delicate sound

.
.
.
.
.
[click image]

.
.
.
.
.

I have gone to bed. I am not here. This delicate sound has been rumbling away pretty good here for quite some time. I think the lightning is pretty far out at sea because it took a while to be sure there even were lightning bolts preceding the thunder. They were quick and you had to have your head turned in the right direction to detect them at all. It took me so many thunder rolls to determine this I began to think they were doing war games out there. I'm still not a hunnert percent sure because those brief flashes could have been some damn newfangled ordnance. How can I tell?

Oh. There. There was just one that was definitely thunder from lightning. Definitely. I didn't see the flash, but it must have been closer because I heard the familiar crack.

.

I am out of bed. I'm here now. I threw on all my clothes and ran out to see if I could get closer to the bliss, but it's hiding out there behind the thick brume and stuff outside is glowing funny. It has this quality of being queer and utterly familiar... the mystical quality of fog to bounce ions in many directions, mirror everything from every direction.

I think sometimes it's mirroring me and if I were not so close to outright blind, of eyeball, that is, I could catch that action out there. People at the post office laugh and laugh at me, fumbling for the right set of cheaters for some transaction, or cursing having grabbed the wrong ones, but best of all they love it when I bellow at the walls that I am blind in this eye and can't see out of this other one. I'm being perfectly genuine. That's what makes it so funny. I can't bellow about this in the fog at this hour because I have neighbors. They would fly from their beds in alarm with their itsy dogs yapping like they think they are the hounds of hell. I want to go for a tromp in the fog! I want to go for a middle of the night tromp in the fog and my chances of getting past those macho squirts is about zip.

I'd just be out there with all the Hispanics driving by to get to their farm jobs anyway. Damn. No. Wait! It's Sunday. Church. Most of them will be home and waiting to go to church. Still, those pipsqueaks are the impediment for me to get to my church. Maybe I could negotiate with Goldie to get me out to breakfast somewhere good and foggy. The officious little pooches don't get so riled by that as they do the patter of footsteps past their abodes.

.

I think my bliss has moved further out to sea. I keep listening and think I'm only making thunder from the waterfall. I make music out of all continuous rumbles... like water... like pool or refrigerator pumps... like the air moving through the ancients. It would have been optimal if I'd leapt out of bed and driven out to a good beach. I could be out there looking for my heart's reflection in the fog and feeling the balm of the electric air and the rumbling of the earth under the crackling atmosphere. I might have gone out there and plopped down in the sand and fallen to rapturous asleep in it all.

.

It's eightish and I fumbled around to pull myself together to go down to the Ship Ashore for breakfast, mumbling don't fergitcher money in yer dirty jeans pocket, don't you dare, don't, don't, don't, and, so, well, I did.

As "luck" would have it, I didn't realize the tiny little breakfast place very near was open on Sundays, so I didn't have to get back in my car and drive far for the dough, and I realized it before we'd gotten past pouring me some coffee. I made myself pay for my deuced absentmindedness by leaving my car home and jogging back to the restaurant.

As I sat there, fat, too full, I realized I hadn't taken my morning empty stomach pills yet.

Pfeh. I did a slow stroll home.

The fog lifted up off the ground, dammit, but I can look up and see it topping the trees all around. It's always very beautiful here, but this is an especially pretty morning... complete with fog horns. The sun will probably be all the way out and the day almost gone before I wake up. There are just days like this sometimes. I don't know what to do about it.

.