A Speculative Guide Written While Privy to a Small Circus Festival in the French Countryside

How We Live

1.  We smell flowers.  It's a good starting place.  Soon we'll notice the delicate aromas of other things too - like grass and people and whatever happens to be riding the wind.
 
2.  We stretch.  Our faces, our lungs our inner thighs, our chests, our hands. 
 
3.  We enjoy, dance to and play music.  Singing alone counts.  Rundancing counts.  Silence counts.
 
    3a.  Play!  In play we find ourselves and in ourselves we find life.  We see the world and recognize the absurdity of purpose taken too seriously.  The paradox is this: service, political redesign, and artistic manifestation require the integrity that is built on a foundation of innovation and trust.  How do we grow these?  (see 3a)
 
4.  We eat and cook (or prepare) the best food possible - food that grows in the ground near where we live or are eating it.
 
5.  We think about bees.  We consider them.  We taste honey like it is what it is.
 
6.  We listen to people.  Especially to those six years and younger, sixty years and older.  There is  wisdom here and there are good stories.
 
    6a.  Listen to and tell stories.  Wild stories, simple stories, dream stories and sad stories.  "Mythological thinking helps us face the inevitabilities of our lives." ~Joseph Campbell
 
7.  Give.  When we do, we realize we have more than imagined.

Scrambling to Get My Pants Down in the Cafe Water Closet

The streets are wet and crowded.  I walk down them this morning pressing a nonchalant hand against my crotch.  It is a very specific position, its execution complicated because I am in motion.  The delicate dance of halted urination.  Right where the thumb meets the wrist, I affectionately refer to it as the "urethra block."  The pose in its entirety is called "Please please please please please…." because that's what I am saying every time I have to use it. 

This morning I almost made it.  It's always those last three seconds - scrambling to get my pants down in the cafe water closet, still wearing my backpack, legs shaking, face sweating, I'm so close!  I let out a little squirt. 

It's not the first time.  This dance is not unfamiliar, especially in this city.  I don't often pee my pants (and really, I just left a little dribble on my panties, which I immediately removed), but it happens. 

One time, after a long drive and 1/2 hour of desperate toilet searching in sticky July at three in the morning in Downtown Brooklyn, wearing a leaf-printed polyester onesie which prevented me from squatting behind a car without being completely naked, I leaned against a building and fully let it go.  People passed by (thankfully inebriated) and I pretended not to be peeing in my pants, which means I smiled a lot while doing it. 

In New York, people are everywhere.  A quick private pee is rarely possible with female anatomy, my predilection for one-piece pant suits, and this dense population.  Everywhere people are honking their horns, blaming each other for inconveniences, pushing, assessing status, sucking in their cheeks, competing for professional positions, unknowingly policing one another for minor social faux pas like public urination. 

The city is loud.  It's hard to sleep sometimes with all the noise.  The smell of garbage and pee is common - which, admittedly (depending on my prior consumption of liquids and the outfit I happen to be wearing) sometimes makes me a little jealous.  Rent is high, jobs are demanding, woody perennials are scarce, stars are hard to see.  So why, when I could be closer to a forest, fresh air, the naked sound of wind and birds...why, when at least once a week I am practicing the "Please please please please please" position because there are not any proximal trees offering themselves for a tête-à-tête, do I live here? 

***

Cities are people places.  Manhattan is people-made.  What makes it beautiful - epic bridges, subway systems, grand performances, universities, high-rise architecture, the 800 languages, the kaleidoscope of various cuisine, legendary visual art, sundry music, the museums, even the parks - these are people things.  This may seem a minor revelation, but when (after a noisy, sleepless night, getting stuck in honky rain morning traffic, and peeing my panties) I realized this, something in me relaxed.  I stopped resenting the decision to come back. 

Why am I here?  Because I love people.  And, on some level, be it conscious or un-, other people are here because they love people too.  I love people so much, it's hard to stop myself from trying to hug strangers...and they are everywhere.  Everyone is full  of stories and dreams that spill onto the urban landscape and make New York what it is.

But it's not what people create that make this city glow...it's them, it's us.  We live here together, stacked on one another in giant buildings, shuffling around in underground mazes, making love, crying, dancing, pooping, heck, some people are even peeing their pants on the street.  Despite stoic faces and well-built personal bubbles, we are still here, all of us always breathing at the same time. 

If I am in Love...

My birthday is a day for being alone. 

I drove through the hills of Marin county - bending trees articulated their branches across the landscape, offering gestures of conversation to the sky, providing arced resting spots for birthday vagabonds. 

Now, the moist loop, be-lichened and sweet smelling, welcomes travelers.  It gives a comfortable perch to purple corduroy.  It listens happily to an off-key rendition of Amazing Grace.  It wholly accepts an impromptu poem that began like this:

If love is space,
    then I am in love.
   
If I am in love, then so is the loneliness.  It is in love,
    with me.

***   

I ate California fruits - the waxy tang and orange cream flesh of a perfect persimmon.  I savored an avocado, grassy and sweet.  It was the best avocado I ever tasted.  I peeled it, exposing its buttery inside, biting it like I would a giant hard boiled egg, enjoying the smooth green smear on my cheeks and squish between my fingers. 

I left the grove of trees and drove down to the ocean.  Running along the surf, I flirted with a vulture, I let the icy tongue of the Pacific chase my feet with its swelling tide.  I found a large rock, stood behind it and took off all of my clothes.  A mother and her son were walking nearby, so I used a superhero cloaking device and disguised myself as a naked woman.  They couldn't see beyond the absurdity of midday November skinny dipping on a public beach.

I squealed as waves crashed against my body.  I turned to face the land, reached my arms out and closed my eyes, falling back into the water.  My bottom met the sandy floor.  I tried to imagine all the habits, addictions, and harmful patterns in my life washing away. 

***

I made my way from beach to car to winding road.  I drove to the town where he said he lived, the beautiful man I met at the desert festival.  One of the elusive spirits that stir my loneliness.

Clouds hovered in the hills and each time a dip in the road brought be below the dense mist, I discovered a hidden forest, giant trees reaching skyward, surreptitious fungi peeking out from behind their roots. 

When I arrived the sun was setting.  Population 350...Elevation 33 feet.  I began at the radio station.  The rain had started and I peered into the cozy room, lined with tapes and records and other labeled stackables.  Three people inside were singing a beautiful rendition of happy birthday to a gray-haired woman.  She tilted her head to the side, clasped her hands, and thanked her friends.  She saw me through the glass and beckoned I come inside. 

"Happy Birthday!" I said. 
"Thank you."
"It's my birthday too."  Everyone laughed. 
"Ha! You don't say.  Happy Birthday to you."

After I had left - nobody knew of my man - a young woman ran outside to meet me.  The rain was real now.  She held a newspaper above her head. 
"I love that you're doing this," she said.  "I love this kind of thing, these adventures.  Why don't you give me your name and email?  I'll keep my eyes/ ears open just in case I come across him."
When I had given my information, she hugged me, crinkling the soggy paper against my back. 
"Good luck."

***

I went to the creamery.  This town - 350 people - has a creamery.  I went inside and temporarily forgot all about the mission to find my beloved.  Wheels of beautiful cheese were stacked in the corner.  Here is the fresh white fuzz covering the triple cream...and here, over here we have the dumplings of cheese washed with chardonnay, flavored with the genius of another ambient bacterium (one, I learned, is in special abundance here, so the cheese cannot be duplicated in other areas).  Over there is the seasonal variety, a cheese made only with the milk from Jersey cows, then rolled in forest mushrooms.  And if you sample this one, mmmm, one of my favorites, your tongue will go wild with the sharp tang - almost like a goat's cheese - it goes so well with warm honey and a sprig of thyme.  (I sampled every one.)

I skipped around the gourmet shop and came across a section where local artists sell their wares.  Hats, gloves, earrings, and lingerie adorned the colorful corner.  The woman at the stand did not recognize my man by his description, but guided me to the nearby gift store.  I bought a sun hat, put on some lipstick, and wandered, cheese-belly-full out into the rain.

It was dark.  The store was so full of things it was difficult to move.  Antique relics, mood rings and figurines shaped like animals all waiting for the relevant moment to tell (or invent) their stories.  None of them had seen the person for whom I searched.

In the bookstore, I read a few pages of a book called Mycophilia and admired an illustrated version of Pinocchio.  I asked the woman behind the register. 

"Hmmm, don't know anybody like that.  Mark, do you know anybody like that?"
"Hmmm, I don't, but that gentleman," he pointed behind me, "he knows just about everyone in town.  Jeremiah, this young lady is looking for somebody."

