The Exurban Outdoorsman

This is nice

If this isn’t nice, well then

I don’t know what it is

This is so nice I will take a picture

A picture of this to remind me

that this was nice.

Because, in the future I think

I might forget that this is nice

or that I might really

really need something nice

because of some future bad.

Can we have the nice without the bad?

Is that the definition of beauty?

Because this day is beautiful.

I was at work on 9/11 in MA... We watched it on CNN online. An alpha-male co-worker cried and went home. Today That same guy Is upset he can't eat his wings at the bar and thinks the other guy won. 

Looks like technology has saved us yet again…We don’t have to do anything differently, we don’t have to adjust our lives, we don’t have to think about our actions and our impact.

Yay, I guess.

I’m over the moon happy that a vaccine might result in fewer people dying of COVID19...

But I’m genuinely concerned that we didn’t take this opportunity to learn and change and progress as a society. We’ve learned to fear eachother. We’ve learned to hate each other. We’ve learned that we don’t know much about each other.

We didn’t learn that we mistreat our most critical members of society.
We didn’t learn

We didn’t learn

An arcade cabinet is not the same it was 30 years ago

Once dirty and dark and like New York City before broken windows policies

I was wandering through, and out the back of an old one last night.

emergency exit door opened onto a brick pathway.  The bricks were not umber, but were the color of a grapefruit in New England in April. Yellowy and jaundiced – little babies with low bilirubin counts.

walking this path toward a village of sorts.  They were fungal blossoms burst forth from rain and clean dirt, but sure enough some bodies lived inside and I was welcome there.

This buzzing.

Stop this buzzing.

Rolling, I glaciate my way to the silver box with the glowing hands and single rouge plunger.

When I drink at night to excess.  When I drink the way writers drink. When I drink the way Mom secretly drank - in the bathroom and hid the bottles under the sink for clean up day. When I drink this way I can’t figure out that red button. Is up On or is down On? Is it like a light switch where if it were up when I turned it on, then down is the new On and I might need to click it twice to activate it.  It is all too much like math class for me.

I’ll go shower. It is not cold feet touching wood floors winter or wake in a sweat ruin the lighter sheets with pools of stain summer. As such the water cleanses but doesn’t try hard to soothe. Coffee will be made. The ritual will be followed. Clothes that have small ink stains. Clothes that have small holes. Socks, the right one usually, the right one usually has a dime of material missing just a few centimeters behind the middle toe toward the heel.

I might spend the day thinking about that hole.
I might spend the day thinking about the mushroom people.

I might spend the day and the night and the next day and the next night – I might spend them all.  Might just as well spend them. I don’t have a retirement account of time that I can bank.

But time also isn’t linear and like my dreams, I can be pulled from revelry or confusion or distress by a buzzing call from elsewhere. Erewhon may haps.

On the widest roads, at speeds unimaginable, bodies fling through space are all thinking of their coffee and their dreams and their sock holes and not much of it seems too important.

Why not fill the day writing words.

Sometimes writing the words helps.

Fills gaps.

As text fits the page, they each – each word – each each is saying

These words do not matter, but what does?

Finding out is as good a way as any to fill out the time slip.

I imagine I’ll keep writing and showering and coffeeing until it gets figured out.

Black mothers (and my sister)

have to teach special lessons to their sons

unwritten rules that are just now

starting to be put to pen

this little secret is out

but there are others

and I wonder

if every group unique

have their own best practices

how to survive

the one I think of most

my dear sweet momma taught me

the bottom of the cart

is where you put the groceries

you can least afford

hardest to see and easiest to forget

be polite

know which items to put back

if you are caught

don’t hold up the line

Feels like some words are only ever used in one context.

Impending Doom, how I wish it were impending Delight

I’d settle for impending dee-lite because groove is in my heart

What if I’m fancy free, but my feet are bound?

I have both a pocket full of Cavendish but I am concurrently overjoyed at your presence?

The workweek was rough

disfruta la fin de semana

Something they didn’t teach in school, during wartime, people still need to work.

When Dresden had four thousand tons falling from the clouds,

Lil’ Ennio was still in the back of the sandwich shop putting cured meats onto bread.

We think of these times and the weight of weights collapsing the ceiling of heaven

We imagine being crushed with amalgam of steel, gas, revenge.

Ennio was only imagining of a time when he could get his hands on some prosciutto.

