It's Never the Same Place Twice

Life is good right now, but it still boggles my mind how quickly things can change. Just like the sea, deceptively peaceful and harmonious one moment then violent and deadly the next never the same place twice. Its not about avoiding storms but steering through them. People keep telling me that darkness purifies the soul, and I am beginning to not trust any person who has never really suffered through anything in their lives. Until then, how could you take life seriously? How could you otherwise rid yourself of the stupid impulses and compulsions that waste your time and life until you start being serious about living well? It makes me appreciate the things in my life that are the most solid and enduring - like my family with all of their flaws and all our strange traditions and our culture and the house I've lived in for the past eight years more or less (minus short stints living elsewhere having crazy adventures). With all other facts of life transient and fleeting those are the things that will keep you on an even keel, what you come home to.

My legs feel strong, I've been racing them. Skating hard, riding bikes, dancing. My ankles are the same size again and my brain has been springing with endorphins.

Whenever it rains pain shoots up and down my leg. Those aches are so abstract to me now, because as long as I can move my leg I will. There have only been a couple of times in the past couple of months that I've felt crippled by the pain, like when I tried boardslides four days in a row and didn't land most of them. The next day I was reminded of that horror when one block suddenly feels like four because you have to limp down it at less than one mile per hour. Thats when I got back into healing mode and slept a lot and ate food for a few days and just chilled. But otherwise I keep my joint loose by soaking it constantly compulsively stretching it, alternately working it.

Dedicated Skateboarder For Life

Stepped onto my skateboard for the first time in 4 months and 25 days!!! The longest stretch of time off the board in years. Dropped back into the pool after making the sign of the cross and right away I remembered why. I can't help that I was born and raised in Chicago and the only things we have to surf here are concrete waves.

I still got it, and I was more than ready.

A big fuck all ya'll to anyone who ever thought that the broken bone would break me, and stop me from skateboarding again. And a punch in the face to anyone who assumed I would never find the will to get back on the board. I know its not the most ladylike thing to say, but its insulting and unsupportive to be doubted. The only people who said things like that were people who either don't skate at all or have never really skated with me, i.e. people who don't know what they are talking about. Ya'll don't know me and you don't know my style.

And if I fall again and have to get pulled out of another ramp or pool with a broken body, I'll be on the stretcher giving the finger to them and it would still be worth it. I skate for love, for no other reason and I am dedicated when it comes to the things I love.

Plus, I'm insured now bitches!!!!!

Hello from the BVI's

From the Leeward Island chain, Virgin Gorda, the British Virgin Islands:

There goes life being stranger than fiction again.

For the 2nd time in as many years, I've been summoned to a faraway tropical island ostensibly for the purpose of business. Hilarious considering that I've made it my business to avoid all matters of serious business, and have been quite successful in this throughout my life. I wasn't even really looking for a serious job this time, but it found me. What has actually happened is that I have spent a small percentage of my time discussing matters of importance, and the rest exploring the coral reefs and ocean life. It has always seemed to happen at just the right time, and I feel that the ocean calls me.

I'm diving wrecks - and getting sponsored to do so. Around this particular island, there are 200 documented shipwrecks. Its not a very big island either. The pirates of the 1500's used this group of islands to exit the Caribbean and sail out to the Atlantic. Many fierce battles ensued, and the pirate ships were sunk. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island about this area.

Its a very odd twist of fate considering that at this time last month I was freaking out about my leg still being in a cast and wondering when I would ever walk on my feet again. Now I feel whisked away to be in the element where I feel most happy, beneath the ocean water flying through the deep pressure of inner space exploring the colors that wash through the diffusion of the light. Divers call it getting off the rock. My body springs back to life in the water. I traded the fiberglass for fins, much more suited to my well being, and the swimming is way better physical therapy than anything anyone can devise. I've slept on the water and been lulled and comforted by the waves of the sea. Everything has been falling into place as if by some grand orchestration, I've been meeting all kinds of people who have become instrumental in healing me. Life is not just crazy, its ridiculous and mine continues shift surreally between the extremes of absolute beauty and absolute misfortune. As usual.

Got the Cast Off!!

I had my eleven week visit to my orthopedic doctor today, and as I entered the hospital I closed my eyes and made the sign of the cross.

