Undressing His Royal Highness

92/93/94

November 9, 2009 · Leave a Comment

92

We cut this city into some neon grid,
and as we slashed the treads of our shoes

several times over on the pavement,
those green squares we took

as religion and truth
slowly disappeared in the wake

of our howls.
What would become of us

when the soles were all worn down
and we had nothing more

to stand upon amidst the rubble of the tallest tombstones?
Damn you, Grandfather Mountain.

Damn you, for who but the
oldest of agers could whisper

so softly and be heard,
could whisper at all.

We cut this city into some neon grid,
but now our own sky-scraping graves have

been sifted through to the black bituminous
heart of a mountain devoid of sound

and even Grandfather quakes
when he hears the last thud

of a train’s coughing

spittle hanging like flies on the tracks.

 

93

Shush! now young lady!
a shadow is born here and there!
underneath the swinging legs of those far-off creature craters!
“I got moxy!”
And I got three figures playing mandolin on the Rue Morgue shouting at each other

IN G MINOR??

at three!
o’clock!
northcentraleasternstandardpacific times!
Oh!
times!
Oh, the times!
Ohh, the best times!
The povs!
The povs old weezies lining up!
Their povs weezy fingers swathed!
swathed like the Baby Jesus!
swathed like Frankie “Everyman” Roosevelt’s dead little legs!
swathed in the whitest and the yellowest of mama’s morning eggs!
On the nickel!
well, if that’s the case why’s nobuddy checkin the floors for

SOME JINGLE JANGLE??

“Oh, but I really got moxy!”
and me I got bathtubs in the countryside!
one on top uh the other!
one on every corner even!
I’m a regular bathtub real estate
tyyyyyyyyycoon!
No tie today boys! it’s casual Friday
for me!
as for me!

I’ll be takin my tea n two slices into the breakroom!
call my brother Madame Secretary! ask him for the number
to his tailor, whom he says is quite good!

 

you, Madame Secretary – stand outside the phonebooth!
make sure the dogs don’t get me tonight!

 

94

These are old images:

maggots, antelopes of that linoleum Sahara,
ringing the banisters,
trampling in herds, spilling over the
edges of the trashcan wherein if I reached
my tiny fluttering fingers, I would
be lost in a stampede of white
and thick fluids.

Fluttering fingers, a pouch of my fathers gut
cinched in half by a leotard;
and yet falling down I was graceful -
I had prima hands, they said!
I had prima hands and dry knees!

Dry, gray knees.

The Piedmont leaves.

It leaves me following horseflies into
virgin forests,
using pecan shells to find my way back

home.

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TWOOOOO new poems??!

October 16, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Why, yes. Yes, TWOOOOO new poems, in the postmodern vein of DUMB:

The Ballad of Beckley, West Virginia, or: An Auto Biography

These are old images:

Oh, what a heavy rifle
I carry like a telescope

All     sprawled
beneath a sweet
shade of blue,

the lord done take my legs from me
so weary are my hands
the lord done take my family
in truth, I understand

All sprawled
beneath a sweet
shade of blue,

there are fingers opening
into
out of
upon
away from mine.

the lord done take all that he can
and me, I pawned the rest
the lord was once all but a man
and me, his lonely guest

There are fingers opening
away from mine
and
trailing them
on tiny strings

on a rusty hitch
are the tools for being
a lady
are the toys for being a
child.

the lord done played a joke on me
but me, I know no differ’nt
the lord done take my family
go with ‘em, I just couldn’t

On a rusty hitch
are the toys for being a
lady
are the tools for being
a child.

oh what a heavy rifle are these.

William Butler Yeats Sits Staring Through His Eyebrows at Me At the Lost and Found (an exercise in Dadaism)

A terrible beauty is born
hardly daring to wet its mouth
for the trivial days
the ramming with the sun.
Wherever green is worn,
a cleft that christened
that fine woman who eats
that crazy salad
rides upon sleep; a drunken solidarity.
“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry”
and yet,
you tend upon it still,
drifting on the still water,
and you will not hush

He made the world to be a grassy road,
and some may blame him
that he took away
the verses that could move them.

Also! I’m gettin’ published again!
Bennington College’s online literary journal, plain china, will be having “54″ in their annual The Best Undergraduate Writers of 2009 anthology. Whaaaat.
I still have to tell myself that I’m not as awesome as that guy I have Irish Poets class with.

