This Is Not A Kiss

A year ago a woman scooped tears from my eyes with her tiny thumbs and whispered, lips to ear, “Oh, silly. Alcohol just makes you feel shiny. But getting drunk—it drowns all your sparkle.”

*

And then one day your door will fly open flung and the room will flood with such a light that you’ll think this must be camera tricks. But it’s not. It’s light alighting lightly like a revelation. And emerging through the door and into that light will be a beautiful stranger. You’ll be inclined to think the stranger’s a symbol—for mysterious new adventures or all the unknown joy that undoubtedly fills your bountiful future—but, no (stick to the image), it really is a beautiful stranger who wordlessly kisses you on the mouth, hard, and you, now duly kissed and bathing in the giddy anticipation that knows rough and vigorous sex is inevitable, realize that the world is worthy of your awe, that life is more abundant than the limits of your desires, and the strangeness of kissing strangers is a quirky kind of metaphor that indeed means itself in addition to deepening into broader, richer relational meanings including, among other things, submitting and praying and hospitality and whales and birds-in-sky and blindingly red rubies. It’s all weirder than you think, man. When you’re walking down the street, not yet to the corner, what exactly, then, is around it? Wondering that alone is enough to kick the legs from beneath everything you know. Your brain is a bowl of soup.

*

There are times, bleak times, when, because of the responsibilities that bind me to the world, I’m with people when they’re doing things that people do and they say things to me, either declarations or questions, and, before I can respond, I wonder What would a person say to such a thing? or How would a real person act in a situation such as this? and I rummage through my background knowledge of the way people are, make hasty decisions, and eventually say or do something, acting like a human being in a particular situation. What I want most is to sleep or read a book or get drunk or jump off a bridge and I wonder things like How are these people so comfortable being people? or How is it possible that I can barely endure the simplicity of “being in a situation”?

*

The rub. The person for whom being itself constitutes prison camp labor—seriously, merely being a noun is sometimes a function of gritty will (you normal ones will not here know what I mean)—that person is surprisingly conscious of the fact that the door will indeed one day fly open, albeit they are entirely unmoved by this knowledge.

*

But then it does! Fly open! The door! And the impossible light and the stranger and the kiss and the sparkle that makes things move and smile. It’s this: it’s not real in the way real things happen. And yet it does happen. You’re kissing the stranger. The strange body of the other teaches your hands to clutch and yank the image, not allowing it to dissolve into a symbol or a metaphor. For who wants to grapple with literary abstractions in the presence of a hot wet mouth? You’re not sure if people will understand you but it doesn’t matter anymore because it makes sense to you. It makes sense to you, which is to say that you’re learning to sing. You keep writing in the dark. The floor is a mess of torn off clothes and these are not just words. These are not just words. Your fictions are truer than the lives of real people.

40

Love And Death And The Helium Balloon Contradiction

So.

You’ve been dead 6 years. How’s being dead? I imagine it’s like being a sand castle as ocean waves wash away its edges until it's indistinguishable from the beach. Or a clown on his day off, lying on the couch and watching TV.

Are all the lost things there? Like maybe death is this cluttered toolshed filled with all gone or forgotten things. How is it? How could it possibly be? 

I used to think it would be like sleep with no dreams but now I toy with a dreamier death. What I’m thinking is that consciousness is an explosion of dreams, that you and I are dreams inside other dreams, which are also inside still other dreams and so on. Inside and out get confused. So “you” die. The dream of “you” ends. But there’s something left, a you bigger than you, the dream in which you figured, that partakes in explosion.

We lively ones die nightly into dreams. Into what lively dreams do the dead retire?

I’ll be 40 in a couple days (your suicide’s proximity to my birthday was noted by the way). 40. That’s a long dream and I’m always itching to wake into another. You lived 42 years and 59 days. So how is it? How’s being dead?

I feel myself drawn to it like a helium balloon tugging toward the sky—floating through the cloudy white vapor into a blue that constantly deepens. Not always due to despair—sometimes—but often solely due to curiosity and readiness. But there’s a few hands holding my string, maintaining the subtle tension between attachment, love, and tearing off my own skin.

So I stay.

And I imagine, dream, wonder, ask, ask, and ask again. How is it? What’s it like? Is there a decent simile for not to be? And I draw lines between fucking and drinking and drugs and religion and running and selflessness, looking for seams between moments, sneaking peaks outside before the door slams shut.

And I love.

People, things, ideas, poems, memories, candy. I love to the point of vanishing, disappearing, burning to the ground. Love is the craft of building your own death. Where clutching the string of your own helium desire to float away blurs into the same thing.

Is that how it is? You’re not going to tell me, are you? That’s okay. I’m sorry to bother you. I’ll be 40 in a couple days. And my birthday is when I’m always the most sorry to have let you float away into the blue.

Pouring And Holding And Drinking and Thirst

After letting it just sit there in my car—being evocative—for three weeks, I threw it away. I told myself it was just a styrofoam cup but I was lying. Nothing is never what it is. The stuff of our lives—each thing is made of its own particular past and future and mood and everything else that it’s not. Styrofoam is not plastic or fog or a pair of pearl ear rings, but it’s informed by these things, all things. And a cup’s only a cup because of pouring and holding and drinking and thirst.

