cxiv

“A world in white gets underway/

I want to be with you/

Be with you night and day/

Nothing changes on New Year's Day.”

-Bono, humanitarian and Certified Badass

            I’m really not a big fan of these society-mandated “NEWYEARSRESOLUTIONS,” if only for the fact that I can’t seem to stick to them for more than two months after their hurried initiation. Attribute it to my two-year-old attention span or my consistent belief that I am already perfect and need to change nothing about myself if you must, but making secret little promises to work out or make better grades has never really appealed to me.

            I guess I’m just very comfortable with my life as it already is: collecting over-priced comic books, making inappropriate jokes, eating unhealthy quantities of equally unhealthy food. I could have relatively easily predicted my life at the end of last year’s bitterly cold December, with me still obsessed with Star Wars, still singing to the steering wheel along with the radio, and still writing crammed little pieces of poetry into crammed little notebooks.

            This all being said, there are a few things that I would like to accomplish in the next twelve months. And so I would like to introduce:

            Brandon Wainerdi’s One-Hundreth-and-Fourteenth Irrefutable Law of Life and Love in General: A new year can inspire both hope in the future, and disappointment in the past. Unless you are me, in which case you just are excited to be alive, and don’t even believe in the Gregorian calendar. That being said, this next “year” I swear I will:

                                                                       

·      1. Figure out where I stand politically: I assume that I am conservative, if only for the fact that I grew up that way. But I need to figure out why I believe what I do, having not paid enough (or any) attention in Government class (apologies to my wonderful teacher.) I hope to all that is holy that I’m not liberal.

·      2. Write a book: Why the hell not?

·      3. Continue to play with toys: I have copied this resolution from a scrap of paragraph in my writing journal. This really means that I will be “buying toys in mint condition and never opening them, storing them in my closet back home where they will slowly collect dust in a sad state of semi-existence.”

·      4. Actually learning how to play guitar and harmonica: No more of this basic chord crap. Now that I know how to relatively play these instruments, I might as well get good at it.

·      5. Read more: I still haven’t finished the book that I started on the first day of the semester. As a self-proclaimed “avid reader”, I really don’t do any reading at all. My latest discovery is historical memoirs, so hopefully that both helps me boost my daily literary patterns, and helps me figure out 1.

·      6. Stop cursing: Nah...fuck it.

·      7. Stop drinking so much Mountain Dew: More generally, eating healthier because, let’s be honest, relying on Easy-Mac, Oreos, and Gatorade as my three main sources of sustenance won’t be doing miracles for my physique in the long run.

            This year I am most thankful for both the friends I have made in BIGCOLLEGETOWN and the friends that I have held onto and gotten even closer to here back home. Every year, I find myself looking back and realizing how much I’ve matured and grown as a person, which I can only attribute to the influence of those around me. And, whether other people can tell or not, I have been improving in leaps and bounds throughout the past few years. But I can mature only up to a point: everything past acting like a ten-year-old is no fun at all.

            So now let’s take this 365 days of white to see if my inner ten-year-old let’s me actually finish these seven NEWYEARSRESOLUTIONS.

cxiii

“Patience is the ability to count down before you blast off.”

-Website that popped up when I typed in “Counting Down Quotes” on Google

            It is 12:15, the first fifteen minutes of the last month of the year and I am counting down to the end of the school week, to the end of finals and the long semester, to the end of 2010.

            I am counting down to the end of the year, and looking very much forward to the beginning of the next one.

cxii

“The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.”

-William Goldman

            A self-realization: I write about not writing, too often. I’ll scroll through the digital trove of poems and paragraphs, finding snippets of snarky complaining about writer’s block in most every corner. It happens.

            Hypothetically, an entire month can go by before I can motivate myself to write a quick sentence or even jot down a quick midnight thought. I can go for weeks at a time, letting my thoughts build up and up and up and up and up until finally they disappear in a sort of neural anti-climax, where I will be left with narrow nothings to fill the white digi-space.

            Sort of like this.

cxi

“For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere...”

-Yoda

I am a director. Or, at least, I like to think of me as a director, small time in the corner of my dorm room, splicing together low definition cuts with cheap software.

