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Missed Connection: 1/24/09 6:25pm

I've never done one of these before, but it's totally fitting according to recently read statistics this town's most common location for this type of thing.

I'm such a sucker for scruff. Your's is well trimmed. I'm standing on the 59th St platform eager to get on the long A train ride to Nevins, switch to G to Russel's and drink away some of my existing cares and probably pick up a few unnecessary others on the way. I'm gazing at the various faces and then see you from a distance, wait five seconds on another face while you approach, closer. I then do something I rarely do enough to seal the deal--I hold my gaze. You look, slight waver away and then back again, yes, he's looking at you. He seems to waver a moment in realization of this. Keep walking past the blue plywood construction wall that I'm leaning on. I step out, two D's have already past and here's the third. I've turned and walked a little toward where you've paused, catching my glance again, I step out, we're both unsure of the others path, but we not getting on this D. I step out onto the bumpy yellow to look for an approachimg A, just an excuse to glance again, too much glancing? You ask a elder woman with a stick if she needs help I think. The A rolls in on the other side, I step up next to you in the crowd and you let me pass to board the train first, we find our places, standing facing, I keep sipping my chai latte down to nothing, fidgeting. Closed off with my headphones plugged in. The glances continue. The train departs, I pull my gloves off with my teeth, you pull out a thick worn paperback--what are you reading? What are you trying to show me
You have a brand name baseball cap I forget the logo for, a cute jacket, hoodie combo, buttons, stylish. At 34th, seats open and I grab one, you move down, I can now see you're reading Philip Pullman--glances comtime. We want more. I catch a glint of your silver belt buckle, you're wearing blue pumas I think. I remove my hat, you look more. A moment you take off yours and rub your hair, a few stands of gray in the mussed black. We look and make cute shy faces when we're not looking trying not to get caught. But we're already past that waiting to see who'll make the first move if at all. You look down the car and your profile is nice, a little slim for my usual tastes, my thoughts wander as they do to an imagined future where we're wearing sweaters at family Xmas recalling the cute story of how we met so long ago on the a train on that ruddy night. Twentythird is yours as you move toward the door as the train slows, you glance back as you move toward the door and we lock gazes, and bid a farewell with an irresistable smile. I spend the next five minutes smiling feeling a bit better about the randomness of the day.

A Confabulation of Emails

con·fab·u·late (kən-fāb'yə-lāt') Pronunciation Key
intr.v. con·fab·u·lat·ed, con·fab·u·lat·ing, con·fab·u·lates

To talk casually; chat.
Psychology To fill in gaps in one's memory with fabrications that one believes to be facts.

Jan 22 (2 days ago)

Backburner. Theraphy. We tried to ford the river and one of our oxen ate Carol anne. *sigh*

I need to try to remain productive. (and not whiny, which feels in fact the cause of this writing) But words are productive, right? And I get bonus points if i just start making up words, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau

Perhaps I'm very subject to placebic effects. I had about four vials of blood drawn yesterday, though; that could have something to do with it. Probably didn't eat enough. Incubators. I feel sometimes like a scientist in a solitudinous lab stubbornly running experiments incessantly - the same experiement? - but on people. Trying to devise...something. Like some ideal interaction-basis for myself. From whence to start out to make things OK from the get-go. Now ever-mindful of yet another stupid complex that confounds the whole enterprise: that need of approval. And now I see it everywhere. I can't go to a stupid non-specific-sexual-pref meetup.com group meeting for Lost without becoming preoccupied with some guy, confabulated by the mysterious mythology of the show that i get myself too-too-immersed in-two. Some guy, that I wouldnt' dare approach but would sit with the subgroup of three friends and try to look only mildly interesting. My god, these are things that I would go home, day ruined, dwelling on five and eight years ago. When does this change? Do I want it all to change? Perhaps I'm afraid of letting go of the quirky, youthful, good parts I like about myself.

He looked just like a Carlos actually. A thicker, bigger version. I wanted to ask what his heritage was. So clearly part of the selling point for carlos in me has to be that I can make it SEEM like I deal with emotions OK, or at least keep them industriously swept under the rug.

