good advice

just pretend that little hole is a mouth
and everything you put in there isn't disappearing
it's just feeding magic creatures that will watch over you while you sleep
and you will have nice dreams
of floating through navy blue skies and feeling aurora borealis tickling your cheeks
falling stars whistling past your ears and landing on icebergs
eskimos waving to you out of their igloos
beckoning you in for hot chocolate
it is warm but snowing still
the flakes melt when they touch your arm and each one feels like a first kiss
melting quickly before the next arrives
floating through navy blue skies up above everything
and everything looks so so small that when you land again it will still seem small
and you are large and swollen with optimism
you land on your bed and think
"the world is young" and you sleep soundly.

how to handle xmas with a former jehovah's witness

'tis the season for questions
where "why" takes a back seat to "why not" in the great christmas debate

Dear friends,
it's ok to just say nothing
and not dance around with what or what not to say or do
don't ask "what you people did on christmas"
don't ask how it was growing up
don't ask if i've started because i haven't

there are forces at work
girlfriends and girlfriend's families with the best intentions
coworkers and customers coddling me with the cold delicate handling reserved only for religious minorities they gleefully shit talk in or out of suspected earshot
strangers who can't help but feel i am slighting those closest to me with a presentless 25th

sorry team

this is america
and there are stones in this pot that refuse to melt
and there are as many definitions and interpretations of christmas as there are snowflakes in a snowman
some want the christ back in
some want the christ out
some just want the look on the faces of their children when they see a mound of wrapped presents beneath The Tree

and who am i to spare them that?
who am i to think i ever stood a chance?
to them that is worth the stress and aggravation of mall crowds and long days with the shortest hours of sunlight
they are probably right
they are right
and i am wrong again

i was wrong when i was knocking on the doors of strangers with news of an impending armageddon
i was wrong when i knew there was no santa

and we don't really have to talk about it

silence is a cold i am willing to bear

love,
jeremy

88mph to a wedding in a vineyard

6\07


Driving out east. Kathrine drove me out east for a wedding in the Hamptons. "Katherine O'Shea and Guest". Thank you for capitalizing the G in Guest, but it didn't make me feel like anything more than a place-holder in a sea of local celebrities. Would it have been funny to introduce myself to people as "Guest"? Maybe for one or two people, but it couldn't last long. It's too self-conscious.

Driving out east. It's like driving backwards in time. You watch the buildings shrink and for once in your life on Long Island the sprawl is green and natural. But it's never enough to pull you too far deep into the past, never believable enough to be comfortable, only enough to get you to slightly identify with the idea when you read about it. Enough architectural anachronisms and they aren't anachronisms anymore; they are what is.

First you see a Ford dealership, maybe a Starbucks somewhere, a Lexus dealership, definitely a Starbucks right over there, then a shiny new supermarket big enough to make Jack Gladney blush.

The illusion was never shattered because it never existed in the first place. We never escaped the 21st century. We were always in a car that was anything but an '85 Delorean. We were never more than three cars away from a luxury SUV.

So we went to a wedding. A ceremony for two people in love, ideally. It was nice to be out in that vineyard in another illusion. This was the illusion of love that will last forever when united ceremonially. But we never left the real world. I was introduced to one of Kathrine's uncles, a divorce lawyer. He makes good money helping people negotiate the terms of their realization that they have failed in their public promise to each other and their one family which will soon again be two families.

Driving out east we never left the real world. We never left it because it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist just as much as the imaginary world does not exist. We never left the world as it is. We live in the crossfire of what we imagine the world to be like and what we imagine the world to be. Perhaps there were some cynics in the wedding party who would cite the rising divorce rate or decreasing marriage rate as evidence of the institution of marriage failing. As if that had any bearing on the ability of two people to be in love.

What is love? Well, maybe it's the constant rediscovering of someone intriguing, maybe it's a chemical reaction, maybe it's a goldfish forgetting what the other half of the tank looks like as soon as it reaches the other side. Whatever it is, it exists. Even if it's nothing more than the sound of the word being formed on our tongues, it exists. I believe in it because I choose to. It's a game I play.

