Been working around the numerical disc of the clock; the emaciated thin limbs of the hour and minute hand shuffle past stiff integers of time as the semester wends its way into completion and I find myself (in less than a week) cloaked in a drape of black, jigging to pomp and circumstance, grasping the slanted palm of Dr. Browski--prestigious president of BU--fightin' off the spontaneous urge to spoonfeed him the finger (my own diplomatic dactyl of integrity and emancipation) while humming out Pink Floyd's infamous introit, more apt in an age where the once gilded, inemitable annals of higher education have sourly transitioned into a financial bulwark oppressing the financial future of many a working-class students, such as myself, for the next three-to-four decades.
"We don't need no education!
We don’t need no thought control!
No dark sarcasm in the classroom!
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!"
Yep, education these days pretty much truckles to the whims of all the pretty-boys Little Lord Fountainbleau's hailing from the likes of Skokie and Schaumburg. They have short hair, drink cheap domestic beer, deem themselves an authoritative asset on politics, never fully know their spouse, inherit their father's erstaz bussiness, have a hard time getting through Slaughterhouse Five let alone allowing their terse attention span to trek across any narrative that can't be imminently fast-forwarded, rewound or freeze framed.
It's almost an evolutionary phenomenom. Six million years ago; by process of evolution and natural selection, certain vectors of our species become bi-pedal, learn to walk up right, learn how to stretch and instigate muscles they never knew existed in order to behoove the development of the clan and perpetuate the betterment of mankind.
Now, six-million years later, society still seems bracketed into those who can walk and those who can't. (When those who walk employ SUV as crutches--the artist has no choice but to fledge his wings and offer those with attuned lobes a healthy flap).
The north american yuppie--a most disgusting mammal. The pessimism that exudes through the cracks of this entry comes from working thirty hours straight, ferrying to the whims of these short hair pretty boys. It comes from bantering with them, encouraging them, appeasing them, lauging with them, serving them. It comes from secretly wanting to be one. Wanting to have the assurance, the commodities, the trust fund christened from umbilicus, the mortgage (the know-it-all Manard's on Saturday, tinkering around the house genius, the bolwing trophy wife)--It comes from being exhausted. It comes from realizing that, the role of the Buddha is "Joyful participation in the suffering of the world" even if that suffering means you'll be in a piss-all tax bracket; that suffering still alloactes an element of freedom--it allows you to be able to sing, to dance, to make love, to be astonished by the thermonuclear slants of the sun, even in old age. It allows you to see.
True, looking back, myself (like allota kids I admire) have never known a week of school where I wasn't engaged in working extraneous jobs to pay exorbitant tuition rates. Scribbling out third shift timecards on a weekly basis may have deprived me of being a student, but, in all realization, it crafted me into a storyteller. It hardened my arteries, bolstered my awareness and apprecieation for the working class, made me dubious about US politics and above all, gave me the one diploma, that is never finished, that I work on every day, every hour, every moment....
Sunday, May 08, 2005
Sunday, May 01, 2005
A blogg for the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.....
No, not Maggie this time. Nor Sexy Sarah who reads Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and has a splash of red hair that would drive any mammal in possession of male artillery thin-weak at the caps of his knees. Nor vivacious Stephanie whose been a real buddy to me this past semester (even though she always leaves her goddamn panties at my house *smiles*) nor Brilliant Hippie Nicki who studies philosophy and whose mind is a gaseous planet full of atmospherical insight and profound beauty. No, sorry, not even Arya and Daniela both of whom in the past year have provided me with the feeling of security and love that often eludes me in face-to-face relationships. Not my brilliant sister Beth, either, who practically disowned me after my father's sudden death, claiming that I was being too selfish (Beth and I have rectified our rapport since then--she's graduated from LAW school in downtown Chicago in two weeks and I couldn't be more proud)--Nor my graceful sister Jenn who has the lead in CRAZY FOR YOU--and who I'm still "working on" to better our rapport--No, this is a concourse orchestrated Blogg directed at a dear friend of mine name Tricia Nyhus, an english teacher here at Bradley, a fellow contemporary 'crazy' screenplay writer, a wife, a mother of three, and--most imperatively--my hero.
I first met Tricia at a reception for then poet laureate of the United States Billy Collins, April of 2004 (Collins' wrote the cigarette poem I posted a few months back). Collins' gave a sold out reading at Dingledine and the following day twenty students were invited to attend a lecture
by Collins. I was in awe just being in his presence and trying to impress him with lord knows what sort of verbal bosh and pretentious tongue blather which made him role his eyes and question the veracity of our department.
In the circle (english majors form circles EVERYWHERE they go) there was one lady I had never seen before. She was wearing a mickey mouse shirt, glasses and had hazel bangs that slipped down the side of her face (which I would learn later on was a wig).
The lady smiled incessantly throughout the discourse of the lecture. She flirted with the poet laureate and made a joke about S &M that made Mr. Collins hackle with delight. At the end of the lecture she promptly gathered her folders and confidently strutted out of the room.
About a week later I was in another classroom (with desks seemingly arranged like crop-circles) when I inquired to Shannon Moore if she knew the origins of this affable creature who felt so comfortable cracking sado-masochist jibes with Billy Collins.
"Her name's Tricia." Shannon said. "She's a grad student and teaches at ICC."
It turned out that Tricia was going through chemotherapy for a lump she discovered late last autumn. Her hair was fake; she wore glasses so that no one would suspect that the streaking brows a top her nutmeg eyes were penciled in and that chemotherapy had ruthlessly stripped her every patch of her hair on her body, like brown bristles sprinkling off a dead-alley evergreen several weeks after the joyous holiday has past.
By the time Tricia was diagnosed with cancer I had already had my fair share of the disease stain the blood-lining of my familily genes. In less than five years I lost two grandparents, a cousin and my father. The last father to son activity I performed with the old man was helping him take a shit, lowering his boxers and wiping the ass of my father before two days before he died.
There's many things I hate in life (rich bradley kids from Northshore 'burbs, my ex-girlfriend, AIDS, poverty, academic dross-n-excess, financial destitution, Dr. Gorin, Illinois Public school systems in general) and Cancer ranks right up there, and, pardon my candor, but FUCK YOU twatty Georgie W. for not possessing the elementary social insight to diagnose CANCER in itself as a weapon of mass destruction. There, I said it mister president, Fuck you. Your troops are haggard and on there deathbed here at home, chief and you manipulate biblical passages for your own global naivete. In the immortal words of Greg Brown "I have my hand on my heart but I don't know what for." I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK!
To the best of my knowledge Tricia was never as truculent as I am towards the disease that blasted the cells of fifteen percent of my family from me over the past half-decade. In fact, what makes Tricia my hero is that she conquered the disease in the same manner in which she conquered the heart of the US poet laureate that one spring morning:with charm and laughter.
The local paper did an account on Tricia this morning and showed a Christmas card of her and her family smiling. Tricia is sporting the infamous chemotherapy-inspired Sinead O'Conner doo while her three children and husband are each wearing a sort of nylon over their heads, pretending to be bald as well.
"Merry Christmas!" the card said, "And a Happy New Hair!"
*
Last semester Tricia stopped me after a Screenwriting class to congratulate me for a local writing award I had won. It was my first encounter with her tete-a-tete. Ironically the story that I sold was about my father who had died from a disease she was all too familiar with.
What happened next was weird. She just wanted to talk about my story and all I wanted to do was thank her for surviving. She smiled and acted like the twelve months of enervating chemo treatments were no big deal.
"When you have kids its just something you do. You survive."
She was wearing her wig, the same wig she had on the first time I had spotted her flirting with Billy Collins. In the article this morning she talked about loosing her physical identity, but never loosing her sense of humor."
"Look," She told the local Urinal Jar (Journal Star) reporter. "I thought to myself, If I'm going to go through this experiment, I might as well laugh my ass off."
*
The last time I saw Trish was about a month ago. We were walking opposite directions. A woman with scruff short hair was power walking on the sidewalk opposite from me. She hollered out my name and I had no clue who it was (I thought it was a lesbian at first)= to my dismay it was Trish.
"Can you believe it--MY HAIR IS COMING BACK!!!!"
"So it's gone?" I inquired. "The cancer is gone?"
"As far as I know." She responded. She went on to talk about her screen play (80 pages!!!) how BU had hired her to teach two classes this pending autumn. When I asked her again about the venom that momentarily rented the inside her body, she just laughed, referenced her kids and again, insinuated, that surviving is just something you do. You live and laugh as much as possible through this process of life--through the art of living.
I tried telling Trish just how much her survival meant to me that afternoon. She blushed it off and I hugged her goodbye, told her that I was proud of her. That she was my hero for conquering the disease that took my old man so suddenly three years ago.
Her shock of short hair looks like golden wheat atop her head and (using her own humor) Trish, you really were the sexiest lesbian I've ever seen that day (with the exception of late night hi-channeled adult quality viewing, of course....hehehe).
What Trish doesn't know is, after our last encountered, I cried. An avalanche of tears spilled from my sockets. True I was missing my dad, pissed off that he had died before he ever had the opportunity to escort one of his daughters down the aisle; pissed off that he had died while his only son and first born was engaged in a rather hedonistic and unhealthy lifestyle.
But mostly the reason I shuffled tears away from my cheekbones that afternoon has to do with beauty. Beauty in its most true and unadulterated form seems to sometimes involve an intersection of suffering, glory, resilience, laughter. What I saw that day, gazing at Trisha's back confidently power walking down Cooper as she gradually dissipated was simply a person who had accepted the "test" they were for some horrible, inexplicably given and had impeccably passed it with multiple plus signs following the first upper-case vowel.
Most notorious writers can't do this. For a long time I hid. I hid behind the blonde that was coddled in my right palm and the beer that was grasped in my left. I hid behind a plume of arid, cancer-friendly cigarette smoke. I hid behind prose so bloated it must be mistaken for splashes of genius 'less it be uncloaked for the elementary ink-drops that it truly was.
For a long time I hid. The Dragon firing up my cigar. The lizard pouring me another round. Mara telling me that the girl who just rightfully dropped my ass and has deemed me a 'creep' was a bitch-to-begin anyway before I cozen her into a kegstand and wet-t contest.
What I saw in Trish was a human being who accepted what life/God had given her and laughed, joyous streams of laughter in response.
Attagirl, Trish! Atta fuckin' girl!
I first met Tricia at a reception for then poet laureate of the United States Billy Collins, April of 2004 (Collins' wrote the cigarette poem I posted a few months back). Collins' gave a sold out reading at Dingledine and the following day twenty students were invited to attend a lecture
by Collins. I was in awe just being in his presence and trying to impress him with lord knows what sort of verbal bosh and pretentious tongue blather which made him role his eyes and question the veracity of our department.
In the circle (english majors form circles EVERYWHERE they go) there was one lady I had never seen before. She was wearing a mickey mouse shirt, glasses and had hazel bangs that slipped down the side of her face (which I would learn later on was a wig).
The lady smiled incessantly throughout the discourse of the lecture. She flirted with the poet laureate and made a joke about S &M that made Mr. Collins hackle with delight. At the end of the lecture she promptly gathered her folders and confidently strutted out of the room.
About a week later I was in another classroom (with desks seemingly arranged like crop-circles) when I inquired to Shannon Moore if she knew the origins of this affable creature who felt so comfortable cracking sado-masochist jibes with Billy Collins.
"Her name's Tricia." Shannon said. "She's a grad student and teaches at ICC."
It turned out that Tricia was going through chemotherapy for a lump she discovered late last autumn. Her hair was fake; she wore glasses so that no one would suspect that the streaking brows a top her nutmeg eyes were penciled in and that chemotherapy had ruthlessly stripped her every patch of her hair on her body, like brown bristles sprinkling off a dead-alley evergreen several weeks after the joyous holiday has past.
