simplex | organism

because I just like saying redux.

and because I spent all day trying to play that song with a bit more... ummm... talent? but I didn't have any more to give, apparently.

It's strange. I'm more down than I've been in a very long time right now, but somehow I ended up writing one of the least down songs I've written.

Also, it's been officially decided that when I have a cold (and thus have a stuffy nose and the voice that comes along with it) I DO NOT sound sexier. I guess that's just Phoebe.

The Boy In Front of You

edit:

A girl told me tonight that I hide behind being a good writer. I won't waste the breath to deny the good writer bit, anyone who knows me knows that my first reaction would be to rebuff any compliment coming my way, but that's not what I'm mentioning this for. The thing that got me thinking was the fact that being a good writer isn't something I do consciously, I simply write the way I write. If I'm a good writer, it's part of who I am, not something added to who I am, so how can I hide behind something that I simply am?

I have, often enough, felt that I hide behind my ability to write or to talk, but I don't think that's it. I hide, don't get me wrong, but I don't hide behind those abilities. I hide behind the lies that I tell; the writing and speaking is just what makes those lies believable.

It's strange; I can't really expect anyone to have any idea about the fact that a while ago I began (and have been rather successful, though not completely so) to stop lying. How would anyone know? What's really hard is the people who have found out, since I started telling them the truth, that I had been lying to them, which has led them to think that I am now doing the same. It's kind of a bitch.

"Knowing what you know now" is an homage to the song "Ooh La La" by the Faces. It's one of the greatest songs I've ever heard.

A reworking of an earlier poem, for my sister. This is just so that I have a record of it.

Also, why am I so obsessed with divorce? It's been years now and I keep thinking about it, writing about it. How can I be so obsessed with something I haven't even come close enough to as to become capable of.

...

Their argument ended abruptly, words, formed hard and cold, paused in mid-flight halfway across the table. Words crashed down, shattering on a glass and plopping in soup unceremoniously, drawing somehow more attention than all the boisterous vulgarities that had led up to this moment. Someone had cheated, this was clear, and someone else had cheated, also clear, which meant that they had both cheated, if our math was correct, but someone had cheated first; this was the rub. And now, as a timid and trembling ceasefire stood between them, waiting to be cut down at the knees, their faces grew serene. Not the serenity of serendipity, nor even the serenity of a deep understanding, just the serenity of companionship, both of them knowing that they were in the presence of someone who had felt the same pangs of humiliation and guilt that they were drenched in. They passed a few minutes in silence, not looking at each other but not looking specifically away. The man asked the waiter to bring his wife more tea; the woman passed the pepper, and so it went for a time. They were civil, courteous and almost kind. There was nothing left of their relationship, at least that we could see from two tables back, but they had made peace with that fact. As they stood to leave, the woman having asked the man if he'd prefer she pay with her card (it having cash back for meals) and the man telling her that he was a few sky miles short of his next business trip getting complimented to him, he took her coat from the back of her chair and placed it on her shoulders. She did not put her arms into the sleeves, but it was not cold out in particular, and he took the flesh of her elbow in his hand as they walked out. There was tenderness, even though it looked like familiarity, the way I kiss my grandmother on the head, not the way you place a hand inside your lover's. They walked away, and in their wake we sat, surveying the wreckage strewn out along their path, the marriage soon to be ended, possessions cut in half, lives separated, but it didn't feel like chaos, and I was thankful for that. I wished I could have caught up with them and told them how much it meant to me, that little reminder of the possibility of civility in war.

My mother just said, 'I used to be a black person, for years and years, but then I switched.'
True, she was talking about coffee, but I couldn't stop laughing.