Soccer is a good reason to stay in shape, to go running, to be with friends. Why bother asking what the point of kicking a ball into a net is? Why question the meaning of the lines on the ground further than their obvious function? Why over-regulate yourself? There are a few simple rules to any game of pickup soccer. Don't break any obvious rules and remember that you're there to have fun.

That's love.

I never asked what the point of a kiss is, I just think about what it does to me. I just remember that I'm here to have fun. Love, soccer, both two games that don't matter to anyone other than the people involved.

I went to a wedding this weekend and it was a ceremony. It wasn't the World Cup, it was more like a high school championship.

Games.

Playing games.

That's what people do. Not just eating or sleeping or mating, but recreation despite whatever reality you can't escape.

Come to think of it, driving out east isn't like driving backwards in time at all. It is driving backwards in time. We got there by not analyzing the inescapable anachronisms and thought only of the impressions left upon us by the shrinking buildings and sprawl that is vernal instead of urban. We drove back to a time where the divorce rate didn't exist because divorce did not exist. The buildings disappeared and we sat in a field of wine grapes. We drove in a car to a time before cars, before the dark ages, before the bronze age, before objects, before artifacts, to a place where two people became two ideas and before our eyes they became one idea. They were beautiful.

The idea behind inviting Guest to your wedding is that there's some unknown person that someone you actually do want at your wedding would like to have beside them. The idea is that you are welcoming an outsider.

This is a message from Guest, the welcome outsider, from one idea to another.

Don't break any obvious rules and remember that you're there to have fun.



It's ok to bend reality a little bit because there is no reality. There is only the world as it is.



After years of being conspicuously abstinent from alcohol I decided to have a glass of champagne at this wedding in the vineyard. There was a message at the bottom of the glass:

"To Guest,

Don't break any obvious rules and remember that you're there to have fun."




This is me raising my glass for a toast to two strangers who helped me learn the importance of playing games.

welcome to a room of my own

6\07

sorry for the mess but every time i try and clean it it just feels like i'm losing part of myself i like the pile of clothes they are mine and usually i can find a shirt when i want to sure i hang up the ones with collars but who even wears those anyway so this is it heres my messy room theres my bed flush against the corner like doing so would give me enough floorspace to do anything but throw clothes on top of i start cleaning it but nobody really comes in here anyway it's kinda weird to see you standing there sorry i don't have any chairs just a bed it used to be a futon i used to be alot of things now i'm just a man in a hotel room a perpetual tourist on the long island beating paths out onto the road with my silly black pickup truck i bought it because they are cheap and functional where am i where does this car take me where do these feet take me but back to this messy room where i drool out words onto myspace like a man in a cartoon on a hump of an island with one tree on it i am on that island throwing bottles into the sea not thinking about shipping lanes or trade winds or anything just thinking about everything i throw into the sea into the river before i go back to my room my pile of coconuts and sand it's not so bad once you get used to it but you could say that about alot of things and one day i'm going to say that about everything christ let this single tree be an antenna straight to the ears of god this is me your humble servant asking for forgiveness i am daniel in a den with my waning positivity crouching like lions but without daniel's grace and i believe they may pounce at any minute i scrawl this hastily and cast it into the water
"spare me lord my work is not done."

earthquakes and contintental drift

3\08

does it make me want to hold on or let go
throw water on burning bridges
who starts these fires anyway

how does the face of the earth change
drifting continents or earthquakes

is this a living room or a lobby
does it make me want to hold on or let go

what does brazil think when it hears about cameroon
or madagascar think staring at mozambique all day

polar bears

the tundra is wide and it looks like the top sheet white and wrinkled
when i see polar bears swimming i think "swim you dumb bastard swim"
learn how to swim
the rest of you evolved and moved south to the great northwest or maine
why couldn't you do that?
you had to stay behind, the last holdout of an ignoble tradition
you'd better swim you dumb bastard
you should have evolved
if you can't evolve quick enough the world won't have a use for you
did it ever?
i am not coming to save you any more than you are swimming to the mainland to learn how to ride a tricycle for the russian circus
that is what happened to your ancestors, the evolved
they pedal tricycles in the russian circus
they balance on balls
they eat scraps of tainted meat in between tazings
while you swim into oblivion
and the history of your existence is fossil record and corpses shot by teddy roosevelt for the museum of natural history
why didn't you survive?
you can ride a tricycle

can't you?

