bigtyper

Here is a list of all the cushions and papers that are my rocks and my hard places.  The world is streaming, and I am eroding slowly.

1. Grade papers
2. Send in car insurance papers
3. Double check car payment auto-pay/debit status
4. Pick up plates for my car
5. Figure out if I want to change my insurance
6. Take my last car off my mother's insurance
7. Sell my last car
8. Pay off as much of my total balance for my new car as possible
9. Pay off as much of my total balance for my college loans as possible
10. Lesson plan
11. Finish reading the book I'm teaching my students (kind of)
12. Move my computer files onto my external hard drive
13. Get better virus protection
14. Clean my room
15. Weedwack the lawn
16. Dig up the heleconia in the backyard
17. Wash the windows
18. Buy new shoes
19. Get orthopedics
20. See my foot doctor about my toe
21. Check my blood sugar
22. Install handrails for my grandfather
23. Clear his stuff away so he can get into bed more easily
24. Help my dad clean out his deceased father's apartment
25. Buy a present for my sister's birthday
26. Prepare myself in case my father asks me to give his step-mom's eulogy
27. Look into getting Kourtney to apply to other schools/taking the SSAT
28. Remember to take my students to testing on Thursday next week
29. Finalize grades by...sometime this week
30. Lose weight
31. Tell Blaine I'm not going to help with the accreditation team
32. Help Neal prepare for the December poetry slam
33. Fold clothes
34. Change my deferred comp over so that it won't keep taking out $1,000 next year
35. Worry about taxes

And most of this needs to get done in the next few weeks.  Forget new year's resolutions...

I wish I could hold you until everything was all right.

"He felt as if he were sinking helplessly into the cushions and the papers and the bodies of his children like a man in quicksand." -Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

I read this and I think, how many writers have written sentences like that?  For how many writers has it made a difference?  This writing thing, it's supposed to be transformative.  It's supposed to make things better.  And who am I to ask these questions?  Writing has lifted me up so many times in the past.  It has also been a step and a step and a step on the downward spiral.  But momentous or not comparisons be damned.  The real question is, what does it matter if Yates still had to suck off his physically feeble mentor before he could get anything published, before The New Yorker would run his stuff?  I'm not above or beyond performing sexual favors to get (or give) a head in the world, but that doesn't mean it doesn't depress me.

We don't know anything.  I truly thought for a second that my grandfather was going to die holding my hands, trying to stand up tonight.  Just to get into bed.

I want to take flight.  I want fancies and fantasies and fatuous fatuities and forget forget forget.  I want to type one word a minute and mis letters.  I want to cry space bars and stars and Emily Dickinson graveyard verse.  I want to listen to the Smiths and wear black and be Lou Reed.  And these identities, these references, they're just ways of getting away, of thinking about not being me.  I chose this, right?  I'm choosing this, right?

I wanted to write a nostalgic e-mail tonight, like empty, leaf ridden roads leading away from Oberlin, someday to the ocean, to the sky, to sex and song and something chocolate.  But autopilot and we're never crashing, are we?

Low.  missssssssssssssssssssingingingingthev.

listening to: gnarls barkley, "going on," "who's gonna save my soul," y'know.

(iron)

With answers that don't feel like answers because of how stupid they feel.  I don't know anything, so there's feeling, but I just don't know.





Oh yeah, and I wanted to get a vid of "Plush" in here too, but none of the Youtube ones are the version most to my liking, so.  I get the sense that these malware/spyware/trojan horses (which reminds me, of course, of condoms and prince songs...and wizards of the not harry potter kind, songs about books about irish men who are like greeks) are like big, predatory beasts, sharks.  imagine one circling the other.  do you think if I have a major malware risk, it negates the others, scares them off into the shadowy depths, like frightened small fish in the ocean, like carniverous caterpillars?

why does the hand towel start to smell of face oil, and why do we continually have to wash it?  questions.  common sense featuring most definitely part of black star, which is (talib) quality.  exhibit 7..



four?  shore-ly!  don't call me; i'll be home alone.  "plush-safe" he think.



5.


(I've posted that before, but I keep coming back to it...)

Good, good book.  Perfect, really.  Not much else to say.


flight
Originally uploaded by t_heda_ilyf_rown

It really, actually, kinda pwns the following.



