I hope I see you on the other side.

Follow no one. Stand for something & don’t be a clone. We currently have a surplus of those. Just amble around town and use your eyes.  Surplus. People walk through life like they are on TV.  Paper-thin personalities. Living a lie. I know. I’ve been there. Everyone is so untrue. If you lie, it will eventually become your truth! Deficit. Anxiety. Defeat. You dug the ditch yourself. You dug it with words as a shovel. Maybe your mouth should be boarded up. People never really say what they mean. Here I sit. On the roof. Dawn. Quiet. Picking myself apart again. As long as I don’t go back to what I was… pointing my all-knowing finger of blame at anyone but myself. The dark hole of self-loathing is a bad place.

I watch the sun come up today alone. The Ridiculous house is empty. Morning light runs down the hillsides. Drinking coffee on the roof, I look over the neighbors fence & think of draining their pool while they are at church. My new neighbor isn’t so nice. I invited his family to the house for the D-Face party & he said something about his kids needing sleep, church and– “too much noise” before closing the door in my face.  People…  Oh-well, he has his view of us fixed in his mind. If I drained his pool & rode it…  it would just make HIM right. I turned & looked the other way. The sun was coming up quickly. Warmth. Life.  A few weeks ago, I found a silver pigeon dead in the street out front. It had a red band on its leg & appeared to be well cared for. It was beautiful actually. Was it a homing pigeon? I removed it from the street & covered it with rocks that night. Up until today, there has been another pigeon that appears every morning & sits on a rock in the front yard. It must be the mate of the dead pigeon. It sits & waits…  cocking its head & cooing. The long wait. Timeless. The great empty void when someone leaves. Always waiting. I wish humans loved like that. It reminds me that we have had quite a few people leaving us these last two years. I think of  Bob Biniak, Baby Paul Cullen, Eric Swenson, Andy Kessler, Chris Cahill & others.  ”I hope I see you on the other side.”  We are –collectively–losing greatness. Just thinking…  I’m sitting on the roof & thinking. Thank you to Geoff Graham for the ‘Dead Phone’ image. Skate- Ozzie