Kneel

At three in the afternoon I am in my bed, face-down, deciding just to fall asleep with the lights on, savoring the texture of Here. I can feel little hooks catching in the fabric, pulling it east. Everything will move - nothing comes with me but clothes and books containing poems. No bed. No posters.

This bed, at which I crouched and prayed, hands on head, on which I prayed again, unable to sleep, on my knees, arced into the mattress, prayed for stillness, retrieval. This bed, containing strangers. My bed, too small, possessor of one hundred, one hundred more waking hours, of more than two prayers.

I say "Excuse me God who is no bearded man with bearded sons who is formless and unknowable excuse me God that is the understander of narratives, who, what is greater than words good and evil who, what makes us hunger for something we've never possessed, grace, Grace, please help me with it, please God let me have Grace, let my body heal, excuse me please Open the Fucking Valve Please."

How small shall I make the instruments of my autopsy? She walks towards me down the hallway, pretending not to see, eyes a thousand miles away. Gleam. Sneaking into an abandoned house to see my first Playboy, age seven. Seven. SEVEN. Gleam. Watching my family drive away for the first time, finding myself alone, staying that way. Seeing the rain begin to fall, fall, fall. Gleam. The pain in the legs, absolutely relentless. Gleam. They gleam on the tray. They gleam tinily next to my bed.

But there is really only one tool. There is only How.

Waking, laying for half an hour, feeling How? How?

Why is too easy. Why has an appropriate answer, which is "nevermind." How has six and a half billion answers, none of them correct.

Walking to the bus, knees aching, How? Riding the bus, seeing the cragged, weathered faces, How? Seeing them walking by the lake, clutching each other, How? How?

This is everything, I am one word.

Knowing always the standard reply, which is to turn the ? into a . Albion Moonlight seeing his own face staring down at him from the house of the divine.

But the question stands:

How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How?

I pray for periods.

Sisters of Mercy

Come over, rub your toothy skin all over my sensitive life. Come over and help me wrap things in barbed wire.

Come over and drink, having never seen me before, rubbing my head, grabbing me, pinning me on walls. Give me enough rope for noose-making, asking for walks out to your cars and then just getting into the cars and driving away, hands under arms, me like a rock hurled at so many pigeons.

"Matt, girls don't like your posters. What the hell do you have on your walls? Commando? Funny pictures? The Kiss. That's alright. That shows you're sensitive. We want you to change your posters, please. Why didn't you make out with that girl? Give me your phone, I'm going to call her."

Then

"Matt, untuck your shirt. You look like a boyscout,"

swarming, untucking my shirt, goofy mannequin,

someone grabbing it, ripping all the buttons off in one movement, shrieking,

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrupture, tipping, inhaling acrid bullshit in the garage,

stranger hugging me, all grabbing at each other's elbows,

saturated with the frustration of it, the obscenity of desiring,

waiting for the sharp grain to rub in the right direction,

watching her truck disappear down the street,

needing a thing,

needing a new shirt,

needing a new life,

waking with aching head, reading Bukowski in bed for an hour,

remembering tests,

"What's my name?"

"Uh, L?"

"No."

"Well, I don't even remember my own parents' birthdays. I don't even remember my own name. What's my name?"

"Matt."

"Oh, really? Ha ha."

never seeing them again,

having failed their test, having shown them my silly boy's wrong objects,

now summoning the truck back, reversed, the door opening, passing it, heat moving to wooden limbs,

sick,

of the crucible,

the variables,

finding nothing in my kitchen but buttons and empty bottles,

finding in my heart reasons for tears,

hoping that somewhere

she is filling my room with honey,

keeping my wings still,

wrapped in amber.

Gummo

Watched a movie that is one of those that I don't doubt has changed my life in some way. Usually hate these types, go out of my way to despise them. This one sticks to the ribs; I may lose sleep thinking about it.



Ive never seen a more honest piece of art.

