Last weekend, perhaps last Sunday, I felt dedicated to writing like this more frequently, maybe daily. I was motivated to make more recordings here and reserve more thoughtful writing for creative writing exercises, one of which I stumbled across not so long ago. I didn't recognize the file name so I opened and started to read. Read on through and didn't know what it was until I got to the last sentence and remembered it was the beginning of a larger idea. I liked what I read there, liked the mood of it.

It's Sunday again.

I can't remember the week.

All that was thought for recording was laid down on an endlessly looping tape. It's all been thought over and over again.

(Nothing is irretrievable.)

I remember I wanted to write about my boss dying. My ex-boss, the one whose pains were diagnosed as lung cancer just one year ago and who for one year has been mostly absent from his post, eventually laid off with the rest of them.

For half of last week I thought about him every other minute or so. Thought of the life in his skin, the way that self-same skin stretched from extroverted teeth to release laughs boiled at the belly button. His tender brown eyes. The jeans he wore and that little watch fastened around one of the belt loops. Later when he'd lost his hair, he wore a funky hat that seemed to fit him better than his health once did.

When I was hired he walked with me out toward the rubble piles where the Kingdome used to be. He told me straight what he knew about the company. He told me, "I know you'll bring quality."

It's not trite to say he was kind. His kindness buffered us from the malignancy of higher management. Under his direction each of us felt competent and capable of more. When he worked with us, the company had a creative direction.

He's dead.

And the rest of the half of last week I thought of his two young sons and the wisdom they know which they'll wish they hadn't learned. Children who suffer like this don't believe in the rules of the world because the rules of the world exist to obfuscate that wisdom. Children with this wisdom drift off the path, taking their chances amidst the undergrowth.

(I am thinking specifically of a recent conversation with a woman I know who survived cancer and whose daughters survived it with her. She said her oldest daughter could not tolerate high school and elected to go to college early instead [yes, this is possible]. She said, What can you do? A kid who knows this much about life can't be asked to participate in inane institutions.)

And then there is his wife.

All that letting go in one house at one place at one moment. When I think of this I imagine him lying in bed, try to imagine the twinkle in his eyes dimming, and, for some reason, I imagine a reaching toward the people near him because I can't accept that his brilliant soul gave up so easily. I check myself for making the assumption and force an image of his lying there in a morphine sleep, his soul already subverted and the body just closing the door, because I don't know. Because I don't know what it is like to watch someone I love die.