Rain Music Duet

a pair of paired legs were the twin tuning forks that struck flesh supple sounds
heartbeats fell in step with rain drops that moistened two dust prints on the ground
drops pound slap plop happy down, danced all around our makeshift warming shelter
our two arms the stroke of love's making forge, our two breaths to stoke its smelter

From Sidewalk Chalk To Pillow Talk Genius

kid hopscotch games is what made us fast friends, first by ones and then by twos
we double dutch jump roped, played king of the hill upon backyard hourglass dunes
those dust devil winds pulled down sands of time, wedged miles of walk between us
other sidewalk chalk tarts became the whos who taught arts of manic pillow talk genius

then rainfalls of time washed into dark gray our sidewalk chalk talk markings
coming storms made us run into the ark by twos away from the thunder's barking
tempests roared up from below our low waist equators, as we shared makeshift bedcovers
we danced hopscotch along, sang doo wah diddy bop songs, dreamed up names for every lover

old games and songs we pull into playback again as a grip on the running hourglass
try to turn the glass over, turn it sideway, every way but you cannot turn it past
for the fine grained moments flow out only one way, soon the tawny brassened base
holds a sphere cleared of all, our finale downfall, the trace of a life's spent grace

Wow, Life Is Beautiful. Ow, Life Hurts.

Recovery Escapades:
A Newsletter Of 2nd Chance Life Across Cardiac County Line Road

Episode Seventeen: Wow, Life Is Beautiful. Ow, Life Hurts.

THANK GOD FOR IBUPROFEN

A few weeks back I had my first martial arts class since karate in my sophomore college year, oh over 33 years ago. So for several nights I was at a dojo named Texas MMA (Mixed Martial Arts). I must not have pushed it too far the first class because I could still type the beginning of this blog entry on my crackberry. Enough to start, and finish it later. I mean my neck was not in a brace from learning grappling holds and being laughably taken down to the mat over and over.

I slept like a log of oak and awoke several times in the night feeing just as stiff. And I had not two cents of sense to start this until 48 hours before a 5K race the following Saturday. If I had rolled over and died that 5K race weekend I'd have no one to blame but myself. Lucky for me rain delayed then cancelled the race.

DODGED A BULLET BUT NOT A FIST

I dodged a bullet then just to catch one the following Tuesday night at Mixed Martial Arts class. The Tuesday following the 5K nonrace I was mixing it up at MMA but not holding up my guard during the 2nd round of sparring with (thank god) 16 ounce gloves. So I catch a jab to the left rib cage. Wow.

The head shots I took before the rib shot faded after just a few seconds, and the body/mind corrected itself but not that shot to the ribs. Some kind of intracostal muscle (what the doc called it) took a bruise or worse. So I am out of MMA class for a while, week or three, until I can afford to spar again with less than perfect guard.

TOO MUCH FUN?

I heard of a late seventy something guy who took up cheap racing - small Mazda Miata type cars, shifter cart style racing. No big muscle car drag strip stuff just a challenge to the driver's skill. When asked how his first race went he said "I got my ass kicked and had a ton of fun". That is what my first Martial Arts classes in 33 years was like. Even the 3rd class with the rib cage dent. More fun than I expected. A butt kicking ton of fun. Fun. Ouch. Fun again. Ouch again.

I must remind myself of all this, the fun AND the soreness, once my ribs heal up enough to not chicken out and to resume the MMA classes. So that I go back and continue what I started, despite the ouch that goes with the fun.

SO GOOD IT HURTS

This is just another example of how a life lived is beautiful and how a life lived hurts. Ask any woman who's raised children if life hurts and if despite that if life is still beautiful. So true is this is fact the woman you asked might look at you as if you as nuts to even bother asking. Kinda like my Cursedly Candid sister looked at me once. Not how she looked when I asked her "If a tree falls in the forest when no one is around to hear it does it make a sound?"

AND YOUR QUESTION IS....?

Nah it was how she raised her eyebrows when I followed up by asking "If a husband is out in the forest alone and no wife is around to watch what he does, is he still wrong?"

"Why bother asking" is what she said.
Um, not what she said but what she asked me not to ask.
To be very technically precise about it.

Fun. Ouch. Fun again. Ouch again.
That's life in my cardiac recovery lane for now.

Yours Truly and Ridiculous,
From Across Cardiac County Line Road

James Sullivan

Friendly FauxPlay On The Moon Sands Of Time

pitched sleep tents with deepest pegs clasped hands could drive
into shifting sand dunes where the bravest trade caravans ride
friend laid beside foe nightly in that much travelled band
whose tent did we share last time when we slept on dune sands?

on morning's moonset we fetched down all the sleep tents
at dawn packed up camels not knowing from where we went
we rendezvous'd nightly, travelled footsteps untraced
reading map legends sketched lightly on the fading nightscape

morning moon trimmed down the lamps that burned off the dark so brightly
we nibble gazed crescent to a sliver as it waned each dawn so slightly
then into a shadow shard it broke sharp hard over hour changing dunes
same and never same, everlasting flame, leading all into their bloom

Teabags Dipped In Wax Last A Long, Long Time

Lips locked are preserved from accidents of unattended slip
Pursed lips don't curse, don't receive an unwanted parting kiss
Can't sip too much wine, won't waste time in idle conversation
Locked lips are reputedly safe from decay of hard won reputation

Dessication for sure unless you drink a chance unlabeled potion
Do you think you'd float downriver forever so minimally motioned?

Perhaps but a firm stance ensures protection from wild chance
Don't by a fool's careless rush bleed to dry up the bank balance
Or stumble by a reach so far it trips at the tipover brink
On every dare a wannabe lover dished into your kitchen sink

Smoke rises resentful from campfires banked into a safe ashen cold
After breakfast before the trip home on getaway weekends I am told
When nothing left to chance dared nothing that was left unplanned
By expectations poured cold syrup slow from a precisely measured can

A good thing, yes, to play cautious with your cards, face down maybe
Yeah whistle that heads up next time you walk past a graveyard baby

Archimedes cried, Where's a fulcrum to leverage purpose in all this
Cried I - Playgrounds are for gambling when we stumble for a kiss

On Dappled Things In The Cardiac Recovery 'Hood

Captain Snark is at it again, complaining about a contrast he found this morning during the daily dog walk.

CAN'T HANG LIKE I USED TO

I stayed out too late last night with friends, stayed up too late, slept in too late today (7am). I still am in need of a de-stiffening, sweaty morning workout. I'm going to work on prepping my 5 acre ranchito for sale today around noonish before puppy class at 6pm. Lots to do, only 10 weeks out from heart surgery last June 1st. More rubble to clear away. But despite the Saturday chore list facing me I felt compelled to journal something that came to me today about treasures seen being treasures taken.

TREASURE ISLAND UNDER OUR FEET, BEFORE OUR EYES

A treasure hunt journey began by deciding to go forward with heart surgery and led back from a passive follow through on the decision. A letting it happen kind of thing can flow from a decision. But along the drifting way I get reminded what my cousing Larry taught me long ago - me that for the living, a free show is around us every day. The price of admission is easy to pay. You just pay attention.

Treasures were seen during the usual morning walk with Hiccup thru my 'hood around TWU, an old 'hood that goes decades WAY back, and still clearly shows clear signs of the 1920s, and 1930s in it surrounds of tree canopied streets populated with the quirkiest mix of old and new housing.

DAPPLED THINGS

All around within sight during this morning's walk was what Jesuit poet Gerard Manly Hopkins would call "dappled things". Dappled things made me go back to get my little digital camera. I so wanted to try and capture the morning's textures. Try that while walking a six month old puppy who wants again to repeat his 'shroom eating ecstacy escapade; quite the juggling act.

THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS

So what dappled thing textures caught the eye?
So many things darlin, so many.

Textures In The Hood

Old saggy gargages built before WWII or before still standing with peeling paint.

Round rusty red water main manhole covers inserted into little strips of lawn between street and sidewalk.

Old pier and beam mounted houses in remodel mode, their clapboards scraped and stripped, waiting to be painted with their next attention wooing facelift of color.

Quirky college student cars painted with Veggie Tale characters or Flying Tiger teeth, parked pell mell on the street or snuggled into their 3-flat driveways.

Red cedar telephone poles the color of Irish Setter dogs, pierced like martyr St Sebastian was with arrows for promoting the Gospel, but here with thumbtacks and staple piercings for promoting bands on concert notices torn down long ago.

A McDonald's drink cup beside a knot hole at the base of a tree - where perhaps some squirrel dropped his munchies trash before coming home to pass out after a night of partying too hard?

Chamfered green fiberglass covers over Verizon fiber optic boxes set into the ground, with strict WARNINGS about digging; dogs and squirrels, obey the law!.

Names of contractors stamped into the concrete of sidewalks.

An anonymous cat that (for a while) was curious about Hiccup the Recovery Wonder Dog.

Tall horizontally laid stacks of dead bamboo, dried to a creamy dead beige and drained of greening chlorphyl.

Tangerine tinted sky mixed with lavender as sunrise faded into full morning sky, washed above the green tree canopy lining the horizon.

A driveway sized mini universe created by a "Big Bang" explosion - the first mini minutes of pre garage sale preparations spilled out towards the sidewalk with a rush of placements: bargain priced lamps-toys-DVDs-puzzles, instead of your usual universe matter stuffings of nebula-nova-galaxy-dwarfstar.

A chair left by the sidewalk from last night's impromtu drink-driven conversation.

Piles of leaves raked into mounds, waiting for garbage bags or a shredder - who knows?

Rough bark of old oak trees, many with lost limbs and scars healed over as best can be done by thickened lips trying to seal some exposed gash

Fist in the air/fist in your face bumper stickers on very used cars, ranging in sentiment from the Reasonable Right ("God Bless America") to the Extreme Left ("Sorry I Missed Church; I've Been Busy Practicing Witchcraft and Becoming A Lesbian"), and an in between more Centrist "There's No Excuse For Domestic Violence"

Running shoes left to dry out on the porch leaning on a galvanized pail of red sandstone rocks

A rubiks cube like multicolored birdhouse.

Redbud blossoms in riot bloom.

A plastic blow-up love doll dressed in a man's white dress shirt and red sweat pants, posed as if passed out drunk against the porch corner railing while doing container gardening.

