December 2011
1 post
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...
November 2011
3 posts
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...
saving-wild-at-heart asked: Nutella girl is a true story ? :P
6 tags
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...
October 2011
8 posts
2 tags
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,...
1 tag
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...
2 tags
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...
4 tags
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...
respiratory specialist
Today I met a respiratory specialist and she took my breath away.
4 tags
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...
4 tags
phantom of the opera
I’m always going to see the Phantom of the Opera. Once I thought I was going to take a girl so I bought some expensive tickets that put us about 15 rows back, just a little to the left of where the chandelier once malfunctioned and really did drop on top of someone. The girl didn’t wind up going, so I took my brother, who likes the play as much as I do. Sometimes on trips we sing the thing from...
4 tags
the problem with fate
I think some people are probably born with a poorly calibrated fate. Like maybe some people were fated to meet one day at a park but the mechanisms were off by just enough to ruin what was supposed to get the ball rolling on an impossibly happy lifetime. Jack trips, falls down the hill and Jill is facing the opposite direction in a yoga pose. They don’t get married to the cheers and happy...
September 2011
23 posts
3 tags
my hands dried
The other day I ate a big hamburger and drank 2 coca-colas at the sort of place that businessmen meet to discuss important deals. 80s rock was assuring me of all kinds of glowing things; I was confronted with my addiction to love and saw visions of myself sailing away. The girls were all wearing shirts that proclaimed their love for beer, a declaration that I surmised was made more to reflect the...
3 tags
unappreciated
One night the gymnast got her car stuck in an ice-covered parking lot. One of the cooks at Ruby Tuesday’s tried to push it out for about two minutes and then shrugged his shoulders and drove off in his truck. It was the beginning of a storm that would leave me barricaded indoors for a week. She text messaged me for help so I started up the Volvo and inched my way down McGalliard to the mall....
2 tags
within arm's reach
A long time ago I spent a lot of time studying a foreign language. I was excited about the prospect of going to another country and talking to the people there. Meanwhile, I was ignoring all of the people that I lived near. I was angry that they were there more often than not. I had fantasies of empty streets. I started sleeping during most of the day so that I could go out at night and be alone...
3 tags
being alone
There was a girl I was talking to there for a while that had a really messed up phone. She could answer calls and hear the other person talking but she couldn’t reply. The thing is about her, she was sort of not a big talker anyway. A normal conversation with her usually amounted to her never making a reply. She even told me she just wanted to hear me, so that I should just call and talk....
2 tags
hang up
I had a friend for a while that was never confident that I really liked him. I tried to tell him that I never even thought about it—but after he kept on bringing it up it wasn’t true anymore. I started thinking about it and realized he made me feel uncomfortable. He told me once that he made a list of all his best friends and that I was on that list, but that he thought about what my list...
4 tags
a big prize
Sometimes I call people and tell them they have won a big prize but they have to answer some questions first. I start out with pretty simple stuff and gradually move deeper down field. After getting an alma mater and job description, one guy told me how he used to steal mail from post office trucks. He’d wait for the mailman to load up and take off down a street and then he’d get in the truck and...
3 tags
drug addled
When I was a kid I always walked at the back of the line in school. It wasn’t like some sort of plan I had, but I was always just going slower than other people. There was one particular day that this turned out to be a bad idea. I was probably two and a half feet tall I guess. I actually don’t know how tall a six year old is, but just try to envision a little towheaded kid humming to himself...
2 tags
partial text messages
I had this dream last night that my mobile device was only sending me partial text messages. A message came in from a girl about meeting up for dinner at —-. I headed downtown. Arrived at 7 pm, a time universal for meeting a girl for dinner. Got another text message from a friend who said he wanted to see —-. I walked around the food court. I received more messages about —-....
4 tags
the mail
“What’s your favorite cereal?” the trim blonde haired lawyer asked. “Honey, uh, something of oats” I replied, “the one with the honey dripping onto the flakes on the box.” “I know the one,” she said. Three days later a cereal box was delivered by mail, covered in a graffiti of hearts and “i love u’s”. Every second day she sent...
1 tag
the same crazy place
I’m pretty sure my good ideas come from the same crazy place as the bad ones.
3 tags
to follow
For a long while there when I was a kid, my best friend was my cousin. She was a couple years younger and she liked to follow me around. She was a very good follower if you want to know the truth. She always let me choose what game we’d play. I was sort of like the president of our friendship I guess. But there was one particular night I didn’t want her to follow me. I told her to stop and she...
2 tags
from Iowa
I have a new friend from Iowa. When she calls I’m told I’m getting a call from Iowa. It’s not true though. She lives here in Indiana. She’s never calling me from Iowa. But she sounds like she might be. She sounds like she could be sitting in the middle of Iowa somewhere and so in that way I feel like I’m talking to someone in Iowa. I guess she thinks like someone...
3 tags
silent but grateful
I remember when I was sick for a long time. I didn’t really leave my room for two months. It was my last semester of high school. The guys on my track team said I’d get better if I just pushed through it so they made me run with them but that made things really bad. I slept for 22 hours a day for a week. I don’t remember much of that week except every now and then I’d wake up gasping for air. I’m...
4 tags
roller-coaster ride
I rode my first and last roller-coaster ride when I was 22. I was working at a summer camp and at the end of the week we took all the campers to Holiday World. There was a girl named Jenny that I had become friends with and she wanted me to go on a ride with her. I was happy for her to ask me so I agreed. She pointed to some colossus of a wooden roller coaster and my heart sort of sank. It was so...
