12.15

Here is a midnight thought just for you because I know you put your phone on do-not-disturb. It will be your wake-up thought.
I asked all my students what they would say if they could speak once into the minds of every person on earth, Babel-fish enabled. A few had uplifting things to say. One or two broke their mixtape or their insta.

One said something that makes me ashamed I didn't think of it.
If they could whisper anything into the heads of the globe, they would say "The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."
I could have cancelled class. They have nothing to learn from me.

[Call your mom. I know I should.]

12.10

Cold air keeps all things:
Life, light, water, air, smog,
Close upon the ground.

[And if (on a cold morning) you look toward the sea, down into the valley, you can see the thin layers of each, trapped tight against each other by the dominance of the mountains.]

11.27

Whenever I see an old doggy,
My memory growing quite foggy,
I want to pet him
Underneath of his chin,
But his under-chin's sloppy and soggy!

11.14b

I have to wake up in five and a half hours to ride with my sister-in-law back to school to get my car so I can drive back home to take the dog to an appointment at the vet. I know this, and yet my subconscious will not allow me to be satisfied. Maybe it's the excedrin I took late in the morning and the residual caffeine kick. Maybe it's the twelve hours of sleep I got last night. Maybe it's the sickness still raking its way through my bones. I don't know. I can't be satisfied.

I'm a parody of a man in torment. I have nothing to be sad about, but I'm crying. I keep opening my eyes and expecting something around me to be different. The dark room does not oblige. I'm breathing in short, panicked breaths, but there's nothing to run from. There's no utility to any of it. I'm living it, so I can't doubt it, but it's certainly not connected to any shred of the reality around me.

I'm going to close this laptop screen and set it aside again. Within minutes, I guarantee I will feel the lame panic of an invalid trapped between sleeping and waking. I will return to the twilight realm of dissatisfaction. And what's worse: that I want to fall asleep but can't, or that I could fall asleep, but won't? I'm not sure either is true.

Begone.
To darkness with you, laptop.
Sleep fitfully, if at all, and see how it treats you. I know I'll be living it until the morning.

11.14

Passing Out 14 November 12:57am

Not a dream. It counts, though.

I am sick. I have already thrown up three separate times, once at around noon yesterday, once in the car on the way home with Philip (calmly opening my lunch box because I understood the inevitable, taking everything but the napkins out, and hurking four or five times into the plastic liner), and once at home pretty quickly after taking a few pills for the accompanying muscle pain and enormous headache. I could taste the medicine coming up on that one. Colors: Bright pink (spaghetti), dark brown-red (spaghetti and oatmeal from the morning), dark green (what? Some concentrated physical oat bits in this one). Each time I throw up, I spend the next few minutes sweating and feeling like a new man.
I wake up at (nearly) 1am and my computer is playing some poorly-executed Slacks-style segment from the Kuala Lumpur major. I guess the games are done for today, and I watch Fnatic players facing off against each other. They have to toss a small pyramidal bean bag up and pick up another before catching the toss. Some of them are mysteriously bad. The hosts, a man and a woman, can speak the players' language and do, but only infrequently. I think Ame wins the tossing contest. Little do I know, but I am about to toss as well.
The games are over. Secret play PSG.LGD tomorrow slightly before noon local time. I close my laptop. My mouth begins to water, and I know what's coming. All I want is to drink some water–I'm so thirsty. Nothing will come of that. I pick up my lunchbox liner and hunch over it. My drool spatters across the bottom. I had thought I was done with this pattern, since the last time I awoke, at around nine, I didn't throw up. I wait. My body is fickle. I know I'm about to throw up and there's nothing whatsoever to do about it, but I have to wait for my dumb secondary nervous system to finish its job. (I know there's nothing to do because at 7pm I tried. I didn't want to throw up, so I chose not to. I still threw up. I don't have the control I used to have, or the bug is much worse, or something.)
Finally, I hurk four small waterfalls into the lunch box liner and sit, sweating, trying to decide to wash my mouth out.
Okay. I can do this.
To the bathroom. Dump the vomit, which is nearly clear, but definitely not colored in any particular way. Run some water from the tub into the liner. Stoop over the sink to slurk some water up into my mouth. Rinse. Spit. Rinse, spit. Gargle--
And here I lose the story. Leaning back and gargling is the last thing I remember as real. I suppose I probably did spit, because I didn't have anything in my mouth when I came to, and I don't suppose I probably swallowed. I don't know.
My hands are twitching-terrified. My mind is tabula rasa. I don't know where I am and my butt hurts. I understand this, /in the way of dreams/, is because I hit the floor quite hard. What was that loud noise? Why did I seem to hit the floor twice? And where am I? I'm looking at things but not seeing. There's a noise I cannot comprehend. My arms are down at my side, touching a cold floor, twitching with fright. My legs are utterly weak. I might be dying.
I start to come to, and what do I understand? Oh, the loud noise was me hitting the uncle John step stool next to the bath. Oh, the sound is the constant rush of water into the sink and the drip of water into my lunchbox in the tub. Oh, I just passed out so bad I wasn't aware that I was passing out.

The last time I passed out so badly, I was at Katy's house. I forget what my overall physical state was, but since I have only been sick twice in 2018 (once at camp and it destroyed me for three days) and today, I can guess I wasn't sick. I just was lying on her couch, stood up, and my brain lost the thread. I was sure I was going deaf. I was trying to scream and I couldn't hear anything, so I must have been deaf. I was overcome when I stood up and stretched, and I couldn't even angle myself as I normally do, to fall down forward onto my hands. I fell over back ward and sat directly on my open laptop. (It didn't die then).

I sit on the ground, breathing. When I finally turn off the sink, I notice my flashlight has fallen in and is wet and working. I flush the toilet and empty the clean water from my lunch box. I don't feel as well as I did right after I vomited, sweaty and huffing. I go lie down and type this up. It was the worst I have ever passed out, and the weakness of it is still not gone from my fingers. I practically seized, honestly.
Good morning. Sleep well.

1:20am

11.12

A boy tried to start a cat city
By bringing home hundreds of kitties.
He would set a cat down;
It would not stick around
Leaving just cat poo and pity.


(Old version: Leaving him with just cat poop and pity.)

11.9

She was hiding just around the corner. She thought I couldn't see her, and I suppose that's true. I saw her shadow on the wall through the doorway. I was sitting in the half-dark room, sort of reading, sort of dozing off. Everything was quiet. But there she was. Waiting? For what? And then I remembered. Of course.
The anniversary of the Good Day. It was two years ago, wasn't it? And now it's my turn to get swept up in an adventure that she's made, my turn to ride somewhere with a blindfold on, my turn to be aghast at how much of our money she's spent on us. So. That's why we couldn't afford to go to the play last week, and the bookstore yesterday. I was just being blind.
The thought of it was enough to make me laugh.
She must have thought I was distracted, so she poked her head around the door to check. I only caught a glimpse of her, but it's enough to drive me to paroxysms of laughter.

I'm too lucky.

11.1

The atmosphere of this morning is dead to me already, buried, mourned, dissolved. Its creeping corpse has three minutes left, but I am not looking at it any more. I've let it go. It can't hurt me ever again.

10.29

I stoop and turn the grass with a trowel. My detector is screaming on the grass nearby, my heart beat ringing in my ears, the dirt soft and wet. My favorite hammer is calling back to me. All the old boards, frames, forms still standing—and their father mouldering in the dirt. Come back, sweet creator of my home. Come back.

10.28

I'm hunched over in the dark, pulling grass up from between my toes. The air feels wet on my back, in my lungs, on the grass. The distant sound of crickets rasps a quiet tick tock, driving the night forward and back, a pendulum on a grandfather clock. My muscles slowly freeze into place all hunched and shivering. I can't feel my hands. By the time I fall asleep with my head on my knees and my pants dew-soaked, the morning is maybe only a moment away.

10.27

What year is it?
1987, probably. By the looks of it around here, I'd say so. These buildings are falling into the ground, but they still hold that intensely practical feel of a single fat red brick. The colors are exactly that hyper-saturated faded primary color combination that I'm so unfamiliar and so familiar with. The people look like they turned off their TVs and radios and never bought a connection to the web. Things are stuck around here.

