Day Twenty-One and the Step Brothers

Hope is a comedically unfunny thing.

Throughout the month of November, mostly without wanting to… and this is what happens when you feel committed to something and then, halfway through it, you’re wishing you’d never even heard of the thing… you begin to confront feelings inside yourself that you, till now, had successfully ignored. 

You’re forced confront those feelings, because the compression in this one month of time forces you, again, not because you want to.  Instead, it’s like you’re living in that familiar moment, where a parent will lock two feuding step brothers in a room together, until the two of them either break their undersized bunk beds, or resolve whatever conflict there has been between them, presumably for the good of the entire family.

And that is hope.  Hope that there is resolution in any conflict.  But like I said, hope is a comedically unfunny thing.  Also, just to clarify, because I’m sure those who got the movie reference want to know, my three favorite Will Ferrell movies are, in order: Land of the Lost, Semi-Pro, and Elf.

You will NOT find the movie Step Brothers named among them.

Unlike the majority of movie-goers, I don’t believe confrontation is funny.  I feel movie confrontation, fully and completely, in my trauma-soaked bones.  And I despise those feelings associated with confrontation, in all their forms.  Not only in our more accustomed violent images in film, but also, in the comedic. 

Those who know me well know THIS about me, very well.

So when I say I do not like the feelings I experience during annual November Blog Month, let me explain it this way.  Find yourself the most emotionally-triggering movie you have ever seen.  Now watch it for 30 straight days.  At the same time, listen to all your well-meaning friends tell you that “You’re just wrong about that movie”, or, “Okay, it’s triggering for YOU, but its ONLY 30 times in 30 days.”  Or my favorite, “I’m sorry IF YOU feel that way about it, but don’t make the rest of us feel bad just because YOU DO.”

November Blog Month is my Step Brothers. 

That one month every year when I must confront my biggest feelings, every day, for 30 straight days, no matter what it does to me.  And, by the way, after doing this six times out of the last nine years, and feeling this way about it every time, I’m writing this to tell MYSELF that I own these feelings, as mine, and mine alone, every time I enter this writer’s space. 

As of tomorrow, I will have 9 more metaphorical showings of Step Brothers to sit through, as I experience the undiluted dread of that daily confrontation in my soul.  I’ll decide what I’m going to do with it, some other time.  Until then…

Talk to you tomorrow.

Day Nineteen and the ASMR Fireplace

Here is a still photo, taken from the streaming video of a Holiday Fireplace, with all the crackling goodness of an open flame, but with none of that pesky creosote that ruins everything later. Imagine the sound of wood, breaking apart in the heat of this two-dimensional similitude of wintry satisfaction.

I did, and although it would be necessary for me to upgrade my WordPress account to accommodate for you the fullness of the streaming video, at least allow me this semi-fulfilling image on your screen, that you might, along with me, feel just a smidge of cheer, as November works its way ever-closer to the winter solstice. I’ve been watching this since before noon, while trying to find the words to write my feelings today.

I can’t find them.

And that’s okay.

We all have a lot on our minds besides blog posts right now. Some days, there is nothing inside us ready to come out except a good old fashioned scream. But I don’t think I can do that today, what with the maybe after 62 years on this earth, I’m finally suffering my first series of migraine headaches and all.

Therefore, today I have kept silent.

So in lieu of that noise, I went with the soft splitting of wood against tender licks of orange flame. Hot toddy and roasting chestnuts, optional. Though I did have a piece of pumpkin pie, avalanched beneath a mountain of whipped cream. I was going to try writing something personal and deeply moving on the topic of how “Joy sustains the revolution”. But I just don’t have that in me now. Maybe tomorrow, maybe never. It’s probably enough that this quote is being given a place in my head, at the very same time that my head can’t handle anything more real than a cold fireplace on a flat screen TV. One more thing to give place to, between now, and the next thing I’ll write in November.

I mean, I found the joy in that slice of pumpkin pie, so there’s that, right?

Talk to you tomorrow.

Day Eighteen and the Birds

(Artwork by Michele Thomas)

Birds

•

Let the birds come. 