Jeremiah turned around and stood near to me.  Our eyes met and my heart made an attempt at jumping from my chest into his.  I stuttered as I spoke to him, trying to describe the connection, the festival, the dancing in front of an old timey house on wheels where they bake cookies in the oven and a gypsy fiddling group plays on the front porch. 

He listened quietly and gazed into my eyes, periodically covered by the wide brim of my wet sunhat as I blushed and dipped my chin.

"I don't know anybody like that," he said, "but I'll text my friend.  She may have some idea."
I reached out my hand and placed it inside his.  We both stopped breathing.  He squeezed.
"T-thank you."

It was time for me to go.  I was borrowing a friend's car.  Jeremiah called me shortly after I departed.  I missed the call, but he left a message, asking if I wanted to spend the evening with him. 

A gentle fragrance, the one of sweet longing, came in through a crack in the window.  I listened to his voice.  I would spend the night with you, Jeremiah, if I wasn't so in love…

If I am in love, then I am in love with this warm loneliness.

The Antihelp Manifesto

“Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols … Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.”
~Hakim Bey

We call ourselves “The Antihelp.”  The exposure of parts of us that want to sweep in and play rescue.  While our insecurities might be assuaged in the moment of felt helpfulness, we recognize such an approach as contradictory to service.  Ultimately, it is rarely relevant and works against creative social opening.

The Antihelp interrupts a cycle of aid that overlooks the reciprocal energetics of world systems and dependency.  We do not participate in global Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, poisoning communities so that we may eventually offer flag-bearing antidotes. We are not blinded by pity and virtue.  We play gratefully in the sweet particularity of culture and pinch one another at any attempt to fix or exploit.  We are interested in healing through inquisition, participatory governance and recognizing opportunities for creativity within conflict.

1.  Intention without direction.  (a.k.a. play).

Change is inevitable.  We stop trying to direct it.  Our efforts are not a series of superficial reactions, but arise within a container of intelligent improvisation.  We are honest about and willing to explore the depths necessary to identify and rebuild obsolete or dysfunctional structures, however, we embrace the process of exploring itself as a primary strengthener of community.

2.  Participation.

We do not play alone.  We need people to participate to build connections.  Change is not relevant unless it’s relevant.
We listen.  With our bodies, our ears, our minds.  We listen.  To each other, to our dreams, to everyone involved.

3.  A sense of humor.

We graciously accept benevolent disparagement.  If not graciously, we expect to be made fun of for reacting to it and/ or throwing tantrums.  The willingness to take the piss out of ourselves, our friends and our projects, dissolves righteousness.  We make absurd demands for laughter, regardless of circumstance.  When we are laughing more than not, all pain is worth it.

4.  Radical Inclusion.

When the uncool, the curmudgeon, the foreign, the weak, the indomitable, or those perceived as threatening ask to be involved, we spread our arms and make vulnerable our tender viscera.  “Bless your heart, you asshole, I love you!” we shout as we embrace participants and onlookers.  Everyone who understands the premises of this community and wants to engage is welcome.  No preconceptions to defend exceptions.  As long as we can tickle each other, it works.  Genetic, cultural, ideological diversity makes for a healthy party.
We love hypocrites.  Because we love making fun of them.
We dissolve the boundaries between helper and helpee…celebrating their obsolescence.
We appreciate radical inclusion as self reflexive: by treating others this way, we get to accept all the parts of ourselves we deny or compartmentalize and judge.  As we open our arms to everyone, risking our well being, we reintegrate ourselves.
We take care of each other.

5.  Wonder

wonder:  a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful.

curiosity:  a strong desire to learn something.

We are honest with our reactions to a space, a circumstance and a people.  We have a multi-disciplinary approach to the perception of beauty.  We encounter circumstances present in the physical and social environment with awe and respect.

Likewise, we are unwaveringly committed to feeling emotional, physical, psychological sensations that arise within our experiences.  We do not deny them, nor do we silence them in others.  We marvel at individual and group reactions.  Anything that arises on the multidimentional spectrum of pain and pleasure, we meet with wonder and curiosity.  We accept the pain.  We follow the pleasure.
We learn with our bodies.
We believe in magic.

6.  Gratitumility.

Even though we have ideas about what is good for us, we meet people with gratitude for any inclusion. We recognize that when we are visitors, strangers, outsiders or aliens, the home-people dictate what kind of help we offer.  We bring the willingness (and appreciation) for being accountants and shit shovelers if that is what is asked, rather than thinking we can offer something better.
We do not identify as “community builders.”  Instead we are lucky visitors who get to participate in the reveal of what is already happening in a space.  We come with playful intention, curiosity, a sense of humor, and a commitment to work hard.
We take our shoes off when entering.
We offer help, but treat it as a privilege when it is accepted and directed.  We come with open minds and creative approaches to problems, but we do not impose.

7.  Respectful Autonomy.

We do what we want to do.  As long as it is harmless, we indulge our passions freely.   As visual artists, we make; as dancers, we move; as chefs, we cook, as musicians, we play.  When people are attracted to what feeds us, we offer them plates.
Creative endeavors such as those expressed in art, music, circus and dance bring opportunities for play, wonder, and a connection with our bodies.  We consider one question of paramount importance in any approach to problem solving and conflict resolution:  “What do we do for fun?”

Pat Benatar Does the Woods

I went dance running through the woods today.  That's when you put on some big headphones (because your ears are shaped differently than other people's and the earbuds they make for runners never stay in) and shove your iphone (which is your music because you don't have a nifty tiny ipod) in your mother's sport's bra (which you're wearing because you like it better than yours) and jog like you've just scored a touchdown...knees high, arms reaching for the sky, throwing dramatic turns and making a periodic microphone of your fist so that you might join in the epic call from Pat Benatar reminding you that yes, we belong to each other.

I did that.  I ran up the hill through a canopy of yellow leaved, bowing branches.  The wind blew hard as I made pirouettes on mossed rocks and leaned against the damp bark of autumn hemlocks.  I ran to the meadow then stopped.  A gust, carrying a dozen yellow leaves pulled me from my anthem and begged my affection.  I turned the music off, resting the soggy headphones around my neck. 

A leaf landed on my left breast and I watched others sail to the ground.  A broken mushroom cap, showing its creamy gills had been nibbled.  Nearby a field of silver acorns disguised themselves as giant beetles until I moved closer to inspect them.  I decided to walk back.  It was an abrupt transition from my superhero cavort to a quiet autumn dreamscape. 

I warmed into my surroundings, decanting myself.  The forest unfurled its scent with my attention.  Wet wood and fungal umbrellas descended in aromatic layers.  I wondered how my scent mixed with the melange and imagined myself a perfume for the pinewood.  Slow motion walking, I came to a point in the path I had run past minutes before.  Another burst of wind pulled a school of leaves through the air.  I shivered.

Above me, pinned in the canopy, a dead branch the size of my body, quivering in delicate suspension perpendicular to the ground.  The slightest breath of wind might set it free.

I knew the perfect timing of its fall could end a life or paralyze or at least cause a serious head injury.  I thought of other people passing beneath it, unaware of their momentary increased risk of death. 

I had been worrying about other things before this place found me, ways to justify my existence - how to bring the circus to Haiti, should I go to graduate school, if I'll ever finish that book, whether I should build a yurt and live on a farm or move back to the city, what logo to use on my website, etc…  Thoughts like the flailing arms of eager kindergarteners hoping to be called on when they know the answer.  When I saw the tree branch, the brain buzzing hushed. 

I walked underneath it.  I closed my eyes.

It felt like my body was possessed by ants - a crawling sensation, "Get away!  Move!  Don't fucking stand here Stupid!"  Everything in me yelled.  I could only stand there for a few seconds.

This mind in my brain thinks it's saving me.  There are always branches trembling above, ready to fall.  The only difference is I know about this one. 

"Don't wanna leave you really, I've invested too much time
To give you up that easy, to the doubts that complicate your mind

We belong to the light, we belong to the thunder…"

It's hard to feel sexy with a skank rash on my face

It's not really a skank rash - I mean, I did give a few dozen blow jobs and had the pleasure of burying my face in some delectable female delights over the weekend, but really...it's not a skank rash.

Sometimes when the weather changes I get a little crack at the side of my mouth.  My ego, strong as it is, rebels against this mild mar on my visage with a ferocity that would match that of mama bear defending her young.  I attack.

