Raymond, Who Presided Over A Kingdom That Was Not His Own

An ugly end it was. Unceremoniously tucked between garbage cans, planks of wood and all manner of discarded household appliance, staring up into the streetlight with those baby blues, the rain pecking at his cheeks. A long way from his lofty living room perch, where he watched a decade of my life come and go. An ugly end. And no dignity to it.

I Look Forward To Remembering This Fondly

Most often, the last time a thing happens comes and goes, and it isn't until after the thing has happened for the last time that you realize it can't be repeated.

Sometimes, you know a thing is happening for the last time just as it happens, and you can enter into it with an appreciation that illuminates the thing. Though, in being illuminated, the thing is changed, and the last time it happened is already behind you.

Cephalopod, Sweetly

There are plenty of things that I love and don't eat. But you're not one of them. You, you're an exception. As if the occasional hankerings were extensions of a divine and deeply rooted affection. As if your taste and texture were as vital to consider as your intelligence and beauty are in assessing your character, and only when weighed all together can one understand your meaning completely. They have everything to do with you as an idea, an object, a thing of beauty, a breathing thing, a skulking alien in a tidepool, an appetizer. As if wanting to swallow you down didn't invalidate my love, but proved it, was a dimension of it. As if not wanting to eat the other things I love were a sad testament to the slightly inferior quality of those other loves.

Bubs

"Everything's upside down," he said in his sweet way, between hummed bars of old Broadway musicals. My grandmother twitched in her seat. And you and I, we looked at each other smiling, nervous but happy.

Bubs drove on.

We Are Smiling And Talking But I Am Sinking

The last time I saw L she looked old. Scrambling across the library quad with a heaping stack of books and folders in her arms, constantly shifting and readjusting herself under their weight, with milky blue eyes around which her face had gracefully crumpled... she was all smiles.

18 years earlier, she had asked me why I never spoke up in class when I clearly looked engaged and thoughtful. I had assured her I was neither. We became friends.

I remember sitting in her office a year or two later watching an old girlfriend's new boyfriend walk by the window while I argued that the pen she was holding might not exist.

And here we were. And she looked old.

I was full of memories and nostalgia and had a hundred little details buzzing in my head. But she only remembered me vaguely, and left me with a faint sadness as she fluttered away into the night.

Travelogue Excerpt: From La Closerie des Lilas, Montparnasse, 2/7/11

"Hemingway and Henry Miller drank here. Neat. I went to the bathroom here a few days ago. A beautiful red room with a golden hook to hang your sweatshirt on."

Memphis, 5:30AM

photo by Kelly Davidson


Affection. Affection. Sociopathic rage.

Opposite The Mountain

Bob had gone rogue. Tramping awkwardly away from the relative security of Happy Valley toward the slope, he left half-cocked, too sure of himself for anyone’s comfort. Jim seemed frustrated, maybe offended… though it was hard to tell. I guess we were all a little shaken.

Brenda and I redoubled our efforts. A lapse in focus now could be disastrous.

Okay. So Bob was gone. So what.

It was later, after a slow, unsteady trip up the Magic Carpet that I saw him again… in his jeans and unstylish winter jacket… poles stabbing, chopping, slicing wildly around him as he tumbled off-balance through a pair of teenagers resting with their backs to him.

Later still, Jim would relay with great patience and little detail the final chapter of the saga, in which Bob, falling with tremendous momentum, sends them both flying to the ground, helmets clacking, halfway to the bottom. Jim, his knee injury re-aggravated in the accident. Jim, who said I was cheerful and made me realize I was smiling. Jim, whose guidance had been forsaken that day, but whose tenderness had never faltered.

And all the while, across the frozen river and the road, a thin, steady plume of fog moved over the hills opposite the mountain. Though in all the commotion, we barely noticed.

"G" Is For Goliath Birdeating Spider

Makes other birdeating spiders edgy.

In An Elevator, On A Rainy Day

Me: Sucks.

Stranger: Yeah.

Me: It'll clean everything off though. It's been so gross and dirty outside with all the dirty snow and the dirt and such.

Stranger: Yeah, really.

Me (getting off at my floor, thinking to myself): Man, I'm a tool.

Stranger (as I exit, thinking to himself): What a brave fellow to speak with such honesty and conviction.

How To Vanquish Evil

Twice now I have been tasked with defeating the evil villain from Heroes in my dreams. Last night, I wielded an invisible bow and arrow as one might wield an air guitar during a particularly demanding solo, with great earnestness and intensity... in deep lost-in-the-moment-ness. But looking very, very silly as I wielded.

The Interesting Lives of Imaginary People

Where do they go? The photographs...

After movies wrap and TV shows air... when the actors and actresses have moved on to the next script and left their characters to suffer or celebrate their fates... once reusable props have been returned to storage closets and sets have been emptied of all that fiction...

Those family photographs, photographs of vacations, of wives and husbands, of significant events in the lives of people with important stories to tell... framed on mantels, office desks and living room walls. Sitting there, hanging there for us to believe in... sometimes barely noticeable in the shot, other times held up for our careful consideration at key points in a snaking plot... Little rectangles that breathe life into a world of moments that do not exist...

They live on! They are somewhere!

Flying Lettuce, Exploding Firecrackers

Chinatown was full of lion dances and firecracker smoke and lettuce leaves littered in alleyways where food offerings had been ceremoniously gobbled up then spit back into the crowds as they howled with glee, everyone jockeying for a better view.

And all those cameras. It bummed you out.

I couldn't have cared less. Of all the photographs taken that day, I only have eyes for yours.

Donut, I Eat You

The jelly in you is now the jelly in me.