As they sat, together in the love seat, both so thin that it looked to be a much wider space than I know, having sat there, that it is, his hand searched out her skin. First an elbow, then a shoulder; he ran nails lightly across her scalp, parting the cascading earth tones of her hair, bringing that irresistible hint of a smile she wears so well, but which is so easy to miss, if you aren't looking for it. I was, and I smiled to myself, almost incapable but certainly without any desire to look away from the spectacle of this, the smallest denomination of affection visible to the human eye. His comfort no less when his hand left her arm to reach up and turn a page, but somehow growing every time it returns, as if he drew a bit more life with every new contact.
It was strange, because I was not jealous, as I so often have been in the past. I did not want what he had, in a specific sense, beautiful and lovely and wonderful as she is. I had wanted her before, but that want had given way, years past, to a caring that washes white as snow my cruelest intentions. I did not envy him the happiness that shown in his eyes and in the corners of his mouth. I simply felt a need to go out into the world and find someone with whom I could spend this self-same time, the four of us instead of the three we were then, sitting in the living room, reading, listening, fawning, typing, being happy...
I fear that I have never dated anyone who truly appreciated silence. I have dated girls who have wanted me to be quiet, certainly. I have dated girls who liked to not talk to me for long periods of time, but that is not an appreciation of silence so much as an appreciation of me shutting the hell up. I strongly differentiate between these two. I had, in that moment of reflection, an intense desire for someone with whom I could pass an entire afternoon without words, save (and this, of course, places yet another requirement on the type of person she would be) for the sharing of uniform resource locators and the occasional instant message, asking if the other might not want some sweet iced tea.
Around this pastoral scene, I wrapped a house, fully furnished, all the trappings: art and fingerprints on walls and decorative plates. I planted gardens we would weed; I tuned a piano I would buy for her. I began to build, in reverse order, endstate to starting line, a life that I would have shared with this mystery woman. I bought the vase she'd placed in the hall, put flowers in it for the anniversary of something insignificant. I found a good job, gave myself a raise, arranged to be able to provide for the wife I knew this girl would someday be. I put away my childish things and my playacting like an artist, though I noted how she'd let me keep a room, up by the attic, filled with all my instruments and with my paints and with my crayons. Sometimes on Saturdays, if there was not much else to do, I'd go upstairs and think back to the ways I'd dreamed when I was young, the way I'll dream here in a minute when I finally go to bed.
I built this life, all based upon the few things I discerned about this beautiful faceless girl I'd wanted to see sitting, slipping her hand into mine, upon the couch, across the room from this beautiful couple. I built this life and sat imagining it, trying to record the flights of fancy I could barely keep up with, while never taking my second eye off of their love laid out in minute detail for subtle interpretive scrutiny. So I scrutinize and I dream and I realize that all I want, in the end of it, is all of it and to be happy.
::edit::thenextmorning::
And then, in the night, I dreamt. I dreamt of a strange party, of a plane. I dreamt of a girl I know, who might be that sort of girl but who would never be the least bit interested in me, and of holding her. Of her kissing me and telling me she loved me as I lay in a bed, unable to move, my back destroyed. My greatest fear, a great longing, a strange combination, but she rested so lightly on my chest, curled into me like a hermit crab, retreating into its shell, and I wanted so badly to confess myself to her, all the sins she already knew about, but which I had never spoken aloud. Certainly not to her.

I think I'm writing the history of the person I wish I'd been for the last 25 years, if the person I'd been was bound to do the things I did, but not to see them the same way, and not to be so hard-headed about it all.

....

some time ago i was involved with a gorgeous blond, one of the few blonds i've really been attracted to, in one of those borderless relationships that are defined by their lack of any real definition. much time spent together, long discussions, great sex (in my mind, which quite probably was only so-so when viewed from the other direction), but for all the content, there was no context.

then one day i kissed her and thought "i recognize this kiss..." but I couldn't exactly place it. the reason, of course, is that i was tasting something on the receiving end that i'd only ever experienced giving, and nothing tastes the same inside-out, not a peanut butter sandwich and certainly not a kiss. it was a kiss given grudgingly, everything done to the precisely measured minimum constitution of a kiss, lips touched but not pressed to lips, tightly held top to bottom with the slight frown of pursed lips and regret.

when i'd extracted myself, as i walked down the stairs from her overhanging porch, my mind was informing me of the simple fact that she'd found someone else, and i, in turn, was trying to convince my mind not to worry itself with figuring out whom it might be. i spent a long time, after that, just not talking to her, until i finally got around to telling her that i knew she'd found someone new. she, predictably if not admirably, told me of how she hadn't meant for it to happen, how she'd wanted to tell me, but it was hard, and how she was appreciative of what we'd had, but that it was over. and it was. and that was alright.

sure, i would have liked to have been informed a bit earlier on, but that was mostly because, had i been informed, i could have avoided the humiliation of that kiss, and the recognition, not only of my sudden unattractiveness, but also of the feeling of sudden unattractiveness that i'd caused in others over the years. yes, i did actually think about those other girls, and i did feel real remorse. i feel it often, it just doesn't usually lead to any better action on my part.

over the following weeks, after her repeated inference of a strong desire to remain friends, we stopped speaking to each other. this was, she told me, largely due to being very busy with school, and we both agreed that having a new boyfriend that she was so happy with would also make it harder to have time for me. this was also fine. as i certainly wasn't all that busy, i told her that, whenever she might have a desire to talk to me, she was more than welcome to call. she took advantage of that offer a couple of times, but at some point even those rare calls stopped, and i had come to a point where i didn't think about it.

