the writing game reborn.

so b.mac sends a pair of lyrics, and i write the story/poem/rant that comes in between:

She's a mixed up kind of girl, The kind you wished you'd never met
She took the country from the world, Now she's teachers pet.
[from Teacher's Pet by Imperial Teen]


She's a mixed up kind of girl, The kind you wished you'd never met. A fulsome kind of girl, not so unlike the rest. No, what separated Debra from the others in her circle (meant here in the loose sense, "circle" -- the geometric bond between these girls was formed primarily by the empty space in their middle) was not that she was mixed up. Nor even the rather sundry manifestations that her mixed-upness took. What made Debra [Pronounced "de-BRAW!" by her crazy-nosed step-mother] different was something very simple -- something noticeable only to a few, as the vital differences so often are: She was obsessed with Mr. Albus DeMornay, her history teacher. Now, Obsession makes for exciting commentary, but the simpleness of this case curtails much of its momentum. So we will look now to a page taken from Debra's ["DEEEbs" by her brother Winceton (self-nicknamed The Winchalator, if you're not into that whole brevity thing)] diary, which she kept on her person at all times. For safety. There are few places where self-evident truth can be contorted and mangled and offered a lollipop more effectively than the pages of a high school girl's top secret diary. And few ways in which those contortions can come to life more vividly than in the form of a list. Thusly, what follows is the entry taken from 19 November of this last school year. (On the opposite side of the page is an entry titled "The Vortex of My Sex," and it looks interesting, quite; but unfortunately it is written in a tight inward spiral, and in very tiny print, all attempts to read it have made us feel not well.) Here, then, is the list, entitled,

WHY MR DEMORNAY WILL FINALLY STOP PAYING ATTENTION TO THAT BITCH SIGOURNEY COX AND FINALLY REALIZE WHO HE REALLY LOVES

1) He has compassion in his eyes, all the time, and Sigourney Cox doesn't know what she's looking at, that soul-stabbing whore.

2) SiCox has an ugly, horrible voice and talks way too much.

3) But when his true love finally gathers the courage to raise her hand, which will happen by class discussion of Ch. 6 of A People's History of the United Sates AT THE VERY LATEST, then he will hear her voice is like a song to him and understand that she IS his TRUE LOVE.

4) And like how Zinn says that when the white marauders came they did more than take over this land, they brutalized it, it was like "they took the whole world out of this country." Like Zinn says that, only this will be the opposite: Mr DeMornay will hear what his almost-now true love has to say and look at her eyes and hear her song and realize that,

5) She took the Country from the World, and

6) Now she's teachers pet.

Stop often to check she is with you every lick of the way.

Everybody who reads this blog knows that it is an almost bodily explosion of ideas, wherein every entry represents a symbolic, sensual death that with its last breath offers fresh life to you (the Reader) via its sharp insights and erotically charged irony. A death, yes; yet somehow a regenerative one because each entry magically begets another.

Like le petit morte, after morte after morte after morte.

These sentiments were echoed deliciously by reader Sexy Kiss, who wrote to say that he discovered my blog during a horrid family trip, and it "warmed [him] up with it's curious topic, helped me escape the family madness, and gave me some great ideas for my sexy kissing website." I knew just what he meant. He continued, "If you have time I could use some tips from a pro on my sexy kissing site, but no pressure." The only pressure I felt was the usual tightness in the front of my pants, so I decided to go see what Sexy Kiss-related revelations aPSI had inspired.

I was so pleased:


Getting Into the Ryhthm - French Kissing


* Increase the pressure on her mouth.

* Now pull back and look into her eyes, to make sure she is still interested.

* Then drop your gaze to her lips again.

* If she is hesitant or shy, you can whisper against her lips softly, ‘Give me your tongue’.

* With your tongue trace the outline of her lips.

* Then give her another all encompassing kiss again.

* Next slowly swipe your tongue across her lips where they meet.

* If she is interested and excited, her lips will part automatically (if they aren’t already).

* Now caress her tongue in a light licking motion.

* Don’t push your way in, or be too aggressive.

* You can even suck her tongue gently.


I really felt excited and like I had learned some things that I want to try really soon. But, too I will keep in mind the parting words of Sexy Kiss and "go slow until you have got the hang of controlling all the wet stuff."

Ooooh ... let's go ...

Hunts walks warily down the street, with his pants pulled way down low.

Ain't no sound but the sound of his feet, witticisms ready to go.

Are you ready, are you ready for this? Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?

Out of the doorway the cynicisms rip, to the sound of the beat.


BUMP BUMP BUMP, badump bump bump baBUMP.

Another one bites the Hunts.

personally, i would like to make a statement.

so i got accepted to grad school on friday. two of them, including spu, my top choice of the schools i applied to. so, that's what i'll be up to come march. i'd like to sit and speculate about how life will look for me and stuff, but i'm too excited, almost ditzy, with the freshness of it: everything is so dope; this smirk on my face won't go away. (i am chilling at the club in my b-boy stance; i have my hoodie pulled up, and my cock in my pants. i'm fresh. i'm fresh.) you know that feeling? it is very nearly a spontaneity-loving, break-into-song type of thing. but, here in my own post-ironic idaho, we prefer things to be a little more subdued, so we break-into-smirk.

with nothing else really to add, i'll instead include some clips from the personal statement i wrote for the spu application -

***

Not until later, when I was talking to my friend Brian, did I realize how lame it sounded. He asked me to repeat myself. “She said it was a ‘two-week break,’” I said again. “During that time we will not talk or write or see each other. No contact at all.”

Brian nodded. “A two-week break.” He took a sip of his coffee. “You realize what that is. It’s a trial breakup.”

And he was right. As he almost always is when it comes to matters of my life, my best and oldest friend was right. My girlfriend had decided to give me a two-week-long opportunity to sit quietly and reflect on how much she meant to me before she ended things between us. Following that morning coffee session with Brian, what I decided to do was to switch things up. Nearly every aspect of my life felt stale or incomplete or both. At the age of 25, making significant life change is an undertaking that is drastic at the same time that it is completely plausible; as such, I decided to move, to remove myself from the distractions I found irresistible. I’d had the relative good fortune to be advanced to the telecommuting team at Amazon.com, and, after confirming that I could live anywhere in the 206 area code and still dial into the server, I spread out a map of Seattle and looked to see how far away I could get. The next morning I took the ferry to Vashon Island to look for a place to live.

For most of my college career, writing had been a latent interest. At the end of my junior year, I enrolled in a creative writing class because A) it seemed cultured, B) it sounded easy, and C) I had a tremendous crush on the professor. But I took to the work. The task of writing down my thoughts instead of my reaction to the thoughts of others presented a unique puzzle, one that was entirely different from any sort of problem solving I had engaged in. During an office visit my professor drew a comparison between the first story I’d written and the lyrics of Beck. At the time, Beck resided just below Johnny Cash and above Paul Simon in the uppermost reaches of the Artists Who Sing Directly To Me pantheon, and by the time I left her office I had decided to dedicate my life to writing (or craft, as I immediately began to call it). But I had little idea what I was doing, and I was lost the moment the semester ended and I no longer had due dates to push against.

In the years following college I had small adventures in beautiful places and was compelled to write about them only at times that were inconvenient. When my girlfriend enacted the trial breakup I had only recently voiced (to Brian, naturally) the concern that maybe I liked saying I was a writer more than actually being a writer. Above all else, my move to the rolling greens and blues of Vashon Island was about quieting my life and myself enough to figure out whether or not I had a native impulse to write things down. Whether or not I had any chops.

Speaking of chops, the first place I felt immediately at home on Vashon was a diner that served the most amazing pork. I would work for a few hours, take a walk, and then drive down to the Stray Dog diner to eat and write a scene, often a more-interesting version of something that had very nearly been interesting all on its own. This was a terrifically leisurely mode in which to operate, and it suited me. I began to write letters to old friends that I never had any intention to send. It was for the sake of knowing my audience that I began each session with the words Dear Brian or Dear Whomever, and followed this by relating imagined nights and adventures and conversations we might have shared.

Around this time I struck up a friendship with the Alternative music editor at Amazon.com and, after a minimum of pleading, got my first paid writing work as a freelance music editor. He said to me, “You know jack for music but you do know how to write,” and placed me as an editor in the “Miscellaneous” genre. It was a terribly fun thing, to receive a CD in the mail, listen to it a couple of times, and then write down my 250-word reaction to it. My life was more slow and measured and salient than it had ever been when, on the evening of the summer solstice, I took my brand-new skateboard to bomb the hill behind my house, fell, and landed on my head.

...In these last years, both my creative and freelance writing endeavors have developed in fits and starts. Professionally this has a lot to do with my not being a particularly avid salesman. I have found that sustaining my fiction pursuits calls for a bull-headedness that is not entirely dissimilar: A writing routine requires the savvy of a cold-call salesman, a willingness to dial my own number each morning and blindly assure myself that, Yes, this will be worth it. And, like any salesman, some sales periods have been kinder to me than others. This quarter I am responding well to my own sales pitches, and consequently confidence is high. While it is impossible to trace my recent progress as a writer as cleanly as I would chart out sales results, I am able to say that my ability to navigate the language, and my love for the fiction form, have grown with a strength that I cannot immediately account for.

...By moving to Vashon I had slowed my life as much as I could, and in so doing found that some of the things I liked in theory – long walks, Russian literature, naps – I also liked in practice. Among those, writing was foremost for the way it transitioned from interest to passion so easily – almost without my noticing. The word “passion” has been rather dulled by use, I think; generally I think of it as either as an overstated affinity (I had a neighbor who was “passionate” about making soup) or as something that is pursued with fiery eyes and a tightly set jaw. For me, neither description fits. My passion for writing, though, can only truly be described as just that, a passion. How the creative process works is a mystery to me, but I know that if I show up at the same time each day, then pretty regularly it will work. Writing is a passion, but also it is a kind of faith: What I believe to be true is far more than what I am able to explain. Whenever I close my notebook and come back from a moment of having lost myself in the writing process, I do so with a mind that is tranquil and an eye that is curious. That wants to look at the world.

the way kathy lee needed regis, that’s the way i need jesus.

