EXTEMPORANEOUS FICTION - "American Idol"

first comment: a city of the world -  Michael B.: Bangkok

second comment: a song - Dennis. C.: "Do You Wanna Funk"

third comment: a holiday or festival -  Christopher DeB.: Groundhog Day

fourth comment: a fictional character - Serge C.: Edina Monsoon

fifth comment: a color -  Casey F.: purple (or indigo)

It had started like pretty much any other Tuesday in February for Phillip. Well, maybe not like any other Tuesday. That morning he had been woken from a sound sleep by none other than Sylvester himself, dead since 1988, somehow screechily demanding at full volume from the room next door: "Do you wanna funk? Wontcha tell me now?" He fumbled around for his glasses and looked blearily at the alarm clock. 7-fucking-23. 

"Toby! Jesus Christ!" he screamed, pounding on the wall between their rooms.

He heard a loud thud and what could possibly have been a cocktail being spilled before Sylvester abruptly stopped mid-screech. 

"Sorry, sweetie! I didn't realize it was so late... -or, err, early..."

How Toby managed to party like a club kid from Manhattan in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, was always a mystery to Phillip. "Yeah, well, just, whatever..." His voice trailed off as he realized that the damage had been done, he was already awake. Another Tuesday in February.

Then he remembered it was Groundhog Day. Phillip happened to live in the one town on earth where Groundhog Day actually meant something: Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the home of The Groundhog. It was a huge deal here in Punxsutawney, and today especially, the town would be jam-packed not only with tourists but with every over-moussed, under-educated TV "journalist" from every third-rate hometown TV station that could afford the airfare. They can grow a human ear in a Petri dish but all of America wants to know if the Groundhog predicts an early spring.
He stumbled out into the hallway, and after a quick pit stop in the bathroom, went down to the kitchen and made a quick cup of strong coffee. The kitchen looked as if Toby had hosted a cocktail party for forty of his closest friends, but Phillip knew from experience that Toby was fully capable of creating a mess like that all on his own. It made Phillip uncomfortable to sit among the dirty ashtrays and empty jars of Nutella, not to mention the fact that he suspected he was sitting in something wet, so he took his coffee cup and sat down in the living room. 
He had never really been much of a morning person, really, but once in a while, Phillip could appreciate those first few minutes, when the only noise outside was the birds chirping and the sound of the morning paper when it hit the driveway next door. The coffee smelled good and strong, and his mind was still a blank page, yet to be scribbled and scratched upon by the thousand little aggravations of daily life. His eyes wandered to the bookshelves, where he had displayed his prize possessions: the collection of puzzle boxes he had been accumulating since he was twelve years old.
They all looked different. They varied in value, from just a few dollars to possibly hundreds. They were from countries as diverse as China, Russia, and Vietnam. Some were plain, some were hopelessly complicated, some looked like "tramp art" from the 1930s. What they all had in common was that they could all only be opened by following a secret series of manipulations, by sliding a piece here or pressing a part there. Phillip had gotten one as a souvenir after a visit to Atlantic City in the summer after seventh grade, and once he had solved the puzzle, he found himself fascinated, and over the years had gone on to acquire and unlock more and more complicated boxes.
Suddenly, the Sumatra Dark Roast kicked in, and he remembered the box which had come only yesterday. He had been waiting months for delivery; it had to be delivered all the way from Thailand, but when he had seen it on Ebay he had known right away that he had to have it for his collection. Nobody else wanted it, or maybe they were scared off by the fact that it came without instructions, but he had won it for a song. The delivery charges ended up being more than what he paid for the box, but in the end it was still cheap and well worth the wait. 
He went and got the package from his room, and brought it back to the living room. He checked again to make sure there were no notes or diagrams or anything, but there weren't. Just an incomprehensible Thai return address and the words "Ebay Merchant diabol8". He tossed the package aside and regarded the box itself. Beautiful. Some kind of exotic wood, a deep bluish-purple or indigo color, like nothing he had ever seen before. The box was perfectly smooth on all sides, no visible seams of any kind. For a moment he wondered to himself whether he had been ripped off, whether he had just bought himself a sort of pretty-ish block of purple wood. But some part of him knew that it was indeed a puzzle box, and when he shook the box, he swore he could feel something, something light as a feather even, moving around inside. He was determined to figure it out. 
It would have to wait until later, though, because Phillip could smell the unmistakable blend of cigarette smoke, Peppermint Schnapps and Febreze that was Toby, making his way towards the living room. 
"Good morning, sweetie!" he crooned. "Why are we up, again?" he asked in all sincerity as he hit the couch with a dull thump, using his finger to spin the ice cubes around in an otherwise empty highball glass. 
"Groundhog Day," answered Phillip. He could never really be angry at Toby. Phillip had always thought of him as the real-life, male version of Edina Monsoon from "Absolutely Fabulous", and in a way he found it amusing that life had somehow paired him up with a roommate like that.
"Right! Groundhog Day!" said Toby, managing somehow to balance an ash which comprised at least 60mm of his 120mm cigarette. "I'm supposed to go with that Kitty Whatshername from Fox News. She can still get Vicodins!"

