SEQUITUR

Hoofed

2011-12-25T22:55:00.001-08:00

I've written three full posts in the last couple months to/for/at you for this blog. But I've deleted and banished all of them. They were silly and stupid and heartfelt and full of the nift and plex of past entries

At their core they were fleeting. Past. Over. Silly. They were me.

And you already know me.

{blink} {blink}

Always will.

Today, during Christmas dinner, I yelled at my dad to his face for the first time in my life. What's weird is because my dying Grandma is fancy I was holding a silver fork.

I didn't quite yell. I raised my voice. And he raised his. She watched. And sighed. And had more pie. And he and me fought, trading blows like actors on a Power Rangers set, but with genuine misunderstanding.

It was about god. About respect. About faith and loss of it. We shot lasers past each other. Missing. Not wanting to really hit but trying to. Voices and curses were raised. I was shaking but I hid it.

I was really shaking a lot.

Faces reddened, both of us, at a shade much louder than any volume.

It really fucking sucked. I hated it. Fucking stupid dumb shit. Elegance evades me. I won, cause I'm right. He won, cause he's also right. That's the equation.

Two men. Stubborn. Two rams. Beasts smashing heads on a mountainside. He's not used to it and neither am I. Thick and unchallenged, old dust raised amongst the orbit of collapsing skulls.

I'm still processing it. I'm still pondering the moment, the moments. Unstuck I am from the glue of forgiveness. That means I'm using that as a starting point. It's growth. It's freedom. It's peace. It's fertilizer. It's ivory shavings.

Dust.

I love my dad. He's why I'm sane.

You, dammit.

You.

I'm done. Just starting.

I'm an evil troll. A thought monster. My existence is a crime of stolen breath.

I'm a broken branch. A snapped length. A wanting bramble. One of those classic whatevers.

Yet..

If you breath that thing I breathe....

I guess I just want to be

Oh, fuck it. Life is sandpaper. Existence is traction. And you're beautiful.

2011-11-27T00:20:00.000-08:00

I want to be challenging. I want to be overwhelmed.

I want to be forgiven for being too forgiving. I want nothing more than the good dirty promise of being noticed.

I'm angry. I'm stupid. I stumble. I lust. I'm a planetary orbiter.

I'm slightly smarter at all times than I am at most times.

But I never forget I'm dumb.

I never forget how much I wish for the good in us to win.

For the pretty to smile.

For the unwanting to share.

I always think: Wouldn't I be better off...

... if I didn't think.

And then I'm wrong and I'm just another crushable animal, a creature clueless of survival, a me, a you, an us. Shrug.

Always.

2011-10-05T22:03:00.001-07:00

I know you still read.

It's the only reason I write.

Hurry, World

2011-10-01T22:34:00.000-07:00

There's a sadness in the way I talk to the world. It's the sadness of hurry.

I drove across the country this past week. One thing I'll say about this place. There is a lot of room for privacy. This is a big goddamned land. There is space galore. No wonder we had to kill the Indians, because they didn't seem to appreciate it. Everybody wants privacy but nobody wants to be alone. Or left alone. Or left to die alone. Or left at home. Or left hanging.

That's how a lot of relationships end. One person is left hanging. Usually it is the one that was honest first. Usually it is me.

It's pathetic to want. It's pathetic to need. I wish I could turn it off.

Orgasms aside, I fantasize about mid-meal smiles and unexpected texts. Finger warmth and that thing that happens between arms during chilly rainstorms. Guarding her seat while she buys popcorn and shrugging under the umbrella I'm holding because I want to hold it at her height, not mine. I fantasize about somebody dying and me being there to offer comfort and shoulders. And a ride while she cries. And omelets. Fresh-made for her the next morning with mushrooms. Something other than button-- porcini, portabello or that long skinny kind that looks like alien food.

To tell her I love how she wore all order of bracelets on one arm and none on the other.

Sigh.

Moonlight. Stupid cliche moonlight. I want to see it on her skin and her hair and her teeth. On the tops of her calves. On the wrinkles of her shoulder when she reaches... On the dashboard as we head home. Off the hood and into her eyes. Off the pine needles flickering past. And I want to watch it die against the blinds while she sleeps to a rhythm more pure than any celestial body.

Sunrise defies her while I'm finally gifted sleep. Preparation for a late morning of smiles.

Eyes across a room. Eyes as close as breath. Mutual muteness. Complete silence defines the symphony between us.

Just as the stars stare. That song.

The agency of urgency. That hireling that's supposed to work for both sides. Hunger. Need. Want. Desire. The hurry to hurry. I miss that. I've had it rarely and when I have it's been the best times of my life.

I accept it, the not having of IT. I can only control the choices I make. That I am a factor of the factorials and facts of existence. That I have more control over the equation of life than I think. And I choose to win the daily decision battle. I choose to win it most of the time.

Doesn't stop me from wanting to win it all of the time.

I, Fly

2011-06-15T21:53:00.001-07:00

I see the world through the eyes of a fly. Many panes, many angles, a kaleidoscope of shapes, each a split-degree off, pointed at the source light but absorbing it a micrometer from the pane next door. It makes me aware, vigilant and tormented. It's a gift and a burden. It's not just seeing. It's an overall perceptual tax, a sensory ingestion that informs the way I encounter the relentless world around me.

I hear a word and I instantly conjure every definition of it and even the tangential definitions of similar words. I've often joked that I have a hearing impediment, which is cute and casual, but is actually true. Well, a more accurate term would be an "interpretation impediment." Most often I figure out the intended meaning of a term and therefore function quite well amongst the fertile world of spoken syllables, but too many times to count I'll pin my assumption tail to the wrong donkey and I'm left confused.

Now would be a good time to share examples but I'm at a loss. My memory fails me. Sorry.

It makes me bad at lyrics. I don't listen well to songs. I've known people that can hear a song and immediately sing along as if they were there the day the napkin got scribbled. But me? I get tripped up on an un-understood word in a song and I focus on that word, my brain desperately processing the possible meanings, like a computer in a hurry to answer a Jeopardy question. Meanwhile, the song has propelled forward, dooming subsequent lyrics to the bin of noise. I just don't hear it right. I don't. And so over the years I've learned to file most singers' voices under the 'instrument' label. Never leave me in charge of the music to play at a funeral.

Ooh! Here's an example. For years I thought that song with the lyric, "Going to the chapel and we're... gonna get married" was "Going to the castle and we're... gonna get married." I was certain that was the lyric until a beautiful laughing girlfriend pointed out my poor aim once it came up somehow. I coulda sworn it was castle. To me, getting married at a castle is much more appealing than at a chapel. It made sense, so that's how it got etched into my brain's hard drive.

It works for emotion, too. All these angles. I'm highly emotional, even though I spend most of my calories hiding it. It's a real fucking burden. It's enough of a challenge to struggle with the insistent presence of my own emotional reactor's output. Add to that my ability to absorb the emotions of those around me. Jubilence. Tears. Peace. Anger. Fear. Worry. Anxiety. Ease. Panic.

Discomfort and awkwardness are two I specialize in, or have at least been honing in the last two or so years since I started doing stand up comedy. I attend many many many shows and I'm fascinated by the entire interaction. I know what it's like to be on both sides of the microphone. Doing it aside, watching it is always a ready lesson in the hows and how nots and in the ripples of shiny shit puddles we all struggle to rise above. The iguana community could learn from my dual sightedness. I always keep one eye on the performer and one on the crowd, seeking the most nutritious insect morsel I can glean. I see someone sitting stiffly and straightening their sleeve and I immediately want to rescue them. I see a comic glance around, brain racing, confused, self-focused, being bitten by the slow accumulation of dumb mistakes and I empathize.

Empathy. There. One of my favorite words. That's the word I've been trying to talk about here. Except it's loaded. Because a lot of people confuse empathy with compassion. They're not the same thing. Empathy is compassion without the caring.

I really don't care. I mean, on some level, sure I do. I won't stand aside during true suffering, physical pain, or acute desperation. But by and large I chalk up the emotions of others as ingredients in the shit sandwich existence foists down our uncloseable throats. Maybe that's what death is: the final insistence that we're not gonna swallow any more shit. Final breath. Relief from the onslaught.

It makes me tremendously good at keeping secrets. Tell me whatever dumb crazy stupid sinful dirty thing you have to share and it'll go straight to the copper-wired cement dungeon of my mind, to be buried, neglected, but most importantly, forgotten about. I like gossip, sure. I'm human. It's provocative. But I simply don't give a shit, nor do I care if others give a shit. That's the secret to secret-keeping. I'm a safe-deposit box that immediately erases whatever you put inside me.

It's the absence of compassion. Seeing, not caring. Feeling too much, not feeling anything at all.

This is all probably why I find the sound of a crying child so painful. Because I don't like experiencing that kind of honesty. It's too pure. This seems hypocritical but I make an exemption for children. They don't know better. They deserve neither blame nor credit for the silly actions of their impulsive instincts.

Adults, however? Adults should behave, or at least they're expected to. You have to draw the line somewhere.

This is why I don't expect anybody to care about me. Because I've proved my adulthood readily with my aging skin and early-onset baldness and bouts of bad credit and paying rent and masturbating to conjured images of other adults. I'll suffer just fine, thank you. Don't feel sorry for me. This attitude contributed to why I broke up with my girlfriend. Cause she was filled with care. She had a sincere ability to love, but I refused to let her do so fully, because I couldn't share my hurt. And because I lack the good sense to let myself feel something sub-surface; to expose someone I care about to the trauma that swirls under my waters. It bubbled up occasionally, sure, but I always beat it down. "Let me in," I remember her pleading.

Never did.

In two years of dating I never told her about this blog.

Maybe I'm not as adult as I think I am.

Easy. Not so.

2011-04-02T17:56:00.000-07:00

So easy to feel. So easy to sing. So easy to laugh. So easy to weep. So easy to be human. So easy to breathe. And cry.

That's the first gift we're all given, this life. We get the ease of being human. Being beautiful. Being graceful. Being challenged. Being ready. Being sweat-ready. Even the ugly amongst us are beautiful in the way they normally aren't.

Because they exist. They persist. The always will. They are us, down to our cells.

The mitochondria churns, no matter how society superficially sentences an organism to it's chambers of strata. Cells divide. Teeth resist. Eyes wet. Muscles contract. Souls bleed. It's all beauty.

Even the most pathetic amongst us is more beautiful than the largest and shiniest piece of granite. Even more than the sweet smell of speed-burnt tire. Even more than the custom bubbles of a private recreational submarine. Even more than the shape of a woman's thighs in genuine moonlight genuflexing atop a blanket next to empty bottles and ignored cheese and fruit unplundered and sputtering candles disrupted by lust... all along the disapproving shadow of an old tree...

Or the stink from armpits. Of hard work. And hard fucking.

We define ourselves by our flaws, our contrast in persistence, how easily we weep and bleed, but our beauties unite us. We gravitate to the seams.

Cell-division and hunger and horniness and the anger of persistence and the ease of forgiveness and how our memory is merely a manifold well of gravity, a chamber of physics propelled by the cruel and loving force of survival, a wanted haunting of never-discovered corridors, an electrical and chemical configuration of electrons and neurons that even our most-talented scientists have yet to figure out.

My brother is one of those scientists. He's about to be a professor. And not one of those shitty professors. He's gonna write books. Textbooks. His brain is that huge. It's massive. Not big in space, but big in storage and recall. And unlike most brain scientists, my brother knows how to communicate with humans. He's taked lessons from me.

We all are given a chance to slay our dumb selves. For some this is a gift and a ritual and for others this is a chore and a project.

For me, it's a process. I'll probably never finish.

It's likely both both. I know intimately my dumbness. And I know the paths of healing. Or I've heard of them.

So good to heal. To feel. To live. To breathe. To smile. To shit. To weep. To be frantic.

To forgive and let the anger become the vapor it was before it formed around me.

Red Whine

2011-03-11T20:10:00.000-08:00

I awake each morning to the sound of waves. It comes through the window in endless and persistent rhythms. It greets me and comforts me and reminds me of the energy of motion, the soothing pulse of a pumping planet. The sound is of passing cars. Sometimes the waves honk at each other.

Trucks rumble. Police cars and ambulances screech. Motorcycles show off but scooters, scooters make a peculiar and distinct sound. A high-pitch whine. Rare. I like to imagine it's the sound of a paleolithic dragonfly passing by on its way to a paleolithic leaf in search of paleolithic pussy. Back then dragonflies had monstrous wingspans, two or three feet, presumably because that was the trend at the time. Monstrous to us, of course, but perfectly normal to them.

We're all a version of normal.

Only a few of us, and I mean US, ALL animals and plants that ever lived, are lucky enough to die in a fossil-friendly zone. These are the immortal. Stories told in stems and teeth and bones, written by creatures and transcribed by scientists.

I hope I die in a muddy river bank that is then covered by a thick layer of volcanic ash. Some day the reptile people who replace us will find me and make conclusions about my diet and my lifestyle.

"He ate a high carbohydrate diet, mostly popcorn and twizzlers and sand. He was above-average height," they'll say. "His cranium was smooth, indicating a high position amongst his people. His thumbs were robust from frequent communication. His vertebrae was thick. He must have carried a lot of weight on his shoulders."

"He is our link to the past."

Such is the folly-filled mind of a brain during a moment of self-importance.

Light is my enemy. Dark is my enemy. Shadows are where things make sense. The gray area, where things are uncertain and undefined.