“as men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so their creeds are a disease of the intellect.”

- Ralph-to-tha-Waldo Emerson

= I like this for so many reasons. and, as with any idea for which I can devise more than one reason, I shall eschew (it’s a vindictive avoidance, not a cocktail nut) the paragraph form in favor of a list =

a) the notion of creed as disease is fascinating to me. i mean, the bad creeds are obviously bad, but deigning the whole thing as systemic badness flies in the face of how I think about creed: a creed is a rallying cry (a gnarly mel gibson shouting “FREEDOM!” as he gets skewered) or it is a way to sum up an impractical ideology (by the people, for the people) . but when I stop, drop, and think, it occurs to me that Creed always seemed nice because Creed is always surrounded by more obviously disease-like clichés and sayisms. nobody will ever try and elevate when it rains it pours or apples and oranges or i’m only giving you this blowjob if you pay my rent to the level of creed because such sayings are too situational and too pesky; a creed must sound good ‘round the clock, not just when it’s sucky outside or is the first of the month. if I’m to think of creed as disease, cliché and truism must be less harmful, like pink eye. or a rash. crabs, at worst.

b) I don’t know about the rest of you, but I really believed them when they told me that if I persist in calling my fries french, then the terrorists win.

c) song as creed: jesus loves me is one of the v. first songs you learn in sunday school, and it is, along with amazing grace, the most persistent – the last to leave your mind as you walk away. (the melody has been pleasantly re-worked since my boyhood days, and even now, as a sunday school teacher myself, it is the praise song that gives me the most immediate access to my heart.) but it is more than just declaration. jesus loves me, this i know: these words are re-assurance, they are reminder; but also they are creed – they tell me what I already know full well. and I am glad to hear it.

d) I heard this quote in an interview with harold bloom, who followed it with the staunch qualification of emerson as his prophet. he’s not one of mine, but maybe he will become so someday. I’ve always liked him. but the idea of a prophet seems incongruous with the idea of prayer as disease, or at least as a disease that is separate from a need. a prophet speaks truths that are eternal, truths that dangle their feet in spacetime before going off for lunch and then setting down someplace else. like unnecessary personification, a prophet’ truth tells illustratively of what has yet to come while being evocative in the present. like emerson. and like prayer.

e) to be clear, when I say prayer I mean good prayer; a prayer that has its own life, in the sense that it is to somehow aware that its destination is the omni-auditory ear of a presence that is unknowable. I don’t think of “dear god! dear god please let there be an empty parking space right in front of the building” as a prayer so much as a flailing cry, a bladder-filled scream through the peephole of You Will Open This Door Right Now! those don’t count. only occasionally do I know what does count; and I’m crappy at keeping track of it, but I know it when I say it. and I just don’t think of it as a disease of the will. an offering of the will, perhaps.

f) but maybe offering, as it pertains to willful cessation, is not that different from disease. I mean it is, clearly, but equally clear is that when I string together words like “pertains to willful cessation,” I have almost no idea what I actually think. so I don’t think I have this figured out, yet. hm.

Learning to Like Our Deal.

My wife and I were having problems. Not the kind that are talked out, or even talked of – rather, the kind of problems where, when we look at each other, it is plain that we both would prefer to be looking at something else. The wall, maybe, or the sink, if it is not full of dishes. At any rate, the passion was gone. That’s how she phrased it, one night, during one of our rare verbal outbursts. "The passion is gone!" she declared with a jabbing finger. "The love between us has grown stale."

I responded that I did not like it when she got "Fresh" with me, which was a witty and fresh thing to say, doubly so because her irrationality had set in as we were deciding what to order for dinner. She had thrown the menus to the floor and huffed that I “always have to over-qualify everything!” Well, I’m sorry. Sorry that I fail to find remote geographical justice in the fact that there can be tons of Canadian bacon on a pizza, but they throw a few piddling slices of canned pineapple on there and suddenly the whole pizza is “Hawaiian?” It’s a nonsense arrangement. Canada is always being forgotten.

Lois was right, though: The passion was gone. Inasmuch as the passion was ever there, was ever not-gone between two people who had agreed to hasten their wedding when the Mother-of-the-Bride’s gout went into unexpected remission.

She told her sister about the Pizza Incident without telling me that she had told her, which was smart, actually, because her sister is an unconscionable snoop and I cannot. Tolerate. Her. And sure enough: Just three days after the PI, we received a call from a self-described “Interactional Sufficiency Counselor” by the name of Professor Ford Spink. Not a “telephone" call, mind you. This was an old-fashioned, “here-I-am-at-your-doorstep, don’t-mind-if-I-push-my-way-into-your-sitting-room" call. His face glistened with oil and his thick, wild mustache evoked the facial stylings of a close-minded walrus. Before he had said a word I knew he was an associate of Lois’s sister, probably someone she had met at the local Lyon’s Club. He sat us down on either side of him and got straight to the business of pitching us on his Program, which promised to “restore an acceptable level of intimacy” to our relationship. I looked at Ford Spink, then past him at Lois, who had an appallingly congenial look on her face. But then he began to lay out the details of the Program, many of which were about doing the sex more often. Or, more accurately, thinking about doing more of the sex. This appealed to me, so I allowed him to continue without riposte.

The most intriguing element of the Program was a series of step-by-step guides he gave to each of us: Mine were under the heading “His Wild Behaviors” and the ones for Lois were called “Her Dark Places.” Ford was quite persuasive, and, after clarifying that he would accept payment in installments, we agreed to his conditionally-guaranteed 20-day Program to bring “something not unlike affection” back into our lives. We walked Professor Spink out to his Vespa, and, filled with the optimism that comes as you embark on something new and risky, we went straight to our separate bedrooms and spent the night devising ways to enjoy each other.

Not wanting to rush things, we had decided that our first foray into Project Learning to Like Our Deal (PLLOD) would happen two days hence. Steps 1, 2, and 3 fell under the heading “Choose the Other’s Adventure,” and involved composing a series of multiple-choice lists from which the other would select whichever choice they most fancied. At the agreed-upon time, we convened in the sitting room. I moved the furniture and arranged some couch pillows on the floor while Lois lit a votive candle and some incense she had purchased from the Target. When we were settled we looked at each other with apprehension. This was a slightly different sort of apprehension than I was used to, though – it was concerned with what she might say rather than if she might say something.

“Ready?” we asked at once, then traded lists and took up our pens. The directions for each of our lists were the same, and read as follows. Pet names are the centerpiece of establishing a viable connection between Man and Woman. Choose one of the following 5 options, created by your partner, which will be the nickname for your genitalia for the duration of Phase 1 of the Program. Trust is yet to be established at this early stage. Therefore, once the choices have been made (in silence), this task is complete. The next is to address in turn the other’s genitalia genially. Following introductions, you may ask if it would like to be engaged in some way, perhaps even fondled. Only after the re-naming has taken hold is this task complete.

We would not make it to Step Three that night.

For my Penis Nickname, Louis had given me the following choices:

1. Skewer Stick
2. Biscotti
3. Drain Rooter
4. Rolling Pin
5. Warner

I was disheartened. None of these choices were remotely acceptable: While Lois's shining attribute was her skill in navigating the kitchen, it was expressly not my domain, and the notion of applying any of those choices to my bedfellow was grimace-worthy. "Rolling Pin" had momentarily appealed to me – what with it being round and dense and thick – but it brought on the image of Lois in her apple-red apron, humming to herself as she applied an even coating of flour to my penis. "Drain Rooter" had an element of vigorous expulsion, but it conjured a visual of long, thin tubing covered in thick wiry hairs that was hardly appealing. Desperate to participate, I lightly sketched a question mark next to it. Perhaps the venture could be saved: I, at least, had invented for her a range of vaginal nicknames with nuance and specific evocative power.

But when I looked up I could see her straining. When at last she started to write something, her knuckles quickly grew white around her red #3 pencil and she began to scribble frantically. She stopped and looked up at me, her eyes ablaze. Her lips had disappeared into her mouth. I gazed back at her evenly, with a calm I might call "Zen-like" if "Zen" were not a word for hippies. We stared at each other for quite some time, an uncomfortable lack of space between our faces. A steady curl of rank incense smoke curled up from its home on the floor next to us. Lois had told me earlier that, at the store, she had had trouble choosing; apparently she had decided to go with the "Dirty Beach" scent. At last I spoke.

"Do you want to say something?"

She shook her head, but then held up her list to me, the paper trembling violently in her clenched fist. "What," she said, "what are these?"

"They are the choices for your vagina," I replied in a mistakenly optimistic tone.

The paper shook even more as she extended it toward me, mere inches from my face. The page was covered with the tiny random-seeming scribbles of her pencil, but beneath those lay the choices I had given her:

1. Foxhole
2. Little Bighorn
3. Operation Iron Triangle
4. Dakota's Canyon
5. Fort Sumter

Lois's whole body was shaking with emotion, but this coolness, this Zen-without-the-pussiness calm had taken hold of me. "I like 'Operation Iron Triangle'," I said. "Although admittedly much of that is because "OIT" is a fun acronym. And you know how I love a good acronym. 'Dakota's Canyon' is probably my favorite. It has the most power."

"It's a fucking canyon!" she screamed.

My voice softened in response. "Yes. And it does reference essentially the same thing as 'Little Bighorn', I realize," I said. "But it implies the broader range of Cheyenne stomping grounds, which gives it more metaphorical oomph."

"I know what it is!" yelled Lois. "I can't help but know! You never shut up about those stupid sad Western Indian battles that no one cares about!"

This struck me to the core. "Only two of the five are Native American battle references. 'Sumter', you should know, is Civil War, and OIT is Vietnam. And what about 'Foxhole'? It has 'fox' right there in it, and 'fox' is supposedly a sexy word."

