(See what I am saying?)

Shuffle Shuffle

Past, Present, Future, Tense

Sometimes the the pains of the past, the uncertainties of the future, and my present shortcomings all fall on me on the same day, like a hammer driving a nail into a board with a single strike. Like a congested 3 way intersection, my mind was in rush hour, and my stomach was empty.

Burritos are poor conversationalist. Mine sat in the passenger's seat and didn't say a word. I looked at it with contempt. It was a poor companion and not much of a dinner either. And it paled in comparison to whom i wished was in its place.

In fact at that moment, anyone would have been better.

I came to a stop sign in the dark. I reached back with my right arm behind the seat. Prada lifted her head up into my hand. For that, i was thankful. I wanted to stop thinking, to talk to someone, to change my state of mind.

The lighted turned green. I turned left quickly across 2 lanes of empty road and headed for the bridge. I couldn't change my state of affairs, but i could change my state. The truss-work on the bridge reminded me of a skeleton; a rib cage, whose spine i drove across as it arched itself over the Ohio River. The air above the river condenses, like a horse's breath in a snowy pasture. Prada hung her head out the window, and i tried to imagine what she felt as the river's air blew past her.

I wanted to stop my car on the bridge. I wanted to get out and jump; not for my death; but for my life, as if the metaphor would somehow change me.

On the other side of the bridge is a sleepy town cleaved with a set of train tracks. Below it, and beside the bridge, on the southern banks of the river is a parking lot. I pulled in and parked at the edge along the rock that held the edge of west Virginia from becoming - ultimately - waterfront property in Louisiana.

I suppose dirt- like me- also has a past, a present and an uninsurable future. Our only differences are my ability to remember, or rather- my inability to forget; and my paltry ability to question providence. that i think, is all.

There is a quote somewhere that says "Food is love." It is maybe more literal to think of food as happiness.

and happiness does not often come to me with a smile. More often, it comes to me in a sober sense of clarity, with open windows on a dark roads, in canoes on quiet lakes, or in a snowfall. All of which never seem to last as long as I would like; and none of them involve eating a burrito on the hood of your car alone at a boat dock in Williamstown W.Va.

Prada went off into the weeds under the lone halogen light on the top of a lone telephone pole. The blue hazy light faded up into the bones of the empty bridge. I walked to the edge of the river.

Saying a prayer is like throwing stones into rivers at night. I throw them both into the darkness with a heave, and wait with open and strained senses, hoping to hear a splash; an effect to my cause; a reply in the night.

Sometimes i do them both at the same time.

I sat down on a stone, and reached my hand behind me. Prada came and put her head into my outstretched hand. Sometimes the pains of the past, the uncertainties of the future, and my present shortcomings all fall on me on the same day, like hammer driving a nail into a board with a single strike.

The pounding reminds me of my inability to forget.

It reminds me of my future that i do not know.

It reminds me of my shortcomings, that leave others alone without me: to program websites, build cabins, move to new houses, and cry themselves to sleep in the night.

House Flies (Kierkegaard had many pseudonyms)

The air felt like a solid brick, baking in a kiln. I sat still on a walk plank at the top of a stack of scaffolding. Still as the air i sat, waiting for paint to dry; literally. sweat ran down my arms to my wrists and fell like water from a leaking gutter. It fell down to where air moved in and out of the door, where the dusty floor was shaded and cool.

I waited for the wood to dry around the top edge of the tallest window. Just above my head the peak of the ceiling joined. It pointed sharp and solid like the ridge in the nave of a cathedral. There i sat like a gargoyle, silent in stone. I held the paint brush. I looked out of the window into the light.

On the glass at the very top of the window, above the dust and extension cords and power tools, flies crawled over each other, fighting for the brightest highest place on the window. they buzzed and shook and pushed their way upwards. They were trying to get outside. They all flew to the top of the cabin, directly for the biggest, brightest place, believing it was the way out; inversely, it was farthest away from the open doors below that would admit their desire. They hung there relentlessly, buzzing and pushing their way against the glass. Swings of my paintbrush would not sway them away from their convictions. In the stagnant sweltering air, they hung on, trying to reach the sky.

I pitied them; their ignorance and their buzzing. Their fighting and crawling. They were going in the wrong direction. And they would never know it. They flew to the light. To highest, brightest window they all swarmed, trying to escape their bondage. Trying to be free. I sat there. Quiet and still. I watched them. Complacent in their situation. As if, in their ignorance, they were confident in their misguided quest. They were sure it were the path to outside. I wondered how long they had been there. In horror i thought, perhaps they believed they were already free. That that smooth bright glass was their deliverance, and not the wall of their prison. That they had no idea of the comparatively infinite openness on the other side. I looked down. There were dozens dead in the window sill. I wondered if they died thinking they were on the right path. I wondered if they died believing they were already free. I realized they will stay there on the window, crawling and buzzing and shaking for the rest of their lives, and nothing would change their way.

