cigarette daydreams, cage the elephant

The milk aisle of a Safeway in Old Town, Fort Collins.

Empty florescent lights and hollow aisles, slightly stained off-white tiles, rows and rows of pristinely packaged food stuffs, neat and clean.

White gallon jugs and white cartons and white bottles, almond and soy and rice and dairy: like a little refrigerated city stretching down the back of the store, and there was no one else and the young girl sat cross-legged on the floor with the city of milk behind her and I sat in front of her.

Something was in love. Something soft and humming like the moths in the lights, something sleepy and beautiful but it wasn't young love between people, it was something more. Something louder than a shadow of wet floor signs and something rarer than the vomit beside them.

The same feeling occurred then that occurred in the music store: the feeling of childhood. Of fragility and safety and calm. Void of responsibility and consequence. And somewhere in the empty superstore a squeaky cart moved down an aisle and somewhere a restroom door closed and the lights hummed down in a softspoken splendor over the milk, the milk, the milk.

And it was love, all of it love, whispering through the music in the car. Familiar and warm, without the repercussions of being held in human hands, it fluttered and flew in and out the car windows, in and out of our lungs. It rejoiced and it told no lies.

And remnants of this love stuck to the kitchen sink, and it was smiling and laughing and holding on to the edges of light and happiness and sound as the music played while music could be found.

An enormous weight removed itself, if only for a moment. A hand of love on your shoulder. Refuge in the milk aisle of a Safeway, holding a ninety-nine-cent bag of off-brand marshmallows, laughing in the afternoon.

Moments of believability. Small glimpses of bliss, shouts from the other end of the void. Caught in the milk net. Tumbling out, laughing. The humming of florescent friendship.

Moments.

Take pictures. Write notes. Sign 'love' before your name.

Pain does not make joy. Objective perspective changes no substance of these theocratic moments held suspended in space and time. We hold a responsibility to touch the beauty of our lives, to hold it where it can be held and to watch it as it leaves us.

I hold no obligation to edit this post.

Poetry makes no difference to the recorded occurrence of love in a Safeway milk aisle.

anticlimax

Cool beans.

Why do you have a thing
against cool beans.

New number?

No, just the one I use at night.

Oh lord please don't tell me
you have a whole separate
nocturnal life

...

Dude, like, several

I am not a fan of your life choices

I am aware

I have a thing against cool beans because 

you use the expression in times of great 

anticlimax thus resulting in frustration

Because I can't stand reaching for 

something and finding nothing. 

That's the worst thing, holding onto 

nothing.

Ah

Wait no

I'm not going to argue philosophy with you tonight 

Okay

...What else am I here for then?

How are you?

Debating whether or not to restart therapy

How are you?

Terrible

Goodnight

Goodnight

I care about you greatly

Cool beans

summer and a leaky roof

Something happens in the summer. I don't know what to call it.

Something sleek and spineless and dangerous, something very dangerous. It crawls out of muscle memory like clockwork. I don't know what it is. I don't even know if it's good or bad, but it's bright and slow and foggy and every memory of it disappears as soon as it leaves.


The roof was dripping into a trashcan in the middle of the floor. The music store was dark and quiet, the ceiling covered with hanging half-translucent plastic sheets where cloudlight shone onto the dark green carpet. Barely anyone was there.

I sat on a speaker beside the guitar counter, where a man I almost recognized re-stringed the resonator I brought in after trying to do it myself and breaking a string, along with a good section of mental and emotional denial and blockage.

My lungs felt new and tired, like the streets after rain, and I realized the music store held the calm protection of a nursery. A nervous-looking old man thumbed through records. Someone somewhere tuned a piano. A mother and young girl opened the door where the light fell softly on the carpets, and their footsteps made no sound. The water from the plastic sheets dripped and dripped and dripped, and I wondered how heavy the trashcan was.

"So you play the cello, huh?" the man asked hesitantly, remembering what I had told him some minutes before and making an effort at quiet friendliness.

"Yeah, yeah," I said.

"Since you were real young, or...?"

"Since I was eight." He spun the stringwinder around the peg and looked up at me briefly. "My grandpa taught me," I added.

Within this conversation we had both gratefully concluded neither of us wanted to talk, and so we happily continued in silence. He worked, and I watched, and learned through watching.

In that dimly-lit damp empty music store, time had slowed and settled, and the world wrapped around it in a tumultuous echo of struggle and chaos.

