Armistice Day 2024

Holy Mother Gaia, who is the sky 
that preserves the life of her children, 
Protect us against our abnormal thoughts and 
the illiterate body-language of hapless perverts. 

Or do what you can.... 

I'd woken up about 6 A.M. or so as I usually do, 
started the coffeemachine, tidied the room...and it's the part 
of the week when I've exhausted the charitable allowance 
that my remaining-parent provides, the tophalf of which pays 
for the week's supply of marijuana. So I was at 
a convenient crossroads of sobriety. 

I did some stretching, meditation, a Zazen Buddhist Rosary if you will. 

And besides the rest of the day with no close friends, no significant 
other, there's YouTube, and I was meant to do a job-screening, 
over the phone, to work with children in a school-setting. 

I was excited about that. 

I've had some trouble with this new phone though 
and while I can hear the voice at the other end as easily 
as a diamond catches light, this woman I spoke to about 
working at the school repeated my mother's complaint 
about being unable to hear me. 

She'd offered to meet with me in person, at the school, a 
fifteen-minute drive or a three-hour walk: If one is looking 
for sex, not a bad deal. 

However, I was looking for work, not sex. 
And I don't have my own car. And it's only one job in the world: 
there is more than one place one can work. 

After sorting away the alternatives for our failed screening, 
all the et cetera et cetera of I'll try better next time, 
I left the lady to the rest of her day and went to the rest of mine. 

What follows is the rest of that day, until 
I woke up this morning and started writing. 

The YouTube Part  

Any given hour is fairly evenly divided 
between the stand-up of casually stoic blacks, 
girls with more brains than insecurity, 
and the likely-yet-hard-to-anticipate 
self-aware foreigner.... Plus philosophical/
religious studies of the Ancient Past as it 
might be concerned with contemporary 
living. (No to Chomsky & Sapolsky; YES 
to Christine Hayes and anyone with the 
punch & equanimity of a Sheldon Whitehouse.) 
....Plus sometimes I can't stop listening 
to old punk songs and rewatching scenes 
from the Wire & certain Jim Jarmusch movies. 

I'm not opposed to silence. 

There is the smoking of cigarettes, the drinking 
of coffee, some kind of noodles with either seasoning 
or sauce, boiled or heated artificially. 

The days of
a man pushing his
life through itself. 

This is the part where Richard leaves the house. 

The Part Where Richard Leaves The House  

Our house, the house where I live, 
sits on at least an acre of property. 
I should know: I've walked around some. 
I've drank in the street at night, 
and I've come to understand the pair of 
brightly-colored cats that patrol the 
gorgeous yard with only some 
unnecessary debris (like an artifact from 
an anonymous childhood no longer populated 
by the child) that those cats are half-ours, likely 
sleep in the garage, and we all look upwards 
at the sky. 

My walk into town takes me through rural New York 
at its most resplendent: Wide 
level streets with nary a pothole 
or scrap of litter or imported bag of trash 
to be found, where people walk their dogs by 
themselves, or ride bikes and motorcycles for 
either pleasure or sport or both, past houses 
with giant Halloween Ornaments, like 
sexless, raceless skeletons or sheet-phantoms (ghosts) 
that strike a wordy mind as especially feeble Klansmen 
(it'd be redundant to simply refer to them as feeble) 
and about a mile or a couple songs later 
I'm at the group home where the guys 
are perpetually cadging cigarettes 
and sometimes I'll get high with them 
and play music off my cellphone 
and some of them have the attention-spans 
to listen about layered things like history 
and politics and faith and culture and the sordid 
origins of things and I've got to watch myself 
because I'll give away all my ephemeral possessions 
if I don't have somewhere to go and often 
at the midpart of the day I don't have anywhere I have 
to be except yesterday I was really into looking for a job....
I kinda feel like it has something to do with the Harris/Walz 
defeat but I'm sure it goes a lot further than that. 

Two things, precisely...happened before I started drinking. 

The First Thing That Happened Was: I went into 
the chain Italian Restaurant and inquired if they needed 
a dishwasher, or some equally dumb-muscle sort of work 
where I could earn a small living and maybe eventually get a car 
or start paying my own rent again... Well, the nice lady said there 
wasn't but she was free to make semi-interesting banter and somehow 
that got us listening to me talking about how America's feckless
government has routinely fumble/fuck'ed our chances to have
a normal, fair, inclusive, prosperous society by taxing the earnings 
of an extremely small, extremely wealthy portion of a population
of absolute millions. 

