finally the demon monkeys that live in my hair will have their voices heard.*

The sidewalk bends where your house ends
Like the neighborhood is on its knees
(from HEM: stupid mouth shut)


“the sidewalk bends where your house ends.” i barely made out the words over the others’ chorus of high shrieks and giggles. (awful sounds, these. as bad as you can get, tear-your-eyeballs-from-your-face-and-stomp-on-them sounds; there ought to be a word for it… shriggles?) then i heard it again, as if whispering in my ear. and indeed it was, for i could feel the little demon whiskers brushing against my lobe: “…sidewalk bends where you house ends.” it was as poetic a thing as i’d ever heard the voices utter, and it was intriguing: the voices had not before employed nuance, to any degree. now, though, during this most unlikely of times, there it was: an intriguing turn of phrase, and one that rhymed, to boot. the voices, you should know, took many forms, but in this period had elected to manifest as demon monkeys that lived in my hair. (they did this for reasons that were unlikely but also practical, eg, close proximity to the back of my head, and ease of travel, but i would not learn of these considerations until much later.) this was the umpteenth physical manifestation of the voices, and it represented a positive evolution in their quest to use me as their earthly muse: you see, i liked monkeys. as a boy i had longed to own one, only abandoning the quest when uncle leroy left for me a buckshot-filled squirrel with a little red hat duct-taped to its head. and now here they were, more monkeys than i could count, living in my hair. the only problem was that they were also tawdry little demons, squealing constantly, shriggling about how they felt overlooked, or whatever. they were of one voice, not like a proletariat collective voice or anything, but in the sense that they shrieked all differently but at the same time, and when they stopped, they ceased en total. all the more surprising, then, that one would elect to whisper to me a private message. i went and stood in my doorway, where i saw only what i expected: no sidewalk at all, but instead a moshed muddy path that ran from my aerostream, through the bramble and weeds, and over the hill into the parking lot. so it was as i expected, and yet, i could not see the parking lot, nor any other part of the trailer community, for all was hidden past the bend in the hill … if the dirty path counted as sidewalk, i reasoned, perhaps a hill was good enough to be “bends.” it was all beyond reason, my sudden to go and inspect the parking lot. but then, one must remember i had demon monkeys living in my hair; as such, reason was a relative undertaking. and sure enough: as i rounded the bend in the hill the demon monkeys started their shrieking – not the shriggling i described earlier, but a frenzy of delighted, anticipatory screams. it was a state of demon anarchy, a monkey rave happening in my hair, and as i rounded the bend and looked down at the lot below me, i knew why. there , in close circles around a series of bonfires, were grouped all of the residents of my un-gated community, plus many others, engaged in a convulsed dance. and all of these had monkeys swinging from their hair, whooping wildly as they clawed and swirled, spinning their headly perch and the rest of its owners around in circles with the combustive force of their movements. and i was transfixed by it; even the demon monkeys in my hair went quiet with the sight. for it was almost beautiful, like orgasm without forewarning, like grace without the coordination part; like the neighborhood is on its knees.



*one of my favorite patton oswalt lines.

Some-thing Viscous This Way Comes

The Memoir of a Loving Man

By O.U. Didnitz


Chapter 1 – Step into da Wolf
Chapter 2 – Gay for Hey Hey Hey!: The parabolic sexual reachings of a young man whose main role model is Fat Albert
Chapter 3 – She Just Smiled and Showed Me Her Vegemite Sandwich: Some things get straightened out
Chapter 4 – Give Me the News: I’ve got a bad case of loving, you happen to be nearby
Chapter 5 – Freedom Kissing: Changing terminology instead of changing what you want from her
Chapter 6 – Prostate Tickling: Same as Chapter 5, but for pervs
Chapter 7 – What Life Has in Store for Me
Epilogue – Like Nirvana, But Without the Nuance

markus erectus

i blink too hard, raise my head, lengthen my spine
and wish to find then keep my stride
i wish never to wish for time.
an empty threat, says procrastination’s side
but, says the other, that you consider a wish a threat
makes jiminy cricket look a beast of lies.

so. as i set out to find the new and avoid the same
already the old girls have announced their game:
procrastination's ribs getting poked by sarcasm's finger
(oh proud finger, strident finger)
said ribs finding strength in numbers; like all good malingerers
they cry, we can do it! and are glad for the poster
with that cute-armed woman, the riveter, she brings them together
unlike sarcasm and his dirty faux-poking pharisee of a finger
(oh sunny-side ribs, might-not-have-a-job-but-great-with-kids
will-wait-for-better-cos-we’ve-seen-worse ribs).

so many inside voices, inner children in the fold
this year's Resolution to resolve is so postmodern i've been told, and that
my at-attention posture is like a prairie dog without fur,
the college girls work so hard not to giggle when told
that their tall-but-aimless classmate is graying and thir-
tee-hee-hee hee, oh my god that is so old.

if, some night soon, your coffee tastes of sarcasm, or your cigarette rolls its eyes,
or your burger begs to stay and stay and linger with the fries
that's just fallout; just me and the girls as we sever inside ties
just me tryin' strike a match, to light the kindling in my eyes.

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.