After a day or so of patience I went after it.  I rubbed it with tinctures, applied coconut oil, tea tree oil, jojoba oil, marula oil, vitamin e oil.  I washed it, put vinegar on it.  I even cleaned it with my own urine.  Gross?  Well, yes I am...and (ahem) I would risk anything to keep my poor sweet image safe and beautifully static.  When it wouldn't disappear (and, in fact, worsened - I have no idea why) I caved and used a topical steroid.  If I can just give it a quick fix, I'll be more attractive.  It's hard to feel sexy when there is a blemish at the corner of my lip.  (And I like to feel sexy).

As part of a gross reaction to steroid cream, the rash began to spread.  I didn't have to do anything except go to NYC to visit friends I had not seen in months.  Naturally, I covered the deformation with foundation.

Yes, it worsened.

Soon the little crack at the corner of my mouth had become a clown-lip, crusty yuck face.  Deep breath. 

I had to go to New York anyway.  I wanted to be beautiful.  I didn't feel it though.  It's unreasonable to feel sexy with a skank rash on my face.

Got to the point where I had to drop back into myself.  I could no longer cover it up - there was no use.  It was painful and fed up.  I wanted to crawl inside somewhere and not come out until I had healed and could again present my crust free smile.

I don't live in New York right now.  I stay with friends.  I could not hide away.  So I reached inside myself and turned it around.

I realized at any moment a change like this (or one far more permanent) could land on my reality.  Who knows, after some exciting sexual escapade I may actually contract a rash.  I may fall on my face, tumble into a patch of poison ivy, collide with a confused goose while on a rollercoaster, breaking my perfect nose (I know how you feel Fabio), I might get into a street fight with a pitbull, get hit by a car (again), piss off a leprosy-curse-casting warlock...

Would that mean I could never feel sexy again?  No!  Even with the stigma attached to a rash around the mouth, even though it's unreasonable, I decided to try, just try, and feel sexy anyway.

Perhaps sexy doesn't need reciprocation.  Perhaps sexy does not need to be validated through a whistle or a pick up line.  Maybe sexy is something felt, not seen.  While it's hard to feel sexy with a skank rash on my face, it is far from impossible. 

I walk down the street, I order coffee, I smile at strangers, I admire attractive men and women, I perform for a crowd, I flirt, I see old friends and pretend like I am radiantly beautiful.  I am full of sexy, it spills from every gesture like a honey waterfall.  Ha!

Sexy, beautiful, attractive, has nothing to do with the measly two dimensions reflected in mirrors.  It cannot be fabricated or reasoned with.  It is felt. 

I still pick at it.  I still worry about it.  I still wish it would go the fuck away.  I still daub at it with topical medicines and think twice after peeing.  That voice keeps whispering lies about how sexy and skank rash can't co-exist.  But when I do feel that way (y'know, sexy), no voice can argue with it.  It is not something seen, it's unreasonable. 

It's Velveteen Rabbit sexy.  All shabby and lumpy and worn and real...but that's another blog.

Are Tadpoles Allowed to Love?

Lying on the floor (again), I watch demons meet pleasure growing and expanding
though my pelvis.  What is buried here?  Is this sexual?

Noon is in the air.

I want the way I love to be unrestrained by archaic morality.  But the dilemma has existed since I was young:  How do I reconcile the yearning to break my heart against the beauty of this world with the voice that threatens me with unlovability if I do?  I am wrong.  I am three years old and the way I love is bad.

The sun beats down on my body. My nipples are erect.  Now my identity has been trapped in thinking sex is the only way to love as big as I do, that sexuality has to exist in a certain form.  I must be a young woman - blond - american - beautiful. I must be porn star sexy, smart sexy, post pubescent katrina sexy...to love like this.

Do caterpillars love?  Are tadpoles allowed to love?

The way I love - an omnidirectional hug desirous of merging, putting our bodies in touch, where we can togetherfeel the pleasures and pain of our anatomy.  Stretching physical sensation.  Is this sexual?

What is sexuality? Where does it begin?

As I look at the reflection of my naked body in this computer screen, I feel shackled to its
form.  Strong limbs, smooth skin, cheerful breasts framing my bellybutton.  The buds of fear swell; open.

What will happen to how I love when those breasts sag down, lying pancake flat
against a saggy midsection? How will I love if I do not carry the correct configuration? Three years old and I had to wait for the development of this fleshape so that my love would be worth something - so that it could be expressed, accepted, acceptable.

Of course I'm attached to it.

So now I practice dying.  Lying on the floor, typing at my computer, hugging you - I die into myself.  I go beyond the frontiers of form.  Is this sexual?

It Doesn't Matter

It has been over a month of growth and death.  I feel the sting of stretching myself.  Staying with my parents for this week, a week in the wake of weeks stretched by French wine and romance and a desert explosion.  Wanderlust.  Wonder lost.

Wonder banged.  I feel the real me going to school again, growing and watching for cannonballs.  I keep dropping them on myself.  All this pressure to do something, to count for something, to finish something.

When this anxiety slinks in, I remember a thing that happened (continues to happen), three weeks ago following a dusty birthdeath in Nevada.  It is best described as a dream, but to call it that would be misleading.  I might also call it a vision or a cogent hallucination.

I was sleeping on a friend's couch in Orange County.  I woke early, the soft cushions unfit for my frenzied tossing and turning.  Unable to re-doze, I decided to meditate for a while.  I call it meditation, but that connotes an activity that requires effort. Really, I just lie on my back and feel myself existing.  (Sometimes I fall asleep.)

I did this.  I dropped in.  Immediately I entered a lucid dream state.  Waking into my subconscious (or wherever I happened to be), I quickly noticed another being with me.  Turning to face her head on, I found myself in the company of what I perceived to be a goddess creature.  She appeared like a gelfling from The Dark Crystal - subtle, pixie-like adjustments to the human form.  I was instantly thrilled to be in her presence.  I could tell she was powerful, the incarnation of greatness, the one who might be able to answer some of my questions.  I went for it. 

"What should I do?  What is my purpose?" I asked her.  The volume of my voice surprised me.  It echoed throughout the room and I was sure that my friends sleeping on the couch adjacent mine, would wake and assume I was slumbertalking.

The deity melted backwards, dissolved into the walls, the room, the very space around us.  She surfaced periodically, rearranging random table objects into a face, pressing a form against the patterned wallpaper, unfolding in a multitude of expressions.  Her presence laughed at me.  There was no verbal response, but the air itself was thick with her humor.  Who do you think you are?  It seemed to say.  Why would you ever consider such a question important?  Ha.  How ridiculous! 

I remained still, despite the waves of deep breath humility pumping through me.  After a few moments, she surfaced again in the cluttered floor and spoke aloud.

"It doesn't matter," she chuckled, evanescent. 

"It doesn't matter what you do...as long as you're laughing more than you're not."

I woke up.  I couldn't breathe at first.  I woke up and (for a little while) stopped taking myself so seriously.

A Nerve Ending on God's Clitoris

What is the sex of food?

***

Linked with the very foundation of survival, let us consider the sensation of hunger (of desire) a primary impetus for action.  Our fleshy, vulnerable bodies, built so perfectly for the experience of pain and pleasure, hold within them the great burden and brilliant gift of the brain.  This benevolent organ wants only for us to survive, so to simplify things, it talks about hunger like it is an assassin.  

This reaction is archaic gossip. 

While it may remind us of our mortality, hunger will not kill us. 

Often I believe the rumors.  I stuff my face unconsciously, get drunk, and go on masturbation binges in desperate attempts to turn off the hunger alarm.  Super survivor!  Put it in me!  I'll take cheese and cock and wine and vibrators and anything else that will put to rest the blinking red light that says I am not safe without them.  But what happens when I stop trying to turn hunger off and let it turn me on?

I'm a bit of an extremist, a pleasure seeker.  Not everyone is as bent on filling up as I am, but perhaps some of you can relate.

In moments of real strength, I take a deep breath and disregard the brain's outdated advice.  I explore hunger.  I invite desire to the table, to the bedroom, to this little plaza in a small French town where I write to you at sunset.  Rather than attempting to assuage the sensation, I let it stretch my physical experience.  I turn into a taste bud on God's tongue, a nerve ending on her clitoris.  

Hunger, then, becomes a source of creativity.  I pay attention to it.  I acknowledge the mortality of my body and I come alive. 

I take each bite with a grateful whisper to the hunger that makes the food taste so good.  I make love with an earnest "thank you" to the desire that charges my experience of the present.  Such sensation is not easy.  I must acknowledge the ephemeral nature of this moment and let go of trying to keep it.  