(Don't actually watch the clip.  Most of the clips I post here I would endorse.  This one I just put up for a change of pace from the regular trailer shiz)  You can tell a movie's production/direction quirks by its exit music.  What can you say about a movie that closes with The Smiths?  Not bad.  Interestingly interesting.  Too many names to cover.  Jennifer Connelly is, as always, superb.  She makes romantic comedy a genuine showcase for acting.  Ginnifer Goodwin was pretty impressive, carries the story along just fine.  And she hooks up with her long time beau-around-the-bushes Justin Long.  They were friends/more-than-friends? on Ed.  Long was underwhelming in his "I'm an adult now" role, which is about right (not because of him, but because there just are too many films where women are overwhelmed by their opposites' roles).  Bradley Cooper was solid and proved his solidity to me in this, after a few under-the-radar performances.  He's always a similar character, perhaps, but he nicely gives each one different and catchable nuances.  I truly dislike Drew Barrymore.  She's right up there with Jennifer Lopez and Sandra Bullock (I make an exception for Miss Congeniality.  C'mon!).  Well, waddya know?  Only three more actors to go.  Kevin Connolly, honestly kinda bleck.  Sorry.  Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck?  I feel like we've seen that before...but I don't exactly know why.  Too much Bennifer, perhaps.  Anyway, that's the cast.  I liked that the message in the end wasn't "there's definitely someone out there for you," but rather hope, never give up hope.  Oh, and you gotta love the Tolstoy touch of unresolved parralellism.  Or something.

( Touch me! )

I had thought, I don't know and I don't know why, that Will Smith had plateaued with Pursuit of Happyness.  I thought that film was strong, a wonderful performance, though spottily written at times.  Why is he fascinated by the declaration of independence?  Why is that a unifying quote?  It's fine to have it as such, but explain how he came across it.  Just a small gripe.  Anyway, he was nominated for an Academy Award for that role but lost out to Forest Whitaker who's always good I guess.  I figured that was that.  He'd go on taking good roles and doing good jobs with them.  I won't talk about the whole who gets what roles thing and the Denzel could've gotten roles that would've extended his career if he was white like Tom Hanks deal, even though I feel like Pursuit was a bit of a step in the career extending role for Big Willy.  The important thing about the role was the way you reacted to it.  When you're supposed to tear up, you tear up.  Solid performance.

Right now I'm in the middle of I Am Legend.  I know it's a remake, and I haven't done the legs to peep the old version, but it's an interesting film.  It's interesting because it's ostensibly a zombie movie, but really it's a character study for Smith.  Here's the line I've been writing all this to deliver.  You're not supposed to well up with emotion in a zombie movie, and I'm not sure if it makes it more or less exceptional that the scene I'm responding to is Smith communicating the difficulty of killing his only companion, a German sheperd, mainly through facial expressions.  It doesn't stop there, though.  When he's talking to the dummies in the video store he frequents, he begs, "please, just say hi to me."  You're not supposed to have a strong emotional reaction to a zombie movie, but here I am, blogging about it.  It must be an emotional reaction.

I haven't watched Smith's stuff that's come after I Am Legend, but I'm certainly going to.  Will Smith takes the leap in my book/blog from actor who makes you cry when it's what the content leads you to do to actor who makes you cry because the emotions feel so real.  See: Sean Penn.  I also liked this scene.  Classic "I'm not your monster!" moment, and Smith pulls it off.

I just watched Kubrick's The Shining.  It's about as perfect as movie reinterpretations go.  Of course it's not completely faithful to the novel.  You lose the whole boiler room background of impending doom, and there are a few layers to the characters that don't come through as strongly, but you also gain the performances by the three main actors in the film.  Young actors are always surprisingly effective in horror movies.  Yay.  And Jack is Jack.  The Halloran character is probably my biggest beef with the film.  He kind of becomes a throw-away, and his easy death makes you wonder why the build up of his character?  Then again, his death could perhaps convince audiences that none of the "good" characters were safe.  The other gripe I have is the cheesy spook house skeletons near the end that Duvall sees.  I don't know.  Maybe it's because it's now morning and the effect is wasted on me, maybe it's because that's the one part of the movie that feels dated.  It just made me laugh in a b-horror way that was not quite in keeping with the rest of it.  Oh!  Oh!  But you do get the awesome layer of imagery created by the slowly cascading blood.  Vintage.

