No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
“Ah, nothing’s really wrong, you know. I was just watching the fireworks with my friends and, you know, thinking about how that’s another year down and… I don’t know, every year I come back here and do all the same things, see all the same people; it’s like this place is standing still. But not really, because whenever I come back the town’s a little more run-down, my friends are a bit older, the stuff we do is a bit less enjoyable. Everything’s just fading or something, I don’t know.”
That had been a year ago and I asked to go back to general assignment reporting. Eventually they let me and there I was in my 40s doing what I’d first done in my 20s, filling a shrinking news hole from a shrunken newsroom for a paper with a dwindling readership competing against bloggers.
To come, and Grow green The vineyards. To bless, and Swell the grapes To the core.
"Thanks, God. Thanks for the life you’ve given me, it wasn’t such a bad life. Dying at twenty-five isn’t so bad, it’s going out with a bang, right in the middle of the good part..."
"Maybe you don’t believe,” she said, exhaling a stream of rich Cuban smoke. “And maybe you don’t miss her. Or maybe you just don’t want to because you don’t understand.”
"Understand what?”
"That you can hate something and love it at the same time.”
Tsk, I knew that woman. She used to live in a mountain of papers and books down by the French Quarter. Knew her husband, too. One of those academic types that fell off the wagon and thought he could make the streets work for him instead of letting them take him.