We are luck. We are fate.

she was so bright in the dark.

2012-01-28T01:54:00.002-07:00

she bites her lower lip when she laughs

like pulling an emergency break in a tailspin,

sipping Diet Coke and chews ice

crunching like potato chips or tree bark

and you just sit there,

across the table,

watching her shed her leaves.

the band's grooving hard

and she follows suit,

up and down like a Minnesota thermometer

until she's ready to burst.

her boots click on concrete all the way to her car

and she plants a rosebush kiss on your cheek,

eventually seen from space.

you watch her drive away, back home,

and you whistle on your own drive back,

a canary in a coal mine,

carrying lovely tunes of drunken hellos and awkward goodbyes,

shuffled feet and downward smiles,

and how much more beautiful

the sound of her boots was

when she was walking toward you

than when she was walking from you

but the fix for that

is why God invented plans.

the simple joys of country living.

2012-01-14T22:15:00.004-07:00

"Always liked the idea of moving out here. You can go no farther, like the pioneers with their wagons and horses. This is it. You've seen everything the country has to offer; this is as good a place to finish up as any.

I'm done with cities. They complicate and compromise. Intrigue against you, even. Something in their nature, their history, it makes you less than what you are. San Francisco was a cesspool in its time. A century ago, little more, there was a stretch of it where every son of a bitch in all creation gathered. They came in off the ocean or across the land, and they made that place a whore to rival Babylon.

But out here, you leave all that behind. You look the past in the eye, and you feel clean."

-Garth Ennis

(even though I'm awful fond of San Francisco and am a big fan of many of its residents.)

there's gonna be a revival tonight.

2012-01-13T02:10:00.002-07:00

There's something different about her tonight that you can't blame on her wine or your whiskey, but you feel it in each step that the two of you have collectively taken: slow rises from the table, gliding through the revolving glass door, dragging reluctant feet over icy parking lot blacktop. And it's not a matter of grace--although you haven't known her long, she's never seemed wanting for grace--that's unique to the evening, but there's a fire in her eyes and an edge to her words and a prayer in the wave she leaves in her wake whenever she walks in front of you.

But the way her fingers overlay through yours like crocheted yarn make you wonder if she snores, and if it would even matter if she did.

humanism.

2012-01-11T20:29:00.001-07:00

Assuming that you somehow *have* to vote for the cruelty and arrogance of Mitt Romney because you have a particular distaste for the specific cruelty and arrogance of Barack Obama is a false dichotomy and I hope that we will all seriously examine our approach to our country, our (respective) faiths, and our fellow man. Cruelty is cruelty, no matter what side of the aisle it's on, but you don't have to support it.

There is no such thing as a necessary evil.

The reason we have such awful politicians (and somehow even more terrible alternatives) is only because we voted for them. If you feel the need to vote, find someone you think is worth voting for. But don't settle for any flagrant disregard for human life and dignity because you've found a form of it incrementally more to your liking than what's currently in office.

Things don't have to be this way. They really, really don't. They only are because we allow them to be.

you can make him like you.

2012-01-10T00:09:00.002-07:00

for the longest time

she found him so handsome

and she loved the way that

his hair spilled over his eyes like blackout curtains

but best of all

she thought that he said the smartest things

until he opened his mouth

and ruined it.

you are loved by me.

2011-12-21T22:15:00.006-07:00

I've known her for years

and him for years

and them for years

and in all that time

through the classes and jobs and weddings and relocations and drunktalks and everythings

I've never seen her eyes light up as much when she told me

that she was pregnant.

for the rest of our meal,

I watched the two of them across the table,

sharing chips and salsa and inside jokes and secret smiles

and wondered if I ever could ever again be unhappy,

knowing that the good guys won

that these two,

two of the best we've ever had,

not only found each other,

but found someone who didn't even exist yet

and

with their powers combined

conspired to bring that goodness into the world.

but the miscarriage changed it all

and, despite my almost impossibly irrevocable optimism,

a little bit of my hope went with it.

I didn't know what to tell her.

because "I'm sorry" seemed trite

and "I love you guys" wasn't enough

while the five hundred miles made "I'm here for you two" patently untrue

so I sat here, sipping Wild Turkey,

wondering how I could numb their pain.

I got a dog last week

and I didn't think he had any idea that I was writing this.

but right as I typed that "...how I could numb their pain" line,

he got up from next to my feet and climbed onto my shoulder

and kissed my ear

before putting his head on my chest

closing his eyes

and falling asleep.

And I remembered their inside jokes

the years that the two of them have known together

how they smiled at each other from across their wedding reception dance floor

all of the everythings

though the cities may burn around them

the fires won't ever take him

or her

or them

or anything but a tragic December night

where something beautiful had to start over.

I met somebody years ago

and went home and immediately wrote something

it wasn't really "about" her, I guess

but about capital-l Life

and how we fight for it

and I can't wait for the day when,

several years down the road,

I'll be an honorary uncle

to what will spring from this love

and I can tell that child:

"Your parents love you so much.

And I know that because I remember

the moment your mother told me that

I would have to wait just a little bit longer

before we would be blessed enough to have you."

So here's to the future,

the fights we face in bad times and bloody trenches

while we wait for the sun to rise

over our humble valleys.

your medicine is faith and your flesh, divine.

2011-12-20T23:24:00.006-07:00

She kisses you like a fire hydrant

and throws you across the room,

against walls, onto floors, into couch cushions, down staircases,

finally reaching the basement,

crunching concrete and cracking foundation.

she hurls you from unfinished lumber and cement ceiling

up toward the sun,

breaking upward through each of the house's three floors,

bracing beams and splitting floorboards,

leaving broken lights and bruised limbs

until you hit the sky and the clouds part,

and that close to heaven,

you pray that you'll never come down.

and then:

you see the sun.

if you love me, let me know.

2011-12-18T00:33:00.002-07:00

I think I'd make a fantastic widower.

My gifts are in my grief,

in the ways I can look over shattered rearview mirrors

and see only beauty

ignoring the scars and broken glass

taking in only the sunshine

refracting into my eyes between the cracks.

I'm good at grief.

Sitting in this hotel room hundreds and hundreds of miles away

I can turn my head back over my shoulder

see behind me

and I can practically run my hands through your hair

feel your falling fingers drag like ribbons down my neck

each one drawing the same blood

that brought the sharks.

That mirror sometimes shows them, too,

circling through cell phones and drifting through divorces

but my eyes never seem to leave that bottom-right corner:

the place where that small part of you held on so tight

while the rest of you drifted

and there I remained,

treading water,

while you dragged yourself away.

This hotel room is quiet.

It's a soft night in a soft part of town,

and Hitch is curled up like a cinnamon bun in my lap,

exuding kitten purrs and kind eyes.

But these last few nights have been a little hard

because Hitch stirs in his sleep

and buries his head in the crink of my armpit,

waking up every three hours or so for a drink of water

blindly kissing my ear (after aiming for my cheek)

just like you used to.

I hope that you're asleep right now,

enjoying the winter air of [wherever the hell you are]

taking deep December breaths

and dreaming of raindrops on windowsills.

But do you see?

Is it clear how I can't even talk about how you destroyed yourself

without me romanticizing the way you used to be?

I've seen people die.

Then I bring them back as ghosts

and wonder why I can't sleep.

Christopher Hitchens.

2011-12-16T00:37:00.005-07:00

Hitch died a few hours ago. He was 62 years old and it took cancer, almost assuredly caused by the cigarettes and liquor of which he so frequently partook, to silence the most illustriously worded, fiery-witted, and ultimately compassionate voice of humanity and decency that maybe we've ever seen.

It's impossible for me to speak too highly of Hitch, or to exaggerate the effect that the man and his work had on my life. It's always been tragic to me that his writing has been pigeonholed into a representation of his most "controversial" subject, his own defiant atheism. Hitch often distanced himself from "atheism," preferring to call himself an "anti-theist," frequently comparing the God he was so often told about to Kim Jong-Il, an all-powerful authoritarian subjecting His creation to eternal submission.

This is primarily why I was never bothered by Hitchens' belief; in fact, the only consistent disagreement I had with him was that the God in whom he chose to disbelief is indeed not a God that would be God, but our mutual dissatisfaction with half-baked apologetics and crackpot theologies perpetuated so blithely by the Rick Warrens and the Tim LaHayes and the Jerry Falwells is too readily misinterpreted. Although he did not subscribe to it, theism was never Hitchens' issue, but the cruel manifestation of it in reactionary evangelical circles and its almost pathological self-victimization, self-aggrandization, and literal demonizing of anything that stood outside the barriers of its own solipsistically drawn circles.

And it was that cruelty--regardless of its origin--that Hitchens rallied against. Despite his pendulum of political swings, it was the injustice that never left his crosshairs, and even his infamous support of the bungled Iraq war was well-defended and reasonable when he explained it. When an avowed stance was proven wrong--his original claim that waterboarding wasn't torture was dismantled the second he willingly submitted himself to a session of it from ex-CIA "interrogators"--he had no problem acknowledging his own error and absorbing his new knowledge into his mindest.

That dedication to truth at all costs is what I admired so much about Hitch. His unsurpassed skills as a writer, his voracious appetite for and knowledge of literature, and his keen insight into matters secular and otherwise were merely servicing his greatest strength: his courage. By refusing to back down from any fight, be it against a fundamentalist Christian preacher telling vicious lies to children, a roving gang of AK-47-wielding Islamic radicals on the hunt to kill a heathen, or the fascist police state in 1970s Greece looking for a head to bust, he stared danger in the eye, took a sip of his scotch and puff of his cigarettes, and told it to shove it up its arse.

I want to end this with my two favorite quotes from Christopher Hitchens, a man who has had more impact on who I want to be (and, hopefully, am) than another non-Sherwin soul:

From his indispensable Letters to a Young Contrarian:

"Beware the irrational, no matter how seductive. Shun the transcendent and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will provide plenty of time for silence."

As recounted by his friend David Frum (and for obvious reasons to those of you who know me):

"When he heard that another friend, a professor, had a habit of seducing female students in his writing seminars, he shook his head pityingly. 'It’s not worth it. Afterward, you have to read their short stories.'"

My friend and co-Hitchens admirer Scott were discussing the tragedy of his loss, I said the following:

"Hitchens was like South Park: on the rare occasion that I disagreed, it was usually because I was wrong. The man was a lion and we were lucky to have him for as long as we did."

I'll stand by that and continue to be grateful to have had the presence of such a hero in my mind and heart, and he'll live on through the massive legacy of work that he so generously gave us.

Here's to you, Hitch. I hope to one day have your courage.

Everybody, meet [undecided] (UPDATED)

2011-12-15T19:39:00.004-07:00

UPDATE: Christopher Hitchens, my all-time favorite writer and lion-hearted inspiration, died about three hours after I brought young [undecided] home. Besides my internal monologue, Wayne was the first to suggest that he be named "Hitch" in his honor.

So, everybody, meet Hitch.

----------------------------

A few facts about [undecided]:

Young [undecided] is a rescue pet. Strangely for a rescue, he's a purebred dachsund--I've got papers and everything. He's two years old and was abandoned when his old owners claimed that he got territorial with their other new puppy. He's so incredibly timid and gentle and clearly terrified of everything (the list so far: shopping bags, stoplights, car windows, people, dogs, the Twilight books, John Mayer) that there's no possible way that there isn't more to the story. He's laying here on my lap as I type this, in fact, having eaten a delicious meal of "New York Strip-flavored liver product" (it came highly recommended), staring at the door and looking up at with me appropriately puppy dog eyes.

But here's the deal: [undecided] needs to be named. My three suggestions, and the men who inspired them:

Orson (for Orson Welles)

Hank (for Hank Dolworth of Terriers)

Custer (for Jesse Custer of Preacher)

Those are the choices. Leave a comment with your choice below. In a day or two, I'll ignore them all and pick the name I like the most.

Your vote counts! Sorta!

at dawn.

2011-12-07T19:25:00.003-07:00

but sometimes

I play video games from 1992

listen to gladys knight

and drink crappy beer

in order to place myself into a world

where I don't have to sit here

in a quiet hotel room

and miss you.

the age of aquaaaaaaaaarius.

2011-12-04T17:33:00.004-07:00

"Relationships are hard," she says, swirling her rum and coke in one hand and brushing back winter humidity hair with the other. "I'm a Virgo, and we just totally get off on messing with people."

"Oh?"

"Yeah."

"Well," I yawn, looking at my calendar, "I'm an Aquarius, and we don't believe in astrology."

you're asking the wrong guy.

2011-11-28T23:55:00.004-07:00

So I'm leaving in two days--actually in about 30 hours from the time of this writing--and this part of me wonders if I shouldn't see you because well yeah we've had fun and yeah I'm really glad I've gotten to spend time with you and am flattered that you'd even consider after the drunken text messages that you've received (and maybe some you sent but I'm not sure what your "practices" are like when you're inebriated so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt)

but even so and even though I've seen you a few times between the time I got here (last Sunday) and now (uh, early Tuesday) the self-sabotaging part of me that waits a few additional superfluous minutes before responding to a text or returning a phone call in order to create a buffer in which memory of contacting me has at least opaqued if not wholly faded so that my response is more of a pleasant surprise than an assurance and not in an unreliable or manipulative way but just in a way that might maybe make you smile like my reply is being sent by carrier pigeon instead of 4G advanced wireless whatever-the-hell

and I don't know what we'll do tomorrow and even though you agreed and even implied that you opened up an otherwise occupied night just to spend it with me before I bail again my stupid brains are still at a point wherein everything that they see/hear/think/do is IMMEDIATELY questioned in order to prevent well I don't really know what I'm trying to prevent and I wonder sometimes if maybe that's just happiness because who on earth knows what that looks like after all

and I thought it'd look like Colorado

and now I think (hope?) it looks like New Mexico

but over these last few days

I wonder if it maybe kinda sorta hypothetically possibly might look more like you

so I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm super pissed at me that I haven't tried to hold your hand or anything because I was looking at it the last time I saw you (and probably failing to be inconspicuous) and it looked so nice on the table as it wrapped around your glass like ivy across old brick

but I get hesitant because I already have roots here and I'd be nervous about trying to plant a seed and I know that there's probably a "that's what she said" in there somewhere but I'm being (mostly) serious and now this agricultural metaphor is played out and dried up like Nebraska summer corn (hey cool I brought it back around)

but seriously you're very pretty and I like seeing you out of the corner of my eye while I pretend to be listening to the person that I'm directly looking at although my brain just keeps demanding to know whether or not you're wanting me to snatch your hand from the table or from your lap or wherever it is and weave fingers together like strands of wicker

so maybe just brace yourself or something.

I'm gonna reply to you now.

so, you know.

get excited for THAT.

thank you, ma'am, but I must decline.

2011-11-15T23:13:00.003-07:00

I've been listening to songs about horses

Not entirely sure why, either

which isn't to say that I don't know

what it is about horses

because it's everything about them.

some time ago

I went to my favorite town

and spent some time at a horse ranch

it was the damndest thing

hearing what others thought about the west

in ways that I hadn't considered

or seen

or envisioned outside of anything but my dreams

but tonight

I'm thinking all about things running free

something about the west

where everything just

goes

the last time I was in Baker City
I saw a movie about someone

who pretended to be a cowboy

and fixed everything

(didn't even try to)

but through sheer willpower

and

literally

nothing else

found himself on the winning side

and everything was okay.

I remember trying that.

I found a hat

boots

paisley shirts

and a pretty girl with red hair

who gave a shit about how she treated people

but not only is life not a cartoon

it's not a movie

nor a cartoon

nor anything worth watching, really.

and that's okay, I suppose

because it is what it is

although

I think I've isolated the problem:

this whole time

I've been worrying about being further west

as though there was something about longitude

something in east/west binaries

keeping me from peace

but now

on my fourth-to-last night in this town

this place where I've found nothing

(nothing new, anyway)

I'm revising my future

replacing ink with lead

and thinking:

you've ruined the west.

I'll take the south,

thank you.

I'll bring you some enchantment.

I hear there's a land for that.

drained the color from your eyes.

2011-11-14T00:42:00.001-07:00

Marshall and his older brother William were never particularly close. They had been born five years apart,which was just too long for them to be in high school together, and just tooshort for them to have the cross-generational bond that seemed to solidifybrothers like concrete when they were far enough apart. They had gotten along okay, both audiblyrespecting the ties brought by blood, but where other brothers’ lives werelived on one big earth, theirs ran parallel, the same space hosting two disparatedimensions.

So it was agreat surprise to Marshall, on his eighteenth birthday, received a phone callfrom William, and told him he was coming to pick him up in an hour and would hebe ready?

AndMarshall was ready. William’s leased Hyundai pulled up at more or less theprescribed time and they went to a tattoo parlor in a neighborhood Marshall hadnever seen and they met up with an artist named Cujo, a drug buddy of William’sbut who did amazing work for not only the prize, but for the glazed look in hiseye and the inability to recognize that Marshall was in more pain than he wasdoing his damndest to let on.

“Noregrets.” That was what his tattoo said. It was inspired by William’s approachto life, which he never ceased explaining

As bad asthe pain from the tattoo needle gun was, that wasn’t what got Marshall themost. What got him the most was the dull whine of the seven or eight otherartists mutilating the flesh of their clients in the various booths andreclining chairs that was like that same needle gun in his ear, the dim humexisting simultaneously above and below any frequency his brain could readilycomprehend. It just went on and on and on and on, like an oil drill on some ancillaryAlaskan island, digging in ink, for symbolism, and toward permanently scarredmeaning among the calligraphy and wounds.

