sometimesaway

Yesterday

I pedaled my bike home from work a bit earlier than I had anticipated yesterday. I love the freedom of the bike. Its so wonderful that when something catches my eye, I can turn to go up to it without the labor and time of parking. The car zots your head, closes your mind. Its a part of the loosening fabric of things. The bike brings me comfort and resistance. I enjoy it even in the rain. What I dont enjoy is my increasingly unhealthy body attempting to work it, but Im still amazing by what I can do. Its like dancing all night. I can still do that. Its baffling to me that Im still there and a part of the world.

I was rolling down this street that I drive down ten times a week. Ive never noticed the cemetery right along the road. Never walked through it and thought about the past or death or the rest of things that go along so neatly with cemeteries. On the bike, I saw it easily. There was just a small fence holding it back from the road. That had been enough to keep me from seeing it before. I hesitated for a moment. My goal was to get home.

I cant believe my mind can become so focused on nothing that I actually believed there are rules governing where I can turn and where I can go. I jerked the bike into the cemetery parking lot. I remember feeling as though Id ripped myself out of one reality and into a new one.where again things were young and new and everything was to be experienced. I then became aware of the fact that I was feeling that way, and knew I would ruin it with that awareness. I had to then forget that I knew. Like how you can fly in dreams when you experience the purposeful forgetting of the fact that flying is impossible.

I pulled the bike up onto the walking path and coasted down a short hill, looking around me as I did. This was a relatively old cemetery, but with new graves as well. The variations of size and shape showed something about, maybe not the deceased person, but certainly those who they left behind when they died. Death always says more about what is left behind.

Does a large phallic grave signify a terrified family, who respected the dead person only so much as they feared/hated them? Does a small discrete plate covering mean that the family was poor, or unloving, or maybe so comfortable with the persons life and death that they felt no need to push large rocks out of the ground to remember them by?

Thats the thingthe question I mean. If our deaths are defined by what the remaining leave for us, then what could our lives be defined by? If we leave behind us a world of words or impact, does it dent the forever ness of time without us?

I came across a strange grave. White stones about four feet long each formed a basic cross. Along the horizontal stone sat five or six empty Corona bottles. Jose Cuervo bottles and more Coronas littered the ground around the grave. The handwritten inscription on the stones said

Vertical stone: So Long Big Bubba

Horizontal: Sept. 1986- Sept. 2005


I thought it might have been a pets grave. But it was a human cemetery. If it was a human, then the guy was so young and so there. His family or friends, apparently, remember him as a bit of a drinker. Or they are drinkers? Or both? Or maybe graves mean nothing much at all about lives.

I paused to admire the grave, and then rolled further down into the cemetery, which was now vast around me. I wanted to roll up to some interesting looking graves farther in, but didnt want to leave the bike on the path. Of course, I realized that I was doing it again. I was limiting the space that I could move around with in the world. I forced the bike off the path, and rolled over the dead to see what I wanted to see.

This is all the dead should ask or expect of us. Its possible that if they are there in any form at all, they spent most of their time praying for us to do it. Praying that we would not hold them so sacred as to not do what we wished with our life. I imagine them screaming it at usconstantly. Maybe thats what the birds are saying.

I saw brand new graves, and very old graves. Side by side. There appeared to be no reason or purpose behind where or when the dead were buried.

Some of the new graves were off slick black obsidian and marble, with the computer-generated etchings of the deceased and their husbands/wives engraved onto them. The ones like this were mostly for those of the Hebrew faith. I tried to find within me cynicism for the luxuriousness and expense for those who could not possibly appreciate it. But I was peaceful all about me. The slick graves had their beds covered in stone, perhaps in some representation of the faith or culture of those who had died.


I remember thinking;
I have to tell my family and friends. I have to make it clear. If I were to die today, would my friends know how I was to be put to rest? Heres how, in case you wanted to know.

Burn me up, and throw me out with the kitty litter. Then everybody tell a story about me.


