Weekend Fire

Too much work recently and too little will in the few free hours kept me from eating well or running. Most days I was content to eat 10 ounces of yogurt and maybe a banana. That got me through the day. In the evening, I sometimes had two beers and some kidney beans. Maybe French fries. Maybe asparagus. It didn't really matter.

I neglected to watch the movies I'd received in the mail. (Two Bergman films and Night of the Living Dead. That's how I roll.)

Today, though, I looked about the paper-strewn living room (made worse by the winds last night that upset the feeble attempt at order on my desk). I decided I needed to make the blood move again. After a four-day absence, I hit the hills. I huffed and felt a lightness expanding in what feels like a space between one's muscles and one's skin. (This makes two entries in a row that reference musculature and epidermis. A new obsession?)

A wedding was to happen in Irvine Park. I walked around the square while the groomsmen and various family members eyed me. The wedding was a long ways off, I think, not a single guest was seated or had even arrived, yet I was an interloper. Or perhaps I was simply a subject for discussion, a way to take their minds off the fact they knew of nothing else they might talk about other than the wedding.

I feel that way too, sans wedding. I feel not so much sore now as just stupid. My eyes feel singed. It wasn't hot, yet I found a way to bake my brain simply through the repetitive act of accelerated ambulation.

I cannot focus. I don't want to focus.

This on the heels of a restless night. I'd snapped awake after a thin hour of sleep with my head in a storm. I was desperately calculating the taxes I'll need to pay in mid-September and mid-January.

I was thinking about a pinball review Web site I'd passed one day. I don't play pinball, but we apparently have some very serious players in the Twin Cities.

I spent two hours on a poem called "From a Sculptor's Son." (Not good, but acceptable for now. Gave it another crack this morning and won't mind working with it.) I spent another hour outlining essays I hope to write. I looked into places I might send writing in exchange for $100 or maybe $75, even just $10.

I could write about spiritual revelation. I could write about scientific discovery. I could read the minds of dogs if given the chance. Everything in that hour or two hours or however long my head was alight was possible. I wrote the words "Z is for xylophone." I wrote, "Atarashi kudema des!" having channeled, it seems, a Japanese version of Price is Right. I'd tapped into some sort of fever that, like the internet, was in tune with all things and just as unconcerned with their origin or execution or reality.

Two and two really could be five, of course, if we simply established a rule that all addition simply overshoots by one. If you want three bananas, you ask for four, you're given three. Do you see where I'm going with this?

I believe they used a similar code for choosing CB channels to speak safely on in Smokey in the Bandit. It wasn't a complex code, yet no one in law enforcement seemed able to crack it. That's what you get for making a former bus driver and pool hustler your ace sheriff.

I read my work aloud. Repeatedly. I didn't understand it but I was happy to have spent the time with it.

That one day their work might rise up and run into the forest in search of a mother.

Prepositions have always been my downfall.

I fell asleep thinking of emigration. In a dream I can't be sure was the product of my unconscious, I took a bullet in the belly in a public place. I survived.
-cK