pg 48

this is the last night in this house the last night on this porch. coming outside i felt it and it will crawl into nothing anyway so i think we’re fine.

I think I’ve discovered a great ability of mine and while I may have been disappointed in the past with what it has turned out to be, I appreciate it now. I am able to forget about the sadness I have felt and glaze over any mistakes I have made. As I write this I feel an unsettled calm that may not make sense to read but certainly makes sense as I now feel it. I know and can even point the times I have felt deep regret, as recently as days ago but I feel okay about it now. I’m not arrogant enough to imagine that I am passed all of that. Even to write that here feels like I am tempting fate and have a dark turn around a corner not far ahead.

I struggle for a definitive answer to the question of whether I am a good person. There are a lot of questions that I will ask myself over and over again before my life is through. On a somewhat related note, it is so easy to listen to gentle music and feel safe. I am listening now to a woman whispering songs from a studio in Seattle and it makes me thankful. I am scared a great deal of the time, I believe that is what makes my calm unsettled.

When I was last in a relationship I did not always act my best. This is not to say I was violent or abusive but I was certainly selfish. That relationship ended almost 6 years ago and I have yet to seriously enter another one. Twenty minutes ago when I was wiping all-purpose cleaner off of a toilet seat, no actually I was sweeping crumbs from the floor of the dining room 15 minutes ago, I had the satisfied feeling of not being in any rush to enter another relationship. This is because then I will not be tested and if I am not tested then I can’t fail and won’t have to face the possible reality that I am still selfish 6 years later. My sex life is good and there have been, not to sound like I’m writing this with a puffed out chest, a steady stream of women. Three years ago this was not the case. Oh what does it matter.

On a podcast I listened to on my way to work tonight someone, and I’m surprised to report it was Dane Cook, used the phrase “through the winters of my own emotions” and it floored me. To push the metaphor into hack territory I would say that I am currently either in the spring or autumn of mine.

I have been waiting for someone to ask me what I have in common with Curious George. But I am no fool. I realize that most likely I will be waiting a very long time; for this is a question that we in western society, and presumably the world over, ask each other rarely. When the time comes- while volunteering in my son’s kindergarten class maybe- and the question is finally posed to me, I imagine my pulse will quicken. Excited beads of sweat will form atop my bald head- the same bald head which sits up a little straighter whenever a hair plug commercial comes on.

I have passed entire afternoons fantasizing about who it will be that finally asks me the question. Their face, their gender, their outfit. Often I picture a beautiful woman. However, if it does end up being a beautiful woman then the kindergarten scenario no longer makes sense. This for a couple of reasons. One, my son’s kindergarten teacher is not a beautiful woman; she is, one can only presume, Billy Crystal’s stunt double. And two, because kindergarteners never turn out to be beautiful women. They always turn out to be children.

I picture a pleasant conversation. A woman and me. She doesn’t seem to care about my bald head or my vague smell of divorce. I am inexplicably charming. I make her laugh. The conversation turns to literature and then to the books of our childhoods. I ask her what her favourites were but really only so that she asks me. Her answer won’t be important. It’s about impressing her and proving that this is a woman who wants me. Her beauty is only tangentally related. What about you? She’ll ask. Oh I’ll say. I guess…I enjoyed Curious George.
And with confidence I say, we both owe our lives to a man in a hat. She’s hooked. What do you mean? She asks. The same man?

He shut the window. The sound of the birds faded and Ron thanked the inventor of windows which was a nice change from cursing the creator of birds.

