I missed you enough for a lifetime.

I haven't felt so comfortable in Michigan as I felt last night in years. Something about being an outsider in my own hometown gelled and for a few hours, I didn't feel like anything more than a transient visitor. It was just pavement under my feet with such conversation and camaraderie as hasn't been possible here in a long time.

It's nice to forget that this place swallows souls by coming back with ours intact.

Fragments.

• The event went quite nicely last night, but there aren't many people to thank for having come out for it. It was fantastic, anyway, and we all had a very good time.

• Every muscle in my body hurts. I don't know if it's the weather changes, the low-level cold or the fact that I keep falling asleep on a teeny loveseat that does it, but I think I've self-inflicted a chronic pain condition.
  

• I am looking forward to the train ride this evening. I miss Amtrak, although getting off at the Jackson station is disquieting because I've got myself perfectly trained to wake up past there in order to be ready for the Ann Arbor stop.

• I slept this morning for almost seven hours and I still can hardly open my eyes or sit up. So sleepy. But the sunshine is nice.
  

Spring.

See, when it's daytime, I'm perfectly capable of completely meaningless entries with none of that self-importance of the middle-of-the-night temporary insanity.

1. Surprise trip to Michigan tomorrow evening to Saturday morning. I hope I didn't make any promises or plans for Thursday and Friday because if I did, I'm standing them up.

2. Diatribe Media anniversary party tonight at the Hungry Brain on Belmont (look it up for the precise address). 8:30pm, readings by Grant Schreiber, Brandon Wetherbee, Aaron Cynic, Emerson Dameron and myself as well as one and a quarter bands you'll like. Free.

3. Do you like oatmeal? I do. I prefer adding fresh fruit and sugar to the flavored type, but the flavored type is also delicious.

I wish you could look at my cat right now. She's menacing. Let's all say a prayer for Questor's temperment.

Shivering away to nothing.

Again and again, it's all over. There are tiny cycle of the mind, ribbons looping around and around from one season of thought to the next. Summer and fall, winter, following one another in a fast-paced game of who can catch whom. They all caught me.

Summer thoughts drive red-hot anger between the hemispheres of my brain. I jump when there's a sound, I yell and yell and yell inside my skull. I smolder. It's stifling.

And when followed by fall, summer's flames are quelled by the crisp chill. A chill made of harsh, scratchy realization that there's nowhere to go from here. A cool settles in the bones, in the brain. My life is slowly iced.

Shallow breathing winter, eyes red, lips chapped, hands shaking winter. Winter of shivers and isolation, cold and quiet and dead.

The thoughts cycle like a calendar whipping around and around a thousand times a second. You could almost mistaken them for a melded whole. But they're different, distinct. They feed off one another.

Shaking hands, shaking mind. This doesn't even make sense to me anymore.

Little slices of death.

I am a robot entrusted to unplug itself nightly for maintenance, but it is so much more rewarding to be alive, awake.

Going to sleep is a wee suicide that clears up by morning.

Why are you so downcast, O soul?

In the middle of the night, I get religion. My eylids droop halfway and my lungs fill more and more slowly. This fatigue is a cradle, and it's shaped like the caring hands of a tangible god.

It's often said that religion is human invention -- a crutch -- based on fear and my four-in-the-morning devotion is witness to just that phenomenon. These days, I am finding myself afraid. I'm increasingly terrified of gory movies, scary music, loud noises.

I can't take crowds anymore: so close, so noisy, unpredictable. My parents took us to see a play when they visited and I was in a state of absolute panic in the lobby, jumpy through the whole show. So many souls sharing space. So many thoughts.

I don't sleep in my own bed most nights because the room seems so tiny, so dark, so cut off. I wouldn't see the murderer coming in the door.

A friend offered the theory that I'm just getting older. Is this a symptom?

At night, it all comes crashing together. I am transformed to a tiny, mewling creature, insane from lack of security. Needing placation, needing reasons to wake up tomorrow feeling like a complete human being. I am simultaneously scared of sleeping and waking up, scared of failure and history, scared of the future. I'm scared of the dark, scared of passing headlights. I'm scared of my own coporeal form, scared of my thoughts, scared that no one will come to my rescue.

No one mortal, no one profane.

