2.4

December 12
Bought a new car, trying to sell the old car! If you want it, send me a message. It still runs, just wanted a new car!

December 18
Sold the old clunker to a guy from Nina's school. He seemed happy, and I've got cash in my pocket. Holla!

December 18
Going out with the girls to celebrate!

December 22
I know you haven't heard anything from me in a few days. I've been in the hospital after a bad accident. I'm okay! I'm out now! But I've learned my lesson. Mostly damage to the car, though. They had to cut me out--embarrassing! If there's one thing I hope for, it's that other people will look at this situation and learn: never drink and drive, not even once. It's just not worth putting your life at risk.

December 25
I have the most wonderful daddy in the whole world! He got me an almost identical cruiser to the one I lost in the wreck. Love you daddy!

December 31
Out with the girls--we're too much!

2.3

Today was the most summer day I've had in a long time. I met Mike in the park because I was playing my cuatro and singing maybe too loud (but who was there to care? The closest people were ages away). I went on a hike to touch the sky, a new part I've never seen before, and I carried two pairs of binoculars and a spotting scope because I have a burning desire to see. I rolled down my windows and pulled over to help a man whose truck didn't work. All I really helped him with was a memory that humans are kind. I fell asleep too late. I'll wake up too early. It's February, and it's summer.

2.2

I can't find my glasses anywhere. The ache is building behind my eyes, and I just know, prescience or experience, that things will get worse. I'm in the store now, and I've already purchased my items before I notice I've picked up a can of ham instead of the black olives I set out for. My burritos will be extremely odd. I hang the grocery bags from my handlebars and push away from the lot. Every car that passes makes an otherworldly noise, accentuated by my growing headache into a wailing song, a keening roar. There's only two turns and two miles to home, but I miss the turn and have to recalculate. I'm deep in a neighborhood I don't really know when a sidewalk creeps up on me and I overcompensate, swinging my handlebars wildly. The bags smash against the front wheel, and the can of ham falls out and lodges itself firmly between the forks and the spokes. My bicycle stops much faster than I do, and I fall head-first to a vaguely-defined ground. Luckily for my spine, my head breaks my fall. Not entirely, I guess, but what little vision I once had is now swimming with stars. I can hear the back wheel of the bike spinning lazily. I can see blue sky and a rim of trees. I notice a small figure loom up on my right. She can't be more than four.
"You're stupid."
She's not wrong. I get back on my feet and walk my bicycle home. It takes me an additional hour, and the sun is setting when I arrive. I strip off my street-grimed clothing and collapse into the shower. Turning on the water, I feel something brush against the back of my hand. My glasses were slung around the cord of an old shower pouf. I put them on, and the steam immediately blanks my sight.

2.1

Fortinbras lives.
I named the bat who didn't know any better than an accidental afternoon in Fred Meyer. I named it because it touched my life when it touched my arm, and cost me up to two thousand dollars in emergency room bills that I've been struggling to find a way to pay. I named the bat because I will remember it better if it's not some thing, but some one. Live long and well, Fortinbras, and tell your grandchildren of the day an idiot licked his arm where you clambered, forever altering his fate and also making it much cheaper to be bitten by a rabid animal in the future. Well done, Fortinbras. You will be missed.

My mother cleaned things from the fridge, hoping to have more space and less hassle to clean. I taught her a lesson about fridges by writing FORTINBRAS LIVES in cheery plastic magnets for her to gaze at hatefully every day.
Call your mom. She loves you too much to be lonely today.

