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Comic by Me circa 2003
Current Music: Jejune
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r_isforrocket
10 March 2008 @ 08:26 pm
10 March 2008 @ 01:50 pm
We separated all our things. I let her have all the pots and pans that we bought together, the French press, the rice cooker. I hid in the bathroom as she rooted around in our . . . my bedroom. I could hear drawers opening, furniture dragging, the closet door coming off its track like it always does and thumping on the floor. Muffled cursing. Finally we were in the front hallway. She was making two stacks of books mine and hers. I'm keeping "The Fortress of Solitude" I said. "You don't even like Lethem that much" she said without looking up. "Besides I bought that book in Europe at the train station in London, it has sentimental value." "I like Lethem all right" I said leafing through the book and turning my back to her. "Seriously give me my book" her arm snaked around me to grab the book. I held on and turned around into her kiss, slightly sour and tasting of orange juice and cigarettes. "I'll let you keep VanderMeer's City of Saints and Madmen" she said placing the book carefully on her pile. "How about that?"
08 March 2008 @ 05:50 pm
We buried him today. Does it make me a horrible person that I was bored at the funeral? There were forty-five rows of folding chairs - twenty two on the left twenty three on the right, twelve chairs in each row except for the front rows which had nine chairs on the right and six on the left. I know this because I counted them all, five times. It's not even that I was uncomfortable because it was a funeral and the body of someone they kept trying to tell us was our friend was lying in a wooden box at the front of the room, open for display like muffins or scones at a coffee shop. I just can't sit still. I kept adjusting and readjusting my tie. I know the lady next to me was watching. I imagined her naked and the two of us fucking in the bathroom for a few minutes. Then I felt bad. Not because I am a prude or anything or that a corpse could make me unable to get it up. I just knew we wouldn't be fucking in the bathroom later and that made me sad. There were forty-seven lilies in the right flower urn and I think forty-three in the left. I wish I hadn't worn a suit jacket, I felt all prickly and I wanted to get up and go to the bathroom all through the service. Now that I'm home I wish I had a sweater on but I don't want to get up off the floor. I poured out all the alcohol in the house as soon as I got home. I'm not sure if this was a reaction to the funeral or not. I think maybe I just wanted to make a statement, say something that I couldn't voice at the funeral. I don't think it was even about the beer and whiskey, I think it was the lack of something I really wanted. Like I was pantomiming not talking to him, kissing him, waking up next to him with every bottle I pour down the black yawning mouth of the drain. There were thirty four bottles in all.
Current Music: pedro the lion, Winners Never Quit
07 March 2008 @ 11:02 am
Even with the all the lights on in the house and people buzzing around in a happy intoxicated mess he felt alone. He sat there thinking about all the dishes he was going to have to wash in the morning and continued nodding at the voices on his left and right. Someone spilled beer on the couch and he excused himself to get a towel. The girl who had spilled the beer was overly friendly. "So this is your house?" "Did you do all these paintings?" "Is that the bedroom?" Walking outside he looked underneath the cushion of the old recliner on the porch to find the mashed pack of cigarettes he kept there. The cold crept up his pant legs and chilled the nape of his neck as he blew smoke up at the sky. The streetlights hummed overhead as he stuck his hands deep into his pockets. He didn't even look back as he walked down the street and disappeared around the corner.
Current Music: The Album leaf
03 March 2008 @ 01:01 pm
At times he felt that his breathing had become an insistent nagging thing. He began to see his lungs as these twin bullies that rose him, chest heaving, from sleep and into a grey smear of a world. The sound of air whistling over his palate or out from his nostril began to grate like fingernails on a chalkboard. A consistently taunting metronome. He began to hold his breath as long as he could. Anytime he spoke it was in great gasps and spurts. He wished that he could just absorb oxygen out of the air as he sat, inert like the continental shelf, sloping down off the coast into the green slumbering depths . . .