Despite the fact that it was cold, 35° and windy in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the heat sits on the skin of Bangkok; itchy, sweaty and stifling, like a wool sweater. In a decaying neighborhood on the outskirts of town favored by British ex-pats who are either too impoverished, intoxicated, or addicted to leave, one Mr. Underhill sits beneath a feeble, asthmatic ceiling fan, futilely fanning himself with a souvenir fan from one of the shadier bars in Patpong. He sits hunched forward, myopically studying the monitor of an enormous, hopelessly obsolete PC.
The room around him is purple. Purple walls, purple floors, purple curtains. Nearly everything in the room is purple, everything except the 1991 Gateway and the La-Z-Boy, which only came in a dried-blood shade of "burgundy". He wears a suit as well, entirely purple, which was probably meant to look either elegant or arcane, but instead makes him look like a pasty-white British parody of John Shaft, not to mention the fact that it's been laundered so many times that it is a bit threadbare, and Mr. Underhill is sweating so profusely that the suit is starting to cling to him in places.
"The package has been delivered, Mr. Overmoor," he announces to the purple gloom around him. Even his voice, somehow, seems soaked with sweat.
"It's all happenin', innit?" answers Mr. Overmoor, somehow stepping out of the amethyst-tinted background. He too is dressed all in purple, but his look leans definitely further toward Charity Shop than Saville Row. His voice is as thick and as Cockney as warm English beer and fish & chips wrapped in newspaper.
"Yes, Mr. Overmoor! Just as the prophecy foretold!" He attempts to laugh maniacally to punctuate his point, but before long it degrades into a rasping, consumptive coughing fit and he has to pop a Ricola just to regain his composure.
Mr. Overmoor and Mr. Underhill give the overall impression of impending menace, of evil intent, but also that they are just too bloody stupid to do any serious harm. 
Mr. Overmoor looks momentarily unsure about something. Before speaking, he enthusiastically picks his nose and wipes his finger on his purple T-shirt. "Are you sure, Mr. Underhill? I mean, bloody hell, we sold the feckin' thing on feckin' Ebay!"
"I am sure, Mr. Overmoor! The signs were unmistakable. "Φίλιππος" - Philipos! Phillip! When I saw his name, I knew he was the right one."
"Yeah, but there's millions of bloody Phillips, Mr. Underhill! Maybe we should have sent it to Buckingham fecking Palace!"
"How quickly you forget, Mr. Overmoor," wheezes Mr. Underhill, wiping his upper lip with a yellowed handkerchief. "The portent we received last Beltane...?"
Not a glimmer from Mr. Overmoor.
"We had to sacrifice a bloody squirrel! Don't you remember how hard it is to find a bloody squirrel in bloody Bangkok, Mr. Overmoor?"
Still not a glimmer.
"The portent read 'δάσος Πεν' Mr. Overmoor! The forest of Penn!"
"Yeah..." says Mr. Overmoor, hesitantly, although it is clear he has no idea what Mr. Underhill is getting at.
"Penn-sylvania, Mr. Overmoor. Pennsylvania! The forest of Penn! Our friend, Mr. Phillip-" he pauses and squints again at the computer screen, "-Smith, lives in Pennsylvania! It's perfect! Perfectly, diabolically perfect!" He opts this time for a much less ambitious demonic laugh, just a quick "ha-ha-ha." 
"What happens now, Mr. Underhill?" says Mr. Overmoor, despite the fact that they had already had this very conversation dozens of times.
"Phillip from Pennsylvania receives the box. He opens the box. He releases the demon. Phillip of Pennsylvania, the Chosen One, will be found by our Master the demon, Lord Indicum, and his long wait for a physical form will be over. Before long, according to the prophecy, "the people of the world shall be at his feet!" And you and I, Mr. Overmoor, shall rule the world by his side! The world, Mr. Overmoor!" he considers another maniacal laugh, but eventually thinks better of it. 
"So now, we wait, Mr. Overmoor. I shall sit vigil by this noble screen, eager for word of our new world order as it spreads."

The crowds in Punxsutawney had reached their peak. It was cold, and everyone was bundled up and layered in hats and scarves and gloves, and it was just beginning to dawn on people in the crowd that unless you were standing in the first three or four rows from the stage, you weren't going to see a damn thing. Some of the little kids were getting cranky and once in a while you could hear a mom or a dad snarling something like, "We're here to have fun, godammit!" Toby and Kitty Whatshername were drinking mimosas while Kitty's cameraman took some B-roll shots of the crowd. 
Phillip was in his own little world, oblivious to the chill in the air or the crush of the crowd around him. He had been totally absorbed by the purple puzzle box, but so far had found himself no closer to unlocking its secrets. 
The big moment drew nearer. Speeches, speeches, speeches, by the mayor of Punxsutawney, by some pencil-pusher from the Chamber of Commerce, by some has-been weatherman from The Weather Channel. Finally, this year's Groundhog Queen, 19 year-old Bridget Clatterbuck, stepped forward and took the microphone. 
"Ladies and gentlemen!" she squealed into the microphone. "Let's hear it for our very own Groundhog: Punxsutawney Phil!"
Two things happened at that very moment: Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog stepped out for the crowd to see, and the puzzle box in Phillip's hand clicked and opened.
Something flew out. It was kind of like a dragonfly, or maybe like walking through a spider web, but it was definitely something. And Phillip thought for a second that it made a sound as it flew past him. Something like, "Woo-hoo!"
The next thing Phillip noticed was that the groundhog on the stage looked like it had just been hit in the chest by something. Bridget Clatterbuck looked a little confused as she tried to maintain her Beauty Queen smile even though she suspected that Punxsutawney Phil had just dropped dead in front of her. 
Moments later, though, the groundhog stood back up, and then stood up on its hind legs like a human. It raised its two front paws in two tiny little groundhog fists and began to squeak.
"Umm, what..?" said Bridget Clatterbuck. She held the microphone close to Punxsutawney Phil's little rodent mouth.
"I am Indicum, Demon of the Seventh Circle of Hell! Bow down before me!" came the tiny little voice over the microphone. Lord Indicum sounded a bit as if Alvin and the Chipmunks had been huffing helium.
A stunned silence fell over the crowd.

