Kinless the Ghost calls for his shadow

“I have seen a person who walked, walked, and walked until he ran into a train”
-Akinwumi Isola

Alcohol is a harsh mistress. A shame society accepts it, but society also accepts people you love who don't love you... coincidence? Yes.

Wisdom is a miserman, hidden away on top of a lonely hill, in a cave perhaps. Having been to that cave when last on the mountain I can tell you skinny he makes a fat lot of sense that doesn't sound anything near the sense people expect you to spout when they say: "make sense" (Mandate.)

For instance: Last night having determined to write a blog about how love ain't for me I meet a girl who is. (Man, date!)

Provocation is fleeting. Here's the damn blog anyway God, you asshole:

I type in my password: BATMAN, (My password is always BATMAN. Except for those systems that require you to change it frequently, or add a number or lowercase, in which case my password is NotBATMAN1) log into the blog site
and slog right
into the writing
of my lastnight forgotten amblings aplaced bry beaded blossoms
mercuric on the evocation of the idea:

What wrong right? Meditate:

Intimacy is an almost muscular struggle for me, both literally and metaphorically. It's debilitating. I come out of a relationship like a miner after a 48hr day, permanent exhaustion buried like a flock of lice under my eyes.

Then the demon alcohol calls me. A Stoli mermaid on the rocks, siren. I don't want to go to the bar, wail. Protest, don't wanna a drink tonight (Waa!) but still my Chevy swerves, drives there anyway, traffic conspiring against a turn-around backout, I go in. Await the initial shock of the shot I've instinctively ordered, waitering for the perfect sad god jukebox moment to swing in and signal, it has begun.

I won't meet anyone tho. Tho the lights dim.

Meditate. Thinking

Perhaps love isn't for everyone. Perhaps the "there is a someone for everyone myth" is a façade, for for some people love is more of an effort than others, the extremities of experience and feeling are these great vulnerable impasses that impress upon them that perhaps they are meant to be hermits. I am one of these people. I cannot connect with other people. I was not meant to. I am not meant to connect with people.

You know who I can connect with?
The litter strewn open road
-The spontaneous poem
The sleepless night

-The heat lightning that never leads to rain
The nearly moldy leftover Tupperware container at the back of the middle shelf of the refrigerator

-The pot smoking dishwasher's duct-taped Converse
The empire state building as seen from Nova Scotia

-The fighting spirit of the Pecan
The pioneering correspondent on the edge of forever

I am meant to be a heretic. A loner, a frantic wanderer of the worlds of words like
a nude woman running the hallway I like to sing in winter. I like to prick seduction, modest in death alight

when I smoke I take off my shirt and sweat, drinking

Pale. Ale. A bittle of spittle on the drip of my uncommunicative lip.

Somewhere long ago something prematurely
killed off all the minor-key affects in me
like friendliness, boredom, low-level appreciation, passing affection, passionate sexprayer or the wingéd-angel inamorato birdtouch of the unseeable unseeable godking.

The only fermata a lingering yearn.
What left is all

Lascivious sexual fantasy in the chips and candy aisle.

Existential epiphanies in the arbouretum.

I consider writing some lines, some
weight of the world song
couched in lyric light and haw haw but can DMM write it?

No.

____ ____ will end like so many earnest nights thinking & drinking I been through before, a different hand stamp every weekend, the stifling airless bars with inhabitants indigenous & indifferent grumbling & ordering things while in anguish I languish in search of the girl & find instead all inter-woven only human mortality, empty glasses, fears of artistic failure and a tenuous, ambiguous relationship to time reversing til they dig the old sadsacka- up,
Light me up that cigarette and drop a coat on my back
and walk through the valley of the shadow of the last train laughing footsteps that were next to me go
have gone and in the prisms of my mind I've seen enough now to know that beautiful things don't last that way
done enough to know the razor sharp rules of love come disguised in smiles and light
walking towards waters small boats of solitude scrawled upon with names like cowardice leaping rudderless upon the blue ocean blooming crests beneath a chandelier of stars your words remembered still in silent

Meditation: Here I am today.

