Holidays.

The Holiday season is upon us like rigor mortis. It seethes incandescent under floorboards. It rolls up against our legs and pulls the hairs from our shins. We are torture victims after the war.

I did not purchase presents for people. I decided to print some photographs for some people, and drew small things on cards for others. Love does not need or want a price tag - nobody values anything that should be valued. Assigning a value to love makes it nothing at all. Our hearts can't handle the pressure, and love dies softly, without a sound. Our eyes closed, we wouldn't see it happening until it was already over. We mourn loudly because death comes so quietly, and never on such tiptoed steps as when love is killed by passionate greed.

The holiday season is one that parts of me love and that other parts of me hate. I hate the crass commercialism. I hate the expectation, the driving desire to let our greed and vanity overcome us. It is one thing when we buy presents for others, but it is another thing entirely when we let ourselves expect presents from others. There is a difference. It is too easy to become caught in the moral ambiguity of those two thoughts. It is too easy to not care, anymore.

What then, do I love about the holidays? Perhaps it is the opposite side of the spectrum - the holidays let us expect ourselves to do wonderful things, to help people that we would overlook on a normal day, to intervene where courage is a gilded lily. We are human and as such we are capable of everything. Good and Evil taste the same to our moral hunger and the voracious appetite that accompanies our actions. We think with our bellies and our hearts think the same way - it is no coincidence that our instinct to kill and fuck are so closely related to our instincts to eat.

It is that humanity, then, which I love so much. It is our instinct to do all of these things except those things that benefit others. We do those things because we can, because doing them makes us human. We help others because it is in that tenuous contact that we can remember what it was to be in the womb - to be one and all, to encompass the world when our heart beats.

There is no snow this year but when I look outside I can see the light falling down like frosted dew and I remember that there were years with snow, and years with you, all of you intact.

-Rich

love in an empty room

Spinach pasta with a mushroom tomato sauce!

This weekend I was supposed to be studying for finals. I did not do that. Instead I worked on a scarlatti piece and made food.

Stage 1: Pasta Sauce
handful of fresh basil
4 vine tomatoes
2 roma tomatoes
1/4 large white onion(peeled, minced)
3 medium cloves of garlic(peeled, minced)
1 can tomato paste
1-2 cups of water
salt and pepper to taste
sauteed mushrooms(see stage 2)

Stage 2: Mushrooms
1 lb chanterelles
1 large portobello cap
1 few drops truffle oil
extra virgin olive oil

Stage 3: Other stuff
1 large section of Kale(reduces down to a small portion)
1 ball of bufala mozzarella
2 packets fresh spinach pasta(in this case, linguini)

Stage 1:

The most important part of a chef's work? The love of cooking. Ha, no, actually it is the knife.



In this case, Henckels. Always sharpen your knives after a few uses, and store them separate from all other cutlery.

Take your knife and attack your tomatoes.



Your Vine tomatoes, above, and below your Romas.



In the picture with the Romas, you can see that I've already chopped my garlic(in reality, I had garlic left over chopped from last week's chili), so I am skipping that step for you. Chop the garlic, chop the roma tomatoes, and then Quarter the vine tomatoes. Don't go to slowly and don't press down - you want to reserve the tomato liquid as much as possible. Place the quartered vine tomatoes and the chopped/minced romas with the garlic, and chop your basil as well. Your first stage prep should look like this:



Throw all of this into a pot



and add some tomato paste and water.



more paste = thicker sauce. Add the paste in tablespoon amounts and adjust with water to get the consistency you want. It will get thicker as the tomatoes break apart, so don't worry if it seems a bit thin.

Stage 2: Mushroooooooooooms

As the sauce is cooking(turn the stovetop onto hi to bring to a boil, then bring it down to a simmer then cover the pot),

you will wash, remove the stem from, and then chop up your portobello cap



and then treat your chanterelles in the same fashion. Keep the chanterelle stems - they are meaty texture for your sauce.



Throw on some awesome music while you are at it, dammit.



And your mushrooms should look like this:



I did this all beforehand(in the pictures you can see the tomatoes still not in the sauce) but you don't have to. I just find it easier to get everything ready before I begin to cook.

Throw a pan onto the stove, head the pan FIRST then add the olive oil and a few drops of the white truffle oil. Then throw in the mushrooms and sautee the hell out of them. You want the smell of the truffle oil to lessen, as it gets pulled into the mushrooms and the mushroom liquid comes out. It looks like this:



right before it is done, at which point you throw the mushrooms(with about half of the liquid in the pan) into the sauce, at which point the sauce looks like this:



at this point, I removed the large quarters of vine tomato, put them in a bowl, and mashed the hell out of them with a knife and fork. I then threw the whole contents into the sauce again. Turn the heat up to about a 4-5 and leave uncovered. You want the sauce to start reducing. Throw in your chopped up 1/4 onion if you have it, and let sit.

Stage 3: everything else
at this point, you want to add a bit of oil to your mushroom pan and let it smoke a bit. Get your Kale and wash it and place it on your cutting board. It looks crazy. Like this.



Well, that is not crazy enough. Let's make it crazier. Chop it up into large chunks! Don't worry about it seeming a little too big. It reduces down a hell of a lot.



place the kale in your mushroom pan and cover with a lid of some sort to trap the moisture. As each batch gets smaller, add more and more kale until all of your kale is in the pan. Let the Kale wilt and absorb some of the flavor from the mushrooms - Kale is a wonderfully textural vegetable, and is basically a blank slate as far as flavor goes. It is not as difficult as some Spinach, and our pasta is spinachy anyways, which is a good complement. The kale, fully wilted, looks like so.




Throw on a song, and wait for your sauce to reduce. The song should be something like this,



and the sauce should look a little bit like this,



at which point it is pretty much done. You should take a large pot, add water with a handful of sea salt, and let it come to a rolling boil. Once it is at a rolling boil, add some pasta,



and cook until at the texture you want. remove the pasta and place in a container with a little bit of the starchy pasta water. Let the sauce continue to boil, and take your mozzarella,



and slice it into thin slices, maybe about 1/4" thick. set aside with the mozzarella water.

Yeah, then throw some pasta in a bowl, add the kale, pasta sauce, and some mozzarella. It should look like this:



and it will be DELICIOUS.

Till next weekend! I think I might cook something difficult, like short ribs with wheatberries and capers. Or I might get drunk at a party, so either way, someone is happy. And vomiting.

-Rich
the subtlety is reduced by two

The embuscade.