“Badass,”William said, gesturing with his head and chin at Marshall’s wrist, elevatedand swollen red with the letters going parallel to the veins running marathonsup and down his arm. It throbbed and burned with each heartbeat and he couldalmost see the blood pulsing across the field of his wound, matching thecardiac metronome pushing life through him at every beat. It hurt so badly, butin some strange way that he approved of and couldn’t define.

Butdefinition didn’t matter; when William dropped him off, the high of spendingtime with his older brother had dulled the pain of the needles and scars and senthim to a high cloud of brotherly euphoria in which siblings were teams, joinedat the hip and the wrist wounds that they’d paid $150 for—each—and they becamecloser through their scars. They’d drawn together like magnets, oppositepolarities dragging them only inches apart.

Nearly twoyears later, William had overdosed on heroin. The police had broken down hisapartment door after complaints from his neighbors, who’d complained about thesmell and the loud techno music that’d been playing on repeat for three straightdays, and the cops had found the dead with rubber tubing tied around hisforearm, the needle retracted and thrown across the room like a streamer for abirthday party celebrated two months prior.

Marshall hadgone to visit William in the hospital, but only William’s corpse was takingvisitors. As it turned out, William had indeed been on what would be hishighest/lowest bender, and his heart had only failed about two hours before thecops kicked down the door. After identifying the body—neither of their parentsfelt like showing up for what, at that point, was an implied acknowledgment offailure—Marshall took the pocketknife from his inside jacket pocket and slidout the largest possible blade it contained. Pointing the tip at his two-years-priorbirthday present from the brother who laid on a slab in a hospital morgue closeenough to bend down and kiss on the forehead, he scratched a large X throughthe “No” of his “No regrets” tattoo.

The bloodrushed immediately from the punctured skin and William grabbed a handful ofpaper towels from in the corner, above the sink, and pressed them to his wrist.He had known friends in high school who were cutters—many of whom couldn’t stopadvertising it, their own brand of blood-red iconoclasm in white-breadsuburbs—but he was shocked at how much it bled. He kept tossing drenched sheetsand applying handfuls of new ones, the blood flowing through and soppingthrough to his clenched fingers, the tips getting drips of warm lurching upfrom the towel onto their edges.

After theblood had finally stopped flowing—or slowed down, anyway—the corner trashcanwas more full than he’d anticipated or hoped. Still clutching a wad of them tothis wrist, he used his foot to push the contents down, but as he removed hisshoe, the soaked clumps rose up higher, unconstrained by his foot, edgingtoward the lip of the garbage can, but never ascending further. He took hisshoe completely out and noted what looked like just a few splots of blood onits toe. He took one final paper towel and did his best to draw them from it.

Walkingalone to the nearby bus stop, Marshall stuck the clump of nearly worthlesspaper towels up the sleeve of his ratty old hoody—a hand-me-down fromWilliam—and situated them in a prime position to absorb whatever remainingplasma and pus vacated itself from the new scarring.

His firsttattoo hadn’t been painless either, he thought to himself, pushing himself upthe bus’ entry stairs and inserting the $0.85 fare into the coin slider. Thisone would heal, too.

if God will send His angels.

2011-11-07T21:01:00.000-07:00

and

at that point

those years ago

I had to finally decide

between two mutually exclusive things:

did I want her to be with me?

or did I want her to be happy?

I knew I couldn't have both

so I let her back into the wild

and watched her thrash and burn

but tonight

I will admit to only you who read this:

that I wish she was miserable

because then she would've been here

and as I walked home

the wind was blowing so hard

but the frost on the grass stood still,

waiting for something to melt it all away.

I'm so tired of writing this way.

maybe I'll just move to New Mexico.

yeah.

that's the ticket.

just wrap your arms around me.

2011-11-01T21:27:00.002-06:00

A few years ago, the cycle continued. I did what I do roughly every nine months: look up the local LDS ward and surround myself for three Sunday hours with a bunch of Mormons. It's not because of Mormon doctrine--I purposefully distance myself from that a long, long time ago--but I think it's the sense of community, a bunch of people that I hope are doing just what I'm trying to do and find some good in a world so seemingly filled with so little of it.

An authority from the local congregation was on hand and speaking to the gathered crowd. He was a big man and thudded to the podium, raising the mic to mouth-level.

"Brothers and sisters," he said, surveying his captive audience, "I'd like to talk to you about--" dramatic pause "--depression."

My left eye twitched. I cringed at what I hoped wasn't coming. Just two years earlier, I had been told by my stake president (a sort of supervisor for local clergy) that I should stay home from an LDS mission, two years in the wilds of the secular world, because my then-crippling depression would've, as he phrased it, "put [me] in a pressure cooker. Just stay home, Andy. There are things to do here." I took comfort in that and hoped that I could find those things.

"We hear a lot in the...media...about 'depression'--" he uses air quotes "--but whatever happened to just, you know...pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and putting a smile on your face?"

Just then, seemingly out of my control, my quivering knees straightened themselves and I rose to my feet, feeling as though I were watching puppet strings make my body rise from the pew and button the suit jacket containing it.

"Fuuuuuuuck that," I said, louder than I meant--inasmuch as I meant to not say it at all--and I went and saw Spider-Man 3 again (I know, I know--it wasn't that good). I didn't go back to church for...well, for nine months. But it was a solid nine months.

And on nights like tonight, when some misfiring synapse or chemical imbalance or residual echo of emotional trauma holds me back from anything resembling happiness or even contentment, I know I can turn on episodes of Louie or rewatch Rio Bravo or listen to "Stairway to Heaven" on repeat or just be generally pleased with myself that I remember appropriate MLA style guide TV series/film/song title punctuations.

But right now:

at this very second,

this

very

second:

I will comfort myself with Sleepytime Vanilla tea

and reruns of Community

and knowing that

somewhere,

somehow,

you're smiling in your sleep

and hogging all the covers.

a private conversation in a public restroom.

2011-10-27T10:11:00.003-06:00

I hear Johnny walking five or six paces behind me, his small legs carrying a v-neck t-shirted frame and struggling to keep up with my brisk pace. We're heading to the bathroom--individually, not as a group, although we've managed to become an inadvertent duo along the way--and I try to ignore the waves of Axe Body Spray that have somehow managed to leap ahead of both of us, despite my being upwind.

We step to our respective stalls.

"Man, I stayed up so late last night," he says, presumably to me (or the urinal cakes). "Reading a book, too." He laughs incredulously as if this surprised himself. Lord knows it surprised me.

"Yeah? What book?"

"Steve Jobs' autobiography."

"Autobiography? He wrote it?" I ask.

"No, dude, he's dead."

"Yeah, I knew that, but lots of dead people have written books," I say. I hate talking while I'm peeing. "Didn't someone else write it? His biography?"

"What?"

"Nevermind."

I'm nearly a foot taller than him, which helps reassure my sense of propriety that any dick measuring will be strictly metaphorical. Over the modest partitions between the urinals, I can only peripherally see spiked Cool Guy hair, but I'm still deeply uncomfortable with interaction of any kind in a setting as, shall we say, vulnerable as urination. But as oblivious as he is, it continues all the same.

"I only read books about leaders," he says, his voice practically visibly italicizing his sentence's final noun, "I don't really read...novels." He spits this second literary form like it was tobacco juice.

"Why not?"

"I don't learn anything from novels." I see his Cool Guy Hair Spikes pivot ninety degrees--toward me--and I maintain my eyes' affixing to the wall dead in front of me.

"Maybe you're reading the wrong ones," I say, zipping up and flushing while never looking away from the center point of the granite wall. He flushes too and now we're walking to the sinks. At least he washes his hands, I suppose.

"I like Michael Crichton ones. I learn stuff from those." I notice he doesn't use any soap (that's just rinsing, guy). "But, like, Steve Jobs said that you shouldn't live someone else's life, you know? So if I read, like Stephen King's books, I'm just living his life, and that's stupid. Living his shit and his brain is just dumb."

I nod to signify having heard this, but Johnny seems to interpret it as concurrence. I keep re-soaping my hands and re-washing them so he'll leave by himself before I'm ready to. He takes out a clump of paper towels--note to self: never use that towel dispenser because he only rinsed--and dries.

"I liked Twilight," he says. "I guess that one was good." He leaves the bathroom and I don't look up from the sink.

I wash my hands four more times and wonder what it'll take to make my brain feel clean.

can't decide if I should lie, tell the truth, or try to hide it.

2011-10-25T22:33:00.006-06:00

she watched laguna beach

and 30 rock

that 70's show (she thought ashton kutcher was funny)

and, aside from reruns of cheers on netflix,

mostly shows about empty people

I had the shield

and john from cincinnati

deadwood and six feet under

shows about mor(t)ality

but that one night at costco

after she'd made it clear how ineffectual a person I was

we passed the dvd sets of

seasons of mad men

and she picked one up and said

"we should have a show."

I didn't know what she really meant

until it was far too late

and we had already reached syndication.

you're as bad as me.

2011-10-25T10:13:00.004-06:00

I hope we'll hold on to the lessons we've learned

and manage to not rebuild bridges we've burned

so never forget all the scars that we've earned.

I lied about being the outdoor type.

2011-10-25T01:07:00.006-06:00

The above title comes from this.

Two years ago, a Lemonheads show in Salt Lake City was to be my bachelor party. A far cry from a more "traditional" event, my gathering would've featured nary a stripper, line of cocaine, pornography, or farm animal. We were to meet downtown for steaks, see the concert at Liquid Joe's, and be home snug in bed by 1 AM.

But, according to both the whims and constraints of the frequently not-unironic narrative that the relationship had become, the concert was on a Sunday night, a place of the weekly calender in which only the utmost of reverent idleness is sufficient glorification of the divine. No family meals out, no basking in the warm glow of a beautiful symphony, no wholesome entertainment at the local theater surrounded by friends and loved ones, and good heavens, of course not some confounded rock-and-roll show at not only a paid venue, but--the Greatest of Gasps--a place that served alcoholic beverages.

I had learned the hard way to pick my battles. She let me choose a suit instead of a tux ("I'm not a secret agent or a penguin") and allotted for a post-wedding, pre-reception fast food meal ("Not an ounce of the food there is for us and low blood sugar makes me cranky"), but my interest in the return address on the wedding announcements--our marital home-to-be, rather than her parents' house--was the first of many headbutts. I found myself being told ever so frequently by more than one source that I was so rarely in the right, how I should acquiesce to the demanding machinations of a disingenuous authority, that a desire for my independence--our independence--were sinful and ungodly, and, eventually, that I was indeed a literal agent of an evil entity, my influence a tempting trial to be weathered, as everything else in her life, with submission.

So I stayed home that Sunday night, sipping at Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper in the home that should've been ours and sleeping in the bed that so often was. And yet somehow, in my cowardly acknowledgment of a hierarchy--hierarchies--that had no bearing on either the secular or the sacred, a Stockholm Syndrome-laden dynamic more familiar to Patty Hearst than to St. Paul, I had become precisely what I had rallied so strongly against behind closed doors that were no longer respected by those who most passionately declared their importance.

I shut down for a while. Maybe still haven't quite "turned back on," to use a phrase so robotic and distant as to be uncomfortably fitting. Subsequent battles for self-respect were destined to fail and did so in spectacular fashion.

This morning at work, having just returned from a life-changing weekend in New Mexico, the aptly named Land of Enchantment, I remembered that The Lemonheads were, these years later, playing in Denver, a mere hour's drive from my new(ish) Colorado Springs home. I debated the merits of attendance:

Save $25 in ticket price
Save ~$20 in round-trip gas
Save $5 on what would amount to a shot of watery draft beer
Be at work, bright-eyed/bushy-tailed come morning
Clean my apartment
Prepare a nice, nutritious dinner
Read some more of that book that's been so compel--

"Bullshit," I said. "I'm gonna go see the Lemonheads."

And oddly enough, more than once, I thought to myself:

"I bet she would've liked the show."

I'm sure I'll write more about this soon, likely disguised through being shoehorned into some kind of narrative fiction, as that's the only way to process how close Evan Dando's voice made me feel to a true and beautiful god when he sang:

"To be filled with hatred/for the time I've wasted

and I'm so impatient/for a new sensation

God knows what I thought I'd do/I bit my own sweet heart in two.

And all my life/I thought I needed all the things

I didn't need at all."

V, wherever you are, I hope you're sleeping poorly and dreaming of what you worked so hard to keep from the world. And J, wherever you are, I hope you're listening to the West Side Story soundtrack and thinking of somewhere else.

shock and awwwwww.

2011-10-15T00:07:00.003-06:00

it took just under nine hours to make it home this time

(about two hours less than last time,

a testament to the importance of proper planning

and attentive navigation).

so here I am,

listening to Steve Earle and the sound of Murphy hrrrrrrrmphing in his office

mug of Perfect Peach to my left

small cup of giant marshmallows to my right

and I think:

I could've driven another just-under-nine hours without a break.

I don't like Utah that much.

there were all sorts of reasons I left

but as soon as I come back

all I see are the things I wish I hadn't left behind

my dog, my family

watching CHiP breakdance and taking Boobie to the movies

etc.

if Colorado Springs was my point of origin

and Baker City was my destination

I'd be just over halfway there

and I think I could make it tonight and get there by morning

just in time for breakfast at the Wagon Wheel Diner

I'm good with transitions

and I like heading somewhere

but I don't know how much I like arriving places

anywhere, really

so maybe that's why I'm always thinking about Oregon

but I wrote once that I couldn't really ever live there

(either they don't trust people to pump their own gas

or they trust that some people are only able to pump your gas)

and I can't dig that.

but it's sure easy to feel peace

when you're somewhere you've never been at war.

October 2010.

2011-10-09T22:36:00.004-06:00

this girl and I had gone to an eels concert

(it was our fourth date)

and while we had known each other for a while

it wasn't until a week later

when I saw what she was made of

and decided I was better off alone.

this is a decision I've made a lot lately

but

specifically

not because of any shortcomings

nothing lacking from those who would do otherwise to "change" it

but just because it wasn't really--

what's the word

--perfect.

I wondered if maybe my standards were too high.

and perhaps they were

(are)

but I kept them all the same.

and

literally

the day that I decided I deserved more

"I met someone."

she was wonderful.

and I wrote about her pretty regularly

especially after something wonderful happened

but it ended.

and it's my fault, of course

(it always seems to be)

but

regardless

it just wasn't right.

one person in a relationship needs to be The Sad One

and the other person in a relationship is The Happy One

but one single relationship

cannot possibly handle

two of The Sad Ones

so we broke apart.

we had talked about living together

(even found an incredible apartment)

and her dog would've become our dog

while my TV played both of our shows

(as you can imagine

I had many more than she did)

but it would've been nice.

quiet and nice.

but I had to stop it

because my brain wasn't settled in itself

let alone in someone else

and now

all I do

day in, day out

(night in, night out)

is think about you

and wonder where you are

what part of the city you're in

(I've been there several times)

and what you sleep like

now that you're unburdened

by someone else

and if me being there

might disturb that

because

if memory serves

I've never seen anything as beautiful

as you trying to welcome in a tomorrow

through a sound slumber

and holding me saran wrap-tight

all the while.

I'll listen to your favorite song tonight

in your honor

because how

could I not remember it?

I hope that

wherever you are

the person who is now making you smile

has earned every last grin

and even though I don't smile much

I hope you know

that the little ones

are enjoying the books that you gave them

and I am enjoying

reading to them.

you didn't deserve better than me

but you did deserve different

and I hope you found it.

and

no matter what

I'm gonna do whatever I can

to keep away anyone

who deserves better

until I'm better.

start that countdown.

People I meet in bars #22: John and Up

2011-10-08T22:01:00.003-06:00

AUTHOR'S NOTE: this, like most things, is for Sam.

-------------------

John--I think it's John, anyway, but the tiny imprints on the debit card he passes across the bar move too quickly for me to be certain--orders a pitcher of red lager and two glasses for him and his buddy. The bartender takes the card and brings back beer that I see over the Willy Vlautin book in which my nose is buried, and John and his unnamed pal pour tall glasses and sip away.

It's "Zombie Night," apparently, and although I am a dedicated George Romero disciple, I'm having a hard time being anything but annoyed at the stench of stage makeup--yes, it has a smell--permeating the already stale air of Tony's. Most of the dressed-up theater kids, with their clever costumes and well-designed decorum, are down at the opposite end of the bar, as far as possible from the entrance, but that's not enough, and the smell of fake blood and pancake foundation drifts toward me in waves every time the door opens and the thirty-degree-Fahrenheit air rushes inside in bursts.

John's dealing with it properly: with beer. He and Unnamed Pal, who I've taken to referring to as "Up," are already halfway through their pitcher within about three minutes. I'm sipping at a Coors Light and lurching my chin upward at any sharp sound from across the room, and my reading comprehension is suffering for it.

I always hated theater kids.

"Didn't know it was Zombie Night," I say, more to my book than to John and Up, but John hears me and laughs.

"We knew," he says, jutting a thumb at Up, "but didn't really give a damn." He takes another pull from his beer.

"No?" I ask.

