"Right right. Jackie. Christ. You were a fucking wreck."

Chad smiled, giving James the raised eyebrow. "And now look at you."

Abashed, James asked, "So how did you get over her?"

Chad looked at James honestly. Between men, there are very few authentic moments. Interpersonal relationships between men lie in a fuzzy realm of half-truths, exaggerations, and false bravado. On rare occasions, usually brought on by severe external stressors, two men will reveal their actual selves to each other, and will converse as two adult human beings. Until things regress back to dick jokes and homophobia. "James, I never really did get over her. I still miss her. Despite all her flaws and all her fucked up insecurities. I still miss her."

There was a pause, and James let it go.

"But what I do now is look for someone to replace her. Someone I'll love as completely as I did Jackie, or even more so."

"So. Kundera's lyrical womanizer."

"That's what I thought. But it's not anymore. I've become the epic womanizer. The blonde girls simply because they're blonde. The Model simply because she was a model. I'd forgotten what the point of this all was."

"Right."

They sat silent for a moment, collecting their thoughts, thinking about what had been said, what would be said, and the impossibility of love. There really is something to be said about beer, men and misery. It's just so bittersweet. The beer, that is. Men saddened by the injustice of failed love is just sad.

"I'm sorry about Julia, by the way."

"I suppose I am too."

"You can do better, though."

"I don't think I can."

"Really." The two of them thought about their memories of Julia. For Chad, she was suburban and domestic, a girl whose dream and sole aspiration was to be a wife with children, supported by a loving, doting husband. Just so pathetically Middle American to the core. Really. Julia, the light of whose life?

"She was making breakfast one morning. Her Meyer lemon and ricotta pancakes. I had just stumbled out of bed, and she smiled at me from the counter, standing in front of the mixer. The light was pouring in through the kitchen window, and the way it illuminated her...." He stopped and gave pause, as the evoked image brought on a surge of emotion that he wrestled down. As any decent gentleman would.

"She looked ethereal. An angel. Her smile. The light catching her blonde hair made it glow like gold, and her pale skin shone. I can't explain it. It was almost a pregnant glow, as if to say to me that she was ready to be my wife. And I have to say. I loved her. Then and there. There was no question. I loved her. Absolutely loved her then with all my heart. And so I had to run out of my apartment. I just had to. I burst out running from the apartment. I was just so overwhelmed. I loved her so much at that moment it scared the shit out of me. I was actively afraid of how much I loved her. I didn't know what to do."

The gravity of what he admitted stunned Chad. "Fuck."

The two nursed their beers. The jukebox played something wildly inappropriate for the moment, but what can you do. Chad thought about saying something, but then thought better of it. He would leave the silence be.

The crowd at the bar milled about, ignoring the two men who sat, rather stunned, staring into their beers, hoping for some unknowable truth to be revealed through the Brownian motion of the carbonation.

Chad knitted his brows for a moment. "Wait. So that was the day of the awkward third wheel pancakes."

James thought for a second, then laughed sheepishly. "Yeah..... Sorry I dragged you into that."

On my wall, I've a poster of Muhammed Ali. Before him was Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan acknowledging every failure that allowed every victory. Before Jordan was Cal Ripken. Ripken recalling the tedium and pain of getting up 2876 times and putting in a solid game. I got this new one out of my ESPN magazine.

Black and white, it's a stark shot of the man in glory. He's built like an ox, huge shouldered. No, more a thoroughbred. Look at his arm, the massive hulk of his deltoid cut and chiseled. The thick cord of bicep he flexes, the clench of his gloved fist obvious in his tensed forearm. Every muscle stands out.

He's looking down on his fallen opponent. He's shouting something. screaming. It's a curse in his mouth. He's dropping the f-bomb. No other phoneme makes a man's mouth contort like that. He's taunting his victim. Ali's old. It's not Sonny Liston below him. Ali doesn't have the pure gleam in his eyes. This fight wasn't about "me and you". This fight was about a lot more. This Ali's got the pain of a hundred fights on him. He's a tired man, an angrier man. the world's not been too good to him. America hasn't been too good to him. The wear on his face makes me think of the Thrilla in Manila. Makes me believe it's Frazier he's looking down on. No, I just wish that.

