You and Indiana and I

(Genre: Lyric Essay)

A few days before I was to leave New York, to drive across the country, to build a new home somewhere in the mountains of California, I sat around the butcher block table in the center of Natalie and Kara’s basement apartment in Brooklyn. I asked Natalie what was worth seeing in Columbus, Ohio. “Skip it,” she said, “go to Cincinnati,” her girlfriend added, slumped on a stool beside her. I had no interest in Cincinnati, the town the pair was from. It must have shown on my face. “Columbus has great thrift stores,” Natalie offered optimistically. Still, I had only asked about Columbus as it was the only major city on my route from New York to Bloomington, Indiana where I would reunite with you.

A few days later, as I made my way across the border of West Virginia and Ohio, a cicada hit my windshield; its body instantly no more than a large smear of exoskeleton and guts obstructing my view. I thought of Natalie then and how she spoke of the cicadas in Ohio from her youth. She once recalled to me the feeling of their bodies beneath her feet as a girl, the same guts rising up between her toes, how their buzz signaled a return to school, how they died in slow cycles like civilizations.

It was midnight by the time I entered the outskirts of Columbus. I pulled off the highway and parked in the closest parking lot. Three neon X’s buzzed in the sign above an adult bookstore across the gravel lot. I tried to find comfort and sleep, curled across the front seats of my Jeep. Sometime in the night the temperature dropped to an all time low for Ohio in September.

As I slept, knotted and uncomfortable, my mind drew connections between my location and my memories, my emotions and my associations. This is how we do. I dreamt of driving through the cold air, my headlights cutting through the frigid fog. Ahead of me, growing closer in the beams of light, stood Natalie and Kara. They were bickering on a cold highway. Me, behind the wheel, squinting as I made out their familiar shapes, the color of their hair. Drawing so close I could see the fear expand in the whites of their eyes as I crashed into them.

I awoke with two gasps, one for each of them. I found myself there in the front of the Jeep, cold beneath my quilt, the cicada still smeared upon the windshield.

I sat in the Jeep with my eyes adjusting to the light, my lungs to the cold. It was just after six in the morning and I turned the key in the ignition and threw my blankets and pillows in the passenger seat beside me. I was something like seven hours away from Bloomington, Indiana where you had started graduate school the day before. The parking lot of the adult bookstore where I stopped was now filled with 18-wheelers, two of them at my either side. I backed out as though through a long hallway and drove west, half asleep. I made it there around noon, found the main gates to your campus and sent a text that read: I’m lying in the grass by the corners of Indiana and 2^nd Streets. Get in touch when you’re around, I wrote, hoping to sound undemanding. You replied that you'd there in ten. And I smiled.

Anticipating our reunion this immediately became painful. It came to mind that I might not be able to distinguish you from the other passersby. I wondered if we might be unrecognizable after only a few years and what that could mean. I felt a soft panic – a nervous twinge. It was the same dull and aching pain I’d endured throughout the two or three years since I met you. It stemmed from my blind and persisting love. It was irrelevant where we were, how long since we’d spoken, how soon we’d see each other. In these years since we met, I have experienced an ignorant love for you. I can say this now without embarrassment. A love like an always pressing thumb upon the chest. When I thought of you a firm print was left over my sternum. It felt a lower temperature than my own and unrelenting. It was ignorable if needed, but nonetheless consistent regardless of our inconsistent correspondence or the ebb and flow of my personal circumstance.

You know how it was. We were always apart. We were always cryptic and scattered in what we said and how we said it to each other. And always, for me, a cold thumb-print. And then, there I was. Sitting on your college campus and waiting for you. I suddenly remembered a letter I had wrote to you maybe six months before asking that you not contact me again, that it was nothing but painful for me, and child’s play for you. I’m not sure how I’d forgotten writing it. It was laughable that I had intentions of seeming undemanding, calm, unnerved. I looked up from the grass where I sat and for you drawing near, the thumb colder, harder than ever.

I scanned the passersby from the grass and anticipated. Around me were students carrying books, wearing their university sweatshirts, walking swiftly. I saw myself from their perspective. They probably assumed I was a student as well, if they even noticed me sitting there. But I was not a student at your school. I was not wearing your school colors and carried no books. I was wearing jeans and boots, a yellow knitted cap and a green t-shirt that exposed my tattoos; new since I had seen you last. I didn’t look like I belonged in classes here, or drinking at a beer pong tables. Still, I could pass for a student in age and in indifference. I laid back and covered my eyes from the Indiana sun with my bare arm until I heard a familiar call of a hawk and saw your shadow bounding towards me. You were undeniably recognizable. And so I shifted my indifference.

Our visit was as it should have been, I can infer now. I’m not sure how you saw it, but it made sense to me. We were stony and silent. We were over-talkative and interrupted each other excitedly. I painted your kitchen and made you dinner. We drank wine and smoked joints on your porch. I walked your dog while you did the readings for your classes. And as light sank from the windows and the night tided in, we played music and lit candles. Beside you the pressing thumb subsided and was distracted by your actuality – the tone of your voice, your posture, the furrow of your brow. All of it made up for the years and miles between us that disallowed for any real meaning, any real emotion. The distance, the vaguity of our correspondence was what let me feel a persisting tightening of my chest at thoughts of you and our time together.

“Where should I sleep?” I asked after our first day.

“The couch is pretty comfortable.” You simply replied.

I thought suddenly of you years ago, a stranger, asking me if I wanted to stay, to not go back to New York where my job and life were waiting and instead, to stay. To drive from Los Angeles to Northern California. To stay.

“The couch is pretty comfortable.” I didn’t respond, just stepped out the door and went to my Jeep to retrieve my bags. To exhale into the Indiana night.

There was a time when we slept face to face in the back of your van on cold mountain tops, our inhales and exhales in opposite, the passing back and forth of a fragile object.

There was a time when you removed my wool cap in your sleep and your breath warmed the back of my bare head.

There was a time that I thought I could love you through everything – the ebb and flow.

But the couch was pretty comfortable, you said. The couch in your rented fixer-upper with the kitchen I’d just painted – the couch was pretty comfortable, I tried to conceive.

Somehow I hadn’t expected this and yet had not expected much more. And so I slept on the couch, which as it turns out was not very comfortable. You slept in your room with the door open to my eyes. I can’t say exactly what I dreamed our how I slept or how I felt when I awoke the next morning and hiked the back trails beside a creek – only that there was a time and it had passed. I spent one more night and awoke feeling the same thumb, now colder than my own body, and understood the pull to leave. On my last night there though, you shared with me a letter you had received before we had met.

You tossed it to me while I sat on the couch, ready to sleep. It was addressed to you from an unnamed address in Arizona. I pulled the creased pages and unfolded it to find pictures of a woman and her family – her husband and young son. They looked familiar and I began to understand, to remember the story you had told me as we drove through the mountains of northern California. You had discovered in this letter that you had an older sister who your parents had decided to put up for adoption before you and your siblings were born, when they were young and unable to conceive their own future.

The woman, now in her mid-thirties wrote to you to tell of her being, of her adoption, and of the years of her adulthood during which she felt a pressing desire to find her biological siblings whom she’d never met, but loved. I read the letter in full, somehow feeling parallel to the lines printed on each page. She pleaded with you to understand that she merely wanted a relationship with the family she never knew, but whom she belonged to. I read and came to understand the circumstances – that of your parents, that of a woman who felt a blind and unyielding love for a stranger, and your experience, you – who received these three pages in the mail and came to understand the same.

The next morning it was clear I needed to leave and with age I’ve learned not to question the things that are unspoken but nonetheless undeniable and so I packed my bags and said a brief goodbye. I told you to look me up in California if you ever passed through.

I drove through Indiana in a cold silence, windows down, the sun tanning my outstretched arm. I was a day ahead of schedule and wasn’t expected in Kansas for two days. Sometime near sundown I pulled off the highway and onto a side road in Missouri. The side road quickly became a dirt road with pale gray gravel that left a cloud of dust behind me. The trees along the road were dusted in the same pale gray, a black and white relief of the green beneath. I found my way to the end of the road when it hit the Missouri River. A signed hung on a clapboard building reading Catfish Katy’s Kamp Grounds. I drove through a field of soybeans and found a small stretch of the Missouri that was lined with mowed lawns and littered with fire circles and site numbers. I was the lone camper at the campgrounds minus the campsite host. One small trailer sat locked with a small barking dog within and an air-conditioner on high. I knocked to no answer and so I made my way down the mowed banks of the river, parked my Jeep and pitched tent. I scaled the inclined and muddy banks of the river in my bare feet, collecting driftwood for a fire. I piled them high in the fire circle of my site and sat, guitar on lap and waited for the dark to come.

An SUV pulled into the site beside me. Awoken from my own contemplative silence I watched as a woman sat inside the vehicle with volume on high and cried. Soon thereafter she opened her door and dipped down the banks of the river behind the trees. I returned to my silence until I heard her scream. One and then another. I stood to reveal a view between the trees of a woman clutching her journals covered in mud and tears streaking her face.

