Greg M. Schumaker

First Person

2009-08-19T16:47:00.002-04:00

Last night I was lying in bed, trying to sleep after reading a hefty portion of the terrifying "The Family" by Jeff Sharlett when I realized that I've been working on my novel all wrong.

All wrong! The third person has got to go. It's going to be first person now. In the first person it seems to be falling into place. In my brain anyway. Now to write!

Also, I'm just waiting for GVSU to print my damn official transcript so I can send DePaul my completed application. Fingers crossed.

A New Beginning

2009-08-16T23:48:00.002-04:00

This blog has sat around for most of my college career with little updates. That's because I was too busy reading, writing pages upon pages of literary criticism, writing my column for the school paper, writing creative stuff, reading stuff not assigned to me by professors, working full time at a grocery store and then (currently) a bookstore, drinking, dating numerous questionable men, self-publishing some books, and seeing midnight shows of new movies and eating out too often with my friends. Also, there was and still is the ever handy, beautiful and timeless Facebook, the brilliant tool that has kept me in contact with everyone I give a shit about.

Today this blog dry spell is remedied. With my Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature from Grand Valley State University tucked under my shoulder, my Twitter updates (essential) to your right beneath a link to a Bloggerized version of my resume (more essential), and a newfound resolution to WRITE while I wade through the dark waters of post grad life and search for a grad school and/or real job, I have decided on Blogger--despite some reservations at first--to host my "official" website. This is mainly because it's free and I'm used to it. Also, I haven't done much, in my own eyes, to make The Official Greg M. Schumaker website. I'd rather pay someone to do that when I'm rich and famous. It's less narcissistic-seeming that way.

I'm also trying to cook more. That doesn't mean that I'll ever pull a "Julie & Julia" and try to master the art of French cooking. Not until I'm 28 and desperate for a real life, anyway. You should know, however, that I made chicken parmesan last night and Shavon's not dead from food poisoning yet. Neither am I. And I even ate the leftovers for lunch at work today. I'm becoming frugal. As if the free website wasn't evidence enough of that.

That's all. Watch out for less rambling posts and some stuff I've spent longer than ten minutes on. I'll go for fifteen to twenty minutes tops. Give you some real quality writing to sink your sweet tooth into.

Resume (August 2009)

2009-08-16T23:37:00.002-04:00

Greg M. Schumaker

456 North Center Dr. Apt. 1B
Grand Rapids MI, 49544
(616) 308-8535
gregmschumaker@gmail.com

Objective
A reporter/blogger position with a progressive publication.

Bachelor of Arts in English, 3.45 GPA
Grand Valley State University (2009)
1 Campus Dr., Allendale MI, 49401
• Minor in Writing.
• Awarded 1st place prize in 2007 Oldenburg Writing Contest for poetry, nominated for 2008
AWP Intro Journal Awards national submission for poetry.
• Published works multiple times in school paper’s literary edition and online student journal, Fishladder.

Experience
Bookseller (January 2008—Present)
Schuler Books & Music, 3165 Alpine Ave. Suite C, Walker MI, 49544
Oversee timely lay downs and returns of periodicals and books.

Editorial Columnist (January 2008—April 2009)
The Grand Valley Lanthorn, 1 Campus Dr., Allendale MI, 49401
Well-researched, humorous and enthusiastic weekly opinion piece.

Supervisor (April 2002—January 2008)
Save-A-Lot Food Stores, 6718 South Division, Cutlerville MI, 49548
Managerial responsibilities helping to run daily store operations.

Intern (Fall 2007)
RDR Books, Muskegon MI
Helped establish groundwork for a published manuscript.

Extracurricular Work
Independently wrote, designed, and published three manuscripts through online print-on-demand retailers, most recently Reasons for the Fall in July 2008. Also, received an Award of Excellence for poetry from The Detroit Free Press in May 2005.

References
• Dr. Kathleen Blumreich, Professor of English—(616) 331-3074
• Dr. David Ihrman, Professor of English—(616) 331-3388
• Alicia Alabbas, former Editor-in-Chief, The Lanthorn— (260) 418-9710
• Trevor Rowe, Schuler Books & Music Manager—(616) 647-0999

The Return of Creativity

2008-03-26T11:00:00.002-04:00

Sunny morning forty-four degrees,
"Ray of Light" on the radio at
eighty-seven in a fifty-five.

I think we're all going to live,
if only for a few more days.
If only for a few more seconds.

There's caffeine and Paxil,
car exhaust and Neutrogena
surging through my veins,

stumbling through my heart,
making my toes wiggle in my socks,
my fingers tingle, sweat as they steer.

Hello Lover

2007-10-10T23:55:00.000-04:00

I lost interest in "Such is Life." That old blog. So here it is with some new paint, a new title, and a new mission.

I'm told that writers should write everyday. Being a writer, I am alarmed by this. See, I do usually write everyday. Required papers, notes, e-mails, texts, lists of things to buy, bills to pay, and price signs for the store. At the end, I find little time and creative drive to sit down and pump out a novel.

But I need to keep perfecting my craft. So "Story-a-Day" will be that. Some stories might be good. Some might be shit. Others may be long. Others may be short. It's like dating, only safe. There's no dark alleys and shifty eyes here, people. Only some good fiction, non-fiction, random words strung together, or poetry. You know, that "emotion recollected in tranquility" that William Wordsworth was talking about. Good old-fashioned, down home poetray. And only mama knows what's going into the batter.

So forget what you've read in the papers. And forget that tagline up there. This site's got no affiliation with Hemingway, other than supreme worship of him. Because he's dead, and here we worship that. Like Michael Jackson's thriller video, without the disclaimer.

The stories start tomorrow. Be here.

Relics or Remains

2007-05-08T14:43:00.000-04:00

Will We Become Relics or Remains?

A stupa is a large hemispherical

solid mound that may have

originally contained the relics

of the Buddha

according to my Art teacher.

Imagine: you die and get

a mound, a hemispherical

pile of earth.

The Pharaohs got pyramids,

even Grant got a tomb,

but Buddha got a hill—

soil, roots, worms and all.

Like we all get for our remains,

for our common decaying bodies

who’ve never had a peasant leave

a bowl of pears on their doorstep for us.

We worship what’s left of saints,

of Buddhas, and of nature,

but hasn’t anyone earned a relic or two?

Maybe a divine pinky toe, a saintly mole,

or the wisest of our wisdom teeth,

who has held on through Snickers

and Coke, wondering if she’ll be valued

when her gums unfurl like a skirt,

or when she is cut out in tenth grade

and set in a steel bowl of water,

drowned and disposed,

the first of our bones to be buried,

to die and fossilize and wait,

not for the rest of us,

but for the answer to her question

when she’s one day dug up

dusted off by horse hairs

and interpreted by wide eyes,

and finally labeled

a relic or a remain.

Delorise

2007-02-20T00:50:00.000-05:00

My first attempt at a prose poem.

Delorise

I only knew her in her work uniform, a red sweater with a white turtleneck protruding around her collar, her black hair short and shiny on her skull that it looked as if she had meticulously painted it on every morning like some primitive warrior painting his face for the fight to come.

I merely knew her buck teeth, her smile, her husband occasionally stopping in the store to pick up a few things and say hello to his lovely wife—his sassy, witty, queen of a wife who spoke in cackling shouts and whispered in buzzing hums.

I only knew her commentary on the state of the customers, life, how crazy they all were, how people had lost their goddamned minds.

Mmmhmmmmmmmmm, she would groan in conclusion as she checked her fingernails, the night’s schedule, the time.

I only knew that I knew she was a woman who spoke what she knew, who spoke the truth without knowing, who was wise without knowing.

I understood that she understood the ways in which the world works.

When I received word that her mother died back home in some state south of here where it’s warm all year and people have accents, and that she’d be back to work in a week or two, I imagined the hug I would give her, the small consolation I could offer in place of the advice I would never have, to show her my fellow employees mattered to me, that her buying me a punching Santa Claus pen from the dollar store was worth something to me in the long run, that it still stands in my metal cup on my desk, ready to punch any offensive pens or pencils that may cross its path.

But somehow I knew our hug would never happen, and when I was told that she was packing up and moving back to Arkansas immediately, I understood again that she understood the ways in which the world does work.

I was relieved, happy for her, I imagined her inspired by her mother’s death, suddenly realizing how short life is, how unimportant the stores and customers really are. How we take everything for granted. How we waste our time fighting amongst one another towards some utopian goal, a world of our own making that would contain us and everyone else that we like, where we’d live forever, just eating, breathing, singing, laughing, and admiring the eternal stars.

How our lives become devoted to building up to a climax that only brings an infinite black.

How we waste our time on needless projects.

I imagine her driving away in a pink Cadillac, top down even in the middle of Michigan winter, her scarf waving goodbye to the flurries, the unenlightened people cruising the speed limit in the lanes beside her, becoming flurries themselves in the dark light of her round sunglasses as the years she knew end in a climax of blackness and her new life on earth opens like the red curtain before the second act, the spotlight centered on the empty stage waiting for her to enter from the left.

It’s there waiting for her to bask in its glow.

Katharine

2007-01-25T23:50:00.000-05:00

A sketch I wrote for Creative Writing:

Now she was craving a Diet Coke.

All day she had yearned for one thing: sex. Now that the whole mess of finding someone, getting them drunk enough, finding a cab back to her place, and finally tearing off that someone’s clothes had all been haphazardly planned, quickly executed, and completed flawlessly—the snoring corpse beside her had been the icing on her cake, what with his square jaw and three percent body fat—and brought her the utmost satisfaction she could devour from a throwaway man…now she was craving a Diet Coke.

The conclusion came to her then that no matter how large the craving—she hadn’t had sex for weeks—there would always be another to follow. One could destroy the earth with a handful of nuclear bombs and a hundred years of devastating climate change, but there would still be a mosquito or two that would eventually track you down and pinch you on the nape of your neck.

Some people smoke after sex, she thought, but I am not one of those people. Mysterious artificial sweeteners that sting the tongue and natural flavors in some carbonated water. That’s the only thing that can satisfy me after a toe curling orgasm.

She slipped out from under the however-many-thousand count thread sheets—she only knew they were comfortable as hell and cost about as much as there were threads to boast. And they were green. Green like the waxy fake plants she would fall asleep staring at in her father’s office when she was still young.

The man let a small breeze escape from some opening on his face. He was burrowed into one of her enormous feather pillows, so he was muted, already disappearing, becoming just another fuck. He sighed again and she imagined that that’s what it sounds like to be a mile from Old Faithful as it explodes, to hear it but not see it, to not be one of the people standing around it taking pictures, watching nature’s strange quirks with romantic wonder and awe.

Yet she maintained some politeness toward her gentleman. She tiptoed from her bedroom as she wrapped her silk bathrobe around her, tried not to push any of the creaky doors of her rusting apartment any more than they had to be driven, and held the can of Coke in the yellow light of the refrigerator as one might hold a baby in the middle of the night, lifting it slowly, holding it to her chest with relentless emotion. She brought it into the furthest corner of her kitchen, as far away from her bed as possible without leaving her home and walking to the roof, to open it with a that loud snap, crack, and hiss that cans of soda produce as reliably as the sun’s rising in the east or the top networks producing shitty sitcoms.

Like a geisha holding a steaming cup of tea she scuttled over to her sofa and curled her legs into a pretzel. And she looked like a geisha too: the blue moonlight seemed to be erasing her dark tan, inverting her into a thin powdery girl with a round face, a flat chest, and hair as black as the bottom of a well. She saw this girl stretching and sliding across the surface of the silver can, the specter of what she hid each morning as she applied foundation and crimped her hair. As she shadowed her eyes and extended her lashes. This was the girl that died each time she closed the tanning bed above her; she left this girl in there as she redressed, it was her coffin.

Yet Katharine kept finding her: when she would nervously put on an expensive pushup bra in the morning, when she would crave sex all day at the office like a teenager who’s just been handed car keys, when she would selfishly troll the bar, only cautiously use men and not let herself keep any lasting relations with them—when she would wake up and crave something as foolish as a Diet Coke.

Then the can was empty. She took one final swig, determined to get any last details from the selfish bottom, and set it on the coffee table. With that craving gone she slipped back into bed, made sure the alarm clock was off, felt herself toward the warmth of the nameless that slept beside her, and wondered what it was that she would want next.

She wondered if she might just crave him again in the morning, and eventually, in many years when the men no longer willed themselves into her overpriced sheets, if she would desire to have him back, his square jaw and two percent body fat, his snoring, his salty, cool smell.

Then exhaustion persuaded her to crave sleep, to which she conceded, and all wonder stopped. So she was briefly satisfied again.

The Future

2007-01-17T23:25:00.000-05:00

The Future

She’s sitting across from me
in an expensive red gown
that pushes her powdered
thick breasts up to her chin,
with a cigarette between her
index and middle finger,
wedged into the red silk
of her classic long gloves.

Like Old Faithful shooting
through the center of a cherry
smoke explodes from between
her pursed velvety lips—
my impervious frown broken
by my gag reflex’s response
to her smog, her storm cloud.
But I don’t care. She could
lunge at me with a sword.
I’d do anything for her.

She smiles flirtatiously.
“You can have all of this,”
she says and I believe her.
Her gloves come off and
halos wrap around the
stumps of every last finger;
her wrists glow even more—

“I want you so bad,”
I moan, I sigh,
as my hand slowly
slides towards her.

She pulls away,
puts on her gloves
and her glasses,
finds her briefcase.

“You can’t have me yet lover.”
She taps her wrist where
a watch should be.
“Patience my darling.”

Then she’s on the train again,
the booth empty across from me,
but it still smells like Chanel No. 5,
and for a brief moment
the cushion holds her form.

And on the wet napkin,
beneath her drink,
is the time and place
in a blurry black stain

where we’ll meet again.

