Rants in the Key of Buddah

She was a Romney, sweet and hardcore.
Preferred to travel the dirt roads and experience the backwater.
Every year a new life in a new city.
Always kind to waiters, it’s a life she knows well.
She listens to Tom Waits once a week.
Prefers her bourbon neat.
Her fiction of choice is hard boiled but has a book of travel in her pocket.
Always will have a thing for Jim Morrison, always toast to his memory.
She cries because they’ll never meet.
Her best memories are lines in her skin
At 27 she has a canvas  full.
Every new record is an event,
the warm sounds bring her comfort,
like the scratches in the grooves
she knows her imperfections.
The abrasions  in the vinyl add to the song.
Her life lived as a record spun.

Reading a lot of Calvin and Hobbs lately has made me aware of why I’ve kind of been a independent thinker most my life. Watterson made a primer for philosophy and made such endearing characters that the questions he raised unknowingly embedded in your mind. He never gave you an answer, he left it open for you to figure it out for yourself. This is what narrative as an art is all about. We should be talking about Calvin & Hobbs like we talk about Huck Finn, 1984, Of Mice and Men, or any other modern classic out there.

A few years back I told myself that I’d move once I get 10k in the bank, debt free, and have filming equipment. The plan was to work my ass off to get there but nothing ever came of it. There was always a three month plan to get there, in that time I found a reason to stick around.

Well I have a camera + equipment, debt is almost gone, and by the end of the January I should be at 10k. Every time I walk out my door I just look at my car, wonder how much I can strap on there and just go. The urge is going to be too strong for me once the 10k cushion is set.

It’s time I took Timmy’s advice.

I baked a batch of cookies, for my health. Gluten Free Semi Vegan (the yoke of avian was used but none of the lactic secretion of bovine) Dark Chocolate Chunk cookies. With a recipe I found on the Internet, I meticulously blended the wet ingredients and drys separately, only combining the two when ready to bake. The way the batter blended I could see that it was wrong, the way it felt to stir was wrong. In an attempt to fix the situation, I poured flower in like a zealous ships captain steering his ship away from boat sinking reefs!

Feeling satisfied with the mixture I placed the droplets of cookie batter onto the obsidian black cookie trays. Placement was, what I thought, evenly spaced, to give the cookie area to grow. But it turned out wrong, all wrong. The black tray turned into this Orgy-amorphic blob of gluten free cookie batter as the oven quicken the atoms of the dough, melting it then turning it into a solid.

I scooped them out, using the spatula’s hard edge to separate the roundish smooched forms as I could. The cookies were delicate, crumbling as I placed them on the wax paper. A batch of twenty some intended cookies laid there, cracked, falling apart in some way or the other.

This was it, wasn’t it? My world has been cracking, crumbling. Cookies that have flaws, too many to count, the kind of cookie you’d just avoid. Irony only the great universe in all its sadistic humor could come up with, these cookies were made in an attempt of fixing me, a health food but they just sat there and resembled their creator in all the hideous splendor. It’s enough to make a human cry, but I don’t.

I grab a box full of bags, sparse out the chucks of cookie into even amounts and place them in bags, twelve ziplock bags in total, about three cookies per bag. The cookies look like shit but they have use, they have potential. Like their maker, they have good intentions, they just don’t look it. Sticking with them, they’ll help me, fix myself. In the end they’ll end up as dirt. The universe wont even remember them a minute from now.