Sometime around solsitice.

The bar counter was stone to a high polish and every facet of the space felt like the most reasonable response to civilized space and just made one feel better. They were central to their story. Married almost 11 years and content. They talked about nothing and everything and perhaps things could have been better and paths could have been different but they were on one together and nothing would change that and it was as it should have been.

God is the fluid moment.

We were sitting on the floor, backs leaning against the wall looking around at a very fashionable show. He, Will, was a former student and his brother had a video release that night and I came out just because.

Since then, the violence has gotten worse and the message clearer. These people are fighting someone's fight. They are doing it to incite disruption and those in the seat are trying to expand their power and get it held in place. They are putting themselves in for a hostile situation and that is rather unnerving. Its hard to concentrate when I don't have a set story to tell. It's a challenge. Everything is being thrown in a light and the only part I do like is seeing the caring that so many of us have for each other.

Sometimes I feel these are transmissions to some place, beacons of how we are. Raising a child in a world on fire from our filth and greed is a bit of hopelessness. Many do more with less, though.
What is my motivation in writing and why should I even care? For now, I have to set goals for me to reach and ones that are valuable. Getting enough written generate any length of thing is the goal.

What do I lose without that vulnerability? It's a weakness and I guess it will always be there and I will just need to be aware of it when I start to see it. We grow to form new uglinesses that need to be recognized.
It's a pain that will be there, like the one where I cut my finger....

Stop bitching and fix what's broke. :In Progress

Frank taught me to weld. . He threw a few pieces over, stuck them together, handed me the welding gun, strutted around the shop, and smoked a cigarette and that was that. Within a few weeks, Frank either moved to a different job or got fired or quit and so it was just Neil and I.
          Neil was the first person to really teach me much of anything in the shop and I still don't know if I have ever seen someone more capable at throwing metal together. Neil was country. He talked about his dad hunting moles by shooting dynamite and had a rope for a belt. He would go down to somewhere in Mississippi during the weekends and get tore up with the wild hill country folks.  Everyone could see how smart and talented he was but dude was an early drunk and had that general air of a fuck up. Just the right person for me to emulate.
         Though I grew up in a blacksmith shop, I did not really start doing steel work until I turned 18 and could work in the shop at Keeler Iron Works.




Rob would bring a set of drawings for the catwalks and then our two groups would split up which ones we were doing. We worked as teams across from each other. The angle iron we needed was bundled on a set of horses between us . We would flip of two pieces, one for each long side of the catwalk, measure them and then cut them down with a torch. I will never be good with a blow torch but was plenty capable for this type of work. While one of us did that, the other started gathering end pieces and flatbar cross pieces.
If you ever look up at your standard interstate billboard and see how it is built, you will see walkways go around for the lower part of the outside, as well as ones that run through the inside. On the stacked sign, there could also be upper catwalks. If a sign is a 14x48, then the walkways run the 48 foot length. Many of the signs were two sided, either a back to back or a V. We didn't build 50 foot long sections, the longest were usually 20 feet. The frames where made from angle iron, either 4x3x1/4 or 3x3x1/4. Angle iron is has a profile of an L. It is one of the most common structural shapes around because it is a useful shape for building and simple. One end would be clamped to a horse and that would be where we would pull our measurements from. The two sides would squared up and then tacked down. The other end would be measured in place and then tackled down. We would weld up the inside of the frame and then lay down the expanded metal. Expanded metal is that open grating that will catch on anything and will slice your hands wide open if you are not wearing gloves. You have to maneuver it like a 6 foot metal springy noodle. There is a method to picking them up off the stack and the sooner one learns it, the better. When I started, we were working with a bunch of galvanized expanded metal and that is worse in every way. Galvanized steel has been hot dipped in zinc so it can handle weather better than painted. I have never been to the galvanizer but I gather that is a shop you work at when you can't function most anywhere else. My experience with the stuff was always awful. Welding melts the zinc and pops hot fire everywhere and fills your welding vision with toxic fumes. The best way to get through that is to set your welder on max hot and burn straight through it. I would crave milk when I got home. It counteracts the zinc somehow. The shop did supply us with respirators but it was 95 in the shade so we wore the minimum of protection like the dumb men we were.
Once the sheets were set, we would put pieces of flatbar across the walkway where two sheets met. We would then tack down the expanded metal, putting a weld every 4-5 spaces down the sides and all across the ends. Neil liked to divide the walk in half, he would start at his end and stop halfway down. No matter how fast I could do my part, he would still finish his part.
After these were welded in, we flipped the catwalk over. He had no patience for waiting for the crane so we did it mostly by hand. After some time, we worked really well as a team and could flip one in a breeze, weld up the back side and then use the crane to stack it in the door so Zeke could come get the stack and spread it out for quality control and painting.
After a few weeks, we got to be plenty fast and mistake free. Neil would then spend as much time as possible making grills. The shop let you use scrap for personal projects and making smokers was the thing to do. Pitbull made the coolest one that looked like a pitbull, big Wes made a big trailer one, and Neil made a bunch. He would scrounge up parts from dumpster and scrap piles and while I finished up welding my half (remember, he was fast) he would assemble it on the floor beneath the catwalk. He would have that done before the day was over, along with getting his share of the work done. Not only was it fast, but it was right.
Periodically, Zeke would come flying in on his forklift with a catwalk and crow about us fucking up or Rob, the foreman, would be frantic to get us to slot a hole or cut it shorter so he could load his trailer and send out the sign.
I worked with these men and a several others and they were influential in a stage of my life but I know now more than ever that I really only knew them through work and periodically getting drunk together away from work. That being said, we often show our most pragmatic and effective selves at work so the good lessons were valuable. One thing that I have always recognized is that you can always learn something from someone and it helps if you can identify what they do best and pay attention.
Neil got made stuff fast and right. The speed came mostly from doing it right. He had the heavy heart of a man who fucks up at life on the constant basis but not in the shop. Whenever Zeke or Rob came in either gloating or cussing us out to fix what was wrong, we all innately looked at the catwalk to see if we did it. It was either us or them. Most of the time, it wasn't us but John, who worked with AC, was eager to assign blame. I followed Neil's lead on this and he never argued, even when he knew John was wrong. He would just look and see how it was going to get done and what steps we needed to take to do so. Neil would spit out some sunflower seeds, our side of the area looked like a bird house neither of smoked so we hate handfuls of sunflower seeds throughout the day, cuss under his breath and we would be done before it had happened and we moved on.
Pointing the finger and blaming others for mistakes makes us powerless. It is, almost invariably, us that messed up.
One time I mentioned about how I didn't like making mistakes in my work, and Thomas, who is a fabricating savant, said, "If you ain't fucking up, then you ain't working." We all mess up, I moreso than anyone I know, but have become so deeply ingrained with assigning blame that we dismiss our involvement both in the problems and solutions. Our relationships with each other and society are far more complicated than some ugly catwalks but from the senate down to the custodian, people are so focused on accountability they let the bath keep flooding. The tragedy in Flint is a great example. People should go to jail, not for the initial big screw up. They fucked up from an oversight and how that happened needs to be recognized but if they responded immediately with the resources to properly fix the problem with expediency, then the world would be a much better place.


