Tangerines

Craig was a very large man, perpetually sweaty and perpetually be-sweatsuited. His scuffed tennis shoes curled upward, and the stringy, dark grey hair on his head poked out horizontally in tufts from beneath a grimy trucker cap. He was the type of person who had the tendency to shout even the most mundane of sentences. He was obsessed with the boxes of fresh tangerines sold at his local grocery store, buying them in stacks and returning always to the store to buy more before he had run out of the small, juicy fruits. The crinkled, dried-out peels littered the passenger seat of his small, rusty 1986 Chevy Nova. To Craig, the bits of orange skin were lovely and fragrant; he thus believed that the discarded peels rendered any man-made air-freshening devices completely unnecessary. To anyone else who dared approach this pint-sized, sputtering vehicle, the scent of tangerines was completely overpowered by the combined smell of sweat, urine, and garbage emanating from the seats.

A gas attendant shuffled uncomfortably outside Craig’s car window. Craig had just screamed at the attendant that he could pump his own goddamn gas goddamn it, and was preparing to exit his vehicle in order to fulfill this intention. Unfortunately, as this scene was taking place in the great state of Oregon, this was not a self-serve gas station. The attendant had gently informed Craig of this fact several times, even going so far as to mention that an attendant would lose his job should the manager witness a customer pumping his own gas. Despite this, Craig's door flew open and Craig half-climbed, half-fell out of his tiny car. The attendant tried to block the man's path with a few pointed "UM"s, but the man simply charged forward.

Clearly this man was completely and incurably insane, so the polite gas attendant stepped aside. After a few moments of watching Craig fumble angrily with the knobs and dials of the gas pump, the attendant entered the QuickMart to explain the situation to his boss. While describing to his boss the smell coming from this strange, fat man's car, the attendant suddenly heard yells coming from outside. "What kind of establishment is this?!" Craig was screaming. "I receive assistance for all of two minutes, only to be abandoned and left on my own to deal with highly dangerous machinery!" The manager and the attendant were looking at one another with expressions of wonderment upon their faces when they heard a car door slamming and Craig trumpeting out his window "I simply won't stand for it! I won't!" They both rushed outside to watch the Nova veering back into honking traffic, gas nozzle still dangling from the side of the car.

"Idiots," Craig mumbled to himself between bites of tangerine.

I started collecting "homeless signs" about two years ago. I found this one on the corner of 18th and High. It's the first sign I ever found.

The next one was left as a surprise on my doorstep by my friend Dylan. He picked it up somewhere around 15th and Oak.

Then I found this one on the ground, ripped in half, just outside of campus on 13th.

I just got this one from my friend Dan, who got it from a "crazy" hitchhiker he picked up.

I also collect bottle caps,

books (kind of),

and tickets. One of these days I'm going to add this pile of tickets

to this sheet of tickets.

His hat wasn't a knit beanie or anything like that. It was smooth, and shiny; I think it was made of rubber.

Toss the dandelion into the grave (A sestina)

Toss the dandelion into the grave,
then call the statues hither.
Motionless of course, but now
they know what is truly betwixt
the core of this one and the core of him,
what’s jostled by the ebb and flow.

They see that only silence can flow
after all they’ve witnessed entering the grave:
the eyes of stone which fix upon Him,
the empty room which calls one hither,
the sheets one’s been betwixt,
and the art that hangs on the wall now.

It’s impossible. There’s no way now
that he can know what will flow
next through that impenetrable mind, betwixt
those delicate ears. The grave
tempts us all, each one, hither.
Unbeknownst to him,

one can see clearly through him.
Walk away from that hollow ground now;
I've always known it calls you hither.
There are others who hope the lovely flow
stops at their feet. No grave,
no trick hides betwixt

their lips. There can be, betwixt
two minds, something for him
and something for the other. A grave
is nothing but a hole now.
The dandelion puffs flow
downward, but one floats hither.

A seed brings hope hither,
A hope which will grow betwixt
The heart and the stomach, will flow
out the eyes and away from him.
You are free, so go forth now.
Some other shall fill this grave.