Because on his face is a vicious expression. It's "I AM the greatest". But it's also "I am greater than you." It's not the playful twinkle that America loved as Ali ripped off Howard Cosell's toupee on national TV. It's the dark bully who called Smokin' Joe an Uncle Yom, the asshole who created a hatred in another man, a pure anger that reverberates within anyone who's ever watched Frazier fight Ali. Watch the gruesome abuse that was the Thrilla in Manila. Watch their bodies as punches land - look at how the recipient shakes so subtly, watch their heads snap back and realize that everything inside is shaking. and sit slack-jawed as they get up from a knockdown, again. And again. And again. Fourteen rounds. Look at their knees wobble as their fists land again and again, they're held up by only will and hate. Nearly an hour they fought, they warred. Ali would say later that the feeling he felt when Frazier's corner threw in the towel, when it was obvious Frazier wasn't coming back for the fifteenth round, when Ali's knees buckled in the center of the ring, he said it was the closest thing he could imagine to dying.

Boxing is a brutal sport. But in their fights, they took it too far.

The tag line that runs through the middle of my poster reads, "Impossible is nothing."

Chiat/Day missed the point completely. This picture isn't about the struggle of man against another man. This is about man against himself.

Maybe Chiat/Day did understand.

---

Jeremy, why do you love me?

Katherine asked with glazed eyes, purring content, her head nested on his chest, his breathing rocking her gently into unconsciousness.

Jeremy’s mind spun. “I don’t really know. I just do.” He realized instantly that would not do. Katherine awoke with an alertness evident in her tense neck. Now Jeremy’s chest rose and fell to meet and abandon her head which stayed in place, stilled with blunt fear. “I love everything about you, Kath. Everything.”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

“This is love, Kath.” He was lying. He loved Katherine specifically and with weighted reason. He loved that she used Hegel properly in an argument about proper governance in a capitalist state, while fairly inebriated, that first night he had spent time with her. He loved the nape of her neck, the clean lines of flesh and hair and bone, the rich mahoganies and cherrywood and oak of her brunette cast against the eggshell offset of her white skin. She was there at the end of the day with a smile, no matter what the hour, happy to see him. That smile, her joy, her mouth half-open, expecting their nightly kiss, lips to be pressed as palms in prayer. These were reasons he loved her. But it would not be said that he loved her for these reasons. “I just do. Very much.”

Logic fails emotion. She wasn’t completely content with the answer, but her head once again rose and fell. “So there’s no reason?"

---

"There was a time I'm going to have to admit, early on in this relationship, when I thought that you were 'the One'."

Ali lays a roundhouse on Frazier. Frazier is shaken. Yes sir, Frazier is shaken.

---

Violence begins in one’s head. In cold, callous anger. Irrational thoughts seeded by pain. Unconscionable actions salve a blind need to lash out at the world. At the world that has failed in its role as parent, protector, guardian. My failures are yours, as yours are mine. Every act of violence is retributive, in the end. Therefore, every act of violence is emotion, self-directed.

Jeremy and Katherine fought bitterly on a bimonthly schedule that failed to be interrupted by news of her pregnancy. Arguments ranged from his impolite failure to explain his every action to her, to the correct pronunciation of ‘Himalaya’, to her inability to simply let things slide. With their massive intellects, Kant and Freud and Hesse were unwillingly brought to bear for either side, philosophical giants ponderously pushed about in acts of domestic violence, psychic assault and battery.

They would fight viciously, tooth to the nail. She unearthed ancient relics of past grievances, he swung freely at every mar and imperfection of her soul.

“Why am I expected to change overnight?” he raged. A silly question, asked by every man since the dawn of marriage. “The human personality shifts gradually, if at all. Staudinger, et al 1993. You have to learn to accept that I am trying, but I will fail on the occasion. And I believe I had sufficiently mitigating circumstances.”

