"Prochaine station"
I wanna get wild I wanna get free Would you want to get off this ride with me?
I wanna get down Down on one knee Would you wanna get off this ride with me?
Oh
I wanna give in I wanna give out Wanna give away everything in this house
I wanna get going Before the fires burn out You can give away everything in this house
-We, Arcade Fire
The spark of life is not gain. Nor is it luxury. The spark of life is movement. Color. Love. And furthermore...if you really want to enjoy life, you must work quietly and humbly to realize your delusions of grandeur.
I was reminded by a client in a text this morning, quite early, that it's the first day of summer. Judging from the temperatures, I figure summer's actually been with us for a few weeks now.
Being singularly focused on her business, the text included videos of country people frolicking at her waterpark, for a small fee of course. Summer as a milestone on a marketing campaign.
But I see a high water mark, a period of inevitable, natural decline to follow, shorter days. Lo Armistead with his hat on the tip of his saber before the Yankees shot him down as he ascended the stone wall along Cemetery Ridge.
My high water mark has long since come-and-gone. This feels more like equinox in my life, not a bad time but a moment from which we can feel the first hints of the long winter ahead.
But then again, if I've learned anything up North, it's that winter isn't so bad. You just have to prepare a little, alter your lifestyle for what's possible when it's 21 degrees and the roads are covered with snow and ice. One can lead a wonderful existence in that space, as long as one accepts that the time for suntans and long days on the lake are over.
My vitals for the day are 122/79 after three readings. The first one was 147/94, which felt like backsliding so I tried again. The next was 133/87, then this very low reading on the third try. I think my blood pressure cuff just wanted to be left alone, to be tucked back into its sleeve and returned to its nest in the corner of my sock drawer, like a coiled water moccasin. If I'd asked it a couple more times, it might've told me I had no blood pressure at all.
The scale at the gym reports that I'm still 190. I sort of thought I might drop a little, after an extremely vigorous weekend working on the farm and eating very little because of the extreme heat, but I was wrong. The blame probably lies in the delicious supper I shared with my friends Tom and Linda last night--boiled shrimp, sauteed crab claws, enormous ground round burgers on some sort of super fancy bread, and a big salad. You'd think after such a feast I would have slept like a rock, and you'd be wrong--with a big trial in a month, and another small trial next week, I couldn't turn off my brain, and spent the evening stirring and sending emails to myself as I remembered work tasks that demanded my attention. Remember to set this deposition, file that motion, review this shareholder agreement. It's relentless.
My fifty minutes of pushing puny weights at the gym went fine, except my ear buds are tango uniform and so I was forced to endure whatever they were piping through their sound system. I can report that thumping club music has a certain timelessness--2022 dissolves into 2001 dissolves into 1988. All the same.
On the way home I ran across the Arcade Fire song whose lyrics crown this pile of psychobabble. Give it all away and live, before the fire burns out. There's discernment in those words. God doesn't just speak through John Wesley.
Last night mortality sort of crept up and tapped me on the shoulder after I left supper. The lightning storm outside had grown emphatic and constant as I drove down Beach Drive. My plan had been to stop by the office and pick up my iPad and some files in case of insomnia, but the flash and crack of the storm led me to decide only one foray into the zone of risk, getting from truck to condo, would be plenty.
I pulled into the parking spot as a bolt crashed over by the curve of Beach Drive and Cherry Street, not a hundred yards away. Leaping out of the truck, I dashed toward the porte-cochere, zig-zagging as if God were a sniper trying to draw a bead with the next lightning bolt. As soon as I reached cover, there was a strike that seemed just at the other end of the parking lot, then another even closer as I dashed down the exposed walkway to 407. I felt like a denizen of Kharkiv, or Ypres in 1914.
But God missed, his aim no better than the Iraqi gunners thirty-two years ago, and I lived to bill another day. Beforehand, however, I took my place out on the patio this morning for my devotional, surrounded by breathtaking evidence of the divine stretched out before me.
Before I dove into my routine, "Open my lips, Oh Lord, and my mouth shall proclaim your praise," I noticed a tiny splash of color on my water bottle, P's water bottle actually. Examining it more closely, I discovered a residue of lipstick, Peg's obsession, evidence of a time not so long ago when she was here.
I just need to endure this part. Trial should be over in a week, and God-willing and the weather cooperating the Mighty Columbia and I will be cruising through the night enroute to Key West and P.
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