Love, Asiago-ly

I came to Panera to write tonight. I often find that I'm more able to concentrate outside of the house, where I don't have a needy kitten or a DVR to distract me.

Tonight when I came in, I plugged in near my regular leather armchair next to the fireplace, before realizing that the middle-aged man in the royal blue turtleneck one table over was going to use his outdoor voice for his entire visit. He sat and jawed at the woman across from him, who was dressed in what looked like corporate attire from the early nineties, about playing the keyboard and giving up "rock star aspirations," the state of the global economy, installing carpeting, and how he could have saved her thousands of dollars if he helped her remodel her condo. The woman maybe said five things, most of them polite questions about his topic-of-the-minute.

Then I saw her get up to leave, and I noticed that she was holding a single red rose. "I'm so glad we got together," I heard her say. In the parking lot, they exchanged a painfully awkward hug. So, I thought, I just witnessed a really awful first date. Much worse than when I thought he took her to Panera to sell her wall-to-wall carpet. I don't think there's going to be a second.

After that horrid exchange, though, something entirely different happened. A young man dressed in gym clothes and flip-flops walked in and said hello to the girl behind the counter who gave me incorrect change earlier tonight. They exchanged some words out of my sight, but I got the sense that they were romantic.

Then, he came back in moments later and called her to the other side of the counter. He got down on one knee, in his gym shorts on the bread crumb-covered floor, and asked her to marry him. She said yes, and the two threw their arms around each other, he dressed like he'd been watching football on the couch, she in her green work apron and visor. And they looked so incredibly happy. Satisfied with her answer, the young guy left her to finish the rest of her shift. Every few minutes I hear squeals from behind the counter.

This is why I come out to write. To be in the middle of everything, to witness the mundane, the traumatic, the ecstatic, the odd, the trivial. Tonight I got a little bit of everything in one sitting, and I haven't even gotten a refill yet.

It's a Start...

In the land of dissonant whistles
and lolling tongues
and skinny trouser legs clinging
to the ankles of mad lovers,
and of the desperate menthol burn...


Warm tongue vibrations hum
inside painted stained dead walls,
unknown bruises and a burning lead singer,
his necktie caught in a woodchipper crowd
of nodding samefaces,
with their water-slick
levitating bottles of beer.

Hiding in the standing-room shadows
of Thursday night, I am reeking with sex
and breathing the stagnant loitering ego,
the musk of hip,
the sandalwood and cigarillo essence
of the it-girls and boys
who are
tongue-kissing the fall
in someone else's clothes.

How do they live
outside of the frantic evening?
Will their halcyon days
be measured in moonlight?
And why must I fight to be their breed of free,
running my hands against you beneath the bar,
windblown and dehydrated,
and shifting my weight to stay awake
on aching rootless calves?

Ride the Moustache Wave

Somehow in the course of our relationship, my fiance and I became equal parts ironically and erotically obsessed with Burt Reynolds. It's one of the many elusive little quirks we share that has a muggy, mysterious origin.

I bought James a book of perverse love letters written to Burt in the Playgirl years. I made James a birthday card with a masterfully cropped image of Burt's famous bearskin rug photo on the front. I bought James an unauthorized biography.

Okay, so perhaps I was the purveyor of this ridiculous obsession and I am therefore the one to blame.

Regardless, we talk about Burt all the time. And the one thing it always comes back to is the 'stache. It's glorious. Sure, the moustache does not make the man, but Burt's moustache is so closely tied to how we remember, perceive, and celebrate him.

The Burt Reynolds moustache is also important because it defies the three most common/seedy moustache associations: Burt's lip fur doesn't belong to:

1. A child molester (we're pretty sure)
2. A porn star (not that he couldn't be one if he wanted to)
3. Hitler

And maybe it's the reason that my fiance, my darling James, felt that it would be okay for him to at last sport some man-baleen.