Let us say that

when you were poor and dirty and hungry and cold

let us say that you made some wishes

held some dreams

but the poverty, filth, gnawing emptiness

created boundaries that even dreams couldn’t cross

Now, comforted and warm, all your dreams

Let us say that all of your dreams have come true

But they were never your dreams to begin with

They were sickly and weak dreams that were so mild and meek

They bring no comfort upon their fulfillment

The white girl turning cartwheels in front of Scout Finch was my sister. 

When you get in your car, do you have to hope it will start, or do you trust that it will start?

When you breathe your prayers up, do you hope you are heard, or do you trust she does hear them all?

A reliable car is a good indicator in most of rural and suburban America of a reliable life. A reliable life makes faith easier. Reliability makes everything easier.

Is easier better?

Who is more pious, the rich or the poor?

There were signs at my birth.

I was husky, at three-fourths of a stone.

They track any baby over 9 lbs since this started. When I was born, they didn’t know how to look for this particular gene abnormality.  It had not been diagnosed yet. There were hints.  There were clues, but, like any global paradigm shift (which this became in short time) …we just didn’t now.  We didn’t see it coming. I realize, old news now.

Most big babies are just big babies, fully 999 out of 1,000 will be “regular”.

To have a big baby back then didn’t create the same level of fear it does today.  I’ve read old articles, back to my grandparent’s days, and, unless it was just unreported, people didn’t get abortions because of the size of the child.  You have to understand…I need you to understand…that throughout history all the way up to the earliest parts of the 21st century people were simply not afraid of giants.

It didn’t take long for me to be outed – it was obvious.

I was only 10 years old when I exceeded my first HRL (height restriction line).  Fourth Grade. End of the year, we had a field trip to the Middle School to see what being in a new school would be like.  I was eager to eat lunch in the Cafetorium – it was a fun and silly word I loved but didn’t understand.  It wasn’t until many years later that I realized the school was too old and small to have separate cafeteria and auditorium (and too small for my kind).  They promised lunch would be hotdogs. I boarded the flat-front school bus with the green vinyl seats. The upholstery, if it could be called that, was without pattern, except that it was embossed with a sort of venous structure, I think meant to look like leather culled from a Capricorn’s lower half.

I was in the seventh row on the driver’s side, alone. My forehead was resting on the strip of aluminum holding glass window to steel frame. And in a child’s way, I thought I was hiding by waist-bending and pulling my shoulder blades in. I could say I was looking out the window, but I was really just trying to be less.

Sometimes, I think, “if they’d let me take that trip...if they let me go to the school and eat the hot dogs and see the cafetorium would we be at war today?” Could there have been a way out? 

Maybe even at ten, I would have understood…that being so much more than the people around me, physically and emotionally, was an untenable situation. Who can say if all of this could have been avoided? A civil war averted. A global war left unstarted.

But that isn’t what happened. That moment, being forcibly removed, ejected was unarguably the start of the end of our time of relative peace. The shot heard round the world. I was the catalyst, but I was only a little boy, albeit of immense stature and stentorian voice. The factions used this moment as clarion call to arms. Both sides knowing this was a fight that was worth dying for.

-Opening page from the Autobiography of Cujo Jones, Giant Rights Advocate.

Nobody warned me he’d be dead soon. What good would it have done?

When I am dying, will there be a warning?

When he died I wanted to be a famous architect.  Wanted to be assured that I’d be remembered.  What better reminder than an old house young people live in. But I live in an old house and I don’t know or care who architected it.  I don’t care who swung the hammer either.  When I die all the coffee will have been poured for nothing.  The breakfasts, all of them from when an airplane landed sauces into my lips and on my lips and on my chin and on my shirt.  From COOOOOkie-Crisp and whole milk from an orange tinged Cool Whip knockoff bowl (3 bowls to a box) will have been Consumed by the dead.  All the rolled steel cans of store brand Spaghetti-O’s that turned the Cool Whip bowls orange will have been rolled by hard leather hands, knuckles like knee caps, for nobody.  My dad has these knuckles. He will be dead soon too. Is he tallying now? Deciding if it was worth the slivers shimmering just below the dermis. I remember we once went to the Hoover Dam. On the highwater side, giant silver fish hovered just below the surface, waiting for feedings from tourists. I thought of the silver slivers in his hands quietly becoming part of him.  Whole hands get replaced by mitts, a catcher’s glove. Did he ever play baseball? Did he ever dream he could have a name that lived on? Did he? Does he? Should he care?

