It’s still Sunday evening (06/26/22) as I write this, and it’s still raining. I made it to Chatter Sunday after all, despite my confusion at 01:47 am as to what day it is. After getting home from a movie set in Santa Fe at 5:15 am on Saturday morning, getting one hour of sleep before my 7:30 am dental appointment, and wasting the rest of the day catching up on messages, packaging a couple items to ship, taking naps, and watching a movie, I suddenly found myself thinking I’d missed the Sunday morning chamber music concert. It takes place 50 Sundays a year. And I’d already paid for my ticket since it often sells out.
I was writing after I’d finished the movie, and never imagined it was almost 2:00 in the morning. So, when I saw Sunday on the computer clock, I really thought I’d been doing all that stuff that same day, until I put 2 and 2 together, and realized I hadn’t missed the concert after all. I posted my previous ramblings around 2:00 am and slept. Woke up around 7:00 am, decided not to get up until 9:15 am, and headed out to the home of Chatter Sunday by 9:50 am. Even though I no longer have coffee every day, I got an Americano (two espresso shots in hot water), two tiny palmiers, and a small apricot muffin. I was ready.
Taking the stage were eleven musicians with two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, three ancient French horns, a cello, and a double bass.
First up was Figures in the Garden by contemporary composer Jonathan Dove. It was superb! I enjoyed it very much. It was based on music from Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro, but with a unique modern tempo and variations.
Next up was the poet Pamela Uschuk. (Spoken Word is always a feature of Chatter Sunday.) She surprised me with her poetry, her background, and her history of surviving cancer. She has a European heritage with family in Ukraine, so she spoke of that and support for the refugees from Ukraine. Sergei Vassiliev, on clarinet, from Ukraine himself, also spoke about the war, his relatives still in Ukraine, and his mother, who not only lives in the U.S. now but was in the audience. We gave her a heartfelt round of applause. Ah, I distracted myself again – I was talking about the poet Ms. Uschuk. She graced us with four poems, including her wonderful poem BULK, recently updated, about many things, including her brother, elephants, bullets, an Israeli humvee wracking Gaza streets, and the bulk of lotus blossoms a manatee hugs to her chest to eat. A fasinating look at things she considered important to tell us about, connected by the common concept of bulk.
My favorite poem of hers is GREEN FLAME. Here tis:
Slender as my ring finger, the female hummingbird crashed
into plate glass separating her and me
before we could ask each other’s name. Green Flame,
she launched from a dead eucalyptus limb.
Almost on impact, she was gone, her needle beak
opening twice to speak the abrupt language of her going,
taking in the day’s rising heat as I took
one more scalding breath, horrified by death’s velocity.
Too weak from chemo not to cry
for the passage of her emerald shine,
I lifted her weightlessness into my palm.
Mourning doves moaned, who, who,
oh who while her wings closed against the tiny body
sky would quick forget as soon as it would forget mine.
There followed Hymnus no. 2 by Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998).
After Chatter’s traditional two minutes of silence, we were treated to the 1878 Serenade for Winds in D minor op. 44, by Dvořák. It was rousing. It was rhythmic. Really, parts of this were based on Slavonic style. And, it was danceable! I happily tapped my right foot and slapped my left hand on my left thigh.
Life can be good, despite war, loss, and pain. And it is still raining! The state-wide fires are going out.
We’ve been having a lot of rain in New Mexico lately, after 70 days without any measurable rainfall. We’ve all been waiting for it. We love rain here because there’s so little of it. The state has been in drought conditions for years. the longest duration lasted 329 weeks beginning on May 1, 2001 and ending on August 14, 2007. The most intense period of drought occurred the week of January 19, 2021, affecting 54.27% of the state. After what seemed like an unending explosion of fires throughout the state, the rain is so very welcome. Of course, now the problem is monsoon rains that have brought flash floods and landslides. But that’s New Mexico. I love it here, although the fires have been getting worse with such extremely dry conditions, and now the fire areas (burn scars) don’t have the vegetation needed to prevent mudslides in such heavy rains.