Current Music: The Saxon Shore
25 February 2008 @ 05:52 pm
the slow crackle and hum of fading radio stations breath frosting up into the sky the late night filter of wan yellow streetlights asphalt brittle and slick stumbling the taste of whiskey bitter on the tongue fingers too cold to fumblingly unbutton coats hands grasping pushing pulling saliva warm and bitter with cigarettes keys dropped and kicked off porch sudden laughter biting lips till blood comes breath harsh and insistent from the lungs
17 February 2008 @ 01:06 pm
Hey! Hide your children and send all the grandmothers off to bingo because I feel an ocean of syllables welling up like a sea level volcanic shaft spewing molten lava into sheets of hissing steam! I've got things to say and people to kiss! Banks to rob and constellations to name! I've got some god damned discoveries to make and I am going to take you with me. AND I WILL NOT SPARE ANYONE'S FEELINGS!
I've got synapses tearing themselves apart burning to spill off my tongue and roar from my pen! I've got a bus locker full of ciphers and codes I am going to pass to you and secrets beneath the floorboards of every farmhouse in the tristate area that I am going to reveal in a Oh My GOD! What A Cliffhanger! No Fucking Way Are They Going To Commercials Now! sort of way.
I want to say things that will make birds circle back around in surprise and then burst into accompanying song to fill in all the gaps when i take a breath. i want to eat great mouthfuls of wolves and grind polar bears between my jaws. I'm going to beat Batman at chess and call Superman a dick . . . because he is . . . really.
I want to kiss you hard on the mouth, our bodies crushed to one another as we trigger the detonators and leap from the thirtieth floor, our smiles flash in the sun as we fall and disappear WITHOUT A TRACE!
I want my picture to be in history books up there with Sirhan Sirhan and John Wilkes Boothe, but when children read the small text next to my name they will find that my target of assassination was boredom and apathy, and that I was the most successful assassin ever! 2 for-fucking 0!
But I don't want to just do things that end in the creation of galaxies and the collapse of supernovas. I want to do quiet things like sip coffee while I watch you read the morning paper, your lips moving along with the words you are breathing. I want to be responsible for the narrowing to a pinpoint of existence that happens when i lie in bed my face buried in the nape of your neck and knowing that all the pens and all the inkwells in the world would not be enough to write a more perfect moment. I want to hold hands and . . . not . . . say . . . a . . . word!
I want to write all this down for you in a book made entirely of CAPITAL, CAPITAL letters.
I've got synapses tearing themselves apart burning to spill off my tongue and roar from my pen! I've got a bus locker full of ciphers and codes I am going to pass to you and secrets beneath the floorboards of every farmhouse in the tristate area that I am going to reveal in a Oh My GOD! What A Cliffhanger! No Fucking Way Are They Going To Commercials Now! sort of way.
I want to say things that will make birds circle back around in surprise and then burst into accompanying song to fill in all the gaps when i take a breath. i want to eat great mouthfuls of wolves and grind polar bears between my jaws. I'm going to beat Batman at chess and call Superman a dick . . . because he is . . . really.
I want to kiss you hard on the mouth, our bodies crushed to one another as we trigger the detonators and leap from the thirtieth floor, our smiles flash in the sun as we fall and disappear WITHOUT A TRACE!
I want my picture to be in history books up there with Sirhan Sirhan and John Wilkes Boothe, but when children read the small text next to my name they will find that my target of assassination was boredom and apathy, and that I was the most successful assassin ever! 2 for-fucking 0!
But I don't want to just do things that end in the creation of galaxies and the collapse of supernovas. I want to do quiet things like sip coffee while I watch you read the morning paper, your lips moving along with the words you are breathing. I want to be responsible for the narrowing to a pinpoint of existence that happens when i lie in bed my face buried in the nape of your neck and knowing that all the pens and all the inkwells in the world would not be enough to write a more perfect moment. I want to hold hands and . . . not . . . say . . . a . . . word!
I want to write all this down for you in a book made entirely of CAPITAL, CAPITAL letters.
