1:40

I don't know what I'm thinking about.
This evening I walked in the dark down Old Main hill. I saw the Temple's twin spires glowing like moons between the trees on the hill while ahead of me the whole valley peeked at me through tiny pricks of streetlamps and brake lights. There were stars. Behind me, Orion lay flat like a falling man, though he was rising from behind the mountains.
We watched Vertigo last night. It's hard to say what is eeriest about that movie, but ultimately what frightens me the most is James Stewart's obsession that leads to the real death of his artificial love.
Today in class, I was wondering if it was all worth it. I looked out over the heads bent over their writing and saw a tree wrapped in a frozen yellow fur of leaves shed a golden tear like a snowflake, which fluttered down to join a field of scattered embers.
It all feels so hopeless sometimes.

passion

Looking at the wall over Brett's desk, I see the evidence of a guy who has really followed his passions. Posters, magazine pages, postcards, newspaper clippings all adorn the wall in an orderly, straight-lined collage. There's Sonny Stitt in a black and white photograph from an article; he's holding his saxophone flat in front of him, as if examining the bend for dents. On top is a panoramic shot of the Beatles, a famous poster I think. The four stand in a line facing the right side of the poster, shaggy hair, huge side burns, Harrison and Ringo in front, Paul ducking almost comically behind, and Lennon erect behind him. Looking into the wind, or that's the impression I get.
What kills me is that many of these are passions I share. Jazz and just good music in general. But I have no such collection. I feel less for it, somehow. It feels like a castigation - if you really loved jazz, you, too would have a wall like this.
But it's not just the art, the hangings, it's his knowledge base as well. No one can talk records or artists with him without years and years of experience. I am a novice, an amateur, a greenhorn when it comes to the music I love to listen to and wish I could play.
And that's how it is with me. I spend a lot of time wishing.

leftovers

I crouch on the rectangle of concrete immediately behind our townhouse, a small pink dust broom in one hand, dust pan in the other. All against the wall, piled in mountainous heaps, lies the grey, ash-like lint that was just pulled from our dryer vent. It's draped like moss on our pea plants, all but dead now, on a camp chair folded up against the wall. Some has fallen in the inflated kiddie pool, some along the edge of the grass. It looks just as if it had all exploded from the small circular opening some fifteen feet up and drifted indiscriminately onto the ground below.
And within the debris are the remnants of lives long past. The lint itself made up of tiny fibers from hundreds - maybe thousands - of shirts, pants, socks, undies, sweaters, dresses, overalls, bibs, and who knows what else. Held fast in each grey clump are more hints at other lives: gum wrappers crumpled into small silver balls, scraps of paper absentmindedly left in pants pockets, a paperclip. Each clump is an artifact. How long ago was that gum chomped? What has become of the guy who wore those pants? Is he dead? In prison? Living somewhere else oblivious to the beauty and wonder and miracle of his life?
A light breeze kicks up, stirring the small bundles. Most just quiver, but one or two smaller pieces break away and tumble towards the grass. Stopping in the middle of the concrete pad. The stiff white bristles of my broom scoop them into the dust pan, joining the pile already there. I dump the whole insubstantial mass into a grocery bag.
Living in a rental unit is this way. You live in the wake of other people's lives. Though they have cleaned up after themselves, shreds of the past remain. When we first moved in, we found a card lying flat on the top shelf - a cheesy expression of love handwritten on the inside. In our last place, under a drawer in the bathroom a slip of paper with weekly weigh-ins recorded on it showed us that the previous occupants had been more or less the same size as us. Or maybe it had been the ones before them. Junk mail and catalogs occasionally show up addressed to previous occupants.
In a way, these people who we never meet are our neighbors in time. This lint I sweep up is just another scrap of their lives. I wonder how much is left.

A Writer

People will tell you "You should write! You're really good!"
Don't listen to them. If you listen to them, you will be fooled. You will tell yourself you are a good writer. You will tell yourself you have a way with words. You will tell yourself that you have this mysterious talent that not many other people have, and it will define you, and lead you into places that you wouldn't otherwise go.
You will pursue writing, but not as seriously as you should, because you will think "I'm a good writer. It just comes naturally to me." And you will labor under this illusion as more and more people, hearing you are a writer, will ask you to write things and praise you inordinately for them. Such adulation is poison, a wise man said.
Then you will discover real writing. Sooner or later you will be faced with the fact that your writing is not that writing. You will discover the myriads of people laboring under the same illusion, only they will be much more talented than you, and they will have much more interesting and worthwhile things to say. You will discover that what you like to do is just a game. Your way with words, your whimsical turns of phrases are trivial, are nonsense, are worthless in the face of the juggernaut of writing.
You will discover you are not a writer, and then you will wonder what you are.

