The thing about faith is that it requires so much more. On a good day, I trust what I’m told by most. On a bad day, I don’t believe myself. Good days are often bad and vice versa. Your eyes give you away, more than your I’s, which say even more. I close my eyes and trace the walk down from the apartment to the corner gas station, sweating in the near-summer heat of the Mississippi and holding the bleeding condensation of Busch in their plastic hearse as I wade back upstream to the patio where I’d wait for you. The first sips take away the heat of the late afternoon while you work, while your child naps, swims or bathes. The sweat congeals against my skin under one too many layers of clothing. The sips become slugs. The days pass. And I wonder if I have traded nothing less for nothing more.
Let there be light is a metaphor
All these mistakes I’ve made don’t exist, except in my memory. It’s past and just as fake as whatever I can imagine comes next. Only now exists. The rest is a mind-game-mind-fuck. I have tortured myself beyond any pedestrian waterboard (which, by the way, really doesn’t sound that bad, especially if you’ve bodysurfed the Wedge or Sandy’s). I’m tired of living in the shade. “Let there be light,” is a metaphor. It didn’t happen as the book says. It happens every second. Wait, this might be hard to wrap your head around, but seconds are too long. Every moment of comprehensible difference from the last. Nano-nanosecond. Every single one of these, whatever you want to call them, is a chance to let there be light. God exists, if she does, in minutiae. The smaller everything gets, the greater the change in our rules of understanding.
Eat butter
There’s a tribe. And I don’t have to taste your mouth to know if you’re in it. It’s not a cult.
I explained to my ex-wife once and I probably hurt her feelings but I wasn’t trying to. There is butter and there is margarine. They look the same. And that’s where it stops. This metaphor can be applied to most of pop culture. Hank Williams? Butter. Shania Twain? Margarine. Nirvana? Butter. Fall Out Boy? Margarine. Social Distortion, The Hold Steady, Drive-By Truckers, Seven Seconds, Bob Marley, Biggie, Loretta Lynn, Jack White, Gabby; the list is a long one. That’s all butter.
It’s okay to like margarine, especially if you grew up eating it. This is not a judgment even though it sounds like one. It’s an encouragement to eat butter.
Simple
This is easier. It’s always been easier. Imagine how much easier it was in 2007 when I didn’t even know you. That was a smooth, well-cobbled road. So I stepped off. And now it’s hard… er. Life is a thing. So simple. But simple eats your soul. And you seek more complex until you fuck yourself out of that moment of simple that you found. And then you do it again. And again. And again. And … you know where the story goes.
Close your eyes
Lives change lives. Lives beget lives. Lives are lost. You can promise on your life with a straight look on your face and lie. Love makes the potential for that lie infinitely larger and smaller. But when you promise on love and mean it, you transcend the promise.
Everyone gets sad. Sadness is part of the human condition. Happiness as a goal is actually a very recent concept for people. Survival trumped happiness for most of our existence. Losing something hurts. And that’s always been around. Of course, there is a very large spectrum of pain defined by the person and the loss. But losing that transcendence is not just sad. It’s a loss of self.
Watching a life erode: if it’s your life, whether you choose to recognize it or not is self-chosen, and sooner or later, you figure out what’s coming and fix it, or self-destruct. When love erodes, it’s not just up to you, and it reveals beauty and terror. It’s mostly sad.
Eyes opening are a blessing, and eyes closing are fear. And the final closing most likely means oblivion. This is a metaphor.
Hedonism
Perhaps I was drawn in by you drawling about your irrepressible, hedonistic nature. Supposedly nothing? You clearly melted my mind at times.
I don’t belong where I was. This is the way of the world. That’s where I met you, though. So now we have to pound through this. I’m not even going to stick my toe in the pond of yesterday to consider anything about retroactive motion. I want you to come, but most likely you’ll stay. And that is where you belong. This no longer troubles me.
Asteroids
While you’re living your life it seems likes chaos and things are just being thrown at you like a spaceship in the asteroid belt. You know where you are. You know what you’re trying to do. But everything just keeps coming at you in a random fashion. In hindsight, you can connect the dots of choices you made in that field. Some crashed you into rocks. Some were brilliant real-time choices that no one else could have pulled off. And there were mistakes everyone would have made, and ones only you did. If you keep repeating those, you’ll never get out. And if you’re smart and lucky you do. Either way, each choice is connected. And the asteroid belt isn’t random, it just appears to be. It exists under the same physical principles that you do. Those laws are immutable (until you get really small, but we’ll save quantum theory for another metaphor). They don’t change, you do. One way or the other you do.
Non-quantum chaos
The thing about chaos (in the non-quantum realm), the beautiful thing? Is that it’s fair. Once you introduce order, trouble occurs. The universe is binary. Every problem can be solved with yes or no. Until you cannot say yes, or you cannot say no. People try to have control. They try to introduce order. Order is a construct. And trying to introduce it only brings the pain of it not happening.
The rime of the modern mariner
The idea of being abandoned is so painful to me that I resist it even when I am running in the opposite direction of my abandonment. I couldn’t feel the shackles fall from my neck, ankles, and wrists. I could only hear, “Now go!” But I was already running and, like a dog on a choke chain, continued to repeatedly asphyxiate myself as I reached the end of my line.
“Now go!” sets me free. I bristled because I didn’t get to say, “I’m leaving.” Petulant, foolish, little boy that I am. I didn’t see that you were pushing me off the Amistad and back toward the shore of life, back to the world. Like the Ancient Mariner, I had been the lot in a craps game between Death and Life-in-Death, and having been won by the latter, it had become the only life I knew or expected. That was not, is not, and shall not ever be a life.
I feel like a snake that’s just molted and am completely grossed out by the shell I’ve left behind. Thank you, thank you, thank you for telling me to fuck myself and die. Isn’t that ironic? That is where I found my life.
Why you growl?
I only feel bad when the sound goes down. I can see the next eight, silent hours. Silence from the outside. The inside is never quite less than a muffled growl. I see myself in some parallel universe, or even this one. Explaining to my pragmatic, European girlfriend what I mean by muffled growl.
“Why you growl? You mad?”
“No.”
“You mad at me?”
“No. The opposite.”
“Then why you growl?”
The short answer is, “I don’t know.” The longer answer that might take a few jumps over our language barrier requires a certain nuance with English, i.e.,”Why aren’t you growling?”
Growling is guttural and seems monstrous. There are examples across every culture when a noise means more than an articulated cry. I don’t want the next eight hours to be silent in any way.