Bullpencatcher

Blog

  • Heartworn

    There’s this DVD that I own that I need to sneak to you now, in that way in which we share things these days, that involves Townes Van Zant, Guy Clark, Steve Earle and others in Texas in the 70s. A black man cries as Townes plays “Poncho and Lefty.” I have this day off of work and have been reading and hanging out, and wishing that I could hear you sing “Katie Dear” to me tonight. I guess I have been missing you. But, is that so surprising?

  • 32

    Just to prove that I made it
    So one night you go to bed and the next day you are year older. I guess it happens to all of us at least once a year despite what one of my friends says. Today I am 32. I have driven now, for as many years as i didn’t drive. I remember the day I got my driver’s license when I was 16. In the photo, which I still have somewhere, I look like a young hoodlum, but I was rail thin. I am more years now than any month has days. I guess birthday’s can be a time for introspection. I have done enough of that lately, so I think I will just try to have fun. Hope you all have a good my birthday as well, but remember it is mine 😉

  • Birthday wishes

    Tommy asked me last night if I wanted him to invite you to my birthday dinner tonight, and as much as I wanted to say yes, I had to say no. It would not be fair to the others for me to just pay attention to you, and it would be hard for me not to do that under the circumstances. Thanks for my early birthday wishes last night, and my birthday wishes today. I know it’s hokey, and you may not believe it, but I wish I could rub YOUR feet for my birthday. I’m sure my hands would tremble a bit, but I don’t think my skills have really waned, even though they haven’t been put to use.
    Take care and have a good day, baby.

  • Hearth

    Tonight I looked at the dormant fireplace. I have lit it a couple of times this year, but not nearly as much as we did when you lived here. I thought about the times we sat when it was so cold – last winter seems so cold now compared to this one – by the fireplace and smoked cigarettes… which led me to thinking about sitting by the fireplace, with the smell of the burnt wood, and smoking, at your mother’s house. Then I thought that you don’t smoke anymore and it made me happy and sad. It made me happy and sad in the same way that the thoughts of hearth-side smoking did. There are so many memories surrounding so many things, but there seems like a special amount of them surrounding cigarettes: the first night on Gates’ porch when I saw the shooting stars that you didn’t, sitting on the porch at various parties, the pool house, the car port at Ashley’s, my parents back porch, in my car and yours, on trips and around town, Jeremy’s porch shivering, and even sitting in your window after you moved out. I guess that’s one of the reasons why it is hard to give the habit up. It is also why it is hard to give you up, too many memories. But there has been a slight shift. These memories used to only make me sad. They still do, but strangely they make me smile at the same time. I am sitting here right now looking at the fireplace, crying and smiling.

  • This town

    Knowing you were out of town this weekend, made this town seem a tad lonely to me. I mean, I had a great weekend so far in many ways, but you not being here made things seem slightly off-kilter. There have been other times when you have been gone when I also felt like this. When I would drive past your house and your car was not there, nor were the lights on, for two days, I would assume that you were in Sparkle, or visiting Nate, etc. I guess since we have split, maybe I keep grabbing for straws, but I do like this city more with you in it than I liked it before you were here. I can’t really put my fingers on it, but I know that you care about me, and it is comforting to know that even if we don’t see each other or talk that much, a person that lives right down the street from me has my best interest at heart, wants me to be happy and fulfilled. Hopefully you get some comfort in knowing that I am down here thinking the same things about you.
    I guess all of this comes out of my fear that you will leave. This city will never be the same – not for me or many others. I know it may be what you have to do though. I wish that you had been able to make more of a go of it here already. It’s never too late to start.
    I will support you, though, in whatever you need to do. I hope that you decide to give this and here a try though. You might be surprised.

  • Please

    Please read bullpencatcher. I am so much better in many ways. There is beauty inside me. I pray about you before I fall to sleep, and dream about you as I daily slough off this mortal coil. I want to dance with you tonight to the tune of a two-fingered gypsy guitarist – or to the the sound of you humming Sam Cooke in my ear. You light me up. I only wish I could do the same for you.

