house of cards

last summer a friend and i were telling stories about growing up in the pre-digital world. i explained summer months in a pin oak tree with a book or a journal, hiding from my brother. he spent his winter months on the living room floor building houses of cards.

i thought that this was super weird and challenged him on the story.
who really sits around doing nothing long enough to build a house of cards?

turns out he did. and was in the guinness book of world records for making one with the most cards, ever. with a 1979 article from the Omaha paper, my friend proved that people really do spend ridiculous amounts of time on meaningless constructs, and the world takes notice.

last night, someone else and i were also telling stories about growing up. i spoke of my pin oak, and he talked his neighborhood on the lake, the freedom of swimming pool baths and no underwear in july.

in this conversation, i added on to the house of cards that i have built. rooms of families and other relationships arranged with such delicate mortar, that they are hard to keep upright in an honest conversation. i made no mention of brazillian voices, hallway pacing, or the squirrel on a fence.

later on his couch, in the fold of a blue silk dress over green corduroy, i got tired of arranging hearts, diamonds and spades in a scaffold that keeps falling. i have wasted too much of what i've been dealt in the neighborhood of "right things to do". too much of these places are done in with one breath. one word. or one squirrel.

i'm quitting card games.
what comes next will be forged from pin oak.
maybe something with a roof to tell secrets on.
and for sure, there's gonna be a fence that i can see over.

i'm chasing that fucking squirrel back into his own yard.

communication breakdown

when i taught creative writing, i was a hag for precision in language. never say tree, make it oak or ash. avoid the word angry, instead write blushing necks and the tightening of a shoulder. i was intent on the idea that words had to be exact to communicate what is felt, known, or believed. only in detailed language could we ever convey the truth in what we are.

last night destroyed that.
i sat at a bar with a man. and in our language, there was no miscommunication. everything we said was what we meant. politics. reading. family. city. all clearly defined.

but at the same time, we did not communicate.
the noise of the bar was a constant distraction.
the basketball fans on espn inexplicably wore yellow shirts.
the bartender tossed me the crown from a bottle of chambord, as though all women really want to be a princess. no matter how precise my words, the truth in that moment was that i not was even there.

and then.
on the way home.
i attempted to communicate with someone else. and the words would not come. stuttering lead to a change in breathing patterns and silences heavier than a house.

so i realized. that the truth in what i am is not in precise language, but in snapshot moments in my digital mind.
a text message at 10pm.
a cookie saved until 9.
the chatter of rain on a window.
and a door opening for one last good-bye.

this morning i stood in the street and watched May winds pull silver maples the way that sheets billow around a body; a buick travelling gallatin road, saying puddle spray, new muffler, and i'm late to work.

and the truth of what i was in that moment had no language but a quote in a book at 2am.

i'll leave you with this poem by Jack Gilbert

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write; and the words get it wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. Oh Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps spiral Minoan script is not a language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.

quote of the day

"Art and love are the same thing: it's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you. It's understanding the unreasonable."

Killing Yourself to Live
by Chuck Klosterman

this was offered up in an, "i've never shown this to anyone." moment from saturday night that i will keep in the queue of moments that i will never give back. this and 1920's bungalow windows to get on the roof, patterns of rust in the basement, the smell of his body after a horse race, losing a game of uno, the way he looked at me when i washed my face, and the moment i let go.

favor

i needed to do myself one of these and not have said the first thing that flies out of my mouth. i did that wayyyy too many times at steeplechase.

all i know is that i had the most interesting conversation about love that i have ever been privy to with someone whom i share nothing and everything with.

that's kind of beautiful.
it's also kind of sad.

hm. that's life.

call it a day

did you know that they make sardines in buffalo wing sauce?
yup.
and they're good.
at 2am.
with chili cheese fritos and hot and spicy chex mix.

my feet are salt swollen to a shrek like state of not-zen.
wagon? can you stop? i'm getting on for a week or two.