Was sitting around this weekend (in 100° heat and with a load of hot restlessness far exceeding the thermometer's reading). So I workshopped a few short scribblings I'd made shortly ago, to pass the time. As always happens, it GREW considerably, those sentences. Into this *thing*. It ain't great which gives it some power, I guess, and even a little bit of gumption.  And I know, for myself, that writing, any writing, doesn't really need read to be valid. But I thought I'd toss it up here, anyway.

 

The sunrise was cut in the middle by pilings
of rocks and of magic. And of lightning and grace.
Ah, such wizardry, really ... a world washed with whipstalls.
The words in rough heaps that explained all the questions.
The questions unanswered (despite all the words), the monoliths standing there,
Prompting more. Telling less.
The mountains were fireworks, grounded by tunnels.
The tunnels were endless, buried 'neath stone.
It was all so worthwhile, willful and right.
Then? My mountains were dreams boldly solid. And large.
And the peaks were as high as I placed them, and waited.
But now? As I look there? My mountains are not ...

The twilight was sliced in its center by shadows
Of clocks and of scrapbooks. And of benchmarks and wile.

Ah, such traveling, truly ... a map marked with March hares.
The mantra's faint noises that sound like jazz midnights.
The jazz bending wildly (despite being quiet), the saxophone resting there,
Pearl buttons. Cheap wood.
The mountains are smoky, all whiskey and Bird.
The birds flying elsewhere, going down fast.
It is morning and moonfire. Worthy and tight.
There? My mountains were riffs near a bayou. With echoes.
And the tempo was right with the skyline, so jagged!
But here? Where it's silent? My mountains are not ...

     Shocking! I was sitting here thinking about that movie I saw on TV as a teenager called "Brian's Song" - it was about two football players who, against all odds, became excellent friends. All based on a true story (of Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers, one white and the other black). It was a great story for its time, really. Not just the aspirations it had toward respectfully probing racial schisms but also because it addressed courage under fire and, most importantly, solid and real friendship(s). I read the book (titled "I Am Third") at the time. Can hardly remember it now ~ and can't remember Gale Sayers explaining where he was third to WHAT (but I'm sure he said so somewhere in the text). That movie played almost forty years ago! Can you imagine? James Caan and Billy Dee Williams, now old farts on TV shows occasionally. That's the shocking part, to me. "Forty years ago" still, and always will, seem like an awful long time for me to be remembering stuff.  It's very unsettling, more than less. Anyway, I decided to make up my own "I Am Third". Two reasons: 1.) because I've thought I was *third* for a very long time now, and, 2.) forty years from now, it won't matter what I write today to any living thing, so my introspection seems harmless [*sigh*].

 

     First is the *truth*. I am old (like a velociraptor I'm old, or so I feel sometimes) so I have had more than plenty of time to see what the word "truth" is to most people. It's their version of it, usually. It's an interpretation of it as per what is hoped it means, often. It's the "truth" that makes the most convenient sense in their usability of it, almost always. This is all human nature. Nothing so new or terribly wrong with it (although that sort of "truthing" gets risky, in my estimation). I've risen above nothing, but have powerlessly accepted one major thing: in all those descriptions of truth, all those attachments to truth, all that *human control issue* nonsense, there is only one truth for any ONE thing. That's it! We can call it whatever we want, we can color it however we choose. It's still just that one fundamental truth and half the time we don't even know what it is before we start doctoring it! So, for me, the most important thing in life is to dig through the man-made layers and find what the truth is at the core of it. And I give it the benefit of the doubt always. I look for it without expecting myself to like it. Or for it to accommodate me in any way whatsoever. In fact, I don't even ever expect to find it (but intend to keep looking, anyway).

     Second is *fairness*.  The word fairness is another tricky thing. The first way we feel it is the way we felt it when we were 9, I suspect - "But ... it's not FAIR that I have both arithmetic and science homework in the same night...." That's not an issue of fairness at all, in my opinion. It's just one of those things that suck as all the factors in a day slide down the hill in the wrong order. And as adults we feel/do it much the same. "It's not fair that I have to pay this much sales tax on already aggressively overpriced merchandise," etc. Fairness is a catchall word for too many things. Are you really being "fair" when you let the person ahead of you get the parking space that he deserves and got to first? Or are you patting yourself on the back like an agile monkey for not doing what you considered doing at first: hitting the gas and stealing that coveted parking space because you needed it more than some irksome stranger did? Taking your turn and acting in a civilized way should not be considered "fairness." It's called being trained right. In my definition of it, fairness is not much of an "action" word, incidentally. It's about knowing that each one of us was a wee baby once, with big dreams. Each of us had scraped knees, broken hearts, terrifying moments, frightfully embarrassing missteps AND nothing we've ever felt, not now or then or this time next year, is (in itself as a concept) "new." Or individually patented by our summarily put-upon selves. So, then, I think that the fairness to which I aspire is knowing that the best expectation there is to be had is that it isn't about the crap, pain, unfortunate events or pissed-off wildebeests that come rolling down the mountain. It's about knowing that we're all pretty much on common ground as the avalanche happens. That some people duck and dodge more skillfully than others is luck. True fairness across-the-board comes in realizing we're all avoiding the same stuff (and simply hiding behind variously sized bushes as we do it).

