19th ave and northern

On 19^th ave and Northern, just a mile from my two bedroom apartment, there’s a woman with faux red hair, working Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday evenings. And on some of these very same days there’s a man, with a mushroom tattoo on his forearm, and an affinity for video games, thinking about her likely dyed hair. He complimented her hair – she’s glad he noticed the change. She’s nervous that they cut it too short but he thinks it looks just great. She likes his mushroom tattoo and told him. Too bad, he thinks, I’ll never ask her out. One day, he thinks. And for every future Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday evening he thinks he may just get another game.

That same day, at a Great Clips in Central Phoenix, a man with freshly cut hair pays for his 10 dollar trim. Maybe he turned for a moment when the bell above the door rings, or he could have caught her reflection in the mirror behind the checkout counter as she walks in and sits down in a chair. “Just a little off the top,” she says. And he thinks about her all the way home, and whether the fact that she slightly resembles Tom Selleck is telling about him in any way.

Way over in Mesa a woman in the express lane watches a man with 4 cartons of eggs explain to the cashier that he really needs all these eggs, he promises. He never says why, but that smile forgives it all. Prank, she thinks. She's sure, in fact. Or a party, maybe, the brunch kind? She didn't have the nerves to ask, not with the cashier watching and all. Maybe he heard her laugh? What was she buying?

It's with a sort of religious zealotry that i pour through these posts, alone in my two bedroom apartment. I'm keenly aware of the potential implications that would inevitably come if anyone searched through my browser history to find thousands of impressions on craigslist missed connections. And in all my self-produced nervousness I think, naturally, how often am i looking for me? I scan the location before anything else. 19th ave and northern, phoenix center for the arts, driving on i-17, taste of tops. All spaces that i know or have frequented. Next, the description. Latina in White, she dropped your lemon, you gave me a discount, Kari from friday night. Next 100 posts, Next 100 posts, and hundreds upon hundreds more from ann arbor and buenos aires and austin and wilmington and san francisco and seattle and phoenix. All evenly distributed - w4m, m4m, mw4w - whatever catches my eye. But it's the location that gets me most every time and drives me to edges of divine revelation or steady emotional disintegration. That just a mile from my two bedroom apartment, on 19th ave and northern, there's a man so taken by a woman with faux red hair, on tuesdays, thursdays, or perhaps sundays, that there's nothing he can do but buy his game and leave.

drunken, eeek, no second read allowed

you read like salinger scripted your moves, every word directly from franny and zooey. i hear your intention burst through the eye skirting and the nostalgic moments of remembering - it's all clouded through cigarette smoke and tub water and late night catharsis. can I hear anything beyond the godamns and the decoratively painted commentary though i was never truly there? I hold most everyone up to your narrative you know, which is a hard standard even for salinger to handle. so they let me down; how could they not? just wanted to let you know, you always spoke like someone outside of you scripted it before you exhaled and entered. and i jumped suit. thank god we never spoke without scripting on our own. i wish, more than ever, that you'd do that thing that you always seemed to do, and contact me now. but salinger never would allow it. it simply wouldnt be literary, because it's been my move for a while now, i guess. i just can't seem to move.

Fleetwood Mac Rumours on repeat

Don't you dare tuck me into a poem, i'm running away with all our memories. Don't narrate a word of this, you didn't earn it, never deserved it. Don't spin me into a lesson - yours were always too trite anyways - so what have we learned? Expression finds those who live it, seek it, form it, fill it... Fuck It, after this you'll have nothing to express: i'm robbing you of your thoughts on the matter. I'm plotting the worlds largest heist, stealing back all the conversations we ever had. And, my dear, I'm setting some of them on fire like the catalyst i had always wanted, ripping some to shreds in the way i always needed to be spread, eating sections of some to give me back that insight that i was so severely lacking, handing the more bizarre ones out in quarter-page fliers on campus streets to unsuspecting students, washing the uncomfortable ones in a load of darks, heavy duty to get them to bend or fade where necessary. You don't get them. This is your alimony, these are my winnings. A fools winnings, and i'll be damned if i don't fritter them away as i so foolishly please. So go on, expressionless, empty, unaffected, unresponsive, because i'm ridding you of that pesky pseudo-guilt-inducing burden that is meant to come with endings. No need to rationalize this to yourself. No need to excuse things done or said. No need to question all that was left undone or that had gone unspoken - you are hereby pardoned of all these obligatory steps towards "moving on". Because i'm stealing all our memories, and they have no place in your fucking poems.

