Richard Riggins, Grade Four: Revisited

Richard Riggins had a little red robot that made his bed each morning and put his sneakers in neat rows in the bedroom closet. He also had a chimpanzee that played ping-pong with him in the basement.

Richard and the monkey liked the same programs on television, and whenever Richard laughed the chimp would bounce up and down, clap his hands, and expose his yellow teeth in a wide, happy smile.

Richard had received the chimpanzee from his father, who was an astronaut and traveled all over outer space in a rocket. Because his father was so busy, he did not live with Richard and his mother.

Richard's father would, though, sometimes come for a visit, arriving on each occasion in a helicopter that he piloted and landed in the parking lot of the Mormon Church across the street from Richard's house. Besides his work as an astronaut, Richard's father was also a famous scientist and archaeologist. He had once sent Richard some dinosaur bones. A strong, handsome man with a fine singing voice, Richard's father regularly sang with a band in a nightclub near the base where he lived with the other astronauts.

Richard's mother refused to acknowledge any of these things about the man who had fathered her only child.

Richard went to school at Thomas Edison Elementary. He was shy and small for his age, and had bright red hair that his mother cut with old sewing scissors. All of his clothing had once been the clothing of a cousin who was almost 20 years older than Richard. The other kids at school picked on Richard and said things about his mother, who was known to make scenes at the Piggly Wiggly and had written checks that were taped behind the counter there and at several other stores in town as well.

Richard never told any of his classmates or teachers about his father or his robot or his monkey.

At night, Richard would sit at his bedroom window in the dark, staring out across the neighborhood of small, low houses. Far in the distance he could see the town's water tower and the big sign above the 24-hour Conoco station near the highway. For some reason the water tower reminded him of a rocket ship, which reminded him of his father. He had determined that the next time he talked with his father he would ask for a talking bird for Christmas.

Richard's father would usually call late at night. Richard would have to tiptoe through the living room where his mother was often asleep in front of the television. Sometimes one of her cigarettes would still be smoldering in the ashtray next to the recliner, and Richard would quietly stub it out before proceeding to the kitchen to answer the phone. The ringing never seemed to wake up his mother.

His father's voice always sounded like it was coming from someplace far, far away, almost as if he were calling from his spaceship. Richard liked to imagine his father in his astronaut suit, turning cartwheels in the air as he chatted with his son on the telephone. His father would ask him about school, and when Richard told him that he was having a hard time his father would say, "It's okay. Things will get better." They would talk about the monkey and the robot, and Richard's father would laugh at the stories he told.

One night after it had snowed all day Richard's father called him from a tropical island where he was on a deep sea diving expedition. Richard told him that he wanted a talking bird for Christmas and his father had been silent for a moment.

"I think I might have just the bird for you," he said. "The one potential problem is that this bird speaks only Farsi, and you will have to teach it to speak English."

Richard said that he felt confident he could teach the bird to speak English.

His father asked him what words he would teach the bird, and Richard answered without hesitation.

"I will teach the bird," he said, "to say, 'I like you.'"

Doesn't It Sometimes Make You Wonder?

Once, when I was a younger man trekking with my dog in a remote part of Scotland, I saw it rain bubbles.

At the time I was as clearheaded and healthy as I have ever been in my life, and I remain certain that what I saw and experienced that day was no illusion and no mere anomaly of precipitation, light, or perspective.

No, what I saw, and captured time and again in my hands, were bubbles, multiform and frequently sheened with shimmering rainbows, and moving and behaving exactly as bubbles are known to move and behave. They floated, bobbed, drifted down in a steady, languid shower and then sailed and shimmied on the breeze.

There was no mistaking the bubbles for mere globules or droplets. Nor was there anything of the quality of berm or the fleeting and insubstantial products of carbonation; these were real, unmistakable bubbles, and most of them were at least as large as Christmas tree ornaments. A few of the bubbles I encountered were as large as volleyballs.

A man who wanders for a solid half hour in an utterly benign shower of bubbles will of course seek an explanation for such a phenomenon. My hosts at the time, an elderly couple who were distant relatives, were nothing if not matter-of-fact characters, and they did not seem to find my story entirely credible. They politely admitted that they had neither heard of nor experienced such an admitted curiosity. The other locals were no more credulous regarding my tale, and I was left with a mystery that has only grown more wondrous with age.

I spent three years in Scotland after graduating from college. I was trying to scare up a sociology dissertation that I never did get around to writing or even properly conceiving. When I returned to the U.S. I often found myself regaling friends with the tale of the day it rained bubbles. This was usually over drinks --for a great many years after my return I conducted most of my conversations over drinks-- and I discovered that listeners who were sufficiently lubricated were generally willing to find the story more credible and to offer up all manner of hypothetical explanations for what I experienced. None of these attempts at explanation, however, struck me as satisfactory or sufficient.

Nearly thirty years after I stood there in the middle of that forlorn, windswept place staring up with wonder into a sky filled with swaying bubbles, I placed a call to a local meteorologist of some renown and told him my story. He asked a number of questions that seemed to me irrelevant and then lapsed into a momentary silence.

Finally he said, in an almost apologetic tone of voice, "This was, as you say, quite a long time ago, and I'm guessing that what you're telling me didn't happen exactly as you remember it."

I thanked him for his time and hung up the phone.

Here's the thing, though: it did happen exactly as I remember it. I can still picture my dog leaping in the air and snapping happily at the bubbles. I can still see a particularly perfect specimen resting in my palm and then bursting without a sound.

