All I Ask Is Four White Horses Follow.

I'd like to spend the day laying out beneath the sun, falling in and out of sleep, lightly lingering in dreams. I'd like to watch the clouds from atop Federal Hill, seeing them through the shaking trees. I'd like to breath and inhale the wind, crisp and brisk and steady. I'd like to read Rimbaud, with the newly fallen leaves blowing around me. I'd like to kick through piles of crackling leaves, feel the sun on my back. Instead, I must go to the Bistro and I must care entirely too much about things I don't really care about at all.

I am watching from my window, the sun strike the bright white windows on the building across the street. Neko Case is singing in my ears. I am preparing myself for all the hours I will waste working, wishing I wasn't. I am counting down the final hour, looking nervously each minute.

I dreamed of weird things last night. They bumped awkwardly around my head and then fell out instantly upon waking. I can't seem to stretch them out from anywhere in my memory. The vague recollection of something mundane is slighty scattered across my efforts to remember. And I briefly recall finding them unworthy of recollection; perhaps that's why they've faded so.

Smudged Moments and Skipped Stones.

I am walking through a landscape rife with rocks. I come home and slip into the words I've spent the day lacking. I moved around dedicatedly, carefully, meticulously. I lost myself in the bustle of the bistro, in the deafening, dizzying din, in all the things that happened around me and all the things that I did without thinking. I've worked from ten am to eleven pm for the last two days and now I finally feel like I have some breathing room before I must be at work in the late afternoon tomorrow.

I am stripping myself of all the things I've done this evening, yesterday evening. I am trying to pull all these fragmented, frenzied thoughts from my frantic head. I am leaning back, inside myself, breathing slowly, exhaling in studied breaths, watching each one fall, roll, off my lips. I open my mouth wide into yawns and try to hold my shaky eyelids still.

The night is wet and dark but the streets are shining, twinkling beneath the bright buzz of the streetlamps. This morning was bustling with a breeze, a cool autumn breeze which blew my hair across my face. I put it back up and looked up at the clouds, trying to ignore the building beside me, the building from where I had come. I saw a few birds flap their wings lightly and land in the little flower boxes which hang from the windows. I squinted into the noonday sun and sighed; I knew I had to spend the rest of the day and night indoors. By the time 3 o'clock came rain clouds had gathered and the sun had sunk behind them. I sat outside only briefly, my pen hoovering above a piece of paper, the words just out of reach. Before I knew it I was back at work, lost again and still my thoughts peered out shyly from the shadow of that lonely second in the sun.

I don't know what I thought, then, or the rest of the night. I let the words lose footing; I let them linger, unformulated and then I come home and try to etch them out of the events of the day. I vaguely mention things here and there. Every sentence I write starts with "I". But, is that not how a diary is supposed to be? Only, it seems there is no real evolution. That I describe the same things the same way. I am trying to capture the tone of the moment but the moments all smudge together.

Will You Know? Or Must I Tell You?

I woke up early, drowning in the muggy mist of morning, groggily groaning my way to work. The air was heavy with the threat of rain; you could smell it everywhere quivering, waiting. It bunched up and caused pressure in my head. It felt like forever before the sky finally cracked and the pressure subsided. It felt like weeks. The sky darkened dramatically but I couldn't see the clouds from inside the bistro. I imagine they swarmed overhead ominously. The day let out slowly and I walked out of the bistro relieved, exhausted, right as the sky broke and the rain crashed down. It was a warm rain, a damp rain (like the kind you find in songs) and I walked slowly to the car, letting it slide down my sticky, sweaty face.

I drove slowly through the rain, the puddles flying up in streams and coming in through the open window. The windshield wipers ran furiously, scraping across the widow, spitting the water off the sides of the car. I came home and took a brief nap. I woke up just at sunset. The clouds had broken beautifully, layers of light clouds sitting right beneath deep, thick layers of dark rain clouds. The sun screamed out from behind them, glowing red and orange. It slowly sank, and Sunday waned.

There is something solid beneath me these days. I feel I am gaining footing. Each day of words I build, on this blog or elsewhere, is a feather in my cap. Each sentence spoken simply, slipping suddenly from my lips, is an articulation of something solid. I feel, sometimes, that this blog is too vague. That a reader might not have anything to take a hold of. That it is too personal, too emotional. If anyone reads this perhaps you can give me some advice.

