Away.

Epilogue.

NOTE: Please scroll back to "Part 1 of 3" to read from the beginning.

This is a meditation on education. This is an open window into a world with few options. This is unavoidable.

There are justifications for every human act because everything a human does comes from an instinct, a drive, a thought. It all has a genesis in reason, however flawed, however mired in the ebbs and flows of sanity. There is always an explanation, even if it is difficult to accept.

Those flickers of human reasoning, those choices made on instincts too much a part of us to deny, are shaped by our options. Our options are shaped by the world we encounter. The world we encounter is the puppet-master, denying us the ability to see a way out because there may not be a way out. The world we encounter is in control.

Education is important beyond math and beyond socialization. It opens a world of options that don't otherwise exist. It forces the development of critical thinking, of self-directed decisions, of a concept of alternatives. It makes us see that there are multiple solutions to each of our problems.

What we are seeing in schools is not education. We are raising whole generations of people incapable of seeing beyond the surface, incapable of understanding the heart of the matter. We are building tomorrow's world with no foundation.

Students are allowed to pass from grade to grade with no concept of how far behind they are, and no reason to improve. They are told that this is all they will ever have. They are discouraged from wanting more. Their options are limited by their stunted abilities. They hardly know the difference between a murder and a spanking.

This is unavoidable.

Part 3 of 3.

"I believe murder is acceptable in some cases. A person that lives very happy never knows how a person being mistreated Feels. When the girls parents listen to all the other kid because they are smaller, how will that make her feel. Not having enagh money to buy what she needs. All the preasure that builds up when a person is not being taken care of properly. In this case I believe that because of the way they lived and the presure that murder was acceptable." -- Amelia G., grade 10

"I think that murder is not acceptable because maybe the Daughter was abused in a unfaithful way that she just thought that what her parents did to her. She could to that to her baby brother. So she wasn't thinking at that moment or something and that's also how some hispanic way to beat their Children." -- Leo G., grade 10

"Murder is never acceptable no matter what circastances maybe. Murder is not a way out. It would have to take a lot of strength to kill a person or in this case a baby. I person wouldn't be able to kill a baby knowing that they are so innocent and cutie. If the girl did do the murder to her little brothers she should feel guilty. Knowing that her little brother died being innocent. I don't just blame it on the teen girl, but also on the parents. If they know that the girl has not patients and that she doesn't feel like taking care of her brothers why would they force her to." -- Julie G., grade 9

"I think that the baby's mother shouldn't have lefted the baby with his older sister because if the parent knew that the girl had wanted to comite murder before and had in a way mental problem. Their parents could off left the baby with someone else because there were alot of people who knew the little 3 years old kid and would had have compassion off him. The parents could off at least try. I don't think it was the girls fatl because she cant even speak well and her parents knew what situation she was in, that she had try to murder herself before." -- Aracely C., grade 9

"The choices that could saved the baby's life that the parents should not her babysit cause before she want to kill herself. Maybe the girl was tired to be living without money. Maybe she was depressed of something bad that happen to her. Maybe the kid should scream for help when she was hurting him. When she was having problems she could talk to someone else so they could give her a advice what to do." Alejandra G., grade 10

Part 2 of 3.

I kept the news on for hours. Switching between networks, I caught every evening broadcast in Chicago. They all told the same story.

The fellow who asked me for change in that alley let me pass in the sunlight, then went back to his hunt for cans in the garbage bins. Simultaneously, I entered the school and he found a dead 3-year-old boy in the trash.

The baby was wrapped in a plastic bag.

Investigation unfolded as I watched the news, dumbfounded. Five other children from the boy's family were taken into protective custody. The parents were questioned. A search party went out to find their oldest daughter, 17, who had been babysitting her siblings that afternoon.

A day later, they found her trying to break into a school building in the suburbs. She was hungry and alone. Without a translator, she couldn't be questioned. She sat in jail overnight.

And that is the last we heard of the story.

Part 1 of 3.

A week and a half ago, I was walking to work and a man asked me to spare him some change. We were in an alley, alone there in a silent sunny moment. I didn't meet his eye.

I walked into the school building, swam upstream against the throngs of students on the stairs and hit the classroom door just in time to see some of my kids making out against the back window. Her eyes were closed. His were open. He was looking outside, kissing her like she was only an excuse for him to stare out at the open world.

