Dress up!

Nothing like putting on a costume, shimmery make-up and wings for flight right smack into an excited, elevated mood. Angel for an evening. Or two. Halloween on a Sunday is only an excuse for liquor treating two nights as time trick or treats us to an extra hour, candy to merely enjoy.

I had too much to drink yesterday.

By midnight my body was in ruins and refused to ruminate or run right. I had two cups of coffee (I never drink coffee), two cups of hot chocolate (I always drink chocolate but don't usually consume so much), and a couple of diet cokes. I ODed on caffeine. I shook still as standing seemed difficult. Me strung out in the car after the Monaco mini-espresso wasn't even as bad as the effects of the dangerous drug last night coupled with no sleep. The cause was an unsatisfying midterm. Weathering these conditions, skewed and staggering off a steady even keel, I was in no state to cope with new information, and stay afloat. Life mimics not art but GG.

Being blindfolded is like doing a cold read of some script. You play the part of the whole you're trying to figure out on the fly. You allow your steps, gestures, speech to be molded by someone else. An actor, you are moved by an outside force. The plot or the dialogue directs you on. You give your lines and listen to them after they've been spoke trying to evaluate if you understand and sgree with the significance. Sometimes, in an absurd world, you are left alone. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the thought comes that we cannot have been brought here, left here for nothing. We have been selected. Someone has sent for us. Even when no one is in sight and a clear fate is blurry, there is the sound of chimes on the wind of a windless day. There is the hope, assuredness of an audience, someone watching even if you cannot see them blinded by spotlights. Most importantly there is the author. You won't worry what to do while expecting a hand to guide you. Yesterday the writer's plot was revealed and I wasn't sure if I liked it, the tone, or the structure. Saturated with caffeine beyond thought, all I could do was melt down and freak out. So naive. What have I gotten myself into? I'm still freaking out on some level, but after recovering from the caffiene into a sounder mind, new sights are not as scary, possibly even sacred. I enjoyed the experience of senses someway that might have pleased Baudelaire enough to write a poem. I've new appreciation for familiar scents, sounds of voices, and the touch of another human mind extending a hand to tentatively, blindly reach towards. Now with second sight, still within seconds of first seeing the whole picture, I think I might paint myself very prettily and occasionaly wittily into the frame.

The Woman in the Moon

hides her face for shame. She's retreating beneath an ominous veil. Out on cross campus, a crowd formed wondering what the murky hand grasping the moon was. Staring up they paused, struck by a primeval dread of darkness. The enlightened astronomy majors were analyzing and explaining away ancient fear through telescopes and principles. I took off my baby blue Yankees hat to look in the eyepiece and see the sphere of the moon held in a tube. Each crater on her face precisely focused. I watched the murky shadow start to shroud her cool face. Boston's winning 3-0. The moist star upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands is sick almost to Doomsday with eclipse. Her hue turns red, as stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, while flame throwers blithely practice trading burning torches for Halloween's fire breathing show. Fire was tossed about at the debate I'd been to of Charlie vs. Seyla, Hill hopefull and Benhabib philosophical on Iraq. On the Middle East, they agreed the system of states to be disjoint and out of frame and little else. She emphasized war as a blunt instrument to use to compose change in the region. He argued we went with international law on our side and more U.N. resolutions than we needed. His closing line was that Muslim communities wanted, waited for us to come in and bring them democracy. The jaw of the room dropped, hair stood on end, and eyes popped out, like stars started from their spheres. Cosmic spheres are lined up, and my stars are going to gaze at the moon.

End of the circle.

Eyes look your last! Take your last embrace of five o'clock warm sun polished stone. Because there will be no more sunshine to breathe. These are the last bells heard from Harkness. The chorus of me, Nostra Damus, and Babe Ruth chant, "It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine." Tonight time stops. At my time 10:23, it's lights out. Stepping in front, blinded by the beam, we'll trip and unplug the lamp. We will fall on a full form. In a battle of representations, earth's shadow suffocates sun's mirror. Perfectly planar with lunar and solar bodies, orbits oddly in tune, a lunar eclipse, erratic, will erase light. A total eclipse of the moon is a sign someone centuries ago, in the dark ages, would have read right by candlelight. It's a flicker of the apocolypse that will flame if the Red Sox win tonight. Eight straight, it's so absurd I'm starting to enjoy it like some French drama. Au revoir, goodbye, the world's ending. Frost favours fire, but if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of human hate and stupidity to say that for icing on the apocolypse cake, Tuesday might suffice.

Worlds, words are slipping away from me.

And I can't seem to take the tired time to wrap my tongue around them and tell you what it tastes like. My time's been disjointed lately. Somehow it doesn't all fit together. There're too many degrees of meanings to make this angle right, square, fit neatly into 24 hours or one thought that will stand up on its own. Fitting corners together at crew Sunday afternoon when I should have been studying, writing lab reports when I should have been sleeping. Last night, I alternated hours of waking to write and sleeping to wake, setting my alarm for odd, unbalanced times like 3:09, and disturbing my dear roommate.

Boston's going to burn. But it's more than that. Everything's more or less alright. It's more wonderful than imagined but not less loneliness than expected. It's October oranges, mean reds, and blues. With the Fall, the big apple plucked down, there's doubt, it's never enough. I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do but I'm too tired to remember why I'm doing what I'm doing. All this is a long round-about, shortest way home way of saying, Ben, that it's not simple to tell you what I'm up to. Because nights like this, I'm not sure what I'm up to, why I'm up all nighters, and why all my worlds don't always make sentences that are light, jolly joking, and constantly happy. Incapable of too much joy or too much fear. I will escape in webs of words and grow seagreen and slowly die, in brininess and volubility. Here's what I'm doing:

I'm refluxing benzaldehyde for an hour waiting for it to turn pee yellow like everyone else's. But somehow mine's dehydrated, the phthalic anhydride, and it needs to get more basic, like Lloyd Dobbler, before the reaction occurs. After adding in base, it's simple, simply another hour and I take my pee product and form crystals from the dubious mother liquid. I leave lab later than anyone and walk down science hill. I eat dinner in a dining hall with goofballs who manage for one night not to talk about things like chicken fertilization, viagra, or cats in heat, at least not during dinner. It was lovely but not as luxurious as the lunch my parents took me out for this weekend where the finest, fanciest part was the luxury of having my Mom, my Dad, and my Jesse about. Right now, I'm reading 113 sonnets Spencer wrote for one woman who wasn't even queen. He really wanted her. What a way to woo. And then, when they were married, after he'd gotten his girl, he wrote her some more. And tonight I'm reading them all, studying for my midterm Thursday, going to the gym, sleeping some hours so I'll be fresh tomorrow morning when the kids get fresh and I get frustrated. I'll be rested and patient to teach first and second graders to spell as I learn to spell names like Anfernee or Quashanta. My job (America Reads) is less glamorous and earlier (8-10:30 am), but it is intensely interesting and excellent getting well paid to tutor some less well off. I'm off, but stories to come. I promise. On all the doings of the week to come, except on what comes that I'm bound never tell you.