Safe Harbor

There is so much I've forgotten, but there is also so much that I remember.

Those days in which the future came to me with bossy demands, stock still, tapping its toes and waiting for an answer.

Milestones.

These days they come cheap. Crack a door and they come rushing in. Peer into a closet and find the damn thing loaded to the hilt with them. Stand on a street corner and simply hold out your hand and watch as it fills repeatedly, and without respite, with them.

Oh what I wouldn't give for a few less, for the solace of anonymity.

But we are our lot, and mine is to hang each day on the hook of axiomatic flux, and quite frankly, I am growing tired.

I have always been better suited for the kiddie pool. The shallowness of its layout the perfect foil to my deliberate wallowing gait. But for some damn reason, I always find myself gasping for air in the deep end, being pulled by some unknown force into the darkest murk. And I gotta tell ya', that is no damn good.

If only my mother could see me now. If only I could see me now with my unprepared auditions and my sprint through china shops, eyes tethered with a blindfold. Were it not so damn harsh, I might find humor in it.

It's amazing the capacity to endure when all signs point to emptiness, when every single place you look you see the returning gaze of apathetic disinterest, and you know that all fights are fought without a safety net and without fans cheering in the corner.

You could allow the flock to come sit at the table and read them bedtime stories for all the good it would do you. You've got piles of pigment rich soil at your feet and no medium with which to use them. You've got tender words of fragile and delicate beauty with which to bolster your window display so the neighbors will gasp in delight at the illusory celebrations that appear before their eyes. You've got a box full of left foot shoes with no matches. You've got an opaque disposition that leaves a wake of confusion. You've got a tongue that serves no constructive purpose unless one were to include obfuscation and the handing out of bad directions.

I take the coterie for a walk every morning, dutifully, regardless of how hard it is to unify this motley bunch. The badger, insistent, unwilling to follow the course, the wolverine, headstrong, picking fights with whoever comes too close, the geese with their regal air and their continuous need to walk in front, the bull, throwing its weight around, smug in its arrogance, and the vultures, always lagging behind, snickering in their gullets, always waiting for something and making everyone nervous. What a fucking laugh it must be to see me from your breakfast nook, where you sit in judgment. coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other. Your grandpa slipper hanging off your toe in that painfully insipid way.

If only I could cash in that ticket I've been saving. If only you would come and take me away, and really take me away, away from it all, away from all of it, every single last little bit of this all-consuming morass, and off into a future that envelopes me in the arms of peace and breathes a soft honey scent over my face, where all the world is in harmony and all this lumbering, all this one-sided crippled stumbling is no more a thing of the past than a thing of the future (which is to say that it never was).

I have foraged into this environment in search of the new terrain, and always I arrive after the place has been defiled, after the bands of ravaging madmen have had their way with the place, and all that is left is smoldering ash and piles of garbage. How I long to banish them from the temple and allow the underbrush to regrow, the wildlife to return, the plaintive hum of the insects to sing their way back into the fabric of this place. How much would I tear down if I knew that behind the final curtain was a scene of beauty so stark and so complete that to see it was to be a part of it forever.

Back here, at the tollbooth, however, my pockets are nearing empty and it is only a matter of time before the toll man demands payment and I have nothing left to give.

Who are these hooded weavers who sit along the pathway with their looms and their hideous, oily, and blackened thread, and wait for us to pass? Who are these beasts that grope in the dark, eyes sealed over with thick flaps of flesh, gangly limbs waving about in the air in hopes of grabbing any part of us along the way? What is it about the stretch of time and distance that invites these creatures of less than stellar intent, to sit along the path and weave their enraged, diseased tapestry of death into the fabric of our course? How could anyone make the trip with this chatter of blunted teeth and clicking of sewing needles, made of bone, and the faint luminosity of their eyes, beneath their drawn hoods, peering out, ravenous and eternally patient?

It is enough to cover the path with soot, to cloud the air with venom and scorn. They will have it this way forever, and it grows like a cancer.

No one is anything until someone else points it out. What is your finger saying about me?

In June I am to be forty years old, so maybe I am beginning to see both sides with a little clarity. For those who are unfamiliar, I am practicing my math in the most open of forums. I have divorced myself from the past and have done so with relatively severe consequences. For all that I have given, and I have given a lot, I am also masterfully adept at taking away. Always have been. And in the realm of futility, I am like the aged seer, doling out shards of wisdom to all who come before me.

As you read this, know that I am someone who has very personal needs. I can take the truth out for a while, give it some air, but I am always holding on to things, keeping them close to my chest, and never letting them out of my sight. For all the senseless blather that I can muster (and let this blog be a testament to that), also know that what passes for quiet, and what passes for whatever the fuck it is you care to attribute to me with your judgments and your critical fucking opinions from the depths of your flaccid imaginations, that I am not foolish and I am not thoughtless and I do not make decisions lightly and what fucking difference is it to you anyway?

I have enough to shoulder without the weight of your opinion hanging around my neck.

I have strayed.

May I return.

I hope that the stinger is embedded and that the birds of prey have removed their brothers from the scene to pick at the corpse that invariably will lie beneath them. I hope that as you sit in the silence of your self-made late night haze that you wonder, to the point of agony, what it is that you could have done to turn the tides and to rewrite the headlines.

I just hope that you sweat it, and that it eats you alive from the inside out.

Yeah.