lxxxi

“There are never enough hours in a day, but always too many days before Saturday.”

-Hanson’s Treatment of Time

            I just can’t believe that the same people that I shared classrooms with, that I shared every Friday night with, that I shared long heart-to-hearts with in the corners of loud weekends, are not with me anymore. We have spread far apart, across highways and state lines, separated by miles and time zones.

           

            Time zones. They are feeling the rays of the new day an hour before me; they are able to tell me what tomorrow brings before I can even close the chapter to this evening. Or they are dwindling behind, on the rocky West precipice, tailing behind the shadow of Texas time with slowly moving clocks and half-paced seconds.

            And now even the schedules of our sacred weekends are awkwardly shifted away from each other, with slight jetlag and heartache.

lxxxi

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."

 -Ray Bradbury

I found a new spot to write on campus and so, for the first time in a long time, probably brought on by the itching sense of betrayal in my heart because of...something, I wrote.

Writing Again Again

My left thumb is nervously shoved against my pointer finger,

as together they grip the too-often-chewed black Pilot G-207 pen,

a final, dying artifact from the high school years of my life.

And now my head is racing and I think I know why, because

I’m putting my inky thoughts to fresh paper for the first time in months.

I’m so used to letting my thoughts, eager and barely matured,

run wild in text boxes and HTML digital spaces

that, now that I have to herd them into quirky tiny verse-squares, I can barely contain them and

this is just pretty counting as long-form prose, and not very good ones at that.

This run-on, out-of-control train-of-thought will be ­eidi edited I swear so

that the words on both ends of these now-unseen red margins will cease to be

nonsensical

and start to be

real.

The cooler winds and the new zipper sweatshirt

are the physical reminders of a summer gone by.

And a bundled-up, front-bitten newness which can only be from the fast-approaching fists of winter are

nature’s reassurance that, I may have gotten used to my new bed

                                                                                                my new friends

                                                                                                my new clothes but

I will never stop missing...

The stone bench lifting up my khaki shorts is pressing against the black leather wallet that my father gave me before I left home.

This uncomfortable is forcing me to pay attention to the scrawled nonsenses I’ve been forcing myself to illegibly jot down for preservation.

I’ve been steadily writing for the past twenty-eight minutes,

still avoiding the reason that I even got myself out of bed, put on my worn, comfortable, familiar tennis shoes and walked around the quiet Sunday campus.

And I will continue to avoid it. I don’t want to even think about my life for maybe the next week

or four days

or tomorrow

because I’m perfectly content to write this free-verse-pretty-much-prose for another thirty-four-minute forever.

And then maybe I’ll take a nap.

lxxx

"I have the attention span of a turnip."

-Chaos Golubitsky (Who?)

            My attention span is very short, mimicking my seven-year-old tendency to watch twenty-eight minute Saturday cartoon shows about superhero leagues and my nine-and-a-half-year-old tendency to practice lightsaber fighting with beat-up broom handles.

            And that, in a nutshell, is my excuse to cut this paragraph, this train of thought, this brief look into my life, short.

lxxix

“It isn’t just what you know and it isn’t just who you know now. It’s actually who you know, who knows you, and what you do for a living.”

-Bob Burg

            I am back at the movies again, another Friday night lightly void of the stereotypical college parties that I just haven’t been able to find (not that I have been actively seeking them out.) But this time the screen is playing out a half-truthful version of my life, complete with flickering images of tongue-in-cheek business cards and computer adeptness, framed by a very-appropriate sense of awkwardness. The words, the lines of code are shot as a way out of the oppression, of the private loneliness.

            But how much is public? What is left sacred after I finished typing a final period, capping off three paragraphs of my most personal thoughts? The fact that I crave this kind of outlet is slightly off-putting, a projection of my advanced, slightly humorous, sense of egotism. Above all else, I need to have someone that cares about the inner thoughts that I’m having, that I’m typing, that I’m spilling out onto the perpetually dusty enter bar.

            And if that means giving up any sense of privacy, then so be it. I have nothing to hide. And everything to share.

lxxviii

“You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.”

-Laurence J. Peter

            For a lack of a better term, it’s weird being here, at this house annually rented by people that I have only known for a week, watching my team (also a weird term to use) lose to a Midwestern power-house. I am laughing and singing with a new group of people that have only known me for a week. I am dancing and cursing with thirty new others that still don’t know all my quirks and my little inappropriate tendencies, the stories of my awkward underclassmen years and the quiet words that I type on this keyboard.

            But I can’t help feeling comfortable around them, though, these new friends who share the same immature humor and the same underlying sense of seriousness. And that’s all that matters, as strings of swear words and jokes playfully jump around the room to the tune of the college football announcers on the screen in front of us.

            New people? Dancing in front of strangers? I can handle this.

lxxvi

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

-Nick Carraway/F. Scott

            My fluorescent lights are all flickering off I my room and I am finally allowing myself to fall asleep, after letting the five-year-old inside of me get distracted for the past few hours by whatever cancelled space opera television show is still silently streaming on my muted laptop. Three o’clock in the morning has become my normal college bedtime, a calculated stab at independence. It is not, by any means, a healthy form of parental and social rebellion, but only one that drains my energy.

            Settling into the cushioned groove of my pillow, I find myself about to fall asleep only to be subconsciously distracted by the single, bright blue light of my printer’s power button, shining strongly into the empty blackness of my room, illuminating every dirt-speckled crevice, mischievously peeking into my twitching left eye.

            It being so late at night (or early in the morning, whichever is preferred), I can’t seem to summon the energy to turn the damn thing off. All it would take is a simple push of the button, in order to quickly end whatever slight discomfort I may be experiencing. But with every passing second, I find myself less and less motivated to get out of the warm cocoon of sheets around me, tip-toe across the thinly carpeted floor, and turn off the light.

            And while it’s probably laziness, I can’t help but think that there might be something else forcing me to hold back on my quest for an enveloping darkness. And, while this is all starting to sound very highfalutin, the surrounding blue light is almost peaceful and, if I strain my de-contacted eyes hard enough, it becomes a pinpoint spec in the far-off corner, a color-shifted Daisy’s dock that I can barely bring myself to go towards.

            And so lying in my bed, waiting for the cold sleep of 3:47 now to take me, I become top-hatted Gatsby for a moment, floating silently in the carpeted sea, bed against the current, borne back sleeplessly into tomorrow.

lxxv

“Happy Birthday to you, you live in a zoo, you smell like a monkey, and you look like one too!”

-Me, ten years ago

            It is my youngest brother’s birthday today. He is twelve years old. I have sent him a subpar DVD edition of a subpar movie adaptation of his favorite, surprisingly decent book series. I hope that he appreciates it.

            He is so far away. It is the first birthday that I have missed. And I will probably miss it every faraway year from now on because I will be in college or in law school or at my job or millions of miles away.

            I miss him. And I hope that the BluRay copy of Percy Jackson and the Olympians can convey that better than nine silly simple sentences can.