10.16

Her hands were crossed and folded, which pulled her otherwise-broad shoulders in. She held her shoes. A curl or two fell, unruly, across her forehead. A loose bun wasn't tenacious enough to hold her hair. The stained concrete floor of the massive tool house was cool beneath her feet. She could see a tall man walking in from across the field, passing other workers in the narrow rows. The air danced and shimmered around his shoulders, but even squinting, she couldn't make out his eyes.
Was he kind? He had to be.
He took off his hat and waved it at her, not cutting his stride. She broke out of the pavilion's shade and walked, near-stiff, to meet him. The air hit her again like a physical object.
"Ho there," he called, from earshot.
"Hello!" She was forced to yell. "I said, hello!"
She could now make out his feet's soft crunch in the old leaf litter between the rows. His toes were splayed out wide, raw, and red. His shoulders and chest were nut-brown. He looked up at her. "Sorry about that. I was on the other field. Mike said you wanted a job?"
"That's right."
"But I'm not hiring."
"You haven't seen me work."
"Fair. But am I supposed to replace one of my guys for you? They're hungry too. We all are."
She paused and said with maybe a touch more dirt in it, "You haven't seen me work." Her nostrils flared once, twice, and she struggled with a self-righteous anger that flashed across her face and evaporated in the sun.
He swept a beet-red hand across his beet-red face and flicked the sweat down into the dirt. He narrowed his eyes at her with that look. She had already shifted her weight to turn and go when he said "Alright. Let's see this." She rocked back on her heels, near-tipping over. Her mouth was suddenly very dry.
He led her down a long row through the terrible bake of the sun to where a man waited in a screaming-white truck. From the back, he plucked a fat linen bag the size of her palm and tossed it to her. "There's your gold. Where's your painter?"
She held up a broad brown hand.
"I'll believe it when I see it," he said, hopping down from the truck. "Come on. There's a fresh row just down here." He fell silent while they walked, and she could feel the thin vibration of her pulse in her neck, hear the crisp sound of the dirt beneath their toes. He turned to her without speaking and cleared his throat.
"Here?"
"Yeah."
She unclipped the top of the cloth bag and held its neck pinched in the fingers of her left hand, rolling the cloth down over them to hang the bag just so in her palm, opened between her two longest digits. Softly tapping her right fingers into the dusty-gold powder in the bag, she picked up a paltry amount with her hand. Her left hand snapped closed again on the small bag and she straightened, reaching up to the top of the plant with her right hand where a stem abruptly truncated in a small confusion of spidery tips. She flicked the pad of one finger across, finding another right behind, flick, another, flick, flick, flick. Tap the dust again–pollen, was it? They called it something she had never bothered to learn about–and again into the plant to find a feather. Flick, flick, flick, flick, and paint the plant. Quickly, efficiently. She was buried into the depth of the vine each time she stepped forward, her skin complaining at the tiny bristles on the top of each leaf. Flick flick flick. She worked the whole plant and stepped back.
He nodded. "Where'd you learn that? 's a new style."
"Up somewhere near Edmonton. I don't remember the name of the town."
"Growing?"
"Grapes."
He nodded and rocked forward and back in the softened dirt of the row. He seemed to settle. "I don't normally hire women, you know. Not often tall enough to reach the tops of the plants." There passed the space of one breath between them, during which he flicked his eyes up to hers. "Not your problem, though. If you want a job, I think I have an idea for you, if you're up to it. Grapes, you said?"
"In Alberta."
"You get snow up there?"
"Once."
He shivered. She opened the bag on her fingers and flicked the last of the powdery gold from her right hand, loosed the bag again, and clipped it shut. She looked calm, but the movements of her hands were too deliberate, too careful. He was lost in a reverie and she watched him carefully, dark eyes unmoving, breath slow. As she breathed, her shirt pulled in small ripples at the dark, wet patches down her back and sides.
He jumped a little as though realizing, wiped his brow again. "Alright, then. I liked what I saw. You wanna follow me, then?" He turned on his heel and strode off, light and fast. She reached out one last touch to the plant she had worked. Without turning, he started talking fast. "I don't think your talent is useful out here in the tomatoes." Her head turned to the plants as she walked, brows furrowed. "They're expensive, but they don't require much skill, much care. They're sturdy, you know. I mean, we've got 'em out here in the sun. Obviously. Nothing to it: Most of the guys use old horse hair brushes and we get good results. But that finger trick, now that's something else."
The two closed in on a massive building with closed up walls. An enormous hum vibrated through the soles of her feet and the building's edges seemed to vibrate with the sun. The whole surface was painted a sun-sharp white and her eyes watered as she looked ahead.
"You're something else and we have something else. Come on inside." A key in a lock. And the door, three feet thick of steel. She stooped as she stepped over the mantle into the dark beyond and then: she jumped back out. A roiling cloud of fog was hissing over the steel around her, the face of which dripped heavily on the floor. He saw her face and said "We have a state license for the cold house. Don't worry. We're all legal here. You said you had worked in Edmonton, so I thought . . ."
She looked at him through a hot face.
"Alright. Let's go."
She stepped through, and he swung the door closed behind her. Its clang made a tumbledown echo that rolled through the long corridor. His light, slapping footfalls proceeded them to the lockers lining the last ten feet before a nearly opaque glass door. The light beyond was golden-green.
He tossed her a neat bundle of grey cloth. "Can't take anything in there," he said. He sounded embarrassed. She only nodded.
The pair scrubbed their feet and hands. He stood facing away from her while she rinsed off the rest of her. He put on his own silly-looking smock over his sunburnt shoulders, and flicked one eyebrow up when she hesitated. "Yeah?"
"I'm ready. You can open the door."
The door swung into the next room, and a wall, three layers thick of thin cotton strips hung down beyond. He pushed through and disappeared. She pushed through the wall and nearly lost her direction, nearly tripped, nearly floated away, but came through the far side blinking at the sudden return of light. Her skin prickled up. The last of the shower water felt like it was freezing. Her chest hurt. She looked up.
The refrigerated room stretched out half a kilometer or more across, an enormous distance for such a low ceiling. Golden light tore through the thick plants from a hundred skylights, bouncing around the small space left for it until all light was swallowed up at the floor and ceiling by vines, stalks, and bushes, each one a dense green body with firework bursts of colors. The dust of a multitude of colored plant-explosions settled soft on the black earth between her dark toes and fought with the plants to cloud away the cutting sunlight. Tearing all throughout were the small sounds of a living place, a cutting buzz, a whining, two million small toes tapping a blind path through the verdant maze. A continuous thunderstorm of rain left the bass clef with no space for the sound of a heartbeat.
She didn't move herself, but she moved, eyes too full, breath caught up. She fell back into the dead passageway. Cotton cloth cut off the overwhelming life from view.
He ducked his head between strips and coughed a laugh. "You ain't never seen no cold house, have you? Well, I'm glad to know you can still be surprised. The way you told yourself is like you've seen everything ever to see."
"What is it?"
"What, the cold house?"
"Am I a joke to you? I'm just a duster, a drifter, a nobody. You can kick me out as soon as show me this. Why torture me?"
He didn't respond to that but stepped away, and the cloth door fell down in soft flaps. A wet smear of air crawled along the floor in his wake. She heard him sigh beyond.
She stood up, but didn't pass through. "Hey," she said. "Why'd you bring me here?'
But there was only green noise from beyond.
She sighed.
Pushing again through the cotton blindness, she emerged again to the vast noise beyond. He was gone. She stood in his footprints, and could just make more out in the black earth, leading in. Leaves rippled everywhere her eye landed. The noise trembled, and she shook at how it vibrated the chill in her bones. Her answers were in.
There were plants that she had never seen now pulling at her smock and scraping down her limbs. All the leaves were impossibly broad and troublingly wet. She felt their indescribable fragility as stems broke and twitched at her passing. She pulled one flat, smooth leaf up and grimaced at it with an alien unfamiliarity on her face. She stooped and touched the baby-thin roots in the softest ground. And then he was beside her again, sudden. He was a ripple of leaves and then a man. The hint of shock ran through her spine, twisting her up a twitch, and then she slowly rose to her height.
"Well?" He looked back at where she had been.
"Why am I here?'
"I think everyone should see it once, what we had. Now, God stands at the gates of the old world with a flaming sword to cut the sky in two, and the sea licks at the toes of the mountains. The world doesn't have much left of what it once was. I think everyone should see this once, if only to feel their old bones—"
"My bones?"
"The ones your grandmother gave you. Do you feel the strength come back to your limbs? Do you see with new eyes? Can you look beyond your size? What do you see?" He was practically whispering, now.
Something moved behind him, and her eyes flickered to it. He laughed at the shape her face twisted into."
Her tongue was hard pressed to the roof of her mouth and every inch of her long legs was trembling from the both the cold and the exertion of holding her to the earth. She stared deep into the leaf litter she saw beyond his grinning and saw there a thing. It moved impossibly and didn't seem to see the two of them. It nosed around through the dirt, chasing the detritus of dreams too small to see.
"What—"
"I don't know what it's called. Don't ask me that. It's from the old world, before. They all are."
"All . . ."
And like that, her eyes tripped on a countless constellation of frustrated motes of life. The undersides of leaves, the point of each colored confusion on a plant stalk, the dirt between and around the roots, the air, the air, the vibrant and tintinnambulous air—all were full and moving. Not just the dusting of plants nor the waving of leaves, but life too small to be conceived was on the move.
His voice was warmer than she remembered. The room was warmer than she remembered. His words creaked with long-forgotten pain reborn, croaked with the ages she had stood unblinking. He held his hand up for her to see a monstrous spiky little shame crawling swift between his fingers, black as the inside of an eyelid on a moonless night. "They're the last gift to be taken from us. My grandfather's grandfather saved what he could and brought them here."
"Here where?"
"Eden."

