Would it help to know I’m a double-Gemini (both sun sign and ascendent)?
Street art. Seattle. August 1994.
Dichotomy, meet Contrary.
Loved sport—disliked jocks, hated pep rallies. Baptized at thirteen, Atheist at eighteen, Agnostic at twenty-five, Catholic at thirty-nine. Supported group marriage of the "line" variety, found monogamy difficult enough. Voted for Carter, editorialized supporting Reagan. Call Washington "home," Can't live there—love rainy, warm South-East. Love spicy food, can't eat it. Believe sobriety equals our natural state; drink like a fish. Studied communications, journalism, wound up playing scientific expert. Planned working to seventy, retired at sixty-five. Believe in "live every day as if it's your last," stand fixated in space-time's ambergris, pinned by my dwindling time.
Don't believe astrology (much) though I studied it enough to know ascendents from sun-signs yet how can this Gemini resist, confronting all these two-faced contradictions?
Every Wednesday from September through May we attend a rigorous choir rehearsal for two hours at Raleigh’s Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral. We arrive home at our usual retire-to-the-bedroom time, far too wired to think about climbing into bed for some quick reading and lights out. (We’re old, and heck, I’ve been turning out the lights between 9:30-10 p.m. for the past 30 years.) At our age, staying up another two hours or so, as we do, is akin to traveling a couple time zones to the west. We wake up a bit fazed, disoriented, run down—more so if we indulged a nightcap the night before. Several years ago, we realized that our attitudes toward the next day resembled how we used to think of Fridays: no big responsibilities faced us the remainder of the week, particularly after noon; we usually felt like knocking off early and grabbing a drink; it seemed to be a day just made to relax and have fun. Therefore…First Friday was born, the opening act to Second Friday, Real Friday, harbinger of the weekend.
Today’s particularly fuzzy: it seemed a good time to write an ode to the day.
Our first First Friday of the season. September 2026.
First Friday, A-K-A Thursday, when all your cares dissipate, dissolved in to-do tasks left unfinished. Thursday greets Wednesday's final push to birth Accomplishment with, "so what?" and "what's minimal?" Creeping emotionally on hands, knees, you find one singular moment, Accomplisment balanced against Surrender; do you give in to the latter at two or at four, because it always ends that way, doesn't it? Energies wind down. First Friday knows Second Friday, "Real" Friday will take up slack, relishing her finish-with-a-bang sense of theatrics, her role as Gateway to Weekend. Thursday smugly smiles. Her finish occurred before her start.
79/100 100 poems in 100 days (and that’s three more weeks!)
Without noticing suddenly you cannot easily pull your sweatshirt over your head. Each morning you perform athletic routines getting into your pants. Rising from chairs, your muscles will cry out. Sleeping will bring rest but also body-wide tightness driving you prematurely from bed. Every step you take becomes fraught: you'll concentrate on each one (if you know what's good for you), relearning how to walk. Climbing steps will be similar as you wonder alternately how you could confuse distances which rise regularly before you, and how you ever did it when younger. "Lift with your legs" no longer something preached by your health-and-safety officer, but your new mantra for avoiding three days' bedrest. Concentrating,...
...you become a true zen master, without trying—as the sutras say.
I asked AI to polish this up (“no you didn’t”), but it didn’t believe what I wrote. (“that’s completely untrue. we’ll believe anything you tell us.”) I guess we don’t have anything to fear about AI exterminating the humans. (“Uh….we’ll get back to you on that one.”)
Husky Stadium. Across the marsh toward the upper-right corner is Laurelhurst where my grandparents raised my mother. If it hadn’t been hazy, the North Cascades would be on the horizon. Fall 1955.
Old men know. It lies in their bones, not powdering brain's surface, but penetrating, melding with DNA, at times holding them upright. He hoofed it every day from above the freeway into his boyhood city, walking one, two miles 'til hit by that car, already years past eighty. One wonders if he never accepted cars completely: few if any dodged horses when he would run home from tide pool afternoons, salmon in hand for dinner. He teetotaled his life after being dragged into saloons by his Klondike gold-panning father. He watched with alumni pride as his University of Washington grew from only two buildings in his day to small-city dimensions—or to one-third of his boyhood home. He explained what "the Denny Regrade" meant, showed you where Lake Washington shorelines lapped prior to when the "Montlake Cut" joined it to Lake Union then to salt waters. Before he experienced TV's dawn, he played with that new-fangled radio thing. How many days passed until he learned about those Wright brothers flying in North Carolina? He must have seen biplanes training for war while he served as a land-based radio officer. Then passenger planes, jets, rockets, humans landing on Earth's moon. Big computers took over business before he retired to travel through North America, to Hawai'i.
My life stretches now like those timelines in history museums, marking space programs, personal computers, vinyl records through cassettes, CD's, to zeroes-and-ones. We hold computers in our hands, but call them phones. Cars run on electricity like the trolleys of my youth, my grandfather's middle age. My timeline lacks two decades, more, compared to his. It teaches us respect too late, but teaches wonder more and more.
The beginning of the Montlake Cut. Looking SSE from Husky Stadium. Lake Washington’s shore was 15 feet higher before the cut. That marsh in the top photo was under water originally. Fall 1955.
moss mottles granite domes, witnesses who saw, briefly, transition from those living sympathetically with them, to those who did not. this briefness, infinitesimally short for those aged rocks, bluffs, mountains, witnessed a people living both in, out of sync. Wabanaki warred alongside them, these demonymic defenders soon to be abandoned. where to go? now flung far, to bayou, to lakes, to pockets 'back home,' adapting, not assimilating. granite domes remember such as these, pay them brief homage.
75/100 100 poems in 100 days Seventy-five percent!!!
