It is Friday.

I am in an impossibly good mood. I wait for it to go away, try and sneak up behind, catch it with a sad thought. I keep looking over my shoulder and it's still there, the good mood, just chilling out in a corner of my mind. I would try to reason it into nothing. Try and understand why, worry where it comes from and worry it away, but out of thin air I am happy. Like Uncle Albert, I cannot come down now. Then I chanced at-a-glance the calendar blotter below me. Friday the 23rd. A pay day week at HHC. July's going so fast. The 23rd of July. Something about the 23rd.

Fuck. I found it. Flowers delivered, proudly sitting on my desk, the rose blushing envy of all the cubicles. I found it. The July month memory of the last celebrated versary. With the foresight of the end I couldn't face, we walked backwards, holding fast to the flavor, same restaurant, and facts, first kiss by the Hudson but we skipped the movie, of the first first date. I turned away from college, the place I'd imagined since middle school was the promised land (Moses couldn't enter after all) and the promise of pain of parting coming perhaps never to depart. Shot tapioca tea balls for distance (peeing contest competitive) and to vandalize the sides of Citigroup's tower walls and ceilings of glass. Swinging in the sky of the play ground, walking around the edge of the fountain, feeling the beauty and peeved that it didn't hit him with the same physical force that made me ill. Going home tired out by all the reincarnation and comparison to the first life. I found the reason my good mood couldn't last. That moment too momentous to me was a year ago, and I bet I'm the only one on either side of the globe who remembered. Damn calendar. I found it.

My arms stretch up from my chair and I smile. The sky just darkened and the rain has been released that was pent up in the air. This morning run it smelled like rain and the cologne of the man across the street and half a block down which dissolved in the humidity. Suddenly the office is startlingly light in stark contrast to the dark falling sky. I will walk home in the rain through New Haven's poorest neighborhood. I am still in an incurably good mood. Some sacrificial right to be held for 365 precise days don't make a difference. No Kabbalah numerology of some combination of a 2 and 3  and a 7 will make me a Mystic, Miss sick, relive again on this day. Writing is something separate from reliving. And happiness something separate from having no pain or spite or some good. It's not enough to will happiness, to decide to be happy. How hard is it to decide to be in a and get in a good mood? Hard. It doesn't add up just because there's nothing to subtract. It doesn't sum to happiness just because I went to see cabaret, drank wine, had a friend to walk me home, the same to go out to a bar with tonight, listened to a good mix on the way to work and the cloth of the gray sky was worn through by the knees of heaven and frayed in one beautiful wrent of light as I looked up and ran through this morning. It's really coming down now. It won't let up. There is no reason to be happy. There's no reason to at all. There's just too much joy to escape it.

I'm eating burritos and blueberries

and blues, Coltrane, alone in the kitchen past midnight. Quynh's gone fast to sleep after pulling an all nighter working on her lab last night. I slept for most of it after I got home at 2 from drinking pink foamy watermelon, listening to Jewel, Sade, Sarah McLachlin, the Goo goo dolls, gossip and horoscopes out of sex crazed magazines. Girls night in, at Cynthia and Becca's from eight till we couldn't stand the sight of pink or couldn't keep our eyes open to see it. We played tabboo and screamed. Romina was the best, Brazillian playing with the handicap of English and getting so excited, swearing and gesticulating furiously every word. We ended watching an Ideal Husband, and while I love Wilde he's really not girly. (He is the man that wrote men represent the triumph of mind over morals and women the triumph of matter over mind.) But I forgot how witty that man in the purple velvet bloomers blooming was. I'm talking about nothing but enjoying it, it is the only subject I know anything about. Or like Lloyd says, some people think they know, but they don't know. At least I know I don't know. The beauty behind the idea of agnostic. What said Jordan the only former mormon I know, besides Ken Jennings a constant friend in my life but whom I'm always in Jeopardy of losing. From Mormon upbringing to put down questions, tonight he believes in maybe, in doubt, in acceptance of ignorance. This conversation took place at a high table at the Yale cabaret, fellows night. Jordan drank lots of wine our director Reggie gave us and explained how his family went from seven, five mormon kids, two mormon mom and dad parents to eight with three parents, two lesbians, and only one mormon left of the bunch. The waitor who came intermittantly to this mix was a Yale soon to be soph soccer star turned actor, waiting tables ain't so bad. Handsome and cool, one of those we know lots about but he's no clue who I am except that I exist and well tonight in a backless white shirt and have no objection to him reaching across me to clear plates. I didn't eat, just drooled. And after the food. We saw 10 new plays. The actual drama was some quite good some too existentialist even for me. My favorite was of course the one where the mathlete nerds have to solve absurdist algebra problems for their lives and one (with the aid of an off stage water gun) wets his pants, repeatedly. It was soo good I almost peed myself. The wine, the waitor and the plays made me giddy happy. Want to act stories to connect but there was too little 4th wall, too much albee for my tastes as times. But so much world to eat and drink and invent. And so many morals to learn and forget in the joy. Have I mentionned recently how much I love this summer.