From where I sat on the top of a speaker, tapping the soles of my shoes on the carpet, I was a child. Everyone was. Frowning in their sleep, twitching their toes, breath catching inwardly every few minutes from all the crying it took to fall asleep.

The man behind the counter would not hurt me, nor would I hurt him, and I watched his face carefully as if in awe of this fact. He fine-tuned the last string and picked up the instrument and rested it on his knee, and I watched as he played something blues-y and beautiful and the both of us enjoyed it and I paid him in exact change and thanked him and he wished me a good day and I wished him likewise. And I walked back out into the soft sunlight, where cars rushed into brightness and brightness rushed into sound and the asphalt all around sucked up the sky where brightness sang.

discovery

On a warm afternoon last autumn, Charlotte brought her dog to school.

She was supposed to be in history class, but couldn't bring herself to the classroom that day. Roonie and I didn't have a class to go to, and so we walked out to the parking lot, where the spaniel, Lily, sat in the passenger seat of Charlotte's car, wagging its tail.

The first thing Roonie said when she saw Lily was,

"Dog!"

Lily wagged her tail and pawed at the window, and Charlotte opened the door and brought her into the parking lot on a leash, where Roonie crouched down to pet her. "Dog!" she said again. "You're a dog!!"

This was all Roonie could think to say for a very long time as she sat ecstatic in the school parking lot with what truly was a dog.

And the dog licked her face and wagged its tail with every word, as if joining in on the discovery. "Yes! A dog!! That is me!!!!! I am dog!!"

I remember a time that autumn when I was sitting in the grass by a tree, and Charlotte looked at me very seriously and studiously, and with what seemed to be utmost amazement said softly, "Your eyes are so green."

And I nodded.

That is exactly the color of my eyes. They're not rimmed or freckled or striped or centered with any other hint of color. Nothing left to the imagination, nothing for metaphors to work with. They are constantly and completely the color green, and Charlotte marveled in this fact, like holding a single crayon from an eight-pack of Crayolas for the very first time.

The amazement of this commonplace simplicity was held as if of great significance, as if the color of the grass and trees and fences and highway signs has never been seen nor will ever be seen again.

And there were other times when she would state, astonished, other amazing facts, such as, "You're a girl."

The funniest part of all this is that, every time she would say something like that, I would feel almost exactly like the dog in the parking lot. "Yes!! A girl! That is me!!!! I am girl!!" 

As if I had never noticed before.

The familiarity of a silhouette on a stage is so stirring and powerful because of its factual actuality. It is as sure and simple as the glossary of a seventh grade science textbook, made no less astounding in its certainty. 

All that is is all that ever will be, and yet never will be again.

And so these small moments of discovery must be reveled in, closely and passionately, every dog and every color and every feeling ever felt. Nothing is new under the sun, this is true, but no sunrise is the same. No morning. No moment.

Everything is dying all the time, and so its worth is held in its entropy.

This has always been true, and has always been known, and yet is at this moment and every moment after discovered again and again. So I write it and type it and read it over again. And again. And again. 

And the dog wags its tail and paws at the window and barks at the knowledge of its name.

analysis of evil

I want a story about a villain.

This has, of course, been done before. But whenever it is done, the villain becomes the protagonist. He gets to be the good guy, gets to tell his side of the story, because in his eyes he is the good guy.

What I want is a bad guy -- a bad guy who knows his role. Not some lost soul who through choice or circumstance, through selfishness or greed or envy or any other deadly sin, ends up harming others. What I want is malice. Malice is not listed in biblical sins to avoid because no one seems to ever, when explaining what led to their mistakes, claim they wanted to be cruel.

I want cruelty. I want someone to tell the story of who they are and what they did while knowing the audience will fall in love with every other character while wanting the narrator's head on a stick.

And for that narrator to tell the story anyway.

It doesn't happen like that. Because no one sympathizes with malice, no one understands it or relates to it because no one -- absolutely no one -- considers themselves a villain. No one considers themselves evil or cruel. Selfish, maybe. Greedy, maybe. But these are only flaws, and you are not your flaws.

No one can wake up every morning understanding fully that the heart within their chest is stone through and through. They have to put their feet on the ground. They have to put on pants. They have to put food in their mouth.

How can anyone do this with their mistakes being those of cruelty? Selfishness is human. Rage is human. Revenge is human. But malice? Wanting to injure others purely for injury's sake? No, this is for the monsters under the bed. The monsters can't tell the story because no one can believe it in their hearts when they hear it.

No matter how much you hate yourself, you cannot truly believe who you are is evil.