I wrote a lesson plan on the board and Leo broke the kiss. "Something happened outside," he said. "5-0 everywhere."

Aracely turned to look and her eyes went wide. "Don't say someone's dead," she said.

As we worked on her book report, talking about violence and heaven -- a heaven where people are not their race, class or gang affiliation -- more and more police cars gathered outside. Just below our window, an entire residential block had been cordoned off. When the helicopters started flying overhead, our faces were grim. Everyone in the classroom knew something was wrong.

We heard newsmen shouting questions, but couldn't make out the words. Leo leaned out the window and called out, "¿Qué tál?" No answer.

By the time our class was over, everything had cleared away. I walked back through the alley to my bus stop and half dreaded turning on the news when I got home.

Drink up.

Love is a cocktail of the mind, a potent mixture of thought and instinct, a biological knee-jerk intoxicant that forces us to come to terms with the limitations of the species. We do not comprehend the game, but we have strong opinions about each and every move we make.

Golden.

I want to lie on an actual bed and be quiet with you, be silent with you. I want to be still. I want to spend time like that until I can't tell if we're asleep and dreaming or not. Silent for hours and hours.

Deeper meaning.

I poured bleach on my thumb this evening. It had no effect on my hand beyond making my thumbnail smell like a freshly-scrubbed tile floor, but it seemed like the thing to do in the moment.

Earlier this afternoon, I chewed on a styrofoam peanut for a little bit. Same deal. No thought went into it at all.

When I woke up this morning, I lifted the register cover off of the heat vent and set it on the counter for a while. Then I put it back.

We all do things without thinking. We all make moves we don't plan. When we reflect on the decisions later, they seem like they were taken out of context, out of the context of the rational minds we know them to have come from.

Then again, I might be reading too much into this; maybe I'm the only person out there with a bleached thumb and styrofoam stuck in the back of my throat.

Killing processes.

On the movie screen, it only needs to run a few frames for you to get the point. Displaying it much longer would be boring.

Late at night and couched in darkness, a face is illuminated by the glow of a CRT monitor. Modem lights flashing on a desk hidden in the blackness that is everything but the screen, the face and the fingers flying like drones over a dim grey keyboard.

It's a bit misleading, that part. In the movie, there's always music in the background. In reality, this is an activity so all-encompassing that we don't tend to notice the silence, the clock tick, or the sound of our own exhalation. Furthermore, there's always something exciting happening on the screen to warrant the activity. It's never just a person hunkered down for the night staring aimlessly ahead, most of the time at nothing at all. But that is what it's really like. Being the silent computer-glow person isn't a fleeting moment on film, it's hours and hours of actual life, actual heartbeats wasted. It's what I miss the most about having a working computer.

I don't feel that I really wasted all the hours I've spent thinking, "what next?" or "maybe someone will log on soon..." and I don't want back all the messages I've sent into the darkness to people who sleep instead of responding. "Are you there?" "Hey, you..." "Awake?"

Being alone in the darkness and calling out for companionship is an eternal facet of the human reality.

Dream you back to me.

Tracking my heart's dearest around the country has proven complicated for the last few years by watching them move away, hearing that they're travelling.

I am a person with strict ideals about knowing where my effects are. Friends and loved ones are no exception to my rules and the idea that I can't control them, can't keep them close to me, can't keep them warm and happy and entertained forever, drives me crazy. I know that people move away for good reasons, but I wish I could offer a good enough reason to stay put.

I want friends in Chicago. I want a real group of real people that I can see and hug and stay up late with. I want people who plan things and invite *me* to them, not my boyfriend and me-if-he-wants-to-bring-me. Surely, I have some of these people, but it doesn't feel the same, somehow. It's not the same as it used to be when I had my own friends, when I had my own history.

The thing that hurts me most is realizing that those friends I had in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, the ones I had in Chicago before they left, the ones that still live here and never call anymore, have all got their own people. They have whole networks of friends where they settled, whole systems of things to do, fun to have, hugs to give. And I'm not part of it.

It is a testament to my biggest failures in life that my best friends never know that they're my best friends because I'm too ashamed to admit it; they may be the most important people for me, but I know that I'm ancillary for them.

I have always wanted a best friend (in the traditional, platonic sense) who could honestly say that he cared as much about me as I did about him (gender-neutral he/him, of course; I'm not picky).

