teleophilia

.skies.over.markham.

2010-09-06T11:30:00.001-04:00

two lovers twined like wick

twitching in twilit light

burning down and out like stars

winking

.folding.maps.

2010-04-27T01:37:00.002-04:00

every visit: a thumbnail

digging creases along highways,

crinkling the continent
into itself in

the self-embrace of a map that
has remembered how

to fold itself back up again

2010-04-03T17:26:00.001-04:00

two poems, one lonely night

2010-02-07T23:30:00.002-05:00

Poem

Today you are a sparrow
and I watch you
flit from twig

girl to girl you are
insufferable
in the spring

the season long
song of a mistake
I keep repeating

Circling, I was in Love

My heart makes
wide circles
like a starved
buzzard

above you
when we walk
together you look
past the clocktower

you say
this grey weather
gets to you
after all

.משפתי.עץ.

2010-01-29T14:56:00.004-05:00

יש במרחק בינינו

רק מילים. בתוך

אוזניי יש באז

שלא בא מעצמי

המילים הלוהטות האלה

הן עלים של עץ

שמעבר שורשו מעדנו

וגם הפכנו לבעלים של

הדבר אחת הזה

בפעם הזהה

.house.guest:becca.

2010-01-27T00:59:00.004-05:00

Becca

Jan 21 - 23

Becca came up to visit me on somewhat of a whim, buying tickets while on the phone with me only a few days beforehand.
I can't think of the weekend having been any better. I'm serious. We farted under blankets. We leveled up. I cooked her the dinners I promised I'd cook her over half a year ago.
We took an Epic Staycation side quest, and racked up XP like it was December 1999 and my mom was filling bathtubs with emergency water.

****

So I thought that since we watched 2012 last night, we should talk about the Apocalypse and your thoughts on it, and what it might entail.

The only thing that really comes to mind is reading stuff about global warming and how they expect--I don't know who they is, but it seems like consensus is that in the next 50 years, if things keep going as they are, Cape Cod will disappear. So my brother and I were talking about investing in some land in inland Massachusetts so that it would become beach front by the time we're retired.

I went on this vacation with my now ex one time, and it was in the Outer Banks, and we were talking about the same thing: all the houses were on the shore, and we were like, we should just start buying property half a mile in or something.

Yeah.

You think it'll look anything like the movie?

No. No, that movie was horrible. That movie was Waterworld: the prequel.

But Waterworld was good, in a weird kitschy way.

Lines like "I'll put you in a jar" are cool.

I haven't seen it for a while.

Me neither, but my best friend had two movies: she had Biodome--no she had three movies: she had Biodome, Indiana Jones--the young Indiana Jones--and Waterworld. So I've seen those three movies... plus I had two movies at my house: I had Aladdin and Mission Impossible. So those are the five movies I've watched a thousand times as a child, not because I particularly like them, but... they stick with me.

So do you have a favourite movie then? Is it one of those?

No, it's Purple Rain.

I haven't seen that either. I haven't seen a lot of movies, but my excuse is that I didn't live in this country for most of my childhood.

We're going to need to watch Purple Rain. Purple Rain is...

How come we didn't download that. What the fuck.

Because I didn't... it didn't occur to me.

We did watch Sixteen Candles, though.

Which was good, minus the whole... racism

Which seemed to just be this extra layer of

fucking unnecessary

superfluous nonsense. ...So the way you're lying on the couch right now is like some perfect typical Freudian psychoanalysis shit going on.

I could say some Freudian shit.

Yeah? You had to read Freud?

Yeah. I started to, but then, sharing this as someone who personally had a cocaine addiction, when I read Freud, I just see some fucking dickhead who had a major raging coke addiction. And if you have personally had that, when you read his stuff, it just drips bullshit and coke. Like all over the place. You know that. I mean, you see this stuff, and the first thing I thought was, dude, this guy just did so many lines before he wrote this, and that's why he's jumping from topic to topic with so much fucking self-assurance. And he can jump from like little babies to incest to Greek myths to ...whatever. I hate him.

Did you ever have any of these thoughts when you were on cocaine?

No, when I was on coke, I was really into the physics of music: like sine waves really got interesting and I really wanted to talk about them.

Just sine waves or--

A lot of bad things happened too, but at least as far as nerd stuff.

What about square waves?

I don't... maybe? A lot of ...that, is all gone now.

You didn't write it down? You could have been the next Freud, high on cocaine, writing down crazy shit. Is there anything specific, then, that you don't like about Freud? I know we were talking about sex and gender before.

He's just a fucking idiot. I'm trying to think of specifics here. I think he was just whole idea of different stages that you go through, and getting caught in like the anal stage or the phallic stage and whatever is complete bullshit. He doesn't even deal with women.

I feel like a common criticism is that he is very phallocentric and androcentric.

It's just a load of shit, and I feel like it set people back. Although on the other hand, I haven't finished this conversation so I don't know enough. My therapist is one of my favourite people and has a PhD in psychology or psychiatry, or both I think. She says that Freud is pretty awesome and does contribute a lot more than I give him credit for. He did start talk therapy. I just think that as a feminist, and many other things, my bias against him outweighs the good part, and maybe I take talk therapy for granted because it's always been around me.

I guess, because I had to read him last term, and whereas the specifics of perversions and etc. etc. might not have been anything I agreed with, but I felt like he was really influential and he introduced ideas of, like, the subconscious. Everyone talks about the subconscious, unconscious mind now. And so yeah, I think he is a lot more than what he commonly gets pegged with.

It's cool, but then he gets so abstract with some ideas about how superego, the ego and the id interact that... It's like he gets off topic and carried off into his own little world where he's created these three things and when you try to relate it back to a human being you've gone so far off track at times.

Did you ever get the feeling while reading it that if you met him real life, he'd just be this big jerk?

I've never really thought about that; I don't know.

So, if you could meet some now dead intellectual, who would it be?

Damn. .......that's not something I can answer quickly.

That's all right; I'll expect a list later.
I think I've always wanted to talk to you about music, since I've heard you play piano and I'm always glad that I play music first, because then you play and I don't feel like I can touch an instrument for a while. I think clearly there's a lot of ...connection that you have with music. I remember we were talking about something and you said--it was a movie, you said you didn't care about the movie but you cared just because it had a good soundtrack.

Ravenous. Yeah, it goes with this landscape and the music sounds like the landscape looks. It was shot at the base of the Rockies, I think. It's kind of similar to the whole Donner Party story. You know it's going to some cannibalistic hell, but what makes it so scary is like... this music just does it. I can't... I'm not very good at talking, but seriously. Music for me is so much emotion. When I was growing up, my father and mother both played the piano, and I remember hearing my mom playing Chopin's Nocturnes. They just got me so emotional as a kid. And in the summertime, when it was hot out, we always had the windows open because we never had AC, and my dad would play ragtime. And it was cool. I would be on the floor and just hear it.

So did you get into music on your own, or did your parents really encourage you? or both?

I begged for lessons, and lessons are expensive, so it wasn't until I was seven that I started. And they really encouraged it. My father especially. We played together. I think they realized that I had something one night when I was sick. I came downstairs because I was having like an asthma attack and they were listening to some show on the stereo, like some symphony, and I heard it and I absorbed it, and I walked over to the piano and like--it was stupid, but like the last chord, I just hit the same notes on the piano. I just hit them without any touching first and they were like, Oh...man, our nine year old knows something. So that was when they started pushing a little more. Yeah, they pushed me harder to practice, but never that hard.

Well, it sounded like you were really self-motivated.

I was really motivated with that stuff. Not quite enough, but pretty... there. I think I always wanted to be as good as my father was at it. But then when I started getting maybe a little better than him, I started losing a little motivation.

Are you better than your mother?

Yeah. She doesn't practice like she's supposed to.

Did you brother also learn piano?

He played piano, but he wasn't really that into it. He played the sax for a while. He doesn't anymore. He had a problem with the piano because his finger joints bend funny.

That's actually kind of funny because growing up, I did a lot of rock climbing and your fingers aren't supposed to bend the way you just did with the last joint going backwards because it fucks up your tendons when you put a lot of pressure on them. So I grew up never doing that, and as a result my fingers don't really bend too much like that. But I remember learning some chords on guitar, some of those jazz chords, and you have to do those ...selective bar chords or whatever, and I was like, ah fuck, I wish my fingers bent like that because I could hold down the right strings. I didn't really think of that until I saw someone really good play and I saw that they were doing that. Maybe I need to do push ups on my fingertips or something.

That's why I quit Tae Kwon Do when I was little, because of those push ups.

Fingertip push ups? or just push ups?

The fingertip ones.

How long did you take TKD for?

Six weeks.

But now you're going to take boxing.

Hopefully. I don't know if it's going to be a reality. I can't find it listed for spring courses.

Are there any last things you want to say? Advice? Resolutions?

I think people should learn to be comfortable with uncertainty. That's about all I got.

.house.guests:james.nick.pat.

2010-01-21T16:19:00.000-05:00

James, Nick, Pat

(from right to left)

Jan 15 - 18, 2010

I've known James for some time now, and not only is he my son, but the co-father of our imaginary child. I was actually considering visiting Columbus over the long weekend for Dr. MLK Jr. Day, but could only find a rideshare to take me as far as Dayton. Not only that, but I would have had to skip some important classes. In a fit of indecision, I called James to get his opinion, and was informed that he, Pat and Nick were planning on coming to Chicago instead. Sometimes things just work out.

**********

Because I didn't have the time or effort to transcribe the half hour conversation the four of us had over dinner, I am instead going to include a link to an audio file that you can download and listen to at your leisure.

I know none of you will.

But for those of you that do, though, you will be treated to a conversation involving space lasers, angry Jimmy John's managers, and how Pat's haircut makes him look like a butch lesbian.

Click here to download interview audio

Holding East

2010-01-21T16:18:00.001-05:00

Holding East
Ruth Awad

I’d never seen my father on his knees except
during his daily prayers, his head to the rug
like a wild dog nosing for foodscraps, hunting
down God, until my mother stuffed her suitcase
full of socks and scrubs, pant leg caught in the lip.
From the hallway I watched my life unclasp:
my father shrouded in his flannel robe as my mother
loomed for a moment then stormed
around the bedroom, gathering her things.

Night swept in like curtains slowly closing.
No light from the stars, useless as snuffed candles.
My father paced the garden, past the wood violet
blooming lavender along the path, past lilacs
overtaking the fence. When he came back inside,
he scooped me in his arms and out to the car.
“A night-ride,” he said, but we circled the town
down side streets and houses of friends, looking
for her. I counted streetlamps that glowed
like little moons over us, my head pressed
against the glass blurred by my breath as we drove
through the night-fog, my father holding east.

.house.guest.interview.1:molly.

2010-01-08T11:18:00.005-05:00

Molly

Thursday, 7 Jan 2010

I have decided that with enough house guests making a stop on our couch often enough, and with this blog being updated rarely enough, I will start interviewing whatever guests we have come our way. It also gives me an opportunity to learn to use the camera that Amanda was nice enough to loan me. And to procrastinate from doing actual schoolwork.

Molly was a good enough sport to up with some of my ineptness at doing this for the first time. Hopefully these things will get better with time. Happy 2kX everyone.

*********

Alright, so I guess we should start with your name.

My name is Molly.

Where are you coming from?

I'm coming from Minneapolis by way of North Carolina.

And North Carolina is where you live, right?

North Carolina is where I live and hopefully will get back to... soon.

Because of the snow?

Because of the snow, and Greyhound.

So I guess because it was just New Years, we should have a list of either your top resolutions or your top regrets.

I don't do much... resolutions, but I do have one. I feel like my biggest resolution is to not have expectations, fewer expectations and more trust in people.

That's almost like the oxymoron of resolutions. Is there anything that spurred that decision? or is it just kind of a general thing?

I have a friend who makes music and they just put out a cd called "Expectations Shmexpectations" that was great, and I think that was part of the inspiration for thinking about expectations and also like... feeling disappointed in people and realizing that... that's not necessary if I just kind of let bad things go and meet people where they're at, then that's less likely to happen.

You think this has anything to do with being in your last year of school and being tired of having expectations for yourself?

Maybe. Maybe it has more to do with being, having lived in the same place for like 4 or 5 years and wanting things to be a certain way and wanting people to be a certain way.

Are there any regrets you have over the past year? anything you'd change?

I feel like I had a good year. 2009 was ok.
...

No? You don't have to have one. If it was a good year, it was a good year.

haha, I think it was a good year.

I feel like starting with these two things, I want to keep listing things: best of 2009, worst of 2009... If you could count up your year.

My worst place I slept in 2009 was the Loreno airport in Texas. That was at the very beginning: January 2nd or 3rd.

What were you doing in Texas?

I was also passing through, trying to get-- I was coming from Mexico City to Buffalo, New York.

Sounds like a long ride.

It was a long ride. But I was on a plane. But bought my tickets in a way that didn't make any sense and so I ended up having to make a 12 hour layover in Loreno, TX, which is this tiny town, and the airport is like, maybe twice the size of your house.

I don't think I even know where that is in Texas. And I'm actually from Texas.

It's on the border. There's Loreno and Lo Voy Loreno [sp?]. And I was like, eh! 12 hours, I'll just sleep in the airport; it'll be fine. But apparently the airport closes. And so I had this crazy conversation with the cops there about whether or not I had dead people in my bag and that we finally decided that because I was female they didn't want to just let me out into the world, so I could sleep in the airport, but they would be watching me.

So the airport actually closed?

The airport closed, but I slept on the floor.

I don't know how many airports I've been in that actually closed.

I know, I didn't expect it. That was the worst place I slept in 2009.

Did you actually get much sleeping done there?

No! And the weirdest--perhaps one of the weirdest--parts: at like 4 in the morning, this man who I don't know who he was, comes to me with a hambrger and a Coke, and said something like, "I thought you might be hungry." Haha, ok! It's like 4 in the morning. Thanks. I didn't eat it.

Oh, so the airport was open again at 4 in the morning?

Well, it was unclear. There were always people there. Like it was never totally empty. ...I don't know, it was a strange experience.

Probably not the best way to start your year.

No... but it was a good adventure.

Was that your first time in Mexico?

Mmhmm. Well, kind of. I had been the summer before. In 2008, I worked on the border, on the Mexican side, a 100 yards into Mexico.

So technically..

I had been there before, but hardly.

Did you need a passport to work on that side?

Yeah... No, you didn't. It was still the time where you could use your birth certificate and your driver's license.

Have they changed that recently?

Mmhmm. I think, summer of 2009? or January of 2009? was when they officially changed it so that you needed a passport to get into Mexico and Canada.

I remember hearing about Canada, about needing a passport, but I've always had one, so... I've not noticed if they transitioned or not.
What was the best thing that happened to you in 2009?

...

or are there competing things?

There're probably competing things. One of the best things: I don't really birthdays much for myself; I like other people's birthdays. But I was out in the Arizona desert for my birthday and people always find out it's your birthday, even if you aren't telling people, so everyone knew.

Especially with facebook.