This is Anna in line at the grocey store. In the 1-10 items line, carrying 8 things, 3 of them oranges but not getting a cart because she was only going in for 5 things but her eyes got big and here we are. Her left foot is crossed over her right, posing unintentionally, right hip jutting out just a bit. Her attention, when not on the oranges, is directed toward the magazines, Archie comics. She wants to read them but can’t and is thinking about jughead. Her mouth tastes like bananas. She is wearing a lightweight red cotton skirt and with the hand that isn’t scooping all the groceries she scratches her left thigh making her skirt ride up a bit. She doesn’t notice this but the 17 year old boy waiting in the next line with the groceries for his mother does. He notices she is wearing ankle socks that creep out the top of her leather shoes. He thinks this is the whole world if he could know her while she thinks about turning left out of the parking lot when she leaves. She thinks it’s 5:46 and knows the news is on in fourteen minutes. Realizing this she leans left and looks at who’s in front of her, calculating the amount of groceries the next two people have before chastising herself for docking the old man who’s next an extra 3 minutes for his age. Tapping her foot to the grocery music overhead reminds her of the man from years ago and the bus ride home from work. He must have worked near and had the nice headphones. She in her kitchen stink, white shirt stained would watch him out of the corner of her eye as he tapped and his fingers drummed out the beat on his jeaned thigh. The line moves ahead and Anna uncrosses her feet, moves slowly forward. Doing so unbunches and rebunches her underwear, riding up the chase of her left thigh. It is red which is why she bought it, that and it made her feel sporty to have those boxerbriefs. Who was most excited by them? James, Claire, Kurt?

from the back of the bar, past the glass-lined walls catching flickers of tabled candlelight his voice rings clear. it stakes its claim on the world the two men have been creating amongst themselves for hours.

i’m on this porch as i read back back back and it feels like home where i can see the red dump truck to my left and the open space all around me. i’ve been writing notes on this porch for the last year and a half and i’m writing now. i think of the space in vancouver, looking out back onto the mountains where my darkness and light would shine looking onto the mountains and now i look onto this space with the red dump truck and the ukranian church and and and

all that i know is i’m falling, i’m falling. all that i know is that i’m thirsty at times and not at others. i know that people make as much sense as their desires do, which isn’t much. you can tell a lot by looking people in the face. you can tell a lot by crying in the bathtub. i want to try but whenever i do it’s so so clear that all i’m doing is trying. and trying hard.

i think we can run as we can hide. there’s a beauty underneath the bed that taps into what i’m talking about. forget about the whole of it. so much figurative writing that maybe won’t tap into the past when i look back and is that okay? i don’t know. i get scared to write in obvious truths because there are one or two others who may know where to find me here. i’ve sat on this porch and i’ve written in the past and i’ve felt other feelings and i’m feeling these feelings now. i’ve left people so i can get on the bus or they can get on the train and we can get back to the lives we lead without each other. there is a large raccoon that just scampered by me. it doesn’t mean anything. when will i grow enough to reach into my brain and pull out the feelings that i know so deeply. i don’t think that it’s possible. everything that i will convey for the rest of my life, when this life scampers out and it’s left and nobody will reach into this hole of internet words to find and if they do will they assume i’m still alive. i’ve been adding to this testament for the last 4 years and none of it is worthy enough in my eyes to show other people and so i have it all to myself and when i die, years from now, so too will it die because it isn’t for you but for me as i’ve written over and over again. i will be an old old man who in a moment of clarity remembers this site and finds it to find that there isn’t anything that has changed and i’m just as dirty now as i was then. i also want to walk you home from school. there is so much to write about and i don’t know how to tap into any of it. this amazing wealth of feeling that seems impossible to convey. maybe i can’t and maybe that’s okay. all writing is is the fear of losing grip on what seems so real and possible at this very moment. i’m scared to leave it because i like this moment as much as i do. i’m to enter a writing group nay a week from now and i want to be supported. does it matter if i’m not? i want to chart it all down. as everybody does. as everybody does.

and i don’t see what the problem is that you’re making such a big deal about. it feels nice to be around you as i feels nice to be back here. we can rush and we can run as i can make this out to be bigger than it is. today i met a person who has it so much deeper than i do and i didn’t find myself inadequate but wanting to be closer to what this person had. it’s scary to share without the other person sharing first and to find out that what you’ve been thinking about is so far off base from the other person and then to find that you’re okay with that truth. it’s okay and it’s inspiring. you meet people who know the teachers and if they don’t who at least know how to look for them. i can’t say that i’m not scared because i am. because it’s an inadequacy that seems okay when considered in the fact that the truth is out there like the x files is out there. i’m already tired of writing but i want to continue because this is how i can come back and chart what i’m feeling even though this isn’t getting to the root of it. how can it be getting to the root of it when there isn’t a root that i can find? i’m excited by the things that i can’t tap into however much i strive to. oh hey there.