Buckle up, folks!
Wednesdays are essay days. Fair warning to my current friends and future self: Wednesdays bring the highest chance of a good eye-roll.
A few months ago, I stumbled across a speech I wrote when I was nineteen.
What an idiot I was. If I had a time machine, I’d go back and give that guy a dope slap…or at least a strongly-worded letter.
Perhaps this will be another stop for a future time machine. However, it ain’t bland.
Hopefully it’ll be useful, or at least entertaining.…
It is offered in earnest. Maybe that’s all we can ever do.
A Burning
It’s one thing to pose for Instagram and flex artsy sentences, but the burning of the world is starting to photobomb everyone. Haven’t you noticed?
Maybe I’m over the top. But the worry is growing in the eyes of those I talk to in a serious, quiet moment between the noise and the confetti.
An old lady trailed off about the “good old days”.
“What’s different?”
“Seems people used to get along a lot better.”
The retired stone mason at the afternoon program grumbled a similar sentiment. “People just think buildings are magically built. Well…where do they come from?”
A friend sat in a chair, I perched on an unplugged speaker after another show. We quietly tried to “figure it out.” Something is in the air.
Northbound
As the car sped north yesterday, I fell into a deep pool of thought, fishing around for a way to save the world..again.
I used to be a little Marxist, trying to save the world through guilt and activism and regulation. That murderous road was abandoned, but the ignorance morphed into the sly arrogance of assumed humility and wisdom that isn’t mine. (Neither is the last part of that phrase.)
A glance at the steering wheel's KIA logo should have disabused me of the notion of BMW thoughts – who am I?
But I didn't look.
Blocks and Books and Jules Cortet
There’s so much brewing “upstairs.” If my mind were a sitcom, there will be a million cameos.
Jack Kerouac sits next to Tim Keller, as the characters from On the Road smoking butts plucked from the floor of a jazz club and trying to impress Jesus with witty banter. He doesn’t smile, only stares back with eyes of a baby, unblinking. Bradbury’s Montag wanders in to burn statues of golden calves, Ben Franklin says what a nice spring it’s turning out to be, and in the distance, a professional voice over the PA system asks for our attention please.
"Something must be done.” Everyone nods, shrugs, and falls silent, thinking.
The redbuds bowed roadside, I blew by, car and thoughts a mile a minute, formulating a monstrous glob of thoughts, closely resembling that insulation foam that expands and sticks to everything, growing exponentially in unruliness, past the point of utility.
Man, I can’t write THAT.
I was talking to Jules Cortet once about poetry while he made chili. “Yeah man, sometimes people get it, sometimes they don't, but they can put their own thing on it.”
Ah! So that's the answer. A poem.
It hit me after too much coffee (a regular), and I pulled over to write it down. It felt more like documenting a finding, actually, a description of whatever I was looking for all day.
It's abstract, but each line means something. It's like...Ikea thoughts. Pieces, fragments, surprises. You might build a floating shelf, you might build a floating ark.
I hope you build something of service. We surely do need it now.
Well I’ll Be
I've been told I've needed many things
A clue
a recipe
New shoes
a haircut
But never
a southern Baptist granny
Until a lady informed me
Of the lack
Well that's a first
But I don't have one
We're from the northeast
Where the moon throws rings across the sky
In a vast night of crushing ice
over bare trees
and we say things like Aunt and Bury
the right way
And sometimes in the same sentence.
I visited the train tracks near where we first arrived
to sweat and toil in America
And saw the Chinese food bags shivering in the autumn breeze
trapped on the fence
Like so many thoughts passed around after dinner
turned over and wondered at
Where we only get the plastic certainty of
“HAVE A NICE DAY”
I told the empty sky
That I'd follow the light
And promptly forgot what I said
until hours later when the sun gave up.
But the words looped back
a boomerang from God.
“Now.”
“Now?”
“Now. That one.”
So I pulled over.
Gas station green light
spilled over the empty lot
outside of Amherst
on a rainy spring night
haunted by pretty ghosts
who whisper at the open windows
down by the river road
over the songs
blasted on repeat
A burnt out sign
half lit
subWAY →
What's wrong with the world?
With me?
Jack Kerouac
and Dean
stuck to their own corner of Utopia
On their road
carved out with knives of excuses and sin
They didn't try to topple the world
(or did they?)
Is that the wind?
Or the sound of flesh against stone
Indifference critical mass proportions
Soft hands of my peers
Bottomless brunch and plutonium
tearing at the blocks
of the Foundation
rearranging the Universe
“creating” in the image of our gods
#ME
Building Back Better
“How's that workin' out for ya, bucko?” a bearded man once asked.
Move over, God, I'm driving
to Big Rock Candy Mountain
and
I'm never wrong.
Josh
YESSS
I wish I could fix the world. All I can do is live in it, and try to ease others' minds and hearts while we walk through it.