.bose.einstein.condensates.

"
"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.

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.

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.

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

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

What Love Is

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

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

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.

"You've trained me to be crazy."

---Jon Chopan

Mayday

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.