before we all burn

I am too acutely aware of my own mortality. I've lived every day, since that awful hangover and text message, like I was dead the next. I've broken hearts, killed parts of myself and met people and seen things I never thought I would. I think it's time for me to gear it back just a bit, take a larger perspective. I don't wanna be broke, sick and sad before I leave for Scotland. I want Paige to see me at my smartest, quickest, best dressed, not the gambling, drinking, suicidial reprobate I've been. I wanna be a better man for her, for my mother, for my father, for my friends, for the world. I've so much to give and I've just been keeping it to myself, squandering it at bars and poker tables. It's time to give without sacrifice, receive without greed. I hope I can keep this attitude for 4 more months.

pretend all the good things are you and me too

Tap the ash out on the heel of your boot. The fog wraps around our outdoor table and I pull on the lapels of my jacket, the cold now alien to my thin, thin blood. A tall young man, blonde and handsome, comes up and asks if we need anything else. I quickly shake my head no, but, you take a moment longer to dismiss him and I can feel the jealously squirt into my mouth, like I bit into a lemon. Still, I choose to ignore it and I steal your cigarette from the ash try, my promise to quit now long forgotten but I'm still not sure where they sell cigarettes in this foreign land, where vice is peddled. You laugh and slap at my hand, but, I lightly grab your wrist as I take a theatrically long drag and then, with that same hand, slip the cigarette between your pointer and middle finger. You suggest we move indoors as a noticable shiver racks my thin frame and I shake my head no, that the delicious, green poison of the summer needs to be forced out of me by this alien cold. Of course, I don't say all of that, I just shake my head. You ask me why I've been so inarticulate since I came here, wondering where that famous volubility is.

"I think I lost it when they stamped my passport"

The cold has become too much, so, I pull a wad of strange colored money out of the pocket of my peacoat and throw it on the table and grab your hand. You look up from your book with a glint of shock but willingly stand up and walk quickly behind me as we go back to your apartment. I'm tired of being stoic and we will make love until my skin feels the warmth it so desperately needs.

the ink drips from a dancer's pen

I have a chest of drawers. It is taller, taller than I am and I need to stoop to hug my grandmother on Christmas. Each drawer is inlaid with ornate designs and whorls but each design is unique, each curve and inlay completely different than the others. The top few drawers are just simple things, socks, shirts, underwear color-coded for the days of the week(monday is blood-red). However, the further you go down, the less purpose each drawer seems to have. The middle drawer is filled with polka-dotted cloth and has a paper nurse's cap, with a big red cross in the middle of it's brow. It smells overwhelmingly of crushed almonds with a slight under-note of expensive perfume. The next drawer, if you were to explore it, is somehow suffused with a pale yellow light that streams out of it and fills the room with a feeling of warmth and, somehow, a slight breeze. The only other thing in this drawer is a small, dead bird.

Now, if you were to leave here, I'd understand. This chest of drawers is only for me and, as you look for something to wear for work, I imagine you realize this search might be somewhat fruitless, but, something must've gotten the better of you and there are only three more drawers and you got some time. So, you tenatively open the next drawer, but, here is dissapointment. As in the drawer is filled with nothing, but, it is a tangiable nothing. It feels like nothing that was created, that was shaped. It feels more like the drawer was scrubbed clean rather than left empty and, in fact, you see some blood streaks on the wood grain and, in places, the varnish came up, exposing the unpolished wood underneath. This drawer makes you the most uncomfortable and you slam it close. You decide to skip all the way to the bottom, which is good, because all the next drawer holds is a bottle of pills and something terrifying, something that was once alive but was killed, destroyed.