You have to put pants on in the morning.

You have to put your head on a pillow at night.

And in the meantime all the other characters, all those whose hearts are brave and kind and selfless and honest and loving and human, are suffering and crying and dying because of you. Where are your pants now?

I don't think anyone can survive being the villain, not for the whole story. Accepting their role only leads to trying to change it, trying to find the ever-present goodness at the center of every human heart. You don't have to believe in God. You don't have to believe in the Universe. But you have to believe in that goodness. There is no way to survive your life without that belief.

Is it true? Of course it is. There is no pure good, and there is no pure bad, not in human terms.

But we wouldn't be able to survive a different answer.

some cute stories

1.)

My stepfather recently remodeled the kitchen in our house, which isn't really news, as our house has been in a constant state of reconstruction for the entire time we have been living in it. This isn't a bad thing by any means. If you are going to marry someone, I think you should marry someone who is constantly trying to improve.

My mother has recently been growing plants with an almost obsessive desperation and meticulous attention. There have been plants crawling all over the house since January. We have full-grown potted tomatoes on the piano.

And, because these two things have been happening at the same time, my stepfather decided to put in a big bay window in front of the sink (you know, the kind that sticks out of the house a bit), with glass shelves for her plants. And because of this, the faucet which he chose to accompany this sink is a great monstrosity stretching way up into the air which can be bent like a garden hose to water all the plants on the windowsill.

The problem with this -- which he found out only after ordering and assembling the sink -- is that the water which comes out of the sink is softened, and would therefore kill any plants watered with it.

So my mom is standing in the kitchen asking why he ordered this huge purposeless garden-hose sink faucet, taking up all this ugly space. And he stands there and thinks for a moment before unlatching the hose, holding it out in front of him like a pistol, and, grinning, says, "For getting into arguments."

And my mother's laughter sounds like forgiveness.


2.)

My father's doppelgänger's girlfriend was telling me the other day about a paper she had to write for English class, a story about her life told with symbolism.

"I decided to use fire as a symbol," she said, "which was very cliche and juvenile, but it's what I did."

"The thing is," she went on, "I kind of lied a little when writing the paper, trying to make it more dramatic, make me look more cool and angst-y. Because it was a very angst-y story. Embarrassingly angst-y."

I asked her to tell me about it.

"Well, okay," she said. "So it was, like, 4:30 in the morning, and I tried to sneak out of my window. But it's a very small window, and I'm not very limber. So I sort of got stuck, and --"

"Wait, why were you sneaking out of your window?"

"Because I wanted to burn this letter."

"Oh, okay. Alright. Continue."

"So I ended up just going out the backdoor, and my mom heard me. And I had a lighter with me, and she came outside and she thought I was smoking pot. And I was like, 'why would I be smoking pot at 4:30 in the morning, half an hour before you wake up to go to work?' Besides, I have a very good sleeping schedule. Sleep is important to me.

"I told her I just wanted to burn this letter -- which was a very thin, one-page letter -- but when she saw it, she thought it was really thick and heavy, a lot bigger than it actually was. And so she said I couldn't burn it by myself; I needed my dad to help me."

At this point, my father's doppelgänger started laughing, an oh no kind of laughter, covering his mouth with the back of his hand. And she looked at him the way two people who really know each other see each other, because she knew he had heard this story.

"So my dad came outside to help me burn this letter, and it just wouldn't burn. He put it in this metal tin sort of thing, and I'd just -- I'd just really expected it to burn, you know? I just wanted my dramatic symbolic letter-burning moment. But instead my dad and I were in my backyard at 4:30 in the morning with this stupid piece of paper in a metal tin that took forever to actually light on fire and kept going out and stuff, and, God, it was so pitiful. And then after so long, when it was all burned up, he finally just dumped it out on the ground and that was it. That's the story."

"I think that's the best story I've ever heard," I said.

3.

There's an elderly and vaguely southern man at my church named Bob. He spent his whole life in "the ice cream business," and now lives in a nursing home. He preaches to all the other people in the home, and mistakenly called a woman a man, twice.

He has told me this story about five or six times, which isn't very many for Bob.

Bob wears a faded blue suit, too wide for his shoulders and too long for his torso, every time I see him. His collar is usually turned up on the right side, which I fold back down while he is talking to me, every time I see him.

Bob is my best friend.

He usually greets me with a smile when I walk in the door, and begins by asking, "Your dad, um... What's his name?"

And I respond with my grandpa's name.