Mr. Overmoor slept. He snored, and a ribbon of drool hung precariously from one corner of his thin, unappealing mouth. 
"You've got mail!" the 1991 Gateway announced.
Mr. Underhill wiped the sweat once again from his upper lip. He leaned in to the computer screen, squinting. 
"Google News Alert" said the header. "Your search for 'Phillip+Pennsylvania+Indicum' has a new result."
"It is here, Mr. Overmoor! The news we have been awaiting!"
Mr. Overmoor snorted as he woke, sucking the ribbon of drool back into his mouth.
Mr. Underhill had already opened the email. It contained a link to a YouTube video, a segment from an American television show called "Jimmy Kimmel Live" His keywords were highlighted in the text below; "Punxsutawney Phil, Pennsylvania's talking groundhog sensation, who refers to himself as "Lord Indicum", wins over America's late-night TV crowd."
No footage of Armageddon. No crowds cowering in fear from their new Evil Overlords. No submissive masses. Just ten minutes of a groundhog, a bloody talking groundhog, telling bad "That's-what-she-said" jokes and waxing nostalgic about the days before Christianity. At the end of the interview, Jimmy Kimmel turned to the groundhog for one last question. "Fifteen seconds, Phil. Any messages for the world?"
"Yes, Jimmy, as a matter of fact, there is," replied Lord Indicum, as the cameras zoomed in for a closeup of his pinched up little rodent face. "The Prophecies have been fulfilled. The world is truly at my feet." The crowd cheered jubilantly at this. "Now where's that latté?"
The YouTube clip ended. Mr Overmoor and Mr. Underhill sat in humid, sticky silence, the feeble ceiling fan wheezing and creaking its way around uselessly. 
"Right, then," said Mr. Overmoor.

CROSSROADS

This is where it becomes like a diary.

"Just write," they all say. "Don't wait for inspiration." "Write what you know." And yet I find myself staring at the computer screen, that cursor just flashing, constant, unwavering; at times taunting, at times pleading with me to write something, write something, write something. And still, nothing. So, "write what you know" becomes writing about this, this moment of my life, this crossroads, this mid-life crisis.

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams!" Thoreau admonishes. "Live the life you've imagined." That's great, and it looks fabulous embroidered on a pillow in the guestroom or on a motivational poster on the wall of the personnel department at the Holiday Inn Express. But what Thoreau fails to mention is that going confidently in the direction of your dreams can also mean going confidently in the direction of financial catastrophe and ruin. It can also mean being told by People Who Matter, that is, the people with the money, that your work is not good, or maybe that it's good but not good enough. It's great to espouse the Power of Positive Thinking and all that, this sort of blissful Zen attitude that things will eventually work out the way they were meant to be. That is, until you're the 52 year-old guy who just woke up with no job after quitting a steady paycheck, no actual plan to obtain an income of some kind, no college degree, and a crazy pipe dream to actually make money doing something you actually love doing. 

It's sort of the same feeling I get from that cursor just flashing, blinking away, waiting to be told where we go next.

What brought me here? Well, a lot of things, for sure. To begin with, one of my greatest personal weaknesses has always been a lack of direction. I never really knew what I wanted to do with my life. My attitude was that I just wanted to live it and not worry about it, and while this may seem to some to be an almost heroic, Auntie Mame-type of approach to life, it has nevertheless brought me to this. Late middle-age, working for years in a job at which I was fairly proficient, but which had gone from being merely mind-numbing and occasionally unpleasant to being actually miserable and detrimental to my spiritual and physical well-being. I try to be a nice person, even at work, but by the end of the day I could be a short-tempered, snarling Hydra who snapped at little old ladies needing refills on their heart medicine. I would go home so stressed out and messed up that I couldn't even communicate with my husband, nothing beyond a few grunts and "uh-huh's" as I sat curled up in a semi-fetal position, rocking slightly and watching "Jeopardy!" without even shouting out the answers. In the morning before work, I would be filled with dread, actual Dread, as if I were about to be marched off to war or a condo association meeting. Some mornings it was so bad that I'd make myself sick. 
This is where the Auntie Mame approach had gotten me. "Life is a banquet!" she would say, "and most poor suckers are starving to death!" as she jet-setted off to Tibet or Singapore. The thing is, Mame had a fabulous Beekman Place apartment and at least one dead rich husband. I have neither. 
So, in order to preserve my own sanity, I had to give up the job, also known as "the income" and "the insurance." 
It's different, though, after you've survived the two weeks, and your last day, as if you're just heading off for a nice vacation. After people have told you congratulations and have patted you on the back, shaken your hand as if you're retiring, you wake up that first morning and realize that you're staring into a sort of abyss. And, for me anyway, the first thought was, "Holy shit this is the rest of my life what the fuck have I done." 
The second and third thoughts went pretty much the same way. 
"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams," Thoreau said. Sometimes, though, it's not that easy to tell exactly which direction that is. Dreams are more nebulous, more like a soft glow on the horizon than a bright beacon. I can face my dreams, I can let that soft glow hit me in the face and warm my skin, but I find myself wondering where, how, to start walking.
One thing I know is that I must write. Even now, the world's oldest fledgling as it fumbles its way out of the nest into thin air. I find myself consumed with my own story, so that is what I will write. 
Just keep the words flowing. Eventually the story will unfold. That's my plan.
Hell of a plan, huh?