Diving into the Wreck

Who else would go from the Pony Polo Club to the digging in the dumpster in one night? From beside linened tables to the side of Trader Joe's, it's a wonderful life. And the punch-line. The Polo Club gourmet meal was mandatory. The dumpster was for fun. Due to a freak monsoon, delicate hot house hydrophobes all of them, Greenhouse diving in the downpour was put off till next week. April (showers sometimes and brings May flowers) says Tuesday nights bring the freshest poetry from diving into the wreck of waste of culture crawling from the wreckage of its own mistakes into a brand new car. Story goes if they've overestimated the previous order, like some Horace Mann husbands, they throw the old shipment away when get a newer model in (although if you've ever gotten chocolate from Oma at Christmas I'm thinking the stuff they throw away's gotta be really old, even older than the sale chocolate, and whatever the righteous sisters of the House say, that must be beyond stale.) But the militantly correct (the sign on the basket letters gets dropped into says femail and mail) are right about some part of it. Traitor Joes, trade up Joes are part of our culture, eager to overconsume, and overeager to throw people, slightly damaged, or food, "perfectly good," away. I don't like Adrienne Rich and I don't want the food, not even rich treasure, the fortune of pounds of dark chocolate dug up one night in the spring. Springing into action, the House intrigues as the counter-culture hero dumpster divers. Counting on the surplus, feeding off the excess of the excessive craze it condemns, the House might be rooting around in refuse but we're not the ones who'd starve if the country slimmed down and de-super world power sized, if the country was lean, skin and bones, used even the useful bones, every last scrap of the animals the House doesn't touch, if there wasn't discarded fat to flavor the empty stomach of an ignored fate. With Yale degrees to come and a steady summer income, a pack of Greenhouse dogs gone to town at the junk yard, joyriding through dumpsters and burning stories to fuel an anarchist hippie reputation will get you far in some loopy circles, I don't imagine we'd look like the revolution, yet. Besides, April, a journalist who works in Waterbury wants to get a cameraman next time for the local news and everyone knows that the revolution will not be televised. And the solution we'll come to with our Yale degrees and freedom of a room and thousands a year, will not involve everyone weekly feeding from dumpsters.

The weekly feeding of the fellows was from the opposite of a dumpster. Or due to my cooking food insecurity, I was the dumpster there trying to down all of the delicious vegetarian lasagna option. It was rich and the solution will not involve everyone eating constantly at the Pony Club, either, but it was an excellent meal. In front of me was first put warm bread, then lasagna, then creme brulee that I listened to intently as I cracked its crust. At my elbow was set a Southern gentleman, Brett's older brother, courteous and cogent as I listened to his intent explain its shift from going into the theater to entering law school. He presented an exterior no one could crack. But I did a quick geologic survey of the crust of himself he gave away. Brett's a President's fellow with political maners, like her brother up from their Florida home for a visit. He was tan carefully handsome, with wavy groomed hair and a wavy Wickham personality. He winked too well and winked at the waitlist he hoped to charm his way off of at Georgetown or Stanford.  He smiled telling us how he'd suffered. He hadn't had the advantages of a Yale undergrad education in such a beautiful place. It was hard to come from an ugly state school, and although he didn't have that quite a bit of money, Yale, Georgetown and Stanford were such good financial investments. He wasn't going to bet on someone turning down one of his places though. They had sincerely wounded him, but he'd make the merriest of any situation. He seemed to have a talent for making the best and hadn't even flinched when a barricuda almost bit his hand off. He'd always wanted to go close to home and it was better to learn in the state he was going to practice on, he said with a shrug that seemed to think it'd look fine in his regimentals of Florida State Law. If Wickham had a smooth Southern accent, he'd be Brett's brother.

There'll be time enough for rocking when we're old

but I want to write now. There'll be time enough for sleeping when we're dead. But tonight I think I'd rather just go dancing. Going to the cabaret tonight, went to a pink party last night. Going on no sleep, went to work wanting to be in bed. Besides heavy head, it's hard to write looking over shoulder to see a supervisor or project peering at my guilty screen. Between all the taking the lively air, I'll have to sit, settle and breathe it out slow soon.

94 degrees.

And the airconditioning won't flow up Hill. At Hill Health the air is broken. (At SCRC, the detox center, the sky is falling, financialy, mentaly and perpetually.) A muggy day, the sky hugs as you walk down the street. It's the hot dog days of summer. Everything is humid and near. The air wraps its arms around and holds you close so atmosphere can suffocate you as it covers your breath. Of course the air conditionning would break and so some tempers break too. A community health center, who knows when climate readjustment will return. After the usual ice age of the office, I'm happy in the tropics.

My supervisor's supervisor just asked me to go to the liquor store. I wanted to explain that there's not much I can buy there. He held up a white rock can of cola. The federal inspector wants a diet coke. This isn't up to her standards, he smirked. Guess the government's gotta conform to name brands from Coke to Haliburton.

