6.
so yesterday’s heat
blew into this morning’s chill
March is not done
7.
nostalgia radio
remember when, remember
the morning as it wasn’t
[Day book 2026 // Spring 3.23.26]
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Poet. Essayist. Fictioner. Steamboat fireman. Bit of a grackle.
I’m pretty sure being in your 50’s is the Kansas of middle-age.
Hear me out. There’s still shit worth seeing, and there’s some sense of urgency or need to get on. There are mountains in the western distance, looming but never approaching. Common sense dictates that distance is finite but the mountains never seem to get any closer.
You have aches and pains, but you’ve had those since your 30’s (which is like crossing the Mississippi River between Illinois and Missouri in a jon boat with a questionable motor and no experience at rowing). There’s an indignity to having to stretch before getting out of bed. The hip you didn’t get replaced complains more about the cold and you start to feel like an old dog and you argue with the TV meteorologists because your aches give you an accurate forecast. The landscape is flat and full of either fallow fields or unharvested crops, neither of which has anything to do with you. Kansas feels like it lasts forever. There’s a few populated areas, but mostly you’re driving with who you started out with in Kentucky, or who you picked up hitchhiking along Route 66, or who picked you up while you were hitch hiking. If you were the one who got picked up, you’ve been there long enough that you take a shift driving.
The mountains loom. You think you can make out the snow trails on the peaks, but then you hit some traffic and have to take a piss and suddenly remember you left the boombox on back in 1982, somewhere around Vermont.
go
go
go
go
shovel snow
go
go
go
go
but
get
a
good
night’s
sleep
go
go
go
go
re
mem
ber
your
vitamins
coffee
coffee
coffee
go
go
go
westward
on
mountains
exits
largely
as
a
matter
of faith
that
some
day
will fall
on your
head
The old merled dog wakes us at 0330. The plot against sleep continues through the winter. The winter is full of plots, real and imagined and at this early hour I can’t tell if it’s the one against my wife sleeping, the one against me sleeping, or the one in which the dogs crawl under the porch to take a shit. I may have to take up midnight fishing just to sleep properly again. The plots exchange themselves out of convenience, because now I’m certain the dog’s plot all along was to get me down to the basement. She knows I will give up and come down here, coffee and apple and tobacco and words.
In my head, the plot unfolds in which I question why I bother getting out of bed, why the tired machine persists. The usefulness of a man is defined by the amount of money for which he exchanges his time between birth and death. These mornings of coffee and apple and tobacco and words I try to keep in mind that practice and faith in the mystical mechanics of the universe are enough. Ply the old ways. Fill the head with notions, jigger, then empty. Every line and phrase is a word cocktail, the output of a machine made for that purpose. The old merled dog knows nothing of this. Only that something drives her, too.
no one will know I ever arrived
until I’m gone
kicked along by some other current
a pebble
gradually worn down
into bone dust
