The fight for summer

In the silence, in the frozen days, we promise grandiose things. We woo, we campaign, and we sell. In the aftermath of extraordinary downpours, I wonder if my January self will look favorably upon this.  My hesitation last night, although familiar as of late was also foreign to me. So I wrestled against its restraints, forcing myself to my knees, and then to my feet. I screamed in resistance to everything around me. No, no, no! I will not lie down. I will not fade. In my portfolio of adventures, clinging to ledges, and holding on with only four fingers, there’s got to be something better than this. I know I got this. I will not be subdued.

And so like at the end of a 1950s science-fiction movie, the sun rises. I wake up seeing that I did, knowing that I did, always knowing it was always possible. What is the shaded alternate reality that slips in when we’re not looking? Slowly it sings a vengeful lullaby, that we may never escape. But I have rage on my side.

The days are getting shorter, and yet I do not see that one red maple leaf. I get torn between the things that I should do and the things that I should also do for peace of mind.

As I sit here, music sways around me, like the air oxygen and the carbon dioxide that is everywhere. I am taken back to those moments when it was just me and my father and to the times when his friend Bob would come off of a ship bearing gifts from faraway places. Nobody even knows those things exist anymore unless I talk about them.

Just imagine if we had social media back in the days when we used to do incredible things. I smile thinking about my 20-something-year-old adventures, being forever, suspended in a cloud of virtual data that outlives me.

A release of Mick Jagger and David Bowie‘s from late 1984 plays. I am transported to that old secondhand sofa that sat under the dartboard on Avenue J in Port Aransas that old 1950s mobile home with the laminate panel walls and the bamboo shades that completely covered the ceiling covering up God knows what. Clever.

Under the canopy, a forest, my campsite yields only slivers of sunlight cutting through the trees. My lone solar panel constantly asked for this dance to find a sharper cut.

The B-side of an old, 1972 wings cut plays. It makes me think of that black 1957 Chevy coming down the road on a flooded Lillian Road. And then another time with a homemade motorhome Bread Truck and a popped balloon. 

It is funny how our lives become these fragments that if we try really hard, can be small passages into other days. Once in a while, you feel it, literally smelling it, feeling it, being there. So much so that your current reality almost disappears. That is ok, so long as we do not disappear too.

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