LABYRINTH

It's a funny thing, getting older. It just sort of sneaks up on you. I've been 55 for a few weeks now, and every once in a while it occurs to me how weird that is. 55. I mean, that's pretty old. But somehow the me that's really me, the me that sees out through these eyes, the voice I hear in my head when I'm thinking, it's the same me, the same voice that was there when I was 25; when I was 12, for that matter. But once in a while I'm reminded that time has marched gaily on, like when I catch a glimpse of my naked body in the mirror and notice how old-mannish I'm starting to look; or when it takes twice as long to shave now because I have to figure out how to shave around all the wrinkles without losing a pint of blood along the way. But it's more than just the physical. The more the years pass by, the more overcrowded the storehouse of memories becomes. Some memories get pushed out forever, some get jostled and bruised in the fray, and some lie in bits and pieces on the floor. And sometimes, what were once memories begin to look like dreams, and what were dreams begin to look like memories, and the older you get the less clear it becomes which is which.
So it is with this one memory I have. I was only 34 or so at the time, so it was over 20 years ago. I had been living here, in this same old farmhouse in Stonington, Connecticut, for a while. Hugh had been gone for about 3 years by that time.
I should probably tell you about Hugh. The easy thing to say would be "the love of my life", but somehow that doesn't really manage to tell the whole story. We met, quite by accident, on vacation in Fire Island when we were both 25 years old. We were at a party at some investment banker's house and everyone was inside snorting coke and trying to get laid except for Hugh, who was outside by the pool with a cat in his lap. A year later we were closing on an 1880 farmhouse, this house, in Connecticut. With him there was never any doubt. This was love: blinding, torturous, gut-wrenching love; the kind of love where you'll give it all up, put your furniture out on the sidewalk and just move away to be together, because that's pretty much exactly what we did.
Unfortunately, in our relationship, it was never really just the two of us. There was always something else, this virus, this HIV, lurking about in the shadows and in the corners. Until one day, about six years later, when HIV decided to collect its due, and then it was just one. Just me.
It was pretty crushing, as you can imagine. I felt angry, I felt cheated out of all the years we were supposed to have in front of us. I felt sorry for Hugh, for the suffering he endured, for how helpless we had both become. But by this day, the day of this memory, I had worked through most of that stuff pretty well. I had begun to reach the point where I could remember him, and think about our time together, with incredible joy instead of grief. I had begun to accept that I had been unbelievably lucky to have received a gift as rare and as precious as absolute love.
Anyway, it had been a stressful week, for some reason. Probably money, or clogged gutters, or some other triviality had me tied up in knots. That's another thing about getting older: these problems, these roadblocks that pop up in our paths which at the time seem so insurmountable, eventually they become so insignificant in our memories as to be forgettable. I had decided that a nice long walk through the woods would do me a world of good, so I had planned to take Sparky through the Labyrinth.
"The Labyrinth" was my private name for a path through the woods near my house. I stumbled upon it one day shortly after Hugh and I had bought the house, when Dylan, our Golden Retriever at the time, dropped his tennis ball  as we walked along Ridge Road and it rolled under this split-rail fence. I climbed through to retrieve the ball, and I immediately felt like the little girl in the Secret Garden, like I had stumbled into a world that nobody else knew about. I called Dylan in after me, and together we walked the length of the trail. The path was fairly wide and clear, and it seemed to have been there forever, probably since the tribal days before the white settlers came. It meandered through oaks and pines, past a beautiful pond laden with water lilies along its edge, and after about an hour and a half, deposited us back out on Ridge Road just a couple hundred yards down the street. I have walked that path every so often, ever since Dylan and I happened upon it that day. Especially if I'm feeling stressed, or sad, or off-center somehow, and if I have the hour and a half to spare, I'll grab the dog and a tennis ball and walk it; and I usually feel a lot better coming out than I do going in. At some point I just started thinking of it as The Labyrinth.
Most people today think of a labyrinth as something like a maze. But actually, they are quite different. A labyrinth has one clearly defined path, one entrance and one end, like life itself. In medieval times, walking the labyrinth was a time for prayer and spiritual reflection, representing the hard path to God in the center. One was meant to exit the labyrinth a changed person, spiritually improved from the person who entered it. 
Anyway, I had grabbed the leash and I was making sure I had everything I needed for the walk. I stopped in the bedroom, and as I was grabbing the keys off the dresser, my eyes rested for a moment on Hugh's picture, the one from his sister's wedding where he looked so handsome in that dinner jacket and he's smiling that smile he only got after a couple of glasses of champagne. Whatever had been bothering me that day had nothing to do with Hugh, or with the lack of him; but somehow when I'd been feeling bad it always ended up leading back to him anyway. So I regarded him for a moment, and I remembered a silly habit we had gotten into. He would be heading out the door, always before me and usually running late for a long drive into the city, and he'd kiss me and fix a stray lock of hair, and he'd say, "See you in the future!" To which I would unfailingly reply, "See you in the pasture!" and I'd pull him down (he was three inches taller than me), and plant a kiss on his forehead. 
"C'mon, Sparky!" I yelled, "Lets go for a walk!" I heard Sparky's tags rattling as he made his way down the hallway towards me.
I kissed my forefinger and touched the picture with it. "See you in the pasture," I said.
I grabbed Sparky's leash and head out the door. 
