WHAT CHILDREN DREAM

Last night I dreamed of an old

schoolroom. A wasteland,

and students edged into view

laughing and not laughing;

And one holds a bag

full of lily white powder.

A fight – a lunge – a yell.

I know what will happen.

The bag tears the room quiets.

I walk through and

I breathe it in.

And I know what it is.

I like it and I do not like it.

My mind clears. It is blue and

white, like orgasm and nirvana;

and it lies to me.

What is this feeling?

Even in my dream,

I question knowing this,

but I know what must happen

so that I can know this.

THOSE PEOPLE, 1.

People die everyday. They wither in their lowly graves as people whistle to music above them.

They like it and they like it.

THOSE PEOPLE, 2.

The dead care more for special interests:

Like being proud, burnt cloth and celebrating tyranny.

That is what wisdom death happened to afford them.

Me, I live, unwise and trampling atop these honorable graves. For I have yet to appreciate what pleasure there is in pain,

What freedom lives in the surrender of liberty.

The young in me vows never to learn.

The old know better.

This is what it feels like to be free.

    The steering wheel feels light under my fingertips as I carefully match the curve in the road. It would be so easy to slip, a miscalculation, a too-long glance down at the radio. Possible excuses.

            A barbell suspended above my head wants desperately to return. For a moment, I consider letting it fall, where it might crush my skull, tear indifferently through my brain and lie quietly amidst a greying body and ashen faces.

            Words form in pools inside my brain, the synapses of which are waging war. Some with the engineered desires to survive. Some with consciousness.

The windshield collects fog as my tepid body creates some dissonance with the air outside. I fail to flip the defroster on, seeing no point as the length of the drive was only five minutes. The fog crowds the window to the street, filling in from the bottom until I have to sit straight to see out. My girlfriend talked with me on the phone, before I had left the gym. She was going to sleepover at James’ dorm. It was a fun day for her: the supermarket, video rentals and now some cooking and movies in pajamas. A few minutes ago, she said my melancholy is only some manifestation of my envy; that she was out with friends and I was not.

            No person handles being analyzed with much grace. Naturally, I respond that this was an oversimplification, that I was not jealous, but instead lonely. The problem was not what she had, but that I had so little of it. “It wasn’t loneliness either,” I think as I begin, once again, some devolution into a prototypical teenager. I believe, momentarily, that my life is insoluble, rich, and complex. Then, mirroring some prior apathy, I see how well labels can encapsulate a being. I connect the two.

Still, it wasn’t jealousy.

            She talked with me on the phone for two or three minutes. “I could go to the beach,” I mused. I didn’t feel like eating anything, even In’n’out which was, incidentally, about ten yards from where I had parked my car to go to the gym. I didn’t want to bother her anymore, nor did I particularly desire the company of my cousin with whom I had arranged to meet. I was and am still, somehow lifeless. However, I know that I am alive, figuratively, because there are things I want to do more than others. I have some passion. At least, I have less apathy for some activities.

I wonder what she thinks of me. There, a thought, an idea. Something to pass the time.

            My girlfriend is good. No slut or idiot by any means. She has a simple charisma to her, like what one might conceive of as a southern belle with a pan-American accent. Remembers details, diligent, personable, careful, plain-spoken. To know what someone thinks of you, you have to figure out what you think of them. I justify, I apologize, again.

            She rounds out my wrongs with good faith, giving me a clearly defined benefit-of-the-doubt. She knows that my persona is constantly sublimating into something else; that it is semi-cyclical. I worry that she is able to compartmentalize me because she knows my past so well. Like having the book on predicting the weather, she is able to box me in. Like the weather, I have my occassional surprises, to which she learns a posteriori how to respond. Then those responses become programmed in, too. What I’ve painted in the last few sentences sounds cold and impartial, but understand that it is completely the opposite. The system is tailored to me; she knows how best to quell the fits of emotion, to encourage a positive, fulfilling means for their expression. Is it perfect?

            I make many more mistakes than she does. For each time she’s hung up the phone in the middle of conversation, I’ve done it five times. I’m sorry. I have lost interest in this too. The fog in the car has taken the night whole. 

Nominal

The compulsion to write is embedded in the doctrine of human affairs. It is in our psychology, the impulse to communicate. And to share stories, true, false or otherwise, is in that evolutionary condition. We innovate like young lieutenants on a warfront, trying to convey the distinctly novel while timidly assimilating the knowledge of years past. Authors, television anchors, corporate figureheads have all appreciated that bitter struggle between apprentice and master; between reading and writing.

An excerpt from a student in my Social Economics course at Millson College. Despite the regurgitation from lecture, the poor use of simile, the confusing and possibly contrived set of three workers, I sense he is approaching a real thought towards the end of his blue book, a shame perhaps that the exam only ran for an hour and a half. What clever deduction about the human condition might have escaped his hands?

We discuss the conventional topics in our marble floored halls. We employ the dichotomy of nominal and real to its extreme and question it. What we affix to things, that power we give it by naming it, possibly Biblical, is fundamental to existence. It is fundamental like the struggle between reading and writing: our names in themselves mean nothing believed only by a rogue; only with a compliant cohort does it become relevant. Then these nominals take on real value, extinguishing themselves only as the language and society themselves erode. Symbolic generation. The creation and destruction of meanings in markets, Schumpeterian, keeps the underlying social contract relevant and understood.