New realities occurs with each birth and end with each death. They react the with the others to create the total timeline



We have reached strange point where the right to speech does not mean that one responsible for the content of his or her words.  Innocent till proven guilty is not a protection of right until proven wrong.

Shadowboxing Prometheus

"You gotta find someone crazy enough to let you do it."
That was the final rule Charles gave.
The first was to make sure your hand was completely dry.
Mr. Charles Logan was explaining how to slap the molten fire pouring from the iron pour. That seems like something plenty of crazy folks I know would be curious to think of but when they found themselves near one of Vulcan's forges, then they would realize how insane this idea seemed.
I only know Charles as he is around a foundary. That is, he is either in the long process of pouring or drinking. Really, foundry folk tend to be always smoking and either working with big machines or drinking beer. The hot work sweats out the prior evenings bad decsions and so they tend to be entertaining as hell to be around.
I had escaped the big tent of people and wandered in on a young foundryman arraying some sticks on the floor while explaining his plan to Charles, another fellow, and my brother. The other guy was mostly unremarkable, my brother is a gift to the world.
My brother brought the whole bit up and the young dude knew of such exploits and was eager to learn more. The good sense angel was telling Charles to not discuss such things because young men are prone to doing dumb shit so he only said a little. He said, "Make sure your hand is bone dry, and if it ain't, stick it in some sand." This is in a foundry so there is plenty of sand. Then he migrated away so as to not get in trouble but he really wanted to talk about it and the young man was full of questions and half tales. When you ask someone about what they know about and get really interested, they will be hard pressed not to talk. Charles does not speak much and he tells things in a spiral because each time he tells it, he remembers more and so he tells it again. No story is more than a few lines long. I long for a videographic memory but am too actively a part of the story to even feel comfortable getting out my notebook. I tell myself I will write it down afterwards. Somewhere, there are a few scribbles of notes and the start of this page. That's something so let's go with that.
"Now hold your hand like that." His is out nice and straight and swinging at a good smacking swing.
"Don't go back. Our you'll get that whole part of your hand."
"You can do it again, just make sure it ain't got wet from sweat yet."
The story went around between him and the young cat (call him Steve).
I recalled towards the end of this conversation, Charles saying in his moonshine aged cadence
"I used to thing the biggest rush come from riding a bull but there ain't nothing like slapping that fire."



