Accept Loss Forever

When I Gave Up On the Flowers

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:31:27 -0400

You are

a red-nosed darling

and tan

and the

only thing I can stand to look at anymore.

are you currently seeing anyone? and if not, anyone who catches your attention?

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:23:54 -0400

I’m not seeing anyone currently and so far, no one has caught my attention any more than any other woman.

30th & Dreaming

Thu, 16 May 2013 08:37:11 -0400

The people;
they are walking
en masse
down
Market Street.
And there are rowers
in the
Schuylkill
under light rain,
then heavy rain.
It is humid
and the buses are
pulling away.
And the girls,
the girls are fine
to look
at
as they pop
their umbrellas
open like
Bubblegum
above their
heads,
some with
men
most without.
As the
traffic on
76
merges like
a hive of bees
I sleep
on the north side
of Philadelphia.

In the Afternoon

Tue, 14 May 2013 13:33:03 -0400

“I don’t know where this feeling comes from. It rushes at me all at once and makes me feel smaller than loneliness, my organs collapsing into themselves in pain. It is the most ashamed I ever am. Shriveled up. And not shriveled up into something sweet like a raisin but something sad like the end of a mushroom cloud.”

Beaujolais on Easter

Wed, 08 May 2013 16:11:00 -0400

Beaujolais on Easter

I took the wine to the window and looked out at the empty town. There were only a few cars parked in the street and the storefronts were all shuttered as if a great storm was coming and everybody had evacuated. I liked when it was quiet like that. Hardly anything moved and I poured a glass of easy-drinking Beaujolais, feeling the soft humid rain drizzling into the screen. It was only when the church bell rang that I saw people walking in, walking out, dressed in bright pink, blue, and floral patterns. Everything besides that was gray.

I never cleaned my room. Piles of dirty clothes pushed up against the desk. Some of the things in there were old. The roommate had moved out, Sophia had moved in, and the beginning of spring was spent like that. On the sill, white and chipping, was an ashtray with cigarette butts. These were the old things. Half of them stuck out with regular yellow ends, colorless otherwise, and the other half were tipped with pink lipstick that made them look like tulips in comparison. Those were Diana’s cigarettes. Diana had died. Diana was an anthropology major at La Salle and was the best woman I ever had. The first time I visited her in the hospital, I tried to apologize for drinking that night. I wasn’t thinking. Actually, I was, but I was thinking without regard and that’s just as useless.

“Tell me you’ll forgive me,” I said.

“I might.”

“I need to know now, before anything else happens.”

“I’m not mad at you, the doctors say I’ll be okay.”

“You lost a lot of blood.”

“Yes, and they’ve pumped me full, like a car.”

“It isn’t funny.”

“Are you okay?”

“Surface wounds. Don’t care about me, it’s you you you I’m terrified about.”

“It just won’t be the same after this. You are truly good, but it just won’t be the same.”

She had gotten worse while I was in the bars for the next two weeks, while I was still out drinking and driving, blaming myself, while I sat in bed for days like a solider at his post, begging for the erasure of her mashed apart body from my memory. I did every dangerous thing without a helmet in the hopes of concussing myself and forgetting. Of course, there were the easy things like downing beer and wine until I stumbled around the house nearly blind, shifting my hands across the wall and crying at the same time. I sat on the highest point in the town during every April thunderstorm in the hopes that lightning would strike me at least once. But nothing happened to me. And that was the worst thing that could happen.

Down to about the half-liter mark of the two and half liter bottle, I went out to get something to eat. The parking garage next to my apartment hung over me like a death sentence, and I remembered those chilling nights at the top of it where I would lean over the concrete wall and spit and counted that, from the top to bottom, it would take seven seconds to hit the ground. Seven seconds did not sound like an unreasonable amount of time to end it anymore. But I learned that what kept me going was having something to do and I had an obligation to eat. I thought that having a full stomach would be good after all that wine and all the wine that was coming and was being looked forward to.

I walked up to Bernard Street and on my left, down to where it crossed High Street, the cherry blossom trees were spread out and clawing inward, letting their millions of pink petals fall onto cars parked in the driveways and sides of the road. They were beautiful and Easter-appropriate even as their skinny limbs pointed toward a dead sky of gray and the hazy white linings of clouds.

I picked up some cheap food at the 7-11 and talked to Rick, a local bum, who said he was used to losing everything. And he told me that you would have to be insane not to accept loss forever. And I asked him what that meant. He said that we are always losing things. We lose keys and important things and sentimental things and of course we will lose people. We will lose our senses and our minds. We will lose because of mortality, because we are men. We will lose when it is our fault and when it isn’t. Does it hurt more to lose when you’re at fault? I asked. I don’t know, he lied, nothing I ever lost was my fault.

