The Difference Between Pepsi and Coke (David Lehman)

Can't swim; uses credit cards and pills to combat
intolerable feelings of inadequacy;
Won't admit his dread of boredom, chief impulse behind
numerous marital infidelities;
Looks fat in jeans, mouths cliches with confidence,
breaks mother's plates in fights;
Buys when the market is too high, and panics during
the inevitable descent;
Still, Pop can always tell the subtle difference
between Pepsi and Coke,
Has defined the darkness of red at dawn, memorized
the splash of poppies along
Deserted railway tracks, and opposed the war in Vietnam
months before the students,
Years before the politicians and press; give him
a minute with a road map
And he will solve the mystery of bloodshot eyes;
transport him to mountaintop
And watch him calculate the heaviness and height
of the local heavens;
Needs no prompting to give money to his kids; speaks
French fluently, and tourist German;
Sings Schubert in the shower; plays pinball in Paris;
knows the new maid steals, and forgives her.

cool places to spend/waste time

http://www.thisnext.com/

v. good for holiday shopping
http://www.etsy.com/

careful, this one is addictive
http://freerice.com/

25

I'm sorry to have not written as much. (I don't know exactly to whom I'm apologizing. Whether it's to myself or you reader.) My perfectionism and my reticence to blog about my everyday bullshit keep this place rarely updated. I figure I'll just start typing and see what comes out.

I visited my mom. I have a gnarly cough and a pair of earrings for my efforts. She has a cat. I'm allergic to cats. The more time I spend in her house the shallower my breaths become. It did provide a convenient reason for why I had to leave. The earrings are a family heirloom, brought by my great-grandmother on the boat from Russia. When I was there I put them on, "Wow they're pretty" I said. "Well, you can have them when you're 25" she replied. Pause. "Mom, I am 25" She laughs, "Really?" I think back to my roommate commenting on her forgetting my birthday. "You think because it involved her she would remember"

I am craving fried chicken, sweet plantains, red beans, and yellow rice from the restaurant up the street. So good.

I recently heard a man say that you owe it to yourself to build the best life for yourself possible. I've been rambling on and on in my own life about going back to school. One fear about it is that I wouldn't be a good student. Today I was going through college notes and was shocked to realize that I was a good student.

Okay, I'm gonna go get me some chicken.

loss

I miss my dad today. I've been going through boxes of my parents' stuff, and reading an article on a camp for kids who lost their parents on 9/11.

My dad and I were close. He was the sane one. Flawed, but infinitely better than my mom. She was supposed to die, she was thisclose to tripping off this mortal coil. Somehow she clawed her way back, and in the interim of hospitals after hospital Dad and I became close.

We ate at the Chinese restaurant near Bellevue, he'd get the cashew chicken while I preferred the crispy orange. Even though I was too old for it, I'd sit on his lap and he'd tell me about his time in the war. Every story being one of high jinks, not tragedy. He gently told me that I needed to work harder in school, or else I'd lose my scholarship. He woke us up everyone morning with a hot breakfast, giving me a couple dollars for a snack after school. Money I always spent on my walk to the bus.

There's something unfixable when you crash into mortality at an age too early. When you're family dies in a heart attack, and you're left to call the relatives. When you're 25 and just want to be able to ask your daddy what to do... but he's not there.

12/2006

Her skin is soft, petal thin, folded from years in the sun, receding to showcase her cornflower blue eyes and jutting cheekbones. She was my mother, for awhile. My brother's sister. She tells me I was the best thing to happen to him. And argues when I take the can from her warped hands to open it smoothly.

I’ve just realized that she loves me not because she has to, but because of who I am. This petite spitfire dressed in pastels and khaki, zooming about on her motorized scooter, shocking me with her humor, love, and acceptance.

She is always cold, and I am always warm. I wish I could cup my hand, scoop out some of my heat and leave it with her. I wish I could stay and keep walking her dog, and helping her fold sheets. I wish I could fall into the fields and the wide sky and leave the city behind. Just move the arm of the phonograph but keep the record spinning, no music just the whoosh-whoosh of time passing.

I left. I cried when the dog sulked by the door at the sight of suitcases. I went into airports I'd travelled through so many times before. I carried bags too heavy and breathed air over used. Now I am home wanting to be held and feeling all alone, stroking a wound freshly healed.

Gotta have the funk...

How I feel about my friends...

poor, unfortunate, souls

I'm sorry to have not published* anything in awhile. I've been working on things, but most of the time I leave the house before 9 and don't come back till 12 hours later. This leaves little time to unravel the web of my thinking and weave into something presentable.

It is no help that I've become increasingly critical of my writing as of late.** I consider mining old journals for material, but am scared of what I would find there. Some of those pages are from such painful times that I'm reticent to relieve them in the reading. I think of a friend's post regarding the emotional state of so-called "creative people". In it he relates in interaction with a woman who asks whether creative people are just tortured souls.

Well, I think some pain and anguish in one’s life provides for a heftier mouthful to chew on. Sustenance for the creative machine. Each genuine experience can provide energy and material for creative expression. Maybe the sad thing is that genuine experience is so often cloaked in the guise of pain.


*Blogger's term, not mine.
**I say increasingly, though truth be told I am always critical.