It's a strange world we find ourselves in.

I met her on the streets of Dublin.

splash

the illusion is that you are simply
reading this poem.
the reality is that this is
more than a
poem.
this is a beggar’s knife.
this is a tulip.
this is a soldier marching
through Madrid.
this is you on your
death bed.
this is Li Po laughing
underground.
this is not a god-damned
poem.
this is a horse asleep.
a butterfly in
your brain.
this is the devil’s
circus.
you are not reading this
on a page.
the page is reading
you.
feel it?
it’s like a cobra. it’s a hungry eagle circling the room.

this is not a poem. poems are dull,
they make you sleep.

these words force you
to a new
madness.

you have been blessed, you have been pushed into a
blinding area of
light.

the elephant dreams
with you
now.
the curve of space
bends and
laughs.

you can die now.
you can die now as
people were meant to
die:
great,
victorious,
hearing the music,
being the music,
roaring,
roaring,
roaring.

Charles Bukowski

Landslide

As I drove to work this morning Fleetwood Mac's hit Landslide came on the radio. Stevie Nick's acknowledgment, "I'm getting older too," resonated in the truck cabin, the melancholy way she accepeted it, like a love that is over.

"I'm getting older too." It's the mantra of the schizophrenic age in which I find myself; over a quarter century old, caught between twin impulses. - to settle down, find stability and start a family, or flee, run, seek out the new and mysterious.

I sat at my desk and twin monitors stared back. Reports, quotes, orders, specs, configurations, skus blinked by. Each voice on the phone anxious, convinced their deal was of the utmost importance. I was struck with the absurdity of it all. Of the neatly lined hushed rows of souls transfixed by computers, locked to the phones. Could anything be as inconsequential?

It's not that I'm unhappy. It's the lack of anything significant - the feeling that days tick by and no movement is made, no hills conquered, no love burning.

I've had brief encounters with love and lust over the past two years. A fluttering of feelings quickly scorched to ash. Vagueness. I experienced a hint of something real that fizzled with inaction, miscommunication, and stupidity. It ended with her boarding a red-eye flight to Australia, someone else's kiss on her lips, while I sat at home and smoked another bowl while Townes Van Zandt played in my head.

I don't know if I'm propelled by the desire to flee what it is that I've created or simply to accept Fate's invitation for something new.

Life is plagued/blessed by dualism everywhere - so why not both?

Coming Home

Thin strips of curdled orange hang on the horizon, intersected by the spindly fingers of leafless tree limbs. Shadows scurry after the setting sun, fleeing the thick black clouds to the east and it reminds me of humanity. Brief, fleeting, triumphant in the face of annihilation.
I unlock my truck and get in; the vinyl seats are a tangible reminder of winter’s lingering hold. I turn the key and the engine whirs and the radio comes to life. I drive four point seven miles - three lights, four exits, five more lights, a stop sign - and I’m home. The windows are all dark, the last remnants of orange gone. The heavy wave of night has fallen.

A love note perhaps?

I'll admit it, I got nervous when I saw her. I thought about her when I fell asleep last night. The woman that I've known for months but have never breathed the same air. She was a voice on the telephone, a sentence in an e-mail, a small, blond woman in another person's photos. But she was coming, already here for all I knew. Perhaps her plane had touched down in the midnight hours, the rubber of the tires squelching against the black tarmac, her thoughts going to me.

I doubt it - the most burning love is often unrequited.

I'd just gotten up from my desk and walked toward the coffee room when she appeared. Actually, I saw her companion first, someone I'd met months before. Butterflies swarmed in my stomach. I tried not to let my eyes dart away and search for the person I'd fallen asleep thinking about. I caught sight of her in my peripheral.. My eyes held to the wall until I hugged my friend and then I turned.

She looked different than her photos. More real, more of a woman. We hugged, I muttered, "Nice to meet you," and it was over. Our first contact. In my nervousness, my spooked movements, I didn't even catch a scent of her hair. I think back on it now and try to remember - was it floral, mint, something exotic, something common?

Throughout the day I snuck quick, furtive glances at her. In an attempt to avoid suspicion, I made sure to look at others in the room, bestowing on each my apparent attention. But always she was there, a smudge on my peripheral. When she spoke, I watched her lips moving over her teeth, twisting in a smirk, rising in a smile. I imagined myself knowing those lips, tasting them. Thin creases lined her eyes, like cracks in porcelain. They held a beauty that I cannot even attempt to put into words. A beauty that speaks of a life lived.

I'll never tell her any of this; never tell anyone for that matter. But today I fell in love, as I do most days. Tonight I will think of her again, looking forward to the next time I see her. The next hug, I'll make sure to smell, to let the mysterious scent of her wash over me.

And the memory will sit like a flower in vase, flourishing in the sunlight of a not-so-spotless mind.

Easter Thoughts

I suppose anyone has regrets. Can you really go through life without them? To be free of regrets is to either have an enviable outlook on life grounded in the existential absence of moral value or to have lived in such a timid, removed way as to done nothing of note.

That being said, I don't know if I could pinpoint any exact regret. There is no single moment where I wish I had done it differently; vague notions of turns made, steps taken that have led me down entirely different avenues, leaving me nostalgic for old paths and remembered companions.

