I Never Think About That

     "It's fine," she said.  "Really, I'm not mad."
     "It's not fine, I need to stop," he said.  "I keep doing this to you over and over and eventually you're just going to be done with it.  Be done with me."
     "I know you've been through a lot and you are getting better," she said.
     She looked at him as he sat, head bowed, fingers interlocked.  Even at an angle she could tell his eyes were focused on some place a great distance away; some place before "she" was part of "them."  The fibers of the silence were filled with water, giving it an unnatural density.  She became aware of the refrigerator humming in the background.  The seashell din of highway traffic a short distance away.  His lips stayed frozen, his brain fighting a thought.  She didn't know if he could ever break the stalemate.
     "I...I know in the moment...that I'm wrong.  That it's me that I'm angry with.  I see it coming.  But then I do it anyway.  I yell at you.  And then you go into your 'Bastion of innocence' mode that we both know is bullshit and we both know boils my blood and it all falls apart in front of me, like I'm sitting back and watching it happen in third person.  And in that moment I love you and I despise you more than any person on the planet, and I see all of the ugliness inside of me and know that you see it to, then I'm lost and scared and angry, furious, livid, all out of this consuming fear and this black void inside of my chest.  And it's like I'm just learning how to feel things all over again and all of the dials are turned up to ten and I can't turn them down or off because they're all turned to ten and where do you start?  I look at you in the middle of this and see that you're behind this armor that I've forced you into and I wonder how long it will be before you just stay in it full time.  I wonder how I could forget that you accumulated your own garbage over the years and that I'm poking old sores with a ripe new stick.  I wonder how much I look like your dad right now and how you can even look at me," he said.
     "I never think about that, I just think of her," she said.
     "It's not fucking about her," he said.
     The silence settled in again and they could both hear the howl of the tires from the freeway.  The noise of the rubber forcing the heavy metal rectangles forward toward the lights of the city buildings, glowing quaintly against the black and purple sky.

Expectations

The table has an inconvenient
height, creating a scoliosis
and tennis elbow.
The writing desk with the appropriate number of
scars and water rings never emanated.
The right spruce never met the wrong
teeth.

The lacquered top is an onyx abyss entirely created by
myself, from schematic to beam and bolt.
Another wonder of the world
snarling alongside the sphinx,
lines of visitors wending, managed
by nylon straps.

The queue is too long because there are too many empty
tall boys on the counter.
What was once a stream of sights grated into
word dust is now a struggle against
momentum.
The moment is impossible to catch,
like a greased pig,
contriving metaphors out of a struggle for
movement. For forward progress,
gaining stability from the spin
the gyroscope stands on toes like a dancer,
still,
tips of point shoes white as the satin
ages from the tension and retires.
White, it turns the white of strain
and grace.

For the dancer the audition is the terror,
a job offer more petrifying than
crucifixion because it binds the need for accuracy
in thick, iron shackles.
Audiences, expecting.
The tryout is a frying pan, the performance is a
fire.
Between a rock and a hard place.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Catch twenty-two.
Dichotomies, all.
Yes or no.
White or black,
or obsidian,
or raven,
or midnight.
The empty film frames at the end, whipping
the projector in spliced conclusion.
All things in twain. Any third
ignites them.
The middle child
of the step-parent.

That got too serious. Too close.
Sometimes the friction between the words
leaves an ember near the kindling
and the flame's tongue licks the edges off
the dream fog.
No more camel, no tiara,
no hopscotch, no orange, no watermelon.
The Princess' desert dunes
vanish back into heat waves above the asphalt.
The crumbs of the family picnic removed from their corner
with a fingernail.
If you've held on to it for so many years
surely it has a meaning.
When the fibers amass on the ballpoint
the moment becomes poignant.
A palm on the forehead, mouth slightly agape.
The same pensive feeling the dam has
when the water level falls.
The drought exposing the algae stains.
The high water mark drawn like a height chart
in a kitchen door jamb.
The concrete monolith bares its strength
sitting,
waiting,
on floods that will not come.

I Am To Describe

It was written on the back of a case for my old favorite
pen. Funny how things change.
The excitement grays and then friends only keep up through technology.
The mole on her cheek becomes asymmetric
and kills her.
You wait in the waiting room for news
but you already know what the last page says.
Life creates punctuation through pauses
and endings.
I am telling, not showing.
I am to make the character want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
I am not supposed to tell how the dog makes the character feel,
I am to describe how the dog
has a seizure;
violent muscle spasms rippling under her white fur and bright pink skin.
Heaving, uneven breaths.
Eyes jerking senselessly, hijacked by an internal lightning storm.
And I am supposed to describe the pause he feels.
The locked gaze and lungs.
The ignored television, laughing in the background, changing volume periodically.
He fixes his sight on the convulsing body not realizing that he's holding
his breath.
That fourteen pounds of effeminate canine represent a tether to reality;
that the ropes tying the boat to the dock can snap
in the right wind.

It Sort Of Stuck

When I was in middle school I shared a carpool with my best friend Alex.  His dad was the Chief of the Volunteer Firefighter unit in Kearney and would take us to school in the mornings.  My mom would pick us up in the afternoons and bring us home.  This arrangement worked like clockwork.  Every morning I was late because both my mom and I hated mornings, and in the afternoons she was always on time because she and my dad owned their own business.  Both Alex and I had older sisters that were around the same age, so nothing was really secret between our families.  When my mom told me that I was adopted when I was eighteen, she also told me that my sister and Alex's older sister both knew, since it would have been hard to explain the presence of a baby without the presence of a pregnancy.  There were no secrets, tendency for tardiness or otherwise.  Our families just knew each other inside and out, because that's the way it was.

