My best behavior

Note: I posted this on my tumblr a few months back. I wrote it one morning while drinking a Bloody Mary and looking out my window. I thought this shit was cold blooded but no one seemed to like it to much. What do you think?

“Hey Aryn!” I scream from the side walk. She was half way through the street walking that little rat dog. I hated that dog, It was barely bigger than a squirrel and it was always yelping and it walked funny, all bow legged like a horse. I just knew that when I finally collected the nerve to tell Aryn how I felt about her that we’d fall in love and then in our third month together, I’d say as she wore her paint stained overalls, with blotches of red and green paint smearing her light fingers and tanned cheeks, I’d tell her that the little rat dog had to go. That it’s yelping was waking me up and I tell her I couldn’t write without right amount of sleep. I’d lie and say that the dog bites on my ankles.

She swung her head around and her red hair had a glow in the sun. I’d been in love with a red hair earlier in the year. An internet superstar, she was tumblr famous. But our love never quite lifted off, she stayed a fantasy while I stayed a stranger. But I just knew Aryn was going to be different. Angel blood pumps through Ayrns veins. She turns around and the sun washes over her face and she looks great and I know in my head that I should savor that moment and way the sun rides your forehead and the way her smile grows slow on her face like that raindrop on a windshield that eats the other raindrops.

She gives me a wave and starts to turn around to meet me at the corner, dragging the rat dog behind her. It’s a fantastic day in Chicago, a Sunday in its infancy.

“Hey.” She says. I open my mouth but my eyes dart to the yellow blurring taxi. There is a clunk and a grinding noise, how you would imagine throwing a rock at a fan must sound. My jaw drops so low I’m surprised gravel doesn’t get stuck in my beard.

“Shit.” I say shaking my head.

“What?” I read her face. When she feels the tugging on the leash I watch her smile crack like an egg dropped from the sears tower.

The rat dog, Sid, is stuck up the taxi wheel. It’s yelping its final yelps. The engine revs and the car goes forward. You can hear grinding and tearing of skin.

“Shit.” I’m petrified, a profanity spewing statue. “Fuckkkk.”

She screams the dogs name; “Sid!” over and over again. It would be erotic if it was my name in that tone, but it is not me. It is the name of her mangled box terrier. “Sid.” She’s screaming and people are looking.

“Fuck.” I’m frozen on the sidewalk. I see what I now know is blood dripping from under the car. She is in a panic, on her knee’s reaching under the car. I remember her first day I’d ever seen her, eyes fixed at the ground, those baggy blue jeans, stained with paint. I was too slow to catch a sight of her full face but when I turn around the elevator doors are already closing, I see for the first time her face her bright brown eyes and her perfect skin. I see her mouth open and my heart bursts. It slices right through my heart, right through my ribs and my heart and guts poured out on the floor and as I struggled to pick them up and stuff them back into the fissure like cavern that was my chest I gasp.

when I turn around to get a full look at her face before the elevator doors close, but I can’t help but think she was looking at me. And those doors slide shut I see her face and a nature felt a flutter slice my heart, Right through my ribs and my heart and guts poured out on the floor and as I struggled to pick them up and stuff them back into the fissure like cavern that was my chest I gasped. I wanted her to like me, I wanted her to talk about me with her roommates, and her friends from back home over skpye. She’d talk about the boy that open his chest and painted the floor with his love.

But now as I watch her dog yelp, that little rat dog, Sid.

“Damn.” My face contorted as if Larry David smelled a Indian food fart. I want to help her. I want to grab the dog and pet its blood matted fur. I want her to thank me and kiss me. She is still screaming. The cab driver pulls off fast, I watch him as he speeds down the block, I see a bundle drop from underneath the cars body. The bundle doesn’t move. She turns to look at me. Tears rolling down, just like the raindrops on the on the windshield. She looks at me and I take off running.

I run for 3 minutes. Our love is that bloodied bundle.

Stutter, Stammer, Stagger,

*This is my rejected thoughtcatalog submission. Guess I'll try something different. Anyway, hope you dig it.

Growing up I had a really terrible stutter. My words were diced and chopped up so badly that, what in my head seemed like amazing sentences, came out as these mangled glitches of sounds. My Friends could all talk normally, firing off words all fast and sharp, thoughts would form in their brains and travel right down and out the mouth with no issue. My brain would cultivate words and send them out too, but at some point during the trip to my mouth, my words would take a wrong turn and get the shit kicked out of them in an alley. Then they would hobble, all bloodied and beaten, under my pallet and across my tongue and everyone listening would have these pained and pitied looks on their faces. They could tell by the look in my eyes that what I was trying to say was either funny or poignant, but what they heard were just off-putting and static gasps for air and syllable repetition. It was embarrassing to say the (very) least.

