the fool’s back pocket…

There is frustration when I look to the ceiling and don’t feel the pull of gravity bringing me down to the right level. I’m OK when the come on isn’t as strong as advertised, or when time is short and the feelings fade to a jarring conclusion, because a conclusion represents the end of a journey. Money paid, trip taken, a fair deal all around. The problem comes as something of a doppelganger, a stand in for the real deal. Mornings like this leave me pleading for that feeling to arrive on golden tires and get my mind off to the temporal. I can’t help it…the nature of the beast I suppose.

All things being equal, the daily reminders of the wounds festering under the cloudy sky are ever more frustrating in light of the failure of the medicine to take hold. My expectations led me into a classic trap. The door slams shut behind me the instant recognition crosses my face on the way down through the rest of my body. I’m stiff in all the wrong places. I want to laugh amidst the carnage, but i hold back out of respect for the uninitiated. I really only smile when I lie anyway.

With a forceful shove into a mindset of vanity, I grit my teeth and proceed to wait for the sign that all is well and the joints are smooth and oiled, ready for movement. I plead for things to make some kind of sense besides the occasional break in the static but am left with the burned out hope that if this one doesn’t work, the next one will. Under the aegis of emblematic sorcery and supplicated prayers (offered to some mysterious hooker in the sky) comes the laughter of the thunder. Is it a reply? I don’t know. Any kind of answer masquerading as laughter is beyond a sick joke under these circumstances. Sooner or later all of the accumulated wisdom sparks one of those momentary crises of faith. It’s dark out, the kind of darkness that hides the sun rather than covering it up, leaving a halo around the darkness. Their are some kids playing in the street, probably evading a teacher or some other kind of fucking administrator, but they don’t seem to notice. They just run around and laugh a lot.

In the ensuing minutes, my crises of faith ends with a washout. My blood carries the long awaited edge the cuts through the fog of the morning into the afternoon. It’s crucial for following the long train of thought into some kind of narrative. Not that it actually means anything, but it will seem important while it’s all going down. Like many other things in life, the whole process slides between controlled contortions and impervious random vibration. Sans the repeated calls for faith in the process, the whole thing just keeps moving on, defying every attempt to capture the release of joy. Look around you and it isn’t hard to find examples in various states of distress or extreme rapture. More than anything, they want to hold on to that moment when everything comes together, and for the briefest of moments they (and I) are enraptured with a colorful world of wavy lined souls that always wear smiles.

In the end, the rationale I’ve just laid out for you is the most important thing you could ever hope to know when it comes to this kind of egress. It is a weary and often unintentional collection of ideas and suppositions that keeps hope alive; the elusive moment we’re chasing down a blind alley with no turn-around. (note: I later discovered there is indeed a turnaround. A big one. First you hit the bricks. Then you stop. If you’re lucky, you turn around fast enough and brace yourself quickly enough to rebound right back out of the alley. Of course, you have to quit chasing the moment and give up on your quest.)

The only fitting analogy is thus: I left the remote control across the room and I want to change the fucking channel. I want to watch the music video for John Hiatt’s “Sharon’s Got A Drugstore.” My cable box is set to HBO. The damn remote isn’t even close to being in range of an arm or even a leg, and rather than get up an get it, I’m sitting here typing away trying to express my frustration with the current state of internal supply and demand issues and wait for a blood rush realization, scoping patterns in the seams of the day. Time to move, I cant take anymore of this waiting shit.