Finding energy.

You know what, that's the story for me.

She wasn't there and then she was. Sitting at the left end of the bar. Details are foggy for time and all manner of reasons but she was wearing a blue (maybe violet) short sleeved sweater top that gave enough of a glimpse, bright blonde crinkley hair, and a presence that I wanted to be near.
Paul must have noticed so he started talking to her and she moved down next to him and we all talked and drank beer and at some point he switched seats with her so she would be closer to me and I knew as we sat there and the sun came up outside that I had met someone who accepted me for who I am and I didn't see any way that there was most anyone else like her on the planet.
Time got short and we had to leave, as we discussed how high and bright the sun was for it was midmorning, I got her number and I, despite the huge fear involved, called her. We had some fantastic times that summer and nothing then or now seems realer to me than who she is or what she means to me.  

---This all used to be in the front of the above part, that I like. 

There has been a lot or not a lot going on, guess it depends what side of the water you see the duck from.

I have found that I need to express myself in all manner of ways all of the time. Pretty much figured that but people think the cool dude I am around means I am at peace. That person is very likely not. It is a shell, everyone has them. I hid my emotions and their motivations and stuffed those away except for the ones I thought people liked. Doing so is very silly but we start out with ignorance and then get heavily influenced by stupidity as we somehow grow and survive. Writing is a place for expression that I super way underutilize. I don't have access to big equipment to make cool shit all of the time, I can always write, express, create. Even the last part is a stick in my logical mud. It's far easier for me to tell stories that actually happened. I am no good at creating the world that fiction lives in. I'll keep trying and get something a little right out of stubbornness but they are enormously difficult for me but I feel like the easier task of documenting my thoughts, experience, and perceptions then it is cheap. I waste a lot of time reading mostly pointless writing and the wandering musings of folks who talk about pick and roll defense. It's a little relaxing in this madhouse we live in. There is a point and I cant get to it through natural progression so I will jump there.

I've been doing a lot of self examination and my role with who I am and who I care about. My family is my everything and that's a given for anyone who knows me. My job is very important to me. Part of what I was realizing this summer that I place so much energy and care into my family and teaching and neglected myself. It takes a long time to get past the recklessness of being me. A big part of taking care of myself is expressing myself. Well, I failed at doing so in a decent way for so long that it came out all over but one thing I tried to do was show or tell people that they are loved and special, at least to me. This is important. We are all stuck within our bodies navigating a world unique in its own particular way from everyone else; when someone is appreciated, he or she doesn't feel alone. If that is for a positive and good reason, then he or she feels better his/her impact on the world. We need all of the love and genuine caring we have to see us through the shitstorm we are in. Hate will never die, at best it will smolder in a cesspool mixed through all other things. It will carry on and we will either get caught in its violent fits or suffocated by the planet adjusting for our greed.

I can't get around to the point...all this is going on and I was thinking about my wife, which I do all of the time, and started writing down the story of how we met. It was a nice strong start with a good flow and I decided it would be good to finish and make really good with some editing. I don't keep anything in one spot but everything goes in its spot. I have three different journaling programs on this computer and a different on my phone and various notebooks, folded pieces of paper, car manuals, etcetera. Can't find this really good start to the most important love I know and the mother of my son. Guess I will start anew and perhaps stumble on what there was before.

The Flip Side

The Flip Side.

Redmond Wallace

Kyle called me up a few weeks back. It was neither expected or a massive surprise. He rolled through one's life like that.

"Hey dude, I got this fucking out there plan and I'm gonna need you to help out on somethings if it all goes to shit." He said between exhaling a cigarette, an unmistakable sound of stressed, hurried, and timed breathing. I hadn't talked to him three years and at the time, he would call up drunk and ramble about all manner of minutiae. Sometimes it made sense. He sounded dried up, there was a purpose in his voice when he wasn't drinking.