But the rain, predicted to last through June 21, is still coming. It’s Sunday now, June 29. The rain has been falling for hours, off and on. I enjoy the light rain pattering on the roof, and I love the heavy pounding of rain during cloudbursts. It’s all good here. When I went for a short walk a while ago, after one of the little rainstorms, I found a large clump of snails on the sidewalk. There were all mostly out of their shells sliding all over each other. I saw a couple strays nearby, but it seemed that about six to eight snails were having an orgy. Imagine that – a snail orgy.
But I also noticed that the rain sounds so different while I paused under the huge Mulberry tree outside my front door. It had a strange resonance. Usually, people say, “The rained drummed on the roof,” but this sound was so unlike that. No drumming. Repetitive, yes. But also extremely pleasant, reminding me of an orchestra of wind instruments. Imagine that: strings played by the rain, for the pleasure of the snails.
Well, I put a movie on tonight while the rain played its tune. I had a copy of The Leisure Seeker on my shelf since last year, and finally popped it in the player tonight. I bought it because it stars Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland, two consummate actors. And, you say? Yes, I liked it. Comedy and tragedy. So very well done. I say comedy, because, in the short interview with the actors after the movie ended, Sutherland called it a comedy with a tragic ending. But it’s not any kind of laugh-out-loud comedy. The comedy fell out more like British comedy, funny, as in strange, with unpredictable actions and words.
In actuality, Sutherland’s character has advanced Alzheimer’s, and Mirren’s character is gravely ill, but they spontaneously take a road trip in an old, oil-burning, well-used RV. The movie seemed more like a slice-of-life adventure, with it’s real-life ups and downs, just as life had been for this plucky couple. The denouement of their lives plays out throughout the movie until the movie itself reaches its climax.
Throughout, we experience the inexplicable devastation of someone’s mind as Alzheimer’s disease takes its slow toll on memory and quality of life. Yet, these two people have a chance to share their love and laughs, and even painful memories, as the unexpected surprises even them.
Through it all, I could see myself in the characters, as I often do when reading books or watching movies. I feel the deterioration of my body and brain all the time, and it is already far more than just being easily distracted, or having the body run down slowly. My heart is not well, and it was very noticeable in the aftermath of an extremely painful and traumatizing tooth extraction recently. As the pain continued, unabated for days and nights on end, my heart struggled. I felt it leaping and struggling to keep up. There was pain. And, the antibiotic I took caused severe stomach pain with constipation, and it added to the malaise generated by the pain in my entire jaw. My eyes are rapidly deteriorating now, as opposed to the barely perceptible changes over the last 40 years. My right hand and shoulder move randomly, sometimes spasmodically. My driving is becoming erratic. Working on a movie set for 13 hours is thoroughly exhausting, and much more difficult to recover from than it was just a few years ago. Driving home late, through the very dark section of interstate highway between Santa Fe and Albuquerque has become nerve-wracking and scary.
As I was writing this, I realized that today is Sunday, and I had purchased a ticket to Chatter Sunday, and forgotten to go again. I so enjoy the music and the poetry. Nothing kept me from going. I knew I was going as recently as last night, but it slipped my mind again. Well, c’est la vie, as the French say. Fuck it, I say. Except, it is simply late, in the wee hours of Sunday morning. I hadn’t noticed it was even past midnight. I will probably go to Chatter Sunday after all later on today. It’s still Sunday.
I will continue on, abandoned as I am in life. I have my motorcycle to ride, and buddies to ride with. I have my acting classes to memorize things for. I’m creating a storyboard for a class commercial project that I will add to my clips. I will also create both a sad and a funny monologue for the same reason. I will be part of a movie the whole class will create. It’s also for my clips and resume. I keep going. One day I will run down. I will be no more. But not yet.
I am feeling better than I have for the last month or so. Too much about that to rehash it again. Today I got Covid tested because I’m working on a movie set tomorrow. Of course, they’re still shooting, so I don’t have a call time yet. At least it’s only an hour away. I’ll probably end up driving home in the dark from Santa Fe at the start of the weekend – not my favorite time to be on I-25. Long hills, up aaaand down, and curves that I can’t see coming. Anyway, I can use the extra bucks, even though New Mexico taxes those checks, I still owe a lot of money to the State come tax time. Perhaps it will be better next year now that New Mexico has decided not to tax Social Security income anymore. Regardless, I do enjoy being on sets.
