I smell good today

No one is going to tell me this, but it’s Monday and I do.
Thank me.
I’m welcome.
Am I trying a new cologne?
No, it’s my hair product!
Tell me what it is so I, too, can smell nice for myself!
What have I done for me lately?
I haven’t bitched at me all morning!
That’s fantastic!
Yes it is, myself, yes it is.

Slowly, It Does Come Back

One of these days, I’m going to find myself completely naked on the page. The being naked and writing naked are the same, only tangents of the same premise. I look into myself and I see that there are a lot of naughty thoughts. A host, a contingent. Legion. I know these are not mine alone but freely pass in and out of all the body known as human. Yet I am timid. I feel like I want to be alone, but why then be among so many as well as have a son and a longing for company? I can truly have the alone any time I want it. I believe that is a strong candidate for what may lie on the other side. I cannot truly want it, even as it feels like it is the best thing for everyone. I might want to go into a chrysalis.

I have a sense like a spider with a foot on a web as it lies in hiding that there is a big moment, an understanding that will bring the weave of my life into focus just moments away. I have this uneasiness that moves through my emotions searching for a voice, meaning.

There is ice on the river that breaks up then gathers on various things like trees fallen and eroded bank. It was ice dams that flooded the Capital. Streams lead to rivers from many and differing places from far away sources and hidden springs, but when they have to all converge to get where they need to get to and there is all this transparent, individually dividable mess of entanglement, very little gets to where it needs to get to for a while.

What’s the hold up? All this stuff is easy. It’s nothing. Oh.

If it were easy to talk about I would already be flowing, not holding back, peeping over a frozen dam brimming with myself.

I am breaking like the hold of winter. You’re damn right I’m afraid.

I don’t have an honest thing I can say after that. It just is really that way. No cure. No apology.

A fat robin appears with a flutter on a branch across the road. The sun shines. This is how I feel. The signs are all here. The snow is diminished. Soon the body I love and miss so will lie naked beneath me, stretching for me, beckoning me to believe in the only promise there is. But now, there seems to be some trouble with the path ahead. Some obstacles that won’t go away, that demand time and understanding and patience (which seems so frayed and worn). A lot of the snow is crushed into massive sheets. Only the persistence of the sun will persuade it to give up its stubborn ways, loosen up, flow. And only as fast as it will go.

Notes from the Surround

I learned this morning that our receptionist position at work is opening up again. This means that yet again, I will become the temporary receptionist.

I’ve noted before that there are two indicators to my mental state. I tend to purchase two things consistently: books and music. When I purchase books I am searching (read: unhappy). When I purchase music I am surging forward (or happy). Lately I have been acquiring books.

Despite my addiction to watching basketball on tv, and the near constant presence of games on tv at this time of the year, I continue to plow through books at a clip of two or three a week. I cannot quite grasp how this can be. When am I reading?

I got an invitation to a symposium of poetry in August. Usually I can track where these come from, but I don’t know who got me this one.

I feel about as desirable as the flu. Nonetheless, two days ago I had a young, pretty girl ask me quite boldly if I wanted to hook up. I laughed and walked away. Later, I lay alone in my room and felt intensely lonely. I don’t understand a goddamned thing.

A Structured Settlement

Brite Silver Morning, I can’t make you copper
nor fill you with birds if you don’t want to fly
nor cause cloudcover, nor possess you, nor try

I can call you something other than what shines
I can make up rules for you to abide by
I can decide that morning is a night robber

shut my eyes and ask for any other kind of light
or demand only late afternoon slants from you
or remain in my covers ’til I get my hue

I can dive in my dreams in oceans of blue
I can swim there alone anyway I want to
I can take it all in without dawn, without fight

Brite Silver Morning, you don’t even try
to be what I want, or light me up proper
I can bury my face in the rag of desire
or open a window for you to come through

Pay to play

It was a lively band night. Not sure what the difference is. There is an eminent sense of freedom in the swooping interaction between all the parts. We covered all the emotions. Soaring and screaming. We got nasty and we got simple. It was greater than fun. It meant something to meet these men on this plane. There was no fear, and clearly we had all been practicing on our own. It was like trysting with a lover who knows your body that you were convinced there was no future with anymore and fooling around and finding your light split open and exploding in delight. We played in a continual string with only brief breaks. We wore out. We smashed through our barriers and found each other on the other side.

My son was out riding his board for awhile early in the evening. He's been listening to the band for two years. He skated up to me during a break and gestured for me to bend my head down. Then he murmured, "Now you guys sound like a real band."