By the time Tricia was diagnosed with cancer I had already had my fair share of the disease stain the blood-lining of my familily genes. In less than five years I lost two grandparents, a cousin and my father. The last father to son activity I performed with the old man was helping him take a shit, lowering his boxers and wiping the ass of my father before two days before he died.
There's many things I hate in life (rich bradley kids from Northshore 'burbs, my ex-girlfriend, AIDS, poverty, academic dross-n-excess, financial destitution, Dr. Gorin, Illinois Public school systems in general) and Cancer ranks right up there, and, pardon my candor, but FUCK YOU twatty Georgie W. for not possessing the elementary social insight to diagnose CANCER in itself as a weapon of mass destruction. There, I said it mister president, Fuck you. Your troops are haggard and on there deathbed here at home, chief and you manipulate biblical passages for your own global naivete. In the immortal words of Greg Brown "I have my hand on my heart but I don't know what for." I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK!
To the best of my knowledge Tricia was never as truculent as I am towards the disease that blasted the cells of fifteen percent of my family from me over the past half-decade. In fact, what makes Tricia my hero is that she conquered the disease in the same manner in which she conquered the heart of the US poet laureate that one spring morning:with charm and laughter.
The local paper did an account on Tricia this morning and showed a Christmas card of her and her family smiling. Tricia is sporting the infamous chemotherapy-inspired Sinead O'Conner doo while her three children and husband are each wearing a sort of nylon over their heads, pretending to be bald as well.
"Merry Christmas!" the card said, "And a Happy New Hair!"
*
Last semester Tricia stopped me after a Screenwriting class to congratulate me for a local writing award I had won. It was my first encounter with her tete-a-tete. Ironically the story that I sold was about my father who had died from a disease she was all too familiar with.
What happened next was weird. She just wanted to talk about my story and all I wanted to do was thank her for surviving. She smiled and acted like the twelve months of enervating chemo treatments were no big deal.
"When you have kids its just something you do. You survive."
She was wearing her wig, the same wig she had on the first time I had spotted her flirting with Billy Collins. In the article this morning she talked about loosing her physical identity, but never loosing her sense of humor."
"Look," She told the local Urinal Jar (Journal Star) reporter. "I thought to myself, If I'm going to go through this experiment, I might as well laugh my ass off."
*
The last time I saw Trish was about a month ago. We were walking opposite directions. A woman with scruff short hair was power walking on the sidewalk opposite from me. She hollered out my name and I had no clue who it was (I thought it was a lesbian at first)= to my dismay it was Trish.
"Can you believe it--MY HAIR IS COMING BACK!!!!"
"So it's gone?" I inquired. "The cancer is gone?"
"As far as I know." She responded. She went on to talk about her screen play (80 pages!!!) how BU had hired her to teach two classes this pending autumn. When I asked her again about the venom that momentarily rented the inside her body, she just laughed, referenced her kids and again, insinuated, that surviving is just something you do. You live and laugh as much as possible through this process of life--through the art of living.
I tried telling Trish just how much her survival meant to me that afternoon. She blushed it off and I hugged her goodbye, told her that I was proud of her. That she was my hero for conquering the disease that took my old man so suddenly three years ago.
Her shock of short hair looks like golden wheat atop her head and (using her own humor) Trish, you really were the sexiest lesbian I've ever seen that day (with the exception of late night hi-channeled adult quality viewing, of course....hehehe).
What Trish doesn't know is, after our last encountered, I cried. An avalanche of tears spilled from my sockets. True I was missing my dad, pissed off that he had died before he ever had the opportunity to escort one of his daughters down the aisle; pissed off that he had died while his only son and first born was engaged in a rather hedonistic and unhealthy lifestyle.
But mostly the reason I shuffled tears away from my cheekbones that afternoon has to do with beauty. Beauty in its most true and unadulterated form seems to sometimes involve an intersection of suffering, glory, resilience, laughter. What I saw that day, gazing at Trisha's back confidently power walking down Cooper as she gradually dissipated was simply a person who had accepted the "test" they were for some horrible, inexplicably given and had impeccably passed it with multiple plus signs following the first upper-case vowel.
Most notorious writers can't do this. For a long time I hid. I hid behind the blonde that was coddled in my right palm and the beer that was grasped in my left. I hid behind a plume of arid, cancer-friendly cigarette smoke. I hid behind prose so bloated it must be mistaken for splashes of genius 'less it be uncloaked for the elementary ink-drops that it truly was.
For a long time I hid. The Dragon firing up my cigar. The lizard pouring me another round. Mara telling me that the girl who just rightfully dropped my ass and has deemed me a 'creep' was a bitch-to-begin anyway before I cozen her into a kegstand and wet-t contest.
What I saw in Trish was a human being who accepted what life/God had given her and laughed, joyous streams of laughter in response.
Attagirl, Trish! Atta fuckin' girl!
Saturday, April 30, 2005
Dust yerself off and try again...
All semester long there was Maggie; the fair skinned doe-eyed wild irish haired lass who sits next to me in irascible Doctor Gorin Soc for inane masochists. All semester long there was her--the beautiful fair-foreheaded goddess (she's like, twenty times more intelligent than I am!). Maggie who said the word 'Quarks' the first day of class. Maggie who dreams of taking her father to Ireland before he dies. Maggie who looks like a snow angel when she blushes, the folds of her smile creasing into the avenue of her lips; Maggie who loves the same state Park I trek to every season for spiritual nourishiment. Maggie whose favorite book is Jane Eyre which, after hearing her tithed confession (shhhh! don't tell her) I read for the first time. Maggie who gave me her phone number and then disappeared for a week and then wanted nothing to do with me. Maggie who either looks at me like she is totally in love or like she just miscarried every time we chat. Maggie who looks sexy in her spectacles. Maggie who inexplicably removed me from her facebook. Maggie who quite possibly, was the creative catalyst behind the best short story I have ever written (ibid see 'The Sail' publication pending and Miss Schutz, if you ever read this, that story belongs to you, so SMILE!) which is saying alot because I fucking write all the time, Maggie who I told my sister all about when I was drunk during the Illinois game. Maggie who I freaked out over because after I met her I felt that we had some weird connection. Maggie who works as a check out girl in ghetto Sav-a-lot of all fucking places. Maggie whose eyes look like lunar satellites every time they blink above the gentle pasture of her prominent cheekbones. Maggie who, I really believe this, is going to rock the world someday--a young woman who says so much simply by staring into the constellation of your forehead and offering the world a terse grin.
All semester long there was Maggie. The joy, the horrible awkwardness, the initial shock when I groped her pallid limb inside Jesters coffee and she said that she was in no particular hurry to get back to her dorm.
All semester long there was Maggie, beautiful, brilliant, wild-eyed erudite Maggie.
And tonight there was someone else.
And there were kisses, beautiful sweet kisses, the dew of spring, the awakenning of youth, the moment of oneness, feeling her body ache in the dark and wondering where she has been all this time.
All semester long there was Maggie. The joy, the horrible awkwardness, the initial shock when I groped her pallid limb inside Jesters coffee and she said that she was in no particular hurry to get back to her dorm.
All semester long there was Maggie, beautiful, brilliant, wild-eyed erudite Maggie.
And tonight there was someone else.
And there were kisses, beautiful sweet kisses, the dew of spring, the awakenning of youth, the moment of oneness, feeling her body ache in the dark and wondering where she has been all this time.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
In this way we are wise
Butt-ass exhausted. Working all the F**king time. I get off work at six am, get a few hours rest, clock back on at nine am, work on and off until 3, come in tomorrow at four, work til midnight, take a three hour hiatus, back on at noon saturday...all just tryin' to get a lil' bread in my jar......
wish I had a warm body to hold....
wish I had a warm body to hold....
Saturday, April 16, 2005
He who knows not how to hide....
...knows not how to love, so the adage goes. Went through four discrete drafts of my novel today, sifting through 1500 pages, four years of slapping shapes and milking metaphores. I'm exhausted. Twelve hour work day which because of pay crunches, I'm only paid for eight and a half.....
Brilliant writing buddy of mine found my blogg. He asked to remain faceless. Here's what he had to say:
Sir David--
Did something I've been meaning to do since NewYears. Recall our conversation with Dr.______,bedfellow of ____ the Plum Persian. Doctor insisted, rather insistently, that Kurt Vonnegut had recently checked out. You and I looked askance. Surely such news would have come to our attention. No, no, saidDoc, a bit dismissively, he's smoked. Are you sure you're not over extending your grasp Doctor? I mean,look, a guy needs a rubber glove in the ass and I'm sure you're just the man for the job. But perhaps you've strayed from your domain on this one. No, no,Kurt Vonnegut is dead, you ninnies. You are piddly writers. I am a medical doctor. You're degree is in abstraction, binge-drinking, mental masturbation. Mine is in medicine, in self-satisfaction. You two will stumble home tonight to toss off in a stack of wrinkled porn right about the time I'm mounting this plum Persian babe all knockered-up on Apple Martinis. Now, do as the good Doctor says and take yourmedicine, boys. I am right. He is dead.
Kurt Vonnegut is an 83-year old this year, and arather sprightly one at that.
Also, I checked out your blog. What a gig. It's the only blog I've ever intentionally read. Your fan base is impressive, though frankly, I'm worried, I'm worried for my life. I came upon the Dave Eggers story--well told, if you'll oblige some simpering. But oh the responses it illicited. I've heard about these blogging types. They're home-bodies,night-dwellers, tomb-raiders; they're wickens, they're patrons of dark lands with mystical powers. They take drugs, they have strange piercings. They have misinterpreted your yarn. They have bu-fooed context,and they have wished me ill-will. They have cursed me. Help me, David, please, to redeem my good standing in the universe. Tell them all that I have amended myself. Tell them of my support for your craft, my unflappable loyalty, my respect for all life and art. Tell them of my pathos, of my commingling with the needy. Tell them of my passiveness--I attended anti-war rallies in three states, albeit inadvertently. But a fine track record nonetheless. Tell them I'm a nature boy. Tell them I've sufferedfor my phone prank. And yes, tell them I have indeedheard of Karma. Tell them Karma recently visited andleft a raging case of ass herpes. I have repented.Tell them. Please. No more bad blogger Karma issued out of misconstrued context. The ass herpes hurts, somuch so I'm reduced to writing this email standing up.Bad bloggers, bad, bad bloggers.
Blogger be good, be good to me my babies. Love and peace to all of God's creatures unless you're and atheist then I love you too and good luck to the Muslims and people in India and I hope you all have enough rice for the winter and good toilets because cleanliness is next to godliness and that counts for you atheists too,
signed
??????????????
Brilliant writing buddy of mine found my blogg. He asked to remain faceless. Here's what he had to say:
Sir David--
Did something I've been meaning to do since NewYears. Recall our conversation with Dr.______,bedfellow of ____ the Plum Persian. Doctor insisted, rather insistently, that Kurt Vonnegut had recently checked out. You and I looked askance. Surely such news would have come to our attention. No, no, saidDoc, a bit dismissively, he's smoked. Are you sure you're not over extending your grasp Doctor? I mean,look, a guy needs a rubber glove in the ass and I'm sure you're just the man for the job. But perhaps you've strayed from your domain on this one. No, no,Kurt Vonnegut is dead, you ninnies. You are piddly writers. I am a medical doctor. You're degree is in abstraction, binge-drinking, mental masturbation. Mine is in medicine, in self-satisfaction. You two will stumble home tonight to toss off in a stack of wrinkled porn right about the time I'm mounting this plum Persian babe all knockered-up on Apple Martinis. Now, do as the good Doctor says and take yourmedicine, boys. I am right. He is dead.