***

We can do this.  Come, do this with me.  Bring your hunger with you.  It's been falsely accused as a dangerous hit man.  Let's forget the brain's panicked warnings and navigate uncharted territory.  Together, we'll brave whatever sensation arises.  

This is the sex of food.  This is the sex of death.  Let's practice it.

Food and Sex

The room has been forbidden.  You have been told only bad people, strange people, naughty people go there.  You don't want to be like that.  You want to be good.  You crave righteousness and the approval of your elders.  You sit down every night and eat your porridge.  It is good, comforting.  The heat warms you and the oaty gelatinous consistency fills your belly gently.  The meal comforts you the way an old man is comforted by the predictable rock of his afternoon chair.  But you are not an old man in your heart.  Your favorite part of the meal is not the substance, but the sprinkle of cinnamon that dusts the lumpy dish.  A hint of the exotic.  Warming and aromatic, adding that splash of color atop the richness of cloud-sky grey.  And you long for more.

Your curiosity grows.  The banquet awaits.  You hear people laughing, crying, the sound of delicate glass repeatedly kissing itself.  You press your cheek against that prohibited door.  The sound is interesting, but it is the smell that calls to you.  Having just finished your meal, you are not physically hungry, but the pull of decadence is strong and the aromas are so attractive.  You know not how to distinguish among them, nor which heady scent belongs to what, but the bouquet seduces you anyway.  It has a depth like the color of blood - or the rich brown of fertile soil.  The perfume moves up your body, evoking images of the evening ocean spreading itself across the beach.  You smell animals - the heady funk of a feral goat and the sweet musk of the hare.  Whiffs reminiscent of spring flowers and cedarwood and the green moss that celebrates after autumn rain arise and fall in the complicated mixture.  You can bear the mystery no more.  You defy the moral code and the piety of tradition.  With a thunderous kick, impelled by carnal desire, you break down the door.  

Your eyes adjust to the candlelight.  Wrapped in that delightful odor, you drink of the spectacle.  A runner of silk, cream in color, spreads across the great, mahogany table.  Festooned and besprinkled with flecks of gold, the beautiful fabric underlies hundreds of ornate platters, each offering a different arrangement of sultry meats, fresh fish, harlequin vegetables, and steaming grains of various colors and shapes.  You see voluptuous fruits with arcs like the crescent moon, sliced and bleeding their juices in playful droplets.  A motly collection of polychromatic sauces, some still bubbling, begs the dip of a rebellious finger.  There is an array of candies, pristine and sparkling in sugary patinas.  Frosted cakes sit plump and inviting - like grandmother's breast, waiting to comfort the weary child with a sweet story.

You do not know what to do.  The spread is overwhelming.  The longer you gaze at it, the more beautiful and seemingly untouchable it becomes.  You want it more now and understand why it is forbidden.  There is a part of you that pulls away.  That urges to turn and run through the heavy door back to the safety of principles and porridge.  Faced with this freedom, you realize you may not want so much choice.  Perhaps it is better to remain with the simplicity of grey.  Yet you know the cinnamon will always taunt you.  But now, here, what to choose?  How should you know what you want?  And if you do not like what you choose?  Where to begin?

It is one thing to break down the door into the secret room.  It requires another kind of courage to taste the food.  With food, however, this is not always such an existential crisis.  With sex, for many, it can be.  With life, for most, it is.  There is so much out there and if we let ourselves see it all at once, recognizing that it is available to us, who wouldn't feel momentarily burdened with the weight of that freedom?  I had a professor who referred to this as ontological insecurity.  When faced with the reality that we can have anything we want, we would rather not take responsibility for our choices and have the institutions (and their respective dogmas), articulate life for us.  

There are parallels between the ways in which we experience food and sex.  Both exist across cultures, both are often riddled with guilt, and both offer powerful experiences of sensuality in our bodies.  

Love Letter #2

New York,

    I love the friend you have become.  Awkward and sweet in moments that betray your facade of cement.  I love realizing you're late too, all the time.  Seeing through the stability into the many cracks of your humanity.  Yes, I know you have streets lined with false fruit blossoms and big movies and Broadway shows and showy museums.   But you also have that magical garden, New York.  The one on 6th and Clinton with overgrown lily patches and tumbled pebbles hidden in the turtle pond.  You have Hope Deli and the orchid exhibition inside the glass castle.  You have bridges with people laughing and yelling at each other to get out of the way.  The gas station with the man who never sleeps, but always smiles and helps me put oil in my car (even though - of course - I don't need help).

    You have my heart New York.  I came to you because of a fantasy - opportunity, high-rise buildings, big names, epic bridges, opportunity, work, inspiration, sweat, opportunity yes yes yes!  What I fell in love with was your circus, your storytellers, your variety in coconut waters.  The gorgeous Polish neighbor who cooks only Korean food.  The endless stream of parking tickets, forever presenting me with opportunities to forgive us both.  The show-stopping summer rainstorms.  Public lightening!  Pokey umbrellas and wet expensive suits.  Foul subway smells that inspire raucous stories among strangers about giraffe pussy.  It's the poker clubs, clicking with the sound of anxious chips.  The restaurant fuck ups, the amazing coffee, the sometimes amazing sweet potato fries, the shitty coffee.  That pub with all the cowboy boots nailed to the ceiling, Roosevelt island, the tiny beach underneath the Brooklyn bridge at low tide that is happy spawning ground for colorful tampon applicators. Omnipotent pigeon feathers.  The giant slug man waiting next to me for an F train at 3am, trying desperately to connect with someone by grumbling loudly about Bloomberg nazism.  You...you know who you are, human avatar of the city...the unrealized romance I know would be almost as beautiful as this pining.  The self sacrifice, learning to speak up.  The psychedelic spiritual ceremony when someone yelled, "I'll fuck your mother!" and it was so uncomfortable, I forgot about the profound and giggled with the fairy next to me.  The ocean!!!!  Tattoos.  Cheese. 

    Oh I could go on.  But you have a healthy collection of songs and poems written for you.  Who knows, if your head grows too big, you might give birth to another freedom tower (and the chance to make fun of you for that would be as delightful as the bar maid who, after a long, quiet night, watched me suck on the end of a brandied cherry and leaned in to my sweetened mouth, a lock of hair stuck to her lips so that it felt perfectly unperfect and I knew it must be really happening...but did it really happen?)

    Anything is possible here.  My favorite anythings are the unplanned in-betweeners.  The events that become stories because they emerge from such a perceivably rock solid background.  Good job New York.  Way to build a set.  Thank you.  I will come back.  I will make more in the shadow of that egalitarian moon, in the light of your paralyzing sunsets.

Music Makes Us Hungry

Imagine I am about to touch you.  You're lying on my table, a white sheet draped over your recumbent body.  I stand at the crown of your head and prepare to descend.  The summer heat has landed, slowing your breath.  Resistance is difficult in this gentle oppression.  My hands hover above for a moment, then connect.  Something inside you reaches to meet them.  I lean in as you lie here.  I hold your head in my hands, trace my thumb along the side of your neck where, until now, you had no idea there was a tough string begging to be played.  Fabulous notes rise from the tension.  The sensation demands your presence.  For a moment it feels uncomfortable, but with each explosive release you let me in a little more.  The toughness in your neck, your shoulders, your face, transforms.

I pour myself into your skin, deeper into the tissue of your muscles through layers of experience, injury, pleasure.  I unravel a history of movement.  I discover music inside your cells.  The small drops of coconut oil I have used to help make this exchange glide waft up to both of us at precisely the same moment. 

I work down your head and shoulders, lifting your now heavy body so that my arms move under your back.  I tighten my fingers beneath your weight so that they drag along either side of your spine.  Again that musical sensation, hot and deep.  You let go.  It is all you can do.  Over and over again you give yourself to me. Your back turns to liquid and it pools on my table, which holds you with planetary stability.  Now I can swim in you.   

I walk to your side and lift your arm, sliding my own along its posterior aspect and up across the shoulder blade, tracing the lines I just made in the curvature of your neck.  Here I take a moment, holding your head again, looking at the windless trust in your face.  This mask to your mind, which travels now through oceans and deserts, along rain forest canopies and into volcanoes.  I close my eyes and meet you in that dreamscape. 

I am dancing along the surface of your limbs, around and through them, forever penetrating.  I feel the pleasure of your body in my own.  Shoots of light take root in the space between us and grow like feral vines up through my pelvis and lower abdomen.  They flower as they continue to climb, filling me with the scent of wet earth and honeysuckle. 