I sat and stared at the glass, waiting for the wood to dry, and paint another coat around the windows. A gargoyle sweating in the still air.

I felt a relationship between the files and me. I had an understanding that infinity superseded their own. How simple the answer was to me. And how they will never know it. How they will push and push against that glass for rest of their short lives, waiting for their salvation; believing that the high and bright window must surely take them into the azure. I wanted them to leave. They were sticking to the wet wood. They were smashing their heads into the glass. They were buzzing in vein. I swatted them with my paint brush, trying to shoo them down. But they came immediately back, not to be shaken from their own seemingly evident attainment. I knew they would die there. I knew nothing would ever change their understanding.

I sat alone in under the rafters. Looking into the light. 20 feet below me the air in from outside moved in the open doors. I looked at the rungs on the ladders. Counted the braces in the scaffolding. I watched my sweat fall to the floor, paint dry, fingernails grow, epiphanies form. I knew their was always somewhere taller to climb. Something higher to know. And somehow, a plainer way to go.

I watched the bugs banging their heads against the window. I watched them try to get to where they so desperately wanted to go; where their blindness would never allow them be, where their gullibility may let them think they already are. They will spend their lives there, i thought, then fall into the dust, when all they ever had to do was stay down low near the dusty floor, at the bottom of everything, among the dust and the tools, where the door to their freedom was always wide open.

The Edgewater

At a wedding reception a few months back, i mentioned my direction in life to a guest at the table we shared.

"That's my hometown." she said.

I immedalty prodded her for the best bar in town. She replied. Her answer reminded me of the subjectivity of the english language. The word 'best' is, like most things in life, defined in different people different ways.

"So how about the most out of the way, unheard of, most genuine spot i can find?"

"The Edgewater." she replied.

"It is on the bank of the Muskingum River. On the deck out back they tie trotlines over the fence with bells on them. during happy hour, when a bill rings, it means there is a catfish on it. The bartender will go out and pull it in, clean it , and fry it for free."

Bingo.

I relayed this story to my new aquantinces yesterday. I only got two sentences into the story when i was interrupted.

"The Edewater." one said.

Bingo.

"I'll take you there. Pick you up at 7."

I was given a book when i lived in Manhattan called 'The Best Dive Bars of New York." I tried hard to visit each page of that book. Though i fell far short, and though i saw some great places, i realized there is an inherent consequence to being called a 'Dive Bar". To be one, means that you know are one. There is a deliberate acknowledgment in the revelation that removes the genuine ethos of a place.

As we approached the Edgewater that evening, we drove along the winding roads and patch-worked asphalt. The road curved like an x-ray of a scoliosis patient. i saw the cinderblock building sliding off of the river bank like in a Salvador Dali painting.

The Edgewater has no idea what it is.

And what is, is the dictionary definition of authentic.

The aluminum screen door swung shut behind me. The shellacked snapping turtle shell stuck into the driftwood was made into a clock-face. It read 7:25. Jerry Garcia is not dead. He changed his name to Paul and sits on the corner of the bar there. The linoleum tile stretched to the corners of the building like drum head, holding the most unpretentious ensemble of character i have ever laid eyes on. My PBR came in a can and my tip went in the mason jar. Out back, the shelter sits 5 feet from the river, less than a mile from the southern most lock on the river, before its terminal into the Ohio. The sycamore trees stretch out over the slowly scrolling water at acute angles, as if trying to see their own reflection in the muddy water. The masonite ceiling fan blades hanging from rafters of the picnic shelter have soaked in the river mist and appalachia air and now hang like wilted petals of a daisy. There are piles of cans behind the horseshoe pits with labels from 4 or 5 branding rebirths ago of the great american beers. Miller, Strohs, and Old Milwaukee lettering from the 80's sits in the yard like a typographic archeological site. The bales of straw stacked by the door are brought out for the weekend musical shows and televised Nascar races, and used to keep the pipes from freezing along the foundation after the summer shows are over. The dock behind the bar had no trot lines tied to them, but the fryer was on, and Tina* gladly brought us dinner (there is no 'heart-smart' menu there) and turned on the speakers for us that hung in the truss-work of the patio. The first (and 4th, and 6th) song played was Sweet Home Alabama. At first i thought it was a mistake. But then i got to thinking, there really wasn't other song i felt i wanted to hear. And what i did want to hear (cash, cline, kristoperson, seeger), we played in the jukebox during the shuffleboard game. Tina couldn't figure out how to turn on the halogen lights nailed on the telephone pole, so we adjourned indoors, to incandescent lights, (except for the bear claw machine's fluorescent bulb) after the horseshoe match was called on the count of darkness.

