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.

"shit--hold on. a bird just flew off with my smokes,"

i said with surprising calm. but any hint of evenness left my voice as i made haste across the long, long stretch of grass in pursuit of the larcenous crow. the cigarettes dangled from his beak. my arms flailed, my left clutching a cigarette (never a thing you want to clutch; a cane, maybe, or a hammer, but not a cigarette) while my right sought to keep the phone to the ear of my smoking swearing self.

why did my right hand do this--so i could hear dalton laughing at me? that's what he was doing, and rightly so. i had just come out of a meeting with a marketing director who told me the freelance project i was to spend the next month writing was "moving in a new direction." (her look as she said this recalled the mildly constipated face of my old girlfriend during our break-up talk, after which she trotted happily into the closet, where she could play soccer and spend all day not shaving her legs.) less than a workday earlier, a uw staffer had called me up and informed me that my services would no longer be needed at my temp job. he didn't tell me this--he informed me, with a deliberate vulcan dryness that suggested he had no life left behind his eyes. i nearly told him this; but then, i also almost told him that having a job with "staff" in the title is obvious and gay.

eventually i got my smokes back. two of the crow's buddy-crows turned on him and tried to get the pack, it fell, and i pounced. caught my breath. dalton did a terrible job of suppressing his laughter, and the tragicomedy of this whole stew i'm in hit me with a welcome force. dalton said he was reminded of the simpsons episode where they go to new york and homer gets conned and then mugged and then is standing on the street, penniless and miserable, when a bird flies by and takes his ice cream. and i was like, well, things may not be looking so good right now. but i'll get there. and, one day,

"someone will call me 'sir' without adding, 'you're making a scene.'"

the state of sheer.

"i don't get what the big deal is," said my portland friend who watched the 35,000 foot plume mt. st helens sent up earlier this week. she went on about how she hikes all the time, is active outside and generally one with nature. so the enormity of the reaction by the news people and much of the public just didn't click with her.

seems to me it has to do with our collective unbending fixation on disaster. even the possibility of biggie-sized tragedy is so very horrific and attractive. the attention we pay to a single spurting plume of smoke, then, is perhaps a bit overly-rapt. it cannot have so very much to do with any sort of symbiotic love relationship between us and nature, because, generally, our love for her has no legs. (i mean i grew up by the woods, rollicking around with my dogs and building lean-tos with only a penknife and a ball of twine to aid me. now, though, when nature bends down to grant me a moment of awe-some respite, she finds me grateful for exactly as long as it takes to re-direct my attentions back into myself: i’m finished soaking in the gorgeous solstice twilight in the same instant that my cigarette is done; i persistently claim to really like hiking and have gone exactly twice in the last 4 years; the one encounter with wildlife my memory recalls more than any other is the time i saw a marmot poo. ..he thought he was hidden behind a boulder, but i saw it come out.)

so nature gets undersold, typically; but her trump card is natural disaster. very big, bad things that humans have no ability whatsoever to control are gripping. even the hint of such a thing can inspire obsession. a seven-mile-high hint is…is rather gripping, as hints go. as gripping goes, for that matter. and it’s not just for the lack of control; but also for the lack of commonly rational reason behind natural disaster. i don’t mean tectonic-plate-movement rational, i mean why-oh-why-must-this-happen rational. natural disaster is not quantifiable in any moral sense; it is tragedy, stripped down to its simplest elements.

and, you know, within that framework, volcanoes are to natural tragedy what boxing is to sports. boxing, however you may think of it, is as close to pure competition as a sport can get—you square two men off, say “go!” then stand back until one of them falls over. the power lays in the rawness of it. the same goes for volcanoes--in the disaster pantheon, volcanoes are the money shot. earthquakes are quite fine, as tragedies go, but the magic is dimmed by the fact that a fault lives beneath us--there's no face. nothing to personify. ask people what they think of at the mention of the '89 san fran quake and i'll bet 3/4 will blurt, Bay Bridge. (in my own memory, the bay bridge is very much the persona; it bears no small culpability and i can remember, 4 years later, being bitterly nervous as i drove across it.) tornadoes are great, so long as you have a sexy victim combo like dorothy/toto. or, better yet, a bill paxton type to run blindly after the twister, his knuckles white around his palm pilot. again the problem is one of personification; the transience of a tornado--the brevity of its existence--makes any prolonged response to it (anger or awe or despairing wonder) difficult.

