Living Room Scene of a Couple

HIM digs hands into couch cushions, as HER nuzzles head into HIM's lap. She surfs the waves of his gently rocking leg.

HER: What are you doing?

HIM: Looking for change.

HER: Change?

HIM: I'm thinking of whisking you away. To an island. Where it's warm during the day, and cool at night. We'll build a hut. And make a fire

HER: And babies?

HIM: I'll fish for them.

HER: And I'll forage for berries, and teach them to read. (beat) Now, let me ask you something. Will this island have turtles?

HIM: Uh huh. (beat) And turtle soup.

An I Believe Speech

I believe first and foremost in my own humanity and respect everybody's humanity above any label they have been given. I believe that everybody varies from one another enough to justify a nuanced understanding of how they need support, and how they'd like to experience life and how they can undergo change if they'd like to. I understand I don't have to be loyal to people, especially if they cause you harm, but I also can't see anybody as a problem above and beyond their inherent worth as a person. Not bigger than nature's or the law's worth in them. Your problems are always less than you, and an infinite amount of solutions exist within you. But they will be corrected over time, at a plodding pace, and it turns out your habits are going to mean more than anything. Are you going to be kind? That is the question that sits atop everything. That question sits atop the structure of many other questions, such as, are you going to take care of your body? do you know how to care for your mind? Are you interested in being awake? Can you rest at night? Kindness is determined by both your habits and your ability to tune in with what's important. And this ripens on a vine over time. You more often have feelings like, "I get it!" "Or this is going to happen and I'm going to react this one way, but there will be a next moment and one after that, so just get through it hot stuff." When you can say that to yourself you have gotten a good deal closer to sincere kindness. Not like those people who are just kind because they can't stand being seen in this life as being anything but kind. Well, everybody starts off there, but kindness doesn't end that way. There are never two instances of the same kindness -- it is wholly unique. It is a nutrient that will start to run through people, and age them in ways with all sorts of pleasant variables. how they notice stuff, or how well they sense the needs of other people. It's like when you're a teenager and you first start to notice how much people talk about objects. Sometimes if there is something wrong with them, adults will sit around, for example, a sprinkler watering a sidewalk, and try to attribute some history to it. How this happened, what the intelligence of the guy was, and depending who you're with, make reference to his ethnicity. If it's all guys you would have a better chance of hearing about the ethnicity of said guy who made a very controlled decision to point a thing spraying water on to the cement and in to the gutter for the next 45 minutes. And he said yes and signed off on watering the sidewalk before the city council. Everybody jeered and it made the next day's blogosphere. Maybe you should just take a picture and put it on social media. Hashtag it the best and hope for the viral outrage of six hundred thousand people who could be doing something so much better with their lives at that moment. I mean, we all do it. But kind people do less and less of that kind of stuff. They have nothing to be afraid of and so they go outside. 

Single Life Spans

"Right now I’m just spreading seeds. Some may sow and many will not." He told his friends such.  With Wisdom. Loudly. And his therapist too. Lonesomely. She understood. Actually.

Secretly, he thought, "I'm a withering seed, somewhere out there, underground and quite probably in my own backyard. A seed that just isn’t taking to life." Well, last night contained a happy sprout who descended hither to have a talk with a seed and its leaking life.

She informs him in a supremely private space that she is taking to life. She is indescribably bright. She dances and smiles often. And then she gives the losing seed a really big cuddle about the hard truth. That he isn’t quite taking.

She says she is flattered. She says he is sweet. She notes the scent of plum in his dry humor and his ability to dance so no one feels comfortable. The causes for thinking so. For being nice.

“I’m already married," she says.

"You're a rare bird. I'm glad I asked."

The dying seed will receive instructions in an email about what to do with his decomposing matter. Compost and pension plans. In a few generations time, the seed will take its experience of not taking to life and dare to become a big thing and a beautiful thing. That will touch the sky, as sentimentalism would have it. All humans will rejoice in its presence. It shall run $3.95 at the local drug store. Just you wait.

I really hate to tell you the ending so impulsively, but this seems like the right time: We win. We are all butterflies aging faster than rocks, but slower than single life spans. We're spasming and breaking up. Waiting to get nature's number done on us. It's a cocoon we don't even know about yet.

Crawling for now, we're getting together. Maybe not owning the day, but definitely the night. Like last night. A big win.

I can actually dance. I can actually hear no.

The night was 74 degrees. No jackets needed. You can either wear pants or shorts. Dirty sneakers or hiking sandles. I never know how to spell sandles right. And you might never be uncomfortable on a night like this. But I tend to think that I will. And when I dance, I hope that you might be too.