On the gray-eyed mist of May,

with flower’s breath,

through rusting screens of

second story window panes,

facing east and waiting for the sun.

Let the birds come.

To sing the blanket from my shoulders,

and greet the bottom of

my empty morning cup. 

Wanting more, but nothing more than this. 

The place where stories run.  Let the birds come.

•

(for Chele)

Day Seventeen and the Stream (of Consciousness)

Day Seventeen and the Stream (of Consciousness)

As I sit in my comfy blue recliner, with my laptop open, Donnie Darko plays in the background on my writing room TV.

The sound is low.  So low that it isn’t a part of the pain I’ve had in my skull since… well, this pain started yesterday, with the borrowed dog we’ve been sitting since Sunday, and a particularly piercing bark that I have never in my life of knowing dogs, heard before. 

So, have you ever imagined what it would feel like to have a tiny buzz saw cut a straight line from the bottom left base of your skull, upward, then over your head and down, to just above your left eye socket, then string together dozens of teeny-tiny firecrackers, and set them into your freshly-cut skull-groove, so that all of them can be lit one-by-one and exploded, for six consecutive hours, while at the same time editing a blog post on an otherwise beautiful November day?

Yeah, me either. 

Until yesterday.

Now I sit, in the same comfy blue recliner, with the same laptop open, almost exactly like yesterday, with the pain diminished just enough to appreciate the deadness in my brain, after a yesterday, and yesternight, of over the counter pain meds, followed by an overnight of nonsensical dreams that, to my meat-tenderized frontal lobe, must’ve made, in the moment, made sense. 

It was almost 8 am, when the full-daylight of morning woke me from my final dream, after a shitty 8 hours of sleep.  I sat up, pulled on what was left of the clothes I didn’t fall asleep in the night before, and gently moved myself from the edge of the bed to the bathroom, then from bathroom to the kitchen, and finally, to the coffee maker on the counter next to the fridge.  My morning routine, set in motion twelve hours earlier, like always, so I don’t have to endure the self-shame of spending two extra minutes scooping coffee from a can in the morning. 

As I completed these actions, a thought hits me. 

What if someone unfamiliar with the kind of headache I was still in the afterglow of… say, an extraterrestrial being unfamiliar with the lengths a species such as ours goes to, every day, to feel, you know, like this species we already are, but without caffeine… were to ask me how I was still functioning in the aftermath of said debilitating headache from the day before, even prior to the coffee said human was going to consume hits the chemical receptors in that still hurting human’s brain?

(My apologies for the complex construction of that sentence.  Apparently my red-underscore spellcheck liked it just fine.)

My response to the extraterrestrial in my kitchen, as the coffee slowly dribbles from basket to pot, would’ve been just as complex, and though it would’ve done nothing to help human/extraterrestrial relations, it would’ve explained it perfectly for a species as simplistically complex as ours,

“What about getting hit with a baseball bat makes no sense to you? 

Now I’d like to tell you that this was the moment when I woke up from that last dream that make no sense.  I’d like to tell you that this wasn’t an ill-thought out blog post with a strong beginning, a weak middle, and no ending at all.  I’d even like to tell you that I’m a famous writer and, because of that, I’m going to be a contestant on the next season of Dancing with the Stars.  But what I’m really going to tell you is, before I could finish whatever kind of blog post this was giving us its best attempt to be, THAT was the exact moment that my head stopped hurting. 

So I stopped writing.

Mid-stream-of-consciousness.

Because, after the last 24 hours I’ve had, now that it feels like that borrowed dog headache of mine has finally moved on, I’m going to make me a snack, watch me some General Hospital, and enjoy what’s left of this day that’s almost over.  Maybe something less painful will come to me between now and then, and I’ll share it with you.  But in the meantime…

Talk to you tomorrow.

Day Sixteen is Seasonal (part 2)

Seasonal (part 2)

The angle of the sun is wrong.