Everything around us is like an explosive. Everything quivers when something else moves - a movement here means a movement there, and it spreads out like a dying wave across white sand. Yet nothing changes. Nothing is altered in any way - no purchase is found on any handhold.

We are all waiting for something. Looking around us, the scenery shivers, and we know that behind the horizon is something amazing. It thrills us to anticipate that unknown thing and we expect to see it soon, if not now. Yet it never comes.

It never comes because it is lodged within us. We are the mountain and the shade. We are the bell that never rings. We are the mouth that never sings. Nothing happens in this world because we are too afraid to act - if we act, then we change and we die. It is our fear of death that makes us indifferent to life. All of life is death and dying, everything exists for only a moment. The person that we are now is not the person that we were a moment ago, and somewhere on a very spiritual level we understand this fact. It seethes under covers.

I look across the sea and smoke cigarettes and let the ash fall into small tails that linger on the legs of my pants. I watch the water lap gentle, full of everything but grace, and I wonder whether my life is just as plain, just as certain as the bottom of the sea.

These last few weeks have been hellishly difficult for me to deal with, in the sense that I don't particularly give a good goddamn about anything. Life is an expanding concentric circle. It plays a rainbow melody, even when I can only hear the reds and the blacks. I am certain that after my trip to Milan I will be recharged. I am certain that I will be different. I wish that I could be the same.

-Rich
tomorrow washes stars in black brigades

waking up.

I was standing and watching the creeping advance of cars outside when I heard that a friend's family member had died. There was a rushing sound of elevators in transit and then nothing. I stood at the very tip of a slate iceberg and when I looked down it was impossible to tell where the clouds ended and the water began. Everything eddies when we look at it from above, even people.

I remember watching my mother play with the telephone cord in a swank hotel room. The sunlight came in through a window blocked off by my father reading a newspaper that should have been important, and the television in the background played the kind of music that we have become accustomed to. The spring was dying outside and we ignored it.

When you do something like counting the curls in a telephone cord, eventually the act gains meaning. Buddhist monks use the same technique - they count the 108 beads on their cords as they chant their sutras and at some point the number 108 becomes the same thing as the number 1, and then numbers mean beads, and suddenly the world has become more precise. Even though everything is the same, it is that sameness which remains different - the thing that everything becomes is really the thing that everything is. It exists, always, like the world in a movie screen exists. It is there and reality attaches itself with hooks and ladders to it, and perhaps that means we can see it somehow. Perhaps when we count over and over, we are opening a door. This door is chased silver with acid etched patterns like the spots of a jaguar riddling its surface. It creaks on a single brass hinge tainted green with the patina of arrogance. It bleeds air where the frame meets frame. When people exist, when their frames meet the frames which enclose other people, the door opens and we discover that life is neither a lock nor a key.

I sat outside and a red car beetled past me. The road appeared as a withered branch and I reached out a hand to snap it off, to pull it towards me. I thought about the Casalinos and I wondered if in the perpendicular of the sky, whether their life was my life, whether my life was theirs, and whether this was the true face of violence - cold and laughing, voice choked sorrow by the wind.

-Rich
two out of three ain't bad

Opportunity.

In the morning, I did not get up until after my alarm had died. I lay in bed and kept my eyes shut. I was waiting for that frisson of cognition where one realizes with a certainty that this cannot be the dream, and that the dream cannot be reality. It is like catching the clutch on a stick shift. The gears mesh, the wheels turn, the sunlight goes from blue to grey and I open my eyes.

Outside I can hear cars going up and down the small street that leads to my parents's house. The neighborhood is a fortress now, and I live in a garret. Once people lived with each other as a community. Now the community lives without the people, a lumbering golem whose life begins with the sound of money being transferred. Everything is changing these days. I don't even carry coins anymore, I just throw them as tips to the girls at starbucks, those flashing bright eyes that seem so full of purpose and potential but instead lead to nothing more than a frayed black smock, turning grey with fingerless age.

In the mirror there is a person looking back at me who desperately needs a shave and will not get one. I examine my face for signs of emotion, some quality that might bleed through my pores and run colorful. There is nothing there - there never really is anything, except around the eyes. That's how I am different every morning. It isn't the hair, it's the eyes. Today they are sliced brown, the color of tea at the bottom of white porcelain cups. There is a flicker behind that dark golden bruise and perhaps it is something left of my dream, a dream wherein I stood on a vast vield of terrifying grass and watched the sky write words with a piece of charcoal.

Today I am going to work but I don't really know where I am going - my briefcase holds a sandwich and a though and maybe that's enough. I think about Deepak and I think about the sea, and perhaps that is why I think about Deepak. We can take this boat. You're damn right we can. You're goddamn right.

-Rich

a whispered wild gyre plays

undercurrents.

I talked with Giulia last night. We discussed things that had happened recently, and as is the case with people who are comfortable with each other's voices, the words didn't really mean anything.

Giulia mentioned a myth wherein a man holds the entire universe within himself. We both believed this myth to be true, no matter whether the story was an allegory or not. The human body is a mystery of subtle action, which is why creationists often use the body to affirm their belief in a higher power. Simply put, everything within us is so complex that to have evolved from nothing at all seems arbitrarily impossible. I digress, though I would like to talk about that argument(and why it is facetious) in another post.

The universe does rest in my body, because it is in everyone. It is simply a matter of understanding that the universe that we are in is solely based on how it reacts to us - reality is a selfish thing, and we should be glad this is so. To have existence depend upon another person would be a dangerous thing, and though sometimes I think it is possible to fall into a situation in which this is true, I do not think that is the norm. Then we move in closer and examine the cells that make up our bodies. They are these small, fragile and self contained worlds. Each cell pulsates with a life of its own, each one lives and dies over a timeline that to it must seem to be an eternity of existence. There is a heart to each cell - a center in theory, and it may or may not spin like the spiral arms of a galaxy we would like to call home.

Closer in, and suddenly the atoms exist like ray traced planets. The modern conception of the atoms suggests "shells" of probability - where an electron may be discovered, if one bothered to look. It is like finding a treasure at a yard sale. One of the more beautiful things about the atoms themselves are the strong and weak gravitational forces...atoms repel themselves up until a certain point, and at that point they hurtle together and latch into one object - that crushing momentum creates a massive amount of energy discharged as heat and light. Isn't this love, right here? Isn't this exactly what humanity does, what humanity eschews in favor of rigid formality by CHOICE, because we are afraid of that explosion and we are afraid of that hurtling fate?

