091713 spiral motion: tragic and redemptive 091913 Humidity became a ghost that summer haunting everybody's houses and every body. Oak leaves in the park hung gravid as the breasts of old crones. 092013 We orbited each other connected by the gravity of shared laughter. Running through the hot soup and smell of the afternoon, beads of sweat cascading off like so many stars being born and spectacularly dying beneath our notice--the yellow cheer of that sidewalk becomes sinister as I look back. 092113 My bare ass presses hard and smooth against the stool in the middle of the glowing stage. Cheesy-movie style, the laughter of the roughshod audience has faded away, echoed into monkey-stupid repetition until call became response and nobody was listening. Pretense lingers like a curtain someone forgot to drop. Slowly, slowly, a hard-on begins. Whisper-soft, Gi's boots walk across the black surface of the stage. His red pubic hair is guileless in the fake moonlight. The set is utterly silent, papier-maché and muslin breathing like a confused forest into the closeness of this artificial night. 092213 The mind is a pointless thing; to try to quiet it is pointless also. Count your breath, count your steps, count your blessings. Count yourself lucky. Whatever it is you're doing, someone else has already done it better. The moon isn't listening to you. You're a narcissist. That really bugs you, doesn't it? Maybe you should have learned Latin. You should have gone back to school when you had the chance. You should have dropped out earlier, you wouldn't have such insurmountable debts. How long can you go on sitting here pretending you have some kind of future? Don't you realize the horrors that are in store for you? Say it with me: You're not getting any younger! Oddly enough, it feels almost as if you're getting younger when Gi shuffles over to where you're sitting on your stool in the half light; he looks away just slightly when he talks to you so his words sound offhand even when they're straight to the point: What are you doing sitting here with your dick out on this stool in the middle of the stage after everyone has gone home? Well it's a reasonable question. Can you come up with a reasonable answer? I was. I was just. Doing some. Exercises, yeah. He laughs casually but not cruelly, you think, and that makes it all right for the moment. For the moment. That's all anything's been all right for, for as long as you can remember. What kind of exercises, then? 092313 The bicycle is scratched up, and squeaks a bit. One of the shifters doesn't quite work. The rear tire is worn smooth. Occasionally the brakes put themselves on, paralysing temporarily the whole operation. Get off and walk. Look like a big dummy, pushing aluminum and rubber and cables down the street. Why not. What have you got to lose. There's a lot of talk about kissing, but no mention of bad breath. There's a lot of talk about fucking, but no mention of swollen hemorrhoids. You know what's weird? I don't feel like being abused much these days. I used to be so convinced that that was the only thing I found sexy. Now, I'm not so sure. Maybe if it was really for real with the right person. But I want to be loved. I want to be paid attention to. I don't want to be fawned over--well okay, maybe just a little maybe just every now and then. Maybe you set up for me a rose-scented bath with a healthy dose of no guilt. Maybe you tell me a story. Maybe you make me laugh hard enough where I can easily, unfolding my elbows and long limbs, start telling my stories in my laid-back semi-southern relaxed voice again. That would be nice. He thinks, and goes back to plowing through autumn on towards winter. Maybe we could even watch TV, sometimes, and not have it be horrible. Maybe we could even have a whiskey, occasionally, and not be killing ourselves. Maybe a train could tremble in the station like Mark Helprin said, and we could squeeze each others hips and get so excited we have to go to the bathroom, the tiny adventure box, once we get on there. Maybe we could be going somewhere. Maybe it's nighttime and the stars are streaked against the sturdy little windows. This is just a warm-up, you say, and you push up to me hip-first and this may even be the first time you've ever kissed me. And there's that brief panic but you catch me. I start to let go and then you stop, casually not recriminatingly, and as you head for the narrow door toward the hall you smile back over your shoulder and say, See you in the dining car, and I am old enough now to know I am in love with you, at least for now, and that is good enough. I'm still nervous about fucking, but that's okay. You have forever on a train. I feel like a bandit, a fugitive, a spy, a gentle giant with a secret, as, after waiting a warm fizzy minute, I follow you down the corridor. The rocking of the car works my knees and makes me feel invisibly massaged, solid. The doors between the cars open with that gravity-defying rumbly glide, like the starting up of a roller coaster. You smile behind your coffee cup. The roller coaster picks up speed. 