and it's stamina that i lack

because i'll only ever be a middle distance runner

e.e. cummings has been sent to me in text form, for the first time, and i sit down in a park next to a highway because everything is so confusing. the faithful moon follows us these days after we've watched everything brilliantly burn into night and it's skinny-dipping season and oh the home brews are out in force and my hand is happy when it touches my burned neck. some of my closest and most inspiring friends are coming to visit next week and my excitement is burning holes in a stomach full of chocolate-covered strawberries and a crumbling mess of peaches and blackberries.

always Milan Kundera

"The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of 'We are all writers!"
-Milan Kundera

beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.

I wonder, sometimes, what anyone is supposed to get from reading this blog. I forget, sometimes, that I'm writing this for an audience, and then I wonder why an audience would come back here at all. But, dear reader, if you exist, these days are big and filled with sky and waiting for the fireflies and harboring those Big Life Decisions in my stomach. It is always now, when the chopsticks are discarded, All the Pretty Horses is half read, barely thought out short story ideas litter a floor cold with night, that I revert to the way I've always been: driving past my exit, dreaming of somewhere lonely with a windowsill. I've spent too much time on this coast, and now? The if-not-now-when's are hard to swallow, the beer less so.

I could drink a case of you and still be on my feet

somehow, it has become summer and I love this, everyone sweating, messy hair clinging to backs of necks, everyone migrating to front porches, where all the stories and the Manu Chao and the home-brews that taste perfectly of burnt peaches come out. I want to ban air-conditioning for days like these, so we can sit on alternate wooden steps, telling stories about eating squirrel in Virginia and that maze of a train station in Buenos Aires and getting lost in Morocco until finally you give up trying to find your hostel and get drunk with men in massive, sinister-looking hoods. I want to toast and toast and toast to you, summer, until we have cheers-ed each other far into August, when we can say, oh, isn't this perfect, look at this world turning into red. Look at all of us, turning into something more beautiful.