I walked through nature in a shower of bubbles.

I was young, and in a rare, happy place in my life. And though it pains me still that I was unable to share the experience with another person who could also carry that wonder with them for the remainder of their time in this world, I'm nonetheless grateful for that single corroboration of one of my earliest and most fiercely held beliefs, which is that life is so much more --more magical, but also just plain more-- than most of us ever even try to imagine.

Any Old Business? The Day D. Boon Died

It was December 22, 1985.
A Sunday. I was home for
Christmas and had watched
the Vikings lose to the Philadelphia
Eagles and then I had gone
to the Sterling Twin theater
to watch Rocky IV. I know these
things because everything then
seemed important and so I tried
to keep a journal of that time. In the
funny pages of that morning's paper
Calvin and Hobbes built a snow fort,
and Calvin declared, "Together, a
veritable fist of defiance, we stand
immune to any onslaught!
We are invincible!"

Somewhere else in the world
that day, Paul Wolfowitz celebrated
his 42nd birthday by drinking the blood
of a poor woodcutter's only son.
There was no internet, of course,
no cellphones or iPods. I didn't even
yet own a Walkman. I was bored out
of my mind. I considered myself young
enough, though, that the world might
still be whatever I dreamed it might be.
All the same, the birth of Christ
couldn't happen fast enough that year.

News traveled swiftly, just not as swiftly
as it does now. D. Boon was already dead
by the time I went up to my room to listen to
records that night, but I didn't know that yet.
He was only twenty-seven years old,
and he had been one of the most
alive human beings I had ever seen.

A friend had to walk across town the
next morning to deliver the news.
I remember that I sat on the couch,
stunned and silent, while my friend paced
and ranted. "Do you realize," he said,
"that we could probably go out and knock
on every door in this town and not manage
to turn up a single Minuteman record?
Tell me that's not fucked. Explain to me
how that's not totally fucked."

This was now a long time ago,
and we were still young and fierce
about the things we loved and had
discovered that made us feel almost
comfortable with our difference,
but I nonetheless couldn't tell him.
I couldn't explain to him, and all
these years later I still could not
tell him, still could not explain
how that was not totally fucked.

This, Too, I Might Be Inclined To Believe

I used to know somebody who insisted that if you stopped whatever you were doing and really concentrated on listening beyond the sounds of the city you could hear the dead clearing their throats.

This was a long, long time ago, drugs were involved, and the person who believed this is now somewhere among the dead.

A number of years ago I was traveling west from Minnesota, headed for the Rocky Mountains. I was in a car with someone beloved to me, and at some point in perhaps eastern Montana we pulled off the road at a place where you could see the land rolling unbroken for what seemed a hundred miles in any direction. We had been traveling along a two-lane highway that saw very little traffic, and I seem to remember that we had gone something like an hour without seeing another vehicle. We had been keeping track.

As we were standing there surrounded by all that space and silence I mentioned to my traveling companion the story about listening intently and hearing the dead clear their throats.

"Out here you can sometimes hear the dead sing," she said. "It helps, of course, if it's a still day, and sunrise and dusk are the best times."

"Is this speculation?" I asked.

She shrugged, and then said, "I might know. I might have heard the dead sing."

We both stood there for a moment, listening.

"What do the dead sing?" I asked.

"Whatever they want," she said. "And whenever they want. They're so far away that you shouldn't necessarily expect to be able to make out what they're singing. There are so many of them, and it's not like you might think. There's not some giant chorus in heaven. No choir robes. There's no reason the dead should have to put up with direction of any kind anymore. I also don't believe the dead are bound to conventional human ideas regarding harmony, and even when a bunch of them are singing at once they most likely aren't singing the same song. I think they just sing all the songs they ever loved. I guess the best way to describe it is that it would be like hearing millions of transistor radios playing all at once, from far away across a big lake at dusk."

"Maybe they clear their throats in preparation for singing," I said. "Maybe that's what my old friend claimed he could hear."

"Maybe," she said.

"What about dogs?" I asked. "Do the dogs among the dead sing?"

"Of course," she said. "They're even easier to hear, if you've spent any time in this world tuned into a dog's heart. They sing nothing but 'Howdy! Howdy! Howdy!' and 'Yup! Yup! Yup!' and all sorts of variations of 'Hooray!'"

We listened some more, and then she nodded emphatically and said, "This is definitely the kind of place where you can hear the dead sing. Sometimes I imagine that they are singing the names of all those they ever loved and had to leave behind, and they're singing purely for the joy of remembering and translating those beloved names into music."

I said that I liked that idea. This woman wasn't by any stretch of the imagination a hippie, and was certainly not given to this sort of talk. That was probably why the experience was so memorable and kind of unnerving for me.

She said I should shut up more often and just listen. "Names are faces and voices, and faces and voices are memories, and all memories are music," she said. "I'm sure that's what the dead must believe, and what they give voice to when they sing. Someone might be singing your name at this very moment, your name and the names of all those you love in this world and have never properly regarded or celebrated as music. What if someone at perfect peace was out there somewhere singing, 'Bradley Dean, Bradley Dean, Bradley Dean'? Wouldn't you love to hear that? Or if they were just singing, 'Baby, baby, baby,' and you recognized their voice and knew they were singing about you? Wouldn't that be worth listening a long time for?"

Yes, I said, or certainly thought. Something like that would definitely be worth listening a long time for.

