G) DmGame

 

Does everybody know what Day it is?

Exclamation Point. Question Mark.

Today is the dawn of another

(drumroll please)

GAME DAY!!!

YAAAAYY!!!!!

 

But first, some matutinal news!

Colon.

I like to read magazines backwards.  Hawthorne kept hearing trains at night.  I like to use my left hand more than my right, even though I'm right handed.  Tolstoy denounced Shakespeare as a bad dramatist, not a true artist at all. The Dude is unloading a truckload of plywood around back, I have no idea why.  Goethe thought that Wolff's attention to microscopic studies prevented him from seeing the analogies between plants and animals.  I don't like to look at myself in the mirror lately.  John Kinsella's response to the exigencies of life is to write poetry, as an act of resistance to the myriadic “hierarchies of control, and the human urge to conquer our natural surroundings."  It's okay to like things that she doesn't like, just like it's beautiful that she likes things you don't.  Like that.  Stephen Crane said to the universe, "Sir, I exist!" I am tired, after punching in at dusk, and coming home so late it's early, so tired.  George Orwell hated authorities, but loved cruelty in his secretest of hearts, that and tea.  He loved tea.  The weather is ghastly and horrible, a reflection of my innermost mind, and at night the moon is full, a darkening sky reflecting on the water.  I stretch out my arms to reach for no one.  Like a ghost.  Its hard to hold things, sometimes.  James Joyce played a mean guitar.

 

Yes, yes, today is Game day.  And this Game is specifically designed for YOU, dear readers, in specie a tu.  It is a Call and Response, of sorts, for all y'all tendentious readerz who are also writerz. I'll post the call, and you comment the response.  And by "All of" you I of course mean "both of" you.  And by "both" I of course mean, me posting anonymously, and myself once logged in, replying back.  Dear Reader.

 

I mulct you.

- Schopenhauer

 

The game begins, thusly:

 

there was a news crew doing a story about the storm. I wanted to be interviewed soo bad and this lady came up and asked if she could interview me, so I said

Well yay its game day. Again.

Yay.

 

there was a news crew doing a story about the storm. I wanted to be interviewed soo bad and this lady came up and asked if she could interview me, so I said

the routes are red.  I have information, a lot of information concerning the possibility of intensified hostilities tomorrow. Despite current conditions, this day is mission essential.  We will not get another day like today when there is tons of intel stating tomorrow will be a bad day.  My assessment of the situation, we cannot ever unilaterally decide things on our own. Hi Mom.

 

there was a news crew doing a story about the storm. I wanted to be interviewed soo bad and this lady came up and asked if she could interview me, so I said

F) Fructuous Feuilletons

Time warps in odd shapes in this house. Upstairs the clock says its 6:21. My watch says it’s 6:08. My phone says it's six.

In the kitchen it’s February already. But the fridge is still showing November of 2008. One wall of my room says its January, but the other proudly displays December. In my car its 6:30.

So this was maybe February. It was sometime at night. The sun was setting. The sun is always setting. My phone, telling me it was a minute after six, did not ring. I had started feeling like everyone in the world was out to get me. Or, more accurately, every one was out to forget me. Can you consciously go about trying to forget something, or someone? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem right. But it also seemed like something I could do something about so I puttered around, getting ready to go out.

Outside, the mail had come. There was mail for my roommates and a package for me.

Honey,

the note read,

here are some things you left and I thought you might need.

:)

Love Mom

How is it that I know what Clark Gable looks like? When I see a photo, and know, "Hey, that's Clark Gable," how much useful information is not getting through to my brain so I can carry around a useless tidbit of recognition like that?

There was a poster of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard in the package from my mother. It wasn’t mine, but I recognized it. Underneath that there were clothes that weren't mine either. I held up a red shirt, two breast pockets, freshly pressed. A pair of shorts. A school sweater. Clothes belonging to my brother. And a book. After I showered I put on the shorts and the sweater and headed out.