"Nah," he says, "not really. But if I had dressed up, I would've come as Zombie Steve Jobs."

"Whoa," Up interjects for the first time, his voice deeper than I expected. "Way too soon, man."

"It's never too soon," I say. "It's not like you were gonna dress up as the World Trade Center towers or something."

"That would've been a good two-person theme costume, though," John says, and he and I laugh.

"You guys are awful," Up says. He fishes through his pockets and pulls out a packet of cigarettes. "I'm gonna go smoke outside. I've gotta get away from this before it gets worse." He walks toward the door while John and I exert residual chuckles.

"That's pretty insensitive," I say.

"What?" John asks.

"You know," I say, taking a sip, "smoking? Right after we were talking about the World Trade Center? A little too appropriate."

John laughs and I join him a few seconds in, but the whole time, I look at the liquor bottles behind the bar and wonder what you'd order if you were here.

waving in the wind like feathers.

2011-10-03T20:49:00.004-06:00

I started therapy again today

(she's very nice and said I was "delightful")

and after I finished work

walked over to the episcopal church on my block

listened to Peter Gabriel for an hour on the back pew

feeling God in rhythm and love in candlelight.

and

for the briefest of seconds

things cleared up in my brain

and I'm going to hold onto that

as the dark, quiet nights

get darker and quieter.

someone told me once that I was only miserable

"because [I] had abandoned religion.

religion has answers," she said, "answers

that [I] definitely need[ed]."

but I don't mind not having the answers.

I always liked mystery novels more than science textbooks.

I'd take Ellroy over Einstein and pray for the space between

and I have been praying a lot lately.

I always stuck with prayer,

even in brief bouts of theobitterness,

but it's different now than it was when I was a kid:

I don't really pray for "things," really,

just comfort.

just to know someone know what I'm thinking

and sometimes,

when you ask a question,

the best answer

is no answer at all.

seems there's been an accident.

2011-10-02T19:08:00.002-06:00

someone just died.

people have misconceptions about Utah

and I blame the media.

seems like half of the world thinks of it like a Frank Capra set

all smiling white people who leave their doors unlocked

and speak impassioned monologues about neighborliness

the men working hard

the women wearing pearls

and the kids, golly gee, getting into occasional scraps of mischief

but doing pretty well on their spelling tests

and only occasionally falling into wells.

the other half thinks of it like a David Lynch set

where everyone looks happy

and the men wear polo shirts and pleated slacks while they mow the lawn

while their women bring them pitchers of iced tea

but behind closed doors,

the men are sexual sadists (and the women like it)

and everybody does heroin

children playing at the dump, torturing rats and drinking cough syrup

and everyone's just waiting to die.

neither is really true.

there are rough parts, sure

and there are nice parts

and there are rough-looking parts that are actually nice

and nice-looking parts that are actually rough

but it's just like anywhere else

and someone did die. very recently.

went to high school with me,

where our lives ran a parallel marathon

until his race ended.

it wasn't too unexpected, really,

but that almost makes it more tragic:

a car accident or a mugging-gone-wrong or a hiking stumble

those all happen in a flash,

ripped-off band-aids taking the skin below with them

and making a new wound, but at least you know it's there,

allowing you to address it accordingly.

something like this always seems to happen in slow motion,

one of those dreams where things are happening around you

at a normal speed

but you're swimming in peanut butter and

going

slow

that you can't do anything about what you're seeing

then it's too late

and you wake up.

but he didn't.

I've heard first-hand that his parents have the serenity

that comes when you're in the care of the angels

but his siblings are a mess

which makes, I suppose,

since you sorta need the perspective of seeing a lot of people die

in order to accept it as something that does happen

and stop thinking of it as something that shouldn't happen.

it's still sad, though.

it's always sad when people leave,

regardless of circumstance.

I own three things of my grandmother's.

she died coming up on four years ago

and left behind a hole in me that could've come from buckshot.

her 1999 Honda Accord,

a small, wheeled kitchen island,

and a scuffed-up microwave that warms food

about as thoroughly as a Bic lighter would.

someone told me to throw away the microwave.

"Get a new one that works."

but I didn't like that idea.

since I also don't like lukewarm leftovers, though,

I am gonna get a new one.

but I'm gonna rip off the door

and gut its insides, take out all the electronics

put it on its back

and fill it with enough dirt

to grow a little mint plant or two

because even though the microwave's now just a shell

and it was given to me only because of death

that doesn't mean it can't be used

as a way for something new to live.

please tell your friends that it was my idea.

2011-09-27T23:03:00.004-06:00

I have this idea for a book

and it'd be called

The Thirteen Wives of Edgar Winter

it's about the many women who married a man named "Edgar Winter"

(not the popular rock and roll musician of the 1970s)

and divorced him within a year

each chapter would be about how these women

put their individual lives back together after the divorce

how they dealt with the horrible things he put them through

and moved past it all

learned from their mistakes

became better people

forged themselves through fire

etc.

(you, rather)

would never actually meet Edgar

sure, we'd hear about him

lawyers' meetings where he'd no-show

alimony hearings

child support discussions, in a few cases

and maybe even the reasons they fell in love with him

but he's not what's important, I don't think.

what's important is the impact that he has on

the wounds and the world that he left in his wake

and the good that can

(eventually, sometimes, perhaps, hypothetically)

come from this man convincing the world

these women

that he is one thing

when he is

in fact

another

I wonder how I'd fit you into it, too

which one of the women you'd be

or maybe you'd be a little bit of all of them

yeah, probably that last one,

since that's how it seems to happen

with everything else.

breaking my shin on the very first rung.

2011-09-08T22:49:00.002-06:00

but sometimes

the next morning

I'll re-read an overwritten email

or an overwrought IM conversation

maybe the draft of a non-fictional story

and I'll think to myself:

"you're not so bad.

but keep getting better."

and knowing that you're out there

somewhere

reading every day

makes that road a bit simpler

and makes those potholes

that much easier to handle.

their lucky number was 28.

2011-09-06T21:09:00.000-06:00

He figured that, after this many years together, he'd be able to determine the catalyst for her oscillations between dark brown hair and bright blonde. But just shy on two decades in and he still had no idea. He'd given up trying to decipher about halfway through the second decade, the fifteen year mark standing lighthouse-strong among the downpours and hurricanes and rainbows and puppydogs that had been their time. They'd seen flowers bloom and ivy spread while the hail fell and walls came tumbling, but here they were, in their marital bed, holding each other after a particularly spirited birthday romp.

They'd wed on her 28th birthday, in accordance with the if-we're-still-single wager they'd entered into with fate and each other, and today, at precisely 12:10 AM that morning--they'd still been awake to light the cake--marked her 48th. He'd met that mark himself about half a year prior and had warned her of its general ineffectiveness, but they had celebrated merrily all the same.

And even to this day, when they'd find themselves tucked into bed, he'd run slender fingers through thick tangles of her hair as she fell asleep. He liked the blonde--she didn't believe him when he said so, but he did because it was hers--although, when pressed, he'd admit that he preferred the brown. While the blonde caught the light and shone it like a mirror, the brown stayed silent in the dark like blackout curtains, existing in the dark not to his sight, but only to his fingertips, soft and full against calluses and worn pads.

He supposed that maybe the blonde was what she thought she was, while the brown was what she hoped she could be. Although he figured this myopic, and his favorite time was the week or two, once a year, when she'd let the roots peek from her scalp and serve as a reminder to what she truly, truly was, underneath her persona and artifice and everything else he thanked the Good Lord every night to be able to see clean through like freshly polished glass.

She stirred and opened her eyes, and they leapt to his. "Are you still awake?"

"Yes."

She sighed and rested a sleepy hand against his chest. "Go to sleep."

"I always do," he said, bending down to kiss her head. "Hey, do you remember when you got married?"

"To you?"

"No," he said, "before."

"Well, uh, yeah...?" She looked more awake than she had been.

"Do you remember after the rehearsal dinner? When I was in that shitty hotel and you called me and I was completely wasted from the free drinks at the Benihana?"

She laughed and nodded.

"Do you remember what you asked me?" he said.

"I asked you if you thought I was doing the right thing." She dragged tickling fingers against his stomach and he flexed involuntarily underneath the small gut he'd developed after the years and years of beer and contentment.

"Do you remember what I said?" he asked.

She paused and ran through her mental rolodex of past conversation. She remembered, vaguely, that he'd said something 1/3 intoxicated, 2/3 profound, but memory didn't serve. The files were combed and combed in her brain and came up short. "What did you say?"

He sighed and took a deep compensatory breath. "I don't remember. I was hoping you would." He kissed her forehead again and brushed a rogue strand of hair from her eyes to behind her ear. "I wonder if I should care at all about the past when we're here right now."

She stayed silent. He lifted her chin up like a periscope before giving her lips a goodnight kiss and shuffling his back down against a stack of too-firm pillows and closing his eyes. "If all of this is what it took," he said, "then that's just fine." She smiled and re-closed her eyes.

"Goodnight, love," she said. "You mean the world to me." She kissed his collarbone and fell immediately to sleep.

He whispered "happy birthday" and held fast, knowing that he could track, to the day and by the Gregorian calender, the day that he'd found peace.

They slept soundly and both called in sick the next morning. Celebrations were, of course, something to celebrate.

that voice again.

2011-09-05T20:25:00.004-06:00

he'd steal glances at her from the corner of his eye

like a cat burglar sneaking a diamond into his coat pocket

and all he wanted to do

was spend his days

watching her shine.

these are words that go together well.

2011-08-31T00:48:00.003-06:00

I'm frustrated and burnt out. "I just want to give up this writing bullshit. Maybe move to Flagstaff and be a melon farmer."

She yawns. "Maybe you could just write about melons?"

"I'm not very good at sex scenes, but I'll brainstorm."

She laughs and each ripple brings me five different stories, none of which are even remotely agricultural.

in closing:

2011-08-26T04:03:00.001-06:00

I drove nearly 700 miles in a single shot

one stop for gas

and another for directions (and gas).

a wrong turn was taken in Salinas

and I ended up in Richfield,

a place I didn't know existed

having to turn around

losing an additional hour to the backs and the forths

and I am now so very tired.

as I drove,

sometimes I was thinking about my nieces and nephew

or the puppy with whom I shall snuggle

my grandparents who are here to visit

or a good meal with my brother, sister, and parents

and that made is easier to keep my eyes open/steering wheel gripped

(but even though I know I wasn't

and although it required a great degree of imagination:

sometimes I pretended I was driving to you.)

with gratitude to the USPS:

2011-08-24T22:32:00.004-06:00

I spend so much of my time wanting things

or just wanting

so it's amazing

to hear something as simple as "you too"

and float off to sleep

knowing that I'll get to hear so many beautiful things tomorrow

rubber on rumble strips

idling engines

Mark Eitzel mixtapes

Sherwood Anderson audiobooks

your voice

and they'll make the nine hour drive

just lovely enough to bear.

sweet dreams.

I'll be back tomorrow.

don't fall through the stars.

2011-08-21T22:04:00.003-06:00

meg asked if me if my use of the term "you"

was directed at a specific person.

"sort of."

she said "I like to pretend that those are all true stories."

"me too."

so I told her about you

the plans we've half-jokingly, mostly-drunkenly made

and how absolutely strange you are.

"we're all a little strange," she said.

I agreed

and am grateful that

we already have stories of our own.

here's to more of 'em.

after all.

2011-08-20T23:32:00.001-06:00

I always heard people say

"it's such a small world"

and I'd dismiss it.

tonight,

I see that the world is indeed small.

and then I wonder what you're doing right now

wherever you are

and I wish it was smaller.

I now pronounce you 99 to life.

2011-08-18T11:42:00.005-06:00

"I don't really see the point of dating," he said, adjusting his collar.

"How else would people get to know each other?" she asked. "How would we know who we want to be with?"

"I like those age ultimatum proposals. If-we're-both-still-single-when-I'm-forty things." He sat straight up and looked right at her. "Why don't we have one of those?"

"Okay. But forty is so far away. Pick an earlier age."

"The next one down is 30, but that's too predictable. How about, like, 28?"

"How old are you?"

He put his hands in his pockets. "27."

they say you don't have a problem until you start sleeping alone.

2011-08-16T20:55:00.002-06:00

I've been planting these seeds in my days and my nights

because you can only reap what you sow

but the sky was on fire and I missed you tonight

and I just thought it fair that you know.

so now I will finish all these stories and sonnets

and sip at my wine 'til I glow

but now I raise my glass to anything that can last

and I want to make sure that you know.

and the breeze coming through my window is cool

so the herbs in my planter will grow

but until then I'll watch and I'll wait and I'll wonder

and it's important to me that you know.

I hope that you're watching the sky tonight, darlin'

and soldier on past what we know

because things just sit so uncomfortably still

and I'd hate for you not to think so.

where your dreams collide, push your faith aside.

2011-08-15T21:57:00.003-06:00

James Ellroy always talks about his dead mother

and the steps he takes to conjure her.

at least she existed at one point

because I'm trying to create someone

who never really existed

outside of the sweet things she'd whisper

on nights when I'd shake in my sleep

and hope that something would be the same

in the morning.

it's harder to write fiction than non-fiction

because all you have to create everything

but I created you, didn't I?

and I did a damn good job

and it's a shame you had to go and fuck it up

by being who you always were.

shuffling through people like cards.

2011-08-14T20:40:00.005-06:00

she'd given him a bottle of 12-year-old Jameson

the Christmas that they were together

before disappearing three weeks later.

it took him almost a year to open the bottle

(and another six months to actually drink any)

but once he had

he was conflicted:

half of him wished he would've waited a little longer

because it would've been that much sweeter

and the other half wished he'd just dove right in

because immediacy is where salvation lives.

but either way

every sip burned

in that good way

and every day burned

in that bad way.

regardless,

yes, the burn hurt

but

as was often the case with so many things

he got used to it

so he let the fire down his throat

warm the heart that he'd let freeze over.

the world's gone flat and no one seems to have noticed.

2011-08-09T22:08:00.003-06:00

He'd had the desk for nine years. In that time, he had never once put a glass on a coaster, and the wood grain was stained with water and condensation that had dripped down into puddles and pools on its surface. And on nights like tonight, he could look at the rings and spots and remember the blemishes that drink had left on his furniture and everything else.

He crumbled into bed, peeling starched sheets from a too-heavy comforter and sliding himself between. No matter what the weather outside, it always seemed too hot inside, and she'd always told him to never let the blanket go unused.

loving you is the only thing that's gonna get me by.

2011-08-08T00:01:00.005-06:00

the bathroom light

which he also used as a nightlight

had gone out.

he did his laundry in the tub (now in the dark):

one of many small steps to save enough money

to take that pretty girl out to a nice dinner.

and when she finally said yes and they had established a time and place

four weeks had passed

and with what he had managed to scrounge together

($6.75 for two loads of laundry

$9 every Friday by drinking water instead of $3 G&Ts at happy hour

$5.38 by eating ramen instead of buying a cheeseburger

$14.99 [plus tax] when he returned the new shirt he'd hoped to wear)

he had $64.52.

not enough for a bottle of wine, but she could get two glasses of malbec

(he'd just claim he was training and only order water)

and he'd hope she didn't like appetizers and dessert

but she ordered reasonably

and his flop sweat dripped back into his pores.

they walked to her car just as it began to rain

and after a kiss goodnight and an implication of future plans,

he walked back home,

singing along to passing cars and trodden gravel.

and his bathroom light was still out.

so he opened the blinds

inviting in the midnight moonlight.

he fell asleep smiling at dancing clouds and summer breezes,

wondering how much he could get at that

pawnshop down the street

for his new tv.

words at your feet and music on your lips.

2011-08-03T18:02:00.003-06:00

they had clung together like saran wrap.

and the first day that they found each other

(and every day since)

the sky had been gray

and the wind had been fierce.

chalk it up to cosmic balance

because perfection is such a limited resource

and they had seemed to monopolize so much of it.

church bells ringing in the middle of a gunfight.

2011-08-02T17:28:00.006-06:00

it hails a lot here.

rains, too. almost constantly.

and the poorly-insulated tin roof

of my (very) old apartment building

lets the sound come through to my second floor one-bedroom.

the building is constantly experiencing blackouts

(I've only been responsible for three of them)

and it's strange to be mid-sentence, mid-line, mid-expository

and have the lights around you disappear

the very second that you're writing something

about a pitch-black, poorly furnished, shag-carpeted apartment

terminally beneath literal rainclouds and metaphorical hailstorms

and then the shots ring out,

the man escapes into the night

and the lights return on and chase the darkness away,

scurrying underneath the front doorframe.

but sometimes

when the embers in my fingertips have died down

and the hail takes a breather

I look backward

revisiting every breadcrumb I've left behind

and last night

I was so afraid that everything would be closer than it appeared

then:

when I poured all of it into a glass

and braced for the burn

it hit my tongue

and was a little weak for my taste.

so here's to the pilgrim's progress

and the bold souls who brave only the darkest of nights

and the murkiest of waters

looking for whatever brings them tomorrows.

here's to unburdened backs

and the freedom that can only come

from leaving things behind.

every night about this time.

2011-07-28T18:52:00.002-06:00

I met Dave Alvin last week.

and even though you and I never talked about it

I always considered one of his tunes

"our song."

and it came up on shuffle the other day

while I was researching effectiveness of subject line personalization

(very, in case you were wondering)

I put it on repeat for

literally

three hours. just sitting there at work,

researching,

listening to this sad song on an endless loop.

