Let Me Sleep It's Christmas Time--1997 (i)

Gray clouds lay aimlessly scattered like abandon jigsaw pieces over brisk denim patches of December sky fifteen minutes prior to dusk. I strutted across Bradley Quad, a half-smile chiseled above my chin, the memory of her lips soaked into my chest, Karen the Fern cupped firmly in the grip of my icy paws.

The winter sun squinted and swelled and swirled into an orange thumbprint as students, fatigued from finals, jittery-eyed from caffeine, lugged back packs and suitcases through the student center en route to suburbia while my thoughts oscillated around the girl I had just held; the girl I had just said goodbye to--the girl who would be flying down to South Padre to see her parents. The girl whose skin was cinnamon tan and whose flesh sprouted into an orchard of hidden scents every time the magnetism of our bodies clinked into an embrace.

I wore my ersatz camel colored trench coat; a checkered scarf loosely tossed around my neck flapped in the cool winter breeze like a minor league pennant. Beneath the coat I layered GAP sweaters; tattered corduroy jeans--a hemp necklace furnished by my ex-girlfriend Allison itched its way around the stump of my neck spawning a love rash for a wayward soul like an artists signature etched into his mock masterpiece.

My hair was cut short and was dyed strawberry blonde. On a good day my hair adapted the tint and hue of a brassy highschool band instrument; a Green Day reject. A palsied punk rocker looking for his next up-tempo frenzied venue. A boy in search of a thickly chorded soil of human bodies from hence to mosh through his every mangled emotions.

It was December. It was 1997. I was twenty years old and, outside of the assurance of a steady menial waged paycheck every Friday, had no clue where the fuck I was going with my life.

The previous autumn brought the ill-time demise of Princess Diana. I was a sophomore at a local commumity college--Illinois Central College--"ICC" (Ick)--Two years prior I had graduated from one of the worst high schools in the state. Manual High--where my Father had briefly attened in the early sixties. It was the same building where my grandmother's locker was trashed because she showed favor to the "colored" folk. The same building where my pack-a-day grandfather dropped out of in the heat of the depression working as a printmaker's apprentice before enlisting in World War two.

Although my ACT was well above the school's avg. of 14.7, I was suicidal for three-fourths of my junior and senior year. Back then a change of scenery would have altered the status quo of my life today--but living in south side working class poverty, witnessing academia as a sort of joke--gradually gave me the ability to laugh; the capacity to find joy in suffering--the drive to become something other than a sorry-ass statistic--the wisdom to discern that so much of our lives depends solely on the topography of our birth; the financial proclivities of our parents; the realization that, even the worst high school America has to offer is better than 95 percent of the schools currently functioning on our globe.

I was twenty years old and was living alone with my parents. My two siblings (one was still in high school) had already left town, enrolled in prestigious bording schools. I was the self-deemed scribe of the house hold. A writer; a workaholic-- a Starbucks addled saint. I had job slaving over a cash wrap, scanning barcodes into a computer, informing yuppie customers how much they purportedly saved.

It was the autumn rich with books. Thomas Pynchon's MASON and DIXON. Don Dellilo's UNDERWORLD. Rick Moody's PURPLE AMERICA. I kept a copy of James Joyce's ULYSSES in the corner of my writing desk, along with DAVID FOSTER WALLACE's INFINITE JEST--the book that I felt already said everything I was trying to say.

There was also philosophy: William James' Variety of a Religious Experience; Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. One night in late November, a found myself smoking clove cigarettes, listening to Ani DiFranco's "Both Hands" I highlighted a passage of out Wittgenstein's Tractatus:

If eternity is understood not by endless temporal duration, but by timelessness; than he who lives in the moment lives eternally.

I ran ten miles everyday, got through a pack of camel filters in two. I noticed how the hard slant of autumnal light cast geometical patterns against the sidewalk and eighteenth century architecture of Moss Avenue.

I was trying to write a book--a compoiste of every toy-train simple sentence my dual-decade aged eyesight had ever perused. The novel was written in ghetto slang (back then I called slang patois) was all about Basketball and Opera (?) and was, for the most part, completely unreadable.

As my creative writing teacher, Craig Shurtliff, at ICC was wont to critique. I came into the class pawning a Kerouac stream-o-piss-conscious finesse. The portly novels that influenced me then, The VISIONS of CODY, the James Joyce's, the William Gaddiss', the Gravity's Rainbow--
the books I thought that were important and that mattered; the books that differentiated from the mass market populartiy of the Grisham's, the Creighton's and the King's, the books that
qualified as leet-turh-ah-ture were for the most part unreadable tomes of arrogance, ensuring tenure for a select few academic dweebs unable to endure the carp and cavil of some other low-life critiquing their own creative tithe.

I wrote one kick ass short story that semester. Dropped all my other classes; decided to focus solely on writing--was certain that, of course, in a years time at least, the world would catch up to my accelerated genius and I'd be scribbling in my name, endorsing six-figure checks from New York publishing houses. My pulitzer acceptance speech was practically already penned.

The novel failed ignominously--it didn't make any sense. People seemed to grow accustomed to looking at everything I wrote with their vexing head titled heavily into their left shoulder in abstruse puzzlement.

My best friend--a writer named Patrick living in New York even told me; "You've lost the desire to be comprehensible. You've lost the will to let people understand you."

Say least my parents. The urge to write--the urge to breath and to live and to thrive--the urge for a future--for security--for a fuckin' life was nil at best. I was what I was--community college caliber-- post-modern pogo stick. Gutter drossed washed up in the middle of Illinois; yearning to heavily flap my dreams in the direction of the waning, rich autumnal dusk.

On Novemebr 17--a month before I said goodbye to the girl with the pearl smile and orchard flesh; a month before I shoveled up Karen the Fern and stood, staring at my shadow in awe across the frosty tufts of Bradley quad--I left. I left everything behind me.

Flustered by my failed shoebox vignette of a novel--I left class early, plopping my book bag into the back seat of my chevette- a clunker my grandfather in Chicago drove throughout the arteries of the city a decade before. I gunned home, shaking, sweating, trying not to look at my agitated reflection in the blue tint of the windshield. A young man on the cusp of flunking out of adulthood. A fetus witnessing the venom of its own abortion--feeling that he is leaving a place before being properly formed.

I drove. I drove as fast as the clunker would allow. 80 mph. The dilapidated muffler firing what felt like cannon fodder beneath the bumper.I drove, even though I had no where to go and worst of all, I had no way to get there. Void of the luxury of FM radio and power steering, I continued to drive.

I brewed a thermos of coffee, filled up the tank at a local gas station, bought two packs of Camel filters and a box of swischer Sweet blunts. I placed dog-earred editions of Kerouac's On the Road and Whitman's Leaves of Grass (germinal intellectual reads--both since given to females) in the passenger seat.

