20 tyrannosauruses on 20 mountaintops

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

"Fuck concepts. Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen."

George Saunders

¶ 9:00 PM 0 comments

Thursday, November 21, 2013

"Never once had they opened the door which leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark. After dinner the dishes were promptly washed and put in the closet; after the paper was read it was neatly folded and laid on a shelf; after the clothes were washed they were ironed and folded and then tucked away in the drawers. Everything was for tomorrow, but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot ever thinks of blowing up the bridge."

Henry Miller

¶ 7:37 PM 0 comments

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Another reworking. Also, I'm not a misogynist I swear!

hard and soft

As the airplane glided onto the velvet runway, Harry slid his hand up Zelda's milky thigh.

"Oh Harry, you move me," uttered Zelda, "you move me, hard."

At this, Harry exploded with raw sex.

"Zelda, you move me harder," he said.

"I'll be right there"

Eric's door was knocking. He was sure there was someone there, but at the time he only thought of the door and the knocking. He had been writing all morning, and was deeply satisfied with his progress. Harry had evaded the police yet again and managed to board a plane and woo a stewardess named Zelda. This would make the fourth tryst Eric had written of in 7 pages. Everything was going as planned.

Eric stopped at the full length mirror just before opening the door. He was still not sure whether he liked having a mirror there. At this point, it was perfect. He swatted the hair out of his eyes and pulled the strands behind his ears. He was hoping to grow his hair to his tailbone.

"Just a second."

Geez. That's what he said as he pushed his chin high and opened his mouth repeatedly, moving his head right-to-left, right-to-left. He was expecting his ex-girlfriend, Mollie. Not that she had told him she would come over that day, but that he was always expecting her, for the past 3 months. He stood smiling before the mirror, opening his mouth occasionally, and finally pulling down his blue plaid pajama pants. He smiled out of the side of his mouth and nodded just before pulling them up and opening the door.

"Hello," he said, very casually.

"Hi. Is this Harry?"

This stumped him. He hadn't told anyone about the story. He had only started yesterday, in fact. Or the day before. Well, nevertheless, he had not told anyone about this story. He was sure because there was no one to tell.

"Hmm. No this is Eric, I'm Eric."

"Sure you are, can I come in?"

"I guess, but I don't know you, and I'm Eric, not Harry."

"The name's Zelda, and I've come to have sex with you, just kidding. My name's Eric."

She burst out laughing. He let out a solitary laugh and stared at her, she walked through the door, he kept staring. She was about 7 feet tall. Well you know, tall. She was dressed exactly like a stewardess to Eric. Not a sexy stewardess, although she was very sexy. It’s just that her clothes did nothing for her figure, which was awesome. Eric was baffled. When was the last time I slept, he thought. Is this happening? Could I be hallucinating?

"So, Zelda, how long have you been a stewardess and when are we going to have sex?"

"For a long time and soon."

"Wonderful, looking forward to it."

"Me too, this is the perfect thing."

"Yes, it is. It's perfect actually."

They smiled at each other, kept smiling. Eric and the couch. In Eric's head the couch was not empty. There was a 7 foot tall stewardess with blond highlights in her bobbed hair.

"Sleeping when you go to this?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Sleeping when you go to this"

"That's nonsense."

"Precisely."

"Time for sex?"

She motioned to the bedroom. He said, you first, she said, after you, he said thank you Zelda you are a gentlewoman. She laughed. Eric opened the door to his room. My bed looks so good, he said. I mean it's been along time.

"I know, darling."

Eric placed his hands on the bed, laid his head down and smelled the pillow. It smelled like Mollie. Which smelled like Pantene, which is what he started using when she left him and he started sleeping on her side of the bed. He breathed in the pillow, trying to become part of it and the memory of her. His hands relaxed and his right shoulder fell into the bed, while his legs dangled over the side, one still touching the floor. In his dream he saw Mollie, in fast motion leaving him, the door closing, the door opening, he saw Zelda, he saw the cabin of a plane, and his laptop. He felt his legs being lifted onto the bed, his covers covering him, the presence of a woman behind him, holding him. He later, much later, awoke to find the bed empty, but this feeling of presence was different than his dream. It felt undeniably real.

Eric believed it was Mollie and it gave him hope. Mollie was the only beautfiul woman Eric had ever dated, or as he liked to say, to paint the most dramatically depressing picture, 'the only beautiful woman I've ever known'. She had grace and character, a beautiful, voluptuous body and real depth. Thick shiny hair the color of hazelnuts and eyes greener than sunlit summer grass. Eric was never sure she loved him, but was all too sure about his love for her. It was, which is why it lasted only a few months, bordering on obsession. Which is not the same as love. It is the same as envy and greed maybe, but not love. There were times he wanted to enter her body. And not at the hip, he wanted to truly get inside her. The same way you’d enter a large balloon. There were other times when he wanted to smash her head in. Start hitting her and never stop. If she had even caught the faintest glimpse of this she would have never moved in. She did eventually see this obsession, it scared the hell out of her and she was gone.

Eric woke up thinking of Zelda, who he thought was Mollie. He felt tired, so tired he half-considered going back to sleep, but got out of bed instead. He went to the laptop.

"Oh Harry, I should have never left you, your hair is like a horse's butt."

"I'd like to see your butt," Harry whispered as he moved his hand up the back of Zelda's shirt and slid his hand down her skirt to her hot ass.

"Harry, I should have never left you. I'll come back to live with you. We can start a family. Just do me first. Hard and soft." Zelda let out a soft murmur. Harry cried. He hated Zelda, he hated her for leaving him he wanted her to die she should die. He kissed her and spit at her he loved her and did her hard and soft.

"Oh Harry I am such a slut and whore for leaving you," cried the bitch.

Whydid you leave me, whydidyou leave me why didyouleave me whydid you leavememe

¶ 11:53 AM 0 comments

Here's one from awhile ago that I've slightly reworked:

10 May

I’ve read the journal of every girl I’ve ever dated, provided they kept one. If she says she doesn’t keep a journal, then I look harder. I have made duplicate keys. I have broken into her apartment while she was at work. I have checked her room while she was in the shower. In most cases, I end up finding her journal. I don’t know what it is about their journals that makes these girls I date so ashamed. They have some lovely prose in there. Here’s one of my saddest favorites:

I never feel like myself when he’s inside me. I feel like I don’t exist.

I wish he’d stop the second he gets it inside,

but part of me never wants him to leave.

That really hurt when I read that. I stayed with her the longest, but ended it when I read about some guy named Ellmore. Besides, I told myself while sitting on the edge of her bed, you’re only doing this out of pity. I put the journal under her pillow, my easiest find because it’s always the first place I look, and waited for her to get out of the bathroom. It was especially difficult to end our relationship with her wearing that lingerie. Not because of how sexy she looked or anything, lingerie is ridiculous, but because she went through all the trouble. I did not buy her any lingerie and so told myself that it must have been a gift from Ellmore. I asked her, with my hand around the doorknob, do you feel like yourself when he’s inside you? She stood there speechless as I closed the door. I really hope she didn’t cry. I did not mean any harm.

If she really doesn’t keep a journal then I am forced to check her email. But I know as I click on her inbox that she will not last long. I will find reasons to get bored with her and end things, or I will let her know the things that will get her bored with me. My longest email relationship was 5 months and her name was Agatha. But she was alluring enough on her own to keep me around. She was the one who ended things. If she had not dumped me I may have never left. She was an exception and exceptions are always the hardest to lose because exceptions have indelibility and I have never forgotten her. The one secret I never got to know.

Other email relationships are bland because no journal means no secrets and no secrets means no personality. I know this is true. Up until my Aggie I never seriously considered an email relationship. But everything about her was intriguing. The way she would just up and leave for 15 minutes. Where did she go? Out for a walk, up on the roof, down in the basement - who knows? I wanted to ride on her back like a koala bear. I wanted to know everything about her because there was so much I knew she was not telling me. One day I woke up and she was not next to me. I found her in the living room dancing with headphones on. I wanted to bite her cheek off. But no journal. I looked everywhere.

