about to sleep...

Just now I started thinking about "the future", so that was it: I'm awake and so much for sleeping. Rain against the building, sudden thought of childhood and on into insomnia.

I wonder how the Pizzas' show went. Dreazy was a little nervous about choice of footwear, but with this rain, let's face it: whatever gets you through the night is best.

Or I could be wrong. to think about it in practical terms: Goofus doesn't care at all what he wears to the wedding. ("Ah, I like these tennis shoes they can go on and smell me!") Gallant wears the right shoes to every occasion. ("With these blue Chucks on, all the indie kids will think I'm cool!")

In my mind I'm always beating myself up for this one time I was with my friend the Beej and my Uncle Mac. We were going to a railway museum in the northwest suburbs of Chicago in the early spring of my 8th grade. Soon would be high school and adult responsibilities like horrible part time jobs that were either 1 to 9 on Saturdays or all Friday night. I'd found this hat with a big fluffy bear-face on its front. I wanted to wear it.

The Beej was in a nice polo and Uncle Mac was out of a 1954 Macy's catalogue as usual. Railroads were a big deal to my uncle and he had bought me some tremendous books, the best one was about train wrecks in the 19th Century, fully illustrated. "Someone's gotta be the personality in this group" I mumbled when my Uncle Mac told me I looked retarded and he was not taking out a child dressed apparently for a sad parade or the end of youth. When your closest friend is embarrassed to catch your eye, you know you've fucked up, but what shames me still is that sense of righteousness and oppression when I went to take that hat off. Only after, of course, a listless argument on my part and a quite spirited one by my uncle defending his right not to be judged by others on my account. In his argument were aphorisms, in mine, the choked illogic of the provincial.

My uncle, because his heart is kind and he is good, was especially attentive to me as we wandered the grounds looking at the retired engines and passenger cars that had once carried the long-dead and the now-retired to their jobs. He knew all the stories, what lines these rode, what cities those had been in. He knew about the people that had taken them all and imagined their lives out loud. He had a gift for cutting to the quick of a sullen teen and getting us to respond to something outside of ourselves. He was always helping out somebody or other while hardly realizing it. When I was younger he told me how mortar rounds sounded, he called Reagan a fool and talked about the failure of communism with genuine regret.

So that's the bear-hat story anyway.

Goofus and Gallant


a bear hat similar to mine


a train wreck