You don’t realize when your neighbors are gone. Not in a city like this. You’ve never met them, but one day their car is not parallel parked across the street and you missed the end of the month move-out. Were they really there for a year or had they made different arrangements with the landlord? We all pray to a landlord here. The tall girl I took for an actress because she lived next door to the playwright is gone now. I don’t really know how gone she is, or where. I never knew her. I know I saw her sitting out on the patio one night with said playwright until they went in and for once she did not shut the blinds and I saw them in an awkward one night embrace. He has to be her senior by 10 years I would say. She always was up and out before me, leaving for work in her pickup truck and a semi-pants-suit, which belied my illusion of her being an actress, and an actress only. I have been here for over 3 years now. Longer than I have lived anywhere other than my parents house. I don’t want to leave, but what I fear more is that if I do, the neighborhood will not miss...
I think I will marry a teacher.
There’s evil little spiders about tonight and the girl want the other boy, the movie star, to come and kiss and play games and then move on. We are trying to save our friends from destruction of themselves, and possibly others. Don’t play Jesus, you will surely be disappointed with the results. On the outskirts of town the Marxist are meeting and the thought of the meeting makes me feel a bit out of sorts. What secret upheavals are being planned. They don’t show this part in the movie. They also don’t show the part where the brother of the protagonist makes a face, says something funny, asks where that one went, and why it didn’t all work out in the end, and the protagonist says, “It got too hot, the summer, it was too hot, our brains started to boil in our head, we ate chemicals and didn’t know it, there’s nothing really to explain it all, we don’t live in this different time and space and place, we don’t live her on this farm, and this family. We live in the city and things are difficult.” And the brother says, “Oh, now I see. I didn’t...
Working on freelance tonight, my constant churn, and after the baseball games were over for the day, Elizabethtown was on and I remembered that there was some connection to you with that movie. I got sucked in, again, and put off going to bed for an hour to reach the pathos to be granted at the end. You remember? The salmon swim up stream risking and causing, at times, there own death, but in that journey they are guaranteeing life. I don’t really know. I guess that’s a way to look at things. It’s worth getting bloodied if it makes all of this more worth it, if it leads to something better for us, or someone else. I feel bloodied a bit these last couple of days. Not horribly so, just a little bruised maybe. But strangely I feel free too. I hate that it meant giving up on us, and on you, for that to happen, but I guess it’s kind of like those salmon. But then of course there’s the Tom Petty songs, “It’ll all work out” and “Square one.” I remember you making me listen to them in your car, likely sitting outside of my house one night. I am not sure. Strange sad yet hopeful sentiment in both of them, but I feel some valuable instruction there as well. Still I wish that the living was a little easier, that I could have my dreams come true. Or at least that I could have another crack at so many of them. Or, perhaps, it is time for the new...
Sometimes I don’t feel like you know me at all. Whoever “you” is any way, or “me”, I guess that’s what I am saying. Like I walk around these days and I try to write about my summer in this city, this hot and sweaty city, where the homeless have such an effect on me. I find it hard to write honestly when I know who the “yous” are that may be reading. I don’t have that problem with the “you” I write to here. So I will tell you about my summer in the city. Some days the homeless are the only thing that can make me smile, some days the bring me nearly to my knees. Yesterday, one was having a streetside straw poll over whether a dog or a super bowl ring was more important. He wanted to know my thoughts. He urged a drunk on down the road and then asked for money for a beer. WHen I said I had no money, he asked me to bring him back a cheeseburger or something. I thought about brining him one back but decided to give him money instead, because I wanted him to make his own decision, and because if I were in his shoes I would probably opt for the beer too. Like tonight I went into the market down the street after having a slice and salad, ostensibly to pick up cigarettes, then I decided I needed milk so I will start eating breakfast, and as I was passing the beer coolers I saw a six pack of Coors. Not Coors Light, but...
I don’t like this at all, even if it is necessary. I mean it, Las Vegas, Walhalla, Mexico…I want to think we could make it work, but some say it will work or it won’t. I can’t be a part of that club. I am ready for father, for husband, for something else to go to work for every...
I don’t like this at all, even if it is necessary. I mean it, Las Vegas, Walhalla, Mexico…I want to think we could make it work, but some say it will work or it won’t. I can’t be a part of that club. I am ready for father, for husband, for something else to go to work for every...
I don’t like this at all, even if it is necessary. I mean it, Las Vegas, Walhalla, Mexico…I want to think we could make it work, but some say it will work or it won’t. I can’t be a part of that club. I am ready for father, for husband, for something else to go to work for every...
Through the windows of my house tonight, there are dark figures laughing at me. Some of them are jesters, laughing at the fool that I am. I never saw that it would workout this way. Never learned such things in school or from mom and dad. Love, caring, kinship and all that stuff were supposed to be good things… beyond reproach, right? If you could find all of those things, you surely had at least a good friend, possibly a spouse, someone, at least, that would be there for life, or until those things waned. The jesters are laughing at me even through their sad masks tonight. All life is lived in a sequence of contradictions. That this love, this care, this kinship could be the precise reason why we can’t go on seems unfair. Not as friends, or lovers, or nothing. I thought I had it all figured out at 16. I would marry her shortly after we both graduated from the college that we would both be attending. And then again at 21, I thought it would be her with the child-bearing hips and malleable person. My fair lady. Then I floundered about for several years and found the thing that made me realize that all of those other thoughts were so wrong. This time was for real. This is what I didn’t know at any time before. This was surely it. Every woman before you that I thought I would marry has proven impossible to remain friends with. I have wanted it so much with you. We have tried, through much internal strife and pain for...
It’s been a week now since the news came down that one of my colleagues at the paper, Diane, had died of bile duct cancer. She found out about 3 weeks prior and it was too late. Single and 42, she was in the process of trying to adopt a child from China, and had a self-help book for women dealing with stalkers coming out soon. I can’t say that I knew her incredibly well, yet I found myself incredibly moved, disturbed, distraught over the news. Although it sounds a bit cliche, I guess events do come around with some frequency that throw you on your head, with sorrow, doubt, confusion, analysis etc. Viewing my life through the lens of what I now know about Diane’s, and her early demise, has led to some severe existential dilemmas that cut across all parts of my life: work, romance, happiness and it’s pursuit, the future, the past… But a week that began with such bad news could surely not continue in such a way. This was also the week that Barry Bonds would tie Hank Aaron’s home run record, A-Rod would hit his 500th home run, and in the waning hours of the week that began for me last Monday, Tom Glavine would get his 300th career win. It was also the week that I would spend every night trying to finish the never-ending freelance project that seems to grow every time I touch it. It was a week without therapy, a week on new medication, and a week that I ended in Chattanooga where I finally saw Rock City, hated...
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