You sipped soda from that cup in a Mexican restaurant when we were still smiling in spite of the inevitable. You left it in my car that night after the long talk, the last time I saw you.

And for three weeks it sat in my car, a partner in my travels in between places. This cup, once in your hand, your lipstick on the straw, a talisman, somehow the receptacle into which my memory of you poured. I dumped the stale water, once ice, and threw the cup away. As memories of you begin to fade, the cup remains in my imagination. I see it perched high atop a landfill, a crown on a heap of tightly clutched waists, vicious kisses, and thirsty women.

*

Valerie, my fourth romance since my divorce, is also the fourth woman who wasn’t being treated the way she deserved to be treated. I’m wary of women with prepackaged agendas for what they deserve, especially when what they deserve is constantly broadcast in contrast to the way I’m acting. Since being divorced, I’m pretty attached to doing whatever I want and this doesn’t bode well for compromise. But then again there’s my thirst. God damn I’m thirsty.

It Takes An Ocean Not To Break

When I’m sleeping, I remember floating in the world of my mother, in the nectar of her amniotic fluid, learning to breathe. Do you remember? Breathing liquid in and out that, itself, would form your breathing lungs. There were no lines between me and the liquid or me and my mother; there were no distinctions at all. In my mother. Not yet other. The only way to remember is to forget. Like being absorbed in the liquid of an intense activity or when you’re dreaming, gone, lost in reverie. Being away—that’s the way. Back to mom.

When I’m sleeping, when I’m writing, when an image seizes my attention, when I’m lost in thought, when I’m helping someone else, when I’m engaged in conversation and trying to communicate the unspeakable, it’s always and ever my mom’s 26^th birthday—January 17^th, perpetually.

I imagine her then. I see her cooking at the stove, minding my brother, talking on the yellow phone. I see her looking in the mirror, placing her hands on her bare pregnant belly and feeling me thrash about, an impatient fish. Nervous. Of course she had her fears and doubts. But I like to believe, too, that she imagined herself a magical goddess with the eye of the future opening inside her. I bet she whispered I love you. I bet she was pretty too. The most beautiful woman in all the land for whom every star poked its ambitious hole in the dark.

I wonder about my mother’s mind. The way her memories descend in the theater. How they form odd juxtapositions of disparate reflections and dreams and thoughts and ghosts. Does she remember walking to church when she was a little girl? In what way? Does it make her cry or smile or both? I remember that little girl walking to church. She was light with youth and heavy with brooding about the likes of salvation and the simple shock of being a girl in the world. I remember when she learned to walk and her unquestioned adoration of my nana. When I’m sleeping, I remember too when my mom floated in the nectar. Hiroshima. She clenched her tiny fists. Nagasaki. My fetal mom winced.

She is made of brittle bird bones, origami, and bombs. Born of her explosion, I’m always in her ocean.

Still a teen, when my first love ended and I hung up the phone, I fell on the floor and cried. When my mom went down as well and wrapped her arms around me, I cried louder and louder. I return to this memory often because it’s so two and confused and whole. I don’t fear shipwreck; there’s relief in drowning.

For her birthday, what can you possibly give the woman who gave you the gift of being somebody? The only thing I can imagine ever truly wanting from my kids is a subtle nod or a wink, just the tiniest acknowledgement that maybe I did right by them. So here’s this. Happy birthday, mom. As long as I’m a me, there’s a grateful fish swimming in your sea.

On January, Melting, And Chris Delaney

January is not my month. I don’t feel well in January.

I’ve been a character in a story who goes down in January for a long time now. I understand and generally disagree with the enthusiastic idea of just rewriting my story. Why don’t I just decide to be Happy Man in January? It smacks of an authorial arrogance that I’ve never convincingly possessed. But I do believe in revision and the masochistic pleasure of imagining new perspectives of my January thaw.

See? I made a move right there. Being a depressed man is so boring to me. It’s an abstraction that conceals more than it says. But to thaw, to melt, to go from a frozen to a liquid state in opposition to the season is a different way to imagine my mood. It’s evocative. It doesn’t easily cohere into the conventional framework of making sense; it resists meaning while inviting wonder. To thaw in the dead of winter is unnatural—so much the better. Because in January, every January, I’m a puddle.

January is the beginning and birth is hard. So this yearly descent can be imagined as a melting into depth, to a yearly kicking into being. And then in February I learn to walk again. Or maybe January is merely the ticket booth where I pay my dues, where I buy my ticket for the circus of another year. Do you see? I don’t have a conclusion. Just a need to see things anew. My New Year’s resolution.

In spite of not knowing anything, I lean toward grief as the rich origin of both my January thaw and my imagination. There’s a laughable notion of The Grief Process, a straight line, simplified and reified for easy consumption and the repetitive squawking of parrots. But—not a line, a circle—January comes every year and with it comes the ghost of Chris Delaney and, like a pebble in my shoe, his need to be remembered in story.

