Recently in Diary Category

1) I was to fly out to San Diego later that night for work. It would've been my first time in California (I have yet to go). I went in to the office to gather some things to take with me. On the way in, I heard NPR sayings something about a plane crashing into the Pentagon. I thought very little of it until I arrived in my office to my mother calling and asking was I okay - and then saying she needed to get off the phone when the second plane hit the other WTC tower (not the actual sequence of events, but the way she and I experienced it). Naively (I realize now), I still packed my stuff thinking I would make it to San Diego before midnight.

2) I leave work after alarms go off at the Monarch Tower in Buckhead - a supposed bomb threat. The parking lot is jammed with people wanting to get out. All emergency protocol is thrown aside as we are fearing that our building may be attacked to. Ironic that the naivete that made me think I may be able to fly out to California later that day did not come into play when reckoning with the likelihood of my own office being attacked.

3) Fat and tired, as I was much of the time in those years, I made it home in the late morning. I called Kathy and she said she would be home a little later. I started drinking whiskey and coke.

4) Kathy would arrive and Tommy T., our contractor friend - staying in an extended stay - would later arrive. Tommy brought scotch. We would tire of watching the video footage on CNN, but could not bring ourselves to change the channel. We would get drunk.

I guess on the last day on Earth, if I knew it as such, I would do something similar, but with a lighter heart probably.

5) Suzanne D. and her friend would call from California saying their flight back from Napa had been cancelled. They were laden with wine purchased on their tour and needed to figure a way to get back. They would eventually drive across the country (probably not the way they had hoped to do the Great American Road Trip) until flight stoppage was relaxed and they were in Oklahoma City. They came back home with various great wines after purchasing plastic sheeting and lots of tape, to strange looks from the Wal-Mart clerk, in Oklahoma. We would later have a wine tasting where I learned to adequately stick my snout in the glass to fully experience the wine, and how to awkwardly aerate the wine for full flavor.

6) I would worry about my friends in Chicago, who had moved there just a couple of months earlier. They were fine.

7) My British friend Robert, an atheist, would write telling me that his country felt for our country and was saying a prayer for us.

8) I remembered my time in high school when I went to the WTC and stood on the enclosed observation deck, scared to go any higher. I would think about how I would never go back there.

9) In subsequent days I would hear David Letterman say that such religious fundamentalism made absolutely no sense - drawing parallels in my mind to the conservative Christian rhetoric that had come to dominate U.S. public discourse at that time. I would watch more news reports where it seemed that the only good thing that had come out of this was that it had brought us all together as a nation. The crime rate dropped briefly. People met new neighbors. We weren't afraid to cry.

10) One year after I would be in the midst of deciding whether to move to Vermont or stay in Atlanta. Kathy (of the getting home late on 9/11) would already be there. Robert (of the British prayers) would arrive for his, at the time, annual trip. We would go to the game with Suzanne (of the Napa wine excursion) et al. to the Atlanta Braves game. There were commemorative t-shirts, a video presentation, songs, and a moment of silence.

I've lost much contact with all of those people now. Tommy T. is gone. Robert no longer makes the annual trip although we talk. Kathy is happy in VT and we talk some. I asked Suzanne today to be my Facebook friend as she was responding to Kathy's memories.

I don't want to ever have to go through that day again, but I miss so many of those people. Sometimes I wish we could have the day after over and over, the good stuff, without the necessity of that really horrible day before.

Lambchop @ XX Merge from sassafrassv on Vimeo.

Had to post this. Sound is not great, but the performance makes me wish I had skipped Pitchfork and gone to this instead. Or just have unlimited time and money to go to shows.

All the turkey dwindling in a freezer container seven feet away. When I moved in here my parents were here and it is apropos that they should be here this weekend - my last. My fingers are scarred, thumb pads rent from the mesh. Today was a long day. The walls have told all their stories and I am itching, this day after thanksgiving, for new palates on which to plaster new stories - clean walls, my walls.

I am running naked and wet through the rain tonight; the family quietly sleeps in sudden slumber. The fun that was had will be had again - but not quite in the same way - if not now, then very soon.

I ate the jello cranberries: my favorite. I sucked my thumb. I played Ken and Barbie and Ken. She can't stand up. She's dancing to stay upright. Kicked the high-heels into the pool. Goodnight this place; it is slowly dismantling. Goodnight sweet prince; he's dead. Goodnight Candler Park, or Lake Claire, or whatever you are.

For a little over three years, spanning from August of 2005 to August 2008, I spent one hour a week - sometimes Thursday afternoons, sometimes Tuesdays, and for a brief period on Wednesdays - sitting in an office with dim lighting and half-closed blinds trying to figure out what was wrong with me. When I started going to these sessions, I was in an awful place in my life in which my then live-in girlfriend had moved out (ostensibly in an effort to save the relationship), who then subsequently left the relationship for good a few weeks later. I had spent the better part of my previous 10 years nightly carrying out a love affair with alcohol, and whereas I had tempered these wicked ways a bit in the previous couple of years, my anger and frustration with myself would still boil over from time to time - whether drunk or sober. During those three years of weekly meetings I would come to realize that I was in, and had likely been in, a deep depression that extended back into my teen years.

The man that I talked to (and I mean "to", like when a pitcher throws a ball to the catcher, because our sessions were 95% one-way) in those sessions was Stephen O'Hagan. I would come in most of the time thinking I had nothing to say, pretending that everything was okay, only to leave an hour later realizing my tongue was tired, and most times feeling much more levity than when I entered, all at the expense of tear-stained cheeks. Steve didn't speak much, but when he did his words were well chosen and had the air of a Zen koan to them. He knew from training and experience that there was little that he could figure out for me, but he would try to clear the path so that I might have moments of discovery myself: self-help authors and cynical critics of psychoanalysis call these holy grails "breakthrough moments."

I don't know that I ever had a "breakthrough moment" during any of our sessions. It has taken the passage of time, the looking at where I was and where I am, to realize what happened during those weekly hours spent with Steve. When our sessions had to end in August of this year because of his declining health, I wasn't sure what would happen with me. He told me, "at the end of therapy, and especially at the unnatural conclusion of therapy like this situation... many people will feel as if they are relapsing... this is natural and is linked to your desire to continue therapy, it is temporary, and should be expected." I asked him what was next for him and he described a new approach to medication and treatment that his doctors were going to try, and that they had reason to hope it would be effective.

My uncle Willy died last Friday. He was 78. While alive, he was the wiry, hairy-chested type of old man of which the world does not make any more these days. He's the first of my dad's siblings to die and I believe that it has affected my dad in ways that even his mother's death over ten years ago has not. When I got the message I was sitting in a park listening to indie rock music in Chicago. I couldn't help from imagining how strange Willy would have thought the whole scene to be, and in imagining that I thought of how far I have come from my family: that thing I grew up with, and as, that I spent much of my adolescence trying to outdistance, and have spent much of late 20s and 30s trying to figure out how to get back to.

What I knew of Willy is that he farmed a bit: sweet potatoes and the like. He worked for several years at the Nu-Tread tire company, just behind the outfield wall of the old Durham Athletic Park; the same park where the Durham Bulls play and where the movie Bull Durham was shot. He also bought cords of wood in the fall the at he would cut, split, and deliver to houses nearby for winter heat. On the property that he owned there are two ponds that my brother and I frequented on weekends for fishing. Bass and bream could be caught in such aplenty, with bobbers and worms or crickets or grasshoppers, that one would think that Willy stocked the pond, but that was just not him. It's almost as if the fish were there because a man like Willy could only have a pond with such plentiful fish.

In the fall, my brother and I (and sometimes father and mother) would help harvest the sweet potatoes. It seems that I even remember gathering bailed hay at some point as well. When a tire went flat on one of the cars we would go to the used tire and repair shop that Willy and a friend had established in a building on his property.

He had a wife named Nelly and a daughter named Patricia, my cousin, who lived across the street with her husband. I would not know Patricia if she were to walk right up to me. Probably wouldn't recognize Nelly anymore, maybe not even Willy in his last few years.

1) Grateful Dead - some of the songs are classics. If you think I am a fool, you are not listening. You are more afraid of being considered a "deadhead," being part of that culture, than just plain disliking the music. Most people who claim not to like the music cannot name a single song even though they know 20, much less say why they don't like it. We're too old for this. Get over it.

2) Dirty Dancing - I was forced to watch it as a teenager by my, now dead, chorus teacher on days that she did not feel like teaching. Saw it again over the weekend and it's a good movie. The main characters all show substantial growth. They are all sympathetic. And it's a coming-of-age story: Jennifer Gray's character has to deal with growing up and dealing with a world that she know nothing about. I prefer my coming of age stories to be about boys, as it is easier for me to identify with, but thankfully this one is not a male coming-of-age story.

That was then and this is now. Five years or more.
It happens in a bowling alley, or at the end of a night.
There's this water flowing freely under a bridge.
There's Christ and good and something in between.
That all happened before now, and so much has happened since.
I like to think we have all moved on. I think we have.
We have to have. People of my life unite.

So many friends of mine here in my space tonight, some that know me, many that do not. I will soon post the favorite albums (CDs) of the year post. We should all wait it out till morning. We should all love each other and suffer in the morning. We need that commitment to one another, since we have nothing that equals it in our past or current life. I love each and every one of you. I do. I promise our parents will ever know the difference.

There's a drunk and another drunk at the bar and they are both failing horribly at telling the punchline to some jokes that they earlier have practiced way too much. He's Andre and she's sally. The people on TV are talking too much about porcupines.

If I could bite off the ass of a porcupine it would mean so little. I would still just be the guy who bit off the ass of a porcupine. It would not win me points on match.com. It would make me pariah amongst the friends.

I could love though. Mouth full of quills.

Quills inmy mouth, writing the things I cannot say on my own.

I miss so much.

I don't like writing about the good stuff. Not necessarily the bad stuff. Just the difficult stuff. That is what I prefer.

But tonight driving through this town tonight, during this time of the year that I have a psychologically disposition to breaking down, was like flying. I have laughed until my sides hurt. I have realized there is someone that knows the ends of all of my family stories when the beginnings are told.

I think there are songs that can and will be sung.

I think I will make it through these holidays, and the rest will become easier.

Chocolate cream cheese muffins on Sunday mornings
and baked good smells all other days,
aging hippies and younger hipsters,
and Bobby at the market and
that place where all the initials are carved
in the sidewalk's concrete
and the House of Nine Cats and the
AA meetings at the Methodist Church,
and runs around the park, and walks
past the big houses bordering the park,
and then the lady with the longhair cat,
walking with it around her like a mink stole,
and the trick or treating teenagers, and
a house filled with ghosts, friendly and other,
and the mural that the kids did, and festivals,
and cyclists, and flowers, and the Jamaican man
I gave too much money too, and the one in
makeshift robes that I ran from the porch,
and the crazy neighbors I know, and the crazier
ones that I don't know, and ground zero for heartbreak,
and ground zero for coming into my own, and
a place where too much money was spent, and
too much time was wasted, and where my heart felt
at peace so much, where I thought I could spend
the rest of my life, I must leave you soon, as well.

Know my friends that you are valued above all, that so many of you have come to me out of these bad circumstances, and where I once stood and viewed this all as sheer horror and detriment, I now see as a whole new opportunity, another step in growing up and growing closer. I value you all in your kind words, and sympathetic sulking, understanding bitching, and well-deserved, mutual, bitter humor. I felt for so long that I was alone in the feelings I was harboring over my stupid fucking situation, but I realize that we have all been drug through the horse shit before, your testimonies have shown me as such. Thank you so much for the wisdom you have imparted, and for the constant reassurance that saying "fuck it" is not bad, in fact it is preferred, and for being there to show that there is so much life to be had after moving on - that waking up from the nightmare can bring such joy, hope and promise just from realizing you are finally awake again.

Was playing: How Fucking Romantic by The Magnetic Fields

"In Israel, nubian ibex prepare to duel over a mate... These are actually young males, but their fights are dead serious. The loser may never get the chance to breed."

- Discovery Channel's Planet Earth: Deserts episode

Why do you have to take a picture of every fucking thing? I've got a whole computer, because that's the way things are done now, full of pictures to remind me of things that I would be better off forgetting now. Oh yes, in case you have not figured it out, the heartbreak came back today, not like a lamb but like a lion - this month that began with my birthday and ends with the biggest case of emotional déjà vu I have had in over a year. You see, I thought I was over G, or at least I fooled myself into believing it was so, but the events of today have arrived to show me how far from the truth that thought was. I am so fucking mad at myself for not being there, not following all of your advice, but I finally have no other option, so in the end you all will proven correct and I will be proven wrong again. If we could only believe in the wisdom of family and friends from the outset our lives would likely be a lot more fulfilling. I am a mess, a thorough mess. I pretended Zen, that I was so good, that I was beyond desire where all pain starts. I am a stupid boy. I should go to sleep now and put this day to rest but I continue to intake caffeine to force myself into this exhilarating punishment. I promise I will not continue to bore you with all of this. I think there's a James' song in that somewhere. I will instead bore you with my lackluster ruminations on books, movies and the state of American politics in the near future, because you should keep your true feelings hidden deep inside so your vulnerability can go there and die too.

Was playing: Keep the Car Running by Arcade Fire

Because I believed in words
over braun the whole world shut down.
I thought your way of tilting your head,
of telling me you love me,
was beyond reproach,
but I thought the way in which I wrote it
was was so much better still.

I gaze the navel,
I bring the end about in everything I do.

I don't know who you are but
our team didn't win tonight,'
except, perhaps, yours did,
and, in that case
was it really our team?

What does it matter what they
said when it was Britain,
and it was 1765?
Only a serve and volley make the difference now.

Oh, the word can topple empires.
The pen is mightier than the sword?
I can talk all night and you
will still not understand me,
you will choose to not even try,
but your sword, oh your sword,
it is made of steel,
and it's slice is final.

Aren't we on a trip tonight to the place of the unknown, or we should be. Weekends like this do not roll around that often. I've got a cat, a borrowed cat, a borrowed car and we are heading south of the border. How can we make this thing makes sense to the people who have never had the desire to steal a car and go that direction in the middle of the night. Let's start the weekend early and go bowling, and warm up to scores respectable. Let's pretend you and I are believable beasts. Let's talk of the things we would do if we had perfect time and money, and let's pretend we don't need an alibi. Let's commit the crimes that they will sooner or later accuse us of. Let's get off the hook.

When they tell us that we are not aging well... when they tell us that we are not who we are supposed to be... let's tell them that there are women that things didn't work out with, that we still hope might work out, and that those women might find it in their heart to love us for us, and to love the fact that we deny, deny, deny that impulse that was not ours, but someone else's totally. That we can deny, deny, deny this thing for a little while longer, and maybe more.

This is the one in which we are milking the worms, but not of milk, but of crud and animal parts, the things it has eaten, like sticking our finger down their throats to induce vomiting, except we are really are milking are milking, squeezing it out of them like a tube of toothpaste. The Bangladeshi man encourages us on. Promises good meat. The skin rolls like a treadmill and we try not to be consumed by these worms as they rampage. These firehose sized worms... And then we eat. Thee slices are battered and fried and those of us with the Western palate do not take to the indulgence too well, despite the oversell. We have, perhaps, seen too much. We know where this food has been and that is more than our stomachs will allow.

It's a day and a day, and perhaps there is too much oxygen, and perhaps there is too much nicotine floating in the air around the great Manuel's Tavern, Highland Avenue, and tonight (and today for that matter) has proven to be, so far, the hardest of the days so far, and I wanted a cigarette after teaching that class, even though I am "great" and "the guru," and even now as I type this I cannot believe that I cannot step onto the porch and have a cigarette. I rub very hard, with fingernails, on the nicotine transdermal patch on on my left shoulder. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is on and I think I may need one, and I may need one just because I am not in bed yet, and before I read that book, and that movie is on which I left G at home for last year and she called me back from and told me she was leaving this house and R told me it was better that I didn't see it (worst moment in cinematic history), that it was better that she called me home to tell me she was leaving here and me. Can I have a cigarette? Should I suffer this movie in the two ways that I will suffer it? I think I should cash it in for the night - pillow turned long - a prayer and a page and lights out and a new tomorrow where I will not want to pay the retainer to RJ Reynolds.

I have officially been longer without a cigarette now than I have since my feeble attempt at quitting 8 years ago. In about an hour and a half, I will have made it for my first 24 hours. Despite the anticipation that I had of how hard this first day would be, it was not very hard. I expect that things will get harder along the way though.

