Friday, January 30, 2009

Okay, this is just an epidemic.

I've never taken this seriously.
By this, I mean the weather
or the piles of snow and broken asphalt
that divide our lanes of traffic
for the next week.

See, I created a relationship right there,
I assume we share roads
and drink from the same glasses.
I want to imagine you and I
on opposite ends of a city
pushing our weak domestic cars
through narrow alleys,
trying to find an open restaurant.

We'll pay in left over laundry money.
At home, you sit bodliless on an l-shaped couch,
a voice slouched into a burgandy pillow.
You belch space so your stomach can fit
two more handfuls of chips. Maybe sometime
after 10, you'll here a Miles Davis ringtone
and answer Hello hun because it's me.

I won't comment on your diet,
or try and guess what show you're watching
between the circular motions of your hand
skating across the round of your stomach.

A few minutes later we start talking
about tackling the driveway.
My hands start to burn
when you say shovel. We keep talking.
You go into the hall closet and pile up
rubber boots with old dirty water in them,
ripped scarves and a brown knit helmet
that rests above your eyebrows.

About two hours later, it happens.
I park the Taurus near the mailbox
and we shovel. My pile grows faster.
After an hour, I can see asphalt
and cracks with weeds sprouting.
I stab the spade into a rocky pile 
and head towards the door.
Your shovel scrapes bare rock. 
A few coughs fall with heavy flakes
and I close the door thinking
about the fireplace that needs to be rebricked.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

I think we should make changes, right now.

I want my life to turn into a sword from a role-playing game: it needs some upgrades.

Snow storm was awful. First ice, then snow, then both at the same time. There's at least 8 inches of snow, covered by an inch and a half of ice. Trees are hanging like red zone huddles, with their tips touching the ground. We have three fifty-foot maples in our yard. Huge branches fell onto the roof, on the overhang in the backyard, on my dad's truck. We have no power. No hot water. I need to bathe, my balls feel like swamp leg, gross and slow.

My phone works intermitantly. Did I spell intermitantly right? Probably not. My hands hurt from moving limbs and scraping windows. I think I'd like to buy a generator and an ATV after this ordeal.

These setences feel awkward. Like, it feels like somebody else is writing this. These words sound terrible.

I didn't sleep last night, I tried to read but couldn't. I've messaged Volkswagen friends. One of them had a tree fall on his car while he tried driving to work. The front of his car looks like your insides.

Pot would be nice right now, so would a Grolsch. I had pizza earlier. I'm not sure how long my house will be without power. Oh yeah, I'm writing this from Jeffersonville, I made it down to my mom's flower shop. It has power, and heat. I'll be sleeping on the floor for a few days.

My knuckles won't stop throbbing, my fingers feel damp on the insides. This is something I don't understand. I hope you're reading this, that means you still have power, wherever you might be.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

I'm listening to Black Flag right now. Yeahhhhhh, No Values and White Minority. Also at work. I've helped three customers over the last hour and a half. That's awful. I'd say the most productive I've been is eat my pizza Lunchable. I've chewed on my thumbnail, too.

Wait... two people are coming in. This blog will continue in a few minutes.

I'm back now. He picked up an order. I like customers like that. They're like the first time you had sex: quick, too much talking with zero action. They're in, they're out.

**

I applyed for a postion yesterday with the Louisville Bats, the AAA-affiliate for the Cincinatti Reds. Aside from Volkswagens, baseball is my favorite thing in the entire world. The position is for a stadium operations intern. If I end up working for a professional baseball team, I'll probably have a heart attack everyday at work and have to be revived. I don't think anyone would give me health insurance.

**

I want to know why every old punk song talks about surfers and skateboards, even the guys who're from the Midwest. We don't have oceans here.

That last line would be a fantastic book or story title. Don't take it from me, ass.

Wouldn't it be crazy if we had to copywrite our lives? Sometimes I think it would be a good idea. That way, people wouldn't dress like Eminem or bleach their hair. I'm not trying to take a stab at Eminem, I just hate his stupid haircut.

I hate that there are at least 100 covers of "99 Luft Balloons." Fuck that stupid song.

**

I need to start reading a book. I haven't finshed a novel in a long time. There are three sitting on my bookshelf half-read. Sometimes I like it more that way.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

I'm going to provide you the future and other things.

Keith Law is like Raymond Carver: low on the horizon. He strikes with few words, but those few words are the entire dictionary. He knows exactly who is going to be five-tool savvy, who's going to crumble like crumbs under sneakers. He knew Nick Markakis was going to be king before anyone else knew how many k's were in his last name.

