words I thinked

I am sticking this here to say I did, nobody will ever read it or give a shit if they even see it. I am writing for an audience of one and that is me, you are welcome to read along but…yup.

Let’s sing songs about roads that don’t go anywhere. Every road may well have a purpose, but many do not announce their purpose, they just are. And in the summer, they are tunnels that define verdant but also stop time. The passage of time is measured in flashes of filtered sun that race across skin and eye. The lack of a destination is freedom, freedom from the crush of expectation, of becoming, of judgement, of the imposition of valuation, from the need to hope for validation that won’t ever come..

Those roads may have purpose to those who live there, but for me they just are, places to shut down the thinking, the naming, the goal setting, the measurement of self against, the naming of time. Time ticks down from the moment we enter the world, whether on purpose or not, we only get so many ticks of the clock. We don’t think of that at 18, we rush to destinations we think we know of, that we imagine we understand and race towards. The alternative is to have no sense of the destination and carry on where we are taken.

What happens, then, when your past, that accumulation of ticks, becomes a place where you have no place, no welcome. Every place that seems it like could offer even the smallest corner of belonging, a refuge of comfort, of being known has been taken, taken or devalued, or demeaned or vanished in a verb like sense. The good old days belong to everyone else and you have been cut out of the pictures with one of those wee pointy exacto blades. Faces peer out of photographs, both faded and fresh, people you may have known but who no longer have any use for you and so you are vanished. The hardest part is that those that care the least also notice the least, out of sight is out of mind is out of existence. That road with no apparent destination becomes a little refuge from time

Driving down one of the roads, Booker T comes on, Green Onions, it is a comforting warm organ sound. It’s nice, but…it wasn’t written for me. Recorded in 1962 it was made for a different world. Recorded in Memphis, I can hear the sound of the pickup truck, driving across along a delta field, a tinny AM radio playing a tinny AM radio station, windows open the thin sound bleeds onto the field. The smell of sweat dances with a wreath of cigarette smoke. Are the truck’s occupants talking? What would they talk about? Such a different world it’s hard to know. Sports had not become commodified as the national distraction, is the growth of cotton a thing that requirement to moment to moment attention? In 2025 we have so many narratives built to distract us, we assume that everyone had that small talk. We assume that everyone had easy access to ‘news’, we forget that talk radio was not a thing, that news papers were probably a thing of certain classes. Booker T, music that speaks of other times to us, those who have that time laid out in front of…behind us.

Watching my elder cat dream, paws move, front paws one at a time… back paws more or less in unison. Whiskers twitch in small arcs, his head moves back. Something in this world catches his attention , piercing the curtains of Morpheus. He wakes with a stretch, a yawn and a swiveled head, eyes wide..  I guess wondering where he was, where he just was. This morning he came, late, very late, to breakfast. My breakfast. He sat on my lap, bolt upright and looked me right in the eyes. For a while. It would be presumptuous to assume that he was trying to say something, though eventually he intent was clear: my food fool is empty, fix it. At the moment before though he seemed content, clear, focused, living in a moment, such that a cat does or does not, and connecting. Scritches were dispensed and accepted. In a way, that was a moment of the sublime: undefined, unpurposed, unsurpassable because it did not succumb to measurement. In a few moments the younger black cat came to have his scritches dispensed, more of a hostage taking than a moment of shared clarity, he lingers pondering the economy of scritch

There are times I wish I could hear my voice at 6, not just the smallnish of it but the logic, the reasoning haltingly articulated in time. I can remember an ongoing argument with my dad about about the legitimacy of pop music. He was quite adamant that classical music was the only music. ( ironic I realize now, the sound track of my youth was more. ) Me arguing that

A song in a playlist, undated except some have some measure of proximity in time. They all have memories, they were assembled with intention, each to spur a thought, a memory of a place: the light, the . Some where share with another, hopes, aspirations, dreams… most gone with most people. All that is left of the past are images of eddies in the flow of life, eventually eddies spin off into the main current and dissolve, the eye that saw is all that is left. Alone.  There are no reunions, there are no home comings… there is no home to come to. Soon, very soon, the seeing eye too will dissolve into the stream of time. Forgotten, ephemeral, inconsequential. A mistake made and unmade by time. Memories are thought of as reservoirs of nostalgia, syrupy sweet, tinged by hopes… but hope is a sharp edged knife. Too often it points to people we failed to become, hopes that are, in retrospect, cruel cudgels of the people we didn’t become. In listening to those echoes,    Becoming is a hard thing, it is made of expectations, expectations are hopes that became rules

Watching the elder cat in repose, sunset sunlight streaming

Norwegian word: fallvinder  a cold wind that comes off the mountains surrounding an ocean inlet. Often with tornado force winds.

James Baldwin. Langston Hughes