Monkey Suit

*


So, making Ezra's fish tacos tonight.



We'd probably starve to death if it weren't for him.


Watch his little cooking movies, you can tell the guy gets it. He cooks with gusto, simplicity, and mad love.

The guy's a goddamn miracle.


*


I had this thing at work this week, like, a big problem that my boss had to address with me and kept putting off.

The solution he came up with made me very happy.


Sometimes that happens.



*



What matters?

Love matters. Getting outdoors matters. Giving yourself to an endeavor greater than yourself, outside of yourself, matters. Overcoming fear matters. Not overcoming it, but doing what you want in spite of it.



Well, you know all that.




*





I really hit it out of the park with my lady. We got our 21st anniversary coming up pretty soon, and I still can't stop looking at her. She fascinates me. You ever see somebody, they just are themselves, no matter the cost? And what a self.

I think sometimes I'm big and strong.
Brave, stalwart.


Huh.


She got it all over me.


And I was such a kid when I clapped eyes on her. Seriously, a youngster. But I remember the very instant. I had never seen a human being like her, and I watched her walk across the room and just about died from it.

It took three years and a lot of changes before we would meet again after that first time, but I never forgot it, never forgot her.

And the first time we got together, three years later?



We met for dinner in the city, NYC, and walked around after and had drinks. She let me walk her home, and I never left.


True that.


*


It wasn't all sunshine and daisies, let me tell you. But I had sunk my teeth into something I will still not quit.


So, that happened.



*



We finished watching Battlestar Galactica. We watched "The Edge of Dreaming" by Amy Harding. You should check it out. It's good.

We're going to watch "Dogtooth" again tonight, and the second season of Wallander, or as much of it as we can.


Tomorrow we are going over to my dad's place for barbeque and beers before he and his wife go back to Texas for a month.


It was supposed to snow here today, which hasn't happened in twenty-six years.


And still hasn't.


*


Tell me something good.



***



Namaste.



***

I Am A Tiger Who Was Born on The Sun.

*


We are all of us tigers born on the sun.


*


Run and tell that, homeboy.


*



Namaste.


***

To Grandmother's House We Go

*


So, this one is for my wife.


All that swimming in the deep waters of home, and family. Of motherly love and guilt, and the ghosts of the dead.


There is no stranger journey to make, nor one more familiar.



*


Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
and the hunter home from the hill.


*


Hey, Ezra, man, I made her that calamari.


She is so my slave.


*



My inner nervous little poodle is fast asleep. I am deeply happy and contented now. It is raining and raining and I don't go back to work until Tuesday. I aim to spend the next few days cooking lavish meals for my lady friend and laying on the sofa and rubbing her feet while we watch Battlestar Gallactica and drank whine and eat cookies.


Eat yr hearts out.



*



I am grateful to you all for the love and affection you bring to this small gathering.



***


Namaste.


***

Man On A Mission

*


Give me the woman, back away slowly, and nobody gets hurt.


*



Woof.



***




Namaste, bitches.



***

Benton's Gap, 1932

*




I am a tiny wooden boat knocking against a falldown dock on a dark green river that tastes of iron and weeds.


I drift to the end of my painter and that's as far as I go.



*


Last night I made calamari a la Ezra.

Tentacles, rings, flour, salt, pepper, garlic aioli, lemon.

Sriracha and beer.


Thank you, Ezra. 


*


I think if I make this for the woman on the verge with a lime chili dipping sauce I might keep her tethered to me a bit longer.


Say a hundred years or so.



*





If you can't be no damn good, be a good cook.




*




I watched Sin Nombre last night and dreamed of bloody killings.




*



Remember impermanence.


It's real.



*



Namaste.



***

Riding a Tidal Wave of Whiskey on A Surfboard Made of I Don't Care

*

So far today I have:


1. Made a pot of coffee and forgot to drink any of it.

2. Made grilled chicken andouille sausages for breakfast and left them unattended in the grillevator until they were nothing more than shrunken, blackened twisted up snakes throwing off acrid smoke that filled the house.

3. Repeated # 2.

4. Ate toast instead.

5. Still forgot to drink the coffee.

6. Got in the shower right after I loaded the washing machine with whites, which I wash in hot water.

7. Took cold shower with tiny, hard sliver of soap.

8. Tried to brush my teeth with my whiz-bang electric toothbrusher.

9. Toothbrush will not turn off. It's still sitting there buzzing in the soap caddy.

10. Got under the heavy dinner table to wait out the rest of the day.


*


Namaste.


***

girls with car on fire

*


things ignite every day.


*








***



namaste.



***

snow day

*






Love, let us embrace like the bereft do.
Let us regard and be regarded, warily,
like old age; or like youth,
with abandon. In the end
it's all the same.

We wrestle half naked in the elements,
waiting to be admitted into that last room,
the room of our long recline;
our beds narrow and severe and sometimes
covered with snow.








