The new jam

Stuff I'm enjoying for summer

-Zinfandel (very hospitable to Cabernet enthusiasts)

-Wearing a T-shirt and khakis to work and putting on a sweater when I get there

-Curry and cayenne in my oatmeal. To literally spice things up

-Biking around DC. Bikeshare is here to stay

-Lightly dressed salad consisting only of cabbage, ginger, carrots, and capers. If you don't like raw cabbage yet you're missing a bet

-Saving lots of money and getting a nice tax deduction for IRA contributions

-T.B. Sheets: haunting when you know what it's about

-Making my own (everything)

-Rapid tomato growth

Early August Heat

-An overactive icemaker that can be heard for miles around
-The bottom drawer of the fridge freezes everything you give it on account of a vent that circulates air between the freezer and fridge compartments
-Getting used to (a new set of) other people's kitchen and cleaning habits
-Condo association regulations on the size of trashcans
-A little less space that is indisputably my own
-Violence Cormac McCarthy describes in minute detail that only seems to lead to more fastidiously explicated violence

Update from @work

-Eating cheaply with rice and beans - very good move. Lots of chickpeas and cabbage, and my favorite, parboiled rice, which has an 'improved nutritional profile,' and is resistant to weevils [boll or otherwise].

-I woke up at 6 this morning and went running on autopilot. Couldn't have even been awake for the first half mile or more. It was good enough, and could become something like a twice-a-week activity. Overtraining could be a risk, though.

-Wrote a list of plausible rejected Jon Huntsman campaign slogans [in an attempt to be funny]. Maybe I'll post them later, if they stand up to increased scrutiny. Or if they make A laugh.

-Plain yogurt, maple syrup swirl. Perhaps not as good as yogurt and honey, but still bears further investigation.

-District of Columbia: 200 range of ZIP codes. Federal Government: 202-205 range. Virginia: 201, and 220-246 ranges. Massachusetts, of course, 010-027 range. Shall I go on? I have a ZIP code map of the United States in my office. ZIP codes are very interesting. It stands for Zone Improvement Plan, if you were wondering.

-Idaho: 832-839 range. Tennessee: 370-385 range....

apologia

-I'd like to apologize to Uncle Dick for making fun of him for liking Heineken in 2009. That was completely out of line.

-I'd like to apologize to Femi for punching him in Ouaga in 7th grade. That was mean and utterly unprovoked.

-I'd like to apologize to my mother for those teenage years where I was mean and nasty and generally difficult. I don't know where my head was.

-I'd like to apologize to M—— for not accepting her invitation to the Prom junior year. I was confused.

-I'd like to apologize to myself for not trying harder in college. It didn't really come together until it was almost too late.

-I'd like to apologize to Allan because it didn't work out.

-I'd like to apologize to my father for having a short temper sometimes. I love you anyways.

-I'd like to apologize to A for saying that the day we spent together at the ICA peaked at breakfast. It didn't.

-I'd like to apologize for not taking the time to complete this list. My attention span is lacking at times.

And all the same, how can I wish that anything had gone differently? I'm right where I want to be.

Pepper soup

I have a way of having my faith restored. There is a way. There is a will. I will go on, if I can will it. Will you wish it? Will I? I thought you'd never ask.

Out of context, floating free in time and space

I have a feeling that F. Scott Fitzgerald had the opposite problem. He had too many people that believed in him. There's a quote on the back of my book that even says “You are a great writer. Believe it, not me.” I'm getting the feeling throughout this book that Scottie [that's what his intimates call him] was given to believe that he was a great writer a little too much [this is another problem, his abuse of italics in the text]. He has too much confidence in himself as a man of letters. He believes too much in his own powers of description. He is also clearly pretty snobby about being an American expatriate in Paris, and is eager to show how much he knows about this lifestyle, much the same as Hemingway.

hurry, hurry, hurry, before i go insane

toe-stepping

uncomprehending streetlights
looked askance at a dim,
hazy talk about nothing really [don't you just tend to agree with people]

we three blanketing someone else's car
philosophical after half-a-bottle [only]

she burned me with a cigarette,
And I didn't even notice she was there.