"I am sorry God, but if they tell me that they're wrapping my leg up and that I am going to have to be on crutches one more time, I am afraid that I am not going to be able to stop myself from just breaking out of here."

I was inspired by the story that a girl told me at Stephen's house about her friend whose arm got wrapped up, and got so frustrated by the debilitating aspect of being in a cast that he just cut it off himself and just let his broken bone dangle. Fuck it. At least he was free. At this point I was willing to deal with the consequences. This situation was starting to feel unnatural.

The P.A. sliced into the fiberglass shell with a small 1 1/2" circular saw, I could feel the heat of it close to my skin as it barely grazed the gauzy underwrapping of the cast. They pried it apart, and I lifted my leg out and started laughing.

"It looks like it belongs to a mummified leper with anorexia!"

You don't want to know what I mean by that, lets just say that I am due for a long session with the foot scrub and pumice stone. I hobbled over to the x-ray department. The x-ray technicians know me by now, they find me and my story very peculiar, but we're cool - one of them even gave me a ride home last time. I high fived them and posed for my shots.

He came back with bad news.

"It's still broken. It's probably going to be a year before its fully healed up. You broke it bad, girl. This ain't no greenstick fracture, this was a real break. They're probably going to cast you up again, you're fixing to be off your feet for a while still. But you didn't hear it from me. I'm not the doctor."

That was the last thing I wanted to hear, and I grabbed the x-rays and moped back to the orthopedic office, fighting back the tears. I drew the images of my bones in my sketchbook as I waited for the doctor, and eyed the door as I hatched my escape plan.

Finally my doctor came around, and picked up my x-rays. He looked at them for just an instant, looked at my chart, and felt up my ankle.

"You've been off your feet for eleven weeks now, I think we can start you walking now."

"Shut up!"

"No, seriously."

"But my bone is still broken in the x-ray."

He launched into an explanation of why that was, bones heal slowly, it takes time, blah blah blah; while I adjusted to the idea that he was really giving me the go ahead to walk without a cast. The P.A. strapped an aircast around my ankle.

"Go ahead, stand up!"

I felt like the Little Mermaid and held onto the doctors hand as I placed my foot with wobbly assurance onto the ground, and on the way out of the hospital I made the sign of the cross again; this time I prayed with much more humility.

* * *

During the darkest moments of being off my feet, I consoled myself by remembering better times. Nine months ago I was on the other side of the world on a tropical island spending weeks exploring and studying the mysterious vibrant coral reef, swimming in the color and life of the ocean, alone except for the cute guys from all over the world. I fell into that experience just as I fell into this one - headlong fully unexpectedly and by chance.

Through my sadness, I told myself the same thing that I remember telling myself the day I scuba dived with the whale sharks: this moment is going to pass, and you'd better experience it fully now because it isn't going to last, and it will never come back. Nothing lasts, everything will definitely change. It is the only physical fact.

I wish that I could say that I handled this experience with grace and dignity, but that would be a total lie.

Last month I found myself bubbling over with frustration over the restrictions my injury imposed on me. Skateboarding is the only thing that I can do in the middle of a shitty day that will neutralize my anxiety; if I am pissed off and I go and skate, chances are that when I return I will be totally stoked out, or at least I'll have been able to brush off what it was that bothered me. If I can't go out and skate, then I'll go out and dance.

As I hobbled around feeling like a robot, with the prosthetic freakishness of my crutches and hard cast, my reality spiraled into a bleak and desolate dream.

I remember a string of days of waking up to the hard repressiveness of that fiberglass prison and closing my eyes wishing I could go back to sleep for a thousand years. I slipped down the stairs and busted my lip when I stubbornly tried to do my laundry by myself, resulting in the corner store guys gently urging me to "take it easy" when I hobbled in for some vitamin d milk.

