I Don't Know Anything Anymore

How I felt today.

Do you ever catch yourself in a moment and it feels like you are outside yourself looking in?

The people around you seem to buzz in a white noise hum of indecipherable words and sounds, while you sit very still, feeling invisible.

Someone catches your eye as they gesticulate wildly on a telephone call in the distance and you wonder who they are talking to. Maybe it’s a work call, someone dropping a ball they’d passed over trusting it would land in the right basket. Perhaps it’s a loved one who always rubs them the wrong way and today is a particularly spicy day. Or maybe that’s just what they look like when they talk on the phone. You’ll never know and it doesn’t matter.

Today I was waiting for a smoothie and a woman behind me told her son to stop touching things because they were covered with germs. I always like it when people talk about germs - to the average person they are this conceptual thing that looks like a little bug and will give you an illness if you get them on you. How it works we don’t know, but we like to talk about them like we do.

I once watched a kid licking a window in a Nordstrom Rack, and then he began tracing shapes in the spit trail he had left behind with his tongue. His mother screamed, “Neil don’t touch that, there are germs all over it!” and it took everything inside me not to say, “Uh, he was just licking that window from top to bottom for the last five minutes.” I didn’t. Although sometimes I still wonder how she would have responded if I did.

I stubbed my toe today alone at home and shouted, “Son of a mother fucking toaster!” I don’t know what this means or why it came out. Then I laughed at myself.

I ate a pancake. I thought about working out then forgot after getting wrapped up in scrubbing the stove. I ate corn chips while staring out the kitchen window at my neighbor’s house. They don’t talk to me anymore because of the stupidest misunderstanding of all time. The hedge they built to separate us has grown tall and reminds me of how long it’s been since we drank cocktails on the porch and laughed late into the night.

My dog hates peeing in the rain so I stood outside with an umbrella until she did. It was cold but the clouds were magnificent and I smiled a the ridiculousness of what I was doing.

Some days are weirder than others.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I alone can contend against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

— Uno de mis poetas favoritos, Pablo Neruda