So, if you care at all about baseball's future, this link is necessary. Like water or a nice down comforter.

**

Today has been great so far. Those days don't happen often. There are new wheels from a Porsche 928 sitting my Golf that're for the Jetta. There are Volkswagen parts ready to become something large, black and powerful this weekend. Plus, the weather is fantastic. I didn't wear a jacket to work. Hopefully I won't need one tonight, because it's buried beneath the wheels in my Jetta.

**

I have the Australian Open on for background noise. What I like about tennis is that fans always scream, it never stops. A rally could go on for three minutes straight, and they're going to freak the hell out as soon as somebody scores a point. The commentators are always so calm and suave. They know exactly what needs to be said. It reminds me of when I had my kidney stone removed and while they were giving me the anesthetic, there was a nurse who was humming a Cowboy Junkies' song. That was the last thing I remembered before I woke up and had a stint string hanging out of my penis.

One thing I can assure you is that Im glad I haven't had a kidney stone since then. My doctor told me after you get one, it's much more likely that you can develop another one. I wanted to get rid of both my kidneys when he said that.

**

Accents are sexy. Always sexy. On women, at least.

**

I'm gonna go Mick Foley on your ass.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Us versus Vermont

This is the title of the book I'm working on. I started writing fiction today. Maybe for the first time in almost six months. I've found it so hard to make stories work. This makes me appreciate good writing.

I found that talking about writing before I finish is bad luck. But I can't ruin the trend. It's going to be stories about Vermont. But I've never been there. I hope you won't be able to tell.

**

Right now I'm at work. Most often, I'll updatet his blog at work. Not out of convenience, but because I'm bored, always.

**

I've been consulting the weather often. For one, because I don't want shut-in days. I don't want to become the igloo that made an Inuit proud. I don't want to be on that bridge when my arms remain tired after scraping windows and blowing breaths from puffed cheeks so I can see out my rearview mirror.

GMail asked me if I wanted a map to my own house when I checked my email earlier. I said no. What a stupid question.

I'm waiting for Facebook in hi-definition. Notice how I omitted the -gh from high. That's so suave. I should write advertisements. I want to be the one who rots your brain by designing thirty seconds of bliss. I want to be the guy dragging pencils across ashy linen paper, drowning out the watermark. I want to be the mastermind who picks the cute faces covered in blue and gray textiles that make your pants drop, your lebido gird, and your face shrivel from drinking the soda.

Today I had the urge to drive up to Muncie. Obviously, I didn't.

**

This blog is over. There's a customer in front of my face. I can smell their gum and the things that are wrong with them.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Don't confuse this for praying after a game.

My dog is jumping up and down right now. I can hear here through the floor. She keeps barking and I'm afraid she'll jump too high and come through the floor. What would be awesome if she landed on the treadmill that's next to my couch and start running on it.

I want to find a better browser option than Safari. Firefox sucks on Macs. I'm afraid to use Opera. Boo. Google Chrome needs to come out for the Mac, I want to try it.

Today I went shopping. I bought some video games to add to my collecting. They are now cleaned and in my container. I also bought some records. There used to be a fantastic vinyl booth at one o the flea markets in Louisville, but it closed. Because of this, I haven't added any new vinyl to the rack in a long time. I wanted some Prince, but I didn't find any Prince.

Here's what I bought:

Are these albums burning your insides? Probably. You need to own these. It doesn't matter what format. You can even have them on laser disc, or written on your walls.

Someone on ESPN just said they have wide receiver syndrome. That sounds deadly. 

I'd like to get a new bass. Maybe with my tax return. Or maybe with your tax return.

Friday, January 16, 2009

It's cold on the underside of the Earth.

I have decided on the graduate schools I'm going to persue later this year. I've narrowed it down to five that would give me a never-ending boner if I got in, and five more that create an equally-as-large boner. This tells me a few things:

** I'm probably going to be reworking the same 10 poems for the rest of the year and that really doesn't bother me one bit.
** It might become tedious to start harassing teachers about getting letters of recommendation. Although, it'll probably be sweet to read letters that are fellating your best attributes.
** I might vomit a few times when I think about a board of individuals reading my literature and an essay about me and base me on "merit" and "potential."
** The thought of gradaute school excites me. I want to be in a small classroom with other people drinking Starbucks, running their fingers through unwashed coconut menthol hair, and nodding their head once somebody makes a great point about "last night's assignment." I'm practically crying just thinking about it.
** My beliefs that I belong in an academic insitution until somebody pours dirt over my embalmed face is pretty much true. I don't belong behind this stupid counter looking at this jerks jacket sit on a counter while he tapes a box together and ships off a pair of sneakers to his wife in Boulder.

