I moved 3 yards of mulch today. That’s a lot. It took most of the day, until the dust of it had caked onto my sun screen and I looked like a white kid painted up for jungle warfare – ever notice how that brings out the little girl in their faux tough faces? I thought about losses, life losses and what you get out of them, and I listened to the scrape of my shovel on the asphalt repeating. I thought about how odd it is that all these sensations have cues already, like the sound of burying something (‘scrapeplopscrapeplop’). I told myself a joke or two and caught myself like Ears catches me sometimes, mumbling into thin air. I reflected on the soulmate concept, the “it” factor, which is in conversations around me a lot lately. I laughed to think that my soulmate is in Lewiston Maine right now, with a vague sensation that something’s a little off but he’d rather not think about it and he’s good at that; he’s busy curing maple syrup with solar panels made of old hub caps, he might not be between marriages right now actually, and he’ll be so late for my show that it won’t be until a future lifetime that he shows up and then we’ll meet as bullfrogs in a post-apocalypse bayou: “By. Gones. [?] Oy. Vei. O. kay. Bud. Weis. Er. [Eye. Roll.] Ha. Ha. Ha.”

"There'll Be Some Changes Made," Billie Holiday