Ralph the Cat

Thirty

“What’s it like being thirty?” said the girl. She had on black tights and a grey dress and sat beside the young man on a park bench in the heart of the city. They were pressed close together for warmth in the cool night.
“Oh, I mean, it’s good. I feel great. But I guess the funny thing is that I probably should have felt this way a long time ago.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well. Ok. The thing is, there was all this time that I was stressing myself out about the strangest things. Or at least, things that shouldn’t have stressed me out. Like paying rent.”
“Yeah, I could see that. Like you’ve experienced things now and you know generally how things will go.” said the girl.
“Right. I kinda know how they’ll go,” said the man. “I guess the only thing is I feel like I should have done more up to now, and I never should have been worried about things like paying rent. I had a friend that said to me a few years back that I should do whatever I most loved. That I should try to do the thing that I would do if I there was nothing to stop me from succeeding. It’s taken a long time for me to try to do that.”
“What is that exactly?” the girl said.
The man thought of all the kinds of things that people say in these situations and realized he had used them all before. He needed to be able to tell her, as best as he was able, only things that were very true.
“I guess,” said the man, “that the degree is what I’ve wanted to do. It’s not music. I thought I wanted that for so long and I still love it, but I guess I’m wanting to do something responsible. You know, something I can keep doing when I’m older. I could never see myself as a drummer for a band when I’m sixty you know?”
“Well. That’s good then.” The girl examined the man’s face carefully. “Is that everything?” she asked while gently digging her elbow into the man’s side.”
“No. It’s not all,” he said, leaning in to kiss the blushing girl.

Home Run Derby

One hot day in July I played home run derby in a backyard pool in Kentucky. My first girlfriend was there running out of the house in a bikini and the sound of her laughter trickled out like a waterfall. Her friend ran out of the house, a block of ice in her hands. My first girlfriend met my eyes as she ran toward me. She was a heaven of long brown hair and dark eyes. Skin gleamed and flashed against the sky. My first girlfriend tackled me and held me on the ground while a block of ice was held against my back. The day wore on in innocence with lemonade and grilled hotdogs and a round of home run derby. For some reason i was the only person able to hit a home run. I hit a home run every time at bat. My first girlfriend eagerly swung the bat but never really connected very well. After my fourth home run my first girlfriend rolled her eyes and made a huffing noise. I hit home run after home run and swam the bases with unhindered joy.
The only thing I was really hitting out of the park was my chance at having a lasting relationship with my first girlfriend. I think my first girlfriend liked me because she thought she could hold me down with ease, call every shot. After the home run derby she stopped flashing her eyes at me and the summer had nothing left to give me but the heat lingering deep into the night.

saving-wild-at-heart asked: Nutella girl is a true story ? :P

real as coca-cola.

Nutella Girls

The air was crisp. Sitting there, outside the education building at the university. I looked up a lot. At the trees. The sky. The top rack of the drinks where they keep orange juice for a buck .75.

I thought about the day and was sort of glad about it. Explained that, no, I don’t want Nutella, even though both of you girls are very pretty. The Nutella girls were much prettier than the 5 hour energy drink girls. The five hour energy drink company probably doesn’t have the same sort of marketing budget as Nutella.

I told the 5 hour energy drink girls, “No, I don’t want your poison.” To which one of the girls replied, “Like I havn’t heard that before.”

The Nutella girls described the similarity between peanut butter and Nutella. I feel like the comparison is sort of thin, but maybe it works pretty well. “Do you eat peanut butter,” they asked in a way that didn’t require an answer. “Nutella is kind of like peanut butter,” the girl with the dimpled chin and ringletted

blonde hair rehearsed. I wondered if Nutella was also like the sea at the last light of day, somewhere much further south than Indiana, with the dimpled chin girl kneading lotion onto my back and running to the cabana for another round of drinks. If I had told them I moved into an apartment and there were four jars

of peanut butter stocked in the shelves. No one’s peanut butter. Like having a private supermarket, rows of Nutella spilling into dreams, an ocean of Nutella to drown into on the bow of some sinking Titanic. The two girls smiled, rows and rows of pearl all lined up. The first rule of a dealer is never to cut into the supply. “So, would you like a sample. You can have a lot of samples.” Both of the girls with handfuls, soap dispensers over-brimming with Nutella.

I took a drink of Orange Juice and fantasized deeper. Halloween bagfuls of rich dark chocolate to cover my flesh. To fill the baptistry, some great awakening of chocolate slathered bodies. Together the girls probably weighed about 215. Goodbye forever I thought. “Yeah, no Nutella for me, but thanks for talking about it.” “Yeah thanks for talking,” and they pursued their $12 dollar an hour jobs pimping Nutella around college campuses. Probably not much different ethically than posing for Playboy.

