may brought me so much two years in a row. three, even. finally awaking from a nonexistent hometown dream of late-night walks on well-lit streets and the sort of summer drives i only effectively participated in that one time in august before college. i had this vision of a place in the place i was from that's actually more like the street i live on now than anywhere else i've actually been, the way the sidewalks are and the way there could be youths on the porches on warmish spring nights falling asleep in each other's arms with a dream of summer and life to come. maybe of its misfortunes, the potential to get bogged down--

the potential energy of youth. blooming spring (that it sweet, not fleeting, in the words of kevin barnes) or a pessimistic colour wheel with three shades of grey.

baby come home, i miss the sound of the door
your step on the stair's not there to wake me no more
and every day's like christmas day without you
it's cold and there's nothing to do

and it's mighty quiet here now that you're gone
i've been behaving myself for too long
'cause i don't like sleeping
or painting the town on my own
so please
come on home...

-- everything but the girl

home. that's what we called it, because we belong together: in a comfortable bed, in the comfortable confines of the folds of each other's longings. this somewhere, anywhere, here. we built it, are building it, with every three-word affection and late-night phone call; every kiss and every tearful goodbye: the elements of us, of we, of who we are and who we are becoming. our bed at the end of an epic poem.

'our curiosity was blossoming like a rose, we wanted to know, we really wanted to know, all the unknowable things about each other and how we were the same and how we were different, if we even were, maybe nobody is. we wanted to strike lightning in dark waters, to see, if only for a second, the entire world that lives down there, the ten million species in amazing colors and patterns; show us life, now.'

-- miranda july

'the only sound in the room is the sound of their breathing, its rising and falling like a distant sea, the ocean, the water that wraps the earth.'

-- anchee min

we transmit our despair nightly across the vast dark skies of the state. she says that she can open her window and see true darkness, black as the blackest pitch, a darkness settling into the cool country air the breathed life into her youth.

laura was here for the weekend, through the rain, and it was letting up just as she left. raindrops outside were a constant background noise reminding us of the world outside even as we reminded each other that we are each other's whole world. she drove away in the last non-depressing moment of sunday evening: before the sun sets and all is still bathed in a post-rain glow beneath a blue-grey sky.

'during a certain period of our lives, we possess youth.
the rest we spend living in the memories of it.'

-- from the diary of a former red guard, epigraph to anchee min's wild ginger

'don't let our youth go to waste.'

-- jonathan richman

'i did not realize until later that these were the days of significance, days of ardent love and days of satisfaction.'

-- anchee min, red azalea

scattered:

it was cold in the new house last night-- deathly cold, it seemed, relatively, to one like me still running on a slow thaw despite all of my spring-mindedness. a return to winter is not welcome, and it didn't help that i've been reading a book set on a day in february. i finished it as quickly as possible as soon as i awoke this morning. the cold carried over into today even though it was warmer outside, lingering in the still-new air of the place. i'm still getting used to it. i went for a walk, trying to place myself in this place as a resident rather than a visitor, and it finally clicked when i made it back to the door and turned off the sidewalk and up the front steps, as if to say 'i live here.'

all i can think of is this notion of young people in houses, like the night of greg's party or last summer at dan's; the vague arrangements and routines we remember from the domesticity of youth shine on a surface of conventionality that laminates the entire experience. we're becoming our parents. i don't know if i'll ever tap into the current of this neighbourhood-- perhaps soon when i have a car and need to negotiate parking in snap decisions on either side of the street in front of various houses. the houses get nicer as you advance down in the opposite direction. i walked that way earlier today. i have to get used to not having people around all the time-- i don't live on campus anymore. imagine that. never will again. there won't be people just next door or down the hall or distractions of the same magnitude. obvious realities still sinking in.