I wish i could write, but i've been listening intensely to this fucking silence for weeks on end now, long before any of this incompatibility and derailing was well earned. Unfortunately, nothing comes out when you yell into a vacuum, but all the better, because i'm sure it would be shit content-wise if at all audible. Found this unpublished entry from many a moon ago, when things were flowing...

A letter to the many women I have known and further fictionalized:

I write a pleading pardon for the thousands of thoughts hinted at but never actually uttered, the self-righteous claims of bold and balled courage, scarves and gloves and matching hats fashioned of faux bravery, I stay darkly cloaked in false security even on the sunniest, muggiest, sweatiest of humid summer situations. I write out all my worry for all that was miscommunicated, most of which I never actually said but - like a story that you hear enough times to insert yourself in as the protagonist - simply convinced myself of saying. This suspended circus act of eye-defying self-exposure flies perfectly fine from thousands of miles away and even more so when poured into thousands of cyber particles sloppily assembled, but wears quickly thin when I’m actually asked to go back and re-read.

As I hyperbolize myself into a surrealist conception of love and truth and bone-baring honesty, life comes tramping in, all horns of reality, clamoring and running amok. It knocks books off shelves, shatters picture frames, tears up essays graded and stained. It turns stereos to full blast playing all the songs that you - the very women to whom this letter is addressed - had sent me in days passed. Songs that may very well have been charged with that same, steaming, shameless intention that I have in all of my avoidance. It's stupid and drunken, all with the hope that these tunes might slip into my ears and slide deep into the crevices of my mind late at night and be the last thought - that sexy resounding ultimate note, that launching pad for 6 more hours of dream play. But they all play too loudly and simultaneously, not even allowing me those vital moments of narcissism assuring myself that you are reminded of me when you hear them too.

Do I miss or resent all the distance? It ripped us apart in the very moment that we had what my skewed measuring stick might mark as potential. And it kept us separated from getting to know each other, from moving past electric moments of eyes meeting, bodies touching, jokes made and laughed at. It stole loads of nerves like fistfuls of jewels and left us poor and confused at how quickly things end. But maybe this was also the basis of all the potential in the first place. That distance could very well have been the throbbing heart of everything we ever had together. Not just physical distance but also personal distance. It gave me the chance to make you up as I have – the less I know the more I fill in on my own. It wraps everything in glossy surprise, all under the pretense that one day you will be there and undo everything I have transposed onto you. And that distance allowed me to keep every one of you, dear women, separate, innocuous, living in functional harmony.

Dear women, I’m sorry for all of the rash decisions I’ve made, and even more sorry for those I those that I did not. I’m sorry for everything I never said aloud but continue to imagine saying. I’m sorry for scripting rather than speaking because it lets me dramatize both you and me and we’re played by sexy celebrities while thousands of people are watching. I never even gave you the chance to say what I know to be true, which is that you don’t and never felt the way I pretend you do in my head. I darken the outer edges so the plotline seems to thicken. In doing so, then I never have to admit that I may very well have already been forgotten.

academic solipsism and the intellectual jerkoff

Ruth Behar's work The Vulnerable Observer has got me thinking about the state of academia and its self-indulgent properties. She has received both astounding praise and harsh criticism for her (some say daring and other call it exhibitionist) tactics to approach ethnography, not just exposing herself as a part of the story-telling, but in fact inserting her own story as part of the work (check out her last chapter of Translated Woman). In sifting through review after review either building a scholastic pedestal for Behar or hammering this pedestal into the ground, I feel that academics all over are missing a larger looming point: all of academia is self-indulgent.

