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January 5th, 2022

We Are What We Think And My Thoughts Are Like Shoes

New Years Day. The snow came down at a slant and covered Omaha in a white sheen. The streets. The trees. Below the eaves of houses. A wind storm white with a heavy dusting whirled the white dust on the shingles outside my window and blew it out over 50th Street.

The first day of a new year was as white as a blank sheet. It was the beginning of something. A fresh start filled with the promise of bright ideas conceived. Of snowy peaks not yet reached. The dream realized in full form right up your sleeve! Anything possible. Everything waiting. All one needing to do is get up and grab it.

I laid on the couch most of the day clinging to the blanket pulled up to my chin. My space heater pointed in my direction. A marathon of Seinfeld episodes streaming from my laptop. It was one degree (Negative twenty with windchill!) outside and the prospects of kicking 2022 in the teeth seemed more like a bitter case of frostbite. I preferred to ease into the whole thing. Take it slow. See what the following days would bring. I saw no reason to rush it, to overly exert myself in any particular direction.

If all I accomplished in the expanse of twenty-four hours was getting good rest then that was enough for me. And as far I knew the world outside had ceased to exist.

It was only me, existing in this solipsistic existence with the house empty.

The billiard balls sleeping in their pockets. The walls creaking from the wind outside. Karthauser was en route to Todos Santos. To his golden beaches. His rivers of cold beer and tequila. The warm Pacific Ocean churning frothy waves against the shoreline. That undulating daydream somewhere out there on the western horizon.

Sometime after noon I got up and moved around. Paced the place. Fixed a bowl of clam chowder. I ate it as I stared out the window at the white world, enjoying every bite as it warmed my insides. And I wondered (As I stared out at the quiet snow silently falling and covering all remnants of the common earth) what other worlds could possibly exist out there. What combinations of lives rolled out surreptitiously from the folds of four walls (And more possibly from within them). Like snakes in tall grass. Like chameleons with ears and eyes and noses. With toenails and teeth. Shapeshifters in pea-coats and puffed jackets and earmuffs. Who are we, really, and what the hell is it we’re doing here. Making it up as we go along I imagine. Finding our footing and digging in for the long haul, hoping the whole thing doesn’t fall flat.

There’s always more than one enterprise at work behind a pair of eyes. Ill-intent or not.

The eyes might be green but the mind is iridescent.

The actions an attraction of grace and mischief. A person is a dark cavern of mysteries being played out in real time. Most like ghosts among us living a multitude of lives (Besides the obvious of psychopaths and rapists and politicians ((The flight list for Epstein’s Lolita)). I knew a girl once whose father was a degenerate gambler with a whole separate family besides her own ((Another wife, another set of kids)) that was later found out because he finally got caught slipping up with the phone records). A chef might play at Scarface. The physician a madman selling you illness as a panacea. The model moonlighting as a body-piece for the pocket grease of a prince (Then writes novels about it for Ss and Gs ((Shits and giggles))). And all the while out of the corner of our eyes Quixote plays at Casanova.

I don’t know when the thought struck me (nor do I remember why I made the initial action to do so) but at some point while staring deliriously out the window in a faded daze of a white day, bowl in hand like a catatonic frozen in its position, I knew that if I were to scan the length of the porch I would find something there (How I knew I don’t know ((It’s that knowing that is I suppose since it is connected to everything))). And as I moved my head from left to right there it was!

A brown box pressed against the low brick wall of the front porch much like the one I had found a few weeks prior.

How strange, I thought. I didn’t hear anyone knock. There were no footsteps in the fresh snow. No tire tracks on Chicago. Yet there it was.

I put the bowl down and rushed outside and retrieved the package before my bare toes froze off. I climbed the stairs to my room and shut the door behind me. Sat in my chair. Opened the thing. And to my surprise I had been Mooneyed again. This time the little book read TO (Two) and was in fact two inches by two inches (I measured the thing) and inside were only two pages to the thing with words from cutout magazine ads glued to them . . . Again. The pages read:

 

“DO It if It is OK? . . . OH no! . . . I’m UP IN AN AS by my ON . . . or be in to it . . . So . . .”

 

I didn’t understand. But I knew that was part of his plan. That was Mooney. Marvin K. Mooney.

A world out there whirling about, wishing for stubbed toes like some modern day Diogenes.

A tragic comedian who would most likely piss on your grave.

It’s going to be an interesting year to say the least with him out there blending in with the rest of us as we all slouch towards eternity.

 

 

January 26th, 2022

I Called For A Renaissance And Got The Wrong Number

Where do ideas come from?

I was recently asked this question and the voice in my head jumped at the opportunity to pontificate. It made ethereal claims about humans being conduits of divinity. Highfalutin notions of a spiritual nature, things I cannot actually grasp at…

 

January 19th, 2022

Life Is Longer Than We’d Like To Think

How do I know? Because I’ve experienced it through the length of thirty-four years. I lived in the moments like small and large photographs framed on the plywood walls of Project Project in Omaha…

 

January 12th, 2022

If Time Paid The Bills I’d Live My Dreams By The Hour

Being jobless has its perks. The money isn’t great. But there’s plenty of time. And that’s got a value of its own…

 

 

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