"Sure, I think. What's up?" I was making breakfast and somewhere between drunk and hungover from hanging with a neighbor getting back from his 3rd deployment. I felt like I was in a barrel, all impulses coming in were muted and irritating.

"Talking ain't an option. I'm gonna send you a time and place. Thanks. This could be the change." You can’t hear when phones hang up anymore. It just sounds like the other person isn’t talking.

"Who knows?" I scribbled on a piece of paper. It was the only viable response. I would think about it periodically like when I was the ratty work bathroom with a flickering light. It served its purpose and we all shared in the lameness of the thing. It had no ventilation and half of us ate government food and the rest subsided on coffee. Sometimes it's a good reminder that everyone's shit stinks. As I would balance on the toilet and once I adjusted to the smell and the spacing I wondered about not work stuff for that is a moment to get away. "What could he be doing?”

    Kyle made a single piston pogo stick when he was 10. Each bounce jacked up the compression so the next one was higher. That led to my first broken bone. When he was 17, he hid on a barge down to the gulf and then hopped onto a container ship and ended up fishing in the South Pacific. I would get calls sporadically throughout his travels. He came back with a botanist wife from Istanbul, they had a pretty daughter. Loved his girl more than anything but didn't know how to be a stable, functioning pillar of a household. He would do various seasonal gig work to send a bunch of cash, strange presents, and long tales of intrigue for his daughter.

    I was curious and a bit worried and so was relieved when Veyonce was at my classroom door with a message from the front, she had hair, new, full of color, and jewelry. I made my way through the various halls of the school house to the office with a near constant level of decent temperature control, working lights, and ventilation. They always make the entry pleasant.
    Ms. Wilmer handed me an envelope. A younger afropunk lady made sure I got it and then walked out, hopped on her bike and road off. It's odd to see bike messengers here.
    "What is it, Mr. Davies?" She asked.
    "I have no idea." I lied as I saw the label addressed to me. It had Kyle's swirling doodles around my typed name. Well, it was only a partial lie.  I took the box to my room. It was a rare moment when students weren't there. There was more than enough tape to make it seem worried about. I finally got through the tape and opened the damn thing. A paper airplane, a 20 dollar bill, a carton of Camel Lights and an old friendship bracelet fell out. I hadn't smoked in 3 years, oh well. I could give them away to the immigrants dropped off at the bus station from the border, they could use a smoke. There was writing in the plane, it looked like colored pencil.
    "A teenaged cocaine dream. Bright and spastic with a need for more we force ourselves to be whatever it damned well feels right to. The future is a belief in ourselves and the past is just a part of the present we are in. 7:42...5/1...1554 Nettlesome..come around back…
It's the thought, if one were such in a machine's processing. Miles to go but I need sleep."

    My wife was supposed to be taking the kids to campout party so I would be free of obligations.  I failed to make a contingency as one should do with weird friends. I was busy enough with life and work to just store the time someplace in my memory and then tend to whatever task was most pressing. At hand time came and I almost forgot. "Hit the clutch, hit the gear, hit the gas, and I'm gone," the line bounced through as I wound through a hidden area beyond overgrown. It was a morning's walk from my door but seemed a world away. There was a popup camper in the driveway of an older craftsman bungalow in some state of repair.  Kyle had been busy on gardens and paths around the house. A recycled brick trail lined with lush elephant ears twisted to the open back door.  A few trash piles marked the way, Kyle had been all over. The inside of the house had been stripped down to studs, big old windows let in good light, except from the street side that he blocked off with heavy shades.   The kitchen was a office-lab with monitors, notepads, and cords leading in all directions.  Copper air and Kyle's lifeless body on the floor. That was a shock. Three quick steps over cables and a bottle of water. He had yet to cool down but was otherwise deanimated. This situation was unprecedented, clearly, but also unsurprising. He wanted me here for a reason.  When you find a dead body, I suggest you either do something immediately or take some time to figure out what the hell you are going to do. Growing older has taught me to do the latter better.
    I sat down on a work stool he made from a milk crate and drift wood years ago and made my way through his confounding script in his most complete looking notebook adorned with skateboarding stickers.  "It's a duality we always see in all things. Ones and zeroes but more than that, energy/matter :: time/space :: art/ruled order :: free will/machine-god. Balance is what we tend to look for but we probably vibrate in some chaotic harmony around balance. What happens when you go too far? Can you reach an extreme or maybe it's like a chemical buffer and once you get past that it's beyond? What chaos would it cause?
           Chips
            Tin foil, T.P, dogfood , coffee, booze
-It seems he got sidetracked.-
Space is the location of matter and time is the flow of energy, what happens if we cause a stop? If all things are coordinated by time and space, like a Cartesian axis of some sort, what part of time if there if you hold your space coordinate? Is each point new or is there a timeline we can access at the unmoving location.  It's a fucking crazy idea but might as well try it."
    He went on to document the process of building the thing. With way too many trips to the interesting and useful stores in town, he managed to cobble a headset together that captured energy location and processed it to identify his precise spot in space. The device had to be unique to the individual.

