rehearsing the big confession

I didn't mean to. I mean, it just happened. One minute I was ordering coffee, trying to decide between Ethiopian and Sumatran, which normally would be an easy decision, right, because Ethiopian coffee is just gross, heavy and bitter and with an aftertaste of burnt, and Sumatran is warm and chocolatey and scrumptious, but the Sumatra was decaf, and who in their right mind would go to a coffee shop and pay good money for decaf? I mean, that's just absurd. And ever since the doctor started me on those funky meds that may or may not lower my cholesterol, I've been lactose intolerant, which we don't need to go into, but trust me, a latte was out of the question.

So where was I? Yeah, I was ordering coffee, and I went with the rancid Ethiopian, so I was adding some of that sugar that's brown so it's, what?, better for the environment or something?, to improve the burnt rubber aftertaste and then this lady comes in, and, you know, she's one of those. You know the types. Big hair, big purse, big SUV, big sunglasses. Big rock on her left hand. Tight jeans that a woman her age may be able to wear but really shouldn't, and she couldn't make up her god damned mind.

If she hadn't been talking on the phone it may have been easier for her to order a cup of coffee. And really, I didn't mean to do it. But she had left her freaking monster of a car running in the parking lot while she came inside on the phone to order a cup of coffee. Double cappuccino, skim milk, low froth, vanilla shot. Sweetheart, that shot of vanilla has more fat in it than a gallon of whole milk.

It just happened, I was leaving, her car was sitting there, running, unlocked in the parking lot, and I drove it away. It just happened.

          ----------

So some days you just wake up and think -- why bother? It just doesn't seem like things will improve from that tangled mass of sheets, a blaring alarm, a dog with yesterday's trash on its breath, and a hangover from the Scotch that kept you company during the John Wayne marathon the night before.

They weren't even the good John Waynes; they were the boring preachy ones that he made to prove a point, and if they had at least been some of the better films then it would have justified the Scotch. It was a twelve year single malt, and it had been a going away present from when I quit my last job on account of them making my prissy assistant with her la-di-da marketing degree the division manager when I had been all but promised that promotion after years of slogging through company softball games and Secret Santas, and I was saving that Scotch for a special occasion, not some third rate John Wayne fest, and, man, was that a nasty hangover.

And, you know, the dog could have let itself out for a walk to the Statue of Liberty for all I cared, and I remembered that we were supposed to be meeting to sign the final paperwork with our first client, and we had all but blackmailed him into becoming our first client, because when you quit a job on principle you don't get unemployment benefits and the mortgage was due and we were ready for the work, but it was one of those mornings.

None of my clean socks matched each other or my one suit that still fit. The last of the coffee grounds were in the pot, and somehow I forgot to use a filter, and there was murky gritty water all over the counter, and no more coffee. The dog came back in with something that was either a semi-dead squirrel or a kitten or the neighbor's toupee, except it wasn't, it was a mama skunk, and she was MAD and that was my only suit that still fit, so now I'm rush-showering and changing into my least rumpled pair of chinos and looking for a presentable button down since these last few months I've just been in t-shirts and my car has exactly the right amount of gas to get to the meeting, and maybe three and half minutes will be enough time for a coffee on the way.

Except just as I pull into the parking lot of the coffee shop, my phone rings, and it's our client, now our ex-client, who decided to go with a firm that would better suit their needs. Bullshit. Why bother? It just didn't seem like things were going to improve from that point, so, you know, I kind of flipped.

          ----------

My next door neighbor has the cat from hell. I'm not blaming anything on the neighbor, mind you, I don't think it's her fault. She's a sweet young thing just out of college who baked me a pie when she moved in and said she looked forward to living next door, and she has one of those blond All American boyfriends who looks as unoffensive and eager to please as a yellow lab, and she doesn't throw loud parties or leave trash in the hall, but she really has the cat from hell.

