so there I was,
hungover again but not too bad,
looking at this ball of yarn
that cost me twelve bucks at some craft store
run by a woman with dead eyes
and a jesus fish on her car.
the yarn was orange and red and yellow,
sunset colors they called it,
like whoever named it
had never seen a real sunset
through the bottom of a whiskey glass
at 3 AM.
but hell,
I needed something to do
besides drink and think about
all the ways the world had screwed me
and I had screwed myself.
so I dragged my carcass
and my yarn
out to the back porch,
that rotting deck chair that
had seen better decades,
and started working the hook.
single crochet, double crochet,
the same mindless repetition
that keeps us all from going completely mad.
stitch after stitch,
row after row,
the sun climbing higher
like a lazy drunk
stumbling home at noon.
and I kept going,
hypnotized by the rhythm,
by the false promise
that making something
might fill the hole
that nothing else could fill.
three hours passed.
three goddamn hours
sitting there like a lobster
in a pot that was heating up
so slowly I never noticed
until I was cooked.
when I finally looked up,
my face in the glass door
was the color of rage,
red as a communist flag,
red as embarrassment,
red as the yarn
I’d been stitching
while the sun fried me
like a cheap piece of meat.
the irony wasn’t lost on me.
there I was,
trying to create something beautiful,
and instead I’d turned myself
into a walking joke.
sunburned while crocheting.
christ.
if that doesn’t sum up
the absurdity of existence,
nothing does.