That too. And people are just sneaky and figure it out. And so two of my friends had made a cake. But before that had happened, I had just gotten back from a walk, and it had been storming all afternoon, and I was soaked from walking in the rain. And I got back to camp in the middle of the desert where we were staying, and over the hill, was the most amazing rainbow I had ever seen: all the way across the sky. And it was so, so bright, and there was almost a second one clearly above it. So like a double rainbow that went all the way across the sky and the sky was still like really dark grey from the rain, and the sun was on the hills, and they were like bright green. It was really amazing. That was my birthday.

That's pretty awesome.

And it was a full moon.

I don't know why Emmet [my roommate Josh's dog] has decided now is the best time to be on my lap.

He wants to be involved.

Well, I guess this is the first interview thing, so I don't really have much prepared. Any closing remarks you want to make? One message to depart?

That... I don't know. Probably that Chicago is snowy.

What's one piece of advice you could give anyone?

Uh, don't ride Greyhound in snowy places in the winter time is a good idea for the future.

********

Molly's "top five things I'd like to change in 2010":

fewer expectations of other people-
more art projects-
more anonymous notes and gifts, extra points if they're attached to parked bikes-
prisons all fall down-
the border melts back into the desert and people come and go as they please-
more adventures in the middle of the night-
more surprise visits from friends near and far-
less time in greyhound stations-

.blue.lines.

2009-12-11T14:42:00.004-05:00

I started college here years ago, moving for the first time to the big city. Well, I had lived in cities before, but there is a difference between cities and cities. There is an inescapable sense of claustrophobia that either destroys you or keeps you scurrying about like a rat in the walls.
I lived in the dorms for the first quarter, having no other choice. It was the school's policy, and I think it was their desperate attempt to make sure the students wouldn't shoot each other by the time winter rolled around. It's kind of the opposite, I suppose, of how you're not supposed to give names to your livestock; the nominalized go on to haunt you after they're gone.
After that first quarter, though, which had passed by in the time it took an orange leaf to fall to the ground, I moved up to the north side. Dorm life had been a little miserable, having had to share a room with someone that watched TV until 4 in the morning. And it wasn't even that I really had a problem with; I mean, I stayed up until then my fair share of nights, shooting zombies, and Nazis, and sometimes Nazi zombies. I guess I really just didn't like him all that much. It was easy then to blame it on his being an Engineering major.
My new apartment was a small studio in a neighbourhood where few people spoke any English. My landlord decided that we didn't need a lease, which worked out fine by me. I had no intention of being bound to him, never thinking that the same thought was most likely going through his head. I assumed he had not wanted to go through the trouble of drawing up a contract in a language he hardly understood, much less used.
I took the blue line train to class every day, and at first it was somewhat exciting. My journey to class was something different. It had transformed and even matured into a real trip. I watched the city go by like a movie. It was if I was here in person now, but still watching everything go by on a screen, out of reach.
Eventually, as could be expected, the scenery became predictable: the same skyline, of course, but the same church with a homeless person asleep on the sloop, the same library under unending construction, and the same people in transit, crossing the blue lines of their to do lists. Of all of those people, there was one man in particular that I recognized. He was largely nondescript to be honest. He wore a bowler hat everyday, and that alone was enough for me to recognize him. He got on the same stop as me, but got off downtown, where he presumably worked. Me, I had at least 20 minutes after the downtown stop just to get to campus.
I didn't talk to him at all my first year.

It wasn't until my second year of school that we interacted at all. I had briefly mentioned him to my then girlfriend once, and it was one evening when she was coming back up north with me to hang out at my place that it happened.
It really wasn't anything spectacular. It dawned on Stef who was sitting down the car from us after a few stops. The bowler hat! she whispered to me with a certain ferocity and enthusiasm I couldn't quite place. And before I knew it, she had gotten up and walked over to him, introducing herself.
Their conversation was brief, and Stef looked somewhat disappointed as she came back. She was surely expecting some gruesome tale, but it turned out that Ethan Moreno was just a close to middle age acupuncturist that worked downtown. His pea coat said his practice was stable enough to afford Brooks Brothers, and his business card, which he had handed Stef, sighed in a thin sans serif font that he was bored with his life.

That year, I went skiing in Europe with Stef's family for winter break. It was my first time, and I certainly didn't win any points with her parents, who were content to bomb down the slopes without me, only waiting for me intermittently in hopes of convincing Stef to scream down the family favourites with them. She seemed a little torn, and I told her I'd just meet her at the bottom.
After returning my borrowed equipment, I tried a legit Italian cappuccino at a cafe. I realized that I didn't have any Euros on me too late, and tried to explain to the girl at the counter, hoping she'd understand. She smiled and told me not to worry about it; she would just say that it was her free drink for the shift. I thanked her profusely and went to go sit down and wait for Stef and her family to get back.
An hour later, there was still no sign of them, and I had finished the last English periodical that didn't offer fashion advice and sex tips.
"How was the cappuccino?"
I looked over to my right and noticed that it was the girl from the counter that had helped me earlier. I told her that it was great, although stronger than I was used to. She laughed more than she should have, and I wondered what European humour was like anyway.
We talked for a little bit and she finally said that she had no intentions of hanging out at her workplace when she wasn't on the clock, and asked me if I wanted to go back to her place for a bit. I told her I was waiting for my girlfriend and her parents, but she was insistent and said she just lived close by. I finally gave in, figuring that it had been almost 2 hours since I had left Stef and her family, so why not.
We walked out and before I could protest, hopped on a bus, where the girl spotted my fare. A few stops later, we got off and went up two flights of stairs to her small apartment. And long story short, I'll go ahead and say that we made small talk for a bit before proceeding to fool around a bit, before a sound downstairs caused her to jump up with a start.
"You have to get out of here. My boyfriend's home," she said quick and low.
"You have a boyfriend?"
"Yes, I don't have time to argue. Go. Take the back stairs."
"But." And I wanted to say that I didn't know where I was, or how to get back. And on top of that, I still didn't have any change for the bus. And yes, I did want to know what was going on.
"Look, you tourists think you're here to enjoy us. But you are here for us to enjoy you. Ok?"
I ran down the back stairs and onto the streets. Without money, and with the sun having set, I finally managed to flag down a police car, giving him the slip of paper the address of our hotel was on.
When I finally got back, there was a new air separating Stef and me, and I could tell she felt it too. They never asked where I was, and I wondered if they had seen me take off with the girl.
In any case, our relationship was never really the same after that holiday, and we ended up breaking up by March that year.

By that time, my grades had started to slip a little bit, and my mom called to tell me that her and my dad wouldn't be able to help me if I didn't pick up the pace a bit. I declared a political science major and decided to start focusing more on my studies.
By the time summer rolled around, I got a call from my older sister, who lived a state over. She was going through a bad divorce and needed a place to crash for the summer while she worked things out. What could I say?
She came in mid-June, after I was done with finals, knocking on my door holding nothing more than a camping backpack, a small duffel bag, and her pockets stuffed with a hodgepodge of new and used wads of Kleenex. Turns out she didn't have a car and I had to show her the ropes of how to get around the city by trains and buses.
Judy had never been on an elevated train before, and compared my familiar blue line to the monorail at Disneyland. I told her to stay away from the Goofies and Tinkerbells around here though.
I pointed out famous buildings, important stops, and when I saw the familiar bowler hat of, what was his name?, I pointed him out as well. I even introduced him as a friend of mine, just so I could remember his name. Ethan Moreno. I'd remember it now.
He looked a little confused as I introduced my sister, and I thought he would ignore us completely. He had that look on his face where one expects a candid camera to be in someone's purse, and everyone to suddenly start laughing at you in unison. Once she mentioned her divorce, however, he was trapped, and did his best to strike up small talk with us.
"How do you know him?" she asked me later.
"I just met him on the train." I didn't mention Stef. "He's an acupuncturist."
"Oooo!" Judy cooed.

I ended up being rather depressed that summer, still a little hung up on Stef, and decided to spend most of August hitchhiking across the country, trying to make it to my friend Dane's house in Portland. I told Judy to watch over things for me, which she was glad to do, if only to have her own place, somewhere to herself, even if it were mine.
"I guess you can sleep in my bed too," I conceded. "But no sex on it."
In the end, I caught a ride with a trucker who picked me up out of concern more than anything else.
"A boy like you: in school and with no goddamned sense. Standing on the side of the road where anyone could nab you," he muttered to what must have been a mysterious intangible third person in the cab. He was driving all the way to Sacramento, it turned out, and my month-long hitchhiking adventure turned out to be little more than a 5 day-excursion, having caught a ride some touring band from Sacramento to Portland. They didn't tell me until afterwards that they expected me to pay for gas.
By the time I got to Portland, I had three weeks to kill, since I still wasn't ready to head back home. I ended up sitting in Dane's living room playing video games for three weeks before finally just catching a Greyhound bus back east. I knocked on my own door with nothing more than a small backpack, a gym bag and a pocket full of receipts, feeling as if I had gotten nowhere in the past month, and that any self-discovery I may have made creeping west across the country was erased like a name written in sand as I crept back east.

It turned out that Judy had started acupuncture sessions with Ethan, and was feeling better as a result.
"He's cute," she admitted, "but he's gayer than a unicorn in a speedo."
In the end, she moved out, thankfully, halfway through fall term of my junior year, moving in with some friends she made at yoga class. She was becoming a bona fide new age yuppie. She told me she finally felt in control of her own body through yoga, and that meant she was in better touch with her own spiritual needs and development. She encouraged me to come with her to class, but I pointed out that I had my International Law class during that time.

I continued to see Ethan Moreno on my train rides to school, and even with our mutual connection, it seemed that he didn't feel very compelled to make conversations with me. To be honest, I didn't feel like being buddy buddy with him either, but out of guilt, told him one day that I liked his new shoes. His aloofness sublimated into the air as he thanked me and smiled, but it was still clear that he had no interest in starting a real topic of conversation.

The next couple of years flew by, and I wondered how it was ever possible that it took an entire year, an eternity, to move up a grade in elementary school. I was finding that it was harder and harder to fit in everything I wanted to do. And that wasn't even with regard to non-school related projects.
I had gotten more serious about school, and the time to think about what program I wanted to be in, which department I wanted to be a part of, where I wanted to live after graduation was already upon me, showing up like an older sister in distress. And I could only hope that it would resolve in a same way, with inner peace and flexibility.
Stef had gotten into Stanford for a PhD program in Linguistics, having texted me enthusiastically when she found out with "fuck this snow!". We were friends again, after having not talked for close to a year. There was no animosity, but we had realized that like the brown line and the red line, we shared paths for a bit, but were soon to diverge in our own directions.
My mother even came to visit, and my sister came with us to the famous Mexican restaurant right outside of downtown. She seemed at peace for the large part, but was still concerned with whether or not I knew what I was doing with myself. I told her I was visiting PhD programs over the next month, and not to worry; I was on top of my shit.
On the train ride back, Judy and I noticed that Ethan Moreno was sitting at the back of our car, but we didn't say anything, and didn't point him out to our mother.

So now here I am again, on the blue line, not heading to class nor my studio apartment, but the airport. I'm flying out to look at some schools on the West Coast. Dane says I can live with him in Long Beach, where he moved a few months ago.
And I know I'll be back in a week, but everything already starts to look alien to me, as if the city knew I was deserting it. Something was receding, like newsprint peeling off of the paper, and I couldn't tell if it was the city doing it or something inside of me.
Ethan Moreno sat across from me, as usual, and more than ever, I realized the obvious fact that I had seen this man for almost four years now on a semi-daily basis and we had no idea who each other were. I was comfortable with this fact, and clearly so was he. In fact, it had never even crossed my mind until I was here, on my way out the door. Ethan Moreno had been here poking holes in people long before I cracked my first book spine, and he would clearly be here for long after. In all this time, I realized, we hadn't travelled anywhere at all, but it was, rather, those years with all of their passengers that had click-clacked through us, leaving nothing more than a concrete platform and enough metal thorns on every horizontal surface to prevent even a pigeon from setting down to rest its wings.

********
Don't forget to read my Top Ten Albums of 2009 list if you haven't.

***********

.ten.albums.of.2009.

2009-12-11T10:33:00.001-05:00

My current top 10 of 2009 (which is a little biased, I suspect, due to recent shows), also in no particular order, with my own notes:

1) Thao with the Get Down Stay Down - Know Better Learn Faster
**This album didn't immediately jump out at me like Thao's earlier stuff did, but I trust her, and in the end, it paid off. The production is a little slicker on this third full-length, and the songs a little bit more mature, but the things I know and love about Thao come through nevertheless. I suppose the one disappointment I had with this album is I felt it was lyrically weaker than her previous work, though, that is to say it is still echelons above anything I can pull off.

2) Do Make Say Think - The Other Truths
**I just saw them play at the beginning of the month. It was probably my 4th or 5th time, and they never disappoint. It's the hardest show for me to leave, because they are so good at creating an atmosphere, a world, a whatever, that by the time it's over, the mere thought of having to re-enter the real world is mortifying and reprehensible. I'm always surprised how this band can constantly refine their song on each album, exploring a new texture and new blends of genre within their own genre of 'post-rock': their last album seemed to me to really delve into a folk sound at times, outright rock at times, and the constant genius bass work of Charles Spearin, who comes from a background of, among other things, free jazz. He pulled out a 6 string fretless bass at the last show. Just sayin.

3) Years - Years
**A side project of Do Make Say Think, guitarist Ohad Benchetrit's solo work is perhaps not quite as solo as one might be led to believe. He opened for DMST at the show, and of course, Charles Spearin finally pointed out the obvious that even though there were three bands on the bill (the third being Spearin's own side project), it was really the same band coming on and off stage. That being said, Ohad's guitarwork, recognizable immediately to any DMST fanboys like me, has a nostalgic quality to it anyway, veering on the path of folk at times. But the whole project begins to deconstruct his own guitar abilities, with a more electronic, glitchy feel than DMST. Two BOSS RC-50 Loop Stations strong.

4) Norberto Lobo - Pata Lenta
**This may have been my own most important discovery of this year. I'm not even sure how I found him, but Norberto Lobo is one of the most blistering yet graceful guitarists I've ever seen. All his work is fundamentally solo guitar work, so you can imagine the normal influence that usual entails of John Fahey and American Primitivism, but the crucial difference here is that Lobo is Portuguese, and one can hear the traditional folk influence of his native land rampantly growing on top of the Fahey aesthetics. As if listening to hours and hours of gypsy jazz didn't make me feel enough like an incompetent guitarist, Norberto Lobo is out there to remind me that I'm outclassed pick or no pick, standard tuning or open tuning.

5) Tegan & Sara - Sainthood
**Well, I don't know what to say about this. As a male lesbian, I think I'm obligated to put Tegan & Sara down on this. I know some of my other lesbian friends don't like this new album, but something about it really grabbed me, and caused me to rediscover all my Tegan & Sara. This newest album has something of a darker, more urgent feel than their older stuff, slightly less of an acoustic sound, and more of a controlled cold growl of distortion that I expect from bands like Metric. But then, seeing as Tegan and Sara Quinn and Emily Haines would form the trifecta of lesbian wet dream awesome, I suppose that all makes sense.

