Trying to pluck that iron string.

The fra­ter­nity of early risers

Wak­ers from night­mares or anx­i­ety dreams,
An elder who just doesn’t sleep,
The ones who work early and can’t stop their body from wak­ing on pre­cious days off,
Jog­gers,
dog-walkers,
Cus­tomers first-at-the-door for that first batch of cof­fee or paper.

Whyever the rea­son they’re up,
there’s a cer­tain smile, a par­tic­u­lar nod,
a tone under­neath the good morn­ing
the pleas­ant exchange of news regard­ing the weather
at the gas-station pump and in the aisles of the mar­ket,
as one yields to the other on the street or the cross­walk, allow­ing the turn.

We saw the sun rise, the sky brighten from starry to pearl-clouded to red-orange, then azure.
We saw the air creak and sparkle with cold.
We saw the moon sink, the snow solid and silent on branches before the heat of the day made it fall.
We saw pos­si­bil­i­ties, posed, before they became–  real­ized, wasted, how­ever.
We felt the world pause as we early ris­ers met eyes and said silently, yes.
The day.  It begins.

Whether we were buy­ing the cof­fee or serv­ing–
Whether we woke happy or not well-rested at all–
Whether we were up because we were alone and regret­ting, again,
Or con­tent in our com­pany and that of the world’s–
Once up, once early-risen, once dressed and about,
There’s a broth­er­hood there, just in the mere obser­va­tion– Yes.  I am up.  You are up too. Things will begin, once again.

I would as soon miss the first breaths of the day as the first breaths of my body.
Who doesn’t want to be known– seen– acknowl­edged, even if just for a moment?
The fra­ter­nity of the why-in-hell-are-you-up-so-early are up for all kinds of rea­sons,
but we all dwell in the pos­si­bil­i­ties before they are spilt– spoilt– spelled for the rest to see clearly.
Leave the late nights to those who mut­ter on what’s been done or how things didn’t hap­pen as planned.
Me?  I’ll go to bed early.
Tomor­row always brings a fresh start.

On fur­ther con­tem­pla­tion of the prob­lems of late– or the use(lessnes)s of enchant­ment at the end of the day

No, I don’t sup­pose hav­ing the pow­ers of the gods in Ovid’s Meta­mor­phoses would help.
After all, they acted out of anger, desire and heartache, just the same as we hum­ble, mere mor­tals.
Being a wiz­ard or witch or an all-powerful being from a galaxy far-far-away, the kind
in binding-cracked, yellow-paged books and those series oft-watched on tv and film, laugh­ing at the some­times cliched plot­lines and bad makeup and yet at the same time wist­ful for a sim­ple, pat end­ing, for such rapid-fire come­backs–
that wouldn’t help, either.  Nor will rat­tling the joy­stick and curs­ing our lack of reflexes, though it all seems so real.
The object les­son is always the same– those pow­ers are no hedge against hubris, no complacency-counter, no way to stop the just plain old for­get­ting to pay the kind of atten­tion you’d want to be paid.
Those old gods were noth­ing more than our­selves, mag­ni­fied, whether they were Ovid or some other teller’s.  (In the end, is it a suc­cess or a fail­ure of imag­i­na­tion that the gods were in our image, rather than tran­scended our mis­er­able moods?)
It’s the golden rule, writ small or large in super­nat­ural pow­ers.
It’s the les­son we try to for­get when we don’t want to get meta, just want to dab­ble in myth.
(More com­fort­ing, that, than fac­ing what’s not black and white– tech­ni­color– wide-screen HD– first per­son shooter or omni­scient POV too– an escape from life’s every­day prob­lems, the ones that seem so much more ingrained and entan­gled than what can be solved in a few hun­dred pages or an hour with just a few words from our spon­sors– except one book, one episode, one game yields to another and then it’s 3 a.m., next week, next year, and where does the time go?)