You can tell a lot about a girl just by the type of journal she has and by where she keeps it. A regular five star notebook means she has been journaling for a long time and will continue to do so. The five star is a treasure chest and they are my favorite. But they never last long, so I don’t know why I say that. They are typically very introverted, which is cute for awhile. But it gets old. I like chatty ones with five stars, they are typically the most fun to have sex with because all that journal writing gets her in tune with her body. If it’s a five star under the pillow, then I know we will get along just fine. A five star in her top drawer is no good.

Then there is the hard leather bound. These girls still think journal writing is like keeping a diary. I’ve seen some with entries that begin with “Dear Diary”. I don’t even break up with these girls. I simply walk out and never talk to them again. I mean, it is not anything special to keep a journal. It is no momentous occasion. Every hard leather bound thinks writing in her journal is a visit to royalty. I might add, unless they keep the hard leather bound mixed among books. She lasted about three months.

A soft leather bound is the hardest to define. She may have journaled before or this may be her first journal. It’s so hard to say with the soft leather bound ones. Typically, these girls are inconsistent, only journaling when they feel like it. I don’t go for desultory journal keeping. These too, never last long. One kept her soft leather with her at all times. That was an adventure. I stuck around just for the espionage involved in trying to get my hands on that pearl.

The one’s that last the longest are always the most unique. One girl wrote in the margins of her bible.That was a hard find. Here’s a passage, written next to Psalm 105:4:

I like the way he walks into a room. He seems to be completely

at ease with himself and in control. I never see that side of him

outside of entering a room, which is most odd.

I disagreed with her, but I stuck it out, if only because her journal keeping was so interesting. There was another girl who kept a journal in a plain blue binder she restocked with looseleaf. Once it was filled she threw away the last page and so on. I found the papers in the garbage before I found the binder. Here’s a poem she threw out:

I test-drove this car once up a cliff and over a tree just

Because the dealer said I could take it off road. If only

He could see me now, that mustachioed harbinger.

She hid the binder on the top of a cabinet above her toilet. It was the necessity of and addiction to the journal that kept me around.

My favorite, and this one hurts more than dear Aggie, is the one who kept a journal with cutout pictures and drawings. I thought it was just a scrapbook at first until I found the connections to her daily life. On August 12th, the day we first made love, I found a picture of the Eiffel Tower, a field of sunflowers, and a black and white picture of her laughing. To make sure I checked the day her father died, and sure enough it was a waterpainting of her father holding a rake with leaves coming out of his pockets and dirt in his hair. There was so much beauty to her drawings, so much depth to her journal keeping, that I thought she was it. I planned to marry her and still do. But she found me reading her journal one day when I thought she was at work. I was stuck on the most recent page from the day prior. The page included a drawing of a dinosaur and a picture of me in the top right and a picture of my friend Greg in the left. I was supposed to hang out with Greg the day before but he canceled last minute. I was sure they had just hung out, so I wasn’t jealous or anything. I was hoping we could still be friends, but she will not see me. I miss you Sara, wherever you may be.

It’s an addiction, I know. I don’t smoke or drink and none of the hard stuff either, of course. This is the only pleasure I take out of life: discovery. And the funny thing is, I have never kept a journal. I was thinking the other day that maybe I would be able to hold down a relationship longer if I did. So hello, journal. Glad to meet you.

¶ 11:28 AM 0 comments

Sage Mountain

I'm gonna burn some sage today. I’ve got a bundle sitting across the room the color of land skirting the dry mountain. I’ve heard the dust never stops building up. I read that in a book by Annie Dillard. She wrote that if you stand still the earth buries you, ready or not. Which is untrue - it would take so long you’d be beyond ready for it. I guess she means it just happens, no stopping it. By walking around and moving about we get the dust off us - that’s clearly her point. I know so few people who are really moving though, myself the worst of them. You can’t watch a mountain erode but its technically happening all the time. And we’re all already dead and so forth. Like Rilke said about pregnant mothers, how they carry two deaths with them, their own and their baby’s. The point I’m trying to make is that you will be buried by the earth, by the dust no matter what - but especially if you do nothing. Mountains do nothing and that’s why nobody respects them. They’ll never have vacation time or any 401k-match programs. Maybe that’s my point, I take it back, change it. My new point is you should never try to be like a mountain, all tall and silent and eroding, your bottom half firmly planted in the earth and your top half getting skin cancer and all that, or covered in snow, or whatever. I don’t really care about mountains anymore, I’m over it. Be like the sage that burns in a new studio apartment, filled with boxes brown and taped shut. The mattress is on the floor for now but soon we’ll raise it up and begin sleeping the proper way. We practice our deaths every night, don’t we? Heaven is probably just dreaming that never ends, no alarm or daylight to wake us. But for now burn the sage and uncork the wine, though you’ll have to find the wine-opener. It’s in one of the boxes marked kitchen.