I'm about to do my post game rub down with Ebert.  Habbits are habbits, and good writing is good writing.  It helps to just push forward, don't it?  I like apologies, but I'll take appositives.  In any case, what's Johnny got to say on the subject?

Done and done.  I and I.  People read books and just skate across the surface of life.  Or life skates across the surface of people.  Maybe it's just me, and I think dude shares this idea with me and, in fact, actively feels it quite often.  How are people not more affected?  But then, how am I not myself?

Nevermind.  I just finished 2666.  To the end, it holds itself outside the realm of Truth, saying editors handled the author's "weaknesses" and "obsessions," quotes included.  As in, who's to say this is the real text or not, though they did a lot of saying and even said Bolano did a lot of saying himself.  Good.  The afterward says the title date is a vanishing point, an invisible center that the novel's storylines all point to.  It goes on to quote Bolano, "Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else."

Some books leave you quiet, and others create rioutous, often conflicting comments in their soulful wake.  Extra words, Sean, yay!  Okay, most books leave me quiet.  This one particularly so.  You could talk about the style or the sweep of it all, you could talk about the violence or the beauty, but it's better to go there than to speak of it, unless you can be somewhere else while doing the talking.  And by somewhere, I mean not here. One's home is never somewhere.  It's always I, the first person center, not the vanishing point but the vantage point.  Yay!  You lost meaning, Sean!  Yay!

Enough.

(Sleep or grade papers.  Same.)

So I had another one with breakfast, and waited a bit reading further fan board stuff about the comic book kind of super heroes not the Joseph Cambpell kind (oh lost, unborn and unknown days), and when I checked my e-mail I had a few good ones, so that's good.  It was good to hear from Molly, and it's kind of weird to write about it here, but yes.  I don't want to over analyze it, and at this point there's not much to over analyze, but it's nice remembering what an infusion of light she was/is for my life.  She's back stateside, which means phone calls are an option and travel could bring me to intersect, but I don't think I need that right now.  No confusion.  Only straght lines to the future.

I'm going to go finish that book on my porch.

Ah, I don't even remember what I was going to post here.  I feel like the world is sagging, cold and swampy in the middle, like a hole is supposed to open up beneath my room.  Or perhaps it's just my eyes.  I feel like I'm running around trying to keep non-existent falling objects suspended in the air.  I feel like I'm running in circles, repeating things, becoming...well, a bore.

Speaking of the great blanket of life, though.  It's great when you feel something and then, years later, you're surfing the net, trolling for gold to mount on your livejournal, and your pre-pubescent reactions are confirmed by legions of others who once were pre-pubescent males too.  Read Kavalier and Clay again, please.  By the way, I should be finishing 2666 today, and I'll probably post on that at some point.  Because there is a point to all this.  Sarcasm intended.  Anyway, here's the Spidey scan (it's actually Amazing Spider-Man #33, for those of you trying to keep up at home).  Eventually, of course, he overcomes.  But I just remember loving the imagery of him trapped underground and under metal and the ground water is rising.  Or something.  You can get resolution here, which is where I found that this scene that resonated so profoundly for me was one of the most heralded Spideys ever.  Run on sentences not fuel, people.

Losing myself in the wires.  The bounty of the endless, the eternity of the numb.  Some things, you just have to forget, right?  I tried to e-mail you once, but you didn't like it.   Too close to home.  Comfort.  I'm not even going to video because, y'know, that'd be too much.

I know there are times when I feel like I post here too much.  It's not like...it's for anything.  I just feel a little saner when there's a day or two between posts.  There was one from earlier today, but I moved it six months back.  A little game I can play.  I feel.  It gets so it feels hard to breathe.  Or there's not enough oxygen.  Or it doesn't get from my chest to my brain.  I feel like a computer animation that can be cross-sectioned and disintegrated at will on someone else's screen.  The silence of God, whatever that phrase has come to mean, sucks because among other things you don't get to feel like someone's always watching, always caring about your minorest exploits.

a video.  and zero.

(trying to stay fresh. clean? nope.)

