DownloaD

Sometimes the smell of a day’s work reminds me that I am still in my body. The same way corn bread left on the street reminds me of the joy that the baby chickens bring me. Life offers a myriad of details. Life takes me though paths I could not have imagined. I don’t know why God has chosen PJ to be the man to work side by side with me, but I cannot deny that something is supposed to happen between us, that if we are meant to work and are both meant to make money that together we will manifest the business we need to survive. And tonight I write only because I am meant to write. I am tired. I do not know what will come out of me. I don’t want to write in more than one paragraph. I don’t want to be David Foster Wallace. I do want to believe that what we build will be seen by those meant to look and that when we sit we get to understand for some moments what the purpose of work is. To feel useful. To feel a sense of belonging. To have something to talk about. To leave a mark. For me, there is also the need to convene with birds. Birds of all sorts. I did not find the cornbread on a corner. It was cut into slices the way somebody might do before serving. It was dry. A dozen pieces of average size for an average American though the size of Americans is not average. This cornbread sat amidst glass and shingles in a pile of garbage left outside the house next to the corner project. I have made a commitment not to hoard. I have made an attempt to clear out my brain. I have felt cold this Tuesday, my bare feet on the bare wooden floor. And I know that a glance at something can turn into an entirely different something. That the cornbread in the glass would become dinner for six baby chicks and their mama. I wondered while they ate what happened to the seventh. I wondered if it was the one I put in the bathtub when Nasim was still here, the one I tried to save because he could not jump over the concrete. There’s something about space. Or about a pause. Or about a place that you see again and again. The way the yellow flowers stretch in the noon day sky. The way I want to stop writing but have eleven more minutes. The way I keep going and going. The way of knowing. Stop. Let the sound of what you do not hear guide you. Consider how everything that was living becomes life once again. How can you predict anything? Who would have known you could fall in love over a screen? There was a frog in the greenhouse this morning, bright green. I sprayed him with water and he didn’t even move. Maybe he was faking dead even though I had just seen him hop. Maybe the rest of us are faking being alive. The way we shop. The way we collect rejection letters. The way the trash comes on Thursday morning and we put it out on Wednesday night. I ate Oreos as a child. I wonder what a psychologist would make of these scribbles. I’ll find land. I’ll watch white gulls stand in a ditch on a road alongside the levee. I will witness lorries before me at seven in the morning. I will be a rapper. Maybe. First with the words. The intonation. I will take a vacation to Croatia. I will find seeds. I will sit here right now and see what comes out of me and maybe I will get to watch PJ become a son to his mom and a brother to his brother. Maybe I am a genius with an alphabet not yet registered. Did I tell you my girlfriend can talk while brushing her teeth which is good because she takes about twenty minutes to brush her goddamn teeth. Did I tell you I am lucky? Do you know this about yourself? Did you see the video of the taxi driver in India who brought a monkey back to life? Do you want peace of mind? This is not the mind’s nature. The nature of the mind is what has been written above. Words from the watcher. Take apart what is and turn this into what will be. We had one of those things with a name that I can’t remember–as a child–made of wood and glass and…ah yes! An hourglass. And this one had pink sand. And what would the odds of that coming up have been when I started to write this. I say all that to say this: Take it easy on yourself, my friends. Be good to each other. Meditate. For if we know nothing at all, we know that each one of us is burdened with thoughts we have no control over. Try it sometime. Type constantly for twenty minutes. I’ll read yours. Only because if you’re still here, and still sane, you’ve read mine. And that is true love!