Although I do admit I have night-lights in my apartment. Orange in the kitchen, green in the bathroom, and aqua blue outside the door to my bedroom. Anyone who's stubbed a toe on the way to empty a bladder understands the value of a few smartly place night lights.

Also there is the street lamp light that bleeds through the blinds of my two windows.

I hurt someone I care about recently. I hurt her deeply. I hate myself for that. But it was necessary. To not hurt her was to hurt her more. I don't understand it either but it was the right thing. Her pain is my shame. I'm still processing. Chapters end. New ones begin.

She's the kind of person for whom sunshine exists and I know she'll bloom again.

An old story. New to me. But old and tireless and always a trenchant reminder of reality's insistence.

Persistence, really. That's a better word. Reality persists, no matter the otherwise.

Denial is the saving trait of humanity. The ability to fool ourselves. Sure, we're good at fooling each other but we're experts at fooling ourselves.

I was looking at the pages of a book recently. Not reading. Just looking at the pages, at the preciseness of the cut, at the right angle, the glue of the binding, the organization, and at the depth of the thinness of the pages, how frail and how strong, and of the permanence of the ink printed on each page, the sequence in which letters were assembled in order to speak, to speak a silent voice inside the mind, words and syllables come to life in a trained brain, imbuing grace and wisdom into the reader. How powerful, such a simple thing. How simple. How malicious and benign. How sleep leaps from the page onto a pillow-bent neck and head... Because of the silence and focus of reading, the stillness of one thought. That is the gift of reading.

I think of the massive and powerful industrial machines that make these books, these mind-bending behemoths of sound and oil and gears and blades and printing wheels and how their real power is the power of dissemination, the power of lucidity.

I cannot sleep to silence. Silent rooms are my bane. My mind is a cacophony. It is filled with a torrent of shit and laughter, a swarm of insects swirling about above a lake of fear and confusion. It is the storm on Jupiter. Perpetual. Too many unlanded thoughts. Tomato splatter. The shape of leaves in a waking tornado. A poet's sloppy orgasm.

When I was a child there was a rumor that the ink in pens was made from mosquito eggs. This discouraged us from writing on ourselves. Eventually I learned that this was not true. But if somehow it was, I'd never stop scribbling.

After a life of being lost, my dream is to die in a place I will be found.

2010-02-20T22:14:00.000-08:00

Ask for it. Demand it. Insist.

Sometimes I think about what would have happened if as a child I ran with scissors. Or crossed my eyes too long. Or ate with my mouth open.

Or stared at the Sun, something I still struggle with. It's no small task to not stare at the Sun. Ask any beauty addict. It's like asking a sunflower to break eye contact with its staring partner, to blink in defiance of that which gives it life. To turn a solar petal away from heat and light. To deny the proper rhythm. Sunflowers take a nightly bow, thanking the heavens not just for the attention but for giving it a reason to get a good night's rest.

So it can do it all over again.

We are penitent sunflowers saying daily grace.

My other thoughts are of shadows, of their formation, of how they writhe against the edges of sight, how they cool the spot beneath a tree, how they define space we aren't sure what to do with, how between the fingers of lovers they stop existing, how they are cast and re-cast, how beautiful they are not just because but because they highlight light.

Paintings need frames.

I think of seeking minds in seeking light, a room of angles and attributes defined by shadows made by intertwining limbs. The deepest are under small tables when knees and hands interact in unseen ways. Warmth can be shared from one capillary to the next, a place where there are no shadows.

Warmth is sought. Heat. Intensity. The burning Sun.

2010-02-03T02:14:00.000-08:00

I live the life of a fool unbound.

I'm uhinged. I drag my feet, finally. I've learned enough wisdom to be selfish. I've quit caring.

Peace is blurry perception and the ignorance not to care.

Problem is I was born with perfect vision. I was born with perfect care. I was born with radar, with an air-traffic control tower, fully-staffed, not just with the best blip-readers but the rookies and apprenticeses and the temps and the paranoid schizos who warn of vectors like wise men warn of wind. Problem is... I'm tuned in.

I'm well-trained to notice the little things. I hate the little things. I use the word hate only in the most specific of ways.

I cherish. I cherish deep and shallow shades of grey. I cherish the potential of Man. Even better is the potential of Woman. Her crinkle, her squint. Her longing to wrangle knowing embraces. I cherish the mind of the woman that finds this sentence simple. Her eyes locked, her pretty blues speaking volumes in silence...

She's a soft wind, a ponderous minx, a steady section of gravity. She's irreparable, she's a beehive, she's a wasp nest, she's perfect.

She begs for answers more than me. But she seeks... she always seeks...

no more perfect

2009-11-24T23:01:00.000-08:00

There is no more perfect shape than a circle, which is why a woman's body is made of circles.

I think of...

2009-10-25T00:15:00.000-07:00

I think of the dying viruses on my steering wheel. I think of the tennis ball hairs that drift away from center court. I think of lava flowing through a burning house. I think of the dust that settles upon a grave during days of no wind. I think of the distance between a heavy coconut and a cranium about to crushed. I think of the minuscule shadow of a single grain of sand, despite the enormity of the beach. I think of deep mines and the timbers that kept good souls from being crushed. I think of the moment when one of those timbers gave way. I think of the eye contact made between poetic and disgusting orgasms. I think of the shape of a bean in a hungry child's stomach. I think of the fairest gender and how she exists within the folds of the deepest sunset. She's a line between paint. I think of the shape of her smile and the depths of her dreams. I think of the photos of ancestral galaxies, billions of years old, billions of years distant. I think of the always gentle upper lip of a woman. I think of the spot of dried salt on a tourists sandal. I think of the human race, that we are a symphony of souls scratching out an existence amongst a chorus of silent rocks and bending branches.

I think this whole experiment is silly.

If God has a sense of humor he hasn't stopped laughing for thousands of years.

Nothing so benign would create something so malignant as cancer. Or bipolar disorder. What sick fuck thinks of that?

Nothing so benign would allow young minds the atrocity of fearing death before the age of ten.

One of our great shames as a species is that we're born with the ability to experience shame.

We're also born with the ability to hold our breath underwater and with the ability to support our own weight with our newborn grip. Ask me to do that now and I won't hold a candle to a dangling newborn. Most people don't test this fact, not even those who live along steep cliffs and balconies.

I'm rambling because rambling is all I know to do. I'm not still enough for moss or mushrooms to take over. Not these thoughts. My mind is a tumbleweed, a bouncing bundle of wind-born bramble that drifts across the parched Earth in search of fertile patches. It's an oblong kite. It's a computer virus of poetry. It's a breath between hiccups. It's the orgy of stuffed animals and prizes in the box next to the exit of a big grocery store. It's the pattern of pigeon shit next to a box of spillt crackers.

We win by smiling.

I think of the peak of human experience.

2009-10-05T00:37:00.001-07:00

I write this post for curious eyes. Here, this space, is where I deposit words. I make a withdrawal from my mind and I leave the remainder here for YOU to peruse. Thoughts, those that I can make sense of, are leftovers from the chaos that is my mind. Read them like you read the pattern of ash after a fireworks show. It's an honest picture, but understand that most of it drifted off with the wind.

I remember being a child and marveling at the minds of adults. So wise, I used to think. So smart. So responsible. So brave, always protecting us kids and looking out for our best interest. So unwilling to let us down, us kids. So comforting to be protected, to be looked after, to know that no matter what I'd be looked after and supported. No matter how horrible I felt, at least adulthood would be an easier go.

Easily pleased, those adults. Smile, nod, say something cute. Don't shit in the pool, sleep when told, get good grades, keep up appearances. The rest will take care of itself.

Inevitably I hit the age of ten.

The greatest skill a parent can teach a child is how to handle disappointment. Most parents are able to deliver a curriculum of controlled failure, moments that scream the following lesson to the absorbent ears of a child: Don't expect too much. This is it.

It always had a tone of apology, a well-deserved apology, an apology required by our instinctual ability to hope for better.

"I'm sorry I brought you here." That's why I choose to never utter that sentence. I choose to not reproduce.

Sad part about that is that the world could use more people like me. Smart, competent, analytical, restrained, sensitive, tall, filled with perseverance, optimistic despite the odds, high pain tolerance, a ready, hungry, wanting smile, a believer in the good parts of existence, the hugs and laughs and good swallows of good foods.

And flawed. Very flawed. When I shed a layer of skin the blotches don't go away, no matter how much I try.

We are electrons, us people, just little sparks of energy, flowing in one direction or another. We aren't water, we aren't wind, we aren't lambs, we aren't grocery-store stockers.

Well, maybe we're currents. We flow. Maybe we're water. We boil. Maybe we're wind. We're gentle. Maybe we're lambs. We fear. Maybe we're grocery-store stockers. We can't wait for the next thing.

Maybe we're big dumb dirty apes who dream between moments of instinct, like when a moth rests. We know the next flutter is just a few beats away but there we sit, persistent, pondering, grasping the immovable brick wall, awaiting a wind to arouse us or a rain to disturb us or we merely count down the dwindling moments of existence. Drawn forever are we towards the light, towards the brightness that washes away our inherent darkness.

Only in rare moments do we pause and appreciate how silly the whole thing is.

I've watched wisps of smoke dissipate into the sky past the light radius of a campfire and I've been jealous. You lucky molecules. Stop showing off your curves.

Heat bleeds.

Death is the shadow of a burned out lightbulb. It exists forever but it was there before we came here and glowed.

This Planet of Ours

2009-03-16T21:59:00.000-07:00

Will the Sun explode before the Moon crashes back into the Earth?

This is a question that concerns me. I have glanced back at the whole of humanity and with a blink I've looked at our present, which has summoned severe and drastic questions about our future. And about these futuristic questions I am compelled to wonder how this planet of ours will end. Will it end like a roller coaster or like a dying roller coaster-- mid-stream, with so many thrills and and lungs yet to be unsatisfied, just another orbit of blood-filled heads and regretfull ticket-purchasers... or in a moment of screams and chuckles and camera captures?

why do I ponder such awful dilemmas when the moments that matter are tears of dreams achieved and dreams missed? How many hopes have been born and died amongst pillow drool?

I do not think it is fair to claim for myself the rightful awareness of an amateur philosopher... although I have seen dirty fingernails. I've seen blown-out tires. I've seen worn-out mailboxes. I've seen the dimples of nervous women and the thigh-related wrinkles of lust. I've swam in toxic streams and crossed clean rivers. I'm a water bug on the currents of life. I'm an insect with a conscience. I'm a feather in the wind with a shadow and a past.

I have learned to conflate philosophy with wisdom. I'm a thinker and a fortune-cookie reader. Both are umbrellas that merely serve to help the smart among us keep their shoulders clean of pigeon shit.

Is there anything more metaphorical than bird shit from the sky? The answer is yes. Bird shit from the sky is merely an occurrence of nature, like pollen or mayflies or mardi gras or other forms of lust. It takes skill to speak in riddles but it takes balls to speak in truths.

Truth moment: I am flawed. Truth moment: my life is worth more than I can perceive. Truth moment: I have loved. Truth moment: I dream more of the happiness of others than I do of my own. Truth moment: We are all leaves and we all deserve our share of sunlight. Truth moment: I am chlorophyll.

This blog entry ends with the following thought: Life is a bad case of poison ivy on the skin of time. We itch for attention. We scratch for love. Our fingers seek both and often find neither...

The best among us are durable toothpicks. We are misdemeanors of time. We count clock-ticks and laugh while the rest hold their breath. Humans and reptiles are the original suckers...

2008-12-28T22:35:00.000-08:00

Every man should have himself a pair of slippers. This is not young man's wisdom but I am happy to borrow it from prior generations, the comfort of having warm feet, the ease of stepping across a mop-hungry floor free from the anxiety-causing crumbs and morsels that stick to the bottom of an unprotected foot, the gentle defiance of gravity. Slippers; durable hugs for the foot. And why not? These peds work hard. They're life's tires.

Nothing quite as satisfying as homemade toast. Huff huff. That's right. Unlike the legions of Wonderbread lever-depressors I'm no ordinary toaster jockey. No, this night I browned up a few slices of homemade bread. Loaves made a week or so ago during a winter spell in which heavy snow traded shifts with tit-tightening air to conspire to keep us Northerners indoors. Yeast-risen breads made mostly out of curiosity but also out of a desire for delicious smells. "Baking is so hard," they always say. This turns out to be true -- there are many ways to screw it up. "You really have to measure just right!" Also true, but I've found measuring to be one of the easier aspects. Like any form of cooking, baking is about decision-making and timing. because of the tactile nature of baking I've discovered it to be an intuitive process. It is equal parts instinct and equal parts "just-fucking-do-it-already!" It's sticky and visceral and it smells like morning in Heaven. Advice: Listen to the dough; it will tell you when it's ready. It won't stick to the work surface or to your hands, but it will be elastic, springy, just slightly short of uncooperative. Proof under a moist towel, grease the pans with your fingers, forgive yourself your sins, use too much spice by a third. That's it. That's life. This night's slices browned just perfectly, warm and ready to accept a pad of cold butter followed by a coat of jar-clicking blackberry jam.

Bread bowls soon. And clam chowder. Chili too.

Moving on...

Oh women, you divine creatures you. So complicated and complex, beautiful and worthy. You puzzles, you roses, you ferns, you insufferable headaches!

