Jim Reed's Blog, page 33

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Published on May 05, 2019 06:44

April 28, 2019

ROMANCING THE HEART OF THE ARTIFACT CITY

Listen’s to Jim’s 3-minute podcast: https://youtu.be/nOYfwszMCy8

or read his story below…

ROMANCING THE HEART OF THE ARTIFACT CITY

Ten years ago, the Red Clay Diary splayed open beneath my writing hand. Here are some of the notes and scribbles therein. Let’s go back to Then and forget Now for a few seconds…

A day unlike any other day, but curiously familiar…

OUTSIDE THE SHOP

It’s like a bolero out there, everybody choreographing their unique dances in rhythm with life…

Remon grabs another of his many daily smokes outside my shop, on the way to the smoking parking lot, where so many others leave their cigarette filters…relics for future archaeologists to uncover and puzzle over.

INSIDE THE SHOP

Everybody brings baggage, everyone has a story—even if unconsciously so…

Geoff drops by and donates a brass-and-velvet theatre stanchion, so that I can place some psychological boundary between myself and the occasional hovering customer.

Carolynne picks up copies of the latest Birmingham Arts Journal to spread the gospel of art and lit.

Randy decides to read Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald. There is hope!

ACROSS FROM THE SHOP

I can see the parallel businesses and activities going about their cycles…

Rhonda soaks the cooling sun and smiles her wisdom, surrounded by shoes and leathery artifacts.

The Matron of Metering carefully prepares penalty notices for people who don’t know the rules and mysteries of Downtown Parking.

A customer donates a bag of wonderful old books.

MEANWHILE, BACK INSIDE

The imaginary reality of each customer swirls about them, influencing the way they see the shop…

Kid customer purchases an enormous football-shaped balloon and a Wimpy Kid title.

A grown-up attorney takes the life-size Marilyn Monroe stand-up home with him, along with Bradbury.

Another kid customer buys a flashing red disco light for his room, to go with a Star Wars novel.

Outside, one pedestrian ogles the Leg Lamp and model train and Piggly Wiggly head and Laugh-In switchboard and Red Lady statue in the display windows.

Yet another purchases a wind-up bunny astride a tricycle, and a Peter Rabbit book.

One customer selects century-old postcards and comes back for more.

Somebody else stays in the front corner for five hours and reads ancient love letters and diaries from within my grandfather’s old post office boxes. Her bliss is unmistakable. The names of my relatives in Peterson, Alabama are on each box.

A Regular ushers and tours her friend through the shop.

Giggles emanate from the back of the store. Collectible books entertain them.

One girl seeks and finds Gulliver’s Travels and carries her smile home with her.

And so it goes.

You go climb Mount Everest.

I’ll remain here in my shop. I suspect I’ll have much more fun

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REDCLAYDIARY

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Published on April 28, 2019 05:38

April 21, 2019

TODAY THE NUMBER 3 DOES NOT EXIST

TODAY THE NUMBER 3 DOES NOT EXIST

This very morning, I am boldly going where no person has gone before: the land where 3′s do not exist.

Beaming down to the post office parking lot, I list to the right while left-hand-toting a red-and-white polka-dotted bag filled with books wrapped and ready to mail to distant lands.

It’s a several-times-weekly trek that is sometimes routine and predictable, sometimes surprising and quite funny.

Some mornings, I startle the dozing postal clerk from her nap. That’s when no-one else is on duty or patronizing the place.

She is always on automatic at first, rapid-firing the required routine script provided by absentee bosses, “GoodmorningmayIhelpyou?” Then, once she sees that it is only I, the elderly gentleman from the bookstore, she manages a smile and even, when prodded, a bit of small talk.

The postal clerk, as demanded by the Postal Gods, continues the script, just in case someone is viewing her through dispassionate cameras. “Anything liquid, explosive, sticky or dangerous in these packages?” she asks (actual words are different, but this is what I understand is being meant).

I tap the computer button several times to awaken it and verify that I am not a terrorist or sneaky felon of any kind.

She diligently weighs and sticky-labels each package. She has learned long ago that rather than wait for a patron to double-check her keyed-in address to verify it is identical to the label provided, she just quickly taps the “this is incredibly accurate” button and gets on with the processing. Much to my relief.

As the receipt begins printing, she frowns, leans closer, and notes, “The threes are not working on this machine.” I laugh and make a lame joke about a world without threes, she smiles slightly as best she can, then hand-inks 3′s wherever they are missing on the tape.

I wait, acting as patient as possible, since she has enough to deal with in this strange little branch that is missing half its ceiling tile, that sports vinyl peeling from the walls…this little branch where service windows behind her are papered over so that patrons cannot see what goes on within the mysterious sunless bowels of the building.

Threes are not the only objects missing. Unkempt displays and puzzling signs sit bedraggled and forlorn, some out of date, some indecipherable. The floor tiles and stanchions are situated much the same way that Disney World controls crowds—even when there is no other customer about, one still has to walk the curving line and wait at a certain point to be summoned.

It’s hard not to laugh, not to feel sorry for the painful rules governing each postal employee. And, after chatting with her day after day, I learn bits and pieces to the silly-ruled life she has to tread while at work.

She always smiles when I mention approaching postal holidays and breaks. I always smile when she smiles, feeling that I have mustered a ray of light to share with her during these brief-enough encounters.

My books eventually get mailed, I gather up re-three’d receipt and polka-dot bag, wish her a good day or a good day off, and make sure I leave her with a big grin. My harmless but effective gift.

As I leave, another, less friendly, patron arrives, primed for battle with plans to make the clerk’s day a little less pleasant.

I duck and weave to avoid hearing the ensuing encounter.

I head for work and prepare to make intense customers slow down and relax, and slow-mo customers to focus their attentions on the things they really wish to purchase but are too shy to verbalize right away.

I am now beamed in.

I beam and get on with the remainder of the day

www.jimreedbooks.com http://redclaydiary.com/

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Published on April 21, 2019 07:33

April 14, 2019

TAKING A LIGHTLY EDITED DEEP SOUTH DAY OFF

Listen to Jim’s 4-minute audio podcast: https://youtu.be/HTlVetEAfJE

or read on…

TAKING A LIGHTLY EDITED DEEP SOUTH DAY OFF

I am strolling, trolling the aisles of a sacred site, what I call the Cathedral of Books.

I pause for a moment, close my eyes, and try to remember what the poet Juan Ramon Jimenez once said:

“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”

I have cruised thousands of book lanes in my bookie life. How can I make this particular moment different and memorable? What is the opposite of browsing?

I close my eyes. I extend my right arm straight out to the side. I feel the spine of an invisible book. I tell myself, This is the book with which I will surprise myself today.

I pull the book to my chest, hold it close for a moment, then raise my upper lids and look down to see what’s being cradled.

A title I’ve never read. Hmm…

I am ready to feel the heft and texture and fragrance of an object produced by an olden bindery. Upon close inspection I note that a modern publisher has reproduced this book to give the first impression of early times. It is actually a recent copy.

I excitedly examine the title page inside, then the back of the title page to see who has loved the author’s work so much that it has been re-animated for this century’s readers.

Then, two words jump at me. Words that cause fear and loathing in the heart of any lover of prose and poetry. These most disturbing words are just below the copyright data on the back the first title page:

“LIGHTLY EDITED.”

I close the volume. I consider whether to purchase it, then hide it away from all possible prying eyes. I feel I am in the presence of a sacred object that has been vandalized.

Why would anyone LIGHTLY EDIT an ancient author’s prized work?

My imagination gets the worst of me and I suddenly envision great literature LIGHTLY EDITED.

The Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Then, he took a day off.”

Mustn’t burden the reader with extraneous information.