I turned it off.

Mustered the strength and put it away

because I didn't need to hear it.

This town is quiet enough.

I went about my day.

I finished my work, packed my bag, refilled my water bottle

and began the mile and a half walk home.

It was raining just enough to notice

and the sun hit the damp sidewalk like the light above a kitchen sponge.

I passed a man on the street

playing songs on his guitar in front of my favorite bar

and I took out my headphones to see how much of my change he deserved

and he was playing the Dave Alvin song.

I put back in my headphones

tossed him a nickel

and muttered under my breath the rest of the way home.

losing you was a crime.

2011-07-26T18:12:00.003-06:00

I haven't been writing here much lately. Which isn't to say I'm not writing; quite the contrary. In fact, I've finally started to write an honest-to-goodness novel, and it's a painful, draining, depressing, inspiring birth. So I won't be putting as much stuff up on here for the next bit as I focus on getting this thing out of my brain and onto the page.

But don't worry:

you're in it.

And I even gave you a gun.

death and the family.

2011-07-20T16:44:00.004-06:00

a few years ago
I watched my grandma die.

about two years later
looking for answers and peace and a new story
I wrote about her
and how her leaving changed everything.

impossible to ignore
of course
was her ex-husband's place in the story.
a man I never met
and about whom I have nothing good to say.

when I wrote about her
I found it necessary to include him,
tangentially, at least,

but I could only write about his shadow
and the echoes he left behind in us.
because I didn't know him from birthday cards
or Thanksgiving dinners
or stories from the war:

I knew him only by his absence
and the holes he had carved.

what I had to say was cruel.
intentionally.
it was spiteful and made of vengeance
a retaliation for the people I loved
and despite its truth (or my understanding of it)
I think it
(like this)
may have caused some unintended collateral damage.

and then today
he died.
"the man I've never met" became "the man I'd never meet."

so now I look over those words
the fruit of my instinctive, vicious reflexes

and I hate myself for not being good enough
to want forgiveness.

we're all just curled up in the sheets.

2011-07-19T16:42:00.003-06:00

After waiting an hour-and-a-half for my food at Poor Richard's, I finally gobbled down the entire plate of pasta primavera like it had fallen from the sky. Five hours later, some remaining microbe or bacterial strain or rare combination of al dente pasta and complete disdain latched onto my innards and rendered me violently ill.

Then there was a power outage. My air conditioner shut off, taking with it my last remaining thread to reality. I entered a hallucinatory fever dream state for just under an hour, seeing things that weren't there, hearing voices that were thousands of miles away, my face and neck and hands caked in a layer of sticky sweat in starchy sheets.

It had been a while since I had been in so much pain, and when my fever broke and I more or less came to, I stared up at the unlit chandelier and the stationary ceiling fan and clutched my torso in horror at the turmoil it was hosting. Conflation of circumstance and condition connected and I thought, "I could just die right now."

But things got better, as they always seem to. I'm currently vertical, lucid, and smelling fresh as a daisy. Power's back on, air conditioner's working, and last night, I enjoyed an Ultimate Cheeseburger combo (with curly fries, of course) from Jack in the Box before falling asleep to season five episodes of How I Met Your Mother and waking up to a rising sun and a beautiful 6:30 AM in Colorado.

And then I found out that somebody just died. Someone I had never met and about whom I knew very little, but that never really seems to matter. This is someone who had a name, a family, friends, relationships, tethers to the world. And then I look at all of the horseshit that I think is so important in my life--the 50% off Criterion DVD sale at Barnes and Noble, the new tattoo of Lazarus that now seems both twice as relevant and twice as inappropriate--and I think that, to this family, to those who are still here, whatever people tell them won't make it any better. I immediately regretted my half-cocked, insincere death wish and resented my own weakness for even having spoken such horrible things.

I've always felt it really horrifying to see well-intentioned people spout ghastly excerpts from scripture to reassure mourning survivors that their loved one is in a "better place." Even if this person truly does believe that the departed is happier now--even if the departed actually is happier now--that doesn't matter. That doesn't make the pain go away and it rarely, if ever, seems to make it better.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is:

"I'm sorry for your loss and I wish there was some way I could help."

Because, in the context of this situation, the only two things I capital-k-KNOW are:

1. These people are desperately hurting.
2. There is nothing that we can do.

And, I guess, one more:

3. I am so sorry that I am strong enough to fix this.

You're all in my prayers.

bang.

2011-07-19T07:54:00.005-06:00

My brother and I were in the hills. He cleaned the rifles while I picked up spent brass and shell casings. I was getting the hell out of Dodge in less than a week.

"You leaving any ladies behind?" he asked.

"No." I tied the full plastic bag together and reholstered my handgun. "It's tough to find a girl who's moderately liberal and totally okay with this whole gun thing."

"Dude," he said, zipping the rifle case closed, "it's hard to find a conservative girl who's okay with this whole gun thing."

We got back down to the house and had lunch. I watched an episode of Justified and dreamed of Kentucky girls.

sure plays a mean pinball.

2011-07-18T10:00:00.004-06:00

In The Who's Tommy, Sally Simpson is a confused teenage girl from a wealthy family who idolizes the recovered Tommy as a sort of spiritual guru. Against her father's wishes (and in accordance with her mother's), Sally goes to see Tommy preach his message of "Love Will Find a Way."

During Tommy's sermon, Sally tries to reach out and touch him, but too much commotion makes her fall and hit her face on a chair, cutting her cheek open. She's taken away by an ambulance and sent home.

Then my favorite couplet in the history of rock and roll, courtesy of Pete Townshend:

"Sixteen stitches put her right and her dad said 'Don't say I didn't warn ya!'
Sally got married to a rock musician she met in California."

Always makes me smile. Listen here.

last night (and earlier this morning):

2011-07-11T17:07:00.001-06:00

on nights like tonight
when the window is open and two fans push warm air
through my single bedroom
and the jayhawks sing me to fitful sleep
while the rain gutters fill and empty
and splash their contents
to the potholes below,

i look around my small town out that open window
and i see headlights glow like fireflies against wet pavement
sirens blazing downtown every twenty or so minutes
and i wonder
in this new place
where neither of us have been manipulated
and no undue advantage has been taken
where we could look to the skies with open eyes
and find solace under spackled ceilings

if we could start over
and reset the clock,
rising every morning
to a fresh sun and hot coffee
like that one night years ago:

the night where we slept soundly
like we had never been scared.

the moral dilemma of Jackson Browne.

2011-07-11T08:09:00.001-06:00

i was little
and I’d go into my dad’s office
he’d be listening to jackson browne
and he would ask me about my day.

it's one of the soundtracks to my childhood
and older people with excellent taste
often ask me where i heard of these bands
the t. rex and the steely dan and the (early) rod stewart
and it’s all just because of dad.

mom would give him intermittent guff for listening to jackson browne.
“the guy beats his wife,” she said. “shouldn’t support him.”
dad acknowledge the point, but listened anyway.
“andy,” she said, “don’t listen to men who beat their wives.”
and for a while, i didn’t.

so
that meant no jackson browne
and no who (i'm pretty sure I once heard that keith moon was a beater)
and no zeppelin (they did horrible things to groupies on tour)
and no johnny cash
and no ike turner
and no rolling stones (mick and keef always were complete bastards)
and no george jones
(and no roman polanski movies, for that matter).

sometimes it felt like there was no one left.
david bowie, maybe
the soundtrack to the muppet movie
tom waits (co-writes the vast majority of his tunes with his loving wife, kathleen)
and queen’s greatest hits (brian may is a reputable husband/father)
but i tried to make off-limits
all those guys too drugged up to hit anything but a bottle.

but eventually i started listening to more obscure people
dave alvin and john doe and lyle lovett and greg dulli
people whose biographical information wasn’t cultural lexicon

and sometimes i pretend
that it’s just because classic rock is passé,
beaten into the ground by years of Ten Straight Hits Drive-Time marathons

but sometimes i wonder
if it’s to keep my conscience clean.

she had fallen in love with his courage.

2011-07-10T12:30:00.000-06:00

They sat only a few feet away in the near-dark, the only light emanating from the softly white, low-wattage bulb stuck into the small desk lamp she had got him for Christmas. “It’s only five watts, so it saves energy,” she had told him. “It won’t be quite as bright, but it’ll last for years.”

She read a book in the battered recliner, each rock back and forth squeaking like a Victorian grandfather clock. He held his small glass of bourbon to the dim corner light, dismayed at its weakness and his resultant inability to see through the amber splashing against the rims of his cup. She had got him the bourbon, too; a joint Christmas present. “The light’s for you to read by when I’m away,” the note said, “and the bourbon is to keep you warm when I can’t.” It was a considerate gift, and he had been grateful.

“Hey,” he said, his voice breaking the silence like a poorly behaved student inside a library. She looked up from her book and took of her glasses. She smiled and he regretted having interrupted her concentration. He sniffed through a stuffy nose. “What was it like when your brother got cancer?”

“Which brother?”

“Chris.”

“Chris,” she repeated, looking above his shoulder, through the roof, and straight into the sky. “Yeah, it was hard. Harder for him, of course, but hard for the rest of us, too.”

“Yeah, but what happened? What’d you see?”

“Him fall apart.” She looked back to him. “The first thing to go was his appetite.” She pushed her palms against her knees before bringing them into her chest. “The hair doesn’t all fall out from the chemo, but enough did that he thought it looked patchy—we all thought it looked okay, but respected his wishes—and so he shaved it.”

He took a deep breath as quietly as he could. “Then what?”

“He survived, but it was the most horrible thing any of us had ever seen. Just squirming in pain, like he was trying to get out of his skin, like a snake molting or something. And every once in a while the doctor gave him morphine for the pain when it was too unbearable, but everything he said when he was on it seemed like he was screaming it from miles away and we were only getting the echoes.”

“Oh.” He popped his thumbs and slid his glass back and forth on the desk. “Anything else?”

“Well, yeah,” she said, her eyes dropping from his and falling to the ground, “but I’d rather not talk about it. I mean, he survived and everything, but it was so hard to watch that I’d prefer to leave it be.”

“Okay,” he nodded to himself. “Okay.” He lifted the glass back up to the light and still couldn’t see through it. She had bought him a nice enough bottle that its contents were empty of dregs or floaties. He knocked it to the back of his throat, took a deep breath, and rose to his feet. “I want to go on a little walk.”

“That sounds nice. Do you want to go to that park?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I think I’m just gonna go by myself, though.” Never leaving his, her eyes took reflexive offense before building themselves back up. “Is that okay?”

“Of course.” Her smile spread wider than it normally did. “Have a nice time.”

He walked toward the door. His right hand grabbed his coat while his left tilted her face toward his. A kiss dropped upon her residual smile. He said “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said, not knowing that what he had meant was “goodbye.”

She had already seen cancer once. Lord knows she didn’t need to see it twice.

scoops.

2011-07-09T16:07:00.005-06:00

It's raining outside like the ground told the clouds that their dog had died and the clouds burst into tears. It comes down in starts and stops and drips and drops and punishes the pavement. I watch this from the safety of a coffee shop corner booth and Scoops sits alone at a two-person table, the unoccupied chair playing host to a bulky backpack, two empty candy bar wrappers, and a piece of foil covering half of what looks like a turkey sandwich. Every ten or so minutes, he springs to his feet, closes his laptop, and briskly lunges outside, where he mills around for a minute or two before disappearing, only to reappear at his table as though he'd somehow rematerialized there.

Scoops looks about ten years younger the 32 I've heard he actually is. He's got a close-cropped afro that would surely burst into a glorious mane were it not so well-maintained, and he's reliably clad in what seems to e his uniform: black sport coat, blue collared shirt, jeans, and discordantly brown workman's boots. The man is some kind of legend, and the facts, as I understand them, are as follows:

1. He's been a journalism student at UC-Colorado Springs for upwards of ten years;

2. He writes extreme right-wing, vitriolic anti-government tracts that he places inside newspaper vending machines (the deposits of which are the brief excursions he makes from the coffee shop);

3. He supplements his modest living by distributing pieces of densely plotted, hardcore erotica (presumably different documents than the anti-government stuff, but I'd imagine some degree of overlap);

4. He is, in the words of my landlord, "a few cards short of a whole deck."

Right now, he's pacing back and forth outside of the coffee shop's glass-paneled doors, and the phone conversation he's having seems to be maddening him. I can't make out any of the words he's using, and I'm listening to the Stones on my headphones too loudly to get any sound out of it, but he looks pissed.

I was walking back from lunch with Dan yesterday, and we ran into Scoops going the other way. Scoops took out his earbuds and made eye contact. Dan dropped his eyes to the ground like cartoon anvils and gave a little wave, saying "Hey, Scoops," and we just kept walking.

"Dude's weird," Dan says.

"Heard he writes porn," I said.

"Yeah, and these crazy weird political pieces. Odd guy."

"Huh."

"Wouldn't advice trying to talk to him, though. You'll get caught up in logic loops and funhouse mirrors and never get out alive." Dan and I kept walking, and I turned back to see that Scoops still had his headphones removed and was waving to 95% of the people he passed.

And I think I've probably seen Scoops ten times since I moved here a week and a half ago. That's just about once a day, and my curiosity never diminishes. I want to sit this guy down, buy him a latte, and figure out just what's going on his brain. He reminds me a lot of someone I know back in Utah, what with the journalistic leanings, grasps for counter-culture, and even specific aesthetic accoutrements, like the Lando Calrissian moustache and the ever-present sport coat. But where his Orem-based counterpart is equal parts insightful and maddeningly obtuse, I have no idea about the content or quality of Scoops' character. It's deja-vu creepy to see this guy and wonder how he found me again and again, like a Mario Brothers ghost that always moves toward you the second you turn your back.

Dude lives by his own rules, though. He appears to be omnipresent in a fairly large city, and everybody knows him. He's made his own admittedly idiosyncratic mark on a place not without marks of its own, and I think there's something to be admired in that. And maybe it takes someone with dirty thoughts and bizarre political leanings to get anything done. Maybe this is the guy that's gonna change the world. And maybe that's a good thing.

I can't seem to pinpoint a larger meaning toa ny of this, either; my minimal observations and minimal-er analysis have borne no fruit. I wonder, though, if I need higher stakes to be able to have anything to say. I have no real investment in this place yet. It's not home yet, and its characters aren't yet neighbors.

There's a place for me here somewhere, I'm sure. And until I find (or construct) it, I'll just watch the strange people of this city who have found theirs and remember the ones from my hometown whose constant self-reinvention prevented their own discovery. I'll learn from their examples and synthesize a necessary presence and keep adjusting until it fits.

And, wherever you are now and wherever you end up, I'll think about you the whole time and how much you love the rain.

to the pretty girl at Safeway in a new town:

2011-07-04T13:09:00.003-06:00

When I walked past the bananas, checking each bunch for optimal green/yellow/brown ratios, I, to turn a phrase, noticed you noticing me noticing you (there may have been additional noticing in there somewhere, but bear with me). We both seem to have smiled simultaneously at one another, and, being a New Man in a New Town, I thought to myself:

"Hey, what the hell, maybe I should ask her out. Establish a premise of being unfamiliar with my surroundings, needing a recommendation for a good Thai place/coffee shop/credit union [hey, I'm super new, I'm allowed to ask], and then we'd hang out and I'd invite you back to my apartment for a nightcap or cup of coffee or snow cone or something.

So we'd get up there, you'd see that the whole place was in complete disarray (but in a nice, homey way) and you'd see the pictures of my nieces and nephews that are as of yet my entire decoration and ask me about them and I'd regale you with tales of our primarily food-related misadventures and how they're what I miss the most about Utah.

And then, through the unpredictable course of conversation, we'd find a handful of idiosyncratic personal connections, like a shared hatred of Bugs Bunny or a completely uninformed fascination with meteorology or that we both adore exposed brick architecture and I would feel the irresistible compulsion to kiss you, but then you'd look around the apartment and see how I had literally no furniture, be offended by my complete lack of home aesthetic preparation and run outside, screaming things like 'THIS MAN HAS NO COUCH!' at the top of your lungs into the ether of an otherwise quiet Sunday night in Colorado Springs."

So, for these and other reasons, Pretty Girl at Safeway, I felt it best to leave you undisturbed and a chance untested. But I'm going mattress shopping this week and I'll be picking up some really cheap folding chairs so that there's at least SOMETHING to sit on besides the cold, carpeted floor of my cozy little pad.

But perhaps, Pretty Girl at Safeway, we shall meet again, and I'll have more than ramen and light-brown tap water to offer you.

were my memory a camera, were my eyes the lens.

2011-07-01T18:59:00.002-06:00

She was a gifted photographer.

And it was so unfortunate that she was so brilliant
because no one else
was ever able to capture
just how lovely she was.

first night in town.

2011-06-30T14:28:00.002-06:00

I left yesterday.

The car got stuffed full of boxes and backgrounds
and the second I got on the highway
the skies opened up gray and poured down rain.

it was so strange to come here
knowing that this was to be my home
and the clouds pushed me out
on a wave of water
and the whole thing was just some kind of dream.

I felt like I was baptized in the rainstorm
and the lightning lit the way
so here I am
in a crappy motel on a dingy side of town
watching Simpsons reruns on a 19” TV
and knowing that I’ll fall asleep soon
closing my eyes as a guest
and opening them up in the morning as a resident

so goodnight.

sorry, guy--gotta fly.

