In the way back and the way back

Dear Diary,

It’s been a long time since my last confession. I have fornicated … poorly. Consumed strong drink  (Chartreuse, that stuff has a kick, diary, and absinthe, it said right in the tasting notes that it numbed the tongue), and a variety of lusting’s and inebriations, maybe I should just get back to ya. Doesn’t seem too hard to be an online catholic, though their notion of assorted lustings might range a bit further afield than mine as in beasts afield.

I was thinking about something ( imagine the loosest sense of thinking then go an octave looser) yesterday that brought me too an odd train of thought. It’s that time of year. I know Yom Kippur isn’t until October 9^th this year, but my personal day of atonement is always Feb 18^th, so my thoughts lean heavily toward maudlin introspection, especially here on the very dark end of my fifties, and so I try to twist them a bit towards the light.

For a few years in the late seventies I found myself in front of one kind of fortune teller or another, and then again in the late eighties. Some were an extension of other sort of intimacies, some were carnies or boardwalk psychics who actually expected money, some were chance encounters. The most interesting of which was a chance encounter, then echoed, years later, by an extension of intimacies. My reason for carny/boardwalk psychics was offering to help them with a better script, they had the nerve to take offense.

That particular incident I’m thinking of wasn’t exactly a chance encounter, it was profound in other ways , and really not all that random. I was hitchhiking down to Tampa Bay to see a friend of mine, and had a bad run of rides from homophobes who ranted religious shit at me and then hinted at whether I’d be interested, Bigots, cheapskates (Who the fuck asks a hitchhiker for money?) and stone cold nutjobs. The latter of which dropped me on some blue highway in the Florida panhandle. Outside of knowing which direction the sun rose in, and, conversely, set in, I was fucking lost and there was no traffic on that road. Hours later I was beat down by the humidity, lack of traffic and lack of food (it’d been two days since I had ate or slept). A couple of black guys pull over in this early fifties station wagon. “ You look hungry and tired son” I nodded and asked where I was. They told me, was not real useful information to me. They offered me something to eat and a place to crash. Usually that sent up red flags. They were nice guys (though if I suppose if they weren’t my death like silence would belie that assumption).

Now in every State in the Union there are little towns far from the keen and mew and not on the maps that you only find if you know you’re going there or if you’re you-ain’t -welcome-here radar is off.  For the life of me I can’t remember the name of the place. These guys lived in this shack in woods with Spanish moss draped over draped over the trees.  There were like four women, A wife for each, something like 10 children, the one guy was dad to some and uncle to others, and dinner on the stove, I got a big plate of … food, good food, not sure I could identify it, and an offer to spend the night, which was really tempting, but it looked like all available space was about to be taken and I was planning on being in Tampa a day prior, not a big deal, but my friends plans had something to do with something. So I began making apologetic sounds and grateful sounds. The matriarch, looked damn old, she said “These two (she used their names, I can’t remember) can get you up to the interstate later, let them get some child loving in first.”  And she gestured to a chair at the kitchen table. I sat in it, she sat across. “let me see your path” (um, I don’t remember any of it verbatim, but I remember the gist) She had this light patois of an accent, a bit of French, a lot of English and some what I think was Seminole, it was honied and warm. She took out something that looked like a medicine bag only unadorned, and old bones with symbols carved in them, oh, yeah, not trying to make them sound exotic, they didn’t want to waste generator gas on light, so I couldn’t see well.

The gist of what she told me was that I was dancing from one world to the next, something like ‘one foot in some high lofty aerie and the other rolling in the mud with the rest of us’ she said it was going to cause me sleepless nights and good fortune, but not good enough to put some aside. I held her hand in both of mine when I left, it was cold so I held it a bit longer, and the two guys took me up to interstate 10. A day later my friend and I were recklessly drunk, she tried jumping on my back, I fell and she broke her foot. I had kind of put the memories of the adventure in the back forty of my memory where the synapses fired nice and slow. Almost ten years later I was seeing this woman who did this energy reading of me, a tangent, I suppose, of reiki. She said almost word for word what the grandmother in Florida had said ‘one foot high in an aerie the other in the muck with the rest of us.’ I suppose I’d remember her words verbatim, and, I’m a pig, her name, but there are hazy shades of shame as to how we left things.

I’m not saying I believe any of that except I really don’t have a cause not to, I’m saying that’s how I twist dark introspection towards the light a bit, otherwise I’d go into all the other guy in another time sort of masturbatory rig-a-ma-role.