In life you come home empty but you still come home. A year earlier, Autumn of 96' I monopolized a journalism scholarship to serenade the love-o-my-life residing in central Wisconisin, a beautiful girl named Megan with a beautiful oak pasture forehead and short cidery hair. Things between us had punctuated in blisters and romantic welts and I came home all alone, my thoughts--my heart blanketed in the gauze of a voice that no longer wanted anything to do with me.

A week before I boarded my grandfather's clunker and left, I received a letter from Megan in the mail. When it comes to chasing the strings of your heart, writers are notorious for locating snippets of sentences and plots in the hushed smiles of scattered muses. So far I've identified three amazing, timeless females who inspire my art in the fashion of what Beatrice was to Dante; what Laura was to Petrach. I have a bond with these individuals that transcends the borders of time and vaults over the arbitrary directions of space. So it was no surprise that day when, arriving home after one of my long ten mile jaunts that I knew Megan was inside the steel jaw of the mailbox. That I could feel her bulging; could feel her tidal-wave of multi-colored sentences foaming off the shore of the lined paper. She wrote me letters in different colored markers, placing random stickers of Barney or Burt-n-Ernie throughout the cursive missive, sketching pictures of flowers on the bottom of each page.

Megan wrote about her experiences as a freshman in Decorah, Iowa. She wrote about the classes she was taking; about the writers she was discovering; about the fluids she mixed into her pettite nervous system on Friday nights.

She wrote about the hills of northern Iowa "You would love it here, David. The parks make me think of you."

Enclosed in the letter was a current photograph snapped on one of her state park hikes. Her smile splashed across the poloroid like a puddle of light--two wild lilies were placed in her hair like estranged homecoming boutenaires.

I kept Megan's letter folded in my flannel shirt pocket, in between the boxes of cigarettes, above my heart. I kept her photograph pinned above the dashboard, close to the rearview mirror. Everytime I glanced into the hyphenated reflection I would see my eyes, looking behind me, and then see her smile focused in front.

I drove and I drove. I ran stop signs, broke speed limits, forgot how to function the turn signals.
it was as if my car was a wild mustang and I was clinging on in the saddle for dear life, unaware when the vehicle would thrust me from the passengers seat.

I guzzled thick slurps of coffee. I chained smoked cigarettes, lighting a fresh stick from the alighted dregs of an expired cork. The ashtray already looked like ground zero by the time I skirted my vehicle on to the interstate wings and I continued to drive, unaware of my destination, unaware of my place in the world, cognizance only the flush of blood, the color of the sky, the feeling that the faster and the further I drove, I would somehow find myself, locate what I was looking for, find the lyrics of my song, the name of my muse, the address of my poetic yearning.

Mara Muse

Just saw Hippie-Nikki (or Hikki-Nippie) for the first time in three weeks since our booze-addled assignation. Told her that after i left her apartment that morning I went back to the party to look for the ring she lost. I told her that I raked my fingers through mud beneath the stairs where we made out that night, feeling like frodo, hoping to locate the ring she lost. Nothing.

She didn't mention that she received the e-mail I sent her.

She told me she's going to Amsterdam over break.

Crazy girl. She's shorter than I remember her. Her dreadlocks were dirty and she was wearing cool thrift store clothing. She kinda looked at me like I was her parent or something (it's the short hair and the fact that I'm seven years older).....

ah well, the human heart. Thank God I didn't get more involved.....

(WOMEN ARE STRANGE!!!!!!!)

"tho we are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
-Tennyson, "ULYSSES"

Douchebag

It's the word-o-the-week for my boss. I love this word. Douchebag! Yesterday I worked 11-3, 5-10, 4-7 (am) and now 9-2 and he comes in here and immediately berates my ass.

Wonder what crawled up his ass and died?

Crunchtime

It's 2 am and my senior project is due in fifteen hours! I'm dressed in my ghetto garb-- Atlanta Falcons cap, raiders shirt and baggy pants ( to match the drooping baggs bustin' a sag under the lids of my eyes) "Give me a project bitch" and I haven't changed my contacts in three days......

I've already spent a cozy 40 plus hours in the library this weekend already. Just keep reminding myself that every sentence I sompose is one rung closer to the top....

Also in dire need of companionship. Anyone out there reclining in the matress of cyberland want to cuddle?

(Not you Mirza, if you're reading this.)

And he's off.......

Hanging up my halo; fallen feathers and timeless light...

Third shift still sucks. Twice in the last week I arrived at my 9am class after working ten plus hours the previous night. That and payrolled screwed up so I won't get my big "Holiday-my-ass-bonus" until after the new year.....In the next week I have a 20 page, a ten page and a 30 page paper due. The 30-pager is already out of the way (It was a final for a creative writing class....(duh)..I finished it in September) but the other classes are dry, scaly, arid academic prose....

No wonder no one likes english....

Thanksgiving greeted us with eight inches of ice and snow caked in thick white tufts gracing the American Heartland. A goliath, three hundred pound slab of oak fell over blocking Uncle Mike's driveway and I put on my cowboy hat ( The one I redeemed from Marlboro back in '97 for a mere 300 miles) and used a chainsaw; hacking each limbs with a disel-fuled sever; lugging the sawed timer deep into the woods behind Mike's house. It was arduous work and sweat froze in little beady icicles on my forehead as I ploughed the skeletal branches across the slick drive, burrowing them deep in the post autmunal foliage of the same woods I used to play in as a child--the woods I immortalized as the "Nuclear Woods" in my first novel.

My great-Aunt turned 98 the day after Thanksgiving. She grew up in a farm outside Kewanee.
Over her life she's witnessed a genesis of tehcnological advancement unprecedented in the discourse of this planet. She's witnessed the automobile, the airplane-the space rocket--radio and telephone turn into television turn into internet. She's lived through presidential assasinations; spiritual segregation, the civil right movement--Viewed through the eyelashes of an aged centurian, her planet has remained the exact same size yet has decresed rather dramatically. She could tell you where she was when News reached her of the Titanic's descent. She's kept her wit and her insight and her memory; She remembers the name of every female I've ever brought to Thanksgiving dinner. Every wrinkle indented into her papery skin serves as an indelible fold to the testament of the human condition. ..

Gotta study. Hoping to blogg holiday memoirs in a week or so.....

Knock-knock

If you rack your knuckles against the screendoor of the Kamikaze blogg in the next month chances are they'll be no one milling around to inquire "Who's there?" Little David just started working an additional job of late-night security (2am-7am, three nights a week) in a failed endeavor to dredge up a few more greenback before the holidays. Yuppie sibblings means yuppie Christmas gifts. Plus I got randomly chosen at Thanksgiving to buy gifts for my 20 year old cousin BRI and the only things she said she needed were "Beer, cigarettes, and thongs." That about sums up the trinity, wouldn't you say eh, there Lewis?