2011-06-26T13:09:00.003-06:00

today was my last time on campus
that bullshit school where everyone turned their head at what you did
and i went looking for you.

i wanted to see the eyes of an unhappy man
and i wanted to ask how miserable life was
ever since you had thrown it all away
pissed your marriage down the drain
just for a salacious shot with a twisted 20-year-old girl
too stupid to know better
and too young to care.

i wanted to put on a shit-eating grin
and ask you how the divorce was going
if you were enjoying the crappy motel where i assume (and hope) you’re living
what machines at the gym you find to be
the most effective spots to pick up teenage girls
and what poems you recite to them most often
which ones make them flutter their eyes the most and fill their cheeks with red.

i wanted to find out what brought you to be this person
if you were always an empty void or if this was a new thing
did critical theory do this to you? too much derrida and not enough decency?
was it misguided subversion of american puritanism?
some big piece of performance art
conceived behind the curtains and the bedsheets?
and i wanted to underline everything you lost
remind you of the pain you caused me and so many others
point out that the two of you are monsters and deserve each other
and leave you withered and wired and wrinkled.

i wanted to break your nose
and welt your wandering eyes
call you out as the coward you are
and bruise rosy, pockmarked cheeks
leave you in a puddle of your own sick and tears
walk away laughing as you clutched a broken hip and wept for medicare.

“but i'm better than that,” i told myself. “that’s what they would do.”
so i packed my bag
put on my sunglasses
whistled “ramble on”
walked to my car
and drove away.

but not before pressing my ass up against your office door
and farting on your doorknob.
so you might wanna wear gloves on monday
because it felt steeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenky

and now you'll have particles of shit all over your hands

to match everything that comes out of your mouth.

enjoy the last third of your life.
i'm just getting started on my act two
and i can’t wait to see
how much better things get
the further i am away from the two of you.

the happiest days of our lives.

2011-06-24T03:22:00.004-06:00

"I'll never forgive you," he said, not even turning his head to look at her.

"What?"

"I'll never forgive you for settling. For settling for someone that wasn't me."

"Oh, you think I should've settled for you, huh?"

He took a deep breath and the November cold shot down an unprepared throat into unprepared lungs.

"Yes." His right foot nearly tripped over his left, but he straightened his stride without missing a beat. "Yes, I do."

And even though they were buried in his front pockets, his fingers were so cold that all he wanted to do was pull them out and rub them together for warmth.

But he didn't want her to see how much they were shaking.

everyone's sleeping but the paperboy.

2011-06-23T00:39:00.003-06:00

I know I'm irresponsible and I don't behave

and I ruin everything that I do

I'll probably get arrested when I'm in my grave

but I'll be saving all my love for you.

Don't listen to the rumors that you hear about me

because I ain't half as bad as they make me out to be

and I may lose my mind, but baby, can't you see?

I'll be saving all my love for you.

The most important thing I've read all month:

2011-06-22T15:23:00.003-06:00

Regarding troubling concepts of supposedly objective, "biblical" doctrine like eternal damnation for souls who never learned about Christianity, Fred Clark writes:

"Conscience matters. If a doctrine offends the conscience of most believers — if a doctrine is so blatantly troubling that even its defenders can ask 'who is comfortable with that?' — then maybe God is trying to tell us something."

Further reading, as well as a recommendation of (and link to!) the most illuminating non-Ellroy book I've read in some time.

navigating the stars by night.

2011-06-20T00:15:00.004-06:00

the main reason i'm heading to colorado

is to escape all of you:

to leave the ghosts behind

and live life as a man unhaunted by the past.

but as i drove home from my folks' house tonight

midnight moon hovering above mountain lines

moisture in the air and

moving on my mind

i was overcome with the first

(of what i assume to be several)

waves of sadness

knowing that not a single thing in colorado

will remind me of you.

so tonight:

i drink to the future

and i'll pour one out for you

and the claims we staked for Spain

all over this valley.

i'll leave the flags planted in the ground

and once a month,

they'll guide my way home

until the wind carries them away

and i have to keep an eye on the stars

if i want to come back down to you.

but until then

i'll find you in every gas station

feel you in every rumble strip

and hear your goodnight in every mile marker

that gets me to fresh ground and unclaimed land.

apology for an accident.

2011-06-17T00:27:00.003-06:00

I'm a magician

I stood up in front of strangers

and brought us back to life

hoisting us up in front of the crowd

letting them throw tomatoes and applause

and hoping that something

anything

would hit my eyes so I couldn't see

everyone that was just waiting for you to show up

because everyone could hear that

every inch and decibel of my voice

was just hoping you'd appear

that I'd pull you out of my hat

and you'd materialize

making everything better

and giving every happy song a happier ending

and each sad song a poetic one

I'm so tired of falling asleep

to neon lights

and reruns of old TV shows

when all I want to hear

is music.

the nature of the beast.

2011-06-14T04:42:00.004-06:00

and so sometimes

they, the little boys dressed as men

tell you all the lies they can muster

and every night

they hope against hope

that they will stumble upon the truth

because they know it's in there somewhere
but their calloused indexes are crossed so hard

that they struggle to put their fingers on it.

and some of them don't care

but some of them are just

so.

damn.

sorry.

what makes you think you're the one?

2011-06-13T21:33:00.007-06:00

He popped a piece from the bedside table into his mouth and chewed, close-mouthed, as quietly as possible. The ceiling fan whirred softly above.

"That gum smells worse than the cigarettes." She sipped her bottled water.

"Tastes worse, too. But keeps the landlord away," he said.

"Keeps me away."

He laid back down on the bed and turned to face her. "Liar."

She pushed outstretched arms toward the spackled ceiling, following a quiet laugh with a stifled yawn. She took his hand and their fingers crosshatched, her eyes never leaving the fan. "What are we supposed to do now?"

WHAT HE WANTED TO SAY:

"We knock the past down. Then we use its parts to build the future."

WHAT HE WANTED TO SAY:

"Pack a bag, leave tonight, and find somewhere clean enough for a fresh start."

WHAT HE WANTED TO SAY:

"Break all the mirrors, walk under all the ladders, and dare the world to pull the rug out."

WHAT HE ACTUALLY SAID:

"_______________."

He kissed her forehead and got up to take a shower. By the time he was finished, she was gone. Her side of the bed was still warm, and that's where he finally fell asleep.

so much lovelier in the rain.

2011-06-12T01:34:00.004-06:00

and the way her eyes latch onto yours

like the cars of that magnetic train set you got your nephew

for an early birthday present

makes you feel like you're worth knowing

and nothing makes someone more beautiful

than wanting to know you.

And I never ever thought I'd say this, but:

I've been driving too much lately.

So I can't wait to build a new bed

and wake up under an unfamiliar sky

because sometimes I'll look out my window

and I swear I already know the exact position

of every star.

Something very important:

2011-06-09T19:47:00.003-06:00

If you're still calling it your "flower,"

you're not old enough to be giving it to anyone.

(you'd be mortified at the people

who weren't aware.)

the summer where we were invincible.

2011-06-07T22:53:00.006-06:00

two years ago

to the day

his teenage daughter died in a horrible accident.

and tonight

I'm eating pizza in north Provo with the man who saved my life

and we're making up for lost time.

"I don't see you often enough.

last time," he said,

"you were about to get married. what happened?"

I hold up my naked ring finger(s):

"I didn't."

he laughs between bites.

"why not?"

a deep breath (the sound of an impending lie):

"It's complicated."

because tonight

on this awful anniversary of an unnecessary tragedy

I don't have the heart to tell him that

in spite of the long list of Everything Else:

I never forgave her

for texting during 2/3 of the funeral.

legacy.

2011-06-06T23:19:00.003-06:00

Gram Parsons died when he was 26.
Otis Redding died at 26.

But
Orson Welles made Citizen Kane when he was 26.

All I'm doing is moving to Colorado.
so I guess we'll see which end
of the spectrum I land on.
let's hope it's Oscars.

later.

despite all evidence to the contrary.

2011-06-05T17:58:00.004-06:00

she said "goodnight" in that voice

the one that's been growing in my ears like ivy

she kissed my cheek

and

at that moment

she could've convinced me that the sun sets in the east

and that the sky had never been blue.

hold steady.

2011-06-04T23:36:00.002-06:00

They queue up for tickets to see the performance
They push to get closer, looking upwards with wonder
We are the actors, the cameras are rolling
I'll be Ben Gazzara, you'll be Gena Rowlands

Sometimes actresses get slapped
Sometimes fake fights turn out bad

Some nights making it look real
Might end up with someone hurt
Some nights it's just entertainment

And some other nights, it's work.

They come in for the feeding, sit in stadium seating
They're holding their hands out for the body and blood now
We're the directors, our hands will hold steady
I'll be John Cassavettes. Let me know when you're ready.

-c. finn

put it back in the deck.

2011-06-02T13:19:00.003-06:00

"I don't want to sound racist," the man said to his coworker, "but that's a really nice shirt."

His coworker's brow furrowed as he adjusted his collar. "Thanks." He paused and squinted. "That wasn't racist in any way."

"I know," the man said. "I said that I don't want to sound racist."

They went about their day.

cards, meet table. table, cards.

2011-06-01T21:47:00.003-06:00

as I started to write tonight

I went through more opening lines than some lonely drunk

trolling for women as desperate as him in an unfamiliar bar

and all because I don't know what to say.

anyone who's ever been here knows:

when I lack specificity, I paper over it with quantity

I throw words into drywall and cover the holes with more words

hoping that maybe there's a secret bag of money

hidden somewhere in the walls.

but tonight

I'm not feeling like words.

I'm feeling like music.

and I wrote a new song

it's called "birthday" and it goes like this:

"dee dee deeeeee dee dee deeeee

dee deeeeeee dee deeeeee doo dee doooo

la la laaaaaa la la laaaaaa la laaaaaaaa"

and then it repeats itself a few more times.

it's about you.

and I hope it was a good one

(but not as good as last year's.)

somehow, in Colorado:

2011-05-30T22:34:00.004-06:00

the trees are red and the rocks are green

and there's gold in them hills.

you can see it glistening like a blanket of stars

refracting sunshine and lighting rocky lensflare.

Scott said he found spirituality in his children

and discovering that you can love someone so much

having never met them.

I get that.

I've got nieces and nephews that I'd start nuclear war for

and I think I found something on those roads.

there's rhythm in rumble strips and interstate junctions

44 oz fountain drinks and Tom Petty albums

and I found poetry in exits and rest stops

no one can find you when you're on the road

and you drive until you can't anymore

but the whole time

you're somewhere else

and sometimes

being somewhere else

is all that matters.

after the dreams of falling and calling your name out.

2011-05-28T14:14:00.001-06:00

...but, beyond any of that, the weirdest thing about it all was the Hula Hoop Girl. She's announced as a member of a local burlesque troop ("troop?" is that right? do they have "troops?") and she wafts like a wisp of smoke between saloon doors, glitter-coated face and red wine lipstick lips. And the singer counts off a one-two-three-four into some eastern European gypsy jazz thing and I guess it's all supposed to be sexy, the way she slips in and out of the hoop and lifts wilted legs into stale bar air, but it's more sad, really.

"How old do you think she is?" Sam asked me. "I'm guessing late-30s."

"No way," I said, "early 20s."

"Then she's done late-60s worth of drugs." I nodded and sipped a 7-Up.

I was too embarrassed for this poor girl to stand inside and watch her do whatever it was she was doing--gyrate? throttle? sterilize?--so I stepped outside to the small bench adjacent to the big window looking into the bar.

"Weird place, huh?" said the girl that I hadn't seen, already sitting on the bench. She's a dainty thing, and her blue sundress catches the light showering down from the flickering streetlamps and the whole scene looks like a music video for a song that'd be on an especially overwrought episode of Grey's Anatomy or something.

And I wanted to talk to this girl. I wanted to hear what she's doing in a tiny town in the mountains of the southwest. I wanted to know what her favorite movie is and what kind of dog she'd like and what she used to dress up as for childhood Halloweens and why her favorite is color is what it is and what she thinks about Big Things and if she's ever felt like talking to a nice person she runs into outside of a bar in God Only Knows, AZ but has become too emotionally internalized and conditioned to be skeptical and paranoid of the outreaches of anyone around her and if a situation like this makes her want to go back to the friend's house at which she is staying and try (unsuccessfully, of course) to fall asleep on the couch, wondering for an unreasonably disproportionate amount of time what it was that could have come of any of this.

But I half-smiled, nodded faux-dismissively, and wandered back inside because she looked just. like. you.

the way it goes.

2011-05-26T21:23:00.004-06:00

He slammed his phone down onto the bar, the sound barely registering amongst the din of emptied shot glasses.

"Don't you just hate it when you call your mom and she just won't answer the damn phone?" he asked her.

"My mom died," she said, not removing her eyes from the vodka tonic she brought to her lips. "She died four days ago."

He paused. "So you must really hate it, then."

That made her smile for the first time in five days.

Road trippin', pt. 15: the beginning.

2011-05-24T23:32:00.004-06:00

Touches of frozen dew on the windshield take my instincts from late May to early December. The worn cloth of the bucket seat is cold even through jeans and steam rises like smokestacks from the mid-console coffee thermos. The coffee, frost, and sunshine make it smell like Christmas morning.

Itinerary:

1. Monument Valley. It was Jesse Custer's penultimate showdown and where they shot Stagecoach. The rocks are shaped like mittens and you could use a warm handshake.

2. Phoenix. Hot tex-mex and hotter afternoons will sweat you down.

3. Santa Fe. One out of every three businesses is an art gallery or museum. Get some perspective.

4. Colorado Springs. The evangelical Christian capital of the world. Though you may disagree, it'll be nice to be around people who know what they believe.

5. Denver. Who knows what you'll find. It's always nice to have a wildcard.

The backseat holds a comforter and a My cooler rides shotgun and is filled to maximum capacity with baby carrots and cranberries, pecans and peaches. Gas tank's full, sunglasses are on, and I feel like a Blues Brother. Aretha is drifting between underpowered speakers and the 6:27 AM sun is beginning to rise over the Rockies on my right and lights the way south. Milk trucks in an adjacent parking lot depart and return from their morning rounds, loading and unloading coolers suspiciously similar to mine.

I made a few cheese sandwiches, too. I might run into you, and I want to be prepared:

something tells me you might be a vegetarian.

See you there.

tattooed, vol. 3

2011-05-22T22:12:00.008-06:00

in preparation for theology school,

i've been reading a lot of religion blogs.

one of my favorites talked about something fascinating.

Augustine and Aquinas, two of my favorites

(among others)

talked about the "just war theory,"

the circumstances in which violence

a clearly anti-Christian concept

can be used for good

allowing some to fight their neighbor

without ceasing to love them, as per the words of Christ.

the author posited an additional meaning:

the idea that you can love something and need to destroy it at the same time.

and i wonder sometimes

if letting you get away with it--

all of it--

was the best way to protect you.

maybe i should've let you be fed to the dogs

so you would've seen how cruel

what you were doing was.

but i think you knew

and just didn't really care

because

your whole life

you've been sheltered from actual consequence

by people

like me

who cared.

but instead:

i kept you safe

and let you live

to destroy homes another day.

i will never forgive myself

for letting you keep going down that path

the road that destroyed lives

when i could've

should've

stopped you.

i thought i was doing the right thing.

i prayed for understanding

i asked my mom for council

i asked Nic what the right thing to do was.

(after a long pause:

"hell if i know, dude.")

i think that whatever choice i made

would've made me feel like absolute hell

so i picked delay over destruction

and hoped you would desist

but instead you just deferred

and i misunderstood the division between justice and punishment.

even now, you continue to do it

(yes, i saw the two of you the other day

and i guess you don't have to hide anymore

now that his wife and daughter know)

from now on

i swear to you

all of you

that i will do only justice

and let the heavens fall.

and

again

i've scarred myself

so i will never forget

what i let you do.

----------------------------

vol. 1

vol. 2

poem of the day:

2011-05-22T15:32:00.002-06:00

"Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;

Breath's a ware that will not keep.

Up, lad: when the journey's over

There'll be time enough to sleep."

-A.E. Housman, from A Shropshire Lad, IV. Reveille

exit 328, Kaysville.

2011-05-21T23:51:00.006-06:00

I went to a wedding tonight.

I was supposed to have a wedding once.

We had planned it:

there were going to be purple tablecloths and cream puffs

and all of my friends and family were gonna be there

Aunt Holly was flying in from Maryland

and Scott got legally ordained so he could marry us

we were going to dance to Tom Waits' "Closing Time"

and I was gonna have a big Dr. Pepper and wear a gray suit

Wayne, Tim, and Nic were gonna play bluegrass

I was gonna bring a bunch of azaleas

and then it all came crashing down.

I've been cheated on more than the LSAT

and lied to more than the IRS

but the most taxing (ho, ho) part of all of it:

seeing things so close to what I thought I had

and getting those reminders that,

yes,

these people have it.

And good for them. I don't begrudge them that.

I'm glad for them, and no one could possibly deserve it more.

I've wanted to get married since I was four years old.

Now I'm 26. And that's not old.

I know that.

But driving the nearly two hours home
(a car wreck bottlenecked freeway traffic)

just made me think of what I was coming home to:

nothing.

