Wool

"I took a plane
I took a train
Ah, who cares--you always end up in the city..."

-- The New Pornographers, "Myriad Harbour"

--

There is a building near my block that used to be a museum, built like a miniature castle. It now houses a local television news station. Its powerful satellites atop the tower scramble radio signals within a quarter-mile in every direction. Commercials, music and news disappear in an audible haze, like steel wool in the ears, as you pass through the complicated intersection nearby, and as you reemerge on the other side, the ellipses lift and the advertising, singing and reporting continues.

--

When the temperature changes drastically in Cincinnati, the famous fog settles on the river, a thick white block that devours the bridges that straddle the Ohio River, a foot in the city, a foot in Kentucky. You drive through that mist on early mornings if you commute between states.

Soon, my commute will become comical: I will live in Kentucky, work in Cincinnati, but meet up with the van back in Kentucky. I will make an isosceles triangle, every day, until the end of May.

And with summer's arid air in daylight and spring's chilly nighttime mist, fog will make that triangle a capped trapezoid.

--

The end of May seems at once close and far away. The end of the tour comes with the end of the month: The culmination of nine months of contracted acting.

My feelings are not as mixed as my sense of time, though. I am ready to move out, in and on. I'm eager to return to an office space, a chair removed from rocking, an offstage gig to balance the onstage weight. I want a phone and a new email address, three walls of four, one size to fit all my workplace flair. I also just want to feel like the last nine months of gruel have led to an entree, some red meat, ready for the tasting, for my salivating and savoring.

I am a dog, sitting, obedient, watching a dangled piece of bologna, twitching at the first sign of release, ready and waiting for the fall.

--

In the Book of Revelations, the narrator writes, "You say, 'I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.' But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. Therefore, I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see."

Am I blind at the moment, seeing only what is to come and blinking past the present? Am I deaf, listening to self-help tapes in the car and not hearing the ambulance doo-wopping behind me?

Am I gold to be refined, or just naked silver, to be scrubbed with the steel wool?

--

The transition is what I feel approaching. The impending shift makes me itch, like a donkey scratching its tell-tale hoof and settling under shelter, like a full man feeling a delightful crap inching its way along through his entrails. But it is not a gradual thing, not like weather or digestion, not as I see it. I anticipate its suddenness every day, storing hopes in it like a believer awaiting Eastern trumpets. That's the distinction: a drum roll before panache on cymbals.

Like I said, it's not gradual, a slow feeling. It is a long time in the waiting room before a quick surgery. I know where the TV station will cancel out the radio, and I see the bridge posts suspended in waiting fog; in the meantime, I drive, trying to enjoy the sights and sounds. Steel wool is coming, and soft cotton awaits on the other side.