Finals are taxing and monopolizing. Two weeks of incessant academic blather and FINALLY I can write again. ALL I WANT TO DO IS WRITE ALL THE TIME! The urge is that of a lover returning to his beloved (and locking the bedroom door with an audible 'click') or a hunter poised to kill in order to feed his starving family. Makes Sense? Hobby=Passsion=Love=Identity=(someday)=career (maybe).

I have THREE BOOKS that are just incubating inside my chest, itching at the tips of my fingers, waiting to be pecked out onto the fizz of the screen. I love words. I love women. I love my crazy no sleep fall in love vizionary life.

But I need to write. I've been getting all this praise and it's like "Don't praise me. I haven't written yet today. Besides, you're brilliant too. We're all fucking brilliant. We all have to dig inside our chests and shovel out our spirit. Don't leave me alone to juggle my own dreams."

I had a wonderful conversation tonight with a female grad student. She is 35 years old, has a family and two kids and has been going through rounds of CHEMO for the past year. Everytime I see her she has a smile on her face. She even flirted with the poet laureate of the united states last year when he gave a reading here on campus.

She stopped me in the rain tonight to congratulate me and I tilted the conversation solely on the emotional axis of her persona. I told her that in the last deacade alone I've lost three family members to cancer. I told her that I've never really met a cancer survivor and seeing her with her vivacious smile cracking witticisms in class almost makes me want to cry.

She seemed stunned when I kept on thanking her. She tugged at her nutmeg flavored wig and smiled when she told me that her eyebrows were beginning to sprout back.

Now I've been blessed to have dated/seduced/struck-out with some beautiful women in my time (You'll just have to take my word that love-o-my-life V-doll looked like a cross between Julie Delpy and a Victoria Secret model)...To me, as a hetrosexual male, a poor-man's poet and an emotionally long-term flaccid philanderer I decree that there is nothing more attractive in a human being than someone who has overcome something. Someone who has harnassed some tangible handicap in order to be here at this moment, this place, taking nothing for granted.

Gotta get back to studying! It's almost five am and I have class in a couple of hours!

Give me a kiss to build a Blogg on....

Three things I remember most vividly about my tryst last Friday night with lovely Hippie-Nikki (who beat up Swissy-Missy)...

I remember the way her face would slightly smile and twist in the directions of the rising and setting sun before she would close her eyes and kiss.

I remember the way she so naturally slipped into my USMC t-shirt afterwards which, because her physique is built like a short, world class gymnist, fitted her like a night gown.

(Is this what scared me? Everytime I get invovled I always end up sacrificing three-fourths of my wardrobe. STILL MISS MY LUCKY RED-SOX SHIRT BROOK!!!)

I remember the way she held her dog. That's not a euphemism. She had a fluffy faced collie named Charlie which she treated like a toddler. She seemed so happy that night.....

She had an ashtray for a heart, a cigarette butt for a smile and she could dance all night long...

So much for being a local campus author! I'm completely exhausted. Drained! Getting less than three hours a sleep a night. Uncle Mike is having a large Fireside tonight while I'm at work so I skipped my last class to clean our pad (shhhh!!!! He doesn't know. It's a secret.) So now I'm high on windex and bleach and still a long eight hour jaunt from here until sleep.....ahhhh...

And yes, still no hippie-Nikki sightings. Big surprise there.......

Who said the Concourse Doesn't occasionally bend their lips and smile?!

So a very cool thing happened to me today and I was told by my Professor "Not to tell," which of course, outside of a few confessional gmails of gratitude to eternal angels always inside of me I didn't, until I saw beautiful and blithe Heather downstairs, a young sophomore writer with red hair, freckles, no boobs and braces. She reminds me of Lisa Simpson. She checks out heaps of books every week and reminds me ALOT of myself when I was reading everything (although she's 50 times smarter than I'll ever be)...

I've had a petite school boy blushy crush on Heather for about a month. I guessed correctly that she, in all likihood won her gradeschool spelling bee.

Honest I wasn't going to tell her, but when I sat down next to her and saw that she was reading CS LEWIS' THE FOUR LOVE....I felt like I had no choice but to oblige!

Now, I have to tell/show my mother. And hear her again and again say,"Why do you always write about sex, David!" over thanskgiving dinner.

Virgin Mara and Mineral water

Stupid! Little David gmails bubbly Nicole (or Nikki, as she goes by in daylight hours) to--and get this--THANK HER!!!!!

--and to readily inform her that syphillus is easily curable through peniciln *smiles*That's a joke....

What the HELL am I thinking!!!!!

In the immortal words of Joni Mitchell:

"and if you care don't let 'em
know--don't give yourself
away."

In the immortal words of John Donne, Mara

"For Gods sake hold your tongue and let me love."

You see Little David has a hard time when it comes to love because those whom he loves ( or once loved) most of all in this planet (three so far, more or less) are represented as miniscule pink crevices slanted into his left palm, reminding him (whether he is stationed over the porcelain lip of the urinal or grasping his hands in a prayer of thanks) that he once held something he loved and cared for very poetically and intensely and somehow lost.

Lost....even thought he still PASSIONATELY, ardently loved nonetheless.


Which is Bull Shit, cuz those TRUE writers-wayfarers out there know that you never really lose anything. Maybe I've lost domesticity and the sight of a three year old young bride sprinkled with tears and the embarrasment of having to buy "bedroom" manuals at Barnes and Nobles while the hot check-out girl notices my nuptial cuff...maybe that.

Still--why do I feel so scared and school boy timid inside? Like I'm wearing my jockstrap backwards in the Varsity locker room

Love? Hell no.

Possibility of commitment with someone you just met? Perhaps.

Overall feeling that I may be just "Settling for whatever comes next?" Affirmative.

Feeling that I might inadvertently crush her heart. Two Marginal Thumbs up Gene.

Ambivalent feeling that I'm being picky. Oui.

Feeling that she deserves better. --Fart Sound--

Feeling that she's "the one." Ah. No.

Feeling that we could just be mutual F.B.'s? Past that stage of your life, David.

Feeling that I secretly like someone else? Secret handshake meaning yes.

Feeling that it's hard to explain to girlfriends parents what you do for a living without them looking at you like your first name is Hannibal as you lick your fork and grope your significant other beneath the thanksgiving dinner table. Something like that.

Feeling like, what RUMI says, is "All you really want in a LOVER is LOVE's confusing joy's."
If I were still Baptist I would holler out an AMEN.

Feeling like you have FOUR huge projects due PLUS you have to work almost non stop until WED. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

Feeling that everyone more or less, feels this way more or less all the time. YES!!!!!

Would you, could you in a box? Would you, could you with a....

