Oracular Observation (or "Obfuscating Via Octahedron")

This gray, paralytic restlessness has fallen on me and my neighborhood. Spending whole days beneath the fluorescent lights of a stark and joyless conference room is not helping. If I had to do this job seven days a week…well, I’d quit, is what I’d do.

I just really want to do summery things and this weather is SO not cooperating.

Let’s go to the beach. Have an elaborate picnic. The kind where everyone dresses in their finest and lightest summer clothes. Let someone absently strum a guitar. Let’s just sit in the sun and be quietly reverent of how breath-taking-ly beautiful it all is.

Sometimes I fantasize about spending a whole paycheck on an old Volvo station wagon and just disappearing into America for a week. See if I could eat and sleep on our United friendliness. Maybe see if churches would take us in, introduce us to their hospitable deacons and elders and such. I’d fill my camera with pictures. I’d get an e-mail address or a phone number in every county. Make instant travel friends.

Or take the bus to New York and spend the whole day bouncing from diner to diner, drinking coffee and eating French fries and chatting with waitresses and regulars. Writing down their stories. Watching them watch me watch them. Looking at place-mat doodles and olympic rings of coffee stains.

Or we crowd around a living room and open the windows to the hot night air and recline in conversation. The room careens with laughter. Or pulls taught with argument. Or glows with admiration and praise. I won’t drink the wine, but I’ll ask if its any good.

Instead, I’ll hope for the just-right latte. And the motivation to push on through the pages of this book. And a moment where I’m sure that being unsure doesn’t do any good. I’ll hunch my shoulders against the gray. I’ll smile an almost-smile. And I’ll say my prayers.

“Everyone crawls in quicksand the same.”

“Are you still a mess?”

The new Mars Volta album is almost…relaxing? Go buy it.

Also, if you’ve never received a hand-written letter from Mari, you really haven’t lived.

Where Is Our Fanciful Futurism?

The linoleum is cold and plastic and awful. It hasn't been mopped in...well, a while, so its gritty with crumbs and a little sticky in spots. Four minutes have gone by and I'm pressing the handle down on the french press, with bleary-eyed diligence. Preternatural quiet. 50 grams of just-ground Trader Joes something or other. 30 ounces of just-not-quite boiling water. The black pours itself through its own cloud of steam in the early spring morning cold. Those fucking boilers...


Traversing the interior threshold from linoleum to hardwood, the steady pad of my feet weaves around the boards I know tend to creak. There's another I ought not to wake. The floorboards are just as cold, but worn softer with the years. More pleasant beneath my toes. The books are already stacked on the sill of the tall windows facing the street. Beside the works, on one side, are the sunflowers I keep in a copper vase and, on the other, the magnolias she keeps in an empty wine bottle. The curtains hang around them all like wedding veils. I lift them and kiss the texts with my fingertips, pulling today's old, dead friend. The mug, sitting beside the stack of tomes, steams the pane of glass in a conical opaqueness.


Wrapped in an afghan blanket from the first time I lived in this city, against the opening volley of cold from a tired leather sofa, I sip and read and stare at the street. A few folks trundle through the cold towards a days labor. A neighbor walks a dog. Too early still for school children. I pencil in a note or two. Underline here and there. I'll open my computer in another place. I can read in this spot, but never write. Couldn't tell you why.


I don't hear her steps, but I do hear the bedroom door creak and scrape across the surface of the floor just a little. I smile and, for a moment, don't read the words my eyes pass over. As I feel her breath on the skin behind my ear only a second before she presses her lips in the same spot, I stare at that photo of her from the lake so many months ago. A strand of her hair falls across my neck. I grin and tilt my head, revealing and yielding more of the tender skin of my neck to her kiss. She obliged, pressing her cheek into the hallow between ear and shoulder. I crane and twist back to look up at her, still sleepy-eyed, but smiling, arms folded.

"You always think I won't hear you. You think you can grind coffee on the back porch and it won't wake me up."


I laugh and she winds around to sit across my lap. She's only wearing a t-shirt and socks, with just the glimpse of boyish underwear peaking out. Its a t-shirt that, the first time I saw her wear it, we lived a thousand miles away. A t-shirt I could never wear again once she'd claimed it without knowing she'd claimed it. She curled in my lap like a cat intent on keeping me from my work, her arms around my neck and nose pressed to my nose.

"Let's bundle up and see the tigers today."


She knows I've got to work. She knows I need so much to read and to write and grade papers and... but she'll talk to the tigers and hold my hand and smile at me when I laugh at her one-sided conversations.

The evening's warmth will be my opportunity to read in peace, after dinner, while she gardened. The rest was too sacred to sully with responsibilities.