MOST OF ALL - The last item begs me to add: Porches, porches, porches personalized by a myriad of gadgets and art objects put on display, along with benches and chairs for sitting and chatting and watching.

THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE

And so little sound about so early in the morning; just some grackles and a stiff, fast food plastic cup curtly whipped along the street by gusts of wind, making for some distraction.

LITTLE BOXES MADE NOT OF TICK TACKY

The textures seen all around were so many, and so quirky, and so individual - so unlike what I usually see in newer suburban master planned neighborhoods punched out in "ka-chooka ka-chooka ka-chooka SPLAT!" machine fashion.

Thrift stores with unmatchable tops and bottoms have more fascinating character than 'hoods where your pre move-in personalization choices for you history making home were a slim book of trim styles and wallpaper choices.

Oh, don't forget your choices of appliances and kitchen counter tops.
Those counted for a real difference, really they did, uh huh.

HISTORY YOU CAN AFFORD, BY THE SQUARE FOOT

"History Maker" neighborhoods is what some of the billboards on Interstate Highway 35 declare are available, around the corner at an exit off ramp a few miles up. Come by our development sales office and see, come and buy some "History Maker" real estate.

Right - so you can buy more than just the come-on of a promise, you can buy what time and design and accident and generations come and gone have laid down layer upon layer to be the foundation for the present moment.

HOW DO WE STAND ON THIS?

Right. We don't stand of the shoulders of all them that's gone before us, nor do we stand on the firm foundation of Scripture or Tradition or Faith In The Promises of God or Dedication To Beauty. No sirree bob a roonie, instead we stand and build hearth and family life upon a firm foundation called The Promises Of Marketing.

STANDING ON THE PROMISES OF GOD MY SAVIOUR

As a kid I enjoyed singing gospel hymns most Sunday mornings. After seeing the "History Maker" billboard, I think a contemporary mashup of a Fundamentalist Favorite is in order. I want to sample and remix the old 'little brown church in the vale' oft sung hymn "Standing On The Promises of God".

But I want to make the hymn into a something proper, an homage to the gory Glory of Marketing - recast song title "Standing On The Promises of God" into "Stranded By The Promises Of Blah", with lyrics sick twisted to wear on you like a cheap suit, all well marketed and marked down for quick sale, no warranty no refunds no nothing.

If overproduced with a wall of cow bell sound (never enough cow bell), it just might be a hit and sell.

I COULD BE, PROBABLY AM WRONG ON THIS SNARK

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe out in the ka-chooka ka-chooka BURRRRP 'burbs out there, there really is a vital life beyond discussions about the latest thing to buy from the Home Shopping Network to put some verve into the streetscape or joy of living into the tepid scene behind the closed front door. If so (it's likely) then I'm not your guy to see for insight into that treasure, for I do not see such yet.

Mea culpa, the problemo must be mine.

Likely, why I get an asthmatic reaction to the idea of living in a freshly extruded development is because I am not paying attention to what is there. That usually is the case, where ever we find ourselves. We lack what we ignore, and I must be ignoring something.

FOR THOSE WHO DON'T READ BUT LIKE THE COLORS

A photographer, I am not, but I will try to master this blog format to post texture pictures from the morning's walk as a slideshow below.

There really is craft and art to making the camera see what the eye sees. I didn't capture the sights to any one's satisfaction, but a start had to be made. As soon as I figure out the mechanics, they will come.



HATS OFF TO HOPKINS

I will let this piece from Hopkins sing for its own supper. It deserves a six course white tablecloth night out, for the joy and wisdom it feeds.


            Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
                Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—
    For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
        For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
    Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
        And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
    Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
        With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
                    Práise hím.

Someone To Watch Over Me

Haiku is not my strong spot. But at times I cannot - will not - keep my own law to do no harm. The pain won't last long on this one, trust me. Per haiku tradition, no rhyme and no title. Like a lot of in the moment living.

summer heat, light sleep
fans stand night watch, whispering
sheets stir, leg seeks mate

Thefts Hard To Forgive

Thefts Hard To Forgive

I know the worries you carry.
The worst ones.
The dark ones about drowning in riptides of time.

Ebbing flows of time pulled a heist on your treasure houses.
Stole from your stautuary garden the best pieces.
Took from you the most finely sculpted features.

Time hid it's theft with cunning.
Time bought itself time for a getaway by deceit and deflection.

One by one, slow and subtle, firm chisel cut figures get cleverly replaced.
Marble replaced with soft, unfired clay substitutes.
Clay that with time, dried stiff with cracks.
Revelations of lost days, summer nights, spring mornings.
Disappointments after our flesh had time to change the wrong way.

A clever heist, yes. By time, a cat burglar without equal.

Flesh fell away from what we saw of it at its finest hour.
What we once saw in silver backed mirrors and once saw in the enchanting gaze of lovers.

Lovers by the way who came before me. Do you know they needed less of you then than I have need of you now? Consider that as you follow me down into the dusk. Hold that warming thought close to you, like soft wool as the night's chill settles in. You'll know that grasp to be a wise move, come the colder hours.

The models for our first attempts at self portraiture - who were they?
Remember - remember how we posed ourselves as beautiful and implausibly immortal illusions. Now lit under a common bright daylight, these young models report on our decline.

Like gossip columnists, our past selves sneer at what we have become.

Remember the promises we made ourselves as children?
In secret and silence to just ourselves.
Promises that we would never become like those funny old people.

And how they moved also - too slow, too slow.

Never to become like them. Ever.
Now we are just plain, mean old liars.
We are promise breakers to disappointed children.

Don't expect children to understand why unspoken impossible promises cannot and will not be kept.

We fade, we weaken.
We fight, we accept.
We unaccept and thrash.

When we sink into serenity do we cease to speak as a child, think as a child, and put away the last of childish things?

Giving up that fight I think is the the last road sign in the rear view mirror on the way out of childhood; a last dollop of hot wax to seal spell scrolls of Childhood Enchantment. Things change once you know by experience if not science why those most important promises made to ourselves cannot be kept.

All this might be the why behind the need for grandchildren. We need a splint to carry on. And grandchildren are a locomotive power that keeps up going on when we'd rather not. Time with them becomes healing time, when we know certain truths too well.

We come to know what the weight of time does to Unkeepable Promises. Like the promise to never change; to always be there when needed no matter what the world does; to never go away; to never die - or die only when everyone is ready for it so it won't hurt so much when it happens.

I know these heavy, sigh making worries that are yours. Don't I too know such loss, similar - perhaps even the same? Half filled bags of sand reside in my arse where in my twenties was scant difference between the hardness of the chair I sat on and the hardness of derrierre I put in said chair. No more Lenore, quoth the macabre poet crow who sings. Cackles, actually.

Elasticity snapped, change sagged and leached into place slowly, so slow as to fool the daily mirrored inventory of once-hard assets.

You and me both, we wuz robbed of what gave us ragged confidence, and now our oldest and most expeditious defenses against cruel self doubt are gone. In the cold light of late winter season days, your accounting often comes up short. And tallys up to being robbed, embezzled.

Or spent.
Maybe just wasted.
Certainly without a doubt faded.

So what now darlins, do we just lay still and hurry on up with our dying?
Do we wave down upon us flocks of hungry crows to come finish us off early?

Don't think so, my dear darlins.
I don't care to be pecked to death by little flights of dark fancy.
Not by crows or any other form of melancholia.
I won't lay down quiet and I think have my good reasons to think I ought not to go easy.

See, I heard about this Irish storyteller. He's a professional teller of supernatural fairy tales to modern skeptical audiences. He sets his performing stage thus:

"Things are the way they are, because we agree upon them".

That is how he deals sekpticism to the "objective truth" that faeire things - faerie folk, faerie bushes, so on - do not exist.

And me, I don't agree with anyone who says that no low hanging fruit remains. Or says it all is too withered to be worthy of a reach or a stretch. A reach to pick a squeezable peach is never an unworthy gamble, even on long odds. In my book it's so, and mine's the bookie with odds for the least long term regrets.

Perception of what's real - what is it really?
So much more about what we ignore than about what really is.

In truth we see fewer good things before us because we can't hold them in mind.
We hold but a small cupped handful of all that is there to see.
So we end up remembering what we can.
And of that, just what is most familiar.

We forget all but what we prefer for its handy fit to what we've accustomed ourselves to believe.

We think we know what is not out there anymore because we've ignored it.
We toss away fleeting perceptions of what can be once again.
We ditch clues under our noses about what we think can only can't be again.

Like what you ask?

no differences between pairs and twos

Call this one a 1950's "I Found My Thrill On Blueberry Hill" type homage to Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress"; which might be every such song and poem ever since Master Marvell's masterpiece.

====================================================

The store display shoes that for dancing cash bought
The scene of the crime where last night's fun got caught
The stage where spun mayhem til the music got stopped
Close stepping, slip sliding until the chaperones spied

When spaghetti straps started to fall by the waysides
Almost all the way gone was when the cops they came by
The stop whistle blown on the park's submarine rides
Convertible tops knocked down popped back up on surprise

Who was it with penny loafers off against all the rules
Juke box quarters spilled, two tones and Nancy Drew clues
No geometry class taught us young fools how to choose
To dodge morning doubts about knees knocked twain in twos

Dance yourself silly in those fresh store bought shoes
No caution in moonlight slowed down hopes that might bruise
Pull fast down from heaven all the joy that you can
Before chaperones and cops bring the night's dance to end

Patron Saints of Slow Learners

Just a passing thought that washed ashore to the beach of my mind this morning, from an alter ego inside me that I choose to address as Captain Snark - body surfer of chaos extraordinaire and the first nominee for COTY/"Cynic Of The Year" - who, knowing the COTY election process to be flawed if not ouright rigged or up for sale to highest bidder, refused the nomination and swore to have nothing to do with the contest. The podium is yours, Captain Snark

=============

Back at my beginnings I felt lost and sought to be found. Now I find myself caught in loops and wish to be flung free. My taste in spiritual matters I suspect changed over time, as my attention wanders to alight on different topics. I no longer sweat with concern for immortality at any low Wal Mart level of brand product quality - not if I see living eternally as running around in the same uninteresting circles; not if immortality means seeing myself coming up to a fixed choice before I get to it. Not if means an eternal life that I would rather bring back to Heaven's Customer Service desk for a refund or credit for replacement.