"Hole is not! And if I have to tell you,” she said as she sucked in a frantic breath, “if I have to tell you that 'hole' is not a word i want associated with my girl-part –"

But I cut her off, my Zen-ness evaporated. "You want to tell me about 'Skewer Stick' then? You want to explain to me 'Biscotti' or 'Rolling Pin' or how all of your choices relegate my man parts to your beloved goddamned kitchen?" Lois recoiled, literally – she drew her knees to her chest and looked at the floor.

"What about 'Warner'?" she asked, her tone unexpectedly meek. "You like the name Warner.”

"I do," I answered. "It took me some years, but I have grown a certain fondness for it. And I'm glad I did, seeing as how it's my middle name." She looked at me, then, and I would swear that in that second she saw what I saw. She looked very tired.

Simultaneously we began to stand and without thinking I offered her my palm; we pulled each other to our feet. Lois sniffled; I drew a long, deep breath through my nose, which I do when I get emotional. We looked at each other a second more, then started to move away to our usual bedrooms. But Louis could not stop herself; she reached out and touched my shoulder:

“'Foxhole'? Really? The best name you could give my wetty-wet is the place you go to hide from bombs?”

I said, "You left me only with 'Warner.' And it is already a name I have. So what about that."

“I can’t stand the thought of it,” she said. The distance between us was miniscule. We stood there for some time, our eyes leveled, unchanging. I could not recall ever having been part of a literal stand-off, and for the first time it occurred to me that I would be quite good at it. Never mind the “stand-on” or the “stand-around” – the stand-off I could do.

But then her grip tightened around my arm and she pulled me towards her. Her hips pressed into mine, just slightly, but with a suggestion that was almost foreign. I froze, stunned. It felt good and I was stunned.

"Goodnight, Warner," she cooed. My pelvis retracted from hers in an instant. Was her sass deliberate or just willfully ignorant?

Either way, I would get off the last shot. "Goodnight, Operation Iron Triangle," I said. “I’ll see you in the foxhole at oh-five hundred.” With that I turned away, and with a little faux-goosestep I began to march down the hall.

“See you then,” she called after me, “Make sure your skewer stick is polished, Private!”

“Plenty of room for it in the foxhole!” I kept marching.

Things I Know About Writing. (TIKAW)

so i am scrambling to get pages laid down and in order for grad school apps due next week. the muse is supposed to be around, you know, encouraging me -- laying a re-assuring and slightly suggestive hand on my knee. maybe chucking my chin once in a while. turns out the muse is high maintenance; the muserly id is constantly in need of stroking. i cannot afford a fluffer, so a lot of my time is spent finding things to keep the muse occupied. one thing i came across is this bit, TIKAW, that i wrote for a friend a while back. after reading it the muse posited that the things it illustrates are very different from what i set out to illustrate. i responded that sometimes being illustrative is good enough.

1. when I find myself pondering the question of What I Want To Write About, I have already taken a wrong turn; this question does no good at all unless I am living in the summer cottage that i built out on the Edge or am like 20 years old and all self-righteous and obsessive. the matter needs to be turned on its own edge, to address either:

a. to Whom am I writing – the question of audience is all-important in that it provides a jumping-off point: when I pick one soul I know reasonably (or imaginatively) well, and just start moving my pen across the page, very quickly I find that the matter of what is interesting and what is not becomes clear; and since all writing is intended to have an audience, I have found that the narrower I allow the scope to be – one person as opposed to one pepsi focus group-style demographic – the more readily I am able to choose one particular voice or aim or intent.

b. What do find interesting. today. in this moment. right at this very second. this is far from an insightful track; except that how it has manifested for me is very simple: I sit and think of a first line. just a good opening line, with no thought to what comes after or from where it may come, except that both of those considerations are sort of the point – a good first line does have something that comes after (what with it being the First and all), but also it tells of something that has already transpired. so I write the first line, then pick up that thread and write the 1 – 2 pages that follow it. if I am really hopelessly stuckedly grim, I make a list of first lines. no thinking allowed : just write them. just write

i. The floorboard creaked under his heel, an ominous aide memoire of that night during his boyhood when the Nurse had turned loose a shoebox of crickets in his bedroom.
ii. As morning sunlight curled around the building’s edge and poured into the room, the devastation was plain; and she wondered if it had been necessary.
iii. Maybe she just needs to be reminded, he thought as he took down his pants.

2. …or whatever -- just go. the old self-helperly pre-eminents may sing the praises of moving the pen across the page. and that is true. but one of the few partners to that practice is, I think, a confidence. a cockiness: you can write without being concerned whether you’re writing about something that is important; your goal is to get to where you’re writing without caring whether it is any good. if you enjoyed it – if you labored through your first page and then without noticing you began to forget yourself and your fingers began to quiver all on their own and then you take a breath or a smoke break or whatever, your job is done. nice work. you do it again; you take a small window of your life and make it sacred, make it dedicated to the pursuit of Whatever You Think Of At The Time. and, soon enough, that becomes part of you. this is good at the same time that it is nothing to tell the girls about. but you keep doing it, because it does feel damnably good to produce and to sanction a spot in your head and your life, without expectation. and the thing of it is, shauna, the thing of it is that creativity needs a petri dish: it needs a familiar framework in which it can move and bounce and copulate. that is what you are after now – parameters that fit your particular head. this list is not called Things You Should Know That I Already Know About Writing, and there’s a reason for that. at the same time that there’s a reason that I knew in advance that I would sit down to write you a list and I would get caught up in it, would have you as my audience at the back of my head and would not be able to segment it off, to write it in a voice that did not have you particularly in mind.

3. sometimes making a list lets you believe that you have more than one worthwhile thing to say because you don't have to support any your ideas, you can just move on to the next thing on the list. and sometimes that feels nice.

Les Storéables!

A Play in One Part of One Act

by Marques the Sade


Cast (in order of appearance):
- Marques, an employee – Despite the eager green of the polo he wears beneath his red apron, Marques is a weary-beyond-his-years part-time employee who is convinced that everything sad he sees is important. Marques has rapidly graying hair that is matched by the graying of his worldview.
- The German Woman, a customer – Has a fine point for a nose and blue plastic daffodils for eyes. The German Woman’s shiny skin comes into view at the toe line of her black flats and continues up to the hem of her simple black dress, which is roughly the size and shape of an oven mitt. An oven mitt, with holes cut in it for the arms and head. Her voice is melodic, which is unusual since it is also German. In one arm she cradles a pair of brown cowboy boots.
- Samad, a manager – Is the kind of person people talk about only by accident. Samad raises his voice only when announcing things everyone already knows. The length and slope of his neck suggest the lovechild of Snoop Dogg and Dopey Dwarf. Samad’s idea of keeping things light is encouraging his underlings to call him “Sam-to-tha-Ad.”
- The Dudes Who Work at Bartell’s, two customers who buy nothing – Against the backdrop of un-tucked white button-downs with the collars open, The Dudes Who Work at Bartell’s wear striped rayon ties loose around their necks. They each are drinking Slurpees and smile at everything, making it clear that the weed is stashed in the glove box of the ’85 Peugeot, which they share.

The scene - The interior of Storables, a place of business that sells boxes and box accessories, which exist in a number well beyond reason. It is a sunny August Saturday afternoon and customers are scarce. Having been zoned in the windowless back quadrant of the store with the hanging shoe racks and the closet poles, Marques busies himself by imagining a screenplay starring a deaf child who speaks only in beat-box and the gay priest who saves him.

The German Woman walks past him on her way to the shoe racks. The eyes of Marques bob in time with her tiny hips. Marques follows her at a distance which is discreet, though the shape of his mouth is not.

Marques: Are you finding everything?

The German Woman (Holding up a metal hanging-rack system with one hand while the other holds a pair of cowboy boots): Does zis really fit on top of ze dohr?

Marques: Zes, ahem, yes. This one is the display model, so the hooks are bent a bit. (Marques takes the rack from her and straightens the metal hooks in as suggestive a way as possible.)

The German Woman: Now it vill fit?

Marques: It’ll fit. It may be tight, but it will fit. Anyway our return policy is so open.

The German Woman (moving rapidly away): Vell then, tank you I see.

As Marques watches The German Woman walk toward the exit, he feels a voice calling to him as if from behind his nutsack.

Samad: The rods should be straight at all times!

Marques: Vertical.

Samad: Perfectly vertical! The rods.

Marques: What was I thinking.

Samad brushes past Marques, his nipples jutting out authoritatively from behind his shirt. Samad does not wear an apron. The Dudes Who Work at Bartell’s appear at the other end of the aisle.

Marques: Hello. How are you doing.

The Dudes Who Work at Bartell’s are busy slurping from their Slurpees. They wave at him. Marques momentarily considers them both to be deaf and wonders after their beat-boxing skills. Eventually they speak.

The Dudes Who Work at Bartell’s: Hey man.

Marques: Are you finding everything?

The Dudes Who Work at Bartell’s (smiling): They make us ask the same thing at our store.

Marques: Where is that.

The Dudes Who Work at Bartell’s: Bartell’s. Up the street.

Marques: Can I help you with anything.

One of the Dudes Who Works at Bartell’s (smiling): It hurts me, you know?

The Other Dude Who Work at Bartell’s: Fully. It’s like I ask if you need anything then you are guaranteed to ask where to find the keychain studfinders we haven’t carried in like eight years.

One of the Dudes Who Works at Bartell’s: And you'll be very insistent and probably get upset.

The Other Dude Who Work at Bartell’s (pointing): Always. I think I see refrigerator magnets over there.

One of the Dudes Who Works at Bartell’s: Let’s go.

(As he watches them move off, Marques considers that if he looks at his watch then he will know how long it is until his break.)


