Midnight Confessions

Never not nothing. Brain dead, I'd been reading all day, and I was tired. A screeching cat-fight woke me, two coons fighting over a rotten banana. Spare me the spats where nothing is at stake. Illuminated by their glowing red eyes, I shot between them with a load of rock salt from a shotgun and they scampered off in a hell of a hurry. Half a moon, maybe two in the morning, but the blast blinded and shocked me into consciousness. The smell of cordite. I drink my juice directly from the carton anymore, living alone, why should I bother washing glasses that aren't necessary? My hands are shaking a bit, but I manage to roll a smoke; I want to listen to some music, to get my hearing back, and I put on Clapton covering Robert Johnson. 'Crossroads", Clapton is so good, then I dig back through the pile and listen to Johnson, then Son House, then Skip James. Listening to the blues, you find a part of yourself, identify an aspect you don't like to talk about that is very real, where you hurt the most. Given that we all hurt, those slings and arrows. Amazing we're not dead. Longevity is mostly genetics, so maybe we were merely designed to fulfill a pathic function. It's nice, in the spring, to see the cherry blossoms. Winter is a killing floor. The noir quality of it all, black and white sunk to a dirty gray, then, suddenly, color. Walt Disney. But also Blind Lemon Jefferson and Mississippi John Hurt. A slack lead guitar. Anything in G, where the minor pitfalls, the petty differences are shed, and everything is reduced to the dregs in a glass of wine. Not that I'm depressed, or like to hear depressing things, but it assumes the cloak of the mythic, and hearing that story again restores my faith. Hard to not sound pessimistic, but that the various gods had suffered, and that allowed us to hike up our pants and get along down the road. Slept for a few hours then got up at dawn, when the orange light fairly blasted through the east windows. I brewed a mug of coffee strong enough to resurrect a dead mule, built a small fire against the morning chill. The radio was such an intrusion that I couldn't even listen to the news. Someone made the finals of a tournament. My attention was drawn to the growth pattern of Sumac, the second-year plant especially. The first year stalk is a five or six foot tall stick, with tight buds along its length, but when the notion of spring occurs, the very end of the stick explodes into a kind of crown, the first leaves in a fan of feathers. Soon I'm shuffling along outside, in my slippers and bathrobe, examining the tips of an invasive weed with a magnifying glass. Invasive is probably too strong a word, call it, rather, opportunistic. A Towhee threatens to drive me crazy with its song, but it's nice to have the song birds back, after a winter diet of crows. I made a porridge overnight in the crock-pot, good stone-ground grits and the last of the acorn meal, I finish a scoop of these with excellent English double-cheddar in the microwave, because making cheese-grits in the crock-pot is an impossible mess, and top them with a perfect fried egg. Store-bought eggs, because TR absconded with my last dozen farm-fresh. Bastard. But such is life, you line up a good supply of eggs, and suddenly the intermediary develops an appetite. Go figure. I'm working on an algorithm that would provide the greatest happiness within any given context, and it allows for a disruption in the flow of eggs, but I never thought it would be so quickly questioned. No then yes, yes then no, a simple binary, but when you apply it to real life, everything is called into question. Whether or not you should have another cup of coffee. Whether or not you should kill a co-worker. Whether or not you should make it look like a suicide or the work of a serial killer. The crows are outside, and I have a couple of dead mice for them. They're so insistent, but I love the way light plays off that apparent black. Iridescence. Where all colors are revealed. Not a rainbow exactly, but something close, a color chart, that swatch-book from Porter Paints. I tweak what I write as I go along, aligning grammar and syntax, not always an easy chore, sometimes I lose what I'm saying by changing a single mark of punctuation, but that's just the cost of doing business. I was looking for shark's teeth once, down near St. Augustine, and I had found a particularly fine tooth, several million years old, some particularly predator shark, I can't remember it's exact name, that had prowled these waters, those waters, sorry, in the day. Now, what do you think? Was that an innocent glimpse or something more? Song birds are already driving me crazy. Spring is sprung, sing goddamn.