Love as you want to be loved– or per­haps more accu­rately, love if you want to be loved– that’s the les­son to learn from the sto­ries we tell our­selves instead of look­ing at our own lives.
Aren’t all sto­ries love sto­ries, when you look under­neath?
The writ­ten tale– the tv series– the movie– the inter­ac­tive RP or video game– the fic­tion is only that until we cross not through the look­ing glass but have to look our­selves in the mir­ror, when the teller of tales writes some­thing so real it bowls us over harder and faster and more blind­ing white in its truth than that bull who car­ried Europa so far from her home.
(Not, we’re led to under­stand, that she wasn’t will­ing in some part to be car­ried, even as she was afraid of what might pos­si­bly hap­pen– but so, too are we.  Don’t we all want to be car­ried, some­times?)
At the end of the day, just try to keep your eyes open.
Just be kind, just ask straight­for­ward ques­tions– like how was your day and then really pay some atten­tion.
Don’t pose impos­si­ble rid­dles that make the inter­per­sonal, psy­cho­log­i­cal bridge one nobody can cross– don’t be a troll and cut your­self off from the clever, kind brother want­ing to res­cue the princess at the top of her tower, don’t be the alien doom­ing the puny humans to fail.
Oh– and step away from the story, at least for a while.
You might even feel transformed.

The prob­lem of breakfast

It’s 10 a.m. and star­ing at the toaster will not make it hap­pen, nor will wish­ing the caf­feine into exis­tence.
It’s not like we don’t have food– and I can cer­tainly cook it.  But hav­ing and doing are dif­fer­ent and while  I am a morn­ing per­son, break­fast is dif­fer­ent.
I don’t want it, even as I under­stand that I need it.
Two days’ old cords and a sweater over yesterday’s socks, under­things, a bare brush­ing of hair and a fleece, some approx­i­ma­tion of footwear, my yup­pie e-reader and I’m ready to go.
I don’t plan on sit­ting close enough to any­one else– not before my first caf­feine– for my funky clothes to make me (more) anti­so­cial.
Not that the cafe’s that kind, though I know the servers, the ones whom I like, the reli­able sorts who’ve been there since the start– I might be a bit of a snot to the itin­er­ant ones and the ones who are emo and sigh, roll their eyes when they have to stop smok­ing and come in and work.
Then again, the reli­able ones tend to be long suf­fer­ing about them as well, so I don’t feel so badly about tak­ing their lead.

I slog through the ice in my Dan­skos– my cords bag, the belt slip­ping up at my waist and the gap between belt and waist­band admit­ting the cold where the sweater isn’t the old baggy long thing I wore when I was heavy.
I’m between fits– I haven’t yet set­tled.
Except the cafe is closed– until fur­ther notice, sorry for the incon­ve­nience– and I stand there, momen­tar­ily dumb, because what am I going to do?
Where am I going to cadge wifi, observe peo­ple, read e-books, work on my lap­top, grum­ble to myself that the vaguely home­less peo­ple who use the cafe for warmth are espe­cially bois­ter­ous today?
How am I going to be fed?
But then, there’s the diner, though I’ve been there only the once.
I don’t know why not more often.

Everything’s clean, even if it is spare and there’s no local art on the walls–the cof­fee is mild and hot even if I don’t know the name of the per­son who roasted the beans, the home fries are spicy and crisp.
If the eggs in my omelet come from the indus­trial food­ser­vice truck and not the co-op– though veg­gie pat­ties and avo­cado slices and melon aren’t an option (not that I get them that often, but I tell myself the options are nice).
If Amer­i­can cheese and not goat coats the tines of my fork, well– there’s still wifi to cadge, and the bus dri­vers giv­ing each other a hard time dur­ing their breaks are a hoot.
The lawyer inter­view­ing her client over steak and eggs and a lap­top holds down one cor­ner, an anchor.
The bleach-blonde latina fry cook tells the man who brings in kitty lit­ter for the back lot how her kid’s enjoy­ing the PS3 she got him for Christ­mas.
The sausage cir­cles in my omelet are savory bursts in my mouth as I mull over my e-book, glow­ing against the clean faux-wood formica.
If my favorite alt-rock tunes aren’t on in the back­ground, maybe I can learn to like con­ver­sa­tion and the noise in my head.

Do I want some more cof­fee?  How’s every­thing?
The fel­low who took my order when first I came in is at my elbow, cof­fee pot in his hand.
My glasses fogged from the tran­si­tion as I tried to (sub­tly, and prob­a­bly failed) make my pants sit on my waist and not fall all the way off.
It took me a few moments to wipe off the haze, get myself set­tled, scan the menu board over­head and place my order–
but now– yes– more cof­fee, please.
Everything’s good.
There’s more than one way to get fed.