The New Reebs Revolution.

I am the human sneaker wave. I'm the guy you kissed at that party years ago; what's his name? I'm the quiet freak in the last row of the classroom, disproportionate to his desk. The one who never took his eyes off the pool felt at the bar. Remember that guy who held your hair back while you threw up? That was me. Or that guy in traffic holding a conversation with himself? Yep. I bagged your groceries once. I didn't ask; I knew you wanted plastic...

I was an unhappy janitor, paralegal assistant, diligent gardener, nursery hand, introverted biologist, chatty barista, warehouse clown, promiscuous server, afterschool human jungle gym, church donation dude, sexy-ass delivery guy, professional birdwatcher. I got the data, then i analyzed it. I crossed the t's, dotted the i's. I signed on the line, i served, i filed... but never, was it hand-to-mouth.

The New Reebs Revolution is a 1-step program. It's a theory i've developed for explaining a thoroughly baseless existence, rooted in the depths of underachievement. It recently struck me that i'm not existing and doing with a sense of contribution or purpose. Often times there's no reason; not even my dear desire to do it (though i usually enjoy and appreciate my present state of being). Rather, i am guided by whim and ethereal command.

Since i have rarely found myself in a financial fix, or otherwise jonesed the carpet for dislocated rocks... i've developed a new expedient for the mundane world of business and its employment: the hand-to-mind existence. Wouldn't it be terribly depressing if one only worked for the money? Work should be even more than the experience itself. It's the combination of absurdity, sure effort, and accomplishment; beginning the task and the satisfaction of being part to true chronology in completion. It's the act of taking the ridiculous (my life) and alchemically making gold of it.

In Response To Everyone...

{Nearing the podium the house lights raise to meet my eyes. A massive arch of light framed above the stage glints downward. The crowd has become silhouette, anonymous shadows seated beyond the stage. I can hear their tenebrous shuffles and murmers. My fingertips find the microphone before me and lightly tap a digital heartbeat. My fingers then reach toward the breast pocket of my shirt. They unfold a piece of paper neatly scrawled with a farewell speech.}

I guess i'm dead. And despite my steadfast belief that our spirit follows its corporeal form above and below ground... here i am.

Jesse: [Clears throat] Um, hello everyone [the four people that read this shit]. Thank you for coming. I would like all of you to feel free, at any time, to question or comment on anything i've said, or am about to say. To begin, i'd like to answer a few questions posed before my stylish exit from the secular life i was leading. Yes, Margie in the front row.

Margie: Were you really epically falling in and out of love at 17?

Jesse: Notwithstanding an enormous influx of viable drugs previously, yes... i believe i was. We led a healthy life together and meticulously studied food labels. Wholesome and whole-grain have a similar ring, don't they?
---
Andrew: Is there really any reason to get bombed out of your gourd by yourself?

Jesse: From time to time, yes. But one needs to get bombed on only the finest. This forces moderation by sheer inability to afford frequent debauchery, as well as solves the problem of poor taste and wicked hangovers from cheap liquor.
---
Manita: Do you ever plan to not make any plans in an attempt to be present?

Jesse: Yes, but it rarely works in the Western World. The way i feel, there's plenty of time for everything, including fruitless planning. What ever happened to that gig for being a Seahawks massage therapist? You'd get to meet the Seattle SeaGals...
---
Dustin: Why do the Seahawks suck so bad this year? And do you feel in any way attached to their failure?

Jesse: They suck because they struggle with putting points on the board, and also find it difficult to stop opponents from doing the same. And yes, their failure resonates deeply with me. We are bound like Pepsi and diabetes.
---
Benjamin: Remember when i toasted you on the Chinese New Year in San Francisco, that you may not hold any more grudges? How's that working out for you?

Jesse: Well, it's going pretty well. I only have one now and i'm working real hard on it...
---
Anne: Do you love Jesus?

Jesse: I had to answer that question for at least a decade. Next question please... Yes, the old man in the back row.
---
Peter: Did you see the light?

Jesse: No, not until ten in the morning. And then it set at half past two. Alaskan winters...

TO BE CONTINUED...

The Impossible Dissolution of Love.

I had a vivid dream this morning sometime nearing the five o'clock hour. It was haunting and bittersweet and packed more punch than Hawaii, more spike than a game of beach volley, and more genuine pain than a real heartache. How about contemplating that between crunches of 5 a.m. raisin bran and a wicked strong cup of coffee. What the hell brought it on?

About seven years ago i fell in love with a woman and i said some things that commited me to a cause, intended an eternity between us. We swore up and down and everything we mused, except the words near the end, didn't come to pass. It took a long time to heal but as sure as a Manhatten martini costs ten bucks, the day came.

Seems that certain promises have a residual, lasting effect. I imagine it has a lot to do with actually meaning it or not. And i'm guilty of bona fide sincerity in this case; i meant every goddamned word. Perhaps for this reason it haunts me still. Does every one of us have a certain ghost that visits us without warning? At one point my ghost visited every night for three months running. She has the face of an angel and brings me to my knees. She dissolves hope and tears at my insides. And i awake embittered, embattled to panic, and that's it... I hadn't seen her in half a year, until this morning.

There were those books we were reading. The ones with Carlos and his Yaqui teacher Juan. The story goes: the teacher and pupil were seated near twilight on the back porch looking out toward the stretching Sonoran desert. The pupil was getting tore up on a bottle of tequila but failed to mention that in his book. Around this time the teacher revealed the presence of a certain being never identified by science: the 'mud shadow.' It could be viewed best at dusk, a breathless silhouette leaping on the eye's periphery. What does this being do? asked the young pupil. Well, answered the teacher, it preys on us. "We are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly because we are their sustenance." At this point the teacher laughed and laughed, while the student grew uneasy (and strangely infuriated) by this information. The teacher further explained that it would be ridiculous, and arrogant, to posit human beings atop the food chain. That, in fact, we ourselves have a predator that rear us as "chickens in chicken coops." And, that daily we are consumed in our places of work, school, or church. And nightly, in our very beds, in our homes, in our dreams.