Paranoia, sweat, dead flesh living.  Cold air.  Not cold enough.  I was going to buy songs, but seeing it said, who wants to do that?  That e-mail to Dude didn't manifest.  Where is it manifesting?  In seas cradled quietly by the slow back and forth of ever, ever, ever.

I want


quiet deck, stars, waves, something red and berry and breathing.  something that feels like reading but is actually moving, is actually touching, is actually feeling.

i don't mean that, i mean kiss
runaway holding my hand and

sand
sound
we become the air
orange

and we are born
the petals of morning
flowers

i want to link every word to pictures ecstatic leaping like shadows celebrate the flames
i want a cave to hideaway in, no runaways in sight

can I do that?  is lj ruled by russians/??#?salvadordaliskull?/??

O!  O nebulous, Nebulous Masses!


And the Angel followed the Ass (in a pantomime cow suit)
Originally uploaded by Jai-to-Z

Re-think your thoughts, re-live your lives, not because you messed up, but because what's worth doing or thinking once is worth doing or thinking twice.  Right?

I don't know.  I can't even read the same book twice in ten years.  Is that true?  I don't know all I know is what sounds good anymore.  Don't separate your i don't know from anything else.

I dunno, but I do think of whales all the time.  They swim in the sky that is not sky.  They swim with twinkles in the firmament and are only kind of metaphorical in their celestial being.

The world interceded today (kids painting chalk onto the street so that we can see where the ocean, sky, and land shall one day meet...they ignore the furlough), and it's weird when it does that because it comes from so many different angles.  Everything cleared up though.  The clouds rolled away to reveal other things that roll, and we are constant but also variable; we move when nothing else does and yet we roll on too.  On to what?

Laughing out loud, I keep throwing my hands up in the air and who catches them?  I thank you.



(In the end--I haven't done this in awhile--everything turns to places in which you can deposit old thoughts, old e-mails, and new nothings you don't want or need to think about...everything comes out wrong but seems to be drawn in right-ing??/?slash?)

"All of the drugs she does scare me real good"
Psst...college kids doing their jobs (see: last post)
In the future i predict all jobs will be as lucky

A heads up (lol): I updated the last post.  Yay for ideas.  With that in mind, these are all just [a...sic] thoughts...
it All goes together.  like runny legGs in the mourning

and I ain't

I like pairing vids (although I haven't done it yet on this site), or at least presenting two vids within the same post.  Did I mention word o' the moon is "reverberation"?  Like two sticks in a forest, struck and ringing, like age within a tree, like ripples on a surface, like bugs in or out of a pond.  My underwear drawer lost its skids (I could change the word to tracks, but it still sounds unfortunate.  The wheel-groove set that keeps the drawer rolling smoothly out fell off the bottom of the drawer).  I don't know what that means, but it reminds me of the time my friend allegedly gave a speech about girls so fine you had to drop your drawers and bang 'em on the floor and I wasn't sure if he was a pathological liar or not.

Hitting slow today.  Steak makes me heavy, my eyes.  Woody Harrelson said not to eat steak, right after Letterman said he slept with women on his show.  Letterman was classy, I suppose, and I haven't gone to the literature, but it still seems a little uneasy to me.  I didn't even know he was back.

Something I realized earlier today?  I don't trust very many people in this world to do their job or at least to do it well.  Here is a list of people I've realized or remembered that I don't/can't trust to do their jobs (well): teachers (that includse me); principals; security guards; my physician and her aides/nurses (the Scrubs 15 seconds thing? totally true. for salience, try the four minute and seven minute mark in the first and the five minute mark in the second...'til the end despite the dinner scene); my foot doctor (why go back to him when he didn't make a difference last time he sliced open my toe?); insurance agents and their computers; computer repairmen; computer salespeople; car repairmen...men...men; sports writers (that could include me too, I guess...I certainly haven't been doing my "job"); parents; politicians; lawyers (but maybe it's the job I don't trust...friends in law school, don't take that the wrong way); union officials; wrestling creative teams; and even Matt Stone and Trey Parker (do they right their own stuff anymore?).  The only people I can really trust to do their jobs well are car salesman (I mean, talk about knowing your stuff) and college students (y'know, they lie around, experiment, and angst out).  Really, it's not the fault of the people.  Add jobs to the list of things that are like limits in calculus (prime example: post-modernism).  They represent an ideal that you can never truly meet.  In wrestling, jobbers are guys who purposely lose to the stars.  Maybe that's what a job is: the voluntary submission of one's soul.