092413 I have to kill the dog. The day is gray and the concrete is grayer as my soles scuff against the front porch steps. The front door is both grand and inadequate. I can see silhouettes of furniture through a meager curtain stretched between two horizontal fake brass rods. The door is unlocked. Right below my solar plexus, just up and a little in front of my stomach, there is a queasy stone. The dark carpet hushes my footfalls in the too-quiet house. When the floor changes to hard wood not artfully but by actual age and wear distressed, there is a wall of books to my right. Old hardcovers, printed in an era with fewer colors in the spectrum and guileless typography. Dust on the dust jackets. The bathroom's on the left, a place of coolness and motherly smells. I almost stop there, and go in. It pulls me sideways, begging with the puppy eyes of summers long ago. My body lists under the gravity of the other world it longs to suck me into. But I right myself with the determination of an intoxicated man. Keep it in the right lane. Even if the eyes can't force the two highway center lines to merge, experience can solve for where the one real line should really be. I walk on towards the basement door. To my right now, the kitchen, with a broader, more distant but no less powerful beckon. It seems the source of shared food is also the repository of tears. I do not go there. Instead I put my hand on the cool dry doorknob in front of me. There is a feeble scratching sound. A hinge is loose and I think about tightening it. Instead I breathe out, and open the door. Every other step used to be brown. Longer ago than that, every step used to be green. We never got around to finishing the brown. Now every step is feathered with deep scratches and faded scars. On the landing, which was never painted brown either, lies the wiry dog. His untrimmed talons rake the musty lumber ineffectually. He tries to get up, crashes. Brittle elbows unfolding awkwardly, he tries again, half turns, his neck twitches, he crashes. A weak sigh of confusion and exhaustion whispers out of his nostrils. He can't see me through those translucent marble eyes, murky as a lonely ocean. I go down the steps slowly. Each time my boot lands on a tread it sounds menacing. Winter afternoon light comes halfway in through the wrinkled window of the outside door. I crouch, and my own knees argue a bit. Someday I'll be as angular and lost as the dog. Sitting on a step more sawdust now than the rich dark brown it was one day, I reach out and touch the dog's stiff coat. Dry, but it leaves my hand feeling cracked and waxy. Agitated motion ripples through him, containing not enough energy to lift his head even to my lap. I lower myself the rest of the way to the floor, lean over him, rest my cheek behind his papery ear, and whisper softly. Working our way outside takes the better part of what's left of the daylight. The scant garden back by the alley has never seemed so far away from the house before. An ancient red wagon, metal, with white wheels with irises of rust, and pockmarked black tires harder than a highway, serves as carriage. The handle clanks softly against semi-frozen dirt. I'm panting out clouds. With the increased expansion of my chest comes a sudden consciousness of the weight in my jacket's inside pocket. It’s ridiculous, but I just keep thinking how much heavier the real thing is than a toy. So many toys I had as a boy. Eight shot, twelve shot, strip shot, paper shot, simple click, total imagination--you name it, I had it. They all felt real enough when I held them then. But this--this steely density now seems livid and liquid, possessed of an eagerness too cool to be sinister. The gun is not mine. I have borrowed it. I distinctly, for one second, remember the tang of gin in the illegal autumn of clandestine drinking. My bad years. The dog my companion. Wild paws pounding sand, barking stars into the sky, carrying smoke signals from mouth to laughing mouth, down by the river. Later everybody in the bar took turns petting the dog. The tick tick tick of his toenails on the polished floor, more laughter. The dog is in the frozen garden with me now, and no longer needs to be barking. He starts to shiver a little as five or six desultory snowflakes settle for pretty much any place to land. I snuggle the end of the barrel in the bristly fur about halfway between the level of his eyes and the base of his ears, slightly off center. I can see small veins in the underside of one ear--it's inside-out, like it always used to get for some reason. With my free hand I turn it right-side-out. The frost is starting to feel spiky against my thigh. I rest my free arm on his warm body. After the crack of thunder rebounds furiously from brick garage to house to neighbor's barn and finally leaps into serrated sky, I sit there. Venus rises over the sagging telephone wire. My toes grow numb. Finally I feel the sadness coming around me like a cold coat, and I know I have to move. I have brought some canvas tarps along in the wagon. They make it easier to transport the dog to the grave I dug yesterday, before the ground turned so hard. Nevertheless, it's hard work. By the time the job is done and I've taken off the bloody and dirty clothes and had a shower, and water is heating on the stove, it's probably almost midnight. I don't know for sure, though--yesterday I leaned the clock against the vine-encrusted bricks of the garage and shot it to pieces, when I was practicing. 092513 She's spread-legged on the couch. 