Moby Dick: “Call me Ishmael. I got to go sailing and saw a big whale.”

That’s story enough. Our readers have to get back to whatever it is they do when they are not reading.

Goodnight Moon: “Goodnight, Moon. The end.”

LIGHTLY EDITED.

Someday, when books I have written are discovered at some obscure yard sale, will the electronically internetted cyborged purchaser pick them up, unopened, tie a silk ribbon around them, arrange them artfully on a coffee table with an old pair of wire rimmed eyeglasses atop, then abandon them till they become dust repositories?

Till they once again wind up in a thrift bin or another yard sale?

I pause again, affectionately pat this orphaned and transmogrified work of art, extend my sympathies and condolences.

Then, I continue trolling the aisles for an unedited copy of this work, one unsullied by abridgers eager to remake the world in their own image.

That’s the version I’ll gladly read on the next day I take off

www.jimreedbooks.com

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Published on April 14, 2019 07:24

April 7, 2019

THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DEEP-SOUTH CHICKEN CAPER

Hear Jim’s audio podcast: https://youtu.be/bT4QEuUC2z4

or read on…

THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DEEP-SOUTH CHICKEN CAPER

This incident actually happened to me one childhood day while I lay abed in my family’s Tuscaloosa garage apartment. My mother and grandmother were fussing about, conducting activities of daily living. Suddenly, a neighborhood free-roaming chicken appeared through the open screen door and a moment of chaos and joy ensued. As proof that all of life is poetry, or at least poetic, here is the poem that emerged from my memory…

PLAYING CHICKEN

Once upon a time or two

when I was less than three

A chicken jumped into my bed

and gave a fright to me.

She fluttered up and cackled ‘round

the room for all to see,

She made me cry, she made me laugh

and clap my hands in glee.

Granny chased her with a broom,

Mama shoo’d her loud,

The chicken left us with a zoom

and flew up to a cloud.

Later, when I saw her pecking

all about the grounds,

I cackled and she laughed at me.

We both made funny sounds.

I waved and smiled and whispered,

“Come back another day,

so we can scare each other

into having fun at play.”

See what I mean? To this day, my life remains a poetic journey in progress.

Thanks for hitching a ride for a moment

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Published on April 07, 2019 06:35

March 31, 2019

JUST ANOTHER ROADSIDE PULITZER

This story happened a long time ago, but I re-visit it every few years

because it tells me so many things about life, about paying attention…

JUST ANOTHER ROADSIDE PULITZER

Why did I ever go into retail?

Well, you know the answer to that—if you, too, are in retail.

I did it because I couldn’t think of any other way to be my own boss and actually provide food and shelter for the family, outside the corporate world. I couldn’t think of any other way to have the freedom to write what I needed to write, free of the Dilbert shackles of the corporate world.

So, a couple of decades later, here I am, the Christmas season upon me, at 4:50pm on a Friday, just ten minutes till closing time, digging through computer-numbered boxes for a 1962 Esquire Magazine featuring Hemingway, a 1956 BBC Listener magazine containing a Salinger review, a first printing of Asimov’s The Martian Way, and a first edition copy of Salinger’s Raise High the Roofbeams…got to get these things overnighted for an anxious customer and then make it to a bookshop across town to conduct a reading, all by 6pm.

The front door chimes go off, so that means somebody has entered the store, 150 feet up the hall and up a steep flight of red stairs. As a retailer, you know the mixed feelings you get: Damn! Now I’ve got to wait on somebody and still get my tasks done…if it weren’t for these pesky customers, I could make a living (!).

I head up the hall to see who’s there, passing the glowing lava lamps and glistening Santas that line the path, giving a fairyland glow to the gathering dusk. When I get to the front, I see a small, pointy-haired big-rimmed eyeglass man, standing and staring at me as if I’m about to hit him. I do my usual “Hello, how can I help you today?” customer-friendly voice thing, since I have never seen this guy before.

