DeLong sat by the window and counted the number of times the miniature raisin buzzed into the glass square. It was now half past seven and was, admittedly, becoming rather difficult to follow its movements between the shadows of the windowpane and the queasy pale of the light from the storefront below. It was an hour earlier when the last of the toyhouse people had replaced their teacups and with much politeness and fussing, had taken their overdue leaves. When the evening wind had swept the last of the offending diminutives out of sight, DeLong retired to the pale green folding chair. The padded foam beneath his posterior and buttocks had long since failed to lend any support to his knobby frame; its function now limited to as much an ornamental purpose as a mulish one.
DeLong sat by the window and tried not to think about the last time he had swept the floor. It was not a particularly difficult task for DeLong; he was always forgetting to sweep the floor.
"I miss having the woods to walk into and just get lost in."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
Nothing.
My roommate moved out yesterday. No kidding. I came back to the room and his clothes and books were all thrown out in the hallway and he was gone. I didn’t think anything of it then because it was pretty late and I had had a thing or two to drink, but when I woke up the next morning and saw his stained, empty bed I knew he wasn’t coming back. I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to do with all his things lying in the hall though so I called his phone. I must’ve still been drunk then because I could hear it ringing like it was in the room somewhere even though I knew he wasn’t. Anyways, it was starting to give me a headache so I hung up and moved my chair so I couldn’t see the mess outside the door. I didn’t sit down though, but closed the door and lay back down on my bed. I wasn’t finished with last night.
You could tell she was into it though. I mean, when you’ve been with enough girls you sort of get to knowing when a girl’s feeling it or not, and when she’s just a good dancer or something. And believe me, this girl was feeling it. I mean obviously not the whole time. It’s damn hard to hold a girl’s attention the whole time the two of you are dancing, especially if she’s a real looker. I used to play baseball with a kid who could do it, but he never gave up the trick. You’d just ask him about it and he’d throw you some line about listening and really caring. Believe me, I care a helluva lot. But most nights that isn’t enough to get you back with the girl you really want. And it definitely never helped me get girls back the way he did. Not that he did it as much as other guys. I never understood that. When you got a trick as clean as that and you’re not getting it every night, well that just seems like a shame and a waste to me. This girl was definitely into it though. Trust me, you can count on that. Sometimes you can just tell.
Hello blog world. It's been a while. As others have said, "college is not conducive to blogging". Or writing. But here's a poem. Does someone want to name it for me?
Conceited, I
Float through the stares
And the inquiring nods;
Refreshingly aloof and inviting.
Some of them who know me do not see what it is I present
And I am comforted and thankful.
Perception is not my only motivator
But it is the most alluring fish.
She flicks her hair and there under the sky roof
The luminescent arc caresses caresses
And as I watch the moon pouring gently
Gently over her shoulder and onto my lap
I no longer care what she thinks.
Sometimes there exists a plane between
Knowing what I know to be and what I know is being.
I am as real as what I think they think I think,
But someone knows that is not the moral.
Have you ever had a dream about someone you didn’t know anything about, only when you woke up you felt like they were your best friend or something? That happened to me last spring. She was a year or two behind me and I didn’t know anything about her but I had always wondered. She had long black hair and I remember she walked like she knew exactly where she was going. She wrote me a poem. In the dream, I mean. It said, “I want to feel the warmth of your hand against my own I can tell that you’re that type of guy even though we’ve never talked before your eyes catch my smiles.” I don’t know if anyone’s ever written you a poem before but I thought it was the sweetest thing I had ever read and in the morning I felt like giving her a call and I would have but I didn’t know her number. And I didn’t ever get around to calling but I never forgot about her. I mean I did, of course, but not forever, so I think that’s close to the same thing. The reason I remembered now is because today was her funeral.
Sometimes when I am driving I begin to feel sad for no reason at all. All of a sudden this horrible longing will crash into me and I feel like whatever was good in my life had just slipped through my fingers and shattered all over the floor and was gone. My whole body aches and suddenly I don’t know what to do. I could be driving to my own goddamn wedding and I have to pull over lost. I get out in a convenience store parking lot and walk until the policeman grabs me and shoves me out of the road and says he has better things to do than deal with drunks who won’t take care of themselves. He’s there directing traffic because she died and that’s when I heard that she died and that’s when I remembered that I think I loved her that morning.
I was still wearing my tuxedo so I went inside and sat down in the back of the hall. The entire room was staring at me. She was lying dead in the front and suddenly I was the goddamn center of attention. I felt like throwing up. You could feel it in your skin the moment you walked in there that none of these people even cared about her. Not like I did. She never wrote a poem for any of them. The blotchy eyed man at the front of the room smiled at the room and then at me and started to speak again, his voice cracking tragically. He rambled for a few sentences - real sincere and sentimental like. “You could search all your life and never find a soul kinder than hers… making everyone feel special and… only eyes I ever… loved you all.” His eyes started to well up and he waved his hand humbly and so damn graciously and sat down again, the rubber necked bobble heads all nodding furiously.
I felt like going up to him right there and – well, I don’t know what I wanted to do. He was just one of those guys who - one of those guys who if they made a fantastic catch in football or something would say something stupid like “Well, I dropped enough of them today”, just to show how goddamn humble they were, right when everyone was congratulating them and all. I felt sick again and watching him parade around when she was lying dead not two feet! away and I felt like hurting him cutting him. Never mind that she was lying there dead in a room full of vultures and I didn’t think I could take them all on there were too many some of them would get by I couldn’t protect her from all of them needed me how did they all get in here they shouldn’t have let them in why wasn’t I called the only one why wasn’t I who cared who loved she needed me now but I better wait she knew that there were too many I had to think couldn’t possibly catch her now but she knew of course without words she knew but she wasn’t warm now
There was nothing else to say and they all started to stand and file out of the pews and I stayed in mine watching carefully ready to spring forward. They were still watching me through their beady eyes their talons sheathed in black gloves and I waited. When they were mostly gone the blotchy eyed man stood and started walking towards the back. I saw him glancing my way and smiling through his blotchy eyes. He stopped to embrace a teary elderly man in a white suit and I turned and left the hall before he caught up with me.
I walked outside into the stuffy air and the close phantasmal mist and couldn’t see anything past my own hands, practically. The others were all leaving and I remembered I had my own church to go to. The ceremony hadn’t started yet but it was on the other side of town and I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it there without driving like a goddamn maniac so I decided to just not go. They wouldn’t understand why I was late anyways. I knew then it wasn’t the place for me; it was really only a fling.
The sun was still just visible over the expanse of evergreens shimmering lightly in the distance, the afternoon rain casting a glistening sheet over the grassy waves of the Hillsboro Country Club. Silhouetted against the dying light and slouched beside an overturned golf cart sat three figures, their shadows a sparkling haze across the 18th green. The middle figure bobbed unsteadily and slumped across the shoulder of his leftmost companion as a small glass object slipped noiselessly from inside his palm. The rightmost figure raised his hand to his face, and nodded, as a bright flash rent the air beyond the clubhouse...
Also -
If I get eaten by a bear and don't make it back, thanks everyone for being in my life