I offered her a towel and while she wiped the mud from her legs she noticed the plates of my Jeep and asked, “New York?”

“Yeah, I’m headed for California?” I said as a question.

“I’m sorry?” she asked.

“I’m moving to California.” I said, this time more assured of my direction.

“Wow, huh. Wow. Well, I just came down here with my beer and my journals and I just came down to sit and write. I left my girls at their father’s house and just came down here to sit and write and the next thing I know I’m falling in the mud and so I throw my beer, I throw my beer to get a free hand and I grab on to these roots and they all break off and I’m like you guys are weak. Weak!” She was speaking in a tone somewhere just between crying and laughter, almost hysterical.

“So this is it?” She paused and asked, gesturing at my Jeep stuffed with duffle bags and pillows.

“You just quit your job and decided to move out West and go for it?”

“More or less,” I answered with a smile.

“What?” she said, leaning forward, “I’m sorry, I’m really hard of hearing.” It seemed a strange characteristic to me; somehow improbable that a beautiful woman should have such a flaw.

She asked if she could join me by my unlit fire. I obliged and she went back to her SUV to retrieve her beer. We sat and talked, she more than I. She explained that her husband, a local real-estate developer and millionaire had nabbed her with his charms when she was only eighteen. She was pregnant only a few months later, married, and kept pregnant for the next five years. She had four daughters who she loved, but seemed to hate her more by the day since she divorced their father. She had discovered upon breaking into his office one late night that he had been advertising himself quite shamelessly for sex on numerous websites.

I was quiet mostly. I had expected to be alone and up until her arrival, had felt as I did pulling away from your house – that there had been a time and it had passed, that this day didn’t seem a time, but the absence of the one that had passed. Perplexed, somewhat sullen, and contemplative. But suddenly that seemed an impossibility. The woman saw me a handsome man with a guitar. She told me this quite forwardly. I saw myself from her perspective – a romanticized version of myself, independent, free, and utterly present.

She spoke of her love of music, how it was the only thing she truly had. Yes, there were her daughters, but they seemed so outside of her and growing foreign. Music, she listened to it constantly, and though her husband never let her go to college or take lessons, she had bought a guitar and taught herself to play. She asked me to play something, said she wasn’t good enough to play herself just yet, but demanded I play something for her.

I, now slightly drunk on the wine, and lost in her stories and the way she saw me, had no hesitation. I played her all the songs I knew and with each one, she drew nearer on the picnic table beside me, eventually her hand holding my knee as I sang. And after the last song, she moved in and put her mouth on mine. I kissed her back. I strangely, perhaps drunkenly, saw us from your perspective. I pushed that thought back and continued with her. She left sometime in the night. I woke up and realizing she was gone, lifted my phone and sent you a text message to tell you I had just made love to a woman beside the Missouri River.

I didn’t know what to do when I woke the next morning, my head pounding, my eyes red and angry at the hour and the brightness of the sun. I remembered the night, cringed, and looked at my phone to see what I had said to you via my drunken text message. I cringed again.

As I fled the state of Missouri and drove on towards Kansas, I tried to understand what had happened, how these days had led to the present. How, after wanting so bad to be in your bed, if not to make love then to just feel your arms as we slept, did I find myself in the arms of a stranger, a woman? A woman who wanted me to be someone I was not, who saw me as she needed – let me embody the freedom she wanted for herself. I thought of your sister of how she needed you to be. We see people as we need them to be.  It is a rare case that we love others truly as they are, but more actually, as we want so badly for them to be.

This time has long since passed, since we met and slept in the mountains, since we reunited in Indiana, since I made love to a woman in Missouri. I’m older now, building my home. I am far away. We speak now and then. And since then I have not stopped loving you blindly, but stopped feeling pain in doing so. I love you as I need to. When I have to need to reminisce. When I have need to remind myself that I am capable of doing so. You are who I need you to be. I have resolved my affair in Missouri a sort of dream of associations. Your sister, her love, how she saw you, how I saw you. In the Missouri night, in the company of a stranger, I let them entangle and held a woman tightly. I saw her as I needed, I let her be something she was not – but who reflected my personal circumstance, my ebb and flow. This is how we do. And so, I’m writing to tell you – that since Indiana, that cold, pressing thumb has lifted but that I will always keep my ignorant love of you.

Nurse of Greenmeadow

(Genre: Dramatic Monologue) For NPR's 3 Minute Fiction

The nurse left work at 5 o’clock. The doctor left thirty minutes before her. The nurse was a younger woman, fair featured with a smile that did not reveal her teeth. The doctor was a middle-aged man, gray at his temples and through his brows. I was a single, middle-aged mother with a teenage son sitting alone in the waiting room of the Greenmeadow's cancer ward. I was watching their affair play out in front of me, of this I am certain.

He left a half of an hour before her each day. He would smile at her as he left, say goodbye to the two other nurses, wink at her, and leave. From there, I’m sure he would drive his Volvo away from the hospital and park in the hills behind it. Maybe get out of his car to relieve himself while he waited for her. I would study the nurse after he left. I could tell that she found the half hour without him excruciating – she acted, tried to cover it up. But I could see that the final 30 minutes of her day were spent anticipating a meeting with her lover, a middle-aged married doctor. How terribly cliche of them.

To think! That this sort of thing goes on in hospital waiting rooms, this adulterous mayhem, for anyone’s eyes to see. It was something I was shocked to find. Several months ago my son called terrified from his college dorm room and told me that he had found a lump in his testicle. I was leaving the grocery store and was shocked to hear my son speak of his testicle on the telephone in the middle of the day. I nearly dropped my groceries. Then I was hit by a wave of panic. My only son was potentially ill and was scared and I wanted nothing more than to sweep him up.

The truth was, several months later I was still uncomfortable with all the talk of my son’s testicle. Shortly after he called to reveal to me that he had found the lump in the shower, I worried it was my fault. I worried that maybe it was because I didn’t love him enough or that I let him sit in the hot tub at my sister’s house too much when he was a little boy. Or worse – that perhaps my own discomfort with my genitals resulted in the abnormal growth he found on his own. These were foolish thoughts to think, I know. But I could not shake them.

I distracted myself by becoming a deep observer of others, trying to decipher their goings on. That day I had watched and discovered that the nurse left work exactly a half hour after the doctor and they were having an affair – Of this, I could be sure. I sat back and watched as the nurse found petty things to do in her final thirty minutes at work. She replaced files and made small talk with other nurses. Hussy.

I sat on a couch with a pile of gardening magazines beside me. In front of me I held a paperback romance novel I picked up at the grocery store. I looked over the book at the nurse station where the young adulteress flitted about. Beyond her was a hallway, and beyond that was a room where my son removed his pants and underwear and sat on a table. He was staring at the ceiling waiting for someone to enter the room and begin. That day they were doing a sort of ultrasound on his testicles, or so the hussy nurse explained.

My son, Logan was uncomfortable too. He laid down naked from the waist down beneath several white blankets in the examining room. He's an only child. Everything is harder for an only child of a single mom. Finally two nurses entered the room with the lab technician and they began. The hussy nurse sat beside him as the lights were dimmed. “We’re going to begin now,” she said somewhat coyly. She spread the blankets away from his middle region, found his testicles and brought them out before laying the blankets back down around them. He stared up beneath the blankets with his testicles exposed. “So are you in college?” the nurse asked as she applied a cold gel to his testicles. “Ugh, I’m…” he responded uncomfortably.

The lab technician interrupted, “I’ll take over from here, thank you Shelby.” Shelby, the hussy nurse glanced up at the clock as she removed her gloves and left the room. It was nearly five o’clock and she was happy and smiling smugly. She was leaving to meeting her older lover. She hung her lab coat on a rack, pulled her hair down from a ponytail and passed me as she left. “Have a good evening, Mam,” she said as she passed and placed her hand on my shoulder. Don’t you dare touch me, I thought to myself. I sort of nodded in her direction. And returned to my romance novel.

Why I'm Staying

(Genre: Dramatic Monologue, Lyric Essay)

You might be surprised how well I’m doing. Not just personally, not just emotionally, but financially too. You’d be surprised how well I’m doing, I’m sure. I heard the way you said “Altoro?” when I said I’d moved to Altoro, California as though you were sure I could never do well here.

Well, as it turns out, I’m doing very well here. I am just a little bit surprised myself, I’ll admit. I didn’t know anything about this little town before I came here. Well, I only knew it was hidden in the Silicon Valley and that it’s mostly populated by computer programmers, and code writers, and that there is a rumor that the inventor of the internet lives here.

And as it turns out, this is all true of Altoro. Well, I’m not sure about the inventor of the internet because I’ve met a few men who claim to be him. But one thing I’ve learned since I left the East Coast is that people can describe towns and cities to you, but you can’t really know until you’re there. When someone says ‘Oh yeah, that town up in the mountains,’ you can see it, you can imagine a little town up in the mountains, but you’d never guess what it’s like to be there. You’d never guess how deep that statement really goes, that description…

I only say this, because when someone once described Altoro to me as a town primarily populated by computer programmers and code writers, I never imagined how that would feel, to be here, to live here, among those people.

