Be chill Cease ill: Saving the World?

Good Times
It wasn’t saving the world...or was it?
A little treat lay in store for us in the back yard: the hot tub’s still hooked up, if not especially hot. We take a detour to the Dollar General, where I find two awesome little Marvel comics shirts with art from back in the old school days, and they turn out to be 1.50 each! I know the one with the six heroes is probably the one he’d like, and I don’t mind the Iron Man; heck, I felt a little like I bought it for the kid I was who learned to come shopping and ask for nothing so well.
Two cool-ass shirts, on the way to coming up with a swim suit for Angela. She hopes at this point we’ll be swimming with Sabrina at her mom’s pool. Man, eight days based out of the Cave alone, with all the books and props and ideas and energy and viewpoints overlooking the valley and a pool down the street? Are you KIDDING me? You could not set up a better place to set me loose that Gypsy Cave. All it needs is a box of comic books, and heck, after Angela gets out of the hot tub, I break out one to read there.

It just happens to be the very first issue of ROM, which has never been reprinted. It’s kinda how many people imagine we Americans live every day, but for me, this is my improvised everywhere vacation, the first we’ve had of any kind in many years. This is a set of elements so perfect it could only come together just this way this time. I don’t wonder much how things would be if I were there to enjoy it every day. I can’t imagine living there and not being compelled to be here in California. That’s just the way it became, before I even got here, and weather and will permitting, I’m brushing against a lot of my dreams. Alone, this was a moment so quiet, I could be nowhere else. We’d had a nice, quick walk, too, before coming in to change, so it’s the type of moment I should go back and live as an antidote to worrying about things truly beyond my power.

You’re imagining this misunderstood, mind blowing space knight standing in a real countryside, while disguised alien enemies try to prod us to destroy our self-deputized savior. You’re there with the young woman in the middle of it, as the fusilage flies and she uncovers evidence that this strange being has spoken a story true. Though she is now in his confidence, without a word he flies away, and Brandy Clark is filled with adrenaline and doubt. There are satellites flying out of sight overhead, and TV antennae on the rooftops spread down the country roads, just beyond the sounds of the battle. It is an age with far less media. It is a time then more ripe to be taken over by carefully placed enemies of humankind. It’s 1979 and summer’s ended and as the days pass into their cooler counterparts, life goes on without knowledge of the secret war in its midst.

Without much steam, I could enjoy being outdoors while reading about Brandy Clark and ROM’s encounter with the National Guard, with dry fingers and a cool drink nearby.
Speaking of National Guard, a fine reason to get out and spend 5 o’clock getting dry is my old friend David is on his way straight over from work. He’s already texted you needn’t bring a thing but yourself, but we’ve got him covered where it counts. We’ll soon all be going for a walk, and with me comes a flood of memories and the spirit of who we were in gettin here, two poking bellies filled with laughter and memories of what we called friendships and adventures. Oh! He did that gig several years out of high school, along with attaining a degree in physical therapy---National Guard. My friend drove a fucking tank. (Just like Rom throws.)

We met girls and rocked out, harbored ideals and a drifting gravitation towards self-awareness, my friend the biggest cynic I trusted who had such an unerring sense of right and wrong and buried so many hatchets with loved ones, driving us sans air conditioning to the house, windows down, laughs, an echo of time killed too deeply to need burying.

I can not express to you how much we laughed. How much fun they find in their sons, even if they are tempted to the shit-bird side of choice now and then. Man, they care so much about how those boys come out, and their attention’s given so freely day to day that I’m sure it’s rather exceptional that someone’s showed up to be the temporary center. I’m holding together friends, generations, little kids that remember me for my voice from our one real time in each other’s company. I’d just buried my Dad, and that night it was so cool to feel full of love and friendship and kindness and wisdom and see so clearly that, given a chance, it was good to pass that to another Dad, another Mom, who might could do with a friend on this road on which we all kill time.

How much more fun was it then this time, to be over before sunset, having a beer then going for a bounce on the trampoline, thoughtfully cleared for weight purposes by the boys, while David said, “go hop on and relive a little bit of your childhood.” You see, for a regular guy, he is like a god in his gift for giving childhood to people. Don’t remember your own? Talk to Dave. He still remembers how to have a good time. If all we can do with the time is kill it, if the best we can do is save our responsibilities with love, if we’re all just passing this way---why don’t we make it fun? All I mean is, from the moment Amy wrote to say let us know when you’re coming to town to this one where I remember the day we had in the middle, it’s one expression of a never-ending supply that will replenish you with hope, the energy for a little fine tuning.

It’s nearly Halloween, now, a favorite time around that house, where the kids (who love playing with Zombies) make a killing in goodies and costumes and play take highest priority (well, along with safety, of course!). It’s so cool to have a household where the family thing’s happening in a style reminiscent of the people with whom we spent so much time with on the rest of the way up here to adulthood. Being an adult also means we share Amy’s bean casserole and sit up extra late, which becomes a little walk which comes back to the big living room for a viewing of Woodstock: the Movie, a treat I’d never seen, complete with Dave-O dancing and singing along and my head tingling all the way through the chanted “Hear Me, See Mee, Feel Me.” There weren’t nearly as many goofy photos as there would’ve been if we’d been tying one on weekend style, but every beer I did have on the way to midnight was tasty.

Man, they did not plan to sit up that late, but there we were awake, there we were as just a one-night only engagement, and man is it a good thing Dave-o doesn’t go to bed at 4:40 am before workdays on a regular basis, but that’s what it took for him to complete burning me about 50 albums of my choice to go with a disc loaded with great comics. About two weeks from now, I am going to back primarily at the drawing board and it will be good to have all that music. But the funny thing is, I am addicted to cheap copies of old comic “floppies” and it will be a change reading them the way most people do these days! I just feel so obliged to type or be drawing from a photograph or screwing around reading and sending messages, when I use this laptop. It can do this, another amazing thing I’ll enjoy. You look at it from the point of view of, let’s say, 1979, and you have such an amazing array of media at your fingertips, just for FREE.

But one thing I don’t try to do is read too much at a time on a screen. I’ve saved all the world for you I can. I saved part I care about.
This is just getting verbose.