Blue Dream

The youngest boyo lost his first front tooth last week and the next day i sat in my car on the tree lined streets of suburbia and wiped tears from my eyes, i am prone to courageous bouts of melancholia, nothing clinical or requiring medication but more an acute awareness of this human condition and all that it entails...

That house next door that now serves as a motel to the shack builders of the Appalachians once belonged to a fat old woman, she had lived there with her husband and two sons, one of which now uses the house as a motel for his construction crews, the other of which showed up in the wee hours of the night in the spring of 1989  and began beating his parents with a baseball bat before pulling out a knife and stabbing them as well, the old newspaper clipping showed the house looking much like it does now, her husband crawled out of the house and collapsed in the yard where he died, the now old woman was beaten and battered but survived... her son drove himself into the city where he found a nice high train trestle with some concrete underneath and did a swan dive...

I always wondered why she didn't sell the place the next fucking day... i wondered and wondered, someone said she was attached to the place, strangely she may have been, i tend to think it was more a fuck you to the neighbors, a reminder that all was not well in Charmin-land, to the clucking hens and their henpecked roosters, the suburbs can be a cruel and unforgiving place, the level of righteousness expanding and contracting like some warped galaxy depending on whose daughter is pregnant and whose son is on smack, the whispers would have started before the ambulance even pulled away, i only ever saw her a handful of times, we'd smile and wave...

Some days (most) i take to the medicine early, names like Blue Dream or Dutch Treat take the edge off the chirping of soccer moms and ease the creak in the knees, i daydream my way through cups of green tea and sides of records, i build stone walls and haul dirt, i break rocks in a zen exercise of creating back fill, i climb ladders and clean gutters and sit atop my roof and watch the angle of the sun like some landlocked lunatic sailor waiting for the siren strippers call, sometimes a groundhog will watch or a deer will stroll by, i wonder about things, sometimes i just sit on the roof and think, the clucking hens are probably hoping i'll jump, that's a week's worth of gossip, little do they know i might just be too stoned to get down... and i am no better than these mannequins in mini-vans or their suit wearing breadwinners, i let them see only what i want, they see rock and roll and a laissez-faire disposition to the things they hold dear like church or work,  they do not know the back story, they don't need to, i'm practically an  upstanding citizen these days...

This spring it will be thirty years from that first joint, i took  my first drink on a Monday afternoon and that Friday i took my first toke, Nike Site park, what was once an old missile site during the Cold War, two friends and i smoking up in front of the metal playground rocket on springs that bounced and shook, each of us asking, "you feeling anything?", fucking rubes, had you told me then the role that plant would play in my life i wouldn't have believed you....

But back in the burbs the pumpkins have been carved...  my old city neighborhood a memory now, dominated by luxury condos and Hyatt Hotels, the masters are even gonna gentrify the poor white people out of their own hood, to paraphrase Mr. Marx, money is the opiate of the masters, accumulation is their addiction, out here in the lily-white we shop and knit our brows and leave carbon footprints and fret about the state of things but we really don't give a shit, as long as the duvet matches the curtains and the hedges are all trimmed, as long as our daughters aren't knocked up and our sons all strung out, we'll suffer our first world problems with a stiff upper lip, the hardships oh the hardships, it's both a crime and a shame that my cats live better than some people, what does that say about me? that i like cats more than people? i probably do but that still doesn't absolve me from being an asshole...

And i am quite enamored of the silence in my suburban hood on a Monday afternoon, the sound of rustling leaves and a trickling of traffic, barely a soul to be found, house upon house and the streets devoid of people, these days i haul stone to the backyard and fill in patches, i dig and rake and grade and pour the stones and grade and rake again, the only witnesses are the birds and deer and chipmunks, sometimes i look at the house next door, i think about what it was like back in 1989, i believe it probably looked much like the house i had grown up in, the one that would crumble less than three years later, sometimes i think the fat old woman would sit at her kitchen table drinking tea, sometimes she'd be smiling, sometimes she'd be wiping tears from her eyes, sometimes she'd be staring and wondering what the fuck it all meant...