A bit behind the regular schedule, but these things happen. Living life, being alive, and such.

And like some belligerent steam engine not knowing the fuel has long since run out, onward, barreling forth, we shall go. Not much more than an hour until this self-imposed deadline. And as the creator of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, and Zaphod Beeblebrox once said, or wrote- ‘I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.’

There was a tune that finished just as I was pulling back into the humble abode from which these literary travesties occur. What my daughter and I would call a ‘perfect timing’. When a song finishes perfectly coinciding with the arrive at whatever destination you’d aimed at. One of the small and yet magnificent little symbols we shaved apes make for ourselves.

This evening, it was a song I have loved for ages, performed by a great many folks of vast musical magnitude, in addition to those more insignificant (including yours truly).

So, the line, right, that’s what I was getting at?

The tune closes as such-

‘These days I sit on cornerstones, and count the time in quartertones until ten, my friend. Don’t confront me with my failures, I had not forgotten them’.

And as the melodic prose suggests, I have not. Perhaps, at times, I masochistically cling to my own failures. An overinflation of my own ego and ability, maybe. Thinking myself more able and earnest than I might actually end up being, or have been, or will ever be. But for all the good deeds I may have been part of or privy to, those are often not what echoes through my heart and mind. It is the failures. The faults and fluctuations away from the ideals and principles this fabricated sense of self implies inward that must be my path, or destiny, or fate, or doom, or what have you. That any deed of benevolence gets droned and drowned out by all the times that falling short was the lightest consequence.

And as a creature of this earth, and this hemisphere’s sectional shifting seasons- this particular time of year always echoes down the halls of the brief eternity I call an existence. Ask me a decade and a half ago, I’d be brimming with the hope associated with an able and overindulgent young man. Keen enough to dream, and dumb enough to believe. Ask me a year ago, I’d tell you I was pulling myself, near limbless, from an existential crevasse, blind to the coming tide that would only open up the earth from beneath my ass, plunging your humble narrator into depths of despair that I am still reeling from. The kind of devastation that might take a lifetime to deal with, and still always miss and wish for a life gone, gone. Gone.  

Or, it might be because this is the last full moon of winter. And that I still, or inescapably, persuade my being by celestial entities, as this dreamer species has done for eons. That in the hours long since the sun set herself on the other side of the globe, our little rock’s sole natural satellite shines with borrowed light damn near bright enough to cast almost pigmentation upon the snow and ice covered crust. So much so, that it almost seems to be alight with the near conception of the daytime coloration. The kind of solemn and shining surface that would invoke a madman to turn off his headlights to see if the lunar illumination is enough to allow navigation of an automobile down some empty rural roads. Not that I would ever do something like that. Such madness would never occur to me, surely.

But this blanket of frozen water is receding. By next week, it will likely be gone. And into the ether of in between we all get cast. Barren still, all the botanical life brimming and about to burst forth with life rejuvenated or anew, while the freezing façade of elegance melts and turns into immeasurable mud and muck. Fermenting and feeding what is yet to be, while clumping upon the soles of my shoes. Perhaps the same amount of carbon as a diamond, with not even a pitiable fraction of the pressure necessary.

What a blowhard and long-winded way to talk about the fading frost upon the eve of vernal revisitations, am I right?

Perhaps, metaphysically, doing little more than grasping at straws with strings of semi-pretty words?

Another line, from another song, from the same drive down the roads leading to this home.

‘Do you know, you can always change your mind? Maybe I will, in time. Once we understand, that no one understands at all’.

I’ve been ignoring the world, for the last few hours. A luxury and privilege that not everyone can afford. One that I cannot entirely afford myself, but geopolitics at least allows the slow burn of consequences. For now, at least. Not the case for a seemingly growing number of longitudes and latitudes across this globe, as we seem to keep finding vicious and intolerable differences between each other, always falling short of seemingly understanding that we are all of the same subliminally stupid stock. That the preconceived and reinforced differences are mostly arbitrary, if not entire of the artifice of our collective minds and desperate cultural disparities. That we keep seeing ourselves as irrevocably different, and yet, according to the classifications derived from dead Mediterranean languages- we are all the same lot, stuck on this spinning rock, for what amounts to a very short span of time.

Same team, right down to family and genus and such, whether we choose to admit that or not. And even among those other organic beings we share the slate with, we are all still so fickle and finite that all the jingoism and theocracies and such are all so easily seen as fabrications, were the lens of time allowed enough zoom for a regularly broader perspective.

     But tell that to the folks living among still smoldering rubble. Or the victims of the great many monsters among us, perhaps forgone in their own humanity. Tell that to the grieving mother or child or teacher or lover. Tell that to the folks living in loss that they may never comprehend as all the vicious and bottom feeding emotes and motivations consume whatever is left of their humanity, fating only the perpetuation of the situations that cast them in their own righteous roles of villain. What was it that the old, old Mesopotamian monarch said? An eye for an eye? And what was it that someone else said, however it ends up being attributed? That if we keep going about taking eyes for eyes lost, soon enough we won’t be able to see anything at all. And maybe that more of where we’re at than we realize. Or, would like to admit.

     But even with the wrongs cast upon me, I wish to gauge out not a single eye. Could be a professional understanding, knowing what non-cinematic gore actually looks, and often times, smells like. And for all the malevolent incidents and accidents my own action and will has brought about, I think I’d like to keep my own ocular vessels, hoping to attempt, at minimum, to learn something from it.

     But it could be I am zooming out in response to some privileged perspective. Because my evening was far from terrible. It was filled with beauty and the antithesis of being both benign and malignant. It contained harmonies and play and soothing. It was filled with poetry in melodic action, and sonic physics resonating throughout my physical being. And, as you can clearly tell, dear reader- it has since been filled with the crafting of words. Something that I recall from bringing up last week, I am certain is something that if not destiny, is at least one of my benevolent addictions.

     A soul, that I continue to get to know, said something profound. I wonder whether she thought of it this way or not, but I trust that it arrived from the genuine part of her heart and mind. She said, and I am paraphrasing, before she started to sing a song-

     ‘Getting back to songwriting, instead of worrying what kind of songwriter I am trying to be.’

     Elegant and direct, for sure. And, reminds me of something my sworn brother once said.

     ‘The only true metric of an artist, is making art.’

     So, as writer, this is my bare minimum. There will be more, as long as this little blood pump and electric skull meat can keep on keepin’ on. And maybe, even beyond that.