Cue Ball

Shaved my head. The kind where every strand of hair is a centimeter-long cliché standing at attention. New Beginning whatever.

A nice little analogy pooped into my head while I was trying to take a nap at 8 p.m. My life is like a cruise ship. Plenty of opportunities for merrymaking, but completely intolerable if not moving forward.

Now my head sheds water. I'm feeling all hydrodynamic. I'm going to sleep at four in the morning not because I can't bring myself to close the book on a day in which nothing was discernibly accomplished but because my cerebral cortex is itchy with visions of the future.

I love and hate the night before travel. Ever feel like a pellet in a slingshot, stretched taut?

The Greatest Told

Pushing the exhaustion margin again, riding the crest into a weary tomorrow (today). Have lately been feeling like I need to write something but the waters are murky and I am having trouble connecting the dots. I'll just see how this goes.

The night before I flew to San Diego, I did not sleep. I was too excited by the discovery of Inferno, a book by my favorite sci-fi/fantasy artist. Not since early adolescence had I experienced as inflamed an imagination - fleeing into alien worlds. When I was tween, I would read Aliens vs. Predator novels and become viscerally involved. That place was real to me. I had the ability to transplant myself into it. Then, there I was, for hours, until my alarm woke up, the sun was on the floor and I was still treading in solemn caravans across the ashen expanses of Hell.

It makes me wonder about lots of things. Like why my mind can be wholly elsewhere, why I'm not involved with excitement, at what point between dropping to my knees, six years old, and tearfully praying that a vivid dream of love (I remember her name, for some reason I don't want to tell you what it is - she kissed me in absolute understanding; among the most beautiful moments of my life) be real to reading the Chronicles of Narnia a few months ago and being deeply moved I stopped believing in awesome powers. At what point I lost track of my holy narrative, which I maybe believe everyone has. At what point the fiery bazaars of Dis became so very interesting.

I try to retrieve things from myself and it results in confusion. I try to retrieve things from others and it results in rejection. I have not tried to retrieve things from God since I was a child, since retrieval started connecting dots with chemical vacations, dumbass haircuts, dumbass books with clouds on the covers, dumbass cults with their dumbass leaders, dumbass esotericism, symbols, heiroglyphs, ciphers, costumes, all the trappings of dumbass, tryhard, dimestore enlightenment. But this idea of God is bigger than the New Age section of Barnes and Noble, bigger than C. S. Lewis, bigger than churches, beyond good, beyond evil, part and parcel of both, stirring its fingers, shifting its weight massively between the atoms.

Trying to escape back into my own story, because I have definitely lost the page.

Exxon-Valdez

The lens is focusing in. We are passing the skin, the muscles and ligaments, the bones, the various squirting masses, down through the brain with its confusion of heat lightning, through the stomach, behind the heart, beyond the body whole, to the swamp, the icky bullshit, which is where music comes from but also poison. Little hippie kids on furry dragons fly around battling Nothingness. The view reveals a mess, That Which Spills.

I know you didn't ask for this uncomfortably intimate vacation. But this blog represents what is important to me, and I can't believe I am the only person reading this who has a hard time dealing with the invisible organ's painful emissions.

At another party, after another rejection (it was impossible, was completely expected, was still kind of heartbreaking), she insists everyone Spill, a gameshow for the intoxicated. She points at me.

"Spill!"

And I spill, about needing too much, projecting too much, various too muches (you don't get to hear if you don't Spill yourself). Everyone pours it out. I walk to the bathroom punching the walls so my Lil' Bow Wow picture falls to the ground.

But my gut still sloshes. The noise kept me awake all night.

I must now organize part of the mess, or I'll be staring at sunlight through my eyelids again.

Let's pull at the biggest thread, which is that I am not happy with my life and have no idea how to rearrange its elements to make it work. I don't care anymore, about sounding whiny, about seeming morose, about the impulse to self-censor in the presence of more painful lives. I grin ear-to-ear, sing to myself and clean my house. I watch caddisflies crawl along the silt at the bottom of the river, little gems of life, watch a pair of mergansers waddle awkwardly up a rapids. But sometimes a hand reaches up out of the swamp and grabs my head and pulls it down so I can do nothing but breathe foul water.

