Monday the day after Easter

I have a feeling that if I continue writing a blog a day you may actually come to know something about me, that I will no doubt reveal a thing or two which you didn't know yet, stumbling on my words until a fact comes sprawling out on the pavement from my treehouse door. I sense that tonight already. For instance, I am writing with my shoes on now. I almost never write with my feet not bare.

Earlier this eve: I'm sitting at a familiar bar, a talky pair of men to my right and nothing but empty space and a window to the left, my SF Giants losing again on the television mounted above me with the ocean roaring beyond the windows in the dark behind me. The conversations get boisterous and specific as another round of drinks comes to the right-hand-men, and I remain sipping my lonely beer slowly as the night plods along. It's Monday, and my brain is somewhere else. Hey look, the Giants just lost and the bar has emptied by a few more people, while jazz springs around from the speakers in the background. It's cold in here, like an air vent to the beach across the street is open and no one feels like getting up to close it, chilling the space around the few people in this joint tonight. The bartender walks down to my end and glances at me but I don't look up, and he gladly goes back to the talking end of the bar. I'm down here with the electric dishwasher and the extra glasses, in the darker corner, and tonight I like it. My heart is on a plane headed to Rwanda tonight and all day tomorrow. My eyes feel alert with loneliness which mingles among immense gratitude rather than sadness, reflecting on a missed soul rather than mourning a temporary loss. My brain requested this beer and my body brought it to this familiar bar where we will eat and drink together soon enough, once my heart returns from Africa in early May. Things are where they should be, for now.

I came to this bar not to drink but to write and think and sit and watch people and wonder. When I feel a pulling to write it seems wrong now to resist, and to be here now feels as good and solitary as if the spinning jazz CD were a live quintet in the corner to my lonely left smoking its music in the shadows while I huddle as I do now, listening and scribbling and watching. For now, I am a solitary man living a non-lonely life alone and aware tonight of the simple fact that yes, life is good, loneliness and aching are also good. This beer is good. My Giants, however, are not good.

"You got to learn how to die, if you wanna wanna be alive." - "War on War" by Wilco