A fine Day in Normal entries

The least important things today were the things I didn’t do. I didn’t smoke a cigarette, for some reason that wasn’t easy today, I don’t know why, I just know I didn’t do it. I’ve kept half the carton I bought back in December, it was full when I bought it, I quit halfway through. I don’t know why I’ve kept it. I mean it’s always a cool moment in the movies when the alcoholic takes down the bottle and tells the tale and then puts it away, but, shit, I don’t know anybody in real life who does that. I think, for me at any rate, I keep the half carton because if I got up to go to a convenience store to buy a pack of cigarettes I’d be deciding to smoke them. These I decide daily not to smoke. That and, unlike a bottle of liquor, these will taste like shit if I ever decide to crack em open.

I also didn’t write this flash that has been bouncing around my head ever since G popped in with the suggestion of October flash. The first year I think we did a horror flash a day for 31 days, but my memory is an unreliable source. I could check my backups but that’s like admitting exactly how unreliable my memory is. It’s a better story anyhow whether it’s true or not, 31 horror flashs in 31 days. It’s hard not make a flash a short splatter fiction or, better and more compelling, a creepy little innuendo. I’ve had this image of bean sprouts coming out of skulls and mustard greens growing through where marrow has, through attrition, left the femur, the punchline being a vegetarian zombie. I’ve worked it out delicate and I’ve worked it out in a voice of an inarticulate man trying to be soft, sensitive. It comes out as a bad pun. I haven’t written it and I can’t seem to shake the idea that maybe it should be written.

What I did do today was extend my walking knee therapy through the little park a few townships away, the sentimental little park where I walked with my grand son a few days before he left, late spring. Halfway along the trail is this middle aged couple and this little girl, two, maybe two and a half, weighed maybe thirty pounds and twenty of that was blonde curls. The guy looked like an L.L. Bean ad, I mean he was dressed like that, just paunchier and sort of baby faced haggard. They had a tri-pod set up in the middle of the trail and were posing for family photos. Looked like a digital SLR. They wouldn’t look at me as I ambled past, the mother and father busying themselves and making that sort of chatter that makes you sad about intimacy, small talk, infinitely small, making noise to fill the empty spaces and, I suspect, to not acknowledge me. That’s no big deal, I actually expect people to not aknowledge me, sometimes I prefer it. That’s not the culture of that little park though. It’s not really the culture of any park I can think of.

I got to the far end of the trail, it dovetails into a walkway around a small cemetery, I took the walkway to see if there was a way back around. There were two elderly women one putting flowers on a grave the other, I assume had put the flowers on her loved ones grave and was kneeling. It’s an assumption she might have been kneeling to whisper to her enemies stone “I hope it burns”. This was a bit before noon.

I took the same trail back. The man was posing on a stump looking contemplative. The woman was talking to the child. Two bicyclists were trying to say hi and apologize, the woman, without looking at them mumbled her own apologies. I tried the same thing and got a similar response. The little girl was cute and dressed for Easter. By the time I got back to my rig I was sweating, less from exertion than from pain. Pain is good, pain I can deal with, physical, emotional, spiritual pain, I not only can deal with but I think it’s a reasonable response to this world. It’s numbness that scares the shit out of meAnd yeah, maybe I was projecting that fear onto the family photos, even so I think it might be sadder if that was a good outing for them. I could try describing the heck out of the park, but that won’t help, you’ll have to take my word; it’s awfully tame wilderness. It’ll look like those backgrounds of woods and the poses they have you do at the family portrait kiosk at a k-mart or Wal-Mart. It would only take a small amount of tweaking to make them vegetarian zombies.

I needed to drive around a bit let the knee rest and because I was a few townships south and a bit west I went into the city. Lansing looks industrial, like and industrial cliché, that doesn’t bother me as much as the empty places on the skyline where the industry used to be. The city could be a Jim Jarmusch movie. I saw bent people in track suits with brown paper bags shuffling along cracked sidewalks.

I didn’t smoke or write a flash, a fine day.