“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
— Ira Glass

Regarding: regarding: regarding: regarding

date: Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 5:16 PM
subject Re: Re: Re: DM Partner and Registration Fee

Sounds better than my Thanksgiving. Went out last night. Drank drinks. Saw too many high school friends I didn't want to see. Drank drinks. Saw former babysitter curled up naked in the bathroom. Drank drinks. Blacked out. Woke up with puke all over my bed/face/clothing, etc, without my belongings. Apparently my mom came and picked me up at 3 in the morning. She won't look at me. So much for warm fuzzy family time.

I love you. Don't be sad. See you soon.

date: Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 6:22 PM
subject Re: Re: Re: Re: DM Partner and Registration Fee

I spent an hour during thanksgiving in my room googling "why am i so sad," "what makes people sad," "what do you do if you like someone who doesn't like you." Then I fell asleep until my mom woke me up. I think if I go out I will repeat the sequence you describe. Let's move to grand marais and write poetry. Let's get addicted to black coffee and words and ice (the frozen water kind, not cocaine). Let's move to New York City and become intoxicated with the buildings until we're numb and dumb and move back to our roots. Let's dye our hair, let's ink our skin, let's make imprints on our hearts we'll keep for the rest of our lives. Let's learn to make our own paper with recycled scraps. Let's find new paths in the woods. Let's eat wild berries. Let's play in the snow with icee sticks and let's forget about falling in love until we do. Let's find new things to be thankful for like not having webbed toes and the fact that there are many colors but not too many and the fact that we believe the illusion of individuals and of life and of death. Let's sip brightly colored things through straws and practice telling lies until we are professors of truth. Let's dance in our sleep.

the sexy meth addict look

I used to make fun of the way he looked like a meth addict when he put his hair up to cook. To keep it out of his eyes. Once I mistook him for a girl, and I told him.

He cut his hair sometime that fall, still long and blond and stringy on Sundays when he didn't shower. Then, before I left for the holidays, it was long enough again, by sudden small margin, to pull up in a tiny bun. In the back the pieces too short curved into little apostrophes around his neck. It's like when I put on the large and thick rimmed glasses left here after a costume party. Through them I see a glimpse of what it might be to be someone else and when his hair is tight, tied up and taught around his head it turns me on.

His name was Aries

Saturday evening I went to a Thanksgiving dinner at the YMCA with my 5th grade mentee Toni. I’d spent the day baking cinnamon rolls for friends and roasting a Turkey in my oven. It was the first turkey I’ve ever made and I squirmed at removing the neck and giblets and at hoisting the rinsed fleshy body out of my sink, into a roaster.

Toni is never excited to see me. After eating & laughing too much with her Toni's mother Reba and some aunts I left, a little upset with a persistent feeling I’d somehow failed. Failed Toni. In the dark alley behind the Y a boy half my size ran past me away from someone chasing him, then slowed down to catch up with me. I’d met him a week or so before on a YMCA bowling trip. Aries.

“Oh he’s a devil,” Toni’s mom Reba had warned me, then. But at the bowling alley he offered me cheesy fries if I guarded them while it was his turn. He had none of that dull stare Toni always has, like she knows—knows that even when her drug dealing brother moves out, when her cousins buy their own place and she can move out of her mom’s room back into her own, what life will be for her.

Outside the Y in the dark I ask the boy what his name is, then remembered because Aries is my astrological sign. But it isn’t his; he was born in August, not March like me. I told him how my parents gave me the middle name May; the wrong month like his.

I think of what his name looks like to the world and ask what grade he’s in and he says he skipped 5th grade because the tests he took showed he was smart, but he already knew because his whole family was smart (except his little sister, he says.) I told him in 6th grade I was the smart kid too. He said he’s good at math and science and I said those are good things to be good at. And then we parted ways and he asked when the next Y field trip was and I said I didn’t know but it felt like meeting a boy I was excited to know better but this time a child, so I said, keep being the smart kid.

Burnham Shores Swing Set

I went to the park the other day, like I always do on runs that exist not for running but for breathing and for beating and for rhythmic pounding. Burnham Shores Park, where all the playground equipment composes a neat circle on the edge of the water. I avoided eye contact with the mother I deemed not-intimidating-enough to keep me away from the swing sets and settled into the one rhythm I learned I've learned and never forgotten. Feet up chest back. Chest up feet back. Until I feel the iron frame tugging at my limbs, the sky tugging at my stomach.

Today I had company but it wasn't from a curious girl child investigating the effects of 15 years on a human body. As I was recalling the swinging I'd done on this very swing (last spring, the spring before, two winters past in the dark and cold with a boy and a girl) I was visited by myself of the future. She was slight but sturdy, clean grey hair and clear eyes, facing the lake like I was, pointing her tennis shoes with evident expertise.

I was humbled that she chose to visit there and then. We didn't have to speak for me to know. I remembered I was young and god of my matter and leapt of the swing in a deliberate show of my jeunesse dorée and smiled at my naivete and her wistfulness. I knew this wasn't time for silly sacrosanctity so I pressed play on my ipod (Club Can't Handle Me) and ran home.

Sometimes Only Motion (May 2009)

The train begins to move, the wind-whir building
the girl with sun-soaked hair is in the shade
thinking of the ghosts of riders past.

The sticky floor is ribbed with crumbs and wrappers
The walls are trees and flowers in full bloom
The scene is almost bursting,
The sound of tires turning,
The gaping of the toothless doors
That chomp with bare black gums.

Today the girl with outside in her is shut in
Boarded up beneath a moat of dirty clothes
The limp and melting pile that ebbs around her hamper
She’s not here to wash them. Her dirty hair
is sand filled, sifting out glass dandruff
Collecting on her notebook as she worries towards the city
Watching all the people come and go
Watching them becoming
exaggerated versions of themselves until they’re hardly real, like her
A humming photon from the sun
Sometimes matter; sometimes only motion.

Puisqu'on est jeune et cons

The fall began in sleeping bags-- on couches, floors, and in the empty rooms
of a house built before the invention of sleeping bags.
The year emerged from squalor fat
with an indulgence only the wise can sustain.
The cupboards brimmed with cahwa from Turkey and squid ink orrechiette;
thin bricks of cocoa & pistachio granola; the fridges stocked with home brewed IPA.

India Pale Ale was invented to slake the thirst of colonialists
over-hopped to keep the beer from spoiling
as it journeyed to un-civilization. Or so the legend goes.
The tangy taste of hops keeps one alert;
The ABV makes one an island.

The weather complied and never got cold;
I cleaned every room but my own;
hid in the covers of others' beds.

When I learned we were not wise
I listened to lyrics in French so as to blunt
the meaning of the words.