All this time, movement had been a distraction and I had finally realized it was a recording of us on a monitor above the sink. I found the recorder and went back to a part where he looked to be getting ready to do his thing.     "With that known, it should be feasible to not move." Kyle put on the VR suit and after a few minutes, he flickers like static and then back in insanity of what happened.
    "That was weird.  No control, I just showed up. Damn, I'm thirsty."
He gets up forgetting all of the cords and they rip out of the machine, jerks to a water sitting on his table. Huge gulps and he spits it on out. "What the fuck is this shit? Pain, so much pain…must talk. Back in time, kid in store, looked like corner but with dignity. Got to see and feel it all again, that smell of walking in to grandmother's house. Mom’s dank washroom but at full. All beyond intensity. Had to escape and...can't breathe.”

He rests for a few minutes. “Ever have dejavu? It’s like I showed up to that point and I felt it because I had been in that space before. The now me could vibe just enough with then to experience it all again. No control but what a trip to go back to where you were. Fuck it, guess it’s off to things that haven’t happened. This is gonna hurt.”
    A missed image in the film.  Between a searing, gurgle cough, his body collapses, life immediately gone.

An note expanded from earlier on privilege.

Many white people are confronted and confused by the idea because while we may have not been willingly active parts, we have benefited. Funny enough, most of these benefits are things people feel justly deserved. I should be rewarded for my work. I will be treated like a person. Banks will give me a loan. The cops approach and treat me as a neighborhood officer. I have clean water. I can breathe.

There is no harm in realizing this privilege. The problem comes when you don't believe everyone is worthy of it. It's not that complicated. We stand for what we believe is best for us and that is for all people. Recall what the hell that is and it's raising our children well. Not my child and your child but our children. We wish for them to have peace and the ability to have a meaningful life. We are human so we'll fuck a bunch of stuff up along the way but if we look toward a principled understanding that we are all we got. Either science is wrong and we are a deified creation wholly unique, or science is right and we ain't found much and seen almost to the beginning of the universe. This includes the world around us. We know we are capable of doing it.

Here's some pictures because I like them and following the news makes me sad and upset.
That's a growing dude holding a funky thing I made for my neighbor whose dog died and she was really sad.
The next picture is something I'm proud of. These dudes built this sweet table. I helped. The third thing is a video of the river.

Reminding ourselves of the best in people

      This is mostly true to the best of my exhausted memory. I spent so much of my life storing useless information in my head I forgot about the moments that are what it is. I'll update or edit it later but if I let it sit here it will fester and never get done.