100113 They all wanted to go with me to the airport. I guess they assumed any friend of mine was cause for celebration--and trust--and sure to bring variety and fun. And you are. And you did, I think, although they seemed a little subdued much of the weekend, a little less boisterous making pies and painting nails than I might have imagined. We looked at twenty-eight-dollar cheese hats and stuff while we waited, and I was slightly nervous. Millie asked if someone could fly the plane hanging from the ceiling. We pointed out our favorite miniature planes in a display case. They didn't really want to go into the bookstore. You looked old, as soon as you got up close where I could see your actual face. That's her, I said as you were coming out of the concourse. Really? Megan said, looking at a turned-inward, sideways-and-down-looking, young but rumpled woman walking a little ways in front of you. No, her, I said hurriedly so as to dispel the notion that my famous friend from Alaska whom I've known since I was a teenager could possibly be that nondescript. The tall one with the dark shoulder-length hair and purple sweatshirt, pulling that red suitcase. Her. You looked so old. You gave the little wave, exactly as I could have visualised, and you had the protected smile, exactly as I remembered. Your face was so lined, the skin around your eyes so weathered and thin. The part of your chest that was showing looked like my mom's used to. When we were talking in the backyard, I said I had a carapace around me, and that's why I hadn't been dating or having sex with anybody. You told me about your nice guy who treats you really nicely, and how you're trying to kick your addiction to guys who are a puzzle but are damaged or else aren't really there once you really start to dig in. When you started to get just a little bit obviously not completely comfortable on the couch, I said you can share the bed if you want, and you said do you want? and I said--what did I say? Did I say that would be nice, or that would be fine? Big difference. When I told you I don't relax because I'm afraid I'll miss something, you said you can miss some things, and it's okay. And you're right. When you were sitting on my bed with your laptop and I asked what you were doing, you laughed and said watching a movie because you never stop running around. Puttering. So I climbed over your blanketed legs, kind of making contact but mostly not, and got in there and watched a movie with you. The movie was pretty good because it had life and death and sacrifice and nightmares and helpless people taking care of each other and becoming a tiny bit less helpless, and greed and gore and tenderness. And it pulled me away from where I was, the way movies have been doing for years and years. Because pretty much every movie that pulls at me at all is some kind of love story, and I have yet to see a love story that really sits right on top of my chest and holds me down and spits in my mouth and says, I'm yours and you're mine, right here right now. At least not one that makes me feel really good and pure when it does that. And when we went apple picking I watched you tell the girls and me what to do a few times, and I watched myself watching that and how that felt, and I disappeared a little bit so that I was there, jouncing along with everyone else on the hayride, but also I wasn't quite there. The last time the girls and I went to that place was almost exactly two years ago, and the woman that was telling us what to do then had hijacked my fantasies, had become swollen beyond the boundaries of her own fantasies and assaulted my daughter, and was picking apples and telling us what to do as I sat there not quite there, marking time until I would have a chance to leave the house without arousing suspicion and go break down in front of the sliding window in the front room of the Muskego police department. And the only time I remember feeling perfectly natural acting silly in front of you was when I was playing with Libby. She had come out to the sun to see what we were talking about and to get some of our pistachios, and I rolled around on the ground with her and did that thing where I pretend to fall asleep on her and then wake up with an exaggerated start when she makes the slightest sound or movement, and she giggles and we do it all over again until we do something else like swing her around in a flying circle. You guys are silly, you said as you walked back toward the house, and it sounded like it meant, I can tell I'm not included in this. And it reminded me of when Katy said in Seattle that she had wanted to cry because she had looked over at me and Dexter crouching side by side with our paws up on the windowsill looking out, and she had realized that she would never be as close to me as that dog was right then. I noticed in the kitchen that I didn't look at your eyes much, and I wondered if you were noticing that too. And after we watched that movie and I was all full of fizzy energy, I struggled like a muppet to get the covers straight, and I said a few strange outbursts that made you laugh. It felt good to make you laugh, not so much because I wanted to make love with you, which is how I used to think of making someone laugh, but because it made me feel a little relieved of the burden of you not laughing and having a good time after you'd spent I don't even know how much on a ticket to get all the way down here. And I couldn't get to sleep because of the movie energy pulling me somewhere, somewhere away off left, over the dark wet grass of the commons, out