03.14.01 - 12:35:42

yadda yadda yadda.

been a while since i've stolen time from productive thangs to sit here and let words fall across my fingers like water over limestone. i think some of the acid gets absorbed betweentimes, the thoughts cleansed. not that i need cleansing. i bathe. regularly, at that.

i was walking down the hallway in bare feet realizing that at this moment and for the rest of the day i am da boss. like, literally. of everyone up here. all four of us. until a certain someone returns tomorrow, it's all me. watch the world tremble. of course, it probably wouldn't be as real if i didn't write it down. or see it on tv. or hear it on the radio.

yesterday i sat here working on something and looking out the window of the thirteenth floor and watching a fire billow from a bar/apartment building four blocks away. at first i thought someone or something was kicking up dust, then i called 911, but they already knew.

i almost became a celebrity by calling 911, until it turned out that someone else already had. i mean, an office celebrity.

you called 911?

yes.

and they didn't know?!

uhm. they knew.

so i experience the brief, meteoric rise that only disasters can bring, and plummeted once more to the depths of the ordinary. lemme tell ya, it was one heady rush.

i'm a sucker for disaster. like, sheer total wild upheveal with slabs of earth uprooted and jagged. large-scale wildness movement beneath your feet sort of stuff, the macrocosm of the sidewalk inexorably lifted by an oak's seeking roots.

here's a secret, when i was a kid i loved those bits of the sidewalk. i literally looked forward to them. i diverted my path to find them. i thought about them before i reached them, and when i did i would step up and over the outcropping and root, and wonder who painted the edge orange - danger - some summer afternoon yellow with ginko leaves and shot through with helicopters falling from fecund trees.

and i wanted to have that validated. er. recognized. entered into the annals of public history by some brief mark of its occurrence. i watched the fire from my office, and last night we watched the news for footage, the smoke billowing out from the roof, the same scene seen differently by the camera's eye and reported, dissected, made real by the acknowledgment.

well. heh. no dice. it wasn't on the news.

the center for pain relief misspelled aching on its intake patient history form. like, the form they use for everyone, everyday. that would drive me batty.

so anyway there is the sky, today it is empty of everything but that endless blue that falls into your eyes and tints them with the horizon if you let it. yesterday it was dramatically stormy - angry flocks of black-bottomed clouds lanced across the top by a wave of sunlight so they skidded, quilted and golden and black, or performed feats a contortionist would envy as the wind whipped in fifty mile an hour gusts from the west.

two double rainbows. did i mention that? four rainbows, full arches visible from one side of the valley to the other, like celestial gates strung across the ohio. two of 'em. twice. the full bore, baby, both barrels, all the way. one set went from the hill bordering the floodplain in wva to the hill bordering the river in ohio. the other set went from the mental hospital to an old folks' home by the floodwall.

twist the knife, baby. twist the bloody lovely knife.

you could hardly believe it now, so bare is the sky. aching bare and drifting from washed, browned out palest blue at the fringes of the horizon to something deeply drowning in the center of the vault. something about the sweep of it, the cleanness of the light that - even half-past noon still feels like morning - makes me wanna move. just, you know, move.

move like you can break every last tie and set off toward the horizon and someday catch the coy earth curving away from you, discover el dorado or the fountain of youth of shangri-la with the investment of sweat and time and attentive, hyperattenuated care, no more. i would like to hold something essential between my fingers and feel green-sap life moving, moving, and feel the horizon in my head, the greatest promise that is never fulfilled.

oh, i want to move, and see the sky move above me, find a new sky that can make me ache just this much, feel a thousand unknown lives slipping past me, secure and alien in their manicured edifaces, and be strangers, strangers all.

it's the kind of sky, today, that you need someone with you to watch it. because you just wanna breathe in and in and in and in and never ever fucking exhale. and when it all becomes so bright-painful with wonder that you just might lose it if the sun hits another windshield and sends it lancing silver-diamond-dazzle toward you, then you can turn around and kiss someone like you wanna fly, wanna drown yourself in their breath, like you know the secret of flight.

and maybe it would all be better somehow. then. like that. heh.

maybe it would.