This one is for my nephew, who loves country music, was born and grew up in Texas, knows that the town of Luckenbach, Texas exists, but had no idea that there was a song called “Luckenbach, Texas.”
…I would prefer to just sit on the hood of my car and watch the stars.
…it would be nice to have one more chance to say, I love you to those I can’t see anymore.
…I let go from trying to wrap my arms around everything, and just let the world pass, and flow through me.
…I let that lovely melancholy hurt that only love can give drape over me.
…I pull my head out of the sand and appreciate and value the silly little gift of a life I have.
…looking at the stars is all I can muster and also all that I need.
(But I can’t go for that…)
I don’t have as many bad habits as I used to. I am a reformed smoker, which was the worst bad habit I ever had, and I know that I am better off. But man… Some nights, a whiff of smoke will catch me in just the right mood, and I get that craving ll over again. I won’t act on it, but it sure is tempting. To be outside of a bar, slightly tippsy, and smoking a cigarette as the rest of the world is asleep. That feeling of being on the edge of the world, almost outside the boarder of normal and decent life. Not a bad person, just not one that fits in. Maybe that’s a tad romantic when it comes to an addiction, and I don’t want to return to it, but like thinking of a long lost ex, it wasn’t all bad.
I don’t want to get too deep into it, because if you know you know, but stupid old Tottenham refuses to give up one winning at least one trophy this year. I had written them off, and I felt better for it, but that damn team went and gave me hope. Just a small drop, a taste of things to come, and now I have started caring again, and that annoys me. I would rather be thinking about next season, rather than what might be.
So, if David Brooks says we need an uprising, then we might need an uprising.
When I first moved to the City twenty years ago, I was very fortunate, with the help of some very nice and generous friends, to get cast in a puppet show pretty much as soon as I set foot off the plane. At my first rehearsal, the director/puppet designer arrived in the studio carting a file box, a backpack, and a shoulder bag full of props and puppets. She then went on to tell me that she lived in Brooklyn, worked in Queens, and came into Manhattan for rehearsal. And being that there was no storage at the rehearsal room, she was forced to schlep these bags all over the City. As she put it in her sing-songy way, “Schlepping days are here again!”
Currently, I am taking part in a schlep myself. When I pick up the kid from school, I have to bring her big soccer bag as practice is right after she gets out. And being that practice is also an hour and a half, I bring along my bag with notebooks, my computer, and other survival things. And when I leave the apartment with my bags to get the kid, I can hear that phrase singing in my head…
Schlepping Days are Here Again!