Current Music: Explosions in the Sky
24 January 2008 @ 08:47 pm
There hasn't been any communication from Control in over two weeks. I've starting checking the drop location more than is advisable. Eventually the growing feeling of desperation that I feel clawing at the back of my mind every morning when I show up for work at the embassy will kill me. I'll get sloppy. My cover will be blown. There will be a sharp popping sound from a silenced gun, they say it sounds like a branch breaking under the weight of a heavy snow fall, and I will die in some dark alleyway. But for now it is Paris in summer. I will walk down the cobbled roads and pause on the bridges overlooking the Seine, the light reflecting off the water. School children will file past me and I will pretend not to be worrying my hollow tooth with my tongue or thinking about the cyanide capsule. Maybe I will get my shoes shined and go out to catch a show tonight . . .
29 December 2007 @ 05:28 pm
The winter days are the near ones
the window panes cracking with cold in the night
and in the morning I am numb
I watch for street signs and turn the steering wheel
with my sweater pulled up over my hands
Swallowing the cracked soreness
of my throat I hum and
the silence has never been
more obvious
the window panes cracking with cold in the night
and in the morning I am numb
I watch for street signs and turn the steering wheel
with my sweater pulled up over my hands
Swallowing the cracked soreness
of my throat I hum and
the silence has never been
more obvious
15 December 2007 @ 08:31 pm
Okay, here is the finished short story for the local Well Fed Head Books contest. It is finished a little more rushed than I would have liked but the deadline is 1 pm today so . . .
I'd greatly appreciate any and all critiques. Also I'm having a hard time choosing between the titles "Kokura Hearts Nagasaki" or "Without Fanfare" so and commentors before 1 pm can weigh in on that issue. But without further ado, here it beez.
He rearranged the condiments in his fridge door for the fourth time that night. The first and second time he had done this he had gone with an ingredient theme, first grouping things together by a foreign and domestic criteria. He let the srirachi chili sauce nuzzle next to the shrimp with soybean oil paste. Segregating the rusty can of condensed milk and Nestle chocolate syrup to a shelf of their own. Then after soaking all the silverware in his house in steaming soapy water he had come back with a new plan. The jars of coarse ground German mustard and pungent horseradish went with the olives and fish sauce. Carefully and systematically anything sweet, the blackberry jams and mango chutneys, were grouped together. It seemed obvious, at the time, that categorizing between savory and sweet was the only logical way to go. This of course lasted only as long as it took him to use his drawing square to arrange the stacks of magazine on his coffee table into piles with perfect right angles, before the epiphany of condiments lined up in order of size descending from big to small. And finally big to small and the reverse on the second shelf so when you stood back it looked like a rippling V of Filipino salted fish and low fat ranch dressing.
Standing in front of the bathroom mirror for fifteen minutes he stared until his eyes watered. He leaned back against the wall and looked at his reflection from under the lids of half closed eyes. He let himself replay past moments of his life and watched the different emotions flit across his eyes, the twitch of his lips, the flare of his nostrils. He tried to see himself as others had seen him at pivotal moments in his life. He wanted to put together the puzzle pieces of their reactions and figure out why things had come out the way they had. He almost made himself cry, but not quite. He leaned forward and backwards, swaying on the balls of his feet. He watched his reflection loom close and then retreat.
He changed his t-shirt twice around 2 AM. There was no relation between the time and the number of times he changed his shirt. The second time he turned the shirt inside out, then back to the right side again. Then reversed it again with the seams visible like an anatomical map or a butcher's sectioning chart. Here central mass, here rib cutlets, here right rotator cuff, here clavicle.
He walked slowly around his house in the dark listening to music, something instrumental with droning strings and a discordant piano. He held his hands against the side of his stomach and felt the warmth of his organs beneath the skin even as his feet met the cold of the wood flooring. The music sounded like a tape that was coming loose and fluttering, snapping taut and then spooling loose. The tones wavered in the dark, on the verge of collapsing in on themselves. As if a giant hand was compressing them down to an underwater blur of sound. He stopped and stared at his couch with his hands still on his stomach. He then went back into the kitchen to organize his Tupperware, stacking them in scratched plastic towers and domed salad bowl cities.
He really liked the feel of his feet on the wooden floor as he walked back and forth. The floor was old and weathered, the type of floor you expected to see in an old dimly lit hardware store. It had huge scrapes where furniture had been dragged and dark stains that showed the map-like contours of where now absent radiators used to sit. There were splotches of paint on the living room floor that he traced the outline of with his big toe. He thought one of them looked like a sketch for a futuristic car. The kind of conceptual sketches you used to see in Popular Science and show to your friends. Each of you knowing that by the time you were grown up everyone would be flying around in these arrowhead cars with robot co-pilots, all of it powered by magnets.
