Thoughts while driving down route 74 from the depths of Indiana into Ohio..

Nostalgia’s a bum trip, but song lyrics have a way of floating through your head, even decades after having first heard them.

“Caught a handle on the rising sun. Took a
day to rise and fall. At the end of the trail I
was scarred and burned. But I felt no pain at all.
Walking through a world of lies With a heart made
out of stone I looked deep into my eyes And I knew
I was alone…

…I’m a son of a son
I’m the son of the sun
My death trip
Has just begun “
-Black Flag, “I’m the One”, as sung by Henry Rollins on the album “Loose Nut”

The tarmac is wet, and gleams with the light of the setting sun, newly mown dried corn fields to the left and right, this year was a bad harvest. Static on the radio, static, it is like music but better. More pure.

The moon hangs unimaginably huge on the horizon, pregnant with light, over-ripe and heavy.

46 slides into 74 smoothly almost imperceptibly,

Wet and slick, Tears coat the tarmac, or is it dew, or is it rain.
Black rain, black glass, slick and smooth.
Scanning the airwaves, I land on stairway to heaven. Someone once told me, there is a secret to this song.
Someone in a position to understand, the secret was rather simple, and yet none guess it.
I wonder…
Who is the lady
and who is the piper

Many pass their lives not realizing that the second question is as important as the first one.

Passing Cleves, Harrison’s tomb down the road. I remember her, an autumn night in late September, her dull copper colored hair dimly reflecting the moon light, and a pair of bright pleading eyes with mixed desperation and joy.
She liked this spot above all, I had no idea we had a dead president in our city’s backyard.

I knew not the West side, she was my tour guide, pointing out the places of her youth.

Her kisses somehow always tasted like kool aid. Almost sickly sweet.

Her Masochism was endearing indeed, as her sad downcast eyes, much like a child, or a puppy’s, irrespective of what dark thoughts brewed within her mind.
A small volcano, a burning ember, self snuffed.

The dead are always sainted in the mind, in the memory. We only remember what we wish to remember of them.
But is this not a second death, one they endure, the second we endure, the death of truth?

“A mighty lesson we inherit:
Thou art a symbol and a sign
To Mortals of their fate and force;
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself–and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter’d recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.”
– Lord Byron