Flat Earth Edginess

     As we stretch away from Jeb’s death day and towards Oct. 10th, Jessie’s tagged first kiss day, will she happily remind me this year, I hope so. A log to leap over on the path of life, we hardly know where the other is in the wilds, the pricker bush thickets, of this haunted house. Without some way to make new, I feel stuck in metamorphosis-interruptus, my feathers out and ready to fly but probably like that bird on the end of the fishing pole that the cats like to chase, as I flick it over the carpet, so they can get a good grip and tear at 50 mph for a few minutes. Then they just roll over and wait for it to come within leisurely clawing distance.
    Because selling the house has a melancholy like an anchor dragging across the ocean floor, an anchor as large as one of those useless skyscrapers downtown that spell life backwards and require formal attire, even if that’s all white. Who would ever want to spend a minute there unless they were mesmerized by money, watching it pass before their eyes like so many donut shaped life preservers, with the name of the ship stamped on there in red: Going Down Slow”. Home ownership is key to the American Dream, which is what I must have been choosing when I let Jeb slip away. He was ready to try the world again and he slipped through my hug on Powelton Ave as his ancient Volvo was at the ready, he’d got it from some Rainbow Family guy I never met who later fell off the top of a ladder and was paralyzed for years. He’d put up these crushingly dynamic posters around town, that I’d been excited to notice, my friend Tim may have some still in his basement except he’s lost his mind too and walks by my house sometimes, joyfully single minded. Free, from burdens and too many thoughts. His wife though is a bit stern and scares me, so I don’t help as I should. The stern judicious women need kid gloves on me which I can’t always find. The good boy.
    I know I have a gigantic pair of soft velvety kid gloves, somewhere, but I haven’t seen them, under all the hoarding in my house. It’s not over the top hoarding, I hasten to add, it’s only a little bit everywhere, the hall mostly. And mostly media: records, books, some DVD’s some VHS. And I don’t really have anything else but these pixels in the mind. Part of the past mashed into mind pixels and ear suet. The birds of self pecking away at a swinging bird feeder, the suet is greasy and looks good, a little old newspaper headline in every peck. Peck peck peck, ‘take anooother little piece of my heaart now baby! You know you willl!’ I relish the day.
    I think I might just get someone else to do everything for me remote control. That’s what money can buy you, as the drops fall from the window screen to the sill from yet another stormy weather day. We seem to either get a heat wave or an entire country’s worth of a storm or hurricane. The entire Caribbean lays down on the entire east coast. This drop of water was breathed in and out thoroughly by a Great White a mile off of Barbados -where Ebby Hinds lives, the most beautiful fine goddess of my junior high years, regal and churchy. She lived with us so she could go to high school in Connecticut, of all places, and she was also kind and benevolent. I was mostly playing with my French Canadian buds who greased their hair back. We invaded a milk packing plant by climbing the up ramp and then got chased out, just as we opened some quarts from one of the thousands of milk crates piled up (like those skyscrapers) and bunched together with dark shadowy spaces behind. We were just quietly sipping the milk, chocolate milk! Strawberry milk! Milk! So what milk! Fortunately one worker guy must have been sympathetic in his coveralls and he motioned towards the loading dock. You know how fast kids can run and we barreled out of there leaping free from the pressurized work zone into the beautiful clean blue sky air of the parking lot, and then out the gate. Happy moments, then into the bushes, is anyone following us? I heard somehow later Richard became a rock n roller, but we always moved away, letting go of houses as if that would change things, but really this family unit was headed for the end of this flat earth. The edge and we made it there and fell off. Is there an American music for this, white boy blues or something?