I'll need to become more ruthless. Cerebral. A rusty bear trap covered in anthrax. Graduate school is a competition. Sure, I'm competative. Like... at Madden and with my Volkswagen stuff. But writing? I'm an optiate float when it comes to writing. I want everyone to do well. I want everyone to write the greatest piece of literature of all-time and get to be on Oprah and talk about it while breastfeeding mom's get excited about plot and the way my jeans are rolled up.

When I send out grad school applications, I'm going to include a knife with test scores and everything else that I shove into an envelope. I'll carve, "Cut up shitty manuscripts, please" into the handle.

Tonight, I'll probably have nothing for dinner, and eat nothing tomorrow for lunch. My body needs to eat its excess and celebrate that there's enough of me to feed on.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

You've acquired abs. I won't mention Dan Bailey in this blog, despite his fantastic everythings.

I want to reacquire abs like they're some kind of special skill you get from killing a dark wizard in a role playing game. I want to slay the ab monster and take his lumps and place them in two rows on my stomach. I'll invited people over for a taco dinner and they can grate the cheese on my abs.

Actually, right now I'm talking to a few people online. My body must have terrible circulation because my hands are cold in different spots. Like a chain of islands who's getting pelted with rain on its side the always faces the sun.

I'm living in one of those moments where I have 10 things I want or need to be writing about, but none of them are going from the back of my face out my fingers and onto the screen that you're reading. I'm also living in another moment where this dirty cup hasn't moved from my room in a while. It should just go away, for real.


Right now, I feel like both of those people. The man, because he's turning a knob hard, trying to show that nun what's up. And that nun because she knows in about 10 more years, some dude will invent Pong, and she'll dominate her monastery until God decides to give her cancer or touch her with an AIDS dick.

That last line was so tasteless.

I wonder what Tony Blair does now that he's no longer Prime Minister in England.

I've been thinking about how great it'll be when I live in a house with two other people. We'll be making music all the time and raising our voices to scare off the things that haunt us when sound in the room disappears. We will stare right between each other's eyes and know that everything will be alright, even if it's only some of the time.

You should go listen to some sweet R&B, nod your head, lay it back on a pillow, and stare at the ceiling until it's morning. Do it, please. I don't want to be the only one doing that.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

We call this town Leonard.

I live in a small town
where roads disappear behind hills.
There's one restaurant
between two stoplights
and people dine behind navy-colored shades,
scooping slivers of steak and vegetables 
onto tortillas and cradle beers
that stretch up towards lamps
long after the bar tender waves his hand
for last calls, 
and the lone bus boy drinks
leftover bourbon from a stubby cocktail glass.

People tear through the town circle
towards other cities. Suitcases
slide along the bench seats of trucks,
clips bang on door handles. Fire
funnels from a cracked downpipe,
singes pavement behind tires
that whine on loose gravel.

They feel the buildup 
going to a town housed by people that reach 
more than three digits. In anticipation,
they make sure to pack extra soap, 
a cooler filled with longnecks. A red Bronco
pulls up to a naked firepit. The driver gathers scraps,
while the loan woman pops off caps with a bent nickel,
passing them around a circle. Gusts of wind
blows the orange fire around in limp wisps,
voices disappear while a Vietnam veteran
who calls his shorter leg Little Buddy
talks about the time he went into a town
days away and sat around the same fire
with the same strangers.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Great quote. Last night dominated like the '76 Reds. I will open your ass with great force, so stop screaming.

I had a customer in the store today for about 90 minutes. She just left. She was here faxing insurance information. We literally talked about everything. I just wrote a list of everything we talked about, and it included everything in the world.

Before she left, she said this:

"Working third shift messes up your entire body. And it makes you ugly."

She speaks the truth like a preacher wishes they could.

**

Last night was one of the most epic nights imaginable. More epic than Godzilla. The reading was fantastic. Everyone had great literature to share. When I got to Muncie, I went straight to the mall and bought a pair of shoes to quell my fashion vagina. Also, I wore my Blue Jays hat, which made me want to drive right back to the mall and buy a few new hats.

Dan Bailey was drunk. He drank some Mickey's and a Zatec, which is probably the oldest beer in the land. I think the label said, "Since 1006," which is equivilant to drinking brown holy water. We walked from Motini's through the streets, and Dan was screaming like a ghost was inside his body. He was also displaying some sick agility, which probably led him to say, "I'm the most agile person in the world." Dan also said ass nuts a few times during the night, which was fantastic.