I walked away, past the pay phone, thought to call an old friend to have someone to talk to, but I thought that nobody wanted to hear from me. I hated myself in a way that would make it easy for others to hate me. I planned to walk up the main street to feel less lonely and more attached to whatever environment this was that was slipping away from me. But the cherry blossoms were the only beautiful things. And no one was walking around. Everybody was praying in the churches and waiting for brunch. I went back up Bernard and lay in the middle of the street, looking up at all those pink petals. They fell into my mouth and onto my eyelids and my back was wet from the ground. Each petal that landed was a morning kiss, Marlboro tulips, a cigarette sucked to its end. For hours I stayed there, drunkenly dreaming of dying, floating, having the power to forget her face. The pink covered me so that I should’ve looked like a piñata in the street. In a way it was like prayer. But in a way it wasn’t.

Pour It Quietly While the Bees Smack Against the Window

Mon, 06 May 2013 21:49:02 -0400

Drinking

alone is

meditation;

I hope that your life is awesome.

Sat, 04 May 2013 00:31:35 -0400

Yours too.

“We spent time talking about all the things we would do. And then we never did them—that was...

Fri, 03 May 2013 13:31:46 -0400

“We spent time talking about all the things we would do. And then we never did them—that was the ultimate sadness.”

Something to Hold On To

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:57:43 -0400

“Remember when we drove through the banana fields? You were close enough, you figured, and I watched your balled up fists reaching out of the Jeep. Then you opened your hands for them and instead grasped hot air. You cried and I snapped a big bunch off and handed you two. Up past the plantation we stopped and you looked up into the Golani sun as if you had soap in your eyes, double-fisting green bananas. You hated bananas. You didn’t even eat them. You just wanted something to hold on to. And I was trying to give you that in the larger sense. I was trying to give you your identity on that trip.

And those are our memories. They are no one else’s. Your mother didn’t want to come with us and your brother wasn’t born yet. You could argue that Chava, my foster mother at the kibbutz, shared those memories as well because she was there but really it was all for you.

We started the Jeep again and drove down a road that kissed the riverbank, flinging up the hard mud with our tires. Your eyes tried to take everything in—the wrinkles in the mountains, the many vineyards, the cool puff of clouds, the eagles in the sky and the cattle cracking their tails like whips against the flies zooming about their asses. I can’t imagine how you felt. You must have been overwhelmed with the beauty of it. Surely, you had never seen a place like that in America.

Deserted on the hill behind the lake were old tanks baking in the sun. I knew my tank would be there with the others, as they were old models that the army had left there for presentation. We stopped and ate lunch on the front of the tank, underneath the big gun before I lifted you by your armpits and placed you in the hull. You were touching everything and it began to boil in there and you looked up at me in anguish like how could you survive in these things? But I did in ’82. That was the year we invaded Lebanon. A lot was learned about the man I would become in that tank. Those were dreadful days, climbing on and off the mountains in the sun like some hot, dedicated love that you did naturally, for country.

In the afternoon, we gathered up our sleeping bags and tents and, with you attached to me, climbed Mount Hermon. It took nearly three hours. Chava tickled your feet and played with you to distract you from the path that was narrow and had no guardrail. Once we got almost to the top, we spread out our sleeping bags and tents and I got a pot of coffee boiling. The sun was bleeding down like watercolors and I lifted you onto my shoulders and pointed you in the direction of the beginning villages of Southern Lebanon and said wave! Wave to Lebanon, wave to Hezbollah! And you didn’t know what I was talking about but you waved anyway, right into the face of danger. We had heard on the radio the next day that rockets had fallen into the Galilee and I wondered if they saw your pure pink face through binoculars and wanted to destroy you.”

“I’m still here, though,” I said.

“Yes, but soon you’ll be over there.”

I looked at his face, really looking for the first time ever, and you know when you grow up with somebody how they never seem to age? You are stuck in that time of agelessness, of being with them everyday and you take for granted that they will stay like that forever. Well, my father was old now. I could see it in his cracked smile, his heavy eyes, his paleness, the increasing thickness of his glasses, his non-beer gut.

“I think this will all be good for me,” I said. “I’ve found myself here and I’ve lost myself here in America. I’ve been burnt out on American life for too long.”

“I wished I would have known what I was doing when I asked your mother to leave with me to New York,” he said. “I don’t know if I would have made the same decision looking back at it.”