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69/73/all of my life

September 11, 2009 · 1 Comment

69

Sometimes I wonder if the people that know me
the people reading this or anything else
will think this is about them
will they draw upon some vague, non-sequitor description
will they find themselves in it
will they hold it against me when I slander their shoulder blades
when I confess my undying love for them or their brothers
when I ride bicycles with them while the wind blows secrets up our legs.

Sometimes I wonder if the people that know me
the people reading me
will they be so vain
as to think I’d breathe their lives back into them
with words.

Or is it that I wonder
if they will find out?

→ 1 CommentCategories: Existential Crises

A Gentleman’s Goodbye

August 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment

It began as a broken horse race does-
the derby where all things were slick and loud
and dripping with crumpled sensuality.
The short jarring of the elbow,
the quick thrust
of the wrist.

And then it were a wrestling mat -
the stench of underarms
and three hairy legs pressed against one another.
A left hook as the right stayed planted between the fingers
of our opponents.
A swift crack into the bone marrow,
and our horns locked.

And then the funeral pyre, crackling in the heat -
our skins resting on the shoulder of a ghost,
and we wrinkled our faces
only in the smoke’s wake.

This is a thing I wrote a long time ago. I changed the tense from present to past here, and the POV from third limited to first plural.

I felt terrible about writing this. It’s okay, now that I think about it.

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The Van

May 17, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Around about Fort Worth, there is a county road whose name is shot up on a thin metal sign by several steaming holes. Bullet casings and wet gunpowder line the gravel surrounding it. “West Fire Tower” it must have read at some point, the remaining white letters now crosshatched by some hoodlum’s Swiss Army crucible. Down the road a bit is where the old fire tower, a rotten namesake, lays in ruins in the tall grass and the staggering pines. Its top busted off years ago and is mostly eaten away by rust and the acrid saliva of large birds of prey. Every once in a while the wind rushes through the stiff broken staircase and the old burnt away pilings so fast that a satisfying chorus of metallic ‘tings’ sounds from way back in the forest, as if the mosquitos had designed a method of communication slightly more advanced than the transfer of human blood. As if a blind and crusty man had lain there for most of the century, and had died chewing sharp-smelling tobacco, now eternally hocking a yellowy fluid spotted with strings of brown leaves into a crushed metal coffee can.

Cars pass by the fire tower sometimes; the drivers and their passengers pull to the side of the road, cram cigarettes and matches into their loose pockets, stuff their bare feet into some flaking leather boots (chiggers will find the holes, always), and step off the dirt, around the fallen remnants of rotted pillars towards a wide open circle, a clearing behind the trees, towards that broken down Econovan slumped like an invalid over the horizon, and though it’s four o’clock in the afternoon and the sun is all brass and noise, the sweat from the driver’s upper lip and the lit end of his Pall Mall are dull, as if both had been smeared flat across the baking day.

Deep within the spare tire is where he found me, curled into a perfect circle and sucking my thumb.

“ ‘Ey! For Christ’s sake, boy. Git outta there…”

He pulled me out of the middle of the tire, out of the back of the van, by the arms, gently. In the waning afternoon, we sat on the rusted remains of a bumper, and I still sucked my thumb. I could feel the pull of my mouth drawing out all the blood in my hand, and as Jim talked in a slow thorny drumbeat of a voice, I felt the sleepy lull of bloodlessness creep all the way up to my elbow. Just like every Sunday, we dangled our legs over a carburetor, some empty canisters of castor oil, and the great bleeding carcass of an old motorbike, picked apart by ravaging animals and thieves. And just like every Sunday, he plotted while I inhaled each of my fingers.

Jim told me on several occasions that the mystery of childhood was that you remember it always, as clear as the rain that collected between the rims of the tire that had been my bed for a very long time now. He seemed to forget that eventually, water rots everything, and mildew spreads faster when you sleep. If you’re not careful, even the fire tower’s rust, a half a mile away, can find its way to your blood.