but a mountain, a volcano--that’s a face. i come around the corner on a freshly bright sunny day, and there’s Rainier. looking down at me. and even from 150 miles away she is HUGE; even at that distance her silence has a low tenor that emanates oldness and sagacity and a quietly authoritarian, dr. bruce banner-ness. her subterranean growl clearly says: You Won't Like Me When I'm Angry. i always stop for a moment to look at her, even when i'm driving. and my first thought is, my god, you are sheer...sheer beauty, sheer power; sheerness encapsulated. the state of sheer. another thought trails after this one, and it says in its tiny pipsqueak voice, “don’t get mad at us, okay? let’s play nice.”

yeah! make that change!

it’s so nice outside. am in a particular brand of funk, here at the office today. here at PDS (Patient Data Services), where i have the patience to service nobody. where i am to sit still as i weigh the shortcomings of copious neat-sounding acronyms against the brassbound need of professional types to make everything simultaneously concise and hard to understand.

so i am straggling a bit, here. I do not in fact need senseless distraction---what I need, turns out, is something to chew on. a teaser, a shred, a strip of jerky on which my mind can chew. the parameters--the ones i'm making up right this minute--state that this imaginational chew toy should not be Heavy, ie, a long and unwieldy consideration such as MCPRACDA [My Career Path Resembles A Career Dark Alley] or FOOFMOTFOMR [Figure Out Own Future, Move On To Future of My Relationship (with a particular pixie of a girl whom to date i have avoided obsession with, but only narrowly; i do not need to be spending my morning break in the bathroom stall writing lovelorn poetry on my knee)]. but neither should this non-acronyminal “something” be entirely devoid of meaning-—i’ve tried that. turns out that composing a list that speculates as to the different ways my latina supervisor ended up with the nickname "gizmo" is a less than satisfactory way to pass the time. i need something with a little more meat on the bone--need to chew on it, yes, but also it should have some flavor. "flavah," i believe the young people call it. anyway, i decided that this was my task to-day, to find a mental chew toy to occupy my imagination's mouth.

..it hasn't gone well. a few moments ago i caught myself googling for michael jackson--not cos i wanted to read about the trial, no!--because i couldn't quite remember the words to “man in the mirror” and i very suddenly and compulsively needed total lyrical recall. in terms of a conduit for my creative juices, the (now) appallingly named jacksonfreak.net is ... is somewhat subpar. is stinky. not quite sure what of, yet, but surely it's rank. so if these words themselves have an odor, are rather tinged with desperation, blame michael.

i'm looking at the man in the mirror. i'm asking him to change his ways. (make that change)

i can't talk to my mother so i talk to my diary.

at the risk of establishing a bloggy behavioral pattern: all weekend my mind was totally stuck on friday's entry. not because of any tangible brilliance--or particular competence, for that matter--but for the fact that i think it would be a fun writing game to play with people. if you and i were to play, we would each have to write down a single line from a song, then would switch papers and have to write a snapshot of prose or a poem that used that line. it could be fun little rapid-fire game that may get the collective neurons firing agreeably, given a big enough jug of rossi and the proper lighting. lighting is crucial. the hardest part would be coming up with a line for the other, given that you want to screw them, but not so badly that they stare dumbly at you for a second, then leave the room, muttering something that's hard to hear but definitely includes the words "friendship" and "over." for an example of the kind of line we'd want to avoid, consider snoop's

"That's whiter than what's spilling down your throat"

although, admittedly, that one is fairly f'ing tempting. just thinking about this for 2 seconds fills my head with rap lyrics that would be nasty to pull on someone. i mean, what do you do if someone says, "okay, you have 5 minutes to write about the following," then hands you scarface's

"And if your shit is flimsy then your ass is gonna bend"

with that as your motif--your idiom, as it were--there are only so many directions you can go.