The spring time for my speech impediment was during grammar school (Elementary school, as some call it. I never like the term ’elementary’, maybe because of the condescending denotation that Scottish detective says it with.) Children, though unassuming and generally not malevolent, are cruel at this age and I was the subject of much cruelty. Although not as much cruelty as one would think for my stuttering. I was short, near sighted, Pokemon obsessed and had a gnarly case eczema that centralized on my forehead, so the hounds had much to chew on. I was called a midget, four eyes, nerd/lame and Dr. Spots (due to my glasses and the pattern the eczema left on my face.) Although my stutter wasn’t the hot button issue in my social executions, it was the one thing I felt the most ashamed by.

Scientifically speaking, the disorder isn’t tied to any neurological status. Not to say that I’m neurologically sound. I’m on my third bloody Mary and I’m in my boxers wearing the top hat from my Abraham Lincoln Halloween costume. I’m only saying that whatever abnormality exist in my brain doesn’t cause the porky pig routine. But it can cause immense shame, fear, frustration and in my case anxiety. 3 million Americans suffer from stuttering, less than 0.01% of the entire population. Not to mention the fact that four times as many males are suffering from it than females. So my chances of laconically reciting love poems to a girl who knows my plight is massively lowered.

In spite of general ridicule and mild social ostracizing. I was a pretty happy dude. Had my group of friends (nerds and outcasts), got decent grades and had enough gamecube discs at home waiting for me to put that extra fire in my step on the days I’d have to run home with the bullies chased me. I was content in stuttering, and although it shook me up sometimes and caused my hands to pour sweat on the tortuous occasions I was chosen for in class reading it didn’t really stop me from getting a reputation as the funny kid. (Not the class clown, the class clown is never all that funny, he is just the jackass that throws paper at people and pulls your pants down.)

During the latter years of grade school the stuttering halted, I think boobs helped. (The growing of classmates boobs, not my own. I’m a male and if I were to sprout chest protuberances it would open up a whole new galaxy of ridicule and confusion.) Girls began to take their first steps into the grassy field of womanhood and when the boobs started to bloom, the stutter faded out like some evolutionary trait kicked in. And while I still had a multitude of other socially crippling conditions (I was beginning to get dandruff and Digimon had just begin to air on American television.) I found a way to somewhat bury the impediment in order to tell Lindsey Griffin and her gaggle of 12 year old harlots crude jokes and over heard secrets.

Which brings me to the now, I’m 22 and while 8th grade seems like light years away I still bear the scars from my years I spent stuttering. I’m a writer now, and a comedian, I take pride in my words and how they affect people. I still stutter to this day, and it still triggers within me vivid, often horrific flashbacks that send me into chaotic anxiety likened to that off a Vietnam vet. But instead of Ho Chi Min cutting off the ear of a fellow GI, its me reading behind a podium in my social studies class trying, to no avail, to inform the class about Sojourner Truth.

To fat to chase my dreams.

Cheer me up cheer me up, I’m a miserable fuck.

Chasing the dream, I need better cardio

I’ve spent the past 5 months in a grey blanket. But maybe I’m not giving proper credit to these new people who have found there way into my world. Nostalgia and felicity are dangerous when dwelled on.

What I mean to say is I’m getting fat. At first I thought the bulge forming was a badge of honor. It has long been a sign that a wealthy man is often plump. Look at medieval kings, all fat and greasy and loud and rich. Even if they aren’t adored they are at least respected and revered. No one would dare call the king fat to his face for fear of the guillotine or the gallows or that thing with the spikes in it that looks like a casket. (Spanish king Al-Mansur would put criminals in iron boots, bound their hands and dangle them above fire, the flames would heat up the metal boots and scorch and singe the victims feet. I assume Al-Mansur would jerk off as he heard the screams. He would have had me killed if he read that. Hope I don’t run into him in hell.)

Back to my fatness, I thought it was charming and to the right eyes it is. But in the way a stinky bum with a funny joke is charming, tolerable but far away for desirable. When I sit down at my desk and scot my chair forward my stomach perches on the edge of the desk like a fat owl on an annoyed tree. My stomach is about 2 centimeters away from completely eclipsing the sight if my feet as I stand up. Its visible in my face too, although my mom denies it. My chin is doubling over so much that when I crane my neck back it folds and resembles that gross stretchy segment of dangling skin under a roster’s beak. Now if you haven’t seen me in a few months you’re probably thinking that I’ve blown up in size comparable to Jaba the hut or that slug thing form the first blade movie. I promise I’m not a blob or a balloon, but yesterday I noticed a crease over my dropping stomach and my pelvic bone could comfortably hold a pencil in between it. I’m actually embarrassed to admit but my arrogance formed a wall around that fact that I was wildly out of shape. The pre-existing zealous devotion I had formed around my face and its perfectly arched eyebrows and my zorro-eque mustache kept me from really being to embarrassed about my weight. I figured what an extra ten pounds when you look like Prince’s cousin?