This is when I curl up in a faith I can't describe. There are bigger things than me on this planet, but thinking about them looming out there doesn't make me feel any better. There are bigger things than me well beyond this planet, beyond this comprehension, and that makes me feel nothing but small. Small and protected. Small and smooth. A pebble, smooth in a wondrous palm, I am kept.

Half asleep, half crazed.

Dream you're sleeping, inner eyelids lit through by moonlight, by streetlights through the window. Blood vessels projected to your pupils, rods and cones going crazy with the hidden redness of it all.

Dream I'm sleeping, let my eyes close, beat my brain solidly into submission. Those sounds of discontent rattle between my ears discussing class war and paranoia, but mostly the crippling and horrible fear of my own power to fail and fail again. They caterwaul against the fine bones in my inner ears, against the backs of my dull, torpid eyes and it's all I can do to keep breathing over the deadend nature of this kind of wakefulness.

Dream we're sleeping, I'm laying my hand across your closed eyes, blocking out the glow, floating you into velvet darkness. You're cradling me and breathing in my ear to quiet my mischievous brain; it's a nice gesture but unnecessary since sleeping with your company is all I need to know that there's nothing to be afraid of at all.

Turning back the clock.

It's a world built on questions, on decisions made by weighing consequences, evaluating possibilities. There are infinite paths, infinite combinations, and nothing is ever carved in stone but the past.

This is true for all of us, and it's what leads us to spend our lives wondering about the could haves and the would haves; we have no solid ground to stand on until we can take one path, turn around and look back at the past and wonder which path we should have taken.

And when we see that we've made a bad decision, there is no turning back the clock. There are yet more options, and sometimes, we take the path that leads us blindly ahead, leaving the mistake to fester, to rot there on the proverbial trail, and we try to forget. But it does not go.

I find myself looking back at one of these and wondering about the should haves and could haves and I, standing on this solid ground that is hindsight, I extend my arms in apology to those friends of mine I've pushed away in troubled times.

A pattern is showing upon the backward glance. I have jettisoned some of the people who meant the very most to me. I have let the memory of their faces, their scents, their laughter -- their very being -- haunt me for years, follow me down the roads that lead me away with my back turned.

And now, I want to say that I am sorry.

I was very, very wrong.

Hair of the cat that bit me.

There are numerous resources out there for cat owners with allergies, but none of them discuss the specific problems associated with having a murderous kitten. They're about sneezing, not scratching. Not about the welts that rise when the little beast bites and breaks the skin. I'm bleeding, but it feels like I'm hemoraging. Ridiculous. Just ridiculous.

Having a cat isn't really the kind of responsibility that people led me to believe it would be. I think it would be different if I pretended that she was something more important than a housepet, but she isn't. Cats could be pretty time consuming if you believe that they need therapy, special organic foods or aesthetically pleasing toys, but the same goes for people. And I don't think those things are true for people.

Furthermore, my cat is beyond repair. She's a lead paint victim if ever I saw one. The stupidest, clumsiest, bipolar midget cat on the planet. She simultaneously cuddles and hisses, purrs and rends flesh from bone. She's got an eye twitch that won't quit. She's broken and that's all right with me so long as she doesn't expect special treatment.

You hear me, Questor? I'm gonna put you in the oven if you don't stop pushing all the stuff off the table. And get out of that plant. Oh, damnit.. don't push that. That's made of glass. AAh! I am NOT playing 52 card pickup with you again! Fucking cat!

Assignment #1

I'm issuing a mission, young operatives. Top secret? But of course (as there's no use otherwise). Will it be fun? That's entirely up to you. I know you love it when I leave things entirely up to you.

Your mission, which I highly recommend that you accept, is to do my homework for me.

I am not being facetious about this. I will compensate you. If you are talented in the academic realm, you have one up on me. But I am talented in ways you are not! We can trade. I will make you gifts. I will call you up not just to talk, but just to listen. I will make something delicious from what you have in your kitchen -- whatever you have in your kitchen -- if you'll just give me a chance.

And if you'll do my homework for me.

So watch this space for specific assignments and feel free to grab up the jobs that sound best to you. Each opportunity will come with a specified reward, which is negotiable.

Not joking at all.