Time goes ticking by.

Every writer and dreamer in history has had the impulse to put this phrase in ink. The words pour, senselessly, out of my fingertips, onto the pages, dancing on the blinking bright screen. Printed letters are only massive clichés in ink or dotting across the radiance in black and blue, punching out my eyes with their lame excuses for skill. Well, cliché needs a voice too, so fuck you, when I can’t find the best grooming methods for my maddening thoughts. So I’m a tad too far behind the rest of everyone’s beautiful prose and killer poetry. My thoughts are just as real and lifelike with the mundane as anyone’s. They swirl voraciously through my skull. I must capture them, yes, but I can’t and I don’t, so I waste this beauty and all my enlightenment. It swells and burns in my brain and explodes onto my soul.

Damn right, it makes a mark.

Notice this sparkling tattoo on my heart? I’ve let every gorgeous moment’s brilliance bleed into me and every poisonous pain stain these pumping cells. Drip by drip the days make their impressions through years of elation and soaring seconds or hours of torturous prodding, poking, pushing needles deeper into my swollen, collapsing veins of lifeline. Each next time claiming too much space taken now for the world’s design shining on my heart and creeping into my ventricles from healthy, pulsing pink to black and tarnished.

Oh, never again, I’ll promise myself, and I end up sinking to the little bits of color and prose that have seeped out from the wild beating of hearts making me vulnerable and exposed beneath the thinnest layers of my transparent skin. Pale and luminous, it flaps and the writing never fails or dulls in the blinding sun.  Don’t dwindle away when my moods turn on me like a passing cloud to the blinding summer sun. The winds howl and shift to elsewhere while you left me burning under high noon rays. Such sweltering ideas writhe away into darkness before I’m ready and the big orange ball sets prematurely against the brilliant, purple sky and I run desperately towards the horizon, trying in vain to scoop it up in my arms before the screams are never heard and the setting star, dancing towards the end of the world, is lost and then worst, is forgotten. I run blindly down my long, empty hallway in complete blackout depression as the night swallows me in my sadness without the capture of the escaping dusk that is sinking away into the twinkling of twilight. Stars collide into a panier of polka dots across the darkness of this sky but are only concealed behind this city’s fog and artificial afternoon. 

Someone tell me, where is my brilliance?

I have spent twenty six years in the blackness of midnight, stumbling along the edge of night’s mystique and grappling for the light switch. How do they do it? Where’s my command over my on/off switch? I know I’ll never find it in your brilliant blue eyes, wide with wonder and unwavering steady truth. Immediately my night is illuminated and I’m squinting my eyes just to keep walking steady. How can anyone pause and just flick off the swtich when there are opportunities to take life to the extremes and shine so brightly in all the appropriate moments? Waiting for when? Waiting for whom? For what? For another girl to take it down to dull when the moment calls for more composure?

I have never known you to keep it together in the darkness of evening’s sexy swaying pulse.

I have never let anyone deep enough to know how to begin.

I have never truly smiled fully from my toenails to my eyebrows.

I have never been so afraid and so ready to dive into the night and let the rhythm take us for a wander.

I have never seen anyone so beautiful peering back at me over his glass of courage.

I have never once decided to wise up and let a moment pass.

I have never lied before like I have just now.

I have never discovered complete command of my illumination and imagination.

I have never believed I would have ever succumbed to the ebb and flow of life’s whole and complete beauty.

I have never wanted anything more than I want to be myself, in this moment, with you, right now.

I believe I have lost all and complete control.

I’ll hitch across our open countryside
Or fly fast and eager over any ocean
Spilling with adventure on cobblestone corners while
The skies are spinning to the ground with a notion.

Desire charges static from yearning fingertips
Shock waves explode out toward a Californian sun
Surging out to realigned stars and planets that careen and tip
Tenderly and sip along with her wine weighing deep into one.

Bleed this blinding stardust out of me
And free write all the right phrases
That breathe aching life back to see
My liberated soul singing for all his faces…

I love every moment of this one life far too much
To concede and give it up again this time around
So quick, though it seems to be always never enough
After heart strings twist me up from standing ground.