from time to time i would remember something we'd done, a conversation, a caress, and i would catch a glimpse, somewhere in the back of my mind, of her hair falling across her face in the morning sun. it always woke me up, the sunlight shooting through all the dust hung in the air between the bed and the window, making for thousands of tiny fairies slowly falling from the sky, some to land, lucky if they did, on the down of her cheek. but, intense as the remembrances may have been, they were not frequent, and they did not cause me pain when they came.

some months later, sitting on my couch prowling through my phone's contact list looking for someone i hadn't spoken to for a while in order to bug them about why they hadn't spoken to me in a while, i ran across the name of an old friend, someone whom i'd seen on a more than weekly basis for almost a year, and then, due to scheduling conflicts and personal obligations, i'd lost almost complete touch with. no fault involved, really, just timing. i began a text message to him, implying great fault on his part and utterly abject ennui on mine, as a result of this long lapse in our friendship. a moment before sending the message, however, i suddenly saw, quite clearly though without any specific evidence, that he was the man that my beautiful blond had found.

i very honestly cannot say how i knew this, i have nothing to support the absolute certainty i felt, but this is often the case in my life: i will know something, quite of a sudden, and have no reason for the knowledge. more than a few girls have been rather annoyed at my ability to know when something was wrong, when they're done something untoward or even when they just wanted to. some lied and told me that there was nothing going on, others simply confirmed what i'd come to know. a very few had tried to prove me wrong, pointing to details of what i told them, but the bottom line was that i'd known the generality of what was going on, and whether or not i had the exact scheduling of instances and locations right was of little consequence.

the odd thing, in that moment, was that i chose to send the text. i chose to send it, and i did not plan to bring it up with him, or even, as was more my style, to lead the conversation in a direction meant to trip him up as he attempted to dance about the point. i just wanted to know what was going on with him. i missed him. i missed him as i missed her; i enjoyed their company.

it makes me sad, how often we lose people because we are afraid to tell them something. we ought to tell them, but we don't tell them, time passes and if we ever get to the point of telling them, we immediately cut them off, trying desperately to avoid the shame we feel afterwards. what confuses me is that we never stop doing things we will end up being ashamed to speak of. that step seems to be a bit beyond our comprehension. we never choose not to have the affair, no matter how horrible the guilt might be later. true, many people are faced with the opportunity for such things, affairs, a theft of personal property, corporate money, dealing someone by whom we feel wronged a blow, and true, many of those people choose not to commit. it does not, however, strike me that these acts are avoided due to fear of the guilt they will cause, but instead avoided due to the potential risk for other losses: our beloved, our beloved comfort, our beloved possessions, our beloved freedom, our beloved self-righteousness. how many times have i chosen not to do something only so that i might lord it over someone else who had not made such a choice?

and so i sit here, thinking about them, missing them, wishing i could make them not feel that guilt. maybe he'll call and we'll talk. maybe he'll tell me he's been seeing her, and tell me they're very happy, and maybe i'll be honest and tell him i was hurt but that i miss him more than i'm hurt, that i'd rather have them as my friends than to try and avoid the painful fact that she chose him over me. i know she chose him over me. it already hurts, and it's nothing but selfishness, not kindness, that has them seeking to keep from coming out and telling me this. there are a large number of men on this earth who have been chosen over me, by a list of girls far too long to dwell upon. and these choices have been made, some permanently, some more temporary; the girl whom i love more than i have ever loved another is married, most certainly not to me, and i haven't spoken to her in years. but not speaking to them doesn't make it any better.

As she sank into the seat across from me, her face slowly settled down between her shoulders, gliding side to side as she hunched forward, toward me, into me. She began to talk, her voice flowing smoothly back out over the ice in her scotch, three glances back and forth across the table for every once raised up to me. Nervous movements of her hands, flittings in and around her glass, to her hair, tracing the table, became a cigarette became a second scotch became a hand on my hand, in my hand.

She spoke, more often than not, into her glass, the fullness of her voice growing even more rounded. And when she lifted herself out of her drink, every time, her lips pursed together as if holding in some great flood, only to fizzle out in a long exhalation through a nose that never flared, never quivered, never drew any undue attention away from her lips and from her eyes. And oh, those eyes, two yawning earthen pits drilled deep into her head, beginning with the brown just below the grass and ending in a black only to be found on Great Expeditions. I always found, looking back, that I remembered the way that her eyelids moved, lazily, like they weren't particularly worried about anything, far more than I remembered her words, poetic as they seemed to me in the moment.