I have always had a difficult time explaining my ghost in terms of a self-projected phantom, something i create in dream and exploit myself with. That just doesn't work for me. This other theory works better, but also falls short by its sheer scope of science fiction. Perhaps that's also why i kind of dig it. I know some jerkoff psychiatrist could have a hayday on this stuff.

Whatever the case, it forces me to realize that words hold physical strength. That they create and form that which we cannot see. And, the syntax of sentence and phrase, its due meaning, and reciprocation thereof can liberate or bind the speaker. Unspoken word: thought, can bring the same result. Hence, the promise even now i cannot break...


Sonora near the border...

"Do you like to gamble, Eddie? Gamble money on pool games?"
-Minnesota Fats, The Hustler

In from the bath...

In the past weeks i've taken to the bath with an increasing urgency. I have begun daydreaming of it at work... the nearing moment when i can draw hot water, shed my clothes, and grab a book. I don't remember such a feverish desire for submersion since i was young, pushing yellow ducks across the surface or watching as technicolor sponges wax into dinosaur shapes (remember those? fucking amazing shit...).

It's the release of breath as i inch my body beneath the surface. The water drawn to redden the skin, almost burn. And then feet up and hearing that hollow ring of surrounding tile and lately the faint murmur of Dvořák's piano trios from the other room (my chosen bathing music~ highly recommended).

In the bath i realize so many things about myself. For one, i'm incredibly tall... how far away my feet are! And skin still tanned from a season or two ago, in the tall ponderosa pines of Idaho. The smooth hairless patches above my knees where my pants have worn the skin, from legs pumping like pistons aboard my bike. That my voice can do amazing things in this private studio of watery reverbration and human echolocation. Or how easy it is to turn everything off, i mean every goddamned voice that jaws throughout the day... they have no place in the bath.

And then i've had enough silence and i let the voices in... thinking of Gary Snyder's The Bath, and discarding that i hum the very best bath song ever written, perhaps ever sung. Bilbo Baggin's Bath Song:

Sing hey! for the bath at close of day
that washes the weary mud away!
A loon is he that will not sing:
O! Water Hot is a noble thing!

O! Sweet is the sound of falling rain,
and the brook that leaps from hill to plain;
but better than rain or rippling streams,
is Water Hot that smokes and steams.

O! Water cold we may pour at need
down a thirsty throat, and be glad indeed;
but better is Beer, if drink we lack
and Water Hot poured down the back.

O! Water is fair that leaps on high
in a fountain beneath the sky;
but never did fountain sound so sweet
as splashing Hot Water with my feet!

Amen brother... i feel ya.

Other places, other rooms...

A storm was coming on, the air had cooled and a sharp breeze cut the streets. Up ahead a vacancy sign blinked haphazardly. We'd been walking around Missoula for hours looking for a place to stay. I'd lost track of how many lobbies we'd entered, prices i'd negotiated, and rooms surveyed then dismissed. My girlfriend seemed intent on finding something that Missoula would not offer.

The lady at the front desk gave us the key to a room. We went up a flight of stairs and looked down toward the courtyard. The swimming pool was drained and heavily cracked, collecting paint flecks and maple leaves in its basin. We pushed open the heavy door of our room and stepped inside. It reminded me of an enlarged janitor's closet. An oversized water pipe was fastened along the wall above the bed. The no-smoking sign had been ignored hundred of times, perhaps thousands. I sat down and divided the blinds with my fingertips and looked out at the courtyard again. The place was deserted. A rundown job with a tacky name like The Oasis or Hotel Paradise. I remember a palm tree on the sign and a shabby room that we didn't take.

An argument had started during lunch. We were the only table at this small joint and the undertasked waiter kept checking on us. His boyish good-looks and 90210 spiked hair were enough to make me sick. I was worn thin now realizing we were at the end. In a little while we would return the key and leave another lobby behind. The lady at the front desk would make a slighted comment about questionable elapsed time. I would smile and tell her to get tossed. Part of me would remain in that room, a single meaningful thought preserving in memory four walls and one door.

My whole life has passed thus far in rooms. And each one returns with a thought, an event, a face.
There was the final night on the campaign when John Kerry lost. i went home with a fellow canvaser and we rung some passion from our sad, weary bodies in a fascimile apartment room. The hardlined creations typical of Orlando outskirts; conspecific condos with only numbers to differ one from the next. Dusty popcorn ceiling above us and a hard white light from the street lamp. It cast a barred rectangle of light over our bodies; three a.m.

My first night as a gringo backpacker. Checked in at the Hotel Imperial in San Jose. The cardboard door, blankets washed down to a paper thinness... late night shadows beneath the door, squeaking bedsprings. The realization that i've been alone all my life, but had to check into this hotel to finally realize it.

There was the night in Montreal when Rebekah and i told stories from our bunkbeds. Our small room was painted light blue and i nearly expected a mobile to dangle above my bed. I was up above looking out toward the city while she brushed her hair on the bottom bunk. Low clouds were engulfing the skyscrapers of downtown. The sight reminded me of Batman's Gotham, the clouds eery glow from within, the mosaic of lit rectangles on the building faces.

I'm a sentimental young fool. I can only wonder at what my gerry years will bring. I wonder if my grandkids will listen to this drivel...