The Archive Of Invisible Ink: From The Crawl Space

I spent much of my early life hunting for fables, and can remember the days when the woods would be full of them in the spring. If you climbed back up into the bluffs behind my little cabin above Canoe Brook and nosed around under the rocks and in the shady areas beneath the big maples, you'd find fables growing wild and burrowed in the roots of the oldest trees.

Some afternoons, just as the sun was settling beyond the rolling hills to the west, I'd hike back home with a burlap bag full of fables. My boots would be caked with mud, my back would be aching, and I'd be exhausted from all the sun and fresh air, but I still couldn't wait to empty that bag on my kitchen floor so I could look over my recent acquisitions.

I once lugged home a bag full of squirming trolls. On other occasions I pulled from my sack a turtle with wings like those of a dragonfly, a collection of breathing mushrooms with dark and inquisitive eyes, and a tiny pirate chest full of mice the color of poppies. Once upon a time I found a stooped and tiny man with flowing white hair and a long beard. Fairies were nesting in his beard. This old man was both the remnant of some fable and an immense repository of fables. He sat on the edge of my kitchen table and told me the story of a giant who once roamed the local woods with the moon in a pack on his back. On windy days the giant would run through a meadow full of wild flowers, flying the tethered moon like a kite.

One day at sunset, the old man related to me in a voice so squeaky and small that I had to kneel to make out his words, a hawk was perched in a tree at the edge of the meadow, admiring the spectacle of the giant's luminous kite sailing into the gloaming. The kite, the hawk thought, would make a lovely addition to the night sky.

And as it sat there admiring this quiet spectacle, the hawk saw an arrow suddenly strike the giant squarely in the chest. The giant toppled backwards, the little man told me, and his feet rose momentarily like a seesaw before disappearing again into the tall grass and flowers. As the giant fell, he lost his grip on his kite's tether and the moon drifted slowly skyward, growing ever smaller as it rose and assumed its now familiar place in the heavens.

The hawk, with its keen and beady eyes, then saw a cat --wearing a red felt cap and in possession of a bow and a quiver of arrows-- make a dash for the dark woods at the edge of the meadow. In the blink of an eye, the little man said, the hawk swooped down from its place in the tree, snatched the cat in its talons, and carried it away to its nest, where the giant-slayer and liberator of the moon was promptly eviscerated.

I always interrogated the fables I brought home with me from the woods, and I also unfailingly released them again before retiring for the evening. Some of the fables I found in those days would leave me dazzled and mulling for many days. They changed me, and changed the way I look at the world and my place in it. They made me want to live to a ripe old age.

As I grew older, though, it became harder and harder for me to get back to my old fable hunting grounds. My life was crowded with work and other responsibilities and obligations. When I did manage to sneak away I found that the fables were increasingly difficult to find, and again and again I returned home empty-handed and disappointed.

I have since read that fables have become almost entirely extinct in America, or have been reduced to little more than grim little lessons and morals without the magic. It is my understanding, however, that patches of fables may still be found in parts of Latin and South America, in obscure corners of Eastern Europe, and in small pockets of Africa and the Middle East.

It is my hope that in the time still left to me I will one day venture to some of these places in search of the lost magic that was the stuff of so much happiness and so many old and wonderful dreams.

Cry Uncle

Everyday somebody's telling me to put
my hands up, somebody's telling me
to put my hands in the air.
I can't tell anymore what's a threat
or what's an exhortation,
but I'm generally inclined to do as
I'm told and so I spend
much of the time I spend by myself,
which is much of the time,
moving around with my hands up
and my hands in the air,
which are really, it occurs to me,
the same damn thing.
Either way, it makes me feel
oddly liberated and captured
all at the same time, a hostage
surrendering with a combination
of ecstasy and relief.
If we are to submit to forces
greater than ourselves,
let us dance our way into
the arms of our captors,
our hands up and empty
of all weapons but joy,
and with the secret understanding
that there really are no forces
greater than ourselves.

Watching The Words: The Relay

Screwing my weight on tight
Wasting my eyes on small type
Running from left to right
Still respectful of borders
The letters sporting as best they can
Within the pasture of the page.

I long for a landscape where the words
Can run all day and clear out of sight
And where I can sit on a hill
And watch them go until whatever
Story they have to tell disappears
And is lost to me but continuing
Somewhere to be continued carried
Along to the next reader in the relay
Who will just have to imagine for themselves
The parts of the story they have already
Missed just as I will somehow have to
Find some way to invent my own ending.

Seen

It was when I said that I didn't recognize you
without your glasses and you said you'd never worn
glasses that I first began to entertain the suspicion
that I really didn't know you. I mean, really didn't
know you, that we'd never laid eyes on each other.
Accustomed as I am to awkward moments,
I've nonetheless obtained no mastery over them,
and so I heard myself saying, "Why is it that
every song, including some really lousy songs,
reminds me of you and not in a good
way, but in a way that breaks my heart?
And why is it that every time my phone rings my
broken heart skips a beat in the expectation that it
might be you? You know, calling finally to apologize?"

In my memory I could swear that at that moment
you raised a thumb to the bridge of your nose
to secure your glasses. "Apologize for what?"
you said, as if you were actually curious.
And when I hesitated in answering --there were
so many possible answers, so many possible
worlds-- you said, not, I think, unkindly,
"Should I wait while you manufacture some memories?"
God bless you for that. Even after all those
years, even as your eyes seemed to be straining
behind your glasses, even as you were looking
beyond me at something up the street,
even as you checked your watch and investigated
the chirping of your cell phone in your purse,
you were seeing me clearly.  Seeing me as
you and only you have ever truly seen me.