6) HEALTH - Get Color
**Similar to the Tegan & Sara album, I have friends (primarily in noise bands, of course) that were not fond of the newest HEALTH full-length. I personally love it all the same, as long as I remind myself not to expect quite the same HEALTH as from their self-titled first full-length. The first thing I noticed off this new album is that BJ's virtuosic drum pounding, with the full ferocity of an entire warring tribe, has been toned down to little more than a 4 to the floor beat at times. It's as if the successful Crystal Castles remix of Crimewave and the resulting HEALTH//DISCO remix album got into someone's head, and they decide to make noise rock album that was more danceable. That being said, the signature guitar tones with all their asymmetric square waves are still there, and you don't realize how much you need those haunting mechanical sounds until you try to find another noise band that is that good at experimenting with tonal qualities.

7) Julie Doiron - I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day
**For those of you that don't know Julie Doiron, I'm sorry. If you have any love for Feist in her pre-iPod days, Julie Doiron provides a wealth of introverted emotional ephemera. Whereas her earlier album Woke Myself Up was up for some awards in Canada, I think that this album has done more for her here in the US. I suspect it's because it was released after her collaboration with Fred Squire and Mount Eerie that put her on the radar of all the Mount Eerie fans. This album seems to take off from the same point of departure as those two earlier albums I just mentioned, with a more upbeat sound, whose sound at times threatens to unhinge, reminding you that Julie is a nice person, who just wants to talk to her kids on her birthday while she's on tour. Anyone that gets a chance to catch her live, do it; you'll be in for a treat as you listen to Julie Doiron haphazardly relate 10 minute anecdotes between songs that remind you that despite what you may think, there is plenty of warmth in Canada.

8) Mika Miko - We Be Xuxa
**Mika Miko was the band that re-instilled my faith in punk rock. And it's a pity that they are breaking up, or have already done so, this year, but that's the way of punk bands. One should be surprised, I suppose, that any punk band lasts as long as it does. Mika Miko has the stripped down guitar work and driving beats you expect from this genre, but with the testosteroney male aggression defanged. That is not to say these aren't some tough ladies, and I find myself describing Mika Miko as a (post)-riot grrrl band, whatever that even means. The vocals are a bit of a departure from typical punk, and are much more in the style of noise rock. It's a pity they aren't playing shows anymore, because they seemed to consistently have the best artwork for their merch.

9) Beach House - Teen Dream
**I don't even know if this album is getting released this year or next, but I managed to get a hold of what is probably a transcode, since the torrent was pulled rather quickly. In any case, I've always liked Beach House, but was never blown away. And normally I'm not really enthusiastic about bands becoming more well-produced, but it seems to have worked for Beach House this time around. Their dream pop has gotten dreamier, like when you know you shouldn't eat those pizza and donuts at 3 in the morning before you go to sleep, but you do anyway. Well, minus the stomach-ache, anyway. The new single, "Norway", (which is available for free on their website, I think) has been the song of the month or whatever for me; I can't stop listening to it. Highly recommended whenever it finally is released for real.

10) The Bell Orchestre - As Seen Through Windows
**I have some friends that say that they can't listen to music without lyrics, and that generally speaking, they need vocals to focus on, even if they aren't in English. Well, if any of you are like that, I hope I don't surprise you with 4 instrumental albums on my list. The Bell Orchestre, from their inception have been in my sights. They follow a similar formula to Do Make Say Think with their 'post-rock with horns' formula, but they pull it off without going the jazzy direction that DMST does (which may just be because DMST has two drummers as well). In fact, I get this general feeling from this Canadian band when I listen to them like I'm going on a fox hunt in the middle of winter, but instead of finding a fox in the thicket of the woods, I find myself in Narnia. This album seems overly appropriate for the new snow and is certainly going to help me make it through the winter.

****
some other honourable mentions:

Charles Spearin - The Happiness Project
Le Loup - Family
Micachu - Jewellery
The Most Serene Republic - ...And the Ever Expanding Universe
Team Teamwork - The Ocarina of Rhyme [no, I'm not shitting you; a Zelda-rap mash up that is genius]
Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport
Matt & Kim - Grand

****
I probably forgot some, so correct me if I'm wrong.
Also, if anybody feels like they need something, send me a message.

.a.missed.connection.to.my.sexually.incompatible.crush.

2009-11-20T12:06:00.003-05:00

[this is a draft of something I'm submitting for a zine Stefanie Murawfsky is working on for a gender class. Everyone should read it whenever she's done with it!]

******

a Missed Connection to my sexually incompatible crush

We met at the Tegan and Sara show last week, when a mutual friend introduced us to each other. I was wearing pants, a tshirt and shoes, maybe even socks. You had hair shorter than mine in an asymmetric style and a half sleeve. You were also wearing a plaid button down shirt. We joked about how nice it was that you were so tall, because you could see over the teeming crowd of teenage girls holding hands. I made a joke about how it's convenient that lesbians don't seem to pay much attention to their partner's height, but I think the applause was too loud for you to hear me.

We found out after the show that we had both ridden our bikes to the show, and that we lived in the same direction. I had gotten a flat tire, however, and upon realizing this, you nimbly flipped my bike over and replaced my inner tube with a spare you had, all in under five minutes.

We stopped by a 24 hour donut shop, commonly frequented by vampiric philosophers (the kind whose postulates and polemics fail to materialize at any other time than the dead of night), and sat down for a late night snack that ironically did not consist of any donuts. You ordered a shawarma, and I ordered a basket of fries. You offered me a bite, but I told you I'm a vegan, and you simultaneously voiced your admiration of my morals and your love for meat, and your addiction to tacos. I laughed and put a small limp french fry in my mouth.

At about 2 in the morning, a bunch of drunken girls stumbled in for donuts. They were loudly singing the latest Lady Gaga song, and looking as if they might have also been competing for a look alike award. We talked about how much this 'girl power' ethos has devolved into pure camp, and that we both missed the days of riot grrrl. We couldn't agree on whether or not Huggy Bear or Bikini Kill was better.

You invited me back to your place to hang out, since neither of us were tired after having gulped down midnight coffee. You had Fallout 3, and we powerfisted the inhabitants of post-apocalyptic Washington DC in slow motion into the early morning. I noticed that there were a lot of clothes around that were far too small for you, and you told me that it was your ex's stuff, and that she still hadn't picked up yet since the break up. I asked you when that was, if you didn't mind sharing. Your break up had only been a month ago. I'm sorry to hear that (I'm really not); how long were you guys together? Three weeks. She took custody of the cat.

There was a slightly awkward silence and I asked if you played the piano in the corner of the room, hoping that it wasn't also your ex's. I said I had learned a song once from my brother. You seemed to perk up and pulled me over to the piano and asked me to play it. I fumbled through the first few bars of Erik Satie's Gymnopédies No. 1 before giving up. You gave me some encouraging words while holding my hands, remarking that I had long nimble fingers and that I had potential as a pianist. Then you sat down and virtuosically hammered out Piazzolla arrangement, further highlighting my ineptitude. The neighbors stomped on the ceiling in annoyance, and you had to end the piece prematurely.

We both dozed off on the couch after having put on the Buffy musical, and I dreamed about sinking my teeth into you, abruptly waking up with trepidation about the morning light. You were already up and taking a shower to get ready for work. I decided to make breakfast, which worked out because you had faux sausage in the freezer, which I guess you liked better than the real thing anyway. You seemed pleasantly surprised at having been prepared breakfast, and even more pleased after having eaten. Apparently you don't usually have time to eat more than bagel before work, and on top of that, you joked that you thought I was such a great cook I should cook breakfast for you every morning. I almost choked on my orange juice, but it may have just been because there was more pulp in it than I am used to.

Well, I have to get going to work, you said. You're welcome to stay as long as you'd like, and eat whatever you can find; just make sure the door locks behind you when you leave. I asked where you worked and you told me at the Valvoline downtown. I laughed and said that I might bring my car in, since the tire alignment seemed to be off. You have me an amazing hug goodbye and you must not have been wearing a bra because I could feel your nipple piercings through your shirt.

Anyway, I misplaced your number and thought it might be creepy to just show up at your apartment unannounced. Our mutual friend is traveling in Thailand right now, so I can't get in touch with her either.
There's a Peaches concert coming up, and I was hoping you'd want to go. We don't have to call it a date. That might imply something! But we can also call it a date if you're cool with it. Whatever works, right? It's not like I'm buying you dinner. I already bought an extra ticket for you. We can also get dinner beforehand if you want.

I think you're really great.
I'm sorry I have a penis.

.regressions.in.listening.

2009-11-05T00:38:00.004-05:00

These confessions of ours
hardly seem to be able to, can only scarcely
beat on our over-taut eardrums. It's a familiar
rhythm, and all we can manage is
to push some air around, as if it weighed
more than you and me put
together. Put
in, out, away.

Hands, once together, clasp
wildly into the air, warding
off the last warm whispers that summer
left us with. White knuckles
grasping for those patches of
colour traversing the open spaces
from brittle branches to their brethren
mashed into the cul de sac.

If we have missed one
beat, we have missed several.
If we have climbed one
mountain of air, we have fallen
through many more. If
we could only remember
the melody, we could whistle
the tune. But we are left with nothing
more than refrains, an empty
chorus we can't place ourselves in
anymore.

.tree.trunk.arithmetic.

2009-10-04T02:24:00.002-04:00

eyes diverge, gaze diverts
swooping fates scratched and
carved, like tree trunk arithmetic,
onto parting palms

.the.smouldering.season.

2009-09-20T21:51:00.004-04:00

Why is it that plants get to take in all this sunlight, turn it into food even, and the three of us are sitting here absorbing nothing more than various shades of burning, possibly even cancer? Black black cancer, that acrid charcoal. I could tell you all about it, and how we're never going to find a cure because we all know somebody with cancer, and god help us if medicine isn't the fashionably late stranger to the party. My ex called me a cynic. My father was a smoker.

"For chrissakes, Mara, you're burning up!"
Nina decided to bring her girlfriend today, and for once, I wasn't the palest one, the one peeling bits of skin off my shoulders by the end of the day. Watching Nina apply sunscreen onto Mara struck me as something less than the lesbian fantasy captured within frat house posters, and was rather a fairly eerie process. It is like when you watch actors taking off their make up backstage, wiping a ghost off their faces and shaking them back into the air of the theatre, to be resummoned and reapplied for the next audience.
Well, I suppose it was like that in reverse, watching Mara's white skin smudge whiter.

"I don't know, maybe we should all get as much sun as we can now. And then we'll have that nice burn to keep us warm when the rain hits on Thursday."
"It's going to rain on Thursday?"
"All through the weekend."
"Ah! No shit, I have to run to campus on Thursday to drop off a paper. Maybe I'll take the bus. Are you sure it's going to rain, Thomas? Where did you read that?"
"I think Ted told me at work yesterday."
"I saw it online too, Nina."
"Well goddamn, summer's really over then, isn't it?"
"It's been over for a few weeks now, hasn't it? Isn't it the twenty-first or something when it switches over?"
"I think so."
"Screw the calendar; you can't tell me that this is autumn sunlight. And who goes to the beach in the fall, right?"
"Well, I guess that would be us."
"And this isn't a beach. It's a lake. You can't have a beach unless you're on the ocean."

The last time Nina had gotten sunburned was when she went with her family to Sri Lanka. In fact, it might have been the only time she got burned in her entire life. There is a sneaking temptation to make a joke about her people being bred to be immune to the sun, but for one, I had already made that joke this morning, and for two, I had the realization that it was probably a little less than a joke. My only inheritance was scuffed up Honda, bestowed on me as encouragement to pack my belongings and move somewhere to make something of life, and have it make something of me.
I lived in that car for a month and a half trying to get there. And when I was halfway to where I was going, I made a phone call to an answering machine and doubled backed, making a beeline for the start of the story, towards the happy hand holding, the first tentative kisses that are felt out with the lips, before we could taste on each other's tongues the sustenance that keeps us alive. She must have tasted on me that black, acrid decay of a bummed Parliament Light before she flung herself across the continent, tasting, herself, ever so slightly of cheap strawberry vodka.
-I know my mom is an alcoholic, she said, and I shouldn't be saying this, but your dad died of lung cancer. Do you really want to be smoking as well?
-Fuck off. He was an alcoholic too, I said as I finished the bottle.

Nina was in the water, treading about with nebulous intentions, deliberating on whether or not she wanted to swim or stand, keep her head above or below, billow up with the passing waves or meet them stiffly like a Dutch dike.
"You don't swim, Thomas?"
"Rather, I swam too much: swim team. The problem is I don't know how to do anything else. I forgot how to really enjoy being in the water a while ago."
"How long ago were you a swimmer?"
"Oh man, I don't even know. High school? I just haven't gone back to the water since then, really."
That was a lie. I had gone to the beach, the real beach, courtesy of Estella's family after graduation, where we had had White Russians in the condo and listened to Elvis Costello. We didn't change our clothes for the entire week.
"What about you? You not a big swimmer either?"
"Hm, I guess I haven't really thought about it too much. It doesn't appeal to me, but doesn't really bother me either, I guess. I didn't bring my swimsuit today though."
Estella and I were busted by the beach cops for skinny dipping at 3 in the morning. They warned us about the riptides pulling out seasoned swimmers and the moustached one gave me a buddy-buddy nudge as we ran back to the condo. We went straight to bed naked and slept on the wet sheets for the rest of the week.
"I think they dump all sorts of trash into the lake as well. It's kind of gross."
"Yeah, I heard about that. I keep telling Nina she's going to get some horrible disease from being in that water, but she doesn't really seem to care."

I had humoured my parents before my dad died, by going with them to the Phillipines for their 25th anniversary. It was the dead of winter and all I had on me were the books and printed out essays I needed for my research paper. My mom had a somewhat disappointed look about her, but must have decided to not let it stop her as she spent the rest of the week drinking rum in the giant sandcastle she commissioned some 8 year-olds to build her, and eating at the various Mongolian barbeques by night. My dad gave me some cash, which I spent at the poorly-ventilated internet cafe writing disjointed emails half a day into the past.
I finally gave in to my mom's insistence that I try the terrific fresh seafood halfway through the trip, being utterly fed up trying to explain vegetarianism to the vendors, who had learned only enough English to pander to the tourists on the island that outnumbered them a dozen to one. As expected, I got not quite deathly ill, but I could make out death on the horizon, it seemed.

Nina was drying off her hair and changing out of her swimsuit, attracting more than a few glances from a Hispanic family down the shore, as well as an elderly Asian family feeding some seagulls.
"Have you ever realized that this beach is usually totally the ethnic beach?"
"It's not a beach, Nina."
"Whatever, babe."
Watching them kiss made me wonder if Estella and I had ever been that sincere. I don't know it was just us or not, but I don't think I was ever as natural at it as Nina and Mara were. It's like they had it all figured out, and knew how to make it count, or if not, were willing to overlook the dark alleys of their doubts, and walk under the bright streetlights of the time they had together.
"So who moved in with who?"
"Ha ha. We still have our own places, thanks."
"While Nina's finishing up school anyway, right?"
"Oh, way to give the game away. So yeah, yeah, we'll be the U-Haul lesbians, but I'm allergic to cats, so don't count on that."
"And I like dogs better anyway."
"No dogs either! It's too close to having children."