3 tags
room for love
Once there was a cat that thought he had met the last cat he’d ever need to meet. She had nice legs and laughed at the cat’s jokes. Her smile was really nice and betrayed an ironic sense of humor and a really clever wit. Whenever the cat made funny jokes, she’d come up with a joke that was better, and in this way they’d spend their evenings together. Now the strange thing was that it was...
1 tag
to be a dad
I imagine it’s pretty wild to be a dad. Especially if you had a whole fleet of kids that all sort of looked like little versions of yourself. I’ve seen guys that took all this pretty seriously. This one guy, I think he wanted boys. But he kept having girls. He had three girls and no boys. He sort of made up for the problem in a novel way though. His name was Alan or maybe Albert, but everyone...
2 tags
the same hills
I was looking at the picture of Indiana today. You know, and I guess I saw something that I hadn’t noticed before. I saw how the southern border is the connecting part to Kentucky—that ambling Ohio river that eats through the hills, licks against the banks. But that border, when I see it representing Indiana, gives me a kind of sickness for home. Whenever I used to see the figure of...
4 tags
just for ourselves
30 and single is kind of funny. Kind of like going to foot locker every month for 12 years and always deciding to leave barefoot. After a while your feet get sort of used to it though. You start to feel like the shoes aren’t as necessary as all the advertising makes them out to be. After all, didn’t the great African runners win marathons barefoot? “Yes, that’s true,”...
siberian tiger
I remember one February I didn’t eat for ten days and I kept on having to sleep out in the open and one morning somebody threw me into a trash can because my hair was all frozen and I wasn’t moving and my breath was real shallow and you could see my ribs. I was having some kinda crazy dream though. I was a siberian tiger but I was working in Chicago and my boss made me answer the phones because...
5 tags
copycat games
Something that is crazy about people is that sometimes they do more than hide who they are from you. If someone’s hides who they are, they just don’t say anything. They just raise their eyebrows and look away. I do this sometimes with controversial people. I know about the arguments they want to have. When people do more than hide its because they are playing a game against you. I had a girlfriend...
2 tags
a beautiful thing
“Ow.” she said as she put her hand on her pregnant belly. “Did he kick?” I asked. “I didn’t realize it hurt when they kicked. I just thought it was a beautiful thing.”
“It is a beautiful thing,” she said “but it still hurts.”
4 tags
the better angels
The piano player for the doors said that it was the better angels of his unconscious that led him to that opening lick on ‘baby won’t you light my fire’. Pretty good stuff I think. If you want to do a lot of admirable things in life, then all you really have to do is make sure you respond to those better angels. The tough thing is that I’m always having these talks with...
2 tags
dear so and so
I have this crazy pressing need to tell people things. I spend a lot of my days telling people things. I think I probably tell too much, like Sylvia Plath baring it all and then baking her head in an oven. That’s what it feels like to tell everyone everything all the time. The thing is, people want to know. People usually like knowing and once you start to tell everyone everything they all...
3 tags
Finding Love
Sometimes people talk about finding love and falling in love, and either one is sort of dangerous. You find your car keys. You fall into a hole. Love though, love isn’t something you find or fall in. Love is more like art. It’s like a picture or a series of pictures that you paint. And then, after working and working at it, you start to understand the thing that you’re painting. You finally see...
3 tags
Sickness
there’s been quite a few times that I attempted to make myself sick. sometimes I like feeling sick, because when I’m sick, I don’t have the motivation to even think about all the things that always wind up getting me into trouble. things get me into trouble quite a lot. but when I get sick, I somehow become a better, more clearheaded person. when i’m laying there feeling genuinely rotten I wind up...
4 tags
Ghost Man on First Base
When I meet girls that I really get along with, they are usually committed to someone else. But usually to someone that lives far away. I guess I understand what that is about though. It’s like having a ghost man on first base. When I was a kid I used to play whiffle ball. If there was no one to actually play whiffle ball with, I would play whiffle ball by myself. I would toss the ball up and hit...
1 tag
Teeth
Losing all your teeth is a lot like going through a lifetime of failed relationships. The first loss is always kind of the most traumatic. Even if people tell you about how it will hurt, there’s really nothing there to help you understand what kind of pain you’re going to have to deal with. But suddenly it appears. This awful thing that wrenches your guts. And blood. And after its over there’s a...
2 tags
The Sunset
I recently picked up an ex-girlfriend from the airport in Indianapolis. It was one of those experiences that you wish you could give away to someone. The whole ride back there was a sunset. To be real honest about the whole debacle, I felt like I was a sunset. Everything going brilliant darker colors of itself until a final fade out. But I dropped her off before everything faded out completely. I...
August 2011
8 posts
6 tags
When to Stop
sometimes one of the most important things you can learn is when to stop. not many people know when to stop too well. I’d say I’m pretty bad at it. I’m bad at stopping and going to tell the truth. But being bad at going doesn’t have the same psychological consequences as being bad at stopping. if you’re bad at going, you might be bored a lot and feel like there’s not much to do. The thing is,...
6 tags
new jersey hotel
man, haha. philadelphia is a pretty big place. i was supposed to go along with a school group but they missed their flight. which left me taking a trip alone. not so bad i guess. lots of time to space out. i talked to leah basically all night once i got to the hotel. we have these four hour conversations once or twice a week. they are the sort of conversations that put loneliness through a...
4 tags
movie starlet girlfriend
i’ve been badly fooled in the past i was in love with a girl who was basically like an actress she played parts that interested her in life. she constructed elaborate puzzles of identity for me to put together. she had piles of movies and she’d pick one out for us to watch to tell me something. her face carried a hidden kind of pride about the way she could nudge the idea of things into my...