I hadn’t eaten meat or lifted weights in a year and then I started doing both again the same day. It was the Fourth of July and the smoked pork shoulder triggered me. Not the taste or the garishness of that cut, but the ceremony of soaking cherry wood and the smell, as the smoke curled out of the charcoal kettle.

I went to Costco on a Sunday afternoon and it was a mob scene. But I savored it: the droves of people with their kids and jam-packed carts, no one in masks, mobs of people mostly Americans gorging themselves on cheap shit. I had to laugh. I was American too, through and through. No one could take us down, not even Donald Trump. We were a sea of laughing, beautiful fools. And we had the best stores, even on a Sunday.

Burning fire wood in our backyard wasn’t the same since wildfires had ruined summer. No one seemed interested in my fires anyway, unless marshmallows were involved. But it was summer and a perfect sky so I set up the lawn sprinklers, scraped out the fire pit, and rubbed the chicken. I got a lemon seltzer and circled the house looking for dog poop. Sometimes I still thought about getting high. It seemed banal enough. I could let my brain get tugged in that direction but then I pulled it back.

I circled the house looking for poop and drank my La Croix. The neighbors had a grow light in their front window that burned pink-purple day and night, and you could imagine the furry red buds with their nappy tendrils in that queer light. That would be hard to smell. Maybe I was just a dog at heart, prone to consume anything, all scent-based thought, which is no thought at all.

I was out of work again too, and that was cause to celebrate. You could worry about these things (when would I work again?) or enjoy being off in summer. I would do that. And though I couldn’t drink or do drugs I could eat meat and do push ups right there in the grass. If ever there was a time for toxic masculinity it was now. And that was a response to something missing, a deficiency.

I would put on that AC/DC song and recall my youth, the spinning lights and blaring cords as I sped around the roller skate rink.

Life is so sweet. My dog’s face in the morning sniffing the air. The first morning birds and the last evening crickets. We are all sense and scents, and no sense at all.

Categories: writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction