She was coy
“Oh yeah, what was it about?”
Neil ran his fingers through his hair and peered over his plate
“Neeehhh, I’d rather not talk about it.”
“What, was it a nightmare?”
Still pulling at his damaged hair he looked up now
“No, I just…don’t want to talk about it”
She dropped her arms forward towards him
“Well come on tell me; why don’t you want to tell me?”
“Because”
Neil had reverted to his five-year old self
“Because, why?”
and Siobhan was now the mother
“Because I don’t think you’d understand it.” He stabbed his french toast with the fork.
“And what is that supposed to mean?” She asked maternally.
“I mean you’d understand what was happening in a literal sense probably, but you’d never understand the deeper meaning to it?”
Siobhan sighed a bit and gazed around the room quickly
“So, I don’t understand it, so what?”
Neil dropped his head again and spoke to his plate.
“Well, you’d have a false understanding”
“And…” Her expression froze as she awaited a response.
“And you would form an opinion in your head, and you would catalog another little fact about me in your head that went ‘Neil had this dream, and it meant this, and that means this’ but it would all be wrong.”
She shook her head quickly, her face in disbelief
“No, I won’t. What is your problem this morning?”
Neil drug the corpse of the french toast across his plate. His black coffee steamed.
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“Yes, something is wrong.” Her head moved with her words.
Neil raised his eyebrows while still looking down. He lifted his shoulders and opened his mouth. He was ready to say something in response, but nothing came. This morning, nothing came.
“Fine, I gotta go.”
Siobhan’s scarf furled around as she left. Neil stared down at the plate, and over at the coffee. If she didn’t understand what he said and why he said it, how was she ever to understand his dream? Neil laughed a bit at the irony of it all. Maybe it was just a bad morning, or maybe every other morning Neil had woken up with no recollection of his dreams.

I could live with the moonlight
and pleasant rivers
made of noise
wrapped up in
streaks of fire
that waver with the water
moving closer to the waterfront
thinking of twenty years ago

And so it begins:
The slow growing apart.
You leave me for someone else
leaving me with myself.
But I will not go the ways
of ancient minds forlorn and dark;
I will cozy up with a pen, a wrench, a guitar,
and I will leave my mark.

     King stepped into the small space. He drew the curtain, cutting the space in two. He stretched his shirt up and off of himself, and rolled his pants down. He lifted his feet out of the rolled denim, and peeled off his last bit of clothing. He hung the underwear and the rest of his clothing from the rail above him where the curtain was attached. Standing naked, he felt the walls hugging him. He felt the quick touches of the ceramic as he turned and adjusted the curtain. Everywhere, everything was closing in.
     King backed away from the water stream. It would always be cold at first. Try as he might, little specks of icy water stung him. The ceramic tile continued to poke him, and the cold wet curtain would wrap its arms around his thigh. Everyone wanted something from him. He waited till steam sprouted from the ground, and he slowly moved under the water. There it was. He closed his eyes and found it immediately. He only found it when he was like this. The curtain had to be closed and the water had to be hot. There had to be quiet.
     He pushed his ears under the streams and the water ran into his ears. It found it’s way to his eardrum, and ran over smoothly. He heard the gentle gurgling and nothing else. As he breathed in, the steam cleared his nose. He took deep breaths, and felt the dirt and grime seep out of him. He couldn’t see it, but he knew that little trails of black soot were running down from his nose. He lifted his face so the water cleared away all the black. He felt around for the knob, and turned up the heat. The hot water felt like a warm coat. He wrapped up his arms, and rubbed his hands against his flesh.
     King had found it. His eyes were closed, but he saw more with them closed than he would ever see with them open. He saw himself standing in the rain in the center of a city square. He had on an overcoat and a black hat. He saw himself holding onto his hat as he walked over to a bench. There was another man on the bench, a bulky man in a lighter colored coat. His face was worn and eroded as if the storm had been whittling away at his face his whole life. King saw himself sitting down next to the man but neither of them spoke. They just looked out on the rain. The wind blew their coats in the same direction. The rain bounced off of their faces, but neither said a word to each other. For a while, they both sat in silence, then the large man turned to King and pointed straight ahead.
     A few hundred meters away stood a woman. She was dressed in soaked white cloth. Her hair was black and strewn across her face. King focused. She opened her mouth and began to sing. Her voice was like water. It ran all through his head and over his eardrums. She was singing for him. She wanted him to hear something. The sound grew and grew. His ears began to pulse with the slow frequency of her voice. The bench and the man and the rain all drew back out of the scene. Soon the woman herself disappeared and King was left with just the noise.
     He opened his eyes and immediately noticed a voice. There was someone near him singing. It was a woman’s voice, and it carried throughout the compartments. She was most likely next to him. King drew back the curtain and walked down the hall to the compartment next to him. He saw water falling onto feet. The woman continued to sing, and King brought up his hand to pull back the curtain. He paused for a moment, then drew back his hand. He wouldn’t do it.

