Out in some field smelling vaguely old and of aspirin
and the evening’s warm indulgences you dissolve: turn
back seeing stars and recall to memory’s language the thin
outline of Oregon crabgrass toe-thick and the repated sidewalk pattern
of brick as your bare now-four-year feet thump/thud to the threshold of the rear door.

Hum now past the dizzying laundry machines
warming sweaters, underthings, and cats self-cleaned
by cinnamon Brillo tongues. Drift into the entryway, leaving
behind this polyester, these shoes (millipedes have fewer), this static cling
and move: scent-lines float you to chocolate chip cookies, blackberries, other cuisine.



Now full, amble down the green wallpaper hall through the linoleum maze
to the screen through which your treehouse whispers and become
its oak, its leaves, its roof, its looking glass; fear and breathe
as you never have. Feel the sun. You are the vector sum
and king of all that you behold. Watch the breeze—

come grow old now and here. Herodotus could not have said it better.
Construct the mental temporal bridge you cross and burn.
Cold: enter sweater. Pain: insert aspirin. Unfetter
chains of touch, sight, sound, unconcealed
and evolve. Dissolve back to your field.

lately though, i feel like there's this whole separate universe being played out around me and i'm utterly not a part of it. as though there's a club with a secret entrance code, a code which everyone knows except me, and i'm standing at the entrance struggling to understand why no one let me in on the secret.

tonight, as chelsey and i were discussing how to divvy up amongst my coworkers the cookies she had made, we discovered that there were not enough gift bags to hold all the groups of cookies we wanted to distribute. no big deal, right? we'll just put some of the cookies in nice simple plastic bags and hand them out that way, because it's christmas, and they're cookies, dig?

no. dear me, no. such a thing is not conscionably done.

you see, it's the small things that matter. the cookies need the gift bags. worthless without them. it's not the making of the cookies that matters, not the time it spent with mixing bowl or oven, it's the wrapping of the cookies that matters. it's not the words that you say, it's the tone of voice in which you say them. it's not the thing itself, it's the framing and the context and the gist of the thing. it's this parallel world of undercurrents and subterfuge and small all-important para-things that completely fails to resonate with me, to which i have absolutely no sensitivity.

this is why i fucking hate christmas. do you hear me? hate it hate it, with swear words for emphasis. it's not enough that i think well of you, or that i want nice things for you. it is expected that i spend time in thinking about something you secretly want, that i go out and get it for you, and that i wrap it up and put a bow on it, and turn what would be (at any other time of the year) a gesture of goodwill and potentially unexpected awesomeness into just another thing that is done for its own sake. we've turned what might have once been called the spirit of christmas into a fat lot of empty, expected gestures.

a bit unexpected, admittedly, coming from a guy who prides himself on being mindful of the little things.

1. the car thing that's supposed to save the world. you see, those awesome batteries occasionally die. and apparently they're awesomely expensive. but i have some good news! i just paid a bunch of money to someone to basically let me keep using what i had already paid for.
2. the iphone. though at&t doesn't know it's an iphone, and that's kind of at the root of the problem. in order to avoid allowing them to ream you on the data plan you have to perform some digital magic, among other steps. but this magic has certain side effects, including people can't call you. ask your doctor if ultrasn0w is right for you—i should have.
3. the roof. it has holes. in it.
4. the stereo of my other vehicle. a long time ago i turned the ignition in my truck a certain number of clicks so i could listen to the radio or whatever, but went one click too far, and then back a click, all in rapid succession, and this let the magic smoke out of the shiny lights of the faceplate. and magic smoke, as any scientist will tell you, is hard to put back in a device after it has escaped.
5. the nail of my left index finger. and now every time i use it it's like the terrorists won their war against the kittens.
6. the dog. i've made clear my thoughts on the matter of sub-sentient life forms. they exude smelly substances and totally ignorant of this fact. they whine for attention. and not one of them has a job.
7. the internet. conservapedia.com will eventually become skynet.
8. my liver. and i have the other items in this list to blame.

i have this thing—this … this condition, if you will—one of the symptoms (though whether this is a symptom or the disease itself is possibly a matter of debate, but i'll leave that alone) of which is that i am not a big-picture person. i understand things by breaking them down into bits as small as possible, and comparing these smashed-up tiny bits against what i already know. it's quite an involved process and i'll spare you the details, mostly because i don't know them. save us both some time and just label me a deductive reasoner; it's a shortcut but it'll do for our purposes.

i'm getting to the point. the above-referenced album by my uncle roger is what they call a 'concept album,' and follows a meandering—and at times, apparently aimless—path, by assumption: it models the dreams of a married middle-aged man, in real time.

under this assumption, it's no surprise that the entire album is disjointed, incomprehensible, and apparently aimless. but only when you consider the parts, independently of the whole. seriously: read the lyrics for the entire album, and you'll see what i mean. but the whole! ah, the whole. as the last track clicked into place for the first time, i was actually close to crying. actually misty-eyed. for the first time, i saw the world as the other half saw it. and yes, i'm talking about you, you bizarre opaque inductive types.

i'm still getting to the point. as opposite as my brain and this album apparently are, i love it, and cannot get enough of it. everything i am, it is not, and vice versa. maybe this is a case of opposites attract? i can't figure it out.

the point is this: i have no bloody idea what the point is; i just want you to listen to the album, and maybe you'll understand me one quantum more.


p.s. the first ninety seconds of track two. i implore you, go forth, trusting me, into the musical bliss that awaits you.

in my future i see data mining and analyses and reports, a dancelike feedback loop of things happening, to data, to knowledge, to other things happening. and i'm good at it, dig? so obviously it's what i want to do forever, right?