One slushy winter morning I piled in to the maroon minivan that had synthetic wood paneling on the sides.  A Chrysler, if my soaked memory serves me.  I was fourteen?  Thirteen?  Somewhere in there.  My birthday is in April so I have always been on the young side for my grade.  Starter jackets were the fashion trend.  Specifically, NFL football teams.  I was a New York Jets fan, predominantly because my tee-ball team had been the Mets, and at that age I had thought professional athletes played all sports.  Jets, Mets, they're close enough to confuse an athletically ignorant six year old, and it sort of stuck.  So I piled into the van in my Jets Starter jacket as I had for so many days prior when Alex's dad Ken turned around and said "You smell like marijuana."  Reminder: I'm a middle school student in Nebraska.  I know that booze, drugs, and sex were a problem for early teenagers in other states and cities in the 90s but Kearney, Nebraska was not one of these cities.  At that age I understood pot in theory, but had zero first-hand knowledge of the stuff.  And now I'm sitting in the middle row of a maroon Chrysler minivan with synthetic wood paneling, at 7:30am, being accused of spending enough time around dank smoke to smell like it.  Because of my older sister I was a foul-mouthed little child, but even so "What the fuck?" is the only thought that persists even through to today.

The foreshadowing involved here is breath-taking.  Around the age of sixteen, after Alex had gone the way of the high school theater crowd and we mostly stopped talking, I discovered what marijuana actually was and fell head over heels in love.  Sixteen through eighteen were just smoky hazes as I didn't have much to do beside smoke pot and, well, that's pretty much all I had to do. But we're not talking about older, high school Bret, we're talking about fourteen year old Bret sitting in that minivan, thinking "What the fuck?!?"   I didn't answer Ken.  He had turned and looked back from his driver's seat when he said it, and he just stared at me.  I sat there, look of shock and surprise, words stuck in my throat at the colossal What-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about-ness of the whole situation.  After a few eternal seconds he simply turned around, put the van in drive, and took us to school.

The whole experience sticks in my mind with no particular punctuation added.  There are some things in my history, in everybody's history, that you can point to and say "Yeah, that's why I don't like spiders, because my uncle got bit that one time and almost died."  This was not that.  I didn't start smoking pot because I forever wondered after that day "What is it like to be high?"  But it happened, and I remember it, and now I've told all of you about it.

Charcoal Drawings

I talked with my sister for about half an hour tonight, and after hanging up Mandy commented on the avalanche of vulgarity that was used.  "I've never heard you cuss that much.  Ever."  There was a metric fuck ton of impolite words used.  I explained that my sister taught me how to cuss, and could make a peg-legged pirate blush and plead for modesty.  I had to explain to my girlfriend that my sister, being nine years older than myself, used me for her entertainment when I was younger.  Being a little brother, I was always eager to fit in with the big kids.  When I was seven or eight, my sister told me that teenagers showed their mothers that they loved them by calling them bitches.  I promptly ran through the house, found my mom, yelled "Mom, you're a BITCH," with a gigantic she's-going-to-be-so-proud-of-me smile on my face, and then spent the rest of the evening in my room wondering why my mom would ever slap me and ground me for loving her.

It took me several years to discover the meaning of the word fuck, but that never persuaded me from mastering its usage.  While my sister never dared to trick me with this word, knowing full well that they would know where it came from, I did overhear it enough that I started to learn all of its delicate nuances.  My young ears were able to discern the staccato, piercing nature of the word, and realized that it was an excellent way to convey intense frustration of draw somebodies focus for important matters.  My mom first discovered that I knew this word because of Tecmo Bowl.  I didn't handle losing well as a child (or now, for that matter) and my friend Tim was just better at it than I was.  My mom came into the room to discover her eight year old angel spiking a Nintendo controller on the floor screaming "THIS IS A FUCKING JOKE!"  Her shock was only compounded when, after informing me that I was grounded for using that word, my response was "What fucking word?!?"  Several years later I discovered the meaning of the word and subsequently increased my usage.

The oddity of my family is that while my sister and I are as foul as soured milk, my dad never cusses.  The worst you'll hear him utter is the occasional "Aw, hell," or, his favorite, "How could you be so damn dumb?"  He has used this one quite a bit over the years.  My mom doesn't cuss, UNLESS she gets flustered.  Then she undergoes this change.  My mom is a tiny little woman standing maybe 5'2" with big, curly hair.  When she's had enough, her little fists clench up, her face gets red, and her first profanity busts from her lips like a balloon with too much air finally succumbing to the rules of physics.  Much like the balloon, once the structure has ruptured everything gets let out.  The usual result is my dad uttering a shock-faced, breathless "Jody" and my sister and I laughing at the hilarity of the scene.  Unless we're in public, in which case we assume the posture of the caricatures that you are used to seeing on streets and in bazaars.

New York

Upon arriving in New York I didn't know what to think.  I knew that I was either going to love it or hate it but that there would be no middle ground.  I had the same feeling in my stomach as you get on the up down up down sections of roller coasters; either vomit or a big smile is coming very soon.  Being born and raised in Nebraska did not prepare me for the old school feather pillow that hit me in the kisser.  I was expecting more memory foam.  I had always told myself that I have traveled.  I have been in bigger cities.  Delhi.  Mexico City.  Despite all of this I had never experienced anything so intensely urban.  I had always heard the term "concrete jungle" in rap songs and other pop culture mediums, but I never understood it to mean pavement and iron and brick so deep that it writhes around your ankles and makes your body feel over-sized and incapable of motion.  I wondered how so many people managed to walk down the street every day because I had the urge to look up at the stone and steel and glass monoliths that are everywhere.  As with everywhere, people become used to their surroundings and jaded to the impressiveness of it all.  I recently told a born-and-raised Californian he needed to move away from the ocean because he didn't even notice it any more.  He has lived here his entire life and hasn't been to a beach in at least three years.  Somewhere there is a New Yorker who thinks of his/her daily 60 floor elevator ride as annoying.  That person desperately needs a dose of Kansas.

Being me I noticed oddities that I'm sure others miss.  People keep their trash cans on the street because there's just no other place for them.  A fact of their life but a blemish on my daily sojourns.  Everybody reads.  The awesomeness of the subway is that it takes all of the commuting part out of commuting.  Yes, you spend 30-60 minutes each day riding this metal earthworm but you're only requirement is to step onto and off of the thing at the right time.  And then you read, or work, or sleep.  I couldn't help but think of how better read and better informed most New Yorkers are, even those you want to stereotype as non-readers.  The city seems to be ESL.  Everywhere I went there was a rich blend of tongues from ports the world over.  My ear became more nimble in my week outside of SoCal.  I noticed the quality of neighborhoods by taking note of the amount of graffiti on walls and the amount of gum on the sidewalk.

