Wake up early.

Think that it is much too early to get up.

Wake up late and curse yourself for sleeping in.

Get out of bed, relieve yourself and think back to the public restrooms you visited in Japan. Some company trip you piggy-backed with an unmarried friend, or was it a raffle prize? There was no seat in the public bathroom at all—you just squatted, aiming at a hole in the floor, centering your balance and urinary aim or having to face the ignominious challenge of walking around with pee on your shoe all day.

Laugh at yourself when you recall the onset of a leg cramp and having to call for that friend to come in and help you stand back up.

Miss that friend. Mark your calendar, your palm pilot and your daytimer to call her. Look at your digital clock and wonder if you can still buy the kind with hands. Consider if time marks anything but itself. Do today’s digital kids know what "clockwise" means?

Go into the kitchen to make coffee and realize that you only have whole coffee beans. Your grinder is broken. How could such a travesty be happening in your own home? Be too embarrassed or too lazy to borrow your neighbor’s. You’ve forgotten their names anyway. Find yourself hitting the whole beans (that are now wrapped in two layers of aluminum foil) with a meat tenderizer on the cold concrete garage floor.

Wonder what the cost of a week’s stay at the Betty Ford Center is.

Burn toast, scream for your kids to wake up, talk on the phone, scribble a note on a pad and be thinking about a boy in college. He always spoke about "lifestyle". Wonder what genious named a condom after this word. Probably the same pimple-faced millionaire high school drop-out who invented the pet rock and the red dye number 7 car air freshener; Christmas scents year round courtesy of petro-chemical evergreen.

Listen to your twelve year old son sing a song while he re-gels his spiked hair: "One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor."

Realize that ‘multi-tasking’ turns one to Prozac, Xanex and Danielle Steele novels. The antidote, you think, is one tequila, two tequila, then four.

See your fourteen year old daughter’s Seventeen Magazine on the kitchen counter. Realize you’re not exactly sure of her birth date. Consider getting your hair cut like the model on the cover. Wonder if she has a vibrator yet. Not the cover model but your daughter. Realize you have two. Or is it three?

Take a call from your Aunt Tally. She’s the one with the little tattoo who got arrested for something that currently slips your mind. Recall the time your mother called her a " jobless, lesbian, hippy, rock star wannabe."

Wonder if you’ll see your mother at the opening Tally has just called to invite you to. Remember how Aunt Tally took you outside at family parties and taught you to play HORSE, basketball’s version of strip poker; how she made you laugh when she tried all those crazy shots; promised you that you would’nt get pregnant from playing spin the bottle, Twister or kissing with your mouth open. How she laughed at herself, but never at you?

You’re not recalling the times so much as you’re recalling your last remembrance of them. That way, memory sort of reclaims itself and time moves out from some kind of straight line to a group of overlapping circles, like a Ven diaphragm, like a rock thrown in a pond, like answers from a Ouiji Board.

Recall that Italian cats are supposed to have twelve lives. Ponder what life you are on, if any. Think that Aunt Tally must be an Italian cat.

Have a conversation with your spouse as you rush to get your kids out to meet the school bus, the regular sized one, not the short bus. You ask:

"Did you return the video?"

He says, "I saw your aunt buying rubbers at the store the other day."

"So."

"Well did she mention if she could get us tickets to the game on Saturday?"

"Here is your blood pressure medicine."

"I didn’t know you needed a prescription for condoms."

"I want to go to the opening of the clinic she worked on"

"When did she go into construction? I thought she lived off of tips from playing at the coffee shop."

"You are impossible," you think out loud.

"Hey, maybe she’s a switch hitter, she always had a thing for Tony Gwynn and Elva Degenerate." He laughs at his own barb.

The longer you stay married, the closer you grow apart.

Wonder why you said yes 18 yrs ago, choosing this life of serial monogamy.

Remember the intimacy and smile but feel the corners of your mouth fall down like old socks with worn out elastic. But recall the roses he bought you last week and the way he washes your car every other Saturday, the time he said you were so perfect he had to make mistakes for you.