Kurt Vonnegut is an 83-year old this year, and arather sprightly one at that.
Also, I checked out your blog. What a gig. It's the only blog I've ever intentionally read. Your fan base is impressive, though frankly, I'm worried, I'm worried for my life. I came upon the Dave Eggers story--well told, if you'll oblige some simpering. But oh the responses it illicited. I've heard about these blogging types. They're home-bodies,night-dwellers, tomb-raiders; they're wickens, they're patrons of dark lands with mystical powers. They take drugs, they have strange piercings. They have misinterpreted your yarn. They have bu-fooed context,and they have wished me ill-will. They have cursed me. Help me, David, please, to redeem my good standing in the universe. Tell them all that I have amended myself. Tell them of my support for your craft, my unflappable loyalty, my respect for all life and art. Tell them of my pathos, of my commingling with the needy. Tell them of my passiveness--I attended anti-war rallies in three states, albeit inadvertently. But a fine track record nonetheless. Tell them I'm a nature boy. Tell them I've sufferedfor my phone prank. And yes, tell them I have indeedheard of Karma. Tell them Karma recently visited andleft a raging case of ass herpes. I have repented.Tell them. Please. No more bad blogger Karma issued out of misconstrued context. The ass herpes hurts, somuch so I'm reduced to writing this email standing up.Bad bloggers, bad, bad bloggers.
Blogger be good, be good to me my babies. Love and peace to all of God's creatures unless you're and atheist then I love you too and good luck to the Muslims and people in India and I hope you all have enough rice for the winter and good toilets because cleanliness is next to godliness and that counts for you atheists too,
signed
??????????????
Saturday, April 09, 2005
Blog Fog
What's been goin on...
* Month of March: In like a Lion, out with a hangover.
*New Wheels--No insurance, no problem.
* Who left the thong on my desk in the library???? (very funny guys! Hahaha. Aprils fool!)
* Found out that b/c I pay so much for school I'm eligible for Food stamps (What!?! I work ALL the time!!!!!!!!)
*Tryin' to be cognizant about my health without making myself and everyone around me feel like a total uptight anal wad.
* All I want to do is sit on my ass and write all the time!
* Biggest graduation party known to mankind planned end of May. It's for myself and my sister whose graduating from law school. My Uncle just splurged on this halycon patch of Illinois soil so the party will entail camp out and keg, requisite late spring bon fire, solitude, fishing canoeing....ahhhhhh!!!!
* Told my prof. that I'd have a copy of my 700 page novel finished and buffed by MAY 13th!!!!
*Biggest Lit-week on campus--two writers, release of new journal (I have three pieces!!!) followed by poetry reading and awards banquet. In a conciliatory gesture, I invited moma bear to awards banquet.
*Go Illini! Wait....
Exam from Hell on monday morning. It's a soc. 100 class but the prof. is driving us all nucking futs. see here: http://www.ratemyprofessor.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=95003
* It's spring which means I'm in love....
* Month of March: In like a Lion, out with a hangover.
*New Wheels--No insurance, no problem.
* Who left the thong on my desk in the library???? (very funny guys! Hahaha. Aprils fool!)
* Found out that b/c I pay so much for school I'm eligible for Food stamps (What!?! I work ALL the time!!!!!!!!)
*Tryin' to be cognizant about my health without making myself and everyone around me feel like a total uptight anal wad.
* All I want to do is sit on my ass and write all the time!
* Biggest graduation party known to mankind planned end of May. It's for myself and my sister whose graduating from law school. My Uncle just splurged on this halycon patch of Illinois soil so the party will entail camp out and keg, requisite late spring bon fire, solitude, fishing canoeing....ahhhhhh!!!!
* Told my prof. that I'd have a copy of my 700 page novel finished and buffed by MAY 13th!!!!
*Biggest Lit-week on campus--two writers, release of new journal (I have three pieces!!!) followed by poetry reading and awards banquet. In a conciliatory gesture, I invited moma bear to awards banquet.
*Go Illini! Wait....
Exam from Hell on monday morning. It's a soc. 100 class but the prof. is driving us all nucking futs. see here: http://www.ratemyprofessor.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=95003
* It's spring which means I'm in love....
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
COMMUNION
It was a feast
Our bodies
Your blanket
Our table
Our outfits
Placemats on either
Side
And for once
We
Supped from each
Other
For once we
Fell inside
Each other
And drank to
The victory
Of our
Oneness. My chin
Tucked like a
Napkin between your
Breasts, and all I
Can tell you again
Is that I love
Every bite of you
Love to chew
love to bite
nibble and lick
But first we give
Thanks for all this
-dvb 2003
It was a feast
Our bodies
Your blanket
Our table
Our outfits
Placemats on either
Side
And for once
We
Supped from each
Other
For once we
Fell inside
Each other
And drank to
The victory
Of our
Oneness. My chin
Tucked like a
Napkin between your
Breasts, and all I
Can tell you again
Is that I love
Every bite of you
Love to chew
love to bite
nibble and lick
But first we give
Thanks for all this
-dvb 2003
Grapple Them to Thy Soul with Hoops of Steel...
So much for masks. I've reposted both my first and last name on Dashboard (even though bloggins takin' a back seat to my other crazy fictional forays these days)....in the last seven years I've lived in ten (count 'em) different addresses. Moving around all the time has severed many frienships. My hope is that if you stumble upon my blogg CONTACT ME....esp if your name is Mark Feaster, Patrick "the great" Mullowney, Damien Segoiva, Misty Gerber, Brooke from Roanoke (sorry I fogot your new married name)-- "Jungian" Brook Jackson from chicago ( crazy loose-loined wild haired trollop that she is), Kris Weberg, Vanessa Hall ( stale apologies and an overdue european tryst are in jeopardy) the former Harmony Anne Dusek of Spokane, Megan Snow, Staci (yes anastaia it's been over a decade and i still haven't forgotten) Blake, Jim McGarth, Courtney from harrisburg (shit--what's your last name girl---that sunrise over Chespeake Bay on Bloomsday was simply unreal)...Matt Brown of Dallas, of course, it's been a long ass time, and yer' hospitality what--eight years ago--changed my life...Jana solomon..yeah, I should aplogize to you to for being such a dickwad, but I guess it all worked out in the end....Kyle Dooyle ( I know, marriage sucks brother, warned you) Karl Gibson, Alexis Jordan (which I guess it's Doctor Jordan--congrats on the white coat)--Sarah Wright, Andrew Engle.....anyone who was on PARADE's '93 YOUNG COLUMBUS trip to LONDON--the trip that more or less opened my eyes to the world of the arts and oriented me into a life braiding words into linear slants......
Dave Strickler--bro, how much crazy shit we did in High school together....
Hilary Lamontaigne, god girl, it's been a long ass time....
Also JoEllen, Brook (number three) Blowzis, Drunk Mike "soon I shall prove to thee world..." Cigar friendly dilettante of life Mike Davis (where are you!!!!!)
Just a few, if your name appears above this sentence feel free to contact me at any time. You've added much beauty and joy to my life. All I can do is to say thank you........
Dave Strickler--bro, how much crazy shit we did in High school together....
Hilary Lamontaigne, god girl, it's been a long ass time....
Also JoEllen, Brook (number three) Blowzis, Drunk Mike "soon I shall prove to thee world..." Cigar friendly dilettante of life Mike Davis (where are you!!!!!)
Just a few, if your name appears above this sentence feel free to contact me at any time. You've added much beauty and joy to my life. All I can do is to say thank you........
Sunday, March 06, 2005
...such a lonesome vocation
Writing is such a solitary profession. You spend hours a day going down on MS word, licking the square shapes of homerow with your imagination, chain smoking, trying to primp that slim sentence into linear perfection--here's one of my favorite stories about a young writer trying to make it---on his B-day no less:
It's the birthday of journalist and novelist Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, born in Aracataca, Colombia (1928). Until he was eight, Márquez was raised by his grandparents, and once said that all his writing had been inspired by the stories they told him. His grandfather was a Colonel and a liberal veteran of one of Columbia's worst civil wars. Gabriel's grandmother told him fantastic legends and tales of witches and ghosts. He became a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and later became a foreign correspondent, traveling all over Europe and the Americas. He had published fiction already, but had long wanted to write a novel based loosely on his hometown and his memories of his grandparents. His inspiration for the book came when he realized he had to write it in the same tone of voice his grandmother used when she told stories, describing both supernatural and political events as though there was no difference between them. The style later became known as "magical realism." Once he had the idea for the book he quit his job and wrote for eighteen months, without a break, smoking six packs of cigarettes every day. To support his wife and children, he sold his car and every household appliance, and borrowed money from all his friends. When he tried to sell pieces of his wife's jewelry, many of them wedding gifts, he found out that all the gems were made of glass. By the time the book was finished, he was $10,000 in debt, nearly poisoned by nicotine, and on the edge of a mental collapse. But the book, called One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), was a best seller, and he never had to worry about money again. The novel tells the story of the BuendÃa family in the fictional village of Macondo and begins, "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano BuendÃa was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." This was based on a true story that his grandfather told him. Márquez is also the author of Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), a story, based on his own parents, of two old lovers reuniting after 50 years.
It's the birthday of journalist and novelist Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, born in Aracataca, Colombia (1928). Until he was eight, Márquez was raised by his grandparents, and once said that all his writing had been inspired by the stories they told him. His grandfather was a Colonel and a liberal veteran of one of Columbia's worst civil wars. Gabriel's grandmother told him fantastic legends and tales of witches and ghosts. He became a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and later became a foreign correspondent, traveling all over Europe and the Americas. He had published fiction already, but had long wanted to write a novel based loosely on his hometown and his memories of his grandparents. His inspiration for the book came when he realized he had to write it in the same tone of voice his grandmother used when she told stories, describing both supernatural and political events as though there was no difference between them. The style later became known as "magical realism." Once he had the idea for the book he quit his job and wrote for eighteen months, without a break, smoking six packs of cigarettes every day. To support his wife and children, he sold his car and every household appliance, and borrowed money from all his friends. When he tried to sell pieces of his wife's jewelry, many of them wedding gifts, he found out that all the gems were made of glass. By the time the book was finished, he was $10,000 in debt, nearly poisoned by nicotine, and on the edge of a mental collapse. But the book, called One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), was a best seller, and he never had to worry about money again. The novel tells the story of the BuendÃa family in the fictional village of Macondo and begins, "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano BuendÃa was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." This was based on a true story that his grandfather told him. Márquez is also the author of Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), a story, based on his own parents, of two old lovers reuniting after 50 years.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
So much sadness, so close to home....
What's up with all this? My best friend novelist was in tears this morning because he told me he feels that he's wasted too much time to ever finish his novel. The beautiful firey-haired wild-eyed creature who gave me her phone number then inexplicably removed me from FaceBook now won't even bat her eyes in my direction....ahhh...fucking sadness...good news is the fast has quelled my exorbitant caffeine intake...at least during daylight hours...also writing has been amazing. I've been supplicating about 8 hours a day turning the alphabetical squares of the keyboard into a confessional booth. I'll spend five hours on a single line of a poem, rip the entire poem apart like a linguistic pineta, slowly slap the sentences back together again. I love it.... Also published a few poems taht appeared here on Blogger (hence the name change to ASHER HALL).....................
Friday, February 25, 2005
Love is not Love which alters when its alteration finds....