The lady, an American-Hispanic for what that's worth, 
sounded wary, even recalcitrant to the notion of 
modern treasure-kings with massive vaults 
recontributing to the world that laid the plans 
for their un-appreciated success.... I tried explaining it 
as two piles of wealth: one overflowing with riches; one of dust and dreams. 

I don't know. 

Maybe it's my attraction to hyperbole. 
Maybe it's the lack of a moral-spine 
in people who ought to look out for their own. 

Neither the lady working the counter nor the undiscovered Jim Norton-looking fellow 
had much to say after that besides make camouflaged excuses for douchebags like 
Donald J. Trump so I kept an open mind for work, figured I'd check 
Craigslist at some point (I think I'll check Craigslist later) and then I went 
to buy some drinks to keep the edge off. (*The Edge is a colloquial expression 
for the naturally inevitable anxiety one experiences as a result of their personal 
concern for the state of the world and one's place in it; non-alcoholics might 
think of it as a needy liar who has invaded one's personal thoughts with nothing, 
nothing, (nothing) that isn't trite, banal, or an outright mistruth.) 

At the gas station, where I buy my beer, I got the boy whose 
face is covered in supra-pubic hair so that he has the appearance 
of a person-sized Cock left in the road by a mother in search of 
lower-priced, higher-quality fentanyl. 

My hands, more often than not, are sweaty from walking around and so forth
and I pee about ten-thousand times between waking up and going to sleep 
on the average day. Therefore: I use the gas station bathroom pretty much 
every time I go in there... And they seem to never have soap... I rinsed my hands, 
dried them, and before I went to the cooler I went to the counter to tell Pubeface John 
that the bathroom dispensers were empty.... I got my things, he rang them up, took my 
money, and he's one of these people who can't touch something without 
getting some putrid essence of their sexglands on it: like money. 

I wiped the bills on the counter, then put them in my wallet, then left. 

On the street to the liquor store I saw a pair of teenage boys 
discreetly not talking about me, pitied them, made a recording 
of them with my cellphone for the distant, distant future 
(when maybe they won't stay in their parents' basements as 
virgins out of fear of intimacy or risk of any kind) and then 
I went to the liquor store. 

One of my favorite people (who doesn't write or act or compose 
things of that nature as far as I'm personally aware) works 
at the liquor store. I think she's about my age. I think 
I know which car is hers. She is married. But she talks to me 
when I know what I want to say and I imagine we've suffered 
several common alienations in the world. 

Well, she remembers my face and what I drink (typically: two tiny E&J's) 
and that's worth a lot more than a few dollars where I come from. 

So I like to do my social best in her place of business,
minding the other customers and chewing the end of my tongue
to refrain from amusing myself with crude, flippant remarks
as they land in my brain tissue from the center of an implacable nothingness. 

I could feel the heat in my neck. I paid for my things and thanked her. 

As I was leaving, something else happened: A woman 
perhaps in her early 50s came into the store, led by a pair 
of enormous dogs. Like, husky or labrador retriever big; small bear 
little horse -sized dogs. I was smitten. 

With the dogs. 

The woman obviously had some issue with 
the color of my skin or some other subjective quality 
about my appearance or presence, and told me (tritely) 
how I should be honored the dogs took so kindly to me 
(I sense they don't like their owner much) and she told me 
how the dogs are usually afraid of strangers. (Dogs are 
rarely afraid of me. I've had several, several since childhood.) 

After our genuine and disingenuous spontaneity, the woman 
got around to making her purchases and more of the old people-
politics came around and I got into my routine of talking about zipguns. How 
kids and criminals a hundred years ago used to fashion them from scratch and 
they could fire an object like a chairbolt fast enough to break a bone 
or shatter an enemy's eye. 

She said that didn't sound very nice. I said neither were the 1920s. 
I said something like, But, workers' rights and shit. And then I left. 

....Mother Gaia, answer these prayers at your convenience 
if you so choose to answer them at all. 

What did the cosmos say to the darkness? 

Wait. 

****