Write out over noon’s glare, inhaling salty mist from the bay
I’ll let my pen make all the wrong decisions
This time I’m ready to break free, to feel right and say
I’ll wait on next time to make the necessary revisions.

So let life take me for now as I invest and digest
The bustle as the sun pours onto my freckled face
Reviving my roaring resolve to let no one else mess
With this fleeting state of rolling deep in life’s good grace.

Golden sparkles in summer’s heat
Jersey waves beckon me on home
Green parkway signs imply defeat
Events unfold we had not known

Blow through this swirling sandstorm
Grappling blindly, eyes covered
Stay the night and keep me warm
Still more, left undiscovered

We turn round and round the hourglass
And we’ll never get our true fill
While clinging to this empty past
Time is slipping, I can’t keep still

The cobbled streets are smiling
With tonight’s October air.
Romantic seasons start me wondering
About the patterns of your hair.
If I ran my fingers through it gently
Just as I always do for him.
If this world were crafted slightly differently,
I could release my inhibitions
And so easily take you in
For just one honest night
Of more than glances and chances.

Start with mime dancing at 3am
Of more than glances and chances
How do I let you in?
Life and I, we don’t agree these days
On much but where I’ve stood
But I can’t help my heart from wandering off to bed warm next to you.

Do beards caress or scrape my face?
A little fluff would never harm a soul.
Just close the space
Cue the music
Just a little closer
Faster moving
Just inches from breath
Move faster, do it
Just take the chance
Move swiftly through it
Just find your breath
He wants you surely
Just do, don’t think
No one can see you
Discretely, stop.
Who is he, after all?
Suddenly we both feel small.
You glance around.
It’s not this easy
I plant my feet back on the ground.
Come down
                   down
                         down
From the clouds up there!
It’s 3am, I’ve been drunk since one,
Aching with love of autumnal fires
Dancing, swinging drinks and fanciful fun
Beside those I know will always remind me
Of this kaleidoscope vision of two hearts pounding one.
Reminders that I will never be alone
And these secret moments we will both forever own.
I hail my cab unaware of what we could ever be.

“Put it in Your Book”

Is it just my mother? Maybe.  She is most certainly one of a kind.  There is more love and emotional depth inside my mother than any type of allegorical metaphor I could come up with to do her justice.  One of her mottos that she often would go on to preach to me (and my friends too) if we were bickering was: “If you can’t say something nice. Don’t say anything at all.” A stolen quote from Thumper in Bambi, but a goodie.

In our hometown, Lisa was one of those Moms you did not want to piss off or disappoint. As she would pull up the driveway, my friends would scramble frantically along with me to clean up the house for fear of Lisa’s wrath if she were tested.  She loved and adored the company of my friends in our little three bedroom ranch.  She loved our gymnastics practices on the grass, forts in the backyard and the shouting and giggling on our trampoline; but she despised and ranted over the aftermath mess of the mayhem strewn about the living room and the front lawn.  She would walk in and give one signature glare and we would immediately start cleaning up like maniacs.

Later, after I felt guilty for making her life more difficult (or maybe I just felt bad that I made her yell), I would break out the theater and heartbreak and still fine something over which I could bitch, and I would begin the earth-shattering, dog-pitched whining.

My Mom’s favorite retort to my dramatic pouting fits was:“Eh, shut up and put it in your book.” She always still jokingly swears my two sisters and I will each inevitably write a book about our miserable, rotten lives with our awful, terrible, good-for-nothing family.  “Boo Hoo. Your rotten family. Yeah, yeah I’m a witch-mother. Write it in your book…” My Mom’s finest catchphrase was dripping with sarcasm of course; I had a lovely childhood and a wonderful family. We were never told “no” and always given love. Looking back, I love her snappy way of asking me to count my god-damned blessings.

At 14 years old, a fire engine wailing down the block seems about as accurate a description as you would get to my whimpering tone.  Yes, my life was horribly tough. My parents cared way too much for my safety and did not understand me at all.
“But Mommm… everyone else is allowed to go drive to school with older people-uhhh, I’m gonna take the bus like a LOSERRR! … It’s not FAIR! ‘So-and-so’s’ allowed to do it!”