Purchased the DVD of BEFORE SUNSET today. My newly aquired Atlanta Falcons cap is doffed in the direction of Richard Linklater. It takes a lot of courage to craft a riveting and honest screenplay where emotionally wizend "thirty-something" wayfarers openly bitch while candidly conversing about their experiment at life. More importantly it makes you realize just how precious a gift this crazy, carousel jaunt around the sun deemed "reality" actually is. It seems to be a blessing, even when a tangible void is sifting inside our chests. I remember hearing a Joseph Campbell lecture where he was pretty much saying:

"Life is pain, life is suffering, life is heart-break--but damnit kiddo you're REALLY LIVING. You're alive. You are ACTIVELY participating in an event. "

Maybe the reason our society wants everything to be bigger and faster and more connected is because, individually inside, our western world feels spiritually severed and emotionally disparate.

Lately I've been guzzling cheap wine in the literary gutter, waiting for my mediocre muse to finish buttoning up her dress and meet me in the bedroom. Assinine school assignments mixed with potent late night shots of work have been monopolizing all of my time and when this periodically occurs I begin to feel completely insignificant. Worthless. My writing (if you can't tell) begins to slow down and stale; little pond green patches of mold slowly crusts into each paragraph like a toe fungus.

Yet still--I try to remind myself that I, personally have never had it that bad. Even if you're homeless in America, you can always find a soup kitchen; you can always find some library like ours whose internet caters your freedom to your every fetish.

I try to remind myself about world hunger. About AIDS in Africa. About how 98% of the creatures grazing on this planet are fucked from the outset. That they'll never have anyone to love. That their primary concern is just trying to locate an imminent source of nourishment.

I try to think about how 80% of my fellow brothers and sisters will never pick up a book. Will never learn to write a complete sentence

But still it's all good. This moment of being; grasping the eternal palm of that eternal someone who is always stationed inside of you.

Kamikaze craziness and a decaf never hurt...

Flapping my wings full-throttle through Thanksgiving. Rough "sandpaper" draft of Senior Project due at 5:30. Poetry reading tonight at 8. Revision of my ghetto screen play ST. CECELIA's PLAYGROUND due tomorrow before I dissipate from campus and surprise Jasna at the reception of her current art show ( I sent her an e-mail and lied, told her that I couldn't make it, so she should be surprised when I show up...with my hair still short, no less)......

Uncle Mike's half-sister is coming to visit which means that the house has to be "gay cleaned" by Friday. That and three more projects due before next TUES. Uncle Mike wants to have THANKSGIVING for people who have no where to go Which means more work (God love him) before I can finally slip off and be with my real family and relax.

Oh, all this and work, work, work. Because of budget crunches they axed half our staff, which means that I'm working three jobs simultaneously and only getting paid for one....which means that I get grouchy and rude and petulant and I hate being grouchy and rude and petulant....patience little tree, in the words of Karate Kid grasshopper, walk first, then fly daniel son......

A perched Lizard on my shoulder, a lotta love cached in my Heart...

BEFORE SUNSET comes out on DVD today!!!! Plus I think my hot lit-prof. was giving me the eye today!!!! She kept swirling her hair and biting on her bangs and blushing everytime I said something in class today. The mara Lizard perched on my shoulder just morphed into TROJAN MAN......

Did I mention she's Mara-arried?

Did I mention I'm an overworked lonely as hell monk with only a phonebook sized abstruse novel that no one wants to buy to keep me company. Did I mention I've been avg. five hours sleep a night while keeping house for an aged mystic who keeps going out of his way to please me.

Did I mention life is beautiful and weird at the same time.

Did I mention there's no spiritual attraction at all. Just an intense physical and intellectual tug.

Did I mention when God gives you mana from heaven don't bitch about being hungry.

Did I mention that I've been plotting ways to seduce Lizard-Mara all day?

Go to her office. Slowly drop her annotated copy of TO THE LIGHTHOUSE off the shelf.

Did I mention that I turned the other way like a freak when I saw her today outside of class even though I should have been more gallant. More flirty.

Did I mention I have zippo clue on how to handle the situation expcept for (like I do with everything) write a short story. Some people have blinders keepin' the slanted sun from burning through their windows. I have sentences keeping the sad truth of reality from staining my heart.

Did I mention that it's a rarity when you truly "connect" with someone in a world where everything is already connencted. Mara-Modems, Mara-macintoshes, Mara-cell phone static...

Did I mention that this unalloyed connection is what most people live for.....

Did I mention, sometimes, when you're totally confused, life suddenly appears golden?

Did I mention my best friend of sixteen years just got back together with his w(hore)ife, even though she banged one of the groomsmen THREE weeks after the wedding?

Did I mention I got two A's on my last project?

Did I mention BEFORE SUNSET comes out on DVD today.

Did I mention life is good, even if nothing comes of the situation. After all, nothing beats being lauded for who you are. Even a naked angel is totally alone and frustrated in the bedroom.

SQUISH! I think a MARA-SUV just flattened my lizard.

A lot like falling in love....

Arrived at the polls at 6:30 this morning to vote. The polls were already packed. Out of the fifty or so citizens there already, I'd speculate I was the by far the youngest by a good twenty-five years. If I would have still had my pony-tail, I would have been a noted liberal. I stepped inside the shower stall size booth and filled in the black ovals for the candidate that I felt would be best....

What's sad about the BUSH era is that we've been lied to. It's like falling in love with the girl of your dreams and TRUSTING her with every facet of your life, only to discern an agitating itch between your thighs three months into the relationship and find her in your arms teary eyed and sad when she confesses to you that she has a past she isn't proud of.....

But maybe, the truth is such a rarity these days anyway, why should we recognize it (or even seek it)....

It's almost like we're enjoying everyone else's lie!

Coincidence? I think not....

As we used to cackle back in my sozzled-debauchery era "Twenty-four hours in a day, twenty-four beers in a case. Coincidence? I think not. "

Tuesday is election day in the United States. Tuesday is also Day of the Dead in Mexico.

Coincidence?

On a more auspicious note, Tuesday is also openening day of the 2004-2005 NBA season. My beloved wayfarer's wouldn't last a second with me in the locker room.

That said, on Tues, I encourage each American who wants his country back to vote for Kerry and then to catch the Mavs-Kings game later on that evening.

...even a dead angel still smells a lot like heaven...

Day:?????

Vices== (:

Been more Kamikaze's than Pearl Harbor. All day I've been side-stepping over dead angels with cardboard wings and hanger halos. There's been the "What if" dead angel, the "She-would-be-with-you-if-only...,"dead angel. The infamous "Your-life-would-be-like-this-if-you-weren't-a-writer" dead angel, the "David, quick-working-millions-of-late-night-hours-and-start-examining-your-health" dead angel. The "David-just-date-someone-random-to-add-meaning-to-your-life-(like Voluptuous Jill. She's cute and she even flirted with you at the bar during the Red Sox game. You could have easily seduced her with wit-n-words and had someone to wrap Christmas presents for and introduce to your family at holdiays)-dead angel. There's the "David-call-up-your-mom-and-apologize-for-being-so-weird" dead angel.

Dead angels everywhere!!!! So many feathers and quills it's like the hot soroity just had a sleepover pillow fight!