Sylvia Plath (books by this author) met Hughes at a party in a bar, and the next morning she wrote about the encounter in her journal. She spent most of the evening talking to someone else, who she described as, "some ugly, gat-toothed squat grinning guy named Meeson trying to be devastatingly clever." She said the party was "very bohemian, with boys in turtleneck sweaters and girls being blue-eye-lidded or elegant in black." Plath had been drinking a little, and she wrote, "The jazz was beginning to get under my skin, and I started dancing with Luke and knew I was very bad, having crossed the river and banged into the trees..."
Plath said, "Then the worst thing happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes."
Plath quoted one of his poems to him, and he guided her to a side room of the bar. She wrote of that moment, "And then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hair band off, my lovely red hair band scarf which had weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face."
Plath composed a poem over the next few days after meeting Hughes. Called "Pursuit," it was a poem about a woman being hunted by a panther and was a response to a Hughes poem called "The Jaguar." Plath spent the night with Hughes and his friend in their London flat right before going on a spring vacation in Europe. When she returned, they spent even more time together, and after seeing so much of each other for a couple of months, they started thinking about marriage.
They got married on June 16th, four months after that first meeting, but it was a secret wedding because they didn't want to jeopardize Plath's fellowship or academic career. The ceremony was in the Church of Saint George the Martyr in London. Plath wore a pink suit, and Hughes gave her a pink rose to hold as she walked down the aisle.
Plath and Hughes spent the rest of that summer in Paris, Madrid, and the small town of Benindorm in Spain. They passed their days swimming, studying, and writing. Plath wrote the poems "Dream with Clam Diggers," Fiesta Melons," and "The Goring" as well as many others while on this honeymoon. Plath told a friend many years later that Hughes had gotten very angry with her during that trip and tried to choke her while they sat on a hill. She said she had resigned herself to die while it was happening, and she worried she had made the wrong decision in getting married so soon after meeting him.
Plath and Hughes decided to separate in 1962, right after they had moved back to England and had a second child. Plath discovered that Hughes was having an affair. She said in an interview that year, "I much prefer doctors, midwives, lawyers, anything but writers. I think writers and artists are the most narcissistic people [...] I'm fascinated by this mastery of the practical. As a poet, one lives a bit on air. I always like someone who can teach me something practical."
Plath committed suicide in 1963 by sticking her head in an oven. Hughes's mistress would also kill herself years later using the same method. Hughes was left in control of Plath's estate, and he edited her poems and controlled what of hers was published and what was not. He once was met on a trip to Australia by protestors holding signs that accused him of murdering Plath. Plath fans trying to chip away the word "Hughes" from her name on the tombstone have repeatedly vandalized her grave in Yorkshire, England.
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Recipe for Dragon Stew (help!!!!!!!!)
First step in killing the dragon--get organized! Find a set time for work (H.W.) Writing...keep your room clean, go through old clothes. Return mounds of library books. Throw away lighters. Serious consider the amount of caffeine you ingest on any given day as being lethal (esp. if you're a pygmy). Make your bed everymorning. Quit clicking on ex-girlfriends blogg every two seconds to see who she's currently banging. Realize that you live with a very nice old man who has helped you out. Realize that you don't want to live there forever. Send out manuscripts more faithfully. Send your mother a valentine card. Don't sleep with girls you hardly know just to feel better about yer'self. Apply for auto insurance. Try to do laundry more than twice a semester. Budget!!!!!! Think about giving up caffeine and alcohol for lent (last year I gave up chastity and sobriety)...Smile at everyone you meet. Hold doors open for females. Be polite. Quit talking about yourself so much--focus more on the other person. Don't be Bette Midler, where in an interview she once said "Enough about me--what do you think about me?"
Be careful how many times you use the F word in public. Wash your hands. Be open minded. Make everyone around you feel like they're golden, even those f'ing Indian students who always seem to break the computers at work. Live your dreams. Most importantly recognize that place where you have come from no longer exists. Quit reminiscing about the past. Realize that you're a different person now. That you're always growing, evolving and that this Lizard silhouette is sometimes just a part of us that is comfortable and doesn't want to grow....most importantly smile. I read somewhere once that you burn just as much calories smiling and laughing as you do while having sex.
Laugh. Pull petty pranks. Tell your girlfriend she's beautiful. Be devout in your routine. Push-ups and situps before bedtime. Run around with the little kids. Realize that NO matter how bad you think your life is, you live in a country that has it better off than 98% of the globe. You've had your sanitized water. You've wiped your ass with something soft before flushing. Quit bitching so much.
Learn to be. Act spontaneously. Know what you want. Put the ball in the hoop. Don't be afriad to lead the life you feel that you were meant to live.
Be careful how many times you use the F word in public. Wash your hands. Be open minded. Make everyone around you feel like they're golden, even those f'ing Indian students who always seem to break the computers at work. Live your dreams. Most importantly recognize that place where you have come from no longer exists. Quit reminiscing about the past. Realize that you're a different person now. That you're always growing, evolving and that this Lizard silhouette is sometimes just a part of us that is comfortable and doesn't want to grow....most importantly smile. I read somewhere once that you burn just as much calories smiling and laughing as you do while having sex.
Laugh. Pull petty pranks. Tell your girlfriend she's beautiful. Be devout in your routine. Push-ups and situps before bedtime. Run around with the little kids. Realize that NO matter how bad you think your life is, you live in a country that has it better off than 98% of the globe. You've had your sanitized water. You've wiped your ass with something soft before flushing. Quit bitching so much.
Learn to be. Act spontaneously. Know what you want. Put the ball in the hoop. Don't be afriad to lead the life you feel that you were meant to live.
Monday, January 31, 2005
This poem should hint (Wink-wink, nod, nod) at the passionate pow-wow stampeding in my chest, right now.....
The Song of Wandering Aengus
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
-- William Butler Yeats
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
-- William Butler Yeats
Sunday, January 23, 2005
Nostalgia
Here's a love-letter I wrote to my ex-girlfriend Brook, four years ago, in the autumn of 2000. Brook was a sexy thirty-three year old Jungian going through a divorce. I was a 23 year old writer, who, like Peter Pan, kept rifling through females sock drawers looking for my shadow. I found this old e-mail today and, in an endeavor to come to grips with my past in the wake of a new four-year cycle, felt compelled to post it. Feel free to read as much or none.
Dearest (Shnuggly-Whuggly) Angel,
Hey girl, how's life with you? Hope I didn't smurf-n-smurf alike my cold with you this past weekend (you know, like, when we were e-e-e-e-e-e). I'm still weathered and nasally washed-up and went to the healthcenter today to get some more medicine. The nurse said that my sickness, in all possibility, was spawned by malnutrition, not imbibing enough fluids (she explicitly told me using her hands demonstrating that, in this quote medicinal 'context' alcohol was not synonymous with the noun 'fluidity' and such underground collegiate panacea's such as 'Hooch' and MGD should be as now declared void and intrusive to my infective immune system) and mostly just over-actuating my deft scholarly prowess by staying up late at night and writing such kick-ass "David, in addition to being the Universal emblem of theworld's-most-Sensuous-lover ( internationally noted asthe Doob-lay-vay, Ehm, Es, Elle-WMSL, en France) you-also-write -the-most-orgasmic-bedpole-tittering-paragraphs-that-it's NO-wonder your-nervous-system inwardly- capitulates- to- such- maladies-when-your-passion-fraught- paragraphs-evince-the erotic ardorusually- reserved- for- the- likes- of- Lesbians."Anyway, maybe I was just drugged up, but that was I thought she told me...
I ended up writing you two 'real' letters last night at work (the kind you have to lick first) and sent youa botched e-mail which became cyberoptically effaced when my computer spontaneously shut off(MERDE-TECHNOLOGY)....
How is my most benevolent BU? Life there (classes wise anyway) was twice as simple. It was like, @Bradley, the teachers would use Baby butt-wipes and here I'm lucky if I can find a sheath of cardboard. My one literature class keeps my elation sky-high. Sometimes I'm just off the wall in the classroom and the teachers and students smile which is cool, b/c at Bradley I had a proclivity to accost LIT/ CW classes like I was DF Wallace's IJ publicity photo and sometimes (esp. twoyears ago) I would act all Serious and evince this inadvertent My-vocab-makes-your-vocab-look like Cream-of-Wheat sans the raisins type of hip-fatigue semblance (yes-my college foibles)which some of the teachers and V. thought was a cool aura to give offonly intrinsically it was not me......(V is still very much like that-henceforth the bombed dyad)..Today Iactually punned the analogy "A verbal Versailles" to describe something, which I thought was cool for only getting 25 minutes of sleep in the last 36 hours..
(Sniff/Sniff)
The short stories I've been working on, not as assiduously as I would have like to but sedulous in sincerity nonetheless, entail a montage of interlinked motif's...very collegiate ambiance shit slathered in a stage-drop that is very oh-so reminiscent of that ADM-noisome watered town which held so many friable avenues of my dreams clasped in it's dog-bear paw. One SS deals with a "true" FRATBOY ritual where all the boys (new initiatives) clamor around an Avantis gondola and, all, at the same time, choke the chik-a-fillet and the last one whose shlong comes on the gondola is coerced by his so-called gelled-hair and dungareed 'brothers' to "Sink the SUB" if you know what I mean.....yeah, I know. "David, thank you very much for that discourse in puerility prior to lunch." Well Angel, anything for you.
I paid your parking ticket yesterday so next time your down here you won't inadvertently get towed. I miss ogling you and giving you back rubs in the thoroughly air-conditioned summer-shaded library. Miss waking up and walking Zoe and making alchemical coffee in Greata's funky-coffee beaker, miss tickling you on the couch and watching your eyes set into Jungian somnolency. Miss the showers and the unbidden view of Illinois from atop of the Handcock. Miss the spontaneous fling of clothes, the Zoe imprints on my sweater, the sound of Kate Bush on the stereo, the fizzily-corona-bubbles moving up-and-down like a lavalamp. Miss the dissipation of summer, the outing's,Gormans and Guiness, the ubiquity of mocha-huedworshipers of Islam and Indra, the Dunkin'-Donuts cooffee runs prior to class. Cream, no sugar. Miss the sight of your skin in perfect proximity to mine. Missthe sound and subtle hums your body gently emits when it is silent and asleep.
Hopefully we'll be able to purloin an autumnal weekend or two and hit Mattheison or Allerton orChi-town for a crazy (though financially complacent)jaunt. Went for a requisite long walk last night priorto work dandling both a Cuban cigar and mirrored beneath a sheet of respelndent stardust and my dreams. My wings fledge as my dreams leap out of the contour,off the frame, into the wildest thoughts of human genomes........reading poetry and thinking of Walt Whitman and Tennyson and (always room for)Shakespeare. Working on a postmodern treatise and writing and wondering how not to get too fucked by my art b/c I'm so indulgent-and-solipsistic that I stop talking to foreigners......
Brooksie-Angel, know that even though I am not with you I am with you. Hourly thoughts of you beseech me harboring poignant memories. Touch knows you before sight. Hang in there with D'ric. Soon, all shall be conciliated. Slow down. Life offers us enough curves as it is. Pull off the four-lane Kennedy and take that lone country road where only you and your thoughts and the sunset thrive in full bloom. I think and pray(I've started 'praying' since -utilizing Socratic Q &A of course- a non-corporeal-intuitive God must existsince the Divine-ineffable palm of Providence willassist me me with my CHEM lab) for you daily that you will find, above all, equanimity and love.
Time to egress this e-mail and hit the books and sleep.
I love you.
Chin'up kidd-o.
