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12.30.2009

Soundly, Calmly, Resolutely

I believe I have accomplished an unofficial sensory overload.
Having no desire to do anything self-destructive is very disorienting.

Cigarettes taste bad.
Alcohol hurts.
Sex is an aching void.
And sweets feel abrasive.

The surprising result of this collection of shifted sentiments is not the woebegone angst of a purposeless twenty-something boy. Actually it's quite the opposite: unbridled possibility.

It's not necessarily so easily defined as to merely be called optimism but there is hope in it somewhere.
And with the search for this rogue hope I shall revitalize my will to be everything I possibly can in the coming season of my life.

And while I may one day need to smoke, drink, fuck, or binge, I'll still hold to the center I'm wandering toward at this time in order not to fly like a spastic pendulum from one manic extreme to the other.

I soundly, calmly, resolutely refuse.

12.26.2009

Here goes the plunge

While I stare somewhat contentedly out the kitchen window of my small studio I realize that I'm happiest when I'm not trying to be happy.

This notion is nothing terribly novel and yet it comforts me.
Perhaps my well being is only as strong as my ability not to consider it too fiercely.

The days all begin to roll into one another the more I release my iron grip on holding each one to some sort of productive standard.
What I will do shall be done.
What I won't shan't.

And what I will become is only the next thing and the next moment.
There are so many, many moments.

12.25.2009

Don't tell me not to go

Whenever I hear someone telling me square in the face not to do something
I immediately resent them.

Sometimes I will listen and ponder
And then agree.

Mostly I just turn on the blind ear
And find the tiniest sound in the room other than that voice.

Lucky for me
Your sound was too loud to hear anyway.

And all of the tiny sounds
Were telling me to fly.

12.19.2009

The night my house was blessed by a witch

Tonight my house was blessed by a witch.

She was not a bad witch.

But she was not a usual witch.

You see she was a he!

And we will keep calling her she.

It flows.

She was a joyful soul.

She filled up her laughs all of the way to the top.

She held talents in her hands like the sky holds stars.

She was a muse.

And she sat with me.

Just with me!

To inspire me, to permit me insouciance, to uplift.

She showed me many things she had created, had drawn for years.

Her pictures were lavish arrangements of precise details.

The length of her investment in their constitution showed in perfect crosshatching.

And once she left I felt her absence.

Only then did I see the drawing on my refrigerator white board:

She had left a little part of herself with me, in my home!

The length of her investment showing in her showing me.

12.16.2009

Carrie

I wouldn't have said anything accept that you saw everything I had, I think.
You looked so much farther into me than I thought a person could.
You reached behind my eyes and sorted through my thoughts.
You seemed to sink into my blood and travel toward my feelings.
How I ever let you in like that is still and most likely always will remain a mystery.
A pleasant curiosity and an overwhelming relief: that is what you are to me.
The way I am permitted to be when we are together is something I cannot fathom or put into proper words other than to say that I'm finally allowed to take flight.
Considering the fact that rising into the air of my own accord is something after which I long on a daily basis, every moment spent begging the release of gravity, and you give me permission, this is what makes you the most special.
I love you in immeasurable, ineffable ways.
If only we had had more time to stare, more words to speak without tongues, I feel you would have known this tonight.
I know you're capable of so much more than simply listening.
You have the incredible ability to hear me in my most silent screaming.
What will my heart do when it is once again solely responsible to bear the weight of my innermost downs?
Surely you will never part from me completely.
Yet I feel the surety of our soon to occur separation and it is one of the few things allowing me these moments of grief at the thought of my departure.
Oh that your essence would alight on the metal wings of that vehicle which will ferry me from here to yonder.
Only soon to be followed by your being.

12.10.2009

Amidst the beauty

When I look around at all of this, this silliness, I can't help but feel a bit detached.
It's not because I don't care. By no means. Quite the opposite.
It's because everything is so beautiful.
I don't want to be caught up in enjoying one beautiful thing while missing out on another.
I don't want to get dizzied and overwhelmed whilst standing in midst of organic chaos.
Rather I remove myself. Somewhat. Though not all of the way. I must still feel active, alive.
And in taking myself just far enough away from everything to see it all, as if seeing one's whole house and yard from an airplane, I am permitted to revel in the simultaneous beauty with near absolute surrender.

I take it all in; the warmth of the people and situations and places softening the hair on my arms; the bursting palette of shades and textures making my pupils shrink; the smell of crisp, open freshness rejuvenating me like waking up with the sun in the middle of the woods; the clamorous cacophony of every word, wind, and drip blending into the faux ocean waves of tv snow.

Where might I find myself if suddenly reinserted into some part of the whole picture?
In an ethereal version of Where's Waldo I would look for my hair above the jostling throng.
And I wouldn't find myself. At least not my body. But somehow, amidst all of the untamed intricacy of the masterpiece, I know without doubt it is where I belong.

12.07.2009

Pay attention to the small things

Do you want to know what makes me supremely upset?

Even if your answer was no I'll proceed to detail anyway:

People who are full of themselves.

You may think of this profession as one that ought not be written considering how painfully obvious and assumedly universal it should be. But the fact of the matter is that the keenest of its offense is found in those who are completely unaware of their own ailment.

That is to say, the ones who don't realize that they are full of themselves are the most annoying.

Again, I realize that many of you may or may not already feel this way.
Even so pay attention to the small things, won't you?

12.06.2009

Sunday as it should be

Having spent the early hours catching up on the sleep I missed the night before while serving the Houston Rockets round after round of Sambuca, I awoke just before 11:00 to the sound of my phone ringing and the crisp sunshine of yet another sharply cold Portland morning pressing through my window. Wayne was calling to see whether or not I would like to accompany him on his Sunday morning rite of a visit to the local Finnish steambath and sauna. Realizing that I was completely without hangover (the result of working too late to procure any Sambuca of my own) I felt that a healthy dose of humidity might be just the ticket to guaranteeing a good day.
We agreed that Wayne would come around for me within a half hour. I boiled the water and ground the beans for my morning french press while simultaneously throwing on some semblance of a warm, half presentable outfit. I had just slipped my arm into the first sleeve of a plushly insulated hoodie when my phone began to ring again announcing Wayne's arrival. Coffee in hand, keys jangling obstreperously, I rushed out the door and down to street-level where Wayne waited patiently in his SUV. Making our way to the spa we chatted lightly although both of us were still somewhat foggy with morning sluggishness.
Located in one of my old neighborhoods, I marveled at having never before visited Löyly. The interior was sparing yet quite stylish. The reductionist aesthetic was complimenting to the simplicity of the notion of simply sitting in a hot space and allowing all of life's myriad toxins to melt off. There was a steam room, a cold shower, and a sauna. Outside of the three was a spacious and naturally lit seating area complete with very, very quiet serene music and a selection of reading materials. And water. For drinking. There was tea available for purchase along with various skin care products meant to augment the healthfulness of the visit.
Wayne and I began by sitting in the steam room where we continued our conversations begun earlier on the ride over. We were a bit more cognizant at that point and could stand to converse with a bit more complexity. Following a brief reprieve in the lounge area we then visited the sauna where we both chose to be rather quiet. I began meditating and found it much easier to clear my mind with the pungency of the heated cedar and sizzling of the hot stones to sooth my sensory perceptions.
Once finished, we showered, dressed and headed to brunch where we were met by Lucie and her roommate Margaret. The four of us enjoyed a lovely meal at the Jade Lounge where our friend Brett had just begun serving the morning before. After coffee, bread pudding french toast, and huevos rancheros, the four of us parted ways and set out to continue our restful and enjoyable days.
Wayne dropped me off at home where I decided to read and relax so as not to upset the placidity of the primary part of my day. Through the hazy stream of cigarette smoke, I stared at my computer screen and decided the whole ordeal deserved to be recorded. How often is it that a chance morning turns out so picture perfect? With the ambiguity of the answer floating lazily with the blue gray smoke I set to work.



And now, for today, I am through.

12.04.2009

Time unwasted

I slept most of the day today.
I missed things I would have rather been able to do.
But I knew I needed it and thusly decided not to feel remorse.
It was this long, deepish sleep that yielded some strange yet crisp dreams.
It has become more and more obvious to me that dreaming is increasing.
I've had friends tell me that they're been dreaming much more than usual.
This is a gift I think.
Perhaps we're all growing to be less and less asleep.
And perhaps that is what's causing the waking to bleed into dormancy.
Whatever the case I try to hold onto the images and possibilities of fantasy behind my eyes.
I can fly, I can see, I can invent.
There is so much possibility.
What if I were to die before the end of this year?
A question worth asking I believe.
We all must question the longevity of our being from time to time.
It undoes the hubris.

12.01.2009

Teaching One to Love Reading

I've always felt more strongly connected to the reading I do where a reference is made to something else I've read.

When an author alludes to the epic battle of Troy, Odysseus's tormented venture homeward, the seven rings of the Inferno, the Glass family, or Nancy Drew I can't help but fall just a little bit in love. I feel special, intimate, in the know. As if the author and I have now officially become brethren.

There's more and more love to be found in reading when one realizes how incorporated literature happens to be. It's what makes us up-and-coming authors feel some sort of right to the field: we are officially in the know.

And we want so badly for others to be as well. So much so that we write and write and write and write. We hope to come up with a way of gaining a new member of this not-so-secret society. And we want our writing to be the door through which they choose to enter into the sanctum of scholarship.

So in essence, teaching one to love reading is tantamount to teaching one to meditate. The student must possess the inner-desire, it's the talent of a teacher to unearth and foster that preexisting passion.

11.30.2009

Though Joy Departs

I can still hear the sound of her voice.
A distinct memory
of the way her words ended
in a soft croak,
like leather
being tightened against leather.

It was calming, textured.

I can still see the wrinkles
around her eyes. Wild
details, punctuating every curiosity.
Like spiderwebs
once taught to snare,
now wilted and pleasant.