I was pissed off and feel asleep on a park bench. Woke up to discern the lunar eclipse. Watched in awe as the chalky pearl moon was superseded by the shadow of our planet ("to see something there needs to be shadow"). We never think of earth as being starship, a spatial vessel. But it was assuring to observe the nylon tint skid across the lunar craters of our nearest satellite.

All these scattered quills and all this sad ink cached inside my chest. Shit, looks like I was meant to be a writer.

....even a dead angel still smells a lot like heaven.

Still waiting for that fat lady to open her mouth and....

.....sing.

DAY:??????

Too much work. Sunday commences with little david popping a hole in his air matress, spilling a mug of java on his new Red Sox t-shirt (my ex-girlfriend still has my favorite one) and arriving into work at 9:45 a.m., where he works until two, takes a leeeetle nap, comes back in around six p.m. and leaves at three a.m. Monday morning....

ahhhhh.....

Had a good writing day though. A great writing day! As you can probably tell by assaying my bloggs, I'm a sloppy first draft writer who all too quickly dashes out long-winded sentences that look like alphabetical train tracks leading to nowhere.

It took me a long time to realize that a.) writing is not a sacred art unless you're Persian and were born in 1844 b.) quit stroking your goatee and adjusting your beret and write for people to glean pleasure and smile c.) Re-write, re-write, re-write!!!!!

By re-writing I basically cut. A paragraph here. A stinted image there. It's like circumcision.( "All the girls are crazy about it"--Mel Brooks)....When I first write something I get really excited. My fingers move into the linguistic loft of the keybaord and, like drunken rocks stars, trash the room into shreds and syllables. I love the intial rush of composition, and there's no better feeling in the world then tapping out ten pages, clicking save, watching your new born child enter the world through the slit of a printer. When this happens I feel like I've acompolished something. Sometimes I look at the pages in paw and (like the beautiful photograph I found on-line this weekend and just can't stop drooling over for the life of me) almost fall in love.

Rewriting is like looking at Mara without her make-up on and still managing to fall in love. I have to efface images that I get but other readers don't. I have to take out a line that may be offensive. Ocassionally, I trash the whole thing.

ahhhhhh........Love it. Maybe someday the fat lady will open her mouth and.......

......yawn. ZZZZZZZZZ. I still have three more hours to go.

House at the end of the World

Day 9--

My spiritual Hunger strike has already out numbered both the days of the week and the mideval number of earthly vices. Now day nine, the number of the female godess. The number of incubation. The trinity cubed. The number of orifces to the house of worship, my destination for tomorrow en route to Uncle Mike's Lecture.

Day nine, almost a fourth of the way through my forty day self-realization binge. Lots of Drama here in Kamikaziville ( a close friends divorce, my inability to sleep, my ability to finally get an "A" in my intellectually steaming hot Pomo prof's class, rashes still dotting my skin) but here's what I've learned so far:

****If genetics has anything to do with it I'm already half way through my earthly trek. My Dad died suddenly when he was fifty-four. I'm twenty-seven. Dad seldom drank, never smoked, and drank coffee in moderation. This makes him look like Ned Flanders to his sons Ozzy Osborne.

I may be at the half-way oasis through my life where shit happens if I keep my head out of my arrogant ass. Dante was "midway" through his life when he realized it was too late. Instead of remaining stuck, he chose to forge a path which of course, commenced in hell.

*****Personal growth is difficult. It requires action; exertion, and it's so hard sometimes just to assert yourself. It's so hard to do the right thing. Pardon the cliche but I've been at a cross-road in my life for the past two years and instead of doing the right thing, I remain stuck. I make excuses. I blame people for my own foibles. I blame my parents, blame the high school I went to, blame the fact that sick things happened to me at a young age. That's all fine, but's it's the past. It's unarable soil. It's a place where nothing can grow.

My best friend had to kick his wife out for infidelity. She's been using him as financial furniture. Every six months she's been screwing around. She comes back, she makes excuses, rationalizes. At the end we discerned that the fact that they were married wasn't as important as the fact that she was an anchor in his life. As long as she was allowed to monthly manipulate him, he would never have a chance to grow, He would never have a chance to leave port. He would always stuck in a world where he felt like he did the right thing by staying with her.

Last night he called her (she was out with a "mutual" friend) and told them both to leave. To leave his life. That her shit was bagged up in hefty baggs. That the locks were change. That this has gone on long enough and that, even though he loves her, even though they're still pretty much bankrupt from the wedding, he can't live like this.

I could tell he wanted so bad to be a part of her. To grow with her. At the end, as my friend told me in all candor, the choise was hers. She was responsible for her actions. For her unfaithfulness.

It was so hard for him to do, but brother, your courage was a beacon. A bic.

*******I've learned that I've done exorbitant unhealthy things to my body over the past two years, most recently working all the time. My 80 hour work weeks have yielded nothing. In fact, I'm realizing only know that I've used them to hide. I even wrote a 300 page book last autumn where I hid. I hid behind every alphabetical curve. I hid behind the balcony of sentences and the stage curtain of imagery. I was afraid to reel back the pulley and see what was out there. Afraid to see the stage settings of my own emotions. Afraid, sadly, of the truth.


****** "To see something there needs to be shadow" remarks Campbell. I came to writing like I'm Peter pan. All of us feel like we're sometimes lost boys (Damnit, yer a true wayfarer then. If not "lost", how can you ever hope to find anything? After all, didn't the bloggers each find the Other by individually being "lost?"), All of us have moments of flight with makeshift Dedalus wings. Writing grants us all access to a timeless "never never land" where the scientific goverances of space and time become flaccid and our spirit freely soars.

Yet in my own Peter Pan (My bad boy Peter Pan knocked up your herbal tea Mara and then boasted about it in the lockerroom) is afraid of his shadow. He's scared shitless to discern the truth. scared shitless about a lot of things in this world

************************************************************************************

Off to the house of Worship. I'll say a prayer of peace for all of my beloved bloggsters.

Peace

Like a child giggling at the mobile-crib constellation above...

VICES: "Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love."
-Turkish proverb

New four year cycle begins today. It's already begun. My whole body is still fraught with Hives. Dreamt last night that I was wrestling with my own skeleton and I purloined my own craggily femur to joust and defeat it in a nocturnal dual. Saw my bones heaped in a morbid bonfire bushel--myself in fifty years.

Like Stella, I'm gradually getting my groove back. Making changes. Starting to live.

Realized that the reason I despise talking publically about my four year cycle is because it sounds like I am ovulating......

Autumnal Steeple

Day VI

Vices: solely caffeine. Infinite Blend.

First time in years I feel like I'm actually growing. Like I actually don't have to live my life kow- towing to the viscissitudes of some postulated cycle. No more intermittent rounds on the quarter decade ferris wheel. No more internalizing; no more whining, No more blaming the arid soil of my past for my emotionally enervated status quo. NO more measuring your self-worth through copious rounds at the bar; through ersatz romantic encounters, through rushed material merit, through affable credit ratings, through the steady nod of society's assenting chin.