It was only day two when I realized I was in love.  There are certainly things that I would dislike about living there but I left the city with that same hungover feeling that lingers after a one night stand.  The next day your head hurts and your body aches but you wear this wry smile that won't go away because you lost yourself for just one night.  Dangling were the severed strings of responsibility, ambition, failure, consequence, doubt, reality, and sadness while the warm embrace of pleasure and enjoyment pushes you onward.  New York and I are not lasting companions, destined for love eternal, but I will keep my eye open for a possible fling or affair.

What I've Learned About Writing

I'm not a writer.  A writer is somebody who gets paid to write and makes a living out of it.  I just write.  I spill my life and thoughts out into journals or free websites but I've never made a penny.  Despite my amateur status, there are quite a few things I've learned along the way.  If I had all of the answers for writing I would have started this passage by saying "As you know, I am a writer."  Regardless, there are a few things that I've figured out that will hopefully be helpful.

1. Just start writing and keep writing.  This seems like dumb advice, but I struggled for the longest time writing stories because I didn't know how to start my story.  I would try to start at word one and progress forward only to find that after a page or two I came to a place that felt like a better starting point.  Then I'd scrap all of the things that I had written and start from my new starting point.   I spent an ungodly amount of time worrying about what was the beginning, middle, and end.  I stressed about it, sought feedback from my friends, and generally did everything I could think of to devise a way for figuring out where to start.  This one just came to me of my own accord.  One day I was sitting in this usual quandary when I realized that I could just keep writing.  The beginning, middle, and end only matter if the story is completed, so I learned to just keep writing until I came to the end of the story.  When I reached the end, I knew that I could work backwards to find where the story needed to begin.
2. Don't force a story.  My last sentence in the previous point says "needed to begin" because if the story ends a certain way, there are certain plot points that have to have happened.  The old theater adage says that if you show a gun in Act One it better go off by Act Three.  This makes sense because if the gun was never meant to be shot, it wouldn't be in the story in the first place.  If your main character falls in love, he/she has to meet their lover, and before that they'll have to be looking for another for one reason or another.  No matter how much we disagree, life happens as a logical progression.  If your story ends in a place that you don't like, change your main character's personality a bit.  Fire him from his job.  Have him be inside a bank when it gets robbed.  Do anything other than expect the reader to think "Well, sometimes people just snap, I guess," because they will never believe your story.
3. Revise your story.  Then go back, read it again, and revise it again.  I'm only now learning the value of revision and I hate it, mostly because I didn't do it before.  Revision allows you to tweak details to make the story better.  It allows you to catch stupid mistakes.  It allows you to get inside the head of your character and learn things you didn't even know before.  Stories are intricate pieces of construction like cars, and you'll never make them better unless you crash them on purpose and sift through the wreckage to figure out how.  Sometimes you'll find out nothing is wrong at all, but if you smash the story by telling it through another character's eyes it comes out even better.  You'll never know unless you experiment.
4. Write about your life and those of your friends.  I'm not advocating that fiction die off and everybody start penning essays, but use the things that you know.  The only things that are genuine are the things that come from you, so even if you're writing about an intergalactic war between octopus people and creatures that look like wire whisks, make one of those wire whisks a lot like you or a friend of yours.  Base its interactions off an anecdote from your own past.  If you want to make it fantastical you can do it by translating it into a weird world or starting at the same point and then exaggerating, but if it isn't grounded in reality your readers will never buy in.

I have more tiny nuggets of wisdom but it's two in the morning and my eyelids are pressing down on my eyelids and my will to write any longer.  Hopefully these points are useful.  Hopefully they make some manner of sense because I will certainly be skipping point three tonight.

Things I've Learned While Driving in California

I've lived in California for just shy of five months and have had quite a few adjustments to make since I moved.  Aside from the different culture of people and the cost of living, the biggest adjustment has been driving.  I've always considered myself a pretty savvy driver, being knowledgeable of traffic laws (and how to break them without getting busted), but there are a different set of rules when driving in California.  I have no idea why some of these things are the way that they are, but here are some things that every visitor or new resident should know about driving in California.

