Private Drive. No Trespassing. Do Not Enter.

Maybe it’s the Humidity


Something is wrong, can’t tell if it’s physical, mental, stubbornness, mood, temperament, the season, a block, not a blockage but a block, some obstacle to moving, doing things, meeting expectations, honoring commitments. Half a dozen or more emails want answering, one from a grandson I love dearly and see never, and the mind shuts down when I remind myself. It isn’t that I don’t want to, or at least want myself to want to. But instead of doing what I want to do I trap myself in the ordinary, crawl under the box and pull the string: hide behind writing a sermon, preparing a Sunday School lesson, reading a Forbes article about the fifteen worst cars, writing this blasted blogpost, watching a C.S. Lewis lecture. In a meeting this week I let someone frost me in a way that crippled me unable to focus all day. I’m a grouchy old man, goddammit, don’t alphabet with me, leave me alone or we’ll both wish you had. But no, it isn’t you, it’s the … WTH is it, IDK, it certainly isn't me. It’s the smoker befouling my universe from two balconies below me: AH, did it ever occur to you that smoke rises? I'm gonna invent a foul cigar with smoke that falls, it’s the flashing light of the control tower at Tyndall Field, it’s that my green channel buoy light has gone out for the day, it’s the atmospheric pressure. It’s my grandfather’s barometer pointing at Fair when I know gardenia well it’s going to rain. 

It’s the clouds: I’m having breakfast on the porch, Kona, roast beef and tomato sandwich on thin ww and can’t keep jumping up to snap every twenty seconds simply because the sunrise keeps on with a new and brighter vision. Did it ever occur to me that the clouds are what make the firmament such a wonder? No, is life that way too? 

It’s the clouds warning me that though December is like springtime, January won’t be, and it’s just two weeks away into the gloom after the XMAS pageant. I wonder what’s coming, I wonder what’s on the other side of Davis Point for me, is that you, Xapov? you can't get me, I'm seven floors up.

In my next life I'm going to be the conductor on a 24/7 zoo train for children.

Father, forgive me for I have sinned by my own fault in thought, word, and deed, in things done and left undone; especially ... where should I begin?

It's the clouds.



You know, that is Xapov in that boat coming for me --