Auction house

     It helped to go into J.’s bed at 2 am for a bit. some of the soothing electricity passes between or goes somewhere, into the blankets. We will be ok. Couple little smooches. But go back to my bed after a bit. Sleep more. Dreams reaching. Kind of like this choral singing from The Early Music Collection. Reaching to encompass the whole story. I get to an early morning moment where usually I would’ve arisen but today I try for more sleep, stretch to new parts of body and it works, I connect in to more sleep, the sleep of more and more connection to the whole story, all the way back to Jeb and I'm standing next to me whilst our Mother-screams-at-sky, and how we took a fork in the road from that moment on, all of us, Miriam too, and Kirk wasn’t there, is that it? No. Wider than that and not so articulate. Having similarities to that movie __________ the other evening, where the 11 yr old English girl has a visit at a resort in Turkey with her divorced Dad, who is loving but distant, holding hands but conflicted, and then the few flash forwards tell you in a few frames that it was a last visit, as he disappears up a corridor, freeze frame on her waving at him goodbye. That movie making! Still flooring me days later. How a movie camera can take you into a person’s experience, a young girl. Saying goodbye forever. And me. Mee. The dad button pressing and the distant Mom & Dad, who are still alive, fought through the lack, the incredible LACK-a-FLACK, but I didn’t learn, you never learn until later I suppose, how its all connected, until trying to let go, the muscles holding the gun, the death tool, is there always a death tool or machine in the background (life is a machine of life). But I had a better grasp of it earlier, the gestalt feeling as I slept further & further, want to go back for more of THIS sleep, and hitting various buttons back in time: the 2 weeks carrying, canoeing the Algonquin Lakes all in one button of many, carrying those heavy canoes between lakes, maybe that was the back break for me, YES, I carried the weight for Cindy and Jay so they could find love for each other while Dad was excluded, sometimes he slept in their tent, sometimes he slept in my tent. And then they argue about what weight of patriarchy that I then put on a hinge pin (where is a forked tree so I can emerge for a moment?) that hinge pin that unloaded broken that Trump election week for 2 years or more of back pain, still it’s in the neck, am I sturdier than ever?
    Back to age 14 in those blank woods, a bear crossing the road unconcerned 50 yards up and I wanted to go closer, and my Mother yelled quick, No! Don’t go up there Hugh!
It’s hard to describe the feeling of letting go of the house and my roots letting go of the pieces of the rock, and my brother who wandered the land restlessly and drew pictures sublime of campfires, and his trucks and the sky, starry, Celtic knots and in a couple there’s a cabin nestled back beyond, with smoke emerging, going up to the sky. Aren’t we all going up to the sky, at least in the morning when we first put feet down on the ground, the smooth wood floor with splinters occasionally and a few nails sticking up. I’ve learned to walk in this house a little less carelessly, snake bitey areas where the boards were taken up in the early days of electric install and the wound to house is as yet not healed. I have done that, in Paul’s house, a road straight through the 2nd floor hall, past each living bedroom.
    And I managed to tell P. and K., at their ten room mansion which can’t quite find the light yet, at the end of the tunnel, when they came in midday, a little bit suddenly (but it always feels that way) and they said ‘We’re getting out of the office, We were getting yelled at’ -as if they needed to explain to me, so yes it’s personal for them, their project to put lawyer’s offices and their own kindly lawyer’s offices into the old English style mansion with wainscoting up to here and a room with gargoyles, a niche -  it’s called the niche, with four lions overhead and that's where the morning light comes splendid (the only morning light in the house like some kind of magnifying glass) and I managed to think like a lightning bolt and say ‘Naw, naw heck with them yelling at you! You guys have good intentions! Forget about them!’ And we hee hawed for a minute on that while my ‘Honky Tonk Radio Girl podcast blares a bit in the background. So then I show them the 9 foot pocket door set and how it rolls a little bumpy even though I fixed the one hanger and that’s fine with Pete, he caresses the door a little as it rolls in and out, that’s how I know it's his old money.
    How electricity jumps so suddenly sometimes, in just a moment an entire memory can be made, a place and arm movement, a face or two, a talking into the air, a sound wave exclaiming.
    And I’m taking the day today and that does worry me a bit, shall I do it and I know I shall. SELL echoing like at an auction house, the farmer’s auction house in Barnesville near my Quaker boarding school. Have you ever been around those rooted farmers, the smell of the floor is rich soil, manure, mature, life and death in a mini heart beat, and growing, everything is always growing. The working farmhouse Mom feeling the opposite end to the auction house with it’s barn doors wide open and suspenders and overalls everywhere. Makes you feel small, but in a good way.

SELL the other house?

