Something About Crickets

After the world got suddenly old and Manhattan pulled this gray blanket tightly to it’s neck, the air filled with an odd sound:

A Warbling of sorts as if a fleet of tiny alarms had gone off simultaneously.

Don’t these crickets know that It’s not yet nightfall?

Why can’t they just get up and dust themselves off and fly home to their Families?

(When a firefighter is immobilized for a certain length of time, an alarm that is sewn into their coat is activated. This alarm sounds like a high pitched warbling. On September 11, 2001 the air around the WTC collapse was filled for a time with this sound as hundreds of firefighters were buried under debris…)

RD Armstrong

Long Beach, CA

It's Hard To Go Mainstream When You Can't Even Find The River

For some reason, I'm having a hard time coming up with content for this blog. You'd think a guy like me would be swamped with ideas to riff on. I used to be quite witty and vociferous but, sadly, those days are gone (with a few rare exceptions).

Now I can't dwell on the past, much less remember it. My memory, or what's left of it, is a portal through which information pulses in and out, like a stream of conscience. It is rich with ideas, fragments of ideas and bits of images, a goulash. But I'm not quick enough to grab much. I can only sit and observe it as it pulses by. How did I get here you may ask. This current journey I'm on started in 2008, officially. But in reality I think it may have started earlier, like 2004. I think the Diabetes that I was diagnosed with in '08 began much earlier; so too the Peripheral Neuropathy discovered in '08 as well. These two plus rolling my ankle around 2000 (never fixed) was the medical trifecta that has blossomed into my ongoing health crisis over the past 23 years. This afternoon I'm listening to Pablo Casals tease notes of melancholy out of Beethoven. There's an uncharacteristic drizzle falling out of the sky on this cool September day. I'm at this blog again, chipping away at it like a sculptor... waiting for the subject to make itself known. Perhaps this is the process, this theater of the mind where the play and all it's characters, scene changes and audience reactions are but interesting bits of equal value. Perhaps I should look for the commonality, the pulsing that I mentioned above. In other words, use the process that I have been merely observing and put it to work in my favor. That makes sense to me; I hope it makes sense to you, dear reader.

RD Armstrong