My boyfriend broke up with me the week before Valentines day, just a few days after I had quit smoking cigarettes for the first time in ten years. I think you have to be a girl to see the horror in that. I couldn't drink coffee or ingest any refined sugar, and drinking alcohol was out too - all that stuff is bone robbers. Everything that I loved and was all about was suddenly on the other side of life. All I could do was lie back and contemplate it all, it felt so unbearable. Then later that week I went to the doctor and found out that my fracture was complicated because of the way that it broke, and that I wasn't going to be healing up as fast as I had hoped and be off my feet indefinitely. It was absolutely sadistic fortune, and it was then that I learned the meaning of the word despair. I also gained insight into such lovely terms as 'nihilism' and 'existential angst' - they were no longer just academic concepts, that shit made sense in a terrible way that it never had before. One interesting thing that I learned about myself was that while I could bear the physical pain of my broken bone with no problem and no painkillers, the emotional effects felt overwhelming and those were the times that I wanted an anesthetic for my heart.

When a few beats had passed, all of the bogus things that went down started to seem ridiculous. Like there was no way that life could get any more absurd or preposterous if you tried to engineer it that way. It dawned on me that shit was so bad, it was funny. There is a fine line between tragedy and comedy in the human experience, which is why the masks of drama are laughing and crying. And it is very characteristic of my life to have things shift in such an extreme, for events to unfold in a fantastically exaggerated way. I couldn't really laugh about it until today, because until now its just been too personal, but I could see the humor in the whole situation.
On the brighter side of things, I finally quit smoking after being a dedicated tobacco enthusiast for half my life. I never even wanted to quit smoking before, but now that I feel the difference I am so glad that I did. I weaned myself of my vices, switched to green tea, ate fruit instead of candy, took vitamins and hydrated like a motherfucker. Almost every vice: chocolate and herbs have healing properties so I figured I owed it to myself to continue to enjoy those, but after Ash Wednesday it was in moderation.

Things changed when I realized that the only thing that I had any control over in this situation was my attitude. It took being around a few good people who set a shining example for me of the difference between being a nurturing force for health and life as opposed to one of negativity and destruction. The one conclusion that I've come to at the end of the experience, on this day that they cut off that freaking cast - its going to sound really dopey to you if you have never been hurt, but fuck it one day you'll understand - but its this: what it all comes down to is that its really just all about love.

Love heals everything. Even if you have to generate it yourself and you feel like you don't have any reserves. I am not a hippie, and I am more sober minded than I have been in years and I'll still say it. I don't care how trite that is. Love is the only thing that can heal you and until I die I hope to always be a force of love.

Crrraaacck Went My Bone

Last August I turned 26, and with a straight face determined that this would truly be the year that I would pack away all the youthful frivolousness and whimsy that I have celebrated in my life since I was way too young, tone it down and take off on a new threshold of maturity. I went out and bought a new suit and high heels to acknowlege how serious I was about growing up, and then proceeded to charge like a hothead through a series of very adult situations. 

So its kind of odd that five months later, I find myself adapting to a new routine of drinking milk, napping with my foot propped on a teddy bear, crawling on my knees up the stairs and crushing on a comicbook superhero. I mean, there were times that I thought I was regressing into childishness before, but it now appears that I've devolved all the way back to the crib, living the lifestyle of a little baby.

The bad omens

The day after the New Year, I went out to the skatepark with the grlz to skate off our weekend hangovers and start the year right. We braided our hair and danced in our seats all the way down there. It was a progressively rowdy car ride. At one moment I found myself simmering down and laying back staring up at the sky, watching the rhythm of the passing electrical poles. I noted the assembly of small black sparrows perched on the electric lines, there was like four miles of uninterrupted bird sitting alongside the road perched wing to wing. As we sped further forward, the birds started to flock in bigger groups, clustering in from smaller groups coming from different directions.

We turned the music off and marvelled. After a couple of miles they were flying in massive clouds of black and looked like liquid shapes that shifted directions, funneled twisted and spun. The bird formation was at times hundreds of meters wide, groups would break off and come back, flying faster and faster. They surrounded our car, got close, flew straight to the windshield and spun away, came back and swirled around us. We were getting closer to the skatepark and the black birdcloud was still escorting us.

We were just a few blocks away from the skatepark and I was still staring transfixed out the window. My rapture was broken with a jolt when my eyes landed on the sign for the ambulance company that screamed *emergency!* and was situated unfortunately just a few blocks away from the skatepark. I sat up and shook myself back to reality and hoped I might never have to be in one of those.