They were calming, textured.

I can still feel the giving
of her smallish body in my arms.
Full, fallow breasts in which to harbor
a slowing, peaceful heart.
Like couch cushions out of place,
now needing to be laid down
to provide comfort for others.

They were calming, textured.

And

while you this world is now without,
I break all oaths to fearful doubt,
though joy departs in present bout,
some semblance of sunshine singes a sad eye,
for you have known me all throughout.





I love you Megan.
And dammit I miss you.

11.29.2009

Benedictus

There comes a time in everyone's lives when the mere glimpse of sunlit bare branches through a skylight or windshield provides the simplest, most complete solace. As if everything is actually going to be alright. Everyone is going to make it. All is not for naught.

That is the place I find myself today. As the bright afternoon stretches on, crystal sky outlining the horizon with sharp, beautiful definition, there is so much possibility, so much potential. I'm happy. Just happy to be. My thoughts drift here and there, high and low, to and fro. And in my mind I'm at sea on the waves of an imagination unhindered by the worries of tomorrow, by the responsibilities of today, by the hurts of yesterday. I'm simply letting the sails lurch and tremble, popping haphazardly against the loose rigging.
And even with the buck and churn of daily disappointments there is an adventurousness to the trials where their foreboding and woe previously stood.

So here sit the tired bones of one with too many thoughts to count and too few misfortunes to bemoan. May this peace and calm be a theme of mine in the coming months and years.

11.28.2009

Tonight after work I somehow lost $90 cash out of my pocket.
It could have been while I was scurrying around finishing the closing duties.
It could have been while I was rushing to the elevator.
It could have been while I was standing inside the elevator.
It could have been while I was bee-lining for the men's locker room.
It could have been inside the men's locker room...or on my way outside...or perhaps while I was walking down the street or even climbing inside Sheila's car.

The fact is it could have been any number of places.
But the bottom line as of this moment is that I am without money that I worked incredibly hard to earn.
Tonight was not the easiest of nights up in the glitzy glam of Departure.
I was bustling from one table to the next, taking orders, making conversation, clearing dishes, running food. And I was contented in my devotion to efficiency because I had this boon in mind, this goal of gratuity.
And then, when finally the last check is closed, the final table is vacated, and my paperwork is done and approved, I come to find that it was mostly for naught.

Don't think that I only see the value of my job as monetary. I realize that I encounter hundreds of people and situations every week that broaden my perspective on humanity. This is something I would say allows me to better concoct the characters, stories, and lives I put on paper. But the money is the thing that makes it all systematic; that permits my seeing to the facts of life so that I may create the fictions.

And when the money is gone, there is only me. Me and more tables.
Me and more nights solemnly resigned to spilled alcohol, late food, and drunken inanity.

To lose the profit I make is to lose the one thing that makes me able not to work when necessary.

And I feel like a failure.
I know this feeling won't last.
I know I'll eventually let go of the meager sum.
It's just that until then I feel like I'm somewhat unfinished, incomplete, inconsequential.
And I begin to let those odious feelings of permanence creep under my skin; those notions that I will never be anything more or do anything more than what I am and do right now.

And that thought drives me mad.
Mad to the point of feeling utterly sick to my stomach.
Mad in the head and mad in my heart.
Like I'm ill and my only cure is to work my way out of sickness.
And losing any part of that battle feels like its own brand of insurmountable defeat.

I just wish I had a patron.
I long to let go of these petty worries.
They are cumbersome, stupid, banal, and completely without inspiration.
I do not know how much more of them I can withstand.

11.24.2009

Leave my dreaming

I am growing weary of being required to wake up.
More and more lately I have been experiencing the most fantastic dreams.
And with all due respect to responsibility and schedule, typically I'd much rather stay asleep continuing with the adventures I'm experiencing behind my eyelids.
Waking up is such a disheartening notion when it means permanently leaving an experience that finally makes me feel alive.
Trite as this all might seem I feel it very passionately.
I'm not much for grandiloquent metaphor or lucid word picture at this time but when I'm dreaming I have no need for such things.
My satisfaction comes from being in the midst of experience; of wondrous, lavish sensory stimulation.
And much of the time I am able to fly.

11.23.2009

Morning House and other exhaustions

It might be the coffee, it might be the cigarettes, it might be the gravy from a late breakfast.
Whatever the case I'm experiencing something of an energetic crash.

Once I was this idea, this notion of something so special and particular.
Now I find myself to be so inauspicious.
Perhaps its simply the resulting sentiment of a draining weekend full of rain and stress.
Albeit there has been sun, beautiful glorious brightness.
Somehow it has failed to seep into me, to get past the layers upon layers of built up lassitude.

I'm slightly afraid of returning to that dark and lonely place.
There are so many quiet, calm dangers.
So many insidious threats and charming ills.

A friend once commanded me, "never lose your light".
I want so badly to find some sort of assurance of this for myself.
Still I meet with a moderate sense of pointlessness.
Everyday is like trying to run on a beach.
It seems like a lovely idea when imagined but once my feet hit the sand every stride feels so heavy and weighted, so much exertion for such meager return.

I'm pressing on determined to meet with some sort of zen.
However I must not pretend it will simply come to me.
I must seek it out and pursue it with what little strength I have.

But it is so very, very little.

11.19.2009

And now...

...comes a time when I am missing you so much.
I am so cold.
So alone in my togetherness.

11.17.2009

Learning to breathe all over again

In the past, whenever I've found need for some kind of calm or peace I've always had to try and drown out the monotony with something exciting, some new sensation or stimulus.

At present I am working toward a more evolved end by seeking out the contentment of quiet.
Carol showed me a meditative pose which I believe I shall attempt to employ here for a little, hopefully accomplishing some semblance of inner quiet.

And I must tell myself, "there is more to see and to know".
I must not grow despondent.
I can be my worst undoing if I am not prudent, aware, present and prepared.

Ode to a Black Butterfly

Fall is cold in Portland. Cold in a sorrowful, penetrating way. And my decision to spend three days in the close company of a dying woman is made to seem all the bleaker what with the powdery gun metal gray of midmorning downtown. I am standing naked in my brightly painted and meticulously organized apartment, indecisively staring into the gaping mouth of my open closet. How does one dress to meet with death? Commencing with the dispassionate announcement of my morning alarm, I contemplate one question: why did I agree to do this?
Marco’s mother is dying. And as a friend of both Marco and his waning parent, I am obliged to assist her in a sort of last wish: transcribe her handwritten book into type.
I leave my home with little more than my journal and a blank expression. I feel in all ways unremarkable. This service to Marco’s mother will give me a sense of temporary purpose, I hear my own voice trudging through my mind with pallid encouragements. Driving out of the city I do not turn on the stereo. I cannot be interrupted. I am pondering.
Pondering car accidents, knifings, floods, poisonings, and suffocation at 35,000 feet. I do not want any of those things to happen to me. I seize a bit at the thought of bearing some sort of hurting until I finally passed away and what that change would be like. Perhaps all of the discomfort would just stop abruptly and I would be left floating without a body in the middle of inky, intangible blackness.
I arrive at Marco’s mother’s apartment several miles outside of downtown. Her name is Megan. She is dying. Megan is dying. From cancer. It’s so typical. So anticipated. The common nature of the ailment almost makes it harder not to fear. It seems so well known and yet indomitable.
I lightly knock on the door. Megan’s in-home caretaker lets me in, ushering me to her bedside. I say hello in a staid, almost silent manner, like an actor waiting for direction.
I have never contemplated just how I might feel when I get close enough to touch someone who’s dying. Will they be cold? Will they be angry? Will I get some kind of infection? The truth I realize more and more every day is that for as much as I live in a time that pretends to know death, I really only ever hear or discuss the events that lead to and/or cause death, as opposed to the morbid concept of a body losing life. Becoming exanimate. Like toothpaste being squeezed from all sides at once. Or a sponge being wrung out.
Megan is calm. Meditative and determined she speaks softly and makes no effort at disguising her weakness. Albeit she still wears her dentures. I feel permeable sitting next to her frailty. The awareness of my own life’s imminent expiration fills me.

It’s the second day. Megan seems to be quite empty. But it appears as if all she’s really lost is some of the water that makes up her physical body. Her ruminations and intimations seem to come out of her mouth like majestic lions and cunning tigers slinking out of a dark stone cave. Her cold, unresponsive exterior belies a strong, radiant product. Her eyes are all stone and lassitude. And yet she’s not miserable. She’s irreversibly moving towards death and she is the essence of peace. I glance at her from my vantage point at the desk next to her pillow-garnished hospital bed. She looks so tiny amidst the plush mounds of cotton and down. But she feels so large, so complete. Her handwritten pages lay in front of me on the desktop. This, her final work, is a collection of learnings, teachings, and inspirations; her legend; her immortality. As I type page after page of tidy scrawl I am again pondering.
Pondering where Megan’s consciousness will go after she dies, whether or not there will be consciousness after death, and why I am so terrified of not knowing.

Many depictions of death feature the notion as some sort of pain, or at least painful. And that immediately makes it frightening. Adding to that fear is the ambiguity surrounding not just the cause of death but also its effect. What does death do? Where does it put the person who dies? When considering such questions I often feel the impulse to put them out of my head, to let them remain unanswered. Further still I must ask myself what I would do with the answers if I happened upon them? It stands to reason that I would let myself be consumed by hubris. Just look at the Greek gods. Life becomes a thing of sport. A bet to be levied in a grand yet ultimately pointless wager. Perhaps death’s doom and mystery are their own koans ensuring the fidelity of my humility.

