We're Good

First Saturday in forever that I didn't go to town. Too beat-up to go another round. My feet hurt and my left hip is a pain in the ass. But I'm conscious, and that's a glimmer of hope. I go and run the Jeep for 20 minutes, for the heated seat, and that's a great comfort to me, a little heat, well applied. I read some recent poems by Stephen Ellis that were so good they defy any description. He's writing, right now, better than anyone in the language. Nothing, it seems, is beyond his reach. Thunder, I have to go, thank god I ran the AC unit to get the house down to 78 degrees. I got some black olives and baby gherkins out of the fridge, a bottle of Riesling, some saltines and kimchi; I can make a meal out of that. Hours later the power comes back on, four in the morning, I'm sleeping on the sofa when the fridge comes to life, and Black Dell says "Please Wait", which is the universal sign that I'm reconnected. I'd gone to sleep with my head-lamp on and Lucretius open on my chest. He says, directly, that the gods don't exist, and that we're pretty much on our own, that we should eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow we're going to die, and that's the end of the story. The Humanists, primarily, were recovering the language. Gutenberg and the earliest printers, the incunabula, actually had it fairly easy, Latin was fixed, Claxton had a different row to hoe, English hadn't been codified. They were speaking French, in London, and in Scotland they were pretty much still eating babies with fish sauce (Garum, a fermentation of piscatorial left-overs, a gift from the Romans). The Angles and the Jutes. Blue Picts flitting through the woods, amber and woad. It seems like I make this shit up, but I was reading about using teasal seed pods, to tease out fibers of wool and infusing them with various colors (indigo, onions skins, blood oranges) and it all seemed logical. One of Julie's boys was following me around, and I finally had to tell him that I just wanted to be alone. He was incredulous that I didn't want company, and I said that, no, I actually preferred being alone, because I could talk to myself, or predict the future based on the spread of chicken guts. Sometimes the world is too much. When I was that age, 10 or 12, a friend of my mother's best friend killed himself. My first suicide. I hadn't considered it an option. Everything was existential for a couple of decades after that. A few more friends killed themselves. Not a lien on the market, but a noticeable thing. I'm a long way from suicide, but I do see the allure. Ending everything for once and all. I've always found that the next thing was interesting enough to keep me from going to an extreme. Right now, for instance, it's already tomorrow. Seriously. When the power goes out I lose track of time. Time is merely a construct, don't get me started. I turn on some lights. Usually I sit in the dark, I like being hidden, but when the power comes back on, I often flip a few switches, just to see the connection. What? You don't trust me? Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. I'm pretty sure I got this right.