Something ain't right here.

What if my backyard is in Greenland? What then, British Petroleum? WHAT THEN?

It Makes Me Sad...

Is that... I mean... Seriously? How can this be real?

Aside from the fact that I was there and took the picture, I find it hard to believe anyone could intentionally name a park that...

*SIGH*

Mixing Work and Romance

Every muscle in my body had to be stopped, because no less massive a systemic shutdown seems to rouse Benjamin from his fearsome driving trance. Some people talk about white-knuckled driving, and that description is certainly apt in the case of Benjamin. In addition, he is red-jawed, tense-eyed, flutter-kneed, pale-cheeked and cold-nosed. Like a hyperactive puppy, too long out of the sun and staring at the bone he cannot bare to relinquish.

Also, he is driving.

“What now, Jay?” he addressed me.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“Bollocks,” he said, calling me out in British.

“It's nothing.”

“You know the penalty for lying.”

“You know the state of my wallet.”

“I know you're pretty quick in the aisles of a Safeway, too.”

“Benjamin.”

“What'd I do this time?”

“Nothing.”

“You're sure?” He wants to know if I'm sure. “Am I driving too fast?”

“You didn't do anything.”

“Remember the rule about lying, man.”

I remember, and I'm not prepared to accept the consequences. “I'm not lying. It's me.”

“Better.” He's satisfied, but it's fleeting. Benjamin's hard glare loses focus, and he seizes on the next inquiry that slaps his gray-lobed brain. ”What'd you do?”

“I'm dating your coworker.” The confession feels good. Like blowing a brick house down.

“It's just us in here, man.”

“I know, man.”

“Heavy.”

“It's really eating at me, you know?” We both think about it. Hard. “It's harrowing,” I say.

He thinks about what to say, taking his time. Mulling it over. Mixing work and romance is always complicated, and this is no different.

“Are you gonna let yourself down easy?”

“I was hoping to do it with a text message, but I'm just not that kind of guy.”

“No, you're better than that.”

“Completely.” I'm glad he knows that about me.

“Do you need a minute alone?”

“Would you mind? The rest stop up there? They'll have a payphone.”

“I understand, man.” He pulls in, white knuckles going flesh-toned. “I could use some Twix, anyway.”

“Can I have one?”

“Sure.”

“A Twick.”

“A Twick?”

“I'm guessing.”

“Good guess.” The car sings a one note song, upset at my premature seatbelt loosening. “Hey, Jay?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry to hear about Jay, man.”

“Yeah, me too.” I'd probably tear up, but the stimulants dry me out. “But it's easier this way.”

“I hear you.”

The Correct Direction

It was time to go and Benjamin was on a serious bender. We had a date in Batesville with a gourd that blocked out the sun so bad, the local sheriff locked up six people for breaking curfew. The kind of shit you can get into in a town with a curfew makes the buttons pop off my vest just thinking about it.

“Benjamin. Let's go.”

“But I'm upset.” He was. The creases in his forehead were so tight I wanted to farm them for geothermal energy.

“What's up?”

“Why can't I just go wards?”

“Go what?”

“Wards.”

“Wards?”

“Yeah. I wanna go wards.”

I thought about it a bit, then spit out “I'm not stopping you man.” I had thought about it. And I wasn't.

“No, no, you're cool.” He paused, but his mouth was open Feed Me wide, and he had something else to say, for sure. “It's not you.”

I tried being encouraging, because when a man is flat on his back, sometimes that's what he needs. “So, go wards. It's your high.”

“What am I gonna do about grammar?”

“Grammar?” I was confused, because usually it was gravity he had trouble with. Lying there, totally prone, I had to wonder if he'd just gotten his "gr" words messed up.

“Yeah, it's bringing me down.” That I could agree with.

“Dude, I agree.” Grammar was always killing my high. Split infinitives and the pejorative tense and all that. For a writer, running into grammar is like finding a splinter when you're a termite. It sucks.

“See, I can go forwards.” He wriggled in the direction his feet had been facing, dragging the throw rug along with him as he went.

“Damn right you can.” I said, and gave him a little applause.

“I can go backwards.” He reversed the act, pushing with his heels and sliding
headfirst toward my chair.

“You can, but I don't recommend it.” Benjamin and I try to keep each other going forward whenever possible. “Remember what happened last time we did that.”

“Yes.” He then picked up his keister and shimmied out to the left. “Just as I suspected, I can go sidewards if I want to.”

“Actually, I think that one's not right.”

“I'm ignoring that.”

“Understood.”

“But there is no wards.” The world kind of blinked into the next day, and I think we both felt it. I held on to my drink tighter, because suddenly nothing made sense. I looked around, and he was right. There was no wards. “I've looked in every direction I can think of, and I'm convinced that no matter which way I go, it won't be wards.”

“You're right. Only one thing can be to blame.”

“I tried to tell you, man.”

“Fucking grammar, man.”

“Completely.”