When I attempt to truly inspect life and my own influence on it, I picture a road. Most likely I'm merely adapting the symbol most religions use - a road, a path, some sort of avenue upon which one travels. The straight and narrow. Except my life as I see it, is upon an unpaved road, perhaps just a game path. Parts of the path are completely windblown, lost to dust and the inevitable creep of nature. Parts of the path are paved with clear, precise lines, painted, obvious indications of expected behavior. The path changes as inevitably as life must. Throughout the length of the path, other equally mysterious tributaries branch off, limbs of a tree careening away from the trunk. And without conscience thought, these are taken, and a new road looms, the same one I've always trod down but life-changing different.

Upon each path, I meet fellow sojourners. Each is on their own journey. Often I will come into contact with a similar burning soul, one who speaks back in an unknowable, untranslatable language. Perhaps hatred ensues, or love, or envy, or friendship. The human exchange of emotion and experience. Briefly we travel together, paths running parallel, steps falling in unison. Irrevocably the road diverges, a turn calls out and I must take it or sacrifice my own journey in return for theirs - or more optimistically, begin a new, shared journey.

Perhaps this is love.

Unsure of where I'm going with this except that it's what's on my mind. An open keyboard and a willingness to write usually brings out these melancholy and meandering thoughts. I've also noticed I'm a chronic over-user of alliteration.

Regardless, the night finds me drinking chamomile tea in the hopes that it will counteract the cup of coffee I finished an hour earlier, the sounds of Ryan Adams flit through the laptop's speakers, and innumerable pages wait to be read. Be well.

I'm a man of vices. There are a numerous things that hold sway over me. Alcohol, weed, women, coffee, music, sleep, anger, but above all, imagination. The prospect of what isn't but what could be. It holds all power.

What me write?

I suppose you have to start somewhere. That’s probably the hardest part - that’s what I try to tell myself when I’m reluctant to write.

“It’s alright Self. You haven’t actually produced anything substantial since you graduated a year and half ago, but you can write. The story is there, waiting to spill out like of you like beer from a tap. You just gotta pour. Pour baby pour!”

But I’m reluctant to write. The blank screen stares back at me, taunting. The cursor calls me a bitch. I hate that fucking white screen.

Sometimes I claim to be a writer, very rarely to others, but sometimes I try to pawn the idea off on myself, sneak it under the rug of self-definition.

But I’m not.

What defines a writer exactly? It’s not being published, being recognized, or even being good – it’s actually writing. Just do it. (Sorry for the infringement Nike) Just produce, sit your ass down and type. And I don’t.

Whenever I’m not sitting in front of a keyboard, letting the thoughts that swirl upstairs regurgitate through my fingers onto a screen, I always have some excuse. I’m taking notes, planning the next (first) big thing. It’s all bullshit.

---A quick interjection here. I’m in front of a computer screen all day at work. Check that, two screens – filled with a flickering plethora of spreadsheets, databases, quotes, e-mail addresses. I hate my goddamned job. ---

The hard thing about writing – actually writing – might be the vulnerability of it all. Once a word is down, read by another, or even by one of my own many personalities, it is absolute. The harsh finality of acknowledging your own thoughts, really contemplating them rather than letting them sit in the background, is daunting. They become real, tangible manifestations of your own dysfunctionality.

I wouldn’t say I’m certifiably insane - perhaps borderline, but not off the deep-end-shit-my-pants-fucking nuts. I call it eccentricity. Keep your semantics off my psychology.

One of my self-concluded redeeming qualities is my adamant claim to “Not care what others think of me.” It’s a mantra, a verbal talisman to rid the incessant premonitions of mediocrity that haunt my peripheral. But regardless of what I say, everyone cares a little bit about the thoughts of others. How do I rate? What do they actually think of me? Any relatively self-aware individual has to accept that; it is all part of the social code, the unspoken Charter man accepted when he entered society. I’m okay with that.

The important thing is to what degree you let that worry of outside opinion influence your individual actions. Actions define the person to an extent. That’s another mantra I suppose – a rarely uttered one but the lesson is routinely prevalent in my unconscious curriculum.

If you fail to act because it is against the social norm, because it is unpopular, because others may think you are a fucking weirdo, then you’re allowing outside opinion to affect you and therefore, your life. I’m not saying out-rightly that that’s a bad thing. I’m merely acknowledging the fact that an overriding worry of other’s opinions has a drastic, yet often unobserved and unmentioned effect on our daily lives.

How much do you care?

I’d like to think that I don’t worry too much about how others perceive me. In the end, it’s uncontrollable therefore irrelevant to my personal agency. Yet, there are many things that I don’t say or do.

I have brief, tangential scenes that play in my head in any given social situation where I do the exact opposite of the expected, socially accepted behavior. If I’m talking to an old woman, I smack her. If someone is showing me something expensive, I break it. If I see someone with a rat-tail, I cut it off. Each of these actions are as easy and as possible as anything – yet I don’t do it for fear of reprisal, along with the knowledge that it’s the wrong thing to do morally – save for the rat-tail thing.

Writing offers that rare freedom to do or say whatever you feel like. Fuck the norms, fuck limitations.

So here I am, unsure of what exactly I want to write except that I know I have something to say. I am alive. And I am very, very aware.

I realize I’m a lazy ant living in a giant’s world. I’m okay with that for a variety of reasons but two quickly come to mind:

-I am surrounded by other ants, equally inconsequential yet striking in potential. We’re all schmucks.

-It is a beautiful world.


**Listening to Warren Zevon's The Wind album.**