Today I had no real cravings. No freakouts because I was going through withdrawal or anything like that. It was just those times of the day, like when you get a task finished at work and are not yet ready to start the next one, a little break would do, a cigarette break, but then I would have to remind myself that that is not possible. Or when I was rebooting the computer this afternoon and thought it would be a good time to have a.... or when the TV dinner is cooking in the microwave... It wasn't that I craved the cigarette, it was just those periods of downtime that I used to fill with smoking. I am glad I resisted the urge, but I cannot say that it did not make me sad. Just like the last one last night made me shed a tear or two. It really is like breaking up with a lover, splitting ways from a friend.

Things I have discovered today is that yes, I am craving food more, and that the box of 100 Pop Ice popsicles I bought 3 years ago indeed have a purpose other than delighting the occasional child in the house. I have had two of them late tonight and they seem to be somewhat of a surrogate for the more cancerous things I would like to be putting in my mouth, albeit I am not sure how safe that artificial coloring is.

Now Sigourney Weaver is smoking a cigarette in Death and the Maiden and it looks so pleasurable. Hell, I know that it is pleasurable. I am trying to take comfort in knowing that my carbon monoxide levels are half of what they are last night, and in the thought that this will get easier.

I am sitting here and I guess it is technically the day that I will quit smoking. I am staring at a pack of Winston Light cigarettes and there is one remaining. I will be going to bed soon, but before that, I will have that last cigarette. When I wake up, there will be no cigarettes in the house. There will be a box of nicotine transdermal patches, 21 mg, the highest grade. I have been trying all day not to romanticize this moment, but those of you who know me, know that it is impossible for me not to romanticize anything. I guess I have thought so many times about how the last cigarette would be. I have thought about who I would like to have it with. Would it be JT, or R, or G... I guess the fight that I am entering into will ultimately be mine to fight, and the addiction that I have developed is my burden, so I guess it is only appropriate that this last cigarette be something that I have on my own as well. I think I may go get it over with now.

It is 6 PM on this Friday afternoon and I have just finished the last cigarette that I will ever smoke in front of the AJC offices here at 72 Marietta Street. I am not quitting my job here at the newspaper, rather I have decided to quit smoking. On this Sunday night, some time before bed, I will have my last cigarette, and when I awake in the morning I will not smoke the morning cigarette, or the one on the way to work, or the one after lunch. I will not smoke another cigarette again.

My friends who have done this tell me of how hard it is going to be, and I imagine I have not even fully realized what I will go through yet, but I am looking for the relief from the burden of smoking. Hell yes I enjoy it. Every cigarette I have ever had has been good - a consistency that I wish other aspects of my life could achieve. However, it is a burden: the trips to the store, the counting of the dollars when the debit card is damaged, the planning my day out in cigarette demarcated spoonfuls.

People tell me that I must find something to take the cigarettes place. G ate carrots, my dad chews gum and exercises. I think I will exercise and write. I will write my way through this thing because writing is what has gotten me through the bad times in the last year. If it can get me through that, it can get me through this. If I can get through all of that, I can succeed at this also. Wish me luck and prepare for the breakdown phone calls.

You did what with whom? Oh, is that right. A hand job everyday in Biology. Mr. Murphy's biology? He taught us about human behavior, and racism, mostly racism. I cannot remember now. Wendy bit my finger and bit it hard. It was always under the circumstances of a woo. She let me see her breasts once. Why am I telling you this? High school was so fucked up. High school was so beautiful. I cannot believe that I made it.

You were Catholic and getting it from all sides. I guess down South we were all a little more conservative. I guess we knew not what we did. There were denominations with more guilt than those who crossed themselves. I guess sexual congress in biology was okay with the Pope, or at least forgivable. You had confession at least.

There's a book that holds memories, and we scoured it. How many of those girls that we felt some sort of amorous/sexual emotion toward. Mostly they weren't pretty. We remembered a moment when they were nice to us, or us to them, and we spawned off fantasies.

Tyler looked old even then. Maybe that is why she dated the guy who was 6 years our elder. I cannot believe now that we limited our future spousal prospects to that place and time. They were beautiful in their on way, but my needs were, and are, so much larger.

I cannot remember if I took my Gingko Biloba this morning.

Oh my god! I am opening up the Samuel within me. I want to make that night so scatological. I want to piss on dreams. To make it real. I read you when I did not know what I was reading. They say Dickens takes experience. Oh, they did not consider you. Through all that piss and shit and fornication I realize that you got to something real. I am glad those books descended and I have learned how to read you. I think love, actually, lies somewhere in those leaves.

I am filled with the spirit, and it very well may be Canadian pop music tonight. It will make you feel better to get outside of your paradigm, and Canada has always been good for that. I want to dance in the streets tonight only if the streets were safe, and it were raining. My arms project from me like antennae. There are crickets tonight. Can you hear them. They are Canadian, and mild-mannered.

Was playing: This Night by Destroyer

Oh, I guess so much has changed now since I last wrote on day 55. I can hardly stand to go back and read those posts just yet. They can easily conjure up what it felt like to live in that dark place and time, and I try daily to convince myself that I am far removed from it.

My car is my car now. The thing that has owned me for the better part of the last five years is now something that I own. Despite needing a bath and an oil change, it seems like the car is doing okay. Maybe I should give it a name. It didn't seem right to give it a name before I owned it, but I guess it would be okay now. Anyone have ideas? Maybe I should call it Oscar for the rolling trash can that it tends to be most of the time.

I am adjusting to this bachelor lifestyle as well. It's still not incredibly easy, but I do enjoy being able to do what I want to do just about all of the time. I can sit here at the house on a late weekday afternoon and write while smoking on the porch, or watch 'Prince of Tides' and cry and think of becoming a better man. I can think of being utterly transformed. When I look back at that day 55 though, I realize that I am utterly transformed. Those of you that have known me long and well, also well know this fact.

I haven't made much progress toward finishing the novel yet, nor to my other New Year's resolution of running a marathon this year. I have readjusted my running goals to aim for a half-marathon. I think just learning to live, and live fully, again is accomplishment enough for right now. All else is really a distraction from that goal.

Oh, and work. I cannot believe that I wrote on day 55 of all hell breaking loose at work. I cannot even really remember what happened that day. All I can say is that I am sure I have had more stressful days recently and they tend to roll right off of me. There has been some fundamental change in my life in the in between months that has my priorities finally set straight.

I don't fret so much lately. I realize that time provides answers as we need them. I realize that prayer is a great healer. I realize that everything is going to be okay. I believe that my life will be a good one. Something that I will look back on one day and be happy that I did it the way I did. That was not the case back when I wrote the last medication update. As much as the pills have to do with it, I would also thank my doctors, and books, and especially friends and family - old and new. I wish we could all be together on a boat somewhere right now.

Watch 'em go!

I know I mentioned this to several of you in person or via phone, but I figured this was the easiest way to give you all a link to my latest creation. Hopefully it is at least a little amusing.

Atlanta Braves Stars sing Stadium Jams

I don't know why, but possibly out of restlessness, I strike out after midnight tonight and I see the blooms of the dogwood tree gleaming in the light of the sodium halide street lamp. It is February still, but Spring is already coming to this town. Outside of my house, the singular daffodil is starting its bloom as well, and the smell of burning wood has subsided on this end of the street. Soon there will be weeding to be done. Our hands could be turned bright green before we could even snap our sweaty fingers.

My car, during this early warming, has lost one of its front lights. In high school we used to call it popeye, and upon seeing one you either had to kiss or punch the person you were with. Amongst dudes it usually was a punch; amongst mixed company, the kiss was more popular. I spent the better part of one Spring evening sitting on a stone wall when I was 18 with a woman kissing at the sight of every popeye. One would have thought that every car in town had one headlight extinguished by the passion that we felt for each other that night. Later she would ask me to her prom and I would weasel out. Then she would become a nurse in Minnesota. She would marry and have a child. She would live near the headwaters of the Mississippi. She would see it fed by the meltwaters of spring. I doubt she ever thinks about me, or these things now.

I guess this time of the year brings hope to my heart. Hope springs eternal, or rather, in Spring, hope is eternal. Maybe I am too hopeful. Forever the romantic. It seems like the stars are slowly coming back into alignment. It seems that the world might just slow down to that pace that I can understand. Tomorrow I think I will spend an hour walking around this city, letting my feet get to know it like they never have. They will feel the promise of pollen, pollution and circumstance.

But tonight... oh tonight, I wish I were in cold and windy Chicago, at the Horseshoe or Bierstube with JT. We spent the hour or two talking, or rather me talking, and it would have been better over a beer together, in that city where they truly appreciate the change of the seasons. Where Spring means something so much more. Where it means the snow will melt. The world will turn green. The Mississippi will fill its banks again, and the world, and you and I, stretched out over this great country, will be one again.

Some of you will know where this comes from, others maybe not. This may be th height of laziness for me though.

Restless eyes close, maybe it'll go away
Please rest tomorrow, bring a satisfying day
The restless urge of love that's worth the burning for
Surely it's that one true thing, love to give you more
Any thought could be the beginning of the brand new tangled web you're spinning
Anyone could be a brand new love
Any tie that holds can be broken, it can tear your bitter world totally open
Anyone could be the brand new love
You won't be the first, your twisted change is normal
Gossip, dirt, whispered to the nodding head
Thrilled you fell apart, instead of them
But they will
Any hope for love can be killed
If you need a different face, it's definite time to destroy this place
Any thought could be the beginning of the brand new tangled web you're spinning
Anyone could be a brand new love
Follow what you feel, you alone decide what's real
Anyone can be a brand new love

There are few things as tiring and satisfying as what I've gotten to do at work the past few days. As you can imagine, we have been covering the Coretta Scott King funeral stuff a lot. I have been sent on assignments to record audio of the horse-drawn carriage procession taking her to the state capitol, and to record audio for the musical celebration the included performances by Gladys Knight and an address by Oprah Winfrey. I guess one of the things I am proud of this city for is that it is steeped in the MLK legacy. I have been to the King Center before, but these assignments allowed me to touch that world in a completely different way. Doing these the recording and putting together the consequent multimedia pieces has moved me tremendously, despite the long hours it has taken to put everything together. Anyway, ultimately I am so satisfied with the products and the experience. I have been moved to tears many times during all of it and have been completely emotionally wiped. If you would like to take a look at the pieces (on was mentioned previously) here are the links:

Coretta Scott King: Lying In State

Coretta Scott King: A life remembered

I was asked late in the day Friday to go and do some audio recording of ambeint sounds for the transfer of Coretta Scott King's body to the state capitol this morning. She will lie there in state until Monday. The burial is on Tuesday. I have teared up a few times since her death this past Tuesday. The King legacy is one of the things that makes me happy to live in this city, I love driving past the MLK artwork at the corner of Boulevard and Freedom, even though it is not the best example of public art. Today I woke up later than I should have, expeceted to go to the Old Fourth Ward to the funeral home, which turned out to be on the West End, so I headed to the capitol and waited and waited and watched people and recording helicopters and people talking and leaves and finally the motorbikes and horses and then she came along. I almost lost it right then, but kept my journalistic distance and integrity together long enough to join the masses on the capitol lawn, and still kept it together, until the bagpiper played 'Amazing Grace' and my eyes moistened, and then her body was taken in and the people spntaneously started into 'We Shall Overcome' and I sang and burst and had to walk away.

Here's the product of the day, the recorder stopped working before the bagpipes and singing, I guess it will be just a memory, with no evidence, for me now.

Coretta Scott King: Lying In State

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What do you do when all of your devices have given up on you? When you decide to kick the sauce again, to dream a sober dream, to make this writing thing a go again? What do you do when Faulkner will no longer lull you to sleep? When his demons, and his characters' demons, continue to strike too close to home? And no bubble bath will take you away? And no phone call is on its way? And there are dead felines that you once loved to hate to love to live with etc? And when there is a woman singing directly into your ear who has always made you cry? And a woman singing indirectly into your ear who even the thought of the voice still makes you cry? And then there are the voices that just set you back, and the ones that push you forward. And out there fathers are dying, and love is dying. The fact is, that tonight someone is breaking up. Someone is announcing to the other that they cannot go on like this - that by the end of the week they will be gone. They both live inside me now. What happens when what you have done won't let you sleep? What happens when Mrs. King is gone? What happens when the dreams won't come anymore? What happens when the last question is asked?

I guess you just learn to do it all differently, recreate a life, or finally create one, and stop this tidal ritual.

I cannot bring myself to sleep in the bed tonight, so I think I will turn on a movie and sleep here on the sofa, like a man who is in trouble with a woman who sleeps in the other room.

Oh let's do the first kiss
all over again.

Tomorrow I will go
to the theater to see
someone else believe in
themselves for a while.

I can hear your heart
palpitate too on this
strange recording.
It's the strange way
these things roll around.

In this city,
you will come to understand,
that we like to eat,
but just as surely
we like to dream.

We make it up as we go,
even when the script
has been written forever.
I said the L word...
Oh, fuck, I said the L word...

This pillow is too big tonight -
too big to hold just my dreams,
so I will try to dream for the both of us.

That clock never worked, now did it? We never could find the weight so it could tell time, so time just stopped. It has been perpetually 3 AM or PM in this house since the day it first graced the mantle. It seems so strange that it takes a little weight for time to move on, but to much weight can bring it to a halt again.

I have just passed 3 AM tonight in the middle of another one of my fits of insomnia. Out with L to the movies and dinner tonight, I came home alone and restless and that clock just sat there telling me nothing much has changed. I had to get out of the house again and go to places where the timepieces do keep track. I need to feel like I am moving on, even if this place can seem warped in time.

I have been sitting here peeling this orange for five years, or maybe two, or just a few months - and as it unfolds I am waiting for that sweet fruit to fall into my hands - but instead it unlayers like an onion - layer upon layer of orange rind with no discernible fruit. I wait. I peel. I hope. But, alas there seems to be no fruit there, and I begin to wonder about the truth of fruit, sugar, diabetes, hope and sickness. All I ever wanted was to get to the fruit, to feel that rush of fructose as it hits the bloodstream, but I get rind, I get zest, and no fruit. I can't figure out if the fruit is reacting to me, or if it is just me, or you, or another - or is it the rind that is all of us. I am trying to discern the nature of citrus in the middle of January. I might paint over the fruit and call it 'soap.' I might write something that has nothing to do with oranges and call it 'citrus.' I think I will put the orange back on the tree, attaching it with super glue and paper clips, and sit and wait a while longer.

If I cannot truly understand what is in my heart, how can I expect anyone else to? I believe I may become a recluse and deny anyone access to my presence, much less my heart. I don't like secrets so much, but feel that my life and those around me are shrouded in them. I have a few good friends with which there is transparency between us. Maybe that is all I can ask for, but ultimately it all will need to be tossed out. Ultimately I will live in my basement with just the one window for light and I will grow pale and old there.

We are trying to create something, me and you two boys, that is truly masculine for us. That is our mantra. Something that is part of our fathers, but more of us - the way we see things. This is our project. Let's make it ours. Let's make it great.

God, JT, I put on finally tonight and they are so us, like we were all once, and that's the scary and comforting thing.

All around me are the vegetable eaters,
the people so full of the sunshine they eat,
and so sunny with radiant lips.
But above here, in that not-so-lovely place,
is all fluorescent glow.

And further below are the meat eaters,
gnashers, and blood drinkers, and
in the end will be the gravediggers,
and grave-robbers, and my toes will become relics
for some gothic basement cause.

Today moves me through
this city again, and the pace has
picked up. I try to block out
all of the city sounds with my own
sounds, until those sound becomes familiar,

and all the worries of the Arab women
asking for help, and directions to the mosque,
fit into a chant that soon boils over me,
until a familiar voice and song -
my voice, my song - penetrates the hum.

Perhaps this is the way it should have
been from the beginning, me and my song.
I walk away at the first sign of showdown,
I want no battles with friends or enemies.
I can sing to myself at night, I can

sing myself to sleep, as I begin to float.
But then the men in the other room
speak like my father, 'If you get that black
on your hands, you can't get it off." And
I think I have something to tell you,

but a far off distant voice,
from a forgotten time has
paralyzed all of that now,
and they strap this sailor to the mast,
and I can feel the blood slowly depart.

I don't know, but I am getting mad as hell today that I seem to not be able, or rather it is not allowed, to feel anything fully. If I want to have any sort of pure emotion I have to start asking myself if this is the right thing for me, how is this going to affect me, how will it affect my therapy progress. I know it is my tendencies that have gotten me into the state I am in, but I really want to be able to just feel something raw and pure and unadulterated and unanalyzed. I don't know if that is even possible, but I would like to try. I really would.

Somewhere over the rainbow
my chronic fidgetiness
is slowly killing itself.
Something inside is

taking back everything
I ever said to you,
the bad, the good and even
the things neither of us remember.

Somewhere I waited by a
telephone too long for
a call to keep me
from breaking water.

I birthed too many panics.
I sounded the horns at the
first pain of the head pushing
through the pelvis.