Day three. I am still typing. Megan is still dying. I finish entering the last line of text and note that I have considered and reconsidered everything I can grasp about my wary review of death. Still no definitive conclusions. Only more questions. I go to Megan’s bedside to tell her I am finished. She raises her wavering head and the skin around her eyes seems too tired to show emotion. Is she relieved? Is she happy? Her cheeks display small, spidery purple bruises from the weak blood vessels burst beneath the indent of the oxygen hose stretched ear to ear across her face. She beckons me in to where she can whisper next to my ear. Nobody can ever be ready, honey, she says. How can they be ready for something they don’t know? she asks somewhat vacantly. I suddenly see the that the enemy is not the question of death, rather it is the demand for an answer; the sense of entitlement to controlling the ephemeral.

With the inflation in popularity over the years of such societal focal points as mass-provided news, crime and medical dramas, and vapid, materialistic “reality television” I see that we’ve been given a ridiculously polar outlook on death and life. While evening news broadcasts, the newest iteration of serial murder, and bedside heartbreak provide the communal imagination with innumerable examples of the menace of oncoming passing, faux-candid scenes of richness, glamor, and meaningless sensory stimulation create a paradise of insouciance. And with a dark rain cloud on the horizon of a shallow paradise, it’s anyone’s guess how much rain it will take to drown us all.

Instead we reach inside each other through the shroud of alcohol, the fog of narcotics, and the clumsiness of sex to feel something, anything permanent. The truth as it always has stood is that death is the one constant life has to offer. Religions and philosophies produce plenty of theories (guesses) concerning where the door of death may lead but at the end of the day we’re left only with the question: what happens when we die? And I ask in return: who can know? The beauty of this mystery is that it is universal. Everyone and everything will eventually die. It is entropy at its best. And in the same way that scarcity breeds value, we may all gain an increased level of worth in our finiteness, in our mortality, in our beautiful walk toward the end.

It is nearly two weeks since my first visit. Megan slips into a coma in the early winds of a Saturday morning. The book is finished. I am at home. And death is still an absolute. By the next day Megan will alight from her perch in the body I recognize and I will be left to envy her having learned the answer to the question of death; left to walk my own path toward that door; left to ponder.

11.12.2009

A Handheld Version of What You Aren't

When I awake from sleep with little more to bring me purpose than the need for Aspirin I begin to worry for my belief in longevity; for my will to continue; for my investment in this misery.

You say goodbye to cigarettes, coffee, and hard alcohol thinking the asceticism will cleanse your confusion. You hope in vain that giving up a number of vices will reveal a number of triumphs. You look longingly at the dying woman next to you selfishly wishing you were in her place. And you go quiet, so completely quiet, not even mice can hear you.

That's when the lurid halogen of anyone else's successes sheds painfully sharp steel blue light on your cracked veneer. There is no one to see you. No one to hear you. No one to give you comfort.

There is only the sharp steel blue light to remind of how pointless you really are; how finite you'll always be; how foolish it is to continue.

Everything in me hurts. Even my thoughts.
And I wish I had the courage to quell them all, those thoughts, those pains.
But I have no gun, I have no pills, I have no rope.
Only weakness.

And weakness doesn't completely silence, only quiets.

11.09.2009

Lately I've been thinking

When the water pressure goes lazy,
and my mirror reflects nothing but clouds of dirty fog,
then I'll know it's too late.

I'm too late.

I will soon be gone with nothing to look back upon but a muddy path I made with angry rubber boots.
They were lined with fur.
My still feet were still cold.
My still hands still bare and numb.

Yet something keeps me trudging on.
It's not hope.
It's not love. That one's for certain.
But it's definitely something just honest, just real enough to liven my crumbling bones.

And I breathe through my own cancerous lips,
all dry skin and exposed pink flesh.
Wetting them seems traitorous.
I am parched.

The last spirit-like trails of evaporating humanity rising from my form toward the heavens I will never call home.
Because I am sick.
My illness is of my own preparation.

Lately I've been thinking:
If I am sick then something must be intoxicating me.
But what agent might this be?

I think of Jewelia and menthol cigarettes,
credit card debts and six packs of flavored malt drinks.
The blood of lost virginity.
The blood.
So much blood.

Too much for my lazy shower to cleanse.
I cannot abandon the effort
as I have been abandoned (say what you will).

But still I grow afraid that the water in my shower will turn into lazer beams and burn through me when I am at my weakest, my most vulnerable.

Now I remember that it already has.

11.08.2009

Deciding which blanket

I've begun to decide which blanket to take to bed on a nightly basis.
Choosing any one in particular requires little more than gut instinct and little bit of attention to my specific needs for creature comfort.
And yet I know they all have feelings.
The cotton has something so sincere in its sea blue tint.
Meanwhile the polyester bouclé begs for attention with its plush fringe.

These are the musings of a madman,
a character who makes promises to his bottle of mouthwash.
And who should not be trusted with the safety of a blind woman's innocence.
A person wrought with the aches and gout of a self-sustained ambivalence.
This vagrant who once held a candle for the others to watch and wish for is now just another miserly man in the dark.
And he is so terribly unhappy.
Meanwhile completely and utterly alone.
And of his own devices no less.

There is no pity for a man with his hand in a bandage when his other hand still holds the bloody blade.
None can know the weight borne on melted wings.
For he once believed his soaring would take him beyond all of this gray, gray water.

11.05.2009

You felt them like plates moving

Change is afoot.
I feel like I'm the path over which it walks, stumbles, runs.
And now my essence is changing.
I'm becoming so much more than just an avenue.
I refuse to let myself fall into my own ditches, full of brown and turgid water and muck.

So I will stand indomitable.
I will resist the resistance to evolution that I've felt so keenly.
I will look to the corners of the physical world in my mind's eye and I will find beauty instead of unhappiness.
Contentment instead of confinement.

And all will grow and blossom and wilt and die.
Only to begin again with me being the change and now loving my path for I was once where it is now.

11.04.2009

Arriving yet again at this tentative place

I feel like my muse is beginning to make occasional visits now.
As if she's decided to forgive me for whatever wrongs of laziness or falsehood I might have committed against her.

These visits have begun to feel like rewards and respites all of their own.
And I am of the mindset that my happiness is on its way back to me as well.
Although it tends to be much more elusive than even my spirited muse.

10.29.2009

The Day Death Became My Mother

Fall is cold in Portland. Cold in a sorrowful, penetrating way. And my decision to spend three days in the close company of a dying woman is made to seem all the bleaker what with the powdery gun metal gray of midmorning downtown. I am standing naked in my brightly painted and meticulously organized apartment, indecisively staring into the gaping mouth of my open closet. How does one dress to meet with death? Commencing with the dispassionate announcement of my morning alarm, I contemplate one question: why did I agree to do this?
Marco’s mother is dying. And as a friend of both Marco and his waning parent, I am obliged to assist her in a sort of last wish: transcribe her handwritten book into type.
I leave my home with little more than my journal and a blank expression. I feel in all ways unremarkable. This service to Marco’s mother will give me a sense of temporary purpose, I hear my own voice trudging through my mind with pallid encouragements. Driving out of the city I do not turn on the stereo. I cannot be interrupted. I am pondering.
Pondering car accidents, knifings, floods, poisonings, and suffocation at 35,000 feet. I do not want any of those things to happen to me. I seize a bit at the thought of bearing some sort of hurting until I finally passed away and what that change would be like. Perhaps all of the discomfort would just stop abruptly and I would be left floating without a body in the middle of inky, intangible blackness.
I arrive at Marco’s mother’s apartment several miles outside of downtown. Her name is Megan. She is dying. Megan is dying. From cancer. It’s so typical. So anticipated. The common nature of the ailment almost makes it harder not to fear. It seems so well known and yet indomitable.
I lightly knock on the door with the bronze 44 just beneath the convex glass bud of the peep hole. Megan’s in-home caretaker lets me in, ushering me to her bedside. And then began the change within me.

You never know just how you’re going to feel when you get close enough to touch someone who’s dying. Will they be cold? Will they be angry? Will you get some kind of infection? The truth I realize more and more every day is that for as much as we live in a time that pretends to know death, we’re really only ever hearing or talking about the events that lead to and/or cause death, as opposed to the morbid concept of a body losing life. Becoming exanimate. Like toothpaste being squeezed from all sides at once. Or a sponge being wrung out.

It’s the second day. Megan seems to be quite empty. But it appears as if all she’s really lost is some of the water that makes up her physical body. Her ruminations and intimations seem to come out of her like majestic lions and cunning tigers slinking out of a dark stone cave. Her cold, unresponsive exterior belies a strong, radiant product. Her eyes are all stone and lassitude. And yet she’s not miserable. She’s irreversibly moving towards death and she is the essence of peace. As I sit across the room typing page after page of tidy scrawl I am again pondering.
Pondering where Megan’s consciousness will go after she dies, whether or not there will be consciousness after death, and why I am so terrified of not knowing.

We’re taught in countless forums that death is some sort of pain, or at least painful. And that immediately makes it frightening. And even when we decide not to run from our fears, when we decide to turn and truly face them, it doesn’t always mean that they will make some kind of analytical sense. Like we’ll burst some sort of psychological pimple and forever be drained of the purulency of impending doom. That kind of catharsis would only bring about unimaginable hubris in everyone anyway. Immortality seems to breed pig-headedness. Just look at the Greek gods. Life becomes a thing of sport. A bet to be levied in a grand yet ultimately pointless wager.

Day three. I am still typing. Megan is still dying. I finish entering the last line of text and note that I have considered and reconsidered everything I can grasp about my wary review of death. I go to Megan’s bedside to tell her I am finished. She raises her wavering head and the skin around her eyes seems too tired to show emotion. Her cheeks display small, spidery purple bruises from the weak blood vessels burst beneath the indent of the oxygen hose stretched ear to ear across her face like a bandit’s mask. She beckons me in to where she can whisper next to my ear. Nobody can ever be ready, honey, she says. How can they be ready for something they don’t know? she asks somewhat vacantly. I suddenly see the that the enemy is not death, but knowledge.

