4.23

"Hope is strong; Justice and Truth their winged child have found." The Revolt of Islam, Percy Shelley.
[I want to write like that]

The wings were stiff and ungainly at first, their muscles having only recently been grown and stitched together. The tiny sutures limited the extreme movement the laboratory claimed to achieve, but I could still feel the raw power in them. The whispery hair that covered the inside and leading edges of the wings hadn't fully acclimated to my nervous system yet, and I could keenly feel every breath in the room. The wingtips were so sensitive and raw that I gasped when they brushed against the ground, and I took to holding my monstrous appendages directly out behind me. And my bones--oh, my bones. They had been siphoned to reduce weight. I had been shaved, my muscles stripped, my intestine reduced, half my liver, a kidney, and my teeth removed to save weight. It was all gristle anyway, but the marrow I missed. The weekly injections of white blood cells from my still-functioning marrow hurt badly enough that I blacked out several times. But I can't argue with results.

I could fly. And not a somber, scientific glide but real, sustained, beautiful flight. I ruled the skies: the biggest bird earth has seen since Incubus.

Why did they do this to me? Why invest the time, effort, and money? Why steal from the mouths of babies? The aim was always simple and obvious: to make a better alternative. To show the future. To eliminate the past. To sate America's love for blood.
I had become a tool of the government in a scheme so broad that I was the brush stroke, and the brush seeming God.

Only the brush will know if I am to succeed or fall.

3.28

[originally a comment I made on a blog, and it deserves to be there, but I wanted to save it here. Maybe I'll post it later.]
Today I saw a picture of an old friend on Facebook and I was taken aback. I had to click on it; I was compelled.
She is a beautiful woman, but for no reason related to her physical attractiveness. Physical beauty is not an asset she has. It is her smile. I cannot describe how a smile tears through her from one end to the other like a package on christmas morning. I can't stop trying to make her laugh because she doesn't hold back even one ounce of joy. I would think she would run out but she keep pouring it on, heap after heap, until you find that she is your friend and there's nothing you could have done to avoid it.
I saw her profile and was compelled to enlarge it, to absorb it, because some brilliant photographer had somehow captured her smile and spread it evenly over every pixel and allowed it to soak in. It was the most amazing thing I have seen and easily the best profile picture I have seen on Facebook in at least five years.

3.27

Fire rings his eyes. I read that today in an anti masturbation pamphlet from the 1800s. Why can't I write like that, even when I'm ultimately extending myself ? It came out of nowhere, hit me straight between the eyes. I can't even fathom what the man must have been thinking when he wrote those words.

3.24

She can't believe it; sometimes it's like he tries to aggravate her. Like today, he said "I'll get to the Poly" and she heard him, she did hear him, he said it. But this evening, where's the grocery? Where's the house paint she needed? Nowhere. And where was he? Getting to the Poly. Aggravating. This evening, a time she should have been able to use for chores and work will instead be wasted waiting for him to get back from a chore he should have done first, not last.
And then again, maybe it's more annoying that he never does it on purpose.

3.21

"There's something about that girl," I thought to myself, "which vaguely worries me. I think she might . . . like me, or something." This thought, of course, was patently ridiculous. Why else would she be wandering aimlessly around our mutual grave-ridden night-time safe haven, if not to avoid talking to me? No, certainly not. I'll have to check.
She of course tells me far after the fact that she had decided that night to marry me. This was before we fell in love, mind you. Long before, when the world was wet with dew from the first sunset and lovers grew on the grass.

3.21

When I walked into Chemistry, I sat down in the front of the class, settling in for a morning class that would never apply to my profession. Every day, I ignored the myriad nursing students cramming the misty reaches of the classroom. I was desolate, like a mountain hermit, until

"Hey, thanks for holding the door! What's your name?"

"Robby. You?"

"I'm Delight. This is Shelby and that's Kat. Nice to meet you!"

And with that one chance meeting, my entire life stayed exactly the same. I forgot their names and I never tried to talk to them again. Apparently Delight and God had other plans.
Delight asked me to tutor her in Chemistry, a tutelage which she needed like Usain Bolt needed a walker. Little did I know that this would become her repeated ploy to befriend me.

3.18

I want to put the news on Facebook, but I'll tell you here first because this blog has learned about my heartache when I write a sad post about other people's lives.

[The sad artist found happiness and couldn't think of a way to write it because he had no practice. He concealed his art by reversing the polarity of his reality with ]

I've made a life-changing, eternal decision, and I couldn't be happier. I'm going to borrow from my sister-in-law a quote.

