He Sang of the Sanguine

Morning Glory: A Short, Short Story

2011-06-13T20:28:00.001-07:00

Milton ate his oatmeal with a dirty spoon. The undercooked clumps stuck to the roof of his mouth like flaky barnacles. But he didn't mind. He just added more syrup.
"Finish your breakfast," Milton's mother shouted from the next room, "we have to get going. And don't you dare mess up your good jacket."
Milton regarded the spray of sugar and milk on his trousers with a worried grimace. He didn't like making his mother mad. Especially today.
He cleared his unfinished bowl and milk-streaked glass then rushed to the bathroom where he locked the door and began furiously scrubbing at his black cotton pant legs.
With every scrape of the damp rag soggy oats mashed into the fabric creating larger and larger stains.
There was a knock at the door. Milton's mother's voice came thundering through from the other side.
"What are you doing in there? You're making us late."
Milton began to cry. His mother's voice grew louder.
"What's wrong with you? Open this door!"
Hot tears ran down Milton's cheeks and joined the smeared cereal on his pants.
"Milton! Open this door!"
Milton undid the lock and trembled as the door swung wide to expose his mother's reddened face.
"My god! Look at you! You're a shambles!"
Milton fell into a mess of choking sobs.
For a moment his mother stood over him, prickling with a palpable rage. He squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the inevitable slap.
He felt his mother's body kneel down near him, her arms encircled his shivering form.
"It's okay, baby," she said, broken, "I miss him too. But your brother wouldn't want us to be late to see him one last time, would he?"
Milton's swollen eyes peeped open and he saw his mother's tear-marked cheeks right in front of his own.
"I'm sorry, mommy," he whimpered, "I'm really, really sorry."
"Oh, baby," she whispered, "me too."
"He's in Heaven, right?"
"Honey, anywhere other than here has got to be pretty damn close to heaven."
She smoothed his hair and pulled him closer.
"Now go change your pants and let's get going. Your brother hated black anyway."

A Thing of Fragile Toughness

2010-05-28T14:29:00.000-07:00

The beach in summer.
That’s how I knew I missed my Lucie.
Her skin looked browner than the sand itself.
Her smile always at the ready.
Sometimes I fashioned myself an inward image of her whole being made up of glittering pearls and oiled leather, a conglomerate beauty, a thing of fragile toughness.

Ugly Like an Eel

2010-02-15T08:21:00.001-08:00

Locker rooms have always made me feel skinny. Too skinny. As if the whole point of being naked is to be bigger than somebody else. Particularly someone of the same sex. Every time I find myself visiting one it’s exactly the same as all of the others I’ve entered, like viewing a drab scene in a excruciatingly uninspiring submarine film over and over.
Walking in, my street shoes echo off of the tiles checkering the floor, the walls, even the ceiling, announcing the arrival of the runt with an ominously resonant sonar. I breathe in deeply, filling my lungs, attempting to make myself as large as possible, like a blowfish hoping to convince the whales that he’s part of the pod. I find an empty locker while trying not to catch anyone’s eye. It’s bad enough that they can see my bony knees, my lanky arms, my tiny waist, my chest full of air making my ribs press out like a pathetic seahorse.
As I remove my clothing I squeeze my eyes shut (as if this makes me invisible). My lashes matte together in the compressed heat and moisture of my shame and I beg them to stay that way as I remove my shirt, my pants, my briefs. I feel cold and meagre. I’d give anything to be wearing a full-body wetsuit.
I’d keep my blindness if I didn’t need to don my gym clothing. Unclenching my visual vice-grip the world is blurry, like seeing underwater. Murky, unintelligible life is happening all around me and all I can do is feel around the inside of my bag for my shorts, like a starfish probing the inside of its prey. As I redress I steal glances around the fluorescent tank of the sterile space observing the smattering of fellow “sealife”. There’s the lithe shark of a man in the shower: powerfully toned form covered in smooth skin which glistens in the cascading moisture. The svelte seal with his deep dark eyes and proud chest. Even the squat figure with the hulking triangular back reminds of a majestic manta-ray taking up space with shape and quiet authority.
I see myself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror. I am ugly like an eel. Smooth, slender, and awkward. No points of interest, no remarkable curvature or contrast of light and shadow. So elongated as to appear unsettling, I feel I make others uncomfortable at the mere sight of me. And I am powerless to change this. I’ve never been able to gain weight. Not from eating, not from exercise, not from biding my time. Thus I am cursed to remain agile, serpentine, an ultimately hideous creature. My own contempt prohibits self-pity. I feel a thousand eyes fixed on my suspicious movements, attributing them some sort of mischief.
As I finally leave the locker room, exiting the aquarium with its variety of beautiful beasts, it’s as if I’m breaching the waves for the first time and seeing the sun.

When we all realized it wasn't lined paper

2010-02-10T11:47:00.000-08:00

While the moon spent time hiding from the stars (even though she be seen from the other side of the clouds) we spent time hiding from ourselves. But not from each other. We were too aware of the truth about one another. We loved in a way that permitted nothing short of naked, bloody honesty. Sometimes this felt dangerous, angry even. And yet somehow still delicate, gentle. Perhaps morose. But never torpid.

We would rather be drunk than dead. For that was the nature of us: seemingly stunted while secretly growing, secretly changing, secretly full of whatever we decided to call living, what we called life. It was a grand puzzle to anyone without love and imagination; without a hope in the world for a publishable signature (who has a signature really and truly worth publishing these days?).

Too many little birds are pushed from the nest without proper preparation.

She Didn't Bleed

2010-01-30T13:28:00.000-08:00

Pip hated the sheets where her lover had left her.
They smelled like Joanna, they lay just like her on top of Pip's petite form: light and incidental, like a garment one only felt when they moved.
And they were beautiful to look at with their light blue gauziness and tiny embroidered white pansies all around the edges. Just like the pansies Joanna wore in her hair every single day, despite Portland's seemingly constant rain.

Pip stared spitefully at the baking orange bricks of the outer window sill. Of course it would be sunny the morning she lost three years, two family Christmases, and one more attempt at happiness.

For any who may care to know...

2010-01-04T23:43:00.001-08:00

...I have begun a blog specifically designed to pertain to my up-and-coming move to New York.

Please to follow if you so desire.

http://thegiftofbeingalone.blogspot.com

Spite

2010-01-04T15:14:00.000-08:00

Vengeance
Why so typical?
Humanity, so hubristic
And yet so pathetic.

God's wrath,
Not our own,
Solely justifiable,
Painted covetous red.

Shame
Bane of lost control,
Poison in the Community
Well.

Death
For plants,
Animals,
People.

Commencement

2010-01-01T17:19:00.000-08:00

While I'm not sure just yet what I'm going to title this new endeavor, I'm intending on starting a new blog.
Beginning today, January 1st, its purpose is to document my journeying and rabble-rousing during this auspicious and pivotal year: my twenty-fifth.
I'll be turning twenty-four in less than a month and then I'll be rocketing into my quarter of a century.

I simply can't wait.

Soundly, Calmly, Resolutely

2009-12-30T00:22:00.000-08:00

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.

Here goes the plunge

2009-12-26T15:27:00.000-08:00

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.

Don't tell me not to go

2009-12-25T01:18:00.000-08:00

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.

The night my house was blessed by a witch

2009-12-19T05:15:00.000-08:00

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.

Carrie

2009-12-16T01:04:00.000-08:00

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.

Amidst the beauty

2009-12-10T19:32:00.000-08:00

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.

Pay attention to the small things

2009-12-07T23:39:00.000-08:00

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?

Sunday as it should be

2009-12-06T15:26:00.000-08:00

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.

Time unwasted

2009-12-04T20:03:00.000-08:00

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.

Teaching One to Love Reading

2009-12-01T00:26:00.001-08:00

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.

Though Joy Departs

2009-11-30T23:47:00.000-08:00

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.

Benedictus

2009-11-29T15:23:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-11-28T02:33:00.000-08:00

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.

Leave my dreaming

2009-11-24T10:43:00.000-08:00

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.

Morning House and other exhaustions

2009-11-23T15:18:00.000-08:00

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.

And now...

2009-11-19T01:21:00.001-08:00

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

Learning to breathe all over again

2009-11-17T16:21:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-17T14:59:00.000-08:00

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.

A Handheld Version of What You Aren't

2009-11-12T10:26:00.000-08:00

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.

Lately I've been thinking

2009-11-09T23:38:00.000-08:00

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.

Deciding which blanket

2009-11-08T03:29:00.000-08:00

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.

You felt them like plates moving

2009-11-05T10:31:00.000-08:00

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.

Arriving yet again at this tentative place

2009-11-04T14:42:00.000-08:00

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.

The Day Death Became My Mother

2009-10-29T20:45:00.000-07:00

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.

The whole story

2009-10-27T12:06:00.001-07:00

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.