Another Evening With Scratch Galligan

I gave my dog, Fergus "Scratch" Galligan, a mustache for Christmas. It is a fine mustache, but I had my fill of it earlier this evening, and made my feelings known.

This evening I have other fish to fry, as I believe the expression goes, even as I remain uncertain whether in fact I am using the expression in the proper context.

The fish I have to fry are not impressive fish --not by any means-- yet they nonetheless must be fried. Once upon a time I spent my evenings feeding words into a rock tumbler; these days whatever words I can rustle up are tossed half-heartedly into the Fry Baby. When these words are sufficiently crisp I mix them in with the Galligan lad's rations.

Galligan is inordinately fond of even the most pedestrian words, and uses even finer words to describe them: Scrumptious. Savory. Delectable. I will hear him utter these and other such fancy words between bites. Often he will continue to smack his chops with genuine relish for a good fifteen minutes after he has dined.

Oh, yes, Fergus Galligan is indeed a fancy fellow, a gourmand of the banal. He will pronounce a bowl of prepositions and the scrawniest imaginable epithets, "the most toothsome repast in recent memory. On my honor, sir, your fried words have enriched my kibble experience tenfold."

Often Galligan will don his mustache as he digests and ruminates over the words he has just eaten.

I am, of course, gratified to be able to serve up such easy satisfaction with the increasingly dreary collection of words that I dredge from the increasingly long nights.

My dear Galligan never fails to surprise and delight me, even in the bleariest days of mid-winter. Galligan is, as I may or may not have previously mentioned, a Chilean Dasher, one of the rare dog breeds to have appeared on the Endangered Species list. At the time he came to live with me, at seven months of age, I was led to believe that he was one of only five surviving Dashers in the world. He was then a refugee, rescued from seismic debris and transported to the United States for safeguarding and study. Even this arrangement did not work out as planned --at least initially-- for the poor fellow. Twice before he came to me he had been placed in other homes only to have his custody rather hastily relinquished. The reason for this, I was told, was that Galligan was rather too spirited for many conventional domestic arrangements. The Dasher comes by its name honestly, and my lad is the swiftest of hounds, long-limbed, and a world-class leaper into the bargain. This is not a dog you want to present with the challenge of a fence.

I have had few problems, however, since taking responsibility for Mr. Galligan. I quickly discovered him to be an excellent conversationalist, an agile thinker, and a most reasonable fellow. These are not, of course, traits that the average person is eager to recognize in a dog, and I was somewhat astonished to learn that none of the boy's previous caretakers had ever attempted to converse with him. And where there is not attempt at conversation, you'll understand, there can be no reasoning.

If ever a dog was starved for conversation, it was Fergus Galligan, and in me I like to believe he found his perfect match. No subject is out of bounds between us, thank heavens. I once asked Galligan why he was not given to the humping I have previously experienced with other dogs. He shuddered quite violently and replied, "Such behavior is unseemly, sir, and beneath a Dasher. Your legs, and the legs of your visitors, as well as your pillows and general upholstery, are safe from me. I assure you I am as chaste as a monk."

Some moments ago, as I was reclining with a book and Galligan was reposed on the sofa, he raised his head and stated that he should like to hear some music featuring the French horn.

"Heavens above!" I replied. "Where do you get such ideas, Galligan? You, a dog, asking to hear French horns! Those words I'm feeding you must be giving you queer notions, old fellow. I'm not sure that, even were I feeling so inclined, I could dig up any recordings featuring French Horns."

After a bit more in the way of discussion on the matter, Galligan suggested that he may have learned the term from one of the holiday carols I regularly sang with him during our recent Christmas revels. I found this astonishing, as you might well imagine, and it wasn't until a good deal later, after Galligan had retired for the evening, that it occurred to me that this was an even queerer business yet.

"French hens!" I shouted to Galligan in the other room. "The words in the song are 'French hens'!"

A moment of silence followed, and I assumed Galligan must have been sound asleep. After a brief interlude, however, his voice --measured and a bit sleepy, yet characteristically undaunted-- carried to me in my easy chair: "What I requested, sir, was not French hens, but French horns. I remain certain of that fact. And I beg you not to trouble my sleep with any more of your foolishness."

My Sweet Lenora

No question, I was sweet on Lenora, but the girl loved only rain and pretty little birds and the goddamn flowers of the field.

She was one of those dreamers who liked to wax poetic about things, including those things I just mentioned, but not exclusively those things, not by a long shot. Oh, lord no. Lenora had some serious longing for the world. I believe she might put it that way, or even some way a good deal fancier than that.

She read poets who talked about trees and the moon and dying voles --I think they were voles-- and other such things, and these poems would make her gasp. The color would rise in her cheeks and I could almost feel her precious heart fluttering from across the room.

Often she would insist on reading poems aloud to me --a fair number of them were about birds, and many specifically about long-legged birds standing so quietly (poised was I believe a word commonly employed) in a marsh as either darkness fell or the sun began to make an appearance. I tried to listen intently to these poems, because that's what love will do to a man. And though I am surely no professor, if I had to say what I took away from the poems Lenora read to me it would be the message that at any given moment every damn thing you can imagine might just be up and fixing to die.

"Life is short," I would say, nodding my head.

"Life is precious," Lenora would say, tears sometimes welling in her eyes. "Life is so, so precious and rare."

"Well, I don't know as it's exactly rare," I might say, but only if I was starting to feel like I'd had a bit too much poetry to eat.