1.31

I drove hours to see the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. I arrived at Capitol Reef with hours of daylight. I walked through a boring desert just to see the valley from above. I saw two natural arches and talked with a young man living a dream life, wandering the country. I caught a ride with the kindest family in an RV, who gave me a coke and a ride to my car five miles away. And, while I was looking at a wall of hieroglyphs through my binoculars, the thought occurred to me--say: it's getting pretty dark. I wonder where the sun is?
I drove hours just to see a sunset in a specific spot, looking at a specific set of rocks. I waited all day in the searing heat and dry mountain air just to feel the cool evening drop around me as the sun shot pure fire onto the waiting vista. I planned around a single moment, and like a soft breath from a dying man, the day perished and left me empty.
I took my car deep into the canyon, willing the sun to move back. I despaired of my chances of seeing anything I wanted to see. The steep slickrock walls towered above me, a dusky brown now, losing their sanguine luster. The sand beneath the car tires faded to match the roadway. The scrub disappeared into the gloom. I had one last gasp of dying daylight to see the tanks, natural pits of gathered water in a vast desert, and then--darkness.
I was alone. Essentially nothing had gone the way I wished. I crunched with near-silence through the expansive night, and a bat swooped down just to my face and flit back again. It dashed back and forth, just at eye-level, catching something I couldn't possibly detect. He paced me, always just in front and never too close, for a quarter mile. Feeling a growing, picturesque melancholy, I pulled out my ukulele and played three songs, quiet, into the soft darkness. I drove out of the slot canyon and out into the open expanse where the sky suddenly dominated the world. No moon, no sun, just a hemisphere of stars, a deep blue-black field of firmament with a soft streak of purple-white where the milky way arms encircle our view.

I had accidentally traded one spectacle for another, and the more I think about it, the more satisfying the loss has become. I do not equate my missed sunset with my nocturnal chiroptic friend. There's no equality in emotion. But I am not disappointed by the loss of a familiar when it has been replaced by something portentous, inexplicable, new.

1.29

Somewhere in Central Missouri, there is a small nothing where there used to be
a farmer's field
a mound of dirt
a skeleton once revered
a man once alive
a dagger
some beads
that is, until the plow turned over some small something, and the farmer (concerned) called on the smartest person he knew, and the old man whose only identification was Professor Soretlan rode down from Sturgeon to turn over the old earth and uncover what once was, to piece it together and send it to Massachusetts, or Pennsylvania, or someplace else back East. They could have never known that a hundred and fifty years later, I would live ten miles down the creek from the old nothing. They could never know my love for the small creek, of the maps I built by hand, of the hours I spent pouring over its history, of the trek I took not once but many times just to put in a canoe so I could scrape along with a friend. They could have never known the intensity some young fool would feel for a bit of land he didn't own. They could have never known how much rage I felt over the cold day on someone else's bones in someone else's dirt in someone else's Missouri in a small nothing where there used to be.

Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.28

Feel the Light
Jennifer Lopez

Where's the delicacy of light?
My mother told me to look under leaves for it,
To find it in soft-shadowed stands of trees.
My eyes grew too accustomed:
I forgot your exuberance.
Your life is more than my expectations of you.
Where's the beauty of shadow?
You taught me to look at the edge
of a beam of cut-splinter light,
to think about the end of a long age of loneliness,
to wrap myself in the memory of finding
a someone.

Lyrics
This song is so uplifting, so positive. But strangely, I'm pretty sure that back in 2014 when I first listened to this soundtrack, it didn't stand out to me. It has taken its place, now. I've now played it more often than any other song on the list. But it took its time to grow.

I'm not unique. I know other people live their pasts over again in their heads, wish backward, hope with hindsight. I know I think back to the happy accidents of my life--finding Capitol Reef, being staggered by my favorite National Monument (which will here go unnamed, for fear you might search for an image and be robbed of its immensity), my bewitching experience at Mount Rushmore. I can reach further back, too. The night I knew I was in love, Jan Haluska telling me to pursue a doctorate, screaming at God in the rain--these are points of extreme illumination fixed to peaks that tower over the flat plains of my life's memory. That's what this song is about. It's about casting back to the moments that you've allowed to define you and being shocked and staggered again by how close, how possible, how real they seem, even now.

Maybe you're not a romantic. I am. I learned this about myself in college, and I've regretted it ever since. I'm emotionally invested in sunsets and sunrises. I find myself staring at beetles and condensation and the weave of a rough-spun fabric. This isn't because of some depth of character or intellect. Far be it from me to insinuate. I'm breathless and distracted so often because I throw myself entirely into a beautiful moment when it catches me. Again, let me clarify. It's possible to be articulate and value logic and skepticism and to come across as reasonable and well-founded and simultaneously be unable to stop staring at a sunset even though it's at a forty five degree angle from your direction of travel and you're endangering your car and your life to stare at it. It's possible to be a fully-functioning human being and without conflict be required by your savagely beating heart to stop your car on the side of the road to run backward to stare at a waterfall through pines. It's possible to fully know the right thing to do or say in a relationship and to instead throw yourself utterly into the arms of another person who may or may not want what's best for you. It's completely without conflict to do all of these things and then to look back on them as the best moments of your life.

