In between

Just a few minute post before the grind of the week begins to grind me up. I am a man on a year-long assembly line, standing at my spot, turning screws and tightening bolts accordingly -hoping all the while it is in fact I who am changed. The weekend is over, but the week has not yet started.

My walls and floors are paper thin. Last night I laid awake while my cousin and her boyfriend watched a movie on a laptop across the hall. The neighbors across the narrow ally from my bedroom kept the party rocking until two. This afternoon I read at the kitchen table, my cousin in the room to my left, and my neighbor in the basement to the right, both talking on phones at the same time, both highly audible, while I read of loneliness in characters so deep the room I was in grew by city blocks.

This is all for now, but a manuscript is coming.

A cough can rattle my chest -and it looks like it's going to get worse, for a week or two.
Causing me to think of all those old romantics, torn apart by TB.

Punctuation, or over doing it for emphases, makes me feel poetic at times.
I've been writing lately, and loving it -but wish I was doing more of it.

I am optimistic of my future, a warm blanket when I am alone at night.
Working with children causes me to want them for my own
-An oddity for a single, 20 year old, boy.
Waiting for my future wife
Like a long distant phone call
In this too, I am optimistic, again, an oddity.

A week ago I felt the snap of Beat Poetry's jazz percussion.
This week I feel tired -and in love-
I value my friends all the greater.

Dave Cope introduced me to Gertrude Stein.
I have never before seen someone write without pain.

At the end of this early October day

Tonight I am tired, and putting off homework to write instead. A near tie, it lags just behind talking with my close friends and dearly loved ones as the foremost action I can take in order to screw my head on strait.
Tonight I am tired, and already logged well over my due 20 hours at the church, and am beginning to fall behind in my school work -tomorrow I shall leave my internship with the Children's ministry early, and play a game of catch up with the classes I am doing poorly in.
Just last year I learned the pleasure of being a good student for the first time. To see my grades hurt now is salt in the eyes and teeth gritted tight.
Tonight we had our first Discovery Village Family Experience (DVFX) of the year. I had a speaking role this time round, and felt the thrills that only theater can afford. Oh, how I miss the medium of acting.
My food will go bad before I can eat it, and somehow this fills me with melancholy. Simultaneously, my battered victim of a wallet only affords the food within my kitchen. Tonight, my stomach is forced to do with cold refried beans; the ones from the can. Somehow this feels a fitting retribution for those suffering from hunger in other worlds.
Nate, the 25 year old who lives in the basement's apartment, is going through a break-up. His typically sunny disposition is soiled and gray. He talks loudly and can be heard through the floorboards at night. He's been drinking too much lately. I realize this is the result of finding your identity in your relationships. It causes me to wonder how I unwittingly seek an empty fulfillment in my own ways. A few obvious answers come to mind.
I am writing a piece of work for my creative writing class. It is a collection of short-short stories, "micro fiction" is the term, I've been told. I am extremely proud of my work. In all my years of reading good and great literature, I feel an extreme sense of accomplishment to think that something, anything, I could ever produce on my own would ever be considered half-way decent by my own standards. Again, I am proud.
But I feel as though I cannot share it with my family, but more so with my father, whom I honor above every other human, and who loves a good book like warm blanket.
What I have written...
It's dirty. And crass. And dark, and at parts disturbing. But it is also autobiographical, and so accurate to my thoughts and feelings, and revealing. Like taking off your clothes in front of a crowd of people who know you and showing them your body as much different than they thought it'd be -with scars and stains from nights they never knew you'd lived.

In all this, I am happy. Life is being lived in a manner I do not think I have grasped it thightly before. I wring it -and it is mine.

"Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes"

I've been listening to that song lately; the one by Paul Simon. "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes." It's carefree and ethnic in the way he does in "Goodbye Rosie,"
and can never fail to serve as a pick-me-up.
"Diamonds" is about a rich girl and a poor boy and how they "end up sleeping in a doorway." Eventually the boy learns to walk with diamonds on the souls of his shoes too, thus "curing these walking blues."
I like to think the song is about learning to live in a state of contentment with the world -and love being the vehicle to help you arrive at that mindset.
And the other day, as I was running into CC, and the skies were gray and it was cold and of the first of the true days of fall, I saw there, on the steps, just in front of the great sets of double doors, a girl curled up and sleeping on the lap of her boy. He was awake and staring out and stroking her hair.
I've seen them a couple of times before, but never without the other. The boy's face is impassive, and looks for all the world like a slightly Asian version of John Lennon behind his small round glasses. The girls face is round, beautiful, and innocent. I have never heard either of them speak.
Curled up in that doorway, they felt in love -both in the way of the very young and the very old, simultaneously.
Sometimes I'm tempted to listen to those who say we can cure this disease that ails man with love alone.
But then I remember that very few people have the capacity to hate with the intensity that former lovers and family members possess. Look at the headlines. Only in extreme circumstances does a brutally murdered victim not know their attacker. Ex boyfriends and husbands. Spouses. Siblings. Step children.
But I'd still like to believe in something as optimistic as love, or the idea of finding peace in the company of another. The fact that we are indeed capable of saving ourselves with our goodness.

But what is "good?" Can you define it by a universal standard?
What happened to the idea of morality? Ethics? These are honest questions.

The other day I actually got in an argument over the sanctity of human life. It was in philosophy class, of all places. It was easily the most worked up I've been in a while; and it truly felt good inside to have a belief actually worth fighting for.
Life is not cheap. The mind body and soul of another human being is no trivial matter. Is it so hard to reach within ourselves and find decency and respect for our fellow man? This is a question apart from my religion.
Relativism cannot give an answer. It cannot cure what ails us. It is watching our house on fire from the front lawn as our children and spouse burn inside with all of our possessions. It is a young man's luxury to hold it in contempt as I do.
But that alone does nothing to heal.
Stitch up our split skin. Our puncture wounds. Our hammered faces.


What can you do?

The sticky truth seeps out between the cracks of my stony surface; a syrup that leaks from some unknown internal break. Its drops accumulate and drip over time, leaving a darkly dotted trail of where I've been, and if read correctly, one may accurately estimate where I'm going. I'm worried about staying in one place for too long -about parking my body in one place until the drops gather to form a puddle, staining the concrete for months afterward. I leave oil stains on carpets and bottoms of chairs all across Michigan.
To combat this, or rather to out run it, I stay on the move. Driving is my favorite method. You can measure the time I've spent in transit by the stack of books on tape I've borrowed from the library and finished. Laying them in a row from beginning to end, I cannot seem to remember all of their titles, but I am certain these are among them: Dress Your Family in Denim and Corduroy, Treasure Island, Red Dragon, Atonement, About a Boy, Cannery Row, The Lovely Bones. I drive to fill the hours of the day, audible books that I can not access in any other way have become by friend.
All this to say that I have become dreadfully lonely. I feel so isolated. Bloated with stupidity, quick anger, and a cumbersome social awkwardness. I dislike the route my existence has taken- days filled with me trying to fill my hunger for food, entertainment, and seeking company. But the hunger for company cannot be satisfied. I string together a series of acquaintances that remain at a distance -adequately removed from my thoughts and at times, silent desperation.



I hate this.

Only a few more days until

The other day I accidentally deleted a post I had spent the better part of an hour on, just as I was putting on the finishing touches. It was all about my extended family and our shared idiosyncrasies -our eccentricities.
I write this in Denver Colorado while I stay with my Aunt Julie, the far flung colonist of the Manion family. About five years ago she married a good friend of hers. His name is Eric, and on occasion he bears an uncanny resemblance to a government teacher I had in highschool, with the exception of some glaring differences. This is something only a Northpointe Alumni would appreciate.
Kids: imagine a laid-back Mr. Anderson, twenty years younger. Now imagine he's a staunch democrat with a dark tan and an affinity for both sailing and a good bottle of wine. Now understand how hilarious I find the irony in their resemblance.
Colorado has kept me busy, despite the dry heat I find alienating being from muggy old Michigan. I truly am no longer in the Midwest. The people here are significantly more laid back -even friendly. Everybody seems to lead an active life-style. Everybody has a dog. Denver chicks are hot.
But I find myself less apt to think, write and read in this environment. I miss the afternoons of reading that Glen Arbor, and the mornings of poetry in Chicago. Instead my days are filled with trips to Red Rocks, rafting, and mountain biking. I have been traveling for a while now, and have been enjoying myself immensely for the most part.
But I am eager to return to my reading and writing, and my friends whom I have not seen in what seems like ages.
But I also find myself eagerly awaiting the shifts in lifestyle I see as completely voluntary -just another path through the woods that will lead to the road. This all comes with the gradual search for your own identity that in turn comes with moving out and growing up. I am eager to grow. The movement is now.