You see, this town is populated by linear thinkers, by real code writers. It is a town just stuffed to the brim with people who must think about each and every symbol in each and every code that makes up the entire internet. You can imagine how exhausting this is for them. Or maybe, you can’t. Maybe you never thought about how deep that runs.

I discovered this accidentally. I was parking my car one afternoon outside the grocery store. I have starting cooking, which you may be surprised to learn. Back East, I wasn’t even interested in cooking. It was out of the question, really. I never had the time. I only realized after leaving the city… that New Yorker’s do about ten times as many tasks in one day than the average human being. It’s a severely exhausting strategy, but it was all I had ever known. Anyway, I cook now. This is just one of the many ways in which I’ve changed and also one of the first ways. But it’s an important one because it brought me to the grocery store that afternoon. I was going to buy tomatoes, and cilantro, and whatever goes into fresh salsa. I was making fresh salsa. I know you’d hardly believe that of me.

Anyhow, I pulled into the parking spot, the windows of my car down, music pouring out. The woman beside me, who was presumably coming or going, she stopped and looked at me as I was turning the engine off, gathering my grocery list and re-usable grocery bags.

“Excuse me…” she said. “Yes,” I responded. “That music, you were listening to music…” she looked confused but I assumed she just wanted to know who it was. “Yes, I was listening to Sarah Harmer; she’s Canadian, a lovely voice right? She has this wonderful song; I forget what it’s called…Oh, basement apartment. The song, it’s called ‘Basement Apartment,’ and it’s got wonderful lyrics, about the smell of bleach seeping through her door…that reminds me, bleach!” I scribbled it down on my grocery list. “Anyway, I love that song because I once lived in this horrible basement apartment in Redhook and I remember the smell of bleach being awful.”

By this time, I had gotten out of the car, and was resting my elbow on the woman’s car window. She was still just staring at me, sort of slack-jawed and bewildered. Then, a smile. I smiled back at her and continued…

“You should look her up on iTunes, or LimeWire, or even just go to her Myspace page. She’s got something like 10 albums. Some are better than others, but they’re all decent. Oh, I should ask you, you look like you come here a lot. Do they have stamps at this store? Or do I have to go to the Post Office?”

“No,” she said. “They don’t have stamps here. You must go to the post office for stamps.”

“I hate that. Don’t you just hate that? I always forget to get stamps unless they are on the grocery list, which is why I just love when you can get them at the grocery store.”

“You’re not from here, are you?” She asked sort of excitedly.

“No, I just moved here from New York. I only sort of accidentally ended up in Altoro because I found this really cute little cottage in the back yard of these super nice people. And anyway, I was a curator in New York. I curate art shows and now I don’t know what I want to do. I’m sort of, you know, swimming, swimming in it. Feeling it out.”

She seemed fascinated by me. I could feel it. I’m very intuitive, you know this about me. But I’ve never really had anyone respond to me like this.

“What do you do? You’re driving an awfully nice car, here. You must make a killing at whatever it is.” I said.

“I’m a programmer. I… program. I’ve never met a curator before. Only, other programmers,” she responded in a dull voice.

“Well, it’s been a pleasure to meet you. I’ve got to get to my groceries,” I patted her on the arm and made my way towards the entrance.

“Wait!” she called out. “Thanks, for the music. I’ll… I’ll listen to it.”

“Oh no worries. Be well!” I called back.

See, initially, I was a little taken back by her fascination with me. I was a little creeped out to be honest. But part of me, a small part of me, was flattered. It seemed I offered her something without even knowing. Yes, there was the music. But it seemed something more to her. I noticed it again at a gas station. A man was paying for his gas in front of me and fiddling with some change. I was on the cell phone leaving a voice message for my father.

“Ok, so tire pressure. What’s it all about, Pop? How do I know how much pressure I need? Because I haven’t put air in my tires the entire way since New York and I feel like I’m driving on soggy donuts. But I’ve been too afraid to put air in the tires because I don’t want to put in too much, you know? It’s because of that movie, where he’s changing a tire and it explodes in his face. Oh my god, can you imagine? So what’s the deal, how much do I put in? How much air? Call me back!”

He was sort of stalling in front of me, the man paying for his gas. He was sort of just standing there with two quarters in his hand. Finally, I leaned forward took a quarter out of his hand, set it on the counter in front of the cashier.

“There you go. It’s 40 dollars and 25 cents.” I said.

“Thanks. It’s just that, you’re not from here are you?”

“Nope, just moved here from New York.” I smiled at him.

“Oh. What do you do?”

“Um, well, at the moment, nothing. I was a curator. I curate art shows in museums and galleries before, but now, I’m not sure. And you?” This conversation was becoming entirely too easy for me. It seemed the same as every conversation I ever had here.

“I’m a computer programmer.”

“Oh, ha. Seems like everyone here is.”

“I’m not.” Said the cashier, sort of angrily.

Come to think of it, the cashier was the first person I’d met who wasn’t a computer programmer. Not that I’d met many people, just my landlords, the woman from the grocery store parking lot, and the man now starring at me in that same slack-jawed manner as they all had.

As it turns out, the cashier, whose name was Tad, was actually the only person in all of Altoro who was not a computer programmer. You may ask now, what about the people who worked at the market, what about the people who work at coffee shops and bars? They were freelance computer programmers. And they were not very good at serving coffee and cocktails. They were slow, and obsessed with proportions.

Tad explained to me, frustrated and clearly tired of telling people in the gas station that while being incredibly intelligent, programmers were a different breed. They were linear thinkers. They were quite strictly this, born and raised. See, Altoro was in fact the town which was at the epicenter of web-based technologies in America. They were the people who had really come up with HTML. If you’re not familiar, HTML is the hidden code of which the entire internet is made up of. It’s everything. Even this email you’re reading, it’s presented to you by HTML. And it had taken a quite linear train of thought to create HTML. I learned this from Tad.

Now, Altoro was the home of several generations of purely linear thinking programmers. All those who were not linear thinkers had been, well… sort of forced out. There weren’t many jobs for them. Rent was high enough that only people with one foot in the computer programming or code writing world could really afford to live here.

So I realized then what there fascination with me was. I am, as I’m sure you’ll agree, quite far from a linear thinker. I’m visual and abstract if that. And so, it seemed my train of thought, my speech patterns, my gesticulation was all too much for them. But I could see in the flicker of excitement in their eyes that they liked it.

See, linear thinkers work entirely with a process of thought which follows known cycles or step-by-step progression where a response to a step must be elicited before another step is taken. And with me, well, how do I explain? If they were dancing, it was something like a march. And if I was dancing, I was, well, drunk and doing back-flips and a tango to the side with jazz hands and a baton.

And the way the brain works, is that it sort of has these pathways, these tunnels that we use over and over. Mine go every which direction and are totally random. I do everything differently every time. But these people have been writing codes, programming computers, thinking linearly for almost three decades now. Their pathways are worn in. And when I spoke to them, their thoughts took a step off the beaten path.

So, as I’m sure as you might have predicted by this point, I became a masseuse. The only masseuse here in Altoro. It was a logical step for me. You remember, for a few years back in the 90’s I had that stint working as a sports medicine therapist, right? Well, anyway, I’m not certified in the state of California, but business has been booming and shows no real sign of slowing down.

I started off with three clients. You remember that woman from the grocery store parking lot? Well, her name is Cindy. I knew I could reel her in if I could find her. As it turns out all it took was returning to the grocery store at exactly the same time in exactly the same spot one week later. See, that’s how linear people think. They find a code that works, they write it, and they stick to it. Cindy is real great and sort of addicted to massages at this point. She has one every other day.

And then that guy from the gas station, not Tad, but the man who was struggling with the quarters, Gary. He was my second client. Again, he got gas every other day at the same gas station, Tad told me. So I showed up and I just said, “Hey, Gary. You look a little tense. Do you seem like you could use a massage. It’d be great for you. You can lie down, take a load off, I’ll put some music on and we can just chat while I give you a good rub-down.”

He was hesitant. But just by having someone offer him something so strange, his mind was sent spinning and he just sort of stood there with his change in his hand, his bottom lip hanging away from his teeth. To be honest, he looked more relaxed already.

I came up with the idea for offering massages because I knew that people who sit at computers all day were prone towards musculoskeletal disorders. They really needed a good massage the most out of all working professionals. But really, it was a way of keeping them a captive audience. I needed a way to get them relaxed and follow my stories.

With Cindy, who was a sort of somewhat lonely character, I focused on her lower back. She was single and sat unusually straight in her chair at work. She said her mother, who was also a programmer, once told her the highest paid programmers and engineers were attracted to girls with good posture. So, with her I massaged her lower back gently while I told her stories about my hitch-hiking romances.