Don't buy a grown man a shirt, not unless he points at a shirt on a rack and says to you, "Buy me that shirt. That is a shirt I will wear in public. I will not be embarrassed in that shirt." Are you listening, Santa Claus? Do you hear me? How bout parents and grandparents? You paying attention? (Of course not, only a privileged few know about this blog) Santa could care less, but I know the DNA-mongers that are my relatives do give a couple of arctic shits about their gifts to me. So here goes: Christmas gifts consisting of sweaters and shirts always land squarely both in the I-love-you department but also in the Here-you-go-wear-an-ugly-piece-of-shit department. I unwrapped a nice purple shirt from the dad's favorite hunting store. Collar buttons, dual chest pockets (with buttons (and flaps)) aside, it's a nice shirt, but it looks like something a truck driver would wear to church. And it also looks like an errand, a mission of return upon which I will someday venture in the next 90 days. I will walk away with a flashlight, or some gloves, maybe some tackle. That would be cool.

I live in a building of many doors. There is a gate. Next to the gate is a bank of mailboxes, all neighbors, all strangers. Lucky for them I find a sense of serenity in shoveling snow. So on recent accumulations I've shoveled snow for them a few times lately. After clearing the communal walk it behooves me to also clear the several stairways and doorfronts, all the way up to the kickplate. I've earned a couple satisfying thanks but mostly I've been happy to just see nature beaten back for another cycle. I enjoy the rhythm of shoveling, the silence, the peace, the work of burning calories, just simply so that myself and my roommate and people I don't know can step comfortably on the last few paces home.

*smile*

Smile.

cold fingers, loud palms

2008-12-14T00:20:00.000-08:00

Walked to a friend's holiday party tonight. Wore my black wingtips, the ones that click when walked in, but only in quiet rooms. I stepped carefully along the few patches where the recent weeks' ice had not yet been fully melted by the day's ingress of above-freezing air. One of the houses along the way had a tree displayed in the front window, a bushy pine covered entirely in blue christmas lights. On the outside of the building just below the second floor balcony hung a large wreath covered entirely in orange christmas lights. The rest of the house was dark, at rest. It sat serenely among the rest of the homes on the block. It sat without burden.

Friends and new friends gathered to clink the rims of red and green plastic cups. The apartment was right proper. Pictures in the right place, beds and bathrooms free of blemishes and not a single unreplaced light bulb to be accounted for. Cider, then beer. And laughs and smiles, and the usual eyes about strangers. Meeting and being met. Some women, available or maybe not, some definitely not. Thoughts of hope and frustration, want, wanting and being wanted, sin and decency... all hung about the place like moistened spider webs in a cave.

Perilous is the mind of the self-reflective man. Oh to be stupid and unaware. How eagerly do I strive to achieve the bliss such attributes endow. Genuine ignorance is genuine mercy. I strive to be present. I live with one foot in the past and one foot in the future and I am completely lost. I am not me. I have never met myself, nor have I ever been introduced to anyone as a whole person. I am a dog hair stuck in the bristles of time.

The fire burns.

2008-11-26T22:24:00.000-08:00

In short order I will wake up entangled in my blankets. Soft morning light will permeate the room while I savor the sweetness of morning-- the relaxed muscles, the warm feet, the disobedient eyelids. I will force myself into my chair before the computer. Then I will read news websites and various liberal blogs while pondering whether or not to jerk off. I will decide not to. I will urinate and shower and then brush my teeth. At some point while putting my contacts in (a task at which I am not yet qualified to call myself an expert) I will swear silently at the saline solution.

A dead turkey will be warming to room temperature on the counter. This animal my roommate will soon violate in ways antithetical to the order of the Universe, but these violations will be delicious. It's proteins and sinews will be ingested with pleasure, first by gnashing teeth, then by insatiable acid-filled stomachs. We will be careful not to cross the line between respectful and worshipful. Worshiping your meat is gauche. Respecting it is right.

Grateful.

I will ascend the steps to the kitchen with thoughts of pyrex and precision. My challenge will be to concoct two dishes: mashed potatoes with parmasean and mozzarella and sausage/chestnut dressing made with sourdough bread. Both recipes call for measuring but I plan to rely on instinct and odor.

When squeezed, soft notes of pain course through my left thumb. This is from this night's task of peeling roasted chestnuts. They are defiant little creatures, their oaky flesh protected by two layers of casing. Tonight I learned, however, that, like women, with the right coercion they yield. Tomorrow they will be rough chopped and added to the dressing recipe I plan on attempting. Like Frankenstein of lore I hope this mish-mash of parts is more than its sum. I will cheer and cackle if it rises from the table and delights tomorrow's guests.

The other dish, mashed potatoes, is pure home-cooking, a recipe I learned straight from space. Teevee taught me this one. Digital satellite TV to be exact. It starts with potatoes and ends with love, heaping scoops of saturated and mono-unsaturated forms of love. Salt and cream and butter. Enough to make the heart pump harder than it should... Yum.

Eventually family will arrive and the smiles will be similar to the many and many that have showed up on their doorsteps over the years. They will have concoctions of their own, some to be chilled and some to be warmed, but all to be eaten-- sent down the gullet on one-way missions of digestion and affection.

Not all of the family will be there, of course. This Earth is too big and complicated to allow us all the same bit of square footage on one particular day. Older brother is fertilizing his soul with wife and child in Berlin. Younger brother will be forty-five minutes away but farther distant than anyone I know. A rift exists and I struggle to reach across my half of it, but I do, and I will, because I love him. Dad is in northern Wisconsin with his buddies hunting deer and telling stories and nursing hangovers. For the last twenty-eight years he has had thanksgiving with them, those hard-working hillbilly warriors. Twenty-nine years ago he was here in Illinois during a similar November week while his then wife squeezed out his second child... Me. Apparently I slid out quick and easy; he came back from a pee break and had new mouth to feed. Fancy that.

And tomorrow for the first time my front door will be knocked upon (well, actually, either my cellphone or my roommate's cellphone will be rung when the family finally finds parking and needs to be let in through the front gate) and my Thanksgiving cherry will be popped in delicious fashion. I will host well. Food will be warm, forks will be sterile and family will be family.

The fire burns.

Make my day, Shoes!

2008-11-02T20:51:00.000-08:00

Late last week, Wednesday it was, while driving from the Salvation Army thrift store in Lakeview to the Village Discount Outlet thrift store in Roscoe Village it occurred to me the absurdity of the task to which I had embarked upon. I was costume shopping, gathering the components of an alternate me. I was intent. I had a design in mind, one of manly kind.

At the first place I spent a good eight minutes pondering the purchase of a woman's belt. It had a large buckle made of silver (shiny metal, not real silver, of course) and those turquoise rocks that are smooth and glossy, whatever those are called. It was $4.50. Pricey. It was just about what I wanted for my costume, considering that it was a belt with a buckle that was large. I passed, figuring I had time to explore other sources, and besides, I was really there to find a pair of boots. That's when I noticed a sign pointing me upstairs. TOYS, KITCHEN, SHOES, MISC.

Stairs hurt just slightly these days (minor softball injury, but that's beside the point)

The upstairs was a flea market of hope and dashed hope. As I moseyed along the aisles, hoping I might find a shelf or case stocked with donated belt buckles or that I might find the best cowboy boot section in the city I glanced down the dishware aisle and saw stacks of plates and dishes and cups. Tucked amongst each tower of plates grew a peculiar weed-- scratched and discarded serving utensils, spatulas and slotted spoons, grill forks and pie servers, potato mashers and kiwi cutters. Something about the stacks of plates gave me pause. In a moment of impromptu archeology I had a vision of a history of meals eaten and served, macaroni and hot dogs pecked at by hungry three-year olds, chicken breasts hacked asunder by dull but determined butter knives, tears and wine spilled over tablecloths, candle shadows and dimmed chandeliers, witness-bearing dining gear to heartfelt graces and heartfelt dining room table sex, Thanksgiving scoops of homemade cranberry sauce, sticky Easter saucers of sugar birds, grandmothers imploring to eat more, have more. Just another slice. Grandmothers like mine, women forged and wired in an era in which food was love. (Although it's good that that era will never die)

"Dude, it's just a bunch of used plates and forks. Relax."

So said the voice in my head that keeps me from going insane. I relaxed.

I bought the ugliest shirt that I could find that fit me. And I bought a "Captain Jack Sparrow" hat. At the last minute I grabbed a set of two-pound dumbbells. They were for my mom, for her to use for her daily exercises since she and I have talked about how some light weights might help her recovery. There is so much one can do with simple dumbbells, I always tell her. Although truly they were essentially just another gesture, a heartfelt effort to help a helpless soul. Through no fault of her own she would most certainly ignore the gesture. That's just the way things are.

I'm ok with that. Why hurry to worry?

At the next store I found what I was looking for. The shoes were in the basement. Even though it was a different thrift store company it had the same odor of disinfectant and infectant. "Wash your hands when you get home," is the common thrift store shopper's advice. Good advice, indeed, although it's probably just as applicable to any day of existence in which a person touches something other than his own teeth and nipples.

In that basement I wandered along the shoes and boots, discarded carcasses of former feet. Just as I was about to give up hope I spotted a pair of caramel colored cowboy boots. They were mangy and marked, but most importantly they were men's. And they were my size.

Stepping into them I found myself two inches taller. So long had I longed to see the world from the eyes of my 6'4" brethren and now here I was, in the basement of a thrift store soaring above the racks at the women of miscellaneous origin and their children of American origin and their sad search for winter clothes.

I was tall and proud and wearing man-heels. They were perfect.

That's when I noticed a pair of Steve Madden's. They were a handsome, casual leather shoe of slight use with no outstanding blemishes. Turning them over the soles presented a story of limited wear and tear. "Sure, I can buy Halloween gear at a thrift store... but can I buy regular street wear? Can I wear some other man's shoes?" I wondered. I'll wear thrift store t-shirts, but shoes? Can I wear the shoes of some sad man who gave up on shoes? Hell no. I make good money. I already have good shoes. I took a breath of that basement, of the shoes and vcr tapes and embarrassing ties that should never have been made and I realized that my dilemma was one not likely shared by the average thrift store shopper. I gave in to the curiosity and I tried them on and they fit like a designer oven mitt. Not too tight, not too loose, and they would would protect me from temperatures up to 700 degrees. They looked right fucking proper under my jeans. And they were $4.

So I bought them, and they look great. I will wear them often and I will carve new memories into their soles, and I will soak their material with foot sweat, with the odor of me.

The cowboy boots were fantastic, by the way. But I had to go somewhere else for the buckle and the western shirt and the cowboy hat. The antennae I made myself... the story will continue... someday...

Man Seeks...

2008-09-09T22:31:00.000-07:00

I'm in the process of writing a profile for a popular online dating service. No, it isn't a rehash of all the depressing shit you are likely to read in recent entries of this blog. Most of that is crud, grime, waste: scrapings from the greasetrap of my mind that have been deposited here like unwanted sweat. No, this profile is sweet, honest and hardened, it's an off-frame snapshot, a mystery confessional, a pixeled introduction of a pixeled boy to pixeled girls whose pixels might live within ten miles of me. Nearby girls who might be lucky enough to get to know me.

I've put in a bit of time writing it, stringing together words that are intended to intrigue and attract browsers. I'm not going to lie and pretend it has all poured out of me. This isn't mere poetry of the soul. It is poetry of the future, poetry of promise, poetry of hope. And so I deliberate, reveal, delete, rewrite, charm, ponder, smile and welcome. I enjoy the process of designing my billboard.

I'm completely revamping my approach from the last time I attempted such online hijinks. Back then I was younger and slightly dumber. I suppose you could say I was successful. Dated a few girls, found a delightful complex mermaid to explore, enjoyed the enjoyment of each other, shelved a lot of great memories, but our roads diverged and life went on, the forest of intrigue separated our ferns.

Back then I was foolish, this time I'm a bit less, just a bit. I'm fueled by hope and naiveté-- a condition I don't ever expect to completely shake.

It's been too long without: too long without eyes made across a room, without knowing smiles, seeking fingers, eager embraces, weekday fits of desire, weekend marathons of the same that are never long enough. Too long without an exploring partner, a motivator, a challenger-in-chief, a bed-warmer, a leg-locker, a mind that enchants, a body I can have, another's rhythm, a selfish thought who craves me. A complex woman in whom to be lost, and hopefully to be found.

I am a healed heart. A deserving, insistent soul. I am ready to love. I have love to give.

It is about wanted sweat.

words, wanting, waiting

2008-08-31T02:13:00.000-07:00

Hello you. I'm somewhat drunk but not so horribly that I'm unable to string two or three words together. Guess you could say I'm just having thoughts of a particular girl in a particular place in a particular time, thoughts of someone who can't hide from me and who I could never hide from, a girl with piercing, getting vision, eyes that penetrate and read, ears that perk to the proper wavelengths, a nose that senses the smell-worthy impulses of a fool, a set of hands that seek the poetry of fingertips, a heart paved with yellow brick, a girl who is right now mummified under white sheets of comfort, soft fabrics that drape to the shape pulled just to her nape, who breathes soft ribbons of air into and out of her lungs, who will wake up with crusty-cornered eyes, who will wake to the vanishing broth of depleted dreams, and who will struggle with the weight of her mightiness, unsure how to wield it, unsure how to hold it in poise, how to pose against the noise, how to grip the hammer and spark the anvil, she knows how to scream at the clouds but she cannot clear them from her search for constellations and comets; she shouts true and honest and with just the right amount of silence, and for this she is rewarded with times and finds of pleasings seams, shapes from the heavens that trickle softly down over the skin, moisturizes the soul. She is a beast and a bastion, and she knows only the notion of being good-willed, good-hearted, hard-won, iron-wrought, slip-fingered, furrowed meanderings of a peaceful soul in a world of soup and lava.