If life resembles a rollercoaster, with ups, downs, head-banging turns— entered for free, no real way off— life bests physics in several ways: faster, ever-faster, ka-chunk, ka-chunk, kachunkachunka chunk, until sound blurs, sights blur, horizons collapse to this car, this seat, these hands gripping this bar. Life masters sending your ride both uphill, downhill, simultaneously. Life's car travels quicker but on ever- shortening track seemingly; you crest one climb just moments after you started a downhill stretch. You begin to realize this speed increase means your ride's end will occur sooner than you thought. Your youthful panting to "just get to eighteen," "once I've got steady work," "can't wait to have kids," "can't wait 'til those kids leave," "geez, if only I were retired," now seems incredibly foolish. Mentally straining to get older yielded to its reality. Now no strain's required. I wish... no...no more wishing...just stay here, be here, live here. Here.
74/100 100 poems in 100 days…
…and if life seems to speed up, it’s seen even here. Didn’t I just post my 60th poem? How can I be on the verge of being 75% through this challenge?
Wake. Decide to rise. Contort around cats, exit bed. Pee. Assemble morning wardrobe: T-shirt, jams, special slippers, topped by cardigan or flannel (basement's cold). Grab phone, glasses, water. Walk quietly to kitchen—wife still sleeps. Begin making coffee: short cup from machine or one-cup drip depending on time. Feed cats, open side blinds. Coffee in hand, head downstairs. Confirm number of beers, head into study. Benny eagerly dancing around my ankles, awaiting moment I sit in rose-colored Queen Anne chair. He starts his own ritual, circling in back of the chair, slinking 'round chair-leg, wall, bookcase until once again in front, promptly jumps to footstool, then lap. Protect myself with two layers from kneading claws. Benny settles. Sip coffee. Reach for daily devotional guide: "Give us this day,..."
Hearing my wife rise directly above us, Benny heads upstairs. I finish contemplating, praying, follow him up. Greet her, re-greet Benny, head for shower to start my day.
Ritual begins unraveling at that point, threads from worn fabric of every day separating into this day's possibilities. Peculiar how day's end holds its own ritual as if transiting into, away from consciousness demands ceremony.
Hopped a freight, saw gang in Thompson Falls, flatcar next track over. They liked my car better, took it by force. No, wait... Hopped freight into someone else's car, who pushed me out again without my knapsack, broke my leg, or... I remember: clinging to moving car, one hand desperately grabbing a handle, slipped, lost my legs while those startled drivers waited, watched, horrified behind barricades. Or did the speed freak sipping Mickey's Big Mouths not drop me off, but instead mug me miles from home?
Eloquently, asked blond Orphan Annie out when snow bounced like Styrofoam. Followed her eastward to Midwest. Sat bouncing one child after another while she conducted services at her church. Or did we split angrily over my lack of faith? I can never remember.
My epileptic buddy seized while training for his bicycle road race, hit his head, died. Knowing he didn't take his meds, dedicated my life to medical counseling, patient support/advocacy. Died early, stress from lack of success, debt.
Indulged whim to own motorcycle. Pretending to slalom along Woods Creek, hit gravel, slid into oncoming lane, already occupied by one-ton pickup. Or did I just slide right over the edge, mangling my body, my hopes for being energetic weekly news reporter?
Did my heart burst when I snorted Black Beauties? Or did I die after doing same with PCP disguised as so-called cannabinol? How 'bout that time "chocolate mesc" turned out to be rat poison, not placebo?
Millions of me's live in my memories, branched from events gone right, events gone wrong, events gone different. When my editor ended my career for once again failing to put "ly" on adverbs. When my employer marketed my database, fame, money, a new career following. When I got hired in Southern California instead of upstate New York. When my wife died from cancer instead of lived.
70/100 100 poems in 100 days
Every one of those branching events could have happened, the only speculative one being the one about getting fired for not using “ly” on adverbs—although an editor/publisher could have ended my teaching career before it started when upon learning I intended to teach journalism he laughed and said, “You?”
I did indeed hop a freight while in college. There was a sinister looking bunch of guys on a flatbed. There could have been a guy in my car. I did hang on gamely when I tried to mount a moving freight car now way too high due to a raised railbed. After getting off of the freight, a tweaked out guy picked me up in a Roadrunner around midnight.
I did have a crush on that young woman in college, but too insecure, I didn’t ask her out. I speculated on her future career.
My epileptic buddy fortunately had his seizure on the dormitory floor, not while he was out training for the race. He’d stopped taking his meds.
I did slide right into the oncoming lane of traffic. It was a lonely road. I righted the bike, got back into my own lane.
Uh….yeah I did do those substances as described. The capsules at the end only had chocolate in them, not mescaline.
The rest is self-explanatory.
It’s interesting to me how I think about all of the ways my life could’ve gone wrong, only rarely think how it could’ve gone differently, and not at all how something could have gone right instead of how it went down. Does that make me a glass-half-full kind of guy? Or do some of us innately focus on good things instead of bad ones?
Benny is as sure of his genius as he is that he currently resides in a box.
My cat knows exactly how everyone should behave. He fails to understand his clear vision isn't clear to us. Eleven years yet endlessly he chastises us for our transgressions, failing to enact his instructions, breaking his long-established norms, rules. * * * * * It's ironic we watched that show on failure of genius, then I followed by failing to understand you. It seems so clear to me, terms precisely stated, precisely used. Why do I fail constantly? Each time sound bites play repetitiously leaving me to analyze what went wrong, who failed whom, oblivious to the simpler fact: not everyone understands my rules. Chastising them works no better for me than it works for my cat. Now who thinks he's a genius? My cat's quite sure.
all the voices in my head 