Getting Better All the Time. Memory Lane. Even Guinevere Was on Loan. Not Vodka. Rule Number 6. Ghosts of You.

…Am I well you?
The question of my life.
Of any life.

...More than anything, its my head that hurts. A good, clean pain, at the temples, at the back of the skull.

…And I need out of this apartment.
KH tells me whiskey fixes a throat gone soar, lungs gone heavy.
And since I believe everything KH says, I decide on whiskey.

…And further, I decide to go down memory lane, or up the 75, to the town in which I lived with the last real girl, in a house that was fine, in a life that at least from a distance would have looked almost perfect.

But then again, from a grave enough distance, a paraplegic can not be differentiated from a ballerina.

…I go with a fresh face, shaved, as if one begins a new life with a razor.
As if one begins a new life by going to old haunts.
As if any of this has anything to do with a new life.

--But it does.
I feel a change.
The closing of some doors.
The opening of another.

I don’t know it when I’m the road, that old road…and I don’t know it when I’m in the bar, or the other bar…those old bars…but there is almost unbearably good news waiting for me at home…

I just don’t know it.

…And driving up the freeway, this ten mile stretch overly well known to me, too familiar, I ask myself: What are you doing?

Still trying to make myself tough?
No. Just trying to see if I am.

Telling myself: You go drinking in the only two bars you drank in in the town in which you lived with the girl that you will never see again the way one finally steps on a leg that was broken.

How does it feel?

What will it hold?

--The pain is more general.
It is the pain of the idea of that things are temporary, all things.

We want to buy not rent.
But everything goes.
Ask any Medieval writer.

The trick is not to see the amen in the genesis.

Most failures are failures of imagination. We didn’t see it properly, so we didn’t make it.

But there is such a thing as seeing too well. As seeing too far down the road.

There is the suicide note: All this buttoning and unbuttoning.

…I think of the Bighorn Sheep’s skull. My father found it in the mountains, the skull with its miraculous curls of horn. A record for the state, for the world, even.

And though he found it and hung it on our wall, it belonged and still does to the state of Colorado.
“I can keep it for them for my life,” he told me.

But it bothers him even then, that it is not really his.

…This then is something I will not inherit.
There are things anyway that should not be passed down.

…At the Appalachian Grill the bartender asks me if I like bourbon.
He’s got a bottle some salesmen left. Good stuff, he says.

He pours it deep, over three ice cubes, killing the bottle, and when I taste of it I realize it’s been months since I’ve had bourbon.

People are eating at the bar. Men with women. Girls with boys.

The men shoveling food into their mouths, their cheeks puffed out, their jaws grinding. The girls thin and glad to be out.

It stinks of fish in here.

The woman beside me and I talk about charisma. She argues that it has nothing to do with looks and I argue that it more than that but that also good looks help. Or at least extreme looks.

The whiskey is hard to drink. But I drink it.

…Down the street, the Irish Pub.
It’s been nearly two years since I set foot in here.
Nobody will know me. Nobody did then.

The last time I was at this bar it was to begin some trouble that followed me some long time, but that trouble seems minor now, a story I could tell myself over a drink.

And, remembering rule number 6, laugh a little.

Hell, maybe in this bar, I can laugh a lot, about all of it.
About everything.

…My barmaid remembers me, after all.
Her eyes are the saddest eyes I can think of.
I remember that she had a sore foot. I remember that she had a dicey marriage.

Her foot is better.
Her marriage is wrecked.

She is tall and speaks with her German accent and always a smile, but God, the eyes.

…And there is the moon.
And there is the road.
And there are the trees alongside it.

There is this drive.
I used to take it twice a day.
It is not the same drive.

I’m listening to a cd. It occurs to me as it sometimes does with cd’s that I’m hearing it for the last time.

That when I put it back in the album book, I’ll never take it out again.

It’s not sad the way you’d feel with a person.
The cd won’t miss you.

…And I think, what we miss, it’s not really so much the place, it’s not even really so much the person, though we do miss people and places.

The center of that pain though is that version of ourselves that we miss.
That person we used to be when we were in that place. With that other person.

We can’t help but think that whoever that was we were, he was more innocent than what we are now.

And that’s what we miss.

Somewhere on this freeway there is the ghost of me, driving that old drive, thinking the old things he used to think. If I should pass him, I’ll smile over.

Perhaps I’ll wave.
He won’t understand.
He'll know idea what's ahead of him. If he only knew. Poor man.

And I’ll forgive him for just about anything.

…And waiting at home, almost unbearably good news.