MY FRONT PORCH

Boy George and I had a heart-to-heart Tuesday over a bumper of brandy on my front porch, and this is what we came up with: We must start saving for a zany day.

It's time. We are both in our 30s — me on the backside, he just through the gate. We have been shirking our duty to have fun for our whole adult lives. Excluding the occasional lap dance and topless drive through Montana (who did which I'll leave to you), we have spent our adulthood in a relatively funless state. And I don't mean Kansas. I mean the state of sitting around and doing damn little, when you think about it, besides working and paying bills and daydreaming and procrastinating.

We decided that we'll never go to all the places we want to go to and do all the things we want to do if we don't just go to them and do them. We're not going to inherit scads of money or win the lottery or have a hefty retirement plan, so we have to do what we can with what we've got. And what we've got now is this: a travel fund wherein we save a modest amount each month until we meet our goal.

Goal No. 1 is London in January or March.

Sounds simple. But it will take some discipline. The big hurdle will be letting ourselves see fun as a necessity, a priority, when there are so many other demands on our incomes and time. But fun will win, right, George? Before you left, I meant to stick a Post-It note on your dashboard with these lines from Ezra Pound: "What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross," which is a fancy way of saying that in the end the only thing that matters is your passion.

And from the same canto this: "Here error is all in the not done/all in the diffidence that faltered," which I know is damn relevant to our circumstance, even though I can't quite put my finger on the diffidence that faltered. I think the gist of it is this: Curb your resignation!

•••••

I was on the porch again today, in my boxer shorts, indulging a vice or two and contemplating the empty space in my neighbor Ed's yard where his Virgin Mary statue used to be — the three-foot high one that Eddie always pees on. Eddie's a dog who lives two houses down. Did Ed tire of the poor little virgin, as men inevitably do, or did she get blown away in the microburst? Or did she get taken by thieves? As I was mulling this mystery, Ed pulls up in his shiny black Hyundai. He and his girlfriend have new matching Hyundais. Ed fancies himself a poet, and maybe he is. I guess poet is as poet does. This, I thought, was especially poetic: Ed kills his engine and sits in the car, windows down, with Journey at top volume. It's so loud his car is vibrating. And Ed — don't ask me why he's always home in the middle of the day — sits there in his cool-dude shades and drums on his steering wheel and sways his crew-cut head, which I think would be a lot cooler looking if he still had his peroxided dreadlock thingies.

"You make me weep and wanna die/Just when you said we'd try/ Lovin', touchin', squeezin' each other."

Normally if something like this happens, I save a guy some embarrassment and slink away before he notices he's being observed.

"When I'm alone all by myself/You're out/You're with somebody else/You're lovin', touchin', squeezin' each other."

But I think Ed might enjoy being looked at. So I stand my ground. And sure enough, he inadvertently throws his head my way in sync with the music — and spots me. He pauses for the tiniest second, then yells "Journey" to me over the music. Like the word "Journey" is the universal shorthand for "Hey neighbor, don't mind my foolishness."

I salute him with my coffee cup.

"You're tearin' me apart/Every day, every day/You're tearin' me apart/Oh girl what can I say?"

Once I heard some of Ed's poetry. It was at a Valentine's Day reading at the Bourgeois Pig. It was not good. Not quite right. Close at times, but never actually there. One poem I remember had a belabored metaphor of trains pulling out of a station, which later in the poem he tried to liken to "pulling out" of his girlfriend. Whatever dude. It left me with a mental image of Ed on the verge of climax with some nymph too dumb to know she had an alleged poet inside her.

"It won't be long, yes till you're alone/When your lover, oh, he hasn't come home/Cause he's lovin' oo, he's touchin' her,
He's squeezin' another."

Just as Ed kills his stereo, the little girl who lives across the street makes her way around the corner. She has been outside for the last half hour taking pictures with a digital camera. I don't know her name, but she's about 10, I'd say. Homeschooled. Red-haired. I should know her name. When I moved in, she came over to greet me: "You're not Owen's mom," she observed, referring to the little boy who had lived in my house. "No, I'm not," I said, to which she replied: "Whose mom are you?"

She is meticulously photographing leaves and rocks and bugs. As soon as Ed gets half way to his house she stoops down and photographs the smoldering cigarette he dropped by his car. She is very, very serious about this picture.

You're tearing me apart.

As Ed opens his front door it occurs to me that he might have some insight into "the diffidence that faltered." I should call him over, have him explain Ezra Pound's Canto LXXXI. What good is having a poet for a neighbor otherwise? Listen, Ed, "Could you mow your weeds once in awhile, keep the '80s rock to a minimum and explicate a few lines of Modernist verse for me?"

Just then I hear a familiar flap flap flap flap. It's my Marine. Jogging down the street. Jarhead with perfect posture — and perfect passion — wearing nothing but skimpy shorts, sweat clinging to his ripped torso.

You make me weep and wanna die.

Now that it's warm, he comes by almost every day, running smack down the middle of the street — flap flap flap flap. Straight ahead. I don't know that he's a Marine, but I like to imagine that he is, fighting a good fight, if those still exist, never faltering, never diffident.

Na na na na na na
Na na na na na
Na na na na na na
Na na na na na