“What do you mean? Aren’t you happy here?”

“I don’t know if America was all it was talked up to be. We had wild dreams and the years have tamed them into submission. There were also important things I missed back home. Your mother, too. I don’t think she ever forgave herself for leaving your grandmother.”

“I can’t believe you ever convinced her to go with you, to cross the ocean.”

“Isn’t it funny? She won’t even leave the house now, but that’s mostly because of the surgery.”

“Will you be fine with her if I go?”

“We’ll be fine,” he said. “We’ve always been fine.”

“Will I like the farm?”

“I think it’ll be good for you. The farm is different than it used to be when I was there. There’s a lot of technology plants that they use the volunteers to work in but you’re going at a good time when they need people in the orchards, picking apples and other fruits.”

“That will be all I need for awhile.”

“And then you’ll do your army service. Three months of basic and three months of combat.”

“It isn’t so bad.”

“No, you won’t see any war.”

“War is a crime.”

“You’re a smart boy, you’re my boy.”

The El Al stewards in their blue suits and white shirts began to wave toward the people in the waiting room. I watched a few planes take off outside the window, rising up, getting away, leaving the soil. It would all be different now. I was nervous about that. And the nervousness was a result of not knowing what I was doing or what it was that I was running away from. But it was bad to think like that. I was always thinking in the negative and it was bad to think that I was running away from something when really I could be running toward something. I hugged my father and kissed him and moved toward the gate. Should I look back at him? I decided not to. I decided not to ever look back because it would crush me. This existence, with its many tricks and unpredictability, had placed me where my father was at 22, only I was going the opposite way. I entered the tunnel, the humidity of the outside pouring in, and began my new life, his life, my life, his life in reverse.

A Morning at Miquon Station

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:41:34 -0400

And then came the hard pellets of freezing rain. They cracked open on jackets like cold little asteroids and a flat gray sky gathered toward Manayunk and then Philadelphia. There was forest on either side of the tracks and fog hung in low between them so that you couldn’t see the trains coming until the last minute, their lights like Anglerfish coming through the dark water.

I had promised Ann that I’d be at her parents’ house early. She told me while I was in L.A. that her mother was very fond of me and asked that I come to Christmas Eve breakfast at their house on Prahls Island, which was a part of Pennsylvania or a part of New Jersey depending on how you wanted to look at it. I was still very hungover at the train station. It was only 6:20 AM. By now, Jack, Pete, Charlie, and the rest of them were sleeping it off somewhere in the warmth. Ann had insisted that I come straight to Prahls I. from Virginia but Jack was getting married and I couldn’t miss the bachelor party. It was incredible to us that one of our own was getting married. It was incredible that anybody was getting married these days. We had all left the bar around 4, went to the Diner, ate, went back to the strip club after management found the heirloom watch that Charlie’s grandfather owned as a pilot in the Second War, and got to the station by 5:15 in Pete’s busted up Ford. Jack slept in the backseat with Charlie, and me and Pete lit up cigarettes and listened to jazz. All our ties were loose and our shirts wrinkled and we smelled of diner food and whiskey. At 6, Pete left me at the station. He had to haul ass back downtown to get the kids ready for the half of the holiday they’d spend at Pete’s ex-wife’s house. Ann wasn’t happy with me when I told her about stopping in Philly because she knows how I drink sometimes with the boys. She reluctantly agreed to it on the condition that I wouldn’t show up to Christmas Eve breakfast still drunk. I loved Ann. She accepted all of me.

The next train to where I was going wouldn’t arrive for another 70 minutes. And every one of them felt like a minute in that weather. Each time the wind blew it made the hangover worse. Miquon Station didn’t have a little place in the middle of it for coffee or a place to really stand inside at all. Across a clearing in the forest, I could see the transit workers building the new high-speed trains I had read about in the paper. The sweat climbed off their heads into the air and at that moment I wished I had a say in where my taxes went. I heard a man say once that anything is negotiable, but then I laughed and thought of tax and how the paper said that would be going up too just like the sweat from the transit workers.

A bell sounded and the loudspeaker cracked over the madness of winter.

NEXT TO ARRIVE ON THE OUTBOUND SIDE: THE 6:45 LOCAL TO NORRISTOWN. NORRISTOWN, NEXT TO ARRIVE.

There was no one around when the train pulled in. The fog had cleared only slightly. Instead of rain, snow piled onto the overhang above me and the tracks, rusted orange like some sunset in some warm place, disappeared under the white. The door of the train opened and one man got off with two packed suitcases. He was thin and balding in front. Little wisps of his hair stuck out in the wind as if by static. He wore a black peacoat, oversized, and thick glasses. Each lens seemed to have come from an old magnifying glass.