Melting Snow

The snow is starting to melt. Great patches lie across the still-yellow grass spanning the entire quad. I only glance at it from the landing, no more than a brief pause as I mount the steps up to my office, and in that brief glance, all of the winter seems to have passed abruptly.
The months of looking out that window on the constant snow seem to have been abbreviated into a period of a week that happened a long time ago. This is the quad returning to "normal." It's how I have remembered it, and returning to snowlessness is natural and welcome. The winter has been unnatural, and now, at the early stages of its passing, it is already forgotten.

At the Bus Stop

Eleven Degrees. The clear white sunshine lighting everything up is a traitor for making the outdoors look so inviting when it is only eleven degrees outside. My face stings, and I wish I had worn my hat instead of just my ear warmers. I watch my shadow exhale a long stream of mist that streams away from my sillhouetted head across the grey-white sidewalk. The bus should be here any minute.
I'm leaning against one of the stout brick pillars lined up outside the transit center. The sun is rising higher in the sky behind me. I'm one of a dozen or so people who for some reason choose to wait for the bus outside, rather than going inside where there is heat. We stand around silently with backpacks and sack lunches - or one guy has grocery bags in hand - waiting for the arrival of the bus that will take us towards campus. No one says a word.
Looking at the guy in the green jacket standing just to the left a few feet in front of me, I seriously consider starting a conversation with him. Should I mention how cold it is? How the bus always seems to be later when it is cold outside? Maybe I should just comment on how no one is talking. I could ask him what he is studying; I'm pretty sure he is a student. I start humming quietly to myself while I mull this over, as if to prep my vocal chords.
He seems to sense the threat of an impending conversation and starts milling around idly. He comes to rest on the other side of the girl with the red jacket and black hair. I catch him glancing over at me accusingly. I return his gaze, not fearing the eye contact.
It's welling up in me, the urge to just say out loud - at a normal speaking voice that everyone would be able to hear, even over the idling of the waiting buses - "Isn't it funny that we are all here with so much in common but nothing to say to each other?" I'm going to do it. I want to do it. How would they react?
I don't do it. I don't have a reason to. I don't know how much any of us have in common. The backpacks, the sack lunches, they could all be red herrings. Perhaps we have nothing in common at all and no reason to talk to each other. What good would it do anyway?
I keep my peace, holding my silence through the remainder of the wait, through the ride up to campus where we all get off, and all the way to my office.

magic

I’m crouched down to clean up a game-closet mess on the kitchen floor when I spot a long, grey-brown, cylindrical abnormality looking like nothing so much as a giant turd with a shiny, grape-like skin lying unassumingly on the tile.
Could my child have done this? What about the diapers? How would Traci not have noticed?
I lean closer to smell it. It is pinched off to a point at one end. It is not a regular roundness all the way down, but has a few wrinkles, or slightly inward curves down its length, which is close to four inches. It really looks like nothing but a piece of excrement.
But it doesn’t smell. I sniff, with no result. How could that be? I stare, inches away, confused by its lack of stench. What could it be?
I reach out a tentative finger. I have kids; I change diapers; I’m not as squeamish as once I would have been. It looks just like the dog “mines” we cleaned out of the back yard with a shovel and plastic grocery bag growing up, one of the light ones, after it’s been in the yard a day or so, but not to the point where it’s dried to dirt-clod consistency, impossible to scoop up without it crumbling to dust. But even those I wouldn’t touch with my fingers.
At my touch the object stirs, wriggles, contracts a little. It’s alive! But no, now it’s inert again. Comprehension starts to dawn on me. I reach out again, poke it, it rolls, contracts a little more.
This used to be a monkey. Where are the marker-drawn eyes and mouth? As I lift and handle it, it continues contracting, shrinking, shriveling. Now it is the size or a tootsie roll, though a little lighter in color. Now the rubbery texture is familiar. In the hands of a stranger working in the dim lighting of a pirate-themed restaurant, this simple rubber tube was inflated and contorted as if by magic into the shape of a monkey to soothe my two-year-old, who had been spooked of the artificial lightning and the skulls skewered on the stalactites of the entrance. It had worked like a charm.
But I hadn’t seen the “I work off tips” button on his striped vest before calling him over. I knew my wallet to be utterly empty and vainly searched my pockets, hoping perhaps that some of the lint or paperclips there had been miraculously transubstantiated into dollar bills or quarters - after all, this guy gave all appearances of being a magician the way he could turn a balloon into a monkey, or a sword, or a birthday crown for my mother-in-law, who was rummaging through her change purse to cover for me.
Shortly thereafter, in the car, the monkey had broken. Only his head – all non-specified monkeys are male, aren’t they? – remained, attached to an elongated trunk, like a snake monkey. Working from the memory of my half-interested examination of the monkey’s construction in the restaurant and the slight indentations along the trunk, I was able to reform the monkey to its previous glory. In part, the “how did he do that?” question had been answered for me, but a lot of the mystery still remained.
Now the magic was over, and I’m left with an empty rubber tube that I mistook for a potty-time accident and then a wriggling creature. But my relief in remembering the innocuous monkey was magic enough.