I am not depressed. I am not the Sad Kid. I knocked down a Lil' Bow Wow picture for God's sake. I'm also having a hard time finishing this post and not listening to R. Kelly and going to bed smiling. I am also not a victim. I'm just allergic to enzymes, overly sensitive to certain squirtings, like, "Why is it so hard to fall in love with someone at the same time?" and "Why is it so hard to dance with the hipster people?" and "Why is it such a challenge to be by myself in my room in the middle of the day?"

Next quarter I will probably be in New York for six weeks, writing and performing poetry in Manhattan. This is a thing I have to do and want to do, very much. It'll be nice to be doing something I know I can become very good at. The reason I write is to focus my own lens, past the clay and into the invisibleness, to retrieve some sort of order. To hell with esoteric ramblings in books; the mouths live.

I am going to sleep now.

Spill it out.

Us

I spent most my time in the backs of cars,
inhaling the dark behind the stars.

We wandered while our parents slept,
tallying slow the hours kept

charting maps before the dawn
of holy places between the lawns.

Was it only I who saw it there,
gleaming faintly everywhere,

one ragged strand of angel's hair
wound through the mornings that we shared?

A ghost of memory not yet whole,
perching briefly in my soul,

of a new day our hearts extolled,
for both to keep but which you stole.

Somewhere out there you lost your way,
burned the map and kept astray.

Now your mother is awake,
watching moonlight bend and break.

Factotum

Charles Bukowski used to talk about how most poets are incapable of writing "true things," that they are "fiddling assholes waiting for immortality that never comes because the poor fucker just can't write." They are incapable of producing simple lines like "the dog walked down the street."

I feel like only recently have I had enough humility to write things that represent anything beyond my own self-involvement. True things, like pieces of the first poem I've written in months and months:


I sometimes think the popularity of coffee is a conspiracy
perpetrated by the same people who pretend that tea
tastes like something other than leaves in hot water
(and carry it around in glass jars like little backstage passes
to Zen heaven where Ginsberg eternally masturbates and
bald men pace flowingly on hemp sandals)


The test is something along the lines of the Goodwill Litmus, a device I came up with wandering through art museums in Europe for judging works I knew nothing about: if you encountered whatever painting is in question on sale for five dollars at a thrift store, would you buy it? The Poetry Litmus is thinking about whether or not you would be embarrassed to speak the lines out loud in front of people.

I saw Kimya Dawson perform at my college. She was all adorable and whatnot, sang songs about farts and butts and people drowning in floods. I love seeing people who have found their genuine thing and are not pretentious about it. I also love seeing them making livings off of it and being able to connect to hundreds of people at once, revealing something that is actually themselves. The best art is neutral, reflecting many places at once. The best art is also simple, contained, true.

I recently encountered a piece of art that has since become my favorite, maybe ever. It's a short book of comic strips about a cat doing adorable things, called Cat Getting Out of a Bag. The following is a MySpace correspondence between the author and I.


I see that you list The Blow under your favorite music. I saw her perform recently. She is, to trot out a tired platitude, a force. After the show, I wrote her a rather gushy MySpace message about how much I appreciate sincerity in art because it is so rare and valuable. Apparently, this is becoming a habit for me.

My gushing will benefit from context:

Tonight, I had dinner out with my parents, who are visiting me at college. I ordered a boca burger. I hate boca burgers, but I've been a vegetarian a number of years and after a while you learn to settle. Halfway through my meal, I realized that I was actually eating beef. It was the first time since Junior year of high school that any meat had made it far enough to be swallowed. I was stunned, and sunk into lasting malaise.