The quite literal facts are that he was struck by a car and killed 26 years ago today. He was 13, dead now twice as long as he lived. So much for facts. The fantasy of Chris Delaney continues to haunt and animate my life. I look to that day as the abrupt end of my childhood and to Chris Delaney as the inexhaustible source of my childishness. His corpse in his casket shocked me into philosophy and the sound of his laughter is in the background of all my imaginal play.

I need to put you in words, Chris Delaney. I know that you live in ways far more potent than the notion of living on in shoddy memories. I need to say you. To push past merely remembering you to a more genuine form of honoring your presence by saying Hello Chris Delaney.

“The art of healing is healing into art.”

If You Don't Want To Read About My Penis, Wait A Few Days Till My Mom's Birthday

I have bifocals and a urologist but me and Eddie Vedder are still alive so that’s something. The sun, my friends, is setting on my 30s. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. I used to hope I’d die before I got old. But now I’m content with a good bowel movement.

The black snake in my stomach, the pain in my lower abdomen when I run, remains a mystery. I don’t know any witch doctors so my situation continues to be confined within the framework of Western medicine and the biased perspective of my urologist and his fancy degrees. I fantasize about chewing on a bitter root in a sweat lodge as a shaman chants and puts hot stones on my belly but my urologist has other plans. If he’d just put a bowl of sweet milk by my head, the snake would more than likely slither right out of my mouth but he just gives me Lortabs and tests.

In spite of the pain being in my lower abdomen, my urologist is obsessed with my penis and balls. I don’t get science. My insurance company is thrilled. The other day I peed into this machine that measured my urinary force. I filled a 1000cc container, kept going, and made a big puddle on the exam room floor, vaguely sensing that this exceeded the scope of the test. The nurse looked at me like she hated her job but she’s also the one who made me drink 16 oz of water two hours before my appointment.

The doctor said I wasn’t normal. I’m used to this kind of thing.

He said the average person could hardly stand 550ccs of urine in their bladder and that I just filled a 1000cc container while adding maybe 300 to the exam room floor. But all we learned was that I have an enormous bladder. I can also juggle. Still hurts when I run.

Next week I’m getting a CT scan of my abdomen and the week after that I’m getting a cystoscopy. “Cystoscopy” is a fancy word for using a telescope to look at my bladder, which sounds like no big deal except for the part about the telescope being jammed in my penis. They’re going to put a telescope in my penis. What I’m trying to tell you is that they’re going to put a telescope in my penis.

I’m sorry, Reader, for this post’s lack of literary finesse but, in case you missed it, they’re going to put a telescope in my penis.

I keep repeating that they’re going to put a telescope in my penis as a means to come to terms with the idea of a telescope in my penis. Again, I’m no scientist but I’m reasonably certain that you’re not supposed to put anything in your penis. And I’m fairly adventurous. I see myself as a guy who likes to try new things. I’ll eat sea urchin. Go sky diving. You can even tie me up and beat me with a riding crop. I’m game. But, hey, let’s not put stuff in my penis. Even witch doctors (so naïve and primitive!) look askance at putting things in your penis. It’s just not done.

Nonetheless, that’s the plan. CT scans, Lortabs, and a telescope in my penis—all toward the end of finding out what’s wrong with me when I suspect that all they’re going to find is that I’m just not normal.

Washing Dishes Is Never Just Washing Dishes

On a normal day, you’d call it washing the dishes. You’d call it despair. And then, to be more specific, you’d whittle that down to something called loneliness. You’d take it for granted that you miss someone and that would be your problem. On a normal day, you’d call it washing the dishes and you’d be so attached to your sadness that you’d forget to ask questions.

But today, like every day, is not normal. Today, as you rinse the blue plate, you’re reminded of that Shunryu Suzuki bit about the waterfall. How can you be a person washing dishes when you’re a drop of water coming down from a high mountain? The feeling doesn’t change. But it’s a new story. Being a drop of water is difficult.

There’s a subtle shade of relief in being a drop of water but it doesn’t last. An elegant metaphor you read 16 years ago is not the answer. Today, nimbly, you keep moving. You realize that what—on a normal day—you would usually call “loneliness” is actually the frantic buzz of a fly with its wings all spider webbed. But even though you’re trapped, you know you can’t stay. Because a little girl in Japan is weeping. Did she wake from a nightmare? Is she an orphan? You can't know. But perhaps you are, in a way not yet articulated by the scientific method, a receptacle for her grief.

You look out the window. You see through the window. You wonder if you yourself are made of glass and on the verge of shattering. Isn’t loneliness more aptly described as an empty place where the wind blows through? For awhile. But then it’s the price you pay for an intimacy that blurs the distinction between persons. And then it’s penance for the boy you punched—you broke his glasses—so many years ago or the man you killed so many lives ago in that bar when the law was upheld with knives. A witch’s hex or a little demon dragging you down to the underworld, clutching at your legs.

You don’t know what’s wrong with you. But your lack of certainty regarding causation is not a case for meaninglessness. It’s quite the opposite. A lack of certainty clears the place where meanings fill, full of meanings, meaningful. There are answers. But they’re bursting with questions and today it occurs to you that your suffering resides only in your certainty about its source, that there’s joy to be found in moving along as you dry the blue plate and wonder.