/ Once upon a time

I read this story the other day, and while I remember it, I won't repeat it exactly, as I have no problem making up one of my own, similar and maybe even an improvement upon the original. The story is from 1920, after all. The tale is about a lesson a father passes down to his son, and later in life the son realizes the significance of the content of the story, though this is not what fascinates me about it at all.

My father, he says, came to me one day when I was very young and gave me two boxes. In one box was a pocket knife. In the other, a pocket knife. My father said to me, "One of these knives cost $5. The other cost $1. I want you to use both knives the same amount each day. At the end of the month, I want you to tell me the difference between these knives."

The point of a story like this is fairly evident, and you know that at the end of the month, the lesson to be learned is that quality matters. The cheap knife will have rusted, will have dulled, will have chipped. The $5 knife will remain pristine, will somehow seem sharper, if only exaggerated by comparison, and later on the son will have a son of his own, and he will encourage his boy to spend extra money on something of quality, like a pickup truck or a tool set. When his daughter picks out the most expensive pair of shoes, he'll probably say, 'Dang.'

What fascinates me is that I don't have a great store of these tales, and I am unsure if I should just make some up for my own parenting. I'd hate to think I'm leaving my kids high and dry in this regard. I am flying to Denver next week, and then to St. Louis the week after, and if I do not return, my oldest is old enough to remember me, but not really any stories I have told him. He will rely upon something like the following, "ONCE UPON A TIME, A LITTLE BOY DID NOT EAT HIS PEAS WHEN HIS FATHER SAID SO. THE LITTLE BOY WAS LATER DESTROYED AND THE REST OF THE FAMILY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER. THE END. THE POINT OF THIS STORY IS THAT YOU SHOULD EAT YOUR PEAS, IN CASE THAT WASN'T EVIDENT."

I just went digging through the garage and found two boxes. Now I just have to come up with something to put in them.

\ Happily ever after

From my private, very nearly abandoned LJ.

I have my new pair of trail shoes, and it is just in time because I want to save my ASICS for the road, they are just not made for the bare roots and river rock and occasional need to jump three feet in the air because what was that? A garter snake? A skink? A mentos wrapper? I turned my heel twice on the path, so I needed these adidas desperately, and plus Alex said ENOUGH, I AM LEAVING AGAIN I MEAN IT and this time it hit harder than the last, because eventually she will mean it.

I think these shoes are more stable than even my Avias, and how observant am I to realize that all my shoes start with the letter A, as does Alex, and have I run all over her? I am causing all this, but am lucky in that neither of us really would even know where to begin. We are hopelessly tangled, and most days happy to be so. We are instead kicking her mother out of the house and feel like the worst children on earth. But something has got to give, and her sister lives just up the street, with no kids and two spare bedrooms, and why didn't we think of this before?

I am painfully guilty of terrible ugliness the past couple of weeks, and yesterday was an unredeemable work of art. We had our regularly scheduled shouting match, and I took the day off from work, worked on my book, and said, "YOU ARE MESSING UP MY RUN AGAIN." and by 9 I had gone through half a bottle of vermouth. By 9:30 a bottle of champagne. By 10 I had already said over the phone YOU ARE PUTTING US AS PRIORITY NUMBERS TWO THROUGH FOUR and hung up. I gathered the kids into the car, with Tristan's 9 year old friend and we drove to the store where I bought everyone ice cream and cheetos, and myself a big bottle of malt liquor and we went to the baseball field where we batted around, and the boys chased me but could never catch me, even though I hit it into shallow left, a Texas leaguer, and ran all the bases, I am fast.

And at home, I made hot dogs for the kids and went into my room, passed out onto the bed. The kids wholly unsupervised. When I came to it was utterly dark and I wandered into the kitchen, and I think I was out for 4 or 5 hours, and Alex had kicked her mom out, said I had ruined everyone's life and I was a drunk and a bastard and that was it. It's over.

And later I made it right, and if I can give up smoking cold turkey, maybe liquor will be even quicker. I hate the way I write when sober. I had to respond to some interview questions today, and 6 simple paragraphs took me 4 hours, and I was so miserable. I got home at 7:30 and have to walk to my bedroom under the uncomfortable stare of my mother in law, who is here until Friday to watch the kids until we arrange day care. It is so miserable that I said, 'You know, maybe you should stop coming back to me every time I change my ways.' And she kissed me on the cheek and sometimes I am so completely confused by it all.

/ Front 9

We played $2 Nassau on Saturday and I might have been the youngest man on the course by 20 years, but we walked and struck it clean. Still, I was down 3 by the 5th, and on the 6th I dropped a long putt for birdie, and on the 7th, dropped one down for par, and by the 9th had my partner shaking his head. Unbelievable. On the back nine, I didn't want to be a bad guest, so I closed my eyes and swung away, and swung away and swung away and dropped them longer and longer. We moved our balls from deer tracks because winter rules were in effect, and removed our hats and jackets and shielded our eyes from the sun. By 18, I was up two, so he pressed, because when you are losing, what else can you do? It is like saying to your girl as she is headed out the door, suitcase in hand, "Give me one more chance. If I win, I win it all, and if I lose, you've lost nothing." I had maybe 15 feet to go, and as the whole day had gone, so did this one moment. It was undeniably fine.

Today I ran 13 miles and not fewer than 4 dogs came running up on me, at mile 10, a pair of Pomeranians nipped at my heels and I jumped 10 feet in the air, looked back at the owner, a tank of a gal smoking her smokes and yelling at her babies, and I looked at her and she fingered me with her eyes. Every neighbor for the past week has been a suspect, and there are prowlers on the loose, and criminals attacking ten-year olds and we are mobilizing because we are afraid that some terrorist 5,000 miles away is a greater threat to our children than the people repairing our roofs and mowing our lawns.

On Friday, I gave a speech and there were protesters and everyone looked at me like, 'What did you put in those words?' and I laughed because there were pretty girls all around and you don't betray your insecurities in the face of long eyelashes and bared midriffs, you do not. On Thursday, my dreams of St. Louis were dashed by a longstanding disregard for roles and responsibilities in favor of other duties as assigned, which apparently include RUINING MY TRIP TO ST. LOUIS. And somewhere in between, we tried to figure out how on Earth we might possibly extricate ourselves from each other, because it is too long running now, and not coming up with any reasonable solution, we opened up a bottle of champagne and ordered chow mein.

In hindsight, I would have ordered the kung pao.

\ Back 9

Do you ever stop talking when you believe you cannot improve upon the silence, but then resolve to whisper, worry your fate is tied to your character, then remember, oh, remember, and the only utterances thereafter are the occasional profanity let loose under your breath, on the walk home, reach the run-down, impoverished house where you grew up and were ashamed and were hopeless, to pick at the few bones that were the feast of your consequences.