I am birthing no more babies.

I am fathering no more miracles.

You will never
even read this.
It will burn before
the end of the day.

In town, this city,
except for a light breeze,
seems to stand still, or
at most just slight motions.

The city spirals into me
as the birds sit quietly in trees,
and the cars pull to the curb,
and my head stops aching for once.

And further through me,
the palpitations become manageable,
even my toes groan
as they finally stretch.

The sun is going down on the city.

It has been a labor day.

And the sky turns red,
and this once-pregnant sailor
prepares, at last,
to set sail.

Was playing: Your Ex-Lover Is Dead by Stars

It was a little over a year ago now, after finishing work I headed up through South Carolina to Spartanburg, on my way, the next day, to North Carolina and home for the holidays. I drive into Sparkle and directly to a party where G is already, and there's time for drinks and then there is time for talking with her friends and then there is back home and to bed and all. But during that party there was a moment outside having a cigarette when I noticed that standing out from the moon, a good distance out, was a light ring. My grandfather had once explained to me that this meant "falling weather" was ahead. That was the Christmas party right before I would get the offer of an engagement ring that was also ill-self-advised.

Tonight I was out to a party for a while with CG and then back home I tried to arrange a phone call with St. Louis, but that wasn't happening, with the time change and all, and then there was a ring on the phone from T. The first one with him saying to someone else, "I am not an officer," and then telling me he would call back. The second was, "I am drunk and at the Winchester and hitting on women." I decided to head down as the aforementioned phone call with the midwest had not happened and I was curious as to seeing the scene.

So it's the first real weekend of the new year and what will you do? Try to find something that will make you believe this year will be better. Set the thing off right. There's been too much confusion, angst, anxiety, analyzation, and analysis.

The best I could do at this point is to water and fertilize my growing spine and hope for a quicker recovery from my rusty resolution. Stop prostrating myself before the gods of self-pity, absorption, indulgence. I'm not so bad. Just frantic lately. Maybe, it's the drugs. Oh yeah, although I haven't written about them lately, I am still on the drugs. Maybe it is me. Slowly, life turns, and returns. It's time to leave well enough alone, and start making a new life without all of the tears and sadness. This weekend is welcome.

Huh? What
you say?
Did I hear that
just right?

I'm out
tonight with
short lines
and crazy mind.

If we gonna
riff, might as well
with this crazy
myth.

Four and four
will maybe two make
and inspiration comes
for no one's sake.

How did you find
your way around this?
I couldn't read
a sign if

it hit me upside
this large head.

But if I break
with rule
it is not because
I'm the fool,

or maybe I am.
Just ask me in
the morning,
just love me tonight.

Why the rush toward definition?
Tonight I should take it easy,
at least that is what Steve has been saying.
I've been making faces at myself
in the grey-black blank television screen,
my head seems so big and
I begin slowly to think of
a beach somewhere I've never been
where I can hear the calm roll over
this columna de mi espalda,
where my tongue would massage this air into
a gambit that could end the game at the start,
and in this screen I am painted well
full with monobrow, and my statement
tells of a more full story,
full enough that I could take flight,
and be there for the making
of divots in a different land,
and not just waiting on another
arrival, revival or resurrection,
that will make my lonely divot
a little less so.

I am going to save Southern food, your collards and coleslaw and all. I am going to ride on the backs of strange waves off the Georgia coast. I will make it all clear to you all. With love, or without, I can inspire a whole region to betterness. This is the way things go. Potassium pulses through me tonight. I am great and will be greater. This may be megolomania, but at the end of it all... it is me that needs to be taken care of as much as anyone. Here's a road, and I think I will take it.

Clickety click! or that is the way it is supposed to happen. You on the phone tonight way past the point that you should be, but still there. This is two in one day, or three. What will we do with this? This city excites you, and maybe I do too. But at the end of the day we all want to retreat to the beach and fill our jaws with ocean meat, and to make pledges to each other that only a beach will make real. How's that humidity? How's that sleepy town? I hope your night makes you new again. I hope it creates great dreams that will teach me and you how we should feel again... after all of this.

I know i still love you in these strange ways and it hurts that it is not the way that it used to hurt, but I realize now that it can be something else, that perhaps you have to crawl back into your own cocoon. I could not even find you in a lineup now as the crazy muses make the effort impossible. I can lay down no more, which may be a great effort to you. Happy new year. Happy life. You, and I, will be happy. How's that, boo? I think I have felt some strange love lately, but it cannot be talked about, because of therapy and talk and gossip... I hope you find it. I think I have, or will, or can hope. I can always hope. Right?

This bed is cold tonight.
I get in rooting around
for a little scent of you
that may have been left behind.

Is it the pillow?
No.
Maybe try the divit in
the sheets where you layed.
It is there.

It is there but
will slowly diminish.
In fact, in a couple of days
I will not be able to
exactly recall how you smell.

It will then become a memory
unattached to any real sense,
that can only be awakened
by you again, my nose
against your nape again.

That too will come to pass
as you return to the winter
heat and humidity of that place
you have created - a sunshine city
for yourself.

I will stay here in the cold,
and rain, in this now quiet house,
trying to find a way
to warm this bed without you -
trying to find a way
to make that faint scent
hang around a little longer.

Today, a federal holiday, and I out finding things I did not know existed. Could I fly on a cloud, ride on a magic carpet? Could I dance to the music of someone strange? Oh, you bet! I will drift to this slumberland, the one that makes the dreams all so real with crazy palpitations in my heart. If we were to make it happen, then this is the way. Oh, this is the way!

Tonight was the first night that I have ever gotten to play Santa. After the traditional soup and sandwich dinner at my brother's house, we put the kids to bed and I stayed awhile delaying a late-night, potentially futile, hunt for petroleum, as my car's gas light had just come on as I arrived in Durham County. He asked would I help and I said I would, so we went down the street to the Grandparent's house and into the garage to retrieve several boxes of Biddy Baby paraphernalia and the new gas-powered 4-wheeler for S. We brought them back to the house and took the baby doll furniture into the house for assembly to begin, and a spirit of Christmas that I haven't felt all season flooded through me. I realized that it really is for the kids, and that not having any kids actively present in my day-to-day life has kept the spirit partly at bay. Tonight it seemed so different, being back here in this town. Although it is strange to me now, there is still a homeyness to the place that is unmistakable. I can feel my pulse slow a bit when I cross into N.C., and even more when the Durham County line is crossed. While playing Santa tonight, I thought, "I can do this... I like doing this," and thus I put to rest some of the nagging doubts that I have had lately about my suitability and desire for fatherhood, marriage, settling etc. I can put those thoughts, fears, and worries away now - and it feels good to do so.

I hope you all have, had, and are having a Merry Christmas. I hope to see or talk to each of you very soon.

Larry Levis is killing me tonight. He is reminding me that it is Christmas and that things are supposed to be good and that you will still be lonely at the end of the day no matter what you find beside you, that it is you that makes you lonely and that your habits will eventually catch up with you, and your tendencies too and that all those pictures in a box are gone, thoroughly gone, now. That time is passing you by and that tomorrow will create memories that you will want to recreate years from now, but tomorrow will seem like an excruciating day on the surface. He also teaches me that there is a love out there that will make it all make sense, and maybe she has already been, but maybe she hasn't. Maybe I have met her before, or just recently, or not yet at all. My job is to live, just simply live, and be good until the mystery reveals itself, possibly in a dream, possibly in a bar, possibly this time next year as the wind grows colder and my eyes begin to dry - when I can finally laugh at myself again.

The divorcee across the street has met a man on the internet and will soon take her son in the middle of the night to a foreign city where she will enroll him in a foreign school with foreign friends and her ex will know nothing of their whereabouts... his son, his ex wife - once the love of his life, and maybe still.

I started reading the Sunday New York Times again today. The day that I drove J and S down to Perry, GA so they could make their way further south to Tampa, and the day that I noticed for the first time that the cold snap and some negligence has all but taken the hanging plants in the Florida room.

I have lost my dream. You see I used to have it, but I have lost it now. I have discussed this with my therapist, he asks, "have you had any dreams lately?", and I say, "no I have lost them, I thought I had a dream a few days back, but it turned out to not be one. It turned out to just be Tuesday." He gets concerned at such talk and makes odd faces at me. Sometimes I try to fool myself into thinking I have a dream, but I realize such games are just games. I have lost my dream. Maybe I will get it back. Maybe tonight after dinner and reading in bed, I will drift off to sleep and I will awaken realizing I have gotten my dream back. I am a dreamer by nature, just one without a dream right now. If I could just remember where I put it. Please let me know if you see it around. Otherwise I will have to shop for another one. My therapist and I cannot rest until.

I scream Antigone to the dark sad night,
or is it agony, or is it uplift,
I can give you all of that.

I can make a sweet dream
out of the outside of your hand,
you were making sweet stuff
out of the bad stuff all along.

Your face in a dream
the last few nights.

I don't care where your loins have been.

A beautiful jaw,
a beautiful face,
your strange absence in this place.

A vacancy in my heart,
my head,
that has no substitute.

It's brunch,
simply brunch,
and I'm buying?

There's a grade school game called 'Telephone' or something like that in which one person whispers into the ear of the next person, and that person into the next and on down the line of 20 or so people, until the last person is reached, and the original message which was something like, "Joe likes pizza" ends up being morphed into something more like "Joe licks panties." Lately I feel that some people in my life have been playing that sort of game with some of the details of my life. They start with a small detail that comes up in a passing conversation, and it ends up being blown all out of proportion until I am having sex with the Queen of England or something like that. It seems as if it is a little way for fans of "General Hospital" to bring a little of that drama into their own lives. People, stop it! I want you as my friends, and I value as just that, but supposing you know what in the hell is going on in my life when you haven't been privy to the information is just wrong. I have been really down as you all know lately, and the last thing I need to feel as if some people I hold dear to my heart are spinning yarns behind my back. I need your support and will gladly give mine if/when you need it. I try to be here for all of my friends. Please try to do the same for me. Don't kick me while I am down. I have never met Queen Elizabeth, much less do I know her intimately, but I do like pizza... and I try not to lick panties... at least not too often.

Talking to S tonight, she finally got the final sign off. She got the "thanks for the 5 years but it is over for good now." I guess I know how that feels, and I conveyed that to her. She said that she understood there were lessons lying beneath but that she really couldn't think about that right now, that the hurt was too much. I told her the lessons would come, and that she need not understand them now, nor could she really even begin.

I awoke this morning with eggs
after a dream of eggs last night
and I wonder today what
my therapist will say
about such things -
these eggs, or those,
in that dream,
or the pigeon eggs,
broken,
just shells that fell
from the rafters
beneath the train tracks
as I was on my way
to the stairs and
to this chair
to write about eggs.

One of the biggest things that holidays are for me is a time to measure out change; to see where you have come, how much your life has changed since the last time that holiday rolled around. Thanksgiving also gives us the chance to take a look at what we are thankful for, perhaps through the lens of that time measurement.

I decided not to go to Durham for Thanksgiving this year. It was not easy to just take the offer of that safety, security and support, but I felt like I needed to stay in Atlanta to prove something to myself. New friends had invited me to Thanksgiving dinner, and I felt that being able to decide to stay here for the holiday showed a substantial amount of progress in my recovery from the break up, and the formulation of a new life that I have been attempting lately.

Okay,
here's how it goes,
we are sitting at this pizza joint,
and at most it is 3 to 4 months into it all.
We are just sitting there and
talking about love and
our love for one another, and
how great the other one is, and
how we should get married
before we hate each other, and
she is saying she has never
felt this way before,
and I am saying I have never
felt this way before, and
there is a way she eats the salad,
discarding the pepperoncini,
that I could see a demise,
that she didn't like blue cheese,
and that orange salad dressings
were distasteful, I could feel death coming.

I am sitting here trying
to convince myself that it was all over
from the start, that these pathologies
were already eating us up,
that we fulfilled some fucked up
psychological void that we each had...
but no it was love, it really was,
as sure as pepperroncinis don't matter, nor
a distaste for blue cheese, it was love.

At least there was that, and
there's nothing wrong with it, and
it was good.

I will awake
in the morning
with a yawn and smile
and the dream will be over.

I always hate when I get
to the final chapter of the novel
especially the last few pages
when I have to start considering
what I will read next and
I start to wonder about how
it will end even though I already know.

I know the writer puts emphasis
on this ending, it will be the last
thing he leaves you with, and
there are novels with such beautiful
endings, even or especially the sad ones.

I am up late again and out tonight
the late autumn crickets are singing
just as they did in the beginning,
and the cars are coming up
and down the road, people are
moving, falling in love, and out,
making love, kissing, arguing,
drinking, and fighting loneliness
and their own demons.

I have been up with too much
on my mind, trying to remember
the first words of the book
so I might write the last ones.
I forgot to save the pages, or
they were washed away in the flood.
I will have to recreate them, but
for now I am attempting an ending.

John Irving doesn't write
the first line of a book
until he has written the last.
If this one ends this way,
then that end is also a beginning.
Maybe there was death at the beginning,
or the thought of, or the fear of,
or was it love, a smile, comfort after
many long days, was a corpulent arm
throwing change to the beggars below,
or did it begin or end with him coming
home after a long day, and her waking
in a monologue, 'yes I said yes I will Yes.'

Some things end that way, or others
with a 'no nope never' and some don't tidy
up so easily.

I remember something sloppy
at the beginning of this book.
Perhaps a metaphor misplaced
or carried on too long. Something
was not right and it carried
its discomfort through all of the pages.

I hate this feeling at the end,
when you start reading so much faster,
and inevitably the phone rings
right as you are reaching the rapturous finale.

This one will end right where it began, I suppose.
The pages will loop back on themselves
and I will not have to worry
about what to read next,
and all of the unkempt ends
will smooth and fray and smooth and fray,
and we will lose sight of
the beginning or ending,
and it will just go on,
fall in love and out,
and in and out until it all ends,
or at least one of us.

Where did it end? Or begin? Or does it?

It was love,
it was love,
it was love,
no matter what the critics will say.

I must warn you all that this one will be boring. Today has been pretty awful on a lot of fronts. This will not be a piece where I will wax poetic very much. It will simply be me purging myself of the demons of this day.

I awoke this morning with JT on the sofa. We had approximately an hour and a half left together after seeing each other regularly in two different cities for the last week. We would board the MARTA train and travel to 5 Points Station together, where I would get off and he would transfer to the southbound train, and eventually to a plane back home to Chicago. It was hard not to be sad. This past week has been a pretty good respite from the things that have been perplexing me lately. I was really scared of what coming home alone from work would bring today.

Despite what you may think, it is Bibb County that this place is in, not Macon County, so the romance ends there. We are departing back to Atlanta now with car in tow behind pickup and I am $165 poorer, not to mention what it will cost to get the damn thing running again this week. Keep you fingers crossed for us, we have been known to screw things up many times before.

Okay, this may have nothing to do with medication or my depression or recovery, or with the breakup, or anything like that, but life does go on in other directions as well.

Earlier this week a sportswriter at my paper, a man of about 55 years old, named Jack, came by my desk and asked me did I own a blue VW Passat station wagon. I had never met Jack even though we both work on the 8th floor. I thought he was about to tell me that my headlights were on in the parking lot, or that he had just seen a band of hooligans run off with my rims, even though they are not so fancy. The story is much more interesting than that, though.

Out tonight with JT and G3, to the brauhaus with a aging German band playing Elvis covers, of course it was hard not to think of G1 when I first met her and a Montero with a bumper sticker that cried out "recognize me." This city has swallowed me up this weekend, like telling me of what I have been missing in a city all of my life. It has not been too hot, or cold, or anything. It is just a city, and of the best variety.

Sitting in the Atlanta airport awaiting a flight to Chicago where I will have a date with destiny and the course of my whole life could change - for better or worse I do not know. Getting here was an adventure. It involved a skittish emphysemic cab driver named Gerald Cody, who seemed like a really nice guy, but couldn't help from going over the lane separator lines and quickly jerking the Atlanta Lenox Ford back into the correct lane. Upon dropping me off at the airport, he told me to have fun at the party in Chicago, and to try not to burn the city down. I didn't tell him of any party - I guess I did tell him about Chicago, but I do not remember - so I guessed he was referring to the White Sox win in the World Series last night. I told him I would put out any fires that I saw.

It's nearing 2 AM and game 3 of the World Series is still on the TV. I am still awake watching and trying to get all of my financial information entered into a budgeting and accounting program so taxes and keeping track of expenses will be easier. If you really know me, this doesn't sound like me at all. With the medication making it so I require less sleep, and the wagon making it so I have extra sober time on my hands, and because I need things to do to keep my mind off the obvious situational difficulties i am having, I do things like getting on top of my finances. I also keep my fingernails pruned and I am reading no less than 5 books concurrently right now.