When I was young and my odometer was barely budged I encouraged myself to admire lives of Early Church heroes - apostles, martyrs and saints. Feeling back then quite damned I was, and strongly in need of redemption. I suspect I am still not done with the need for redemption. Not nearly, by a long shot. But a touch older now with a few more turns on my wheels of being, I find myself curious about Bhuddist Bhodisattvas. I regard these as patron saints of slow learners. You know, champions for folks who ain't got a snowball in hell's chance of learning a new thing or making a needed good change in this life if they applied the rest of their whole dang life to it.

That includes the likes of me and my prospects for learning how to play slide guitar and blues harmonica - not likely in this lifetime. And not even if my life depended on it.

Well maybe somewhat likely to learn some little thing more if my life really did depend on it. I mean could learn enough to fake some Texas Juke Joint blues on an open mic night at a college town coffeehouse. Easy to do for broke audiences with low standards. And too much empathy because everybody there is either up next or just was up.

All of us coffehouse followers are devotees of the Cult of Mediocrity, there at open mic night hoping for Redemption via Art, with each attendee a member of the Supreme College of Electing Cardinals. At least for that one night we are electors. And if there is a merciful God in Heaven, you could do worse than to look there, at coffehouse open mic night, for proof of Heaven's Mercy - given how wretched are some performances, truly worthy of damnation, but no lightning bolts of Judgement coming down to smoke the would be rockers, folk singers, poets, bluesmen and blueswomen. 'Scuse me, wanna bees not wood bees; a different kind of winged insect here.

But I digress. Again. Back to Bhodisattvas.

See, if some burly Bhodhisattvas were on your team, that game time clock of one life to go won't matter (or won't matter so much). You will never run out of time with Bhoddies like you do hanging with the skinny saints of Christendom. Saints and Bhoddisatvas.

Why all the extra rounds with Bhoddies? Easy that one - reincarnation. Another dealt hand of poker, another spin of the roulette wheel. Only trouble is all the forgetting you do between rounds. You are supposed to be wiped clean of everything you've learned except for some vauge kind of karmic score that promotes or demotes you. Sorta like moving up from AA football league to AAA league. Eventually you go overthe top, pro and all that - and you get to retire in Nirvanna, if you wanna (your option though, or you can choose come back as a Bhodhisattva - a spiritual sportscasting commentator for the unwashed masses).

Two very different kinds of spiritual heroes here. One kind of these spiritual heroes if he retires and to stay busy opens a Texas watering hole (beer joint) he calls it "The Next Chance Saloon". The other champion of a competing brand of spirit goods decides to run something he calls "The Last Chance Saloon". Can you guess which of these joints is St Peter's; and on which side of the street is Siddhartha Gautama's watering hole?

Old hell fire is getting little mind share nowadays except in niche markets long committed to the product brand. Comes across a little musty to public tastes, what us all having growed up in an America soaked in splendors of post Depression material comfort. Spoiled people like product brands planned with more adaptation to the constant drift of their tastes, more novelty; fickle is what they are, the spoilt demographic.

The smell of brimstone frightens few nowadays. Me it frightens less than before even though by time's passage I s/b closer to its source - or it portal of entry, if not its sulfur delivery dock - to catch a wary down wind whiff. If I were to engage a Transworld Lucid Dreaming Show (a Consciousness Cable Channel spirit service not soon to be offered by HBO) I would expect to soon see some of Hell's red workmen bursting open palletized yellow stacks of sulfur, sacks who too must suffer an entropic fate - be burst asunder and fed into the fiery furnaces of Hell, where they can see to it by golly that Human Souls too can know just what that feels like, to be neatly and impersonally palletized just to be undone and burst and burned up as fuel in the engine of some obscure machine of Hellish bureaucratic purposes.

Again all this is to say that by now, perhaps I s/b catching a wary down wind whiff of Hell's docks. I would expect folks really coming near to the shores of brimstone lakes to experience something like the smell you get when you are nearing a prosperous Jack in the Box franchise. Think of those always busily filled baskets of french fries nestling down into the brown foaming froth, strips of potato starch efficiently processed within Cartesian squared corner stainless steel pots of crackling oil. So might be the roiling scent of souls boiled in the brimstone pits of Judgment, were you close enough to tell by the smell.

My stomach gets to turning once I got within sniff range of those fast food fry joints whose grease traps don't quite conceal the true nature of how their processed fare ends up at the store's glittery front. And seeing my life's midlife crisis point recede over the horizon (in my rearview mirror) you'd think I'd be closer in for a sniff of the brimstone lakes by now; screams from sulfurous torture have a way of echoing across dimensions, I'd think.

If you don't think that is so my friend, try an East Texas oldtime hellfire and brimstone revival meeting. You have to find one run by a really gifted evangelist, one really seasoned by a turnaround from authentic hard living. On the right suggestive summer's eve, he can have you thinking you really are downwind of Hell's Gates. And - if in the End he is right, well then.... you were given the overlook tour via his preaching brochure, and that well ahead of Your Time; so "Man Up" on it, walk through the Gates of Hell upright to your fate, and don't act so surprised come That Later Time.

But no such gut revulsions do I sense. Not lately at least.

This begs a question: am I being awakened in a new stage of life, wiping sleep from my eyes to see something from a better prespective? Or am I just drifted towards the in fashion flavor of spirituality, a noncomitting perspective on pseudo-suffering?

Maybe I am just caught between being up wind of a real Hell and down wind of an imagined Jack Kerouac's Burger Joint and Sports Bar. Or vice versa inside out. That too. A lot may or may not be riding on the answer to this question.

I want and choose to have fun with such questions as I turn up the heat on a whole basket of them. Onion Rings of Ontology, Curly Twists of Jesuitical Casuistry, Time Temporal Tempura, Corn Dog Causality Bites - all served up with the condiments of Curiosity and Metaphysical Mirth. For dessert, I'll veer away from the somber and serious sauces, indulge myself in chocolate dipped jokes and riddles.

I'll be checking in at the Next Chance Saloon after sundown, and then later at the Last Chance Saloon. That I think is the most logically sequenced itinerary for this soul's weekend getaway.

See you there, maybe - if so I'll buy us a round of drinks to lubricate the discussion and how about some fried appetizers, too?

Episode Fifteen: No Blast Shield To Save The Ice Cream; Work Reentry

Recovery Escapades:
A Newsletter Of 2nd Chance Life Across Cardiac County Line Road

Episode Fifteen: No Blast Shield To Save The Ice Cream From Work Reentry

THE RIGHT STUFF

I vividly remember the space reentry scene in the movie version of Tom Wolfe's book "The Right Stuff". The book was about our early astronauts' ability to face incredible danger unaware or at least unaffected by the prospect of fiery death. Ed Harris played astronaut John Glen, strapped down in his one-man capsule Friendship 7.

That little lifeboat capsule orbiting the planet came close to turning John Glen into one crispy critter because of a flaw in the sacrificial burn shield covering the arse of his little ark. Talk about a rough reentry ride back home to mother earth. And that was after the high of some ride - a mind boggling amount of altitude from which Glen viewed the world, from in space.

ALL HAT AND NO CATTLE

It's all old hat now. Nobody notices much about the next space shuttle launch. The real is all so cliche and banal compared to unreal SFX - sci fi special effects. But I was a first grader watching it on TV and nothing about it was boring then. I think it was venerable TV news anchor Walter Cronkite (Uncle Walter who just passed away at age 92) on the CBS network who helped us plot Glen's progress around the world. It was done with the aid of a little blinking light. Mounted on a board map of the world with a a cutout slot in which the blinking light slowly was shoved across the plywood backed world map to simulate Glen's flight.

CHEEZ WHIZ, BATMAN

Cheesy Velveeta drenched Cheetohs in the extreme this was, SFX wise. But back in that day, it was something. It even got us out of class. And kinda, that getout mattered as big as the space race thing, as big as beating the commie pinko atheist Soviet totalitarian godless bastards. In militarily precise rows we kids sat uniformly and quietly, watching dutifully on the school's TV Our Astronaut - kicking Cold War ass.

JOHN GLENN AND HOT MISS HAVERSHAM

John Glen's all out ride was the catchup hit that moved us from behind in the space race, got the score evened up by halftime. Later astronauts would take the ball all the way past the goalpost of the moon's dusty surface. And watching the news got us much time off from writing drills in Ms Haversham's first grade class.

Or whoever it was who was our teacher back then. Haversham sounds like a nice spinsterly name for a hot first grade teacher when you cannot remember, so it Ms Haversham it will be (er, was; gotta get those tenses right or Ms Haversham would be upset - don't want her ghosts or zombie grade teachers visiting me at night to motivate me towards correct grammer, no siree bob a roony).

16 TONS, 800 EMAILS AND WHADDAYA GET

My reentry into the work world was not so dramatic. There was no threat of being vaporized as was portrayed in "The Right Stuff". Fatigue and time off for doctor appointments were the worst strains. Well, the the worst next to the 800+ emails awaiting my return after being gone for five weeks. Much of that was junkish mail that cleared away easily on day 1, leaving a solid set that had to be read and dealt with carefully the remainder of the week.

PUT ON A HAPPY FACE

And oh, the other risk was the side effects of putting on a happy face. Which truthfully was my internal state of gratitude, not just a mask. I answered the inevitable "So how are you feeling" with "Not as good as before the surgery obviously but all things considered, quite well". Sometimes I'd be shockingly candid and say "I look better than I feel, which is old and feeble. I want my old self back, and can't wait to start working out again".

I WAS A TALKING MR POTATO HEAD

For those who've jumped into this without reading prior posts, I prepared two years for this surgery. I changed from being a ventriloquist's Mr Potato Head (I was a talking couch potato, perhaps not truly sentient, so I had to be ventriloquism in a skinned over bag of fibrous starch). I changed my diet, and added in vigorous exercise to drop 114 pounds or thereabouts, and was running 4 miles or biking 35 miles the week before my heart surgery.