-You're burning up, Thomas, my mom said as she put a damp hand towel over my forehead. God knows where she found a thermometer in the Phillipines. Her hands felt soft and cool against my skin, despite the callouses from playing the cello.

Mara's recital was in a few weeks, and it was her big fall performance, the last proving ground before her college would relinquish to her her due degree. Nina had nearly gotten fired from her part-time job trying to get that evening off.
-Aw, damn the man. You know I'd go even if they fired me.
None of us knew if Mara was going to get her visa renewed after graduating. Nina joked about her screwing up on purpose, but I suppose that it is some seriously bad juju to talk about that kind of thing. And in all honesty, Mara was good, too good to force herself to underperform. The first time she had played for us in her living room, it was if each wavering note had trickled down our ear canals and set fire to the kindling in our chests.

Summer was burning itself out, us smouldering along with it, leaving blackened husks to wait for its inevitable return the coming year, complete with new ultimatums of reigniting myself or finally collapsing inwards into the tarry darkness of my heaving lungs.

.where.do.you.find.a.dolphin.frame.

2009-09-15T17:33:00.002-04:00

"Mr. K and Ms. S cordially invite you to attend their wedding on the 16th of May"

The invitation was pretty, I suppose, if not decorated overzealously with dolphins, which S loved so much when we were together. It looks like some things never really change. She certainly sat in his lap as they stared at the computer monitor, sifting and sieving through images of dolphins, deciding whether or not they should go with a gracefully submerged s-shaped posture, or the exuberance and raw energy of a bottlenose exploding from the water. Jesus, did they actually consider getting those cheesy entangled dolphin rings as well? or matching yin and yang dolphin tattoos? She'd never be that tacky, of course.
Don't get me wrong, here. I don't have the kind of emotional stake in this whole thing in the way you might imagine. I'm over it. Seriously. I'm seeing someone too, and she comes over every Tuesday and Thursday and spends the night, usually. I try to make it over to her place on Fridays when I can, but in all honesty, she tends to go out more than I do, and after spending a few nights alone in her bed, it seemed a little easier to make plans on my own.
Actually, most of these plans end up being lonely nights in, trying my best to churn something out of the piano. She plays the cello. Not S, that is, but Kaela, my current partner. We actually met at a city-sponsored free opera event, where we were shushed by the teeming ocean of white people indulging in high white culture. We laughed about how we were setting a bad example for our respective stereotypes. It didn't matter what they were, of course, so long as we were browner than the rest of them. She told me to fart behind a particularly stuffy collar as we ditched the concert mid-aria to go throw pebbles at the small sailboats in the harbour. We fooled around on a park bench before she straightened her jacket, looked for the earring that she had just lost, before finally deciding that she didn't have time before her cello lessons.
Last I heard from S, she had made it back to school like she had wanted. She was working on her masters now, if I recall correctly, in child sociology, in particular something to do with the legal system as it applies to minors. And the funny part is that we had always talked about how we hated children, or at least the prospect of creating any. I wonder if K is bringing any children into the relationship. Common sense says no, but I never thought S would go back to school either. I never thought she would give up eating meat again, and I figured it must be K's fault. It always seems to go one direction or another with those kind of dietary relationships. I must have corrupted her for that year and a half, when she reintroduced into her body the disassembled flesh of once living animals. She vomited the first time she ate the sushi we had picked up on a whim. I was caught off guard, and when I realized what had happened, I told her that we could have at least made an event of it, rather than mediocre take-out sushi in front of Star Trek reruns on my living couch. I thought I could handle it, she said, I didn't want to be the girl that orders the salad all the time.
I put the wedding invitation in the top drawer of my filing cabinet. It's where that sort of thing goes these days: invitations, birthday cards, ironic July valentines from Kaela. Below it, I keep folders of various photographs people send me. I think that my diploma might be tucked away in that drawer as well. And finally, the bottom drawer is where all the letters go. I have lost some of the envelopes, and a few of the letters met sloppy fates with saucy meals, but everything, for the most part, is still fully intact.
Frankly, I never even read anything, and hardly even look at the photographs, although I had always promised S I would find a good one to frame. Kaela doesn't seem to really mind, and suggested that I should get the photo inside an elaborate dolphin frame. Do they even make those?
The more I think about it, the more S fills up most of that cabinet, and some days, I really just want to lose the key and throw the whole thing into the ocean, walking away without ever seeing whether or not it sinks sleepily into the murky depths or surfaces for air.

2009-09-08T23:22:00.000-04:00

I'm sick of hearing about the goddamn wind. I want to sink my teeth in a poem already.

.echoes.on.the.line.

2009-08-19T00:33:00.002-04:00

It occurs to me that I can't recall how you sound, the voice that crept over me for so long. And we have all these great analogies and images for how it's like watching a silent movie, or hitting the mute button on the remote, but it's a little more eerie than that, I think. It seems that - with the absence of subtitles in my memories - the words are preserved, but given breath by other voices. So I suppose we can modify that metaphor a bit. We can call it a dubbed film.
Is it a big deal? Probably not. I tend to shy away from the phone anyway, and at this point, both of us having taken flight to opposite ends of the continent, drawing open like curtains the vast expanse of land in between us, there is little chance of actual contact. We would have nothing to say to each other.
It's bad enough for me having to call customers while I am at work, and I spend most of the time hoping that they won't pick up, allowing me to leave a message wherein I will trip over the same inevitable consonant clusters. And for all the typos I ignore in text messaging, as I spread grease all around the tiny illuminated keys on my phone, no one is expecting more than a few words. No one is really expecting my voice.
So maybe you don't remember what I sound like either. We could have an anonymous phone conversation from two pay phones, and talk about all the things that have been going on, and we can imagine the voices and stories coming from the mouths of strangers. If we could free ourselves from memories.

My phone rings, and I scramble as I always do to pick it up.
She's calling me back!
I answer the phone, my tongue ready to walk a tightrope of the right steps and sounds. For a moment I can almost recall your voice as she says my name, but as she continues speaking, the memory recedes back to being nothing more than an unplaceable humming along to this new refrain.

Fever

2009-08-17T23:41:00.003-04:00

Your skin is a fever under
my fingers. At night when
thunder beats like a drum
against the house, we shield
our bodies in blankets.
I feel like a new moon
rising over you, far away
but seemingly near.
Let me love you from here
where it's safe, where
it's easy to lose.

Illinois

2009-08-12T21:45:00.003-04:00

Come over; eat cereal with me.
I want to be poor
with you.

But then I don't. I don't
want what my parents had,
their food stamps and their love.

This morning
two slugs drug across my porch,
one half on the back of the other.

I sizzled them with salt, what else
was there to do?
It is a fool's thing to die alone.

.history's.hooves.

2009-08-09T14:47:00.003-04:00

"
It's the old Gestapo headquarters. They're digging it up, researching the past. I don't know how anyone of my generation could accept that --Gestapo crimes neutralized by archaeology.
"
-Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

We are the walking, breathing past, not come to life as in the movies, but refusing to submit to rest. But not all of us. Don't flatter yourself; you may be as old as I, and although the stampede of history tramples us all, rarely do the wildebeest deeds of our lives make eye contact. Rarely do we come close enough to feel the breath from hot history's nostrils.

My two-year old nephew comes to visit me today. I told my brother that I would watch him while him and his wife went on a date. They are going to the same restaurant they were in eleven years ago when he proposed to her. I remember him asking me about it, if I thought it was wise, if I thought she'd accept, and what could I say? Would they have enough money? How did our parents do it? I had half a mind to follow him to the restaurant that night and watch from the corner as he sweated in his new collar, making small signals to the waiter.
And after they got married, our parents kept asking when the grandkids were coming, as if they could think of no better way to elbow their way into our lives any further. My brother and his new wife said they weren't ready yet; they were both still in school, and wanted to have enough money before bring a kid into the world. I wondered if there were some stupid book of these conversations that normal people memorized, quoting and playing the part with lack of gusto when the scene was set. 'And what of your brother', they asked him. 'Tell him to stop screwing around. He's the oldest son and he still doesn't have a girlfriend, much less a son to carry the name.' Where do they get this stuff? My brother sticks up for me as best he can, but it's a losing battle.
By the time that Jonas, my nephew, was born, my parents were in the ground and sea. My mother wanted to be buried, returned to the earth and all of that business. My father wanted to be scattered into the waters of the Pacific Ocean, presumably to make the swim back to his homeland. Even to their deaths, my parents were of firm, if not stereotypical character. How is it that my mother wished to be reunited with that great natural mother of all of us, while my dad thought he could still conquer the vast expanse of azure wilderness? I'm telling you, if there is some guidebook to staying in character, I did not receive one.
My brother tells me maybe I can start Jonas on the guitar early, haha, and maybe he'll be great musician one day. Like I never was, my brother is mindful not to add. And technically the guitar is partially his, as he lent me money to buy the 54-year old guitar, money which I have yet to pay back, though he has long since forgotten about it. I have not touched it in at least a month, to be honest, but probably closer to six weeks. The strings, no doubt need to be changed. And what the heck, why was I even considering all of this as if Jonas was actually going to sit down and play the damned thing, which sits, older than both of us combined, in its humidity-regulated case more often than not.
Jonas is dropped off shortly after Angie gets off work, as my brother swings by on his way to picking her up. I eye his slick black car, barely a year and a half old, and wonder how long it will be before they decide they need an SUV, or a minivan. Or maybe they'll have enough money to keep the date car, loaning me the minivan when I need to run errands.

"Thanks for watching Jonas, bro."
"No problem," I say, thinking of whether or not he was welcome.
"We'll probably be back before midnight, after the concert."
"Oh, a concert, too? Who's playing?"
"Oh, I don't know. Nobody you'd like. Angie got the tickets. It might be an orchestra?"

He sped off down the street, and I could picture him straightening his shirt, and delicately playing with the spot on his nose where he had a mole surgically removed when he was 24. It messed up his mojo, he said. You still got it, old man? he joked with me. I told him I hadn't had a date in six months. He laughed and told me maybe he'd try to set me up with someone he knew, maybe someone in his program. I don't need a green card girlfriend, I told him. He laughed again and drove to the hospital.
I never had the nerve, or desire, to renovate my face, but I held no qualms when it came to my house, an old duplex my parents had bought so I could have a convenient home while I was in school. They had rented out the other side, but since they died, it sat vacant while my brother and I circled around the idea of trying to rent it or sell it. You could move in with me and Angie, he said. I told him I could probably fix it up a little and then we could play it by ear. Sure, let me know if you need help.
So it began over three years ago, and I am still in the process of knocking down walls, replacing flooring, repainting. I stayed at my brother's for a week while I was working on the plumbing, but Jonas had just been born and I suspected I wasn't truly welcome. But he had promised, and with the prospect of the duplex being sold, if not collapsing beforehand, he was probably figuring out what he'd do if I actually moved in with him. After all, we were both raised with the unbreakable tenet of family first, and it'd be sooner than later that Mom would rise from the dirt and Dad's ashes would stop midstroke and turn right back around if we were to violate laws of family. 'Do you know how much we went through and sacrificed to give you everything? You wouldn't even be here if your father had gone to school for playing guitar.'
I think, really, I just enjoyed seeing change. I liked seeing the rooms change size, location, the walls change colours, the doors tentatively experimenting with which way to swing. We were told that if there were to be another earthquake, like the one that brought my parents' house down over their heads, we were to try to hide in the bathtub or underneath a door threshold. And why not a bathtub under a threshold, I joked. The lawyer tried to muster a chuckle before getting a papercut on his ring finger from some document or another my parents had prepared in case of their incidental demise. They were ready for everything, I suppose.
Anyway, that was the uninhabited side of the duplex, of course, and despite my satisfaction at the constant and complex rearrangements of structural skeletons, it was a relief to sit down on my couch and be entertained by Jonas. Jonas despised television, which I imagined was something of a vestigial trait from our parents, who bought a TV as a status symbol and consequently banned my brother and I from watching it for more than an hour a day, maybe two on weekends. The first time Angie had tried the electronic babysitter, Jonas burst into tears at the garishly coloured puppets on the big-screen TV, expanded to unnatural sizes. It could have been worse, but Jonas was rather well-behaved, a Golden Child all of Angie's friends joked, before relaying the last post-natal catastrophe. Jonas seemed pretty content to sit around and practice walking and running around most of the time, so long as someone was there to pay attention to him.
Eventually I decided to relocate to the porch, so we could watch as the setting sun painted the sky like an Easter egg. And with the outline of the buildings etched into the horizon, I thought about my little neighbourhood, this small town actually being inside a giant Easter egg, waiting to be found by someone, to be held by new hands, and examined by new eyes.
The librarian girl that lives down the street is walking her dog and stops to coo at how cute Jonas is. She knows he isn't mine and doesn't bother asking. I tell her that her dog is also cute, to which she laughs and says, 'Oh, this old fart? He is far beyond his cute years.' We talk a little longer about the weather and Kurt Vonnegut, before she starts to continue with her walk. 'Before old Woland here decides to crap on your yard,' she smirks as she tosses his ears around. 'Woland?' I ask. 'Oh yeah, I got him long ago right after I read The Master and Margarita and just thought it'd make the perfect name.' 'Ahh. I think I may have just gone with Margarita, personally.'
I would have asked her if she had liked to make some margaritas had I not tried asking her out to a movie when she moved into the neighbourhood. She agreed, but had decided to bring a friend of hers along as well. We had a good time hanging out, and I couldn't help feeling like that Steve Buscemi played in the movie adaptation of Ghost World. They would no doubt talk about how I was an old creeper after we parted ways that night. She would then think of various ways to tell me I was too old for her. She never did.

'Maybe you'll have better luck than me, Jonas.'
He wasn't particularly paying attention to anyone right now, and was playing with plastic ring etched with bite marks. I thought about how terrible plastic was for the environment, and how it would outlast both of us, and this house that we were sitting on the porch of. And yet, it would never receive the baton of history from Jonas, or his potential children, or their potential children. It will remain well-trampled, and utterly ignored by history stampeding by. Looking at Jonas, and the librarian girl disappearing down the block, I felt truly like walking, breathing history, and how we all have our turns to catch the eye of time's wildebeest, before being relegated to nothing more than ink to be written into the memoirs of those following us in the kicked up dust.

.eskimo.rolls.