The issue was not just dismay over having compromised, even if by accident, my values. I was upset, deeply, because I didn't know if I really WAS all that troubled; whether the past however many months, even years, of adherence to my diet was just out of force of habit. Was I just too lazy to come up with a tenable enough justification to start eating meat again? Did I care at all?

We went to a bookstore because my parents thought it would cheer me up. I was going to buy the new Onion book, "Our Dumb World," but some guy swiped it while my back was turned in defiance of his ambiguously European wife, who was loudly denouncing it as trashy, distasteful, and gauchely American.

"Cat Getting Out of a Bag" was on display. I opened it and thumbed through half of it.

By the time I came to the sequence of Misty summoning you to turn the light on in the basement so she could use her litter box, I was on the verge of breaking into tears right in the middle of the shop.

I settle for boca burgers because sometimes animals look at you and there is a moment of recognition, maybe even understanding.

I bought the book. Your drawings helped me to renew my conviction when it was most threatened, so thank you.


Matt
Thanks very much for the message, it's truly appreciated, and it makes the art making all worthwhile.
I have yet to see The Blow live... I did mix some song titles and lyrics into a comic I did that comes out later this year, I'll be interested to see if anyone catches it
Best to you,
Jeff

~

I want to learn create things that are exactly what they are, that are of use to people, that are true.

Orientation

I have been in this library staring at words for over ten hours solid. Next to me sits a six-page outline scrawled painstakingly in green ink. It constitutes the rough sketch of what is to be the most fruitful implementation of my analytical energies of my entire college career, perhaps barring a 20-page biopic about metaphysics in The Journal of Albion Moonlight.

It took me over ten minutes to write that paragraph. I am trapped here for another half hour. Girl with the magic purse is asleep on a couch.

Sat down at this computer to start writing the introduction to the essay proper. What came out in giggly delirium is the following:


Dragons dragons dragons poopy poop dragons.


Right now, that's the funniest thing I've ever produced or seen written by anyone ever.

Girl with magic purse is giving me a scalp massage. This is the best thing ever. I am about to pass out. Not fall asleep. Pass out.

Girl with magic purse finds her nickname vaginal. I can't tell if I agree.

She wants to know if she farted in her sleep. I can't tell. She also says she is so sleep deprived that she's going to go home and "fuck a bunch."

Instead of writing this essay, I'm going to gluestick some cookie fortunes to an orange and throw it at my professor's head.

Now I'm filled with glee because GWMP just materialized next to me holding a slice of cold pizza and let me take a bite. I demanded she recognize my status as "the best girlfriend ever." This guy keeps walking past and I flash him the Wu-Tang sign and I can't tell if it's funny.

GWMP is making toy police officers have sex on my keyboard. She also put a felt mouse on my shoulder. I am living in a David Lynch movie.

I swear to god I'm not trying to sound dazed. This was supposed to be a narrative. Art transcends.

Wu Tang.

Prodigy

I was supposed to be continuing my ten-some hours of reading about China things for a constipated 12-page political economy research paper that is scraping its way through my intellectual bowels with all the ceremony of a kidney stone but was instead jittering around my room yelling John Denver at the top of my lungs. Nobody was home.

Then I got way too into "How Soon Is Now," playing it three times in a row, arms, legs, hair akimbo, hoping to Sweet Jesus I would hear the front door open if somebody came home mid-shriek. I got to thinking about all the times I've watched family members start projects they didn't or couldn't finish, how used to mediocrity I had become. I started to think about what if I got good at this, what if I'm almost there, what if I am approaching, have approached, the moment at which the ball is dropped or carried over the wall?

"Adam Smith In Beijing" called from where it sat on my couch. But the throat kept going and I found myself cycling through most of my back-catalog of practice songs until I was crooning an a capella Country Roads and totally hypnotized by how melodic I found my own voice all of a sudden.

"Holy shit, can I sing now?"

Only science can tell.

