Appetite

Until Monday I had no appetite. I haven't been doing a lot which is likely a contributing factor. Aside from the twentyish pull-ups I'm doing a day I mainly trek back and forth from the couch to the computer with occasional sorties to the kitchen and bathroom. For the first two or three days I had no sense to eat at all, I simply did because I knew that I should. On Monday I called a couple of friends to see if they wanted to go to taco night at the Crescent Moon. Jeff was game so we met at around seven. By the time I got there I was famished. I had my usual ten tacos (they are tiny little things with maybe a tablespoon of meat, a dashing of cheese, and a couple pieces of lettuce) but felt that I hadn't eaten anything. Jeff and I split an order of fried cheese curds. He had to take off but I stayed and kept the bartender company still starving. I ordered a meat and cheese tray, which consists of two pretzels, summer sausage, hard salami, and two cheeses to combine and dip in delicious mustard. It was as if I were eating for the first time. An amnesiac that had forgotten how things tasted. It continued into today. I'm expecting Stephen Hawking to show up at any minute to explore the black hole in my belly.

The First

The sinking feeling that I get when I come home and open the garage door and her car isn't there. That summarizes it. I've spent the last two years building my life on a foundation of memory foam and the weight is now crushing the viscoelastic memory cells. Fortunately the wine won't spill as the energy doesn't transfer, it just sits on the couch and tries to convey through the cosmos how badly I want you back. I have to believe in telepathy now.

It would be easier if I had done something specific. One isolated evil is something that I can tackle with sword and shield. Nebulous insufficiency is something that even Quixote wouldn't ride against.

Periodically Dot sits and stares at nothing in particular and whines and I understand.

Best Post Ever

I was vainly looking at the visitor map for my blog to see where the last 100 visitors came from and what they looked at. I usually get a lot of viewers from all over the world because of my post about Donald Barthelme (which actually contains very little about the man and his writing, but there were obviously more pressing things on my mind at the time). However, somebody looking through my archived blogs returned me to possibly the most succinct blog that I've ever written. It exactly conveyed what I was feeling at the very moment. 8/30/07. Warning: Blog contains adult language.

Forced It (Give me a break, I needed to write even though I'm not feeling it)

I jerked her by the collar and smacked
my lips. There was lilac in her hair that reminded me
of mom and dad and their divorce
that wasn't my fault. They had never gotten
the sailboat that they had wanted
to take over tumultuous seas to Cuba in hurricane season.
Driftwood lined the beach of the long
silence between them at the dinner table,
powdered mashed potatoes substituting
for a child with an MD, JD,
architecture training, computer science background,
teachers license, TIG welding certificate, or a degree
in video game design from a community college.
I sat there with my sallow complexion gazing at
the potatoes wondering why my promotion
had been a pink slip.

They rose from the table and said "Good
luck, I hope you find happiness," as I remained
stationary at the mahogany table, eyes transfixed on
the potatoes with strings
that tugged at my skin from the inside
with the aid of pulleys.

And the phone rang and it was her.

I met her in the parking lot of Wal-Mart.
She held out her hand
for my key because she will only be
with somebody with an MD, JD.
I reached out for her collar.

Dog Park

The water tower looked like something Don Quixote would challenge. It stood on top of the horizon, sandwiched in the middle of the neapolitan view that was the sky and earth. The day was quite obviously a gift; still in the upper sixties despite being six o'clock on the first day of November in Nebraska. It was a day that I needed. I've been fighting the world for a couple of months now and the outcome is still undetermined so the opportunity to switch my brain off was welcome. For around an hour I watched my dog blur around the park trying to both get dogs to chase her and make sense of a world with more things in it than Virginia and I. I had parked on the wrong side of the converted baseball field but the walk back to the car was serene. It was one of those rare moments where I was connected to everything around me both past and future. As I watched Dot zig-zag around the amber grass I easily could have been Meriwether Lewis treading that patch of ground for the first time. The rows of rooftops melted away to rolling hills being showered by the setting autumn sun and I was alone with my dog. Dot stopped at a puddle in the grass and mud and looked at me to ask if it was okay and I told her that everything was going to be fine.

Phone Assistance

She aged twenty years in the span of three or four seconds. The anger drained her face like Gaia calling in a loan of mana. The culprit was a Western Union representative being less than helpful and contradictory. As I sat idly waiting to provide any assistance that I could, I felt bad for the woman. I tried to imagine what events had compounded in her life to cause such a catalytic reaction every time something minor went wrong. I'm not Job, but as I've aged I've learned to write off the annoyances in life and be happy for the lack of tragedy that I've enjoyed. Except when I'm driving. As she withdrew into her own eyes and peered at the gray desktop I felt uncomfortable. The way that a wealthy person must feel in the presence of honest poverty; privilege tugging at conscious like heavy earrings.

I tried to create a scenario where the pallid-faced anger belonged; a raucous New Year's Day celebration on the other end of the phone, the customer service girl splitting time between trying to help the lady in my office and keep the amorous interest of an overly-boozed fall intern. I tried to imagine that the reason that she needed the money wired was because her children had been kidnapped and were to be killed. Children in the hands of ruthless killers allows for disproportionate anger. None of these were the case, however, so I continued to avoid eye contact.

Cornered in my own office, I tried to be productive. I printed an e-mail that I had read a dozen times before, forgetting that my printer is louder than a nuclear test. Life returned to her eyes long enough to flash fire in my direction and then solidified into stone as they returned to the desk. I neatly stacked the pages on my desk and slowly clicked back and forth between open applications, occasionally scrolling up or down a little ways. After another minute or two she wrapped up her call and then sat staring at my desk. She might have sat for several minutes had I not interrupted the silence and asked if everything was corrected. She regained herself and genuinely thanked me, only sharing a small bit of her phone exchange with me anecdotally. I walked her halfway to the door, returned to my desk, and stared at the gray top.

Fall

I'm in love with the summer
but it's fall now and everything is
dead. I woke up and the sheets next to me
were empty and only shards
of leaves remained. Diamonds of brown
perpetually poking through
pillow slips, puncturing my memories
of trysts filled with
warmth and shine.
Gentle breezes taunt from the cracked window.
I never could sleep when I was too warm
but now the ceiling fan brutalizes like
the pounding of the drum and the crack
of the whip, bidding me to row again
as we cross north towards Iceland; Reykjavik
beckoning from the future
and the winter
dispatching
summer with a stern finger and a look
of disappointment; a spurned lover
giving the last look over the shoulder
before becoming the person
that was wanted.