That cat is the devil incarnate, I'm telling you, with a smushed up face and yellow eyes that always look deranged and hair that might be attractive if it was ever combed, but it's matted as a rug emporium and it's my guess that she's afraid of the cat, too, or she would get it groomed or take it to the pound or something.

This cat knows nothing of private property; you'd think it was raised in Russia in the 1930s the way it wanders in and out of other people's apartments at will. And it takes things: things that don't matter so much, like paper towels or Kleenex, and things that matter quite a lot, like dollar bills of any denomination and computer cables. Devil cat's owner is too sweet to be held accountable for this beast, but once it took a rather sensitive paper that was on my desk, and for a time it was stealing socks like the eternal winter was about to descend.

I hope this beast never has kittens, because I can't imagine how evil its spawn would be, but this cat will spend hours sitting just below the window, crying, screaming, meowing, and carrying on like there's no tomorrow and Armageddon is upon us. Nothing stops it: locked doors and windows, thrown boots, even getting a dog -- the dog is terrified of that deranged beast, and the cat has taken to taunting the dog at all hours of the night, flinging itself up onto the window screens, screaming, while the dog keeps barking through the window at it.

After three weeks of this game on a daily basis, I tried to catch the cat and take it somewhere else, and the fight that ensued landed me in the emergency room. So when two more weeks went by and all it did was spend entire nights rehearsing the full libretto of Faust under my bedroom window from midnight until four in the morning, I was prepared to kill and skin that beast, regardless of how cute and wholesome and kindly its owner might be.

I'd get her a new kitten, but first I needed a shot gun. That's all the gun was for, to kill that evil excuse of a cat.

          ----------

Something just didn't go right. The to-do list was thorough; I had checked it against the newspaper article on closing up your house for the season, adjusted the thermostat and the pipe settings just so, bled the radiators and double checked the leaky pipes and the areas of the gutters where dead leave accumulate, emptied the trash and the fridge, made a run to the dump, packed my necessities bag with a toothbrush and some clean underwear, and then there were the glitches.

The sudden flat tire on the rear passenger's side. The almost empty gas tank. The out of order teller machine at the bank. I realized that my cell phone had a tracking device, but if I got rid of the phone I would lose all my stored phone numbers, and they might be useful; and if my cell phone had a tracking device, and those new passports have a tracking device, odds were good that my laptop had a tracking device, too, somewhere in the internet connection that could be traced to my location, as of course so could credit cards, and then I was leaving the phone, numbers be damned, the laptop, after running over it with the car to provide some protection of whatever files people could access, my passport, my cut up credit cards, suddenly I was leaving all these things in a dumpster behind a Best Western motel and limping along old state highways on the spare tire that was a nightmare to put on, and something just didn't go right.

This was supposed to be a getaway, a new start, a clean slate, and how was I supposed to know there was a 20 miles per hour school zone on a state highway in July, and that the cop patrolling it had just graduated from the academy a week ago and was duty bound to serve and to protect, and how they managed to get my particulars to a no-stoplight town three states away, I still don't really know. Something just didn't go right.

          ----------

{all confessions are from the same person / incident}
{no felines were harmed in the creation of this story}

---

reading
the August reading list is still in the compilation stage

weather
less than 48 hours until arrival elsewhere

seen

The coffeepot boiled over. Burbles and spits of brown droplets scattered over the stove top and quickly evaporated, leaving brown flecks on white enamel. The small child handed a palm full of breakfast cereal to the family dog, and giggled with glee as the rasping slurp of the tongue wiped them away, leaving the opportunity for another handful, and another.

Next door, a gentleman of uncertain age and unpredictable income sits up, stretches, scratches, glances at the clock, decides to postpone those things which really don't matter, returns to a fitful sleep, dreams in Corsican and in Basque and snippets of Latin.

Across the street, weed whackers whirr and edge the sidewalks into submission, held by impassive landscapers in sunburned hues of red and orange, whose impassivity is only matched by their passion for baseball and their utter hatred of whichever political party happens to be in office.

