Gratitude

Well the gals are gone for the weekend (off to St. Augustine to visit our friend Edie) and here I am contemplating Eurocentric Christ, who, in this portrait, looks suspiciously like a 3rd Allman brother. What's with these portraits, anyway? Everybody knows Jesus Christ was Filipino.

After I got back from the airport yesterday evening, with much still on my "to do" list, having narrowly escaped being trapped in Atlanta's traffic vortex, damn if I didn't forget to roll up the windows of the car. And, naturally, even though we're in the middle of a drought and general rainlessness is something we've all gotten used to, this is when it decided to rain, rain, rain all through the night whilst I slumbered. I woke up to the sound of it pounding on the heat pump outside our bedroom window. "Aw shit," and then I'm outside, in slippers, in a deluge, rolling up the windows to our Jeep soaked from the inside out, with four treed crows staring at me through the 6:30 a.m. mist.

There is an interesting problem ahead of me and my atomic family ('cause it sounds cooler than nuclear family) - getting to Iowa. We will do it, if it be Eurocentric Christ's will, but the details are hazy. We're actually a little too stunned to problem-solve. Stunned because we somehow aimed a snowball into the elephant's mouth at thirteen hundred yards, on the hottest day in Hell, with Hell freezing over on top of it, and made one Christ of a badass Kareem Abduul-Jabar skyhook right through the crosshairs and into the geometric center of that pachyderm's friendly ol' mouth.

It couldn't have happened without Janelle being the world's most supportive woman. And I don't mean that in any kind of "vague praise" way. Here's a woman who consistently made it possible for me to get time to write and work on those applications, which was a daunting task in itself, even in the midst of new parenthood and adjustment to the many life changes it entails. She helped phone and fax forms. She annied up some of the necessary funds for all those bleed-these-people-dry application fees (and they do add up). She made time - actually made time in a household where time is always the real commodity. Time to sleep. Time to eat. Time to connect. Time to work. Time to create...She did this. Because she's the bomb. An atomic bomb.

So, after all that downsizing and complaining about this inevitable Kali Yuga we are now in, and strategizing re: how to raise a child in all this cultural chaos, it would appear that our atomic family has been given an actual break. Or at the very least, an Adventure. And I'm glad. I like adventures. And this looks like it'll be a good one. So soon we'll figure out a way to start saving money for the Big Move North. And whatever will happen next will happen next.

One hundred and fourteen posts, ago, I started this blog with the intention of staying in touch with friends and having a means to process a certain kind of thinking and writing that falls somewhere between journaling, e-mailing, and rapping out on the loading dock with a Marlboro. Then I wrote: "Despite the fact that I'm no expert on Chet Baker, I'm currently writing a short story about him. And 2 kids. And head lice. And a psychotic uncle. And a factory. And interspecies miscegeny. And the railroad. My hope is that this short story will catapult me and my family into a writing program somewhere far away from this dead end town." Well, I'll be damned. (Gotta watch out for them hopes. They can get'cha.)