*

Rendering

*


There is yet goodness in the world.




*



Though you be blind to it, it yet exists.





*



Tomorrow I get to go to the range all day and instruct on the killing arts.


*




*


I'm thinking all the time of my dear wife, doing her best to take care of her mom out there in the everglades or wherever the fuck she is. That state, I don't know.


She's a goddamn trooper, is what. I never met her equal. I could spend ten thousand years just hanging out around her. She wouldn't even have to speak to me.


I got it bad for her.


*


Sometimes I feel like there is a really good, really centered and spiritually creamy person underneath all the layers of anxiety and worry and laziness and tooth-grinding stupidity I seem to be wrapped in. Most of the time I'm pretty sure that for every layer you might pull off there would just be another layer exactly like the last one. A bitter, nervous core under layers of bitter nervousness.


I'm damn near fifty and I still feel like a third-grader waiting for his daddy to come home and whoop his ass for failing arithmetic again.


What a sorry thing.


*



Fortunately, I don't take none of it seriously.



Only thing I take serious is love, and you can take that to the goddamn bank.



*


Namaste.



***

Tools

*


This is what I carry:


Glock 17, 9mm x 17, plus one in the chamber.
Extra 17 round magazine.
Shivworks P'kal folder.
Ka-Bar TDI fixed blade.
Shield.


*


Gear selection is a constant process. Trying stuff out, seeing if it works, seeing if it stands up to abuse, seeing if it works better than what you had before or is just different. Does it require new skill-sets to put into play, or can you run it off your existing 'software'? How does it fit in with what you've already got?

It's easy to spend a lot of time and money chasing after the new cool thing. It's also easy to find what works for you and then never change it, and maybe you lose out on something really good.




What I have is spare and simple and battle-tested.




*


I also have a metric shit-ton of stuff that didn't work out, or is for special evolutions. I got more knives and pistols and holsters than I do pairs of socks.


*


But I've spent a lot more money, and a hell of a lot more time, investing in training than I've ever spent on equipment. If you have good software, you can make almost any hardware work for you. But if all you ever do is buy the cool guns and wazoo laser-sight/strobing tactical light add-ons and you don't build yourself the corresponding skill-sets to deploy them, you're fooling yourself.

It isn't the tool that solves the problem, it's who's running the tool.


*

So, keep it simple. Make sure it is rugged and reliable and you have it rigged securely and then you build the reps in deploying it. You train with your set-up every day, in the clothes and shoes you'll be wearing, and you do it over and over and over until you've got it hard-wired and then the tool is going to be in your hand before you've had time to consciously decide to deploy it. Which frees up cognitive processing space that you can then direct toward your threat and your environment.




Making you a deadly motherfucker.




World without end, amen.


*



What I've found it that with my spouse gone the world just seems drained of color and life. I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog day, except that nothing happens and I don't learn anything. I'm just a hamster on a wheel. Get up, go to work, come home, sleep, repeat.

I guess I'm lacking in self reliance or something. I'm bad anxious, pacing and grinding my teeth. I can't settle down. Soon as I sit down I jump up again, then in ten seconds I'm back on the sofa.

I got no peace like a river in my soul.



*


I watched "The Parking Lot Movie" last night. Indie documentary about this crew of over-educated slackers that work in a pay parking lot and take the job, or at least their thoughts about the job, to a semi-psychotic extreme. There are in-depth discussions of the rise of "parking lot attendant God" delusions, the role of parking lot attendants in balancing the scales of karma, and how to throw a wrench into the windshield of a rich, entitled, SUV driving yuppie that refuses to pay his three bucks to park.

It was both enjoyable and horrifying, on many levels.


*


I wish that I could find a way to calm myself down and just enjoy things the way they are.


That, however, is not my destiny.


*




Namaste.



***

Billy and The Delta Clipper On Caladon 9

*




prayers to summon 
the destroying angel


moon stuttering in the sky
like film
stuck in a projector





The Mountain Goats, Tallahassee 









*


We watched the movie "Dogtooth" a couple of weeks ago.

I cannot get it out of my mind.



*


I don't want it to leave.


*



It is a dark, deeply disturbed and disturbing film that I found utterly intoxicating. My god, though, don't go see it if you find nothing funny in cruelty. Especially the cruelty of parental love.

Not all of it unintentional.




*


Today is a quiet day of laundry and housecleaning and dog washing. The sun is shining, the sky blue, and I've thrown open all the doors and windows so the world can come inside if it wants. I've got The Magnetic Fields blasting, and I've got coffee and I've committed art.






I want to take a hammer and crack my head open.

*


I mean that in a good way.


*


Okay, let's think about this for a minute:

Something like ninety percent of all of our sensory input gets thrown out on its way through our neural processing net. And we're already only getting a tiny sliver of what's out there. Then what gets used is almost entirely unavailable to us consciously. It's all done behind the curtain of our unawareness.