“Well, do you buy stuff?” he asks. I’m in a hurry, so this means my thoughts are going to be negative—I’m thinking he’s got the usual dog-eared Reader’s Digest Condensed books and Stephen King paperbacks that we see a lot of around here.

“Well, it depends on what it is,” I say, thinking this does not look like a millionaire about to donate his Gutenberg Bible to me. “We have just about everything, but we’re always looking for what we don’t have,” I say, motioning down the hallway.

“What about this?” he says, pulling a rusty three-inch-tall miniature replica of a Sprite cola bottle from his pocket. It’s cute, just the thing I have all over the store for decoration, along with the life-sized Leg Lamp from Jean Shepherd, the seven-foot-tall Piggly Wiggly statue and the Pee-Wee Herman Playhouse suitcase, interspersed with books galore.

The next negative thought is that he will, like most people, have watched the Antiques Roadshow and determined that this is worth $32,000, of which I should pay him half for re-sale. I brace myself and say, “That’s neat. How much do you want for it?” He says in a small and meek voice, “What about a dollar?”

I am relieved and brighten up instantly, I pull a dollar from the cash tray, give it to him and he walks happily toward the stairs.

He bends to pick up two large and obviously heavy satchels he’s lugged up the stairs—I’m just now noticing them. Then, he turns and asks, “Can you tell me how to get to Jimmie Hale?”

The Jimmie Hale mission is for homeless people, and it’s a long walking distance away. I give him instructions, he thanks me, then begins his painful descent. I wait in the foyer, hoping he doesn’t stumble, and hoping I can get the door locked behind him so I can head to the post office on my way to being an unknown author reading my stuff aloud.

I can tell he’s about halfway down the stairs when I hear his meek voice, “I read everything you write.” I freeze in place to hear more. “And I see your columns in the paper. You are a natural-born writer.”

I can only yell thanks! as he closes the door behind him and disappears from hearing. I rush down the stairs to lock up, look up and down the street, and see nothing. No trace of this fellow and his heavy luggage and his mild temperament.

I lock the door, take down the OPEN sign, and start up the stair, turning out lights as I go.

Back at my counter, I reach into my pocket for keys and find the tiny Sprite bottle.

I hold it up to the lava lights and note its special green glow. And I wonder what a Pulitzer Prize looks like. This may be as close to one as I’ll ever get, so I’m going to adopt it and keep it around to remind me that now and then—just every once in a while—a writer can get a good review, a good award, at an unexpected time from an unlikely source…and then wonder later whether it was all imagination.

Later, at the reading, I tell the story of the little man and his Sprite bottle to Joey Kennedy, who is a genuine Pulitzer Prize winner. He grins ear to ear, because he knows all about fate and how things come to you only if you don’t look at them straight on

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Published on March 31, 2019 06:22

March 24, 2019

THE BOY WHO ALWAYS KNEW WHAT HE WANTED TO BE

Listen to Jim’s audio podcast: https://youtu.be/dw4TbsBgOJs

or read his tale below…

THE BOY WHO ALWAYS KNEW WHAT HE WANTED TO BE

Lenny is chasing Jimbo in circles down on 15th Street, in sight of two bemused policemen who are chatting inside their parked patrol car. The officers listen for radio instructions as to what they should do next during this Saturday evening shift. Jimbo and Lenny are just having fun, all excited that they are playing close to their uniformed heroes.

All Jimbo can think is, “Maybe the policemen will see how fast and nimble I am. Maybe they will call me over and recommend that I attend police academy when I grow up, since I obviously have what it takes to do their job.”

The officers eventually shut driver and passenger doors and cruise on up 15th toward their next assignment. Jimbo and Lenny go on playing till it’s dark and their mamas start calling them for supper.

After supping, then doing his chores, Jimbo sits alone atop the front steps of his home, thinking about being a policeman. Or maybe an astronomer.