The end.

if I could just put it all into all I spit.

i haven't been around to post much lately. have been working quite a bit but even more have been working on my Dear Fat Kid piece trying to get 40 absolutely pristine pages laid down for grad school app purposes. it's starting to get pretty fun; i mean we're still in the first draft stages but close to having enough that i'll be able to spend the next weeks paring them down and playing around.

this past week my theme song, the one that my alarm plays when i try and wake up early so i can write some pages before work, is Rabbit Run from the 8 Mile soundtrack. i know, eminem as creative auteur -- sophisticated shit. but that song is all about digging down and finding the momentum you need to lay down words:

i'm like a skillet bubbling until it filters up
i'm about to kill it, i can feel it building up
blow this building up, i’ve concealed enough
my cup runneth over, i done filled it up,
the pen explodes and busts, ink spills my guts
you think all i do is stand here and feel my nuts;
well i'mma show you what, you gonna feel my rush
you don’t feel it, then it must be too real to touch
i'm about to tear shit up
goosebumps, yeah, i'mma make your hair sit up.

that's my battle cry. next week it might be the girl from ipanema, or whatever, but for now Em's got my back. the pap below is excerpted from pretty early on -- it's probably nonsense without any context at all, but, hell. i'm still writing this chapter and Patois has proved an unexpectedly fun character to write.

Dear Fat Kid,

..Yesterday, in your absence, I plugged around your house, just taking stock of things. And did so with an enthusiasm Howard Stern might call “the feeling of having your hand down the pants of somebody new.” (I do not think he discounted for the scenario in which the pants are empty – are in fact wedged in a time-honored dark place in the hallway closet where they live between stacks of brown boxes, all bearing the title “Things I Need” – but, still. The image has power.) I really gave myself over to the process; in the upstairs closet I modeled some of your clothes in the manner of a committed 9-year-old stalker. I cruised the other rooms looking for signs of life that stood out against all the unfamiliarity of your world now. (And found some stuff; more on that later.)

When I heard the knock at your back door I was in the middle of being disappointed by the lack of anything even mildly pervy under your bathroom sink. How does a person end up with five open cans of Comet, I wondered. None of them are even close to empty. Five? Somehow not aware of the B-grade snooping with which I was busy, I heard the knock and trundled downstairs to find your door open and a man sitting on your couch, a white dinner plate on his lap. I stopped at the foot of the stairs.

“Hi.” I waved at him.

“Greetings,” he said without looking up. From a leather hip purse he withdrew a small pair of scissors and a conservatory of marijuana stuffed into a vaccuum-sealed pouch. Removing a long, crystalline bud, he began to cut away slivers of weed that quickly piled on the plate. My suspicion that he had done this before was confirmed when he looked up at me while his fingers continued to work. The look on his face told me that he was confused; it was then that I remembered I was standing there barefoot, wearing a pair of striped legwarmers and your commemorative Linkin’ in Lincoln! sausage contest hat. “Welcome,” he said loudly, as if to a foreigner.

“Thanks for having me,” I said eventually. “It’s nice to be here.”

His forehead unwrinkled; he shrugged and bent again to his work. I went and sat down next to him on the couch – see, saving face is not the top concern when one is presented with a strange man getting ready to smoke drugs on your friend’s couch. And this man was strange: His long, flowy black locks matched perfectly by bulging eyes; his tailored, French-cuffed business shirt was complemented by fitted denim shorts and brown clogs.

I crossed my legs so I could better admire the legwarmers you used to wear during intramural basketball games. After a while I said, “I’m Hal, an old friend of Fats.”

“Yes, yes you are,” he said, rather as though I had told him something he’d already known, such as my pro-legwarmers attitude. He ran the blunt paper along his tongue and, following one fluid roll-smooth-and-twist motion, turned and presented me with a joint the size of George Foreman’s thumb. “The thing to know about this stuff is that it doesn’t take much,” he said. Between my wary lips the joint was frightening for its girth; just the scent was so powerful as to be dizzying. High-ifying.

“I haven’t smoked weed since—”

“Shh,” he said. “Hush. Now is not the time.” He flicked a silver lighter to life and extended it to me, and as I took a deep drag he announced, “I am Patrick, though Fats calls me Patois.” I began to cough with enthusiasm.

“If it’s been that long,” he said, “you could be in real trouble.”

ogle goggles.

her eyes have a gleam, a glisten and crack
they look from between sharp strands of bangs.
god, how her eyes do inquire
and lay down that affection be given
they legislate faster than congress
or the bodies thereof.
they demand that i look longer than planned
that i suck the marrow from life
--but i am not so sure what "marrow" is,
just that it has something to do with bones--
instead let's say her eyes tell me to draw
in my breath, to wait for a beat
to hold if i please,
and enjoy having lost track of what's real.

you. complete. me.

from the collection Riddles for a Person of Medium-High Culture.

If it weren't for all this ______1_____ surrounding us, trying to _____2______ our every attempt at ______3_____, we totally would have _____4______ by now. That much is clear. As it stands though our task, our true task, is to _____5______ with a vehemence becoming a _____6______ on the night of her first true _____7______.

No. No, I remember your first ______8_____, of course i do -- it's not as though you would allow me to forget the slightest degail -- but it doesn't count. Why? Because of the way it happened, the way you tell of the _____9______ that took you by "surprise," you say, and _____10______ you in the back _____11______. That by itself is barely credible, but when you insist on emphasizing the _____12______ and how you knew you shouldn't keep _____13______, but you couldn't help it, how every time you opened your eyes you saw only _____14______ and felt fated to _____15______ again ... That's why it doesn't count. It's either fake or it came way after your first or both. Well, let's discuss it more later.

What we need to focus on right now is neither your _____16______ nor even my _____17______; our efforts must concentrate on finding the best, most ____18_______ way to _____19______ in the history of _____20______. Their humiliation at our _____21______ will be all the more profound if we were to _____22______ in some public fashion, don't you think? Yes, let's. Let's do it until the _____23______ come _____24______, until all they can think of is our _____25______ and how they will never _____26______ again.


Answer Key:

1. twinkling
2. blink
3. sparkling
4. Penguin City
5. thinkthinkthink
6. coterie extravagance
7. intersection
8. con-de-jour
9. circumspection
10. hallowed
11. vithertulously
12. "spirituality"
13. fucking around
14. sweet, sweet thighs
15. bless & bless
16. insight
17. foresight
18. difficult
19. hypothesize
20. it all
21. concern
22. blast it all
23. carabinieri
24. fire us
25. giddy juiciness
26. try this all

(thanks to the esteemed dr bryn for her help in sussing out the answers.)

i can write as many stories as i want

in the next 2 or 3 years and not run out of character names; cos today at the hospital office i filed away all the info for the incoming class of chaplain interns. some of the highlights (and there are more):

2. Alegria Albers
3. Jack Brace
5. Shayne Flowers
9. Chevy Spink
10. Bong Yang
15. Eunice Awino
16. Kollin Hogan
17. Junker Wong
18. Flavia Roach

Eunice is in kenya right now so there's no way to confirm it, but the suspicion within the office is that her name is actually pronounced A Whino. which is almost too explicit: it's like a Catch-22 name.

Alegria Albers is just beautiful; definitely she has had a lilting concerto written for her by a tortured autistic wunderkind from austria or romania or somewhere.

now that i am 30, my age prohibits me from commenting on the name Bong Yang without
a) sounding like the faux-cynical stoner of my late 20s who deliberately mis-pronounced it Ambi-ition or
b) dating the fuck out of myself by making a 16 Candles No More Yanky My Wanky the Donger Need Food reference.

Flavia Roach is a woman, and a dignified one. which is a very good thing as it will save her from the unsavory consequences of being mistaken for Flavah Roach, the roadie who stole off with the cooler containing the entire supply of nicey-nices for Too Short's west coast tour.

she looks so good in those smartypants.

she gathers up her keys and smokes, kisses the air, turns away. a silence ensues as she walks off. soon enough, the two friends refocus and find themselves looking at each other across the table.

we both just watched her leave, says the first.

probably, says the second friend, probably that has happened before and we just haven't noticed it.

i guess usually i watch while she walks off, says the first friend, neither confessing nor confiding. there's something almost austere about her now.

totally! agrees the second. lately i've been noticing that every time i'm with her... she has a, not a sadness but a somberness to her lately. and it’s a good thing; I know it’s a good thing but I can’t figure out why I know that, because I love her, her kind of humor.

when she’s on. but yeah, usually she's on so much of the time — she’s so f'ing sharp — you love it. when she turns on you, even. even then it doesn’t matter much because the way it’s funny to you; it smarts.

right. and you know this because, because you —

love it too, yes.

you do. okay. sometimes you sound like yoda if he became a therapist? but, of course you do. so what is it about her?

which part, then?

the part that is like the class clown only mean.

he laughs. the class clown only by default, but she does have that part. because right at the start she gets tired of the class clown – she decides to wait for him in the parking lot after school.

she mixes her school-related metaphors.

but she does it so fast, relentless, and the class clown doesn’t know to defend himself, and then he is all sad inside, and takes off his clown hat and gives it to her. and now, back in class, she has it in her lap.

just holding it. but what I’m asking is why her being in a smart and reflective phase makes her less barbed. barb-ish.

barby.

right, but not. it’s not like I don’t want to be around her now, quite the opposite. but she has this reserve about her, almost; she is a lot slower to rise to the surface and bite.

well, the class clown and the smartest person in class are different people.

that’s why.

that’s why. those are the types. they're just a bump on each end of the graph -- any time you go towards one you move away from the other.

all grows up and grows up.

am seated outside in the chilly air, here at the coffeeshop, trying to sketch out a savings/budget plan -- trying to look sophisticated and unflappable. and failing; i just caught my reflection in the window and saw that my face resembles that of a sexually confused gerbil. my 30th birthday is tomorrow. it looms -- not the i-will-now-weave-you-a-fabulous-hemp-blanket kind of loom, but more the abstract-yet-ominous signifier type. on this last day of 20somethingness i am struggling in my search for a bit of peace; for a bit of confidence, a bit of resoluteness in the face of the sizeable solitude that sits before me. as well as to find a way or a mode by which i can do a good job of loving the ones i love. ..and the task feels wantonly tall, today, shit. why is that? shit. i don't know.

so here i am on this gray windy sunday. i try to sit still while i fight the inertia, while i struggle against an all-at-once need for a comprehensive mission statement**. and i do eventually succeed: my body manages, for just a moment, to pass from idleness into stillness, and, then, the furthest-back place in my head clears its throat and ever-so-calmly reminds that the only needed means of strengthening myself lies in remembering my loves. just stating them to myself. then stating them to the ones i love. then demonstrating it where i can; even if, today, that is just the saying of it, there is something very nearly big in the small number of words it takes to do so. then: i love you, my peops, my bruddahs and sistahs who have been and will be there for me; you know who you are; i love you. you have kept your hands on me, have offered me your arm even at times when it has been damnably inconvenient and downright hard. i love you. am so grateful.