The universe, if one thinks of it as anything but love, begins within our stomachs, it begins as a writhing fabric soaked in stars.

-Rich
tomorrow we can drive to Europe and see the sights

Songtooth

It is a Tuesday and I feel like Monday was lost, left somewhere in America's biggest mall and taken by someone who wanted it more. It is strange that we can want things that we do not love, with such ferocity as to rival the strength of any other desires. We don't give a damn about things but we will fight for them. Maybe that's a terrible thing. Somehow I am certain that it is a good thing - somehow I know that within that kernel of knowledge is a truth about humanity that I would rather choke on than laugh to.

When I sat in that hospital corridor and looked up at the lights I left like a camera was watching the weight of my throat as I breathed in and out, and I thought about that crippling grasp of old age which curls slowly around your neck. We know it is there - it sometimes touches us on our veins, where we can count our pulse in fear. Yet it does not scare us - there is a gentleman's agreement between ourselves and our age, in that we may ignore it until our bodies remember the weight of gravity. When we are children we fear gravity and cry, we cry arrogant until rooms are full with the sound. When we are old we remain silent. We have lost a game that mattered to us, and only too late have we realized that it was never a game at all, it was a tease, tantalus with grapes above his head on prescient branches.

This girl is seventeen and she is terrified and when I held her hand I remembered being terrified and seventeen and part of me was in love with here, there, where white lights played cheerful pantomime on her cheeks.

Later in the night I found myself drunk, sitting in a bar and laughing, because I could. I laughed and the sounds fell out over my feet, crawling towards the windows and railing and searching for escalators to the stars. I let them go and drank another shot. There was a full moon somewhere but I didn't feel like looking for it that night. I still don't.

-Rich
somewhere in this shaved undying boneyard

the sour.

The sky is grey but clear. It shines as if reflecting light from the earth - light pollution from every living thing around us. I lay on my back and let the cold air wash over me. It feels like carpet being pulled over my body, starting at the feet and moving up slowly. I let my fingers dig into the ground and my heels follow. It seems like only a matter of time until I am swallowed up by the earth and perhaps it is. If I lay here, unmoving, the grass would grow around me, dirt would cover me, and I would sleep under a mound of life - teeming with insects and worms and those stable roots of grass and weeds that push their faces ever upwards.

In my hand is a stone and I am feeling the surface as well as I can without looking at it. I think that I should be able to know what a stone looks like by what it feels like. It shouldn't be a struggle to associate one reality with another - even if they are different in appearance, they are the same reality. The stone I feel is the same stone that I see if I look at it. The essence of the stone remains - it is hard and it feels rough like old leather. It does not fray under my fingers, nor tear...it is solid and in my mind I can see that solidness as a wash of brown. Reality bronzes itself if we can remember it.

There are clouds above me and I wonder if perhaps it is going to rain again, and whether I will feel it this time. Rain was something that I struggled to ignore for a good part of my life and to this day I still sometimes walk outside into the rain without noticing it is even there. I have trained myself so diligently to only see those things I want to see, to feel the things that I want to feel. It is a training that I fight now to forget. That is why I am lying on the ground, prostrated before myself, in an effort to remember the world around me. I am scared that nothing will ever match what it feels like, nothing I see will relate to anything I know even if it is inside of myself.

A bird flies over me and with each wingbeat I can see the air moving down, that motion dispersed through the atmosphere until it settles in my heart, a shimmering ocean of waves that shine in the light of an overcast sky.

-Rich

cash rules everything around me

The Sun is Down.

I had just gotten off the phone with a friend of mine when I realized I was hungry. The realization was stark and sudden - it felt the way it does when you see a person being shot in a movie. There is a moment of plain confusion, a wide open space full of blank pages, and then everything is filled with scribbles and words that only make sense when the camera pulls back. I was hungry. I was surprised I was hungry, and perhaps that made the hunger seem more important. It wasn't the kind of far of hunger that one sees...hunger that slowly humps the horizon as it makes its way to your stomach. It was sharp and painful and required immediate attention. I did what any other man would have done. I ordered Dominos Pizza.

I used the online order because if technology has done anything for us it has made us cognizant of the fact that we can be as lazy as shit and get away with it. This is something that I am not particularly averse to, except that my vanity is affected over time(I would get fat) so I tend not to use the laziest methods available to accomplish things. In this instance I did - even knowing that I could simply walk outside and a few blocks away to procure food. Midnight, the clock hitting 12 and striking 12 times, does not mean that food is unavailable, unless we are counting in pumpkins and glass slippers.

The pizza arrived at 12:20 and I went downstairs to get it, where I discovered that I had not paid with a credit card online and had, in fact, been required to have cash. This was news to me - if there is anything else that the internet has begrudgingly taught us, it is that electronics muck things up just as much as they speed up the process. In the end everything tends to average out and you find yourself a little more frustrated, having saved no time, and really gained nothing except a tingling need for Excedrin. I had to go upstairs to get my wallet and, as I was turning to enter the secure door of my lovely apartment/fortress building, I noticed two teenage kids standing outside walking past. I paid no notice to them(who pays attention to teenage BOYS) and went upstairs, grabbed my wallet, came back down, and walked out to find that those two lovely rapscallions had robbed the pizza guy of his money. Which amounted to 13 dollars. Which was somewhat on the same level of sadness as the fact that he had been robbed.

I ended up calling the manager and doing a CC transaction and paying for the pizza while tipping the poor guy 13 dollars to make up for the loss. That was when I discovered that the kids had stolen my goddamn pizza along with the money, and I was furious.

I was hungry, I was a bit scared, and the security guards that finally showed up did nothing to assuage my problems. It was absolutely wonderful.

-Rich
I'd like to be under the sea in an octopus's garden in the shade

Indiscreet.

Outside it is cold in the mornings but when I wake up and look, all I see is a wide swatch of sunlight that is laying over everything. It even manages to make it through the manmade canyons of reflective glass and red stained bricks to come through my window and cover my face. My face is turned towards the window and when I open my eyes every morning, if it is sunny outside I wonder if perhaps I am dead, and if this is what heaven is supposed to be - cold and white, starkly dangerous and yet soothing to the touch. It reminds me of holding a jellyfish through a rubber glove, where nematocysts are unavailable for comment but the soft and wavy motions travel from fingertips to the palm of my hand.