I think every now again and then I mean to ask a question without actually getting the punctuation right, and only when faced with surprise realize that I ended with an exclamation. I shaved my head, shorn locks in the open, close at hand.

I am almost ready to wish my youth a farewell, like when you are reluctant to leave camp, and the bucket of water is at your side, the gear is packed into the truck but the embers still smolder. You know that throwing a bit more wood, green though it may still be, on to the coals, the flames could be waist high in little time, but there are other fires to be burned, controlled, easy heat that won't threaten your safety, but won't smell of cedar, for that matter, warm your back while your face freezes, looking into a quiet forest that has never lost a blinking match. And that is why you stamp smother it, and that is why it hisses and cries.

I will continue to struggle as long as I believe the opposite of happiness is wisdom.

/ Part One

(Text of my speech at the statewide AmeriCorps Launch, October 26, 2007. Sorry for reusing so much old material!)

To be perfectly honest, I practiced my speech last night and halfway through the presentation, the person who was listening said, "DADDY I HAVE TO GO TO THE TOILET," and I said, "NUMBER ONE OR NUMBER TWO?" and he said, "NUMBER THREE," and it reminded me of that day back in 1998 during my last month as an AmeriCorps VISTA, in South Carolina, the doctor handed me this child and said, "CONGRATULATIONS!" and I said "NO REALLY WE CAN'T, THIS IS MUCH TOO NICE," and he said, "HA HA HA, NOW THAT IS FUNNY. TAKE THE BABY NOW," and I backed up and said, "SERIOUSLY I AM NOT QUALIFIED TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR A LIFE, SOMETIMES I EVEN FORGET TO CHANGE MY OWN DRAWERS," and he was like, "OKAY NOW, TAKE YOUR SON," and I was like, "WE ONLY WANTED A PUPPY!" and he said, "TAKE THE CHILD! YOU MADE IT!" and I said, "WE WERE JUST WRESTLING!"

Later, we were convinced to take the wee thing home and came this close to naming him Ed, short of course for Ed Award, because he pretty much set us back at least $4,725, but that of course was in 1998 dollars, so don't go around thinking you can make nearly as nice a baby with that kind of money in today's economy, unless you can somehow cash out your award in Euros, but really, the points I'm trying to make are these: 1. Before the end of my speech, you will likely experience an overwhelming urge to use the restroom, and 2. ALWAYS SAY NO TO VIOLENCE, ESPECIALLY WRESTLING.

For those of you keeping a scorecard, incidentally, today's speech is titled 'CRIME (OF PASSION) DOESN'T PAY, or HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING ABOUT MY BILLS AND LOVE AMERICORPS.'

Wow. I can see that some of you are on the edge of your seats already. You're intrigued. Or you're wondering which one is the closest restroom.

Fortunately for you guys (and girls, girls can use the restroom too, i'm just saying) I happen to know that there is ample room in the bathrooms to accommodate the length and intensity of this speech. I mean there is ample room in the men's restroom. How would I know what the women's restroom is like? Note to self, please don't read this part of the speech tomorrow because it will go badly. IN FACT, WHEN IT COMES TO RESTROOMS YOU SHOULD JUST GIVE THE WHOLE TOPIC A WIDE STANCE. This is going badly.

What I really meant to say before I started reading the parts of my speech that are not intended to be read aloud is that I know from experience that there is too much going on in the world that demands our focus, and our attention spans are about as stable as the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, so for your guys benefit (and girls, girls can have benefits too, i'm just saying) I have actually developed Cliff's Notes for my speech which I will now read so that you will understand what I will be saying for the next 20 minutes, or hour and a half depending upon how many times "I" have to use the restroom.

IN THIS SPEECH THE AUTHOR USES SYMBOLISM AND LINEAR DEVICES SUCH AS OFFICE CHAIRS, MAYONNAISE AND MYSTICAL LEGENDS TO CONVEY FEELINGS OF HELPLESSNESS WITH THOSE IN NEED. THE PARABLE OF THE BOILING FROG, IN PARTICULAR, POINTS TO THE PROTAGONIST'S PAST FAILINGS IN TRYING TO ASSIST THOSE CLOSEST TO HIM (AND HER, GIRLS CAN BE PROTAGONISTS TOO), KEPT FROM THE TASK BY AN UNSEEN ELEMENT (IN THIS CASE, THE PERISHABILITY OF CONDIMENTS). THE CLOSING SCENE COMPARING ORDINARY CITIZENS TO THE WORLD'S PETROLEUM RESERVES IS THE AUTHOR'S WAY OF SAYING, OH MY GOD, WE ARE ALL REALLY COUNTING ON YOU. PLEASE DON'T RUN OUT!

Okay, speaking of running out, the other day I was in Ocean Shores and I was running out along the beach, and my old friend Rich said, "You know that when you are running for a long time and you start passing gas? That means you're burning fat." And I have never in my life heard something like that, and as soon as I had run about two miles away from my friend, I stopped and I wondered if perhaps he was just making up a story to make his point (or her point, girls can have points, too). Because these kinds of stories don't necessarily have to be true in order to be effective. From birth on, we are lied to in order to protect us, to instruct us, to keep us safe.

This is one of the oldest lessons I remember from childhood. We sometimes invent stories in order to give order to our world. And now that you've signed up for AmeriCorps, your world just got a whole lot bigger. And in order to make order for an even larger world than you ever imagined, you need to make up ever greater stories that may or may not be true! Truth is not the point anymore, people, purpose is the point.

Like you remember that story about when you are driving and the driver coming up on you has his high beams (or her high beams, girls can drive too, i'm just saying) on and your passenger says WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT FLASH YOUR HIGH BEAMS BACK AT HIM BECAUSE IT IS A GANG INITIATION AND THEY WILL SHOOT US. And you look at the person and you think, 1. Do you really believe that? and 2. OH MY GOD, I CAN REALLY TAKE ADVANTAGE OF YOUR NAIVETE.

So then if you guys are smart (AND GIRLS. GIRLS CAN BE SMART TOO. I'M JUST SAYIN.) you will say something like. YES, YES, YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. BUT THAT'S NOT ALL. IF SOMEONE DRIVES PAST YOU WITH HIS OR HER HIGH BEAMS ON AND YOU DON'T GO OUT THE NEXT DAY AND BECOME A VOLUNTEER TUTOR, THEY WILL ALSO COME SHOOT YOU.

REALLY? IS THAT TRUE?

Yes. Yes it is. I read it on the Intertubes. On a site called URBAN LEGENDS.

OOOOH! URBAN! SOUNDS SO SOPHISTICATED!

And legendary. Don't forget legendary.

Okay, so here we go. Chapter One of my Speech. And by the way, when you invite a speaker who has to break up his presentation into Chapter One? Shame on me. Chapter Two? Shame on you. Chapter three? Fool me, you can't get fooled again.