** thus far, rejected candidates include:
"I understand perfectly, but that doesn't mean you have to get all emotional."
"Is that really necessary?"
"Mark's Eightfold Abs - The way to the end of suffering that will help you grasp the impermanent and imperfect nature of worldly ideas and make your tummy the envy of everyone if properly developed"

Happy SKULSTICE 2005 Everybody!

hurray for the longest day of the year. hurray for my Still Being Here to enjoy it.

Things That Have Happened To Make Us Want To Make Nice With God; A List

1. have begun reading the bible again; the first time in a while i have read it for reasons not in the let's-read-Job-and-dissect-it-with-absurdist-sartorialness vein. granted, it's a gradual process: we have read the first three chapters of the book of mark. over a three-week period. but,

1a) mark gets straight to the good shit. matthew nimbly-pimblys around with his who-begat-who-firsts and his page-long accounts of pregnant women riding donkeys; mark doesn't mess. by the end of chapter 1 jesus has already performed like 4 miracles.

1b) when asked in front of crowds just What In The F he thinks he's doing (healing people all the time & casually mentioning the fact that he can forgive sin), jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man. i love this, the way it plays down his messiahness--it's more open to interpretation than Son of God. turns out he borrowed it from daniel--when gabriel appears to him in a vision, gabes calls out, Hey, You, Son of Man: What Is Happening [sic]. i love that jesus was read enough to know this, to know that people who know daniel would know there was a precedent and not condemn him. just as much for me, though, the Son of Man factor is about the kind of presence he is -- not like i typically think of omnipresence, which has a quality of over and above-ness to it. this is down here, standing across the room, eye to eye. which leads me to,

2) being at st james, singing in latin at the friday night service, enjoying the little latinish spiritual vibe; when i remember to raise my chin so the words don't get formed in my throat -- then i am looking up at the evening light pouring in through the glass dome atop the altar space, and inscribed around the rim in thick letters are the simple words I AM IN YOUR MIDST. and i start bawling. singing loudly and bawling and the louder i sing the lighter i feel and my toes are tingly and eventually i get ahold of myself but, after it's over, i cross the sanctuary to look at the statue of peter and when i look up at the dome again i see that the other side says only, AS ONE WHO SERVES. my eyes begin to stream again. and i am so happy as i leave.

3) while it is too-often and rather glibly remarked that God Has A Sense Of Humor, such a statement is not far from the truth in our experience, which is that God Has A Borderline Absurdist Appreciation Of Juxtaposition. for, when we have collected ourselves and cruised around the sanctuary lighting the occasional candle, we exit the cathedral's side door. as we round the building's corner onto 8th ave (our toes tingly, our spirits bubbly, our mind serene), we fairly bump into 2 bedraggled and dirty hobos, one of who jumps back, sizes me up quickly and asks with a gruff earnestness, "Do you know anyone who needs some CornNuts and some ID?" not cornnuts or ID, you understand -- cornnuts AND ID. we smile. look at him with eyes that are bleary with appreciation. and move on.

The Sub-Cum-Con Project.

Some of you have written to express concerns that we appear to have slowed in our ongoing endeavor to prolong obscurity. Not to worry! We are back, this time with the first of what promises to be a needlessly drawn out series entitled Sub-Cum-Context: Behind the Mask of Today’s Pop Lyrics. An expository spin on the tired trend of musical biographies, the Sub-cum-Con project will uncover exciting new ground by biographializing not the songwriter but the lyrics themselves.

The concept arose out of a mescaline-enhanced late-night conversation we had with a potted houseplant in front of our apartment building. We had been enjoying a delicious menthol cigarette and contentedly humming “Back On The Chain Gang” when the houseplant remarked that he knew the tune from somewhere but couldn’t quite place it. Soon enough, conversation had eased into the manner in which a song possessES a life of its own – one that exists quite outside of the artist who performed it. If, we posited, a specific song is able to contain a certain sense of life, then it must also possess life history, and, even more interestingly, life issues. With this hypothesis in hand, we eagerly donned the analytical lens and went in search of life-containing lyrics. What we found there, between these well-loved lines, is breathless and revealing. The first example is below. [note: a bold typeface signifies original lyrics; emergent subtext is in regular font]


from Lean On Me orig. composed & performed by Bill Withers

Sometimes in our lives / We get sores that look like hives / We all have pain / We all have sorrow / And it hurts like a mo’foh / But, if we are wise / We don’t go for our gun because / We know that there’s always tomorrow / So just call on me brother, when you need a hand / Then we can bring up the topic, of painful pustule glands / We all need somebody to lean on / We both remember that night, when “Lean on” was code for “Rub against nude” / And now / I just might have a problem that you’d understand / We were trashed but did not think, we’d end up on the motel room floor / And now it hurts like me johnson, got slammed in a door / We all need somebody to lean on / Like we are trying in vain, to pee out a mel-on / We all need somebody to lean on

(woof?)

:guest blogger : robert daltoid:

i am a lap dog
by mark :ten-gallon: huntsman

chapter 1: i like to stroll while i masturbate
chapter 2: it wasn't my allen wrench
chapter 3: that's my beautiful wife giving that hand job
chapter 4: where to hide broken porch swings
chapter 5: first the elbow, then the song
chapter 6: really now. can't you just lie still?
chapter 7: life was funny. like zebras are funny.
chapter 8: looking forward to my next hard-on

appendix: linear history of prostate effectiveness

tits and/or ass.

:
Opportunity! You Could Become A Published Author!

The editors at Turgid Matters Books are in the solicitation phase of an essay compilation that aims to lend insight to a matter of particular cultural revealingness. By amassing the grammatically-suited introspections of a variety of entrants we judiciously deem to comprise a representative sample, we will shed light on a carefully re-worded age-old question: Tits and/or Ass (Body part preference and what it reveals about the self). Oh, yes – light will be shed. Dating standards will be scaled back. Nocturnal emissions will be exculpated.

Interested parties should adhere to the requirements outlined below. In the interest of helping you achieve the level of voyeuristic reflection we seek, the following is an example of the kind of submission that will be skimmed, squinted at, and subsequently folded up and stapled into an ass-shaped hat for our pet rabbit to wear:


“When I go out to the club with my bros, I usually have a few drinks, lean back against the bar, and survey the room and then I decide if I want to score some box. First I check out the blondes. If the hair is long then my eyes will follow it down to her ass, and stay there until she turns around. But only until she turns around because it’s the tits that really churn my buttah. Some dudes pretend like they don’t like fake tits. But those dudes are fags, it doesn’t matter. The best titty job I ever had was this night just after high school. Me and my bandmates were at this party (what happened was that we all realized we were tired of the boring hard-core stuff, and so one night decided that we should make power-riff music dedicated to the themes of hardcore porn. So we did. We decided our new genre was called Core-core, and our band was called Scratchshot! Which was wicked.) Anyway this big old chick who had done some internet stuff was there at this party and we convinced her to take us each in the upstairs bedroom by turn – later we found out that she had titty-jobbed every one of us and we were like “Yes that Rocks!” And so we were all so amped and totally felt like brothers in a way we hadn’t before, you know? We went in the practice space and pounded out this anthem to her, which rocked, it was called “Thanks for the Mammaries,” and it was our most popular ever, it got played almost every week on the local college radio station…”


By contrast, here is an excerpt taken from a more substantial entry:


“…Personally, my jaw goes slack when I am confronted with the either/or attitude with which males persistently state the question: ‘Are you a tits man or an ass man?’ Yea, it is not terribly uncommon for females to use similar phraseology, though one suspects that, most often, this results from the linguistical tyranny of society’s change-resistant, rayon-like fabric. But let us momentarily accept the hypothetical premise of forcing a choice between the primary protrudinal parts of female body. What are men really choosing?

After seeing the data from a controlled study conducted in a heterosexual bar in the greater Duluth area, I was intrigued: Men who have an answer at the ready – this answer is almost always “tits” – are not really interested in which one they would like to have; rather, they would prefer to opine on the matter of which they would prefer to stare at. When asked to consider and actual choice – you get to have one but not the other - the response of one unbendingly pro-tit subject named Tad was to take a long, slow sip of his beer; his his face grew visibly somber; and I could literally see him saying wistful goodbyes to a variety of perfect handfuls, sand-dollar areolas; the waitress with the D-cups and the biker chick who liked to bite her own nipples. I asked if he had indeed changed his mind; he nodded. And before I could ask why, he offered, “Yup. I’ll have to hold on to the ass. Gotta have butt. It’s practically attached to the part that you nail.”

(Please keep in mind that the above are just examples of suitable and not-; we seek to attract a variety of experiences, including those of women. We are having a hard time with the women.)

Do you have an answer to the question of Tits and/or Ass? Send it to us! If your writing has a certain sexiness to it, we may very well read what you have to say. Please clearly delineate a thesis, and make sure your submission is five medium-sized paragraphs in length: attention-grabbing introduction; wholly redundant conclusion; and three lithe, taut body paragraphs in between. If your nipples are attractive when erect, include a series of decreasingly-tasteful pictures so that we may confirm your qualifications. If your ass passes the pencil test,** send verifiable photographic evidence. Best of luck.