I thought I was doing alright coming home this afternoon. I've had a day that was pretty good, not too much depression or melancholy, managed to really throw myself into some work that needed to be done. Was looking forward to having a willing night at home alone until I arrived at home, and coming along the sidewalk by the side of the house, I remembered that the area where the azaleas now sit empty, was where earlier in the late spring or early summer we had weeded together when we got back from dinner. We were quiet and intent, only talking to figure out how to dispose of the refuse. G was so happy out there just pulling those weeds with ugly stalks a pretty, but tiny, flowers on them. It seemed the more that we pulled the more there was.

Out this morning
the malignant gardener
moves the bin to the curb
and straightens his shirt.

Later he will do a little
pruning of this and snipping
of that until it is right
or he is tired.

I sit in the Florida room
putting out a cigarette in
an ashtray that cannot let
one in without letting one out.

The gardener will later turn
into a bird. It will not
be many days now, as they are
turning cold enough to crack bones.

I will later turn into a bird as well,
an autumn bird, and will migrate,
this nest left behind, and flight
and warmth and motion will become home.

It's been restless
being man lately.
The pleasures of the bird
have appeal.

Success, then, is that when you are
gingerly nudged from that nest, like the
cigarettes in the ashtray, your
wings will work before you hit the ground.

On the other hand, we must
continue to feel failure
in our hearts, even as all the
world lays its garlands on us.

What does the bird know
that we don't? Or the gardener
when he turns into that sparrow?
What does he then know?

What can that cigarette butt there
teach us? Or the end of
these days? Or ours? And, where
will we winter this year, or next?

To be a bird, maybe,
get to the end of it all,
a good son, a good friend,
a good husband, and father,

And nothing more.

Ah, day 40. The amount of time it took for a full inundation, and I had an inundated weekend. You would have thought my eyes were the cause of the flood. I couldn't seem to keep it together. I fell apart at every juncture. I guess that is always the danger when you feel you have gotten stronger. J says just mark it up as a bad day, or a weekend in this case.

It's all gonna be alright,
breathe fucker, breathe!
Ooooohhhhm!
It's all gonna be alright.
I am a bird and there is
no land and no nothing,
and I will fly on knowing
it's all gonna be alright,
and on and on.

Up too late again. This is how it goes these days. After the break up I could not wait to get to sleep. I would sleep anywhere at any time if given 5 minutes just to relax. Now, I have not had but about 8 hours of sleep over the last two nights. I have been feeling mostly good until today. I spent much of it by myself. I went tonight to a movie and music festival by myself, but it only stood to remind me of how alone and lonely I have been all day. I have gotten used to weekdays, but I have far fewer Saturdays - many of them spent other places - and it takes some getting used to when you awake alone and realize that the rest of the day will be much like that. I don't know. I want some sort of relief and I cannot figure out how to get it. And all of this after having a great day yesterday. I was strong, forward-looking and hopeful. I don't know where it all went today. Listening to sad songs and reading way to much good, but sad, poetry probably doesn't help the cause much. I think the medication is part of the late nights. I want to fall asleep right now and sleep a very long time. Maybe the morning will bring a new reason. We'll see.

It was on that last night,
before I took you out to the truck,
and before mother's litany
of photos from the Northeast,

and before the phone call,
that phone call,
later the next day,
and even before the final foot rub
for my parents, and all the world,
to see, as we sat on that
love seat, and I believed
that being there may indeed
make the love possible -

you and I were in the bedroom
one last time (why
were we there?) and
I asked would you sleep
here with me again before
I have to leave this place and
you said, "yes," and I fell for it, and
later we kissed and said goodbye
for the final time out by your truck,
and that too was before
I knew what the next day would bring,

and now I sit here in this bed, and
I haven't washed the sheets or made
the bed since then, and it stays wrinkled
and in the space where my body usually lays
there's an indentation, and where yours laid
there is a chalk outline
surrounding a lone pillow,
and where my heart lies,
restless most nights,
there's a chalk outline
around it too.

click head to enlarge

I thought of posting a full body nude photograph of myself here as well, so y'all could see how much weight I have lost (28 pounds since the beginning of August, or roughly 1/8 my previous body weight), but realizing I plan to keep the weight off until I see all of you, I decided to spare you and me the embarassment. Besides, the company that hosts bullpencatcher will not host pornography, even though I assure you, despite the facial hair, this would not be pornographic or titillating in the least.

I know that some of you think that I should be over this by now, and I guess I think it at times too, but I am still struggling with the breakup. G was the one, so I thought and still do to a certain extent, and it is just so hard to get over that.

The days are going on and our relationship now has become mostly electronically epistolary. It is frustrating at times to have to wait for a response to an email, to not be able to just call her up - even more, not to be able to see her. It is odd that one of the people that you love most in the world, and that you think the highest of, is also a person that you cannot just pick up the phone and call. I guess that's what most people feel when standing on my side of a breakup - a little bit helpless, a little bit crestfallen, and a little bit confused.

Awh, babe! Where are you? I know you are there, I felt it tonight. See, it has turned cold out - a little nip in the air tonight - the first of the season, and I am coming back to this house, and this bed and the AC is finally not working overtime, and I have to keep socks on as I walk around on these wooden floors. Out tonight, late, I went to retrieve T on his return from gambling wonderland, he did not win. From the airport and to the Winchester and a sandwich and then delivered him to the highrise and all of that. I didn't even mention you one time to him tonight. Nothing about where my heart is, or if it is hurting, healing or just hanging on. Just a sandwich too late for proper sleep and rest, and then home. And during the getting back part it takes me by that place where you are, and I feel it, up the steps with lights out and two hours into slumber and I feel my heart adhere lock-step to the beating of yours, and I feel warm, and the bed seems less lonely, and I know that this cold winter may be a little easier to get through, now that I have found you.

Oh, it's Friday and I greet these weekends with relief and apprehension. They definitely have not gotten back to being the relaxing time they once were, although they slowly move in that direction. I left work early for a 1 PM therapy session only to wait in the waiting area until 1:25, then to find out that my therapist was not in. I knocked on the door and there was no answer. I checked voicemail, but nothing from him. I imagine he either had an emergency, or he simply forgot. I left a message and hope to hear the reason soon.

The things they didn't tell you when you checked into this world... it was all printed in a booklet given to your mother just after you had descended the birth canal and she was in no state to be the keeper. It was written in type way too tiny for little baby eyes to read anyway. They intentionally keep this information from you, and you eventually learn the hard way. There will be no repairs, refunds or exchanges for certain types of damage caused by misuse, or any of these other scenarios:

Sitting in this room that I have known for years, yet now looks nothing like the one in which I put you to bed those nights. Kissing you on the cheek. Then I wanted to go to sleep, as I did just after the sky fell and I started my medication. Those nights when slumber came so easy knowing that you were still there, in there, waiting for me. We would awake in the morning, and like the night before go out on the porch, and it would be cold, and we would smoke cigarettes and the cold would work up through our feet to our head and it would be like drinking a milkshake too quickly before we became mutually lactose intolerant. I haven't figured out the pill for that. Or were we just intolerant, and irritable, and the pharmaceutical companies haven't yet made a cure for those things.

I guess this is the way it is. Funny thing memory. Funny how it works. Or the cosmos. Oh them? Are they conspiring again? A man's book across from me upon closer examination is Marathon: You Can Do It by Jeff Galloway. A word on the crossword was "a city in Wyoming." You can only guess. All of this within an hour. And the news from New Orleans. Another crossword, another clue: "Relative of the cello" - guess you can figure the answer there as well. I am not making this up, folks. It is written out like the stars may spell your name if you squint and tilt your head appropriately. We live in an intricate trap. Everywhere there's something to totally floor you, or lift your spirits to the sky.

Tuesday was one month since G and I broke up. Yesterday was her birthday. In the month after the breakup I worked on a long series of short pieces about G and what she means to me, why I love her and such. So much had become confused in me and in her and between us in the last few months and I needed to start sorting it out in my head. All of the pieces were attached to a memory of her, and involved me remembering small details and talking about what those details taught me about her. The aspects of G that were brought to light ranged from the very cerebral to the somewhat goofy. All of it was heartfelt, and I spent many tearful hours sitting over the keyboard to work out all of the stuff. I gave it to her for her birthday yesterday and I hope it means, and will continue to mean, a lot to her.

Yesterday in my therapy session, I was discussing these writings with my therapist and he made the suggestion that I might think of doing the same for myself. He said that part of the process that I was going through right now was learning to like and value myself more, and that he thought going through this process would maybe help me identify some things that would move me in that direction.

Today is G's birthday. She turns 28. I think she is still plenty young enough to give away her age. Those of you that know her may want to drop a line and wish her a happy one. You can post the wishes here or send her an email if you have her address.

I realize that the hardest to get through time of day that I have is the hour or so after I arrive home every afternoon. When G lived here with me I always seemed to be in a bad mood when I arrived home from work. Looking back, I really do not know why. It seems foolish now. Why wasn't I happy having the life I had? Now I get home and I am not in a bad mood, just a sad mood. I think every afternoon I start partially daydreaming as I am driving home, and when I get here I expect to find G watching Oprah or taking a nap. It never turns out that way. Walking into the house feels lonely and empty. I think that is why I have started writing this at this time of the day. It gives me something to do until I start feeling better.

I know I usually write these things later in the evening but I have had some things on my mind since having lunch with T earlier today. While at Manuel's I told him of starting to wonder whether or not the way I feel, and have tended to handle things is all that radically different that the norm. In other words, am I possibly over-pathologized, or at least do I feel that I am a lot worse off and abnormal than I really am?

Today began late. I any of you noticed the timestamp on last night's post, you will see that I was up late. I awoke this morning around 11, immediately got a Diet Coke and popped my Wellbutrin. Last night was somewhat of a blur. Too many stimuli, felt like nights that I have been nostalgic for many times over recent years. Interesting conversation with interesting people about things that most of the time would seem so un-ininteresting, but that due to the circumstances are just perfect.

Okay, I guess this is the way it should be. I finally have reached the point that I have stayed up with my friends until way in the morning. Colleen has kissed me on the cheek in front of her other to tell me good night; to thank me for being a good club soda patron. It is too late. I am too old to do this kind of reconnaissance and I want to make everyone happy.

I spent some time time talking to K tonight who probably gave me the best advice - spliced into the middle of tales of anal sex exploits. He told me that I needed to figure out who I was, a scary proposition. Who am I?

Today was a departure from the norm lately. I awoke again to no Diet Coke (things I seemed to always take care of when G was in the house have become, apparently, less urgent now), no cereal today either. I had to go to my therapist earlier today than usual, an 11 AM appointment. Afterwards, I had lunch with T and then came back home to work. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just a day, too much time spent again on technical issues.

Later in the late afternoon/early evening G called and we talked and I broke down a bit. I try so hard not to. I want to be strong and good and something worthy of her, or anyone else's for that matter, affection. I think I have been walking through this week trying to steer a middle path between the peaks and valleys that I have been experiencing lately, and today it all just came to a head, I had to let out the missing and sadness that was still inside. I had even broken down during my session a little earlier in the day. I think it was the first time I had allowed myself to really think about the situation in a few days. I had managed to distract myself for much of the week with various technical issues and projects.

Today began almost like the others, a small emptiness in the stomach, 300 mg of Wellbutrin, skip the Cheerios, had no Diet Coke in the house. Stayed up too late last night working on the new laptop that my aunt just bought me and from which I am now wirelessly writing this. Long story about working on it, but now I have it up and running, but cannot connect to the AJC network. I need to revert to a previous version of the OS. Does this bore you? It kind of bores me, and I know what I am talking about. Too much time spent on technical dilemmas.

Today, again began like the rest, except this time with a 300 mg dose of Wellbutrin XL. My prescription has doubled, apparently to the standard dose. I have been told that any binge drinking on this dosage would run the risk of causing seizures. If my sanity and recovery weren't enough to keep me from drinking, this scarey possibilty surely is more than an added incentive. Today was up and down and up again. I am finishing the day on an upswing. Played tennis earlier with new friends. Went to Outback for filet with T and L. I am feeling lonely still, but more clearheaded now. I don't know if it is the meds, or if it is just getting better. A lot of the white noise that used to buzz about in my head seems to have dissipated. I am enjoying things a little more. Still sad and lonely and very missing of G. I can start to see a light at the end of the tunnel a little bit though. I don't know exactly what I will find when I get there, but I am willing to go forth.

Today began like the rest during this experiment. I awoke, ate a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, popped the top on a Diet Coke and then popped my 150 mg Wellbutrin XL. I went to work for a while and then had an appointment with the prescribing doctor at 3PM. We talked for an hour. He told me that he could tell that I was feeling better, that my demeanor was more upbeat and I looked to have energy. He asked me where I would like to be in five years, and I laughed. At times it is hard for me to know where I want to be in five days, much less five years. All I could come up with was: 1) I would like to be married (kid[s] optional in 5 years), 2) I would like to have a mortgage, and 3) I would like to have ventured into a larger more significant writing project (publishing optional).

We talked about how education and creativity open us up to many more options than some people have. I told him that that leads to the "cable television effect", the one where when we only had three network broadcast channels on TV there was always something good to watch, but now that we have over 200 there is never anything worth watching. We become paralyzed by choice, and I think this has been a predicament for much of my adult life. I have a bit of musical talent, a bit of writing talent, a bit of design talent... but how could I ever choose to pursue one of these solely, or even more than another. He said that these should be viewed as opportunities to me, not burdens, that the thing that I needed to get working the most in my head was my indexing and priority systems. Then decisions would come easier. I thought it would have been great to be able to tell G, "I think Sotto Sotto would be great tonight, I've been craving Risotto!" when she asked, "Where would you like to go to dinner?" Indexing, prioritizing. Something is not computing right in the old internal CPU.

Yesterday was Day 6. Still not really feeling any effect from the drug that I can really feel. I got up as usual, another 150 mg, and then to the gym for some treadmill time. I have lost 17 lbs. since robert left at the beginning of August. I am not really trying to lose weight, but if there's a silver lining to all that is going on, that is surely it. I spent most of the day relatively comfortably alone yesterday, only stepping out to play pool with Tommy for an hour late in the afternoon.

G called last night and gave me the update on the wedding over the weekend. We talked and I believe I was more updbeat than I have been lately. I am starting to not care as much. Not that I don't care, I just don't care as much. I realize that there are so many things about my situation right now that are out of my hands, and that I need to stop worrying about the things I cannot actively do anything about. I really need to just keep on track with my personal plan and things will work out for the best, no matter what that is. I know it sounds a bit pop-psychy, but I'll keep telling myself that.

I am reading a book about a guy who starts to take medication for chronic indecision. He has real trouble making event the most basic choices - whether to go to dinner with his girlfriend, out with friends etc. He starts taking the "experimental" drug for his condition, and at this point in the novel he is even more paralyzed, putting off making decisions for a week or so, until the drug starts working. I feel like that is somewhat where I am on my new regiment of Wellbutrin. I am starting to set up strategies to deal with my new circumstances, but am wondering if the medication will make me need new strategies - or at least different ones - once the medication starts to work. I have been told it will be 2 weeks to a month before the real effects will be found, and I am only 5 days into my treatment. I have moments of relaxation and clarity, but those many times give way to confusion, anxiety and over-analysis of even the smallest details of my situaiton. I don't know how or if Wellbutrin will help with these, I hope so. But I feel that I cannot just wait until the medication kicks in before I really start dealing with these tendencies. If you read this and have advice, I am open to it.

Yesterday was day 3. Same bowl of serial, another 150 mg. Tommy told me I needed to build a morning routine, and I guess I kind of have it now. It is anchored around taking my medication. My day went well, minimal amount of the blues, until I was coming home. It was then I realized that I had been having a bit of anxiety related to spending the whole night alone last night. I arrived at the house after work to find the City of Atlanta had come and cut down the one remaining oak on the street by the house - that sent me over the edge and I started crying before I could even get in the front door. I called mom and caught her on the way into the mall to talk about it. I finally calmed down. Talked with JT later, went to the bookstore, came home and read for a while with baseball in the background. Later, G called from Sparkle and we had a good conversation. Seems like things may be continuing to improve in that area of my life. In case, you don't know, I love her so much.

I awoke on day 2 much better than the day before. No scarey dreams or anything of that nature. A little of the hit in the gut feeling, still forgetting while sleeping the changes that have occurred. I immediately recovered fairly well though. I had another bowl of cold cereal and took another 150 mg of Wellbutrin XL. I felt calmer and more energized, some of which had to do with the phone call that came out-of-the-blue from G the night before. My primary emotional problem on a day-to-day basis is how much I am missing her, and it was nice that she called.

