Taking Out the Trash   

Sunday evening, in the garage, with a flashlight. No one knows I'm here. The family is searching for me, calling me. It's time for supper. But I'm in the cool autumn air, looking at things. 

In the shadows, I feel like a kid again. Everywhere I turn I'm stumbling into stuff, every time I reach out I'm knocking something over. I'm giggling. The garage is haphazardly packed, like some drunk's storage unit. It's a lifetime of acquisition, weird junk, memories. Tonight I want to look at it all. 

Why is it that if it all burned up I wouldn't give a damn, yet there's not a thing I'd be willing to part with, right now, if you were to ask for it.  

Look at it, the flotsam and jetsam of my existence. I haven't poked around in here all season. I've thrown some things in from the doorway, ripped some things free from a tangle of fishing poles and hammock material, but I haven't hung out here for an evening in far too long.

I stand on top of a power mower and reach to grab a wooden chest high atop a shelf. The chest comes down on top of me, I try to get out of the way but hook my ankle on the mower's starter cord and fall backwards. The chest bounces off my thigh into a stack of baseball bats. I wind up against a wooden barrel filled with Tiki torches and a single nine horse Evinrude.  

There's got to be an overhead light in here somewhere. 

The cool autumn air swirls around the room and, on my back, I shine the flashlight to the ceiling and smile at the cobwebs and the shadow that just shot across them. A squirrel, I've scared up a squirrel. It's alive, terrified, and frantically moving like a pin ball from wall to wall. I feel it shoot past me, its feet lighting on my shoulder momentarily. I'm laughing like a giddy eight year old. 

What an irrational form of entertainment. Aren't some men watching football right now? How does one explain the glee in this lost, mindless trek through the clutter, the blissful chaos and unpredictability in every movement.  

I start chasing the squirrel around the garage, whooping and hollering like a rodeo clown. I don't know which one of us is knocking over more items. The cacophony is deafening. I hear camping equipment crashing to the ground. I feel sleds coming off the wall and a ladder displaced and knocking into lamps we should have gotten rid of years ago.

 "There's no way out, Mr. Squirrel. I've closed the door. It's just you and me, kid!"

I haven't been drinking. Honestly. But perhaps I've been drugged by a weekend of responsibility and detail, errands and commitments, and now I'm breaking free, escaping the numbness in this wondrous darkened otherworld adjacent to my house. With my flashlight flailing, feet and arms churning, I'm riding  an eight-year-old's high and I'm loathe to come down. 

Five more minutes and then I'll quit. I'm too old to keep at it much longer. I'll stop, finally, brush myself off and head in for supper. I'll tell my family I didn't hear their calls. I'll tell them I was just taking out the trash, and straightening out some flower pots on the front stoop. 

The cool air has me invigorated. The smell of gasoline and turpentine tell me some containers didn't have their lids screwed on tightly. I inhale it all. It's all good.   Playgrounds are everywhere in this world, one merely has to give in to them, hand oneself over to them.  

My garage will be a sight come morning. For a moment I have half a mind to toss a match inside and give it all back to nature. But the kids are hungry and my wife's cooking is getting cold. Time to go inside and recreate the mirage of sanity that, over the years, I've labored so earnestly to construct.