With the inflation in popularity over the years of such societal focal points as mass-provided news, crime and medical dramas, and vapid, materialistic “reality television” we are given a ridiculously polar outlook on death and life. While evening news broadcasts, the newest iteration of serial murder, and bedside heartbreak provide the communal imagination with innumerable examples of the menace of oncoming passing, faux-candid scenes of richness, glamor, and meaningless sensory stimulation create a paradise of insouciance. And with a dark rain cloud on the horizon of a shallow paradise, it’s anyone’s guess how much rain it will take to drown us all.

Instead we reach inside each other through the shroud of alcohol, the fog of narcotics, and the clumsiness of sex to feel something, anything permanent. The truth as it always has stood is that death is the one constant life has to offer. And as such we ought not place an undue focus on what little we know and how much that knowledge terrifies. Instead I elect to embrace its mystery as a comfort, as an assurance in its definite quality.

And with that I am safe. Safe from this myth of death because I will not pretend to know. Only to ponder.

10.27.2009

The whole story

When I sit down with little more than a comforter for clothing and not so much as one cup of coffee in me I'm sure I've gotten to a point very near rock bottom.
I've felt gray and deflated so much of late that all I currently see around me seems just as drab and weak as me.

But I am not drab. Nor am I weak.
I just seem to be having the hardest time stepping away from the comforts of their disappointment.

What happened to being endless, without boundary, without limitation?
Where is all of my once whipped-cream luxury of boundless potential?
Everything felt so light and sweet and yet rich and sybaritic.
And now I have nothing more than a plastic tray with some dried out hashbrowns and a meager clump of sandy scrambled eggs.

I feel sometimes like Meg Murry. Like I have all of this older siblinghood that I don't really know what to do with and yet I want so badly to rise to the occasion and become what everyone wants of me. Nay, become more.
I want to outdo even myself and not just their expectations.

But I have no energy for such an undertaking.

10.23.2009

Last Night I Dreamt

I was standing with my mother on some sort of vacation and we watched a big, bland-looking white-painted concrete apartment tower come crashing to the ground.

The moon ducked behind the horizon just before the dust cloud punched into the sky accompanied by the rolling and thunderous explosion of air and plaster. It was as if some giant hand had squeezed all of the life out of a giant plastic bag. Only this plastic bag was full of people and furniture and television sets.

We ran to escape the falling debris but doubled back to make sure the Camry was alright. Our priority was to check on our vehicle.
There is something so terribly wrong with this idea.

Another Bout of Melancholy

Why is it that everything I once took any kind of joy in has suddenly wilted like a maple leaf fallen into a muddy puddle?

I know I'm pathetic and yet in my realization of this I see how truly and deplorably pathetic everything and everyone else actually is. We're all stuck in a giant eddy. We're swilling our filth and murky attempts at clarity around one another in some sort of go nowhere carousel of self-delusion and feigned completeness.

As creature of habit we all look for the cause and effect of things.
We want to know why.
And it's only in the last several hundred years that we've been provided with the one fatal element that undoes our natural sense of curiosity: convenience.

Everything we engage in must be constantly examined and reexamined in order to come up with some method or some device useful in making said engagement easier, more convenient. And in this pursuit we eschew out typical ingenuity and readily available imagination in trade for effortlessness.
When once our work was what documented our embracing life, our art being the legacy of our being, we are now faced with an age of abbreviated conversation sent in textual chunks; a society predicating efficiency over quality; a general attitude of spite toward the notion of patience and its inherent value in building an appreciation for life and its cycle.

And I am through with it.
I realize the hypocrisy intrinsic to such a claim made from the standpoint of an individual just as saturated with the need for ease as all of the surroundings he finds so needful of critique. And there lies my weighty and inward combustion. My systems of engagement are breaking down and my will to continue along with them.
I am finding myself without any reserves where hope and optimism are concerned.
And this is a difficult place to be in the same sense as any addict finds her or himself experiencing the keenest of loneliness when they finally are departed from their vice. I am unfamiliar with a life with convenience and yet I am so desperate to find out what that means, how that tastes, the way in which I will rest when finally without it.

This would seem appropriate basis for my recently inflating desire to vacate my present life; to leave the makeshift home I've concocted from so many clashing parts; to run far, far away from the network in which I find myself snared like a spider's prey. Only this spider is one of selfishness, of pride, of conquest and recognition, fame and celebration. But only of me. And nothing of the beautiful and majestic World in which we all forget we live.

Because the World is not convenient by nature. The World is determined and productive. At its own, ethereal pace. And who are we, puny humans, to try and impress upon the preexisting world some semblance of control?
Even if you blithely follow some Messianic faux-historic poetry about 7 days of creation, humanity still came last. And yet somehow we've all come to blindly forget this.

We're not the top of the totem. In fact the notion of hierarchy is just the thing killing us all. And by our own hands. What is this need for superiority? What does it actually accomplish? Survival? Social betterment? Equality?

By no means.

All the quest for superiority accomplishes is so much discord, conflict, and devaluing. The wake of destruction left by a militant effort toward establishing oneself or one's group as better or even best has always been and always shall be of no benefit to any but the sole interest of the would-be victors.
And as the victors soak in the glory of their dominance, the World around them retreats into decay and the kingdom the victors once so arrogantly reveled in will slowly and quietly wilt into a wasteland where no ones proliferation will seem worthwhile.

And this is where I have found myself.

10.20.2009

I can't find my envelope of Au Pair paperwork.
I can't find my wine key.
Life is eating my opportunities and calm.

I'm terribly unhappy.

10.18.2009

Disjoin

I am scattered and disparate.
There is little to me other than lacking order.
I feel lost in my own bits and pieces.

And when I try to collect them up and reassemble their once confident wholeness
I grown more and more lethargic with each found morsel
and eventually just drop them all over again out of sheer ambivalence.

It's as if I'm allergic to my own completion.

10.17.2009

Well,
It's here.
Again.

That hovering, haunting presence.
Dark and dreary.
Sorrowful and full of sticky persistence.

I'm careening into chaotic flustering pandemonium.
And the tragedy is that I seem so well put together on the outside.
That's just the cleverness of me.

I'm miserable a little bit.
There seems to be no end in sight.
The gray clouds blind my view of the horizon.

And what I wish I was doing,
the reading, the writing, the making,
is a hopeless set of now daunting incompletes.

I am so angry on the inside.
I want to break everything and then go to sleep.
And have it all be put back together when I wake up.

But it's when my eyes are closed that everything falls apart.
And the juices in my stomach begin to churn.
I am sick with the fevered tedium of a crippled explorer.

10.09.2009

Because I felt the need to collapse

No one really knows much, really.
Although a lot of people pretend.
They pretend very hard.
But it tends to be those who pretend the hardest who know the least.
And it tends to the ones who know the least who pain me the most.

10.08.2009

This son also rises

I am awake.
I am feeling a tad unhappy.
But I am not tired.
And I am not disparaging.

Last night I fell asleep to the sounds of my boyfriend's thoughts.
Today I greet a welcome silence in this cool morning air.
The sun filters through nothing as it enters my room and the walls beg for an echo.
And I hold my own counsel.

10.07.2009

For boredom I hold unwavering contempt.

10.05.2009

When the cold rolls in

We've entered that time of year where sheer chills drive me back to the keyboard.
At least I know I'll be writing with some consistency.

Having awoken to yet another morning punctuated by the silent cries of my ailing back I must admit I grew somewhat despondent upon finally exiting the bed. The mere fact that being in an annoyingly persistent discomfort disallowed my getting up prior to noon causes me no small sense of frustration.
I feel like I'm wasting my life. Or rather the pain in my back is wasting my life.
I'm missing something important. Like seeing a child on a leash waving at an ambulance with a smile on their bewildered little cheeks. Or seeing a dog trotting aimlessly down the sidewalk with a tagless collar and no one walking beside them. Or feeling the bite of a bright cool as the Sun shines through the filter of invisible ice.

Instead I wallow in shame and anger as I feel subject to something inside me that I can't control.

And while I feel the love of those around me who empathize, sympathize, and moralize, I'm still left to my own emptiness once their cheers die out.

If only I could harness this angst and channel its power into something like a novel or screenplay. Or perhaps pursue acting in a real way. Or something. Anything.

At least I'm writing now. It is oddly satisfying. Almost drug-like. If only there was some sort of narcotic that would permit me to feel successful. Hopeful even.

And here I sit listing this objects I've misplaced of late. My favorite tank top (although I'm pretty sure I know where that is), my pages of typed (and unsaved) writing, my keys, and finally, my sense of purpose.

10.03.2009

It's 5am and I am a slave to the ceiling fan.
The hypnotic flinging blades jilt my unblinking eyes.
I'm tortured by their indomitability.
Listless and motionless I lay victim to their taunting chill.

When the lights go out I am still aware of it.
The spinning.
If only I had such redundant purpose.
Such collected poise.
Instead I am abandoned to the thankless spots of used sheets.
Still and searching.

And still searching.

10.02.2009

There he rode

Cycling over the interstate with a definite purpose, Janvier lifter his flaming hand.
The left palm and digits sparked and danced with the blue flame of peace.
The colorless color of dark before light.

He looked down at the myriad cars sailing beneath him in their predestined routes, guided by so much concrete and yellow paint. He pedaled with only half an effort. No one was going that fast. And he was more interested in studying them as a whole as opposed to scrutinizing every vehicle.

The blue flame stayed strong and icy, like a frosted wave.

Les Nuages

There are moment when I feel free.
I listen to music with an inherent sense of hope.
A liquid optimism.
More than joy.
More.

And in my flight
I am still weightless
though the winds pull
and worry

I do not worry.

Where can I go
without the gravity of home;
without the angst of an unknown tomorrow;
without a sliver of fear
to pepper the love.

Where can I go to worry?

9.29.2009

When it's not that interesting

Sometimes I feel a strong sense of dysphoria when it comes to just about everything.

