Waver/Wuthering Heights

The more I read Wuthering Heights, the more I like Heathcliff. The more I relate to him, empathize, sympathize, despise, recognize. I dunno, it's one of those books that draws you because all the characters are repulsive somehow. At least, they are to me. Who knew you could write a story like that? Perhaps that's the draw of it. What makes it literature. Initially, you despise them all. Sequentially, you associate aspects of the self with the loathing, and you end up hating the fact that you like them so much because you feel like you shouldn't, but you can't help it.

Even ugly people have a fascination with mirrors, I suppose.

So, I like Heathcliff. I adhor him.


I've been listening to instrumental music more than anything else lately. Plateau music. I love that idea, the plateau. Jonathan gave me an image to go with the feeling, and I've taken it and run. It's where I am, most of the time, I think. The plateau is how I orient myself. It's a corner plateau. I climb there, and sit with my back against the walls, and survey the landscape below me, like David in his palace.

A time-share condo for the plateau. It's a fantastic idea. We all use it.

Strings, ends of things, you can sit and unravel them, or wind them tighter. Why do I think in pictures? It's how I think. I don't think in words, words aren't colored enough and when I have the picture the words just come. I don't need to think them.


Wuthering Heights, instrumental electronica-type indie stuff that I dig up from interweb corners. What else have I been stuck on this week? I kicked Adam out of my spaces for 4 weeks, it was an ultimatum I gave both of us. That's been odd. I feel like I set myself drifting toward something without anything to drift on but myself. What did Jack do? Lash together sea turtles and ride them in toward the island? Pah. Who wants the island. I like the drifting. I like the lack of control in my drifting. I can be immobile and things will still move me.

It's not true, though. I cling to other things. Stupid things, really. Facebook, for one. Not worth the time and effort I put into it. WoW? The same thing. It's a stupid computer game, and I only started playing it for Adam, but I got sucked in. It's like heroin, only worse for you. You laugh, but it's true. You pour time, energy and money into something completely unreal, you feel accomplishment for sitting on your ass hours at a time and ignoring life around you.

But I love video games. I love the way they pull me from my reality. The life around me is something I often prefer to escape, and video games and music are my only moral options, as far as vices go, and even then, they're not moral. They can be, but they're not. I don't do the drugs that I want to...what're those Neutral Milk Hotel lyrics?

"And the first one tore a picture of a dead and hanging man who was kissing foreign fishes that flew right out from his hand and when I put my arms around him, felt the blushing blood run through my cheeks and an airiness surrounded when his tongue began to speak, he said,'Oh boy, you are so pretty - enough to wrap tight in rice paper, string.' And when I finally kissed him the whole world began to ring, lost like a bell that's tipping over, with two cracks along both sides. And I knew the world was over, so I took a look outside and watched the fires that were reaching up to the weathervane and the tops of trees and the waiting scene and the Sunday dream were all waiting here for me. Deli markets, with their flower stands and the pretty girls and the burning men hanging out on the hooks next to the window displays. And I took out my tongue, tried to move from my place. I crossed the bridge and I crossed the mountains, threw a nickel in the fountain to save my soul from all these troubled times and all the drugs that I don't have the guts to take to soothe my mind, so I'm always sober, always aching. Always heading for mass suicide, occult figurines. And wasted gas station attendants, attending to their job and a nice drive in the country, find a nice cliff to drop off. Oh when this life just gets so grating, all the grittiness of life, but don't take those pills your boyfriend gave you, you're too wonderful to die. And the last one tore a picture from the pornographic page, but all the pleasure points attacking all the looks of love were staged. And it's a lie that you've been given that just hurts you every day, so why should I lie here naked when it's just too far away from anything we could call love? Any love worth living for? So I'll sleep out in the gutter, you can sleep here on the floor. And when I wake up in the morning, I won't forget to lock the door, 'cuz with a match that's mean and some gasoline you won't see me anymore."

The italicized part is what I meant, but I had to present it in context. Someday I'll have a host site or something where I can store all sorts of my music and then you'll get the music too.

I can always find a song to fit. Just can't write them myself, and I read lyrics like that and feel like I'll never do anything half as creative, pull anything near as fantastic and abstract and all-encompassing out of my bag of tricks.

I'm searching the cracks in the walls to remember that the girls in the middle are always the first to fall off for the dregs in the crowd.

Who wants to pull things out of tricks anyway?

I feel like spewing whatever's in my head tonight, avoiding cautious hyperbole. I enjoy being hyperbolic. It makes life ridiculously bigger, like the balloon Garfield in a parade instead of the chaff of some blown dandelion clock wafting on the wind.

No old guys at work today forgot their passwords. Do you know what I did? I played Scrabulous on Facebook for three hours (I think I'm losing all thirteen of the games I am playing) and then spun my novel a whole new direction: back into myself. Maybe the whole NaNoWriMo thing was a stupid idea in the first place. I'm stuck right now in a mental location where "stupid idea" is as expressive as I get.

Then I read the stuff Jonathan writes when he's not even trying and come to the conclusion that I will never sound original. Maybe the prose is just not my idea medium. Poetry isn't either. I feel mediocre at everything these days and wish that I could find a place where I can adequately express myself.

I still haven't finished the art I promised him, I keep starting over. Maybe I should take the half-done abandonments and turn it into a collage, but it would look as crap and disparate as I am feeling and wouldn't do for anyone's wall, let alone a friend's.

I've been drowning myself in Pink Floyd today. It's what I do when I feel like life is inexplicably dull and, even if it weren't, I'd be incapable of expressing myself or taking advantage of it.
It's been a day for Animals. Pigs on the Wing, part two. What is it that Waters sings in the dark and bluesiness of Gilmour's guitar? You know that I care what happens to you, and I know that you care for me too. So I don't feel alone, or the weight of the stone, now that I've found somewhere to bury my bone. And any fool knows that a dog needs a home, and shelter from pigs on the wing...

So, come. Bury your bones in my. Listen to me singing. Or just listen to me. I wish I were inaudible, or selectively audible, anyway. Can I pick the people who will hear?

I want to hear you. In other places I want to be the things that you need. In this place, I'm not and never will be. Here, I can only draw you in and then disappoint.

Am I in love with distance? I adore the idealism, the intangibility, the potential for perfection.

Instead of the reality of failure.

This is a distraction

I had a whole bunch of stuff written here and it disappeared when a bumped a stupid key trying to put some pointless post-it notes back on the printer after they fell down.

I was talking about how I am trying not to annoy people in the little things. About how it's dark outside today, the tops of the trees blowing, the air cold enough to feel like air again. It looks like it's going to rain any second but it probably won't. Or it will.

I want to go for a walk, but I wore the wrong shoes and I also want to take a nap just as badly.

Twenty-five more minutes.

Talk to me. Tell me things in little sentences.

Write back to me, you jerk. I'm sorry I broke your heart all those years ago. You wanted a van and ten kids. I didn't want to think about someone else. I wasn't ready. I am now. I am putting myself on this limb, ready to change, for you to catch me. I am letting go of what I held on to for so long. Don't let me fall into nothing. I have been there for too long before.

My iPod just died. I was listening to Owen Ashworth again.

(The post-its just fell, but I shall learn from my mistake and not attempt to replace them.)

I had a dream the other night that I adopted a Japanese orphan baby. We were refugees, running through things. I woke up crying. Not because I was scared, but because when I woke up, I didn't have the baby anymore.

These things happen when you get older. They happen even when you don't expect them to. When you tell yourself you don't want things.

I want. Oh, I want.

My old roommate is engaged to some guy she's been dating for 3 or 4 weeks. Apparently they just know. I went with her yesterday, to look for engagement settings for the diamond she inherited from her mother, who got it from her mother-in-law. She found the perfect ring. Because that's more important than the perfect man.

I don't want a perfect man. I want mine with holes. I want cracks and scars in him, to make him interesting, to run my tongue along the edges. I want him here, is all. Here and willing to want someone else with holes and scars. Lick my edges.

Had bad sushi for lunch yesterday. I am over it, the whole sushi thing. Too many episodes with dubious avocado and unfresh eel. Was up at 2 am puking it all out.

I can hold so many other things in. But avocado escapes me.

And I have new work to do. I don't want to do it.

I want to go sleepwalking.

Today I got up On Time

First day in a week or something, I can't remember. Been falling asleep so late I can't get up in the mornings.

I got up. I had breakfast. I never have breakfast. Sleep is always worth more than food. At least, in the mornings.

Can't sleep lately, have a hard time with it. Acting asleep is no big deal, but it's always one of those tortured half-sleep things. Paranoia with sharing a room, I guess. And the one night this week I do actually fall completely asleep, my sister informs me that I sleeptalk. Excellent. Like I need my dreams advertised to the family when I have no idea I'm doing it.