The bank is unlocked, greeting a string of customers preferring to discuss the weather with a teller rather than remain in creature comfort in the drive through window and distrustful of the passivity and mysterious beast-like bowels of the automated teller machine.

A trio of pensioners drinks weak coffee on the sidewalk and rights the wayward ways of the world, and the pierced and tattooed art student behind the counter thinks of possible thesis topics that combine Walter Benjamin and Wittgenstein.

Upstairs, a canary considers singing in the morning air, decides against it, and unwittingly changes the course of day for its owner, whose decision tree for today, written after three whiskeys and a brandy chaser, had read: wake up --> bird sings --> call mother --> shower --> job applications; or, wake up --> bird is quiet --> propose to girlfriend --> take job in clinical drug trial. His is not to know that his girlfriend dumped him for his best friend, and the drug trial will result in a rare but serious allergic reaction that causes a need for immediate hospitalization and permanent kidney failure.

Across the city, the morning bell rings for classes at the public elementary school to begin, and a third grade teacher quietly recites the seven-times table to herself to calm pre-class anxiety, as the previous day her dyslexia, until that moment kept a secret, had revealed itself all too publicly during a teacher training session with the superintendent. She is now on probation pending a competence appraisal, and does not know how to tell her husband, who has also not been told of the disability.

Two first grade students become blood brothers using a safety pin in their index fingers at morning recess, and the janitor, a month and three days away from retirement, naps in a broom closet.

Stones crunch in the alleyway; a tomcat stalks a sparrow; a firetruck blasts past in response to a false alarm at the nursing home; the clerk at the 7-11 decides to hollow out the three week old hotdogs and stuff them with canned cat food; a train crosses Main Street, composed of ninety six cars filled with coal, two engines in front and one behind.

Clinging to the side of car number forty seven is a seventeen year old high school dropout, a battered paperback copy of Aesop's Fables and a postcard from Nevada with a message scratched in pencil begging his company on an expedition like no other. The engineers are all well aware of the youth, and are tempted to intercede, to inform the local authorities or simply to detach the passenger, but over a scratchy intercom discussion decide to leave the situation alone, and let the next shift of workers decide whether or not to interfere with the kid's fate.

He will make it as far as Colorado Springs, where a weary conductor will read him the riot act about trespassing and threaten a lot of bullshit about the repercussions of transporting minors across state lines, threaten to telephone child services and the governor, then look the other way while the kid escapes and scrambles to hitchhike across the final stretch of the Rockies. The conductor had hitchhiked for a week and a half himself, back when he was twenty four and just out of the Army and returning to his sweetheart in Oklahoma, and now they had two sons and were a part of the clockwork of their community, so he wasn't worried about the fate of the traveler, who was picked up by a high school youth group on their way to a revival camp in the mountains, in a chartered bus with a driver who may have been on substances expressly forbidden to members of God's flock.

Rather than continue to Nevada, he stayed at the Revival Camp and took a job in the kitchens, not so much from an overwhelming presence of a deity but from the awe of the mountains and the weariness of the road. He stayed at the camp for five years, working from the kitchens to the grounds keeping to the building staff, until the camp was sold to a ski resort and he drove his battered Nissan down out of the mountains to Nevada, at last.

The post card had been sent by his father, deep in a peyote induced trance at the time, and with no memory of writing the message and only a hazy memory of his son, whom he had last seen twelve years ago, in Alabama. The father had gone on, first to Idaho, then Utah, Arizona, and then to Baja, and would have been flummoxed at any point of his own journey with glancing upon the face of a familiar stranger awaiting recognition. In Baja, he took up with a meteorological expedition studying oceanic currents as compared to seismic activity and the El Niño effect, misfiled two of the reports, and thus inadvertently skewed the research data to demonstrate a correlation where none existed, thus providing an additional ten years of grand funding to attempt duplication of the data and demonstration of a tantalizing new theory of weather and plate tectonics, none of which was verifiable.