I retrieved a digital audio recorder I had left over from a previously abandoned venture to become the school paper's only gonzo reporter. It now contains: about two hours of life soundtrack from being accidentally activated in my backpack; some hippies talking about their organic kitchen compound in the woods and how people need to rise up and take back the power; two voice samples that roughly approximate how Denver would sound if he reprised his greatest hits as the plane was crashing, and he had chugged a bottle of Drano minutes before, and there was a raccoon mauling his face.

But what's the alternative? Compiling theory about the dynamism of the Chinese market economy? When Guitar Guy still lurks the city streets and youth hostels of the world, unchallenged, laid? No, friends. I can't let that happen.

Fucking Jack Johnson.

Oral History

My lesson today included "Take Me Home Country Roads," which, in a moment of delightful synchronicity, we discovered was co-authored by the guy who wrote "Afternoon Delight."

There are a few benefits to going to school two thousand miles from where you grew up. One is being able to get sentimental listening to John Denver when the lyrics have absolutely no relevance to your life beyond a general feeling that somewhere there is a dusty road leading up to the old homestead. Your favorite cow idles up to you as your boots kick up dust and snorts a snort of recognition right as the screen door swings open to reveal your whole family, wearing aprons, leaning against the door frame with the exact same cross-armed posture. Why is everyone wearing aprons? Because you're home. Country roads.

You get to picture your city like a fishbowl filled with the smiling faces of everyone you know, unified in mutual consciousness, content in shared presence. He who has funny mustaches and talks big-heartedly about Socialism bobs in quiet revery next to She who pierced her tongue for a day just to prove she could. Wearer of late-night speedos streaks by Carrier of way too many fragrant, earthy things in her magic purse. A parade of the femininely demure floats indignantly past a chorus of the damned shouting gleefully about buttholes. The disembodied heads, still smiling, roll across the floors of places you keep remembering.

And even though most everybody's on different continents and maybe have always been there, it's nice to think about bowls and roads sometimes.

My Education

It's hard to tell, sometimes, whether I stand for very little or very much.

Maundering, quasi-poetic, autobiographical narratives. Certain lines in certain paintings by Klimt. Anticipatory thoughts about the future. Calming down. Not pretending to understand much of anything. Turning your back on prophecies and the apocalypse.

It's hard to buy a t-shirt for Waiting To See. It's hard to write about it so that people will know quite what you're talking about. There's no club to join for There Are Things to be Reconciled Within You that are Ultimately Larger than Men in Helicopters and the Declining Value of the Dollar, Maybe, Maybe.

Secret taboo thoughts I share with myself, like, maybe it's more important to be kind of baselessly in love with her even though she didn't know what the devil-horns hand thing was and you've only said maybe fifty sentences to her and she didn't show up to your party anyway than to read esoteric scribblings in your room about imperialist American wars and the economic fallout of globalized capitalism like tracing the shadows cast on the ground by silhouetted giants boxing millions of miles away, somewhere around the moon or maybe Jupiter, and going to rallies to let the starving people know how sorry you are to have stood in the darkness. Forbidden things like talking about my friend with the startup company being possessed with a good soul and treating his workers like people and keeping some sodas in the fridge for them and having the professor later stand up in class and say "Matthew knows a friendly capitalist, maybe you should get his autograph" and later having the professor laugh in your face chuckling "I mean, how is that relevant to anything?" and all the time wanting to say Fuck you fuck you fuck you with your crude hieroglyphs of men in top hats holding bags with dollar signs on them and pyramids and dire proclamations about all these goddamned gadgets 'WHAT IS AN IPOD ANYWAY, am I right? Am I right? Ha ha ha.' like the world was so simple and the beauty that is inside of people could ever be captured in your stupid algorithms and the only way to make space for your unborn children is to lock arms and resist, resist, grassroots resist with your slogans and sexy, sexy molotov cocktails and bless yourself with the tears of the oppressed and FIGHT, KILL, FIGHT, KILL, BLEED, BLEED, BLEED and your killing will be vindicated by the purifying glory of righteousness.