Lenora was a fetching gal. I'll be damned if she wasn't. And she had a view of the world that was comely as well, even if I did often find it difficult to square with my own. She was almost more adorable than I could stand, the way she would stir that strawberry powder --which I was pretty sure was carcinogenic, an opinion I shared with her-- into her milk and blow the mess full of bubbles with a red plastic straw.

I have to pause, God help me, after conjuring such a memory.

Eventually, however, my sweet Lenora and I had a conversation in which she admitted that were she forced to choose between subtracting a single homely tree or bird from the world or parting ways with me, she would choose the homely tree and the bird. Smitten as I admittedly was, that was just more batshit-crazy nonsense than I was willing to put up with. It just flat-out was, and when I said I was going home to Sioux City to see if I could get back my old job dealing blackjack, she let me go.

A lot of years have gone by now, though, and I've had plenty of time to wonder if maybe I shouldn't have tried just a little bit harder to be a different sort of man. Every few months I'll get to pining, and I'll type Lenora's name into the internet, even as I know damn well that she doesn't exist in that world and never will.

Still, I like to imagine that she's out there somewhere, on her knees in the wet grass, crying out my name as I'm crying out hers. What about people? I sometimes say to Lenora in my head. Sometimes I shout it out loud. What about love, little gal? Aren't them things precious too?

Everything Was Stolen From Germans And Made By Slaves

Scolded by Emerson.
Shamed by Schopenhauer.
Drugged by German poets.

Lord of nothing,
suckled from a she-wolf's teat,
locked down in a hovel of words.
Bad light. No invention. Inoperable.

Eyes conquered by the rearview mirror.

I might have liked you
if I could have heard you,
but your voice was on the other
side of some great divide.

The giant goes with me when I go.

Under my diaphragm you will find
a nest of young rats.
Be careful with your knife.
They are hopeless things, but harmless.

The world is full of judgment days.

This, though, is the hour of the carp
and of the dying flies.
No compensatory spark flares across
the neutral dark.

Call the crows. They will surely be
interested in this. And let some intrepid
astronaut among them carry these
ashes back to the stars.

In the ruins of the garden,
night with its black snout
follows the trail of blood
in the fresh snow.

Once, out of wild dreams a boy awoke
to discover that his tongue had turned to stone.
From the distant village dull bells
were pealing and darkness was advancing
swiftly on the chaos of his heart.

Let us pray,
and at least pretend
as if our lives
depended on it.

Shit Could Be A Whole Lot Righter

...Really I began the day

Not with a man's wish: may this day be different,

But with the birds' wish: May this day

Be the same day, the day of my life.

--Randall Jarrell, "A Man Meets a Woman in the Street"

Domino-like, one

"maybe" followed another

until...all fell down.

--Rachel Wetzsteon, from "Among the Neutrals"

Why didn't anybody tell me this shit was over? Couldn't someone have told me that I was climbing off one dying horse and onto another?

If you saw a man heaving one word after another into a casket wouldn't you have the courtesy or curiosity to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing?

No answers required.

No one blogs anymore, apparently. Or only old people do. I'm old, but I'm not that old, and God knows I'd hate to be quaint. There's still plenty of whippersnapper in me, but not enough to know what exactly the whippersnappers are doing now that they're not blogging.

At this point, however, I don't suppose I'm likely to find out.

I'm pretty damn sure, though, that the youngsters are not sitting around with their dogs listening to Bryan Ferry. Perhaps you'll agree with me that no straight man should ever listen to Bryan Ferry unless a woman is present. But there you have it: I am listening to Bryan Ferry. There is no woman present.

It's not the way I drew it up in the playbook all those years ago, but it is what it is.

Bryan Ferry is 65 years old. He probably has a blog.

Look, I'm not expecting a telegram anymore. Hell, I no longer even expect mail. I expect something, though. It doesn't look like the world can beat that out of me. I probably couldn't claim to have great expectations anymore, but I am still --I think-- expectant.

Actually, I can't say. I can't say, and I don't know, and I'm not sure.

Maybe you exist. Maybe you're actually out there, and this is some sort of connection. I'm grateful if you do, and if you are, and if this is.

I am, I can assure you, at least happy to imagine, and it is my one fierce hope that I will remain so, even if this shit is over. Which it appears to be.

If, in fact, you're real, I imagine you are good people, and I thank you and encourage you to persist in being good people. Hold your heads up high when you walk down the street. Say hello to the neighbors. Ignore the actuary and the clicking of his abacus. Seize every opportunity to defy gravity and amortization. And please find someone to dance with, hold them close, and speak some of your very best and most sincere words directly into their ear. Don't ever lie to the one you dance with.

Finally:

May you be seen and heard.

May you be known.

And may you never, ever be destroyed.

Sweet dreams.

Upon A Time, Once

I am listening to monk impersonators, but if you put a blindfold on me I wouldn't be able to tell you I wasn't hearing the real deal. That's how tired I am and how damn good these characters are.

Listening to the monk impersonators makes me remember the time I was walking along a road somewhere with my dog and heard monks singing. Real, live monks.

There was some sort of monk habitation there, and it looked every bit the part. I also recall noticing that these particular monks kept bees. Perhaps I'm imagining the bees, but I don't think so. I'm quite certain there were bees there, or evidence of the keeping of bees.

I may even have seen a presumed monk, outfitted in one of those bee suits (the kind that look like astronaut suits from an old issue of some science fiction magazine) and waddling across a field toward what appeared to be bee towers.

This, of course, would have been while the other, unseen monks were singing. Or chanting, which may be the proper term.