For the first times, in years, I feel like I actually have the capacity to grow. And it's been so long--probably since junior high (no shit) that I've felt this way. For so long my future was dim. Not the light at the end fo the tunnel. Not the train at the other end. It was non-existent. The sodden fleece sloppily shaved off the hide of my familial Black sheep. The eldest son; the cauterwauling; crying, trying to find the origin of his name, gutting the curved innards from the stomach lining of the alphabet, scraping out millions of syllables in the process.

Ace! Your prophetic skills are beckoned!

Day V:

Collective vices: Who cares. I just had a dream where I was in love.

In the three hours allocated for sleep between third shift and school, I dreamed of my angel, my lover, my universal dual.

She was with me. We were in a writers workshop full of hot lesbians who availed their tops. She was next to me. She made me so happy. Our waists were buttoned at the hip. We wrestled, we flirted, we held each other. We were one.

There was a swimming pool. People were moving furniture. Uncle Mike was orchestrating the movers where to put things marshalling his thin fingers in the direction of the Indian Sun. Both antique furniture and posh loveseats milled around the dream like bees agitated in an apiary.

Human beings kept cannon balling in the chlorine blue pool. They took off their clothes and they jumped into the neon blue pond reflected throughout the house of mirrors of my eternal consiousness.

But I held my angel. We sat at the lip of the pool. We left our clothes on. We occasionally splashed each other. we felt like one.

We were at peace.

The only person I recognized in the dream (besides Uncle Mike) was myself. I was five. I had cinamon bangs neatly clipped across my forehead. My five year old self was in the pool. My five finger year old self was wearing one of my dad's undershirts. The shirt was dampened considerably from my frolicking. I could see the little stubs of my five year old nipples.

I was looking at myself back at myself from two decades ago. I was with the girl of my dreams.
My dream angel. The scattered jigsawed fragment that fit perfectly into everything I lived for.

As in reality, strangers were everywhere. They not only knew me, but they knew her. They knew us. They knew how much she had meant to me. I had no clue who they were, but they kept addressing us as she smiled. she was flattered. I enjoyed watching her smile.

We got separeted in the end of the dream. I went back to Uncle Mike's house. The house was fraught with women I had never seen. They knew me. Apparently they were having either a bridal or child shower for my dream angel.

Only she wasn't there. I had to find her.

I left the house only in my socks. I ran down hill, over hard chunks of gravel, trying to find my dream angel. Even though I was running down hill, I could feel the hard gravel leave flecks in my feet.

I was running down hill and all these black boys were running up. Some were African tribesman with shiny chests and azure eyes and javelins. Some were athletes. They all had shiny black skin and I jostled their shoudlers as we past.

They didn't obstruct me. We were headed different in directions.

*

My alarm clock harshly shrilled into conciousness. That's the end of the dream. I was at Peace.

Before the dream convened however, just when I was closing my eyes, just as my mind was leaving the corporeal port, drifting into the blanket of sleep, I saw a shadow of my dream angel. I saw a silhouette. I saw her vividly. I saw her even more vividly in the shadow than I saw her in the dream (in the dream I saw her, but I mainly felt her)...

In this shadow, she was kissing the person she was with in real life. Kissing him on the side of the cheek. They seemed happy. She then kissed him again. Then her shadow left him sedated; breezed in my direction.

Then she took me to that place where I was happy. Our secret place, where we together, so happy, our limbs dangling and free....

Kamikaze Vesper

Day IV:

Ciggies: Only second hand. Nothing beats running outside to the smokers deck every fifteen minutes and deeply inhaling.

Coffee: Only one venti coffee so far.

Booze: Not even an issue.

Health: The right side of my face is still a vibrant orange swirl, although it's detumesced much since last night.

I started the Kamikaze blogg as a gauge for personal growth. I know that sounds a little too posh and individual-oriented and solipsistic. Last weekend I had a sad, autumnal catharsis that things in my life aren't changing and that I'm not growing. Worse than that, things are exactly the same as they were four years ago. In an eerie sense they are almost exactly the same, only the thin, polaroid film of reality seems to shift.

Four years ago, I was working third shift in a library, living in a nest of abandoned manuscripts and flapped open Vintage Contemporaries, living hardcore off of my trinity of vices. This year same thing.

Four years ago I had a hot, studious prose prof. who, no matter how hard I tried, would not give me an "A." It was always a B. This year, same thing, same young beautiful intelligent female prof., only different school. And I still don't have the balls to accost her and bitch.

Four years ago my heart was carelessly tossed out the passengers window by an older woman. This year, the ironies are similar.

Four years ago my cousin commited suicide. He was eleven.

Last night, exactly four years to the date of his suicide, I break out with volcanic rashes all over my body. Every patch of skin I would touch I would itch. My neck. My feet. My genitals. My ear started to bleed and there's a mail slot welt on my lower chin. It was like I was wrestling against my skin. Like a snake who has lingered too long in the dust, trying to slough it's oily garment.

Human beings have the amazing capacity of change. Unlike our fellow mammalian cousins, fellow bipeds who eat, procreate, defecate, search for food and die; human beings can change their thinking. They can change their attitudes, their ideologies. They can alter their notion of what is capable. What is achievable.

I'm trying so hard to change. It's hard at times. I wish I didn't have to work so many crazy shifts. I don't know why it seems that my mom wants nothing to do with me and Uncle Mike wants too much to do with me. Most of the time, I don't even know if it's a.m./p.m, autumn or spring, or if I'm seventeen or twenty-seven....

But I know I can change. Four years ago George Bush was running for president, the Yankee's were headed toward the World Series victory cigar and I was doing exactly the same thing that I am doing right now....

We learn from previous cycles. We learn what to avoid and what to fall in love with...

And I know that if I can change; I can tread through this linguistic mire of life singing songs and writing stories, than anyone can.

More than I Mara'd For.....

Day IV (early, early day 4)

Nicotine: Guilty. Ahhhhhh. After a pack of Al Capones and a half-pack of mara-boro lights, I can breathe again.

Booze: Still being a good boy. Still being a very good boy. If you're a dad you'd probably introduce me to your first born daughter I'm being such a good boy.

Caffeine: HA! Columbia just called me at work and said that I've whittled down their crop for the next two seasons. I told them not worry. Isn't Columbia notorious for something else as well?

Academic Progress: For the first time in a very long time, I actually got stuff done.

Health:Careful what you Mara for fellow wayfarer's. A big part of this forty day fabricate about your daily vice intake blogg is that i wanted to overcome some fears. i wanted to cultivate my courage.

Ever since my old man died I've been scared shitless of hospitals. The illuminating white paneling and heavy scented amonia. the palce where life's paragraph begins and where life's puntuation concedes.

Anyway, I may have a minor medical mishap, so it'll be intriguing to see what happens. I have a skin irritation and it started gradually flipping everyone and then myself out. I feel fine, though my face just looks a tad Quizzimodoishand itches.