Speaking of Damien Rice (see: "my eyes" link, two paragraphs up)...and sports writers...and parents, I watched a Clive Owen movie today.  In which he generates Oscar buzz.  Yay.  Ecstatically, though, I did enjoy it.  I wasn't quite in the right place to fully...parse the thing, but The Boys Are Back is, in words, something like Sleepless in Seattle except beautiful.  And British.  Or Aussie.  Both.  And harrowing.  Smart.  Did I get my blurb yet?  How 'bout this: Almost Karenina-esque in its parallelism.  I don't know if any of that works, but the movie's worth the watch.  I read a review that compared it to Dennis Hoffman's Kramer vs. Kramer.  I don't know that Owen can hit the high notes like Hoffman, but it's not a bad comparison in that they're both a little quirky but tend toward the gravitas.



Take the moment in your life filled most with conviction, the moment in which you knew the words that leapt from your lips were the words of god, ambrosia, if there was a god he would be digitally portraying them in the air, your words shook the air with the amount of feeling you put behind those words, and you believed with all your might that this was a moment you would remember for the rest of your life.  Each moment with Clive Owen feels like that.  He's trimmed down for this movie, which makes him less imposing and more...well, realistic.  (I had no clue what to do with him in Closer.  He was just Man, there for the world to reckon with.)  The performance this really reminded me of was Benicio Del Toro's in Things We Lost in the Fire.  Great performance, a break-out in the sense that this was clearly his movie whereas other's in the past have been more of an ensemble deal, and he absolutely nailed a handful of scenes.  It wasn't, however, quite a tour de force like Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke last year, Philip Seymour Hoffman's recent body of work, or even Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood.  As with Del Toro two years ago, I wouldn't be surprised if Owen doesn't even get an Oscar nomination.  In fact, I would openly support that.  However, that's not an end all be all evaluative measure, if ya know what I mean.

For the record, I still don't see the Lewis oh-my-god element that was bruited about two years ago, but he makes for a good comparison.  When you look at the four actors I just mentioned, they presented total immersion in their character.  I knew who they were off screen, but I wasn't for one second made to think about that other persona.  Owen didn't quite achieve that for the most part, though there were moments when I felt he had complete control over my emotions.  There was one scene where he begins to cry and then stops himself, and I was right there with him.  It all happened in a breath, but it's the kind of thing you can't mistake as a mark of solid acting.


The movie kind of dwindled at the end, though it kept swinging for the cinematographic fences.  This is the kind of movie that manipulates you emotionally so skillfully and often subtly that you forget to question what's going on.  Owen's character makes questionable decision after questionable decision.  A quick scan of reviews shows the overwhelming senti-mentality hasn't gone unnoticed.  The (moving) picture "perfect" ending hides the fact that it's not perhaps the most emotionally sound or healthy of scenarios.  Scott Hicks, the director, has become old hand at this stuff, and perhaps it's become a bit too old hand.  He's done Shine (which I need to see, if only for Geoffrey Rush), Snow Falling on Cedars, Hearts in Atlantis.  He has also did some commercials, which he dubbed "million dollar mini-movies," and a Philip Glass biopic (what a word).  If you're interested, it's a movie about a man and his young son dealing with the loss of their wife/mom.  I guess I said that with the Sleepless reference.  It's a nice change though that the man's son from a previous relationship comes back in the mix.

Thematically at least, and referentially at most basic with its Peter Pan tropes, It reminds a little of D. Hoffman's Hook, though obviously less light-hearted.  The older son reminds of Rupert Grint of Harry Potter fame, and his name is Harry, but it's actual George MacKay who had a role in the Daniel Craig flick Defiance.  That's all I have to say about that.  The younger son, however, was a show stealer.  Throughout the movie, he displayed a huge range, including inquisitive, insouciant, petulant, catatonic, sad, and that perfect manic mix of glee and sorrow that cannot help but be communicated through certain moments with younger children.  The young actor was Nicholas MacNulty.  Who knows if that name ever comes up again, but what a performance!  He gave Owen this glare that made me want to just give up and say, "What do I know now that I'm older?  Nothing."

