For at least two years now I’ve been trying to buy corn starch when I go to the grocery store, so that I can make gravy.  I don’t really know how to make gravy, but if there’s some sort of meat juice left after the crockpot is finished with a roast, I know I can add corn starch and it’ll turn into something thicker that my son and I can pretend is gravy.

So yesterday, after two years of trying, I finally remembered to buy corn starch.  There would be gravy!  I bragged about it to the boy.

“You bought another box of corn starch?” the boy said.  “How many do we need?”

“What do you mean?”

“You just bought one when we went shopping on Wednesday.  Dad, it’s only been a couple of days.  I think you’re losing your mind.”

“Maybe.  But at least we’ll have gravy.”

“I don’t even like gravy.”

“That’s because you’ve never actually ever had it.  Hey look!” I said, opening the cupboard.  “Cornstarch!”

I was kidding, of course.  I knew there were two boxes in there.  I suppose next week, though, the third box will take me completely by surprise.

The significance of it all is lost on me.  The relationship of time and movement, the interaction of lives, the complexity of something that should be so simple, so base.  The straight line of here to there, twisted in the hope of somehow making it longer, the distance traveled greater, the time spent slower.

Have I really been working on a new understanding of time, scavenging for truth amongst the tangled wreckage of all my secrets?  What’s it like to climb over and around the piles in the dark, scraping open old wounds on things long ago discarded, as the blood flows and the only sounds I hear are those I make myself?

I wipe at my eyes, but there’s too much blood, or maybe too much time, because wiping does no good.  Everything is blurred beyond any hope of recognition, even if there were light to see the way, which there isn’t.  Straight line something inside tells me.  Follow the line.  I fall again, tripped, maybe knocked down, there’s no way of knowing for sure, and the air grunts from my lungs as I hit, something sharp stabbing at my chest.

Yes, if only I could follow the line.  If only I could see it.  Maybe then.

Would I know a new understanding of time if it looked me in the face?

We can let go of the world, but does it ever really let go of us?  And what would we do, if it did?  Before ever reaching that last breath something simply snapped, and the line from here to there no longer mattered and we just floated off, all the old familiar struggle, the heaps of memory, the cuts and the blood, the blurred vision and confusion and silence just slipping through our fingertips until it was no more?

Railroad Man ~ The Eels [Link removed]

Sure I’m full of good ideas.  I’ve been saying it all along.  Saying it for years, come to think of it, at least to myself.  You wouldn’t believe the things I talk about with myself.  Some days my skull gets vibrating so badly from all the chatter that the dog howls and glasses start breaking in the cupboards.  What a mess!

I might lose my house.  Forced to sell by those commie bastards who are out to get each and every one of us.  No, wait.  That’s not right.  That’s Cold War talk there, that’s what that is and I’m not even old enough to know Cold War talk.  I wouldn’t recognize a commie bastard if I was standing in line behind one at the grocery store, close enough to get a good whiff of him.  Or her, I guess.  Commie bastards surely must come in both styles.  Everything comes in both styles these days.  His and hers.  This and that.  Yours and mine.  It’s all the same.  Variety and choice.  Plenty of it to go around.  Enough for everyone.

But like I was saying, my choice is basically boiling down to I might lose my house, and of course I need something or someone to pin the blame on.  Everyone needs something or someone to pin blame on.  It’s all about the finger pointing and keeping the attention off of ourselves.  Misdirection and confusion.  The element of surprise.  A smokescreen. 

You know, every month in America there are roughly 500,000 burglaries committed but only about 6,000 people sent to jail for those burglaries, which works out to about 1%, which has me wondering just who made up that old saying that crime doesn’t pay.  Who pointed that finger?

Not that I’m thinking of a life of crime, just so you know.  I’m too old now to switch professions, and besides, I’ve always thought of crime as a young man’s game.  It’s kind of like the Olympics - they have senior Olympics, sure, but everyone knows how exciting that sounds. 

So I’m out of money.  I found out yesterday my car insurance had been cancelled, which probably has something to do with me not opening my mail.  But I organized it last week, if you’ll remember, so I’m getting close.  Organization is the first step of any successful endeavor.