“So I just wandered in to town just before dark and I didn’t have any real plans but I knew I probably needed a campsite because it was sort of cold and a fire was the only way I’d stay warm and so this guy walks by, right? Really tall. And I say to him, ‘hey, do you happen to know if there are any campgrounds near here?’ and he says that he thinks there might be some up by his cabin and do I want to get high. So we hop in his pickup and ride up the mountain, but first we stop at this crazy glass blowing shop where they sell the most amazing bowls…”

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhh...” says Cindy. See, she needs this. Her mind just doesn’t take those pathways naturally, they never would. Cindy comes from three generations of programmers. Her peak romantic experience came when she traded office chairs with the cute Asian guy in the fish-bowl office next to hers. And what with being a linear thinker, she builds her understanding of things based on progression. You can only imagine how these stories excite and expand her mind, and also overwhelm. When I am in a session with Cindy I must be very careful not to go into territories that might cause her to spasm.

My third client was Tad, the gas station cashier. As it turns out, it is very hard for Tad, being the only other non-computer programming resident of Altoro. He complains about it quiet openly with me now. Truthfully, I feel sorry for him. He’s fallen in love with several women who stop to get gas or ask for directions, other non-programming types. But they always leave within minutes, pull away and go towards some other town with multiple industries, go on living their non-linear lives.

I now have over fifty-something clients. Some I see almost daily. Others can only truly handle my services and company on a monthly basis. They are mainly first generation programmers and I don’t blame them. I’m very cutting edge with my massage technique. Some people are opposed to change, to trying new things. It’s not their fault, it’s just human condition.

And as for me, well, I’m happy. I’ve found a real niche here. I’ve always got people to talk to. Everyone is very interested in hearing about my past careers, my many lovers, sometimes they even ask for me to read them my poetry. And I do, because they appreciate it. Some of them, they even need it. And that’s why I’m staying.

A Hunter's Son

Genre: Poetry


The spent head of a deer,
hanging from a tree branch,
in the thicket past my father’s
yard –
is left to find maggots and drip-rid
his eyes and flesh.

A full three years and still he hangs,
with a dumb-struck deer smile,
declines decay, keeps his flesh and fur
looks
with hardened gray eyes – waxy, like prunes.
says, “I’m here –

I will not go inside –
to be mutely mounted
in the house beyond that yard.
I
cannot bare it,” and he smiles, nodding
there with me.

I, a visitor to
my father’s hushed house, stand
stoned and protesting with him, the
deer
whose job was just to drip-rid those eyes,
shed his flesh,

lessen to skull and horns
so that, by my father’s
hands, the same hands that held the gun,
can
be mounted on cedar or oak and
prized–

With no eyes nor dumb smile,
just quiet bones on wood
against white walls, over pure pine floors.
No
flesh. No indications of life or
fear or indignation.

I know too well how to
contradict my father’s
demands, but turn at his call and
make
my way across the yard, “why are you
nodding, Bo?”

i dance on all the mountains.

(genre: visual)

A found piece of poetry by Gary Snyder recently made it's way into my sketchbook.

Candlestick

I recently scavenged my head-space for old material in an attempt to find out how much and what of my own writing I actually store. I managed to remember a few poems from early 2000, some nine years ago amazingly enough. I remember reading it at the public library in my home town to a room filled with society ladies. Since it stayed with me for this long I decided to use it musically and did a short arrangement on the ukulele I recently received as a birthday gift from a dear friend. Enjoy.

Englishman

image by bowen.ames, who urges you to visit englishmansounds.com

Why I'm Staying (II)

Genre: Flash Fiction 

This is Part Two of a flash fiction piece titled "Why I am Staying." Flash Fiction refers to the original publishing style.  I crafted Part One shortly after moving to the West Coast and decided to publish each part in email form.  Part One and the continuation below were sent in the body of an email to a fictitious friend and BCC'd (blind carbon copied) to several hundred unsuspecting friends, family, and readers on my mailing list. My intentions in employing this experimental form were to provide the reader with a voyeuristic and perhaps scandalous reading experience, providing that each recipient supposed they had received the story accidentally.  Moreover, it created widespread and skewed understanding my chosen occupation and current location.   Enjoy.

 How are you? Things are going well in Altoro. My massage/talk therapy venture is really taking off. Also, I'm seeing someone, but before I tell you about him, I've got to come clean. I know I’ve told you several times that I’ve met many of the men I’ve dated at Space Bar. Well, I need to tell you something. Space Bar isn’t a really bar. It’s not even a place. I know you’ve tried to find it. I remember when you called me. You said you were in front of a Garage that had Hello Kitty graffiti on it. Well, I’m sorry. I felt very bad when I got your voicemail. And then we never really talked about it. But Space Bar doesn’t exist. So, there you have it. I lied. I’m a liar. There you have it.

And while you have it, you might as well know that the reason I was always telling you that I met those guys at Space Bar, it was always code for… okay, here it is. Online dating. I date online. I do, I date online and all those times I said I met those men at Space Bar, I really met them online. Ugh, I feel so much better. I feel like I’ve been carrying the weight of a desktop computer on my shoulders.

I don’t know why I kept it hidden from you. I guess it’s because I always made fun of you that time that you dated that guy from online. I felt like a hypocrite. I’m sorry for that. I’m really sorry. It’s just that those were different times. That was 2000 back when online dating was still creepy and stigmatized and you might have been murdered and I just found that so funny. I couldn’t help but make fun of you. I’m sorry.

But now it’s 2009 and things are very different and we can be open about it. I date online. I’m not ashamed of it. My roommate does it to. We kept it a secret from each other at first too. But then we just… well, god who cares! Now we sort of look at it just like if we were to have met someone on the subway or at a bar.

I can understand if you’re still somewhat resistant to the idea. It can be difficult to believe that meeting a perfect stranger who may or may not have seen naked photos of you online is safe. But it’s safe now! It really is. I like to think that online dating is actually our generation’s reward for having made it through the 1980’s when kidnapping was so popular. It’s like we can finally taste the forbidden candy being offered by strangers! You know? It’s liberating, right? It feels good, right? I mean think about how rarely you hear about people getting killed by psychopaths they meet on the internet. Hardly ever anymore, right? It’s very rare. True, psychopaths are probably still online, but they’re online looking for love!

Listen, I’m sure you have some questions and you’re probably still very disappointed that Space Bar doesn’t exist. But I’m happy to offer the internet to you as a replacement. I mean, just look at the several dozen men I’ve been with in the last few years. True, those weren’t lasting relationships, but those are memories that I will hold dear, truly. That guy that I met in California on business and then lived with in his van – he was from online. But that was MySpace. That was before I was really comfortable with the idea. Myspace seemed a sort of lighter version of the real online dating sites. Before that it was Friendster, and now take your pick! Manhunt, OK Cupid, Lovelab! I’ve got six profiles running right now.

That hitchhiker I met in Colorado on my way to that wedding in Portland. He was online, and he wasn’t a hitchhiker. I met him on a proper online dating website and he wasn’t a hitchhiker, he was just unemployed. So when we hit it off I offered to take him as my date to the wedding. I know I told you that I met him at a coffee shop and that I had innocently asked him if there was a campground nearby… well it’s not entirely untrue because I was on my laptop at a coffee shop when I met him online. I was really just looking for campsites online and it was taking forever so while I was searching I logged into my OK Cupid account there he was!

But you should know that I’m very safe. You’ve got to be safe. I’m always safe and I always meet them in a brightly lit place. And if I meet them in my apartment, I make sure that all the lights are on. But anyway, you know me, I’m very good at reading people. I almost never meet psychos. Though, this guy that I met recently said that it wouldn’t matter if he were a psycho anyhow because psychopathic characteristics wouldn’t show upon first glance.

The real reason that I’m bringing this all up is because I wanted to tell you about who I’m dating. His name is Bill and he’s excellent. He really is. But now that I’m in Altoro I can’t very well tell you that I met him at Space Bar. There are no bars in Altoro so I decided to come clean. I am glad that I got my crash course in online dating in New York City where there are real psychos out there. I’m very confident I can handle any computer programmer I meet here.

So Bill. He actually contacted me first. I’d seen his profile here and there and I could tell he was fun, but I was playing coy so I didn’t send a message right away. He asked me only after the first couple messages if I was interested in partying with him. I knew that this didn’t mean playing beer pong so I said, “What kind of partying did you have in mind?”

He replied, “What sort of mind-altering substances do you like (esp. ones which augment libido and extend sexual performance)? I'm friendly.”

At least he was honest. I replied, “I mean, pot is cool. I've been thinking about trying to get some shrooms recently, but haven't found any, which is surprising because I thought they might just grow outside my cottage since it’s California and I thought that shrooms were all the rage. Ha.”

See, the great thing about dating online is that you can really test your boundaries. I didn’t really have any intention of meeting up with him. I usually limit myself to people within a 20 minute drive and he lived about 30 minutes outside of Altoro. It just seems silly to set yourself up for such a long commute for casual dating, you know? And anyhow, it’s true, I was thinking about finding shrooms. I just think it might be a fun way to fully experience what remnants there might be here from the Summer of Love. And even if he and I weren’t a match there was the chance that he’d have a connection to some shrooms.

