Lately I’ve been having dreams in which guys in black come into the room where I sleep and carry my rigid body out and into an awaiting chartreuse 64 Ford Fairlane. I am perfectly alive, yet immobile and turgid. It is the way I imagine my body looks when I have been on a week long drinking binge. When I haven’t eaten right in a while. I don’t want food. My body swells and I languish. The guys in dark clothing come in and carry me into that car and we head off for Lake Mickey to check out how the city’s water supply is doing today. When I was younger, much younger, my brother came into a duck. Or rather, a duck came into our family, and after trying to provide a proper household for a duck, and failing, my parents decided that we would take the duck to Lake Mickey so it could live in a colony with the other ducks there. We would occasionally go to visit and my brother and I would ask which duck was ours. My mother would point at one and say, “That one!” Even though we were young, we were old enough to know that that duck looked nothing like ours, but we nodded and chased it as if we believed her. We did not even keep the duck long enough to give it a name. Rochelle Street was no place for a duck. We did keep Lester long enough to give him a name though. Lester was a mutt of a hunting dog gotten from my Uncle Ray long before...
Driving back from NC. That’s where we were. It was the solstice, the long one, and an argument ensued and I broke down. Wendy asked me to lay back and close my eyes for a while. Why does everyone seem to get married? Why this pairing? I guess I was sunk again into one of my ways, my depths, and the negative excitement of arrival ensued and I broke down. Jennifer asked me to go away for a few days and think about all of the things I had said to her. I went away and thought for a while and came back and had tiny burritos for lunch. I was locked up in the penitentiary in Oswego when an elephant walked through the door wearing a sting of freshwater pearls and a Hunt’s beans can on one front leg. The elephant was walking on it’s hind legs and had its trunk looped on the tail of another elephant, but only the other’s tail was present and nothing else. I talked to my mother on the phone and slammed the receiver down. Hilda suggested that I call my father on the west coast and discuss what had gone down. I told her I would and left for the Cask & Flagon and never made the call. He and I haven’t talked in years. I was making my way across the Eno river when a submarine tree limb snagged the leg of my pants and I went under for a mile or two before resurfacing in a patch of purple poppies with a orange road and concrete ditch going through....
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