HAS BEEN ACTORS FROM OLD SLASHER FLICKS

I am now struggling to retain the active lifestyle changes I gained while motivated fearfully, while running not from Jason with an axe and a hockey mask (or Mike Meyers, whichever) but a masked surgeon with a chest saw. And now I only run/walk 3 miles and cannot do so yet without stopping to catch my breath, kinda like old times back two years ago. But I am getting there, back to my old meaty hearty self. I smoke all the other dudes in my cardio rehab class, leave them behind in my dust. Easy to do if you are the youngest guy there and had a two year head start before a non-surprise surgical procedure. Still there is much to remodel - I lost another 5+ pounds net after surgery and muscule turning to soggy mush from 5 weeks of torporous inactivity, waiting for my split sternum to heal back up.

HEAD OF THE SLOW CLASS

That said, head of the class I am again, at cardio rehab "class" I rock and I rule and like America did when kicking commie ass across the planet seen below by astronaut John Glenn. And to be frank, I rule arrogantly so at times (in my mind). But this time around I am not the class teacher's pet. The rehab center supervisor, she's kinda hot like a first grade Ms Haversham-ish teacher, but too young - young enough to be my daughter, rather than her being hot AND old enough to be my Mom. That was the constellation of wonderous things unfathomable to a single-digits years old kid back in his first grade class. Back when John Glen jockeyed himself around the world and showed everybody that America Rocked, America Ruled, America Couldn't Lose. Hey, me being part of America - then by proxy or democratic trickle down, I couldn't lose either.

HOURGLASS INSIDE OUT OR UPSIDE DOWN?

We were all much younger then. (Or maybe you weren't around then, not even up to being younger; prior to age zero on the time charts, I dunno what you'd be - feel welcome to look it up in some book about preincarnation, but it's opaque to me at that stage of statelessness). Now I see the hourglasses of time are reversed; and I think that Einstein was right, it's all relative to the observer's point of view.

KING OF THE TIME HILL - NOW WHAT?

I perceive I am looking down from a higher mound of time passed behind, not looking upwards towards a potential and undefined, unlimited future. And this cardio rehab class? That is one of those classes in which you really don't want to belong. Unless you really do belong, and then it is better to be there huffing nad puffing rather than sleeping six feet under the dirt nap storm weather up top, unable to nab that perfect school attendance record despite having to walk to school against the beating winds of stormy living.

POST STAR TREK POSTURING

"Not as good as before the surgery obviously but all things considered, quite well" - banal and cliched my answer, like how we now regard the space shuttle launches (notice I did not properly capitalize the shuttle as a proper noun, in consistency with America's spoiled post Star Trek attitude about imagined future space travel; how much America lives in fantasy as it disregards the real but plain and routine toe dips into space, hey - it's all red white and blue and all that, but we cast that aside once it's no longer novel).

INSTA-GRAVY

But I do have breath to speak that banal answer to "How are you", as clumsy as it does come out. Say it proud and say it loud, with the brown on the down low below - instead of the brown being six feet up over my head. The brown, man, it is all gravy - gravy, gravy, gravy. Ah, gravy - explaining that triplet is another story, a story from my brother after he returned from Vietnam. I'd rather not say what he did when he was In Country, just to say he came back - kinda sorta.

See my brother after 'Nam became a system engineer with Compaq Computer Corporation in Houston. One day he got so frustrated about the over heated conflict at a design meeting to choose what type screw to seat cards inside a desktop PC (the only kind of PC back then, laptops were not yet invented). He was overheard muttering "Gravy, gravy, gravy. Gravy, gravy, gravy". He did not misspeak the word "Groovy" which was much over used back then.

GRAVY ON BUTTERED MASHED TATERS

When asked to explain if he had some kind of eating problem, he replied "Eating disorder? No, not that. When I was out In County back in 'Nam, I promised myself something. I promised myself that if I ever got back home, the worst day back home would be gravy compared to my best day in 'Nam. Ao this stupid meeting is gravy man - fine brown gravy, on 'taters, mashed with butter".

Well said my brother, so very well said. And my 800 emails and my stack of bills and calls to make all awaiting me is the hot chocolate fudge on top of my ice cream dish of troubles for the living. And questions like "So how are you feeling" are the whipped cream and my tartly sighed answer is the red pitiful little cherry on top.

FROM POTATO HEAD TO SAGGY SHAR PEI

It's all ice cream for me, despite feeling like a cross between a plate of half stuffed steamed Asian dumplings and a shrunken Shar-Pei puppy. How so that? When arising in the morning I look at my sags in the mirror. Sags around the once-six packed gut, sags from the muscle loss due to inactivity and suppressed appetite after surgery. Still, it's all ice cream sundaes from here on out. With sprinkles on top, to boot. Homer Simpson approves and agrees, but mainly because of the sprinkles. In his own way he is wise, and so am I; for despite all this, this I know: S'All Good Darllins, S'All Good.

I BEST REMEMBER ALL THIS GOOD CHEAP ADVICE

I'll have to remind myself of all this feel good exhoration come time to resume my workout regimen (soon if not by time of publication). Bear crawls up and then down a flight of stairs, mixed with wind sprints and push ups and then add on free weight work, all to put human meat back onto my skinnied down frame. I will yet get back to feeling 12 years younger than and remain not much longer feeling 12 years older than my clocked age. Time enough to make that happen (6 months, a year?) will pass no matter what I do/don't do, so why not start with finishing a 5K race this coming August 1st? I won't beat my best 5K time but I can finish the race, and put myself back on the road to a new and better normal. Get to feeling better by anticipating better outcomes from the effort.

FEELING A RISING WIND, EH?

Wind in my sails and lungs, it's rising, coming. I just gotta breath in all the way - in and out, each breath a gift. Breath that aids the firing of neurons - sentience, that improbable burst of a self aware fireworks show. The thoughts and emotions in our heads can be explosions in multicolor splendor against a slipstream sky of layered conciousness, as we move against the backdrop of other acting, living souls. Quite the trip fanstastic this thing called living, despite the times that it feels like trying to swim upstream in a river of pudding otherwise known as the workworld flow of emails and calls and memos and meetings.

WHAT A LONG STRANGE TRIP IT'S YET TO BE

I wanna ride this trip to the very end of the line and back again. I want to make happy talk with the other passengers along for the ride to where ever we are going. Even to workplace and my cubicle and the LCD cyclops that crouches in front of my office chair. Because that too passes, and then it's time off for first Tuesday and Gypsy Jazz Cabaraet night at my favorite coffee house. You hang on, and you win by showing up after work.

LIKE SGT PEPPER'S BAND SAID - ALL TOGETHER, NOW

Together, we the living where ever we stand right now (in the work cubicle, at a workday lunch line for the $1 Wendy's value menu specials, or roaming halls at yet another tech conference at a fancy hotel - anywhere we are) we are all quite an impressive cast. Together we all are a travelling dinner theater troupe - serving up dinner and a show - and that is very good entertainment; educational, too. All of us are the actors and audience, though sometimes it is hard to figure out which part we play at any moment. But give it a bit of sand in the hourglass to sort itself out, and both turns will come about - actor and guest/watcher.

PASS THE PLATE, PLEAXE

Come time for my turn to leave the stage and sit a bit for dinner, please pass the gravy my way and do not pass me by come time for ice cream dessert. Forgive me if the cherry on my dessert adorned by a slip or melancholic conversation is occasionally the tart pity (not pit/pitted - pity)cherry, versus a sweet cherry. I'm working on changing that and making good progress.

WE'RE ON A MISSION FROM GOD

For I am on a mission from God now to patrol the bachelor fridge of my mind. That mental appliance from which conditioned responses are drawn for serving at home's table. I am sworn to update the stash of condiments found therein, and henceforth be sure that any jar of cherries found are proper maraschino cherries packed in sweeter syrup. And fresh, unexpired - like I am and want even more to become. I shall decorate the desserts that life serves up with better perspective and thus sweeter fruits, saving those most tart and sour thoughts for chunking at occasional 2am wakeup-in-the-night blues. That is my commitment, and my ever more frequent follow through.

Life is good, getting better - and if it is not yet a bowl of organic cherries, it is at least a Kroger Card discount priced jar of maraschinos. Fresh and unexpired. Like me.

Gratefully yours, and back now
Contributing into the common economy

James Sullivan

Magic Silver Pop-Flash Lightning Storm Show

The post below is a recap of an actual evening's close, not just fantasy fiction - it's about real times spent in my driveway watching the weather.

The ranchito outside of Krum, Tx that is the scene of this evening is up for sale.
I fear I shall see few evenings like this from my driveway in town anytime soon.

==================

In my driveway, I stand under the traces of rain passed on. I feel wind rush from a high pressure front just rolled by, fading out. Thunderstorms recede miles, miles and more miles away on the prairie horizon.

They race to their next appointment for a hail drop. Quite an ambitious schedule they keep.

Spirits of Chaos revel up in the heavens and silent xeon lamps pop their flash. Might be cannon thunder of the gods but it's to far away to hear, barely felt. Too far away to hear? Yeah but easy to see by an unaided eye.

At night when driving home I've got to turn off the AC. Roll down the windows, and smell that fresh scrubbed air.

Lucky for me, I checked out a Maria Callas CD from the library. Popped that sucker in the CD slot as the silver sliver light show fires up the sky. Laughing, growling and barking I was like a coyote dog, as I drove north along I35.

I get paused at the railroad tracks, by this night train pulling freight, in the crossing way. I breath slow and easy, turn off all but the running lights. And wait for the train to finish rooooolllllling by. Gonna wait a while for a night train blocking the entrance to downtwon cosmopolitan Krum, Tx.

So then I watch the sky show but through trees by the roadside, trees yet to sprout leaves. Rosebuds and azaleas - they are in bloom but strange, these trees appear to have no leaves yet.

Rock-bam-boom, clacka-clacka-doom, train keeps going on, on, on.

As Maria Callas sings sumthin in eye-taliyun about some dying lover's broken heart. I see the show through fingers of tree trunks, smell the blooms, hear... nothing but CD and train. And the sky just rocks with silent ka-BAM on each explosion of finger light.

But they are .... Sssshhhhh - silent explosions. Voiceless ropes of cold silver dropped from sky to ground, jumped from ground to sky.

All I hear is the train at the crossing, and Maria Callas. Doing that classical wail, which is akin to a soul sister wail, just different. An earlier form of soul music, is whut them opery arias is. Nice stuff, opry - whut some folks call an acquired taste.

