8 posts tagged “raleigh”

My cup mouldeth over outside Cup A Joe's on Hillsborough St, and I'm reading theology blogs and watching traffic drag past from a little stone table on the sidewalk. It's dusky, and as the light and heat fade, I'm chewing the ice from my iced mocha, and ponder the phrase "balls deep in culture." Surely, if such a feat could be, this scene, right here, right now, has nothing remarkably in common with what it signifies. How many remarkable little conversations are going on just inside that window pane? How much goes unsaid? There's nobody to ask out here, and nobody who'd know.

I'm soon to go play some video games or something. After I finish this beverage, $3.16 worth of an excuse to sit out here, I'm off to waste an evening on wine and Halo 3. In truth of course, I'd like to come back here; or follow these people, or find them again - people like the hot (as in 'sweaty') girl and her boyfriend who just ran past me, indefatigably intent on another quarter mile, or the little mutt Ziggy and his black-socked-and-sneakered, middle-aged rock-and-roll-guy owner - and accompany them to wherever and whatever misadventure is sure to befall them after they take a shower (and yeah, they all need a shower).

That whatever they're up to is as pedestrian as... well, as pedestrian as they are, is no injunction. It's kind of the ideal. The paraphilia of it: the lust to know what's going on in the lives of people who just happen to be around. It's filthy gratification: sipping coffee, watching them, and guessing.

What could be a better hobby?

As the ambiance cools here before closing time, and I prepare to leave here, I accept, for the moment, that I am to the people here at the cafe what they all are to me: somebody walking by, of middling interest and plausible intrigue. I'm aware of a deep abrogation what structure comprises us, a chiasmus of sorts, an antinomy:

When you're alone, everybody's with everybody else, but to everybody else who's alone, you're with everybody else.

Throw in the word 'God', and it's theological.

And a billion little moths lifted out of the brown leaves and into the air for the first time, billowing around like a gentle cyclone, catching light on their white wings. By and by, every moth wanders off. Late in the morning, it's warm and silvery.

Sip.

"Where are my bitches?"
"Where are my bitches?"
"Where are my bitches?"
"They're all gone."

Devote the day to driving around, just to stick to the seat, taking laps all around Atlantic Ave.

Minutes of Friday spitting out like calculator tape. With this many months of this deficit, years overdrawn, past due, if time is money then my life is a crime spree. And they'll never be able to take me alive; I spend every second I have getting away. The math saves me: I treat time like it's worthless and I have more time to myself than anyone could possibly ever need. When it's all said and done, I'll have wasted not just all of my time, but all of your time, too.

I am devilishly clever.

Hours of Friday in my little red pace-car, driving from place to place.

A hot Friday afternoon in the city, and the notorious criminal mastermind has executed another daring caper, this time in the Warden's own car! Now safely escaped to The Outside, he takes the weekend, lights it, takes a drag, and slowly exhales. The smoke curls it's way out the window in a loose slate-blue lanyard, and rising out over the roof it plumes decisively into nowhere.

All day Friday pacing around and with only echoes to keep time, reflecting every step for me off blocks of Raleigh walls while I walk my cell. Everybody is a jailer in uniform.

Stealing is a dehumanizing way to live. There more you take, the less there is. The less there is, the less there is to take. Soon, there's not much and then there's nobody. It's getting to the point where you can't even get a minute in a city of like a million people. You steal enough and waste enough and then nobody will give you the time of day.

How are you supposed to start over with nothing?

The instant you're born into the world they take your entire life away from you.

How are you supposed to start over with nothing?

Friday, trapped at the end of the week.

I'm just out for some sun, to hear some music I got.

"Where are my bitches?"
"They're all gone."

How to survive on just Ovaltine and coffee.

We don't do a whole lot around here, but we celebrate what we do well enough.

Took a nap this evening, and after the phone woke me up I went back to bed where Dad was sleeping and he woke up and told me monastery stories.

We got that CV joint installed today.

Made a couple trips to Wal-mart to get medication for my mom.

Drank a lot of coffee - it stays you warm.

We try to make adventure of little things; it helps us to talk sideways about bigger things that slip out. I can't imagine what my dad's life was while I've been away at college - I can't believe that I never thought about it much before now. He'd have been alone every day, all day while my mom went to work, you know?

She comes back and complains about things, raises her voice, and he goes out for a drive. He leaves the room with his head down. He shuffles off and waits for her rages to shout themselves out of breath, waits for the bile to wash itself back down her mouth and he'll offer her something to eat. He admonishes me to love my mother and hold my piece, and I try to convince him that he should stand up for himself regardless of the poison he's sure to bring out. I tell him things must change. I get the uncomfortable feeling that I am Lucifer himself in those times.

Millions of minor epiphanies I've stacked up like bricks, each one with a capital letter on it. How long before I can move in? Each one's a primary color. How long before they fall all on top of me?

I stand under the mouth of the open garage door, looking up at the pines -- all on their branches little cones are set up above us, at different distances, so that they make you see little living constellations; They're so small still. It's early --

and take a sweet sip,
and sip.

Okay, giving back up books and reading stuff again.

I think I can do it this time.

Hey!!! A family of deer!

They just passed through our yard, single file. They weren't so small - long flicking tails, some size to them. We have a pile of dead branches and sawed trunks that they like to come behind. There may be flowers there that they eat, that I've not seen.

Hm.

There they are.

I'm watching a little one wander through our yard, one ginger step at a time, nose to the ground, puling at stems. His big brown brother isn't too far behind - ears perked up, he's watching the woods. They're running! Tails up, hopping gait turns into a sprint, like furry traincars picking up speed and heading away in unison. How silent they are though!

Guess something in a neighbor's yard startled them. They probably won't be back to our woods for the rest of the day. We'll see them again though.

The easiest way to find them in the morning is to watch for the shine of the sunlight on the leaves out there. Wherever there's a brown shadow, it's either a tree or a deer. Don't focus too hard, and if the shadow moves, you've found a deer.

I will miss the woods when I'm gone.

Out on the deck, with my good speakers and Mike's compilation cd, Long Way Home, keeping my company. This first song is special. I've got a malty mocha, naturally. I'm well-kept company, with the speakers shy of bass, the unvarnished wood beneath them apparently afraid to resonate. A few flies treble around, minding their business. It's just cool enough in the shade to wear an old hooded sweatshirt - these are the good times, when the new leaves on the creepers intend to glow all afternoon and a clear blue sky drops down through the canopy of the highest trees, bringing new smells from far away jetstreams. Great blows of air, reminding of how thin my skin really is, but allaying those fears: the harsh times are really over, they seem to say. It's worth the worship, says a guy who doesn't pray often enough. Lots to see, nobody to say it to.

I am about to dive deep into the work I've been neglecting. It seems to be okay.

This is it.

That other time is over; it took this long, just exactly this long, and not a moment longer.

I feel pretty good.

This cd is great. 

Last night it wasn't windy, and only a little cold. Standing out by the door, watching cabs pass. Say hello, take $10, step aside, admit one. I'm both bookends for the evening - say goodnight, step aside for 82 people to leave.

Some friend of apparently everybody's died yesterday. He committed suicide, as far as I've heard. In the center of our long hallway, I saw a huge, stocky man holding his girlfriend, sobbing. I watched, and watched the girls at the other end of the hall watch, watched them sober up, listening to the wordless grief, anger, and confusion, coming back out of themselves. Something about the sound of that brought out interesting reactions in people. I watched some turn with anger, contempt, at the sound, eyes widening to a lame resentment of this abrupt display of humanity. One of the bartenders spent 25 minutes on the phone with someone outside. I'm used to seeing him differently, stoic and gamefaced; irony, hesitation, frailty, ambivalence crack through. He smiled helplessly at me.

At the end of the night, a drunk girl waiting for a cab slurred a question at that group as they left, and I asked if she knew them. She growled, "I know lots of people around here. I'm waiting for my cab," and turned her shoulder to me. She, at least, stayed intact.

These days I float, listening to old music, little errands. Found my first summer song, I think. It's early yet, but we'll see.

The rain that came early this morning brought a decrease in temperature. We lost 20 degrees just after dawn. The little leaves on the berry bush out the window have pursed and stiffened. Rainwater has a way of making trees look especially nude: here, a pine has black mold bruises on her bark, and a few feet away, her sister is thinner and veiled from 10 feet up to her crown in green lichen. Branches bare, a tree without her greens, without her summer vines, upholds only claws to the sky. Trees asking, and the rain coming down is a response and from the sky, grey as a newspaper, that is no answer. None of us are sure whether it's really, really okay to bloom yet. The layered golds and browns on the forest floor, like shredded sheaves of papyrus, are the unreadable history of nature, among living ruins: between the trees, bare columns themselves, lay past years of drafts of Declarations of Independence, scraps of the terms of life's uneasy Pax with her host, elegies in leaves telling of the end of every spring / summer Golden Age.

When a column falls now, in March, at this time of the season, it lies in state.

When a column falls now, of all times, it falls because it had been sick for so long. It couldn't hold out any longer. You know the trees who are unlikely to return to life - the ground around the trunk records in a halo of bark what must be life's fundamental iniquity: survival means the end of life. What survives is us, the arcane and holy interpretation of this elegy that is our human story, and more importantly, our priesthood: we owe each other the falling water and protection from the rain. After the Fall, good God gave man his habit.

As the temperature drops, we are lucky for the sacraments we have. In unlearned ages, men would read leaves, living and dead, to speak of the future of one another. We open our palms to the sky, too. As the weather warms uncertainly here, we must be grateful for the Sacraments we have - in the future, they are our past and present, and our humiliation - out of them comes such a strange promise...

Life cycles: but we have each other, blessed memories, and this one tender piety, as we, dying in life, lose bits and pieces of ourselves and others see our halos and stay perfectly silent for us.. Some season, we'll fall. It's our shared grace. It's the terms of the peace, the gilt and the saffron and the cashmere, and when it's all spilled and split and gone cold, it's our own scraps of gold on the ground.

Loving nature, I'm inclined to believe, is part the sanctification of a man, given our condition...