As an undergraduate senior at UofM trying to write a premature and overeager thesis, i find that the only thing to pull me out of my dark and wildly convoluted mind is to remind myself that this process is entirely masturbatory. My work and all its prefacing research (all of which should be encased multiple sets of mocking air-quotation-marks mind you) is for me to hear myself think through surface-level concepts that i've never quite been able to break into. These are all part of the genre of "theory" that i'v been spoon-fed for at least the past 4 years. And fine. Great. There is nothing like a good ole solo session to clear the mind of all that disturbing white noise of expectations. However, just like self-sex, writing and reading these works from our higher educators gets me thinking about the more legitimately respected types of sexual exploration. Writing pieces to be published, is quite like hoppin in the sack with two or three or thousands of others for a night of intellectual ecstasy - an academic orgy of individuals all searching for self-fulfillment potentially through the fulfillment of others. What we all know and are not saying is that there are times (for some of us, this is more often than not) when we fake it - act like we're more turned on than we are, play into the roles we have set for ourselves or those that others are hoping to see us act out. So how are critics like Daphne Patai or the "vulnerable observers" like Behar much different than the rest of us partaking in this massive group-sex scenario? I maintain that they aren't. So what, if Behar wants to scream her name louder and more often than she does her partners'? And so what if Patai's pissed because Behar's yelling is making her lose her hard on? I'm bored of the culture of peer-criticism because in the realm of academia it is strictly denouncing rather than constructive. Lets call a spade a spade - this is a university dating site, the cultured equivalent to Craigslist casual encounters. The publishing industry is like a massive intellectual brothel, one that privileges the universities as the better pimps, the faculty as the high-class hookers, and scoffs on us streetwalking types who dabble in our self-indulgent writing from time to time, both for us and in the constant pursuit of making a living. If academia isnt a socially acceptable way of letting out those inner-kinks for the most sex-starved individuals, i dont know what is. This is why kids who got laid in high school are stereotyped as being burnouts: they already found their outlet. Maybe the rest of us in higher-education just needed to get our freak on at an earlier age.

The PC culture of sex and education translates just as easily. Some are proponents for rationalizing social norms, others hope to unleash all taboos on their institutional partners and wait with a sadist/exhibitionist's smile for the reaction of the unsuspecting. I admittedly am not as kinky in either realm as i'd like to proclaim, and while i support the process of letting the fetish out of the proverbial closet, let us all take a moment to remember that the items hangin in there dont necessarily fit everyone just as nicely. I look particularly stupid in a number of outfits, and that being said, try to tailor my clothing appropriately. Same goes with sex and writing. Plus, we see that some situations allow themselves for different get-ups - its far too cold in Michigan to wear that strap-up lingerie outside of my house (but we see sorority types braving the chill every night, so you see, its all subjective in the end). So while i spend my time talking the talk, i hardly walk into an academic setting spewing my blogger bullshit into the linoleum-tiled florescent lighting of the classroom, because i would like these particular partners of mine to giveafuck. This, my friends and fellow internet voyeurs, is material reserved for the tiny blinking cursor within a blogspot box, and i'll be damned if i dont look fucking fly in it right now.

Tuesday

Tuesday, fucking tuesday, there's something vile and rotten, sour tasting about this particular one. A tuesday that has been sitting in our broken fridge for a month and some past its expiration date. Label reads: this tuesday best by friday, september 30th 2011. It's been a tuesday that is stuck in monday's hangover clothing, a particularly wrinkled tuedsday with a pad thai stain on its left sleeve, a tuesday that wednesday regrets to be sitting next to in our weekly seminar. Fucking tuesday, tumbling in and out of bedspreads, a tuesday that listens to too much music and has temporarily lost its sense of sound. Talking too loud and too much, sloshing 2009 malbec over the side of its inappropriately chosen champagne glass, a tuesday that hasnt done the dishes since the tuesday before. I'm sure there is and should be more to come, but that's a thursday-friday task not ideally suited for a tuesday such as this

2:13 in just-laying time

I've had dreams of insects pouring out of unexpected places, like the tips of my fingers and those unimaginably deep holes in my three cushioned couch. They invade, armies of them, and like Enders Game alien forces weave elaborate formations around my body, but never bite nor do they sting. Aha, so just threat with no painful consequence you're inner Jungian shouts as he flips through his leather bound journals and puffs an extended breath from his pipe. It's always fear of the future or unresolved issues of the past. But as i took a break to lay, just lay, in the university grass today, i felt the ants begin to crawl up my left leg, scamper across my midsection, hide themselves in the crevices of my shirt. For 20 minutes in just-laying time (which is about 4 minutes of normal functioning future-driven time, for reference sake) i continued to smack sections of my body attuned to the tingling sensation of something foreign, thinking i could warn them off, scare the critters and hope they tell their friends. How disturbing is it to hope to lay, just lay, and be continually bothered by other beings' agendas. Or is it me disturbing myself with the slapping and kicking and constant notice of their presence. Maybe it's time to learn to let the creatures crawl as they may, nestle in my present shorts if need be, for a moment of shelter from this october's Indian Summer sun, because in a couple of just-laying hours i'll be on the go again, and they will have taken to the force of gravity and movement, eventually shaken off.