Some of these are true.

---

A girl behind glass. She thinks she’s alone.

She fixes her makeup, adjusts a hair fallen out of place. A moment of personal innocence in the red glare of an amsterdam street.

She looks up to catch me watching. Eyes meet. She reddens, not from the red light of her street and profession, but simple blush, caught with the mask askew.

I smile at her, and she returns the favor, and we are two people in a street, not hooker and john.

I feel my heart beat as I walk away. Her face locked forever in my mind.

---

She tells a story in her thick scottish accent. Something about a dish I think we’d call hash back home. But it doesn’t mattter what she’s saying.

She cooks, waits tables on this small private train. As she tells me her story, she brushes hair from her forehead, wipes sweat from her brow. Her blouse is sleeveless, and her arm pits are lightly fuzzed with soft, soft golden hair.

I remember her voice as she said It’s nice. The glow of her pale scottish skin. The soft, tawny gold of her hair.

I wish I could remember her name.

---

She wants to make a left turn in front of me, and I slow, beckon her to go. She looks at me, across the impossible gulf, two wind shields and a few yards, and smiles. She smiles not like one driver thanking another, but like sunshine, like an invitation. I wave to her as she turns, and she leans my way, and blows me a kiss.

I watch her honda in my rear-view mirror. I want to make a U-turn, but I do not.

---

She dances next to me at a concert. We’re at the stage, the music ear-splittingly, blisteringly loud. We’re not together, yet dancing, leaping, cheering, we’re in each other’s space.

She’s smoking, and at one point my windmilling arm meets her lighted smoke.

The pain is nothing – in the drunken, sweat-slick frenzy, I barely feel it. But she sees, and kisses my arm, and shares her beer with me, and we dance the next few songs.

The show ends, and we hug, and we kiss, and then she is gone, her date confused and asking her some question my abused ears cannot hear.

I taste her sweat on my lips as I walk away.

---

A bar in a gray and average hotel in a gray and average city. She runs the bar, and stocks the most amazing collection of caribbean rums I’ve ever seen.

I order, and she fills my glass, and we talk about rum, and she tells me her dream of a sailboat; she’ll write a book some day. Just the two of us there, no one else.

Her hair is short; she’s tall. My senses tell me she’s a lesbian, but when we talk she looks into my eyes, and my heart and groin say, maybe not, or maybe not tonight.

I drink too much rum, just to be near her, and promise to come back and see her again; but my flight plans are changed.

I hope today she’s on that sailboat, writing that book. And some day, in some sunny port, I’ll run into her and we’ll share her latest discovery, and I’ll ask her if my heart once again told me lies.

---

Her dress is green. Velvet. She speaks in a soft southern accent; I’m not good enough to know where she’s from.

A bar far beyond my price range, in a city where thinking about a drink costs you twice what actually getting it would cost back home.

I order the most expensive brandy they have. I’ve no idea why. But it seems a night for such things. I sip my drink, and as I watch her bare shoulders and the fit of her dress on her hips, I’d pay twice.

I want to hear her say my name.

---

We talk about her tattoo design, as she waits for the artist to finish piece. Some strange primitive pattern. It doesn’t make sense to me on paper, but she slips her shirt down off her shoulder to show me where it will go, and I want to taste that shoulder.

Later, when the artist places the design, it makes sense; a shoulder so perfect, a design that fits. It looks like it belongs there, and more than ever as the needle bites into flesh and the droplets of blood ooze through the ink, I want to taste that shoulder.

How many people at thirty, fourty, fifty, can say to themselves, this is the life I planned on having?

I bet I could find a few. People who knew. I’m going to be a scientist. I want to play violin in an orchestra. Some people feel a calling in life, and answer it, and have the luck, and the gift.

Most of us just sort of wind up where we are, washed onto some beach like semi-sentient flotsom. We know we made some choices there at some point, we chose that fork, not the other. Yet so much is random eddies, currents we can’t control or choose not to control.

Read more “Who planned this?”

Mate Care-For, protect me.

There’s a book by Tim Powers, On Stranger Tides. It features, among other things, Black Beard, Stede Bonnet, Calico Jack and his wenches Anne Bonny and Mary Reed, Voodoo, and the Fountain of Youth. It’s typical Powers, which is to say, not typical at all. It’s an insane, inspired, possibly brilliant piece by one of the most inventive SF/Fantasy writers working today. It threads a fictional story into real historical events, fictional people in a fictional story side-by-side with real people from the pages of history books. Powers is an obsessive researcher so when he tells a story this way, it’s spot on with the details.

