This Long Road

These lousy kids. Washing bedding in hot water. Up all night. Heat and haze. Some call me a fool. Huck and Jim argue over the relative wisdom of Solomon as nightly I read aloud their iconic meanderings. Team Granada sees hope and light at last. Other kids get thrown out of hair salons, stung by jellyfish. An amusing yarn about teenagers and a pet rat spun upon a Sunday eve of shrimp and rice. My neighbor mysteriously blasts top forty radio at me from underneath the figs by my carport. It takes a few days for me to realize that this is an attempt to mitigate bird predation. Branches heavy with figs gesture and reach for my vehicles. I bicycle to the downtown community market and bring home cucumbers, tomatoes, granola, peaches. The livin’ is easy. Late at night I hear that a man in Rhode Island breaks the D.U.I. record after crashing into a road message sign and blowing a .491, and then resisting arrest. Alleged war criminal Radovan Karadzic was found this week living in Belgrade incarnating the archetypal wise-man, a practitioner of talismanic healing arts. Sales of large cars plummet, and neither the consumers nor the manufacturers know what the fuck to do. A long road. An empty room. Information is neither matter nor energy.