Despair, debasement, awake the stagger from Dantean music to blunt dejection in the single flicker of his eyes as he shakes his head returns to the purling old-om eastern lung rhythm, sigh. But it could be fun, everyone would love- she will come- he doesn't think so. Write nothing. He returns to the deep from whence... such squalor tonite, I think. Such clamor and fake tits in clubs with such steep covers. Dark pits, the pounding, I look back and see he is calm, or mostly. Like a sigh, A cow, a child going off to school on a day when there is nothing better to do, than go to school.

Of course that's never how it works out.

I met the girl in a simple conversation that you might just call chance and leaping hearts abound, you
, astounds, you. You, O

We all know

where this is going. We make plans and love sours them. I have no idea why I even went out last night. Next thing you know I'll be marrying the girl and then kids making me ambitious get a job to support the many suckling suck mouths and I

think

Man!

Man fuck the regiment and it's little interlaces of certitude. Ask about my String Theory. What wrong stellefaction? What wrong mundanities? Animism? My saints protect me, stroking I pray

to:

St. Nothing of the Real Hard Sadness

St. Nothing of the Doggystyle fuck

St. Nothing of the Steady Speculation

st. Nothing of the Little Strolling Week

St. Nothing of the Smoking Recollection

St. Nothing of the 9000 Parliament Glare

St. Nothing of the talking Dead Chicken Dumpling

St. Nothing of the Least Remembered Conversations

St. Nothing of the Hand-holding Wonders

St. Nothing of the Thinking away the night

St. Nothing of the Whole Boring Yesterday

St. Nothing of the Last Seventeen Rides

St. Nothing of the Nonstop Phone Ringing Ringing

St. Nothing of the Let's Talk Exception

St. Nothing of the Stewing Purchased Want

St. Nothing of the Pictures without Voices

St. Nothing of the Grisly Wild Lake Littoral

St. Nothing of the Ruthless Tide Salvation

St. Nothing of the Another Weekend Ends

What wrong adoration?

I want to write a blog saying love is not for me, and meet a girl. While I am sleeping the clouds roll in, I guard the interior from a further interior, my dreams prey on each other, procreating vultures, copulating with their dead offspring eternally groundless that usually live in the darker recesses of my mad cornered mind. What do my dreams dream about?

When the last nostalgia?

Where the floorboards of content?

My brave night disguises melt and pour onto the sequestered self's tiny remaining box, inaccessible, the singular puzzle inside I hear the rains harden and moreover watch out the window with my eyes still shut as great uproareous projectile shape-clouds graze the sky. I am deaf, I scream in the dream and awake, naked. Meditate.

The whole thing weighing on me, finding it's apex on the back of my throat and I yawn, not alone any longer. She beside me. The tousseled blankets our nights' only legacy.

Jangle (& then some (more spamku))

If you are setting

up a trip in any woods,

by no means swallow

city he had long

dreamingly looked up to as

Scotia's energy

we all fall in love with the wrong people, (she got out of the car, slammed the door,) it's part of getting older, growing up, (my saab's been having trouble starting lately so i couldn't immediately follow, then the ignition caught) we find out who we are by finding out who can love us, but just as often it's who can't (a sharp pungent twist of her waist and she heads up Bay Street) that allow us to reflex a voice of self assertion in a world that doesn't make much sense.
Please (back the car up, turn to follow) get back in the car I (a profusion of trashcans have emerged to watch us parade) am sorry for what I did (a thin gray rain blurring the windshield) I am, I'm sorry (my eyes burning) just get back in the car and (her heart is a stone, the wipers squeak) we'll talk about it.