"My mother used to have..."

2007-01-14T00:17:00.000-05:00

The book we’re reading in my creative writing course encourages the aspiring writer to write in a journal everyday. To write anything apparently, like exercise. Of course this idea excites me! So I’m going to use this blog as a sort of journal this semester to try out some of Janet Burroway’s exercises from Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft. It’s called “freewriting,” and allegedly, if I’m going to win a Nobel prize someday, I need to do it a lot.
     The first exercise is to use the line “My mother used to have” as a prompt. Here we go.

My mother used to have these cleaning sessions where she would blare The Judds and make my sister and I pull every knickknack off of our living room’s shelves and dust them with rags drenched with lemony Pledge. It was almost a very medical procedure: remove the blue Petoskey stone collected from Mackinaw Island, wipe it off, return it to its proper place next to the VCR.
     But mostly I remember the music and the smell. Once Ashley Judd’s mother and older sister were done singing and the house fell quiet again, the room would feel eerily clean. I didn’t want to sit on anything for a while. I wanted to admire our work and feel good about it, not dirty it up by living. The carpet looked darker because all of the hairs had been brushed to their darker sides. The couch and chairs looked as though they had just arrived from their warehouses.
     Eventually listening to The Judds stopped. I can’t recall when exactly, why, or how, but from my own personal experience, listening to the same few CDs for years on end isn’t possible. (Unless, of course, it’s a Rufus Wainwright album, then we have an exception to the rule.) So I lost touch with Wynona and Naomi and grew into a hatred of all country music thanks to my parents’ excessive listening parties to our local country stations in the family cars.
     But a year or two ago I came across The Judds’ greatest hits album on iTunes and couldn’t pass up the cheap opportunity to download it. The minute I double-clicked that first track the memories of my mother shuffling about our manufactured home (an old “single-wide” mobile home my parents had bought after they married and moved out of my mom’s mother’s house) and singing every last word as she dusted and vacuumed came rushing back. And surprisingly, I didn’t hate it. I don’t hate the Dixie Chicks either, which leads me to theorize that I only like country music that comes before and up to the Judds, and from the Dixie Chicks onward. The gap in there with the country music I hate is the time period of my childhood where I was too cool to like anything that my parents did—plus most country music in the 1990s was just plain shitty.
     When I’m cleaning today I usually listen to some upbeat dance music. The Judds have been set on a shelf like a good memory in a picture frame. Lately, it’s been Madonna. I’ve even toyed with the thought that I might dance and sing to the queen of pop while I’m forcing my kids to help me clean. Will it be her that helps shape my kids’ musical tastes. Will they cherish the memory so many years later and download her on iTunes like I did with The Judds? Would letting my kids listen to Madonna at such a young age make me a bad parent?
     Regardless of the moral implications, it will be fun, just like it was when I was pulling little porcelain figures off of our entertainment center and setting them on the floor next to the Super Nintendo, as my mom crooned nearby, “Have mercy on me!”

Je ne sais pas

2007-01-05T01:28:00.000-05:00

Je ne sais pas
I don’t know what

We were watching this French movie
where all the characters just sing
their lines to one another as if
it were the most normal thing,
as if they always heard an orchestra
playing somewhere beyond the horizon,
plotting notes for every step of their lives.

They were singing but there were no songs,
and I thought that if this is what life as
a musical were to be like, I’d want no part—
I want to wake up with Fosse dance numbers
and choreographed steps out the door,
with the chorus line close behind on my tail,
the sun shimmering like a disco ball.

I don’t know what these French filmmakers
were thinking when they pieced together
this beautiful film—the actors, the colors,
the sets, and the music are all so beautiful—
but it’s lacking dancing and real songs,
those true, powerful, tearing down the ceiling,
climactic pieces that make the audience clap
even though the actors on film can’t hear.

Yet it is evident that the French understand
life the best, because our fair lovers end up
apart with separate and very different lives,
and run into each other once more as it’s snowing
in the end but, as I predicted from the start,
it didn’t have a happy ending, it all fell apart,
and the lesson was taught again, that life
will never be a real musical, never have happy endings.

Eight Hours

2006-12-31T02:24:00.000-05:00

Eight Hours

It’s December 31st, 2006,
and I am typing at 2:21 a.m.

But if it is 1986 today I
will be born in eight hours.

My heart has been
beating for nine months.

I have been clutching
to the insides of my mother.

I have not known time,
nor life, nor joy, nor pain—

I have not known a
single thing of what’s to come.

I have not yet seen
the color of grass in sunlight.

This is the beginning.
But not before a good night’s sleep.

Reviewing & Reevaluating

2006-12-29T02:19:00.000-05:00

My horoscope just told me that I’m in the process of reinventing myself, and that I need to “exercise to review and reevaluate what [I] accomplished this year.” While I don’t take my horoscope too seriously—it sits right under the Entertainment Weekly “TV Watch” box on my Google homepage—this does seem like some good advice to anyone who updates their blog on a regular basis. It’s a good writing prompt.
     In brief, 2006 was exhausting. These holidays have gotten tiring. I am ready for the new year, a clean slate, to start things all over again. I’m not in dire need for a life-affirming “fresh start,” I just want the security of January, the reassuring knowledge that there’s a stockpile of days ahead that’ll last twelve months. Living the last days of December is like feeding on crumbs. Then everyone gets drunk, happy, hung over, and back to work.
     My plans are exactly that.
     I haven’t written much since I finished chapter one of the second book of the book I’m writing. I get half-hearted ideas for poems that don’t come into fruition. I can’t find the motivation to pick up another book from my pile on my coffee table. I’m more attuned to watching Will & Grace and Nip/Tuck on DVD and reading magazines and websites.
     In other words, I’m officially on a vacation from my intellectual self until sometime next week. Which is when I turn twenty. And we all know what that means: by the time she was twenty, Mary Shelley had published Frankenstein. I need to get to work.
     And work was much of what I did this year. Worked at school, worked at the store, worked on several failed relationships, worked on stories, worked on poetry, worked on finally getting proper products for my hair.
     Generally, I had fun. I got to see Madonna in Chicago. I won the school paper’s literary edition contest for poetry. I’m currently holding a 3.46 grade point. I became a manager at the store, got the keys and a raise.
     And I just remembered that Shittypants McGee died! I got a new car, and an accident, and a new insurance company. That seems so long ago. Probably just my mind blocking it all out.
     The year seems to go so fast and yet the early months of this year feel decades behind me. That’s college.
     I’m rushing this because I’m tired tonight, I’m tired of this year.
     So my resolutions for next year are to finish my new book, keep up my organic food craziness, and to save (and make) money. I would make some bold wishes like getting my own apartment, but we’ll worry about that next year.
     Which will be here before you know it.
     Cheers!

Coming Attractions

2006-12-27T17:22:00.000-05:00

This is the only bit of my play “Things Could Be Worse” that I’ve written. I need feedback, encouragement, and any other form of relief/inspiration you can afford/offer.

Things Could Be Worse
Act I
Scene 1

A red wooden double door is dimly lit in the middle of the stage. It’s midnight. Two voices, a male and female, are heard offstage alongside footsteps, drawing nearer.

Man: Life is all about sex really. We may express ideas, create tons of things, build cities and destroy the environment. Yet at the end of the day it’s all still really about hardcore, raunchy, amazing sex.

Woman: How do you mean?

Man: Let’s say you write a book. Is the main goal behind that to get your thoughts to the public, to enlighten…or deep down inside is it to make a ton of money, buy a beach house, and find someone who you can fuck all day?

They walk onstage, the man opens the door for the woman.

Woman: (hesitating in the doorway) It’s a tough question. But I can imagine both. Perhaps the first book to satisfy the urge to publish something of value, the second just for money.

Man: (motions for her to enter before him) So, essentially, you agree.

Woman: Essentially. They enter.

Read this Book

2006-12-17T23:56:00.000-05:00

You all must read this book. It will make you feel better about being alive.

That is all.

Little Girl

2006-12-10T00:55:00.000-05:00

Little Girl

You’re breaking my heart
like all the other copies
of you I see in little dresses
in plastic wagons being
pulled by your mother’s
hand as she pushes her
shopping cart at light speed.

Innocence still dries on your
blonde curls, hope vibrates
from your fresh blue eyes,
and I can hardly suppress
the urge to pick you up,
forge your parents’ names on
the adoption papers, and
take you cross country to
save you from hate and war,
from the profanity on the streets
and on every T.V. channel—
to make sure you drink
only water and milk,
maybe tea when you’re older,
and stay away from non-organics,
fast food, cigarette smoke.

I want to hand you life on
a silver serving tray,
I want to lift the warm
lid and watch the steam
kiss your lifted rosy cheeks
as you applaud the chef.

I will prevent heartbreak
by screening every boy—
will walk beside you and
stare paranoid at the sky,
worried that one drop of
rain will force me to become
your human umbrella,
so you will never know the
sting of a rainy day.

You Across From Me

2006-11-23T20:23:00.000-05:00

You Across From Me

This is all I wanted,
you across from me,
sleeping, drenched in yellow
in the library bench window
that is doomed forever
to watch the sun only set.

As these moments drag
I notice computers whirring,
the silence blanketing us,
and the books beginning to stare
as you start to snore.

I slap your knee with Poetry,
you need to wake up!
You are snoring!
(This is all I wanted.)

You look at me with one eye
and smirk—like King Arthur
will when we finally wake him—
and you turn away,
unable to believe you snore,
your body whispering,

“Give me five more minutes.”

A Glimpse of Celia Reed

2006-11-21T11:56:00.000-05:00

Her first thought that day of any minor comprehension was that it was autumn. The leaves were littering the beach as if the trees had descended the dunes the night before and danced into the early hours of the morning, shrugged off their leaves and skinny-dipped, having to celebrate yet another successful season of green, ready to once again freeze to their roots for another long winter as autumn painted their faces red and orange. Plus, Celia noted, it was very cold.
     These were her first two thoughts: It is autumn, and it is very cold.
     She walked toward a sandy flight of wooden stairs that ascended to an expansive slab of black cement, that when viewed from above was an oval with plenty of parking for the summer beachgoers. She noticed how the dune seemed to loathe the parking lot’s presence, how it grew all around it, its sands spilling over its edges, as if at any moment the mountain of sand could be persuaded to finally let it go and shove it into the lake (was it a lake? she was vaguely remembering a lake). It was after climbing the two dozen flight of stairs and setting foot on the dark concrete that Celia had her third profound thought: I’m not wearing any shoes.
     Autumn, cold, and no shoes. This is of what Celia’s mind consisted.
     Clouds were in a constant overcrowded congress in the sky, looking as though they were arguing amongst themselves whether or not to rain. The sun was faded behind the crowd, providing for a harsh morning light on Celia’s small patch of earth. It was the perfect day to film a horror film. She worried that at any moment savages, rabid apes, or worse, aliens, would funnel out of the dark woods that capped the dunes, hissing and growling at her, hungry for her flesh and bones—she being the last living human in the area, she would have been a valuable item.
     Perhaps I’m the last human on earth, she thought. Perhaps aliens have killed everyone else.
     It is quite obvious by now that Celia Reed’s imagination wouldn’t let amnesia stand in its way for very long. She wouldn’t remember such an imagination, but before waking up on the beach she would find herself daydreaming constantly, concocting ruthlessly believable stories every hour, mastering conversations with humorous fictional dialogues she would create in conjunction with her friends. Celia was funny, witty, and would never, even upon the utmost politest request, shut up. For her mind functioned on her interior as her mouth did on her ex. And as shown, even in an adverse and oddly challenging situation, a frightening and bewildering situation, her mind could not cease to imagine something worse, albeit slightly comical and outrageous, going wrong.
     Red and brown autumn very cold with no shoes and a possibility of being the last person on earth with rabid aliens in the woods—this was Celia’s strand of thought in the only functioning, yet constipated, synapse in her brain. And it would remain so for several minutes as she crossed the parking lot and headed towards a cluster of little brick buildings, a miniature boardwalk. It was there she found a woman asleep on a wooden table, snoring, face down in a red cocktail dress with an empty golden bottle of Corona straddled by her fingers. The woman’s black hair was short like a boy’s. This was a feature that confused Celia endlessly. Yet she didn’t focus much on aesthetics or details, rather she wanted to communicate with this woman. So she poked the sleeping body. The groggy head with short black hair rose immediately, alert, awake, blinking ceaselessly, trying to focus on who had touched her. The bottle fell quickly and broke into countless pieces. The awoken yawned.
     “Celia,” she said. “What are we still doing here?”
     Celia just stared at her, wondering who Celia was.
     “Did we fall asleep?” the woman asked.
     Celia continued her blank expression.
     “We must have fallen asleep,” the woman concluded, holding her stomach with one hand, her forehead with another.
     Celia nodded for reasons unknown to her. Fluctuations in gravity would have been a better explanation than her agreeing, for she couldn’t agree nor disagree—instinct made her nod to show that she understood, even though she didn’t; couldn’t.
     “Celia, are you okay?”
     Celia frowned. She looked over her shoulder to see if there was another person there, if maybe Celia was behind her.
     “Celia?”
     And she finally spoke: “I…don’t know who Celia is…?” She said this almost apologetically, as if the woman with the short hair was the one who was lost and looking for help.
     “Are you kidding me?”
     “No.”
     “Celia, you’ve seriously got to be shitting me.”
     Celia shook her head.
     “No way.”
     Celia stared at her blankly again.
     “Your name is Celia Reed you moron!” The woman with the short black hair laughed and punched Celia in the chest. “There, you got me, now stop fucking around and let’s go home!”
     “Where is that?”
     “Where is what?”
     “Home?”
     “Oh my god Celia, you’ve got to stop this.”
     “Stop what?”     “Whatever,” the woman said as she stood up and pulled down her short dress, wiped off a patch of sand, patted her hair. “Let’s just go. I’m having bad flashbacks of the Full House series finale.”

