every time i make pasta i think of my father.

or, to be more specific:
every time i strain out the water after cooking pasta and the steam rises to fill in my glasses, i think of my father. (now that i'm dependent on my glasses i am beginning to understand what a pain it is.)

it is the essential recurring memory of my childhood. pasta. dad. glasses like white cartoon eyes suspended in front of his face. i am watching him from the living room and he's the strongest man in the world, carrying that massive bowl of pasta, pouring out the terrifyingly hot water. plaid button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up and beard still mostly black. i set the knives blades-facing-in:

my father is brave and blind; i am a child. he sent me this picture of home:



these days, his beard is mostly white, when he wears it. i'm not carrying any foxtails, in my hair or my socks or my boots. i was talking to carrot-boy last week and he didnt know what foxtails were.

in the meantime:
pasta. wine. supervillian regenerate! back to work!

summer is at the edge of my brain and i cant wait to fall of into it.

Our unrelenting

Summer, 1933.
Your hat on a post,
and my --

a most exquisite exchange overheard this afternoon
amidst the soft falling
of almond blossoms
(the palesoft brush of spring,
that Tease):

"ey, dude."
"ey-dude."
"dude, we were gonna meet up last night --"
"ugkh, dude!"
"you get in trouble or something?"
"ugkh, dude."

in spite of everything, you got:

sweet-ass, mostly functional light fixtures,

neighbors who dont find you too creepy,

and people in your life who get mad for you,

let you eat most of the pizza,

help fix a flat in the rain

and are generally composed

of pure rock-and-roll.

from barry stone's good times bad times project. more of his work can be found here.

i've Saved up my money and i'm Buying a Camera on tuesday when i go back home.

i am not going to pretend to understand this shit; but it feels good, it feels so fucking good and i'm going to follow that feeling. i keep making lists of projects, of series i want to work on, and goddamn if that isnt going to be taking up a wonderful chunk of things.

totally excited.

last tuesday, my teacher passed away.

she'd beat the 4 month prognosis by a year and a half. i'm stunned that she fought that long and equally stunned that she is gone.

she was the kind of person who fundamentally changed everything. she was the first person to ever grab me -- to say, this is what you'll do because you have to do it and i am going to help you in every way that i can.

which is exactly what proceeded to happen for the next four years. the tuesday just prior, she got out of bed and gave me a lesson and for the first time in a long time i didnt wonder if it would be the last.

the fact of the matter is that i feel obligated to post something about this but at the moment i just dont understand.

the best explanation for anything at this point would be mompou's canciones y danzas.

whenever he leaves a room, it takes on the stickiest possible smell of fish. my teacher once referred to him as "the scuzzy violin guy" so i call him "scuzzy fish guy" and people seem to know who i'm talking about. he likes the way i play bach.

the first time i learned this was one night over the summer, when i was farting around with the f minor keyboard concerto. he walked in with his violin and mysteriously omnipresent grocery bag and began exclaiming. he talked with a vacant enthusiasm about the mysterious "ancient minors" and it was strictly upon his exit that the room took on the smell of fish.

several weeks ago, i was practicing again and heard the crackling of a paper bag outside the practice room door. i finish the second fugue from the e minor toccata. he walks in and exclaims, questions, declares. he leaves and the fish come in.

last night, i'm having break-throughs. i get it, this, these things, how it should swell and prick and that strong is not heavy and all of these things and the world just scintillates. i'm feeling totally brilliant. i've caught the spirit. he walks in.

"what is that? e minor?"
"second fugue."
"yeah. interesting."

and then he leaves. interesting? where are the exclamations?

i thought i was playing really well! he leaves me with the fish and a general perplexion.

one thing i've learned is that if i swear loudly while sprinting to the shower, it actually makes me move faster. it is like shouting when you kick something, breathing out in little tssts that accompany and so magnify each punch. i am clamoring with a violent lateness through the early morning and my roommate says, "did you hear our neighbors working on their stomp rendition until 4am?"

did i, jesus. my actual reply is something more along the lines of "fuckity fuck fuck." the period is the bathroom door slamming. i've overslept by about a million miles.

ten minutes later i'm at the bus stop. my hair is flopped heavy like soggy jungle vines but clean. i dont know what the neighbors were doing, but in my half-dream state i understood it as a fugue. they were playing a fugue for the apocalypse on the apartment complex as though it was some tremendous multiple-percussion set up. when the deadbolt came undone and and somebody walked into the kitchen, i resigned myself to the fact that they'd come to kill me. and then i realized that people dont often make toast prior to partaking in a giant fugal butchery. and now! a coda by toast! to-a-to-a-to-to-ast! the small ding saved my life. like a lighthouse on the shores of consciousness.

i want to ask them what they were on, man. but, hell.

the problem with being in a relationship with your work is that you can't have much of a dialogue. i can't say to my work, "yo, work! i need you to say something kind to me every now and again." then my work tells me i'm pretty at least once a day so's we're assured to cuddle up real sweet and wake up real gentle.

it is just a series of observed successes and failures that have nothing to do with how you actually live your life.

i want to curl up in my bed and translate beowulf from old english to contemporary english and then back to middle. sounds like heaven.

and a photograph.

note to self:
frozen spinach is not such a bad comfort food.

i hate reading poems about buses, seeing plays about buses, being prompted to examine myself as if i am a bus. who are the different people in your bus? who is driving this bus? this is the bus of you.

but fuck if i haven't been harping on them, lately. these little pods of people. they're especially compelling before the sun has completely risen. fucking huge fireflies that open their misted abdomen to you like some sacred mother machine.

last night i was riding the bus home and the driver and i were the only people in the universe. it was so cold you could smell fingerprints on the windows. the driver was a talking loudly talking man. i sat on a cold plastic seat at the far end and didnt say a damn thing and he kept on talking loudly talking. he told me at great volume about how his friend charlie had a bus, this bus his friend charlie had, a 30 footer, that charlie, he'd furnished it and he was selling it, his friend charlie was, it was a nice bus, a 30 footer, that charlie had.

if you stare at fingerprints long enough, pictures show up like on a cottage cheese ceiling.

"80 grand, though, i dont got that." he bellowed like train stack. "but i dont want to buy a house, neither."

his voice was a large flapping bird shooting from the windshield at which he was shouting down the tunnel of the bus. it then bounced off the back and scatted into a thousand simultaneous and disoriented trajectories, in the same way that the lights of passing cars would refract and flicker through the windows and the fingerprints in a thousand simultaneous, disorienting geometries. his friend charlie had a bus.

this morning at the bus stop a drunk transient was trying to help a chinese girl on exchange figure out the schedule. it was proving to be more difficult than he had anticipated. the glowing mother machine arrived and she and i both got on. from the ground he made me promise to look after her. one of his eyes didnt open all the way. i promised. the doors flapped closed. we were back in the womb.

she and i never made eye contact.

he was on another bus this afternoon and lost track of his leg compared to the exit door. and then he realized it wasn't the right stop anyway.

mardi therefore gras, bitches.