Repeat

You know those moments you get every once in a while, once in a long while, that are perfect snapshots of how life should always be? Those precious rare seconds of complete happiness? I'm living one right now. I know it and, while in this moment, I know that I'll be sad and that I'll miss it when it passes, which it is doomed to do because moments are just that: momentary. We'll talk about it years from now: that time she was here and we didn't leave my apartment for a week and we stayed in, reading books and eating take-out and listening to records and having sex. Utopian days on repeat.

I set the needle down and open the window to let the early summer air in. It's always summer, but the heat doesn't seem so brutal today. The normal tasks of eating, sleeping, breathing: they all seem less brutal in these moments. A guy could get used to this.

In a slinky white camisole and white panties, she's curled up on her side on the recliner with her serious face on, looking hard at the tiny text of her book. She doesn't even know what she's doing to me, just by sitting there. She doesn't even see what I see. She doesn't know that just watching her read turns me on. Would she hate me if she knew what I was thinking right now? Her smooth legs, bent at the knee and leaning against the back of the recliner, are taunting me; I just want to see them spread.

I take my seat on the couch and pick up the opened magazine I'd placed on the coffee table. I haven't read a word since she woke up and peered out my bedroom door. She caught me in here by myself, said she didn't like that she woke up alone this morning. I told her I'd make it up to her tomorrow and I intend to. Now, I just peer over the edge of the magazine pages, watching her chest rise and fall with each breath. The record pops a little, but it sounds just fine and I want to take her hand and make her dance for me. I wonder if she would. Would she?

"Love this song," I say as I stand up.

She looks up from her book and grins, her bangs brushed just over her brow.

"I know; you said that last time you played it for me."

I graze her knee with my fingertips, then her arm up to her shoulders. She smiles and I lightly rub her shoulders until she looks up at me and I down at her. I bend down until my lips reach hers. "Dance for me."

She laughs, "Uh uh, no."

"C'mon, dance for me."

"I'll dance with you," she negotiates.

"Okay," I say and I grab her hand and pull her up, her book thrown onto the chair.

I take her right hand in my left and I wrap my right arm around her waste, placing my hand right at the small of her back. Last night, I learned she's ticklish right there, but she doesn't know I know that. She giggles.

"Am I that bad at this?" I ask.

"Haha, no, not at all," but she takes my hand and moves it up slightly. Let's call the whole thing off, I think, and I move the hand again, but this time over instead of up and I pull her in closer. With my face buried into her neck, am I bold enough to plant a few soft kisses? Before I'm able to answer that questions, I feel her warm lips brush against my neck and chin until they find my lips.

Back and forth, we sway to the song with a twirl here or there. Really, I'm not that good at this, so I'm extra sure not to spin her too hard. She's smiling, so she can't be having a terrible time. Back in my collapsed arms, her fingers seem to find all the spot on back I never knew were so sensitive. I'm a little hard, but hoping she won't notice. Just in case, let's get this show on the road: I kiss her neck and my fingers fondle the edge on her camisole, lifting it over her head.

She grins. "Again?" she asks. I don't stop kissing her and she doesn't stop smiling as she pulls my shirt off.

I spin her around and push the bedroom door open with the collective forces of our bodies. The mattress collides with her back as I battle with my belt. I don't want to take my lips of her. She pulls me under and helps me with the problem. We fumble over each other with impossibly graceful rhythm until nothing separates us anymore. I don't know where I end and she begins. The darkness is a mask and we don't have to be ourselves under its influence.

Breathing deeply, eventually, our bodies turn to mush. Somehow, I think I can even feel her limbs tingling. As I begin to pull away, she pulls me back again and kisses me hard, then smiles and rolls to her side.

"I'm hungry," she says and she gets up to find the take-out menu.

***********************************

Vignette #2.

As a select few people know, there's another one I wrote similar to this one that I didn't post, but may edit and put up later. That one's written from the woman's perspective, though. They comes as a result of listening to a lot of Minus The Bear.



"A few summers ago, we spent weeks in her room just having sex and listening to jazz and that was the life..." Minus The Bear Let's Play Guitar In A Five Guitar Band"

"And you're holding on to me like an old love that you know every inch of..." Minus The Bear My Time

"Black and white dress puts me into a trance as I memorize you..." Minus The Bear Excuses

I Ain't Got No Home

"I'd like to see the ol' man" I tell the nurse, comin' in outta the rain. The nurses don't think he got much more time. His fits are gittin' worse. "We don't think he's got more than a couple weeks," the nurse says and I take my hat off 'cause it's impolite not to greet a woman by takin' yer at off. She tells me that they think my playin' might doim some good, though, so they let me in even though I missed visitin' hours by a couple. He don't get many visitors these days. Except me, acourse. These halls and little rooms have surprisin'ly good acoustics. Not that it matters much to the ol' fella. She tells me they had him strapped to the bed most of the day, afraid he might go and hurt hisself real bad. Or someone else. Or worse. When I open his door, though, he quiets down a bit. He can't talk no more, she tells me. He just makes noises. Loud unes at that. Scares the whole damn place. He thinks there ain't no other patients or somethin'. He gave one of them nurses a real hard time a few days back, she says, and now that nurse, she won't go back in to see him. They think he can still write, but he ain't calmed down enough for anyone ta give him any writin' u-ten-sil in a long while. He only try to communicate by makin' noises and fast motions. He can still see and he can still hear, though, and I may not be much to look at, but I can give ya an earful if you can hear.

"You should start working here, maybe," she says. "He won't hush for anyone else." I says to her, "Thanks, but Ima geetar player. I play gigs in New York City. I ain't got the the brain matter for takin' care a ol' folk or folks whose heads ain't screwed on quite right. Now, don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful and much needed profession, but I ain't got the stomach for it." She grins and gives me the one-up and I grin back at her. "If ya ever find yerself if the big apple, though, you should look me up," I says to her. She smiles and her fair skin blushed faintly and she leaves me and the ol' man alone.

