The toaster gives off the kind of glow a harvest moon should.  Especially when the lights are off (or what’s far more common in my case, the lightbulb’s burnt out).  As many times as I tell myself not to look away because the toast will be done soon and if I look away it’ll just pop up and startle me like it always does, I still look away, and it still startles me, and I always think of that scene in The Graduate.

Sunday is for introspection, but then every day that ends in y is for introspection.  It has not always been.  There was a pre-wallflower period where I snuck around factories after dark, climbed into dumpsters of mattresses and jumped until I couldn’t jump anymore.  I walked up to man in a coffee joint taking notes and asked him what he was taking notes about.  I wore a black robe into a gas station and mumbled an imaginary prayer in an imaginary language to get a reaction.  I squeezed the juice out of every moment; I mean my life was concentrate.  I drank and talked and drunk-talked.  Now I spend so much time trying to reconcile myself with my former self that I don’t see people, I don’t see opportunity, I don’t see privilege.  I just see an adjusting Tetris game of prior goals, current discontent, future failure.

All the while the truly disadvantaged dance around me, daring me to do something more than make fun of Brian de Palma and add to landfills.

Dear God I just want to do right by you.  I’m so tired of being a screwed-up son who shows up drunk at your parties.  You’re so good you never send me away, you send the guests away and make coffee and lean over the kitchen table as you tell me I’m special.

Help me to be what you see.  I can’t see it.