He gazes up at the darkened sky and tries to count stars and planets, and thinks, “Maybe I can become an astronomer. Yeah, that’s it—I can calculate the heavens for a living.” He tallies his talents, “Well, I’m smart. I read astronomy books. I even own a star chart. I know the names of lots of constellations. What else is required?”

Law enforcement fades away in his mind as Jimbo contemplates comets and meteors and novae.

Next day, neighbor Lenny and gang show up to play softball in the vacant lot across the street. One kid has a chipped wooden bat, another produces a frayed ball, and among them there are at least two old mitts to share.

Since nobody is trained or little-leagued yet, the tattered players kind of make up their own rules as the game progresses. Jimbo suddenly has the idea that he could maybe become a famous baseball player. Lenny underhands the ball, Jimbo hits it hard, and there’s a sudden CRACK! as it hits the asbestos shingles on the side of a nearby house. The owner is not amused and exits her back door to dress down the delinquents-to-be.

Jimbo realizes that maybe sports is not his thing, unless of course he can be a celebrity who is beyond criticism.

After seeing the new film, Destination Moon, Jimbo is so excited about becoming a space man that he rushes home and creates an entire comic strip based on the story. He considers his options.

After much contemplation and consternation, Jimbo makes a list and checks it twice.

1. No way I’ll ever be brave enough to be a policeman. Heroes of the movies know how to dodge bullets, but with my luck…

2. Being a sports hero would require effort and athleticism. Jimbo is smart enough to know he’s not into physical strength and endurance.

3. Jimbo learns after a bit of study that astronomy would entail being a natural math and physics wizard. He still has trouble with his math tables. Cross that off the list.

4. Being a spaceman might mean becoming an obsessive scholar and trainer and explorer. Jimbo has explored the red-clay ditch down the road from his home and found it to be buggy and snakey and kind of scary.

Eventually, after years scratching potential careers off his list, Jimbo grows older, maybe wiser, and falls into what he actually CAN do, as opposed to what he wishes he could do.

Jimbo owns the fact that he is dreamer. What things can a dreamer do?

Looking back, he comes to understand that dreamers can write poems and books, dreamers can tell stories, dreamers can entertain and read books. Dreamers can even find a way to make a living being around the engines of his dreams day and night—the engines called books.

These days, Jimbo ekes out a living by returning to his default setting. He now knows that dreamers can experience all the careers you can possibly imagine…just by dreaming about them, writing them, telling them, selling other dreamers’ dreams in his bookstore.

Jimbo gets to live a thousand different lives and still make it home in time for supper and moment by moment security in his home that is fifty miles away from his original front steps.

His special secret is the sure knowledge that instantly, at will, he can still sit on that 15th Street stoop and imagine the stars in a universe that is contained safely within his dreaming mind

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Published on March 24, 2019 06:58

March 17, 2019

JERRY MUSKRAT HITS A SPEED BUMP

Listen to Jim’s 4-minute audio podcast: https://youtu.be/M5wk-15MRq4

or read his memoir below:

JERRY MUSKRAT HITS A SPEED BUMP

Chapter V of the pulpy-papered book I hold open begins, “If in all the great world there is any one pleasanter than Reddy Fox when he tries to be pleasant, I don’t know who it is. Of course, in that handsome red coat…”

“Jim!”

I jump two inches vertically when I hear this call “Jim!” and the book snaps shut and I am torn from the multi-textured world of Jerry Muskrat and Reddy Fox, into the reality of my mother’s voice.

“Jim!”

“Coming!” I respond, scrambling to my bare feet on the hardwood floor of our tiny asbestos-shingled home on Eastwood Avenue in 1950 Tuscaloosa.

I trot into the kitchen where Mother stands holding an overflowing metal trash can. She has a no-nonsense look that I dare not challenge.

The meaning of her stance is clear.

It is my chore to “take the garbage out” and transfer its contents to a much larger receptacle in time for city workers to rumble by and transfer its innards to a large and noisy truck.

