Scree

Nighttime again and I’m in bed again. Actually on top of the bed. Too hot for blankets, even with the air conditioner and over-head fan running. My brain is running, too. Running hot and I cannot even begin to tell you what it might be that I had been thinking only a minute before. There is no backstop to the hard thrown pitch that curves in over home plate and slips by at the outer-edge, and still my body is burning up, my brain, boiling.

With a helpless sigh, I get up and pull on my shorts and a tee. Gonna sit out in the living room for a while, relax if I can, maybe fall asleep on the couch like I’ve done so many times since March. A slight chuckle huffs from my chest, exits my mouth at parted lips as I realize that I never used to falling asleep on the couch. What makes it so funny is that I promised myself that I’d never do such a thing.

Best laid plans — and all that bullshit.

Music. The bedroom door is closed so I don’t interrupt my wife’s sleepage and I turn on the radio, adding even more light pollution to the living room. The microwave and the stove’s lighted numbers, the refrigerators blue-glow of ice and water dispensers, the Internet tower and the TV satellite box.

We are not in Kansas anymore, nor are we in the 70’s or earlier.

Speaking of the fridge, one side is the freezer, where I keep the booze. Sure, I’m overheated on a rather warm night for October, but my taste-buds aren’t broken, so I help myself to tumbler of liquid-relaxation and trouble-starter. Isn’t gonna help my brain none either, but what the hell. I have all night and early morning if I need it and no place I have to be. So bottoms up.

The gentle fwup-fwup of the overhead fan feels good and the blades are syncopated with my heart’s beating.  But it seems that there is nothing decent on the radio. So, what about that black-box of NSA doom? I’ll ask her.

“Alexa, play soft-rock.”

“Here’s a station you might like, 70’s soft-rock.”

Two or three tunes in and I’m on my feet, slow dancing in the dark, by myself, a glass of whiskey in one hand, the other madly conducting the band. Berlin. Take My Breath Away. Whadda song, memories of youth well spent and the knowledge that my old age is being wasted.

More laughter, because that isn’t what I really meant to think. But now, I can’t recall what it was I was thinking. Two sips and this Scotch whiskey is already touching my head. Perhaps it isn’t the drink at all. Maybe it the fact that thoughts come and go faster than I can hold on to them. Seems to bug me more than when I was kid. Back then I used to tell myself that there was plenty of time for those lost thoughts to come back around.

Hmm…maybe I was right: my old age is being wasted.

So lets get serious! I walk to the back room, the computer room and switch on my best quarantining friend and it lights up at my touch. Time to get some of my rambling thoughts down on paper or rather the computer screen. Then it happens like it always happens — what the fuck was I thinking and what the fuck do I write about now. Oh, how the dirty, foul, vulgar words slam up against the gate that are my front teeth and I force them back, swallowing a considerable amount of sharp-edges that leave me feeling like my throat is grated and raw.

Then I think how at 12, my dad brought home a cassette recorder that someone had given him. It came with a blanket tape, a wall plug and microphone. It was the first time I’d ever heard my voice, stuttering and all, and I fell in love with the idea of talking into a mic. Over and over and over again I recorded myself till the tape finally wore out, getting so badly jammed that not even with a pencil could it be saved. Back then, though I don’t remember what I was gobbling about as a preteen, it seemed that I had a lot to say. Unlike then, his night — soon to be this morning – nothing come to mind and I’m happier to be pounding at the keyboard and not staring blankly, dumbly at a cheap microphone.

“God, help me,” I hear myself pray, “Clean up my dirty mouth, help me put my thoughts in order, help me write something more notable than this rambling scree and please, keep me cool and let me sleep. Amen.”