Of course, the sage was in a box marked first things. And so the wine-opener should have been in there as well. But we can’t be perfect my love. Does love keep the dust away? It might, but its really just a striving for perfection and I’ve already explained you can’t be perfect. Mountains are the perfect example of imperfection. They’ve done nothing in my opinion, everything’s been done for them and they get all the glory. But they’re constantly dying and eroding, technically right before our eyes. I guess they’re also growing too, right before our eyes. Now I’m imagining all of these people watching mountains, as if that’s how people spend their time. We do all love watching things build and grow and fall apart. Birds live there and other animals. And people sometimes too live on mountains and the dust fills their lungs and covers their paths and soon they go to sleep with the birds and the other animals.

I’ve only just woken up. I brewed coffee, a recent thing I’ve been doing since I bought a coffee maker. Also I’ve been adding cream and sugar to my coffee, which is also a recent thing. Black coffee is only really good with a sweet thing to eat with it. And I don't feel like eating today, not a sweet thing or any thing. I’d like to spend my entire day not eating and listening to music and drinking coffee and thinking about dust and mountains. I should be applying for jobs because the one I have I do not like. I want precisely what the mountains don’t have, the vacation time and so on but add to it a banker’s schedule. How banks used to be. How mountains used to be, too - getting weekends off. The birds and other animals used to head to the beaches, they knew the score. Can’t be on the mountain all seven days of the week, it’s exhausting. Gives the lazy mountain more time to do nothing but grow and erode and have a boozy brunch with friends.

Goes without saying that me talking about sage and the actual burning of sage are both metaphors, the drawings of lines in the sand. The welcoming of change, the hope for better days or the best of those past good days made constant. In other words, either its nostalgia or a ridiculous hope for something that’s never happened. Could be a vague hope for things you never imagined, better than you could have imagined. The bad days not so bad and the good days better than ones you’ve experienced. Sage burning and the opening of boxes in a new apartment. The sound of tape being ripped from cardboard and the conversation that comes from seeing things you own and adore or find funny. Making snap judgments on where things ought to be placed. Stacking the now folded cardboard near the door. Wine stained tongues and the smell of a burning, cleansing herb. Unopened boxes surround the mattress, which is covered with folded sheets and pillows and towels and candle holders. It’s getting late, so we practice death again.

¶ 11:01 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Personal Ad

First grade is the earth
The earth is practical,
consistant, patient,
and persistant. I want
to explore the whole
universe with you
Mostly the earth lol!
I am goofy & success-
ful and HEY
I'm down-to-earth
& down-to-fuck.
I am Water & I
enjoy videogames
But I'm full-figured
Good Luck. Not
playing the cougar
card yet
I'm a GF, FWB, ISO
& my DOB is I can't
wait to hear from you!
Seeking Earth & Water.
<3

¶ 9:20 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Blue Factory Flame

That song came on as I was driving to Target on rainy streets. Tears moved towards my stubbled chin. Before the marriage, before I went on that street with her, before that ended and I was on my way to Target to buy clothes, there was this song. Sitting in my mildewed apartment in Turtle Creek. Yuengling sweating by the open window. Cigarette smoke coming from deep within me and filling the day-dark livingroom.

When I die, put my bones in an empty street
To remind me how it used to be

Found two shirts pretty easily. I always try them on. I don’t want to take any risks. Make any mistakes. The one was a little tight, but I liked the fit. The shirt and I, we fit well together. With time, I’ll forget and I’ll put it in the dryer and it will shrink. And I’ll be back on that street, going to Target to return that ill-fitted shirt.

They ain’t proud colors, but they’re true colors of my home
Where I am, paralyzed by the emptiness

¶ 2:21 PM 0 comments

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