It's not polite

It's not polite, but I stare, mouth open at the unexpected freezing of time. A face in the crowded street can do that, evoke some pristine feeling and paralyze like electricity. I know the zap, the sudden shift in consciousness, the shortness of breath.

This face, though: eyes disproportionately large, speechless lips stained strawberry, a wisp of hair thrashing in the wind, rising from asphalt whiter than the snow. In this face, something of a flower's softness, but between the petals metal glints. The metal is jagged from living among the broken and seeking that familiar brokenness.

And me, am I content to go home and write, intoxicated with the gift of this image, this silly trinket? Do I place it with my other trinkets next to my bean-filled puppy? Next to the plaster cast of my forearm? Is that the cast of my forearm or my...

No, no settling today. If I'm going to stare, I shouldn't miss the point. This face belongs to a person, a young woman on her way home. But maybe first, she has to rouse Pa from his barstool, and in that bar of hardened lonely men, only a child could mistake her face for a gift. And at home there is a child, it's not talked about whose, who at some point during dinner will fling food at the wall. It will be a victory if he misses the pictures of Jesus, and there are many pictures of Jesus. Nothing riles Ma like having to wipe Spaghetti-O's off Our Savior's hands, feet, and side (why is it they always land that way?). And when Ma's riled, it's an unpleasant night for everyone, except for Pa, who would rather pass out than eat.

Later as the child sleeps, I imagine this face gazing down at him in the half-light, sleepy-eyed, without the lipstick, soft with a half-smile.

There, that's a nicer trinket. I'll put this one next to the conch shell.
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The Suburban Fantasy

My friend Bill moved to the suburbs in exchange for a clean house and clean sex, pure and cold as a hole in an ice sculpture. Of course, that's not fair to his wife. She'll call me bitter and jealous, and probably impotent besides. Maybe that's the case, but I don't see why a figment of Bill's imagination needs to turn on me like that.

In my lighter moments, I too indulge in a suburban fantasy. In my head, I move in with my blonde lawyer wife, who owns a cute house with a cute yard. She's sharp as a diamond blade and doesn't hesitate to mention my lack of earning prowess when I laugh at what the priest says in church, even when it's ridiculous to the point of humor, even when it's a parody of Christian love. We navigate social circles, always having the best manners. We grow so terribly awfully bored with each other that I do yard work for excitement until she takes me to the hospital when I cut off a finger, again. At the hospital she says "I love you" and strokes my hair while the doctor re-attaches. We have good health insurance. That's probably the best part of the fantasy.

Then one day, she goes to the grocery store (not the one where the brown people go -- in order to maintain our superficiality, we've had to channel all our natural passion into racism). There's the hiss of gas escaping into her empty house and then soon appears a trail of fire and a great ball of flame. Bricks fly for miles. Standing in the cul-de-sac, I laugh, and it's over.

If she visits your imagination, say hello.
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Toward an easier dream journal

My favorite time of the day is those intervals of sleep between when I first wake up and when I decide to spend the rest of the day awake. During these snoozes, I often write essays on a yellow legal pad (in the dream world). Upon waking up, I am so intensely curious of what I just wrote that I go back to sleep, hoping I can recover a piece of the manuscript, and often I just start writing where I left off. This arrangement would be fine if I lived in the dream world and slept in the waking one, but that's not the case.

So I have fashioned a device that I think might be able to record my dream writings. It consists of a six-inch needle attached to a ball point pen with copper wire and dental floss. I would theoretically hold the pen in my hand over a pad of legal paper, and the hand would mimic the movements of its dream-counterpart. The only problem is I haven't been able to think of a way to get the needle-end into my brain without doing severe damage. If only I were a baby and had a soft spot in my skull.
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Transcription - Part I

I keep a digital voice recorder in my coat. Don't ask me why. And I couldn't think of any nice, funny, inoffensive things to say tonight, so I transcribed this, my stream-of-consciousness recorded on January 3rd, 2008 while parallel-parked on a residential Chicago street. There was snow on my windows:

Over loud background noise.

The ice melts. Dots on the windshield. Strange to hear my own voice. I don't like it. I'm scared of where it will take me. It's two in the morning here. I'm in a car. Maybe you can hear the heat. The heat is on. It's loud. The car's covered in snow. I'm not outside the car, scraping the snow off. This is my new year's ritual: I like to watch the ice melt.

I'm scared a little bit, being out here at two in the morning on January 3rd -- I was too drunk to do this on January 1st or January 2nd. And it's the first year I've done this as a new year's celebration. So there's that. You never quite know what you're gonna think when you're alone. Sometimes you think you're going crazy. But I don't think it's going crazy. I think... it's just when you don't give that inside voice time to talk every once in a while, bad things start to happen. You can get drunk and make it talk. That's good. It works. But it causes more complications than it fixes. Or at least as many. So.

Here I am , waiting for someone to smash in the driver's side window and shoot me a couple of times and dump my body out in the street. I hope that doesn't happen. I guess I should have cleaned the car off (laughter) if that happens.

I'm watching to see if the rear defroster is going to turn off. It's on a timer of some sort. It's not really doing much good against an inch of snow and ice. The front [defroster] is faring a little bit better. There's some distinct pooling going on towards the base of the windshield. There's spotting above, behind the rear-view mirror, near the I-Pass, behind the sticker that says when I should get my oil changed that I'll probably ignore well beyond that point.

I wonder if somebody is going to be looking in the window after the snow melts. That would be pretty scary, especially if that somebody were a cop. Not that I'm carrying anything illegal on me. Well, (sound of a zipper) other than that (laughter).

Part II upcoming.
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Southern Cross

I've always hated going to church, except in my mid-teens when I would be blessed enough to sit behind some hot suburban mother in a tight pantsuit. I would spend the standing parts of Mass with head bowed, committing her ass to memory and trying to arrange my boner so it didn't poke directly outward, lest it be taken for a Crucifix. I never felt guilty about that, which is odd, because I grew up Catholic. Maybe guilt just became my default emotional state. Or maybe I didn't feel guilty because my instinct told me that my boner was normal and natural (since then I've realized that my boner is neither natural nor normal -- it's cross-shaped).

Cross-shaped. You ever heard of anything like that? Outside of the supernatural?

And the second weirdest thing about my penis is that it looks relatively normal flaccid: not at all like a "t." And then, by accident, I see Joss Stone on Carson Daly. Pop! I can hang Christmas ornaments on it. But only the ones with the strings, not the ones with the hooks, unless it's Christmas Eve.

You want to know what it's like having a cross-shaped boner? Ladies?

Well, the condition manifested itself in my early teens, and I worried nightly that there were malignant tumors in my penis. At fourteen I had a choice to either show the male doctor my boner or risk death. I chose the latter. That was a terrible decision, but twelve years later, I'm still alive. To date, a doctor has never seen the cross (or the Cross, if you prefer). Doctors have grabbed my balls pretty regularly, and they have never led me to believe that there might be something abnormal about my penis. If I were hard, my condition would be staring them right in the face.

It's a cross left-to-right, not up-to-down, in case you were wondering...

My relationships tend to be pretty short. I don't like the awkwardness of pretending that I don't have an intimate defect, so I make it a point to tell a hot suburban mother before she has a chance to see it. And I often ask her name first.

Offerings can be left in the comments section.
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