David
(ironically dated September 11th, 2000)
Dearest (Shnuggly-Whuggly) Angel,
Hey girl, how's life with you? Hope I didn't smurf-n-smurf alike my cold with you this past weekend (you know, like, when we were e-e-e-e-e-e). I'm still weathered and nasally washed-up and went to the healthcenter today to get some more medicine. The nurse said that my sickness, in all possibility, was spawned by malnutrition, not imbibing enough fluids (she explicitly told me using her hands demonstrating that, in this quote medicinal 'context' alcohol was not synonymous with the noun 'fluidity' and such underground collegiate panacea's such as 'Hooch' and MGD should be as now declared void and intrusive to my infective immune system) and mostly just over-actuating my deft scholarly prowess by staying up late at night and writing such kick-ass "David, in addition to being the Universal emblem of theworld's-most-Sensuous-lover ( internationally noted asthe Doob-lay-vay, Ehm, Es, Elle-WMSL, en France) you-also-write -the-most-orgasmic-bedpole-tittering-paragraphs-that-it's NO-wonder your-nervous-system inwardly- capitulates- to- such- maladies-when-your-passion-fraught- paragraphs-evince-the erotic ardorusually- reserved- for- the- likes- of- Lesbians."Anyway, maybe I was just drugged up, but that was I thought she told me...
I ended up writing you two 'real' letters last night at work (the kind you have to lick first) and sent youa botched e-mail which became cyberoptically effaced when my computer spontaneously shut off(MERDE-TECHNOLOGY)....
How is my most benevolent BU? Life there (classes wise anyway) was twice as simple. It was like, @Bradley, the teachers would use Baby butt-wipes and here I'm lucky if I can find a sheath of cardboard. My one literature class keeps my elation sky-high. Sometimes I'm just off the wall in the classroom and the teachers and students smile which is cool, b/c at Bradley I had a proclivity to accost LIT/ CW classes like I was DF Wallace's IJ publicity photo and sometimes (esp. twoyears ago) I would act all Serious and evince this inadvertent My-vocab-makes-your-vocab-look like Cream-of-Wheat sans the raisins type of hip-fatigue semblance (yes-my college foibles)which some of the teachers and V. thought was a cool aura to give offonly intrinsically it was not me......(V is still very much like that-henceforth the bombed dyad)..Today Iactually punned the analogy "A verbal Versailles" to describe something, which I thought was cool for only getting 25 minutes of sleep in the last 36 hours..
(Sniff/Sniff)
The short stories I've been working on, not as assiduously as I would have like to but sedulous in sincerity nonetheless, entail a montage of interlinked motif's...very collegiate ambiance shit slathered in a stage-drop that is very oh-so reminiscent of that ADM-noisome watered town which held so many friable avenues of my dreams clasped in it's dog-bear paw. One SS deals with a "true" FRATBOY ritual where all the boys (new initiatives) clamor around an Avantis gondola and, all, at the same time, choke the chik-a-fillet and the last one whose shlong comes on the gondola is coerced by his so-called gelled-hair and dungareed 'brothers' to "Sink the SUB" if you know what I mean.....yeah, I know. "David, thank you very much for that discourse in puerility prior to lunch." Well Angel, anything for you.
I paid your parking ticket yesterday so next time your down here you won't inadvertently get towed. I miss ogling you and giving you back rubs in the thoroughly air-conditioned summer-shaded library. Miss waking up and walking Zoe and making alchemical coffee in Greata's funky-coffee beaker, miss tickling you on the couch and watching your eyes set into Jungian somnolency. Miss the showers and the unbidden view of Illinois from atop of the Handcock. Miss the spontaneous fling of clothes, the Zoe imprints on my sweater, the sound of Kate Bush on the stereo, the fizzily-corona-bubbles moving up-and-down like a lavalamp. Miss the dissipation of summer, the outing's,Gormans and Guiness, the ubiquity of mocha-huedworshipers of Islam and Indra, the Dunkin'-Donuts cooffee runs prior to class. Cream, no sugar. Miss the sight of your skin in perfect proximity to mine. Missthe sound and subtle hums your body gently emits when it is silent and asleep.
Hopefully we'll be able to purloin an autumnal weekend or two and hit Mattheison or Allerton orChi-town for a crazy (though financially complacent)jaunt. Went for a requisite long walk last night priorto work dandling both a Cuban cigar and mirrored beneath a sheet of respelndent stardust and my dreams. My wings fledge as my dreams leap out of the contour,off the frame, into the wildest thoughts of human genomes........reading poetry and thinking of Walt Whitman and Tennyson and (always room for)Shakespeare. Working on a postmodern treatise and writing and wondering how not to get too fucked by my art b/c I'm so indulgent-and-solipsistic that I stop talking to foreigners......
Brooksie-Angel, know that even though I am not with you I am with you. Hourly thoughts of you beseech me harboring poignant memories. Touch knows you before sight. Hang in there with D'ric. Soon, all shall be conciliated. Slow down. Life offers us enough curves as it is. Pull off the four-lane Kennedy and take that lone country road where only you and your thoughts and the sunset thrive in full bloom. I think and pray(I've started 'praying' since -utilizing Socratic Q &A of course- a non-corporeal-intuitive God must existsince the Divine-ineffable palm of Providence willassist me me with my CHEM lab) for you daily that you will find, above all, equanimity and love.
Time to egress this e-mail and hit the books and sleep.
I love you.
Chin'up kidd-o.
David
(ironically dated September 11th, 2000)
Monday, January 17, 2005
Entrance by alphabetical troops....
Last couple of days I haven't been able to sleep and have been stomping around my house in pajma bottoms; my body quietly tucked in the helm of my late-fathers flannel housecoat like a drape or a fallen husk-- writing nonstop. This happens maybe twice a year (mostly with "poems"), the words decide they're going to deprive me of even more sleep and I can feel the hard slants and sensual curves of language--the verbal gargle of my life, slowly sieve through my pores, demanding this insomniac to surrender and splatter whipsmart shapes and images against the new born snow of a fresh page.
All I can do is stare at the square bluish tint of the screen and rattle out images.
It's the best feeling on the planet.
Whatever your gift is....whatever your passion, never stop giving.
All I can do is stare at the square bluish tint of the screen and rattle out images.
It's the best feeling on the planet.
Whatever your gift is....whatever your passion, never stop giving.
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Shadows and silkweeds and the possibility of a prayer
Leaving early (early) tomorrow morning for phase two of my vacation. Wakey-wakey arrives at 3:30am so I can bus it up to Chi-town. After that its about an hour rickety commute up to Wilmette where I can capitulate for a couple of hours into the clandestine womb of prayer. In all candor, I hate praying--hate praying!!!! Or rather, I hate praying for myself...hate asking my own myopic heavily Westernized ideology of a Diety for assistance. For wayward orientation. For direction. Even if I'm lodged on a kyak in a remote corner of the Pacific with nothing in paw but a limp compass and a box of stale cracker-jack to subside on, I'm more wont to rely on my own "interior" sense of navigation--where I think I should be going--rather than humbly asking for guidance.
I come from a family deeply rooted in spiritual soil. Growing up we were known as the freakish family who squinted our eyes, lowered our collective chins and "prayed" in public restaurants prior to taxed meals. My parents were never embarassed by this--thanking a supreme being for nourishment (in the similar fashion of our Neanderthal relatives offered gratitutde thanked the spirit of the hunted animal prior to consumption) but myself and my sister were horrified. In the mid-eighties, the age of Max Hedron and ALF, praying in public places was a far cry from posh.
When I was around the size of a firehydrant, my father would come into my room, tuck me in, bow on both knees and pray. He would pray for his childs safety. Pray that his child would be healthy. Pray that his child would know what was right--for his future partner and that the two of them would be blessed. Often, during the prayer, dad and I would volley the lyrics to "Now I lay thee down to sleep" Dad chanting the first line, his son, thirty years younger with a snotty lip, echoing the refrain.
Mother always prayed in the early hours accompanying the gravitational tilt of the planet into the solar tug of dawn. Some of my most cherished memories of my mother were waking up at 5am and watching mother huddled in her green housecoat sipping weak tea, a splayed, thoroughly annotated NIV splattered across her lap like a wounded dove.
Mom always had "prayer partners." Over the past holdiay I tumbled across a huge literary "tome" chronicling decades of my mother's spiritual epiphanies. In one box alone, I found about thirty spiral notebooks, each brimming with mother's swirly blue-inked cursive handwriting.
These notebooks contained my own matraich's "Blogs"--her spiritual yearnings, her humble requests for her progeny. Like her eldest, mom could write for hours; but unlike her firstborn, mother didn't rely on her own intelligent or acuemen; she mastered the capacity to whittle her own ego and ask for guidance in something whose worth transcends temporal material satisfaction. More than any other human I have ever met--my mother has put her stock into something higher.
Don't get me wrong. I have no aversion to prayer; towards the art of supplication and praying--
I've never held qualms abouy uttering "gratitude" prayers. Prayers of thanx and joy. I once heard a Philosophy prof. deliver an emotionally riveting semantic sermon on how the words "thoughtful" and "thankful" were derived from the same etymological prefix.
"At one time a 'thankful person' was synonmous with a 'thoughtful' or 'intelligent preson.'"
The prayers for the departed also hover on the tip of my palate like a canker sore. Uncle Mike (whose an ornery hybrid between Gandalf the Good and a spiritual Socrates) always insists to remember the souls who don't have support. Every time we drive past an open cemetary, I sense Mike uttering the words for those souls that have "abandoned the physical garment and have ascended to the spirtual world."
On my first sojourn to the House Of worship, the caretaker, Eve, ferried me around, addressed me as "honey," and I sat upstairs, head down and uttered prayers for my late-father and grandparents.
Six months later, at Greenlake, I encountered Eve again. She didn't remember me, but when I accosted her and thanked her for giving me that tour (mentioning to her that I happened to be in chicago for my grandmothers funeral at the time) Eve immediately reclined her lunch tray, clasped the lids of her eyes shut and submitted the prayer of the departed in the middle of the cafeteria. The fact that my identity was a blur to her was merely secondary.
******
After grousing to Nick the Writer and Shannon Moore about yearning to find a short story that grabs me by the labels--I found one. A story entitled "Bamboo" published in the chicago Tribune five years ago. I stumbled upon it via Microfish (ick).....it's a brilliant story. A yuppie going through a divorce falls in love with the chain-smoking female carpenter constructing his sun deck. It's been, by far, the best short story I've read in the last three months.
The part of the story that melted into me was one that carpenter, who it turns out was an ex-priest, told her amor that she left the seminary after reading a story about national Geographic about a succinct type of bird that migrates thousands of miles every year, to this one remote island, sheerly to mate.
The carpenter relays a story to this yuppie--how a science experience was conducted. Scientists incubated several of these birds in Scandanvia; hatched their eggs; kept the winged creatures indoors in a covered cage. When the brids swiftly arrived into sexual maturity, they were released into the atmosphere for the first time and they immediately new where to fly. They knew exactly which part of the planet to flock to in order to continue their species. They new where to go, even though they had never been there.
I've mulled over this analogy alot over the past couple of days. That spiritually imprinted in all of us is the ability to know exactly, our purpose---not only to know, but also, perhaps, to live out our destiny as well.
I come from a family deeply rooted in spiritual soil. Growing up we were known as the freakish family who squinted our eyes, lowered our collective chins and "prayed" in public restaurants prior to taxed meals. My parents were never embarassed by this--thanking a supreme being for nourishment (in the similar fashion of our Neanderthal relatives offered gratitutde thanked the spirit of the hunted animal prior to consumption) but myself and my sister were horrified. In the mid-eighties, the age of Max Hedron and ALF, praying in public places was a far cry from posh.
