CONTEMPORARY EXPLORER

"Sarah Street Waltz" - Chester, SC

The email on the phone shouted, “Where are you?” I didn’t have to look at the sender. It was my business partner, wondering why I missed another meeting. Emails from my wife were far less pleasant.  I found myself ignoring both, like the rest of my world that I knew. There are a hundred different names for it. Going over the edge, off the wagon, outside the ropes, off the grid or just being an asshole. They all fit me. Like other nights, my life danced in places I should not be and always ended with a drink in my hand. One night I found myself in some dive, dark and dirty with the sweat of life. I looked around and saw people at the end of their rope, lost souls with no hope, just like me.  I didn’t want to be them or me. Just then a voice rang out from the other side of the bar. “I am Pastor Robert. You look troubled. Come with me, be saved and redeemed.” I turned and looked at a slightly built black man with gray hair and a cropped beard in a simple suit.  ...

“The day you feel like you’ve won, you need to drive out of the parking lot and not come back.” Mark V. Hurd Drama swirls around parking lots. You worry about finding a space, happy when you do. Angry when you don’t. Always, you hate to pay. When you leave at the end of the day, a sense of freedom beckons. Love never seems to linger in these places with the coming and going of life. They are empty as the city when cars leave.  Parking lots form an undeniable part of the city fabric. There are over 1.6 million parking spaces in Seattle. Many more in places like New York. They take up huge parts of a city. Ones some advocates say could be better used for affordable housing or public places.  Some parking lots become abandoned for good, needed no more by the city. They sit in unadorned nakedness. A few find temporary lives again as storage yards, but most just linger, mourning the changing of a city. Hoping against hope that enterprise or new uses will find them again....

I suppose I got hired because of looking like a pliable nerd with glasses that would do what they were told and keep their head down. That wasn’t hard in Seattle, the sun only shined here a few days in July. My card read Jeff Blake, Customer Service. My job, to receive claims reports over the phone, usually auto, prepare a summary and pass it on to the claims adjuster. After a week, I knew all the forms, what to ask for, learned to differentiate the phone screaming of claimants and had begun doing what everyone else in this hell hole did. Compile a list of ways to commit suicide.  There were the normal work station distractions. Tom who came in each day smelling of alcohol and Mary, down the row who crossed her legs in an ever-increasing artful way framed by a shorter and shorter skirt. Beyond that, the job reeked with boredom. I tired of it quickly, but never the stories. People found all types of reasons and circumstances for their claims. Then there were the obvious fr...

The vast horizon t akes you within. It throws your dreams, t hen pulls you back. The crooked plants a nd the earth cracked. Streams filled with dirt r un with the wind. Run before the sand, w here does a man hide? You are hard, b ut the animals tougher. Each season brings something different. Locust, Red Racer snakes, Bobcats, migrating caterpillars. I passed a rattlesnake, i t's belly full. It did not strike, It would again with the next day light.... David Young