project 365 #269: morning glories

project 365 #269: morning glories
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

This morning there was a great blue heron standing in the French Broad River while I was letting the dogs run. The river used to be deep and brown (a color which may be attributable to the staggering numbers of tires that form the native riverbed) but now it’s shallow and rocky and you can see the bottom – hey, check out those tires - and it only comes up to a herons’ knees. I watched the heron for a full five minutes; he didn’t catch anything, but once or twice he made hopeful movements with his neck.

Then I walked back with rocks in my pockets in case there were driveling psychopaths waiting in the scrubby woods to ambush me and eat my soul. I don’t think there were and, unfortunately, I don’t really think that I’m good enough with a couple of fist sized rocks anyway to scare anyone off. Too bad I can’t juggle – then I could juggle them, causing the psychopath to come back to sanity and coo in delight at my incredible juggling act and feats of balance. Then I could escape while he was lost in a juggling induced reverie.

See, the other day a friend of mine expressed fear that I would walk in that park alone in the early mornings just as the sun was coming up. “They find bodies there,” she said darkly. Yeah, they probably do. I wondered about that while I was walking this morning: what it would be like to find a body, what I would do, if the police would think I was a suspect (why the fuck would any self respecting murderer do something as dumb as “discover” the body anyway? I mean, it’s just so stupid. Dump the body quick and go about your daily life with an aura of blameless innocence, people.) and if, by finding the body, I would have locked myself into becoming a Detective. Then I would be driven to find the murderer and, to that end, would get myself all mixed up with a bunch of clues and quirky people who are just demanding 27 profitable sequels, which would mean that then I would have to start finding a body every week or so. That would be a drag, and anyway, I never feel afraid at that park. I have those scary, terrifying dogs with me, after all, poised to destroy any attacker's furniture and possibly his shoes. I do worry a little about coyotes and bears and raccoons and rabies, but that’s just one of those underlying thrums of panic that I’m supposed to be medicating with something other than alcohol, which of course, I’m not. I think I should start worrying about something more fun, anyway, like a tentacular river monster, birthed from tires and old planks, who seeks vengeance on humans for driving big trucks on bridges over the river every day and night and making it hard for him to sleep.

None of this is what I meant to write about today. I meant to write about waking up in a cranky funky mood, which I’m doing a lot lately (yeah, I’m not getting laid. At all, let alone enough. Yeah, there’s some truth in those old misogynistic sayings. Yeah, if you said that to me I’d totally kick you in the shins, male chauvinist pig. I get to say it and you don’t.) and stalking down the trail cursing my new bunion and the world, thinking about some tales of woe my daughter told me about people who are poor and hurting and desperate in this fine new world where the rich get richer, ever and ever, and the poor get poorer and poorer, and, in that lovely twist that may be the devils own special contribution to our time, blame themselves for it and noone else. I thought about money and Christmas and vacations and kicked a rock or two and then I watched the heron for five minutes and, briefly, it was better, just like hours later it would be better when I was slouching my way off to my car to drive to the bulk mail office and then stopped to take pictures of morning glories in a vacant lot and watch the leaf shadows on an old brick wall and think, god, this world is fucking insane, it can’t go on like this but yet, you know, it does, it lurches onward and around and somehow, someway, there’s some kind of crazy glory in that.