It wasn’t until last week that I saw my gut as hindrance. As if my appetite wasn’t a sign of power but a tool of self-destruction. I saw it as if I had been eating my own life, devouring my soul. And my stomach acid was melting away burritos and whiskey, but instead it was putting out my fire. I realized that as I was picking a film of dirt out of my belly button and talking to a girl with spite in my voice. I’ve been in the practice of deprecation for a while now, but let me honestly tell you nothing makes you feel more like a piece of shit then looking down at your maternally inflated stomach as you try your hardest to break a heart that doesn’t deserve to be broken. I got off the phone feeling low and angry and dark and I looked at the wreck my room was in. The piles of clothes wrinkling on the floor, the stains on the carpet and the sheets, the curtain I hadn’t put up, the way the bed sheet rolled up on one side exposing the plastic wrapped mattress. The general disarray of my life reflected in my room. My dog shit soul had made a dog shit room, and all the way up on the 23^rd with a room with a view too die for their lived a fat little brown boy who was eating away his own talent.

When alcohol and me first started going out back in 2008 it was always fresh and new. She was vibrant, wild, and spontaneously sexy. When we would meet at night, our lips would touch we felt infinite. Everyone around us was a painting on a wall, admirable but little more than decoration. She made bathroom floors feel like plush beds with satin sheets. The stars I had in my eyes for her have sense faded out and our love is now the relationship I have with booze is one purely based on sex. (Bad analogy, ever put your dick in gin? I have and it hurts.) But food gave me that feeling again, there is a subtle romance in a 3am trip to the refrigerator to heat up the double cheddar cheese bacon burger on pretzel bread you had from Bennigans. Food grants me that instant satisfaction that alcohol once did, and it was maddeningly beautiful reunion with a sensation I’d been chasing. It was medication. Medication for the anxiety I felt around these new people, and new ways, and slipping away from old ways, and turning 22, and bombing on stage, and feeling unsteadied and lonely and annoyed and foreign in my own body.

Sorry, that last bit was melodramatic, I’m forever emo. (Forever emu, always a bird.)

I’m a man child. I need the spiritual equivalent to a bib and a diaper. I’m a miserable fuck and I like it that way. All I need is a girl to cheer me up and a noteworthy amount of people who adore me for my art. I’m trying to chase my dream but I’m fat and my cardio sucks.

Norman Raine wrote; ‘An artist should remain true. Otherwise his talent, like his stomach, grows fat and stuffy.’ I haven’t necessary been myself this year and a huge part of that if because I haven’t been writing as much ass I should. I’ve been doing stand up, and while the connection between writing and stand up is clearly visible, I’m a way worse comedian than I am a decent writer. I love words, and while extracting laughs out of crowds is intoxicating, it’s not quite as rewarding as the scientific manipulation of words. The book I’m working on is in its infancy, my stand up is barely funny, and my brain is being dulled. I’ve been caught up in a bunch of spiritual bullshit. I’ve been over eating and under thinking. Writing is my mediation, except way cooler. (Mediation is kinda stupid. I tried it for awhile but all I did was spend an hour in the park every Thursday making fun of people.)

So this is me slicing a vein and finger painting in the blood. Here is me with no guard up, here is me fully and honestly, no more eating my life out of fear. Here are my words medicating me. Her is my art helping me, wiping my boogers, cleaning my finger nails. This is my art as my wheel chair and my girlfriend and my joint and my bottle and my……socks.

Don’t no body like cold feet.

Without even trying.

This blog means too much to me, to kill without an explanation. So here goes one, without even trying. I'm over a lot of this stuff I've written, it all seems short sighted and naive. This blog has been a intense source of pride and embarrassment for me. I'm proud of every word but I hate them. Imagine how Macaulay Culkin dad must feel about his son, that's probably the way I feel about this place, this plain black background, odd blue border it all seems like a place I no longer want to be. I'm over it. So with this one last final entry, I'll write about something I'm not quite over yet.No courier font, no bullshit. Enjoy.

