FOMO ya ya

Ok, no choice but to get over my case of the yips and get back to screaming at the Dragon. 55 pages today and I just have to stop. It’s like running marathons. Started watching a documentary about Paradise California. So sad. Just go downstairs and work a little bit more on your weird version of immortality and you can go back up to sit under the electric blanket for the last 20 minutes until Big Daddy comes home from molding, moldering. young minds…

***

One day I went to the place where I’d grown up and almost missed the street. Even the house had been remodeled and reduced until there was very little to be nostalgic about. A giant maple tree across the street had been raised. The giant fields of raspberry brambles were now a low-income housing development. The horse pasture was a mobile home park. The old U.S. Bank was a really good Mexican restaurant but the old grocery store where I used to be able to buy anything was subdivided into a failing strip mall.

There was a new library and also a new fire station in place of the cramped City Hall building they used to cohabitate. Most were upgrades but there was nothing left to suggest home or anything like it was in that place. The old Car Vue drive-in theater was now Fred Meyer, a cinema complex, and a car wash had been built across the parking lot.

There was even a Starbucks staffed by tall well-fed native-born children or grandchildren of my long-gone migrant neighbors. These were beautiful accent-free hipsters who proved their families had come to the right place and did the right things. I could stand there and grin stupidly at these embodiments of the American success story but there was nothing familiar. Trying to explain why they made me happy would only make me weird. I didn’t belong there anymore.

***

Once I tried to retrace the course of my childhood journeys to Fernhill. Dismayed not to be able to find the way I discovered later from the Internet that the old Grange and burned down years ago. Find a new home there is no way back.

***

I gave them away, the tomes full of bones and prose that gave me joy when I could not go and do the things that inspired me. Diversions at the time that’s all. Never the one to look back I left them on cluttered shelves at some cabin I cannot even identify now. How many places have I been? Enough to start to forget and now I want to try again to “get it” when I thought I understood before but somehow missed nearly everything. How long before my words leave me and the book I cast-off as a done deal on the checklist of my human struggle is new to me because I don’t remember how it goes, because I didn’t pay attention? What made me rush to see the ending of the thing and not realize there is no done deal so long as we have the ability to claim our territory in that unfinished part of life? What comes after will not bother us at all but right now is pretty seriously important and how many “right nows” have I squandered?