I was taking a good, hard look at my life for some reason and after falling asleep, I woke up while the rain did a passionate tango on the roof and the lightning flashed like a photo booth at a county fair and the thunder boomed and crashed and the dog hid under the bed looking for a safe spot, and then in the closet looking for a safer spot, finally wrapping himself up in an old blanket...it seemed to me that the day I did nothing but lay in bed until five p.m. with the shades closed and my imagination penetrating through the cracked ceiling and into the vastness of the sky--and it just ran around up there for a while, free and I touched the stars and drifted through the milky way...that was the best day of work I had ever done...seriously...in another world somewhere outside these walls and the walls of my mind, there were false deadlines imposed by imposters posing as somebody important, endless meetings about meetings, fake camaraderie from fakers...the days painfully crawling by like a wounded man on his hands and knees...many moons ago in a brick and mortar school somewhere in nowheresville where after learning to count and the ABC’s (everything else was pointless), I gazed out the windows for hours and hours and watched the snowflakes fall into their perfect resting places no matter where they fell...all of this taught me more than any bespectacled old stuffy schoolteacher or gray bearded professor ever could...no binders or syllabus’ required...just open up the mind like a parachute and let it drift to earth slowly slowly slowly...let the birds fly around it, the clouds drift by it--let it rain, snow, hail, get foggy, get soggy...let my mind go for a cruise...there are other days now, happy days that pass rapidly like a shooting star in the nighttime sky...now all that desperation and unhappiness...none of that mattered anymore and it all passed away and was buried under a warm sun, or a cool afternoon, or a rainy day, or with snow falling silently...I watched it all...the day I learned how to live from watching the passing clouds, changing forms, shapes, colors, blending in perfect rhythm to the sky behind them...one day on a small patch of grass in the backyard, just laying on my back with my back to the world and with no motivation eased my mind more than a medicine cabinet of pills could ever do...on a fall day with the fallen leaves crunching and smunching and breaking into a million little mosaic pieces--dogs barking, birds squawking, more leaves falling...red, yellow, brown, green, orange... under me and on top of me after I had fallen blissfully to the ground was of far greater educational value than all the years of learning, studying, and memorizing useless bits of information that they tell me is important...I wish I could get electro-shock therapy and erase all that garbage from my mind that they fill you with...none of that crap would do me any good if I lived on the earth for one thousand years...sitting on a front porch watching the snow accumulate on the cars, on the sidewalks, on the fringes of my mind and my hat...never feeling cold, just comfortable and becoming one with the snowfall...some might say I could sit and look at the clouds all day but that wouldn’t get me anywhere...of course I haven’t looked at the clouds all my life and I never got anywhere so I might as well look at the clouds...I feel like I’m finally making progress.
