don’t bother the traffic

I’m feeling especially invisible this days.

I sit in this room and wonder why and how that is. On the wondering spectrum somewhere between Walden House’s “Own my own” and Annie Hall’s “La-dee-da.” There’s a line in a Pink Floyd song – “They flutter behind you, your possible pasts.” Say, turning here when I could have turned there, considering Robert Frost’s “All the difference.” Or not.

When I was working for the Aids Support Group of Cape Cod there was an all-staff meeting in which ‘experts’ came in and administered a personality test to determine each person’s degree of extrovert and introvert. Of the 30 people there, I was placed by test results at the end of the line – most introverted. I’m not sure “possible pasts” have anything to do with that. Or with taking the BART from Oakland to 214 Haight Street most days. The Summer of Love long gone.

The very first time I drove over the Bay Bridge I was ticketed by the Highway Patrol for not wearing a seat belt. I don’t enjoy being told what to do.

I’m a writer, always been one, and that’s a lonely, kind of invisible profession. I can tell myself, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” and then the phone doesn’t ring for two weeks. Maybe if I went out to coffee with Forrest Gump he’d tell me, “Invisible is as invisible does.”

That might be helpful.