And that is something that I will tuck under my pillow and retrieve and wear like a pair of spectacles when my alarm goes off tomorrow, or rather when my baby rolls over and plants a kiss on my forehead because it is Saturday and we have no need for alarms.

I think I feel much better about my life than I did yesterday at this time. I think by tomorrow I might even be cured of the clinical depression that, so mingled with the memories, the flashbacks of psychoses, can seem so overwhelming at times. Maybe even for the rest of my life I will be spared the scourge of mania, and so too will be spared all that I love and care for in my resting state. Perhaps Tara will never have to see me in that state, will only get to know the Richard that she loves and cares for, the one who just yesterday expressed to her that she was the love of his life, to which she respond “and you are mine.” Maybe we can live in that love for the rest of our days with no major injuries or tragedies. Maybe, if we are very lucky. But I would rather be good than lucky, in this case, with life the relevant thing being described. Be good, maybe get lucky. That is how I think one should live, and that one should forgive liberally, as if it were the gravy you ladled onto your thanksgiving turkey.

So give thanks if God (what is) is good at the moment, and pray and work towards a reality where It will be good if It is not at the moment. For we must move the plough with more than our words, musn’t we? It is easy to be in love when you have it, and terrifying to consider that you might lose it for any reason. With 100 years to live I would spend as many with her as I could stand, meaning that when I fall down dead I will let my love for her die. But still, but still, the fear is not banished. The unreasonable fear that I will not survive to see the cure for death and that her husband in the afterlife will be another. Who knows, who knows, but I think it safe to say that I intend to make her my wife and live a long time making her happy. To make your loved ones happy is the dream, after all.

TTFN,

Dickie

1.5.25 Sitting alone in the dollhouse

It is a slow Sunday, sleeping late and then taking a nap on top of it. Wanting to be dead and so refusing to face the day, repetitive thoughts of “and then he killed himself” that are not quite forceful enough to be considered intrusive. And for that I am grateful, that it is less an itch and more a chorus that is barely audible, as if the refrain were being signed instead of sung. I hope that does not scare you; today is not really so dark. I am just alone waiting for Tara and the girls to return to this little house where I am hiding in the bedroom on my macbook with the book I am reading resting idly on these rumpled sheets. It is slow days like this that can test your patience, but I am determined not to go back to the cigarettes. I smoked the last one last night before dinner and today the craving is less an itch to be scratched and more another passive desire…it is as if suicide and cigarettes go hand in hand; I think there is a Bowie song to that effect.

And now they are headed here, headed home from the other house, from the house where the husband still lives. And I just an interloper in this little dollhouse, just a man who is here for love and for the long haul, if I have anything to say about it. But that is quite beside the point, which is that this is a much less pointed entry than the last one. I am not, today, worried about missing out on forever. I am more afraid that I will miss her at dinner, that she will opt to make spaghetti instead of coming out with me and my gramma. Of course that is hardly the end of the world, is hardly even a sad thing. Because we will be away next week, or much of next week, and so she will be missing the girls…I love that she values her time with her children. That she is a good mom, even if not a perfect one—for who can be perfect at raising another human!

And always the joking question—for they have returned—from Tara, “You sure you want kids?” Or maybe half joking, as there is certainly an element of  ‘you don’t have to if you don’t want to’ inherent in her already having three, mostly grown children. But I do think fatherhood is something I would like to experience, even if we only end up with an only child. And now, as I listen to her sing along with the song on the juke as she flits around the kitchen, I am reminded of the many things I love about her. Oh let me count the ways, doesn’t the saying go. Shakespeare, no?