1. Traffic - By my best estimate, the road system in California was designed somewhere in the 60s-80s, when there were substantially fewer people here.  Additionally, the culture of California is style over substance.  Why would I share a car or use public transportation when I could show everybody the new Benz that I can afford if I skip my rent payment every other month?  These are numbers in an equation that adds up to stupid amounts of traffic, at all times, for no reason.  Do you want to go shopping on a Sunday at 3pm?  You may cruise along unimpeded and cover the ten miles in ten minutes.  Or it could take 45.  I was driving to LA one night to visit my girlfriend.  Friday night, 9pm.  Traffic was 5mph at best for about 45 minutes and I kept telling myself that there had to be some horrific accident.  I kept my head on a swivel looking for burning nuns frantically running around or random body parts scattered about BUT IT WAS A FUCKING TRUCK TIRE.  A two-foot piece of rubber standing on end had crippled tens of thousands of drivers.  Not an actual wheel/rim combo that fell off, your standard chunk of exploded tire.  I can't even think of a ridiculous metaphor for the rage and hate that went through my body.  It changed me.  In that moment I knew that I am superior to every Californian.  That is a fact.  A supporting piece of evidence for this is that...
2. Rain Shuts Down California - There's this myth that since it never really rains here and that there are so many cars, oil builds up on the freeway.  When it does rain the water beads on this oil and causes carmaggedon.  The reality is that real, actual rain causes power outages and landslides and the bullshit mist that they call rain causes the clueless shell people that reside here to play thirty-six car bumper cars.  And they do this even though they're only driving 22 miles an hour.  If any of these people actually saw real rain they would drown to death.  From their own feces that would fill up the inside of their car.
3. Traffic Lights - The light directly in front of your lane most likely has no bearing on what you are actually supposed to do.  There is a four lane road that leads toward my house that has an additional turn lane at a light.  Five total lanes.  There are two lights at this stop.  One light is in front of lane 4 (the left turn lane being lane 1) and the signal for the left turn lane is actually in between lanes 2 and 3.   My best guess here is that the state is too bankrupt to afford an acceptable number of traffic signals.  Even if they had one signal per lane it still wouldn't matter because...
4. There are Secret Lanes in California - I know it says Bike Lane, but that's really just code for Right Turn Lane.  That thing on the side of the highway for Bimmer's that run out of gas because the owner can't afford to keep the tank full?  That's not a shoulder, that's just an extra exit lane.  Anywhere a car can squeeze becomes a lane.
5. Speed Limits - ...don't matter.  If there's bad traffic, the speed limit becomes this mythical thing like a unicorn or a girl who actually wouldn't cheat on her husband with Brad Pitt, if given the opportunity.  If traffic is good, there are still too many cars for a cop to radar you in any manner that would hold up in court unless he's right behind you.  Motorcycle cops are a concern, but only because...
6. You Will Kill a Biker if You Drive Here - I've just accepted this fact.  California allows lane-splitting, which means that good people who are eagerly ready to volunteer (their organs) can drive their motorcycle on the dotted lines BETWEEN cars.  This will scare you shitless the first month or so that you drive here.  Putzing along at 38 mph in a 65 will have you frothing with hatred until you get blasted by motorcycle exhaust 3 inches from your open window.  You spend the next couple weeks paranoid, looking out for bikers when you're crawling to and from work, even trying to scoot over to give them more room.  Until one day you just accept fate, like a stage 4 cancer patient, and resume whipping back and forth between lanes to gain those extra 3 feet each time the tiniest of gaps appears.  One of these lane changes will eventually lead to a biker witnessing his own death in my rear view mirror, and I'm okay with that.
7. The Fast Lane is Not the Fast Lane - Everybody in California is original.  That's why they all dress alike, drive the same cars, and think that In-N-Out is better than any other fast food burger on the planet.  They all also think that the far left lane is the fast lane, which is why it isn't.  The second lane from the left is the fast lane well over 50% of the time.
8. Turn Signals - Aren't used.  This seems counter-intuitive because it is.  There are more cars here than 99% of places on the planet yet nobody feels compelled to tell the other motorists where they intend on going.  You do get used to it after awhile.  If it would be massively dangerous for that car in the right lane to cut in front of you with no warning, they almost certainly will.  They're not really concerned that they're going 45 and you're blasting along at 80 as this is a detail for you to work out and can't possibly affect their day at all.  While lanes are usually pretty clearly marked and there aren't as many people on their cell phones while driving, I still have that self preservation instinct that forces me to move my middle finger three inches every time I want to turn or change lanes.
9. Cell Phones Are Not Recommended While Driving - They're actually illegal, punishable by a minimum $325 fine, but it's more of a recommendation since all of the people that you don't WANT using a cell phone while driving still do.  Trophy wives, douchey business guys with slicked back hair, and high school girls still yack away while tailgating you and mysteriously looking to their left, but when I lived in Omaha it always infuriated me that roughly 75% of drivers had their talk box glued to their face at all times while operating a car.  The law knocks the number down to probably 25%, but that's still an improvement.
10. Road Rage Doesn't Really Happen - This is another one of the positives.  Everybody wants to get home as quickly as possible and be out of the awful Royal Rumble that is rush hour traffic, so when you nose your way in front of somebody shaving 2 more seconds off of your commute the person behind you reacts more to the tune of "Well played you wily bastard" than "I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN AND FUCKING MURDER YOUR THIRD COUSIN!"
11. I'm getting bored with this, so I'll just lump these all together: You hate the fact that every day you see somebody, who is obviously a prick, driving your dream car; Toyota sells more Priuses here than anywhere in the world and the drivers do, indeed, sniff their own farts out of smugness; Carpool lanes are fantastic ideas that nobody uses because carpooling isn't very cool; and gas costs a dollar more per gallon here than anywhere else in the country, at all times.

I hope this has been informative.

The Shanks

I had a computer science professor in college that constantly chirped the adage "Garbage in, garbage out."  Computers are stupid and do what we tell them, so when we tell them to do dumb things, they oblige.  I've pushed this saying to the outer bounds of what Dr. McClung ever thought possible.  It turns out, nearly any system in life spits out garbage with cartoon smelly lines and flies swirling around when we provide it with half-assedness and stupidity.  My writing habits lately are an example, as is the bulk of the productive things that I'm attempting.

My writing hasn't totally flat-lined, and I'm not suffering from writer's block because I'm still lucid and seeing the world in this patchwork quilt of words and phrases, but some of the phrases are in Tagalog and I can't tell which one starts the damn quilt.  I should change things up and go into editing mode to polish things that I've written and don't presently hate, but I don't want to take an up and coming bit of writing and introduce it booze and women and easy money and sully it before it's prime.  My sentences are running on like a marathoner that picked up smoking.  Premises of pieces are lost like droplets assimilating into the ocean.  I used to be able to know how long to drag on a sentence, how many flowing phrases to string together before punctuating it all with a little five word staccato.  Now words are piling in before periods as if they were some sort of horrific train accident moving from right to left.

Of course this all assumes that I had a manner of swagger with a pen that may not have existed in the first place.  A slump isn't a slump if it's normal.  As with all things I will persist, head down, crooked jaw clenched in concentration.  I will fight the urge to backspace all of these words out of existence because if I can't stare down my garbage writing in the mirror and pluck out the edible bits like some sort of homeless author then I won't get through the winter.  And the humble writer has no conclusion so he merely stops writing for now.

Disappearing Into the Hollow

I only ever write beginnings
because I don't know how it
ends. I can't see over
that hill because the trees
are old growth and overdue for
a fire. The crackling would be
horrendous
and a generation of larks
wouldn't learn to fly.
The fire would bring new
plants but the old ones
probably won't give a shit,
casting charred, shrill looks
upon the new buds.
The new beginnings.
The ozone would catch the brunt
of the fire smoke like that huge mat
that catches pole vaulters each time
their vision turns
from ground to sky.
Deflating but not quite rebounding
all the way.