My Friend Who Cared

2006-11-05T01:41:00.000-05:00

My Friend Who Cared

After finishing the news articles
about how President Bush made
a fool of himself by pretending
to not understand a bad joke,
and after catching up on the
deaths in Iraq, its growing chaos,
the latest midterm election polls,
and who would be on Leno tonight,

my friend found an article on
the bottom corner of his paper,
actually a bit of the corner was torn
and a smudge of Garfield from the
comics page was staining the words—
but he could make out its data
without all the words intact.

He read the polar ice caps are melting,
ever so much faster than before,
and now it’s been discovered that
all the fish in the ocean are dying,
ever so much faster than before,
and he quickly wondered why
his neighbors weren’t sitting at their tables,
like him, wondering how to stop it—
he panicked until he found the key phrase:
there is still time to correct these problems.

Feeling alone, powerless, and having
already been drained from work and school,
my friend did what he felt he only could;
he tied his shoes, threw on his coat,
walked behind his house and faced
the small forest that was still green,
the birds that were still chirping so loud,
and the sky that was still glowing blue,

and he told himself to relax, breath, that
there is still time to correct our problems—
as this thought calmed him he crumbled
belly first onto the long wet grass
and gently clenched it into his hands
as he breathed in that smell of cold soil;
he felt his heart beat alongside hers.

My friend stayed there for minutes,
getting reacquainted with his old friend.
He forgot about the nukes in North Korea,
the terror in Afghanistan, its growing chaos,
and the failures of the worst president
in all of the United States’ history—
he forgot all of this and whispered to the grass:

“I care.”

Satisfying a Need to Type

2006-10-18T02:11:00.000-04:00

I’ve forgotten how impossible it is for me to write when I’m drowning in schoolwork. In the fall and winter my life becomes a) school, b) work, and c) whatever is left of my social life. Part a) is 70%, b) 10%, and c) 20%—roughly.
     So you can imagine how hard it is for me to write anything that I might want to write. I’ve written two major papers, one in American Literature and one in British Literature, which once they were completed made me question whether or not I would write again. Ever again.
     Not to mention the classes I really don’t care for. Logic and US Diversity. The Study of Modern English is okay, but I’m not exactly thrilled to be there. It doesn’t matter, however, for if you throw those three classes in with the other two, you’ve got plenty of brain spent on that, and little left with any energy to write the second half of your new novel.
     But lately…something has been working. Driving home last night I managed to come up with two lines for my new book: “Oh muse, to say that Celia Reed wasn’t beautiful would be to deny the rose its reputation.” And: “The skinny wet road seemed to attract leaves like it was a fly ribbon.”
     Two lines, I know, but two lines less to write nonetheless.
     And it’s then I realize that my long and heavy critical essays in my literature classes aren’t draining my talent—they’re crafting it. The inability to write for a while afterward…well that’s just a need for sleep, and maybe sex.
     It’s when I come up with lines like that at three in the morning that I can tell myself to slow down, that I don’t need to have my next book done anytime soon, because no one is really badgering me to. Should I have a publisher knocking at my door in the future…then we’ll have worries.
     But until then, I have this. And my long drives to and from campus. I’ll get it all done. The urge to write comes back to me. You’re witnessing it right now. And if you wait long enough, I might just get a chance to fill you in on just who my Celia Reed is.

You're Christmas

2006-10-16T00:50:00.000-04:00

You’re Christmas

You don’t make me think
of sinking ships,
bitter cigarettes,
apocalyptic days,
solitaire in bed,
or bitter ends.

You’re stationary—
someone to hold,
who for the first time
isn’t slipping through
my fingers like snow.

You’re Christmas,
with gifts, a tree,
a fireplace too—
and even children,
who I can see

climbing all over you,
while the blizzard is
erasing the outside,
collecting on the sill,
the glass fogging from
our warm breath.

Two Weeks In

2006-10-10T01:21:00.000-04:00

Two Weeks In

You should be aware that
there was life before you and,
as many men refuse to say,
there is a life without you.

How do I know? you might ask,
when in fact you know the
answer to the question yourself;
you’ve breathed as many breaths as me.

I’m conscious to the fact that
there was life before me for you,
and I’m also awake to the idea that
there is a life without me for you.

But let’s not take our chances,
knowing these options still subsist,
and give life with each other
more than just a passing glance.

For there was life before you,
and there is life without you,
but right now those lives
are better given to a poor man,

who withering away on the sidewalk
begs for a gift of any value, and would
get one of those spare lives not knowing
there was one of greater worth under my coat.

Lives before you, without you,
and maybe even after you—
we can admit they do exist,
but they are bitter, unsweetened,

a cup of tea that has been steeped
for longer than the recommended time,
that no artificial sugar could save,
for whom the only option is the drain.

The Historian

2006-10-01T21:57:00.000-04:00

This one happened in my linguistics course I’m taking right now. We were talking about the Indo-European language that linguists are trying to reconstruct, which led me to think about my anthropology courses on civilization, my history classes, and how it all comes down to some nerdy guy in some little apartment under a lamp putting all our little fragments of unknown history back together for us to enjoy. So this one’s essentially a tribute to sad, depressed anthropologists.

The Historian

He’s stirring here, turning pages,
dusting off fragments of femurs,
trying to rebuild the ancient
and lost Indo-European words,
sitting on his wooden stool,
in his dark stone studio—
five slabs of cement creating
a box to house his ventures—
under one yellow spotlight
gluing all the pieces back together,
taping up the torn pages
that history’s hands have torn,
whose hooves have trampled,
whose sands have covered, frozen.

He’s thriving here, sweating,
trying to stop the earth from turning,
imagining the day when the
past and the present are one,
existing in the same moment,
smiling at one another, hand in hand,
fearlessly marching ahead
to the time when he can’t excavate,
when he will leave the stool,
turn off the small lamp above him,
collapse onto his twin bed and
rest knowing his work is done.

Kismet

2006-09-19T02:03:00.000-04:00

A new poem. For a new anthology—someday.

Kismet

We could have boarded this Titanic
knowing full well that your plans,
your forthcoming departure next year,
would be our iceberg, dead ahead.

Yet we could have seen the shores
of distant lands while walking the deck,
held hands throughout the endless days
en route we thought we’d forever have.

We would have danced, sang,
enjoyed our lives all at sea,
in that certain block of mortal time
when plans were just the sequel—
unanticipated, unnecessary even,
and hundreds of pages away.

We could have forgotten our destination,
that faraway land we bought
through the tempestuous pictures
of magazines and brochures,

and just breathed the cold Atlantic air,
warmed our bodies next to each other,
never saying a word about April,
a month now synonymous with doom.

We could have boarded this Titanic
and hoped to catch a lifeboat together
when the ocean finally got her way—
concocted a way to bypass kismet.

Yet here we stand at the dock,
the sun is shining, folks are waving,
the seagulls seem like confetti in the sky,
and our bags are packed with weeks unborn.

Life is so feeble to live so dangerously,
it’s really only done in the movies—
this is what we have decided
with our hands at our sides,

our minds angrily killing our
haphazard notions of the impossible
as our ship sails away with a moan,
our feet firmly planted on the ground.

Self Preservation

2006-09-18T01:22:00.000-04:00

After my relationships fail, as they all do, I have this process I call Self Preservation.
     Basically, it’s a hatred of anything that isn’t good. Friends, ice cream, fast food, boot cut jeans, shoes, books, and tea are all good—a small list of the countless good things Self Preservation allows me to overindulge myself with. The bad things list is shorter, more precise: cable news, stupid people, and relationships in general. One may develop their own personal activities for their own processes of SP as well. For example, I listen to one of Rufus Wainwright’s most bitter yet happy songs constantly: “April Fools” from the mid-90s; the chorus begins triumphantly, “And you will believe in love/and all that it’s supposed to be/but just until the fish start to smell/and you’re struck down by a hammer.”
     The process is like this. When you have a huge breakfast and eat so much that it pains you to look at food, when you feel as though you may never eat again—we’ve all felt the same way about love. Self Preservation is ignoring that feeling.
     My current state of SP began last night on the dewy fresh cut lawn of some apartment complex in Kalamazoo that I had been laying on when my scattered, drunken conversation ended with my phone clapping shut. I tossed it into the leaves of grass, and being me, immediately thought of Walt Whitman—we are all leaves of grass!—and my favorite poem by him, “As the Time Draws Nigh.”
     “O soul!” he writes in the final line, “We have positively appear’d—that is enough.”
     I stood up, grabbed my phone, headed back into the party, surrounded myself with all these new friends, save for one: Nicole, the ultimate SP indulgence. If there is ever to be a manual written for SP, there would certainly be pages devoted to the requirements of the best friend. She would certainly fill all of them.
     And this morning our hung-over group managed to overeat breakfast at a little place called Maggie’s, founded in 1984. Maggie makes some good French toast, and I ate so much of that and whatever else they served me, that the feeling of never wanting to eat again overtook me.
     Then we went to Barnes and Noble and I bought some tea and a book.
     Then I watched Grey’s Anatomy with my best friend.
     And I humored myself for a moment by thinking that I just might want to eat again. Maybe a crumb or two—eventually, whenever the feeling’s there.
     That’s Self Preservation; the real goal is to get the participant to eat again, to entertain mild notions of another possible meal, to regain the hope that the next one will be the best they’ve ever had. All the while one is reminded that it is good enough to have simply existed, to have even just positively appeared.
     And there’s ice cream and onion rings. Self Preservation knows not what a calorie is.

Get Second Hand Smoke

2006-09-13T23:02:00.000-04:00

Surgeon General warnings don't apply here.

Get it here

Second Hand Smoke

Like a lit cigarette

I dare not touch,

your smoke lingers around.

My mind always starved,

craving your trademark—

your sultry, addictive, presence.

It would be the death of me

to ignite its end,

to inhale with such

heightened expectations.

My second hand smoke,

you’re the next best thing—

Proven deadlier than the source.

A Carrie Bradshaw Moment

2006-09-09T23:29:00.000-04:00

Today was a gloomy day. It had that heaviness that rainy cold days of early fall bring—you’re automatically tired despite having just slept nine hours. To look out the window is exhausting, to take in such a dramatic change to the environment in just twenty-four hours.
     Yet Audrey and I made the best of it. I had to buy some t-shirts from Express, a planner from Barnes and Noble, and I was hoping, just maybe, to buy something with my new Chase credit card just to test it out. There was also a side task: finding Derrick B.
     Audrey and I both went to elementary school with Derrick B. “He was my first love,” she reminisces.
     “Yeah, well, I spent the night at his house,” I reply.
     He was one of my best friends for a while; we’d hang out and talk about Power Rangers. He even asked Audrey to be his valentine. However, he eventually moved away, as some friends do throughout the course of childhood, and he left Audrey and I out in the cold. The last time I saw him was in fifth grade, I believe, when we celebrated his birthday at Bill Knapp’s with his entire family. That was that.
     Imagine my surprise when I saw him working at the cell phone clip booth in Rivertown Crossings mall a few months ago.
     I had called Audrey almost immediately.
     “I’m quite confident Derrick B. works at the cell phone clip booth in the mall,” I said.
     “No way! Are you sure?”
     “I’m quite confident!”
     “Is he hot?”
     Thus our side task of the evening was born. Audrey actually had an opportunity to talk to him last night when she was at the mall without me, but she got cold feet. So we planned excursions to both malls this evening.
     We had the entire act set out. I truly need a clip for my phone—I’ve had it for a year and still put it in my back pocket. Therefore we would go up to his booth, ask him for a clip for my phone, and then Audrey, acting completely surprised and excited would say:
     “Aren’t you Derrick B.?”
     There was a hand motion that went along with this certain line that really isn’t describable. Perhaps if one were to imitate the death of a butterfly with their hands, they might come close. It is safe to assume that the effect would have been extraordinary.
     We had it all planned, the script ready in our minds. But he failed to show up at Woodland mall. Then he wasn’t at Rivertown—we discovered this only after a slow and long confusing walk towards the booth. (“Is that him…I think that’s him—? No it’s not him. Dammit!”)
     With the search for Derrick B. incomplete, with me not having charged anything on my new card, we headed to Panera Bread.
     Two hours later we were at Steak ‘N Shake. Drowning out our sorrows alongside a few more friends. Together we never fail to make each other laugh. Which is when I had a Carrie Bradshaw moment—when you begin a thought with “I had to wonder…” and feel as though you’re writing an important piece for the next issue of Vogue.
     I had to wonder what the importance of searching down an old friend (or in Audrey’s case an old grade school flame) is. Isn’t it enough to have lived that era of your life with that person, to have said farewell? Is there ever a chance for a chapter two with one you haven’t talked to in years? And should that person come back into your life, would it really have been worth all the fuss to draw them back in?
     We won’t know until we stumble upon him some other day, ask for a phone clip, act surprised, flail our hands.
     But if that mission fails we still have our friends of the here and now. We have Halloween themed milk shakes and plenty of gossip. We have the “Yes or No” game when checking out strangers.
     And that’s just fabulous.