I’ve been technically making movies since I was four years old, roughly moving the plastic limbs of my stormtroopers, jerkily stopping the camera to create a strange illusion of motion.  And as I would attach thin threads of floss to heavy starships (to make them fly on film), I discovered very early in my life that there is something graceful about being “behind the scenes,” that there is nothing more frustrating or humbling than sitting at a computer, trying to edit down a sequence of scenes to utter exactness.

You lose track of all time as you try to breathe life and believability into frames of digital captures. I’ve learned about patience and humility from these quiet hours, slowly mastering the art of OCD-fueled cutting, editing, perfecting.

When other kids were growing up, they idolized quarterbacks and goalies, hung up posters of Patrick Ewing (I think) and Troy Aikman in their rooms, living vicariously through their hard-court buzzer-beaters, their game-winning touchdown passes. But I was that one weird little kid, who enjoyed the bonus features at the end of the movies, who read every single “Making Of” book that the small public library had to offer, who wanted to someday be like George Lucas or Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson, my idols.

            And today one of my idols died: Irvin Kershner, director of, not only my favorite Star Wars movie, but easily my favorite film of all time: The Empire Strikes Back. This was the movie, with its snow battles and duels, that ignited my love for storytelling, my love for creating new somethings. (And it even happened on the very day I was about to mail him a replica clapboard from to autograph, which will now sit in front of me forever, unsigned, acting as a motivator for my future: my future writing, my future directing, my future being.)

            I had the honor of hearing him giving a talk a few years ago, hearing him gently remembering how he created the latex puppets and steaming vents, hearing him making the audience laugh and reminiscence with him, taking them on one final journey back down the film strip.

He was speaking about the importance of inquisitiveness to a child, another four-year-old stop-motion-God-in-the-making when he said:

"Good. You keep asking those questions. Don't ever think that something isn't important enough to ask your dad about, son. That's how you learn. That's how we all learn. Maybe your dad won't have all the answers, but those questions you can figure out together."

            So today I will watch his movie as a bittersweet homage , mouthing the words to every memorized line with a pathetically teary grin, answering some of these questions with him, and sending him off to the all-surrounding, all-binding Force with some style.

cx

“Yeah, Mom, I just got back home. I’m unpacking now.”

-Anonymous Handsome Devil

            It’s weird that I consider this poorly-lit, falling-apart, too-cold room to be my “home” now. 

            And now I am back, sideways-squatting in this narrow bed, getting used to it again after sleeping in my old, wide, beautiful bed back in Dallas for half of a week. And I can't shut my body down for the night because of the beating mechanics of my heart and the wiry conflicts and emotions swirling around in the deep whatevers of my brain. And all I can really do is let the noise of the almost-broken air-conditioner to waft over me, and let me sleep.

            I miss my home. My other home.

cix

“A day without a nap is like a cupcake without frosting.” 

-Terri Guillemets


            Napping has officially taken over my life. Feeling “rested” is my daily quest, brought on by the consistently recurring cycle of goingtobedlate and wakingupwaytooearly. My countable afternoons are being wasted and slowly disappearing with the change of the wall calendar; entire evenings disappear because of a poorly-placed three-hour “four o’clock rest”, sleeping through my phone alarm, sleeping through the day around me.

            Today I woke up at 1:51, the afternoon sky shining feebly into my blinds, my entire day (and a certain astronomy class) gone forever. And it was raining. At least, I think it was raining. From my bed it took me a good two minutes to mentally register the quiet crashing sounds outside my window as a thunderstorm, the rhythmic percussions slowly drawing me back and back and back to sleep.

            And so my eyes were and are lullabied shut into another nap cycle. Not that this is a problem: tonight wouldn’t have been productive, anyway.

cviii

“The back of yo’ head is ridiculous.”

-MadTV

            I’m becoming too distracted, during class or during conversation or, here, during mass, as I can only pay attention to the back of people’s heads, figuring out whole life stories from only the way certain strands of hair are pulled together or the number of bobby pins stuck on the sides, or the overuse of gel and other statue-ing products.

            I’ve become sort of an expert, I guess.

cvii

“Remember what Bilbo used to say: ‘It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.’”

-John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, from the mouth of F. Baggins

            I am driving around in the leather backseat of a new friend’s pick-up truck, driving on the midnight road in a slow circle of repetition, of a constant search for just something better than what we are doing right now. We do this for hours, stopping only for short pit stops at parties or dancehalls or houses that we think will be better than what we are doing right now.

