Only One Man

Yes, the entries have been sporadic lately. But, as Regis Philbin put it so succinctly in his autobiography title, I’m only one man.

There have been troubles lately. Quick-cutting cat-out-of-the-bag troubles. Timberwolves-out-of-the-playoffs troubles. Reassessment-of-life's-priorities troubles.

But there has also been the sun, glorious as it warms the greenest Los Angeles ever. And there has been the Decemberists, whose new album Picaresque defies categorization and underfits hyperbole. And the Ian McEwan book is still resonating. And Seymour, fat lovable Seymour, the healthiest 20-pound cat in America, turned 12 the other day.

So, until tomorrow, I leave you with a very very short story I wrote several years ago. When I wrote it, I thought it was about someone else. Today, I’m not so sure. I think it’s about me.


For Risks Not Yet Enumerated #1

I’ve watched you, your black shoes the full range of your darkness. There is a light emanating from you and I can’t say that I always like it. I can say that I always have to think a few moments before knowing if I like it. And there is a real tension to your two eyes and what they take in. It seems that they don’t wish to be bothered with the pieties of human interplay. There have been no invitations given. And surely none declined.

Sometimes, you’re found slumped over like a bingo parlor polar bear one short on the diagonal. You realize that it doesn’t matter anyway because bears can’t bask in human reward. But there is some joy in seeing others go home, to the long suburban night, uncompensated.

Other times you’re laughing silently, an inner movie dialogue coming up roses on your pearly whites. You follow your laughter with the stillness you’re known for. I can see the atoms cringing at your homeostasis.

But this is all from afar, this watching, this theorizing. And I am smart enough to know I know nothing, no, to believe that I know nothing. That I only chase knowledge because I like how it looks from behind. You could say more about me – accurately – than I ever could about you. That’s partly due to you and your daisy-like impenetrability. But the rest of it comes from me and my love for the labors that come with the furthest distances.

I imagine you at home, tap dancing to a free love folk ballad, twirling candy canes with your good hand, smiling like a come-on to your teeth. Minutes pass and I imagine you now head in hands (good and bad), hair as face, chin as single breast, and your feet weak from dancing but wanting more and this time more angry, less angel. I imagine you slighting your whimsy with the punishment of staying still, eyes buried between knuckles and it doesn’t matter that they’re closed or that your glasses are unreachable or that none of this is really happening. I imagine you asking for an inorganic forgiveness from the only one that counts: yourself. And you, as always, are forgiven.

Again, a pause is called for. All of this is my own artifice and no one else’s. This is my reading of your mind reading your life.

I see you sleeping, dreaming of colors you can’t invent awake. I hear your bed breaths, shorter and louder than your upright ones and I notice that you’re pacing yourself better. Last time, you were out there. And my newest theory is that perhaps this is the reason that in the brief conversations of yours and others that I’ve overheard, there’s a newfound wellspokenness to your delivery. The sleeping and the non-actualized color dreaming is fueling your new locution. I am swimming in my own pride of you.