Excerpt from "New York Dolls and Rifles"

I took four of them, and put on “Heroin” by the Velvet Underground, and sat in the bathtub, filling it with warm water. Submerging myself, I watched the water level dance in front of me, listening to Lou Reed's wail, dragging me under the water level. Opening my eyes underneath the water, I can hear the bass lines reverberate as the lightsoftens. For a few minutes I can hear the song perfectly, my ear canal soaking up not only the water, but all that dissonance as I floated up out of the tub, and rubbed my face against the glass of the mirror, arms and legs floating at the top of a large water cooler, up inside the one in the view from the window, lying there, waiting for the darkness to envelop me, hearing the cacophony of sound take me under its wing, the whole band there around me: Lou Reed, Moe Tucker, John Cale and Warhol too.

A Month of Mondays

I used to wake up with ideas, mantras that marched through my head throughout the night.

Sometimes writing is to me like a mirror in the desert. I can see the mirror, but I have trouble seeing what I am looking at.

In the desert, everything exists in a vacuum. It’s impossible to quantify anything in it, as borders are awash in sand, and the lack of water means I can never visit for very long, before I’m awake and sweating in bed.

Getting up first thing in the morning, when its still dark out, the prayers, meditation and silent drumming in my head that drags me telepathically to coffee, the gravity and lack of grace as I prepare breakfast, a series of button-pressing that yields reheated food from the freezer. I think I have to open some sort of box in order to get there.

I kiss my wife goodbye, a pair of lips in the darkness, not connected to anything but the scratchy voice that reminds me of the love I have.

It’s a straight walk to the door, and with that comes the first actual thoughts of the day, of deadlines, excuses and expectations. It’s sometime after this when I drift off, the drive to work so familiar as not to warrant too much interest. It’s autopilot with my favorite soundtrack.

It’s still dark when I get to school, the brick stretched out across half a city block, rising up out of the wet tarmac, declaring itself with a shade darker than the clouds that stick around until well after nine am, when I stare out at it out of a small porthole in my second period class.

I don’t see genuine daylight until I leave most days, it heals after its too late, and I head home, scatter-brained into coming back on different day. I might live through two days until tomorrow, will see what tonight brings.

"Goodbye"

"And I feel so damned nostalgic everytime I think about those times. I forget how it began that I wouldnt recognize you on the line. And I start to feel so guilty, goddamned it I swear to you I tried, to place between the distances before I left without saying goodbye."

The lyrics are from a song I can relate to now, as it seems all the friends relationships you counted on as foundations. Relationships where you knew they were going to last forever. You spent time making plans in the back of your mind for all of us to celebrate, the way we did for mine.

And then, a few years later, when it all goes away suddenly, and without warning, we're left with the underlying feelings we had about the world before they ever got together.

And while it strengthens your own relationship, staying strong despite everything that's going on around us, you can't help but feel damn sorry for your closest friend(s) as they attempt
to piece back together the life of who they were before they met this person.

So you spend time, like you did before you were married, and time flowed on like beers just before night, sitting out on the porch with your roomate that summer watching the sun go down. Not much was said, but you were both hoping, that the way you shared time with one another, that it would continue, even with our siginificant others.

But there's a ghost inhabiting our talks, walking through the woods with the ghost of the ex- girlfriend looming large overhead.

Songs take on new meaning, and all around theres that reminder that its so easy to be alone in the world, easy to be angry and bitter, and sometimes its just really hard to be alone, with ghots gnawing at you, memories taking you back to places you don't want to go, with people you no longer care about.

Excerpt from Love and Other Aquatic Creatures

There’s a kind sweet sense of emptiness on the water, listening to the tides wash up, tickling the coast line as gulls and couples walk arm in arm. Looking out at the ships in the Atlantic, I couldn’t help but think there was a way out of this, wandering from town to town just long enough to settle in one place, meet someone and then promptly move away before it became too
much.

Staring into the baby alligator tanks at the Aquarium, I’m with a woman I met only a few hours ago while sitting in a coffee shop.

“I think they’re like children, bobbing in a lake, vying for Mom and Dad’s Attention”

She let her eyes wander to the back of the tank when she said lines like that, and I felt a certain element only found in my favorite movies: of man and woman bonding over small aquatic creatures.

The Distance of Advice

http://www.nwdrizzle.com/

One of the more interesting experiences of my life thus far.