"Did you expect me to reason with thunder?" I know I cannot.

Stephen
Do you like sad music, or happy music? Do you tend to gravitate more towards one or the other? I've noticed I tend to learn sad music almost exclusively for the ukulele, but I honestly listen to a diversity of music. Why is that split? Why do I play a different set of music than I listen to? It's not like happy music sounds worse on a ukulele, I mean, for heaven's sake it's a twinky little sunshine instrument.

If you had to eliminate entirely one class of music from earth, which would you give the ax? Sad, or happy--you can only choose one.
This is maybe a better question this way: which type could humanity not live without?

1.26

I forgot you today, blog. If you were my heartlove, I would be getting into bed with cold feet and a great rustle of covers, and you would be annoyed perhaps, and you would roll over perhaps, and you would make a great sigh (just to let me know how you felt). And perhaps this would all be just to say "Where were you?" But if, blog, you were a metaphor for marriage? I would be able to love you through your disappointment, and you would be able to love me despite my late remembering you. That's what this relationship is, mon frere, a making of space for another.

I'll remember you better tomorrow.

1.25

I locked my bike outside the library in who-knows-whereville. I don't remember now. But there was a millpond where the local dam locked up the stream through town, and the only place I could find to eat was a pizzaria that doubled as an inexplicable burrito joint. I walked inside the library, but it was a bigger building than a library. I think perhaps it was the only government building in town, and despite its venerable facade and imposing size, the single floor of books contained fewer volumes, perhaps, than Brooke and I own privately between us. When you and your sister-in-law outbook a library, perhaps the only thing the place is good for is what I used it for. I locked myself into the only restroom and stripped off my riding bib (faithful companion) and dunked it in the stream of hot water from the faucet.
I washed my only pair of cycling underwear in a library sink until the water no longer ran gray.
I think people assume that just because they've never conceived of a thing that it is difficult. There is nothing difficult about doing your laundry in a public sink. There's certainly something shameful about coming out and finding a five-year old waiting with his dad, trying to hold his pee. There's certainly something illicit about standing, naked, in a public place. There's certainly something liberating about having so few articles of clothing that washing your shirt and underpants in a sink is enough for another few days because you just don't have enough laundry to warrant a washing machine. But I couldn't begin to tell you what town I was in or why I chose the library over the ice cream shop. You couldn't force me to explain the intricacies of what I felt at that moment. Some people hear the bare facts and the spartan explanation and assume it's inexplicable and monumental, but I have the exact opposite feeling.
Sometimes, the things we least understand are just so. The way they are and no more.

I think anyone could bicycle across the country.

1.24

It wasn't enough that she had taken all the begonias. Somewhere along the way, she had also misplaced my trust in humanity. You see, I had lent it her when she was having a rough day about six months ago, and she never saw fit to give it back. I noticed her using it a few more times, and so I didn't say anything. I figured she had needed it for something or other, so I let the thing lie where it was. Why fuss? Well, now she's hoofed it, and with the television, too, and not only that, but a full set of linens for the bed (but not the bed) and about half the parts of the collapsable easel and, as it turns out, the begonias her aunt gave me on my thirtieth as an ill-fated attempt to somehow catalyze a hobby for my free time. Anyhow, I can understand why she would take the flowers, but she didn't take my warm feeling of brotherly love--I saw her packing the car, there's no way it was in there--and so I can't understand why she wouldn't at least let me have it back before she went. I'm going to have a hell of a time finding it, now. It could be anywhere! Well, not anywhere. It's certainly not with her. But my point still stands.

[Have you ever looked at a thing and known it to be poison and you just didn't care because it was time to destroy yourself? Well, an afternoon can be spoiled just as readily as a lifetime, and with the same tools.]

Songs for a Neophyte: 2015.29

Weapon
Bastille and Angel Haze and F*U*G*Z and I guess that might be it.

I'm the heartbeat of a city
I'm the scream of a small man
(yes both)
I'm clean in a small way
I'm personal just to be rude
(why do you object?)
My artistry is choice and deliberation
But I create in a state of haste and anger
I walk in patterns, but I try to change it up
My lover appears
(he is thin where I have meat
(he is steady where I am frustrating
(he is porcelain where I am steel
(he compliments me
(and I blush

These poems aren't very good, eh? Maybe I wasn't cut out to be a surrealist.

