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Despite what you may think, it is Bibb County that this place is in, not Macon County, so the romance ends there. We are departing back to Atlanta now with car in tow behind pickup and I am $165 poorer, not to mention what it will cost to get the damn thing running again this week. Keep you fingers crossed for us, we have been known to screw things up many times before.

Okay, this may have nothing to do with medication or my depression or recovery, or with the breakup, or anything like that, but life does go on in other directions as well.
Earlier this week a sportswriter at my paper, a man of about 55 years old, named Jack, came by my desk and asked me did I own a blue VW Passat station wagon. I had never met Jack even though we both work on the 8th floor. I thought he was about to tell me that my headlights were on in the parking lot, or that he had just seen a band of hooligans run off with my rims, even though they are not so fancy. The story is much more interesting than that, though.

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Out tonight with JT and G3, to the brauhaus with a aging German band playing Elvis covers, of course it was hard not to think of G1 when I first met her and a Montero with a bumper sticker that cried out “recognize me.” This city has swallowed me up this weekend, like telling me of what I have been missing in a city all of my life. It has not been too hot, or cold, or anything. It is just a city, and of the best variety.

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Porch view (click photo to enlarge)

Sitting here in this room at J and S’s, and they have gone to bed as S stayed an extra night and is leaving for her trial early in the morning. Tonight will be the last time that they see each other for about a month, and I wonder how they do it. I used to flip out at G going away for a weekend! Outside I was staring over the sky that is dark now, but this afternoon had the most brilliant sunset. J called us outside just to witness it. We probably should have headed up to the roof.

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Sitting in the Atlanta airport awaiting a flight to Chicago where I will have a date with destiny and the course of my whole life could change – for better or worse I do not know. Getting here was an adventure. It involved a skittish emphysemic cab driver named Gerald Cody, who seemed like a really nice guy, but couldn’t help from going over the lane separator lines and quickly jerking the Atlanta Lenox Ford back into the correct lane. Upon dropping me off at the airport, he told me to have fun at the party in Chicago, and to try not to burn the city down. I didn’t tell him of any party – I guess I did tell him about Chicago, but I do not remember – so I guessed he was referring to the White Sox win in the World Series last night. I told him I would put out any fires that I saw.

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It’s nearing 2 AM and game 3 of the World Series is still on the TV. I am still awake watching and trying to get all of my financial information entered into a budgeting and accounting program so taxes and keeping track of expenses will be easier. If you really know me, this doesn’t sound like me at all. With the medication making it so I require less sleep, and the wagon making it so I have extra sober time on my hands, and because I need things to do to keep my mind off the obvious situational difficulties i am having, I do things like getting on top of my finances. I also keep my fingernails pruned and I am reading no less than 5 books concurrently right now.

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I thought I was doing alright coming home this afternoon. I’ve had a day that was pretty good, not too much depression or melancholy, managed to really throw myself into some work that needed to be done. Was looking forward to having a willing night at home alone until I arrived at home, and coming along the sidewalk by the side of the house, I remembered that the area where the azaleas now sit empty, was where earlier in the late spring or early summer we had weeded together when we got back from dinner. We were quiet and intent, only talking to figure out how to dispose of the refuse. G was so happy out there just pulling those weeds with ugly stalks a pretty, but tiny, flowers on them. It seemed the more that we pulled the more there was.

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Out this morning
the malignant gardener
moves the bin to the curb
and straightens his shirt.
Later he will do a little
pruning of this and snipping
of that until it is right
or he is tired.
I sit in the Florida room
putting out a cigarette in
an ashtray that cannot let
one in without letting one out.
The gardener will later turn
into a bird. It will not
be many days now, as they are
turning cold enough to crack bones.
I will later turn into a bird as well,
an autumn bird, and will migrate,
this nest left behind, and flight
and warmth and motion will become home.
It’s been restless
being man lately.
The pleasures of the bird
have appeal.
Success, then, is that when you are
gingerly nudged from that nest, like the
cigarettes in the ashtray, your
wings will work before you hit the ground.
On the other hand, we must
continue to feel failure
in our hearts, even as all the
world lays its garlands on us.
What does the bird know
that we don’t? Or the gardener
when he turns into that sparrow?
What does he then know?
What can that cigarette butt there
teach us? Or the end of
these days? Or ours? And, where
will we winter this year, or next?
To be a bird, maybe,
get to the end of it all,
a good son, a good friend,
a good husband, and father,
And nothing more.

Ah, day 40. The amount of time it took for a full inundation, and I had an inundated weekend. You would have thought my eyes were the cause of the flood. I couldn’t seem to keep it together. I fell apart at every juncture. I guess that is always the danger when you feel you have gotten stronger. J says just mark it up as a bad day, or a weekend in this case.

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