The night before
an hour long death:
I am counting down the minutes
and any second now
it’ll hit me.
I will soak in these moments
till the cloudy waters of idleness
prune my skin.
And my flesh will fall off
as I try to hold on to this instant.

     You have one look at her, one glance, that is at least non-pessimistic. It’s not optimistic by any means, but at least it isn’t pessimistic. It’s merely a judgment: “That girl is very attractive,” you think. Then your higher brain cuts in. “She is a lesbian.” There isn’t even a ‘probably’ in the sentence. At this point, it has happened too many times for you to even entertain the possibility that she isn’t a lesbian. It only takes a matter of milliseconds to identify a rainbow colored bracelet on her wrist, and that’s the end of it.
     You do pretty well for most of the night. You manage to ignore her, and the few times you can’t ignore her, you don’t suffer all that much. But something towards the end of the show changes that. You notice she is looking at you. Even in the frenzy of the pit, while you are being tossed about, you feel this slight uneasiness. You say to yourself, “she isn’t looking at you, she’s watching the whole event, and you just happen to catch her eyes looking at you a few times. It isn’t anything to worry about.”
     Towards the end of the show, you are thrust from the pit backwards. You accidentally knock someone behind you. You do a half turn and realize it is the girl. You move forward as if to say “sorry for bumping into you” but in your head your are nearly proud. You make a mental notch on your bedpost. This is your “love em and leave em.” This is as exciting as it gets for you. You are celebrating your conquest when you feel a brush up against you. It is not a simple touching of skin, but a nice lateral rub with plenty of surface area. There is elbow and forearm, and maybe even a little breast. You do another half turn and are shocked. It is the girl, and she has just rubbed up against you. There was no one behind her to push her; she was outside of the pit. She did this on her own.
     Now you are dissatisfied. There is ambiguity. You try to recall clues to her sexuality. Was the bracelet really rainbow colored? Or was it just colorful? The other girl she was with, did she show her any signs of affection? Was there any nuzzling? Did the other girl even look like a lesbian? What about the guy she was with? Was he her boyfriend? Was he just a friend? You continue to question, and you begin to doubt your instincts. That night you sleep uncomfortably thinking about this girl. She has done what every girl has done to you. She’s made you frustrated and sad, and she’s made you want to go back for more.

So, after not updating or visiting this blog for a while, I started to debate whether or not I should delete it and move it to another website. I know it looks like I am not doing much, but believe it or not I’d like to expand, and WordPress just does not offer that capability. I haven’t decided what I will do yet, but I do have some new and sort of old stuff for posting. I don’t know who has been reading this, but my dashboard stat things says this has been getting more views these past few days. Given that, I will actually update with some stuff. For those of you who are reading, I welcome your comments and what not.

I would write something substantial but calculus has dominated my life. The reason I’m not doing well in calculus is because I sit and write poetry. I wrote this today while my teacher was lamenting the market crash.

and we all thought it was safe
and we all thought we were at the top of our game
and then it all came crashing down
and we searched the ground
and there was no money to be found

potential song lyrics?