Rambling again

I've made a huge mistake, find myself being drawn intractably into maw of a terrifying, uncomprehending bureaucracy whose only end is to perpetuate itself profitably. Don't assume that profit is valued over perpetuation.

* * * * *

How can you ever hope to produce something great when the way you conduct your business is so narrow-minded? We are looking for cogs, not people, and we will gladly numb your personhood into nothing if you yearn to be a cog, find your place, catch the same notch on another cog, again and again in increasingly arcane shades of meaninglessness. You will take consolation in HAVING BEEN OF SERVICE.

I used to live in Pittsburgh, now I live in New York

-What was that sickly sweet smell that flashed through the train car? I narrowed it down to blue cheese, bourbon, or my own sweat fermenting.

-Please notify a crew member if you plan to vomit at any time during today's trip. You will be swiftly dispatched.

-Bernard's bald head and teeth gleamed in the advertisement's photo, and seemed to welcome the inference that earning an MBA in Philadelphia would be safe for a black person.

-Gleaming against the murky dusk, the repair bays stretched efficiently into the middle distance.

ROYAL SONESTA

-Eternities spent in station stops were really only a minute or two, and the train bolted down the line so quickly that it had to slow to keep from reaching the line's terminus too early.

This Year's Model

I feel crazy today, thought I should write it out

Last night I

drowned in a sea of tapioca and tequila

Usually do not feel scorn

Ashamed, unwed

Do not have a kinship with the job,

fall in love with a cubicle

The blown-out umbrella on a platform in Salem had aimed to break

my heart

but it had no claim after we

laid eyes on

stacked railroad ties

* * * * *

I loved her I love her I will love her I have loved her It's her I love I can't not love her I am loving her usually do not feel this way, maybe that's a lie, I tend to love, Allan forms strong attachments with people that is the hallmark of him. He has to love others and bring them close to exhale into their ears twenty years of talk love breath fear anger beauty. This specimen talks too freely it wants to captivate people and inflict on them its oversized useless brain.

People laugh as they please to, People all want to be writers, People know everything there is to be known child please

Sometimes I try to understand everything at once

Sometimes I try to understand everything at once:

Everyone else, to a man, was saying Good Luck, but I preferred to tell her Congratulations to be leaving that harried, always rushing place that took up so much of her life. Good Luck? An insult almost to her. I expect that she'll do good things; luck shouldn't have too much to do with her trajectory after she's gone from here.

* * * * *

My father became obsessed temporarily by the prospect of capturing the twin rocks as we saw them. It strikes me that they may have held a certain mystical taste of the past, to him.

* * * * *

Bad news for you: I got a twitter account. If I started saying the word 'tweet', though, it would feel like giving in. Twitter is entertaining. It gives me little doses of people whom I think are funny. Is this so frightening?

* * * * *

A full life, that's nice. If I come off disjointed, it might be on purpose, have you considered that? Do you answer these questions? I try not to bother, but I care just a little too much, you can tell.

* * * * *

Short on time, long on options. Shortfalls I fear are the ones that cut between you and I, but at least now it doesn't seem like there are many of those. Look at your picture and be happy, not regretting anything that has happened in the long stretch of time behind. Happiness doesn't come without peril, but I pray this is right, and I think it is.

Windwhistle sentences, Part One

*Martin wished she had given advance notice of her visit, so that he could have made his expectations far too high to meet.

*The crown of the rock was encumbered by low clouds and a crowd of puffins.

*He took his frigid feet as a sign he had long overstayed his welcome in the shady nook.

*Caressed by the ever-present breeze, his feet carried him to places he could not have expected, even as he wished he had.

*The refrigerator laid ice cubes four at a time, and Mary grew tired of the private joke she replayed in her mind when they fell, clattering.

