Pitch #2....

A misplaced ol' boy in Tenessee is in his late twenties and he just mindfully screws engines into mounting units in an auto factory with south korean manufacturers. Every day for ten to twelve hours. It's a hyundai plant. he’s just great about making sure the car engine he was screwing in would have no problems with its mounting in the future. He seriously pays attention to every thread. And he’s sensual. He’s funny and he really makes a difference in his coworkers’ lives. I'm not kidding when I say he pays attention to every thread.

Friday 3pm at work

This is the afternoon after a dream I had last night

I went into the backyard, and it looked bigger but similar to mine, even though I was living back in Colorado with my parents. When I went back there, they were there and these two men were performing construction on the house. They were putting stain all over this brand new wooden roof on my parent's tall and shiny house. There was a pitch to the roof and all of this liquid flooding off of it, which I came to realize was not water but oily -- the wood stain, and it was getting everywhere. I noticed that the substance was flooding my garden bed near the house with poison, and that all the plants were dead.

I became infuriated and asked the two construction guys wtf and they were muffling their responses, continuing to work, and the backyard was increasingly flooding with wood stain. my other two garden beds were going down two. I demanded they stop. One of the constuction guys looked vaguely familiar to Slicky Slack, a scruff looking prostelytizer I knew from AA, but I really never talked to. I turned to my parents for sympathy and while my mom tried to show sympathy and soothe my anger she also insisted this had to happen -- getting this roof stained was too important to them. even at the cost of a dead backyard for a few years. even at the cost of my garden. 

I became inconsolably angry. I lost all control and I punched the Slicky Slack looking guy. He fell and I started pummelling him. As I was pounding his face in I could see his head start to swell and bruise up. I could see how totally helpless he was and so I stopped. But refused to acknowledge what I had just done and so I just screamed about my garden. I started to sob and sob. Moreso than I ever had since I was a kid. I went to enter the house through the back door and I just decided I was only going to keep crying harder. I had absolutely no breath anymore. Suffocated in a crying fit, I finally woke up.

When I woke up I was thankful to be ok and I got calm and told myself what had just happened. That it was ok. I talked to myself sweetly and was thankful that my garden was still there. I held myself and started to feel calm and decide to go in late. do yoga, water the the living fuck out of my beautiful garden, to take lots of detoxifying vitamins that day, to take care of myself. But I kept laying there and started to cry in bed about it again while I was awake. I did those things I vowed to do and felt the better for it. I got really playful and light and funny on the way to work. "Tea for Two" was on, Lester Young's sax was blaring in my car. Me doing different funny voices at people who were doing annoying things in traffic. I saw everybody as sweet. This middle-aged woman spilled out of the Whataburger -- body not fat but a total mess and that determined look in her eye of an addict who went all night and now it was nine in the morning and no addict really knows what to do at nine in the morning. When she reached the corner there was a short old hispanic man smoking a cigarette and checking her out. I was thinking no way he's just gonna be a mac and talk to her. And he did! And I was thinking she'd show interest back because she looked really lost with nowhere to go. But she reacted protectively and waited uncomfortably for the crosswalk light to come on. It did not seem to phase this guy and I admired so much that he just saw this woman he had interest in and started talking to her on a dime. Anyway I drove and shimmied to the sax and for some reason right before I got near the parking garage at work I just let out a loud "yeeeeaaahhhhh!" and I thought that was like the funniest thing I'd ever heard. I kept laughing about it later when I was thinking about it.

An interesting note is that I remembered the crying part of the dream really well, but it took me a few hours of being awake to remember the pummeling the guy's face in part. It's disturbing how I did such a violent thing myself, and the whole victim perspective on the dream went out the window. I had one thought -- although there were many levels to this dream including the city council meeting on construction on my street that day, my childhood experience and even last year's experience of my parents prioritizing money/business/house constructing over some needs that I had, and the identity of the man relating to my anger at AA. It's about my autonomy. All that factors that threaten it. The garden is mine. It's fragile and delicate and I will go to any lengths to protect it right now. It's not only about the force I am capable of exerting when I go on the defensive about it, it is about the very nature of its fragility and delicacy. that it is the garden itself. And it's mine and it's beautiful and that is true whether or not others understand it or not. Something so scary was lost and dead and the soil wouldn't recover for many years and I lost my whole breath over it at the end of the dream. I suffocated. All due to construction. To a fancier fucking house. To meeting the material standards of life -- which are rigid and destructive to the sweet delicacy of the garden which I absolutely equated to my thing. My work -- well, nature's work and my work. Certainly there's something in here about the resistance to growing up as well. Certainly something about the pressure's of working life and success pulling me at me in a suffocating manner. Like I said, I was just so thankful to water my garden and spent like fifteen minutes doing it this morning. 

I texted about the dream to a friend and started to tear up about it again. Though was fascinated by it and knew that some of the floodwalls that had been on my emotions all week had finally crashed down. I was relieved about that. And I did tear up again now when I tried to write about it. But I feel ok about it now that I'm at the end.

Complaint Letter

Dear sir,

I'm afraid that when you were singing "You've Got to Move" last night at 3 in the morning in a way that I was just too moved. The way you were singing it, and enjoying music from 60 years ago, I could just tell that you were enjoying life more than me. You really sang the shit out of it. I could tell you were fucking boogieing on the other side of that goddamn wall. You woke my wife up. So I guess don't do that again.

