Day 29: The Wonkavator

 

 

 

 

 

THE WONKAVATOR

 The Wonkavator started in late summer 2006 because I was bored and kept finding random beer caps strewn around the contours of my apartment like stale New Years’ eve confetti and decided I might as well immortalize my drunken larks by plastering them inside the interior of my kitchen cupboard so every time I flapped open the lethargic eyelids of the diminutive doors above my sink in idle search of a clean coffee cup I would be nominally greeted with a favorable acrostic connoting all things hoppy and beechwood aged. I became a daily drinker in May 2005 but the Wonkavator was my way of justifying the realization that I wasn’t an alcoholic, I was an aesthetic connoisseur, an aficionado of quality ales. That I could jive beer-speak jargon with the best craftsmen in the country even while I was tippling out of control.

That when it came to the two things I loved more than anything else in life (namely books and beer, oh, and women) I could more than hold my own.  

The only rule to adding to the WONKAVATOR was that every beer cap had to be culled from the crown of a different brew and that no beer caps could be displayed more than once.

At its height there was close to 2000 different beer caps, each one chugged by a certain impecunious author with an overstuffed manuscript and an intractable liver, doting the interior of my kitchen cabinets like unblinking eyelids or failed political campaign buttons. 

 

 

  



original wonkavator....

The wonkavator (of course) was christened under the sobriquet of  'The Wonkavator' as an homage and allusion to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, because, after drinking 2000 different beers your anatomy, unlike the anatomy of a regular elevator which can only go up and down, can suddenly find itself going sideways and slantways and longways and backways and frontways and squareways and gayways and straightways anyother way you can possibly think of.

Don't fuck with me when it comes to Willy Wonka.

When I left my apartment and moved back to West Peoria in early 2009 the Wonkavator was officially retired although I kept the beer caps in a vacant coffee can and once (when I was drunk and going through a serious Carl Jung phase) made a mandala out of them.




                      

 



I hadn’t sifted through the collection of caps in three years. While scanning caps for this entry I was emotionally awash on a shoreline of sentimentality. There was the cap culled from the six pack of Spatens my Uncle Larry bought me on my thirtieth birthday.  There was the Kostritzer (love Kostritzier, german Guinness) I drank after I graduated from college. There was the cap from the pint of Svyturys (the world's finest Lithuanian lager) I always drink at Bernice's tavern on Halstead before meeting my best bro John (also Lithuanain) at US CELL to cheer on our beloved WHITE SOX twice a year.

The Killians my friend Scarlet planted outside my door on St. Patrick's day and told me it was from a Leprachaun.

The Shiner Bock I stole from my friend Matt Brown's fridge in Dallas when I was 19 and smuggled on the flight back home.

There was the aquiline cap from the bottle of  Imperial beer my brother Nick gave me when he returned from Costa Rica. The Alfred Hitchcockesque silhouette saluting the top of the Thomas Hardy Ale which I thought I would enjoy more.

There was capped emblems from the  (perfect )shipyard and the stalled evolutionary shark cosigning dogfishead, two of the best known IPA’s ever to have grazed the lips of mankind.

                                          
 There was the numerical cap derived from the Fullers 1845 bitter which I drank in the spring of 2007 which just destroys me. The feral feline coating the top of LION stout (from Sri Lanka) which was indelible. The Utenos cap which looks like it comes replete with a zipper. The New Belgium Fat Tire which I submit is completely overrated nutty and disgusting, like using a fecal sample in lieu of mouthwash (and also a testament to keen marketing).

Each cap seemed to be endowed with its own narrative. Each cap seemed to ferry its own story. Like the buttons on Willy Wonka's elevator, each beer cap reeled me slantways to a lost epoch of the past. 

There was the cap from the Pilsner Urquell I slipped in my side jacket from my friend’s Jasna art reception and drank the whole night as we walked around Bloomington-Normal lost in the crinkle of autumnal leaves.  The Amstel Light I drank a shit ton of cause my cousin Larry was peripatetically crashing with me because that was the only import that the gas station sold. There was the Ruddles which got frozen in our cooler the time myself and my best bro Hale partied in Chicago—Hale, unable to sleep, jacking the A/C so high in the hotel room that the ice INSIDE the cooler froze and we had to chisel the libations free and place them in the bathtub to thaw before consuming.