"So," I says to him, "one a yers or one a mine today?" I throw my hat down on the table and pull my jacket up over my head, the one with the broken zipper I never did get fixed. I take the stool next to his bed and start tunin' my music box up. "No opinions today?" I says to him. "Oh, right, you can't talk no more is what I hear. That true?" I ask, doubtin' it. He's a stubborn one. "I guess it is, huh? Well, how's about 'I Ain't Got No Home' then? One a yers. Standard tunin': E...A...D...G...B...little e."

I strum 'em all through once. That'll get the idear across anyways. And I plays him one a his own songs and then I plays him one a the ones I been hearin' up in New York City, 'round the folk clubs and beat bars and poets' pit-stops, and then I plays him one a my own songs.

"I wrote that one, there," I tell him. "That's right. That's my own. I've been writin' - you know - whatever been comin' into my head for a while. Just ain't really put tunes to it, but why not?" He wrote his own tunes. He taught me a thing or two about havin' sumthin' ta say and how a reliable geetar can help ya say it.

He just lay there, quiet, but grinnin' his little grin at me, maybe a little wider than usual. I won't let on how the nice nurse lady broke my heart tellin' me he can't talk no more. His stories are the stories ya listen to. He's been all over this land. He's been trapped in the dust bowl and stowed away in box cars. He's been east coast, west coast, Gulf coast, no coast. He's always been a workin' man, though. He always been workin'. Paintin' and singin' too.

Now they tell him he's crazy, legally in-sane, and they go an' lock him up here in this ol' buildin'. All them stories can't be just the ramblin's of an ol' crazy man, though. He was sane when he was singin' 'em, writin' 'em all down. It wasn't that long ago he was out there, on the road, in the corn fields, with the union folks. He's got all this history in him. Maybe that's what drove him crazy. Maybe that's enough for put a sensible man over the edge.

I know he's gonna die soon. He knows it too. I probably won't come back here no more neither. I don't just come for his stories - no, that ain't true - but the songs just don't mean as much just comin' outta my mouth as they do when he sings 'em along with me or when he tells me he was walkin' on a hot road out in Cali when he wrote it. He never told me where he was when he was writin' "I Ain't Got No Home." But I think I know where he was.

He was home. He just didn't know it. Some men's homes ain't where there stuff is or where their families sleep. Some men's homes are where ever they can get to with a sack a clean clothes dancin' against their backs and the sun beatin' down on their necks. Some men just ain't at home if they ain't sweatin' or bleedin'.


******************************************


I'm trying to write more prose, but shorter than my usual 20 - 40 pages "short" stories: a series of vignettes. I have already written one (that would need editing before posting) and am in the process of writing another. So, those are what you can expect in short term.

This is just a hypothetical account of an event that happened. In short: this is what I imagine Bob Dylan's last visit to Woody Guthrie to be like. Guthrie had Huntington's before anyone knew what Huntington's was, so he was diagnosed with various mental disabilities and Dylan would visit him at Greystone Hospital in Morristown, New Jersey. Woody's mother also had incorrectly diagnosed Huntington's and I believe she died in a fire she set, which also killed her daughter, Woody's sister (if I remember correctly from Guthrie's autobiography Bound For Glory). I have no idea how debilitating the disease was to Woody, so he probably was able to talk the last time Dylan visited him in real life, but - as I said - this is only hypothetical. In fact, the characters don't even have to be Dylan and Guthrie, as they are specifically left unnamed. The name of the song (and the title of this vignette) is a Woody Guthrie song, though. This is a scene I may visit again in the future as it's something about which I've considered writing a full story. So, we'll see.




"Woody was not celebrated at this place, and it was a strange environment to meet anybody, least of all the true voice of the American spirit." - Bob Dylan Chronicles [page 98 - 99].

"I'm out here a thousand miles from my home, walking a road other men have gone down. I'm seeing a new world of people and things, hear paupers and peasants and princes and kings. Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song about a funny old world that's coming along: seems sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn. It looks like it's dying and it's hardly been born. Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know all the things that I'm saying and a many times more. I'm singing you the song but I can't sing enough 'cause there's not many men that've done the things that you've done. Here's to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too and to all the good people that traveled with you. Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men that come with the dust and are gone with the wind. I'm leaving tomorrow, but I could leave today. Somewhere down the road someday, the very last thing that I'd want to do is to say I've been hitting some hard traveling too." - Bob Dylan Song To Woody [1962].

That Same Old Moon

The twilight ended
hours ago
and the calm, cool dark
seeps through the slits
in my blinds.
But the darkness is shattered
by a thin ray of light
that stretches over miles
and lands
on some far away coast,
where a lonely boy
sets the needle down
on a jazz record.
I know you see
that same old moon.
The one above my head
that now sleepily awakes
over yours.
Soon, you'll look up,
as I do now,
you'll see its face;
you'll see its shine
while I see yours.

Can you see mine?

************************************************

I just sort of feel a little less alone when I look up at the moon or the stars and realize all the millions of people who are looking up at that same moon and stars at the exact same time. Not everyone at the same time, but a good fraction of the population. People thousands of miles away from each other can all see it. It sort of unifies us no matter who we are. We all look up and can see them. When I look up, I wonder if you are. When you look up, do you wonder if I am?

Happy stargazing.




"Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog where no one notices the contrast of white on white. And in between the moon and you, angels get a better view f the crumbling difference between wrong and right..." Counting Crows 'Round Here

"A few summers ago, we spent weeks in her room just having sex and listening to jazz and that was the life..." Minus The Bear Let's Play Guitar In A Five Guitar Band"