The night drive felt like a repeated experience. I was alone, for a time, with the wind. I tried to lose the wind by veering right, onto a frontage road, but it stayed with me. Crowing. No, not crowing. What was the wind saying as I drove? Not much. I wasn’t really listening. But it felt like a repeat experience. I turned on some music and a man sang about surrender. The streets were lonely. The clock said it was 6:45. In my backseat was the book I had brought from home. The book my mother sent me. Wealth of Nations. Who knows where a party will lead, I had thought without thinking. Perhaps it would come in handy.

I picked up the girl. Waiting outside her studio I turned off the car and a whole world of sound emerged from the underlying emptiness of night. Perfect fifths from the freeway, low skids from the overpass, a siren faraway and closing steadily. The girl got in the car. "You're late" she thought but didn't. I imagine she thought this but do not know. She had that 'you're late' look in her eye. What should I say about this girl?

She’s fun. She’s different. I’ve got a big crush on her. This was to be our first date.

There is a panel in the dashboard of my car which I never use and have rarely even noticed, so integral is it in the landscape of my days. At first I must have decided it served no function, I think, but maybe not. Perhaps I had never noticed it before. It was right in front of me, and it was hidden, and when she first got into my car it was the first thing her hands reached for. A secret! Touch it, open it, let us see what is inside.

There was nothing inside, of course. She took the sunglasses from my sunvisor and put them in there. It felt like a gift, even though they were my sunglasses. We had a long drive ahead of us to the party. Soon I was seeing nothing except that panel in my dashboard.

She’s a city girl. "Where are we going," she asks me. I had not told her about the party. Well, I had, but I had not told her where it was.

"This way," I say.

"You don't have any idea, do you?"

"Sure I do. We're going this way. This is the way we are going."

Where she sees the city as a network of roads that lead to specific places, more specific places dotted along the very specific way, I see it as a grid of cardinal direction. I’ll head towards the bridge. Head towards the water. I don't know the streets. I don't know the names. I just know which way I am going. And I will get us there. I do not like to turn around.

"I'm thirsty, let's get a drink before we get there," she says, and so we stop and get a drink. Because who can imagine a world where there is not a drink ready to be purchased and consumed wherever your car may chance to stop?

I can.

Our warmup drinks were cold. While we drank she started talking about children and her voice made my heart recoil. Suddenly I became very aware that I was in a room where I'd never been before. The lighting was low and red. I felt a certain terror, that there was only one way out of this room. I began nervously scanning for other exits. A man needs to have at least two ways out at any given time. I cursed myself for not remembering this sooner.

Then she put her hand on my leg and when I looked at her she was smiling. She had stopped talking. Her smile was meant to make me smile too so I smiled. I thought of happiness. I thought of telepathy. She began talking about work and I thought about what a dick I was to call girls by their cities. By their countries, at my worst. Girls have names too, you know? They are not merely the names of places where they are from. Like trophies and conquests, its denigrating to call them by their cities and not their names. I felt bad that I had done this, and resolved to stop doing it in the future. She asked if I would like another drink and I said I would. The party could wait. I was feeling less trapped in this room with this girl. I was feeling more trapped in these clothes which were not mine. I felt like a poser, dressed in my brothers' clothes.

The bartender had a long two-pronged beard. We ordered more drinks. As he poured them, two frizzy women in black dresses came in, each carrying an handful of balloons tied to strings. Their hands were full of the strings, not the balloons. The balloons were black and blue. One gave her handful of balloonstrings to the bartender. The other released them into the air and they dispersed along the ceiling, and began to disseminate throughout the bar.

