It's Over, It's Over, It's Over

regent (REE-juhnt) adjective

One who rules for a limited period, on behalf of a king or queen who
is a minor, absent, or ill.

We approached the Armitage apartment nearly crippled over with stomach knots. The old neighborhood, the old walk, that burned feeling of tender scars, all floating in the crisp winter air, drying out our lips and accelerating our heart beats. Were we under surveillance? Does she stalk the block, hunting down her aggressors, volumes of law books tucked under her arm? Street lights posed as eyes; pedestrians trolled like agents. We arrived.

My attention immediately focused on the original location of the For Rent sign I taped atop the inside window facing the street, some two weeks prior. It wasn't there. I paused. We began whispering our thoughts, searching quickly for tangible indications. A lone chair sat shadowed by the building, hidden in the far corner. Adrienne pointed to a small mound of cigarette butts just outside the front door. Possibly, maybe, a light shimmered in the kitchen.

Smiles staged a coup across our faces--rejoicing, we sang Roy Orbison to Damen. The burden lifted high and wide, drawing out sudden exclaims and gitty laughter. Our lease, our landlady, was broken.

His Name Was Peter Sacks

akimbo (uh-KIM-bo) adjective

With hands on hips and elbows turned outwards.

I've tried to write a decent blog entry for the last couple of mornings and nothing's surfaced. My quick, furious jaunt to Tucson proved both ridiculously exhaustive and wonderfully reaffirming, yet, somehow, I am starved for how to put together a set of interesting sentences. So here's an unrelated thought.

A very kind coworker gave me a pocket version of Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg as a gift. In the foreword, Goldberg quotes a passage from Jack Kerouac that, in a roundabout way, reminded me of a South African poet I met in college. His name escapes me (as names often do), but the experience of listening to his thoughts and hearing his voice enliven his poems will remain etched in my memory forever. "Patience is passion," he said, nonchalantly in response to a particular poem. "The words stem from the same etymological root."

Patience is passion. I used to say that all the time. It used to ease my more depressed moments, used to make sense out of loneliness, out of pining. Almost like a little prayer--was there ever a god of Patience?--to help balance dreams with reality. And now, from this palm-sized book about applying Zen meditation to writing, a fountain of old practices emerge.

I used to write every day. To journal. Read. Every day. Bike to class, to work. Shoot baskets at a nearby park. Drink on desert porches and draw self-sketched portraits. Sit alone in bars. Midnight breakfast burritos. Sunsets atop parking garages. Tack book or magazine-cut collages to my bedroom walls. Smoke joints, laugh, and drive home. I used to have a car. I used to underline only in pencil. I used to like two cigarettes each night of drinking.

I used to write every day.

A Mixed Drink

bling-bling (bling-bling) noun

Expensive, flashy jewelry or other items.

I just finished the Bukowski novel and, honestly, I doubt I'll pick him up again. Not that I was particularly disgusted or offended, as would probably mark most Never Agains in the Bukowski readership. Personally, I simply didn't find the book as a measure of much more than a succession of sexual exploits and belligerence. Although remarkable for their longevity and humor, all the stories of drinks and girls and erections and vomit never resulted in any interesting kind of enlightenment. Then again, maybe that's exactly what Bukowski intended. Pornography for the casual poet.

Bookowski

forehanded (FOR-han-did) adjective

1. Providing for the future needs; prudent.

2. Well-to-do.

3. Made with the palm facing forward (such as a stroke in tennis).

I'm reading again and it's much better than it ever was when assigned. I get to pick what to read, when to read, how far to read--a whole world of choices. In the mornings now, I go to the second or third floor of the theatre (whichever contains less distractions), sit by the windows, pour myself a cup of coffee, and read for about thirty or forty minutes. Starts my day off with a little story, kind of like meeting a friend for a casual breakfast. Only, I suppose, they do all the talking, you decide when they stop, and there's no check involved.

Anyway, this morning I started Women by Charles Bukowski. I received it as a gift two birthdays ago and, after moving into our new apartment and reorganizing all our books, Adrienne found that we now own two copies. We also own two copies of Catcher In The Rye and Catch-22 (nodding to our mutual interest in good catching), but the Bukowski pair signify the only identical editions we share. With two absolutely exact copies of Women sitting side-by-side on our livingroom shelf, I realized, having never read the book, I was taking the ultimate decorative risk: displaying something, in duplicate, I knew nothing about.

Twenty-two pages in and I can say, with a certain authority, that Charles Bukowski, too, knows very little about women.