Before we get started on this monthly Casual Short Story, I wanted thank all of my Patreon subscribers: Jen, Julie, Michael, Davos, Roshi, Doji, and our newest subscriber, Phil! You guys are phenomenal.
Every word of support, every like, every share, everything you guys do allows me to continue evolving this project and work on it. Every day, I’m thinking of new worlds and new characters to share with you.
The next Poetry Drop and Casual Camera will be coming up soon and I look forward to sharing what I’ve written for my next Patreon exclusive short story!
I had the perfect day. There is no other way to put it. I toyed with faffing about the statement, prefacing it with conditions and clauses and constructions to protect myself from the voice of doubt. But there is no doubt: on Friday, May 9th, 2025, I had the perfect day.
It didn’t seem that way at the start; I was running late to see my guide, Clay. I had spent the night before reformatting my living room around a new coffee table I had acquired from my friend Serval.
It was not an urgent need. The living room could have survived in its format at the time, however cramped it may have been. But in a fit of mania that takes me every time a new piece of furniture enters my home, I proceeded to tear down and rebuild my space. To enter a new phase of interior living by exterior rearrangement.
I did not go to bed until after having sufficiently rearranged the deck chairs of the U.S.S. Casual Rambler at 4:30am. And now Clay would be waiting for me, in his office, for our sessions, as the seconds ticked and minutes clicked past 11am. Five minutes from the hour, I decided to give the call.
“Clay, I’m really, sorry, but I set off late again and won’t be at your office until 11:15am.”
“Well, that’s alright; I’m not even at my office,” he replied, straightforward but with a slight tone of jest, “I thought we were going to do a phoner.”
An audible “oh,” fell from my mouth before I could stop it, as if the weight of failure had been picked up from inside my chest and dropped on the floor of my car, left to roll under the seat.
“I can be there, though, in twenty minutes,” he said with conciliatory grace.
“What? No,” I rejected the premise offhand. I was already speeding down I-5 towards Vancouver. Cars, semi-trucks, exits all whipping past me on either side of the middle lane.
“A phoner is fine, seriously!” I say, not knowing if it were true.
By 12:30 pm, we finished the session in his office. I had laid out my troubles, we noted the interactions, identified the patterns and adjusted for each with one fell observation. Clay, in all his silver haired wisdom, laid it out simple and kind, “You have a rescuer inside you.”
When I see the distressed, my first impulse is to think of what I can do to help. All the more so when these are people I have chosen to invest in. We did not spend much time on pondering the origins of this behavior—I can do that on my own time—only noting that it exists, what impacts it can have, and strategies for when the impact does not match the intent.
“Neutral questioning,” Clay said, “allows us to explore the feelings of the other without triggering them.”
That is questions prefaced without the accusation of you statements or the ego of I statements. That was our lesson for the day. We hugged to let it sink in. The smell of his cologne, rich and mahogany, stayed with me.
“Take care of yourself, Rambler,” he said. And we parted ways.
When I returned to my car, no emails or notifications awaited. I had intended to pick up a new catshelf for Chuck to replace his rickety old tree, but garnered no responses from the Craigslist inquiry. I was free, the sky was clear and blue, and I had a whole day to spend. There were plenty of things for me to do, plenty of tasks at hand, but the object of the day had been made clear: take care of myself.
I would be lying if I hadn’t planned for this. A blanket, a jambox, my contact staff and a backpack full of books and journals and charging cables were my liberating forces, my means for a yoga that would stretch beyond any pose, a meditation that would breathe deeper than any stillness. And Mount Tabor would be the point from where all of this would flow.
Would I read a book? Write poems? Practice contact staff? Drill a new technique? Blog? That remained to be seen. As a matter of course, I left myself the option of doing nothing in order that nothing could go undone. Perhaps I would stay on Tabor for an hour, regard downtown from across the reservoir and then continue on to another spot.
How foolish would I have been to give up on that view.
From my position, I could see the rosen glister of Big Pink, the lithic stripes of the Wells Fargo Center and the crowning peak of the KOIN Tower. A light breeze exhaled from the Willamette, rippling the reservoir and pushing clouds formed into fingers, blown like bubbles, embroidered by mist.
All of this played out under sepia tone sunglasses. And while that was not the tint of real life, it makes a sunny day all the more enjoyable. An adjustment for brightness, exposure and contrast all rolled into poly-carbonate lens. It could not have been a perfect day had it been spent behind squinted eyelids.
And from this, each activity rolled into the next. The last page of my book rolled into listening to music. Those melodies rolled into contact staff practice. The last technique requiring practice rolled into journalism. The last word written for journalism rolled into more contact staff practice. And this again rolled into a filming a video haphazardly shot from my tablet.
It’s slightly uneven, propped up on shoes and a book, set diagonally to the hillside slope. But its aim is true, capturing me, the city, the sun, the shade, the passersby, all in a moment I can hold as I practice my ground matrix.
A matrix is a contact staff technique that requires the staff to travel under the arm, over the chest, under the other arm and then over the back. When done correctly, it looks like Neo’s iconic dodge from The Matrix. It’s not an especially easy technique even when standing. It requires flexibility in the hips, back and legs to make it all work. A way to cheat is to turn with the staff. But without the facility of my legs, I had to rely on my hips and shoulders and back for success.
I’ve tried and failed it multiple times before——sometimes while flowing on fire——but I was determined to seal it that day.
My first try was no good. Going down the right arm over the back, under the left arm and then over the chest, I failed to make the appropriate amount of contact with the staff on my chest and watched her tumble only managing to save the sequence by transitioning into Chi Rolls.
From there, I switched back into some Steve rolls to prepare for my second attempt.
The second attempt was even worse; I botched the underarm transfer from my left arm to my chest and let the far head of the staff hit dirt. This was going to be harder than I thought.
In an attempt to be fair to my contact staff, I ceded control. Instead, I let her guide me. Conveyor belts, Steves, Chi Rolls, they all flowed effortlessly.
And, then, at precisely 7:24 PM on Friday May 9th, so did the ground matrix. It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t need to be; upon finishing the sequence I found myself in a state that could be induced by no substance, no purchase nor indulgence. That would come later, in spin jams and a midnight rave. But at 7:24 PM, I was somewhere else entirely.
Some might consider everything I did on Friday to be an indulgence——yes, even therapy——that these were all privileges afforded to me by socioeconomic station. I agree. They are privileges, but that does not take away from the necessity of their undertaking or otherwise.
Paying the mechanic to tune up a car or a boat is a privilege of assets, but that doesn’t take away from the basic principle that a running vehicle deserves some form of maintenance, that rearranging the deck chairs was just as important as the work on the engine below. And when both were finished, I could enjoy the view from bow knowing the maintenance had been done.
But midway through the experience, it didn’t feel like maintenance. It didn’t even feel like happiness. No, this was something rarer in life.
This was me, mindful, present and at peace. This was me, content.
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The Casual Ramble 