"Does this mean we get free beer?" one of the women asked. I could not distinguish her from the other. They looked like the same woman. "We have just come from our friend's birthday party," the other woman said to me, smiling. She had a large nose. Perhaps this is what distinguished her from her friend, I thought, but later when I got a closer look at her friend I saw that it was not. Although, maybe I saw the same woman twice and mistook her for multiple women. "The party is over and no one knew what to do with one-hundred and fifty birthday balloons so we all took them with us!" She seemed quite pleased with herself. My date was flirting with the bartender. Leaning across the bar to tie a balloonstring to each prong of his beard. I looked away. Looking around I saw how much joy had come into the place by the very existence of these black and blue balloons. All the mournful red people were now looking up, white teeth smiling. All except the man sitting next to us.

He has a look which I take to express loneliness. He is slouched against the bar in a bout of voluntary isolation. There is a girl beside him. She is doubtless lonely also. The possibility of talking with this guy haunts her, she's aware of his presence, she fantasizes of his embrace, of holding him close and keeping him secure. He is absorbed in fantasies of his own, two girls who cannot satisfy him because he cannot satisfy himself. But he requires their counsel, their admiration, the comfort they can give him, which he denies tonight because he cannot comfort either of them. Sleepless nights give way without differentiation to sleepless days, all of time but a hopeless setting on love’s humiliating stage. He cannot talk to the girl, because he is imagining another far away. But he could enter her, if only he would turn and talk. And he tells himself he would walk on his hands and knees, across a frozen thousand miles, to be with the other. Once there she would care for his wounds harshly, and he would wish that he were home with another. As it is, he sits alone.

When we arrive at the party David is midstory bragging "…so I beat the snot out of him," he says. "Once he was on the floor I started kicking him. It took me a while to get him down, so I wanted to do as much damage as possible."

I flinched. The room was full of people, spreading out into the yard. The whole room felt like a projection of my brain, the one true home, the only shelter, unfamiliar and teaming with unknown elements, each mingling body a neuron, fusing, stumbling, disappearing, reemerging. Setting, rising.

"I don't know how long I kicked him once he had fallen. There was blood all over his face. His nose was fucked up! Just a bloody pulp!” There was a glaze in his eyes. The circle of revelers were sniggering and dazed. Heartless, all, I thought. Pride.

I snapped out of it. Went outside for a smoke and to look at the stars. One of the girls followed me out. Pen.

"I've been at the full brunt of the force. I've been the devil of darkness' horse."

"Blake?"

"Maybe. How are you?"

"He is watchful while they are at peace."

"Protect me. He is here."

We started drinking. The conversation lapsed into watchful staring, the girl claimed she needed protection. I was getting drunk. I would close my eyes and listen for threats, and strange broken sounds scuffled around us. Who knows where a party will lead? I heard without hearing. There were voices talking about children, a problem child, a baby, voices, and faces flickering with smokey dots through two windows. She read me monologues about the roundness of the earth, and the protection inherent in fathers' voices. I wasn't following. My mind was elsewhere. Relenting to the standard arsenals of distraction, searching for exits. Trying to think about the things I'm trying to forget. Trying to find a use for the word unctuous. Fructuous. Feuilletons. Write that down. I reached for a pen in my pocket, the pocket of my brother's shorts. They were lined with sand, white sand from a beach halfway around the world. All the way around the world, depending on your means and methods of travel. Across the dateline, where it is tomorrow already. Soon it will be tomorrow here. Then it will be two days from now there. 12:07, according to my watch. 12:01 according to my phone. Two months from now. Three years ago.

Fate is a blanket. My date was gone. All the girls were gone and alone I drove home. Fuck this, I thought. Write that down. The dashboard taunts me with what is hidden. 1:23. My watch chimes the hour. I opened the door and took off my brother's clothes. Day began to dawn somewhere. Somewhere else the sun was setting. In my mind they are the same place. I was going to make a call, but there was no point. It didn’t seem right. Or, it seemed like something I could do nothing about. I decided to join the human race in their mass attempt to forget me. I took a shower, and went to bed. I wasn't going anywhere anymore. I was going everywhere. Which is another way of saying, I was going nowhere.

E) & e

All things are every thing
All places are everywhere
 

 

Luigio_5extus: this one is an important one, eh?

DMsqdMn17: yeah.
Luigio_5extus: am i going to be in it?
DMsqdMn17: you're important too.  I think.

What's really important was what I was wondering as I sat out on the porch looking out over the sleepy lights of the midmorning bay.  Late at night the lights move and shake.  Trains roar and cars blink, planes descend and ascend in mesmerizing flight patterns all, people moving mysterious over the farthest flings of this fathomless continent towards unseen destinies.  But in the nitetime we swallow the parenthesis of darkness as a flavor, which tells our brains it is quiet and still and peaceful.  Although one must really wait until midmorning when everyone settles into a kind of negotiated siesta.  I smoke and observe this silence through a tiny cloud of tiny bugs that hover about our flowered bushes in a kind of regal dance to the god of speckled sun which shines through the myriad clouds like the light of a projectionists reel, playing out this movie of the world on the surface of the quiet earth.  Get yer popcorn.

 

What’s really important

The Dude came out before she came up.  Before her car rumbled around the bend and parked and waited a sad beat before bearing her out just as the sun came through and everything in the world was gold and goodsmelling and tinged with the reverberation of some distant prehistoric perfection now coming into its fullest and utmost intended glory.  But first, the Dude emerged from the house, and lit a smoke and said well.
"Well," I added, "what?"
"You work today?"
"Yeah. You?"
"Yp.  But I doughwanna go."
"It's what pays the bills," I pointed out.
"Barely," he said.  I knew he would say barely before he said it.  Sometimes you know what will happen before it happens.  Barely.

 

We stared out over the sleeping houses swaying slightly in their dreamsong of better tomorrows, and then he went in and I poured myself a drink into the tumbler and heard a car around the bend and it was hers and it was her, a sweet song on the radio, and there she was. 

Love is love's refrain

"Howdo!" hailed I.  "What am I walking into?" she cooed. Voice like butter.  Smiling with outright joy, the kind that creation intended only for children or those who don't know better.  Skinny Goddess, your heaven shines on you.  Up the steps and into the opposing chair.  Our lives are a series of opposing chairs.
"Oh, just trying to write," I said.  Alas a lie.  An escaped truth anyway.  My computer was in the Dude's lair, and without it I claimed, I could not write.  I told this to the Dude when I popped my head through his door acrack, and he stared up at me, gun drawn, "Whaddaya huh?"  "I can't write without my computer, how long do you think it'll be?”  A voice behind him on one of 4 monitors, "From mah cold dead fingers, yee haw." Here we are in Dude country.  Pirate flag on the wall, recessed speakers blaring music fit to mimic a dogfight waged on cymbals and drums.  A RPG taking up the whole of Moniter Beta, gunfire flacking away at amazingly lifelike corpses whilst some commander issues vaguely militaristic order barks between rounds.  A real voice or a computer?  What’s the difference?

"Here," the Dude said, "use mine," and he handed me a laptop I'd never seen before.  Apparently one of his.

But I couldn't use that laptop because, although it had the internet, and I claimed I couldn't write without the internet, I also couldn't write with the internet.  Who could blame me, all this porn to surf!  And none of my own documents saved therein to divert me!  If my laptop were fixed and I had it in my possession, I told myself I could write, but I knew that I wouldn’t write.  I would open my documents, tell the tale in bits and pieces, ever more garbled and terse, sporadically lay out an acrostic turf of field notes, open O’Hara for inspiration, and then turn exhausted to a browser filled with tasteless tasteful nudes and try to find God.

 

and I have lost what is always everywhere

-O’Hara

 

My God was a 17 year old girl named e who was not a God and was not 17 anymore and was not named e.  Don’t question my religion.  I had a copy of her journals and I used it like scripture, a divine influence to steer this life I am blindly leading and feel less lost because I was following someone.  "luke told me that men find it impossible to be with me once they fall in love with me, because loving me means seeing a huge sadness, and once they realize they can't fix it, they duck out because its just too sad. i think this is lame and very false, but perhaps a little comforting."