The world was full of possibilities on nights like tonight. Although he somehow had nagging doubts about this, the dull certainty that things would not come out all right. He wished he could somehow connect the feeling of vast potential that he felt sitting on his porch and staring into the night sky with any sort of hope for it becoming his own. Instead he always felt like a con man mere moments away from having his cover blown.
He went to work the next morning, just hours after the sun had risen - the skyline awash with all the pinks and blues of a cheap grocery store birthday cake. The mall was always surprisingly busy for early morning, with most of the stores not even open yet. Old people fast walking, their faces always set sternly to their task. He imagined them before the doctor offices that had sent them here. He thought of them actually enjoying a retirement of leisure before a doctor had sent them of scurrying in fear with words like cholesterol index, congestive heart failure and arterial clogging. So now they circled the halls endlessly between 6 am and 10 am, their steps unfaltering. Their clothing was completely inappropriate for cardiovascular exercise, cardigans and dress pants, fluffy sweaters and polyester stretch pants, their only concession to the fact that they were exercising - white velcroed orthopedic sneakers. They would nod at him but never pause in the odd fast walk gait, their faces set with dogged determination. He wanted to stop them and say that they didn't have to do this to fill the hours of their days. He wanted to offer to go and get coffee, to listen to their stories, let them cook him a homemade meal. Anything to stop their endless circling amid stores carrying flashy to the minute fashions and bizarre alien gadgets that made them feel like hordes of circling anachronistic ghosts - specters of the inevitable in matching sweater sets and complimentary bingo visors.
He didn’t notice her until he had counted down the cash register and walked around his store twice straightening board games and arranging stuffed animals into surreal pastoral scenes. Life sized stuffed Labradors raising their paws in greeting to Bengal tigers and posable giraffes. He didn’t even see her at all at first. His attention was too taken by a new kiosk outside of his store. He walked out, leaving the tigers and fluffy giraffes fending for themselves and stood looking with curiosity. It looked as if a riot of colored paper had grown out of the round molded plastic booth. Closer examination showed them to be origami. The entire booth was teeming with small pale blue herons made from intricately folded tissue paper and Easter egg green rabbits folded from handmade paper. There were fuscia kangaroos, their hands and ears all right angles and calculated geometry. He picked up a robin made from the Sunday morning comic section of the newspaper, its wings were folded upward as if taking off for flight, one wing Peanuts and the other The Wizard of Id. “Good choice, that’s my favorite piece” a voice said over his shoulder and turning around he finally saw her and thought “Kokura”. This was a name he always thought every time he felt an instant attraction to someone. He thought of the Japanese town of Kokura and how it had been the original target of the second atomic bomb dropped by the United States instead of Nagasaki. All the citizens of Kokura going about their daily lives, maybe not all of them blissfully unaware but still unaware all the same that for ten minutes they were in danger of incineration. He felt small and scared, the way he thought they would have felt if they had known of the bomber planes droning above the sudden cloud cover that saved their lives, their survival hinging on a bomber not being able to find his X. “That’s my favorite one” she repeated and he swallowed hard when she tucked her hair behind her ear in an manner so endearing he want to hold his breath until he was sure it would stay there. Either that or he wanted to reach over and tug it loose so he could watch her shrug her shoulders and tuck it back again. He also wanted to knock over her origami stand setting the swans and sparrows free into jerky folded flight so that he could escape in the aftermath. Instead he thought very hard “KOKURA”. She looked at him expectantly and then as his silence lengthened her smile slipped, she rocked back and forth nervously in her sneakers and crossed one arm across her chest holding the other arm straight at her side. He placed the colorful newsprint robin back down to preside over its folded kin and walked back to his store. He wrote “Nagasaki” on the back of old receipts and tried to fold them into otters or kittens. He threw away the crumpled results and hid them beneath mall flyers. They bumped into each other awkwardly waiting in line for pretzels. He was getting a jalapeño pretzel and she was getting a cinnamon raisin one and a bottle of water. He gave her a small smile then immediately regretted it. He bit savagely into his pretzel as he walked back to work and didn’t taste a single bite. He knew he was being irrational, that if he was nice to her and she laughed and fidgeted with her hair that nothing horrible would happen. There would be no sudden flash and mushroom cloud. He knew that as he walked out of the mall he would not hear the phantom drone of WWII bombers above his head. But still he shrank away. As he was locking up he heard her clear her throat and when he turned around she was holding out the robin. “I wanted you to have this,” she said quickly like she was trying to get the words in before he could run away. “Since I am going to be your work neighbor here for awhile anyway”. She placed the bird in his hand and walked away before he could say anything . Later as he drove home he placed it on the dashboard and watched it slide back and forth as he made turns. Its wings caught on the air conditioner vent and it floated into the air for a moment before falling into the cup holder.