Oh, by the by, here are some videos I've been returning to because they make me feel warm and gooey in a few places.  They are a "Use Somebody" cover by Paramour (originally by Kings of Leon) and "My Girls" by Animal Collective.  One of the substitutes who works at my school recommended AC, and they haven't quite saturated (keep an eye out for that as next moon's word o') my listening habitats yet, but I love that one song and it's video is quite the odd riot, which is good and unlike those which plagued my school this past week.  Final note: must see the new Coen bros. movie A Serious Man.  Don't know what it's about but does it matter at this point?  Burn After Reading was a bit disappointing, but what are you going to do after coming out with No Country for Old Men?  Ah, what the heck, three.

Update: (because I forgot to provide those last two links, and because I've always liked the idea of one blog post that you constantly re-vise and update and it grows increasingly in length, obviously, until you decide to cut it all off one day; hopefully you donate it to people who've lost their heads and need to wear wigs/masks) Hulk Hogan says he wanted to kill himself.  I felt like death tonight.  Not like dying or wanting a good serving of death, but like the reaper himself.  Tired and bemoaned and can I please get a family guy moment?  I wondered (the following link goes Dali, and I think I went there before with this site, but that's okay, best beloved...I'm not sure what that painting is actually called, but Dali had some out there titles with his shiz) about death's heads, which is a nebulous term (see: the newer post...iCrossreference) and the kind of moth used in Silence of the Lambs (that's a 15 Minutes clip, 7:30 for the money-shot, because we're going for satire, sacri-legion, sardonicism...I enjoyed that flick, and it was really pleasant to view, an enjoyable emotion-scape, although you'd really be better off watching True Romance...nice clip with Sam Jax and G. Oldman, by the way).  It's time to shift this to e-mail to Dude form.

Which is to say, video link.  Standing at the icebox, feeling like William Carlos William, I realize that dissatisfaction is the [home] of intellectuality.  I could throw up (see: vomit, sweet smell, the earth, mornings) a Rolling Stones vid, but that would be tres trite, no?

extend your (cuff) links, lil homies.  y'know, for the accompanying (like p_diddy) pic.

Quick hit style, yeah?

• South Park starts tonight, and it receives a big pop from your one man army of me.  Wrestling on SP, in your face main stream media.  "Pro" wrestling is still significant.  It'll never be true sport.  I will never look at it as such, though I can hope.
• Speaking of wrestling, Michael Voltagio makes a heel turn on Top Chef tonight.
• Um, that's it for actual TV stuff.
• I'm behind on grading, but what else is new?
• I'm behind on writing basketball.  That is new.  The season starts in less than a week.  I'm supposed to be counting the days down, but I fell off the track.
• Trains, planes, and automobiles.
• Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and...adverbs?
• Kourtney turns 13 on Friday.
• I drove home in the dark tonight, and it gave me a snapshot of my life.  Right now.  The lights crept up into the sky, slow snakes in the solemnity.  Valleys, mountains, perspective in the dark.  In the dark, I am growing.  Social atrophy, personal unfurling, yes?  It just takes time.  Screw this

bullet.  Who's biting?  Students fighting, and I am standing there with bodies whirling to push-shoving around me.  I don't know.  What kind of dude am I?  I'm just a dude who goes to work, stays late, works like B-Frank burning the midnight oil and blinding himself onto the one, and I go home and get ready to work some more, do some work, this is my life.  And that's fine.  Someday, I will do more.  It doesn't need to be now.  As long as I'm working something.

Some days, you feel like everything's bottom has fallen out.  But most times, at least, in smiles you can find the joy that tells you that you're making a difference, doing the right thing.

There's so much on my mind right now, and no space or time for any of it.  Except this, which is why I'm here.  I'd like to talk about my car.  I'd like to talk about Shelley.  I'd like to talk about work and school yard brawls and palm frond e-mails I haven't been sending Molly.  I'd like to talk about terrible e-mails to Hannah, and pitiable ones to Thatcher and Ezra.  I'd like to sum up my life in a handful of interactions and intersections.  I'd like to talk about water on the bottom of my feet leaving footprints on the fake wood paneling of my house, as if I was drawing up the ocean with every step.  I'd like to talk about masterpieces and motorhead and handlebars named Lenny.  I'd like to talk about Confederacy of Dunces and English department meetings that go fifteen minutes too long and are held hot in an old (as in defunct, not as in chronologically old) band room with no AC and arguing over course titles and registry and semantics, semantics, semantics, people.  I'd like to talk about Kourtney and YaYa Boxes and grad school and quiet beaches, bare chests flapping in the wind, my parents, my grandparents, death.  I'd like to talk about criticism, as it is a form of death, is it not?  And I've dabbled a bit of criticism here, on this site.  Wallow is a word people sometimes use.  Bolano says only masterpieces matter, and they're hidden.  But then he talks about Jesus (not in that way...that way), and criticism lasts a lifetime but art is eternal.  Or some such something to say, yes?



