I totally lost track of time, but by that I don’t mean I lost track of the immediate hour, minute, or cluster of seconds which cling tenaciously to the face of the wristwatch cinched to my left arm.  Instead, I couldn’t decipher whether I was living in the past, present, or future—Honest to God I couldn’t; it was crazy; it really was!—and this conundrum left me feeling plussed and profoundly bewildered.  I was a temporal pilgrim with no direction to turn that didn’t feel strange and foreign; I was lost with no idea where I was, let alone where my true home might lie.  But why should this seem odd to a discerning reader?  After all, it is a well-established fact that we inhabitants of the Universe live on the cutting edge of a spacetime continuum, and if one can readily get lost in the space plane of that continuum—And who amongst us hasn’t at some random point in their lifetime?—then why should it seem weird and illogical that one might just as easily get lost in the time milieu as well?

…..and he looked around and slowly came to realize the canvas he was painting on was positively puny; Lilliputian; minute; embarrassingly so.  The others were painting on gigantean canvases that were manifold more expansive than the one he was utilizing, and this epiphany caused him to involuntarily blush and to wonder why his attempts to create something large and lasting were so feeble and wanting compared to seemingly all the mortals who surrounded him.  But after much thought he was unable to come up with a satisfactory answer, thus he sighed the sigh of the mortally defeated and continued going about his trivial business with an air of resigned despondency…..

I saw a little sparrow on the gravel road that Carla and I live on during my early morning walk down to the intersectional “T”, and it obviously couldn’t fly; something catastrophic had happened to one of its wings.  My best guess is that it had first been careless and subsequently grazed by one of the infrequently passing cars on our desolate township road.  In any event, the forlorn little creature couldn’t fly and instead hopped around desperately when I approached and quickly passed by it on the narrow roadway.  I made no attempt to assist the little sparrow because, let’s face it, there wasn’t a goddamned thing I could do to enhance its future or change the impending outcome.  This creature of God’s was a “dead bird walking” (No pun intended), and the only question relating to its future now was the method by which it would eventually perish.  Would it be run over by a passing vehicle if it insisted on sticking to the gravel thoroughfare?  Would the hapless critter be serendipitously discovered by a roving fox or coyote and then gulped down instantaneously—feathers and all?  Or might it just unceremoniously die from severe dehydration there in the tall roadside grass as a late July sun climbed ever higher in the azure sky?  None of these possibilities sounded very enticing to me but, again, there wasn’t a fuckin’ thing I could personally do to save the frantic little bird; its relatively quick death was now as assured as the aforementioned sun tumbling over the western horizon come duskingtide. In truth, the feathered creature was now as dead as it was alive, even if the tiny, admirably resolute avian still held out hope like all living things do until their very last minute and breath arrives.

…..the inherent stupidity of “fighting” cancer.  How do you fight your own body cells, even if they have decided to follow a traitorous path and have turned neoplastic?  The simple answer is:  You don’t!  Like it or not, those malignant cells are part of your body and much like mutineers aboard an ocean vessel, they can no sooner be dissociated from your body than it would be to amputate an arm or a leg or an unthinking skull.  You don’t “fight” cancer; you begrudgingly accept its presence and then take proactive measures to eradicate a malignancy knowing that the ultimate resolution to the matter does not rest in your hands and never will.  Fate will “decide” whether you live or die irrespective of your wishes, however fervent.  Treating a cancer diagnosis like it’s some sort of epic battle to be won or lost in the grandiloquent coliseum of human consciousness is just about the most juvenile, egotistical thing an afflicted person could ever do.  Understand, contracting cancer is not a battle, not a binary choice, not a hostile engagement.  Instead it is a premature death sentence that medical intervention may or may not be able to contravene, depending on the mood of the fickle omnipotent gods on any given day of the week we hominids choose to employ…..

…..and throughout this and that and everything else besides, time kept moving along slowly, ineluctably, inexorably…..and even though a mortal person could not empirically detect that movement with the five traditional senses, one could sense instinctually that life was moving along with an irresistible momentum all its own and that one was trapped aboard an incomprehensibly large ship from which there was no complicity and no escape.  We were all in it together—that I knew—yet incongruently we were all in it alone as well. We had no hand on the ghost ship’s rudder with which to influence the direction we were going; we just stood by and watched dumbly as things slipped by in the pitch blackness, amorphous things that we thought we might like to sample but were never afforded an opportunity to do so.  We just continued moving forward and onward, not unlike undiscerning hogs in a slaughterhouse, with no clear understanding of where we would eventually end up …..