"You owe me money," she says (munificence is dead) before disappearing into the 52^nd Street Club (I am still breathing).

start with treating swig

you find exclusive cleansing

then dampen s hot.

iniquity sink

of the wet aridityto

of to with some form

Jingles of Love: Colour-Coded (& Separated by Spam Haiku)

"im a selfish little ball of haikus" -e

I had a professor who told me to avoid sentimentalism at all costs. That sentimentalism was the opposite of truth. "Well fuck you," I informed her "what if the truth is that I am feeling sentimental" and then I stormed out of there. She didn't know anything about truth! Truth was subjective. So she gave me the failing grade that I deserved (true enough) and I moved to California and laid in fresh cut grass in a park in San Francisco and went to movies alone and drank vodka because I loathed myself and taunted the ocean in the dark and then I met you, online, and believed that our souls were brimming over or burning out to meet each others bodies, (or at least I hoped as much) so I bought a ticket to Richmond and we saw a movie where lots of men got shot and I thought it was very good and you commented that it moved me more than it did you and I was reminded of my professor's comments about sentimentalism and so I got out your iPad (from the plastic see-thru sock drawer where you keep it) and read you my blogs and you put your head on my shoulder while I read them aloud to you (the best way to read them is out loud) and I felt a real flush of kinship with my younger self for saying "fuck you" to that professor and standing up for sentimentalism. Some say write what you know, but I say fuck that: write what you're desperately unable to understand, (Somebody else said that first, I can't remember who it was.)

Using ContCom West

Vietnam never looked so

compulsory alt.

I met this super cute girl down the hall from me in my new apartment and I fell for her because she was super cute with thick curly dark hair and thick-rimmed librarian half-glasses that she'd sometimes wear and I'd always say "Hi" when she'd go down to check her mail and she would smile and say "hey" back but I think she had no idea who I was or that we lived in the same building. For a while I camped out in the vacant room by the stairs where someone had set a musty armchair waiting for her to come up in the afternoon after her classes but that felt ridiculous and stalkery so I stopped. Plus I discovered she had posted all of this stuff online where she talked about her favorite video games and movies and books and plays and paintings and painters and her pet theories about life etc and so I fell for her hard and I thought it was karma that she was in my building and I went out of my way to always run into her, telling all my friends to call me whenever they saw her and then memorizing those places and times and writing out a schedule so I would run into her at all these (to her) various times on campus and she was always so sweet to me and never blew me off but I never tried to say more than "Hi" to her and I'm pretty sure she still didn't know who I was and just thought I was this incredibly shy randomly occurring campus person who should say more to her than "Hi" but never did

To say I was in love would be an understatement. She was super cute and it was a safe way of investing in a person without any of the unpleasantries of actually getting intimately attached. To see her glistening skin after her 9 AM sessions at West Gym was the sole reason I would get out of bed, some days. And during second semester she straitened her hair which at first really bothered me but I really started to like it after a couple of weeks when, one night, I was just lounging alone in the student commons across the street from our building (where I had discerned that on Tuesday's and Thursdays she sometimes passed through on her way back from Chem lab) drawing little spritey comics to avoid doing my Geo homework but totally not expecting her at all when I heard her voice behind me. I spun around and there she was, my heart racing, she was talking with her best friend Kristine and the two of them sat down at the table directly behind me! She was showing Kristine (who was blond and friendly, but distant) some pictures that I decided just had to see! I got up, walked past them casually to the back of the commons, like I was going to get a drink, and then, unable to think of what to do next, I got a drink. Then I came back and as I passed I saw two pictures as she flipped through them: Two pictures that looked like self-pics, dark and blurry, her face bright, arm extended to the camera, wearing a blazing red dress, and pressing her head against two different very scruffy looking guys. I sat back down and gathered up my stuff to go home. They both headed out at the same time. I held the door open for them. "Hi," I said.

Look atsle items

abercrombie & fitch caps

dissimilar Mmm.

