by Salamander Davis | August 19th, 2010
There are sometimes when you sit on your porch in Southern California listening to the sounds of old motorcycles backfiring. There are sometimes when you are sitting on that porch, which is covered in a thin layer of black soot, drinking a Korean beer and wondering what your friends in Chicago are doing. There are sometimes that you wish the four porches across from you were filled with your Chicago friends, your Colorado friends, your Texas friends, and your Kentucky friends, just like you talked about at the lake or while playing Canasta. There are sometimes when one of those friends is sitting in Kentucky with one leg three inches longer than the other and five months of chemo on his calendar. There are sometimes when you wonder what another buddy is up to in BFE, KY that is prohibiting him from returning your phone calls. There are sometimes when you look at your roommate’s bike sitting on the dust-covered porch that you want to join one of those seemingly endless groups of bikers that roam through the streets wreaking havoc on traffic for hours. There are sometimes when you are sipping that Korean beer and writing, that you think, “this is what relaxation looks like,” except you are not relaxed. There are sometimes that you almost cannot distinguish the difference between this porch and the one you sat on many years ago and learned how to write in an old green chair from the seventies. But that porch was different because occasionally your roommate-turned-Colorado-friend would come out to smoke and share profound silences and the other roommate would come home and tell you his day, “wasn’t too bad” and you both would wonder what exactly that meant. There are sometimes while sitting on the new porch, appearing to the Asian woman watering her flowers on the next balcony like you are relaxing, that something feels like it needs to be violently removed from your stomach and your not sure if it is the Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles you just ate or loneliness.
Let’s go bike. I’m sure you know someone that has a bike.