The Indecisive, Conflicted Life of

There is free wireless at this Holiday Inn. It's these little discoveries that keep me going, I'm sure of it.

Yesterday I read a book. Yeah, a whole book. It was nice-- I forgot how much I like doing that. Just sitting down with a book and reading it. Minimal interruption, taking it all in. "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz, before you ask (as I'm sure you were about to). Do I recommend it? Do you think you've ever been in love?

It brings up something interesting, though. The title character, a socially awkward and overweight Dominican sci-fi/fantasy enthusiast, has the bizarre but beautiful habit of falling in love with all of the many women who pass through his life. As endearing is this is, Mr. Diaz' theme works in near direct conflict with one of Mr. Sheff's (Yeah. Will Sheff. Okkervil River. My hero.)

Will writes, (as the album name of what is, in my opinion, the best OR record) "Don't Fall In Love With Everyone You See" But Oscar did just that, in the story of his brief, wondrous life. And it was magical. Beautiful and fucking-- innocent. The purity of man in possession of so much love despite the absence of its reciprocation.

So who's right?

I don't know. But while I think Will is right to warn us, but I get the feeling he believes as strongly as I am beginning to that we all fall in love a hundred times in our lives. Hell, I'm talking a dozen times a day. Maybe not Oscar's love, the awkward forwardness of the unkissed and looking to become lost, but the kind of love that comes from looking upward out the back windshield of your buddy's car from the backseat. Or from simultaneous laughter. I think I fall in love every time I buy a damn coffee.

It's like wanting something so bad you build it. It isn't the same but that's what I've got. Somewhere, there's a perfect balance between care and discretion-- and the capacity to have and share all that love.

Unconventional, yeah. But some nice thoughts, I think.

I'm in Florida. But not the Florida with beaches and bikinis and Disney characters. Nope. The other Florida. I haven't seen anyone older than 7 or younger than 45 sans my sister and random waitresses in 3 days. But I'm getting some reading done. And reminding myself why I'm no "family" man-- despite how badly I want to be one.

I wonder if I'll ever write that novel.


Bomb the blogosphere,
Mike

Jesus, etc.

Christ is dry on my tongue and I am a puddle of digression.

I am, perhaps, the term personified. As if a single one of us isn't, now. Catholics
in his house, kneeling and thinking that in the morning we'll draw straws

to see who makes the omelets. We're a splatter of pea coats and sweaters
and hairloss. Too in-between the ages that remember Jesus. The Nicene

Creed is projected on the wall because we don't know it. It should
have been in Latin like I've heard it used to be for all the good we did it.

And I remember Jimmy, telling me with a mouth full of Dutchmaster
that you have to keep it wet so it won't rip. His thumbs working to crack the spine

and spill the dirt and the shit onto the floor. Like a surgeon. Or
maybe like something else, which escapes me. And I remember Junior

year, and how stupid I was. I wonder if I'm as stupid now. Now
that I've come full-circle on the subject of intimacy and landed

nowhere. Like it won't change tomorrow. Like it ever stops. Maybe
it's the way things move around me when the bathroom is dank that makes

people climb out of their people-costumes and stop reciting Shakespeare.
And when someone puts The New Radicals on I feel my own people-costume feather

like molted spiderwebs-- crumbling under the implications of the past
tense and exactly what it is to be too anything. Late, late, late--

like my grandmother who always asked how my girlfriend was. I would protest
at the embarrassment of being eleven and treated like I thought about girls like that

(which I did). Now I think I'd lie. "She's fine, Grandma. Beautiful." And maybe
she'd smile. As I write I realize grandma never met a girlfriend. As big an injustice

as any. Jimmy's name isn't Jimmy. But the idea is the same-- the tongue, like
it intended to send a letter. And I remember cracking the window and toweling

the door. And I remember Father's homily about being God's great masterpiece
and thinking it bullshit. And I remember the great sadness of regret

and the way it all rushed back like if Central America stopped and the East became
the West like it sometimes does in songs about believing. The sex

and how it wasn't important like the music was.

And I remember standing in the upstairs E wing
as I was recited lines I knew by heart.