When I was engaged, a close friend bought me a bottle of scotch.

I've kept it hidden.

I did some research and learned that it cost him over $200

it's old enough to rent a car

and

every night when I feel like this,

I wonder if I should open it.

Instead

I bought some fast food and antacids

and I'll finish them both off tonight

because Hidden Scotch deserves better than tonight.

tonight is ignominious and exhausted

so I'll watch something with Orson Welles

and I'll wonder to myself

what we would've danced to at our wedding

and how you'd look

throwing back a bouquet of azaleas.

even though I'm so glad we didn't get married

and after the fires you lit burned us to the ground

leaving me to sweep up the ashes

I'm not too proud to admit

that some nights it sounds worth it.

but give me an hour.

I'm sure it'll fade.

most things do.

and there you are (again).

2011-05-19T00:02:00.003-06:00

the rain's running off the adjacent gazebo

the drops forming puddles below

a thought kept occurring to me through my day

and I thought it's only fair that you know:

so I closed the window and listened so closely

to the water just out of my sight

though the sun's come and gone

(and the porchlight's still on)

I just wish I could kiss you goodnight.

uh oh.

2011-05-17T22:41:00.002-06:00

I seriously hope that the Rapture doesn't occur this Saturday, because that would really screw up the headcount at Tess and Kimball's wedding.

But, if it does, dibs on the leftovers.

and there you are.

2011-05-15T22:35:00.004-06:00

it's been windy all night and was windy all day

only now it begins to calm down

so I peek out to nighttime and can't help but wonder

how it looks in your corner of town.

and there is a breeze climbing in through the window

while clouds glide against the moonlight

and the way that the wind's brushing up on my cheek

makes me wish I could kiss you goodnight.

like a moth to the flame.

2011-05-14T01:06:00.005-06:00

And anyway, the room was too small. There was barely space for the things he needed, let alone things he wanted, let alone things he neither needed nor wanted. He looked at books piled in corners and shelves that had become home to nests of books and the books lined up like rows of corn underneath the bed and the ziggurat stacks of books underneath the ten or so shirts he had hung from wood hangers in the closet and he decided, speaking it out loud this time so as to make it stick and prove his seriousness to any listening deities that could later hold this against him:

Enough was enough.

So he took it all--the books, the journals, the notebooks, everything--and he started taking it outside in piles. The next-door neighbor was watering his lawn and cocked his head at the sight of a man that young taking inventory of everything on a potholed driveway, sorting it all neatly into stacks that seemed to be in some kind of internal order, one impervious to any outside scrutiny, building a pyramid out of these stacks of paper.

And he kept watching as the young man re-entered and re-exited and re-entered the house ad nauseum, placing page upon page atop one another, adjusting all corners straight and putting all entries level.

The young man stood to the side of his creation, not ten feet away, and crossed long arms across a soft chest. He looked upon his works, tilting and squinting his eyes at the moment that stood before him. The neighbor looked only out of the corner of his eye, wanting to see how things proceeded.

He put down the hose and finally spoke. "What is it you're doing there?"

"It's sort of like a statue," the young man said, not removing his eyes from it. "I've got to run to the store. Do you mind keeping an eye on it?"

"Sure," the neighbor said, scratching the back of his head. "I needed a break, anyway."

"Make sure nobody touches it."

"I'll spray them with the hose."

The young man laughed and pulled keys from the pockets of his shorts. "Thanks. I'll be back in a few minutes." He opened his car door, calling "Don't let anybody touch it" out to his neighbor before getting in and driving away. The neighbor mock saluted as the young man turned the corner and disappeared.

The neighbor went inside and returned to his yard with a beer, sipping slowly and admiring the architecture of the young man's construction across the lawn. He took a seat in the wicker chair on his porch and looked more closely. The corners of it all looked papercut-sharp, as though the razor-thinness of the pages the books contained had been filed down to points before an onslaught. The mid-May breeze took its time making its mark, but began dancing through the loose pages, throwing them up and down and poking its head between the spines of the novels and the dustjackets of the hardcovers.

A gust snatched an unanchored bookmark and threw it on the neighbor's lawn just within arm's reach. The neighbor leaned out of his chair and picked up the renegade sliver and seeing only random words and numbers scrawled upon its surface. He checked both sides, finding nothing he understood. He rose from his chair and stepped slowly to the young man's pile, looking for an open front cover in which to slip the escaped parchment.

But his eye was caught by book titles and covers. Most of them he hadn't heard of--he had never been much of a reader--but a few of them he recognized from high school. Even these twenty-or-so years later--Good Lord, he thought, had it been that long?--he could remember some of them.

That one was about pirates. And another. That's the one where the kid fights in the Civil War. Another. I think that's the slavery one. And his eyes flashed with recognition at more than he thought they would. He slid the bookmark between the pages of a copy of Cannery Row and he returned to his chair, never taking his eyes from the cover of it.

"What were you doing?" the young man said, suddenly standing in the street next to his car.

"I didn't even hear you pull up."

"You were staring really hard. What were you doing?"

"Nothing," the neighbor said, "just putting a piece of paper back. It blew over toward me and I figured it was supposed to be in there somewhere instead of on my lawn."

"Sorry." The young man carried a small plastic bag and placed it on the ground a few feet away from the stack. "Thanks for watching it."

"Sure. The piece of paper had numbers on it. What did those mean?"

"Page numbers," the young man said. "I would write down my favorite words and which page they were on."

"What were some of your favorite words?"

The young man smiled as he crouched in front of the bag and rifled through it. "Strategy. Amorous. Colloquial." He pulled out a bottle of vodka and examined the label. "Clandestine. Umbrella. Transcendent." He unscrewed the top and took a deep draw of the scent, his eyes fluttering at its strength. "Recognition. Audibly. Seafaring." He began to pour the bottle's contents all over the pages.

The neighbor's eyes widened, but he found himself unable to do anything but continue to sit in his chair and sip his beer. A gust of wind brought the smell of soaking pages to him as the books grew visibly dark with saturation.

"Radial. Strumpet. Amalgamation." The bottle was empty, and the young man threw it on the pile, pulling another full one from the bag. "Defenestrate. Constructive. Eastern." He unscrewed the cap to this bottle with his teeth, spitting it onto the sidewalk.

"What does that one mean?" the neighbor asked, his voice shaking. "Defenestrate?"

"To throw something out of a window." The young man began emptying this bottle, too, looking for spots he had missed with the previous bottle and, when he couldn't find those, doubling back over already covered areas. "Subsequent. Hypothetical. Immaculate." After this bottle was emptied, he placed it against the side of the pile. He pulled a matchbook from his pocket, and though the neighbor screamed louder than he had remembered doing since he was a child, it was too late, and the young man had set fire to the entire stack.

The neighbor watched, horrified, gasping for breath and inhaling small ashes of burnt paper, floating through the air like snowflakes. His eyes went from focusing on the young man, who stood casually and objectively only a few feet away, to the massive inferno that had just found its feet. Blue sky turned red and black and heat distorted his view of the fire and all that laid beyond it. The flames grew strong enough that he had to take steps back, the roar of the fire cracking and crumbling on this quiet street in this quiet town on this quiet day.

And they just stood there, the neighbor and the young man, watching it all burn away and turn black and charred and curl up into itself. They stayed silent and continued to stare.

Minutes later, the neighbor wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. "Why did you do that?" He saw the young man draw his thumb underneath his own eye, catching a stray tear and flicking it onto the sidewalk.

"Because nothing burns like stories," the young man said, taking a single step back.

something about the Age of Enlightenment.

2011-05-11T22:20:00.001-06:00

I'm drinking iced tea and watching Jeopardy

when Gwen calls.

the guy in glasses and a tweed jacket is

so far ahead that no one's going to catch up.

"I'm fine," she says,

"just tired of boyfriends."

I can hear her smile.

"yeah?"

I mute the TV and put my feet up

on the bed that has been making

such a good ottoman.

"I just wish that things

were different, you know?

that things were always good."

"like how?"

I see the leading player

wager too much.

"Romance is overrated.

I just want companionship and sex and

someone to feel safe with. Why does

everything need a label? Can't we just

all be happy together?"

I wonder where she first heard that

because it doesn't really sound like

something that a girl as pretty as her

would ever be forced to think up herself.

And the man on TV got the question wrong

and he lost most of his money.

"Because that's not how it works," I say.

"I know.

But I hate that how things are

is rarely how I want them to be."

I nod and unmute the TV

just as the other two players reveal

that they got it wrong, too

and bet too much money themselves

so the first guy still won.

"It's the way that things are," I say.

"What is 'unfortunate?'" she says,

the theme song swelling underneath

her voice.

"here comes a regular."

2011-05-08T21:37:00.003-06:00

"You've just got to get out of your shell," Kate would tell her, but Victoria had a hard time trusting her sister. She had always been pretty, she'd always been friendly, and she took to social situations like a duck to water. So it was difficult to take her seriously, but Victoria knew that she wasn't really wrong. Just misinformed.

So Victoria tried. She made extra-long eye contact with strangers across the way. She'd smile at other drivers when she'd pull up to stoplights with her window down. But these were seemingly all for naught. Turned faces would face forward and strangers' heads would pivot at the ocular insistence of a cute girl who didn't feel like she had much to smile about lately.

But it hadn't always been like this.

One night, in a burst of independence that shot her through her shell and landed her on her feet and alone in the middle of a crowded restaurant on a Friday night, she was seated by a hasty hostess.

"Just one?" the hostess had said, looking Victoria up and down for whatever obvious defect she was hoping to find in the pretty girl who had the audacity to come to such a romantic destination with a book and enough self-confidence get her through the doors and on the list.

"Yeah," Victoria said, straightening her back and flexing her toes inside of those nice boots she never wore when she left the house alone. "Just one."

"Okay," the hostess said, arching skeptical eyebrows and grabbing a single menu before guiding her to a small table for two, an island amongst the booths. "Your server will be with you in a second."

"Thanks." She pulled out her own chair and crossed a defined left calf over her right leg, brushing apostate strands of dark brown hair behind nervous ears. She opened the menu and pretended to look it over--she'd been here often enough in the past to know that she wanted the sweet potato cannelloni --and she wondered how her order would affect the way the waitress would judge her.

A pasta dish? She figured that another woman, even a working girl like whomever would bring her the meal that onlookers would think a man should be buying for her, would think of the heavy carbs and judge her for her indulgence. Or maybe she'd respect her for it? Perhaps she'd look on the full plate in front of her and the empty chair looming across the table from her and be in awe of her, supportively envious of this bold woman, this single outlier who braved the outer social world for reasons of her own, who sacrificed her shame at the altar of dignity and made her way into a forum as publicly romantic as this for a fine meal and a grand statement.

Or maybe, as she soon found to be the case, it'd be a man so beautiful he looked as though he had been chiseled from Grecian marble and set to live eternally in the Parthenon. And he lent over her, only an inch or two closer than most other waiters (waitresses?) would've been but noticeably enough for that much more of him to form an over-the-shoulder human tipping point.

"You look like someone who knows what she wants." She leapt at his utterance, wondering where he came from and what that fantastic cloud of smell was, lingering over her shoulder like tear gas. "I know it sounds like a pickup line, but do you come here often?"

Victoria nodded quietly and smiled. "Used to. Sweet potato cannelloni, please."

"Can do. Anything to drink?"

"Water."

"No wine? Not even soda?"

"No thanks."

"Don't feel like living it up?"

"I already am," Victoria said. "Just the water, thanks."

And her meal went well from there. Her server--"Jason," his nametag reported--kept her water glass full and her check punctual, never once making more than the most surface-level "Anything else you need?"s and "How's everything tasting?"s, but that was enough.

So when she signed the check (and left a generous 25%-ish tip), she also scrawled her phone number in the margins, complete with a "-Victoria [smiley face]" to indicate that she left it there for more than just in case there was problem with her debit card. She left before he saw it, but answered a phone call from an unknown number before she fell asleep.

"Is this Victoria?" the voice asked.

"Yes?" she said.

"This is Jason, the guy that served you dinner tonight." She smiled in recognition but said nothing. "Would you like to go get dinner sometime? Preferably somewhere I don't work?"

"I'd love to," she said, banishing the remainder of their conversation into the clouds and ephemera of small talk.

A few days later, when it had been decided, they met for dinner. And he was everything she hoped he would be: charming, handsome, gracious, etc. And so, at the end of the night, when they left the restaurant and he began the pins-and-needles drive to take her home, she put her hand on his arm when they passed the grocery store.

"Do you wanna go get a half gallon of ice cream and watch a movie or something?" She across the console, looking peripherally at a man she barely knew. Someone she had just eaten a meal with, someone she barely knew, someone who could possibly be more.

"Sure," he said, the whites of his teeth gleaming against passing streetlights. He pulled into the parking lot, put his truck in gear, and checked his back packet for a wallet. "What kind do you like?"

She smiled, reported "butter pecan," and waited the four minutes it took him to run inside and acquire one, and then the subsequent eleven minutes (she was watching the clock) it took to get to her house.

"I don't have a couch, only a bed," she said, keys jangling as she unlocked the door to her tiny little place, "so don't get the wrong idea."

"No such thing as wrong ideas," he said, grinning, "but don't worry."

"Good." They walked in and plopped themselves onto her springy twin-sized, making armchairs out of pillows and molehills out of mountains.

At some point during Win a Date With Tad Hamilton, the only movie upon which they could agree, he slid a thick arm behind her warm shoulders, and she tilted a tired head onto his solid collarbone, somehow finding it simultaneously both softer and firmer than she had expected.

After the movie, after one bowl each of some generic brand of butter pecan ice cream, she walked him to the door, they said their goodnights, and he dropped a quick kiss on the tip of her tongue like a stop sign before hesitantly trudging back to his car. He winked as he drove away, weakening her knees and her resolve.

Two days later--precisely when her sister said to--she sent a "Hey, how's it going?" text. No response.

One day later--a day before her sister said to--she sent a "Hope you had a good night!" text. No response.

The next night--two days before her sister said to--she sent a "Do you want to go get sushi this week?" text. No response.

Two hours later--she didn't even bother asking her sister--she sent a "Did I do something wrong?" text. No response.

Several hours into the evening (morning, at this point), she realized that she wasn't going to get a reply, so she submerged her regret in a bowl of butter pecan. Which was, of course, followed by another bowl of butter pecan, and another, until it reached the point where there was only enough ice cream left for two more bowls.

And she saved them. She bought more ice cream, other flavors, other brands, other sizes, so that, when Jason finally got the time to call her back and ask her for a second date, and when he dropped her off from a nice dinner at that Italian place they had talked about mutually liking, she would be able to say, mid-him-walking-her-back-to-her-front-porch, "Hey," laughing, "I still have some of that ice cream left!" and then, when days had become weeks had become months had become years, they could laugh about that butter pecan, the remaining four scoops (two per bowl) a signifier as to their original bond, romance writ large by shared confection and off-brand dairy.

So, for the next few weeks, she didn't eat them, because you never know when that phone's gonna ring.

After two months, Victoria opened up the carton to find freezer-burnt whole milk and chunks of frost themselves the size of spoonfuls. She threw away the carton and immediately replaced it with the one she had bought only an hour before.

That second carton only lasted the week. Victoria loved her butter pecan.

dress for the job you want.

2011-05-04T22:45:00.005-06:00

i had an idea for a story.

it's about a boy and a girl

(big surprise there)

and its plot hinges on two bottles:

one is $5 hair dye that begins to fade within the month

the other is a hundred dollar bottle of fifteen-year-old Irish whiskey.

i don't want to spoil the ending

but it involves a new haircut

a stolen journal page

and a strange reunion some months later.

but on nights like tonight

i wish that i didn't have stories.

that all of that was done.

because

again

i took my guitar

and beat myself dazed and senseless

coughed blood when i got home

and turned out all of the lights.

i never know when you're going to show up

but i should know how to predict it by now:

all i need to do to summon you

is forget that you're there.

and then:

poof.

there

inexplicably

you are.

my prayer for the week:

2011-05-01T00:38:00.003-06:00

Lord:

in the face of what I've seen,

and in spite of what has come of it all,

no matter how gray the sky or crowded the clouds,

between the drops of May rain that come like hail,

don't ever let me become cynical

or allow me to find anything less than beauty

in every step I take

and every beam of sunshine

penetrating part and parcel those same coming clouds.

help me to find warmth in ice

and breezes in fog,

clarity in conscience

and the divine in the decent.

help me find kindness in conspiracy

and purity in pain.

let these fires burn me down

and let them boil away the surplus

until I can stand as I may,

until I can repay my part

to those who have provided the advance.

amen.

(ps a new Jayhawks album would be nice, if You've got the time.)

i think i forgot the melody.

2011-04-30T02:00:00.004-06:00

when we climbed up to that stage

the songs went forth like battle cries

and in every single tapped foot and synced lips

i saw you.

these happy songs about reunions

patient portrayals of roundabout reconnection

they cover so many wounds with sincere smiles

and i love playing.

i do.

maybe more than anything else.

but

i swear to god

sometimes it feels like i'm just picking at scabs

and hoping that you'll smell the blood.

welcome, [untitled].

2011-04-26T15:49:00.002-06:00

Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury Box:

We all know why we're here today.

The young woman on the left, not even 12 hours old, has been accused of being the most adorable thing in the whole damn world.

"Guilty as charged," she cries.