I have no recollection of drinking an Indian beer called Mahbaria or a Tazmania beer or any kind, which meant that I must have enjoyed them very much indeed.

 

There were sentimental caps. The vintage BLATZ cap that my cool girlfriend Tara made into a necklace for my birthday. The bottle of LaBatt Blue I was drinking in Traverse City Michigan when I got drunk and called my girlfriend from a payphone and told her I loved her.

The nostalgia. Slamming Leinenkugels on my backporch while listening to the SMITHS’ on summer nights. The Moose Drool I drank to divert the bartender’s attention so I could steal a Guinness chalice at Ulrich’s the night after Sully died.

The Grolsch with the bottle rocket cap I was slamming when the White Sox won it all in 2005.
 

The New Holland beer cap culled from the Mad Hatter IPA I was drinking when I kissed the proverbial one-that-got-away-elbow-nugde-to-the-rib-cage-eh-there-son girl of my dreams (there was candles lit) in my apartment. We were listening to Jospeh Campbell lectures on metaphysical realizations realizing that you and the other are one…it was autumn and wind was splashing through the lip of the window as if the seasons were getting off....What could be more sexier…more timeless…and I’m just talking about the beer.

The memories.

 ...of course, sometimes liquor is quicker.

                                                                   

                                                                   ***

 Since this forty days is an inward quest for enlightenment as well as it is a heavenly hiatus from alcoholic nirvana here is my own personal rendering of the hero’s quest via THE MOVIE version of WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (I’m using Robert Bly’s IRON JOHN as a reference since that’s the closest epistle I have of a working Jungian text with me at work as I write this)…

 

 

 

In Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory the protagonist Charlie is emblematic of the hero’s journey.

 

 

From the outset of the narrative Charlie finds himself fatherless (movie version) pining for the elusive gold that is the rudiments of his telos.  He also finds himself (as all hero's do at the outset of their journey) enduring ashes and living in spiritual squalor. Even the name itself Charlie Bucket implies arduous work and hard times. In the beginning of Iron John poet Robert Bly, “The story says that once one goes down one has to work with buckets. No giant is going to come along and do the work for you: That magic stuff is not going to help.  A weekend at Easlen won’t do it. Acid and cocaine (note and probably beer) won’t do it. The man has to do it bucket by bucket.  This resembles the hard discipline of art. It’s the work that Rembrandt did, that Picasso and Yeats and Rilke and Bach did. Bucket work requires much more work than most men realize.”

This is our hero Charlie Bucket. Going inside himself on a quest in search of fairy tale gold, beginning with the color of his name.

 

 

Bob Dylan knew about Buckets.

It is interesting to note that it is only after Charlie psychologically divorces himself from the possibility of ever finding gold that he locates the last golden ticket (an alchemical sugary mixture of dreams and destiny) at the moment, in the poetic patois of Thoreau, "unexpected in common hours." This is reminiscent of the Gnostic Gospels in which when asked when the end of the world will appear Christ comments, “The Kingdom will not come by expectation. The Kingdom of the Father is spread across the land and men do not see it.” This is a psychological realization of opening one’s self up to the radiance of being that is all around us. It also implies “letting go and letting God.”

Being driven by spiritual desire by being divorced from earthly wants.

It is also of  note that the elders’ in Charlie’s life are bed-ridden and psychologically inert.  It is only when Charlie goes looking for gold (the creativity that is already latent inside of each of us) that he not only gives his life meaning but also  animates and influences the life of others’-- Grandpa Joe is able to walk again.

When we find what it golden latent inside of each of us others are healed and are able to realize their full potential and are able to fly.When Charlie is selected to enter the Chocolate factory it is intriguing that Willy Wonka makes tourists  sign an illegible pact. Hey many of us, when we convene on a journey, whether it is becoming an artist or a cementing nuptial contract, have no clue what the hell it is we are signing. We are blind to the fine print.

