On a good day, my mind wanders as I walk in the morning beside the canal, coffee in hand. I don’t think about work, about daily tasks or the horrible place where I worked for the man with the screwed-up brain. Of course, it wasn’t always that way, but it was at the end and that colors everything, paints over whatever beauty there once was into an ugliness that is impossibly present. I can’t help thinking about it, how after sixteen years, I walked out of the office for the last time. That was four years ago, and I still can’t shake it. The Dylan song from that day still rings in my head:
“Gentlemen,” he said
“I don’t need your organization
I’ve shined your shoes
I’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards.”
I can’t say it was for the best, the leaving, for there are good and bad in everything. There are trade-offs, and anyone that tells you otherwise has a thing or two to sell you, and whether it be fortune or fame, neither of them are what they claim. Oh, these desolation row peddlers. Work may be easier, less stressful and demanding, but there were financial repercussions, too, and my confidence took a hit, and I am staggering like a boxer now in the later rounds when the bell is singing, and the reverberations soon may be ringing in my ears. And I fear if I should fall, then maybe that’s the end of this. And I keep asking myself: “Who killed Davey Moore? Why and what’s the reason for?”
Not me. It wasn’t me. I swear I didn’t do the deed, if you had seen me in my hour of need you would have known I never could have acted alone, I could barely stand without a helping hand, I was reeling and if that’s not enough losing all my feeling, the times were rough, it wasn’t me that made him fall you can’t blame me at all.
On a good day, I drift away, make up songs in my head, sip my coffee and see the shimmering lights on the water that I so often try to capture, but never can because some things are best left obscured. These cameras on our phones are good, but not that good. They still miss a lot. We all miss a lot, and so I am not taking shots on the inadequacies of tech, our so-called Gods of the Age that so many think are infallible because for all we gain, we lose too.
On the contrary, on a good day I like when I miss it too, when my mind takes me to a sunny place with avocado trees and limes, fresh guacamole on the deck, an ocean not so distant, but not too close either. It is just there, a stunning vision, a visage, a vibrant image better than any painting because it is real. Oh wait, none of this is real. It’s all in my head, them dreams. That’s all they are, just dreams, and on a good day they keep all the bad things at bay.
On a good day I don’t think about where I thought I might be, about the words I could write if only the timing was right. I don’t think about the ones I’ve lost touch with or what they are doing with their lives. For all I know, they could be truck driver’s wives. On a good day, I imagine the possibilities, the future, and not the past. I don’t think about death, my father, or Vietnam. There are no helicopters slaying the sky, there are no desperate pleas asking me why. I don’t think about things I cannot change, but somehow think I can, as if I have magical powers. I know that kind of thinking leads down a rabbit hole, and if you go ask Alice when she’s too tall, or too short, or her skin is not right, not shiny and bright, then you will only know all the ways you don’t measure up because it’s right there on the screen, in her feed, and since you have no likes all the world surely agrees.
On a good day, it may be warm or cold, but the sun shines in the morning, and the sky is clear, and as I walk, I see people with happy dogs, rowers on the canal, a jogger or two, birds on branches in trees, but no crows. They are brutal, murderous beings, and they don’t like me.
In the distance my eyes pick out a point, a spot, but it keeps moving as I move because being is always in the process of becoming. That’s okay. Sometimes I just want to get in the car and drive, turn the radio on and let the goddess on the highway be my guide like some ever-elusive angel, a Madonna, a sweet song on Spanish guitar.
On a good day, I don’t think about how much worse the world has become in my lifetime, because I know there are trade-offs, and nothing is perfect, and to get there, sometimes we must make sacrifices, endure hardships, and suffer greatly. Nothing worth attaining ever was easy. That’s what they say. And the corollary is just because you work hard, you still may not get what you want. Life is cruel. Life is not fair. On a good day, I won’t think about these things because my mind wanders, and it feels good just to breathe in the air on a good day.
On a good day, I sleep through the night and am not uptight and anxious with thoughts hitting head-on hard against traffic, colliding against the current, against the wind like a Bob Seger song. I simply close my eyes and dream dreams and magical things. I do not replay the day, get endless scam calls, useless scripts of email, and texts from strangers who want to give me crypto tips. I do not think about events so many years removed that I can never prove I remember at all. I do not get called a liar. That always gets me. Being called a liar. Betrayal cuts the deepest, wounds the most, because there are too many layers to heal and there are no drugs in the land to conceal its roots.
On a good day, I write, and I walk, and maybe share a few words with someone special; I connect and I cook, and maybe I make the world a little bit cleaner, though it is hard, so hard, to blot the ink from a page that has been discolored, to clean the slate and free the mind, and start over again. But on a good day, I start over again.