*He wondered fruitlessly if her claim that it was different this time around was only a feint, though he knew it to be genuine.

Check potatoes, stir

I left the truck running as we switched positions. So this is it.

Demure brown chairs stacked high in the back.

Don’t tempt fate by counting your chickens before their eggs are all hatched in one basket.

I couldn’t tell if I was smelling fresh bread baking or the celery-colored paint from last night.

That I have intuited things they couldn’t find out through hours of hard research.

I think it gives me comfort to know that I could always switch email clients. Even though I’m with Outlook now, I could easily change to Thunderbird, and that might make a big difference.

Dreams of domestic bliss, being cheeky about other people’s friends, private jokes with my lovely partner.

how do you vary sentence structure in a cover letter?

I have a hard time dealing with confrontation, a hard time to make a decision. I use humor as a sort of social lubricant, smile and laugh at all the right places, but it doesn't always work, and it makes me feel fake sometimes. I'm never not hungry. People's parents usually like me. I don't do very well at meeting new people, but I like to do it. I can't stop starting new books. I ask unanswerable questions of my television. I make jokes that only I would get.

These are the things that maybe you don't want to know about me, but maybe you should.

I am a person. I am a whole. I am not to be used only for good times.

I worry a fair amount about everything. I go hot and cold sometimes and am short with people I love. Inevitably regret it, but still, I think it's how I am. I know too much about living cheaply, but I always live well. I scoff at people who can't spell, but forgive the fault at will. I love talking to old friends, even when it makes you miss how things were. I want to tell people how much I love them, but usually can't. I like knowing smiles. I'd like to hold on to being 19, or 22, or 24, but not cling desperately. I mouth words when I type them in personal communications; this may look unseemly when I'm in public places. I'm not very good at sleeping anymore. If I'm serious, it's probably because I don't want to be the guy who always tries to be funny and is never serious. I tend to hold doors for people all the time, but I'm nervous about the interactions this entails. I don't know how to look at people in the hallways at work. I pray for things that I think I need. I want to write effortlessly. I want to live a good life, and be loved.

Then the radio to Heaven will be wired to your purse

Your way about things. How you sort of lean in and smile and say "This weekend?" How you make time to kiss me (you're so busy, it's an honor). Your mock surprise/super-excited look upon receiving a gift. The way you just look at me and smile a little during pauses in the conversation. The way you are. How I can't help but want you around. How you honestly seem to know something about everything. How you wouldn't let go of my hand, that first night you held it.

That's why.

Miracle Man

I'm a catch, what are you?

Some other kind of trite fishing metaphor?

I'm a catch, but I hope not to get hooked; it might hurt.

Don't want to fight an angler with a pole.

Let me determine my own fate,
Lady of the Lake.

An afternoon spent laughing

-We'll start with a quotation of one of Barthes' parenthetical references which struck me:

(A squeeze of the hand -- enormous documentation -- a tiny gesture within the palm, a knee which doesn't move away, an arm extended, as if quite naturally, along the back of a sofa and against which the other's head gradually comes to rest -- this is the paradisiac realm of subtle and clandestine signs: a kind of festival not of the senses but of meaning.)

This is from A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes, published in 1978. It's an amazing book. It describes in minute detail all the sensations of being in love, simultaneously from a detached philosophical perspective and from the perspective of one who has been in love. Barthes has been a lover, but is viewing love in a cold, dispassionate, academic manner. The juxtaposition of the two within the book is fascinating.

-The way it feels to wake up an hour before the real post-time, and put a pillow over your head, with utmost confidence that you'll be able to get back to sleep. So much confidence that you don't know you have confidence in it; you experience it as knowing you'll get back to sleep, as a fact. How many things can we really know with this kind of certainty? These moments are valuable when they happen, because they are so rare.