Loss.
[I'll miss the bees when they're gone.]

10.14b

I've seen an eclipse so badly that I couldn't do it as well again if I tried. Not solar. None of that daylight-waking-no-fooling-where'd-the-sun-go trash. A lunar eclipse, in which not only is light an object of mystery, but so also the memory of it, an eight-and-a-half minute desperate streak frustrated from its destination by both direct and oblique means. And aren't I the same? A desperado discouraged by both direct and oblique means?

I was once close to the sun while I watched an eclipse, body to body, and she chose to eclipse herself. Right there, where the earth meets its end and the clouds pull clothes on the panicking cosmos, the sun was too much for itself and died away.

10.14

I lost an October, once.

July 20th. I remember because it was the anniversary of when man first stepped onto the moon. That's how I felt, too, sharing in the reflected glory of a first step. You know, that's how I felt, too. A first step, tumbling forward into a dark unknown, expecting nothing sharp (abrasive? caustic? no). The first of it was well descending into true nothingness, too. Have you ever closed your eyes while you fell asleep and drifted away from your body? Have you ever closed your eyes while falling in love and lost hold of the hand you so tightly once held?

October won't come back.

May 17th. I remember because it was the last day I wore my sleeve on my sleeve, that outward expression of discretion and chastity now stripped away and thrown, more regurgitated from revulsion, really, into the passenger's seat as I drove away. What was it about the face looking back at me. Was it really a mirror, or perhaps a painting? And what would a painting look like if it weren't also a mirror? Either way, I drove away from that place and knew I had lost a breakfast joint forever. I'll never go there again as long as I live, nor never wear the chain forged for me (by me).

October has left me. Oh, it's written down someplace or other. I could go look it up, search through texts, hunt down journals, find traces of old faint lines now erased by sun-fading into thought-shadows litter. October exists. But I have left it, and I haven't lived an October since. You know, two years ago I was on a bicycle nearly every day of the month and even so couldn't reconcile that I rode past a place where I once saw god in October. I couldn't make sense of the cyclical nature of the month. Found in October, lost in October, remembered in October, alive in October. The whole month has the resonant frequency of play-acting fear, but its bell tolls brash brass, for me. I'm done with it.

I renounce October. Flee me.

10.8

Aral Sea
Once the fourth-largest lake in the world by surface area, the Aral Sea was destroyed by irrigation efforts in the USSR and continuing irrigation by Russia and Kazakhstan. It and Lake Chad, among others, are visibly-disappearing lakes.

Ogallala Aquifer
A vast aquifer spanning the high plains, once treated as inexhaustible. In most places, rainfall replenishes the water reservoir an inch or so a year, and many farmers pump out a foot or more a year to water their crops. Because the aquifer is an underground resource, there's no easy way to know if it's dried up until your pump gulps air and your crops die.

Elephant Butte Reservoir
The largest reservoir in New Mexico, fed by the Rio Grande, and built in a spate of optimism in the 1910s, the reservoir is, as of September 2018, empty. I mean, three percent full. Part of the cause is low rainfall and snowpack from upstream (the Rio Grande is drying out entirely in northern New Mexico), and part of the cause is increased use. It doesn't matter generally, the effect is the same. The lake is empty. The article from the Las Cruces Times points out that of course it emptied: that's what reservoirs are supposed to do. They disburse in lean years what was saved in the wet. The lake is, regardless, empty, and it feels like such a fragile thing. Maybe reservoirs like this and Lake Meredith are like heartbeats of Nowhere, America. I think Elephant Butte is less important globally than the Aral sea or the Ogallala, but I know I intend on keeping up with it.

Lakes, reprise

In view of my constant fascination with lakes, I have a new and more idiotic question than ever before. This is not an article or an essay, just a meandering exploration of things I found interesting. It's not as well-written or as ground-breaking as my previous flights of fancy, and that's alright. I'm not writing these for you; this writing is just a reason for me to research, a way to spend my time well, and a documentation of my findings.
If you find it interesting, helpful, or enlightening, God bless you. And so we begin.

What percentage of the United States is surface water? And of course, this comes with a flood of other inane questions that are easily answered by a single Google search. Come with me on an adventure of pure, untethered silliness as I dissolve into increasingly difficult-to-answer questions, aided only by the greatest collection of knowledge the world has ever produced and my own feeble research abilities. One by one, we shall knock down the doors to the temples of knowledge and ask the confused monks whether the state with the largest percentage of water is likely to be a very small state due to its overall small area of land, or if it's just Michigan because it's probably Michigan, isn't it? Take my hand, and we shall see realms undreamed of. And incidentally, the United States is 3.96% surface water (not counting ocean).

Considering that the United States is the fourth-largest country on earth by land area, how does it rank by water area? The same wikipedia page can answer this question. If we take only the top ten countries by land area, the US is fourth again, passing China and falling behind India, Canada, and Russia, in that order. Considering that India is 9.55% water, according to Wikipedia, and that I cannot name a single lake in that country, I think perhaps India is reporting vast swathes of the Indian ocean as its territory (which is the sort of thing the US also likes to do, but is kind enough to part out as a separate number). Canada, on the other hand, is as honest as you would expect and has 8.93% surface water without counting any ocean. Canada has a larger freshwater area than the smallest 163 smallest countries on the planet. This is despite its above-board approach on an overabundance of lakes, cutting the Hudson Bay and all territorial waters from the count. If we re-include the 1,600,000 square km of Hudson Bay and 200,000 square km of coastal waters, the total water area of Canada is larger than all but the seven largest countries' land area. Canada has more water than Kazakhstan has land, and that should make Kazakhstan a little uncomfortable.
The United States is third in total water area after Canada and Russia.
The Marshall Islands is first in water area percentage, with 98.47% of its territory being Pacific Ocean, obviously.
Lesotho is 0.0032% surface water and yet makes most of its money selling water to South Africa.
And if you're being non-idiotic, the country with the largest area of fresh surface water and percentage of fresh surface water is Denmark, because Greenland (a self-governing Danish territory) is covered with an ice sheet roughly 1,600,000 kilometers square.*

How do each of the states rank against each other? Now we come to a stop-and-pause moment. I know the USGS calculates water area for even ludicrously small communities (Shady Cove is 0.26 square kilometers water), and I can confidently state that the USGS is the best.
Sidebar: what other country on Earth gives away free maps of the entire country that are accurate down to the foot? And we give away NOAA data, Smithsonian visits, library books, and twelve years of education? I like where our head is at.
I would like to guess. I have already found and opened in another tab the actual list of states by water area, but I want to just open a map, pontificate, and be proven utterly wrong. I will choose the top five and bottom five states by water, and I invite you to play along. Come with me on this embarrassing humility exercise.

Top 5 guesses by area:
1 Michigan (doi)
2 Wisconsin
3 Ohio
4 New York
5 Minnesota
(Alaska don't make the cut, but that seems risky)

Bottom 5 guesses by area: uhhhhh
46 Iowa?
47 Arizona . . .
48 Colorado
49 Kansas
50 New Mexico with least.
I am unconfident on every possible metric.

Before I start looking at stats, do you want to play another dumb game? Top by percent?
Top 5 guesses by percentage:
1 Michigan still (doi), and if ocean is counted,
2 Maryland
3 Deleware
4 Rhode Island
5 Wisconsin.
These are no better than a poor gut instinct.

Bottom 5 guesses by percentage is probably so overlapped with bottom by total that it's not worth me embarrassing myself.

The truth exists on the USGS website for the world to see. You didn't cheat, did you? I didn't, but I am gratified to see that ocean counts (the total water coverage is the much higher 7% if coastal waters are included. Oh, wait. Florida. Oh, crap, Hawaii! Too late now. Heartbeats. What's the highest? Lowest? I copied the information from USGS to this handy chart to add rankings**. I'll give myself a point if I even named the state in the wrong order.

True top 5 by area: 2/5
1 Alaska 245,383km square (risky and stupid--ocean counts)
2 Michigan 104,052km square
3 Florida 31,424km square
4 Wisconsin 29,367km square
5 Louisiana 23,761km square

True bottom 5 by area: 2/5 or 3/7
(not counting DC with its 19km square)
44 Colorado 1,170, a second honorable mention45 Iowa 1,077, an honorable mention46 Vermont 1,035km square47 New Hampshire 1,027km square48 Arizona 1,026km square49 New Mexico 757km square50 West Virginia 497km square (oop)

True top 5 by percentage: 3/5 or 4/6
1 Michigan 41.5% (e a t  m y  s h o r t s ,   h a w a i i)
2 Hawaii 41.2%
3 Rhode Island 33.1%
4 Massachussetts 26.1% oh, right, Chesapeake Bay
5 Maryland 21.8%
6 Delaware 21.7%, an honorable mention

True bottom 5 by percentage:
46 Iowa 0.7%47 Kansas 0.6%48 Colorado 0.4%49 Arizona 0.3%50 New Mexico 0.2% water

You will notice that I named all five constituent members of the percentage dryboys, but thought they were area dryboys instead. Vermont!? What about Lake Champlain!? What about Robby Complain? Regardless, some interesting things to notice include Illinois' rank and percent water. It's 25 of 50 and 4.1% water, the closest percentage to the total country's true (not ocean) 3.96%. That's some nice symmetry. (I learn later that my numbers are poorly-informed by USGS rounding. More at the bottom of the page.)
And speaking of symmetry, I decided to calculate each state's true wetness (percentage of surface water) by how many wets it is (total area of surface water). Essentially, what rank would you expect, given how much water (ignoring how much land). This post is already monster long, and I'm just getting into the gritty details that I find the most interesting.