2009-08-08T00:04:00.003-04:00

With compulsory athletics, you don't end up having too many options until senior year. Until then, it was boys beating on boys in intramural house football - the oldest full-contact football league in the United States, I read - and then lurching into the drudgeries of winter and spring sports at which only the occasional sub-talented, or too lazy to try out for varsity, boy would attempt to lead his team. That was me with volleyball in the first month or so of winter term, and soccer at the start of spring term. Perhaps the best memory I have of how house volleyball played out is not even my own, but rather that of the duty master who coached our volleyball antics towards, and hopefully over, the net. It was some point during one of the games, when a boy on the other team happened to be standing on the court with his hand - and this is a bizarre trend I have not seen, thankfully, since my high school days - crassly down the front of his athletic shorts. He was neither fondling himself, nor was it cold, and the duty master (who we were all convinced had been a spy, and had a Chinese wife who barely spoke English) looked on with disgust, remarking dolefully that it was his personal volleyball that we were playing with. And does that cretin even realize where his hands have been and where they currently are?
It goes without saying that sophomore and junior year were a nightmare of competitive apathy.

So by the time senior year rolled around, the leashes were let out a bit, just taut enough to remind us of who was in charge, but just slack enough to earn our gratitude for the slender mercy afforded us: an extra hour of parietals (though I never really had girls in my room anyhow), an hour chipped away from study hall, and allowing the senior Upper House to become something of a quarantine colony for those with quick onset senioritis. And clearly, there is enough mayhem and debauchery in those extra hours to fill out page upon page, chapter upon chapter of epic stories. But my school, which I will perhaps keep unnamed for a while longer, has more than its fair share of lore in that manner, the kind of unspoken lore that garners a sly hint of a grin from the housemasters' mouths if they deem you worthy of such exclusivity. For the record, I never quite bought into the whole system of house competition (and as seniors, who were we fighting anyway?), and consequently suffered something of a rebuke from the housemasters. You have to figure that anyone living with their family in a house stuffed with over a score of teenage boys has to be looking for something they didn't get enough when they were stuffed into the plaster-walled rooms. They are curators of vicarious past ribaldries. They are the fathers that try to incompetently play Nintendo with you, and then refuse to drive you to your friend's house. Old boys and older rules lorded over the brick buildings of those dorms.

But in any case, with no one else to compete against - the senior boys were all packed into one enormous dorm - the non-varsity or JV sports for us were a hodgepodge of whatever activities the teachers that abhorred athletics wanted to do. Well, of course. You know that not all among those intellectual bunch had forgotten the days when they were humiliated by poor endurance and an anemic sense of coordination. So as it were, one of the physics teachers and another teacher I can't remember taught and sponsored - babysat, really - senior kayaking, the refuge of those of us looking to escape not only gruelling physical exertion, but also the confines of the 800-acre campus designed by the infamous Olmstead. There's never enough space when a wall is around it.
The first task was to teach us not to drown. We were taken to the swimming pool, where we then provided with kayaks, lifejackets and paddles, maybe even helmets. As we were instructed on how the skirt worked, and where the handles were, and how to bail out of the capsized kayak, I came to the realization that I was going to have to get wet, something I had reached a plateau of loathing for after having been forced on the swim team for 7 or 8 years of my early life. And whereas I appreciate the broader shoulders now, which I have received compliments directed specifically at (leaving me speechless, as how do you even respond to such a remark), there has ever since been a sour taste in my mouth for those chlorinated rectangular bodies of water. Eventually, we were all taught how to eskimo roll as well, which I think was taught to us more so to boost our self-confidence than anything else, as I don't think any of us were ever able to successfully execute the maneuvre in open water.
But finally, they thought we were ready to pile into the van and make our way towards the Delaware River, the very same one that George Washington brazenly crossed in a painting somewhere. The noble posture was a little compromised when I realized that the water was no more than chest deep in most parts I paddled about in.
At first, we didn't do anything fancy; we just took a leisurely kayak canoe trip down some side stream, where, to counteract some of the boredom of teenagers being surrounded by nature, my classmates began to compose a theme song for my roommate, who had somehow acquired the moniker of Robot Astronaut. I think that may actually have been my doing. It was partly because at some point in time in the van, we had been discussing a bass guitar, which Will heard as a "space guitar". It was also partly because we all enjoyed harrassing Will over his large head - though it could have just as well been a slender neck.
Eventually, the instructors decided we should tackle one of the waterfalls on the river. I think everyone was a little excited and anxious over the proposal, envisioning grandiose waterfalls from fiction and photos alike. Not to mention that one scene in The Last of the Mohicans starring Daniel Day-Lewis where he makes out with some girl behind an Indian waterfall before diving down the toppling water (I think that that particular film was watched a disproportionate amount in high school, and still sticks to the inside of my head to this day).
Of course, when we arrived at the waterfall, it was a gurgle of rushing water with the ferocity and grandeur of rainwater swirling down a sewer grate. Our physics teacher was clearly more excited than he had been in weeks, and was eager to get us all to 'surf' the little waterfall. We willingfully complied, paddling a few times in the rushing water before turning around and floating downstream a bit until we could make it back to the wooded bank of the river.

And one day, as the fall days got inevitably cooler, and the river correspondingly dropped a few degrees, we found ourselves more than a little disgruntled at the prospect of getting wet on such an overcast day, the kind that has the odor of unprepared for midterms and college essays. It was another day tackling the great waterfall and we could practically see the field lines and vectors of excitement radiating from our physics teacher's face.
We all took our time trudging down to the ater, dragging our kayaks on our shoulders (I swear they got heavier as the season wore on). By this time in the year, we had resorted to wearing the waterproof nylon jackets provided to us, possibly the most uncomfortable thing I had to wear all senior year. The wet nylon was one thing, but the elastic fitted cuffs and waistline made the whole thing near unbearable for me, and I even decided for a day to forego the thing altogether and just deal with the cold.
But if anything was a sign that none of our hearts were really in it that day, we were ignored. The results were almost comical, really: as we each took our turn, one by one, to try to surf the falls, we each, one by one, capsized immediately. Every last eight of us in less than ten minutes, swept downstream by the current, and unable to do an eskimo roll taught to us over a month ago in the placid serenity of the swimming pool. We all abandoned ship, which had been the modus operandi anyhow, as none of us were really capable of anything except saving ourselves. Except this time, I wasn't able to grab my kayak and paddle after I emerged from underneath the water. I began to focus, instead, on my swimming training as a child and started taking some decisive strokes toward the river bank. If anyone was watching, they might even be impressed enough to ask me where I learned how to swim like that. As it were, I took approxiamately three strokes before I realized I could stand up in the water, which came up somewhere along my thighs.
When I made it back to the bank, with all my other wet and shivering friends, I told the teacher that my school-provided kayak and paddle were floating downstream along the Delaware River somewhere. I could see my physics teacher's expression collapsing, like Rome in flames, becoming nothing more than a defeated resignation of an old white-bearded man by the time we all piled back in the van.
But for the moment, as the two teachers chased my kayak and paddle down the water, we were left on the bank of the Delaware River, shaking our wet hair out, with at least two hours before dinner at the dining hall and miles from campus. For the next 15 minutes or so, we were all free, free to be swept away by the fiery leaf-bearing currents of brisk autumn air before we too were hunted down by grizzled old physics teachers.

.things.i.have.been.putting.in.my.body.

2009-08-06T23:39:00.004-04:00

Everything I eat looks the same.

Love Poem No. 1

2009-08-06T19:45:00.001-04:00

I was here when I loved you
and so
I am here just the same.

.knocking.bones.

2009-08-05T10:07:00.002-04:00

you never liked
me knocking my bones
the dull impact as
something in my skin
came into contact
with the outside world

millions of microfractures
it is said, over time
will regrow into stronger bones.
but one major fracture will floor you

i bounce my elbows together
i flick a pen back and forth against my shin
i tap my fingers on my ribs, my skull
as if i were punching into a typewriter, out of paper
or fingering frets on a stringless guitar
there is no soft hand coming between myself
staying my knees and wrists
no voice saying,
"Stop it, that really creeps me out."

.a.legacy.apart.

2009-08-02T18:28:00.002-04:00

It didn't occur to me until rather recently that some of my friends from childhood, while I lived in Saudi Arabia, were around for the Apartheid. I could wrap my head around some of my peers being around for the Berlin Wall coming down, albeit I don't actually feel that I know too many Germans. I did think about the head German baker at my former job having grown up with that institution in place, but maybe I never gave it too much thought.
But that's just it, really: political trauma seemed to be symptomatic of older generations. And it's not even as if I really believe the world has become a better place to inhabit. With each problem solved, new ones seem to spring forth, like heads of the Hydra.
But anyway, even thinking of talking to Lithuanian and Latvian friends about their experiences of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc collapsing was bizarre, but it just didn't really hit me the same way as realizing that I had white South African friends that grew up with Apartheid as standard practice. What are we teaching ourselves?

This isn't meant to be a rant, or a PSA. Rather, it's an attempt for me to discern shapes through the translucent glass panes of their country's history, distilled through nothing more than some books and texts I've read. And there is no fiction that I can create in the face of what should never have been squeezed off of the paper into non-fiction in the first place. As much as we want that photo of black and white children holding hands, sharing toys through a chain link fence, I think they exchange nothing but skeptical gazes and taut silence.

.southern.wedding.

2009-07-23T17:14:00.002-04:00

Have you ever noticed (I am sure you have) how freshly cut hair never falls in quite the way you wanted it to when you started. Perhaps it's more noticeable if you cut your own hair like I do, and you have no one to blame but yourself and your twitchy fingers on the reins of the hungry blades. I suspect this is why it's so easy to keep snipsnapping away until you have nothing left to obscure your prominent widow's peak.

It was just a little trim for this wedding I'm going to this weekend in the dirty heart of Texas, which isn't so dirty, and is actually rather young and hip and Bohemian, not unlike you. It is if Texas is an oyster on the seabed of the country, and in all the obesity and terrible air quality (oh yeah, and rampant racism and backwoods conservative cowboy ethos), some pearl was solidified, fortified and called Austin. The safest place for our kind is dead centre, surrounded by vast expanses of hostile white neo-natives. In fact, it's not unlike Columbus in that regard, I suppose.

My friend getting married, Sahar, constantly had a problem when we were younger: everyone seemed to want to spell her Persian name "Sarah", and you'd think that in the international community and school that we were in, a place where there were more Omers and Osmans than James or Johns, there would be some sensitivity to that sort of false typo. It even reminds me of taking a class with one of my favourite English professors at OSU, Pranav Jani: it wasn't his name that was mispelled, but the course was on Salman Rushdie, which the university printers had graciously corrected on the syllabus to read "Salmon Rushdie". We were headlong into postcolonial discourse (the Western biases of technology and its spell checks) before we had even cracked open Midnight's Children.

My friend Gianna will be there too, and is probably the main reason I agreed to go to this wedding at all. It's not as if neither of us are friends with Sahar; I think we just needed each other's presence to motivate ourselves to go.
And so, for the first time in probably a decade, our three families will all be in the same place at the same time. It feels as if it is some elaborate astrological event, but if it is scattering any tea leaves in my direction, I have done nothing more than ingest them to settle my recently poisoned stomach.

I imagine it like some ghost image of the past, blurred into the present picture. There we all are, standing in line: the Phams - 3 boys, the Bishehs - 4 girls, the Leggios - 3 girls. We hardly fit into the pictures of ourselves, and what is this business now of Sahar getting married? Is this for real?
The ghost image decays a bit, eroding slightly around the edges, not in quality necessarily, but in a more ontological sense, if that is the word. Objects begin to disappear from the field of vision, until all that's left is each of our faces, and how we have even outgrown those.

Am I ready for this confrontation? On one hand, yes. I have my clothes picked out, an outfit that was remarked upon as being "very GQ". Gianna told me that her mom is putting money on me as being best dressed at the wedding.
And on the other hand?...
Who's to say. My family stresses me out. Being in Texas stresses me out. Confronting layers of my past seems to have interesting effects on my head, a palimpsest of escapism and striving to just be enough.

Families reunited. Families expanded. Children gone. Fathers gone. It's not the same picture at all. One wonders how one was ever deceived in the first place.

July II

2009-07-15T20:48:00.004-04:00

A flower pressed between the pages
of a book I haven't read: your way
of saying I was something else.
I call for you all night and get the same
machine. As if our bodies in infinite collision
were not enough. As if
your shoulder in the bare moonlight
could make any of it easier.
I find my way down
the block where our neighbor's
crab apple tree spits fruit
all over the sidewalk.
Then the rain in summer, how
warm, uncomfortably warm
like you in bed beside me, sweating
out your dreams.

Diner

2009-07-14T00:08:00.003-04:00

The woman in the Chinese diner sits
two tables diagonally from me.
She is aware of herself the way
lonely people are.
I could be her in thirty years,
eating lunch by myself in
an over-sized sunflower shirt
and red pants. I want never to be
old. Each bite of lo mein
closer to my last.

.just.to.show.you.can.

2009-07-12T23:55:00.002-04:00

I remember when I was probably about seven years old, I was thrust into all the activities a son could let down his father in. Try your best. Swimming, soccer, little league. There were probably more things, more sports. A healthy body, a healthy mind. Right? Explain jocks. Rotten minds in ripe bodies, moldy flesh in firm fruit. But not me; school comes first. Absolutely. Keep your grades up. Why only a B+? I'm talking to the teacher for you. Oh, that's so embarrassing, a mother shmoozing up some better grades for you. It's 'cause the school's so small. You can't help but know everyone. You can't help but be in everyone else's business, if only because they speak the same language. And you'd poke fun at their accents as well. You'd run around taunting the lunch lady until she cried. We sure as hell did. Maybe that's why they kept us busy with these sports. And maybe it was some semblance of familiar motions, comfortable movements, choreographed as if we were all at home across the water, where none of us would have known each other. So we'll just pretend, for the sake of it, for the sake of the charade. Were we playing sports? playing parts? And although swim team was the worst, I couldn't quit it for the life of me. I certainly tried, but it was like trying to reverse a dive back onto the starting block, a bootstrapping feat wherein it proved rather impossible to fully extricate myself from the agony. I wanted none of it. Do I totally regret it? Perhaps not. I have broad shoulders, and I suspect I have years of swim team to thank for that. I have recently found I have the shoulders of a medium sized woman, but not the hips. If you squeeze the forms a bit, we'd all resemble each other in a bit. Mold your body into the furnishings for the mind. But I also remember the guitar lessons. I couldn't have been more than, what did I say earlier? seven years old. Signed up for guitar lessons after school. Same building even. Same teachers too, I suspect. Did I know what a guitar was? Only in theory. And I had a realization a day into it: I could quit. So I quit. To what end I have no clue anymore. In fact, I think of all the good it could have done me. And yet I quit, for no other reason, I suspect, than to simply show myself that I could, that I could simply walk out that door and never have to look back. And there is certainly a story in that somewhere, should you look hard enough. A moral? None. Only lessons, once learned, forever clawing at that door to be released. Let me out! I quit! And never look back. Not until you're far enough to safely reminisce nostalgically about your regrets, insulated like a down jacket by the deadened silent feathers of all the years you put between yourself and whatever it is you thought you had quit.

July

2009-07-06T21:31:00.004-04:00

July, like the hot breath of the dog
lazing on the porch.
I'd hole up in my room for days.
I could smell you all over
your side of the bed, right against
the wall. Even when you're gone,
you're there.

.house.and.homeless.

