I tried describing you to someone

i  just met
at a crowded bar.
with my ninth gin shot
clinging loosely in my hands,
i started,
“she has short hair–”
and stopped
when I saw
a multitude of you
in the dance floor
crashing
towards me
like an angry wave
of memory.

The length of it

On writing a maximalist paragraph (yup, the kilometric one-sentence, one-paragraph route) for our Fiction 2 class today, one of my male classmates remarked.

“The longer your paragraph,
the shorter your penis [gets].”

Dear Daddy Long Legs,

Such a pleasure to have met you! But what a short acquaintance we had! You were a swift read. But that is only to mean that you were compelling. The time I laid my eyes on your pages yesterday’s early morning I was hooked! I read you freely the first twenty minutes after waking up, then I had to stretch out and take a bath so I took you to the bathhouse, propped you open in the towel hanger so you wouldn’t get wet and read you while I soaped and shampooed. I took care to wipe my fingers on my towel before I turned your pages. It was ridiculous but I can’t really help myself with a good book.

After the bath (that proceeded rather slowly because I was paying more attention to reading you than bathing myself), I carried you back to my room (and my mother’s too, I musn’t forget) and splayed you out on top of my clothes box and read you while I dressed. Judy can write a storm, really! I wish I had her wits. And Ms. Jean Webster’s too!

After I dressed, I took you with me while I ate my breakfast and tried reading along until my mother scolded me for “mixing up priorities”. She said I should eat when I should eat and read later. My mother’s so old-fashioned like you Daddy dear. But you are more entertaining. My mother is, some times, when she’s not worrying about things she shouldn’t really worry about. So I told her, I can do two things at once. I have my mouth to mind my eating and my eyes to mind my reading and I have two hands to do service to each of the two principal senses I was using to do two tasks at once. You ought to know, Daddy, that’s how it is these days. Better if you can do a lot of things at once. We call it multi-tasking. It makes the world revolve faster as much as we like to think. That’s what you think when you are “modern”.

Anyway, it’s not only the modern people doing a lot of things at once these days. Even the things Daddy! You should try our coffee. In the 20th century, we made coffee “instant”. In the 21st century, we gave it various properties so that it cannot only be just “instant” but also be creamy and sugary. We call it the 3-in-1 coffee because it’s instant coffee mixed with cream and sugar so you wouldn’t have to make your own crude estimations of cream and  sugar and make your coffee undrinkable. Then we upgraded “3-in-1 coffee” to “5-in-1″ coffee”. This upgraded coffee has healthy properties along with the usual cream, sugar, and coffee. But still there are lots of possibilities! Somewhere out there, a new coffee product mixed the properties of tea is being made and sold. Perhaps, in the future coffee can also taste like orange juice. See Daddy, if you had lived in my time, you would have a grand time finding both delight and disgust with all these modern concoctions.

But modern times do get tiring. That’s why I found you engrossing. Your times, though already modern, had the smell of a fresh bud opening up. Perhaps, it was all because of Judy and her tellings of her fresh start in life, in college away from the dreadful John Grier Home. It is always enlivening to discover and do new things.If I could just begin my college life again or my whole life in school I would have made a better progress in life. The dissatisfaction of the 21st century! The case of another miserable youth! What tragedy! I am moved to think I am a gift to the human race turned languid and sour. If I could just sicken and die.

But don’t you think there’s hope Daddy? In my deepest, darkest pit of a self, I think there is a tunnel of light my slow, creaky train can pass through. In the meantime, I just have to chug along.

I hope I have not bored you Daddy, with my juvenile misery (I may be in my 20s but I can never grow out of being sixteen). I am really a sunny person but I can’t always keep at it, naturally. Sunny personalities eventually retire like the sun every afternoon. But before that, I can be awfully bright. That morning when I finished you, I was.

Yours in brightness,
21st century Judy

Never Fear

When I travel far and away and alone, I never fear. Fear is just impossible. It will also make things impossible. It won’t get me anywhere. It won’t let me have fun. I do think of the unfortunate possibilities that could happen to me while waiting on the road, extending my thumb for a hitch to familiar and unknown places, but I don’t fear them. Danger is always part of the adventure. Danger is also part of the fun. I’ve had so many long rides in trucks with strangers, mostly men. But I don’t fear their presence. If you don’t fear them they won’t touch you. Never show fear. Never fear. What I always feel while on the road is my heart so tranquil like a placid sea on a summer’s day.

If I became catatonic, I’d hope for someone to carry my rigid body at the top of the tallest building and throw it down the street below. Maybe at some point in the fall, panic and fear would get over me and I’d find a few seconds to live.

If I don’t die too soon, I’m going to be a pilot.  If I do, I’ll just fly.

RIP Heath Ledger

See yah Heath!

I used to have dreams when I was a kid that I’d go running down the street and jump up in the air and go flying and just fly through the air all by myself. That’s what weightlessness is like.

                                                                                            — Robert Gibson.

Wake up and Live!

-BOB MARLEY

I will build my own home with my own hands.