A Specter of Something

I am trying to remember my dreams but they are sinking fast into all of this days disasters. I ran around- crazy. A chicken. And I've come home to try to find the remnants of yesterday, only to scramble back to bed to find the morning. I am always looking for things. There is someone hinting on the edge of my memory and I am pushing him back, far from me, but I can still see him in so many sideglances, dangling around in my peripheral vision, a specter of something I can't remember in words, only brief images and dreams, only in a floating feeling. I see the little statcounter map and I wonder if it is just someone else in Montreal. It could be. Last night I dreamed I was there. I dreamed I saw you standing in the middle of the mall, bundled up in snow gear, mittens. There was a line of light coming in from the glass ceiling above you and you were still as young as you were then. I want to brush it off. I want to let it slide off my shoulders but those words which once rang so true inside me still vibrate in my memory every once in a while. I suppose, though, that this is not rare. That I am a pisces and everything reverberates inside me always, people I can never give up. And they all stare at me from photographs which capture so much of who they are. And sometimes I wish I could forget. But, mostly I just wish I could write them more real than they ever were and therefore know them. That's what must be done.

The Shadow of The Person I Only Vaguely Remember Being.

I've been lost, lingering on the edge of an almost understanding. Wavering, wandering on the brink of a battlefield I can't remember ever stepping onto. Each day I face with a shaking fist and a hidden agenda. Each day I sit and stare at the next, expectantly. I am waiting for something which only I have the will to wish into action. I wonder, like Pessoa, like Mr. Cobain, "Who needs actions when you've got words?" And then I wonder, how can I make actions into words so that they live as actions, wholly and truly and so that the words move just the same as the actions do.

I walk outside, lost in the vague and visually unpleasant tapestry that shrouds the streets of Baltimore. I try to find beauty in all the unfinished things, which we all know will never be realized the way they were intended. I find the most beauty in the broken buildings on the brink of reconstruction because they aren't yet a failure; they are still fighting valiently, hanging wires like vines, pieces of metal- shrapnel- sticking out from beneath the dug up earth. They haven't yet become what people want them to be. They stand, unstructured, gradually becoming more and more shiny, becoming more and more human.

I am struck silent by the city streets. By the uncanny way that everyone is exactly who they are and how we can know them so suddenly. I see someone walk and I know him. I see someone hold her eyes to her brow to sheild her face from the sun, and I know her, her small denim skirt clutching onto small feminine thighs. And she alters her walk to suit her skirt; and she alters her walk to suit her shoes. I see a student stomping steadily down the campus steps, heading to the food court, plugging his laptop into the wall and staring intently at graphs and charts. And I know him because I can write the exact way which he moved along those stairs. I know what he thought as he moved toward the counter at the checkout. He studied his watch; he studied the zippers on his backpack. He fiddled with something, jingling, in his pocket. This is the movement of life, this ethereal, glowing, commonality that is everything we are- whether or not we are aware of who we are.

I am frustrataed by the instinct to settle, the way people sink beneath the briefest hint of frustration. I wish I knew less of the rich, of how rich the rich are and how they feed on each other, worms. I wish I didn't work for them, moving briskly to make them money. Learning facts just to show I know and then coming home and caring about the facts, making them mine, only be be quizzed on them later. As if they're required. As if that's a possible expectation. Some people are so themselves in the midst of so much that is not them. I wish I was not so mutable. I wish I could hold my ground.

I wish I could write more but I must wake up and make myself someone I wish I never had to be, only the shadow of the person I vaguely remember being. All the things I used to do bubble to the surface in the brief intervals between work and I can almost see my own shadow; I can almost step into it, become it. But just as I find it, just as I shift myself into position, it moves. The daylight peeks in through the curtains and throws my shadow far behind me. And I wander, lost, practically motionless beneath the weight of my memory. And I wander through work, a shadow.

Not So Steady.

Today was yet another day littered with light misty drizzle, exploding with unending stillness- where the rain wouldn't let up nor actually become something. It would only suggest the idea of rain, casually coating people's hair and clothing, listlessly littering the edges of everything. And I stood at work, wandering, wavering, gazing out the window, wishing I was anywhere else. I stared at women with faces which were cut, pulled, placed. I stared at them disgustedly, glaring. Those foul creatures. And I claimed, more than once, and seriously so, "If everyone who ever had surgery for purely cosmetic reasons would just fall over and die now, I would volunteer to go around and clean up the bodies."

How is it that people can be so shallow? That who they are is so defined by how they look that they would sooner give up their bodies to plastics and scalpels than actually be a person or learn anything about themselves. I think of this and I think of the life you live isolated, mostly, from these people. And I wonder if I would rather see them, broad as the gloomy day, or hide from them beneath papers and the past. I suppose it's rather the same thing, that the past is just like now, that people have always been frightened, meekly peeking out from behind their own eyelids as if from behind a curtain, on a stage.