 

     And third, then, is me. On my endless search of "truth" - a 'thing' that I've already given the power to NOT be what I'm looking for. Finding it will be enough, I suppose - no need to steal its thunder by expecting too much. And, no, I'll never find it, anyway. I'll always believe it's there, nearer than it ever could be (that's what they call faith, I guess ... with all of its head-spinning labels and uniforms). But I'll quietly assume I'll never be in the scary position of knowing the ultimate truths. And my search will be a fair one, too. I won't judge the know-it-alls and zealots out there who profess to have it all figured out. They NEED that "parking space" a lot more than the likes of me does. Ask me forty years from now, though? I may have an entirely different conviction about the matter. It is, after all, just the human condition ...

 

 

   How is it, I still wonder, that such an event as that one -- spent in a frightening basement with bizarre unexplainable thoughts and events pounding off of one another like waterfalls in the rivers of the human heart -- still rattles me as the very saddest day I've yet to experience? Magical? Oh, yes, indeed. Did I question EVERYTHING that I even thought I knew before then? More than a million times. Do I still remember seeing Sidney flutter the way "he" did (with no strings anywhere on him because, believe you me, I checked) and thinking that life was a thing that seemed boundless and made no sense in the most dizzying and wonderful way that I had not even dreamt about it seeming before? Certainly. But *just like that* something fiercely patterned within me changed. There is quite a rigid map to even the most keenly observant innocence, make no mistake about that. My map had been, with only a snip and a strange smile 4 feet away, altered permanently. And lost forever. I was on a path, in seconds, where I was left to grieve my childhood as I'd known it. I was growing up. Growing out of what I'd been. Yanked from the safety of my head and my imagination by a butterfly made out of silk pajamas. Seeing it happen hauled me into the high-wire act of "becoming a man". And I knew, just then, I had to forever make a choice whether that direction would be a life of scary underground phantom *nothings*. Or one of unbelievably possible simple endeavors that, by mere virtue of the passionate belief placed behind them, could become places of real and possible (and apparently not-to-be-categorically-explained) *somethings*. I remember feeling like a lucky (suddenly not nearly as smart as I thought I was) 12-year old, too. Because of a "simple" mind  [which wasn't] and a pile of scraps left over from old clothing [which was much more than just that]- and even being given the option of knowing that, behind every mud-splattered window that still let a little light in -or- scraped knee that really might be less a wound and maybe more an interrupted river? I had been given maps to consider that many people have to find much later in their journeys. If ever.
   And I so vividly recall sitting there, looking at George. His somewhat blank stare so layered and empowered, as he nurtured young Sidney to perfect an entirely peculiar maiden voyage. And, oh! what a voyage it was, too. He fluttered unsuccessfully more than once, crashed without a bit of grace into that bare light bulb, flopped (alarmingly) back down to that unyieldingly solid cement floor. But George nudged. Sidney stretched those wings, and tried again. Pretty soon he was soaring like he knew what he was doing. Like he knew where he'd come from? Like he just knew it's not so much about where you land or the obstacles that exist. It's all about how you steer as you get there. Sidney was, fully and magically (and all in just 15 minutes), alive! And George didn't make "him" that way because somebody told him he ought to. George had done it because, as I'd heard him say more than twice during that magnificent summer:
   "You just have to notice what needs done, Ellis. And then just get busy figuring out how to do it. You can. If you really want to..."
   And here I am, ten years later. Studying like a crazed fool (always trying to figure out, it seems, if it really "needs done"). Learning Science. And Math. I decided to try becoming an engineer and will very soon have a paper calling me one. I don't fit into the rest here at school so well, though. I think it's because I understand what an engineer really IS, at the heart of it. A retarded man with an uncomplicated heart by the name of Göran basically summed up the whole field of endeavor, for me. And, be it good or bad, I've learned "down" since knowing him. Given that, it's all a much easier project, quite frankly. I won't tell you what finally happened to George Thunderhack or his lovely mother. Let's just leave it that sickness (something George could not repair or UN-create) found their family and George had to move away after just that one summertime in Ohio. And, as I was afraid might happen, I never heard from him again. The last time I looked at him he smiled and said nothing. But his expression said it all. George Thunderhack had determined, using a keen eye and a simple appraisal of it, that I was *fixed*. Thank God one of us thought so. And thank God even more it was him that did.

   So I leave you to ponder this tale I've laid before you now. I suggest you ask yourself, without complication, whether or not you believe even a word of it. It's really up to you, after all. And, anyway, I am just a young man here on the University campus lazing away a solid two hours between political academics and equations that try to explain everything. Just me, the future, my sentences and my interpretations of a day at the moment. And a visitor just landed on my knee, too. A fuzzy little thing ... pink striped wings and lime green legs. With a blinding white pipe cleaner holding him together as he flutters about, looking around. And [*sigh*] the joy of it ~ real as real can be, my wayward visiting butterfly. Even though, try as I might to find one, not a textbook anywhere would validate him...

   Not that I worry about such things, mind you. His being here is validation enough for me.