It was a lovely day in late spring. The windows of the monk lodging must have been thrown open for me to be able to so clearly hear the startling sound of the singing. I recall that there wasn't another soul in sight. I also have an image of blindingly bright linens --bedsheets, I think I surmised-- swaying gently from a clothesline.

Where or when would this have been? Somewhere in Europe, I suppose, in a time when my life seemed to be comprised of nothing but just such wonders and I as yet had no reason --not a single reason in the world-- to suspect that the wonders would ever cease.

Fall On Your Knees

One day soon, if someone asks me I'll say I was never here. I'll claim the last five years never happened, because they didn't. They never happened. These words don't exist, have never existed. Whatever words did exist you won't find here, no matter how hard you look.

I'm not assuming anybody's going to look hard.

If there had been that much time I'd feel something, wouldn't  I? Wouldn't I have some memory of something having happened? But I don't feel or remember anything other than things that happened way more than five years ago.

I know time is supposed to fly, but it doesn't. I'm not denying that there are indeed some things that fly, just that time isn't one of those things. So, no, I'm not one of those flight deniers. There are, though, plenty of things that I'm prepared to deny, and I don't give a rat's ass what anyone has to say about it. If I haven't seen it or can't remember it, it goes right in the 'denial' column.

I fall down. I've fallen down. That's something that I won't deny, but I'm also not prepared to admit it as any sort of proof that the last five years happened. Maybe I fall down in some other dimension. I don't know, to be honest with you, but I do know that I don't fall down in what some of you people will insist on calling the real world or "the here and now."

I'm not going to deny that hamburgers exist, because I ate one recently. Ate the living shit out of it, and almost felt some small sense of gratification simply because a hamburger isn't soup and soup is mostly what's served up in Limbo, if anything is served up at all.

I realize that by admitting to the hamburger business I'm opening the door for folks to say that the very "fact" that I recently ate the living shit out of a hamburger somehow proves that at least ten or fifteen minutes of the last five years actually happened. It doesn't prove that at all, and doesn't have a thing in the world to do with the last five years. Nothing does, because the last five years never happened. The hamburger, the soup, the occasional serving up of something --these things all take place (which isn't to say they happen) in what I call the astronaut creases, these floaty, slow motion interludes that are necessary to sustain a body that is living completely outside of time.

You notice that not a single one of these clocks is in working order? See? That's what I'm talking about. That's exactly what I'm talking about. For five years nothing has even attempted to tell time. Everything has given up. Everything has stepped away from the car and put its hands in the air. Everything is waiting. Everything has stopped and will soon be over.

I'll never have been here, and even if I had been here, I can for damn sure tell you that I wouldn't have been one of those people who thought he was here in any kind of a hotshot, make-a-difference sort of way. You can certainly try to claim otherwise, but you were never here either.

You know that phrase "here and gone"? It means something.

At any rate, happy holidays to those of you who persist in believing that you're living in some sort of precious present, even though you aren't. Please don't think I'm not sympathetic to your delusions, because I surely am.
I can remember how irresistible that whole notion can be, and those memories and flashbacks are never more acute than during the Christmas season, which before the last five years never happened I loved unconditionally. Even in the bleakest limbo there's still something about it I love and cherish.

I can, in fact, describe almost exactly what it is about Christmas that I love, and love unashamedly. I love it for all the things it can still make me feel and remember (those feelings, of course, don't in any way discount my claims that the last five years have not existed; they are feelings rooted in memories of a time before the last five years never happened). And those things are so deeply rooted that I can now say that only the last obliteration of consciousness can threaten them. They are so powerful that it is even conceivable that they will survive beyond time. In a sense, of course, they already have.

I am, in the words of some writer or another, a self-made lonely man. Yet the rituals of the season (which I still faithfully honor even in my hermitage) continue to provide pure, narcotic transport. All it takes is the warm glow of the lights on the Christmas tree and an endless loop of the holiday standards of my childhood and I can travel even further out of time than frankly seems possible, given how out of time I already am.

There's something melancholy about these experiences and memories, certainly; the feelings they inspire, it seems to me, meet an almost precise definition of "bittersweet." They hurt, these feelings, but there is happiness buried deep, deep within them, and I remain grateful to have access to such a powerful store of memories and feelings. They are probably best shared, of course, yet they are so intertwined with memories of shared moments that there is some loveliness in them even in isolation.

I was truly happy once, it occurs to me, and not just once, but on a great many occasions. I was happy and hopeful and possessed of a certainty that there were people to whom I belonged, and a place that fit any reasonable definition of home. This season played such an over-sized role in nurturing my dreams and my imagination; it inspired my love of stories and music and community and ritual. It cultivated wonder. Even now, living in the no-longer present, I am able to recognize that I was blessed to be born into a family, situation, and time that honored such things and made them possible. As a youngster it was regularly made apparent that this was a blessing, and that there were people all around me and all around the world who were not so fortunate as I was.  A proper appreciation of our blessings required that we see these people, recognize ourselves in them, and acknowledge them with at the very least the offering of compassion.

I am in limbo now, but I can still feel and remember all those old wondrous things, and can still recognize and acknowledge those less fortunate and offer what's left of my treading heart to them, and also to the old memories and rituals that once made me such a happy and dreaming boy. A boy with a present, and a future. A boy who hadn't yet fallen.

The world was better and more whole (holier?) once, I believe, before the last five years never happened, but perhaps, in truth, it is only I that was.