Last Night I Dreamt

2009-10-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-23T13:33:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-10-20T14:58:00.003-07:00

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.

Disjoin

2009-10-18T15:50:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-10-17T13:43:00.001-07:00

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.

Because I felt the need to collapse

2009-10-09T13:49:00.000-07:00

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.

This son also rises

2009-10-08T10:21:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-10-07T15:10:00.000-07:00

For boredom I hold unwavering contempt.

When the cold rolls in

2009-10-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-10-03T05:21:00.000-07:00

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.

There he rode

2009-10-02T01:28:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-02T01:26:00.000-07:00

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?

When it's not that interesting

2009-09-29T02:30:00.000-07:00

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.

The nightstand in the middle of the room

2009-09-27T20:46:00.000-07:00

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.

Commensurate to experience

2009-09-23T16:23:00.000-07:00

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?

And with the rain I grow afraid

2009-09-19T10:11:00.000-07:00

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.

In this moment, I

2009-09-13T03:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Blood and Hair

2009-09-08T13:03:00.000-07:00

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.

Where's there's life there is love

2009-08-23T16:32:00.000-07:00

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.

This one's a downer

2009-08-22T16:48:00.000-07:00

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.

The moment I first realized just how beautiful you are

2009-08-06T02:55:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-07-28T03:18:00.000-07:00

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.

Pressed into the corners

2009-07-23T11:23:00.000-07:00

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.

And when you've wiped the foggy mirror clean

2009-07-22T11:53:00.000-07:00

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.

An early morning haiku

2009-07-16T03:28:00.000-07:00

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

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

2009-07-15T07:51:00.000-07:00

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...

The avocado lady at night

2009-07-08T04:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-08T03:20:00.000-07:00

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.

It hurts like razorcandy

2009-07-05T11:21:00.000-07:00

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.

The black tar rain

2009-07-02T01:04:00.000-07:00

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.

It's nice is all

2009-07-01T03:24:00.000-07:00

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.

In Commemoration of a Broken Promise

2009-06-26T10:10:00.000-07:00

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.

What might have been done differently

2009-06-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

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.

First morning from inside the closet

2009-06-08T11:58:00.000-07:00

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.

Jumping back into a slow-moving wagon

2009-06-02T10:57:00.000-07:00

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.

Lost in Translation

2009-05-26T11:38:00.001-07:00

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.

When it's nobody's fault

2009-05-14T10:22:00.000-07:00

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."

“Hands Off My Box!”, Laissez-Faire Sex, Sexuality, and Gender

2009-05-08T00:32:00.000-07:00

From the day you’re born, nay, even before then, from the time your mother receives her first sonogram and receives that ever-anticipated declaration of “it’s a girl,” or “it’s a boy,” without having been consulted personally at all, you will undergo one of the most complex and delicate portions of your development as a human...and you’ll have little to no say in the matter. Scary isn’t it? Scarier still is the fact that once you have matured to a point of being considered competent at making your own decisions, so many will have already been made for you that it will be next to impossible to alter your course of growth without huge amounts of upset and financial setback. Not to mention society at large will collectively frown upon you while ensuring you that there’s clearly something the matter with you for not just accepting the what they’ve given you is good enough. This process of restricted developmental agency is so typical in contemporary America that it has become accepted as completely natural and appropriate. The facts of the matter are based on indisputable scientific physicality: once an infant is independent of the mother’s functional somatic support, that infant is to be revered as independent of the mother’s control. And that concept is the very core of this debate: control. Society at large has fostered and proliferated very carefully crafted constructs surrounding the notions of physical sex, gender, and sexuality and the reason they continue to affect the minds and behaviors of said society’s population is because they are equivalent to fences built to hold back the broiling masses from the assumed chaos that would ensue in the case of a non-binary gender-based social hegemony. Social constructs are observed because they are assumed to be the key to keeping the peace, to keeping the hoi polloi feng shui, to keeping control. But what good are peace and order without the freedom to enjoy them?
According to Leslie Feinberg, “each person should have the right to choose between pink or blue tinted gender categories, as well as all of the other hues of the palette,” (Feinberg, 1). Leslie’s statement raises an additionally thought-provoking point: there are more than two simple, solid colors of pink and blue on the gender line. And yet while I leave the consideration of the multi-faceted nature of human gender to stew for a bit, allow me to address the assumption prompting this statement: the binary system of gender.
Since the written history of mankind there have been languages, cultures, and haberdashery constructed with built-in reminders of human anatomical variety. However, over the millennia the width of that acknowledgement has condensed considerably, leaving in its wake a limp and patchy portrayal of just how much complexity is intrinsic to humans with regard to the relationship between physiological sex (as a vagina/uterus woman or a penis/testicles man) and mental/emotional gender (the outward behavioral expression of one’s cognitive identity). I’m reminded of the SMYRC training’s first discussion of the gender Gumby and most especially of when Mehera relayed her personal preferences of wearing mostly men’s clothing as an acknowledged physiological female. And there was nothing upsetting or willfully disruptive about it! She was simply comfortable expressing herself as a person of both male and female gender traits. It was comforting and even inspiring to observe someone with such self-awareness and self-possession confidently making a statement about the diversity found even within each individual.
The social constructs surrounding what it is to be “woman” and what it is to be “man” are separated by an additionally socially constructed chasm of impassable discrimination. At birth, a doctor examines a newborn in search of a penis. If one is present (and not considered “too small” by arbitrarily-set industry standards and thus genetically aberrant) the infant is declared a boy. However, if the elusive penis is not present (and the clitoral tissue isn’t too large by industry standards) then the infant is inferred to be a girl. And as referenced before, so begins a lifelong tour through being instructed on how to behave, how to dress, what to play with, how to speak, and even more specifically, how not to act in order to claim irrefutable membership to your medically declared sex. And the truth of the matter is that we’ve all been subjected to this ubiquitous social instructional even in direct relation to the words we take for granted in daily language. Alex G writes,

We automatically assume boys will be boys, and girls will be girls, as the old saying goes. For instance, what comes into your mind when you hear the word “Boy”? What about “Girl”? Most people have entirely different images, built on memories and experiences, which make them treat boys and girls very differently, (G, 1).

These constructs have been engrained into the culture in which we all reside to the point that to avoid being at all affected by them is quite impossible. We’ve been audience to a lifelong story telling of bold and strong knights rescuing beautiful and dainty princesses...who are then banished to the kitchen with no shoes and a gingham apron. These are excellent examples of the gender roles that exist in today’s culture: men = rugged, physical, aggressive and assertive, women = passive, pretty, weak and emotional. In no ways are these descriptions accurate, much less in any relationship to a given individual’s gender identity. As we have discusses on multiple occasions in class, gender identity is the cognitive understanding a person has about their gender. Taking the discussion a step further, I think of when Jen from TransActive pulled up Rae and Liz as the contrasting examples of a gender expression. Liz’s more predominantly female gender identity was clearly seen in feminine gender expression (what people perceive as her gender) while Rae’s more fluid gender identity was additionally clear in her more intentionally ambiguous gender expression.
Our society is so hungry for categories and neat little boxes that it is rather resistant to the idea of a less cut and dried system of thinking. We have to define everyone as female, male, gay or straight. Only in recent years has the chic of (solely female) bisexuality become a topic appropriate in the generally accepted forum for discussion. And that stems from a socially-constructed masculine desire to see two women sexually gratifying each other so that he might reap the sensational rewards for the sexual efforts he no longer has to make. Implicit in the gender binary system is the idea that there is a declension amongst the hierarchically arranged boxes of individual definition. Men are superior to women. Gays are inferior to straights. But gay men are right about on par with women (if not a little above) while gay women are flexible depending upon whether or not their gender expression threatens or arouses the straight men. It’s a ridiculous mindset and yet it has been known to be the foundation for huge amounts of exclusion and pain.
Take Emily from In The Life, for example. A girl with talent, intelligence, piety, and kindness. Until she came out to her small community as a homosexual female, she was seen as worthy of great amounts of attention and even celebration. And then her position within the “straight female” box was rattled loose and she suddenly found herself in the “gay female” box where there was much less understanding and positive response. The same is true for men who come out as gay. Whether or not they’re laudable individuals with exceeding popularity and social acclaim, their shifting from one box (straight male) to another (gay male) is a process that tends to dismantle a large portion of their positive social reception.
The solution to all of this mess is rather simple, really: do away with the boxes! As a society, it makes no sense for us to try so desperately to universalize every aspect of our populace. We’re not homogenous and it’s foolhardy to expect everyone to be just the same in behavior and expectation. It would be like assuming that everyone would be allergic to the same foods just because they’re human when in fact, everyone’s immune systems and tolerances are different across the board. And no amount of social conditioning is going to save a person with Celiac’s from reacting to gluten, it’s just not the way they’re put together! The same might be said for physiological women who identify as partially or totally male; no amount of social conditioning is going to change their true identity. Rather their expression of said identity will perhaps shift slightly (or drastically depending on the pressure) but their inward understanding of who they are apart from the social standard is immutable. It’s a hardwired aspect of their chemical and physical composition.
And on the point of social conditioning, there is research to support the notion that our current schema for qualifying gender and gender-based processing is not as concrete as the contemporary mystique might hope. According to Christopher Kilmartin, in his book, “The Masculine Self”,

Sandra Bem (1981b; 1985; 1987; 1993) constructed a theory of gender-dependent information processing with an important emphasis on cultural factors. Bem believes that cognitive development and gender role development are parallel in some regards. She also argues that gender-typed information processing is taught to children by a culture that emphasizes sex differences for virtually every domain of behavior. If our culture were not so gender-typed, children would learn to use other categories to organize their experiences, (Kilmartin, 81-82).

