Letter to my Lover

Love,

I never made it to my spiritual vagina. I was
En route Saturday afternoon, the mercurial
engine of my blue Toyota Camry rattling down
The country highway arteries of autumnal

Illinois on a full tank of gas—its owner still
Half-sleep, wizened from work-week and wear
On the soul, harnessing the plastic steer like a
Button or a globe in front of him, two packs of

Smokes and a Venti coffee stowed in the passenger’s
Throne where once you sat next to me just three
Saturday’s before we drove into the sun that blissful
Afternoon I dumped my heart out for you like a

Carafe of memories for you to sip on and from which
You drank (can still intensely feel the curve
And syllables and alphabetical shapes your lips made
Over the faucet of my heart from that day)

Your Copper—the tangible token—a solidified
Tear licked from the upsidedown
Ocean of your heart stashed in my front right pocket
The copper, culled from your own northern

Superior spiritual nest, the pulsating eternal token
A green on-line ajar-eyelid keyhole to
The mysterious joy of my beloveds’ heart—an introit
To the conversation of lips and longings the

Tango of universal souls separate yet solidified. My
Last sojourn to Matheisson Grace had foundered
Outside the town of Lacon with the mechanical organs
Of my vehicle foundering like the transient

Interior orbs of the human body, leaving me stranded
Out of reach from my wooded creative uterus—
And your smile (always with me) As I drove,
Wending my vehicle over dips and valleys

The weather was pushing sixty, yet overcast
Beautiful gray continents of clouds
Cobbled the atmosphere in a ceiling like
British Tea occluded even a treacle of orange light—

There was the woods between the worlds and there
Was my car and there was a desolate road
Sliced between the skeletal brown brush
Strokes of the trees I followed inexplicably the

Wounded arm of the Illinois river to my right
abandoned, my orientation guided now by
the navigating tug and reel of the atlas inside
My chest, the atlas that pulls me into long drives

In autumn madly chasing, madly smoking, madly
Frisking my soul for meaning dashing after
The Last ashy dregs of sun spilling out on the
Earth in a blister of gold and tears.

Oh love, I was lost yet I was driving, content
In a zone out dream state, not giving a
Fuck about the discourse of my sojourn, visually
Enamored by the sight of a sunken

Red brow barn slouched and lonely, fields
Clipped yet a two-day harvested no shave
Gruff semblance connoted to the land—following
In love with the sight of a two story country house

Swallowed on all sides by land and thick sky—
I drove, as fast as I could, smoking
Lost, past a hamlet, into the swerves of
Hills and inclines and steady slopes when

I noticed a vehicle tailing my rear bumper—
The vehicle blue, reminding me of the
Car you drove around MN-St.Paul last august
The night you tottered and balanced with

The acrobatic finesse of an angel tottered
Sedate on my lap before we cruised home,
Lost in the syncopated chimes of Depeche mode my
Fingers lost in the veil of your hair not wanting

To let go of creature situated next to me. That car was the same
Blue as the one you were ferrying that night
August last, behind me as I was lost, and I thought it was indeed
You in the vehicle for a moment

The editions of Rumi and Leaves of Grass both
Tucked in my back dashboard— both
Editions pregnant with fallen leaves from the
Picnic table the morning after you left

Finding the expired kisses of cigarette butts, creases of our bodies
Still imbedded in the mattress of earth from
That day. I let the vehicle pass me and it gunned ahead

Myself, turning on a road I had never ventured down
Before, Myself still lost in the gray autumnal
Overcoat of the afternoon amidst barns and silos

And Trees pregnant with fairy tales, driving a
Different route then the vehicle I thought
Contained your smile—only to find that vehicle,
(speeding) behind me once again, as if it had chosen

Me, as If the vehicle were beacon leading the
Front of my car into nocturnal vistas
A dalliance of dreams, the rich lathered soil of night
Fused in front of me past shires and dirt roads

As I followed only to find it shooting ahead, swerving
Into a large house with a fence and yard
(front newly refurbished) a bouquet of thicket and
woods between the worlds on all sides

I knew as I past it that I had seen this house before
That I had lived in the house once perhaps
Before—for it was the house from the dream we
Shared—at least the front of it matched my

Dream from earlier in the week and the vehicle I had allowed
To navigate pulled into the driveway and waited
A white arm extending from the drivers side—waited
For me to pull into my dream world and

Discern the inside of what it was I had driven so long to find.