I have failed to perform my duty in a timely fashion, but back in 1950, there is no whining or complaining about daily responsibilities.

I can read all I want to read—indeed, it is encouraged and expected of me—so long as I take care of the daily deeds assigned to me.

Each of us kids has a list of responsibilities. Mine includes clearing the dining table after meals, disposing of trash, making up my bunk bed, mowing the lawn and so on.

The chores are part of life, but so are other things. It is also my responsibility to read books and comics, play in the yard with local buddies, engage in all sorts of indoor games when it rains…

But there is always that moment of shock whenever anyone interrupts my reading. After all, to me, reading is like a vacation trip or an exploration adventure. As soon as a chapter begins, I am inexorably caught up inside another world, another time. I am a captive of the author and the artist. I am suddenly not the Jim of Eastwood Avenue, but the Jim of wherever the book takes me.

I sneak back to the book that has fallen to the floor. I search for the page that took me to Smiling Pool, where Jerry Muskrat and his pals live and thrive and go adventuring.

Thornton W. Burgess’ book continues revealing things about Reddy Fox I could not have imagined, “Only when he forgets and grins a little too broadly, so that he shows all his long teeth, does his face lose its pleasant look.”

Uh-oh, Reddy Fox may not always be nice and polite. Watch out, Jerry Muskrat!

Seven decades after Jerry and Reddy disappear, I find them again this morning. There, on a lower shelf of dusty books in my writing room…there is the book itself, still awaiting my touch, still sporting my fingerprints, “Jerry Muskrat at Home.” The book’s dust jacket front panel is marked with my penciled name.

Just inside the book, on the first blank page, is this hand-inked inscription, “Presented to James Reed 1950 for studying Sunday School lessons well. Mrs. Mills, Forest Lake Baptist Church.”

The jacket is tattered but bright, some pages are held together by cellophane tape, but the stories within are still there. The stories of all the critters that Burgess invented during a career that boasted 15,000 tales.

Hmm. Thornton W. Burgess was prolific! I wonder if he was one of my influencers?

Here I am all this much further along in my terrestrial journey, having written more than 2,000 stories. I’ll never catch up with TWB. But to this day I continue to weave my true tales, because they never end.

And I continue to this day to be annoyed and jarred whenever anyone anywhere interferes with my literary immersions, my fabulous journeys to anyplace but Here

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Published on March 17, 2019 07:11

March 10, 2019

HUNKERING DOWN WITHIN THE SAFE ROOM

HUNKERING DOWN WITHIN THE SAFE ROOM

You need a password in order to enter my Safe Room.

Being of sound mind and unsound body, I retain this password for my eyes only.

The Safe Room is the only place where I can retreat from the media gnats and surly siegers that constantly pound away at what attention span I can muster at any moment.

Even though I can cocoon myself when the world overbears itself, there is one point of vulnerability. My Safe Room has a large shadeless window.

The gnats and trolls and snarkies and stormers and pesties anxiously await my exit from safe haven to the world outside, ready to pounce the moment I show myself. I keep them at bay as much as inhumanly possible.

How do I know these annoying, sometimes mean-spirited critters are anxious to derail me? Well, I can see them outside that danged picture-window.

Within my Safe Room, I can examine and digest and prepare whatever shape I would like to present to the world. I can try my best to tamp down and control those unlikable primal irrational hair-trigger responses that seem to be built into me. I can remind myself that, seeing as how I am ensnared by the reality of being human, being on Earth, being surrounded by people who are also concurrently ensnared, I can at least spend my remaining time doing worthwhile things.

I have this deep-seated and frustrating desire to Be Worthwhile.

The sign that floats above me in plain view would make a good bumper sticker. The sign says:

BE WORTHWHILE

So, how do I protect myself from the thousand and one distractions designed to manipulate me, exploit me, win me over, alienate me—those thousand and one attempts to empty my wallet or capture my vote or tamp down my resistance to becoming part a lemming posse?

