Dante's Prayer in General

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For the first time in three day I am not wearing a hat. Inside my apartment. This is getting ridiculous.

I have known cold. I grew up on northern tier bomber bases. Places that don’t exist anymore. Kincheloe, Loring.

I’ve done detachments to Eilson, Alaska that weren’t as cold as it has been here lately.

I woke up last night with my toes burning. I have no idea why I went to bed without socks on. Habit, I suppose.

This is some miserable shit. Everything looks like it is frosted over in calcium chloride and shit on by God. Nasty.

I do the “in six months you won’t remember this” thing. But it is miserably cold. And I have no one to share this misery with.

2018 arrives in five and a half hours. It was a waste of a year for me. I only made it to the beach four times last summer. Only made it into the waves once.

My gear and my board are still in the trunk of my car.

Aging is not for the faint of heart. I am more heat and cold sensitive, more light sensitive that I have been in my entire lifetime. If the temperature gets above 80 while the humidity is below 30% i get slightly nauseated. Not puking my guts up nauseated, just rumbly in my tumbly.

I did three pumps to Saudi Arabia. Now I have no idea how I did it. I guess it was because I wore a younger man’s clothes. I also can’t sit or stand more than and half hour at a time. How did I do 10 hour translants and tranpacs strapped into an ejection seat? Routine 6+ hour missions into Iraq.

That said. I ache to be back in the air. Today I found myself staring at the sky, listening to the unicom. I’ve said it before, but once you have been up there, you never actually belong to the earth again. You become one of the people of the sky.

Title song I tried to arrange for guitar. Two problems. I broke the middle three fingers on my left (fretting) hand seven years ago and have no feeling in my fingertips anymore. And while the song only has about five standard chords I can’t seem to find a pitch to sing along. Loreena is doing some weird A minor shit there and I just can’t intuit. I am not a musician, but I am sure someone who is could figure it out.

I was given Loreena McKinnett’s “The Book of Secrets” while in port in Sydney, Australia. She was a restaurant manager. Age appropriate. At the time I was 36. Seems a lifetime ago. I could have fallen in love. If only for that accent. And that body.

I have no idea how a kid who grew up on northern tier bomber bases in the US could ever have anything in common with a girl who grew up in urban Australia. But we had a lot of shared interests. Shakespeare, ee cummings, books and movies.

For a week I would walk from the pier at Kings Cross to the taxi stand. Take a cab over to her restaurant. Wait patiently until closing time, when the staff would lock the doors and break out the wine.

I would nod agreeably until I no longer had a clue what they were talking about, then I would nod some more.

She was blonde and gorgeous. Before I got in the taxi for Kings Cross she kissed me.

And she said “Don’t just disappear.” Three weeks later I was in Maine. We talked on New Years Eve. I watched the New Years Eve Celebration in Sydney, even though it was broad daylight here.

I saw a chipmunk on my parents’ deck. She argued that there was no such thing as chipmunks. Those are just cartoons. Our relationship was untenable. We were literally on opposite sides of the planet.

She asked me to “Not just disappear.”

And that is exactly what I did.

To a degree I hate myself for it. I hold on to things for too long. But when I let go, I really let go. And then I wonder. What could have been.

Cast your eyes on the ocean
Cast your soul to the sea
When the dark night seems endless
Please remember me