When not so very far away, sometimes the thunder you know is there by its lightning is just the softest of murmurs. Murmurs like a contented lover lying beside you. Sleeping away the night in a lazy semisnore, semislumber, semiwakeful way.

I hope that lover, she's dreaming down a concoction of storm drama. But safely in her sleepy head, and out the way of our waking lives. Get it all over there and then, darlin' -- all that stuff what German poets called "Sturm Und Drang". Keep that in your dreams and out of our walking, wakened lives.

Maybe that's what's going on up there. In the world of silent faraway storms. Somebody's lover (or everybody's) draining off all the day's disappointments. Sweetening their wakeup on next day of life, by dreaming the sour drama out, at night. Up there. Out of the way.

Silently, or just softly as a murmur. So as to wake up with more of those blues gone, gone gone. Gone into the inky black blue of the night, where them blues belong. Sometime around the 1:30's or the 2:30am's of the night. All done by the Oh Dark Thirty point of time before sunrise.

You'll wake up safer, saner, more ready to just do the day w/o sour drama hurled all over other folk if you dream it out up there. Sonambulent, that's the word for which I've been fumbling around for. Means a sleepwalker, or the likes thereof. Them's that don't dream it off, they's the sleep walking sonambulent types. The ones you avoid at the office water cooler next work day. 'Cause all they want to do is bitch and moan about stuff still stuck in their guts.

Maybe they don't have no one to lie down next to at night. Nobody to pat them on the rear real soft in the night, stroke their hair. Murmur in their ear, say that it's gonna be allright. Whisper to them to sleep it off, do all that drama in their dream times.

You can take it to the limit out there, up into the night storm sky. Let the ink-night write lines of blues way past your ledger pages' edges. Balance your books with chits from the land of who-cares-where, but do the math away from the two of us joined together, please.

Ain't got no witness to their lives, the water cooler people all soured up like that, the unwitnessed. They wake up sour and loaded for bear. Sleep walk through the day, as a thunderstorm that wants to be heard, up close and nasty real.

Rock-bam-boom, clacka-clacka-doom, the water cooler train wreck yet unhappened people keeps going on, on, on with their... "unresolved issues".

At the office, I'm gonna do me a double radar take on my next approach to the water cooler. Though I do feel sorry for such who sleep walk so sour during the daylight. Them what ain't got no night-witness to watch over them as they send it up to be swept away with the next passing storm.

Heck, I'm among 'em, the unwitnessed, I sleep alone now. Did so even beside that gal I married, towards the end of it at least before that train done wrecked all messy and expensivo-mente boy howdy. But now I take care of mine angst or sturm und drang or whatever in my driveway, and during that drive home to my little ranchito. I laugh, I bark like a coyote, I shout out the window at the silent murmuring thunder show. Thank gawd for rough prairie weather.

With the windows rolled down, I take in the ozone long before I wake up and smell the coffee the next day. I get it out of my gut, mind, feelings, right then and there. I wake up no more that half a bubble off level. Which is.... socially functional and thus acceptable and economically reinforced. It's a social duty for us to do this before we go out to meet the world. To get levelled up and all. At least enough to pass morning inspection at the water cooler.

I can hardly wait for the next storm front to blow through. I'll check the library for some of them other opera CDs, maybe something German. I will expand this new acquired taste of mine for arias. Get me some spicey batch of that German "Sturm Und Drang" stuff I heard of. I want to hear that kind of color, as my soundtrack to the next silent thunder-show. If it ain't too burdensome like that German opry with the fat lady holding a spear and wearing a pointy, two-horned helmet.

But if I must wait for that next thunder show to come, then wait I will.
But I won't wait to live while waiting.
That just won't do, nor will I.

How To Remain A Goddess In Good Standing

Can Hera remain a goddess in the eyes of her husband Zeus after he catches her clipping her toe nails?

Go Down Knowing On A Chi Town Night

Asked I am why I ask so many questions about why.
I ask because a gap is how it is between you and I.
Between you and yourself, him and her, us and them.
And no one is asking the whys about wheres we've been.

It's what we know, and all we pretend not to know.
Because life is, thank God, still like it is in Chicago.
A town where everbody knows everything; and nobody knows nothing.
That's what cops hear in Chi-town, when they go sniffing around.

In Chicago everybody knows everything, and nobody knows nothing.
We know it all. We know it not, that's our story should we get caught.
And we' sticking by that to the bitter end. That's all folks, enemies and friends.

Who knows the deal on how it went, between you and me. Do I know?
Who knows how it went down between you and the mirror. Don't you know?
Who knows how it went between him and her, us and them. Do we?
All we know is the gaps separating the sides. Don't we, though.

Like it is in Chicago, on the north side and the south, suburb and city,
Indifference and pity, dark and the light, black and white, the living
and the closed mouth. Poor pretending rich, the high class go slumming,
Everybody knows ever thaing; and nobody knows nothin.

Know a popular tune? Whistle it when you walk past Graceland Cemetery
On Chicago's northside, not so far from the night life in Uptown.
Sing it to those lying in wait, their ears are cupped to the ground
Listening for songs the tongue-less want to but can't sing merry.

Gracelanders at rest lying where now they know so much,
No longer at last so troubled by all that they cannot touch.
While everybody around knows it all, knows ever damn thing;
Ain't nobody knows nothing about the coming night's sting.

Go down knowing on a Chi-Town night - step aside shadows,
Jump from pool to pool of flickered street lamp light.
What you do not know, what you do and deny as foresight
Waits for you, waits - makes you want to take flight.

Almost A Ghost But Not If I Can Help It

For a while I thought I was a ghost after I heard Lyle Lovett and His Large Band. But then after I gave it some thought, I know that I really ain't no ghost. Or ain't like any of the usual ghosts you ever knowed.

All this thinking happened while I was listening to one of Lyle Lovett's CDs - of him and his Large Band. In that CD's songs I heard crisp, bluesy riffs reach out of my truck speakers and slap me right upside the head. Early before dawn this morning, en route from the house to work, I had Lyle on the CD and on the brain. And the heart.

It came from his guitars, guitars tightly strung and precisely struck. Oh there were some horns and such, but mainly it was Lyle and his guitar. Singing and ringing together they were a twisted thread on a needle, a metallic strand-sound that sewed my mouth shut as it opened other things. It was a sound that only God-favored flesh tipped fingers can play. I've tried to learn how to play guitar like that, like Lyle and his bandmates. I can't. Maybe I ought say not yet instead of can't. It's been four decades of trying, so I can't easily just say someday soon. Oh I can pick one up, strum it a bit, rattle the strings - but not open anybody up with what comes out.

But that's against what I can imagine in my head, the exactly-so if what I want heard coming off my fingertips. Sometimes I can feel it, too - how I'd feel if I, I had God-favored flesh on my fingertips. Have you ever felt like that before? Have you felt like that many times? Like you knew what you want to hear out of your mouth when singing. Like when you need, not just want to, you need to wail like Aretha Franklin; but that's not what comes out.

Like knowing what you'd like to see come out from under the sweep of your hand. If old China is your locale, it would be an inked brush in your hand, flying across rice paper. If colonial America is where you stood, it would be a pinched quill pen scritch scratching across parchment underneath your hand. Either a brush or a pen, but under your eyes, under your hand, a beautiful thing would come to be. A poem or a love letter or a Bill or Rights or a portrait of someone, but something you loved would take shape.

And the fruit of those talent blessed fingertips, it would be alive with feeling. It would pour out like sticky honey. Sweetness licked by another's hungry tongue. Breath blown over hair above another's soft warm ears. It would flow, it would softly blow, like a whisper it would go.Surely the message would go down in after over someone's fleshy ear lobe. Go down into the bones of their affections, and grasp their senses by the roots.

And then you'd know it - know not just that they but you too, were alive. That you had lived and you had loved and that's how you'd know it. You'd know it by the warmth of the other person's reaction, know it by their in-kind responsive heat. Know it by their nighness, of their drawing nearer to you. By your audience you would know - lover or even enemy, by their reaction you'd know you weren't no ghost.

Know this you would by the slight curl of a lip. Or a smile so rightly accented by some crinkle-wrinkles around the eyes. That's the trick to reading truth in faces, did you know that? Which is reading those little squints around the eyes.When the smile is sincere, they will be there. When it ain't, you still may have 'em in your grip but in a different way - better that you know that.

But what to do if you can't pull those metal stranded strings like Lyle Lovett? What to do if you can't push the trumpet notes around like Miles Davis, as smooth as a speed skater on ice? It's all about what to do to get a closed door open, and not just rattle the door knob like ghosts do - make a reach but without effect.

Shake people up with appearances, like some ghost who can reach out but can't touch? I don't want that, I want what results in a felt touch, a smile, a real resonant reaction. A chill down the spine is good, if it's the right time; but not the spooky kind. How to guarantee a warm blooded response I don't exactly know. Not yet do I know.

All I know to do is try what I'm doing now, which is to point you at something that moved me. I will tell you about it, I hope that it rattles your senses to the point of your feeling it, or at least an itch that makes you go scratch it. A hand on the shoulder is good, but even a prick on the skin will do. All this I do in hope it opens a door that's between us, one that is closed.

So I point out how Lyle Lovett sounds coming out of the truck speakers. Or I mention the song "Moondance" by Van Morrison, how that can spin you around (sometimes at night). Or I say you gotta listen to Miles Davis and his "Sketches of Spain". Ear stuff works real good for that kind of shake up wake up call. I might exhort you to listen to "Spem in Allium" by Thomas Tallis; 40 people it takes to sing it, but when they get it right there's no words to describe the places you go on that carpet ride of choral swell. Or hey, playing some psycho rockabilly by Reverend Horton Heat could do it, to get you out of your chair and your toes a scootin' across the apartment carpet, maybe.

Sometimes I describe how trees look in a forest mural painted by Thomas Hart Benton - how they writhe like live snakes that got by magic spell and patient strokes turned into wood. Remind you I might about how sitting on the hood of a rumbling muscle car can feel. You'll feel the heat move through you starting where you sit with feet on a hot chrome bumper, while you ponder the horsepower; you'd want to smoke your tires, turn heads, burn rubber and screech, to get the whole block's attention.

