Yesterday, a particularly miserable day for weather, I popped in the earbuds and listened to a podcast about attention and focus as I walked for an hour on the treadmill. Many of the ideas the guest on the podcast had shared were concepts I was familiar with. There is no such thing as multi-tasking. Our attention is like a flashlight. Meditation and mindfulness can help us learn how to focus, and perhaps more importantly, refocus the flashlight. When I finished my walk to nowhere, I decided to practice. Usually, I read the headlines or scroll my phone while I eat. I decided none of that. Instead, I focused on my lunch: toast with peanut butter and banana. I paid attention to how the banana was just right. Unripe, they are bitter. Over-ripe, they are too sweet. I thought about how I like cake better than icing and that I might never trust a woman who only likes the icing – there’s something inauthentic about only wanting the sweetness. The peanut butter is a blend of salty and sweet. Coffee goes well with desert because it balances out the sweetness. A pattern had emerged – a reaffirming of what I already knew about my personality – I like the spaces in between, I find beauty in the bittersweet.
In my long ramble post from yesterday, I mentioned the poetry of Stephen Dobyns. He was one of my first favorite poets. I bought his book Velocities when I was an undergrad. I never read the thing cover to cover. I’m doing that now. He’s probably more bitter than sweet. This morning I read the poem “The Gardener.” It’s about god, retired and reflecting on his mistakes. It ends:
It’s lonely. God had said. So he made it a mate,
then watched them feed on each other’s bodies,
bicker and fight and trample through his garden,
dissatisfied with everything and wanting to escape.
Naturally, he hadn’t objected. Kicked out,
kicked out, who had spread such lies? Shaking
and banging the bars of the great gate, they had
begged him for the chance to make it on their own.
I have a lot of scraps of lines – tiny observations that, if I don’t forget them or lose them, might one day build into a story or an anecdote, or just get cannibalized and repurposed. From the notes on my phone:
Drove by a goat shitting on a steep green hillside.
Most bars, let alone towns, aren’t big enough for one Wade, this was a bar with two Wades.
Dead souls.
I walked along the hardened shores of memory – trying to place a feeling whose description evades my tongue.
Winter’s brown hillside.
Never fall in love with someone who is in love with their own mysteries. They will always insist that you don’t get them…. because if you did, it would shatter their sense of self.
The democratic republic of Sunday flapjacks (this is the title of a poem)
Casual studies in the closed-off hearts of sometimes callous men. (A shameless riff on the title of a David Foster Wallace book Brief Interviews with Hideous Men)
We drank a reasonable red in unreasonable times.
When I was not so young and probably should have known better, I took a wrong turn and accidentally fell in love.
A red hawk perches on a tree gone emerald with moss.
The other day I saw a bumper sticker. It read “Straight. Conservative. Christian. Gun Owner. How else can I piss you off today?” It’s hard not to feel out of place when you’re surrounded by people with such an antagonistic approach to life. I often see decals on trucks #FJB or else it’s Calvin pissing on something that represents liberals and “wokeness” or Brandon. I sometimes jot notes down about those things as well.
Then there are the screenshots from the phone:
A series I found on Twitter:
Grumpy, cute, and kinda funny:
Nuggets of truth:
Conflicting Sunday vibes:
Tucked in to my copy of Velocities was a note from a woman I dated. “When I close my eyes I see your face.” She had placed a bunch of these notes throughout the house – maybe a dozen, maybe more. When I found the first one, I went looking for the rest. She couldn’t remember how many she wrote or where she put them. Every once in a while, I find a new one. They always catch me by surprise in a sweet and good way… I took for granted her affection – though not intentionally. Ironically, I had done a similar thing in a different relationship – left a note every morning. At different points, and under different circumstances, we’re each capable of giving or receiving. The banana is sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet, and if we’re lucky, we take the time to enjoy the moment when it’s just right.