Messy Hickeys

2008-07-13T21:28:00.000-07:00

Silly shitty poetry writers and garagebound songsmiths write too often of the moon and her phases. It's been spoken of as if she was a watchface that requires pondering. Rubbernecking the heavens leaves only messy hickeys. They write of broken hearts and escaped loves when they should be writing about spider thoughts and the threads of sinew that hold together a slice of pastrami. Why pastrami? Because it's there! They wail about war and injustice when the actualities of existence are sidewalk cracks and offered elbows, broken shards of glass and the dying sum of old sun-powered calculators, band-aid residue and dryer lint, shipwreck survivors and easygone newspaper ink. Power, money, women; what king or pharoah wasn't lustful? Or entitled? And which of them grasped at their golden threads at the moment of death? When a crude peasant's crude spear rightfully pierced a gilded artery and delivered the exclamation point such an absurd life needed in order to die proper. And didn't that peasant smile at the sight of the steaming blood just like his own? Isn't life just about having a soft pillow to place behind one's back, whether after a hard day of slaving or long day of pharoahing? People write of what shakes their windows. They either peer through them into the outside and imagine the ingress the shadows are intent on making or they gather piles of piss and mercy that must be withheld by the silicone sheets that glow yellow against the evening's sleepy eyes. Menu's are browsed with determination and vigor, as they should be, because food is often the best part of a person's day. I've posited that the most common story ever told is that of wasted potential, but I'd put forth that such a notion is rivaled by the universality of a good meal. We are fish. When we eat we are happiest. We are lizards. When we do not understand we fear. We are apes. When necessary, often when not, we beat our chest. We are humans. When we love we forgive. When we understand we stop hating. We care and we create. And we wallow in our own greatness. As we should. For who else is there to pat us on the back?

Wood burns.

2008-06-30T23:49:00.000-07:00

"... it burns because it's wood."

That's a line from the song House Fire by Someone Still Loves You Boris Yelstin. Their songs are pretty and digestible, like edible flowers.

I am witness to fire. I'll never understand why it was set.

But like the line goes, it burns because it's wood.

I, Refuse

2008-06-30T21:24:00.000-07:00

I dreamt last night that my alarm clock was green, not that the thing itself was green, but rather that it had green digits: bright, glowing green digits. And a squawk like an extinct bird. That's all I remember from the dream. It was a clock from bizarro world, a clock conjured by my unconscious to confuse and distort me and make me question upon which side of the quilt do I reside. For in reality my actual alarm clock is red and it sounds like a mother hen cooing in the dew of morning.

Why such a detail has velcro and others do not baffles me. Certainly there was more to the dream than a slightly different alarm clock. Could my mind be so simple as to struggle at night with such frivolity? In slumber do I not find myself engaged in grander designs? Flying unassisted, perhaps? Slaying dragons? Rubbing elbows with aliens at debaucherous galactic balls? Showering under waves of liquid silver? Defending my peoples from an invasion of paddle-wielding midgets with quick reflexes? Lust-filled dalliances with Renaissance babes who take thirty minutes to get undressed but are worth it? Inventing new gadgets for grateful lazy people? Being taken hostage by Leprechauns who are tired of being mistaken for the Keebler Elves but sound so cute when they talk they have a hard time being taken seriously by the authorities? Rescuing the princess? Fedora shopping? Volcano humping? Being on the set of the original Star Wars and being the guy who gets to remove the electrical tape from Princess Lea’s nipples? Breaking up a clown fight and going home smeared with blood and pie? Living in a world where mailmen bring donuts to your house instead of mail and are called donutmen?

For some reason I struggle to bring dreams across the threshold; just a few make it through. It’s too much contraband to sneak past the guards at the gatehouse; meaty trolls in sweat-marked uniforms who decide what you may or may not bring with you, casting confiscated figments behind them into a writhing landfill of dreams and nightmares, an impossible pile of odorous images, melting colors, flickering faces, unsought tears, reversing thoughts and unique notions, a pile that could never be inventoried or accounted for and is at turns too bright or too dark to look upon-- ever evaporating, decomposing, returning to the ether, but living nonetheless. Characters dig for the bottom of the pile and escap down ancient rabbit holes, tunnels that lead back to the place where people and aliens have orgies and donuts after a good day of dragon-slaying.

Tonight I will dream and tomorrow I will wake. The dream in between will teach me not to look at the horizon. There is nothing for me there.

Good thing I won’t remember.

From the Random Quote Machine (RQM):

2008-06-25T21:34:00.000-07:00

"What's the matter? Do you have something in your eye?"

"No, but I have something in my diaper."

Hilarious.

I love my nephews.

(Well, technically, my cousin's kid, but he calls me Uncle, which makes him my nephew, right?)

(And don't give me that shit about how if it isn't obvious what someone is to you then they are a "cousin"-- second cousin, third cousin once removed, fourth cousin twice baked, fifth cousin don't give him sugar, blah blah blah. If he's three and I'm twenty-eight and good friends with his dad and his dad's brother (MY cousins), then I'm one of his uncles. Sure, make a list of his uncles and I won't be at the top but I certainly don't belong on his list of cousins. So I'm an uncle. Problem solved.)

(Oh, and FYI, he's apparently grasped the idea of peeing in a toilet but the pooping in a toilet thing has thrown him for a loop. Being that he is three, it's important to clarify why he hasn't joined us porcelain sitters. His grandma reports that while he's cool with urinating he struggles with the notion of poo because he feels that he's losing something important to him, that he's losing pieces of himself. This is why he was distressed by his full diaper, and why I noticed his reddened eyes, prompting my question about their condition. Even at his young age he's acquired a fear of losing parts of his body, which is a good thing. It'll keep his fingers out of light sockets, away from stuck gumball machines and off of railroad tracks. Retaining body parts is important for survival and breeding, especially with how picky women can be, and the child clearly has strong instincts. By next December I'm sure he'll be corn-squirting and wiping like the rest of us.)

(Fuck, did I just I write an entire post about my infant nephew's excretory system?)

Jesus.

nothing, and everything

2008-06-16T22:40:00.000-07:00

I write more gingerly of non-specific specifics than I do of reality. I wallow in vagaries and speculation, self-spelunking flagellation of the mind and soul, awful entreaties of dog-eared dreams. It's a mapping challenge, to navigate these waters. I sometimes wonder if my instruments were designed for a different set of stars, if this whole time I've driven in circles amongst the squid and the icebergs, lost by the confidence of a tool-reader reading right readings in the wrong galaxy, and have henceforth driven myself mad in the process. I've befriended the moon, because she imposes limits, and I require structure.

I am a soldier of simplicity. I've been recently developing a technique for slicing limes. Guests are either passively appreciative or wholly uncaring, as they should be, but they are also free of scurvy. For that, I am happy.

Homeless people often beg for money at exit ramps. I never give them any. They bear heavy crosses of cardboard, scrawled about with their most immediate problems and their sympathetic pasts: vets, christians, unemployed, hungry. I weep that they exist but to my baggie of coins I never reach. I cannot bring it upon myself to crack open the window and transfer some money. I don't want to, that's why.

There is vacancy in their eyes, an affliction of absence not found in the homeful. To beg for scraps and to do so willingly requires reformations of the brain, involuntary reprogramming that excludes pride and ego. It hurt today to not give to a woman wrote on her cross that she had five children. When the light changed and the column of cars drove off, she held the sign to her chest. On the back of it was a picture of two young boys, smiling, their hair combed for photo day.

Such is city life. Tonight I watched a woman wait at the bus stop for the next bus. In her hand she held a gallon of milk inside a plastic bag. She had feeble gold earrings and she didn't seem pleased to be bus-hungry at 10:30 at night. Likely, the milk was not for her. Gallons of everything have become expensive.

I drove past the dunkin donuts where a clerk was shot and killed five years ago, before I moved to the city. It's not a dunkin donuts anymore. Two men argued loudly below the lights of a closed shoe store. By their body language they seemed to care greatly about their positions. Their passion was refreshing. Their existence, however, was somewhat disgusting. It's Monday. Get a job, losers.

Rarefied air soothed each follicle as I drove. Sweet bends of hair made elbow-draping the preferred driving technique for the rest of the way. Headlights diamonds, breaklights rubies. Clean and shiny, the City breathes deep. Her denizens deserve so, they do.

Inside the mind of the collective being we make do with who we are, only occasionally pausing to ask why we are. On days like lately when the blue blanket from distant ridges settles over us it's easy and proper to ingest the peace. Observe the willful wanting of sunlight and its corresponding desire for shade. Without light there wouldn't be shadow and without both we would drown in our own colorful brilliance.

I'm a colorblind pig, wallowing in shit he can't tell is red or green.

At least its warm.

2008-06-12T21:32:00.000-07:00

Into the breech, dear friends. Amongst the shadows we must travel and within the corridors of our eyes we seek the exit. We step lightly upon the Earth, groping forward along the walls for the next corner, seeking the deeply needed turns that keep hope alive, the thought and the notion that around the next bend there might be light.

A glimmer would do.

Skin

2008-06-04T23:14:00.000-07:00

I am impatient to stop getting tired so easily. There are times when I run empty, when fumes are barely enough, when sleep calls like a siren, when the day's chances and choices are vague clouds above the pillow, hardly worth bothering about. These times are too frequent and they are lovely and they be damned to eternal hell.

I am frustrated with the persistence of worry. I am ready to shed the skins of the past before the layers become too thick to bear.

I am a man with too many things to think about, too much to contain. If only it were a problem of sweetness—too much honey for too few jars, too much sunshine for a lazy pontoon, large lots of leftovers… but I speak of a different sort of abundance. I speak of the kind only the walls (gods) understand, troubles whispered against silent ceilings and shouted against road-scratched windshields, notions wrought from iron, hardened not by fire but by the soft redness of the back of the eyelid. I speak of the deafness of caring, the mind railing against a world that spins and spins whether the shout is loud or not.

I speak of shit. I speak of life. There is more than enough to go around.

Sighs and French horns, toy chests and cellos, dinosaur wallpaper and a ten dollar bill, Varnish remover and open floor grates, blue tarp and shredded roofing shingles, neighbors, streetball, big wheels, lightning bug contests, a bike and bricks, an angry dog, a dead one, a missing hamster, a well-meant soul who encircled it all with broken fences. I speak in nouns and riddles because the sentences are not yet ready to be formed. They are there; they form a pool of snakes. They boil below my mind; hissing and spitting, but contained they are and will remain.

Someday a crack will form and the snakes will escape.

I promise.

There Will Be Beer

2008-04-20T16:03:00.000-07:00

Today was in the upper 60s with cool breezes and generous sunshine. Because of this the city is full of grateful Chicagoans. Dogs and strollers were dusted off and put to good use, shorts could be spotted on just about everyone brave enough to display their fallow skin, whitened over the long winter months the way lichen dies during the winter, myself included, children sought pennies and lollipops with an extra bit of delight on their soot covered faces, and women, freed from the bondage of historical oppression displayed their arms and upper chests, delighting onlookers and passersby alike. The Cubs won. It's sandal season.

Although I don't wear sandals. Never have. Not as an adult at least. Just haven't been able to make the transition from sneakers. I think I enjoy too much the thrill of finding a pair of socks so small that they virtually disappear beneath the rim of my shoe. Ankle socks, amateurs call them.
Carwashes and flowers are in full bloom and will be for many months. One tree I had the pleasure of glimpsing was a twenty foot bouquet of white flowers, each a circle of five rounded petals, like propellers, a cloud of white stunt planes emerging from the center in all directions.

And now, I shower, in preparation to eat a friend's lasagna at her lasagna party. There will be beer and wine and laughs and probably peanuts.

the one of writing...

2008-04-08T21:29:00.001-07:00

Well, my new life as a blogging blogger has become quite a challenge. This morning I awoke with nothing but the rosiest goggles, nothing but the highest hopes and honestest dreams. (sidenote: aren't all dream honest? I would think so. Only the truest of liars could lie in their dreams... *thinks*) This morning I pledged to update my blog more regularly, a promise I intend to keep. I awoke full of fantasies of disclosure. Brutal, self-censored disclosure... a slow drip of intended secrets, a sharing, an offering to the altar of word worshipers, a new source of frog shit upon the shore of the bog, noticeable only to the most alert of passing insects until absorbed by the Mud, evaporated by the Sun, or stepped on by The Man.

I woke with impulses of a familiar passion, the one of writing, the one where I sit and think and conjure and imagine and distract myself and scan the brain, flip through the rolodex of long-filed hopes, invoke the skeletons and the bowling balls and the racquetballs, the dictionaries and the shotgun shells, the oily rags and old shoes, the unfinished journals and finished magazines. The brutal realities of the past, the hopeful dalliances of the future and the incessant persistence of the present. The brightest corners of my mind, my brain, my trillion plus configuration of neurons and chemicals and electrons, full of more shadows than a collapsed building, but bursting with a hesitant light...

Ok, I've gotten off track. The purpose of this post was to post a cover letter I found on my computer while dredging up old, dusty files. It's a cover letter that I wrote at some erstwhile time to some erstworthy publication, hoping they might grant me the honor of ink upon their pages and the further honor of being read by dozens, possibly hundreds of people. Even though I'm still unpublished, I can't help but detect the odor of naiveté, the overly detailed taint of desperation, the unmistakable confusion of a writer in his early 20s behaving as such. It's several years old and a part of me hopes it wasn't sent in its saved form. I don't remember, so I'm posting it as is...