When I was around the size of a firehydrant, my father would come into my room, tuck me in, bow on both knees and pray. He would pray for his childs safety. Pray that his child would be healthy. Pray that his child would know what was right--for his future partner and that the two of them would be blessed. Often, during the prayer, dad and I would volley the lyrics to "Now I lay thee down to sleep" Dad chanting the first line, his son, thirty years younger with a snotty lip, echoing the refrain.
Mother always prayed in the early hours accompanying the gravitational tilt of the planet into the solar tug of dawn. Some of my most cherished memories of my mother were waking up at 5am and watching mother huddled in her green housecoat sipping weak tea, a splayed, thoroughly annotated NIV splattered across her lap like a wounded dove.
Mom always had "prayer partners." Over the past holdiay I tumbled across a huge literary "tome" chronicling decades of my mother's spiritual epiphanies. In one box alone, I found about thirty spiral notebooks, each brimming with mother's swirly blue-inked cursive handwriting.
These notebooks contained my own matraich's "Blogs"--her spiritual yearnings, her humble requests for her progeny. Like her eldest, mom could write for hours; but unlike her firstborn, mother didn't rely on her own intelligent or acuemen; she mastered the capacity to whittle her own ego and ask for guidance in something whose worth transcends temporal material satisfaction. More than any other human I have ever met--my mother has put her stock into something higher.
Don't get me wrong. I have no aversion to prayer; towards the art of supplication and praying--
I've never held qualms abouy uttering "gratitude" prayers. Prayers of thanx and joy. I once heard a Philosophy prof. deliver an emotionally riveting semantic sermon on how the words "thoughtful" and "thankful" were derived from the same etymological prefix.
"At one time a 'thankful person' was synonmous with a 'thoughtful' or 'intelligent preson.'"
The prayers for the departed also hover on the tip of my palate like a canker sore. Uncle Mike (whose an ornery hybrid between Gandalf the Good and a spiritual Socrates) always insists to remember the souls who don't have support. Every time we drive past an open cemetary, I sense Mike uttering the words for those souls that have "abandoned the physical garment and have ascended to the spirtual world."
On my first sojourn to the House Of worship, the caretaker, Eve, ferried me around, addressed me as "honey," and I sat upstairs, head down and uttered prayers for my late-father and grandparents.
Six months later, at Greenlake, I encountered Eve again. She didn't remember me, but when I accosted her and thanked her for giving me that tour (mentioning to her that I happened to be in chicago for my grandmothers funeral at the time) Eve immediately reclined her lunch tray, clasped the lids of her eyes shut and submitted the prayer of the departed in the middle of the cafeteria. The fact that my identity was a blur to her was merely secondary.
******
After grousing to Nick the Writer and Shannon Moore about yearning to find a short story that grabs me by the labels--I found one. A story entitled "Bamboo" published in the chicago Tribune five years ago. I stumbled upon it via Microfish (ick).....it's a brilliant story. A yuppie going through a divorce falls in love with the chain-smoking female carpenter constructing his sun deck. It's been, by far, the best short story I've read in the last three months.
The part of the story that melted into me was one that carpenter, who it turns out was an ex-priest, told her amor that she left the seminary after reading a story about national Geographic about a succinct type of bird that migrates thousands of miles every year, to this one remote island, sheerly to mate.
The carpenter relays a story to this yuppie--how a science experience was conducted. Scientists incubated several of these birds in Scandanvia; hatched their eggs; kept the winged creatures indoors in a covered cage. When the brids swiftly arrived into sexual maturity, they were released into the atmosphere for the first time and they immediately new where to fly. They knew exactly which part of the planet to flock to in order to continue their species. They new where to go, even though they had never been there.
I've mulled over this analogy alot over the past couple of days. That spiritually imprinted in all of us is the ability to know exactly, our purpose---not only to know, but also, perhaps, to live out our destiny as well.
Monday, January 03, 2005
Mara under the Mistletoe.....
Happy New Year to all ya'll blog oglers lurking around the bin of cyberspace!!! I can't even begin to fathom all the possibilities this New Year will avail and wish all who read this joy and happiness and of course, and endless stream of creative karma flooded with fields of laughter and smiles and friendships and lovers and all the things that add meaning to this skip-n-sojourn around the sun.
Highlights from the past holiday include being Net free for two weeks (it's amazing how peaceful life was prior to our warbled dot.com obsession), presnting "angels" to Mama Bear on Christmas day --she liked the golden cross I purchased for her better, but that's just her--travelling all around the state, spending New Years eve with a mixture of Iranian dissidents, anarchists, heavy drinkers, Med students, and my best friends Nick the writer, song writer Dave McDonald, published scholar DUST and of course, a friendly close-lippped "button" kiss from my beautiful friend Jennifer on the final gong indicating Midnight (was she Jennifer or was she Cinderella?) .....perfect.
I went Ice fishing with my Uncle and Brother-in-law the day after Christmas. The pond was frosted over with about eight inches of ice. In mid-winter, the brittle Illinois horizon is streaked with a hard nickel back gray refulgence. The tufted clouds seem splattered against the atmosphere in an overhead puddle of silver bulbs. With the snow patches and barren landscape, the sky and the land seem to weld into a subliminal oneness with the earth, with the body, with the soul that yearns--the heart that seeks; the flesh that aches to acheive this sort of oneness.
My Uncle, my late-father's younger brother, is a flannel shirted man of the hills. We drove out deep into the country, swerving down slings of gravel roads and rackety hills. Way out, past Glasford, we found the frozen mecca--the pond, a chalked fount awaiting the orchestrated casts of our wrists; the dips of our baited lines.
We drilled holes, smoked cigars, drank pissing hot coffee from a thermos, froze in between shots of family philosphy and idle jokes.
"That's what Jesus told St. Peter when he tried walking on the water. 'Just try it in December!'"
While sloshing to work in the frigid rain this morning, I came to the realization that the reason I love writing so much is that a writer--the true artists-- understands that he is always a dilettante; always a virgin. There's no black belts, no PHD's, no corporate rungs, no anniversaries. No matter how much a writer has published or written, he always arrives to the pristine winteresque blankness of a page--the virgin whiteness of an oblong sheath--the bridal pinings awaiting inky scratches--the overall newness of language. Same with a painter and his blank canvas; or as my brother in law noted, a doctor with his white coat- an estimatation that no matter how much we learn or acheive about the human body; about the world of art, about the pulsating spirit, we will always be sophomores--always be yearning, acheiving and growing in our finite knowledge of our ever vibrating globe.
True the race may not be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor wealth cosigned to men of understanding, but chance and time do happen to us all. On the advent of this New Year, my friends, let us never forget how little we know, how profound and curious the world is and what a joy it is to be immersed in this bubble of life one magical eternal moment at a time.
Highlights from the past holiday include being Net free for two weeks (it's amazing how peaceful life was prior to our warbled dot.com obsession), presnting "angels" to Mama Bear on Christmas day --she liked the golden cross I purchased for her better, but that's just her--travelling all around the state, spending New Years eve with a mixture of Iranian dissidents, anarchists, heavy drinkers, Med students, and my best friends Nick the writer, song writer Dave McDonald, published scholar DUST and of course, a friendly close-lippped "button" kiss from my beautiful friend Jennifer on the final gong indicating Midnight (was she Jennifer or was she Cinderella?) .....perfect.
I went Ice fishing with my Uncle and Brother-in-law the day after Christmas. The pond was frosted over with about eight inches of ice. In mid-winter, the brittle Illinois horizon is streaked with a hard nickel back gray refulgence. The tufted clouds seem splattered against the atmosphere in an overhead puddle of silver bulbs. With the snow patches and barren landscape, the sky and the land seem to weld into a subliminal oneness with the earth, with the body, with the soul that yearns--the heart that seeks; the flesh that aches to acheive this sort of oneness.
My Uncle, my late-father's younger brother, is a flannel shirted man of the hills. We drove out deep into the country, swerving down slings of gravel roads and rackety hills. Way out, past Glasford, we found the frozen mecca--the pond, a chalked fount awaiting the orchestrated casts of our wrists; the dips of our baited lines.
We drilled holes, smoked cigars, drank pissing hot coffee from a thermos, froze in between shots of family philosphy and idle jokes.
"That's what Jesus told St. Peter when he tried walking on the water. 'Just try it in December!'"
While sloshing to work in the frigid rain this morning, I came to the realization that the reason I love writing so much is that a writer--the true artists-- understands that he is always a dilettante; always a virgin. There's no black belts, no PHD's, no corporate rungs, no anniversaries. No matter how much a writer has published or written, he always arrives to the pristine winteresque blankness of a page--the virgin whiteness of an oblong sheath--the bridal pinings awaiting inky scratches--the overall newness of language. Same with a painter and his blank canvas; or as my brother in law noted, a doctor with his white coat- an estimatation that no matter how much we learn or acheive about the human body; about the world of art, about the pulsating spirit, we will always be sophomores--always be yearning, acheiving and growing in our finite knowledge of our ever vibrating globe.
True the race may not be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor wealth cosigned to men of understanding, but chance and time do happen to us all. On the advent of this New Year, my friends, let us never forget how little we know, how profound and curious the world is and what a joy it is to be immersed in this bubble of life one magical eternal moment at a time.
Thursday, December 23, 2004
Let Me sleep it's Christmas Time--1997 (iii) finale
"Do you know anything about the Festival of lights?"
It's not the voice I was anticipating hearing, but its a voice. It's feminine warmth permeates into the plastic lobe of the phone. I can feel her entire body opening up; pouring like a carafe of vintage wine through the plastic receiver.
"Yeah, in fact I was wondering...."Romantic bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Not the voice you've been waiting for kid, but a voice none the less. A voice tucked inside the plastic womb of Ma bell. The voice caged behind succulent lips and a killer body. And that ass. You told all your male co-workers that you would hit that. You tell your gay boss when you are reeling down the metal grille that you're going to hit that, even though he responded with a shoulder shudder and a verbal 'ick. You tell you best friend Hale that you are going to hit that. It feels like everyone is expecting you to hit that and now, She is even expecting you to hit that. She made the first initiative. She cornered all of your emotional pawns on the dating chess board and now expects to be mated.
She called you up. She wants you. She's been waiting for you.
You already have her phone number posted in the back room memorized. Twice, during a shift, you burrowed your face deep into her fur coat, inhaling, wondering what her warmth feels like from a closer angle.
But you are waiting for another girl. Megan. You called her the day after Thanksgiving and she was her typical, aloof self. Quiet. Confused. She didn't laugh at anything you said. She suggests that your view of reality and adulthood are askewed everytime you talk about your books you are writing. She said she would call you back Sunday night. It is Sunday now. You've called Megan twice already and left friendly messages. You tell her you love her. You tell her you'll wait for her. You tell her that whatever she's going through right now is fine. You practically make-out with the dubbed voice that informs cyber-optic solicitors that she can't take your call right now. You call back long distance just to listen to that voice. YOU LOVE THAT VOICE!
You try to write poems about her. You wait. And finally, the phone rings!!!! It is a female voice and it asks for you! You smile. You're charming. You're confident. She came back to you. You're life once agian has merit. You're no longer a failure. But wait.... It's the lithe voice of your co-worker Jana. The girl with the nice ass. "Is this the nice ass club? Hale said, nudging his thick slab of elbow into your gut the first night she clocked into the book store where you are a supervisor. You trained Jana that night. She smiled at you. She seemed charmed, delighted. Her cheek bones drove you nucking futs, the two of you continued to flirt. You feel comfortable around her, the two of you LAUGH incessantly together. The world's a big joke. Even things that are meted by a certain measure of sincerity--important worldly topics-- seemed to sit on the global whoopie cushion--like someone farting in a United Nations Press conference.