I used to explain to friends that I hated when the seasons changed, and summer would turn to fall, simply because, in my estimation, “The angle of the sun is wrong.”  Almost no one understood how in-touch with such things I could be, having grown up in a world of asphalt and concrete, tract houses and freeways, with the sounds of cars and trucks drowning out the birds, and most days, even the wind in the trees.  What no one understood was that, as a child of summer, and with the vastness of a west-facing shoreline only minutes from my front door, that I grew up, almost Druid-like, with a “bonus sense” for things like angles of the sun, and the coming of the morning light.

It still lives inside of me, in this place that, though it is an “island”, more resembles the inland of the San Fernando Valley to me.  The only way I recognize it as an island is to drive the 45 minutes or so, from the middle of it, where I live, to the north shore, or “The Sound”, which faces Connecticut, or the other way; to the south shore, which is the westernmost edge of the wide open Atlantic.  It’s not like where I’m from.  No hills or overlooks, which gradually descend from the inland heights, to the 200 mile-long stretch of beaches that run from Malibu to the Southern Border.

I remember my first late summer here, in 2022, when out of nowhere, I caught myself thinking those same words, “The angle of the sun is wrong.”  Even though it was like 90 degrees outside, even though the shirt on my back stuck to me like I was locked inside a sauna, I could still see that the autumnal equinox was damn near on top of us.  It’s like I start to see the whole world in sepia-tone, and the shadows, still hot like a sidewalk in August, seem unnaturally thicker than they should be, before late September. 

Which brings me back to why I’m wanting to take a two-hour nap at 5:03 pm, because I really don’t know.  Blame my advanced age?  Blame the fact that, though I have worked at every hour of the day and night, now that I’m on the government cheese, I hate sleeping in past sunrise, just like an old person?  Hell, blame my Druid ancestors, all I know right now is, this is the first time something Seasonal is having its “Affect” on me, to the point where it feels a little like a Disorder. 

And I’ll let all my friends, who are readers, know just how this turns out, again.  AFTER November Blog Season is past; when the shortest, darkest days fulfill themselves in the longest, darkest nights.  At the height of winter, when I make snow angels again, and wearing tee shirts while I do it has had its way with me, again.  But now, every hour of every day is the same.  Every hour is a writing hour, until the next post… and the next… is done.  Just as this two-part post is.

Done.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Day Fifteen is Seasonal (part 1)

Seasonal (part 1)

I begin to yawn at 5:03 pm. 

This is the first sign that nothing is as it was in the past.  That is, as it was in my past.  This is my second autumn in the east.  My second, colder than I’d known before, darker earlier because the angle of the sun makes it feel like I live just beneath the North Pole, approach of winter. 

It’s really not cold, yet.  Not even in the very early morning, when the red-orange leaves on the ground are frosted, is it cold enough for me to wear anything more than a tee shirt, above a pair of sweatpants, when the need sometimes arises to walk outside with my first morning coffee.  Oh, and slippers.  Not fucking UGGs, mind you, just bedroom slippers. 

On Eyewitness News every day, anchor Liz Cho never misses the chance to tell viewers how “cold it is out there” before handing it over to meteorologist Lee Goldberg, who politely reminds the audience that it’s really a lot closer to late spring weather than it is an early winter, but he can’t convince Liz.  All I know is, having spent more than 60 years in Southern California, this isn’t cold.  Last winter, my first winter in New York, I made snow angels on the same front lawn where I found this morning’s autumn leaves all frosty.  Just like last winter, I was also only wearing a tee shirt, above a pair of sweatpants, with my feet in just a pair slippers.

And we know it’s not dark at noon, right?  Also, this is not a graphic novel about vampires in Barrow, Alaska.  At least that’s what I’ve been led to believe.  So what gives with my desire for all the zees, four hours before I turn out the lights?

In my life, I’ve worked all hours of the day, and night, since I got bit by the bug that made me a chronic sufferer of late-stage capitalism, sometime before my eighteenth birthday; when my first adventures on the graveyard shift predated my earliest understanding of the magical properties of coffee.  Nodding off, upright, in a warehouse full of rattan and bamboo, became a normal occurrence for seventeen-year-old, as yet still decaffeinated, Bill, when sleeping all day wasn’t the stigma it might have been, when my years of marriage and child-rearing would make their appearance, a decade-or-so later.

