Small Wonder and Corner Man Catch A Thief

I stare at maps. Maps on my wall, maps in books, maps on the computer. I used to have a map shower curtain that I'd study while rinsing and repeating. I look at streets I lived on, live on, walk by. I look at the intersections, the rivers, the blue highways, and all the distance between me and those I love. The distance is inches, or feet, or thousands of miles, depending on the mood, the view, the map.

I've been reading old notebooks and staring at word maps, the details of places and times well known and half remembered, or half forgotten.  I wonder what I will think when I look back at the notebooks of today, the maps of my here and now.

Going Through Little Black Notebook Dated November 25, 2009 Through February 5, 2010

Hurts.

The Lady's Grace and Other Drink Names Consumed

Intervention...my heart beats Pacific. Randomness at late night-ness. This is where I'm at now. Two steps forward several hundred steps back. I'm not surprised at the way it ended up today. I don't have time for intervention. Words coming through while I write words, trying to hold it together, not sure what "it" really is. I thought I was ready to rip it up, sort of did rip it up, now, not so sure. Someone is standing on my chest. Boot chest. I used to live on Northeast Streets... then the west side. I walked down California and Gold the other day, and had to stop and turn around. When the morning sun is missing... etc. It's tough to be so big and feel so small.

An Excerpt of a Stalled Project, Shelved and Forgotten Or When to Stop Writing Therapy Fiction

Blue.

I was part way through the bottle of whiskey and I managed to open and take a couple of Unisom-- or its store brand equivalent,--when I noticed that the TV screen had gone all blue.  It was the only light in my bedroom, but it seemed bright. Dark bright. The entire room was blue, my hands, my drink, the walls, the floor, the air, all of it… blue. I don’t remember if I was even watching anything, if it had always been at a blue screen, or anything. My world became the color, the color became an idea, a sustained musical note, yet visual, a moment, a thing, some thing, wrapped in blue.

I held up my blue glass, the blue cubes swirling in blue liquid. I drank the rest. I could feel the blue strolling down what had to be my blue throat, into a blue stomach, where it would see the departure of the blue pills I had taken not so long ago; departing my stomach, leaving through the walls, going through to the rest of me until I became liquid. Heavy. Thick. Encased in an idea of something, sleep perhaps—blue sleep to end a blue day of blue.