this thing here

I brought the dog to the park where she frolicked in the crisp air of winter. It was cold and she loved it cold. So did I actually, as long as it was winter I preferred it to the heat. At the park there were other dogs, and ducks on the icy creek waters, and a light fluffy mist from the lake effect settling on the branches, creating an other worldly sharpness to the scene. Then the clouds got thin but not enough to break in the mid morning sun when Faf and I headed to up the mountain trail. It is more of a wooded hill really not a mountain, but I think of the relative distance and the relief I feel when inside of them, surrounded of them. Years go by in either direction and I breath deep of the steep climb and relief of escape. When the snow makes a dust and stays lite and airy, the gray wash seeps the range and a sharp, utterly pristine air projects from each surface. Every dribbled line of bark and amber fall grass on each short ascent and rise sings like the summer. Silent and certain - as beautiful as youth.
Babe had some advice for me. "You're all surface" she said, "you've stopped getting deep into it." She wants the dirt I thought. I've got dirt but I imagine to protect Buttercup I'd stop talking because she's dying. I could make mistakes and those are easier to take if everyone lives and moves on and can assume their own responsibility though that is not what is happening here. I'm afraid to write because I feel the need for permission. I want a mentor or God or others to tell me with clarity and pure definitive certainty to speak my thoughts or not in this way. Silence, then Babe adds her two cents - she says tell it and don't hold back. I can't think of anything but Buttercup with the cancer eating her up and how I leave and how many of my friends fall away and are actually not friends. Big deal. Every time I think about telling you the story now my heart beats slower and time gets shaken up. The story is halted by the march of time and the fear that I am over the edge and a dirty lone wolf-type creature. This is how it gets written down only. What I have found is not something altruistic or profound but instead my fear is confirmed and love and cowardice. I had wished for something more, I think, analyzing and wasting time. At the same time that something more is delivered - Love in an abundant rush. Then the voice shatters and comes to present in tiny shock waves like broken glass or crystal or even something more, reverberating in the present state and I follow the ripples forward, mostly. This means I think, fairly soon, I'll be living forward. On listening, I hear the present. Stay tuned I tell myself. Stay tuned I tell you.

confessionals, in the ass

The lord speaks in wonders and so it is as I leave Rochester Chicago bound only to find a flight delayed and grounded in Philadelphia as a storm built on the eastern seaboard. Fleeing to safety I find the other Pete and Kate and hunker down post liquor store and watch as the clouds form to ice to downpour to blizzard to a foot then an additional foot of snow. We talk and the next action becomes clear, then more clear, piling up like inches. We talk and I sit to write.

I wake up sometimes thinking I'll find my wife beside me. In the haze I reach over and remember, vaguely now, the feel of her, her presence. I know now for certain that these thoughts will linger with a person forever, with me until I die. There will never be a time that the thought and dreams of pure love and original connection and vows and belief will disappear. They will always be there and be there in want and desire, at least the story I had planned it to be in fantasy. Love conquers all and delight is the reward. At the same time I also know that this story could be any story. I also know that chemically Buttercup was my girl. I doubt there was or will be any two people with the capacity to melt into one another than she and I had. If you ask her it may be a different story but for me it was true. Softness is not wetness, it is the bond two people have when their chemistry matches like bone marrow. Buttercup was the moon and she'd keep me up till 3AM or all night with it. I knew it and never came inside of her. That was her deal, you can't cum inside me until we are married and then you get my ass too. You can have me in the ass and cum inside me if we stay together in the eyes of God. Some God but I respect her for it and I never did either. And this will haunt me. But it should not be underestimated the force of what I first set out to tell - that with a man is love for his bride (if it is true), that when definite and failed will go on forever. It will go on with more force of forever than as such to any living force. Of course, when I am dead it will be too but so will everything. So will the tectonic shift and Seychelles and all the nations awaiting changing tides and high waters and fire and meteors or any such boy dream Romantic nonsense. Nevertheless.

So I speak in the quiet, calm and more than coincidental realization that the face plant of landing inanely in Philadelphia, in the heat and cold of transition, in the need for a break and time to make a better move and forceful plan to march on I find a tiny reason to post this and remember that in the quest for an honest life one makes horrible mistakes. That living is not hiding and wanting is not needing and helping is often the equivalent of shifting rather than changing any outcome. Still it is entirely the debt of stupid belief in something honest. So I must, at the very least, tell the truth on my way through. Honest report for whatever it's worth. Dear God, how stupid.