I got fooled once. And it was over mayonnaise. You get fooled by a condiment and you know that you've got no shortage of teachable moments lying along the path of your future. But all my life, and this includes the three or four years that I wasn't indentured to the Corporation for National Service, I was under the undebatable impression that leaving out my potato salad or tuna salad or egg salad for more than 3 point 5 minutes would doom me to a life of death, A LIFE...OF DEATH, that not only would all my internal organs spontaneously combust, but that the explosion would be just mild enough so that I wouldn't actually perish until my grandmother had a chance to get off work, hop on the bus, watch the last half hour of Days of Our Lives and then walk across the street to say I TOLD YOU NOT TO LEAVE THE MAYONNAISE OUT.

But, the thing is, my grandmother was lying to me. And all of you, if there's one thing I want you to remember when you go home tonight, even those of you who actually ARE grandmothers, is that your grandmother has been lying to all of you guys (and girls, girls can be grandmothers, too, I'm just saying). But the fact of the matter is: Leaving mayonnaise out will not kill you.

Mayonnaise...is acidic.

Which means that it will prevent the harmful bacteria from developing that will make you sick. It might not taste good if you leave it out while you're trying to complete your service project, but it's not going to kill you. And the point I'm trying to make is that during my time in AmeriCorps, I found that some of my most closely held truths were proven to be just more evidence that my grandmother didn't know what the heck she was talking about, even though I fully recognize that her intentions were good, and still, I think of all those years where I threw out all that rich, creamy, tangy goodness, and wonder, "HOW MUCH HAPPIER WOULD I BE NOW IF ONLY SOMEONE HAD BEEN INVITED TO GIVE A SPEECH WHERE HE CALLED MY GRANDMOTHER OUT AS A LIAR? HMM?"

But I'm not done calling all the people you love a liar, yet, so save your questions for when you guys are in the bathroom with me (and girls. girls can go to the bathroom with, oh never mind).

By the way, I thought long and hard about using the urban myths about mayonnaise as the basis for the point I'm trying to make, since some of you are really, really conscious about your health and fitness routines, and some of you are all like, I don't want to eat mayonnaise, I don't want to smoke, I don't want to drink, I don't want to drive, because I want to live a long, healthy life. But I know plenty of people who always walked, never smoked or drank, and never ate fast food entirely dependent upon mayonnaise who still didn't live very long, and you never hear about the famed longevity of the neandertals? Hmmm?

Okay, that's not fair. Here I am offending you, when all I really want to do is wish you a year that will be rich, smooth and immensely fulfilling, sort of like, oh, I don't know, MAYONNAISE.

Great. Now every time in the next year that you guys eat something with mayonnaise you are going to imagine me calling your grandmother a liar.

Why don't we go ahead and skip to Chapter Two of my speech, where I lecture you about the importance of using this year of your life to get outside your comfort zone, and by outside your comfort zone I DO NOT MEAN THE WOMEN'S RESTROOM, what I mean is annoying your project supervisor.

HA! I just lost about 10 percent of the audience, now didn't I? In addition to about another 10% of you who after completing your terms of service will also become AmeriCorps project supervisors, not because you're committed to national service but because of a little thing we like to call VENGEANCE.

\ Part Two

Chapter two is about lectures and comfort zones. This is something with which I am intimately and infinitely familiar as both a parent and a mayonnaise connoisseur. Why just the other day I got up and right before heading off to work I woke up my son and read him a list of all the reasons I would be disappointed with him before I got home and he said, "Why are you lecturing me? I haven’t even done anything wrong yet! I'm really not even awake!"

And I said, "It’s called pre-emptive parenting. It’s perfectly logical."

The reason I share this story is because the single most inspirational sentence ever uttered in my presence wasn't even meant to motivate me, but sometimes we grab onto precious things that do not belong to us, that's usually a felony, anyway, and we run away with them, and right or wrong, they make us richer. Once, a guy was talking and he said, "If you don't ruffle a few feathers, you're probably not doing your job." Please don't ask me what I was doing at a cockfight, but the point was well taken.

The greatest fear we face these days is phobiphobia. The fear of fear itself. It is the fear of asking questions. I am lecturing all of you to reduce our dependence upon our dependence on comfort zones.

But in addition to my lecture, allow me also to offer a bit of praise. Those of you who show up on Monday and ask, "Can I succeed?" already have. The power of fear, one that a lot of us old VISTAs faced, lies in the ability of fear to buy our silence, to quell that curiosity within us that demanded we ask, why the hell do we still have so many of these same problems?

To ask the question is to succeed. To name your fear is to conquer it. Later on, you will make a pledge, repeating, 'I will get things done.' But on Monday, before you set off for work, ask yourselves, 'Can I get things done?' Our hope lies not in the courage of your convictions but in the courage of your curiosity.

I wonder if you will accomplish all that you set out to do this year. And every year since I graduated from AmeriCorps 10 years ago I have wondered if I will do the same. But this decade's worth of questioning shouldn't frighten you.

I am not afraid to question why we still face these problems. Moreover, I am not afraid to question my ability to do something about it. I know that the hardest task ahead of me day in and day out is simply asking myself, why on earth should I leave my comfortable desk chair for a few hours each week? I am not afraid to ask that question. And I am not afraid to wonder if I will make any difference whatsoever. I am no longer afraid to question my own abilities. I am no longer afraid to be the one kid in class who asks the dumb question that all those teachers of ours assured us never existed.

I'm not afraid to ruffle a few feathers. And this annoyance, and believe me, there is no shortage of people who will assure you that I have annoyed the hell out of them, is not steeped in antagonism or belligerence. Curiosity does not require cruelty. There are surpluses of cruelty reserves in this world of unknown capacity. And I will tell you this, you cannot spend your way out of a cruelty surplus. You have to starve it, like a fever, despite what my grandmother always said, which was to drown it in teaspoons of bourbon and honey, perhaps the one lie she told me that I find mildly forgivable.

Look at yourselves as independent carbon emissions traders then. Overall, we burn through a lot more kindness than we can generally produce. As a result, kindness has become very valuable these days. And yet, we are less willing than ever to pay for it. The 1,000 of you in this hall are covering our excesses. Without you, the rest of us would have to be a whole hell of a lot nicer, more forgiving, more involved, more aware.

Don't you dare forgive us that debt.

Chapter three of my speech is again about urban mythology. (By the way, I have to again apologize for how long I have carried on today. In four years, I have never spoken to such an extent and it has always been an overwhelming honor to be asked to do so, and if I am ever asked to return I promise to tell you that I will be more concise. I won't be. But I promise to tell you I will be. That is the true nature of hindsight after all. Not that you would do things differently if only you had known. But that you would SAY you would do things differently, even though you really wouldn't. I am totally serious on this point and you know it.)