Before the fire balls begun to brim behind her azur eyes to launch out at me she would say:
“Well then, why don’t you go live with ‘so-and-so’s” family then?  You think her Mom is nicer? Fine. Boo hoo quit playing the martyr and complaining to me and write about it in your book.”

The intention of this blog here is aimed towards a creative forum for my memories. And possibly partially for my thoughts to sound less like venting and complaining and more like organized thoughts and memories that blend and move and make sense of all that I do not understand or refuse to understand and accept about life.  Like she suggested, write it in your book.  Best advice my Mom could have given. I should have begun earlier. But where to begin exactly?

A dream analysis macrocosm. What the hell does that mean?

What I am trying accomplish is whatever the opposite of a microcosm would be, I suppose.  I want to broaden my memories and dreams, mingling bits and pieces of my life, my imagination or yours, friend’s suggestions, newspaper articles, garbage can lids, dishtowels… endless possibilities, anything can stimulate creativity.  Instead of pairing down everything into one focused story, I want to take a piece of my story and turn it into everything or anything.  I’m kick starting the process by discovering new avenues of inspiration to fuel this reinvention-of memory machine.

I am going to send myself backwards using pictures, videos, recounted recollections, made-up stories, inanimate objects from the 1990’s, dialogues, discussions, incidents with ancestors, blended character traits, accidents, purposefully placed lies that may or may not have actually occurred. Memories mingled with imagination mixed with facts and fabrication to develop fictional non-fiction about my life growing up.  Growing up. Have I yet? Working on it, because I’ve clearly progressed little if I’ve chosen the most cliché and enduring theme in the history of life on which to write my dinky little stories.

I want to salvage my memories and create something spectacular. Spectacular to me, at the least, that remains at least in some form or another, with each of you.  We’ll see if this ride continues out past the horizon.

Bonsoir, Bonesaw, Nizza La Bella!
I step warily onto the rickety balcony pushing open the pastel Provencal shutters set myself Indian-style and grasp the curly end of the railing.  I reflect upon the foreign scene below.  From the terrace of my quaint hostel room at Residence Segurane, the July evening already rivals no other in memory.  Dusk begins to descend over the sky and although it is considerably late (if I would bother noticing the tick of a clock) the balmy streets remain warm.  My polyester curtains (that resemble the pattern of a 1980’s Easter dress) billow while twenty-two o’clock slinks in along with the Mediterranean breeze.  The sun, on the other hand, seems childishly reluctant to tuck away its brilliance and enthusiasm and admit to its scheduled bedtime, much like the crowd that begins to gather on the terrace and spill out to the street below, ready to begin their adventure through Vieux Nice. 

The afternoon’s last glows from the west cast an amber glow upon terracotta rooftops that extend for miles until dispersing into the Alps or spilling into the sea.  Above the buildings, dotted amidst the undulating clay countryside, the tips of crisp, white sails herald “Le port de Lympia,” the port of Nice.  The yachts with their helicopters float grandiosely, seeming remote and secluded from the vibrant, quotidian of the bourgeoisie-life about Rue Passeroni, our temporary home.  Just beyond looms the six-story Hôtel Kyriad with its neon, flashing sign above a grinning student in American-attire, cargo shorts & white T.  He turns the corner, careful to dodge the dog-poo pile lurking on the curb as he’s strolling back from the corner Tabac with two bottles of wine wrapped in a towel. A girl catches up beside him, her hair golden and skin bronze from spending an afternoon on the rocky shores.  Her canary-yellow tank-top with two spherical watermarks over her chest clings in a shadow to the wet bikini beneath.  She lugs an azure-green, beaded bag, poises a straw beach mat intertwined among the straps and a baguette under her arm. 

A Monoprix shopping bag floats by on the salty breeze and seems to mock my American habits with its classic design and elegant, soulful French dance through the alleyway.  A dog barks territorially at this wistful tango of plastic scraping the pavement.  The mutt bounds back to his master beckoning him to attack the intruder, but the man continues cooking on his hotplate in his staked-out corner of Segurane.  The familiar aroma of pork & beans wafts up and enters my nostrils. The resident clochard, oblivious to his sans-home predicament, hums a catchy, classic Jazz tune, lights up a cigarette, and greets passing students “bonsoir” while enjoying his bubbling feast.  Students begin to congregate on the street, eager to embrace the night while the smiling outdoor resident and his four-legged companion entertain the crowd with a recorder flute and affably solicit a smoke from every passerby.