I feel you wanting me.  Wanting to grab and possess me.  There is a hungry animal in you that stirs as I strum the chords of your release.  It smells the animal in me or perhaps the fairy riding her.  It wants to consume, wants to kill.  It is alive with maddening hunger.  Yet your beautiful mind knows that consuming me will only end this song.

Music makes us hungry.  The music that lives in you, the rhythm we discover as I press into your skin casts a net around our hearts and binds us in this hour.  The melody arouses and we long for some appropriate expression to further connect us.  We fall in love.  We sing the ache of wanting to merge.

We breath in tandem, our bodies traveling through worlds and infinity.  Moments of popping intensity, the release of a knot in your lower back, the tender thaw of scar tissue along the outside of your thigh, remind us that we are in a room in a building on a street with people walking by. 

I'm at your feet now and we could both die it feels so good. It has rained on your body and the calm following our rippled ballet produces rapid stillness.  The silence after a sonata.  I walk towards your head again, put a hand on your chest and tell you I will go wash my hands.  You nod, but you do not know to what you are agreeing. 

When I return, the room is full of questions.  What did we just do?  Where did we go?  Were you there?  You look at me and layer the experience with impossibility and social etiquette. 

But don't worry, I was with you.  It happened for real.  We found the song that plays endlessly in our bodies and waits patiently for our attention.

Where Did They Get So Many Snowshoes?

There is a house inside my heart.  I lived there once.  Now I visit on occasion.  It was bought by Cracker Barrel. They make food and sell nostalgic paraphernalia.  On long road trips, I venture in for an "old fashioned" stack of pancakes, the kind I used to make when I lived there full time.

They're ok.

I used to have a garden outside the house, when it was still mine.  Fairies rode dragonflies and hid in the purple bells of foxglove blossoms when summer thunderstorms blew through.  Morels popped out of the ground on Saturday mornings and I would fry them in sweet butter for my friends. 

One day I woke up and I was standing on the side of the highway, looking at a wooden facade with US army rocking chairs forced on the front porch.  My fairy garden had disappeared and there was a jar of overpriced rock candy where I once kept my bluejay feathers. 

I tried to keep living there, but it's hard.  I am a little uncomfortable with the decor.  Old rifles mounted beneath the shabby heads of small deer, black and white portraits of unsmiling strangers, a rolling pin, six or seven pairs of venerable snowshoes, browning macrame patterns set in circular frames.  These walls are overwhelming.  I feel like a tourist.  I retreat to the woods.

Do you ever have that feeling, the one when you are at the edge of something and want only to be part of it, but you can't break through the invisible skin separating you from yourself?

Here in the forest, I get crazy after a while.  I go mad, unzip myself and let my wildness jump into the trees.

This makes me hungry.  That's when I walk back toward the highway to visit the Cracker Barrel.  I'll have an honest-to-goodness homestyle meal.  I must admit, the food is getting better.  This morning they put morels in my special omelet.

Happy Clumping Booger Glue

Happy clumping booger glue.  Glim glam squabble bits. 
In Googlepie, Godumperton there sprats a giggleforth.

Tis holy so the gobble clouds on great goombunctious flavor days,
they playful clump above the lake
to tit mark tears on tiny cakes

People of Goomblepie cry cry craze. 
Been saving for summer in winter homes. 
Blumpy fatfluff clouds that gobble   
    the sunshine on vacation days.
A giggle mini of Goomblepie
    who knows what where no waver
    the best days are today days,
    no matter what the flavor

And when the weather whispers dumpy, tis the perfect tits
For clumping booger glue to glue
Glim glam squabble bits.

Any day's todays a day, clouds don't gobble mirth
For flavor threads through thank you thinks and sprats a giggleforth

I'm Lonely, You're Lovely, Let's Hold Hands

On Sunday I was jogging across the Brooklyn bridge and ran past a dark, wrinkled man who looked up at me and grinned with the light of a full moon.  "You're beautiful," he said.  His voice scratched with a density comparable to the summer heat.

My friend was riding her bike to meet me.  At precisely the same time, another gentleman, surrounded by a group of friends all wearing tight undershirts and baggy pants, shouted at her.  "I want to fuck you in the butt!" he said.  She swerved, then continued.

Two minutes later, near Duncan, Oklahoma, a young mother was pushing her shopping cart through the local Walmart.  A small fellow with a round face hissed in her direction.  She rolled her eyes and turned away from him.  She did not know it then, but would later realize she took the gesture as a compliment.

Three days prior, a young man with gentle eyes and a shaggy haircut was delivering a package of anti-aging supplements to a woman who lives in an expensive apartment on Central Park West.  When she opened the door to receive the product, her heart (encouraged by the two martinis she had consumed for breakfast) jumped out of her robed body and onto his sleeve.  She reached for it, grabbing his left arm in a gesture of cinematic passion (only it was awkward because she had not practiced it before) and kissed him.  He was confused and had to hold her up.

The beautiful drummer who has a studio down the street is right now eating Chinese food with a woman who giggles and flicks her long, shiny hair with chopsticks as she asks him a series of questions that all begin with "Don't you think…"  She does not listen to his answers and instead imagines the sharp sting of his drumsticks on her body.  He knows she is doing this. 

Great Mountain

A Story For My Father

He was of small stature, with skinny legs and a mess of freckles, which made him look younger than he really was.  His mousy brown hair often covered his face and he had to push it out of his eyes when he walked in the mountains so that he could see the stars around him. Most of the other children in the village stopped believing in stories of magical creatures on Great Mountain long before he did.  At first this did not affect him, everyone assuming he was years behind his actual age.  Eventually though, as he grew awkwardly into his body and his mousy brown hair became curly, the other boys and girls began making fun of him for talking about dragons and unicorns and the other magical beings their parents had told them as small children, lived up there. 

The village was nestled in the valley made by three mountains and bordered on its North side by a large lake.  Two of the mountains rose up, their pointed tops scraping the passing clouds.  The third mountain was higher than the other two combined.  It went up up up and pierced through the sky, so that its peak was never seen.  There were many stories about Great Mountain.  A few people had tried to get there, but nobody had ever returned.

The boy continued to grow.  He was the youngest of seven.  His three older brothers, skilled with tools and savvy when it came to business affairs, became ship builders, crafting great boats to transport people across the massive lake.  His sisters, equally clever with money, grew and sold sweet potatoes, a great delicacy among the villagers.  The boy learned how to build ships with his brothers, he learned how to grow sweet potatoes from his sisters, but he would not spend the time necessary to make a business of either.  While his brothers and sisters gained wealth and success in the village, he spent the majority of his time alone. 

What he loved most was exploring the mountains.  He knew all the plants that grew high in the hills, he knew the different animals that lived in the forest.  Often, he sat on a rocky outcropping overlooking the village, facing Great Mountain.  "Has anyone ever made it to the top?" he asked the forest, gazing up at the invisible peak.  "Can you imagine what greatness would wait for the man that went up and returned?  What stories he could tell!  Everyone in the village would want to listen and people would remember him forever!"

On a sunny afternoon, a voice answered him.  "Why don't you go and find out?"

"Who's there?" he asked.

A young woman came from behind a tree.  He had known her as a child.  She too liked to walk alone in the forest.  She too wondered about the top of the third mountain.

"Why don't you climb it?  You dream of it always, don't you?  You held on to the stories when we were young.  Go find out what is there.  If you return, greatness will surely follow."

The next week, with a few sweet potatoes, a warm sweater, and a walking stick, the boy prepared to go to the top.  His sisters did not understand why he was going, though deep in their hearts they were happy for him.  His brothers could not fathom doing something without a foreseeable profit, but somewhere inside, they were envious of his adventurous spirit.  The townspeople all gathered to see him off, for it was not often that a person tried to climb Great Mountain and never had anyone returned. 

The boy felt the beginnings of greatness already.  It was not as he had imagined.  It weighed more than his pack and it tightened around his throat.  He brought a flower to the young woman he had met in the forest and began up the mountain. 

At first it was like any walk, except that it was harder to breath with the greatness hanging around his neck.  The plants were the same.  The animals were playful and unmagical.  He walked for two days when he noticed a darkness had formed around him.  He looked out behind at the village below, but there was no village.  He had passed through the skin of sky and was beyond what he had ever seen.

The sun above still beat down on his head and the wind, stronger now, whipped at his back.  There was not much to see, but curiosity prevailed and the promise of greatness held him like a spell. 