~

Around about Texarkana, there is a country road that leads up to a whitewashed porch with a large glass pitcher of sweet tea sitting at the edge of the stairs, or at least, I assume it’s all still there. My mother’s hair – her red hair: I sat on her lap, pudgy and soft, and pulled and twisted the long threads of her red hair that fell around me in great ropes, and I imagined I was a sitting devil in a great curtain of fire. I sat on her lap, and she sang me country western songs until I fell asleep with my head between her breasts, and the long afternoon shadows that reached their tendrils up the stairs were defeated finally by the western sun, settling itself between the branches of two thick oak trees growing into one another on the edge of the property. The tea steamed in the heat, and I dropped to sleep with the faint taste of hot sugar drifting in the haze around us.

The next morning, I sat cross-legged on the countertop, sucking my thumb, and I watched Jim talking low and quiet to her.

The immortal Pall Mall stuck deep between his teeth, he breathed heavily so that I could smell every sulfuric leaf stuffed into the rolling paper like gunpowder, and he pointed emphatically at a piece of paper that I found unfamiliar, some blue lines running each and every way on thin pieces of parchment, forming a web, a second place for us to live, or to be found dead in. Once and only once that morning, he looked at me with jaundiced eyes, veins alive and writhing beneath the sun-pocked skin of his face.

To her, but without taking his eyes off of me, he said, “You think you oughta teach that boy not to suck on his thumb all the livelong day? ‘S liable to fall off…” I looked down at a small wet fingernail and puckered skin. I thought of the bowie knife and its faded shadow impressed upon the back pocket of his jeans where it had rested for many years. Jim had skinned bears with that knife and had their pelts stacked as high as I was in the bed of his truck; with it he had gouged out muskrat eyes as proof of his conquests, and now they hung like curtains along the eaves of his trailer. I quickly blew on my thumb in an attempt to dry the spit off and stuffed every inch of my hand deep within the folds of my legs, hidden from Jim’s shredded back pocket.

And the next month, he raised the bright shining beams and made a skeleton of our new house, a carbon copy taken from the pale blue veins I had seen on the parchment paper before. He fleshed it out, gave it shingles and siding and plaster, and made it proper for us to live in. And I sat on the plush new floor, sucking my thumb and pulling tufts of sticky red carpet from my hair.

The carpet had come in from the back door in rolls as thick as tree trunks. For a few weeks, they laid motionless in the corner, propped lazily against the wall as if they were yawning while someone tried to find a use for them. At first, a spongy foam blanket was laid out and stapled to the floor, and while Jim painted the outside of the house a pallid yellow, my mother and I bounced through each room, seeing how close we could come to touching the new crown molding on the ceilings. When the carpet was finally laid out, a fibrous permanence came into the house. The carpet was red, the red you would find on the edging of a rich woman’s red housecoat, and it was transferred everywhere by a mere touch. And it stuck. Soon, our white walls were covered in red lint; Jim’s smoker’s cough produced red; I began to find red in my comb every morning before school.

For a while, the smells were new. They were new as it was, as I was, but now they were foreign and man-made. They were cigarettes and rubber and sweat and leather and dirt, instead of my mother’s soft cotton shirt, faintly effervescent, dry even in the sun’s afternoon bloodbath.

The next day, we drove west of Dallas. It rained, and so the junebugs lay in sheets on the gravel roads we rode down and buzzed as our tires rolled over them. Next came the frogs, seeking comfort in the puddles on the roads. When the rain dried up, my mother stopped the truck and got out. She turned her head once, I saw, straining her ears to make sense of some tinkling in the trees, but like me, she guessed the rain had gone back to its work. Looking to the west, she saw something hidden in the brush, and then something behind that on the horizon, and she trudged through several old rows of dead grass as high as her hips to find out what was there.

I waited a very long time for her, and all the while I sat in the back seat and sucked my thumb and thought of the sun between the oak trees and tried to smell the sugar in the heat instead of cigarettes.
When she came back, she said nothing and drove me home.

~

That night, we stayed inside, though the squall line that had swept the Northeast part of Texas had come and gone, taking with it the lingering smell of mildew and wet cement. Jim had come over for dinner, and had smoked his cigarettes over the ribs she had cooked. She had taken the meat out of the freezer and sliced it between her fingers it as if it were made of plastic, stiff with sheen and smelling like nothing. When it had thawed, she had rubbed every part – shining white tendons, smacking red muscle, streams of translucent fat – with peppers and salts and smells. She had stuck it outside in a smoker, and I had watched great clouds of flat, gray smoke go up and over into the neighbor’s yards. He smoked over it; he flicked his ashes into the shredded innards of his meal. And he ate it. Chewing into the muscle, I saw little flecks of fat caked onto his teeth, so white and globular that the reflecting light from the overhead lamp blinded me as I sat across the table, watching him and slowly moving my empty fingers to my mouth.

