I Love the Smoke

I’ve not been honest, here with my words.

I’ve not been entirely disingenuous either, but wanting to be clever and poetic and beautiful has gotten in the way of sincerity.

I resolve to try harder henceforth. If I’m lucky, there will be clever, poetic, beautiful moments, but they will be sincere clever, poetic, beautiful moments. I’ll probably regress from time to time. Be patient. Grab me by the shoulders and shake me. Hopefully my cringe-causing affectations to greatness (or cleverness or poetic-ness or beautiful-ness) will be short-lived, and I’ll return to the straight-talk, the this-is-me-this-is- who-I-am I know to be me.

Even now, as I fight to break the habit, I find myself writing in circles without honing in on what I mean to say, like I expect you to “get it” but when I reread, my words ring false.

I mean:

When I read what I write, I sound like a phoney. I want to be honest. I want my words to sound authentic. So: I resolve to be more frank. I resolve to turn on the spigot to my brain so that even if I’m not spilling my guts with emotion, I’m at least giving a truthful account of what’s in my head.

I’ll start now, with my current view from the window of my mother’s guest room.

Having lived in England so long, I have forgotten what impending rain smells like. The pervasive damp, forever-about to rain state of affairs in England is so saturated with the smell of rain that it is the always-smell.

Having spent near on three weeks in a truly arid climate, where my skins crackles and my nose innards get crusty, I forgot the smell of environmental wet. Until last night when the cotton ball clouds rolled themselves up into a puffy blanket behind which the almost full moon glowed. The cotton ball clouds had become rain clouds. I could smell it!

From the vantage point of the guest bed, which looks out the window of my mother’s guest room, I watched the cotton ball clouds become fat, threatening thunder clouds with the glow of the moon whitening their edges. It’s a guest room decked out with paraphernalia of the Southwest. Anywhere else, and this room would be tacky: branches taken from the rugged desert and fashioned into pieces of art, Native American Indian feathers (of course, not feathers actually plucked from the Native American Indians themselves, but rather feathers plucked from sacred birds by the Native American Indians), prints of old cowboys with faces as rugged as the scenery outside my window.

Now, in the early morning, the sky is clear and pale blue all the way down to the gentle curve of a piece of the mountains that surround this valley. Sometimes I fantasise: if there were no Mista* would I give up the Smoke and banish myself to a place like this?

*The Mista is no man for this country (side).