Later when you had gone to work at the radio station and I slept in on your bed I looked through all your drawers. I don't know why. Something about the thrill of being alone in someone else's room, one wants to see if others hide their secrets in the same places youdo. Too-small sweaters, ink-stained pants, squeaky tennis shoes, lip balm and dollar store perfume. I found the CDs I'd made you and one you were planning to give to me, and a journal where a 16-year-old you confided your consternations regarding the single-minded drive of the male sex. I put the journal away without reading more entries and played through the CDs until you returned.

so much November

hyperbole has talked a

lot?consternation?

My best friend (who is a girl but not my girlfriend...) told me about this dating mixer (although we do go out together all the time) she'd heard about downtown where all you do is sit around a table and meet new people for like 3 minutes and then switch partners and for some odd reason she wanted to do this and wanted me to come along too (it's called speed dating) so I agreed to go but when it came to the particular day of the mixer I was feeling absolutely shitty because of work and didn't feel up to it at all.

"Let's stay in and watch TV I don't want to do it" I protested but she refused to hear it.

So we went.

My gripes were ripe and plentiful. You don't get to choose who you want to talk to (I didn't want to talk to anyone) and I hadn't been told that the Girls get to stay put all night (err, it feels like all night, actually the whole thing only lasts an hour) while it's the Guys job to move around every 3 minutes and tell their stupid story. The whole endeavor is nothing but a bad middle school dance for grown ups where the rules are you have to dance with everyone, and all the while you harbor a progressively battened down & diminishing hope that as you work your heartbroken butt around the room someone somewhere among the melee is perfect, someone hoping likewise to run into you.

It wasn't meant to be. We entered the massive room and parted ways and I found myself over the next hour talking to strangers who were keenly interested in freely sharing with me whatever is on their minds. I keep waiting to hear an epic story, but I seem to be condemned to the gloomy gamut, stories spanning from deceased animals to business complications to debilitating stomach conditions. Don't get me wrong. These stories were well rehearsed, extremely exciting tales, and without fail, after listening to them for a while I can't help but feel like my own life is boringly pale in comparison; so to spice things up I started embellishing the narrative as I circled back around the room. The first woman I decided to do this with I convinced that I was French, and I spoke the entire exchange in a french accent. The second woman heard the french accent so I couldn't very well change it when it came time to speak to her, so I continued, telling her I was a French rapper named Pierre.

"Oh I'd love to hear one of your raps."

"Non, madame, ve call eet ze flow. Not a-- zees zees-- rrrap"

She apologized and told me she would love to hear one of my flows. I checked the clock. A minute and a half left. Shit. I panicked, started reciting the lyrics to the first song I could think of that she wouldn't know, Communist Daughter by Neutral Milk Hotel. In French.

She bought it. I got her number.

Later: my best friend was pissed.

"What?" I asked, "It's no big deal!" She scowled at me as we drove home. I continued to defend myself, "It was actually pretty good considering my french is terrible and I couldn't exactly remember all the words!"

She laughed reluctantly "did you just make it up?

"Yeah of course. Stuff that sounds french."

"That's like the most unlikely song you could have picked in the world to be a french rap song. Good thing she doesn't speak french."

"Oh I'm pretty sure she does. I think she just gave me her number because she

took pity on me."

thank you for hosting

this amazing giveaway

here's an Online loan

So my girlfriend used to work at this really posh law firm until her ex-boyfriend broke up with her. Not only did she work with him but she lived with him so when they broke up she moved out right away and got the first new place she could find on short notice, which was actually a room in a house with three other girls, one of whom, Rachel, worked with her at the law firm. She got a new job at my office and that's how we met and started going out soon afterward but I try not to bring up anything related to the law firm (or coincidentally enough Burger King, which was one of their big clients) because her emotions about the whole thing are still right there tight under the surface and even slight provocations tend to blow her up. I only bring it up because I went over there the other day and I hate going over there because the girls she lives with are all geniuses and their conversations just soar over me.