That night when he got home he did not organize the condiments in his refrigerator. Instead he tore the pages out of magazines. He cut out pictures and wrote new captions for everything. He made a pop-up book. He used pictures from his tenth birthday party to make sunrises. He folded utility bills into rainbows and wrote ideas of what he wanted to do with his future. He left all the lights in the house on. Every page had at least one sentence that ended with an exclamation mark. The story in the end told of a lazy boy who became a sad man because he was too lazy to not be afraid. He made graph charts and check lists of how to change this. There was a page with a sea urchin who talked about holding hands and kissing till their teeth clinked together and the stars faded.
The next day he left the book on the counter of the origami kiosk and tried to busy himself with sorting receipts. He wondered how he could have been so dumb as to make a book detailing his faults and dreams. He wanted to slip out the back door of the store and run away to Alaska where he would work on a salmon fishing boat and grow a beard, wear rain slickers and smoke a pipe. Incidentally those were all things he had put in the book as well. He was giving change to a customer when she came into the store and stood at the counter without saying a word. “Your change is $5.79. Have a nice day” he said and then turned to look at her. “This has to be Nagasaki.” he thought. “Your book is beautiful” she said placing it on the counter. “My favorite part is all of these blank pages in the back and the colored pencils you included with it.” She started to sketch a mongoose right then and there, her hair falling down to hide her face as she smiled.
I'd greatly appreciate any and all critiques. Also I'm having a hard time choosing between the titles "Kokura Hearts Nagasaki" or "Without Fanfare" so and commentors before 1 pm can weigh in on that issue. But without further ado, here it beez.
He rearranged the condiments in his fridge door for the fourth time that night. The first and second time he had done this he had gone with an ingredient theme, first grouping things together by a foreign and domestic criteria. He let the srirachi chili sauce nuzzle next to the shrimp with soybean oil paste. Segregating the rusty can of condensed milk and Nestle chocolate syrup to a shelf of their own. Then after soaking all the silverware in his house in steaming soapy water he had come back with a new plan. The jars of coarse ground German mustard and pungent horseradish went with the olives and fish sauce. Carefully and systematically anything sweet, the blackberry jams and mango chutneys, were grouped together. It seemed obvious, at the time, that categorizing between savory and sweet was the only logical way to go. This of course lasted only as long as it took him to use his drawing square to arrange the stacks of magazine on his coffee table into piles with perfect right angles, before the epiphany of condiments lined up in order of size descending from big to small. And finally big to small and the reverse on the second shelf so when you stood back it looked like a rippling V of Filipino salted fish and low fat ranch dressing.
Standing in front of the bathroom mirror for fifteen minutes he stared until his eyes watered. He leaned back against the wall and looked at his reflection from under the lids of half closed eyes. He let himself replay past moments of his life and watched the different emotions flit across his eyes, the twitch of his lips, the flare of his nostrils. He tried to see himself as others had seen him at pivotal moments in his life. He wanted to put together the puzzle pieces of their reactions and figure out why things had come out the way they had. He almost made himself cry, but not quite. He leaned forward and backwards, swaying on the balls of his feet. He watched his reflection loom close and then retreat.
