Fat and Easy on its Own Good Time
It’s snowing just fine as the winter makes a spicy wrap out of this, my latest new coffee shop. The walls are zesty, the seats are empty, the music is depressing but comfortable, and the green tea is made in Portland, Oregon. Scratching the back of my bald head seems fine. Looking people in the eye and saying “hi” seems just fine. Smoking two cigarettes in a row seems just fine, and as my stomach swirls around the smoke and some strange sort of carbonation-like gas from the tea, I feel completely at ease with my life.
Entertaining the idea of progression vs. depression, that if a mind isn’t moving forward, it’s moving backward, nothing that I’ve originated myself, I’m sure, but definitely the basic ethos of my 20-something or longer experience. If I’m not delving into new experiences, drastic grand new ones where I’m living in far away lands or beginning a freelance career or wooing a long lost lover, then I’m slowly sinking into mediocrity, continuity, elasticity that whitens the rubber band under the weight of a brick its trying to hold up.
But in the moment between, or perhaps in the moments just leading up to progression, there’s a solace in the simple easy pleasures of what life is. Walking down a particular street where the building is painted my most adored shade of olive and if I look up I can see the carved out gargoyle faces that go unnoticed as the hundred or so people who walk underneath their spitting smiles stare at their feet passing by. Sipping a simple tea, no milk, no honey, just water and leaf, the smooth, hot, bland flavor coating my throat in perfect compliment to the right blend of Turkish and domestic tobacco sliding down the middle. Or fashioning a meal from the freshest vegetables in the new Winter, a simple salad, with good cheese, thick and dripping olives, avo, tomatoes and a variety of vegetables – hold the lettuce, please.
Discovering the moments where life is a drop of water clinging to a leaf, getting fatter and fatter, exactly at the point where the leaf has buckled just enough under the weight that the drop isn’t quite clinging to the leaf anymore, but it hasn’t become rain yet falling down. It’s just in the middle, fat and easy on its own good time.
Up Next: A Maple Tree, Chapter 7