What was my point?  Groceries, that was it.  I had just enough to go grocery shopping yesterday, which as you know if you’ve looked around the store lately, is just as much about advertising as it is feeding us.  I’m surprised the potatoes don’t have little jackets on them, luring us into buying something else we can’t possibly live without.  I almost bought a The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe frozen pizza, but thought to myself, what would C.S. do? (WWCSD).

You know, there are people out there who think that dinosaur bones were snuck into the ground by the devil to trick us all.  I’ve never met any of them, or at least not that I know of, but then, I probably wouldn’t know it if I had.  I could have been in line at the grocery store sandwiched in between one of them and the commie bastard and I wouldn’t have had a clue.  It’s a mystery out there, there’s no doubt about it.  I’m starting to realize that I’m completely in the dark, and from the looks of things, without much hope of things getting much better.

I can tell you this much with certainty, something somewhere has gone terribly wrong, and until I find out just what it is, I won’t sleep well at night.

I’m of course also wondering how the court case is going for Luigi Cascioli, the 70-something year old Italian atheist who’s taking his boyhood friend to court, suing him to force proof of Christ’s existence.  “The Church constructed Christ upon the personality of John of Gamala,” Cascioli claimed, referring to the 1st century Jew who fought against the Roman army.  “I started this lawsuit because I wanted to deal the final blow against the Church, the bearer of obscurantism and regression.”

Meanwhile, Pat Robertson gets on television and makes claims that God smote Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with a stroke, which got everyone up and out of their seats almost as fast as the other day when the family members of those dead miners got it into their mind that the trapped miners were alive by the mercy of God, started ringing the church bells, but then found out it wasn’t true at all, causing the whole lot of them to break into a fist fight.

Of course, the whole business will be a mute point if the Italian atheist wins his case, and I’m thinking - no Jesus / no God, no God / no Devil, and no Devil means that it was someone else out there, hiding dinosaur bones.

Who could have come up with such a tricky scheme?  I mean, dinosaur bones?  You have to admit, it’s a stroke of genius that’s kept us off balance and looking the other way for as long as I can remember.

I’m thinking maybe a Communist plot, but I’m open to suggestion, if anyone has a better idea.

Well it’s here now, or behind us, depending on which way you keep your head turned.  Myself, I’ve done quite a bit of looking back the last couple of years.  Too much looking back, that’s for sure.  Time to swivel this big head of mine back around straight and figure out where the hell I’ve wandered off to while I wasn’t looking.

It’s hard to see where you’re going when you’re looking back over your shoulder.  Did you know that?  You lose the trail and get off course.  Did you know that?  Yes, I suppose you did.  Of course you did.  What am I thinking?  Everyone knows that.

Here’s something you might not know.  One time a friend and I were put in charge of burying his dead father.  Seriously.  His father had been cremated and one way or another, it had somehow come down to just the two of us, and the father in his canister, to find a shovel and go down to the cemetery and bury him.  My friend knew the spot.  A stone was already in place, waiting for us all to show up.

I can’t say I actually remember helping my friend carry his father’s ashes, but I do remember helping to dig the hole.  That much I remember for sure.  We wondered a little about things as we dug, some of it out loud - like whether or not his father’s replacement hip was in the canister with the ashes, or if someone fished things like that out - and some things we wondered about to ourselves - like what it meant to die, or to be left behind, or to be twenty-some years old, burying another person.

The thing I do remember most of all, the one thing that sticks in my head clearer than anything else from that day, was the thing that my friend said when the job was finally finished, and we were patting the earth back down onto the hole.

“Well, that takes away the pressure.”

My friend’s father had not been an easy man to grow up with.  Loving, but demanding and controlling.  Friendly, but a temper quick to show itself.  A drinking problem that I’d never witnessed, but was all too fresh in my friend’s memory.  My friend’s words seemed harsh, but were some of the most honest I’d ever heard, even till this day.  Burying his father, as hard a thing as it might have been, had also lifted away some heaviness.  The cost had been steep, but finally there would be room to breathe; room to be himself. 

And without another word, the two of us turned and left, leaving behind something that seemed best left in the past.  Buried, but not forgotten.

So yes, this morning the new year is here.  Another year.  Another chance to find some of my own breathing room.  I won’t forgot 2005, but part of me knows that the best thing to do, maybe the only thing, is to dig a hole for it and just walk away.  Walk away without looking back.  Focus on where I’m going for once.  Live a day or two without the past hanging over my every decision, without all the pressure.