We had been walking the Labyrinth for about fifteen minutes or so. We were about to come up to a beautiful old oak tree, with an enormous, gnarled trunk and a canopy which spread out and dwarfed everything around it. Sparky ran on up ahead, and I was absent-mindedly watching him as he began to sniff around the roots of the old oak, and just as he began to raise his leg I noticed that he was about to pee on a person. There was someone sitting there, dozing off, apparently. 
"Sparky! No!" I yelled, which seemed to startle the man. He jumped up and it looked at first like he was trying to figure out an escape plan. He looked right, he looked left, and then he looked right at me and seemed to resign himself to the fact that, well, there we were. "Umm, hi," he said. Then Sparky jumped up and started to lick his face.
"Sparky, get down boy!" I said. "I'm sorry, man."
He laughed a little bit. "It's OK. No problem," he said, smiling at Sparky as he ran off after a butterfly or a stray leaf. 
"I'm Matthew," I said.
"Jack." he answered.
"Hi, Jack," I said. "And that," I said, regarding my dog who was now trying to uproot a sturdy birch tree, "is Sparky. We love these woods."
"Do you?" said Jack, his eyes flashing. "So do I, Matthew. So do I."
"I have a place nearby, over on Millstone Court. Where are you from, Jack?" I asked.
"Here," he said.
"Here, like Stonington, or here like Connecticut, or..."
"Just, here," said Jack.
I left it at that.
We had already begun walking together. Anyone who walks a dog will inevitably come upon these situations, when someone will decide to walk along with you uninvited and all you can think about is how to ditch this person without coming off as totally rude and antisocial. But, this was not the case with Jack. I felt genuinely comfortable with him right off the bat, and we talked about the dog and about the weather and about the woods. 
He seemed to know everything there was to know about those woods, and as he talked about the various flowers and the birds and the actual ages of ancient trees, I stood back and regarded him. It was no surprise that I hadn't seen him at first, as he lay there napping among the roots of the old oak tree. He sort of blended with the environment, if you could say that. Like, he was wearing jeans, just like anyone else, but when you looked really close they weren' t really blue, they were kind of green, like the sunlight that reaches the forest floor. It was probably a trick of the light, but it seemed that shadows falling across his face always gave him a sort of dappled appearance which could easily fade into the background. His voice brought me back to reality.
"How old do you think it is, that old oak tree back there?" he asked.
"Geez, I don't know, 150 years old?" I said.
"Close, but no cigar! That tree is 284 years old. It's the oldest living soul for miles around."
"284 years old," I said, genuinely impressed. "That's pretty old."
"I have known that tree for a very, very long time," said Jack. I looked at him again. He looked younger than me.
"You said you love these woods, Matthew," he said.
"I do," I said. "I come here a lot, especially if I need some time to think, or to meditate, sort of, you know? I like that I can be alone for an hour or two. Well, usually," I added, and we both smiled a bit. "I feel like the air is just a little cleaner in here, like I'm on a walking tour of the Oxygen Factory. I like that you don't have to have silence to have quiet."
"That's very wise," said Jack. "There is a lot to learn in the forest."
Wise. I thought that was kind of an odd thing to say. "Like what?" I asked.
"Here," he said, "being successful in life doesn't come from killing or competing with everyone else. Here, it means having strong roots, and spreading out and embracing the sunlight as much as you can. It means sharing the bounty, and living in harmony with everyone, with everything around to create a place where everyone can thrive."
"Yeah, I guess it does," I said, turning that thought around in my head for a bit. 
We kept walking the Labyrinth. We talked about the birds, and the conversations they were having above the treetops. I began to ramble on about the colors, about the hundred shades of early-spring green you'll find in late April, about how some of the leaves were so young that they weren't even green, but came peeping out in shades of orange or crimson, perhaps foreshadowing their fiery exit in the Autumn. I talked about how it all looked like a beautiful Monet, an Impressionist masterpiece, when you see all the colors and the shadows and the splashes of light; the stark tree trunks embracing a diaphanous halo of young green. Jack really seemed to like it when I talked about that, like he took it as a personal compliment.
"Wow, that's awesome," he said. He looked like he was about to say something else, but just then we heard the sound of a car, whizzing by in the distance on Ridge Road. Jack stopped dead in his tracks. 
I had already taken two steps before I realized Jack was no longer walking beside me. I turned to face him. 
"This is as far as I go," he said.
"OK," I said. Sparky was forty feet down the path trying to eat a giant rock. "Well, it was nice talking with you, Jack," I said.
"Yeah, I don't know a lot of people," he said. "Not a lot of people, well, see me, I guess. But I'm glad to have met you, Matthew."
We shook hands, warmly. "OK, well, take care, Jack," I said, and I turned to go. Sparky had managed to get the boulder into his mouth but now couldn't seem to dislodge it.
"I see him, sometimes, in here, you know," said Jack, his voice behind me now. 
I turned and looked at him again. Already he seemed to be fading into the background. "What? Who?" I asked.
"Hugh. I've seen him here, too, walking the Labyrinth. He says he'll see you. He'll see you in the future."
I struggled for something to say at that moment, but all I could do was stand there, silent, my heart pounding in my chest, until finally the tears found their way out of my eyes and began rolling down my cheeks. By the time I had wiped them away, Jack was gone. 
Sparky, on the other hand, was now trying to pursue a squirrel up a giant pine tree with the rock still stuck in his mouth. 
So now, you'll understand why, at my age, I begin to question whether this encounter ever really happened at all, or whether it's something I dreamed up and have begun to believe as fact. 
The thing is, I have marked the occasion every single day since that encounter along the Labyrinth. Since that afternoon, every day, before I leave the house, I stop by the picture of Hugh which sits on the dresser, the one of him in the dinner jacket. I kiss my forefinger, and then I touch that picture, right on Hugh's forehead. And, ever since that afternoon, I say, "See you in the pasture."
And I think I probably will.