And the sad fact is that at present I'm experiencing a strange and permeating ambivalence with regard to changing that state.

Maybe it's just the post-Summer blues, maybe it's just the number of little annoyances I've encountered lately, or maybe I'm just finally getting just restless enough to be miffed and tired enough to be inactive.

That said, I miss my once and future optimism.

9.27.2009

The nightstand in the middle of the room

Sitting on top of a demi-chest of drawers is an array of strangely neighboring objects: camera, roll of blue masking tape, 3x5 card with a scribbled picture of a red-winged blackbird, bronze necklace, hammer, paper cup of coffee, and a mobile phone.

These things were by no means placed with any ultimate intention. They simply ended up where they happen to be. And while the raw list makes them sound quite messy, they all sit with one another in utter peace and lovely composition. A still life of the ordinary. Sans fruit.

In a way I feel that my life as a whole tends to follow this example: there are many beautifully normal pieces somewhat thrown together with little to no premeditation and yet once assembled they all seem to belong with and to one another. And ultimately they create something so lovely.

The misplaced bedside table of my present life features a lone painted wall, collection of hand-sewn throw pillows, set of clean fingernails, bearable (though not always enjoyable) occupation, willful friends, and a moderate restlessness.

Perhaps this odd assortment of facets will combine in some new way soon. Perhaps they will end up staying just as they are and act as a solid foundation. Whatever the outcome I hope to see the good in its inherent chaos. I believe I miss seeing the good.
And I hate rain.

9.23.2009

Commensurate to experience

While my life seems to be in a place of calm collection I cannot help but feel the cloy of sweet peace.
I'm in the mood for something different as I always seem to be.
It's not the thing that I thrive on, it's the newness, the novelty, the wanting to learn.

And here I enter into the first academic season sans school and I am curious:

what will I do and where will I go to keep my thirst for knowing alive?

9.19.2009

And with the rain I grow afraid

I won't pretend to be overjoyed at the prospect of yet another season of precipitation.
Something about the climate of home shall always be wont to hand me satisfaction.
Selfish or demanding, I don't care. I just want sunshine and river trips and no need for fenders on my bike.
I know better and that's the hard part.
This is going to be the first Fall and Winter where I haven't been hampered by the onset and suffering of a compromising academic regimen and yet something just as weighty seems to be slowly falling on the spaces just south of my nape and north of my tailbone. Like I've been leaned over by the burden of something as yet undetermined.
One might say this is a period of reckoning for everyone.
A time where every person in this gray area is allowed little more than introversion and stiff self examination as a result of the dimly lit skies and wet crosswinds.
It's as if the elements drive us inside ourselves.
My skin is my raincoat and my inertness my galoshes.
Only they'll never get muddy.
I'll never need to move.
That is what the dark clouds tell me.

9.13.2009

In this moment, I

I am the soul of displacement.
Torn between an ambiguous then and now.
Whichever focus chooses me I am rendered angrily helpless.

When and when and when?

I've asked you three times, like knocking on an unfamiliar door.
And I have yet to receive an answer.

9.08.2009

Blood and Hair

I hit a dog with my car once.
My son was in the back seat.
He was too young to know.
And I was too old to forget.
So I made a bargain with my dead mother:

“Give that mongrel a second chance
and I’ll do the same for you.”

The mutt sprung up from the mess of matted hair and hot blood just to the left of my now dented fender and trotted the rest of the way across the street. That was when my son uttered his first bark.
At the time I remember thinking he was simply acting like a child. But when he neglected to make any other noise than growls and yaps for the following three days I began to grow worried.
I took him to the pediatrician and the doctor asked me if he was eating normally, drinking water, and maintaining regular bowel movements. When I responded that yes, he was performing a number of his usual healthy behaviors, I was told that it was most likely just a phase and sent home. My son kept his head propped out the window the whole way, his little tongue pressed firmly out the side of his gaping mouth.

I called my sister and she suggested that I look into therapy.
He’s only four, I told her as my fingers worried the coiled phone cord and my son tore up the newspaper with his teeth. Well make sure he has all of his shots, she advised with no hint of comedy. I hung up and thought about taking up smoking.
The next week my son still showed no signs of anything other than canine communication. I caught him squatting naked in the living room and managed to snatch him up just before he soiled the carpet. That night he refused to eat with his hands, instead burying his face in the mashed potatoes and tipping over his cranberry juice while trying to lap it out of his plastic cup. I didn’t do the dishes that night.

When the lady behind the counter at the coffee shop offered my son a milk bone I finally decided to look into professional help. On my way out the door I scanned the community bulletin board and noticed a neon green page with none of the pull tabs ripped off. In all lower case letters it read “pet psychic”. I was desperate. I took the whole sheet.

That afternoon I drove my son to the small strip mall near the freeway on ramp and parked in front of the bare looking glass window with the same lower case font and a neon open sign with a burnt out e. I opened the rear passenger door and had to grab my son by the collar in order that he not run off into the parking lot. I still refused to resort to a leash. Leading him into the waiting area I commanded him to sit and stopped myself just before adding a stern “stay”. Moments later a woman dressed in draping tie-dyed fabrics and wearing the anticipated rind stone-garnished horn-rimmed spectacles greeted the two of us with the airy ambivalence of a stoner. I could have sworn she smelled of pot. Where is your creature, she queried. I remember cringing a bit at her use of the word creature. As I began to attempt an explanation my son jumped from his chair and promptly began humping the woman’s cloth-covered leg. At that point I quit speaking. The woman looked down at my son, then at me, and then at the ceiling for an uncomfortably long period of time. Finally, looking back at me, she said, I think I know what to do.
Gently removing my son’s determined grip, she led both him and me back to her work area. It definitely smelled of pot. She had a medium height table like you’d see in a veterinary clinic and an oversized plush chair covered in cloth matching that of her gown. When she sat down it appeared that her body disappeared into the cushions leaving only a floating, bespectacled head. She gestured for me to help my panting son onto the table and instructed me to hold him steady. I thought to myself how in any other time this whole situation would have had me running for the door back when my son began thrusting himself against a stranger’s leg. But I didn’t have much time to continue this vein of thinking as the woman shushed me quite determinedly and began blowing gently on my son’s face. His nose crinkled a bit and he snorted more than slightly annoyed. The woman then held out her hand just in front of his nose and he began smelling it curiously, finally sticking out his stubby tongue to taste her fingertips. To my embarrassment and disgust she then withdrew her hand and began closely examining my son’s saliva over the top of her twinkling glasses. Her own tongue flicked out of her leathery lips and traced the same spots where my son’s had been only moments before. A foul, coppery flavor seemed to appear in my mouth as I watched.
Pondering for a moment she looked up and me: your son tastes very old and very young, she said. I could say I was perplexed but that wouldn’t begin to describe the confusion I was feeling at that moment. She stood abruptly from her camouflaged seat and took my son’s ruddy cheeks in her knobby hands. Looking him dead in the eye she pressed her face in so close to his that their noses touched. She began stroking his nape with one hand while maintaining her hold on his chin with the other. I simply stood there, watching a grown woman petting my child. I could feel my son tensing a bit and then heard him uttering a soft yet menacing growl. At this signal I expected the woman to retreat but instead she began growling back. As my son’s timbre grew in intensity she raised her own to match until both of them were baring teeth. Then, just as gradually as it had begun, their threats quelled like the fading embers in a dying fire. I noticed my son’s eyes lazily closing as the woman reassumed her perch on the hippy chair. I couldn’t tell if her actions had put him to sleep or if he’d simply grown placid out of indifference. Whatever the case I was relieved to be able to loose my grip on his tee shirt. My hand was getting sweaty to the point of feeling a little gritty. I glanced over at the woman to see what she might be doing with this temporary hiatus and noticed that her eyes were closed as well. I stared at her eyelids, watching the pupils sliding around beneath the sagging skin under her meager brows. Eyes still closed she began to speak: I don’t think you belong where you currently live. Her voice was calm yet commanding, although I couldn’t tell to whom she was directing her ruminations. Her nostrils flared as if she was remembering a strong scent. Now tell me, she continued in the same direct tone, who invited you? Again I was at a loss as to who she might be asking so I simply maintained my puzzled silence. Checking back in with my now fully dormant son I noted that his pupils were moving a bit frantically beneath his own, smooth eyelids. I suddenly felt guilty for a reason I couldn’t fathom. It was quite frustrating. I looked down at my feet, shifting my toes inside my boots and wishing I could find some sort of answer for the whole messy predicament. My introversion was rudely interrupted by the woman’s voice only now it was somewhat patronizing and clearly directed at me. You did this, you know. I most certainly did not know. You invited her to live in your little boy, she said with a blatancy that jarred me like watching a stranger slap their child in public. Invited who, I begged, the guilt gaining bulk by the second. Your mother, she said matter-of-factly, she was not at all a good person in her past life.
My head was spinning and I felt my knees buckle a bit coaxing me to sit down legs crossed indian style on the floor next to my sleeping son. What do you mean her past life, I nearly bawled as the words started to catch like velcro in the back of my throat.
You recently gave your mother permission to have a new attempt at life. She spoke as if she was sharing a piece of commonly held knowledge to which I was simply not as yet privy. She continued, considering her former character, she’s been allowed this next time around as a pup (and a rather unruly one I might add) and there seems to have been some sort of mix up.
I sensed that I ought to be putting a number of pieces together into a larger, sensible whole but I felt as if I was trying to jam a car key into a household lock.
Your son is playing host to your reincarnate mother who has been allowed new life as a lesser being, in this case a dog, she said. And apparently things got a bit jumbled in the process seeing as how her soul has been placed in the body of your child.
The fact that the explanation was beginning to make sense gave me a combination of alarm and misery. My son’s body was holding my mother’s dog soul like some sort of human puppet on a canine paw. But where is my son’s soul, I implored. It’s been moved, she replied with a steadiness that inspired me to shake her right out of her tie-dyed drapes. Moved where?! My anger was beginning to take the spotlight off of my desperation. To a body that wasn’t being used, she explained making it sound like I ought to know the body of which she was speaking. By that point I had reached my limit.
Standing quickly enough to give myself a brief sense of dizziness, I scooped up my then stirring son and rushed out of the back room, through the glass front door, and past the blood and fur still staining the front fender of my car.

