Last year for some reason I started noticing eye floaters in my right eye. Th eye doctor said my pupils were unusually dilated and asked if I were doing drugs; not in this decade. but they get on my nerves; they flit back and forth and the only way I can humor myself other than look for miracle herbs to soak on my eyelids that theoretically came from prehistoric snakes that once mated with our women and through the generations resulted in Congress, I imagine each floater contains microscopic chunks of the Dead Sea Scrolls and if I focus on each one I can see what kind of hair gel Jesus really did use before a good sermon; every time they swing across my eye my brain soaks another piece of knowledge about history they would dare not put in anything published by King James or Scholastic Update, really very similar editing styles; except in Scholastic Update, when I was a kid, had stories of giant cities floating in space inside of these contraptions shaped like Bugles corn snacks where all of this would be happening in the 21st Century, about fifteen minutes from now. there’s more crossover in King James than you think.
All of this is to keep from letting the holiday blues take command of mood central. Christmas, my birthday on Thursday (now tomorrow) and New Years on top of being stuffed in a Lonesome Dove type of Crevasse between an old life that wants to hold on in places like HMO’s or some other horrible idea that has outgrown its time and a new life which calls and beckons and flirts and asks to wait then come; it’s odd, turning 41 and looking around at the suit I’m supposed to wear at this age seems also too small, out of fashion as I don’t care really what I’m supposed to look like or feel; but it’s one of these habitual press ons, like temporary tattoos that at forty I need to start having nightly conversations, maybe in German, with my prostate about when it’s supposed to swell up and why my sex drive is expected to deflate faster than my penis does thinking about plastic surgery breasts; it’s a cell by cell assertion and cleansing to kick back the onslaught of death; there’s grappling and resting, grappling and resting with habits; some feel glued onto you since the dawn of time, some a little more recent; this week is made for steel guitars and lyrics written on a napkin in some bar you never knew existed and you’ll never walk into again but it has a real jukebox and none of the songs have drum machines. We move, burst, slide, swivel until we can sometimes hear our heart has more than one river, of more than one liquid fabric that flows in it and it looks and smells like a melted skyline and maybe one person can tell or two or three but it’s never so easy; the ones that can dip the toe deepest changes the flow of the heart on top of merely uncovering it; some people have a heart like a turnstile, and in a way I envy that; and then I do not. I am grateful for the multi layered fabric river that changes when the weather around me is potent enough; I am grateful to have the life I have to this point; my birthday is sometimes the meat in a holiday blues sub, but I am vegan, so fake meat, fake blues.
