Today's Subject Is Failure: One Day Soon That Dam Is Going To Break

A night for Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” for roast beef sandwiches with horseradish, for wrenching squalls, for geese sailing across the sky, for the tired old monkey business with the flag and the usual recrimination, for the bowed back and the metaphoric broken teeth.

What do you take me for, a leader? I am only a little more this every day, maybe a little better or a little worse, but always this same skin, these same bones, the same cross-wired brain and stuttering heart.

I make a good mix CD. I have decent taste in footwear. I have a way I like to imagine the world, but the world is just a solid, reliable, and challenging reality, and is unconcerned with my imagination.

But still.

What an unsettling business, that hamstrung day behind me. This is the time of year when a man should live in the country, where things are clearer and you can watch things develop in a more leisurely fashion. You can see stuff coming from a long way off out there. There’s a lot more darkness of the pleasant kind, and music fills a quiet room the way it never quite can in the city.

Was it a pale bird or a pale horse I saw in a dream, standing silent and unmoving in a late autumn wood shot full of moonlight?

Why the fuck should so much depend on a red wheelbarrow, no matter what color it might be?

Three a.m., pacing and muttering and climbing the walls and karate-kicking like a madman.

I had waking dreams of the end of the world. I was trapped in a bell tower, tossing pennies –penny after penny from a giant bucket full of pennies– at chickens rooting around in the rubble beneath me. The stairs that could have taken me down from the tower had collapsed. In the distance I saw a line of blindfolded children, holding hands and being led along a trail by two hooded dwarves. I tried to get their attention by banging on the bell with my fists until my knuckles were bloody.

At exactly this moment in the waking dream, I was standing at the front window, staring down into the street, when I felt what I was certain was a hand grasping my own. I turned around, startled fully awake, and discovered there was no one there.

Okay, Mister Bones, let’s go out back and see just what you’re up to.