“So, this is the one?” he yelled over the wind to the train operator. He was pointing at the big billboard next to me above the bench.

“Yeah, yeah,” the train guy said. “That’s the one. Happy Holidays, sir.”

The train knocked along. The man in the glasses just shook his head in some ultimate sadness and guided his finger down the board schedules.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “That damned bitch in the SEPTA office told me they were running on a SUNDAY schedule, none of this Christmas special shit.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t know about it either until this morning.”

He looked over at me, then the board again, then the snow and set his things down in front of the bench and sat next to me.

“You smoke?”

“On occasion.”

“Smoke with me.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“Christmas Eve and divorce.”

“You got divorced?”

“Wife kicked me out today, so I guess we’re in the beginning stages, right?”

“Jesus, man.”

“No, I’m afraid not even Jesus could save that marriage.”

He drew two cigarettes from his pocket, lit mine, lit his, passed mine and we smoked them in the cold.

“Where are you going now? What’s your train?”

“7:40. Lansdale. Old college buddy has an extra room. Lives above a bar, too.”

“Is the bar open today?”

“It sure as hell better be.”

“What happened?”

“I fell in love.”

“More specifically?”

“We ran out of money, and somewhere along the way we lost the love, too. I been unemployed for a good amount of time now. Last year I had just enough money to get the kids presents. This year I didn’t. Even the tree looked shittier than ever.”

“And that’s why she kicked you out?”

“Partly.”

“How old are the kids?”

“One is 8 and the other is 5. Both girls.”

“What’s the other part of it?”

“I made a mistake. Granted, I only had to move a little to make enough money for the bills, presents for the girls, and even something nice for the wife. Police got to me last week. It was nighttime. The girls were scared pretty bad and my wife said she didn’t want them to be around me anymore. She said that I was getting sad and desperate and uncharacteristic. I stayed out late. I smoked and wouldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t know what to do. I convinced her like I always did and she let me stay. But now, you see, I didn’t have the money anymore and the girls ask for more things from Santa every year. Last night, my wife and I got drunk into the morning and made love through the morning like all had been forgiven and when she got up to do her hair and couldn’t turn any of the lights on, she realized I hadn’t paid the Electric Company bill and threw the curling iron at me and threw me out saying she had had it.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“How do you explain it?”

“You don’t even try, that’s how.”

“But you loved each other.”

“So?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where you going? What’s your train?”

“7:30. Doylestown.”

“You’re a young guy. Coming home from college?”

“To see my girl. She lives on Prahls Island with her parents.”

“You ever meet them?”

“The parents? No. First time. They invited me to Christmas Eve breakfast.”

“Must be serious, you and her.”

“Hell, I don’t know.”

“Do you love her?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve never been in love. You’ve been in love.”

“Because I’ve been married?”

“No, because you admitted it.”

“Well still, marriage is not love. So even when I say I loved her, it wasn’t enough to put a good marriage together.”

“So tell me how you knew when you loved her.”

“It’s different for everybody.”

“I just want to know it.”

“What’s there to know?

“That feeling when you realize it. That indescribable one. There must be something common about it. I’ve never known it and I want to know it when I see it.”

“But there aren’t even words for that sort of thing.”

“I’m sure there is one.”

“What makes you sure?”

“Don’t you know about those words the French have?”

“Which ones?”

“The ones with no English equivalent. Like La douleur exquise.”

“I don’t know that one.”

“It’s a term meaning the heart-wrenching pain of wanting someone you can’t have. The unique feeling of it. There’s no word in English for that.”

“I never knew anything about it.”

“So, I’m sure there is one. One for the feeling of knowing you’re in love.”

“Is that all the French do is make up words for things?”

“There’s words like that from all over.”

“Right.”

“Anyway, try.”

“Well, we dated for two semesters in college and at the big summer party they have outside for graduation, we drank and drank a lot. I was ordering more drinks at the bar when she came up to me and snapped her teeth at me with her beautiful drunk eyes floating and reflecting the lights and she was wild and I was tame and she bit me on the nose when I turned around and I grabbed her by the waist and said ‘Marry me, you fucking bitch’. And we did a couple weeks later.”

“So at some point you did actually equate love with marriage.”

“Who the hell doesn’t think that when they’re young? I just didn’t want her to be with anyone else.”