Hate that term, "The grass isn’t always greener…blah, blah." Screw that. Stifle a single tear. Just how hard can it be to snatch the eternal out of the ever fleeting? To get health insurance that covers the terrifying oxymoron of "marriage counseling?" To lie with your mate without the intrusion of another man’s face?

Say God dammit out loud for forgetting to feed the dog this morning. Feel like you are chasing two escaped dogs running in opposite directions. Wonder who you really want God to damn.

Turn the radio on while you drive to work and go through all 12 preset buttons before you find any music. It ends quickly and you put in a Self Help tape your sister gave you while you put your make-up on in the rear view mirror. A man with a very soothing voice tells you to close your eyes. And so you do. Until you realize you are about to have a head on crash with an SUV driving soccer mom who is putting on her make up in the rear view mirror, one hand gripping eyeliner, the other smothering a matchbox-sized cell phone. Whatever happened to the "two and ten" grip from driver’s ed?

Say, "Thank God" as you miss each other and mean the words for the first time in awhile. Get mad when she flips you off, that single red fingernail dancing like devil’s fire through the safety glass. Doubt seriously if she will tell her therapist about that.

If you had became intwined, an add on part of that internal combustion engine, flesh and grey matter mixed with brake fluid like scotch and soda, would you wake up in the stories of your children? Would they speak of playing HORSE or burnt toast?

Hear the voice on the tape again. It says "Things change."

Think, "no shit sherlock". Hear him say "Some we control, some we are controlled by. But it is the evidence of the presence, not the absence of union that makes you feel delight and despair in the very same moment."

You remove the tape from the dash, toss it out the window and watch as a teenager driving a lowered ’95 Toyota Corolla with a wall of bass speakers runs over the tape to a tune by Puff Daddy rapping his way into the hearts and minds of mindless kids.

Hum a song that comes from one of your past lives, "Come gather round people and please hear the call..." Wish you could gather round something other than who you are at that moment in time.

Hear the cell phone. It is your mother calling to ask what you are wearing to Tally’s opening. She wonders if she should wear pants and comfortable shoes. Or will this give off the wrong message?

Cringe at the thought of it all. Weep for somebody’s future--weep for yourself. You cannot take it anymore. Take, taken, took, token...to take, isn’t that a verb, an action requiring personal choice?

Feel the tears fall onto your new beige rayon skirt and wonder if they will dry leaving little rings of salt.

Arrive at work feeling fragmented, like your body is not connected to your mind. Wonder if the self-help tape would have addressed that problem on side two.

Walk to your desk knee deep in an ever-expanding cube farm and see the pictures of your kids peeking out from under the memo from the new V.P. of Marketing, the guy with doll hair implants, detailing new regs about camera-ready art. Bend a business nod at the boss as he walks by, quickly picking up the phone and shuffling papers. Capture a large breath and punch the numbers on the phone with false vengence. They are your dad’s numbers. Hang up when a strange voice answers. Remember you father has been dead for 8 years.

How hard can it all be? You have it all but you have nothing.

Just castles made of sand. And you forget who sang that line.

Go to lunch with a fellow worker and listen to her tell you how she regularly ‘buys’ new dresses from Nordstrom’s, wears them once to a party and then returns them on Monday.

Picture yourself doing that, but then breaking down at the cashier’s counter and admitting that you did in fact wear the dress. Without panties no less.

You went there clean and got dirty. It’s never the same. Just a matter of degrees.

Wonder if you cry too much.

Or not enough. Feel exposed, raw as a December oak.

Drive home, cars swarming, little baby birds waiting for a worm, an opening to get on the freeway, this vein carrying metal and glass objects toward two points converging on the horizon into nothingness, a perspective drawing without prospect.

Pull into the driveway. Are you home or in transit? Open a bottle. Open the mail. Close the window. Close your eyes. Recall a fellow worker saying you looked "spun". Realize that you are not sure exactly what he meant. Come to think of it, you know exactly what he meant.

Stare out the window, comfortably numb as a feeling moves down your skull like warm motor oil. Begin to realize that nature is only out for survival. Contentment and piece of mind take work.

Think about the time in college you made love with a lifeguard in his tower one night. Afterward you asked him what he was going to be when he grew up, like you had a right to know.