He changed his t-shirt twice around 2 AM. There was no relation between the time and the number of times he changed his shirt. The second time he turned the shirt inside out, then back to the right side again. Then reversed it again with the seams visible like an anatomical map or a butcher's sectioning chart. Here central mass, here rib cutlets, here right rotator cuff, here clavicle.
He walked slowly around his house in the dark listening to music, something instrumental with droning strings and a discordant piano. He held his hands against the side of his stomach and felt the warmth of his organs beneath the skin even as his feet met the cold of the wood flooring. The music sounded like a tape that was coming loose and fluttering, snapping taut and then spooling loose. The tones wavered in the dark, on the verge of collapsing in on themselves. As if a giant hand was compressing them down to an underwater blur of sound. He stopped and stared at his couch with his hands still on his stomach. He then went back into the kitchen to organize his Tupperware, stacking them in scratched plastic towers and domed salad bowl cities.
He really liked the feel of his feet on the wooden floor as he walked back and forth. The floor was old and weathered, the type of floor you expected to see in an old dimly lit hardware store. It had huge scrapes where furniture had been dragged and dark stains that showed the map-like contours of where now absent radiators used to sit. There were splotches of paint on the living room floor that he traced the outline of with his big toe. He thought one of them looked like a sketch for a futuristic car. The kind of conceptual sketches you used to see in Popular Science and show to your friends. Each of you knowing that by the time you were grown up everyone would be flying around in these arrowhead cars with robot co-pilots, all of it powered by magnets.
The world was full of possibilities on nights like tonight. Although he somehow had nagging doubts about this, the dull certainty that things would not come out all right. He wished he could somehow connect the feeling of vast potential that he felt sitting on his porch and staring into the night sky with any sort of hope for it becoming his own. Instead he always felt like a con man mere moments away from having his cover blown.
He went to work the next morning, just hours after the sun had risen - the skyline awash with all the pinks and blues of a cheap grocery store birthday cake. The mall was always surprisingly busy for early morning, with most of the stores not even open yet. Old people fast walking, their faces always set sternly to their task. He imagined them before the doctor offices that had sent them here. He thought of them actually enjoying a retirement of leisure before a doctor had sent them of scurrying in fear with words like cholesterol index, congestive heart failure and arterial clogging. So now they circled the halls endlessly between 6 am and 10 am, their steps unfaltering. Their clothing was completely inappropriate for cardiovascular exercise, cardigans and dress pants, fluffy sweaters and polyester stretch pants, their only concession to the fact that they were exercising - white velcroed orthopedic sneakers. They would nod at him but never pause in the odd fast walk gait, their faces set with dogged determination. He wanted to stop them and say that they didn't have to do this to fill the hours of their days. He wanted to offer to go and get coffee, to listen to their stories, let them cook him a homemade meal. Anything to stop their endless circling amid stores carrying flashy to the minute fashions and bizarre alien gadgets that made them feel like hordes of circling anachronistic ghosts - specters of the inevitable in matching sweater sets and complimentary bingo visors.