As he neared the top the wind bit at his ears and he had to close his eyes because the dust and rocks were being blown around in powerful gusts.  But he knew his body well, and could feel his way along the steep incline.  A thought entered his mind.  What am I doing here?  How stupid of me to think there could be anything spectacular about this mountain.  There is nothing here for me. 

At that moment a great gust came and blew him off balance.  He fell hard, knocking his head against the rocky slope.  He lie there for a while, letting the pain wash over him.  Time passed.  He realized the wind had stopped and dust was no longer streaking across his face.  He opened his eyes.

He was not on the side of the mountain.  He could not see the sky.  He looked instead at a spectacular ceiling, smooth and curved, like the inside of an egg shell.  Gold columns rose up around him.  When he brought himself to seating, he realized the entire edifice shone gold and white.  Although it was bright in the new space, he could not identify a source of light.   It seemed the building itself was luminescent, the walls glowing inward, as if they were made of starlight.  He stood and turned around.  Is this the magic of the mountain?  He wondered.

"Yes."  The voice was feminine.  It rang strong and clear.  "This is the top of Great Mountain.  You have made it, as have others before you.  This is the entry point to a world where suffering does not exist and people do not need anything.  Come, walk toward any wall and you will pass into it."

The boy was sure he could see the silhouette of a unicorn and the forked tail of a dragon dancing beyond the gold columns.

"But I want to return to the village.  I want to tell everyone about this magic.  I want to finally be great like my brothers and sisters.  The people are waiting for me.  When I return they will truly know I am great and I will never be forgotten."

"You may return young man, but it comes with a price." 

With that, he felt another cold gust carry him from the temple and back to the mountain's peak.  When he opened his eyes, the dust once again stung his vision.  He looked around briefly and grabbed a rock, then began down the mountain. 

It was several days before he reached the edge of the sky.  As the village came into view his heart leapt with a joy he could not remember ever having felt.  There, his greatness waited for him, there he would finally be celebrated.  He was so happy he spread his arms and shouted down to the friendly view.  But no sound passed his lips.  He tried again, tried to speak, to yell, to scream, but the effort was for nothing.  His voice was gone.

Upon returning to the village, the young man was met with a grand celebration.  The villagers made a feast.  His brothers and sisters hugged him warmly, everyone begged him to tell the story...but he could not speak.  The children, tugging at his pants, asked again and again.  "Did you reach the top?  Are there real dragons and unicorns at the top of Great Mountain?  Tell us about it!  What did you see?"

The young man could not answer and without his voice, nobody believed he had been there.  They shrugged their shoulders and went home.  Once again, he was alone.  The heaviness returned and he put a hand to his throat where, since he first left, the burdensome promise of greatness had hung.

A whisper in his left ear woke him from despair.  "I'm glad you're back," said the young woman he had met in the forest.  She held out a flower for him then kissed him on the cheek. 

***

A long time passed and the people forgot the man had ever tried to go up Great Mountain.  He lived happily with the woman from the forest and they often walked together, smelling flowers and watching animals.  He liked to listen to her sing. 

He liked to listen to everyone sing.  Although the people of the village had made fun of him as a child and did not believe he ascended Great Mountain, he liked being around them anyway.  He grew to enjoy all of their stories.  And the people liked talking to him.  They came to him, asking him to guide them on walks through the smaller mountains.  The animals followed him.  It was known in the village that they would come out if a person was walking with the man who did not speak.

He listened to his brothers and sisters when they were frustrated with their businesses.  He helped repair the ships after long journeys across the lake.  He made small boats for the children and showed them how to sail.  He taught the people how to make the most beautiful gardens, passing on secrets for growing sweet potatoes.  He listened to everyone and helped wherever he could.  He loved the village.

***

After many years the old man became sick.  He knew he was dying.  The woman he had met in the forest so many years before, sat beside him.  She kissed his forehead with tears rolling down her cheeks.  He raised a gentle fist, then turned his hand over and opened it.  There, resting in his palm, was the rock he had brought back from the top of Great Mountain.  It had changed.  The stone was now as gold and glowing as the temple he had found there.  It lit the tear-streaked face of the old woman.  She leaned over and whispered in his ear, "I always knew you had been there.  I never forgot.  But it didn't matter because I loved you no matter what."

The next day the whole village came to his home to say goodbye.  He was very close to death.  One by one they knelt by his side to cry with him and tell him how much they cared for him.  Afterward, they gathered around his bed.  "You have done so much for our village," they said, "You are a great man.  May we all find greatness as you have." 

The man, cleared his throat for the first time in many, many years and spoke,
"Greatness, my friends, cannot be found.  Like love, greatness is not for getting, it is for giving."

Nothing Like a Healthy Dose of Psychedelics to Muck Up the Week (in a good way)

I could write this as a manifesto, but manifestos can be so pushy...I can be so pushy.  I would rather let this fall like a gentle rain.  Right now it is one hundred degrees outside in New York City.  People are everywhere, putting up with the glorious stench of urban living.  We are braving the decomposition of rat bodies in the subway, we are saying things like, "Excuse me," or, "Hello," even as we sweat through expensive business suits.  Yes, a gentle rain would be nice. 

There is nothing like a healthy dose of psychedelics to muck up the week (in a good way).  I did not learn anything new, but rather, had the fog wiped from my windshield.  Now I am full of quotes - the kind you find written beneath photographs of canyons or eagles or eagles flying over canyons.  The kind that hang invisible on office walls or make great paperweights.  I'm full of those now.  And while I could grab you by the shoulders and shake you, shouting obvious bits of wisdom in your face, it's just too hot for that.

Instead, let's hold hands.  If we get too sweaty, we can simply sit together, take a break.  No matter what you have or haven't done in life, good job.  Keep going.

On the mating habits of diamond back snakes (and other things)

Sometimes, when it's time to write I look up articles about stilt walking.  Other times, it's the inflammation factor of various foods.  Sugar is particularly high.  Sweet potatoes are hugely anti-inflammatory.  Sometimes I find myself reading about recent elections in Greece regarding the European bailout or looking at artsy pictures of breasts or how to make bitters or youtube videos of elephants giving birth.  I wonder if I'm addicted to information.

I binge on it, scanning through articles with the dilated pupils of a winning gambler...or a losing one, I suppose either end is a hook.  Information (I've read) is rare in nature and so, like sugar, we are attracted to it.  Today information (like sugar) is available everywhere, but our biological evolution has not caught up.  So I grab for it like it won't be there tomorrow.  Like I need to fill up my brain quickly because in this jungle of unpredictability, even if I'm not hungry, some other ape may gobble it, leaving me regretfully unhealthy in my lack of knowledge regarding the mating habits of diamond back snakes. 

I ask myself these days, "Is this research necessary?  Or is this me getting my information fix?"  If the latter is true, I put the computer down.  I stand up and rub my belly, pinch my nipples.  I dance in a circle, spin and let my arms flail around my sides like noodles.  I put a hand down my pants and ping a finger on that sensitive bean.  Sometimes I smell it, just to remind myself I am an animal.  I go for a walk and smell other flowers too.  I drink a glass of wine, eat a strawberry picked this morning.  I hope someone will kiss me spontaneously and toy with the idea of doing the same.  Sometimes this body needs remembering. 

Aliens have probably done some really cool things.

My father has done many great things.  Recently, he climbed Mount Everest.  He told me that each step he took during the most difficult part of the trek he said to himself, "What any man has done, can be done again." 

People have written books.  They have danced for hours on pointed toe.  People have ridden giant waves and created Vulcan languages in their minds.  People built the Chrysler building, they invented camembert. 

Some people have chosen to sit in caves all their lives singing to a mostly deaf world about things that are invisible.  Others staple their scrotums to their bellies.  A person paints.  A person makes music so real, people scream and cry for or because of it.  Aliens (if they are also considered people) have probably done some really cool things.

To me, it is radically enticing and equally scary to think of doing great things.  And what are great things without other people around to call them "great."  Sometimes, I imagine I am a princess, locked high in a tower.  I can do nothing, the burden of free will is not mine to bear.  I can simply sit there and write and think and breathe and play lonely games of Yahtzee all day long. 

Goodbye Again

The man on the airplane is reading - an interesting activity for a young person these days. I immediately assume (without reading the title of the book) that he is of another cultural ethos. I keep glancing over, looking behind my mother as she speaks to me about sudoku and taxes. He is handsome and it is fun to watch him shift positions in the un-accomodating space of economy seats.