"Do I know you?" he said. (the first line of my movie in which all this un-plottable plot will figure predominately)
If you convince them all you're crazy, then it's okay. There, there.
I have a tingly body-awakening feeling, breathing, digesting, making these words has something to do with it. Paragraphing not yet a strong suit.

there's always something bigger it feels. Like bigger than our joking of my issues. (totally fine and needed) , which is the real issues, and bigger than those, which is my simple not-yet-switchable state of mindness that really is the only thing complicating/creating them perhaps - and then bigger than that - some idealized productive-milk(honey?) land where I'm building (the right ones) bridges and buildings and boats for us to sail out on for just the day (and don't leave anything onboard when you leave!) and then eventually a farm, with chicks and ducks and geese out in the woods. Out west. Is stability really a state of mind?
My sweater is a weird merlot with sky blue and red stripes. I wish someone could ride along with me on these stripes. Could see that this is bad in its place of my productive reality and centeredness but also good and imaginative in its rambling-off the beaten tracks train of (too) consciousness. Ride along for a spell.

There are too many men. Too many that I've grown fond of for unknowing distant wanting reasons. Too many that were i to have the skills I want to (lure? obtain? what?) ...to... have them see me (Selfish desire!) I would be more overwhelmed than now, which is to awful to think . How do I become contendented with leaving the amazing new toy on the shelf and be happy knowing its there. How do I deal with the fact that i regularly compare human beings to consumable goods?

the record skips. this song is too long.
but i appreciate the canvas to ramble a bit.
lost was amazing last night. probably too amazing.
i get wrapped up in it.
sit down with management is today. i'll brush myself up.
three working days left. no promise of a new temp job.
i get down when trying to apply myself like this.
self-emailed craiglist ads sit expiring in my inbox.
i can't even talk to my mom. (this is how it happens)
too too long.
don't you worry yourself with me, but eagerly await our next talk.
and why you'd worry I'd be like someone else.
chat soon.


11:43 AM (9 hours ago)

Sometimes I feel like i play a game that everyone thinks its unfair because i haven't taught anyone the rules. I'm figuring out them as i go along and what fun is it to know all the rules ahead of time?

Sometimes I feel like i bend awkwardly this way or that to put a keyhole to something in myself right in front of someone's line of sight to see if they bite, but...nothing. They don't see the cavernous opening in which a great deal still remains hidden, a loose thread begging to be picked. Someone to open me.

Going skating tomorrrow? More bears to appear than my flimsy affair to be sure.
I'm off tomorrow if u perhaps wanna do lunch before.

In Preparation for this Next Change

The anxieties and the letting go of them. The wish for snow and getting rain. Wishes in an empty tumbled glass, a stomping taxi ride home- sometimes alone, many times not. Staying in the sun too long to burn, or being burned unwanted by the lights.
This is too, too vague. I'll come back to this and many more stories, as I have many to tell and all I can carry with me is memory. I have learned.

"I see their knavery. This is to make an ass of me. To fright me, if they could. But I will not stir from this place, do what they can. I will work up and down here. And I will sing that they shall hear. That I am not, I am not afraid. I am not afraid."

Though my hands grow tough and my ears furry and long, I will press on in this great task. I am not afraid. I will read. A Winter's Tale, Amazing Adventures, Dreamboy. Great, and then more.

A few steps back, several forward.
In a direction only you and fate and any poor fool that has the courage to push you can say. A dance regardless. Whether blithe and green or gray, heavy with awkward bags. A trudging along.
We'll struggle forward, we'll push through.
As long as there's music, the dance will never cease.

