The way by moonlight.

Bowling has been around for, I don't know, maybe a hundred years or so. And I rarely bowl, I haven't in almost a whole year, but for weeks now I find myself waking out of the most vivid dreams of bowling--pink silk, those bright shoe laces and tough boots, bliss, and that bowling alley music. If I could at all, I would perhaps like to have conspired that the encyclopedic dream interpretation of bowling might have been too closely developed in accordance with derivations of psychoanalysis that linked all to eroticism, the psychology and the sport both sharing an historically mutual period. Yet, you know, sometimes psychoanalysis is uncannily bowling turkeys.

But dreams are the most important, I'm sure of that. The things that might happen to you in a dream reveal a certain truth about yourself and your heart that you might otherwise not easily see when awake. The ones that enter into your dream, and especially the things they say to you in the dream, are the most significant--because their presence and their very distinct words are in a great sense your very own thoughts and feelings as well. And so they are shaped upon a rationale that is stronger and deeper than a positivistic line of thinking that you might make drawn when you are awake. Because anyone can reason out anything, really. But that in both dreams and wakefulness, city buses always seem to first be driving through eternity before arriving for you at their stop.

That noodle thing.

From the top corner of the movie theatre, the mixture of subtle irony and overt, secretly shared enjoyment of an unreasonably large cineplex is best held. There is no other way but with buckets of sodies and popcorn. Way in the back was perhaps the only place, though, because the theatre was filled. All that stadium seating, conditioned air and buttered popcorn, sold out to what in that dim light at least sounded to be about a million unseen middle-aged women. And us, too, everyone come to see that movie with Alec and ol' Steve in it, and Meryl doing her usual. I insist that movie is magic. It split the moments between an absolute happiness of circumstance, the clowning film, and an overwhelmed laugh at all those women down in the rows below, bursting their seams at Meryl's sexual misadventures. Everyone cackling in the dark.

When it alteration finds.

[...] What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;'
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me
[...]

The sight of the stars.

Must be a need in a person.

Beneath those penants I was telling a story. I never knew where the penants had first come from, now hanging onto that part of the low basement ceiling. It is easy to imagine a golden 1950s varsity championship, with fans all frantically waving their cloth triangles.

But I was doing what I often did when talking and thinking at once, and looking up at the blemishes on the ceiling. There were stains from water pipes and curious gashes and marks from I always imagined what. Or that remnant glow-in-the-dark ink on the wall.

I was telling about a quiet place I had visited called the Sacra Santa. It was small, tucked adjacently to a much more attractable building across some square, and so it did not gain many visitors. It took me a long time to find it through the old winding streets. But I wanted to, and I must have passed along the cobbled stone several times before I found the way.

It was a chapel, and inside was only a long set of high steps, twenty-eight of them. And every step was made of marble several thousands of years ago in Jerusalem, though they were now wrapped beneath encasing steps of hard oak that was warped inwards from the pressure of those who have climbed them. Once inside, no words were allowed to be spoken. They say those steps were the ones that Christ climbed towards his judgement. The blood from his whipping was said to have dripped from him onto what must have been that characteristic of warm softness that rock takes on in sunlight. Wherever that blood had fallen, there were small holes carved out of the oak for one to see as they climbed

But to climb those steps now, one may only do so on their knees. There were a few others there, and I watched for some moments. The movement of each looked pained, and all took pauses to rest upon each broad step and summon what strength and prayers were left in making that climb. I did the same. I didn't know anything, did not understand the relevance of penance and judgement to prayerful reflection, but I could feel all the things that were within me. For every one of those twenty-eight steps, my knees burning, I gave the same prayers, each the same but growing more earnest the higher I climbed. I felt the silent pain in the few others around me be reflected in my own as my knees and my spine grew an increasing ache. To believe that an entire marble staircase had travelled from Jerusalem to Rome may be difficult or easy, depending upon how you consider the historical economics of Catholicism. But that does not matter when you reach the top of the steps. I think about spirituality and the steps of that chapel now, and how it was only most important that the prayers I felt at each instance along the way came to me on their own. Because they came on their own, they lit up my soul with a truth that led me back to tell this quiet story in that basement room.

So there were no glittering rooms beyond the top step. Other than pretty frescoes, once your wordless and aching body reaches the top, you exit the chapel with only that complete experience of self. And if I had reached with my hands and shared what those repeated prayers were then, while looking towards those penants and along the curve of light from the lamp, I would have said that I was glimpsing their complete reality. And if I were to tell of them now, they will have always stayed the same.

You say I'll get tongue cancer. You smoke too.

I take my late night walks through the parks and woods that stretch along York Road from the covered bridge to the Lionsgate pool. Yesterday I had mine planned out to carry one of those Wellington Imperial Russian Stouts along with me, along with a cigar, to stand and sift through the snow while I watched our boy trot around, bounding somewhere and then back to me to check in.

There is usually no one about the area when it is dark. But while I walked and sipped from the can of beer, I noticed that the young man had disappeared. I turned to see him scampering with a little Italian mastiff, and tucked the open can into my coat pocket just as the owner appeared from out of the bushes, and I don't really know why she was in there. "Hi-i," she said, with that throaty, drawn out pronunciation that drifts up and then downwards again. "Now since our dogs are playing, we have to talk to each other," she said, apologetically. "I'm Jacie." I returned her greeting, and she said, "Now we have to talk about our dogs, since that's what people do." And we did, of course. It's what people do. Her dog is two years old.

I asked her if she lived in town and what she did. "I'm a brewmaster," she said, and in my thoughts some hasty reasoning pointed towards that slow slur in her speech. I told her that is an excellent title, and asked which company she worked for. "For Sleeman--well, I'm not one yet, but maybe in five years I will be. I'm working towards it." I was listening too closely now, but I remembered, too, my own tremendous discretion that I was the one who was trying hard to keep the open drink in my pocket from either spilling or being noticed. Except she threw her hands out next, saying, "It's all so secretive you know, the recipes and all that kind of stuff," and her hand knocked against the can to make that recognizable tinny ping and the liquid jostle. I coughed.

"Anyway, it's good. Yeah. I'm Jacie, by the way, we already introduced ourselves." She forgot and remembered this a few more times while we walked, back towards the covered bridge, and she talked about her dog. And as her direction split towards her car, she said, "You know, dog owners have to talk to each other, it's just the thing, even if they're not nice," and I said yes, that's a part of it all, though sometimes it's fine. "Anyway, I'm Jacie, but we said all that before. Have a good walk home to wherever you're going." I started home again and pulled the drink from my pocket.

Been hoping that you'd drop in.

"To make a Christmas best," says my Great Uncle Herman, "it is up to you to decide. The entire purpose of the season is joy. It has nothing to do with gifts or food, but with giving thanks and praise to life and to those in your life. That's Christmas. To love."

I recall what was in this moment, how the one who I was thinking of in this conversation several years ago is still there now. And, you know, now there is nothing else but that.