the dinosaurs invented baseball, dammit

me: argh. plan my life please

alexa: get me pregnant, let’s move to the east coast and take it from there?

no. that would be bad. no no no. and if it worked that way, it should work that way, and maybe it does. college is a place to reflect on all the things we “will” end up doing, while the actual things that happen to us take their course. all of this planning and career mapping and interest inventoring only separates us further from the point, which is that we need friends and family and community. professional teaching communities just doesn’t cut it for me. give me an ice cream truck and friends over that any day. maybe i don’t mean that, maybe money will mean more to me one day. if music and milk keeps getting more expensive, i will become a lawyer. milk is going to get expensive as hell by the time i graduate (or drop out)

kate says that being a creative writing major is better in the eyes of the people that matter. she also says she is worried that she has ruined my life. maybe. maybe.

Pascal Chimbonda is an awesome name

he is a defender from tottenham hotspur. super cool. anyways, i am sitting next to a couple of cans of tuna fish, two in oil, one in water. i want to throw them out my window, it will be months before canned fish is even vaugely appealing to me. last night i laid on my back and stared at a lamp through a kaledioscope for about an hour. i think someone should buy me a kaledioscope.

mom and bridget are headed up to help me pack clothes, and i will give them a ten cent tour.

“here is the first place i ever saw a person vomit in public”

“there is can man jim, the local used beer can collector”

“anspach hall, which smells like week old scrambled eggs when it gets above 60 degrees”

and somehow this will help to convince bridget that going to school instate makes sense. run, do not walk, to chicago.

“i’m at that level”

busted his forehead on the front porch of a frat house because he forgot to use the step. reckless, i can hear him snoring now in the bedroom, on a matress with the sheets stripped off.

i could call and say it is alright, but i don’t think that it is alright, and maybe i let things get out of hand. i’m not so sure though.

his mom sent him a box of snacks, called an “energy pack”, to help him study for final exams. first we have to wash the sheets.

two little situations i can’t quite sort out, never feel like leaving people (including myself) alone. when i go back home all of my friends still in high school will have parties to celebrate going away. but there isn’t a lot here that wasn’t there. it is all about people, location is bullshit, weather is bullshit, music and people and conversation is everything. and right now i really need those three things.

scuffed, and other things of no particular interest

so that last clusterbang of a poem, which i have named “scuffed”, because my shoes are, is going to be some sort of thing in some sort of a book, filled with crayon pictures and mediocre papier mache. awesome. in other news, dad might have landed me a job at a steel shop where i will hit buttons, listen to tigers games on the radio, sweat my ass off, and land a paycheck. so. that is good news.

playing fifa 2008 (video game soccer) last night in the towers computer center/ sauna (the heat is still on down there, jesus christ) and my friend mike wonders aloud “do you think they eat orange slices at halftime?”

which is extra hillarious. orange slices are a hallowed tradition in youth sports, especially soccer. i would often snag a couple when i would go to bridget’s games. but, more awesome and hillarious than mike asking this question is the thought process that went through my mind.

step 1: dude. i totally remember orange slices.

step 2: yeah, everyone likes orange slices

step 3: i betcha these guys like orange slices too

step 4: totti probably eats a shit ton of orange slices at half-time

step 5: i wonder if there is a virtual locker room in fifa

step 6: would they have virtual orange slices?

step 7: could there be some kind of orange slice mini game where you could eat them by pressing buttons in order to regain endurance?

step 8: could you injure yourself in this game, possibly costing you the actual game?

step 9: oh shit. he was probably talking about soccer players in real life

step 10: i need a girlfriend. so badly.

to better know a poet

told dan over white bread sandwiches that i wanted to write a really long poem about college, or atleast my first impressions of the moon. so here it is, uncut so far, not sure what i will do with it. maybe it runs too much, should let it breathe a little more.