Yesterday was my first day on Wellbutrin. I awoke in the morning, turned on the morning news shows on TV, and ate a bowl of cold cereal. Then I went to the kitchen and with a bit of adrenalin running through me I popped my first 150 milligrams.

Tomorrow I start anti-depressants for the first time in my life. After much time resisting and feeling my brain reacting against me time and time again, I finally gave in. I got over my Marxist tendencies to consider it another opiate, a way of making happy workers and happy kids who would grow up to be happy workers and would not question the status quo. I went to a psychiatrist who explained what the research on the brain was in these matters, and I left his office with a two week supply of Wellbutrin XL Extended Release formula.

I am so tired of feeling depressed, and the recent events and changes in my life have not really helped matters in this department.

G's grandmother died last night at around 11 PM. She had fallen a couple of days ago and broken her hip. Earlier last night she had a massive heart attack and G called to tell me that. She then called this morning to let me know that Thama had died.

What I knew of "Thama" (a name G's sister, the oldest grandchild, created through childhood speech) were these things.

I saw her today. Three days after we officially were over. I was taking a walk, one which would have taken me by her house, not by design, but necessity. Walking up the front sidewalk and into the house with sofa seat cushions she went. I thought all of that was going down tomorrow night, not tonight. I was trying to be strong. Had been trying all day, but seeing her almost brought me to my knees. Carrying sofa seat cushions is not usually the most romantic image, but she was a vision doing it. I guess she will now have better furniture in her new place. That will be good and comforting. I took a detour and went down through the park and around the golf course so as not to create weirdness or thoughts that I may be stalking. I wanted just as much to run up and hug her. To help bring the sofa in. To have a glass of water. To tell her I love her. To pretend like we were still together. Like I would be sitting on those sofas soon... but maybe soon.

drunk with his muse

It is 4 AM on the morning and Grier and I have been broken up for some 10 hours now. My parents have come in town this weekend for a visit, and emotional rescue of sorts, and things have not worked out as well as I had hoped. I awake a few minutes ago with cold arms and tried to warm them and get back to sleep. The split second that it took to decide to put my arms back under the covers was enough, however, to let in the reality of what has gone on.

G is gone. She told me today maybe it could work in the future, but it definitely cannot work right now. That we needed a clean break in order to work on the things that we individually need to work on. Hers may be finding out if someone else is more suited for her than I am and I imagine some other things. Mine are much more.

I have been bad, very bad. I have kissed another woman once early in our relationship, during the time G says, and I somewhat agree, was the good time in our relationship. It was my mistake. I should never have done it, and will never again. At the time, however, it only proved how deep my love for her had gotten so quickly. The kiss was awkward, and quick, and I immediately felt guilt and great swells of love for G. I vowed then that I never would do such a thing again, and I have not.

I thought G was the ONE though. I thought she was the one from the moment I drove to her sisters apt on June 21, 2003 after being out with my friend, because I could not bear not to see her for another minute, and we sat on the porch and talked and smoked cigarettes for much of the night, and I saw no less than 5 shooting stars.

In the midst of a bout of unemployment and indecision about a big move, I fell head over heels for a girl from Spartanburg, SC. I think most of you know how in love I was, and am. There's another part to the story though.

My other sins were much bigger though. I know many of you who I talk to regularly have heard me talk of "drunken belligerence" directed toward G. I don't know where it came from and I am not sure still. However, I think mostly it came from low feelings about myself, feelings of not being worthy of a woman like G, of fear that she would leave me one day and to take control of that, I should hasten the departure.

I had a dark side, an evil side, and it was fueled by alcohol. "Drunken belligerence" is euphemistic. I would get drunk and fall to pieces and start to curse her, her family, her friends. As she told me yesterday, I would call her a "whore and slut" and would generally denigrate the things that were closest to her.

She became fearful of me, and while it never came to physical violence, I understand if she felt that it could one day. I understand why she wanted to run, and I guess I understand why she finally did yesterday.

I don't fully know why I started or continued this behavior. I know that drinking had something to do with it, especially in great quantities. I also know that she tried to love me through it all, to fix it through love, and I am grateful for the attempt. I am not grateful for, or even respectful of myself, for not taking that love for what it was and making the change happen. I am sick tonight with guilt and regret. How could I shit on the thing I had waited all of my adult life for? How could I have shit on this woman who I consider to be the one? Why didn't I stop earlier before it came to this? Why didn't I stop earlier out of simple humanity? I feel so evil inside. I still feel so unworthy of a woman as good as her. I want to be better, to be made whole again. I want to feel happiness, simple and innocent happiness, and peace.

I am writing all of this because I cannot figure out any other way to get back to sleep. My mind is racing with all of these thoughts and they are keeping me awake. I didn't know what else to do. I am at a loss, but am tired.

To G, and God, and all of you reading or listening. Find it in your hearts to forgive me. Find it in your prayers a little word for me, in hopes that I will be a better man, so that I might one day find again many things that I have lost, and especially the one big thing... and that I won't squander it all if my search is fruitful. I repent. I repent. I repent. I repent...

Bryan

Oh, these August babies! All hot in their mother's womb. Like a vacation in hell, but you like it. I'm sure that the croupier's hair is teased to hide the horns beneath. I've spent too much. Now in the bedroom, I'm thinking of you. I'm thinking of you a lot. When I imagine that Mississippi river basin out there, the one I saw when going to bed this morning, you are walking across it in a cotton dress. Sweaty and hair sticking to your neck, you are walking across it toward me this time. I feel you in my heart in this flat place. I feel you there intensely. I hope it is not just imagination. That is you? Cotton dress? Sweat and hair? You are walking toward me? Or is it away? Is the heat that rises, mixed with river water, creating mirages on the horizon? My kingdom for you to be here for just 5 minutes.

My baby just called me,
drunk after the party,
to say she loves me
and misses me, and
just after I had
fallen asleep in
this old new bed
that has yet to be
christened again and
it woke me up and
I wish she would
do it again and
again and again.

Out tonight,
the neighbors are having a party,
and all up and down
this street are cars,
parked where yours did once
and I came home worried
about potential blockage
to the back drive
after watching Charade
with Shannon at the new house that
he and his wife and new baby
have in Reynoldstown.

I drank a beer
a couple of gin and tonics
had a burger
a Coke and a movie and
at midnight find myself back here
with a picture of you
floating in the air...
just simply floating.

I put on a shirt that
you bought me with
a shirt that
you bought me on top
like a double hug
tonight because you
were not here. Burger,
gin and tonic, beer. Stop.
Western Union and Pony Express.

Your quackery is on the shelf.
It's all gonna be alright.
Still the love of your life.
It's all gonna be alright.
Beatles playing cards.
It's all gonna be alright.
Western shirt and empty bed.
It's all gonna be alright.

When I imagine dreams,
and they will come,
you will be floating there,
just above the horizon,
just simply floating.

Your heart will be a house
and you will hold it in your hand.
The sign out front
will not be for rent
or for sale,
it will just say for me
to move back in.

House,
shirt,
cards,
comfort,
and all.

Tonight is nothing,
I am supposed to be nothing too,
or at least happy, and
to be sure,
this house is really nothing,
a nothing you once thanked me so much for,
but nothing can bring this nothing back.
Nothing acting on nothing.

The orange glow from the pub sign
atop the refrigerator with
the ice maker is nothing, and
the picture of you applying
mascara in the bathroom on the hall,
your bathroom, is, too, now nothing.
The oven stench from tonight's
frozen pizza is nothing, and I fear that
where I sit here, in this room, and
write this is nothing, and I too, and
so is this nothing as well?

The times we made love on the living room floor,
atop a flea market throw will soon be nothing, and
only later will other lovers hear maybe an echo,
but ultimately echoes are nothing. Ultimately,
the Florida room is nothing,
and the 5000 packs of
cigarette smoke there is nothing,
as smoke always is.

This house is smoke,
this house is burning,
this house will soon be nothing
but a spot two blocks from where
you chose once, in my absence,
to carve our initials for the ages
into a mound of concrete,
and to then come back here,
when here was something.

I am sitting here
waiting on you to return from
a gender exclusive affair on
the other end of the street, and
every car passing turns down the one street and
continues down the other and
at times I convince myself, that
tonight you've decided not to come back.

You told me yesterday
you were leaving,
not me but here, this
place that we found so perfect.
You needed an adventure, one
in which you hoped to find yourself, and
today we went and looked at
particularly adventuresome spots.

Tonight I am waiting,
after pizza, water, orange juice, cigarettes,
and the glass door tilted in,
and the glass windows tilted out,
and the screen door shut,
and the bugs humming -
all cars make the turn and continue straight,
sitting and smoking,
I hear clanking of keys
and think it is you,
but it is just ghost,
as the whole place soon will be,
little by little,
until nothing of matter
of either of us will be here.

It's 6:30 AM on the morning after our little world together first showed a crack and began to crumble. A cigarette and a glass of water. Robert leaves later today.

I'll get back in bed and try to hold it all together with an embrace, for a little while.

I have sad news to convey. I awoke this morning to a text message from Robert, friend of many of you, and sometimes writer for bullpencatcher.com, telling me that his mother died at 10:10 GMT today. As many of you know she had been recovering from a several-month stay in the hospital after having an allergic reaction to medication for gout that caused her to lose close to 70% of the skin on her body. She was recovering well from the reports I had been receiving from Robert. When I talked with Robert on Friday of last week, he told me that she was going into the hospital for treatment of the skin on her eyes, not a simple and easy procedure, but not one thought to be incredibly dangerous either. Last night I recieved a call from him during which he told me that his father had called earlier in the evening to tell him his mother had turned for the worse and the doctors predicted she would only make it, at most, another week. The loss of her skin had made her very susceptible to bacteria. A staphylococcus (Staph) infection had entered her body and made its way to her heart where it was destroying one of her heart valves. Her heart was, for all intents and purposes, pumping blood back on itself. Robert told me that he and his father had decided not to request more life support once she started to slide. His father told him of the plans he would make for the funeral. Robert was planning to leave Oxford today to go up to Yorkshire to see his mum, perhaps for the last time.

This morning's message said simply, "My mum died at 10.10 this morning. Could you let people know?"

Keep Robert in your thoughts for the coming days as I imagine they will be difficult ones for him. Please feel free to post comments here if you want.

To paraphrase Tony in The Up Series, talking of his family, "I love them all, all equally, except mum, who I love more, because if the family is a tree then mum is the root."

Robert's Entries during his mother's sickness:

Intensive Care
Small Mercies & Little Miracles

It was about then that the sky turned black, even blacker through the tinted office windows. Black like ink clung to the skyscrapers downtown. The occasional pop of light added to the noirish aspect of the afternoon. All systems come to a halt. I want my mother. Wish to be at home. Not that home, but home. Michael and I riding out through the trails to the lake. can't even have a cigarette. It's too dark. Couldn't find the match to the tip. I fear that the atmosphere may turn me black too. That just walking in it. To get to my car to get to the airport where the flight will not be on time, jets all covered in black, ink. Will we drink black drinks. It so scary its boring. Then a lady in a pink sweatshirt struts by. How does she stay pink. Seems like petroleum products could be the answer. The phones are off the hook. People are calling from the north to tell of devastation. Calling from places like Cleveland and Blue Ridge. They tell us the whole place is black. Like an oil tank leak. Not fish this time. Not furry seafarers. This time it has come for us. Are we what we eat? Have we too become polluted? Is that the reason the sky is black? The jets can't take off? Let's call of all Earth Day activity... due to the weather. Let's send the last dog from the pen to the executioner's chamber. I'll give him up too.

Was playing: Heroin by Lou Reed & The Velvet Underground

My parents have just left, heading back to North Carolina by way of any roadside arts/crafts stores. The faucet in the kitchen doesn't splatter all over the toaster anymore. You can shower with reasonable assurance that the water pressure will be strong enough to cut the lather off of your body. I can indicate left turns without the fear of inattentive crashing into me from behind, and my car doesn't groan anymore during the left turn. There are cosmos planted in a small window box out front. The grill is silver and clean. The futon is stripped and back in place. There are TV dining trays in the living room with classic country LP covers decoupaged on them.

A birdhouse in the city rain

I awoke this morning to a clap of thunder right as my alarm clock was going off at 6:45 AM. G was walking naked through the room, looking for clothes. It seemed as if it were much earlier. The light in the room was all off. I did my morning ritual of Diet Coke and a cigarette , then a shower - all the time worrying that the lightning would come in through the pipes and electrocute me. I wondered what that would feel like. Would my heart stop? If it didn't start back, who would call the paramedics? I survived only to field a call from an insurance adjuster who needed to take a picture of my car for a claim I recently made.

The usual 10 minute drive to work took 30 as Dekalb Avenue was a river due to the stopped up drains and the overdevelopment of land alongside the road.

The office windows in my building are tinted, subtracting two hours from morning light and adding two hours to afternoon. It felt as if it were dusk all day. And then finally, I left.

A happier place and time?

Much has changed in my life. I decided to stay in Atlanta. Found a job at the newspaper in town. Found a new girlfriend. Moved... twice! Went through a tough process of trying to cut down on the sauce, six months of therapy and more. I still struggle with periodic depression goblins and have yet to find that elusive paradise of being. In fact, I have become increasingly concerned that such paradise may not exist at all. Overall, however, I have found some way of making a little sense out of it all. I have found a place, where not always happy, I don't seem to emotionally bounce back and forth all the time.

My friend and sometimes bullpencatcher author, Jeremy, just lauched his personal blog/web site and has been pretty active posting some great stuff there. Through the inspiration of his site and the fact that I have been missing writing a lot, I was pulled back to the bullpen. Through all of the months of inactvity on the blog, I have labored over ideas, felt that I had no time with my ever-expanding work schedule - basically found every excuse not to sit down at the keyboard. The happier place I found myself in didn't seem to make writing as automatic as it was before, and because of that I couldn't find the energy to work at it. I am hoping to change all of that a little now.

I spoke on the phone to my father today. The difference between the way he answers the phone now and how he did three weeks ago is marked: where there was fear, where there was pain, where was the acceptence of the worst, there now is joy. There's a smile in the voice that only a couple of weeks ago sounded leaden and careworn. You see, my mother walked today. This morning she shuffled along the burns unit corridor with the aid of a Zimmer frame, and then she did it again this afternoon.

Dad is buying a new bed for her return; he's dercorating the bedroom; he's shampooing carpets; he's shopping for new clothes; he's looking forward to what, at our family's lowest point, seemed to be the impossible: Mum's homecoming.

I raise my glass to the NHS. Thank you Mr Bevan! Thank you.

I know you have all been thinking of me. You cannot know how much that means to me. You should know that I have been thinking of you. And that always helps.

I am just about to make the phone call. And even though I've dialed the number every day this week, the thought of it ties my stomach in knots. By writing this I know, in a way, I am putting off the moment when I must pick up the handset, tap in the area code, then the number, and wait until a nurse answers at the other end: Hello, Burns Unit.

My mother is in a pitiful state: She has lost seventy per cent of her skin - face, arms and hands, chest, back, tummy, thighs and feet; her breathing is aided by a ventilator through a tracheotomy; tubes come in and out of evey orifice for food, blood, piss, you name it. She is very ill. And all this from a drug allergy.

When my father rang to say that the doctors had given her a less than fifty per cent chance of survival, I dropped everything at work, rented a car and drove the 170-mile journey to her bedside.

The medical staff are amazing. I can't even begin to express my admiration for, and gratitude to, everyone who is working so tirelessly to save my mother's life. The nurses are constantly monitoring, testing, adjusting and tending. Registrars, consultants and surgeons are honest yet encouraging in their counsel, answering any question with patience and warm sensitivity. She really couldn't be in a better place or in better hands.

There is no end to this story; no one knows how it will end - all we can do is hope. Now I'm going to make that phone call.

Oh, and if it isn't bad enough that my thoughts continually go to the fact that I have severe doubts about Kerry winning the presidential election... John Peel is dead. Who will save us now?

Out of loneliness, time is going to turn back on itself. Time is lonely and I am too. All of the friends have moved on to the promise of better lives far north of this place. Nothing good ever happens south of here: abductions, mass mudrerings, rape, disappearance, infidelity...

I am working on an atomic machine that spins out of whack, to help time in its quest. Nothing is funny about this. If certain rhythms are reached, waveforms are created, the wheel of time will spin backwards - irregularly - the same way the spinning wheel of a hot rod seems to do when you stare at it while cruising beside down the highway. This atomic machine wil take away all bad things. The last four years included.

I don't know what you all were thinking. I have decided not to write much lately, at least not here, but this is a call to anti-arms. A call for you to bring your asses home. Whether or not you heed, you will be here in the end. It is the nature of the machine. I will be a 12 year-old boy when you arrive. You will all be relatively the same - twelve or so, pimpled, and in the throes of hormonal upheaval. You may not understand at all now, but understanding comes slowly under the auspices of the machine.

