I am the Phoenix

It’s a week now that I’ve been back home in Eugene. Highlights of the week: Aliza picking me up at the airport with a sign reading “mail order husband #729HP34”; giving my roommate a bloody lip with my patented right hook; the nearly constant rain which has fallen for the past three days; mimosa Sunday; the Wild Oats Christmas slash drinking party where a bunch of recently laid off Joes & Janes got lit off of free beer & danced to below par music spun by some DJ who must have been dropped on his head a few times as a child, his father probably a few bloody marys south & then attempting to ‘bond’ with ‘the child’, as his darling wife would put it, by throwing the then baby version of what has now grown-up to excel at nothing but minimum wage jobs & spinning horrible records at non-formal functions, including but not limited to jr. high socials & his lame friend’s house parties, into the air up above his head & catching ‘the child’ on the return downwards but who, due to the bloody marys & the stressful day at the office, proceeded to misjudge the return catch not once but twice, {in point of fact after missing ‘the child’ the first time he (the father) picks the screaming child back up &, not having any other idea as to how to calm the weeping &, though not visually, still obviously hurt thing in his arms, as well as feeling such guilt which only expensive clinical help years later could assuage, & that only minimally, over hurting this poor, weak, innocent thing in his arms (‘the child’) with which he has no known connection or bond to speak of, he chooses to once again start tossing said child into the air & catching him on the downward flight, hoping this will alleviate the child’s pain & become in later years a warm memory the child looks back to whilst thinking of his father, this hope based upon the father’s own warm memories of being tossed up into the air & then caught by his own father & remembering how much fun that was to him (the child version of the father) & how it created a bond between him & his own introverted &, occasionally, abusive father, but in the second round of toss up & catch he again misjudged the catch & gave up entirely on ‘bonding’ with ‘the child’, taking the weeping, inconsolable thing to its mother & making himself another drink} & from then on habitually neglected this child who grew up to become this really mediocre DJ who spins at best shabby remixes of genre & era defining songs, thinking these tunes are danceable & even beyond that, enjoyable, but in truth the music he plays is only a good time if you’re extremely lit or you are his friend & know him to be a good person with the best intentions at heart & so you patronize him & his record collection.