Which equals more paranoia, which equals less sleep, which equals more irritation at little things, little people.

I am writing this because I was meant to be writing to a friend's email, and my gmail has gone nuts on me and keeps trying to refresh in the middle of things and I kept losing everything I was typing. I hate computers as much as I love them sometimes.

Today, I have decided to listen to whatever's on my iPod nano in alphabetical order by song title. I don't know why, I was just obsessing that way. Right now, it's playing "London Still" by the Waifs, which Adam sent to me. I like this song, it fits in little spaces today. (Apparently little is the word of the day.)

Wonder if you can pick up my
Accent on the phone
When I call across the country
When I call across the world
I...see you in my kitchen
I can picture you now
As you toast to your small town
When you drink the happy hour
I’m in London still
I’m in London still
I'm in London still

I took the tube over to Camden
To wander around
I bought some funky records
With that old Motown sound
And I miss you like my left arm
That's been lost in a war
Today I dream of home and not of London anymore
I'm in London still
I'm in London still
Yeah I'm in London still

You know it’s okay
I’m kinda happy here for now
I...think I've finally grown up
And got myself a lover now
And if I ever come home
And I, I think I will
I hope you're gonna wanna hang at my place on Sunday still
Oh yeah I hope you will
Cause I'm in London still

You know we got it sorted, yeah
We really got it down
To a fine art on Sunday
In a sleepy Sunday town
I wonder what I'm missing
I think of songs I've never heard
I'm dreaming of your voices
And I'm dreaming of your herb
I'm in London still
I'm in London still
I'm in London still

Oh I'm in London still
la-la-la-la-la London still
I'm in London

He misses me like the left arm he never had. A phantom third nipple? How would that hurt? It's what I feel like I should be. In his world, I want to be a tiny thing, I want to be...whatever that word that starts with an "a" is that means an organ that's not necessary for survival, like an appendix or a tailbone.

I don't want him to need me anymore. It's how I fall out of love. When I don't love being needed anymore, because that's what I fall in love with in the first place...the things that need me. Being needed makes me feel bigger, better than I am. I am the saviour, the anchor, the hand up in the dark. I make them brighter, clean them up a bit? It gets that way at first. They need me to feel good about themselves. I am a champion ego-fondler.

Because I see everyone as better than me.

That's why I let them love me, I guess. Why I love them back. If they love me, such an impossible, flattering thing, the least I can do is be what they need, love them back. My love is a thank you, it's an obligation.

I always get tired of my obligations. If you know me, you know this. My playlist is shot-riddled with songs he has sent me, beating guilt into my ears for keeping him like this, for staying when I'm screaming at myself to go.

I don't want to hurt him. The hurt is inevitable, and I delay. I was - still am - always crap at finishing things. Rilke once said:

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything.

And I love beginnings. I am always beginning, I'm good at it. The finish is what I dread, what I avoid, what I never get around to. I wonder if I love beginnings because they're violent. I wonder if, really, I'm just an angry, bitter person after all.

What kind of sicko pulls guys in and holds them there for 6 months just to let go and drift away? What kind of perversion am I, being everything they need, an ideal, never really there and then gone? Do I kill the rest of the women after me with the things I say I am?

I can be the warm thing you lay on in the dark. But...and I told him this in the first poem I ever wrote for him, before we were a we...

custodian

we've peered
through each other's
windows.

candlelit matching.
the same

trinkets of
self-absolution

adorn both mantlepieces.
the kitchens stew

meals
for one -

not us.

we cook for people
who aren't home.
we interact through
invisibility -

wonder why
nothing pauses, looks
back,
focuses on us.

us: the benevolent

presence,
nightbreaths,
but not anything

they can cling to.
our relationships:

janitorial.

we maintain,
upkeep,
locking doors as

we leave in grey hours so

morning can find
us
asleep, behind other

walls.

It's 3 am, love. And I am slipping out from underneath the covers.

I am listening to Keith Jarrett as I type this

Another corner, another box for me on the edge of things. I was tired of editing it all, of not being able to post, of posting when I didn't give a shit and then having it come around to bite me in the ass while I was sitting unaware a week later...when I was back to giving a shit.

I should stop swearing. It's not ladylike, and it's allegedly going to be another piece of the puzzle of the picture of my own bobsled to hell.

"Hell" doesn't count if you're talking about the place, anyway.