This summer I lost my grandmother and my best friend. She was 73 and he was 21. I cried more for my grandmother but I think about Jordan more. I didn’t like the fact that memories of someone I’d known for less than 5 years could trump the memory of my own flesh and blood. I felt guilty, like I was a traitor to her legacy. My Grandmother was the beautiful woman who had given birth to my mother, she had been there for literally all my life with love and a telepathic understanding. Her birthday was 2 days before mine and not to get on a weird astrological trip, but we were both Libras and shared this intense dual nature. Prone to fits of passion and rage, we were shipmates on the U.S.S Bi-polar. And Jordan, my best friend, was a border line sociopath and drug abuser, and not always in a charming way. He was the type of guy who lived on his own accord and had this completely bizarre way of sculpting reality to fit his ideas. He was a megalomaniac and had enough vices to make a Las Vegas priest barf in confessional. If my Grandmother was Bjork then Jordan was 80s hair metal.

It’s easy to romanticize death, but there is nothing poetic about how their hearts stopped. Grams died first, on a morning in July. She had stopped living long before that. Jordan died August 26th in his car outside of his girlfriends house. She had been fighting cancer and dementia and he’d been fighting the future. Time took her and drugs got him. She was probably dreaming, and who’s to say what his final thoughts were. When I heard about Grams I was drunk at my girlfriend’s house, my dad called to tell me and after we hung up I had a cigarette in the bathtub. I thought about her mole, so perfectly place on her right cheek, it would have made Marilyn Monroe and all those ugly girls with piercing jealous. I remember tearing up but not crying, I remember wanting to talk to her but not wanting to be sober, I remember thanking God and wanting to drink myself to sleep. Me and my girlfriend talked about it but not for long, She said that I should call my mom but I told her there would be plenty of words between us later. When Jordan went, I found out through a facebook message, sign of the times I guess. It was kind of like an earthquake, one of those moments when you have an out of body experience. I called a few people and they all confirmed it, Jordan Richardson had died and month after my grandmother and a day before I had to move in to my new apartment. I couldn’t sleep that night and my parents don’t keep booze in the house, besides the absinthe I got my dad for father’s day but that hardly seemed appropriate. So I stood up until 4 A.M and tried to write and looked at facebook pictures and listened to sad songs, I played that one Nickel Back song about looking at photographs and started to tear up. I was crying listening to Nickel Back and could almost hear Jordan and my Grandmother laughing at me.

I’d last seen Jordan in the Mulberry Mountain of Arkansas. It was June and I was working a pretty good job in a gift shop at the number one tourist Attraction in Chicago, Navy Pier. The Pier sees something like 3 million people a week. An overwhelming number of which are tourists. Strangers from all around the world swarm the Pier every day. French bikers and German film makers and Japanese rock stars. All yammering, and yelling and laughing and walking too fast or way too slow. 3 million people all spending vomit inducing amounts of money on food and souvenirs. If Chicago is a 19 year old girl, Navy Pier is the Friday and Saturday nights she works at Pole Cats to pay the bills. For those of you lucky enough to not know what navy pier is, imagine the worst mall you’ve ever been too, and then put it by a lake. A throw in the world’s jankiest Ferris wheel and random dudes dressed as pirates giving fat Texans boat tours. There is a ball room and garden, and in the first week I worked there I’ve seen three proms take place. Navy Pier solidifies that originality died in the 1990s along with Kurt Cobain and the Real Michael Jackson. But despite the cheese ball work setting all in all it was a good and I really liked it there, and what is most important is that it made my parents and Grams happy, and happy parentals are less naggy parentals. Plus it gave me the extra money I needed to live comfortably but far from lavishly. It was a Thursday when Jordan called and said he was coming to visit me at my job. Jordan was the face of a group of people I call my ‘Toxic friends.’. Toxic like the smell of a gas station at night, thick and warm but insanely hazardous. Now imagine that smell personified by in group of people. I met my toxic friends my first year living on campus. It was a pivotal year in my life and the hell we made in that old paper mill turned student residency crafted me into the well adjusted maniac I am now. That Thursday when Jordan called telling me he and Peter Marshall, a friend of ours who recently decided to move back to Chicago after spending the past year and a half back at his parents’ home in Texas were coming to visit me at work. They had come 40 minutes before closing. There wasn’t many people still at the pier that late and thank God for that because when they saw me from half way down the hall from my store they began waving a massive glass dildo around. Massive is no understatement when it comes to the description of that monster. It was a foot and a half long and the tip was about 5 inches around. They saw me and these two shit eating grins spread across their faces as they charge me. I look back to my coworkers who were folding clothes and talking amongst themselves, oblivious to the charge. I didn’t run or make too much noise when Peter, who his around 6 foot 3 and has giant hands with fingers the size of polishes and Jordan who was around my height but literally had about 100 pounds of that solid flab that city dwellers get when they mix their awful diet with an active night life. They held me and threatened me with the dildo, I didn’t think it was that funny but I made sure to smile so when my supervisor saw the scuffle she wouldn’t think there was any real danger. After I calm them down we begin to talk and what I thought would be a short catch up session actually turned into a persuasive speech to get me to come along with them to a music festival called Wakarusa in the mountains of Arkansas. They asked me how much I made working in the store and I told them it averaged to about $600 a month. They laughed and said they had just come from a festival where they had both made out with $1200 each. double what I made in a month in 3 days. They were on a tour of sorts, hitting every summer festival in the United States hearing incredible bands and seeing amazing people all while making a pretty sizable amount of money. Now I knew Jordan and I knew the racket, Jordan was a purveyor of narcotics and a pretty successful one. There was a point in time where if you were buying weed in the loop, there was a good chance it passed through his hands first. But what they did at these festivals was pure business genius. On the first day they would sell fake LSD, usually drops of Visine for ten dollars a hit. With that money they’d buy real drugs and large quantities, set up shop and very literally watch as the money comes in. A risky business and while the prospect of being locked up in a Arkansas jail house wasn’t alluring all that money sure was, not to mention possibility of falling madly in (drug induced) love with a hippie girl. Fast forward to 24 hours later and we are in a van with 4 other friends entering Arkansas state lines . The next three days are worth a book or at least a dirty limerick of their own.There was Porto potties stuffed with dynamite, a beautiful waterfall where hippies would have nightly orgies, an opium den in a cave on a mountain, music thumping long into the night from the forest, and 3 girls from Tuscaloosa whose names I might never remember. While on the second day I realized that Jordans idea was little more than a cutco knife pyramid scheme It didn’t really matter, because it was literally the best 3 days of my life.

