Taking the heat.

It's a quarter to four and I can't sleep because of the heat. My mind keeps circling through songs, work strategies, family dynamics, plans for the future, ruminations on rebuilding the Jaguar engine and various remnants of procrastination. My program for the night is a sleepy version of Hitchcock's "Rear Window" meets Graham Nash's "Songs for Beginners" looping incandescent somnambulist ropes around my bulging waist, reminding me that exercise as a daily practice will help settle the dust of self-analysis - like mist from a hose at dawn.

I am trying to be good you know. My history, habits, and influences weigh in against me at times and attempt to dislodge these wheels of good fortune from the track they are on. My daughter reminded me this evening to pray for my enemies - that, in my case, begins with me. Because enmity truly is a point of view, an illusion in many cases, a choice I make rather than something that is imposed upon me. I have a weakness for it and paradoxically have come to understand through the grace of You-Know-Who that it is one of those things in my life that I can change.

It reminds of a line from a song: "Don't want to wake up in bed with the Christian Right". There is this prevalence we have as a culture to square off the round edges, line up across the field from each other with sword and shield, take a cue from the generals and run full speed toward collision with nothing else in mind but how wrong the other side is. It delights an old Devil like me to see how taking personal responsibility is still rather unpopular, perhaps becoming less so as the world crowds up, heats up, tenses up. It's been almost two years since this nation took an unprecedented step toward what has been referred to as Hope - and currently every possible way of mocking, tearing down and reversing that decision is being thrown into the mix by politicians, big media companies, sociopaths marching as representatives of the Common Man, flat-earthers, birthers and bigots.

No wonder I can't sleep. There is so much work to do!

Yours,
B

Metal Pedal

Experience teaches us that in spite of our best efforts to come around to "the good red road" there is almost always a mistake to be made lying in wait around the next corner.

Case in point; driving the old Jaguar across Montana in 100 degree heat with wife and son, camping gear, music loud, really loud, taking the hills at 90+ mph when all of the sudden the oil pressure drops to zero and we are stranded - cooking and derailed. Major engine damage is likely, this was an expensive lapse.

A much as I want to hate myself and drive the stake of failure deep into the heart of the vacation experience, somehow we manage to dust off our boots and make lemonade, gallons of it, continuing on our way as if these kinds of interruptions are part of what makes us human.

You see I am a human being after all; the books may speak of some kind of fall from heaven, some manner of angel imitating man, but the reality is cleaner, deeper, fundamentally more difficult to dodge; like a good flood in a Wyoming gully.

Human beings all are we, that little part of me in all of you; that suffering, broken, hopeful part of you that is in me. I am more than a weather vane on the temperament plateau with thin scars of removable wings singing at my shoulder blades. I am no less than forever and no bigger than your smallest hope.

Yours,
B