We entered the skatepark, our usual spectacle of disorderly femininity and immediately aroused the ire of the girl at the front desk, wearing head to toe skate gear and the mug of a gargoyle. "She must not skate at all," we collectively thought at the same time as she glared at us with beady eyes, and possessively placed her hand on Bob, the guy at the desk. She smooched him, while staring at us with a peripheral sideways glance. We shifted uncomfortably. "Nice shoes!" I said. She ignored me. A girl skater would have been excited to see us, at least as excited as her boyfriend was. My cousin rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue in her cheek lewdly. We signed in and bought our way into the new girls skate free! Tuesday club that Bob agreed to start there on the spot.

Yippeekiyay

We warmed up in the pool and loosened our muscles. It was slippery with waxy masonite and required a lighter gentler touch than concrete. It took a while to grow accustomed to the feeling of the pool, but I was getting stoked out more by the minute. It had been such a long time! I had a few tentative runs and realized that this bowl was small enough for me to get up to the lip consistently and had enough compact curves to speed me around endless lines. I worked my way up from just hitting the back truck for a 5-0 and then I finally found a place where I can stick a long 50-50. I've been wanting to do that. I started experimenting and seeing if I could get my front wheels over the lip and try a feeble grind. Yeehaw! Almost! I took a break and called my boyfriend to brag that I was skating and he wasn't. That bowl was fun.

Hours past and we were skating hard, we moved to the street course and did some wall rides. I made some miserable attempts on the manual pad and got super frustrated with my stabs at landing my flip, which I have sometimes then lose. So I snuck back to the pool and did some runs, my heart was beating hard now and I was having so much fun, I was almost delerious.

Here's when it happened

A girl came up to the platform and started talking to me, Corinne and Cheryl. We high fived her and just started chatting while we took turns skating. She asked me how to drop back into the pool from a 50-50 and I couldn't explain it. "Uh, you just twist and drop? Do you know what I'm talking about? Here, let me show you."

I waited for the last skater to leave the pool and balanced my trucks onto the lip. Something felt wrong from the moment I stepped on the board, but I just did what Mariah does and I shook it off. Something felt wrong as I pivoted on the back truck, but I pushed down with the front anyway because I was explaing something to someone. Something felt wrong as I was sliding down, but I figured it might be salvageable...

As my back wheel hung up on the lip, I dropped forward five feet to the ground, where at some point along the way the edge of my shoe by my pinky toe caught the ground as my leg and my body twisted the exact opposite direction, crushed on top of it. I heard a snap, inhaled, said "FUCK!", and knew that whatever happened it was serious. My foot had bent beckwards, the wrong way. It hurt so bad I couldn't hide it, or get up; the two things I normally do immediately when I fall. My leg spasmed and shook and inwardly I screamed, and as I got onto my elbows to look up, I saw three helmeted rollerbladers and two bikers gaping at me. I thought for a moment they heard my silent scream, before I realized that they were just shocked because they saw it all. I summoned my best glare and shot them with it, then looked for my friends. They mobilized into action, Cheryl took off my shoe as I tried not to cry and I hopped out of the pool with my arms on their shoulders. I realized that for the first time in my life I had to be carried out of the bowl. 

I'd never sprained my ankle before or broken any bones. I've donated blood to the concrete, and lost a lot of skin, but my skeletal frame has always been intact. The only other time I had ever been injured somewhat seriously was the time that I got a concussion from skating in the rain like an idiot at Wilson, and me and Whitey crashed into each other head on - our skulls hit the ground and I was seeing stars. That was painful more for how stupid it was than actual nervous system trauma.

"I never thought I get broke off in a pool this small!" I said as they got me onto the bench and ran for ice.

"That's happened to me before. You're talking to a professional ankle roller. We just have to get ice right away," Corinne said.

I'd never sprained my ankle before so I didn't know how that was supposed to feel, and looked dubiously at my foot, which now dangled at freakish angle. "Do you think its sprained?" I asked.

"Yeah. The same thing happened to me before. You should get an aircast. In two weeks you'll be fine."

"Two weeks? I can't waste two weeks of my life hobbling around! I have all kinds of shit to do!"

"Well maybe you could get back on it in a week and a half."

"That sounds better."