On the day I left Jordan was walking back from the waterfall that the hippies showered in. He told me the next stop on his tour was Tennessee for Bonnarro I told him I’d booked a cab to the closet town with a grey hound station and that I had to go back to Chicago to see if I still had my job, he put his hand on my shoulder, and asked me If I had a good time. I told him I had the best time and he said good and taped me on the dick, harder than usual. I called him a bastard and watched him walk off. When I got home it was early in the morning. My mom was at work, my dad was asleep. My Grandmother lived with us. I followed her breathing tube back to her room, the machine sound like a robot snoring, I hated that machine for many reasons, it kept her confined to the first floor, she couldn’t even move to the basement to do her own laundry because the tube was too short. The dog would lay on it, and if it wasn’t funny it would be very scary. I walk in to her room and the tv is still on, I inched around to turn it off when she wakes up. She looks at me, not scared but happy. She asks me where the party was. I tell her that she’s looking at it. She looks confused and asks me again. I mentioned earlier that my Grams had stopped living long before she passed away. That’s because in those last weeks she wasn’t the grams I’d known, she was a just body and flaring words, she was suffering dementia. That day my mom told me that since I was gone Grams had taken a turn for the worse. Her health was rapidly decreasing. The weeks that followed were awful. Sometimes she would forget our names, my mom and dad had to change her, help her go to the bathroom. We’d all have to keep watch, sleeping in the guest room next to her bedroom. She’d scream in the middle of the night, and whoever was on duty would have to sit with her. One night things were particularly awful and she tried to escape her bed, I told her she was too weak to walk and that if she fell it would all be over, she told me she didn’t care. The last time I saw her I confessed I had l my job. The owner had played back the surveillance camera footage of the dildo incident and had fired me. I told her that for the last two weeks I was lying to my parents, telling them I was going to work when I was actually going to bars and seeing movies. She told me that I should slow down drinking, I told her I would try. She told me to stop licking her hand, and it wasn’t until several hours later I realized she had confused me with the dog.

Gram’s funeral wasn’t what I wanted it to be. It was at the church attached to my grammar school. The priest wasn’t dynamic and when he misprinted her name ‘Stella’ as ‘Steller’ I considered jumping over the pew and hitting him in the face. I thought about how it would embarrass my mom and dad but still make them proud. I was very close to doing it. Grams was vain in the way that women used to be before beauty became a face book profile picture, she would of wanted a better casket, a better priest and a bigger church. I didn’t like how everyone was touching me and asking me if I was ok. I wanted to stop talking about it and I wanted to go home. At the wake they served cake, and my relatives considered having the casket at the wake. My dead grandmother would have been overlooking a room full of mourning cake eaters. I didn’t make it to Jordan’s funeral, but I went to his house the day after he passed and blasted the whole with a fire extinguisher. I wasn’t even that drunk, his girlfriend told me it was mourning, I’m not sure what it was.

