It's a little messy.

Tyranny is the single feeling,
richer to hold both contentment
and suffering side by each.
Happiness and struggle in the same breath.
Despair and renewal dreaming each other.

Language

"Drooplets of raspberries"
and
"Parental love rather than condensation."

On vibrate

Supposed silent cell phone
moans.

How

My unconscious roils in simultaneous
dream and nightmare.
Conscious self, unbidden,  stacks, alphabetizes, squares,
measures, sums up and calculates an answer
by the end of the day the remainder is
increasingly outside the lines.
The truss in a heap by the bed
to be put back on the next day
by my own hands.

A journey none the less

With the bike in lock down
it does not move relative
to the living room.
However the bike does move me forward
from
pre-dawn dark to light of
day.

Two cubes over

Don brings his recently heated lunch
of leftovers to his desk and the smell
urges me to go heat up my
lunch and eat.
Rice,chicken,black beans,chick peas,peas,corn and
one pork pot sticker.
(Ten minutes later)
Nice surprise, two pot stickers!

Skunked

Once in cribbage and then again for real in the middle of the night.
The first was done laughing around a friends dining room table,
the second having been forced from my warm bed
standing in my front yard at 1:30 in the morning
wondering what the hell I am going to do.

January weather

Fifties yesterday,
forties today,
snow tomorrow.

January 5th, 2011

Thanks Than.

After I hung up the phone I cried.

I told Rick that with raising kids
if you have the same number at the
end as at the beginning
of the day that you were a good
parent.

After hanging up it hit me that there
were parents who lost a child this day
and I felt heartless for what I said.

Appreciate the redundancy.

Dr: Baxter to Dr. Barouch : "Which eye?"
Dr. Barouch to Dr. Baxter: "Left."
Dr. Baxter to me: "Which eye?"
me to Dr. Baxter: "Left."
Dr. Baxter to me: "Point to the eye you mean."
I point.
Dr. Baxter to me: "I am going to draw a dot over that eye. Now take a deep breath."

Where the me meets the not me

It is not a hard boundary,
a solid line,
where I do not cross.
It is a gradual foam of
atomic and sub atomic
interactions where I am neither
completely stopped or started.

Birthday gifts.

The ability to stand and go take a walk in the late fall sunshine.
The ability to put my shoulder of the figurative wheel of work
and to imagine what that work might be.
The enjoyment of amazing cauliflower crust pizza,
greens recently harvested from the very Earth itself
and a slice of Lembas with my lunch.
Discussing if dogs are starter children and joking whether I will ever
get fucked in my fifties.
Most precious of all is time spent with people for whom I care deeply
and who also care deeply for me.

I have come to understand that everything I do is part of my nature
and can be approached with mindfulness.
Zen driving is leading me to Zen work.

I seek to find my true nature.

I am not as tuff as I thought.

I felt that I would be good with my camping equipment
down into the 20;s. Mid 30's proved me wrong.
Lesson learned. Get  carbon monoxide detector
and figure out how to use the furnace in the
Beast.

The campfire shuffle.

The moon was waxing to 3 quarters full,
oak trees shod of their
leaves would rattle in the breeze.
and fir trees cast moon shadows.
Below 40 degrees the fire pulses
up and down in time to adding wood
and it being consumed.
The shins are closest and being perpendicular
to the radiant vector are first to
complain when they get to hot
causing me to shuffle the camp chair back
a foot or two. As the fire dies down
a bit the shins tell me to shuffle

back in.

Thanks

To Chris, Nancy and Meagan
having us over for dinner.
That my kids have gotten to know
my dad.
For the invisible made visible.

I am a lucky man, now is the time to respect that luck.

He just has to touch the hem of the ghost's robe, BAM.

Scrooge gets to be transformed so completely and in such a compressed period of time.