Seriously, they live in this great big brownstone on this privileged hilly street and I'll go over and feel under-dressed and unkempt even before I go in and then I'll be there not two minutes before someone will bring up something like Melville or The Silmarillion or make what sounds like an important point in Russian (two of the girls are Russians) and they manage to hit cruising altitude high above my feeble head.

Anyway I went over the other day and Andrew was there, who is Rachel's boyfriend. Andrew still works at the law firm where Rachel does and my girlfriend used to, which means he knows her ex so I've tried not to ever say too much to the guy. He's stayed there overnight several times, just like I have (and may have even hooked up with one of the Russian girls once or twice while drunk since I found him on the couch a couple times when Rachel was away) and my first impression of him was early one morning coming into the kitchen and seeing him step out of Rachel's room in only a towel. He quickly introduced himself, said that he was on his way to the shower, and vanished down the hall, so not the best first impression, but as we waited for our girlfriends to get ready the other day we sat together in the living room and semi-paid attention to the College basketball games and I realized he's actually a pretty down-to-earth guy. He initiated the conversation which pleasantly surprised me and I found him pretty easy to talk to, which was nice because the normal extent of my conversation when I am over there is just to say, "Um, how interesting" a lot when I'm there because, well, I don't recognize the historical and possibly obscure people that they frequently make mundane reference to, zooming as they do, in flight up above me.

We shared our stories about being abroad in Asia and Ireland and what our majors were (are, in my case) and what classes we're currently taking, (he's in a graduate program now. (That means he's more educated than me, FTW), FYI) and what I may want to do with my degree in the future by the time the girls were ready (and they did take their time, Rachel has a lot of bags and likes to always have the right one). I had no idea I'd have anything in common with this guy and thought I wouldn't like him but I got to know him pretty well in such a short period of time and told my girlfriend about it as we drove out to the pier.

She didn't say anything back though and we drove for a while before she made some comment about how he isn't really Rachel's type. I said I wasn't so sure. "They always seem to get along pretty well, at least when I've seen them together, both matching each others' crazy eccentricities on a fairly-even and understated keel."

She said nothing and I let it drop. My girlfriend can be judgmental, I learned.

We made it to the pier and parked in silence. Across the parking lot was a Burger King I had forgotten about when I picked the pier to come out to that day and I glanced over and caught the recognition of it in the corner fragment of her eye. Neither of us said anything about it, but I knew then that she would never stop missing him.

We walked out into the pier, the water choppy, gulls swooping down out of the clouds.

simple confession,

strong feeling, social habits,

never recovered

Making dinner at the counter you kissed me with wet lips and I took two steps back, overcome with a memory of my father, how he loved time in the kitchen when I was a kid, I'd sit outside on the rockstep and listen to him cooking up his latest "gourmet" dinner, or he'd prance back and forth between the barbeque grill outside by the garage and the stove inside where the corn cobs would be boiling, a sweat-splotch seeping through under his arms, or shirtless and he'd sing along out loud with the radio blaring loudly - usually Garrison Keillor -- and slam the cupboards, bang the countertops, clap his hands, stamp his feet to the beat and laugh, chasing me with a roar out of his way, I'd hear bottles smashing, cutlery clinking and smell steak cooking in sauce and smoke and onions, and beer– he'd pour a little beer in everything saying it "brings out the flavor," and then dinner would nearly be ready and we'd scramble to the sink to wash the black dirt from our hands knowing that it was going to be a good meal and it was. It always was.

