The clouds are comfortably resting on the City in the Sky, nestled over the verdant sea of mountains at its knees. Makes it hard to rise and shine, but in an almost pleasant, melancholy fashion, at least at first, evoking a bit of nostalgia, memories of those who are no longer in my life but live forever in my memories, good and bad. In a way they shelter me from the horribly polarized environment orchestrated everywhere in mad quests for power. That’s delightful, a respite from omnipresent calumnies and distortions. Fools’ gold comes to mind, fools’ bitcoins too for some reason, and streams of consciousness floating serenely above my head, … if I could only tap them.

Surrounded by white ether, at least seemingly; the all-encompassing color molding the ethereal emptiness. I wonder what that portends. I’ve always associated divinity with the capacity to see in myriad colors. I wonder if slumbering deities are discomfited. It might serve them right.

Perhaps it’s a day to ponder might have beens and should have beens rather than why in the hell did I do thats. Or perhaps, to consider what I should now do and what I shouldn’t. Disturbing but necessary, … how depressing. Or perhaps a good day to go back to bed had I not already diligently made it, my morning ritual fulfilled, wouldn’t want to spoil it. Being anal retentive can be painful.

Perhaps it’s a good day for rereading favorite books, visiting old friends there who never change and rarely disappoint. Christopher Moore’s Sacre Bleu perhaps, or Tolkien’s hobbits. I wish I still had a working fireplace, I have a gas facsimile but it leaks unpleasant odors that hint at inchoate disaster.

Television perhaps, … But not news, … please, not more of what passes for news today. Perhaps comforting sitcoms, Anger Management perhaps, I like that but evidently not too many others do, unless of course, our arbiters of taste are again making decisions with which most of us would not agree, … had we been consulted. Good old Charley, poor old Charley, a life fully lived it seems, if perhaps not all that well.

I wonder what Ocala is like today, and what my sons are doing, and their families; wives and daughters, an all-female crew. I wonder if Manhattan remembers me at all, I think Charleston does. Pieces of my soul scattered in so many different places I’ve called home, places I’ve loved and where I’ve sought love, … not all that successfully.

Lazy shades of grey evoking emotive contemplation on a hazy day hidden high in the central range of the Colombian Andes.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2019; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia although he has primarily lived in the United States of America (of which he is a citizen). Until recently he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.