It’s snowing today, though the sky’s still blue, a few leaves on the trees, the last guests who refuse to say to themselves, the party’s over, it’s time to go home. I’m thinking of a childhood friend hit by a car while riding his bike—the driver panicked, stopped, backed her car over him. How horrible for her: First one thump, hard, abrupt; then another, muffled, slower.

                                                        *

There are things that frighten us about the world. Accidents. Serial killers. Cancer. Terrorists. Childhood.

                                                        *

Peter Wu, smart Chinese kid, top of his class, good athlete, not geeky, friends with everyone. One of those kids absolutely free of aggression or malice, a golden child, so much so it always made sense to me he never lived beyond childhood. At the funeral his parents were devastated; though they held it together, kept decorum, I saw it in their faces, that mask of utter anguish, knowing they’d confront what was missing the rest of their days. In the program they printed a poem by Peter about a little ghost dancing in a haunted house on a cold and windy fall day. A day like today.

                                                        *

I remember driving in a car with three friends and they were going over the disasters of their childhood. One, a Chicana, talked of running around a schoolyard not looking and smacking her forehead right into the flagpole—an allegorical touch since her parents were illegals. The other, of Taiwanese, grew up in a white suburb in New Jersey and one night some neighborhood brats gassed up a fire behind her garage and tried to burn her house down. The third talked about the Lebanese civil war, how at thirteen he held down this outpost all by himself, fretting he’d run out of ammo for his AK-47.

All of us tossed up our arms, laughing, Okay, Tony, you win.

                                                        *

Thinking about Sun Tzu lately. There’s this whole group of rappers into The 48 Laws of Power, samplings from dudes like Machiavelli and Sun Tzu and my man Matsumoto reduced to four dozen precepts. Sometimes the rappers see in these laws confirmations of why they rose up out of the streets; sometimes these are lessons to help them keep rising, not to get trapped by a certain credo from the hood which doesn’t recognize the way the world actually works, the reality of how people react, no matter their culture or history.

                                                        *

Nearing solstice, it gets dark so early now. I don’t like this time of year cuz it reminds me how old I’ve become, and I keep wondering how it all passed so quickly. I know it’s a cliché, but Peter Wu, I can close my eyes and see him, playing ball with us in that field near my house, and it’s like he’s still there, like the car never hit him, like his dad never had to get up at his funeral and read Peter’s poem about the little ghost.

                                                        *

I spun out on the ice yesterday, twirling a five-forty, on-coming cars flashing closer in slow motion and blinding snow. No thoughts of loved ones. Then the wheels gripped, I veered off the road.

I’m never going to die.

                                                        *

Compared to Tony, I’m just a child. Never been in a fist fight or come close to killing even a goat or chicken. Some Rumsfeld or Cheney, some grunt or CIA ops, they’ve sussed those ancient manuals, doped the new ones too. They know it’s a dog eat dog world; we’ve got to raise some pit bulls if us French poodles aren’t going to get ripped to pieces by those Al Qaeda Dobermans. A guy like Khalid Sheikh or al-Zarqawi, blading Danny Pearl’s head, slipping into Fallujah with utter glee, like a conventioneer off to Vegas? Hell, they’d devour me like slices of sushi, hack my nuts in a heartbeat, and I got to gall to say I don’t want our Hooh-ha grunts hunting in Iraq?

                                                        *

(Neville Chamberlain be damned.) I use this as consolation. All my pettiness reaffirmed.

                                                        *

The following is not Peter’s poem—

Top Dog, underdog, which would you rather be? Our lost boy, our lost boy. I am the designated mourner, this is how it goes: The soldiers get their homecoming, only it’s a long way off. Here’s to the world. Playland, vice, greed; the three little pigs. A roll of the dice. Melting ice. Red light, green light. That is no country. That is no civil war. Graceland. Dance, dance, dance. Our white toothy smile shining in the cosmos. We are not alone. Oh the enigma, the arrival, the fortress. 9-11/Ak-47. Deep in the soul’s code. Not. Not Alone.

                                                        *

Thursday, Dec. 6, a cold cold day. Blackness out my window. Temperature zipping far below freezing. Arctic wind. Glad I have heat, you know. Glad the oil’s flowing. Glad I can write these lines of a boyhood friend, his farewell poem about a ghost.