GET REMINDED

Originally published on August 19, 1997

Suzy celled in from Saint Thomas last evening before reboarding the liner. She & Aunt Lou are having a sizzling time. I could smell the fun on her breath from here. It's really strange without her at home, but you know me, I'm soaking up all the quiet I can. I miss her, but it'll be Labor day until we baby dance together again. With that ringing in my left ear I've carried since the Zodiac Mindwarp show in London 1992, my days and nights pass eerily as if in the woods or the farm, crickets and the silence of nothing but the fan. Alone, no pressure to succeed, no terms of regret, no inkling of failure. Hints of a new routine, say for instance an evening walk around the neighborhood, a dip into the city, a relaxing drink in the backyard nirvana.

No, I've stuck inside avoiding the heat, but I've noticed these inner stirrings. Today is twenty degrees cooler, but even so, I hack away at this terminal, working, planning, fooling myself I'm living life with some great plan to succeed. Me, I just do what I can, and try not to aggravate or be aggravated by every whim and weasel this world has to offer. Guess I'm still stewing over Blumstein's bluster because I don't know where it came from, life?

Life? That word just swooped in on me and I cannot fathom why or how he intended to mean it other than demeaning me. But, I'm way off the path of solitude when I let Bob crash my peace. He gave a blanket apology. Back to the crickets in my bad ear, the purr of the fan at my feet, and the allure of the Internet where anybody can be somebody and everybody can be nobody, but none of us can ever know the difference until we do the work.

I, of course, associate these feelings with Lofton Creek FL, the chicken farm days, the cabin, forty thousand birds, long lonely weeks without ever seeing another human, my daily summer skinnydipping, vegetarianism, cheese and grapes and rye bread lovers, writing my first serious, better poems of a lifetime, poems I still read with enthusiam today (aching to plug online), those ten mile hikes into town, Dylan Dog who looked and acted just like Nickel Dog, getting buried three hundred year old literature checked from the library, Will Durant, and a steady feed from PBS.

I was 24-25. Young, thin, even skinny. Full of zest, vigor, and peace. Life is not a home-brew. Life is what happens to you when you are busy making plans for something else. I said that before, but that's the fat and the gristle of it. Nothing's any more clear than that. Now the chicken farm is gone. My mentor (of hard work) has been dead for ten years, and the farm I helped build torn down. Life? Yeah Bob, lemme sit at your feet, such wisdom.

Have you heard the recent uproar about the thousands of fish sporting nasty abcesses on their smelly bods first in North Carolina, and now proin the Chesapeake? After nearly a year of mystery, the problems are being blamed on chicken farm runoff, shit tragically high in nitrogen and ammonia gases running off into the streams and creeks and into the ocean. That's some powerful stuff that survives the plunge into the sea.

GT