super fast Chicago winter

has been zooming past at unimaginable speeds. As if I could have ever hoped for this crusty tundra life to go on enveloping me.

This morning I had a one-sentence story published in Monkeybicycle, which is encouraging and smile-inducing and makes me want to project more oddly contrived language in to the universe.

thought-a-thon

So about all of those ideas I keep hidden in my closet, skeletons of genius...when they grow up, grow flesh and emerge will you, will you, oh will you take their hands and accept them? Oh, oh, oh. This is the coming out terror of academia. Ideas are these embodied beasts that come to represent all that you are and wish to be and if the world of your field's experts doesn't love them, woe, woe, woe.

Meet Tommy and Franky and Isabel. I swear I gave birth to these flashy light bulbs, these bedazzling fire crackers, as I labored over mountains of dusty, overly-fingered books, the sweat, the dust, the blood of my brain running in light frothy drips of in
sight. Drip, drip,
get the gore? Get it? If it hurts you better get it. Birthing pains produce a fetus, no? Isn't pain supposed to emerge as productivity in this painstaking life? What if it simply produces more misery? And what if, after all the self-induced eye-straining, scalp-bursting concentration it comes to yawns, apathy. Horror. Horror beyond Frankenstein and zombie monstrosities. The horror of chasm: the yawn, it will swallow you up like oxygen, a simple passage of air into the lungs. The continuation of a diagram. In and out, you are going in, being recycled, one more molecule in a matrix of everything and nothing.

hilarity and jenga dating

I played a game of "Jumbling Towers" (knockoff of Jenga) last night. I won. And then I won again. And then I won at Chinese Checkers. It looked like an absolutely unoriginal dive bar EXCEPT it has tons of board games, random ones. It attracts an older businessy crowd, and just a middle-aged Chicago crowd. And there I was on yet another "date." Squirming, uncertain what this latest member of team testosterone wanted or didn't want as he caressed my leg and made incessant half-funny comments and quips and soliloquoys flavored with something like a weird blend of intelligence and ignorance. How can people be so intelligent and so ignorant at the same time - I think the sheer ridiculous ratio of intelligent-funny-ignorant had me laughing. This dating thing, it is such a put-on in this obnoxious country. Yes America, I have qualms with you sometimes. I'm beginning to think that WASPy men always have ulterior motives, and the sooner you find out what they are, the better. Relations between men and women are so convoluted, there is constantly some kind of bizarre social and sexual and commitment calculation going on between the guy's brain and his royal member, lets call the royal member Bob and the Brain Bill. Imagine a conversation between Bob and Bill... (forget Ego, Superego, Id, just Bob and Bill)

ACT 1: The One and Only Act

Bob: Ass, I see ass, hot, hot, I want!
Bill: Yes, yes, I want to touch, but....
Bob: Oh Bill, don't be a pussy! Go for pussy!
Bill: But Bob, you know I do think she's hot...but what about Karen?
Bob: Fuck Karen!
Bill: Maybe you're right Bill, I want, I want...
Bob and Bill: We want, we want, we want!!!
-a few hours later-
Bill: Bob, I don't know I have thoughts, and they scare me.
Bob: Ignore them, Bill, they will kill you.
Bill: I have thoughts and insecurities, and, and, and-
Bob: I'm done with you, you wanker.


END

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I wasn't expecting to go there, whoa...but I can say that every day lately has moments when something or someone pulls out that last Jenga block and everything collapses to humpty dumpty smithereens. Except there's only me to pick it all up, and if I really can't stand it, at least I can turn it into caricature. At least I can laugh! When life isn't beautiful, it can still be beautifully funny.