A Big Black One

2006-08-31T01:20:00.000-04:00

I’m sitting in Muffler Man watching MSNBC report that one of the FBI’s most wanted has just been captured—a polygamist, not a terrorist—when I decide to not cross my legs and try to act as masculine as I can.
     “That guy had it made,” a middle aged guy in a gray suit sitting a few chairs away from me says as he bites into his messy Subway.
     “Yeah, now he’s goin’ to prison,” Gary, the Muffler Man if you will, says from behind the counter as he tries to locate and price the pieces of a 2000 Kia exhaust system that my broken Sephia needs.
      “Now he’s going to have a dick up his ass everyday,” the man in the suit says with a mouth full of lettuce, bread, and meat.
     “A big black one,” Gary says, his eyes not leaving the computer.
     I try to act normal, as if I encounter casual conversations at any business I visit about guys getting dicks shoved up their asses. Such words are commonly heard at Barnes and Noble, Target, or Taco Bell.
     “You hear about that polygamist,” I imagine a drive-thru speaker saying, “He’s going to jail! Yeah! Gonna have a big black dick up his ass now! No fun.”
     “Ha. Yeah,” I imagine is my only response.
     “Anyway, can I take your order?” Perfectly normal.
     I plant both my feet on the glossy tile floor. Forget any kind of leg crossing. These are Muffler Men. I don’t contribute to their conversation, and I hesitate to comment on how every news channel is fixated on this ridiculous story right now when terrorists are blowing up the Middle East, everyone is dying from AIDS in Africa, and Rosie O’Donnell is about to join the cast of The View.
     The fact of the matter is: it’s ten in the morning and I want my car to stop making a noise comparable to a subwoofer blowing up in the middle of a KISS concert.
     Gary dials the Kia dealership, yells into the phone, explains how bad their service is, then calls them again. The second time he gets through, asks for the parts, and laughs in an evil yet sympathetic way as he writes down the prices.
     “They sure are cheap when you buy ‘em!” he says as he hangs up the phone.
     “Oh no,” I say, forgetting that I’m trying to pretend to know anything about cars.
     I follow him out to my car, which has been lifted up above our heads so we can observe the undercarriage—a term I picked up from watching NASCAR many Sundays in a row when I was twelve and stuck at my step-grandparents’ house.
     He points to all the pieces I need, the broken and charred remains of my exhaust dangling above our eyes, rust flaking off as he pokes them with a pencil. When a particularly big cloud of rust falls, I jump back—I know where that undercarriage has been.
     “Sorry,” he says, realizing now that I am truly not a man. He concludes his assessment of the damages by saying, “So with all the parts I need, plus one hundred twenty for labor, you’re looking at seven hundred and thirty dollars.” He delivers this news to me as if I’ve just been diagnosed with cancer, it’s spread everywhere, time to pray.
     I call my mother. She is shocked, appalled, and immediately begins to formulate her plans—those strange motherly plans which involve connections with people you’ve never heard of before. I tell her what Gary has told me. I leave out the conversation about the polygamist and his future as a black man’s bitch. She says she will call me back shortly.
     I stand outside the garage on the damp pavement staring at the morning sky, wondering why all these horrible issues with cars happen to me. I’ve had three accidents and random toils with only two cars under my belt. There is a good reason my last car was named Shittypants McGee. And I also consider the coincidence that the cost Gary estimated to repair my car is the same amount as the check I deposited this morning. Someone is working against me, I conclude, someone is following—
     My phone rings again. It’s my mother, whispering this time. She has connections downtown (she might have connections everywhere!) and she knows someone who can fix my car for real cheap. They just won’t replace one of the parts I “need.”
     “Why don’t they need to replace that?” I ask.
     “Oh, it’s just something the government requires you to have to lower emissions,” she explains.
     “Great, so I’m going to have Al Gore breathing down my neck!”
     “What?” My mother is oblivious to his movie about global warming, as is the rest of the nation—to the film and the crisis itself.
     She continues to whisper. “So if you get pulled over, you know nothing.”
     “Right, I’m completely ignorant.”
     I close my phone and regretfully give Gary the news that I won’t be needing his overpriced services today.
     “We’re considering just getting a new car,” I lie, trying to sound as if my family is loaded, I’m in town for school, we actually have a place in Grand Haven on the beach. “This is just too much.”
     I feel Gary is excited to return to his Subway he was sharing with the man in the suit; he is ready to forget about my piece of shit car. I almost pity him, stuck here all day with a man in a gray suit, watching depressing news channels, eating sandwiches endorsed by an ugly guy who was once morbidly obese.
     “You know, I could do a patch job, weld it all back together,” he says as he pushes a lever to lower Karl Marx (that is the name of my Kia) back to the ground.
     It’s now that I lose any remorse I was feeling, for I realize that he could have been making it all up. Replacing converters, sensors, and some piping. He could have just offered to patch it all up.
     “But I guarantee it will all fall apart in about a month, maybe two,” he admits, curling up his nose and sniffling like all men who work in a service field do after they offer their honest opinion.
     “Well, we’ll see,” is all I can say.
     He hands me the list of prices. “Talk it over with your parents,” he says.
     I start my car, satisfied that I have not been conned into some outrageous mechanic’s scheme. I am not another victim! I will not tell horror stories about how I was robbed by Muffler Man. I will tell tales of my mother’s strange automotive connections, how she saved my money, and how, when it is started and its exhaust is broken, my car sounds as if King Kong has been given a gasoline enema—a big black one.

The Invention of Peanut Butter and Jelly

2006-08-25T21:25:00.000-04:00

The Invention of Peanut Butter and Jelly

It’s an inevitable moment in history.
The peanuts have been creamed.
The grapes have been jellied.

Then in one magical instant
they are forced together like
they were prearranged to marry at birth,

yet this monumental action,
this milestone in human achievement,
a silent affair with no “One small step…”,

is the antithesis of a celebration:
a tired housewife has just enough bread
and these two cheap jars of mush

to make some sort of lunch
for her kids to bring to school,
if she could only fathom how it would taste.

Poor Pluto

2006-08-25T01:51:00.000-04:00

We’ve been had. Generations have studied them. Since kindergarten we have eyed them with wonder. Now the planets are under scrutiny, and Pluto is out. Out like the scrunchy.

That poor little cold planet, stranded out in the middle of nowhere, stuck between somewhere and hell, has finally had its status revoked. What does this mean for our culture? Will Mickey Mouse’s dog be renamed? Will the god the planet is named after rise up and choke a bitch? And most importantly: will anyone actually care?

We’re used to this by now. In first grade the first Thanksgiving was painted as a picture perfect meal between healthy settlers and welcoming Native Americans. Today we know that the settlers were dissidents, slightly twisted people even, and the Indians would soon be murdered mercilessly, subjected to our diseases, and kicked into reservations by Andrew Jackson.

In first grade Pluto was a blue speck in the collective shadow of Jupiter and Neptune. Today it’s a bitter, rejected space rock.

Any day now we’ll be told the earth’s core is actually solid as stone, that stars are really just holes poked into the roof of the world’s ceiling, and swimming in Jell-O isn’t likely to end up an accidental suicide.

Upon Completing the First Part of My New Novel

2006-08-17T12:54:00.000-04:00

Last night when I was brushing my teeth it all fell in to place. I’d had this great day, great food, spent lots of money on necessary things, and the weather was beautiful. And as I thought about the novel I’m currently working on as I shined my molars, it all became obviously clear: I had to finish it, immediately. I saw every last scene of the first book perfectly in my mind, just as they should be.

I wouldn’t say that writing this current book has been divine, but when I started writing it on a whim the library at GVSU last December I had a good feeling about it. This is the first time I have felt completely free with a story to do what I want, because for some reason all the others have constrained me to my first concepts. Yet as I wrote this one the characters came to life in a way my characters never have for me before, the story became very simple but deep as well. The voice I use is a mix of my own and whatever lame attempt I can make to sound anything like F. Scott Fitzgerald—the book’s inspired mainly by his novels, perhaps even a tribute to them.

After I spit out my toothpaste and washed my face, I sat down with page sixty-three and ended on page seventy-two, twelve pages over my original goal, which can be a testament to how the story has grown for me as I’ve written it. Thus, ending this first part of two was a bit devastating, because of course something dramatic and traumatic happens, and the second part doesn’t pick up until 30-40 years later in a more present setting. I’m going to take a break for a number of days and enjoy the last week and a half of summer vacation and think about the next part, and hopefully when I get the urge to start writing it will come to me as easily as these first 72 pages.

Enough with boring you all about it, here’s one of the poem’s that appears in the book:

Heartbreak Blooms

Heartbreak blooms
like a flower,
starts as a seed
hidden from view,
but in time,
through wind and
rain and the
passing tides of
endless months,

it cracks open,

slithers to the surface,
climbs into the air
with its elbows
on the ledge of its
tiny fissure,
and gasps for sun,
opening its bud,
worrying little about
its beautiful
red feathers,
stinging sharp thorns.

It catches its breath
just as it’s plucked,
sold to the penniless,
but it’ll grow back
another season,
another year.

Tahitian Treat

2006-08-04T01:28:00.000-04:00

I feel like writing, but I don’t feel like I have any thing to say at this moment. All I can gather is that I am sitting here in the dark with Conan on and a Tahitian Treat soda almost gone (a gift from Audrey) on my coffee table. We have just finished watching Moulin Rouge, because that is what we do when one of us is feeling down. I was feeling down tonight because sometimes life is a bitch and my friends came through, as they always do.

I will always have my friends, my computer, Word, and Tahitian Treat soda. I know this much is true.

I’m working, I’m writing. I promise you that much. Second Hand Smoke will be out September 5th.

I also must let you all know that I have a new love: pore strips. They really do look like a porcupine when you’re done!

Stigmata

2006-08-01T02:42:00.000-04:00

Stigmata

You were smoking a cigarette
at your favorite table
in your favorite café,

not feeling any requirements
from the world bearing down,
but the last few pages of People.

You’d taken a moment
to gaze longingly out
the smoke stained window,

to imagine the perfect man,
a beach, a sunrise, a day
without a list of things to do—

little did you realize your
wrists had begun to bleed,
streaming down to your elbows,

drowning your one beauty mark,
dripping onto Britney Spears
as you took another hit.

Front Cover: The Final Cut

2006-07-23T22:06:00.000-04:00

Nicole had her input, and this is the final cover for "Second Hand Smoke," but the back cover is staying (brilliantly) the same! Thanks to all my lovely friends for letting me know what they feel, whether I like it or not.

It's a bit darker, a bit more old school. I love it.

Getting Closer

2006-07-21T02:22:00.000-04:00

I have a good feeling about these two. The right one is the front cover of "Second Hand Smoke," and the left one is the back cover, it's just missing my little picture and bio. I would greatly appreciate and love to hear exactly what you think of these. Nicole would appreciate being called fabulous.

Covers are a Bitch

2006-07-19T19:15:00.000-04:00

Here's a rough idea of what the "Second Hand Smoke" cover may look like. I've decided on the picture for sure, but the font of the logo will probably change... Let me know what you think!

Click on my dearest Nicole on the left to see the big image. It may take a second to load.

Green Tea

2006-06-28T03:46:00.000-04:00

Inspired by my new drink of choice, I wrote this at work last Saturday night when I found little else to do.

Green Tea

There’s a greater journey,
I can feel it in my tea,
the way the white steam
gently burrows into my nostrils.

There’s light underneath
these buildings and roads,
under this grass, this dirt—
these cracks in the sidewalk
don’t run deep enough to expose.

A small preview is the fire
that we gather around
with friends on a cool
summer night in June,

like we did thousands
of years before when
there wasn’t a June,
a day, a clock on the wall,
and the heat, flame, light—
it was all so magical,
unmatched, unsettled.

We knew it then just as
much as we know it now,
that there’s a higher plain,
there’s ecstasy, light,
a greater journey beneath—

if we could just get all
the damn kids in China
to jump up and down
at the same time,

the cracks would ignite,
our faces would glow
with just a meager glimpse.

I Love Chicago

2006-06-20T01:27:00.000-04:00

Bet your bottom dollar you’ll lose your blues in Chicago, Chicago…

I can’t get Chicago out of my head. I’m listening to Judy Garland sing about it right now. I haven’t been in a place that inspires me, that relaxes me so much, since I discovered Saugatuck last summer. I came up with at least two good poems during my short stay there last Thursday.

It’s the city life, the shops, the fabulous important looking people, the traffic, the food, the mood that floats around and in between everyone on the street that seems to say, “There’s something important going on here, you better move.”

I want to live in Chicago. Nicole, Shavon, and I all want to live there, which seems to me like a viable option in the somewhat near future.

The only purpose for going last Thursday was to shop around (H&M is perhaps the greatest store ever) and to see Madonna—she was amazing. But what I experienced was more; I didn’t feel like a fish out of water, I felt like a natural, as if I could suddenly walk the streets with the best of everyone after being dropped from suburbia. I could flow with the crowds of important working people. The people that make the world move from their offices with views of the skyline.

I feel like I could live there, it feels warm. And it wasn’t just the weather.

Oprah lives there. It doesn’t get much better than that.

West Side Story Widows

2006-06-14T00:57:00.000-04:00

Shavon and I watched “West Side Story” today, and I came up with this poem…

West Side Story Widows

I’d like to imagine that
they’re all sitting at some
café in Giuliani’s New York,
sipping lattes, discussing life,

the latest handbag Anita
picked up from Prada and
just who that man was she
took to the show last night,

where Maria’s youngest
is planning on going to school
(what with the oldest having
just graduated from Yale!)

and when her husband will
ever find the nerve to retire,
and just what is Biff’s love—
they still haven’t caught her
name after all these years—
going to do with the dining
room in her new apartment.

There they are, I imagine,
friendly and grasping one
another from the jokes and
hilarious morning gossip,

having found common ground
in their very first years of
sorrow, heartbreak, silence,
and the eventual need to
move on from mourning,
to feel pretty once again,
in America, tonight, tonight.

We Survived

2006-06-07T00:11:00.000-04:00

The day started out with Nicole telling Shavon and I that her mother had heard the spirits talking and that she has been devoting all her time and energy to praying and has placed us in a protective bubble.

Needless to say, we survived the once in a millennium day 06/06/06. How do you survive such a day? You buy an LCD TV at Best Buy, sit around in Barnes and Noble (I finally bought Mrs. Dalloway, one of my favorite books), and going to Cheeseburger in Paradise.

