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.