Return with me back in hindsight, then a few years. I am in a classroom. The man at the podium delivers one of the oldest lessons from our earliest childhood and as the audience applauds I realize why it is I feel I never belong. A friend looks at me, notices my hands firmly unmoved from my lap and asks, "Something you don't agree with?" At the table, eyes roll in abundance. I am that ever annoying participant who never agrees, am stunned when others do. I want to say to them, "No, that's just not true. What he said is mythology. It's not even good mythology."

They will continue to applaud and I will be thinking about my son coming home from school, likely from a similar lesson, and he will ask, "Do you know that if you drop a frog in boiling water, it will jump out, but that if you put a frog in cold water and slowly heat it up to boiling that it will stay there and die?"

This is our slippery slope.

"No," I say, "I do not know this. I think you have it backwards."

"But," he'll ask, " if you drop a frog in boiling water, do you not think it will jump out?"

"No. If you drop a frog in boiling water, it will die. It will stretch out its arms and legs in a final act of suffering and surprise, and it will remain there until you remove it like a lobster."

"But if you put it in cold water and gradually heat it..."

"No. NO. Imagine that you are taken from your comfort zone, your home, you are locked up into a room with no exit. There are people, as well as animals, who have not lifted a hand in defense when that final moment came even as it was spotted miles away. Listen to me. Ignore the old rules of the great experiment. Put the frog in a pot next to a pond, next to his home. Give him a reason to jump and a place to go. Whether you heat the water or not, he will not stay. We've done this, you know. What poor creature has ever remained willingly in our possession except those we killed or those we tamed or those without any hope whatsoever?"

"Your teacher may not have known this, but this story is not about frogs. It is about people."

This is what you are all going to realize in the next year and it is what is going to make you the 1,000 most annoying individuals in the entire pacific northwest. You are not the pot, you are not the kettle, you are not the water too hot, or the water too cold, you are the untenured professor who will ask, why don't we just take this experiment outside? And as the establishment rolls its eyes and showers you with ruffled feathers you will cast aside the old mythology and turn the heat down just a bit and maybe tilt the container towards home and carry the picnic basket down towards the water's edge and forget about the potato salad for a moment as you find yourselves at home in this new comfort zone where people are no longer experiments but actual people trying to overcome decades of urban mythology and when they flash their smiles at you you will flash right back and when they offer you bundles of joy you will accept and be joyous and when the people stand in rote applause you will raise your hand and not be afraid to ask your questions, regardless, wear the courage of your curiosity like a solemn commitment, and let loose with the occasional profanity when the appropriate euphemism escapes your vocabulary, let loose with the occasional compliment when the appropriate complaint escapes your mood, and go into your very last day as though it's your very first, overwhelmed with the stories you will just absolutely have to tell all because you once wondered if you had something to share.

And my great honor, my thrill, is to stand up here and realize that I've been at this long enough to know that you do.

Do not forgive us this debt.

Thank you all. Have a great year.

/ proesy

...
I am somewhat disheartened today reading through the old archives, the exhortations against this poetry in prose that sustained me through my years of Rimbaud and Verlaine, because there is not enough regulation, I suppose, or structure, and being a 12 year old in the body of someone much, much, much and such older, rules build character and stamina and all the other ingredients so vital to the long, dull life of the poet. But I am too limited in how I see the world. When I write, I have to acknowledge that I am subservient to the images before the words. I could never write what I have not seen, or cannot imagine. When I run, I remember the stones and the grass as they passed beneath my feet, and the thought of rearranging them so that they might later in my memory follow a specific theme, adhere to a recognized structure, obey an acceptable meter, good fucking god, discipline is just not in my nature.

I laugh, imagine that I pass some likely tableau, stop, turn around and roll up my pants legs and get down in the creek and move the earth, because later I will want to write about this river BED, but seeing only leaves of yellow, I am forced to find one that's RED. Later, I wonder if I can do this with people. Darling, your eyes are so very BRIGHT. Could you perhaps back up an inch, into the LIGHT?

I know that it is not quite so simple, but fuck, goddamn and hell almighty, just try and tell me what it is I am supposed to admire, whether women or words, and christ, fuck and shit and bite me, I will be upstream from that creek of yours sending you water too warm to concentrate on form.

\ posy

...
Through, through the window, oh, no higher than the last gray leaves falling from the cottonwood, I saw the cruelest dance, a bohemian waxwing hovered for a moment until I noticed a slow flying insect, maybe a midge or a lacewing, and the bird would halt her wings, drop to the fly, take it in her beak and rise a few feet, then release the poor, helpless thing, and then as the midge would take wing again, the bird would insist for another turn. She would wait a little longer each time as the lacewing needed more and more energy to gather his escape, and in the end, he wouldn't even flap his own wings, but relied upon simple gravity for flight.

I couldn't bear to watch the last march under the drawn swords of the lowest branches, budding alders at attention fighting for the scarcity of light closer to earth, because I experienced envy. I wanted to be attended to this way, dropped from the clutches of a superior being, angel, you, released and re-released and caught and recaptured and adored and fulfilled until I am utterly spent.

In the lowest drawer, too close to the floor to bend, we had our own space, and in it we would keep our most treasured possessions, keys and coins and pages torn from our favorite books, and they were prisoners to us like prey of the alate. Gray, gray prey of hope and circumstance, so fortunate these light winged, short lived satellites, happy to be chosen from among the masses, you picked me to feast upon. I cannot be any vaguer when I say, oh, you, you, you.

/ Accompanists

If by keeping an online journal I might refer to myself as a journalist, then let it therefore be heard far and why but that I am also an accompanist, all the A+ company I keep; the music that I have swimming in the mystic, opal pools of culled memories only serves to reinforce my natural talent for identifying and befriending talent, if not synonyms. Either you have it, or you do not. I sort of have it, except when I don’t. I totally just divided by zero.

We dressed up in our finest silk, donned our ties and posed for and to each other (except for her, whom I negged from the beginning. All so that we could reach committee consensus on how there will come a day when all of us will gather in the city of brotherly love for tequila related festivities, and pinball. We all met up at the Rocket, very politely complimented each other’s choice of neck apparel although secretly I could tell how envious everyone was of the best tie, hands down and I don’t think I have to tell you who the owner of that garment was and still is. “What’s with the ties?” the bartender asked, and I never really figured out why wearing ties elicited such a profound depth of confusion, but perhaps it was gender role misunderstanding.



Anatomy/physiology clearly plays a not-so-private part in all of these affairs, and at one point maybe it was Vahid who said that we were reaching a sort of event horizon where the planning meetings for TequilaCON were becoming so entertaining as to threaten the viability of the real event, because how can you compete when PBR and cheeseless pizza and unfortunate photographic evidence of goatse combine with people who now know each other well enough to forgive an indiscretion here and there?