I love that Keith grunts or cries out while he plays. Maybe it's someone in the audience, but I like it better if I think that it's Keith. I owe Hippie Craque for sending it my way. It's the perfect music, really. Something I needed. Something that I can write to.


It was short today, quiet. I was unreciprocal. My significan other'd stayed up late for me, wanted to chat. I didn't. I haven't all week. But I do anyway, because I don't want to hurt him.

I am back to the same familiar place. Holding hands because it's familiar, not because it's comfortable. Because he wants to, not because I am actively participating. I am back to thinking I am doing him a favour by staying, by not saying how I feel, by putting myself in the silences and hoping that he'll notice and leave before I have to say anything.

It gets to a point, you know, where you realize that you love someone wholly, completely, inexcplicably profoundly as a friend. And the more and longer you keep them as a lover, the longer you keep them, the easier it is to see what they really mean to you.

He was the right thing - once. Was the one. Once. Now he's not, he or I have done some sort of moving on, and it feel different. It doesn't feel right anymore. I have carried on this lie long enough, and I should leave now, before I get there and have to leave after everything more.

The vagueness is intentional. I am only as clear as I can make myself understand. It has to be abstract.

Because I can't just look at the thing in my hands and say, honestly, I am bored and I do not want him anymore. I am over him and I am trying to untie and let go, without him noticing that I'm leaving, because I am tired of feeling nothing just to make him feel good. But I don't want him to feel bad.

Enough. I cannot do this today.

I am the truth of what I feel. To myself. In my dark corners.

Everywhere else, it's a fake feeling. And the faces you see aren't me. No one sees this face. No one's been here enough to peel back the layers and understand.

These words are an exorcism. I distill myself in poetry until you have me complete and enigmatic enough that I no longer need to be here. And when that is done, like Sylvia, like Emily, I will run to the quick and eager dark. Heed the call of some need to discover if I can still be, without all the masks and the voices.

I wrote that once, elsewhere. Elsewhen, even.

But I am back to a place where it fits. I am back inside, cowering. I crave this shell, the hidden places for things where I am...just am. Where I can feel and say what it feels like, can look like it feels like, and no one has names or faces or knows enough to point and judge me.

No one even knows I'm here.

About It...

My intangibility. The way I hung - just so - behind such real doors. Like some born-again god, I was his omnipresence. Everywhere without consequence - an inability to measure the real stature of his devotion. I was idea. Accommodating. I hung behind doors, so well...suited...for his purpose. I could be inanimate. I could be. You were. Who doesn't pick their dreams at night?

He spoke more. He poured himself into the cup beyond ears. I was his backdoor escape. I was host to verbal soirees sans repercussions. My rhythm, basslines, the perfect seat for the shredding amped high-voltage rock plane he feared unleashing on you. You were a groupie for his emotions. I was the band. The crack habit. The toilet bowl, stained fingers, needles in the dark, forged prescriptions, his trips, his highs, his genius. I amplified his energy. You channeled it. I hit him in the face. He liked it. He hit you in the face.

I was the one to come. I was through the looking-glass. A tawdry, elusive, seductive reflection of what he showed himself. I was an obsession merely because I was a possibility untamed. I was his hunger. He ate you.

You were a ship that passed in the night. I sunk you behind the horizon at sunset in the rushing waves of all that he'd have me believe. Blissful in the ignorant wash of opaque tides. If the long boy with the endless piebald side had been a woman, had not wanted to devour - I would have been his. I only thought he was spending all his time in Booya Moon, Lisey.

We laughed at the gimmicks any group of friends would have heckled. Never about intentions, about things inherently you. Only the farce of action, of life's bloopers. It was to commune a sense of endearment, not a ridiculing or stoning. I was, occasionally, one of the guys. Always have been.

Have you never made plans late at night to chase after the impulsive? Of course there were plans. Cloud-castles. It was always a good dream.

I couldn't see anything. I was blind, groping for the way he reached at me in the dark. I propped my blindness on the truth of the way he was so willing to hold me. Will you really decry, and fault me, for my faith? It was a devotion. Who doesn't love the things they repose on in the dark?