The evidence on the left clearly indicates the truth of this accusation.

I hereby sentence you to HOLY CRAP SHE'S GORGEOUS comments for the rest of your life.

Dismissed.

hairy.

2011-04-25T22:30:00.005-06:00

when Ruby came, i shaved my face

because i wanted her to see someone else

who'd always be there.

and i think that was fine and all

but i'm not gonna do that tonight.

i haven't shaved (or even trimmed)

for closing in on two months, and my

beard is getting ferocious. and i want

you to be able to see that, regardless

of anything else, good things come to

those who wait. and some people may

think that growing a beard is a passive

thing. that it just sort of "happens" like

a wound hardening to a scab and then

flaking off like snakeskin. but i submit

that those people--those people--have

never grown a beard, and, accordingly,

have nothing to say on the matter. so

ignore them. they'll never know what

it takes. and that's okay: perhaps they

are just as scared of growing as i am

of meeting you. because i'm absolutely

terrified about the world you're being

brought into. there's a lot of bad stuff

here, and sometimes it feels like things

are getting worse before they get bet-

ter, and there doesn't seem to be much

that any of us can do about it. but then

i think of how much brighter it'll all be

now that you're on your way. and i

already feel better, you know? tomorrow

morning, i'll be able to finally shake that

red little hand, the result of nine months

of growing that your mom would surely

say was an active thing, not a passive

thing. within two months of Ruby being

born, she ripped a chunk of beard and

skin out of my face and made me bleed

and she clutched the tuft of chin hair

like it was a little league trophy, and it

hurt like absolute hell. but it was worth

it. and you'll be worth it. and Ruby may

have gotten to see me babyfaced, and

CHiP saw me in a shirt and tie, but you:

you'll get to see me how i think i really am.

i'll see you in the morning.

drive safe.

i already know which zeppelin songs you'll hear first

and your stack of spider-man comics is totally huge.

whoa, baby.

2011-04-22T15:58:00.004-06:00

i get a new niece on tuesday.

her name is (probably) going to be Harriet Sue

and she'll have igloo cheeks and wrist rings.

i look back to the last time i got a new little person

and how good of timing she had

so i wonder if things are going to stay this way.

and i'm not sure how many of you can know what it's like

to hold something that's just getting started

rocking it to its first living sleep

and letting it cry neophyte tears on faded tattoos

lord knows i didn't know until i saw this

and everything changed.

so i look forward to tuesday's revolution

and a new pair of eyes that'll stare up

bundled in blankets and bursting with blue

and i'll fight like hell to protect you.

but don't worry about that right now.

just go back to sleep.

i'll sing you rolling stones songs

until your eyelids drop like cartoon anvils.

welcome home.

we're gonna have a great time.

black eyes and end times.

2011-04-20T00:01:00.002-06:00

Alan had gotten the black eye after he'd mouthed off, half-drunk, to some townie about his choice of beverage.

"Bud Light," he muttered under his breath, just before raising it with a "really original, there, guy."

"What was that?" the man said.

"Is your hearing as bad as your taste?" Alan said, flexing and unflexing his hand into a fist under the bar.

"What's your problem?" the man said, not even standing up from his barstool.

"You and everyone like you," he said, "you get accepted into some out-of-the-way rural school so that they could meet their Asshole quota and so you come here and make the rest of us who built this place on our backs serve you burgers and pour your beer."

So the man knocked Alan out, leaving a swelling ocular cavity and a gin-bitter headache. He went to the health clinic to make sure he didn't have a concussion.

"What'd you do?" the nurse said, staring at his eye without making actual contact, dabbing a cold compress around the dark edges.

"Said something stupid."

"You wouldn't be the first," she said. Alan peered down to see her white nametag, "Betty," slightly crooked against her green scrubs. "But you're fine. I don't think much is damaged but your pride and some blood vessels."

"Can I buy you a beer and talk to you for five minutes?" he said.

She smiled and handed him an ice pack. "No, but my shift is over in about half an hour and I'm meeting some friends for a drink at The Corral, and you could come and try to pick me up there instead of at my place of work."

"Think you guys could go somewhere else?" he asked, scratching behind his ear. "I'm not allowed back there for a week."

"We already made plans. But if you wait outside while we're in there, maybe I'll let you walk me home."

"Deal."

So he went and waited, keeping a close, bruised eye on his watch. An hour and a half from his clinic visit, she left, waving goodbye to the small cluster of women that each climbed into their own cars to go back to their full beds and fireplaces.

"You waited," Betty said.

"I said I would."

"Yeah, well, you probably didn't say that you'd get a black eye this morning, and you went ahead and did that."

"What's wrong with being proactive?" he asked. She laughed and they started walking.

Betty was staying the night at a motel only eight blocks away while her house was being fumigated, but in the twenty minutes or so that it took to take the scenic route there, they managed to talk about everything that mattered:

how Alan grew up wanting to be a concert pianist

how Betty got a full-ride journalism scholarship but chose nursing instead

how Alan's dad was an actor who drank too much

how Betty has two dogs, both named "George," but they don't seem to get confused with each other

how Alan has been six credits from a Bachelors degree for about nine years but is too afraid of failure to go back

how Betty just got accepted into a Masters of Biology program out of state and can't decide

how Alan dreams, every night, that he can fly

how Betty has a tattoo of a cross on her right shoulder so she never forgets her faith

and how Alan would really like to kiss her goodnight

and how Betty smiles and looks at her shoes when she's shy

and how Alan moves in slowly like a watch's minute hand

and how Betty can't stop herself from laughing whenever she's really happy

and how Alan's black eye throws off his depth perception

and how Betty can't stifle the inferno of chuckles that Alan's miss ignite

and how Alan gets it right the second time

and how Betty can stop laughing on a dime.

She'd written her number on a drink receipt, and Alan was careful not to smudge it. His brother had told him to call her that next day—"Do you wait three days to send a thank-you card? Sack up and call her."—so he spent every hour until 8:03 PM to give it a try, but got a wrong number.

"No, this is the number she wrote down," Alan protested to the voice on the other end.

"Well, I'm sorry, still the wrong number."

"But this is what she wrote down," he repeated.

"Sorry. Wrong number. Good luck." Click.

"But this," Alan said to the phone, "this is what she wrote down."

He went back to the motel, but housekeeping was already cleaning her room when he got to it. The front desk clerk wouldn't give him the name of the guest—"I could get fired, and unless you have ten bucks an hour for 39 hours a week, you don't have a better offer"—so he went back to the clinic.

"Sorry," the receptionist said, "you can't see a nurse unless you need medical assistance. Do you need medical assistance?"

"No," Alan said, "I just need to see Betty. She gave me her number last night."

"So why don't you call it?"

"She gave me the wrong number."

"Maybe there's a lesson there."

"Come on, can you just pass on a message?"

"You can come back if you have an issue that requires medical assistance."

Alan stormed out and walked straight back into the bar, but was stopped two steps in.

"I told you not to come back for a few days," the bouncer said. "Until you clear your head."

"Fine," Alan said. "I guess I'll see you back at your mom's house."

"Dude," the bouncer said, "that's the weakest thing I've ever heard."

"That's not what your mom said last night."

"Yeah, that's probably second place. Go home, Alan. Sleep off this angry and come back in a few days and I'll buy your first beer upon your return."

"Whatever."

Alan started walking away before turning back and screaming "AGGIES FOOTBALL SUCKS" before stepping out of the bouncer's jurisdiction.

"You idiot," the bouncer said. "Good luck. I'm staying in here." He held the door open for the five or six drunks that followed Alan outside.

Twenty minutes later, Alan showed up at the clinic again, a second, larger black eye adorning his face like a ring of Saturn. But his depth perception was restored, at least.

"I want to see Betty," he said.

"She's not in, and I can't give you her schedule," the receptionist said. "But someone can see you in about twenty minutes."

"Don't worry about it," Alan said, hunching his shoulders and dragging his feet across the linoleum, out the door, and all the way home.

He checked back every few days, then every few months, and finally just semi-annually, talking back to the steel workers and the bricklayers and the second-string football players and the adjunct faculty members and anyone else he could get a rise out of to the extent that they'd resort to physical violence to put him in his literal and metaphorical place but whenever he went back to the clinic, he'd get checked by the nice old lady or the sweaty Italian guy or the brand-new fresh-faced just-outta-college newbie or the belligerent mother of nine or the recently-divorced former-star athlete.

And no matter how many black eyes he got, he never saw Betty again. He really hoped she was getting that Masters degree.

She wasn't a very good nurse.

pack your bags.

2011-04-15T15:10:00.005-06:00

i made a brief inventory on a yellow legal pad

and it's titled:

THE PEOPLE WHO UNDERSTAND

and it's not as long as i'd like it to be.

which is okay, i guess,

because it's hard to expect someone to understand

if you're not willing to explain it.

but

this list:

these are people who know

and who always seem to have known

instead of instincts

they have glands that let them predict the future

with frightening degrees of accuracy.

and as i looked over this list

this roll call of connective tissue that reads me like a poem

those who can see stanzas in statements and pentameter in protests

i realized something:

very few of them still live here.

most have moved away.

east coast, primarily,

or spain.

this

for obvious reasons

was troubling,

until i let it stew for a while

and then it made a certain degree of sense

because most people here that get it

get it well enough to know

that they're not gonna find it here.

come see me tomorrow.

2011-04-10T23:40:00.003-06:00

i'm reading on Tuesday night.

i wrote a story about a girl

(she doesn't have a name)

but parts of you are in her.

parts of all of you, actually.

but

in any case.

y'all should come.

it's at UVU campus at 6 PM on Tuesday, May 12th in rooms 206a-b.

maybe you should come

and we can go get frozen yogurt after.

okay, i'm still sick

so i'm gonna go watch Bob's Burgers

and fall asleep on my uncomfortable bed.

thank you.

for everything.

tattooed, vol. 2

2011-04-09T22:39:00.007-06:00

here's vol. 1

below the line: vol. 2

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

meet Parker.

ignore the sheen of the layers of aquafor i applied earlier

glance around the blue hue of the overhead light

and go about your work.

because he's not going anywhere.

and if you've read anything about him

you know that he doesn't stop.

ever.

we'll see you around.

turn out the lights.

2011-04-09T02:02:00.004-06:00

my favorite new show ended last Wednesday

and i watched a good man fight his battles

throwing right crosses at his demons and left hooks at his past

in one way or another, he came out ahead.

there's something about these shows

the man with the hat who got out of town

and found himself drawn back

to somewhere he didn't belong

(except that he did)

and he's not a good man

but he does what's right

regardless.

right now i'm watching the men with cuts

they're fighting for their children and their wives

and they're not good men

they don't do what's right

but

somehow

they make me want to.

i think Corey summed it up best:

"sons is badass

and justified is hardcore

but lights out?

well

lights out is inspiring."

i haven't been inspired for some time.

everything in my brain is betrayals and bad luck

unholy alliances and library smiles

people

as they often do

pretending to be something they're not.

tonight i was getting dessert

and i was so angry and i don't know why

i think i just want something to care about

but my shows are all over.

there once was a show

about two bad men who wanted to be good

so they made themselves change

they pushed square pegs into round holes

and let themselves out of their cages

so they could bring the bad down with them

but of course

nobody watched it

and now it's gone.

so now i have to wonder:

what happened to them?

did they make it to mexico?

or were they caught at the border

and thrown back into cages?

and i wonder about you like that, too

whether or not you've made it out of your cage

(and

perhaps more importantly

if you belong inside

or out)

but luckily

that's not my decision.

it's above my pay grade

and i have enough to worry about.

but i'm wondering

what stories i can lock myself into now

and sometimes

when it's late at night

and the winter revisits april and throws cold through my open window

and a song comes on shuffle and i can hear you singing along

and i know beyond any doubt that i'm on your mind

i ignore it all

and i go to sleep

and dream of a world

where the ugly shows lose

and they don't make it past pilots

but the good ones?

they keep getting renewed

and the seasons change with the seasons.

because everybody loves a winner.

and darlin',

have i got a winner for you.

you've got to stay positive.

2011-04-03T16:41:00.011-06:00

Victoria was so tired of quiet nights. What started as nice, quiet evenings with a glass of wine and Philip Larkin on the front porch ended up being a prison sentence. She couldn't even create a premise under which to leave the house tonight. Go stump for a cup of overpriced coffee? She had a brand new bag and a new bean grinder. Wander through the labyrinthine shelves of the used bookstore down the street? Her to-read pile was tenfold the height of her have-read pile, so that ratio was embarrassing enough. Head to some purposefully trashy dive bar and "people watch" when she's really just trying to get someone, anyone, to look at her with eyes that say "Yes, Victoria, you seem like someone with interesting thoughts and a warm soul and, although I don't know you, I would love to buy you a gin and tonic and talk to you for five minutes to confirm my recently formed hypothesis about your innate goodness and decency"?

Okay, that last one didn't sound quite as bad when her sister Kate called up and phrased it like this: "Wanna go to a bar with me and some work friends?"

"Not really," Victoria said. "Is it that bar that you guys always go to? The skeeviest guys hang out there and I'm not in the mood to be ogled tonight."

"Don't worry," Kate said, "I got this really old ring from the store on consignment. I'll bring it and you can wear it on your ring finger and people will leave you alone."

"Or extra-creepy guys will figure I'm trolling for something on the side."

"Just come out with me and wear the ring and we can make fun of anyone gross enough to not know better than to try and get between sisters on Girl's Night."

So Victoria put on those jeans and that shirt and those boots and slipped herself into that jacket and made her way down the street to Puzzles or Bubbles or whatever the hell this bar was called.

She thought she'd be getting there early enough to scope out the least-active area of the place and sequester herself in a Naugahyde corner booth fortress, impervious to the prying eyes of the prowling men and scowling women. But the 9 PM call-time that Kate had presented (and that Victoria hoped to subvert by showing up at 8 PM) was apparently an overestimation, and the half-concealed booth that was to be a temporary sanctuary was already occupied by Kate.

While Victoria had grown up to become pretty, Kate always had been. She was one of the beautiful ducklings that made the teenage, pre-swan Victoria into the Awkward Younger Sister that every pretty girl seemed to have. Kate was born a beautiful baby, grew into a beautiful child, became a beautiful teenager, and remained a beautiful adult. And growing up under those standards, the levels of Gorgeousness that Kate had embodied effortlessly, repressed by their obviousness, had always made Victoria feel like a biological, aesthetic disappointment, an evolutionary letdown in the cherubic face of an older sister who never had to try.

So now, all these years later, when there wasn't Victoria and Her Prettier Older Sister, that they were both just The Pretty Girls in the Corner Booth, Victoria felt flattered, not suppressed, by Kate's campfire eyes and summer hello.

"You're here early," Victoria said.

"So are you," Kate said. "I figured you'd show up early, so I adjusted the time accordingly. And I even got you a club soda and lime." She reached into her blouse's breast pocket and pulled out a small, ornate ring whose diamond caught even the dim light of the bar's overheads and pushed it back out as a supernova. "It's so shiny that no one will be able to ignore it."

"Thank you," she said, sliding her legs into the booth and her finger into the ring. "It's a little garish, don't you think?"

"Yeah, but that's a good thing for your purposes. Easier to spot."

"Okay."

"So," Kate said, "how are you?"

"Good."

"That's good." Kate sipped from her own glass, and Victoria tried to count the drops of condensation on its outside. "How's the job hunt?"

"Meh," Victoria said, "it's going. Slowly but steadily."

"That's what wins races." Kate smiled. "I could probably get you a job at the antique store. Jan is about to quit–don't mention it when she gets here, though–and so there'd be at least a few shifts a week. Help keep you afloat."

"Thanks, but if I take part-time work, I don't get unemployment anymore. It'd probably be a net loss. And I wouldn't have as much time to sit around and not do anything." Victoria raised her glass to her lips and her tongue snatched a piece of ice from it, batting it back and forth between her teeth like a pendulum.

"Well," Kate said, "if you want, it's an open invitation."

"I'll keep it in mind. Thank you."

"We got this huge shipment in the other day. Some old guy who had this massive record collection had a heart attack when he went sky-diving or something and we got the whole thing. You should come check it out." Kate paused. "Uh oh."

"What?"

Kate slightly raised a deep red fingernail over Victoria's shoulder and affixed her eyes to the table. "There's some guy coming over to hit on us. Five seconds to impact." She breathed out deeply. "Brace yourself."

Victoria whipped her head around to see a tall, clean-shaven man in a gray sweater approaching their table. They made brief eye contact before she did her best to look nonchalant. She could tell she was failing even as he continued the final few paces to the booth.

"Excuse me," he said, "can one of you do me a favor?"

Kate chuckled dismissively, raising a skeptical eyebrow to her younger sister. "Oh?"

"See that tall guy over there? Standing in the corner?" the man said, throwing a slight nod of his head to the opposite corner of the bar.

"What about him?" Kate said, her abrasiveness making Victoria uncomfortable and unable to lift her gaze from the table.

"That's my friend. His name is Brandon and today's his birthday and–"

"And," Kate interrupted, "what, you want to get one of our phone numbers for him? You want to give him the gift of a one-night-stand?"

"Actually," the man said, shifting his focus from Kate to Victoria, "I was hoping that one of you would slap me."

"What?" Victoria said, surprised at how loud her first words in the conversation came out.