…..just do what’s right!  That’s all. You’ll instinctively know what’s right when the situation confronts you.  What stands as blatantly unclear to you right now will distill very quickly when the moment of truth arrives and then the decision facing you will become amazingly easy.  Trust me on this.  Everyone possesses a conscience just as everyone possesses consciousness.  Just because it is not visible on the surface does not mean that it does not exist.  A conscience serves consciousness.  In fact, a working conscience is the greatest handmaiden that consciousness could ever hope for.  All this being said, some consciences are woefully underdeveloped and could stand for a lot more time in the weightroom…..

…..I don’t want anything tangible from you.  Nothing.  Squat.  You have given me the greatest gift of all—complete honesty—and everything else pales in comparison to that majestic offering.  You gave me crushing news with both barrels blazing and didn’t spare my feelings one iota, and now I have this ugly truth hand-delivered by you to confront and to grapple with in my mind as I struggle searching for a solution to my myriad character deficiencies, if they in truth even exist.  According to you they do, but who really knows for sure?  Honesty is the most slippery and elusive and subjective of all pseudo-emotions, and just because you say something is so doesn’t necessarily make it so.  You aren’t God, after all, even if you pretend to be on far too many occasions ……

Later on in the evening—this was after I had purchased a cheap hacksaw in that seedy Kmart discount store in downtown Great Falls, Montana—I walked out into its parking lot and crawled beneath our ailing van and began sawing off the crushed section of tailpipe.  The atmospheric temperature was exceptionally hot that duskingtide, still hanging out at probably ninety or ninety five degrees Fahrenheit. 

And yet the next thing I knew this kid wandered over to our maroon vehicle; he was evidently parked somewhere in the capacious discount store lot as well.  A barefoot kid—young man, rather—and, you know, that callow rascal offered to help me with the sawing, which naturally entailed lying on filthy, oily asphalt in a parking lot with grainy particles of rusty shit falling into one’s face with each stroke of the hacksaw, and don’t forget to factor into my misery index the reality I was doing this pleasant chore when the air temperature was hovering right around ninety degrees Fahrenheit and the relative humidity couldn’t have been lagging too far behind that metric either.  The barefoot kid said he hailed from somewhere in western Washington state—I forget the precise location right now—and I was extraordinarily impressed and appreciative that he would come over and offer to help purely out of the good of his heart while I was lying under the van sawing away like a champion lumberjack, all the time sweating profusely analogous to an eighty-year-old demi-fossil jacked up on Viagra struggling to come atop a nubile, voluptuous young sex kitten. 

(Excerpted from the forthcoming travel saga “North By Northwest“)

As a sidebar to this topic, my most vivid memory of the ear-popping descent down the backside of Going-To-The-Sun Highway occurred when Carla and I visited Glacier National Park back in the late 1980s.  I noticed with some element of mirth that there was the distinctive, acrid smell of burning brakes when the two of us finally reached the bottom of the steep mountain passageway and then, after peering around me on the roadway in an effort to spot the guileless, dumb-shit offender…..suddenly realized with horror that the malodor was coming from MY vehicle at the time.  I nearly shit my pants coincident with this unsavory discovery, but a long rest to allow the automobile’s brakes to cool down followed by a more sensible, gear-shifting strategy on the westbound trek won me redemption (I think!) in Carla’s disapproving eyes.

(Excerpted from the upcoming travel saga “North by Northwest”)

Goodbye is the ultimate oxymoron.  Think about it for a minute.  What exactly is good about expressing farewell to someone you obviously feel strongly about and sufficient kinship to that you wish to be present when that person takes leave of the situation they currently find themself in, all too often against their will and better judgment?  Nothing.  There is nothing—Zero!—good about emotional departures such as those, hence there is no valid reason to characterize the words spoken at a time such as that as anything other than sad, bad, mad, or saturnine.  Settle for the “bye” part and cast aside the inappropriate and dumbly used “good”.