This is also clearly a book that inspired a lot of the Pirates of the Carribean movie. I mean, the lead character is Jack Shandy, his lady is named Elizabeth, there’s a ship crewed by zombies, there are curses. Too many similarities to be completely accidental. Published in ’87, it predates Curse of the Black Pearl by a good fifteen years.

The beauty of Powers’ work is that he peels back the cover and shows us the magic – sinister, dangerous, dark magic – hiding behind ordinary reality. He shows us a world where everything has a meaning, and everything that looks sinister actually is. Of course Blackbeard was a sorcerer, we think. How could he not be? Of course pirates practiced Vodun. How could we not already have known this?

The pirates in Powers book call on someone, a protective saint, a person, a protector. Mate Care-For, they call him. They summon him for luck, for protection. They carry charms to suppon his attention and thus summon his protective presence.

Only, he’s not just that. He’s someone else. He’s someone more.

Maître Carrefour. Master of the cross-roads.

Read more “Mate Care-For”

We need someone to blame it all on.

Someone to hate. Someone to blame. Someone to point at with the finger of righteous indignation, and say j’accuse. It’s all you, you fuck, it’s all your goddamned fault.

Read more “Imaginary Enemies”

A friend just said to me, I just wish I could fast-forward life six months.

So I started thinking about it. How would that be? How would we use it? What would we miss?

It’s easy to look back and see blocks of time in one’s life that simply had to be endured; times when things were out of whack, when days are painful and gray, or red with anger, or simply a haze of boredom. I can see eras where I could take six months away and never miss them.

But how do you know where life’s most important experiences lie? How do we know where it is that we learned something? We don’t always learn from the good moments, the exciting moments, sometimes it’s the agony of time’s passage that teaches us about who we are.

Would you fast forward, when you have to wait?

Waiting is, of all life’s challenges, my greatest. I hate lines (Well, ok, I liked *that* kind, I mean lines, as in queues). I hate waiting rooms. I hate being early and having to wait for someone I’m meeting. I hate it when I have to be patient. I want it now. I’m Veruca fucking Salt, dammit.

But there are times when nothing I do, nothing I can do, can hasten the flow of time. There are things which must happen at their own speed. Seasons, changes, evolution. Healing. Growth. Things need space and time, and conditions.

Patience, jackass, patience.

What would we lose? When my children were babies, there were low moments where I wished, why can’t I just speed this up or run it forward? But now I look back, short blinks of time, seasoned with tender memories. I would pass the weeks of frustration being a support organism for a mindless screaming want, yet, I might miss the golden seconds of a baby’s first smile, first laugh. Seconds of joy in weeks of pain and frustration, yet they balance easily.

What else might we skip by if we could hit that button and jump forward six months? Would we find that life’s travails lie behind and only a clear golden horizon lies ahead? Or would we find things unchanged, time lost, important moments never experienced, and life’s ballast of problems still strapped firmly to us?

We don’t have a button to push, so the point remains moot, or at least rhetorical.

There’s one way; the hard way. We can’t skip a page, we can’t run a scene ahead. The best we can manage is to fill our days to the point where they roar past, or numb ourselves to the passage of time.

There are days though, where simply being able to look ahead would be enough. Am I on course? Will all the work, the wait, the patience pay off? It makes one understand faith, something I have not and do not truly want. But how comforting it must be to be able to say, I know it will work out in the end, for my faith tells me so.

But for me, it’s simply waiting, and oh, how I hate to wait.

Sometimes one has to just trust to fate and fling oneself into the void.

For some of us, that’s easier. Fall back and trust hands will catch. Close eyes and trust others to lead in the dark.

For some of us it’s harder, we think too much. Second guess. We look beyond and under and around, we ask, is it right? Is it good? Are people to be trusted?

Who are you, and what do you want from me?

I’m not a great planner. I tend, in general, to be impulsive. I tend to do things on whim. There’s no gratification, I always say, like instant gratification.

But I’m also not one who trusts easily, who does things on faith. Let’s double check that, I say. Are you sure? I second guess and think too much. I question and consider and re-think.

Sometimes one has to just do it. Just go. Just make a leap, and hope for good luck.

Sometimes one has to trust for no reason, do things for love or passion or just because.

It’s not easy. It’s not easy to open. Bare the throat. Drop the shield. All defenses gone, cut the safety line.

Is that freedom? True freedom? I don’t know.

Just once though, I would love to be there. To live in a place and a time and a situation where all the walls drop down and souls are laid bare.

Take my hand. Close your eyes. Jump with me.