I sometimes peer out into the darkness and wonder what it is I'm doing, mascarading as someone who lives a life outside of words. As if I am capable of understanding anything without promptly putting it properly in paragraphs, in phrases. The more I force myself to sit here, staring, at the blank, buzzing screen infront of me, the more I articulate the things I would often rather forget. I feel so responsible for people, I find it ridiculous. Everyone I've ever actually known I feel somehow responsible for. Because the second I know someone I feel like I have some objective insight into their personalities and I can better help them to understand themselves. Unfortunately, I often forget that most people would much rather meander motionless through a life they don't understand than take the time or effort to change, or even understand. I give so much weight to the few who do; they carry me through.

I can hear the mice run amok through my apartment. The sink is dripping steadily, every few moments. I am trying to ride on all the words which came before these. I am not so steady myself.

I dreamed about some strange sort of heaven and hell. There was a concubine of some kind sucking me down but at the same time I didn't know if this fellow, with whom I was in love, wanted to go back to heaven or to hell. I couldn't even tell which was more pleasant. Except this creepy concubine was in the lower level of this Alice in Wonderland-esque world and I figured that was hell. Now that I write it down I realize that I've had a dream which took place here before. I remember the long winding road with the yellow hills to each side. In the other dream, which I must have had 5 years ago or more, I was trying to get somewhere which I thought would be the finale of the dream but I was in a wooden wagon and nobody was pulling it. These dreams are all so symbolic. I wish I remembered more.

Things Alive Only in Whispered Words.

All day the sky has been grey and dull, a damp blanket coating the sky, covering the sun. I spent the day in awkward transition, dreading the coming cold and the trees- empty of their leaves. I think about these last few years and wonder where they've gone. They live for me inside of letters, words piled a top one another and sent forth through the vast network of space to the minds and eyes of others. I hear the words I've read echoed in my head and I wonder how long they'll live there, waiting for me to make use of them.

Today, the sky cracked it's poems in naked thunder. I stood at the window at work looking out into the glossy parking lot, at the grimy puddles, thinking of all the things I've left unthought and unwritten, unrealized, for so long now. I am bobbing around a sea of confusion, in a raft which is too small for me and blistering beneath the burning sun. I am afloat, riding the light waves which weave me across the sea, waiting for the inevitable storm which I see so far out in the distance. I can feel the weight of all things I do not know as it pulls down on me; I can imagine all the possibilities but I cannot reach them.

There is something new. Some small light shining where it wasn't shining before. And all at once, I feel like I am losing something. The ground beneath my feet, perhaps. I am wrapped up in a world of unsaid things and slowly they are leaking out, finding the way to their rightful places. And all at once, I am keeping things in- hiding them in dark corners where they live only in whispered words.

The ground outside is still damp and obsidian, the black street iridescent and opaque. I look to it as into a crystal ball and I see myself reflected, my eyes wide with wonder. I wish I was staring out into the bright, blue pacific- my feet digging in the whiteish sand, someone beside me pressing his mouth against my neck, tasting my shoulders.

Why must we only have one life?

Fading Freckles and Frantic Fumbling.

A dog is barking outside in the distance; I can hear his shouts echo through the alleyway in front of my house. These have been many days full of waiting, listening, hearing the faint reverberations of what once was ringing in my ears. The winter is imminent and each fallen leaf, brown and broken beneath my feet, is a warning. And yet, I am looking forward to that brief period between the seasons when the air is just crisp enough and the breeze is blowing the leaves around your knees. I look forward to shuffling my feet through piles and piles of leaves and the sound they make when the swoosh up into the air. This last summer is now just a distant memory and I've been looking in the mirror everyday to study how quickly my freckles are fading. I don't want them to fade.

I am trying to lose myself in something but, perhaps, I don't know what it is. I miss all the days I used to spend alone, on rooftops and running through back alleys. I don't know myself as well as I should because I don't spend enough time trying to get to know myself. I'm lost in the constant rushing swirl of clattering dishes and the busy din of the bistro. Every movement is so fluid and steady and yet everything is so calculated and cold. I am thinking about the past and how it is a constant present. Everything builds beneath me, it bubbles and billows and often breaks. I'm lost in the different people and I am trying to refine all the things I have been and all the things I want to be.

I dreamed something dark and awkward, something different and I dreamed it in stuttered movements. I have many things hidden in the folds of the sheets. I am lost in a landscape which towers over me and I can barely see behind me. I am caught in memories of things so long finished they may as well have never happened. Yet, I am haunted by all the people I used to know and perhaps I must write them in order to forget, in order to make them something outside themselves. And I am haunted by a feeling which lies deep within my chest and which I cannot break free from. I am looking up from the bottom of a rocky cliff and I cannot see what waits above me, far out of reach.

