Kerouac Sunday

It's a Kerouac Sunday – as they all are, kind of like how a red-sun October day is the best – waking up in the piney wood-smell streamside camp among the red squirrels, crows, grey squirrels, herons, frogs, osprey, chipmunks, turtles, goldfinches, hermit thrushes, bluejays, eagles, muskrats, raccoons, deer, beavers, water snakes, spiders, butterflies, loons, ducks, cormorants, and other assorted sentient beings going about their business without a care about the crucifixion (see D.H. Lawrence's Self-Pity) – absalom comes to mind – don't forget the mosquitoes either or the flying squirrels who only visit at night . . . . but it's raining today and I only know most of them are here from memory as only the squirrels and crows are braving the weather – the shack's a little bigger than Jack’s on Desolation Peak and there’s no Hozameen looking over my shoulder but there's a dark feeling coming down the river carried on misty fingers and settling in my aching bones, achy from sleep, age, damp bedclothes . . . . And that's about it, about all I wanted to say today, another on “the good side of the grass” (the day's not over yet) as they say down at the local watering hole in Gardiner home of Edwin Arlington Robinson (not of the Swiss Family) who's buried there, too – found his grave once and read Richard Cory aloud after a good swig of Bushmills (as is my practice at author gravesides – Thoreau, Kerouac, Frost to date with Dickinson on the short list). It's only two days past solstice but real October's coming, that bittersweet month of crisp smells that transitions into long winter snow doldrums when I dream of todays and wonder if they'll ever come around again or soon enough to save me . . . . It's a big old mystery anyway 'cause where spirituality's concerned all systems and all beliefs are wrong – only the creatures matter and they don't care about sophistry only the moment and if we all spent more time there we'd end human suffering – who knows we’ve never tried it – ask the little ones they have it figured out and don’t even know it.Happiness visits the smallest of things. That's all I know.