Kilmartin’s description of Bem’s gender-dependence theory presents a fantastic alternative to the currently held beliefs surrounding the necessity for establishing absolute masculinity or absolute femininity. And reminding of my point just prior, the boxes we as a society so desperately cling to are not really as assisting as we’d perhaps like to think.
In considering the basis for these ills one cannot help but look additionally to the social quandary that is transgender. Because the concept of transsex falls completely outside of any of the currently available categorical boxes it is not only viewed as aberrant but threatening. Its novelty is not welcomed with excitement and celebration but cringed away from with criticism, fear, and disgust. Well what do we have to be afraid of? How is transex harmful? This address of a much larger issue of social discrimination could be expounded upon for greater length of a three-volume novel and thus I’ll elect to curtail it for now with a pointed acknowledgement of its huge injustice and social mistreatment.
Leslie Feinberg marries all of the aforementioned points of discussion in stating:

Our struggle will also help expose some of the harmful myths about what it means to be a woman or a man that have compartmentalized and distorted your life, as well as mine. Trans liberation has meaning for you- no matter how you define or express your sex or your gender, (Feinberg, 5).

In order to address the social wrongs resulting from the hasty and typically insufficient definitions and flash judgments surrounding individual sex and gender there must be a juggernaut effort to alter the collective mindset with regard to the concepts of sex separate from gender. The two are not the same and yet society paints them to appear as one. We must stand against that assumption by ending the silence that has muted the voices of so many throughout the years. End the silence by confidently and openly discussing these topics in all social forums: religious, political, commercial. They are all just as saturated with the misinformation we’ve all been fed and thus they are all in need of reformation. That reformation can only happen if their is willful dissemination of truth. And that is where every voice raises together in constant, vigilant fervor. Don’t let shame overpower your just right to freedom. And in this nation where we are said to have human rights for all, claim those rights by being unstoppably vocal and demonstrative. Start discussions. Change the verbiage. Make a change. And once it’s been made, keep it.

I'm already sick of Swine Flu

2009-04-28T17:39:00.001-07:00

Has anyone stopped to think of what this nebulously corroborated "Swine Flu" actually means on a social level?

-the introduction of increased of international trade limitations
-possible justifications for closing borders
-governmental permission to allocate excessive funds to ambiguously described health campaigns
-and the compulsory compliance of the entire nations as fueled by fear of contraction

Now, I don't know about the rest of you but these concepts seem oddly coincidental (not to mention convenient) on behalf of a government in financial crisis as a result of a costly (and unnecessarily prolonged) war, and an economy in the plummeting downturn of highly publicized purported undoing.

So how do we go about convincing everyone to reinvest in their local market? Get them scared of anything from outside of their own country.

Suddenly, all of the baby-boomers glued to their television news broadcasts are rocketed into cataclysmic terror at the onset of an ominous threat with the familiar face of a new strain of already recognized illness. And this new threat's spread is entirely dependent upon the promotion of information by large numbers of inter-coordinated news networks with clear bias and framing influence.

And then it goes global and everyone starts begging for the quarantining of any and all afflicted members along with the cut off of all imports due to their now high likelihood for transporting external infectious germs.

So what do people do? They start spending their money inside their own local communities and nation.
And what does this do? It stimulates a weakened economy.

In addition, everyone is now fully amenable to the idea of governmental control on international travel. Borders are the new Berlin Wall and obtaining the privilege of leaving ones own country is now a worldwide difficulty.

And all because of a little flu.

Who exactly is telling us there's this flu?
And where did the term pandemic enter into the discourse?

The fact is, we're getting little to no truly empirical proof of this rising menace and instead we're being caused to shiver in fear at the unknown.

Fear. This is all about fear.

And isn't it interesting that in all of this melee, a new National Health and Human Services candidate is swiftly thrown into office whilst we, as Americans, are being informed (not asked) that $1.5 billion are being invested in an anti-swine flu health effort?

What does this mean?
For what is the money being used?
And who is Kathleen Sebelius?

And finally, why are we so afraid?

Sunshine and that

2009-04-21T11:18:00.000-07:00

I've spent two days living in the light of real, unadulterated sunshine.
Each day its own.
Every moment special.

I rode my bike and bore my skin.
I played with my comrades and laid with my lover.
I drew pictures and wrote words.
And now I look forward to more of these sunshine promises.

Just when I thought it going so well...

2009-04-16T17:12:00.000-07:00

Having entered class today with a rushed effort at what should have been a much more carefully crafted assignment, I felt a little self-conscious about actually handing the piece of paper to my professor.

Imagine my dismay at having him respond with a sound and thorough exhalation combined with a frown deep enough to be mistaken for the Mariana Trench.

I've now been informed that not only was the pivotal assignment completed incorrectly but I've got to finish the missing element by noon tomorrow.

And thus the camel's back did splinter.

I felt myself tumbling back into that familiar sense of overwhelmedness.
I started to make a mental checklist of all of the things I have looming above me and began to lose myself in the squalor clashing due dates, commitments, and too much to do in one sitting.

And then I started thinking about sunshine, the fast approaching Summer, and the fact that this would not be forever.

And I began to feel better.
Sort of.

I just need to take a deep breath and recognize that this is all going to work out just fine.
I just have to take it one task at a time.

You'd think I would have gotten this thing down by now.

When She Loved She

2009-04-14T11:22:00.000-07:00

Margret's mother had no tolerance for tomboyism.
She made a decisive point of applying strong discipline whenever she caught her daughter playing football, wearing pants, or signing up for the army national guard.

Margret didn't really mind her mother's aversion.
She kind of thought her mother was boring.
And she couldn't speak English...or any language for that matter.
(She was mute)

Margret's mother's strong sense of tradition tended to go mostly unnoticed considering that she could do little more to promote it than grunt herself into a ruby-cheeked fluster. And this caused her to look more than usual unappealing. A fact that made her constant social rejection at PTA meetings anything but mysterious.

Margret did her best to steer clear of her mother's watchful eye whenever she dressed in the morning or left on a Saturday afternoon with a pigskin under her arm. But on the odd occasions when her attempts were unsuccessful, Margret simply sat and observed her mother chastising the living daylights out of her via a series of sharp inhales and phlegmy expulsions of hot air.

One Sunday afternoon, following just such a mother-daughter arrest, Margret found herself sitting on the counter in the kitchen nursing a glass of lemonade and playing audience to yet another wordless critique. Only this time she had had about enough.
Her mother's facial flare-up was reaching a wheezy crescendo when, on some unfamiliar impulse, Margret flung the contents of her glass into her mother's face.

Margret's mother sizzled like a freshly quenched flame.
Her redness instantly receded and her once-bulging, bloodshot eyes shrunk back to their normal diameter.
An ice cube resting on her shoulder slid carelessly down the front of her now sopping apron.

Margret looked at her mother and then at the empty glass in her hand and then back at her mother. She couldn't decide whether she ought to be afraid or devout.
But while she thought about her mother made the decision for her.

THWACK!

Margret's mother's swing was completely unexpected.
Margret flew from the counter top preceded by most of her teeth.

Arguments ought to be based on logic, not emotion.

2009-04-08T16:28:00.000-07:00

While I am in full support of free expression, I cannot stand to see intolerance dramatized for the sole purpose of dredging up vapid pathos.

This advertisement may seem rife with ingenuous motivation and yet, in response to each of the minimalistic, dire, and gravitas-ridden statements made, I have to ask:

-How is anyone's life exempt from their country's government? If you'd rather not have these issues impact you, depart from engaging the system. In other words, you can't just have your cake and eat it to. Others have a right to a slice of the same desert. (Yes, it's a double entendre.)

-Which of your freedoms will be taken away? Freedom to deny equal rights to an entire naturally-occurring population? Freedom to discriminate against those who hold different tenets of faith and morality than you dictate?

-What kind of a California doctor are you and why are you vilifying gay marriage as opposed to voicing your outrage at being discriminated against in the workplace for your faith? (Might you be seeing just what LGBTQ people across this nation are experiencing on a daily basis?)