It's weird how you can read something over the internet and then diagnosis yourself with those afflictions. When I was in 8th grade I was convinced that I had an STD b/c I read an article in the weekly reader. Convinced even though I was only in 8th grade and was pretty much just an alter boy...

...I panicked and my mom diagnosed me with jock itch. Craziness of life......It's 3am. Guynight.

Gallery of Vices

Day III (take two):

Number of alcoholic beverages consumed: zippo

Number of cigarettes smoked: Six Al Capones Miniature cigars

Number of Vetni Coffee splurged: I'm so wired right now that, using my navel for a socket, I could illuminate your house for Christmas.....

Academic Progression: Propitious and promising, for once.

Health: Still have this horrible rash splashed into my facial skin. I "hate" acting petty about my appearance.

Mara sightings: Haven't had a drink all week and then , BAM, Mara's centerfold shows up. I get a select invite to this sorority's "Lingere and panty party" this Friday; the sort of party I never would have gotten invited to when I was nineteen. Nothing beats watching rich North-shore girls go crazy in their underwear. Ahhhh, college, the best decade of my life.

Would go but why continue to tread over old stomping grounds. My footprint is still the same shape......

Blustery Day Fortissimo....

DAY III

Tobacco: zilch (yak-yak-yak--that's my lungs wondering what happened to the tuft of interior smoke it was pleasantly sifting on....)

Booze: Zilch, although I suffered hard-core insomnia last night and didn't crash until five. A shot or three of Knob's Creek REALLY would've lulled me into intergalactic peace. Liquer, the universal icebreaker.

Coffee: Already 10 am and, uh, yeah, look over there (Slurp-slurp-slurp)...

Academic Progress: Still chiseling away. The slab of marble I was handed in the beginning of the semester is starting to look less like a giant ornate rococo shaped Liver and more like the first letter of the alphabet reserved for pithy students who do exactly what their prof's require of them and seldom harbor a life altering notion of their own.

Health: WHAT? The rash is still festering on my face. I look like the Phantom of the Opera sans the shattered hockey mask. The rash is red and oily and itches like hell. I've raked my fingernails through it enough times that you'd think my skin would be ready for next years harvest already. And it looks terrible. But oh well. I need anti-biotics and maybe if I go to the Health Center and cry they'll give me some. Only, like the majority of the planet, I don't have Health Insurance and that's where techinicalities come in.....I swear, sometimes I think in America it's easier to score a dimebag of Heroin than it is to get simple medical attention.....

Which is part of the reason of this forty-day hunger strike, look over there (slurp-slurp-slurp). I have phobias that I need to vault over in order to become that individual I need to be. Phobias that I've seldom blogged about. Stupid little phobias like how the inside of a hospital ward scares the fuck out of me....I'll blogg about it later. Now it's time for the toady lil' scholar to creep out of me. Jeeves, My pocket calculator....

Slurp....Slurp....slurp.........ahhhhhhhhhhh.

Paper Glass Chateau

DAY II

Number of cigarettes: zero....Good considering I've been inhaling a pack a day of Al Capone's mini-cigars.

Number of alcoholic beverages consumed: Zero. Good considering last week I poured a healthy portion of the Suez canal down the old hatch. My liver was easily doing the back stroke next to my buoyed spleen.

Number of Starbucks Venti Coffee's carelessly slurped: Two (ok three)....plus a cup at brunch with Jason. I know, I know....

Academic Progress: Later, it's still technically fall break. Although I scowled at the empty blue of microsoft word for a half hour in an endeavor to finish grinding out that screenplay.

Also shaved my beard. My father always had a beard growing up and I can't cultivate hair on my face for the life of me. My beards look like dead needles dangling off of an old back-alley Christmas trees in mid-February. Pathetic. Worse that that, they itch. I seriously scratched the hell out of the side of my face so now I have little volcanic rashes everywhere that look like hickies. No wonder my co-worker keeps elbowing me in the ribs.

Also, in an effort to allocate spirutual purification, I axed about half of my MATURE VIEWING catalogue. I once wrote a short story about a young married couple. They're married about three years and their marriage of course sucks. The battered groom starts to get heavily into porn only knowing that his insouciant wife will be royally p.o'd if she ever discerns his secret cache, he starts hiding his totemic heap of colorful, oversized boxes in random places around their newly morgaged suburbian haunt. Eventually, he runs out of places to stash the MATURE VIEWING videos and since his wife can't cook, he decides to place the cache of porn neatly into the back of the stove.

Ironically, one day when he's out playing golf, the groom's skeptical mother-in-law spontaneously stops by and decides to cook a meat loaf. The results are readily predictable and the Mother in law ends up whacking the Groom over the side of his head with a rubber house after the fire is extinguished....

Cleaning My Teeth with Adam's Wayward Rib

DAY 1:

Everyone knows who I am and everyone falls down when they're around me. In the last month alone three separate pairs of knee caps have crumbled into limp tea-bags; heralding the bodies they ferry overboard like laytex stilts, toppling head and torso, tithing into the cement mattress a singular offering of plummeted flesh. A beautiful dream angel on Michigan Avenue tripped over Invisible shoelaces (double-knotted by the Concourses' gossamer fingertips); a hollow eyed lass named Lorlei fainted holding my hand at the Reserve Desk last week. She had donated blood earlier in the day. My hand reached acrossed my workstation like a chinese bridge and grappled her palm. I asked her if she was going to faint. She looked and me, her eyes rolled up into her yellow sockets like carbonated bubbles from draft beer. Her body then fell and I held her arm, lamenting for my co-worker. And ambulance arrived and they revived her. She was anorexic and donating blood.

Last week Allan fell and we took him to the hospital. Uncle Mike watches Allan on the weekends. Allan is sixty-three with Downs Syndrome. It was a Baha'i convention in Urbana. I was escorting Allan across the road when Uncle Mike told me that Allan is more than capable of walking on his own. Allan took two steps and then, realizing that he was alone in his toddle, capitulated to the whims of gravity. There was a splat. Allan was fine but he needed attention. He locked himself in the bathroom at the Baha'i center and inflicted wounds into his arm with the opposing fingernail. He refused to leave the bathroom and once we got in we sopped up the blood and I had to hoist up Allan's boxers and zip up his pants. We gauzed the wound, but his shirt looked like a Great Lake patterned with blood. When we arrived back at the nusring home ambulances arrived. Allan's blood pressure was fine and he was laughing. He was flanked by beautiful females tightly clad in white garments with visible panty-lines; perhaps Allan thought that he was surrounded by wingless angels.

People know who I am. Everywhere I go I am recognized. They know my first name. They recognize my gait. I pause and smile as I shake hands. I work in a job where I interface with easily 300 students on a daily basis. I smile. I'm charming. I'm known as the crazy librarian who helps out the foreign students, who always has the skidmarks of a smile slapped into his face.