And I no Shakespeare, not even a Hemingway, Bukowski, or Miller. No I am just a Dinon, singularly unoriginal in my stringing together of words, in the sculpting of paragraphs, in the confluences of images that populate my better work. I hope you can see it, someday, in a bound book, or at least in an ebook that you paid for. Some have said the prose is cinematic. I like that description, as it means it could be adapted to film, presumably. And of course the second draft of Parable would not exist without the screenplay version…who knows, maybe Micki will come through and Elena will find its way into Sophia Coppola’s hands…of course that is a distant dream, would she even be interested in my story? I wonder, since the lack of response I have gotten from the professional community, if anyone is interested in the stories I have told, as I embark on another, different tact in the new project, to say nothing of the two partial tales that I have told in the past year or so.

So let me forgive you if you have wronged me, and let me show you who I really am, in the event that you have forgotten. I’m not sure that I know anymore precisely who I am, so if you can help enlighten me then please do. Maybe you don’t know any better than I do. Maybe I am a mystery to the world at this point, unknown to all, a perfect stranger to my friends and family, even to myself. Oh gosh this has gotten out of hand, is firmly going nowhere. So I will cut it short, and move on to wine from coffee, from pasta salad to chicken wings. I will spread my own wings and fly, up above the eaves of this little house where the afternoon has passed me by. This day where I have done little but sleep, where I have done next to nothing productive, when there will be no record other than this slipshod, meandering text. I think that maybe that is the perfect record of a lazy day, and that I have, in the meta-analysis, succeeded in capturing the mood of the thing. Dreams and nightmares and ice cream in the middle of the night. That is all.

TTFN,

Dick

1.9.25 High above the land

They say flying over water makes you cry. Or somebody did. But here in the skies with baby’s leg pressed up against me, chewing on the ice that is all that is left of my coke, having trekked through the Sierra de Gredos for a bit, and now onto this, what a world, what a life! I think that it has been a long time since I’ve flown, but now, soaring over Kentucky I am reminded of what a great convenience, and in fact what an unimaginable miracle air travel is. Certainly my ancestors could never have dreamed of getting to Central Florida in two hours. And to the couple on my left wearing masks, the person in front of me watching that ungodly bad movie about Lily Blossom Bloom, have faith that everything is going to be alright.

Why did I address those people? The reasons escape me, as the reasons always do. Why is it this way? Why is the world a mystery to me? Can’t I have it all figured out and so prescribe for others the way they should be livin?. Certainly I think we should all be kinder, that goes without saying. And probably that those with access to it should drink more water. And I on the way to the most magical place on Earth, the illusive realm of Walt Disney World. What a ride to be here in the sky while below on the ground life goes on as if I were not rushing over the Earth at enormous altitude at an unthinkable rate. Jet propulsion for the win.

But enough about that, I have a few days away from the working life, to race around from attraction to attraction and to eat well at every occasion, to enjoy the company of my family and my beloved, to try to see the world through the eyes of a child like I once was on this voyage to the center of the western canon, or any way something like that. For Walt had an outsized impact on mine and so many other childhoods. From the little mermaid to the lion king we got our first tastes of cinema, and though I can’t remember the last movie I sat down and watched, certainly those things did affect my artistic development. Where would we be without those bowdlerized retellings of old fairy tales, where would we be without Mickey Mouse.

Probably at war with Canada. Good lord the news is a joke right now. 392 miles to my destination, and scarcely an hour to go, which I assume is the time to the gate. I don’t know what to make of the movie I’m watching on the screen in front of me. I don’t know what to make of my life. Except that it is one among many, and that all are important and unimportant at the same time. The greatest emperor will be forgotten sure as the lowliest slave. Oh gosh what a tired bit a rhetoric. Dust in the wind, even the Earth and Sky impermanent. But here in the sky right now this moment seems forever.

Seems to swell with the promise of some warm weather, with the early wake up and shuffle to go stand in line to check our bags, with the ladies in the security line who just couldn’t figure it out. Here in the sky the promise is infinite, going on forever in all directions like the fiery sunrise that has been shut out by the shade that the old lady with the mask has lowered so she could watch her movie. Oh if I can grow old, what a blessing that would be! Here in the interminable moment with the whirr of the fans and the beeping overhead tones. What a miracle to be whisked away and carried and dropped off as if the world were much smaller than it is.