Head start in a circle game

I'm writing a grant, focused on Spanish speaking Hill residents. Recent studies have shown poor health literacy is costly in money and people. The government (your guess good what which figures got their attention) is finally handing out money, we want some, and we need it. Composing a section titled Statement of Need, it's long. Children in the suburbs come to kindergaten trailing toys and a vocabulary 5,000 words longer behind them, already leaving behind not no child of the city still near dumb to say how hot the day is. Poorer in other possessions, they're not even given self-possession of their tongues. Their tongues and pens do more than 30% worse than the stated average seeming to Supe Reggie Mayo(nnaise) to defy him in spite. Despite the brand-new, state money built buildings brandishing in the sun their glass faces under the noses of critics of the public system, they start off at the end of a cycle. Parents fuck kids up, they don't mean to but they do. Critical parental involvement hard to take; any parental involvement is critical to the success of kids in urban schools. But a third of the adults in New Haven can't read well enough to fill out an application, read a food label or prescription, or a simple story to a Goodnight Moon child much less any higher level-reading or problem solving skills that another third of adults lack but need to help their Where the Wild Things Are grown ones. How's head start to help when it all revolves around the circle of no words. It's not fair. Perhaps we are products of our class. Or our classiness, or class of values. (Cause if it's class as the sole determinant, then account for Justin Morelli or David Brailey, even Dr. Schiller could barely teach them to read, take that Marxist.) But if it's all about the class then it's up to the lucky literates to teach a better one, get grants and write a world more can read in.

The bad stuff's easier to believe.

You ever notice that? a pretty woman asks Richard Gere in bed. Memory, a belief about the past, the bad stuff's easier to remember. Blunt bitter anger, sweet sorrow of planned parting, weeping to have what I feared to lose. Thoughts of you are as a death that cannot choose to go out but linger in in indecision. Precipitous precipitate (from my eyes) suspended in sorrow, my image of you refuses to grow up and grow old and grow out. (In my mirror with moldings of memory, this face is still framed by that old haircut my reflexion in your glance gave me. Like favorite frayed hair and dyed jeans, I haven't grown out of you yet.) If there'd been only effervescent happiness, laughing gas of you would have bubbled away, been exhaled or evaporated long ago into the spaces we breathe and release. But these feelings clutch, follow the four letters of your name my mind mentions fifty times a day till I do not even need to think of you discretely because buoyed by melancholy memories you float vaguely on the uncontrolled vagues of language. Buckled to tragic vision of a former, better time, you swash about the ocean inside my skull and wash up on the smooth beach of my cheeks. You diffuse across the membrane of concious and unconciousness. Dissolved in a dilute deperession solution, which true to its liquid properties expands till it fills the shape of the container, the vessel, vessicles I am, you are the omniscent, omnipotent, omnipresent grammar of unspoken speeches.

But on the roof at sunset, the church corner clock (and all the clocks in this city) chimes, "Oh let not Time deceive you, even You cannot conqueor Time." The first love leaks away, I clip loose locks of Greek grief for you and the firm soil of self wins of the watery mane of tears streaming from the head of hopes floated on your shoulder. In the wake of no one, I sunk my heady hopes in you. Hearty hopes I transplanted to your chest. Hardy hopes, they were weeds watered with salt which did not shrivel or burst but sprouted dandalion wine and saltwater toffee I sucked and sucked on, endless in its hidden source yet never ending hunger. Yet, the river wears the suit ability of you out and down current washes the stains away. The water wheel turns faster and the memories, easy wish-washy long lived longing and hard happy, splash off the sides, sink under the strength of the stream of new thoughts, uncertain whether they will ever appear again. You will surface late and soon will be plunged under the great flood; gates have been openned to wide world. You are an antidilluvian and it is a new era, Noah, I will not be your ark. No one's going two by two. After dark, it's single file for now.

For the first time

I'm not sea-green with jealousy. There's nothing that does not suffer a sea-change into something marvelous and strange. My jealous intoxicating whine's been watered down. Like French children I'll drink a less potent draught and stay steeped in sociabili-tea strong enough for British afternoon parlors. A wave of reason has broke on the beach of emotion I am often stranded upon; some not flirting might mark some other page than a blank lack of interest. And their interest, the play-flirting that they practice on other "girls" before the heroine arrives, may not be worth as much as a hill of refried beans in my world. To tacos topped with salsa and spicy security.

Complacencies of the whole some

Some times I think I'm a lot like me.

I feel myself in legs pumping down Dwight Street, arms at sides sprinting home. I feel myself lying on my roof in the sun, my body heavy with summer sun and tar warmth. I feel myself in the small of my back, tingling and taught, collecting in the center of my life breathing being. In my fingertips poised over the keys, in my lips pliable and full of the words they wait to form. In all my parts I exist completely. Replete with thought current through the snynapses of all neurons of my corps. Esprit de corps. I am a living corpse. Electric ideas animating so much clay. I am not just the figment of my imagination. I am tangible, a thing of substance animated by some moving principle, some soul. I am highly conscious of the physical, the farthest thing from a disembodied theory, a monk, somehow living on their principles. I live certified organic on fruit, vegetables, and bread.

I am embodied.