Falling asleep in the cul-de-sac

Last night, you crawled into bed, 

kissed my forehead and asked how I felt

about falling asleep next to you while it rained.

A car rolled through the cul-de-sac

a handful of times. Water from catch drains

sloshed dirty onto the lawns right before

automatic sprinklers turned on. 

You whispered it again and I told you

Give me like, five minutes to think about that.

I was hoping you'd fall asleep or turn on the TV

and forget about asking. All four corners of the room

were lit from the revolving door cul-de-sac car.

It's tires drowned out rain against the window

or the stray cat batting at low branches on a bush.

I guess it's good and bad, you know?

You pushed your head into my shoulder and 

took a long breath.

"I don't know what you mean."

The newscasters talk about a grand opening,

I know this from a montage of pictures.

I watch their mouths move with no words coming out,

just showing teeth and smiling.

There are nights when I have to sleep alone

and I ball up t-shirts and shove them in my pillowcases

so they feel more like a body. I'll wake up three or four times

and use the bathroom or get a drink. Then,

I'll lie awake and listen to music just loud enough to hear

over breathing and hope somebody walks into the room

to watch dusk and dawn say hi.

Well,

you fell asleep. That's alright with me,

as long as your promise to be awake

around 6.

The bottoms of my feet are itching.

I had to work late today. I had a feeling that would happen.

Now, I'm listening to Outkast. The days is getting better right before it's about to end. I'm not looking at the monitor while I type this, so if there are typos, I'm sorry. My face is buried in a pillow, the cold side of a pillow.

It's the best feeling in the entire world.

I want to tell you, whoever is reading this blog right now, exactly what I'm feeling and what I'm thinking about and who I'm thinking about, but it doesn't seem possible. I've actually typed a few paragraphs that just aren't making sense.

I have somebody in my life that gives me the bungee cord is stretched all the way and everyone on the bridge is gasping because their eyes are making them believe the cord will snap but their heart knows that the cord is going to just flex and contract until everything around them stops moving feeling.

A girl can do this to you.

My eyes feel like that little triangle piece that floats around in the blue water of an 8-Ball and tells you how many women you'll sleep with. It's time to close them so the triangle stops spinning.

This post will be long, guaranteed.

It's going to go on and sweep, like something Kerouac wrote. I never liked him, but wrote two papers on his work. I had a 'phase' where I was interested in Beats. Not anymore. I don't think I could finish a Ginsberg poem. Every male poet has a hard-on for his sincerity at least once during their life. I had a birth as a senior in high school. It died. Then another kid as a freshman in college. I read Howl like fifty times. I always hated how he edited the word 'crazy, from the poem, in reference to his mother.

Whatever, Ginsberg. Go scratch.

**

So, I heard somebody shit talk Yo la Tengo and that upset me greatly. It was while I was in Starbucks getting a latte' for myself and something with chai for a co-worker. I don't remember what this person said, but it was definitely total bull shit. My stomach tied itself in a knot and begged to die. It was limping like a gruff hound whose stomach sags and gets nicked by rocks. It was awful, almost like somebody was bad mouthing your folks.

**

Today I finally listened to Heartattack and Vine from beginning to end, which means I've now listened to every single Tom Waits album. Ever. I'm not sure what this says about me. I've never seen him in concert. I'd probably pay upwards of $500 if I got the chance to see him perform.

**

Opening Day is Sunday. It doesn't seem probable for me to put how this makes me feel into words. All I know is it's baseball season again, and I get to think of fantastic hypothetical situations, such as: would I rather face 1984 Dwight Gooden, 1999 Pedro Martinez, 1968 Bob Gibson or 1966 Sandy Koufax? That's like choosing between acquiring AIDS, heart disease, brain cancer or some virus that eats your face from the inside-out. You know all are inevitable death, it's more of a question of which one is going to be the most fun to die from.

Knowing that I actually saw 1999 Pedro Martinez, I'd probably give him the nod. Back then, hitting 98 with a chest-high fastball was a frequent occurrence, and when he'd pull the string on that curveball, the best hitters alive would look like toddlers trying to hit a wiffle ball off a wobbly tee. Oh yeah, he had a slider, too. And two change-ups. A two-seamer? Sure. It'd stiffle righties.

I think the scariest part about 1999 Pedro Martinez was his strikeout-to-walk ratio. 8.46 to 1. Yes. Not a typo. 313 wiffs compared to 37 free passes. Are you kidding me? And he only gave up 9 long balls. I need to dig up some vintage videos of Pedro dropping hammers on professionals. I mean, there was a time in Pedro's career (1997-2004) where he could've probably told each batter, "Okay, here's the sequence: Belt high, wheelhouse fastball, a circle change, down and away slider, and we'll try out another barn burner and see if you can catch up to hit.

There could be video game shit going on: people could slow down time, Matrix-style, and he still would've collected 300 strikeouts. The man can throw a baseball through a Froot Loop. He was that cerebral. It's a shame that in the twilight of his career, the man can't even get signed to a minor league contract.

