I Don't Think It's the Caffeine

"Here's the alcohol and drug pressure my mother warned me about..."

When the man walked up to the coffee shop counter, clutching his multi-colored racing bicycle tire, I couldn't imagine the fact that his back hair crept out of his sleeveless shirt, or his curly dark hair from under the straw fedora style hat, but just that somewhere, a racing bike was missing a multi-colored tire.

This was enough to remind me that I was alive, and that, truthfully, I didn't know much of anything. And not in the self defeating sense of a 12 year old kid who hangs out at Hot Topic (or wherever the current day equivalent is) just, that mystery remains in the universe.

Another walks up, clutching her copy of Hunger Games, and points out the biscotti she wants with the book's spine. She pulls her wallet from her back pocket, and I am still trying to decide if she's cute or not.
And this feels like the garbage one has to write in order to unearth the good material.
I forgot how hard it can be.

I think I wanted her to pick me out of the pastry case, instead.
Her being cute wasn't really important,
at least, not as much as my need
to feel wanted-- carnally
skin taught with goosebumps
fingers like spider webs spreading
on my back.

I remember a comment from my friend's wedding reception,
"You're engaged, not dead," as we both admired
the long green and yellow dresses
and the bodies that moved them.

Getting Started

"It's a dangerous business... going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet there's no knowing where you might be swept off to."

It occurred to me that I need more writing practice; so, it's time to just do it.

I guess it's only fitting that it's around the time school is starting back up. One doesn't keep a schedule for 20 years and, all of a sudden, break into a new one. Unless you have amnesia, perhaps.


An addiction counselor has noted that some marijuana addictions in younger humans are less about the chemical deficiencies that one needs to overcome, and more about healthy behaviors that need to be taught to overwrite unhealthy ones. It occurs to me that this might fight my relationship to mindless videogaming. Sometimes it is a form of meditation, and others it just seems to be about killing time in a comfortable place-- like going back to a favorite part in a favorite book and reading it over and over. You know you're not going anywhere, but that place/feeling/time is somewhere you just want to stay.

When Madolyn told Billy in The Departed that she just wanted to keep her life, "on an even keel" and he responded "So, one of your parent's was an alcoholic," I thought this quip was totally out of left field and a case of a script writer playing god, but I've come to realize that it isn't. This aforementioned behavior is one that is present in those people who have to battle with addiction, or who have had to live with someone in this state.

It seems a bit too poetic that my functional alcoholic parental figure really likes sailing.