We love the things we love for what they are.
- Robert Frost
Always running. Always hustling. To schools. To jobs. Always running to the supermarket for milk and bananas and dumb shit. Always moving. Up and down the valley. Always coming up on a slow car. Always running up on someone doing the speed limit/ 45/ when 60 would be safe and fine. Always thinking. Always thinking to myself. Always talking to myself all by myself. Sometimes talking to myself as if I was with someone else. Out loud talking. Real talk with no one around.
One day I’m standing down in a town at a chop saw, cutting pine boards for window sills.
One day I’m sitting in my bedroom writing.
In the evening I am in the kitchen and the kids are slipping through the downstairs rooms as the sun sets in the west. The sun setting down way out in front of the house and the low slashes of dusk shine a spotlight on all the dust on the floor of the places I stand in. On the kitchen floor, and over in the room by the front door, I can see all the old mop marks where me and Arle slopped up dog piss with the Swiffer. Always running with the Swiffer to push dog piss around. Then later on, I see the dust balls laying in the mop trails and it’s like tumbleweeds moving through a crop circle.
Or Roman chariots pushing across a hundred-yard mosaic.
Always over at the coffee maker emptying it out or using the side of my hand to pull sugar crystals off the counter down onto the floor. Always watching the dogs lick the dirty floor. Always seeing them getting off on the sugar crystals, even if there’s hair and dust and dead flies down there too. Always surprised at how a dog will eat two feet of silver garland just to get one mini candy cane.
Always mixing up my ideas with things that happened. Always tripping over realities when I’m dressed up for pretend. In my mind, I explore the tight crevices of an unbounded sense of creativity. But in the real light of day, I don’t do much.
Yesterday I made a graveyard out of leftover garlic bread sticks and a frozen lasagna box. Always thinking that someone will notice my eclectic genius but always knowing that that ain’t what it is, so that ain’t what they’re noticing.
Always running to the back door to drop a wine bottle in the recycle can. That can is filthy now/ years old/ get rid of it. It’s cracked at the top and it’s sour rank if you put your face down in the dark. So many fish stick boxes. So many IPA cans. So much frozen pizza un-corrugated cardboard. A trillion yogurt containers we didn’t even bother to run under the sink.
Let them worry about the fucking yogurt, I tell myself.
Cleaning it out creates jobs, I say to no one in particular.
But I don’t even know who they are. I don’t even know who deals with the yogurt containers down the line. I’m too busy to worry about that. Maybe they all go into the ocean, I don’t know.
I tried, I guess.