Oh those times when I was in doubt about the structure of the world. When I thought that getting on a plane was traveling to another planet, or another dimension. And in fact it is, gives us no perspective on the distance covered. We may as well teleport, for the comparison to traveling on foot, or horseback as were the norm for so long. And even in a car, racing at breakneck speed pales in comparison to this! There is no comparison, truly, except to say that an airplane is much faster. I suppose that is technically a comparison, so I am wrong, for the upteenth time in how many iterations. What a strange day, what a strange morning, what a strange week, what a strange year. And strange in the best way as opposed to last year which was strange in a terrible and despairing way. What a trip to have traveled through all those states of mind, all those troubled realities that left me grasping at anything that could take away my fear.

But now the only fear I have is the lurking one in the back of my mind that a mechanical failure render us falling rather than flying. Always present when I am on an airplane, this one. And and and. And and and. There are too many conjunctions on the table. There are too many capital letters, not enough capitols. I think I would draw you a house to live in if I knew how. Baby knows how. Just another reason I am enamored of her, another reason that she is the perfect woman, all these skills that she possesses. And I just a man with a penchant for stringing words together, for crafting inanities from the twenty six letters of the English alphabet. Can’t I at least have the decency to write in Russian or Spanish, perhaps even German? I do not understand why I was born where I was. Perhaps it is all an accident.

Perhaps this whole world careens on into the future without a master. No margherita pizzas can save me from the notion that chaos is the language of the world. No polpette can usher in a utopia. Why must we look to food when the answer is in the wine? Or is the opposite true, do we look to the wine when the answer is in the food? When we make love do we see in color or is it so dark that there is only the sensation of touch? When we taste each other do we memorize the sensation, so that we might recognize it again should it surprise us in the night, as in dreams? Is there any hope that death will not separate us from the things that we love? That is why some dream of heaven, no?

There I go again with the questions as we enter Floridian airspace. There I go again wondering if I have to lose it all when I die. Didn’t bring any cigarettes with me though, so hopefully I can get clean and finally at long last be done with the damn things. They say now that a single one takes twenty minutes off your life. Of course it is an average, and who the fuck counts their cigarettes? Pack after pack up in smoke and the lungs and the throat at risk. Who knows what will become of me, but most likely I will end up dead. Sooner than I want to in all likelihood. But maybe not, maybe I will outlive my usefulness and be like my Grandmother, and like Tara’s Grandfather, who would rather be unalive now that they have reached the ripe old age of old as fuck.

I don’t ever want to do that, don’t ever want to be so old that I would rather be dead. The future is a mystery as vast as this world, and I can’t wait to explore it for as many years as I have left. In the shower yesterday I was worried about stomach cancer, but today, even with the little nagging pain this seems a paranoid name for gas. Who knows what will become of me, if I will make it to fifty. I am only thirty-three after all, and there are many things that can go wrong on any given day, not just with our fragile bodies but in the world at large. Each day a blessing, each moment a gift.

And each kiss as if from the Lord Himself, in whom I do not, strictly, believe, but who works well at least conceptually as the receptacle for thanks that things are not even more of an absolute shitheap than they are. Of course things are worse for some than others, and I have it pretty good, for all my struggles. All my dealing with the aftershocks of psychoses, with the mood disorder that makes me feel that I should end it all on some days. These things are trivial because I know where my next meal is coming from, and I do not need sleep out in the six degree weather that is gracing Petoskey at the moment. Instead I am on a jetliner steaming towards Orlando where it is in the sixties I believe, and I am probably over dressed. Dressed too warmly, that is, and I think that as good a place as any to end this missive about sailing through the sky. Not to be confused with the recent hypothetical about airplanes, this is a real, honest to God ear popping descent into the vastness of MCO.

Goodnight sweet prince, may your pickled peppers taste better for having picked them yourself.