And let's not hold back. It will take the damages of war the same amount of years to heal as it took to fight the fucking thing. This is a simple and hard truth that most people don't want to face. That is because it might take another human history for people to altogether stop killing each other. I'm talking about taking to life. In just two-hundred thousand years.

This is the type of news that has to be broken to you by a dancing underground smiling sprout. After delivering the hard news, with shiny whites, she will add that it should start today. The not killing. Starting today.

Her lips look firm and her voice sounds the same. And I leak and I crawl and all no's become yes. "Just you wait."

Order of the Roses

They trim the Tyler Roses at the Capitol.
Down to nubs. Every February.
Just a week short of the holiday.

That holiday, a few weeks passed,
fell on the side of mercy.
At least this year.

I continue to nose in on them.
Nothing to smell. Yet twice each day.
A loyalty previously unknown to me.

What I've begun to notice,
as workdays stumble into March,
is the first thing rose bushes grow back.

Their thorns.
The stems, now smacking with assurance,
sprout leaves next.

Asking the sky -- expectant and green.
Hearing the answer -- blushing reddish.

The order of the rose bushes:

• Fierce necessity
• Sway and be patient
• Expect that brilliant day

The order I have been craving.

So I amble in a serpentine pattern back to my desk. 

Fixing my gaze on the Four O'clock sun. 

And all the while, setting expectations.

Friday night, 11/15--Staying Supple

At the risk of sounding angsty or overly reflective, I have really been hit by the emptiness bug over the past month or so. That feeling of always needing some form of soothing. It's this quality that when people come face to face with it they instinctively recognize it and then feel hesitant of you. My old approaches of dealing with this feeling is an unwritten comic book series. My next life-stage of dealing with the emptiness bug was all of this spiritual perspective, which felt amazing because the ideas were so new to me and you just kind of had to understand the concepts and it would make you feel better. That's when I named and chose the colors for this blog, which I now think looks like total shit. The returns on spiritual perspective can diminish over time. A flimsier approach than I ever suspected. It was a time when "Answers" really seemed like an answer.

But lately, I have been kind of mumbly, doubtful, numb, unsure of myself, uncomfortable seeming, etc. It's not amazing-feeling and good solid routines and habits are just not doing the trick. I don't know how to be so I am just going ahead and not knowing how to be in public. At least it's honest and genuine and so I can take pride in that. And I noticed in conversations I don't really try to tell people "cool facts about me." Which is so nice. I hate when I do that. I hate that I have told so many people about the one time I drank in a camera truck with a famous movie director and make it seem like we were total buds. Hate. And come to think of it, my uncomfortable social behavior perfectly lines up with this other value of mine--that I should never act like I know what the fuck I am doing in life. Like Goethe's insistence that we should all remain an apprentice at life. And that we strive to stay supple. I think I am right in being insecure, showing pain on my face, mumbling, not being able to make simple decisions like where we should go sit in a coffee shop, what to order, and what is an interesting thing to talk about.

But the expectations of your company may boo and hiss at that. Or at best, meet it with indifference. Maybe a grown man should be confident by now? That he should have a feeling of security, even in a critical environment. That one should be an expert or have a specialty at something by now? Well, fuck that. I insist that I am right in not being able to navigate subtextual expectations. I would rather just hold others to the standard of not having them. I want to be a scorned little boy. And sometimes if you insist on staying this way, you get taken aback by an alien sweetness.

Like last night. Friday night, 11/15. Playing by the rules, I set up to meet this girl at a bar for an underwhelming club soda. No charge, dollar tip. The soda-glass giveaway to my no-alcohol ways led to my having to make the justification of why I am happier in life drinking club soda. And I really didn't believe myself at the time and so it sounded apologetic. I looked at other tables, and mind you it was still early and so 90% were laughing and happy at this point and the other 10% were couples. I had full intentions of joining the 10% of unhappy couples if that's what it took to make this feeling go away. And so she hears me talk evasively and then she forgets to ask other questions about me and she had this admittedly amazing dog with her that everyone felt the need to interrupt our conversations to ask about. And then I absorbed an excuse about an early departure and came home and texted an always-kind ex girlfriend because indifference has been feeling intolerable to me lately.  She is always so nice. And I think I might love her. I was telling you about all of those "might" feelings I have been having lately. But she was not on cell phone this night. Checking the screens and my virtual social connections at an increasing pace, feeling the attachment-less mental processes starting to kick in, my practically-brother roommate and I start barking out forlorn tones of voice about the general conditions of being alive.