Some pictures of trees by the river.

climate story: part 1

I was first explicitly taught about our environmental impact in 1991. Dates and years tend to be a blur but I can pinpoint this to the Double Vision skatedeck. My computer class partner and I made a sweet pixel art picture of one them in 6th grade. In that same class, we participated in a project to collect data on acid rain and share our results using telecommunications. In a public school in a maddeningly inept city in the middle of the bible belt, we learned that rain was gathering acid in the air that got there by pollution and bathed the world in such fun stuff. We even used computers and the internet to talk to someone far away. There were protests and campaigns for the ozone layer and smog. Every picture of L.A had that dystopian sky. Enough real movement to happen to see some changes as well as the protracted emigration of manufacturing to nations without pollution and labor laws lead to much cleaner skies. The hole in the ozone began to close!
The first war with Saddam came along but the essential difference is that one had an end. There was a small measure of hope. We weren't at war. There was no boogey man.
I gravitated toward studying environmental science and ecology. The structure of the intertidal zone is a world as worth exploring as the great forests. Academia and science were in strong agreement that people were causing global changes. We could see it happen in the great fisheries of the Grand Banks. Basques had been fishing there for 500 years. History is cool.
The environmental signs were pretty clear, we needed to modify the structural elements of the global system or a lot more and lot worse shit was going to happen. The scale of impact was far to great to understand and any reasonably logical person could see that there were exponentially more variables we had yet to even thing of considering. No avenue of research on our efforts to poison the world yielded positive returns unless we had either never touched it or were actively trying to minimize our impact. This is key for anyone just now jumping into this discussion. We can't save the environment just as we can't fix a cut. We react and allow our body to heal itself, as the planet would have if we had acted then. This is not a tragedy of the commons because it falls far more squarely on the global profiteers.
September 11th, 2001. I was a senior in college and should have been preparing to be a productive piece of the world. We know what happened but it is the response that has ripped our soul from itself and made earlier climate predictions woefully short. We have not stopped being at war and now I teach kids who were born after 2001 and are headed off to the same endless fight. Some accounts place the United States military as the largest polluter in the world. It is definitely in the business of actively destroying it. It does not have to be but that is a different tale.  We are now rounding the curve in the hockey stick cure of global systemic change and it is going to be a strong reminder of how terribly awesome our god is. Kali Ma may be a more apt representation. I have no reason to believe we will create the change we need to avoid this suffering or it would have already happened.
We were duped into letting it happen by profiteers and the leaches that have gained sickening wealth along the way. They take our money to build jails for kids, what's poisoning a river to increase profit?
Something will be done and it will be too late.


Hey!
Some pictures we have.

As for those who deny any of the science, watch as we live through an endless demonstration of energy's movement to balance.
Consider the billionaire class. They know all of this and are surely planning for a different future. They believe that they can protect themselves and their wealth and come off their arks with even greater influence. They stand to recreate the world in their image.
The drums of battle are striking anew. We can not worry about snail darters and beef management when we have a new enemy to consider. We can not afford to do much about it either because we have to buy more bombs. There are and will be some magnificent efforts to redirect climate change.

what is the ultimate point. time for us to plan for that future.....This is a chronic pain and a disease we created and watched. It's not hopeless, the climate is going to change and our response is the everything. The best solution is an all hands on deck change to less waste. You could get a beautiful hope behind an intentionally orchestratred migration of humanity to better formed societies. This will not be false for everyone, what structures do we make the grandest changes in and those require a focus on things far beyond any individual could imagine.
None of this do we have control of. It is hard enough to do so in our ownselves, much last past our doorways. The only changes we can inact are nearest at hand. On the climate level, that is enough to drive the engine but it just can not be that easy. Here's the thing, the best way to having a secure and meaningful life whether the world burns up or not is through much stronger communities that can be self suffecient but also operate as nodes for an even greater societal construct. We, as individuals, can not afford the stress and nonsense to constantly bog down the need for some to prevent progress for it comes at the restructuring of their system. Our votes and living habits should do that lifting for us. As we turn and work to make our community  healthier, stronger, and more sustainable then we force the market towards us.
This is not easy for those of us plenty able to and far more difficult for those who can not afford nearly so much...

Another tape job.

At night between the cries
of late summer forest glory
Cicadas amass the sound
is home but now
he feels the words
shrapnel to his being.
Said with intention to hurt, an end
for which they excelled.
His heart lay before him, once more
battered and amiss he found the tape he carried in his bag
wrapped it with too much practice, gathered it up and continued.



A poem in progress!
Poetry is so hard for me to access either reading or writing it. I am improving slowly but the sensory impact of it is rather difficult for me to pull together but I can't help but view it as the finest of all the literary arts. It's interesting that poetry is also most children's entry into the language. The rythem imprints rather well.
The world is still on fire and there is an idiot at the wheel. How did we get to this point is insanity. Does it matter… I had a story of a visit from one of those prankster gods. It was not long ago. You never know when it may happen but something will clue you in down the road. The presence of a person you have never known and never really see again is familiar to all but difficult to say beyond stranger but these individuals are something more.

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.