Being There

The light pierces from high-up transoms, crescendoing to a tilted whirl of glittering abeyance, cut soft through flutters of airy cloth. Low stakes. Terror in the brushy autumn colors. Lint free napkins tri-folded and arranged at obtuse angles on live-edge oak tables. The atmospheric skein is clean, humble, and muffled. A scuffling rumble, like an engine that used to purr but now just neighs and whines showing the scars of its rambunctious youth that only now seem like hard-won badges of better times. A stickler of vagueness, this reticent preemie of an idea man, creeps onto the scene. He’s late to it. A prop plane for your thoughts to skim. Chin chiseled into the withering scrub and loam of the festivities. There’s not a lot left to scope, but he’ll make out the gravel sounds and shovel divots just the same in all that violet air of dusk. Boy, is he with it.

These folks, they smoke cigarettes in their bathrobes. Tacky. It’s an affectation. That’s all. I’m not like that. I’m ethereally real. The designer-grimy aesthetics of a parking lot attendant. The slippery hair of a night mechanic. The concave manners of a pawnshop trombone. I can stipple with the best of them.

“Not exactly utilizing your skill set, are they?”

“Nope. Nope. Getting nothing but grief.”

A frontage road hugs the river in a sort of gorge or bubbled-up blurring between machine…