"Festival of Lights. Yeah. I'll take you. This Friday I'll pick you up. How 'bout dinner before hand. You ever been to Rizzi's? I love Rizzi's! That settles it. This Friday. I'll pick you up."
Months later you find out that Megan, the girl you were waiting for, was actually sitting next to her anwer machine when you called that Sunday night in November. When asked why she didn't pick up she would shrug and say simply "I couldn't."
*****
You pick Jana up in the same clunker you ferried to Matthiessen three weeks earlier. She is dressed to kill. You could light a cigarette off the low-cut leather skirt she is wearing; that's how hot she looks.
You hand her a rose. It is the fifth of December. For the next nine months the fifth will be christened as your anniversary. You'll take her out to dinner on the fifth--hell--you'll take her out to dinner every Friday!!!!
She's a picky eater. She doesn't eat "crusts." She also doesn't smoke "What a coincidence?" You say, making an inward vow. "I just quit!"
You take her around town. The two of you look at the Christmas lights together. At first you feel like a clumsy high-school freshman usurped from a John Hughes film taking a stab at the senior homecoming queen. You drive fast. Your left hand on the wheel; your right hand in her lap; ensconced in her palm--a clam shell composed of fingers and flesh.
You take her up on the bluff to a place where you can see the entire city. The city is a blur of holiday lights. You hold her. The two of you have yet to kiss. Have yet to fully embrace. You quote her poems; your favorite poem, a mantra from Whitman-- you quote, holding her hand, looking through the glass windshield of your clunker, dazed by the green and red lights -- interstellar holiday constellations.
I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them, or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment—what is this, then?
I do not ask any more delight—I swim in it, as in a sea.
There is something in staying close to men and women, and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well;
All things please the soul—but these please the soul well.
It is the poem you live for and she seems stunned. It was the poem you read in front of your entire illiterate high school. The poem you first came across three years ago when you decided you wanted to be a poe-hit.
You take her to your bedroom. Your parents are downstairs. Your mother is friendly. Your Dad smiles at you and wobbles his chin in an assenting manner as the two fo you pracne through the televised heat of the living room. Your room is full of books--so many books--and a thick oak desk you use as an emotinal puddle--splashing around the chorus of words and sound.
There is art in your room. Renoir. Boticelli. Most girls you reel up here think that you are gay. You hold Jana. The two of you kiss.
"Let's go back to my place." she suggests, with a smile. "I'd feel more comfortable there."
*******
Entering her dorm you feel the wild orchard of her breath--the rosemary sage of her tongue. She is an RA--she has her own room. Everything is neat. Once the door clicks lock there is a rattle. A bevy of college sophmores huddled together in pajama bottoms, giggling. They all want to meet you. She has told everyone about you!
You feel important. The door clicks shut and the two of you glide to her mattress; your lids peeled down; your bodies connected. You are saying things. Making promises no twenty year old should make. You hold each other and before you know it a pastel winter dawn streams into her side window and the two of you are dressed only in your undergarments, huddled on top of a futon, listening to enya--your bodies contorted into a sleepy pretzel of limbs and appendages.
"What's that?" You say, pointing to a plant as you rise up to adjust the blind.
"That's Karen." Jana says, slipping into the shirt you were wearing without asking.
"Karen?"
"The plants name is Karen." Jana says. "Don't ask me why I name things. A friend gave me the plant and I just thought it looked like a Karen."
"I think you look like a morning angel." You say, before cursing at the osciallting hands on your watch, reailzing that you have to open the book shop in forty-five minutes.
You get dressed. She peels off your shirt and hands it back to you with a smile. She's more comfortable with her body than you are.
Although the blinds are clipped, the morning sunning still slants through the window, hitting Jana, forming a corona of light, a nimbus, around her head.
"I'll call you later. Thanks for last night." You say.
"Think will have more 'last nights.' Jana inquires.
"I think last night was just the preamble." You say, kissing her lips, her cheek bones, her forehead, her smile.
********
"So you didn't hit that?" Hale inquires, tugging on his pipe during a smoke break, later in the week.
"She desn't want to have sex until after she comes back. I mean, she says she wants to, she says she's in love with me. She wants it to be special. Not rushed."
"What," Hale's pipe falls out of his mouth.
"She wants to do it once she comes back from South Padre. She says she knows it's right for her."
"Shit," Hale shakes his head in disgrace as if his office pool lottery pick is now void. "you been talking to her."
"For hours every night." You say.
"What about Megan?" Hale inquires.
"She never called me back. She doesn't care. Fuck her."
"Jana is hot. She has a nice..."
"I know. I know."
Hale starts to make unctuous male sexual mating sounds. He re-lights his pipe. Normally you would fire up a cigarette, but since Jana is so adamant about not-smoking you decided to quit.
"I'm spending the night at her dorm this Friday." You said. "It's our Christmas together. She leaves next Tuesday and she'll be gone for a month."
"That's a long ass time bro,"
"Shit."
"Do you love her?" Hale inquires, you smile.
"I think I might."
Hale begins to laugh, breaks into his locker room rant. "Well you know Dave, if she really is your soul-mate there's only one way to find out."
*********
It is the Friday before she adjourns to south Padre and we are having our Christmas together. I break into Jana's dorm and surprise her. Heaps of packages are placed under diminutive Christmas tree. Jana is talking long distance on the phone to her mom. She wants to tell her mom about me in person. I do everything in my power to distract her; to make her laugh; giggle while she is talking to Mamma Bear.
" Be Good," Jana says, with a smile, twisting my hand.
"Ahhhh."
"Nothing Mom," she says, her cheekbones protruding slightly as she says goodbye before tying her arms around my neck.
"Merry Christmas, darling!" She says, before escorting me over to the Christmas tree. We exchange gifts. We tell each other which gifts to unwrap first. We hold gratitude make-out sessions between bartered packages. Finally, she reaches over to her bed, hoisting up a small package from behing her pillow.
"I'm not creative like you try to be in your writing, but I did make you something." Jana says, placing a thinly wrapped package in my palms. "Merry Christmas."
I open it up. It is a wooden frame with two sides. On one side is a picture of Renoir's Les dejeuner des canotiers a picture she had noticed in my bedroom--on the other side was a cursive rendering of the poem--Whitman's I Sing the Body Electric--the poem I quoted to her on our first date, only a week and several decades ago.
"I thought you could keep this on your writing desk and think of me." She said, her face full of smiles.
We kissed and held each other and again, awoke several hours later, the hard winter orange signifiying morn creeping it's feathery tail into her bedroom window.
"It's gonna be sad though." Jana acknowledges, batting her eyes. "It's gonna be sad when we say goodbye on Tuesday."
It doesn't have to be sad, " I said. "I mean, we could be like. HI-FIVE."
Giggles and work. There's always work in the morning. I dress, kiss her forehead, clambor in my clunker and head back into work.
******************
On the Tuesday we said goodbye Jana's friend Jill lets you into her dorm room.
"I have a great idea." Jill says. "Why don't you surprise Jana."
"What?"
"Get into wardrobe and jump out when she comes in."
Jana's bedroom was full of suitcases and duffel bags.
"Oh, and one other thing." Jill notes, in a manner reminiscent of a camp counseler, "Strip."
"What," I say.
"Come on, it'll be sexy. Just take off your clothes. Give Jana something to remember you by."
Jill pushes me into the closet and I begin to slough my outfit. Shirts and shoes doffed, no problem. My jeans are wreathed around my ankles when I hear Jana's voice. I trip. The closet door springs opens. There are ten other females in the room. I am in my underwear. The girls begin to laugh in a confetti of sprinkled giggles.
"Is that your boyfriend or are you just happy to see me baby." One of them says.
"So that's where you've been hiding him" Another says.
"Funny," I say zipping up my pants, snapping my belt into place. Jana smiles.
Gradually the girls filter out of the room. Jana and I exchanged sealed envelopes. earlier in the week we agreed to compose each other eternal missives declaring are love for each other--we decided we read them at four-o'clock the next day. The exact time her plane leaves the runway.
"I have a question for you," Jana asks. "Could you take care of Karen the fern when I 'm gone. I mean. just water her every couple of days....and I don't mean pee on her when you're drunk. I know how rowdy you and Hale get around the holidays."
"Wha...I can't pee on her."
"No," Jana says. I hoist her luggage and help her to her vehicle.
"I love you," Jana says. I volley the thread of syllables back into her forehead, knowing nothing about love. Knowing nothing about giving myself, feeling only that is the correct thing to say.
We begin to kiss. Jana swats tears from her sockets. The car horn is blaring. Jana has to go.
"Goodbye," We both say, Jana in tears.
"Wait," Jana says. "Hi-FIVE!"
We hi-five each other. Jana smiles. The car dissipates. I am standing alone, in my camel coat, holding Karen the Fern in my arms like a toddler.
Our lives would change and thank god for it. In a little over two years Jana would be engaged to a horse-trainer named Chad. When she came into the library to show me her engagement ring I gave her a hug. When we said our life long goodbye and wished each other luck, the only thing I could think of to tell her was "Hi-five." She remained quiet then, and walked out of my life forever.
I saw a picture of her with her husband in the campus Alumni magazine. Ironically it was the same alumni magazine that had the obituary of my father's death.
But that Christmas--Christmas 1997, I slept with the possibility of rebirth sprouting inside my chest. I slept so well. And that chalky December afternoon, cantering across Bradley quad with Karen the Fern in tow, I felt complete.
There was a car horn. It was Hale in his Dodge Ram. I entered the passenger seat and handed him the fern.
"So," Hale said. "Did you hit that?" Hale inquires, giving me a masculine nudge. My lips remained reticent.
"Brother." I told him. "I'm gonna be hitting that shit all my life."
*
It's not the voice I was anticipating hearing, but its a voice. It's feminine warmth permeates into the plastic lobe of the phone. I can feel her entire body opening up; pouring like a carafe of vintage wine through the plastic receiver.
"Yeah, in fact I was wondering...."Romantic bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Not the voice you've been waiting for kid, but a voice none the less. A voice tucked inside the plastic womb of Ma bell. The voice caged behind succulent lips and a killer body. And that ass. You told all your male co-workers that you would hit that. You tell your gay boss when you are reeling down the metal grille that you're going to hit that, even though he responded with a shoulder shudder and a verbal 'ick. You tell you best friend Hale that you are going to hit that. It feels like everyone is expecting you to hit that and now, She is even expecting you to hit that. She made the first initiative. She cornered all of your emotional pawns on the dating chess board and now expects to be mated.
She called you up. She wants you. She's been waiting for you.
You already have her phone number posted in the back room memorized. Twice, during a shift, you burrowed your face deep into her fur coat, inhaling, wondering what her warmth feels like from a closer angle.
But you are waiting for another girl. Megan. You called her the day after Thanksgiving and she was her typical, aloof self. Quiet. Confused. She didn't laugh at anything you said. She suggests that your view of reality and adulthood are askewed everytime you talk about your books you are writing. She said she would call you back Sunday night. It is Sunday now. You've called Megan twice already and left friendly messages. You tell her you love her. You tell her you'll wait for her. You tell her that whatever she's going through right now is fine. You practically make-out with the dubbed voice that informs cyber-optic solicitors that she can't take your call right now. You call back long distance just to listen to that voice. YOU LOVE THAT VOICE!