     Truck stops. Cars stop at truck stops. They stop so that life can keep moving. Passengers refuel. Drivers drink drinks, eat snacks. They wipe salty chip dust on their khaki pants and pile into the Subaru with their family of four. Little kids press greasy unwashed fingers on windows and ask about the big trucks. The dad laughs and explains that maybe they can go see the big trucks one day. On the inside he knows it’s not a possibility. He lies to his son for his benefit. He can’t be realistic because the boy is just a child, so he leads him on a bit to nothingness. He can’t tell the boy that at the end of the day, he won’t see the trucker, but he can’t tell him he will. He just tugs him along a bit, never letting on to the final destination. When the kid asks where are they driving to and if they are there yet, the dad just responds
     “Soon.”
     Soon, the trucker will slam a vial full of crank into his vein. Good meth too, made by bikers. Not that white trash sudafed shit. In the thirteen hours that his heart will be jerking, he will make it to his destination. Somewhere in North Carolina, he’ll unload, and load back up. He’ll score some more crank, and make his way to Minnesota. From there he’ll get his next few routes. His company always gives him a few routes in advance, but never a yearly schedule. They lead him on a bit, hinting at California or Florida or somewhere warm. But they never tell him his final destination. They can’t tell him that at the end of his life, he will be sad, alone, and drug-addicted. But they can’t tell him he’ll find love or fulfillment either. So they tell him, he’ll find sunshine and sandy beaches in Miami, Florida. He is old enough to never ask “Am I there yet?”
     He just keeps on trucking. When he starts to question, he shuts himself up with some speed. When it gets darker, he switches on the headlights and stares out into the blackness. The lights don’t show the road way up ahead, just a little patch of blacktop. The trucker stares out into the blackness, not knowing the final destination. He doesn’t ask either.
     The little kid stares out the window. The road and the monoxide are making him sleepy. His mother, on the other hand, is nervous. She stares ahead, not knowing where they are going. She turns to her husband.
     “Are we there yet?”
     The husband, not knowing where ‘there’ is responds,
     “Soon.”

I used to joke with my friend Steve that I never wanted to have a blog where I just blogged about not updating. Both of us ended up doing that. I’d really like to change that. This blog definitely had a heyday, but, like the american economy, it has started a steep decline. Perhaps I need a stimulus package. If I were taking a personality test, I’d say I’m self-motivated, but I don’t think that’s the case.

So maybe I’ll resolve to write. Raymond Carver suggested that one should write everyday, multiple times during the day. Seeing as how it is Lent and the economy sucks, and we have a new president, and it’s my senior year, and the planets are aligned and shit, I will write everyday. It may suck, it may show clear lack of thoughts, but I need to get in the habit at least. I’ve been sober of writing for a few months now, and I do not like that.

With the leviathan below
and your hand above
I know which one to trust
for I trust the animal
I know where his teeth are
and where I shall die
but the human kills from all angles
no surface safe to touch
The belly of the beast is at least soft
but the flesh of the human grates the spirit into shreds

English teachers invariably review connotation and denotation with their students. This has happened every year of English without fail. I could assume that everyone knows what they are or I could take the ironic route and explain them to those who don’t know. I’ll take irony. Denotation is the book definition of the word and connotation is the meaning that the word has taken in everyday speech. For example, Alan recently asked me if I had decimated something. I responded by saying, “No, I destroyed more than one tenth.” Albeit pretentious, the example works.
In that same day, I also heard many people misuse words. They used words that could have passed the inattentive ear, but did not fit. I thought of all the times I had not understood what a word meant but used it in a sentence hoping I had it right. There is a common psychological process that takes place during that awkward situation. We think of the word and wonder whether it fits in the sentence. If we have no knowledge of what the word means, the last resort is how it sounds. We pick all words, even the ones we know, based off of some level of how they sound. When we finally say the word that doesn’t fit, there is a level of tension created. There is comfort however in knowing that at least it sounded right.
Sound is important to speech, so why not create a subsection of –notation called phonotation. Phonotation would be the meaning as a result of how it sounds. It would be onomatopoeiatizing every word.
I believe phonotation serves a place in language especially in areas like poetry and lyrics. Sound can be more important, especially when dealing with spoken word. The meaning should come through in the rhythm and noises. That was what initially attracted me to Talking Heads: they didn’t make sense. David Byrne used his voice as an instrument, not a complementary text to the music. I’d like to see more of that: a liberation from the limitations of denoted and connoted language. There is a whole world to be explored from the sound of words. Mayhap I’ll write a poem or a song employing such techniques.