My heart beats with subtle intensity - curiously notable when compared to that of its normal resting rhythm, but not too fast. I tell myself to go over there. The drum within my chest responds in turn, making it difficult to read my book in peace. The decision to approach him is inevitable - either I spend the next eight hours with an erect throat, pretending to calmly enjoy my regular en route activities, or I say hello. After a chicken or beef entree and halfway through a bad movie, I make the move.

He glances up at me with beautiful dark eyes. His face is open and kind. I tell him he looks familiar, terribly so, and I smile because - while the comment is true - it is not that kind of familiarity. It is the recognition of connection - the familiarity of a lover-to-be or a kiss yet unrealized.

I speak with him for moments leaning over the seat. I stand in the aisle casually draped over the back of the chair and cock my head to the side, intrigued by the foreignness of his American English, excited by the look of pleasure on his face. He invites me to sit with him. I hop in. Naturally. The sensation in my chest has softened with the execution of my approach, and now extends like sunshine in all directions.

He has very straight teeth behind his lovely mouth which reminds me of my breasts, so I decide to touch them as we converse. How might we know one another? He knows I don't know him.  We relax into comfortable banter.  A word, a philosophy, a birthdate, the books we are reading, a sharing of politely intimate details. We ride the exchange, brains speaking sweetly while bodies negotiate their eventual meeting.

In no time my back rests against the soft inward arc of his chest and stomach. I watch the way he moves his hands. I let myself enter them, experience from their perspective, my own fingers drawing lines up and down his forearm, tracing the shape of his thumb, the skin between his knuckles. Is it forced shared space that impels the immediacy of feeling? Is it time travel that inspires rapid connection, or would real life have produced a similar circumstance? I ponder irrelevant questions and sink more deeply into his chest. The sound of his voice in my left ear is so familiar, just like I knew it would be. Soon it is his lips on my cheek.

I kiss him now. Roll my body over and reach further into his. Beneath blankets fashioned from old felt puppets, surrounded with recycled air and flight attendant call buttons, we breathe into one another's mouths. I lick his lips and now it is his hand on my breast. I unclench my jaw and let light wash the place where my thighs meet, where our legs begin to tangle. With my hand against his back, I pull him closer to me, I feel his tongue. He has become erect and the whorls of my body are now damp. Desire builds in our mutual wanting, but the genius of this interaction lives in its apparent lack of resolution. Despite the desperate tenting of these gimcrack covers, we cannot make a bedroom. Instead, it is the unfinished longing that serves as the orgasm. Moist petals and rigid organs accompany quiet moans, fuel a final attempt at human integration. The paradox of our climax is amusing. Aching for more, we exhale into gentle resolve.

This is where the honeymoon becomes a little bitter.  A few stories, favorite movies and the electronic identities that mean so little, lay in a pile around us. Only the kisses are honest now, and our creatureliness is ready for sleep.  I go back to 33B.

Decades pass as we dream in our respective seat assignments. We travel the world and have babies and watch them grow. We endure small dramas and disagree. We hold hands through college graduations and humbly accept awards for lifetime achievement. We become wise, wrinkled versions of ourselves and reminisce about how it once was, how it could have been. When I wake up, one (or both) of us has died, but it doesn't matter who because the lifelong romance has returned to her immortal sleep. I look over at him and wait for the heart thump, but it is replaced with a knowing contraction. Oh...it passed. It is different now, having fallen back into sweet hibernation.

Extra-pragmatic as I am, I do not believe it right away. Instead, I come back to re-visit him and cuddle (un-magickly) against his new body.

Sadness has an arduous charm, it lingers and becomes uncomfortable. Happiness, with her fickle moods, sweeps in and out more dramatically. The knowledge of her brief visits creates a more welcoming space. The sadness of acknowledging the end of our romance still sits with me, but is a tolerable reminder of our infinite exchange. I know, regardless of how many lifetimes pass between, that this connection will reform itself. Somewhere it is already happening - the awakening of a union, the variegated expression of this ever-unfolding moment.

I sigh while writing for him my (electronic) information. Superficial hopes let him kiss me one last time before stepping into the line of US Customs. The faceless lover that chases me through the bodies and lips of unsuspecting men.  Goodbye again.

Homesickness for Freedom

"Put your talents to good use," I say to myself. 

"Make something of yourself."

But even if it means putting off other responsibilities, I can't stop walking around, holding hands with life and smelling her. 

It's not easy pushing away the weight of "real life," but I do it anyway.  It reminds others to do the same.  Despite the necessary responsibilities that come with accomplishment, deep down maybe we all share a homesickness for freedom. I like that.

What is Real?

I'm sitting on the outdoor terrace of a woman's giant apartment.  She has two cats I feed three times per day.  One of them has hyperthyroidism.  I can relate to this. 

There is a piece of a garbage bag draped over a tree and all of my attention focuses on it.  When I realize that, I let my attention spread toward other things too, like the rumbling of machinery next door in the building being renovated.  And the almost rainbow flirting from a gray sky.  There is a yellow and orange table on the stoop in front of me.  It is made for very small people.  Two blue chairs, similarly tiny, rest in the corner of the landing.  The small people for whom they are intended probably don't sit in them for long. 

Morning glories are about to bloom.  An orchid blossom, most elegant of things, droops its head toward speckled, tongue-shaped leaves.  This is my world right now.  What's yours like?

I listened to the radio for a long time this morning because I was cleaning.  I thought the woman was coming home today, but it turns out it's Monday.  I finished unloading the dishwasher anyway.  Today is Friday.  On Wednesday, after a possible government mandate, a village in Syria was massacred.  I say "village" and not just "people" because most of the animals there were also killed.

So often I don't realize where I am.  I don't realize I'm sitting on a terrace or riding the subway or having a conversation.  I keep thinking I'm working toward something, I keep reaching out from back then to over there.  If this terrace were to crack, if a great pain were to surge through my body, if a small person destined to fill the seat of one of those blue chairs were to look at me and wave, would I find this moment?

"Come here," I say to myself.  "Sit and look around.  This is what is real."

Off the Cliff With You!

She breaks through the forest and meets with the sandy precipice.  Unshaded light cuts across her face.  She fights for breath.  Sweat drips into her eyes.  The hunt is not over, but she has come to a limit.  She looks back over her shoulder.  Her adversaries are quickly approaching.  The sandy earth beneath her feet gives way, sending a few stones off of the treacherous ledge.  She weighs her options - the advancing mob may kill her or perhaps she can seduce herself into sexual slavery.  And there is the jump.  What does she want?  What will she choose? 

She puts a hand to her chest and looks at the crashing water below.  Angry shouts boom from the forest edge.  Human yelling, calling to her to surrender.  "There is no way out," they say.  She waits, trapped. 

Their ugly faces come into view.  Feral, predatory grimaces, mad with the weight of always doing what they are told.  Now is their time to be wild!  They relish the opportunity. "Attack," they hiss, "Yes.  Kill her, take her!"   Would she want to be part of that group, suffer what they have suffered just so that she may live another day?  As they reach their dirty hands in her direction, she looks again at the apathetic sea.  Her mind is screaming, but her heart booms louder. 

The internal battle began along time ago and it rages now.  She has been fighting this all her life.  The glorious moment of forced choice calls her to action!  She runs at her attackers, a final yell! 

They do not know what to do, cannot predict her.  Hushed by her unexpected resolve, they make space.  She turns back toward the water, the unknown.  She has her running start.  A brief slip in the dirt, slow motion as she touches the ground to regain her balance.  Her enemies are dumbfounded.  Every muscle in her delicate, powerful body fires as she commits, commits finally to everything, the great leap!  One, two, three steps and the terminal push.

"No!" they yell, deprived of her murder, of consuming her or making her one of them.  One kicks the ground and whispers, "Coward."  But he knows, as do the rest, that her courage is great.  She has not only escaped their hungry teeth, but shamed and inspired them. 

Take flight young woman!  It is time, stop stinging yourself with promises of what you will someday do.

R.I.P. Erwin

Have you ever walked down W44th Street during rush hour without a purpose?  Not going home, not going to eat or work, just making right turns, so now you're on 5th Avenue and then its W43rd.  Have you ever thought as you walked, "All these people will die."?  And when someone meets your eyes - and a surprising majority do - you think, "You will die." or "I will die."  And suddenly everyone around you becomes more precious.  There is no room for wondering about beards or handbags, dieting secrets or destinations. 

I did this today.  In response to an email I read in between giving chair massages at an underground poker club.  It's not really underground.  It's actually the 8th floor, but wives and police officers pretend it doesn't exist so it's underground in that way.  I asked the players - there were 9 at the table - if anyone wanted anything from the deli because I was going there.  Junior said he wanted two slices of pizza. 