Cut to us sitting at a French restaurant. Cut to him charming this long-dreadlocked French guy who noted he was in a rock band. Cut to the French guy leaving and coming back out with two truly beautiful women. The kind of women you only want to remain visual input so as not to risk your stolen breath with a personality or something. Cut to social miscues, talks about art, sixteen dollar burgers, talks about loneliness, extremely complex techno-social dynamics and what it might say about the character of people that reject you, and the best lettuce-only five dollar salad you then say is the best salad you ever have. Cut to a hesitation for two men to make meaningful eye contact, but then doing it. Cut to understanding and a feeling of being loved and understood. Cut to the clock, just before midnight.

The ball is ending soon. The bills are being distributed. An extremely-dressed, under-impressed clientelle overwhelms service workers hiding wine glasses in the host booth and then this curly-haired blonde lady walks in and everybody looks and wonders if she is famous. I think it's the rose lipstick. And I wonder if she and her suited man friend have just come from a theater production--that they starred in, and that was set in 1940's L.A. But what I really think is they actually just came from their house. It wasn't worth mentioning. I don't even think my dinner company noticed them, too occupied by a mind fixed on steak fat and cigarette smoke. There was a meal and I devoured all of the grease and fat I possibly could. And the thickest mayonnaise I ever imagined.

Earlier, sitting in our living room, the seedling of a hunger for experience (and a second dinner) had driven us out the door and down the street to a French Restaurant. Hunger had whisked us away. The working men we are, we could go somewhere good. And so we did. My blood felt thick and full and I felt relaxed afterwards. A restaurant, which was maybe a staged experiment in controlling others perceptions of who you are, felt suspended in this viscous mayonnaise-y atmosphere. I floated effortlessly in it and club soda. My old sweater and lazy hoody. Canvas sneakers laying flat among the tapping leather boots. A nice smile and the air of not giving much of a fuck about her appearance got the waitress a 25% tip.

If I remember it correctly, what I experienced was carefree fun. If I were to be a fully confident American male I'd go to lots of school and wear smarter clothes and eventually design a prescription pill to produce exactly this effect. Once in Miami, in fact, I did this harbor tour on a boat and one of the houses you could see from the boat was owned by the man who patented Viagra. His backyard had rare palm trees imported from Africa. His backyard, fully under the hot sun and with no physical shelters in sight, was climate controlled (?!) -- always adjusted to 72 degrees. That is a man truly wearing the man's man's rose lipstick. But nevermind that. My blood is thick and heart full and I'm feeling two steps removed from rose lipstick. Not wearing it. Not wanting it. Instead, going home to sleep. But not a dreaming kind of sleep. I felt like I had everything there and so I just slept till morning.

Stolen excerpt from my own Sunday E-mail

...There's a magical spot I visited this morning, and do nearly every day. It's a nestled away stretch of the creek I live by. It's really city territory, but there's this tucked away spot where sometimes a homeless person will find and hide out in for a week or two, or the rich homeowners will take their dogs for a month or two but then get out of the routine because they can't stick to it. You have to pass under this long sagging tree branch shaped like an arch way to access it. I'm not kidding. It's sharp cuts in rock enabling channels of runoff water to gather in a long deep pool at the end. In drought it gets still and nasty. Even at its grossest, you see a turtle climb out of there on to a log or rock. For a few weeks this summer there were about a thousand tadpoles in there working toward toadhood. It took one big rainstorm and only about a few dozen made it and turned into these tiny toadlets, smaller than the pad of my thumb. I put one on there and possibly altered the course of that little guy's life forever. But animals seem to get over traumatic events better than people. You know what I mean? There's also train tracks that run along this neighborhood and they are the perfect distance where you can hear the train whistle clearly. Any louder would be a disturbance, but it's at a distance that feels soothing. I've been going for eight years, but in a routine way for two or three. 

This morning it was flowing something fiercely magical. I vaguely remember some three in the morning thunder crashes last night. It was a restless sleep and it was all mossy and drippy at the creek this morning. It got me alert. I get to visit with my head there. And then listen to it and trying to slowly ease out of it. Sometimes I gather around some other point of pain or passion in my body. Sometimes my chest just wells up with something personal. When it rains the night before it's easier to leave my head because you can concentrate on the sounds of water flowing by. It feels drippier. Like I said, it was flowing fierce this morning. Sometimes I open my eyes while sitting there and I imagine that the rock face underneath the water is what's moving and that the water is perfectly still. Doing that helps me levitate. Then I get up and say thanks and sprint back home. When I'm running I pretend like there's a hawk chasing me, a vulture circling me, or a crow guiding me somewhere, depending on the day. I've seen all these types of birds there before and they have stayed with me. I know them well by now. I usually go to the creek after a jog so I'm good to go for sprinting--in running shoes and red basketball shorts. When I get back home I proceed to sink into Conor Jensen's life again, but it feels sweeter.