laura was here for the first two nights and i can feel her absence so acutely in every part of the house because she was there at the beginning. she'll be back next weekend but this will be the longest we've gone without each other in two months-- she was always reassuringly next door. she left me a note which she hid under my pillow so i'd find it later and she left wearing my sweatshirt in the increasing cold of sunday's late afternoon, which grew into the cold night whose tinny frigid aftershocks still lurk in the air between these pieces of secondhand furniture and new blinds. maybe making seamless connections will make the time seem to go by more quickly.

while you are away
my heart comes undone
slowly unravels
in a ball of yarn

the devil collects it
with a grin
our love
in a ball of yarn

he'll never return it

so when you come back
we'll have to make new love

-- björk

is it bad that all i can hear is 'i won't share you' sounding in every corner of the empty hallways?

i stripped my walls today of their colourful adornments, leaving myself headachey in the face of overpowering whiteness and these endless throbbing logistical calculations for a friday of moving. i've been haemorrhaging friends for the last few months and i've been vaguely aware of the fact, but it hit me especially hard today when packing rituals started to uncover scraps and reminders at the backs and bottoms of drawers, echoes of the way things used to be.

i've been nostalgic for the autumn in other ways lately anyway, waking up mornings with a leeching desire for alasdair roberts when he was new to me and harvest displays in the supermarkets and pumpkin bread and lustrous low-hanging moons and the reason i originally started using the green apple conditioner laura likes so much. inexplicable, that. i'm in love with the now. it was raining when i did this last year, when i had this moment of past bits uncovered-- this year, it's hot. laura and i were outside for some twenty minutes today after the ugly unpacking business and it drained me even further. some people have already left without saying anything to me and i know others probably won't when their time comes.

scattered thunderstorms in the forecast for friday just as move-in ensues. it'll be hectic and the apartment won't have everything right away, but there'll be enough for a comfortable first night and maybe some reassuring booms in the distance so i'll know the world is still happening outside the personally tragic microcosm of inhabiting a place.

'They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It was really something to see, they thought, and this was why they spoke loudly and gestured, inviting onlookers to admire [...] and so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.'

-- Zadie Smith, On Beauty

as certain vital dorm appliances and food items disappear with roommates on their way home, we enter and live through another lame duck period on campus, when school is basically over but finals linger for some, logistical details complicate the lives of others, and summer seems only a breath away. i reflected on the year as it was happening, foreseeing clearly the conclusions i'd be making right about now, and for my part i was fairly accurate. last year i was pre-nostalgic as fuck, taking pictures of what the view through my window at bowditch had looked like (though the view was early may through and through, incompatible with various winter memories) but this year i'm eager in all ways but one to get out of here. it's incredibly difficult to not start packing right now, but i have until friday and i need to spread that labour out so i don't condemn myself to boredom. it seems like there are so few things here but the weight will multiply when it's time to move.

and moving: not all the way back to dracut as is customary, whether the physical moving that took place at the end of last year or the emotional re-centering that mid-june entailed back in the days of a lengthy school year, but a few minutes down the road to my new apartment in salem. laura's driving me back to dracut on saturday to gather my books and whatever else i'll need from my room back there to make it home for the hot months, and maybe i'll be getting a car (possibly even sasha!) again, at last. driving around here still carries immense terror value in my eyes, but i'll try to get used to it and become a functional person, as i suppose it's time to do. i hope people will visit.

an ongoing series:
summer 2005 , 05-06 academic year, summer 2006.