"Yes, David!" he says. "You know, a couple of weeks ago I think I saw him in here, he was visiting, you know. And I had asked him to give my memorial talk years ago. So when I saw him I says, 'You know, David, I don't think I'm going to need you anymore. I'm not gonna die!'"

And he looks at me, eyes smiling so brightly that somehow you begin to realize nothing has ever been more true. Bob really will not die. It is simply not in the realm of truth for anything else to happen. This fact is an absolute, and it is standing right in front of you, beaming.

"I'm gonna keep right on living, all the way up to -" he moves his hand to his left, in a small shaky sweeping motion " - you know, when God restores the earth back to the way it was in the garden of Eden?" He looks at me for understanding, and I nod, because I have heard this story. "Before Adam and Eve ate the fruit, and they weren't supposed to eat it. But the devil told 'em to and so they did it. And you know what?" His eyes are shining and he taps me on the arm, smiling. "I'm not gonna listen to him!"

"Me neither, Bob," I say, every week, twice a week. And every time, the story is brand new. It solidifies. The smile only becomes more genuine, the light in his eyes only brightens, and I turn his collar down and wonder if the suit was always too big for him or if I should be worried.

But you just can't worry about Bob, not when you hug him and say, "Bye, Bob," and he says, "I love you too." 

And this is why Bob gets dropped off here twice a week: for a hug and an "I love you."

Stories are not always for hearing, and love does not always involve knowledge. I don't know much about Bob, and he knows even less about me. But every time he tells his story, I love him a little bit more, and thus it feels I come to know him a little bit better. Sometimes he tells stories about senior ditch day, or a rabbi he talked to about the sunset, and once he told me the story of how his wife died.

These stories become him, though they are not really all that he is, and it is a great comfort to hear the remembered stories of an immortal friend. 

an open letter (between myself & your medicine)

I found your medication on my windowsill this morning, and then wondered why it had taken me this long to notice it.

The pills sat like little twin robin's eggs at the bottom of the bottle, a springtime blue with little official-looking numbers etched into each smooth little side. So small and bright, tinkling merrily as I lifted the bottle in awe and dread.

Maybe you just brought extra, I thought, pretending antidepressants are in a constant ambiguous surplus, and that of all the things you must be missing this will most definitely come up first and foremost in your mind.

The question of why you left them here will, of course, remain unanswered, and the pills will remain unreturned. I do not wish to become your drug dealer. Don't be worried.

Later in the day, as I sat in bed unconsciously playing old songs on the ukulele, I noticed the bottle sitting upright on my bible-reading journal -- an elegant and extravagant-looking book with an intricate gilded design and a red ribbon. It took me until the second verse of the song to realize I was serenading it. 

The chemistry between myself and your medicine was oddly sincere, and I somehow seemed to feel I was being very attentively listened to. I leaned towards it, showing off with an unnecessarily soulful half-finger-picking type of strumming, slow and quiet and genuine. Each word was sung softly and without reserve, and I once in a while glanced shyly towards the bottle without realizing the ridiculous circumstances of the performance. 

And oh, the bottle was beaming. It practically lit up the room. I could all but feel it harmonizing at the last chorus, you know that part. It requires two voices for the full wordless meaning to be achieved. The ending drew itself out, spacing the distance between notes like runners in slow-motion at the end of a race, wishing to hold the moment as long as it was possible to be held. 

And the last chord rung, simple and small, a few inches around us, for about three fifths of a moment.

I wanted your pills to cry.

I lifted the lid and it smelled like your mother and I wondered why I knew what that smell was. 

I could throw them away, of course, or flush them down a toilet. They're not anything heavy or serious, really. Just a temporary buoy. "To function," as you explained. Like a machine. The vastly misunderstood and complex machine of the human soul. 

Or I could take them. Two little blue robin's eggs wouldn't really change anything. It's just like coffee or whiskey or sugar or any other legal and popular drug. 

There are times in life in which it is necessary and helpful to cut your heart out of your chest, and this is one of those times. The hand must be clean and the blade must be sharp and you must be kind to yourself, please. You'll only have to break a couple of ribs. Slice the arteries first, and then the aorta, and do so as quickly as possible. Then finish with the pulmonary veins and vena cava. Lift it out gently and leave it in a clean basin of hydrogen peroxide for thirty seconds to three months, but no longer. Then stitch it back into place and realign the ribs. It is a fairly simple surgical procedure, meant to be taken entirely literally.

You must be kind to yourself. One of the most important rules, which I should have written into the list, is this: Do not ask to be understood.