Visitation
*
This week we had the Denny's shooting, three dead, two injured. Also, a friend of mine got a grazing wound to the neck in a shoot-out, and another guy I work with killed a guy. I just got off a four-hour standoff with a barricaded man with a shotgun and an AR-15. We had a major set-back on the homicide case I've been working. Oh, a meth lab on Tuesday, too.
It's been crazy.
Full moon.
*
I called my wife from the standoff to tell her I couldn't pick her up from work. I could tell she was pissed. Since I'm off the SWAT team, I wasn't supposed to be doing this stuff anymore, but I can't seem to convince her that we don't get to pick and choose what we go on.
I know she just hates it.
Aaron was telling me about coming home after the Denny's shooting, knee deep in dead people, and having to compete with his wife on who had the worst day. She won. She's a forensic interviewer for sexually abused children.
Yay.
*
I was standing there this afternoon, peeking out from behind a fence, pointing an AR-15 at the window where the bad guy was waving his shotgun and saying he'd never be taken alive, and all I could think about was how glad I was to be there.
Same kind of feeling I had coming back into the bureau last week.
Alive.
Focused.
In the game.
*
I really am trying to get out of the game. I got promoted. Got off the SWAT team. Sitting a desk, the whole shebang.
I know it's time to put this behind me, leave it for the young guys coming up.
You get a taste for it, though, and it's hard to shake. If you don't love it, you hate it. But if you don't hate it, there's nothing else like it.
*
Blah, blah, blah.
*
What I don't want to do is come across as some kind of bullshit thrill jockey. It isn't the thrill, exactly. I don't know...it's a kind of focus, like the best, deepest centered meditative state. Everything small and unimportant falls away, and this wonderful clarity settles over everything...
It does have to do with knowing that everything is fragile.
Short lived.
Transitory.
*
And so, so beautiful.
*
It is good to be alive.
*
posted by tearful dishwasher at 8:57 PM
9 Comments:
well god almighty. not only do you live that life but you have the words to express it, not only the 'it' but the vastness, the particularness, the connection, the delicacy, the ferocity, the rawness and the thread that ties all of that 'it' to the universe and me too.
scott, yes. there is always time down the line to abandon those things that give us joy and focus and enlarge our souls. don't even think of turning your back on this again until maybe the knees start going, or you've had your first heart attack, or you can't remember the face of the most recent victim.
i celebrate your life, and your work, and your big picasso heart. and your friendship, which i cherish. and you can take that to the etfqiyn.
I called my wife from the standoff to tell her I couldn't pick her up from work.
I am so using this next time I need an excuse with the husband.
I'd tell you about my week but, compared with yours, there's nothing to tell.
Einstein called it real time, where you are so immersed in the moment that there isn't room in your brain for anything else. Einstein got his real time by playing the violin.
"I don't know...it's a kind of focus, like the best, deepest centered meditative state. Everything small and unimportant falls away, and this wonderful clarity settles over everything..."
Isn't this how you feel when you write or create your artwork?
It's how I feel when I write. It's how I used to feel when I was in art school. Both focused and abstracted. Deeply inside myself yet completely outside myself.
Real time? Funny, it feels so unreal...
It's those times that yes, we're glad we're alive. I'm glad you're alive.
Fully engaged in the whole catastrophe.
I love your bio sig. So fitting.
Jack says hello.
You're in our thoughts.
Thank you all for your kind thoughts and all. I am glad to have this place where I can be myself and say whatever comes to mind and have so many wonderful people around that don't seem to mind too much.
You are all wonderful. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
-
tearful
A poem for your doll head:
Broken
All night, the night presses
down, a lover that doesn’t know when
to go—how does one know when
To say when?--the sky full of doll eyes
that won’t close, the moon a cracked skull.
This is what you have given me:
A mattress on the floor bereft
of box spring, a busted lock on the door,
bones that ache as though broken
or growing and a mouth that throbs.
Today’s root canal, a blatant metaphor
for what we left unsaid between us.
I opt not to kill this pain. The pills
remain in the bottle. So, do what
you will. Come back. Or, go.
Put the infant’s skeleton back
in the ground. Some things should be left
as and where they were found.
Some things like dogs chained
to houses and lightning stabbing
the yard are better off left alone.
Remember that all-purpose warning:
Don’t play with fire. Shhhh!!
Hear that? Creak of hinges.
A door opening somewhere below.
Or, maybe it’s just the wind.
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