            It is only later that night, lying in my bed as the sun comes up, unable to close my eyes on the truck and the costumes and the adrenaline, that I realize that we could have just pulled over on the side of the quiet highway, carefully piled out onto the light-glistened street, and had the best night of our lives.

cvi

“Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.”

-Mark Twain


It is 2:28 in the morning. And I have yet to start studying for my two tests tomorrow.

            There is no time to write tonight, except for half-awake scribbles on notecards and bullet-points, the day hours slowly creeping behind my chair.

cv

“A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.”

-Edmond de Goncourt

            I’m running out of these poetic fillers from my past, these cloggers of space with discordant, inapplicable nonsense. And, while I want to promise that this will be the last, this ten-month-old ode to a dusty violin (spoiler alert…), it will not be.

Old Friend

She looked just like she did three years ago,

Just like the day when you put her away

from your mind and went onto “better things.”

The day the music stopped.

Her red blushing skin still curves its way around

your fingered memories of ten years.

The only thing different is her voice:

discordant,

out-of-tune and

out-of-place.

It’s strangely satisfying, though, knowing that

your absence in her life affected her

some how.

And so with a sigh, you'll just close the

case, leaving the violin glistening in the dark mustiness,

and the music echoing between walls of

plastic and faux-leather.

civ

“True country music is honesty, sincerity, and real life to the hilt.”

-Garth Brooks

“Country music has always been the best shrink that 15 bucks can buy.”

-Dierks Bentley

            Ever since I have started college, I’ve made it a point to listen to more and more country music, shuffling 278 shadily-obtained Nashville-recorded songs into my daily playlist, trying to learn the new culture that I have been thrust into through the music of four basic chords and a Southern twang.

            I’m a classic rock guy, letting my days before this defined by The Beatles or The Eagles or The Who or The Commodores, by guitar solos and impossible-to-understand lyrics. So this is new.

            I’ve been slowly trying to ease myself into this, wearing the only two plaid shirts that I own on a fairly-regular basis, letting myself grow used to the heartbreak and comedy and slow polkas of these new artists, trying to put myself in their inspired position, trying to find something in common with the surrounding, boot-wearin’ student body.

            I was surprised by the relatability coming from the words streaming out of my dinged-up iPod, the lyrics giving new heartbreak to old wounds, transposing whatever mostly-imagined problems I have had in the past into a chorus or bass riff.

            And amid the bustle of the still-newness of the crowds around me, my hands jammed into my new jean pockets, sometimes the songs remind me of the past. It is terrible and sad and, again, mostly-imagined. But I just can’t stop listening and singing along.

ciii

“Welcome to the Church of the Holy Cabbage. Lettuce pray.”

-Author Unknown, (fortunately)

            If there is one thing that I’ve learned since I’ve been in college, forgetting the stacks of text books and hastily-scrawled notes, it’s how to eat by yourself.

            I’m not complaining or making a veiled cry for help, I’m merely relating that I just don’t have a “lunch date” every single time I sit down to eat whatever unhealthy concoction is on my plastic tray. And I love it.

            I’ve mastered the beautiful art of eating alone, decaying ear-phones plugged into my cold ears, listening to a new indie album while tackling only the most messy dish possible (barbeque baked potato or roasted corn or an onion melt double cheeseburger). And I have time to think and to write and to think and to just have some time alone for the first time all day.

            And to think.

cii

“Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.” 

-Kahlil Gibran


            I found an old scrap of paper, tucked into a old scrap of folder, wielding a flurry of short poems that I jotted down probably two years ago. And I was relieved to find that they were still applicable to my life, they still could have been written by me last night or two weeks ago or two minutes from now.

            And that is very relieving.

Untitled 1

The sky fades

but I still run,

my shoes caked with mud;

the road caked with dusk.

Untitled 5

The radio blares

a first-rate song

on a third-rate station.

I’ve been asleep for hours.

Title 3

The rain is dying on my window pane and
I’m counting sheep, even though

It’s only noon.

ci

“People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

            I like to consider myself a rather religious person, most of the time anyway. But today, after a long car ride back to BIGCOLLEGETOWN (note: never call your dorm “home” in front of your mother), I was exhausted. And, like every other time that I feel even the slightest ripple of tiredness, I quickly collapsed on my narrow bed and fell into a deep sleep.