You asked if I was alright and I realized how much I love you. The lines on your face when you scrunch it up, reminding me of that fact, I love you, and reminding me of when I used to work at the restaurant at that fancy resort hotel by the lake, a server in the dining room, which meant that I was de facto fill-in for any kitchen related job that needed doing any given night and there were always about 100 things that needed doing. Even though there were 8 or 9 of us per night in the dining room, (plus two Buffet attendants & 3 cocktail waitresses) the boys in the kitchen always asked for me to do their odd jobs because whenever they had a spare second they were snuck out behind the dumpsters smoking pot and they knew that I wouldn't snitch on 'em to the boss (or the owner). I was always there when they needed me but sometimes something would happen out on the floor and I'd come back into the kitchen crying that I needed this or that and the boys wouldn't be anywhere in sight, then they'd stumble back in, ten, sometimes 15 minutes later, and I'd feel like I was high just by standing near them, talking to them, trying to figure out whatever it was they were saying which was invariably, "calm down. Calm down man."

So now we are here, in our house in the city, and it is warm and I am making you dinner. Today was not a bad day but I'm glad I am here. I feel more relaxed. Its funny what 20 miles will do to us. I think that maybe, after we eat I will ask if you want to go for a ride. Together alone. The fact is we need to talk. I need to know why it is we hate each other.

He is face to face

second one, as soon as he

cash Hugo Chavez

I Came to Eat

Oh.
You again.

*Oh.

Remember in the good old days of The Masked Mind Revealed when every day I updated and every Wednesday was Game Day? (Yay!) Oh man! Even I forgot the rule that every time we said "Gameday" we had to say "yay"! (Yay!)

It was just a just a thing.
Like the token black guy getting shot
and yellin' out "Awwww Shit!"
(his catch phrase)

NO!? You don't remember?????

... damnit.

That's okay. Those were halcyon days tho.
And they were a long time ago.

Seems I've about alienated everyone who read me then in the dark times in-between.
They probably don't even remember me. That's okay too. I barely remember them.

Let's see, there was cow man. Angry guy. Poet kid. Space girl. Um...

neway
those of y'all that are reading now are new. Readers are supposed to be valuable things when you write a blog. Especcially if you're a made up comic character and yr not sellin' anything Whereas I Swap out my readers like baby teeth.

Bad analogy. Metaphor.
Shit what is it?

...

What I'm trying to say is that Fate has brought us this far together friends. This (that short) far down them there long (far) road. Fate. Oh and loyalty. And Loyalty is the coat that love wears—a tattered and ragged coat, yes— and it doesn’t always prevent us from having our disagreements, or out-and-out fights, but it just may be the best thing we have.

Do you know what it means to come home at night to a lover who'll hold you, give you a little affection, some sweet tenderness, compassion, understanding, forgiveness?

It probably means you're in the wrong fucking house dumbass, that's what it means!
HaHA!

And that my friend is the prelude to today's game day
(YAY!)
As you may have noticed,
there are some comics that I
drew & posted
throughout this blog...

NOW IT'S YOUR TURN!

Please Create a Caption for this Photograph:

and please make it HUMOROUS. (I'm talking to you Sam!)

Feel free to make up more than one.
Leave your ideas in the form of comments below.
(Yes my blog now supports comments.)
Not sure why it didn't before.
(Probably Sam's fault.)

Good luck and many warm safeties!

-Dmm

*(And yes, we are aware that
the title of this blog is a
bad sexual innuendo / double entendre)

Shit what is it?

Have Masked will. (Travail)

Where do I find myself tonight? At home chewing on a textbook trying to catch up on studies and almost dead. Something about Logical Positivists. My academic attention span is rather obstreperous. I'm Not what you would call a diligent Student.

Current project: overdue. Thoughts: new novel forms of expression; since alternative communication gimmicks and the like are getting harder and harder to come by why not try older methods? Is it too late for me to go back to school, but this time perhaps attend some kind of English boarding school, in England, so I can work Lacordaire, Guizot, Radcliff, Montalembert, Zurbarán, Quarles, King Aethelbert, Trahernem, Huysmans, Vaughn and Carlyle into casual conversation? Like Dyer or Fermot did?

No? Well hope springs eternal.

