Having A Summer Cold

It actually makes me pensive and like I can feel things more – like my skin is thinner. So I take the cap off my pen. It only seems fair. My point’s exposed. And here’s where a certain symmetry kicks in. I ratify. I condone. Actions make truths. Waving my hand in the air is (I feel confident) irrefutable. I am waving my hand in the air. The man leaving the Tsarbucks with a tray full of coffees for his colleagues at work has the nerve to look at me askance. I leave flowers in the barrels of rifles. I am a fly in the face of defensiveness, in the ointment of appointments.

I can’t write at moments like this. My pit’s too close to the surface. Coal in the furnace, burning peony-pink. A summer cold is that deep, glowing ember at the center of my thinking. My childhood, spent under the hood of allergies, encouraged an internalism, a deep intellectual embolism, a reticence, a skein. Still, I take the cap off my pen. I haven’t learned – don’t want to. It’s the ungirdledness of these moments of forgetfulness. I’m prone to call it joy.

I spent the first 40 years of life wanting desperately to know as much as possible. Now, in the second 40, I wish I didn’t know so much. Accordingly, I accept joy when it comes, however it comes. I know I can count on a summer cold. At the first twinge of post-nasal drip, my heart lifts. I sing old Pavement songs to myself. It’s that rust-colored deep shag optimism of the 1970s, of swimming holes and knocking down white birch trees with a stunning shoulder. I can hang a radio on a nail in a tree and hit it with an airborne hatchet. I can sing along to both AM and FM. Even the tune at the top of the hour on News Radio 88. I guess I just want someone to love me.