I did not imagine you. Period. I scrawled dark mental lines over you any time he presented you to me. You were selfish, desperate, friendless, pathetic, gnawing at the legs of the only thing I could stand on. I hated you for it. I pitied you and the holes you dug for yourself. The holes you crouched and whined in. I blew energy into expending you. I simply did not allow you to exist in the places I did. For 6 months. It's a hard habit to break... I will admit, it itches and irks me to have you here. This is my world. In this one, I was here first - and in my absences I still garner the sense of you supplanting me. But these are my own selfish demons. They will be burned, purged. Until them, we are opposing forces, and I have not the current means of laying claim to my territory. My days, my life, my emotions, my words, my friendships are imbedded in these halls you romp through now. Surely you can sympathize with the way this grates me. Can understand the reasons I avoid you. You are taking a whole of the only half I have.

For now, that is enough to say.

I was not naivety. It was wool-covered. It was a heedless sabotage. It was betrayal. I adamantly refuse to blame myself. All I did was love. He misused it.

Have you never asked him? Has he never told you of the way he crawled, begging? Of his grandiose promises of your immediate, impending dismissal? Of the hours he sobbed on the phone while I set my jaw, stoic, resolute, hammering the blame into him; setting the responsibility, the wrong of it squarely on his shoulders? Of how he disgusted me and how I told him he was an even bigger fool to trash two relationships?

Did he tell you I told him that if he was with you, he was never with me? That my time with him was nothing. And that I didn't him to make a mockery of my 6 months by wasting them and not allowing them to make a difference, to turn a new leaf? To tell you everything and to be a better man?

...No, he didn't. A coward, he shrank in his skin. Told you I was the compulsive liar. Urged you to dismiss me the way he did. I loathed him. I was furious. And finally, I realized I never really loved him. I loved that he loved me. I loved the way he needed me.

I did not cry. I always cry, but I did not cry. Not when I found out, and not when he was sobbing in my ear, trying to rationalize his reasons for what he did and why we could still work.

My love cut its losses. My heart withdrew. My obsession, my addiction, my habit of him did not. After the murderous end of our emotional affair, we were pared down to a drug habit. An addiction. We were users and there was no rehab. Weak, wretched, drained... cold turkey, the only option, wasn't feasible on our state of dependency. I tried to substitute other drugs. Never got the same high; I did the drug he wanted to. It didn't last. You were his coffee and cigarettes. We dealt eightballs in the back alleys of our days. Cut lines together when no one could see us. It was miserable, selfish, but it was compulsory. We cut our lines in silence. We cut our lines alone. They just happened to be the same lines.

I forgave him for being himself, not for what he did. But forgiving him for being himself was something I had been doing since it started. Forgiveness was nothing new. It was what let us work.

He never censored himself after that. He always told me what happened with him. I slid myself, intrigued, into his shoes. I said whatever I needed to, to get him to say what he wanted. I didn't trust him. I never trusted him after his initial treason. I still don't trust him. But I know him. And I stayed very good at letting him trust me. You see, I've always listened. And I've told him the answers to things he'd ask me to listen to. They weren't - aren't - always my answers. But they were answers. You learn a lot about someone when you let them talk, only pausing to hear you agree with them. I wasn't lying to him because I wanted him back, or because I was trying to perjure him. I only lied to him because I was curious about what he said when I did. He fascinated me. And I realized he didn't love me. He loved his idea of me, just as I loved the fact that he loved me. We had always been so accommodating that way.

I still didn't think of you. Not in the sense of "the other woman." You were just the half of him that didn't particularly interest me. Your story - the two of you - fascinated me, but I only studied his half. I talked to him because for some reason I felt compelled to mentally log and calculate and observe him. His personality. His state of self, if you will. Conversation ended in January when I hit a plateau in my findings. The proverbial bedrock. It had been a fascinating study, but every researcher comes to a point where they can dig no further. I was done with him. Adequately and completely detached. On bad terms, but detached. A month later, I called for a follow-up. No new developments confirmed my diagnosis. I ran a test or two. Readings were the same. Progress was as anticipated. I watched him leave once more - at least from this book, this thesis. I end it with a sense of completion. A sigh of relief that finally it is done.

He is as he is as he is.

Finally, I have solid proof of that. He is done. He is nothing to me. He is a finished piece, another novel. A thing to be shelved. Dusted off occasionally, but put in a place to be forgotten.

Just because I learned from my experience with him, it doesn't mean he taught me anything.

I have a new profession, a new life, anyhow.

another character sketch

Raed had recently lost his only son. Crushed by the unweight of such a tremendous release, Raed was not him. Unlike him, Raed expanded in emptiness, was made of it. Like a sponge, he was completely holed. And Raed's hole seemed boundless; it surrounded him in a hollow presence that was nearly tangible.

In contrast to him, initially you are disheveled by the enormity of Raed; your instinct saying to give him a wide berth. When people pass him on the sidewalk, though the sidewalk is wide and few are traversing it (and though Raed likes to stay close to the buildings, the walls, finding comfort on the edges of things,) they will step into the gutter, or the street. Already Raed had stopped noticing this. Perhaps he never noticed it.

Have you ever noticed how the emptiness of people is often the only thing that keeps them from falling apart? Raed wore buttons: dark shirts with buttons, and a large navy blue coat with more buttons. The smallest of points can still hold things together. The reprimanding 10 am glare off the cement and the buildings rendered his coat unnecessary, but Raed was used to wearing it; had once been used to walking to work in the dark and the damp of the day. That had changed. His long navy coat, that looked like wool but probably wasn't, had not changed. How could you not cling to familiarity in the places where it doesn't burn you?

A big man, Raed still was not as big as the berth–unscrupulously gifted from the rest of us beyond him–would lead you to believe. Big is the wrong word. Raed was broad; his chest and shoulders, his hands, his feet. In high school (in his other life) they called him The Wall. It fit him. Raed was a vast and stubborn bastion of impassibility. What he was, he was. What he felt, he was. What he thought, he was. And he was unchangeable; always convinced of the right, the truth in his ways of thinking.

pen stretches

It was meant to be a tragic story, one of love lost and the desperate way people interact. And I intended to write it backwards, because that’s how we see them; blue veins of emotion that bleed though the shrug and meh of other days. It’s not until they are once again empty that you look back and realize it was in them, in the grief and the hope and the lust and the echoes that you pulsed, electric, red, alive.

I am used to this. I am used to the pyrite luster of epic intentions. The way they’ll glitter until the time for them is past, and in the aftermath you hold them in your hand. Tacky, they look, ugly and brown. It’s the reflection of yourself that you catch on a smooth side that honestly disgusts you. The Wal-Mart feel of yourself, and not the actual rock. Rocks… intentions are rocks. Intention is a rock and you, the literal you – stripped bare of intention, dreams - are a hard place. And what is between them? What is between them?

Casserole. She had settled for casserole because the cupboard was stripped down to the leavings; the last-picked-in-gym equivalents of the canned food world. All those twenty-five cent, cream of MSG, this might not be real meat…or even food… foods that seem so harmless and even necessary, until you step up to the plate and have to face them as they are. And there she goes, projecting herself once again, onto everything that she touches. Or perhaps, she absorbs it all… takes it in, with some yet unrealized corneal tractor beam of the subconscious and it becomes her. The cream of mushroom soup and her are not two things, they are not similar, they are the same thing. This could be important later. Or it may not. Who are we to say? How does anyone decide the things that are really important?

Frozen chicken breasts. She had those. Rice. The aforementioned soup. Parsley and assorted whatnots of the seasoning variety. Water. Ugh…the sink was overflowing, dishes with remnants now indiscriminate. It was a statement she was making, making herself sick. She was not their mother. She will never be their mother. Does she remember to say thank you when they clean up her dishes? What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?

It would have been a reasonable thing two hours ago, casserole; at this rate she wouldn’t have dinner until 11 and nearly chickened out and tried to convince herself that maybe she was just thirsty, or that she could smuggle a roomie’s popsicle and count that as the only needed caloric intake for the day. Her stomach rallied and internal democracy took over. Very well, she’d cook the dang thing.

It will start out with details like this, and you, you will get used to this. As it continues, less and less of it will feel real and now; it will haze, ripen… it will become ripe, almost too-ripe, the sugar will ferment, and just as you expect it to reach some apex of sweetness the bitter alcohol bite will leave you feeling detached, unsure. You’ll see it through the watercolor washing of time, of dissolving recollections.

I am being too abstract. I should perhaps abandon this line of narrative, and just tell the story…


Frances was coarse. It was not a word to describe her, it was her essence. Her voice: Louis Armstrong, only an octave higher. No one could remember if she’d smoked, but she sounded like it. Her breathing was ragged, even when it was supposed to be quiet, through the nose. She was older than everyone who knew her, but the way no one will admit to their age meant we really didn’t know. Keith Richards, she looked like. Keith Richards all over, only with an extra 30 lbs. of what may, centuries ago, have been some lusciously aerodynamic curves; now flightless, gimp, Frances’s curves had succumbed to gravity at the same time they unyieldingly clung to her frame. It was baggage, she had; Keith Richard, with baggage which had nothing to do with emotional or mental stability. When she moved, her body would have to vote if it was coming with her or not… of course it would always vote yes, but counting the ballots is what held it up, I think.

