Blog

Maybe it’s better like this. I can still write here and not know if you will get it. My frequency will inevitably get less and less, and eventually this will become a museum with little models, and placards and stuffed extinct animal specimen.
I hope you are doing well. I hope things are settling for you. I hope that you are happy, or at least on your way there.
For me, things still hurt from time to time. The days are better. I can do those with ease. The nights are getting easier too. Even the ones when I don’t gorge myself with friends and phone calls.
I talked to Chad tonight and his life is all going to shit. He and Annie have split up, his mother is likely going to jail, and his father is trying to take all the money and the businesses from them all.
In light of that, I realize that it is time for me to stop this mourning. My problems seem so little compared to that right now, not to mention what is going on in Africa and the Middle East, but a friend’s woes always bring it home a little better.
As hard as it is, and as weird as it sounds, I feel freer now. I am not strapped a solitary version of a happy life that could not exist without you. I think that one could’ve been happy with you. Extraordinarily so. I thought for too long it was the only way. I imagine you have to feel free too now. I imagine my desire, my need, for that could’ve been overwhelming at times.
And so the days go on and get easier, my life seems to be changing at a pace that I thought would be impossible by this age. It wears me out but excites me. I have seen you two times in last week, just in passing. It wasn’t easy, but not as hard as it once would’ve been. You are still beautiful. You will always be here with me, inside me, no matter where the nearing crossroads will lead me. The days are getting easier, and I guess the nights are somewhat easier too.
And if you do ever read this anymore… if you haven’t seen “All the Real Girls” check it out. I am not sure what I think, but it did seem to speak some truth to me.

The Arcade Fire concert was life-changing, despite the crappy venue, one of the highest energy shows ever. Only could have been better if you were there. If you ever get the chance to see them, you must.

And all of the pretty things are here, and you are too. Toto. And you were there too, and you and you and you. And there’s a kid in there, and he’s big, and dumb and kind of scared of what may come after this. I can imagine my little legs tangling with yours, but he’s much taller and handsomer and deserves the permanent spot in your life, your house, your arms. I’ve got my angels too. They love me darling. I want my heart entangled with yours but time and circumstance forbids it now. Once as it was, and always as it should be. I no longer want to drive my car headlong into the side of his now illegally parked car. I accept it as a symptom of my day-to-day life. It all hurts, but less and less. I want your fanny full stop across my face, but I realize that it doesn’t happen that way ever again. Age brings on more nuanced approaches to sexual conduct of that kind.
Robert’s love has left him in much the same way that you have left me. She needs more space. She will dangle him around for awhile and take joy in his dangling. He will come out better for it.
I saw Jonathan the other night. He asked ME about YOU. I told him to come over and play violin.
Music can save us all. Tomorrow night we will keep the car running. Tonight it was rhapsodic fuel of love that made all differences indifferent. I wish you could have been there, but that would have never happened. Buy the Sunset Rubdown album. Play at top volume and ask Nate if he understands. Ask yourself. If only you do, then come back to me. If he does too, marry him and know you have my good graces. But do not lie. I have not lied to you in longer than you, despite what you may have imagined.

The afternoon of his death, his wallet contained a single item, a photograph of his first wife, Anne.

Come back to me again? Maybe once? Maybe one day? Maybe you will come to find me?
Was playing: Left Only With Love by Smog