The walk towards Fell's Point is thick with the smell of seawater, and it cuts further towards the back of the throat in dry winter air. The distance is dotted by people in various levels of exertion, and their words echo across the point while their mouths exhume thick slabs of steam that trail behind them like grey and fibrous scarves. I walk and breathe quietly. Sometimes I worry that when I am breathing out and steam rises, I am losing part of myself that I can't recall ever having had. It is a short and childish fear but it hits so quickly that I am really afraid, very much afraid until I remember that I am no longer a child. I am not afraid of the dark anymore...secretly I still fear the amorphous mass of shape that is the evening. I think I always will.

I recall during my walk that this world is really a million worlds, that the world I am in is not the one that you live in, or the one that the girl walking past me lives in. All of us have our different worlds and all of us can almost touch the others around us when we kiss or laugh, or hug to share warmth. A girl told me about penguins and I wonder if perhaps we are like them in more ways that we like to imagine - except that they are better dressed. In an existence where death remains so close, laying next to them in sleep like a deposed lover, understanding comes much sooner. They understand that everything changes so quickly that it seems like nothing has changed at all, and they are dressed for the occasion. No matter how hard we try, we never will know another person or their world - we can approximate it but that remains the best that we can ever do. A friend of mine is colorblind and he will never know the difference between red and green. That fact shocked me, but it shocked me more that I did not pity him in any way - I simply felt jealousy, clear and smooth jealousy for a person whose world was that much easier to understand. In a perfect world everything is the same color and when we close our eyes we see it, glorious and triumphant, the silver color of trumpets in the sky.

I stand at the end of the point and I look across the water at tall ships and for once I think that perhaps the sea is nothing but a marble in a pond, and that we have thrown it there.

-Rich though we remembered it didn't matter in the slightest

Weathered.

Today is the first really cold day of the season and I am sitting in my office wearing a winter jacket. My fingers feel a bit like icicles, except they aren't melting to the touch. I think that icicles are fairly interesting objects. They exist perfectly in form during a very well defined range of temperatures and they only really change when we interact with them. It reminds me a bit of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. If we are observing the action of a particle of light, we are "pinging" it, which changing what it is doing and where it actually is. hence we can never really know for certain what anything is doing, though we can be reasonably sure where it should be. Or so science has told us. Whether or not that theory is true remains to be proven.

Thinking about the change in weather makes me think about being weathered - it isn't a matter of changes in a physical sense that make something weathered. A house becomes lined with the grooved and toothy marks of the years, whether or not there are multiple seasons or just one. Being affected by the environment is in itself the act of being weathered. We are a particle of light and the world does not know for certain where we are, but it knows with some probability where we should be. It is refreshing to think that all of us are in some way protected from the possibility of really knowing where anything is. It gives me hope that perhaps I might reach out my hand with my eyes closed and grasp the warm fingers of someone I love; when nothing is certain, everything really becomes an option. This is different from the life we are hemmed in by on all sides, of course.

Though in that sense, perhaps it is because we are observing our life in the first place. Perhaps our lives are not hemmed in at all except for when we attempt to figure out exactly where we are in our downward sloping journey. If we didn't care about 401k plans and retirement and children and love and always, always love, then wouldn't we be more alive? Wouldn't we live just as happily and just as easily as that? I like to think I am right in this matter; of course it doesn't matter when a person considers themselves as a separate thing from what I consider them, but I still like to think I am right. It gives me a sense of hope that buzzes around me, and which I casually swat at with unsurprisingly virgin hands.

Sarah Stevens had her birthday yesterday and I wonder if perhaps she was ever born at all, whether she will be born in the future when green lawns are green and not grass.

-Rich

it's not easy trying to have yourself a good time

Before the keys.

I am sitting on a bench that could also be called a stool, and I am perched above a set of piano keys. There are 88 keys on a full keyboard and they shine like teeth cut by mountain air and before I can begin to play I have to speak to them.

This is not a real piano in the sense that these keys are connected to electric circuits and parts that barely move. It is a piano in theory - it is connected to the idea of a piano in much the same way that I am connected to the idea of a human being. Perhaps that is the source of the emotion that begins as a hard knot of twine in my heart, when I place my fingers on the keys and gently press down.

I am playing now, a warm up to remind my fingers that they are not simply for show, they are not there to give the tailor an idea of where to place the cuff. Here, in this room, they are working. They have been employed and I am making sure that I get my money's worth from their tired backs - arched joints a bridge between hand and key. That bridge attaches itself to the base of another bridge - one between key and mind, between our ears and the song that we are singing. It is amazing that we can sing with our fingers, and I think about Sarah or Giulia because that is what they do naturally. I am taking lessons to learn how to do something that other people can simply DO, and it strikes me that this is not a bad goal to have. There is another shining thread in the room between what I am playing and what I am thinking I am playing, so I watch it sing under tension while the song continues. I cannot imagine the song ending but I know that it will, soon. Everything will end too soon, and that shining thread will fade away into the boxed in corners of a room, where music changes the warp and weft of the boards that shape a room. That room holds me in its palm and I know that I am being shaped by that song as well.

If enough harmony echoes through my bones, will I somehow become harmonious? If enough music plays through flesh to flesh, will I one day become music itself, that quicksilver remedy for fear and pain, that brooding antigen for love? I can't know that answer - I can't know that I have changed when the change occurs so slowly as to seem like nothing at all. We know ourselves only briefly and only when we are left and leaving. That is the honest truth about our song, the ones that beat against our ribs, a hummingbird fading away in a cage. Our cages are found outside of this room, outside of what we have made.

The song ends. I let my fingers come to rest and then begin to play again. I know that I will do this over and over until it sounds right, until I know that it is correct without having to bridge those gaps again. My fingers are stiff and cold and they move like dancers and I let them.

-Rich

somehow you knew that we would give up

On crabs, and parties. (2)

It was while sitting outside that I learned the proper way to eat steamed crabs. The girl who was throwing the party sat with me and helped me remove the top of the shell. I have no fingernails, as I am a biter out of habit, and I could not scrabble my finely honed fingernails into the conveniently shaped key of the crab's underbelly. She slipped a nail under that protruding piece of shell and I did the rest, opening the crab like a book, where the sound of a page turning is the same as a breath being drawn in. Next, I removed the head and brain. I could not touch it due to squeamishness, so I used a napkin and broke that part of the crab off and placed it aside. I removed the arms and legs and finally I was left with a bottom half of a crab, robust with secret meats and covered by treacle thick fat and gills.