At first I was pretty excited about the possibility of my man shedding his full beard for a more streamlined look--something that would require one of those neat little metal combs. When the idea surfaced (again, muggily) in one of our late night conversations, I had recently purchased "The Darjeeling Limited" on DVD, in which Jason Schwartzman sports a very sexy, brooding, full moustache. If it works for him, why couldn't it work for my fella?

And so, armed with the most convincing of arguments...

Jason Schwartzman had a moustache for a while. He's hip.

and:

Burt Reynolds.

...I somehow managed to convince my fiance and myself that this moustache would be a good idea.

And so, last Saturday, I waited nervously outside his bathroom door as he shaved with a fully-charged electric razor.

First the sideburns, then the beardy mass. Eventually, he got his face fur down to a simple classic goatee that made him look sort of like a veteran closing pitcher and sort of like a stuffy literary critic (both turn-ons, in case you didn't know).

Then came the Fu Manchu. Ridiculous. Standing shirtless in his tiny bathroom with a sloppy moustache dripping all the way down to his chin, James looked like he was the father of one of the kids in "Gummo," posing for his proudest MySpace picture.

I was at last glad to see the jowel hair go, making way for an adorable moustache-soul patch combo. It looks perfect--all the trappings of a power-stache plus the sensitive hipster presence of the patch. I could really get used to this look. It kind of works for--no, no! Please don't shave off the soul patch, James!

But he did. And there it was. A shocking, straightforward strip of orphaned beard hair, bristling above his grinning upper lip.

Throughout the day, the moustache took turns surprising me, mystifying me, and warming up to me.

It's kind of an okay look for him, really. But I still can't get over the 'moustigma.' The next day we happened upon a pretty low-rent community fair, and there were three things that the good country folk were celebrating there: cheap hot dogs, cut-off jean shorts, and--you guessed it--moustaches. Every burly dude we came across had a well-seasoned bushy moustache and the kind of stiff upper lip that comes from years of working in a factory or lifting weights on a bench in the garage beneath a poster of Tawny Kitaen on the hood of a Firebird.

This judgment is deeply seated within me, and I don't know how to respond now that I'm engaged to marry it. Poor James.

And yet, when I look at Burt I feel no trepidation. I feel not a tinge of doubt. I don't associate him with a good ol' boy eating Funions at a truck stop.

Perhaps then, it's one thing to grow a moustache, and quite another to grow into a moustache. To allow the stern and brooding power of a well-trimmed patch of lip hair tell the world, "why, yes, I do enjoy Russian literature." Or, "come. Let's spend the evening savoring small plates at a tapas bar and then retreat to the veranda for cigars and aged scotch. What? Did you think I was some sort of rube?" Or maybe even to let your moustache say to the world, "Why, yes, I did once go out for a pass with a bare ass in an issue of Playgirl. And you know what? I'm still here."

Prove me wrong, honey. Prove 'em all wrong just like Burt did. And maybe someday, your facial hair will also have a band and a sex act named after it.

Instant Writing

My professors of creative writing recently sent me a book of surrealist games. I decided to do some "automatic writing" exercises. Each of these short pieces were written without editing, without planning, without stopping. Every time my consciousness slowed or became too present, I ended my piece. The only real "edits" are the breaks that form sections. Here they are:

One:

The journeyman’s pack is full of baked beans and barley wheat, stiff and worn, and full of midday sun. Dried sweat and leaves stick to his calves as he hooks a strap around his ankle and sets to rest in the shade of a willow at the edge of a trickling ford. This is the way we wash our hands, he thinks, recalling some rhyme from his past, some chanted childhood dirge smelling of lavender soap and a warm oven.

Now constant motion is his reality. He is a soldier with active joints and tendons, muscle that has little time to be sore, only to react, to react, to react, to build, to ache only for what is new.

The beard was an accident—a consequence, a guarantee, whatever. It’s there, ruddy and full, consuming his features and blurring his existence.