       The interns were always a way to place a time or age for me. My memory of those early years has been a blob for as long as I can recall. Who knows, maybe I'm hiding some trauma or maybe that's the way I am. I know it can't be awful because I always felt so much love around. That could be the way people shielded me.
     There are two intern Seans. Sean K. is a super rad dude who makes some meticulously cool stuff. I would say he's a bit nuts but that's true for all of us. The Museum is a screwed like Wonderland that way. And the other Sean. I forget his last name and I have only fleeting memories of him. Cooper talked about almost kicking his ass and he was intense.
     A supremely crucial fact to the Metal Museum and known to everyone who has ever been through that space is the space. There is no finer view of the universe's glory than the sweep of the Mississippi River and the profoundly fecund Arkansas Delta across the way. As you stand at the top of the high bluff, the river stretches a half mile across, you can look to the North and nearby are three old truss bridges carrying the world through the distribution capital. At night, you can see cargo plans lined up for hours on end. Massive rafts of barges power around the river. The bridges are over a hundred feet off of the water. From a distance, the river seems to amble along but once you are on it that it has all of the force and turbulent dynamics to always remind you that it goes where it goes.
Periodically, people would jump off a bridge to commit suicide. A poetic exit.
     Crazy Sean grew up jumping off of bridges in Philadelphia and whatnot. He timed his jump with a rock but just messed up somewhere. Instead of hitting the water in the nice pencil, he broke the base of his back. Crazy Sean was also young blacksmith strong so he managed to swim/float enough with just his upper body for a boat to be able to pick him up a few miles downstream. I heard the story but didn't see him again until years later for a reunion show. It was a big deal for him for he had to travel some hard times to make it through.
     That weekend, there was a music and culture festival put on by the Center for Southern Folklore. The Museum had a booth there and so we had all the passes we needed. There was all kinds of great music and tasty fried food and people enjoying being human. Good times. My dad handed me some cash and said to make sure Sean had fun and headed off to do some work. I was in high school, I think. We wandered around, he was all over the place in his wheelchair and just grooving along having the grandest of times. I am very unsure with responsibility but we got some beer, he gave me one. He said later he figured he was supposed to be watching me but who knows.  He had a bunch of beer and I just took my sweet time with one. The music was great was we wandered around Main Street. Little Milton came on and a party broke out in the middle of a big party. Everyone was dancing and grooving and no one more than Sean. He popped and spun his wheel chair around and up and down in a uniquely beautiful shimmy to the music. Everyone smiled at the dude in the wheel chair just making us jealous he could move like that. It was a blast and then he flipped his chair on the side, unlocked a wheel and tossed it toward a pretty blonde lady. Promptly, people looked and a big dude with thick arms and skinny legs walked over puffing up about his woman, itching to get in a fight. Sean taunted him back and I got really nervous.  He wad big and I was a really shy, weird, with the worst skin teenager. The dude looked down at Sean and got really confused. I had to have gotten the wheel back and then we found a cab. It was the prudent idea.
     "I like doing that shit to people, like what the hell am I going to do, paralyzed in wheelchair with no wheel." He told me as I moved his pillow to the cab seat. 

What do we recall?

To be continued and edited.

This is a tough story to tell if only because I'm not sure I feel comfortable putting it out there. I don't see anything so awful about this part of the tale but perhaps moments that came before. Everything present is created by all these variations of what has happened that really understanding cause and effect is a matter of relative perspective. Anyway...