The next move was to snap the body in half so that each moon-pie shaped piece sat heavily in the palms of each hand, and I watched as the girl demonstrated. Her face was the full of tired glee and her fingers shone bone white before a crack signaled the real death of an animal. I can't eat an animal. I can eat meat though, and up until this point I still saw the crab as an animal, albeit an animal without legs head or arms. I did the same and grinned when the body snapped open and I knew then that I had fallen in love with a process. It is in well defined processes that I most easily find something to enjoy, and this was truly enjoyable. The fact that I was making this transition on my own, from animal to meat, was something that I very rarely had the fortune to encounter. I looked up and around us there was the cold evening, where even bugs found no reason to fly anywhere but towards the light and I thought for a moment that we were on an island in the middle of a dark sea.

The next step was to hold half the crab as if genuflecting, and to pull the body apart, revealing ample space for slim fingers to gently pry meat from small, egg colored cavities. After seeing it done, I attempted to do the same and it felt like prayer, it felt like I was praying at last and that God was away but he would be back shortly, just leave a message after the beep.

I ate a few crabs and used the hammer as a visceral tool to get the meat in the claws. After a few crabs I was sated and I realized that it was cold outside, I realized that I was shivering not only from a blistering hangover(which even at this point hung over me as a shroud) but from the intensity of the temperature as well.

After washing my hands I stood on the porch and watched people by the bonfire talking and laughing and having a good time and I wondered if I ever really belonged in a place where people are doing those things - I wondered if I am even capable of faking talking and laughing and good times and all of that which remains a necessary disjecta in this world. I could have kept thinking about it to the point of going numb. Instead I grabbed a bottle of water and made my way over towards the warm red glow, that glow which speckled the crowd sitting in chairs around a blaze, that shimmered as it flew from mouth to mouth in the form of a smile.

-Rich

so we couldn't make out that night, so what

On crabs, and parties. (1)

On Halloween I dressed as a kat boi, with ears and a tail, and a collar with a bell. I had girls tugging on my tail at a bar where I drank heavily. The colors of the lights behind the bar started off discrete and singular, and then all the lights began to bleed into one another and I realized that I was drunk. It was the middle of the evening, and I was drunk again. Life is a pattern that always folds neatly down the middle - the beginnings and ends are always the same no matter where we cut the cloth.

The next day I went to a crab feast north of Baltimore, where I drove for hours on 695 as I was lost. The road was an ocean and each partition of concrete thumped under my tires like waves. I began to think about driving like I do about swimming. My car ignored my thoughts and pushed onwards, leaning into the journey like trees lean into the wind and rain...Claire sat next to me and made my time passable. I wanted to throw up but did not, and that by itself was somewhat admirable.

The house where we finally arrived was small and cozy, and simple. It stood with little fanfare and I appreciated that - when we walked in I knew that this was a home and not simply a residence. We too often rent things spiritually, and never let our lives place roots out of fear. There was nothing to fear in this house except the scent of pumpkin pies, covered in obscene drawings done with shaking hands, a tremulous fork. I laughed as I ate cookies shaped like animals and doritos that vaguely nudged my Mexican memories before their taste vanished across the length of my throat.

-Rich

where the grain meets the heft of your skin

Poem.

The harsh salt spray becomes wind again
and taps against the end of my nose,
rubs against the mercury of my lips
and I cough from the advent of evening.
There are no soldiers here but we salute anyways
when girls parade past us
their arms trimmed golden by the glow of every sun
that has ever set over the east coast
on their way out west.
I round a corner and then
and then the bricks change course below my feet
where a pattern comes undone from effort
from overweight tenacity,
from diligent hunger that gnaws nightly
from finger to finger along the railings of our well defined lives.

-Rich
too much for you to remember

Songbirds in Eulogy

After a while life becomes a routine that we follow without realizing it. Even after we have realized it is a routine, we can never shake it. We may change the way we do things for a while but eventually our existence finds its own equilibrium, it's own level space. I wonder if perhaps I am in one now, or whether I have changed something just a tiny amount.

If I think of my life as a physical shape, it is flat. It is dry there, and in the distance I can see the faint shadow of mountains and foothills. I am certain that they exist, but I am afraid to extend my hand out past my body, for fear that I will hit a piece of paper. I live in that flat space where there is not even a grain of sand...fear keeps me from searching for one beyond what I can see. The sun rises and sets with variable times - it never seems to come up when I expect it to, and it sets when I am still cursing the sweat that stains my collars grey. My sweat stains grey and never brown. Brown is the color of the earth and perhaps a person has to feel connected to the earth to have that color. These days I look up and I know that the stars are lumped together into groups that make mathematical sense, that fall neatly into columns on worksheets. I have become a routine, a program that runs in futility. The air is dry and when I breathe in at night I know that I am tasting faint laughter that falls behind those mountains like a fugue of raindrops.

I have a textbook in front of me but nothing is coercing me to read it. Knowledge does not seem worth the effort to gain it. By the time a person learns something it is already meaningless - it has become less than nothing because you replaced something you knew with it. You replaced something you knew, that you knew! Truth is peeled away like the skin of an apple, and our innocence is held by the ridge of our father's thumb, where the blade rests and scrapes it away in spirals. After everything there is nothing but an empty striated shell and that is what we are now. That is what is left, that is what remains and I am certain that it is what we are now. A wind blows and I stretch like an accordion to sing with it - how sad that humanity has come to this, that we are only reactions to an impulse...

In the winter, snow will fall and cover everything. It will be like a Greek rite of mysteries, where phallic cults would sacrifice the King-twin, the tanist, and in that way preserve his innocence and his manhood. When the snow melts a wave of birds wil blanket those once empty spaces with song and we might even notice the butterflies returning, if we ever lift our faces away from the screens of computers. The earth will be renewed and it is a terrible thing that we will not. There is no spring for us...there is only this soft winter, this bleached existence, this wavering plane where sunlight dully shivers.

-Rich

you weren't looking for an answer so much as a song

Travel.

I am sitting in my room right now and it is early or it is late. Time becomes meaningless after enough sleep is lost. I have sheep that never needed counting, whose wooly heads adorn fake cashmere sweaters in open air markets.

I have returned from traveling and it is sometimes enough for me to look around and realize that and sometimes it is not. I feel like shit, as I ate fairly unhealthy food the entire time I was there, so this week it looks like I am basically doing a detox programme. I like spelling certain words in the British sense - it gives them a more fair sense of dignity, like those words died for freedom and for the world to know that freedom was worth dying for, once. Maybe it was beyond the stark grey trees that bloom wherever men congregate, maybe it was before everything we loved became an epithet.