In those old Kipling tales, the author would frame a new lesson within the scenery of an exotic locale and inject a tenuous situation with uncertain thrill, and this is a technique Jenny and Asia have mastered over the past year, teaching me about the whys and wheretofores of menstruation while kicking the ever loving christ out of me in pinball, though the telling moment would have to be when I anted up my own 7 million score and said, ‘I BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW THAT MENSTRUATION STOPS WHEN YOU LIVE UNDERGROUND IN A CAVE, HMMM?’ And a local searched it on the internet and what I said was proven to be true, and yet still remained bizarre, because why on earth would I carry around that kind of information?



Wait, don’t answer that, because every business meeting (SERIOUSLY, said the waitress at Ken’s Pizza, WHAT’S WITH THE TIES??!?) needs to have its monogamy shattered by the occasional taboo topic, like how many times can one group of pinball players throw hip thrusts into full out tilts? And how much of a saint is Sibyl for constantly listening to me pine away for her friends (WHO COINCIDENTALLY NEVER COME OUT WITH HER TWICE WHEN I AM THERE, HMM?), and how much more can I fake that look of disapprobation when sweet, sweet Djustin starts throwing profanity like copper? Full out biblical swears and the occasional compound unmentionable. How many times can one meeting be interrupted with reminiscences over people who should be here if the world were kinder? An incomplete list, to be certain.Really, really certain. FILLER
(I work for the internet).

Dave is going to have his work cut out for him in terms of swag, Sarah will surely embrace her hostess duties in Philly, and MG! I am totally going to expect some killer venue recommendations, and I don’t say that just because Philadelphia is the murder capital of the 21st Century.



And I suppose I’m going to have to work harder, too, because I hear that Tequilacon may not last forever, and I want this next go around to be metafantastic, so I may occasionally not be so anti-social. Please don’t think because I have a barebones site with nary a blogroll or archives or even accessible content that I am not down for passing around a shared glass of the adult beverage of your choice. I won’t even wipe off the lip gloss. And if you want to be blood brother and sister, I will happily pull out my knife and CUT MY OWN PALM.



I don’t remember the name of the last bar we hit and shut down for last call but as the lights came on that old familiar question escorted us out the door. What’s with the ties? he asked.

Just wrapping up a little business.

\ Zero Divisions

After my run along the beach, I dreamed of waking up to a bed covered in blood, unfurled the bandages from my ankles and brimmed with pride, how I had broken through the wall of pain, the final step in my regimen where instead of ignoring my limitations, I embrace them and scissor-step alongside. These are the stages of loss, and I had accelerated my development so as to skip denial and bargaining, particularly the latter with its too-hard-to-bear insult-to-injury quality. Bargaining deserves its own 5-stage process of death and dying. I am willing to do it, but god, I hope it never comes to that.



Your feet sink even deeper into the sand when no one is around, the wind picks up just a bit, the view distracts more from the task at hand, and worst of all, you notice that there is ever more driftwood along the beach, weathered perfectly smooth by the salt and sand, impossibly comfortable and ever inviting park benches lonely for a visitor. As the number of pros outnumbering cons approaches infinity, you realize that eventually you will essentially have no choice but to stop and rest. I give in to my impulses more quickly than ever, and it’s mostly based upon my understanding of fractions. It’s, it’s.



Running home is even harder, because you somehow expected the wind to be at your back this time, and you suddenly understand that you were never running headlong into it, but that the current was mocking the very waves at your feet, the air crashes about you from above, makes it feel like a one-dimensional wall in front of you when it is really all around, adding not just to the resistance of your movement but to the gravity of your existence. The mental devastation is what makes it so much harder to run all the way back, and makes you stronger as you imagine your feet would sink into concrete and asphalt much as they do this sand, how much heavier you have become from the sacred and profane and searching exercise.



Every time I go out, I believe that I will finally know all there is to know and then be ready for my next new passion, and there is that wind hitting at all directions, I am curiouser and curiouser, and the difficulty of understanding this has created a brand new furrow in my brow, and for the very first time I am starting to like how I look, weathered.

/ this is the sound

I made inappropriate jokes today at inopportune times with an unfortunate audience and somehow that saying about two wrongs not making a right, although three lefts most certainly do held so true, funny how it seems, because in the end I apparently made the right kind of impression and it was one of those days where walking down the street people meet your accidental gaze and smile. People smiled today, and I will take those smiles at face value.

This was me last night. A year ago I came here to the ocean and ran towards the beach with a bottle of gin in one hand and a pretty girl in the other and fast forward 12 months it is all distant hazy weather rising on the horizon, we found ourselves in an Irish pub playing Scrabble, and I fell in love with the bartender, and never had the common courtesy to inform her that I fall in love with everyone. Don't take it personal. The tiles in my hand presented an opportunity for a 40 point word, but I wasn't quite sure if it was a word, and of course was too embarrassed to try it out, to say it out loud, to give voice to my fear. This is how I occasionally fall short, by not saying what it is that would be so right to say. I kept not only the word, but all the individual letters close to my heart.

At the end of the game I picked up the dictionary, and there was my word, plain as day, but it caused me no heartburn. Some things are better left unsaid.

\ thrill in my heart

A fireplace is a recess, in a wall, where a fire can be built, and I am staring at something called an electric fireplace, and were I to set tinder and kindling and yule tidings under a kerosene spray, throw in my flame, the definitions would come undone, the plastic would melt and the tenants would die for not having a flue. It is not what it's advertised. It's not what it's.

I don't want to be that uncomfortable pause for you, where you think of me and say, accidentally, out loud, I'd rather not deal with this now. And if you were to say, maybe we should just call this off forever, I would steel myself for an eternity, and if you were to call the day before forever arrived and say, I'd like to see you, just this once, I would unshackle those irons and burn the midnight oil, ignore the smoke in the carburetor, pretend it was the promise of popcorn before an empty theater, and, well this is surprising, but I'd take a wrong turn, god, I totally would, and I know this because I have, and combing the beach I'd watch for an ocean sunrise that will never come, because this is not the right coast, this is where the cowboys dip their toes into the cold Pacific, wonder if the sequel will have them join the merchant marines, dread the tales about the custom of the sea. Who drew the short straw.

The straws these days have nothing to do with length, but width is an economic driver. Open up that diameter and add profit to your coffers, the wider the straw, the more bicarbonate of soda into the gullet, the more, the morer, the morest.

Years ago, I lay out in front of this fake fireplace, I faked a bit of discontent, I imagined that I would keep coming back to revisit all these fake regards and false promises, and here I am. It is warm, nonetheless. It burns coronas into my eyes when I close my lids as tightly as can be, I can read fireworks in the phosphenes, crawl back under the blanket, hear the waves crash against the surf. There is an empty bottle still buried out there in the sand, and maybe that's how all these beaches came to be.