Re: what's up Matt?

so i'm writing this now (so late? so earlY?) only because i've been fortunate (or un-?) to find myself in an introspective mood. i don't want to be that guy that beats around the bush with people as i've often been. i don't want to be dragging people around, being socialable un-had acquaintances with every guy on the block. what i mean to say is, i want to try and begin to learn to be someone that can know themself to see a feeling in them and then, by choice, commit to it. own it. i really enjoyed having lunch with you and chatting, cuddling too on that dreary day. and i want to commit to the feeling of saying that i do not want to pursue anything more than a friendship with you. cuddling is always nice, but i hate-- i hate-- being-- ...having dragged it out for so many people i've truly grown to care about. i want to tell you this so i won't leave you waiting around for more. because i just don't think i'm in a state to give you more right now. i'll apologize for not being the gutsy guy to say something like this over the phone, or in person even. but i really do want to give you that, that honesty, as i'm figuring it out for myself.
as you can see i'm still very much in a lifepath of figuring myself out, if that can ever be done. most people tell me to just relax and let it be. we'll see though. stay tuned.

Crash Reported

Just got off the phone with the Koeppel VW Service stooge.
$439.00 for the 80k, $420 and $350 for the front and rear brake pads that need replacing, $76 to repair the broken center console, $203 to repair the broken seatbelt lock, $470 to replace the missing front grille. Feels like some American Express ad, "Priceless" should follow this list. But alas, Koeppel VW does not accept Amex. Grr.

So I'm essentially paying $2000 to get my car fixed to sell for what I'll probably only get $6000, which, after paying a few debts and moving costs, I'll be left with about $1000 to plop into my forsaken savings. I'll attempt to step back from the jarring practicalities of things and calmly nurse feelings of any fulfillment my darling bug has brought me over the past four years.

I flip through the CarFax Vehicle History Report I printed from online, basically summarizing, in a few short pages, nearly every recorded affair my car has been through.
5/27/02 - Vehicle Sold
9/10/03 - 21,999 miles - Vehicle Serviced (surely there had to be some non-recorded service prior to this)
03/11/04 - Accident Reported in Brevard County, Vehicle involved in crash or collision, Vehicle functional

05/13/04 - 34,766 - Vehicle Serviced
03/07/07 - 69,503 - NJ DMV - Title issued or updated, New owner reported
12/29/07 - 75,601 - Vehicle Serviced, Brake Light Switch replaced

Some gal named Kelly is telling me I can get $7,365, but something in me, or rather, everyone else's judgment, is telling me to bump it down a grand or two. I flip back to 3/11/04 and, in trying to recall, the slew of un-recorded accidents resurfaces.

You rarely remember those moments where you're sitting in stillness inside your vehicle thinking of where the two of you will go and what will change for you because of it. But this particular time, I did. There was a moment's pause before I turned the ignition. It was only a mile to the Southgate apartments from my apartment at the time, random impulse trip to hang out with Derek. Misty Oak Drive, Babcock St, University Blvd, and Albermarle Street. Speed limit was 25. I was going it. Campus apartments on the left; Low income apartments on the right. Halfway down the street, a kid on his bike came sailing out--he might as well have been sailing, suddenly taken aloft into the sky as my the rounded hood of my beetle collided with his body and his bike. They rolled and his left stunt peg turned my windshield opaque with a shatter proof crackle pattern. Endless instants later, post-the loudest scream that ever escaped me, my physical reaction kicked in, and a slammed break just barely kept him from rolling all the way over the dome of my car. He flew what could easily be fifty feet forward in front of the car. Other cars stopped behind me. Blood stained his dark body. My only fortune was the responsiveness of everyone else. Friends from his neighborhood came to his side and determined he was still breathing. They surrounded him. I think I saw him move. In my tangential mind, crying mothers cradling his body screamed at me as her tears pooled at my ankles, blood on my shoes. 911 was already called by the people in the cars behind me and they told me it was an accident because I wasn't sure. A crowd of students on the other side of the street formed. In my mind, Sharks and the Jets. I stood, ambiguous, justice in deliberation, with a hand on my forehead, longer hair pushed back--making gestures of what I hoped would be taken as affectedness. I called Jon and Derek. The start and destination. They came and consoled me. A helicopter landed on the baseball field to take the boy away. Firetrucks and police cars. A photo was taken of my car that would appear in an article in the campus paper the next week. I gave my perspective for the report. Dozens milled about. I let myself be taken care of, be taken home. My car let the tow truck hook up by it's battered face and take it away.