Two:

My father never asked me to pull his orange cart, though I idle through the market most weekdays with no import. After his heart attack my mother had to re-learn how to cook for him, and consequently grew exhausted. She died clutching a ginger root at the Fratelli’s stand, of old age as far as we can tell.

The thirteen year-old kid from the floor below hooks the cart to the back of his banana bike and pumps standing up down the street, smiling lasciviously at buxom mothers shopping for their family meals. Every day is a Fellini film, full of tit ogling and the coming-of-age celebration of cock.

Every day I regret stealing the bills from his wallet. Every day I punish myself by feeding my supper to the mutts that gather below our window. It’s always unseasoned beef and some sort of limp, wilted vegetable.


Three:

Our prize was a bowing pin, spraypainted gold. My husband hoisted it above his head and gloated in front of the lesser couples, still sweating, still red-faced and fat-fingered. We weren’t bowling—this was a Scrabble tournament. Someone thought it would be funny to have a trophy. Tom found it at a secondhand store, already painted, as if designed with our specific needs in mind.

That’s the thing about Jim. He sweats constantly with no regard for company, for upholstery, for shirtsleeves, for decency. Even with a tray full of vowels for the last three turns, we managed to win. We need to start spending time with people who are more than passably literate.

When you relocate, you make friends with the first genial people you meet. Genial people are mostly simple-minded. To meet anyone with any sort of complexity, you have to put on airs or pretension. You have to be aloof yet full of attractive kinetic energy. We’re so tired from the move though. Jim’s aunt died and left him all of her antique furniture. It smells of rose-petal sachets and her oxygen tank, except that the oxygen tank doesn’t smell like anything.

Eponymous

Sam Cooke's "That's Where It's At" is truly where it's at. Best slow dance ever. End.

Back in Action

I found this scribbled on a scrap of paper while I was cleaning my desk yesterday. I'm assuming it's the beginning of a poem, so that makes it qualify for my "Poem-a-Day" challenge. It has no title, and the penmanship is horrible.

Remember type
before fluidity,
Gestalt dot matrix particles
within
sounds
within
symbols.
Remember
before it left behind
serif
scars?


That's it. Sounds like an ode to my parents' old Apple II GS, complete with noisy dot matrix printer and those perforated reams of paper.

She & Him

Lars and the Real Girl

No Country For Old Men

Quit Doggin' Me!

I know, I know. Major slackery alert, right? But I will have 30 poems on here eventually. I promise.

I haven't been neglecting poetry completely. In fact, two nights ago I organized a guerilla group of poetry writers, and we spent the waning hours of the evening chalking some great poetry across the campus of Baldwin-Wallace College. Sides of sandstone buildings, sidewalks, fountains, picnic tables--none were safe from our dusty little fingers!

I've also been devoting a lot of my time to a documentary collage that I'm creating for my creative writing seminar capstone. More about that later...

Oh! And yesterday was Poem in Your Pocket Day. More about that at www.poets.org

Okay, here's the next poem. This is actually a "found poem" that I wrote for my seminar. The assignment was to collect words from billboards, road signs, print advertisements, product labels, and non-English textbooks. We were only allowed to use the words we found--nothing more than that. Here's what I came up with:

Night Paving

Bottled,
           positively     balanced on
shoulder (in
                     different cities
in one day),
a good alternative to caffeine.

The elderly
              de-
              clawed consecrator
handling tarot cards
                         begins recruitment.

Women buy
             guns &
                           tackle
well-balanced flight
attendants,
                           made of
                                   malty
                                             eukaryotes.

You can...
                      imply
full-bodied         truth
in          carbonated
                         express lanes.
North,


            south. 

At the Museum of Natural History

You kissed the little girl
who shares these thick
frames, now clouded
with your skin oil.

Particolored moths,
pinned,
looking the most alive (their
wings are still dusted).


A stuffed kodiak bear,
still hazardous.
Looming,
head-sized paws
stupidly reaching.

Something ceremonial:
a headdress for a wedding...