Even the bums are in heaven here.  

A moped rushes through buzzing with bravado.  A handsome young man in his riding helmet, khakis & a billowing white button-down, winks at us as he slows to scoop up his Mediterranean beauty, a mature woman who looked dazzling in her perfect tan, linen pants and bright turquoise tunic.  She clings to her driver’s back whispering in his ear.  A puff of exhaust kicks up as they head around the curve laughing.  The students uncork their swinging wine bottles, break apart a baguette with cheese and begin their stroll down the cobblestone roads, disappearing through the haze of an exotic evening that has only just begun to take shape.

Nov 2008, reminiscing Summer 05.

For some of you out there, one of the highlights of your trip to the deli is the zesty delight of a pickle poised politely alongside your lunch. Every hamburger enthusiast enjoys their side of onion rings or fries, but their true mouth-watering treat is that pukey-green bumpy, nugget lounging out next to the cole slaw that reeks like urine. Sometimes sliced, ridged, kosher or dill, anyway you find them provides the normal pickle gourmand a private thrill. As much joy as a pickle brings your Uncle Darrell at family picnics, for me it invokes just as much misery. Every luncheon scene plays out the same way, haunting me.

“Aren’t you going to eat that pickle?” some nameless face asks me while I suck the salt from my fingers after polishing off my chips.
“No…” I say preparing to debate my position, but the pickle is snatched away before I can start with, “I hate pickles because…”.

Puss-tinted juice residue on my plate has infected a few chips that are now down for the count. So, I guess lunch is over. Now, everyone always has the same stinkin’ comment. So I’ll tell you pickle protectors exactly what you’re thinking:
“Pickles!? Oh my god, I looovvve pickles! How could you hate pickles, they are so good! I mean, really I love them, it’s the best snack! And they’re like, no points on Weight Watchers!”

Oh! Fickle, pickled, tickle-me fate! Why must you torment my taste buds, so? To deny my mouth such succulent sweetness that the whole of humanity praises but I, is the cruelest form of torture!

I hate goddamn pickles. More than I hate pickles, I hate the fact that I hate pickles, if that makes any sense. Which I’m sure it doesn’t, to a pickle-lover like you, so I’ll to explain myself more clearly. I hate that I have such a natural disdain for an imposter. A pickle is nothing more than the half-witted, goober cousin to a cucumber, towards which, I feel an involuntary urge to vomit upon tasting. On days that I’m courageous (or ravaging for a snack when I haven’t been to Stop & Shop in a few weeks) I venture a clawed hand into the fridge and down into the depths of my roommate’s pickle jar. It smells of an embalmed body, but I give it a whirl anyway. My tastebuds curl back immediately when it slaps onto my tongue and my body shudders. But WHY? I think to myself, still trying to force it down in little nibbles, large bites, savoring it in my mouth, and finally just trying to chew and swallow as soon as possible.

A half-eaten pickle sails into the trash.

It infuriates me even further when the pickle is considered by a food establishment to be a hearty portion of my meal. It’s always a bummer when you get this great sandwich equipped with… four chips? That’s it? Great, four stale chips and this measly, rubbery turd-bomb wedged between my hoagie. What a waste of 50 cents to go for the “deluxe” upgrade just to chuck my pickle in the garbage. So, while my companion is eagerly snatching away my pickle, I shy away, ashamed of this character flaw. It sincerely bugs me that my body physically rejects liking pickles. It’s not like I don’t try. But I completely abhor them. It’s insane really, I feel cheated. I enjoy most any other food, why this?

Yes I memorized the opening lines to this poem that has tormented me so…

“Dill pickle, fickle-me fate in a jar.
I’ve got a whole bunch of it in my car.
It glows so bright, I can see it from real far.
At the masters. Tiger Woods shot an 87 par.”
-7th grade O’Bryan’s english class. 1997.

