#uncoffeed...

Kalamazoo now has traffic circles. why does pain so familiar feel so good?  I play the same song over & over opening the same vein over & over recounting the crossroads where the path could have been different mighta been coulda been shoulda been woulda been never matters anyway It's not regret I'm feeling, no I'm playing Physical Graffiti to remember a particular permutation of me. The me who helped break a puppy out of dog jail. ...the one who once took a bunch of the blinky traffic signs and put them in someone's yard like their front door was blocked off...and then another day did the same thing but blocking off Douglas, one of the main streets in Kalamazoo. THERE WASN'T ANYTHING ELSE TO DO. We were kids who didn't want to go home. I was "raised" by old hippies. I'd given up on traditional life entirely, skipped school, and went downtown to hang in basements on the North Side with musicians who had weed and philosophy. They talked to m...

Today is the birthday of one of my soulmates.  I say it like that because I never think there's only one, but this one I had the good fortune to meet. We shared 12 years, a home, and many adventures. He was a father to my baby girl twice - first when he took us as family, and then later when she ran away from me as a teenager.  In 1995, he was diagnosed with a slow-growing Astrocytoma . He died in 2002, after we'd broken up 4 times by phone. He was living with another of his soulmates by then - I make assumptions, but I'm probably right, because even I knew she was the first girl he ever had a crush on.  I remember he used to tell me his mother thought she should get a gift on his birthday, for having given birth to him.  He also believed that she was a 15-year old virgin when he was conceived, and his parents were responsible and used a condom in 1954, and that obviously the condom broke because he was born. I only laughed at him once when he told this story;...