"And the Blessings were like Poets that we've never found time to know..."

Just got hired on at the library FULL time!!!! This means I'll be able to make financial split-ends meet and still be able to write SIX, seven hours a day!!!!!!

Kamikaze Countdown...

Novel due on Prof.'s desk in nine days. Today, retype the rest of the thirty pages that I lost. Try to go through my Glossaria and employ opperative moves. Say fare-thee-well to fellow Chambers classmates (George still has both my copies of Before Sunrise/set). Se Bulls take a hopeful 3-1 lead in playoffs with Best friend.....

Dirt tired and in dire need of caffeine....

"....."

Write! Write! Write! Write like your life depended on it, boy!

Seven hundred page "draft" of my novel (my very corpulent, four year old daughter who for some reason goes by the disgusting name of 'Yellow Monkey Bars & Unbidden Erections: A failed campaign') is due on Dr. Palakeel's desk a week from Wed--and all I can due is bitch that I have to retype forty pages that I lost......


Gotta get motivated. Gotta get crazy. Eschew the urge for spontaneous feminine contact and write!!!!!!!!!

Back to work young man, you've got a long way too go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Faretheewell Fellow Bloggers....

On the three year anniversary of his Father's Death, Little David has decided to take a blogging -bymonth and pursue a cyberspatial sabbatical.

I've written five (!!!) quality short stories (and reams of poems) in the last coulple of weeks and now comes the task simply to market them and to keep on writing. I love blathering my life away into the jaws of the keyboard in front of cyber soulmates and total strangers but in all honsety I sort of took up writing as a vocation 'bout ten years ago and I can't tell you how much it would mean to me if I could make a steady income from this shit. Can't tell you how much it would mean if I could support a love-mate from my writing, to help someone grow, to help other crazy seekers locate their joy and bliss.....

Also need to Kill the Dragon Thou Shalt. Note to dearest Sister A, if you really want to rid yourself of the lizard quit wearing glittery stitches of "Dragons" on your jeans. As all the sages note, Dragons and Lizards horde things--"Heaps o Gold and beautiful virgins"--and they don't know what to do with either of them, they just remain stuck....

I've been stuck in front of my own dragon for a long ass time. Now its time for me to go into battle, lace myself with the armor I've gleaned and not look back....

Big Deadline begining of March. I'll be back with a new set of wheels, tons of legends and, of course, the scalely hide scalped from the carcass of a lost lizard...

Kick some ass for me out there!!!!!!!!!!!!

Stranded up Shitcreek without wind or a sail.....

When I die and Bradley chooses to immortalize my literary genius by erecting a gilded naked statue of my lanky frame a la Michelangelo's David--I hope they plant it backwards, headfirst into the bullseye center of Olin Quad, facing Swords Hall, so all the financial witches in room 111 can kiss my brass-ass!!!!

If you can't tell by the sappy sarcasm it happened again--on Edgar Allan Poe's birthday no less!!!! My refund check which they TOLD ME was supposed to arrive today was delayed. "OOOPPPPPS. I'm sorry. You forgot to sign a release form."

WHAT!!!!!!!

Two weeks ago when I verified my financial status they assured me all was in check. Now.......

Shit, Swords Hall even called me the night of Feb 5th three years ago (my father died very early that morning) asking for my father's name, requesting a cordial alumni donation and I Bit My bottom lip so hard it bled down my cheek as I refrained my whiplash tongue from ushering out an I-ching of random vulgarities......

Shit, my grandmother even worked in Swords Hall...for 33 years!!!!!!!!

Oh well, now comes a trip to mama Bears to humble beg for a loan. Mom's been somewhat cool lately. she even showed my stupid lil' story to her co-workers and now they think her son's a total nymphomaniac..............

Ahhh....Life.......

Attaboy Link!!!!!

CHECK THIS OUT!!!!!!!!!

http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/take/six/


Congrats Link, Ethan and elusive-eyed fairytale-French Goddess of my dreams Julie for making such a kick-ass film that totally captures the human condition as we know it.....

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.