            And then the unthinkable happened: I missed mass.

            Now, it could have easily been a subconscious motion, silencing the chiming bell ringtone alarm with one swift motion of my right hand while in some stage of slumber, but it was more than likely just an honest mistake. And I feel terrible.

            So tonight my bed is the linened altar, the lamp is the flickering candle, and my bedposts are the brick frames of the small chapel of room 372, and I kneel down to pray myself to sleep.

c

“Act your age, not your shoe size.”

-Horrible colloquial advice for people that have relatively big feet like me

            Brandon Wainerdi’s One-Hundreth Irrefutable Law of Life and Love in General: Maturity has different forms in many different situations, some less mature than others, but all equally overrated.

                                                                       

·      Addendum 100.1: Walking around a Science Fiction convention is a surefire way to appear more mature than you actually are. Maturity may seem inevitable but the key to avoiding maturity is to never be in a situation where you are the most mature. The obese thirty-year-old man painted in all green dragging a stroller around with a baby in a Klingon costume has nothing on you.

·      Addendum 100.2: Continue to play with toys. Or, at least, buy toys in mint condition and never open them, storing them in your closet back home where they slowly collect dust in a sad state of semi-existence.

o   Addendum 100.2a: Internet shopping with the plastic card your parents gave you is a good way to get back at them for not getting the toys you wanted as a kid. Surprisingly, eBay is seemingly a treasure trove of late 90’s memorabilia.

·      Addendum 100.3: Do not be afraid to live out childhood fantasies, like piloting the Millennium Falcon as Harrison Ford with a Wookiee co-pilot. Feel free to substitute a mini-stuffed animal version of Chewbacca and your dad’s 2005 Toyota Avalon, going twenty-over at 1:30 in the morning for the desired results.

·      Addendum 100.4: Girls are still hard to figure out. That never changes.

           

            I am eighteen-years-and-one-hundred-days old today. And I bought myself a signed Back to the Future poster to celebrate.

lxxxxix

“If the wall is breached, Helm's Deep will fall.”

“Even if it is breached, it will take a number beyond reckoning, thousands, to storm the keep.”

“Tens of thousands.”

“But, my lord, there is no such force.”

-Saruman and Grima Wormtongue, The Two Towers

            It rained earlier today, the quiet morning barely interrupted by the slow-falling, dark-cloud spew.  A splattering of tiny drops of water had collected into small haphazard pools on my new sweatshirt by the time I walked into Business Calculus 2.

            I’ve started to sit in the same seats for each of my classes, giving my new locations a sense of familiarity, of schedule. It’s easier to not pay attention to material that I have already learned when I have new people around me to not pay attention with. It takes me awhile, normally, to feel at ease with situations, never really letting my Helm’s-Deep guards down until I have completely settled into comfort about the newness of it all.

            The seat is a wet against my back because of the sweatshirt pressed against the plastic marbling but I ease myself into it, anyway, letting the rain water wash over me for a second time as I turn to the person next to me and ask what I missed.

lxxxxviii

“Sleeping is no mean art:  for its sake one must stay awake all day.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

            How can I sleep when I know that a more-rosy tomorrow will bring me back to my friends and family and pesky dog?

            Simple answer? I can’t.

lxxxxvii

“I base most of my fashion sense on what doesn't itch.”

-Gilda Radner

            I’m running out of clean clothes.

            Since I’m going back home on Friday, I thought it was a good idea to refrain from doing any form of laundry so that I could just pass on the dreaded washing/drying baton to my tired mother.

            But the plan is backfiring, slowly but effectively, as now I’m being forced to wear high school sophomore t-shirts that do not fit anymore and mismatched socks that clash with everything, bearing the sacrifice all in the name of “efficient laziness.”

            Now I just need to find a pair of clean shorts.

lxxxxvi

“It's never safe to be nostalgic about something until you're absolutely certain there's no chance of its coming back.” 

-Bill Vaughn

“I don't like nostalgia unless it's mine.”

-Lou Reed

            I’m feeling nostalgic today. And that’s never good, is it?

lxxxxv

“Lord, Lord, Lord.  Protect me from the consequences of the above prayer.” 

-Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

I have a test today and I have yet to start studying.

The study room across from my closed-door dorm is quiet, save for the flicking fluorescents and the barely-silent cries of the marker board, the cries of strangers leaving their dry-erase mark on the white gloss. It is distracting, to say the very least.

I am very easily distracted by anything. And while this computer is instrumental to my studying, it’s also filled with movies and phone books and flash games, everything I need to feed my mind with anything but Astronomy.

Instead of quarks and binary systems, the Boondock Saints scream profanities and prayers from tiny speakers, forcing me to not pay attention to text books and notes by holding two guns to my computer’s quivering head:

“And shepherds we shall be,

for Thee, my Lord, for Thee.

Power hath descended forth from Thy hand,

our feet may swiftly carry out Thy commands.

So we shall flow a river forth to Thee

and teeming with souls shall it ever be…”

            And I’ll add a little post scriptum: “Lord guide me to start studying, here, right now at three o’clock in your new morning.”

“…In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.”

lxxxxiv

“Better three hours too soon then one minute too late.”

-W. Shakespeare

I was late to Mass again today, rushing in while the echoes of the First Reading were bouncing off of Stations of the Cross. Awkwardly climbing the steps to over-looking loft, I whisper my silent sign-of-the-cross and sit down in the corner of a pew, avoiding locked eyes and awkward stares.

And so I’ll offer up a prayer to help fix my time-management skills, because they apparently leave much to be desired.

lxxxxiii

“I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to to dance better than myself.”

-Mikhail Barysnikiov, a ballerina(?)

I’m dancing again.

My legs are still sore from Thursday but this Saturday night was just too inviting to just stay in my dorm room, to just watch some old movies on my whirring laptop, sheets curled around my legs. And so I am out with the rest of the hoards of college kids, wearing one of my two plaid shirts, the cuffs of my favorite jeans straddling my low-top faux-leather shoes.

I have never been here before. I alternated normally between two “country clubs,” reveling in the familiar faces and lively, open atmospheres. But this is different. This place is cold and contained and tiny, full of older, hardened locals, death-staring at my plaid shirt and favorite jeans.

Dancing in a crowded space literally cramps my style. I just want to animatedly lip-sync the words to every pop song, not be fenced in by these people with their gyrating idea of “dancing.” The night is shoddy and unmemorable, save for the new sticky-note place in the back of my mind to never come here again.

Maybe I should have just stayed home tonight.

lxxxxii

“We like sportz and we don’t care who knows.”

-The Lonely Island

Sports have never been my forte. But these guys don’t know that.

For my entire life, I have been awkwardly misstepping across courts and fields and tracks, laughing at my own poor coordination, slowly working through failed catches and botched shots, getting better and better in my own right.

I’ve been working on it and now it’s time to just blend in, here, crowded in a shroud of mediocrity, receiving two short passes and running back an interception. I’m not too good, but I’m definitely not too terrible.  I’m just one of the guys.

lxxxxi

“Never trust spiritual leader who cannot dance.”

-Mr. Miyagi, The Next Karate Kid

It’s late and I’m still dancing.

The night will drag on until one-o’clock, until two-thirty-o’clock but still I move awkwardly but triumphantly on the dance floor, towards the center of the room, towards, the girl in the corner double-majoring in Education and Dance, towards the Calculus class at 9:10 tomorrow that I will probably sleep through.

I am slow-dancing towards the next day of my life.

lxxxx

“A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.”

-Aldous Huxley

I’ve been trying to finish the same book since the first week of classes, which has been an eternity. I’m ashamed to look at it, its spine arched back in a dance of memory preservation; my three-quarters-of-the-way-through spot saved by slow ruining of the physical copy. And it’s not a classic or a modern piece of geniu: it’s Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, a piece of cheap science fiction that I picked up at the bookstore, triumphantly carting around proof of my self-described-quirky tendencies.

But I have lost interest, to say the least. The words that used to give me so much joy, as I would plow through endless volumes of space battles and choppy tech jargon, now only invite criticism. I am continuously assessing the usage of this adjective or that paragraph break, finding nothing but personal vendettas against Matthew Stover’s writing style and dry treatment of the characters that I once knew like the proverbial back of my hand.

