Leprechauns on the back of lions.

Under the patriarchal sun, we grow like...

"Try to forget those memories that make you sick."

Today is (will be) the first day I start to write (to really write, not the half-mad scribbling’s I’ve been doing in that journal I received as a gift with the corny salutation inscribed on the front.) Today my fingers will hover over the key board and scour the letters like an eagle scours the fields for prey.

But first I’ll need some drunken abandon. This lime-a-rita will have to do. With this Lime-a-rita and at least one miller high life (The champagne of beers) and maybe a taste or two of the absinthe I bought my father for Father’s Day, I will write something deeply affecting and legendary but not without a healthy amount of the dark that graces (curses, taints, fucks with.) all my actions. Today, on this most pleasant of Saturday afternoons I will listen to songs sang in muddled falsetto and I will get drunk so that I redden in the face and I will bloviate on this page so righteously that God will ride his Segway down from heaven and give me the keys to his condo.

The lord’s condo, the lord’s yacht, the lord’s timeshare in  Wilmington.

I have just come back from New York from a business trip that took place in the forest.

I still have dirt from New York under my nails and deep in my pores. It was a baptism by mud, and I came back feelingly unjustifiably venerated, and I smell of earth suffused with sweat and star dust.

New York was a spiritually cathartic that put a great deal of money in my wallet.

On my first day back in the city I rode the trains and felt no marvel or fondness toward Chicago, I only felt pulled toward the night and for drink and fast company. I got off the blue line a Damen and Millwalkee and surveyed the mass of the well-dressed yet tragically blue collared denizens of Wicker Park and I remember feeling let down by them, as if I was expecting them to dazzle me, as if I expected them to know I was gone, they didn’t know me yet I knew all of them. (Half broad generalization and half hypothesis based on textured experience.)

That first day I spent 100 dollars at a tavern, both on my own drinks and the drinks of a few friends. We talked about the civil war that festered in Chicago, we talked about how C.P.D is 22,000 applicants in the red, we spoke of dirty dealings and moving west. Then we parted and I got a tattoo for a man who suffered a spine injury from a motorcycle accident. After two hours and 200 dollars I was marked for life.

I spent a lot of money that first day.

Later that week I found myself preparing to head back to New York but this time to the City for a festival that would have been a culmination and liberation of all the years spent behind the glow of my family’s Hewlett-Packard in MySpace groups and forums desperately outstretching a hand for companionship and comradely and maybe a little nookie.  It was going to be a road trip but unforeseen problems arose (We couldn’t rent a car due to bad credit.) and I found myself stuck in Chicago, a town I was rapidly falling out of love with, with a fully packed bag and a pair of eyes set for adventure.

So I immediately trivialized the quest for wholeness by drinking Captain Morgan and taking a nap on my friend’s sofa.

babe.

Eventually the house filled with people and I woke up to a room full of energy varying from pensive to sloppy to rotten to errant.(Can you guess which one I was?) I caught sight of the girl who had played muse to my many nights of selfish pontificating and idolization. This girl was short and fair skinned. She wore a mane of curly blonde hair and green eyes that shined like trophy’s, and even now writing about her I am compelled to pour myself another beer and fantasize about her with a sort of mournful exaltation. I’m not sure if it’s the music (Right now I’m listening to The Cure’s Lollapalooza performance and ‘love song’ is playing and I’m slow dancing with my dog.)or the beer or the memory of all the years I have known this girl and wanted this girl that are filling me with the radically burning fire of desire and longing but the truth of the matter is that no matter how good I get at monogamy and chivalry and empathy and all the other qualities relationships with girls deserve I know that this girl will always be able to melt my resolve, atomize my integrity and leave me shaking and confused just like I was 16.

We hug and she tells me I am ‘stupid’ and I analyze her words the way a teenage girl would analyze the ‘xoxo’ in a text message. I kiss her cheek and this is the first time in my 4 years of knowing her my lips press against her flesh. I melt a little bit, and she hops over the puddle that was once Adam Lawson to embrace the night that is still young, and I want to follow but I don’t want to over saturate my presence so I stay in my friends bedroom (He is off on a trip to the casino with a girl I used to know who once asked, with disarming sincerity; ‘Were Vampires real?’)

Eventually a Sudanese girl with a demure squeak of a voice sits on the bed with me and we watched Anime and youtube videos of our favorite live performances. She’s from Iowa and she is the type of girl I describe when I speak of the hidden majesty of the Midwest. She had dark skin and dark hair and a thirst for rum that not even I could match.(That particular night.)

We shared a few beautiful sentiments and we slept (platonically) on a pull out bed in the basement that night.

The party died down and the cats walked across our bodies. We woke up and got beer and talked about things that would have been important if our hearts were present.

As a writer I am very cognizant of my hearts involvement in my words and actions. And looking back on that new morning I realize I was playing the day on the fence, not a hunter, not the hunted, simply existing.

Under eye baggage.

I am beginning to feel guilty and incompetent for not making a point to this writing. So I’ll fast forward…

The Sundanese girl met her Chicago boyfriend at the Bucktown 

festival and I felt abandoned and unloved and began to walk home when I saw the masterpiece that was the blond with the green trophy eyes.

Let me clear things up about her….

All my friends have been following her like loyal fans follow their favorite band for years. We all pine over her beauty. She is a classic like a little black dress, but she hasn’t so much as given any of us the time of day. Although I know she dated Judge Mathis’s son.

This next statement I say with drunken hubris so forgive me if it is inaccurate…

Her actions, this girl, seem to carry a tinge of conscious banality  as if she knows that she is capable of more…

What I mean to say is….I’m not sure she follows her heart.

Anyway, the Sundanese girl leaves and I meet up with green eyes and we drive to one of her friend’s houses,  which turns out to be a mini-mansion in Logan Square and we drink Pinot Grigio and listen to bands with member no younger than 45 and I convince her to sing and I fall in love with her and I ask to run away with her and she tells asks me what can I give her and the first thing I think about saying is ‘my dick’ then I realize I can devote myself to her then I realize I’d get nauseous the way I did with my last lover then it’s too late because she ditches me for the guy who directs Chance the Rappers videos, a skinny twig, hipster scum bag who can’t dance like I can, but I guess they have been ‘intimate’ for longer than I feel comfortable divulging.

So I sit in a stranger’s back yard, with my pallet hot from wine and smoke and the fire from the pit laps at me like my dog does when he licks the dew from our tree.And again I am lonely.

As a writer I spend long stretches of periods alone. Writers are creatures of beauty and buried heartache.

That was the closest I’d ever gotten to green eyes, and when we danced there was a part of her I could feel in my bones. She was exuding soul but I guess my nice polo, pressed jeans, and spirit weren't enough to coerce her into my life.

Her body seemed attainable, as most of body’s are. But her heart seemed to hold this distant seeming majesty, like a mountain too steep to climb.

Now on this Saturday that as crawled past pure white clouds to darker hues, I watch my dad climb a ladder to fiddle with the flower pots he has planted on the deck.

My father is in his 60s, and the ladder wobbles like it has Parkinson’s, if the ladder where to fall I’m not sure my dad would be okay.

My dad is a Vietnam veteran who survived not only a grisly war but a life time of other ordeals, if he died while plating flowers…

I’d have to lie to people. Death by gardening is so gay.

And not ‘gay’ in the ignorant, negative sense, but gay as in same sex sodomy.

I don’t want my Dad to have a gay death.

Add caption