He replied, “There's cooler drugs in California than shrooms, I would hazard to say. Anyhow, mushrooms make me nauseous, unfortunately. I prefer K for hallucinogenic experiences... also dig GHB and ecstasy. But I have a really strong sense that it'd be fun to get into some mutual molestation with you. Are you working tomorrow? We could do this tonight.”

Well, this would usually be the point that I immediately eliminate someone from my contact list. If someone thinks that I am interested in virtually shaking hands and nothing more before I dive into an actual bed with them, they aren’t getting any real sense of me at all. But something told me an on-going correspondence would be entertaining at the very least. I replied,

“Hmm, I don't do K for sure, maybe E, but I had to Google what GHB even was. And what made you ask? I'm only entertaining the idea because I haven't tripped in ages, but truthfully, meeting up with a stranger and popping some hard drugs and maybe getting murdered sounds less than appealing to me at this point in my life, let alone tonight.”

His response, “Puhlease.... I put the wood chipper away last month, I'll have you know... and why would I want to waste some perfectly nice recreational drugs on a corpse-to-be? I asked because you look like someone who enjoys recreational drugs from time to time in tandem w/ having great sex, and I'm in that sorta mood tonight.”

See, I told you. Hilarious. And to be honest, I was sort of aroused by him making jokes about killing me. Or rather, not killing me. Anyway, I told him that I might consider meeting him for a beer. I didn’t hear anything back for a few days. I was all like what happened to him? What was he doing?

There is something about online dating that truly mystifies your understanding of others. It’s somewhat easy to imagine someone sitting at their computer, their face lit by glow of the screen, smiling as they toss around witty banter. But in the time that goes between messages, one is left to fictionalize the life of their hypothetical other. Where do they live? What side of the bed do they sleep on? Where do they work? Perhaps you’ll even bump into them as you go about your day.

Well, as it turns out, Bill was unemployed. Eventually he wrote back sternly, “What's your insistence on meeting out for a beer? It's quaint but it kind of bores me.... it implies either that you fear you'll be in some danger in paying me a visit (long after I've stowed away the wood chipper for the season). This itself displays some naiveté about the nature of nefarious people (the worst of them don't exhibit their sociopathy right away, but tend to wait till many months later, after they've intertwined their finances, insurances, lease, etc. with yours).... or that you worry I won't be able to handle your rejection, should it come to that, and the crowded conditions of a bar will be what prevents me from lapsing into hysteria or something. Anyway, I'm really not a drinker anymore, and don't really frequent bars these days.... think you can brave it and come hang sometime in the near future?”

Do you see? Do you see my attraction building? His intellect was apparent. I’m not interested in playing games. But this was different and I was ready. I knew that my response must be sharp and distant. I mustn’t allude to any interest in meeting him at all.

I wrote back confidently, “Well, as it goes, I like to function at some level of comfort. Please, don't get me wrong, I'm no stranger to discomfort, I just moved from New York, I'll remind you. And being that I'm twenty-five, I feel quite comfortable at a bar stool. I don't feel that same comfort knocking on the door of a stranger and trying hard to seem as though I'm maintaining said comfort when I am indeed not comfortable at all. Add that with a Dixie cup sitting on the coffee table, and well... I’ll be honest, I'm a bit of a yes man, especially when offered free drugs, which has proved both rewarding and damaging in the past. My fear, if you can even call it that, is that before I know it, I'll be high as a kite and watching a stranger roll around on the floor trapped in K hole and that, well, I'll just leave and thusly leave you to die alone in your apartment. Or worse, the roles reversed. And so, albeit a grandiose forecasting, a bar stool is a simpler alternative, a calming one. And, also, you're a little creepy. But, maybe.”

He responded within an hour, “I can work with maybe... How's this evening?.... I got a new Monster Mash album I can play in the background when you get here... BTW, there's no need to knock; the front door creaks open on its own to admit you when you arrive I'm also out of Dixie cups... if you could bring some that would be much appreciated. You got a # my people can reach your people on?”

I wrote back at my own leisure, “I do have a phone number. Would you like it? While I wait for your response I'll mull over our hypothetical meeting and drug doing more. See, you haven't exactly decreased your creepiness with anything you've said. Also, your last message completely ignored my request to meet at a bar and now has us hypothetically back at your place. Which now sort of makes you seem pushy. Either pushy or dim-witted. Also, I suspect your place smells bad. Something about your single profile photo screams of smelly apartment. I mean, I don't mean to be offensive or presumptuous, but I don't want to be murdered or die in a K hole in some creepy guy’s smelly apartment.”

His response was perfect. It was when I knew he might be the one. “I’d rather you die alone than in my smelly apartment. That will be all.” It’s been six months. Bill and I are still laughing about how we met.

Scissors

(Genre: Poetry, Visual, Dramatic Monologue)

Nobody Leave the Room. Cut.
Not one of you leaves this room.
We had seven pairs of scissors here
at two o'clock and now (shh)
there are two pairs
and it's two-thirty.

Quiet. No one move. And

hush.

Quiet. I want those scissors
right here on this table (shifts his view)
I can stand here all day.
Scissors can't wander or fly
or drive away.

With stern eyes:

Linda, close the door.

We need those scissors.

Being in love or Not...

Genre: Visual Thesis (Sketchbook)

Advice

Genre: Flashbulb of a Thought

Now: Pick pocket the one that you loved. Take back everything that you gave to him. Even all that bright, red love. Now, give it to a man in the back of a bar. Pick pocket that man too. Take back everything he stole from you. Now he's a lonely fool. And someday he'll steal from you.

I Forgive...

Genre: Visual Thesis (Sketchbook)

Broken But..

Genre: Visual Thesis (Sketchbook)

Boil, Bubble, Boy in Trouble

The Dance Dream

Genre: Lyric Essay
Photo by Holly Andres

1



A girl is waiting for a boy. She is nervous, but not really about the boy. She is nervous because she wore her prettiest dress and is not sure it will make a difference. She is not sure of much, which is why she’s here, she thinks. She’s been told this is what she is supposed to do, instead of drugs. She has brought her report card because she needs something to impress the boy so he will let her stay. She’s not even sure if she wants to stay, only that she’s been told to, and also not to do drugs.

Finally, after years and years go by, the boy and the girl meet. They do a dance. She was told this might happen, so she tries her best to remember the steps. She tries very hard to remember the steps but the music isn’t the music she had practiced to. It’s slow and fast at the same time and the boy acts very normal, bored, boy-like. She isn’t sure what sort of dance she’s doing, nor what sort of dance he’s doing, or how long it’s going to last. She’s only sure that she’d much rather have done drugs. Or done anything rather than putting on this very pretty dress, only to fumble and fall about nervously.

The boy doesn’t care about the girl really. He’s one of many girls he’s seen and the truth be told he doesn’t like seeing girls. He doesn’t even like girls. He really doesn’t like to dance either. But the boy has danced for years and years and years and now it’s all he really knows how to do. It’s become easy for him and easier to tell who is a good dancer and who can’t dance at all.

This girl is trying very hard and he’s making it pretty easy for her, he thinks, because though she’s awkward and fum-tumbling about, he likes her. When the dance is over (which is when he stops dancing, not when she gives up, which she’s about to) he says she can stay. Suddenly, she forgets that she ever questioned whether or not she wanted to stay and dance and dance and dance. It seems so clear that she loved dancing all along and she’s very happy she never did drugs (except that once. Well maybe a little more than once). Everything is happy and pretty for the girl now.

But the boy is not happy. He only wishes that he didn’t work so hard at dancing and that he could be happy and stupid like the girl. The boy wishes he were a girl. He wishes he could wear dressed and dance like he cared for it.

2



I’m outside his office in a chair that is far too close to his door, I decide. If it weren’t for the catchy radio tunes coming from his assistant’s desk and the opening and closing of the elevator door (ding-dang), I’d be able to hear whatever very important phone call this hard-headed editor was taking. On second thought, I bet he is letting me stew. I bet that’s it. That’s the reason – the reason that it’s 2:15 and my interview was scheduled for 2:00. Letting me stew, what a dick. Well this gives me 15 minutes of will-I-get-this-internship-limbo, combined with will-I-cry-if-I-do-not indecision. Finally his assistant, a blonde-bobbed NYU journalist-looking girl with cat-eye frames, picks up the phone before almost immediately setting it down and says “Miss James? He’s ready to see you.” I hate that fucking assistant. I hate her for having a job where she actually gets paid, but with far less responsibility than I’m about to lie about having the drive to take on. I hate her and her fucking cardigan.

I gather my briefcase, which is only filled with my resume and some Tic Tacks, because what twenty-one year old even owns a briefcase, let alone has a reasonable amount of documents with which to fill it? As I walk to the door, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to let the assistant open it or open it myself. I stall for a moment. She stands and gestures to the door. What the fuck is she gesturing at? Yes, I can see. It’s a door. Now fucking open it so you can get back to that bag of Snickers in your desk drawer. Bitch.

