lovely morning and all rainy out. it’s a good day to have jim as a roommate. “you can hear the rain hit each individual leaf in the yard,” he says, and he’s right. it’s not loud, not like a freeway, but full and deep, textured. the softest drums in the softest light. coffee tastes best when you’re skipping church, reading on a morning’s rain. nothing’s gray, it’s all white and green. raindrops make each leaf drum, each leaf glow. somehow this story by chekhov really is as good as they say, the one i hadn’t read before and never really believed in. but there it is, and ford wasn’t lying. dylan either. it’s about as good as the morning, as good as anything could be.
i spent last with a bunch of old friends, drinking high life on a balcony overlooking the square, just the same as we used to do in summer 2007, the best summer. it was funny to see how much i have changed since then, how much life has happened to me in the past four years. david and harrison too, len, all of us. nick flynn says, “In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel.”
i’ll take the blemishes. hell, my hair’s finally falling out, not a thing i can do about it, not really. well, that’s fine. i’ve lived a lot of life already. i’m grateful for every scar, every bad tattoo. or at least i tell myself that. not much i can do about it at this point anyways. and, reader friends, if you’ll allow me to hurl one more quote at you (i do love those quotations), this time from jack gilbert: “What lasted is what the soul ate.” i do take comfort in that, cling to it like an old baby blanket.
“continue being the benevolent ruler of your own green world,” jim says. he’s not being poetic, he’s just on his way to wal mart. “middling figurehead, at best,” i say. “good-natured governor, powerless to the committees, but with my arms stretched wide.” i swear jesus is everywhere today, so tangible you can breathe him in with a cigarette, see him in the exhaled swirls. feel him in the raindrops, in jim’s friendship, sitting penalty box in len’s jeep when he picks me up for the movies later. just washing the world off, giving the morning a new shine. in each glimmering leaf, the happy tired eyes of a hungover friend. good morning.