So, in a trance, you open that last drawer and it smells like the northeastern sea. You pull a beautiful sundress out of it, patterened with chevrons and made of crepe. You picture yourself on a tall beach, the wind whipping against your dress, the thin material crushing against your body. Work calls. You turn hesitantly away from the drawer and answer the phone. You're not needed today, it turns out, and so you put the phone down and reach for the dress and pull it over your naked form, feeling how well it fits and, as you pull open the blinds, the sunlight bursts down upon you and already you start to feel yourself sweat.

sit down, girl, i think i love you

Recently I can't seem to make the right choice, if I go left, it's clear I should've gone right, if I choose to go to the bar, it's clear I shoulda stayed in. The cosmic dispensation I have been experiencing for the past couple of weeks seems to have dried up and that's enough to shake any man. So Micheal Jackson died, right? "ABC 123" is probably the best pop song of it's era, so, that's something, though I imagine that's more the work of Quincy Jones and their tyrannical father, but, stilll. Thriller is also a killer album, but, I don't think that's a very controversial statement. MJ died back in '93 when he first got accused of molesting that kid, or at least, he became more and more of a sideshow than a bankable artist and, honestly, I think the "grieving" that seems to be going on seems more like a collective sigh of relief more than anything else. Kat Williams has lost some material, that's for sure.

I have a bad case of amnesia. I forget what it's like to be younger than I am now. I mean, I am hardly a pillar of stability, but, as I brought up in my previous post, I am starting to identify certain distinct characteristics and have a more or less defined "routine". However, as I sink my toes into the luke-warm water of Atlanta social pools, I have to remind myself that it wasn't always that way and that I have to be willing to give some dispensation and patience to those still hard-scrabbling up the sheer side of adult identity. After dating primarily older, or incredibly mature, women I have to remind myself that if I wanna date for looks, that has it's downsides, namely the ability to pin them down is similiar to Nabokov's complaints about butterfly hunting. However, I think a change of tactics rather than persistence is the key here. Also, the conversation isn't exactly sparkling. I sat next to a young woman last night at the bar who preceeded to wow me with her critical and unique insights on why Paris Hilton is not someone who should be recognized as a cultural icon. While I can't say I disagree, it was like talking to an episode of the Soup circa 2001. I mean, making out with her was fun, but, the accquired phone number now seems more like an albatross than an invitation. I groggily deleted it this morning. I think that's a good choice.

It's been said newly minted lovers might as well be ghosts on this earth, etherial creatures who lose, or abandon, ties to their friends and family. Phone calls will always end in a short sounding message machine, emails will go unreturned and even unexpected run-ins will end with a distracted hand running through hair and a "I gotta go, I told her I'd meet her". Andrew Quinto had somehow gotten a passport to love's null-earth, but, he was there alone and therefore belonged to no-one. He was a good student, his teachers said, responsive to discussion and quick with an incesive comment, but, he never talked to his fellow students and always seemed irritated when he was assigned to faciliate a study group. His friends saw him often and they would describe him as charming, cynical and perhaps a little judgemental, but, never really participating past the surface of the conversation, always just skating across it's mottled surface. He almost always had a new joke or story to tell about a girl he had met and fucked, but, he never remembered names so it was always "the girl". "Andrew has a new girl", they would say. "What's her name?" A shrug and a laugh always followed and this has had become ritual, because their was never a good answer.

The true of it, however, was that Andrew Quinto was desperately in love, but, not with any one person. This woman was an amalgamum of every girl that had ever yielded herself up to him, in beds, cars, indoor tennis courts. He loved them all and never let them go, even when he stopped calling and actively avoided the neighborhoods they lived in, riding his bike a few blocks south of the block they lived on. They would cling onto him long after he had simply added them to the huge, grotesque sculpture of his love and when they would, months or years later, try to contact him, their names and faces provoked nothing but a faint feeling of accomplished work, as when an archtiect looks at a building he designed in his early career that, while technically competent, lacked a certain flair or creativity he had recently discovered. Still, love flowed through every pore of his heart and so he had a permanent residence on the shores of this distant place, a wooden bungalow swollen with sea water and memory.

Andrew sat lanconically at the end of the pool, the sun slowly roasting his fish-white skin. He had been recently adopted by a friend of his mother's, an older woman named Sam who was married to a british jew who often gave him sidelong glances of curiousity and asceribc but friendly remarks. Andrew lit a cigarette and put it between his lips, his other hand holding the top half of a Big Chief notepad. Matt looked over. "Seems like we have a budding Rimbaud over here, huh, Sam?". She looked over and smiled warmly, her brown-and-grey curls framed by the white sun. "I don't know, I'd say he looks more like Hemmingway". This interchange temporarily made Sam lift his mind from love's grasp and he blushed lightly, taking a quick drag on his cigarette. "I prefer to think of myself as a male J.K. Rowlings". As he said this, the smoke blew out of his mouth in a huge blast, escaping from his mouth with the speed of embarassment. "Ah, the writer's escape" Matt said with genuine affection and they all laughed and the two children, Ethan and Maude, looked over at the two parents and the not-parent-but-adult figure and screwed their faces up in youthful imitations of wry irritation.