There's no good sense in hearing, seeing, feeling all this good stuff and keeping it to one's self. Got to use it like tinder to ignite heat in somebody else, in their - oh, where to put it? In their self, their heart, their mind, on their tongue, in their guts? Words for these parts of us are just handles not screwed into anything, sign not mounted on posts - no the real thing itself, not the 'where' where the feelings go inside us to be combusted and burn into vapor. Smoke - real smoke that you can smell is air more dense than puffed words; though sometimes the right words can cause us to smolder and smoke inside.

Whatever. You name it, I'll try to put it aflame. In any audience - lover, enemy, friend, or noncombatant. Others lit my candle here and there; so why shouldn't I do the same for others? I must do so, I must. And so must you. Because if we can light somebody up, we ain't no ghosts, are not apparitions just rattling door knobs in vain. Or if so, then I will be the best dang ghost there is around, bar none like you never seen. Cause when that door between us done gets opened, who cares how I spooked it into happening, it's opened. And then we can cross the threshold of divided worlds to see, touch, hear one another; share our muse, dance and fuse.

It's all that matters.

Dry Cleaner Pickup, Deferred

Gets tiring, all the gumshoe footwork to uncover Truth everlasting.
There are stories you want to be different, but they won't rearrange -
Cause they're history, old history. The right questions no one is asking.
Too busy paying rent to spare change for friends, much less strangers.

So many things that you still want to leave all the way behind you.
Like clothes you dropped off at dry cleaners, never picked up for weeks.
Didn't pick up for months. Didn't pick up for years. Don't have a mind to.
They wait for you, those old clothes; and so the bill whose loss you seek.

That same old suit, that same old dress, that same old shirt and slacks.
The outfit you paid dearly for with your first paycheck, what you had after tax.
Clothes that dont't fit so good like you hoped they would off the rack,
Make you look like you should to others and yourself. Past time to pack.

But they were all you could afford at the time, was the best you could do.
Can you afford the real story now about how you look, now? Look out now.
You know the skinny about how you wanted to look back then. Look in, then.
What will you do with the fact of difference between the two?

An illegible highway sign says it all

An illegible highway sign
Hangs by one unsheared bolt
Upside down on a galvanized pole
Beside the only road out of town

Not heeded by the reckless
Not needed by the cautious
Hard to read and hardly read when legible
Seen while exiting the town's one lonely cafe

You may not be in the habit of reading signs

Signs of the seasons? Nope.
I got girly shop calendars for that on the wall
Signs of the times? Nope.
I got CNN news on the tube and they're on the ball
Signs of the cross? Nope.
Unless I'm on the ropes, not til Judgment day calls

Route drivers circle back to receive board special sacraments
Chew chicken fried steak silently in cafe booths built for four
Say nothing about alleged dangers down the road, nada
Nada about scenic overlooks or interesting strangers, nothing

At days end when twilight begins, night starts to roll in
A driver is on their own with maps of private publication

Friday Daylight Be Wastin', Wastrel Wench

Introduction:

My grandpa for a while was a tenant sharecropper. Weekends before he got religion, he liked to go out to the dances. Granpa was your normal cowboy - played fiddle, carried a boot knife, got into fights. Lucky one dance night for him he forgot his knife the night he got into a bad fight.

Otherwise during the Depression instead of working as a prison guard ... He would have ended up one of the "guests" of Texas, "camping out". Might even have been a roommate with Clyde Barrow, who he bullwhipped once. Granpa bullwhipped Clyde because Clyde came short a few seconds of shooting Granpa. That was during a break when Bonnie killed another guard on the other side of the field. But that's another story and another poem for another day.

This ... "pome", of sorts, is for my Granpa - in his younger tenant sharecropper fiddling knife carrying dancing drinking fighting pre-prison guard cowboy days.

Friday Daylight Be Wastin', Wastrel Wench

Leave the low paying vineyards, find a better sharecropper camp
Thumb a ride where bands play weekends, no cover charge

Friday sun sets on horizon, good love luck forces be a rising
Moonlight soon to wash ironed blouses stiff from their sizing

Skirts soon to swirl swishing, boys and girls soon to be wishing
That tonight luck favors both the brave and coward alike

You've better things to do with your limited time and
Nights are for - well, somebody got to drink the wine

Why not play your best hand on those few hours off
But work the odds, best no bluff bets 'gainst the house

Oh Buffalo Gals won't you come out tonight, come out tonight, come out tonight
Yes, Buffalo Gals we will come, come tonight and dance by the light of the moon

Years later we won't search for albums you put up on shelf
With pictures of you and me and your old vamp self

We won't resell old gossip and news tips long gone stale
I ain't one to drink bad water from just any old pail, hon

Oh Buffalo Gals won't you come out tonight, come out tonight, come out tonight
Yes, Buffalo Gals we will come, come tonight and dance by the light of the moon

While Walking The Dog After Morning Rain

street curb gutters fill with sheened reflection
waving fresh news of a morning storm like paperboys
ditch water taught with tension and smoothed surfaces
impresses on itself a cross hatch diamond face

liquid ribbons cross hatched to run cuts of straight crinkle
tugging surface creases into line by curb and concrete underlay
storm gates are the winning receiver of merged raindrops
sprinting to finish downhill 5Ks to the greater liquid whole

like panting puppies eager to be first to the tossed ball
water comes to a corner turn, slows to stop by the choice
of which way to go? at corners things have time to settle -
tea colored leaves, sticks, soil and soaked grass clippings

if underlay softens, you break surface tensions
water puts on a new face of pure calm, spreads itself
too wide to step over easy so we return to our home
put the puppy away, adorn commercial armor, cease to play

now go earn pay for the taxes eating
your check boxed soul's labored endeavors
please don't let that be all what happened
if sight can linger, hang this aback in your mind
throughout the live long slug dog day

the morning breezes on your cheek,
what you breathed on the way home
a lover's kiss was blown at home's door
en route to your fray for impersonal profit

what compares to that cool and calm?
composure - the perfect perfume
you need some to soothe a jangled soul,
when it is crank yanked counterclockwise

by desk phones that shake it up baby,
ring and shout while you work it on out

Cheap Rhyme Answers A Fair Question

Asked if I wax and then wane or am always so deep
To answer that question cheap rhymes will I speak

Tides run with the moon, so I wax and I wane
As night next to day, I change and stay the same

Earth circles the the sun, same old seasons get spun
The road I am on is the road that I run

But bounce on waved waters or swim silent below
Where ever you are it's from there you must go

En Route To Heaven's Gate, Next Stop - Bus Lobby Church

At a bus stop lobby I wait for my ride to Heaven's Gate. Poet WS Merwyn drops by. He gives me a personal reading of his poems. He’s got many poems with powerful one-line grabbers at the end. That Merwyn, he’s got a real good closer-trick going on there. Salespeople could make good money if they closed deals like he closes the trap on your attention.

While WS Merwyn reads, Country Western singer Trace Adkins glides by on a Rose Bowl parade float. He is playing "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk", with proper background dancers in sprayed-on bluejeans. He then starts playing his old hit, “Chrome” and points at me. Shooting a magic twitch into my fingers, Trace lets me play for 30 minutes.

Now I can play guitar like I always wanted. Versus "play at" which is mostly what I do with lots of things. But now I play so well that everybody including hardshell Baptists get up in bus lobby to dance. We all have a great time, even the hardshell Baptists - who figure after this gig is over, they will have to repent big time.

But not repent entirely, though if it was all up to them they would double pure, double sure. Before they can finish their explaining, St Peter at Gate would interrupt. St Peter would say what was the problem anyway, and why didn't they tip the band? 'Cause they wuz really smokin' that night, especially that guest guitar player. Is he with you, I want to talk with him.

Night drops into the bus dock and washes in deep blue ink in the sky above my head. My bus finally pulls up. Time to go on the next leg of my journey. Bus doors open with a hissing swish that could sound evil, but don't. Music from ZZ Top pours out of the overhead speakers.

As I get on board for my next destination, a Thomas Tallis 40-voice English motet is playing in my iPod earbuds. A bit of entranced enchantment settles on my face. Right quick before the final stage of trance I wake up and smell cheap coffee from the bus lobby diner. The smell of burnt cheap coffee is like the smell of burnt out souls, it keeps me from slipping too far into a vapid trance. Keeps me in the plain old here and now. Or what's left of it, this close to Heaven's Gate. Things get ethereal the further you get from Earth and the closer to Heaven. Ever try to hug smoke? Not an easy thing to do.

Down the bus aisle, I see someone reading the very same book I am carrying. One that I am planning to read; and I might even finish it this time (probably Don Quixote). Lotsa time to pass in eternity, so my stack of unfinished books will get whittled down soon. I take a chance to sit alongside this person. This time it works out great, I listen to her and finish one more book by hearing the cliff notes first hand. Before the night fades into day, one more friend is made on the multi-stop ride to Heaven's Gate.

I am hungry for some chow, but by music and friendly connection, my soul's been fed. That's bread that used to I knew not of and did not partake of near enough before I came to Bus Lobby Church. Those days of starvation by hesitation are long one, since now I am en route to the Diner of Heavenly Delight. Still, I wonder if deep fried Twinkies in Heaven hang from every tree, and if there are vending fees before you pluck one down.

Hey I did tip the band before I got onto the bus. Tipped them right good. Nothing for me to worry about come time to talk with St Peter.

Not that I know about, anyhow.

Rabbits and Dillos and Deer, Oh My!

Summer Weekend Perfection starts with a Saturday morning bike ride along a canopied forest trail. A hot summer sun saunas you on those short breaks of canopy come some open meadow here and there. The pace you want to keep is barn burner fast. As fast as you can stand.

Along the way you see touches of wildlife bounding from edge of forest and meadow. Deer, armadillo, maybe a rabbit; things that get by on edges that demarque the tamely populated wild lands from savage socially ambitious suburbs. Real loner predators of the 1850s prairie range, like cougars and jaguars, they got edged out long ago by adaptive, more agressive non-native species - like packs of feral hogs (escaped after import by careless European settlers) and suburban tract developers (mere roadside dump by irresponsible vacationers from Hell who abandon unwanted pets before returning home).

So we got... Rabbits and Dillos and Deer, Oh My!