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation – Seamus Heaney
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim – David Sedaris
Only Revolutions – Mark Z. Danielewski
Free Love and Other Stories – Ali Smith
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
The World and Other Places – Jeanette Winterson
Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories – Angela Carter
Utopia – Sir Thomas More
Half In Love: Stories – Maile Meloy
Asleep – Banana Yoshimoto
All This Heavenly Glory – Elizabeth Crane
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson [re-read]
Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
Adam, Eve, and the Serpent – Elaine Pagels
The Sparrow – Mary Doria Russell
Children of God – Mary Doria Russell
The Friendly Persuasion – Jessamyn West
Ocean of Words – Ha Jin
Hardboiled & Hard Luck – Banana Yoshimoto
Wickett’s Remedy – Myla Goldberg
The Areas of My Expertise – John Hodgman
Sexing the Cherry – Jeanette Winterson
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
When The Messenger Is Hot – Elizabeth Crane
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined – Georges Duby
Good-bye to All That – Robert Graves
Lizard – Banana Yoshimoto
Beautiful Losers – Leonard Cohen [re-read]
She Got Up Off the Couch – Haven Kimmel
1984 – George Orwell [re-read]
The Pugilist at Rest – Thom Jones
Candide – Voltaire
The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages – Shulamith Shahar
Maggie Cassidy – Jack Kerouac
Walden – Henry David Thoreau

'10.
I always wanted to be loved by the Communist Party and the Mother Church. I wanted to live in a folk song like Joe Hill. I wanted to weep for the innocent people my bomb would have to maim. I wanted to thank the peasant father who fed us on the run. I wanted to wear my sleeve pinned in half, people smiling while I salute with the wrong hand. I wanted to be against the rich, even though some of them knew Dante: just before his destruction one of them would learn that I knew Dante, too. I wanted my face carried in Peking, a poem written down my shoulder. I wanted to smile at dogma, yet ruin my ego against it. I wanted to confront the machines of Broadway. I wanted Fifth Avenue to remember its Indian trails. I wanted to come out of a mining town with rude manners and convictions given to me by an atheist uncle, barfly disgrace of the family. I wanted to rush across America in a sealed train, the only white man whom the Negroes will accept at the treaty convention. I wanted to attend cocktail parties wearing a machine gun. I wanted to tell an old girl friend who was appalled at my methods that revolutions do not happen on buffet tables, you can't pick and choose, and watch her silver evening gown dampen at the crotch. I wanted to fight against the Secret Police takeover, but from within the Party. I wanted an old lady who had lost her sons to mention me in her prayers in a mud church, taking her sons' word for it. I wanted to cross myself at dirty words. I wanted to tolerate pagan remnants in village ritual, arguing against the Curia. I wanted to deal in secret real estate, agent of ageless, anonymous billionaire. I wanted to write well about the Jews. I wanted to be shot among the Basques for carrying the Body into the battlefield against Franco. I wanted to preach about marriage from the unassailable pulpit of virginity, watching the black hairs on the legs of brides. I wanted to write a tract against birth control in very simple English, a pamphlet to be sold in the foyer, illustrated with two-colour drawings of shooting stars and eternity. I wanted to suppress dancing for a time. I wanted to be a junkie priest who makes a record for Folkways. I wanted to be transferred for political reasons. I have just discovered that Cardinal ---------- has taken a huge bribe from a ladies' magazine, have suffered a fairy attack from my confessor, have seen the peasants betrayed for a necessary reason, but the bells are ringing this evening, it is another evening in God's world, and there are many to be fed, many knees yearning to be bent, I mount the worn steps in my tattered ermine.'

-- Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

and people wonder why i love that book so much.

found myself reading walden at sunset just as those last beams of light came in through the window here at central onto the fleurdelisé on the wall opposite my bed as they have every night since september. i had to hold the book out over the edge of my bed to catch the light; it illuminated the page and i read until i couldn't see it anymore. last night i was editing a story i haven't looked at since march and it came to me to add in a wayward sentence in allusion to last summer-- i've written about last summer at length in other classes but i don't know if i'm ready to give it the treatment it deserves in good fiction. or that i'm ready for good fiction at all, for that matter. i don't think i ever will be.

i waited so long for spring and now that i can see flowering trees i'm shifting into summer, maybe because i remember the raw heat of last may best and i expect no transition. it's either that or the rains, and if it rains soon i suppose i'll be thinking differently. things are temperate for now. i'm leaving this room in nine days for another room with a different set of expectations, and i'd like to think i've learned not to have expectations, but i know that will never be true for me or anyone else. something said in creative writing today about driving home late at night after dropping someone off on a pleasant summer evening with all the windows open when the perfect song comes on the radio, and the feeling that comes along with it, the feeling of absolute unity and a flavour of providence, keeps coming to mind. i've had nights like that. i've had days like that. i've come upon places in the middle of the night that made me wish the morning would never come.

in relatively chronological order:

--

in response to a student using 'robin' as an example of a famous sidekick in literature:
'could you just pretend that this is a course in intellectualism?'