Lyrics
Maybe it's the milieu, maybe it's the meaning. I could be wrong. But this song reeks of social discontent, the collected realization of a once-silent group that there's power in speaking up. The 99 percent that occupied Wall Street were one. And I watched hundreds of angry, partial families charge the national conversation about Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown. I lived thirty miles from the MU protests. I saw the National Women's March and the #metoo movement. I haven't been part of any of these uprisings, not because of geography or willingness, but because I'm the target of each one.

My opinion doesn't matter too much on this one. I haven't lived everyone's life, and I have enjoyed immensely the life I've lived so far. That's not everyone's reality, so I already know that whether or not I give you my opinion, other people think it doesn't matter. There are enough folks who want to stop me already without me putting my foot in my mouth (I've done such a thing and will continue and probably won't apologize in time for my idiocy). So, understanding that identity politics has no place for me even as a well-meaning ally and that I have been placed into the ranks of the opposition forces without even understanding that there was a conflict on, let me speak.

This is my story, and I don't know why I want to tell it. Maybe I won't. Do you want a trigger warning? It's at the top of the blog, and has been since 2010. I will make you weep. For a few months near the end of our ailing marriage, she stopped being intimate with me. We were still close, emotionally (though how close has become an open question with hindsight). I have to believe we still loved each other because I had very little evidence otherwise. We loved each other, but she didn't reciprocate my erotic love for her. I would charm and she would laugh me off. I would smarm and she would duck and weave. I would surprise her with kisses or suggest an adventure or try a date, and I can't remember her reactions--she was so level, I swear it was like nothing I did affected her. The old tools were busted. It was like trying to flirt with a brick, but a pregnant brick at the end of a long day still wearing drity underpants from before because it was laundry day in the brick household and the clothes were waiting to be folded. I wish I were joking when I tell you she noticed the wrinkles in the bedspread with more emotion than she noticed that I was into her.

You'll have to forgive me. Looking back, now, both of us were myopic to a fault.

Finally, after too long, I finally put to words what I was feeling, and in saying it, I made it true for the first time. She was sitting in bed, and I didn't even feel like I could sit on the bed with her. It was the aura she gave off. I knew I wasn't welcome. I sat on the floor by the bed in the light of the only lamp in the room and I cried. She wasn't interested in me, sexually, and I was destroyed. I wish I could find some metaphor to paint for you that would induce the stark realization I had as my mouth spoke ahead of my brain, but I'm not sure it's possible. I had, for years, been so anxious about whether or not I would be any good at sex, and if anyone I slept with would ever find agony and release through me. I can't be the only person who has feared these things, so I know you will have the shiver of it run cold through your bones, whether you want to or not. She said maybe it was the positions we were trying. She asked if I knew anything from porn, but firstly that's not how porn works and secondly porn is as real as a transformers movie, and about as badly written. She said maybe it was the way I was approaching, or the times I was choosing. She didn't know any more than I did.

After that, I sat, crying by the bed, and she left the room, uncomfortable. If I'm honest, there's no way to know how much time passed before she came on to me, suddenly. It could have been the same day, and I'll never know. This time of my life is glimpsed through gaps in dark forest as I speed past in a car someone else is driving far too quickly. All I know is that she came on to me while we were in bed. I can picture it, and it's awful. Maybe she kissed me, maybe she rolled over and pulled me to her, and maybe she just asked. You must forgive me. You must: history has not been kind to me, and I've had the benefit of years to explain this as clearly as I am. You have a privilege I never had, and you can see ahead of time what's to come, and I know you must want to yell at me the way people yell at movies when the idiot walks to the closet to examine why they heard someone inside it say "Please open this door so I can hurt you very badly." It may sound that plain to you, but I must beg of you to inhabit my skin, just for a moment. We humans, as a race, haven't lost that, have we?

We had sex.
She didn't have sex with me, nor I with her. Certainly the first is impossible because as soon as she thought I was engaged, she disengaged. She left her body there and went somewhere else. And so, I couldn't have been with her because she wasn't around to be with. I looked into her eyes and saw nothing there. I felt any heat or passion flee from me--I couldn't go on. (Maybe it's unfair of me to be so unilateral, but have you been married to her? Then you'll have to take my word for it: I am perhaps the only person who will ever read this who knows what she's like when she's on. She was not.) I don't know what drove her to this. Guilt, perhaps. Duty is possible. I tend to think it was love. I implore you, don't scoff. We cared for each other deeply, she just didn't find me physically attractive anymore. I don't believe she lied to me about wanting me to forget the past failures and to feel like she wanted me again.