I noticed the clouds and how one looked like a chocolate Easter bunny with a bite taken out of its paw.

some questions that no one can answer

One day is just as good as the next. But is it as good as the days before? There’s no way to know that really. No one has some sort of scale or grid to chart it out. Maybe I should devise a grid. You’ll have to go out a point on the x axis for every chance encounter you had with someone that had an overall positive affect, one direction back for every negative one. Emotional, psychological and social values will plot to the x axis. The y axis will be oriented toward things having to do with career, school, technical abilities and skills. Advancing positively in one of these areas will correspond to the moving up of a point on the y axis. I suppose the daily charting won’t be as helpful as the weekly charting. There are only so many points one can move in 24 hours, but a week, there’s a lot of time there. Lots of things can affect the movement across the scale. Although, when it comes down to it, if I was asked if its better to not have the dots move at all or to just rest in place, I’m not prepared to answer that really. What if the dots are moving the wrong direction? What if moving up on the y axis causes me to plummet on x? There are some questions that no one can answer for you.

to run

Lots of people find arrowheads all over the place. Arrowheads in the forest and arrowheads on the farm. I’ve seen large collections. I guess some of those arrowheads must have found their mark somewhere in the dark halls of the past. It’s one thing to find an arrowhead, half sunk in the ground, unmoved for a couple hundred years, it would be another to be shot at with one. To run with a cold feeling in the stomach and then be struck. To lay bleeding on the ground until a wild figure collects another scalp. it sort of changes the way you think about collecting arrowheads. I mean, I don’t think that people in Afghanistan go around collecting empty bullet rounds, categorizing them by gauge. I’d say most people wish there were no bullet rounds to find.

the great Babe Ruth

I was never really a baseball fan when I was a kid, but I collected the cards because the guys in my kindergarten class were all baseball fans. One of the kids had a birthday and instead of letting us give him presents he gave everybody baseball cards. He might not have given the girls in our class baseball cards, but who knows really. I had never actually seen baseball cards before. I thought they were pretty slick. I opened up the two packages and had no idea what I was looking at really, but from the excitement of the other boys it seemed like the right thing to have those cards. To know the names of all these people on them. So I started getting baseball cards now and then. I thought it might be advantageous to memorize the stats on the back, but it seemed like too much work. Instead I looked at the teams the players had been on. For the most part, it was never worth spending the time to look at the cards of the guys that never stayed with one team for very long. I mean, even if they were really good, it would still take a long time for the whole team to figure out how to play really well together. Everybody knows that though. That’s all they talk about on sports center. I went to a few baseball games I guess. There was one game that we had seats real close to home base and afterwards one of the players signed a baseball for me. I wasn’t excited at all. It was just like the baseball cards. It was something to watch him write his signature on the ball though. I started practicing my own signature a lot after that. A girl asked me for my signature once. I was a drummer in some band and we had played a show for about 25 people in some little town in Kentucky. A girl asked if she could have one of my drum sticks and she wanted me to sign it but there wasn’t a pen anywhere. I wonder if the great Babe Ruth carried a pen with him to the games.

in the elevator

There was a night that I got stuck in an elevator with the gymnast. We had gone to a concert in downtown Indianapolis and parked in a big garage there that had lots of signs posted listing lots of rules. After the concert we got in an elevator along with about four other guys. I kind of felt like it was a bad idea at the time. When the elevator doors wouldn’t let us out onto the fourth floor I felt the nearness of each of the elevator’s chrome walls. It was a precarious moment. I sort of looked at the four guys I didn’t know and there was a weird charge of static pulsing from the desires of their collected consciousness. I wondered how long social laws would hold. I drew mental pictures of myself punching the throats of the other men in the elevator to keep them off the gymnast. We tried pushing different buttons for a while and holding down the the door open button and all sorts of things. There were some long minutes there. I can’t remember what I did, but I figured out how to get the elevator to go back down to the first floor and open up. Ten minutes of recycled elevator air and six bewildered bodies spilled out. I laughed along with the gymnast. “I really thought we were going to be jammed in an elevator for the rest of the night,” she said. “Holy crap yeah. I was sort of fighting off a mounting sensation of panic,” I said. She fell asleep during the hour drive back. I felt good because of the trust she placed in me. I wanted to drive and drive.

respiratory specialist

Today I met a respiratory specialist and she took my breath away.

weird sort of ache

I’m not sure what’s easier, to lose track of who you are or never know to begin with. I’m pretty sure that I’ve lost track of the lost track. For years I invested more into a video game than real life. Whenever I finally stopped I had dreams about the game. I still dream about it. You can’t do something for years and merely forget about it. It sticks with you. I started believing that I was not a social person in order to stay on the computer deep into the nights I should have been meeting people or reckoning the earth like Walt Whitman advised. Once, during my senior year of high school my best friend and I took a bike ride and plunged down a long, steep hill. I could hear him yelling behind me, “This makes you know you’re alive!” I had a weird sort of ache. I had been standing on the outside of it for a long time.