Like with any book that I have grown tired of, I find myself skimming the surface of the pages, jumping over entire bodies of words, racing myself to the end of the novel so I can contently put it in my bookshelf and never look at it again, so I can start a new book, a new chapter in my life.

I still have seventy-eight pages left. It’s time to read faster.

lxxxix

“Why is it so important for you to dream?”

“Because, in my dreams we are together.”

-Ariadne and Cobb, Inception

            Tuesdays are my SLEEPINDAYS and today was no exception.  It was 11:07 by the time I woke up, my roommate already gone for the day, almostafternoon light shining through the plastic cracks in my blinds.

            The first fourteen seconds of waking up are always the worst: the pair of contact lenses that I had forgotten to take out the sleepy night prior becomes, to say the very least, uncomfortable, clinging to my tired eyes with a dry stubbornness, forcing me to acknowledge that, yes, not letting them rest in their chemical vat of clear stuff was a just terrible decision.

            But after countless mornings of this unfortunate wake-up call, I still have yet to find the motivation to take them out each night, to avoid the mornings of two minute blinking sessions, trying to restore some inner moisture to the sleep-sand deserts of my eyelids. Without my contacts in, I (admittedly naively) think that I’ll stumble through the dreamscapes that this night will offer, which is not my idea of a solid sleep. I’d rather see my subconscious synapse sparks with the sharpness of prescription eye ware, leaving no dream step to chance, a way to see my deep REM cycles with clarity.

            And anything that offers this type of mental clarity is totally worth the dreaded dryness of this next late morning.

lxxxviii

“Math is radical!”

-Bumper Sticker

            I wrote a poem today in my 9:10 Math class instead of studiously jotting down notes, like most of the time.

Business Calculus 2

…and though I’d gotten a full five-and-a-half hours of sleep last night,

my eyes can’t help but to slowly start furling up, closing the light-receiving gap

between my twenty-nine lower eyelashes and

the curled upper lid.

…and it’s not my fault, I swear to God and Pythagoras;

it’s just that the room is bottle warm and dead still,

while the professor drones on and on and on and on

in her signature flatline monotone

about the cosine charts and increasing/decreasing tangent curves

and who knows what (I haven’t paid attention once in the past two weeks.)

…and, unless she is about to walk right up to my

sixth row plastic perch,

stare me right in the face, and

tell me exactly how the rest of my life will be plotted,

on the graph paper axis of eighty years,

I’m just going to sit here, writing poetic equations of verse,

my quickly-negating attention passing the x-axis

…and never looking back.

            This next test will prove interesting.

lxxxvii

“Come out Virginia, don't let me wait.

You Catholic girls start much too late.

Aw but sooner or later it comes down to fate.

I might as well be the one…”

-William Joel/Puck from “Glee”

            My old church hasn’t changed. The old ladies, constantly wrinkling and breathing through their mouths with heavy gasps, are still there in the first pews, anxiously fixing their white, lace veils. The stained glass windows, carefully moved from the old hull of a chapel, now forever line the connecting passages to the altar, saints quietly coalescing with the parishioners shuffling back and forth.

            And I’m standing here, kneeling here, sitting here, kneeling here again, unchanged only here, in the watchful eye of the petrified church ladies and the LORD.

lxxxviii

“O bed! O bed! Delicious bed! That heaven upon earth to the weary head.”

-Thomas Hood, Miss Kilmansegg-Her Dream


            I forgot how big my bed was. I forgot how the down comforter is molded to my body’s sleep posistion. And I forgot how the nineteen-year-old fan above me sings the best lullabies and how quickly I fall asleep.

Night Prayer

Now I lay me down to sleep                                     as i stare at my bedroom ceiling,

 it transforms.

 its grooved edges become

 patterns, grotesque and beautiful.

I pray the Lord my soul to keep                             i cry for help

as the patterns evolve into monsters,

glaring and menacing.

If I die before I wake                                               their bloody mouths swallow me

           enveloping me in warm darkness.

           it’s overwhelming,

           almost intoxicating.

I pray the Lord my soul will take                       i switch on the light in a cold sweat

         mastering beasts, who, i realized,

                      were only caused by a splinter        

                      lodged firmly in my mind’s eye.