**Developed in 1953 by the mildly greasy, sexually ambiguous nephew of Alfred Kinsey, the Pencil Test is widely considered the apex of the Teacher Says It’s Part of Class Period, which in itself is looked upon by scholars as the first sign of postmodernist acquiescence among our nation’s youths. Though it is pre-dated by the True-or-Falsies Quiz, the Pencil Test was the clear inspiration for the Protractor Opinion and, later, the notorious Spit-or-Swallowball Fight. The Pencil Test refers to the practice of removing pants and under-things, then taking a standard #2 pencil and placing it lengthwise along the crease where the heel of the buttock meets the thigh. If, when the hand is removed, the pencil stays in place, you have failed and deserve a spanking. If the pencil falls to the ground, you have passed. And deserve a spanking.

paralleliality.

so yesterday a couple of my (god how i hate that i am about to write the following 2 words) online friends were bantering about relationships and the guy was complaining about how he has been prematurely and premeditatively burned by girls and how he will never trust again. and moss (who is a girl herself) said that he needed to ease the f off with the desperation and relax; to not expect anything; to enjoy his chance to find "a string of awesome girls to play with serially or parallelly." i smiled at that, then immediately wrote a personal message to moss:

the updated version of the OED gives the following definition:

Parallelilialism - the grammatically gentiled -ism state wherein one is continually in search of another person who possesses a similar fondness for linguistical plasticity; (eg, with regard to the bendiness of words "Thank the Lord, at last i find someone who has a sophisticated sense of parallellial inventionalness" P.Laureal, Notes and Other Blunders Vol 4, 1957)

then i paused, lit a smoke. and realized that, for me, her use of that word encapsulizes both the dilemna (of doubting your ability to trust a girl again ever) and the solution: i now have a crush on moss. simply for the cadence of the way she chose to phrase her reply. "parallelly" is a fun and make-believe word; it has a delighful odor. it is the kind of word that is invented when 2 kids are up in the tree fort discussing schematics for the most efficient way to assail the obnoxiously needy neighbor boy with water balloons. and that is so fun. moss is so fun.

everyone, even ferris, wants to treat -isms like cold product -- let's put your fascism side by side with my nihilism and take turns moaning about humanity. but i think -isms are also much tinier and more important than that; i truly actually believe that your very first thin-sliced impression of someone can give you an accurate and true sense of their particular energy and mode of operation on this wobbly spinning circle. meanwhile, though, you have all sorts of outside influences and inner daemon-like-figures that do their subtle damndest to sway and distract and ultimately damn you to pursue those who move away from you. so we must take care. ..i say that as someone who is days removed from having his heart as badly bruised as it has been since i was taking english classes that taught the inflexible merits of the 5-paragraph essay [Bing. Bang. Bongo] and meanwhile i walk around, functioning and sharply sentient while simultaneously aware that my spirit has had its ballast cut and is drafting ever-further away from me. we must take care, but ultimately we must re-learn to trust that which every one of my 6-yr-old sunday school students has in spades: the ability to look a person in the shins-and-then-the-waist-and-then-the-tits-and-then-the-eyes and know, with instant and honest surety, whether she can be trusted.

for a look inside the cover

..of the newest work by the internationally self-esteemed author RB Daltimeter, go here. courtesy of Words Are Born Publications.

children, this week i will stand here while you teach me about love.

during 1st grade sunday school at UPC, which i’ve been helping lead for a couple of months now, after the lesson we have group discussion questions:

one that we asked this week is “what’s love – or, how do you know what love is?”

hannah, age 5, tentatively raised her hand. and suddenly i couldn’t breathe for my spirit shot up and got lodged firmly in my throat:

“when your name feels safe in someone else’s mouth – then you know you are loved.”

"everybody thinks lesbians are cool until his girlfriend turns into one."

just now outside it is sunny and lightly raining on me at the same time. which i like, always; is a rare kind of juxtapositional beauty via madame nature. also, because i am in a quasi-reflective sort of state -- the kind my writerly end is wont to make too much of -- nature's simultaneous beauty tells that now is the time to lay down a history of how i came to think of myself as a writer; to feel with certainty that writing was something i was called to do. (i haven't mapped it out in my head and so do not know if this will be long to the point of tedium. if so, please accept my apology in advance.)

January 1996
- mark decides not to pursue a minor after all. he realizes that "minor" is a word he is already adequately acquainted with; as such, he does not need an official transcript to remind him of this familiarity.
- so now he has a bunch of credits available; mark deems that he will take english classes that sound fun. one of these is Introduction to Creative Writing.

February 1996
- mark finds himself at hot spots coffee shop -- an all-night place where he often goes to study and flirt unsuccessfully. on this night, he is to write his first short story, due the following day.
- he has not the slightest idea how to begin and so just sits there, feeling increasingly useless and dirty. he decides to write this; hence, the opening lines are
- god i need a shave. a shower and a shave. a shave and a shower. whichever.
- the rest of the story -- about a dude who discovers, after the fact, that his girlfriend has broken up with him so she can date girls -- follows immediately and with ease.
- upon completion of the assignment, mark feels a tinge of self-satisfaction that his studies have never before granted him.
- mark sleeps only briefly but wakes up feeling fresh. sharp.

March 1996
- mark has his first office visit with dr randy, his creative writing professor.
- in that meeting, dr randy kicks his feet up on the desk, flips through the story, and sets it down with a smile on his face. he says that
- mark's writing reminds him so strongly of beck lyrics and asks if mark knows beck?
- beck's current album has not left mark's stereo in 9 weeks.
- mark decides to dedicate his life to writing, which right away he begins referring to as his craft.

..so, yeah: in all earnestness, that is how long it took. now i will go back inside so i can listen to beck's guero record some more.

drop knowledge not the ball.

..A glimpse inside the newest hard-hitting work from MediumWell Books

Drop Knowledge Not The Ball : The sociological impact of the sports metaphor

by Dr Mark Huntsman, PhD, PdA, BdSM


This book is fondly dedicated to John Tesh


“If you fumble, if you fall
If you muff the pass
If you force us to punt
If, for any reason, you drop the ball
I personally will tear open your ass.
Now go out there and just have fun.”
- Coach Bear Bryant of the Texas A&M Crimson Tide


~ TABLE OF CONTENTS ~

Chapter 1. That Is Out of Bounds – The parameters of social acceptability
Chapter 2. The Mendoza Line – The benefits of a collective mediocrity
Chapter 3. Take a Timeout – Postponing the inevitable in a masculine way
Chapter 4. Buzzer-Beater – The superiority of last-second accomplishment
Chapter 5. And One! – How mild physical hardship reinforces entitlement
Chapter 6. Hit a Home Run – Understanding physical intimacy in 90-foot increments
Chapter 7. Take It To the Rack - Female perception of sex in sports imagery due to the predominance of sticks and balls and racks
Chapter 8. Changing Teams – Discussing homosexual impulse without removing your beer hat
Chapter 9. Dribble Penetration – The art of pulling out with mad style*
Chapter 10. 4th and Long – Disguising profound desperation as opportunity


*The inspiration for this chapter comes via the esteemed scholar RB Daltimeter III

penis has an idea that could be helpful.

you politely ask me
to button my collar
to tighten my belt
if i wore a tie you might
wish it rather more straight.

(i mean, no, that came of badly--
but you would like to sit at a party
to listen while i speak urgently
of the postmodernist bubble
and its imminent burstation)

you rather forcefully suggest
that i reel it in, maybe leave a nice tip
and put it back in my pants;
the verbiosity of my penis does nothing
but extend the rebuttal.

if he may, penis would like to share something?*

you suggest that i force the issue of myself,
that i appeal to my spirit's court
on grounds that verbal contract is not--

penis wants to re-iterate a certain willingness

--aargh

you sink your fingers into me with a great care
not plainly different from that which came before
except your eyes are unlike
they are breathless with understanding
the sheerness of their faith makes my own eyes squint.

then you ask me to walk you to the car
where you kiss me briefly, ask me to be tremendous
and pull away

the ball chills in my court.
the ball casts an eye at my broken shoelace.

you ask me (penis, et. al) to be fabulous




*rebuttal. re-Butt-all. buttal. butt.

PSI: Special Treatment Unit

today marks the first in a series of life-recalibration efforts that we are calling (with redundant sarcasm) the Special Treatment. after meeting this morning with the director of seattle pacific's mfa writing program (now cemented as our #1 target school) we had a lunchtime session with the venerable bonip, our therapist. (seriously--"venerable" is the word for her: she's getting paid to sit there and listen, but she does so with a quiet grace that leaves us feeling distinctly like we are being granted something.) it was here that the term "recalibration" escaped our lips maybe 14 times in 45 minutes--but in a good way. which is to say that we have some momentum going in matters of both brain and spirit, and it feels real nice.

is a welcome change... to paraphrase bonip, it seems to her as though now i am standing in a grassy field, while my prior state called to mind the image of looking up from an empty grave while simultaneously standing on the edge of a cliff. which is fabulously paradoxical. it's as though, were i fortunate enough to climb out of the grave, i would take one step and promptly tumble into the abyss. ..it is perhaps fitting that my f'ing therapist's conception of my dark side looks to have been produced by mel brooks. but the point is that i am in a field; before, grave-perched-on-edge-of-nothingness; now, a field. (around me, each blade of grass is sunlit. soft pink worms leap from the ground into the happy beaks of waiting robins. in the cooler, the ice ne'er doth melt.)

so the task before us is a simple one: to keep the momentum going. and for this the Special Treatment is required. it is exactly one step long, consisting of: get up early. my life currently involves no daily obligations that begin before 10am, so my arising "early," as it is commonly understood, takes some doing. why it has to happen is twofold: i need to write; i need to pray. and any honest approximation of either happens only in the am, before the spindly pokey wires of daily life have had time to close in and begin jabbing at me. how praying and writing affect me on a given day is a known (not to say understood) quantity: writing--something that is my own--sharpens my eye; it lends my verbs a certain tartness, and these things cannot help but carry over into the rest of my day. meanwhile, prayer--thankful prayer, as opposed to dear-god-don't-let-the-bank-call-till-tuesday prayer, which bonip calls Vending Machine Prayer--serves to make me almost palpably more thankful and loving and honest and capable. we have been terribly unsuccessful in recent times at both of these endavors, hence the application of the SpecTreat. we'll see how it goes; while there are only a very few things i know about myself for certain, putting a personal certitude into play has always proved harder than it has any right to. but i like it, here in my field. very much.

