The woman who lost her small white dog several weeks ago sees me walking this morning and approaches. She tells me that after thirteen days on the loose they finally have Charlie back home. We set out nine live traps, she says. Caught one fox, one possum, and a dog named Charlie. He’s back home, the woman smiles.
Rachel writes to say that after a year and a half of pain she has neither the previously diagnosed Parkinson's nor dystonia but a movement disorder that can get better—a no meds kind of better.
I am becoming more functional—walked 4.5 miles this morning, yesterday morning. Did a light workout in the gym. My diet is better, but not what it should be. Still, I’m sipping bone broth every morning, taking turmeric curcumin, drinking emergen-C, and swallow a few Advil capsules in the morning and at night (I’ve cut from four Advil a day to three). I am scheduled to see the rheumatologist Friday. Only a three month wait.
Listening to Cowboy Junkies singing “I’m so lonesome I could cry.” Though I’m not, not today. Not yesterday. There are people I miss, terribly. But I haven’t been feeling lonesome for some time. I cry for Melinda maybe several times a day, but it just isn’t a lonesome feeling. How do I explain. I am alive in this world, on this planet, in this moment. That seems to be enough for now—somehow knowing now won’t last makes it enough.
I sip my coffee—something I should probably give up, but what the hell. Take a breath—single breath meditation.
I have a stack of new poetry books to read, picked up at Langdon. Nathan Brown’s Arse Poetica is sitting on top. Then there’s Alan Berecka’s Welcome to the Hamlet of Stittville.
I think about my friends who write poetry, who sit in coffee shops or at home working words on a page with pen or computer, hoping the string the right combination of words together that will somehow transcend the limitations of being words, hoping to somehow make it right or better. Alan reminds us that Shakespeare—but we know where that line goes. Poems don’t change the world, we say. But we don’t really know that for sure. It does seem to bother the shit out of despots and other goons who periodically round up poets and intellectuals in the dark night, drive them to some secluded place. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for—to annoy the perpetrators of ignorance and fear.
My coffee has grown cold.
Florida is smashed. Southeast Texas is busy stripping soaked sheet rock and carrying water logged furniture out to the curb. The sun is shining this morning. Fall is on its way. I am alive for now.
Kiss me quick.
Love,
Brady