 Could it be that I am sliding into deciding to SELL? Inevitability reigns over me like a fog. Desire to make little movies of reflection, like all this writing. Little nothings that don’t really add up because it’s not done yet. While listening to pulsations of Purcell. How nice and quiet this pre-dawn joy can be. gee Gee lying on my customary seat. The wonderful Indian guy at the takeout, explaining the possibilities of the dishes. Chili Garden, the Chinese place Jessie had ordered from on Grub-hub, had a gigantic iron steel gate over the entire store front, a tidal wave of nobody home and the aroma from Mood Cafe, was just so pleasant, for Jessie and I, holding hands on Rosh a Shana. She says she’s a bad Jew right as a family, also looking Jewish but a tad more middle class walks by, four abreast, the young man holding a child, the wife pushing a stroller, so they can’t really scrunch down very well on the sidewalk. Do I love this neighborhood, the same as ever. Since 1977, oh my goddess, lay me down to die! Whatever happens next. I WANT so much.
Just need to admit that amazingly this relationship is working out very well, after so many years of wandering in the desert, like Moses and company. Me, a lost Christian finding a lost Jew perhaps, in the post modern world of bigger than ever forces washing over and around. Can I say these things out loud, lost Judeo-Christian children feeling Anarchist-loneliness, where we could sing the song without any misspeaking ‘By the Waters of Babylon’, we laid down and cried, and cried, and cried for thee Zion. Except it should be known that the supposed ‘real’ land of Zion, Israel is turning into an apartheid state before the eyes of the entire world. People weren’t able to see S. Africa so well back in the 1940’s, pre TV, even if they were predisposed to do something about it. So it’s pomo all over again then now, lostness and repetition pounding like the saddles on the four horsemen’s steeds. Good thing for me the real Zion is here in America, the real real (idea) of Zion. If I was interested in that being true …. In passing through I suppose. Looking for the Goddess behind it all, perhaps, and before that the way way back (900,000 years ago!) a tribe of 1,280 who lasted for 10,000 years in some portion of Africa, with as Jessie pointed out a wider gene pool than probably any random 1,280 people you pick out of, say, a stadium of football fans, or at the theater watching ‘Hamlet’ or any one neighborhood in any city in the world, or any Amazon tribal gathering. Perhaps tribes don’t gather to the size of 1,280 people though, so scratch that one. The point is the amazing lost tribe phenomenon of 1,280 people, average, for about 10,000 years are everyone’s literal ancestors, and wouldn’t you like to meet one or more of them to say hello, how are you?! Thanks, good should, for whatever and how much of whoever you may be, you gave to it, for it, from it, for me, in the end. The very end. Thanks! Zardoz laughing in the sky. Schedule that Zardoz viewing with Chris for next week sometime, will ya? I’ve got to get this movie making weirdness, that eats at me, onto the ground somehow, step by grueling step. Like facing myself into a hall of mirrors. Aaaah! That could be the first shot of my narcissistic disemboweling John Wilson/Sherman’s March type movie. The one that’s supposedly about: can I make a short movie cuz I’m turning into an old man before my very eyes and thank god I’m settling down with a beloved, even whilst weeping inside about all those left behind, who already went to join the great behind, the one with the lost tribe in the sky. Jeb most of all, my brother, with Richard right next to him. The main thing to think about is how we are all interchangeable parts on this human scale march through time, a thought around which so many have tried to put their hearts and minds. And so many haven’t, the lead procrastinator in chief being ol’ Trump-head himself, the proverbial turd on a stick if there ever was one. I’ve been known to lay a ripe one often enough, but that guy! He needs an exorcist, basically, on a different scale. Could it be on the scale of the media, of the movies and the music and internet? Perhaps. We shall see.
On the topic of said culture war: I’m intrigued by the word/concept ‘thirst trap’ and I think its probably women or men dressing in very revealing clothes, like the two at Stupid Baby’s. Prancing about, I looked and didn’t look. I suppose I wanted eyes, really, so thats the point, like daggers to the heart, where does the soul lie? Mine is with Jessie, right? Yes, my soul is with Jessie and I’m a whore of Babylon, in my way, proudly. I like to dress the way I dress and I’m sure, like Naas said “You’re a hot Dad” in a text. She wants to find a ‘hot Dad’ or somebody! of her own she goes on to explain. These endless texts she leaves for me sometimes with occasionally Colin or Zack chiming in with their remarks. And today might get together with her at the Rittenhouse Art Fest, a harmless moment I’m sure.