A few days ago, I left the briefest of posts on my blog for the briefest of hours. It simply contained the lines from a movie I saw a few days ago; words that had stuck in my mind as fodder for thought.
"What do you want out of life, my son?"
"Sorry?"
"What do you want? A shot at the title...or a seat by the band?"
Is the title ours to shoot for, to stand the chance of gaining or losing more than we can possibly imagine? Or are we removed from the ring, cheering or helping those others claim what is theirs? I submit that for now, the only answer I have is the response the character in the movie gave.
"That's a very expansive question."

Spiders in the Sky

It is the fourth of July. The Declaration of Independence, the groundbreaking document that I have never read in entirety, is two hundred, thirty two years old. The good folks at the cable television head-quarters have decided to celebrate by broadcasting some professional wrestling “Smack-down.” I imagine some beefy, steroid laden thug growling “Happy birthday Uncle Sam –get ready for a spanking” before launching himself off the ring’s corner post.

“Choke hold! Get him in a choke hold!” God bless America.

I am in down-town Chicago. My father acquired a condominium from a friend of a friend for his study break and we have joined in the good fortune for the weekend.

We are on the top and seventh floor, and I write this while sitting on the balcony with my sister’s boyfriend. Though our lodgings are for all purposes affluent, we overlook a section of tenements. Two blocks to the north we can see two green grass vacant lots –all that remains of the infamous Cabrini Green projects, where for years gangs ruled and the police themselves were afraid to go. For the present, many blocked row houses are below, to the east, and well lit. Seven stories and one street removes you one whole world. Fireworks and rockets shoot skyward between the buildings, exploding at our eye level some couple-hundred yards away. M-80’s go off with enough force to trigger car alarms and flinches from my father. Hip Hop and R&B is playing loudly, though we cannot tell from where, giving us a soundtrack to read and write to.

The magnificent mile looms over all of this; so well lit in against the black night behind it that it resembles some form of cardboard cut-out or computer generated image too perfect to be real. On the way home from Navy Pier’s fireworks, we passed several nightclubs, complete with red carpets, ropes, and bouncers. We imagined what enclaves of the social elite were permitted inside, and what forms of bizarre, ritualistic, Hellenistic hedonism they engaged it.

The two worlds, filled with two peoples celebrating the same event in their own fashions, did not escape me. Two nations, on either sides of the same fence. First and third worlds, juxtaposed, both seemingly empty, with hardly an individual to be seen inhabiting either. Where did the sea of people we flowed from the docks with disperse to? The flood of people crashed upon the rocks of the city, falling through its cracks. All that remains of them is their noise and their lights in the night sky. The horizon to the west is filled for miles with the ignition of the fireworks of many towns and villages and suburbs. The mass of humanity, sprawled out in this tide pool, seen from above.

Fireworks always remind me of the collected images my brain has stored of war time. Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome taught me that no kingdom can last forever. How will ours end, and how soon? How long will it be until the explosions in the sky mark something horribly different, and people flee at the sight of them? How long will it be until the lights of Chicago are dimmed, and the forests overtake its sidewalks and rooftops –and we all resemble the ruins of Cabrini Green?

p.s. Four Friends, the coffee shop that is a mainstay and institution of Downtown Grand Rapids is closing on THURSDAY. Sadly I will be in Denver, and cannot be at its side when it breaths its last. Remember me to it –I have loved it so. Order a 007, and think of me fondly as you sip its goodness.