Words on St. Stephen

He shook a cigarette from a crumpled pack and lit it with a match, shaking the flame out with a flip of his wrist. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except I tell everyone. I’ve learned very little in this life, and most of my words aren’t worth the spittle that comes from my telling it. But listen to me if you ever gave a damn about something.” His Irish drawl hung in the air like the smoke around his face. Behind us, the sun was setting, our shadows stretching out before us, pulled toward the creeping dusk. “Tell your woman what you feel and allow yourself to feel. Feel hard. Be passionate. Allow life to knock you ass over tea-kettle. Because everyone one of those times that you're left reeling was precipitated by something wonderful, something that makes colors exist. Something worth living for. I see men go through life stoic, straight-faced, like something made of granite. And I think to myself, which one of us is missing something?" With that he stood up and walked away, toward St. Stephen's North, where the shadow of Fusiliers Arch bled back into the hedgerow.

New Poet

I read this poem and immediately thought of a woman. One woman in particular. Although most things make me think of her...

i send you this leaf

not because of its supreme beauty or uniqueness
not because the tree it came from looks like you
yawning in the morning
not because it would be a good substitute for lettuce
on your next sandwich
not because it's a page ripped from the book of my thoughts
not because i placed it on my tongue and tasted your earlobe
not because it's the lit-match color of your nipples
not because it's the remnant of autumn's confetti
not because it's shaped like your eye when you leaned forward
and blew out the candle

-jeffrey mcdaniel

Passion

Excerpt from a book that a beautiful young woman recommended to me, Eleven Minutes, by Paulo Coelho.

"Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No wants their life thrown in chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know."

Me either...

To know

I'm a man of mercurial tastes and fancies. Ideas slip in and out of my head like clouds skirting across a Buffalo sky. Plans are formed and discarded, convictions flame and burn in a moments time. Sometimes I feel like I need to escape to the farthest reaches of the globe, at others, to surround myself with those that I love. A future in the army, faced with certain death, all in an effort to experience the absolute certainty that comes with such an environment. To search out a grounding love, filled with the unnamed moments that stir the soul. All options I've considered in less than 7 days.

I worry that this is a trait that I will forever carry. It's not exactly a feeling that something is perpetually missing or a 'grass is greener' syndrome. More of a resistance to complacency. Does this make me constantly unhappy and unfulfilled? I think not, but then again, these thoughts will change again before this beer is finished.

Ah, such is life. Such is the soul I have created for myself. Such is...

In Spite of Ourselves

The sun set in a yellow glob, the color of my suns when I scribbled them as a child, waxy red, orange, a conglomeration of texture and hues. The dark rushed in along with the winter chill. I sat at my desk and wondered what she was doing, a world away.

I awoke that morning with someone else: a thin, tattooed brunette who liked to crinkle her nose, sleep with her head on my chest, play fight and rode horses for a living. She was intelligent, recommended books that I had never read and could discuss those I had. She liked sex and was good at it. Yet there was something missing. That integral part of something. The fire the caught in your stomach, that defied gravity and had the simultaneous power to set afloat and crush.

I fell asleep thinking of Her while holding someone else. The One that slipped away, both from my own neglect and idiocy. Life is full of such 'hers'. We are a species of dreamers and romanticizers. I could blame it on Hollywood but that seems too convenient. The trait is universal, a shared blessing and curse. The ability to imagine. Imagination breeds dissent, breeds greed, breeds yearning, breeds the exceptional. Love is visceral imagination.

And like imagination, it largely goes unaccomplished and pending.

Always expanding.

--Currently listening to John Prine's In Spite of Ourselves

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?

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.

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.**