It's fairly cold at night now, so I wore quite a few layers as I made my way across the deserted street in front of my house, holding my dogs near me with the occasional grunted command. I prepare before leaving: a cut, lit cigar, a playlist of Keith Jarrett's music set, a tennis ball.

My neighborhood is illuminated, in places, by the amber sodium vapor lights I happen to have loved since my dad narrated a series of fantastic stories to me in Bay St. Louis involving a protective street lamp; these extemporaneous fables involved a level of absurd creativity that I find hard to believe now, but memorable fragments remain: something about a devil or a demon in a cloak and the street lamp saving me from him.

That sodium burn has been an innate love of mine since. I recall being a young adolescent, perhaps thirteen, and traveling on the streetcar to the French Quarter with Collin and Paul; we sat upside-down on benches and laughed at how pedestrians looked as though they were bobbing off of the world's ceiling. When evening arrived, I would experience a euphoria akin to C.S. Lewis' "Joy" when the parking lots and buildings were cast in the orange light. I thought then that it was the most beautiful light I'd ever see. It made pavement, steel, glass, people sublime and intensely luminous. It seemed a marker for something deeper, but I couldn't even articulate that much. The feeling I had then I call now a type of mania, but life wasn't yet complicated in that way.

I made my way to the golf course as a piece from Radiance started to draw my mood out; I felt good, expansive in my solitude, comfortable retreading all the same memories I plumb semi-nightly. The haze of sprinklers on some of the distant greens defined the parts of the course we'd be walking. Ambling off into the darkness, I thought about where Collin and I parted. I have broken with so many of my friends... How could a personality so mercurial, so destructive, not have immediately attracted medical attention? But what difference would any of it have made? And I am, after all, lucky to have been helped at all.

Every car that passes along the edge of the fairways, some distance away, reminds me of ex-friends and ex-girlfriends, so I turn inward toward the center of the course and look only at the purple sky and the black ground; it's impossible to see my feet.  Music is the primary sensory experience of the moment, and I wonder about Jarrett and the relationship between happiness and creativity; and creativity is not confined to media like music, but can be reflected in the creation of moments, relationships, stories.  Creativity, in that it allows one to envision the realities of others, is a necessary component of empathy.  Must one be creative to be good?  And must one be disturbed to be creative?  Am I creative or good, or am I just disturbed?  Does it matter what I am if I am alone?

Who cares?  I don't.

The dogs are ecstatic out here: they love the cold, they run and chase each other, they rush past me in greeting; they do things they normally haven't the energy for in the heat. That they're happy makes me happy. Although it's hard to remember it when making choices, the superiority of being good to others over benefitting from goodness seems crucial.  I'll never retain it.

We wander across the train tracks that bisect the course, down the hills, through the trees, then back up as more sprinklers turn on; it's time to go, up the fairway and under the magnolia trees, stumbling on their roots, and down the street again, past the dark houses on whose shades are visible televisual light.  Soon enough we have walked all the way back to my home. The cigar is still burning, though, so we stay on my stoop: I toss the tennis ball, they race for it and roll on the sidewalk. I think dark thoughts: will I ever feel love again?  How old will I be before I get a real job?  When will I have the courage to leave this city?  Where will I go?  Why go anywhere?

Who am I kidding?  I will wake tomorrow, go to work, stay a step ahead of the tidal wave always rushing behind me, have ups and downs and never change or leave.  Then, one day, dust.

I come in to the warm living room and sit down.  This is what I do.