She and Frances are not the same, at least in the sense that it is not Frances who was making the aforementioned casserole. She was. But you need to know Frances. Frances needs to be a part of this story as much, if not more, than she does. And in that sense, she and Frances are the same. The way she and the soup are the same. And Frances and the soup are the same. It is these similarities that will make the difference, you see.

He was different. Tiny. When you see him, it’s the first thing you notice, how small, how childlike and fledgling he is. Sitting, in brown wool slacks that are (somehow) too short for him, on a grey pine bench, he folds into himself, drowns in the blue-lined button down shirt that at first glance looks new, so starched and white. You close in; its seams are worn, the shirt is off-white, the blue was brighter some other day. He’s had it since Nixon, he just knows how to use things. You forget to notice that he is missing a finger. You forget to notice the American flag pin near the brass of his suspenders. His tree-root hands rest on a dark varnished cane, the rubber cap on the end of it worn off on one side, at an angle, slowly grated off by cement, asphalt, dirt, the empty tennis court he walks through on his way back to a place we’d assume is home – he walks through them to clean up the trash, the papers, the empty ball cans and Gatorade bottles that everyone else has left during the day.

Laboriously, he sweeps (well, shuffles) his way over the courts in the ochre dusk, collecting, tidying. He cannot hold it all, pieces fall and he fumbles after them. Sometimes he’ll make three or five trips to the giant orange plastic garbage bins. The ones with the disheveled black plastic generic Hefty-equivalent bags; the bins they chain and padlock to the pavilion columns so the delinquents who frequent the park after hours can’t roll them into the street, overturn them.

He breathes, but it’s not breathing, he is talking. You will not understand what he is saying. He is not talking to himself. His panama falls when he reaches for the lemon-lime bottle that has stumbled. A heron, he is precariously balancing, the hat he replaces becomes the same. Like a bonsai, he is tiny, but he is huge in his minutiae; he occupies his space. He is a steward; he is more than the lie of his appearance. You see the very world as it sits on the backs of his shoulder blades. It is this that folds him. You reel in your own tininess. It swallows you.

Better – he is – than she, than Frances, than you. Better, and the same. He is the same. The watery cream of mushroom fills him, is him. He likes it with saltines. The stove and pot he cooks with even older than his shirt. You know this. Like Bubble-yum in your hair, he sticks to you. Like Bubble-yum in your hair, he will make you cry.

Unlike Bubble-yum, he will make you wonder how to fill your spaces. When you remember him, he is tall. When you remember him, he fills you. Like cream of mushroom soup, afloat with soggy saltine ships. He marks you, changes who you are physically, a bit like that compulsory gum-in-the-hair haircut you had to get when you were seven, when you were playing with your Bubble-yum.

Blue Sky

Can any of you understand the glorious feeling of having a sad, disappointing chapter of your life finally, finally close and a whole new bright and shining one open up before you like life is new, and wonderful, and full of potential and hope and wonder again?

If you can, then you can sympathize with me.

If you can't, I feel sorry for you. It's an inexplicable feeling.

Like how clean the world can feel after a completely violent, huge, loud, overwhelming thunderstorm.

My thunderstorm is over. The world is clean.

I can see the sun again. Better, even, than before.

In other news, today it finally stopped raining and I went hiking up the canyon today.

Is it just me, or is nature delightfully purging when you can't write and to much of life feels like complete shite?

I love the trees when they talk and listen at the same time.

Give A Little...

Y'know how that Coke ad says, "give a little love and it all comes back to you?"

It's not the same truth if you give a lot of love that you can't help giving. It actually rarely comes back anywhere near equal measure to what you gave out.

The trick is not to care, and to realize that you're here to spread love across everything so that it can fill in the tiny cracks of lives that people don't realize need constant filling until you've gone.

What you have to learn (and this is usually the hard part) is how to prep yourself to live with knowing your only appreciation will be a constantly posthumous thing.

But then, the task of life is service - a charity of sorts. Charity isn't something we do to get credit. It's not something we do just to get to heaven. It's the very fabric of which heaven is wove.

All I'm saying is that maybe loving EVERYTHING too much is a soul's way of attempting to repay God for that act of greatest Love.