/ all alone

I am only afraid of those injuries, accidents, horseplay mistakes that steal from you the memories that get you from day to day, hopping stones across a creek. A stroke that might make a liar of me when I say, I will always look for your face in the landscape, try to hear your voice in the understory. Maybe I would try to wink out a message, bedridden, spoon-fed, shocked by the sensation of surgical steel, whether scalpel or emesis basin, I don't know, but to not imagine not being overwhelmed with reminiscence?

Once, I actually forgot that it was impossible to feel nostalgic for a history that wasn't my own, and for days I lost weight and lost track of time and lost all critical patience, until finally I remembered I was mourning somebody else's memories.

This hotel bed where I'm sleeping now lacks for certain comforts that were once my jealous possessions. Space. I can kick out as though emerging from a failed bridge suicide, the housekeeper will enter my room, at once overcome with memories of snow angels and frost nip.

There is no faucet hooked directly to the headboard, either, and I can see why hospitality is such a break-even sort of business.

I used to be a well-seasoned veteran. Now I'm just salty.

Tomorrow, I run along the beach with an old friend.

Pirate's life is the life for me!

Ho!

\ in the moonlight

I think a man must have died unexpectedly yesterday, because last night his entire life flashed before my eyes, and there were episodes of having misplaced his children, stressful weeks of working under deadline, a caribbean tryst, and I wish I could thank him, not for the occasional excitement but because I am so difficult to wake, I will surely sleep through my own funeral, and this seems nearly impossible, given how much I like to hear the sound of other people talking about me.

Not to worry, because it comforts me to know these conversations with the hosts of assumed identities represent circles, that I am merely passing the baton to someone just as uncomfortable as I once was in receiving it, though in my role it is impossible to imagine, or at least enjoy the prospect of, your passing on the handle to someone likewise unmoved.

I understand the rules of small town living, and experience the deja vu of walking the snow covered streets at night, talking out loud, wondering what it is that no one else understands about me, that I am going to leave this place, but know that I never will, go crazy in trying to find god after so many years of denial. It is funny to me now! I keep telling myself to remember that it always was.

Once, I took a job in the middle of the night throwing boxes at a transit center, and in the interview, they made it clear I would never make it, and the rumor on the street was that no one ever does, and it was like a badge of honor that I was hired in the first place.

And one night at 2:45 in the morning, I walked home and said to myself that I would never quit, the adrenaline still high in my stream, white, breaking crests for the most part, and as soon as my face touched the pillow in my tiny apartment, that I had rented for $245 a month, I realized, with not an underwhelming amount of sadness, that my preferred drugs are depressants, and I quit the next day.

I keep thinking that one day I will go back to that time in my life and start over, make better decisions, but each year it gets further and further away, and each year I add just a few more irreplaceable moments, and each year the emotional physics overwhelm my force of will, and I know that I will never get back to that kid who ran away from home, took on a job at a midnight warehouse, got addicted to an entirely misinformed class of narcotics.

Ain't givin up the dream, though.

/ The First is Always New

In my left brain I am listening to a reader bring the life of Prince Edward Island in the 1870s to as comparable an idyll as can be found in the driver's side of a foreign sedan and in my right brain I am imagining what kind of hat I would wear if I were to fake my own demise and emerge pseudonymously abroad, certainly in a Romance language country, and in my center brain I am burying my most recent regret deep in a hippocampic box sealed by a combination lock with all the numbers scraped off and in my top shelf I am scheming to use the homonyms insightful and inciteful at one fell turn over drinks, and when you mix it all together, it's called a suicide.

In my office chair I am currently pressing the 'do not disturb' button on my phone, because I do not wish to go through my day disturbed, even if I appear that way on frequent trips to the restroom, and almost immediately someone calls and leaves a message, and the flashing red light is more disturbing than the actual call could have possibly ever been. My do not disturb button needs a separate do not further disturb light disenabler. I can practically hear the pounding of the little red strobe, good god.

In my notebook is a line that reads, 'Litotes will not be uncommon in my next tall tale,' and the line is repeated successively in anaphoric consistency, litotes will not be unuseful, litotes will not be unmeaningful, and so it goes not without nausea. And still I cannot use it out loud in conversation, the words either too difficult to grasp or too plain in the presence of my more common phrases, you betcha and ain't it, though?

I ran through it yesterday morning, really, wholeheartedly got over the friction between my knee and its ligaments. I mean, in my own self-serving manner I ran through it yesterday morning, really, wholeheartedly and not unquickly. It was the first time since my injury that I pulled out my pretty black watch with the not at all disturbing blue light that never flashes when I have phone calls in the queue, but only when I want to illuminate the progress I have planned out for myself, and only when I push the button. The time coincided with the actual time of day, and it took me over a minute of switching from TIMER mode to TIME mode before I figured out the trick, which is almost certainly to run an hour earlier and a minute faster tomorrow, if you want to experience that same thrill of confused repetition all over again.

...

\ The Second is Sometimes Old

I am totally going to stop believing in evolution until I start seeing better results.

It is less tiring, and now I am addicted, and I flush with anger when my routine is interrupted, even if by responsibilities that I know good and well are my own. But at mile 5 the red madrona bark blends in with the yellow alder leaves, the slate and river rock, the loam and mulch, and it is a marbled path, the illusion of running atop aspic, and oh, if I haven't believed in an afterlife until now, at least I am hung up on this one.

I run until I hit the wall on Saturdays, and on Mondays run a mile as fast as I can. On Wednesdays I used to try to strike a balance, but balked when I realized the metaphor. Now I just try to get over the hump.

I ran my mile up two hills, and I just know I could go faster, although I suppose I could slow down a bit and still arrive at the same time, and back at the house I am on my knees coughing primordial days, depths of my lungs not dredged since my witless years. It is like a deep river down there. What is the opposite of tears? It is a river of dust and tobacco and wrongs more imagined than imaginary.

I write onto my hand with a magic marker, 'I am my own wasted talent.' It is my deadly slogan. But i prefer to imagine myself a recycler of limited potential. I re-absorb every good idea, put words down on paper, then suck them back in to be re-used later on. I am full of my own possibilities.

I can no longer get by on plotting my revenge, and it is to the point where i have given up on making peace, and instead of becoming that person who constantly talks out his issues, I am that person who always seems to be rolling his eyes and shaking his head. I am still allowed the luxury of pinching myself to take my mind of the reality of boring conversation.

I am far too busy imagining my alterego floating upon rainclouds from adventure to adventure, and have little time to reproduce this idyll for my co-respondents, dragging on my personal amusements. The imaginary me is angry and intense and constantly tripping over his own callousness, and yet somehow adored all the more so for it. The real me is trying to close the gap, so that I can catch up with the next runner in line. Even from way back here I can tell, whoa, she is something else.