Tonight I went to a play, yes, a play – plays have been shut down since Covid began here, but they’re coming back. A classmate from my movie acting class invited me to see it. It’s called Keely and Du. She is Du. It’s not the sort of thing I’d likely have gone to see if she wasn’t in it, because the topic is abortion, but the play is not about that so much. It is about the interaction between a woman who was raped and goes to a clinic to get a safe, legal abortion. On the way, however, she is kidnapped by a fanatical underground Right-To-Life group who plan to change her mind while they imprison her and feed her propaganda leaflets. It’s clear that the group puts the life and rights of the unborn above the rights of the mother, but they take care of her invalid father while she is imprisoned.
All that aside, the play is about the two women; Keely, who was violently raped by her ex-husband while he beat her head against the floor. She hates him, and cannot bear to have his child inside her. Du is her nurse, who stays with her in the cellar prison. Du, perhaps because she lost her infant daughter after three heart operations, is fanatically against abortion for any reason. She is not as insufferable as the Christian doctor who leads the group, but she never gives up on saving the baby, and comes to realize that Keely needs her help. The play is about their interaction. Both actors were incredible. I do not know the woman who played Keely, but Ramona, who played Du, is my classmate. She was incredible! Applause, applause, applause.
The play was written by Jane Martin (pseudonym) and published in 1993. No one knows the playwright’s real name. With the state of our country, divided as it is over this subject, I can understand why she keeps her real name secret. The play is very powerful, but it was made into a movie in 2018 in case you cannot see the play. It is worth seeing, no matter which camp you fall into. I think the play, based on what I saw tonight, is a better vehicle for this story.
So, afterward, I decided to stop on the way home. The Frontier Restaurant is an iconic place in Albuquerque.
The sweet, warm, iced cinnamon rolls there are amazing! Try with melted butter.
The place opened in 1971, right on Route 66. I first started going there in 1977 while I worked for the University of New Mexico, which sprawls across the street from Frontier. Forty-five years ago was the first time I went to this place! The food is always good, even though it’s a bit on the fast-food side. I can and did get a freshly prepared Carne Adovada burrito in minutes. The New Mexico food is great, and the chile is spicy, but there are lots of food options, They have those automated drink machines now, the ones that are popping up all over, and there are 200 choices. I got a regular ginger ale, although I could have added any of five flavors to it. I prefer ginger beer, but they didn’t have that.
I ate in because watching the people come and go there, especially at night, is always fascinating. There are lots of young college students, of course, but also street people, theater people, families, people literally covered in tattoos, and those with wild piercings, and/or almost fluorescent hair. You see every kind of person in there. Most of the time, everything is cool. But, sometimes there are crazy people out late at night, sometimes doped up, drunk, or looking for trouble, so now there is an armed security guard always present. That’s sad.
It was a joy to visit the Frontier again. I’m not often in the University area, but when I am I stop in. What’s sad is that I have been doing so for forty-five years. I think I need to get out of town. I need to just take off again, and see where I end up. That’s how I ended up in Albuquerque in the first place. Jobs, union, and family kept me here, stable and comfortable. Increasingly, I think it’s time to move on. I don’t have a destination in mind, but forty-five years in one place is an awfully long time. I’m retired, and I don’t own a house. I’ve no family here. There are people I know, mountains to climb, movies to audition for, and really, there is plenty to do here. I’ve no reason to leave, but conversely, no reason not to. When I crisscrossed the country those many years ago, I met plenty of people on the road. You form quick friendships if you’re open to it. You get to know people quickly. You don’t watch much TV, or see plays, or watch movies. You just live day to day. I had that once upon a time.