You also listen to Kelly Clarkson’s “Walk Away” nonstop.

Later in the evening all had returned to normal, with Shavon and Nicole building a fort in Nicole’s living room with the boxes we were supposed to be using for packing, and Nicole’s mother calling, screaming, that one of her younger brothers had to make a project about a plant or animal cell and it was due tomorrow and they didn’t have even a sketch of what a cell looks like. I recalled my cake that I made in sixth grade and did my best to give her advice. After all, the lady has bought me tons of pizza over the years and placed me in a protective bubble when the spirits were getting extremely active on a day that will only happen once.

This Life

2006-06-03T21:47:00.000-04:00

This popped into my head last night at the club when I was drinking my free Sprite. I was looking at this spotlight on the carpet and then there it was, a little moment of clarity.

This Life

This life will surely kill us all in the end,
but not before it lifts us up,
makes us breath the cool night,
forces us to dance with the crowd
under a blanket of noise and light,
brings us to the oceans and skies,
face to face with the planets and stars,
and eventually, if we’re lucky,
sets us down like a wilted flower,
so paralyzed from ecstasy that
we could never go on again,
allowing us get acquainted with the
prickly damp grass from once we came.

Walt Whitman is Cool

2006-05-29T23:54:00.000-04:00

"O soul, we have positively appear'd—that is enough."

Walt Whitman wrote that. I’m not a huge fan of his, but I find that line, from the poem “As the Time Draws Nigh” to be quite stunning, brilliant, and maybe just a little bit wonderful. I may never read any of his other stuff, but I’m happy to have read at least that poem.

Who Dares to Say

2006-05-27T21:50:00.000-04:00

Who Dares to Say

Who dares to say
that anything’s impossible
when you yourself
were made from a
mixture of liquids,

atoms, energy, lust,
and something even
more impossible than
anything that is:

love.

Random Thoughts of Shavon

2006-05-16T13:39:00.000-04:00

Random Thoughts of Shavon

I would have named you Serenity,
but your name as is stands to do some damage,
and I wouldn’t doubt those fists—
as relaxed as they may be at most times—
could kill a man or two.

What I feel most when you’re around
is mint chocolate chip ice cream,
on the tip of my tongue,
my most favorite of the flavors,
that only you seem to bring.

So to think you can’t find love,
“Pish posh!” I would say!
He’ll come for you,
but let us hope not today,
because the sun’s breaking through
the clouds now and a man can’t
ruin something like that.

Love Will Keep Us Together,
we sang that over and over
until it was our theme song,
our anthem that cried out to
our new university and the world
that we had arrived—

there’s no getting rid of us.

Two Souls We Are

2006-05-14T00:34:00.000-04:00

Guess who this one’s about…

Two Souls We Are

Two souls we are, intermingled,
traipsing along together down
this inexplicable path to some
life we’ve vaguely sketched on
the pads of sticky notes in our
brains that constitute an ever
changing first draft of our goals.

May the wind not blow and
lift these papers into its stream
like a flock of yellow fifty-nine
cent butterflies and rearrange
these ideas that are our future,
that shall become our present,
and in time our beloved past.

This I pray as I look at you
from behind my laptop on
your couch as you nap with the
cheap blinds that came with
this place clapping behind you
in the gentle cool breeze that
flows through the open sunny
windows and over both our heads.

This I hope as I discover that
love isn’t what I feel for you,
it’s something more vague,
deeper than words and breath,
it’s less troublesome, less scary,
more comfortable and tasteless
like a tall glass of ice water—
soothing, necessary for life.

Killing this Notebook

2006-05-07T14:24:00.000-04:00

Killing this Notebook

I’m rushing,
running to finish
filling this notebook
with words.

Tired of its
twenty-five cent yellow
and rusty
spiral spine
that’s been
uncurled, bent
with too many
angry openings,
and tossed
onto tables
with so
much anger
that it’s
a surprise
that the
Sharpie-signed
label “POE”
hasn’t worn
down to
a measly
dusty gray,
or actually
rubbed off
and stained
my anthropology
or algebra notes.

I’m ready to
buy another,
perhaps blue,
bigger,
more expensive,
and to see
the blank
promise of
a journey
not yet
started but
waiting to be,
after a
pit stop
at the motel
at the
next exit,
and a good
night’s sleep,
with a pen
stolen after
the stale
continental breakfast.

Sunglasses, Smoke, Sorrow, and Silence

2006-05-03T01:20:00.000-04:00

This may be about as moody and miserable as my poems may get. Yet I like it. It’s like therapy in verse.

Sunglasses, Smoke, Sorrow, and Silence

I want to be sitting at a café,
bookstore, restaurant, anywhere
that’s dark, gloomy, tragic—
yet peaceful still.

Sunglasses on, covering my eyes
that are either opened wide
and bloodshot like Mars in winter
or damp and half open
like a crescent moon lost in August,
reflecting off the humid
fog over a chirping swamp—

they could just be closed,
rolled up into the back of
my head from too much
of this all—
oh the madness of it all!

There should be a cigarette,
either in my hand or the ashtray,
pissing a fine line of blue gray
that is doubled by the
shiny beetles’ backs of
my obsidian lenses.

I’m mourning another love failed—
all relationships failed!—
and another tragic miscarriage
of the first pangs of passion
that were torn from me
by another one pulling a Houdini—
slipping out of my cuffs
and vanishing behind the curtain.

I am irate, as a matter of fact,
standing in line at Starbucks,
seeing another one who never returned
my graciously given phone calls—
I don’t just hand them out you know—
only wanting a green tea (iced) lemonade,

yet thinking that all I crave is
my sunglasses, smoke, sorrow, and silence
right now in the poetry or fiction
or that dark corner right over there.

Leave it all up to fate no more!
I think as I look forward
and smile at the one who
does not return the phone calls
and cautiously wait for their words to
trigger some sort of pleasant
phrases of my own—
I don’t just hand them out you know.

Not these days, not anymore,
not in my dark corner with my
sunglasses, smoke, sorrow, and silence,
and my newfound disrespect
for what I once believed to
be Fate teasing me towards a love,
but was actually just the world spinning,
the clouds rolling, the wind passing through.

Summer Resolutions

2006-04-30T01:56:00.000-04:00

Suddenly we’re all sitting around Rachael’s kitchen table, reminiscing, as if the first year of college that just went by was just another event to talk about. Now really, that’s all it is now. A span of ups and downs and a serious bundle of months stamped “Learning Experience.”

After everything we’ve been through, we’re back in Rachael’s house eating French dip and playing Dance Dance Revolution. All a little older, a little wiser, a little more ready for whatever this future of ours holds. Yet we’re still us. Rachael and Audrey still tried on too many dresses at Marshall Field’s for no reason; I finally tried on the white jeans at GAP to make everyone shocked at how good they looked.

I’ve decided I’m going to write on here every night this summer, in my bed like I am right now, a little music playing on my iPod next to me, my pillow propped up, myself scantily clad in whatever pair of boxers I choose to wear to bed.

I shaved today, for the first time in months. Not just a trim with the beard trimmer—a full shave with the Gillette Fusion five blade system. That baby could skin a walrus if given the opportunity. I also got my hair cut. I’m a whole new Greg, ready for summer, for this summer I suddenly have after successfully completing all my finals.

One of my goals is to shave this summer. Here are the rest of my summer resolutions:

Finish reading my stack of books; finish putting together Second Hand Smoke; get pretty far on writing The Complete Works of Harper Blaine; save a little money; spend as much time as I can in Saugatuck; spend all the possible time that I can with Nicole; have a summer romance; receive no tickets under any circumstances; drink more green tea and eat well.

Seems to be a pretty reasonable list. I should be getting the poetry collection done quickly. The cover is going to star Nicole, as “Ms. Fabulous” (one of the poems in the collection) holding a smoldering cigarette. It should be fabulous in its own right. We just have to find some certain time to take the damn photo. Yes, and I need to go to Staples and get all my poems printed so I can sort through them and select sixty or so that I want to be published. It’s going to be a story of sorts: of hope! of loss! of love! of want! of peace…

Or something like that.

I need to get back into my writing groove. This will require lots of bumpy entries such as this. So bear with me if I jump all over the place. As a matter of fact, I find standing in one place for too long to be counterproductive.

Final thought: I love my friends. May our summers be fabulous.

In Nicoles Bed

2006-04-25T21:19:00.000-04:00

In Nicole’s Bed

I could lie forever in here
as the morning lights
every artifact of your life—

Marilyn Monroe stepping out of a limo,
Audrey Hepburn looking pleasantly surprised,
your stepfather’s mother in her wedding gown,
with Georgia O’Keefe growing a garden on the northern wall.

A porcelain city of perfume atop your dresser
reflecting the framed random snapshots
in cheesy to classy frames bought on impulse
that still cease to outnumber the
five shelves of Nora Roberts
on the bookcase I bought you
for Christmas on December third.

It’s hard to discern
whether sleep is more peaceful here
than being awake,
but it’s hard not to sleep
if only for a little while,
so you can awake and explore again,
and in time rise,
to explore the rest of
this tiny Babylon you’ve built,
destroyed, and built again.

Expecting Something to be Wrong with You

2006-04-20T00:02:00.000-04:00

Expecting Something to be Wrong with You

I’m expecting something
to be wrong with you—
for you to add “Stud”
behind “Hey” or “Hello,”
for you to say “Ciao”
instead of “Goodnight.”

I’m thinking that at any moment
I’ll be caught in the headlights
of the horrifying confession that
you’re actually seeing someone—
his name’s Chris, he bought you a dog
and that’s practically the
only reason you’re still with him.

Your feelings have changed
or you’re just not ready—
you just won’t call,
you won’t respond.

I’m afraid because
I’m expecting something
to be wrong with you—
any glitch to make me
reconsider, repent, run.

At any moment you’ll vanish!
You’ll just be a memory!

Yet I know my phone
is about to ring with your call,
and your message will
somehow reach me just
as I’m about to fall asleep,

and you’ll still be perfect
on the other end of the line,
effortlessly avoiding any
booby traps my mind has
set to trigger the alarms.

Urgent Memo

2006-04-11T22:17:00.000-04:00

This one’s the first poem I wrote after kind of being all depressed during my writer’s block/caffeine withdrawals. It’s pretty self-explanatory.

Urgent Memo

Life’s about chances,
circumstances,
wild romances.

Life’s a chance alone,
a bittersweet drone,
an enchanted zone.

Grasp it now!
Before it’s too late!
Live your chances!
Life’s about fate!

Mi Cosa Favorita

2006-04-07T11:54:00.000-04:00

An assignment in my Spanish class has me thinking: what is my favorite thing?

On the fourteenth of April I have to stand before my fellow classmates and discuss, in two to three minutes in complete Spanish with little hesitation, “mi cosa favorita”—my favorite thing.

We all have favorite things, loads of them. Julie Andrews had more than just a few in The Sound of Music. So how can I choose just one?

In an effort to narrow down my search, I will now conduct a mental spill of random favorite things that pop into my mind: peach tea, books, Emily Dickinson, boneless wings from Applebee’s, chicken caeser salads, water, Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, music, chocolate, Rufus Wainwright’s Want One (although all his albums are my favorite), showers, summer, the smell of Michigan at night in spring, the beach, Saugatuck’s beach primarily, that blue of the sky right before the sun is just about to set, mint chocolate chip ice cream, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Barnes and Noble, boot cut jeans from Gap, the mall itself, brownie fudge sundaes from Steak ‘N Shake, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Moulin Rouge, driving really fast on the highway, eating too much food at Fresh Food Company, all my friends, my family, my dogs, my room, plucking my eyebrows to perfection, the satisfaction of brushing my teeth, moisturizer, my cell phone, my iPod, my bed, my pencil.

Four weeks ago this would have been an easy decision. I could have spent sixteen minutes, in complete Spanish, letting everyone know just why coffee is mi cosa favorita. I just had to go and quit.

Perhaps I’ll do escribir—to write. I’ll take a stab at writing a Spanish poem. Or I could say my favorite thing is mater—to kill. That’ll scare some people and get their attention. I should go for affect, give ‘em the old razzle dazzle, Chicago style.

I don’t believe we all have one favorite thing. If I have one favorite thing it is just vivir—to live. Estar to no estar, eso es la pregunta—to be or not to be, that is the question. I choose estar… to be is mi cosa favorita.

And money. I really love money.

I Quit Caffeine

2006-04-06T21:51:00.000-04:00

I knew I had an addiction to caffeine when I bought a thirty dollar coffeemaker from Bed Bath and Beyond and named it Sherman “Big Red” Mackenzie. Paired with my stainless steel coffee mug my grandparents gave me for Christmas a boy could not help but smile. It was love.

Flicking Sherman on in the morning became a mundane routine. His Folger’s 100 percent Colombian roast became the fuel for my thirty minute commute to campus at seven in the morning.

Then there were days when I would wake up late, and Sherman would not be turned on. Those are the days I label “Lost.”

It took a horrible cold over spring break for me to realize that my caffeine addiction was getting out of hand. The cold broke my routine, and with it my attitude shifted and I started experiencing withdrawals.

Now I’ve been cracking open Diet Cokes since I was seven. My babysitter would even let me sip the remains of her morning coffee. Disgusting, I know, but I was a foolish child.

So the sickness and the withdrawals made me realize that if I continued on it would only get worse. I feared eventually waking up on a plane with a hole in my cheek a la James Frey in ‘A Million Little Pieces.’ I haven’t done rock or gasoline like him, but drugs are drugs.

Surprisingly, the process of quitting turned out to be very easy.

I had already dumped diet sodas a few months back. I was dating someone who told me that the artificial sweeteners cause brain cancer. I scare easily.