Some of the smoke particles would float out
into space, assuming an orbit
that takes them into the far reaches of
the cosmos, where trillions of crumbs are
gathering.
Sucked into a black hole,
crushed together into what scientists call a
singularity.

And then their knowledge stops.
They don't know if inside that dense abyss lies
a universe's graveyard,
bleak and without flowers,
as if the groundskeepers have been by
several nights after Memorial Day.
It could be the void like a canon fuse
disappearing into the hollow
of the launch tube before
propelling the artillery shell
skyward with a big
bang.

The thud reverberates between the houses,
the shockwave making itself known against my chest.
My favorite ones are the shimmering
fingerlings that slowly shower
down, blurring the line between night
and dream.
I've always wondered what happens
to the embers.

Ding Dong, Reality

A friend of mine was arrested today for something that, if true, is despicable.  I'm not ashamed to call him my friend because the version of him that I know is kind and selfless, constantly struggling to fit in but always feeling like an octagonal peg trying to fit into a round hole.  So very close, which makes the separation that much more frustrating.

I have an empathy for him, for a lot of people, that is hard to understand.  When I received the news via text the witch-hunt began.  "I always knew that something was wrong with him," was thrown around.  I didn't.  If I had I would have distanced myself from him.  I try to make a habit of avoiding people who are sinister or at minimum have broad swaths of evil painted across their soul.  I prefer to dabble in mischievous and the occasional misdemeanor.  Felony is too far.  Yet I understand, in a way, because I know that good people can do bad things for good reasons.  Sometimes people aren't equipped to play the hand that they're dealt at all and choose to throw their cards away.  I can't say that I blame them.  The reaction is where I differ but I also feel like that is more to chance than any of us really care to admit.  Apparently most of my wires connect to where they're supposed to which makes me laugh.  If sanity were a horse race I would not put my own money down on Bret Londer.  Things could be so very different though.  When I'm confronted with a reminder like this I can't help but think back to what would have happened if I would've stood up in that restaurant and flipped the table like I wanted to.  Or opened that second bottle of Evan Williams.  Or skipped the meeting with the professor.  Or, worse, what if I had just rolled with the punches, cramming it all down inside, rotting from the inside out.  Some cosmic coin flip made all of those decisions for me.  God knows I didn't.  Any one different decision could have turned me to the paving stone path that led a couple of police officers to my door.  I would have opened it and had that same rush of terror; that the upward trajectory of my life had just been cut short, that I had caused it, and that there was no way to fix it.  Self-created helplessness.  Real despair.

I feel bad for the victims.  Even the most benign tornado ruins farmland and tears down trees.  The land will never be the same but over time new plants will grow and the new trees will regain most of the height of their forebears.  If I'm being honest my hurt for them doesn't outweigh my hurt for faces that are familiar and shamed.  Other people's problems are never quite are as potent.  It's harsh, but it's true.  For my friend, I hope it's all an awful dream.  I hope he was an unwitting participant in a game that he wasn't aware was occurring.  Even if that turns out to be the case he'll always have that film of doubt and mistrust on him.  Even in the best of scenarios, life will be a hike up a steep mountain made of mud.  I hope that through all of it he discovers something about himself and meets fate head on.  But in this moment he's dealing with reality one minute at a time, and these words are nothing more than bullshit.

Unknowing Participants

I have these memories in my head that linger with a breathtaking magnitude wherein I'm sure the other participants have long forgotten the moments.  There's this longing to clue them in so that they can share the feeling but I'm always worried that I'm incapable of conveying the same feeling I have for the moment.  While I'm sure that time has glossed over some of the more unpleasant relevant details the images themselves stand out as clear as a photograph printed on high gloss paper.

One such memory is during the beach vacation in Mexico at the end of my summer of study there.  I had spent the entire summer flirting with my now-girlfriend Mandy and the promise of a drunken beach weekend before parting ways was packed with expectation.  We spent the whole of the first day together doing whatever we felt like doing.  Most of what we felt like doing involved drinking.  Flashes of beach, pool, vibrantly colored drinks, shops, a crowded restaurant, night clubs, moonlit beaches, the carbonated waves of the black ocean lapping at the shore, a kiss while standing fully clothed and chest deep the water, and waking on the balcony of my hotel room alone.  After I was finally able to wrestle movement from the mouth of the single worst hangover I've ever experienced in my life I went searching for her, thinking that she was just out enjoying the day.  As the hours pressed on I realized that while she was out enjoying the day she was also avoiding me.  I tracked her down going into her room later that evening.  I asked her if last night's kiss was just a kiss because that's all that it could be given the circumstances.  She said "Yes," and went into her room.  I took my hangover and my sunken heart back to my room and went to sleep.  The next day I found her roommate and best friend from the trip, Amity, aimlessly wandering about the hotel.  We proceeded to spend one of the best days of my life walking around the beach, shopping, eating, just being tourists.  It was one of those rare moments that I felt completely at ease.  Most of my side of the conversation was trying to analyze why Mandy wouldn't want to spend more time with me in our last few days together.  Amity talked about how our time in Mexico had changed her life forever.  We were two people in awe of things much larger than ourselves, like people standing at the feet of a colossus that we couldn't see, even when we leaned back as far as gravity would allow.  Despite the thick coating of alcohol that stands between my brain and the memories from that long ago I still remember what she was wearing, each place we went, what her hair looked like, and her facial expression when I crash-landed the parasail that we rode on into a beach umbrella.  It was never love, it was simply wonderful.  The next day we boarded buses and she disappeared into the distant fog like a character in Grand Theft Auto.  I wish I had a way to thank her for that day and apologize for the version that she certainly remembers of it, spending a day with a mopey twenty year old bitching about how he didn't get laid.