And she is.

/ LD

You know it is a great conversation that ends with the following question: WHAT'S BETTER? THINKING ABOUT THE FACT YOU GOT LAID LAST NIGHT, OR KNOWING THAT YOU ARE GOING TO GET LAID TONIGHT?

Really, it was decided, there are only two personalities in the world, and both are defined by how you answer this particular question.



...

\ Debate

I was remembering an argument one night with a sweet tea belle in South Carolina, not long after moving into town, still rubbing my eyes seeing the Palmetto bugs make liars of evolutionary biologists everywhere, save Tokyo under attack from Mothra. Well, not an argument so much as an AHA moment where our toes got overrun by the wheels where the rubber meets the road to nowhere. Because here is my deal. I debated throughout high school and the result is that I find it now impossible to argue with anyone unless I'm wearing a hand-me-down polyester suit, am allowed to cart in my portable file box and there is the promise of an aluminum trophy upon my victorious final second affirmative rebuttal (3 MINUTES).

So folks like debating me nowadays because my main weapons are NODDING MY HEAD and REPEATING 'MM-HMM' until I have thoroughly proven their point.

She picked the topic, as is proper because at this particular institution, women won't ever enter a building until a gentleman deigns to open the door first, oh mercy, the long lines at the restrooms until automated sensors arrived 'round these parts.

We debated the subject of lying, as in lying TO someone, not lying WITH someone, heavens. Her first contention was this:
-- LYING IS ALWAYS WRONG (emphasis on eternity)

Her second contention was:
-- BECAUSE

Her coup d-e'tat:
-- CAN I GET AN AMEN?

And in between my nodding and affirmative moaning, I said, 'You are so pretty when you are right.'

Still, I couldn't help, lack of a polyester suit notwithstanding to say, 'Let me ask you a question. Let's pretend you are a Dutch family in 1944 and the Nazis pay you a visit and wonder, 'DO YOU HAVE A LITTLE GIRL HERE BY THE NAME OF ANNE SOMEWHEREABOUTS?' Whaddya say?'

Vexed, she pursed her lips in such an adorable way that I could no longer imagine the shiny new trophy atop my wardrobe and thereafter we talked about her grandmother's ginger snaps, the mighty fine scent of jessamine on the setting summer night and her secret yen for roadside bolled peanuts. My god, there are some pretty girls way down south.

/ Westward Ho

Whenever I look to the horizon of my future, I slowly back away, wonder if I can reverse time by spinning the earth underneath me feet like a lumberjack in a log-rolling competition, but realizing my density is only just barely matched by the entire planet, which also has age and inertia on her side, I take to playing Westward Trail, to make me understand that things are not so bad as they could be.



The lessons are harder learnt when failure means you don’t eat, and still, somehow, these early pioneers were audacious enough to bring children into the world, and then made back-ups, just in case, urged on by the apparent bounty of the land.



Sometimes, they had naught but the clothes on their back, except when they didn’t even have that, because Pa was such a poor shot when Ma left the mulberry cordial too long out in the sun. In my adult life, I have never wanted for liquor, and can hardly cry in comparison, now can I?



A thousand terrible shots is often just barely what it takes to overcome by force of numbers what wit alone cannot and could never accomplish, not when fresh meat is on the line. It reminds me that lately I must be overthinking my problems, when what’s probably all that’s needed is a mental outburst full of rage and projectiles.



In pioneer days, sometimes the first thing you lost was the one thing you needed, and love almost never fell into this category, being as how you could shoot your way to good health, whereas companionship, while it might get you comfortable from age 50 right on through to your very own pair of porch rockers, does very little in the way of acquiring the kind of sustenance that keeps you strong enough to ward off dysentery. Not back then it didn’t, and so whenever I long for physical touch, I remind myself that there are soup kitchens in nearly every major city, so I’d best just keep it all in perspective.



That is not to say we don’t share in some mutual suffering, and I know from my turns at the round how the settlers often succumbed to that most poetically justified of circumstances, when the person least likely to fail you very often does. There is a moment that both of us have thought, ‘Not you. I would have expected almost anyone in the world to let me down, but my god, not you.’ Occasionally I say this only to realize I’m in the bathroom brushing my teeth.



And then you might think that the opposite holds true, that the person you most expect will live up to his suspicion of weakness will in fact surprise you, ride in to rescue your party, against all odds, but you’d be wrong. That person will live up to his name and fail you time and time again. But at least nowadays that failure won’t result in a slow death at the hands of cholera. It’ll just set you on edge, maybe cause you to get hammered and dump sugar in his gas tank.



Of course, back then, the people who let you down often died shortly thereafter, being as how we were all so closely bound up in the web of our livelihood, tethered together in a way that really brought your mistakes close to home. And no one I know who has done me wrong has gotten so much as a stomach ulcer, and me being well past the average lifespan of the Oregon pioneer, this has me wondering if anything has really changed at all.



I suppose the storms these days are really metaphors for tempestuous relationships, what with weather prediction nearly down to a goddamned science. You no longer hear about rain and floods killing scores of unsuspecting settlers, and if you do, all you have to do is turn the channel, maybe check the weather in Phoenix.



Like then, your fate today is likely held in the hands of someone in a hurry to attend to more pressing matters than your welfare. But there is no frontier justice keeping me from shouting my opinions far and wide. I like to complain, albeit very quietly and only among others who agree with me, so this might be the most advantageous difference of them all.



I have recovered from screwing up more times than I can remember. The pioneers got far fewer do-overs. I cherish my mistakes and would like to think I’d make a poor settler.

\ Nary a Hitch

I tried out a new exercise last night, following another faulty run, a routine that supposedly helps me find my central line, then pushes me off to one side and makes me strain against the weight of gravity, build resistance, push my limits until it hurts. The result is that now I am more self-centered, unbalanced, stubborn and hurt than ever before. Lying on my back following a round with the medicine ball is the best place to tell myself that I have never subscribed to the whole 'YOU SHOULD LEAVE BECAUSE YOU ARE TOO GOOD FOR ME' routine. I don't see the point, I think, as I throw the ball up into the air. People will choose and unchoose you based on what they think is good for them, not you, I murmur, crossing the ball over from my left to my right. If i am rotten and you hitch your wagon to me, then I trust your decision making skills, I exhale, holding it behind my head into a crunch. When you let the oxen graze in greener pastures, then I will briefly think that you are wrong and need to be cut, but quickly, it passes, and then look: FREE HITCHING POST SPACE. I shout this last line, pulling myself into a standing position, then leaning into downward dog. I have never been so flexible.

