Permissions for Joy

Rat traps, rat traps – I don’t believe there will ever be enough rat traps. So the mind tumbles down the basement stairs, no surprises, no promises, just another day, which should go without saying “Thank you God” though otherwise no promise that any of it will get any better. Not all better – even simply plain old better. No promise of that.

Not with Lawrence Ferlinghetti dead, gone away for good and I swear when I saw it, some internet buzzline, I felt the planet shift. Honest, I swear I did. And when I woke the following morning, a middle-of-the-week Wednesday, I felt I’d been given new permissions. Sure of it, clear as if I was back in Oahu on a North Shore beach, super hot and tropical and wonderful – that degree of clarity, and possibly (there in Hawaii) I may have run into Charles Laquidara on that beach which would have been nice, him another volunteer for gentle planetary kindness, but I didn’t though those days with the wife were the best.

I awoke with that degree of clarity that the planet had shifted for the worse, with Ferlinghetti gone, and with new permissions to do my own thing. Yeah, I woke up like that.

And like they said back at the Wareham Park Department storage/hideout shed – “Fuck the raingear.”