I have made time my friend. I have turned the bastard foe that takes my weekdays away from me, deposits me in the arms of the "man." I have taken it all and placed it into my little machine. I have placed it around my machine. I have realized how to make friends out of mud, cow dung, assorted broken stereo parts. Suddenly you will not be able to walk forward properly - legs wobbledy, kneeks knocked. You will return to me, to here.

You will fall in love all over again with whom you have chosen to love. (The nature of the erratic machinery.) And you will file bills of sale, and bails of hay, for action figures and comic books and tether ball sets. There will be no need for law and success and promotion. You will have a 2 week uptake cycle on education in the mandolin, cello, harpsichord and silk screening process. You will not leavve or feel the need to leave.

This is not a dream, for you are alive and we are all at Denny's with wiatresses carrying fluorsescent bouquets. Poker can be won for pride. The grand slam breakfast for us all. The machine shaking on the table doesn't even disturb the babies in accompanying carriages.

You will all return to me, to here.

Sherman will retrace his steps, rebuilding all of the structures of Atlanta. We will all move back to this place. We will start a commune in Candler Park.

It's all Saturday night and rock and roll and bullshit. Boys playing and a girl. A pledge of allegiance in absentia and a dirge. Can we get rid of the fucking president? One way or another. Signe me up for a FBI file. If I haven't one yet, I haven't been living my life right. Oh hly hell it's sunday and I have no inclination toward a church or a beach or a watering hole with food in this godforesaken state.

Love always,

Bryan

I'm in Atlanta and it's a cloudy day. And for the first time this trip I am yearning for home - I need to be home right now. But it's not the cloud-cover that reminds me so much of an English Summer that is pressing all these homesick buttons in my heart. It's not the comfort of my own bed that is calling me, nor the gentle poetry of cricket. It is not Queen and Country, but friendship. I need to throw my arms around my friend and tell him that I love him.

You see, I opened an email from Martin this morning. He and Tanja have just returned from a hiking trip to Utah - it was something they'd been planning for months. On the way back to the UK, they stopped off in Vegas and got married. And, unlike so many unions, I have no doubt it was the right thing to do.

I'm feeling so at a loss lately. Like I had been taking it all for granted, as if this would never end - I had found the one, and the one way, and the rest would surely fall into place bit by bit over time. I know that is not true now. And that my complacency with the situation - indeed with the state of my life - was truly asinine.

Nothing is ever for sure. I felt you slipping through my hands last night as we made a desperate embrace - like sand, or better yet slime, as a residue has been and surely will be left. I feel that I am going back to the drawing board. How stupid I was. How utterly stupid I've been . In my anti-Copperfieldian act, it's magic in reverse, except I don't make myself disappear this time. I do it to you.

Turtle

'We can't be turtles,' I said. Then recited a litany of the objects in the house that would not fit in a turtle shell, regardless of its size: silverware set, guitars, chest of drawers - even the collection of second hand bath towels was just too big.

If I did not have to pay for housing I believe that my lfe would be happier. I know it seems obvious, but I believe that even a prepaid one room in a crumby hotel would bring some sort of peace that cannot be found when one week out of every month is worked just to pay for shelter. I have begun to believe the old adage that we are owned by the thing we think we own. Especially those that still carry monthly payments.

Andrea used to be able to move everything she owned in the back of her Ford hatchback. I guess that is as close as we can ever come to being turtles. If I started all over again, I do not think I would collect records or books. They get heavy no matter how small the box you are putting them into is.

I believe I would collect air samples from cities around the world, crepe paper samples, helium-inflated balloons. I believe it would be alright with just her.

I don't really want to be a turtle at all, as a matter of fact. It seems a lonely existence. For intimacy you would be hard-pressed. Your houses would come between you like Romeo and Juliet. It's impossible to fit two turltes in one shell. Simply impossible. Let's move and get it over with.

Me and Marlon and Owen

I had seen Marlon last on the waterfront as he was in the midst of a continuing struggle with the big business thugs there. I had seen that movie some 20 times. It was sad that he had become so secretive as we grew older. I knew nothing about him in his old age, or his waning health. I knew he had become an island. He had gotten fat and came out of 'hiding,' it seemed, only for recent awful movie parts. He was the first person I ever saw on the screen that seemed real. Even though I was much younger, and there was plenty to attach myself to in terms of screen reality, no one, except possibly Paul Newman, could rivet me in that way. (Bogart entertained, but he never seemed real.) I wrote a song about him one day. Or rather it was a song about a loved one in which I imagined him and his solitude. I will miss him.

Today as I gazed up at the TV while at work - CNN - and saw the ticker telling the story of his death across the bottom of the screen, I became 'misty-eyed' and pulled off my headphones and excalimed to my boss. "Brando's gone!'

Only a couple of weeks since Reagan went and I am feeling a celebrity death really for the first time. Reagan bothered me not in the least. The best I can say about him is the same that so many seem to be saying around me lately... "He had charsima!"

Marlon Brando gave me a reason for living at a time in my life in which I was ready to turn out the lights. I know it sounds hokey, but it is true. Some turn to God, I turned to Brando, and it seems to have worked out fairly well so far.

Owen Meany died today also.

A few weeks back G and I had been discussing the book and I was sure that I had read it. As it turned out I had not. For God's sake I hadn't. I had read 'Garp' but not 'Owen' and it was made clear to me that the book was requisite reading if this whole thing between me and her was to ever work out.

Owen and I quickly became friends and I found myself thinking of him at the most odd times of the day. I expressed my obsession with G and she began to worry of my sexuality. She knew the Wally story and it had plagued her for some time, so she was perfectly willing to believe that I could fall in love with a man who I had never, and never would, meet in person.

What I knew of Owen after some time, was that he would die on July 8th - at least that's what he thought, and that I would somehow be complicit in the tragedy. He died a few days earlier than even he expected requiring a new slab and a new cut with a sterilized diamond blade. It was alright in the end, I suppose. He saved Vietnamese orphans returning with nuns during wartime. This ain't no party. (Stop reading now if you haven't read the book and plan to.) He had his arms blown off by an overzealous piece of white trash (and I use the term knowingly) who was armed with a 1968 Chinese hand grenade.

He knew how he would die, and roughly which day he would, and he knew he would be a hero, and he knew a few things that would come to pass as well:

"WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY? THERE IS SUCH A STUPID 'GET EVEN' MENTALITY- THERE IS SUCH A SADISTIC ANGER...SOON THERE'LL BE AN EVANGELIST IN THE WHITE HOUSE; SOON THERE WILL BE A CARDINAL ON THE SUPREME COURT..."

He never knew he would die the same day as Marlon though. He never knew Reagan, or that he would die within weeks of him. He never knew that he would leave me reeling in the way that he has tonight. He would look compassionately, yet condescendingly, on the fact that I am trying to drink his death away. He would tell me that I should eat something - and I should.

I remember Johnny Gou's poem from college, open-mike night, in which he described Brando while performing 'Streetcar' on Broadway. How Marlon would go out the back stage door during his down times and have a drink at a neighboring bar, in full make up, and character.

I imagine Owen was a little like that. He never left his character, although the character changed. He knew his destiny was to be savior, yet he finally let righteousness wane a bit. He would have skipped out on a funeral to have a drink with me.

Brando would have done the same.

I miss that in friends. The drop-all mentality and uncomplicatedness.

G will be back tomorrow and we will talk about it all. She did not know that so many would fall away while she was gone. You will have to suffer me less.

But even her return will not bring back Owen or Marlon. Thus, something in me dies today, I realize this now.

O God - please give them back! I shall keep asking You.

Lately I've been having dreams in which guys in black come into the room where I sleep and carry my rigid body out and into an awaiting chartreuse 64 Ford Fairlane. I am perfectly alive, yet immobile and turgid. It is the way I imagine my body looks when I have been on a week long drinking binge. When I haven't eaten right in a while. I don't want food. My body swells and I languish.

The guys in dark clothing come in and carry me into that car and we head off for Lake Mickey to check out how the city's water supply is doing today.

When I was younger, much younger, my brother came into a duck. Or rather, a duck came into our family, and after trying to provide a proper household for a duck, and failing, my parents decided that we would take the duck to Lake Mickey so it could live in a colony with the other ducks there. We would occasionally go to visit and my brother and I would ask which duck was ours. My mother would point at one and say, "That one!" Even though we were young, we were old enough to know that that duck looked nothing like ours, but we nodded and chased it as if we believed her. We did not even keep the duck long enough to give it a name. Rochelle Street was no place for a duck.

We did keep Lester long enough to give him a name though.

Lester was a mutt of a hunting dog gotten from my Uncle Ray long before he had a heart attack in his tree stand and fell to his death. Lester was the runt and we rescued him in a way, as Ray would always take the runt, as my grandfather had done before him, and chop him briskly on the back of the neck, taking all life from him in one fail swoop. It was his own helping hand in natural selection is what I decided. I could never decide what threatening to cut my ears off with a buck knife had to do with natural selection though.

Anyway, I was talking about Lester. Lester was a dog whose cuteness as a puppy only belied the beast he would become as he grew. He was part German Shepherd, part Pointer, and part Uncle Ray. He would jump on my 8-year-old legs one day and scratch me until tiny rivulets of blood would run down my overtan legs. Four perfect parallel scabby lines down the nubile strigns that stood for legs.

That was the same summer that we would go to the beach and return and Lester would not be in the back yard, tied to the twist-in-the-ground security mechanism that we had attached him to to obey the Durham leash law. I know now it was to protect him from his own stupidity as well. (I later became a vegetarian and vowed not to hate any animal, but I could still not forgive Lester. RIP)

We returned from our beach trip that summer and Lester's chain was broken. To my early brain, and given my experience with the bastard, I was sure that he was fierce enough to have snapped the 50 pound chain and escaped. I wasn't sad, although my brother shed quite a few tears. I understood, I guess, as my brother was my tormenter number one and Lester was a close tormenter number two.

It was a few years earlier that, on a whim, mom had bought us hamsters. Two of them that had names which escape me now. We had kept them for a year or so it seems and another vacation came. The little rodents had to stay with friends of the family, the Belchers, who had sons roughly my and my brother's age.

Upon return from Kure Beach, no mention was made of the hamsters for a couple of days until Felt finally asked. Mom told us that while we were gone the hamsters had died in the Belcher's toilet. They had escaped their cage and climbed up a toilet-side mountain of dirty clothes in the Belcher's bathroom. They had paused for a moment, looked at each other, and decided to mutually commit hamster suicide to avoid the house of filth that we had left them in. That was more or less mom's story.

After the hamsters and Lester was Misty. She was a Poma-poo that we got from my Aunt Bonnie after she and her husband had acquired too many Chows and was afraid the little dog would be eaten up. Misty was my favorite and I cannot say much or too much about her. One side of her heart failed and all should could do was walk in circles. It was like watching Albert Einstein reduced to entertaining himself with an Etch-A-Sketch. She handily passed on the morning my mother was going to take her to be put under. She has been buried some 17 years now in the garden patch behind my parents' house. Last summer I found 17 four leafed clovers on the ground above her grave in a manner of two minutes.

After Misty, my mother swore to never have another pet at the house. Whatever lesson that could be learned by us having them around had surely been already learned. And besides, the heartbreak was unbearable when they had to leave.

Until one day my brother arrived at home from his job painting computer parts, and in the back of his truck was a chow puppy. The puppy came with the name 'Hulk' which my brother had given him on the drive home as a testimony to our favorite TV hero as we were growing up, I suppose. (An appropriate hero, I suppose, as he would change into something different when he was angry, as everyone in my family tends to do, except my father. And we seem to be angry a lot.)

Hulk was with us for a few years. He grew in fits and starts, and by and by my mother came to love him after ther initial panic at having another pet in the house. He met his end with a speeding car when I was either in late Jr. High or early HS. I was awoken by the sound of a hot rod engine charging down the street early in the morning, only to be more awoken by mom's screams moments later and our run to the top of the driveway where we found him with mucousy blood slung from his mouth and nose. My mother cried like she had been the first on the scene to find her son dead on the battlefield. Later she would tell me that she believed she heard the car speed up before it hit the dog. The only hot rod in the neighborhood with dual exhaust and glass packs that would sound like what my mother and I mutually agreed we had heard belonged to the Shepherd boys who also purportedly did and dealt drugs to the kids in the neighborhood and at the school. Drug-addled hot rod driving teenagers had killed Hulk and the world would never be the same.

After Hulk, my mother would make the same vow to not get another pet. Largely she would keep that vow. Until, of course, one day my brother arrived home with a half mutt, half English bulldog which he had named 'Buddy' on the drive home from the pound. Buddy lived and did not die in Dude Ranch. He moved with Felt when he finally got married to Carrla after 9 years. He died last year when his gas just finally ran out. Felt buried him in his back yard where I hope within a few years there will be plentiful four leaf clovers. I will teach my nieces and nephew the geometrical approach to finding them. We will call them shamrocks.

Tonight I will go to bed and the men in dark suit swill come again. We will go to Lake Mickey in a Fairlane to talk to the ducks. I have it all figured out out. I will make duck sounds. Talk to the ducks. I will make quack and whack and ack and quack again. Some old gray haired bag of poultry will walk out of the woods and say to me, "It's alright my brother. I've been here all along. All is good. You will be good and do good. God loves you and that may very well be all you'll need to make it in this minor place."

Driving back from NC. That's where we were. It was the solstice, the long one, and an argument ensued and I broke down. Wendy asked me to lay back and close my eyes for a while. Why does everyone seem to get married? Why this pairing?

I guess I was sunk again into one of my ways, my depths, and the negative excitement of arrival ensued and I broke down. Jennifer asked me to go away for a few days and think about all of the things I had said to her. I went away and thought for a while and came back and had tiny burritos for lunch.

I was locked up in the penitentiary in Oswego when an elephant walked through the door wearing a sting of freshwater pearls and a Hunt's beans can on one front leg. The elephant was walking on it's hind legs and had its trunk looped on the tail of another elephant, but only the other's tail was present and nothing else. I talked to my mother on the phone and slammed the receiver down. Hilda suggested that I call my father on the west coast and discuss what had gone down. I told her I would and left for the Cask & Flagon and never made the call. He and I haven't talked in years.

I was making my way across the Eno river when a submarine tree limb snagged the leg of my pants and I went under for a mile or two before resurfacing in a patch of purple poppies with a orange road and concrete ditch going through. I took the road until it reached the other side of the patch, where Olga was waiting and she told me I needed to get my shit together. I went away for a while and had regular bowel movements and ate nothing that could not regenerate naturally. My BMs were not solid for years.

I made a point of saying to her grandmother before I left the hospital. She lambasted me in the car that I need not do such things, that it comes out hollow, that either, "I love or don't love, it's that simple." That, "You are full of such horseshit, why can't you just be." Lilly suggested that I go and make amends with Edith at the textile mill and things would be some better. I went away to Anchorage for an extended month and came back with frostbite in my toes and seasonal depression.

I was batting in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and a runner on second. My team was down by one and the pitch came. I heard the crack of the bat and saw the trajectory as the ball sprung from the bat; I didn't look for where it went, or at the scoreboard, fans, here or anything. I ran the bases making sure to touch each one, all the way back home. Christy tells me on good days that I hit a homerun, on bad ones she tells me that the center fielder caught it just at the top of the fence. All other days apparently it went foul.

Here's the night for you baby. You've been gone for full minutes now. There was the drugs in the bathroom which I am not to tell you about. It's a rock-star secret. Don't tell the girl... only to hurt the mother, and father all coming down on you in strange and opportunistic ways.

I made up my mind that I would off to the wheelhouse go. He's got me in his. Where is it? I don't know. Fell half in love every half mile since I left the state penn. You know what I am talking about. Or the latter in which the man became half bike, and bike half him. Here's your Irish lullaby.

I have been drinking again and if you didn't realize, or are not a veteran, this is the time when this place tends to bloat - for better or worse.

And you are standing in the shadows of a wide-swing tremelo. I am undercertain of the sustainability of the current circumstance.

I think of you two way too much. I think of what we will ever have.

You are in a distant part of the planet, brought closer by virtues of internet-enabled communication. You, in-love and unavailable. I guess now I know how you felt about the rest of us all along.

You, you one, and me and Chuck went one night and heard her sing and cried like adolescent boys at the loss of first conquest. She says, "take the glory any day baby, over the fame," and I break into tears in front of a CRT, a testament to my cyborg-ness. When I have these moments they seem to be so.

