When it finally got through to me and I realized that the doctor wasn’t messing with my head, I found myself wanting to be...you know—deeper, more honest, compassionate and wise. But it hasn’t worked out all that well. For instance, I started yesterday by meditating on the Prayer of St. Francis, but for breakfast I ate fried Spam and eggs, and that afternoon I had a significant wrath-and-fury session while watching the news. After meditating on world peace for a few minutes, I then met a friend for coffee and talked for two hours about the upcoming baseball season. I have some beautiful spiritually-inclined friends, but seem to spend more time with the fleshlier ones. Like Charlie, who just got his new leg because he lost his old one to diabetes, and whose main passion now is watching the news three hours a night to see how that thing with Trump and his porn star turns out.

And so it goes, early morning spirituality, afternoon gluttony, and evening pointlessness. I confess I’ll miss pointlessness the most, the cosmic practical joke of it, the humor that makes the days slide by almost unnoticed. At night when my head hits the pillow, I sigh and wonder, where has the time gone?

—Published previously in a collection which the 81-year-old Gilmore has called his “swan song,” My Dharma Box (KYSO Flash, 2018); appears here with his permission

Dan Gilmore

is the author of a novel, A Howl for Mayflower (Imago Press, 2006); three books published by KYSO Flash: a collection of new and selected writings, My Dharma Box (2018), a collection of new and selected haibun stories, New Shoes (2016), and a chapbook of haibun stories, Just Before Sleep (2015); and three collections of poetry and monologues: Season Tickets, Love Takes a Bow, and Panning for Gold. He has won the Raymond Carver Fiction Contest, the Martindale Fiction Award, and multiple Sandscript Awards for Short Stories. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, San Diego Reader, Aethlon, Blue Collar Review, The Carolina Review, Sandscript, Loft and Range, KYSO Flash, and Serving House Journal.

“Happiest Black White Man Alive,” one of Gilmore’s flash fictions, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was chosen by novelist Robert Olen Butler as one of the winning stories appearing in the anthology, The Best Small Fictions 2015.

In his time, Gilmore has been:

• a fry cook,
• a jazz musician,
• a draft dodger,
• a soldier,
• an actor,
• a minister in a Reno wedding chapel,
• a psychologist,
• a single parent of two children,
• a college professor,
• a dean, and
• a consultant to business.

Currently, he lives in Tucson, Arizona and divides his time between playing jazz, writing, and loving his children and grandchildren, his life partner JoAn, and his cat.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ New Shoes, Gilmore’s collection of new and selected haibun stories reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa in KYSO Flash (Issue 7, Spring 2017)

⚡ Just Before Sleep, Gilmore’s chapbook of haibun stories reviewed by Duff Brenna in KYSO Flash (Issue 4, Fall 2015)

⚡ Dan Gilmore Poetry Reading at The Rogue Theater in Tucson, Arizona; in addition to Gilmore reading from his poetry collections, also includes readings of his poems by actors such as David Greenwood (“Semper Fi” and “Prayer Wars”)

⚡ Consternation and two other prose poems in Serving House Journal (Issue 9, Spring 2014)

⚡ The Hyperbolist and three other poems in Serving House Journal (Issue 8, Fall 2013)