I saw a squirrel running across the street today, with a full slice of pepperoni pizza in his mouth. He had the crust end in his teeth, and the pointed end out ahead of him. Hauling ass.
That has to be an omen of some kind, a portent of something. Only, I have no idea what; and I have even less of an idea of how to look it up and find out.
At the time, I was on the way to my ex uncle-in-law’s house, to bring him a tubing plum set for an IV pump, the kind with the cartridge at the end of the tube, instead of a filter.
Long story, but I’ll get to it …
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The universe is fucked up, man; fucked up in some basic ways. We look out into space and we see the smooth, starry sky, the Milky Way, the evenly expanding universe. But there are anomalies, rents in the fabric here and there. There are folds in the otherwise smooth surface that throw everything off. I don’t know the reason why.
It’s just fucked up, is all. And I intend to get to the bottom of it, if I’ve got to go to Mars and back to find out.
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Dusk was approaching, and the evening air was cool, dry, and comfortable. I was sitting on the deck in the backyard of my new house, post-cookout, savoring maybe my fourth or seventh Miller Lite pint of the day. Who knows? I don’t usually count.
I’ve been on a serious Stones kick lately, and I had Let It Bleed playing over the outdoor speakers, pretty loud, too. As Keith Richards launched into the searing, apocalyptic opening chord run of “Gimme Shelter”, I had a shiver run all the way through me. It wasn’t the weather that gave me goose bumps. I looked up and saw my next door neighbor, Ted, sitting in an adjacent lawn chair, a beer in his hands, his eyes closed and his head nodding slightly, to the music. He was smiling.
In the whole great universe, there are many wonderful things to see. I was thinking about that, sitting there rocking to the music, and I’d closed my eyes by then, too. I imagined a vivid image taken from outer space, from the kind of spy satellite that can take vivid pictures of the most minute details of things down on the earth. For some reason, on this day, out of all the awesome things on the planet they could zoom in on and look at, the guys operating the satellite decided to zoom in on my postage stamp-sized backyard (I recently moved into a garden home, of all things) in the tree-lined west end of Beaumont, near the Gulf of Mexico, in southeast Texas.
And what they saw, in vivid detail, was two middle-aged guys sitting in lawn chairs, beers in hand, eyes closed and heads bobbing in rhythm to something, some type of music, it seemed. It was probably the least important thing going on, on the entire Earth at that moment. Seriously, the satellite guys should have been looking for nuclear plants in Iran, or Al Qaeda camps in the Sudan, or something. Somehow, though, they found the sight of these two guys in lawn chairs, perfectly at peace, with the weather, with their lives, and their beers, and whatever the fuck music they were listening to … they found the sight of Ted and I so compelling for some reason that they couldn’t pan away, while meanwhile trucks full of weapons grade plutonium were rolling across the desert north of Tehran …
People are forever seeking inner peace; and they’ll climb to the mountaintop, move to the desert, blast themselves out and up amongst the stars, trying to find it.
And good luck to them, too. It is just that … some of us have found out you don’t always have to go very far to find inner peace. Sometimes it comes to you in un-beautiful places, in mundane surroundings. Not while viewing a breathtaking vista in the Himalayas, not amongst the austere, terrible beauty in the heart of the Sahara or Gobi, not out in the desolate reaches of outer space, looking back longingly at our blue, blue world … no, sometimes you may find your inner peace right where you live, in the smallest events, in the simplest details. The reason I shivered at the beginning of “Gimme Shelter” is because the perhaps unlikely combination of 60 degree weather, Keith Richards playing lead guitar on one of the best songs ever written by anyone, a little Miller Lite, and my friend Ted, brought to me a profound feeling of well-being and peace, right there on my 10 x 10 deck in my small backyard, in the wild west end of Beaumont, TX, USA, Planet Earth, Milky Way, Universe, 77707. I didn’t need sherpas or a Land Rover or a Saturn 5 rocket to find it. Just a couple of nine-packs of these bad-ass Miller Lite pints in aluminum bottles, a kick-ass outdoor stereo system (that came with the house), the second of four straight awesome fucking LPs by the greatest band of them all, and my neighbor Ted, who I have known for maybe two months now. That’s it.
The say you can see God in the tiniest details. I am not going to say you cannot. But, if so, then maybe God can see us in the tiniest details, too.
Ponder that over your next nine-pack, whilst listening to the Stones, in your backyard, with your neighbor. Then tell me if I am right, or if I am wrong.
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