Shades of Grayout: Spiritual Redemption

She held the cup of coffee like a fermented bow against the dark spaces of reason.  In the breach of the morning light, it was a dawn she would have like to repossess 2000 miles to the West.  But here she stood at the back window of a Duluth Heights group home, snow filled to the lower trunks of the pines with passing deer just as confused-- a swallowed up memory of timeless landscape that had lost it's gravity.  No movement or sound.  Just vacated rabbit tracks and an un-shoveled deck.  She had a hard time defining the American good life.  It was like a bad clown portrait won at a local carnival that needed touch ups in the basement.  Most likely the painting had clumped up acrylic laid across a velvet sheen intended to captivate magic.  There was no visible magic in her life, just matchstick counting of days as her bank account increased in relation to her 30 plus hours of overtime each week.  She was saving for the fate against time, the anti aging gene that would set her back 30 years into Mick Vrudny's arms.  The only jilted magic currently was John Nettles, a British actor, who captivated her consciousness.  She lived in his Netflix underbrush of green Midsomer meadows, stone walls and luscious English gardens.  It was in the transient, tranfererable state she could begin to imagine.

Death and Life were produced from the same definitive noun -- a non tangible conception to mark beginning and end, with the same flat line emotion.  A spooled consciousness that rotated poignant memories- her daughter that lie dead on a morgue table, the last words her hometown boyfriend spoke to her, the evasiveness of her father, a flicker of standing on the mountain in San Bernardino, the view of the Moreno Valley from the rim of the world.  It was in those high places, away from the City of Angels or those dense forests of Minnesota where she came to be, an infrared heat source to tranquility defined apart from humans.

I can only hear the faintness of your voice as you prescribe to me in your own predestined oral values contrived from a Melody Beattie book with Joel Olsteen innuendos....the advice you thought I should heed and what concrete silhouettes fully got me out of the casino. It was by my own doing with a divine, powerful hand.  My will gave into reason.  A shimmering voice against the glaze of my mind, a cultural restitution of conformity that sculptured my inner objectivity into a Jesus provoked denial of materialism.  It was all about separation- the separation of fleshly will to encounter divine will, the perpetuation of mortality and attempting to increase riches and multiply them from a post -mortem minimum wage.  Desire, conquest, the casino imagery and baseless nonsense that drove me into plummeting bank accounts, followed by false crescendos of excess.  The savage minimalism of my father who had 800,000 in the bank and wore his tattered light blue sweater 5 of 7 days a week.  All I need is a BLT or a Reuben and a bank balance over $100 to be content, but I was driven to drive 20 miles to Black Bear to expand paper dollars I could not eat.   (to be continued)