Afterglow

It's shaping up to be quite the week. Queerly exhausting in some way that probably only makes sense to me. The madness began Sunday when a bluesman of my admiration was broken beneath the blade of the leukemia that devoured him. I was the one who broke the news to our bookkeeper, who was actually friends with the man. She's one tough bitch with a scathing New Zealand accent-the way kiwis pronounce bastard is just fucking cool-and watching her reaction to the news was just painful.

Then the knowledge of two coffeehouses I dig-dug?!?-closing down. Some of it was a shock. A bit was melancholy. I think it got me nostalgic.

The last bit involves a man I've not spoken to in thirteen years and change lost his war with cancer. The other friend, the one who told me the news of the one cat's illness a year ago, apologized for not telling me sooner. In the whirlwind I'd been forgotten. That didn't bother me. It'd been so long and we'd drifted into that space where old friendships go to die.

 I do confess to being bothered by the fact it was a cancer death. Something I had an eighteen month front row seat to watching. There are those in this world I do not like, and I'd not wish the disease, or, watching what it does to someone close on them for money or godhood.

I find myself feeling tired and emotional and all too willing to stab something, or, someone, thirty-seven times in the chest-I might miss at thirty-six and thirty-eight seems just a little excessive. Coming home from obligations involved the Thursday chores of watering my plants and trimming my beard. I lit some incense to that cat I once knew, to the wreckage that's been the last four days, and poured some whiskey. Despite the distance in orbits, I caught myself muttering words from another departed friend of mine as I toasted youthful memories;

"Goodbye, my friend..."

Having purged words from my skull, letting fly across the spider's web of cyber into the either, ether, and or, I find myself standing in the afterglow. Perhaps I will take note of a catharsis after eating something and collapsing into sleep. Maybe it doesn't really matter. The last four days offered a queer sequencing of events, which would have the more superstitious wondering about the omens and portends contained therein. I weathered it, for I maintain I've yet to encounter the force in the universe that can break me, and, perhaps that's simply enough.



Yeh, over the years we drifted apart. However, due to bone, blood, muscle, sinew, and skin, it is anatomically impossible to have a shadow cross my heart. Just saying...