My son ran away a few weeks later. I called the police. I put up missing posters on telephone poles. But he never came home. Although a month or so later a mutt wandered onto my porch and refused to leave even after I shooed him repeatedly. Eventually I had him taken to the pound. That same day I traded in my car for a newer model and chose a new coffee shop.

8.23.2009

Where's there's life there is love

I'll admit it, I wasn't in the best of moods.
Not that I didn't want to be.
I guess I just gave out when it came to crunch time and let the angst and disappointment wash over me.

I rode home after an interesting shift at work only to be greeted by a roomful of my dear friends applauding my arrival and too many hugs and kisses to count.
I was aglow with the true love shared amongst all of our beautiful, weary souls.

And then Carrie and Annie showed me a dance they'd choreographed just for me!
I'd never received such a lovely gift!
I was elated...to say the very least.

The evening drew to a close with all of us dancing on Belmont until Carrie fell on her ass and car's honked their horns.
A marvelous time was had by all.

8.22.2009

This one's a downer

I'm going to rant for just a few moments only because I'm getting to the point where I feel I have little to no real joy to escape to in the face of all of the external miseries I'm playing home to on behalf of so many of the people surrounding me.

It's not everyone.
Just a few individuals who I used to trust.

It's not so much the complaining and pathos.
It's that I wanted to be able to keep trusting.
That really says it all.

I feel that I make constant and concerted efforts to maintain a position of trust in the lives of my loved ones as a result of my hopes to provide all of them with one solid thing. One dependable character. And I don't see much of that returned.

Give me something, anything to work with.
I'm tired and running very low on willing contributions to the lives of those who refrain from making real investments back in my person and energy.

So this is it.
I've had it and I'm through.
I'll continue to love and encourage but beyond that I am now receding from my position at the forefront in an effort at fortifying my own individual sense of security and well being.

There's nothing quite so disheartening as admitting to yourself that you gave people too much credit. Too much optimistic hope.
It's like realizing that Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny are not only childish fabrications but they're also stealing something from you.
And all you ever did was look forward to seeing them.

Perhaps this whole Burning Man thing is coming at just the right time.

8.06.2009

The moment I first realized just how beautiful you are

There was something tragic about
the moment I first realized just how beautiful you are.

We couldn't have been more sincere and I couldn't have been more broken.
The desk where my hands were busy became the altar of my dignity as I felt your words squeeze from the tiny spaces behind my eyes.

I wanted so badly to start bleeding.
To show you with my insides what I felt as your gentle secrets painted the skin and bones of my ears.
They're such little bones.
And now they're just like you.
Little and beautiful.
And broken.

I don't think they'll ever work as well as they did before they knew you.
I don't think I'll ever work as well as I did before I knew you.

Couldn't you just stay?
You could live in my closet or even in my bathroom.
I would make room out of anything I didn't need to fill.

You'd be so welcome.
You're always so welcome now.
And to think I thought you were welcome before.

7.28.2009

As I spent today wandering about the walkways, waterways, and byways I experienced the recurring notion that I was not expected to be anywhere, to be anyone other than where I was and who I was at that particular moment.

It's terribly soothing to know that what simply is is simply fine.

And that is all I could hope to have and to be: that which is simply fine.

Meanwhile, life goes on and on in its imploding circular funnel and I'm carried on the backs of so many tormenting waves. Waves of emotion, waves of demand, waves of breath and movement. And yet I've learned how to ride atop their crests instead of merely being dragged along in their merciless wakes.

Even in sleep I've somehow seemed to come into a position of comfortable coincidence.
We're passengers on the same vessel, sleep and I.
It's a ship of healing and rejuvenation.
And the tingle of fresh skin is just as tantalizing as the evasive comforts of a good night's slumber.

And now the question is when will these new foundlings be given freedom to roam and burn and scrape and renew?

I say here, I say now.
And then I sleep.

7.23.2009

Pressed into the corners

Whenever I have to opportunity to discover a new experience there is a certain level of attachment to which I subconsciously hold. It's like my mind wants to relive it over and over again. And then my body follows suit.
I become fixated on the opportunity to take myself back to that moment, that sensation.
And I am helpless to resist.

It's such a wonderful set of chains.

7.22.2009

And when you've wiped the foggy mirror clean

Made to be other.
I am a boy who loves men.
And they are my plight.

Howling kittens age.
Middle-aged daisies are plucked.
And youth is still gone.

Walk me to the ledge.
Take my hand, please. Or refrain.
Either way I'll breathe.

Perhaps you've known.
Or maybe that was mere chance.
Please keep my secret.

Once a mother-bird.
And next a prideful hunter.
Hatchlings left to wilt.

Pinkish wine-stained lips.
Horrible, empty eyeballs.
Still with your shoes on.

7.16.2009

An early morning haiku

Paper dry foliage
Weightless and lifeless yet free
A soul of soft wind

7.15.2009

Good morning, it's time to break your face.

And thus, upon waking at the brightest hour of 6am, I found myself unable to ignore the pathetic groans of a saturated bladder. I arrested myself from the comforts of my plush nest of a bed and made my way stumblingly to the bathroom.

I lifted the lid and seat, dropped trou, and let loose.
I then promptly fainted.

I came to and found myself embracing the toilet.
Now, I don't know how many times you've had the opportunity to feel your arms wrapped tenderly around a porcelain S-curve but it certainly does give one a new perspective on the priority of things.
Apparently, fainting makes a person really value the seriously unappreciated commode.
I made my way back to my feet and just as I was near to fully collecting myself I caught a glimpse of my face in the dingy mirror above my sink.

"Well hello there, gash-in-the-face," said my inward voice as I digested the image of my interrupted upper right cheek. A stream of dark cherry-colored blood ventured down my skin and mingled with my stubble. It was just a small thing. A trifle, really. But a laceration, to be sure. (I'm guessing my face came into passionate contact with the edge of the basin on my trip down to hug the porcelain goddess.)

In all honesty, I have to state that I addressed the whole would-be alarming situation with a relatively noteworthy ambivalence.
"Hmm," said that same little voice, "well this will certainly make for a sexy scar."

I roused the temporary roommate, Chad, with a brief recounting of what I could remember about the sink attacking me and tried to convince him that I was too tired to go to the emergency room. He combated my opinion with a fastidious opposition.
"We need to take you to the emergency room," he insisted, "if you sleep it's only going to scar."
(Uuuuhhhhmmm, this is bad why?- Granted, I'd just hit my head. Clearly things were a bit harried where my reasoning might have usually played a keener role.)

We shuffled into the car. But not before I made a pit stop at Stumptown to fetch some much needed caffeine and show off my recent faucet-induced injury.
The baristas were terribly accommodating and wished me the best as I headed off to Providence Medical Center (also know as Emergency Room Fun Camp).

Once there, I have to admit, everything got a little bit ridiculous.
I began the whole ordeal off by walking up to the admittance desk and announcing that I was the victim of spousal abuse.
With a due sense of alarm, the receptionist stopped whatever she was doing and rushed over to comfort me. I then informed her that I was, of course, kidding. And further, and there was to be any abuse in my relationship, I was clearly the one to be doing the roughing up. (I'm such a man.)
The receptionist laughed (I think in spite of herself) and then began walking me through the process of obtaining swift medical attention. Once we reached the question about whether or not I'd been into the emergency room before I responded by saying,
"Why, yes. Last summer, in fact. Why? Do I get to be part of a frequent flyer program? Do I get a punch card and after 10 visits the 11th is free?"
Her laugh just kind of burst out like it was hiding behind her gums and wasn't really supposed to be released. Like an insistent and untrained puppy.

The rest of the intake flew by and before I knew it I was having my blood pressure checked by a lovely nurse in Triage 1 (I was quite pleased to be place in Triage 1 because God knows how foul Triages 2 and 3 must have been). My blood pressure nurse said that I reminded her of her son in Las Vegas and I asked if her son happened to be named Cher.
Another untrained puppy laugh.

After I was declared perfectly healthy (and unstoppably entertaining) I was taken into the heart of the emergency room to bay 12 where I had a lovely view of the nervous center-like buzz that was the central console of the treatment center. Bay 12 consisted of a padded, white sheeted bed (with all of the imaginable bells and whistles), numerous tools and liquids and brightly colored containers, and a practitioner named Dr. Toy.

Dr. Toy was a jolly sort of 30-something with a smile that reminded me of one of Santa's elves and white doctor's coat that appeared to be a bit biggish. His assistant, Raquel, was additionally quirky with her pink scrunchie (1999? Yes, yes, it's NOAH! I love you, too! Such a lovely thing to hear from you!) and green sneakers that kind of reminded me a two toads strapped to each of her feet. I made ribbiting sounds when she left and Chad almost peed himself.

After discussing the situation leading up to my all-too-friendly encounter with the washroom, (could mean so many things), Dr. Toy declared that I most likely experienced something called Micturition Syncope. I was rapt. I hadn't just stupidly fainted. I had a condition. After informing me of my newfound favorite ailment, Dr. Toy departed with the promise of a swift return to deal with the aftermath of my trauma.

Meanwhile, I had Chad play paparazzi and photograph me with my sizable gauze pad.

Very shortly thereafter, Dr. Toy returned to anesthetize my cheek in preparation for the stitches I was going to need. He was pretty enthusiastic about his lidocane.
"This'll sting and then burn," he noted while getting dangerously close to my open eye with a knitting-needle-sized syringe full of cloudy liquid.
I think by "sting and then burn" Dr. Toy actually meant "I'm trying to kill you." All unpleasantness aside, he was definitely thorough. I think I got something like 5 injections in the space of about 1 square centimeter of cheek. One can never be too careful.

