Living The (Ancestral) Dream

So, it really does just come down to genetics and accidents of history. *Shrug* Meh.

Pushing @ Alpha

Eventually, I'm going to need to get a mathematics education.
(Thanks to Steve for showing this to Emily. Thanks to Emily for showing this to me.)

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.

He Has Dreams, Like I Do

About dancing:

Sometimes I even close my eyes. Other times, because I forgot a bandana to tie my bangs out of my eyes, my sweat-slick hair whips across my glasses, so that it's like I've been crying in front of my glasses, and not behind. Then I don't even need to close my eyes. I just let them wash in unfocus, my peripherals used to prevent collisions.

But it always starts a little more tentative; a little less in general. Feet together, head bobbing and shoulders rolling side to side. Getting the feel. Finding the beat. Remembering the steps. Remembering to forget that people watch and smirk and judge. Learning all over again how to just trust the music's instructions. Its little cues and set ups. Its mini surprises and pseudo conclusions.

And most nights, I get going a little, take a break, enjoy a song, goof off with friends, and maybe even dance with someone novel. I've been the guy kissing a stranger on the dance floor. That's happened. That's kind of thrilling.



But the best nights are the nights where I'm alone in a room full of people. The nights when for 20 or 30 minutes, even an hour, I get into tribal-rain-dance mode. When I peyote-vision-quest that shit for song after song, except without the peyote or the desert. It's when I lift my head from my feet and the floor and avoiding eye contact with non-dancers of all stripes. When I lift my head and smile and look at nothing and let my body wind and bounce and shift improvisationally, mysteriously in tension with what's been and what is about to be.

And I smile. I just grin pleasantly to no one in particular. And I try to lose all my gravity and keep my balance all at once.

Who Do You Trust?

Jump to about 4:19 and listen through till 8:19. Four minutes of AWESOME.

I count the days to find / what was left behind. / Only these names I clutch / will lead me to my home. / Somehow this river marks / a wrinkle hand in mine / and everyday that parts / the water into two. / Mothers and feathers start / to drown the living proof. / I can’t remember these lakes of blood. / Wrapped in a blanketl, / there sweats a cut.

A Picture's Worth a Couple of Words

Um, awesome.



Well, shit.

Sorry Mom, But I'm A Man Now

So, after that other thing self-destructed with greater finality, I find myself...well, a little lonely. Moreover, I feel a little guilty about feeling a little lonely. I've got a bunch of friends that, at any given moment, at least one of them wants to hang out or get coffee or what-have-you. And its not like we're just acquaintances with little in common or a lack of emotional availability. We talk about just about everything. Especially our feelings, struggles, questions, etc. They're great. Really.



But there's this other thing. This...I dunno, romantic thing, right? Erotic thing, I guess? Though I mean that in a rather proper sense...not at the exclusion of that "other" sense, either. Its that "I'm approaching my mid-twenties and I'd like some companionship but its hard finding someone you're compatible with who's in a similar life station and also feels the same way about you" difficulty that a million tv series and movies are all about. So, I guess I should take comfort in the normality of all this.



So, anyways, I'm just trying to keep my eyes open and make myself available, though I am feeling a little gun-shy after that other thing. And I've been cramming my life with cuteness and beauty and loveliness where-ever I can (as you all might have noticed from the photo-tastic posts of late). I'd just like to meet a girl who nests into this lovely life I've got for myself these days. Someone to bake for and go on picnics with and snuggle next to on sofas. Someone to dance with and sing to. That kinda stuff, ya know?



Its like that other girl got all these boy-friend-y motors running and now I'm just idling in the parking lot. *sigh*

Who wants a blueberry muffin?