I feel like I am writing you this from fifty years away. I watched the debate and wondered what you thought. I watched the Cubs floundering post-season efforts, and wondered what you thought. I dug a photo of you out of the closet, full in frame, and wondered what you look like. I hope, sincerely (and I mean it) that you are happy, and from the handicapped observations that I can make, I think you are. There’s just an itch at the end of the day, and it’s dying, that I feel only you can scratch (and I know that’s not true). I just miss seeing you and hope that we will find a way to make that happen one day. You meeting mine. Me meeting yours. Us looking into each other’s eyes and knowing we made the right decision, without...
Know that if I remove you from my friends on Facebook it is just so that I am not tempted to click and see your “wall”. I am glad you are happy for you, but it’s not easy for me to see just yet. If I remove, I will have the complete intention of adding you back when, indeed, we become friends again. I’m going to try just not to look for now. I think I will be having great moments of joy myself very soon, so maybe that will help...
I’ve spent several afternoons over the past months sitting here at my desk, at the end of a day. The light for most of the summer streamed through the windows that are straight ahead, and I battled that late afternoon light with baseball hats, pieces of cardboard taped to the window, my tennis racquet in its case, and odd body contortions. The days are getting shorter and the light is not an issue any longer. Today it is making orange quavers full across the office and living room, and on the fireplace all the way over there. It gets me to thinking that I likely will not be here in this place next year, and in that I will not be here during this time, I will never see light quite like this again. I try to enjoy it for today. Try to take a picture, but although photos are really made of light, they never quite do it justice. The way in which you experience it in person cannot be captured. I am not sure whether that is good or bad. I would like to keep a little of this orange light today in a bottle to bring out and remember this place on days like this, in the early fall. I am house hunting and will be gone within months if not sooner, and that new place will not sit on top of this hill just so, at just this angle, with those trees just there. Everything will be different, the light, my likely preoccupations, me in general. I will have to see what the summer is...
Mo doesn’t want me to tell you this, but I once had sex with his wife, before she was his wife, but while I knew he was in love with her, and I don’t know if I can ever live that down. Now I am married, and happily I may add, and I don’t want anyone other than you to know. I am a sonofabitch. Today, he wants me to kiss his ass though, and I am not married to her, so I refuse. He wants everyone to bow down to the holy Clower ass, and we all rise up, and say no. Each and every one of us. I am so sorry to you, dear readers, but not to him. He’s an asshole and I just want all of you to know...
It’s hard to not love New York City, even after your twenties are long gone. In the approaching autumn of that year I found myself there again and was transported back to post-college-graduation. The world as a proverbial oyster. Surely, NYC would come, but the job was at a newspaper, back home, in suburban North Carolina; just a step on the road to the Times and a loft in the Village. So, in that year, my early thirties, I found myself in New York again, ostensibly for a tennis tournament, and a few drinks with almost-lost friends. A storm was approaching up the coast, skirting the coast with a bump and then back out into the water, where it would build steam and head back inland. Thousands south of the city, including those in the town I then called home, were without power, many without homes. I found myself in NYC oblivious to the storm except the blips of it on cable TV news. In my mind, the city was covered in a protective seal that kept out such things as storms and locust infestations (the last of which could be correct). My name is Moses Clower, or Mo as I like to be called – gets past the biblical implications which I have come to find problematic, and once made for an immediate launch in to the realm of the “academically gifted” as a child when I became the first in my class to know how to spell his name. I have been divorced for four years, six months ago I jumped from the sinking ship of newspapers...
This storm thinks it’s going to get the best of me, better think again. I’ll fuck it up. This ain’t no Katrina, harbinger of heartbreak; people standing on roofs while husbands die. I think they wanted husbands to die. Die drunk. New Orleans, best city in the country. Remember a spring break there. Met a girl and she sang songs to me in a courtyard. New Orleans has courtyards. Take my fucking house, but you’ll have to do it out from under my feet. I deny God. Been twelve years without church and don’t know that I miss it. European friends think I’m an ass for even considering. That’s right, European friends. I got this house, and I got my dog, and I got my testicles and my dog has his too; fuck Bob Barker. Fucker lives in Burbank or somewhere and spent too much time with artificially colored hair to be trusted. Just worried about the one slug hole in the roof. Might pour down right on my diploma. That’s right. Don’t ask. I got it. Take the DVD player. Take my fucking wife. Oh, that’s right, he’s already done that, so take his house, my chldren – just leave me the fuck alone. I mean it this time. I got my bread and my vienna sausages. I got cigarettes again after 15 years. I got a pistol and I’m pissed off. I got love in my heart, but no one’s gonna get at it for a long time. This storm. This storm. Take from me, like fucking Braveheart, my property, but not everything else. I just wanted...
For days, Richard has been reading the weather reports, watching the weather reports, researching weather phenomenon on the internet: wikipedia, NOAA, weather.com, various weather related blogs. Even before anyone else on the east coast knew anything about Nolan, old Dick was already buying canned goods, bread, bottled water, beer, whiskey, nudey magazines, a diesel powered generator, a prepaid cell phone. The weather radio already works on batteries, as well as AC. Ashley left him back in the spring, long before hurricane season. His heart has never been the same, as anyone that knew the two of them would suspect. He has been obsessed with the things that he really cannot control since then, but they are all things that he thinks, through a more perfect understanding, he will be able to control. For him, it is not turning on and off the light switch an odd number of times, that’s too easy. It’s these weather phenomenon, and when a storm of this size and shape is on the loose, he is in his heyday. Ashley left with the guy who designs the charts and graphs, the best he can figure, down at Channel 2. Said he’s hung like a horse. Tells Richard, on the night that she walks out, that he never did shit for her in the sack. He always felt like he was attentive, if not overly so. The approaching storm is hesitantly welcome. He misses her kisses. Her orgasms, or feigned ones, or half-hearted attempts at them. The one mutual friend says that Ashley always said that he took care of her, but he’s not so...
Nancy’s in the cedar hall closet waiting for the storm. She hasn’t seen a weather report in days – no weather.com, CNN, or newspaper either. There was just something in the way the clouds were moving when she got up this morning that got her worried, so she called in sick, took the dog to the kennel and is sitting in the cedar closet in the hallway, the one that still smells of cigarettes from when she and her husband used to spend time smoking in bars, and before he died. The cedar has tried, but the cigarettes have won. It’s the smell of the cigarettes that remind her of him, and thinking of him, and the smell of the cigarettes, makes her want to smoke – but mostly she wants to smoke with him, or be with him, and that’s not a possibilty, so she wishes that she had picked up a pack on the way home from the kennel, before the storm clouds started churning too much, so at least she could smoke, even in the cedar closet. It would make her feel close to him. It looked like the storm would be long and powerful this time. She didn’t know why he lied to her, and about such easy things. She didn’t know if he was dead, it was just easier to think of him in that way. The military jacket he had worn during the war still hung overhead in the cedar closet, so there was always a possibility. When she thought of the jacket she thought it might be nice if he were not...
Sometimes I have dreams, and in them I wake up and you are here. Some days I come home and I imagine that you arrive and park right where you are. Those days I think that you are coming home, back home. I think that you are back home, but then I realize you are every day. Thus it’s time to move. There’s nothing about this that is home for you, it is for me, but no longer us. There’s time for everything and home will find...
I realized, while in the shower this morning, that the anniversary of the breakup finally came and went this year without my notice. Looking at my calendar I was returning from Cooperstown on that day, having gone to a Belgian brewery tour and eating at the snack bar at what amounts to a petting zoo. It has to be a sign of improvement that I no longer need to lick wounds on that day,...
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