When You're Caught Betwixt Charibdis and the Krill

I drove down the highway today; the midnight moon was bright in the sky. The sky was a much lighter blue than I expected and the streetlights shone along the rim of the road. It was an empty road and I traveled toward the lights. I wondered what I was coming home to and what I would write when I got there.

The highway was an extension of myself; it stretched out far in each direction. I could have gone any way I wanted. But, instead, I headed home. I blinked, perhaps more then a few times, at the brightness of the road, the brightness of my dashboard. I knew this car was taking me from one place to the next. And I wondered, “Where am I taking myself?”

Am I walking down a long road headed to the highway? Am I destined, by the stars, to do something I barely understand but that can be explained quite clearly? Am I free to choose who I want to be and be that? And I laugh, also, because I think it’s funny.

I’ve thought too much about Ayn Rand today. Her horrifying empty cliché’s she calls people, just empty symbols for “righteousness” and “arrival”. The pain I felt upon reading that conjecture was magnified so much by her complete and utter lack of understanding of what a human is. God, what a foul creature. And I had to think all day of the sort of denial it takes to be able to read that and claim that it is based on even the vaguest understanding of humanity. Am I free to puke all over myself? Why yes, yes I am.

Fiction is as little known a thing as how to actually live a life. People don’t realize that fiction is a means of expressing what life actually is and, therefore, in order to understand something about fiction you have to, in turn, understand something about how a person lives a life. It is rather difficult to make a person and prove he lives a life, a real life, and make his life real to others. It is perhaps one of the most difficult things. But it is amazing because those people you make, they live. Sometimes, they live more than the author does. And all the people we haven’t made, they live inside me so soundly, so simply, sitting so still and waiting so patiently to be made into someone. George Barnes just wants to go home and we will not let him, to spite ourselves. James will always live with the shadow of his foot crunching a cigarette and then, walking away. Edeline will, forever, wipe her nostril on her mothers’ coat, unless we choose to make her grow. And I suppose that’s what’s best about fiction, you can make people grow at the rate that you, yourself, are capable of understanding how it is people do grow. Fiction is not molding a bunch of plastic people to fit your ideals and your philosophies. Fiction is about making people come to life through words. Making real people come to life through words.

Or Beast of Man Left Wantin'

I've been thinking about posting something for some time now without actually doing it. I've been listening to Rob's new songs and I've been wishing I was able to just make something and have it whole so quickly. George Barnes has been alive for so long without being finished that it makes me think I don't even know who he is. We trudged through so few sentences but they were such full sentences. I sit here, still, with my fingers on the letters, hoovering, waiting. The words simmer beneath my consciousness and I wonder if I've been thinking them all day or if they just found their way to the tip of my tongue, the tip of my fingers.

I dreamed of running last night, that I ran from some unknown source, from some scary someone who I didn't understand. They knew me, the both of them, and they cornered me. I sunk into the seat of the car I had stolen and I waited for them to get me. I had tried to hotwire the car but I realized, once I had the flap open, that I didn't have any idea how. And I woke up confused.

And I dreamed I swam frantically from an angry Orca through the flooded hospital halls. And the Orca saw me but didn't seem to mind my presence. I sat in my bed and wrote pages and pages of my dreams this morning, my fingers feeling that they had long ago been finished. My head was full of the deep, colorful things I had witnessed in the night and I pushed the words onto the page in illegible early morning scrawls. And I felt beside me the warmth of someone I believe so much in. And I heard beneath me the sounds of someone I believe so much in. And today I looked up from a fancy dinner into the eyes of someone I wish I could help but she can help herself. And I'm so glad she can.

I spoke to a friend last night who was so sad and so silly. I wished I could whack him once or twice in his head. He spoke of the selfish nature of art and his desire to engage in humanitarian deeds and I laughed because he would never do such a thing. He would only wish he could. I haven't seen him in so long and we just started talking out of nowhere. He's not as different as I think I am. I feel like he knows me now just as much as he ever did, which is not so much at all.

And I felt, beneath the surface of my skin, the person waiting to emerge, winking. She looked up from the place I always knew she would wait, and she showed me that the person I wish to be has always been there, waiting. I think of how I work so much that I don't get to sit through these times, these smooth surfaces and soft transitions from one moment to the next. I've been pushing the moments past for so long now, just hoping for their end, just begging for the time to pass so that new time could begin. I've spent so long asking people what they want and not thinking, seriously, what it is that I want. Can I bring you anything else, I ask. And really, can I bring myself anything to start with?

This is, likely, just a bunch of nonsense. Just a bunch of babble, but I bet some of it lives outside things. And I bet I sit and hear the best songwriting I've ever heard and I grin giddily because he made it. And now he makes absurd noises.

I won't be a while.