My mind wanders just from my hatred for her to why he (the hard-headed editor) didn’t just open the door himself and say “C’mon in!” and be jovial and light-hearted and like-my-father like I’m hoping he’ll be as to make this entire interview just a little bit less jaw-locking. I hate everything about this fucking office.

To my surprise, and slight alarm, he opens the door himself and I hope I don’t look too nervous or panicky or young or old and in the end I just smile sweet and calmly and let my hand greet his already outstretched hand for my best this-is-the-way-my-father-taught-me-to-shake-hands firm, firm, firm business handshake. I hope it worked and before I can decide if it did I find myself swim-walking in the very dim light of the office. I always do this, slide into some sort of auto-drone when I’m so nervous I could cut myself. My voice smoothes out and I start talking like a soft-porn actress.

I’m not sure if it’s a chair I’m approaching, but my hand finds it in it’s so dark or if this is the sort of thing I should question before my eyes slightly adjust and I am sitting, smiling and he’s explaining…

“I’m sorry for the lighting. I’m afraid I suffer from migraines here and there and I find it best to avoid those horrible, fluorescent office lights.”

“No problem, completely understandable,” I say, hoping I don’t sound too agreeable/ass-kissing. But he moves right along without much eye contact or notice and says…

“So, you’re interested in interning at this find establishment, I see.” He’d looking down his nose, over his thick-framed glasses and at a piece of paper which I assume is my application, which I faxed a week earlier. “What makes you want to work here, for us?”

“Well, uh…” I begin, quickly scrambling for the answers I practiced on the subway ride here, which I now realize was not nearly enough time for them to fully sink in. “Jane Magazine really represents the path I see myself taking… uh, in life, as well as a career. It’s fun, it’s feminine, it’s edgy, but it’s also very sophisticated in terms of it’s delivery… much more than other fashion and lifestyle magazines of it’s nature.” I wonder if I made any sense or if I just delivered the same speech that he’s heard a million times and before I can fully decide he nods, clears his throat, and says…

“Well, I see you’re doing very well in school… a senior… Any other internships on your resume?” and he looks up right at me, for the first time since I shook his hand.

“I…” I start to speak, and I’m not sure where my eyes are focused or if they’re avoiding his eyes, but I know I’m thinking about what an ass-hole I am for not doing this sooner, for not building some sort of life a little bit earlier, for just going out on weekends and never working and how (and I hate this the most) I should have listen to my parents. Ugh, so instead of continuing on, I pull my resume from my briefcase and say… “Well, as you can see here, on my resume, I’ve had quite an interesting three years at college, and I’ve been involved with some really great groups on campus and my course-load…” Oh, fuck it. I keep talking, he keeps nodding. I cross my legs and uncross them and I’m fully satisfied that I have been royally unprepared for everything I’ve ever tried and somehow got by, until now. I know I won’t ever be a journalist. I won’t even be an intern.

3



I’m sitting in my office, sure there’s something I am actually meant to be doing, but avoiding it, heavily. Instead I’m flipping through last months issue and regretting things (font sizes, photo layouts, entire stories). I hate my job. That’s not entirely true. I love avoiding talking about. I love being at a bar and one of my friends casually mentioning who I am and what I do to someone. There’s this beautiful moment where they’re impressed and I’m actually caught off-guard by the fact that I actually hate my job, but someone else wants it.

There’s a 2pm appointment, an intern interview. I’ll let her (I’m sure it’s a blonde-bob NYU cougar) stir – soak in the juices of the office, make sure she really wants to work here – for free. I literally stare at the wall for fifteen minutes before deciding I should really tend to the little cartoon deer that’s waiting ever-so-patiently in the waiting room. I decide I need to do something about the waiting room. It’s not right for people to stare at my door and wait for me to open it. I swear, sometimes I can feel them, eager eyes – they could burn through it, really.

I pick up my phone and ask my assistant (whose ass is growing by the minute, what with the drawer of fun-sized candy bars she shovels down her throat every time I close my door) and ask for her to send the cartoon deer in. There seems to be some major dilemma, however, because I make the phone call and watch the second hand tick tick tick tick tick and still I get nothing so I charge the door and open it to find the deer startled and afraid of the big-bad-gay wolf inside.

I feel bad for her and her sorry little disoriented state. This is clearly, as it always is, something she’s built up to be important and life changing and will probably call her big-mother-deer and tell her all about it and although I feel bad for her (bad in the same sad way she looks at me) I have forgotten how to do these intern exchanges with anything more than the normal hum-drum-impress-me-now series of questions I’ve always asked.

“I’m sorry for the lighting. I’m afraid I suffer from migraines here and there and I find it best to avoid those horrible, fluorescent office lights,” I say. Which is not true. Well, it is true, just not right now. The truth is, I think more of myself, my life than someone who sits under that dry lighting and works works works, busy busy bee, and I think the dim (but is it too dim?) light is just classier.

“Coo, Coo,” says the deer.

And then, like a robot, I forget about feeling sorry for the little speckled fawn and robotically ask questions for what I feel to be a decent amount of time – time enough for her to feel like I paid her some attention and lookup from a piece of paper that has nothing to do with anything, but is conveniently located on my desk for moments just like these. And as I lookup, I catch a glimpse of her sadness. Her complete lack of guts or drive or anything that would ever make me hire anyone. But I see that she, like myself, probably believes that her life would be better than this. Better than an H&M suit, a knock-off, empty briefcase, and cheap questions with cheap answers.

“You’re hired,” I say, interrupting her valiant efforts to impress me.

Simple Math

On Glass

A Lyric Essay on Commercialism, Love, and the American Childhood

1. “Some people would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love,” aphorized French writer Francois de La Rochefoucauld. La Rochefoucauld’s implication is that love is neither some inexplicable force nor a conceivable passion of the heart. Rather, love may be an attractive idea that has been presented to and pursued by the mind through suggestion. But when do we first hear of love and why is it so appealing to us?

2. Madison Heartfield is a three-year-old living in Portland, Maine with her parents. Madison is different than most children. She is silently behind in her development. She is of normal height; she stands forty-one inches, barefoot on the kitchen floor. Next week she will stand forty-two inches with the addition of her sparkling Cinderella-inspired glass slippers. These slippers were purchased in the toy section in a distant Walmart. These slippers, more like miniature high-heals really, mark Madison’s departure from a brief phase in her life. They are the first materialization in her unrealized pursuit for love. But for now, she is forty-one inches tall, which makes her average. For now, she knows nothing of romantic love, which makes her different than most of the world.

3. Would we fall in love if we had never heard of anyone doing it before? Answering this question is nearly impossible. This is because one would have to imagine a life without ever knowing love. This means eliminating the notion of love as one has experienced it. And furthermore, erasing one’s exposure to its many expressions. Try now. Imagine a world without romantic comedies showing at local theatres. Imagine libraries less every novel that muses on love. Without these materials would the heart follow the same inevitable path towards romantic love? Would love exist as we know it? In Western societies these expressions are everywhere. They are unavoidable. And they enter our realm at surprisingly young age.

4. Madison lives in this world we find inconceivable. She lives in this world without love. She does not read novels and knows nothing of the intricate patterns of courtship written by William Shakespeare and Jane Austen. She has not been to the movies like her parents to see the routine breaking Meg Ryan’s heart. She is not especially attuned to noticing the advertisements on highway billboards and bus stops that display happy couples and red hearts. If she has seen them, they were quickly forgotten and replaced by thoughts more appropriate for the mind of a three-year-old: I am hungry; I am tired; I feel sick. And when these thoughts come into her young mind she has learned to voice them. Soon enough her qualms are soothed. A banana enters her hand, already peeled. Her father’s strong arms sweep her up and land her in a soft place well suited for sleep. Her mother strokes her hair and takes her temperature. Madison is well cared for.

5. This is not the world any adult in the Western world is accustomed to. We do not find peeled bananas in our hands so quickly after announcing we are hungry. We take note of the signs and expressions of love that surround us. So saturated are we in love propaganda that all an advertiser need do is present the image of two hands holding each other. The Western viewer understands this image as a representation of love and affection. The viewer often understands this before they understand the product being promoted. Beyond advertisements – we find love at the movie theatre, in literature, on television and in music. These advertisements not only offer us the products they are selling, but they are seemingly advertising love itself, in all its hand-holding glory.