where are you?

you are somewhere in the desert sprawled and hugging the earth backwards with your fingers in the dirt
the night and the moon are washing you in blue the coldest blue the coldest color
the wind is scratching you as it passes and the quartered moon is dumb and bright
is there no one coming to pull you up?
are those the footsteps of horses under gallant men galloping to your rescue?
is that the flood of the old testament coming to carry you off?
only the blood in your ears rushing through their capillary creeks
the horses are in their stables
the gallant men are sleeping soundly
the waters are not rising and there still is no water
your stomach is rotting
your teeth are chattering
the sun will soon come up and burn you alive
where are you?
where is this cold blue world?
and how did you get here?

... (this is not a poem)

is there a greater effort being made for monoculturalism or multiculturalism
homogeny
hegemony
is the push for monoculutralism an inadvertent capitalist endeavor to find new markets
is this push aided by people responding to the synapses between countries\states\counties\communities\families
this will be something to think about when i blog again

hey kid

your friends are gonna get old and turn on you
your favorite bands are gonna sell out
you'll meet a girl maybe
you'll have a kid maybe
and that baby you held and made smile with your silly faces
well he\she's gonna not call you for months on end
and if everything goes according to plan
he\she watches you die
and the best you can hope is that you die in a bed
it's ok
it's ok
it's ok to go out and have fun
the world wants you to laugh because you are still young
and if there's one thing it's ok to fight for
it's the lives of our children
and not necessarily our own

i wanted to write

ugh.

what do i have for you today? maybe some more curse words, maybe not. god. shit. next time those two words are next to eachother i promise it won't be tourette's. fuck. goddamnit. i wanted to write. i wanted to write all my life. now i don't want to do anything. i want to lay down next to kathrine and cook food and play video games and read a hundred pages every two weeks. this is me and this is who i am.

i have no grand ideas.
i am out of the mart of intellectual discourse.
people buy food and i make sure they have the food they want to buy.

i say "DO SOMETHING" to every reflection i come across; the milk in the cereal bowl, the bathroom mirror, the pukewater in the toilet, but it always comes back the same.

"why?"

the "why" game at 27 and i keep getting older. i like the people i work with. i need a little more money, but who doesn't?

why am i not writing? i am not writing because writing is tepid and my words are bland and even if my water broke with the next great american novel it would die of SIDS if it didn't die laughing at the doctor that smacked it's ass.

oh but lookie i'm writing about not writing. oooh irony! fuck you. stop reading. stop reading everything. move to china or azerbaijan where the silly marks are just silly marks and don't have the power to start wars or hurt peoples' feelings or flare up your bile duct. stop waiting to be entertained or wooed by intellectuals. stop looking for references to great books you were forced to read. do you remember how old you were when you realized the best thing you could for yourself was to learn to appreciate and admire what everybody already appreciated and admired?

yeah, that mona lisa is really something. but i'd rather watch an animated gif of something dirty or a twenty seven second porno clip on redtube than bear the unamused smirk of renaissance nobody. not that i don't identify with the sentiment. what does that make me? what does that say about me? i'll take it. i might even tattoo it on my arm.

there is a point to doing things even if you'll never do them better than someone else. shouldn't the world have stopped writing plays after shakespeare wrote the tempest? some might agree. but then we wouldn't have... y'know... those other guys who wrote plays too.

there is a point.

i will never invent a more efficient way to heat our homes, but i might be able to start a fire that could get us through december.

here's to getting through december.

special thanks go to merle haggard by way of john mccain's ipod (according to blender magazine)

am i going to have to explain everything i write?

if so i quit

a common lot

she opened the door to her vehicle and put her child into a shopping cart. it was small. her legs crossed slightly making for several dips to thread her legs into the two holes for legs. do you want to know what kind of vehicle it was? was it a car? was it a minivan? was it an SUV?

if i tell you that you already know some things whether you know them or not. you know if this woman is old or young, you know her socioeconomic status, you know whether there are stickers on the bumper or windshield or finger smudges from the older children closing the trunk or hatch and you might even know what color her hair and eyes are.

where is she? is the sun shining? is she at a waldbaums or a piggly wiggly or a certain unique grocery store? is it raining is it snowing is the hurricane ablowing?