What implores you to stay here?
I have been here myself
all my life,
her
then me,
like wooden nesting eggs
behind glass.

Pitch

I was only
told
of the last shape he took.


Paws outstretched,

sunning lifeless
on one side in a
clearing
of trees.

Fur unmatted,
legs un-
broken.
Only a drop of blood
creeping from the side
of his cat
mouth.

Death
with a pellet gun,
aimed steady.

Startling,
the way a flashlight is
to a frog
in our creek bed.

Day Three

State Fair

A row
of bearded
pie-eating gallants,
the moon a packaged pad
of butter
in an old man's pocket
at a buffet line.

Baskets of deep-fried
ferris wheel riders
dripping oil onto
the head of
prize pig
with her symmetrical
nipples, roasting
on a spit.

Me the apple
in her mouth,
red and hot
with shame
for having entered that tent
and staring too long
at the man with the
reflective forehead.

Day Two

For Maic:

What if I am your sister,
the one bathing
in a pool of
ersatz moonlight?

Unashamed
of my nakedness,
you spring
upon me
in a bear suit
on your tiptoes,
challenging my height.
And you wrap me (like text
at the end of a
line)
in your Stooges t-shirt.

We watch the ball game
broadcast late,
West Coast,
our arms resting limp
on your sweaty
gaping
brilliant bear head.

National Poetry Month

The title of this entry tells it like it is, for sure. April is National Poetry Month. In the past, I've celebrated by gathering large groups of friends and chalking poetry over sidewalks, buildings, streets, and fountains. I plan to do this again (college being the perfect setting for this sort of play).

This year, I've also decided to write at least one poem every day, and to share my writing, completely unedited, in this blog. I want every poem (or start of a poem) to feel organic and unmussed, for better or worse.

Today's poem, my first of the month, seems greatly influenced by the departure of my lover this morning. I should also note that I've been reading a collection called "Isn't It Romantic: 100 Love Poems By Younger American Poets" edited by Brett Fletcher Lauer & Aimee Kelley." Sappiness often occurs by osmosis.



Wire

I confess
I am not so afraid
of birds.

But if you will continue
to squeeze my
elbow, to arrest
my pulse
in the presence of gulls,
I will never object
to your protection.

Pretentious Literary Form #294: The Lyric Essay

The concept of the "lyric essay" still eludes me, even after reading several essays that attempt or profess to define it. Perhaps it should be expected that writers writing about writing will do so in coy metaphor. Whatever.

In my senior creative writing seminar, we were assigned to write a two-page lyric essay using the conventions of one of these forms:

Flash Cards
Billboards
Catalog Descriptions
Rorshak Tests

I decided to explore the duality and the associative power of the flash card. A single word and its intended definition, teamed together with the intention of being forever committed to memory. The workings of memory and free association are at the heart of my latest effort.

I should also add that this morning I found my love's t-shirt next to my bed, which was enough of an event to make me cry over my oatmeal. I hardly ever eat oatmeal. I'm not generally a big fan of mush. Unfortunately I fear that my first conscious attempt at lyric essay might possess that quality:

Three Spices Commonly Used to Disguise Sentimentality

Tamarind:

The pod of a large, tropical tree, Tamarindus indica, of the legume family, containing seeds enclosed in a juicy acid pulp that is used in beverages and food.

Under creased blue tarps upheld by whitewashed two-by-fours we slip sideways through a sidewalk-wide market, past bulbous tubers and raw earthly monster fruits, and family-owned cardboard signs with tentative prices, your hand in mine as a necessity. This is not my city. To slip away would be the pinch in a muddled Hollywood comedy.