Four states were ranked exactly as you'd expect.
South Carolina rank 21
Kentucky rank 34
Tennessee rank 35 (it's nice that they're next to each other)
Indiana rank 39

Texas was 23 ranks drier than you'd expect given its rank-eight 19,075 square km of water. California, Montana, Oregon, Utah, Nevada, and Alaska were all unexpectedly dry for their large water areas, but only 16 (CA) to 10 (AK) ranks too dry. On the other hand, all our tiniest states are so small that street-corner puddles add a percentage of surface water. Rhode Island is 43 ranks wetter than its paltry 1,324 square km of water would suggest. Other big performers include New Hampshire and Vermont, 24 and 22 ranks wetter than expected despite being 46 and 47 for least amount of water overall. Frustrating idiots. Am I writing too much? I like statistics and outliers.

I have ungoogleable questions, as well. What is the largest lake in the state with the smallest area of water? . . . with the lowest percentage of water? Well, the largest area of water in the smallest-area-wet state (outside the Potomac in DC) is Summersville Lake in West Virginia. It has an 11 square km area. Apparently, somebody sunk a boat in the lake to give divers something interesting to see. And, though it's not interesting, someone thought it was worth explaining that the lake's name is unusual because the Corps of Engineers didn't name the lake for the closest town or for a person, but a slightly-further-away town. We all have them to thank for not having to read about Gad Lake.
As for low percentages, it doesn't get much lower than the mega-dry New Mexico. Well, let me tell you about Elephant Butte Reservoir, 147.7 square km of dull glory. That's slightly larger than Disney World's area. It holds the dubious distinction of being the 84th-largest man-made lake in the United States (my guess: Salton Sea the largest? Upon looking it up, I am embarrassed that I just didn't think very hard about the unbelievably vast Missouri-river lakes in the Dakotas. But! Salton is fourth by area and an accident, which is more fun than Oahe). Elephant Butte is named for a volcanic core sticking up from the water, not the stegomastodon skull discovered by a bachelor party in 2014. Also, I seriously doubt the size estimates of this lake, given that it rains less than in the past and we waste more.***

Is there a state that uses more surface water than ground water for drinking/farming/showering/carwashes? Well (haha get it), I can find this USGS website counting surface water use and ground water use, but I don't understand what I'm looking at. Looks like I'm gonna have to read the underlying data in this paper. Crud. It's very old information. Crud! 1995!??! Well, regardless. What's water use like?

Oh, no. My question is garbage; the reverse would have been more interesting. Something more than half the states use more surface water resources than ground water resources. Now the question becomes "why do Nebraska, Kansas, and Arkansas use so much well water, I mean holy crap?"
Let's start with total off-stream consumptive water use so we can get a sense of the scope of the problem. Let's pull the top three and bottom three examples just to see the interesting outliers.

Total off-stream consumptive fresh water use per state
1 California 2.55 x 10^11 gal/day
2 Texas 1.05 x 10^10 gal/day3 Nebraska 7.02 x 10^9 gal/day----
48 Alaska 2.5 x 10^7 gal/day49 Vermont 2.4 x 10^7 gal/day50 Rhode Island 1.9 x 10^7 gal/day

This almost makes sense. California and Texas have a lot of people and agriculture, but Nebraska? Ignore it for now. I'll come back to it. California used 365000 times more water PER DAY than Rhode Island did in 1995. At the time, the population ratio was 32:1. The farm acre ratio (in 2007) was 374:1. Now, say what you will about growing food, but using ~1000 times more water per farm acre than Rhode Island might explain why California is having a water crisis. Now let me tell you the worst news of all. Consumptive fresh water use is a use that is not returned to the water table. It's water that has been respirated by plants, evaporated from a canal, turned into a product, and so on. It's actually non-renewable water use, and California so outstrips the rest of the country on this metric that it's almost panic-laugh-worthy.
That's how we come back to Nebraska. I read further in this 1995 water use report. In Texas, about 1/3 of fresh water use was consumptive. In Vermont, it was about 1/20. In our great American heartland of waving grain and not much else, consumptive (non-replacing) water use represented about 2/3 (66.9%). In Nebraska, the place where boredom goes for vacation, 7/10 (70.2%) of the state's water was pumped up from ground water resources. In Nebraska, America's breadbasket, 92% of total land is farmland. In Nebraska, our nation's collective memory lapse, 71% of total water use was for crop irrigation. In Nebraska, aka the Devil's ironing board, 2.2 trillion gallons of water was pumped from the ground there in 1995. Nebraska,  accounts for nearly a tenth of all United States ground water use. Is there a state that uses more ground water than surface water? Oh, yeah.

The Ogallala Aquifer is an enormous groundwater basin underneath nearly all of the high plains region, including essentially all of Nebraska. When I visited Union College as a senior in high school, the college showed all of us a tourism video that boasted of Nebraska's most alluring qualities. It was a short video and even so they managed to run out of things to say. "Home to the nation's largest underground lake," the narrator crowed. I turned to my friend and said, "Did they just insinuate that the Ogallala is a tourist attraction? It's not a lake. It's saturated dirt." A third of the United States' irrigated land lies over the aquifer. We pull something like ten trillion gallons of water from it every year. The aquifer has lost an estimated 9% volume since 1950, and to replenish the aquifer from empty would take six thousand years of natural rainfall. Is there a state that uses more ground water than surface water? You bet.

I'm not looking into Arkansas because I assume it will sadden me.

Is there a city I can name that is over 25% water area? Over 50%? I will guess five and see what kind of results I get. I doubt there's a list of "Cities with highest water area" but who knows? I might get lucky. To give myself some context, I'll look up a few large cities that I know will be sub-ten percent water. Chicago (3%) New York (35.40% oops why) Saint Louis (6%) and Minneapolis (6%) Saint Paul (7.5%). I guess New York wanted to control their harbors? That was anti-climactic, but I'm not writing to be interesting or compelling. You're along on this journey, discovering as I discover. From my guesses, there are several factors I think will increase a city's total water area. Enclosed lakes are obvious, but few. Enclosed rivers are more likely, but the city has to be small and on both sides of the river, and the river would have to be large. Bays and harbors are even better. So I think that Seattle, San Francisco, Mobile, Boston, and (cough cough) New York are some of my**** best bets for big cities with loads of water area. I'll list and rank them for you.

San Francisco 79.78% (479.14km2 water/600.59km2 total)Boston 45.98% (106.73km2 water/232.14km2 total)Seattle 41.17% (152.0km2 water/369.2km2 total)New York City 35.40% (429.53km2 water/1,213.37km2 total)Mobile 22.58% (105.31km2 water/466.34km2 total)

Mobile doesn't encircle the bay like I hoped. On the other hand, San Francisco has been as greedy as I assumed it would be. Congratulations, SF, for artificially lowering your per-kilometer population density. I thought breaking the 25% mark would be difficult. Nope.

Correction:
Wow, a pre-publication correction? Yes. I am not editing this document in any way. So, why did I do all that work when Wikipedia lists everything in easily-parseable tables? Because errors are my friends. Come to find out, Nebraska and Nevada are both drier than Iowa in %, which frustrates me, but what are you going to do?

*Antarctica isn't a country. At 98% coverage, that's 13,720,000 square km of ice. So.
**I made a useless table because Wikipedia made it first.
***I wonder--in drought years--how the rankings of the water surface area of various reservoir-dependent states changes. Elephant Butte loses something like 80 to 90% of its surface area in a drought like the one pictured above. I might have to call the Corps of Engineers and do some legitimate research to find that one out.
****Bron came over and guessed New Orleans, which is over 50% water.

10.1b

I wore camouflage. I was running through the big back yard, through and into the woods beyond the creek. I slinked low, trying to stay near to the cover that broke up my silhouette against the grass. Binoculars hung around my neck. My shoes filled with grass seed. I started to sweat through my camo hat. But I could hear him just over the ridge, so all my precautions were necessary.