TTFN,

Richard

1.16.25 Disease, disease, leave me alone

The last few days have been tough, feeling all sorts of bad things, as if my fears were bearing down on me, my worst fears, the fears that things are compromised on an essential level of my being and I am going to suffer the consequences of being damned. Of course there is no evidence that any of that is real, and in fact it is things that were said to me that have haunted me for years, things by people I trusted, people who seemed to know a thing or two about my compromised psyche…so maybe there is some truth to the realization that there have been compromises to an essential level of my being. Maybe living in fear of bad things happening is the hell the devil prescribed. Or maybe the devil has nothing to do with it, maybe it is just the same cognitive distortions that made me depressed and lonely when I was younger, only transformed into something monstrous by the imaginarium that I passed through in my twenties.

Regardless, I am feeling somewhat better, somewhat more relaxed, trying to put all the fear to bed. It is okay to be afraid, but it is far from comfortable. But right now I am okay. Trying not to let the past haunt me the way it can, regarding the future. Once you have felt the feeling that you are somehow damned it is very hard to shake. It rears up and kicks that cloven foot right between your eyeballs. Makes you cry, makes you shake, makes you feel as if everything you value will be snatched from you. And the little things that people have said to you over the years seem like a prophecy, something that can’t be escaped. Maybe it is all predetermined, fated, and maybe some bad things are bound to happen, but maybe it will have been mostly good news when we face the end and finally tap out of this life. I don’t claim to know what is going on in the grand scheme of things. I am just a little guy who likes to have faith in the goodness of the world even when the world so often shows its ugliness.

Where was I going with this? Was I going to say that I am angry with myself, because I don’t think that is true. I think instead I am learning to be gentle with myself, to give myself space to feel my fears and realize them and then let them fade back into the background like a storm receding into the distance. I have great things in my life, and I intend to keep it that way. The past thirteen years of my life have been marked by what could be considered a great unfairness to me. A lot of things happened over which it felt like I had no control. I dealt with a lot of uncomfortable thoughts. Thoughts that were traumatic, thoughts that left scars. And yet I am winning. Each time I have recurrence of the bad thoughts, it seems that even though they are scary and real for a while, there are people around who can talk me down, at least a little bit.

I have arrived at a community of just a few, a family, really, that is kind and caring. I try my best to be good and do good and let the good things come over the hills down on this little valley where I have sat beside the river. There are good things that aren’t metaphors, there are real good things in this world. I hold mine close and hope I never have to let them go, but of course we must let go of everything at some point. I pray that I only have to at the end of life. Mine or theirs. May we all enjoy every second of being together and may there be very many of those seconds. This is my dream, to have peace, love, and harmony bestow serenity on my countenance. 

Maybe it is too much to ask, but maybe those people in my past were just blowing smoke, and I don’t have to worry so much about what the future holds. Maybe there is no great secret contest that I must win. Maybe I don’t need to worry so much. Maybe I can just relax and enjoy the wondrous present! That is a dream I have struggled with this year, with many many panic attacks to the credit of my brain. I breathe, I live, I laugh. I hope to continue doing all those things. I hope that everyone I love continues to too. It is silly, really, to worry about things that likely do not exist but in the suggestive phrases of ex-friends. I continue to do my best and that is all I can do. Maybe if I worry less I will live longer, too. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Love love love you all, even those of you who have not always done right by me. There aren’t a lot on that list but I forgive each and every person who has ever wronged me. I go into the future with a scoured conscience, ready to face each new day and the brightness of its possibilities. I can’t wait to have a nice dinner tonight with my beloved. And a sleepy night beyond that. Thank you to those of you who help me figure it out. Thank you to those of you who make me feel better. This life is beautiful and precious and you must hold close what you value. Renunciation will only get you so far, and all I choose to renounce is that which does not serve me. Like the fear, like the angst. Let all drink up and be merry, the hour grows near.

TTFN,

Dick