Should I.

Nobody warned me he’d be dead soon.

But he’s dead now and I guess that’s all that matters.

May 16 1750

There is rioting in Paris

In the streets

The police are out of uniform

They are taking the little ones

Off the Street

A wealthy aristocrat needs blood

He is not well

One girl 6 years old

She was alone on the Rue

On this Rueful day

Oh how she wished

That someone had a token

That represented her

That someone gave value

Just to come back for her perhaps

To be a Foundling

With a tiny diadem

A flat thimble even

In all the world

There are many 6 year old girls

Fewer are the Founders

Who rescue

And trade trinkets

And baubles

For their safe keeping

Outside, just outside

If S-F- had a breezeway or a vestibule

This quaking aspen would be in it

Far enough away still To forget that

the voices all around

Are so old here

While (A)rtistic less (a)rtistic

Fact almost an Artist Capitol

Still the winter weight blanket

Of experiences and of days

And of cups of ylang ylang tea

On the hottest days and coolest evenings

Squat on you in the stores

And Coffee shops (not cafés)

And on the sidewalks everywhere

Gravity for the gravity of the grave

Science promises and swears to us

With elevation we

Should feel heavier

Except

Except

As we rise

We are leavened

Above the age

Above the experience

And into the blood of Christ

There inside the holy

Is where I found my reward

Aspens are unique

In dendrology and beyond

A copse

Of silver spectres

Jingling their sleighs

Begging for change

In tambourines

They rattle rattle

In unison

Yes from one wind

But also from one root

(L)ike us but not (l)ike us

They are one being

Not similar not twins

Paternal or fraternal

They are one

We do not have time

To see and hear

To feel and taste and touch

All that is above the loam

Perhaps we should be forgiven

For thinking they are, like us

Each unique

The quaking Aspen

The quavering Aspen

The fallen rotted Aspen

All one

All one Aspen

Conjoined and consigned

Below

Bellow

Blow

A tree in a forest

On a hill

In the wind

Gets it all wrong

A tree is a forest

A hill is a tree

A wind is nothing

If not for the tree

That is a forest on a hill

In S-F-

I Invent

But the control is not mine

The idea manifests itself into reality

Only a conduit am I

I invent the way I sleep

Lovingly against my will

Some words Some devices Some ideas

Horrible

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The Covid Wars started around November 2019 as far as I can tell…

China first…they are saying.

They kept the attack quiet from the world pretty well. I don’t personally remember hearing about it until maybe February, and it appears now that there was fighting occurring on American soil as early as January. As an average citizen I don’t even really understand who this enemy is, or what they want. I know only that as of last count, they have executed 85,000 of our U.S. citizens and more are being killed daily. It seems they want to kill those with the most memories and experience…the elderly are the most common targets of these covid assassins.

It looks like South Korea took early warnings about an invasion upon their shores seriously and prepared their citizenry for the coming war. They had good plans for what to do in this very situation and acted accordingly. They have only been minimally affected with under 300 casualties as of mid-May. The U.S. on the other hand has pretended that we are/were prepared, but the truth is obvious with the recent count of 85,000 dead.

Lance Armstrong got caught cheating at bicycle racing. He was universally reviled and shunned.

Lance also raised $750 Million Dollars for cancer research.  He wouldn't have been able to raise $7,500 if he didn't win.

There are a few people for whom I feel bad - the folks who called out his cheating before he was caught and got ripped to shreds...I feel for them.

Then again, shut the fuck up...he's raising money for cancer.  Who cares that he broke bicycle racing rules to do it.

While I'm on the subject of unpopular opinions - I think it is sometimes OK to rob graves and to dig up highway onramps.

• Did you hear the story about the lady who got caught pooping in her boss' chair?

  • She was relieved of her doodies

• I went to Fashion school to learn all about wedding clothes.

  • It was to  know a veil

• My friends say that they think I have ADHD...

  • But it must be at least 85 or even 90 HD.

• I know a guy who used to have a really bad issue with premature ejaculation.

  • His solution was to keep an 1897 Uncirculated Silver Dollar under his pillow.

    • Those things are hard to come by.

Prompts

• • What would happen if some portion of the population starting being born larger and smarter than the rest?

  • What if certain trees, when touched, reset the day for the toucher - timetrees?