6. Madison has not even witnessed this – this holding of hands. Her parents are often separated due to work schedules. She rarely sees them in the same room. She has somehow missed their every embrace. She knows them entirely separate from each other. She does, however, recognize they serve the same purpose – to supply bananas, to put to bed, to take her temperature. We, as adults and versed in concepts of love, are tempted to say that Madison loves her parents. This is entirely false. She sees them only as providers of care. She seeks their protection. Even when Madison falls to the ground and scrapes her knee. She looks up to find rescue. Her mother places a bandage over the wound and provides embrace. The embrace is merely comfort in a time of fear, reassurance that she is protected. As her mother strokes Madison’s back to comfort the crying child, her mother turns towards the family’s new television. Madison rests her head over her mother’s shoulder, facing the opposite direction. The television was purchased yesterday and her mother has just used the remote control for the first time. She has found a soap opera. Quickly, the program is interrupted by a commercial for a body lotion. The woman on the screen boasts of pregnancy scars or stretch-marks that have disappeared due to the hydrating nutrients of a skin-cell rejuvenating lotion.

7. Advertisers are right to play on the social phenomena of love to market their goods. At the root of advertising there lay a single goal: to relate to the buyer. It has been determined that the human mind functions in this manner: I relate to that person, therefore I want what they have. Madison’s mother places her hand on her own stomach. She looks down at the fresh and ever present stretch marks that grew as Madison did within her womb. She had not considered using lotion to be rid of these scars. The thought enters her mind and she makes note – perhaps she will pick up some lotion when she is at the store. The commercial appealed to her because she relates to the woman on the screen who expressed her dismay over the imperfections of her body. Madison’s mother related to the woman and thus wanted what the woman had – the supposed cure for stretch marks. Madison’s mother goes on with her day, thinking more routinely of her stretch marks before seeking out the lotion at a local market.

8. When an advertiser makes use of images relating to love, they suddenly appeal to a vast and varying market. The advertiser uses a repertoire of images that relate to love. The images have long since been established – be it the simplicity of the red Valentine’s heart or the cliché of candles surrounding a bathtub littered with rose petals. Making use of these images immediately draws forth the notion of love to the viewers mind. This is appealing to many. The audience is comprised of those who boast of currently being in love. With them sits those longing to experience love for the first time. And last in line are those who have been burnt by love’s bath-side candles and remain broken-hearted. Not all people are victim to the scars left by childbirth. But perhaps if the commercial Madison’s mother watched boasted the ability to heal the scars of love – sales would soar. Buyers would not only be those wishing to heal the scars left by a recent breakup, but also those anticipating a breakup. And standing somewhat sheepishly behind those customers would be the ones who have no scars to date, but are buying their lotion ‘just in case.’

9. Madison’s life without knowledge of love is coming quickly to an end near the afternoon. Her mother has grown increasingly tired. She has made lunch and just when Madison is typically ready for an afternoon nap, the young girl is bursting with energy. Despite her hesitation to introducing Madison to the world of television, Madison’s mother opens a box of video-cassettes. The collection of Disney videos was purchased at the same time as the television. Madison’s mother picks Aladdin at random. She puts the cassette into the VCR and reclines on the couch. Madison is sitting attentively before the television screen.

10. SEDUCE: pronunciation- /si-düs, -dyüs\, fuction: transitive verb, meaning: to persuade to disobedience or disloyalty, to lead astray usually by persuasion or false promises, to carry out the physical seduction of : entice to sexual intercourse (Webster)

11. Perhaps it is more accurate to refer to advertisements using the above term, seduce. Advertisements (such as the one viewed by Madison’s mother) are images, words, or media that lead the consumer astray. Is it not fair to say Madison’s mother had no intentions of ever buying a skin-cell rejuvenating lotion to be rid of her stretch marks? Her intention was to seek entertainment in the television set. In doing so she was inadvertently led to consider her scars and a way to remove them.

12. S.M. Greenfield proposed, in an article in Sociological Quarterly, that love exists today because of its need in modern capitalism to:

… motivate individuals – where there is no other means of motivating them – to occupy the positions husband-father and wife-mother and form nuclear families that are essential not only for reproduction and socialization but also to maintain the existing arrangements for distributing and consuming goods and serves and, in general, to keep the social system in proper working order and thus maintaining it as a going concern.

13. Most adults are confirmed and unconscious consumers of love sales. Madison’s parents are seduced into their commercial purchases. Were they even seduced into their marriage? Their courtship revealed a standardized format similar to their friends and most young couples. There were initial “butterflies” upon meeting each other. Both will confirm the other truly “stood apart from the crowd.” The couple attended county fairs and drive-in movie theatres. They had a Spring wedding. All their family and friends gathered to celebrate the couple’s truly unique and abounding love. Madison was born a year later. Madison’s parents unknowingly acted out a performance for each other. Similarly, they had inadvertently been studying for a long time. They had studied the love and courtship of the couples they watched on the screen of the drive-in theatre. The couple’s love, as abounding as they believed it was, was anything but unique. It was remarkably similar to every love they had seen throughout their lives, starting at their childhoods.

14. As the film begins, Madison’s attention is quickly waning. Although it initially seems alluring, the color and sound of it, she is unsure of its prospects. The story she is being told is not nearly as interesting as the ones her parents have made up for her, all involving animals and nature and instructions on how to use the potty. Instead, the film begins with an old and ugly merchant in the mystical city of Agrabah, who tells the story of a magical lamp and how it changed one young man's life. Madison becomes irritated with disinterest and stands. Then she quickly sits at the sound of music. “Arabian Nights” fills the room as Madison squirms along. Shortly after she is introduced to the character Aladdin who is an orphan. Madison turns and looks at her mother. “What’s an orphan?” she asks. “A baby without a mommy and daddy.” The idea is terrifying for Madison.

12. Children have no interest in love, at the very least romantic love. They quickly learn their parents are providers and protectors. They seek comfort in the soft embrace of their mothers’ breast as it reassures of them of that nurturing figure. They seek the warmth of the womb from which they sprung. It is perhaps the first thing they became familiar with. To imagine a world without their parents is perhaps to confront their greatest fear. It is to have lost all protection and care. Almost every child experiences that truly unsettling and icy fright; it seeps over them when they reach for a parents hand only to turn and see their parent is not there. To find a child in this state is to be of no help unless you are the parent. There is no way of reassuring the poor thing without being whom and what it longs for.

13. As the film progresses Madison sits attentively as her mother sleeps on the couch behind her. She is rapt in the film. She waits to see what Aladdin will wish for when he comes in contact with the magical lamp containing the Genie. The Genie can grant him three wishes. She is aghast to see that he does not wish for parents of any kind. Perhaps this is because the Genie forbids Aladdin to wish to bring back anyone from the dead? Yes, Aladdin’s parents must be dead. Again Madison is horrified at the thought. Instead Aladdin begins an endless journey to pursue the Princess Jasmine. Madison can understand this just slightly. Princess Jasmine is beautiful. She has long dark hair, like Madison herself. She lives in a castle and has a pet tiger. Madison imagines herself in the same position. Soon Madison is smiling as Aladdin and Jasmine soar through a starlit sky and sing “A Whole New World” while riding on a magic carpet.

14. Likewise, Madison herself has entered a whole new world. Behind her, where her mother sleeps on the couch, is the world without love we find so impossible to believe. Her unadulterated view of the world has forever been altered in the viewing of this animated film. Aladdin worked for Madison as the commercial worked on her mother. The film related to the three-year-old’s greatest singular fear: a life without her parents, the life of an orphan. In doing so it hooked the young mind and gained her attention. Her fear in relation to a life without her parents is calmed only by the reassurance that Jasmine is happy in the end. The Princess gets to ride on magical carpets and marries Aladdin because she loves him.

15. Madison’s father returns home as the film credits take the screen. Madison’s mother awakes at her cheers. She runs to her father and embraces him excitedly. She had never considered life without her parents. Suddenly the sight of her father comes as a great relief. Her father is happy to hold his child in this state. He is proud to have worked hard enough to earn the new television. He is proud in his fatherly decision to purchase the video cassettes that brought his daughter this joy and won him her embrace. Madison’s mother leaves to work the night shift. After her mother has left, Madison’s father selects a second film from the Disney collection. He pops Cinderella in the VCR and begins to prepare Madison’s dinner. Madison experiences the same stream of emotions and is shocked to find that Cinderella is also an orphan. Cinderella’s fate is perhaps worse when Madison learns of Cinderella’s evil stepmother. But still, there is Prince Charming and ‘happily ever after.’

16. In the week that follows Madison becomes obsessed with the characters from the Disney films. Her parents think little of the obsession. They even encourage it. Seeking the same embrace after he purchased the videos, Madison’s father seeks out toys that will elicit Madison’s joyful cries. On Friday before work he stops at Walmart and purchases a pair of glass slippers with Cinderella’s image on sole. They are clear and tinted lightly blue with specks of silver embedded in the plastic. Madison is thrilled as expected. She stands forty-two inches and totters across the kitchen floor. She does not ask why her slippers are plastic and not glass. She does not ask why Cinderella’s image is on the shoe and not her own. Instead she waltzes across the linoleum with her father. When he leaves for work she dances alone, holding her arms in the air, imagining Prince Charming between them.

Written for Anyone With Eyes in Their Head

do something pretty while you can.

I; King Canopy

It is possible to remain passive to the world. Oh, shame on me. To think that I have encountered the world is the great naivety – the great woe is me: the human being. But so we manage to believe. The crowd, the boys, the man, and me: the King Canopy.

