running it back with a new blog post

 The end of our trip is a nuclear cover-up town whose guilt is ours to decipher. He was embarrassed cause he was perfect and still got kicked out for missing all the important landmarks. Frunch’s grandpa, that is. He lied to us at the dinner table that he never went near one of Richland’s seven decommissioned nuclear reactors, while his wife blathered on and on about the church choir using the old facility for its good acoustics. The whole situation was a hopeless case, a basket, a prairie fixer-upper. A lesser man would’ve left his wife after she found out she was a was a great king in the past life, and in this one she was meant to experience life as one of the common people. He was one, and he did. 

In his later years, while everything widened, he would often find himself on bridges overlooking duck ponds. The people who saw and pointed sometimes became his friends. So did the all waterfowl. It became a kind of mundane magic, as geese, ducks, and swans would flock to him. In return, he would feed them grass or ropes of algae and bid them good luck in the next life, where they may be responsible for a facility or organization or commission or institution of some kind. In his eyes, there were three categories: Eckankard king, waterfowl, or commissioner. He liked coming up with discrete things like that cause he could take the bus home and think about how he had just come from a good think on a bridge. And when he got home he could think about how he had just come from a good think on the bus. This way, time transfigured into intervals of tough thinking, and his life in the tri-cities of scrubbing sap off the porch with arthritic hands, losing track of obsolete files, and dousing salad mix in hidden valley was a thin veneer over all kinds of strange associations in a man’s mind. And what was everyone else coming from and going to, there on the bus, that was guilty or slimy or absurd?

He’d heard about some gender fluid people who still hopped trains and slept on free land. They also went to Caeser’s Palace for winter. He didn’t feel much like a man anymore and he wished he could find them pre-news-of-their-eradication. Richland was just one big train track next to a highway anyway, and maybe if he spent enough of his days in various kinds of transit around town, he’d stumble upon one. 

Metal-on-metal music played in the Amisto cafe where he sat, eyes innocently sweeping away from items below counters or behind stock closets. And of course, he avoided ankles at all costs, being the most sensual part of the body. A Josephine Foster song would rub nicely against a good set of ankles. That one, “By the shape of my pearls” or something. His precious folio teased between his thumb and forefinger with two thumb prints demarcating his sweaty possession. At some point he decided to start recording his thinkings onto paper, in a very relaxed way. He’d walk along the wall opposite the highway in the morning, to the cafe with its whole blue-grey shiplap, sly Jesus, edison bulb, and corny aphorisitic quote decor with sayings like “Coffee: because adulting is hard." He liked these things and laughed at them too. This morning, he wrote to himself about a new discovery—his ears pounded if he touched a certain place on his inner buttcheek. He wanted to check it was the same today as it was last night, but he’d have to go to the bathroom and do that, and he still had some of his vanilla milk steamer to finish.

He planned to live off the fat of the land soon, or see what the fuss with e-cigarettes is about, dance, pedal steel, or act like a goddamn asshole. During Frunch’s last visit he has said to them, “Pick a side. Are you to work or not? You could table for grief or solicit door-to-door subscriptions to Tahitian travelogues. It could be romantic for an artist like you to do something like that.” He felt bad that he’d been so intolerant toward their unemployment. He wanted to call them up and tell them that he realized yesterday how so many occupations were a hoax, including the not-work he did at the not-reactor. 

He went to the accessible-stall in the bathroom and checked the spot. Like a little button, it was stil there, putting thunder in his ears. He loved that he could be 78 years deep into a body and still be discovering its secrets. He pushed the pull door, and then pulled it, and retraced his way along the highway wall, thinking about how it was getting warmer, and that meant he needed to start working on his summer feet. He’d lose his shoes for his walk tomorrow.