“What’s the matter with you, boy?” he said through a crusty mouthful of beans. “You don’t like it here? Dont’cha wanna stay?”

I didn’t say anything; instead, I looked at my mother, my mother and her red hair. Everything in the kitchen was dark except the lamp that hung above our heads. It was a fluorescent bulb, Jim’s idea, because it was cheaper he said. And yet as I looked at my mother under that fake purplish light, all I could see was her red hair. It was adorned in a vibrant halo, a shaky haze that enveloped every strand. Underneath it all, her eyes sunk into their sockets and sagged under the heavy weight of oily mascara. Her mouth seemed like a dry pouch, with little flakes of skin of varying thicknesses, caked in pink lipstick, all falling about her lips. The worst of it were her wrinkles. The fluorescent lighting revealed to me finally how old my mother truly was – not cotton-soft and effervescent, but sallow and riddled with crevices brimming in dust.

She saw me looking at her. With one furtive, nervous glance in my direction, she found the disgust I was sure I had hidden like a perfect crime.

Suddenly, she got up from the table and walked to the bathroom. She was gone for a very long time, and I heard her rummaging in the medicine cabinet behind the mirror for something. She left Jim and I sitting across the table, that harsh, interrogating light overpowering the two of us. I saw the shadows lengthen under his eyes and nose, and sweat began to form across his upper lip.

The smell of something powdery and bitter reached my nose, and the nostrils and hairs stood on end, and as it mixed with the smoke coming from across the table, I suddenly felt sick.

A deafening thud from the bathroom, like a heavy head of cabbage falling into a wet garbage can, and the next morning I stood outside the property line and watched Jim bolt up the house he himself had built just a month ago. He walked past me without saying a word, but our eyes met – his yellowed and mine small – and the veins in his face pulsed a rhythm wholly unfamiliar to me.

He got to the edge of the road leading up to the house, and waited for me. I sucked my thumb, alone on the pavement, far from him. And then I turned around and followed.

~

I am kicked away. Jim has tried making up for it by talking to me about the direction of the wind or how many more bullets he’s got left in the rifle. All the news he has is foreboding. He offers me tobacco, but he knows I hate the smell, just like some people can’t stand a sweaty t-shirt or horse meat. He knows I’ll never forgive anyone for what I’ve been left to: this heat – this sucking heat, this sucking smoke from a silent follower, and the small dead animals sucking at the windshield behind us, stuck there perhaps by their own blood or sweat.

“Maybe we’ll go back,” I turned to Jim and said without conviction, feeling as if I was much older than I really was.

“Not a chance. Our luck’s run out. People have stopped caring; people don’t go back. Question it all you want, boy, but you know I’m right. Goddamnit, stick that thumb outta your mouth!”

Taking my thumb out of my mouth and putting it back into my pocket, I looked at him. Under a sky pregnant with the heat of a coming storm, I looked at him. His profile leaned against the wall of the van, and in the background, all I could see was the soft grass of summer, waving as a flag does on patriotic stamps, waving with a ferocity that shrinks you. Jim had fallen asleep with his forehead pressed against the inside of the Econovan, his face soon to be creased with dirt and rust. But the wind coming in from the storm, the wind that now filed into the open cavity of the van and filled it up with a swirling semblance of a tornado, would soon sweep free the debris. His mouth now laid open, ghastly open, as if I could play a ball-throwing game inside of it. What jarred me most was that it was a deep black, a flat black, as if his open mouth went only so far as his lips, as if it were solid, as if it could suck you under and trap you as the solid ice of oceans inevitably traps its own inhabitants.

Very carefully, I swallowed hard and sank my neck deep between my shoulders.

“Wouldn’tcha like to stay here forever, boy?” he mumbled in his sleep.

Xeroxes of blueprints strewn about the bare countertops in the kitchen.

They were the same words. The same since he found me hidden in a spare tire left over from the wreckage of a van some one hundred miles west of the house that he had built, the house he had built for my mother.

I put my thumb back into my mouth as he spoke. I sucked at it until it became wrinkled with moisture and all the blood had been pulled into the tip, leaving me yet again with the sensation that my mouth and my fingers were joined by the same tense nerve.