past and above the airport, into the glowing dark, past all the exciting places you told the girls you'd flown or floated to in all your exciting jobs, and I wondered, and I had to actually do that sideways ladder climb half touching and mostly not touching your legs to get to the dresser to get my phone to make a note about it, I wondered whether or not that real big life and death big music charging ahead movie love can ever be possible again. And I'm still wondering that. And not knowing? That actually feels okay, right now. 100213 Hollow-point raindrops strafe the roof; wind surprise-attacks the wrinkled windows. There's nobody in the upstairs but me. The bartender chatted cheerfully and told me a story about bloody marys after I'd ordered one at four in the afternoon: I only make them extra stupid ridiculous spicy if people annoy me. She winked. After arranging the coaster, the tall glass, my jacket on the back of the chair, myself, having looked out the window at the growling rain and slush, I finally sit back with a sigh and take a sip. The drink is so fiery hot it burns my lips off my face, but I smile over towards the bar, not showing it though my eyeballs are sweating, as the bartender cheerfully wipes the counter with a clean rag. She might as well be whistling. It's a good thing I've ordered a beer as a chaser. I'm going to have to chase this infernal concoction all the way down and out. The beer, in a pert green bottle with a foil lable, is sweating prettily on the table. I pick it up with thumb and two fingers, gingerly but firmly squeezing its neck, and give it a little suck. So cool, so bright, though there's a little burn as the fizz encounters my devastated tongue. The clunk of the bottle as I set it back down, gearing up for another pull on the hellish bloody, is answered by the clomp, clomp, clomp of someone coming up the stairs in heavy shoes. It's hard not to look him over as his head and shoulders clear the top landing. He's tall and wide and carries himself like an elegant brick wall. Very good posture, well-trimmed facial hair. Somehow manages to look liberal, gentle, and authoritative all at once. Although there's something-- not sure-- exactly-- Just as I'm getting lost in people-watching him, his eyes meet mine and mine do a seemingly involuntary half-flutter, looking not exactly away, trying to avoid having been caught. Because of that, I can't see if he's still looking right at me, or for how long. In any case, he sits down, fitting his large long legs with relative grace under a small round table orthogonally across and away from me. I can look at him now, not head-on, and the angles are such that it's pretty unlikely there will be another visual skirmish unless I'm just ridiculously obvious about it. He takes a half-crumpled pack of cigarettes out of the breast pocket of his rugged raincoat, does that wrist flick that makes exactly one snow-white cylinder poke itself halfway out as a couple of its brethren barely show their tips and then slide resignedly back down into the pack. On the table there is a pear-shaped glass candle holder swaddled in a white mesh that looks a little like a hair net--to the flame ensconced in this squat vessel the man leans forward and, inhaling, touches his cigarette. The tip flares. The smoke both repels and entices me. I want to condemn, scorn, remain superior to him. And I want to taste him, kneel down under that table, unzip, and suck while he inhales. I take another drink of my horrible drink. The bartender, acting like a waitress now, exactly the way she didn't when I came in, goes over to his table, her stiff linen apron surrendering mid-thigh, and asks him what can she get him. He orders a rum and coke. That doesn't seem right, I find myself thinking. I really want some popcorn, but to get it I would have to go right past him, practically close enough to brush against his knee, between the corner of the bar and where he sits. But I really want some. But I really want to not get up and run that gauntlet. But the window is ancient and thin and I shiver once, plus I kind of have to pee and so, before I am ready, I hurl myself off that high dive and get up and make my legs start walking inside their silly blue pants. I wish I had different shoes on. As I pass by, curlicues of smoke wander lazily past his broad, pale face. His beard hair is a little red--the red curling against the white makes me think about his pubic hair, and that messes up my carefully measured Hey what's up, and turns it into something more like Hergnzt. He returns my gaze levelly, without flinching, and says, Hello. How are you. It's a statement, not a question. But by then I'm already a step and a half in the direction of this is not a conversation, so I proceed to the grimy bathroom door, push it open, and retreat into its reverberant shelter. What the fuck is wrong with me? The rain swells up again outside, and its beating on the roof and walls of this dive from a long-gone era is barely louder than the squalling of the plumbing as I turn on the cold and splash my face. I stare at my young haggard vaguely familiar face in the mirror for a moment; it drips slowly, unimpressed. When I am finally ready to go back out into the larger world of the small room inside the even larger world, something smells different. I pull the door open and sidle out, and see that the bartender and the rum and