...

Call comes at bar close. Her voice swollen with drink, looking for another place to go. Listen to the rambling as a scream builds deep down. Manage a fairly polite declination to entertain amidst mild verbal abuse. It's right back to that first apartment when the drunken call comes and other whisky swollen voice curses from the other end. A shriveled meat pump labors in a cage of bone and blood. Pieces of a life long left behind lodged into the cracks leak poison. Years long it creeps, waiting to spring out and scream "REMEMBER!" at the slightest provocation. There is no trust, no warm embrace to take the edge off the days labors. There is good built into these hands though. They make things, beautiful things. There is dirt beneath their nails and thick calluses. There is solace in that.

One spring day

Seventeen years. Numbers like that are the way it is now. Seventeen years. Jesus, where does it go?  I stood in front of the gods and everybody and made an oath to stay with her to life's end. Last I heard she had done time for identity theft and was living in North Dakota with her new husband. Not exactly death due us part. There was an effort made, ten years of effort, but only so much abuse can be tolerated. When there is no better and only worse and worse and worse. Been out of it for almost as long as I was in it. Hasn't stopped it from haunting me, kept me in the same patterns. Repeating patterns of love. Like the song goes. Heh. Cooking a great feast for mostly myself. An exercise in loneliness. Sad songs on the jukebox with a couple revenge of the nerd style joints. Going to drink my own wine, feast on the fruits of my labors and drink to better days ahead.

Nightime

These nights grow so long. Sleep an elusive thing that twists and turns like a twisty turny thing. Managing a few hours of actual REM time, but little else. Sleep deprivation is a harsh mistress. Everythings washed out and coffee stained. The place where normalcy exists, balanced forward thoughts, is long forgotten. This brain matter has rebelled. No amount of medication/meditation brings that once restful thing known as sleep. Seems to be growing worse as time progresses. Focus remains somehow. Possession of will makes all the difference. The real question is, can this be maintained? The answer has always been a great big capitol NO. Hasn't changed the nature of things though. In the dark moments, twisting in the grip of some creeping thing in the hiddy spots of the subconscious, time ceases to be and there is only that moment of frozen horror. An infinitesimal macro universe spins, huge and terrible. It seeps down into the quantum spaces between the protons. All the while it's just me, my mind, and the dark.

Equinox

The spring sun has risen and I hunch for a moment over the death box before the shovels fly. Too cold for planting yet with the weekend lows hovering in the high twenties, but much work to do regardless. Good thing too, the "too much to do" keeps me moving. If I stand for too many moments my mind goes dark. The loss, the fall, the horror of it all. Growing things keeps it at bay, with the aid of some choice chemicals and healthy dose of artistic endeavour. It's a struggle to be sure, even with the "best I've ever done" on the table before me. I stand outside many of the little joys now, and always will. A societal anomaly with an empty nest whilst the others bring forth new lives with the loving support of lifelong partners.
I have a cat and five guitars...

mirror, mirror

Faded technicolor kodachrome. Hands full of glass shards and plastic burns. Blood dries on the cardboard while the stack of heirloom seeds, both saved and purchased, wait for the soil to warm. The hum of strings and her haunting voice float through smoke filled air. Flickering light takes on all the shapes I could hope for, but lacks any of the solice. The cold air seeps in from between the cracks in the door and these bits and pieces of ideas rattling around from year to year have become something. A real existing thing, bending light and time in it's own little cycle. The puzzle is still so far from done and, as always, as a new piece falls into place someone snaches another from the board. Still, progress is progress.

New Ground

Winter winds down and new soil waits under grass. To till, shovel and  prepare for the seeds and starts. A cycle that takes more and more precedence. So many things go astray, lost to human drama, but the growing things are a constant. There is still much in the larder from years past, but the looming reality of fresh from the ground food always makes my blood quicken. The days go by fast, though, and the tasks are always so, so many. The soil here is thick and dark. Doesn't need much to grow fine, fine veggies. It is also the climate I know how best to work in or at least it was. It grows increasingly difficult to know what each season will bring. Daylight's a wasting. The old rototiller waits.

Ruminations from the Hill

Another growing season winds down and I take a slow morning to think about where it's all going. A proper mixture of certain chemicals is an essential part of this process. One that must be adhered to in order to maintain proper function.The removal of nicotine from this mixture has given me a little trouble of late, but the overall benefits far out way the drawbacks. The caffeine though, cannot go without that, no, no I can't...
     It's cold this year, not uncommon to have beautiful seventy plus days all the way to the big freeze at Halloween. If we have one this year. It is getting harder and harder to know what's in store. I worry for a bad year, where a blight comes and crops fail. Not a new worry for the human condition, but it feels more and more relevant as I watch our little climate experiment unfold. I can't be the only one that sees the storms rolling in, stronger and stronger, almost with a sense of malevolence, and it would be hard to blame them. I myself often cheer them on. In fact, most of the art and music I have been generating over the last twenty years has been based on the belief that it would be best if most of humanity were to annihilated in some great catastrophe. One where only the most extremely clever and lucky mother fuckers even have a chance of survival. I realize there is a conflict between worrying about successful crop cycles and hopping most of humanity dies in the hideous nightmare that is the change we have wrought on our little blue green planetoid. There are many ways in which we have interacted with our environment is nothing short of fantastic. Cultivation and selective breading of plants, for example. There are, at present roughly seventy five hundred different varieties of apples grown thought the world. So clever, us homo sapiens. So much abundance and so much of it wasted.