I think I had one once, but distance is distance and I'll never know how to wrap my head around his motivations. Moving away doesn't help, but I can't pull him back because I have nothing to offer him (not gender-neutral, of course; and actually, I am quite picky).

Between realizing that I have no close friends who are present, realizing that the ones I had moved away a long time ago (incidentally, it has been longer than I expected when I counted the years just now), and realizing that if I found some, they, too, would move on to better things, better people, better places... well, between all those things is me, looking across horizons at past lives too busy to look back.

Blades about the edges.

The further they fall, the less I fucking care.

Communique: Get a grip, get a life, apologize to those whom you've fucked over. Stop fucking them over. Run back to where you got that permanent scowl implanted and raise Hell. Shatter your ways, the ones that serve to hurt the ones who care the most. Smash them in with a hammer, give them a taste of the fury of all of those who have tried to help and gotten nothing but bitterness in return. Consider the children, the flowers, the stars, and the divine truth that you are small and unimportant, that you are not worth the trouble that the universe went through to get your molecules to come together in this time and place. Look at how you are treating the miracle of your very existence -- by taking every moment, every instant, every person, every friend for granted, like it's owed to you. Watch yourself celebrating the sleaziest of creations: the invention of hubris. Now stop it. Figure it out, and how.

Communique: I love life and struggling, even when they are one and the same. I cannot, however, abide frustration. There isn't time for anything so selfish as dwelling on the difficulties. The world keeps moving, and it's enormously self-centered to not move with it. I am no more important than a blade of grass, which moves with the world. I am no more deserving than a stone, which moves with the world. Trees, birds, clouds and streams all move with the world. Who am I to break that tradition because I am having a bad day? I, a living, breathing part of the world will follow it where it takes me and say thank you for every moment I am allowed to be a part of those neverending changes. To be a living, breathing creature that refuses to change is so heartbreaking. It's so wrong, but I suppose that, for some people, it is exactly how they let the world go by, from inside a box.

Wake up. Life is all too precious to waste on resentment.

Bombs are not jokes.

Greetings from a weird payphone terminal thingie at scenic Midway airport. I have 2min15sec to tell you how much I love the fact that I have been in this airport since noon, that I am currently holdinga STANDBY ticket for a flight over two hours from now. Wish you were here.

Merry Christmas.

I feel like a deaf kid at a string quartet. I know that this is wonderful, but I'm missing something required for enjoyment. It's something that I'll never have.

Somehow, being among happy believers just makes me feel stupid. I'm missing something that no one can even explain to me. I'm missing out.

Off a cliff.

There are stories in every past that haunt the living. There are truths we come to in the course of life that keep us catching our tongues indefinitely. Certain casual turns of phrase aren't casual anymore. Certain topics are off limits. We avoid the gaze of others when the buttons are pressed knowing that they won't understand that they've pressed anything; they weren't there. They don't know.

Something odd about it is that the memories that hold me back, the people whose faces flash through my head when someone says something unintentionally insensitive, the eyes I see when my mouth forms certain words -- words I know better than to say -- those people are all dead. Somehow that makes it all seem more real.

Hibernation.

I have built a blanket fort!

I swear to you, it's like heaven in here.

In the dark.

A recurring theme in my writing is the dichotomy I face as a know-it-all who is thrillingly naive about a few specific topics. I don't know about money. I don't know about parties. I don't know about sex. The latter two were lumped into one chapter of Brainiac Zine #1 under the title page marked "fun" and I want to expand a bit on what I wrote there.

We went to a party the other night and I know it was a great time, but I sure as hell didn't have a great time. Aaron was jubilant, Dave chatted with a few people and seemed content, Jeff was mainly by himself but smiling and drifting among friends, and Amber stuck to people she already knew but seemed comfortable. I freaked out. I'm always freaked out at parties and I don't know why -- how -- other people are not. It's noisy, there are drunk strangers making overt passes at you, the music is not your thing. You don't trust these people. Why on earth are you having such a good time?

I don't understand why people drink like that. I don't understand why it seems fun to be stumbling, blacking out, groping people, whatever. I have remarkably low tolerance for alcohol, but I have proven in the past that I can drink an entire bottle of gin *an entire bottle of gin* and still feel self-conscious, still know I'm an idiot for stumbling or slurring or giggling or taking too long to answer a simple question. What is it about other people that allows them to lose the concept that they, in fact, are also idiots. We're all fucked up. How does alcohol erase that from their minds and not mine?