I know I can be a real Pollyanna sometimes. There's a reason for that. I made a conscious decision, a couple of years ago, to try to banish, or, to use a five-dollar word, to eschew negativity in my life. It's been transformative, something I recommend for everyone, actually. But that's a topic for another day. Anyway, take away the negativity and what you're left with, I guess, is Pollyanna. Or Paulieanna.
I had another Pollyanna moment yesterday.
There is a street in Provincetown named Ships Way Road. It is about a 10-minute walk from my house, maybe 30 seconds from where I work. It's a road that most people in town don't even know is there, much less where it leads. Well, at the end of this little-known road is a little-known open, unspoiled space called Shank Painter Pond Wildlife Sanctuary. It's huge, it's open, and it's a place where I have been able to take my dogs over the years where they can run around unleashed and enjoy their dogness.  There is a single walkway which leads to a nicely constructed viewing deck, which overlooks the pond itself and the adjacent wetlands, but other than that it's completely wild and there are acres and acres of unspoiled wilderness. 
Anyway, it had rained most of the day yesterday, That was kind of a bummer, because it was my day off and I was hoping to be able to enjoy one of those long, sun-drenched spring walks I've been waiting so long for.  But by 4:00 or 4:30 in the afternoon, the rain had finally abated, and the sun began to come through, just in time for the afternoon dog walk, so I decided to take the dog to Shank Painter Pond. 
I stood on that nicely constructed overlook. The air smelled crisp, if crisp is a smell. It smelled like air that had been washed and hung out to dry in the sun. The sky was 1970s-eyeshadow blue; as if once the rain ended, the sky said to itself, "I gotta get pretty before the sun goes down!" There were still some Maxfield Parrish clouds painted high in the sky; and it was cool, but a nice cool, like the cool of your car's A/C blowing on your face on a 90° August afternoon. I looked out at the pond. Even though it still has the rather dull grey and brown palette of an early Cape Cod spring, it was beautiful. It took on the glow of an expectant mother, thinly concealed fecundity and the promise of so much life, hidden for now, but oh-so there.
So, that's when I had my Pollyanna moment. At first, I noticed how big it all was, marveled at the sheer acreage of all this; and how funny it is that probably 90% of people in Provincetown don't even know that it's there. That made me think how lucky I was that I do know about it. How lucky I am that I can walk for 10 minutes and have this whole, huge, amazing place pretty much all to myself, any time I want.
My mom would have called it "counting your blessings". I call it "conscious appreciation". Call it what you will, I think it's really important, like petting the dog or telling your husband that you love him or that he looks nice in those jeans. You have to consciously appreciate the things in your life that make you happy, the things in your life that are good. With your mind you have to really appreciate these things, to be thankful for them if you want to think of it that way, to remember how easy it would be for things to be different. Once you start thinking that way, you'd be amazed at how long the list starts to become. Instead of thinking things like, "I really wish I had a dishwasher," you start thinking more like, "I live in a beautiful house." 
Anyway, so I sat there, looking out at Shank Painter Pond and the largest quaking bog in the entire world (it's true, you can Google it), only 10 minutes from my home, listening to the peepers below singing a duet with the spring birds above, consciously appreciating stuff. I was mostly thinking, as I often do, of the place where I live, this amazing, quirky, bi-polar mix of earth, air, fire and water.
It may not be obvious, but I have lived my life pretty much like a leaf, floating on the surface of a brook in the woods. I have always lacked direction, just sort of floated along through life, more or less allowing the current and the landscape to push me along. "Let go, let God", some would say. "Lack of initiative" or "Squandered potential" others would say. "Too much pot" might be the closest to the truth, but what I usually say myself is that "things just kind of worked out that way." Sometimes I think it's my greatest weakness, and sometimes I think it's my greatest strength.
So I began to appreciate yesterday not only the beautiful town where I live, but the very fact that I'm here at all. Some wisdom, some force, some quirk of fate, knew that this is where I needed to be. And here I am. Some gentle breeze just nudged that little leaf downstream to just the right place. How amazing is that?
Then the dog reminded me that we had places to go. I got up, and soon my mind returned to stuff like, "I can't believe how much the electric bill is," or, "How many days until I can sleep in?" But I was smiling, and feeling very, very blessed.

BECKY

the challenge here was to build a story from the first sentence. First sentence provided by Serge C.

Becky wasn't quite sure what to make of the corpse lying in her bathtub that Tuesday morning. At least, it might have been a corpse. It probably wasn't, but last night was kind of a wild night, and with a roommate like Innominata, anything could have happened. She thought she saw the corpse breathe, but at any rate this was all going to have to wait a minute because right now she really had to pee.
Somewhere nearby on the streets of Portland, a siren wailed, not giving a second thought to the fact that it was 7:30 in the morning on a Tuesday, when no self-respecting 24 year-old should even be awake. Becky glanced over at the body in the bathtub, and wondered for a second whether they were coming for her.
As soon as she flushed the toilet, though, the corpse in the bathtub began to moan.
"Awww, man," it said. "Jesus fuck. Where am I?"
"On Flanders Street, in Portland. In my apartment. In the fucking bathtub," she answered, standing over the bathtub with her arms folded like a disapproving mother.
"Oh, right. You're one of those Goth girls, from The Lovecraft. Sorry, I don't really remember very much after the fourth or fifth shot of tequila. I'm Todd," it said.
Todd, right, that was it. "Beck- err, Natasha," she said. Becky still sometimes forgot to use her Goth name. Out of sheer habit, she stuck out her right hand as if for a handshake, but Todd was still wedged unnaturally into the bathtub, so they just looked at each other awkwardly for a moment, until Becky cleared her throat and ran her hand nervously through her hair.
"You look like hell," she said as Todd slowly unfolded himself and struggled to stand up. She didn't mean to be unkind, but he really did look like hell. His clothes were all wrinkled and stained by something the color of rusty nails, his hair was a disaster and he looked kind of pale. Like, really pale.
"Well, thanks," he said. He gave Becky the quick once-over. "You look a little rough yourself, there, "Natasha" " He even made little quotation marks in the air when he said that. Becky decided at that moment that she hated Todd.
When she glanced over at the mirror, though, she saw that he was right. Embalmers' shade of pale foundation and tons of liquid liner might look fabulous at 2am at the club, but after a wild after-party and a couple of hours with her face in the pillow, she looked more like Alice Cooper in a car wash than the Queen of the Damned. Not pretty.
She let out a tiny shriek and feebly tried to hide her face with her hands. "Ohmigod," she said. "Go make us some coffee, will you? There's a Keurig in the kitchen."
"Yeah, OK," said Todd. He found his way out of the bathroom but it almost seemed to Becky that he had to lean on the walls or something for support. A little wobbly. Well, it had been kind of a wild night.
As she washed her face, she tried to piece together the events of the night before. She and Innominata had gone to see Rat's Ass at The Lovecraft. The crowd was kind of lame, just the same old poseurs from Tacoma and the heroin addicts zoning out and drooling in the corners. Innominata kept bitching about "new blood" and then her attention latched on to Todd and his frat buddies who were acting like they were there on a dare or something. Ridiculous. But she reached into that seemingly bottomless purse of hers and kept sending over rounds of drinks and shots, and before Becky knew it they were all drunk and buddy-buddy like it was Mix-With-The-Freaks Night at Delta Phi. Then it was last call and Todd and a couple of his "bros" were coming over for cocktails. Becky had managed to stay up for half a cocktail, but was starting to feel a little nauseous. The last thing she remembered, one of the frat boys was asleep on the stairs, one was leaving, and Todd was sitting at Innominata's feet looking like he was in some kind of trance. Innominata herself had a kind of hungry look in her eyes, and Becky thought to herself that she didn't really want to be around for wherever that game was going.
Funny, she thought to herself, how this sort of thing seems almost normal since Innominata had moved in. Before that, the wildest thing that had happened was the time her friend Melissa had puked in the movie theater when they went to see "Breaking Dawn". Then, four months ago, Becky placed an ad on Craig'sList. She had worked on it for hours. It started out with "Single Pale-White Goth Female seeking Crypt-Mate in Portland," and it ended with "Undead preferred, but not mandatory." And in walked Innominata, like something out of the Perfect Roommate catalog, with a Goth girl's dream wardrobe and a pocketbook full of hundred-dollar bills. She had moved in two days later.
She even had the ideal name. "Innominata VonDrakula" How perfect! Becky didn't even know what Innominata's real name was. Even her checks had Innominata VonDrakula printed on them. How cool was that? Becky still hadn't even settled on her own Goth name yet. So far the best she could come up with was "Fatale", but she thought that it sounded too French or too X-Men, so for now she was using "Natasha" but hopefully nobody realized that it was actually the name of a character in the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons. She hadn't even dreamed up a Goth last name yet.
She finished washing her face. Alice Cooper was no longer looking back at her from the mirror. Neither was Natasha, really. It was just plain old Becky from Baltimore. She had moved clear across the country and still couldn't outrun that identity.
She gave herself a little sigh, pushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear and walked out to the kitchen.
Todd looked a little better. He had sunglasses on and he was holding a cup of coffee up to his mouth. When he saw Becky, he glanced over toward the counter where a cup waited for her.
"Thanks," she said, holding the mug with both hands and taking a deep breath, smiling slightly before taking a giant gulp of coffee.
"Umm, she getting up any time soon?" said Todd. He meant Innominata.
"Probably not," said Becky. "She kind of likes to sleep in. I hardly ever see her before dark." Like, never, she thought to herself.
Todd nodded and took his phone from his back pocket. When he looked at it his eyes went big and he sort of snorted some coffee out through his nose.
"Shit! 7:43!" he said. "I have class in fifteen minutes. Shit shit shit. I have to go. Nice meeting you, Natalie," he said, simultaneously putting the coffee mug into the sink and putting his jacket on.
"Natasha," said Becky. She noticed that Innominata had given him a humongous hickey on the left side of his neck.
"Natasha," said, Todd, closing the door behind him.
Thank God it's my day off, Becky thought, taking another grateful gulp of coffee and taking a hesitant look at the apartment around her. Disaster. Beer cans. Red plastic cups toppled onto their sides and fused to the counter by whatever was once inside. Half-smoked joints leaving little scorch marks on the coffee table. Inexplicably, a black feather boa hung from the ceiling fan, which was creakily turning at the lowest possible speed. This was going to be an all-day cleanup.
Becky finished her coffee and made herself another. Despite all her attempts at being "Natasha" or "Fatale", at being a strong, fearless, Woman of Consequence, she still ended up being the one who cleans up after a party she didn't even get to enjoy. As she got the Swiffer and the Dyson out of their closet and pried the red plastic cups off of the counter, she kept looking over at the door to Innominata's room, and she found a little ball of resentment forming in the pit of her stomach. While she vacuumed up potato chip crumbs and stepped on a bottle cap with her bare foot, the little ball of resentment began to grow a little bigger. And when she found both a cigarette butt and a condom in a potted plant (she didn't know which one disgusted her more), it had become a very large ball of resentment indeed. It had become the kind of ball of resentment that causes soccer moms to run over their husbands with the minivan. It had become the kind of ball of resentment that was about to make Natasha go Fatale.
She stood for a moment in front of Innominata's room. "Stop! Do Not Enter! Undead Sleeping!" said the cheesy sign on the door. Please, thought Becky, my little brother Petey had one that said "Genius At Work". I didn't pay attention to that sign, either.
"Do Not Enter Before _____," said the sign. Innominata had written "7:53PM" in the space. Becky had no doubt that that would be the exact time of that day's sunset.
At first, she knocked. Old habits die hard. She knocked again. Becky croaked, softly, "Ummm, Innominata..?"
Dead silence.
Then, Natasha pounded on the door. "Innominata!" she demanded. "Wake up! You need to help me clean up this mess!"
Nothing.
She tried the doorknob. It was unlocked.
She turned it and opened the door, just a couple of inches. It was completely dark inside Innominata's room. If it were possible for darkness to ooze, Becky would have said that darkness oozed from the cracked door.
She opened the door completely. The windows had been covered over and the darkness in the room was so dense that it absorbed all the light coming in through the open door; so dark that Becky couldn't even see the other side of the room.
"Innominata?" she said. "We need to talk for a minute."
She walked over to the window and opened the curtains wide. Crisp, bright morning sunlight poured in, flooding every corner of the room.
The first thing Becky noticed was a huge pile of cash on the dresser. Thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars, just sitting there. And she couldn't even pay the cable bill on time, Becky thought.
The next thing she noticed was Innominata herself, on the bed. The sunlight had fallen across her body. She was wearing a beautiful, black silk nightgown, and for a second Becky thought to herself how odd it was that her body seemed to be on fire underneath the glossy silk. Then she looked at Innominata's face as she lifted her head and looked Becky squarely in the eye. At that moment, thought Becky, she looked very, very ugly. And somewhat angry.
"Becky!" hissed the writhing succubus on the mattress. "What did you do? You stupid fucking b-"
She's calling me a bitch?, Becky thought to herself. But Innominata never got the chance, because at that moment the skin on her face liquified and her bones turned to dust.
"Shit," Becky said, aloud.
She stood there for a while, motionless, silent, contemplating the enormity of everything that had just happened as the last wisps of smoke dissipated from what was once her roommate.
Her eyes found once again the pile of cash on the dresser.
Looks like I'll be needing a new roommate, thought Natasha. In her mind, she was already composing an ad for Craig'sList.