-How is it you're being punished and by what form of government? Additionally, as a member of any church group oughtn't you be concerned about the separation of church and state that this country's founding predicated?

-You're not helpless, you're a mother. You have the responsibility and role of being the core of your offspring's education. Have open conversations and answer questions with honesty instead of obsequious and fearful muddlings of the truth. And if it's really all that problematic, send them to private school. And to take it one step further, what is so wrong with gay marriage that you're afraid of your child learning to be accepting and open-minded? Might you be afraid that this horrible, oppressive public school is actually permitting your children to begin to grasp the necessity for seeing life from more than one interest group's persepctive? Namely, the church. And on the subject of this menacing public school, according to current literature it is experiencing the same plummeting academic achievement levels and lowered test scores as schools nationwide. These decreasing academic standards are the result of education setbacks caused by lack of funding due to poorly managed government monies. Monies alocated to prolonging a profit-based war and the public acceptance thereof.

-In pointing out the malcontentment of same sex couples who have been "living as they wish" are you blatantly ignoring the fact that same sex couples are discriminated against on enumerable counts? What of legal release of health care information to a same sex significant other? Yes, it's possible in some cases but the process for obtaining permissions is demonstrably more difficult and includes aspects of inquiry that go far beyond limitations put upon attempts at accessing the same kinds of information by heterosexual significant others. And that's only one example. As for "those advocates [who] want to change the way [you] live", advocacy is meant to be an effort at broadening perspectives. If your perspectives are narrow enough that they limit your life then maybe you ought to contemplate how reconsidering said perspectives might in fact open you to newer, more collectivist understandings of how to coincide with a nation full of different perspectives, a nation heralded for its embrace of people from all walks of life and all cultural and religious and lifestyle backgrounds.

-You also have no choice on whether or not you are legally allowed to own slaves. I'd be quite incited by that too if I were a bigot.

-And finally, you call yourselves a "rainbow coalition"? That's just insulting. It's ubiquitously understood that the rainbow is a symbol of queer interests and while it is still a notion free to be utilized by any and all people, its present status is as a token of acceptance and understanding. Not discrimination, stigmatization, or hate- and fear-mongering.
You say you're coming together in love. Well what kind of love rebukes those who wish to embrace the same traditional demonstrations of that very concept as all other members of their society based solely on an argument of difference in sexual desire.

How is gay marriage hurting you?
How is it hurting your families and your interests?
I'm quite sure tithes will maintain themselves, value systems and morality will still hold true (to whatever degree anyone might already be applying themselves), and if anything, the marriage industry will boom from the gargantuan number of couples suddenly granted the same rights as their heterosexual counterparts.

On an economic note, gay couples have been proven to have higher incomes, less financial requirements, and more expendable cash. Want to stimulate this faltering economy? Then let go of discriminatory and fearful ignorance.

Alright, I'm finished...

...for now.

While everyone is sleeping

2009-04-04T03:15:00.000-07:00

Here we are, way too sleep-deprived and way too nervous.

But the question is: why?

We are of high vitality, we are confident.
Perhaps we are just thirsty for the conventional.
Maybe that's what we're all longing for: to be considered conventional.

And while we may find solace in our positions of pride and individuality, there is still and undeniable urge to be among the throngs of anonymous unity.
Where everyone is truly the same.

We call such ideas communist or Utopian but in truth we're just turning what we really and instinctively want into a wrong, a problem, a sin.
We're afraid of what is the best for us!

And I repeat my question: why?

Maybe the answer isn't as straightforward as I would like to believe.
But at the same time, I wonder just how much I really care about believing in something.
Maybe I like the mystery and the curiosity it inspires.

Maybe mystery and curiosity are the things I'm really the most excited about.

No, not maybe.
They are.

And by acknowledging that I am free.

When that one person talks a little too much

2009-04-02T11:32:00.001-07:00

I'm all for sharing personal anecdote.
I find them to be both poignant and easy to relate to.

But when anyone takes on the role of real-life-example-provider in a class full of students who are looking for an academic basis for their didactic reception let's just say that they become the primary source of my frustration.

I have to chuckle to myself to realize that I'm probably the one and only scrooge truly that misanthropic about someone just wanting to validate themselves by means of public self-exposure.

Thinking for a moment on that last line I have to admit I am by no means above reproach if I am in fact going to vilify those who are open books for the sake of feeling universally known.
As I recall, that very mindset is a steadfast tenet of my character.

So why am I so blithe to point a finger of heckling at the overweight mother all too eager to tell the class about her 5 year-old, pink-wearing, purse-carrying son?

It's probably due to the fact that I feel like the spot light is being in some way taken from me.
It's all about attention and gratification.

Now to gratify my need to quit the attention binge I've been on...

Hot tea and the fresh feel of cleanliness

2009-04-02T03:10:00.000-07:00

I'm off to a lovely start with regards to the day tomorrow.
I've already cleaned myself, practically dressed myself (it's all planned out), and prepared myself for all of the knowledge likely to invade my brain over the course of my classes.

And then it's off to yet another night working for this new machine.
I feel like a necessary gear in the mechanism and yet sometimes it feel so easy to lose myself in the impression I get of the whole crazy mess of this new establishment.
I'm maintaining my optimism with fierce determination and I'm additionally resolute in my will to make life happy for myself and those the closest to me.

I'm just feeling a bit worn down.

2009-04-01T01:31:00.001-07:00

Clearly it was time for a change.

He knew it.
His friends knew it.
And more importantly, his lover didn't want to know it.

Whenever he glanced at his own reflection in some shoppe window or unsettled puddle he would hold his own hands back from tearing away his features in hopes of erasing the sad, angry, lost person they comprised.

But then, just like that, his strength left him completely.
His restraint became a thing of the past and all at once his nails dug irreversible gouges into the dark spaces beneath his eyes, his knuckles clenched mercilessly around his tongue, and his dirty fists pounded his ears into a ringing deaf submission.

And then he woke up.

The sun wasn't really shining and it wasn't really not shining. It was just the Sun.
His guilt wasn't really palpable but then it wasn't really without flavor. It was just guilt.

And that's when he first saw them.
The scarring gashes and bruises checkering the place that used to be his character.

If you can imagine the thrill of mystery combined with the angst of realization literally written all across a person's face then you might be able to grasp what he felt.

He was nearly ready to start the battering all over again when he stopped just long enough to read what he'd etched in his own visage:

At least when you're bleeding you know you can heal.

Sorry and Thank You

2009-03-22T16:47:00.000-07:00

It seems to me that whenever I say 'I'm sorry' it's inevitably and eventually followed by my saying 'thank you'.

When I think on this recurring pattern I come up with time after time where it's been proven true.

At work: "I'm sorry but we're actually out of the special...thank you for dining with us tonight."

At school: "I'm sorry I missed class...thank you for understanding."

In life: "I'm sorry I did what I did...thank you for forgiving me."

I wonder whether or not this seeming relationship is something that I might have come upon because of its universal nature (doesn't everybody do this?) or if it might just be a mindset (I just tend to say 'sorry' and 'thank you' a lot, of course the two will happen close enough to one another.).

Whatever the case, I'll now attend to my words with an increased fervor in order that when I see myself approaching an area where the space between 'I'm sorry' and 'thank you' might be quite large I can curb my behavior in advance. Thus saving myself and the received of my expressions ample ache and unpleasantness.

That said, I'm sorry to have blathered on and on about this.
And thank you for listening.

Predawn ponderings

2009-03-21T03:38:00.000-07:00

It's funny, isn't it?

The lonely seem to get the least sleep.

A quiet and utter lacking

2009-03-21T02:18:00.000-07:00

I've been so many things in my somewhat brief lifetime.

Some of them laudable.
Some of them criminal.

And only when I look to the stars do I see the sheer tininess of me and my actions.
Who I am and what I do seemed to have lost each other somewhere along the road stretching behind me.

And now is the season to bring them into accord with one another.

And in being in accord with myself, I hope to be in accord with what was my once and future promise and devotion.

If only to know that he could feel my dwindling energy and hazy terror at every moment I realize just what and who I have lost.
To lose is to be thoughtless.
And I have displayed the utmost of thoughtlessness.

I have been known to make mistakes

2009-03-20T01:00:00.000-07:00

Whenever I'm facing something as cripplingly disheartening as my own face in the mirror of hindsight it's a rarity for me to find any really Earth-shattering revelations in those banishing and hateful glances.

But now the glance is the action.
The bullet fired by my own gun injuring me only peripherally but leaving me with the daunting knowledge that I pulled the trigger in the first place.

And like all wounds, self-inflicted or otherwise, the healing is by no means simple or without suffering.

But it is still ultimately temporary.