We will complete our mission at an Asian market that is held together by stapled parti-colored flyers and incidental grime. There is a bell, the woman at the counter does not understand us, and we cannot read the labels on the jars. While I pay for the pulp, my eyes gravitate toward the coy lips and navels of a hundred Bollywood women on bootleg clamshell cases, splayed beyond my reach. I want to ask if these films have subtitles. Can we sweat together in bed tonight to the garish trill of Mohammed Rafi and to the beaten sound of your mostly inadequate window air conditioning unit, and to the spices that squeeze persistently through our pores like delivery bicycles in curb lanes? But I assume that this sort of communication is futile. No bag, please. Alright, then. Plastic.

Fennel:

A plant, Foeniculum vulgare, of the parsley family, having feathery leaves and umbels of small, yellow flowers.

This one’s harder. My limbs have elongated, swollen and melting with the warmth of taste. The seed, the stalk, the heady climb up the stairs while the stomach still lingers at the dinner table. During the first set, my eyes are closed and his softer songs are punctuated with clattering silverware one wooden floor below. I forgive them, and weep in time with the percussive nature of the universe, each open-mouthed sob releasing the lingering vapors of thyme and some other spice that still eludes my palette.

On a different evening there are gossamer curtains falling around like fluttering scarves. The room is accentuated with copper and murmur. Everything is flickering. We have trouble with pronunciation for different reasons as the night surrenders to the subtly erotic grace of my elbow, bent with lusty intention towards the waning boddess of a stemless wine glass. Tonight I will give myself to you on a full stomach.

Lemongrass:

A tropical grass (Cymbopogon citratus) native to southern India and Sri Lanka, yielding an aromatic oil used as flavoring and in perfumery and medicine.

The flea market closed before we could make love between the leather bound encyclopedias and the unwittingly racist Americana antiquities, the way we’d buzzed about on especially complacent Saturday mornings. That one time, I let the taste of summer dissolve beneath my tongue, and plunged euphorically past you into stacks of must and warp and hairline cracks from amnesic use. Leaving without purchasing a single relic will be the easiest decision we will make.

Soon after it closes, the Chinese restaurant across the street follows. We have yet to find a new place. Mornings, bristles scrape across reluctant papillae, and we are made conscious of it all again. The taste, when mixed with toothpaste, is understandably unpleasant.

Evolution

There's rough gray carpet around the edges of the glass, surrounding the sharks in a sort of domesticated tranquility. The little children gather around it, their warm hands pressed against the wide pane that towers seven feet, maybe more, over their cowlicked heads, their dusty craned necks, their faces shrouded in sickly green aquarium glow.

The inside of the tank is curved and cylindrical like a soup can, its cement walls coated in mossy film. From the main viewing side, Lana can see across to two hidden portholes, and if she stares long enough, she sees a kid's face appear in the lower of the two as a blacktip sweeps sharply by, cutting another neurotic circular path.

Lana watches, a canvas tote bag weighted down with juice boxes and triangle-cut turkey sandwiches hanging limply over her left shoulder. She is standing contrapposto, posing in a way, as another living exhibition in the zoo's aquarium gallery. Her frizzled dirty-blonde hair is tamed, with much effort, by a red bandana. In an oversized t-shirt and a hand-written name tag, she watches mothers pass by with their own, actual children. She wonders whether they wonder how old she is. If they know that she is pushing thirty. If they could trust a day care that would employ a fragile woman like her. At 12:30, once the kids have tired of the sharks, Lana will seat them at the splintered wooden picnic tables in front of the polar bears, and distribute the lunches. Then she will retreat behind the ladies restroom and smoke a cigarette while she watches a daddy long legs crawl up a drain pipe.

For now, the kids aren't tugging at the legs of her jeans. They are engrossed, captivated by prehistoric silky bodies that seem weightless and hazardous in the water. Lana is repulsed by their black eyes, their gaping mouths. She is bothered that she cannot see her reflection in the side of the tank. The dim lighting in this space makes her feel as though she is drowning, but there are mothers and fathers milling about her, holding the arms of their children, negotiating problems with camera flash against the glass, breathing underwater.

