The Ripest of The Wild World's Apples

I'm not saying that things were better in the past, but I held less responsibility to others in my hands. I could muse romantically and dream wide-awake in line at the corner store. I would return home and pace the dusty first level, thinking, just thinking.

I could wrap myself in the warm shearling of pure imagination and spend days positioning toy bears and photographing them.



I found some old thoughts from old-timey pencil and paper logs:



'i've been on a free ride across the states for nearly three months now. i've driven through snowstorm deserts, mountain piles of boulders, flat sands, dense forest. i've fallen asleep to coyotes and plateaus, and woken to the pacific ocean. i've slept with kittens, screamed at the moon, watched the texas night come alive, and drank away my worries with a smile and a hard gulp.

i woke in my own bed today for the first time in a while, confused and a bit uneasy. my lazy room is sparsely decorated with dust and a few items my sister left behind. oliver is gone, presumed dead. i lied on a pillow covered in his fur and tried to not feel sad, though sometimes there isn't anything better to do.'

______________________


' veda, as i liked to call her, had ended her own life at a milemarker on the hill that drops off motorists to the rockaway townsquare. she had kept just enough life in her mechanics to coast to the exit and hobble into the driveway like a fat, wounded toad, all choking and sputtering. i couldn't even curse her. i realized that my automobile's death was indirectly and partly my fault. i was and still am a terrible father, and my pewter and orange baby was stripped from me because of that fact.


that winter was cold, just me and my shoes.'

______________________



'i'm waiting. i'm waiting to move and drive really far with the night. traveling by car awakens good memories and i feel like it's crack, yeah, how the crack-head constantly attempts to recreate the bliss of the first hit. the road does that to me. that sucks to see typed or written outside of my most private thoughts, because it sounds like some routine, cliche'd jim morrison shit. i just like it, ok?


the weather's been goofy but we all love it, and it isn't a secret. i'm wearing a jacket in the house and smoking. i'm surveying my kingdom and it's making my nips all hard with tired promise. i feel vague here, in totowa.'