The boy's mother, remarried and living in Tennessee, did not know where either wanderer had been, and was too troubled with a colicky infant and a second husband to stay awake nights wondering about her misplaced men. She had done her duty and married the father of the boy rather than finishing college, and when her husband had left she had found a job as an accountant to keep them all honest, and now with a second family to raise and a business to run and a potential election to the city's board of selectmen, chasing down previous family was a rabbit hole to avoid. Her second husband knew of the existence of the son, but had never met him, and was content to leave well enough alone.

A new highway bypass was built along the old county road, the reservoirs stayed filled, the news was declaimed at nine o'clock, and the coffee boiled over, just as it did every morning.

---

reading
messages of hope and cheer and joy and love

weather
sunflowers, a tornado warning, a tornado drill, a lightening storm

liberté &c

It is often reported that, deep in the woods, lurks a being so foreign and so forlorn, so passed over by evolution and by civilization, that all it can do is shake its shaggy head and bellow, bellow at the unfairness of the universe to pass it by and leave it alone in the woods struggling to communicate with beings of too fragile a construction, too rapid a lifespan to ever be peers or companions.

Some say it resembles a giant elephant, some see a creature closer to a bear, some an aquatic variant, some a human thought to be closer to a Neanderthal, some a tiger, and some don't believe it to be anything more than a fairy tale, the figment of imagination of a people whose own lives are so isolated as to create fantastic stories to explain what they cannot understand. They are wrong, undeniably, unutterably wrong, all of them, although none of them will accept this.

There is a creature, of course; there is a whole host of creatures, who live in world parallel and simultaneous to our own, who occasionally become lost in the woods and slip down the wrong hallway and suddenly find themselves in a world that doesn't quite fit, the food isn't nourishing, the beings lack grace and subtlety of movement and communication, and these lost visitors become panicked at the difficulty of making their way back to their own reality, the reality of if onlys.

If only God had created the world in two weeks rather than one. If only the Ark had been a slightly larger ship. If only the flood had lasted 40 millennia rather than 40 days. If only the Crusades had been settled with a round of charades, best two out of three, and a chess match, winner takes all. If only Marco Polo had traveled to Brazil. If only Magellan had sought the North West Passage. If only Ponce de Leon had recognized the fountain of youth when he found it, instead of allowing his horses to drink deep but not even filling his canteen, for the water was cloudy and filled with spiders, and he was eager to find cities of gold. If only France had kept Louisiana, if only Napoleon had been content with Josephine and without Poland or Russia, if only Mussolini had taken a moment to reconsider his actions, if only Lord Elgin had left the marbles in place, if only my violin teacher had survived her heart attack, if only I had used my turn signal.

In this world, this parallel reality of choices not made, decisions and alternative outcomes from thousands of years worth of consulting the stars, the fall of tea leaves, the intestines of sacrifices, the i-ching, the dictionary, in this reality of the alternative ways of being ramble creatures of unimaginable beauty and dexterity, flying, running, swimming, skittering through five or six dimensions, where their unusual size is no hindrance and they sing in a tonal scale unintelligible to our ears.

Whales take opportunities to dry out their wings on land, spending years on top of mountains before returning to the ocean. Bears have marsupial pouches that provide incubation chambers for premature kittens of tigers, and in return the tigers charm fish from the streams, left in baskets woven of rope like silk at the entrances to caves deep in the desert, many days' journey from the forest.

Humans, too, inhabit this land, humans who decided to live in a world without reconsiderations or recriminations, a world where death, disease, discouragement are accepted without fear, sadness, or God, a world where neither the vacuum cleaner nor the pressure cooker are employed at house parties, a world where roses and Johnson grass are grown in pots on windowsills and aspidistras are tended with loving care and weekly fertilizing along borders of gardens of knotweed and clover. When the sun sets and the moon rises and the skies turn indigo and coral, small children play hopscotch with tree frogs and elephants beat out announcements of local news.