Across the table, and I could still feel the skin wrapped to her spine, the softness of her skin tight over the bone, my fingers running up one side and down the other. I could see, out the corner of my mind's eye, her skirt twisting clock-, counter-, clock- around her thighs, with the most bewitching upswing at the apogee of each turn. Across the table, and I knew she was thinking about her drink, about her day, about anything but my hand on her back, helping her into the car on the way here. But what could be done? Nothing to be done, nothing to do, nothing to change the situation or make myself more relevant.

And that was the sad truth of it all, that what I lacked was not appeal, was not that je ne sais quoi that draws a woman to a man. I lacked relevance. I was not appropriately timed, positioned or connected. I simply did not matter in any of the ways that now concerned her in her search for suitable companionship. I had thought, mistakenly, that she was looking for a suitable companion, but her words made plain the impossibility of a suitable companion, in a total sense. All that she could or would hope for lay in the companionship, itself.

Her hair fell, as it so often did, across her eyes, across her lips, against the curve of her glass. Her fingers, fore- and middle, joined together as if one, pulled back at the hair, caressing a line up her cheekbone and behind her ear. Up and over, all the way round, and then back down her jaw, her fingers tracing lines everywhere that, connected, constituted a line drawing I can still see sketched on the red behind my eyelids if I concentrate. I loved her in that moment, her eyes closed just before opening, like light is about to be spread out over the world, rolling over field by field and spilling into the valleys.

That light will come. The world will burst into flame, the trees will burn their brightest greens, and her eyes will shine with two white squares reflected on the surface. Lips will break out across those bright, white boxes in a smile that will warm a cold nose and two cold ears and the only tragedy is that the cold nose and two cold ears will not be mine. So I carry chap stick in my pocket, and mittens and a scarf and a woolen toboggan, and I wear a warm coat when I go out. And someday I will find someone whose smile will warm my own. I only wish that I already had.

To the untrained eye, the varied multitude of objects and motions that populate our world and bring us so much visual pleasure may seem, in many cases, to be happy coincidences or, at best, to be the result of a sort of freeform creativity possessed by the gifted among us. To a more trained eye, especially when training denotes Art Education in institutes of higher learning, these coincidences are broken down into their many subordinate parts, separated out and categorized by the particular aesthetics employed, purposefully or subconsciously, by these accidental designers. A beautifully handwritten note on a Post-it, skewed counterclockwise on the door, just by the frame becomes an amalgam of calligraphic art, composition, the emphasis of the yellow and the juxtaposition of something worthwhile written on something so disposable.

This sort of analysis leads directly to so many people with natural senses of what might be mistakenly called style spending their time trying to create things with obviously intentional beauty. While there is nothing wrong with understanding the techniques of analysis, and with wanting to be in control of the work we produce, it is important not to stifle our spontaneous creative urges. Edit to your hearts' content, but when the mood strikes you to draw a foot, whether or not you have some reason to be doing it, draw a foot. Draw a retro-futuristic couch. Doodle on your interoffice correspondence and write your mother a letter by hand. Sign your name ridiculously largely and laugh about it out loud.

In the interest of fostering more design in this world, find products that you create repeatedly in the world around you and take the time to make them pretty. And don't avoid the word pretty. It may not seem very sophisticated, the purpose of design is not, as we so often fall into thinking, to properly use the elements of design. Such a recursive concept does not lead to the furtherance of design, but instead serves to hole it up inside a bunker made of the design ideals of the day. Design is the use of those elements to most effectively do whatever it is you were going to do anyway. Design is a more conscientious method for accomplishing any goal you have set out for yourself, and creating something that is aesthetically pleasing, without the need for stimulating intellectual analysis, is an entirely worthwhile goal.

I'm sure that many people would argue that such an "empty" pursuit should not be given the same weight as more socially significant goals, such as political satire or education. I would agree that, when it comes to the allocation of money for these projects, more resources ought to be given to those that have more than beauty as their purpose. I would agree, however, based on the idea that it costs less, in most situations, to create something that is pretty. Ideas with more complex messages require more planning, and are harder to execute in most cases. So many of us have a natural inclination to create beauty out of the chaos around us, but so few have a similar inclination to depth. That Post-it note is a thing of beauty, but the irony of a typeface that reminds us of simpler times used on faux parchment spelling out, in the layout of a town edict, the virtues of racism and sexism takes a great deal of work. That work is well worth it, but the beauty of that note is no less so.

after all of the arguing ends
and there's nothing left but the waiting until it is over
a kind of peace creeps over everything
with all the pieces knowing where they'll fit
and loving kindness once again
becomes the modus operandi
there's no more reason to be mean
or to be callous
to separate themselves from one another
and so they stand
smoking their cigarettes on the porch
next to each other with his hand
on her waist
surveying the wreckage strewn out along their path to here


I wonder if, in these last few days, the sex will be better... somehow, I think it will be.