coke man have built a fire in the old fireplace I had always thought was just for decoration. She's waving a paper plate because there's too much smoke creeping out from under the hood. It's not working right, but she laughs. He laughs too. Suddenly he seems normal. Some weather we're having, huh? he says, and when he says that he's actually looking right at me and talking to actually me. You guys want me to make some more popcorn? the bartender says, and it's suddenly like we're all family here. I've missed supper anyway. That'd be great! I say, aware but not minding terribly that I sound a little like a little kid. So this is it. We're going to have popcorn and drinks and smoke and be in this old half-fallen-apart stack of bricks and plaster and warped woodwork. While the storm outside grows ever more enraged, engorged. Okay. Things could always be worse. Right? 100313 We're slick from the shower. 100413 It feels like somebody has to fuck somebody. It's raining. 100513 "Getting beyond primal emotion" is just a more elaborate way of manipulating primal emotion. "None of this matters" used to be a self-esteem problem; now it's an attempt to paint a clearer vision. "Life" is a form of discomfort. Try again tomorrow to say the thing that's not said. 100613 "And that's what happened" is an affirmation of enlightened neutrality. Pseudopod pressing the mechanism, amoeboid causes mechanoid to be propelled along long ribbon within seemingly endless lattice of asphalt and other aggregates--quasi-two-dimensional materializations of tactical structure woven neurochemically within semi-cooperative illusion of amoeboid species. Amoeboid generates signal sequence "You're halfway there", causing dominoid effect to reverberate throughout both ectoplasm and endoplasm, causing an energetic pattern to microcast effluviently; which pattern (apparently) semi-cooperative illusion cannot assimilate; therefore pattern shall be called any or all of the following: excitement, alarm, real, love. Amoeboid pedals harder. Things happen. 100813 Whirligig astral anthropomorphize canal birch sycamore spanish moss broken asphalt. This pattern shall. Formality Italy freestyle fluorescent basement office hours knock knock the smell of books and plaster pressboard shelves on brackets cinder blocks top desk drawer glides out smoothly smell of gum and paper. Xylophone cacophany epiphane the wonder years. Nubile stubble razor neckline half shirt midriff nipple summer squeeze exquisite sweat. Radio. Camphor senile root beer brandy vanilla bucket cold cream dresser kool-aid siren midnight bedtime translucent curtain headlights flow around the walls. The rhythm of the ride. Random traffic perfect pattern neverending nonrepeating only the irrational is real. Calumny. Thoughts moment the die paper they put are on. Into words into dreaming silent back me way me way way me take take. Hibachi cobblestone sidewalk cracks the oaks the elms the radio the flyer. Block around the. Tea. Gauzy filmy breeze hot effulgent thistle the table the iris the the. Periwinkle and is and radish strawberry wild onion thyme spice cabinet the poor farmer's gift to his new bride the she she the know the eyebrow the assuming raised in desperation having poor been having not had wanted this but when but who she searches. Seeks not having had but wanted lost. Found? Not yet this. Desperation quietly makes a sailboat out of wind. This is not what she wanted. Lost she knowing young drama playing house not knowing having knowing not yet this. Far away from Lebanon. Far away from Mass. Far away from Georgia. Young not knowing knowing this. She far she scared sad lonely having thought not knowing knowing this farmer. Not she. And the south dakota sky so wider knowing now not Lebanon not sidewalk crack the south dakota eyes his sky in his. The poor girl sky so wide it takes your breath away not knowing knowing this so wide so razor blue serrated clouds hot breezes dry not knowing this she knowing this she going going gone. Shoes downtown leather purses couches car seats luxury sedan now this not knowing this she smokes she this she now. In office coffee sidewalk glitter concrete pouring winding woods lake drive way out of broken sidewalk side of town she know she now she now she knowing what she wanted. Oaks the liquidambar willow maple ornamental shrub tomato fireplace the bar downstairs two furnaces and this. Man she this the stereo the basketball she smokes the leather cool garage she now she king size bed the satin sheets she laughing grabbing this she knowing man. She personal own world war two home come to this. And haircuts. Victory in European Theatre Japan the Armistice the Holocaust the deep long closet full of swish and satin box of books and memories flaps over clover four leaves interlocking like a swastika. In it her diary. Makes he knees my still when at look him I weak. Me too mama, me too. Perhaps because he's not my quote real unquote dad. Spurting liquid moon 101013 My kat made a cottonmouth at the glass patio door. She then shifted into motorcycle mode, after I said indulgently, What is it honey? Who's out there? She just continued to sing and shift gears. She doesn't listen to me. It's basically winter already, even though the calendar won't say so for another two months or more. Naked chest cold where my robe opens up, I begin to assemble coffee. I have three questions for you this