Whoop de poopy doo doo; but hey, that is all that is left, so that is what is; and we are where we are. But all is/can be holy if still in grace with the Creator or a sentient observer. At the ride's end is a spring fed river whose banks are lined with shade trees. Lucky you, the trail ends right next to an outdoor camp site with grill, and...

Omigod, archbishop's chamberpot Batman - the park is hosting an outdoor Egyptian belly dancer convention! Striped tents, thrumming drums, snake dancers, jackpot!

Looky looky at the wind, it too enchanted by the prospects of this event. See how it flows round those silken gossamer clad dancing does. See that rush of air over the skin and the slay of their hair spin. Who's the enticer and who's the enticed here? Wind whips gladly as it flirts. World and dancer each smugly believing they are the enhancer of this dance - but both act in concert to make the felt breeze as strong between as the two can stand and not unmake their embrace. In short: a whole lotta thumping jumping and writhing going on.

Coast your knobby tired ride to a stop, do a trick dismount to one foot on the pedal before step splashing down into the shock chilly water that is willy nilly crashing off rocks. Rocks that laugh wet and hearty, a laugh that invites you in. Go in and under all the way, go back to a womb of awakening water and hold your breath like before you were born. Practice bursting out into a new world using legs thrust up on unsure footing atop slippery gravel smoothed by eons of river time.

Walk yourself and your bike out to the river edge, soaked to skin and briefly shiver cold to look for campfire wood. Even if Glad Sandwich baggies leaked river water on your marshmallows and Graham Crackers, you can still stand tall to speak without apology to the wood gods living by this River. Declare your petition as you search for kindling: "S'more, Sirs. Can we please make S'Mores." If you are polite and firm you will find fuel to make the heat you seek.

For yet your stash of dark bittersweet chocolate remains unharmed. And while there is chocolate there is the bittersweet - hard bought wisdom and immanent joy. Think those Arabesque conventioneers at the camp site next door might trade for chocolate in exchange for dry graham crackers and fresh marshmallows?

Your day has started out right and the sun is not yet as high as you feel; so go forth on this gambit and ask brazenly, haggle. It's a venal sin if you hesitate. Worse if you balk. Mortal if you only talk in your head to yourself, and walk away without cutting a deal with the dervish devils next door. So go cross a camp site line into the world next door and ask, bargain, charm, be charmed. Offer to play by refusing lightly, but only temporarily. Time is wasting and there's no need to go fasting.

This ain't ocean front, it's the river and even if it were a beach, there's no way to gather sand underfoot and stuff it into your own drained hourglass anyway.

Dusk, Green Bikes And Tangerine Tea

Shells of spent July 4th fireworks on grass lie about
Cicadas make raspy chitter chirps from places of hiding

A weak tea orange sky percolates above my forehead's horizon
As I get out of my Bubba Big Butt Redneck Dually Dodge truck

NPR shining night star Teri Gross let a guest preacher testify
Preach to a radio pew where I was just sitting, service now let out

He taunted devils yet to strike us later tonight in the wee hours
We best watch out for their attack of the lonely 3am blues

By ringing heaps of praise on vintage 1975 Toni Bennet & Bill Evans CDs
The pulpit's guest slings his shot at the coming dark hordes

My own choir gathers, cicadas tsinging jazz scat like a soft brush on cymbals
Summer night wakes up and chains links a memory fence, stirs tangerine tea into ink

I walk my new dog and watch him chew his newfound drum stick
While I chew the fat with some of the alley cats, soul passers by

A tired father pumps up the tire on a fat tired green Schwinn bike
As my shrill shill cicada chorus pumps up their volume to the max

Without so much as a nod from me nor any gesture or tricks
Not a turn of any dial, like me it all just happens, like I happen

The father, he asks how I am as his son's bike takes off, my reply must be brief
"Cicada choirs, and tangerine tea with mint are what we lived for 20 years from now"

Episode Fourteen: PETA relax. No animals living or dead harmed on my behalf

Recovery Escapades:
A Newsletter Of 2nd Chance Life Across Cardiac County Line Road

Episode Fourteen: PETA relax. No animals living or dead harmed on my behalf

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) true believers, relax. No animals living or dead were harmed on my behalf before, during or after my cardiac surgery. I'm not sure if there is a certification for "animal free" surgical procedures. But if so I'd pass all animal suffering tests with flying colors, like old times passing exams at my high school.


See I was good, sickeningly good, at taking exams in high school. More than a few types desired to cheat off my papers. Freak hippie chicks, not just dumb jocks. Hmm, dumb jocks - there I go, redundant again. Not so lucky at cards or at love was I mind you but the very floors in high school classrooms seemed to roll good exam grades over into my corner.


Yeah, the classroom floors must have been canted in my favor grade wise, in unseen hyper space dimensions. I'd say it was the 5th, 6th, and 7th dimensions jacked in my favor. Maybe more. Stephen Hawking says reality in toto might be as many as 11 dimensions in all. Our only big catch (and it's a big one, natch) is how curled up tiny would be the dimensions past # 4. The fourth dimension (time) is familiar and is most people's big worry. The time dimension and how we might be running short on what's in it is a big concern to most. Out of time is eventual, since time leaks out of the 4th but not back into it.


Yep, no reverse tidal flow on time as far as we know. Those who don't worry enough about time pass it like water. Those who fret to excess over time's one way flow just burn a lot of it up with nothing to show for the worry. Time? Not a dimension useful for controlling outcomes if put into the hands of the apathetic or anxious. Other dimensions work better for them than #4 time.


Got to be a better middle course way to deal with time besides ignorance or worry. But what higher dimension that path lies in, I dunno. Could be inside the 10th or 11th dimensions.


Usually I'd take the trouble to find out which dimension that is, before I wrote this, so's I can tell you. But after my divorce I don't get out much to travel, so I wouldn't know. Anyway, the stellar exam outcomes they rolled my way, maybe across the floor via these unseen higher dimensions. Whichever were the dimensional ones that affected exam grades. On tests for spelling, history, literature - never had much to worry about. Not to worry about like time, running out of time, anyway.

One might wish (as I did) that those tiny curled up higher dimensions past the golden #4 of time could have distilled something in high school more like rollicking good fun, versus just good grades. Yeah, something that works better like how coiled copper pipes do when they trickle out drops of moonshine. Or lines of sonnets, how they work to seep into pens of poets, scratching out lines that punch the gut and send the mind of writer and reader alike reeling.


What plumbing in what unseen dimension does those things I dunno, but I gotta find what dimension to go to, to get me some of that. How do I buy, where do I sign?


Just time trickled out of dimension # 4. Maybe choice or fate factored more in the outcomes of grades, love and luck at cards. But my twist to the old nature/nurture, fate/choice dilemma that I hope to market for profit is: Blame the unseen curled up dimensions of reality for distilling all your bad luck. Point fingers at action behind the curtained stage of the seen reality. Leap beyond the limiting restrictions of causality and personal responsibility. Don't blame yourself for anything. Blame the unseen dimensions.

In regards to PETA's animal suffering test, that old Unseen Dimensional mojo from HS was in effect, sputtering pennies from heaven down on me. There was no need to take parts for transplant from the innocent animals to keep me ticking. My chest crack to repair an aortic aneurysm involved no borrowed flesh. Not even a vein from my own leg had to change places.

Much like elections in Chicago and dead Texans voting in alphabetical order for Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, the fix was in and the fix was all artificial. Two inches of arterial real estate - all replaced by dacron tubing.

When your personalized Medical Prophecy of Deadly Aortic Diameters is 99.9 percent realized, you get medical religion and act pronto to get medically righteous. Not that in this newly gotten religion any repentance was needed.


Moral dilemmas about child labor practices, or ecologically destructive packaging need apply at the back door of this experience. And no repentance - this cardiac gift of the gods was not caused by what I did/didn't eat, smoke, shoot, sip or snort. So as Teddy Roosevelt might put it, it was merely time to "Get action". Some surgical action.

Honestly I'd have to force this to be a moral issue for me. Unless I want to unbless myself by subscribing to theologies of Original Sin, it's time to move on.


To anybody waking up in a bathtub of ice sans a kidney, a vein or a chunk of artery I say - hey, it wasn't me. Go over to the Unseen Higher Dimensions to round up your usual suspects.


Yours Truly and Ridiculous,
From Across Cardiac County Line Road

James Sullivan

2AM NIGHT TRAIN TAKE ME SOMEPLACE NEW

2AM NIGHT TRAIN, TAKE ME SOMEPLACE NEW

Trains pass through our town at 2AM, trains that wake village sleepers
Bind those that wake with spells and enchantments to listen immobile
Tracks are switched by invisible hands to derail dreams in progress
Dreams not to be remembered anyway come time to rise for work

The howling of locomotive horns holds back behind the stage curtain
The very understudies called up from the actors' union hiring hall
Understudies and their thoughts wait on tiptoe trembling, ready to leap
But remain unperformed behind the threshold lines taped on floor
Lines across which lies recognition and fame, action its own reward

Rented aspirations lay piled like discarded dressing room clothes
All put away unpurchased, unowned, unearned - unworn, saddest of all
As the ow ow owling night train howl bays, bleeds a last spurt of hot combusted breath,
A finale for the night concert, fading the cry to love new chances that ought be taken

And leaves in beds and heads of the gathered audience piled high
Dry leaves raked for dispersal, twirling counterclockwise in winds of sighs
That stir every morning a few steps, just a few steps more ahead
Of the planet's change from night watch to day labors

Twice, thrice each night the gypsy caravan rolls in
And sounds through each darkened block of our town
And every house in earshot can attend the show
All can open the gate between sleeping and waking worlds

Brittle leaves of still desire and dessicated hope swirl spellbound
Go green and supple if for only passing minutes while the call is heard
You need only be alive tomorrow night to catch the next sound drift
And not too tired, and troubled enough to not sleep too soundly

The passing 2AM train calls a number, your cardboard badge on the actors' hiring wall
If dues are paid, loyal union hands can stand ready to take the call and cheat Death
And taxes a little in lives imagined onstage, while the train horns call the village roll

Episode Thirteen: Vice Versa Vertue

Recovery Escapades:
A Newsletter Of 2nd Chance Life Across Cardiac County Line Road

Episode Thirteen: Vice Versa Vertue

I prepared for my heart surgery by dropping 114 pounds, getting off two asthma meds, an acid reflux Rx, eliminating my sleep apnea, getting off high blood pressure meds and a severe anxiety Rx. And I did this by diet and exercise after decades of sedentary lifestyle. While undergoing an acrimonious divorce, to boot.

