GSTO

I just spent nine minutes and twenty two seconds of my life perched atop a moisture warped glulam smoking a cigarette and staring at an old rusty storage bin that’s occupied one of the parking spaces in the lot behind my office for the past five years, two months, and six days. Trying to figure out what in the hell the letters G.S.T.O. stencilled on the bin’s face could possibly stand for.

I didn’t even realize I was doing it until I came to after taking a drag that was no longer there.

It’s a bitch of a thing, time? And how it passes whether or not a person is present? Thought about it for a few, biding those precious six minutes I had to spare before my next scheduled conference call with some lawyers concerning a project we completed over two years ago (and have not yet been paid for…).

I haven’t worn a watch in over five years, but damn if I couldn’t still hear those handful of seconds ticking away.

And that thought led me to the next one – how the whole of today has been wholly different from the whole of yesterday and the day before. Holes in time as it lapsed and sped up and dried out and slowly simmered, days and nights sucked into a bottomless black hole, only to be made whole in a clearing by the creek that makes its home on an Indian Reservation in La Jolla.

I laughed at the irony, sitting Indian style on an old pile of fabricated wood, thinking about where I am now – a stark contrast to where I was less than twenty four hours ago, body slack and barefoot, knees slightly bent and face turned sunward. Borrowing the comfort of an old large rock from the swiftly flowing creek for the purpose of enjoying an ice cold beer and something of a home grown cigar that wasn’t at all a cigar with two of my finest and one true love.

I don’t know how many hours the four of us passed that way – alternating between water fights and adventuring and just being present up there on that rock, listening to all the things we couldn’t take with us back home. Or sitting around the camp fire, watching as the sauce from my spaghettios slowly started to boil in the tin can amongst the hot coals, not really saying anything, thinking how great it feels when you don’t feel it necessary to fill the silence with unnecessary bullshit and white noise. When closing your eyes feels whole instead of empty.

Where there are no letters stencilled onto the sides of things for my head to worry about.

And the most pressing of matters is whether or not our shoes will be dry in time to get them wet again.

And they always are.