Rocky Raccoon Has Shin Splints

The whiskey is going down as it should. Warm and about right. I haven’t had my hair cut since before Australia and I look ridiculous yet feel more like me than I do with the silly cut I usually get. I look like Joey from Blossom with a hint of recede. A great look if ever there was. Life is an argument at the moment and it is a tired and cold and rainy night in Nashville. Em sleeps finally and is entirely covered with stuffed animals. He is a scene from ET. I need to run for a year. Take off for the Keys. See if my shin splints allow me a mile marker past Homestead. O’ let me hobble as far as Islamorada—please. I’m homesick of late—for a place I gave away long ago. I was never happy there, yet it was and is still home. Change was always hard for me. I could use a dose of something familiar. What I wouldn’t give to walk into the Fox’s Lair tonight and see Roger play any one of the 2,000 songs on his playlist. There were nights when I’d walk in and he would stop whatever he was playing and launch into an eerily perfect version of Rocky Raccoon just for me. Significant to me for purely adolescent reasons. And how pleased I would be to walk into the Bar at Friday’s (three deep on three sides) and watch as a cold, cold draught materialized in my hand, a knowing wink from Todd the bartender. And I’m homesick for the people I depended upon for unconditional… accessibility for lack of a better word. It is raining harder now. The house is dark. It will rain through tomorrow so says the boyish weatherman. That’s ok. For now, I like a dark house and the sound the rain makes hitting the roof and windows. And I like it when the whiskey goes down as it should. Warm and about right.