--

'we always love words with -ing. they make us feel sexy.'

--

on symbols and their meaning:
'when in doubt, just say sex.'

--

'don't go to movies. save your money. i know everything.'

'i don't know how to say this, but, if you've ever seen goats fornicate, your sex life is ruined for the next several years.'

'yeats, the great 20th century irish poet, better known to you as GOD.'

--

'this is not the palmer handwriting method-- go to hell.'

'tv? you have to watch people play poker. that's a fate worse than castration.'

'i had to say something obnoxious. i feel so good.'

'if you can't do well on this, i'd like to help you out the window.'

'wait long enough and even i'll be fashionable-- i retract that.'

--

on sophocles:
'if you can get better poetry anywhere, call me collect.'

on getting invited to weddings by students:
' i forbid you to get married while i'm alive.'

a hypothetical people magazine cover story:
why i raped my favourite nun last thursday

--

'has anyone ever been to tuscany? what do you do with yourself? you go to saugus. don't go to saugus.'

'when an italian hasn't got anything to do, he builds a fountain.'

'if you're french in literature, you're in trouble.'

--

'that's elia psychology-- shut up.'

'i'm half dead. i probably am dead but no one's told me.'

'hey, look, let's get sexist.'

--

on anna nicole smith:
'who is the babe that died? 'cause i'm the father.'

--

'you pay me poorly and i don't get any chalk.'

'if one more person tells me they're opening a bed and breakfast, you'll read in the vermont papers: homicidal instructor from salem state slays manhattanite.'

'i was about to touch this piece of chalk, but i don't know. it's a little too phallic for me.'

'i have to make your lives comfortable socially. i have to make your lives comfortable sexually. i'm up every night wondering how my honours students are doing sexually.'

'erin has already declared me the king of sprezzatura, and i have a diploma to prove it.'

--

'what is the logic of these ads we have? with a name like smuckers, it has to be good? why the hell is that?"

'you women won't sleep with anyone who uses the word cool. i forbid you. your soul will be damaged by people who use banal jargon.'

'whores! no, it was hos. from the rap talk.'

'what the hell is barnes & noble filled with other than vade mecums? handbooks on everything; making love on thursdays and everything else.'

--

comment if you have others. god knows i couldn't get them all.

see here. i get excited about may day, 'kay?

it was an interesting end of april weather-wise. i came back to central after my archery final and the rain had let up but thunder came by shortly thereafter, shaking the buildings. lisa was apparently terrified, but i missed it. by the time i left again for the rest of the day the rain had stopped and in the sunlight i could see the first of the blooming on the trees around north. sun showers later as i walked back to central laden with espresso for finals week; the looks of disbelief on the faces of everyone moving in the other direction were priceless.

this week is a pretty good example of rushed creativity: i'm burned out enough from academic papers i've been writing but i'm expected to make a serious revision to the story i wrote for creative writing back before spring break by the end of today. i'm going to put a footnote at the end of the first paragraph that starts a background story that will run at the bottom of every page if i can figure out a good way to format it.

lizzie and i are getting apartment stuff together and it looks better and better, i should be getting a call about a job later today unless the school decides to completely screw me again, and i should be relatively de-stressed by wednesday at 2:30. classes will be over and it'll just be a matter of tests (which i don't get too worried about) and moving-in logistics before later spring and soon summer and a new life of sorts.