At one point, Jon was showing me a progression he wanted to work with and the garage door opened and there were suddenly 10 people standing in our space gawking and smiling. We played on after a brief scramble of senses. One of the women who was with the group likes me and had brought a friend. I'd chatted with her on one of my excursions to the house. She has designs. Still, I'm emblazoned with task. I want more of myself than surfing from distraction to hope. I don't need anyone to think I should be or do anything. I've got life work on my mind. I've got a black notebook in my pocket filled with sketches. I've got black keys in my fingers filled with longing. I've got a black voice in my mouth smoky to lay across the melody.

All the pain of life and love. Failed endeavors and misunderstanding. Hope and fear and sex and dreams. How long have I controlled my passions in trade for someone else's security when there is none? I turned my face to the ache. I know the names of my heart. I call them out in my work with a moan and a slur. I lure her, tempt her with the sweetest of siren songs, muse of my longing, voice of my soul. My ear bends to know every note of your song.

Oh, Andy

I continue to compile books in my head. I'm reading at a great clip from multiple sources, simultaneously studying seemingly everything. I don't know how much interested I am in the topics as the way the ideas are presented. I don't know what I am looking for. Everything, maybe.

Pudding. What is it with this stuff? It's like snot that tastes really good. I adore pudding. I feel like I'm slumming when I eat it. I love the dirtiness I feel with the little cups and the spoon. One day they are going to crack down on this stuff. Why doesn't it need to be refrigerated again?

I used to watch a lot of monster movies. Then I figured out that the monster was always my hero and I associated the destruction with what I would do if I wasn't always under someone's thumb. This led to the inevitable examination of my psyche and caused me to become prematurely enlightened, which causes swelling and tenderness. Once I recovered from that, I resumed watching monster movies again, this time adding pudding. So far, so good.

So I read a lot and while I read I frequently day dream. Sometimes I am attacking Tokyo while I read about physics, but just as often I attack random futuristic cities that are obviously models. Yesterday I was laying on the couch reading about Raymond Chandler's homophobia while I sensuously made love to a velvety soft spoonful of chocolate goo. Ooh it melted on my tongue as the discussion raged about why he would marry a woman so much older than himself. Later I looked at some pictures of pudding.

Who else is tired of the Fibonacci sequence? Hey look, a flower…does it remind me of a vagina, or does it make me want to get out a calculator? For some there is no difference. I'm just going to say that I'm not one of those people. I'm pretty sure I can tell the difference. They aren't spelled the same, and one of them is never where it's supposed to be. While neither of them needs refrigeration, only one of them feels like pudding on my tongue. If there was a woman here right now, I would get her to show me her calculator.

I don't read a lot of humor. I don't find things to be particularly funny when all around us raging monsters are tearing up cities by the roots and shaking their rubberized tails to neo-modern disco. That music is just not that funny. It wasn't funny when the BeeGee's were snorting coke and it's still not funny. I cried when Andy died. Curled right up on a couch with a four pack of chocolate/vanilla swirl and read about Simon Bolivar slowly dying in a sodden shithole town that no respecting monster would deign invade. The music died with Marvin, but Andy was special. I can still see him hosting Star Search in his leather unitard with his package jutting precariously out at the audience. He came and he gave without taking and we sent him away. Oh Andy.

Years ago I had a nymphomaniac dominatrix girlfriend who informed me that I'm a stimulant freak. One night we were just driving around in my old van and she was prattling on about one thing or another. She was an honor's student at Berkley so I figured she had to talk about something interesting sooner or later. Most of her psychology training was learned in the dungeon making guys eat her poo. We never got that intimate; she used to light me up in other ways. But she was right. I do love stimulants. My favorite form is the plastic coffee you get at gas stations. If only they put caffeine in pudding and I could pull off the sudden road and skip away from whoever I'm riding with and fill a slow cup with lovely snot textured, chocolate flavored, high octane gel, my life would somehow be different. Maybe then the golden ratio would be the size of the city being tormented divided by the anger of the monster bent on its destruction. Maybe then we could come to our senses about the truth of the number zero and the things that can or can't be divided by it's absence.

A Bit of Floatsam

You know how a digital picture can be blown up to the point of pixelation and what used to be a fine piece of lovely optic stimulation becomes bits of color that don't make a whole lot of sense unless you are a fan of dots? I'm feeling this in my life. There are so many bits that make up the altogether, but I am having a very tough time reeling out far enough to see what kind of image appears. I don't feel out of focus, but I do feel that I am too close in.