Secret taboo thoughts I keep to myself, like, tying up the demon of blame-casting, scapegoating, adherence to anything but that which fills you with love or oddity or wonder or tolerance or memories of things that mean something to you in a burlap sack and filling it with rocks and tying it closed with a dozen knots and throwing it into the river so it sputters and dies a watery, silent death and stays dead in your heart forever, and ever, and ever.

Sometimes it is difficult to tell whether I stand for a great deal or nothing at all. But other times, it is not so hard.

Middle Distance

I smell like strangers.

Ended up dancing because I opened myself up for long enough to be swept into it.

I smell like the prettiest girl in the room, who agreed to dance and laughed as we spun, among other strangers. Sometimes something invisible transpires. Then sometimes you get all cocky when she doesn't know what "Padawan" means and you're trying to be funny but just seem like a tool.

Somebody important told me I need to learn how to quiet my mind when it gets carried away with itself. But it's impossible when the heart complains in concert.

After the dance, after an incomplete goodbye, I detached, exasperated. Wandered around staring beyond things. I've been there lots. All fingernails on chalkboards, hunger heaped upon hunger. Treading the perimeter of familiarity and kicking at the walls.

Tonight I realized something, really learned something, not in an artificial poetic device narrative way, really had a minor epiphany.

These moments are rare, but they're among a very few breeds of moment that make banality tolerable, make life livable. I mean that. It's my greatest love.

I do not love drudgery. I do not love the morose. I FUCKING. HATE. THE MOROSE. Know this, please.

Buoyancy comes with new things, new people. The heart quiets.

This is my greatest love.

My singing coach (I have one) called me to ask me if I wanted to learn Space Oddity. I explained to her that I associated the song with a very close friend who died and it would be too emotional for me to handle. So I walked into today's lesson prepared to sing "How Soon is Now." Yes, Padawan, much less emotional.

"Y'know what your trip is? You need to sing happier songs."

We had been singing Suzanne by Leonard Cohen.

So I found "Afternoon Delight" in one of her songbooks, turned it around to show her, grinning, still heart. We belted that shit and it was glorious.

There are so many chances to bring wonderful things into your life. And I am just so poorly equipped to rise to that potential. So the moments are rare.

Authoring memories out of nothingness. Rivers of alien faces. This is my greatest dream.

Shh.

Lost in Space

This beautiful girl is glaring at me witheringly over a 40 of Steel Reserve, her eyes completely empty. She turns away to talk to her friends. "Let's go find the hot guys at this party. It's gonna be hard."

Five minutes later,

"Let's go to Jake's! LET'S GO TO JAAAAKE'S!!!" (a gay bar downtown)

Yes, please go to Jake's.

It's farts in the dark, the little rejections that lump up in the arteries. Repugnant but ephemeral, passing.

Then they are redeemed by moments like Steel Reserve's friends, who are nice, having a minor argument interrupted by a dreadlocked guy wearing a parka doing a magic little pixie dance.

"What the fuck are you doing, hippie? Get the fuck out of here, man."

But he keeps dancing anyway and eventually blisses off somewhere else of his own accord.

My house is full of strangers. Requests for the wandering band of Woody Guthrie junior folk musicians in my living room to put down their tambourines long enough for people to dance to an Outkast song or two are met with more absent, withering glares. A guy from my class, gone, is talking about how much he loves Hitler. A couple is making out in my garage while a girl takes pictures of them.

Then I think about the handful of times in my life I have held the same feeling in my heart as someone else, simultaneously.

It's all farts in the dark. A gaseous nebula lingering in space, dotted every million light years or so with a few bits of dense matter and a whole lot of fire. Marbles jangle loosely in the belly's expanse.

Then you get loose and send them hurtling towards collision. Which often destroys things, but sometimes makes bright new constellations to guide you, out in the salty tumult.

Klink.

Unlikely Elephants

Go to bed. Instead of writing about things that will make you excited and think about dinosaurs and Jericho and resurrected woolly mammoths piloting flying cars around the Eiffel Tower.