It's a wide-swing tremelo, it's a you in a baker's hat. It's a creepy sensation that all of the world has closed down. No lights moving, nothing open. It's a no-doughnut kind of world. It's a missing you, and you, and you and you. It's a drunken night alone. It's a creepy sensation that this may need to be the state of affairs. It's a sixties, throw-back, live in the woods, all of us - burn technology into a silicone lumpen mass, hell, look at me, I am naked - kind of dream.

And it is all along the shores of Lake Michigan - or the Potomac - or the pond at the Lodge.

It's th coming through complicated, and the search for simple.

It's what we had all along.

I figure something will happen if I lay back and wait for it to. I guess all nights converge. I guess sweetness converges. I guess the hall light will stay on all night. A half-pound of coffee you never tasted until the next day at a completely different place. I bought it for you.

I gotta get my shit together. I gotta get to bed. It won't never make sense for many of you. But perhaps for the ones that it counts, it will.

How's the for an errata, a filler, pro-epi-logue. This book will be a thousand pages before I turn it in, Holling.

At home, I guess it was Christmas, my mother was all in palpitation about the HGTV Dream Home sweepstakes. Apparently every year the cable TV channel builds and gives away a house that is primarily funded through product placement and advertising revenues. This year the house was in St. Marys, GA. Georgia, the state where I live. My mother and father live in North Carolina. Despite the fact that I realized chances were minimal that my mother would win the place, I occasionally allowed myself to think of what it would be like. A house in the state where I live where my parents could come, I could visit, when they weren't there, I could possibly use the place etc.

While at home over the holidays mom and I pulled out the old laptop and dialed op to the internet and downloaded, slowly, photos and panoramas of the house. We talked about good and bad design choices made by thte decorators. We talked about which room could be the office, was it the tower, or the hideaway place upstairs?

My father just retired. I could see fishing weekends.

Today at the paper where I work I saw a small, almost insignificant headline that had come across the wire.

"Calif. woman wins HGTV dream house in Georgia"

I don't know what happened, but I do know that I did a bad thing. It was all so simple once, so simple. I'll be thirty on the other side of the weekend and it seems so complicated now. I can't figure out how to hold my drink, to paint it clear, to get back to it. I guess it all started this way about ten years ago or so and I have really managed to wind myself into the yarn.

Who once was the guy who helped everyone out of the mess can't seem to figure out the puzzle. Instead he waits for things to get better, he flagellates himself, points fingers at others. I guess there will be happiness, right? Everyone says it starts getting better on the otherside of this weekend. And it's lent. And I guess I need to give up my childish ways.

When I am gaunt and pale your heart will flow down drainfloors for a man lamented in subway stations and a girl who was just a whore. A boy that played baseball diamonds, a blind boy, with a billfold, and a dream and a clothes hamperer full of locomotive steam. There were three twenties in the jukebox, by the time we came to lay. A full cheat spread of atomic bones and a girl all dressed in red. If you can't figure out the rhythm to this, it's how I found it along the way, make a great leap, into a brand new busy, and forget your tired dismay.

But giants are real folks, lets not forget that. I've been to Sheila's tonight and she laughed me in my face. Made a laugh like none of our circle has heard in 15 years. Told me I was a stinking drunk, while she, drunkstunk, balanced on a balance beam. I wish your sweet side would come out right now. I need something to throw my left shoulder on, I'm off-balance and my sister hopes for a morning draw. The steers are rising and the scallops are in my bed. It sounds so good when you say scallops, once you get it in your head. I am a reactionary.

Your miles are money and mine are too, or honey. Got gas... will make it. You made it this far passing yourself as a salesman car. What of it jester, I once had a dog named lester. Your house is of immaculate proportions and I believe the party is there. Gatsby! Not to lead you on. It meant nothing. Hold your tongue, boy! Manner where it's at. I make love with submarines and date an awful wretch.

More miles than money. I made out with queen of Memphis. He had a light and me a bucket and went off with a barrell of funny. I made it through that wilderness. Lost a bank card along the way. Which way to Union Station? I got heartsbeats and track meets and a whole cantata on the way. I got blue dreams and mad schemes and the sky gave way for you to hit dat shit.

Make a name for yourself in one book or another. Hollis is going to prison and me to the other side of the tracks. I've settled for untruth so long because truth is so slippy. Made you look. Took a typographical dream in my heart and made it mine.

I like your name. I like it a lot. I've tried to make endless anagrams. Your heart burning out, I'll stir it with a fan. Late night over easy. A capital breeze sworn over easy. I'll turn to the guy-faced dolls. Bitch them all and prepare the syrum. A word excercise for you and me. Can't wait until, on that whole city. This whole land. Make Marxists out of rooftops, a tie above the ropes. A turn into the turnbuckle. Am I happy? Fuck yeah, I am happy.

Get out of the house. Embrace those dolls. It's the best it can be. Watch out for the minor pause, and find something here with me.

Johnny Cash is dead, or so they say. And I can't remember the sequence, but I believe it was JT's daddy soon after or before or something. It doesn't really matter in the big scheme. Lots of great men arrived at their pearly gates in a short timespan and I am sure Tom T. Hall was custodian as St. Peter has been on an extended leave. I heard the stars cry out one night in a dream and the next day I saw colors I have never seen on this earth.

Mama talks about emotions like they are gasoline. Apparently the majority of them, we are gettting right now from the Middle East. My man lost in Iowa. I am floundreing to a bogus electorate. Let's elect one who will make us all solvent, politically, for one good time. I can't flip the switch for you....

Pardon me boys. The deal has gone awry. NC senator may be the best choice.

Can he stop capital punishment.? Give us health care? Stop the war? Restore our reputation in the world? Can pimple-lip make it all that much better? I imagine not. Nor could the dean for that matter. I was hoping for a sweet Norse god from the north that would make it all better.

Awh! But that's all horseshit. As sure as Milliken with a rainbow full of strawberries is horseshit. My horse doesn't shit. I assure you. It wears a string of silver beads and a saddle of silicon, and all it's excrement is of the most beautiful wordly kind.

There's other things that should be written here. Your entrails on a map. It leads from middle Georgia up the interstate to the border, and it comes right back.

There's someone waiting to die in prisons tonight of my own reluctant choosing. Steve Earle is close shaven, Johnny Cash and Jerry Wilsonare dead, and I can't figure out the truth.

Look for it folks... in the bottom of your tea cups. I am devining tea leaves. A Year, or ear, is at an end and if it all goes back. Recoils like a Red Ryder BB gun into nothingness, a small recoil, as sure as shit, she shot the cans from the top of a bail of hay. Oh, my word! What of all of this now. A tisket and a tasket, holy hell, baby's brains in a baby basket. The line between truth and fiction, or me and you, heaven and hell, has grown precariously close. I have spit Satan's hot venom out of my throat tonight, the morning arrives too quick. I made sweet sandwiches of Earthlike proportions for our dinner date. John has no shot. Howard is lurking. Noone says what I want but all try to come close. Maybe by next May.. or November at latest, someone will break through. I am tired beyond tired of fightng fights that I never signed up for...I wouldn't even make the cut. There's a SC, and NC, and GA... we have no shot right?! My heart pounds to get out of this place. Tuck tale and run. Make a new dream in some distant land. Forty-eight acres in northern Montana, a license for nudity if that's what strikes your fancy. Three acres-a-piece for the loving children. If you died in your sleep, I would end it all. Spleen, heart and lungs.

Quay

She was so pretty when she was young. Took great delight at the discovery of ice. How did we keep the freezer from her so long? She lived ice cream and seemed to have an inherent understanding of the substance. Ice, in and of itself, was a totally different beast. I made my way across town in my father's pickup tat he had left me when he left for Mexico in '97.

He speaks fluent Spanish now and struggles with certain parts of English. On the occasional phone calls it is as if daily certain words are leaving him. My grandmother had the same issue the three years preceding her death and we called it Alzheimer’s. Dad has just wound up in a new world full of tequila, late night discos of a different sort, and, I imagine, the occasional Mexican prostitute.

I was from across town, and the plant, coming home to you. Bacon I had bought at the supermarket hours earlier languished in the bed of the truck. But it's bacon, I figured it would still make for a decent morning meal on the coming Saturday.

I think the problem ultimately is that this is not a mystery although it seems like one at this point. Or, it is a mystery, just not one that the average will discern as so. I made my way across town with bacon in tow. A little drunk if the truth be known. I know I am too old for this shit, or that shit, should know better etc. Two cars I came across along the way. Little Jenkins was out by the road already waiting for the mail to arrive, which was not a possibility at least for another 12 hours. He heartily gave a wave as I went by.

See I guess it is ultimately a shift issue. It is not that you sleep or that I sleep. Hell, we all need sleep. I know I have raised a ruckus over this shit lately. Keep me off the gin at least until the weather makes a turn.

Henry was in the yard barking and barking as I made the turn. He ran to the car and chased me that half-mile, lapping my heels as I exited the truck and up the steps, into the house, I let him in as well. I know you don't like this shot, but it is a cold night, or was. I locked him in the mudroom so don't be scared. He's just a dog.

But here's where everything got wonky. I watched the replay of the Orioles game on HTS, or at least the last three innings. The phone rang but I didn't answer it. Julia came down stairs and I gave her orange juice and asked her how her day had been. She told me it had been fine and that she was sleepy and so she went back to bed. What am I missing?

Forty-five minutes later I came up the stairs and there you were sleeping. I laid down and had a time of it trying to get to sleep. I thought of the things I had overheard your mother saying about me on the phone two nights earlier. I thought of the way it had been two months since you had had a period. I thought even about my college friend Dan and how he was starting to make it in NYC.

Finally around 4 AM I started to dose. You rolled away from me and told me to hold you tight, and I did. Everything is going to be alright I thought and finally drifted out and away, and somewhere between then and morning a dream jumped from your head to my heart and when you awoke to go out this morning you shook me for morning kisses and we said not a thing until you made your final departure. A kiss on the cheek became a thesis. You turned as you after shower and makeup, deodorant, nasal tissue, and said, "Mama said, ' pessimism, boy, is for people who are well off."

here's what I have to write. Head all tight and all. You go into the garden morning and night and my fear is that I have lost... lost it all, and the fight. Make ways and waves and things unconfit. I don't know how your menu reads. I could go to an area in Central America and make a few strange puzzles in the ground there.

It will all become a bit simpler, I will make my aim a bit more accurater. I will talk to mermaids as they wash my feet, and kings as they polish my shoes. Happy 2nd birthday darling. It makes me feel like a father already. I can't wait to play it all for our children.

They bound my body in black plasic. Put me in the ground under 7 cubic feet of earth. I would breathe no more. They had done me in. Proverbially, I had been whacked in the most stellar sense of the word. I was not dead. Do you understand, fair reader, I was not dead. A wall had been masoned around me, but in blood I wrote on the interior, " I am not dead, I am here, what of all of this now?"

This is the way things go, right?

You've been dancing for hours on the floor and I have been in this suffocating rhythm. Your manager knows nothing of the way in which they put me in the ground. A forehead grew out of my forehead. I prayed to the God of the second moon and made sweet love to fair maidens of unhuman kinds. I have fallen in love. I have fallen... pure and simple. I am not dead, although they think me so.

Uncle John died. And upon leaving his funeral an albino dear skirted across the road precariously close to our car. Jaime and I went to see a movie that night. I felt the world overturn and upheave and reveal itself to me in an instant.

This is not Georgia. This is North Carolina. Georgians think they have monopoly over this shit. Cold and grey on these dark fall afternoons. I made my way from there and then stopped as it seems ot have happened. I am not dead. The plastic covers my face. I am suffocating. Yet, I have found reason and adequate air supply to bring it all back home. Just enough to make it all interesting. Some of you will understand. You prayed for my death. I promised it by 35. But no longer. I will outlive you all out of spite, secret southern beatification, if nothing else.

Get used to the way in which I speak. I have dusted off the clothes and the awkward suit they hoped to put me finally to bed in. I am your worst fucking nightmare here to see you home.

But some will still prey.

Patty

We sent the women to bed early as the day has been long and that is their time, or at least I suppose. We could drag this night out indefinitely, if it would only stay dark. I deny the sun, I embrace the stars. Let's sit on the porch with sunglasses on, extremely dark sunglasses on, until the sun goes down again. Might as well have another. Right?

You left at the end of summer two years ago and I thought my world was crumbling a little. You guys left virtual post-its on my screen that made me sit in a corner for an hour. One bad decision followed another it seemed, a few minor good ones along the way as well. Life was happy at once, but foreboding. I took a jet ski into the middle of Lake Lanier at 50 MPH and abruptly stopped and sat there for hours with my head in my hands.

Tonight you were back, and as always, for a few hours I pretended like everything was as it was. I don't make it your way as often so you do not have the same benefit. We drank stupid things, said silly things, made pacts with the things we didn't say. We always do that, don't we? The crook of my arm tonight made a woman's inner thighs. I haven't spoken of masturbation during our last three meetings. Progress?

Your father's death hit me cold like too much ice cream too quickly, it lasted for days though. The old wives' tale of putting the cold in the palm of your hand didn't work either. I thought Three Stooges, Nightly Business Report, mid-evening dinner and cigarettes on the porch. I thought my father, and what I would do, and unknowing, fathomless. Selfishly I have gotten to see you more. I wish it could all go back to the way it was.

Tonight I am dreaming cold on this hot November night. This all not real the - heartbreak, mourning, glee and substance. I wait for the morning. Sunglasses on, I will deny the sun when it rises. Give it the finger for once and welcome its return.

St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland once, but long before, he was just Patrick and a group of sailors offered their nipples to him just to say "welcome". I don't know what it all means but it seems a good way to end.

Me and Steve at a bridge in Scotland.

Scotland is nice this time of the year.... if you are the type that enjoys dark and cold days. The green is waning but it is still green. I know nothing of the Scottish way, but I hear it is beautiful to visit this time of the year. Braveheart, yaddayadda. All times of the year are better in a peculiarly Scottish setting. I don't know why I write about Scotland. Perhaps Braveheart, perhaps photo development. Maybe the Arab Strap. Didn't you always like Braveheart and the Arab Strap?

I remember me and you at the Green Room that summer when we worked at the video store and I thought the world was an oyster... or a clam or something like it.

We drank the Schlitz and had "power hours" before you moved to Silver Spring and then further on to Brooklyn. We watched Orioles rebroadcasts on HTS at 1 AM after the last copy of Braveheart left the racks and we cleaned up kiddy-spilled candy messes.

It's all foggy. I don't know what it is all about. Or why I am even writing right now. I have nothing really to stay. It's just that I stared at this page and it seemed empty and you were on my mind for a bit. You didn't invite me on your baseball trip this summer. It's not that I would have gone. I never have. I always look forward to the invitation though.

Did we ever really play a game of pool at the Green Room, or did we just drink watery domestic beers?

I hope you are fine. I hope Jeremy is too.

I didn't go to VT. I am still here. Just a few yards away from where I was. Call if you want.

It was a sad few days and the thoughts turned to everything , and I picked you out of the crowd.

Despite the time change and the way things were working out, I see light. You have always been as foolish as me, but you never saw me angry like I have been. Jessica, who you met once, said to me waybackwhen that I was the most genuinely happy person that she had ever met. That it was refreshing. I don't know what happened but I feel if I try in the right ways that I may be able to find my way back to that state of affairs.

I hope NYC is doing okay, and you as well.

I think I'm at the turnaround. My baby came back to me tonight.

Take Care,

B

Why not?

Leaving there tonight I made it around a hook and a crook and an Atlanta police cruiser to the old sweet spot where I used to procure Staropramen, because I liked the name and the label. I would walk twice a day to acquire six nuggets of middle european delight. My neighbors loved me, and the walkers-by loved my inattention to my nicotine deficit.

Tonight I happened to be lonely upon departure from the lovely combined b-day party. Lakey had begun off to bed too early as a result of the too much booze. Wendi was awake and cognizant, and lovely, and all that. It was 3 AM and time to head back to the hood, as Sian informed me was the name of where I currently reside and pay rent. I cannot imagine a diffrerent way. So I scuuttlebutted away to points in Oakhurst, on the cusp of Kirkwood, past your dreams, or what any plan could make possible.

As a nicotine imperative seems to drive me to my grave, I made my way by the old corner shop, where I used to procure the aforementioned Staropramen, for a refill.

Remeber me when I lived in that place. Remember how I made mad faces to the moon on certain given nights. Remember that I was mad as a hatter, a matter, a smatter of kitchen utensils thrown randomly about the room.

Please accept my apologies for all that follows!

Tonight, I made my way to said corner shop and outside found the late-night attendant talking to a local, presumably cool-cat, homeless man. My arrival initiated the trip inside and the certain scan of the local costs and taxes.

Before I headed in, man outside of the store asked if I would take care of him upon departure. I said, " I will see what I can do."

Paragraphical errors mean so little to me these days. Just stay with me.