I finally got to the treehouse: the last refuge point, the primary fortification. Its ladder was on the same side of the tree as he was, so I, white-knuckled, gripped the ladder's side and slid up it, my body obscured by the wood. I was lucky that dad had nailed the ladder at the top, or I would have pulled it over on top of me since I was hanging off the side like a ripe bunch of bananas wearing a stupid-looking hat. I slithered up to the second level of the treehouse, nerves tense, sweat dripping, patience shot. I could hear him still, but the slight ridge wasn't going to protect me now. I was above it, perched at a vantage good enough to see him, now.

And there he was: my brother.

He's only twenty months younger than me, and we're intense rivals. I'm a little taller. I'm a little faster. I'm a little further ahead in school. I own all the cool toys. And now I've got one up on him again: I'm spying on him and he has no way of knowing. I'm clever enough to wear camouflage, to bring binoculars, to slither my way through the bramble without drawing his attention. I win again.

I bring the binoculars to my eyes, and through them, he becomes clear. There he is with the dog. What are they doing? I try to imagine his dumb, dumb activities. He's got a big stick, and he's walking around swinging it like a weapon. Ha! What a dumbo. Obviously I'm much cooler in my camo, spying on my nine-year-old brother. He's just cutting the tops off of weeds out in the field. What a waste of time. And what's the dog even doing? Just sort of . . .  running around? Ugh. If the dog were with me, we'd be having a much better time. I'm obviously much better than my brother in all ways. I'm smarter, faster, stronger, and much more creative. Ugh.

He's so boring. I watch him for twenty minutes. And when things get rapidly unboring, I start wishing for the old boring again.

I'm just watching Philip through the binoculars when I see him walk slowly toward the dog, curiously. The dog is digging in the long grass. Just when Philip gets close to the dog, I see him tense, jump, swat at my very good boy. The wind brings me a strange noise: Philip's yelling. But it's not his voice, quite. He's masked it to make it sound as low as he can. It's not very low; he's nine. But he's tried to add all the gravitas he can, all the basso, all the pomp. He's scraping the bottom of a shallow barrel, but I recognize that voice. It's his "Hey, I'm important too, don't mess with me" voice. Sometimes he uses it on me when he's mad and trying to get his way. It never works, because I am better than him in all ways. And now, he's using this "power voice" on my dog, yelling at my dog and swinging a stick at my dog. How dare he!?

Philip runs the dog off three times, yelling and swinging. A cold feeling falls into the pit of my stomach. Has he gotten tired of whipping the tops off weeds, and now he wants something more exciting to bludgeon? I'm mentally gauging the size of the stick. Is he likely to catch the dog? Is he likely to maim it? And is he likely to do this again? Because: camouflage. He has no idea he's not alone. I'm seeing the inner soul of a vicious nine-year-old killer-on-the-loose. I'm seeing his darkest secrets. Maybe he'll grow up into a criminal. Maybe he'll be a serial killer. I don't know. My mind is reeling. I'm calculating the worth of my life. If I interrupt him now, will he turn from the dog to me? How will he handle my presence? Is he dangerous? Should I tell mom and dad? Maybe they can move him to a home somewhere. I have heard about military academies and juvenile detention and other places they send bad kids. That's where Philip should go. I'm sweating puddles in my jacket. I take my hat off and wring it between my tensed-up fingers.

The dog finally runs away. I'm breathing silent prayers. Philip follows, cool as you like, a salad cucumber on a hot August day. I'm feeling a chill, but mine is worry. What exactly was he doing over there? Why would he attack the dog? And for digging a hole? It's a dog!

I wait. I wait maybe two minutes, though it feels like an eternity. Philip breaks back into the tree line, headed back for the house, and I slip and slide down the ladders, hardly hitting the rungs. I scramble up the slight rise and run pell-mell to the spot in the grass where I saw my dingus brother try to hit my precious dog. I'm looking for evidence, forming an argument in my mind. ("Mom, I saw Philip trying to hit the dog with a stick, and the dog was just digging in the ground! He wasn't even digging up a tree or anything, just grass!") And it is just grass, you see, all grass around here. Oh, my gosh. My brother is unhinged. I live in the same room as a serial killer.

That's when I hear it, and the sound turned my mind around 180 degrees. "Peep peep peep peep." Down in the grass. "Peep peep." What is that? "Peep peep peep." I part the grass a little with my hands, inches away from where the dog has been digging, and I see a small nest—a tiny cup in the grass filled with birds. How did Philip know they were here? Wait. Philip knew they were here, and he saved them. He risked scaring his own dog, and maybe the very good boy wouldn't love Philip any more if he got hit by a stick. Maybe he would only love me and mom and dad and Katy anymore, and he wouldn't love Philip just because Philip hit him with a stick. And for what? For six tiny birds?

For six tiny birds.

My camouflage feels heavy and stupid. The binoculars are just dumb tubes of plastic, anyway. They don't really magnify anything. My sneaking around has brought me a sum total of nothing: no glory, no intelligence, no quality, no cleverness. I am no better for my afternoon of glorious plans. I'm left with a heavy feeling in the cavernous pit where my heart should be. I'm not the better brother. Would I have saved those birds? Would I have risked my dog? Would I have been so kind? No. Philip saves birds. I sneak around. Philip risks and loves. I judge and spit. Well, crap.

He's only twenty months younger than me, and we're intense rivals. I'm a little taller. I'm a little faster. I'm a little further ahead in school. I own all the cool toys. And now he's got one up on me: he's not just the better brother, but the better man. He wins again.

10.1

What kind of writing teacher do I want to be?

Superlative.
Am I done? I assume that's the answer that's lurking deep down under the layered obfuscations of "Ohahohoho but whatever do you mean?" I have taught writing classes—taught reading classes, even—and even now I don't actually identify myself as a writing teacher. Sure, I'm a writer (bad, of late, having produced nothing noteworthy or even likeable for the last year or more [or am I forgetting something? Have I put anything in the sidebar in that time?]). Sure, I'm a teacher (I show up in classrooms [which is a low bar to cross]). But I don't feel like a writing teacher. The grammarian in me screams at how I started the last sentence with a conjunction, and the optimist in me shrugs and whistles a merry tune and the dreamer in me allows that maybe I am a writing teacher after all, but none of these things make truth of the claim.
Competent.
Because what does it even mean to teach someone to write? Language is a function of such innumerable hours of difficult work (an aching, paining difficulty that no one quite notices because the rewards are often immediate and overwhelming. I think we have become inured to the difficulty of language and our expectations are so far benumbed that we forget that each (limp? querulous? gravid? disappointing?) tumble-down phrase we construct is the product of a thousand thousand tiny choices all piled up and leading to the one moment in which we speak, hear, read, think. I don't know what it takes to build proficiency in this activity other than to look deep into someone's helpless eyes and say more of the same.
Satisfied.
And deeply satisfied, I think, is a state of mind. I've been there, and I will be there again. I'm quite happy with who I am and how I teach, but satisfaction is a tacit remonstrance against the critical eye. One cannot coexist peacefully with the other. But if I am to be satisfied, and I hope to God I will be, where is the space for self-doubt? For questioning? For improvement? Perhaps, I fear, there is no space. I'll never improve. I'll never be competent. I'll never be superlative. But on the off chance, if I am very lucky and charmed beyond belief, I may well yet be satisfied.

9.29

The dog is looking at me, I think, but can't see me. Not blind from cataracts or damage, but rage. In that dog two small pinholes break the seal between this plane and the next, opening a doorway through its eyes into some dark beyond. I stood on the backside of the gate, wishing he were within and I were without, in the street, striding by without needing to pay attention to the savage barking of the devil dog trapped behind a gate.

9.19

When Terrance was twelve, he took to calling himself Slingshot. Not at home, not where his mother could hear (she was far too practical for such nonsense), but around his friends and the rough acquaintances that count for friends among children at the cusp of sentience. And perhaps that's exactly why he could get away with such a daring maneuver: none of the children he played catch with in the school yard were old enough yet themselves to understand the unmitigated gall of first giving yourself a nickname and on top of that choosing such a ludicrous concept as its basis. After all, you don't look askance at a Slingshot when you yourself are Riptide, Slashfire, Orca Commander, and Buck.

When Terrance was thirteen, his mother (ever practical, ever down-to-earth and a firm, foundational rock upon which to build a childhood) moved her small family in pursuit of a job. The company she worked for was willing to pay her nearly twice as much to do the same tasks in a decrepit corner of the state, far from any normal folks who might turn their noses up at a Slingshot wannabe, and in fact, far from anybody who might be interested in wanting to be a Slingshot, and in fact, far from anybody at all. Slingshot (please again remember, this name is not my work, but his) was not devastated because he didn't know enough yet to be devastated about such small things. Where once there were people, now there were new friends, but not of the sort that an older person might be able to comprehend. Our sometime child was even yet ante-sentient. He made good use of his limbo. If his mother chattered with the mile-and-a-quarter neighbors about the inconvenience of the small river separating their two properties, Slingshot made full use of its storytelling potential. If his mother sighed about the fallen tree blocking the majority of the tight, winding driveway, Slingshot saw the covert influence of a cabal of nettling enemies. If his mother complained about the long hours her son spent out doors, Slingshot wasn't there to hear it. In the forest that crept up to their timid lawn, his complete wasteland friendscape was forgotten, for a time.