I am listening to a dashboard confessional song and it is moving me and that fact makes me want to never listen to music again.

I talked to Sarah last night and everything in me wanted to stretch across states until it could wrap itself around her and keep her safe from everything. I don't know that she needs to be kept safe from herself but I would do it anyways, I would let her hate me if it meant she stopped hating parts of herself. Every movement is a celebration, every song is another votive candle.

I cannot sleep. I cannot sleep. I cannot have any more thoughts. They sting and bite so deeply, and sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I stopped thinking entirely, if my body simply took over and lived as it wanted to live, if it fucked like it wanted to fuck and sang with every animal's death song.

-Rich
we were against the windowpanes

Interlude.

There are trees in the distance that look like they were painted onto the mountain. The mountain looks like a sheet of paper and I have a growing urge to put my hand out and crumple everything I see into a ball. I want to tear the corners off of my view and unfold it again to find that everything has changed - that the trees are all around me and the room I am sitting in is far away, across the sea.

I have been lax in writing on my blog and much of it has to do with a sense of accomplishment with my last blog. Much of it has to do with how busy I am - and that bothers me. Writing has always been something for myself more than anyone else. I hate to think that I am starting to care less and less about myself, even if that is what appears to be happening.

I went shopping today and was startled by prices for just about everything. I am not a thrifty soul - far from it - but I have no desire to pay upwards of 600 dollars for a sweater. I'd rather just freeze my pretty little ass off instead. I am going to finish this take home final and then go back out for more shopping in the afternoon. There is no reason to be hasty about anything, anymore.

When I return I will call everyone I have missed so dearly and I will e-mail everyone that has sent me a missive. There is something about my home country that doesn't feel like home anymore, and once I noticed it I found that it wasn't my home country anymore. Perhaps that part of my life was folded up once or twice and rearranged where love touched love, where reality became thinner and gauze-like across the flesh of memory.

-Rich
me and you only in this heaven only here

Korea day 3, part 2.

The airshow drew to a close in the afternoon and I felt nothing but exhaustion. We walked out past the security gate and tried to hail a taxi with no luck for almost an hour - Admiral Bae saw us as he drove by and picked us up instead. We arrived back at the hotel and I stumbled upstairs where I fell onto my bed face first and slept, still wearing my suit.

When I woke up it was about 8 pm, and my brother was ironing his fatigues in the middle of the hotel room. I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself, a long and sallow look that meant nothing to him and nothing to me. I washed my face and went back out into the room to change into my normal clothes, stripping of the wrinkled suit that I knew I would have to iron the next morning. My nametag was still on and I threw it onto the desk along with my tie. My brother looked up from his ironing job and continued what he was doing. Ouside the sun had faded to a bluish grey recollection and the city lit up like votive candles in a church.

My brother called his friend who was stationed in the area, and we met him outside to eat dinner and get a drink. He showed us the hill of hookers as we passed by - phillipino women standing with restless eyes and all of them hidden by the scent of smoke. We walked on towards the international part of the city, where English was more than just a breakfast tea.

Dinner consisted of a meal had facing each other across a faux wood table. There was an omelette with rice, a tonkatsu, some ramen. We laughed and it sounded real enough when it came back to us in echoes. Everything that echoes is real enough. The bill for three people was less that sixteen dollars and I was fairly amazed by that fact - in a city where opulence is the norm, one could still eat like a pauper but dine like a prince. The world is a thing that only makes sense when everything is placed side by side, matching green bowls and the color of flavors iridescent dew overhead.

After dinner we headed into the city and found a small bar. It was a Tuesday and the normal tuesday crowd was present...we did not mingle with them but instead headed up onto the rooftop where we watched foot traffic underneath us. My brother ordered a giant blood dark beer and Bickford ordered a light beer and I ordered a diet coke because we all have to be healthy. It made sense under that cloaked sea of stars and we laughed and pointed out beautiful women, but all women are beautiful somehow so we pointed at all of them.

Eventually the night ran out and we yawned with the effort of swaying upright. Bickford walked back with us part of the way until we saw him off - a wave and he vanished down a side road towards his condo. My brother and I shuffled back into the hotel with the changing of the guard and sleep carried us up in velvety quiet elevators.

-Rich
we use our mobile mobiles to sing of stars

Korea day 3.(part 1)

The Air show began early for us - we left the hotel to go to the Seoul Airfield at 6 in the morning. I was wearing a suit and a tie and I felt strange enough that when I stood in front of the mirror it did not seem like me. I waved my hand back and forth and watched my reflection do the same, but in a more snide manner.

The taxi let us out in front of the back gate and we walked the hundred meters or so to the show entrance. Our breath coiled sibilant around us in the cold morning air and my throat hurt from the dry atmosphere. It smelled a little of shit and of stale water from the river beside us and I looked at the shiny planes and helicopters in front of us and nothing really seemed to make sense. We walked through security and I headed towards our booth to help set up.

Our booth was surrounded on all sides by monsters - Northrop Grumann, G&E, etc. Companies that could swallow our company whole, even knowing how much we were really worth. Their booths were gigantic affairs with custom made everything - ours was just a little thing with a single device represented. I quailed in the shadow of giants. I set up the Blue Force Tracker according to instructions hastily read on our way through the gates, and loaded everything up. It was freezing cold in the gigantic tent that housed our booth and I walked outside to let the sun flay the cold from my body. Thick tendrils of sleep fell to the ground and lay belly up against the sun. I was awake with the country around me and I watched helicopters fly into the base in lines like ants following the scent of honey through a nautilus shell. Oh, Icarus you flew high but your real curse was not vanity but improper science - science wins, now, and God is dead and I wonder if we are all better off for it. I walked back inside and waited for something to happen.

The conference started off slowly - there were few people trickling through the show, so I went and viewed all the other booths. There was one beautiful booth babe whose picture I took and whose picture is at the top of this blog. Her name is Kim Ji Ae, and she gave me her information and told me to contact her. I am a beautiful boy I think I think I am when I'm not.

All around me were inplements of destruction and death and I knew that I was a part of all of it and it did not bother me. It did not bother me at all, and once again I remembered that everything comes with a price attached, even prices have prices and they are terrible and lean, like wolves through the fir trees. I went back to the booth and stood to greet people. I was a booth babe and suddenly everything was full circle and I was resplendent with meaning, a peacock feather soul.