"See, it's his birthday, and he's just turned 21, but his girlfriend is a few months younger than him and couldn't come–it is a bar, after all–so he's kind of bummed, and I think he'd get a real kick out of thinking that I'm hitting on some beautiful girl, only to get slapped in the face."

Kate looked to her sister. "Can't say I'd blame him. You want this one?"

Victoria's tongue, cold from the ice, stumbled over the handful of words she'd managed to summon. "I don't know. I'd feel bad. And I'd start laughing."

"Oh, come on," the man said, holding out a hand to her. "I'm Patrick, by the way. And you should shake my hand, so it looks like I'm making actual progress with you."

Victoria shook it and it was so warm that she worried she'd burst into flame. "I don't want to hurt you." She noticed Kate smiling in the corner of her eye, but didn't grant her the attention of a full-blown look.

"Don't worry," Patrick said, "I'm tough. And if you do it right, it should hurt me. But come on, it's a birthday gift. Help me do this for a good guy whose night should be a lot better than it is right now." He smiled and Victoria found herself doing so, too. "Count of three?" he asked.

"Okay."

"One." Victoria stretched out her fingers and let her eyes open just a little bit wider.

"Two." She flexed her hand and wondered where they might go on their first date after such a funny first-meeting story.

"Three." She let loose the dogs of hell and sent an open palm flying across his cheek.

But while the ring Kate had lent her had been light enough that Victoria had already forgot she was wearing it, the jagged stone fixed in it was sharp enough to leave a small trail of perforated cheek in its wake. Victoria's jaw dropped and heart sunk as she saw the trickles of blood gather along the line before gravity took over and they turned to drips.

"Oh no," Victoria said, "are you okay?"

"Yeah," Patrick said, wincing through clenched teeth, "I'm fine. Napkin, please?" Kate, aghast, grabbed hers and handed it to him. "Thanks." He closed his eyes and, even above the ambient din of bar noise, Victoria could hear this teeth grinding together.

"I'm so, so sorry," she said, pointing to the ring, "I'm not used to wearing this. It's not even mine." She took it off and hurriedly handed it to Kate, who slipped it back into her pocket.

"It's fine. Guess I should've looked for a ring first, anyway," Patrick said. "Thanks for trying." He stepped quickly back to his friends in the corner.

"Hey," Kate said to her horrified sister, "don't worry about it. You didn't mean to do anything, he asked for it, and he'll be fine."

"I'm gonna go," Victoria said, lifting her legs out of the booth and rising to locked knees. "I'm sorry. Tell Jan I said hi. Tell everyone I said hi."

"Oh, come on. You don't need to leave." But Victoria could barely hear her sister's words and instead noticed only the pointing fingers and derisive chortling of alpha males on the other side of the bar.

"Have a good night," Victoria said, near-sprinting to the door, her sister's protests slowly transforming from comforting declarations to nothing more than a distance-muffled piece of the crowd noise the closer she got to the exit.

Finally getting to the front door, she saw Patrick and his friends about ten feet away. "Happy birthday," she said. "I'm so sorry." She walked out before any of them could respond.

She drove home a steady fifteen MPH above the speed limit and threw herself into pajamas the second she arrived. She tried to go right to sleep, but an arrhythmically flickering streetlight shone through the slats of her bedroom's window blinds, rapping her closed eyelids back open whenever she was close to falling away. The frustrated tears that began to well in her eyes left two hot streaks, but they quickly turned chilly as they trickled down the sides of her face.

His hand had been so warm and soft and these sheets were so cold and stiff.

boys and girls in america.

2011-03-31T20:37:00.005-06:00

Victoria had grown up to be pretty in a way that she didn't know how to deal with. She had been an adorable infant who grew into a cute child who stumbled into a clumsy adolescence and had awoken one day, now 23 years old, a beautiful girl. Her skin had cleared from an unpatterned moon landing to a vaguely topsoiled farm to a still lake. Her hair, once ravaged to straw-like consistency after a few months of half-hearted anorexia, had become thick enough to braid into rope. She'd noticed her body pulling in at certain places and pushing out at others, like her mass was being reallocated from Overweight Girl into Full-Figured Woman, and she was grateful for it.

However, to her chagrin, the half-societal, half-physical adaptations Victoria found herself receiving did not come with an instruction manual. When her hips had expanded to their post-teenage shape, they threw off her balance. She had to relearn how to walk in heels, like a stroke victim, and had to get rid of most of the ill-fitting, formless clothes she had concealed herself with since she was old enough to learn that she wanted to be concealed.

She did keep the corduroy jacket, though. She had always felt fashion was something out of her reach, but even her broken aesthetic clock was right twice a day, and big, military-inspired jackets that fit like an oversized pillowcase were "in." So on one particularly lonely night of self-imposed exile, she slipped her arms through the worn fabric and made her way to Target to buy a new bulletin board for the pictures of her nieces and nephews. The old one was getting full, and she didn't "need" one, but hey, she had made more expensive excuses.

On the rare occasion that her unintentional, reflexive permascowl (Victoria wasn't an angry person, her mouth just turned that way when she wasn't making the effort otherwise) didn't send the boys a-runnin', she'd not know how to respond to out-of-the-blue greetings from strangers. But somehow, the guy with the wire-rimmed glasses and the armful of 3x5 cards disarmed her with a hurried "Do you know where the Sharpies are?"

Victoria looked around to ensure that he was addressing her. "I don't work here," she said.

He looked her up and down far too quickly to have objectified her. "Oh," he said, "but you're wearing a red shirt. Under that awesome jacket."

"Lots of people wear red shirts. Doesn't mean I work at Target." She retroactively winced at the defensiveness of her response.

"I have a red shirt," he said, the film of worry sliding down his irises and a small green glint emerged. "I got it here, actually."

"You bought a red shirt at Target? That's a little on the nose," she said. She forced her jangling nerves into a smile-shaped mold and a small grin stretched itself out over her lips.

The man laughed and dropped five or six of his, at Victoria's estimation, thirty packages of index cards. "Crap," he said, "I knew I should've gotten a basket."

"Why are you buying so many of those?"

"I have to make flash cards," he said. "I have to take a big Spanish test next week and I'm sorry, this is a quick change of subject, but what's your name?"

The gears of her brain ceased and she realized that she was in a position to make up an incredibly convoluted backstory. She'd always read about actors who had tiny little parts in huge movies and would construct elaborate histories for their barely-sketched characters, giving them dead relationships and emotional scars that'd help them understand the motivation of the person they'd been chosen to portray.

Time froze, and, to her own surprise, Victoria came up with three alternative personal histories in the space of one second apiece:

ALTERNATIVE PERSONAL HISTORY #1:

My name is Paige. I came here to get away from my ex-husband–we've been divorced for three years now–and my four-year-old daughter and I live downtown. I tend bar at night and am taking some college courses during the day to get my Associates degree. I'm good with numbers and I think I want to be an accountant."

ALTERNATIVE PERSONAL HISTORY #2:

I'm Stephanie. I grew up in this town and my parents opened a small hardware store on the corner of Main Street, and every year, the big chains try to buy us out and get us to leave, but my parents are as stubborn as a good doorstop and they'll get buried with the deed to that place in their caskets. I'm allergic to gluten and I cant think of a life I'd like to live outside of this town. It's my home, it's always been my home, and it'll always be my home."

ALTERNATIVE PERSONAL HISTORY #3:

"My folks named me Olivia, but everyone calls me Olive. I'm in town for my best friend's wedding, which was yesterday. I'm leaving in the morning to drive back to my life and job and my own fiance on the other side of the country, but I think we should spend the night together and make love until the rising sun hurtles me back into my return home because I'm so terrified that returning back to what I've built will jail me into a narrative I don't want my life to transform into and I'd never forgive myself if I didn't say so."

WHAT VICTORIA ACTUALLY SAID TO THE GUY AT TARGET

"I'm Victoria," she said, "but I have to go."

"What?" he said, dropping even more of the 3x5s on the ground, the rose red in his cheeks evacuating, leaving behind snow white. But she had already started walking away, more quickly than she felt she could safely do. But she just had to get home.

"I'm sorry," she said, pivoting back on one foot to see him, but never stopping her hasty retreat. "It was nice to meet you."

Victoria didn't bother driving home. She figured she could use the air, so she ignored the twitching in her right foot and the sleepy pins and needles in her left and walked the mile-and-a-half home, taking her corduroy jacket off halfway through her return and tying it around her waist, where its arms flopped like stray tentacles looking for something to grab onto.

Her real name wasn't even Victoria. It was Vicki, but she had added the extra syllables because she thought it sounded more like a well-bred socialite who knew how to charm a stranger into asking her to dinner than it sounded like a sad girl who got so nervous at the idea of speaking with someone that she literally ran into the night to escape.

She got home, brushed her teeth, changed into a dingy pair of sweat pants, and opened her window in order to the rain that had just started pitter pattering like faraway footsteps. The raindrops underlined the Aretha Franklin CD she had decided to fall asleep to, and she clutched one of her extra pillows and squeezed so tightly she thought she'd split it in half.

When she woke up, the open window had let in the rain, and a small puddle had gathered on the windowsill. Victoria saw the broadest outlines of her reflection in it just as she wiped it up with a dirty t-shirt she planned to wash later that day.

But she turned off her alarm clock, returned to a fitful sleep, and half-heartedly dreamt of what she'd look like in ten years.

Because you never know what'll change and you never know what'll stay the same.

celery and reduced-fat peanut butter.

2011-03-31T00:34:00.003-06:00

Victoria never treated herself to anything. Food-wise, especially. Years of societal conditioning and issues of Cosmo in the grocery store checkout stands made her self-conscious of even the small container of frozen yogurt she had tossed in her basket as a reward for having been so very, very diligent. And after reading the headline of that month's cover article--how to please your man, do things to your man that would make him never leave you, convince him you're the type of woman that's worth opening doors for, etc.--she removed the eight ounce plastic container of White Chocolate Raspberry and tried to hide it between the boxes of candy bars and sugarfree gum hovering above the item belt. But then she realized that it would probably melt to an irreparable degree within about five minutes, so she slid it into the half-open door of the Coca-Cola cooler, hoping that it'd at least delay the inevitable long enough for an inventory-minded stock clerk to take it back to its home.

She felt so--examined, watching the checkout girl, who couldn't have been more than three years younger than her, run the half-gallon of skim milk, bag of celery, jar of reduced fat peanut butter, two-stick pack of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, and a packet of facial cleansing wipes over the scanner and toss them far too carelessly into a single plastic bag at the end of the aisle, looking up at her between items, all skeptical eyes and open-mouthed gum chewing. This wasn't food that Victoria wanted, but she had her goals, and she'd be damned if she couldn't just exercise some willpower to get there, and she didn't have to justify herself to this girl or anyone else.

After paying in cash and receiving a small handful of change, Victoria marveled at how neatly all of the items fit into the single bag, when they had looked so disparate and unconnected in her basket as she took them down from shelves like leaves from a tree. Maybe they teach that during training, Victoria thought. Maybe they show you how to put everything together. She walked all the way to the end of the massive parking lot; her mom had recommended she try and get exercise wherever she could, and an extra quarter mile walk was at least ten calories gone from her thighs. That adds up, she reminded herself.

The refrigerator was customarily near-empty, and Victoria's few purchases did little to populate it. It looked like one of those refrigerators in a movie about a poor person, the ones where the character opens it up and you immediately pity them because of how little food there is, how the three-quarters-empty jar of mayonnaise is beginning to turn yellow under a flickering florescent bulb casting judgment below. But she unpacked her purchase, folded the plastic bag for future use, and went to bed.

It took her a while to get there, the rumbles of her stomach always off-rhythm to the whirring of the central air leaking from hiding vents and waking her back up. But she started imagining each patterned air conditioner hum cycle as a footstep toward the two miles she'd be running in the morning. She double-checked her alarm clock, verified the accuracy of its setting, and wondered how many other people would be up that early.

Victoria slept fitfully. In the morning, when the sun finally came through the slits in her window shades, she wondered why it didn't feel any warmer when it was actually up. After putting on her tank top, running shorts, and shoes--the ones she only wore running--she began her jog, able to push herself only by pretending that she had somewhere to go.

The morning dew on the green grass made front yards look like a graveyard of broken mirrors and disco balls, catching the light and putting it straight into her retinas.

She wished she had worn her sunglasses. She hated leaving her eyes uncovered.

Instinct, aggression, and the dharma of Murphy.

2011-03-29T18:42:00.009-06:00

This picture is Murphy (left) as a pup. He’s shown sitting next to the late Max (right), a Yorkie terrier who was hit by a swerving car not a year ago.

He now weighs near or around 180 lbs. If he were a boxer, he would be placed squarely (or roundly, if you want to make a fat joke about it) in the light heavyweight category. And that sounds about right, if he’s being measured as a person. But Murphy, bless his big, coagulated heart, is now a five-year-old English Mastiff, and by the time you read this, he will probably be dead.

Murphy became a Sherwin after my folks moved into their house on the hill. It’s about as rural as suburbs get; the nearest house is probably 500 feet away, and while that’s not a huge differential, and although the most crime Alpine sees is people parking on the street during city government-forbidden winter months, my dad travels a lot, and he and my mom thought that a big dog would be a good supplement to a top-notch security system.

Like most dogs, Murphy is almost completely oblivious as to his size. While the aforementioned, aforepictured, full-grown Max was evenly physically matched with Murphy for only about three months, Max maintained his position as (groan) top dog, with Murphy unable or unwilling to acknowledge his own hulking mass in the face of Max’s yippee snips and pointy little teeth.

But it didn’t take long for problems to start. Even at the breeder where they picked him out, Baby Murphy chased after and nipped the heels of my then-six-year-old niece. My folks laughed, telling her that the three-week-old pup had “picked” her. But the foreboding frame of Murphy’s father, treading the edges of the corral that he alone inhabited, growling at any approaching anything, was a sign of things to come, and it wasn’t long before my dog’s paternally inherited instincts began to get the better of his warmth.

What it comes down to is that he’s too aggressive. We’ve attempted professional training more than once, but the big puppy eyes and the slobbery affection he bestows upon me and the others in his favor is doled out selectively and rarely. He growls at men, women, children, deer, snowflakes, Republicans, modern art, any mention of Rebecca Black, and episodes of Outsourced (he’s more a Community guy).

But it’s gotten to be too much. A few months back, a visiting friend opened the door into the garage, unaware of Murphy’s presence within, and Murphy leapt to his feet and, if not for the swift reaction time and door-slamming ability of the friend…well, I don’t want to think about that.

That’s my problem. I can’t even begin to imagine that he’d be capable of hurting someone like that. I think of Murphy and echoes of his trademark noise (“Hrrrrmph.”) are what I hear. He eats marshmallows and can only run for about five minutes before collapsing in exhaustion. He takes up half of the bed and spoons better than just about any girlfriend I’ve ever had (I hate admitting that). He buries his head between my legs as a greeting and his favorite toy is a stuffed rabbit that he adores like a child.

But the garaged lunging was too much. It wasn’t the first time, either. My parents took him to a specialist vet who said that he was very, very dangerous, and suggested euthanasia as a preventative measure. As much as I love my Murphy, him being a risk to children, especially CHiP, Boobie, and their soon-to-arrive younger sister, draws a line in the sand. Adding that to the professional opinion of a man trained to know these animals like they were people makes it more certain than I wish it could be. And Murphy will soon, in what I believe to perhaps be the ultimate act of mercy, be finishing that race well run.

But isn’t he just following his instincts? Isn’t this how centuries of biology and microevolution have trained him to be? Why, then, could we punish him for succumbing to those primal urges that’re so deeply entrenched in his tiny little brain and his gigantic heart?

It’s like that old Hindu story, I think from the Bhagavad Gita, which I’ll paraphrase:

A wise man walks along the same path every morning. Along his way, he sees a scorpion turned on its back in a river, drowning, struggling to get upright. The scorpion notices the wise man.

“Help me,” the scorpion says, “for I will drown if you do not."

“I will,” the wise man says, reaching out his hand to overturn the scorpion. After setting him on his legs, the scorpion’s tail flings at the wise man’s wrist, stinging him. The wise man recoils, sighs, and continues his walk. Another man walking down the path stops the wise man.

“Why did you help the scorpion?” the man asks. “You knew that he would sting you.”

“Yes,” the wise man says, “it is in the scorpion’s nature to sting.”

“Then, knowing that, why did you reach out your hand?”

“The scorpion’s nature is to sting.” The wise man dabs his wound against his robe, leaving a small red blood spot bright against the white cloth. “It is in my nature to help.”

After the worst night of my life, I packed a bag and went home for a few days to regroup and reconvene. I was greeted by a pleasantly surprised Murphy, who gratefully licked tear-stained eyes and a runny nose, put his paw on my knee in solidarity, and eventually rested his gigantic head upon my weary shoulder. I fell asleep on the floor in front of the living room fireplace, and Murphy draped his foreleg over me as I broke down to an old episode of Cheers.

So that’s how I’ll always remember him:

cuddling his sobbing mass of an owner during as dark a night as he’d ever seen, ignoring the laugh track to a two-decades-old sitcom.

And that’s how I’ll always remember you:

hearing your stuffed nose struggle to pass air against the nape of my neck, squeezing tight when I’d shake at every holiday firework going off outside.

I just wish the two of you had better instincts.

We could’ve all been so happy together.