In The Crawl Spaces Of My Life

I crawled on my stomach under this house today - and I grasped what it means to be a mortal human.

This house is intimidating, just by its sheer longevity.

Sometime in the 1930s, we're told. We're not completely sure.

The wood that supports it is cut from the center of centuries-old pine trees. They don't do that anymore.

Old Christmas cards surface in the attic. The plaster cracks. Coke bottles are entombed beneath, surely someone just as frustrated as I at how little room there is to move.

I'm down there because of the smell.

Black spots on the support beams.


Everything is ancient. I feel so helpless.

I'm both comforted by the strength but frozen by the magnitude of how old this stuff is.

Crickets are hanging around.

I knew this. They don't bother me (I hooked plenty to catch fish) - except for the fact that they represent that you might have a problem you don't want to deal with.

I'm crawling with the crickets. And the spiders. And perhaps the baby possum that I saw slink through a hole in the vent (which later would die beneath after sealing the hole; an outcome I tried to avoid but failed).

Choking on cobwebs. Waiting for the next lowly form of life to greet me and show me where the real party's at in my home.

The space crept smaller and smaller as I got to the most-important part of the house - where at that particular time, the most fucked-up shit is going on.

The rusted pipe. It says, "We've been hear longer than you."

This water dripping. Drip, drip, drip. Let's fuck up your shit.

The crickets ... they eat mold, they thrive in a cave.

And, on my stomach, prone, knowing that if some creature chose to use whatever evolutionary tool at its disposal to fuck with my life, I feel connected to our mutual mortality.

We live above these things. But we are interrelated with them. To live above, we must have something beneath.

And I'm here to tell you what's beneath is not where you want to go - because the grandiosity of the human triumph kills a truth ...

We are these things.

We are living.

My face in the dirt, my nostrils clogged with black fibrous dust, my throat swollen from .... whatever ... this is the foundation from which we're all living.

The crickets pop up through the drain sometimes. They see my life.

But they aren't looking for it. They're looking for the cave, the cave below my house that I wish was less a cave experience.

If a snake bit me, it would take me 10 minutes to manage the maze to get back to my space.


Then you realize ... I'm on their turf.

The view my dog sees every day.

And all these unsavory creatures (who really wish you couldn't come back), they'll still be doing their thing when our loved ones in the life above have got no other place to put us.

One with the Earth. We will meet again.

I am a mortal human.

Not unlike them, except the human part.

But that part doesn't feel so significant, when you're stuck with the reality of how this life - and things you think you want -  really aren't possible without the places beneath.

A destination, sooner or later.