Hate The Post, Not The Poster.

Sorry I'm the worst blogger in the world. Real post coming soon. Until then, enjoy some pseudo-discourse hilarity from Good Magazine. Yeesh.

I'm such a Liar.

I know EXACTLY why, when I woke up at 6:15 this morning, I couldn't get back to sleep.

Read This

No seriously, read this. It's adorable.

Belabored Behavior

From the short story I'm working on:

His curly, dark bangs fell in front of his eyes and he wrote the words across the bottom of the page in an elegant, sweeping script. He dressed like a boy from a century ago. His trousers were the color of cold fireplace ashes. His shoes were of a simple, leather oxford style and suspenders left a trace beneath his scratchy wool cardigan. His shirt was not gingham but it made one think of the word. The frames of his glasses here heavy, round and wire. Literature majors sometimes called him “that young Dickensian” and he heard this sometimes with pleasure. He packed his leather folio and tucked it beneath a willowy arm on his way down the stairs and out into the April chill. He swung his free arm into his peacoat, and reached into a pocket, feeling at a bag of tobacco and an elaborate cellular phone.

I Get Paid For This...But Not By You

Well, normally you’d have had at least two posts in this stretch of time. I’ve been up to other creative endeavors lately. For one thing, I rearranged my apartment and cleaned it pretty thoroughly. There’s something genetically latent in me that just loves walking into a clean apartment at the end of the day. I’ve been getting my recycle/green/hippy thing on and taking all these disposable plastic bags I’ve got saved, cutting them into rectangles and then ironing them together 5 or 6 sheets thick. Then I iron three of the sides together, flip the whole bag inside out and (*TA DA!*) it’s a tote-bag. Well, it’s a tote bag once I fashion and attach a strap from a larger, heavier-duty bag by ironing it into the seams. If that was all a little hard to follow, I’ll post pictures of ‘em soon enuff. They come out quite nice, actually.

I’ve done a bit of baking, though I’m a tad behind in that department. I made what I affectionately call “grown up” bread last week. It’s made from whole wheat flour, a cup of Guinness and a cup of strong coffee. It tastes like grown-up things. I made some mediocre raisin-bran muffins and pawned them off on my friends heading down to N. Carolina for the week. They loved them and I only ate 3 or 4 of them myself. Then, on Sunday night, I finished off my giant bag-o-raisins and made some really delicious oatmeal-cinnamon-raisin bread. I think John dubbed it “breakfast bread” and I’m incline to run with that moniker. I’m scared to bake anything else cuz I ate just about all that damn breakfast bread by myself and now feel like a fatty. However, I anticipate some more bran-muffins this weekend and maybe some chocolate chip cookies when my girls get back from the shore.

I have friends who go to the shore! How east-coast of me.

I met a girl coming up on two weeks ago now who was very interesting. Gonna be an Emerson senior next year. Literature major. From the south. Raised by a fundy pastor dad and now an atheist. Spent the better part of a drunken hour trying to convince me to smoke pot with her. Smart and fascinating, but we were pretty clearly about different stuff. Still, took her on a date last Thursday and had a damn good time. Stayed out late and talked and talked. I offered a second date a few days ago and she didn’t return my call. Probably for the best, since I was gonna let her know I wasn’t interested in romantic thing and that we were in different places and blah, blah, blah, lets just be friends.

Come to think of it…she lives in East Boston. Like, bumble-F East Boston. Yeah, even as friends, this never had a chance.

BTW, all the pictures in this post are ones I took myself. I’m finally getting that digital camera I got for Christmas some use. How embarrassing.

What I’m…

Reading: All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Watching: Friends With Money (Film, 2007)
Wearing: American Eagle skinny-ish jeans, Thrift-store button down, H&M cotton sweater, Black on Black Chucks
Working On: A short story about hipsters and professors.

Futurisms' Lazy Lawn Language

The spring-time soil pressed its moisture through the blades of grass and into the fibers of my shirt, its sleeves rolled up to the elbow and long un-tucked about the waist. I tried to stare at the dimming sky and roiling birds returning from their winter-time somewhere. I tried to be with the atmosphere and not wonder what bugs were crawling into my hair or if the grass was staining these new khakis. Christ, I thought, I never wear khakis and now I’m on my back in the grass and it’s getting colder and wetter every second. I pushed my toes through the sod and thanked God for His interminable patience. Patience for things that grow quickly, like grass and patience for things that grow slowly, like me.

Nearly everyone had left by now. The evanescent cloud of mesquite, carnal air had since been blown off by the June-evening breeze. Little sculptures of bones and corn-cobs and silverware wore skirts of paper napkins on dance-floors of paper plates. A sub-note of cigarette smoke cut through the chill and polyphonic voices swatted the days events back and forth. Who had shared glances with whom. What so-and-so said about so-and-so’s new such-and-such. The clatter of plates and the splash of dish water and the understated barks of a dog in search of scraps. Now and then a balloon would lose its tenuous life and the voices would chirp and then cascade in laughter.

This prone posture was really a stratagem and a retaliation. Retaliation for the beautiful decorations and the lovely food and the conspiratorial smiles. She’d spent most of the party perched on her sofa with the terrier, scratching behind its ears and singing quietly along with the records. She would venture up to greet those arriving and bid two-kissed farewells to those parting. She spent only 20 minutes in the sun, in an ancient lawn chair watching young men in straw hats and suspenders play badminton in pale, be-soiled bare-feet. Now I’d swiped a sweating bottle of champagne and two maybe-clean glasses and was not-so-subtly waiting for her to come and see why I was sprawled beneath the elm in her yard.