Once Dr. Toy finished harpooning my face he again left the room, informing me en route to the door that he wanted to allow the numbness ample time to develop around the area in question.

As soon as the room was completely vacated by hospital staff, Chad and I spent a few moments discussing how well I was taking the fact that I was the victim of a vicious bout of appliance abuse. We then pondered whether or not the resident nurses and intake assistants perhaps thought he's been beating on me and we creatively came up with the bathroom fainting story as a clever cover. I really hoped so.

Then, all of the sudden, a random doctor with a tie that looked like a piece of wilted paisley wallpaper and a name tag that proudly displayed the title "Frederick" came in, mumbling something about needing to get an extra catheter or some eye of newt or something. Without any reservation I immediately piped up:
"Ah, so you're Frederick," I said with a knowing tone, "we've heard a lot about you."
"Oh, really?" replied Frederick with an unmasked look of surprise, "I hope only good things."
"Oh, but of course," I replied with only the smoothest assurance (only slightly tempered with the most minute hint of obsequiousness), "mostly everyone's just made a point of noting your great taste in neckwear!"
Dr. Frederick looked happily flustered as he muttered an incoherent thank you noise and placed a hand on his limp accessory as he rushed from the room.

Again left in bay 12 with no one but Chad, I decided to break out the tunes and began playing thunderously contagious pop music, calling out the door that there was a dance party in number 12. One of the nurses seated at a desk in the center of the main area looked up, smirked, and bobbed her head a bit to the music. I simply gyrated from my perch atop the padded bed.

Dr. Toy soon returned and stitched up my cheek while the two of us talked about restaurants and working in the service industry. He was quite the man about town, it seemed what with all of the places he'd dined and owners he knew. I must say that I found it positively charming that he could discuss steak tartar while jabbing a scythe-like utility through human flesh and tying knots of black thread around smushy skin.

Once through, Dr. Toy thanked me for my positive attitude and told me the nurse with information about taking care of my wound would come in momentarily to send me home well-educated about my changing body.

Anna was the next victim of my eccentricity and she came bearing the release paperwork along with some sage advice about sun damage and the need to use vitamin E at night as opposed to during the day (oil, as it turns out, attracts sunlight which can exacerbate scarring and we simply couldn't have that). She then instructed me to apply some SPF 50 to the stitched area when in the sunshine in order to fend of those pesky rays.
I asked her if she was sponsored by Coppertone and she replied with, "Nope. Neutrogena, actually."

I liked Anna.

She then told me that the nurses in the main area had all been discussing "the hilarious guy in number 12" and decided that I was the most fun person they'd ever had in the ER. I stoically accepted the nomination and gave a dramatic Rodeo Queen wave to the scrubbies outside the room. My magnanimity never ceases to blossom.

Chad and I then returned to Belmont where I popped into Stumptown to show the baristas my lovely new needlework. Jessie, one of my current favorites, told me I looked really pretty and volunteered to hit me in the face on the other cheek to balance out the look.

I told her I was doing alright for the moment but if I ever decided I did need the service, she'd be the first person I'd call.
"Well, you know you kind of had this coming, right?" she prompted.
I inquired as to why and she quickly responded:
"If someone was constantly putting their dead skin and spit-up toothpaste down your throat don't you think you'd hit them, too?"

She had a point.

So, I guess the moral of this whole story is that one should never refrain from appreciating their bathroom fixtures. Take some time to love on your lavatory. Otherwise, it just might bite back.

Have you hugged kissed a Kohler today?
If not, you could end up like this...

7.08.2009

The avocado lady at night

There was this middle aged woman named Kathryn who used to shop at the same market every Saturday
4:30 AM

She arrived each week promptly and 9am, bought a pastry and some coffee, and set out for her list of goods.
4:31 AM

Usually she only alotted about 45 minutes for the whole thing but sometimes she lapsed into the 50-60 minute range if the store happened to have some fresh stock of avocados.
4:31 AM

Kathryn loved avocados.
4:31 AM

But only when they were prefect.
4:31 AM

So she would spend positively ages looking for just the best ones.
4:31 AM

The most accurately shaped and supply ripe.
4:32 AM

And quite often she was met with sad disappointment and ended up settling for one or two of the meager options.
4:32 AM

One day, the store manager, Keith, came over to say hello to his Saturday regular.
4:32 AM

"Morning, Kat. How's the kitty doin'?"
4:33 AM

Keith had a thick Irish brogue and a general air of miscreance about him at all times and Kathryn had long since learned not to react to his vulgarity.
4:33 AM

She instead would say her neighborly reply greeting and then move on with her shopping.
4:34 AM

But this day there was a particularly promising bunch of avocados in the last bin on the produce wall and Kathryn was cornered there by Irish Keith right as she'd begun testing them all for bruises.
4:35 AM

"My Charlotte is doing just splendidly," replied Kathryn with a dried leaf thin crackle of automatic politeness.
4:35 AM

"Well, isn't that lovely? Always fancied a happy kitty to a sad one!"
4:36 AM

Irish Keith had little to no social graces (much less tact) whatsoever
4:36 AM

(it's a writing technique to show not tell)
4:37 AM

Well I'd find it awfully nice if I had the chance of meetin' 'er sometime soon," he added onto the end of his already far too unwieldy prior statement.
4:37 AM

"Perhaps I'll bring her in with me sometime," answered Charlotte with unmasked terseness. She was having trouble looking for her avocados.
4:38 AM

"Well, I'd certainly be happy to walk you home with your bags today," suggested Keith with a boyish glint in his bushy white brow crested eyes.
4:38 AM

"Maybe I could meet her then!"
4:39 AM

He sounded so childlike and hopeful.
4:39 AM

"Actually, I have a basket with me today." Said Kathryn through a curt smile.
And with that she walked herself up to the next available cashier.
Pending

She never got any avocados.
4:40 AM

And she never shopped at that store again.

Memory by the pound

It's happening just like I thought it would.
I guess I shouldn't have expected anything less. Like I deserve some sort of get out of jail free card or pass go collect no heartache whatsoever.
I've begun to miss him.

And in my missing him, I feel like an inward traitor because I was so happy for a moment that I lied to myself in saying it would always feel like that so that nothing would take away from my then present elation. I was living, really living!

But as with all things, really living only stays on a seasonal basis. And there is no moon to regulate them for they are ersatz and willfully so.
It's as if the wonderful and beautiful season that was the two of us is still so freshly acute in my sense memory that I have yet to see how the benefit of its joy could ever wear off.

Only now it has. It really has.

I've come to the autoanalytical conclusion that I have only two capacities in feeling my emotions: not at all or with complete surrender. When I am in a place of nonreactivity it's typically the result of some former deflation brought about most likely by some disappointment or unfulfilled expectations. Thus I've managed to coach myself into disallowing expectations to be formed, therefore eradicating the pesky and rotten feeling of a knotty and poisonous stomach.
However, when I'm in a place of complete saturation in feeling my emotional state holistically, I am flying. I soar above worry and trifles. I soar above criticism and doubt. I soar above convention and I touch the meaning of God in some ways, just being that far removed while so intertwined.

At the point when I knew it was no longer for our mutual best that we stay each other's, I was unaware of the coming wave of overwhelming happiness that would result from such life accomplishments as graduation and promotion. And quite honestly, their afterglow is toxic in something of a trailing and infiltrating manner. Only now is that beautiful and euphoric smoke completely dissipated. And so I come into the day with nothing on my back but the burden of knowledge I gladly carry throughout my charmed life.
Only now I must add to the weight the knowledge of how alone and ignored you may have felt.
How completely abandoned and utterly insular you must have loathed to possibly be.
I would not impress upon you these feelings as they are but my own, meager guesses. And yet I feel them somewhat educated by the lessons I've learned from you since we became two completely separate pieces.

I couldn't feel the pain because I wanted to feel nothing but the happiness.
I was in such deep longing need of true and uninhibited glee and rapture that I closed myself off from feeling the rue and agony of my recent thrusts of a killing knife at love.
It was a love borne of space.
And it is that same space that now feeds into such anger. Such hostility. Such sorrow.

"God, why couldn't I have only found contentment in the honest simplicities?"
And yet that same voice prompts me to hold fast to the seasons as they are the only fact of the matter. Change is the only definite.

And with the definites come limitations.
And thus is my newfound plight: what was promised to be the purest of freedom has now become the sincerest of shackles.

And only now am I able to take on the full trudge of their icy weight.
And you are like a fellow prisoner, bound to me by the same chains only you hang below me, suspended in the cold, wet darkness. And you pull on me. You pull me down.
And the less and less you struggle, the heavier you seem to become.
And as the weight is my love, it is also the angst I feel in the absence of you.

To truly be missed, and to truly miss, there is none who can escape the chains.

7.05.2009

It hurts like razorcandy

When I try and swallow my whole throat signals me with a rasping and crumply pain that it is not in the best of states.
When I drink water in an attempt at soothing the squalor inside it's like trying to wet sand in the middle of the dessert: clumpy and fecund.
I suppose it's yet another physical manifestation of the fact that I simply cannot try to externalize everything about my own pain by seeking out the solutions to other people's problems.

7.02.2009

The black tar rain

Hence gatekeepers, the black tar rain is nigh.
Barricades and plaster mouldings retrieve little of the safeties once known.
And as they might
None shall allowed be to lie in wait for yet another sunlit eventide.

Played as music from a hateful lyre
we open the gifts of ancestors filled with moths and rusted joints.
None shall enter these gates with singing and piety
for none shall be found.

And so we angrily cut open the sides of our cattle and sheep
with the love of patterns and matted furs.
Drinking red wine is to be enjoyed but not savoured.
Pretense. Is lying a sin?