I wouldn't know where to start to thank people in my life for these moments.  The day my college roommate Paul came in to our shared room in the fraternity.  It was a gorgeous spring day and the lights were out because the sun was able to overpower the shadows in spite of the smallish windows.  I was sitting with the TV on but not watching and Paul sat down and asked me if I would talk to somebody out of a favor to him.  Looking back I can tell that he had spent hours carefully choosing vanilla words to keep me at ease as he was telling me that he was worried about me and wanted me to see "somebody," but even in the fog that I was living in I knew that "somebody" meant "therapist" and that "worried about" meant "I think the road you're on ends in suicide or accidental death."  Judging by the struggle I'm having nearly ten years later to type these words in front of this anonymous, inanimate computer screen I can't imagine how difficult that must have been.  Had he not done it I'm afraid that I probably would have proved him right.  Despite reliving that moment every so often I've never thanked the kid that sat there in an old white soccer tournament shirt and red shorts and told me in not so many words that he wanted to help save my life.  I have never thanked him.  Nor have I thanked my other friend Matt that had donated his courage to Paul to have that conversation and did the grimy legwork of finding somebody for me to talk with.  I don't imagine that they think about that moment any more.

These are but a few of the dozens of moments that helped to shape who I am and it's odd to me that in some cases the people that helped to smooth out the ridges and repair the cracks in my clay aren't even aware that they did so.  The only thing stopping me from looking them up right now is the inadequacy of what I would have to offer in return.  Some kind words and a humble thank you seem to pale in comparison to helping a person define who they are and how they fit into the world.  I should host a parade.  One with gigantic inflatable Mighty Mouses and floats constructed of thousands of flowers.  I should hire marching bands and military jets for a flyover.  Of course this is all preposterous.  A parade with depictions of these moments from my past should surely be banned for public decency concerns.  Huge, inflatable liquor bottles.  Drunken float riders swinging shovels at each other.  Think of the children.

Whatever Label You Prescribe

I've had the furrowed brow of somebody tangling with a Rubik's Cube over the past several weeks.  There's a foreshadowing of understanding.  A dramatic irony wherein the audience can see what's about to happen to me but I'm on the screen and I have no idea.  Some author, probably Vonnegut, wrote a passage wherein a clairvoyant character explained to a human character that their clairvoyance had nothing to do with a special gift or a heightened perceptiveness to the universe, but merely that when you're taller you can see farther down the road.  The feeling I've had lately is that I've been standing on the opposite side of the street, on the corner, and I'm watching myself plod down the other sidewalk along the building.  Walking Me has earbuds in, face canted toward the sidewalk, and the same shoulders-hunched profile that is probably the root of my back problems.  It's a thought I've preoccupied myself with over the past month.  Spine straight.  Shoulders back.  You're slouching again.

Observing Me can see Walking Me on that concrete conveyor belt, but can also see what lies around the corner.  Dog poop on the sidewalk.  Cars whizzing through the intersection.  The play of the light through the leaves of the young ash tree on the corner and the dancing shadows that it casts onto the sidewalk.  It's not a scene of impending doom because I'm still controlling the split personalities.  Observing Me can call out at any time.  Walking Me will likely look up periodically to check for disaster on the horizon.  I still haven't given up the idea of becoming a government spy so I remind myself to be perceptive.  I need to work on inconspicuous if espionage is in my future.

This at-odds feeling with parts of myself has stemmed from a looming awareness of the fact that one day I, and everybody I know, will die.  It's a feeling I've always had.  Right before I fall asleep at night, for as long as I can remember, I have the thought "This is what it will feel like to die."  It's right at that moment when you've closed your eyes and it feels like your consciousness is Sylvester Stallone in Cliffhanger, dangling from the insides of your eyelids, in peril of dropping into the infinity of blackness inside of yourself.  Nirvana, or whatever label you prescribe.  This thought at that precise moment usually either causes me to gasp awake each night like I've caught my first breath after being suffocated or to settle comfortably into sleep knowing the ultimate end result of the fruits of my life.  No matter your outlook, there's an odd comfort in the idea of oblivion.  The reaction doesn't vary night to night, it goes in patterns.  This newest iteration is different.  It's like both ideas are standing eye to eye.  UFC fighters in there pre-bout mean mugging stance.  My reaction has been a combination as well.  I'm getting a fair amount of sleep every night but it isn't restful.  I'm not constantly distracted but I'm only able to muster around 83% focus at any one time.  It's limbo, but there's no stick or accompanying music.

And this is where my Observer/Walker analogy spawns from.  The sense that while I can't see the Magic Eye picture the authorities assure me that I will if I keep staring.  The thing has been sapped of its despair.  The feeling that there may be all manner of obstructions ahead and treacherous, broken pavement hidden by thick fogs but I am able to help myself by calling across the street and asking if the record store is on the next block or if it's two down.

Sleep Deprivation

During my freshman year of college I didn't sleep much. Over the summer before that year I had filled the void of year-round high school sports with an online game called Artifact. The game never stopped, so the easiest way to be good at it was to play non-stop, which I did. I didn't really taper off when I started classes so the math of a day became unfavorable for sleep. I managed to stay social mainly by roping a couple of my new friends at college into playing as well. As the semester dragged on the nights grew shorter until I was getting an average of four hours of sleep during the weeknights and cramming in twelve hours a night on weekends. As the weeks droned on the haze began to descend over my world and it slowly turned into Grand Theft Auto, minus the larceny and killing. Everything out of my immediate line of sight didn't exist and things that appeared out of the ether were only there long enough for me to pass by. When finals rolled around everything was magnified because I couldn't sit on cruise control through my classes anymore. There were papers and projects due that I had been pushing off like dust bunnies in front of a push broom. Now they were clambering up the handle like zombies in a low-budget horror movie. My weeknight sleep went from four hours to two. My weekend sleep went from twelve to four. While backing out of a parking space after lunch I fell asleep while looking over my shoulder and drug the front of my truck along the side of the car parked next to me. The only thing that woke me up was the jolt of its rear bumper losing the tug of war it had been playing with my front bumper. To this day I don't certainly know that incident happened because it was impossible to separate the real from the dreams. My friend who was riding with me told me what I had done and he had no reason to lie to me but my own brain has no comment on the matter.

Despite instances like that one I still functioned fairly normally. I was always exhausted but outwardly I appeared to be normal. There was also something about that base state of mind wherein the brain has moments of really, really incredible things during its struggle to simple maintain thoughts like "Eat food," and "Pants are required to leave your room." The toll it took is noticeable. At almost thirty I'm already turning into my father, falling asleep while the TV laughs at itself at six-thirty. Where the nineteen year old version of myself could keep my eyelids open with willpower alone the twenty-nine year old version struggles to avoid head bobs even after enough Full Throttle to kill three silverback gorillas. At nineteen I drove straight from Lincoln, Nebraska to South Padre Island, Texas, somewhere around twenty-two hours. In 2011 I had to pull over in eastern Colorado after seven or so hours because I was going to turn my car into modern art.

