Dime store dreams.

[KB.]

“Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.”

~John Ruskin



It isn’t a dull and aching pain; it is a sharp and invasive feeling. Watch me and you will see when it hits. I will make a face, I can’t explain it, but look at me from time to time and if you see that scowl slide across my eyes like a man casually crossing a busy interstate then you will know you have just witnessed a moment of my patience being tested. My knees ache, they have for years. I have learned to live with it and ignore it for the most part. My head feels like a rail road spike is being driven into about once a week. I usually ask someone for an aspirin or a vicodin. I am not used to that ache yet. Its nature won’t allow for it to be ignored.

I’ll mention it once or twice a week for as long as you know me. I’ll say, “I think I’m going to move.” I won’t of course, not immediately, but when I finally do you’ll find out after the decision has been made.

The thing about that invasive feeling, that rail road spike, all it takes is an Excedrin or a “No, you stay right here, be still.” and it goes away for awhile. Held off like a monster in the night confronted with an angry mob wielding pitchforks and torches. It is a part of me and it always will be. Live with it or be slave to it.

I have grown restless with my restlessness. That is what someone recently said. I can’t imagine what it would be like to not have those simple yet clarity filled little insights available to me. I got lucky with a random email I sent back in late March. I with out one doubt picked the right person to send it to.

Some people say to judge a man by his enemies; well I don’t have any. None that are of any more significance than a worrisome gnat would be. I have some very cool (that is the best word for it) friends. I have never just moved somewhere and not had a place to lay my head when I arrived, and by the time I leave I have many more places to lay this big head of mine than when I got there. I have left a lot of places I will never go back to, but I have never left a place that I can’t go back to.

Some one very special to me asked one night “if you could be any inanimate object what would you be?” I had to think about it for a minute but I told her that I would want to be a favorite book. Not a new favorite book, but the old one; the one with dog-eared pages, worn out binding, and smudged edges. I don’t want to be the copy of Paradise Lost that sits proudly in the first spot on the first shelf. I want to be that copy of On the Road. The book that spends time on the nightstand, in the bed, on the bathroom sink, or outside on the porch steps next to what ever kind of cigarettes are on sale. The one you pick up and just flip open to some random page and start reading. You might read a page or two from the middle, and then turn back forty pages. You might read the forward or just look at the copy right date. No matter what page you turn to you love that book and it goes with you where ever you go. In your head, your hand, or your restless little heart.

Have you ever been to some small town old school drug store? A used book store that has an alteration shop in it? Depending on your age, or where you grew up you might know immediately where I am going with this. Do you remember those wire racks that turned on a base and held “dime store novels”? Have you ever been in a Woolworths? Do you remember when the Jackson mall had the Woolworths, right across from where that coffee shop is now? It had a cafeteria in it and there were those wire racks full of cheap paper back books. Ivanhoe, Moby Dick, White Fang, and Gulliver’s Travels.

When I dream some nights that is what it looks like. I see wire racks full of cheap books; cheap books whose pages are filled with priceless stories. I love those dreams. The books are always vividly colored in oranges, reds, blues and greens. I’m always just a child and the top racks are beyond my reach and of course that is where the best books are. I never know what the books are about but I know I can’t reach them so they have to be the best. Right? So I reach out and spin the rack and just let it twirl around and around; it spins in place like my thoughts do on those rail road spike days. When it stops I reach out and take the closest book, I open it up and I am filled with the images of one story or another.

There is rarely ever sound, but there is always color. The sound comes later when I replay those dreams and persuade them to become almost tangible. Words on paper. I figure if I had sent that random email to a different person back in late March that my mind would be mush by now. Alliteration meet sentence fragment. I think you two will get along splendidly. The children will be gorgeous.

The first dozen stories I wrote I did like I had done for so long. Pen on paper. It wasn’t working. No one was reading them. It isn’t repentance it is confession. There is a huge difference. I was writing them for a woman with a flower as her middle name. Rose. Muse. Truth be told I still do. It’s a hard thing to explain. If I had not decided after much contemplation to send that first story to a red headed stranger and if she had not replied saying “I wanted to slap his face” referring to the father of a certain woman in Houston, I doubt I would have ever written another word.

I find it amazing how the click of a mouse button can change a person’s life. Here I was sharing stories I was writing for someone else with who ever decided to read them. All the while the intended audience had to wait until late May, and 80,000 words or so later to read the first story. She is probably another 80 thousand behind at this point. I dropped off a second batch of stories in August, but none since. I can’t find her address and I won’t be back up I-55 until next year sometime.

You see she listened to those stories when I told them out loud; she laughed, cried, nodded, and told her own in return. I can see her talking about the day when her son turns 18 and she could travel. Go somewhere. Meet some new people. I figured I would just tell her about the places I had been and the people I had met to hold her over until that day comes.

People ask if we think that things happen for a reason. Well of course they do. Look at it like this. If I had never clicked on that picture, if I had hesitated and hit delete instead of send. I would probably still be in St. Louis, I would probably be passed out drunk, and I would most likely be half dead from exhaustion. I would think of the place as hell instead of the Center of the Universe.

“What about all of the bad **** that happened?”

Valid question with a simple answer.

“What bad ****?”

I will take a hundred clarity filled moments of “what if” over one cloudy moment of contentment.

Never, ever, think I have any regrets. I would not change a single second of it all. I love my dime store dreams. I love the songs that enter my head when I think of something that happened ten years ago. I thoroughly enjoy the conversations, believe me it is not just “thinking”, that go on inside of my head.

No, I do not wish I had stayed. Yes, I am glad I came home. No matter what I say when you ask me that question right there is your, God as my witness, honest answer.



Do I miss them? Hell yes I miss them. You know that feeling you get when winter rolls around and you wake up at 7 in the morning and look outside into the pitch black, the first thought to enter your mind is that you missed an entire day. That some how you slept until the sunlight had passed and now it was night again. That empty “**** I missed everything” feeling. That is the feeling I get sometimes when the day at work is over and I drive home knowing that I can’t just get out of my car and walk two blocks and have a nice meal, a good drink, and someone calling my name as I walk in the door. I miss them all. Every day. I ache to just see the place. To borrow a line from Dylan, “It makes every nerve in my body vacant and numb.”

I’ll qualify that with another few lines of his, “I'll eat when I'm hungry, drink when I'm dry, and live my life on the square, and even if the flesh falls off of my face, I know someone will be there to care.”



I’d be missing them all a hell of a lot more if I had stayed. I doubt I’d made it through.



Enough confession.

I met a woman named Rose, no one calls her that, and she didn’t have flowers in her hair. I never heard her utter a cross word. She didn’t know how to hate. Her shoes were always untied and she probably had a bad night. Day. A simple touch would make even the most hardened hearts turn back into flesh and beating blood. Those eyes, they are the reason the sky is blue. It doesn’t have **** to do with science, filtered light, water, or anything else but those eyes. She is an unknown legend, and yes I did order just to watch her walk across the floor.

KB

I say there're no depressed words just depressed minds.

~Bob Dylan