Ed Charles

Sometimes lunch is lunch. You go to your local spot, order the usual, look out the window at nothing special, eat up, see you tomorrow. Same same.  If there’s a new face, maybe you watch a little closer. But mostly, it doesn’t rate so you don’t bother.

Other times…you’ve heard about these times, read about them in paperbacks, watched movies about these times. When lunch goes past lunch to the rest of your life.

Maybe you met on the train, or your boss introduced you so you could take her off his hands. Or…

The old person singing — doesn’t have to be a man just because it’s my voice — this old person…it’s late in their life yet somehow they’re not at home. 

The place looks familiar: a bed, a chair by the window. Behind a door there’s a sink and toilet. But the shower’s down the hall. So is the food…in a large room with stained upholstery and tired drapes, where the tables are always set and rarely used. 

But no kitchen. What’s a home without a kitchen? If you want tea or a bit of chocolate…you ask someone and…

And after he could no longer hide his anger with kindness, 
and do good deeds for those who’d forget him…

After failure upon failure regardless of how many hoops he leapt through 
or how many rules he’d broken…

After he’d burned all his bridges and all his rage, 
and there was nothing left to try or curse…

Even after he’d given up and sought release by drowning his demons…

His mind turned back, to before his life of becoming, 
when he alone was the little man of his nearly empty home…

And he saw…

There’s a lot we…

I never drink unless I’m alone or with somebody. That may’ve been my grandfather’s favorite joke. He’d say it all the time to somebody — when they were pouring him a beer — or when he thought he was alone and was pouring his own. He’d start at noon. Nurse a bottomless can until he drifted off to sleep after Jeopardy. Never drunk but always drinking. You know the kind.

Didn't make him mean, though. Made him soft. He’d laugh out loud at things I didn’t understand. He’d talk about things I didn’t understand.

…

If you're new to Blow Up you might want to read these blog posts and get your bearings. We're about to make a turn. 

If you've been here from the beginning, then you're familiar with the facade of wellness masking a diseased mind. Restlessness resembles ease. Humor hides hate. Until…

We arrive at clearing in the wood. The clouds lift. The sun shines. Fatigue gives way to exhaustion and a sudden sense of clarity. Of course, the plates we've been spinning come crashing to the ground. But soundlessly. Like a…

Sometimes you want to just scream. I do. Sometimes my inner thoughts — the private ones, the ones that I just can not say out loud…

…from the dingbat who can’t code a simple annual physical right, to the insurance hound who’s up my ass about a dinky $20 that I shouldn’t have to pay because the dingbat botched it up at square one…

…to the lady behind me at the market who jumps the line when the register opens in the next aisle (and I’ve got maybe 20 things in my cart…and I was ahead of her) and she knows she’s…

Twisting up some newspaper for this morning’s fire, I noticed an ad for the local cinema: Wonka and Maestro. Got me thinking about what we celebrate, that is, what we blow up into great God-sized pictures and worship sitting before a supernatural canvas, and I thought -- Wonka. Maestro. Both revisions of some past dream. Monumental, cherrypicked memories featuring heroes we recognize and adore. 

And why not? We need heroes, fighters, winners. We need to see a grand scale battle and we need to see something…

I know this playwright. His students called him “The Master” back in undergrad. And he was. Is. Masterful. Produced by theaters you’d recognize in New York, California, London. A few of his plays became movies with household-name stars. You get the picture: he’s a cut above everyone else. Maybe two cuts.

But disappointment just pours out of him.

Always compares himself to the now mega-famous writers he came up with. They can’t write like him, but…they’ve got something he doesn’t. Success. Dollar signs…