2009-06-26T19:47:00.005-04:00

In this poem, he compares the heart to a house. It is a nexus of coming and going, eaten-away foundations, and wooden supports ready to ignite.

Whatever. You have to think that any grizzled old man writing poetry in his cabin knows rather little about love. And on that note, why is everyone so persistent on the topic? Universal themes are boring, aren't they? Or maybe it's just that they're safe.

The house is a haven. I do not need to reiterate the adage that a man's home is his castle.

And yet, she just did. Do women poets compare their organs to architectural structures as well? Why do all these men feel the need to construct their emotions outside of themselves? Erect themselves in nature somewhere and disappear again back into the woods and, eventually, the dirt. Why make symbols? At what point does representational analogy re-establish itself as paradigm, reasserting itself forever like a defiant statue in the desert?

And besides the direct metaphor, we must think about what is being implied given social context. Men have traditionally built houses; women have made homes. If the heart is a house, then the speaker is perhaps relating to us that he has an unfulfilled space. He requires his mistress to perform the transformational act of house to home.

House and homes have always been dicey for me. I lived overseas for most of my life, with the implicit knowledge that my house was temporary, as if it were written into the walls, "You are here, and you will leave". And the stark reminders every summer when my family returned to my country of birth, of citizenship, chiselled away at my American identity. I didn't really live here. Who was I fooling? My parents came uprooted from across an ocean and stretched their branchy arms into the air and grew money on their fingertips, shaking it down every fall to pay my tuition. And do I live here either? In this dorm? This is no more a home than a hostel, with possessions bolted down, and memories sewn up in mattresses.

What does the reader have to make, however, of the secret chambers of the heart that occur in the third stanza? What do locked rooms in a house denote? On which side of the door must we assume the speaker's love interest is locked? Is she his mistress? or does he have mistresses? If we extend his referral to her as his lifeblood in the first stanza, then we have to contend with two things: the first is that blood occupies the whole heart, and if there are sealed off chambers of the heart, we must assume that they contain blood all the same. And the second, is that the movement of blood through the heart, as the speaker admits, can only flow in one direction. From what rooms is the speaker's love moving, and where to? Is she destined to be expelled altogether?

Living in Saudi Arabia, the law accommodated for up to four wives, a fact that is often recited in Western demonizations of the Muslim and Arab world. In reality, it was rarely fulfilled. Four wives are four wives, and not just four more mouths to feed, but four more voices to hear. And given a few generations, that number grows exponentially. Did these women and their children have their own rooms, as the multiple wives their huts in Achebe's Things Fall Apart? or did they mingle together? Half-brothers, and half-sisters struggling to remember names and social standings. In the Bible, it was the custom for the first son to inherit everything, but it never once happened, at least in the Old Testament. Look for yourself. A rabbi told me.

The heart is the nexus of emotion and passion, as you clearly know, class. But, given the popular modular perspective of human character, where then does the mind reside, if not the house and home? And does the soul encompass the two? or does it too have its own dwelling place? Are these three components defensibly separatable? Can they act independently? And if the answer is yes, do we have to contend with the Self as an amalgamation of discrete identities? And if the answer is yes again, then is the poem setting up a parallel with the Christian model of the Holy Trinity? If we have that parallel to consider, then we, the readers, are in a place where we must decide which parts of the Trinity align with which parts of the Self as presented in the poem. If we accept the Father as the mind, the Holy Ghost as the soul, and the Son as the heart, then we are now left with a situation in which the Son, or the speaker, is the house, which the Father does not reside in, but has created. The question this leaves us with, and the topic of your coming essay, is whether or not the speaker has knowingly created an impossible love scenario for himself, wherein he must abandon reason and rationale - his Mind - in order to inhabit the fragile and empty structure of his house with his mistress. We will discuss the ensuing parallels with Father-Son/family connotations and how the Holy Ghost/soul plays into the dichotomy next class. Don't forget to pick up last week's paper before you leave.

Impossible scenarios indeed, this long distance relationship. And I know that it is only temporary while you are studying in Central America. Or was it working with Habitat for Humanity? Houses, homes, habitats. We live in all of them, but so rarely do I ever feel as if the walls will hold me in. What are we sheltering ourselves from? What elemental forces are so violent that we must shield ourselves inside of ourselves? You were like a tropical monsoon, ripping through all the little buildings inside of me, growing like palm trees. And now we have reached the dry season. Can we make it another year? Are we ever going to feel that cyclonic ferocity again, shaking the beating walls? It tires me, replanting, rebuilding, repairing every season. There is no such thing as progress, only cycles; no linearity, only meandering garden paths. And at the end of the day, when the sun sinks in my head, the heart is still the house to which we return, and I am homeless.

.refridgerator.

2009-06-25T23:32:00.004-04:00

like my mother, you
have come and
gone
in your wake an
overstocked fridge
an open front door
inviting the night
air cooled by rain
it refuses to enter

Other Homes

2009-06-25T21:31:00.000-04:00

My father moved to Indiana
under the pretense mother
would follow and when
she didn't, he shook her
off like old skin
and made for us another
home where nothing smelled
like her but she was there
all the same.

.jersey.barriers.

2009-06-22T21:38:00.003-04:00

"
people always say "it's really easy, there's a simple formula. you just turn it clockwise half way and then turn it the other way until it won't turn anymore and then look in your mirror twice and turn the wheel a quarter turn and and and"
"

My roommate has made it to almost 30 without learning to drive. Or perhaps he has learned and forgotten. Maybe he has a secret license he has been hiding from us.
I think I can beat him. But I'm only 22 now, 23 tomorrow, actually, so that's only 6 or 7 more years without being behind the wheel that I have to get by. That's somewhere between a quarter and a third of the life I have lived so far. It will somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the life I will have lived at that point.

There was one time my father decided it was time for me to learn. I was already older than the average American teenager engineering his escape pod, courtesy of having attended a boarding school. In fact, my dad decided it was time because I had just graduated from high school.
My family was helping me move from New Jersey to Ohio for college, but we had to make a stop in Tennessee to pick up the old Toyota (or was it a Honda?) that they had bought for my grandparents to use almost a decade before. My mother was the type of person to stock up the top shelf of one our closets with various gifts, just in case. So when that kid in my class that I didn't really know or like invited me to his birthday party out of nowhere, my mom was ready with some wrapping paper. Or maybe we got invited to some kind of housewarming party. The shelf got a little emptier before the light turned off and we closed the door.
So it was really no surprise that she had masterminded a scheme in which my parents bought my grandparents a car to drive around in, with the hopes that I would drive it 10 years later when I was old enough, and my grandparents were too old (and in all actuality, it was only my grandfather anyway, since my grandmother, stricken with glaucoma and osteoporosis, preferred to putter around the house, stocking up Apple Jacks and Mello Yello for my impending summer visits). With me having graduated, the plan was simple: drive down with my family to Tennessee from New Jersey, pick up the Tonda (or was it Hoyota?) and drive up to Ohio from there with two cars, one which they could leave with me.
Maybe they hadn't counted on me not having a license yet. Nothing that couldn't be fixed though. Driving's easy. Tennessee is pretty sparse. My father drove me to an abandoned strip mall.
I have never been comfortable around particularly noisy mechanical things. Vacuuming was a chore. And airplane toilets were absolutely terrifying; I would be halfway out of the folding doors before I flushed the toilet. It wasn't even as if I feared being sucked through it or something, and in fact, that might have made the idea a bit more appealing. Blenders? Also terrifying, but my love for smoothies generally wins out.
The car was not particularly noisy, but feeling the herds of horsepower on the other side of my foot had the same unsettling effect. After all, it is not a far cry from stepping on hot coals, and maybe I even felt a bit like that one scene in Dr. Strangelove, riding that hot and bothered machine into certain doom.

I didn't take the car beyond 20 miles an hour.
And in retrospect, that's almost rather hilarious, as I am rather comfortable, these days, riding my bicycle around at that speed and beyond.

Perhaps my father was a little disappointed in my slow, misshapen laps around the parking lot, and thought that perhaps it was time to work on parking. I know: that pun wasn't intended. He pulled me out of the car and ran over a few basics of parking. I closed the door and my dad stood in front of the car, pretending to be a cone pretending to be another car. I began to ease the car into the parking space and crept forward until my dad jumped out of the way, pushing on the hood.
In retrospect, "crept" might have a bit of an under-exaggeration.
He drove home.

Maybe one day I'll have to get a license. My roommate is getting one next year, his financial situation is strong-arming him into the suburbs and into the front seat. He'll uncomfortably readjust his seat position and angles, never quite finding that sweet spot. He'll ignore the oil economy fueling him, and his role in fueling them. He'll check his mirrors. He'll take a sip of his coffee, sigh, and back his car out of the driveway like a retracted promise to himself.
I think I can beat him. Six or seven more years. They're just numbers.
Or maybe I will have to get a license as well, and take the plunge. Learn to walk those hot coals. And when I am issued my license, complete with haggerd photo, I will hide it in shame. Maybe under some towels in the hallway closet, on the top shelf underneath the hanging lightbulb. And when I forget your birthday, our anniversary, my best friend's wedding, a graduation party in a nearby city, I will open the closet door and wrap my license up in my wallet, and hope it's enough of a gift. I will hope you can unwrap those retracted promises, beaming false rainbows, failed covenants.

.a.million.fingertips.

2009-06-16T23:59:00.003-04:00

normally, i
like to sleep to
music, playlists built
on strings and horns
arpeggio stairways and
sloping crescendos for
the handicapped

tonight, the
rain drowns it
out, with the
percussive
repercussions
percolating
like your fingertips
softly repeating
their customary
rapping, requesting
permission to
return
to your own bedroom

Notes to Self

2009-06-16T23:17:00.003-04:00

Lose ten pounds. For real this time.
Sift through the shit you don't need to take with you.
Stop spending fliff. On shiny things.
Resist the urge to burn all your bridges before you move.

.burnt.toast.

2009-06-14T23:59:00.000-04:00

so tan
these days
like toast, browning
on both sides
never evenly.
a little darker,
with every step under
the sun
pushing me down
smeared into a
shadow, melting
into yours

11 pm

2009-06-14T17:51:00.003-04:00

Don't come
around here
like a hound
on the scent.
I've seen your
kind before,
don't I know
a thing or
two about
the hunger
of men.

.cherry.picker.

2009-06-12T19:46:00.003-04:00

What do they call those guys that wear those reflective vests and hard hats on the side of the road, but don't actually do construction? Are they just workers? Telephone line repairmen? Surely they have names.
I saw a few on the way to work today, and since I was going in early, decided to stop for a bit, already having almost thrown myself off of my bike due to my own carelessness. I just about ran into the back of their truck, parked on the side of the road, as I thought about the sad sag of the telephone wires, victims of gravity. But you know all about that affliction.

I forget their names already, but they gave me an extra bottle of water they had lying around, and I pretended that it wasn't warm as sweat and just about as smelly. Water is water, and water is relief. And one of them asked if he could try my bike, not having ridden one since he was a teenager. Sure, why not.
When he came back from the other side of the parking lot, I told him he had to take me up in his cherry picker now. Sure, why not.
Wait.
Really? Oh, so he was serious after all. Maybe they were having a slow day as well, trying their best to prevent the sun from beating away their motivation and livelihood like colour evaporating from tattoos.

Up I went, a little choppily at first, but slightly smoother as I evened out to the height of the telephone wires. Some birds squawked disapproval and fluttered away, leaving me wondering how it was that they didn't get electrocuted.
I hung out for a little while. I marvelled at how much windier it was up that high, and when I finally looked down, I saw people walking dazed on the sidewalk. Here's an angle one doesn't see too often! How many people, do you think, make sure they look presentable from an aerial view? And as I sat up in the cherry picker looking down, there was some relief in realizing that people have lost interest or ability in ever looking up.

.book.burning.

2009-06-09T11:07:00.003-04:00

"
This was terribly hard to do, because written-on paper burns reluctantly.
"
-Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

I made a bonfire last night, feeding it all your novels and notebooks, your diaries and magazines. There may have even been some of mine in there, but devil knows I haven't read a book in months, if not a year already, so what do I care. I can't help but see a wall of words stacked in front of my face, filling me with the desire to punch a hole through the paper and binding, and as I remove my hand, peer through the tiny prison cell window into the world.

The glossy periodicals went up first, the yellow flames looking a bit sick as they digested the various inks and chemicals. The models on the pages didn't blink as their faces were blackened and eventually erased altogether.
It occurred to me that I had forgotten the recent novel that you had finished and left on the bed. I walked back into the bedroom and found it undisturbed from where it had landed like a pine cone last week, fluffed and ruffled and spent of its contents. I looked around for any other forgotten texts: a piano score you had printed out, a newspaper with employment ads circled in blue ink, an inhaler prescription, a love letter written on a dollar bill.
I wrote a check out for the rest of the money I owed you, and hung a sheet over the mirror.

All that was left on the bonfire when I returned were some drawings from your sketchbook and the letters we had written each other while I was studying abroad, while you were visiting your relatives in the mountains, while you were in the kitchen. Bulgakov was right: the written-on pages stubbornly refused the flames, but even they eventually succumbed. Without ever changing colour or the shape of your looping cursive, the words clung obdurately to the crisping and crackling paper until, finally, your heartfelt confessions rose like smoky whispers into the ears of the night sky, leaving me with the cooling white-edged embers of all that remained.

God According to my Father

2009-06-08T23:36:00.002-04:00

It doesn't matter what you believe, only
that you do.

And Jesus is good enough, but
that's not the whole story either.

After your mom left and took you girls
I thought I'd never fall asleep

and it was that way for days.
Nights became mornings became another night,

impenetrable dark and every
unwelcome nightsound magnified

by night's camouflage. The small apartment
rattled with the traffic of footsteps

and laughter from the neighbors. I was lonely
for them, for anyone, any sound

other than the heater as it shook at 4am,
grumbling to a slow wake in the dead of

that winter. But listen--
all that was dead inside me

made me live.

.when.the.moment.comes.

2009-06-08T15:12:00.001-04:00

אני עוצם בעצם

.wild.things.

2009-06-07T17:20:00.004-04:00

(Just so you know, the real version of this has that empty bottom square cut out completely so that the page is see through. Didn't quite translate when I scanned it)

Whoa! New mix cd!
Hit me up if you want me to figure out how to get you a copy.

For those of you that still can't read the tracklisting after blowing up the image:

Ear Pwr - Epic Suitcase .1
The Mae Shi - Run to Your Grave .2
The Magnetic Fields - I Think I Need a New Heart .3
Dillinger Four - Suckers International Has Gone Public .4
Rilo Kiley - Smoke Detector .5
Page France - Here's a Telephone .6
Erik Satie - Le Piccadilly .7
The Unicorns - I Was Born (a Unicorn) .8
Andrew Bird - Candy Shop .9
The Thermals - A Pillar of Salt .10
Malajube - Le Métronome .11
Thao Nguyen - What About .12
Mika Miko - Attitude .13
Stereo Total - In-Out .14
Cansei de Ser Sexy - Hollywood (Madonna) .15
Japanther - River Phoenix .16
Yea Big + Kid Static - The Nameless .17
She & Him - This is Not a Test .18
Kurt Weill - Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (Moritatensänger Macheath) .19
Do Make Say Think - In Mind .20
Julie Doiron - Nice to Come Home .21

Linear

2009-06-07T00:45:00.003-04:00

Because there are many ways
to fuck up a straight line. Because
when I walk toward you, I want
to walk away. Because
every path is forward moving
and devolving all at once.
Because in the hot breath
of a June evening, you were too
beautiful to bear--even another
moment of you would undo
all that was done.