A 60 foot tall flamingo who breathes fire. He wears tap shoes. His name is either Greg or Carlos.

She puts the hot sauce in the refrigerator. You’ve never understood that. It’s a gross parallel to you, cold and spicy. The kind of bizarre inversion that can swallow smaller universes. But it’s her place, although your ass has made a dent on her couch and your stink, barely favorable, is soaked in her pillows like salt water in dog fur.

An hour ago you were passed out on her floor in your underwear, your gut rounded, inflating and deflating as you crawl out of the coma the night before dropped you in. You notice a cover on the body half of your body that you certainly didn’t have the forethought to put on yourself. This is her doing. She’s on the couch, her long legs dangling off the couch and over your head like a chandelier.

Love is intricate, that’s what you say. She says it’s a natural thing. You tell her volcanoes are natural too. She says that the lava from volcanoes harden and formed the continents. You tell her you went to catholic school and that her radical scientific talk will land her in hell. You both laugh then she asks you why you think love is so hard and intricate.

She made omelets with bacon. You ask for hot sauce and she says in in the refrigerator, you cringe. She always looks at you take the first bite. People are always looking at you and it annoys you, it drives you to drink. Eyes are complex, and despite what people say, eyes aren’t windows to the soul but lasers that sear and confuse and annoy and drive men to drink. But when she looks at you its comforts you, it’s one of the complexities that love dulls. Love has honest eyes, maybe love is natural.

“Where did you get the eggs to make these omelets?” You ask.

“Burnham, but don’t change the subject, why is love so intricate?”

“Oh I havn’t this is all part of it.” You grin.

“Ahhh, an egg metaphor about love? Ok, go.”

“Yes a cheesy egg metaphor.” You say motioning with your fork to the cheesing oozing from the omelet. You sense you’re on a role and must strike while the iron is hot.

“Did you walk to Burnham?”

“Yes. I wouldn’t take a cab.” She rolls her eyes and eats her omelet. Burnham is only a block away for her apartment, of course she walked, your roll slows and the iron cools a bit. But that’s the sign of a good women, gracefully checking ego and putting it in the corner like a bad kid with ADD and a sugar rush. But even with that you’re still on a roll and your best words are like a avalanche, a giant snow ball that can still crush her.

“We’ll when you walked out side, you didn’t float into space did you?”

“Obviously.”

“And when you got to Burnham, and bought the eggs, did you think about the chicken they came from? Or where that Chicken came from, or where that Chicken came from?”

“Dinosaurs.” She says, unbeknownst to her, she done goofed.

“Exactly, giant fucking reptiles. What I’m saying is that, we exist in this space where everything is a giant mystery. Bricks and trains and fucking Asian children. All this is infinitely mysterious, we, well not we, but scientists, scientists have theories on how all this shit works but nobody really knows, and we brave this gigantic mystery every time we go out to get eggs, who knows what will happen. Purple smoke can come out of the ground and turn us all into golf balls. And we won’t know what happened until years later some scientists will come up with an some ridicules explanation and we, well not we because we will be golf balls, but everyone else will believe it and that will be one of the many mysteries people don’t even question while they walk out into gravity that can suck water into space as we text on our cell phones and can hold thousands of songs and send verbalized love across the sky and shoes…rubber, how does rubber work.”

“Okay crazy, now what’s love got to do with it.“ She gives you that look that solider come back form war masturbate too.

“What’s love got to do with it? Everything. What is everyone’s ultimate goal at the end of the day, its love. All this shit was created, fuck, gravity was ordained by the gods so that when we kiss we don’t float into space and imploded. If you weren’t hear, I wouldn’t need a cell phone, or rubber soled shoes and that hat that was spun from fabric that comes out of worms asses, to keep my hair in order. All these mysteries are put in place so that we can find love and procreate and take pictures. All this complicated shit, that we consider natural , and love right in the center, imagine how complicated that shit has to be.” You finish while shaking your head and grumbling.

She stays silent for a minute then kisses you. A good woman, you’ve always though, has the ability to turn the valve in your mind, she can open the flood gates. This one does that for you, you look at her. She says something to contest you, it probably made sense, but you were only sort of listening, your omelet got cold, and the hot sauce got warm.

She turns on Ru Paul’s Drag Race on the TV, and you ask her to switch to Cops when the commercial is on.

