Fishbowls and Football Fields

This is what happens when I'm grouchy and off-kilter and don't write anything for a long time.

In the great fishbowl of fate, it is hard sometimes not to feel dead in the water--like a moist, pebbly fish dropping, or a stiff plastic stem of seaweed, or a lumpy green clump of algae stuck to the side of the tank.

Work and alarm clocks and disappointments drag us down.
Chemicals in the brain fizz over into agony--apathy--dischord--sleep.

I was not who I am this morning. I haven't felt like myself all day.

I'm trying to be eloquent, but mostly what I feel right now is tired.

Tired of letting time slip away--tired of the ways in which the days force me to spend my time--tired of never having enough time to sleep--

Tired of the descant of drudgery splashed across the newspaper pages,
the wrath of ages,
the talking heads they tout as sages,
the dyspepsias of cubicle cages.

And things that rhyme.

I'm tired of using up my minutes on the minutae of my life.
Tired of composing melodious malefactions on the mismatched militiamen of the gridiron.

Every time I sit and pick at words, the time comes up empty.

I'm not making much sense, I know. I've slipped into the doldrums this week.

For the past several weeks.

I keep meaning to write something about football.... I keep meaning to write. And this week, when it seems like it would be most respectful to let the words fall flat and let time pass in silence--

I can't.

I keep thinking about Declan Sullivan.

And all sorts of things that go along with that, too, of course...youth and life and death and time, and what I use and what I waste, and what if I had been cut off at 20 years old? And all that sort of thing.

But it seems unwise to say too much on Sullivan specifically; what happened this week feels too far away and too close to home all at once, and anyway what could I say that has not been said already? Especially speaking of a person I never really knew.

I can only express, in the act of breathing in and out and pressing my fingers to the keyboard, the strange and unrelenting sensation of being alive...the solidarity of sleeping and waking and sensing that is shared among everything ephemeral, everything that dies.

And to say that, on the opposite tack some might take when speaking of perspective, in fact I think tomorrow means a great deal. To watch the game. To play the game. To sweat and scream and shiver. To be alive because we are alive. We owe that to ourselves, and to each other. And, in no disrespectful way at all, to the dead.

Every awakening--every spurt of blood--every slash of pain--every shaking press of palm to palm--

These are all saturated with the knowledge that we are vital, we exist, and sometimes I think the only real disrespect is to ignore that--to resent it--to be careless with our time and piss it away.

To stare down the field of fate and decide not to play.

I suddenly don't feel so stuck anymore.

In memoriam...

I will scream louder
I will live harder
I will breathe into every last inch of me
and I will not be afraid of time.