*Typing*

I'm writing from this wonderful hotel in Upstate New York where in my room sits this little box radio that gently hums at all hours of the day.

It's partial to Patsy Cline, "I'm crazy, crazy for feeling so lonely––". It plays in the morning when I stir awake. It plays at midday when I pare the pages of a book. It plays prior to supper as I wash away the day. It plays well past midnight when I stare at the ceiling and watch the occasional headlight of a passing car paint the ceiling yellow.

Radios are like your favorite people. You always want them around––even when you want to be alone, you still want them around––and when they're not around, you become intimately aware of their absence.

It's exactly as it says in the ending of The Catcher in the Rye, "Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

The older you get, the harder it is to show your throat. You still feel everything. You never stop feeling everything.

You just get better at hiding the feeling––the hurt. It's almost as if you're ashamed of the hurt. Are you ashamed of the hurt?

I read somewhere that if you ever come face-to-face with a mountain lion, you're supposed to hoist your shoulders up to your ears to protect your throat, backpedal, box the sonofabitch––and pray. If you make it out alive, you will find the blades of your shoulders forever sewn to your earlobes.

Art helps break up the scar tissue.

You play your favorite songs, watch your favorite movies, read your favorite books and gaze upon your favorite paintings until you've memorized every lyric, every quote, every line and every stroke of the brush.

(It's endearing––and dare I say cute?––how we humans revisit our favorite pieces of art like we do our favorite people...)

You throw on some Nathaniel Rateliff and walk the streets of Philly at 1 a.m. with a few Sazeracs warming your lungs––and eventually you drop your shoulders and feel the cool air bite into your throat like a mountain lion or a mistress or a feeling you've struggled to recognize until now.

Years ago, I would frequent this tea shop in Littleton, Colorado. The walls were covered in hundreds of drawers, each of which housed a canister filled with a particular tea. I knew absolutely nothing about tea so I’d always ask for a recommendation.

The woman working the counter would fall into silence for a time as she scanned the closed drawers and the names that resided atop of them. Once she had come to a decision, she would climb her rolling ladder, open up the appropriate drawer, unearth the canister inside, fish out a small heap of leaves and then steep a cup of tea for me. There was something deeply meditative in watching the entire affair.

Once my tea was ready, I’d find a seat at this L-shaped bench at the front of the shop and look out the window at the people passing by. Some days the snow would fall outside and dust the streets of Littleton in a thin blanket of white and the passerby would make footprints hat would soon be covered with more white.

I remember the strange, beautiful contrast in temperature: my knuckles pressed against the ice-cold window and my palms clutching my cup of tea. I haven never gone back. Some places you refuse to return to so that they can remain forever the same in your mind, untouched. Perfect, almost.

Have the courage to choose: meaning over mass appeal, conviction over reassurance, purpose over popularity, depth over reach, friends over followers and inspiration over influence.

This was years ago, back when my grandfather smoked so many cigarettes he looked incomplete without one dangling from his mouth. He drove an old Dodge Dakota that just stunk of nicotine. I'd plop down on the bench seat of that truck and the air would suddenly smell like someone had spritzed the cabin with a generous dowsing of Pall Mall scented Frebreze (if there were such a thing).

Scared to death his habit would dirty the lungs of his grandson, he never smoked when I was in the car––and when he lit up outdoors, he'd shoo me away like he had come down with tuberculosis. "Don't follow my example", he'd shout across the driveway in-between pulls of tobacco, his potbelly hanging over his Levi's, his arms as strong as tire irons.

One day he nicked himself good and deep with a box-cutter and the blood came spilling out of him like it had banged against his veins all its life to be set free, a side-effect of all the nitrates he took after his four stents. "Don't follow my example", he said as he grabbed a roll of duct tape, rolled it around his finger until there was no more finger and got right back to work. He'd rather work himself to death than turn and face the pain.

But, death hasn't come. The cigarettes haven't done it. The heart-attack hasn't done it. The stroke hasn't done it. He's impossible to kill. He's one of those men that will have to choose to die. Several months back, I visited him in his little house in Indiana and I found him sitting on a 5 gallon bucket, washing the rocks in his landscaping. Who the fuck washes the rocks in their landscaping? I adore him.