I once knew men from Peru and Nantucket...

You're supposed to use hot water to make ice cubes. I could explain it scientifically, but you wouldn't care. I bet you thought this line would end with the word 'bucket'.

The women who know me also know that brownies are the best way to control my simple self. Yes, I just denied my alleged complication. Turns out chocolate and flour, when combined with an egg or two and some oil, form the demise of my own free will. Totally worth it in most cases. Pawned off the rest of my mother's on lunch break at work last night. One of the guys, his mouth full of chocolate, told me to thank her. It may have been a cheap shot, but I let it slide. Saved the other batch to munch on in my truck during those fleeting quiet moments in between the pipes that I've come to cherish so much. Even heathens keep some things sacred.

Then, as always, there were the silent deals made with God and the devil. It's important to include both in case one's having an off day, and to deny the existence of One is to deny the existence of the other. Sometimes I throw the Easter Bunny into the mix for good measure, but never Saint Jude; that poor slob's got his own list of woes.

See, there were two birds doing the nasty in the lilac bush outside my kitchen window this morning. That's what Walt and Frost forgot to tell you: We're all only human. Even the birds are human. 'Human', as I use the term, means flawed by the unruly combination of instinct and desire. I once had a car that was human, it always stopped at the beer distributor on the way home from work. Those were the days when brew still did the job. Four stiff cocktails and I'm straight now. Straight enough to see crooked and smile wide for no good reason, often times a bad one. Not tonight, though. Tonight I deserve the pain of sobriety. Penance for all this humanity inside of me. The aftertaste of milk is aiding the process.

I got rid of the monkey, but now there's this albatross on my back. And it's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a thing. A thing I'm not sure what to do with, where to keep. I am not capable of eluding a high-speed pursuit. I'm not capable of anything faster than the ticking of my watch sitting on my dresser to the left of my head. Quite frankly, I'm too sore to do anything but sink into bed tonight. This typing business is just a promise I made to myself, one of the few and true minority.

Citronella candles don't work as well as advertised, but I'm going to buy them anyway. Sometimes I bet the slow horse since I know it will lose. That knowledge is comforting. Almost as comforting as the smell of those burning yellow tins will be, even without the sound of the ancient bug zapper going off in the back of my head. My father and my neighbor shared one. Its bright blue light symbolized all being right in the world back then. It hung right on the property line behind the last peach tree. I hated the peach trees, the fruit would fall and I'd have to clean it all up and the bees would swarm 'round my six-year-old head. That's the head I miss most. It was smarter in knowing less. You don't appreciate good head 'til it's gone. And now I hate my father instead of the peach trees. He cut them down when I got old enough to tell him what I thought of picking up the fruit.


If you have to ask if there's something wrong, there probably is.

But at least the Easter Bunny made the rain hold out 'til night time for once. He's not such a bad guy sometimes, despite moments of humanity.