The passing of seasons

 I always thought it would be easier to live after the cats were gone. We were always saying that we were not going to do it again. Very smugly taking beautiful things for granted. Even Donna said, we just did not understand how exceptional they were. Lava's final cries in pain were of death itself, I just know it, and they were the most harrowing sound I have ever heard. It tears me to the core.  Doctor House was right though, there is no dignity in dying, we all do it alone and it's ugly and horrifically terrible. The only thing we can do is live with dignity. 

Our daily numbness makes us not even do that so well. And in Goodbye, Farewell, Amen, there were light points and deep ones too. Even in hardship, we can take the good for granted. Hardship, well yes, it can have lasting effects. And that is on a chemical level. I heard a summary of societal decade disintegration. I know this all means something yet I am losing the drive to put the idea into a summary. Everything is a mad rush to stay steps ahead of the predator. My elaborate propane system, combat finance strategies, racing the first snowfall, and of course,  paying my rent every day in the tower of song. 

Sadness always brings words. I love words but I do not like the sadness that they ride in on. I think John Lennon said it best in the song I know from 1973. "The years pass by so quickly, one thing I've understood, is I'm only learning to tell the tree from wood." It's like that, you travel so far, only to realize that just maybe you are only just beginning to learn something. What a raw deal that is! Inside fueling the engines there is the rage in the cage, so carefully accessed just like an internal combustion engine. Gives a whole new meaning to Joe Walsh's words "I'm just looking for clues at the scene of the crime." 

Taking things for granted is like Paul Simon's Slip Slidin' Away. "He said a bad day is one in which I lay in bed and think about things that might have been." And so many ways, that burning of seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years. I know what that regret will be. So here it is Wednesday. Before the Nights in White Satin and before the Late Lament, can you change what "bedsitter people" will think of? Can you change just a little of this? As I saw with Lava in these last lonely cries, the Late Lament does not take its time, it is not a time of peaceful reflection. It is like being hit by a car. The moments after being so awful and so lonely. Rose Tyler figured it out she could not save her dad, all she could do was make him feel just a little less alone when the moment came. That's all. 

Some days you hit that coffee mark perfectly and other days you think you did but you did not. Harry Callahan asked a detective as he arrived at the diner back in 1984 if coffee could determine a day's worth. 

In all the reflection one can have, there really is only one relevant question, and that is: where do we go from here? Knowing all we know is the total sum of wisdom. What do we do next? Do it now, make it count. In reflection, but looking to draw wisdom from scraped knees and massive falls, I think I might pick an album out each day. It could lead to things to write about. To take my boys sometime in the future on a trip with me to decades before they were even born. "The world's gone crazy nobody gives a damn anymore and they're breaking off relationships and leaving on sailing ships for far and distant shores. For them, it's all over, but I'm going to stay. I wouldn't leave anyway, I know that someday, we'll find a way, we'll be okay." Those words from Ray Davies in 1978 on the Sleepwalker album.  Why did I mention it?  It has been playing in my head since 3:30 this morning.   I totally hear the rain on the rooftop. It has the sounds of autumn to it. If last year has taught me anything, I have learned that you cannot predict what the coming fall and Winter hold. I remember how Rosilee loved my 1982 piece "The Orange Leaf." She saw the words how I intended them to be seen.  They were so profound to her, with the impact of war.  I sent it to Yankee Magazine back then, and they responded with static.  As deep as I thought they might be, of course, they were not.  If you are deep, if you hear the words for what they really are, you know, they must be respected.  

A bunch of random particles spinning in the void...

I do not feel that I have really blogged. If you want to be respected as a blogger YOU MUST EARN IT! So I have failed. I need some gravitational core to cause all of the bits of me to pull together into a cohesive ball of blog wielding excellence. So what is it that I do? I play guitar, I can write music and lyrics ( at least last time I checked I could). I can cook, make soap, perform nearly every mechanical task on an automobile, carpentry, propane work, painting,flooring, propane installation and service work, drive big trucks, write books, sing, glaze windows, sheet rock, fell trees, camp, fish, hike perform many tasks in the technology field. What does one write about, when these are the things you can do? I just want it all to make sense. Tormented by this knowing a little about a lot makes me feel aimless at times. I have this magnificent long term memory. I always say that I can remember anything that does not make me money. Do I like working on cars? Absolutely not! I do that to save the load of money it would cost otherwise. I have held colossal pieces of junk together with p!umbers strap, sheet rock screws and my bare hands. I do have stories, and just maybe I can capture the age. Mine and the age of the world at the time and MAKE you feel it like a summer downpour. My abilities and my memories float like on a Sunbeam together, not knowing their proper place. Can I liberate them and allow the stories to be heard and the ability to be shared? Days Of Future Passed, the Moody Blues album was released in 1967 two months after my 2nd birthday. My parents loved it (the 8 track) and played it allot. Every note and word is etched into the fabric of who I am, like tying a rope around a tree limb that absorbs the rope as it grows. Nights in White Satin,the more famous of the composition, ends with a poetic and futile rant about the manipulation of our perceptions when it comes to night. The poem at the end of NiWS, actually called Late Lament reads, "Breathe deep the gathering gloom, Watch lights fade from every room. Bedsitter people look back and lament, Another day's useless energy spent. Impassioned lovers wrestle as one, Lonely man cries for love and has none. New mother picks up and suckles her son, Senior citizens wish they were young. Cold hearted orb that rules the night, Removes the colours from our sight. Red is grey and yellow white. But we decide which is right. And which is an illusion?" Friday night was the harvest moon. My family and I just pulled into Winhall Brook in South Londonderry Vermont. After setting up, Noah and I took a walk in the (forgive me) serious moonlight. Winhall is in a severe valley. The moon light lit everything to be seen, but, spectacularly in black and white, Just like the poem says. Never have I seen it so vividly. I kept pointing it out to Noah, and although I think he gets it at ten, I am sure that during some harvest moon many years from now, he will suddenly feel close to me, even if I am gone for a long time when he really sees it again. Of all that I am I can only promise this, that the way my brain works will confuse you sometimes and you will wonder how one thing can possibly relate to the other in my head. Sometimes I will be nice and explain the connection. Other times I will not. Again, a kindness, the reality being just too boring. They may be random particles, but they somehow compose me. I may have the smallest of hopes tonight of a chance to be blog-worthy. I promise though not to get too over confident, there is a very long way to go.