This could go so wrong in so many ways as he had thought to fashion a certain laissez-faire vibe here somehow as reflected in this changeling month alone which allows for rash winds and few breaks in the steadier routine of nature. But events conspire, objects digress or compress depending on the view from side-mirrors and the clattered settling of balls dispersed off anxious roulette wheel whirring and distributing it’s small orbs to slot into the only real choices, 3 actually as it is the key to solving most pyramidical mystery: red for life, white the ghost color for death, green for the purgatory (boredom? small death?) of not knowing whether there is a loser or not and who bets on that small chance anyways? The lack of closure is what must suck most about purgatory. And also, for sure,, the accumulation of unpaid parking tickets.
So i am afraid for you the pasanos, new followers even wandering the desert here fore-bearing indeed in face of this stumbling meandering “substack”, the mirage appearing in reality as it is approached more like the glare of border lights carving out a swath of light on a river’s surface and after the anonymous gritty scuffling over scrub-land, even the thorned plants sanguine, callous in face of suffering, i am disappointed to say it will be the hard road for us all. But take heart. I have had amicable ranchers set out water for us along the parched journey and i figure if we are in this together cartels be damned. Regardless shhhhhhhh! beware of darkness. Mind the snakes. Keep the fires low…….
Yeah i missed a great opportunity here this week to rip into our composting democracy circled by scavengers and tended with all good faith by those vulnerable to the larger predators and even a great basketball game on tap same night to wash away the exploded residue of politics which tends to fill nostrils with the electric stale cordite whiff of every promise never kept, every amateur acting job exposed and politicians are nothing if not the clumsiest of actors and ironically as they should be and are measured against a profession which i perceive as amongst the most instinctive but difficult of human expression/interpretation/sublimation, the true vocation of “acting”. But there i would defer to those far more aware of its challenges and sacrifices and i have ever only crept gingerly sideways up to grasping any of it.
would know.I was played out long before that as it turned out. There was the finality of a death, Scottie’s and even a new faint glimmering distraction from another unexpected romantic quarter filling in the dried hole of recent rejection and surely as fantastical as the rest and yet still there is a continuity to this one, a flickering sporadically along the daily dashboard of another’s warning panel even briefly and of YOU is something one might purchase if available and meanwhile we substitute with guessing. Who we give our attentions to and love is certainly made up of a large part of that gentle warning light flashing and hopefully not mistaken or too much waylaid.
Anyways more serious a topic is permanent subtraction from our living world wise-cracking sarcasm-dripping Scottie filled it more than amply for such a diminutive appearing man. One who figured over carpentry challenges in anonymity like we all did but with modest efficiency much faster than i ever could and with a work ethic carved out of the fresh cold streams of his native New Hampshire. We joked about that precariousness he had come to live with before they moved farther south towards Orlando as he had cheated eternity anyways with a precariously inserted battery into that frail-seeming but deceptively coiled and ready frame which from the get go they had told him when it stopped it would be over and that was 5 years ago and Holly his wife called on his phone earlier this week but it was her voice and i knew immediately, irrevocably, he was gone. He was unsentimental and would enjoy this shortened version and not a whole lot of self-aggrandising bullshit.
Scottie’s childhood best friend Tom who had connected us all, the builder, social, gregarious, and Holly’s brother and Scott’s best and earliest childhood friend had died suddenly a decade ago and at 53 here and Holly had borne it all, plus a father’s death up north. That was a shock the cardiac arrest choking off oxygen to brain and him laying him in coma where we grasped his lifeless arm for one last squeeze goodbye and then the blank walk out into hot sun of Fort Walton Beach hospital parking lot, stunned. He had died suddenly and far too young at 53. Now Scott had joined him and my best memory was a chat from 2 summers ago as we were both dialed back somewhat, i in a folding chair overlooking Superior in late June mellow evening splendour and he telling jokes about rampant STD’s in the Villages nearby where the heat and humidity were just ramping up and his wife the nurse could be near tending her vulnerable remaining kin. We are northerner usurpers.
Here is the set-piece i fashioned from there as pertains to the hard road veered upon now and made up of a weekly sum of parts both in human and more imagined worlds driven to like a previous night’s dream imagine: rugged Sierra Madre dappled in mist and all those glorious sun-drenched death boulders casting shadows at forenoon on treacherous trail winding below like a scene out of a film, a western like with Redford and Neumann. The Sundance Kid of the two was the wilder more unpredictable one and the one least likely to suffer the torments of loneliness the other might if deprived of the female comforts he depended on and elicited with necessary artful blending of both brain/bodily connection. Those like the Kid who can enjoy all that without the damn introspective nonsense are blessed in my opinion. Come to think of it though these days, years and alone for most part haven’t been lonely except for perception of missed opportunities.
SET PIECE
If you were to bury something where would it be? Maybe within a private interior monologue its faint insistent looping sweep like continuous modest waves carving and etching ideas along a lake’s somber-toned shoreline punctuated with steep clay cliffs and at random intervals and when necessary and perceptions and seeking to grasp riddles like this one: what is the end-game of being desired?
I’ll continue this another time. The animal seized his freedom last night and i shrugged as i was disoriented with no meal and wired somehow and pounding out horrendous crap on keyboard until the sky shattered with an ominous thunder burst and i saw his shadow stir at door. There is relief and responsibility when you sense dependence to and from another living creature and accepting their attentions back is a tricky dance and i am even at this ripened age still learning the steps.
“Cross Creek Road” from the soaring tribute to her influences by Sheryl Crow (and with her friends) ‘Threads” Its a damn good one.
Wow wow wow!! I did a double take at the picture of Huron, magnificent.
I think the end game of being desired is the consummation of desire -- ideally in a domestic where both are willing to get up and bring the other ice cream.
I am sorry for your loss, Appleton. I don't think anything or anyone can replace an old friend and the longer you get to stick around, the more you lose.