This left me with just the coffee, with Sherman glaring at me as I headed for the shower on the first day back from spring break. I opted not to use him, not because I was trying to quit, but because he had gotten smelly. It turns out coffeemakers need to be cleaned out. It didn’t say this in big bold letters on the box, so naturally I never gave such an idea the time of day.

After a week of the mild coffee on campus I spent a weekend without coffee. On the following Monday I opted for orange juice, terrified to set foot in my 8:00 a.m. Algebra class without a drop of caffeine in my system. Could I handle exponential functions without excess energy?

It turns out that no one was murdered. I was actually delighted with the sudden onset of vitamin C and chewy pulp. For that day, and the several that followed, I sat in class in a dreary state, feeling neither stress nor boredom.

After a week my withdrawals subsided and I finally began to wake up. I didn’t miss much, maybe an epoch in Anthropology or a fotonovela in Spanish. Worth the loss in order to lose a needless dependency I’d say.

I haven’t had any caffeine since, and I don’t plan on it. Naturally made energy is amazingly sustaining when left unaffected by any sort of booster. I just hope the Starbucks mermaid and I can still be friends.

As for Sherman “Big Red” Mackenzie? He’ll be taking up residence on campus in a friend’s dorm where he will be given a good home by someone who needs him as much as I once did.

Yet Another Cover

2006-04-05T15:39:00.000-04:00

I promise, sometime soon, I will actually write something new on here.

I added some sleek smoke. (Click it for a bigger one!) Let me know what you think...

Another Cover

2006-03-29T15:54:00.000-05:00

What do we think of this one...?

Cancelled Plans

2006-03-04T12:57:00.000-05:00

Nicole and I always make plans.

Those plans always fall through.

Not the little plans, like visiting each other for a day or random shopping trips and meals—those never fall through. However, when we plan an event like, say, going to Chicago on Monday, March 6th, 2006, the idea remains a plan until, like last night, our conversation grows to a climax where we both realize, as we have been silently knowing for the past several days, that the trip is not going to happen. We just finally say it out loud and lose the denial.

“We’re not going are we!?”

“I don’t think we are!”

“Jesus Christ Greg! Yes, we are going!”

“Well not if it’s snowing. I’m not driving in the snow. And Shavon and Jenny have both dropped out!”

“Maybe we should go in April.”

“Good idea!”

This has happened before. It may have been last year, or the year before, when we were sitting in front of the airport waiting for her mother’s plane to land. We both decided we’d take a vacation (all by ourselves!) to Mackinaw. Of course that fell through because the summer came and we were both ensnared by other needy “best friends”—a period we now dub “when we were seeing other people.”

That period’s done now, and we still can’t follow through on plans. Why? Because we’re Nicole and Greg and we hadn’t even printed out maps, because somehow we both knew it wasn’t going to happen. We’re going in April now, we’re taking the train, and it’s going to be splendid.

I’ve always wanted to be in a train crash.

Poetry Book Cover

2006-03-01T12:40:00.000-05:00

Let me know what you think, pretty please?

So Long, Shittypants!

2006-02-23T00:12:00.000-05:00

The moment Nicole shouted the name “Shittypants McGee!” while waving her hand in front of her face I knew there was something special about it. We were on the 44th street overpass, in the spring of Junior year, stuck in her car behind a huge, and smelly, truck of some sort. It hit the gas, let out some gas, and in an unintentional stroke of genius that left me laughing all the way to our chiropractor’s office, she named the car I would soon come into owning.

Shittypants McGee is an early 1990s Ford Escort. I think it’s a 1991, but it may as well be 1971. The sedan is light blue, cramped, rusty, and it has never, probably from the minute it left the assembly line, had a good exhaust system. Thus listening to music and generally driving around without feeling a tinge of embarrassment in my stomach became familiar obstacles I would have to face daily.

I have driven Shittypants McGee for through two summers, through my final year of high school, through (most) of my first year of college, through my first and second car accidents, to Saugatuck and back too many times, to Kalamazoo and back, through the streets of downtown.

Now there was the first car accident on the highway right after I got him. There was the incident where we got stuck in the mud of a street that was under construction and actually closed. There was the second accident last December. There was the incident where it died in the middle of an intersection last fall.

And there was this morning, where Shittypants McGee finally went to meet his Lord at the intersection of Kenowa and Gezon. I was turning right, but he wasn’t, and he finally, with one final whimper, said goodbye to the twisting turns of this world and hello to the never-ending autobahn of the afterlife.

His tires were becoming as smooth as paper. His steering wheel was loosening even more. His exhaust system had never been louder. And he didn’t want to get up in the morning, at all, anymore.

May he rest in peace. We will hold our memories of Shittypants McGee in our hearts—of the time spent with him, beside him, and pushing him out of the way of traffic. May the afterlife welcome him with open hoods.

Now comes the next step: naming my new car, the beige Kia. Given time, we can only hope will grow to be as shitty as Shittypants McGee.

I Would Wait Forever

2006-02-18T13:33:00.000-05:00

Now we’re getting a little more personal. Or perhaps this is completely fictitious. You may never know…

I Would Wait Forever

I would wait forever
for you—
I would wait forever
for your kiss—
until my dying day
on the edge of oblivion,
with the waters of space
rippling beneath my toes,
I would wait for you.

If only I could
harness my impatience
to capture you,
contain my need
to feel you every
moment up to,
not finally when,
this forever ends.

I would wait forever
for you,
if life wasn’t for living—
if one moment on
the edge of the end
was as priceless as
a lifetime of touches.

I would wait forever
for you!
But hours become decades
and no clock can conceal
forever’s monstrous minutes,
that I would hungrily nibble,
one by one,
waiting for you.

St. Valentine's

2006-02-17T14:05:00.000-05:00

So I finished this a couple days late. So sue me.

St. Valentine’s

I feel I should be bitter—
drinking black coffee
and dressed to match,
scoffing at love and chocolate,
declaring, “This is just
a Hallmark holiday!
You’re just making
some old hag rich
by buying her cards
for the one you love!”

Instead I feel solid,
alive on the edge—
of some feeling—
light as a feather,
holding a single seed
of an apple tree,
one little black dot,
that needs just enough soil,
rain, sun, wind,
to sprout, and in time,
grow its own bleeding hearts
that will be plucked and eaten
by whomever is fit
to grasp onto them.

Just like my own in
this beating chest,
standing steadily as
I waver and bend
along the icy sidewalk
with the snapping red ribbon
of St. Valentine’s Day
slithering between my fingers—

hopeful, content,
in love with seeing,
in love with the
momentary belief that
this is it. Nothing more.

A Picture Share!

2006-02-10T13:06:00.000-05:00

Jesus is in my mashed potatoes!

In the Backyard Looking Up

2006-02-06T12:19:00.000-05:00

In the Backyard Looking Up

Gray sky frozen to the
same swatch as the
white of an ice cube—
black tree branches
killed by the onset of winter
forming a permanent
web of cracks letting in
a little black light
from outer space—
briefly interrupted in its
broken beautiful silence
by the bird fluttering past,
the squirrel hopping through,
and the distant bark of a dog
in response to a little girl’s scream.

But slowly the sky will melt,
and the cracks will grow
into a pool of oily night—
much more aqueous and alive
than the afternoon and its
broken metal dome—
with stars shivering cold,
but moving nonetheless,
the last remaining flakes
of that drab sky,
and reminding the few that
walk the velvety midnight streets
that there is life elsewhere
and beyond this world—
behind the gray sky
that’s almost blank and
holding back any promise
of bluer days ahead.

A Million Little Pieces

2006-01-28T00:14:00.000-05:00

I’ve slowly begun to adapt to getting through days with little sleep. The greatest evidence of this is my new coffeemaker, Sherman “Big Red” McKenzie, sitting on my desk next to my letter holder.

Unfortunately all this business has stricken my creative drive to the core. On top of that I’m reading a book Oprah no longer supports—a non-fiction book, and I’m not too keen on the non-fiction as it turns out.

My relationship with A Million Little Pieces by James Frey is not a very good one. All those who have read it have claimed it was life changing, that it was brilliant, that it is a new pedestal of human achievement. To me…not so much. It’s good, and I thought it was good before Oprah came down upon him with the force of ten thousand bolts of lightning, but it’s obviously fabricated at many points. How millions of Oprah’s readers, readers who spent last summer with their eyes glued on three Faulkner books, did not even question the book’s validity is amazing.

Perhaps I can’t connect with it because I’m not addicted to any hard drugs and I’m not a raging alcoholic. Hell, in the books Frey drinks coffee and smokes cigarettes non-stop. Now I drink coffee, and I’m addicted to caffeine, this much I know is true, but I don’t think binging on it will ever make me blackout only to have me wake up hours later on a plane with a hole in my cheek and my destination unknown.

So you can see how I might not be able to identify with a book written by a man who actually resorted to gasoline. Only sad fools resort to gasoline. I’ll keep my coffee, my lack of sleep, and my dangerous sleep inertia, thank you very much.

My point is this: I will never consider and/or resort to hardcore drug use. Therefore an alleged non-fictitious account of one man’s recovery from an addiction that nearly killed him almost seems irrelevant to me. This either makes me heartless or just numb to inspirational tales. I read Brokeback Mountain, and that moved me.

Perhaps Frey should have just set his book on a mountain and changed his love interest Lily into Lance. Perhaps then its validity would never have been questioned and Oprah would have kept her greedy paws off of it. I’d drink a mug of coffee to that, maybe even two, because my name’s Greg and I’m addicted to caffeine. (Hello, Greg.)

The Word

2006-01-16T11:06:00.000-05:00

The Word

Just say
the word
and we’ll
tear down
this wall—

I’ve booked
Billy Joel
for the
after party,

and a
Ronald Reagan
look-alike
to commence
the ceremony,

ready at
any moment
to exclaim,
“Tear down
this wall!”

as soon
as you
just say
the word.

Wendy's Girl

2006-01-14T02:16:00.000-05:00

This is now one of my favorites:

Wendy’s Girl

Little girl dancing in the Wendy’s line,
hopping up and down,
around and about,
behind the ketchup and napkin counter
and back up to the railing
that the hungry customers funnel through—

you’re on your own personal dance floor
bopping to your inner song
with not a worry in your heart
but if the kid’s meal will come
with the toy that you want.

But there will come some day
when your music will stop
when some boy (or girl)
has stomped on your heart
and the bills are piling up
alongside the homework
and the job just isn’t paying off—

and you will be broken
and standing with your hands
in your coat pocket
with an empty stomach
and a pocket full of cash
scammed from your parents
just like me.

Or maybe you’ll get off unscathed
and the vicious earth will hold you up
and bring you love
and prosperity that you need,
and you’ll keep dancing without a care—
curly black hair flopping about and
of grown-ups like me unaware.

A Happy Poem for Nicole

2006-01-10T22:10:00.000-05:00

Nicole griped about how depressing “Near Death Experience” was, she even threatened to put me on suicide watch. I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I am not depressed and that poem is rather hopeful—at least I think. (And no, I have not had a near death experience myself.)

So in response to her pissing and moaning, I bring you all my most exquisite work to date. The Biblical and Greek allusions in it are so well hidden that they will never be unearthed. The rhyme scheme is utterly so complicated that it seems completely practical. The scansion…well I honestly still don’t know what scansion is. Regardless, here is my epic masterpiece, the one that sets the standard for all my poems that follow:

A Happy Poem
For Nicole

I’ll write of roses
and pink or blue skies!
Of endless wild rainbows
and sparkling bright eyes!

Give me soft blankets
and a green rolling field!
A sunset or sunrise
for my picnic to yield!

Newborn puppies!
A first kiss!
Happiness—no sadness—
infinite bliss!

Let’s blemish truth
with tan concealer!
Let’s live a happy poem
until it gets realer!

Near Death Experience

2006-01-08T23:01:00.000-05:00

Near Death Experience

I was expecting blackness
but my hands push up
on the rusty and damp
heavy metal slab
until a crescent of light forms
and grows into a full moon
while countless voices pour in.

I slide it across the pavement
and raise myself up—
I could always do at least
one spontaneous pull-up
back there on earth—
and find myself in the crowd.

They’re all bronzed or pale,
There are women, there are men,
there is muscle, there is flab,
but there are no clothes.

Sweat flows from my palms
under the warm orange sky
as I push my way through the crowd,
frantically searching for someone.

Who? Who is it I’m looking for?
The crowd’s laughing, talking, crying,
Some are hugging, some are just still,
but nothing strikes me greater than the
mother and small boy holding hands
with their train tickets dangling
between their fingers like fresh fish.

The boy points ahead, behind me,
and I smile at the sight of you
leaning across the oak desk,
with a cigarette in your right hand
waving like your elbow’s flag,
making casual conversation
with St. Peter laughing at your every word.

But as you turn to me the
mistake of my arrival is caught
and the manhole opens beneath,
plummeting me back to my
warm and blanketed body
that is now calmed by the reassurance
that you’re still holding up (even the line)
just fine.

The Price of Genius

2006-01-04T23:56:00.000-05:00

I had to stop myself from punching the cashier at “Brian’s Books” today when she told me that my total for two books was $236.27. Algebra and Spanish 102, the latter of which was a $152 chunk of that total.

It’s hard to let go of money that quick, especially when you’re left with so little after your card is swiped and the perky girl squeaks, “Have a good day!”

Luckily there’s the Amazon.com Marketplace where I found my American Civilizations book for a small amount (relatively speaking).

This is my second round of buying textbooks and many around me don’t seem to take me seriously when I tell them how expensive it is. Last fall my books altogether cost just as much as two this semester. It is quite outrageous. So one can imagine my frustration when I told my step-mom that all I wanted for Christmas was some money to help pay for them and she refused.

