Ernest Hemingway describes my Tuesday.

The hedges needed to be cut. 

I thought to myself. 

The November sun was high and winked through cumulus clouds that looked like breasts full of milk.

I should be in Sea Isle with a sky like that. 

In Sea Isle you know where you stand. 

Day, Night, Ocean, Land. 

You can keep your beer cool when you're on the jetty by tethering it inside a basin of water that collects between the rocks.

Crab cakes and flounder fried in sticks of butter, and so much beer and sand you begin to feel like you may have been that young university post graduate researcher traversing the Levant in another life during your brief walk from 57th to 53rd. The wind snaps through your hair.

"You better get up now."

"I'm coming."

Get up. Sit down. Eat. Shave. The cycles of odious tasks. I blink and sit up straight.

A half a pot of cold coffee. 

I try to fire up the Fire Arrow but something in the Otto cycle isn't giving me the juice.

The man we got this car from said that there had been wasps in the filler neck of the fuel tank.

He got them out though.

Wasps.

 

I light a cigarette. The world is run on tiny deflagrations. 

Every Day. 

Every Second.

I cut the hedges.

Dashiell Hammett describes my Sunday Night.

"Unlikely," I said to myself, sotto voce, as I eased my left hand down over the soft curve of the steering wheel. 

The sound of my hand and the friction of the padded wheel.

It made the sound of money. 

"I can't believe I find myself traversing this particular heap of creation again." 

It was Sunday. 

It was night. 

The world series was going to be on. 

And I was making quick work in my father's Yaris of a road I knew only too well.

The moon squinted off of the hood, and somewhere a 35 year old dentist would decide to get a turkey club, but the turkey club nor the dentist nor the moon could guess at the inscrutable designs the spheres in this brave o'erhanging firmament would construe to contrive the present circumstances.

I checked my rear view quicker than a bullet from a Luger from a Kraut on Pervitin.  This road is notorious when you get aways further, it's the Wild West. I was suddenly cut off by what was either a masculine female or the champion of the high school bowling teem. 

His/Her face was a portmanteau of the words "Perspiration" and "Ignorance."

I waved the butchy creature on with the tip of my hat as if to say - "All's well guy. No harm done."

But the harm had been done. Years ago now, in the ancient past, like engraved words on a tombstone, wounds carved into the soul of time that all the whiskey tears and bourbon rain could never wash away. The day you found the dear john, and she pulled a Nancy Sinatra on you.

As if on cue by the cosmic conductor, the fella on the radio played a song about self-esteem.

A Mazda Miata, black as an oil slick whizzed by me like a business women on lunch break. 

I was on Route 1.

I was picking my little brother up from Trenton.

The land that time forgot.

I was itching for a lucky, but since the tree-huggers got hold of the car owner I'd be facing a mild sanction if I lit up in the car, so the smoke and Trenton would have to wait. 

Traffic, at night, is a mysterious thing. 

If you can see past the worried mothers, truckers, aching backs, the unregistered plates, the rough and tumble scramble, the business men in rented cars with lipstick on their collar you'll begin to feel your head turned slightly to the side the way a child turns their head in delight and nostalgia when they watch a heartwarming Christmas special.

You begin to feel your vision pleasantly skewed like when your sweetheart lovingly touches the nape of your neck. Suddenly, the world isn't like the brackish baywater up close but the grand 'ole Atlantic with a view. 

Then the idea of Trenton doesn't hang on you like Jacob Marley's chains.

"All right fella" I say to myself, I say to no one.

"Here we go."

Rain

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