In a temporary innocence

2009-03-19T02:54:00.000-07:00

When moments like this puncture the tarpaulin I've pulled over my rain-streaked and shivering form I stop dreading the inevitable rain and instead realize and enjoy the air seeping through the the new holes in my stifling cover.

Some might propose that I be angry when my safe little space is punctured...

...but I am sick and tired of pretending to agree with them just to feel their false sense of safety.
They have no idea what safety really is anymore because they've fought to forget it. To them, safety is only waiting longer to be hurt.
But I'm not afraid anymore.
After so many merciful tornadoes of guilt and apology- of genuine remorse- only then could enough lovingly chastising branches scrape and invade my little cocoon.

And I have begged for those scrapes and invasions...and now I realize that I needed to be hurt by myself to see that I was holding myself too tightly.

Protecting another is so much more liberating than protecting oneself.
I've had to understand this in the most naked way.

The answers you don't want anymore

2009-03-18T01:50:00.000-07:00

Yes, I overreacted.

No, I don't want all of those things I said I did.

Yes, I wish I could take it all back.

No, I'm not naive enough to think that's possible.

Yes, I feel more remorse and pain from my own doing than I ever have.

No, I do not have what is necessary to be good right now.

Yes, I am sure I will one day.

No, I am not superior to anyone.

Yes, I used to think I was.

No, I'm not asking for your attention.

Yes, I'm hoping for it.

The bitterness of grape skins and oaken barrels

2009-03-18T00:28:00.000-07:00

Where does a person begin once the tornado they've created finally hurls them to the ground in blustered and bludgeoning disinterest?

Should they start by assessing the damage to their surroundings or the damage to themself?

While it would seem the natural response to take stock of one's corporal being, the fact is that when one breaks their own bones they tend to feel reticent to splint the jagged throbbing for fear of worsening the injury.

And yet if that same person was to try and observe the trail of destruction left in the wake of her or his own selfish broodings, an increasing sense of self-loathing would doubtless circumvent any notions of repair.

The whole situation would become little more than a self-perpetuating mess of more and more razor cuts on naked thighs and quivering arms.

And here I stand, battered, broken and full of absolutely nothing.
To think it was me who created this chaos as some form of crude medication.

I think I've overdosed and now withdrawals aren't an option.
I'm simply left to curl up in a corner and wait for the demons to carry me off to somewhere bad enough to make me feel something once again.

Sleep 'til Dawn

2009-03-17T02:22:00.000-07:00

Sleep ‘til Dawn
by: Noah C. Buck

[Verse 1]
When you look up at the sky
and your lucky star turns out to be an airplane,

When you wake up and see your sunrise
is actually sunset,

When you think you’ve got an answer
and it’s only my machine,

[Chorus]
You’ll know you’re lonely.

You’ll know you’re scared.

You’ll know that everything you’ve done
is far too far away to forgive.

If you could only see
that this is what you’d know if you were me,
then maybe I’d be able to sleep ‘til dawn.

[Verse 2]
When every breath you breathe out
stings like a cigarette,

And all of the floating fireflies
burn out like the embers they are,

When every dream prepares you
for a tomorrow that will never come,

[Chorus]
You’ll know you’re lonely.

You’ll know you’re scared

You’ll know that everything you’ve done
is far too far away to forgive.

If you could only see
that this is what you’d know if you were me,
then maybe I’d be able to sleep ‘til dawn.

[Bridge]
How many times did I abandon you when you were lost
How many hours did you spend thinking of me not thinking of you
How many faces did you pretend you didn’t see me make
Just to hold onto the hope that I’d get better.

[Chorus]
I know I’m lonely.

I know I’m scared.

I know that everything I’ve done
is far too far away to forgive.

And now I wish you’d see
that this is what you’d know if you were me.
I hope you will be able to sleep ‘til dawn.

Onto the next adventure

2009-03-14T22:11:00.000-07:00

Tonight was officially my last evening working at Saucebox.

I wish I could say it felt bittersweet or something but the frank truth of the matter is that it's just that: frankly true.

It's not as if I'm going to quit seeing my friends from that place or that I'm going to be losing a valued means of income or some vital aspect of social connection.

I'm not too terribly traumatized by this change.
I feel a little numb about it.
I feel a little numb about everything right now.

Perhaps that will change as the weather continues to improve and I continue to finish all of the last bits of required work from this nearly through term of school.

I kind of hope so.

So, with all of the memories, strange occurrences, and mistakes as my souvenirs, I'm shipping off to new places, new people and new endeavors.

We'll see how long until I'm writing this same post about Portland as a whole.

My Cup Runneth Over

2009-03-13T04:31:00.000-07:00

SUNDAY, MAY 11, 2008 - Gravida Hills, CA

...In other news, a Southern California suburb received a special Mother’s day gift this morning. Eight of them, in fact. At 6:36am, Gravida Hills resident, Ava Pleonexis successfully gave birth to octuplets via cesarean section at Gravida Hills General Hospital. Doctors present commented that the mother was surprisingly calm and composed during the 45 minute procedure.
A behavior not unprecedented considering Miss Pleonexis has been a frequent guest of the Gravida Hills delivery room, having visited for the births of six preceding children including a recent set of fraternal twins.
Now a mother of 14, 32 year-old Ava says she’s grateful for the blessing of so many healthy children.
Now turning to the local-

BZZZIP

Sally scowled sourly at the blank screen as the last static hum of color and image receded into the dark grey television tube.
“That bitch is going to make millions,” she thought to herself as she pulled her large frame from the wooden rocking chair, “and she’s probably not even a real Christian.”
Tossing the remote haphazardly over the back of the couch, Sally ambled into the kitchen where her husband Richard was sitting at the counter reading the Sunday paper. He was still wearing his sport coat while his favorite tie fell in a lopsided wilt where he had loosened it upon returning from church.
“Hey honey, did you see this article about the woman with the eight babies?”
Sally cringed visibly at his question as she retrieved a box of snack cakes from the cupboard above the sink,
“It was just on the news,” she replied with the enthusiasm of a recently crippled cheerleader, “I don’t think it’s fair! I’ve been wanting a baby of my own for years and she just gets eight all at once?!”
Her exclamation came out louder than she’d intended causing Richard to put down the paper.
“Sweetheart,” his tone was almost as deflated as her uterus, “I’m sorry I haven’t been able give you any children.”
“Well it would help if you actually tried every once in awhile!” she snapped while unwrapping the creme-filled cupcake.

They had the same argument every Mother’s day. When Richard Wiltington had first met Sally Baron the two of them agreed on one thing: Children. And lots of them. However, as a result of their strict adherence to premarital abstinence, neither had been given the opportunity to realize that Richard had a serious problem until after they were signed, sealed and committed.
Their wedding night had been nothing short of a travesty. After hours of coaxing, frisking, and multiple attempts at soggy felatio (she was desperate and she felt God would understand), Sally eventually went to sleep telling herself it was just Richard’s nerves. Richard went into the bathroom and cried.
With every following wedding anniversary and Mother’s Day, Sally and Richard’s hope for offspring diminished faster than Richard’s sperm count. As a means of filling the awkward void left by their painfully lacking sex life, Richard turned to various publications of the men’s study Bible while Sally turned to food. Richard’s avid studies eventually resulted in the publication of his own men’s devotional while Sally’s avid consumption resulted in her weighing over three hundred pounds. And now in their seventh year of being the only couple from their small group without a maternal excuse to miss the usual Sunday evening meeting (everyone else was having Mother’s Day brunch at Denny’s then doing something family-ish like picnicking or watching Veggie-Tales) the two of them felt ever more despondent over their shortcomings as good Christians.

