3

I had to do some work at an Army Maintenance Site, involving some vehicles and equipment. I was on my own, waiting to meet up with a guy from central HQ.
I sat in their break room, watching ESPN, with my paper work, ready, in front of me.
I could feel how I was a boy, once, before I was a ghost, I remembered how it felt to watch the Duke Butler game while high. How when I was a boy I was macho and loved watching sports until I forgot.
The commercials .. the guys look like me, my look is normal here. It’s not like that on network television. I almost dropped my jaw, this must be what it was like when American Blacks started seeing themselves on TV. Maybe I was intended to be an athlete. I look down at my arms and legs; maybe the reason why my body is like this is truer than the life story I’ve lived.
I can’t talk with guys about sports; it’s my thing. It feels like a private thing, a private connection - athleticism.
When I got home I opened another canister of this powder I buy from the local GNC. It’s about sixty bucks a pop but it’s well known for helping the body recover. It had a little pamphlet attached to it and I read it absent mindedly. It was a chart that asked you what kind of athlete you were and matched you up with the GNC supplement product your body would need the most. I run about three miles, then make a drink out of the
powder, then I lift weights, then I do abs, then I take another powdered drink and don’t eat supper. That’s my after-work routine.
According to the pamphlet I was an endurance athlete and was taking the proper supplement.
There’s that word again: Athlete.

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2MAY2010
(thinking to myself as a I woke up) So it’s a game.. To see if you still love yourself, no matter what. Moment to moment. To see if you can still be
Him. That’s how it works. You never get to be free of loving yourself, you never get to be free from being present.
I’m supposed to be able to speak like I write. Not pretending to be one person in the outside world, then making up for it by writing who I really
am, what I really think, how I really feel. I pretend because I feel like the outside world would destroy the real me - because it seems like it came close once. I’m supposed to be Brave, not just honest.
_Same as the whole world can be seen in a moment, in a piece of wood, in the feel of wind against your cheek, looking into a person’s face -- the whole world, including every story, every experience, is implied._
I want the whole world reflected in my honest movements, not my honest words. I want to be one person - Him - not two.

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