I’ve been looking at “live cams” on YouTube.I watched a couple of Florida beach views,from Fort Myers and Hollywood Beach. They were OK, I suppose,but not really what I wanted to see. So I returned to my perennial favorite, the Brooklyn Bridge live camera view of the Bridge, spanning the East River, looking into Manhattan. In the distance one can see both the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. Ships, boats, barges , and pleasure craft, both motorboats and sailboats, ply the River, passing under the Bridge in all of its granite majesty.The Brooklyn Bridge is the modern cathedral, devoted to function, its span an elongated altar to commerce.

I keep telling myself to go back to bed. I have an ache behind my eyebrows that I think are tears not shed , but more likely, it’s congestion from seasonal allergies.

I switched back to the Ashland rail cam to watch #67 stop on its way to Newport News. A big freight is headed North, the cars nearly all marked with graffiti, as if their function is to serve as the substrate for the artists’ garish colours and gargantuan cartoons.

Life goes on.The workers, wearing hard hats and blaze orange vests, are finishing the improvements to the Ashland Amtrak stop. One day, a “high speed” train will stop in Ashland, the Northeast Corridor has spread South of the Potomac, the Rappahannock by now.

Truth be told I can’t keep my eyes open. They are dry too .And I can’t write comfortably

Later, friends.

Woke up.I felt very vulnerable asleep .I got up, got dressed, came downstairs to pray The Rosary.

Having done that, I considered my loneliness, wishing it would end.

A fourteen year old boy shot and killed a thirteen year old girl Friday, here in the affluent Western suburbs of Richmond, Virginia.

Thirteen. Fourteen.

There’s a child dead, another child whose life is, for all intents and purposes, over. Do the races, religions, sexual orientations, or any other marker we use to characterize human beings matter?

If you want further evidence of the dysfunctionality of our time, consider that one of the dead girl’s classmates, a girl I’ve known since she was a toddler, made a suicide attempt last fall. Unsuccessful. Still.

Explanations, analyses, commentaries on cable news channels, Congressional testimony won’t change a damn thing. How much money should we throw at these problems? Members of the intellectual/professional class might get grants to research violence among children, but none of them can resuscitate the dead.

Let’s stop thinking we are one published paper, one drug patent, one comprehensive law away from Utopia. ‘Cause we ain’t.

Well I got The Shot. I was given The Shot about 26 hours ago. Now I can’t stay awake.

The Shot kicked my butt but good. I’m sitting up now, watching Women’s Collegiate Softball. It’s my favorite college sport. There is such enthusiasm and the women are fiercely competitive. Most importantly, the players are having fun through it all.

We had a murder in our community. A middle school kid murdered another middle school kid. That’s all I can say, because I’m still trying to wrap my head around the sheer mindlessness and evil of it all.

We bought a Dyson vacuum Friday. We hear it can suck the chrome off an exhaust pipe. This is what we need around the old dust pile we call home. As soon as I find the energy, I will take The Sucking Beast out of the carton and give her a spin.

Yes. I’m stoked about a vacuum cleaner.

The Shot (#2) has a reputation for being a butt kicker., a reputation well-deserved. I’m done, for now.

I woke up around 4, maybe earlier, maybe I was never asleep. I take a shower now, so the water heater can heat more up for J. I am clean. I trim my fingernails, go downstairs, fix a black cherry Italian soda with Sugar-Free Torani Black Cherry Syrup.I add a slice of line to help with the aftertaste the sugar-free syrups all have.

It is now 5:15 AM. The shot is at 8:30. We leave the house at 7:30, hoping to get through the crowd with a bit more ease.

The noise I hear in my ears is tinnitus, I think. Kind of annoying, it is. It’s the least of my problems.

I’m watching the Ashland railroad tracks, with its road noise, from I-95 picked up by the microphone, even though the road is a couple of miles away .

I just want to get away from Richmond for a short time, hopefully soon to New York. Maybe a trip to Charleston or Savannah’s would be nice, or St Augustine. That’s an interesting place. Tourist-y but interesting but I’m a tourist, so why not?

Back to Bed.

530. Been up two and a half hours, I think. I’m listening to Joan Armatrading. Again. Thoughts come back of Ayer . That was her name. I guess if she’s been dead 5 years and 4 months and 23 days, her anonymity doesn’t need protecting .

I don’t think I’m the only person who has fallen in love with the wrong person . I’m a repeat offender. Done it twice. At least twice, maybe more.

Joan Armatrading was part of the background music of all that newly ignited passion. I kick myself when I think of the pain I caused her. Oh well , she’s dead now and so are her parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents And that White Folks World she rebelled against and I aspired to .

Paradox is what you call it, I wanted to be in the John Cheever short stories she wanted out of, with the alcoholics and bisexuals, the suicidal relatives and the beach cottages of soulless beauty that trap the memories like a bell jar holds a specimen.

J is home now. The third time. She’s The Charm, so it is said. Who said it?

And there is nothing but the memories. And the child, now a man , that melding of us together .

I should say more, the longing demands more words, more Acts of Contrition, more penance. I was hoping, God, for another penance, besides celibacy without end. But I do get your well-taken point.

In a Middle World, one of many

Flesh finds flesh

Flesh fills flesh

The hard finds the soft wet slippery folds til muscle comes to grip

And power dissolves in a flood of sweat and cries

It is all we ever wanted.

It is what we always deny .

What?

Sofa and chair.Not up to the high standards of thrift shops. They want upholstered furniture so nice that only really rich people would give items that perfect away..

So having unsat furniture creates a problem if, for example, your sister is giving away her leather furniture and you’re kinda kinky about leather. So the green fabric stuff is just, like the boll weevil, “lookin’ for a home.”

To make this Charlie Foxtrot even more fox trotted-up,my marital partner Is a foxtrotting hoarder. She has boxes and bags and brown Manila folders holding client files from when she was a CPA, copies of emails of absolutely no importance from her days as a Church/Parochial School Finance Manager, empty bags from her time as a merchandiser,.

I could just scream.

I’m too old to run away and join a circus, I think.

Content Warning! This is sexually explicit writing. Adult things are discussed Consider yourself warned.

We fall in love with the unattainable. Our first loves don’t even know they’re “Loves”. Silly them. They thought they were only just people, unless they went to the movies a lot. Maybe they got hard or hot or wet when Liz Taylor changed her stockings in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Maybe they wanted to feel that way again and didn’t know how to get there. Or with whom to get to that place.

I think about fucking my wife, in all her asexual Ice Queen Glory Maybe even lick her asshole and lube my cock real good and fuck her there. And maybe one buggering will be all that’s needed to exorcise the Demon of Prudery.

And she will call me “Daddy “ and stop wearing panties and masturbate when she’s bored instead of watching Andy Griffith Show reruns. She will say, “Daddy please watch me and take your cock out and stroke it.” It’s a pity the Queers and the Dykes are having all the fun.

But we all think we’re so bloody awful smart and have The World figured out. Then somebody invents the atom bomb or the oral contraceptive or even a goddamn Post-It note and we’re back to Square 1, hoping The World will survive this Latest New Thing.

“I’m innocent, I tell ya!”

Does it make sense that we get in our cars and drive to a gym, where we walk on a treadmill?

Yeah. I know there are all kinds of extenuating circumstances, but let the irony at the core of the paradox sink in. If we can’t walk outside our own homes for reasons of safety or security, something is amiss.

I’m not saying don’t go to the gym or don’t drive to the gym. Gyms exist because they fulfill a need, for social interaction at the very least (or most).

Chalk this rant up to questioning how we do things, of how we got to where we are today.