a very long forgetfulness.

so dr. john medina, a family friend, brain researcher, teacher, and generally overwhelming person for the strength of his love and the vociferousness of his mind, has somehow taken it upon himself to actively mentor me in the process of sifting through my spaghetti-piled career path. and he is alarming for the way he engages me, for the manner in which he waits for my eyebrow to arch with interest, then dives headlong into some phenomenally fecund tangent to illustrate his point--quarterback fran tarkenton's invention of the deliberately broken play [the benefits of premeditated improv] or the circle of fifths as the unwavering structure beneathcharlie parker's improvisational music [the observation that the most breathtakingly sudden creations possess a simple-but-rigid foundation] or fox2p, the uniquely human gene that lets our thoughts translate into language with immediacy and ease [honest, useful communication as a skill and commodity]. he is like charles wallace murry (the younger brother from the wrinkle in time books) trapped in the body of a bearded, venerable george costanza. (remember charles wallace? he's the kid everyone in town thinks a retard, cos he always looked so serious and never spoke. not one word. then, one day when he was 4, he started to talk. in complete, complex sentences. ideas poured out of him.) yesterday medina was analogicalizing about the transference of information from shortterm to longterm memory, and i asked him how long that takes. he got this crackle of excitement behind his eyes and was like,

really want to know? how long do you think--how long for any piece of information to lock in and never be forgotten? and i was like,

hmm...90 minutes? and he got this kind of giddy smile and was like,

yeah, no. 10 years. it takes 10 years.

and i was like, f me. right? how do they figure this shit out? i have only the sliveriest sliver of a clue. but. he's teaching a new university course in the fall about the biology of learning, and i get to take it. ..maybe i have a natural interest for this kind of stuff; more likely it's a hybrid result of teaching distractful teenagers and my RA work at iLABS -- whatever the reasons, I think my interest in learning to learn is a sustainable one. which is exciting. super-extra-duper-for-reals exciting. it's going to be a lot of work.

postsript-cum-inquiry -

almost certainly this is a completely unneeded, almost self-self-referential thing to do, but. for some reason i am compelled to make note of my blog-absence of late. it is due in part to an un-new and unsurprising lack of focus; but even more it stems from a re-direct of said focus. (am very quickly falling very much in love; am also in the middle of mental wanderings regarding my future schooling/career-type paths. [i strongly dislike that recent days have heard me use the word path quite so much; path, together with direction, course and endpoint, have conspired to make me feel a grade-school copernicus -- too naiive to object but intuitively certain that it makes no sense to conceive of your every ambition as leading straight away from you in a line.]) so, i've just decided to ask all of my closests, namely you, a question: let's say that i'm back in school in the fall of ‘06. studying writing, but with the primary aim of equipping me to teach writing. also let's say that a good chunk of energy in the coming months is to be spent locking down a bunch of pages of my shit for application purposes, but that, after that is done, i’ll have a chunk of time to work as i please with no concerns of it leading anywhere, other than keeping my pantry stocked with a variety of ramens. this is a rapid-fire, thin-slicing sort of question -- answers are encouraged to be honest and wide-ranging, from “you would make the best rock star ever” to “you would be the movie star ever.” (it is worth noting seriously that, while there is no such thing as a stupid question, a stupid suggestion is not so hard to come by. as such, please refrain from demanding that i do something like sign up for a seminar series in balloon art; ie, when considering what mark should do with himself, bear in mind that fitting and useful are not always interchangeable.) the actual question is twofold: a) what do you think i should do for work during that time and, more importantly, b) if you were in my (most probable) shoes what would you do. extra credit for describing the shoes – should they be sensible walking shoes? kangaroos perhaps? loafers? please, god, don’t let them be loafers.

it's my party, and i'll wear pants if i want to (i do not).

today is NoPantsDay, everyone. the mandate for observance is, you know, kind of obvious. but should you require context, go here.


am sitting here alone on saturday evening, jittering happily in anticipation of tomorrow’s sonics vs. spurs: game 1. the supers have been ever-so fun to watch. one week ago, ray allen was awfully retarded; was awful in his retardation. his shotclock-beating, game-settling, off-balance-fadeaway-rainbow 3-pointer with a minute remaining was called by announcer kevin calabro as well as a shot can be called: they give it to the man; he drifts right and lets it fly … boom! goes the dynamite!

tuesday’s series-ending game was extra fun cos i watched the game from a stool at bishop's – the one bar on vashon island with tvs. lynnette and i tromped over to vushina that afternoon for reasons that are still unclear; either we want to move there together or we want to pretend want to move there. running around was super fun, though; and at bishop’s the trailer boys were out in force to watch the game and drink and hollah. when i went in to the men's room, a guy (big, excessively hairy, mullet-possessing) came in to use urinal next to mine, and another dude walked in to use the stall. their exchange is as follows.

"Wassup!!"
"Drainin' the spices, alright!"
"Whooooooo-oooop!!"

and, you know : Draining the Spices? yeah. that's what he said. who would've thought that the bishop's men’s room would provide my favorite mixed metaphor. of all time. not me. but damned if i’m not excited for the series.

word is (re)born.

here in our cyclical world – not the grand-karma, circle-of-life kind so much as it is the repetitious, dulls-the-senses kind of cyclical; think spinning tires and asphalt and the dank intrusive smell of hot rubber – we are in what looks to be arm’s length of a tipping point. a new beginning, if you will. now, granted. we may have tried very hard not to notice, but by now we cannot help being at least partly aware that every weekly flip of the calendar seems to bring with it a warbling internal rhapsody about new beginnings or tipping points. on this particular monday (sounds like someone’s got a case of them!) we are nonetheless convinced that it’s a new day. for one, slowly and unavoidably i have become aware that my every serious desire to be formatively productive is a reaction to my well-worn inclination to a) party b) lay down or c) lay down and party; not only that, but my desire to hypothesize and rhapsodize about the above realization has at last at last evaporated. so. from our vantage here in the back of the café, it would seem that we have backed ourself into a corner: change closes in from every side. as recently as yesterday i’ve talked about needing a catalyst – a spark. an agent of change. but today i breathe a sigh, rub my eyes, and raise my head to see that every book on the shelf calls for revolution; every napkin on the counter begs to be frantically scribbled upon; every album in the folder promises to make our eyes wide with love. resistance is … not “futile,” exactly. but it’s been done. so let’s experiment.

lately i have been of a serious mind to seriously re-engage with the story i’m in the middle of; efforts have been stifled by my internal quibblings as to the voice and motives of the narrator. it is baffling only in the mildest sense, yet enough for me to scribble aimlessly about how i want to recast the character, a process wherein my eyes are too often narrowed and i end up using the word “theme” in every other sentence. i have never liked journal-writing, but essentially this is just what i’ve been doing: journaling on the behalf of my protagonist. one of the few things i know for sure about the character is that the idea of keeping a journal appalls him – just decide what you think and move on, already. the strength of his feeling on this matter, coupled with his page-one compulsion to begin to write his friend letters nearly every day, is part of what is supposed to give him some duplicity or depth – to make him interesting. this is all prelude. what will happen in the coming days is that every now and again hal will be given the floor; he’s got this idea that if he were to write a journal-type entry about his conception of and treatment by the author, then i would just leave it alone and finish the f’ing story already. stay tuned.

write white like me.

my old friend & professor had told me she was excited for ian mcewan's new book, saturday. this morning i saw an interview with mcewan on salon.com, so i clicked it and let my eyes scan along the lines, absent of any definite expectation. before i'd reached the bottom of page one, though, i realized: here is a guy who speaks with a trained, easy precision at the same time that he fairly reeks of perspective. heretofore, my response to author interviews was either a) reflexive disdain when i sense that there's a hole where a sense of humor should be or b) chummy excitement--partly for the warmth or intelligence of the author, but mostly for an accessibility and style of prose that clicks with me; that allows me to think practical thoughts along the lines of i am so going to do this--i am going to write loads of books and be popular, hello. but ian.m provoked a variant response, due to the almost preternatural ease with which he said things like,

"One of the privileges of writing novels is to give characters views that you have fleetingly but that are too irresponsible for you ever to defend. You can give them to a character. His [the lead protagonist in saturday] views on magical realism, I could never really ... I know there are some great novels in that vein. But still..."

i read this and laughed at the memory of trying Really Hard to like magical realism in college, but never quite getting there. then i glanced to the right end of my desk at a printout of the latest chapter of my story, wherein the narrator agrees, on a dare, to go gay for one month. huh, i said.

and, also, here's another of mcewan's parcels -

"I thought I'd have a go at challenging the notion that happiness 'writes white.' That we're drawn to forms of misery and conflict because they're easier to describe, while happiness is bland. There's supposed to be a universality to happiness while there's a distinctly individual quality about misery."

that one struck with particular acuity, since, at this particular point, writing with self-congratulatory irony requires a minimum of effort. sarcasm is a kind of muscle memory. and it's not like i am not aware of it--just yesterday, in the closing moments of the night, it struck me that how i choose to write plays into the regard with which i hold both my inside self and the outside world. so then to wake up, pour coffee and read those words even before i'd had time to settle into my niche of sarcastic awareness--it made me think.

if, in the coming days, i come across as rather unnecessarily bland or boring or needlessly glib, please do not take offense; i am practicing with dedication before breakfast-time each day. one day i shall be content and interesting. at the same time. and, while the characters i write will be the only ones allowed to hold views one might consider questionable, i've never had a particular feel for the dramatic anyway.

what doesn't kill us.

after listening to me ramble, a friend assessed that it sounds as though the job search is making me "a bit poopy." i squinted my eyes for a second and was like,

not quite -- we've passed Poopy. that was a ways back; even before we hit Frustrated. Desperate is also behind us -- was like three exits ago. we've arrived at ... not a "crossroads," exactly, but a meeting place of some kind, where Need & Clarity have intersected to grant me a Zenlike Calm. my friend just looked at me, slack-jawed and silent. which i thought was appropriate.

so i thought to repeat it when i spoke by phone to my old professor, who disagreed, calling it "frail and solipsistic;" i believe the man who overheard my phone conversation at the coffeeshop muttered something about "a grade-A clusterfuck;" while my writer-friend commented later that it "sounds more like narcissism minus the fun parts." i am impervious: their skepticism only makes me stronger. man.