In His Dreams He Built The First Ladder

In his dreams, the original creator believed that putrefaction was the beginning of all life. That before there was any living thing there was rot; decomposition before there was composition; that death preceded life and made it possible.

All of his life, for as long as he could remember, he had been blessed with visions.

The first creation of the first god he created was a compost pile that covered the entire earth. From the great compost pile grew the Tree of Life, and from the seeds that fell from the Tree of Life there arose from the earth --fertilized by putrefaction-- all manner of other plant life. And from the larvae and maggots and other blind, squirming things that were born in the putrefaction there grew flies and frogs and other creeping things, as well as, eventually, flying things that would perch in the branches of the Tree of Life and eat of its seeds and fruits.

On rare occasions the head of a raven that nested in the Tree of Life would turn snow white, and from that point on any common brush or shrub on which the white-headed raven alighted would bloom with flowers as red as the blood that would one day flow in great rivers throughout the world.

The original creator believed that the souls of evil men were reborn in flies, that flies were incubators and propogators of evil. These flies were the ultimate cause of the rivers of blood that would overrun their banks and flood the planet, and each time the floods receded a new age of putrefaction would commence and lay the foundation for another cycle of life.

He knew chaos, and believed in chaos, and saw in it both a source of wonder and the origins of order and all beauty, all ugliness, all good and evil. In his dreams he built the first ladder, which allowed him to escape the worlds he created. He recognized that the end was swallowed up by the beginning, the beginning swallowed up by the end. He was androgynous. He was lonely. He was no one. He was a dreamer and a dream, a dream born in the first clouds.

He saw everything, including the first moonlit night, the death of millions of planets and stars. God was born in him, and died in him --again and again, over millennia-- and with each new birth He was a new god, wiser yet more cynical, with a new host of tricks up his sleeve.

But he --he in whom God was born-- was still lonely. In time he got lost in creation; it had gotten too vast, too teeming. He missed the first world, even as the putrefaction seemed to be once again rising around his feet.

He lived in a basement apartment, worked in a copy shop, and kept a large glass tank swarming with hide beetles. He carried plastic sacks in his pockets and would collect road kill --squirrels and rabbits, mostly-- that he would bring home for his beetles to scour right down to the bones.

When he turned sixty he sat down one afternoon and willed himself to stop dreaming, and when the dreaming ceased he was carried straightaway back to the clouds, where his soul became snow and fell all night, steadily and unnoticed, over the North Sea.

The People Who Learned To Hide

The girl who was never asked to Homecoming. Or any other dance. The girl who had never danced, period. The girl who would get up every morning and dress so carefully, anguished, long moments in front of the mirror, turning, scrutinizing, thinking: nothing she did would matter; no one, not one person, would notice her, would see her, would do anything but look right through her. The girl who never liked what she saw in the mirror. The girl who finally let a boy hold her down and fuck her, a boy who left bruises on her breasts and never spoke to her again. The girl who never learned to speak what was in her head, never learned to sort it out, to give voice to it. The girl who never raised her voice, who didn't dare. The girl who wished she could crawl into her old dollhouse and live out her days without ever moving again.

The boy who learned to hide. The boy who had his books knocked out of his arms hundreds of mornings and afternoons at the bus stop. The boy who was always picked last for teams in gym class. The boy who was always the last to undress and shower in gym class. The boy who never raised his hand. The boy who sat alone in the lunch room. The boy who loved Tarzan. The boy whose parents never gave him a baseball mitt. The boy who threw like a girl. The boy who lived in fear of the dodge ball. The boy who sat alone in his room each night filling notebooks with words or sketches nobody ever saw. The boy who looked longingly at the moon from his bedroom window and longed to live there some day. The boy who hoped to be spared. The boy who was not spared, or who was entirely spared.

The single woman mourning alone the loss of her cat. The single man who walks by the playground each day and feels a hole in his soul. The single man who is afraid of actually engaging any of the children he meets for fear of being suspect. The single men and women who stand outside the Super America at ten o'clock at night, intently scratching away at lottery tickets. The single men and women who go through the drive-through at McDonald's alone at midnight. The single men and women who drink alone. The single men and women who wish they were not single, who wish they had children, who talk to themselves or their dogs. The single men and women who believed in fairy tales. The single men and women who no longer care what they look like and no longer listen to music and no longer believe in love. The single men and women who can't think of anything to say to the people who aren't there or the people who are no longer there.

The old man who lost the love of his life and his connection to the world. The old men and women who never found success or satisfaction in their work. The old men and women who no longer dream. The old men and women who eat canned soup for dinner. The old men and women who no longer feel like taking their pills. The old men and women --and the young men and women-- who will spend Christmas alone.

The fifty-year-old man with the newspaper spread out on the floor in front of him, circling unpromising and in all likelihood hopeless job advertisements.

The stutterers, stammerers, and mutterers. The lonely and blank and broken. The angry and disenchanted. The unloved and unseen. The people for whom hope has been reduced to a persistent and almost entirely unpleasant instinct that grows more acidic by the year, yet which remains on some sad human level ineradicable. One connection, one real conversation, one person they could claim as a friend would be encouragement, if not a triumph.

They're everywhere. They feel like they are hiding. They feel like they're invisible. See them, why don't you? See them as they are, but also, if you're able, as they might once have been and --most importantly-- as they've always dreamed of being seen. Because this world is killing them, and they are killing the world, and every time we look through these people we are --all of us-- complicit in one of the greatest and most unpardonable crimes in human history.