How do I make up my own mind? How do I behave like the independent entity I know myself to be?

A glance outside the Safe Room window provides all the motivation I require.

I don my protective Safe Garb, focus on the floating bumper sticker, take a deep breath, and exit the room, ready to wend my own way, ready to avoid all speed bumps and barriers and attackers, ready to seek the company of people who are kind and unselfish, ready to dismiss the exploiters, ready to assist the meek.

Ready to become worthwhile

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Published on March 10, 2019 06:27

March 3, 2019

HOW TO BECOME A HUMAN BEING

Listen to Jim’s 4-minute audio podcast: https://youtu.be/JMA-BIVSriU

or read his tale…

HOW TO BECOME A HUMAN BEING

I’m way Back There right now. Having re-calibrated a memory bank, I can be Back There anytime I wish. This is one of those times.

What is going on?

Back There I am fifteen years old. It is summertime. I am lolling about, jobless, confused about the present and clueless about the future.

Longtime neighborhood playmates have disappeared into adolescence, making tracks through puberty, no longer eager to run amok in the backyards and vacant lots of childhood.

Junior high and high school attendance distracts me from just plain having fun. Activities of daily living slam me with social structure and class division and the proprieties of being a properly acceptable teenager. Peers pressure me to be one of them. Outsiders still engage me.

I don’t know where I fit, so I am somewhere between the Ins and the Outs.

School will begin anew in a few days. Sixteenth birthday will interfere with my need to remain just plain Me.

I retreat into my books, I hide within my writings, I find occasional joy in participating in local theatre productions. I am a born actor and am most at ease with life when on stage, being someone else for ninety minutes.

Outside my books and journals, offstage, I am uncomfortable and clumsy and directionless.

I feel like a Martian. A goulash of hormones and growth spurts, always seeming on the edge, on the ledge.

As a Martian, I find a way to dialogue with myself.

“Self,” I say, “I don’t really care for being one of these humans. How did I become ensnared within this particular body in this particular family in this particular village on this particular planet? Why can’t I go back to Mars and feel real again?”

Self replies, “Well, you just have to adjust to what’s what. I do not know how you are going to escape this fine mess.”

I ruminate and retort, “As a human, I am so subject to having primal irrational hair-trigger responses to every thing, every primal feeling. This seems to be built into me.”

Self says, “Welcome to Earth. What’s the problem?”

“I just don’t care for this…this bumper car existence that shuffles me about and taxes me and challenges me and makes me feel as if I have no control over anything…”

Self grimaces, “That’s just the way it is going to be from now on. All you have to do is decide which it is going to be—the ledge or the leap?”

I know Self is right, but I need someone to talk to, so I continue, “The leap would solve my problems.”

Something within me—maybe a shard of intelligence attempting to get my attention—immediately identifies this sentiment as irrational and not quite accurate. I’ve studied Hamlet and I know that the leap in no way guarantees the end of my troubles. Things might be much worse Over There.

“OK, Self. I see where you are leading me.” I pause to find the right words. “You can take a break now. I know what I have to do. I basically have to dig myself out of this quagmire, stop whining, and just get on with doing what I can do.”

“Attaboy,” self mutters as he fades into the cobwebbed niches of memory.

I get up, wash my face, comb my hair, and grab a pencil to write a poem that just popped into view.

Someday I’ll share it with you. Maybe a few decades from now.

Meanwhile, allow me to be your Self for a moment, just in case you are not in touch with this imaginary but very real friend.

Follow instructions carefully:

Take the good from my stories. Look for the good. Use it to your advantage. Remain on the ledge.

Be a better person or at least a better purveyor of good than you were ten minutes ago. People are watching. The Ins and the Outs are looking for guidance and inspiration.

Whether or not I am always conscious of it, others do look to others, only more secretively than they did in the vacant lots of childhood.

They still want to know whether it is acceptable to have the same desire as you…to yearn to run guileless through good memories

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