There's a terrible New Yorker story called "Cat Person." There's a difficult Babe article about Aziz Ansari. There's the popular term "enthusiastic consent."
I leave the pieces of an ill-formed puzzle for you to understand me poorly, because I will not explain myself without losing an argument I never wanted to engage in. People look at me and see a white heterosexual male, and what good is it to me? Just when I want to explain to you what happened to me with my (ex)wife in my (ex)bed, the right is stolen from me by people I don't know who are angry at a set of labels I didn't choose. In the grand narrative of #metoo, I'm the villain, not the hero. Besides, I cannot make any broad proclamations about the cause of the problem, nor can I provide solutions to young people on either side of the issue. I don't know any more than you do.

I just wish we would start seeing people complexly for once. Nothing is ever all one way. I hurt her. I hurt, too. I will have to live with that for the rest of my life. She put that weight on me, tricked me, used love against me, motivated by love. And it's the absolute worst. Nothing is ever all one way.

Stephen
Stop goddamn picking these songs three years ago.

1.22

[I think now that you read this blog, can it possibly be as honest as it once was? I would rather say things face-on than backchannel sideways slip-wise.]

Montseratt flipped his legs over the edge of the bed and thrust the heavy duvet from him. The morning sun cut like a knife through the tall window looking out. The beam fell clean across her face, but still she did not wake up. He didn't turn to look at her, though. He had seen her the night before (not with his eyes, mind you, but nonetheless) and there wasn't much mystery to a wife of six years, anyway. He sat for a long minute, staring out across his neighbor's field running down to the great lake below. He could see, far away, a long bank of clouds, and their shadow skimming along the water to crash like some ephemeral breaker upon the shore. He could almost hear the hurrying wind, if he strained, carrying the cloud along on its back. It was the same view as the day before, the same view he had seen for an age, now, and there was no mystery in it, really. Just a picture book with a new page for each day, each page a minute modification of the day before. His toes grew cold on the tile, and still he looked. He wasn't sure what he was searching for, exactly, but he didn't find it before she stirred. He heard a sharp intake build into a yawn and felt the bed shake as she levered up behind him. Then, a stillness. A small moment as he waited for her to speak, to say good morning, to ask what he was up to. She didn't, though. She just reached up and put a soft, reassuring hand on the back of his neck. A smile pulled the corners of his mouth up quietly. It was six years, today, wasn't it? Montseratt liked his life.
"Good morning," he said, and meant it.

1.21

Porbus, as the grand vizier, had many things to do. Indeed, the day was positively filled with activities. Why, at seven there was the Anniversary Nursery that needed grand opening, then the Full Stop Crop Top Emporium and Bar and Grill dedication at eight. Things continued likewise until the very end of the day, a small speech to a group of friends about time management, (venue: City Hall) and why Porbus hadn't been able to join the weekly crocum game for six weeks. After all the official business, the real work of management began: Porbus walked back to the office, foot-weary and world-worn, to fall asleep at the desk, drooling in the keyboard. The next morning, the routine would start again with the same old five o'clock call to the I.T. department for a new keyboard. Things never stop, and (if Porbus were to tell the truth) that's the way things should be.

1.20

Have you ever listened to another person breathe? There are the folks who breathe with their mouth open, standing behind you in the checkout line, and they sound symptomatic and you just wish they would not. There are folks who whistle through their noses in a screaming high pitch on sharp intakes. There are folks who don't seem to breathe at all, and after a while sitting still you can't seem to make out their chest or stomach moving at all and you have to guess there's a constant low-volume exchange of air keeping them alive, or how else are they maintaining that dull stare? And there are folks who gasp when you say something funny and it's very charming and you wish they would stop.

1.18

She had such beautiful hair, actually. Like: aesthetically pleasing. It all sort of sprang from one temple and swept around ecstatically in great looping curves. I wish I had her hair on my own head, perhaps, but maybe not because (what would that look like, even?). Or maybe just to be her friend so that I could look at it from time to time, just to figure out the how of it.

I don't know how to parse this feeling. Just give me a wig that reminds me of it and I'll be satisfied at that.