A Moments Rest

Today I spent the afternoon in warm post-summer sun. I walked about the Tinker Nature Center grounds, across the rolling field, where young trees lie here and there with ceremonial plaques at their feet, and toward the Dimeo Labyrinth, one of my favorite haunts in this oddly spectacular tiny city. I stopped by a young poplar. Sat facing the sun and ate my spinach, tomato, and cheese sandwich.

I pictured the clouds passing overhead and momentarily blocking the sun’s rays. When I checked to confirm, they were always smaller than I imagined. Must be a) my sense of awe at the passing shadow of a cloud, or b) the clouds are already getting low, a surefire sign that the winds are coming across the great lake in the north and that winter truly looms.

At the labyrinth, upon entering I always have a sharp sense of my presence and location. But by the fourth turn, I am lost. This despite the fact that I have walked this labyrinth a minimum of eight times. That means it is working. The labyrinth is fulfilling it’s purpose. Furthermore, when reaching the center, I swear I have not set foot into the immediate tracks and curves surrounding me. Efforts to trace the path with my eye fail. As if the labyrinth, or my appreciation of it, forbids its unraveling.

Later, I laid in the full sun on a bench made of plastic made to look like wood in a nature park at the entry to a labyrinth. I read from Ergo by Jakov Lind, which I am enjoying quite a bit. My thumb marks the coincidence of my location in the book and my location on the earth. It reads, “The city is a labyrinth.” The cover of this book is blue, but not as blue as the sky in this picture.

The real world starts in a week, if you believe the hype.

I Want to Ride My Bicycle

I haven’t ridden my bicycle all summer. Not once. The tires are flat. The tires are flat. That should be a crime. I should be in handcuffs.

The other day a kid was flying down my street on his bicycle (I live near the top of a hill). In front of my house, he lost control. He went over his handlebars and onto the pavement, face-first. His eye was bleeding, swelling shut, and his radius or ulna, probably radius, was broken and made a protrusion of skin on his arm. There was much screaming. I was napping and his cries woke me. I jumped out of bed and looked out the window. He was sitting on the neighbor’s stoop, a bloody cloth held against his eye. The expressions on the faces of those around him told me it was serious and they were on the phone with 911, there was nothing I could do, so I callously went back to bed.

I thought about the time I was a kid, probably ten, since that is my go-to age for my childhood — the truth being that I don’t have a good mental clock for memories — and I was riding my bike around a gym at a park. As I turned a corner, I collided with an older gent on a bike. I flew over my handlebars and onto the the black asphalt, head-first. I looked back to see what happened, almost instinctually, like when one trips on a crooked sidewalk and instantaneously feels embarrassed and inquisitive. The older bicyclist cursed at me, told me I had “better not messed up [his] bike”. I loss consciousness. I came to with my head in my mother’s lap and on the picnic blanket we had set out for lunch before my fateful bike ride. A cool damp cloth rested on my head, a red-stained towel laid within my periphery. I could feel dried tears and matted blood-soaked hair. I had been bleeding from a scrape across most of my scalp.

Some people can be so cruel.

Self-Immolation

A day or two before completing Quim Monzo’s two-part novel Gasoline I told my friend how much I was enjoying it, how familiar it was to me, which she was surprised to hear because normally familiarity makes me feel unoriginal and depressed, but this was somehow different. I tried to explain that there was a frailty and honesty in the characters that was a welcome change from other instances of shared brain syndrome.

But then, upon reading the last few sentences where a character is describing what might be his first bout with insomnia, a strange thing happened within my brain. A tingle developed near my brain stem, followed by a sudden wave that surged through my brain and which I rode to the completion of the book. It felt like the reawakening and release of a stored train of thought, perhaps from my own first bout with insomnia. And the description was so on target and familiar that I wanted to throw the book across the street of the cafe I sat at and curse at it. I could feel the corners of my lips furl, my eyes narrow, and my eyebrow scowl as an unexpected rage surfaced from my mind. The feeling of familiarity was too much and it sparked an unexpected reaction from within.

After the smoke cleared, so to speak, I was sitting there quietly thinking to myself, how did Monzo do that? It is as if he was soaking me in gasoline and those last few sentences ignited me.

There was a young man on the television, he was on the verge of tears, saying that this was the most important thing in his life. You could clearly see and hear the passion he must have felt, I thought he was going to light himself on fire in protest. He was upset that basketball player Lebron James was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Miami Heat. The song, “We are the World”, was produced to raise funds for and awareness of the famine in Africa^wikipedia, Cleveland Cavalier fans sung a parody of this song in an effort to keep Lebron James in Cleveland. The late Manute Bol, another basketball player, spent all the money he earned from his 10 years in the NBA, and many say his life, trying to improve the conditions in Sudan.

I am just saying… and I’m not doing enough, or anything for that matter. I listen to songs on repeat for hours on end, but to what end? Familiarity with a sentiment at the cost of strangeness to the spectrum? Or to a severe crush on Julie Doiron, all you need is unattainable love, to paraphrase a pop group from the past.

The Lake District at Night

After traveling over the Atlantic, immediately transfering to a train, walking around for three hours looking for an address on no sleep, two beautiful bouts of slumber, and a constant attempt to comprehend the language, I lie awake in my comfy B&B in an idylic part of the United Kingdom. It is 10:30pm on the eastern seaboard of the United States, plus five where I lie.  Jet lag can explain some mysterious things, but it cannot explain that moments ago, as I slept, I dreamt of an email from a friend, upon waking I received this email. This and the facts that the sunrise is creeping upon me as I type and that the evening resides in a perpetual twilight, leave me to wonder if I am not still asleep.  I can’t help but recall how twilight looks best reflected off the face of a lover.  

Wardrobe Disfunction

There is a wardrobe that can bring me to my knees. A veritable closet full of bittersweet memories. It exists for the time being; until moths or friction evaporate the fabric.

After my favorite pair of pants exploded, I am now reporting that my second favorite pair of pants are disintegrating.

Waterloo is terrific, but not quite ready to be pulled out of the oven, in a few years, it will be spectacular.