He didn’t notice her until he had counted down the cash register and walked around his store twice straightening board games and arranging stuffed animals into surreal pastoral scenes. Life sized stuffed Labradors raising their paws in greeting to Bengal tigers and posable giraffes. He didn’t even see her at all at first. His attention was too taken by a new kiosk outside of his store. He walked out, leaving the tigers and fluffy giraffes fending for themselves and stood looking with curiosity. It looked as if a riot of colored paper had grown out of the round molded plastic booth. Closer examination showed them to be origami. The entire booth was teeming with small pale blue herons made from intricately folded tissue paper and Easter egg green rabbits folded from handmade paper. There were fuscia kangaroos, their hands and ears all right angles and calculated geometry. He picked up a robin made from the Sunday morning comic section of the newspaper, its wings were folded upward as if taking off for flight, one wing Peanuts and the other The Wizard of Id. “Good choice, that’s my favorite piece” a voice said over his shoulder and turning around he finally saw her and thought “Kokura”. This was a name he always thought every time he felt an instant attraction to someone. He thought of the Japanese town of Kokura and how it had been the original target of the second atomic bomb dropped by the United States instead of Nagasaki. All the citizens of Kokura going about their daily lives, maybe not all of them blissfully unaware but still unaware all the same that for ten minutes they were in danger of incineration. He felt small and scared, the way he thought they would have felt if they had known of the bomber planes droning above the sudden cloud cover that saved their lives, their survival hinging on a bomber not being able to find his X. “That’s my favorite one” she repeated and he swallowed hard when she tucked her hair behind her ear in an manner so endearing he want to hold his breath until he was sure it would stay there. Either that or he wanted to reach over and tug it loose so he could watch her shrug her shoulders and tuck it back again. He also wanted to knock over her origami stand setting the swans and sparrows free into jerky folded flight so that he could escape in the aftermath. Instead he thought very hard “KOKURA”. She looked at him expectantly and then as his silence lengthened her smile slipped, she rocked back and forth nervously in her sneakers and crossed one arm across her chest holding the other arm straight at her side. He placed the colorful newsprint robin back down to preside over its folded kin and walked back to his store. He wrote “Nagasaki” on the back of old receipts and tried to fold them into otters or kittens. He threw away the crumpled results and hid them beneath mall flyers. They bumped into each other awkwardly waiting in line for pretzels. He was getting a jalapeño pretzel and she was getting a cinnamon raisin one and a bottle of water. He gave her a small smile then immediately regretted it. He bit savagely into his pretzel as he walked back to work and didn’t taste a single bite. He knew he was being irrational, that if he was nice to her and she laughed and fidgeted with her hair that nothing horrible would happen. There would be no sudden flash and mushroom cloud. He knew that as he walked out of the mall he would not hear the phantom drone of WWII bombers above his head. But still he shrank away. As he was locking up he heard her clear her throat and when he turned around she was holding out the robin. “I wanted you to have this,” she said quickly like she was trying to get the words in before he could run away. “Since I am going to be your work neighbor here for awhile anyway”. She placed the bird in his hand and walked away before he could say anything . Later as he drove home he placed it on the dashboard and watched it slide back and forth as he made turns. Its wings caught on the air conditioner vent and it floated into the air for a moment before falling into the cup holder.
That night when he got home he did not organize the condiments in his refrigerator. Instead he tore the pages out of magazines. He cut out pictures and wrote new captions for everything. He made a pop-up book. He used pictures from his tenth birthday party to make sunrises. He folded utility bills into rainbows and wrote ideas of what he wanted to do with his future. He left all the lights in the house on. Every page had at least one sentence that ended with an exclamation mark. The story in the end told of a lazy boy who became a sad man because he was too lazy to not be afraid. He made graph charts and check lists of how to change this. There was a page with a sea urchin who talked about holding hands and kissing till their teeth clinked together and the stars faded.
The next day he left the book on the counter of the origami kiosk and tried to busy himself with sorting receipts. He wondered how he could have been so dumb as to make a book detailing his faults and dreams. He wanted to slip out the back door of the store and run away to Alaska where he would work on a salmon fishing boat and grow a beard, wear rain slickers and smoke a pipe. Incidentally those were all things he had put in the book as well. He was giving change to a customer when she came into the store and stood at the counter without saying a word. “Your change is $5.79. Have a nice day” he said and then turned to look at her. “This has to be Nagasaki.” he thought. “Your book is beautiful” she said placing it on the counter. “My favorite part is all of these blank pages in the back and the colored pencils you included with it.” She started to sketch a mongoose right then and there, her hair falling down to hide her face as she smiled.
29 November 2007 @ 11:04 am
There's madness running through the veins of London. The street urchins have started shying away from the nightly fog that curls hungrily out of the sewers. They mutter amongst themselves over peat fires about the voices they hear in the fog. The voices of their friends who have gone missing in the labyrinthine sewers beneath the city. They huddle and make gestures against the Evil Eye. Rumors of the Spring Heeled Demon abound in the byways of England's greatest city. They say the Jack has returned and the Tower of London stands abandoned . . .