I see the dot that is the part of you I want to be different. I see the blip that confounds me. I see the lightning blocks that energize me, the swath that I can no longer touch, the spot of you that wants my spot. This is the angle of the part of your body I love the most. This is the point that keeps coming up that I wish wouldn't. This is the period that says the sentence is over.

Caught up in the drag race, is there anything other than the road? I know that within you and I there is another, more comprehensive meaning than either you or I, but that the design is intentionally mismanaged. Ah, safety. Crack open any self-help book. This is the advice you have been looking for. The answer is yes and sometimes no.

Meanwhile, I keep having to open the door. I keep shutting it. Then I pull the blinds, which I then discover I have done and open up again with a huff. I'm open to all, but not to you. You are totally open to me, just not now. Oh, you want in? I just locked the door and I don't have the key. You have the key but the lock only works from this side.

I don't like the tangent we are on, but I've totally forgotten what we were talking about before. It seemed important and I meant to come back to it, but so many conversations have happened since then. With all this wind and weather, I could use an anchor, an angel, even an argument. Forget the big eaters. Let them consume it all and we'll live well. We'll change what we can when we can.

From this close in, it could be an abyss, but it started because I wanted to get so dear to you while you slept I became the breath of you. Now we are floating as dust in the sun.

A story with pictures

Here is the story about how there is so much condensed into each moment, and here is the picture of how snappy so many decisions about so much information looks, so blurred around the edges, so lost in the lines of fast. It takes a while to get what we are looking at.

Looks more like the camera has some smear on it or like the picture spent some time underwater. I'm a go man and a stop. I put places on the map and send the map to Venus. I've been sleeping in my mind clothes and I have the aroma of sharp sleep in need of a rouse.

And then there is you. You who have stepped in and modified. You who have turned on all the lights and endured my grouse. Put feathers on its trail and called in the authorities. Left bits of dust in the air on your way out.

All these books with all these word mountains. I have send miners in and built cities with the gold. My erection was defiant. I laid waste to all comers. I hid my momentum in deep valleys. There was so much I wanted.

But I noticed the king was absent. There were very few who knew. The guards were fooling around with each other's ex. They were busy fixing their teeth and posing for the cameras they knew were everywhere.

The baker had replaced his pride with profit and was planning to move away. The secretary wanted to run the gears, the mechanic became a vegetarian. The plants wanted locomotion. The miners were too busy getting laid. The phone lines only propelled questions anymore.

The past was mixed in with the slaughter of the present. Mandates were doled out from the thinnest. An impatient captain knew he was better looking and moved into the center and made speeches while the books held silent vigil. There was no correction.

This is the latest picture I have from just after the king's return. That just looks like blood. Forget how ravaged everything appears. The astronaut had the greatest news. Kept saying to look beyond this little operation. Kept shouting it over and over.

The smack of fruity goodness

I actually have an apple and an orange on my desk today, so I'm comparing them. We've all heard that little cliché about how this is supposed to be a paradigm for error. I should be gasping in horror at what I am about to do. You should immediately stop reading and report me to the authorities.

Assuming that you have done that, I will take what remaining time I have to continue to gaze at the two objects on my desk and note their similarities and their differences. This is my understanding of what comparing is. I feel repulsed, yet drawn to attempt the forbidden. Will my mind bend in ways from which there is no return? I thought the same thing the first time I dropped acid. Is this action the last sane decision that I make? Not that I would know. This is like wondering if the 1000lb bomb that you have failed to disarm is going to hurt you when it goes off. Does vapor have a consciousness?

I often wonder at the ability of the mind to perceive time. I was talking with my son about time distortion. You know how when you are at the carnival and you are there for hours and yet time seems to go by so fast (when you are a kid and not filled with dread about all the hidden terrors of large spinning equipment and spooky carnies and what the hell did I just eat?) as compared with when you are stuck in a meeting you keep wondering what you are there for, or in the case of my son, stuck in math, time does not go by very fast at all. It's the same amount of time that passes, but it passes quick or slow depending on your engagement.

Apple. Orange. These can stand for so many things, but if we reel back out in our perception a ways, they are both round fruit. Go out far enough and they both become little dots. We can go the other way as well. Move in on your perception to the atomic level and they are both extremely large fields of whirling electrons. It is only at the general human level that their differences overcome their similarities. My orange is smaller and oranger than my apple, but they are both sitting on my desk. I'll inevitably eat one before I eat the other, but I will eat them both. Eventually they will both become part of me for a while. I will have stewardship over their electrons; they will become part of my experience. I will throw parts of each of them toward my trash can. I'll prefer one to the other.