The snow fell harder upon Miquon Station as if the universe had answered sadly to the man’s heartbreak. The sun was hazy and up in the sky but no light reached down to us.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about that old saying,” he said.

“What old saying?”

“That all’s fair in love and war.”

“What about it?”

“What do you think of it?”

“I never took it seriously.”

He laughed. “I didn’t either at first.”

“And now you do?”

“I used to think that at least with war you had a choice, right? You volunteered to get your leg blown off in the desert. You volunteered to be killed. That’s why war is fair. I didn’t see love as the same thing. Especially if the result of love is this. This devastation. You didn’t sign up for that. You didn’t volunteer for that. I know I didn’t. It isn’t a damn bit fair. Where’s the warning? But now that I think about it, all’s fair in love, too. Love is simply war dressed up much prettier. That’s why we think nothing bad will happen, because love is figurative and war is literal. And you don’t see love on the news, but you see war all the time. And you identify love with good intentions and war with bad ones. So you find it impossible to be let down by love. You get into it for all the right reasons. And then you realize that those who don’t believe that all’s fair in love and war are the ones who have either never been in love or never been to war. You volunteer for both. You volunteer to be destroyed by both. It is unspoken. A part of the ritual. There’s no way around it. People feel entitled to love. And good love at that. But they don’t know what to do with it once they have it. People feel entitled to love. But nothing is an entitlement around here. You see, you’ve never been in love and you’ve never been to war so naturally you think it’s unfair.”

“Does anything make it easier?”

“She was worth it. Only that. She was.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You just can’t be afraid to lose them. You have to live without the fear of losing them and the reality that they are wild souls and won’t wait for anybody. They can leave whenever they want when you don’t make them happy anymore.”

“I see.”

“Do you make her happy, your girl?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“Then you start with that. Build it into a fire.”

My train pulled in and I said goodbye to the man. On the train, a husband argued with his wife and a banker laughed and there were poor people with nothing and there were rich people with everything and the children hopped with their shoes on the seats. I looked out the window at the white, white, white and I died a little, thinking of how much of my life I had spent looking at the world through a window. We passed a square with many stores and many people going into them and out of them. I saw the little episodes of people trading momentary sparks of compassion. Compassion that they saved, that they restrained, that they held out on using like sick days until the middle of December. And December always moves so fast. How soon after do we go back to hating each other? It’s an ugly time, and people think that it can never get ugly but it does. The man’s wife kicking him out—that was honest ugly business. But when it falls apart it falls apart. You are then unable to dress your wounds. Especially ones that have no intention of healing. And as he’s drinking the bottle later, he’ll realize this and smile and think of good things like his daughters.

When I finally got to the edge of the River and could see Prahls Island, I breathed and looked around. The fog was thick and pressed against the water. The trees were rough and gray like elephant skin. And I couldn’t see any movement. The lights of the house twinkled from up on the hill and another one lit up by the door as Ann walked out. She wore a green trenchcoat and waved a speck of a hand to me across the river. She smiled as she came down the pier and untied the boat. I could see her climb in and start to pull back on the motor string. She came forward, cutting through the water, and the sparkle of her blue eyes came through the fog like train lights. The engine sputtered and the wind took her hair in its hands and she was beautiful in the spray. Beautiful and militant. The boat was rushing at the riverbank too fast and she cut it left just before land. A tiny wave of water drenched me and she laughed and I smiled at her like I don’t often do. I was happy in reaction to her happiness. I thought that might be love. She pulled at my tie and I fell into the boat. And we just sat out there on the water until we were hungry.

I've already left you a rather hero-worshipping-type ask before, but I simply wanted to remind you that your writing is phenomenal. I fall in love with words rather easily, but your words are some of my current favorites. And I'm presently also slightly worshiping Kerouac and Salinger, so this is serious.

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 19:09:46 -0400

Kerouac and Salinger are both giants in their own right. I hope to live long enough to get there and to please you along the way.

I Know You're Inside Even Though It's Beautiful Outside

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:08:46 -0400

I know, I’m here for you.

http://acceptlossforever.tumblr.com/ask

The Conversation is Over

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 18:09:00 -0400

“You know that you are such a child.”

“Don’t talk to me like that!”

“I’ll talk to you however I want to.”

“Just because you’ve had some wine doesn’t mean you can talk to me like that.”

“It’s shitty wine anyway.”

“Hey, you bought it for me.”

“Yes, I bought it for you.”

“Even though you didn’t like the brand?”

“Yes. Isn’t that what people who are in love are supposed to do?”

“I am not in love with you at all.”

“You say that now, but just wait.”

