Well, You Probably Saw This Coming.

Because it is this way anyway, I'm getting the name of everyone I've ever slept with tattooed on my person. If I get the money or get emotional, maybe I'll do full-color momento mori portraits of the ones that were at all important to me, smeared initials in discreet places of the ones that weren't. If things don't get too crowded (at least one person deserves the full length of my back, in neon or some kind of fantastic hologram tattoo technology that hasn't been invented yet), I'll throw in Patrick Whitlow from second grade, maybe that neighbor chick who let me basically molest her in that teepee one time and the cartoon lounge singer from Who Framed Roger Rabbit that confused me so utterly. I have a special section of myself designated for long, milk-carton descriptions of the people I've thought really hard about fucking but didn't: that-guy-who-played-the-bike-messenger-in-that-one-Italian-movie, man-on-the-bus-carrying-a-paper-bag-full-of-amazing-fruit.

I know it's probably enough that I remember them as hard as I do. And yes, jerks, I'm aware that I am incapable of writing about anything but them, that they are the ensemble cast of those subconscious-scraping nightmares I wake up choking on so often and the riot of voices screaming into the loudening pipes that my bones become whenever I'm touched. I know that it's a weak metaphor, and that it's pretty twisted to begin with: my body as the altar that praises right back everyone who's stopped to worship at it. I mean, it's disgusting, really, but what am I supposed to do? My skin is the only part that no one expects to forget, to pull them all into some slow and perpetual undertow of shed and re-grown cells, to lose them forever.

(Photo is from Denis Darzacq's series Hyper, which is, like, stupidly cool and I will probably post most of if it here).

Sherry Whose-Last-Name-At-Least-Used-To-Be-Wilson

I know this probably isn't the best use for a time machine. But I've read that one Bradbury story about a dude who steps on a butterfly in the Mesozoic era and fucks up the rest of the universe one too many times, so I'm just gonna do it. I'm going to Battle Creek, to 1983, and visit my sister's mother. 

I should note that she isn't my mother--and really, my sister isn't my sister, and our father is barely her father, so it's all kind of a shit storm. She's Sherry Whose-Last-Name-At-Least-Used-To-Be-Wilson, and she is the background of a christmas card or two and a gigantic head of Farah Fawcett hair and I don't know what else. When my atoms re-materialize on the steps of the Kellogg factory, she is a neon blue double wide, and the steel doorjamb that burns my fingerprints off when I grab on, the silhouette through the seafoam blinds that grows into an open door.

And you know, I wasn't all that far off. Her teddy is as pink and as polyester as I'd pictured it, the hair as tremendous, and the Virgina Slim, is, indeed, one solid bar of burnt carbon. When she (somehow? miraculously?) manages to ash it into a Folgers can using only her mouth, I've decided to just fuck it; when she invites me in for pie, I will not tell her that her daughter will grow up to be a lesbian Chili's waitress, or that there will be a very regrettable picture of her in pleather on her ex-husband's mantle in Ohio for the rest of her life, or anything else she might want to be warned of. I know that if you breathe on a cockroach wrong in the past you're supposed to be responsible for Hitler winning the world war or whatever, but really, nothing changes. The trick is to be forgotten just as much as you were never remembered, to come and go and love nothing in between.

(Photo is by Gregory Colbert, again).

So I Know We've Only Been Trapped In This Elevator For Ten Minutes Now.

But I really feel like it's been longer, long enough to really know you, you know? Long enough, at least, that I feel like I have things to tell you, that it's all right that we're standing close like this because we've done this all the time, for years.

So did you know that there's an organism that can survive for ten years without water, and inside of a black hole, and in the blue part of a flame? Oh, and the other day I heard about this place in Niger called the vanishing coast--and when I say vanished, I mean vanished, as in the fog gets so deep that ocean liners run up on the shore at full speed and thousands of barefoot men with blow torches have to cut them up like watermelon.

Okay, that was the wrong choice of words. How about this--in the thirties, this guy Tesla invented a peace ray that shot atomic clusters of tungsten so fast it could incinerate the Blue Angels in the middle of a dirty loop. Hey, hey, don't cry, I just--I just wanted to tell you things, things I thought you'd like to know.

What else did you expect me to say, anyways? I know this isn't the best of circumstances, but there's no sense ruining your nails like that. Besides, the alarm is going to stop any minute now, and I knew as soon as we stopped moving that it would eventually, and that I only had 264 words, at most, to make you fall in love with me.

(painting is by stina perrson)

The City Inside

I've been looking for a cure for my solipsism, mostly in Lincoln Park and early shows in the east loop. There really should be a therapist for this shit, at least someone to pummel me with a blunt object until I'm damn sure that they and that object are real. Instead, there is Chicago. 

Its easier than I thought it would be. On the way back from the el stop, the carton of dropped eggs that spangled this morning's sidewalk has miraculously vanished; the bright asterix of fireworks over Wrigley Field appears despite me, the city an enormous footnote beneath it. Back home, I could will anything into being, provided I willed the wrong things. 15 below ice storms that freeze the electricity in the power lines. The airless silence in the basement, the braille the carpet leaves along my cheekbone as I lie there, too.

And now, 600 miles later, there is this sudden world outside of me. There are buildings of insane proportions and mopeds and whole parks full of children whose faces and freckles I could not dream with twenty brains. There are fantastic chemical sunsets, and for all of it, I can't help but miss my mind control, or whatever organ in me can shape a reason for how ludicrous and delusional and lonely I am, the blueprint of this stupid city inside me. 

Tact

I usually give my change to the amputee at the Division L stop, but lately, I've been thinking about switching allegiances. It's not as easy as swapping presidential candidates or taking a new lover; there are things to be considered, options to be weighed. My amputee is north of 75, 80 years old, and has exactly one tooth, gold-plated, which earns me empathic glances from women in skirts. This other amputee, that's a whole other ball of wax.

First: you wouldn't know she even was one if your sightline got bisected by a low fountain or a stooped newspaper vendor. From the waist up, she's Audrey Hepburn back from the dead, twenty years older but still as bird-boned and wide-eyed as ever. Really, it's other wordly. I can't imagine her in the homeless shelter, layering makeup along her jawline and neck while sixty men in salvation army pants bang down the bathroom door. Can't picture it, because she never really moves-- she just stares out with this perfect coil of smile painted on, a cup and a bouquet full of swiftly waning roses pointed out at us in specific, motionless angles. 

No one ever drops her change. So really, we need each other, more than the Division guy needs me, more than I have ever needed a woman in my life. Here is something I can picture: my hands on the ribbed leather of her wheelchair handles, pushing her out to crowded vein of that street, she watching no one, no one watching me.

(Painting is Stephane Tartaline.)

#2

I've been thinking on bones, on the moving landforms of my teeth drifting in my mouth, the hole in the pillow exact as a fingerprint where I've bit. I'm thinking on each of my counted and recounted scars and the slow haul of cells that planted the six of them kiss-red on the pale of me. I am thinking because this is not what an animal would do: would not worry the loosed eyelashes and wish them away, willing the fabric of time to unfurl in three unknowable satin directions. This body will say one thing only--now, now--until I make it otherwise, until I scream into the inside of my own mouth that I am, and will, and have been screaming.

(drawing is by Sidney Pink)