I don't want it, I'm not worth it. (Part 1) (Super Rough)

It’s been a rainy May and the fog that lifts from the pier clouds the tops of buildings, making a thick mist that make it look like the sky is falling. It’s about 11:30 at night and I just got out of work. Luckily the rain is light and the bus is rounding the bend to pick up passengers. Tonight my cousin is turning 20 and she’s having a party at some club in Wicker Park. At first I wasn’t going to go, it was too late and working on my feet for 9 hours straight, answering the most remedial of questions for the most aggravating of tourist has a way of draining motivation. But then I remember its for family and I haven’t taken you out in awhile. This will be a good chance for you to meet the younger half of my family, not to mention the club is giving my cousin a few free bottles for her birthday, although if she is truly my kin those bottles are empty by now. I text you and ask you to get ready, expediently. When I reach your building I call and you tell me to go the bar and take two shots and you’ll meet me in the lobby after. I smile like a fool and agree. I walk to Georges, It’s lit in a way that reflects the deepest part of the human condition, the accidental perfection our words and actions have in apathy. The Bartender is inattentive, and what’s worse she’s inattentive with a smile. That hollow, bobbing, idiot smile that people have when they are oblivious to the needs of other. I repeat my order; ‘Jameson and Coke.’ She fiddles around making the drink, unsure and without any pride. A good bartender is attentive and takes prideful in the drink. She is neither she is a bad bartender, she will get no tip. There is a generosity outside of bars on the weekends. A roar of lifted spirits, I ask a stranger for a cigarette to which he obliges. It’s stopped raining, the post-spring air floats around me and its like that first small laugh after a cry. A sign that things will press on, as they have too.
I wait outside your building for 10 and a half minutes. I peer into the lobby from the outside and watch as the digital monitors track which floor the elevator is currently on. 28,13,5. No 17th floor visits, you aren’t ready yet. Just has the true nature of my impatience begins to manifest you step out of the elevator. The 15 minutes you made me wait is nothing compared to the eons of beauty that rest on your face. All made up and tall. A new curl in your hair, I’m happy you exist, I‘m happy I‘m part of your existence. You tell me a cab would only take 8 minutes. That’s all the info I need to began wildly waving toward traffic hoping a taxi sees my beacon. We wrangle one. I ask him does he know where Geisha Lounge is, I cant understand the words under his accent, but I’m sure whatever series of grunts and coos he muttered meant ‘No’. I scan my phone for the text message my cousin sent me with the address. I find it and I tell the cabby, making sure to emphasize the ’West’ in ’West Milwaukee.’ Any other accidental direction on the axis would prove fatal for my modest budget. He says he’s taking the highway, its bordering on 12:30 and the roads should be clear so I don’t object. If there is one thing I’ve learned from taking cabs in Chicago its not to fall asleep in the backseat. However, if there are two things I’ve learned from taking cabs, its that there are about 4 ways to get to any single destination. The roads of Chicago stretch out and mingle often. Laid out like the flaky rules in a child’s imagined game. One second you could be in a completely new pocket of the city, full of foreign sights and new possibility only to turn the corner and find your favorite McDonalds and that club your friend dragged you to last August. On the ride there I notice a dullness in your smile, the placid one you wear when you’re annoyed by me. I’m not sure what I did, and I’m paying for the cab and probably the majority of the drinks tonight, so I deduce the source of your contention can’t be me and if it is, all will soon be absolved after I open the door for you and cart you into the bar. As we pull up to Geisha Lounge I notice the hand you placed on my knee is a different hand. It’s limp like a dead fish, not the usual warm loving death grip. We get out the cab. You go first and I trail you to the door, the bouncer looks you up and down, as amazed as any man would be, then asks for ID. Everything checks out then he says the cover is 20 bucks. The strings of the violin in my head pluck and you turn around with that pseudo embarrassed face. I’m outraged that Geisha has the outward audacity to charge anything over 7 dollars, I tell the bouncer that I’m there for my cousins party, he says he didn’t have a list but if I could get her out here to talk to him he’d let me in for 10 dollars. Still a steep price, but I agree, as I take out my phone to make the call the bouncer notices my shoes and says I can’t get in with sneakers. I look at him right in his big fat head, the fat rolls on the back of his head resembling hotdogs and a snicker and say ‘Rad.’ sarcastically. My cousin answers and I try to tell her they wont let me in, but its no use. She can’t hear me over the music. It never fails, no matter how loud an event is people will always call and people will always answer their phones. As if the satellites in space that bounce our calls have special noise canceling waves that activate when there’s too much background feedback. We both yell in our phones, but its no use, it’s like trying to tell a secret across the grand canyon. You look at me, that same smile. The one that conveys your beauty and your disdain for me equally and elegantly. You ask; ‘What now?’. We are in the heart of Wicker and if we can’t find a good time in the Heart of Wicker at 1 a.m we aren’t the adventures we think we are. We head to evil olive. You don’t make me hold your hand, I consider grabbing yours but then I get a text from my cousins friend at the party. She asks where I’m at and why couldn’t I get in. The tall pretty one I’ve known all my life. She’s pretty cool and is way over do for a humping. But I love you, way more than a potential hump. I’ve loved before, and it is possible I could love after. But this is the closet I’ve ever got to perfect. If love is art, you and I are a Salvador Dali painting, while the other have been Andy Warhol. Fun but at the end of the day just a can of soup. Uncooked soup. We get to Evil Olive and the bouncer scenario plays out this time my shoes are okay and the cover is only five. You walk in before me and the bouncer tells me I'm with the ‘baddest girl in the club’ I say almost without thought; ‘Yeah, you get over her quick.’ He laughs and asks to search my bag. I open my messenger bag and its just my folded up work clothes. The khakis and the staff shirt remind how much I really ain’t cut out for a 9 to 5. How much working dead in jobs makes me want to do better in school. I think about how in a week it’ll be June 3rd. My paycheck comes in June 3rd. I think about my hard earned money, I think about how I promised we’d get real high and get oriental massages. I’ve never taken a girl to get a massage, I’ve never even taken a girl to the movies. I'm new to this stand up guy routine, but I don't hate it. He’s done checking my bag and I walk in.