into the brittle april wind
two fingers making peace,
choking a snuffed cigarette,
between two ragged blue eyes and
torn socks, inseparable myths
about the slowly declining mitten state,
a woman putting out the candles in
delicate lansing, find myself
with uncomfortable suede shoes walking
down a gravel path where
empty cans of crushed
lite beers spilled themselves
into bushes before falling asleep
on park benches, small
chants of celebration erupt
behind an old brick house, girls
walk by wearing thin strips of skirt,
a beard with no mouth collecting
cans on the back of his bicycle, some boys
in shirts that neither mock or support his effort,
police car with taxi cab lights makes us
pause to consider the difference, everyone
just trying to find a place to sleep this off
anyways, scattered #2 pencils
like the front desk as a golf range, tests
gone untaken, bubbles
gone unbubbled, saw myself sitting
into a lecture hall writing poems
about my mother, the jaw clenching scream
of a fire alarm, jolting out of bed into
my scarred and stretched skin, watching waves
of untamed hair making left turns
down a back staircase, seeing
an english professor afraid of a flickering screen
smoke his pipe beside cowering aspach hall, two neon girls
with matching bags walking back
to the room they used to share, one curls up to her conditioner
and sleeps in the shower, an old letter from you
sealed with a lipstick kiss i found confusing,
it really has been that long
since my last-of-this-era
birthday, catastrophic furniture collapse
in the living room, steel skeleton of our couch
long since given out, threw it down
four flights of concrete stairs while it
lost metal teeth over every single step, kept
ourselves from uncomfortable boredom by running
in nylon shorts through the slush filled streets
until warm weather came and we
abdicated, finding solace in the ten second kisses
that girls would offer up
in bizarre self-sacrifice, then into the
dirt alley behind your house, where permanently
parked cars take communion, finding myself
with no please to walk back to
call a cab and sleep in a vinyl home.

for your neural walls and plasticities

up he went, off my left hand and through the second story window. rescuing cobwebs, a small blown-glass pipe, dreams we could not figure. but he succeeded, and maybe that meant more than anything else. trivial pursuits, discussing possible public access shows in which Andrew Bird plays the next door neighbor. birds flying though a cracked front door, pigeon, toucan, toucan, and then we establish the lack of logic in my speech pattens.  at the very least we wish you a merry christmas, the rest will come with time.

the birds willing to announce our arrival

how glorious the late spring time sun has come. and will turn these pale arms pink. walking over scrub hills with dan, in his bare-feet, talking about bathroom politics and the girls we know. failing miserably at disc golf, having never tried before, giving up and walking along tree lined paths. heading back towards another place we have never really known.

in the distance great limestone towers, cut out against the sky like some industrial complex. could be doing unnerving experiments inside that place. but we live there, sleep on uncomfortable cracker thin mattresses, supplied by the place we send our envelopes full of torn five dollar bills. you said it reminds you of home, coming down geddes and seeing the castle of a hospital, appearing at the end of a tunnel of trees. everything a little more gray through these plastic sunglasses.

i don’t get God, but i do sense sunlight. a warm and softly sung song.

if i could be any animal

it would be really hard to choose. all of the options are staggering. birds are amazing, but fish are so cool. then there are super awesome options like jelly fish. oh to have a velum. anyways, there is something in the air, summer i guess they call it, and my mom and i are having all of these conversations we should have had such a long time ago. and we are talking about maybe getting a cottage, considering that everything is worth nothing in michigan anymore, it would be a good time to buy one. bank says our house is worth half what we paid for it, which sucks, because we spent half what we paid for it on making it nicer. so, a third. yeah.

whatever. tonight we will eat on the back porch, and let the sun do whatever it can to calm us all down. also, my dog is so fucking cute it hurts my brain. the end.

(i would be my dog)

theodore roosevelt shakes head, walks away

all of these beautiful things. seriously. being home is the weirdest combination of warm nostalgia and horror at the stories we share over curly fries and coffee. when did people start having guns? selling coke? whoah. suburbia got weird.

anyways, extra-super-bonus find on the intarwebs

http://www.bearsthebook.com/images.html

teddy bears unstitched, flipped inside outside out, restuffed. so cool. holy shit so cool.

roscoe wallace ain’t scared of ya’ll

seriously, there must not be a better athlete in all of professional sports. rasheed wallce could be the best power forward in the history of organized basketball. is he? fuck no. he takes outlandish shots, jogs around, and generally has more fun than he should. which is why he is my favorite basketball player. yells at refs when they deserve it, and smiles, and dances (before every game with the b squad)

watch this video and soak up his shit talking glory

http://www.need4sheed.com/videos/april_15_08_sheed_scared.html

when did this turn into a sports page?

never, i just love me some rasheed motherfuckin’ wallace.

[video from need4sheed.com the ultimate site for all of your sheedy needs]