TBC

through recessions and addictions

I'm finally hitting the mineral stage of adulthood. The man I thought I was gonna be, was trying to be, was trying to pointlessly avoid, to flat out run from, is the man I have started to become. I drink my coffee black, once because I was trying to impress a 32 year old beauty, now because I like it. I drink whiskey, once because I thought it'd make me more like my father, now because it's burn is normal. I smoked cigarettes to hang out with a specific group of people on my friend's porch, now I am one of those people. It's more than that, though. The regretful way I roll out of bed in the mornings, the smile that crosses my lips when someone laughs at my jokes, the way my eyes always have a sad cast to them. Those affectations, those habits we so assiusdously cultivate or fruitlessly try to prune, those are what we become and make us the people we will be till old age. I am what I am and, while there is still some flexibility in these old bones, the calcification is starting and I find myself pretty okay with that.

a good woman is hard to find

She laughed, showing off-white teeth and a massive overbite.I smiled back and it was a mirror, one of the pieces of her she lent to me. "You just need a sweet girl to back you up", she laughed again and I smiled wider, drawing circles in the air with the lit end of my cigarette. "Aw, you're all the woman I need, Mom". She smiled, a little sadly, and held onto my shoulder with one hand while her other hand drew another cigarette from the pack we had decided, after a few hours, just to share. "I wish that was true, Ben, but, you're just like your dad. You might only need your mother, but, all the girls that have and will fall in love with you don't know that". I shrugged and felt oddly angry for a second, but, I just put my hand on hers and we stared out onto the sunset.

"You're just like your dad". I couldn't get it out of my head as Ashely and I walked through the H&M, her pulling down black lace skirts and white, button-up blouses and smiling at me with every purchase, as if my presence over her shoulder had guided her to such sartorial treasures. My nerves rattled with boredom and my jaw clenched and unclenched sporadically. My hand was clammy in hers and my eyes wandered across the many women on the floor, imagining myself in their beds and the backs of their roommate's sedan. I had already sexually mastered about 20 women before she finally turned to look at me for more than a second's grin and asked, in a self-aware and falsely cheery tone, "What's that look on your face for?". I love that the English language has a habit of absorbing words and sometimes even whole phrases from other languages and calling it ours when we don't have the proper word in our toolbox. So, from au revoior to modus operandi, why the fuck couldn't we have the french phrase for "I've already cheated on you 30 times today in my head and you asking me such an asinine question you know you won't get a straight answer for is annoying because the redhead behind you looks like she's going to go downstairs to menswear and I wanna get a good look at her face before I fuck her in her room while the dvd menu for The Life Aquatic plays ceaseslessly in the background". I'm sure it'd be something classy and sophisticated sounding, something that would allow her some dignity and perhaps, with a certain wry inevitability, move herself slightly to the left to afford me the view. Such as it is, I have to content myself with "What look?" and a barely masked sigh of disapointment.

hard to say

not talking to her makes my ventricles seize and my blood run sluggish. my eyes water and my hands shake and i feel cold. these days, i don't do too much. my body is active, i am locomotive, i don't see the inside of my new place too often, but, my mind is always with her and it'd probably be difficult to center myself, but, i rarely try. i guess you could say i was lonely, but, i'm not sure what that means honestly. i've almost always been alone and never seemed to have any trouble coping with it, but, this feeling of solitude is different, unwanted. i see her, from time to time, and it catches my breath, the oxygen halting in the back of my throat and making me choke on nothing. i've tried dating her lesser phantasams, what nabokov would call her "haidmaidens" but they either ignore me or my body rejects them as it would a rotten heart transplant.

all them beautiful guls

The general straightened his tie, ran a hand through his thinning hair. There was a press conference to attend, a public to assure.


He saddled up to the bar and ordered, a smile plastered.


He touched her hair and she smiled in the same way.

I guess it's all really the same.