It's possible that one or the other will thrill me enough so that I go out into the wide world as an emissary for my chosen preference. This happens a lot to people. Someone will take up smoking and find themselves so thrilled with the taste of a Camel Light that they use the little points on the pack to collect t-shirts and hats so they can advertise. Some people do this with beer, clothing lines and sports teams. Will I be an apple guy or an orange guy? Can I buy products that extol one while disparaging the other? Will I make decisions about someone when I find out they prefer the same food as I do? Does one align me more closely with a political party and therefor influence my presidential vote?

What if I don't choose to eat either one of them, instead preferring to let them rot on my desk while I go back to the vending machine and select a bar of chocolate? This is not an unheard of scenario. Mmm. Chocolate tastes good. It compares favorably to the flavor of fruit, but there is the hidden swirl of energy that my body can use that I have also been contemplating lately. Chocolate has it's own influence, but I have found that I don't prefer it to the energy that fruit releases within me. I like the flavor of chocolate more than the fruit, but I would rather have eaten the fruit than the chocolate. Experience has taught me some things that I can use. I like that I can time travel now, even if it is only for a few moments.

Clouds swirl about on the unseen levels of which we are made. I think about impermanence and entropy. I think about the real difference between my apple and my orange. I think about sex because I am a guy and it's been seven minutes. Energy courses through me and I direct it as a practice. Attention, perception and direction. When I eat my fruit, baby, I'm gonna eat it like I mean it, and my pleasure will be beyond compare.

Saturday

I'm sitting again in my room, watching the snow continue to pile up over my windows. I'm not writing to anyone, so the thoughts in my head are nimble and hard to catch. Part of me wants to aim this at someone, part of me wants to just let it all go and let it all be.

I wrote a long letter to my ex-wife last night. I was pretty honest and pretty open. I haven't deleted it yet, but I haven't sent it either. Some part in the back of my head wants to warn me that honesty and openness, while the ultimate goal, may not be what I need to send her. It's hard wanting to make things between us more solid so that we can reunite the family and raise our children together while knowing that she is in direct contradiction to what I want in my life right now. Raising kids is a noble goal; continuing to be with someone who cannot feed my soul is not. As much as I love her, I need to be with people who have a broader view.

I sent a letter to my last girlfriend this week as well. More of a 'hi' letter, I felt a sudden and urgent need to send something out to her. Strange how delicate every word felt. How measured and deliberate. I wanted her to know that she is still with me without conveying anything unnecessary. No expectations, no grief. How happy I was when she wrote back!

As I sit, I wonder at how a period of time gets borders and seals off and then fades back into time. My childhood memories are still photos, the same as the months I spent with Kelly. The same as last weekend in Cape Cod. They happen and then are gone and it's the residue and how I feel about them that stay in the same time with me. And no matter if these memories are delightful or scary or full of regret, they cannot be altered. I can think about them from different angles and reinterpret what I think they mean, but they are unable to manifest themselves as now reality.

This makes it difficult for me to consider the future with any authority. There are things I could do, places I could go, levels of happiness I could achieve, depths of despair I could plumb, exotic locales, beautiful people. I could start a business, drop out completely again into the deep woods, walk across America and beyond. I could build a spaceship, a submarine, a kit car or a fortune. Some of these I expect I will do, and yet, knowing that everything has a beginning, middle and end, I can also see that everything that I will do will also appear in my rear view window as a memory that has no real bearing on anything I would know currently. What I look forward to I will also remember. This is the wonder of contemplating a creature in amber.

Here is where there is room for all the thoughts of suicide and despair. And yet here is also where there is a great deal of laughter and freedom. I think the point is that all of it is impermanent. This makes it more about living as close to the bone as possible. There are deep regrets that have pestered me. There is great love that flows through me. We are part of a stream that is made up of the same kinds of things but always in different combinations. The water passing by is not the same water though it is all water. Each drop is unique and endlessly combining with other unique drops. Same same always, and yet never the same.

This is me as well. I may look the same, and my interactions with my life make patterns that seem to define me, but I am made up of endlessly changing combinations of events and feelings and relationships and environments. I am never the same, though I think of myself as unchanging, though others see me the same year after year.