Hammurabi and the Sun

I don’t trust this nice weather, don’t trust it one bit.... weather’s not for trusting, weather’s for living, so be it...

Meanwhile, the boy sits here in the middle of spring, and everyone is so happy around him. The girls and boys are out playing all up and down the street... new sneakers kicking balloons and soccer balls. And, the Catholic girls walk by with popsicles and big jugs of frozen purple that hold up thick white straws. All this happens under and above the smell of green leaves and grass, the world is alive again all of my friends, he says to himself.

Meanwhile, out on the lake, I can hear her screaming to me, to me, does anyone ever scream to me?

"C’mon in while the water’s warm, boy," she says,

"No sense standing out there dwaddling your toes in the surf, the fun’s in here."

"Oh, I hear you,"

And, I do, I do and I can’t wait, I can’t swim, but I can’t wait... so off I go running into the marine blue... there I go to spend the whole day basking in the world by the side of her.

... oh, but in a span of a day the sun can throw a million shadows over the blues, all you can see is brightness, brightness, brightness. And, then, the day dims, and the sun gets turned down, and all that was hidden comes alive again... no day or night can ever steal away the blues, but this should be nothing new to you.

Meanwhile, the sheer physicality and exhaustion of the heat suffered in the day leaves the others to burn out peacefully and contentedly, and she, too, falls away blissfully and easily. I do not, I go to sleep restlessly, nervous and confused, distrustful of both the night and day and their refusal to cooperate.

And, lying there, the fact seems manifest to me that I will also die like this, I can’t imagine why the moment at the end of a day would be any different than the moment at the end of a life.

a week in the life

Another week of madness, madder than I can’t remember when...

Hey you.. What do you study, what languages do you speak... Hey you explain yourself to me, justify to me why it is that you deserve the right to suffer my inquisition...

Oh, my friend, I may have liked you years ago, when you were a child.. Before your wife spit out daughters that made you distaste the sight of men... especially white men... those bastards had interned your grandfather in some northern British Columbia jungle... Yes, and they were the same bastards who had thrown many grandfathers into some coal mine, into some colonial war...

Alright fair enough you concede this... but if the truth be told... and if it be told... you’d know that you want to be here about as much as I do... this is no vacation, don’t kid yourself... Or go ahead and kid yourself, evidently that’s what you want to do anyway, and keep on with your lecturing on compassion and kindness and the Tao.. Keep doing it, it is the way after all... But who really wants to listen but some brew u cap that wants a grade... but boy you say what authority I have, what authority I have, and how right I am...

The joker, me, your stammering narrator, has been called out to prove himself to this man to stand in his shadow to prove his worthiness as a human being, and the man's history of adoration stands as testament to the obviousness of this fact... and a fact it is indeed, because when I resist I’m shunned, left alone at the bus stop... he’s the doctor the superhuman, I am the loser... And, even if you, you one of my few readers, doubt this as I do, the weeks and days to follow will affirm how wrong we all are.