(perhaps someday I'll post the story the cover letter was covering for...)

+++++++

The Missouri Review
Address, Address
Address, Address

The Missouri Review:

I'm submitting the enclosed nonfiction piece for publication in the Missouri Review. It recounts the experiences I had during a summer spent crabbing on the docks of Seattle. Rather than look for work, which is what most unemployed people do, I used my time in pursuit of crabs, an activity people lucky enough to live near saltwater have the opportunity to do but one that few seem to know about. What started as an excuse to get out of the house became something I came to rely on in order to add meaning to my otherwise income-less existence. I got a lot more out of it than tasty crabs. I met an incredible array of people, people I would have never otherwise had the opportunity to meet. One need only visit the waterfront to get an idea what the textbooks mean when they talk about diversity. There are lessons to be learned out there and you need only interact with other human beings to learn them. Crabbing was an important chapter in my ongoing curriculum of life. The piece is bookended by the story of a seagull with good aim (it pooped on me) and a man I met later the same day who had cancer and was on an evening break from the hospital. Needless to say, he gave me some well-timed perspective on what it really means to get crapped on.

About me, I grew up in BLANK, Illinois, studied business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and have lived in the Seattle area for most of the last year. I've recently returned to Illinois and now live in Chicago where I clean fish tanks. I am a writer trapped in an unpublished writer's body.

The piece weighs in at 4700 words. I would be happy to accommodate an editor's suggestion concerning length or tone. I want nothing more than to uphold the high standards of writing readers have come to expect from the Chicago Reader. Thank you for your consideration and I look forward to hearing from you.

++++++++

The time has come

2008-04-08T06:54:00.000-07:00

for more posting. It's been too long. I've neglected this poor blog for far too long. I've given it the houseplant treatment and it's done nothing but wait and wilt slowly over time, desperate for another watering. How long does it really take to spill out some thoughts? To tap out a phrase or four? To pour a cup of water into a bowl of dirt?

I'll stop imposing such a rigid filter on myself and simply get on here and write. All I need is a germ of an idea, a seed, water, sunlight and I've got all the makings of readable entry, not to mention of an overwrought analogy. I just need to write. I'm a writer.

My fan(s) deserves better.

Black Cat, White Man

2008-03-19T20:36:00.000-07:00

I'm tired, almost too tired to write. I'm still wearing the jacket I wore when I went out to pick up the thai food I had for dinner, the one I didn't take off when I got home because my living room doesn't ever quite want to heat up, the one I eventually wound up napping in on the couch I got for free from a client. The nap was a few minutes of blissful obliviousness. The jacket is blue and slightly clean. Why don’t we wash coats and jackets as often as we wash shirts and pants?

The couch is a green monstrosity that is too small in which to totally lose myself. In a perfect world I’d have a couch that swallows me whole. It would envelop me so completely that not a single Earthly distraction could possibly distress me. Like some sort of mysterious jungle creature that sits idly among the vines and ferns and appears to be a place for weary adventurers to lay down but is actually a monster that devours its victim by wrapping him in soft pillows and conforming cushions. Its cry the sound of a Sunday afternoon baseball game on television. It digests him the way a cloud swallows a flock of balloons and every once-in-awhile it belches out a small pile of broken pretzels and quarters.

Speaking of not fitting into things, I’m reminded of the day I was home on a visit from college and decided to take a bath. Nothing extraordinary about our bathroom at the time, aside from the various objects inside the medicine cabinet, that favorite place of guest-snoopers and curiosity devils. Although all medicine cabinets are home to numerous stories there weren’t any bestsellers on the shelves of ours. It was a middle class bathroom in a middle class neighborhood in a middle class town. A sink, a shitter, a tub, and the occasional bacterial infection.

The tub was only notable because it was a favorite hangout for our diseased cat, Angus. You’d charge into the bathroom in the process of unzipping and unsheathing, thoughts a thousand miles distant and suddenly you’d be jolted by a small black cat sitting in the middle of the tub. That was Angus, small and sleek, as serene as a pharaoh and immobile as a statue of one. Just sitting, doing nothing but blinking in the slow carefree way only cats are able. If your mind was sufficiently distant it would scare the shit out of you, that freaky little animal lolling away the afternoon in the tub. It would shock you, because of the starkness of his black feline form there in the whiteness of the tub and surrounding tiles. He’d turn his head at you in slight irritation at the interruption and you’d stare at him for a few moments, penis in hand, cat in the tub, and then you’d both move on.

Angus died of cat AIDS after too many late night fights. (Either that or he was sharing needles. Seriously, click here: http://www.vet.cornell.edu/fhc/brochures/fiv.html) After he was diagnosed the vet told us to keep him inside but we were too lazy to bother much about that.

I don’t know what compelled me to take a bath but that’s what I did. The entire act was an exercise in both determination and grade-school physics. I don’t think I was motivated by a desire to get clean, as any sensible person my size would use the shower for such a practical purpose. I’m tall. I have long legs. I could sit in the bath but my knees were out of the water. I could wash my ass and ankles just fine, but to get my knees wet I had to straighten my legs, awkwardly pushing up my back. This part wasn’t so bad. But then, to get my shoulders and head wet I had to slide down on my back and put my legs up against the wall. Only after I was straddling the faucet like a teenage girl would my back and shoulders and head be wet. I was a loaf of bread in the sink; I didn’t belong there. But somehow I managed to sufficiently wash myself, coloring the water an unpleasant dirty, soapy gray. The color of bath water. And I had to wonder who the hell takes baths? Small women, kids and midgets, that’s who. And babies, but unlike bread, they actually DO belong in kitchen sinks.

I should probably take off this coat before it gets too dirty.

2008-02-09T00:13:00.000-08:00

Well I suppose it all comes down to simply sitting my ass down and writing. I don't know what I fear, when it comes to the blog, that is. I know plenty what I fear in real life, when I'm not a set of numb elbows connected to fingers fluttering on a plastic tray full of buttons. In real life I'm afraid of failure. I'm afraid of the ghosts that haunt my imagination. I'm afraid of dressing room needles. I'm afraid of rejection although I stopped caring so I still try. I'm afraid of dying alone. I'm afraid of burning my forearm while reaching for a pizza. I'm afraid of shushing somebody who doesn't deserve it although most people usually deserve it. I'm afraid of not understanding children because as a child I always felt misunderstood. I'm afraid of finding love but I'm much more afraid of not finding it. I'm slightly afraid of heights but I trust my self-control enough to know I will not jump. I'm afraid of infection. I'm afraid the pan-asian place I order from will forget the rice. Again. I'm afraid for humanity but I refuse to submit my resignation from the species as I believe we need more people like me, even though I don't quite know I want to reproduce. I am afraid of clowns although if I may clarify, I am specifically afraid of the sadness of a clown's life, of them getting ready, washing their clown clothes, putting on the makeup, tying their clown shoes, driving to parties and stopping at a gas stations for gas and beef jerky and cigarettes and mountain dew, making children and weirdos smile for three hours then sobbing silently on their way home while they deposit their check at the bank so that they may pay their clown mortgage. I'm afraid of misspelling a word in a letter to a hottie (not really). I'm afraid that the future holds more horribleness than the past. I'm afraid of saying too much and not saying enough. I'm afraid of false dichotomies. I'm afraid of turning into one of those writer fuckheads who writes only of his childhood and his relationship to his parents even though I have plenty of interesting shit to write about when it comes to those two jokers, although I fear my experience, while unique, is sadly not unusual. They taught me both-- things to do, which I love them for, and things not to do, for which I'm grateful they gifted me the wisdom to notice.I'm afraid of other drivers. I'm afraid of liver as a food but not as an organ. I'm afraid of the pancreas. I'm afraid of being eaten alive by ants. I'm afraid we will run out of metal and will have to go back to wooden coins and then we'll run out of trees and we'll have to go back to sea shells, which will be awkward to carry and will give those living near beaches a distinct advantage in raising funds. I'm afraid of being stung by a lionfish. I'm afraid my dreams are more interesting than my life although in my defense I have pretty fucked up dreams. I'm afraid of cats, not that I don't think I could take one down if the situation called for it, but still. I came close to having to take one down once. Fucking cats.

The Sun and the Stellar Structure

2008-01-29T20:59:00.000-08:00

Another day and the Earth has spun once again,
twenty-four ticks on a calendar of tocks.
Another day and the Moon circles her shark,
delivering shade to the night and shape to the tide.
Another day and the Sun warms the fleas who think
She exists to warm them. She would if they didn't.
The Sun does not have days. She does not have time.
She has a soul of boiling hydrogen. She spins and flings.
We are slaves to a sliver of her waste.
She is an open eye and she has one blink in her.
The stars on the rim smile their extinguished flame.
Twinkle, we say, we fawn, and we wish upon them.
This is the fodder of sleeping bag gazers, of child philosophers,
It is the poetry of crayons, immortalized on construction paper
with glue and glitter and the innocent smiles of missing teeth.
They write not of hatred or forgiveness, nor the cruelties of curiosity
nor the love and the passion of unrequited dreams,
nor the kink and the lust of reptilian urges,
nor the emptiness of loves lost or the pallid squalor of love never found,
nor of back pain or disease or of fantastic orgasms or of evolutionary conquest
or of those pathetic roadside shrines to the teenaged victims of physics,
or of a hand held tight under a surgeons knife, or of proud applause,
or of whispered dreams and urgent nightmares,
or of people pressing bodies during moments of laughter and moments of tears.
They do not know they are gifted with giggling and crying.
They do not marvel at the sheer absurdness of it all.
They write of parents and stars and brothers
and the moon and sisters and the Sun. And pets.
The sad among them write of fear and confusion.
The saddest among them cannot hold a crayon.
So spins the Earth. So goes the time.
Each day a drama dies, a life is born.
On warm breezy days the gravity-bound feel the air that teases their forearms.
The rest of us; we are the wind.

The Magnificient Smile

2008-01-24T19:56:00.000-08:00

Click here (links to the BBC)

It's a test of your ability to tell the difference between a genuine smile and a fake smile. It's straightforward and simple. No personal information required. You watch 20 different people form a smile and then you decide if you think the smile is genuine or fake. It's kinda fun.

Bragging moment: I got 19 out of 20. I gots da people skills.

The Space Race

2008-01-04T22:49:00.000-08:00

In space penguins shall be known as spaceguins.

They will be even more cute in zero g than they are here. They will wear adorable penguin space helmets, so that they may breathe and communicate with each other. They will fly in delightful groups hunting space krill-- sprill.

Those meteor showers we all enjoy? Those are schools of dying spaceguins.

Elephants should not be forced to live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Nor in Chicago, Illinois.

I've killed two geese in my lifetime. Both were satisfying kills. I hated it.

I am one of the best parallel parkers in the city.

There is a giant disco on the opposite side of the moon. It is named, "The Moonwalk." It has large blue-green neon signs and is open 28 days out of the year. It serves amazing margaritas and kick ass chili. During lunar eclipses the drinks are half off and the Moon women are just a little bit easier to talk to. During the 60s, back when mankind made modest attempts at unwrapping its potential, the Moon people who hide in the dark were nervous. But now they know better.

An office lady once told me the walls were the color sea-foam green. I thought, "What an absurd name for a color?" I thought the walls were Robin's egg blue. I told her so. Her co-worker agreed.

Is there a shade of yellow called urine-foam yellow? Do women know urine makes foam in the toilet? My guess is most do not.

*sigh*

Elvis is buried next to his stillborn twin brother, Aaron. Both of their graves are marked by six foot long metal covers, engraved with their names and years of existence. Elvis had three TVs in one room and a pool table room with no windows but drapes on the walls and ceiling. I watched a man cut his head open on the exit to Elvis's shooting range. The doorway was low. The man was tall. Because of him, I ducked.

I am one of those learning monkeys. I touched a toaster once, just once.

I am also amazing at wedding dancing.

When I was a child my brothers and I saw a product called "Disappearing Ink." We thought we could cover ourselves in it and rob banks or scare teachers. Disappearing Ink taught us never to trust advertising again.

There will someday be a movie about a murderous barber entitled, "Shear Madness." There will be a film about a runaway train entitled, "Rail Biter." It will be horrible.

Wouldn't it be safer for school buses to accelerate over railroad tracks? It seems there is greater chance of mechanical failure during the gear shifting process of stopping and starting. Why don't they have seat belts on school buses? Is the cargo not valuable enough to strap down? Why do my friends make fun of me for putting my seatbelt on in taxis? They are morons, yet I forgive them. And I will visit them in the hospital when their turn comes.

I will wipe their drool and laugh and laugh.

Why don't people ride zebras?

Did cavemen name their hurricanes?

Does all the hurt mean something or is it just there so that we may enjoy simple things like Spaceguins and debates over wall color?

Here's the best poem I've ever written:

I wish I were a bird in the shade,
Because then I would be envied.

I am sad of being tired.

That New Blanket Smell

2008-01-03T21:01:00.001-08:00

I've been breaking in a new blanket lately, one I acquired while shopping for toys for little girls. I found the blanket in the blanket section, not the toys for little girls section. This was right before Christmas. Rather than actually accomplish my task, which was to buy toys for little girls-- gifts for my nieces, I found myself upon a more feminine pursuit: I was looking for a new set of sheets, as it was time to change the sheets on my bed and I was too busy (read: lazy) to do laundry. Well, one thing led to another and now I’m writing a post about my new favorite blanket. It’s actually a quilt. I think.

