Happy Halloween

September 25

Ten years ago today I kissed a friend for the first time. Then I fell hard and quick. Life has never been the same and I couldn't be happier. I love you, baby.

Well, it's fall

Or close enough, really. Once September starts -- hell, once August hits that mid-point -- you know summer's on its way out, scooting along so the door doesn't hit it in the ass on the way.

And for once, I think I'm actually looking forward to it.

I'm slowly climbing out of the morass of little ambition and energy. Slowly, I say, because it's not a linear process. Is anything? But I wish it were. It would be so much easier. Wouldn't everything?

I'm sending applications out into the void. Putting together a Fulbright app, applying to MacDowell and Stanford and a bunch of other places. I'm trying to make tracks on the latest project and trying to market the project that's been hanging around for a while.

I'm chipping away. Chipping doesn't feel as good as smashing, but one step at a time.

Lap band blues

In August 2010, I got a lap band and dropped 40 pounds. By Thanksgiving 2011, I was overfilled and unable to eat. I wound up in the ER and they took all the fluid out. I've gained the weight back and am disgusted with myself. I'm going back to my surgeon today to get another fill and I know I have a lot of explaining to do. I hope I can make it through.

The era of sleep

I sleep all the time these days. It's as if I can't get enough and maybe I can't. I feel shrouded, covered in something I can't name and can barely fight. It's not depression. It's not anxiety. It's just this feeling of resignation that I don't like, and I don't accept, and I need and want to change.

Today's writing

The pleasure comes not in waves, but in stabs. The short, sharp intakes of breath are punctuated by sensations of separation, of a journey to somewhere else. It’s a patchwork of departure and return, of absence and presence.

Leigh is lying on her back, naked from the waist down. She’s braless and wearing a t-shirt that says MIZZOU. She closes her eyes, then slits them open, then closes them again, more tightly this time. Behind her eyelids she can see spirals, a laser show of sorts. Her fingers find the head that is between her legs and they squeeze, first lightly and then with increasing force, feeling the skull that lies beneath the hair, the fragility of bone.

She thinks of demolition, the kind she saw just yesterday in downtown. They were taking down a hotel, one that hadn’t hosted a guest in well over a year. She’d paused on the sidewalk and watched the crane yawn and chew, the construction workers stand idly by with their cigarettes, not even acknowledging the destruction. Were you supposed to smoke at a demolition site? Wasn’t there some risk involved?

By the time she was done watching, the crane was lowered as if in embarassment. One of the smokers had put out his cigarette and was watering the debris with a long orange hose. She felt a sick and sorry fascination, a dull ache at the idea that at one minute something can exist and the next moment can reduce it to nothing.

Sharp pleasure undercuts her thoughts. She bites her lower lip, bites it hard. Brooke, she thinks, lingering over the double o’s. The head responds by moving faster, the tongue by making its movements even more precise. Brooke, she thinks again but for some reason doesn’t say. Instead she presses her fingers against the head’s face, feeling – stubble?

Evan. It is her husband, Evan, who is going down on her. Her husband of 13 years, her partner in life. Remember, Leigh? Remember?

The crane stood out against the bright blue winter sky. That she remembers.

Two years

It's been two years since my buddy Oliver died. I miss him terribly and in a way it gets harder, not easier, every day. He was 21 and 3/4 years old when he died. He was robust as hell up until the end. Who could ask for more? But I do. I love you, Bear.