I was fated to be the man who passed this three with neither guts nor fury – a panda, a goat, a sheep. I have felt the cold spittle of their mouths spray against my neck, my back, my knee. Not in great sheets, but enough to consider the three.

The crowd: I wore a pink shirt, my first mistake. And while walking through Thompkins Square I found myself in a gauntlet. There were two walls of boys, not young enough to be conceived as harmless, not old enough to know their doing. Three and three, and in the middle: me. Perhaps it was my pink shirt. Perhaps it was my canopy. My two able eyes numbed and staring forward as if at the sea. They wanted to wake me. Uttered “faggot,” and spit. From their mouths to my back. I walked their gauntlet and onward to Avenue B. I never looked back at them nor to the shirt of me, but felt their saliva soak through the fabric and to my skin. Yes, through my shirt, but not through me; the King Canopy. Nothing permeates me.

What a sin of the human being. He believes the moisture of his tongue, projected through air and landing on another the greatest of insults. What a sin of me. I did not change my pace, but ignored the dark skinned boys who spat on me. I did not meet their eyes, like so few ever do. I walked on. I; the Kind Canopy.

The boys: The second time it was by chance and by boredom I came to feel their spit. Two boys, young enough to know the acidity of their tongues but with lesser aim. Their saliva hit the back of my bare knee. I considered myself nearly missed, it was not my face nor the back of me. They spoke Spanish and had been recently freed from the chambers that be, standing on the sidewalk of their elementary school. Again, I walked onward with my father’s step, looking forward through my mother’s eyes, and swallowed with my own passive tongue whatever words one might say to a child that has just spat on me.

I am twenty-three and of no great storm, but a small and quiet pond. I am frozen and unthawed through and through; there is no shocking me; I, the Kind Canopy.

The man: Standing in the middle of the platform, waiting for a train. I noticed him at a yards length, darker skin than mine, and mirrored glasses. I stepped towards him and then to the side, looking down the tunnel for the train’s light. It was near arriving when I saw it fly pass my, a fleck of paper sodden with spit. I nearly glanced backwards but knew the mouth from whence it came. He must have sensed or saw my eyes follow the fleck pass my face and onto the tracks and so followed it with another that hit me directly on the cheek. I, without flinching, brushed it from my face, leaned forward and over the tracks as if I had not, in fact, been spat on. Nothing permeates this canopy. “You,” he said, “shoo.” Alas the train came and I boarded and took my place, not raising my eyes to see my reflection in his mirrored lenses as he sat across from me and continued to speak.

I, the King Canopy, shed whatever moisture falls on me. It falls down the lids of my eyes and past my tight mouth and to the floor or the street. From there, your thoughts on where it goes is as good as mine. Perhaps onto the tracks and under the East River where it collects itself until it causes train delays. Spit on me, let’s see.

Oh shame on me. I, the human being, have only triggered the three: the crowd, the boys, the man – my canopy – neither words nor actions that teach, to make them see. My ignorance to the spittle from their tongues causing their belief – that they are a power, a sea. That they can do as they please. And they will, not to me, but to whomever they please. And all because of me; the King Canopy – who ignores all he feels, thinks, and sees.

Left-handed Sentiments

The Allure of Invisiblity

Genre: Lyric Essay, Photograph by Pierre Debroux

Humans (pre-ghosts) have long been allured by the invisibility of ghosts (post-humans). I write this in the most vague sense. I mean not to say that we are all chasers of spirits, but merely to observe that there is a breed of humans (mostly gaunt and with a urge towards Polaroid photography) who wish that we possessed an enchanting invisibility. I understand this attraction. I am attracted to ghosts; moreover I want only to be one. This has been a constant in my life and only recently understood after being haunted by Philip Vlasov.

I am a Ghost. I want to be photographed out of focus. I want to escape the first-person. I carefully arrange my things in my carefully cleaned apartment; I savor the possibilty that someone might enter without my presence and want to know more. And because I understand this attraction, I am able to comprehend the itching desire for Ghosts to strive towards invisibility within our daily living. It is in our art. It is in our writing. It is in our endless attempt to be seen and chased but never caught in the physical.

The essence of ghostliness is the subtle note. In a photograph: a room the corner of a room occupied by a single, worn shoe; a bed made for sleeping but unclear for who. The messes, the imprint of where someone was and the question of what they were doing. Anonymity is pre-ghost's attempt at invisibility. I, perhaps like you, came to New York to find anonymity. I came to a place where everyone could see me, but few knew whom I was and what I was doing. I came to make fleeting eye contact with strangers on the metro. I came to give my name, but not my phone number. I came in contact with the photography of Pierre Debroux after a strangely anonymous interaction with Philip Vlasov. And with this interaction came to ponder our desire (the aforementioned three - Pierre, Philip, me) for invisibility (I am, but you can't see).

Vlasov, Creative Director of Vogue Russia, keeps a loose schedule around his office. He leans back with his hands behind his head, often. He throws his head back and lets his hair fall, often. His hair is gray though he is just thirty-two. He searches Myspace profiles, searching but unsure for whom. I imagine him sitting amongst modern furnishings, leaning back in his gray, leathered chair. He leans forward and into his computer screen examining the profile of a 23-year-old writer living in Brooklyn. Perhaps he only examines the photos. Or perhaps he is thorough and looks further; reads my written words in their vague absurdity. Nonetheless, he chooses to make contact with me. Not a message with words in return, but a simple request that would link our profiles, allude to some sort of relationship.

"Do you really want to add Bowen Ames as a friend?

Click "Add" only if you really wish to add Bowen Ames as a Friend. "

And still, Vlasov, perhaps with the throwing back of his head, clicked 'yes.' Yes, he is sure. Yes, he really does wish. In lesser circles this might be a bold gesture. But Philip and I know the allure of requesting the friendship of another Ghost. If done properly the profile is just this; it is a ghost town, a quiet remnant of where a human once was. I upload. I type carefully arranged words beneath "About Me." Still, I am not here. I am the profile of Bowen Ames. Requesting my friendship is to request the hypothetical. The pending possibility that the Ghost me might peruse your hypothetical. And I do.

"New Friend Request"

"Philip Vlasov wants to be your friend!"

Impossible, the Ghost muses. Philip Vlasov would never use an exclamation point. Philip Vlasov leans back in his chair, mussing his pre-maturely gray hair. I examine his profile and find it's true. Philip Vlasov knows the allure. Photos, just four. He is concealed for the most part. Exceeding and excessive photos of the pre-ghost diminish invisibility. It is a ghost’s nature to limit the angles at which you can see him. It is his nature to be shot in black and white. The ghost writes in no or limited captions. Beneath the second of Philip's photos he writes, "On board Mouna Ayoub's yacht Phocea. Photo by Bettina Rheims."

The ghost keeps few friends. The friends he has are names without faces, but grandiose titles. In the photo Mouna Ayoub, most certainly a Ghost herself, has the allure of her name but veils her eyes behind large black sunglasses. She is the French socialite and Businesswoman of Christian Lebanese origin. You have never met her; she is invisible except to the camera. She herself has no origin, though she is often the guest of the Cannes film festival. When she was 20 years old she converted to Islam to marry Nasser Al-Rashid, a 40 year old businessman and advisor of King Fahd. The ghost is drawn to tragedy made into fortune. After eighteen years of marriage she left Al-Rashid (too human for her) and Saudi Arabia. She made a fortune in real estate. In the photo Philip and Mouna Ayoub sit at a table set for twenty and attended by two. Ghosts order dinner for many and invite only few.

Looking onward, I examine the hypothetical friends of the Ghost of Philip Vlasov. I find myself examining the profile of Photographer Pierre Debroux, Male, 98 years old, Belgium. At a hypothetical ninety-eight, Debroux writes nothing of himself. He too is a Ghost. I contemplate if he and Philip are more than hypotheticals, if perhaps they've passed each other in an empty room. If this were true, I'm sure no words were exchanged between the two. The ghost makes fleeting eye contact and is silent too.

Debroux's photos capture exactly his, mine, and our sentiments on invisibility. A bed made neatly in a space that discretely is without recognatives. No one will sleep there. Not even Debroux. Ghosts don't sleep, they saunter through hallways. They stand numbly in vestibules, smoking a cigarette. They pass through the interspace between profiles making gestures to other unresponsives. They are gay but date no one. They take photos with no subjects. They create profiles with no photos. They do not smile. They are always in waiting. The allure of invisibility is, to them, a response the blaring fact that they are visible and no one is looking. The subtleties of their exchanges bring them both pleasure and frustration in that it can never go beyond vaguety, cheerless flirtation. Any more would to be human, and humans are without subtelties. They know too little and speak too often. It is the ghost's silence that makes him seem austere.

And so "Accept Friend Request," but make no contact. Go to a bar and make sideways glances, but no conversation. Your reward is in what others suppose, a larger and greater fortune than you may possess - the allure of invisibility.