Here’s something about myself I’m okay with: I love blankets. I do. They’re great. I love ‘em. I love large blankets, small blankets – even medium-sized blankets. I love all types: quilts, bedspreads, comforters, throws, sheets (they’re a type of blanket, right?) There are probably other words for “fabric used to trap body heat while resting” that I haven’t yet learned. Oh! Sleeping bags! That’s a really specialized kind of blanket. I have a down comforter that I don’t use, although I have two different duvets for it. It’s made for a twin bed but it’s the perfect size for a queen, because it fits perfectly well on the top of the mattress, without draping over the sides, thereby preventing gravity from pulling the down down along the edges in thermally inefficient lumps.

My new blanket still has that new quilt feel. Stiff, a little uncooperative, slightly annoying -- like morning wood. But with continued use and frequent washing, which will likely be infrequent, its fibers will stretch, its seams will ease, its threads will relax. It will become soft and soothing and might even earn a permanent place upon my bed, except on summer nights when a single sheet is all this Peacock needs to nest up for the night.

I'm not sure where this peculiar taste of mine comes from. For those wondering, no, I wasn't that fucked up little kid who couldn't sleep unless he had his ratty, tattered Big Bird blankie tucked tensely against his chest. My childhood was fucked up for different reasons, but not something ridiculous like that.

I guess I’m just one of those guys that likes a good blanket.

Near-Life Experience

2007-12-16T17:38:00.000-08:00

During one of the evening hours on a day just before Halloween I was turning onto my street. Traffic was thick in the oncoming direction but some cooperative soul had paused to let me pass, as people in Chicago are wont to do. I put my foot on the gas and gracefully guided my vehicle left through the gap, relieved of the fact that the days distractions were over. It had been a long, tiring day. I was a mere sixty feet from the alley and just that much closer to being home, that much closer to taking off my shoes, putting on some music, maybe cleaning something, maybe jerking off, watching the news, having an orange... whatever it is people do when they get home.

Then, mid-turn, I saw a girl and a bike, a girl on a bike, a girl on a bike moving really fast, a girl on a bike moving really fast right for me! A girl on a bike about to slam her head right fucking hard into the side of my car!

Reflex, most experts agree, is how quickly a person reacts to a sudden stimulus, but I've come to believe in a different definition. Reflex is the ability to quickly predict where something is going to be and to do so with little time to be wrong. Imagine a wine cork rolling off a table. Good reflexes does not mean reaching for the cork. Good reflexes means placing your hand where the cork is going to fall, catching it and returning it safely to the table and then reveling in the admiring stares of those around you.

Good reflexes means getting your car out of the path of the speeding girl. My foot slammed on the gas. In response the engine snarled like a woke dog but the old beast just didn't have the oomph she once did. She's old, loyal and hard-working but her quick-sprint days are in the past. The car leapt forward just enough that I was able to avoid the worst, which was having her head penetrate one of the passenger side windows of my car, or worse: having her head NOT penetrate one of those windows, the way a paintball hurts more when it doesn't break.

Every nerve in my body was suddenly on alert as blood raced through sleeping capillaries, driven by a frantic heart. A gentle click-tap near the back bumper pulsed through the car. For a moment it seemed as if nothing had occurred, the click-tap was so gentle, so subtle that maybe I had imagined it. But the rear view mirror was a widescreen shot of a girl with black hair somersaulting off a turquoise bike. I pulled over. The engine returned to calm but my heart did not. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.... I've got band-aids. I've got water... Oh shit... I could drive off. I can't. I couldn't. Could I? No, fuck, I can't. I have to help her.

I hit the blinkers and stepped out of the car, uncertain where the days twist had taken me or to which hospital I'd be accompanying her or of what awkward conversations I'd be having with her parents. The girl and her bike lay on the ground. A round, ethnic woman in a purple coat approached with obvious concern, but she quickly made herself scarce once she realized I had purchased ownership of the situation. She was a caring raisin but she obviously had other vines to worry about.

The girl stood up, dazed and brave. "Are you ok?" was all I could stammer out. "I am so sorry. I saw you before it was too late."

"No. I -- I'm okay, " she said with detectable uncertainty. I looked her over and have never been more relieved NOT to see bones protruding through a person's torn skin. She actually looked ok.

"Lets go over here," I said, grabbing her bike off the ground and guiding her to a nearby curb. Behind us traffic ebbed and flowed. One car after another passed the scene, a bike, a guy, a girl. Gas and brake, gas and brake -- feet controlled by tired minds, each one full of shit and sunshine.

"I'm gonna sit. I need a cigarette," she said. I kneeled down next to her, still processing the raw data of the previous two minutes, my neurons conducting an orchestra of bolts from each out-stretched dendrite. These were two minutes I wouldn't easily forget.

Her knee had been skinned a little, tearing further the hole in her pants. She had thick dark hair, white skin and a modest piercing just above her lip. She was probably twenty-two or twenty-three years old, one of those hipsters that populate various neighborhoods in Chicago, the more hurried ones transporting themselves on vintage ten-speeds. I offered her water and bandaids -- even neosporin -- but she refused. All in all she had come through in good shape, a little shaken up, a skinned knee and a tear in already torn jeans. Even her bike escaped injury. I put the chain back on and spun the wheels. No wobbles. It was good to go.

She told me her Dad had bought her that bike several years ago. It was old and he had fixed it up. She spoke of it as something cared for and needed, something she loved her father not for providing but because it was a piece of love from him. I was glad it still had some miles left in it, that my impatience wasn't the weapon to remove it (or her) from existence.

I sat with her until she finished her cigarette. We chatted. I tried to be funny. Her name was Liz. She had a plastic bag of make-up she had just purchased, which she'd planned to use to turn herself into a zombie for a party later that night. Even the jeans she was wearing were to be a part of the costume because of its pre-existing holes. Always the optimist, I commented that she would be a great zombie because now she had a sore knee, a large hole in her jeans and a great story about how she nearly escaped death on the streets of Chicago. She seemed to agree, although a part of me suspected that she probably would rather just be a regular zombie, one without the near-death experience.

Picky, picky.

The Abominable Snow Fan

2007-12-04T20:18:00.001-08:00

Snow has fallen for seven hours and the world will sleep tonight under a blanket of water five inches thick. In the morning scarves will be found, gloves will be matched, boots will be stomped. Winter is here.

From my third-floor apartment I am among the trees. I wander from window to window, peering from each at a different winter postcard. Everything has been whited out, each frosted branch a pixel on the lens of Adams, each car an annoyed commuter wondering where the ice scraper is stashed, each sidewalk a stream of supple cotton. I'm reminded of a table-top model, those intricate recreations of towns, buildings and trees, stoplights and roads, children and mailboxes, winterized by a glittery chemical snow from a can. Foam snow covering foam grass.

I am compelled to go outside though I have no rational reason to do so. Most people wouldn't choose to go outside in weather like this and more often than not neither would I. Call it the wild, call me crazy, call me impulsive or maybe ordinary, but some circuit in my brain seems insistent on being a creature in the haze, a participant of the night, a stomper in the snow. I decide to walk to a nearby gas station to buy a bottle of milk.

On snowy nights, especially the first of the season there is a tangible peace to be found by being out of doors. This peace is fleeting, not unlike the first few minutes of a new pair of socks. At some point during minute four, the socks become used. Before the plow trucks and salt spreaders rumble through, belching destruction upon the tender surface of snow I must join the fray. Slush, grime and slippery reality have a persistent way of overwhelming such halcyon winterscapes. Shovels and footprints and shivering pits of cooled dog shit counteract the effect. Admittedly though, there's something unimpeachable about a single set of Man prints alongside a Dog's happy traipse. Leather shoes and light steppers beware. But during the first few hours of a snowstorm there is perverse safety and perfect silence, the kind of thing that can't be bottled or sold, only presented by Nature for those simple and indulgent enough to enjoy. So for that reason I put on my coat, hat and gloves and step outside. Plus I am out of milk.

My boots are on a shelf in the garage, next to a can of stain and a milk crate of softballs. They fit well. They are familiar. Whatever memory my feet carry these boots elicit. After a quick footwear exchange I make my way down the alley. Save for the crunching of snow beneath my feet there is complete and utter silence. The kind of silence that can only be heard. So rarely achieved or observed. Every surface softened. Rooftops shimmer. A tire track curves into a garage. A woman laughs. The buildings doze.

I am a lone figure marching happily among the chaos of peace.

Fat flakes of snow fall silently from the sky. An uncountable chorus of vertical lines, not a sliver of wind exists to disrupt their descent, their long fall from dark ethereal clouds above. Grace defined, as much as tired minds are allowed. Bushes and trees support ribbons of stacked snow seven, eight times the height of the branches themselves. Each twig confidently sporting a mohawk of white. Occasionally a chunk will break loose and fall to the ground -- absurd flakes that penetrate the surface of the blanket. Nature's unnoticed divots.

The gas station has a line, an oddity at tenpee'em although not unexpected. While in line I grab a red-bull. I am not in need of it but the small child in me is. I need a slight change of consciousness and I'd rather not spin around in a circle in order to achieve it. A hefty shot of caffeine will have to do.

Walking home the street lamps, headlights and windows cast their beams upon the airbound flakes but it is from the blanket of snow on the ground that a mystical Earth has emerged. Instead of the dreary shadow of a late-fall night there is a soft orange glow, not unlike the final seconds of a dying flashlight. There is peace in the air, falling one frozen molecule at a time. It is a fool's paradise. I am given the gift of night-vision, modernized, sure, by many pools of light pollution, but just as pupil-dilating as the moon-driven night travels of the past. I imagine with sadness and comfort that there are still places where pine trees cast shadows at night.

Flights of Fancy

2007-12-02T20:16:00.000-08:00

Going through security at the airport this redhead gets in line behind me. She’s noticeably attractive, and roughly my age. A side glance is all it takes to activate the Single Man’s hottie-dar. Bogey! Bogey! Sudden and exciting such bogeys are also familiar and forgettable. And horrible – horrible in the way sunshine is horrible. Our radar screen is clouded daily by blips and beeps, some deserving of more attention than others but each a primitive calculation of want, need, desire, ego and frivolous but urgent sexual aspiration.

Of the millions just a precious few come in for a landing. The control tower remains eternally vigilant, alert and over-worked but all too often the ground crew sits bored and idle. So goes the airport metaphor.

Anyway, I’m collecting my coat, bag and shoes from the bin. Her items roll through right behind me. I look up at her. She’s already looking at me.

We smile. Both of us. At each other.

A good, healthy, eyes-first-lips-second smile, the real kind of smile. I get a better look at her. She’s beautiful. Warm, brown eyes, smooth skin, radiant red hair. She's beautiful in every cliché way. She's beautiful as defined in the hungry minds of poets and artists and soldiers. She's beautiful in the way a hand is warm. She's beautiful in the way water reflects light. She's probably beautiful when she cries. The moment ends as such moments always do: too soon, nothing said. Awkward but utterly delightful.

I’m putting my shoes back on, as is she. We're sharing a squat. “You always gotta wear your good socks to the airport,” I say.

She laughs, genuinely. She actually found my lame-ish joke funny. “Yeah, I never thought of it that way. No holes in these.” More friendly laughter. Her smile is like candy.

We stand. More banter. It's fantastic.

Then I violate every worthwhile instinct in my body. I put my coat on, grab my bag and walk away.

Why? Why? Why? Why didn’t I chat her up a bit? Why? I’d already done the hard part, the ice breaking. There was at least enough there for further conversation. There was at least enough to say “Hi, where are you going?” Fuck! She was hot. She laughed. She seemed intelligent. Maybe I could have gotten her email or her number or maybe a date or two or maybe sex or maybe one of the versions of love people seem to settle for. Or maybe the kind of love we all deserve.

Or at least another one of those honey smiles. One more smile.

I paused at the bank of arrival/departure TV’s not far from the security checkpoint. I stood there, my best “relaxed” posture on display, gazing upon the rack of screens listing the comings and goings of the entire building, comprising the collective energies of the day's herd of Traveler Sapien. I vaguely remembered where I was or where I was heading but within my swarming head I obsessed over an entirely different purpose. I stood there in front of the those blue TV’s hoping she might do the same, thereby giving me another opportunity to say something.

Or maybe I’ll catch her heading for her gate, I surmised. Or maybe after I'm sitting at my gate she'll walk by and I'll summon boldness and hurry to intercept her, perhaps even on the moving walkway, I'll walk along while she stands upon the conveyor. In 50 years that will be our meeting story, how I chased like a fool after a flower. I'll get her attention, hold her gaze, say something charming, swim in her smile and drown in her laugh. Maybe she'll miraculously be on the same plane as me and she'll sit next to me and we'll converse about every wayward subject on Earth for the full four-and-a-half hours to California, ending with a hug and a promise to call. For her I was willing to shed a million extra heartbeats. At least.

But then she went off in a different direction. For a moment I pondered chasing after her, casually bumping back into her and making some confident comment about how I wouldn’t let her escape so easily or how I needed her email in order to board my flight or about how gorgeous she was and how I absolutely had to introduce myself and say hello. But no. I stood still and watched her disappear behind a wall. The opportunity was gone for good.

Fuck. Fuck! FUCK!

Reality reared its logical head. Settle boy, settle. All in all it was a minor moment. It was pedestrian, ordinary, quotidian, and she might have filed it away as such, forgetting the friendly chatter at the security gate as easily as the price of her pre-flight bottle of water. Stop obsessing you freak; you're on vacation!

But what if that wasn't the case? It was minor, yes, but what if it was minor the way a seed is minor? A life of great moments between two people is usually sparked by a small one. Each and every great love of the world started with a smile. Fire needs kindling.