When Terrance was twenty five, the thought occurred to him that perhaps he had not actually been friendless at any time in his life, but perhaps he had never had friends either. The treehouse pine and the gully with the fort in it and the culvert tunnel were, to him, the exact same utility as Riptide, Slashfire, Orca Commander, and Buck. Terrance was floored by this revelation in a conversation with his first adult friend, Corey, to whom he told everything and from whom he held nothing, and with whom he realized that at twelve, all friends are essentially trees.

9.17b

9.17

Craters of the Moon

9.11

You were pregnant and I was trying to bring the whole sixth grade class over to watch. I doubt you would have minded. Miracle of birth and all that. But they just wouldn't settle into an appropriate attitude, and I missed the birth of our son. If I were a better man, I would have made it. If I were a better teacher, we would have all made it. But I'm just groggy enough from the dream that I doubt I'll be either for some time to come.
5:01am

9.6

In the hush of totality, two strangers passed paths on an old section of forsaken road. Neither knew where the other was going, nor wherefore. They only knew they had to go, while the rest of the world watched, and the sun was eaten.

9.5

The twice-toasted smell of old crumbs is gagging me. There's something stale and hollow about them, something greasy about the rancid aftertaste of every breath, and something metallic mixed from the screaming aluminum of the countertop. I stand up, spine tingling, knees creaking, and stop sweeping behind the stove only to find my self-satisfaction is fleeting and the next order, this time a reuben with a side of fries, waiting for me.

9.4

Don't mind me, I'm just over here planting my Gorrum bulbs. Soon, they'll grow up into small spiky plants that puff out thin wisps of light. Don't touch the light, please, it's how the plants reproduce. You wouldn't touch the gametes of another animal. What's that you say? Roe, caviar, chicken eggs? Well, that's gross and depressing, but you really shouldn't touch the Gorrum pollen. It's probably poisonous and it definitely causes cancer.

8.28

I haven't seen anything with wonder in my heart for months. Two nights ago, while a cloud rolled over the mountain, the full moon did its best to cut through the shroud. Trees fell away into shallower and shallower gradations of deepest blue, and I finally looked up. Tonight, again, I saw something that stopped me dead. Far away beyond the closest ridge, a cloud caught the shallowing sun and scattered its light, a deep red smear on the smooth gradient of the sunset, hiding between hilltops on a distant horizon. I know the person I was walking with didn't know what was going in my head, but I can try to tell you.
I haven't slept like I know I should for two months. I haven't dreamed at all in that time. I woke up earlier than I wanted to hold people accountable. I fell asleep later because there was always more to do. And the last four nights running, I've been getting more than six and a half hours. I've been taking eight and a half. I've been dreaming. I've been alive.

Goodbye. I'm going to sleep, now.

8.12

What's the smell of the world when you like somebody? What's the taste of food when you are loved? Do colors shift when you kiss for keeps? Or would we know these things, weak as we are, always in love (whether we know or no)?
For who among us is strong enough to look away when new love is nearby? Who among us is strong enough to open his eyes when he is kissed?
Nobody.

8.9

Dream 9 August 2018 4:58am

At camp. A camper asks me a question. He has been interrupting me all night. I have been up front talking and I am sick and tired of it. I decide now is the moment. Sure, interrupt. You asked a question about how stories get told. You are not interested in the answer. I am done with your interruptions. I am going to win this one.
"First," I say, "I wish you would stop interrupting me. Second, the shape of stories is often determined by what happens in the story. Third,—"
"But what about in the story you just told?"
"First, I wish you would stop interrupting me," I patiently reply. "Second, the shape of stories is often determined by what happens in the—"
"That's what you said before."
"First," I say, holding back bitterness and victory, "I wish you would stop interrupting me. Second, the shape of—"
"Ugh!"
There are a hundred people in the audience whose time he's wasting and I have decided to waste it.
"First, I wish you would stop—"
"Can you just go on!? I get it."
"First, I wish you would stop—"
"Oh my gosh, quit it!"
Pause.
"First, I—"
"Stop it!"
"First, I wish you would stop interrupting me. Second, the shape of stories is often determined by the content of the story. Third, I don't remember your original question at this point and I get neither do you, but the original question was never important to you in the first place. It was just a way for you to project power by interrupting me—"
"Why are you doing this?"
There's a long pause. Everyone is tense because by now they know exactly what will happen, and my revenge is so unbelievably sweet. This annoying half-baked potato has decided he can control the flow of my dialogue for the last five minutes. He has decided that his asides and commentary are more important than the time and enjoyment of the other few hundred people in the audience. He is wrong and they know it. So I, stopping just one moment this time to let the lesson sink in, without waiting too long for him to feel pleased or revenged in any way, give him exactly what he wanted at first and desperately did not expect the shape of: control.
"First,—"
He screams. I've won.

5:15am

7.10

I walked up to the White House to see the President. Not The white house, mind you, but a big brick building painted white, with columns on the portico and bushes so big there were walking tunnels through them. Not The president, mind you, but the older man who had taken in me and my group of friends. But something had changed since the last time, a day all, when I was here last. When I was here last, things were newer, and the whole house has settled into its bones a bit since then. I don't understand. I have gone to see a dog, talked to my parents, and walked the big intersection downtown with the Walgreens and the pizza place and the strip mall all behind the big parking lot. Across the road, where I was trying to get, there were more shops. Everything had a strange surreal quality to it, certainly, but only in retrospect. I never realized when I'm in the dream that the sky isn't. Not that it doesn't exist, but that it isn't to exist or not. It just isn't.

But now, an old friend sees me, and they are just that. Old. She walks under the columns of the portico and says "Oh, he's still a young man." That's it. Nothing more. I'm confused. Why say that? How did you become old? I'm worried. I quicken my pace. I reach the door and someone coming out says "Oh, it's you! You're still a young man." Why are they so old?

I push the door open, terrified in a quiet way of what might happen. There are all my friends of such quality and fire, but they're all in their seventies and eighties. The skin has fallen from once-fresh faces, the fat has built up around their middles. Hair has left the once-shaggy heads and their once-smooth and girlish cheeks are stubbly. Everyone has age spots and pants pulled too high and a comfortable look. They're all slouched in rockers and easy chairs in the entrance, lined up as though waiting for me, or maybe a bus that will take them to the mall for a walk and something interesting to do in their retirements. They're all so old. So old so suddenly. When I left them just so short a time ago, they were vital. We had plans! And now what of them? What will we do with ourselves now?

They all react to seeing my shock. There's a cheer of kindness and one or two say, in an old, familiar way, "Oh, he's still young!" Yes, I think, and you're so old! But then, I must be. Oh.
It clicks.
"How long this time?"
"Just two days, so far. Enjoy it!" shouts John Cleese from a big armchair. I intend to. I turn to look at all my friends. They're not old to me, now. They're beautiful. "Why, Annie, we never thought you would make it, living the way you did! And now you're here, outliving all of us! And Eddie! Oh, Eddie, what a looker! We've got to warn people about you or all the women in the state will be your girl. How do you still look so good, and with this gorgeous mustache!?" Annie is hunched, and Eddie's mustache is cut up badly, not the pencil-thin perfection of his youth. But his Cuban blood has held his beauty, and Annie deserved to live and got it. "Chuck, I'm just so thrilled to see you! What the hell, how do you look so good as such an old man? I'm jealous!" I continue around the circle, giving compliments from a young man to a collection of octogenarians. Then, Salty grabs my hand. His grip is old and curiously strong.
"Where's your Bible study tattoo?" He asks, tapping the hollow between my thumb and the back of my hand.
"I don't . . ." Is all I can say before he and Hiram next to him bust into a big, gut laugh. I would never get a tattoo. What are they saying? Hiram pulls up his sleeve, and Salty lifts the cuff of his pants to reveal matching blue-black tattoos, small, and shield-shaped. I'm staggered. I can't even see my body. How powerful is my psychosis? I'm feeling strange about everything, but I want to meet all my friends even so. I want them to know how beautiful they are still, or how good it is to see them, or how much I loved them all when I was young and how close we were as friends. The thirty aged firebrands assembled in the entryway of the white house are laughing, now, and I feel bittersweet. Maybe tomorrow I'll be eighty, too, and this youth is only a recollection. But I'm luckier than they are. I get to re-live myself again and again, and they are trapped in a linear progression. I get to know that the story ends, and they had to write it one day at a time. My whole perspective has changed. Everything is lovely.

I awake.
5:31am

6.17

There were mice, I think, in the props. Mice or chipmunks, certainly. They're not there now (I didn't find them). I found their evidence. This box of hats had a gobbet of excrement bound together by urine. This box of blankets was worked through in tunnels, small teeth marking paths through the stuffing. This bag of clothes has been torn open and the dresses leaking out.

