I got into a fight with a man and woman. We argued for several minutes before I realize they were in my refrigerator. I told them to get out. They did, exited like royalty, while wiping themselves off of condiments and fastidiously brushing off crumbs from an unknown source.

My soul wants a hamburger.

Behind a bale of hay, I walked. The dog followed. I could feel it’s breath on my knee and it seemed to be guiding me from the farm, then out the farm, then down the little dirt path under a trellis (Who’d put that trellis there, I wondered?) and then out onto a small fileed that had once been an orange grove.
What’s this all about, I asked the dog, a medium-sized blond Labrador.

I’m just following orders, it said, as it led me onward.

You are doing something that no one else dared do. You sit in space and stare at nothing. For a long time. It was an effort that caused you to flush. Just staring, as particles jumbled, were thrown out into from the centrifugal force from your mind, sending beams of light northward, toward home. Your spectral remembrances collected sweat, filling, falling, rolling over your chest and navels. A blue blazer got soaked. You took it off and thrown over the couch. Love was made. By yourself.

On the other side of the room, cornices notwithstanding, a pin wheel spun faster and faster until it seemed to move backward and there you saw the image of cat as it leapt from out of the whirring machine, and flew across the room, landing in your arms.

Now it was time for some music. People.  And petting.

Short, bald and fat.

Funny how the way I came into this world is how I ended up as a thirty-five year old man living in New York.

I have created an impossible love affair, falling love with a man who doesn’t know I exist, a tall,blonde gorgeous man who looks like an over muscular ballet dancer. I doesn’t get more impossible than that. He possesses eyes so deep set that I’ve never even seen the whites of them, have never been closer than a few dozen yards away from him, never close enough to smell his sweaty body. I’ve never heard his voice. The only sound coming from him has been his running shoes slapping on the pavement and dirt of Central Park, where he jogs several times a week.

I first saw him in 2012, back when I had still had wisps of hair, and less belly, when my belly button wasn’t as deep. As he ran past me his chest bounced. And so did my heart. At the time, he was running with someone younger and less muscular. Maybe a colleague, maybe a boyfriend. But then I never saw him run with anyone ever again.

That’s when my imagination went wild. That’s when I was determined to run after him.

But before that, for many years after that, I would stay up all night crying about him. Now it is 2019. I am no longer fat. Or bald. But I’m still short. But that’s okay. Because I’m fast. Not as fast as him. But gaining speed.

In praise of things not yet seen. In deference to things not yet made.
In calculation of things not yet reasoned with.
It all comes down to the the science of when a Popsicle melts; it can’t be put back on that wooden stick. So face it: She does not love you. She never did. She was sticky and cold and sweet. And now she’s gone.

Instead of chewing on that tiny wooden slat, join an exercise boot camp, rub penny royal on yourself as you head into the woods with your exercise equipment. Remain determined to oversee this latest heartbreak with flair and and sweat. Stretch, warm up, feel the intense protest of your leg muscles as you squat your sense of freedom, amount yourself to movement in rhythmic intervals until you are exhausted, then crawl out of the woods, and treat yourself to fine food and wine. Burp escargot, spoon up polenta where you find it.

Vogue. Vogue. Vogue.

Calling all cars, calling a cars.
Be on the lookout for shiny other cars.
Especially the ones in bars, parked next to other cars.
Drunken people inside? No. Funny people? Hardly.
The real fun is in the parking lot. With the machinery, gone drunk and awry.  Autonomous.

Calling all cars. Come back. Please. Come back.

In Central Park, there is a couple who don’t know they are. They run past each other, every morning, giving each other the finger, as they run (always) in opposite directions, having gotten at odds for giving each other slights decades ago in which neither can remember how it started or who had started it. Here are words that have been used: asshole, douche-bag, dick wad. And these are grown women now. But back then, when the words were simpler, when nothing had taken much root, they were young college students, not yet twenty. One was an eastsider, the other an outsider. Their fights happened weekly and yet without much traction or luridness. Their confrontations were like drips of water. Bu to them, it had been building and building over the years, like a venerable typhoon. Especially when the Outsider succeeded, made a name for herself in bakery circles, while the Eastsider married, had children, divorced, married again, and divorced again. Their lives never converging but always building.

There was a point, however, when a small fissure developed in their secretive fighting, the tiniest bridge, when the Outsider stuck her finger out, during one of their morning jogs, to show the Eastsider that she was now engaged.  The Eastsider, assuming she was being given the finger, gave one back. Which happened also to have an engagement ring on it.

Neither one of them saw the diamonds. Either they were running too fast, as they usually did, to notice. Or, as was usually the case, they were too blind with rage.

With her hair dyed and curled, she walked into the coffee shop, thinking it was a perfume shop, and there attempted to spritz herself using coconut water. She was stopped before causing too much trouble. Which is a good thing, because a few moments later a man arrived, in his early seventies, retired, bored out of his skull who, out of the blue, felt like knocking on the display case of desserts–as if he could wake them from their slumber. He was corrected, lightly admonished and stuck around long enough to order a latte. In another corner of the shop, a woman could be heard telling her twin sister, with heavily weighed words: “That was in the third grade, when you used to wear those sandals.” The other twin protested, insisting they’d always worn the exact same outfits in the third grade, including those sandals. They began to argue loudly.

Two baristas ducked behind the counter, afraid of what might ensue. The manager of the coffeehouse ordered them to stand and work. They did, grudgingly.

The arguing between the twin sisters slowed.  Something else simmered, in another corner. But by then, it was the morning rush hour and the place grew loud as a whole, so there was not one thing that one person in particular could focus or fret on.

I am not a person who cuts himself or drinks too much. I am a person who sings off key while having mini (not many) nervous breakdowns that are usually over before four-thirty in the afternoon–plenty of time to prepare a nutritious meal for my family of five. My schedule is a very tight one. For to run psychic breakage later than is necessary would mean less than stellar meals for people who count on me. I might only then be able to make nutritious meals, yet they would probably lack flavor.