All I had to do was take the slightest bit of initiative and I would have found out. Instead I walked. I stood. I watched. She went.

Loneliness is a choice, I guess.

Goddamnit.

Shades of Blue

2007-11-28T21:51:00.001-08:00

Click on an image for a better view.

Pic? Sure!

2007-11-27T23:08:00.001-08:00

Test post of an image. I took this on my recent visit to California, the land of weird seed things.

Lower resolution for better web-viewing (hopefully)

California Dreamin'

2007-11-19T20:49:00.000-08:00

California, here I come!

(I probably should start packing.)

2007-11-17T15:48:00.000-08:00

My physical appearance is above reproach. I have strong, healthy bones, including a skull that would make a witch doctor jealous. My vertebrae are aligned like marines on graduation day. My femurs are long and robust. They'll make great clubs someday when the only weapons left with which to kill each other are the thighs of dead tall people.

I've been told my fingernails are very wide. This was told to me by a person whose fingernails were very narrow. I do not remember if it was a man or a woman. He or she was completely wrong; my fingernails are the definition of.

Hair does not grow on the backs of my hands. The skin between my knuckles and my wrist is as smooth and barren as a sand dune. There are a few persistent follicles on my fingers but these are only visible under certain lighting conditions, none of which I care to divulge. The moles on my forearms are exact replicas of ancient constellations, celestial bodies used by those seeking God or spices. My elbows are moist. My shoulders are wide and muscular. When I stand up straight and am relaxed there is a pocket of air between my shoulder blades. This is the calmest pillow of air in the world. Calmer than a dying balloon.

Beartrap designers have studied my back and ass for the same reasons I model for the vase industry. Words like form and function are bandied about but I do not pay attention. Cameras flash. Lasers measure. The ruler freaks and plaster casters flit about like hummingbirds while I munch on grapes and pumpkin seeds and cherry tomatoes. Whole pineapples are often made available. Does no one realize that even I prefer my pineapples carved?

Benevolence restrains me.

Fine suits were invented for lines like mine. My eyes are as precise as scissors and bluer than memories of the ocean. My chin is an atmospheric carving knife, shedding plasma like the underside of the Shuttle.

My tears, when they do, flow with the sadness of a melting glacier.

I have small feet, to confuse my enemies.

When I run I am a leaf in the wind, a ghost on reflective shoes passing brick walls and doorways and parking meters. Mailboxes salute. When I dance I am the pen of Mozart. When I swing I am Ruth. When I yawn indoors the fire dies, just for a moment. I nap like a full lion. When I enter a room people stare. When I leave a room people mutter.

Reality is my canvas. Living is my art. Don't ask for a price. You can't afford me.

Women of taste and value want me. They want me for the joys I am happy to share and the secrets they will never learn.

I have a mind I cannot turn off.

It is full of truths and lies.

It is never calm, except when it is.

Brains! Brains!

2007-11-13T15:06:00.001-08:00

My ongoing obsession with post-apocalyptic disaster movies continues unabated. This past weekend a friend and I watched 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to one of my favorite movies, 28 Days Later. The premise of both films is that the entire island of Great Britain has been infected by a virus known as rage. Wait, it reads better if you call it RAGE, and it even helps to say it out loud in a devil voice, or at least a bronchitis voice. That makes RAGE sound scary, which it is.

Symptoms of RAGE include reddening of the eyes, loss of coherent speech, severe mood shifts, aversion to daylight, uncontrollable twitching, neglect of proper hygiene, spontaneous ejection of blood from the mouth, an overwhelming urge to savagely murder any person not infected with RAGE, and mild heartburn. Those infected should refrain from operating heavy machinery or using motor vehicles.

It's kind of like restless leg syndrome but with more killing.

Anyone unlucky enough to contract RAGE will exhibit symptoms in under five seconds. It doesn't take long for the virus to turn its victim into a homicidal zombie maniac. Though I lack the biomedical training to accurately comment on this it seems to me that this is a little fast. Don't viruses usually have to reproduce a zillion times in your body before they start to mess with you? I don't know. Sounds like a question for my scientist brother. He knows all sorts of shit like that.

One of the great things about the films is that these aren't your grandpa's homicidal zombie maniacs. These are zombies of a different breed than their lackluster, stiff-jointed, brain-eating cousins of lore. They are fast, sporty, aggressive and driven by a bloodlust that is unrivaled in the world of zombiedom. Truly, they are zombies of the Gatorade Generation for the Gatorade Generation.

Anyway, after the virus is released accidentally by an unnamed animal rights group (they were liberating the chimpanzees on which the virus was developed*) it rapidly spreads throughout the population of London and quickly to the rest of the Great Britain. The first film tells the story of a bike messenger who wakes up in a hospital after twenty-eight days in a coma to find the city of London completely abandoned. He soon discovers that things aren't so simple and bands together with other survivors to make do in a world gone to restless leg syndrome hell. It's scary in the good way and was shot on digital handheld cameras, giving it a more realistic, almost low-budget documentary feel, which adds to the intimacy you develop with the characters throughout the film.

The sequel, 28 Weeks Later, is about a botched attempt to repopulate the island after all the infected have supposedly starved to death. A child with two different colored eyes may hold the key to solving the RAGE problem, as he is the son of a woman who appears to be infected but is not exhibiting symptoms. She is a carrier. Unfortunately she gets offed by her husband after he accidentally gets infected and goes on a fairly predictable zombie rampage, infecting and killing others along the way. There's lots of running and screaming and some explosions and military dudes and dark hallways. No intelligent robots, however, but I wouldn't expect such a thing in a zombie movie, although it would have been nice...(hint hint producers of 28 Months Later!)

Whatever. It was a pretty bland sequel, all in all, suffering from many of the things that make sequels the under-performing siblings they tend to be: predictable, slightly corny, more of the same. It was the TV dinner version of the first movie and was entertaining in a similarly vacuous way. I give it a C+, which sounds a lot scarier if you say it in a devil voice, or at least a bronchitis voice.

Damn, wrote too much. I was going to make this entry about my obsession with post-apocalyptic movies and other cultural consumables. Cormac McCarthy's The Road comes to mind. An exciting subject, I know. I'll get around to it sooner rather than later. After all, none of us can be sure how long this pre-apocalyptic world is going to last.

*Lesson for you burgeoning extremists animal rights groups: always check the apes for zombie viruses before letting them out of their cages.

I am not a prick! I said I was sorry I ruined your night!

2007-11-11T18:00:00.000-08:00

I overheard a couple of the neighbors arguing today. Their voices penetrated like wind into the back stairwell as I made my way down to the laundry room, a large ball of clothes held against my chest. Naturally, I paused for a few moments and listened until I realized both that their dispute was none of my business and that if one of them happened to open their back door they would find me standing there outside their apartment in the dark... in the silence... in the cold. I do not have many fears, but one of them is awkwardness.

For a brief moment I absurdly contemplated turning around and going back upstairs.

Drawing on great bravery as well as a need for clean pants I proceeded lightly on the steps, partially to avoid twisting an ankle in the dark, but mostly to stifle the usual rumble I produce when descending the stairs. In so doing I wondered why I felt compelled to be silent. It wasn't a fear that I would get caught attempting to do laundry. In an odd way I felt that if my presence were detected they might feel I was imposing, or that someone was getting access to a part of their life that they did not intend. Arguing is a private sport. Spectators are for debates.

I don't know them well but we've hung out a few times over the past year. Played cornhole a couple of times with the guy. Helped with some furniture. They once had a party with an inflatable kiddie pool in the backyard, around which people lounged, soaking their feet and drinking beer, myself included. The water was cool and had pieces of grass and red plastic cups floating in it. The girl promised to get me stoned when her sister came to visit, whom she described as 'granola'. They're good people. They seem to care for each other. They recycle.

When I got to the laundry room their voices were even louder and clearer. Seems floors are thinner than walls in 100-year-old four-flats. Though I had pledged to tune them out, doing so is like promising to ignore the murderous clown staring at you from behind your closet door. Mostly it was him yelling, defensively and reluctantly apologizing for some weekend crime that involved him falling asleep... and him not knowing how not to disappoint her. She shouted back, matching his tone and volume. I should remember more detail than I do, but the one gem I do remember was him shouting, "I am not a prick! I said I was sorry I ruined your night!" I couldn't quite get the narrative down... and for that I'll have to earn my eavesdropping merit badge some other time.

It was pretty vanilla relationship stuff, but it was the stuff of relationships. People have misunderstandings, they ruin each others' night sometimes, they fight about it and then they makeup and have above-average sex.

When I got back upstairs, my apartment seemed a little emptier, a little quieter.

Ground cover

2007-11-09T15:24:00.001-08:00

Chicago has been named the most caffeinated city in the country, which doesn't surprise me. I can think of four Starbucks within walking distance of me, not counting the ones in the grocery stores or the ones in the grade schools, or the many other coffee shops that are not named Starbucks. According to the article we eat a lot of chocolate and we also drink a lot of pop, or as the rest of you call it, soda. Not to mention there's no shortage of Red Bull and its clones to keep the hands shaking. Plus, the ink in our newspapers is laced with caffeine so that anyone leafing through their daily rag gets a boost just for having thumbs.

Last year we were named the fattest city in America, which did surprise me. I look around and see a city of mostly fit, mostly young and frequently symmetrical people. Of course we will never make the short list for thinnest city but when I'm out and about I rarely observe the undulating jars of jelly that populate the suburbs and surrounding environs. You can always tell you're near one of the tourist traps by the expanding waistlines of the people waddling about on the sidewalks. Navy pier is not only a sea of fanny packs; it's a sea of fannies. And sometimes Asians.

Not that people who live here don't know how to eat. This city never met a chicken wing it didn't fry, a mozzarella stick it didn't dip, a chili it didn't slurp, a rib it didn't gnaw, a pad of butter it didn't spread, a gram of saturated fat it didn't store. Ours is a city that knows its way around a wet wipe and its way into a bottle of Tums.

(Uch.... these photos are taking FOREVER to copy... maybe if I were a better photographer I wouldn't need to take 163 pictures in a day... damn old slow computer...)

Here there are too many restaurants to explore in a lifetime, although attempting to do so is going to be fun, I suspect. The selection is as diverse as a student UN meeting. Just in my little hood I can walk to four Mexican, one Thai, two Chinese, one Hungarian, two Italian, one Guatemalan, three American, two Irish, one Gyros, three Sushi, Two Dunkin', one goofy Vegan breakfast place, ten or twelve bars, and four sandwich places. That's all within a four to five block radius, and I live in one of the "quiet" neighborhoods. Give me a cab or a train and I'm eating on any continent I choose. (Tip for the Antarctican restaurant: Bring a sweater.)

I've always considered Chicago a city of good-lookin', hard-workin', g-droppin' people. We eat, we drink, we wipe, we repeat. And we're a bunch of caffeine addicts, although I'd have to count myself out of the long lines of coffee drinking foam-sippers. I do fancy the pop and the occasional red bull and vodka, but I couldn't tell you the difference between an espresso and a cappuccino if you paid me in chocolate-covered coffee beans.

Pay me in chocolate-covered raisins and we might have something to talk about.

Random acts of textness

2007-11-09T15:13:00.000-08:00

Johnny, 2:55pm: Bowling starts in a couple of weeks

Me, 3:21 pm: Are we signed up?

Johnny, 3:21 pm: Yes

Me, 3:23 pm: sweet, man. That's the greatest thing I've ever heard!

Johnny, 3:24 pm: Yes it is, yes it is

Me, 3:27 pm: I feel so alive right now!

the filth and the beauty

2007-11-06T21:32:00.000-08:00

It's cold out there these days. Not as cold as it's going to be but cold compared to the previous months. I've been experimenting with my cap, trying to find that balance between how much to fold it up without sacrificing fashion or heat. I don't want to show too much ear, lest the ladies get overly excited, and we all know how dangerous that can be....

Caught a glimpse of the skyline the other day. Nighttime. Unblemished. So beautiful. Once I was on a date with a girl who grew up here. We were driving across some bridge and we caught a similar glance and I asked her if she ever gets bored of it. "No, I never do," she said. I saw her a couple more times but it never went anywhere. She was too tall, anyway, almost like one of those skyscrapers.

I see it all the time, the skyline, from every angle-- up close, within the caverns of stone and steel, from the non-slip surface of the sailboat I crewed on, from the softball fields and the smelt-fishing docks, from the various condos of clients at various heights, from the distance of a haze-tinted suburb... and it never gets old. It's forever a presence, demanding nothing but occasional bouts of respect. Too often people ignore it, take it for granted, or are simply too busy and distracted to pay attention.

Do ants know they live on a hill? Do we?

There are times when the skyline catches me off guard. I'm surprised by the geometric poetry of the buildings, their collective majesty, their sense of purpose and permanence. I'm impressed and humbled, and grateful. The density of people, the productivity of capitalism, the filth and the beauty, armies of I-beams, miles of wire, each building a big bad fuck you to the pessimists and the non-dreamers out there.

They used to land blimps on top of the Empire State Building. It takes gall to ride the sky, kiss a cloud and then mount a skyscraper.

In other news

2007-11-02T16:55:00.001-07:00

In other news, if I'm a match, I might have to give my mom half my liver.