With my hair sliced short I look exactly like how I did ten years ago, when I was seventeen. I had just started writing poetry. My ex-girlfriend Renae Howard phoned me out of the neon blue and invited me her Senior homecoming. Renae and I dated two years prior when I was a freshman and she was a sophomore attending rival high schools. Wearing varsity jackets with out respective graduation dates stitched in the lefthand corners, we would wait until her father's Firebird had completely pulled out of Westlake Parking lot before our opposite hands groped and squeezed. I don't know where people learn to kiss (besides television), but when I was fifteen I never shut my eyelids. Our tongues would tango and our bodies would tinkle and my eyes would remain completely ajar, myopically observing the warm blanket of her forehead, blinking several times like a stuttering stage curtain watching her head fall back into her body, hushing out smiles.

People recognize me. People whom I have never seen before accost me and call me David. A lady walks up to me claiming we had the same french class for all four years in highschool. I squint and I squint and can't recall her face. The name doesn't register. We talk about madame Suhr. She inquires how my siblings are doing. She tells me that she married a friend of mine on teh Track team. I squint. Still, there is nothing. A face that knows my story. A face I swear I have never seen.

A boy with a thick red-beard yells out my name in the parking lot of Jesters. He claims to have had the locker next to mine in high school. Again, I squint. Nothing. We talk about mutual friends. He remembers me always buzzing off of caffeine in the blue-coated hallways of Manual High. I squint. He looks like Leif Erickson, a viking. He claims we used to go to the alley before classes and smoke cigarettes together. I know the alley; it's the alley where I first tasted the scent of burnt nicotine harvested on my tongue in mid-autumn. Still can't place the boy. He tells me that nearly all of the fellow smokers are working dead end jobs, just like 80 percent of my graduated class. That most of the smokers have kids; some have three or four kids. I don't look surprised.

Then last week, I spawn a conversation at work with a girl who claims to have my picture tacked on her wall at home.

"Ohmigod, I knew that was you. Now that you cut your hair I know for certain that it was you."

Apparently I met this girl ten years at a homecoming I went to as a courtesy. My friends cousin needed a date. I voluntered. It was in a little country town called Brimfield. I went outside to have a smoke and was accused of pulling the fire alarm.

I had completely forgotten the girls name, but it turned out to be (geez, go figure) Alicia. She claimed that we had one really nice slow dance together to ("yaak") that damn Whitney Houston song from the Bodyguard soundtarck. Oh well, maybe being diagnosed with mid-twenties alzhiemers can be a blessing when it comes to effacing certain "momentous" events of youth you wished had never occured in the first place.

All the craziness culminated yesterday, inside HOMETOWN buffet. Uncle Mike and I were having dinner. I was actually telling Uncle Mike how everyone seems to know me even though I have no clue who these people are half the time. Mike mentioned that this was what was known as confirmation, that I was doing things right.

I left dinner early to run to Barnes and Noble. As I'm walking out the door I hear my name bellowed very loudly by someone who sounds like he has just monopolized the entire day imbibing cheap beer and watching football.

"DAVID VON BEHREN! I knew that was you! SHIT brother. How you doing?"

I look. I see a middle aged man with a pumpkin-hued face chewing over plates of food. A girl sits next to him. I look back at Uncle Mike, saluting a little wink before engaging in remedial conversation.

"How you doing? Good to see you! I'm sorry you look familiar and you know my name..."

"Sean Art..."

"Yes, Sean, hi...."

Guy I haven't seen in eight years turns out to live exactly three house down from us on Heading Avenue. I offer to catch up and rush to the ATM in Cubs foods and randomly spot my boss from work assaying the aisles. I ignore my boss and rush into Barnes and Noble where I see Sexually Frustrated Gretchen from Theory Class who hates me and takes my order barking a "What do you want!" into my face. After complying her mandate with a "Venti Sumatra" I see Valerie, (who's better hemisphere I devoted an entire blogg to last July, see "Myopic Mara")...even though Valerie is engaged to a trucker who looks like Allan Jackson, Val and I flirt like it's always mid-april and we're on a nude beach. I then turn around and see CHUCK. Chuck was (is) my late-father's best friend. They had a beautiful friendship for like forty years, although Chuck thinks that I'm a drunk and a disgrace to the family name. My father's only son, the proverbial black-sheep financial fuck-up.

What's really intriguing about Chuck is that my Dad helped him get a really good job at this place called ACCELERATED READER which helps gradeschool kids foster a love of reading. CHUCK lives pretty oppulently and he never to my knowledge returned the favor to my old man. I'm surprised CHUCK hates me as much as he does. There REALLY is a social/economic rift between people who write books and the people who market them.

I'm flirting with Val and Chuck is ignoring me even though I just said hello. The Concourse must not of liked me flirting with Val because, after a month of watching people fall down, bam, I inadvertently swatted over my Venti coffee. There were continents of puddles everywhere. When I went to sop it up, Chuck just looked at me and shook his head, although he came over with a stream of paper towels and assited me. I don't think he would have stopped over to my table to acknowledge me otherwise.

I leave Barnes and Noble and who to i run-into but one of my twins. There's four other lads in Peoria who look EXACTLY like me, especially when I had long hair. Matt still has long hair and I actually got arrested b/c the cops thought that I was him four years ago......

So here I am, new blogg. Trying to find that part of me that everyone else knows. I spent the majority of the last two week completely shitfaced. I love drinking and, like every other alcoholic, I'm charming and try to rationalize my sozzled sins.

Last night I decided that the reason I started to drink so much again is because of confirmation. Alcohol is wonderful in making you feel that you're not alone in this world and each round assists in momentarily confirming your rash choices. The confimration I lack from parents, lovers, teachers, academia, I've always found located in little cidery globs in the bottom of a forty.

There was no drunken epiphany. Daniela was very kind to hoist my drunken ass out of the gregarious gutter and to call me the next day at work to make sure I was ok (how many bar flies do you know who actually take the time out to call you the next day after a night of binging)...my tolerance is pretty high but it got to a point where I'm trying to move up; trying not to remain stuck in the curves of some theorized cycle. Trying to find out what I'm here to do and do it to the best of my ability.

Trying to change.

So the new blogg, trying to go forty days without vices....caffeine is FAR worse on my nervous system than booze or smokes, but it's the one that's most "socially acceptable" and the one I abuse the most......

Forty days bashing around....trying to change.....

Prelude to Joy: Yearning

I have risen this morning by Thy grace, O my God, and left my home trusting wholly in Thee, and committing myself to Thy care. Send down, then, upon me, out of the heaven of Thy mercy, a blessing from Thy side, and enable me to return home in safety even as Thou didst enable me to set out under Thy protection with my thoughts fixed steadfastly upon Thee.
There is none other God but Thee, the One, the Incomparable, the All-Knowing, the All-Wise.

-Bahá'u'lláh