Self-defense

Anything I say about Cherl leaving is going to sound defensive, right? “He was not good to me.” How do you defend yourself from that? In future posts here I’ll detail it all to the last bloody Eggo waffle, believe me. To half-quote Slick Willy, it depends on what your definition of good to me is. When you’re not married and there’s no money to divvy up, a woman can get in her car and simply drive off to San Luis Obispo, move in with her old college roommate Lisa Kleinfelter, and call your son to tell him it’s over. Roomies again! How nice for them.

I wish now that I’d slit her tires after the last fight, instead of just crawling into the tent and passing out. (We keep a tent pitched out back, originally for Cherl’s little nephew Hammond who sometimes came down from Flagstaff. Soon the tent became a place for me to sleep after I stormed out of the double-wide after a brawl. Or sometimes I wouldn’t storm out, I’d be literally kicked out the back door like a schnauzer.)

Sinking my Roman Meal pocket knife into each of her tires occurred to me that night, it really did. Something must have told me she was going to leave. I think it was her saying, “I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” over and over.

That was my reality. Today my reality was toddling down to the pool in my jams, towel over shoulder and J. Milton tucked under arm, and being told that I can’t go in the pool. I asked the guy why not. I’m shocking it today, he said. How do you do that, I asked. He said, You pour in this stuff called shock. Oh, I said with bottomless gravity. Stuff called shock. I know about that stuff.
laaame private joke and play on words. There’s no poems in that. That is truly the stuff of BLOGS.