status

what is my status? cuss and/or bless the apparatus. discuss and address the (lack of) progress. assess any success. express distress. if necessary confess when you transgress, but do not digress from the status.

less

this is looking less and less like a fling and more and more like the things that people wait for and write about and make lives from and dance beneath over-sized white christmas lights draped over canopies in the summer evenings.

this is starting to look like love.

less.

"One less, today, than last week."
"That's the way it goes."
"I just wish I could reach more of them. These kids, they're in their prime, but religion isn't relevant to them anymore."
"That's because there are crazies out there painting those of us who take it seriously as fundamentalists."
"And we're not."
"No. And we never have been. But most of the world, they just don't get it."
"And they never have."
"I stopped believing in religion a long time ago, you know?"
"Yeah, but that never stopped you believing in God."

less

the more and less i think about the gravy that soaks reality, i realize -paradoxically- that i cannot simultaneously think more and less about the same subject. …but i have been thinking both ways at once.

vague

"Listen to this. Marcy comes over and she tells me that her ex-boyfriend was over late last night and 'yada yada yada I'm really tired today.' You don't think she'd yada yada sex?"
"I've yada yada'd sex."
"Really?"
"Yeah. I met this lawyer, we went out to dinner, I had the lobster bisque, we went back to my place, yada yada yada, I never heard from him again."
"But you yada yada'd over the best part."
"No, I mentioned the bisque."
- George, Elaine, and Jerry, in "The Yada Yada"

Oh, thank GOD for The Yada. Vagueness has never been so fun and so easy.

I worship The Yada. Call me a Yada-ist.

vague

vagueness steps through the open-ended memory of faulted fissures. i can't remember exactly what it was. was it what i remember or did i overwrite serrated experiences with false recollections of honey and lilacs? sometimes i can't quite tell, and that uncertainty is enough to bitter the honey and wilt the lilacs in my mind.

faint

The hot young doctor that I saw today, Dr. Bossenberger, had the faint smell of Old Spice cologne.

Suddenly he wasn't so hot anymore.

He smelled like my grandpa.

Faint

I thought I was going to faint today. I was at sword team practice sparring with Derek. He had a poleaxe, I had a staff. I deflected his poleaxe upwards to get in close to hit him with my staff, but he swung the butt of the axehandle right into my throat. The non-padded butt of the weapon, mind you. I have pictures if anyone wants them. I thought I was going to faint. It hurt a lot.

faint

faint. I say the small speck of intellect is faintly understood when you speak. your voice not necessarily weak, but the ideas supported poorly.

faint

there is a faint hint of sex in the air. i smelled it the second i walked into the room. the question is, really... was it stemming from anticipation or previous engagement?

with my luck... well.

sigh.

wind

like a jack-in-the-box
people keep winding me up
and winding
and winding
and winding
and winding
and
winding
and
winding
and
winding
until

*POP*

i flip my lid.

wind

swirl and whirl about my body. lash and thrash clothes like a whip. peel and seel eyelids back. roll and pull tears along the temple to the back of the head where they collide and trade salty kisses.

morning

when I meet you in the morning near the rattling refrigerator let us not work around each other like I'm a dishwasher and you're a toaster. let us pause and touch and kiss and remember that we exist in togetherness.

Stereo

The stereo blaring in the background, the world around me is at a stand still. Here I sit in my little dorm room with nothing to do on a Sunday night, wondering why I'm not out partying with my new friends, or practicing like a good music student should. Oh yeah, thats right, I'm a slacker. My stereo plays on...

stereo

I think of Joni Mitchell's song, "You Turn Me On, I'm A Radio", especially this part:

Oh honey you turn me on
I'm a radio
I'm a country station
I'm a little bit corny
I'm a wildwood flower
Waving for you
Broadcasting tower
Waving for you

And I'm sending you out
This signal here
I hope you can pick it up
Loud and clear
I know you don't like weak women
You get bored so quick
And you don't like strong women
'Cause they're hip to your tricks

Yeah, I know. Radio, stereo... whatever.

I've been in a Joni Mitchell mood big time lately. Thought I'd share.

K, I'm going back to my paints.

Stereo.

"Yeah? Well, Bush sent us to war and invaded three countries while in office!"
"Yeah? Well, Kerry's not running on any sort of platform, except that he's not Bush!"
"Yeah? Well, if you don't support Bush, you're not supporting our boys and girls in uniform!"
"Yeah? Well, if you don't vote for Kerry, you're just sending more Americans to die over there!"
"Yeah? Well, I heard that Kerry doesn't deserve his medals!"
"Yeah? Well, I heard that Bush never actually served!"
"You suck!"
"No, you suck!"

Ignorance in stereo. Hot.

stereo

stereo... I swear that "stereo" is not a real word. it's a hallucination of a figment of a fragment of half a syllable. but truly, are not all word naught but abstract specters of thought? I believe but when I conceive to transmit you do not receive the entirety of what I perceive.

reach

I've been reaching for things all my life. Like Tantalus, just when I am close to touching what I aspire, it becomes out of my grasp again. Also, like Tantalus, my exact crime is unknown (well, unbeknownst to me, anyway).

Lately I haven't been around here much because my life has been hectic. A rather tumultuous August ended on an upswing, followed by a chaotic first week of September, but now that September is settling in, today I find my usual unquiet mind and body in an eerie state of contentment.

Many things in my life are positive right now. I should be obtaining both a Bachelor's Degree and a Masters Degree within the next two years. I have several projects; work is going well. School is going so smoothly (so far) it's ridiculous. Though the state of the world is beyond absolute insanity, and it leaves an ulcer of despair in my heart from compassion, things in my own world, as busy as they are ... for once are falling in place.

My long creative dry spell has been saturated by tears. I am taking more pictures. I am rediscovering some of my favorite old music. I am laughing. I am smiling. I am dancing with children.

I am writing again.

Perhaps the curse of Tantalus has been lifted from my pilgrimage.

"... Your cleverest poets ... deny food and drink to Tantalus, merely because he was a good man and inclined to share with his friends the immortality bestowed on him by the gods. And some of them hang stones over him, and rain insults of a terrible kind upon this divine and good man; and I would much rather that they had represented him as swimming in a lake of nectar, for he regaled men with that drink humanely and ungrudgingly ... But we must not suppose that he was really the victim of the gods' dislike ..." [Flavius Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana 3.25]

reach

I extend my hand of hairy self-love unto myself and I stop-pause-think-play-skip: I need to shave my palms. They are stubbly from too much… If I don't love myself, who will?

reach

reach for the starz and then pull them down and smother them in your hands. crush all of the light and love out of them, soak up all the heat and fire and try to make it your own. steal the beauty and power of the sky and ride it straight into that fucking black hole.

blanket

blanket. toss the blanket on and on and on until the end has devoured the beginning and I'm wrapped up tight, like a human burrito. i feel safe and secure now.

dusk

that moment, brief as it is, when the world decides it's time for bed, yet like a child refuses to surrender to it's sleep deprived state.

dusk

and the sun goes down around us and the lines of twilight brighten and sharpen all the pain and lust we feel for each other but more importantly for ourselves and we somehow mistake this...

for love.