“Overnight?” she railed back, with considerable vehemence. “Six months is not overnight. The fact that your behavior persists is evidence that you don’t care enough about me to want to change.”

“How did you jump over several boundaries of common logic to reach that conclusion?”

“It’s the truth.”

Paul Pierce? “How is that the Truth? I promised I would change, and I am, gradually. It doesn’t happen simply because I wish it. And what about you?” The war would be fought on her ground, to scorch her soul, not his.

“No, this is not about me. This is about you. Why are you bringing this back on me?” Russian history is all about fools, and she was no fool. She had long since learned stand her ground.

Every argument was an emotionally exhaustive rehashing of a previously held debate, evolving glacially over time. Every argument was a State of the Union on their relationship, which, though solid when analyzed third-party, was delicate and terrifyingly unstable for the two parties to the marriage. Their love was deep, with a mutual respect and an understanding that they were similar human beings, but they were also fully aware to the fragility of their egos, and their bonds. They would fight savagely, fearless in their egotistical assaults on the world that owed them so much, but they loved delicately, tentatively. And in their fear they lived life and loved.

---

"But you know, between you and me, I was happier this week without you."

Frazier is down, ladies and gentlemen! Frazier is down!

---

When one human says to another, "I love you", what precisely is being conveyed? Love, for all its primordial, biochemical roots, seems to imply an acknowledgement of need, an understanding of addiction. Stories about love around the world contain the words "despite", "even though", "through it all", and that mother of all conjunctives, "still."

Boy A loved Girl B despite X. Girl J loved Boy K even though Y. Boy M loved Boy N through it all Z.


Jeremy loved Katherine, still.

wow. I haven't touched this in forever.... but here we go again.


My very good friend and former co-worker is applying to various universities to study literature. He has also been at the same job for five years. I can only imagine he hates money. But the man has simply awesome taste in books.

Blood Meridian (or the Evening Redness in the West).

Cormac McCarthy. The guy who wrote the book "No Country for Old Men". That was a book he wrote on an off day. An off day. Blood Meridian is considered the heir to the throne of greatest American Novel, just a stunning piece of writing that fuses an unmatched aesthetic value with a frightening insight into the violence that pervades the American psyche.

Professor Harold Bloom, a hater and elitist on a level that I can only aspire to (that is to say, a literary critic), says in another interview whose transcript I lost the url to,

It is--it's as close, I think, to being the American prose epic as one can find, more perhaps even than Faulkner, though there are individual books by Faulkner like "As I Lay Dying," which are perhaps of even higher aesthetic quality and originality than "Blood Meridian." But I think you would have to go back to "Moby Dick" for an American epic that fully compares to "Blood Meridian."

It is intense. It is unsettlingly violent. It is spare. It is dense. It is, by far, the most manly text I have ever read. I am not even a third of the way through, and there are so many lines that simply scream of this man's genius. There is no thought of why. There simply is. The language! The words! I swear to fucking god that my lexicon is larger than yours, but I spend half my time in this book wondering where the hell this man finds the words he uses.

Three simply astounding passages:

They saw patched argonauts from the states driving mules through the streets on their way south through the mountains to the coast. Goldseekers. Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague.

Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me?

He woke in the nave of a ruinous church, blinking up at the vaulted ceiling and the tall swagged walls with their faded frescos. The floor of the church was deep in dried guano and the droppings of cattle and sheep. Pigeons flapped through the piers of dusty light and three buzzards hobbled about on the picked bone carcass of some animal dead in the chancel . . . . The facade of the building bore an array of saints in their niches and they had been shot up by American troops trying their rifles, the figures shorn of ears and noses and darkly mottled with leadmarks oxidized upon the stone. The huge carved and paneled doors hung awap on their hinges and a carved stone Virgin held in her arms a headless child.

The imagery is awesome. Not awesome like your frat party's ice luge. Awesome like the gods of old. The ones who would kick your ass. Leadmarks oxidized upon the stone? Motherfucker is gonna go out and be that accurate? How are the regular people going to compete?

