City Lunch

There's a kid wearing khaki shorts and a plain undershirt loading the back of his S-10. He looks up at me, holding a laundry basket with keyboard cords and stereo equipment spun together like a chunk of steel wool. He squints and looks into my face. Middle of the face pinched together like a magician's handkerchief.

This makes me uncomfortable. I'm up on my apartment balcony with my legs propped on the railing. Shifting weight back and forth on the balls of my feet. Leaves turn over anticipating rain. A mother bird perched on my neighbor's roof digs her nose into her nest. Sauce drips onto my work uniform from my sandwich. I'm drinking Sierra Mist from the two-liter bottle in gulps that push my cheeks out. I spill sauce in lines and I keep watching the basket.

I look back down and watch the kid rub sleep from his eyes. Lazy. He points down the street towards Ormsby and says, "I'm going back home for good."

"Great," I push my thumb into sandwich crust,"then you won't need directions."

He grabs at his crotch. I assume he needs to use the bathroom. Spring trees drop berries onto the ground and leaves keep turning over waiting for it to rain. Truck door slams shut and the starter clicks four times. I think to myself not enough spark, check your plug gap. Head out the window, adjusting his seatbelt. A woman rides by on a bike with an empty child seat towing behind her. Helmet swinging by its straps from the handlebars.

Bread crumbs float at the top of my soda and the kid yells something as his starter clicks again. I get up from my chair and hope he stops halfway home.

Didgeridoo. Work. Cars.

Remember that art festival I told you to go to? Well, I went to it with Brianne. Lots of fun. Tons of cool things. Also, I bought this.

Yes, a didgeridoo. You can pretend you're not jealous, or you can admit that you are jealous that I bought one. Either way, I'm indifferent. Playing one is a lot more difficult than I had originally though. At the art show, I talked with Ms. Tanya Gerard, who's been playing the didgeridoo for a very long time (I think like... 20+ years) and also been handcrafting her own for nearly as long. 

**

Everyone says, "Man, I don't want to go into work today," at some point in their life. Today is one of those days for me.

**

Helped my buddy do some more wiring on his Rabbit Pickup project and a mock-up for the fuel lines. I hope he can get it running for this weekend. It's our club's last gathering before the winter season. Hibernation for Volkswagens. How exciting.

Paid for nothing. Saturday. Junkyard hopping.

Usually, I get paid for doing my duties at work (packing boxes, making copies, cleaning, etc.) but on days like today where everyone should be outside doing fun things anways, for example, the St. James Court Art Festival here in Louisville, I get paid for sitting here at work and listening to music. Devin is in back looking for a dog on a website that's kind of like MySpace for animals. The store is clean though, and that's really all I ask for.

On topic, here's some of the music I'm listening to:

Listen to them all now, you'll thank me later.

**

I started on my car project, titled Project 2.0. You can read about it and look at pictures of it here. You know, if that's your kind of thing. If not, that's cool. In lue of the project, tomorrow is going to be some fantastic junkyard hopping, and if I can find a decent looking OBD1 head, I'll start cleaning it up and maybe get some of the motor started. Who knows?

**

Also started submitting some poems and stories to lit. mags, since it's "that time of year again." You should do this too.

Home. Closing in on milestones. Submissions.

I'm home from Maryland. It took me three tries to type that previous sentence, I kept spelling Maryland wrong. The show was fantastic. Tons of cars equivalent to a mortgage. Others drove like mortgages: loud, fast, unassuming. Waves were tall from the wind coming from Florida. People parked their cars in the sand and let the sink low enough for the oil pans to rest on a layer of sea shells and sea grass. 

People were drunk. I was drunk. Jager, Blue Moon, Yuengling. Not Bud Light. Everyone had fun. I slept on a wicker couch without blankets. I bought shirts from vendors and talked with people through hand gestures and poorly emulated sounds of a VR6 engine. But that doesn't bother anyone, they understand the garble. 

I'm finalizing some poems and flash pieces to send out to publications. Cool, huh? You should be doing this too, it's very important. And hey, somebody might end up loving your writing. That'd really make your day.

I mean, can you frickin' believe it?!

Thanks to No Posit for publishing one of my poems. It's an oldie but goodie! Check it out here.

And you should read it, because you have nothing else to do with your time, right?

Goods. Road trip. Biz.

This represents good music. As does this. I'm going to keep telling you to listen to it until you do!

Tomorrow after work I'm leaving on a road trip for H2O International in Ocean City Maryland. Think of it as the Woodstock for Volkswagen and Audi enthusiasts. The area is beautiful and my condo is right on the Atlantic Ocean. I'll be able to see things kind of like this from my window.

I'm getting ready to submit a bunch of stuff to literary journals. I was really excited to hear that the Broken Plate is now accepting submissions from individuals outside the Ball State literary community. Exciting.

**

I'm at work right now, and Devin, one of my co-workers just said, "LORDDDDDDDDDD, that fat bitch has some eggroll pussy. That shit's not good for your health."