Usually it's better for me to be left entirely alone, as I will be, than to go out where my disconformity embarrasses me, but sometimes the savage weekend rage slaps me in the gut and gets me out of my hut out looking for the fidgety fix. In other words:

It gets hard wearing a mask all the time and sometimes you want to get out and let people percieve that you are feeling vulnerable. And then you can focus proper.

So. Down Main Street, or Market is it after raven midnight with a brand new pack of cigs and a cramp in my gut as I steep precariously forward, counting steps because I have this obsession with numbers at the wee hours of the morning, (remember to adjust for drift in declination though) still, did I mention how tired I am? Oh. so. tired..

It starts to rain.

"I'm not Lonely. I'm just alone."

- Neil Macauley (Robert DeNiro), Heat

It's one thing to be alone in the world alone. I can keep myself reasonably and sustainably amused.

It's another thing to be in a crowded room and feel alone. It's awkward, and it happens, and it's why I generally keep my own congenial company, more or less. It's difficult for me to connect with others overall anyway. But it started to rain lightly and the street grew slippery and then it rained harder, the drops denser and colder and denser until I could hardly see anymore. So I acceded and decided to take Refuge with a friendly bunch I know out past the Cortland crest on Mission. I stepped into the threshold and shook my shiverring shoulders. Outside the wind bristled and howled aspostatically.

There is a second story party going on.

“What gets you somewhere is exactly what holds you back once you've arrived.”

-James Fallows

A curious and oft-observed quality about music is how communal it is. Even bad music like that gruffled-hipster “DJ” was spinning and listeners are packed, literally! A dingy room jam filled like sardines in a tin container, there is of course the everpresent strong smell of beer, body odor and just a tint of Parliament cigarettes. A mass of people dressed in dark colors with outrages hair styles and covered in piercings and cliche ironic tattoos.

I squeeze in and drape myself against the window with a can of lite crapturd beer and happy to be in out of the gale I let the music work its spars over me. The night goes, there is talking, and laughing and such. My mind. It wanders.. .

I know some of them here and yet still feel the vague tug to sneak away. I intuitively fear something bad ever about to happen, even around my friends. I don't open up to people, I've realized my life is a series of boringly told talestories involving oddsituations that I have been in because of flimsy, or unsupportable motives, sometimes for no reason at all. Perhaps there is something wrong with me. I'm good looking. I'm intelligent. I have both some book and some street smarts. I'm unique... just not any more unique than everyanyone else.

My internal interlocution was cut off by a big barrel-chested guy staring down at me, not an easy thing to do, as I'm 5'13&½ ", intoning some hollow bombast in his jackhammer voice that sounded startlingly like a threat.

Now, I'm not a fighter, 1anem hairy macho unkempt bone-breakin nut-bustin furry rut pushy butt rippled motherfuckin sonsabitches. No. I'm not a figher or even one very good at protecting hisself really. I's given more ta grandiloquence than any kinda visceral clip. And I said this too him too I said “I's more given to grandiloquence than any kinda visceral clip, is it too late to step outta this?" but the music was loud and I don't think he heard me. He barqued something else, sounding like a tow barge on a swell and I was starting to freak out a bit as he blew his fists together, about ready to shed my fear-tightened skin and run for it when no sooner did a girl throw herself between us and say something calming that seemed to defuse him and he shrunk a bit from his former height, cowed and bowed, stuck out a steak of fettered flesh, his hand and we shook then he billowed away and vanished, the music still so loud that I had no idea what any of it had been about.

“You scrofulous took!” I yelled out after him to becalm m'self once I was sure he was out of earshot.

He didn't hear.

She did.

She was a bit of a waif, I noticed, a few choice bones poured into nice clothes. Tall, slim and quirky-gorgeous. With dangerous dark eyes. I mean intense. She had a calm sooty demur demeanor now as she smiled at me and I mumbled a thank you, but I don't think those sharp eyes of hers missed any detail. Nice teeth, slight overbite. Not a tiny mouth, but right, with somewhat pouty lips. Pixie nose. Fairweather skin, tawny, sinewy almost.

