::Saturnine

I dig my way out from the rubble and it’s another moonless night.  Just like that, it’s been a month.  Full cycle, full circle, while I was tumbling among the stones and the lava, grinding bones to dust and bleeding myself dry over the roots of the mountains.  Even now, the earth is trembling as I pull myself free, dripping and limp.  The night breeze hesitates, as if the stars aren’t quite sure what to do with me.

My guts are wound up tight, feeling full of stones.  Knotted-up knuckles and torn claws from all this digging and fighting.  Eyes dragging down through the bottom of my skull.  My back feels like I’m about to grow a new set of wings, all clutched up and swollen.  I’m weary and maudlin.  One foot, two, I stand and shake off the dust.  Reach my hands up and stretch, and feel my spine creak, ominous.  I don’t grow wings.  So I start walking home.

—

Nothing is going to change at work, and I need to come to terms with that.  I am a good follower, until the day that I perceive that my leadership is doing a piss-poor job.  Which, sadly, is the case.  Then I become ambitious and hateful.  Sarcastic and angry at the garbage I’m forced to deal with.  Hopping mad and ready to take over and Do It Right.  So now I’m grinding my teeth to nubs, ready to pick up the sword and lead the charge — and find that nobody listens to the blowing horns, nobody sees the waving standards.  I have proven myself invisible and powerless, for the time being.  It’s time to swallow the medicine and collect my paycheck.  It will be years before the ship takes enough water to sink.

But for now I’ve got myself all hackles-up hissing and snapping like a disturbed snake at every little motion.  Which isn’t good for anyone.  I’m closer to throwing things through windows and taking a swing at the bum asking me for change INSIDE THE GROCERY STORE, jeezus why do I shop here.  

—

Nights I should be writing here, I’m spending maudlin about times gone by.  Choices made and opportunities missed, people whose faces I’ve begun to forget and whose voices I can’t quite recall.  Those who have left me and married others, those who have left the country to live on the other side of the world.  One or two who deliberately disappeared, not just from me but everyone.  And all the rest who just faded away and stopped calling.  Some whose names I’ve even forgotten.  I’ve been clicking on old notes.  System Message:  Diary does not exist.  A little pang of loss, all over again.  Who were you really?  What happened to you?  How did your story end?

I had a close friend who up and left town a few years ago, and didn’t tell anyone.  No warning, no news, no forwarding address.  Even his family didn’t know where he went.  He left behind an ex-wife and a very young son.  I never was able to wrap my head around why he might have done that.  I think I’m a little closer to understanding that lure, that wild desire to shuck off all the baggage and chains we willingly accepted, not knowing the weight that would come to bear.  To run free and lonely and screaming into the darkness, thinking we’ll recapture what we had in our youth.  Which is also a lie. 

Chewing on all the decisions left unmade and paths left untrodden.  Things I’ve never done and May Never, now.  Too old and fat and tied down and frightened.  Trying to accept it and simultaneously trying to wish it all away in a hail of tears like my toddler son:  fists in my eyes, sobbing "nononononono".   (It doesn’t work for him, either, and he’s just trying to avoid taking a bath.)  I want to see Europe.  I want to know heartstopping, maddening love at first sight again, even if it makes me burn down everything.  I want to see Bad Religion live in concert.  I want a reckless, passionate blowjob just one more time.  I want to pull more aunts and uncles and cousins from thin air and have a large family.  I want my father back, you son of a bitch.  I want to be famous for something ridiculous.  I want to see the Pacific Ocean.  I want to conquer the Red Men of Mars, bloody sword in hand.  I want to fuck in the grass in the middle of a summer thunderstorm.  I want to ride a horse through woods deep and dark.  I want polyamory and a government that I don’t have to fear.

I find that in times like this, it’s like my wiring pulls two ways.  An even more slavish duty to hearth and family and labor.  And an even stronger lust for reckless abandon.  Yearning for escape, that pressure valve.  I find myself fantasizing ever more about a weekend in Vegas with an anonymous lover.   Of escape across the sea, or of time travel.  Of double lives or living forever or pushing the button to end the world.

I powerfully miss marijuana this week.  I was never a huge pothead – I experimented a little in my twenties, was extremely casual about it, and quit for good when I got a job at the airport (where I could get tested on a regular basis).  Haven’t touched it since.  But the reason I miss it is because, in times like this when I’m all curled around my stress, all  hisses and scratches and fussing and anger, it helped uncoil all that nonsense and give me a couple hours of giggles and nonsense.  Made me feel spacey and creative and carefree.  Without actually fixing any of my problems.  It gave me a genuine mental/emotional break that I’m not getting now., and made it easier to deal with things and people that suck.  A good, solid toke would relax all that territorial growliness about my job, at least.  This I know.

—

Also, toddler vomit is possibly the most disgusting substance known to man.  If we could somehow decree that all bullets splattered you with toddler vomit when fired, we’d have an end to war.    ….Also to deer hunting, but you take the good with the bad, I guess.

—

Coming closer to knowing where to start with my novel idea.  It’s an elusive bitch but I am thinking more about it as the weather gets warmer.  I still don’t know my hero and that’s the biggest sticking point, I think.  I can’t ramble about how the world is broken unless I have someone to ride, to show it to all of you.

Until then, I’m doing this and you’ll like it.