"Un just"

Running through my hometown, rustling trees swaying in the wind, sun beaming down from above, dripping sweat, I passed a sight unseen to the common eye. An older man, gray beard and long white hair tied in a braid, wearing hiking shorts, a white collared shirt, top buttons unbuttoned, tan socks sticking up above his hiking boots, carrying a walking stick in the same hand as his dog leash--beautiful black German shepherd on his right side, following his every command--holding an empty Coors Light can in his other hand.

And I thought to myself, "Who is this vagabond man, roaming the streets of Farmingville like a wayfaring pilgrim in search of something more?"

To your eyes or mine, this man and his canine may stand out, and questions inevitably arise--'Is that his beer can, or is he helping to keep our streets clean?' "Is he homeless and walking all day long in search of shelter, or is he retired and just a nature-lover, enjoying the day just as I am?'

And I thought that my critical eye--and the many eyes that incorrectly judge this man everyday--is an American injustice, resembling e.e. cummings' poem of a similar name. "In just spring when the world is mud-luscious the little lame balloonman whistles far and wee," cummings writes. His balloonman is similar to my wayfaring pilgrim, unjustly stereotyped as being an eyesore in a springtime teeming with sunshine, treeswaying, and cool zephyrs rolling us towards nighttime and a seemingly endless summer of starblasted open skies and unending felicity.
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Who am I kidding?
I'd want to walk around all day, absorbing it all...in just the same way as my wayfaring pilgrim and his canine companion--to do otherwise would be unjust.

Remember Two Songs

Driving through Wyoming, glorious mountains to my west; Lake Yellowstone to my east, straddling the Continental Divide, tuning into this station and that, some country here, some soft rock there, my sleeping passengers oblivious to it all. I first heard Chris Stills “When the Pain Dies Down,” a beautiful opus by a relatively unknown soulster, when the windows were down and I was winding through the Grand Tetons National Park headed towards Jackson Hole. The landscape was all blue and green, tremendously breathtaking and titanically overwhelming. I think about the formation of these monstrous creatures and how man is absorbed by their shadows. We are but a tiny sapling sprouting from the dirt floor, shaded from the towering edifices in the distance that were there way before our seeds had ever been thought about being planted.

Freshman year, walking through the Stonehenge campus at Albany--if cement could personify dying, it would happen on this campus--listening to “Float On,” the first song I had ever heard from Modest Mouse, I was not worried. I knew that things would get better and I would leave that place that constricted me, and like a balloon being held down by an anchor, one day the anchor would be released from the balloon’s string and “we’d all float on.” Alright?

Prufrock's Pears

Sometimes when the heavens, the clouds, and the stars pour fourth from their luminous eyes myriad tear drops, little boys on earth become crestfallen and yearn for a time of sunny days and cool breezes.

And on nights like these, with tears falling from the skies, I rejoice in the succulent flavor of the second pear I've ever tasted in my life. And I question myself, Do I dare eat a pear? as if I am J. Alfred Prufrock in search of a peach and some eternal happiness.

What is a pear?
What is a tear?

That which grows from some other grower.
That which is produced by some other producer.
That which is created by some other creator.
I can create a tear by thinking of something despondent.
Yet pears, when they are created, are something ripe, new, delicious, nourishing.
I want to create something enriching. I want to be able to produce something ripe, something new, something delicious, something nourishing.

I want to create something that will enrich others, like the grown pear to crestfallen boys on nights when the sky is crying and the ground is reaching up, catching the fallen tears, the wind blowing in between, consistently asking the sky, Why?