“Why it’s good to break routines”

I was curled in bed like a backwards comma, like a crescent roll or uncooked prawn, embryonic, curled inwards. The guy at the gas station looked homeless when he approached; we talked a good five minutes. He was like a walrus wearing a Carhartt hoodie. I tried to shake his hand but he was sick. He was speaking at 2x but lucid, every word carved. His skin was sun-browned and his beard so thick you couldn’t see his mouth. I was trying to record the bits about Christ and Constantine, the Council of Nicaea, the Book of Gnostics, the Gospel of Sophia. I wanted to know what it all meant; it felt like we were on to something. He was talking about inner truths and healing, trauma, The Matrix. He glowed like someone super high on psychedelics whose brain’s all lit up. He was fully dialed in.

I drove to the transfer station in the rain thinking about him. Thinking about Jesus and spiritual leaders, was this guy some version of that. Seemed it. I watched him go into the store, wondered if he worked there or what. He was gathering litter when I first saw him and said to me hey man, nice beard! He then approached and my guard went up, my sensors. I was ready to get back in my car, check my wallet. But I’m glad I didn’t.

The leaves were now near peak with their golds and reds, coming down everywhere. There was a big storm warning and I wanted to get to the dump before it hit. But it seemed my timing was off everywhere I went. First the dump and then the pharmacy, I kept arriving too early. I had to sit in the grocery store for a spell eating a sandwich, just watching people. It’s surprising what you see when you slow down, when you take yourself out of a scene and watch it from a distance. People were looking at me too, sitting by the Starbucks-that-wasn’t-a-Starbucks. How fluorescent the lights. How hurried everyone seemed, not really there.

But that guy at the gas station had been so real I wondered if there was more to our meeting.

I spent a lot of time in my room. It was my office, our bedroom and bathroom, and it got good light. There were other rooms downstairs too. Going into the garage it felt like a different world. And with all our things from years passed, a bit of time traveling too.

Today I broke my normal routine and started the day in the garage with a cassette and my coffee, moving boxes and sorting magazines for the recycling. The cassette was a recording from an album so it crackled and sounded warm, especially in the dank garage with the old bookshelf speakers I kifed from my mother-in-law Beth. The speakers and tunes sounded really good in the early morning dark.

I hauled a lot of stuff for the dump into Charlotte’s car, an old Honda Pilot with 200,000 miles on it. The tires were low and it needed gas so I stopped at the Jackson’s convenience store and that’s where I saw the guy who looked like a walrus and engaged me on Jesus.

Maybe I felt nervous but I wanted to shake his hand and when he refused it felt weird. I offered a fist bump but he didn’t respond to that either. If I’d gotten gas before filling up the tires we wouldn’t have met and that’s funny because normally I would get gas first but for some reason today I didn’t. As he was talking I heard another car pull up and felt self-conscious talking about Christ and drugs with this homeless-looking guy but then the person on the other side of the pump popped in and said excuse me, I just wanted to say 100% to everything he just said. And I recognized the guy, he’d been to our house, he was the dad of a girl Charlotte played soccer with and her name was Sophia. That was funny, he’d said I should read the Gospel of Sophia.

Everywhere I went it seemed like my timing was off now that I’d broken my morning routine and skipped my walk. And maybe that’s why I met the walrus guy, the one who might have changed me. Never got his name, but we were definitely onto something.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, inspiration

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest