man sees moon and wonders

so I’m outside taking a leak.

what is a man if he loses his ability to piss outside?

besides, I’d wake the baby if I went upstairs.

The flush of a toilet can be startling to a sleeping toddler.

the air is spring water.

It’s like those hooded sweatshirt nights I used to spend slugging

Bottles of brown and green. Chasing

Something that was never there.

Vick’s vaporub atmosphere with a twinge of fireplace.

I’m balancing myself.

Bare feet on the patio’s borderstones. All tip-toes,

watering the rose bush.

Wondering about the soil’s ph levels when...

I get suckered by the moon.

It’s mammoth. Embedded in blue-black directly above me.

I look around my back patio. I can see everything.

It’s eleven at night and I can see the contents of each corner.

The dead leaves.

The bolts on the fence are sequins.

Then I honestly, sincerely, ask myself the philosophical mother

Of all mothers. The same

question that the bog bodies asked themselves

Before they became such. Their ignorant contemporaries asked it too.

It’s the same question

Two ranchers ask each other under a Montana sky before, with crossed legs,

The older one says, “it’s crazy, I know.” Then tips his Garth Brooks hat over his face.

zzzzz.

This moon made me ask that cliché:

what the fuck are we really doing here?

To know the square root of 144?

Reminisce about the mentos campaign of the ‘90’s?

Bemoan our lost loves, write rap parodies about uncomely math teachers, discuss how much you hate Da Brat, or rather how much you hate street spellings of real words, obsess over the number of steps in everyone of your relatives’ houses, complain, daydream about broads, discuss the different names of toilet manufacturers, drink a certain type of booze until you throw up and never drink it again, yearn for the past and all its trappings, discuss the subtleties of wine, point to a flock of geese, diminish people, wish you were something else, hear somebody ask yet another: “do you know what the definition of insanity is?”, sleep, eat salad, get a well-rounded education, imitate darth vader, security checks in airports, know all the positions jose oquendo played at the major league level, counsel, be counseled, piss in slightly inappropriate places?

My manly stream comes to an end.

i shake off the pee dribbles.

Ykk my pants.

then, for some reason, another question:

What monkey’s eyes are larger than its brain?

Gotta google that.

4.

This is the life, she thought, as she sat in the hospital bed recuperating from...what was it? Something had transpired that put her here; something pretty bad, she's guessing. She's got the pain in her elbows and knees, the dull throb on the right side of her face, and the little fluid bag thing which must mean something bad happened, right?

The nurse would be by again, she posited, and figured she could try asking some questions then. It would be fine to keep doing what she remembered doing for the last few hours, which was drifting in and out of a druggy sleep.

Striking Story

I don't think it was the first or fifth time or eleventh time she hit me that I realized I was going to lose my wife at the end of this fight. She hits me a lot, and I don't really think about it in terms of a defining characteristic of a fight that will end the relationship. I mean, if every fight where a punch got thrown ended the relationship, who'd have any friends?

Living on the Western Slope, it seems like you'd be pretty cooled out, off the wildlife and the stunning vistas and everything else. Flying in on an airplane, you're inclined that there are only two kinds of people on this side of the mountain: the super-rich and the flinty individualists. But there are folks of all stripes here, from sane and boring to half-crazy, and on through to crazy. Lisa and I weren't a perfect match, but I was a link from the edge where she dwelt to the rest of the world. People would say that I "spoke Lisa." I guess they meant it as a compliment, about our compatibility or my understanding as a husband. I guess.

She strayed so close to the edge, dabbled in this dark space where everything she said had a sharpened tip hidden beneath the flesh. No comment or action was without a looming consequence, and tiny barb waiting to sting you. Folks didn't steer clear of her (and us) outright, but over time people understood that it was safer for them and better for everyone if they just kept their distance. She was as funny as the day is long; others with poison in their veins found her to be absolutely unforgettable. "Your Lisa," they'd say, with envy behind their eyes for both her barbs and who knows what else, "she is really something."

When we met, I didn't think she was that much fun. She was, looking back, just refining her methods. She's not a killer or something, but she was more raw, working off the anger, tension and angst of a childhood which wasn't so much scarring as callousing. She had evolved incomplete defenses to lots of things a kid shouldn't need protection against. These sharp words, this drum-tight sense of wounding wit, the relentless cynicism, all came as weapons of self-defense.

But by the time adulthood set in, these weapons had overgrown their boundaries, and their original application was long forgotten. Lisa was the life of the party, and though she insisted she hated every second of it, she was helpless to stop. She was merciless, and was rewarded with the general affirmation of like-minded types whose own tarnished outlook made it nearly impossible for her or them to see how corrosive this behavior really was. They were blind inside it.

With that adulthood came all the normal obsolescence; we had a little girl in 93 and a little boy three years later. They were perhaps her greatest joys and her tenderest victims. She couldn't control these manic feelings, couldn't turn away from the microscope and the quiet angel inside couldn't act fast enough to slow the devil's tongue. They were cowed by her, quick to apologize, perpetually in fear. It was no way to live.

3.

Sitting back on the couch, listening to that little chit-chit noise, drinking some leftover beer she bought for her dad to drink at Christmastime, she realized that it was probably a healthy thing she wasn't actually making lists about the potential success of an evening like this one.

This was the new normal for her, the way life would be for half the nights for forever. No kids in the house, no brain-scrambling moments of distress about whether they're awake or need something. No lunches to make or careless tasks to take her mind off the silence. And certainly no one interesting enough to disturb this pattern for the near future.

She idly picked at the bottle's label, making a little pile of paper beads on the maroon couch cushion. She got up from the couch and the wrapper-paper scattered everywhere. Normally, a kid making -- plotting out, really -- such a mess would be worthy of a quick comment. But she let the beads fall. She ducked out of the tv room, down the hall through the back bedroom and out to the patio. She was hiding cigarettes, pitifully, from nobody but herself, and she shook one out of the pack as she collapsed into a plastic chair and eyed the darkness. She heard a car door in the next garage, or maybe just blocking the alley, but didn't think much of it. It was an apartment in a city that nodded but never went completely to sleep. Footfalls approached and instead of passing and getting quiet as they receded, they stopped. Close to the gate to the garage, she thought.

2.

The chit chit sound of the nearly-frozen hedges dancing on the windows was actually doing its designated b-movie job of putting her on edge. The entire night had been a complete bust. The list she made of the events that would have qualified the night as worthwhile was actually pretty exhaustive, and yet not a single one would have a check next to it.

The unshaven face, the pissy attitude, the baffling fifteen minute conversation about cheeseburgers (cheeseburgers?), all of it was off the list.

1.

Journals are things writers keep to keep the muscle tone, the systems lubricated for when they are called upon to truly write something. Almost no writer says, "The secret is to to only write when you feel like you've got something to say. Otherwise, just browse the web for a while, masturbate and go to sleep." No, of course they say, "The key is to write every day. Whether it's a grocery list or an epic poem or a short story about a short-sighted canary in love with a hand of bananas on the counter in the kitchen adjacent, just write."

And this is advice I haven't heeded up to now. Oy, I'm tired. And I can find something else to do every night and every day. Work is work, it swallows all the time, expands to fill the space like a gas and suddenly you aren't doing anything but work.

And there's family, and a dog, and the trash bins to take to the curb, and grandparents to update about the lives of the children, and bills to pay and small stuff to sweat, and suddenly you haven't written anything since the short story about the infatuation and the moonlight, which felt like genius but probably was more like meh.

What then to do? How to tackle this problem, reset the balance and find this sliver of time? Just do.