Tonight I am flying high above you in the stratosphere, staring down at your beautiful slumbering body, trying to know what it is that you dream about. Is it me? It can’t be him, he lies there beside you and we all know that the things that you have are not what you dream about. Is it about that house with a screen door and kids in the yard?
This process is so difficult. I am trying to kill the you inside of me. I am trying to find a way into selective amnesia. To take back all of the bad memories, realizing that certain good ones will have to be sacrificed in the process.
If you were to fly above me tonight, you would realize that the dreams firing between my synapses are of you. Or a vision of you. You the idol that I have created, partially from reality, partially from hope and desire. It is of the house with the screen door and a dusty yard and grass slightly overgrown, and laughter, and love, and sex beyond belief.
In my awaken state I am a killer. I slay the memories at every turn. It is during my sleep that I cannot maintain the slaughter. It is then that you come to me. While I am flying so high above. You meet me in the air. I have nightmares, and pleasant dreams, and the ones of a dirty nature, and the ones of a future forbidden now, possibly never possible to begin with.
I may try to accept you as muse, thus you can stop really existing, because muses don’t really exist. They energize and inspire, but they do not really exist. I am sure that remaining on the pedestal that I put you upon was as hard as it was for me to try to keep you there. No one should marry their muse, even if they really existed, so maybe we are both better off now.
But I know you did exist, and do, somewhere out there in this world tonight. I held you once. You loved me back. We ran our hands over and through each other’s bodies. We ran our thoughts through each other’s mind. We escaped reality for a while, and that is where the danger lived. What we had is not a possibility and it never was. Such a dream cannot exist.
So I fly tonight, sleeping, trying to discern what I have lost, and what was, and what will become of this life now that things will never be the same, as if they ever were.

Oh, us boys who fall in love with dreams.
Out tonight with Scott and talk of his failing marriage. Three years he waited for Morgan to come back to him. Sixteen ruined possibilities all ending with the same thing: “I am still in love with someone else.” An affair with a business partner and 8 months of therapy and he still wants to lover her, wants her to love him. I have no clue what goes on inside her head. He and I go out and we are like Frank and Dean. Not so attractive, but irresistible, but none of it matters. Morgan is in New Orleans likely with another man, you are irrefutably just down the street with another living with you. We still pine like little idiot boys.
I had a dream that existed long before you. A house in the country, with a screen door. A woman and children in the yard that I spied through that screen door. Music feeling the house. A backbeat 50’s rhythm for kids whose peers would come to treasure them above all come high school years. An eccentric life that is thoroughly normal as well. A daughter, perhaps, who sings perfect harmony.
I had a dream that existed long before you, that you waltzed in upon and demanded the leading role in . I gave it to you. You took it. We both fucked it up. I am not sure what your dream was. I am not sure that you want to sing death ballads to you children. But my dream and you became inseparable in me.
These last few weeks I have been trying to give up on the dream. To create a new dream perhaps since the one I held so long seems so impossible now. I think New York City. I think a hipster life in Texas. I think what it would be like to live in the London that wanted to eat you.
I cannot think of southern countryside. I cannot think simple anymore.
This afternoon I saw “my niece” walking in to see her aunt attached to her mother’s bosom. Fifty yards later on my run I saw “his” car and realized that Clary and he are no longer strangers. I wanted to run across the street to see Gates, but she was too close to you, to your house, and there is one place I cannot allow myself to go in this world. Fifty yards further down the street I would have that simplicity of seeing a child, that comfort, but not there on those grounds.
It was my dream flying away from me. It was a testament to my foolishness. More than drunk, I have always been foolish. Oh, pity us boys who believe in such silly childish dreams.

I buried my heart in a hole in the ground
and waited for you to come dig it up.
I watered it at first with water,
then with whiskey and beer,
and all that came of it was weeds –
weeds with pretty yellow flowers
that had me asking what weeds really were,
but textbook weeds still in yet.
It impatiently beat at first,
reaching out to God to bring the proper gardener.
Then the beating slowed only with sporadic flourishes.
That heart swallowed a diamond and waited.
It swallowed such sorrow and waited.
It swallowed rock and roll and waited.
It swallowed a slow-played banjo,
and your voice, and a sad song,
and your beautiful body in memory,
and it waited.
The spasms subsided.
The heart got slow and dirty.
Life seemed impossible, and at an impasse.
Then I dug my heart up and placed it back in my chest
and months later I passed the concrete-covered corner
where I once buried my heart, and you carved our initials,
and valiantly pushing through a crack wise a brambly vine
from which later sprang a blood-red rose.