*sigh*

Spreading the Joy

2007-11-02T15:43:00.000-07:00

I starred in my own little episode of Sex and the City this afternoon. No, I didn't sit around a posh restaurant discussing the intricacies of my vagina with my bestest gir'friends. No, I didn't put my hair up in a ponytail and type frivolously away on my laptop about my latest bed buddy for my column about sex. No, I didn't divine the Zen of Life from a typo on a box of birth control pills. Was there an episode about that? No? Well, there should have been.

I did, however, go coat and shoe shopping!

My trusty old fleece just ain't cuttin' it no mo'. Actually it's the wind that cuts it, right through it, and that makes for one cold honky in the mornings, especially here in the City of Wind. After considerable mirror-gazing in different colors and styles I just couldn't pull the trigger. I came close on one particular coat. It was robust and not too tight around the shoulders but it was a bit short. If I can find it in a tall on the net I might go ahead and get it.

Then the shoe section beckoned and I wound up selecting a pair of New Balance sneakers. That's right, I call them "sneakers" and I'm not going to change no matter how much you assholes laugh at me on our way to paintball.

At the checkout counter awaited two checkout counter girls. As I walked up I heard the one say to the other, laughingly, "Thanks a lot. You just ruined my dreams."

"You don't need dreams," I told her. They laughed. "Dreams are overrated."

More laughter. "Boy, you just spread sunshine and joy wherever you go, don't ya?" said the one whose dreams had been ruined.

Joking ensued about how she would still be working there when she is seventy years old. All three of us chimed in on the subject with humorous chimings. Somewhere during all that I spent eighty bucks. It was a rather pleasant transaction, compared to most. I mean, what more pleasantness could strangers find than light-hearted banter about giving up hope and failing to find fulfillment?

I left the store feeling good about my little shopping spree. The early November air went straight through my inadequate coat but I didn't notice. That girl was right on. Her sarcasm was both warranted and accurate. Nobody wants to hear a guy say dreams are overrated, even if he's kidding.

Well, off to work on my sex column. This week's subject: The Zen of Life from a typo on a box of condoms.

These sneakers sure are comfy. They make me feel new and balanced.

An odd chore, an odd package

2007-10-29T19:54:00.000-07:00

Last week I found a dead cat in my laundry room.

I came in the back door and went down to the basement to adjust the temperature on my apartment's hot water heater. Some unidentified schmuck had turned it all the way up for some reason, damaging both my fingers and my gas bill. The room inhabited by the laundry machines and the four hot water heaters, one for each unit in the building, was illuminated by a single exposed bulb connected to the ceiling. The cat was lying in the middle of the room.

At first I thought it was sleeping. It was average-sized and gray. I recognized it from the few times I'd seen it in the past scurrying away from me on the back stairs of the building. It looked almost peaceful, lying on its side. I stood for a moment or ten, peering at it, watching with the intensity of a professional fire juggler. Even the slightest elevation of its ribcage would have unleashed a wave of relief.

Nothing.

This is the part where I'm supposed to kick it, I thought. But what if it wakes up? It'll be mad. It might hiss and claw at me. Or what if it wakes up but it's actually only partially dead and is an angry zombie cat, and I have to kill it with above-average gruesomeness all over again in order to restore balance to the Universe? Or what if it's just a simple dead cat lying in the middle of my laundry room? I didn't want to touch it.

Luckily there was an abandoned sweater on the shelf opposite the machines. I grabbed it and lightly swung it at the cat. Nothing. A respectful kick. Nothing. It was entirely dead.

But whose was it?

I went upstairs and penned the following, made copies and then taped to my neighbors' doors:

Ron, Julie, Carol, Dakota & Dude in the basement*

I wanted to let you know I discovered a dead gray cat in the laundry room, right out in the open, so it must have happened today (Wednesday the 24th). I'm not sure if it belongs to-- to whom it belongs. I am sorry for your loss.

-Name, top floor
phone #

*names changed to protect the innocent

The next day one of the building's newest tenants, whom I'd only met a couple times prior, called me asking if I'd heard from anyone else. I told her I hadn't and gave her a quick rundown of how I found it. She said she was sorry I had to find it. There was genuine sympathy in her voice. It wasn't a big deal, I told her, truthfully.

She was sweet to say that. I wondered, not for the first time, if she was single. I plotted to ask her out.

Friday morning rolled around. On my way out the back door I checked the laundry room and the cat was still there, untouched.

So nobody claimed the cat? Apparently, it didn't have an owner. Not in our building, at least. It lied down on a concrete floor and died under a single lonely light. I sure hope I don't die that way.

I called the management company and apprised them of the situation. The girl said somebody would be over to take care of it. "It's been there three days," I said, hanging up. That evening the cat was still there. I triple wrapped it in garbage bags, tying each layer tightly. Then I put it in a cardboard box that happened to be in the garage. The box still had foam peanuts in it. I tucked the stiff plastic cocoon into the peanuts as if preparing it for shipment, taking care to nestle it into the center of the package. I folded the box closed and unceremoniously deposited it into one of the trash cans that stand sentry outside every garage in every alley in the city.

Then I went on with my day.

Holding a candle

2007-10-23T19:10:00.000-07:00

Today I put the finishing touches on the table I've spent the last two evenings building in the garage. It's a workbench-style table with a shelf for storage. It was needed desperately for a spot between the door and a rack of shelves. Over the last few months that spot-- a pile of neglected, disheveled items heaped upon the dusty concrete-- screamed out at me to build a table for it, with shelves, and a 2" lip around the perimeter for clamping. Well, yesterday I heeded the screams and started building.

Tonight, when I finished and had it in place I put my toolbag on the middle shelf. This was the moment of truth. Even though you know your way around a circular saw and a speed square, and you used good screws and carpenter's glue and you measured each cut twice too much, you still hold your breath at the moment you use it for its intended purpose, like tasting a hot pepper you've grown for the first time, or pressing the power button on a computer you've just built. It's one of those moments when the clouds stop to watch.

The shelf held. The clouds nodded and resumed their journey.

That was all the satisfaction I needed. That's all the satisfaction any man needs. When he builds a shelf or mounts one to the wall and it holds the first thing he places on it, be it the saw or drill he used to make it, a candle from a nearby shelf, or his bag of tools, then he is happy. He is complete. He is proven as sturdy as the shelf he just built. Nothing is worse for the male ego than a shelf that fails to hold a candle.

This table is much more robust than it needs to be. It will never hold anything heavier than a case of water/beer, my Dewalt 5-piece kit of power tools, assorted wet towels, perhaps some work equipment and miscellaneous sports gear. But it can hold so much more. The reason? Two words: shoulder cuts. A shoulder cut is accomplished by removing material from the top of each leg, enough so that the top frame sits upon the leg, rather than simply being fastened from the side. The weight of the top is therefore supported by the vertical strength of the leg, rather than the connecting strength of the screw. Oh, whatever. Just know it's all very exciting to the amateur engineer/woodworker/mad scientist inside me.

Okay, that's it, there's another quest. Someday, before I die, I'm going to break this damn table. I'm going to put so much weight on it that it splinters into a million or several dozen pieces! Mwahhahaahhaa!

The best part about the table is the 2" lip. This means I can clamp anything I want to it, except for pets and girlfriends. The lip is key to future woodworking projects. One of my favorite non-sexual fantasies is to someday build furniture, for purposes both indoors and outdoors, and I don't mean hillbilly furniture. I'm talking quality stuff, solid craftsmanship, quality wood, anal-retentive measuring and proper tool usage. Something that will impress myself and my friends. I'd like to build custom entertainment centers, desks, flower planters, cabinets, maybe even chairs! I'd like to build chessboards and custom lamps, picture frames and beehives.

Now, however, I don't have the space, or the time, or the knowledge, or the proper tools, so all I have to go on is my desire and my hope that someday I will have all of those things. And someday I will. I promise that. For now, I'll have to settle for a sturdy shelf.

The guac shall not be photographed

2007-10-22T20:46:00.000-07:00

There are some things in this world that are just simply wrong. Private submarines, paper cuts, clowns on their way to work, exercise tv shows for old people, dying because of improper scissor-carrying (DBISC), girls that wear too much makeup when they don't need to, girls that need to, metal toasters, etc. Well, I learned today of another thing that belongs on that list: Pictures of guacamole.

I'm driving along and I come upon a van. It's covered in advertising for a local Mexican restaurant. Big pictures of their offerings; burritos, tacos, tortas, even rice and beans. It's one of those goofy tall vans, you know, the ones that look vaguely European. Covering the entirety of it's back is an enormous picture of a bowl of guacamole. Not like a sexy Gourmet magazine shot of a stone bowl surrounded by unblemished tomatoes, fluffy tufts of cilantro, ripe avocados, fat limes and onions. A sombrero and one of those guitars made out of a giant gourd hang liesurely from the adobe brick wall in the background. No, it was a top-down, straight on, open-heart surgery style picture. Had to be six feet wide by six feet tall. A moonscape of glistening lumps of mangled green flesh, dotted by specs of cilantro and torn chunks of tomato, like bloody carcasses awaiting dental identification. A big, nasty verde mess.

Done well, guacamole is one of the world's finest foods. It can be be delicious. Among some circles, including mine, it's considered an artform. It's what the gods must eat when they go out for mexican food or football parties. Wars have been fought over the stuff! No, wait, that's women.

If I were a chip, it's how I would want to die. It's bonito.

For anything to be beautiful. there must be unidentifiables. The secret to my own blue-ribbon guac is ********. You don't really think I'd divulge, do you? Does Bono say where he gets his glasses? Did DaVinci ever give the real name of the Mona Lisa? Does the butterfly ever share its thoughts? Does John Madden explain exactly how you're supposed to fit a duck inside a chicken and then fit that inside a turkey? (Hint: Vaseline)

Sometimes distance is the key to appreciation. It's the watchman of taste and tolerance. Look too close and you start to see the cracks in the painting, the dents in the car, the seam in the statue, the actual skin color of the Blue Man, the pimple scars on the news lady's face, the bruise on the porn star's arm. You might witness the gratuitous violence that is a six-foot tall stank shot of guacamole.

For a moment there was dismay, a twinge of fear that seeing such a beloved dip in such a way might ruin its rightful place atop my list of condiments. What would replace it? Salsa? Mango salsa? Black bean and corn spread? Ranch? Cheese? Hummus? What was I to do? A moment later the wave passed, although the van did not. I was right behind it for a good three blocks, enough time to ponder the intricacies of the twisted moonscape. What hellish tornado had shredded that landscape, spreading cilantro like roofing shingles? What mass murderer stalked those innocent pieces of tomato, leaving their bodies mutilated and their families helpless? The Closed-Casket Killer he'll be called.

As the van pulled away, restoring a healthy separation, my thoughts crept back across the sanity fence. Normal things like bills, women, work, whether or not I should get a watch or a dog. With a vague sense of relief I knew my relationship with guacamole wasn't ended.

And that relieved me.

Written across the back of that van was a simple question. "Hambre?"

Keep driving, Guacamole van. The answer is yes!

I've been reborn!

2007-10-17T22:04:00.000-07:00

Well, not really. I mean, really, if I were reborn, don't you think I'd capitalize the word "reborn"? That's the kind of thing you capitalize, like pronouns or state capitals, or diseases you respect.

What I mean by "reborn" is I've finally figured out how to actually view my blog. I've written two posts prior to this one and I've never been able to view the blog. I'd get a message saying I've posted a post and when I go to view the posting I see no post posted. Such unhosted postings makes a lesser poster go postal.

But not me. I'm cool like flint.

Neither browser would display the blog. Until tonight. Only after I changed templates have I been able to actually view the spitriol I typed previously to this. I'm using one of the generic templates blogger provides for people too lazy to create their own. And if I may say something about that: Who wants to create their own? I mean, if you've got something good to say, then say it, and let your words, your voice stand for itself on its own. Don't sweat the presentation. Good writing is just that... good. Critics may lower their noses (or raise them). Good writing is either completely clear or so utterly vague that the author is credited with seeing the "big picture"-- a charge he/she must carry blithely, so as not to appear deliberate.

If you don't understand what I mean, then assume I'm full of shit. If you do, then smile knowingly and don't let the fools in on the secret.

Here's the fools' secret: Everyone shits brown.

Here's why it matters: Baby shit is as cute as shit gets.

My other thought on the subject is that it's pretty cool to design your own template for your blog. Call it packaging, call it design, call it revelatory context, call it wrapping paper... presentation is important. It's vital. It's vital the way first impressions are vital. It's vital the way boarding an airplane and making eye contact with the hottest stewardess is vital, it's vital the way handshaking can make or break a job interview. Design shows care and commitment, it shows passion. Done well, it shows a person who can care less, or one who can care more.

That pretty much sums me up: I more or less wish I cared more.

More later.

Test-O-Matic 2007

2007-09-25T21:21:00.000-07:00

My last post didn't post so I'm posting a test post.

It all follows this

2007-08-29T22:25:00.000-07:00

This here's my first blog post. I don't remember creating this blog, but after logging into blogger tonight (for reasons I choose not to divulge) I've come to find it's existence, ready and waiting, sad and postless, like a lottery without a winner, an orphan without a wallet. Seems awhile back I created this blog, and I named it Sequitur, and I never bothered writing a post. Now I'm compelled to do just such. So I'm posting my first post and I couldn't be more disappointed. A better me would know what to say. A better me would have a theme. A better me might care. As of this moment I'm simply hoping I write a second post one of these days/weeks/months/years.

[Truth moment: a part of me has always wanted a blog.]

For any curious persons, I'm listening to Sinatra, I'm in my underwear, I'm completely fucking horny, and I'm waking up tomorrow in comparable conditions, minus the Sinatra.