Bob the guy at the front desk came over. "Its probably a sprain", he decided and I was relieved that that was what they though it was. A different girl was with him, rubbing his ass.

"You think its a sprain? Does that girl want to kick our asses now too?" I asked my cousin. "I hope its a sprain."

"Hey," she said, "do not ask me. I am not a doctor."

"Yeah. It has to be a sprain."

But there was no way that I was going to take a single step on the foot, and when Cheryl asked if I could walk to the car I refused. I knew I couldn't.

I looked around in a panic as the cold blood from the ice seemed to trickle through my body. Everyone here was like thirteen years old! I needed help! Then I spotted Brian C. walking up the stairs, he just got there and was tying his shoes. He was a family guy and the father of several small children and I trusted him as a responsible adult and recalled the time that he broke his wrist at Wilson. I was so glad to see him.

"Brian Carly! Could you please please please carry me out to the car? I weigh around a hundred pounds! I don't want to try to make it down the stairs!!!"

He saw the ice pack and winced. He picked me up and carried me as I tried to remain calm and make small talk. "So, how's your wrist?" I asked. "Oh my wrist, that was so long ago. Its fine. Don't worry, it's probably just a sprain. This happens to me all the time," he said. We talked about pain and sprains and I hugged him before we sped off.

Bloody aftermath

A few days later, my foot had swollen to about the size of a small loaf of bread. I wrapped it and had been taking ibuprofen, which didn't help at all. I had tried very hard to remain calm, but the pain was so intense and there seemed to be no end to the swelling. I started to worry that it might explode, because it felt that thats what it wanted to do. My brother the medic examined at my foot and felt a weak pulse in it, which was a good indication that it wasn't badly broken. He diagnosed a type III sprain, or a fracture. Fuck. I was still going with the sprain. 

Dave D. had come over to visit and brought over some crutches. "I'm out of here!" I proclaimed as I bounced out of bed to stand on my leg. I felt something shift just under my knee from my ankle movement and got the chills. I continued to bury that thought, then proceeded to crutch around town.

I was lying propped up with ice tucked all around my ankle, which was throbbing and still swelling. I looked at it in horror and felt my blood grow colder. My emotions were bottoming out and I don't actually remember much of that evening at all, but was told later on that I was cranky beyond belief, picked several fights and insulted my boyfriend's art. I am still ashamed of it. It was the pain! All I can truly recall was the feverish sweating and the deepest agony in my bones, drifting in and out of dreams that started with the sound of that *SNAP* that I heard when my ankle twisted and evolved into a gallery of terror and dread. In one of my dreams, I was a galloping black horse and I heard a sharp crack, then collapsed in a pool of cold icy blood as I was shot in the leg. In another, I was a person in midstride hearing battle cries, then cut down fallen to my knees when an axe swung fast at my ankle and it crunched, in a red and orange swirl of heat. I woke up sobbing, at which point J. picked me up and carried me into a cab headed for the emergency room.

A couple of vicodins later things were still unreal, but at least my nerves were calm. My temperature was a few degrees colder than normal. I looked at the x-rays of my foot with the radiologist, who pointed out the place on my fibula where the bone had broken cleanly. The prognosis was 6-8 weeks with perhaps a surgery to repair the broken tendons by the small bones in my foot. "So it was broken!" I said with wonder. Denial is strangely comfortable, but coming to the bottom of things is way more satisfying. No wonder why I couldn't walk on it, duh. The emergency room doctor came around with strips of plaster to splint my leg and told me to roll over on my stomach.

"You want some more painkillers? I can get you some."

"No thanks. I think I'm going to puke from the ones I already took."

"You know, this splint is going to be pretty big when I finish setting it. Do you want a, uh, hospital gown? Because otherwise you might have to cut your pants off with some scissors when you get home." 

"There is no way I am going to traipse around here in a hospital gown," I said, eyeballing the gangbanger moaning in the bed across the hall with his chest wrapped up around his stab wounds, and the old man lurched up next to him gaping across the way. "I would rather die, and I will sacrifice my pants not to have to do that. Could you just fix my foot and make sure to set it straight, please?"