I promised in an earlier post to reveal to you my secret arsenal of strength that got me ready for heart surgery.

Below are the powerful forces that aided me in making huge life changes; these soliders of internal fortitude were the fighting force under joint command of myself and trainer ranger buddy Torkey the Terrible (aka Torquemada the Torturer). These are my Mighty Morphin Rangers of power:

1. Procrastination.
2. Laziness.
3. Fear.
4. A tiny dollop of will.

Note on #4: this is NOT what Nietzcheans call "Uberman Will To Power". Nah, just a lowercase 'w' snack portion sized chunka will, best labelled as tepid warmed over good intentions.

Great. This was my dream team of internal soldiers to fight for lifestyle change.

This was my army of invincibles, come time to make war within myself for a lifestyle change, for a shakedown makeover to prepare me for open heart surgery. To get me from living in a State of Inertia to a State of Readiness.

George Bush's secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld said you go to war with the army you have, not the one you need. At least he was right about that one thing. Too bad about everything (and I do mean everything) else.

Well I had to use what soldiers I had inside to go to war with the Kingdom of Inertia. Inertia, our unofficial 51st state, and my State of Dissolution. And then it ocurred to me - the old kids game of rocks paper scissors. As a strategy for creating the Will to Fight.

Ends up Fear could overpower Lazy by whispering "You're gonna die if you don't get fit. Or worse, have a stroke and wear a drool cup strapped under your chin with duct tape to catch the spittle while you lie in bed waiting to die".

Yow, scary. Scary enough to scramble up some action.

Fine start, now that Fear had given a proper whuppin to Lazy. But that's only a start, not enough to get across the finish line. Evil internal Overlord Procrastinator still reigned and had to be trumped - but how?

Well turns out that an hour of exercise immediately on rising from sleep could burn off more fat than 2 or 3 hours at night. So somebody was going to whisper strategic disinformation into Lazy's ear. True information, just "dissing" type info, in street lingo terms.

Ever see a nasty barfight at a beer joint? Admit it or not, barfights they go on inside your head, at neural junction hangouts for pending decisions. They start with a whisper into some drunk jerk's ear.

So somebody whispers into Mr Lazy's ear saying "Hey, that dude Mr Procrasinator on the other side of the bar, he says he's Top Dog around here. He says you better not even whimper at doing twice as much exercise later tonight. 'Cause that's the timing Mr Procrastinator wants and what Mr Procrastinator wants he gets. He says way past time for Mr Lazy to suck it up and do a doggie submission display - lay down and bare some throat, roll over - capiche? Geez, what kinda guy says that to everybody in earshot 'cept for you? The ladies, they were sure laughing their butts off at your for that one. At least the hottie ones were laughing. Them coyote uglies, at least they was sympathetic for you. Hey Mr Lazy, no way would I call you a Total Loser - I mean not like, you know, a complete Total Loser."

And such is how seeds of productive intra-psyche conflict are laid into the soil of one's soul.

The reigning regions of your brain ought to be named not medulla or cortex or frontal lobe. Instead they should carry monikers like those blinking above the doorway of small town county line watering holes - beer joints as we call 'em down in Texas.

Call one of these joints in your head the "Hell No We Don't Go" tavern, which shares a common dance floor with the "My Way or the Highway" saloon right next door. These two areas of your brain are beer joints where two cliques of self-sorry stick-in-the-muds glare at each other through a shared cutout in the fire code wall that divides these establishments. Left and right lobes of your brain, as it were.

Enough to say that from such straegic whispers, a big barfight done broke out in my head every morning come time to rise shine and exercise. A dirty eye-gouging street fight between Mr Lazy and Mr Procrastinator come every dawn. Before dawn, actually - what time the military type folk call "Oh Dark Thirty", about 30 minutes before sunrise, the darkest time to the human eye and soul and the will to rise.

This daily barfight starts and spills over onto the shared dance-around floor. Then it goes from the original establishment of Inertial Resistance To Improvement over to the joint next door that is selling the same Elixir of Excuses. All this was goin' on in mah haid, come every mornin' time. A self induced hangover of sorts, but with a solemn purpose in mind.

Not always but more often than not, Mr Lazy busted a longneck bottle over the head of Mr Procrastinator. Jim Croce would be delighted were he around to see it. Jim Croce would have stayed alive just to write another song about it; I can almost hear in in my head, over the jukebox as these two start to fighting.

See, I decided that hard changes made on an uphill grade, they are all about egging on two skunk-striped stupid small town bullies into a right proper barfight. In the end, the village is all the better off once they finish each other off. Despite all the broken furniture and cleanup cost.

Or look at it like a rewrite of the Godzilla monster movie where King Kong stops Godzilla from stomping the crap out of Tokyo. Godzilla he gets all upset about Tokyo wanting to change a few things for the better. And the only thing on hand to stop Godzilla besides lotsa too-little people was King Kong, asleep on his island.

One ticked off Godzilla. One cranky, irascible King Kong wanting not to be bothered. And many Lilliputians of virtue wanting effective change, but drenched in hopeless despair. Sounds a lot like the American body politic and our Two Party System to me.

This ain't gonna end well 'cept as a chance for Home Depot and Lowes to open new stores for the rebuilding of a stomped over Tokyo. Not unless the right spin is put on it. But before the Japanese home remodelling industry can rebound, you gotta rightly pit monster against monster. Vice against vice.

Let Godzilla and King Kong wear each other out as enemies. Then my internal Lilliputians of good will and virtue can move in for the kill. Then it becomes as easy as cowtipping. Worked for me, can work for you if you spin it right. That's the trick, to trick yourself into doing the right thing at the right time.

If only all of life's sucky stuck scenarios could be so deftly managed into a funny cartoon denouement. Try this one out, and if it works there's no charge owed me 'cept to tell folks where you got the idea - from this side of Cardiac County Line Road.

Yours Truly and Ridiculously
From Across Cardiac County Line Road,

James Sullivan

Episode Twelve: Hiccup The Stoner Recovery Dog

Recovery Escapades:

A Newsletter Of 2nd Chance Life Across Cardiac County Line Road

Episode Twelve: Hiccup The Stoner Recovery Dog

Small mistakes can expand, get expensive. Quickly. Violating a small pragmatic rule may have proven that recently.

In earlier posts I mentioned that for the first 4 weeks of recovery from cardiac surgery I was not yet 'condoned' for solo walks. That's sister or auntie or girlfriend lingo for what the CIA calls 'sanctioned'. Well one Sunday morning in recovery week 3 I was short my 7am walking buddy. I was in need of my morning recovery walk. As was Hiccup the Recovery Wonder Dog, the Pocket Beagle puppy whose (initial) mission in life is to aid my recovery as a cardiac patient (patients with pets recover better than those without; and I am all about improving my odds).

What to do, with no sanctioning walking partner?

I decided to be ambitious. Push it a bit, get a little burn on by walking Hiccup a mile's distance to the Jupiter, a favorite coffeehouse haunt. We'd get in our walk and Hiccup would enjoy meeting some of the early Sunday Jupiter House crowd. Share the love, share the puppy, play a round of "Je Ne Se Quais".

"Je Ne Se Quais" - this is a coffeehouse tasting game I invented. It pits the wits of Jupiter House barristas against my nose and taste buds. Barrista adds a shot of mystery syrup on top of a shot of vanilla in a skim milk steamer. Then I guess the mystery flavor.

Briefly the score was neck and neck until barrista David (marketing major at University of North Texas), pulled out trickier tactics - double shots of vanilla too plain to believe; or slipped a subtle demi-dash of pumpkin under a decorative Ghiradelli syrup swirl of chocolate flair. Sneaky, devious and entirely legal - truly David is well trained in the dark arts of advertising to distract the senses and mislead the appetites of consumers.

Marketing major barristas - coming your economic way to hypnotize your tastes and inflate conzumer desires once they matriculate. Caveat Emptor, conzumers - Buyer Be Very Wary. In all that you do, in all that you shop.

I think my hopes for winning a round of "Je Ne Se Quais" is what tipped over my judgment towards the stupid. See, David ain't barrista-ing on Sunday mornings. My chances for victory are better Sunday mornings. So I set out to walk uphill with Hiccup just 1 teensy mile's distance to the Jupiter House. Along the sidewalked way I take on a distracting cold sweat. A bit too much? Bah, press on!

This while I am too distracted to notice that Hiccup the Recovery Wonder Dog chews on anything he smells (he is a puppy and he is a Beagle to boot). And that chew list lines out as: a stick, a piece of bark, a chunk of pecan shell, a leaf, and - as we later find out - two chunks of hallucionagenic toxic mushroom.

I go back to the 70s when 'shrooms were considered an interesting, umm, day trip out of town. I didn't do 'shrooms but had some hippie friends at Texas A&M - chemistry and agronomy majors - who did such tripping. And boy howdy was my dog tripping, just like these classic psychedelic sea sailing trippers of decades gone by.

Hiccup barked at things not there. Standing transfixed and trembling, his head bobbled listlessly about before breaking into a manic sprint around the apartment. But his little puppy hind legs clearly were progressing towards a complete loss of motor control.That last observation was the clincher; clearly he was ill, in some kind of toxic shock. So off to the doggy ER we go, me and driver buddy Kenneth.

While on the exam table Hiccup up chucks twice. The emergency vet is not aghast, only more curious. We find amongst the goo two suspicious soft chunks of brown vegetative matter that later proves out the 'shroom hypothesis.

My ward Hiccup - he turns 17 (weeks old) and starts doing drugs under my distracted nose - and doing 'shrooms, of all retro things. At least my dog is not a crack head or meth junkie.

Things are better now, after getting Hiccup out of doggie rehab for just under $1K of vet bills. I am so much more vigilant now during our morning walks. Hiccup feels none the more free for this. Not since an ultra kibosh comes down from the heavens on his trailside tastings of cigarette butts, dirt clods, bird poop splatter, and ANYTHING that looks like a 'shroom.

I ain't dying 'cause I ain't lying, word up to the people.

Yours Truly and Ridiculously

From Across Cardiac County Line Road,

James Sullivan