You and Me

I'd rather fade into the wood-work. I'm tired of the world and it's machinations, I'd rather hole up in a tree-tip pit with a tarp and a twig fire than listen to any more bullshit. I could see, at dawn, that it was going to be the first major leaf-fall day. A rain of orange and yellow. You have no idea. Consider the couple of trees in your yard and the way their leaves are a pain in the ass. You can't burn them anymore, so you buy a device that allows you to blow them into the street, where they become someone else's problem. Magnify that by a thousand. A four inch layer of leaves, saturated by continuous showers overnight, is as slick as anything you could imagine. I woke up talking to myself, which isn't unusual, but I sounded angry. I don't like myself when I get like that and I knew I couldn't deal with other people, so I called Pegi, at the museum, with some excuse. The dog ate my homework. I have the thought that I am actually ready for the final removal, where I stop talking at all, go to town once a week, just point at things and grunt. I learned enough American Sign in St. Augustine to ask where there was a public bathroom. There's something quite elegant about sign language. It goes through a different part of the brain. Like dance does. Silent film. And body language, the way, sometimes, a shrug carries a huge amount of meaning. I realized, when I saw my ex flirting, in a very explicit way, with an Irishman, at a dining room table that I had built, in a house that I had built, on land that I had paid for with my hard labor, that the universe was not necessarily fair. Let go of your expectations is easy enough to say, but it's natural, in the real world, or real, in the natural world, to expect that certain things would follow other things. We're hard-wired in that regard. The night is over, the sun comes up. It's hot for a while, then it gets cold. The rain has brought out the color, or rather has washed the color clean. The sumac and the sassafras are particularly lovely, and there's a hickory, down the logging road, that is almost medicinal in color, an orange very like the color of those disinfectants they put on minor wounds when I was a kid, mercurochrome? Black walnuts litter the roads. They're actually slightly dangerous, the way they can throw you off track; and the god-damned squirrels, scavenging road-kill nuts and changing directions three times as you bear down on them. Do not veer for a squirrel. Don't play his game. A dead squirrel is merely a dead squirrel. Besides, you almost never hit one, and even if you do, you can usually get a meal out of it. After a walk in the drizzle, I had to change clothes completely, soaked through to the core, but it did clear my head. I can't remember why I was in such a bad mood, something about there not being a promised land. I knew there wasn't; but I occasionally forget, imagine a world in which my feet don't hurt and there's no chance I could possibly get tangled in my sleeping bag, roll off the bed, and break a hip. I don't delude myself: if there's a bear between me and my house, I always go back to the Jeep and play Eric Clapton very loud and bang on the ground with a stick. Sometimes I do wish I lived with someone, so I could occasionally turn to them and ask if they had seen that, whatever it might be, a bear in the woodshed, a yellow rattlesnake with a mouse in it's mouth, three crows pecking at a road-kill coon I'd thrown on top of the outhouse. Whatever fiction I could create is way over-shadowed by fact. I'm not a terrorist, I'm only interested in the aerodynamics of falling leaves.