The events proceeded with an awkward silence until I could finally get up and hobble away. I felt like Sophocle's punchline to the Oracle of the Sphinx's riddle to Oedipus, the "What walks on four feet than two feet than three feet?" I've healed fast from every injury I've ever had, and look at this as a good opportunity to make my ankles more solid, and stronger. I come from the sort of people who maniacally think that abusing the fine lines between life and death is loads of great fun and the only way to live, and that painful situations are useful as ninja training. I'm using all the hopping around that I'm doing on the good leg to build up strength so I can nollie on it and the balance to help do better nose manuals.

Life continues to move forward at breakneck speeds.  It's very convenient being a skateboarder and feeling accustomed to moving fast and reacting quickly physically to quick changeups and force yourself to skate through the pressure.  The good news is that I haven't bailed on any hills I've bombed lately.

The tone was set a few weekends ago when Inbum dropped the needle on a record of ghoulish laughter from beyond the grave.  It was some echoing voodoo caca hoohoo haha's.  He was playing it over Vincent Price's monologue from Thriller, a normally pretty scary thing to listen to, but the absolute height of freaky creepiness to me that night.  "Why can't I stop dancing to this?" I asked myself, as I clutched my skull fearing that I might seriously be tripping out.

It was a good thing I was dressed as a superhero that night, as was my cousin, because we needed some sort of supernatural force field to deflect all the deep pressure of the dark Halloween night.  The Chicago White Sox had just swept the World Series and beat Houston TX in baseball.  Every night during the weeks building up had been lively.  I had been spending a good portion of the night hours prowling the streets like a werewolf with restless energy.  The night before, my cousin and I visted a haunted house, where we practiced our ninja skills by jumping into every horror filled, strobe lit room and spooking the monsters and scary clowns before they could scare us. 

Mars orbited very close to the earth that very night.  I pointed it out to my cousin Cheryl as we drove west.  At 11PM, it was 65 degrees above the horizon and glowed strongly, a very bright red. 

"That's your planet!" I told my cousin, an Aries.  "The god of war.  I can't believe we can see it this clearly!  And its Halloween"

We mused upon the sight as we felt the effects of the chocolates sink in.  She put on her mask and gloves, I strapped my guns to my thighs and checked to make sure I had a lighter.  Both of us reapplied our lipstick and searched in vain for eyedrops.  We got out of the car and strode confidently towards the door of the party.  We stopped abruptly.

"Oh shit, I forgot my phone!"

"I forgot my wallet!"

Fifteen minutes later we were still in the car a few blocks away from the party and no closer to being ready.  We drove up closer so that we were right in front of the party, and finally we made it through the door.

"What the hell kind of superheroes are we?!?"

As the night proceeded, we made our way through clowns of masked strangers and found refuge in the company of some dancing bunnies with manic energy.  Everything in that party quickly developed a coating of booze, including somehow my hands and cigarettes.  We boogied down on a white glowing dancefloor with built in transitions, a floor to wall quarterpipe where the corners should have been.  I had been sulking enviously watching the girl dressed as a roller chick because she had roller skates on and could skate the dancefloor.  The guns were an absolute necessity as we fielded several leers or evil eyes and pushes and shoves, all of which were quickly stunned by a quick shot by the water gun.  I put perfume in it before I left the house and found myself being obnoxiously trigger happy.

"Where the hell is my skateboard?" I wondered out loud, and I looked around.  I spotted an old flat nosed torpedo of an old school deck flipped onto its side at the edge of the dancefloor.  "Whose skateboard do you think that is?" I shouted in Chewie's face.  He was wearing a bloody pink tutu and Mickey mouse ears

"That's Jeremy's".

"Who's that? I wonder if he'd let me ride it."

He pointed to the pillar, where I had noticed a figure standing motionless watching for the past half hour. 

"Excuse me, dude? Can I ride your board?  I've been wishing for a skateboard all night!  This shit is bananas, there's no corners on the dancefloor!  Seriously, when does that ever happen?"

I handed over to him my spray painted black squirt guns to make it an even trade, and skated the dancefloor.

