She moved without sound in a dark wood

*

Last night I watched a documentary on the fighting in the Chosin resevoir during the Korean War.

You think you know a little bit about horror. About suffering. About the disassembly of the human animal.

Then you listen to these old guys talk about what they went through.

*

The night before, I watched this french movie, Seven Days. A little girl on her way to school goes missing. They find her body later that day. She’d been raped and strangled.

They find the guy who did it a few days later and arrest him.

The father, sick with grief and rage, kidnaps the man from police custody and takes him to an abandoned farm house in the woods and keeps him there for seven days, doing just what you’d want to do to the man.

Or maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe you just think that’s what you’d want. Or maybe you want it more than anything at first, and then, well. Then maybe it’s too late.

Anyway. Quite a meditation on grief and rage and how monsters live among us.

Inside us, even.

*

Meanwhile, I’m still reading The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll. Imagine Cormac McCarthy and Werner Herzog and Joseph Conrad and Garcia-Marquez and Daniel Defoe taking turns writing a story about Don Quixote set in the jungles of South America and the seediest ports of call around the world.

No mules killed yet, but there is criminals tossed from airplanes into the marsh so their bodies bury themselves upon impact, saving time and effort for men who are no longer able to muster the effort it takes to bury the dead. There is pestilence and fever. Corruption corporeal and political, spiritual and philosophical.

There is a wary stance towards both grief and joy, and no expectation of mercy.

And yet a fierceness in the living of each day, the recognition that it is, in the end, an astounding gift of immeasurable worth.

*

And I’m reading Sean Carroll’s book, From Eternity to Here. He’s built on Huw Price’s work in Time’s Arrow and Archimedes Point, and made it a bit more accessible for the lay reader, I think.

I don’t know why I chew on these issues, except that they calm me and they feel like spiritual practice.

I imagine that if I can stretch my mind enough to grasp the entirety of reality as we presently understand it, I….I….

well, I don’t know what.

I only know that it gives me a deep sense of joy to feel my way around the edges of everything, trying to find a way in.

If I could, I’d be a psychonaut. I really would.

What a boor I’d be then.

ha.

*

I miss my wife.

*

Namaste.

***

No. 32

*

Never very good, I’m at my worst without her.

I miss her bad already.

*

Plans:

take the dog for long walks.

take myself for even longer walks.

read more Alvaro Mutis.

wash the floors.

 

eat my liver.

pace.

 

go for another walk.

*

I really am grateful for this stupid life. I got more than most folks, certainly more than I deserve. I don’t want for anything. Okay, I got this idea for a house I want to build, overlooking the sea, with woods and hills behind it, three miles down a dirt road.

But that’s just a wish, not anything I really need.

what I need is to keep my eyes open and to listen to the people close to me so I can love them the way they ought to be loved. So I can give them, not what I think they need, or what I think I need, but what they actually say they need.

 

and I need to take myself out back and kick my ass.

 

I need to be a good friend to myself.

 

*

 

ah, me.

 

*

 

more gnawing the bones, more pacing ahead.

 

 

*

 

 

gggggrrrrrr.

 

 

*

 

namaste.

 

 

***

Crime Scene

 

*

 

I watch a lot of movies about crimes.

 

I read about them.

 

*

 

I study them up.

 

*

 

I was thinking about Dierdre killing her first deer. I was thinking about the animals I’ve put down, those unknown to me and those much closer.

 

I was thinking about the dead folks I have seen, laid out in their slaughter before me.

 

 

I was thinking about them I have had in the box, getting them to tell me why.

 

*

 

 

I was thinking about my own terrible failures.

 

About all the ways I have done it up wrong.

 

*

 

I was thinking about rage and redemption. About loss and blindness and error and wrong.

 

How it is not foreign to us.

 

*

 

I sometimes I mostly feel that I am at the helm of a great wrong, mowing through the innocent of this world. Mowing down the inept and the broken, driving them against the rocks.

 

I feel I am doing it for the even more innocent.

 

*

 

 

And what comfort can there be in such an endeavor?

 

 

*

 

 

Cold comfort, if at all.

 

 

*

 

I am at the helm of a terrible machine.

 

 

Nor would I quit it.

 

 

*

 

 

Here come the rocks.

 

 

*

 

Namaste.

 

***

Waiting for the Ferryman

*

In the book I am reading there is a river leading ever deeper into an ever more malevolent jungle. There is an untrustworthy soldier and a pair of criminals. A drunken captain. An autistic engineer.

Above the lumbering steamer, a rusting, ancient seaplane circles, its engine coughing and intermittently going silent.