Now, just to be open and upfront about this: I don't have a very detailed or nuanced sense of how things work in the domain of the feminine brain — which makes negotiations in congress with said parties all the more hardwrought. But she took care of all that by grabbing me by the funny bone and dragging me into the kitchen where at least I could hear every third or fourth word. She introduced herself and poured some shots, the first of which we barrellshot back quickly and the second set we nursed while she conversed and I listened. Her eyes glistened.

She knows french, loves to surf, makes a mean breakfast smoothie, and has an ear for the next indie musician. Not to mention, she has retro inspired wardrobe that can make any vintage lover go gaga, or so she says, a tattoo of a del Toro devil on her shoulder and a fishing lure on her ankle, she didn't say why. All proof that San Francisco attracts some intriguing individuals.

I felt a bit like a shy deer in the headlights. Fuck the headlights.

"What about you, who are you kid?" And there it was.

"I, uh.. . .. . uh I like uncrustables and shopping at target."

A silent moment followed filled with sound. Several boys floated in and squeeze between us falling over everything for the liquor. We braced on opposite sides of the tumble, they smelled like motor oil and cold cotton and I was finding meaning in every momentary glance we stole.
They made no indication wanting to leave the kitchen so we left. She grabbed me by the elbow again and we went out the front door into the stairhall where I followed her up up around and up, to the rooftop access where scrawled on the heavy door:

electric spaceheaters of the world, ignite!

Electricspace heaters of the world, goodnight

Shut the door behind us and found ourselves open to the quietude of eternity, sort of, the rain stopped, sky was chillyclear and the roof was covered in small stones where others were already havened, smoking weed and playing roof top pool on a table godknows how it got there. We joined and laughed, guarding our secret despairs and disappointments until she found a comfy chair and guided me over where we could share it.

"What were we saying?

"I'm feeling rather acualine at the moment.

"Are you just making up words or does that mean anything?"

"I'm sure it means sumthin to sumbuddy"

"So tell me about you,"

"I waste time because it's mine to waste."

"Not when you're talking to me. I've wasted enough time already. That's why I came back to the city."

"Where were you?"

"Wasting time. Following my amazements. I guess I found that I couldn't really be comfortable trying to be amazed all the time. Everyone is amazing, sometimes only at first, and some some time later. I was only intermittently at ease, really. With myself and with being loved by others and so I needed to make a change. I'm discovering I can never really be at ease." She got up and perched on the edge, staring out over the dark houses and bright streets.

"We all resort to what's easy don't we? What's comfortable. What we know.”

"If you're not going to push boundaries you might as well may be dead."

"I don't want to die."

"That's not apparent."

"It's getting late."

"No.”

“It is.”

“No it's not we gained an hour."

"Oh right. Oh! Great! Well let's go lie down downstairs anyway I'm getting-

-An alarm and a flashing light. Some sort of fire we guessed, the trucks showed up in less than a minute and we cleared the roof, down dark flashing stairs and strobe chambered corridors to the mass of people huddled up across the street by the Deli Mart. People were screaming, running and jumping over us and the police were yelling at us to sit down and be calm and I went into the Deli Mart when it started to rain again feeling incredibly tired because I had not slept in...
but I started having trouble breathing and I never know what to do exactly so I went back outside and put my head down and blocked everything out, my world shrinking, shrinking. Walking around helped, I could see my own breath which felt okay and I walked and felt surer and safer and walked and I started to forget anything was wrong. Seeing your breath is validation. Where was I?

Oh right well, I couldn't find her again but I walked until it was nearly dawn anyway, searching I guess, but concluding the mission in banishment to the solitude of my leaky garret once again where I feel, alas, comfortable. Comfortable not to have to face the tyrannic expectations of social venality for another week.

Weekends only come around once a week.