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Monday, November 5th, 2007

(Seemingly) disconnected scenes

I sat in front of a blank screen and tried to remember moments, scenes from my life. And then I typed them out, as I remembered them, stream of consciousness, no editing, no matter how big or small they might be, in whatever order they hit me.

Try it some time. It can be interesting to read later...

(seemingly) disconnected scenes from my life

jogging up 6th avenue in new york city on a crowded sidewalk during a hot summer day behind a stunningly beautiful woman who could only have been a model and knowing precisely what it means to be a stalker

sitting in the sand, laughing, stoned and drunk on cheap wine with my brother on a crisp spring afternoon on the shoreline of pensacola bay staring at the vast expanse of sky and how the setting sun turned the sky and the water into a beautiful layer cake of cloud, water and air and how my brother stood between me and the sun, outlined

walking through downtown chicago on a bitterly cold day, lost and freezing from the biting wind, in the middle of a street, pausing for some reason and looking up to see a woman in a 3rd floor window of an old house surrounding by skyscrapers looking down at me, catching her eye for just a moment and then wrapping my coat tightly around my chest and walking on down the street

driving across kansas on a hot summer day through endless wheat fields thinking of a girl, staring at her photo, held in my left hand, on the steering wheel and thinking of how I was tired of regret and pain for regret and pain's sake and then rolling down the window and, at 85 miles per hour, reaching my hand out into the blast of air and just letting go… and then thinking for miles afterward of a farmer finding her photo, wondering how it got there

sitting at the dinner table with my two brothers, my mother and my father -- a much more tense man in those days -- me, a young boy, anything but self assured, asking for the bacon bits and then spilling them out over my baked potato -- the entire bottle -- and how my father exploded in anger as if I had meant to do it

how it feels to forget everything, to lose myself entirely, eclipsing my ability to know past from present, and present from future, stepping entirely out of time, for just a moment, or if I am lucky, for an entire song, while playing and singing during a show

the smell and feel of my dog emma's soft ears -- behind her ears. It is the smell of sleep, a drug

any party, pick one, how in the middle of someone's sentence (any one's) you realize that your mouth hurts from smiling politely, and then deciding not to smile anymore, and then becoming self conscious, and then smiling again - meaning it this time - because you realize how neurotic you are

the first time I smoked and how ridiculous it seemed -- why would anyone willingly do this?

getting hit in the face by the young black kid half my size in the lunch line in middle school while his very large friend pinned my arms behind my back and lifted me off the ground -- feet dangling, feeling the impact, over and over again and realizing that i am looking up at the ceiling and feeling so very tired, made of lead, and in the middle of it all, not wanting to hurt him, even though he is hitting me in the face, and realizing that this probably meant something was wrong with me

running my car into a curb and the horrible sound it made when the tire exploded off the rim and the crunch of the rim as it conformed to the right angle of concrete

pulling the truck over late at night on the mountain road in Vermont after work, tired but feeling very alive, thinking about everything and nothing at once, hearing the slow crunch of snow and gravel under my truck’s tires and then stepping out into the bitterly cold and clear winter night, looking up, tilting my head back and looking up through the naked branches of the tree by the river, by the road, looking up through my freezing breath, up into the black sky, seeing the stars so very, very far away and feeling incredibly alone and then realizing that what I was feeling wasn’t loneliness, it was solitude and knowing what it means, again, to be inconsequential and loving that and realizing that those stars and that sky and most everything, really, cares not, thinks not, feels not for us… that we are alone on this spinning rock and feeling truly okay with that, blissful actually

Posted By John Common at: 12:11 am

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Monday, November 5th, 2007

(Seemingly) disconnected scenes

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