Missed Opportunity

Offered the opportunity to be an Okapi, I declined. I didn't even have to think about it twice. The city in which I live has a zoo, and a few years ago this zoo was the staging ground for the birth of an Okapi. Everywhere you went they were talking about the impending --and eventual-- birth of that fucking Okapi as if it were some long-awaited prophet. The local newspaper had a contest to name the damned Okapi and once the thing was born you'd see photographs of the actualized Okapi on bus shelters, billboards, and taxi cabs. It was an unsightly creature. I'm guessing the zoo decided in the end not to play along with the whole newspaper contest and just sold the naming rights, because, unless I'm terribly mistaken, the Okapi was branded in the end. Honeywell, I think it was, or perhaps Outback.

At any rate, I did not want to be an Okapi. And I had zero interest in being a fish, no matter how "big and magnificent." I could have been a fish, though. That offer also was presented to me. As was the opportunity to be a bird. I'll admit that I gave the bird notion a bit more thought. I could, it was explained to me, be an exotic bird --a talking bird, even, or a bald eagle. The problem, however, was that once the offer was accepted it was not rescindable. I suspect that I would, at least for a brief time, rather enjoy flying, but wondered about the dietary aspects of the avian life, as well as things like life expectancy and predators.

I was mildly curious about the bird opportunity, is I guess what I'm saying, but ultimately not curious enough to give up being a man, even a deeply unhappy man.

Eventually the genie (I'm guessing that's what he was, even as he looked like an old man who had worked in a post office for many years and smoked too many cigarettes) extended his offer in ever wider directions; I could be a cheetah, a bear, an elephant, a chimpanzee, an otter, a pine marten, a hippopotamus, or even a rabbit (a rabbit? This was when I began to suspect that the genie was mad, although I had been presented with convincing evidence that he had turned Ray Wilson into a horse, this after Ray's wife left him for Pete Mickelson, the local State Farm agent/Lothario).

The thing was, this character, this genie, had just started showing up at my door one day, almost like one of these guys who's intent on feeding you the Book of Mormon. It was a very bad time in my life, and the genie clearly knew it, although I could never figure out how.

"Face it," he'd say, "You're no great shakes as a man. Humanity's got nothing more to offer you, and it's a two-way street in that regard. Yet you've still got all the stresses and burdens of trying to survive as a human, and it's clearly not working. You'll never be free in that human suit. This is your one chance."

I recognized the truth in much of what the man said, but the idea of being either predator or prey spooked me, and I was no big fan of the elements.

"Couldn't I be a dog?" I finally asked. "The pet of someone loving and lovely, someone with a kind pair of hands?"

"No offense," the genie said, "but you're not good enough to be a dog, and I couldn't turn you into a dog even if I wanted to. That's God's work, and strictly a posthumous option. You have to die to come back as a dog, and the selection process is rigorous to a fault. Dogs hold an exalted place in the Angel Guild. So, sorry, but in my line it's strictly hands off so far as dogs are concerned. I could, though, do a cat, but between you and me, most human-cat transformations end rather unhappily. Cats are easily bored, and tend to develop an opinion of humans that's even lower than your own."

I chose --perhaps unwisely-- to remain a man, but you will understand, surely, when I tell you that from the day that genie disappeared from my life my dreams have been about virtually nothing but flying.

The Consolations Of Philosophy Are Precious Few

When you push it this far night after night you start to lose the battle with chronology. The story is what? Too many scraps and loose ends. Too many stray words.

Plodding. Bell burst. Black sky. Blue angels, kneeling. The man with an empty tower on his neck crawls across the long table and takes the flowers in his mouth. Bundle of ankle-bound bodies dangling upside down from a helicopter. Blind woman on the wall raises her chin, mumbles something about God. Not menacing: Puzzled. Pleading.

Sky, sea, land: layered like a '70s gelatin dessert. Fragments of a broken clown. Hanging man, upturned chair. Still, dark waters. Rock tumbler. Forlorn sign at the water's edge, no longer legible yet unmistakably a warning. Patch of tiny white flowers in the deep shadows of a dead oak. Rolling house, carried away on wheels with an old woman rocking a crying baby on the front porch, brown smoke billowing from the chimney. Fat man in a top hat tiptoes across an endless heap of skulls, wobbling, eagle-armed like a tightrope walker.

I can hear Chopin --or Arthur Rubinstein-- in the playing of John Lewis. I see the influence of John Singer Sargent in Francis Bacon. I believe that Maurice Sendak cribbed from Philip Guston. I could pick Steve Lacy's soprano saxophone out of a line-up. I have a radar for broken and neglected things, including people and places. I am able to communicate with animals, most keenly with dogs. I can parallel park like nobody's business and have a way with potatoes. I can go days without eating or sleeping. If you dropped me in the middle of nowhere I believe I would survive. Give me a job to do and I will do it reasonably well, or at least to the very best of my abilities. I have a high tolerance for pain. I am on occasion driven to tears by the abject posture and clear suffering of a stranger on the street. I have never had a decent photograph taken of me, which leads me to conclude that I am ugly. I am a hazard when bored. I can see in the dark, even when I do not like what I see.

I howl.

I can't tell you what you are looking for.

Now, again: the spy way the night feels, intrusive, the way it claims all sound, transmutes, muffles and swells.

Empty fountain. Bulldozer with wings. Dreaming rat in a drainpipe.

Too late: the lucid moment has dissolved.

Welcome to the Sacred Garden of the Sweet Dreamers.

Destination beyond this? Can't say. Can't see.

Waiting once again for the light to fetch me.