quotidian

What I miss most about New Mexico is singing. Late at night, walking a stretch of the old Santa Fe Trail, hands full of apricots no larger than a skipping stone, I sang and sang to myself and there was nothing to stop me. I had a head full of traditionals then, murder ballads, old love songs, things I've forgotten.

I picked tons of apricots...
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The general plan for the summer is: poetry, dinners, analysis of the Bohm interpretation of quantum theory, the East Village, and stop thinking of her after you help her pack her things and say goodbye.

The afternoon I figured out she was straight, I walked to her to a meeting. When she left, she placed her hand in mine and ran her fingers slowly from...
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Roommate number one dreamt of a rat attacking her. Roommate number two's girlfriend dreamt of a rat in the bathroom, while roommate number two dreamt of her furniture rearranged, everything in disarray, no one to be found. I thought of rat-faced Travis, that malicious grin, that vengeful sense of humor.

What if he's really here?

In my dream this morning, Travis was running around the apartment with a handgun. It wasn't one of those little .25 caliber deals that he liked so much (most little guys like big guns, but not Travis). This one was a big black nine-millimeter monster, thick-handled, counter-weighted barrel. I could hear his boots thumping against the hardwood floor, the clean sounds of his black leather...
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I've decided to start photographing food. Specifically, I've decided to start making extravagant meals (I cook when I have writer's block) and documenting them as table presentations. I wish I could say that there's a perfectably logical reason for this meal-photographing urge, but honestly, very little of my life has anything to do with logic.

All is as it was. I'm working on poems, which...
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Last night was a private poetry reading / wine party with friends, which I found to be simultaneously pleasant and intolerable. I love to share my friends' talents, but I hate reading my work aloud. Tonight is another (this time decidedly less artsy) party, a blunts-and-40s kinda thing that promises to be an okay time. The roommate and I talked about making a run into...
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Best drunken misspeak of the night: "Nicotine actually makes a really good incesticide."

I used to collect interesting misspeaks until I realized that most worldly conversation consists of saying something you don't quite mean unless you're concentrating really hard. People are most beautiful when they reveal themselves without meaning to.

In the bar tonight, there was a young woman knitting. Who knits in a bar?...
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None of us ever get to be who we wanted to be. Be honest. You wanted a beach house in the Caymans, a truckload of money in the bank, a record deal and an Oscar. You wanted to be a guru or a rock star, and if you are a guru or a rock star, you wanted to be an average somebody with a mortgage...
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Lately I've had this difficulty that isn't so much writer's block as it is restlessness. I want to sum it up by saying that I skipped a lot of school as a teenager, but that won't make much sense to you.

I am a notorious skipper. I've skipped schools, court dates, weddings, birthday parties, on and on. I sometimes wonder if I get myself involved...
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THE LOVE SHOP

Like most things, it requires robots.
We extract it from designated
donors at the moment of legal death,
but it's so acutely volatile
that only a machine hand can
draw it out, clean and uncurdled.
The good stuff smells stringent,
slightly oaky, with a note of pineapple
or pear. A spoiled batch has that
piss and vinegar smell of methamphetamine,
of violence....
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I seem to vaguely recall mid-February as the season of requited and unrequited love. When did it become the season of heavy drinking with your fellow bachelory jerks? Or has it always been this way?

You have some romantic moment that left you feeling neutered, an instant of love that rendered you dull and powerless. Mine was someone who was beautiful, brilliant, creative and mischievous,...
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