“Can I pretend to be, like, fucking crazy? I love doing that.” That’s what L– said from the back seat while we were stopped at a red light trying to see if the person in the car next to us was someone we knew. It wasn’t.

Also she was hugging a three-gallon tub of cheez balls.

“That’s ... my sister, folks,” C– said to an imagined assemblage of her friends outside the window.

In the midst of everything, small moments like these are my salvation.

I almost got run over by a car today while I was taking a walk. There’s garbage everywhere. The streets are chasmous and nobody’s going to do anything about it. People drive like murderers and nobody’s going to do anything about it. And this is just here, in this one city. Then you got, like, the whole country. Yeah, that whole thing. You know. Whatever. Commence with the rhetorical questions. Leave them unanswered. For about two blocks, I was able to unfurl my mind. It’s a game I play while walking: First, notice that I’m bearing down on certain thoughts, usually unpleasant or anxious ones, as if somehow the worst outcome will manifest if I fail to keep them in focus. Next, grant myself temporary permission to let go and forget what I was thinking about. Putting a time/space limit on it helps: OK, just until that mailbox. Just until the end of the next block. That reassures the mind that it’s not just gonna be total chaos forever. Then, walk along, enjoying the clear beam of the present moment shining through the fog, like when your sudsy finger circumnavigates a crystal goblet’s rim, begins to find the friction point, and makes it sing.

I used to get high to accomplish more or less the same effect, but that doesn’t really work anymore if it ever did. It’s a maudlin surrogate, a potemkin village of profundity, backed by gaping, aching, unfathomable longing and loneliness. Shudder. No thanks, I’ll keep my relatively elastic intact feelings, thanks. Don’t need a drum head made of wet cardboard anymore. I’ve known too many sloppy people, been too sloppy myself. Some places, you leave them on a random Wednesday, not necessarily conscious of the fact you’ll never be back, and it’s surreal — how was that the last time? And it can be bittersweet. Other places, whatever tiny impulse led you out the door that day can lead you down the road to being in pain but alive, instead of remaining a zombie.

Meanwhile, we try to pretend language isn’t real, a ravenous animal that’s fattening us up to eat us all.

Can I pretend to be fucking crazy? Let’s see what today’s pigeon has to say.

pigeon

It’s drowning everything else out!

I fucking hate pigeons. Why’d I have to get this one, now, tonight, or ever? God dammit. OK fine, here we go.

I’m gonna say it real barebones, because I don’t want to touch it with my bare hands. Don’t want to spend any more time dwelling in the shit stink of it than is absolutely necessary. Lol. It’s not that serious. Why I always gotta be so dramatic?

I was at Harrington Beach State Park with the “girlfriend” I had followed from Seattle to Milwaukee, let’s call her Si, and her sisters. Their parents too but they had come separately.

Coming on dark. Walking away from the lake, through the little paths, to a picnic shelter.

Meeting up with the parents and some friends of theirs. Always feeling a little like a 7th or 8th wheel with this family, but whatever. I thought I was charming enough for that to be OK.

One of the family friends and Si’s younger sister, let’s call her Willow, playing guitars. Willow could really play, too, with a sense of melody, harmony, rhythm, humor. For some ungodly reason there was a 5-gallon bucket there, which I overturned and used as a drum with which to accompany them.

I did not (yet) know how to listen. I was acutely self-conscious and therefore self-centered. Fragile ego. Needed to be special. Therefore played too much and too loud. Willow laughed it off, she had a true musician’s sportsmanship. At one point, her stepdad proclaimed, “It’s drowning everything else out!” Meaning the stupid bucket, of course, but somehow I failed to adjust much. Well, I probably got a little bit quieter. Probably.

Later, one of the other friends in appreciation said to Willow, “Have you played together before? Because you sound really good together!”

And I literally twitch, like a dog trying to shake off a fly, whenever I remember this, but I said, “Thanks!”

Thinking she had been referring to Willow and me, for chrissake. Realizing an instant later, of course, it was Willow and the other friend that sounded good together.

That instant where nobody says anything is only an instant, but it’s also an eternity.

Mark Helprin, in Winter’s Tale, says, “If there were such a thing as archaeologists of the soul, they might reconstruct all that has gone before from shame and love, two everlasting columns that rise into time though everything else is worn away.”

Just sayin’.

Oh well. I’m creakier, achier, slower, saggier, wrinklier, sadder (in some ways), more anxious and burdened with responsibilities now. BUT I’M A LOT LESS LIKELY TO PULL SOMETHING ASININE LIKE THAT! So I guess getting older is good for some things.

Now if I can just avoid getting run over by a car, we’ll see what happens next....