Ballast

Ode to a cheese curl.
Oh lovely, crunchy, neon orange waste of a dozen calories. When the day is done you are the only thing that remains with me: glowing from the tips of each finger like radioactive waste; gummed up along the crevices of my molars; stuck to my shirt like late spring snowflakes.
Whenever I become excessively pompous, whenever I go on too long about the symbolism of the Thunderbird in “Thelma & Louise”, nothing brings me down to earth faster than a handful of your hollow fingers.
Is there anything more normal, more everyday, more matter of fact than your obscenely inflated carbohydrates?
Is there anything more accessible, more available, more capable of inking over the aggravating details of existence, than your sold by volume not by weight insubstantiality?
Yeah, I guess there is.
A good hot dog, for one. The first juicy clamp down on a sugar-fed Double Bubble.
Hell, there are probably a hundred economical antidotes to my middle-age onset addiction to the pompous and/or unnecessarily complex.
Pardon me, but I’ve just come to the realization that along with my Silver Patron Tequila, and the anniversary edition of Mile’s Kind of Blue, the poetry of Russell Hoban, the blogs and the journals and the saxophone and a thousand other subtly intoxicating substances and services that I have become philosophically and/or physically addicted to, that I crave the everyday too: I need the average as well, as much, to be happy.
Those guys in the clown outfits that ride the tall unicycles while playing Yankee Doodle Dandy on the fife in the July 4th Parade – they aren’t still out there, are they?
No, I didn’t think so.
You can only balance on one wheel and play the fife and wear the clown makeup for so long – before you go arse over teakettle. Sooner, not later, you have to put the training wheels back on.
Even blimp pilots go on vacations.
And let me tell you, when a blimp pilot takes her vacation she sticks close to the ground: seventy-two percent of blimp pilots are avid spelunkers (I made that up.)
But seriously, what I am babbling about is balance. Not Yin and Yang – those are two sides of the same coin. No, the kind of balance that a ship needs to keep from floundering at sea – balance from ballast: from forty-thousand pounds of cobblestones in its belly (40,000 pounds of cheese curls would do too).
I remember an afternoon playing so-called touch football with some overgrown, underage hard-asses some twenty years ago, and getting carried away with the contact – with rushing the quarterback, with smacking into the oversized yoot left behind to block for the opposition and, though afterwards I could hardly walk, feeling almost high from the contact, the physicality, the total abandonment of intellect.
(I also remember the sound of my bones collapsing like cheese curls under the existential jaw of age).
Touch football is the cheese curl of athletic endeavors.
I love the relative mindless-ness of hiking in the White Mountains too, where, for most of the time, there are no sights at all to see, just branches to avoid, boulders to scale, slopes to scramble up and where – before you know it, your worries are far behind. I think it must be far more tiring to hike out west, where you are often moving across open glades with too much to see, too much time to think.
But then, of late, I haven’t had the time to hike at all.
This year my hikes have consisted of going from the phone, to the computer, to the phone, to the TV, to bed.
Lately life has been like a ride up old Route 1, from Peabody to Medford, with never a break between one oversized array of blinking lights to the next; no exits except those that just turn you around and send you back down the other side like a gerbil on the wheel.
Simply put, I am in need of simplicity.
I could use a bowl of Gram Tobin’s rice pudding.
I’d like to get my hands around one or two of those grenade-sized Rolling Rocks.
I could use a fast drive through the North Woods, with the windows down and the lights out.
I’m searching the dial for a static-free AM station.
This blimp pilot needs a vacation.
Another bowl of cheese curls, please.


(Photo courtesy of Cinemaben)