drifting

That was an interesting day, definitely not the same old same old. Like they say, like I’ve said.  Oh yeah, but the train came off the tracks, that day. Really, honestly. I’m not talking metaphors here; it’s real, it was really, really real.  Sometimes, when you just feel like reading the funnies because everything else in the freaking world is too real, all so vivid and ugly, well, even when your nose is stuck in the funny pages hiding from everything wrong, even then you’re vulnerable. Even at those times the train can come off the tracks. Even then, especially then, a life can change, a person can die. Yes, a very interesting day. I wondered, what happens now?

At first I didn’t see it, but I was moving toward one thing, all the time. My footsteps took me places I couldn’t see in advance. I wandered, always believing I’d turn up someplace, well, memorable. Somewhere historical, from my past, with people I knew. Friends, family I should glimpse one last time. Old friends and lovers; the dead I might commiserate with. But I never again saw another person I once knew, or even recognized. I figured it out eventually.

They were intersections.

I have seldom been a happy man, or even an overly zealous spirit. It’s the cloud you know, or the ‘soul’ I suppose you could say. Mine is fairly neutral, the neurons don’t lean much to one side or the other. I would liken the inner being, the nonmaterial self, to a cloud. Now I am set adrift, sockless, unshod to drift about here then there. But I’m following a path unknown to myself. Floating amongst the lives of others and witnessing intersections.

I am, I’m guessing now, to choose.

Most are like me, such as I was, and somewhere in the middle. That’s our lot in life, the great multitudes that make up our kind. We fall among the ranks of the forgettable. All together we make up just a tiny part of the whole. That’s how big the whole is, and the whole cannot be measured. It is that weighty and is more than just a number or demographics. Big, big stuff is the whole. I guess I should capitalize the word. It means that much, the Whole. I see it that way, in my head, well, in my mind that resides somewhere in a cloud. A cloud, adrift.

The Whole is everything. It’s not only souls, things, or atoms. The Whole. The Whole is everything. Dammit, it’s even more than that. When you glimpse it, and you will, then you will wish you might never have. The first time I felt like I might throw up because the Whole, just the part you can see in one glimpse, is nauseating. Seeing, feeling the Whole even in pieces – good grief – is like riding on the subway backwards, or tossing on the high seas in a boat as inconsequential as the flea on a brontosaurus. It is not to be explained, not by the likes of me or even Whitman, or Yeats. Or bloody Ginsberg. No one has the balls to define the Whole. If you want to know the truth, then the Whole is as much a thing as it is the absence of a thing, the void, a hole. Whole/Hole. It’s all the same. It’s all the same to me. And it isn’t.

As it is, I’ll leave the poets to it. Surely they know better than I and those whose spirits I may have brushed against probably torment themselves and even invent unnavigable syllables to prove me wrong. Their ions are most assuredly not neutral. They inherit a stormy unmitigated jumble of hair rending madness. Those who reside in vexing clouds will never see the forest for the trees. For them the intersections are backlit avenues in a rearview mirror. Gone, gone, gone.

Here I’ve let it go, viewing the Whole from the corner of my eye because that’s where I prefer it. Better yet I wish it lay beneath the reflections of darkened pools. I like to see what can be seen upside down and in reverse and the mysteries can hide down there – below - deep under the things we think we can touch. Even the concrete facts aren’t what we always thought they were, but in life it is what we are taught it is. That’s enough for you now. And for me now, too. It’s easier that way, and that kind of thinking stays the madness. Rationalizing keeps the Whole in corners: obscure, uninvited.

The deep thinkers won’t be moving on. Too busy, they are, dealing in dross. Maybe you’re beginning to wonder why the age of romantics is gone and never to circle back around. All of the great ones, or most, are sticking ass up from the muck. It’s an image not far from the truth. Only the menial can look beyond the void. That interesting day I was speaking of? It’s in the past. I’m perusing the options now, drifting through the intersections, working my way toward the top of the pyramid. Some of us, I guess, never choose. You feel might them, aimless, like a damp rag catching on your heels. There are a lot of choices, too many in fact. The intersections are endless and some never pan out. It’s hard to choose. The wrong choice can be pretty much the same as life and death; they go hand in hand you may as well know. Nobody gets out alive, once they’ve selected. Selected and admitted. This life, this living stuff, is an elite club. Most spirits never seem to make it and they don’t know what they’re missing.  Then again, I know. Here, I can tell you, from where I stand, life is no bowl of sugar. Nor is it a crock of shit, but for the moment I’m clear of it. My intersection is, blessedly, somewhere off the grid. If I’ve derailed in my past life, then I’m content here this moment beyond the third rail.

Beyond a distant curve I think I have seen around the Whole without going mad. There is a boy and a girl and he is leading her on a pony. My atoms have done the math and the probabilities are endless, but they aren’t finite. She’ll marry another, but it’s his son she’ll have. The son will find another and that is the intersection I’ve glimpsed on the brim of the void. It’s caught in a whirlwind but I’ve thrown down a line and only time, a lifetime of time, will tell the whole story. I’m not eager to begin anew, but treading this slurry is joyless even to a neutral soul. I long now and then to skim across some manic and feel the prickle of chaos. There is no anarchy in the hereafter; it’s only a waiting game where the points don’t add up. Some win, some lose. Some go down the drain.

Rub a dub dub.