..i got this killah up inside of me...

why can’t you set your monkey free?

this is the year of the hungry man. –if that sentiment strikes you as rather broadly subjective, that’s how it struck me too. at first. i was at the bar, alone, on tuesday night, watching the couples move onto the dance floor and groove to the slow rhythms as i slurped my oly and tried to take proper stock of things. now, one does not have to be seized by genius to realize that bar + alone + tuesday = dismal + fucking + life. but i was not in a good place. though i felt a pervasive slowness -- as though i were sitting in a large pan of goo, or a gloppy substance of some kind -- i was not really aware of the depressing fundamentals [no car, no woman, no friends, no job, no prospects]. and so, when the queenie dj decided that an extended george michael set was called for, well, i didn’t object. in fact, something rather like a smile came to my face as i welcomed the old, familiar words of my prodigal idol.

but no sooner had i opened myself to the moment than i was quickly downcast. i mean, i had just been downcast a second before, and now i was again. so i was re-downcast, or cast-down-over-again-ow, or whatever the word for that is. the point is that i had just felt a welcome blink of joy at the sounds of my old friend george michael, and then the slow pulpy guilt began to sink in as george michael moaned about how “i’m never gonna dance again / guilty feet have got no rhythm / though it’s easy to pretend / i know you’re not a fool.”

and that’s when it clicked: i never really liked him. he always seemed so open, so willing to share, all those nights we spent together on my bed, talking intimately as we stared at the paula abdul poster on the ceiling. but it was always about him; always about how much he hurt, how “he should have known better than to cheat a friend” or how he’s “never gonna dance again the way (he) danced with you.” he’s almost like a monkey in the way he has one speed, the way he grinds his organ of lost love, the way he bleats his woeful monkey bleats without a care for anyone who may stop to listen. there, i said it. george michael is a monkey. i have my own problems, sure. but i also have my dreams, my hopes. my aspirations may be feeble and too often ignored, but they are all i have—they are my babies. george michael might whine in a way that makes me think he wants to be my friend and confidant. but it’s an act, it’s horseshit. i crushed my empty beer can and ordered a jaeger. shot it, slammed it down on the bar. stood up with a forgotten fire in my eyes and asked the world, Why? the bartender said she didn’t hear me. so, with thunder in my chest, i said again: WHY –

why do i have to share my baby with a monkey?

always. love you.

My life as an office peon (temporary?) does have its advantages: I need look no further than my own extremely narrow putty-colored world in order to find things that are wholly intolerable. At this moment, from the cube katty-corner to my right come wafting the gentle (yet always somehow forced-sounding) harmonics of Mrs. Bobby Brown (I will Always Love You Until You Run Out of Crank). From the cube to my right, I am being treated to the clock-radioed bass bumps of the BlackEyed Peas, who are anxious, apparently, to Get It Started. In Here.

Separately, neither of these do intolerableness make. Whitney’s pathos actually makes me smirk now that she’s transmogrified from "Diva" into "Gaunt and Demented Divalike Lovechild of Kid Rock and Latoya Jackson." And I really like the Peas song—--Let’s Get it Started grooves with me nicely. But. When you put my burny scratchy eyes in front of a medical database for 9 hours and set my work to music over which I have no fraction of control, you’re liable to make me into a frowny pirate--one who may take to making officy declarations about how the 4th floor's air control setting is UNACCEPTABLE or about that piece of coffee cake that's been in the break-room fridge for almost a WEEK and is totally INTOLERABLE. It's a strong and deeply depressing cycle.

But, you know. It's not so bad. Like the music says,
Bittersweet Memories
That is all I'm taking with
Get started, get stupid
Don’t worry ‘bout it, people will
Please don't cry
We both know I'm not what you
Step by step, like you’re into New Kid
You
My darling you
You wouldn’t’ believe how we wow shit Out
Mmm-mm
And I will always love you.

POST INTERVENT BOWEL PAIN MGMT

an odious task, this
telephoning managers to say
d. n. u. a.

they are less than eager in their complicity.

i too am unenthused
and so assume the manner of a
wet ball of clay.

my clayness fails to educe even mild felicity.

..and if you make me beg
for just a smidgen of play to buoy my day
safeguard your babies:

your DOWNTIME CARE RECORD has become
FLOWSHEET - ADULT ANAL ELASTICITY.