I sat at the table with the Crew coach, a biology and a geology professor. We peeled labels from bottles over a discussion about mastodon bones, until the bar light went out and we went home. The turtle shell read 11: 43. Before we left, we said our goodbyes, and paid our tabs. Tina kept no credit cards, nor wrote anything down. As we left she asked each for the money we owed. She put it in a metal box behind the bar below the pickled pig hearts and hard boiled eggs.

There are many great places to quench your thirst, from Midtown to Malibu. But like teenage girls, - like $16 martinis, to $1.50 beers, - they are self conscious, they are concocted, like a push up bra, they are forcing their issue. I imagine the people at the edgewater don't have much of an opinion about that, or themselves. The topic of the biggest catfish in the river, however, was a different matter altogether.

*Upon my second visit, with my father, Tina welcomed me by name as the aluminum screen door shut behind me.

Signs. (There is creative reading as well as creative writing)

1. Somewhere last year in the middle of the night, northbound on the 405, i was listening to Los Angeles talk radio when i first learned of Universalism. The minster on the radio was explaining it and it's theological foundations. Like most broadcast religion i hear, especially in the middle of the night, - including this seemingly new-age trend- at best, leaves me mentally macabre. (Also Read: Notes on AM Radio )

2. Sometime last year I came this town and the first person i met was a man named Robert McManus. I was introduced to him upon my first visit here. He offered to meet me and show me around the town. So on a snowy saturday morning i took him up on the offer before catching a flight back to california.

Yesterday in the heat of july, i was walking down the street to the river. I saw this sign. Some signs are allegorical. some are metaphorical. and some are literal. St. Augustine reminded us that first we must determine the literal meaning in messages, then look for more. As if to say, some signs start with two posts stuck in the ground, with black board and white capital letters.

Two memories came back to me. Both of which I addressed at the time, date and place on the sign.

Unfortunealty, instead holding the service in the main chapel, I had to enter the side door into the air conditioned basement . There were 50 or 60 people there. They were sitting on folding chairs instead of wooden pews. Only a few folding chairs remained in the back. I sat in one of them. I listened to the service. I sang the songs. I listened to Rob speak.

Not everyone in the folding seats was christian. Not everyone in the folding seats was not. But Rob was.

Not everyone in the basement was gay. Not everyone was not. But Rob was.

Not everyone in that basement perhaps understood what Rob said. Not everyone did not. But I did. (or so i believed.)

You could hear a pin drop on the linoleum basement floor as he spoke. The son of a Baptist minster, and Ph.D. graduate from Regent University (founded by the christian broadcast network and Pat Buchanan), Rob spoke about his life and his morality as a gay man, and his decisions not to enter into a traditional marriage, the woman's hearts he broke, and the truths he has since told, and the jobs he then lost, and how he has done that in the context of his faith and principles. On each folding chair was silent stares; closed hymn books and mystified looks. it was unusual, i thought. or perhaps, i soon realized, only odd on the account of my ignorance of the matter.

After Rob's lecture, and the service concluded, he approached me and welcomed me again to town. I expressed my disappointment in not seeing the church upstairs to one of the members. He promptly took Rob, me, and two other visitors, both faculty members I met in the crowd, up a narrow staircase up into the foyer. The staircase turned again and rose into the dark with deep black walnut banisters. The railings were made by a slave who earned his freedom by carving the wood around the tight corners into the balcony. I walked out under the cathedral ceiling and looked to the far end of the pews at the pulpit where Emerson once spoke. I sat in the pews with names carved in them from the original 1857 congregation, and saw the giant fresco mural above the altar of Jesus weeping on a hilltop above Jerusalem. All odd perhaps, for such a church, i thought. or perhaps, i soon realized, only odd on the account of my ignorance of the matter.

Thoughts can grow thick in my head. So can assumptions. They both shade out the sun like the deepest of unseen jungles. They twist and spread like vines and thorns, like paradox and contradictions, obscuring my landscape. Every once in a while a small path is cleared allowing a glimpse of light to fall through the thoughts. The light is not a metaphor. it does not endow me with any wisdom. it is like a black sign with white capital letters; like a bare light bulb in a dark and empty room. it does not show me any direction. It is only a thin column falling down on me. Showing me in my singularity. Showing me and my ignorance; my assumptions, surrounded by a dark and tangled mess. The path i forge is always cleared like all underbrush is cleared; by exploring the forest, rolling up my sleeves, and slashing and swinging with a mental machete.

And that blade is always double edged.

And that path seems always wide enough for just me alone to fit through.

And that path is not straight, nor flat; and it always leads me deeper into the forest.

Summer Time: Saturday Night; back porch.

