8.31

I'm slipping on my tired but I'm not sleepy. There's so much tired it's actually oozing from my skin, but I can't drift off. I'm writing a blog post about myself, but I'm not egotistical.

But alas, I inverted two truths and a lie.

8.30

"Kiss me and poison my dreams. Shy away and poison my life. I don't even drink coffee, so stop inviting me to."

He sent that text to me last night at three am. Either he was drunk, or he really loves me. Now, I have two options, neither good. I respond, like a good person, who has nothing to prove, or I ignore the text with so much force that it ceases to exist on this plane of existence.

I threw my phone into the lake because I love him too.

8.29

The blade was only difficult on the way in; it moved gratingly and with much effort. He had to throw his arm behind it, and the reverberations shook his teeth. But the pull--oh, the pull. It was like the flourish on a well-practiced signature. The blood hung lazily in the air when it roiled from the point. His arm swung wide at full extension. The pull was his favorite part of a knife.

Of course, his victim felt the opposite feelings. Suddenly, a hollow ache and a thumping pressure as the blade penetrated, but a sharp sting and a heartbeat's pause when it left.

If he had taken the time to think, he could have written poetry about the pull that would seduce even the hardest of women, before they knew it was his love song to a knife.

8.28b

I'm still young and vital. Blood fires from the piston of my heart. Muscles rise, taut like bowstrings.
But she walks in, a whisper of a shadow of my former future life, the possible woman I might have seen. She's like an empty hourglass when the last time I saw her the first grains began to flow. She's like seeing the fully-laden apple tree though when I turned around, she had just blossomed. She's like a woman I used to love, but I look up and here she is, twenty years and two children later, acting like a mother in the firy autumn of her life, made more beautiful by the knowledge of birth, fear, and love.
I'm still in the power and crush of my youth, the spring and the fertility of a young bull who snorts at death and charges. I can have and want anything that I see, but I can't want her. Her eyes bore into me and bleach my bones in the half-light of her waning harvest moon.

Yet--I can't help thinking that I'd have her if I could.

8.28

The longer I wait, the more my legs itch to be up and about. I long to be vital. I yearn to pick up a spear and run through the woods, shadows playing on my ragged hair, wind bringing the scent of certainty to my prey. And then, I can drive my blade between ribs and through organs, out the skin and dripping blood. Lines leave me feeling cramped and oppressed. Collected with the press of humanity, I stand, trembling in the gates with a race to run.

8.26

[Mary Sues fill a vital spot in the wish fulfillment fantasies of the person who writes them. I know this because I have intimate knowledge of this process. I have done it myself, on occasion.]
Robby was tall and crushingly present everywhere he went. Nobody was afforded the opportunity of missing him in a crowd.
[When I was younger, I wandered the field at home, telling myself stories and acting them out. I was trying to figure out who I would be and what I would act like when I got older. Believe it or not, I can draw a few incredibly strong parallels between my core character traits and the stories I made up about myself.]
When he was twenty or so, he noticed his latent powers. He kept his prowess hidden until his birthday, when his whole family was gathered in celebration of him. That day, Robby stood up and stretched his gorgeous fiery wings to soak up the sun and his family's shock. The thin skin stretched over rattling bones and filtered out all but the blood orange light of a deep sunset.
[But wish fulfillment is that, and no more. No one can claim that their personal fantasies have worth to humanity. If they do, the value is purely accidental. No, the activity of a Mary Sue is not literature. It is creativity for an audience of one. Sadly, when one bores of one's own story, there really is nowhere left to go.]
When Robby left town, he left a him-shaped hole in the heart of all the women and children. Grizzled men shed tears for his future.

8.25

Bill flicks his boogers at girls. He's not slow, exactly, but he just doesn't click, exactly. They hate him, but he's my friend. What am I supposed to do?

