always a flow

I think today’s post is either going to be about income tax returns or Otis Redding. They both showed up in a timed writing (25:25) I completed a short while ago, one in which the first sentence was me thinking maybe a Blog post for today would show up, since at that time my mind was blank. Probably, so far, it still appears blank. It feels like it.

Les Brown, the motivational speaker, asks, “Can we meet conditions as we find them?” Implicit is accepting those conditions, the way it gets said, “Go with the flow.” These days I do offer lots of my attention to meeting and accepting the conditions in my life – some of which feel forever, some of which are changing eight minutes from now. Meaning, the fact I haven’t received my income tax back yet is just what it is. Tax-free mailbox. And paying just a bit more attention to Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay” lyrics – having always been a music first, words second kid, maybe that’s surprising being a writer and on-again poet, dancing with language and sentences, in fact, romancing sentences when one of those conditions is ain’t no one else to romance nowadays. Otis singing, “Ooo, I’m just sittin’ on the dock of the bay Wastin’ time”. Which is like me sitting on a couple of different logs by the edge of a eucalyptus wood down the end of 28th Street. Where “Wastin’ time” is something of a wide-open no-and-yes wonderland.

Maybe the government isn’t gonna give me my money. This middle-aged black woman from Georgia walked me through a Turbo Tax hour and said, oh yes, it belongs to me. And middle-aged black man Les Brown said, yeah, you can accept conditions as you find them. And no-longer-with-us black man Otis Redding said he couldn’t do what 10 people told him to do, and I can for sure relate with that.

And when I was a kid in my hometown, fishing over a stretch of rapidly-incoming tide in the Wareham River with my pal Donnie Sisson, a valiant cast flew me into the water, and there’s no Blog here today or ever without some middle-aged black man, fishing way over there on the railroad trestle, comes running over and jumps in and saves my life.

Maybe he was Otis Redding, or Les Brown, or what’s her name in Georgia in disguise. The way a breeze maintains anonymity. Me there then, me here now, fairly empty-headed mind both times and the years in between. Cool if the government wants to keep the cash. And there’s sitting on a log by the woods, wasting time, where everything’s okay.