Love,
Your Neighbor

Living Room Scene of a Couple

HIM digs hands into couch cushions, as HER nuzzles head into HIM's lap. She surfs the waves of his gently rocking leg.

HER: What are you doing?

HIM: Looking for change.

HER: Change?

HIM: I'm thinking of whisking you away. To an island. Where it's warm during the day, and cool at night. We'll build a hut. And make a fire

HER: And babies?

HIM: I'll fish for them.

HER: And I'll forage for berries, and teach them to read. (beat) Now, let me ask you something. Will this island have turtles?

HIM: Uh huh. (beat) And turtle soup.

An I Believe Speech

I believe first and foremost in my own humanity and respect everybody's humanity above any label they have been given. I believe that everybody varies from one another enough to justify a nuanced understanding of how they need support, and how they'd like to experience life and how they can undergo change if they'd like to. I understand I don't have to be loyal to people, especially if they cause you harm, but I also can't see anybody as a problem above and beyond their inherent worth as a person. Not bigger than nature's or the law's worth in them. Your problems are always less than you, and an infinite amount of solutions exist within you. But they will be corrected over time, at a plodding pace, and it turns out your habits are going to mean more than anything. Are you going to be kind? That is the question that sits atop everything. That question sits atop the structure of many other questions, such as, are you going to take care of your body? do you know how to care for your mind? Are you interested in being awake? Can you rest at night? Kindness is determined by both your habits and your ability to tune in with what's important. And this ripens on a vine over time. You more often have feelings like, "I get it!" "Or this is going to happen and I'm going to react this one way, but there will be a next moment and one after that, so just get through it hot stuff." When you can say that to yourself you have gotten a good deal closer to sincere kindness. Not like those people who are just kind because they can't stand being seen in this life as being anything but kind. Well, everybody starts off there, but kindness doesn't end that way. There are never two instances of the same kindness -- it is wholly unique. It is a nutrient that will start to run through people, and age them in ways with all sorts of pleasant variables. how they notice stuff, or how well they sense the needs of other people. It's like when you're a teenager and you first start to notice how much people talk about objects. Sometimes if there is something wrong with them, adults will sit around, for example, a sprinkler watering a sidewalk, and try to attribute some history to it. How this happened, what the intelligence of the guy was, and depending who you're with, make reference to his ethnicity. If it's all guys you would have a better chance of hearing about the ethnicity of said guy who made a very controlled decision to point a thing spraying water on to the cement and in to the gutter for the next 45 minutes. And he said yes and signed off on watering the sidewalk before the city council. Everybody jeered and it made the next day's blogosphere. Maybe you should just take a picture and put it on social media. Hashtag it the best and hope for the viral outrage of six hundred thousand people who could be doing something so much better with their lives at that moment. I mean, we all do it. But kind people do less and less of that kind of stuff. They have nothing to be afraid of and so they go outside. 

Single Life Spans

"Right now I’m just spreading seeds. Some may sow and many will not." He told his friends such.  With Wisdom. Loudly. And his therapist too. Lonesomely. She understood. Actually.

Secretly, he thought, "I'm a withering seed, somewhere out there, underground and quite probably in my own backyard. A seed that just isn’t taking to life." Well, last night contained a happy sprout who descended hither to have a talk with a seed and its leaking life.

She informs him in a supremely private space that she is taking to life. She is indescribably bright. She dances and smiles often. And then she gives the losing seed a really big cuddle about the hard truth. That he isn’t quite taking.

She says she is flattered. She says he is sweet. She notes the scent of plum in his dry humor and his ability to dance so no one feels comfortable. The causes for thinking so. For being nice.

“I’m already married," she says.

"You're a rare bird. I'm glad I asked."

The dying seed will receive instructions in an email about what to do with his decomposing matter. Compost and pension plans. In a few generations time, the seed will take its experience of not taking to life and dare to become a big thing and a beautiful thing. That will touch the sky, as sentimentalism would have it. All humans will rejoice in its presence. It shall run $3.95 at the local drug store. Just you wait.

I really hate to tell you the ending so impulsively, but this seems like the right time: We win. We are all butterflies aging faster than rocks, but slower than single life spans. We're spasming and breaking up. Waiting to get nature's number done on us. It's a cocoon we don't even know about yet.

Crawling for now, we're getting together. Maybe not owning the day, but definitely the night. Like last night. A big win.

I can actually dance. I can actually hear no.

The night was 74 degrees. No jackets needed. You can either wear pants or shorts. Dirty sneakers or hiking sandles. I never know how to spell sandles right. And you might never be uncomfortable on a night like this. But I tend to think that I will. And when I dance, I hope that you might be too.

And let's not hold back. It will take the damages of war the same amount of years to heal as it took to fight the fucking thing. This is a simple and hard truth that most people don't want to face. That is because it might take another human history for people to altogether stop killing each other. I'm talking about taking to life. In just two-hundred thousand years.

This is the type of news that has to be broken to you by a dancing underground smiling sprout. After delivering the hard news, with shiny whites, she will add that it should start today. The not killing. Starting today.

Her lips look firm and her voice sounds the same. And I leak and I crawl and all no's become yes. "Just you wait."