There is a little bit of my mind that hangs back, a little piece of Kate that is never a part of the fun. There's a voice, a piece of my brain that just watches and listens and learns. It's the voice that pipes up and points things out... "crying doesn't change anything," "he only says that when he's drunk," "that smile looks so fake," "you're the only one," "that person probably has alcohol poisoning," or just plain, "ick." It's the sober critic. I can't drink it quiet. I can't laugh it off. It's there, it will always be there. This is not my advantage, this is my curse. This is what keeps me firmly alone, apart from the fun. This is what has me hiding.

On a completely seperate note, someone has to explain internet porn to me. I know you know. I don't get it. What the hell is it that you're all looking at? I have searched, I have even *found*, but I do not understand the appeal. Videos make some sense sometimes. Like, depending on what's in them, I can see how those might serve a purpose, like to stimulate imagination or something. But just the pictures? Those disjointed pictures that have no context, no movement, no sound, no anything. What part of your imagination do those play to? You've seen naked people before... can't you just remember them? Why do you have to look at *new* naked people who aren't even *doing* anything because they're just photographs. I want to know. I want answers. No one ever really answers. Oh, so many many many questions. This is only one. There are more.

Read and destroy.

Here's an article from a Canadian source. Since we're all into trusting Canadians as faultless moral beacons, you should spend enough time and energy to really dig through this one. If you do a good job, you should feel sorry that it ends (good essay) and wish to pre-purchase the full-length book which will be released by Harper-Collins in September.

I'm a fan of the critique but not the action plan. The essay perfectly lays out the problems with our notion of anti-consumerism, then tells us that taxing advertisers is a way to fix this. I'm not keen on that idea. More later. I have to go to class.

My trusty thermometer.

Here's a valid excuse for lack of updates

Your reading assignments.

Here are some things that I suggest you read so that we can have an enriching class discussion some day.

This abstract describes the basic reasons that toast is known to fall butter-side down.

A cogent little page on what the greenhouse effect is not.

Nose art on military aircraft: an index.

Okay. That's it for today. You'll have more later in the week, and I look forward to our discussion on the above.

Au revoir.

The web made this internet a strange place. Communication changed. We have hyperlinked profiles, hyperlinked friends' pages and photos and sweet background images and then some. Where we used to have personality, now we have fashion.

But it helps you recognize a person.

Now twice in the past ~month, I've accidentally hit on the blog of an old, lost friend while playing around online. What to make of that? These are both people who, without this voyeuristic web culture, without the online diary craze, would have been lost to me forever. Odd.

It's like goodbyes hardly exist anymore. You can Google them years later and say hello again.

Look out.

Real life has its way of spiraling ever closer to total enjoyment anihilation. It's a wonder that we don't all take the reigns hanging slack in our hands and tie nooses from the responsibility we never wanted in the first place. This should be a world awash in the juice of sour grapes.

"I didn't ask for this."
"I knew it was a bad idea from the start."
"If I had known it was going to be like this, I never would have agreed."

That's the risk of real life. There are real consequenses, real traps. There are real failures. But what are we failing at and falling into but the makings of other people? The fashions of a civilization hell bent on making it so difficult to live that it's difficult to think. More people should give it more attitude, all things considered.

Diehard deathbed.

People are often surrounded by the reminders of their worst moments.

We walk down the street proverbially trackmarked and smoking, pushing proverbial strollers too young, carrying our parole officer's information in our wallets with the insurance card that cost five times as much since we hit that guy. These things surround us like a halo -- notes from past relationships, that dress we bought before we got fat, the homework crumpled up in the bottom of our backpack -- and it glows until it blinds us. We have bad habits so bright we can't see beyond them.

Mine is here on this couch, literally surrounded by blankets and trash, wishing I could muster the energy to get up. Knowing I have class today. Knowing that there are real people out there who really miss me and wonder where I've been.

But those people don't know me. They don't know my couch, my computer, or my complete inability to see past them. They don't know how wonderful it is for me to stay up all night talking online. They don't know how much actual love is here in this world. They don't know how the comfort wraps itself around me, the waves of binary communication, the friendships and loves swirling all around this couch, these blankets, this moniter, my mind, my heart.

Even if this isn't healthy, I want to keep it.

Sunshine and snowflakes.

Reviving an old tradition, today is happy thoughts day.

Where the baby pandas of a few posts ago left off, the whimsy shall continue today.