As she moves toward the back of the exhibit to recline on a carpeted bench, one of her charges, Madeline the doctor's daughter, lets out a scream. Its shrillness is absorbed by the fibers in the walls, but it is felt and echoed just the same, from the cavernous mouths of the other children with their unfinished stalagmite rows of teeth. And then Lana sees the source of fear. The smooth-sided body of a blacktip shark rolls to one side, suddenly lifeless and no longer sustaining its own motion. Slowly, it cuts back and forth like a sheet of paper blown from the edge of a desk, and plummets past the viewing window, sinking to the bottom of the tank, leaving no wake.

Madeline runs, flailing to Lana, her stubby pink arms outstretched, plump fingers splayed. Lana watches her gaping mouth, her chubby cheeks, the way she chokes on her own spit when she sobs, and knows that one day Madeline will be ugly. And so she hugs her, the way she's been told to, and is suddenly joined by a mass of other bandwagon seekers of affection, who dutifully rub Madeline on the back of her corduroy jumper, and pat her hair until it is a knotted mess.

Outside at the picnic table, Lana watches the children eat their sandwiches and trade juice boxes, which come in two flavors--grape and apple. One of the boys has a ring of artificial red food coloring around his lips, and he's watching her with heavy, watery eyes. Lana reaches into her back for a pack of cigarettes and swings her tired legs over the bench of the table, heading for a spider-infested patch of dead grass behind the ladies restroom. She'll stay here for a minute or two. Long enough for a smoke. And when she returns everybody will have forgotten about death.

It's Official.

Ricky Nelson is the hottest teen idol of all time.

Daunting Task Force

My good friend Kevin recently published a list of his top five albums. I've always wanted to do this, but most "Top 5" lists in my life are too tentative to document. My attentions are fickle.

I've learned that growing up can change the way you feel about an album, the same way falling in love can change the way you feel about a song. It's the same with all art, I think.

But these are the albums that have always been there, or that have come into my life so boldly and explosively that I can only assume that their effects will be lasting. There are five of them. I think I might be ready.

1. Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

There were seventeen tracks on Wilco's previous effort, Summerteeth, but this time, one of the most inventive and versatile American rock bands did it right, releasing a cohesive and groundbreaking 11 track album that would forever change the way they made music. The critical and commercial success of "Yankee" allowed Wilco to grow as a band, and listening to this album made me forget that any other band in the world existed.

The album feels dreamlike. It lets me into a new place, where negative space becomes important, where descending chimes and sleepy fragile vocals play with underwater guitars, and where everything echoes.

I listened to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot two summers after it was released. I'm actually ashamed of this fact to this day. Though I was familiar with Wilco, I had never listened to much of their music, except for a few tracks off of Summerteeth. Now I can't make it through a week without immersing myself completely in the final dissonant measures of "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," or the playfully nostalgic pounded piano chords at the beginning of "Heavy Metal Drummer." Every time I hear "Reservations" I fall hopelessly in love.

2. The Police: Outlandos d'Amour

Even finding out the sad news that my cat had died while I was listening to "Born in the 50s" did not ruin this album for me. It says something that I only own it on vinyl; there's no skipping tracks with this one.

This is the time in the Police's career that I admire most. Nobody knew what they were supposed to sound like, and I think they didn't either. And on this album, it sounds like they didn't care. Part reggae, part punk, all pop genius, "Outlandos" has been one of my favorites since I was thirteen.

It's driving, it's fierce. Sting's vocals wail and gargle and scream. Everything is tight when it needs to be, and cacaphonous when appropriate. It's probably measured and calculated like most things that Sting does, but it doesn't feel that way. It makes me go nuts.

3. Ellis Paul: Live

I've always hated live albums because they never sound like they should, and because there's always an annoying person in the crowd who makes jarring sounds at inappropriate times. But this is a folk concert. And it's one of the most intimate folk concerts I've never been to. When Ellis breaks a string he reads an original poem whilst changing it. His guests include Patty Griffin and Chris Trapper. He jams on "Autobiography of a Pistol" and "Martyr's Lounge," and whispers and coos on "Last Call" and "Conversation With A Ghost."