The students often file in quietly to my lectures, aware of my sternness, my acrimony for ignorant questions and unabashed hand-raisers. Lectures are an escape from interaction. I speak and they listen, annotate, record. Those who do not want to come are not welcome. I speak with the precision of a physicist exhorting the finer points of his incisive proof and the rigorous dullness that becomes inescapable at forty-three. I imagine that there are more exciting speakers, but no more exciting material than we cover. Hear the voices of science churning to answer the questions of life, of dynamic social interactions, of government and psychology. In mid-lecture I sometimes become passionate, my striding pace quickens, my hands wave more fluidly. Then I see the students smile their attending curious smiles. They type or write in their code, bulleted and in Times New Roman or perhaps with loopy o’s and undotted i’s. They wear the shirts of contemporary bands, of their respective dorms, of their culture expressed through the market system, itself excited to innovate with progressively more imitative art. The shirts in particular are a fascinating time-series. The frequency of collared-shirts, densely populated in the front rows contrasted with the cliques of girls hiding towards the sides beneath Millison sweatshirts. In a few weeks, they reorganize as the girls in sweatshirts begin dating those with a need to declare their musical preference with clothing; they separate from their herd only to be reunited with them after Spring break. The collared shirt crowd sometimes puts on the suit and tie, ostensibly for an interview with a financial firm. Sometimes one or two stop coming altogether, disappointing me most. These are not my contemporaries, they are more important. These are those who in their casual judgments decide the life expectancy of my thoughts. Despite my disregard, I am dependent. I fear they know this, too.

In the background of my life there is a murmur of solitude. Perhaps it explains my compulsion to write. Perhaps it explains the absence of my wife, long separated now. The solitude is in bed with my personality, the two conniving pieces of my life that have worked in unison, feeding upon one another. A positive feedback mechanism, my students would tell me. I have meaning because of my contributions to the literature. My contributions to society are tangible in the papers written and cultural analyses that have made my students a self-selected and prestigious group. They are mine. I know their names and histories, their stories. They are the ones I will give anything to. At office hours, I hear their academic struggles and they hear my personal ones. At lecture I become the analytic animal; in person, the social animal.

Still, loneliness pervades my life. After the year passes and my select seniors graduate, the most I hear from them are what is written in the college newspaper. The college paper, the unimaginatively named “Times,” has the cloudlike sensation of ivory-tower delights. It bears the burden of fact with the restless guile of indolent, casual sensibilities borne in the undergraduate ethos. Sparkling champagne and cheap beer, discarded pizza boxes, uneaten cafeteria food, ambiguous regretful hookups and misguided after-school events litter the social scene. Nothing here pretends to be more than camp for the well-educated and the well-endowed.

I was wrong, it does pretend. I pretend. I pretend for the sake of advancement, that if I redefine the environment; if I write a constitution, contribute in to the ethos, it will change. Let it become something.

The letter from my wife that night said, “The papers have been filed today. I missed you Eric, but I am not going to let my life go by.” That was real.

Wanderer

The peaks lay with valleys in between
Where the daughters are thrown at night,
Thinner blood on the mortal scale
Hollow bones and a hollow life.

Faded

Camera lens, find me:
See my hairless skin, my soul
Touch upon my back,
With a hard flash.
The obscurities in focus,
A bargain model.

answers shortly thereafter

Frozen, in dim curtain time
Pale and black we wait, we pray
For company, in the parlor
A wrinkled toddler whines, aged
Whispers and breathing, mildly
Because death is among us,
Raspy and foreign.

Redemption

“it was just a kiss? darling, what is just a kiss?”

I waited for you by the patio steps
Holding a bouquet of flowers and keeping my breath
When I saw you with him
You looked straight through me,
There’s redemption in those eyes,
I braced for the lies,
Because there’s nothing to share,
He’s standing right there
At the door to our house,
She buttons her blouse..

There is something to be said for love,
Something to be said for many things,
I don’t know where the trouble is,
But my troubles sure found me.

I opened the door from the patio steps
Holding flowers for a heart that already left,
I remembered you, and what you’d said
About not being satisfied.
Commitment slurred by the wine,
Our kids are resting their heads
As you slip into bed,
I figure out where to go,
It’s your silhouette on the window.

There is something to be said for love,
Something to be said for a lot of things,
I don’t understand much of this,
What am I supposed to be?

I opened the door to the local hotel,
Where I found Mary Jane ringing the bell,
Booked a room and Jane came inside,
I told her “no,”
At least for tonight,
Passed her my flowers,
We lay there for hours
She told me everything
Married and divorced, living the American dream
In a duplex house on 120 Penny Street.

There is something to be said for love,
Something that eludes me,
Softer now do our voices call,
So much more quietly

For the girl of my dreams,
The boy of her fantasy,
All the more quietly

Piano Keys

Quietly, we turn, we dance
To drown ourselves in a room so full of others,
I am blue, the saint of doting mothers,
For a porcelain world I could not see
So pale and wistfully passing
Cast to appeal, things on the side,
Listen to children because they have
Nothing sinking, only suffered cries.

One, I’m not sure what Larry Summers said wrote all those years ago. I read the transcript today and was kind of hoping for something scandalous. Instead, the worst is that, by a back of the envelope estimate, differences in proportions of women in math and science might be due to differences in variability. “I don’t know the answer, but I think that if people want to move the world on this question, they have to be willing to ask the question in ways that could face any possible answer that came out.” - From “Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce” Or: How I Learned to Say Quasi-Offensive Things and Lose My Harvard Presidency.

Two,  

*Before I myself become a pariah (not that I’m well-known enough to be one), I want to establish my view of the sentiment of the comic. That is, that group generalizations are made when it comes to women but men are treated as individuals. There’s also an undercurrent of truth, dynamically related between the social perception of girls in high school math (the intro calculus in the comic), the reinforcing experiences of seeing mostly boys in math, and so many other things someone should write an essay or a speech about where to begin studying the issue.

Blood is red like love.