I went in, and cigarettes did procure. Dollars laid down I headed out the door and into the East Atlanta streets, a ten foot walk from my car, and on the way....

"Do you thing you can help me out?"

Maybe, I thought. But I am not sure.

"Can you help me out?"

Oh, sure, what do you have... can you sing?

"Of course I can!"

To my sorrow the first effort one was one of laying down poor versions of poor Eagles songs, that I presumed were for the benefit of my sorry-white-ass.

"Do you have anythng better?", I asked after shoving over $2.

And out of his mouth came, as sweetly as a giant, these words...

"It was just my imagination,
running away with me,
it was just my imagination.........."

In a different part of the city it would have not meant anything more. In a different part of the city we would not have made harmony. Two dollars made all the difference for this unemployed compadre.

Tonight I sang a song from the depths. I sang a song with a heart that he chose. I made a mighty bow toward the sweet, and we danced a bit without dancing. We believed a little in each other, just for the asking. I waited two full minutes before encumbering myself in the car and off to home.

Or was it just my imagination... running away with mee. Possibly!

Coward of the county.

My fingers do not make such great things as my mind does. I hope it will all go down in the the analogues as a sweet and disturbing chore.

Beach winds blow on your back tonight, and if you could not tell, I am not asleep, or asunder... but rather dashing homeless dreams of incredible numbers, less seen, less noticed, only once in a half moon...

I walk signigficant juntas by my pillow. I await substantial paradigms. You thought summer was easy. I realized it was hard, and hot, and me and you. I bowed to catholicoprotestant prayers. I made a haven to you and me. You will be back here sooner or later you see. C. Columbus says the star are in aligment. (Wrap around the world once for good measure,,, it all comes back to you,) I make moons out of your left eye.

Mascara smudges my pillow. You are so far away. A Pawley's Island getaway, I felt a heartbeat. A heartsmudge. An inclination before awakening.

If I asked you there, would the answer be, " Pie Glue!" ? Or something of the sort? We have it all, and to us all is figured out.

Make it and keep it like a secret. I saw you 78 days before I knew you, and knew that I was in love.

Your strained lip, your beach ass, your whole thing sends me running.

I hope that all of them will keep me writing, after the dealing's done.

Stand still... and it will all come back to you.

Since this is an "everything story" I will put it all out there. I realize that it has been eternities since I have caught up, so I will write it all here, word by word. Video is forthcoming. My mother is opening a new business. I have become a changed man. I relish and agonize over my brother's... unchangeability. What if the world really is flat? Would it make a difference to the crows watching 747 jet planes landing on the runway at RDU?

I am sorry to wield such a rusty sword. I pulled it from a stone years ago and submerged it in salt water. Did the same with a Craftsman screwdriver, but could at least take it back to Sears for a renewal.

For those of you who knew me during that time, I have moved once again. Ten times in ten years. Two weeks since I moved out of the house where Kathy and I lived for a while - and then me after Kathy left for the North. Yesterday I was there as they moved the last of K's stuff out of the house and into an 18-wheeler bound for more temperate climates this time of the year.

I watched the table where I served my burgers, or Mark Dale's to be more exact, be moved. I watched as the yellow umbrella, where Lisa Kemp hocked a loogie that dangled for hours, was moved. I watched as the shelf where K put antique postcards of the places where she had lived went out the door. I read F. Scott Fitzgerald as they took a bedframe, mattress (always last), spices, half-full wine bottles, the bar with the duckpin bowling balls encased, the bathroom cabinet with risque ceramics. I remember it all, and in a matter of 9 hours it was all gone.

I'm sorry to write it just like this, but I have to. Someone has been telling me lately that I have to emotionally deal with this at some point so I guess that is what I am currently doing. Don't worry, all, I am okay. I know you bastards aren't really worried afterall, anyway.

I know that ultimately a personal note to each of you would be better. These form things do not generally provide the personalization that my needy cohorts seem to desire. Understand that this is the only way I could do it.

Barnacles grow on my eyes, a stiff calcification up the length of my spine. I 've taken too much time off, yet I want more. A beach breeze, love, walks on sand, a maniacal man descending a ski slope... in Colorado, in August.

My father's previous profession has nothing to do with this, to be honest... nor does my mother's new business. Whereas I did not make it up, I leveraged it. To be honest, I could not figure out any way to get into all of this, and that was the first thing that came to mind. Please forgive me if it reads like a mid-century French film.

And I guess ultimately I should give all of you the new contact information... after all that is what this was to be about in the first place, so here goes:

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Please none of the letters with your normal platitudes. Only letters with vitriol, scathing, cutting to the bone etc. Those of you with conservative leaning should not even bother to write.

Take care all.

bryan

PS- I should be addressed as "President" George W. Bush if written to at the above address.

Gershwin

Shug, should we take a pause for 10, 15 minutes or something. You been away too long, but you's was just right over. I can hear the beating in this heart, head, hound of mine. I'm going crazy. A lot makes nothing and nothing makes lots. My mama told me always find it wheres I find it and I found it right where I gots, but my aunt Theresa worries. And my mama at times worries. My whole world, and the whirly bird seems to be worried. I wants to say, "juss truss me james, juss truss me belinda." I made it alright. I eat at fish house. Supreme fish delight on Sunday nights after 4PM departures from church. Good lord done got me in my heart and I's in his. I make sun borne fish to a declining ridge.

I still fill the ridge of your noses. I feel the outstanding. I loves you Porgy. I loves you Bess. And it is hot, and southern and night and summer and crazy. If I could take everyone of you, as my friend says, detractors, under my left breast, I would show you that yous educated fools ain't got nothing on me. I walk through a vinyard half-clothed and the whole world revolves at my feet.

La columna de tu espalda.

Not to sound dirty here, but I could make the life of a woman completely unbearable before I even had a memory, or a consciousness of what a woman outside of my family may or may not need - or one inside of my family for that matter.

At twelve years, i took up the camera, developed a fascination for the photographic. I adored the way in which, even now, your skin, could be yours, or it could be the Sierra-Nevada mountain range. I took multiple photos of my inner, hairless thigh. With the right lighting, the right crop, the right artisitic eye, your body would be the whole world. But all of this of course, happened long before the age of twelve, and so it means nothing of the one who stands here now.

There was nothing of the way you stand there, but only of the way in which you were there standing beyond and distant from the viewfinder. Everything could be, and was best if it was, seen as something other than what it was. I love it all. Your back as Nags Head's dunes was my favorite. I travelled, but should've travelled more.

But I have grown. I take pictures still. Mostly at 30 frames/second. More to see of you but less to interpret. I walk silkenly stars in a grotesque mass of information overload. Your back is your back now.

I put it all down tonight. I put down the foreign capture device. The lens and the distance. The hour and a half in dark room with me and a memory of the way it all went down. The way in which apparently I cannot deal with that which is real. Life seems to happen on the other side of a lens. Or at least on the other side of someone's lens. I want to make amends, or love, or peace, or something like that.

Sensory organs grow from the end of my arms, I find. The way in which I used to read topographic maps, I read the back of a woman tonight. And not just any one, but rather, one that I had wondered about the way in wich she twitches and turns. The way she may turn to say, "I love you."

And in a way, it's Frida, and "La columna de mi espalda". Around number twleve you have experienced a fracture and a disk protruding. I felt it with my own hands and it wrote into my encumbered mind an image of what exactly it is going on inside of you. I made memory with touch that becomes photographic and forever. I render prison keys with nothing but my head.

Three and one half inches up your spine on your right is a mole of indeterminate size and I think it is on that that you should blame all of the problems. I saw it not with the viewfinder, or with my own eyes, but with my hand as it glided across to comfort, and perhaps to woo. I know it is there, just as your other protrusion further down is.

My hands are helicopters twirling as whirlybirds are wont to over the back of something such as this, or the spine of the Appalachian mountains. I make it all up you now. There is no way that this happened. My fingers have memories that my head cannot possibly account for.

I remember the way your skin felt under my fingers better than I remember the way it posssibly could have looked before my eyes. I lay my lens aside and consider the landscape. The way the mountains look this time of the year in a frost brought on at the end of spring.

Pink Flamingos.

I awoke this morning thinking, after dreams, that a life of nights like that would be completely, and more than so, acceptable. I do come on too strong.

You see, I'm in a pickle and it is not as though I haven't proclaimed it to the world here and in person. The spirit of a Danish prince has me, and has had me, for months. I walk around in black and gingham and plaid patterns of the aforementioned color. I make rainbows of shades therein.

But last night it was pink flamingos and, no matter how it is shaken, there is not a shade of black to be had there.

There was a dream, look up, and in that there was you and marble and whiskey and frosted glass - window treatments, harmony vocals, Fun Dip™ and one-legged pink birds. I'm sorry if it all doesn't make sense. It doesn't to me either, and I feel as odd as a six-legged elephant today .

But to go on...

There were two girls in dance recital attire, a boy in baseball leggings and a message from your mother when we got home politely asking if everything was alright, and how we were doing - if we needed anything. My mom asking how the girls were doing. A walk to the closet after bathing children, and two pink flamingos standing in a puddle in the yard at midnight, of all things.

Barnacle.

B

The lamb of my porch.

Let me know what you think.

When Your Dream Lovers Die (MP3, 2.9MB)

The Hillary Step.

Repatched and rewired, I have taken the plug out of the socket 15 times in 7 days and finally it seems to be purring along like a window cat. I took out the low frequencies and added an oscillator that seems to be the right frequency to keep me from convulsions.

It was good while it lasted, but sooner or later the waves collided and cancelled and I fell off the wagon and under the truck tires of the lorrie driven by the Amish man with black hat and beard and his three boys, two girls and wife in a bonnet.

Sooner or later you decide that you have to live, I suppose - either that or the other option and at that point you can't write a thing anymore - and upon making that decision there's a moment of clarity.

This is my announcement that I am not your biggest fan.

I know it sounds strange, but the truth of the matter is that I have been sliding for the past couple of months. If I made it there without you I would feel as odd as toothpaste on a cracker. I guess it really makes no difference the other way around. All the luck in the world to you. My rates just went up. I'll hear it on the radio when you get there. Watch it at the Hillary step. There's been many to lose a life there.

A good accountant and a good lawyer are always advisable. As well, make sure the company throws some marketing bucks your way, and a good web designer... I've got a list, and in the end some folks will indeed purchase the improved product, I guarantee it.

We could all quit work for a few days on the proceeds. We can talk later about this portion.

I wish that I could write vindictive. My heart is just not in it.

Oh, you've changed. I imagine the same could be said of me. Remember, this is not the brain you used to know. The engine is rebuilt as well as the transmission. Everything is in retrograde or so I have heard, but round about today the tides are shifting. Certain gravitational pulls have been alleviated. I'm taking the back way into the alley, to the cab awaiting and then to home. Snails carry homes around everywhere the go, they can sleep in the bar alley with a roof over their head - I suppose that is part of the fascination.

But we might as well make it level from here. Or at least level with one another. I am not your biggest fan. I may have once been but all that has changed. My compass doesn't even point north anymore. I might just as easily take flight and turn into ice as make a decision that seems sensible in your paradigm.

I do believe in truth and love and home and that when you meet a girl that you love, you should marry her and make a home and never look back. Rock and roll will always be there, and you and me and possibilities, but that does nothing towards baking the bread in the morning, a laugh from my nephew when he falls from his bicycle. We got the beat, he's got the beat... I even think you've got the beat. It's there. I know.

You'll let it all come in someday. It will wash over like a river in the 100 year flood. Mark my words. The beat is there and you will be too. Send me a postcard to tell me you are happy once you arrive. Otherwise, I will stay heartbroken.

"Goodbye, Jack."

"Goodbye, Dean."

"See you around."

Or something like that.

Waveform of my distortion.

I believe that lovers should be chained together.

Whiksey

I arose this morning at 4 AM to try to get out with the camera when the morning light was good and to see the world like I hadn't seen it since I was swimming in high school. To make sense of this city when it moves more along the pace of the place where I grew up. Residual whiskey in my bones, like a dead lover, weighed heavy on my mind and the only photos I could find, which seemed beautiful to me at the time, were ones on the shadowy sides of buildings, perhaps the peek of sunlight around a corner, but no more.

I went to bed with thoughts of you, and I awoke with you still standing there in the corner of the room. An apparition of light and darkness all tied up into one little mess. It was not you I assume, as you were across town, the continent, or somewhere else as your alibi would prove - but a bundle of tied miscellania - earrings, one sock, a hairpin - enough to conjure the spectre.

There's a dream that I have had, and had again, that seems to be unwilling to let me go. A hyperactive kid jumps in and out of a pool in a NC summer. I walk around the pool patrolling until my heart falls out of my body and into the water in the deep end and the tike swims down, sits on the bottom and eats it in a matter of two bites. My therapist knows nothing of this and I would rather keep it that way. I know it says something about me and you, or the apparition of you in the corner of this room, as I watch the war tonight, and try to drift ever so silently into slumber, and dream a little dream... dream, dream, dream.

A Long White Car

Hank Vegas & The White Lightning - Long White Car (MP3, 3.2MB)

Cheers,

Bryan

A Cup of Coffee

But perhaps it is beautiful in the north this time of the year. Or is it just cold? I might head that way, as I know what heat feels like on the skin at night, and the way a sweaty body moves through the atmosphere. I know the way that ginger feels when rubbed on bare skin, and cinnamon. And I can imagine a way in which all of this, and rum, can help to keep the kids quiet tonight if we play our cards right.

I take your right hand and make a crustacean. I take your left, and of it make a paper airplane. We are now flying south of the equator, north of the capricornious tropic, south of cancer, or somewhere noone has been. I might make a million being something that I am not, but a cup of coffee would still be nice.

Hank Vegas & The White Lightnin'

Driving (New Song) - MP3

Another Way to Lie Take 1 - MP3

Another Way to Lie Take 2 - MP3

Another Way to Lie Video Footage - 12.7MB (requires Quicktime)

Scene in bathroom 3.36 hours after our protagonist's departure.

This conversation took place in the downstairs bathroom just off the kitchen. She'd dragged me there to escape the raging New Year party that filled the rest of the house. We'd only just met - I sat on the edge of the bath while she locked the door.

Subject line of email received today:

"Complimentary free gift at no charge!"

The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!

I can throw myself into work, into the charts and graphs, checklist, budgets and schedules and try to forget that the sky is falling. falling gently all over Georgia tonight. Skyfall is general all over the Southeast tonight. It is rain and hail, touches of snow in the higher altitudes, and chicken eggs across the coastal plains.

A whale bone not unlike the one in my recurring dream.

I guess even as I have grown up, I haven't really grown up too much. I rail against the bed and bath still. I do like feeling rested, and the clean feeling after bathing, it's just the process that gets me down. Kind of like eating as of late as well. I like not being hungry, but the food finding and the consequent eating just doesn't seem to appeal.

My therapist keeps telling me that these are all things that point toward a deep depression. He's really a brilliant guy. I think he has read at least half of the books on the Self-Help Psychology shelf at the local Barnes & Noble. He even wrote a book about adolescent angst and depression entitled Mommy? Are You Listening to Me, Mommy?: Adolescent Angst & Depression, in which he goes into great detail about how most of the deviant behavior of children these days points to an underlying "angst and depression" that the contemporary adolescent feels, and that in turn points to the common feelings of abandonment that said adolescent feels upon beginning the transition into young adulthood. I haven't read the book yet (all of the above was derived from reading the flap as I fell asleep one night) but I will just as soon as I have read Ulysses, the Bible and Don Quixote from cover to cover again. I am sure it really is an outstanding book, but back to the point.

My therapist says that my problems with growing up point to a depression (I am taking the medication in case you reading this, guy!), and I believe he is right because every time I make a call at 2AM and don't get an answer, or even worse, get a groggy response on the other end, I do indeed fall into a depression that keeps me up for a while pondering all of the little things about myself that I don't like, and reassuring myself that they are indeed issues by the fact that no body wants to talk to me. Everything from belly button lint to toenail fungus come under the mental knife. I lay awake listening to the morning birds, spanish speaking voices arriving on the job site next door, the sounds of cars cranking to warm and thaw the frost... the city coming to life. Then, and only then, do I drift off to dream the recurring dream of a whale bone descending.

Teddy Roosevelt on horse not disimilar from one ridden at Ann Marie's 13th birday party.

She was the biggest fan then, and probably forever, that the artist (formerly?) known as Prince ever had. It was because of her that I bought the Purple Rain album, the first time. And because of her that I searched out, in the dictionaires that came with the World Book Encyclopedia, the precise definition of 'masturbation' after listening to and reading the lyrics in the liner notes of Darlin Nikki. It was all downhill from there. It was also because of her that I bought the heinous purple sheen bookbag that plagued me for the better part of my 5th and 6th grade years.