I write down my repetitions, wonder why adjusting takes such getting used to, realize why my faults are so hard to imagine, but remember that it must be because we are used to concepts only inasmuch as we can define those concepts by words, and we can only relate to words inasmuch as they appear via their letters on a computer screen and on the computer screen, these letters appear two-dimensional, but the concept itself is not. To the left of normal is modesty. To the right is full of shit. BEHIND normal is self hate. In front of normal is self-awareness. Below normal is that I am perfect, just not for everyone. Above normal is I am super, but once or twice, I need a reminder, such as a lady in the airport bar buying me a drink. This is not degrees in a spectrum. It is depth within the rainbow, not just colors, but temperature and humidity, which unlike me, tend to settle down as it gets later in the evening.

/ burn, baby

a shared appreciation of dollar sushi is not enough upon which to build a lasting friendship, not NEARLY, and growing older teaches you these hard lessons, and the list of common passions that can bridge any friendly divide grows smaller with each passing fad. if she likes talk like a pirate day, friendship pins AND baroque music, then we are DESTINED to be bosom friends forever and ever, you think. almost. a lot of awful people like pirates. for instance.

these foundations are so easily chipped and cracked, and more often than not for me, the death knell is a poorly received joke.

Ow! I need a new office chair!
Why?
Because mine is a weapon of ass destruction.
Huh?
YOU SAID YOU LIKED SUDOKU!

but sometimes it is just flat out over.

i have learned to convince myself that this is not necessarily a bad thing. i have little choice. i am an expert in bringing friendships to a close. i have absolutely no concern that a high school or college friend will stumble upon my writing. that is because I HAVE NO FRIENDS remaining prior to 2001. i burn through the motherfuckers at an eighty-six percent efficiency.

in the next couple of weeks i will be seeing several people that i would never refer to as friends for this very reason. business associates, shall we call them.

still, when you share an appreciation for pabst blue ribbon, laser Pink Floyd, eye patches, ties, glow-in-the-dark tattoos, chocolate martinis, karaoke (SOMETIMES) and BLACK LIGHT PIRATE THEMED PARKING GARAGE MINI GOLF, there is hope.

i mean, even i couldn't 86 that.

\ burn

Whenever she cradles her eyes, we fold into ourselves, became the children from our past; not the memories of cross-country car rides, not the stories of summer camps by the lake, not the dreams of hiding from monsters in the den, but the adolescents simply waiting for the time to pass. I know who I am during these times, know why the future seems so unattainable when I am 12 years old. When we need to come into the house, vault its unfriendly steps, weather its barnwood creaks and moans, we whisper so as not to wake her, though in our adult state it is easier to do the job we are here to do, we cannot bring ourselves to ignore this gift.

She was awake much more often in the beginning, but in the past two days, she has slept increasingly longer hours into the morning, reaching midday, and napping as soon as the apex of the sun starts throwing our shadows back to the east, where we are from, some part of the south where the claustrophobia of the foliage now has us in wide-eyed astonishment, the openness of the prairie.

Today, her breathing is so shallow that the tips of her fingers are blue, the muscles that hold her jaw tight have given to gravity.

The house, full of dangers, lies threatened itself, in the path of a fire 50 years wide, and during the day we put up a barrier with rakes and shovels, and an old tractor with a scoop attached to its front end. We are alone in our defense, we refused to leave, as much as we were sentenced to it. We are tied to her and she is tied to this land.

It's so flat out here, she thinks, and I try to remember that you can still get lost within this candid wilderness, that it only seems barren of secrets because we stand on top of the earth, cannot see the craters and ravines. Cannot help but be fooled by the illusion of these grasses and tumbleweeds. You can drop into this ground and never be seen or heard from again, and burn just as easily among these flatlands as in the Smoky Mountains. Even easier. Two men died in '95 not so far from here, at the Point Fire, just on the other side of the border. They found them still in the cab of their brush truck, burned up in grass no higher than your waist, with a final vista of 200 miles in all directions, atop a flat, sleeping hill.

/ possess

i am happy.

wait, let me qualify.

remember that time your mom walked in crying and pointed at you (in real life it's reallllly bad when they actually point) and asked ARE YOU HAPPY NOW??!

i am happy.

\ poses

there was a mercifully brief two week period in high school when suspenders made a comeback. except you couldn't actually wear them over your shoulders. you had to let them hang coolly by your waist. which meant you also had to wear a belt to keep your pants up. we never understood why the old men down at the elks lodge would laugh at us when we strolled by with the local senior picture photographer striking irretrievable poses against a backdrop screen with the inexplicable salmon colored circle. if you could draw your life along a straight line on graph paper, then set the image next to a map of the universe, then you might be under the impression that you occupy the exact same point in time with the fake smile staring back at you from 1989.

i love this complete and utterly senseless approach to life, as though the decisions you make may not haunt you for eternity, because perhaps forever was not guaranteed in the legal sense, but in the commercial, not-really-true-but-please-buy-our-product sense. I'm down to my last two installments, you know. likewise, conversations with the people from our past represent circles with no refunds, but you can bring your faulty purchase back for in-store credit. take your flying shoes down aisle 3, pick up some marathon bars.

hopefully, one day, one of my friends will walk into my office, maybe when i'm filling out a travel reimbursement form or drafting a memo on mailroom procedures or trying to remember my department account code, and she will shut the door behind her, and she will hang her blouse over the motion sensor that controls how much light i am allowed, and she will kneel next to my chair, put her head in my lap and start crying, asking, 'why do we continue like this? how have we become trapped within these expectations? i am 17 and following a strange man as he leads me through the park, ordering me into unnatural poses and commanding i smile at the very goddamned moment i feel unlike baring my teeth except in fury. they are dressing me in funny clothes and now i am five years old throwing a tantrum, not because i am angry, but because i do not possess the words to express my frustration, and before we got our first thesaurus we had anger, and whenever you don't know a word, a suitable substitute was your tiny fist striking the desk.' and i will lift her chin and say, 'how can you have turned out so wicked, being as how i raised you by my very hands?' and if she laughs, it will be because we were both scolded this way, dropped into such tired care.

i will kiss her so deeply then that we will pull the power strips from the wall, cross the street where there is a garry oak savanna overlooking a salmon bearing wetland, and for an afternoon the commuters will sound like bison, the salal will tickle like cabin flames, if we love what we see, we will be unafraid to say it, and the contrails will frighten us, the angry eyebrows of a disapproving god. my god, it will be like old times, even until the day sets and we return to our desks to complete our travel authorizations. we will have had at least this day, and never doubt that it might even happen again. one day, when you think it will not happen, we will remember, that it will, that someone you understand will walk right up to you in the middle of a workday, will come right up to you, will actually reach out and my god lift your hand, actually touch you breaking any barrier of impropriety, lift your fingers, your incredulous eyes, and before you have time to reach for your thesaurus to give voice to the word for which you are suddenly searching, lead you out into a very old sun, glaze your eyes with impossibility. my god.