“I’ve tried everything I can, dear,” Richard’s dejection was made all the more palatable by the cracking in his voice, “you know I have.”
Sally had to admit Richard’s efforts had been nothing short of valiant: prayer, counseling, and even a small amount of *gasp* masturbation (again, God would overlook it due to Sally and Richard’s honorable intentions).
“Oh, Richard,” Sally said through a mouthful of greasy chocolate cake, “I didn’t mean to come off so critically.” She had begun to feel terribly cruel for blowing up all over Richard when he was all but desperate to do the same for her.
“It’s just that we’re running out of excuses for the Quiverfull group. What are we going to say the next time they ask us what we’re doing to contribute to God’s army?”
“We can always say just what we’ve said before: we’re waiting until God tells us it’s our time,” Richard offered.
“I don’t think they’ll accept that much longer,” countered Sally, “and soon they’re going to ask us to leave the group. You know sometimes I think I ought to just...”
Sally’s voice trailed off.
“What,” asked Richard somewhat urgently, “you ought to just what?”
After a pregnant pause, Sally spoke, “I’m just saying that it might be a good idea for me to visit Dr. Foreman and discuss my options.” Sally neglected to look at what she knew would be an expression of dented pride on the waxy brow of her now crestfallen husband.
Long ago they had mostly ruled out the option of artificial impregnation. Richard said it felt emasculating. But Sally was desperate.
Another pause allowed Sally a fresh mouthful of frosting while Richard fought the building indignation that threatened to squeeze its way out of his well-used tear ducts. Sally swallowed and then went on, ignoring his display of weakness.
“If only I could just find a baby and bring it with us next week.” Richard shifted uncomfortably on his barstool.
“Don’t you think they’d be a little suspicious if you and I just showed up to group with a baby when you haven’t been pregnant at all up until now,” he asked.
“Not if we tell them we’ve been keeping it to ourselves,” Sally responded with an odd glint in her glassy eyes, the last of the snack cake now framing the corners of her chomping mouth. She continued while reaching for another cellophane-wrapped snack.
“We could say that we weren’t wanting to bring attention to ourselves and we could just tell them I don’t show easily!”
Her excitement was so thorough at this point that the still-wrapped snack cake had been squeezed to a nearly unrecognizable pulp.
“But where are we going to get this surprise baby,” Richard inquired without shielding his incredulity.
“I don’t know,” continued Sally, still elated by her strange plan, “that woman in Gravida Hills has fourteen kids! I’m sure she could do without one.” Sally’s gaze was now straight ahead looking at nothing in particular as she tore off the corner of the once decorative confection and proceeded to shovel the decimated morsels into her plump face.
Richard was beginning to feel slightly alarmed at his wife’s fervor and tried to think of a way to calm her down before she did something brash. The last time she had tried to scheme up a child she had proposed volunteering at the local Zoo’s lost and found and taking home any “leftover babies.”
It had taken Richard nearly two weeks and countless boxes of snack cakes to curb Sally’s “brilliant idea.” And as much as it pained him to suggest, Richard knew that the only way to convince Sally of an alternate course of action was to give her something she wanted.
And he was pretty sure that snack cakes wouldn’t do it this time.
“Why don’t you make an appoint with Dr. Foreman first thing tomorrow?”
Everything in the room stopped for a moment. Richard looked at Sally. Sally looked at Richard. A hefty squeeze of white filling dripped from the corner of Sally’s mouth and onto Richard’s paper.
“Really?” Sally’s inquisitiveness softened her slightly.
“Really,” responded Richard, relieved to see her calming down, “I mean, we don’t need to make any final decisions right away but it would be a good idea to know our options.”
“Richard, I- I-” Sally struggled to think of a way to express her gratitude to the waifish little man in front of her, “Thank you. With everything in me, (“and everything I hope to have in me,” she silently added), thank you.”
With that, she bounded from the room heading to her closet where she hoped to pick out the perfect muumuu for her visit to the Sperm Doctor.
Richard turned back to his paper, wiping the creme off of the photo of Ava Pleonexis adjacent to the article he had been reading.

* * * * *

Sally had arrived at Dr. Foreman’s office twenty minutes prior to her afternoon appointment. Having called just after dawn, she’d left several massages requesting to be put on the wait list in the event that any of the doctor’s Monday appointments happened to cancel stating that she was “very much anticipating him getting her pregnant”.
The receptionist called her just after 9am, immediately asking rather dryly if she knew that Dr. Foreman was a fertility specialist and not a male escort. Sally laughed a gooey and shrill staccato guffaw, informing the woman that she was fully aware of the doctor’s profession. If there’s one thing Sally was never called, it was quick.
The receptionist grudgingly proceeded to make an appointment for Sally in the early afternoon and then promptly hung up, bringing the call to a curt close by hurriedly informing Sally that the doctor would answer any questions she had during the appointment.
After two sizable breakfasts, a donut break, lunch, and an early first dinner, Sally didn’t have any other meals to distract her before the appointment so she ate some snack cakes and then drove herself downtown to the doctor’s office.
She busied herself in the waiting room by looking through the baby magazines she’d purchased along with her box of chocolate covered donuts from the gas station on the corner.
By the fourth time she approached the receptionist’s desk to ask about how soon the doctor would see her, the receptionist refrained from responding in speech and simply handed her a tissue from the box on her desk.
Sally took it gratefully, using it to noisily blow her nose. The receptionist had intended it for the donut crumbs on her cheeks.
Just then Dr. Foreman stepped through the door behind the desk and Sally’s already overhauled heart went into turbo as the anticipation overtook her massive form.
“Sally Baron-Wiltington,” his voice was immediately drowned out by the overzealous noise made by Sally. What was originally intended to sound something like “yes” or “here” came out as an elephantic trumpet blare of thrill and exuberance.
Dr. Foreman looked over his clipboard first at Sally and then at the receptionist with whom he shared a “what in the bloody Hell is this monolith doing in my waiting room” look.
He then escorted Sally with a saccharine smile into the first examination room where he stated that he would be with her shortly. Sally was so elated that she couldn’t sit still. She then decided it better if she get ready for the doctor before he returned in order to save time.

Dr. Jorge Foreman was an average man. Five foot ten, just under 190, full head of greying brown hair, and a job he really hated. With every new day he came into contact with more and more people so mindlessly oversexed and hopelessly irresponsible that he wished he could just diagnose them all as infertile and feed them cyanide tablets. If it weren’t for the fact that these greedy breeders paid his way to Hawaii and back twice a year, he would have quit years prior and tried his hand at acting.
No amount of acting could have disguised his reaction upon entering Sally’s room.
She stood in the middle of the white-walled space with her arms out stretched and her legs spread like a Staypuft marshmallow version of DaVinci’s man. And she was completely naked.
Jorge wanted to shut his eyes and turn around but it would have been no use. The ghastly image of Sally’s gargantuan form would be forever burned into his memory. He wanted to vomit.
“Miss Wiltington-”
“It’s Baron-Wiltington. There’s a hyphen,” interrupted Sally with an eager smile. Jorge was surprised she knew what a hyphen was.
“Miss Baron-Wiltington-”
“Misses Baron-Wiltington. I’m married. See?” She said, gesturing toward the ring on her left ring finger. Jorge noted that it was the only article she’d kept on. Most likely because she couldn’t remove it from her pudgy finger.
“Misses. Baron. Wiltington,” Jorge tried to maintain himself, “please put on your clothing. This is not a physical examination. I’m simply administering an intake.”
Sally’s whole demeanor shifted and it seemed like the cheer drained from her and she appeared to momentarily sag a bit more than usual. Jorge stepped out in order that she might sheepishly redress. Once she was finished and he reentered, the remainder of their interaction was terse and brief.
“Have you ever seen a fertility specialist before?”
“No.”
“Are you having a regular menstrual cycle?”
“Yes.”
“Does your family have a history of infertility?”
“No.”
“Are you presently sexually active?”
Silence.
Jorge looked up from his notes and realized that Sally was staring quite intently over his shoulder. Checking behind himself, Jorge noticed that the chart where she was looking depicted a cross-sectional rendition of a penis penetrating a vagina.
“Miss-” Jorge caught himself, “Mrs. Baron-Wiltington?”
Sally started slightly and looked at Jorge as if he’d just woken her from a light nap.
“I’m sorry, I must have gotten distracted,” Sally laughed nervously following the excuse and immediately began fumbling through her purse, retrieving a candy bar.
“Look,” began Jorge, “why are you really here?”
“I’m here for the same reason as anybody,” replied Sally overly cheerily as she focused on tearing open the wrapper, “I want to have a baby!”
Jorge thought carefully before responding, “Sally, have you thought about just why you want to have a baby?”
“Dr. Foreman,” said Sally with a tone of familiarity (he had seen her naked after all), “I don’t expect you to understand this but God wants me to have a child- well, children, really. We’re all called to have children in order to add to His holy army!”
Jorge was dumbfounded. Sally continued, “In the Bible, God calls us to have a family like a quiver full of arrows. Always at the ready to uphold His name.”
The contrast between the gravitas in her voice and the smile on her face made Jorge mildly uncomfortable. What had originally been meant as a heartfelt line of questioning had now become a venture into yet another form of the twisted psyche that made abortion clinics across the nation install bullet proof windows and escape tunnels. And Jorge was no longer interested in playing audience to an obese fundamentalist’s views on the holiness of parenthood.
“Well Mrs. Baron-Wiltington, that’s all well and good but I’m not sure if you’re at a point physiologically where it would be wise to attempt pregnancy. I’m recommending you receive a full physical- and psychological assessment from your family physician before I take you on as a prospective patient.”
Sally’s smile disappeared completely. She shoved the partially opened candy bar back into her purse.
“What do you mean I’m not at a good point? Are you saying I can’t get pregnant because I’m fat?!”
“Of course not,” Jorge responded quickly, “I’m simply stating that your body would be put through a great deal of additional duress if you were to conceive and it would be a good idea to understand how ready you are to sustain such rigors.”
Sally stared at Jorge’s face, blinking in surrender.
“I’ll have my receptionist make you a followup appointment for a month from now. Visit your personal practitioner for a check up and have him compile your results and send them to my office.”
Jorge removed a small set of stapled sheets from his clipboard.
“Give this examination sheet to your doctor and have him fill it out and send it back to my office. It will let me know whether or not I ought to continue with this procedure.”
Sally took the stack of paper cautiously and was about to place it in her purse as well but thought better of it and tucked the sheets beneath her arm instead.
“Thank you Doctor,” she said crisply as she stood to leave, “I can assure you that I am in excellent health and I’ll look forward to seeing you in a month.”
And with that, she left. Jorge sighed heavily and then went promptly to his desk to look up flight schedules to Hawaii. Just after he instructed the receptionist to have calls from Sally’s home number blocked.