-Feeling of waking up in a cluttered, dirty apartment, wondering mostly why? Why bother with all this again? This feeling had passed by the time I was showered and getting dressed, but I remembered the panic there was in it. Not getting anywhere is what it felt like. This coffee cup I left on the corner of my desk was there when I went to bed last night, it is still here this morning; Nothing ever changes, nothing I do means anything. I don't know why the feeling passed so quickly but I was happy to let it go. Something in the bustle and work of getting dressed and ready to leave felt significant enough to reassure my nervous heart.

-Heaven help me, but the best thing I did yesterday was to let myself pass out at 11. I always wake up too early on Saturday anyways. This time I was prepared, though. Woke up at 6:30 feeling well rested, and I thought it had to be about 10 until I looked at the clock. Went back to sleep until 7:45, when I woke up with about 8 and a half hours of sleep under my belt (It's only 11:30 right now, and I've been up for four hours. What a lark!). It felt great, and it makes for a day of limitless potential, which I will now proceed to squander.

-Emptiness of the train seat that was full a minute before. Now, sun shines freely through a window that had been obstructed by the face of a stranger. She is gone now, to God knows where. I'm almost sad to see her seat unfilled. I had nothing to do with her, why do I grieve her absence? Is it that any trace of a loss hurts us as humans? Was it the way the light fell, that it just looked sad? I don't know, but it hurt me that she was gone. Human emotions are baffling.

[semi-appropriate lyrics that I was thinking about on the train while pondering the above incident:]

The person across from me, sitting in her train seat, reminded me of you.

And I looked out, past her cheeks, through the glass light conduit. The sun had sunk, disappeared into New Jersey; Oh why don't they have phones on these things?

What can I do? I'm stuck thinking about you.

Did you know my sweet, yeah that I once took the liberty of watching you in your sleep?

Eyes of an angel

I like to lose myself in these pop songs and little poems. Remember what it feels like to be lost? Pour yourself into something bigger; that's dangerous, you might get swallowed up in another. Forget who you were when you started. Isn't that everything we do? Give ourselves away to get someone's self back in return.

The better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part I have sav'd my life.

Being on my lunch break at work, and not having too much else to do before 1:50 pm, I thought I'd post a list of some of my favorite periodical titles, whether absurdly obscure, or just humorously titled, that I've encountered working in the Checkin department.

-Portable Restroom Operator - Basically everything that could remotely be considered an industry has its own trade paper. This is one of them. There's a lotta dung out there that needs to get moved and disposed of, and this is the magazine for the people who are out there on the front lines every day.

-Australian Clay Target Shooting News - The title really speaks for itself, like an absurd Sci-Fi channel movie (Sharks in Venice, anyone?). The thing that gets me, though is how small the target audience must be for this publication. How many people subscribe to this? 500? 1,000? Can't be too many more than that, can it?

-Journal of Civil War Medicine - Not that funny a title on its own, until you notice that it's published by "The Society of Civil War Surgeons". Sorry guys, it's not 1863 anymore. You can call yourself "Civil War Surgeons", but you're really just 20th Century People who have way too much time on their hands.

-Millionaire Corner - For those issues in a millionaire's life that ordinary commoners just wouldn't understand. As I remember, this publication concerns itself mainly with telling millionaires about things that other millionaires enjoy, and that they should therefore enjoy. And I think it goes without saying that you have to be a millionaire to subscribe.

-Mythprint - I think the lithping English professor/mythologist who thought of this title is still patting himself on the back to this day. Mythprint! Get it? Mythprint! No, seriously, do you get it?

-The Avant Gardener - My favorite, and another one, in the vein of Mythprint, that's just a little too clever for its own good. Really, guys, you've outdone yourselves. Let's scale it back a little. Once again, though, everything you need to know about the magazine is right there in the title. Looking for cutting-edge horticultural techniques? You've come to the right place!

strange abstractions that come out of my head from time to time

I'm not afraid to be myself. I guess that's the biggest thing. It feels like being free. It feels like I'm finally coming into my own, like I'm right where I ought to be. And maybe that means recognizing that there isn't anywhere in particular that you have to be, and that right where you are is just fine.

Feels great,

Affirmation.