7.18.07

it’s early…early on the 18th, a tender hour…I should really keep calling it the 17th, that’s where most of my night happened.  

Maybe it was just another night.  No better or worse than any before.  Extrodinary only in its mundanity.  But what the hell does that mean? 

What do you see as amazing?  What do you find incredible?  What strikes you as noteworthy?  When is superb superb?  How was then better than now? 

Did I spend the day walking through the woods with a friend?   Did the almost-rain cling and slide from alder, maple, hemlock and fir?   Did the trail climb and climb like a suggestion that up is somehow the only right way?  Did it say in winding, tortured turns that its ends and means can only be guessed?   Did talk go from love, love lost, love to be, love’s labor lost, longing, love’s languishing, lies, lingering limitations and lonliness?   Did we talk of conciousness, its quantifiability, “capturability”, the containment over time of what we have now, the splicing of self, the multiplicity of being?  did it heat our minds with each step?  did our ideas, questions and ventures into the abstract roll lockstep stride-full with the miles?  Did green and green and brown and rot, drip-drip drizzle-hiss and smells sodden earth hang on and around us in loose-cloth comfort?  Did day turn to night, woods to pub, earth-scent to barley-rush, measured words to drunken shouts, full-lit skies to rough-wood rafters, air to smoke, lucidity to pseudo-such? 

Did long-haired james with reticent speech and sharp eyes tell of his nightfall descent from Ruckle Ridge, the tricky shadows, the fateful step that caught nothing but air, the five story fall, the bounce at 10 feet, the sensation of peeling backward into the open air, how his upper arm bone slid down parallel into his forearm like a knife into sheath, how his pelvis split,  his vertebrae snapped, how somehow he landed sitting, screaming up at sam ”I can’t find my fucking arm sam!  Where’s my fucking arm?!”  His head untouched, no internal bleeding, just tooth-grinding pain as dusk turned to night and two grown men huddled in the sleet-wet mud of winter to keep warm.  How one was sure the other would die and the other thought so too.  Of sam’s long scramble out at first light, the knock on winnebago, and a tiny girl in pink pjs openingthe door to a wild-eyed mudman.  Only then did he break.  The sobs, the relief, the fear, the tension.   The fat cops who couldn’t keep up with the rescue team, the lifeflight rescue, the news vultures finding out, wanting to make james the miracle and sam the hero.  And sam in his deliberate way recalling the family he worked with for ten years losing a daughter to deportation in the del monte raid so some fucking “read-meat republican” could feel better that “them damned mexicans get sent back where they belong”, followed by the requisite bush-bashing, our disbelief, disgust and general hate of the man and the administration tired and echoing fatalism because of so many similar moments.  The 12% imperial reds that punch you in the face with each sip till you’re shuffling and talking like the 2007 Ali.   The hugs and “You’re a great friend” assurances as we stumble out the door.  The smudgy lights and lurching ground, the quiet, empty streets, the electricity-faced black men in track suits on every corner like traffic signals or signposts on the way to hell.  Every alcove filled with a lumpy wool blanket, feet and head and hands bared, every one like a poorly covered crime scene, every one a toll of a bell that measures out the arriving end.  And I lay in my bed and I replay what was said and I wonder…

did we say what we mean?  and when?  exactly when?