my careless contagion

I sit here heavy with troubling thoughts. I sit here full of remorse. I sit here begging for her to hear me, but she does not.  I'm sorry, Cindy. The words I had for you were the most unkind things I could have said. Whether or not I was being noble is no longer an issue. I know I hurt you, my dear friend. And that is a fact that tears at my chest like a wild animal.  I don't deserve to be your friend. I don't believe I ever did deserve that. Somehow, a magical door opened between us, and I was in your life. Soon, you saw the man I was, and that door closed. Our magical moment was gone, and I will pine for that as long as I live. I miss you, and I want it back, but it's not coming back.  My words. They were desperate. They were meant to hurt. They were meant to drive you away from me. They wanted to make a choice that wasn't mine to make. They wanted to send you through a door to a wonderful world beyond. But all I did was make you sad. I have cried, and ...

Mud Hill is a breakup song by the band Samiam. I think we've all been there before. If we haven't, then we haven't lived. Right now I'm assessing my life and taking stock of my 41 years' worth of experiences. What strikes me is how many times I've broken up with girls when we weren't even dating. What's more surprising is how many times it messed me up. Maybe it was the fact that we weren't even dating that made it worse.  Samiam is a band better listened to than watched. Maybe this is why they never made it big, or perhaps because they didn't take themselves seriously enough. The band is (mostly) defunct, or at least off and on defunct. And who cares about Samiam when Ariana Grande just released another shitty track? She wouldn't know poetry if it bit her in the ass, but then again, neither would her fans. I digress.  There really isn't a point to this post besides the fact that I'm going over my list of failed relationships...

When I was in grade school and we lived in a small town in the Black Hills, on specific Wednesday afternoons some of the kids went to church while the rest of us went to the Veterans Affairs (VA) campus in our town to hang out with some of the veterans there. The program paired one or two kids with a vet, and we did projects and tours and other fun stuff. This was the middle of the 1980s, so these vets were WW II guys, the Greatest Generation. It's strange the memories that come to you when you're not even trying to think of anything. This is one of them. There seems to be a necessary recall going on in my head, the end of which I've yet to see. The VA once tried to arrange for our parents to meet our vets. There was some sort of party that we were all invited to. It was a great idea. I didn't tell my parents about the party. My veteran got upset with me, asked why I didn't invite them, why we didn't go. I just figured he wouldn't understand, so I di...

My parents in 1984 surveying the house they were having built. I have this memory, but not because I actually remember it. I was too young to remember it, but the story was retold often enough by my mother that it seems like I actually have the memory.  I was very young. It was the mid-1980s. My parents had a house built (which went wildly over budget) in 1984 on Happy Hollow Street in a little town in the Southern Black Hills in South Dakota. Parents raised their kids a little differently then than they do now. There was also the matter of finances, which meant that a babysitter wasn't always possible. My parents had a colleague leave their company and start up a competing business across the street. In order to compete, they were putting in 100 hour weeks, both of them. This continued for years.  My mom didn't want to work, but my dad was the boss and women were working a lot in those days, so he said she should too. She started out as the bookkeeper, setting ty...