I'd say all these things, but instead I want to leave one memory of a moment within which this post shall reside.  It's a car memory, and one of Shelley too.  I'm still a little on the fence.  I don't know how appropriate it is to infuse this blog with reality.  I mean, it's always been based on an emotional reality, and I've purposely erred away from bogging this kind of perception down with facts and figures, names and nomenclature.  Writing that, I almost wonder if I shouldn't stop while I'm ahead.  Look, that car, the one I'm getting rid of.  It deserves a post.  But I'll probably neglect it (except if I mention it in a blog post, in which case we spiral downwards into a pit of pop-superstitious-predictions.  Anyway, one of the big reasons I'm nostalgic at the thought of selling that car is because of the memories I have of Shelley in that car.  I don't want to say fond memories, and I know Shelley would cringe at even the suggestion, but they are significant memories.

I kind of feel bad for writing about Shel in this forum, using her name without her knowledge.  I think it's necessary or at least excusable in the sense that I wouldn't be as forthcoming or forthwright in other avenues of expression.  Shel, if you ever come across this, I hope you don't mind.  It's just because I don't want to forget.

In 8th grade, I confessed my undying, adolescent love to Shelley.  She was very good about it all, showing me how such grandiose statements were a bit much, a bit relatively silly.  I didn't handle it so well.  But all that's personal history.  The other memory of Shelley from 8th grade was telling her if she ever needed anything I wanted to be as good a friend as possible, I wanted to be there for her.  I told her this on the two year anniversary of her mother's death.  This is a song we used to share quietly, internet reassurances.

Since graduating from Oberlin, at which I kind of lost track of a whole host of my high school friends, I've been able to spend a bunch of quality time with Shelley, which I'm really grateful for.  One night she got really drunk.  All her demons came to the surface.  She lay in my car, door open, and puked in my driveway.  She beat her fists against the inside of my car, she shook violently.  I held her when she needed it and told her over and over again, it's okay, let it out, you have every right to be angry.

Later, she told me (through the same internet avenues through which we would once quote songs, whole songs to each other) she didn't know how I could look at her after that.  I should've said, how could I not?  She is and continues to be one of the most beautiful people in my life, someone I respect and adore and do love undyingly, if not in the same way as I had professed in intermediate school.  I thought about ending with, "how could I not?" but that's not the focus of this post.  I told her she had nothing to be ashamed of, that anger and pain and release are natural, and you have to let them be that (though, of course, eloquence is 20/20).  She slept the night in my car.  She's the only person besides me who has ever slept for a significant amount of time in that car.  When I woke in the morning, I asked her if she wanted to come in to my house.  She'd refused the night before, and I'd taken her my blanket.  In the morning, she acquiesced, and I don't know why but it just felt natural to crawl into bed with her.  I held her, lightly, without the fierce protective feelings I'd felt the night before, with something similar but softer.  I brushed her hair from her forehead and placed the quietest of kisses there.  She looked so beautiful.  I didn't know how to say anything more than what we'd gone through that night, so I just lay there with her.

I felt, at that moment, that I had finally been able to be there for her when she really needed me.  It was a good feeling to know that mine hadn't simply been gallant words from a young man trying to be gallant.  That we were an important part of each other's lives.  Intermittent as these moments are, with her, with other friends, I think they're the things in life to hold on to.  I try not to wax cliche or overly sentimental here in bigtyper mode, but sometimes it can't be helped.  So often it feels like we're alone on our journeys.  In the end, I think we may just very well be that.  Alone.  Still, it's nice to know other people are going through the same things.  It's nice when we're able to break through and find each other's hands in the dark.