That first audacious crazyman to say, "We will carve this unmovable boulder into a wall, that will stand in the desert with other walls, and we will live inside."

And now the audacity is holding up a plastic cup and feeling like a skydiver with a malfunctioning parachute masturbating until he hits the ground. When did we stop being thrilled over the fact that we have the power and the resources do whatever the hell we want? We threw stones, then we threw spears, now we have WALKED ON THE MOON.

The future is taboo. Don't have hope, kid. You're killing everything. The story is ending. Buy some wheat grass at the co-op and tuck your race into bed for a long, long sleep.

One of those things you can't really let anyone stamp out if you don't want to is thoughts like supercharging silver linings, expanding them, setting up a lemonade stand in the fucker. Thoughts like "The human story is beautiful and frightening and unpredictable and is leading somewhere none of us can even imagine so let's pop some popcorn and see what cosmic dramas we get to enact before we die."

Let that rattle around down below. It feels so strange, to have hope. To have confidence? In this enterprise we've been steamrolled into dismissing as the death rattle of a golden order and the dissolution of all things, forever and ever, anon anon? To hold up a piece of plastic and see something that will stand testament to our existence thousands of years after we've all eroded back into the ground?

How absurd. How thrillingly, thrillingly absurd.

Passenger

I got a comic book for free once, an illustrated guide to keeping an art diary. On the first page it references most diaries as being "filled with longing for a transformation." I've repeated that phrase in my head hundreds of times. Longing for transformation. Being dissatisfied with what you have but unable to capture that which you lack.

And it's not grass is greener. It's the blessing that becomes a curse - our birthright as thinking, emotive, self-aware creatures: absolute freedom to create your own life. It's horrifying.

I go to the gym every morning to try to work my way through accumulated injuries and the body-based insecurity I've been fermenting in my gullet since fifth grade (big goddamned surprise, everyone).

Well, who really gives a shit about that, Matt? You're right.

So I go home and look at all the books I haven't read, ostensibly containing some vast revelation that will dump itself into my soul and catapult me into the driver's seat. Then I push a few keys on my music keyboard, peeking timidly from behind the corner into rockstar land. Then I think about maybe I should be writing something profound, or should be doing homework. But I usually end up consulting the oracle for a while, thinking about how things could be.

Could be if I said "I love you" every time I felt it and meant it (I will be bringing up the topic of loving people frequently, so if this makes you uncomfortable, ask why, but I don't apologize), could be if I had been true to my birthright from an early age, could be if I could learn to pick up the reins NOW and get on with it, could be if I weren't so self-aware all the time, a cup pouring endlessly back into itself, which is a line I just found in my journal, which is filled with longing for transformation.

But really, Matt, who gives a shit about that?

You're right. Really, you are. Just keep driving.

Oracle

Or wishing well, whatever few things you thumb through on the internet when you should be going to bed. Pages with pictures of people you miss, people you'd like to sleep with, people you don't know. Flipping out coins, staring, measuring the parameters of yourself against the traced lines of friends and strangers.

Their mouths live. Sometimes they burp and keep on talking obliviously and it's adorable. Sometimes the lines solidify, in scratches, in being awed by how beautiful she is when she cries, in drawing pictures of unspeakable things all over your friend's homework. In graduating. In seeing his head shoved down so it doesn't hit the top of the police car.

But the tracery - of gameface pictures, of names of things, of glib glibness - is the lattice empty? Maybe not. A bookmark of time spent with various presences. This person you miss because the words "I love you" actually came out of them and they meant it and sometimes it helps so much. This person you want to sleep with even though you know better. This person you don't know but think about telegraphing because their names match yours.

You can look at the thing, make wishes, construct the future, see yourself reflected back in dim lines. Because finally, you thumb through your own names, your own pictures, your own carefully assembled nexus in the web. And then you see all the points coalesce into what you made for other people, truth (both the happy whole of the part and the ugly concealments) wriggles somewhere between your diaphragm and your kidney, and you think,

"Really?"

