The sun is quite left of downtown now, and I don’t exactly mind its sinking into landscape, as opposed to the transamerica building, as much as I mind knowing no one I know is there to catch it.
I had no idea I was operating under the assumption Train was sitting in a lounge chair with a catcher’s mitt everyday at PST+3, looking up and fielding the heavy swoop of my day after it cleared my bat. There: my best go of it, my hardest swing, all I could muster, the day’s take, as good as it gets, no more, no less: my sun. Now his. I was counting on Train to spin that sun however he wished, go to second, lob it to the adoring fans, or bobble and err, so that when it lands in a nisei broker’s mitt in a few hours, there would be nothing left but his glowing stat in the sky. Right next to mine.
And when he was on that tour of duty, I would stare at the sky and feel it’s enormity in one way: it was the same sky. Only one goddamn sky for all of us, no matter who we were, or how disparate our circumstances. This was not an annoying new age tautology, this was a concrete perception of a deep pile carpet. How can it be? I’d ask for the hundredth time. His sky and mine?, focusing on my shoes for bearings.
It is not so.
I am misunderstanding.
And the sky would appear again the next night. Dang! A smell that always made me hungy, no matter how recently I had eaten.
If the sky had summer in it, or halloween, or star jasmine, or 4th grade, or 10th, or a thesis completed, or an air so provocative I had to be rude to others in it so I could feel it for what it was, then I wished the sky on, scraping it forward into the night of the next person, anyone, anyone at all. Take it.
When Train stopped being west of me I went sad. Now it was true he was getting more done by 9am than I would accomplish all day. And it was only possible by cheating, greenwich-wise. I didn’t need his industry. My day was his discard. And I could never remember to drop what I was doing at PST-3, get into an open space, pound my glove, squint at the heavens and catch his texas leaguer.
Why? I was too busy catching up to the east, absorbed in my infinitely divisable distance between my ability and my desire.
Catch!
Some days the whole place looks new, only because I remember the time I passed through here without knowing where I was. Streets travelled in ignorance are now my cow trails. I know all the fjords, the hours, the dogs, the dwellers, the hidden life, my suburbia cloaked in roll-ups, storefronts, hazmat, container trucks pulsing their compressors just to keep their insides from rotting. Walk here and you have a crack at wisdom, but I always fall short and end in arrogance: I know this place and all of you are driving by convinced it does not exist. Not a dumb thing, but neither smart. It is Here, you see. Feel free to accelerate but know you are accelerating away from Here. Hey. Come back. I have a secret.
The sun isn’t setting, we’re toppling backward. Every day, god hang on, there we go again, and no seatbelts.
A crack and you realize you’ve been dreaming. Here comes that day and you’re sleeping in left center.
Hang on, oh, man-
Heads up!