Girl No. 32

*

So, this grief.

It is nothing special. Grief is all over the place, you don't have to go looking for it. It's right there, out in the open. Easy to see.

Or the causes of it, at least.

Maybe grief itself is less visible.

The cause of my sadness is not anything earth-shattering. But it has taken hold of me. I thought for a long time that I was dealing with it. I thought it wasn't bothering me, that I had found a way to get along and not feel it. Like a dull ache, a sore tooth, but not the keep you awake in the night agony.

But then a few days ago something came unmoored inside me and the grief rose up, like a leviathan from the depths of a dark sea, and I was undone. It felt as fresh and astounding as falling in love at sixteen.

I was that unhinged.

Luckily, I am old enough to have weathered a few storms, so I waited, and it passed. Or subsided, for that's all it did. It yet endures. It won't return to the depths, but stirs near the surface, agitated, moony, inconsolable.

***

I am tended to in my grief by my long-suffering partner, who holds me like a baby and soothes me with her touch. What a great gift I have in her. Next to that my grief is but small, truly.

I go on and on in these pages about suffering and beauty, longing, despair, as if I had an understanding of them. I do not. I do not.

I am constantly undone by them in their each particular way.

*

It is something to stand before a problem you can't solve, nor lessen, nor end, ignore, or endure. It is akin to that feeling of standing before the sea in its endless thrashing of the shore, or that feeling of lying under a wild star-strewn sky high in the mountains, far from the stain of city lights.

When you know in your bones you are less than small.

In a universe that is implacable and horrifying for its scope and scale.

*

Ah, we yet endure. For our small span of time. We seek our comforts, and often find them.

I claim this grief as my own. I have earned it. I will not be a bad host to it. I will not refuse it.

You can't say no to none of it.

That's the whole point, isn't it?

*

So, thank you, my good friends, for the kind thoughts you are sending my way. I am glad for them, and glad in my heart for each of you.

*

The world is not kind, but there is kindness in it.

Namaste.

***

I couldn't be

more sad if I tried.

Leading The Blind To Water And Making Them Drink

*

I got a love for this world.

I know it aims to kill me.

It's just so damn good looking.

*

One of my big faults is buying into this idea that to be a man you have to be a fist-fighting, bridge-building, bear-killing, art committing, novel-writing, good-woman-loving, stout-hearted, fearless, warm-hearted, sink-fixing, celestial-navigating, straight-razor-shaving, bronc-busting, homestead-making, fish-catching, bomb-defusing son-of-a-bitch.

And I am short a few of the above.

*

It galls me.

*

But I have put a few sons of bitches away.

I have put down almost every murder that came my way, and then some that never really did. I had to go stick my nose into them and get what I was after.

Nor have I forgotton those I have failed.

Your faces yet live with me.

*

I am a dyed in the wool so and so.

You can ask anybody.

***

Namaste, y'all.

Sinking Dirigible

*

I've got nothing to regret.

*

Well, that's a lie.

***

The list is longer than my arm.

*

I am at the business of writing a little something.

I have a small fire burning for it.

*

I am thinking today about Sgt. Kimberly Munley.

Her actions make me so proud.

She ran to the sound of gunfire and put her man down. She took bullets in both legs and her right wrist and yet closed on him, firing all the way. She put four bullets in him. She stopped that son of a bitch right there.

I'd like to buy her a beer, I'll tell you what.

*

I'd like to paint her goddamn house.

*

I got a call on Friday from this woman, she's crazy as a shit house rat. She's got aphasia and the IQ of a ten year old girl and she's pretty good looking. You can see the problem there.

The local cops are sick of her shit.

But she's going to get killed by this guy who's stalking her.

It isn't anyone who'll listen to her.

*

I'm fooling myself thinking I can make a difference. In ways that matter or don't.

This shitstorm has been rolling on unimpeded long before I showed up.

I ought to be more cautious than I am.

*

But it can't be helped.

It's some things you do despite you know better.

*

Namaste, y'all.

Don't give up.

You'll yet persevere.

***

Small Cotton

*

They say that women dream of danger to those they love and that men dream of danger to themselves.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

*

I ordered Deirdre's book today. I cain't hardly wait to get it.

Rebecca is right about her.

She can stone write. God bless her crooked little heart.

*

Right now I just want to be home. I don't want to go to work. I don't want to do for anyone.

I crave stillness and silence and everything gleaming clean and the sun hard in the blue fall sky and the trees shuddering and flexing in the mad wind and the hard frost in my heart.

I got some bad weather in me.

*

I yet love, even in foul temper.

*

Namaste.

Peace be upon you.

***

Chief Sitting Down

***

I am happy.

A little restless, it's true.

I tend to gnaw at myself.

But that is a surface condition.

Deep down, I own a glad and grateful heart.

*

I will be forty-five in a few days.

Time for another self-portrait.

*

Maybe Chief Sitting Down is that.

***

If I am supremely lucky, I am about halfway through with my life. I hope so. I would like to get old. I think I would be a nice old guy if I could have another thirty or forty years to mellow.

Take some of the edge off.

Develop a little depth and complexity.

*

Easy to say now. The road ahead, if there is one, is fraught with perils. And the end is certain. The road gets darker and twistier and the trees crowd in and the hoot owls call and...what.

You run down. You bust down. You get crippled and stove in. Deef. Blind. Incontinent. You get bladder cancer. You get emphysema.

A troll sits on your chest of an evening and you gasp out.

*

What a adventure!

*

The other thing is I just get smacked on my way to work tomorrow. Lights out. Or crippled. Brain injured. It could happen.

It happens all the time.

But I could just keep being lucky.

That happens, too.

***

I love trying to make my mind come to terms with the vastness of the known universe, and with the limitless expanse of deep geologic time, of cosmological time, of interstellar distance, of neural complexity, of genetic structure and epigenetic processes, of complexity emerging from seemingly simple repetitive structures and a handful of rules, of love and loss, how when you lose someone you really do lose them, for all of time and in every corner of the universe, and how that, in the end, has to be okay.

We are all riders on the same merry-go-round. We are all grist for the mill.

How our small hearts beat with love and fury!

*

Namaste.

***

RIP

***

Rajah

1991-2009

*

She was with us for sixteen of her eighteen years. When we got her from the shelter they told us that she had a little problem with running away. She would scale the six-foot chainlink fence every night and take off.

In the morning she'd be waiting by the front door.

When we took her home we left her in the house while we went to get her some dog food. When we came back she was gone and the screen was off the window over the sink.

A pattern that would continue for her whole life.

**

That dog would not be domesticated. She lived life on her own terms.

We are lucky to have had her.

*

Go easy, friend. We will miss you.

***