A Tour Through the Childhood Archives

Spending a week at home after being away for four years of your mid-twenties is a bit like slipping into a tropical fever -- an effect that is magnified if that home happens to be located in coastal Florida. I am here now amidst the mangroves and mosquitoes, and for the first few days back I am still fighting the current; clutching at driftwood and débris left over from what has already become a dimly-recollected adulthood. No wait, I was working on something... a project... I was reading something... something was happening at work... already they are lost to me, these links in a chain of thought. The years slip off me like a Dance of the Seven Veils. I am a teenager again. A decade of experience has vanished. I am that boy whose plans are made without respect to fulfilling them, since the time ahead is limitless. I am the would-be reader who is continually defeated by the size and number of unfinished tomes next to his bed -- where to begin? The possibilities are endless, and therefore actually starting on anything is impossible. I even slept in until 11 o'clock yesterday -- something I have not done in any recent year I can recall. I am praying for work emails as for a lifeline, to remind me that my twenty-seven year-old existence still continues on somewhere, even if it involves a different self.

In Quotes: Talking Turkey After Four Years

"Twas just this time, last year, I died," quoth the bird, accusatorially (citing Dickinson -- more on this practice below) -- for indeed, the third anniversary of Six Foot Turkey came the previous June and went, I fear, unremarked by me, such that it feels almost as if it might never have happened. And it seems in some way that its spirit did evacuate this mortal realm on that occasion, and hasn't been with us since. The blog has ceased, especially in recent months, to be the primary creative outlet in my life and has become a kind of mausoleum of poems and repostings that didn't have a logical -- or decorous -- home in the pulpit but that I wanted to stick somewhere, since I'd gone to the trouble to write them.

Cross-Postings

My final column in the church newsletter:

Memories

This past Christmas I embarked on a project that has been on our family’s bucket list for years, and that I don't think any of us ever actually expected to see get done: namely, transcribing all of our old home VHS videos on to DVDs. Although I've heard there are professional places that do this, I was afflicted with a D.I.Y. bug when I contemplated all the unknown mortifying childhood antics I might be handing over for a stranger to record. I figured I’d get the equipment myself – pretty cheap and portable in this day and age, especially if you are fortunate enough (as I was) to drop in at Target and find what must be the world’s last known VCR on sale at the way back of the shelves – and transcribe the tapes on my own.

Five Poems

I.

The moment I knew
In my strange youth
That I was sure to come
To no good
Was the day I was left
In the presence of
An item known
As Bass Clef.