she could be any of these places but she will be at none of these places. here she is, in the parking lot in your mind threading her childs legs through the shopping cart seat.

she is surrounded by tundra and the baby's legs are frostbitten under her old navy jeans and when they get warm they will be dead and so will her hands be dead also.

just kidding.

but if i don't say it's raining, it isn't raining. you're here in this with me, and i make the rules. you just read. do you want specifics? yes you do. or else you're reading some fucked up boring quasi-postmodern Mad Libs by some fucked up boring man. and not even that fucked up.

do you want rain? well it isn't raining.

the sun isn't even shining. it's not scorching hot, it's just a plain day in one of those months where the weather isn't a character and doesn't foreshadow anything.

here is a woman and her daughter. she is pushing her daughter in a cart to the front of a grocery store to buy food. the sun is an inch or two above the treeline but not moving very quickly. her hair is shoulder length and manageable having been cut for the first time since the baby, her first. a good haircut put a little something in her she has been needing since the baby. she looks at herself and thinks she is deflated and used like the balloons from her baby shower. her old clothes fit but she still wants to wear yoga pants as often as possible. is she finished with idle meaningless beautification or does she relish in the attention of strangers?

when her hands close on the cart to push it there is a film of some sort she does not recognize. she continues to the door with a wipe of her hands on her thighs rather than deal with another leg rethreading. this is a small victory. her husband would pick on her for being too princessy, but after diapers vomit and diapers anything that doesn't smell can stay wiped at the top of her pants until laundry is done. she looks at her cuticles and thinks a manicure would have been nice with the haircut. a mani\pedi. what is annie doing that she can't give me a mani\pedi? has it really been a year? i can't really afford it but what if i think of it as an investment into my sanity? i was torn in two by an 8lb 4oz sack of meat and, unlike men, my hormones are in my head. let me live let me be still young with this cart and this child who is growing quickly behind my back let me feel longed for and wanted instead of disregarded. i am going to paint my nails the color of passion and if the world does not notice i will snap my fingers and drum my nails on whatever table i can find.

she enters the store and streaks through the aisles to the nail polish. she finds a good bright red like a fire engine. she thinks about sparkles but doens't want to overdo it. she will paint her nails like a fire engine and maybe the baby's too just for fun. she shops offhandedly before pointing her cart to a cashier she is two other carts from meeting. when she thinks nobody is looking she kisses her child on the forehead and slips the nail polish into her pocket. she is young and pretty and the world will not begrudge her the simple pleasure of stolen nail polish like the sixteen year-old who never saw herself with red nails and a cart with a baby. this ends with her dreaming about how she will put the nail polish on her baby's little tiny fingers.

she will use a q-tip.

a little guy

what does a poem?
what else but this
to fondly rue
to reminisce
to shine upon
a darker time
to fill a void
to sound a rhyme
make students groan
a somber tone
or scholars scoff
their nose aloft
well without them
i'd scorn the pen
i see no hope
in minds of men
that don't disclose
a love of prose
or high regard
a clever bard
a thought well writ
can never flit
it stays and haunts
politely taunts
to think upon
from time to time
the soul inside
a stack of lines
what does a poem?
what can they show?
i do not ask
i only know.

nostalgia

i want to live in a world that is less nostalgic
i want our history to be less malleable by way of flattering cinematic portrayal

i want to live in a world that is less nostalgic because the moment is meaningful
where the past does not haunt and the future does not loom

i want to keep my best days ahead of me

i want to look on the future the way retired athletes look on the past

well...

maybe i don't totally like the last thing i wrote but what the fuck it stays because i can play empty games that look like parallelism just like anyone else can. empty. just a little literary manicure. look ma no hands.

pain

i want to feel
i want you to feel
i want you to feel pain
i want to always feel pain
i want to be the hole in the dike separating the city and the ocean of pain
i want to grow until the city is flooded
i want to grow until i am as large and vast as the sky
i want to bathe every being in pain until there is no pain

what would that look like?
what is a world where everyone is suffering?
what would be different?

tell me about hell
tell me what hell is like
tell me what hell looks like
tell me what happens to sinners
tell me are they flayed or stretched on the rack
tell me who gets to torture sinners
tell me is it angels or demons?

why would evil punish evil?
why shouldn't good punish evil?

there should be angels easing the arms of sinners out of
their sockets
their limbs that cracking with a small burst of blood
there should be angels delicately driving spikes into eyes until they have confessed everything they have and have not done

god make me that angel
god heaven for me would be an ocean of pain so great and wide my own would seem trivial

it would get lost in that ocean
it is a gift i have not asked for
it is a cancer on my soul

you who have brought so much death
you master
you god who would kill a beast in the field but spare the beast in the home
you god who asks for the lives of infinite beasts
you whose necessity is another's luxury
you whose luxury some would not dare dream
you Caligula
you who are born in the city of high walls
you builder of dikes

i am praying for a flood one day that will wash us up to the eyes
i am praying for a flood of water painfully clear that will one day wash us up to the eyes
i am praying for a flood we can watch

watch the pain we have spared ourselves for so long
watch it lift us up off the ground into fire or ice

i am praying for a flood

something

now what. just put something down. you might not even have to use punctuation enough talking to yourself already you always feel like writing but never know what to write well take the plug out of your head and watch everything drip on to the paper. do you remember in new paltz when you used to get bloody noses out of nowhere? maybe it was the altitude, it definitely wasn't the coke because there was no coke. maybe sunday there will be some aderol. how do you spell that? what does it matter. what does anything matter. why do i have to write that in everything i write. anyways, do you remember the first bloody nose? it was you hovering over a chair looking at your monitor. that old computer you brought with you to school that just broke out of nowhere the way things just break sometimes. that old computer you probably have some pictures of tits on there still floating around in the great nothing that files go to when they're deleted. all just compressed ones and zeros floating out nowhere they don't exist anymore. well this was in new paltz, you were leaning over a chair and blood just started coming out of your nose and landing on the chair. that's not your chair, jeremy. that chair belongs to SUNY New Paltz. just some blood. a little blood won't kill anyone. well what i meant by talking about that blood was how it just dripped right out. you didn't even have to think about it. all you had to do was be in the right place at the right time. the planets were aligned. the trees outside had all their leaves in exactly the right position, every fish in every ocean was where it needed to be the stars were unseen behind the sunny sky but they were dialed in to what was happening and then a small little something opened up inside my nose and blood come out. not a stream, just a little bit. it was scary. you never did find out why or whatfor and that was a good introduction to the rest of your days. never really finding out anything. just making guesses. just looking at the stars and making up your own goddamn constellations because nothing they said ever really looked like what it was supposed to. the only thing you know how to point out is orion. well, good for you. the big dipper is up there somewhere. i know how hard the stars are to see, i'm you. the little dipper, who knows. i look up there i only see little dippers. 40 or so little dippers just banging around in the sky looking for a star to be part of the handle or part of the dipper.
so put something down on something. put some dots down on a piece of paper, bleed out your nose. someone will look at it and call it something. someone will say 'oh that sort of looks like a dipper. ooh there's another one that's even bigger. this will be the big dipper and the other one, that will be the little dipper. these will be the most popular things because the big dipper is so noticeable and it has a little brother somewhere. who knows where, the moon is too bright tonight'
this is just a little terrible something i will not apologize for. throw this bottle away there will be another floating along shortly with maybe something more consequential inside.
but don't hold your breath.

write every day

i know i know
write every day
and drink 8 glasses of water
and brush your teeth after meals

well i eat when i'm hungry
and drink water every now and again
and brush when my mouth feels filthy
and this will do.

The World Is Ending (April Fools)

The world is not ending
The joke's on you

Go back to your job
your room in whatever house large or small

The world is not ending.
I hope your stocks are untouched and your boss still doesn't know how you really feel.
You can still return the non-perishables.

The world is not ending.
That was a close one.

The world is not ending.
Now what?

The world is not ending.
You don't have to take back any of the nice things you might have said to your family members or coworkers you have only known for the past several years or months. They will keep them until the need to pad their deathbed, then they will be laid out like fine linens as the clouds part and their own personal rapture ensues.

In us there is an empty box you can fill with whatever if you know how to keep strangers away. This is for anything really, but I suggest you use it for words like that because it's so hard to get clean once the shit drops in.

The world is not ending.
The tedium and the minutiae is important once again.

The world is not ending.
Go wash your car.