Category: Diary

Out tonight with JT and G3, to the brauhaus with a aging German band playing Elvis covers, of course it was hard not to think of G1 when I first met her and a Montero with a bumper sticker that cried out “recognize me.” This city has swallowed me up this weekend, like telling me of what I have been missing in a city all of my life. It has not been too hot, or cold, or anything. It is just a city, and of the best variety.

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Porch view (click photo to enlarge)

Sitting here in this room at J and S’s, and they have gone to bed as S stayed an extra night and is leaving for her trial early in the morning. Tonight will be the last time that they see each other for about a month, and I wonder how they do it. I used to flip out at G going away for a weekend! Outside I was staring over the sky that is dark now, but this afternoon had the most brilliant sunset. J called us outside just to witness it. We probably should have headed up to the roof.

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Sitting in the Atlanta airport awaiting a flight to Chicago where I will have a date with destiny and the course of my whole life could change – for better or worse I do not know. Getting here was an adventure. It involved a skittish emphysemic cab driver named Gerald Cody, who seemed like a really nice guy, but couldn’t help from going over the lane separator lines and quickly jerking the Atlanta Lenox Ford back into the correct lane. Upon dropping me off at the airport, he told me to have fun at the party in Chicago, and to try not to burn the city down. I didn’t tell him of any party – I guess I did tell him about Chicago, but I do not remember – so I guessed he was referring to the White Sox win in the World Series last night. I told him I would put out any fires that I saw.

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It’s nearing 2 AM and game 3 of the World Series is still on the TV. I am still awake watching and trying to get all of my financial information entered into a budgeting and accounting program so taxes and keeping track of expenses will be easier. If you really know me, this doesn’t sound like me at all. With the medication making it so I require less sleep, and the wagon making it so I have extra sober time on my hands, and because I need things to do to keep my mind off the obvious situational difficulties i am having, I do things like getting on top of my finances. I also keep my fingernails pruned and I am reading no less than 5 books concurrently right now.

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I thought I was doing alright coming home this afternoon. I’ve had a day that was pretty good, not too much depression or melancholy, managed to really throw myself into some work that needed to be done. Was looking forward to having a willing night at home alone until I arrived at home, and coming along the sidewalk by the side of the house, I remembered that the area where the azaleas now sit empty, was where earlier in the late spring or early summer we had weeded together when we got back from dinner. We were quiet and intent, only talking to figure out how to dispose of the refuse. G was so happy out there just pulling those weeds with ugly stalks a pretty, but tiny, flowers on them. It seemed the more that we pulled the more there was.

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Out this morning
the malignant gardener
moves the bin to the curb
and straightens his shirt.
Later he will do a little
pruning of this and snipping
of that until it is right
or he is tired.
I sit in the Florida room
putting out a cigarette in
an ashtray that cannot let
one in without letting one out.
The gardener will later turn
into a bird. It will not
be many days now, as they are
turning cold enough to crack bones.
I will later turn into a bird as well,
an autumn bird, and will migrate,
this nest left behind, and flight
and warmth and motion will become home.
It’s been restless
being man lately.
The pleasures of the bird
have appeal.
Success, then, is that when you are
gingerly nudged from that nest, like the
cigarettes in the ashtray, your
wings will work before you hit the ground.
On the other hand, we must
continue to feel failure
in our hearts, even as all the
world lays its garlands on us.
What does the bird know
that we don’t? Or the gardener
when he turns into that sparrow?
What does he then know?
What can that cigarette butt there
teach us? Or the end of
these days? Or ours? And, where
will we winter this year, or next?
To be a bird, maybe,
get to the end of it all,
a good son, a good friend,
a good husband, and father,
And nothing more.

Ah, day 40. The amount of time it took for a full inundation, and I had an inundated weekend. You would have thought my eyes were the cause of the flood. I couldn’t seem to keep it together. I fell apart at every juncture. I guess that is always the danger when you feel you have gotten stronger. J says just mark it up as a bad day, or a weekend in this case.

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It’s all gonna be alright,
breathe fucker, breathe!
Ooooohhhhm!
It’s all gonna be alright.
I am a bird and there is
no land and no nothing,
and I will fly on knowing
it’s all gonna be alright,
and on and on.

Up too late again. This is how it goes these days. After the break up I could not wait to get to sleep. I would sleep anywhere at any time if given 5 minutes just to relax. Now, I have not had but about 8 hours of sleep over the last two nights. I have been feeling mostly good until today. I spent much of it by myself. I went tonight to a movie and music festival by myself, but it only stood to remind me of how alone and lonely I have been all day. I have gotten used to weekdays, but I have far fewer Saturdays – many of them spent other places – and it takes some getting used to when you awake alone and realize that the rest of the day will be much like that. I don’t know. I want some sort of relief and I cannot figure out how to get it. And all of this after having a great day yesterday. I was strong, forward-looking and hopeful. I don’t know where it all went today. Listening to sad songs and reading way to much good, but sad, poetry probably doesn’t help the cause much. I think the medication is part of the late nights. I want to fall asleep right now and sleep a very long time. Maybe the morning will bring a new reason. We’ll see.

It was on that last night,
before I took you out to the truck,
and before mother’s litany
of photos from the Northeast,
and before the phone call,
that phone call,
later the next day,
and even before the final foot rub
for my parents, and all the world,
to see, as we sat on that
love seat, and I believed
that being there may indeed
make the love possible –
you and I were in the bedroom
one last time (why
were we there?) and
I asked would you sleep
here with me again before
I have to leave this place and
you said, “yes,” and I fell for it, and
later we kissed and said goodbye
for the final time out by your truck,
and that too was before
I knew what the next day would bring,
and now I sit here in this bed, and
I haven’t washed the sheets or made
the bed since then, and it stays wrinkled
and in the space where my body usually lays
there’s an indentation, and where yours laid
there is a chalk outline
surrounding a lone pillow,
and where my heart lies,
restless most nights,
there’s a chalk outline
around it too.