        I recall a fog of a moment walking. The bathroom door partway open. My step mom slumped over the toilet. She died that night, maybe right after but I know not before. They said when she fell over from there she hit her head. I don't know. That room was nothing but military hard brown tile and a fearsome steel dragon toilet paper holder. It's a pretty badass holder my dad made and mounted right in front of the toilet so you had to study it.
        Maybe I should have done more but I had tried many times before, this was not a new position for her to be in and I was still a real asshole. Shit like this probably helped me grow out of that but it takes a lifetime to change from ourselves. This is, perhaps, the root of the intellectual and artistic study.
       Life and booze had transformed her into a pitiful, frail, bitter version of herself. She lashed out in the most oddly piercing ways and stayed withdrawn in her last realms of intoxicated comfort.  Judy was a woman who did not believe that she had reached her station based upon what she knew she was capable of. I know so very little of her past but she grew up in Memphis in the middle of the rock and roll scene. It was a unique time and space that created her. Her friends were all nuts from Vietnam, drugs, and riots and she fell into the art world so they were avant-garde crazy. Somehow, she ended up at the museum and became the assistant director and my stepmother. It never really mattered to me to figure out why since it was life as it was presented to me. The drive to get work done and disregard of self care let her follow the busted route to a mean self destruction. It was a long slow death that I didn't enjoy; I had some great people around to help me along.
            My last real good memory with her was riding down to pick blueberries at a farm in Mississippi. It was a good drive on a warm day when the air felt clean but she always rolled with the windows up, AC cranked, and a long menthol. She wore the heaviest glasses and decided at some point it was best to go with it. Thick frames and big dark lenses to go with a black helmet of hair that she battled grey with constantly. My girlfriend at the time was with us, Judy adored her.
             The big oaks of Northern Mississippi were fully dressed in green to catch the sun and shade our way. The air wasn't dripping yet and so the lines weren't blurry. It still had the strong contrast to mean something.  My dad's second wife was content on the drive and that was all too rare through most of my time knowing her. She took the two-lanes down as much as possible roaming through the land in such a more natural pattern. We got there and she went to a little trailer hut and got us all buckets and so we set off around toward the patch. The first times I ever picked berries were in the Northeast and you get tasty little morsels from scrubby brushes making it a corner somewhere. Here were huge beautiful bushes with berries hanging in bunches like grapes. you could eat handfuls and fill your bucket at the same time. We stayed there for and hour or so and had so many berries. We got in her Toyota station wagon, meandered our way back, stopping at a gas station Baskin Robbins for malts.

First story in while.

A member of the homecoming court gets her purse while the basketball coach is exacerbated.

One of the better concrete chunk walls I have seen.

Directions

Poisoned to inconsequence.

“You want a belt?” The kind old man in the passenger’s seat asked.

“Naw, Im cool.”

It was another day oozing cold rain. Weather that can get you cold to your deepest soul and had been filling all the pores of the world up so that the ground smeared onto the pavement. Birds still looked bright and clean, perhaps more so than ever from contrast.

“Where are you headed?” 

“Work.” I didn’t want to expand further since I would have to admit to prior lies. We had crossed paths at the gas station.

He came into the store and first glimpse suggested that he may be homeless but definitely in need. There are so many more people suffering now or perhaps I can just see it more clearly but every other car in the lot looks like it is someone’s home and ramshackle reality sets in.

He had a thick white beard and a down vest, wore a duffel bag full of odds and ends. “Could I get a ride down Poplar?”

“I’m not headed that way.” This was the lie that made me give him a second chance for me to decide what to do.  

He asked once more while I paid for guess and so I asked, “Where are you trying to get to?”

“Poplar and Cleveland.”

I figured as much. This is an intersection with all stages of people moving about dependent on society to survive the struggle. It’s almost in the shadow of the VA and one needs no clearer reminder how we treat people than the hollowed out and broken men wandering, staggering, wheeling around. I can see it from my classroom.

Back in the vehicle, he noticed “Say, you got a CD player, I have some old school stuff. O’Jay’s, Johnny Taylor.” He sat, riding shotgun, with his duffle in his lap.

“I’m good.” 

“I wish I had a job.” I may as well learn some more. You know, reignite the discovery of details that once made me write.

“What do you do then?”

“I’m a diabled veteran.”

Damn.

“What happened?” I figured he may have been in Vietnam.

“Sarin gas, messed up a gland in my brain." The gentle old man with a clean white beard was ruined from ourselves.

“Where’d that happen?”

“Fort Campbell, Kentucky.”

That was a straight shot to my serenity.

“Can’t hold a job because my brain doesn’t work right.”

 I wanted to find a place where he could make his part but we had reached the intersection and I had to get back to work.