* * * * *

Arriving home, Sally felt humiliated. The dream doctor she had cooked up in her head was nothing like the hateful little prick she’d just experienced. Not at a good point? Who the Hell was he to tell here whether or not she should have a baby? His job was to give her one and then step off. At present, she felt he had failed on both counts.
The real truth of the matter was that she knew her physician would say just what he had been saying for the past seven years: “You need to stop the compulsive eating, do some serious cardio, and embrace your sex life.”
Embrace her sex life? She might as well have been telling Sally to go buy a vibrator (something Sally had seriously considered on multiple occasions but never gone through with on account of God’s frowning on the idea). And that made Sally think of Richard. What would she tell him? She couldn’t bear to admit after all of the nagging and pleading that finally visiting the fertility doctor had yielded little more than a much needed membership to Weight Watchers.
As it was, she was home and so was he. The men’s devotional had garnered them a series of handsome royalty checks which permitted Richard to work only part time while spending the rest of his week hunched over the computer composing his next brilliant gem of Christian self help literature. She would need to tell something. Preferably something impressive.
“I’m pregnant!” She squealed.
It just popped out.
“You’re what?!” Richard nearly fell over from standing so quickly.
There was no going back now, Sally was stuck in this one.
“Yeah, pregnant! I, uh, I need to, uh, go in for a, um, series of hormone treatments over the next few months. Yeah, and, um, well...” Sally was unsure how to continue so she just decided to stop there.
Richard slowly sat back down, lowering his head into his hands. Neither spoke for several minutes. Richard just kept raising his head and opening his mouth like he was ready to say something only to close it and lower his head again. Finally, he spoke.
“How could you do this without me?” There were years of hurt and volumes of disbelief in his disparaging voice.
“Oh, Richard,” Sally was caught somewhere between comforting and conniving, “it wasn’t without you. I, um, I felt like I would have your blessing on this. It’s for our quiver.” She finished in what she hoped he would take to be a complimenting and fulfilling tone.
“Whose sperm was it? How do you know for sure? Why do you need more hormones? What about my hormones? Will it even be my baby?” The questions flowed out of Richard like bathtub faucet water.
“It was an, um, anonymous donor,” Sally began to realize that she was in way over her head.
“An anonymous donor?!” Richard’s volume shot into unpracticed heights, “how in the world could you accept the seed of some man you’ve- we’ve never met?!”
“Doctor Foreman assured me that it was a good choice!” Sally knew she was going to need to do some fancy footwork to get out of this. And for someone who had difficulty navigating stairs due to sheer tonnage, the prospect was daunting at best.
“Doctor Foreman? I’ve never even met this Doctor Foreman. What’s the number to his office? I’m calling to talk to that sonuvagun right now!”
Sally suddenly saw the end of her pride (and possibly her marriage) in shockingly close proximity and began to panic.
“But- but-” Sally knew her number was up. Sighing, she resigned to imminent defeat. She handed Richard the stack of papers from Doctor Foreman’s office and he snatched them from her with the passion of a man on a mission.
Riffling through the stack, he quickly found the page with the office’s contact information and tore it out allowing the remaining sheets to fall on the floor.
As he dialed Sally held her breath. There was nothing she could do now. She was so worried she didn’t even want to eat. Richard waited with the receiver to his ear, his face scrunched into a vengeful grimace.
He waited.
And waited.
“There’s no ring,” he finally said. Sally let the breath she’d been holding out. She was safe for a moment.
“I’ll try again,” said Richard with determination. And once again Sally was rocketed into the tension only someone caught in their own trap can experience.
And again there was no ring. Sally knew better than to think it was all over just like that. As Richard reached for the received to dial a third time the digital tone of an incoming call startled both of them causing Richard to actually fall down this time taking Sally with him (no easy task considered her weight being twice his).
While Richard struggled to snatch up the call, Sally had begun to pick herself up when something caught her eye. What was left of the stack of papers from the doctor’s office laid in a disheveled pile just beneath the chair Richard had been sitting in. Sally overheard him standing above her speaking with some level of returning calm and realized that the caller was Andy Watersworth, the leader of their Sunday small group. Neither Richard nor Sally could afford to have their church group know they had been fighting, much less about pregnancy. What would the group think?
Sally was temporarily relieved, assuming that the men would be talking for awhile. This allowed her to direct her attentions to the papers on the floor. As she reached her husky forearm through the legs of both her husband and the chair, she made sure not to disturb him so as to cause his attention to be drawn downward.
Pulling the leaves of wrinkled print to where she could better decipher them, she saw that there was handwriting on the back side of the second sheet from the top of the stack. As she read over it she felt a shiver of excitement and disbelief all at the same time. The writing read:

Ava Pleonexis
1649 SW Clearhaven Ct.
Gravida Hills, CA 91341

* * * * *

(To be continued)

When one makes oneself lonely

2009-03-12T11:07:00.000-07:00

I'm tired of banishing everyone and everything to Hell.

I feel like a heinous and critical bastard.

I'm realizing with each new day that I'm seeming like more and more of a hateful and judgmental fiend and I'm begin to reap the crop of self-sustained bitterness I've been sowing.

This is something that I've always feared.
This feeling that I'm unintentionally pushing everything away from me at the behest of my disparaging review of the world at large.

Why can't I just shelve some of this incredulity and be happy?
But even when I pose such an open ended question I'm reminded that I don't want others in my age to "just be happy", I want them to be incited!

I want them to be angry with the contorted way in which this country is being operated and the idiotic priorities we've all been bred to embrace.

And yet I don't want to be miserable.

What the Hell do I do?

A short, short story

2009-03-09T15:51:00.000-07:00

Claiborne wanted nothing more than to eat.
But he couldn't because he was allergic to most sugars and a number of wheats as well.
He was also destitute.
When he happened upon either money or moderately fresh dumpster foods he was doomed to the leafy boredom of mixed greens and the occasional dance on the wild side with a bit of tasty (although gas-inducing) cheese.

One day he found a marvelous hunk of lavender bread in the wicker garbage bin behind the local boulangerie. And although he knew full well that it would be a nearly suicidal thing to consume, he raised the slightly crusty baguette to his lips and was shot in the back by a passing policeman who thought he was strangling a snake.

He died in a pool of his own blood.
But not before eating the entirety of the lavender loaf with what little life he had left after the negligent and trigger-happy officer did him in.

The End

Oh, the (strange) cleverness of me

2009-03-07T03:41:00.000-08:00

I've only just arrived from a thrilling walk home from work.
I say thrilling with every intent of corroboration.

I was alone. Truly alone.
I had my music and the knowledge of a warm, secluded space of my own to comfort me as I fought the bitter cold.

And step after step, song after song,
I arrived safely at my perch.

Here I sit, realizing with a warm gratitude, the things I have to be incredibly thankful for.
I have a home, a wonderful, perfect home with a loving and trustworthy best friend.
I also have a comfortable bed and glorious IKEA sheets that always remind me of Michelle.

On that note, I have Michelle.
She's kind, caring, full of honest and uninhibited love, and she's so heartbreakingly beautiful.

Following in like manner, I have Sean.
He's in every way the man of my dreams.
(Don't scoff at either the cliche nor my unhindered fawning).
He's so understanding and patient. He's so bravely vulnerable and willfully thoughtful.
He's humble and witty, handsome and sweet.
And I love him.

So much.

Sometimes, when I'm alone and all around me still seems to be in the midst of chaos, I just think of the times we've been asleep on each other's limbs. The calm and quiet of lessened bloodflow can lead to a queer and riveting sense of euphoria.

And to think we've only just begun to discover it.

And what a journey it promises to be.

Goodnight.

Round 1b

2009-02-27T15:19:00.000-08:00

After having bumbled my way through the intake assessment at the PSU Center for Student Health & Counseling (or SHAC as it is commonly referred to) I have to say that I felt a little trepidatious about going back for a second appointment with a new counselor.
The prospect of re-introducing my self-diagnosis as a bitter misanthrope was less than appealing.

However, upon stepping into the SHAC waiting room I began to feel the knots in my shoulders loosen a bit. Little did I know that the soon-to-begin session would provide an even grander denouement.