Nothing moves me anymore like a Third Eye Blind tune.  Honest, truthful and raw as newly plopped shit.  The songs are unbearably real and throb in your veins as Jenkins sings. As the melody ensues, nostalgic, authentic emotions cry out, escaping my heart in an echoing, pulsating search for my lost teenage soul.  A forgotten piece of me awakens when I feel the strums from the first strings of an acoustic guitar.  Just one familiar rolling beat and my heart pounds along as the song takes on human form. Beating, crying, yearning, living.  My chest wrenches and winds into the aching knot of my idyllic suburban childhood that became an unheralded, self-inflicted agonized adolescence.

When is the last time my heart skipped a beat for LOVE? Mine’s skipped a beat or two recently over a missed or rapidly approaching deadline.  A nasty email from a boss.  I did gasp for air as I took my first glance at the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling or while I watched the Eiffel Tower light up and sparkle from the banks of the Seine at midnight…. Wild beating in triumph from a raise and promotion.  A silly night laughing at friends’ drunken debacles in the saltiest bars in Seaside, NJ on a wrecking, dirty boardwalk bar shuffle.  Van Morrison singing ‘Moondance’ under ancient roman ruins, beer pouring copiously, French wine bottles swinging free under a starry sky dancing among a circle of new-found friends.  Ah Nice, how I miss the soul of that city.

All these moments!  Woven together into my memories to create a waving tapestry of who I am, from where I hail and to what effects and bits of life I worship and praise for its value, beauty or poetry.

But where is the love? Where did the raw emotion and devotion run off to? Left me numb and empty in the lull of days passing. I wonder if Love didn’t just skip out along with my father onto his next smiling, appeasing family when I was sixteen… when this… this sort of jaded veil fell across my eyes, covering my vision.  Or did it peace out on my 17th birthday when “Ugly Parties” and silliness were no longer as fun as drinking and obliterating brain cells?  When college applications trumped summer days of make-believe Sweet Valley High.  Or when virginal days of love and lust and intrigue were replaced with a shallow, deadening goodbye.  A shadow cast out over all of my avid, teen-aged intensity. I end up sinking underneath its opiate cloth and choking in the foggy mist with booze and sex, drugs and petty theft, parties & travel. I lifted it up for air to taste and savor in only select moments: as I whispered goodbye to my grandfather: my pious idol, as i cried farewell to an empty love that was beautiful once, or for a fleeting moment, and maybe he might have been more to me if I were honest. If I were me then. If I knew to where my Love had escaped.

I’m escaping into my musings as the music lingers and my iPod churns out the next 3eb tune, or as I’m cleaning the apartment and I absentmindedly start humming “One in Ten”.  I am reminded of thirteen. When love was not some elusive, oddly unattainable fairy’s tall tale. Just a # – 13. For but a fleeting moment I can feel the young girl’s smooth hands grazing a boy’s sweaty palm, gazing for minute after minute into a pair of eyes that watched as intently back. Exploration and adoration without fear, feel full speed straight ahead without thought to the future, to the world around, never knowing woes of loss and learning it all and realizing nothing at all.

Bliss.

Beautiful, youthful, ignorance seeps into my veins and flutters a few courses and recedes. Like a fountain of youth spilling out melodic meanderings and sounds of alliteration, prose and poetry taking me back.  To where I truly had never been so alive. Far, far from alone.

So I play and replay in my New York City apartment, seeking my release from this veil of age and constriction that continues to fall cloud my vision each passing day. Searching for the moments of passing enlightenment… beautiful – bursting – colorful - orgasmic – rejoicing - release – epiphany - grasping.  Momentary clarity from some tunes. For now it’s enough, it has to be enough; but I do wonder if I am genetically predisposed to an unavoidable life-long search for meaning and this unquenchable, earnest need to continue this futile struggle.

To quote the great Kurt Vonnegut: “So it goes.”
To quote the great Stephan Jenkins: “Where’s the soul I want to know, New York City is evil, The surface is everything but I could never do that, Someone would see through that.”

So clearly, I love Third Eye Blind, I live in Manhattan. This is my little blog about the aforementioned… while remembering a past in suburban New Jersey. Yes, the Shore. And no, not like the MTV show…