 

She was a tiny thing, I should not have ever noticed her, but she was wearing big baggy corduroy pants with bright clown colored patches all over them, and an edwardian vest over her ripped yellow T-Shirt.  She carried big thick unlined notebooks and beneath tangled curls of hair wrote straight lines in colours like: "i adore sunshine so fucking much. i am so unbelievably elated about the entire everything!"  And she was 17, and is perpetually 17 in this religion that I have created, so that when I begin to question the meaning of things the answers that scriptures give me are the answers of a 17 year old, and I accept them like I did when I was 17.  Now all my High School emo Drama club antics seem cliché, the same kinds of things that everyone went through and everyone that age is still going through, but when you were that young you couldn’t see that larger picture and everything you were fighting for and against was a life or death struggle that is yours and yours alone to wage and e says: "i think that as much as it hurts, its ok to give love and love and more love- even if you don't feel it coming back."

 

Luigio_5extus: i need advice.

DMsqdMn17: We all need advice.

Luigio_5extus: its this girl named E—----

DMsqdMn17: There’s always a girl.  They’re always named E—----.

Luigio_5extus: in a way i'm lazy and i don’t get out much but she is very unvicelike.  she goes out.  in a way she's very good.  but there’s this road that i feel like i'm supposed to be on, and this me that i'm supposed to be who is social at night and seeing people.  she is good for now, but not for who i want to be in the future

DMsqdMn17: Hey man, it’s like Shakespeare once said…

Luigio_5extus: we eat kings?

DMsqdMn17: We eat kings at the Paris of the Prairie

DMsqdMn17: You probably won’t get that.

 

There was a time before the girl was close, when she was distant.  I am talking about the girl now.  Not the God.  The Goddess.  The girl who is now distant, now that she is close.  But when she was distant, we were close.  And in that time I am remembering how I immediately dismissed her without a second thought.  She was younger then.  Cliché.  But she was young, and thin and I tracked her nervous eyes and loved that she had straightened her hair, and wondered what it would feel like to cup my hand around her ropey muscled white arm.  I am remembering burning, going out for a smoke and shivering under a patchwork sky that made me sad, seeing grass in sidewalk cracks and envying their humble resilience.  A time, when later I came to associate everything good in the world with the thought of her face, the crack of her voice.  When I knew how many laughs she had.  Could navigate the knots in her spine in my dreams.  Thought of the skin along the inside of her leg, or that soft spot at the top of her neck, as the holiest of holy heavens.

I felt it then.  I felt it and I hung onto that feeling to make up for a lack of having felt it for a long time.  I hung on too long, not long enough… I hung on.  You know how if you hit a tuning fork up against  something soft, or dull and it will only clang, not unpleasantly but a far cry from when you tap it against something hard and it’ll reverberate both deep and high, two notes, an octave apart, ringing perfectly and then subsiding into the infinite realm of perfection. 

 

Remember that old philosophy question

about whether existence precedes essence?

I like to think about that in love. 

 

I have been with girls and felt no deep emotional resonance whatsoever, although I like them.  But those girls who I felt the most deeply connected with have by and large been, themselves, deeply rooted to some sort of drug-fuelled abyss.  I crave the kind of person.  My heart is it in.  The kind of person who craves nothingness, which begs the question of emotional disingeniousness, which I am least worthy to even ask because  I can’t love anyone who's not stoned because I don't connect, and I’m too stoned myself to connect to anyone who’s not stoned.  What does it say about me that I have only really felt love when that love's recipient is periodically incapable of facing everyday existence without a little leaf, pill or powder?

 

Luigio_5extus: if truth is the lure, humans are fishes

DMsqdMn17: ?

Luigio_5extus: lotsa white bones in 'em eaten-up dishes

DMsqdMn17: What's that even mean?

