Monday, February 19, 2024

Five-minute write: Can't find a way back home any more

This is my hand clawing onto dock, I'm desperate to pull myself out of the water and up on to the hard surface that's real, feels real, is real underneath my bent body. But this unibody aluminum clamshell has got its one or two teeth in me, pulling me to do one or two more things in/on it. Just one more! It's only...oh, crap, sorry, now it's 9:00 and you're still working and you don't need to hide from highly perturbed and uncertain world out there, and phone notifications, and random thoughts (am I dying? what is the age difference between Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas, anyway?) any more.

I can do this. I can get up here, if only because I can hear this coming out of a radio somewhere. Not out of this computer (okay, yes, really, but I need to keep this scenario going).

If anything can pull me out of this, it's this pair of "California v888na sailors".  The wise man has the power, after all.

Sunday, February 04, 2024

Five-minute write: Nothing takes the past away like the future

Not far from where I'd bike home, heading west on Kinzie, past the produce warehouses and distributors who'd finished for the day, some of the vegetables languishing in the gutter, no one really driving past me, no one interrupting my ride, my thoughts, I heard, live, for the first time, some of the songs that beat my feet into the pedals in the summers of 2001-2003. I was in as much of a trance as I'd have been on a dancefloor, except the ray of light was high summer sun of rush hour sluicing through the West Loop grid. I'd pedal, and feel, and dream, and feel some more. And, somehow know that something else was out there for me. 

If that's not what she sings about in just about every song, and what this concert was about, then I don't know  what matters, really.