I have help to spread every item of clothing out on the stage in the open air. There's a hope in me that the sunlight will disinfect the disgust from the cloth. It certainly hasn't destroyed the disgust in my heart. The clothes are out. The props are out. And when I come back? It rains.

Only a half inch, I think, but it's enough. Essentially every costume on the deck is damp. I was going to wash them either way, but now they're activated. The musty smell from this pile is overwhelming. The grime from that one sticks to my hands. I'm angry with myself for leaving them out. I'm angry with Oregon for not delivering on its desert promise. I'm angry with the washing machines for taking so unbelievably long.

Someday, all my new props will smell like human clothing again. Not today.

6.11

I found, deep in a box somewhere (I'm sure), some small piece of us. My mind is crowded with "where is he now" and "does he still think about me" and the soft, evil whispers of "I'll never love again." But I'm the one who left him, aren't I? I deserve to be alone in this.
I hold up the piece of us to the light. It's smaller than I remember, though maybe it has shrunk in the dry of the box. I can practically see through it. It wasn't this transparent, then. It felt deep with mystery, then. I cup it in my hand as I walk about the apartment. It is light. I remember when I put it away, it bowed the shelves and I had to put it on the bottom with the atlases and geode collection, and even then it had a gravity. During the earthquake, you already know which bookshelf didn't fall. But that was years ago.
I take it now and put it out on the counter. It still holds its shape, but it's not perhaps the same as when I put it away. I can't look at it, so I do the dishes with it near me. I carry it into the next room and try to read a book. It's still there when I throw the book down, restive. I heave an enormous sigh.
There's an old specimen frame in the garage. I take out pins and spread this old remnant as flat as its crinkled edges will allow. I hang it in the entry above the console. It no longer mocks.
Picking up my keys, I go out. It will be there when I get back.

6.9 (nice)

My sneezes smell like turpentine. Sometimes, when I'm in a car with the window down, I'll sneeze out into the open air. But the rest of the time, I try to lift my shirt collar and sneeze into my shirt. It's disgusting, but wouldn't you rather all that be inside than out?
I sneeze three times, nearly every time. It blows through my body like a swift kick off a tall cliff and I'm left panting on the other side, my face inside my shirt with the sneeze. And sometimes, when I'm getting over being sick, or when it's early in the morning, or just exactly whenever it feels like it (but only sometimes), my sneezes smell like turpentine.

6.8

Your skin hangs off you in loose sheets, floating in the air like fabric in water, its edges corrupted and lacy and slowly going to nothing at the ends. I'm wading through the curtains of you, pulling swaths of hanging you, looking for the underneath truth parts, the self you label "you." I'm collapsing. I'm already losing my strength. I find hands where I don't expect them, obfuscated as they are by waves of ragged flesh. I'm off balance. You pull me in.

6.7

Alexi's eyes were sunken deep into the unhealthy-looking bones of his face. He stooped to pick up each piece of trash on the sidewalk with a slowness born of infinite deliberation. His pockets were full. He started to hold the trash in his aged fingers, skin pulled taught over knobbly joints, flesh pocked with old mistakes and the scars of accidents he had already forgotten. He spied a trash can on the corner and his pace picked up, arms shaking with anticipation.
A piece at a time, he watched his collection flutter down into the bin. I watched as he emptied the pockets of his pants, front and back, each pocket of his shabby coat, and began to pull apart the lining. Long strips of fabric, torn from his shirt, the elastic from his socks, an accumulation of bunched-up fibers ripped from his pants. Soon, he was reduced, and the can was full. He tottered off again, down the street, where I saw him stoop for another scrap of paper.

6.6

[How did this occur, you may well ask? I don't know. In fact, I do know, but I don't want to acknowledge it. Here goes nothing: we're back to daily blogs.]

Through the door, I can hear my father clattering through the kitchen before he leaves for work. The sun is streaming in the window, and I'm bone-tired, but I know I'll never go back to sleep today. I have a feeling behind my ribcage walls that I can't quite define. Something raw . . . hot? A touch of tearing? I think it's fear. I have art to create, and I don't work well on a schedule. 

5.25

A Toyota Supra rolled loudly down the cul-de-sac past me. I pulled back on the dogs' leashes, trying to keep them to my side of the road. The car stopped at the edge of the orange grove and two men got out. They walked into the oranges, three trees deep, and left their car running. Two minutes later, they drove past me again, leaving for points west. I can only assume they were stealing oranges.
The sunset washed the earth with pink-orange light, and the wind filled the trees with a soft sound of oceans. The dogs pulled lightly at the leash, eager to see anything, everything, as long as it smelled interesting and wasn't at home. The evening air was already chill with no moisture to speak of holding onto the heat. I walked the dogs home and pulled my brother's oranges out of his tree with a long claw on a stick. I haven't even plugged in his fantastically expensive juicer. I think I've juiced fifteen citrus now, by hand, with a terrible juicer that feels at any moment like it will fragment into thin slivers of plastic across the floor, spilling the juice I've fought for and forcing me to mop. I stop, my hands wet with juice, the dogs dancing with each other (mouths wide open and lightly encompassing each other's heads), and thought back to the boys in the Supra who stole for their fruit.
I drew no conclusions. All I know is that I have the taste of oranges on my lips, and so must they. It's strange to have that connection with two people I will never meet.

5.24

I spit out my toothpaste foam and always hold back a nauseated feeling. The mouth contortion I've developed to scrape and push the paste out of the back corners of my mouth doesn't help. There's something about spitting out a nonliquid nonsolid mush mass of bubbles that sickens me instantly.

It passes, but it's always there.

5.22b

I just watched the Netflix documentary about Rachel Dolezal and I am soul-tired. I have positions and opinions but I'm struggling recently with sharing what I believe online. About transracialism, and flat earth conspiracies, and socialism, and gun control, and the American health care system, and more.

I have a voice and an opinion the same as anybody else, and sometimes my voice and opinion matter? But I prefer conversations in which I can ask questions and moderate my verbiage to be sensitive and intelligent. You can't do that online, in a text thread, shouting to the void.

So, with that in mind, I think I've been lucky enough to be handed a set of identities at birth that I just don't care about, that I don't HAVE to care about, and I'm extraordinarily glad I don't feel like fighting with whatever opinions people have about me.

I have the richest sort of privilege: the honor and joy of not giving a hot fart about whether or not you think I'm any label or none. So, to address transracialism: Love yourself for yourself and give your haters the bird.

I'm here to love you, child, and you, and you, and every soft bag of flesh that feels out of sorts in its skin until someday (the Lord willing) we all feel like we can give our haters the bird. Because on that day, there shall be no haters. Selah.

5.22

I'm getting wrong calls from an inmate at the Bledsoe County Correctional facility. James. I wonder what his life is about? I wonder what would have happened if I had accepted his call? I'm suddenly wracked with regret. What would it have been--five dollars for a connection to someone? Five dollars for a lightning-strike chance of a new friend?
I've called the warden's office and they've offered to tell James that he's been calling six-one-five instead of nine-one-five. I hope he gets a laugh from his mistake. He's wasted a full day on me.

5.21

"Should we . . . ?" He's holding the menu like a wall and looking over it plaintively. She told the waiter that they had, in fact, been here before.
"Hm?"
"An appetizer, I think?" To go with their water+lemon price-saver special.
He orders nachos. ("There's only one . . ." "Yes, only one way we make nachos.") She orders a wrap, and he a burger. Both with fries.
I phase in and out of their conversation. It's inane, quotidian (a word I've stolen from the last thing I read, not ripped off the domepiece). It's safe. I'm not interested. When Vanilla Ice's opus Ice, Ice, Baby starts very quietly in the background, I cover for my involuntary "Haha yeah" by leaning away and remarking, as though to myself, "It's the nineties all over again."
When they need a box from the waiter, she sees him and makes a hand motion and a mouth noise that sounds like she choked off a call just as it thrust itself through her mind. They eventually get the box.
My waiter is earnest and kind as he explains why there's some unsolvable difficulty with the charge. The Internet is out or some such. A waitress with an attractive haircut is commiserating. She sighs and we all three laugh just a little. Our conversation is just as inane, just as quotidian (again, that stolen word). But we're in it, so it feels immediate, visceral.
I pick up my bag and walk five paces.
Wait. Did I get everything?
I turn around and hold my hands out as though the mere act of reaching will draw any lost belongings to me. My waiter has gone, but she's standing there. Her shirt says Certified Teaching Staff on the sleeve. She gives me a look like she would prefer I wasn't one of her employees if I'm incapable of remembering whether my phone is in my pocket after five steps. I close my open hands into dual thumbs-up, smile, and spin away.
"Have a good night!" she says.
A wave over my shoulder is all she gets, and then I'm out into the night. Maybe it's this place that makes me feel so commonplace. Maybe it's the weather. Every day has a gravity to it. Every day feels predetermined. It won't rain. It's likely to be sunny. There's a light wind from the west. People will drive their cars too much. And Tommy and Nicole will go back to work serving wraps and burgers and nachos to people who need boxes for their fries.