Then of that sliver of a sliver of a sliver that does get through we largely ignore, misinterpret, or find unbearable. We drink and drug and distract ourselves so we don't even have to deal with that tiny fraction of the world that makes it through our defenses.

Then we use this sad little sliver of 'facts' to make up our minds about the way the world works and by god we won't be swayed once we've decided.






Seems like a pretty good way to proceed.





*


I don't know how anybody makes up their minds about anything.



*




I wish I could make an atomic bomb of love.


I'd drop that bitch on all of us.



*



Namaste.



***

Liquor Mart

*




I drove down to the City of Angels to see my little broken-winged one. She shines like a bronze buddha that's been burnished by flames and rubbed smooth and hard by the ten thousand things.






You hope your child will gain wisdom, but you forget what kind of pain that entails.






*



Better to hope for a measure of peace.



*



The whole drive down, I couldn't stop thinking of how completely insane it is to get on the freeway with a million angelenos, hurtling down the road at eighty miles an hour, inches apart, every single one of them reading the newspaper or talking on the phone or texting or eating burritos or giving each other hand jobs or being on the nod or suicidal or homicidal, I don't know how any motherfucker makes it out of there alive on a daily basis.

The older I get the scareder I get.


I figure I already used up my good luck.




*



Here's the thing:


I only like the good people on this earth.


The rest of you?


I got no time for you.


*


I don't fucking understand it. I don't. I know I'm all kinds of fucked up, but I am one of the good guys. And it don't matter. You can be all fucked up and still be good. You can be goddamn miraculous.

But some of you fucks, you just don't get it. You won't be good no matter what. You just suck the life out of the rest of us, make us as miserable as you are all the time. You look out for yourself, you see the raw hand you got dealt, you do what you think you can get away with if no one's looking.

You don't never reach out a hand to someone else.

You don't let the beauty in for fear of your lockedup heart.

You squander all the goodwill and love that comes your way.


Out of your fear. Out of your ignorance.


Your greed for what you think is owed you.




*



Well, you can go fuck yourself.



*




The super power I wish I had was I can reach inside your head and rewire your network. Plug shit in the way it works the best for you. Not to turn you into someone else, just to turn you into who you were supposed to be. Before your shit got all miswired.


I guess I'd start with me.


*


I think that when you love someone you should just go ahead and love them damn the cost.


It's how you'd want to be loved.



*



Do you remember in City of Angels how those invisible angels would all the time be hanging around the fucked up humans, trying to hug them, or shield them from something, kind of crying and ineffective?



Like that.


*



Namaste.




***

The Engineer's Dilemma

*





If I don't have a murder to work on I'm about a worthless fuck.



I need to go a hundred miles an hour, or I won't go at all.





*


Lately I've been indulging in this fantasy where I quit the whole endeavor and take to the hills with the woman on the verge and build a nice modernist glass and rusted-steel house on the edge of some woods overlooking the sea and a wide expanse of green. A three mile driveway that leads to a rutted dirt road that is a dozen miles from the nearest paved anything. Some dogs to lie around on the deck and wander in the woods and down to the beach. Maybe a wind that comes up in the afternoon, but dies down by nightfall. A kind of old barn that houses the studio, with kilns and potters wheels and big easels filled with gigantic white canvases. Metalworking gear, a whole wall of drawers and cubby holes the woman could fill with fabric and doll parts and found objects. A heavy bag to hit, a little platform to do yoga and meditate.

The house filled to the rafters with books, a kitchen running down the side of the house overlooking the fields. A fireplace or two, a japanese bath, big open spaces and small, intimate nooks, and light and quiet and stillness.

No murders. No phone calls. No wading through the blood and guts, no crime reports, no witnesses to babysit, no testifying, no watching the parade of stupid, violent, thoughtless fuckups.


Just the sound of the sea and the wind in the grass and the feel of a day that is entirely mine to share with the woman I love.



*



Sounds kind of nice, doesn't it?




*


And to be honest, I have something that very closely approximates my daydream right now. I don't have the modernist house, but I have a house. I don't have every day to call my own, but I have some of them.

In all the ways that really matter, I am living my dream.



*


And I'm not fooling myself.



I like the blood and guts.




I don't know if I would miss any of it, I don't think I will if I ever get to leave it behind, but if I have to have a job, this is the one for me.



*



When the woman is gone, I realize how little there is of me. I am greatly diminished. I pace and fret and scowl, I can't sit still for five minutes at a time (Okay, that's how I am anyway, even when she's here, but that's not my point).

I just don't feel like anything I think or see or do has really happened to me until I experience it with her, or at least reexperience it through her eyes. Something like that.

It's like I'm missing both my arms, or like my set got tuned to the wrong channel.


I'm not worth a fuck.



*


I have to say that I've been really humbled by your kindnesses lately.


*



Namaste.



***