Balding Epigraph

First day of classes and the sky is a hard-colored morose green swirl....like looking through an empty 7-up bottle in your basement or something. Dank, sullen, lachrymose, dated. Summer is suppose to eventually dwindle into a rushed autumnal gale with luminous nerf-colored sunsets heavily beating orange hymns across hard candy shaded leaves mottled in vacant overhead boughs. But no. An overcast green trenchcoat stamps an indelible punctuation mark for scantily clad (and scantily brained) sorority sweethearts worshiping the sun on Olin Quad.

After marshaling finances, quelling incubus-shaped emotions, playing a rather sadistic-inflicted version of Simon Says with the Registrars office, truckeling in front of Mother Mary Mama Bear and chomping off my six-year old identity tail as a co-signer sacrifice, I finally entered my first class this morning with equanimity and sharp poise.

Can't walk two square feet on campus without the inevitable comment on the absence of my pony-tail. My friend April walked past BR 227 twice and then jutted her head in to confirm. My Mom's best friend (she teaches Hebrew here at Bradley) came up and gave me a hug before petting the spontaneous mop that sits atop my head like demolition follicle rubble.

I always throught castrating my northern limb would be rather dramatic--like in Steel Magnolia. When Dolly Parton southernly sears Julia Roberts bangs, it's a tranistion into motherhood (god-I'm referencing a chick flick. I need help male help. SPORTSCENTER and stale doritos to the rescue!!!!!!)....

To my astonishment, the void of golden thread that faithfully served as Toto to my traveling Dorthy for almost eight years has not really bothered me all that much. When I was butchering my Bodhi tree a few weeks back I canned, actually threw away a 300 page single spaced novel I wrote last autumn called Book of Muses. 300 pages!!!-and I tossed it out because I had a dream where my grandmother came into my bedroom and yelled at me for writing such 'filth.'

"You're giving our family a bad name." Grandma said, in the dream and it scared the hell out of me b/c it was one of those dreams where its like "Shit, she's really here." Almost like Adam not only swallowed the fruit, he also knocked up Eve up as well and God is waiting at the garden gate with a blue-colored pregnancy test and a biblical versed pre-nup.

So in my dream I say the greatest name and liquid time freezes into dream cubes and I wake up. The book had to be tossed (It's not one of those scripts I want to be remembered having written--sort of a well-written handbook dedicated to lonely housewives everywhere) but also as an exercise in detachment.

So here I am in the library with short hair that'll grow back in a year. I remember hearing a Joseph Campbell on detahcment once.

"You cut your lawn everyweek. Suppose your grass would say, 'Now well what's the use!'"

Oh......and I had a dream during my turbulent lone-kayak-bracing-the- Atlantic-hurricane breakdown. When I get depressed I almost always have bad dreams about my underwear-model ex-girlfriend who I dated for thirteen months (my longest romantic rapport ever) and then had to leave town. Most dreams we're fighting and throwing things. Some dreams we're actually married and miserable and trying to conceive a child only we can't. Anyway, I keep having this dream where my-exgirlfriend and myself are having furious arguements.....only in this dream, to get away from my-ex, I delve into a bar and start doing cocacine. I'm shoveling little Peruvian mountain peaks of coke up my left nostril in a swanky hotel bar to deal with the loneliness and who do I see but my own mother, looking professional and wearing a bussiness suit. Mom is conducting a lecture in front of all of these (mostly persian) people and she's surrounded by all my relatives in P-town....and it turns out she's teaching the faith and that she's radically very ardent and passionate about it (she's a passionate Baptist in real life).....

.....and in the dream (which relaxed me because I had finally lost dream-periphery of my ex-girlfriend) I yell at my mom. I don't know why, but I yell at her. I scream at her. I tell her to stop.......

The next day my mother entered uncle Mike's house for the first time to co-sign a loan for her eldest child, still learning after all these years.