I could go somewhere, stay for a bit, and then move on, again, and again, and again until I die. Or perhaps, find something that really excites me, gives me purpose or an emotional connection. But, I think I’ve gone past working for carnivals or odd jobs, riding my bicycle around the country with just the clothes on my back, or having casual sex with strangers while we seek elusive connection. I’m not connected to anyone here, so I want more than that anyway.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT BY A WORDPRESS ARTIST/AUTHOR
I’m just rambling tonight. My mind is clear, I’ve no pain. I’ve given up coffee and booze. I like writing, but I’m not very consistent about it. I may not make it as an actor. I could write a screenplay. I’ve seen a lot and done a lot, but the exciting things were in my youth. I wish I could travel to other planets. It’s always been my dream to travel to space, to go out there. Explore. Star Trek echoed my dream, but it never came to pass. I should run for President.
“Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.” – Omar Khayyám, Persian polymath: mathematician, astronomer, historian, philosopher, and poet.
A little while ago, I sent the quote above to my dearest Maya as she left town on the next adventure in her life. I sent it with mixed emotions. I was happy for her that she was taking charge of her life, not content to stay in bad jobs and lose her spirit. She truly is an amazing person: curious, full of life, energy, determination, and love for others. But, something was sadly missing from her life, and she’s off to find it, or at least search for it, because, sometimes, that is the best that we all can do.
Despite all that, it was miserably sad for me to feel her leave. It still causes my eyes to water just to say that. It was terrible at first: days of tears soaking into my beard, depression, heartache, and a sense of loss that I could not imagine ever recovering from. I am, of course, happy she was in my life, however peripherally at times, and gloriously when we worked together making and selling wine or going to wine tastings together, sometimes blind-tasting wines. It was fun to see how much we had learned, or still didn’t know about wines. It was fun to celebrate our birthdays and celebrate holidays together.
And that’s over. It hurts to realize that.
Then I found that intense physical pain could eclipse such mental and emotional anguish. The pain was so awful from the beating I took to my jaw and head to have an old molar tooth removed, through extensive pushing, pulling, and hammering away at the tooth, breaking it into little pieces. I had never experienced such pain after any medical procedure or accident. It was only days, but they were days of pain that I could not believe possible to endure. Moments when I felt I’d rather die than go on having pain that overwhelming consumed me, unrelentingly, pain not even dulled by opiates. And yet… And yet, here I am. I survived.
There is still pain in being physically separated from Maya. There is still soreness in my jaw.
One thing I learned from the tooth extraction, on top of Maya’s departure – besides being something of a wimp when it comes to constant, unforgiving pain – is that it does end. The screaming in pain, the despair, the crying – all of those things have ended, but are not forgotten.
It feels trite to say so, but really, it’s another day. I survived what seemed unsurvivable. I’m here now.
This moment is my life, not yesterdays and yesterdays. It appears I can survive anything. Like Maya, I don’t want to just go on living, just to exist. I want more, and I keep trying for a more fulfilling life, one with real joy in it. I haven’t given up. It appears to be that I must exist moment to moment, and take joy in that I can still look for joy, for something or someone in my life. If I can’t have Maya by my side while I search, at least I can take comfort that she is on a similar path, even though we may never cross paths again.
Pain. There is nothing like physical pain to shock oneself out of emotional pain, such as the loss of someone you love, even if they’ve just moved far away.
This pain, though, I wouldn’t have asked for. There are worse things, but when you experience a pain that is unlike any other, pain that doesn’t respond to drugs, that continues unrelenting at the same unbearable level for days on end – you want it to end by any means necessary. Even death seems preferable.
It all started, in my youth, with a loose tooth. I had lost all of my primary teeth – the ones we all call baby teeth – except for one. I had never given it any thought. For all I could remember, all of those baby teeth were gone. But that one tooth felt loose one day. A dentist confirmed that it was indeed a primary tooth, which is what medical professionals call them. It wasn’t coming out, it was firmly in the gum. I had it capped on the advice of the dentist, in order to stabilize it. Years later, I had to repeat that process. Finally, on seeing a dentist for an unrelated problem, I mentioned the loose tooth. It was a molar, and one root had dissolved. She suggested that I have the tooth pulled, and replace it with a bridge. Big mistake.
I understood that the bridge would be anchored to the adjacent teeth, and would cover the gap, looking like a real tooth. I said OK. The removal of the baby tooth took a lot of work. The dentist repositioned herself several times trying to get it out. She pulled and pulled, but it was very firmly in there. Finally she pulled it out – all in one piece – and it had brought quite a bit of flesh with it. Painful, but not overwhelmingly so. Once it had healed, she started preparing me for the bridge. To do so, and I hadn’t understood this, she had to grind down the healthy tooth on either side as if for a crown. Because, well, because the teeth would be the supports for the bridge over the gap, and had to be one integral piece. So, it was two crowns connected together – creating a bridge over a gap.
What had worried me at the time was what would happen if even one of those two teeth were to be attacked by decay. So, recently – four days ago – I found out. The bridge had to be removed. Previously, the posterior molar had one root removed by a dentist – specialist – who convinced me that the root was interfering with the regeneration of a deep pocket in my gum adjacent to it. Why the pocket had formed, I have no idea, but it trapped a lot of food and took a lot of effort to clean out. So, in a bizarre procedure, he went into my gum horizontally, and slowly sawed the one root off. The pocket never leveled out, and it took persistent flossing to clean food particles out, but, it also didn’t get worse. I was very thorough.
Suddenly, last week, I had pain, a pain that appeared to come from that bridge. My current dentist removed the bridge, exposing decay in that same posterior tooth that had one root sawed off. I wanted him to do a root canal to save the tooth. I hate to lose any tooth. He said that he didn’t want to do that. If I wanted to recreate the bridge, it wouldn’t have sufficient strength with one root. However, it had lasted at least 35 years before. In a prior visit, he had recommended pulling the tooth. He also said that a tooth implant there would cost $2500. I would need two. I survive on a small pension, supplemented with social security. I don’t have an extra $5000 just laying around. I let him remove the tooth anyway, but I shouldn’t have.
It turned out, AGAIN, that the tooth wasn’t going to go anywhere. It was firmly rooted in the underlying bone or adjacent bone, and he spent over an hour getting it out. I thought he could just pull it out, but he couldn’t get a good grip on it, probably because of the mandibular tori I have alongside my teeth. These tori are bony growths. In me, they resemble a second interior row of teeth below the gumline, but alongside my normal teeth. It is difficult to clean the interior of my teeth because of this thing, which is all of one piece really, so it feels odd to use the plural form of a torus.
NOT my mouth, but similar
During the procedure to remove that poor abused tooth, he was not just pulling, he was pushing, pushing down so hard I had to tighten my jaw muscles to keep my head straight. He was using all of his strength, and I felt like I was in a tremendous fistfight. He kept pushing and pulling at the tooth until he broke it into many small pieces. It was exhausting and traumatic in a way that anesthesia doesn’t touch. He even stopped to give me more shots that felt like they went into my tongue and lip.
Even now, my lip is swollen and looks bruised, probably because he used it as a place to support his hand while digging away at the tooth. When I went home, due to all the anesthesia, I felt OK. Before I had gone to see the dentist I had been in intermittent pain that had finally become constant. I had used a mixture of ibuprofen and acetaminophen that a doctor had once recommended for persistent pain. It had become less effective until I was using more and more. I figured that the removal of the offending tooth would relieve some of the pain and pressure, so the ibuprofen/acetaminophen cocktail would be enough.
I wouldn’t be writing this if it had been enough, even enough to at least dull the edge of the pain. In fact, IT HAD NO EFFECT AT ALL. I was miserable all night. I slept only fitfully, waking up and taking even more pills that first night. The following morning I called to see about getting something for the pain. The dentist prescribed acetaminophen/codeine pills. OK, I thought, but I used plenty of codeine in cough syrups when I was younger, and I had my doubts it could mitigate pain like I was having. My pain was epic: continuous, intense beyond any injury I’d ever suffered – a broken bone, a ruptured appendix with sepsis, bad sprains, two hernia repairs, and a head injury – all rolled into one, and more.
