birthday musings

I'm not opposed to the passage of time. I don't dread the creeping, ticking dial of one year adding to the next. As I have no desire to die at this particular moment, I'll gladly accept the advancing year with a wry smile.

I like assuming the adding wisdom and poise I like to think gathers around my person the moment my birthday strikes at midnight. My soul feels heavier, and I equate this added weight with experience and maturity, and in no way see it as some fabrication of my imagination.

I like surrounding myself with those closest to me come celebration time. For years, I've boycotted parties. I'd rather spend the day with those that know me best, who demand no show from me. A documented tale of birthdays past chart very intimate gatherings. Nothing garish or forced. I am nothing on my birthday if not relaxed. This particular birthday has departed from the pattern in necessity. I am surrounded by acquaintances and near-friends. I spent yesterday alone, celebrating on my terms.

I'm balancing between bemused anxiety and existential brooding. Perhaps it's my recent series of life changes. Perhaps it's feeling the slow sting of adulthood. Perhaps it's realizing how lonely I really have been. Perhaps it's realizing that I have accomplished all I had hoped I would at this point. Perhaps it's the fact that my life plan stopped here and I have a hell of a lot to figure out from tomorrow on.



Regardless, happy twenty-fifth.

but i'll admit that i was glad it was over

Woke one morning, free. No thought how long the change went unnoticed. No scenes haunting or conversations echoing. No reverberating regrets. Just silence. 

But I'll admit that I was glad it was over. Now you're just somebody that I used to know.

And I hope I'm just somebody that you used to know.

unintentional innuendo

work chat. brilliantly uncomfortable for all parties. all because i was sipping a coke.

male work-associate: is vanilla coke so much better than regular coke?

me: yes. 

so certain are you
yes. 

well, i guess that settles it
it does. 

i guess me question is: i was never a coke guy, but does is the vanilla taste way different?

yes. 

what do you usually drink?

because this is nectar. no lie. 

sprite

i tend to obey my thirst

lame joke?

maybe

gross. 

to the drink AND the joke. 

yeah, i tried

sometime, you need to pour me a little drop of it into a cup

i want to sample your nectar

whoa!

that sounded messed up

so sorry

whoa. that's actionable. 

really

did not mean it like that

coming attraction: sexual harassment seminar. 

next week. 

huh

well, some time let me have some vanilla coke

that's all

nothing else implied

and that is the end of this ill-fated and somewhat ill-conceived conversation

fair enough. 


fin. 

i don't want to loose myself.

I have before, but don't plan to now.

one more word from gilda radner

I can always be distracted by love, but eventually I get horny for my creativity.

a word from gilda radner

I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.

to be a person is to have a story to tell.

I love stories. I love hearing the personalized, fractioned portions of human experience told with unfiltered honesty. I found these two stories tonight. Neither are particularly happy, per se, but both are honest. Both stories have been carried. Perhaps some fragmented peace comes by the telling.

danny and annie


germans in the woods

To be a person is to have a story to tell. Isak Dinesen.

if only....

slow art of decay

I was given a rose for valentine's day. typical. It is still in a vase on my nightstand. atypical.

The first thirty-six hours of my possession went well. Said rose was red. Said rose was sweet-smelling. Kind (albeit temporary) pleasures of my dismembered rose bush member. Decay was always inevitable.

Petals still intact. Wrinkled now, submissive. Stem half black half green, have resigned half mulish. I could throw rose away, but let's not rush this.  

forgotten untitled attempts

I watch mountains. Not close
where inconsistency suggests imperfection.
I watch mountains distantly.
Blue, illusively perfect.


You tore into me
              and left
leaving me to gather
what remains
of my guard.

the pull of entropy

I am a notoriously infrequent writer. Notorious to myself, if to no one else. I start writing creatively only to drop it. Or critique it into oblivion. Or forget about its existence full stop. Or in those rarest of instances where I finally write something I'm even marginally proud of, I hide it. I'm very crafty, you see. I have many hiding places. 

I didn't always hide; I was braver before. In my first year of middle school I would write poetry, often. I would dig into whatever recesses existed in my twelve-year-old mind and share my finding with full classrooms without the reserve and embarrassment I would somehow adopt a few months later. Confidence failed, typical of adolescence, I suppose, and poetry failed suit. 

Perhaps I should make amends with the past. 

In an uncharacteristic play on consistency, I intend to write more. Openly. What follows I expect will be both unique and quite mundane. My thoughts, attempts, frustrations, fragmented memories—my disorganized matter. I cannot promise art. I can hardly promise readability, coherency, or logic. I can only promise honesty. 

hated is blind, as well as love. thanks, oscar wilde.

Valentine's day must get picked on by all the other holidays. Or at least by half of them.