Buying textbooks is like signing on the dotted line. It’s your last spending activity—after getting accepted to the school, after paying the tuition—that drains you before the actual semester and expensive activity of living take place. It’s the one activity that has made me ask the question: what’s this all adding up to?

It’s a question many college kids must face when their checking account is nearing zero and they don’t know how they’re going to pay for gas to get to class on Monday. I always nearly choke on my pride before asking my parents for money. I count change and check crevices in my wallet.

And money is the last thing we should all have to worry about. We have classes to focus on! We have jobs! But the world seems to knock our heads before the semester starts and make things a little more difficult.

What is this all adding up to? Will this endless stream of cash going in and out of my checking account eventually lead to a steady pool? Will there be a day when I get paid by a job in the field that I’m majoring? Is it all worth the effort; is it all worth being broke for weeks at a time? Is it really all going to add up?

Yes.

That’s the one word we can count on. Otherwise, we’d be a bunch of cynical assholes. We’ll all get our graphic design jobs, our teaching jobs…or maybe even some of us will one day live it up in Chicago with our magazine office around the block.

But until then college kids like me are stuck paying $152 dollars so when asked, “¿Hablas espanol?” we can respond with a nod and a little wave of our hand signaling mediocrity as we apologetically say, “Poco.”

Non-alcoholic Resolutions

2006-01-02T00:58:00.000-05:00

I have five identical 1MX shirts from Express Men in my closet now. They’re all button-ups, all smalls, and all cost me $19.99. The only thing they don’t have in common is their relative age to one another and, most importantly, their color. Theoretically, if I actually felt like ironing them every Sunday night (the designated laundry-doing night) I could wear one of the beautiful shirts on every business day. Blue Mondays, Orange Tuesdays, Brown Wednesdays, Red Thursdays, and Fuchsia Fridays (I’m told it’s fuchsia—but it may be some other color, but for the sake of alliteration it’s fuchsia).

Perhaps that will be one of my New Year’s resolutions: to wear those shirts for one week straight.

I obviously don’t take resolutions very seriously. For example, Nicole and I just rattled them off to each other in our nightly phone conversation. Hers included taking better care of herself, exercising more, eating healthier. Mine began, of course, with me listing the various personal writings projects I’ve burdened myself with completing: the poetry collection, the next book, the other next book… Then I proclaimed I would save more money, get some action, and that I need to pay off my credit card debt! Why not read more too?

Then it occurred to me as I was hanging up those multicolored identical shirts in my closet, dancing to Madonna with my iPod plugged into my ears, that I don’t really have to even find it necessary to consider making resolutions. My resolutions are like St. Julian’s—that fake wine. They’re non-alcoholic, but the cork still flies off and the carpet somehow still gets stained. All talk, no buzz; they just fail anyway. Look at 2005. That year was absolutely nuts, even filled to the brim with oddball events, but there was no period of daylight where I joined a gym or gave up my morning Diet Coke. There will never be a day in hell cold enough where I do either of those activities.

2005 shouldn’t be discredited; it was an overall good year. In comparison with others, however, it just doesn’t fit in—like Martha Stewart’s Apprentice. So there’s always these next 525,600 minutes where I won’t find any time to clean my bathroom, joining a gym will elude my budget, saving will become impossible, and giving up caffeine will seem as impossible as finishing that seven page paper due in seven hours. But I’ll have those 1MX shirts for every business day of the week, and with any luck after plenty more $19.99 sales this year I’ll have one for every day of the week…and them some.

Nineteen

2005-12-31T00:22:00.000-05:00

I watched my cell phone change from 11:59 p.m., Friday, December 30th, to 12:00 a.m., Saturday, December 31st. I did this by continually clicking the volume button on the side, which lights up the outer LCD for a few seconds to show the time. My belly full of Triscuits, I set down my book and enjoyed a cherry Tootsie Pop. Happy birthday to me.

I am doing what I want, here in my pajamas. This is ideal compared to the chaos of the party coming tomorrow night. Who knows how that will all work out. But right now, with the taste of cherry still on my tongue, I feel as though everything will work out. There’s something funny about checking off another year. Nineteen: the last year of my teens.

It’s fun to reflect on your life with a Tootsie Pop while lying on your couch in pajamas. If just for a few moments, if just during the first minutes of your birthday. I realized all the effort it has taken to get me here, to this lazy position on this couch, holding a book in one hand and a sucker in the other. Think of everything that has happened to you. Yeah, that’s intense. From your first breath to scraping your knees to one of a billion raindrops clinging onto your shirt.

Yet somehow I feel there’s much more to come—I’m content with this idea. There’s so much more to live through, to barely make it through, and sometimes, just sometimes, to plow through with the confidence of one who has lived all his life with barely little of it only to suddenly find mounds of it hidden in his gut.

So rejoice in knowing that I, Gregory Michael Schumaker, have been allowed by the gracious hands of fate, the mysterious inner workings of the universe, and the fickle strings of time to spend at least just another year with all of you. I’ll feel the same in return.

Happy New Year!

Christmas #18

2005-12-25T17:31:00.000-05:00

I could really care less if a boy named Jesus Christ was actually born a little over two thousand years ago today. In fact I know he definitely wasn’t born on this day. But his followers were strong enough to name this day in honor of him, and all in all they did a pretty good job stealing it from the doomed sun worshippers. Look at what Christmas has become. Stores sell out of mostly everything. People go into debt. Couples scour store after store searching for the one thing that is equivalent to their love for their significant other—of course they’ll never find it. Herds load into churches, many of them absent for most of the year. Folks bust out bibles; some stations strictly play holiday songs. Families find themselves together, whether they like it or not. They find themselves enjoying the company, whether they wanted to like it or not.

This is me on Christmas. Reading The Time Traveler’s Wife, sipping a bottle of water, stealing intermittent snacks from upstairs. I’ve tackled all the phone calls, all of the text messages—including an unexpected one as I was seconds away from full sleep, as they always occurred earlier in the fall. It was almost bittersweet. Of course, I’ve seen all of my family by now: Nicole and her mom, my grandparents along with my mom and step-dad, and today my dad and step-mom, my sister and the soon-to-be-although-not-officially brother-in-law. Tonight I’ll be seeing a movie with my brother Alex. You see everyone, the everyday family to text messages from classmates and former somethings. That I’m alone at this moment, reading an awesome book, doesn’t bother me one bit. Okay, maybe a little—

But it’s holidays like this, even if you’re like me and think the Bible makes mediocre mythology compared to Greek, that allow you too see everyone, to open up, to just be intermingled with everyone for a brief period of forty-eight hours. That little baby Jesus had everyone around him at his birth, but sooner or later the three wise men had to get packing—and so it goes today. We are all one big web that gets bunched up on this day. It can be stressful, it can be enjoyable, but we all seem to relax knowing that in six days the vicious year will be over and another clean slate will begin. Hangovers and tax refunds for everyone. That web will expand, maybe unravel in places, and the New Year will bring more chaos and disorder, but there will be another one of these days in there.

And many more opportunities to hear our favorite Paul McCartney song.

Happy whatever you do today.

Holiday Poem

2005-12-24T17:40:00.000-05:00

This is an older one I have dug up for Christmas Eve…

The Holiday Poem

I awoke surrounded by falling snow,
Lying about an angel made hours before.

My head throbbed from the attack of Irish Cream,
This stunning hangover seemingly a dream.

My sister didn’t like her new Barbie,
Telling me this after counting the years since she turned twenty.

The Christmas tree went ablaze,
Following the menorah’s twelfth lighting,

As my brother choked on those hazardous parts
The package of his gift boasted so much about.

Mother burnt the turkey
As Bob cursed the game,

And finally I chugged down the escape in frenzy—
On the Origin of Species sitting open in my lap,

Thinking perhaps my holiday wouldn’t have been so straining
If your “Merry Christmas!” hadn’t burdened me so early.

Good Conversation

2005-12-24T03:04:00.000-05:00

Simple poems are my new thing…

Good Conversation

I had to resist the urge
to highlight all our words
typed to one another
over this world wide web
and save it in Word
for some later viewing
so I could laugh on days
that are less bright than now
and remember if only
this one good conversation
I completely resist from
actually keeping anywhere
but in the pages of
my dim librarian mind.

Missy's News

2005-12-20T02:47:00.000-05:00

Wrote this while babysitting my mom’s dog. So I’ll share it.

Missy’s News

Springing to life and shouting out barks
after someone opened and closed the front door
I yelled at her to stop until her tail
shamefully crawled between her legs and
her ears folded around her head,
ready to hang upside-down in a dark cave.
She moped back to her little bed,
still growling so as to notify the spiders and mice
that the big guy had opened and closed
the front door at 9:20 a.m. this morning—
no belongings were taken or stolen.
Then after my final “Shh!” before falling back asleep
she continued to whisper little growls and moans
to the ghosts that sat crouched around her,
eager Indians and hippies and kids
growing wide-eyed at the surprising news
that she was so determined to deliver.

Another Saturday Night

2005-12-18T00:58:00.000-05:00

I said earlier that I now truly know what real exhaustion feels like. Now I know what real relief is. The past few months have just been outrageous. Unlike anything I’ve ever lived before. And it’s a good feeling to be spit out with both feet landing firmly on the ground.

Now there are a few things I’m going to try and focus on over the next three weeks:

Quitting caffeine. I do not need it. Listen to me people.

Reading. Relentlessly. I’ve already got two books down. A Short History of Nearly Everything (very interesting) and A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham (he wrote The Hours, and now this book is another one of my favorites).

Getting together my poetry collection. Oh boy.

Writing something.

Seeing everyone and enjoying their company in a state of metaphysical love and bliss unlike any other time before.

Having the best birthday/New Year’s party yet.

And there’s working…I guess.

Now bring on the food and the gifts. The holiday season has truly begun, for tonight I watched Love Actually…and the holiday season doesn’t truly kick-off until one has watched that film and been reminded how lonely they truly are.

Dogs and Humans

2005-12-15T20:51:00.000-05:00

A recent observation of mine led to this.

Dogs and Humans

To satisfy a dog:
Throw a ball.
Scratch their ears.
Scratch their belly.
Feed them.

To satisfy a human:
Offer undying love.
Scratch their ears.
Scratch their belly.
Feed them.

Saturday Night

2005-12-10T23:57:00.000-05:00

The past few days have been great to me, save for the minor car accident.

For the first time in several months I'm feeling quite alright.

How are you?

Ashes

2005-12-07T22:31:00.000-05:00

Here it finally is…the sequel of sorts to “Second Hand Smoke,” I’m thinking this one might conclude the collection of poems that I’m going to put together sometime soon…

Ashes

I wear a patch now—
I chew gum.
Anything to convince my mind
Your scent’s unneeded.

I had withdrawals
And those relapses,
But now you’re just ashes
In that blue ceramic tray—

Still slowly burning,
Rising up and around
In one final line
Of second hand smoke

That I briefly inhale
With little enthusiasm
Behind an unquenchable thirst
For something less vapid.

Our Office is Currently Closed

2005-12-05T23:39:00.000-05:00

I can now say I know the meaning of true, real, actual exhaustion.

We'll be back soon.

-Mgmt.

Scratch the Ice

2005-12-01T21:19:00.000-05:00

Came up with this on the cold, dangerous, long ride home from the good old GVSU tonight…

Scratch the Ice

I’d rather just scratch the ice of brilliance
And not find a way to cut a hole
In order to dive underneath
And swim with the fishes,
Meditate with the seaweed,
Or sing with the clams—
Ruining all communications
With the other guys up above
Digging their fingernails and ice picks
Into the frozen slab that separates us,
Little clanks, taps, and thuds
Our only simple means of communication.

Autographs

2005-11-29T22:17:00.000-05:00

I signed five copies of my book today for my mother and her various friends. It was quite strange, yet strangely fulfilling. I got all excited!

I came to the conclusion today that I do indeed have a severe addiction to caffeine. I'll work on that in three weeks...when the semester's over.

Nicole gave me a vintage Dior jacket for Christmas. It really was the best gift ever! Applause for my other half!

And I'm spent. Good night, and good luck.

Looking for Ghosts in Mirrors

2005-11-27T01:11:00.000-05:00

I just wrote this!

Looking for Ghosts in Mirrors

Looking for ghosts in mirrors—
It’s always the same one—
I expect some unfamiliar face to show up,
Curiously staring back at me.

Not so I can jump or scream,
Turn and flee to another room,
But so that I can calmly walk up
To whoever it may be that has

Decided to drop by at 1:47 a.m.,
And politely ask them if are there
Other mirrors on the other side
Of this wall, is the wall the same color

Over there in the afterlife?
Or do they continuously check
The same exact mirror every night,
Like me, hoping that eventually

A stranger will appear before them
And answer their questions
Before they turn off the hall light
And crawl into their warm bed?

Watching the World Go By

2005-11-25T23:43:00.000-05:00

Watching the World Go By

My mother always tells me,
When she’s talking about
When I was just a baby,
How I would simply sit
And watch the world go by.

I think of that now,
Gently staring out this window
Watching the clock tower
Lynch minute after minute
For the gentry to see,
Wondering what it must
Have been like, being my mother,
Wondering if it was a problem
Or some damn good luck
That I wasn’t screaming.

Now eighteen years later,
I think with amazement,
I can still just sit down
And watch the world go by,
Albeit with the heavy lines of experience
Slung under my eyes—
The hammocks as marriage beds
Of stress and sleep uneven.

But not only can I watch it!
Ah, I can feel it! Hear it!
More so today than early on
In my minute t-shirt and jeans
When my eyes were but plankton
Swimming in a sea of infinite depth.

Thankfulness

2005-11-23T23:45:00.000-05:00

There’s always a time to collect your thoughts and feel truly thankful for the things you have. That was tonight. Now, despite my left hand’s index finger’s under-the-nail injury that’s causing an immense amount of pain with each tap of these keys, I am going to casually list them off in the tackiest way—like fourth grade.