Crested tree tops shine with the glimmer of moonpaints and stardeath.
And I am alone.
Where the lone shall reign
is only the best
of places.

For now.

7.01.2009

It's nice is all

Never had a little strip of colored print made so many so happy.
That week's forecast was comprised of seven perfectly square bright blue boxes with egg yolk yellow spheres dobbing them all directly in the center. All lined up, the boxes could have been made into the beads of a cheery bracelet.

6.26.2009

In Commemoration of a Broken Promise

Whenever Cassie Freedman bought paint she felt like a bit of an ingrate.
The fact that she was never contented with white walls wouldn't have typically been thought of as anything terribly affronting except that Cassie had been known on several occasions to have written rather nasty letters to her landlords detailing their lack of inspiration and horrible sense of interior decoration as demonstrated by their color choices.
It wasn't that Cassie liked to complain or that she felt that any of her landlords were truly bad people. She just hated white walls. They made her feel as if she might disappear into their plainness and monotony. Thus it was always necessary for Cassie to expunge her living spaces of their threat of ambivalence by means of some sort of color and/or pattern.

This time she had selected a lemon yellow for the wall behind her television. It was shockingly bright. Almost abrasive. It was the kind of yellow that brashly brought the taste meringue to the tip of your tongue on sight. Not everyone likes meringue. But the hardware store in a small town is never a place known for variety.

Once home and properly outfitted in an old shirt and some baggy cargo shorts with velcro pockets, Cassie began to spread the color on the wall in haphazard columns with her paint-soaked roller. After about 4 minutes she stepped back to survey her progress. She stood legs squared with her shoulders, arms akimbo, paint roller decisively gripped in her left hand. She looked like a defiant child standing up to a boring adult.
Cassie stared at the squarish segment of the tacky yellow on the otherwise naked wall. Her grip on the paint roller loosed just enough to let the instrument plop down against her side, contagiously sharing some of the wet paint with the fabric of the over sized pocket on the over sized shorts. It didn't matter. They were Jordan's anyway. She'd planned on throwing them out once she'd finished the walls.
And then, still staring at the yellow spot on the white wall, Cassie's eyes narrowed as if she was focusing on someone running away very quickly. Without breaking her gaze, she slowly began to lower herself down next to the opened paint can sitting on the plastic sheet covering the floor.
She looked as if she might have been a devout woman praying to a holy wall (perhaps someone important and spiritual had died against it or at least touched it). Once on her knees in front of the freshly painted surface, Cassie groped around with her empty right hand, feeling for the paint can. Standing behind her, one might have thought she was blind.
When she finally found the open container's lip, cool, thick, and wet, she paused only for a moment and then plunged her whole fist right up to the wrist into the whipped and viscous liquid. She felt a shock of shivering cold ritter through her whole form. She didn't think the paint would be so icy. And that's the thing about paint: it holds the cold against skin like a frigid band aid. Cassie hadn't thought yellow would be so chilly.
She withdrew her hand from the paint bucket and looked down it the pills of rolling pigment suicidally streaming off of her now unclenched fingers and back toward the open container whence they'd come. Some missed landing on the plastic in a series of popping individual splats.
And then, in one decisive motion, Cassie flung her open palm against the right side of the oversized shorts, hitting the fabric so hard it stung her thigh beneath. She left her hand there for a moment and then slowly pulled away her yellow digits one by one to observe the scars they left on the drab and threadbare khaki. The result was less than pristine and this made Cassie rather satisfied. She looked at the print on her leg and decided it resembled bright yellow roadkill. She then looked up at the matching pannel on the wall. Then back at the shorts. And then at the baggy shirt falling lazily from her slight shoulders. On the front it had a picture of a brown bear standing on all fours with block letters beneath it reading "Alaska!". Whenever Jordan had worn that shirt she'd always remembered hating the exclamation point.
In her left hand, the saturated roller still lolled without any discernable will against the other leg of the shorts. Cassie lifted the cylindar to just beneath her chin and let the weight of the paint-soaked fibers pull the whole brush down against her clavicle. She then let the roller venture down the length of her chest, drowning the bear and the exclamation point in sticky yellow.

Cassie put down the brush and walked out onto the front stoop where she extracted a packet of cigarettes and a book of matches from her shorts pocket. She struck one of the flimsy matches and held it up to the end of the filter, noting the smudged yellow on the rolling paper.

6.18.2009

What might have been done differently

Too many moments are spent frivolously, like the pennies I throw in the garbage.
Dull and pallid, their value is misunderstood.
Individually they hold little to no appeal and yet, when combined, they add up to days and weeks and even years of trial and error, mistake and revision.

Counting never seemed so tedious until it became something I realized I had neglected to do before.

6.08.2009

First morning from inside the closet

In arranging my new apartment I found it necessary to cloister my writing desk away in a sizable closet adjacent to my boudoir.
Having removed the door, I converted the once enclosed and mysterious space into an open and creative-prone cocoon.
Whatever wings flourish painfully open from within this minor chrysalis shall surely carry me into the farthest reaches of my need to self-explain.

And THEN people will begin to understand me.
Oh, I'm just kidding. Lord knows that's not going to happen anytime soon.
I'm still in my twenties.

6.02.2009

Jumping back into a slow-moving wagon

Here I sit in the first class of the first day of my last week of college.

Some might think that I'm worried, trepidatious, and perhaps even afraid of the fast-approaching loss of structure and academic retaining wall.

Well, Some, you couldn't be more wrong.
Everything is blossoming to a greater effulgence with the counting down of every day.
As I tick off each class period on my mental calendar and envision the deep red Xs on a prisoner's wall, all I am capable of feeling is elation.

True, uninhibited, and thoroughly intoxicating freedom is so close that I can feel the hairs on every limb buzz with an electric crackle and even the clouds seem less gray and smothering what with the knowledge of my Daedalian flight coming to an melting and furious dive.

Falling is for those who have been told they'll only ever be known by the heights they reach.
Diving is for the few of us who cannot be contented by solely air.
The cool, dark and mysterious chasms beneath the waves hold so much beauty and possibility.
And I am unafraid.

Everything in me is longing for the refreshment of the asphyxiating depths.
Because I don't breathe air.
I tolerate it.
I don't beg for the safety of land.
I challenge it.
And I don't just accept what I'm given.
I vivisect it.

My life is naught but a timeless vivisection.
And how I love to be drawn and quartered by my own hand.

5.26.2009

Lost in Translation

I seem to be having a particularly difficult time making myself transcribe my life and inward contemplations for the purposes of furthering my literary art.

Quite simply, I'm not inspired to write.

My friend Traci and I once had a very lovely conversation over cigarettes and coffee in which she relayed to me her feelings on the notion of a muse.

"Sometimes she's there and sometimes she's not. You simply have to respect her," she said.
"The important thing is not to give up on her while she's away. If she's gone then she simply must be coaxed back. And wallowing in artless misery is by no means attractive."

So here I am: coaxing.

My muse has an odd sense of humor considering how she/he/ze/they pops onto my shoulder and into my mind at the most awkward and inconvenient of moments.
I spent a good portion of Sunday at the Portland water front enjoying the grease and sugar of the Rose Festival carnival and while there I was bombarded by brilliant occurrences. Everything seemed to thirsty for description. Stories burst from every miserable ride attendant and angry single mother. And where was my notebook? Where was my presence of mind?

I'll tell you: gorging myself on cotton candy, hot fudge mud pie, and my lovely boyfriend.

Whether or not I plucked any creative bits from amidst the chaos, I still had a lovely time.

5.14.2009

When it's nobody's fault

I awoke to the unfiltered sunlight streaming through my bedroom window and thought to myself, "Wow, it's just going to be a stunningly lovely day."
Sean stirred next to me and I pushed him off of the bed.
I simply have no tolerance for stirring.

Alright, I didn't shove him off of the bed. But I did jar him from sleep and insist that we get out of bed and enjoy the day.
(By enjoy, of course I meant imbibe caffeine and heckle the barista).

Thus, we got out of bed, I showered and washed my hair (and it looks fabulous, incidentally) and both of us got dressed and headed out to the truck.
Having started on our way, I noticed that the air inside of the small cab smelled quite frankly like chunky poop.

"Did you fart," my question was direct and quasi-accusatory, "'cause if you did I'm going to rip your face off, stuff it with lettuce, and serve it up to you like a burrito!"

Alright, I didn't menacingly threaten Sean like that. I just thought it sounded comical.
So I wrote it.
Moving on...

Where were we? Oh yeah, I asked Sean if he'd farted.
He responded with a faux-indignant "no, I thought it was you."

And so we traveled on, assuming that with the passing blocks the acrid fumes would dissipate.
Not so.

It grew worse and worse and I was on the verge of asphyxiation.
"Okay, seriously, what in the world is that horrible stench?!"
I was nearing my sensory wit's end.

I continued, "did something die? Did an animal crawl up into your fan and transform into a fur smoothie upon the starting of the car? Did you leave a whole chicken under the seat a month ago?"

I was desperate to discover the source of the smell.

"I don't know, babe," Sean replied, "maybe it's something in the glove compartment. Or maybe you're a leper."

"I am NOT a leper! Maybe YOU are," I retorted with a passionate pissy disposition.

We were still pointing fingers of blame at one another when we pulled up to the coffee shoppe.
The vehicle hadn't even come to a complete stop before I threw myself from the door and gasped for fresh air. Sean employed the tuck and roll method and sustained only a few minor abrasions.
The old lady on the crosswalk wasn't so lucky but I'm sure she's on medicare so she had it coming.

And that's when I noticed the masticated salad and gravy attached with furious determination to the sole of my shoe. That's right, my foot was playing taxi to a dog shit passenger roughly the size of the middle-aged pheasant (with just as much color and sinew).

"Oh," I said with a little less emphatic tone, "I had dog poop on my shoe."
Sean looked at me. I looked at Sean.

"Well," he began, "at least I know you weren't lying about farting."