we come to the point. i tend to do this thing when i encounter something i like: i binge on it, totally saturate myself with it, eventually get turned off, stop liking it. it's an extremely male-brained thing to do. i do it all the time in many and varied parts of my life, but so far, not in any of the really important parts. my fear is that i'll inexorably work my way through all my dream jobs, all those things i'd do for free if i had nothing else to do, in exactly this manner—loved intensely, but shortly, and discarded.

i like my job. i really do. it gives me little fixes of certain things i like (including, not least of which, money). i want to continue liking my job. but the first six weeks of the year are my hell weeks, and i'm definitely smelling the brimstone; i hope this is not the year i discover i forgot to pack my asbestos armor. or my boots of +5 fire resist.

i wonder how long i could string this metaphor along. if i really tried.

i've been thinking about this a lot, recently; do not mistake brevity for flippancy.



if M is mood, the magnitude of dM/dt here is so large as to be beyond mortal comprehension.

this particular second monday started very early with a dream. in this particular dream i was a close personal friend of elliott smith.

elliott smith, it turns out, is a regular guy. i know this because i lived next door to him, and we were mates. he had legos on his bedroom floor, fantasy books on his shelves, an old home-built computer on the desk, a playstation under the television, outdated glasses. a card-carrying geek, if so unimaginative an epithet may be ascribed. he had a set of utterly loving parents and a cat who knew her name.

of course, elliott smith is no longer living in the strictest sense of the word, though this didn't keep him from speaking with me throughout the dream. and listen when i say that he's just like me. in fact, all throughout the dream, he didn't say a single thing that i myself wouldn't have said, were i in his position. the entire experience was eerily similar to talking to myself. i know what this is like because i do it most of the time.

i've long given up on the theory that dreams mean anything, but think about it this way: a good novel is one that lies to tell you the truth.

i'm trying to say something here, i just don't know what. it's been quite a long time since i wrote directly about a dream because it's a pretty cheap source of words, invariably flippant, ridiculous, meaningless, and meritless. it should, then, be regarded as a telling thing when it is about just such a dream that i now write, after such a long hiatus*. exactly why it is telling i leave as an exercise for the reader (hints are red herrings: there are multiple solutions).

*hiatus n. period of laziness. see also: respite, suspension, you have become a boring person

also. remember how i listen to carefully crafted vibrations in the air? it's a thing i was doing today. and by random, the song 'mai' by loudermilk came on. it mentions, specifically, the sixteenth day of may. tell me itunes is not sentient. tell me! tell me! you lie.

if my mother knew what i was doing here tonight she'd maybe cluck her tongue at me. maybe.

i see the picnic table in the center of the park's single light (a/(h²+r²)), but the very fact of its visibility rules it out immediately. tonight's work suggests shadow. i lean against a wooden construction barrier covering a muddy hole where too many construction trucks have driven. fascist object, taking away my civil right to step haplessly into the filth if i damn well please, i'll show you.

i tear open the paper/plastic wrapper, pull out one of what i came for. click, puff, puff. for moments all i see is an afterimage of the lighter's sparks and tenuous flame (the crowning achievement of the human race; the machine and very means of alchemy). click, puff, puff. kindle, baby. click, puff, puff.

i had forgotten the taste of this particular brand. acrid to be sure, no cubano, but not wholly unpleasant and linked in memory to far more pleasant nights than this. i fill my mouth again and again, and try and fail to blow smoke rings. some of the foul stuff leaks into my lungs, and oh how i cough. some hobbit i'd make.

who originally thought of this? who decided it would be a good idea to pick some stinky weed, dry it, wrap it in paper, burn it, and breathe the smoke? and in spite of the lungs' immediate and intense instructions not to do it again went ahead and did it again? i conclude it must have been a teenager. probably looking for a way to piss off his dad.

puff, puff. at this short distance the combustion is audible. is it the actual oxidation, or some residual water flash-boiling out of the dessicated leaves and escaping into the entropy-addicted universe? at any rate it's beautiful.

and you: i watch you not seeing me see you trundle down the sidewalk, hands in pockets and mind (omnipresent) in who knows what. have we ever been here before, you and i, roles reversed?

i dare a cop to spot me, approach and smell the smoke, ask questions. in my head i'm oh-so-brash, agreeing to produce my identification only when he produces the warrant, and only if it has been signed by the attorney general himself. puff, puff. what a troublemaker i'll never be.

and you: i see you jogging, see the thin white wires connecting your consciousness to some hidden marvelous device and wonder if i'd enjoy what you're listening to, if i myself have listened to those same words jogging that same road, syncopating steps with the same rhythm of inhale/exhale. i decide it's as unlikely as anything possibly could be—though it is true that everything that happens does in fact happen.

puff, puff. i spit, trying to extinguish the burning that always fills my sinuses when i perform this foolish self-poisoning act, the burning that triggers so strange a response, the burning i hope i never get used to.

there, the school where so recently i made my slow four-year migration from front corners to rear corners. there, the water tower in whose shadow i have lived so long but which i have never climbed. there, the field where i made my first real football tackle. there, a house worth possibly more than all the money i've seen so far. puff, puff.

and you: i can see your balcony from here, can see how he's holding you, and think what you have might last.

existence in every direction, i think. i exist in space and time, always will exist. existence forever, in every direction. this does not comfort me. by ways nothing ever ends, but by the same ways nothing ever begins, does it?

uncharacteristic thoughts, even for such uncharacteristic circumstances, i meta-think. perhaps i've been here too long. puff.

i crush out the cherry-red tip. i'm tempted to leave the ashen remains on the swing set for some naïve elementary schoolkid to find and titter over. the temptation passes.

on the walk home, the chill and the essential loneliness make me feel like a character in one of my own off-center stories. i consider how this one will end, and just who's doing the writing.