April: bastard daughter of February

chill, damp april. gray veils rushing back in over the sun, as though the sky is embarrassed to have shown it so early. a spatter of rain last night. the asphalt glistens before seeming to suspiciously disappear, except for the sheen from the streetlights. in a surprise verdict, i am sent home early from work. i spend the night lounging in a green stupor before the television. it is all mindless. i investigate the more absurd corners of this glowing world: so-called 'reality' programs, game shows, a truly terrible movie, cartoons, even the news. the news, i find, is the worst of all of it. sensational headlines. although one of them was merited: in our small town, two nights ago, an individual set fire to ten cars over the area of three to four blocks. some of the flames were so intense as to leap to buildings nearby, leaving twenty people homeless and most people (at four in the morning) awake to the shrieking sirens. E. is incredulous: this, all this, the work of one person? apparently he was down the block, setting more fires, as the sirens & lights filled the streets just behind him.

from that story, it's onto another house fire, this one fatal, killing a young man and gravely injuring his friend. from there, a murder, a killing. the weather, which is dramatically rendered in poor, halting, 3-D graphics. there is a wide swath of variegated green rushing across the lower half of the state.

morning: chilly. that kind of filtered gray light that still makes you squint. the air seems thin. i can feel it in my lungs - amidst the cigarette smoke, mucus, and god knows what else.

the cigarette abruptly undergoes a transfiguration. no longer am i holding a paper tube filled with god knows what else, suddenly i am injecting a white syringe deep into my throat. the needle curves, spitting noxious black liquid into the cushiony bottoms of my lungs. i hack & cough as a convulsive result to this grotesque image, and stare for a long time at the ash-end of the thing. a few seconds pass. i watch the smoke curl into the air, nearly invisible. the clouds become god's exhaust. i stub out the cigarette but make no commitments to quitting. just the vague, formless notion.

i watch the cat, curry, a plump patchwork lady, stare at a row of three birds on the curb. she is far enough away to ready herself for the pounce, eyes fixed on her target. the one on the end, i imagine. it hops a little stranger than the other two, looks smaller. the runt, i'm sure. curry's tail is lashing, deliberately, side to side. her hind legs are tensing - i can see the minute twitches of instinct running electric through her muscles -

i blink, and there's a brown dog, large, barking madly, skittering against a leash, and curry has bolted backward in a contortion of adrenalin, somewhere up & beyond me, to cower & quiver up on the second story porch. the dog is straining against the collar, chuffing, spittle at his jaws. i, being on the top of the food chain, can't help but laugh. there is no sign of the three gray birds on the curb. the dog's owner, or at least, the woman on the other end of the leash, is getting on in age, chiding the dog at the same time as reining him in. we make amiable chatter for a moment. i fill her in on the moment before. she tells me what happens from her perspective, which i imagine is a sudden jolt in the arms, followed by a stumble, a regaining of balance, and then that brief tug-o-war.

she moves on. curry is nowhere to be seen.

oh, yeah, and the IRS took my tax refund to pay for some of that, like, 20k i owe to various loan-places. i figure if i keep this up, say, at $250 a year in taxes withdrawn, i can pay off my debts in my eightieth year.

ha!

last night & this morning, and not in that order

honey crunches of oats, the cereal, invaded our town this morning. congregated in mustard yellows and ketchup reds, the hard-hatted purveyors of breakfast milled around and accosted passersby; vendors with a mission. two were astride segways, upon which were attached two larger-than-life cereal boxes and, on the front, a spoon filled with plastic representation of their product. i was approached by one of these segway-riding crazies who held outstretched a miniature sample. i thought to myself that within a three or four block radius i would see a lot of those boxes, empty, on the side of the street, or languishing in bins. flash-saturation.

i accepted the box and she continued on her way. someone with a bullhorn was yelling "honey crunches of oats!" a giant mascot of their logo was parading around the square, taking pictures with various locals.

waited in front of the library with music in my ears and a cigarette in my mouth, thinking idly about how i take myself too seriously. nick drake's "fruit tree" came on as i saw K. and S. crossing the street toward me. both in sunglasses. a conversation ensued, cordial and relaxed. as always, i found my legs trembling and my voice wavery, even though i know K. pretty well and have on more than one occasion had occasion to talk seriously with her. i know S. as well, but only on the edges. the sunglasses made it difficult to read their expressions. poker-players who aren't playing poker. maybe it's just me.

we talked briefly about bees, a new band they started (Garden of Weeden) - K's phone rang & S. and i talked about the weather - language, living situations, town news - then the library gates opened and in we went. i scored a copy of dostoevsky's 'the idiot' at the free book counter, and S. a copy of what looked like non-fiction regarding Communist China.

that's what happened this morning.

>>

this is the way summer begins. suddenly the wind is no longer cold and walking from place to place isn't like trying wildly to defeat Zeno's paradoxes. from time to time, a blustery day: the leaves from the park skitter madly across the street, a strange, brittle diaspora.

last night, i cleaned up - swept the dust out of my room, sneezed a lot, reorganized things. stacked books neatly. indexed columns of old notebooks, again gave thought to collating them. nearly stripped the plastic off the window, but restrained myself. made dinner.

this banal list of things accomplished ... desiderata around the edges. things i do to distract myself from things.

saw a woman today, a mother, with her child and her lover by the monument, climbing up its grassy mini-knoll. saw her pick her child up and dust him off, brusquely, and setting him back down. the child obliged by putting his feet down where she stood him. i thought of him as a cat, as Gato, one of our housecats, who acts counter to anything you want him to do once he's picked up, and especially scrabblesome when you set him down. i wondered if that was the difference between the two: the trust and faith of the child as opposed to the escape instinct of the cat.

i thought that maybe someday i'd like a child. i heard a familiar clock ticking arrhythmically in the back of my skull, but couldn't figure out its morse code.

i am both nervous and excited to see what happens next. i'd say 60% nervous. 30% the other way.