roller coaster ride #72649

(you flash brilliance here)

it was just after midnight when I looked down and noticed I had a cut on my finger... it wasn't fresh, it stung and had the thin rid rim of slight infection, but I had no idea when or how it got there... I brushed my thumb over it to be sure and yes, it stung, it was there all right...

the clock on the wall shouted out nothing, as if time stood still... the breeze agreed, for there was none... no movement at all in the world outside the window, a still life painting of treetops and dark sky with a few faint stars scratched in it... paint chips falling from a ceiling...

I went out for a run wondering if I would ever return...

fifty-eight minutes and forty-three point seventy-one seconds later, I died... no wait, that's another story... in this story, I returned from a run mostly intact, but burning with fatigue and puffy from bloat... there I was, finishing up a report no one asked me to write because we were ranked sixth out of ninety in the state for the fiscal year in percentage of patients who made progress and I stayed two hours late to finish up a justification for an improvement plan that sets a goal to do better in this coming fiscal year and I grab my salad and head home just as Precious calls suggesting Kentucky Fried chicken...

I hem and haw, pick and ponder, and finally saw, "naaa, I don't think so..." truer words were never spoken because I sure don't think, so... I saw them pulling into KFC just as I was approaching and so I stopped and met them and made an entirely too self-indulgent a pig of myself... ever so bloated later, I wandered over to myspace to catch up on a bit of reading while nodding in and out of Carborado (the El Dorado of carbohydrates) and was inspired by a few of my favorite distractions (and I use the term quite endearingly, most sincerely, and much appreciatively) to pick myself up and head out the door in spite of being in a dragging bloated zombie state... thanks Jenny and Sharon and Cali, even if you don't know I thank you here...

of course you guys help enormously too cuz you keep me grounded cuz I know you'll be here to pick me up if I pass out, laugh it I don't (but fall over anyway), and you'll dance if I die... good morning, good morning, yeah...

and was this the night I was to get to bed early and sleep long and deep?... instead, I picked myself up just after midnight and dragged my heavy feet around the neighborhood four times... a mediocre almost fifteen minutes a lap when some voice in my head is laughing at the tears my heart sheds for knowing I should be doing the four laps in twenty five minutes, maybe less... I shudder to think how many miles the course I run really is and forget to clock it on the odometer as I park my car after work each evening... please let it be more than four miles or I am beyond pathetic... but nevertheless, even at this body's advanced years, I will not be satisfied until I am running six minute miles again... and perhaps I will never again be satisfied in that way in this life... tell me there are other ways and I might believe again, someday...

and then, I wrote in a comment somewhere:

perhaps it is as simple as understanding that life is a journey that ends in death and doing nothing leads more directly to death, while doing something, making choices, grabbing the steering wheel of your life and turning in the directions you want to explore slows the process of dying and that is what we call living...

fill that glass of life and when it gets half full, ignore those who claim it is half empty and rejoice in the awareness that it is it's simply time to fill it again :)

and the roller coaster ride just keeps on rolling...

it was some time back in the late eighties that I corresponded with a great big gay guy from Oklahoma City named Tristan McCauley... I'll let you wonder if that was his real name, or if he was ever real himself, but in fact he eventually moved San Francisco to find bliss, or nirvana, or something, and then got lost during my mid-nineties disappearance (when I put Toronto and love and family ahead of everything else, including myself, and we all know how that turned out... or at least some of you do) along with hundreds of others I loved exchanging words with... he was one of the longest and closest pen pal friends I ever had... addresses, if they are still valid (like who lives at the same address for twenty years anymore?), are lost in Toronto (and possibly packed in one of many hundreds of boxes in storage just north of Niagara Falls...

Niagara Falls!...

slowly I turn...

Well, I used to have a lover once, I used to have a friend
How in the hell you ever find one?
My song is almost over now, my story's at an end
You lived yourself a good life but a blind one.

Well I've hidden there up on the shelf
And it's funny how you've kept it all for yourself
Hey honey, could there ever be,
Should there ever be,
Could there ever be something else?

thank you, Harry

for the reminder... and I wonder if I will ever be able to access the many thousands of letters and rhymes I wrote and stored on Atari floppy disks way back then... alas, sigh, and more alas, when I think about the loss of the potential that might have come from all those words had I not buried them... up on the shelf...

I am such a creative genius, after all...

yeah, so what else is new?... I get home from work and sit back in the big green chair and can nod off till morning if I'm not interrupted, but I haven't had an evening (or night) without interruption in weeks, at least... like Monday night... and I could have joined the local movie meetup just twenty or so minutes down the road in watching Jodie Foster's new movie and snacking at The Cheesecake Factory afterwards... sure, I don't need the expense or the calories (or the temptation), but I sure could enjoy the potential of finding friends who share more of my interests and activities and energy levels...

writing about it is a step towards getting back to doing it, or so the theory goes... after all, I might actually run yesterday (figure that sentence out and you may actually start understanding me and my writing process a bit better)...

maybe I should just head over to myspace and distract myself with hopes and dreams of stumbling across the one again...

or more likely, I sit and wait for a site to load that never loads and forces me to shut down and restart the computer... these are the nights (and evenings) of the times of the life these days... which is exactly what just happened...

I think I'll eat some worms...

aren't I worth knowing?
aren't I worth loving?
aren't I worth introducing to your friends?
or not
maybe you're ashamed of me
maybe I'm not good enough
for your company
or your sister
what if I kissed her?

aren't I worth meeting?
aren't I worth reading?
aren't I someone to tell your friends about?
oh why
am I not finding more
sharing that I'm looking for
what's wrong with me
can you tell me
why won't you sell me?

people tell me life is all about networking
so I put myself out there, right here, here I am
and I leave you all messages wishing you well
I read you, I listen and respond cuz I care
can't you tell?
doesn't it matter?
there, that feels better... nothing like a little pity party to get the stupid out and get me back to laughing confidence and not feeling like I need something outside of myself so much... so the pendulum swings back to fuck 'em if they can't take a joke" and "it's their loss" and I go back to happily frolicking in the fields of my dreams with or without you... not you personally, mind you, cuz I know you're there and you care and I appreciate you... self-pathetic poor me crap comes from the generic me to the generic you, if you know what I mean...

I appreciate me... you do too... so if the other seven billion people on the planet don't, oh well, their loss... the opportunity to add one or some new friends in Oklahoma City still remains anyway, so don't forget to call everyone you know in the mid-west (or is that the great plains?) and tell them I'm coming... preferably somebody who isn’t afraid of roller coasters, ya know?... and then if they don't show up at the airport with seventy six trombones and a big parade, their loss... yup, there's just not enough of me to go around sometimes...

when did humans forget how to have fun, anyway?...