Recall how he looked at you oddly, his eyes seeking purchase, and then smiled so sweetly, those saving eyes burrowing their way deep within his thoughts. He said nothing and pointed out to the reflection of the full moon on the water.

Later, he told you that on the edge of land, when the suburbs have chased you to the final sandy cul-de-sac, all you have to do is step in, out and finally, off.

Flick on the new flat screen box and surf the channels. Ask yourself, can real surfing be any farther apart from watching TV? Malibu Barbie, Baywatch, Survivor—this balanced diet for the vicarious, stuck of their own volition, your own choice. Feel like putting your finger down your throat to vomit every "Arco-some people care" commercial ever fed the masses. Stop at the History Channel and see a former box office draw "hosting" a special on the deadliest weapon of the Middle Ages, the crossbow. Fall asleep with face cream dripping on your pillow, your husband’s work clothes, piled in the corner, feeling middle aged.

Have a dream that you are a champion archer, hitting the center with every arrow you let fly, impaling each previous arrow from the back while a well disguised Robin Hood looks on from behind a tower. Wake up embarrassed but a little satisfied about what you and Robin of Loxley had done, how your subconscious had brought you up against realities, to stand vigil and choose a life for yourself. In your dream he had asked you what does an arrow pierce but wind? You said "fish". He said "hearts".

Something inside you is different this day. Maybe it’s the coffee. Maybe you’ll get a letter from Ed McMahon because, "You may have already won!"

Have a conversation with your daughter on the way to school. Well, not really a conversation. For her, you are a ride, a lady in the background with a credit card. Your daughter yanks everything out of the glove box looking for a pen. Napkins and straws and a dead flashlight and a pair of now-out-of-style sunglasses you lost 3 years ago and old McDonald’s ketchup packets fall all over the floor of your car. You pray that a bit of what you tell her will seep in, no deeper than a blade tracing figure eights in the ice—infinity signs. You love her, she hates you. You hate her, she loves you. But there are not yet words for that crossroads feeling.

"What is all this shit?" she asks. "Maps, honey," you tell her very calmly, "Not really places but just ink on a page."

She scrunches up her overly made-up face and asks you if you have been smoking crack.

Try to recall what the word prodigal means, what status quo could ever stand for, why you can’t remember which side your gas tank is on after owning this car for 5 years?

Stop to get that gas after dropping her off, run inside to pick up a bottle of aspirin, over the counter wine and salt less pretzels. Reach for the new Cosmo but set it down, not knowing why. Be amazed as an elderly man in a uniform holds the door for you, smiles an authentic smile and asks you; no he doesn’t tell you, he asks you to have a nice day. You say nothing, leave, but come back to find him hosing down the asphalt, humming a Spanish folk song. Walk up to him, tense, tenuous, and speak in a cracking voice through red lips tasting dripping mascara, "thank you", you say. "Gracias."

Ask him his name. In broken English he says, "Jesus." Figures. Give him yours. "Maggie." Drive away feeling like Mother Theresa. Lighter, almost airy.

Hold that thought, hold it so tight, squeeze it and bring it close inside. Make it your center for the rest of the day, your own private transaction with someone with a name badge that read "Jesus."

There are more of those jewels hidden beneath the TV dinners and raging billboards and this umbrella of Happy Gilmore zeitgeist. You know that now or at least know that you need to know.

To know: That everything is true, but nothing is true, that the best, they die young, but they live twice, that the trouble with normal is that it only gets worse. That choreography belongs in dance, not out here in the world. That the grainy, unpeopled rawness of life is the texture that all artists hope to capture.

You know that everything just falls into the sea, eventually.

You hold out hope that there must be a wheel’s hub someplace from which you can begin to attach stainless steel spokes; wires, roads, people and maps of truth; red bricks, yellow bricks, dirt and rocks that won’t crumble in your hand; a compass with character; ladders, handles, lovers...life.

No. It’s not easy being you after you have been you.

All you want is a path that begins at the center. That’s all, just a place to move out from, like a drop of blue/green paint on a spin art canvas. Like those concentric circles flowing from that skeptic rock thrown in a deeper pond; a wide open horizonless sea.

That’s all.