“Wait until what?”

“Until the Greek gets bored of you.”

“You think I’m boring?”

“No, I think you’re interesting. It’s the other men who will think you are boring because they don’t understand you.”

“And you understand me?”

“I’ve tried my hardest and I think I do.”

“What color are my eyes?” She looked away.

“Blue.”

“No, they’re green. See? You don’t know me at all.”

“Ah, horseshit, I know you plenty.”

“Mika says he’s rented a villa for us in Greece. He knows the color of my eyes. He’s going to take me on a boat, too.”

“You’re always about that.”

“About what?”

“Living a life that you don’t want.”

“Who says that I don’t want it?”

“You give too much away when you talk about it, like you’d rather be away from all that fanciness.”

“Well, maybe I like it. It doesn’t hurt to be treated like a princess.”

“No, I guess it doesn’t.”

“Can’t you just fucking enjoy being a good friend to me?”

“I enjoy it, but it isn’t enough.”

“Am I the only woman you’ve written about that you haven’t fucked?”

“Yes.”

“I feel good about that.”

“Really? It makes me sick to think about it.”

“How long has it been?”

“It’s been a very long time.”

“Write about me soon?”

“Never.”

“It’s my legacy you know.”

“You’ll provide a robust legacy all your own, I’m certain.”

“I couldn’t be with you.”

“Am I that terrible?”

“You’re just so depressed. We’re too much alike. Two depressed people should not be together.”

“Everybody ends up depressed together eventually.”

“You are very wise.”

“What’s that sound?”

“It’s the pipes. They are very loud, aren’t they?”

“I’d never be able to sleep if I lived here.”

“Oh, I can’t sleep without some noise.”

“I need the quiet.”

“People need different things to get them sleeping at night.”

“Since I’ve met you—”

“Don’t say whatever it is you’re about to say.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“Good.”

In the haze of 4 a.m. we sat in bed drinking the wine, the alcohol and the sugar filling our bodies as replacements for something else. And the pipes rattled on and on but they had no purpose as we were still shivering.

Yuma

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 10:15:33 -0400

Colorful things in the sky were invading Yuma. As the train inched up along the side of South Gila Street, I saw the hot air balloons scattered above the desert like great big teardrops and didn’t know how to feel. We had until midnight until the train left again. Once off the train, I headed into City Hall where all of the people were. There was jazz, food, and strangers bustling and hustling with strollers and ice cream and cameras. There were so many of them. And, for sure, I knew how to feel about that. Very trapped and sick. Like I was walking through my life in a packed elevator. Some people gain energy by being around people, but in my case I started with a set amount of energy for people in the morning and through the day it would diminish until I couldn’t stand it and stayed in bed all night under the covers. It wasn’t that I couldn’t eventually come to like them as individuals, but it was when they were in a sea like that together that I became anxious and suspicious of them.

Outside a bar in the square, a few drunkards with dirty white shirts were leaning against the rail of the patio. One of them was dressed as a clown and sucked at a beer, his shirt pockets filled with wrinkled balloons and toys. As the sun strengthened, he began to sweat and the make-up became splotched and fell down into his neck as he turned to look back at the circus tent.

“When do you suppose you’ll be done?” one of them asked the clown.

“Dunno,” he said. “Sundown.”

“Where’s Mary, and the kids?”

“Mary took the kids on her business trip to Michigan.”

“You mean that she took them with her boss, that Frank guy.”

“Yeah.”

The other guys looked at him, their faces loose and red and numb as the beer swirled in their cheeks.

“I know what you’re all thinking,” he said, fixing his blue hair. “But Mary is a good woman. She wouldn’t do something like that.”

“She’s been gone a whole lot lately, Jim,” one of them said.

“That doesn’t mean a sliver of shit to me. She works hard to support me. Don’t you trust anybody anymore? None of you have a woman, that’s your problem—you’re in love with the booze. You don’t trust anyone.”

“We’re just concerned about you.”

“I don’t need your goddamned concern,” he said.

He leaned over the railing and bowed his head.

“Jim, you have to know, right? I mean, you at least have a suspicion, don’t you?”

“She hasn’t done anything. I would know about it, I would see it on her face, written all over her.”

“Denial is poison, Jim. Poison.”

“I’m choosing to trust her,” he said.

“I don’t know how I could trust someone that way—someone wrong enough for me that I had to make a choice about whether to trust them or not.”

“I don’t need to stand around and hear this shit,” Jim said, and walked off to his booth in his polka dot suit, a smile painted on but a frown wrinkling through, where a superior clown just stared at him disapprovingly as he walked past.