By now you're thinking "Just get more sleep, idiot," but it has never been that simple. When I descend into that mode of minimal sleep required by biology to continue living it gets harder and harder to get a full night of rest the longer I go without one. The desperation for a cool pillow blossoms into this fear that it isn't merely my consciousness slipping away when my eyelids close, it's the sands in the hourglass of my time here on Earth. The slowing, heavy breaths do not feel like dreams being pulled up over me but instead like Father Time with an ether-soaked rag. Try sleeping with that image in your brain, no matter tired you are. If you can I'd like to briefly explain the theory of perpetual motion and cold fusion to you because you are capable of anything.

In those moments I find myself jealous of those rare, comfortably religious people. Think less Rick Santorum, more Gandhi. But I don't desire their religion. I still look at using religion to cure my fear of death and the unknown as I look at people who quit smoking by using chew. What I do want is their faith. That Philosopher's Stone in their life that has told them the path they are on is true and washes away their self-doubt. For now my religion is kept in books. In books I have the unwavering faith that if I keep searching for answers on a nightly basis I will invariably wake up. Usually because I have passed out mid-sentence.

Humanity

I get pretty down on people and the world. Working in customer service as I do I get to see the lazy, stupid side of civilization. Every day I'm asked at least one question which makes me wonder how that person even survived to the age that they've acquired. What I realized today that I don't do often enough is to simply submerge myself in people in their natural habitat.

The only real time I have interaction with people is almost always in a commercial setting. Movie theaters, restaurants, department stores, places where people have a purpose. The problem with this is that we all have different ways of getting the things that we desire. Some people are forceful and yell and scream if they don't get there way, embarrassing their families by screaming until they are red in the face, forehead vein throbbing. Some people go the route of the 80's movie best friend who is in love with protagonist female, just be kind and patient and all good things will come to you of their own accord. The juxtaposition of these various styles in any given setting is a tragedy. The culprit: We act our own certain way because we believe it is the best way to accomplish our goal. Nobody does anything that they think is wrong or incorrect, you genuinely believe that how you act is the best way to act. But people who try different methods are idiots. And bastards. Take the screaming gentleman from earlier. If I see this man I get filled up with rage and go red in the face myself. I wonder what on this earth makes him think that he is better than the person he is yelling at to talk to them in such a way. But I am a person who believes that the best way to get what you want is to be honest and treat others with respect. If throbbing forehead vein guy saw me in a similar situation he would also think "What an idiot, he's never going to get what he wants," just like I do.

Walking in Balboa Park today nobody wanted anything from one another. It was a beautiful day in San Diego and tons of people were simply out enjoying the weather. Being Easter there was a church group reading Bible passages out loud. It wasn't to recruit followers, it wasn't to denounce homosexuality or Muslims or abortion, it was just what they saw fit to do on this day. Across from them were Syrian-Americans trying to raise awareness of the forceful suppression of freedom in that country. There were a group of Muslims trying to use Easter as an olive branch to show Christians that they have nothing against Jesus at all. There were Tarot readers and mimes, a violinist, balloon artists. The lady raising awareness for San Diego Bird Rescue had quite the crowd. Yet nobody seemed to want anything. The lone group of Christians trying to sell their version of Jesus as superior to other Jesii found few interested in being lectured about God when it was quite obvious that we were all in the presence of the one of our choosing. Even the peddlers of wares seemed to be following the Alcoholics Anonymous ideal of attraction over promotion. Even the children had the sense that today was somehow different as their volume dials were all set to an acceptable level, including the one wading through the fountain, his father following his progress, a look of pride in the adventurousness of his mini-me.

And in that moment I again felt the earth's heartbeat. That imperceptible rhythm that keeps us from strangling each other in restaurants. The rhythm that instills in us the idea that those movie scenes of impending global apocalypse where everybody comes together in peace and love might not be total bullshit. The sun grandstanded a bit with a 360 degree rainbow while the earth continued breathing in and out.

Dog training is substantially harder than you might imagine. By substantially harder I mean there are certain things that I hate spending time on because I'm bad at them and dog training is one of those things. I get frustrated by the cycle of Dot looking at me for guidance and me not knowing how to translate my objectives into woof. For her part, she is incredibly quick on the uptake. While I gave my dog free roam of my house in Omaha Dan objected to Dot jumping on his bed when he moved in. Within three days she recognized his bed as a no-fly zone and never had another issue. Yet when it comes to cat food I could rig a shotgun at the edge of the food bowl and she would pad right up, ears pinned back, and take the buckshot right to the skull. And I get frustrated because I know it's me. When I took some computer programming classes in college one of the professors had a saying. "Garbage in, garbage out," meaning that if you told the computer to do something stupid, it would. Dogs are apparently computers. That poop.

My frustration comes out of a weird place as well. Like everything else in life I've cultivated a dichotomous temperament. I can sit on the phone at work all day and have somebody scream at me over something trivial while maintaining the demeanor of a monk with a butterfly landing on his wrinkled Indian finger. Yes, if you're wondering, all monks looks like Gandhi in my head. And if I hear "Shaolin monks" I'm already thinking about the Wu Tang Clan. If I struggle with something that I should easily be able to take care of or something that I think I should excel at, it's an instant blind rage. It's always been that way only slightly more embarrassing. When I was younger, and if I'm being honest even occasionally now, if I go completely postal I just cry. It's the weirdest reaction ever and usually ends with me laughing because I feel rage bubbling up out of the top of my head...and then I'm crying. Big crocodile tears. Even though there are some neurons that obviously aren't connected properly the ones that are able to recognize "This is weird" still blast chemicals between each other, and after a minute or two of crying I just start laughing. The feeling of terminal frustration pervades for awhile after. Even know I get a flashback of the feeling. Something like a searing heat through all of my muscles coupled with big, gasping breaths. In that moment there isn't enough oxygen in all of the world to make me feel whatever the word is for sufficiently oxygenated. And when I laugh it takes me outside of myself. I can see myself standing there stitched together with dental floss. The seam is uneven and bits of stuffing hang out of the gaps between the thread while empty spaces occupy yet other ones. Overall I look like a sketch from Tim Burton's early years but I'm not ashamed of the quality. This is how I've put myself together and I've done the best that I could.