8.22b

[I find myself increasingly turning to impressionistic word pictures that paint something unimaginably microscopic and invite the reader to explore on their own time or discard the work as worthless. But that word--"work"--is used wrongly. These take no work for me. I put no effort into writing them. I say nothing with their creation. I provide no answers. I fill no gaps. I'm not adding to humanity's sum total, I'm merely commenting on it.

That, I believe, is stagnation. America is filthy with it. Our incessant self-parody has come to a point where sometimes even "original" works are still parody. Mockumentaries and referential humor are so pervasive that they are sometimes used as the only crutch of an intellectual property.

Perhaps it's my energy levels since camp started--I have been feeling sluggish. Perhaps it's my attention span--I can't play one video game all the way through. Perhaps it's the drive for the work--I have no questions for the universe, so I have no reason to write. Perhaps I just had a lapse. I do that, sometimes. I think I'm allowed.

All this aside, the one thing I must not allow myself is the luxury of ease. Socrates is widely respected for his rhetorical method of asking questions to advance a conversation. But take careful note: Jesus is respected for his astute answers to real-life questions. When I stop adding to the conversation, I am only (I must repeat stringently--ONLY) obfuscating someone else who is doing actual good.]

I pick up the typewriter from the desk and trudge the twelve miles to the sea in the pouring rain. The Atlantic blows back in my face as I set the machine down on a log. Salt water tears whip past my face and I spool a new sheet into the slot prepared for it. Crack your knuckles, sir, and begin to type. Can I claim to know what I'm typing any longer? The ribbon is so old that it slips into a wet goo as it is stripped from itself in the pulley. My slapping at the keys produces nothing but small, irregular holes in the paper. I take pleasure in the roar of the surf, the stinging slap of fat water drops, the mechanical absolutism of the typewriter keys, and the next round bell of every return. I take so much joy in the small things, but the writing has become unimportant to me now.

8.22

Dear mother, forgive me. The therapist says I have a fixation, which perhaps explains why I haven't talked to you since that wholly unremarkable Tuesday on the twentieth of April, 2003. I barely remember.

8.18

Marshmallows. I've built my kingdom of them, and now the fire threatens to destroy all my work. Soon, a thick slime will spread over the heaths and heathers, moors and mountains, woods and wilds, glades and glens (though they're the same thing), vales and . . . valleys (the same thing again? I'm running out). . . and all topographical structures in between.
The land will be whitewashed by sugarslides. Animals both great and small will be caught in stasis, struggling futilely to escape my hubris. Moose will bray wildly to their partners, ten feet and an impossibility away. Rabbits will be moored to a spot, and the hawk who tries to fly away with an easy prey will find his pinions slowly and furtively ripped away by the bubbling goop. The wolf will waste away within sight of nutriment. Porcupines will fill their quills with the sugary concrete. Platypus will lay their eggs to die in the crush. Pandas will never find a bamboo shoot again. Capybara--but you get my point.
Many a youngster will gorge themselves on the feast, first with hands, then with shovels. Soon, they, too, will be trapped (by obesity, the greedy pigs). Diabetics will die of shock. Everybody else will become diabetic.

Marshmallow will be everywhere.

Soon, the world will suffer a second ice age because the white of the marshmallow will reflect all sunlight directed at it. The sea levels will drop as all the water freezes to the mallow shell, trapping everything underneath. The goo will freeze and form an immobile second crust, preventing all movement of the earthy crust below. The friction and force exerted by the tectonic shift will be forced through volcanic rifts, and a quaternary crust over the earth, mallow, and ice. A googol of years shall pass, and yet life will not bloom anew. Aliens will drill for core samples and find their drills gummed up. The earth will simmer and die.

I will be the cause of the apocalypse.
I'm sorry.

8.16

Someday, mom, I'll climb the bony mountain peak and meet with God. Soon, dad, I'll prepare my mind and body for the hike. Tomorrow, pastor--maybe, or the next day. I'll just postpone until the weather looks right. I'll just put it off until I've got a break in my schedule. And then I'm off like you haven't seen. Nothing can stop me.