morning. One is what is the friction point. Two is how do you push yourself and fail constructively. Three is how do you go beyond primal emotion. One. It's not always sexual. Or is it? Why did Chekhov say it's always a boy and a girl? Why do we have point sources of what we consider genius? Why do some names become household? Is it always sexual? How about it is always an organism, and almost every organism that we can imagine reproduces sexually, and there's an aura of beautiful mistakes and sweat. And even those that don't, we tend to anthropomorphize them anyway, bring them involuntarily into our little circle of humping and puffing. Two. It's not always mental. On some days, you have the luxury of its being physical. Why is the physical so much easier than the mental? It's not easier to talk yourself into beginning the physical, but it's easier to continue without constant rationalization and self doubt. But either way--are they the same thing? I had a rocklike small object in my slipper. It was stuck like a hyper-burr to the inner lining of the bottom. What do you call that? Not the sole, cuz that makes it sound like it's on the outside. The inside, where the bottom of your foot rests? Look that up. I ripped the lining there while forcing the small grape-nut-like object out, because it was doing a princess-and-the-pea number on my tender foot. So I may have ruined my slipper in the course of perfecting it. Three. I'm not convinced you can. Okay, so Lethem I humbly believe was talking about science fiction, that genre numerous others have said has characters as ideas. Okay, fine. Do your idea-characters then do the going beyond? Humans always come back to that boy-girl engine. Yes, even the gay ones. Bisexuality is innate. Deal with it. I'm not talking about fucking or even love. I'm talking about a vortex, how particles of a fluid rotate around a shimmering axis. I don't exactly know what I'm talking about. I'm just wondering, wouldn't it be a little artificial if you started tacking "ideas" onto the movements of your words, I mean just grafting on some super-emotional conceit for the sake of proving your maturity? Isn't science fiction actually a depth and breadth and distance of metaphor that takes your primal breath away? Take your primal emotion with you as you explore your obsessions, and see what happens. You animal. One. Yes it is often encrusted with sex, dripping with jewels, raw as the bared neck of some lithe girl you're grasping forcefully from behind, one hand on her neck, hard, and one hand roughly furrowing her naked pudendum. The growl escapes your throat and you bite, not waiting for categorical permission. Later that same night, you're biting the rougher, larger neck of some man, tasting his hardness that butts up against yours, rough on rough, a form of cooperative combat. Two. You get up at 4:42 in the morning and you sit the fuck down here and do this even though the gravity of the bed was jovian. That's fucking physical, my friend, and if you keep furrowing out that friction point, spiralling around and coming back to it every time it hides like a naughty clit, you will be pushing yourself in some way. Only you can know if you're really doing it. Some days you'll do a lot, some a little. Adams said twelve good pictures a year. Some guy on the radio said learn one thing a day. Three. I am coming to terms with bisexuality. I can talk about clits and girls and the hard little nipples of sweaty boys and junior high football underarms and all that stuff, but as I age I become a little more humorous about it all. Maybe sense of humor is what's required to turn the lizard human, to make the brain stem contribute its fuck juice to the greater good of building spaceships. God I don't know. I hope to find out someday, you know, when I grow up and grow out of this adolescent phase I've been in since oh about 1974. One. The friction point is primarily an emotional experience. The friction point is primal; it has to be in order to propel the vehicle. And there's nothing wrong with that. What actually happens at that point? You know after all these years, I don't really know. I wonder if my dad had any idea what exactly was happening when he hollered, STEP OUT THE CLUTCH!!! It was like in that one TV show when the old man yelled, STAND DOWN!!! and the hapless kids kind of half stood half sat, not knowing what to do with their gangly dumb bodies. It has something to do with the meshing or releasing of gears, I know that much. The meshing, for gently lurching into motion, across the parking lot at first, awkwardly jerking at first, across a continent later, smooth as a bottle of applejack and the surface of a rocky mountain tarn. The releasing at first so young and hot, like a toyota celica bashing through a quaint white fence, a young addle-headed bull insisting on existing, and later? Later a middle-aged meerkat sipping coffee at the pre-dawn kitchen table, truly in love with life, with men and women, with his own kids spawned from the loins of a roving female who then tried to eat them. But we escaped, there's no shame in escaping when you're not the alpha but your sprogs survived, there's actually a ragged kind of glory in that, you dog, you kat, you moaning at the mirror-dark window on an autumn's moon-fucked morning, you just awake from dreams of razor-hot girls and stubble-musky men, you old fucker, I love you.