My French literature professor

My roommate is going to be Angelina Jolie's The Fox for Halloween, and she asked me to try to recreate some of the character's tattoos using henna.

Day 1

I pulled back the dripping vinyl curtain and took a step out of the hot, humid shower. My foot landed with a moist splash right in a shockingly cold puddle of water on the linoleum floor. I wrenched my foot back, but it was too late, the wet chill had already run between my toes and over my foot. I quickly pulled my foot back into the shower, spun the shower knob to “hot,” and gave my foot a quick rinse under the steaming flow. I turned the faucet off and stepped out of the shower again, this time avoiding the puddle.

Day 2

I was sitting in a desk at the back of the classroom with my back to the large picture window through which a ray of sunlight shone. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel the heat, the light energy being absorbed by the blackness of my t-shirt and warming the skin on my back. I glanced at my left shoulder and saw that it was back lit, and that, in the sun, my shirt's tiny loose fibers formed a slight, glowing film across the surface of the fabric.

Day 3

I dug at the peel of the tangerine with my fingernail and felt an immediate stinging as I remembered that I’d clipped that fingernail just a hair too short the day before. I noticed the fruit’s residue in the crevice of my nail, before placing my finger in my mouth in an attempt to remove the citric acid from my nerve endings, but succeeded only in causing it to burn more painfully and leave a harsh, bitter taste in my mouth.

Day 4

After lifting the book from my shelf where it had been resting for years, the pages rustled as I opened it with an audible crack of the binding and pressed my nose to the meeting place of the pages. It had that old, sharp, rusty scent of libraries and long uninhabited attics.

Day 5

It was three o’clock in the morning and I’d only slept a few hours the night before. I was exhausted, but it was all okay because tomorrow was Saturday, I’d just taken a shower, and my bed sheets were freshly washed. I fell into my bed on my stomach and let my face be buried in my cool, clean-smelling, feather pillow. I flipped my head to the side to get some air, and my wet hair made a soft slapping noise as it hit the mattress.

(There are 26 sentences, one for each letter of the alphabet. The first letter of each sentence is in alphabetical order.)

Any other day, Drew wouldn’t have been the least bit perturbed by the behavior of the two courting squirrels on the nearest square of sidewalk. Behavior such as this was, in fact, something with which Drew had become well acquainted in his approximately five million years of consciousness as a 1.4 pound mass of sedimentary rock. Courtship, frankly, played a small role in the grand scheme of things when compared to birth, death, change, extinction, all of which Drew had witnessed again and again, generation after generation. Drew supposed all of this rebirth and renewal to be part of some larger, beautiful process, though, of course, he hadn’t the faintest idea what “beauty” really meant nor did he claim to.

Every day he rested on a single small patch of earth, only occasionally thrust forth to a new resting place by some outside force such as the foot of a bored child on his way home from school, or the tire of a speeding semi truck rushing its oversize load to a packing center in San Jose. For some reason, Drew had always enjoyed musing about all of the thousands of different ways he’d been jostled about in all these years; it usually made him feel secure somehow. “Good things come to those who wait,” he often recited to himself. However, resting upon his bleached square of concrete with only one crack in the sidewalk between himself and a pair of fornicating squirrels, this idea, like the squirrels, was on this particular day somehow very… disconcerting. Inexplicably, a strange new idea suddenly occurred to him: “I should try to flip myself over.”

Jittery with nerves at this new development, Drew considered whether or not he should really go through with it. Knowing that he, for one, had never observed another rock successfully flip itself over, he understood that it was very unlikely that he would be the first to do so. Logically thinking the issue through, however, he also understood that there was no way for him to even know whether or not he’d ever seen another rock attempt to flip itself over. Maybe they had all been trying and failing every day, or maybe they, like him, just hadn’t yet thought to try. Nothing was going to deter him from giving it a go, he decided. Only, even though he knew that no one was watching, as he prepared himself to make the attempt, he felt quite silly. Probably, this great effort would not end in success and Drew, who preferred to maintain a comfortable air of nonchalance at all times, would be greatly embarrassed.