Under a canvas shade, a man scribbles notes on ancient bills of lading with the nub of a blue pencil.

Startled by the noise of the low-flying airplane, a flock of parrots erupts from the trees and crosses in front of the steamer.

The man with the pencil knows that all things are provisional and untrustworthy, and that he must keep his wits about him.

*

I am utterly in love with this book.

*

Namaste.

***

Blancett

 

*

 

 

Seriously, what this man is doing.

 

It makes me want to howl from my ridge across the valley to where he might be, or howl the more because the ridge has never known him.

 

 

 

The Pugilist’s Daughter

*

It is saturday.

I ain’t going back to work for a week.

Yippie-skippy.

*

I ordered The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis after reading this post on biblioklept. (ps- i like this blog a lot.)

I am eager for it to arrive.

 

(Okay, update, it got here today. I swear to GOD i’ve never been so enamored, so undone, so upswept, by a work since I read Cormac McCarthy’s border trilogy, and this, this has me on my knees.

 

I don’t want ever to finish it and I am on page three.)

*

What is happening? I am listening to the grandbaby gurgling and singing to himself. The woman is wrapping ancient japanese papers over some beads she’s been making in the kitchen. The Wild Woman of Borneo is bustling back and forth, looking for something.

I don’t know what.

And I am here, typing away.

*

I need some breakfast.

something fried.

*

Last night I lay awake for a long while, worried that I haven’t been doing enough to let the woman on the verge know just how bad I have it for her.

It is no cure for me anywheres.

Nor would I take it, if there were.

*

Maybe something is happening. Maybe something is going to happen.

Maybe maybe.

*

Namaste.

***

Happy Valentine’s Day

 

*

 

 

Truly, madly, deeply.

 

*

 

 

Namaste.

 

 

***

Miriam Takes The Train

 

*

 

I got the day off from work so I am pretending that today is Valentine’s Day.

 

Gonna see if that Woman on The Verge will be my Valentine.

 

I sure hope she will.

 

I aim to woo her with fancypants cooking. I’m doing some David Chang Momofuku and Thomas Keller French Laundry fusion fu.

 

I love her so damn bad. It’s like I won the best lottery there ever was. Forget about a three-hundred million dollar powerball. You can have that weak ass shit.

 

I won her love.

 

*

 

We tried to take the grandbaby and the bulldog out for a walk on the cliffs, but it were too windy. We went up to the cemetery and walked under the creaking pines instead. It was sunny and blustery and cold. The little guy blinked in the bright sunlight and grunted and thrashed around a little bit, excited with all the noise and color of the outside world. The bulldog ran around and pooped and smelled stuff and looked over her shoulder every once in a while to make sure we were still there, then ran off a little ways again to eat some grass or take in a particularly compelling smell.

I thought about how nice it will be when I can retire and I can go for an hour long walk with the woman any old day I feel like.

*

 

I guess this blog is a old man’s blog now. Talking about grandbabies and retirement and taking long walks.

It’s what I love, though. A simple life, simply lived.

 

Go on and show me a luckier man. Point him out, I’d like to shake his hand.

 

*

 

My wish for you is to find the small things that bring you real pleasure, and just enjoy the hell out of them.

 

*

 

Namaste.

 

***

 

The Spaceman Lectures, circa 1951

 

*

 

I got this meal planned for my honey on Valentine’s Day.

 

It’s fancypants.

 

*

 

 

*

 

This is where I’m spending Sunday.

 

With books about food.

*

 

Sanctuary. This little nest we’ve built.

 

It is a balm to my soul.

 

*

 

I got my O’Keefe & Merritt stove to cook on. I got hardwood floors to vacuum. I got sunlight that comes in through old double hung wooden framed windows. I got books and artworks. A comfortable sofa.

A huge hedge surrounding my little castle like a moat or siege walls.

 

I got the world’s best woman and a bulldog and a unholy monster and a grandbaby.

 

*

 

 

My cup runneth over.

 

*

 

 

Namaste.

 

***

Moonlight Sonata

 

*

 

Peace be upon you.

 

*

 

 

I keep thinking about that guy who killed his kids last week because they were starting to talk about how they went camping and daddy put mommy in the trunk. He waited until his court-ordered supervised visit and when the social worker showed up he told the boys he had a big surprise for them.

Then he slammed the door in the social worker’s face, and took after the boys with a hatchet.

Doused the house in gasoline and set it on fire.

 

*

 

I made a big breakfast of bacon and eggs and waffles. Hot coffee.

It fed us all.

 

*

 

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.”

 

*

 

Una selva oscura.

 

*

 

Oscura.

 

*

 

Namaste.

 

***