  • Groundhogs

    I don’t know why, but possibly out of restlessness, I strike out after midnight tonight and I see the blooms of the dogwood tree gleaming in the light of the sodium halide street lamp. It is February still, but Spring is already coming to this town. Outside of my house, the singular daffodil is starting its bloom as well, and the smell of burning wood has subsided on this end of the street. Soon there will be weeding to be done. Our hands could be turned bright green before we could even snap our sweaty fingers.
    My car, during this early warming, has lost one of its front lights. In high school we used to call it popeye, and upon seeing one you either had to kiss or punch the person you were with. Amongst dudes it usually was a punch; amongst mixed company, the kiss was more popular. I spent the better part of one Spring evening sitting on a stone wall when I was 18 with a woman kissing at the sight of every popeye. One would have thought that every car in town had one headlight extinguished by the passion that we felt for each other that night. Later she would ask me to her prom and I would weasel out. Then she would become a nurse in Minnesota. She would marry and have a child. She would live near the headwaters of the Mississippi. She would see it fed by the meltwaters of spring. I doubt she ever thinks about me, or these things now.
    I guess this time of the year brings hope to my heart. Hope springs eternal, or rather, in Spring, hope is eternal. Maybe I am too hopeful. Forever the romantic. It seems like the stars are slowly coming back into alignment. It seems that the world might just slow down to that pace that I can understand. Tomorrow I think I will spend an hour walking around this city, letting my feet get to know it like they never have. They will feel the promise of pollen, pollution and circumstance.
    But tonight… oh tonight, I wish I were in cold and windy Chicago, at the Horseshoe or Bierstube with JT. We spent the hour or two talking, or rather me talking, and it would have been better over a beer together, in that city where they truly appreciate the change of the seasons. Where Spring means something so much more. Where it means the snow will melt. The world will turn green. The Mississippi will fill its banks again, and the world, and you and I, stretched out over this great country, will be one again.

  • You will

    I don’t have much time to write today, but you know how I usually like to do a post-mortem on our conversations…
    I know you are feeling down right now, but if you could look at objectively, I think you would realize how much love surrounds you. From your family, to your Sparkle friends, to your friends here, including me. We are all here to support you in getting and feeling better. Don’t hesitate to use us. Don’t feel alone, because you never really are.
    I definitely know the feeling that you are having right now. I have been through it, and I can say that it does and will get better. You are in a period of discovering things about yourself right now. That can be very difficult, but I promise at the in the process you will realize what all of the rest of us see in you. You will blossom.
    I told you in the thing that I wrote you for your birthday that I thought you were bound for greatness. I still wholeheartedly believe that.
    I am here for you if you need me.
    I love you.

  • Baseball

    I think I thought you were the baseball in the poem for so long. You felt so soft and comfortable and good in my hands. There was no need for other projectiles. It’s time to stop throwing things.
    I used to have a baseball from when I played little league. I looked for it last night, but could not find it.

  • Yeats

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…
    There is a juggler just down the boardwalk there and he has been doing it for six months or so now. Every day. Every day adding a new item: bowling ball, helium balloon, toaster, ping pong ball.
    How he keeps these things in motion. Always just one in the hand, the others in the air. How he keeps the birds above entertained, and the sandal-and-sock-wearing drunk old men, coming out of the casinos, so very enthralled.
    At night, when the juggler is home alone, in his attic appartment overlooking the alley where they filmed those fight scenes in Barfly, he sometimes dreams in an Irish accent of drunken perambulations around another city, another time.
    His hands finally rest. His arms can luxuriate in cotton, and springs, and sleep.
    He dreams of a girl distant and lost now, that once meant something to him, but he can’t remember what, can’t fully remember her. Not a mother, or a lover, just a girl, and a footprint, and a gale blowing up the face of a cliff.
    He dreams Hollywood car crash scenes on the rocks below. Or Holden standing there catching VW Squarebacks full of grade-school children.
    You would think his muscle memory would be such that even in his sleep he would juggle, but every day it is like learning it all over again. Learning the tricks, how to work the stilts, where to hide the canary. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Where do the ducks go when the lake freezes over? What if instead of keeping them all in the air, he lets them all fall to the ground?
    The crowd will disband. There will be no tip. Rent will be hard this month. Things will be broken.
    What if all fall to the ground but that weathered baseball from childhood? What if that’s the one he catches as the bowling balls, and beanbags, and World Book Encyclopedias, and diamond rings all fall and shatter or thud? What if, better yet, he throws all of these into the ocean, except the baseball? Never the baseball.
    Would the center then hold?
    He could sleep for days with it under his pillow, as the drunks and hookers and lights take over the night.