We make a B-Line to the bar and immediately I notice a girl with half her head shaved. The other half is the sort of auburn blonde color. She has nice lips and her make up is right. She’s sexy, like a catfish fillet to a homeless man. She’s no you, by any stretch, but still worthy of a hump down. She walks up a stair case to what I assume is a VIP section. I kiss you on the cheek and give it that extra second of contact, my way of writing you a poem without all the hassle of rhyming and sounding cliché. Transferring Shakespeare through kisses is hard but I think sometimes I nail it with you. I order us two shots, then two more, then you get two more, then I slap down my last 20 and get us two more. Four shots in under 10 minutes, hardly a record but still impressive. We share a dance, the goofy bouncing kind, not the booty grinding kind. It’s close to comfortable, and that’s a incredible. It may have been the first time I’ve ever had fun dancing in public. A good dance should be all knowing but never judging. We got close that night.


We have a cigarette outside and the generosity of the night and the club is alive in the air. We strike up a conversation with some Greek guys, he says I’m lucky to have you. I say I know, you look at me but I can’t look back, its awkward and embarrassing and too much mushiness makes me tired. He says he likes my hair and that you’re lucky to have me, you say that I’m ‘Pretty great.’ The Greek guys say they’ll buy us drinks but what they really mean is they’ll buy you drinks and begrudgingly get me some. Perks of not being outwardly possessive, besides I’m not threatened by these guys, they haven’t what it might take to pull you away from me, not like anyone could if I didn’t let them. My cousins tall, busty friend texts me. Telling me she’s waiting outside at Geisha, I say I’ll be there in a minute. I have no intention of bringing you. I’ll devise a plan to slink away. I good at that.

One Better

She flings her arms around my neck, and grabs a handful of my hair pulling it just hard enough that it hurts. She pants when we kiss, trying to catch the breath I’m sucking out of her. We do the dance of the intoxicated lovers, are arms tangled around each other in a volcanic warmth that is ready to explode, but this is the one of the best parts and I want to make it last a little longer. Her legs are getting weak, I’m pulling her all around the room, usually the rush kicks in and I try to pull the trigger before she realizes that I’m short and desperate for love. But tonight there is something in Paulette’s voice telling me that tonight she’s all mine. She’s got a boyfriend, but I’m the ghost in her sheets and I’d be damned if I don’t haunt tonight. This is a test, Paulette’s got a boyfriend she says she loves. Now she’s shaking and moaning with me in a bathroom while he’s probably writing shitty poems. It’s always the poets, that take my girls. They are braver and do less brooding, but no poet can fuck as good as good as I can, no poet knows the dark truths of the night like I do. She’s wearing tights, and as my hands creep down her back I peel them off, I feel them ride around the curve of her ass. She’s losing the test, the test to see if she’s the good girl I want her to be, the test of her loyalty to her boyfriend, she’s failing the test and its bitter sweet to both of us. I want her to push me away, I want her to pull up her tights and rush out of here, but as my hands and explore her and I feel her wetness I gather in my mind how this is going to end. Before long I bend her over my bathroom sink, she’s got a great ass, it aint the biggest one out there but it suits her body and its soft, like angel skin. She takes dick like a dream, you never have to slow down with Paulette, and if your legs, or abs or arms start to burn she’ll happily take over. She screams ever time, like a grunt, like shes pulling splinters out. She moves her hips so it goes all the way in every time. I’ve got a angel bent over.

NOTE:
I'm blushing. I'm over it. Off too porno.