It is not that they are any more content or less full of existential anguish than we are in this world, it is not that they saw advances in Calculus and particle physics as treasonable offenses to be followed with a month in the stocks and a broadside of bad poetry; it is not that the speed of time moves a quarter turn for each of our rotations; but each of these developments reflects something deep in their psyche, reflects a love of the smell of the ocean before a storm, a voice which echoes the wail of the wind through bare trees, a foot that is designed to paddle a boat and climb a tree, a hand which holds tigers still and peels the bark of trees, a heart that grows heavy with longing at the full moon, and a soul that nurses an ambition to remember how to float as easily on air as it still can on water.

There is no sense of betrayal or of waste, for as the day slowly grows into a week, a year, nothing changes, and nothing is remembered. Everything is immediate, the past forgotten, the future inconceivable.

One day the nursing kittens awaken to discover they are tigers, not bears, shake hands with their wet nurses, and leave the desert for the forest, where the echoing emerald replaces the windswept brown they once could recall with perfect clarity.

The whale tumbles from the mountain after a drunken evening of spring water and racy limericks, forgetting to use its wings for propulsion, and falls back into the ocean, seduced by the cooing of mermaids and the promises held by the oysters, promises hinted at but never revealed, the sweet nothings of the mermaids never developed into stories, the whales not aware of any depth beyond where they lie, as the sun drifts down through the ocean.

Sometimes someone from our world falls into the world of parallel possibilities; rarely do they survive the transition from height, width, depth, and time to a world of other facets, other dimensions of which they previously could not even conceive. They are stretched, flattened, twisted, torn, taunted, spun about, and finally placed in a chrysalis of mango leaves to await their rebirth as a sentient being who can communicate tonally and float on the eddies of time, who trades memories and expectations for reverberations of instances of the now, without question or judgment.

Often, beings who survive the initial plummet scream, scream and yell and curse and shout in tongues, begging to be placed back in their home of Sunday roasts, Monday laundry, Tuesday casseroles, Wednesday meetings, Thursday spaghetti dinners, Friday cocktails, Saturday lawn mowings, a world of logical ordered sense rather than this chaotic, random, unprincipled kaleidoscope they've fallen into. Often, they are drowned, put out of their misery for their own good, although sometimes the mermaids play mischievous games with their memories before their dying breath.

It is the very young and the very old who best survive the transition, those who have not yet formed prejudices and those who have lived long enough to forget their prejudices. These are given a woven chrysalis of mango leaves, a month of silent feasting on twenty four carat goldfish and the effervescent waters of eternal youth, and when they hatch at the conclusion, they are transformed beings who shimmer and reflect the depths of the secrets of the universe in their eyes, being who have grown tails or gills or wings or all three, beings whose formed and forgotten memories are translated into the roar of the ocean and the explosion of volcanoes, whose heartbeats are earthquakes and whose stories are myths.

On dark, moonless nights, deep in winter and at midsummer, their songs can be heard, in the silences between the beat of butterfly wings and in the hesitation before a tadpole sprouts its tail, and there is nothing like it that you will ever hear again, anywhere else.

---

reading
ceci et cela

weather
c'est Juillet: anniversaires partout

with thanks to 1925

Somehow I woke up in a library, but I had no memory of how I ended up there. For a while I just lay on the floor, looking up, seeing books, and I couldn't have told you if they were books in a bookstore or books at the New York Public Library or books in some person's own private collection. When you don't know where you are or how you got there, the details can get a little lost: the setting just doesn't have any context. So there I was, looking up, and there were all these books, rows upon rows of books, and they went up up up, towering so I couldn't see any ceiling or ending to the shelves, which seemed to continue on either side of me for miles of neatly arranged rows.