Quite nervous, but excited as well, Drew prepared himself to make the attempt. Realizing that there was not much he could do to prepare, he decided to just go for it. Suddenly, without any warning, Drew the rock flipped over of his own accord at the very moment that the squirrels finished their deed. Trying not to get too excited about what had just happened, Drew forced himself to remain still and calm for a few moments. Until this very moment he’d had no idea that he had any control over his own destiny. Very much wanting to flip himself over again, Drew did not allow himself to move, for fear that once he began flipping himself over he might develop a desire to flip himself over so frequently that he would begin to actually roll across the ground, a thought which terrified him.

“Why, if I were to begin rolling around of my own accord, who knows what kind of trouble I could get myself into? Xenophobia, some may call it, but good old common sense is what I call it. Yes, that’s it; I simply must forget everything that’s happened today so that tomorrow can be just like yesterday. Zest for life is too dangerous for someone like me... I wasn’t unhappy before; I can simply continue to exist as I always did,” he concluded, so that's just what he did.

I'm outside under a large concrete slab roof. I'm holding a bunch of balloons which I discover to be, upon closer inspection, strings tied to a bunch of multicolored, cheery birds, one of every color of the rainbow. Each bird has long, correspondingly colored dandelion puffs coming out of its body in every direction. I can barely look at them, they're so beautiful.

Elton John's The Circle of Life begins to play and I decide to run with the birds from under the concrete roof out into the sun. As the sun washes over my face I'm hit by a sudden gust of wind which lifts my hair up and around above my head, The Circle of Life reaches its climax (...it's a leap of faith... it's a baaaaand of ho-whoa-ho-hope..."), and as the birds flutter away I distinctly feel my heart unwind.

Anyway, I dreamt last night that two people tricked me into walking in on them while they were, well, you know. I also dreamt that I licked someone's bellybutton, for no good reason at all.

Doodle tip du jour:
-Imagine there's a vertical straight line down the middle of your paper
-Draw one long, sloping, twirling line on one side of that imaginary line
-Draw the mirror image of the sloping line on the other side of the imagined vertical line
-Add eyes and things

Sometimes I practice my signature over and over again while having elaborate daydreams of sitting behind a desk before a large crowd of people fawning over my latest best-seller/Oscar nomination/Grammy nomination.

As you can see, I also practice writing "Genevieve" and "Sara," just in case either of them ever wants my advice on how to sign her name.




Occasionally, I really do take class notes.

Epitaph for the race of man: X
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

The broken dike, the levee washed away,
The good fields flooded and the cattle drowned,
Estranged and treacherous all the faithful ground,
And nothing left but floating disarray
Of tree and home uprooted, -- was this the day
Man dropped upon his shadow without a sound
And died, having laboured well and having found
His burden heavier than a quilt of clay?
No, no. I saw him when the sun had set
In water, leaning on his single oar
Above his garden faintly glimmering yet...
There bulked the plough, here washed the updrifted weeds...
And scull across his roof and make for shore,
With twisted face and pocket full of seeds.

My sister Sara and I are walking down a long gravel road through the country on a sunny day. Mom and my friend Gen are behind us somewhere, out of sight, because Mom was walking too slowly, and Gen stayed with her for some reason.

A small black and orange butterfly the size of a nickel flutters around my head and settles on my nose. It seems to sort of be pinching me or something, but I don’t really notice and am excited to have such a picturesque thing happen.

I tell Sara, “Take a picture!” but she won’t.

She says, worried, “Amy, no, it’s just following you,” while eying the butterfly warily. “Get it off,” she says. So I brush at it gently, but it doesn't fly away. I begin to feel a little bit nervous, as now I can definitely feel it doing something strange. I brush at it again, but it still won’t fly away. Finally, after actually grabbing it with my fingers, I pull it away and onto the gravel path at our feet.

Now I see that it’s a large ant-like thing, with a sharp black prong and a big, black, round body that shines in the sun. It begins to skitter toward my feet, and when I try to get out of its way, I see that it follows me. Sara and I run a little way down the path, but the insect runs after us. I stomp on it, and when I remove my foot it’s dead. Sara and I look at each other for a moment, and then continue down the path.