I am thankful for this laptop despite the debt it put me into. With this laptop I can casually spread out on my couch and type what I want to, when I want to…but mainly surf the web and look at people on Facebook.

I am thankful for my cell phone and the Sprint PCS network. Without it I would not be able to have my nightly phone call with Nicole, who I am extremely thankful for as well because she apparently has the greatest Christmas gift for me waiting at her apartment. And for that I am excited.

I am thankful for Sex & the City five nights a week on FOX 17. Enough said.

I am thankful that my book has sold tens of copies and that my authorial career has churned a tiny profit. I am thankful that after I finish this little column, which I’m using as warm-up, I’m going to take a stab at a chapter in something along the lines of a sequel. I am thankful for my writing voice…and my real voice (I am told it is rather “sultry”).

I am thankful for my extended family that will greet me tomorrow for the first time since May. I am thankful for the friends I see often, and more for those I don’t. I am thankful for it all, for school, for the library…for Billy Collins and a Gatorade in a window on the third floor.

And I am thankful for the last line as well, for they always usually lead to another first.

Thank You Ashley

2005-11-21T20:42:00.000-05:00

(And everyone else)

For buying my book.

Sincerely,
The Fabulous Author

Thank You Jenny

2005-11-21T00:27:00.000-05:00

For buying my book.

My Brain Hurts

2005-11-19T00:40:00.000-05:00

It's an all time record! Two long essay papers on two very different subjects in one very long day!

The day began with me waking up early so I could get Lorenzo's ass to class on time. That's the last time I wake up at six in the morning ever again. Apparently, the whole world turns on you when you wake up before the sun is up. For example, all of my car's doors were frozen shut and I couldn't get to my parking pass, so we had to muster up some change on campus, enough for three hours and twenty-five minutes of visitor parking. That's how deep our dedication is as students.

The title of my politics paper is "Authoritarianism in a Democratic Dress." Who wouldn't love to read that? The title of my Shakespeare paper on Richard III is a little less artistic: "Essay Assignment #2." I am a master of the language arts!

That's all you're getting tonight.

The Death of November 17

2005-11-17T22:57:00.000-05:00

Written on the Zumberge Library’s third floor, per my usual Thursday evening tradition of sitting in the southwest window of the third floor, watching the sun go down and reading before my politics class:

The Death of November 17, 2005

I want to capture this moment!
This moment right now!
When the sun looks like a distant fire
Over the horizon—
Like Chicago’s on fire again—
Yellow melting into red and pink
Like segments of those sour gummy worms,
Being extinguished by the icy
Tank of a cloud that is rolling
Over it and tossing down its frozen ash—
An anti-volcanic eruption from the sky
Capable of turning the source of
All life into a ball of black ash—
On this day, November 17, 2005,
At sunset, 5:23 p.m.

Today's Two Cents

2005-11-16T20:30:00.000-05:00

"Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough."

- George Bernard Shaw

Save Plumpy

2005-11-14T22:56:00.000-05:00

Nicole and I have this new tradition started. Every Sunday night during the commercial breaks of Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy we usually call each other, having quick four minute conversations that look something like this:
     “OH MY GOD.”
     More inaudible exclamations and laughter.
     “He just threw that guy off the bridge!”
     “Can you believe it!?”
     “This is seriously like the best two hours on television.”
     “I know. Oh my god.”
     “Okay, show’s back on gotta go. Love you bye.”
     “Bye!”
     Click.
And this is perfectly acceptable behavior between two long distance best friends who appreciate the American Broadcasting Company’s Sunday night lineup.
     However, last night at around 11:30 p.m., post the chaos that was DH and GA, I was calmly reading Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko for Brit Lit while waiting for a load of laundry to finish when my phone rang. It was Nicole.
     “Oh my God Greg, guess what I just found out.”
     Holding the phone to my ear a couple thousand things popped up. Her tone of voice sounded quite upset. Perhaps her mom’s left town, I thought, or her roommate has a crazy lesbian crush on her. Of course I couldn’t have guessed the next words that would come out of her mouth. No one could. Because they were strictly, uniquely, Nicole…
     “What?” I asked, slightly concerned, setting down my book.
     “You ever play Candy Land when you were younger, back in elementary school?”
     “Yes,” I said, smiling with relief, preparing for the absurdities that I knew were about to take place on this phone call.
     “You remember Plumpy? The plumb guy?”
     “Sure.”
     “They got rid of him! They replaced him with some ginger whore who lives in some ginger tree! CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT!?”
     Of course I couldn’t respond right away because the phone had fallen from my hand and I was crippled over in laughter. “That’s just horrendous!” I exclaimed after regaining the ability to talk.
     “I know! My entire childhood down the drain! They got rid of the only guy in Candy Land who promotes healthy eating! He’s giving out plumbs! And now he’s out of a job.”
     Minutes later Nicole and I had established a plan that would stretch nationwide to bring back Plumpy. The Save Plumpy campaign. T-shirts, colored wristbands (“Plumpy Strong” anyone?) and other various ideas were concocted.
     And then it occurred to me. If we had just used all that brain power for a cause that was actually real and just, that is actually a real issue in the world, we could have possibly done something good.
     Scratch that. Save Plumpy!

This Could All...

2005-11-09T16:38:00.000-05:00

This Could All Be Worth Something Someday

If one man’s
Trash
Is another man’s
Treasure,

Then this earth
Could all be worth
Something
Someday.

A Proclamation

2005-11-06T23:45:00.000-05:00

I love Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy. Sunday 9-11 p.m. is the greatest two-hour block of the week (especially with my Nicole calling during commercial breaks).

I should be reading Richard III.

I should be.

You Missed Out on a Good Thing

2005-11-05T18:21:00.000-05:00

Thanks to everyone and your crazy interest in my book! (Especially to my mom, who has taken the initiative to become my personal representative and tell anyone about the thing.) Alas, I must continue on with the blogging. So today I bring my latest poem…a venting of sorts…

You Missed Out on a Good Thing

The following’s going to sound conceited,
But if more people thought like I do
Then we wouldn’t have so many suicides.

You missed out on a good thing.
I answered your late night calls—
Even that one at five in the morning.

I even went as far as to think,
As I smiled at you one morning,
How could anyone hurt you?

Now I have the answer to that,
Now that you’ve gone without reason
And missed out on a good thing.

Now I know my skin’s not perfect and tan,
And I know that I can get too smart,
And I know that I’m not too wealthy—

But here inside was an opportunity grand,
Hoping for just a friendship, nothing more,
But you missed out on a good thing.

Get the Story

2005-11-01T12:06:00.000-05:00

The Story of Gene Stoughton that is.

Get it here.

Here's a preview of the prologue:

The wooden picket fence that surrounded him gave a sort of blanketed comfort. He felt, as he stood in a tiny glistening pool for ages three to seven, as if nothing could ever enter the back yard of his home except for the sun and squirrels. Multi-colored whales danced around the sides of the inflatable puddle as he splashed and submerged his body, save for his tiny head, into the blanket of water. He was hoping the slimy sunscreen his mother had slathered onto him would somehow wash off.

He finally slid his entire body under the water and felt calm as his hair wavered weightlessly as tall grass blows on Midwestern plains. He opened his eyes with wonder and watched one tiny strand of that dark red hair float across his vision. Strangely able to hold his breath for an extended time, he admired the blurred blue skies, obscured white clouds, and greener than green leaves dancing above him.

Suddenly a bird of sorts flew overhead; everything went dark, and…a scream.

Meredith Stoughton was cleaning dishes contently and cautiously glancing through the window above the sink below her every other second to make sure her son, Gene, was safe in the children’s pool she had bought him. He was so excited when she brought the toy home that she didn’t regret favoring it over a cashmere sweater at her favorite discount store. She loved to make him smile, it kept them both happy. The two of them had to rely on each other, for beside the Jamaican neighbors, they really had no one else.

She dropped the glass she was rinsing into the sudsy basin and was outside to Gene less than a moment after she heard his unfamiliar scream. Her hand covered her gaping mouth as her chin protruded below—her eyes open wide and eyebrows inquisitive at the site before her. She immediately asked, in a panicked tone, “Baby are you okay? What happened?” What the hell?

Gene looked at her with his chin quivering and body shivering, eyes crying, all too stunned to respond. Meredith grabbed his blue towel, with a cartoon character resembling a starfish on it, and wrapped it around him. She picked him up out of the pool and set him down on the edge of the nearby deck, proceeding to wipe him off and examine every inch of his small frame.

“Can you see alright?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, wiping his eyelids clearly. He sniffled from his crying.

“Can you hear good?”

“Yeah…”

“Did you fall?”

“No.”

“Did you get cut, bitten?”

“No…”

“Are you hurt anywhere Gene?” she asked, frustrated, desperate to find an answer.

“No,” he said, sounding almost shocked himself.

She put her hand on her hip. “Then what in the world is going on?”

“I don’t know, but I want to get this off me!” he shouted impatiently.

“Yeah, let’s get you into the bath,” she conceded, picking him up in her arms. The sacrifices a mother makes, she thought as the fluid that covered him rubbed from his skin onto her white t-shirt, what a great example I am at the moment.

She turned on the warm water and had Gene hop in. She threw the now red dyed towel into the washing machine in the room next to the bath, sighing as she eyed the trail of red drips running all the way from the side of the bathtub, along the floor’s white tiles, across the brown carpet, out the back door, across the wooden deck, speckled on the green grass, and finally ending in the pool itself. She would later, while quietly watching the summer sun set in the warm breeze, stare anxiously at the pool from a patio chair she was cuddled in, wondering exactly how to dispose of a children’s pool sized vat of blood.

Life = Temp. Good

2005-10-30T23:23:00.000-05:00

Happy anniversary to my mom. Six years of love.

She was in such a good mood today that she gave me money to buy shoes. And there is nothing that will ever make me happier than free, surprising, money that will buy me nice things. There is nothing.

This was a great weekend. The Weather Man was good. Rachael's French/Freedom dip was good. Rachael's mom going on about how much I resembled Peter Gabriel was strange. The club with Ashley was thrilling. Being with Nicole and Shavon and Mike was just hilarious. I love Ben Folds.

The book's out Tuesday. The link will be up then. Relax Bob.

A Picture Share!

2005-10-29T02:11:00.000-04:00

This girl is a bad driver.

Roll Credits

2005-10-27T23:09:00.000-04:00

This is a contender for the last poem in the big old collection, Second Hand Smoke, that I’m aiming to have ready in January… Yeah, I wrote it today.

Roll Credits

Walking across this bridge
That someone jumped off—
Willing himself to somehow
Breath his last breaths
Atop these metal rusty rails—
I smile in knowing
That it wasn’t me;
I’m still alive,
I’m still exhaling
Warm puffs of smoke
In this frigid morning air,
Thinking of that jazz song,
And how the cello sounds like
The song of a thousand souls.

Zoom out from these fingers,
Tapping this railing,
Zoom out above the city blocks,
Until the land’s but a quilt.
Zoom out until it’s blue and green,
And white streams swirl about,
Zoom out until the air’s too thin…
Until gravity gives way.

Zoom out—
Fade into
The black.
Zoom out,
Roll credits.

Finalizing the Manuscript

2005-10-26T22:20:00.000-04:00

I am sick of this book.

I am sick of this book.

I am sick of this godforsaken book.

...But I did manage to figure out that chapter twelve, "Over the Rainbow," can be read in just about the same time as it takes for Judy Garland to sing the song (live at Carnegie Hall of course).

I will finish this book. Tonight. It is finished tonight.

I am my own worst critic.

My Other Half

2005-10-24T23:49:00.000-04:00

On the occasion that it is October 24th, a date which has no real significance, I promised Nicole over the phone a few hours ago to post my poem that I wrote for her. Sorry woman, I couldn’t find a good photo of you on this computer.

My Other Half
For Nicole

We cripple each other with laughter
From jokes only we understand –
Allude to epic problems and stories
That actually never happened.

We rewrite history and current events
To make our lives more hilarious;
No small error or fashion mistake
From our waiting eyes can escape.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s to The Hours,
We always have the best of taste;
Flipping through Vogue and People,
Watching four TV shows at once.

Christmas comes every November 29,
The gifts just cannot wait!
Just like expensive trips to Target
Are simply commonplace.

And while to dissect all of these lines
Will be your mission,
Please note that I didn’t list
Your countless indiscretions!

My sister and my “lovah” supreme,
Ms. Fabulous based on a true story,
You’ll always be my other half
In a marriage of constant adultery.

For Judy

2005-10-22T12:48:00.000-04:00

For Judy, On This Certain Day in Memory of Her Life

I was prepared for the phone call,
Two years ago,
On my way to work,
Behind the wheel,
My phone beeping to life
With my mother’s words of your death.

I kept my eyes on the road
And sorrowfully clocked in—
I had seen you die the night before,
With every laborious breath
Looking to be your last,
In between melted ice cream
And our friendly conversation.

Standing in the kitchen
Of that house that night,
Away from the heavy ailing glow
Of the dining room’s yellow light,
Connecting the dots between
Refrigerator magnets,
I almost broke down—
But you wouldn’t let me.

I wasn’t prepared for how boring
The yearly family reunion would become,
Sitting amongst my relatives, your relatives,
And feeling inside, and agreeing
With my sister on the ride home,
That something was missing.
Your soul was missing, your laugh,
Your wit, your wisdom, and watchful eyes—
Your optimism.

Perhaps it was there,
Amongst the green summer leaves
Of the humid and sunny Newaygo,
But you lacked any prominence,
The party was without subject,
Silenced by loss,
Lacking its star.

I was prepared for your passing,
But not for your death.