Four months?

[That shouldn’t take long,
Right?!
Not too long.
Don’t let your panties get in a twist.]

3.14

[I'm going to see what naughty words my keyboard will let me type while it has its filter on. Already, naughty is out.]
Naught.
Serial.
Pennies.
Basins.
Treat.
Balls.
Gaby.
Fair.
Chung.
Interpose.
Conjugal.
Falopian. (Why did it misspell it?)
Hung.
Sick.
Kiss.
Quicker.
Fruitage.
Song.
Wacker.
You.
Bun.
Agile.
Pen.
Visit.
Bundle.
Creamier.
Mild.

[Took me a while to get to this point. In not a young man with time to spare. The bold words are ones I actually tried and got. There are a few other words and names I could try but won't. How well can your phone do at filtering out the admit? (Smut?)]

3.13

Couldn't it just be a phase we're working through? But no; I sense that we're not so much phasing as we are shifting somehow; perhaps the best word for our state is shifting. It's not as if we have gone from larval or embryonic to adulthood, and we certainly haven't passed any energy threshold to become vapor. No, shift is what we do and shift is how we will define ourselves.

Soon, I'm sure, we will shift apart, but for now let's take advantage of the vast pressures that have brought us bumping and grinding against each other like icebergs in a midatlantic tidal anomaly.

3.8

I heard it yesterday--a "tempest dropping fire." It has been rolling around in my head, and I want to use it, but I feel yet unworthy of it. I need practice. I need more time to become capable of working it into a statement of my own.
So I won't. (Coward)

3.4

She had a very glass beauty; one repentant of its physicality. It seemed that her every motion was intended to deemphasize her abundant charms, grace, poise. Sometimes, I looked at her (she really held an extreme sexual attraction for me), but mostly, I listened, and knew her beauty.

It seemed to me that her intellectual purity and prurience would quickly wilt under the full examination of an impassioned mind, that it would somehow reveal itself to be less than a fully-ostentatious beauty of rut and sensation. I always thought to see wrinkles around the eyes of her thoughts, or to find the creaking joints of long use, but she always was fresh and important and virile.
This, all with a manner that suggested asexuality and sterility, fired me like a pottery fertility statue.

3.2

[This month is pi.]

Twice in my life, I have been unable to speak. When I was born, and when I died. When I was born, it was my fault: a life unlived, potential yet unknown. When I died, it was your fault: a feeling too strong for words, incapable of expressing my grief.

2.27

Ope the doors of heaven and let the rains fall but once, and the whole world will swim in the vale of tears. God's will being uncontrollable, however, and his promises infallible, the world has little hope for catharsis aqueous. Instead, we must muddle along as we can in the grime.

2.24b

As I read over the meagre offerings on the shelf, I am reminded once again why students don't like reading. Each book is a reminder of purple prose and over-enthusiastic keepers of the terror "history." Why Plato? Why Chaucer? Why Brontë at all? Moreover, the Christian offering is yet more threadbare, for all its vulgar display. I can see which books have Christian messages from the spine alone. Redeemed, and from what? And again, the Valley of a pseudo-romantic ripoff, one with no tension or development. Another Justin Case.
No wonder the self-developed reader is there only kind! There is no nourishment on these shelves. Where are the S E Hintons and Harper Lees--a brilliant flash in a dark place? Where are the Tolkiens and Rowlings--a relationship rendered over time and wood pulp? Where are the Brooks and Roberts and Greens and all the host of young adult fiction authors--all true to the craft, all pure in their form, all idealistic on their worldview?
At this juncture, I would accept A Wrinkle In Time, and that book insults my childhood aspirations of greatness.
Everything is ash. Everything is fire.

2.24

I'm shaking the anxiety out of my limbs, trying to find something to do. I want a distraction. I want peace.

She just called me; she's sick. How sick, she won't say. Maybe a year, maybe two. I searched for it as soon as she said, but the Internet is not a place to go to feel better. Hundreds of images--is that what she'll look like? Symptoms and side effects--will she still be the vibrant lover I knew? Predictions--should I even tell my mother? Or should I carry this joy and sadness alone (a forbidden love, a secret death. All so poetic)?

Mom is a fatalist. Maybe she'll understand. If I had to fall in love with a woman, it would be a girl fated to die. I just wish the ovarian cancer had found me instead.