Sestina

The look in her eyes told me all manner of things.
Lights were out and the wind moaned under the door.
I looked at the tabby in the corner to break her gaze.
Not again was my only lingering thought.
My chair creaked as I shifted my weight
and for a brief moment I forgot the world.

And in the next moment she didn't crush my world.
She commented on the gravity of this thing,
how it was a decision that couldn't wait.
I willed somebody, anybody, to come through the door.
Maybe Jesus on a pegasus, I thought,
would divert her relentless gaze.

That gaze.
It began to make me unsteady as if I'd been whirled
around, stirring my gray matter and colliding my thoughts.
"Get me off of this thing!"
I screamed as I lunged for the door
but she hugged me and I was comforted by the weight.

The moment held its breath, waiting.
Her eyes closed on my shoulder but I still felt her gaze.
Inches from escape it was now eons to the door,
the floor stretching out like Pangea into the new world,
the globe on the floor depicting the whole thing
over an expanse of time that defies thought.

I realize the vacuum of the room has thawed.
Her grip on my torso still had weight
but the heaviness had gone out of the thing.
I no longer felt that gaze
and the globe with a bar inside it showed the correct world.
I didn't even notice the door.

Slowly gliding open on frictionless hinges. The door
that revealed a black hallway of thoughts
like blinking yellow eyes in a black, black forest world.
Waiting.
Affixing their eyes on us in a gaze
that dripped of starvation amongst the throngs.

And it was that gaze, from outside the door
that splintered my thoughts with a crushing weight
and stopped this thing, this woman, from leaving my room. My world.

Why You Should Read Literature

Of late I have neglected my reading. My fourth grade teacher Mrs. Forney can take credit for starting this particular habit. At the beginning of the year we each received a metal ring. The ring's purpose was to hold index cards with the name and a brief summary of each book that we read throughout the year. Since it was like a contest I quickly started plowing through Goosebumps and Hank the Cowdog until I had somewhere near one hundred cards by the end of the year. Since then I've just kept reading. Along the way there have been some road bumps. I still have not completed a book written by Charles Dickens, but I do wish that he lived in the age of motorcars so that he could've been gruesomely ended by one of them. Regardless, I have kept reading. And I've always focused on literature instead of fiction. Huge difference here and the impetus for my writing tonight.

People typically view non-fiction as a source of personal betterment and sage advice. Here is where my path diverges, and I'm going to try to show you why I'm right. Which is weird because I never ever ever do that winky face. Non-fiction is not what you should be reading to inspire change or improve your station. We can start with motivation. I can't look at a single rack of books on effective habits or engaging leadership without thinking that more than fifty percent of the author's motivation was dollar dollar bills, y'all. I look at the authors and wonder about their histories and their qualifications to tell other people how to live and act. I've hinted at it so I'll just call it out: Stephen Covey isn't qualified to tell people how to live. He did receive an MBA from Harvard and he has a doctorate in Religious Education, but his most successful endeavor to date has been telling people that he knows a better way to live than they do without anything in the vicinity of proof. It is great to get other people's viewpoints on things. Actually it's essential for us to thrive, but this is not the way to do it. And please don't read books on management or leadership. To save you the time I'll summarize all of them ever written right now: If you treat people with respect and show them that they have personal value, they will respond by acting respectably and valuable. Gasp.

This paragraph is about why you shouldn't limit your reading to David Baldacci, Stephen King, etc. As a note please understand that I do enjoy the occasional foray off of my high horse and read something that is technically garbage for pure self-indulgence, but that's my caution here. Much like eating nothing but Peeps for every meal will leave you fat, toothless, virginal and dead at thirty-three, reading nothing but genre fiction will leave your brain fat, toothless, virginal, and dead at thirty-three. These books are guilty pleasure. The literary equivalent of masturbating while thinking of the cougar next door that keeps wearing those sweaters with the plunging necklines. Keep it up and in a decade she will be sixty-five and no amount of therapy will be able to help you. Substitute all of the above references with genre fiction and you have my point.

Now we arrive at contemporary writers. The examples that come to my mind are The Hunger Games, anything by Chuck Palahniuk, The Harry Potter series, Tom Robbins, etc. In and of themselves benign, but the problem seeps in around the edges when you realize that all these are doing is marinating your thoughts in our current sociopolitical stew. The reason there are Timothy McVeigh's in the world is that with so much access to information we can swaddle ourselves in our own little world where are thoughts are never challenged and fester like plague. Like it or not, all of these authors above, no matter how divergent you think they may be, are all ringing the bell of class difference in our modern age somewhere in their writing. While it isn't always the main theme of the story, it's there, much the same way that your house smells like your pet no matter how much you clean and no matter how little you notice. Literature is the antidote. Truly timeless literature doesn't really push an agenda. On the Road and Of Mice and Men aren't pushing agendas, they just tell a story. Even if you read a book like Slaughterhouse Five which is pushing an agenda, it's not our agenda. It's an agenda for a world just coming out of war. Our hippie liberals are different than those hippie liberals. And that's what we need right now. We need to spend our days trying to find ways that our viewpoints are wrong or need to be modified instead of this insanely dogmatic environment that we live in. I am right and you are an idiot for disagreeing with me is usually the opening line to a story that ends poorly for the thick-skull. The learning in literature is ceaseless as well. In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair is writing about the horrific treatment of meatpacking workers in Chicago in the early 1800's. Read that book and you realize that while we have labor laws and two hundred years of experience under our belts every company still "speeds up" on it's employees, we just have different words now. So finish up The Hunger Games trilogy but go out and pick up The Heart of Darkness or For Whom the Bell Tolls. Your brain will reward you with green sprouts of fresh thoughts and an oxygen that you haven't felt in awhile.