**

One of my favorite things in the entire world is using the bathroom RIGHT after somebody cleans it. Not to be a dick, but it's like: it's comforting, you know? The toilet water is kool-aid blue and the soap is full and nothing else really matters, you can just piss or shit in a clean bathroom. It's weird whenever you use a bathroom at somebody's house, and you know it hasn't been cleaned in a few weeks.

**

The American Analog Set is a great band.

**

Let's curl up on the couch
so you can whisper something useful
or lovely.
It's your chance to stop using
the thumb-sized Post-Its
and the soft talk over the phone
while I press concrete at work.

We can just sit here
with my arms across yours,
and you can talk
talk until my ears get warm
from everything you say.
Then, sooner or later
we can fall asleep
to have time to think about
what we both said.

**

I like the prospect of us waking up together every morning. With bad breath and bad hair. Almost naked, cold feet, runny noses, the small bacteria strings that float around our eyes and whatever else. I've said that about other people before, but I never looked at them when I said it. Those other times I said it they were insincere. But so were those people.

**

I got that promotion at work. Kind of exciting.

**

I told you this blog would keep going. It's almost painful to keep writing. None of this seems pertinant.

**

I'd like to eat something with Tabasco sauce on it for dinner. Don't even care what it is.

**

This blog is over. For now.

I don't watch many movies 'cuz I can't sit that long.

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Spending $150 dollars fast

Hood comes up,
smoking engine like a bog at sunrise.
I dig the back of my head into the tire
and draw sighs into the air.
Cars rumble past.
Twenty minutes later,
a tow truck coasts around you
and cups the bumper like a sick child.
It grinds and pulls the car upright.
Both disappear beneath an overpass,
the car spilling its insides on the road.

Doin' jump kicks and parlor tricks while wearing spurs

So, updates happened sparingly, almost not at all. Lately, they've happened regularly. I needed perspective. I needed to miss the blogs I read, so I stopped blogging. It never occurred to me how that was supposed to grant me perspective or distance from anything. In fact, it alienated me.

Things have changed. Like cars and girlfriends. Both are new. Both made me reexamine what love is. At this point, I'm not entirely sure how to love either. I'm trying, though, which is probably the most important factor.

But yeah. New things, lots of them. I might be getting a promotion at work. New (better) schedule. New store. More money, maybe? Won't count on any of those.

My dad's not working as much. Thanks economy. He doesn't like to be bored, so he sits at home and stretches all day and makes faces at the TV. He just wants to work. He's a truck driver, and sometimes I thnk they're more important than doctors or politicians. I want to see what my dad looks like driving a semi through a mountain range. He probably looks furious and has the tip of a cigar hanging from between his lips. This image would be a great album cover.

Visual supplements of change:

78' Rabbit ABA Turbo. Fast. Green. Roll cage. Turbo. Wooshing. Backfire.

Gorgeous.

Also notice that I cut all of my hair off. It happens. I was well overdue. I don't think I'm ever going to let my hair get long again.

I think I said that at one point before. I'm a liar.

I'd like to go to Muncie soon. I need some sort of vacation again. This makes me a terrible long distance runner. I'd need to stop four times during a race to sit in a lawn chair and drink from a straw.

Oh well, I'm good at other things.

Everything gets laminated.

Some people call it old age.
When your legs tremble like splitting earth
and the only way you can get around
is from the assistance of something with an engine
or something with a battery hum.
You take sepia photographs of your parents
cuddling on stairs and laminate them.
You wear them on a laniard around your neck,
you choke tears when you glance down,
patting your chest with a sweaty palm.

I cracked open a beer and
nurse a small layer of foam.
My wife sits cross-legged on the floor
jockying the waistband of her pants.
She thumbs through pictures.
Water drips into a dirty pan in the kitchen
and every few seconds she looks up at me
with a bent four by six in her hand,
her eyes saying, "Please go shut off the faucet."

The head of my beer disappears
into long gulps of tan.
There's a stack of upside-down pictures at my wife's feet,
and the drips turn into a thin whisper of dishpan ping.
She hands me a small binder.
"Why not look through this for some pictures?"
I draw the bottle to my lips,
"I have nothing in my life worth laminating."
She lets out a fake yawn,
"Maybe you're right."

Watching the sunset hurts sometimes

You know?
It's like finding old celery in the crisper
but not knowing how old
until the stalk is lathered in peanut butter
then chomp.
Two weeks too old.

It hurts
because sometimes you're alone
in a park, picking at your flip flop.
The sky turns Easter.
Clouds burn and shrivel.
You just want the day to end,
then the Earth spins backwards
trying to milk forty-three more seconds
out of the day
and all you want to do is crawl into a mountain
of Ikea and breathe in down comforter
like it was the last six molecules of oxygen.

Other times, you're with the girl you love.
You aren't paying attention to clouds
or a sunset.
Imagine the sun whining, it feels neglected.
It wants your girl
or at the very least,
to be watched.
The sun wishes it had a lap
so the girl could fold her pigtails behind her ears
and cradle hands
and let out drawn sighs into your legs.
Enjoy this,
because somebody's jealous,
even if it's just the sun.

Project homes for birds.