These frogs are in a kind of love I think that humans can't even imagine.

Systems of classification always make me happy -- I like seeing order in things I don't quite understand. I like to know that even if I don't understand zoology, I can put animals into categories based on recognizable features. Same for snowflakes. Look and see!

I meant to have more and perhaps will add later, but I got really distracted looking at photos of yarn. It looks so soft. Think about yarn. That's the happiest thought I know.

My favorite night is therapy night.

Pain swells, smarts, sneaks and slaps its way into my life. It’s nothing if it isn’t strong. When something causes pain, be it physical or otherwise, there is a ricochet of pure vitality on its tail. While the pain is sudden, the consequent realization that I am very much alive comes as even more of a surprise.

This action-reaction sequence takes its various forms in much the same way that pain, itself, can be many things. When someone winds up and slugs me in the shoulder or lands a fist on my thigh, the resultant sensation makes me giggle uncontrollably. Through some trick of reflex neurology, my fight or flight response takes the form of laughter.

As for emotional pain, all the phrases I read in books that describe a person’s reaction to gross injustice or offense are completely applicable to my own experience. When someone deeply insults me, I feel as though I’ve been slapped in the face, as though the wind has been knocked out of me, as though my lungs are tightening or as though numbers of other clichéd expressions of inner pain are playing themselves out in my body.

But I laugh when I'm slapped. I giggle when I'm punched. As an emotional corrolary, when the pain comes from within, I'm secretly delighted.

It’s what I do with those clichés which makes me feel like less of a participant in the world of those with normal relationships to pain. I feel that sting in my cheeks, let it flow into my body like a syrup rife with shrapnel and then, then I savor it. I treasure it privately and fuel its licking flames with my own material. I make it worse and deeper and sharper until it is the worst emotional tar pit you can imagine, until so many tears caterwaul between my eyes that I just can’t help but think, “Holy shit, this is fucking amazing."

"Holy, shit. I love this."

Being turned on by physical pain is a common enough racket. Being turned on by humiliation and demoralization isn't much more rare. So why do I feel like there's something so wrong with being exultant by these things. Yes, they hurt. Being kicked hurts. Being insulted hurts. But the more they hurt, the more joyously they demonstrate the limitations of the human body, heart and mind.

Too drunk to fuck.

The problem isn't how tired I am, it's how awake being tired makes me feel. I get a giddy kick of energy in my brain that doesn't match how exhausted I am. I feel drunk -- loopy -- and I hardly remember what year it is. But I'm not sleepy. No, ma'am. No sleep for moi. Not when I can look at pictures of a baby panda and also, I can do research on things I want to learn like cross stitching, though I don't have any of the supplies.

Look at the baby panda. Just look.

I am too exhausted to even lie down.

Comcast Feind Club

Emerson can live his life to its fullest extent again because the cable is turned back on.

For the sake of it.

Recursive loops are the little snags in the otherwise flawless tapestry of logical thought. So many times today I have heard that I need to "do the responsible thing," "act as a responsible citizen," or simply to "be responsible." Why?

Because it's the responsible thing to do.

I know it's childish, but I mean it when I say that this attitude baffles me. This is a child saying "why?" and hearing "because." This is a dog running after ball that someone feinted to throw. This is a game. No one wins.

It seems like that's a shared idea across the board. Those who try their hardest to convince me to vote tell me that I shouldn't think of it as a matter of someone winning, I should think of it as a matter of someone losing. They want Bush to lose, not Kerry to win. They want Keyes to lose, but who doesn't?

Is that the purpose here? We do this dance every four years to try to scare off our enemies, to keep the angry volcano spirit from spitting his wrath on our petty infant nation and all it assures is that it'll keep us running. Would it kill these people to just stop and look about themselves?

The passionate "vote vote vote for the love of all that is holy this is your last day on earth unless you vote vote vote oh my gosh the sky falls and falls and the only way to stop it is to vote vote vote lookit my pretty sticker vote vote vote" crowd seems so ingenuine to me. Their ideals don't match their actions. They want me to vote so badly (someone actually cried at me today -- real tears -- because I had missed my chance to absentee) but they'd just lose their minds if I voted for Bush. They'd die if I voted for LaRouche. They'd kill me if I voted for Buchanan. So what does it matter if I vote vote vote since you're only satisfied when I vote for your guy? Isn't that like you getting two votes?

My kingdom for some democracy.

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.