Then you drop another penny in the water.

One fast move or I'm gone.

Made my whiteboy pilgrimage to City Lights in San Francisco this weekend. I told myself I wasn't going to drop money on books, as I never read any of the ones I buy. But it's City Lights and I'm a whiteboy with seriousness in his heart so I picked Big Sur by Kerouac as my memento.

I open it in the motel room later and it's like going home and visiting a teacher that believed in you; like talking with closest friends at night, on a cliff, staring out over the place you grew up in, remembering why you're doing what you're doing. It is remembered, that Kerouac writes things that are true, that I am not the only person ever to spend too much time rubbing their fingers over the texture.

Awakening from a three-day binge, hearing bells in the mist, seeking refuge from himself, he writes, "One fast move or I'm gone."

I put the book down and think about tattoos.

Spend a lot of time with my fingers stirring around in the past, rubbing them over the texture of things. Trying to get my bearings. And there's nothing to bring back. So much to resolve. So little assurance there will ever be a chance.

Yes, here we go, right back to the back. This way, friends. Never left anyway.

You spend so much time wanting one thing, etching out a slot for it, staring into the space, filling your head with want. For years, maybe. Then a few simple words pass, a simple barrier or two overcome by a breeze of momentum - Really? That's all it took? - and it's gone. You're outside of it. Staring at this useless hole you dug for yourself, wondering how many hours you spent shuffling around in the dirt at the bottom. But it's not sad because you never filled it with the Thing. It's sad because the Thing was in your head the whole time.

How much can be devoted to "I love you, oh, I love you, love you, I love you so wholly that it hurts me, physically hurts me in the morning first thing upon waking, is how much I love you." How little we really want the labor of actually loving. How easy, in comparison, is the hole in the ground.

Stirring the fingers, touching the rough spots, pressing, finding them give way into little depressions where a body should have been, but, instead, there is just morning aches.

Imaginary friends don't make good company.

Go kiss someone on their living mouth. This business is so much harder than wanting.

This blog has sunk way back into the Id. It kind of goes in cycles but it hasn't been aired out in a while. Reading my friends' blogs has reminded me that events are usually more interesting than feelings.

I have decided to take a break from writing. That doesn't mean I will no longer write. It just means I'm unburdening myself of the self-imposed expectation to achieve brilliance in the form. I haven't written a poem in months. The dating blog kind of sucked the enthusiasm out of me, not that I ever really had that much to begin with when it came to sitting in front of a blank page feeling exasperated.

As a consequence, I'm trying to make music. I'm even taking singing lessons. Right now I'm feeling like I'm just poking my head out from beneath a rock. But screw the rock. I've routinely embarrassed myself in the past over things not one one-thousandth as worthy.

For Christmas, I'm taking my mother to a shooting range. Anyone who has met my mother will understand how bizarre this proposition is. My whole family are pacifists - I have never shot a gun. And that's the point. She quit the nursing job she held for twenty-some years, finally overwhelmed by the lack of self-preservation most of her patients demonstrated.

After I got into San Diego, we went to Balboa Park. As we were walking, I suggested off-handedly, "You should dye your hair purple." For all the times I've mocked this sentiment, it seemed like a good idea. To do it appropriately is a tall order, though.

When I resurrected Dillon, I reaffirmed an idea I've knocked around for a while: the big secret of life is that you set the rules for yourself and you can do anything at any time as long as you are congruous and confident about it. People move aside to accommodate your momentum. The strongest reality wins.

So I told my mom she should do something that threatens her comfort levels. I told her the best thing you can do for yourself is to temporarily become something you resent, or to participate in something that you hitherto felt you could never be a part of. We reached an agreement: she would go shooting if I agreed to take a personality test out of one of her "find your ideal career" books; something I have openly resisted for years.

It makes more of a difference than you might think. A lot sticks. Try it.