Ellis is a storyteller, and each one of these songs moves gracefully and keenly, like fiction you want to believe. His soaring vocals are unmatched on any of his other studio efforts. It's two discs of modest, heartfelt pleasure. Every time I hear it I pick a new favorite song. Ellis Paul is simply one of the best living songwriters, and this is him, essentially. It's all you need.

4. Weezer: Pinkerton

Screw The Blue Album! Regardless of how much Rivers Cuomo seems to hate Pinkerton, I think it's one of the strongest rock albums I've ever heard. This was a time when the guys of Weezer weren't afraid to be playful. Their self-deprecating, angsty lyrics are the soundtrack of adolescence. But they aren't pandering to anybody. They're just playing fun, kicky, rocky, pop songs.

I miss the days when the boys would make strange noises in their songs, and sing along with guitar solos. Weezer was too big to play in the garage at this time, but this album feels like it belongs there. I love it. It makes me feel like I fit in somewhere. It always has.

5. Sufjan Stevens: Seven Swans

Sufjan Stevens saved me in a way. His music and Over the Rhine's music finally gave me positive feelings towards Christian artists. This wasn't annoying praise music. This was lyrically dense, intelligent, complex stuff, that just happened to have Christian themes.

One of the most intimate, sensitive, and heartbreaking albums I've ever heard in my life, Seven Swans makes me feel like a human being every time I listen to it. The melodies, the banjo, the haunting starkness, in contrast with Stevens' other efforts, are what makes "Swans" so special. The first time I heard it, I was driving home from the library, and it began to rain. "To Be Alone With You" came on just as I pulled into the driveway, and I remember sitting in the car and listening to it all the way through. That's what Sufjan makes you do, especially here. You have to stop and listen to all of it.

Things left in the pocket of a winter coat

I can shapeshift in the fall. I can slip into things and realize that they feel familiar. I can be more restless, but I can also be more patient.

I was quiet in my mom's car, getting my sense of hearing confused with my sense of feeling, exhausting my memory. The last time I heard this album all the way through without stopping, I had a broken heart. I basked in melancholy on my roommate's futon, under piles of blankets in the middle of the day with the blinds closed tight, trying to create the illusion of night for dramatic effect. The feeling of hurting someone else made my skin feel pinched. I was punishing myself. The time before that, I was reclined in the driver's seat of my Toyota Echo on the night of my high school graduation party. Guests had gone, I was alone with the windows up. This album was a graduation present. It was hard to sleep.

Traditionally, this is the time of the year when I want to say the most, but when I feel the least eloquent. Nothing that I write will match the importance of what is happening around me, or inside me.

I'm unpacking sweaters that I didn't know I had. I'm recalling moments that I'd similarly forgotten.

This is the ticket from the theater in the park. The wrought iron table teeters, my right wrist slips across the page of a notebook, the spine creaks when I press too hard. This is the end of the summer and I'm writing this. And I can smell popcorn that doesn't smell like popcorn, but more like a high school football game, or the floor of a movie theater on Lee that we've just trodded into, wrapped in wool scarves and watching our shoulders moisten as the flakes melt under soft yellow lobby light. Now we are at the corner, and we've said goodbye too early and isn't it strange now that we must continue this way. This is you and me drinking coffee from clear cups, being diplomatic about the last bite of cheesecake, which has fallen over onto its side in surrender, and I'm realizing that you are leaving. Now I understand why you came, and why you stood for so long under the hot lights of the stage. Not because of the cold, but because you weren't sure. And at the time, neither was I. I kept a few things. When I get my phonograph fixed, I'll think of you again, when I play them.

This is me promising that my attentions will not die with a season anymore. I will play the same two-disc set all year long--perhaps more rigorously at times. And I will keep one of my sweaters folded on the top shelf of my closet.