You try to write poems about her. You wait. And finally, the phone rings!!!! It is a female voice and it asks for you! You smile. You're charming. You're confident. She came back to you. You're life once agian has merit. You're no longer a failure. But wait.... It's the lithe voice of your co-worker Jana. The girl with the nice ass. "Is this the nice ass club? Hale said, nudging his thick slab of elbow into your gut the first night she clocked into the book store where you are a supervisor. You trained Jana that night. She smiled at you. She seemed charmed, delighted. Her cheek bones drove you nucking futs, the two of you continued to flirt. You feel comfortable around her, the two of you LAUGH incessantly together. The world's a big joke. Even things that are meted by a certain measure of sincerity--important worldly topics-- seemed to sit on the global whoopie cushion--like someone farting in a United Nations Press conference.
"Festival of Lights. Yeah. I'll take you. This Friday I'll pick you up. How 'bout dinner before hand. You ever been to Rizzi's? I love Rizzi's! That settles it. This Friday. I'll pick you up."
Months later you find out that Megan, the girl you were waiting for, was actually sitting next to her anwer machine when you called that Sunday night in November. When asked why she didn't pick up she would shrug and say simply "I couldn't."
*****
You pick Jana up in the same clunker you ferried to Matthiessen three weeks earlier. She is dressed to kill. You could light a cigarette off the low-cut leather skirt she is wearing; that's how hot she looks.
You hand her a rose. It is the fifth of December. For the next nine months the fifth will be christened as your anniversary. You'll take her out to dinner on the fifth--hell--you'll take her out to dinner every Friday!!!!
She's a picky eater. She doesn't eat "crusts." She also doesn't smoke "What a coincidence?" You say, making an inward vow. "I just quit!"
You take her around town. The two of you look at the Christmas lights together. At first you feel like a clumsy high-school freshman usurped from a John Hughes film taking a stab at the senior homecoming queen. You drive fast. Your left hand on the wheel; your right hand in her lap; ensconced in her palm--a clam shell composed of fingers and flesh.
You take her up on the bluff to a place where you can see the entire city. The city is a blur of holiday lights. You hold her. The two of you have yet to kiss. Have yet to fully embrace. You quote her poems; your favorite poem, a mantra from Whitman-- you quote, holding her hand, looking through the glass windshield of your clunker, dazed by the green and red lights -- interstellar holiday constellations.
I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them, or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment—what is this, then?
I do not ask any more delight—I swim in it, as in a sea.
There is something in staying close to men and women, and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well;
All things please the soul—but these please the soul well.
It is the poem you live for and she seems stunned. It was the poem you read in front of your entire illiterate high school. The poem you first came across three years ago when you decided you wanted to be a poe-hit.
You take her to your bedroom. Your parents are downstairs. Your mother is friendly. Your Dad smiles at you and wobbles his chin in an assenting manner as the two fo you pracne through the televised heat of the living room. Your room is full of books--so many books--and a thick oak desk you use as an emotinal puddle--splashing around the chorus of words and sound.
There is art in your room. Renoir. Boticelli. Most girls you reel up here think that you are gay. You hold Jana. The two of you kiss.
"Let's go back to my place." she suggests, with a smile. "I'd feel more comfortable there."
*******
Entering her dorm you feel the wild orchard of her breath--the rosemary sage of her tongue. She is an RA--she has her own room. Everything is neat. Once the door clicks lock there is a rattle. A bevy of college sophmores huddled together in pajama bottoms, giggling. They all want to meet you. She has told everyone about you!
You feel important. The door clicks shut and the two of you glide to her mattress; your lids peeled down; your bodies connected. You are saying things. Making promises no twenty year old should make. You hold each other and before you know it a pastel winter dawn streams into her side window and the two of you are dressed only in your undergarments, huddled on top of a futon, listening to enya--your bodies contorted into a sleepy pretzel of limbs and appendages.
"What's that?" You say, pointing to a plant as you rise up to adjust the blind.
"That's Karen." Jana says, slipping into the shirt you were wearing without asking.
"Karen?"
"The plants name is Karen." Jana says. "Don't ask me why I name things. A friend gave me the plant and I just thought it looked like a Karen."
"I think you look like a morning angel." You say, before cursing at the osciallting hands on your watch, reailzing that you have to open the book shop in forty-five minutes.
You get dressed. She peels off your shirt and hands it back to you with a smile. She's more comfortable with her body than you are.
Although the blinds are clipped, the morning sunning still slants through the window, hitting Jana, forming a corona of light, a nimbus, around her head.
"I'll call you later. Thanks for last night." You say.
"Think will have more 'last nights.' Jana inquires.
"I think last night was just the preamble." You say, kissing her lips, her cheek bones, her forehead, her smile.
********
"So you didn't hit that?" Hale inquires, tugging on his pipe during a smoke break, later in the week.
"She desn't want to have sex until after she comes back. I mean, she says she wants to, she says she's in love with me. She wants it to be special. Not rushed."
"What," Hale's pipe falls out of his mouth.
"She wants to do it once she comes back from South Padre. She says she knows it's right for her."
"Shit," Hale shakes his head in disgrace as if his office pool lottery pick is now void. "you been talking to her."
"For hours every night." You say.
"What about Megan?" Hale inquires.
"She never called me back. She doesn't care. Fuck her."
"Jana is hot. She has a nice..."
"I know. I know."
Hale starts to make unctuous male sexual mating sounds. He re-lights his pipe. Normally you would fire up a cigarette, but since Jana is so adamant about not-smoking you decided to quit.
"I'm spending the night at her dorm this Friday." You said. "It's our Christmas together. She leaves next Tuesday and she'll be gone for a month."
"That's a long ass time bro,"
"Shit."
"Do you love her?" Hale inquires, you smile.
"I think I might."
Hale begins to laugh, breaks into his locker room rant. "Well you know Dave, if she really is your soul-mate there's only one way to find out."
*********
It is the Friday before she adjourns to south Padre and we are having our Christmas together. I break into Jana's dorm and surprise her. Heaps of packages are placed under diminutive Christmas tree. Jana is talking long distance on the phone to her mom. She wants to tell her mom about me in person. I do everything in my power to distract her; to make her laugh; giggle while she is talking to Mamma Bear.
" Be Good," Jana says, with a smile, twisting my hand.
"Ahhhh."
"Nothing Mom," she says, her cheekbones protruding slightly as she says goodbye before tying her arms around my neck.
"Merry Christmas, darling!" She says, before escorting me over to the Christmas tree. We exchange gifts. We tell each other which gifts to unwrap first. We hold gratitude make-out sessions between bartered packages. Finally, she reaches over to her bed, hoisting up a small package from behing her pillow.
"I'm not creative like you try to be in your writing, but I did make you something." Jana says, placing a thinly wrapped package in my palms. "Merry Christmas."
I open it up. It is a wooden frame with two sides. On one side is a picture of Renoir's Les dejeuner des canotiers a picture she had noticed in my bedroom--on the other side was a cursive rendering of the poem--Whitman's I Sing the Body Electric--the poem I quoted to her on our first date, only a week and several decades ago.
"I thought you could keep this on your writing desk and think of me." She said, her face full of smiles.
We kissed and held each other and again, awoke several hours later, the hard winter orange signifiying morn creeping it's feathery tail into her bedroom window.
"It's gonna be sad though." Jana acknowledges, batting her eyes. "It's gonna be sad when we say goodbye on Tuesday."
It doesn't have to be sad, " I said. "I mean, we could be like. HI-FIVE."
Giggles and work. There's always work in the morning. I dress, kiss her forehead, clambor in my clunker and head back into work.
******************
On the Tuesday we said goodbye Jana's friend Jill lets you into her dorm room.
"I have a great idea." Jill says. "Why don't you surprise Jana."
"What?"
"Get into wardrobe and jump out when she comes in."
Jana's bedroom was full of suitcases and duffel bags.
"Oh, and one other thing." Jill notes, in a manner reminiscent of a camp counseler, "Strip."
"What," I say.
"Come on, it'll be sexy. Just take off your clothes. Give Jana something to remember you by."
Jill pushes me into the closet and I begin to slough my outfit. Shirts and shoes doffed, no problem. My jeans are wreathed around my ankles when I hear Jana's voice. I trip. The closet door springs opens. There are ten other females in the room. I am in my underwear. The girls begin to laugh in a confetti of sprinkled giggles.
"Is that your boyfriend or are you just happy to see me baby." One of them says.
"So that's where you've been hiding him" Another says.
"Funny," I say zipping up my pants, snapping my belt into place. Jana smiles.
Gradually the girls filter out of the room. Jana and I exchanged sealed envelopes. earlier in the week we agreed to compose each other eternal missives declaring are love for each other--we decided we read them at four-o'clock the next day. The exact time her plane leaves the runway.
"I have a question for you," Jana asks. "Could you take care of Karen the fern when I 'm gone. I mean. just water her every couple of days....and I don't mean pee on her when you're drunk. I know how rowdy you and Hale get around the holidays."
"Wha...I can't pee on her."
"No," Jana says. I hoist her luggage and help her to her vehicle.
"I love you," Jana says. I volley the thread of syllables back into her forehead, knowing nothing about love. Knowing nothing about giving myself, feeling only that is the correct thing to say.
We begin to kiss. Jana swats tears from her sockets. The car horn is blaring. Jana has to go.
"Goodbye," We both say, Jana in tears.
"Wait," Jana says. "Hi-FIVE!"
We hi-five each other. Jana smiles. The car dissipates. I am standing alone, in my camel coat, holding Karen the Fern in my arms like a toddler.
Our lives would change and thank god for it. In a little over two years Jana would be engaged to a horse-trainer named Chad. When she came into the library to show me her engagement ring I gave her a hug. When we said our life long goodbye and wished each other luck, the only thing I could think of to tell her was "Hi-five." She remained quiet then, and walked out of my life forever.
I saw a picture of her with her husband in the campus Alumni magazine. Ironically it was the same alumni magazine that had the obituary of my father's death.
But that Christmas--Christmas 1997, I slept with the possibility of rebirth sprouting inside my chest. I slept so well. And that chalky December afternoon, cantering across Bradley quad with Karen the Fern in tow, I felt complete.
There was a car horn. It was Hale in his Dodge Ram. I entered the passenger seat and handed him the fern.
"So," Hale said. "Did you hit that?" Hale inquires, giving me a masculine nudge. My lips remained reticent.
"Brother." I told him. "I'm gonna be hitting that shit all my life."
*
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
Sometimes the Light at the end of the tunnel...
...is just the train at the other end...
Tonight is the last night of round the clock errupt through the calendar workaholic fest. Did the inopportune thing and slept for ten hours today so now I'm having a hard time concentrating.
Two finals tomorrow than two weeks off of work. My body is overly taxed, thoroughly caffeinated, dehydrated, exhausted, fatigued..blahblahblah ...
Break means three-or-four trips to see family and friends in Chicago. It also means plenty of writing (my favorite vice) and a chance to read non-stop OUTSIDE OF CLASS for a month!!!!!
But now I have to finish composing my theory final. THEORY SUCKS!!!! I've had a hard time in this class. Nine times out of ten people who are into LIT theory are writers who never got laid in grad school and who salivate for the literary spotlight. Give me a short-story and a secret world over semantics anyday!!!!!
Tonight is the last night of round the clock errupt through the calendar workaholic fest. Did the inopportune thing and slept for ten hours today so now I'm having a hard time concentrating.
Two finals tomorrow than two weeks off of work. My body is overly taxed, thoroughly caffeinated, dehydrated, exhausted, fatigued..blahblahblah ...
Break means three-or-four trips to see family and friends in Chicago. It also means plenty of writing (my favorite vice) and a chance to read non-stop OUTSIDE OF CLASS for a month!!!!!
But now I have to finish composing my theory final. THEORY SUCKS!!!! I've had a hard time in this class. Nine times out of ten people who are into LIT theory are writers who never got laid in grad school and who salivate for the literary spotlight. Give me a short-story and a secret world over semantics anyday!!!!!
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