But they berated the old man and swore at him until he moved off down the bar muttering, and how else could it be?
How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again and in the dawn the kid and the second corporal knelt over the boy from Missouri who had been named Earl and they spoke his name but he never spoke back. He lay on his side in the dust of the courtyard. The men were gone, the whores were gone. An old man swept the clay floor within the cantina. The boy lay with his skull broken in a pool of blood, none knew by whom. A third one came to be with them in the courtyard. It was the Mennonite. A warm wind was blowing and the east held a gray light. The fowls roosting among the grapevines had begun to stir and call.
There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto, said the Mennonite. He had been holding his hat in his hands and now he set it upon his head again and turned and went out the gate.

That was deep. AND someone just had his head caved in. Just a stunning tour de force.

This book is the most horrifying, amoral, twisted, beautiful tome I've ever read. The man writes like he communes with Hemingway and Faulkner, Joyce and Hasek. It's like the book version of The Raft of the Medusa. Crossed with Rambo 4. Then set in the Wild West.


This book is good. So good. I can't put it down. Go. Go now. Go buy it now and read. Then weep that you will never, ever, match its genius. You poor bastards.

it's been a good long while.

i forgot how to write, it seems.

passion is a necessary catalyst for the reaction. perhaps that is the essential muse. the element that allows what already exists to coalesce, and fuse into product, without ever having entered the equation. i wish sometimes that i hadn't taken such a science-based course of study all my life. perhaps my text would be more readable, more effusive.

but what has been done, has been done.



today will be brilliant. absolutely brilliant. so help me god.

post-valentine's day self-examination.


jessica, evelyn, zoe, serah, jae, jackie, tia.

nan, emily, helen, carolyn, sarah, rachel, janet, angela, jane, rosa, yeoni, jessi, alarice.

list #1.
the girls i've fallen for.

list #2
the girls i know who have loved me.


the problem lies in the entire lack of overlap. dear lord, i am a jackass. stupid beyond words, physical expression cannot convey the depth, the magnitude of my ineptitude, my simple inability to find happiness for myself. they say even a blind pig occasionally stumbles upon an acorn. i cannot compete with the blind pig.

Rachel, it seems, has found peace in her life. I am entirely jealous. Not of her joy. I would never begrudge her that. I am envious of her fiance. That could have been me. Unfortunately, I made some stupid moves. It's so sad. I look back and see that I could easily have infinitely happier.

Except I'm an idiot.

How did you end up like this? He was overwhelmed by a sense, no, a suffocating stench of failure. He had also been watching too muc "Jerry Maguire". He wondered how he would manage to find hi sway out of the miserable fog he found he was entangled within. But life would go on, right? He'd make his way out. Somehow.

He found himself in the middle of nowhere. How he ended his wanderings out in the middle of the desert was beyond him, yet seems such an appropriate outcome. Sarah is another. She's pretty. Her friends are gorgeous. How appropriate.

He was so very stupid.

But it was decision time again.


Jackie or Jessie.

a happy valentine's day.

i didn't even realize it was the fourteenth of february until well past midday.

i wandered about the city as if lost, looking desperately for something.



what the hell am i looking for?



love? i gave up on that nonsense some time ago.

happiness? as each day goes by, i realize what a futile pursuit this is.

money? perhaps that's what the goal should be. after all. isn't that what everyone wants?




but i don't care for it. i'll be good with a middling salary. but everyone else invests so much worth in the almighty dollar. and so. again. everyone else decides how my life will be led. give me a reason. give me a reason. give me a reason. a reason. a reason. a reason.

you need one to live. you need one to survive. drifting aimlessly is the most tortuous way to die in the ocean, i've heard.

it's been a long time. perhaps too long. but it seems i've lost my muse.

i haven't written a thing in some time, and all of the words that used to circulate and swarm and aggregate in jumbles have all dissipated, washed away into the ether.

what has happened?

where am i going?

who knows who knows.


and this is costing me.

easyeverything.