I wasn't really going to the deli.  I wanted to walk around the block.  I had just read an email informing me an old man I didn't know very well, an old man full of stories, had died the night before. 

Have you ever wanted to yell something in a crowd of people?  Ever wanted to yell about something you feel is profound and grossly under acknowledged?  I have.  But I didn't today.  In the muggy evening which has sticky air so clouds of cigar smoke, perfume, halal food keep their shape longer than usual and people walk a little more slowly in the thickened setting, I felt quiet.  I didn't want to tell anyone anything.

I just kept thinking, "You will die."

And then another though arrived.  "Maybe you won't."

"Maybe nobody here will die.  Maybe a great cloud of magic freeze will descend and hold each person in a state of forever now and no one will ever die."

"Because I can't know the future," I thought, "Only guess at it based on my experience in the past.  And now, all of these people are alive.   Maybe nobody will die.  And I never will too." 

And I came back to work.  Have you ever returned from one place to another, and it felt like entering another world?  Then you realize the places didn't really matter, it was what you had to do in them or maybe how you felt about what you had to do that made the places seem so different.

I Want To Snuggle Up Against Your Tongue

The dark chocolate dissolves on my tongue.  It smooths out under the pressure of the flexible muscle.  It spreads, deflowering my palate with the musk of vanilla and cacao nibs.  It has been carefully crafted so that it can rest and unmake itself in my mouth.  That is its purpose.  To be lovingly consumed…

What if the same were true for me?  I would love to crawl into some one's mouth and melt.  To dissolve the fear that prevents me from being anything other than what I am.  I look around me, I look within and I see a constant attempt at keeping form.  People pressed into frozen expressions by the freezing of their respective physiognomies.  They pay for surgical paralysis, dipping themselves - like m&ms - in colorful candy shells that don't melt.  I put on my makeup, dab a bit of concealer in the corners of my eyes to brighten the expression.  I don't want anyone to see me melting.  I don't want people to see that I haven't been sleeping, I drank too much last night, I've been lost in the stressful indecision of what to do next...

I'm performing myself, performing Kat Pratt.  The stage name that smiles and flirts, that dances in her candy coating.  But I dress up to be undressed.  I want a real tongue on my real body.  I want someone to enjoy me, not the packaged version.  I don't eat this chocolate just because of the way it looks.  I need to explore its complexity, its depth.  The most enticing flavors go beyond sweet.  They curl like fiddleheads at the bottom of my brain.  They ripple in the language of jellyfish, nesting where my dimples meet my teeth. 

So even though it is a terrifying proposition, please taste me fully.  I want to snuggle up against your tongue, move through the tears of my insecurities and shed the candy shell.

I want you to explore my physical spirit like you might a rare honey or the bloom of a feral cheese.  I want you to pay attention to the secret places - the roof of my belly button, the scent of my inner thigh, the shape of my eyebrows when I am captured by a sonata, the curious hair that grows underneath my left nipple.  I want you to discover parts of me I don't even know about.  The thoughts, macabre and devastating; ideas like diving loons; the self destruction, the creative healing.  Taste me as a hungry gourmand would a truffled pheasant, untie the kitchen twine binding my ankles.  Consume me so that I might look into your sated eyes and finally see myself.

Is that why I so crave coupling?  To experience my body though yours.  I want to smell and wrap myself in your savor.  Eating is the tickling of our own sensual bodies.  Making love is to share that corporeal feast.  I am no longer looking for a sugar fix.  m&ms will not do.  I want a slow cooked meal.  I want the tobacco depth of Senegalese honey.  I want the unapologetic oozing of camembert.  I want to brave rejection.  Anyone can eat an m&m.  It takes an adventurous epicure to explore the intricate flavor of a real human.

One Fart at a Time

Sometimes my mind takes over. It becomes consumptive and crazy.  It goes to work in a million directions.  I think of this, of that, of this.  Frantic attempts at grabbing those ideas, overwhelmed with their force and abundance.  Like a small child gifted a thousand helium balloons at once on a windy beach - each color more striking and attractive than the one before.  I scramble to catch them and just before panic...

I save myself with flatulence.  The pungent smell rescues me from mania and inspires a curious inhale.  The pause… depth like pork with notes of fresh corn.  The aroma is followed by a simple, refreshingly lonely question: why do I like to smell my own farts?

There is something humanly satisfying about the whole thing.  Reminds me that I am breathing my own lucky poison.  That the maddening head I have resting on my shoulders has to shut up sometimes with the stink of my digestive system.  I am not only brain. In truth, the farts coming out of my other end are just as valid as any thought, any realization, any profound moment of insight that seems a product of my mind.  I get so attached to the brain's ideas.  But the farts are important too.  They invite attention to the uncomfortable.  Above all, they remind me that I am breathing. 

Of course, when I am in the company of others, I am praying for innocuous gas.  I search for the scent, expanding my nostrils, shifting my eyes from side to side, laughing a little louder than necessary, making hollow statements to reassure my company that I couldn't possibly be expecting anything unpleasant to suddenly fill the room, "Oh look at that interesting person over there.  Um, no that one."  Watch me gesticulate, watch me agree to whatever you said that I wasn't paying attention to, but please disregard the casual wave of hand behind my rear or the forceful exhale directed at my lower half. 

I call out to the random breeze that might sweep in and save me from the embarrassing admittance of human physiology, heroically carrying away the gaseous faux pas to another place and perhaps planting it on the face of some unsuspecting stranger, one who cannot connect the smell with anyone in particular, most importantly me. 

Yet when I don't have to protect myself from the discomfort of shared stink, I indeed look forward to the brief company of my own miasma. 

I like to smell my farts.  Why?  Because something inside me gets to acknowledge, Hey, I made that.  I made something that changed the environment.  I didn't even have to try. I am affecting this space without having to try...

Yes, smelling my farts reminds me that I am breathing.  It reminds me that I am in this body, alive.  I am breathing and affecting, even when the effect is not aromatically noticeable.

I spoke to Scott MacInnis the other day in a moment of brainy exasperation, "There is just so much I want to do and see!  So many ideas!  I don't know where to start!"

"Kat, take a deep breath," he said.  "Now think about all the air you have breathed until this point.  Think about all the air you will ever breath and picture its volume."

"That's a lot of air," I said.

"Yes, but it happens, it can only happen, one breath at a time."

Later in the week, when I was again spinning in mental circles, eventually brought back to his statement by the aforementioned stink, I relaxed.  Letting one rip is just a louder (and often smellier) exhale.  We all have a lot of gas to pass in this life, but we can only do it one fart at a time.

I'm Not Suicidal, Except When I'm Really Happy

Here is an excerpt from the book I'm writing.  Hopefully sharing this will put a little more fire under my ass!

Sometimes I imagine myself at the edge of that building - arms outstretched.  I have been there.  I have stood before, looking out at the land spreading before me, opening like a flower or a bee hive - above it all is the buzz of everyone trying, in a million languages, to say something.  

There I am listening to the collective music, pulling from the wind specific aromas, threads from the woven melange that rides the air.  Here is the ocean and then the Hudson, a muddied cousin to our beloved Atlantic, swishing around, the inspiration for many great bridges.  I stand taller, breathe more deeply.  There is a loaf of Polish bread sitting on a counter top, baked this morning.  There is the smell of plastic and waste - diapers set out the previous evening, not yet collected by the trash man.  Here is a passing grandfather, coat impregnated with the aroma of mothballs and basement hiding places.  It takes me away for a moment.

 I smell traffic fumes, the mushroomy wash of false fruit blossoms, the city's attempt at decoration without the mess of arboreal ovaries.  I have been in this place, listening, smelling, looking and feeling separate from it all.  The seduction of an easy step, the dizzying pull to finally, finally become part of this world.  Perhaps I would not die, but simply atomize into it all, float with the wind until it was time to stop and rain on a swampy patch along a river.  I have been close to convincing myself of these things.  But it's always a flirtation.  Nothing more serious.  When Luna told me her mother jumped from the roof of this building, I felt every cell in my body turn itself inside out.  My own coquetry with life became childish.  My heart ached and I reached out to my friend.  I wanted to hold her, but it was not just to offer comfort, I wanted to remind my body of the importance of connection.  Why haven't I jumped before?  This is why:  so that I might sit closer to another human, feel myself in her.  Opening myself to real connection is another way of leaping, the unbearably beautiful pain of looking at someone and recognizing myself.