The other men continued drinking passionately, holding their bottles, feeling sorry for the clown. It was obvious to me that many people did not seek truth. They wanted bliss, they wanted ignorance, and they wanted everything to be as usual. Rarely, they would do the hard work necessary to confront a truth that would hurt them, and that was only after all illusions of untruths had been exhausted or proven wrong. And the truth is out there for anyone who wants it—that’s the easy part. But some spent their lives in a quiet acceptance of it and never stood up for themselves while others spent their lives in utter avoidance of it, knowing that they weren’t made of the right stuff to stand up to anything to begin with.

I walked away, into the bar, and called Mayo.

“You good?”

“Yeah.”

“On schedule?”

“Los Angeles in the morning.”

“Has travel been rough?”

“It always is.”

“Well, hang in there,” he said. “I’ll be there tomorrow, meet at LAX around noon?”

“Sure,” I said. We hung up the phone.

I took a seat at the bar and ordered a sandwich with a beer, looking out from the dark arches at the festival. Little crowds of people gathered in the fields around the hot air balloons and gasped as two at a time got in and they turned the burners on. I sat and ordered more drinks, terrified, watching them rise to a dangerous height above the desert.

Favorite book and author, and why.

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 00:21:05 -0400

I mostly read short stories but from the novels I’ve read up to this point: On the Road by Kerouac. I think when I read it at 18, the language struck me in such an overwhelming way. When you’re young and have certain notions about what good writing is and what good use of language looks like—Kerouac had shattered all of those perceptions for me. It proved to me that there were no rules in writing. I wouldn’t say Kerouac is my favorite author though…

Top three writing inspirations?

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 00:14:55 -0400

As of now:

Carver

Kerouac

Hemingway

Are you in a frat?

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 00:14:10 -0400

No.

A Late-Night Talk

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 23:30:58 -0400

http://acceptlossforever.tumblr.com/ask

I didn’t know what it felt like to be a man until I met Florence. Up to that point, women confused...

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 12:58:57 -0400

I didn’t know what it felt like to be a man until I met Florence. Up to that point, women confused me and I reacted coldly to them because I couldn’t make sense of what it is they wanted from me. I tried, I really did. I adjusted, said I was sorry all the time. They had to know they were loved, and if I had written about them then they knew they were loved immensely. But I wrote about all of them, even the less serious ones, even the ones that I didn’t want, even the ones that didn’t break my heart or shock me into depression. And it was then that I could see the problem about that. I thought if I had nothing to say about Florence, and did not base the heroine on Florence, that I could love her on the earth and be satisfied in never making her out to be more than she was by turning her into literature. I have already failed in that regard, as you can see.

We weren’t looking for each other. We weren’t even very cordial at first. Not even at the party on 34^th and Brandywine with all the Russians where we met in the kitchen but otherwise kept to ourselves. I was very satisfied having casual sex every weekend in the summer with a stripper, and she was a stripper that all of my friends wanted to fuck and simply never could and I felt proud about that. Besides, Florence was from New Jersey and came from money and was a fine Jew, a woman my parents would approve of, and those were all strikes against her.

On a Beach, Thinking of Everything

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 21:05:52 -0400

            There was nothing to compare between the temperature of American beaches and the temperature of that beach on Kiryat Yam. I had never been in water as warm as that. At the edge, it was clear and the jellyfish, colorless, wiggled aimlessly into the bowl of the Mediterranean toward Cyprus. On the left, in the distance, a part of another town stuck out into the water. The houses were white and sat on hills where roads were cut into them right against the coastline that carried you up into the towns. The apartments behind me were in very bad shape. I don’t know how I thought that my father and his siblings were lucky. Even on the beach, I wondered how they lived in a small place like that. Six of the children and two of the adults.
            As I studied the space, the small kitchen, the small bedroom, I decided that all six of the children were set up in the living room beside each other and counted six spaces for narrow beds. It looked so impossible but I knew that it had worked. My grandmother must have had this place for forty years or more and must have known every other tenant and their histories. I thought about what that must mean for a person to carve out their own location and know everything about it. Most of us were moving too fast for that.
            The sand was too hot but somehow my toes could stand it, and I lifted them out every so often to catch the breeze and watch the sand blow off of them. People walked along the promenade with their dogs and in between the apartments, cats congregated around big open dumpsters. My father called out to me from the window for lunch. Upstairs, I sat and had a meal of steaming fresh pita and Moroccan fish and carrots. After drinking out of cartons for so many years, it was something else when my grandmother pulled a big white sack of milk from the refrigerator and plopped it down on the table. I was young, and afraid of knowing something unordinary and too embarrassed to ask about it so I let it sit there and get hot on the table. It was hard to understand my grandmother because of her stroke. In the true fashion of my family, she was stubborn during speech therapy and stubborn about the recovery and now spoke like a car breaking and starting and breaking again. She put her fingers to her lips and motioned for me ‘to eat, to eat, to eat’ but I was already too full and looked at my father who simply looked back at me as if he too was full but didn’t say anything or bring any objections up. I finished the entire goddamn plate with her watching over me.

