As of late I have become excited about “dispatch” as a genre. Certainly, other authors’ short prose has been juxtaposed in books, and yet I feel this is a new genre of sorts—one that is especially suitable for Substack. Think of my “dispatches” as notes in a bottle sent by an aging humanist stranded on an island of uncertainty, as he tries to make sense of a world where the grand narratives he has lived by and satirized are fading faster than an aging action hero’s career.

* * * *

Old age is, indeed, the Great Equalizer. I’ve been a shape-shifter my whole life—raised working-class, spending ten years golfing at country clubs because of my ex-wife’s socio-economic status, and finally ending up living a modest academic life. But I “identify” as working-class and have always detested the way the rich, mostly in private, poke fun of the working class and shamelessly brag about their wealth—usually attributable to one good-old-boy phone call their fathers made shortly after they graduated with C+ averages. But when you come upon four old guys on a cold February morning in the waiting room of a Goodyear Tire shop—one guy with prostate cancer, another undergoing targeted therapy for leukemia, a third who hasn’t gotten it up in five years, and a fourth whose son stole the business from him—man, that’s when we’re all comrades. That’s when we realize we’re all one baby step away from the Abyss.

* * * *

Let’s talk about Petrarch for a few minutes, or, even better, my friend Hank, surnamed the Apoplectic, who could have been a meditative Apostle if they’d had Xanax back then. Hank and I met one sunny day at the goose pond where we discussed what future philosophers would call “Agitations,” brilliant yet disturbing bursts of language to be gathered in a book we stupidly believed millions of troubled people specializing in esoterica would gobble up—clueless oafs convinced that “animal matter” was falling from the sky and that a president could control the price of eggs.

****

The invitation from the President said I could join the Cabinet as long as I came to the Announcement Party with a woman “everyone could sexually assault,” but instead I brought my black pug, who has never called me unmanly and who has always known her place at the head of the bed.

****

Just Death and me trapped at the oncologist’s office discussing the difficulty of choosing the right exit with so many seductive voices beckoning from each trail. I’m grasping a vial of blood. A peace offering or a taste of what’s to come? Meanwhile, on the overhead television screen, a Confederate general is yelling, “That’s why you’ll never find an atheist in the trenches, Lieutenant,” completely unaware of the century he’s living in. An old TV show, for sure, but then the Truth and the Way are often anachronistic.

****

Evangelicals have finally come clean. When asked why they supported the Chosen One, they proudly proclaim: “He shares our values.”

And what values are those? Kindness? Tolerance? Love of thy neighbor? Forgiveness?

“Makes me long for the Final Showdown,” my friend Hank says, “when they’ll all be yanked out of their suits of rotting flesh and tossed into Hell, forced for eternity to sleep with their heads on a Mr. Pillow that catches fire every five minutes or so.”

****

“Poetry’s sex is feminine. Is not the Muse a female?” Czeslaw Milosz once wrote. The Good Old Days when you could compose such a metaphor without being canceled like a sitcom that would have been legendary if people had been perceptive enough to get the jokes.

****

I reimagine a Utopian past where neighborhood smokestacks spewed out perfume, and I was cheered on by classmates who recognized my sacredness. A time when a certain neighbor wouldn’t have called me a “little prick” for eating coconut from his garbage can when I was six. Back then, I was too scared to reply, but now, full of arcane knowledge and swagger, I say to him, “Do you know that in 1772, the French Academia was sent to Luce to investigate a report of black rain and an angel falling from the sky, landing on and killing two pigs. Black rain, falling angels, and we stupid people not even capable of securing the tops of our garbage cans.”

Whether it was my calm demeanor or his respect for my unusual metaphors, he never troubled me again.

****

A kid from my neighborhood who, even at twelve, thought of nothing but “pussy” (his word). A kid we called Guido Libido because he was Italian. As a middle-grader, the word “pussy” was a strange, often terrifying, almost hermetic subject for us, like chest hair or the suburban legend about a sacred stick of butter with an alien inscription on it hidden in some Polish grandmother’s refrigerator. At the time, I was obsessed with conspiracy theories, thinking that made me interesting to girls. I was also writing bad love poetry based on the Acts of the Apostles. . . . Four years later, Guido would knock up the heartthrob CVS cashier, destroying her dreams of becoming a concert pianist; ten years after that, he’d die from Leukemia; and two years later, my second girlfriend would dump me, calling my painstakingly written love poems “narcissistic rites of self-contemplation.”

****

To all of you have ever lost a parent and wonder why you stumble around ten years later still mired in grief, consider this from Confucius’s Analects:

“Tseng Tzu said, ‘I have heard the Master say that on no occasion does a man realize himself to the full, though the mourning for one's parents may be an exception.’"

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems

His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories

Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss