The Thing That Isn’t There

This getting up in the morning and reading the news first off has got to end. Rumi was right, you know.

The internet is deadly in this respect. Concentrated “truth” from focusing on certain streams can overwhelm an organism. I know I’ve said that before, but it’s still true: the stuff is bad for me. It punches all the wrong buttons, lights up the old “victim” constellation and pulls me off my center. What’s my center? The place where everything doesn’t feel like shit, basically. My spot, the one from which I do no harm. I don’t mean keeping isolated or withdrawing from the world, not at all. I mean the place from which we naturally handle the world without breaking a sweat. The seat of love.

Today to my perception my wife was exceptionally tense. She had a physical therapy session early today which probably released a demon, although by bedtime, it appeared she’d cast it out. (If I were an aboriginal, I would be right.) I claim some credit for this, because I did absolutely nothing. That’s right, I didn’t do a thing, but especially, I didn’t bug her. This was a while after I gave up on the news, and just shortly after she cracked the two-by-five foot kitchen window by swatting at a fly and hitting a hanging crystal pendant instead. Before that, she’d already announced that things weren’t going well for her, and that she was cancelling her errands and intended to clean the house — occupational therapy, I suppose, but any husband feels the undertow of the entangled gods. Yes, I almost wrote “fears,” but these are quasi-enlightened times. Accordingly, I restrained myself from saying something like:

“FORGODSSAKESWHATSWRONGWITHYOUYOU’REFREAKINGMEOUT!”

There was a wrestling match between the two approaches, of course. It’s so much easier to pull the trigger, you know? Like throwing the hammer across the room after you hit your thumbnail with it.

(All those years of shooting at the thing that wasn’t where I thought it was. No wonder I missed!)

Good things will come now. A friend of mine will drop by to help fix the window. He knows hundreds of people. Ironically (?), perhaps a better housing situation, another place to live will flow from this, intuitively. No more camping out inside. We need a deal, the kind that never shows up in the paper. Receptivity to word of mouth and openness to change, yes, that will do the trick. Yet how can that state ever arise if I’m upset because there was no revolution after all?

Maybe there has been, though — just mis-located, once again.

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