NO GO

(Continuing – from February 19 posting – EXERCISE: START HERE)

Later that night. Near midnight. The apartment is dimly lit.

A shadowy Burmese cat sits in the windowsill. She looks outside. She looks inside.

Hey Perkins, what's up? I figured I'd call, I get so tired of texting… It's nothing but soundbites and blinkeys, emoji's…

Well maybe we can catch up sometime… Glory is still burning man. I'm about eight fingers deep into the JW blue label tonight, sor' fime sloshing silly like an ass… I was just politely uninvited to finish my essay for the Journal. Apparently the editorial board met recently to review the upcoming issue and decided it wasn't a good time to move forward on the Destructive Power of Teaching the Sinful Nature, especially after the recent shooting in a black church in Birmingham.

We've got a white gunman with hate in his heart and I want to write against a sinful nature… Man, oh man… Part of me says, of course. I get it. I understand. But another part, man… What terrible timing.

And what the hell do I know? I was two thirds done, man!

So there's that… Call me back and fix this. Peace out – oh, and say hi to Peg!

He belched horribly and lay the phone down on the end table and turned up The Doors, leaving Zoe to wonder whether he would make it to the room to sleep tonight or simply fizzle here on the couch as he had done quite a few times before.

I wonder if anybody could ever think a little more broadly sometimes.… Take that poor soul, the one everybody will judge as a violent redneck, the one who filled that sanctuary with terror and hellfire…

His thoughts went on.

Start over – and tell that boy from day one that he is a treasure to his Creator and that he is special in this world, tell him no one else can bless like he will bless, no one else can be who he is, not ever, give him love and encourage him… Show him his remarkable and miraculous self and place him in a world of such intricacy and wonder and richness that living visions won't be able to help it but to emerge… Visions of cocreative love and cooperation and a more humane and thriving planet coming to mind with faces in them… TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL… How many tragedies, how much psychosis and violence could be so simply avoided…

Riders on the Storm was playing as he drank the scotch. Zoe's gaze was tender.

Had I been going about it the wrong way maybe?

I'm still so angry.

Should've started from the abundance side of things.

A reverie sauntered into his consciousness as though a veil of red love was thrown over him, as though an ocean of red drew him into itself beyond himself and into pure love that he could taste, that quenched and that nourished him. Zoe hopped from the windowsill and came to sit directly in front of him as though attending a flowers petal.

From there he continued: I commit myself still today to the holy remembering of the pain I witnessed as I listened over the years to all of the hurt kids I counseled, how, at a deep level, they hated themselves and punished themselves, one to the point of suicide…

THERE'S A KILLER ON THE ROAD, HIS BRAIN IS SQUIRMING LIKE A TOAD. Jim Morrison's voice commingles with the raindrops dripping through the album and outside the window, up and down the city streets, through the skies and ceilings of the apartment building, raindrops drip upon his tongue.

He sleeps.

A man drinks and drinks. There is a soothing. There is a glory burning.

God is love.