I have no qualms with valentine's day. I don't stomp around cursing old lovers or mow down passing couples with well-aimed death stares. I don't comfort-binge. I don't rant. But I don't bedazzle myself with v-day red and pink either.

I've never quite understood the divergent armies that seem to gather around mid-February. On one side of the holiday, an over-armed/under-dressed child-creature gains temporary deity status and love abounds. by law. On the other extreme, "love" becomes an expletive, a 24-hour dirty word that will ruin the party for any "singles awareness" participant.

I think extreme responses to one day is exhausting. Enjoy if you want, ignore, if you please.

Don't bury the world in conversation-heart romance.

Don't begrudge the love.

Truce?

the ten commandments of detective fiction

1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.
8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

Thank you, Ronald Knox. Always a pleasure. 

sometimes bulimia is the healthiest option

I am regretting the night's activities. Harmless movie followed by harmful consumption.

Fast food always seems like such a good idea at the time, but regret almost always follows. (Why do I forget that regret almost always follows?) Poor decisions put me in a slightly urgent state of moral dilemma: Do I complacently allow my body digest the large side of cow and harvest of potatoes I was too foolish to deny--resulting in a drastically reduced lifespan filled with obesity, heart disease, and self-loathing? Or do I just have up with it all?

It's an interesting evening when you realize that developing an eating disorder may be a strategic advancement up the rungs of the health ladder.

i still need you but i don't want you now

The video? Disregard.

The music? Embrace.

planning the metaphorical winter of my life.

Periodically, I feel old. Really old. This, as I am fully aware, is utter lunacy. I am young. I have not lived a quarter of a century. (I am youngish. I have lived almost a quarter of a century.)

Today, however, I found the perfect combatant to prematurely inappropriate thoughts of age. Courtesy of Sigur Ros.

I don't have a five-year plan. I don't have a ten-year plan. My one-year plan is terrifyingly vague. But rest assured my 45-year plan is solid, complete with firecrackers, dirt clods, and a wooden sword.

Not Crazy

Sometimes I think I need to clarify my current standing in the world. Despite several suggestions to the contrary, I am deeming myself sane.

It was a close call, though. I'm not going to pretend the jury had an easy go of it. Of late, I have been a bit neurotic, insecure, and, well, some other things which just are not me. Characteristically. Tonight, though, was a good night. I snapped out of my delirium (or at least a large portion of. No one wants to be completely free of delirium). Verdict in: not crazy.

Congratulate me.

Ice Dance

Escape, if only temporarily.

This weekend, I went with a group to tidy a local cemetery. Rake leaves, enjoy the weather, that sort of scenario. We worked for a productive couple hours, and by the end produced clear headstones and taunting leave piles as proof of our efforts. As we were concluding our part and preparing to return home, however, we were met with the surreal: a gust of wind. Like technicolored snowflakes, leaves simultaneously leapt from the surrounding trees and poured from sky to ground. Any indication that we had spent the previous hours clearing the grounds instantly disappeared. It was delicious irony.

The moment the winds began, I could hear the insulted complaints of those around me. To them, the wind had no sense of propriety, no consideration.

To me, the wind was a perfect conclusion.

I looked above--saw the leaves gather and fall--and danced.

I may sound comically juvenile, but my mind instantly played a piece from Edward Scissorhands. I heard the music, I saw the snow, and though I was surrounded by falling leaves, I danced in it.

Perhaps it's the impending pressure of my future career. Perhaps it's the threat of adult responsibilities looming over the rising months. Perhaps it's dealing with the aftermath of death. Perhaps it's simply the stress that comes from living each day and finding the energy to maintain steady breaths. No matter the need for the moment, it came. The escape was transitory, it was temporary, but it was perfect.

Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

Let four captains
Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royal; and, for his passage,
The soldiers' music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

Halmet, Act V, Scene II

In time, I will write much about the past week. But not today, not tonight. My mind can't make sense of what it insists on seeing.

I feel the coarse flag under my fingertips, hear the military commands, the rifles. I keep seeing the same white ranks filing past row after row after row after row. White over rolling hills. Pristine lines. Always called to attention. It's the white, I suppose, which denies my sleep.

But not yours. Sleep well, Phillip. Your brothers shot for you.

semper fi

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,

Shoulder-high we bring you home,

And set you at your threshold down,

Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay,

And early though the laurel grows

It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut

Cannot see the record cut,

And silence sounds no worse than cheers

After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout

Of lads that wore their honours out,

Runners whom renown outran

And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,

The fleet foot on the sill of shade,

And hold to the low lintel up

The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head

Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,

And find unwithered on its curls

The garland briefer than a girl's.

To an Athlete Dying Young

A. E. Housman