First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a fully assembled furniture set, with interlocking handgrips, interchangeable parts and and is available in the following colors; red, green, and banana yellow.  No, I'm sorry.  Fire red, forest green, and banana yellow.  I'm sorry, sir, those colors are no longer available.  We have slate grey, cobalt, and mesquite.  Mesquite?  Well, it replaces our fire red.  I'm sorry?  No, sir, it's not fire red.  It's mesquite.  Sir?  Like a red with a bit of charcoal to it.  I would consider it a deeper color.  Yes, sir.  Very good.  And how would you like to pay for that today?

Old christmas lights on my wall like a forgotten scar.  I'm slowing it down.  I'm turning it inside out.  But I'm not getting any closer to it.  I can feel myself out there, in the brush.  I'm just trying to be patient.  I have the gun in my hand.  I'm trying to be patient.  Everything that I want to talk about seems unutterable.  The past two years feel like a well-executed graph of betrayal.  And that shouldn't matter.  A lot of times, it doesn't matter.  I think there are times when I feel bad and the first thing I ask myself is, "well, why do I feel bad?"  And then I look for a reason.  But maybe it would just be better to feel bad and go through it, rather than put a face on it.  Because I'm assuming a sort of cause and effect here that shouldn't have to be there.

But maybe that's an excuse to get out of talking about how fucked up and out of sorts I sometimes feel.  Maybe the suffering through it is to avoid naming my pain.  Because I don't want to dwell on it, on Chris and Kurt and Erika and high school and my parents and etc. and etc. and etc.  There are times when I just feel fuckin' terrible and I can't tell if my feeling somewhat better now, after saying that is what really was making feel bad, or if I just am tied to a waterwheel, strapped to the wheel of fortune, and now I'm ascending when previously I was descending.  And how would I like to pay for that?

Maybe someday it will be possible to be everywhere.  But for right now, it's not that possible.  I would be happy if I could open the door and I would be looking out at an open field.  The interstate would be off in the distance, trying to pretend that it's the ocean and it would be night and the field would be fertile and ready to grow.

When the film gets caught in the projector but the projector is trying to pull the film forward but the film doesn't want to go, and an internal shoving match breaks out in the projector; that's what my insides feel like sometimes.  I can do anything, as long as anything involves doing nothing.

Why am I covered in sweat?  Why this world?  Why?  And why did I decide that I would time this and that I would write this and then post this?  What the hell was I thinking?  My brain is the projector, and I am the film.  I don't want to go forward, I just want to hold still.  But is that what's making me feel bad, or is that what's keeping me from feeling worse?

I remember thinking about writing a ghost story once and realizing that all of us are ghosts, if not in our own lives, then in somebody else's.  And just as most ghosts seem completely oblivious to who they are haunting, we will never know who's lives we haunt until later.  Maybe I'm burning.  Maybe I'm on fire.

There's a bit of a breeze in the room now.  How it manages to catch heat, I don't know.  I'm in the garage, for christ's sake, and heat's supposed to go up, right?

I remember a time in college.  I went to take a shower.  This was in Verducci Hall, itself a ghost for many years until it was finally torn down and became just a memory. In Verducci, if you weren't in a suite, you shared a bathroom with your roommate and the two people in the room next to you.  And the bathrooms had lights that were set on timers.  I was taking a shower when the timer ran out and suddenly it was dark.  And I started to get out of the shower to feel my way across the wall and turn the light back on.  But I stopped because, frankly, what was wrong with the dark?  Because the bathrooms were inset in the hall, and the halls didn't get very much light unless someone had their door open, it was pitch black in the shower.  I waved my hand in front of my face, waiting for my eyes to adjust, and they didn't.  It was just too dark.

There was no light.  There was no sound, except for the sound of the shower.  And slowly, my body acclimated to just feeling, rather than being led about by the twin dogs of sight and sound.  I could feel the water, very warm, hitting my body.  And then, after a few minutes, I could no longer feel the water hitting me.  I felt instead as if I was the water, moving through the darkness.  My body felt blessedly insubstantial.  There was only sensation, only the feeling of moving through darkness, of moving through the warmth and knowing that I had stumbled onto something essential.  I had managed to lose myself in the shower and was blessedly content.  I felt then like I want to feel now; like a flock of birds taking flight, and I wish that I could take that shot and catch those birds in mid-flight forever.

A long time ago, I was trying to figure out where marathons came from, what need they filled for people.  And I realized that running in a pack is our earliest memory, if memory it can really be called.  There we are, one sperm among thousands, and we're all trying to get there, we're all moving, we're surrounded and we're moving.  Someday we'll find a race that reproduces like rainwater running down stalactites and they'll have no marathons; they'll have strange contests where they'll rolll slowly down an incline, spinning like a spiral to their final end.  And then everyone will get their names in the paper.  And that will be that.