Eventually I was able to turn my head a bit, but all that did was show even more books and give me a blinding headache, and when the headache finally cleared and my vision came back, I couldn't tell if the light was just really dim or my vision had disappeared or all the books really were just grey, grey, grey. Since I had never really been one of those bookish types, I really didn't care, but it was idle curiosity while I waited for my head to clear in the stacks of that mysterious library.

Some experts say to try and work backwards to remember the last absolutely definite moment of memory, and then tease it out. So one person might remember nothing but buying a gallon of milk, but then they remember waiting in line to pay the slowest checkout clerk ever, and then they remember getting into their car and driving home, then arriving home to find something, a telemarketing call, maybe, sets them off, a soon they've taken a chainsaw to all the telephone poles in the neighborhood and are being charged with three felonies and a misdemeanor, but they can't actually build a reliable case, since it was like a subconscious fit.

But I didn't do any of that, that's all just a story I heard somewhere, on one of those news programs or in the seatback pocket airline magazine where some inconsiderate lout has torn out the final page of the article. So I lay there, on the ground, between all those books, and looked for my recent memories.

There were lots of randomly generated memories that didn't seem very important, or at least not very helpful, memories of falling off the fence at the zoo and of spilling an entire wheelbarrow of leaves and of stabbing a pencil into the couch when I was punished for something my brother did, like put bubble bath in the new hot tub and turn all the jets on high. I remembered learning to drive an old 1981 Datsun pick-up truck and finding a yellow lab puppy by the river and bringing it home, and I remembered the day in college when the letter arrived telling me of my uncle's death by drowning and my need to be there right this very minute, final exams or no final exams, and that was the end of college.

Then my memories just start disappearing. I remember the tastes of burnt coffee and warm beer, the scent of a roasting hog and the sound of the lawn mower, but I couldn't tell you if I live in a house or in an apartment, whether or not I'm married, whether or not I have kids, or what state I live in. If my arms didn't hurt quite so badly (and I'm beginning to suspect my wrists just might be tied together) then I'd reach into my back pocket for my wallet and verify these particulars with a glance at my driver's license and business card. Come to think of it, my legs might be tied together, too, and back in elementary school I was always the losing team of the three legged race, so even if I could stand up I probably wouldn't be going anywhere, if I knew where I was, or where I might want to be headed.

More than anything I craved a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone with pink and blue sprinkles, and my nose was starting to itch, and my lumbar needed a bit of support. The books had that smell of imminent mildew, and as a child I had suffered continually from asthma, and the itch in my nose and the mildew in the books didn't bode well for the functioning of my lungs. I tried rolling onto my side, since an old sports injury meant I could never stay on my back very long, but rolling didn't seem such a great possibility either.

The books were still there, still grey, still musty, and the titles didn't reveal anything at all about where I was. There was an Encyclopedia Brittanica set and some books on anatomy and physiology, three or four books that were either about Egypt or the Mayan Indians, an introduction to archaeology, and the rest were too far beyond my field of vision to be legible.

Back in high school we had studied the Mayan Indian, how they drank chocolate and wore gold and had live human sacrifices and all died by smallpox brought over from the Europeans, upon whom they took revenge with the scourge of syphilis, but that was really all we learned, and unless I was going to be a live sacrifice for some re-formed Mayan cult, there wasn't any chance that they'd find my knowledge of the situation helpful. I'd never been to South America, didn't speak Spanish, wasn't an archaeologist; and if they needed a sacrifice, shouldn't it be someone who actually believed in the god to whom they were being sacrificed, and unless I'd converted recently, that wouldn't be me.

So where was this library? And why was I craving mint chocolate chip ice cream with sprinkles? And why were there tatta tatta tat paw steps coming towards me?

---

reading
"I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library. -- The Great Gatsby / Fitzgerald

weather
is there any greater summer joy than a knotted rope, a riverside, a leap into the cold depths?