I paced, I screamed, and I was moved to tears by this pain. I had never been so affected in my entire life. I felt like I’d be better off dead. I would have done anything to stop this pain. I tried the codeine. IT HAD NO EFFECT. The directions said to take one pill every six hours. I took one. Two hours later, as there was no lessening of the pain, I took another. Two hours later I took two pills and went to bed. I couldn’t sleep. The pain was overwhelming. I was up all night taking pills two at a time. I slept in short bursts. At 4:30 am, racked by pain, I took four of the codeine pills at once. After some frantic pacing, yelling, and exhaustion, I felt a slight dulling of the pain.
I couldn’t sleep. The dentist’s office wouldn’t open until 7:30 am. I got through it because of the four codeine pills, but I knew I couldn’t do any more of that. Besides, I only had five of the fifteen pills left. At 7:00 am, I stretched out on the bed to rest. I slept for an hour, so then I rushed over to the dentist to present my case for a stronger medication. As a drop-in patient, I had to wait for scheduled patients, but I didn’t have to pace for long. Previously that morning, I had noticed that my jaw and lower lip were swollen. My dentist was not in that day, but I spoke with the dentist of the day, who ordered another x-ray. He saw nothing of concern. I asked for and got an antibiotic (amoxicillin) and a stronger drug (hydrocodone-acetaminophen). I took the antibiotic immediately. I held off on the new opioid since I still had plenty of the previous opioid in my system. Overdosing on opioids was not an option I wanted to experience. Later, as the codeine wore off, I took a hydrocodone pill. After some time had passed, as I was still in pain, I took a couple more ibuprofen liquid capsules. Less than half an hour later, the pain stopped. I was shocked, but I think it was the combination of the two opioids in my system and the antiinflammatory pills. I still had some soreness in my jaw, but that mind-numbing pain was gone.
Finally satisfied that I had something that worked on the pain. I dismissed the codeine as ineffective and just used the new opioid. My cheek and lip are still swollen, and there is a small painful nodule in my gum below the space where my tooth had been, so, as a precaution, I continue to take the antibiotic, even though I haven’t experienced any fever. I am scheduled to see my dentist again in a week. I think he dislocated my jaw because I felt something slip when I stretched my mouth. Part of me wants to punch HIM in the jaw.
A RADIOGRAM TAKEN OF MY TEETH TWO YEARS AGO
You can see the former bridge (lower jaw) on the right side of this picture in bright white. The left tooth remains with the bridge cut clean there, but the underlying metal is now exposed on the posterior side. I’ll probably need a new crown on it at some point. I’m not removing any teeth ever again.
She is out of state now, riding with her dad and her small pile of simple possessions. She is going to try driving a little on the straight sections of Interstate 40. I hope her dad lets her. She misses that bit of independence. The lack of peripheral vision in her left eye is due to the operation to remove a cancerous growth in her brain. It’s all that remains of her illness and treatments. Her doctor said she no longer needed testing, and she didn’t need to see him anymore. She says it’s the best breakup she’s ever had. That was years ago. She always runs a lot and stays healthy. Her body looks extremely fit at 38 years old, although she has found a few grey hairs.
Trying to avoid obsessing about her departure, I read a book called The Death House, by Sarah Pinborough, about a place in a dystopian future where the British take children with defective genes who are going to die horrible deaths. It is a great story of resilience in the face of tragedy and the power of the human spirit. I enjoyed it, but it is a tragedy, and the ending was a bit more than I could take today.
My thoughts just keep going to Maya. Sometimes that’s OK. She’s on her way to a new life and her future is unknown. I am happy for her. Her happiness has always meant a lot to me. I love her. But then this malaise (anxiety?) comes upon me, and I don’t know how I will survive. Really. That’s not hyperbole. Tears appear on my cheeks from time to time. I’m restless, pacing, and unable to eat right now, although I ate well yesterday. Emotions make my throat constrict. It’s so bad now that I can hardly get a bite of food down. It all comes and goes. Writing this is painful, but what else am I to do? I drank two beers talking with my neighbor last night, but it didn’t help. I wrote a poem a few days ago about Maya and her imminent departure. I sent it to a poet I know, but there’s been no reply yet. It’s painful to read now. It hurts so bad. All those years I’ve known her, 30 wonderful years of having Maya in my life. The joy I feel every day that she survived brain cancer, that she is alive and healthy, is overshadowed by my selfish despair at the lack of her presence in town, my inability to see her, have lunch with her, go to dinner with her, or enjoy a fine wine tasting at the Slate Street restaurant. It’s all just memories now. I find it hard to take. She kept me stable, alive, and happy. I have no family here, no close friends. I didn’t need anyone with Maya around.