A Triassic Lark

As a youth I entertained many notions of possible future employment. Astronaut. Cowboy. Garbageman. All of these, of course, are rugged, manly professions destined to attract the tiny male brain in early stages of development. None were to be my true calling. None would even sustain a level of desire beyond facetious reference or “oh, sigh, if only” platitudes.
What I truly yearned for...
What I notched my belt with, each tenuous step of the way...

The Life Calling that haunts everything from dreams to social-networking-profile self-assessments is not a future culled from the collective unconscious of the alpha male zeitgeist of centuries past, but rather a life of dull inspection. Of rational examination of the remnants of an era past. Long past.

My obsession with paleontology is rooted in ancient memories. So the largely-apocryphal family story goes, in an easter basket in my third year of life were tucked several plastic dinosaurs. They became my instant obsession, birthed from that plastic hash and possibly even from brightly colored eggs. Animals, clearly, but with a legacy of being long gone, unknowable and trapped in purview of science only. Literally, they were afforded their own discipline fraught with powerful words even my all-knowing parents were not familiar with.

Some of these names—Tyrannosaurus, of course, because what collection of saurischians would be complete with him. Stegosaurus, because no grandfather can resist teasing a child about the “kookiness” of those plates and spines. Triceratops, because she is perhaps the most identifiable of these long extinct animals—sharing characteristics of the rhinoceros or the cow.

There is power in words. There is an echoing in my inmost desires that is only slaked by the proof that I have more words than a rival. Even than a friend. Maybe this comes from all the teachers, friends of parents and shocked passersby and their remarks. “I could never remember all those words.” “How can he pronounce all of those?” Maybe, conversely, I was already wired to be prideful at the mention of my great linguistic prowess, and the discovery of a science that offered a panoply of new words was too much to handle.

Clearly a five year old who knows the difference between Dromaeosaurus and Dilophosaurus (and can tell you which one he identifies with more) isn't your average five year old. But honestly, even now I'm somewhat tickled by it. Remembering how I failed to ever become more than a dabbler in that magic. I have the words, but I will never sit in the hot sun of Laiyang county, cracking rocks to their Cretaceous core and robbing their secrets. I won't get to lay these words out in front of lecture halls. Robert Bakker will never know my name.

The funniest thing, in retrospect, is how tame these words sound now. Diplodocus and Psittacosaurus, though not in the common lexicon, are stiff words with only one meaning, less rhythm and no poetry. The pangs of echolalia one suffers from too much time discussing our long-gone Terrible Lizards is also a little tedious. This is nerd knowledge. It's as useful as star wars trivia, or rote memorization of the first hundred digits of pi. It encourages knee-jerk criticism of movies in which Brachiosauridae are depicted dragging their tails, or which feature man-sized Velociraptors. There are probably entire message boards dedicated to a crusade to unmask and lambaste the purveyors of these cinematic tragedies.

But I just don't care anymore. Because these were the dreams of my youth, and they're as silly as dreaming of being a cowboy.

Of course, if I were a cowboy who got to ride a dinosaur, there would be nothing silly about that at all. Seriously.

Thin Boundaries

There's nothing that causes quite the same mix of consternation and joy as finding evidence of the internet moving into realspace. Seeing a graffiti heart depicted on a wall in spray paint as a "<3" is disturbing in the way that it must have been for people to start receiving love letters in typeface. It has the kind of world-blending elements that the turn signals on Amish horse and buggies have.

As long as no one starts gluing captions to cats, I think we'll be ok.

A Brief Retrospecitve

I dig into my old poetry between laundry and a cocktail, hoping to find some inspiration. Maybe a glimpse of the past will mask these grinding emotions with a little perspective. They always twinkle on the screen as though fresh off my mind. Still I expect them to be frayed or tattered. A bent corner. A forgotten line. A little age. They ought to embody the time that's passed and the moods that've come and gone. They stay fresh; blacks crisp and whites clean. The emotions get the treatment—watered down and softened in a spin cycle that never stops. Tumbled brilliant like stones until the image is all that remains. Until they're metaphors and not tirades. All my vitriol is gone and the art remains.

There are visions of a man who loved like a falling stone. No conviction, no remorse. Heedless of his own motion. The shape of things is a dog song—pain and joy so subtle and too strong to comprehend. The poetry screams out like madness at the sight of some dark god. Who was I? What did I see as I launched myself from every precipice, and did I even imagine the ground below?

Though with time there is a pattern. A clear one of glory-seeking and empty vessels. He becomes the rock. He is blind. He is thoughtless. He becomes the dog. He replies with barking and with sex. Then something magical happens. In those pages (the ones most yellowed and aged in my mind) he learns who he is. He blinds himself with a mask of imagery. He wears the poem, and puts it on. He erects straw-man gods to do his dirty work. It's beautiful, but maddening. A patchwork of prediction and delusion. A back seat driver in the verse.

I used to say I never journal. But it seems I may have done something even more explicit.