Ryan Adams: Jacksonville City Nights, + "Jacksonville Skyline" (Whiskeytown). I searched for 'Jacksonville' in iTunes, and let it play through the open window. On repeat.

A gift; 10,220th day

Prada is the name of my Dog

"You're cute. How old are you? She asked.

She wasn't talking to my dog. She was asking me.

I was done restoring the hardwood floors in my apartment before i moved in. The padding and carpet that had coved the wood was hauled away in a pick up truck ealier that day. I had moved in my furniture, and spend the day unboxing my belongings. I took prada with me as i stopped by the grocery store and bought a pint of milk. I needed to move. I needed to change places, so i drove to a store across town. On my way home, there was a crowd downtown. I pulled over and let prada jump out of the back seat. I put on her leash i keep in the jeep. I read it again as she pulled it tight, trotting down the street, between parking meters standing alone and couples holding hands. It read 'Wheat Ridge Animal Hospital: 303- 424-2235'. It reminded me of how many places we had been. It reminded me of where we are, which in turn reminded me of where we were not.

We were stopped in front of the Lafayette Hotel by the woman.

"Well, my dog is 6. I am a bit older." I replied.

Prada sat down and the woman bent down to pet her.

"Well she is cute too." she said.

She continued to pet prada. rather than stand there like a parking meter, i asked her, "What is going on here tonight?"

"It was the Marietta Idol Contest." she said.

"I sang in it."

She stood back up and smiled, and pulled a crumpled pack of Virginia Slims out of her purse. The carton was collapsed and the cigarettes took the shape of her fist, like a bouquet of flowers with the blooms chopped off.

"What did you sing?" I asked.

"Jesus Take the Wheel, and Respect, by Aretha Franklin." she said as she lit a cigarette.

"It's too bad i missed that." I said, with a smile.

"Well, this party is about over." she said, and pointed towards the crowd with her cigarette in her hand like a majorette with a baton in a marching band.

"But they got Karaoke at the Holiday out on the edge of town. You should come. Room 415." she said as she took a drag and smiled at me.

I smiled back, but for a different reason.

"What is your dog' s name?" She asked, before i could bid her goodnight.

"Her name is Prada." i replied.

"You mean like the movie?" she asked back enthusiastically, as if she had found a connection.

"Uh huh." i said, not having a clue what she was talking about.

she could tell.

"The devil's wearin' Prada." she said, as if to acknowledge my confusion, and knelt down beside her new friend on my leash.

"Oh, right." I said.

"Like the movie."

Prada looked at me with chagrin in her dark eyes.

If I had patience, i would have let my thoughts leave my mouth.

I would have told her 'the movie' is really about 'a book' which makes reference to 'a fashion label' which is in reference to a woman's surname, which, in turn is from a family company that started almost 100 years ago in milan italy.

If i had or interest, I would have told her also that the movie had just been released, and my dog was 6 years old.

I might have continued by telling her book was published a few years ago, and my dog was still 6 years old.

If i didn't want to risk any interaction that would lead to another invitation to the Holiday Inn, I could have told her that at the time of prada's birth, the brand did back an italian sailing team in 2000, and that i did like the notion of adventuresome solidarity in racing in the open ocean, and perhaps that could have influenced me in my naming decision.

If i truly believed my thoughts were worth anything standing there in front of the Lafayette Hotel, i would have told her we all assume with ever little question, conventions that have been piled upon and upon each other through time until the meaning and the purpose has been covered up with more timely, more palatable, and more accommodating interpretations. like rumors passed around a school yard, like carpet over hardwood floors. covering up what is often much more simple, much less dramatic, much more solid , and most always, much more beautiful.

I would have told her that beauty is so easy to loose. I would have told her there are many great things that have books, and movies, and labels, and brands piled upon and upon them, that puts distance between me and the simple and beautiful truths i look so hard to find.

Or i could have told her I named my dog for none of that.

and that I named her for Radha, a beautiful woman of Indian folklore and Hindu religion, depicted with great fondness and reverence in Vedic artwork. She was a simple girl who captured the heart of the divine. Her story parallels that of the Virgin Mary in her role in Hindu culture and her story epitomizes pure beauty in art and unconditional love; and her name bears only a similar resemblance because i was sleeping in my 8:00 am art history class in college and mistook my professor when he named her. 'R's' and 'P's' sound the same when you are barely awake in a soft chair in a dark lecture hall.

Once the final exam came, i missed that answer on the test. But prada had been born. and Prada had been named.

My milk was getting warm.

I said goodbye to the Marietta Idol, and left her with the parking meters, and smoking under the Layfeyeette awning and went home.

I sat on a box on the hardwood floor, with prada beneath my feet. I drank my milk. I peeled the label away from the plastic jug.

And I admired the solid simple beauty at my feet. And wished for more of the same in my head.

And for pickup truck to haul away all the rest.