jacob

Beer.  French fries.  Television.  Chocolate.  Wine.  Smoking.  Pills.  Masturbation.  You are coping.  It’s fine.

I cope, too.  I have an imaginary friend named jacob who lives behind my eyes.  I talk to him when I am lonely, when I am alone.  Jacob and I sit on my back stoop at the pin prick between dusk and twilight, munching on matchsticks of straw, teetering gently, rocking in our wicker chairs.  We watch the golden sun get devoured by the underbelly of an aching wild sky.  Infinite, this.  Not me though.  I am coping.  It’s fine.

Some people are hard wired for struggle and flit through it like weightless butterflies, others get mired in the sticky cobwebs of grief.   Some of us are bass drums and others are saggy sacks of oats, puddles of sour milk.  Most of us, though, are somewhere in between.  Brain chemistry.  Not fair.

I strive to be the bass drum: successful, independent, hands out of pockets and strong, my hair strategically amiss.  Would you love me for my bass drum, my intransigent bliss?  No. You’d love me for eating ice cream in the bathtub and farting in my sleep.

Our inability to be perfect is a disservice to our ability to be good.  We’ll never get it quite right.  Forgive others, ourselves, these chemists, for skewing it messy, amok, amiss.