I was greeted a few minutes after my scheduled time by David, a shorter graying man with a light beard that resembled lambswool. He had crystal blue eyes that revealed a youthfulness and honesty which I immediately found welcoming.

He seemed like one of those guys who kind of always knew that he was cool even though no one necessarily nominated him for prom king. Like he didn't even think of needing anyone. He even swore a couple of times during our session which only added to my collective liking for him. And yet throughout the entire interaction he maintained such a patronly and available nature.

He was like salted caramel: sweet and soft with a savory, serious edge.

After our greeting, David and I strolled down the open hallway between the various offices and potted plants until we reached his door halfway down on the right. He had a geometric rug and two comfortable but subdued chairs in a well lit office with vaulted ceilings and a sizable window. I was glad to have the natural light.

The session itself commenced with David asking me to describe to him why I decided to request counseling at this time.
I was off like a shot.
I spoke of school's innocuousness and the belabored efforts of making enough money for rent and bills in light of this purportedly problematic economy and then transitioned into my underwhelming impression of the United States as a whole.
After continuing on in like fashion for the duration of the hour-long meeting (punctuated consistently by David's polite interjections and reflections) I realized that I felt incredible.
Everything in me was opening up and breathing and I felt fully porous, like air could move through my entire body cleansing the built up residue of anger and indignant dissatisfaction with the status quo.
Granted, it's not all gone just yet. However I feel a strong sense of optimistic and anticipatory potential about this guy, this process.

In hopes of gaining still more of said optimism, I plan on maintaining this counseling relationship and writing about it along the way.

At least something in my organic life is interesting enough to garner my attentions and written reflection.

Photo Flashback

2009-02-25T15:26:00.001-08:00

In a surprising and cheerful recent instance of serendipity, I happened to come back into contact with the woman who played witness to the valiant reclamation of my absconded bicycle last Summer.

She is mentioned in the entry where I detail the event because she happened to take my picture that day and, since it was something of a random request, it stuck in my mind gaining placement in the formal storyline.

Well it just so happens that this charming and lovely woman still had the photos she'd taken of me that day and was kind enough to send them to me in order that I might document them for all cyber-eternity.

These skimpy shorts are what allowed me the speed necessary for abducting the thief.

This look of prideful
charm and boyish confidence
is actually farcical
considering that just behind
me is a neglected bike about
to be made off with by
some drunken crook!

And once again,
hubris incarnate.

I promise I did learn
not to be so ridiculously
full of myself as a result
of the trauma sustained
from this adventure.

The Sad Case of a Much-Needed Separation

2009-02-25T11:37:00.000-08:00

Judy Peal never really believed in God. She played church so well that she married a preacher and lasted a whole 11 years with him before she ran out of energy and will. You can imagine what a depression might come with the realization that you had just divorced the self induced-poison of faith in false conventions such as prophecy. She still managed to get herself through a dark phase of loneliness and confusion with the determination of someone whose prophetic faith in nature could trump the status quo.
It was like being a non-weight bearing beam in a frivolously gaudy steeple and cross; you ran a thorn of pointless venom through the otherwise elegant and necessary structure. And one might only imagine the drawings of such wasted plans to be a thing of sheer squalor and deeply set ink from a lengthy and belabored concocting of such shameless indulgence. Judy tended to think of herself as shameless and indulgent, too.
The idea that she was leaving a man and a marriage which were both rooted to an unwavering piety soaked through her like spilt coffee through a thin cloth napkin.
There would be metric weight for a guilt of that inescapable magnitude. In fact, the ripple effect that such a sensation would wrack upon the surface any mistaken perception would issue tremors of the the most thoroughly unfamiliar and puzzling new kind. It would be a masochistic thirst. Like stealing a firm press on a dark bruise just to feel alive. So alive that it might be called thorough. What a beautiful detail indeed.

And in this was found the moment outside of a moment...

...but not really.

A Magnificent Death of Perfection

2009-02-25T11:36:00.000-08:00

There’s a childish romance to be had of the world. If not us then who? If not now then when? The beauty of such immediacy is in its drive. And from that we derive our daily enthusiasm.
Why have we pushed so far away from the simplicity of innocence and naivety? The answer would seem simple- “we wanted to” - but there are some things that just beg for explaining.
Yes, we wanted to. But it’s just not as cut and dried as all that. Why did we want to? If you’re growing weary of all of the open ended questions I’ll do my best to put them at a halt from here on out.
Back on topic: We wanted to because the idea of imperfection was enticing. It was juicy and annoying like your fingers just after eating an orange. But we always thought we could just lick our hands cleaned and they would dry soft and dexterous just like before. We didn’t know, we’re at present having a hard time understanding, that none of this bland and massive stress is actually as overbearing as we’re permitting it to be with our greed, selfishness, and misguidance.
We wanted to because we thought that breaking status quo would in some way paint our lives just a little brighter instead of being placated by the peace of normalcy.

Now is not normal.

Now is when we do have to start making an effort to break trends and stray from our current path. We do have to rebel against the conventional. Because conventional as we know it is in an irreversible state of entropy and painful decay.
Stray from material things. Stray from a need for money. Stray from the idea that you’re better than someone based on your belongings. These are the ropes that lash us to our downward spiral fate. We must act out and cut ourselves away with the blade of a keen new vision.

We must return to a state of community and cooperation. This is quite a euphoric notion and yet I assure you, for some it is quite possible. Likely, even. But right now is our final stage of struggle before truly embracing peace. Be intentional about your contribution to the convalescence of our age. Love and cherish. Be free from the weak yet blinding constructions of a scared and enmeshed worldview. Open yourself to the fresh air of critical thought and thorough examination. We are a future of change and progress.

If only we choose to be.

How did I know?

2009-02-24T19:18:00.000-08:00

Whenever I feel like things are getting so terribly rotten that I won't be able to stomach eating my way out of them, some random happenstance affects my whole perspective and I'm allowed to let go of the ever-present tension in my stomach and just relax into the normalcy of life.

And then something poisons that and I'm flung into despair all over again.

And then I'm happy.

And then I'm sad.

Are you seeing the same innocuous pattern I am?

I guess what's becoming so overwhelming is the idea that this rise-and-fall roller coaster won't ever stop. And once you've been on the same ride for, oh, I don't know, let's say 47 go-arounds, it sort of loses its thrill.

I'm at the point where the sharp drops and dizzying spins no longer hold any anticipatory excitement for me.
I just dread the next nice day for whatever horror will doubtless follow.

This is getting silly.

Just one more day

2009-02-22T00:17:00.000-08:00

I'm heading to bed after a full day and evening.

Following yet another lengthy session of discussing just how much garbage we all ought to be filtering to try and maintain a generally balanced idea of the world at large, I came into a somewhat comprehensive sense of exhaustion.

Thus, I stopped by work to bid Matt a farewell (yes, I feel like a big person for having done so) and then I kissed and hugged Sean and made my way home.

En route I stopped at Safeway where I procured a number of necessities such as several cans of tuna, two gallons of discount ice cream, and a plethora of avocados.

No, I'm not planning on eating them all at the same time.

I then hiked the 10 or so blocks back to my apartment, laden with the trappings of school and nourishment (a heavy book bag and an equally heavy paper grocery sack).

Upon arrival at my home, I unloaded the unnecessaries and set to work in the kitchen making myself some delicious chicken noodle soup with dill dumplings.
As much as this might sound like the title to an episode of Little Rascals, it was actually quite sumptuous and I drank my weight in water throughout the course of the day so I rushed to slurp down the last few doughy blobs before jetting to my semi-archaic (two light bulbs burnt out) bathroom to relieve myself.

Once THAT was done I continued watching Stardust which I had started when I first sat down to my oh so filling dinner. And then Tommy showed up with his own entertainment contribution: Zach and Miri Make a Porno.

I was expecting something quirky and a bit mediocre and I'll note that I was neither impressed nor disappointed.

Now, following the completion of the dishes and a thorough bout of oral hygiene, I am slowly fading into pre-sleep which I will further strengthen by reading Watchmen.

God, I miss reading.

Right around the corner

2009-02-21T10:35:00.000-08:00

Having just finished perusing NPR's article on the drastic lows in Wall Street, I have to say I'm growing more and more worried about the state of my current inability to garden effectively.

I feel like I ought to have been fostering the growth of a smattering of nutrient-rich vegetables and perhaps even raising some chickens what with the soon-to-burst balloon of debt this whole country seems all too blithe to keep inflating.

I'm just waiting for the day that I wake up to find that there have been countless runs on the banks and all of the numbers in my online bank accounts are simply that: numbers.
Meaningless, valueless, pointless numbers.

Then again, maybe that's just my problem: I'm just waiting.
Maybe that's all of our problem.

Seriously though, when I ask myself what it is I'm actually doing to counteract or at least prepare for these declining times I come up with precisely squat.

This is simply not acceptable.