“You’d stay here forever if you had the chance to, wouldn’tcha?” His voice trailed off into a deeper sleep than could manifest speech.

Zeroing in on a lone blade of grass sticking up far enough from the ground for me to reach, I nudged it with my big toe, and it broke; it broke, and it fell apart and disappeared into a tangle of metal and green.

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90

April 14, 2009 · Leave a Comment

She stares out at me from the backseat of an unmarked car in a bad part of town.
I stand in the rain,
soaked and smelling like a great curtain of worms
hanging onto their silk in the water,
as if caught by fishing line.
Limp and shivering, I watch her intently back.

And there is an amorphous fermata between us -
between us only, because our strings are twisted adn many
and tied in little clear knots intermittently at poignant intervals,
and are plucked all at once,
limp, and shivering,
and yet resonant.

Between us only, a great swollen belly.
Between us suspended,
with its giant pair of cupped hands,
a navel for us to lie in
nestled and melting deeply under the smooth rounded surface
of a head
or a fist.

I raise my cheekbones and crinkle my eyes at her,
and maybe to her I am simply old and sentimental.
But ever day it seems she runs at me full speed,
head down,
little horns of black curls aflame,
and she breaks the rotting pendulum of my arms with one
swift, hard, and graceful leap.
And we fall down onto a cold linoleum floor,
flush with the impact,
and laughing like bedlam echoing into the empty halls.

She waves a tiny hand through the glass window streaked
in rivulets of water,
and as she goes to sleep, she grows.

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89

April 12, 2009 · 1 Comment

Another drop of sweat washes away all the salt I’d left out for dinner.
Damnit, it’s cooking my skin, not my food,
sizzling like frying fat in a skillet.
My reflection is all around -
“Here! in the water!”
“Here! in the light!”
“In the marl’s scales, I know you can see me now!”

Jelly for eyes, he’s got, they’re jaundiced,
and they’ve been following me for a week now,
watching me pant across the fourteen foot span of my skiff.
You know, I’ve got blood everywhere from this one -
my blood, and only a bit of his, only a drop,
but nonetheless mixed and mingling,
oily in the sun, sickening and sweet as flesh.
His eyes roll back
with every twist of the sea’s flirty temperament
and I can see in my head
the moment we get back to shore,
a great mountain of sick
boiling forth from his sworded beak,
and spilling all over the trash and debris
lying naked in chrome and turquoise on the shore.

I remember the boy.
“Take me with you.”
But this is no journey for a kid, is it?
Just like it’s no country for an old man.
Do the sharks know about DiMaggio?
Can they throw a worn leather ball into the sand
and take great pleasure in the grit it gathers as it rolls?
Can they read the paper each morning
in an empty cell, empty but for fishing line holding up their yellowed shirts
with a cup of bad coffee and a soiled blanket?
I remember the boy,
and how my place only had one photograph on the wall,
and that kid staring at it the day through,
challenging its memory and begging to be a man at last.
“Santiago, who is she?”
Manolin, I didn’t know.
I can’t know everything, Manolin.

Marl, it’s not fish
because it’s not fishy,
and though it’s been said to resemble a whore’s belly,
pocked and greasy
and smelling of running sewage,
it tastes nothing of the sort.
I’ll slice him open this time,
I’ll feel his guts and his eyes and his brains this time,
and he’ll sit soaking like a king this time
(in a plate of his own refuse),
and I’ll peer into what might have been his eyes,
and maybe, Manolin
maybe this time I’ll know.

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88

April 10, 2009 · Leave a Comment

A long winding promenade,
wooden and mechanical,
dusty and littered with light and the drawn out sketches
of a painter’s insect mausoleum,
and many empty pews for him
to rest upon and feel bones forever forgotten in his mad rush for impudence.
Here, a wind rushes upwards,
just like before,
and people cry openly in front of
the homeless and God and the restoration of His house -
a whitewashing eclipsed by the unnatural open frowning of even His immense, drawn-on mouth.

I remember a scene like this when I was smaller,
and my feet could sit comfortably wedged inside the slot where the psalters
were normally placed.
I pushed great volumes of those hymns under my seat
to see them come out on the other side of service
with bugs crawling inside their loose bindings
and dust staining everything.
And I sit now with my head between my knees, peering
to the back of my pew, searching
for something I had lost that first Sunday,
and I hear her,
empty and acoustical,
my woman in the back of the church telling herself little white lies,
but only they’re not so little now.
Only now we stand up to pray.
Only now we stand up to pray for ourselves and in other places.

