Love and Will

So I ambled through downtown, took a quick turn through a used furniture shop, walked down by my old high-school (BMC Durfee) where the socio-path and sometime high-school football coach Don Montle, once carried me down a flight of stairs by my hair. I was around seventeen and I was pretty much designed to deliver a one-note message to all authority figures: "Fuck you." Coach Montle being the sort of guy who didn't take these things lying down, needed only the tiniest provocation, and I being posssessed of neither brains nor brawn, gave him exactly what he was waiting for: I was smoking in school. I remember nothing other than taking flight at the top of the stairs, his fat meaty rage-filled paw gripping my (very long) hair and not touching another stair as I landed at the next flight down. It was as close as I'd ever come to literally, well, never mind.

I walked around the block and a few minutes later landed inside a nifty little place where I sipped a decent latte... Cafe Arpeggio is on South Main street somewhere around where the Cherry & Webb building was, near the old McWhirrs. So I'm sitting there and they have these books on the shelf for customers to read...They come from Baker's Books a few doors away. And there is Rollo May's Love and Will on the shelf. This is Fall River, mind you. (His "Courage to Create" is a classic for you artistic types that can't get your brushes out....) Anyway, "Love and Will" is May's opus and is about love as the fundamental human experience...If you want to feel and understand what it means for a human being to bring every possible tool to the party, read May. If you want to know what it really means to be human, if you want to see what an illuminating intelligence, in service to knowledge, understanding and humanity, is about, read May. And, if you want to know how utterly stupid and bankrupt the United Theocratic States have become, read Rollo May.

Summer is coming. Bring it to the beach. But listen. You don't need to read the whole book. You take dips, as if the book was the whole wide ocean, which it pretty much is.

I finished my latte and walked home to my parents house. Their house, or rather their marriage, is a place where the meaning of "Love and Will" is wrinkled and stained, cheapened and stale like an old polyester suit that no one wants anymore. It hangs limp on a rack in a store no one goes to.