"Across my dreams, with nets of wonder, I chased the bright, elusive butterfly of love..." - Bob Lind, Elusive ButterflyBy Patrick Alcatraz
Editor
McALLEN, Texas – There’s a certain road most guys look for when the warmth of unexpected romance begins to fill the air. It is a quiet, unpaved, brush-lined road of the sort favored by birds and snakes and scorpions and lizards – personalities of the animal kingdom who know their place in the star-crossed universe. A duck wouldn’t be there, nor would a dolphin or a chicken. Those need the human touch. Birds know altitude, a definite presence in every soaring love affair. Snakes, scorpions and lizards don’t need humanity. They are rough-edged and generally heartless and okay when alone. It is that long and winding curve, dusty and gravelly and desolate, that allows for thinking of feelings such as those delivered by arriving romance – the male & female kind, I mean.
By now, you likely know what this is about.
I’ve met a certain woman I seem to enjoy at every turn. It is a remarkable occurrence, because I wasn’t looking for it and, I suspect, neither was she. What to say and, more important, what to do? I know it happens, but my history is more the traditional flaming meteor across the sky, the one that burns out fast and forever. I generally meet someone and sort of know quickly whether my actions around her will segue into something else, something that will show her I am freakin’ interested. Usually, that is me acting the angel, saying silly things and chasing conversations of the sort that maintain a certain linear element, basically to let-on that there has to be more to it than smiling or being funny. I can be funny, although I eventually bore myself. What I focus on is being a “good date,” which to me means having a free-and-clear wonderful time, whether at the movies, dinner, the museum, or my place. Life is daily; love is, at the very least, three or four chapters in a book you can’t put down for the first 100 pages and then toss after 101. Love has a beginning, middle, and an end – even those that last 50 years. I seem to specialize in those that last, at best, a year. But it is a good year, full of everything, fast as a falling star, the spark in the universe that flashes and then burns out. In the end, I wheel-out my favorite coda: “I’m not that kind of angel…”
I have no idea where this one is going, or if it’ll go anywhere. I would like it to come with me around the moon, but I’m just half of the equation. Something tells me she wants to, but what man ever knows about anything to do with women? I know that if she reads this, and she comes here often, she’ll know it is her I’m talking about, me being silly with, throwing something out into the open that perhaps she’d rather keep private for the time being. She is the proverbial spark I haven’t seen in any other local woman. I get energy from her even when we text. She knows it if her sentient messages are any indication. They make me want to steal a horse and ride across the range toward her side of town, in the heaviest of rains, yeah. My desire to kiss her is strong. I’ve said that to her, even as I know that her home life wouldn’t stand for it, wouldn’t allow it. The universe is funny that way – it offers and it denies. Just how strong is love? I used to know, when I was in control.
Seeing her today and tonight and tomorrow and the next day and the one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-one hundred after that would be nice. A year would be better, five or ten or fifteen the Jubilee. I’ve always been inspired in my writing by the women around me and can say that a small group of them can find themselves in the pages of my first three books. Something tells me this one will inspire me to reach for higher ledges on the rocky literary mountain, perhaps even force me to reach the summit, from where I would proudly bellow a panther’s roar of the sort that would speak to great discovery: Love, love at last…
Editor
McALLEN, Texas – There’s a certain road most guys look for when the warmth of unexpected romance begins to fill the air. It is a quiet, unpaved, brush-lined road of the sort favored by birds and snakes and scorpions and lizards – personalities of the animal kingdom who know their place in the star-crossed universe. A duck wouldn’t be there, nor would a dolphin or a chicken. Those need the human touch. Birds know altitude, a definite presence in every soaring love affair. Snakes, scorpions and lizards don’t need humanity. They are rough-edged and generally heartless and okay when alone. It is that long and winding curve, dusty and gravelly and desolate, that allows for thinking of feelings such as those delivered by arriving romance – the male & female kind, I mean.
By now, you likely know what this is about.
I’ve met a certain woman I seem to enjoy at every turn. It is a remarkable occurrence, because I wasn’t looking for it and, I suspect, neither was she. What to say and, more important, what to do? I know it happens, but my history is more the traditional flaming meteor across the sky, the one that burns out fast and forever. I generally meet someone and sort of know quickly whether my actions around her will segue into something else, something that will show her I am freakin’ interested. Usually, that is me acting the angel, saying silly things and chasing conversations of the sort that maintain a certain linear element, basically to let-on that there has to be more to it than smiling or being funny. I can be funny, although I eventually bore myself. What I focus on is being a “good date,” which to me means having a free-and-clear wonderful time, whether at the movies, dinner, the museum, or my place. Life is daily; love is, at the very least, three or four chapters in a book you can’t put down for the first 100 pages and then toss after 101. Love has a beginning, middle, and an end – even those that last 50 years. I seem to specialize in those that last, at best, a year. But it is a good year, full of everything, fast as a falling star, the spark in the universe that flashes and then burns out. In the end, I wheel-out my favorite coda: “I’m not that kind of angel…”
I have no idea where this one is going, or if it’ll go anywhere. I would like it to come with me around the moon, but I’m just half of the equation. Something tells me she wants to, but what man ever knows about anything to do with women? I know that if she reads this, and she comes here often, she’ll know it is her I’m talking about, me being silly with, throwing something out into the open that perhaps she’d rather keep private for the time being. She is the proverbial spark I haven’t seen in any other local woman. I get energy from her even when we text. She knows it if her sentient messages are any indication. They make me want to steal a horse and ride across the range toward her side of town, in the heaviest of rains, yeah. My desire to kiss her is strong. I’ve said that to her, even as I know that her home life wouldn’t stand for it, wouldn’t allow it. The universe is funny that way – it offers and it denies. Just how strong is love? I used to know, when I was in control.
Seeing her today and tonight and tomorrow and the next day and the one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-one hundred after that would be nice. A year would be better, five or ten or fifteen the Jubilee. I’ve always been inspired in my writing by the women around me and can say that a small group of them can find themselves in the pages of my first three books. Something tells me this one will inspire me to reach for higher ledges on the rocky literary mountain, perhaps even force me to reach the summit, from where I would proudly bellow a panther’s roar of the sort that would speak to great discovery: Love, love at last…
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