I continued rolling through and around the graves. Some where simple markings, some were landmarks of pride. Some were for the living to remember historic events, wars or tragedies. All were of the dead. The countless trillions of the dead that bite at our heals with the world they left for us to live in. The warriors or poets who wrote the world out in verse or action, who only showed themselves in stark relief after their hearts had stopped pumping precious life through their bodies.

How many drowned? How many burned? How many withered to the point of no longer controlling the functions of their bodies. How did they dieI wondered? They died every way you can die. Every death has been experienced. Every nightmare or fantasy fulfilled by someone, somewhere. There is no dramatic or worthwhile death. There is nothing but death, and time, and the washing away of what the deads hands had made in order to make space for the next set of hands.

We bleed in this world. The purpose and beauty is in our humor, our love, our taunt passionate sex. The sex of body, sex of mind, sex of bicycle riding. There isnt much at all in the limitations we build for ourselves, the places we tell ourselves we cannot go, without even knowing that is was we are saying. When we drive down the same road everyday, its so very hard to see the cemetery, unless we find a way to get out of the car.



I rolled passed the mausoleum. The mausoleum, for those whose ideas of life and death were not compatible with thousands of years under the ground. They needed to float on marble and brick, stored as if frozen, awaiting the rebirth of their minds and lives.

It was a beautiful, smallish building, softly lit by the dimming clouded sun. Ticklish wind brushed past my ears and some leaves danced near the foot of the structural wall. A locked gate safely held the building closed. It looked like a fort, or a very small castle. It was about 20 feet tall, 15 feet wide on all ends. The building itself intertwined with all that was around it, and I felt a rushing flood of emotional reaction.

Warmth like rising bathwater choked up my throat and I stopped the bike to look around me. I suddenly wanted to believe in something, to have something, to put meaning into everything. I wanted to find a priest, a rabbi, a secular humanist. I suddenly wanted to speak to someone older, smarter, wiserwho might tell me somewhere to go or something to do to wrap everything together in a neat believable package. I wanted a prophet and a purpose. I wanted to sign my name on a line, to commit to the ideals of someone else or sometime else.

Just as suddenly as it had come, the feeling faded out. I flipped through my mind the various men or women I could have met at that moment. A solitary priest walking through the cemetery, contemplating god? A Woody Allen-like neurotic, hastily scrambling over his words as he explained the meaninglessness of meaning? A Buddhist monk, offering the comfortable enfolds of historic enfolding robes?

I found hostility in me for all of them.

I do not even know how to believe in believing nothing.

I found then inside me a giant sweeping out of all the previous pushings and pulling. My mind washed all of it away, the doubts and the questions and the distance between all of everything. All that was left was a solid substantial fantasy-act playing out in my head, of breathlessly fucking a screaming young woman inside the mausoleum walls. She was a woman from my apartment complex, who Id seen once or twice in the hallways. She was odd, strange in speech and talk. I had thought she might be mildy handicapped, but then came to realize she was simply eccentric.

Like many of my fantasys, I started with the hardcore act, and then worked backwards to create the story of how we got there. The momentary, casual conversation in the apartment building elevator. The walk down through to the cemetery, talking about politics or the strange engravings on the strange graves. How she gained both my attention and attraction by never saying a commonplace thing. By surprising me into the laughter of appreciation. I played out in three seconds the entire play. Those stifled giggles as the lock on the gate of the small building was discovered to be rusted away to nearly nothing. The devil look on her face as we easily snapped the lock in two with a short stick. The mad dash of clothes here and there. I played out so that we became silent as rhythmic footsteps rustled past the building. Who was there? Were we in trouble? Why dont they go away? Who was it? It was indeed an isolated priest and his newfound friend who spoke like Woody Allen, and they were on their way to whatever meaning or unmeaning they can come up with for things. She toyed with me as they passed, daring me to cry out as she refused to stop shifting her body this way and that, holding me in her tight and controlling. She looked at me with a sick little grin the whole while they passed. I made up for it when they were gone.and the rest was the rest, as they say.


I started pedaling again. I went directly home.