Mosiah said it best: "When ye are in the service of your fellow beings, ye are only in the service of your God."

And I guess that true mortal progression comes when you realize that you can never repay God for all you've been given, and that you keep loving and serving the people around you anyway.

Is there really such a thing as settling for laying up the proverbial treasure in heaven?

The world's such a tainted, crummy place anyway. Why settle for it's recognition?

I'm not saying this to any of you. It's just something I had to explain to myself this morning.

Always,

Chels

I Love

Reading: The Sea by John Banville, The Quitter by Harvey Pekar, Snow by Orhan Pamuk.
Playing: Nothing, at the moment.
Listening to: Indie stuff, The Engineers mostly. Ted Leo. Casiotone.
Using Cell Phone For: Sudoku. Email. Web-surfing. My calendar.

Quote: (from page 108 in "The Sea") "Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much more then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvelously finished pavilion of the self. And incredulity, that too was a large part of being happy, I mean that euphoric inability to fully believe one's simple luck."

I can't recall being a child. I can, but most of my childhood recollections - memories, to be so torpid - aren't exactly happy, or blissfully ignorant of their fortune. My descent from childhood, emotionally, was an un-numbing. A slow awakening to the awkwardness of self from the blissful anesthesia of a extroverted penchant for both curiosity and compassion. My childhood was observation, filling in all of the spaces in my subconscious and conscious mind (the white space that blinds you - a child so fresh from God - with it's pervasive sterility.)

I spent my early life assembling the experiential control of a stumbling, perpetual, experiment of maturing which would be lobbed a godless (well, it was painfully felt) amount of unchartable, unstable, unconscionable variables. I never adequately prepared for it, you see.

I never once caught in this giant, pieceless, hemless, smothering patchwork of acute observations a vision, a premonition, a sketch of myself. I am not mother or father before me. Not grandparent, teacher, mentor, friend, crossing guard, bosomous church lady, supposited male figures, artist, artiste, poet, Dr. Seuss character, or prophet of fire and light and the holy terror of the love of God. I was a composite of each of them - including the Harley gang bikers in the bank parking lot who I was convinced were going to kidnap my three year-old brother.

And so it goes. We are each that way - we are divinity and experience (as nouns and not adjectives - we are Divinity + Experience) both constantly grappling for dominance in the meager confines of a fleshy, imperfect, beautiful, expanselessly limited wuss of a soul. I envelope you, my truth-wielding, seraphic self-counterpart; my bumbling idiot.

I am still doing these things.

I am still tripping back to the places where people love me. Quenchless. I am on hands and knees groping from the veritable desert of days and "mellow fruitlessness." I have loved you. All of you. I do. I love you because I cannot help myself. The wretched soul-fingers that reach for your reaching merely because I breathe. I see. Because I need something more red - more here - than here is.

I write, I confess, I mistake, I over-react because of all that encompasses me, of all my patchwork properties, the batting - those very fibers of my being - of any being - that make a quilt worth having - is composed of loves.

Like Brod from Everything is Illuminated, like Jesus, like Enos, like a mercenary, like a sinner, like the faces you half-see and forget, I love you. I love. It claws, it ekes itself out of me. With such force I can hardly believe it's not tangible. Can hardly believe these letters do not burrow themselves into your very corneas with the perviousness of which they're imbibed.

I clamour for this place - this slew of lifewindows, of the real shadowyous, where each breath, space, symbol, absence, cloying presence of mine only begs you:

Love me. Because I am afraid that love doesn't exist - and I am willing to try nearly everything that does to find it.

Love me enough to take me seriously when I am not being serious - because even, perhaps especially - insincerity and humor have their truths, their sadnesses, their silent admissions. Who stops to count them? Who gives them priority?

I love you, so-imaginary-you're-real-maybe-even-more-real place. You People. Your nuances, your flavors, your magazines, your harrowing rapport, your steely-tottering precipice of tolerance for the shenanigan, the casual word.

Everyone builds life on a hope for tenderness. Who would shoulder the burdens of actual living if love - in its layers - wasn't worth waking up for?

If happiness in childhood consists of a heedless taking, of sorts, is it safe to conclude that at the bottom of this adulthood, this foot of clay crumbles flawlessly on the happiness, the satisfaction, of GIVING with a clear and observed understanding?

I was merely wondering, you see. I seem to have crossed a threshold. Putting away a portion of my childish things.

I find myself increduless (misspelling intentional). Schrapnelled on the panguishing moments I live. I love.