5.20

Somewhere in the high desert, there's a small patch of disturbed sand where I buried the letters you sent to me during the war. It's between two crusted stumps of Joshua trees, beneath a cholla that bit me while I dug. I didn't know until afterward that I was waiting for someone who had moved on. I didn't know until afterward that you were writing letters to assuage your conscience. Well, I lived, just as you didn't expect, and you live with someone else, which I didn't expect. I don't know which one of us is more disappointed.
It's okay, I think. You have a lovely family, and I'm lying on the still-warm sand, staring up at the stars. I had better move, though, before a scorpion finds me, before I forget which direction the car is in, before I change my mind and dig back into the hole to get back the past that has left me.
I can feel my bones shift as I stand up. I can hear the night swallow up my footprints behind me. I can see the car over the hill..
Maybe I'll ask that carhop for her number. I pulled in just a few hours ago. Maybe she's still on her shift. Maybe she'll remember the chocolate soda I ordered and didn't drink. Maybe it's time to move on. The desert seems to think so.

5.15

I have a sudden rush of memory. It's a tactile assault, as it were, from the history of my brain. Suddenly, I'm there in the bed with you again, the open window making no dent in the oppressive heat of our room, and I'm uncomfortably hot against the furnace of your skin. There's a difficulty in moving my limbs, too, as though the skin is stuck to the air around me. I peel away from your back and roll over, kicking the last of the sheets from my legs. I toss myself upright and lean against the wall. Am I in a dream again, or is this real yet? I look back in the darkness and I would swear you're not there. It's just an empty bed in a different room in a faraway place, but all the same--my legs are weak and my skin is shining.
I close my eyes and remember you again.

5.9b

I've never had a dream in which my teeth fall out.
I have never dreamed sex.
I can't remember dreams of being dead, taking tests, or growing older.
So what dearth in my life has robbed me of these common dream tropes? What paucity of will? Do other people just have smaller choices, accidentally limited by the dreams they've heard of, limited to things they've seen before? I can't imagine, but I know: whatever gamut I've been granted hasn't only been for me. If you'd like it, if you're piqued now, I would share a dream with you.

5.8

I built one wall of the building I needed to live in. With one wall standing, I walked away. Each time I rounded the corner of the driveway, I saw it haunting me. I dropped my tools and left again. This slip-shod work of half-heart power has stopped me, stopped me, stopped me, halt--and now I realize my fault. I'm going to tear the wall apart, use the bricks for different art.

Don't let the something of the past stand in the way. Destroy, then start.

[I wrote two and a half pages of a play, hated it, and didn't work on it for a week because it was impossible to use and too scary to delete. I couldn't throw it out because I thought I would be wasting my time. Cursed hindsight--I wasted my time regardless.]

5.7

I am madly in love with my girlfriend of three years and I have been trying to convince her that I have read shakespere and all that stuff, but she hasn′t been convinced. She′s so smart--I just need help for a love letter written like that guy so that she will take me seriously. PLease, you have to help! Thanks. SHe is goofy and a lot of fun, so she will appreciate it I know she will.

::I will write a convincing love letter

Thank you so much! This is such a life-saver.
Do you need more piectures of her?

::I will write a perfect letter that will make her give in
::Yes, you may add one picture
::Should the love letter focus on convincing her that you have read Shakespeare? Or should it be a general love letter to her?

I do want it to be a love letter, but can it like show that I have read shakespeare?

::So I should start with the love letter, then I conclude by convincing her that you have read Shakespeare

Yes, please. Omg, this is a lifesaver

::Great. I will make it perfect

[$31.40 is an investment in the future. I haven't laughed so hard in ages. Supposedly, this person guaranteed has a masters degree. Thank you, Dr. Don Papers.]

5.4

I think I take with me the microbes you've left on my skin. I'll have the memory of every person I've ever met, unless--my biome too strong, no purchase remains. There are those whose bacterial signature is thunderous loud in the microbial world. There are those who listen. Which am I?
I shake your hand anyway, not knowing if you'll house my flora, or perhaps you'll spread to me. Either way, someone is leaving here changed.

5.3

What right have I to write poetry? I have not studied its greatest works. I have not dissected the choices of its finest minds. I have not practiced its forms. Yet, in brief: I write, the right rights or wrongs left undone, a tapestry woven tight and bound with song.

5.2

When first I slept, life was cold in the ground hard by. As I watched, the morning sun could not, its beams a thousand piercing rays, once breach that venerable crust. My crust is a self-made prison, a rime of ancient tales and mounting fears that took me an ill-spent youth to build; a prison of myself, to myself, for myself. Where once anon you planted seeds, I saw no fruit thereby. Where yet again I saw you tread, the earth's unmarked thereby. Where now and then we passed the time, my heart is rent thereby. When first I slept, though spring encroached, life was cold in the ground hard by.

When last I slept, the world was all awrack. A noonday sun and a quiet glen had my cares belied, and I, (once careworn, cold, and clumsy,) allowed myself to sleep. What cosseted place had this once been! What blanketing power to renew! The rime away, the man remains. And yet, and yet: the time explains. It cures all wounds, dulls all pains, breaks down walls, compounds gains. I can with perfect expediency understand life's softening effect on my own jagged bones, but why have things gone so with you? Why has the wearing of the calendar served only to file down your cutting words and soften your carbide will, when in me I see the year wear down my finest features? Why then has it refined you? I take it as an attack. In my sanctum of rest, a keening lack. Suddenly, the life in me wants you back, for when last I slept, with what was all the world awrack?

When next I slept, I owned the world in pride. What blooming lavish fields lay there beside? No cares have I, or should I "we" for our sake be? I'll tell a story of a sunset. I cannot open my eyes but you are there. I cannot move my breath but it stirs your smell. I cannot fall to dream or it blanks my mind. And yet the blank would not unpleasant be. The rime forgot, the glen forgot, and only this, a field where your hands sow and my hands reap. What of this field where we sleep, our might combined to hold against all odds a dream (against the odds of time and daylight a dream we both can live to love in). Where once was morning light, the sun has crossed the wide expanse of heaven to bring in the tide, a rising urgent question I'll decide: when next I slept, I owned the world in pride: the fields I lay near were just you—heart. Mind.

I hold you whether the sun will set or no.

5.1

Today, fourteen and a half miles from the house and up in the hills where the snow only melted a week ago, I have stopped riding my bicycle. I made the ridge line, or the pass, or whatever you would call the highest point on the road, seventeen hundred feet above where I started. I have drank half a liter of water and laid out on the road in the sun with my shirt off. Where's that bird I hear, I wonder? Who put in the culvert behind me to divert the water gushing through? What was the person's name whose hands sunk the signpost for my bike to lean against?
I've regained my breath. I'm about two thirds cooked, and I know I overdid it today. I can make it home, I know I can. It's all downhill really, and some of it very steep. Besides, there's hours until sunset still. I flip my leg over the saddle and push away down the hill.

There's red cinder on either side of the road, and my tires crunch into and through it, down the lane. I'm going fast. Maybe twenty, thirty miles an hour. I'm not even pedaling; I don't have to. And then--an oscillation--(small at first, but enough to be troubling. I have had the bike worked on only a few weeks ago, but I have also been extremely hard on the old girl for a very long time, so who knows how well a check up would catch and solve all problems with her anyway) and the tire has begun to overcorrect itself, despite my hands gripping white-hot, driving all the blood up my arms and into my panicked heart, my breathing fast, my brain incapable of any thought but slow down. I squeeze the brakes ever so slightly. I can't remember which brake is front and which is back. I wish I could pull the back full-bore, but I can't risk pulling on one only to find out it's the front, to feed the shimmy and send myself into the asphalt. I'm still going twenty five, maybe. Too fast. I would lose a lot of skin. I could break something. Many things, if I land especially badly. I'm pulling on the brakes and pushing hard against the bars, hoping against hope that the oscillation will abate. It doesn't.
It gets worse.
The front wheel is flipping back and forth crazily now, faster and faster, and I'm staring at the road ahead, willing there to be no cars. The shoulder is across the opposing lane, and it's wide and rocky, and at its lip is the line of red cinder. If I cross that badly, it's game over. there's no friction in the cinder, not for lateral movement, and it seems like all my tire wants to do is move side to side. I unclip my feet just in case I need to jump from the bike. I'm panting. I'm squeezing the brakes. I'm slower, slower, slower, stopped. Putting my feet on the ground, I can feel my heart ripping against my tongue, trying to claw its way out. My mind is blank.

I lean down, pull the quick release, replace it. There's nothing wrong with my tire, nothing wrong with my wheel, nothing wrong with my bike. I push off, waiting for the worst. The brakes are singing at me--maybe it's that? I'll buy new rotors, I swear it. The tire behaves. It rides true for fourteen more miles. I feel like I'm going to die for the next half hour. I'm fine.