I read 8 poems, two of them I wrote that day. I'm not sure how the audience felt. A lot of people stared at me like I had a leg growing out of my face. I cracked some jokes when I read, and I think people may have liked those more than my poetry. I remember making an analogy that the stomach pain I felt due to the beer that was consumed "Pre-reading," was somewhere in the neighborhood of my dad getting ass raped by a cybernetic man.

Despite being totally pumped that Muncie greeted me with tons of fanfare and great people, I found myself not wanting to leave again. I missed all the potholes. I missed living in a shitty apartment with shitty people that do shitty things and leave their shitty dishes in the sink for me to not clean the shitty things off of them. It's pushing me closer to wanting to apply to graduate schools for next year. I had been throwing around the idea of taking the Praxis so I can get an emergency teaching license, and then take the necessary courses to get my Secondary Education license and teach high school. I still might do that, but reading my poems for twenty minutes made me want to get back in a classroom and write poems all day.

I miss that a lot.

**

I'm making myself write a poem a day again. Otherwise, I feel like I'm wasting my life.

Sorry, I have to end this thought because a prick just walked into my store and I'm going to disembowel him and use his face as a urinal.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Here is my caravan: a silver car.

Right now I am preparing to drive to Muncie. First showering, then I'll stare at a closet full of flannel and expensive jeans and decide what to wear. The baseball cap I choose is really important. It's like tying off the bull's balls before a rodeo. Like unwrapping the cupcake first, then filing your mouth with frosting.

I'm looking at a pile of poems and don't know which to read. Maybe I'll write something new. 

I expect to be greeted by veiled dancing women, some Persian rugs and maybe a chest full of jewels. Or maybe just a cold beer. Any of those things would be nice.

Monday, January 5, 2009

Sometimes I want to be a train. Other times something else.

It'd be great being a train. You'd have momentum posing as steam and smoke. People would call it pollution, you would call it sweat and the afterbirth of working for ten straight hours. It pours from your gears and the stalks that churn you forward. 

**

So, I think you should drink Vitamin Water. Never in my life have I drank something that instantly obliterated thirst. Like you're outside shoveling or trimming the cracks in the driveway, and your mouth tastes like what you'd imagine friction and despair meeting together and creating some soy-based dish.

See. People usually have to get through an entire glass of cold water before they're no longer thirsty. This stuff? It hits your lips like Dick Butkus pounding Larry Csonka right into frozen dirt. It hurts, then relief. 

Now I need to go upstairs and pull one out of the fridge.

Damn, no grape ones. I settled for the XXX concoction: blueberry, acai and pomegranate. My insides are on holiday.

**

I'm going to be doing a lot more reading this year. I'm promising this to myself. I'm open to suggestions. Or you can just mail me books. How about you do that? Mail me 350 papercuts waiting to happen.  I think I read two books last year. Maybe. Two novels. Tons of short stories and poems, but you can't keep track of those.

**

When I was a kid, I wanted to write some stupid song about a celebrity and get it on the radio. What about Rosa Parks? Shit, Outkast beat me to it. She was all pissy about the song, too, which makes me mad. It's a great song. Don't believe me? Watch this.

See, I knew you'd change your mind.

**

I shaved my beard today and now I need a haircut. Also, I'll be in Muncie Wednesday. Get ready.

Friday, January 2, 2009

They're sharing a chair right in front of my face.

The title to this post is a literal representation of something that's actually happening as I write it. Think of it as meta-fiction. Er, meta-blogging.

I just had a tough conversation. It'll be tough for a while. You know the conversation, you've had one with your mom or your neighbor when you hit his mailbox backing out of the driveway. The only thing that ever comes out of it in the end, is my body feeling a bit lighter and I have to pee. Well, that's not entierly true. Nobody knows what's true about conversations.

When my grandmother died in May, my dad inherited her Hyundai station wagon. It's silver and has less than 35 thousand miles on it. Driving it around and merging it between a Land Cruiser and an S-series Mercedes leaves a feeling of inadequacy. The car is something you can't see on any map, a breadcrumb you mistake as an island. It's alright, though. In this car, people just let you drive.

It's been driving me to work. Granny listened to the Beatles a lot. When I sat down to drive it to work last Wednesday Let it Be was on, and that's all I've listened to driving to work, running errands or getting food.

Well, until right now:


Muncie poetry reading on the 7th. Please be there, if you're anywhere close.