 

The girl was different from all of them.  She was clean.  Always clean, and therefore in that equation I was dirty.  Always dirty.  She took issue with my smoking, loved talking to me when I was high unless she knew that I was high and then she took issue with that too.  Not the knowing, the high.  When I was not around she assumed I was banging other women as a matter of course, what else would I ostensibly be doing, the dirty one, than banging other women, and if she was ever banging other men I never knew or thought to ask.  She was clean.  Why would she bang other men?

Such a diverse polemic I constitutionally establish in my relationships.  With the girl, I was my own deep end because she was the light.  And maybe that’s why we fought, because I could never really see myself as the darkness… (does darkness see itself as darkness?)… nor could I really forgive her for loving me.  I was perpetually prepared to forgive her for not loving me, but she never let that happen, even though I was perpetually prepared for that eventuality.  Still am.

 

EFFLORESCENCE n. Do not for a moment consider that

your having long since left school absolves you from the responsibility

for remembering, and distinguishing between, the meanings of this word

and its host of friends and relatives. Now concentrate.

Efflorescence: flowering or (in chemistry) crystallization.

Effervescence: bubbling. Deliquescence: liquefaction.

Inflorescence: floral structure of a plant.

Infloration: inflorescence. Defloration: dehymenization.

Defervescence: reduction in heat or fever.

Refervescence: resurgence of heat or fever.

Sorry; there’s no refloration.

-Peter Bowler

 

I was reading e when the other dude asked me about how things were going with the girl.  Not believing the midnight texts' I'm pregnant I told him we were just friends.

"Vertical or horizontal?" he asked.  A joke I didn't get until later.  Actually, it wasn’t much of a joke.  He went back inside.  My phone buzzed again, I lit another cigarette and in the white smoke I remembered a time when I had gone to see e.  As many years ago as miles, several snowy hours drive in my Dad’s beat up conversation van, a 17 year old kid seeks an audience with a Goddess high in the misnomered Green Mountains, in the age before cell phones.  I got to the town, and it was only a bleep on the map.  A few sharp bends in the road at the bottom of a steepled valley, school just getting out, and no where to park the monstrosity, until, just out of town I found a Mobil and parked it, badly, went inside to use the payphone, but there was no answer.  I had come all this way in vain.

I drove off, back around the sleek slushy corners, and up the hill to the high school where I imagined she had been earlier in the day, probably broke out around noon, maybe returned if they were doing something which interested her.  The athletes trampsed around the snowy fields.  Little curly brains in big hockey padded shoulders thumped their bass amps and cocked off to the rink, somewhere. I felt lost.  I drove back down into the valley.  Parked and smoked a cigarette, shivering myself into realized existence.  The air was gray with exhaust and smoke, and the sky looked cold, ready to crack open and drop somemore wintry ash on us.  All the world one colour.  I went inside the quickstop and tried the phone again.  Still no answer.  Turned around, and there she was, or was she?  Buying pills at the counter.  Looked like her.  Swishy nylon snowmobile jacket unzippered beneath what appeared to be a bearskin shall.  Her hair in knots.

"Hey," said I, whispered, more like.  Hadn't spoke in hours.  Days.  Years.  Ever.

"Oh hey. You ready?"

"I didn’t know where… I just tried…"

"Hop in, let's go, " she said.

"But I'm driv—"  If she heard me she didn't care.  "I guess it's okay there," I resigned, looking forlornly at the enormous van, taking up three spaces, ass half in the road.  I tried not to think about how I would explain a ticket, let alone pay for one.  e spun her car out and into the road.  I held onto the Oh Shit Handle and off we went into the wilderness, too fast down bumpy roads walled by snow.  She grabbed a CD and popped in the cassette adapter.  It kept skipping so I held the player with my other hand.  It gave me something to think about other than her reckless driving.  Where the hell were we?  It was getting dark.  She lit a cigarette.  Soon we were at her house.