And I just said, "You mean like a can of Nutriment?


Woah.

Short poem. Update. Other things

I'm neglecting this blog,
never a good thing.
It gives me a sick feeling
like my stomach is dropping out of my ass
or I just licked a battery.
Ultimately, I'm not neglecting my life
which is the most important thing.

That poem was about things. I remember a teacher told me a long time ago, "Never use vague words in poems. I want to see what your saying and describing." I was an asshole back then and thought, "Man, that's total bull shit. I can put whatever vague word I want in a poem." I wasn't trying to piss the teacher off. I sent him an email a while back. Mentioned graduating with an English degree. Mentioned getting poems published and he said he was proud. He rememebered me having long hair and I said my hair was long-ish again.

Right now I'm at work and the Canon Imagerunner won't shut up. I hear the feeder wheels spinning their layer of grease off, it's a stupid sound. Outer space sounds that never stop. Like robots having sex with metallic dicks.

That last paragraph was a great example of what not to do when you're writing. What a positive thing to tell an entry-level writing class. I remember one day when a teacher said "You need to know the rules before you can break them," and I said, "Writing a poem doesn't have rules." I felt so smart.

Here's another poem:

When you eat jerky,
you don't think of it as a former animal.
Texture of carpet, like eating a dried tongue.
Dried tongues sealed in a black bag.
A Native American on the front,
hand resting on the trunk of a rotting tree.
Wild dogs with sparse fur licking the
points of his shoes.

The former animal
never thinks of itself as potential jerky.
He or she stands in knee-deep water
swatting an orbit of flies with its tail.
When a man comes from the barn waving a stick,
he or she can't help but follow the rest of the cows
to a clanging bell.

Sad News

Writer David Foster Wallace was found dead in his home on Friday. You can read about it here.

Fucking sucks.

Not much writing has been going on lately. Tons of Volkswagen things, which may not be important to you, but it's important to me. Lots of working, too. Sometimes at work I make pretend customer profiles in our Pre-Production Assistant and imagine what kinds of products they can make. I pretend they're mad because their thumbdrive won't open. Taking off the cap, chewing it in a circle. Drawing backwards when it cuts their gums.

They're mad, but I finish their project. I bind their pages. In color. Double-sided color on legal-sized cardstock. EC4 cardstock, color code for Sea Spray. Kind of a periwinkle with black and tan speckles. A bird's egg or fragment of stone at the bed of a creek. Or stuck in the tread of an ATV tire.

I have a former professor who blogs here. You should read his blog. I like when he writes about nachos. I had nachos a last week at work because a new Mexican restaurant, Senor Iguanas, moved in behind us in the shopping center. We ran them some copies of their take-home menu on green paper, so they gave us some free food.

Good nachos, sorry there's no picture. I'd say the only real weakness was the fact there wasn't enough cheese. The refried beans got hard really fast and the chips were soggy like newspaper spinning in an open sewer drain after a storm. Still good, though. 

Read his blog, read about Volkswagens, and do some writing. 'Cuz I said so.

Manhood.

If manhood had horns,

I'd grab manhood by the horns like a bull

and tie its head and face in knots.

A bull's face as a sneaker,

worn at the sole, covered in tile grout.

And if manhood had horns

and was a bull,

I'd have its sagging brown testicles

in my gloves. Spinning and surface

flinching like sullen Earth.

Turning itself over in my hands

like a God that holds testicles.

Don't ask yourself a question,

like "Does God hold testicles?,"

because God does hold testicles.

He held your testicles in his hands

and turned them into plains

and pushed two sets of testicles together,

built them up into a hill,

then bunched his fists, moulding

the hill into a mountain over 

a million years.

And flattened the mountain

into a plateau with the side of his hand.

Everyone's manhood is a part of the Earth,

your manhood could be Billings, Montana

or just a tree.

An apartment building somewhere

Imagining something you've never seen before is imagining something you've seen before. A building with windows covered in dew tailing down the glass like transparent blood, children hanging arms down and scraping their elbows against yellowing stucco. Picking scabs shaped like states, balling up dried blood into circles. It's too hot outisde. Nobody is using the fire hydrants for showers, slickingh air back behind ears. Flies orbting piles of trash.

Mothers shake skillets filled with strips of meat and yell at the clock. Dad drags his finger across a newspaper ad for a used lawnmower, "2001 model Husqvarna. New drivebelt and battery. Worn seat cover, bald tires. Make offer." He puts on reading glasses and skims again. Skim milk in a glass.

Meats burns in a skillet and children continue to drag elbows, ball blood and scream at piles of trash. Somebody is across the street buying bus tickets with a sandwich bag filled with old pennies and arcade tokens. He thinks about a time twenty-six years ago in Idaho, riding a horse through a storm. An old horse with knees without cartilage, bone rubbing bone. Spurs into muscle. Drawn breaths behind rotting teeth with oats and grain stuck between. Thunder rolling along clouds like the beads of water down the apartment complex glass.