My father slept and my grandmother showed me her room, adorned all over with pictures of the family. The dead heat from outside traveled in. I knew the hot weather drained her of energy, vitality; the sun, depressing, expelled heat that hung so thick, steam rose in waves away from the sand, dusted like confetti on her front step. Her skin, tired and a schema of planned obsolescence, was still vibrantly dark like the Columbian roast her son would drink with cigarettes, reposed with an Uzi in the lap, on the windswept border with Jordan some summers after the Six Day War. Imperial matriarch she was. Prior to 1956, the year of Moroccan independence from “les Français” as she naturally referred to them, her lifeblood merged with the steady trickle of Moroccan Jews finding sanctuary in a State eight years young, still precarious but curiously alluring; Hebrew pipe dreams and hallucinatory wonders pervaded the country, making whole the displaced and scattered causalities of an egregious World War. I looked across the street. The corner, like a slow riot, bustled into waves and waves of heat, hands full with shawarma and figs, olives, lending palatable smells to the dry, desert air. At the bed, her hand extends and curls, wrinkled finger over wrinkled finger, to touch mine, envelop it actually. She motions carefully to her head and neck and back.

“Everything hurts,” she says to me in low, broken Darija.

On top of the cherry dresser hugging the blue wall, she kept her pillbox, white, the inside assorted with every geometric construction and variant color of pill; a pair, sometimes three for each affliction. She grasped for words with eager eyes showing big through librarian glasses. During her siestas that summer, I had read books and took nickel pieces from my father to go downstairs to the shack on the beach where a man named Shlomi sold ice cream and coffees. I snoozed generally and only woke up when I was hungry. I had decided to really go out this time and asked her if we could go to the temple on the opposite side of town. She agreed and packed up a little canvas bag.

The noisy traffic along her narrow, bricked street charged fast, swiftly navigating around traffic circles and swerving curmudgeons on their ways home from work. I waved my hand out, my other hand holding hers for support. A plain white and black taxi like a generic brand good eased up.

“Efo atem ol’yim?”

“We’re going to Bahá’í,” I responded fluently to the driver.

I felt good that I had planned on taking her out from the house at least for a short while, away from the cooking and sitting and watching the hands on the clock drag.

The whole town seemed to have literally been born from sand and hot sun. We exited the car right across from it, the Bahá’í, nestled on top of Mount Carmel in Haifa. The Shrine of the Bàb’s golden dome overlooking the coast capped the entire World Centre, spiritual and administrative epicenter of the Bahá’í Faith, a monotheistic religion that lends credence to the teachings of Abraham and Buddha as well as Jesus and Mohammed, whichever messenger dictated the time period. Egalitarian, pacifist, and large believers in the value of human relationships, their outlook on the human condition was reflected in the remarkable gardens they built, seven in total around the world, basking under every sky. There was no confederacy among the verdant lawn, everything endowed with unique purpose, carved by god to the last blade. We walked slowly higher and higher up the colorful expanse, tall palm trees on either side raised like skinny fists to heaven. Something about the place merited deep reflection about our human race; what we have yet to achieve in the ways of equality and priority that the Bahá’í doctrine and habitude is imbued with.

The night crept up over Mount Carmel as the sun retired behind the golden coast of a holy land. We began our steady exodus from the mystical collection of gardens; the humid, gathering night laid heavy on the eyes. I took her to walk along the warm beach over ice cream and she smiled and kissed me often, the warmness of familial recognition blossoming. A burgeoning awareness was fostered that we were much more the same than different; the way my father barreled into a poisonous Southern Lebanon on a broiling June day in 1982, Uzi and cigarettes strewn on the hot, metal belly of the tank, that resilience and determination he learned from her as I learned from him as I might pass, through no power of my own, to my sons and daughters.

In the morning, she took me to sit under the weathered, beaten canopy in the sand just to be lazy again for a day, the laziness only interrupted to revel in the warm Mediterranean that brushed her steps at high tide.