Now I’m lost. More alone than I was when she was here and often unavailable. More alone than I’ve ever felt. The tears are rolling down my cheeks again. It’s happened in the past. It’s not the first time I’ve been through this: the first lover I lived with who left me suddenly for another after I’d moved here to start a life with her, the two marriages over a combined twenty-one years that ended in divorce, the death of my father, the dread that hit me when Maya was first diagnosed with a brain tumor, the fear that she would end her existence in this world.
It feels like all of that rolled into one terrible waking nightmare. I can’t wake up from this. I try reading. I signed up for a hiking trip to the Capulin Volcano National Monument. I lost my Shadow motorcycle a while back to a mechanical failure that I caused accidentally. I finally found one to replace it. Actually, I hadn’t liked it as much as my old Honda Magna with its four cylinders, four carburetors, and four exhaust pipes. That one was stolen from me two years ago. I replaced it with that Honda Shadow Phantom that I broke. I have not been able to ride with my biking buddies, and they have been riding a lot lately. I couldn’t find a bike here in town – one has been “on the way” since late April with no sign of it yet. Honda is having problems with inventory and is experiencing shipping delays, and their model offerings are slim. I can’t afford a Harley, even a used one, and the local dealership is corrupt with price gouging and high-pressure salesmen who kept saying: “But it’s a Harley,” while they try to get me to sign up for a used bike at new bike prices, said prices more than twice the MSRP, and at an 8.99% finance rate instead of the 3.99% that the Harley-Davison company itself has been offering on used bikes.
I looked around through Cycle Trader and similar places. Eventually, I found a bike I like, with good power, and good looks, and only a year old. Kawasaki – I never in my life thought I’d ride a Kawasaki. But almost new? A four-stroke? 903cc? Belt drive? High tension steel? 5 speed? With large, hard case, locking bags, a highway bar, and dual backrests with a luggage rack? It’s in Tucson, Arizona. I sent the money, and am hiring a man to haul it here. I don’t have a truck, and can’t hook a trailer to my car, and it’s a thirteen-hour round trip at best. I could have taken a bus there, maybe even a cheap flight, but then I’d have been renting a truck and trailer to haul it all that way (gas prices are too high for that to be economical), or riding a bike I don’t know 450 miles in the desert heat. Hell, I’d still need to have it registered and licensed in New Mexico and transfer my insurance over. Better to get it here first.
So, yeah, I’ve been looking forward to getting it. Now, however, that happiness is eclipsed by my sorrow at Maya’s departure. Nothing matters much. My life here feels suddenly empty without Maya here. Where’s here? Why am I here? What does it all matter anymore? It’s hard not to think about Maya. It’s hard when I do think of her. I’ve been stupid to have invested so much emotion around her. She means so much to me. Her happiness means more, so I can’t even tell her these things. It’s killing me.
I know the new bike will keep me entertained. I don’t care at the moment. I’d give it up in a heartbeat to have Maya back here. But, there is nothing I can do. Nothing. I will continue to love her. But I feel so empty, so drained of life, with no clear way forward. It’s much the way she feels herself, but she took action. She moved away. 940 miles away. Not insurmountable. But I’m part of the past she’s leaving behind. Her last message said to take care of myself. That’s it? Take care? How? Why? She knows I love her. She said she loves me too. It hurt so much for me to write those words. My throat tightened up. Tears in my eyes. I’ve been deluding myself for years. 30 years we’ve known each other. Now I’m just someone that she used to know. She always says “Cancer Sucks.” Well, this sucks too.
That’s all I can write now. Enough of this pity party. Enough wallowing in despair and regret.
Random Writings and Photos 
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