AMEN

lxxxv

"That feeling that comes on Friday night? You’re gonna miss it. It doesn’t come back often. So you seniors that are focused on college, on your work after high school, on what you’re gonna do next... you got plenty of time for tomorrow. But these tonights are going by fast. You focus on tonight. This is about the guys in this room that care about each other that know there’s only so many more of these nights left…"

-The Boys of Fall

            High school football games still baffle me, with the exceptional possibility of injury on every down, with the brute strength of sophomores who during the school week can’t figure out their algebra homework, with the complexity of play-calling and the quiet fuming of the coaching staff. High school football games were the highlight of my life, up to this point, with the screaming and the laughter and the girls.

            And then now, after going back, after seeing these nights as an outsider, as an older alumnus (“Do you even go here?”), I can’t be so sure. Friday nights like these were what shaped me as a person, which partially gave me the strength and the confidence I needed to act in front of people, to speak in front of people, to share my poetry and inner thoughts in front of people. The stadium lights seem to be flickering at a dimmer light and the fumbling wide receivers seem to be moving just a little slower, as if I had over-hyped and more-than-remembered the past weekends and memories.

            But some of my old (weird word to use) classmates are here, familiar faces in a crowd that surprisingly I do not recognize. And as we laughingly toss the beat-up football around, I can’t catch more than half of their perfect spirals, I can’t throw anything except wobbly weak passes, and I remember, for good this time, that some things just never change.

lxxxiv

"Canadians are cold so much of the time that many of them leave instructions to be cremated."

-Cynthia Nelms

            It is 4:20 in the morning and it is now October 7^th. I don’t know how this happened. But the frigid air of the study carrel across the hall from my room has frozen me in this position on this poorly-supported, maybe-vinyl couch. I haven’t moved for the past two hours, silently staring at the black screensaver in front of me, warming my hands on the mechanical whirrings of my laptop’s internal machinings.

            And I have yet to start studying.

lxxxiii

“The crane will lift us way up high/up up up ‘til we reach the sky.”

-My mother, 1998, in a poem to my little brother

            For some reason, my school seems to be in a constant state of construction, never fully achieving its highest level of architectural completion. But in any case, towering cranes are stationed at, what seems like, every street corner, lifting up unimaginable bundles of brick or mortar or gravel, doing the work of twenty sweaty, tattooed men. It is majestic, nonetheless, piercing the cold BIGCOLLEGETOWN blue sky with its metallic reminded of mankind, an American flag waving from the top-most antenna on the top-most section of the steel terracing.

            And, gazing up at this sight, as I’m running to catch my next class (late, as usual), I can’t help but feel optimistic, stereotypically continuing to literally “keep my chin up” as the slowly swinging crane traces my movements on the pavement below it.

            The crane, however, doesn’t have to worry about a cute girl in a blue shirt on a black bicycle who is not looking up and is barely able to avoid the curly-haired new optimist who just had a wake-up call with the near-accident of reality.

            But I do.

lxxxii

“I play the harmonica. The only way I can play is if I get my car going really fast, and stick it out the window.”

-Steven Wright

            Checking the mail is the most adventurous part of my day. I’m always seem to be running late for class at the moment when I realize that I’m only a two-minute-sprint away from my post office box. So, of course, hyperventilating as I climb up the last stone step, I am always hopeful for something in the mail.

            Today is no different. Astronomy 111 starts in three minutes halfway across campus but I am running as fast as my rarely-exercised legs can take me, towards the opposite direction, each footfall equaling a silent prayer for a package or a letter or even a magazine. But, today, I got a harmonica.

            I’m not the most musically-adept person. While I used to play violin and can arguably work my fingers around a guitar neck, it takes me countless hours to reach a level of musical perfection that I can feel good about. And, since these aforementioned “countless hours” are instead normally spent on Facebook or watching reruns, musicality in my life is rarely achieved.

            This harmonica, though, is a completely different story. I haven’t been able to stop learning and perfecting with every harsh exhale, filling my empty dorm with the abrasive, somehow lyrical chords of a Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan or Beatles jangle (favorite word ever.) It’s become my release, my musical hyperventilation that washes all my stress away with the sometimes-grating sounds of “Piano Man.”

            I hope the people next door don’t mind, separated only by our thin plaster walls and, if they’re smart, some earplugs. I'm not too good, yet.