This post is background to a poem that has not even been posted yet. Heck it’s not even fully done, but no matter. It is inspired (if that is the right word for something very sad) by an article in the Washington Post about Old people going walk-about from their OA homes, getting lost and never being seen again.

Yes told you it was sad.

I felt moved to write the poem for two reasons; 1) my dad passed away in a home that, well let’s just say, we all wished for better and 2) I just know this will be me, in some fairly (hopefully) distant future, because I am very, extremely good at just deciding to get up and ‘leave’, to disappear .
I first tried this way back in high school, 2nd last year there; the plan was to hop on a train going anywhere and seek my fortune, I was stopped thank fuck.

Then across the million moments of a life I have perfected this habit, fashioning it into a fine fearful furious art.

I left my first (crummy) job, working in a rural post office up in the mountains, and hitch-hiked to the big city far away and way down below. I met up with a moody Norwegian and thanks to his even moodier dad both got a job at a giant construction site, well paid, chaotic, soul destroying. One night I just packed a bag, left everything (a common theme) and hitchhiked some 800 kilometers to a small coastal town. There I morphed into an apprentice electrician and lived literally beneath a huge noisy sugar mill.
There I got into strange emotional situations and decided to do my leaving suddenly thing again. Decades later I found myself thrown willfully into one of those situations featuring people I had left all that time ago. You can run but you cannot hide I guess.

Then journalism, then theatre, a writer of plays in another big city.
Then sudden departure and another city and falling headlong into a quarter century relationship and a kid and even marriage. A happy ending here; she ended up with the coolest person that was not me and we got a lifetime friendship in exchange

More theatre, dodgy night clubs for which I played, rather well, DJ, then rock clubs then a band and .. as Vonnegut says… So It Goes
Somehow the leaving took a clever twist and here I am, in Germany, writing this to you all.

But when it is my turn to go into that home for the wary and the quietly insane, I KNOW one afternoon, I will tell everyone I am going to go buy a coke at the nearest kiosk, and I shall never come back
I have been told (correctly as it turns out) that I am obsessed with ‘’endings’’ so there you go, that is mine.

Look out for the poem its coming soon and it is gonna be a good one I think.
‘’Sometimes, I don’t know where this dirty road is taking me
Sometimes, I don’t even know the reason why’’
Townes Van Zandt (Waiting Round To Die)