The President of Korea showed up around noon and I went outside to take a picture of him. I was ushered back inside by security men and women with grey toothless smiles and I went back to the booth with my camera. Conversations were altered by the sounds of planes passing overhead and eventually sentences stopped completely. I watched the crowd pass and mentally compared every woman against the girl I had met and they meant nothing at all, less than sand at the bottom of the sea, colored pink and grey by fish bellies and semen from sewers.

Suddenly there was an ocean of security and the President of Korea was walking through the area with his wife. This is the man that I could have had dinner with and did not and I understood that his gravity was heavy because his position was heavy. I felt pity for him and I wondered if he felt pity for me - even if he ever saw me with that straightforward gaze. After the President left I went outside to the food court and ate a lunch with soldiers and security, models, CEOs, everyone who was at the show. I sat alone and munched on fish cakes and ate my jigae. The booth was waiting for me so I went back in afterwards with a cup of coffee, the rest of the day resplendent behind me.

-Rich
bottle poppin what's he droppin?
(I will upload the picture later...blogger in Korea sucks)

interluded.

The weather is cold, and my thoughts are as cold. I will write more tomorrow perhaps - at the moment I am starving and tired. I took pictures of planes in flight today and I thought, for a moment, that I could have been like that once, before I knew what lips are like.

-Rich

korea day 2.

In the morning I went out to the cafe on our floor and sat facing the windows that overlooked the city. I ate a brioche with a bit of butter and some strange cured buffalo meat. The morning had not broken yet so everything was quiet and muted - the cappucino makers hummed a lively tune and as I spread a pat of butter on my brioche and absentmindedly looked across the river towards the high tech part of Seoul.

We went to see my Grandfather in the hospital. He was recovering from a stroke and had been moved to a recovery hospital. The train station was a bustling mess and at first I was a bit confused by all the people walking around, everyone with shiny black hair and clothes that leaped off the front page of an H&M catalogue. Apparently, style does not come hand in hand with burgeoning wealth. There were full length mirrors all over the station and wherever I looked I saw girls fixing their hair or their outfits, staring with hard bored glances towards themselves. It made me feel a little sad to be there, a little embarassed to know that I could have been the same way. Thank God I was not.

The train ride was long and I fell asleep on our way to the small town in which my Grandfather was staying. I woke a few times to the sound of raucous laughter, to someone singing amazing grace in korean, and to the flashes of light off of mirrored buildings, sheathed in glass. It was a desperate thing to wake up to and I immediately sought the comfort of sleep afterwards.

The town that we stopped in was a strange mix of suburban and urban, of european and american styles in architecture. We took a taxi to the hospital and asked around to find the right building. We entered my grandfather's room to find that he was not there - it was a large room with six beds, and three were occupied by people whose grip on this world was tenuous to say the least. It was a terrifying thing and I was scared of the sick, immediately feeling terrible about being scared in the first place.

The hospital was grungy and small, not like the one where my grandfather was placed initially. This was a hospital for physical therapy and recovery - the worst had passed, and the long road to recovery was just beginning. At least, that was the sentiment which was not mirrored in the dirty floor, the lackluster service, the smell of preservation and forced cleanliness. This was the last station before death and the doors were not going to open. I was nauseated, and felt a chill roll through my body. I did not want to be here, not in this place where life was already spent, and no-one would understand what I was saying.

We went downstairs to the physical therapy ward and I finally saw my Grandfather. It was a strange moment- I have never been able to speak to him because I do not speak Korean and I never learned, and he does not speak English. Yet we have always had a very strong bond - one forged by blood, and by the similarities in our character. He was the one who taught me zippo tricks when I was fifteen or so, standing behind his house overlooking his farm, showing me how to light the zippo in a variety of ways until my mother stopped him. He looked up at us and for a moment I was afraid he would not know what I was, he would not recognize me. Instead he reached out his one good hand and I gripped it in mine. We stood like that for a few minutes while people talked, and I felt the beat of his pulse through his small and leathery fingers. The sun stood through the window and peered across a mountain range somewhere, and I felt the same way.

We left the physical therapy area and went back upstairs to wait. I sat next to my Grandfather's bed and looked at all the different things placed around him - teas and decaffeinated coffees, humidifiers, etc. Across the room a man vomited in pain and began to weep softly, a thin humming moan escaping from his mouth. I stood up and felt sea green, and walked outside where I ran into my cousin, literally. She is a middleschooler but taller than me - 5'11 or so. It was difficult to imagine that we were related.

When my Grandfather was wheeled back into his room a large group of our family was waiting. I had never really spent time with anyone outside of my immediate family before, and I was to learn why later in the day. My family history is complicated, and everything hangs upon the fact that my Grandfather is wealthy as hell. His farm and various properties are valued somewhere in the range of fifteen million, and all the heirs in Korea are fighting over the money like dogs. My family declined to be considered in the inheritance - why should we be when we don't even live in Korea? My father was proud the day that he decided that we would refuse anything, hoping that it would be a solution to bring together the other members of his family, his brothers and sisters. It did not work. Greed is a terrible thing, and as my father told me the backstory behind ths, I could see the pain that this caused him in the way he looked off to the side, as if seeing an old friend from a sepia toned memory. I did not ask him more, I simply sat by my grandfather and held his paralyzed hand, where fingertips flexed quietly.

Korea, day 1.

I arrived half a day ago, carrying over a slight illness from the States but still avoiding the quarantine line. There is something so terrible about the clinical approach to sickness - not only are you sick but you are alone as well, in a country that perhaps you do not understand, and it is deafening. To die somewhere strange is not so bad, but to do so alone when there is life all around you is horrible. I hold in my sniffles and move on.

While on the bus to Seoul my father points out various places and how they are significant to him, to his history. He doesn't give a shit about the rest of the world and one wonders if it is ever really possible to do so when your own life is staring you down, when your own memories ressurect themselves through a smoky pane of glass. I nod and listen and I wonder whether I should take pictures. I do not - the windows produce too much glare for a lens. Machinery can't see what we see, and sometimes we have to help things along with gentle cooing, subtle coaxing.

The hotel is very large and it sits on a hill overlooking the city center. My windows have a view of all of Seoul and what strikes me the most is the number of red neon crosses that seemingly hang in the sky, suspended from the tallest buildings. Christianity grasped such a firm foothold here when the missionaries came and I wonder if I would be Christian as well, if I had been raised here. I tell myself that I wouldn't have been - but I know that is merely hope and I know, I know that my God right now is on the other side of a mirror.

It is five in the morning or so, and I cannot sleep. I will write more about Seoul and Korea and whatnot - in the meantime, there is a fairly delicious looking asian pear on a table next to me that requires some attention.

-Rich
never remember never remember what'll you say

Forget.

I am walking next to the water and when I look to the side I can see the reflection of everything around me but somehow upside down and colored differently. They aren't negatives - it isn't a picture that I am looking at, but the colors are different and that somehow makes it more real to me, it makes it seem as if the world behind that sloughing sheet is better than this one. Even me, even us, we shed skins and the new us that arrives with eyes closed is more perfect and more beautiful and more meaningful that the us that stepped out of the shower last night. The morning bakes and hardens our spirits until all we shed anymore is red clay in our footsteps - you can see the hard, flinty centers of our eyes when we laugh these days, and laughter means less and weighs less than ever. This is the future and we are choking on it.

I try to remember her face and I remember the eyes first, always the eyes first. They are luminous and a color in between blue and grey, and when she looked at me I thought for a moment that storm was coming inside of her, and I was always right. It never mattered what we said or did, the storm always came and soaked both of us to the core. I never loved her but I said I did, I said it because I knew she needed to hear it, and I have not regretted doing so, not even now when I can barely remember her startling blonde hair, that shock of frozen lightning that wavered over her eyes when she looked from behind a cascading waterfall of light. I can't remember anything else about her, not her taste or the shape of her lips, or the curve of her back, but I can always remember her eyes and they mean something to me, I just don't remember what.

There is a stone shelf at the end of the canal and I sit on it with a cigarette and a homeless man digging through a trash can near me on the street corner. I watch him and he watches me, both of us suspicious, both of us hungry for something and then I turn back to the canal. The water is rising from the runoff, and with the water comes litter in all shapes and sizes. There are milk cartons like paper icebergs, bobbing up and down in the water. I watch a crab maneuver between two soda bottles, plastic the easiest way for us to assert that humanity matters in some way to all of us. I flick the cigarette into the water and it is gone before the smoke rises far enough into the sky for me to lose sight of it. The homeless man sits on the stone shelf near me and eats from an opened styrofoam container. We throw away life, we are so fucking rich that we throw life into the trash can for others to find, and I am okay with that. I am okay with that! I almost want to cry for us, for all of us, but I don't - it would disrespect the choices made by those before us, soldiers wearing fatalistic grey and singing songs in monotones.

Tomorrow the sun will rise high enough for me to watch it burn the clouds, and nothing will change except I will still not be in love with anything but myself, and you will be in love with me and that is everything. Corn will still taste like corn, and water will still drench our spirits in stalls, and mercury still coats us in fascinating colors when we cough. But I am not in love. I am not in love.

-Rich

something this way fell apart

It has been a few days since my last post. Things have come and gone. A terrible weekend was had, and a dolorous stroke avoided by observing dolphins. Let it be known that the greatest cure for any ailment is watching dolphins jump through the water to tap a ball suspended over a pool some ten feet above the surface. I crowed and cooed like all the children in the crowd and for a moment I felt that perhaps I was not too different from them.

Tonight I am driving to Philly for various reasons - that is all I really think is necessary to write about that.

Last night instead of going to class I went to a friend's house. I had not seen him in a while, and when I first pulled up his driveway I looked around at the dilapidated walkway and felt slight apprehension. Why is it that in the absence of honest reality, we always assume the worst about things? Human nature is just that, it is human, and it falls more easily that it rises.

Yet the evening was normal. We talked about various things that had little to do with our lives, and then we talked about things that had much to do with them. There is a cycle of conversation that every meeting follows, no matter whether the conversation is long or short. Even a sentence can follow in the footsteps of noun adjective verb noun. Suffix and prefixes fix tenses. All problems are tense to begin with. We are all laughing soldiers, painted green by brass age, and smelling of ball-bearings under pressure. After a while the evening drew on and other people showed up at the house - people that I did not know, and did not particularly care to know. I left and drove home in the darkening night, highbeams on in protest. Every yellow line that passed me by was filled with a word, and the car wrote sentences that danced behind me in the red glow of stopsigns.

This weekend there are things that I have to take care of, and I am sure that I will fail miserably at some of them. It is responsibility that shaves so close to the skin, it is expectations that drag so heavily at the feet, and in the end we are all dead under polaris, under the only thing that never changes.

-Rich

as if we weren't enough for you

About Friday.

I went out last night. To several places, after my piano lessons were concluded. I am recovering. I will write on Monday.

-Rich

continuee.

I drive down 95 in the left lane, going as quickly as possible to avoid the slower cars on the right. It always infuriates me when someone is driving slowly in the left or the center lane - didn't the driver have to pass some sort of driving school? Aren't they required to know what the hell they are doing? Then when I pass, I see their somewhat sheepish faces and it makes me feel guilty that I am harboring such anger for someone who is probably scared. Then I feel stupid for feeling guilty for cowards - a coward is less than nothing, a coward is what remains after everything good in a person is gone. I make note to never give a damn about these people again. I know that I will. Human nature is as binding as anything else that humanity depends on.

There is a starbucks near my office and I contemplate going, but I am trying to detox my body in preparation for the weekend so I decide to skip it. I used to go all the time when the beautiful girls worked there but they all left, they grew up and got jobs somewhere else, they worked and laughed and some of them must have died in the time between now and then. I hate the burnt out women that remain. There are two in particular - one is a shrewish former riot grrrl with terrible red dyed hair and a nasal tone to her voice that makes my skin crawl. She is an idiot - fully incapable of actually working at a starbucks. Imagine just how stupid a person has to be to be unable to work at a starbucks. She can not remember anything beyond the first second that she is told it, and her utter complacency is annoying. The other woman is simply old and stupid, and I can not fault her for being old and stupid but I wish she were not old and stupid. I drive past the starbucks and head to the office. My shirt feels tighter around my wrists when I clench the steering wheel with both hands, making a circuit. My head is in the middle - that's the part that lights up but I can't, I can't see through the night like that, I can't.

I am merging into the correct lane with my turn signal on, driving at a conscientous speed, when the truck hits me from behind and flips my car over. I black out too slowly, unmercifully. The last thing I note is that my radio has died, and that the road is really a very loud thing after all, every car passing by sounds like an arrow loosed from a bow, and I am the target, riddled with colored circles and worth so many points. Have we made our point? It sings out of every wounded limb, yes.

-Rich
complete satisfaction spells a four letter word