Shytown, 6 PM

indurate (IN-doo-rayt, -dyoo-) verb tr.

1. To make hardy, inured, accustomed.

2. To make callous or unfeeling.

verb intr.

1. To make hard.

2. To become established.

adjective (IN-doo-rit, -dyoo-)

Hardened; callous; obstinate.

Trains on the el track beams
keep above, stalled in three beeps
(glad it ain't me)

An ambulance
weaves through a one-way
past a blue bus stopped behind
a blue bus--
all full, windows bulging,
people cooking in awful overcoated heat
(glad it ain't me)

All it is:
I walk, see
a shoulderbag-toting trooper
deadright
on my view of life
straight ahead
eyes-glued just past the
shoes and
those blue buses, the ambo sirens shout--
fuck, man, is that a
firetruck
too?--
over mumbles and averting glances
crossing on time with white light
words, routine advances--where,
where is the fire, that emergency
where do they all go in such a hurry?--
(glad it ain't me)

Do you know?
Do you know?

City living's like shit-fearing flies
If you believe all you're told
then all you know is lies

Logging In/Out

pusillanimous (pyoo-suh-LAN-uh-muhs) adjective

Lacking courage; timid.

If you stop, if you just stop for two seconds and close your eyes, you will hear the ghostly buzzes and whirs of our machinery as it ticks and percolates through time. This constant current running to plastic-cased hardware--low-level high-rises, condos full of data memory--pierces the air like phantom whistles. You, your body, responds: this listening to the purrs, the sudden changes of tone and pitch, the fabricated background music of existence, forces a physical, alien, conversation between the hidden eyes of these machines and our over-worked fingertips.

Somehow, during this whole unspoken discussion, a new taste emerges. Your tongue, its tip, soaking in an unknown development--a wetness, a dryness, a familiar consistency--that doubles with each pulse. First: not enough to know. Then: too much to stop. Is it blood? Are you cut? Is it batteries? A leak? Is it metals, or is it cells?

Remember, there's no murder in shutting down.

Another Blog? Seriously?

For the handful of people that check this blog--and handful might be a little over-zealous--I would like to invite you to check out my new blogging endeavor. I'm not ending this blog, merely taking an announced hiatus (as opposed to the myriad of unannounced pauses between posts that exist normally) to focus on rehearsals for Lipstick Traces, an ambitious play Pavement Group (my theatre company) is producing next month.

Too Early to Cause Alarm

I woke up this morning at six AM--two hours before my alarm--and layed there with my eyes shut, feigning the opposite. Clinging, in a bleary-eyed morning daze, to a faith that my body and mind would fall back asleep if I could just overwhelm myself with hope. Sadly, the old rehabbed wooden windows that rattled me awake in the first place continued their arrhythmic drumming and, in a wind of sighs, I eventually whipped off my covers and stormed to the shower in defeat.

This happens from time to time to everyone, I assume, whenever your body awakens before "it's supposed to". Meaning, of course, that the fine-tuned morning regiment of obeying one's alarm occasionally fails in the most unexpected manner: preemptively. There's nothing surprising about sleeping through the calming drone of NPR or, for the true logs among us, even the robotic stomp of the beeps and buzzers. When someone receives more sleep than they apportioned for, that's viewed as a symptom of necessity. But waking up before that preset switch in bedroom volume? Before the weather and traffic together? That's no regular occurrence. That's just purely divine defiance, losing the bet before the deal. No one bolts out of bed early and shrugs, "Well, guess I only needed five hours of sleep last night! What a life!" No way, we all act just as I did and suggest, by mental and/or physical force, that we continue to lay shrouded in our cave of covers until the appropriate pronouncement, until the very right moment when we should--when we normally do--rise from our hibernatory state and get up.

Such a stubborn refusal to accept the morning's arrival only serves as punishment for an immutable, unchangeable course of events. Ultimately, no amount of base-level self-trickery will reverse the early day. I guess such occasions act as reminders that the "it's supposed to"-ness of life follows a lead unhindered by the human invention of calculated time. It's just too bad we can't all take naps at work.

Unplugging the Virtual Torture Machine

blimey (BLY-mee) interjection

An expression of surprise, dismay, etc.

[Contraction of "blind me" or "blame me", from "God blind/blame me";
sometimes heard in the form gorblimey or corblimey.]

It's increasingly difficult to maintain a sense of humor about this waiting game. At this point, based on a fairly recent (probably ill-advised) email correspondence, I'm certain the committee held many sessions of interviews; I simply attended the first round. That being said, I must now begin to accept rejection. From this day forward, I will no longer check the website for an official rebuke, but, in its stead, assume it. If they choose me, I will receive a packet by mail and that--that ghost--would arrive just days after an online decision.

Now I must find a new job before it elicits a psychotic break.