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Ghost.

I am coming home from the bar, after a shift of serving death, and I am tired of it all. I want to live in a house with my children, the first of which shall be named Anker, regardless of sex. The days are growing shorter now…this is my dear friend Austin’s wisdom a few solstices ago: June 21…it’s all downhill from here, the days dwindling, diminishing as we speak.

It is too late to blather, the sun is rising, and I still have a bar towel hanging from a pant loop. My woman is beautiful, and as much as I romanticize a bullet in the head sometimes, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Really, when I think about it, nothing is stopping me.

Welcome to my world.

We’ve got all the time we need, and we’re running out of time. That’s what I’m trying to say, maybe. The infinite has been duly noted and is presently secure in a warehouse outside Pittsburgh. We start off small, a welcome mistake maybe, or the result of hard hard work. We find out what our neighbors smell like, what blood tastes like, what anger feels like when its snapped and slapped against our skin. We learn the craft of deceit. We grow accustomed to the thin dry air of dejection. Someone else has pointed out the idea of a horizon, and ever since then we’ve followed it like a gilded carrot.

Working hard. I’d prefer not to. Pointing out the obvious.

Affar used to walk me down to Shore Road in Bay Ridge and we’d sit on one of the benches there and have a vantage point of the Verrazano Narrows and the mouth of NY Harbor, and he’d point to giant tankers and cargo chips with his burly Norwegian finger and tell me this and tell me that. He died when I was 11 or so, and I was home alone when Tante Lillian called and told me that “Morfar has gone to be with the Lord.” I was aware of my lack of tears and sorrow … mostly, just confused, really … huh … and when my parents pulled up in the green Datsun 210, hatchback open for some lumber they had lugged from wherever, I jumped into the back and made them stop their slow and short journey backing up the driveway and feigned some good tears for my mother’s sake, I think. I remember my skin feeling weird and numb, like plastic.

There was never a shortage of milk at Mormor’s. Always pouring me glass after glass, tall thick glasses with diamond shaped etchings in them. Nice silverware on a cold white metal table, a small radio on a shelf above the salt and pepper, and a Lord’s Prayer plaque beside it. I would always play with her fancy cutglass perfume atomizer with the silky pump ball with fraying tassles, not really spraying perfume around, but just checking it out, so strange and foreign to me … mostly I remember the ring she stopped wearing, laying on the mirror counter beside the perfumes and powders … 4 square stones set in a thin gold band, different colors, pastely … pink, green, blue, and yellow … one for each of her children. When she died I was “living” at the Glenwood on Broadway and Marcy in Williamsburg, a $7 a night hotel for junkies, like myself, or for forlorn old men to die in … my brother found me there– I think I left a phone number with him once– and picked me up to go to her wake, and I made him stop at a Dunkin Donuts to use the bathroom, and I shot a good speedball into my neck and got back into the car and we continued on, and just before we got to the funeral parlor I looked at myself in the visor mirror and noticed the small bit of blood staining the collar of my dirty shirt.

Ah yes, wonderful to arrive into Newark yesterday afternoon to learn that we’ve won the war with Iraq. Whew! That must’ve been a close one. Glad we sqeaked by that one. Good to see the statues falling, don’t you think? Resonates with how safe I feel right now, probably as safe as we all feel, right?

Anyway, enough enoughing. To recap the last few days: we bused in from Panama to Golfito, then took the watertaxi to Puerto Jiménez, then a 2 hour ride in the back of a pick-up fixed with 2 benches in the back and a tarp overhead (reminds me of an Australian Outback kind-of thing, you know?) to what is commonly called the last frontier of Costa Rica, the southern Pacific coast of the Osa Peninsula. Nothing there, for the most part … no phone of electricity, just miles of black-sand beaches and jungle and an occasional leathery expat trying to set up a little cabina business in this jungle getaway … we stayed there for 2 days and just wandered the beach, as well as taking a formidable hike up the Rio Madrigal into the jungle … that is, until we heard the knee-rattling roar of a pack of Howler Monkeys, at which point we started back tracking.

Then back to Puerto Jiménez, where Maja and I planned on taking a small small plane to San Jose … and here our troubles began. The pilots were wishy-washy about flying due to the heavy storms over Golfito, which we needed to land in first because they had avoided doing so on the way over due to the same storms. After about an hours delay (mind you, we’re on a gravel runway in the middle of the jungle, for all intents and purposes), 12 of us (including pilots) board the little coffin with wings … landing in Golfito, ok, then more waiting … as its pouring on us, they rush us into the plane and we take off, onlt to fly through gray numbness that just kept getting darker and darker, rain pounding (literally pounding) the plane, they 2 small tico pilots can barely see over the dashboard, which we unfortunately had a clear view of … the GPS and other panel controls/lights kept going out, and we could see the concern and frantic gesticulations of the pilots trying to save their own lives … then the plane starts really rocking, quickly tipping left and right with such degree that your head actually snapps against your shoulder or the nearby window or fellow passenger … great drops in altitude … fishtailing, so much so that you look out the window and expect to see the tail of the plane out beside you … dead silence except for the repeated beeping of emergency status indicators from the cockpit … prayers and incantations all around, I’m sure … then, suddenly, though the edge of the clouds and into sunlight beauty and long-limbed vastness, and the nervous laughter and excited chatter begins … the captain looks back to check on us and you can see it on his face, the holy shit we actually made it expression you never want to see on the pilot of your aircraft …

More later on the comings and going of whatshisface …

And now, leaving for Brooklyn and an ICU somewhere in the building I was born in. Ugh. Not looking forward to this. Pistol summed it up today as “going to say your goodbyes”, and initially I thought, fuck off, but yeah, that’s part of it. But on that … who do we say bye for? Or who am I saying bye for? Me? Fuck all, I’m in no mood to say bye, no. More for her (Nana, aka my grandmother) I guess, but what’s the sense in that? Last moments, how long are you really going to remember them, like up from under water at the people staring down at you, floating away, like seen through hot gasoline air …

And Jason … ah, shit. It’s all scaring the healthy piss out of me. Whatever. Here’s a picture of my desk. There’ll be a CD before March, and that’s all there is to it.