8.15

Within the tight concentric rings of her tattoo lies just one more truth: nothing is ever what you want. I turn her over, looking for the center, the bull's eye, the widening vortex, the tantalizing inscription, and all I find is more skin. Sometimes, I forget to look without an end in mind.
[I started this and all I could think was how much I wanted to use the phrase "Within the tight concentric rings"]

8.14

Her breath tickles my ear. I mean, it's nice to be reminded that she's alive every few seconds, don't get me wrong. But I can't laugh about it because the baby is on my chest and she's by my side. I suppose we did save a lot of money by taking a single bed, but it means I'll never sleep again.
"Illyena," I whisper.
The brief breaths belie her awareness of my words, so I whisper more.
"When we arrive--when we find somewhere to live, I mean--you know, and I've got a job and things are looking up, I want . . . "
A brief snore teaches me the truth. She's been asleep all along. Well, I still want a bed like this in America, no matter how rich we become. I want to remember where we came from and how much love we have right now.
Her arm snakes up over me and lands on my hair. I close my eyes and picture better times ahead.
Her breath tickles my ear.

8.13

The Totally Delicious took a bite from the Completely Absurd. The Totally Delicious wasn't always as mean as it is today, but there were always inklings of it around the edges of its personality. Hearken back to the first time you saw it in the royal menagerie and you'll remember the chilling sensation that ran down your spine. At the time, of course, you were young and naïve, and you suspected that your chill was from meeting something so violently alien. Though "alien" betokens something otherworldly, which this certainly isn't. If you'd thought about it, it was your familiarity which bred contempt. But I digress.

Agree with me now; we should have put the Totally Delicious away when we had the chance. We should have taken it into the smallest holding pen we have and merely barred the gate, closed the door, and taped shut the air holes. Let it waste away with no chance of escape. But we didn't. We never do.
Think back to the Personally Unfriendly. Do you remember what you said to me then? "It deserves to live," you said. "We shouldn't be the arbiters of eternity," you said. "Let fate decide," you said. Can you dredge up a memory of Harmful? What about Destructive? Loathsome? These and many more all look like Unspeakably Happy and Tittilated and Noticeably Pleased, but they aren't. Underneath each one lurks a dark heart. Once you realized that, you were quick enough to cloister them, but you visit them often enough that they might as well be free.
No, Totally Delicious is your fault. You need to realize that not all evils are so obvious as to be visible at first pass.
Next time, you should be able to toss out a Delicious, no matter how Total.

8.11b

Trembling, fluttering, ragged--a single word flies from her lips with the tearing sound of a thousand women's hearts. "Animal!" she screams. The sound rips through my paper ego.

There's more to the story, but it's then that I died.

8.11

The woman walking past me in the cross walk is the only thing I see for five seconds. Her hair is perfect. Her dress is perfect. Her posture is perfect. Her makeup is perfect. She's beautiful and she's looking at the ground.
I can't blame her; this whole city stinks of the breath of a million dying people, each as ready to stab you and take your things as they are to shake your hand. She won't make eye contact from whatever self-preservation instinct is left after the requisite desensitization of every city dweller. She's no different from her neighbor.
But that's what makes me wonder. She passes me and I'm finally free to look somewhere else. The German couple staring at their map, the Asian businessman checking his watch, the Mediterranian transvestite checking the Knicks scores all have this in common: they won't meet my eyes. The postman. The off-duty cop. The street vendor. They won't look at me. They won't look at anyone.

So why, for God's sake, did this women get so dressed up to go out on the town and be ignored?

8.5

I'm broken; my main motivator snapped off sometime in the night. I've been drifting, cold, in the black. Hours later, you find me and call me yours, take me home, patch me up, soothe my wounds.

8.4

Soft, like the inside of a banana peel. Hard, like the weight of a bear.
Loose, like the hug of an alzheimer's patient.
Cold, like the floor in the morning.

Metaphor, like you don't usually see.