I never used to change a single guitar string on its own. Like, if one broke I'd buy a new set of six strings and start afresh. I don't do that anymore.
I guess consistency of sound doesn't mean to me the same thing it once did.
There is a concrete walkway by the river, lined with dried out rosemary bushes and collapsed wooden pylons. The pylons stick out of the edges of the river-bed, scattered and pointing up and out in all different directions. Blackened by decades of rising and falling water levels, some are rounded at their end-points and others are shattered and jagged.
They all look like they fell there so perfectly - it all seems so well timed.
I like to walk along there after 5pm. It's still hot and it's still humid and I still only wear white, long sleeved button-down shirts. But I don't have to apply as much sunscreen at that time. The other day I needed my head cleared earlier in the day. I loaded up on the SPF 90 and took on the midday sun. A young man approached me and asked if I wanted to "play around" in the truck he had parked at the Bywater end.
I couldn't tell if he was hoping that I'd pay him or that he would pay me.
I thought about asking. I was seeking an answer that would prop up my ego. But I did not want to get his hopes up either way. Better to put the earphones back in and leave him be. Entrepreneurship requires belief in one's product and I didn't want to dent the belief he had in his.
People wave a lot here. At strangers. Not the sort of wave that uses wrist and elbow. The one where you raise a couple of fingers and hold them in place for a second or two. Sometimes, they'll lift an eyebrow at the same time. The more gregarious folk will follow up with a single nod of the head. A small tilt back at the neck.
My neighbor is bald and fat and has a black eye. He got it during a meth deal gone wrong. I'm not sure which side of the deal he was on. He seems like the sort of fellow who could easily be either the buyer or the seller.
At the Marigny end of that concrete walk along the river, is a half dozen, iron-clad warehouses. They are painted green and lie in a single line facing out onto a raised train platform. Flanking each of their entrances are stacks and stacks of wooden pallets. These stacks rise up as high the the tops of the buildings. If you force your way through a gap in the cyclone fencing and wander down the platform, you'll find that these towers of ashen timber add up to thousands of pallets
This is way too many for them to just be resting there for a short while. They aren't awaiting a chance to be cycled back into use. These pallets are simply unneeded or unwanted, but not yet discarded. At times, life down here can feel just like that.
Because of my last ending, I'm working on a new way to make new beginnings. It takes effort, which leads to sweat and then it gets so humid here in the afternoons. I've learned that the key is to just surrender to what's coming and to find a way to enjoy the condensation and graft.
The other day, I thought about giving it all away and committing to a different path. A different path along the Mississippi, that is. There's that one that runs to the east from the other side of the platform of ghostly pallets.
I don't know why I was going to do that. But New Beginnings mean taking first-steps that one can't find reasons for. First-steps that one probably has a ton of reasons to not take.
But that's how I ended up at the Wrong Ending last time - because of reasons.
The South is a place where the reasons don't matter. Many people come here looking for reasons, because they don't know this. What they end up finding instead is their own fiction that they then feel the need to retell to people who don't care for it.
A stack of unneeded remedies and unwanted vaccines.
The truth is, the only things that are broken down here are the things that no one has bothered to fix. And if you group enough broken, splintered and rotting wooden pallets in one single place, it gets hard to see that.
But, that's ok too.