.bose.einstein.condensates.

2009-06-06T07:19:00.002-04:00

"
"Condensates" are extremely low-temperature fluids which contain properties and exhibit behaviors that are currently not completely understood, such as spontaneously flowing out of their containers. The effect is the consequence of quantum mechanics, which states that since continuous spectral regions can typically be neglected, systems can almost always acquire energy only in discrete steps. If a system is at such a low temperature that it is in the lowest energy state, it is no longer possible for it to reduce its energy, not even by friction. Without friction, the fluid will easily overcome gravity because of adhesion between the fluid and the container wall, and it will take up the most favorable position (all around the container).
"

When we are at our lowest and coolest points, it's hard not to think of all the potential.
It's hard not to climb all over you, screaming all the time that you will never contain me.

.overdue.

2009-06-04T00:48:00.000-04:00

You asked me to clear off the bed today, to put my guitar somewhere sensible, which in this case turned out to be sitting on the basket of winter coats in the corner of the room. A childhood friend once told me that when he didn't have anything to plug his electric bass into, he would lean it against the wall and listen for the resonation of his plucked strings in the walls. I couldn't tell you whether or not it worked, and my guitar in the corner is an acoustic one, which is not to say, I suppose, that one couldn't play it with one's head bowed, one ear to the sound hole and the other pressed against the vibrations of a house reverbrating with comfortable chords.

When I finally got home, I found your book resting on my side of the bed. A discarded dropping. Books building up in the room like autumn leaves hiding the sidewalk, and whatever chalky proclamations we wrote each other on warmer afternoons. Books building up in the rooms like the autumn leaves on my skin, tucked under my arm. And when the night breeze rushes through the room as I enter, the leaves disperse into their corners, accumulating dust and library fines. And your book lies on the bed, consumed and dispensed of, its spine neatly broken.

My mother, a teacher, often had this habit. Most of the books that I read growing up were at the 4th grade level, providing a progressively decreasing challenge with each passing year. Eventually, she told me to move onto more worthwhile books, but like a secret nook in a distant relative's house, there was something familiar in staying at that 4th grade level, never moving past my mother's occupational preoccupation. Like a dung beetle, I was rolling up the discarded scraps of her lessons.

I'm glad that you bought that book, though. You certainly don't need any more library fines, and I probably don't have time to run up there tomorrow anyhow. I would like to think that if it sits there long enough, I might eventually get to read it. But the truth is, I'm going to move it two feet to the left tonight when I lie down to sleep, an arm's length away from the never to be read chapters lying next to me.

.lactic.acid.blues.

2009-06-03T19:27:00.002-04:00

Ever since the break up, it's been an easy relief to lose myself in working out. And don't get me wrong, I was active anyway: I ride my bike everywhere. I don't drive. To hell with that. To hell with everything.

But it wasn't enough. I mean, at first I just started going on longer rides on my own, when I wasn't heading to work, or to class. A fine distraction, and on the longer rides, I did find that my legs burned with exertion. I borrowed a friend's fixed gear bike to do some more training, and found the lack of coasting hard to settle in on at first, but welcomed the aches and cramps that welled up in my butt.

I joined the gym. It was the one that my friends go to, which is how I found out about it in the first place. Frankly, I could have just gone to the university rec center, but any more time spent on campus and I would have most likely gone crazy. I did go once, and ran into a former professor of mine. We nodded at each other without a word, and I watched him shoot basketballs wildly for five minutes before leaving. I ran into my ex on the way out.

I don't go to the gym when my friends do. It's fine seeing them here and there, and probably even nice to grab a cup of coffee with them when we do cross paths for that brief morning half hour before we head off to our jobs and classes.
I started with the elliptical, after hearing so much about it. And it was great, I won't lie, but I don't think there is much more to say about it. At least, not any more than has already been said. I also took a spinning class, figuring that it was close to home for me. It was something comfortable. I wasn't a runner, but I used the treadmills. I started swimming with a coworker once a week, barely keeping up with her.

Eventually, I even started lifting weights. I had never imagined myself doing so, or even wanting to do so. And yet, here I am in my bedroom with dumbbells at my feet, begging to stub my toe on some dark night after I stumble home from the lab bleary-eyed and smelling slightly of the beer I had on my way home.

There's a comfort in taking it out on my body. Or maybe it's a distraction. Equal parts of both, like counter-acting muscle pairs, pulling and pushing me towards blissful exhaustion. Without your body here next to me, my body has turned inwards, trying to build enough muscle mass to reconstruct a counter-acting body pair, something to fit together like South America and Africa swimming across the Atlantic Ocean into sub-equatorial embrace.
With each new muscle popping into definition, begging God to rip through my torso and remove a rib, I figure that I will finally be strong enough to lift up myself out of this ocean of lactic acid.

.tachyon.theif.

2009-06-02T16:26:00.002-04:00

I didn't even feel his hand when he slipped the bills into my pocket. Did my father ever pick any pockets in his childhood? It's a certain sleight of hand that can't be taught, only learned.

They didn't order any food, but were content to sit down and watch me eat half of a free burrito. Oh, we already got food. It's in the car. We have to get to the airport soon.
Munch munch munch.

Maybe my father is some sort of anti-pickpocket, like an antielectron, a positron. He is robbing me of something, but moving backwards in time as he does it. He is a tachyon thief. By the time I'm born, I'll have nothing left.

I have to go back to work soon, but there's still a little time for some parting words, some advice and consultation. Make sure you see a dentist. Don't forget to look into apartments in Chicago for the fall. Please write.
Munch. I wipe my mouth.

My mom pulls me aside on the sidewalk and slips some bills into my hands, drawing her head in close in that way she always does, as if she's telling me a secret. It is in Vietnamese anyway, so we are being doubly secretive. If my father is the tachyon thief, my mother is temporally backpedaling con artist. She'll look me in the eye and deftly snatch up the meagre allowances I had put aside for my oncoming childhood.

I am already ten minutes late getting back to work, and the door is a handful of strides away. My mother is reminding me again to see a dentist and to take care of myself, not yet releasing her grip on the folded bills, her hand still resting in mine. This is from your dad's parents. They said they think you're too thin. They asked if you were on drugs.
I do nothing. I take a step into the doorway of my workplace.

Sam is smiling at me and holding her bike. She has not yet gotten her new haircut, and is wearing her helmet. My family is walking across the street to their rental car with West Coast license plates. Sam is amused to have seen me interact with my family. She loves my mother. For once, it is my family sealing themselves off in a metal carriage to be machined away. I finger through the bills in my pocket and discover the ones that my father slipped in. He is gone before the crime has even been committed.

Sam rides her bike to the bookstore downtown and I return to the backroom, where I face a bicycle with a tire robbed of air. Once, I patched a hole in my tire with a dollar bill, forgetting about it until I sold my bike to a friend. I realize that I too am a tachyon theif.
Money flows like eye glances, disappearing behind irises. I remember that my mother told me to put my money away into my wallet so I wouldn't lose it.

I get off work and ride my bike to the bus station. I want to return their money. I want my father to be a real theif, moving forwards in time like a normal person. I want my mother to sell me dreams and hopes as I drop bills into her hand.

I try to buy a ticket, but I would have nothing left to return when I arrived.

Apartment hunt

2009-05-28T17:52:00.001-04:00

I'm going to Carbondale to find an apartment! Wish me luck.

What Love Is

2009-05-26T20:47:00.002-04:00

Loving you is inconvenient. You think
it's callous to talk about love that way.
Your love is
heroic rhetoric. Big as
a canyon, full of air.
My love is a coal mine, all
tunneled out, no light.

Walhalla

2009-05-21T21:39:00.002-04:00

I took the road hidden in the dead
of the city, where a heart of forest
canopied the cut-out path
past homes I could never
afford. Where everything fell away
for the five minute drive to its
conclusion. I shift
the car to neutral. My friend once said
a kid hanged himself from the bridge overhead
where my car slows to a creep
under its arch, cowered in shadow.
Trees shake in the warm wind,
branches waving like a warning.
I could keep going. I could
drive all day and still be here.

Overcast

2009-05-20T22:56:00.002-04:00

Today, my father's face is full
of shadows, his age showing
like cracks in the sidewalk
we walk along now, talking
about next year and the move
south. I don't want to leave
Ohio, its constant gray, the way
it makes me feel a little sad
most days. How overhead, like
my father's worry in each line of his brow,
the clouds gather around the edges
of the dull sky.

2009-05-18T22:15:00.002-04:00

"You've trained me to be crazy."

---Jon Chopan

Mayday

2009-05-15T20:18:00.004-04:00

Today I saw a woman walking a three-legged Pomeranian. I don't think
it gets sadder than that. Or maybe I was just sad and saw what I wanted
out of the thing. The way it hopped along on its one front leg like
a pogo stick. Mouth open and tongue unfurled and breathing hard
in the heat of May. Reminding me what's broken can't be fixed.

Joseph

2009-05-14T23:31:00.003-04:00

A black man on the corner says,
You are the dreamer, you

are Joseph. Someone howls, Get A Job
and he pulls his technicolor scraps
tighter around his waist.

Overhead, a single pidgeon
sits on the wire and one feather
drops to the street.

Traffic, heavy at midday, stalled.
Hot city air, metallic city noise.
Who has time for dreams

when all we can do is unravel
our threads.

Beatitudes

2009-05-13T22:45:00.002-04:00

I woke early to hear the remnants of rain
after an all-night storm. Gray morning, diluted

light coming through the shades. A bird from
the willow chirped, each note

another beatitude. I took my time getting
up, an unfinished dream still warm

in my head: it was two autumns ago
and you were there with a half-smirk,

scarved neck, framed in sunlight.
All the leaves scuttled to your feet

and far off somewhere, a woman’s voice
wisped like a westward wind against my ear.

But this morning I find no love where
once it glared like a thief who overturned

all I own and still wanted more.
My bed was empty and it was spring,

another season without you, had you
been here at all.

.hold.your.breath.

2009-05-12T23:44:00.001-04:00

I'm thinking, now that Ruth is back, I might take a brief hiatus to recompose myself and not squeeze out little turds for updates.

I will be back!

French Kiss

2009-05-12T20:37:00.003-04:00

The story is that I was just a kid when Mom left us, me and my father and my two sisters. My father gave me her old bathrobe she left behind, ratty blue and white striped cotton. Smelled like her perfume and Aquanet hairspray. She had a life to get on with, a life that didn't include us or who she used to be.

The next time I saw my mother she was living in Murfreesboro, Tennessee and remarried to a man she'd known for a month or two. His name was Lee and he was a burly Southern prototype who believed that heavy discipline was all it took to rear good children. Naturally, he had none of his own. I was eight at the time and I remember how my mother used to kiss him full on the lips, open mouth. I'd never seen her kiss my father that way. Me and the sisters sat in the kitchen of her two bedroom apartment and tried not to stare. Lee poked his tongue against his cheek to make sure we knew Mom had her tongue down his throat. "And that, girls, is a french kiss!" he'd bellow. Mom lowered her eyes and shook her head, her cheeks flushed. I couldn't decide if she was embarrassed or amused by the way her claret-painted lips twisted into a half-grin.

The story is that was the first time I knew I'd lost her for good. Until that visit, I thought she'd be back, thought she'd drive up to Bluffton, Indiana to that crappy rental house next to the gas station off the highway, thought she'd knock on the door in the middle of the night and we'd take her back like she hadn't stomped our hearts into dumb red confetti. I wanted the mother who hot rolled her hair into big, puffed out curls. I wanted the mother who handmade my Christmas dresses and knitted new sweaters for our birthdays. Not this mother with her fishnet stockings and dyed black hair. Her deep V-neck dresses and heels and cigarettes and french kisses.

MIA: a defense

2009-05-11T23:28:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the complete lack of posts lately. I don't really have a good reason for it other than being sick & lazy. I'm gonna get my ass back in gear after I'm done wallowing in mucus-soaked misery.

.pneumonia.

2009-05-10T22:48:00.002-04:00

Do I have pneumonia? I should probably get that checked out tomorrow. I know I have good health insurance through my parents, and yet, I feel totally incapable at using it.
Where do I go? What do I say?
None of this makes the least bit of sense to me. I've never believed I was sick until my body staggered and fell, a nation of cells caving under internal strife. And even then, it'll pass. I have a certain degree of denial when it comes to my body, I suppose, although perhaps in a slightly different way than, say, a teenage girl. If I were 20 years older, we could chalk it up to believing I'm young and healthy, in my prime.

The last time I remember being really sick, I was so zonked out I couldn't even get out of bed to do much of anything. At most I staggered to the washroom to drain myself of bile. Was I on meds? Probably. I don't really remember what I took. People threw pills at me. They landed in my mouth and slid down my throat.
I still don't know what I had. And it makes me think of ancient times: everyone exhibiting unmistakable signs of sickness, and only in our modern day can we give our afflictions names, a pale grasp to control them.
But you can't fight that cough. And despite rubbing your nose raw, the snot still drips onto your shirt at inopportune times. So don't go on dates when you're sick. Stay home. Enjoy the company of your favourite pillow. Drink something hot. Read something. Take a nap.

And really, who am I kidding. I just got home myself.
You can't control your afflictions by giving them names, so why serve them when they have titles?

.clean.nostrils.

2009-05-09T22:48:00.002-04:00

So many birthdays in such a short span. It makes me think that no matter how much we're muddling up our lives right now, we can all think of at least two people that were having a good time x number of years ago.

Yeah, that's pretty gross, but I just went there. It's ok for me, because I've never witnessed my parents doing it. But I've never witnessed them really fighting either. The question, then, is whether or not they were being considerate, or if they are just the Asian robots that society wants to believe they are.

So ask yourselves: with the recent spottiness of our updates, what are Ruth and I doing? Are we being lazy? Are we casting doubts at our literary ring fingers?

It's tough to tell! But don't be surprised if a hiatus happens, and maybe you'll shuffle back and forth every other weekend. You'll probably be better off with her for most of the time.
But don't be surprised either, if we come back at this blog project with the full force of a spring-borne sneeze, expelling all the seeds and pollens of ideas inseminating into the air.
Eyes closed,
lungs emptied,
there's not much left to do but inhale

.untidy.mitosis.

2009-05-08T23:55:00.003-04:00

Sometimes - actually, most of the time - I enter a certain illusion that my return home will be ushered in by receptive cleanliness. And below that tidy surface, enough undercurrent of discombobulation to prove that someone has lived here in my absence. I did not leave a tomb. I am not returning to one.