But today, I’m not 17. 

I’ve lived my adventures in, and out of, the light.  Now, there are only so many things I have left that I want to do, and none of them involve dozing off at 5:03 pm.

Next time, the conclusion of, Seasonal.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Day Fourteen and the Old Poem

When They Say Your Margins Are Good



They told me there’d be seasons in New York. 
I began to believe they lied. 

The skies have been gray since I got here. 
That seemed more than fitting. 

I’ve come to this place to die. 
No one knows that yet. 

I no longer ask difficult questions.  
That made the transition easier. 

Holding a grudge is hard when they say your margins are good. 

Doctors tell you what they want you to hear. 
It’s okay that I miss California. 

I want to see snow falling at night. 
Hearing I’m still young is getting old. 

I changed my mind about dying here. 
It isn’t worth the paperwork or the heartache. 

They told me that spring was the best time to move. 
I believe that was also a lie. 



*originally written May 15, 2022*

Day Thirteen and the Hi and Bye

Not every day is our best day.

Some days, no matter what we want to do, it is a day for other things.  Today I drank coffee, I journaled, I made breakfast, I did three weeks of laundry… and then, I did this.

By no means was that ALL I did, but those are the things I can tell you, here.  And I will tell you, all those things… the for you to know parts… and the NOT for you to know parts, were all more important than to write another head-scratcher of a blog post about theoretical physics, or baseball.  Which, actually, both occupy the same universe. 

I mean, have you ever seen a slider come out of a pitcher’s hand at 93 miles-per-hour, rotating at 4,790 revolutions per minute, breaking almost 3 whole feet, downward AND right-to-left, spinning more than 170 times in just the 55 feet from release-point to the ball’s terminus, in the pocket of the catcher’s mitt?

Physics, baby!  What the batter calls straight-up witchcraft, the slowest of slo-mo cameras calls… PHYSICS.

Damn, just when you thought you were gonna miss out on two of my favorite subjects in all the world.  And every bit of it only taking up the space of a November hi and bye.

So with that, I’m headed downstairs to do one more load.  Tee shirts, I think.  And for next time?  Well, I still have coffee.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Day Twelve and Motivation Monday on a Sunday

What is motivation? 

Or in this case, what is MY motivation?  Unlike what passed for motivations in the bygone times, my children are grown, and the days of 30 weekly hours of overtime have given way to government cheese and, by the time New Year’s rolls around, a job that’s just enough to supplement my government cheese, without working too many hours, so that the government cheese industrial complex won’t take any of my monthly supply away from me, because I have some minor ambition for the finer things in what’s left of this life.

All I want for Christmas is a new book in print, and then one more in the next year.  And yeah, if you’re a writer, I know we know dozens of people who seem to give themselves this same gift, every year.  The only difference with me and this gift, and with the motivation to give it to myself for the first time in SIX YEARS since the last time, is…

I really don’t want this gift to suck.

Because with my old motivation, if I had published a book in 2019 or 2020, maybe in 2021 or 2022, hell, even in some part of 2023, I promise you, that book would’ve sucked.  It would’ve been like a gift you gave yourself a generation ago, when neckties were really wide, and Netflix still mailed you DVDs.  It wouldn’t have been something that you, now, should be okay with. And since this is a gift to yourself, you shouldn’t have to lie when you open it and, with a straight face and a fake smile, tell yourself just how much you love it.  Because you don’t.  And you shouldn’t.

Because it sucks.

And if any of you reading this have read anything I wrote between 2018 and the middle of this year, and still insist on telling me that it DIDN’T suck, just know, I’ll always love you.

But that is why today, I’m writing a post about motivation, since I haven’t had enough of it to write something so good that I felt safe letting it go out and play in the daylight, for damn near six years.

That was then, this is now.

So let’s call this Motivation Monday… on a Sunday; just a short blurb of a blog to remind myself that I can feel differently about what I write, and how I write it, and continue on with it, even when the reasons for writing have changed as much as fashion neckwear, or how we get our entertainment.

But I do still miss my stainless steel Motorola Razr.

Talk to you tomorrow.