Friends and roommates and lovers came to my side. The boy would be fine. Lawsuits for the apartment complex and it's botanical blindspot would follow for two years. Statements were required of me. My car came out of the body shop with a new face two weeks later. That's the most we've faced together.

And even since I have moved up here to NJ/NY there have been countless adventures she's carried me on. We drive to Redhook to sample local street vendor fare. Rockaway beach. I drive to Deleware Water Gap, camping and rafting. To Albany for a frost-bitten Glover tap performance or to Windham Mountain for disgruntled boarding incidents. To Niagra Falls. In my mind I lay out the map of the roads I have traversed in my minty scarab, here and there, back in Florida, and many roads in between.

When it comes to orientating, the mood of the map-reader colors the map itself. The ability to conjure, the willingness to fill in the blanks, the urgency with which one needs to know--all contribute to what the map becomes in the hands of the inspired imaginer; an instrument of destiny. It can involve public, national destinies, or simply a familial geography or history, a goad to take the transforming journey on which you meet the person or see the landscape or have the experiences that changes if not a life, then at least a trajectory. It is hard to look at a map without sensing, in our bones, private hopes and secret fears about change. In my Mercator daydreams, I see: An erasure, perhaps, of the laid-down lines of the past. A willingness to draw new meridians. A reconfiguration of the private globe. A silent earthquake.

- from "I, Mercator" by Stephen S. Hall

Cornfed

So I'm back.

The wedding and my four days of being wrapped up in it was exhilirating. I often have this strange bittersweet observation of pieces and parcels of the seemingly endless staions and terminals of my life as it has progressed. Though, they are broken and jarred about as some uncared for dig site; where I can pick up a rock or handful of dirt and understand what shaped it, as similar forces shaped me.

I see things from my past that I hardly remember, but that seemed to trigger an attraction in something familiar to it in chapters that were to follow.

My best friend from high school (undoubtably holding the title for the long haul) says to me while we wait in the wendys drive-thru on the morning of his wedding, after having purchased some starfruit, a monkey, and all the ingredients for the peach sangria: "I feel like as we get older things move slower and slower.". On afterthought, I figure this sentiment of his could have his amazing moments-future wife and all of the carpe diem-moments they have shared as it's contributing factor, but my immediate response flipped it all around- embracing our precipice-clenching pasts and the futuility of our memories to grasp them forever. "maybe it's just because of hindsight. The more we progress, the greater the past contains and the harder it is for memory to grasp it, thus making it seem to fly by faster and faster and more memories are built up- and conversely making the present progression of things seem slower and slower. ..I think I now lean toward his understanding of it.

In some unnameable dis-order, I was able to, among the passing of endless not-so-remembered faces, experience:

- another father and son...and father...and father.

- crabs and crazy relatives I had met as a different boy in a past life

- Seville, the mega-(straight)bar of pcola, dueling pianos, with a beautiful bartender (derek)

- Being a best man but not; none of the typical responsibilties of getting to be by the guys side through the thick of it, straightening ties and combing hair, making sure the punch gets made and the music goes off without a hitch.

- Emerald City the mega-(gay)bar of pcola, dead before 1130 and not the same as you rememeber, though the thrill of confident compasrison is worth it.

- Staying up the night following the wedding, not to get wasted and party but to sit in the hotel lobby with the best man, bridesmaid, videographer, and random others chatting about philosophy and concepts of culture and society, religion and politics til 6am.

- Noting that the men I see down there always seem so much better-fed than the average guys in the northeast; hulking, worn, cornfed boys with handsome lilting accents that makes you you remember the awkward adolescent days of your first attractions.

Despite my seeingly unavoidable list-making, I still hang onto a giant cloud of goodfeeling that my best friend, the man that shared some of his kind, honest soul, that I probably wouldn't have made it through grade school without, is now with his match, a woman of equal caliber in giggle-cry humor and zest and such an overwhelming amount of love and goodness-- so lucky a guy am I to have been able to stand next to them on the threshold of this great new adventure.