It's rarely the case, though, as you doubtlessly already know. Everyone leaves in a hurry, clothes strewn about: last minute exclusions waiting for the next suitcase out of town. And if not a comparable degree of disarray, entropy does as entropy will, and piles multiply and subdivide, never quite garbage, but never quite clean. We return to the messes we left.
Or how does the saying go?
You made your bed and now you must lie in it.
The inverse is also true. With every surface littered with forget-me-not-but-I-wish-I-coulds, there's hardly a place to be knocked down onto.

.dc.

2009-05-06T23:59:00.000-04:00

If your car should get broken into, let it be a shoestring around a brick, holding a note: "drive safely. i miss you already. godspeed."

May

2009-05-06T23:09:00.002-04:00

The fan, switched off on the window's ledge, still turned
when the wind ran through it.
I didn't feel so alone. Traffic
slicked by on wet streets. Everything
was motion, everything was stopped.
I sat around watching the spring rain like one does
when their lives become a slow unravel.
Except for those few moments of stupid joy
I took from you, I didn't have much.
But it was enough.

manifesto II

2009-05-05T23:26:00.002-04:00

Dogs > people.

Samara Key

2009-05-04T21:25:00.004-04:00

Sugar maple seeds spiraled groundward, pelting
the sidewalk, each landing haphazardly
across our path. It was spring and I was
feeling better, if only for the stupid
seeds, their dizzy descent
toward a dizzier world.
I wanted to shake loose from what I knew.
I wanted to learn how
to leave what I love most.

.philadelphia.2.

2009-05-04T20:58:00.002-04:00

Like a hot shower, home-cooked dinner with new friends steams up the glass; you'll never see us not peering back out.

.philadelphia.

2009-05-03T23:59:00.000-04:00

Another Chinatown (the same Vietnamese cafe across town) has me convinced that pieces of cities are now following in our wake, a toilet paper past tucked unknowingly into the back of my pants.

.new.london.

2009-05-02T23:59:00.000-04:00

All the hispanic children on the pier, so ready to race you, cover their ears when the train arrives.

.cape.cod.

2009-05-01T23:01:00.001-04:00

From the catwalks above, all our actors' skulls are crosshairs, waiting for the lightning.

.boston.

2009-04-30T23:59:00.001-04:00

The roads here, like our crisscrossing emotions, have never been tamed.

2009-04-29T23:45:00.002-04:00

i owe y'all some decent blog posts...when i get a chance.

.manhattan.

2009-04-29T20:37:00.002-04:00

Inside concrete tunnels, you are oxygen, being carried into the heart of this city.

.butterfingers.

2009-04-28T20:48:00.001-04:00

You like to throw your weight around, but I can't ever catch it.

jesus!

2009-04-28T00:56:00.000-04:00

after this week, i'm never gonna want to tattoo again!

afternoon

2009-04-27T21:19:00.003-04:00

felt like august only
it was april. you shed
your clothes like
a good tease, one layer
at a time. summer
sweat on your skin.
all we had was time
to give each other,
these few hours
in a room full of
the sun's glare,
and nothing else
mattered.

.these.bristly.legs.

2009-04-27T13:34:00.001-04:00

These bristly mosquito legs, finally shaved free of your bloodsucking buzz, always around my ears.

.fans.aplenty.

2009-04-25T23:03:00.003-04:00

All these fans, we're just pushing hot air around us. And you can hear the spinning coming from the ceilings, the windows, the whirlpool where your heart should be. You can hear the windmills making the wind, hoping to attract themselves a little chivalry.
All this hot air rushing around us, gushing out the windows, and hopefully taking with them the stale emotions, still lingering, like a flirtatious glance.

the pursuit of happiness

2009-04-25T14:27:00.000-04:00

you are more work than worth.
fool's gold.

.dr.light.needs.right.to.win.again.

2009-04-24T18:45:00.007-04:00

All you bitches come to my show on Sunday.

And afterwards, I'm taking a 10 day vacation, but I'll be trying to update everyday with a cheesy dark line, unless I think of something better.
You get a sampler today:

Who knew this picture was a jigsaw puzzle, so ready to fall to pieces?

.always.hungry.

2009-04-23T22:58:00.004-04:00

If I could swallow the world, I would keep it in my gut. I would lock it all down, a collapsing star shaking off its last lights like iridescent sweat.
And then I would vomit it all back up, everything dissolved into unprocessed acidic bile. I will pick through the bits for small chunks of you, and I will read gastrointestinal fortunes as if they were tea leaves in your grandmother's cup.
I will consume my past with ravenous hypotheticals. I will loosen a notch of my nostalgic future, the belt of expectations that ties it all down.
And all the time, I am hungry. I am full. Unsatiated.

Your Room and Everything In It*

2009-04-23T00:14:00.000-04:00

stay home today--I want you
in your most natural state.

and let me undo all the hard work
your clothes perform.

this can be a secret,
our chaos marked by

the unmade bed and a song
that keeps skipping.

when your mouth moves over me
my skin burns for you.

I wanted you closer, I
don't know how else to tell you.

*I kinda stole this title from Jon Chopan's piece, "This Room and Everything In It."

.knight's.tour.

2009-04-22T23:54:00.002-04:00

why do we purchase one-way tickets back home?
an errant knight's tour come back around
jumping over black and white squares
blending all together into familiar grey sidewalk slabs

Remaining Separate from What One Loves Deeply*

2009-04-22T22:21:00.003-04:00

Don't believe me
if I'm cold, far
as the moon from you.

I wanted your love
but I'd only ruin it.

*line from Louise Gluck's poem, "Telemachus' Guilt."

.topless.bridemaids.

2009-04-21T22:46:00.001-04:00

One of these days, I will marry you, and we will ride your scooter into the sunset.

in a rage

2009-04-21T20:07:00.000-04:00

i hate when my house is filled with children. go home!

.constellations.

2009-04-20T10:49:00.004-04:00

I used to see the stars all the time. Or at the very least, on a regular basis. And I don't just mean spotting a few every night; I'm talking about seeing all the stars. Every last pinprick hole in the night dome. As if we were all being suspended upside down in celestial sieve, waiting for bits of heaven to trickle in.
There was less light pollution over there. Light still remembered to say its goodbyes and disperse come evening, retiring for the night. Nowadays, it lingers around into the still hours of the night, like the smokey haze of teenage smokers. Your eyes can't really help but cough.

Alcohol was illegal, so most of the parents would distill their own wine in their closets at home. When it was finally ready, they would get all the families together and head for the dunes, the vast sandy skin that covered the Arabian peninsula. It was a great chance to try out their homebrews, which I understand were always rather foul. Some of the adults had simply snuck beers back in from Bahrain. We didn't really care. It was a great chance to get away from any remnants of life. The closest structure was a radio tower miles away.
And invariably, after the adults set up camp, the rest of teenagers would set off to establish our own sub-camp, usually a ten minute walk away, and generally over a dune. In our isolation, we were neither children or adults, and our self-imposed exile was maybe a stab at self-determination, punctuated by our brief return to the main camp for food and lighter fluid.
And that was really one of the other great things about being out in the desert: creating our own bonfire. We could get by without the rules of thumbs and the watchful eye of Smokey the Bear, because after all, we weren't going to burn down the desert, eh?
Our flames stabbed upwards, as if the light were trying to force itself back into the sky. And as fires burned after the sun sank beneath the sands, we would lie down on a blanket or towel, four of us astride, and stare upwards at the stars. I used to be able to point out far more constellations, even creating a few of our own.
Once in a while, someone would get up and feed the fire more palm fronds and newspapers, as if in the darkness of the extinguished sun, we were burning up the world, and everyone reportable in it, to keep ourselves warm.

constellation love poem*

2009-04-20T00:22:00.002-04:00

i trace you, freckle
to freckle, connect
each scar with my
fingertip.
my nightsky,
always above me.

*thank you, Mike's post, for the title

.with.balls.

2009-04-19T21:43:00.002-04:00

I spent a good part of my shift at work today ogling cyclocross bikes that I want to buy. One time, a coworker of mine gave an excellent description of what a cyclocross bike is: a road bike with balls. Maybe all those picky customers that demand fast, but comfortable, bikes that can be taken off the road had some effect on bike production after all.
In any case, it really would just be a matter of switching out tires: throw some slick 700 x 23s on those wheels instead of the knobby 32s and I've got myself a road bike, albeit a slightly heavier one, with a shifted-down gearing range.

Life should be so easy.
I could switch out some shoes and step outside.
I could win a race. I could be a me with some balls.

the rain

2009-04-19T18:59:00.004-04:00

the rain started slow. i kept the window
open, listening to the water hit
the sidewalk. sounded like
pebbles plinking down, manic.

we were fighting again
so all my bitterness
turned the rain into a prophesy.

look: this is why
we wouldn't last.

your love is a dark cloud.
and all that wind is just
me, howling.

it seemed better to leave you than
to stay long enough for you to disappoint me.
how could you not?

I could feel the rain,
it started in my bones.

.diagonals.

2009-04-18T23:34:00.004-04:00

With the bed
to myself, I
attempt to sleep on
one side of it
anyway,
contemplating whether
I tend to occupy
the left or right
side of the bed
more often
I wake up,
finding myself
sleeping at a diagonal,
bisecting the mattress
from corner to corner.
Filling your space and mine.

Calumet

2009-04-17T22:57:00.003-04:00

I took the brick-paved road to Calumet
where the stone church always looks empty,
even in daylight, that lonely red door
like your starburnt eye.

Who keeps You company these days?
And is it enough?

I sat on the steps, deciding where to go
while the sun fell lower in the sky.
If I find you, I'll tell you
what I really think of this place
that feels like hollow ground
everywhere I am.

.the.great.golf.course.sham.

2009-04-17T20:22:00.002-04:00

Going to a boarding school, I lived with relentless parietal rules, which, for the most part didn't bother me, since I wasn't getting any for most of the time. There were all sorts of tactics around it, and everyone knew them all. Some people just knew better than others which were legends, and what was strategm.

My friend Charlie and I spent an evening walking around the campus golf course, searching for couples in compromising positions. That was the sexual hot spot on campus, allegedly, the lover's lookout. Needless to say, we found no one. Was everyone perceptive enough, devious enough, to avoid detection? Were we not being thorough enough? Or was it all a ruse?
Most people, I think, ended up just breaking parietals, sneaking themselves up to dorm rooms and hoping for the best. And truth be told, the duty masters didn't really end up being all too investigative most of the time. I mean, maybe they saw it from our perspective, as an isolated population of teenagers living in dorms. Maybe they had sympathy. Maybe they realized how futile it would have been.
There were cases, of course, where the administration did have to crack down and lay down the law. It was generally once a year. The most vivid memory was my last year, in which a pair of students had secretly installed a webcam in a dorm-mate's room, and when said dorm-mate snuck his girlfriend upstairs, the hankypanky was captured on film. A fifth person ended up ratting out the two filmographers out of his "good conscience". We all suspected ulterior motives of furthering his house-political profile.
All parties were busted: the filmographers, and the lusty lovers. Lawyers were called in. Students were kicked out and reprimanded. Administrative emails from the Dean of Students most likely still linger in a few people's inboxes, gathering mildew, and decomposing into the ether of the internet. Nobody I know of ever saw the video.

I, myself, did have occasion, during a less than well-remembered relationship, to experiment with breaking parietals and doing afterdark explorations of campus. I had my fair share of close calls and times being caught red-handed. Nothing nearly as spectacular as any of the aforementioned scenarios, but a learning experience nonetheless. Perhaps one of the more important lessons learned by a majority of the student population there.
And you can imagine how bizarre it was to go to college, living on campus, and finding that for the most part, nobody really gave a shit what you did or where. Roommates being caught became the stuff of college comedy, commonly commanding it's own code of ettiquette. Did it demystify and deromanticize the entire experience of slinking around a dark campus? of sneaking around rooms with doors considerably less than 90 degrees ajar?
Don't ask me. I certainly wasn't getting any my freshman year.
But for a moment last night, I felt that old knowledge come back to me: the mental notes of which buildings were open late, how to sneak around dark hallways into even darker classrooms, how to lay low when we heard the sweeping of the janitor in the hallway outside, singing a song to herself.

unfinished

2009-04-16T22:05:00.003-04:00

rain pecks the window
like an angry bird. the fog
of breath on glass, the blinds pulled up
so the neighbors could see.
somewhere, a siren howls down the wet street.
i undress in daylight.
i pull you by the collar so
you know: this is all my heat
against you.

.blue.room.

2009-04-16T08:35:00.003-04:00

My mom put me on the swim team for 8 long years of my life, under the guidance of an Egyptian coach. And he surely knew his stuff, since we had heard some fluff that him and his wife had almost qualified for the Egyptian Olympics team in the past. Their children certainly were part dolphins, we wagered, slipping through the water all the way to the regionals, nationals, and junior olympics. The rest of us were jellyfish, littering the pools like plastic bags.
And what made it all the worse, was that the pool we practised in was a 50 meter pool, rather than the standard 25 meter one that we swam at the meets. The distances we swam were the same, but without that extra flip turn and push every 25 meters, we found ourselves in the middle of the pool.
I used to imagine what I'd do if I suddenly saw a shark materialize in the deep end, slowly swimming over from the diving end of the pool. Nevermind the chlorine content: this was the special shark, bred to punish boys that grabbed onto the lane dividers during the backstroke. And most of the time, I found that I wanted to sink down to the bottom of that pool and just sit on the bottom forever, shark or no shark. It was an empty and silent place.
And then I would hear my coach, yelling at the top of his lungs as we approached either side of the pool. Yelling at us to pull harder, swim faster. He had quite a voice on him, that Egyptian, and we could hear him 5 meters away and half underwater. In all likelihood, we probably did pull harder and swim faster as we approached him, if only so we could turn around and swim away from him sooner.
I haven't swam in a while now, having a brief stint with laps at the rec centre pool with a friend that was trying to get in shape. I tend to either feel that I'm just standing in water being cold, or that I feel compelled to swim all the laps that my body can't keep up with anymore. Nevertheless, I'd love to take that 11 kilometer bike ride out to the quarry this summer with some friends and maybe float around for a bit. Or maybe sneak into the Canterbury pool and hot tub late at night. There's no pressure to pull harder anymore, of course, but there's always that moment, after having jumped in, when I'm once again alone in that underwater room, stuck between a shark and an Egyptian.

.by.the.side.of.the.pool.

2009-04-15T23:59:00.000-04:00

boys will be boys.
growing up as one is what you'd expect:
dirt and grass and melted action figures,
ninja turtles and x-men grimacing
with blackened faces and cracked shells
it was a surprise we ever got new toys at all
nothing belongs
to little boys
everything is taken

Vigil

2009-04-15T19:40:00.002-04:00

I waited by the window all day.
Streetlights came on, halos
full of moths. Even then
I stayed.

I see no reason to grieve--I've got
this grey world for that.
And if you come home
I'll have kept room for you
where my sadness should have been.

.button.eyes.

2009-04-14T23:52:00.000-04:00

She likes boys!

the O.C.

2009-04-14T00:16:00.000-04:00

I need to be rich, I've decided.
I wasn't born with good taste for nothing.