NEW ENGLAND, MARCH 28, 2015

Have faith in things you may not see
We're told since we are young. 
So I, despite the evidence,
Believe there's still a sun.

The sky, once blue and bright and clear,
Is now dull white and gray.
And since the start of this new year,
It's snowed like every day.

Each day I reassure myself:
"The day will come I know,
when I can step out of my house
and not step into snow."

Through the window, in the back, 
Thermometer sits teasing. 
He stubbornly refuses to
move upward above freezing.

The weatherman on Channel 6,
he said it won't be long.
"Today is Spring's first day!" he said.
I think now he was wrong.

But just beneath the frozen earth,
the mangled corpse of last year's garden,
Lie crocus, tulips, daffodils
Awaiting springtime's pardon.

So keep the faith, do not despair,
Believe the day will come
When you can raise your face and feel
The warmness of the sun.

When that day comes, I'll step outside
and say, "I was not wrong!
Dear Sun, I knew the winter through
You were there all along."

BLACK SWAN GREEN

I'm about 98% finished reading David Mitchell's Black Swan Green. Interesting. I don't know, something about Mitchell's work just makes me want to think about it, to dissect it, to write about it, like an over-enthusiastic high school Lit teacher who smoked a fatty in his Prius during lunch break.
I think I most admire his skill, his deftness at writing, his ability to use language to push your brain to think in a certain way. He manages to tell a story with a minimum of actual narration, by showing you the story as if it were an object which can be viewed from many different angles. An ability to turn simple prose into poetry. For example, this brief passage describing a teacher writing on a chalkboard:

"Who can tell me what this word means?"

                       ETHICS

Chalk mist falls in the wakes of words.

Black Swan Green is written in the first person, from the point of view of Jason Taylor, a 13 year-old boy in backwater England in 1982. Each chapter represents one month of the year, so it's not so much one big story as twelve smaller, almost arbitrary stories which, when taken together, suggest something larger. 
What I like best about it is that Mitchell seems to have isolated that singular period in this boy's life when he is actually walking through the door, or series of doors, which lead him out of boyhood and into manhood. But Mitchell avoids the obvious ones; there are no losses of innocence or virginity, or moments of glory on the ball field. He reminds us of the real moments, moments that happen both within us and to us, the things which in the end really forge the child into the adult. Moments like realizing, as we wander further and further away from the constant protection of our parents, that the world is strange and random and that life unfolds in front of us in the most bizarre ways. Finding out that life isn't always fair, but sometimes it is. Coping with being "different" at an age when all you want to do is fit in. Making those first few, seminal, monumental choices, choices which in the end determine the person we become: to Do The Right Thing or not to, or even learning for sure what the Right Thing is. 
Since it's written in the first person, we know nothing more of the world or of these events as they unfold than Jason does. We experience these moments just as he does, and just as we ourselves did when we were at that point in our own lives. 
So, a few more pages to go and I will be done with this book. So far, it looks like Jason is going to turn out alright. You never know, though. the story isn't really over until you've turned the last page, just like real life.