19 November 2007 @ 01:41 pm
Okay, I don't usually do this but I feel like actually talking about my life. I think I am ready after a two year hiatus to finish my masters. I am probably going to do the thesis class this summer, and then do my last generic three credit class in the fall. Then I want to go and work on a fishing boat in Alaska that upcoming summer. And after that go to work in Antarctica (probably manual labor) for a year. After that probably join the Peace Corp. or some similar organization where I can do social/social justice work. Also the year of 2008 I am going to do a "buy nothing" year where I only purchase essentials to living. This is exciting but also a bit daunting. It is however time I put my actions where my anti-consumerism mouth has been.
16 November 2007 @ 03:00 pm
There was nothing discrete about the crashing waves. They demanded attention of the boy as he walked the shoreline, his toes scrunching down between pebbles and sand with every step. But not everything needed to be discrete, not everyone walked the oceans limit to be soothed. Not everything needed to be a soundtrack bought in the "world music" section. The boy always thought that there was something terrible about the sea. The idea that in some part the water washing around his ankles was made up from the decomposing bodies of those lost at sea. That suicidal lovers and homesick cabin boys were dampening the cuff of his blue jeans actually comforted him. The impartial monster of the oceans depth was actually a mother welcoming back those for whom dry land had become a burden. The harsh sun reflecting off of asphalt, echoing cries in alleyways and the buzz of fluorescent lights would never reach the green embalming depths. There was nothing discrete about undressing on a beach with early morning joggers passing by. And there was nothing soft or comforting in swimming out until he knew he could never make it back. There was animal violence as his body fought to preserve itself. But this far down the thrashing was silently green and fish darted away, waiting only moments before returning.
26 October 2007 @ 02:12 pm
The mountain was never really dormant
it was just waiting to be climbed
for someone to pitch their tent and flags
to say that this land was good and worthwhile
but all the while it knew it was really just backdrop scenery
it was just waiting to be climbed
for someone to pitch their tent and flags
to say that this land was good and worthwhile
but all the while it knew it was really just backdrop scenery
24 October 2007 @ 02:01 pm
Hi, how are you?
I haven't seen you since that time at the llama farm. Do you remember? The time we thought their faces were so funny for reasons we couldn't quite put our fingers on. The time that you turned from the chain link fence and for no reason pulled me into your mouth. Our teeth clicked against each other like ice cubes and you laughed halfway through, your breath was hot and warm and I thought that I had never known a moment like that. Like we had discovered new molecules in each others eyes.
But that was all before you decided to cut your hair and start hanging around with guys that had grease stains behind their ears and surly answers in their toolboxes. This was during the summer when I jumped into my pool fully clothed and frustrated. You remember that don't you? I broke the watch you had given me for my birthday. You just stood at the edge of the deep end not even looking down.
Haven't seen you in awhile. Barely recognized you just now. Guess its all the eyeshadow. I found some pictures we drew the other day. They were hiding along with some polaroids stuffed in the back of my sock drawer. We drew owls and cows jumping over the moon. You had written little notes making the owl say thing like "Hoot hoot" and "I'll love you forever"
I'm sure you do remember one thing however. The fact that we used to behave like we had already read our ending and it had a sunset and a porch swing for two scripted into it. But that was before you bought all that white out . . . .
Current Music: The National, "Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers"
20 October 2007 @ 03:38 pm
Why are my hands so cold but my heart so warm? Darling dear, the calendar pages are turning and I am growing colder the longer I lay here. I'm hoping these pages reach you by Christmas but I can't even remember what month it is. The storm hasn't let up in weeks and my frozen breath hangs in front of me, a cloud that is diminishing over time. I hear you are engaged now, and I understand my dear. I am an uncouth man of the lower class. I spend my time tilling the soil and trapping along the nothern rivers. But know this fairest, I would have built you a home safe from rain and snow. I would have put food on our table and clothed you in all the hues of the forest. I would have loved you with the depth and fierceness of the mountain winds. But I understand, whatever would people have thought? I am going to go and check on the oxen now, I haven't heard their lowing in a few days. But I will think of you when I am shoveling their oats and scraping down the hay. I will remember you when I walk out of the barn and into the woods, small against the tumult of the storm . . . not even looking back.
Current Music: Sweetwater Abilene, "the Giant Ate the Rainbow"