Inside it was cold.  She took off her coat and asked me if I wanted a drink.  I was 17.  I was 5.  I was awestruck.  She made herself a screwdriver with the liquor under the counter, and then another, which she drank as I walked around the house.  Her parents weren’t home.  She had little to say.  I had less.

 

Imagine your fathers’ hands.  This isn’t a story about hands, but do me the favor of tangential embellishment so I don’t have to tell it yet.  Do your hands look like your father’s hands.  What about your father’s hands when you were born?  My father’s fingers were thick, and calloused all over.  His wrists were wide and hairy.  I don’t have my father’s wrists.  Maybe when he was my age he had wrists like mine but I will never know.

 

I had forgotten that my phone had buzzed when I called, just hoping to shoot the shit with the girl far away.  How are you?  What’s goin' on?

"Are you fucking serious?"

"What?"

 

I'll always remember those snowy roads in the impending dark.  Too fast, and I don't know where she's going. 

 

So she was pregnant.  The tests all said.  I was silent and I was far far away and then I needed to be there and so I was there.  An appointment on Thursday.  Okay.  The next day I bought her flowers.  Or should have.  I like to think I bought her flowers.  I know I bought a book on the way home from work on what expectant fathers should do.

               

                Isn't it funny how the unimportant things sneak up on you?  No wait, that’s not funny that’s tragic.  It's funny how the important things sneak up and ambush you, like love and accidents. Who said that?

My hands didn’t shake when I smoked and I talked to her, things were going to be okay.  This could work I told her, believing myself.  Words are powerful that way.  You believe them if you say them.  Things were going to be okay.  An appointment on Thursday.  And we talked all night, and Thursday morning her appointment was postponed until Monday, and life snuck up on me.

 

                I imagine the life that was cut short.  A little escapologist from the start.  Like his Dad, getting out of uncomfortable things.  Black hair, many cornered flesh, all elbows and knees, threaded in that bending rope of flesh.  A sashcord around his wet skin, umbilical of the drowned, shrouded in the hood of a woman we both could have loved longer, and I see him stretching out of there, screaming ululation like rumours of wildfire through a crowd.  Bloodlines, the sinews of life, flush with wails of lament and joy, all wrapped up. 

 

                When Sunday came I did not call.  And Monday, I sat and smoked in the sun, wondering what's really important.  Wondering if my fathers' hands shook like this.  Reading e, God to man, Holy of Holies.  Spell, sky, prayer, wrist, funny, "i mean. maybe funny isn't the right word.
it just gets into my head. that perhaps forever and ever the people i meet seem to love me for things i do, for how i act, and that he'll forever be the only one who got in from the inside. its hard to tell if i'm being crazy or i'm being strong.
i guess if you think something is worth fighting for you have to fight for it until you can't
or don't want to.

i guess.

i'm fucking exhausted. i want a thunderstorm."

 

Sometimes you know what will happen before it happens.  Barely.

 

I didn’t call.  She called.  I put down my book and burned and smoked.  My God, I could say nothing.  It was finished.  It had never begun.

 

There were three of us then in that play.  The girl, the boy, the muse.  And the one who was not to be one and really there were only us two, the one who was and the one who was never to be and really there was just one.  Me.  And all the world was bit players without lines in this scene, which a director in a beret continued to shoot again and again, cut, action, again, again, covering different angles.  How selfish.  I imagine him filming just my hands as they slide away from hers, out of that delicate and symbolic lock of fingers and promises and into my pocket where I have stashed my fire and what I burn.  And I burn it, and the camera follows my hands, and they shake slightly, for they will never write this story, and they will never pull that wet baby up and hold it and know that it is, and it is me.  And she was never there.  And we were never to be.  And e was never worshipped and this story was never written and I’m going to go outside now and smoke another cigarette and think about what is really important.

 

Soon the sun will come out, and then I will sleep with the rest of the world.  But in the meantime it gets brighter and brighter.  And if you think of the saddest, sweetest song, know that when I hear it, I think of you.  Come over.