I'M so EXCITED! In the WRONG PLACES!!

someone from the group of 5 really close friends i studied in england with in college sent the rest of us her new email address, and it triggered a wash of what's-going-on-with-me messages from the whole crew. when i looked in my inbox i got all excited, simply for the prospect of reading the words of my england cats. it says a lot i think when a series of group update-type emails makes me feel all tingly with warm reminiscence and love. that i care for each of them is a primary difference-maker, but also it must have to do with the fact that they all are competent writers; you know how most peops, when they email a group, are compelled to say everything with mislayed emphasis? i subscribed to an email group for my high school class, and everyone--even the multiple-phd sophisticated research types--sends these long updates that are urgent for no reason and full of yelling in the wrong places. like, my update would read along the lines of

HELLO Everybody!

It has been so long it feels like!! I'm SO SORRY NOT to have written sooner, but life has been CRAZY. Just to catch you up: Exactly one year ago yesterday, my GIRLFRIEND and LOVE OF MY LIFE and me decided TO BREAK UP!!! we each agreed that "we" had some "GROWING TO DO!"

I got off to a fast start; and proceeded to play basketball ALL DAY LONG as well as SMOKE too MUCH WEED. In retrospect, i can see that it was a pretty sad time for ME!!

Now, though, things are Much Mo Bettah :: BOTH of my contract jobs--one of which i'd hoped would turn into an IN-HOUSE WRITER position--ended EARLY. And on the SAME MONDAY!!! I was feeling quite MOPEY and sad about having NO JOB and no money and NO PROSPECTS TO SPEAK OF, but then my roommate came home and I told him about it and he just said,

"SOUNDS LIKE SOMEBODY'S GOT A CASE OF THE MONDAYS!"

..and wow, i'm tired. it takes a lot of energy just to write like that. A LOT OF ENERGY!!! anyway, in case the circumstance arises where you, the general reader, should be interested in the actual update rather than the form said update takes, the rest goes like this: i've got nearly 3 months to reach my goal of having a job i want to be having when i turn 30. and something should happen by then. i've been officially dating a girl for nearly TWO WEEKS!! probably i'm in love with her. i first met her 5 years ago. and, oh! if you read that quasi-erotica story i wrote for fatalbeauty a while back ("you are my thumb that is useful for the road") , she is the one i wrote it for and about as a going-away present when she moved to denver. she came back to finish up some credits at the uw for winter quarter, and i slowly worked my magic. which is the only way anything approximating magic has ever been worked by me. anyway she's stayed here and we're together and i like her and i have a new computer so i've started work on my story again and as soon as i pick up a new job, and a car, and a new place to live, it'll all be settled and people will stop looking so disappointed all the time.

it’s a pleasant day in purgatory.

the morning finds me at the starbucks café inside of the qfc at university village. a corporation within a corporation. i am rather unsure of what i--the consumer within the consumer--am doing there, but there i sit. sipping my coffee. gazing at the eery blankness of my calendar lends me a moment of empty content--but something catches my ear and i look up at the tv screen to see cnn headline news. the volume is up more than is strictly necessary, which is to say, at all. and i have this moment of non-recognition where it is not clear why the station exists; like, in my quasi-existential frame of mind, in this moment, i am honestly unable to pin down how anyone could go about creating an all-day news network without considering that news needs to be made all the day long or the anchors will have nothing to say. but even before it has fully expressed itself this quandary is being laid to rest, for

deborah, the commentator-announcer woman, suddenly has her screen split so as to share space with betty, the in-house exercise-expert woman, who is sitting at what looks to be the far end of the same desk (and already i am grinning for the marvelous redundancy of a split-screen shot of two people sitting next to each other). betty distinguishes herself by having her neckless business top be a decisive pink instead of deborah’s wilted mauve. she provides an almost lilting commentary for the segment on urban exercise-—something to do with the integration of brightly-colored inflatable balls, which allow your cardio-intensive exercises to be performed without your having to stand. but betty is just getting limber. looking excited now-—looking like she is ready to barrage us with helpful tips-—betty does just that, and we are off. 180 seconds from now, we will have picked up a wide variety of useful tips about walking. the first of which is: “concentrate. don’t lose focus. for most of you, this will mean not talking on your cell phone.” mmm, yes. nice. keep going, betster. and she does-—from the consternated frowny look on her face (to convey non-cellular concentration) she is on to arms: “use your arms to really get you going. don’t be willy-nilly about it,” she says as her wrists flop aimlessly about, like she’s doing an impression of the gay man she met. “really work those arms in front of you-—make a fist with your hands and punch them forward: just like hitting a nail with a hammer! hitting. punching!” she shows us how to do it, but because of the high desk she sits behind her closed fists are effectively moving straight up and down, with a sharp, piston-like economy. her arms are still pumping as her head swivels to her right, “back to you, deborah.”

a long and narrow sigh escapes my lips like i’m exhaling a stream of imaginary smoke. i do this, sometimes. usually it means that i have encountered a welcome defrocking of some misplaced seriousness or pretense. that light has been shed on some absurdity and, as a result, i feel better about my own coniferous station, my persistent cog-in-wheeldom. why is this so? why is my daily sense of myself tied so plainly to things which have nothing to with me? i don’t know. but i don’t know that i care to know; on this day, at least, betty and deborah have done a fine job of reminding that the confines of this shit i’m in are not quite so narrow and stinky as they often seem. refills, after all, are just 50 cents.

you're the one i think about most every time.

i go to read my friend blacklisted's journal today and it says only,

"IT PUTS the lotion..."

which flashed me back to freshman year of college with a quickness: my roommate and i struggling to get our cheap vcr paused in the right spot so we could record that line of dialogue from the silence of the lambs (and the "..on its skin, or it GETS THE HOSE again" that follows) as our outgoing voicemail message.

(it's fun to remember how, back then, such a passing absurdity commanded my full and unabashed attention. i was meticulous. would not blink before spending 2 hours to concoct a voicemail message even when i knew that only like one other person would think it funny, and then only the first time they heard it. as valentine's day approached that first year, i took proper stock and determined that i had 12 crushes, 5 of them serious. so i had lunch, ate a baggie of chocolate-covered espresso beans and went to the library, where i spent the next 9 man hours making 12 exact copies of the red-heart-and-lace valentine that calvin gives susie one year---she opens it and reads: "dear susie, i hate you. drop dead. calvin.")

later in the semester i came across a tape of the (one) milli vanilli album, and when i showed him the cover my roommate had a near-epileptic freakout. he had some...rather unsavory memories associated with that record, apparently. he did not want to talk about it. so the next morning, he goes to class and i go straight to the stereo; spend the next while re-recording our outgoing message, from the spoken intro to "girl you know it's true." the first voice is female, the other belongs to milli:

"so what are you doing back?"

"well, i sat back and thought about the things we used to do. It really meant a lot to me. You mean a lot to me."

"i really mean that much to you?"

"girl, You Know It's True."

Chasing the Huntsman.

r.becker couldn't remember my blog's url, and, in the course of googling for me, came across Chasing Alex ..it's a piece of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit fan fiction. that any one person decided that law & order: special victims unit fan f'ing fiction [hereon LOSVUFFF] would be a great idea, let alone have dozens of other peops who would write and submit hundreds of LOSVUFFF chapters, is quite remarkable. by which i mean, "worthy, i suppose, of some remark."

as is the fact that i've come off looking so poorly. i mean, i know it's "fiction" or whatever, and anyway i became immune to slander some time ago. (having oddly vicious and slanderous remarks hurled at me is not unnormal; and, no matter, my ego is hewn of rock. not actual "rock," you understand, but a very metaphorically hard, rock-like material).

so i'm used to this. all i can say is that, if you're going to slander me, at least have some tact: paint me as colossally amoral/evil as needs be, but in the guise of a mad criminal master or a long-con wunderkind or some nefarious somebody with a cool hideout. all i'm saying is that a little nuance does everybody good, from the slanderr to the slandee.

here is an excerpt:

...at least Alex had the decency to be sweating a little. There was a soft sheen on her throat . . . and the front of her shirt was clinging in places . . . .

"Do you want to get something to eat after this?"

"I don't think you're going to want to be around me," Olivia replied.

"Why not?"

"I'm hot and sweaty and dripping wet."

"So why wouldn't I want to be around you?" Alex hopped up on the curb to make her way around a jogger who was losing steam.

There were so many things she could say right now, Olivia decided, most of them unwise. She stalled for time by taking another sip of water, then casually looked around again at her fellow runners. She wasn't really doing that badly; hell, there were more people behind her than in front of her, right? A zealous race volunteer yelled encouragement at the runners as they passed the 2.5-mile marker.

She could hear Alex saying something else, but she was momentarily distracted. Funny thing about crowds, she thought; you always think you see someone you know, and it never is. In the first mile, for example, there'd been that woman who looked exactly like Petrovsky from behind, but of course it wasn't. And now this guy, up ahead on the left, looked like Mark Huntsman.

A lot like Mark Huntsman.

A lot like a six-time rapist who skipped bail last fall, then disappeared somewhere within the boroughs as only a person with money can.

This is silly. Why would a serial rapist be running in a charity race . . . with all these women . . . . Old habits die hard . . . .

The man in question was jogging with two young women, maybe in their early twenties, if that, both of them laughing at something he said. Chiding herself for her paranoia, Olivia nonetheless found herself moving nearer to him. Was that a scar on the side of his neck? Right where Chris Gardner had managed to slice Mark Huntsman with a pair of scissors before he beat her unconscious?

With a deep breath – you can do this – Olivia picked up her pace, edging closer until she was only a few feet away to his side. At that moment, fate intervened: As the group of runners rounded another corner, the man's gaze fell upon her. Recognition crossed his face.

That's right, you bastard. You know me.