It was nice to be able to skate around the crazy party in my costume for a moment and regain my sense of balance.  That skateboard, a wide sturdy Santa Cruz reprint of a 1988 Jeff Kendall board, was a solace to me.  The pressure of the night was building, and already felt intense.  Outside the night was filled by the sound of sirens and most of the people at the party looked like strangers from some foreign city underneath their masks.  And the boomers were kicking.  We ate the second half of the chocolate. 

"What we are witnessing here is the force of gravity between two large planets.  How could things not feel very intense when large heavenly bodies swing close to each other?  It is a natural phenomenon that we are seeing made manifest by everybody acting all bizarre," I reasoned pedantically like a geek as my cousin and I moved to the next party in the car.  "Actually this is all very normal."

We pulled over to park on a dark empty street, and I stepped out to the curb to smoke a cigarette and regard the night sky.  Cheryl was looking for her phone or something in the car, and Jeremy sat in the backseat keeping her company.  I had dragged him along, when I stood in the doorway of the party and demanded to know if he wanted to hang out with a couple of superheroes for the night or what.  So I was trying to relax a little bit and was in mid-thought when I saw a figure walking fast in the dark towards me.  I sat very still and watched as a man emerged in the light, trying the handles of the doors and looking into the windows of all the cars parked on the street that I faced.

"What the hell are you doing?"  I couldn't stop myself from talking shit in the silence of the streetlamps.

He looked up and saw me staring at him.  He shot me this hard look from across the street, then kept walking.

"Don't be a jerkbag."

He glared at me intensely and I glared back.  He walked away, swiftly, not looking back.  I stubbed out my cigarette and jumped back in the car and locked my door.  "This shit is bananas."

We walked down Milwaukee Avenue, past car accidents and police cars all over the place.  I was trying to remember where I put my id, when I heard a voice stop me.

"Hey! Come over here!"

I looked over and a policeman in a vehicle called me over.  I felt that I had no choice but to go over there.  He looked me over.

"You know we're giving out tickets for jaywalking tonight."

"Oh shit.  I am so sorry officer.  I didn't realize I was jaywalking."

"You're not supposed to cross the street until the light says walk.  If you don't, then that's jaywalking."

"Ok."

"Next time I will give you a ticket."

"Well thanks."

I walked away with the pressure of a thousand emotions.  When another cop asked me across the block what the matter was, I stopped again. 

"That guy almost gave me a ticket for jaywalking! Are you serious? I try to follow most of the laws every day and this is just too much for me to bear tonight!  I just stopped a guy from breaking into cars; where were you guys?  It's Halloween and I am just seriously overwhelmed, so I am sorry that I jaywalked, but I have had so much on my mind, I've been through so much this week and everything is just crazy! I am sorry for jaywalking, what else can I say!!"

"So where's your boyfriend?  That guy was just trying to talk to you, forget about him."

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, but this was an emotional crescendo and I just went with what felt more natural, which wound up being the latter.  I started bawling.

"It should be illegal for you to ask me that!"  He let me go with no further questions.

As the night wore on, more images of ghosts and spirits swirled in my head.  I had to at least get off the street and away from the cops.  Far away from the noise and the light of the city, I huddled in a the sanctuary of a dark room listening to the voice of a boy whispering about the souls that haunt him, that continue to ride through life with him.  I told him a ghost story of my own.  It certainly felt like the eve of the beginning of the dark season of the year.

Ifelt the presence of certain ghosts, from Jim Morrison's voice singing
to me all day through the radio, in Walgreens and even on tv, and books
of his poetry falling off my shelves and into my hands, to Oscar
Wilde's plays making their way into my path.  I had visited both of
their graves earlier this year.

The ancient Celts count the first day of winter -the dark season, the end of the light season- as November 1st and bring it in with a festival called Samhain.  This was a time in which the realms of the living and the dead were blurred and chaotic forces would invade the world of order.  What a coincidence.  During this time, spirits of the dead and spirits yet to be born were said to walk amidst the material world.  Magic is most potent during this time of the autumn solstice.  In Norse mythology, it was a night said to be overrun by mischievous elves.  They were all most likely laughing at me. 

the pace of this place

Racing through hours and minutes that pass

I've seen twelve things in the time it takes

to catch one breath.

moments slip past in a flash

faster and faster

my eyes and my mind

slice like razors through time

cutting my path through its fabric.

(when I can hold them steady)