Story

Well I mean, L.A. is so easy, the greying men at the table next to me repeat, in the midst of recounting how work is going and how their children are doing. He's dating a lovely girl now, but since I last saw you he's had three jobs, I don't know what he's doing. Monday bar on a Thursday, I am wrapped in the season's first tights, I'm swathed in a sweater and somehow impossibly October appeared out of the July that was yesterday, everything is topsy turvy. My phone autocorrects it to tipsy turbo,  and I am loath to change it.

The cherry blossom tracker on said phone morphs into a fall foliage map, washing the screeen in fiery shades and cozy exclamations. At last the waves line up and I see a life make sense: this is what it is to be human, this is what it is to be you. You fight so hard against the demons instead of seeing how much they look like you, how much they could help you tell someone else their story. You spread out in your usual corner of the bar, piles of paper and empty glasses, you think of what home is and how the only thing that matters is that when you are homeless there is only survival and when everything lines up you can think straight, and maybe I do think more about the weather than most but don't you know? A maple on fire can change your life just like a wave at Rockaway beach, the point is we are insignificant specks in the Universe and so you owe it to yourself to
live this life as
goddamn much
as you possibly can.