Three weeks ago, we drove to the beach and I complained about sand and she dipped the edge of her dress in the skim and surf. Her eyes were smokily made up and hollowed me at a glance. Her bracelets clattered pleasantly while she regaled me with tales of galleries and underground music and the ways New York was the center of God’s own universe. I clutched my sandals, realized this day had to end and contemplated hurling myself from the lighthouse. She inspired extremity in all of us and obviously pretended not to notice.

The screen door wheezed and rattled. I craned my head over back to see. The inverse form of her and her dress, all pink and lines and angles, meandered through cluttered tables towards me. She swiped a whithering peony from the last table and planted it behind her ear.

“What is all this?” she inquired, sweeping a hand lazily across her field of view. I just smiled and looked up. She toed her sandals from her feet and descended, cross-legged, to my side. I did my best to pour the glasses of champagne suavely and without looking. I only spilled most of it and she laughed an absent laugh. I reached into the breast pocket of my shirt and found a small yellow note with a bit of glue across one edge. I’d written something in my neatest hand on it. I stuck it to her forehead gently and held out my other fist, closed around two small treasures.

“Can I read it or do I have to walk around like this all day?” she asked, lightly touching the spot it was stuck to above her brows. I nodded and breathed her smell through both nostrils. She plucked the note from her face and I brushed the bangs from her eyes. I opened my other hand and let the sun play off the polished metal rings. The eyes that always stared at you steadily and with casual self-certainty darted for a rare moment. Darted from my hand to the note in her own and back. She pressed her lips to mine.

“It is, isn’t it?”

We just watched the trees sway for a long time. The cigarette smoke would wander between us and the after-party chat would linger at the edge of attention at moments. The dog would scratch at the screen and the champagne would run out. I never did get those grass stains out.

Futurisms' Roadside Revisionism

The three-decade-old leather seats were cracked and discolored with sun-bleached striations. The foam rubber headrest was crumbling where it stood most exposed to rolled-up-window temperatures. I’d sometimes find bits of it in my hair at night, like oversized novelty dandruff. I’d cut out the ceiling upholstery somewhere east of Omaha. Creeping, two–dimensional stalagmites of rust clawed in miniature rusty fingers at the metal panels of the old Volvo wagon. The air conditioning had been fucked since just outside of Gary. The left rear window since the late 90’s. A lurid and half-peeled Jane’s Addiction sticker would sometimes reflect a sharp beam of sun into my eyes at inopportune moments. Mountain-pass switchback roads, mostly.

Heading west, every color outside that $900 stack of Swedish steel burst like the Fourth of the July. It seemed like my life was earth-toned and the entire earth was life-toned. When I’d glance down to pull the water-warped road atlas from my drab shoulder bag on the passenger seat, it’s like the universe would snap from Imax, Blue-ray vivid to sepia-toned nostalgia and back, just with the dip of my gaze. I was wrapped in an ocean of beige-volvo boring, but everything that waited beyond this car was color-fast floral-print wonder. Heading west, I only listened to music that I liked a decade too late. I spent three days cycling through cassettes from bins at the Village Discount on Milwaukee. Alice in Chains. That band with the Bumble-Bee-Girl in their video.

Taped to the driver’s-side pillar was a Polaroid instant with the words “Soon Enuff” swirled in an elegant but exaggerated hand across the white beam at the bottom. The image was dark and yellowed and candle lit. On the back, a stamp and an address and a postal-code. When I was almost there, sitting in insufficient-infrastructure traffic, I’d flick it nervously. When no one answered the door at the apartment at the address on the back, I’d tape it to the door handle and trusted in God and adhesive and fate. But for now, I’d just try to stay awake on highway-hypnotic stretches of American dreams. I’d listen to dead men sing and wonder if their children ever listened to their music. Where do the people who work in those little highway towns really live, anyway?

“I’m sure there’s nothing about you I don’t already understand,” she’d said, leaning away from me against a flat black barroom wall, “and I’m sure you already think I’m wrong.” I laughed and she just stared at me, with something almost not quite unlike a smile on her face. She handed her empty glass to a passing bar-back and wiped her hand on her jeans. She pressed a folded napkin into my left pants pocket.

“It’s okay,” she confided just an inch from my ear, “I don’t like surprises.”

I’d dream about her sometimes. Heroic, absurd dreams about the things she must do between Saturday nights. As alluring and marvelous as the real girl was, the dream-girl was more so. Almost too much. A person I would watch and forget it was me watching. Someone who spiraled through the world, part pretty pin-wheel, part errant table-saw blade careening through a place narrow on either side. I was driving to her as much to demythologize the dreams as I was to reclaim some remembered reality.

I drove through the crushing fauna and the crowd of mountains to the shore. Everything natural looks more natural by the ocean. Anything built looks worn out. The people all feel in between, caught in the preternatural saline air that lends one the gravitas of geology and the malleability of the weather. I took my shoes off and left the car unlocked. I meandered over rough pavement and across the sea wall, eventually settling into the coarse sand with my back to the oceanic wind. Tomorrow I would call someone and find a place to stay. Tonight I’d sleep on the beach and try to let the cold keep me from oversized dreams.