I jump suddenly at the familiar sound of an approaching heat storm.
Always, always the sound of thunder, like flies, drove us outside like stupid cows,
our faces turned upwards expecting the empty caress of rain,
and receiving only the heaving chest and rumbling gut of a small spark near the horizon.

Inside, a moth knocks itself desperately against the pieces of broken glass on the floor.
It lies prostrate for a minute,
probably resting.
I am taken aback,
as I’ve only ever seen here the shorn off wings of butterflies
or the meat of hornets sucked out of their hard exoskeleton
by an alabaster chorus of crackling.
And so I wonder at the sight of something living,
surviving inside of such a cemetery
constantly drowning and reemerging,
face down in its own reflection,
bouncing against itself
yet again.
Beating itself out of itself,
a rhythm that mimics the cadence of yesterday’s sermon,
or last year’s,
or the very first.

A thin beam of light carries from the top of the empty altar
to the thin flaking of water-logged hymnals
to the selfsame tapping of the moth’s wings against the fallen window,
a tapping too quiet in its own degree
to still be remembered,
to still be alive.

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Chicu, you’re the cools.

April 4, 2009 · 2 Comments

“I am a poet by trade, NOT a scholar. NOT an academic.”

→ 2 CommentsCategories: Uncategorized

Crerar Revisited

March 11, 2009 · 1 Comment

I have taken to the sterile tiles, Christopher.

I always wanted to be an astronomer. I always wanted to play with the boys and build rockets and shoot them as high up as physics would allow. I even bought those cheap rocket kits from the convenience store with all the money I had found under the washing machine, and I painted their balsa wood bodies with pink and glitter and slapped my name in ugly black paint across the sides. Just to prove I was better than the boys. That something pretty could go over their heads completely, could work better than them, could know more than them. When it came time for the moment of truth, the wind blowing our little launching pads about the cow pasture, my rocket never flew up. I always got something wrong. I always got something wrong, and the thing was a dud, or it would shoot horizontally, or all the little trinkets you fill the shaft up with didn’t trigger and let loose. I could never keep up with them, the boys. The rockets. The stars. The boys. The stars – the constellations confused me, and all I knew of the nature of light was what my mother told me through a camera lens. At astronomical scales, her little connections didn’t apply. I always looked at the universe with this feminine eye I could never shake, something I acquired from her. It’s never quite stood up to the boys. It’s not harsh enough, not mechanical, not practical. It’s never quite stood up to the boys.

And still, I’m on the tiles, thinking about the stars. About gravity and space-time and Doppler shifts and why the sky is blue. Thinking about how in thirty years, I’ll be the one coming back to this university and giving talks on the merits of a literary movement that isn’t real, isn’t grounded on anything other than the need to be post-modern, and the reaction of being more post-modern than the next guy. Post-post-modern. That’s what I’ll be giving talks about. Writing for other people, and looking uncomfortable while they fawn over work I’m not proud of. And all the boys will still be here too, but they’ll be happy. They’ll be forever young, always the boys, always screwing around – the dirty, pot-bellied mechanics of academia. They’ll be stumbling across top quarks and shattering everything we know about particle physics. Because that’s the nature of science. And what will I be doing?

/existential_crisis_installment_2.exe

Addendum:

Christopher, can we just agree for me to write my memoirs to you? Or maybe I’ll just call a diary Christopher and be really creepy about it.

In any case, Christopher, have you ever been snorkeling?
I like that things feel silky underwater, I like that they collect bubbles, like at the bottom of a glass of coke. And I like that everything is listless. And then with a snorkel, everything is forever. I am suspended, sure, high above conch shells, lolling fish carcasses, and sea cucumbers – but I can stay there for as long as I like, because I can breathe. Because I’m submersed in an unlivable environment, but there’s this single loophole, this single connection to the only thing I truly need to live, the only thing the water doesn’t have. It’s minimalist living. I like that with a snorkel, I can wear my glasses and see under water, and I like that everything is as clear as a photograph, and paler. I like that light does weird things in the water, I like that it shows you what it wants to when it wants to.

I think I like it best that sometimes I can hear this unexplained source of Sigur Ros. I think it comes from the floating.

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