I'm making a list of my favorite things.
At the top, I'll scribble crunching leaves,
not because it's semantically ambiguous
but because doing so burns my the bottoms
of my feet. My heels chap and smell like
campfire after a few minutes.

Crunching leaves is like gathering up clothes
that rest in a pile inside an open closet
and pulling on loose threads around the neck
until the shirt is a scarf that barely covers your neck.

And when that scarf turns into one long thread
I'm going to let it go and hope it blows across
yards and a bird can use it to make a nest. See,
the leaves are gone from the ground,
they're all part of nests. They're shelter to mothers
bading wings around a chick's shivering head.

Okay. Maybe I'm selfish that I destroy potential shelter
for birds. The leaves.

So, this is a conversation that's happened somewhere before.

Okay, so let's talk about some things that make us wonder.

Wonder about what?

I don't even know. I had this girlfriend a few years ago who would speak in a made up language when we had sex.

Did she know any other languages?

No, just English and that made up one. It wasn't the Charlie Brown grown-up speech, or a roll of pennies in a blender speech. You knew the words mattered to her and made sense.

Neither of us are smart enough to make our own language. Have you ever wanted to travel to the middle of the Earth?

Not really, I hate cars, and buses. And whatever mode of transportation might bring me to the middle of the Earth.

Just think about it for a second though: if like... theories and science are true, wouldn't you just get to the center of the Earth and flat there forever because of gravity and inertia?

Those are Scrabble words to me that're worth a lot of points. But yeah, it might be fun to be stuck somewhere for a while. You'd have a lot of time to write an apology if you needed to.

Yeah, I need to apologize to a few people. I tried to drown my mom's dog last week. It kept chewing through my shoelaces.

How'd you try to drown it? Did she stop you?

No, the toilet kept automatically flushing itself, so I gave up after a while. I did end up spending five minutes brushing my teeth. My gums felt like a rainsuit after I was done.

That's always a good feeling. Do you ever want to just run until your joints freeze up and your feet swell from all the sweat that can't escape your body?

I actually don't like running. I don't own running shoes. In gym class, I always ran in sandals. My arches are terrible.

What's a good arch or bad?

A foot specialist could probably answer that.

You know what movie I hate more than anything?

Adventures in Babysitting?

No, Forrest Gump. I love how your face scrunched up when you said Babysitting.

It's probably illegal somewhere for you to not like Forrest Gump. What could you possibly not like about that movie? It was flawless.

You know the scene where Lieutenant Dan got his legs blown off?

Of course.

I didn't care at all about that scene. I was supposed to. Somebody was mutilated, and Bubba died and I didn't even care. I'm pretty sure the first time I saw that movie, I walked in front of the screen and went to the bathroom.

Poor manners.

I know, I'm probably the only person who didn't feel something. The ending sucked, too. I wish that feather would've been sucked up into a plane turbine or something.

But then the ending would've meant nothing.

It already meant nothing to me.

But not to everyone else.

What's your least favorite car that you've owned?

Back in high school I drove a Probe. Black... it was a stick shift. The hood had a hole in it and whenever it rained or snowed, the top of the engine would steam like a restaurant grill. It ran until I got rear-ended on my way home from the movie theatre a few years ago.

Well, how could you hate it? Sounds like a dependable car to me.

When I was leaving senior prom, my date had her period on the seat. She ruined it. I don't know why, but I loved those seats. When I just didn't feel like dealing with my family, I'd go sleep in that car. After that, I couldn't do it. It was like the car was haunted.

I would've just bought a seat cover.

That’s not the point. The point is a girl’s crotch exploded on my seat. The only part of the car I could tolerate. I wanted to burn the car.

And the girl?

Didn’t put out. Kinda’ ruined prom for us both.

I never went to prom. I just stayed at home and welded.

Welded?

Yeah, it’s the best feeling I’ve ever had. I soldered, too. Have you ever made something out of nothing?

I don’t think that’s possible.

It’s entirely possible. That’s what welding is. Turning waste into resources. Remember shop with Mr. Tosch?

I skipped twice a week.

That day he brought in all of those scraps for us to turn into furniture was the best day of my life.

All I remember about that class was making the electric bird feeders. Mine killed birds.

You’re such a masochist.

It was entirely on accident.

Doubt it. But seriously, I made my parents an entire patio set for the campfire. They still use that shit, it hasn’t rusted.

The man’s nails were piss yellow. That always freaked me out. I think he was Jaundiced.

Your attention to detail is nauseating. I always thought that his “worthless class” was the least “worthless class” we had to take in high school. Remember that business prep class?

The one where I drew dicks all over my resume?

Flip books. Every day in the corner of that text book. Every single day.

Nothing wrong with that. Although, I’m glad we had to take it. It was almost like having back to back study halls.

Thinking about that class is making me tired. Do we have any more chips?

Baked Lays or those lime tortilla things?

Either. At this point I’ll take anything with sodium. My insides are wilting.

I love running my finger around the base of this bean dip jar. I feel like that plastic diver in the aquarium.

Can you imagine how wonderful his life is? Like that scene in Life Aquatic over and over again.

I cried during that scene. It was so sad. He finally won.

I know. Angelic Huston is such a fox.

A fox?

A fox.