 We enter the journey just a little bit blind and not possessing the foresight to anticipate knowing what is ahead harboring the hopes that we might  see again, or as Joesph Campbell eloquently notes referencing a grail legend,

"You enter the forest
at the darkest point,
where there is no path.

Where there is a way or path,
it is someone else's path.

You are not on your own path.

If you follow someone else's way,
you are not going to realize
your potential.”

 

En route to the chocolate room (the earthly paradise of exacted human potential) the bevy of characters find themselves surfeited in an elevator that appears not to move when it is moving the whole time. A narrow plume then appears disconcerting the construct of periphery, “He’s getting smaller. No he’s not, we’re getting bigger.”

 

If this were to happen today everyone would be texting “OMG” and calling Wily Wonka a creep, perhaps even suing-him from trauma-inflicting psychological discomfort in a Kim Kardashian sort of way.

Change requires discomfort. Being born again into a life of creativity requires, as Nietzsche said, “ A break from sociological norms.” And when the path is narrowest and there is no exit is sight suddenly we find ourselves, if just for a moment, entering a chasm of bliss, or, in the case, the chocolate room, the earthly paradise.

 

 

The earthly paradise of the chocolate room is not only the realm of pure imagination it is the womb of unlimited human potential. It is the garden of Eden where dreams sprout from the sugary soil of infinite possibility. This room is emblematic of an artists' "epiphanic calling" a spiritual catharsis or vision or moment of ecstatic awakening experienced early (and briefly) in the artist's career.

It is this vision of paradise that compels the artist to create. But in order to create he must again  be re-born. The grotesque 'tunnel' scene is a re-enactment of rebirth, the tenebrous chunneling of following Persephone into the inscrutable wink of the underworld. The male initiation amidst the cave paintings at Les Tres Frere.  Christ being buried for three days in order to rise again.

 Once entering the underworld there are many trials Charlie and his vestigial cohorts endure.  They find themselves privy to a type of alchemical magic where metal is altered and dreams are reborn in cumulus wisps of longing. While being shuffled through the dream-like cogs and labyrinth of the factory they are given the gift of eternity matrix-molecule of an everlasting gobstopper.

 

As Stephen Daedalus notes in Ulysees, Am I walking into eternity along sandymount strand?" As Joseph Campbell pontificates, "“The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience,” or as this impecunious wayfaring writer christened a blogg after a little known Wittgenstein quote, "If eternity is understood not by temporal duration but by timelessness, than he who lives in the present lives eternally."

 

In other words, each of us are freely given eternity here on earth although we have a hard time discerning it (mainly due to the sociological vicissitudes).

 

 

 

Slowly they begin to witness the music makers. The fumbling of frivolity. The dreamer of a single dream.

 My favorite scene (from  Jungian perspective) transpires when Charlie and Granpa Joe defy Willy Wonka's mandate and sip from the forbidden Fizzy-lifting drink as Robert Bly notes, "Young men when lifted up may become white swans, grandiose ascenders, "flying boys," just as young women similarly when lifted up become flying girls and both make love with invisible people at high altitude. (i.e., see Puer Aeternus)...flying people, giddily spiritual, do not inhabit their own bodies well, and are open to terrible shocks of abandonment; they are unable to accept limitations and are averse to a certain boring quality native to human life."

 

Unlike Icarus, it is the human element (music, the anatomical burp, fortissimo of flatulence) that saves Granpa Jo and Charlie.

We all yearn to sip something that is forbidden.

We all yearn to fly.

 

 

 

“Woman can change the embryo into a boy, but only the initiation of another man can change a boy into the man he is destined to become.” At the end of the movie Charlie finds himself dealing with a mercurial fisted Willy Wonka (note the duality/the halves/the evident yang in his office). Charlie is not fully formed. His last trial is (unselfishly) giving the gift of eternity back to its creator at which point the creator gives Charlie every thing he could ever want. The gift-return of the ever-lasting gob stopper is the final sloughing of ones ego, "DEATH TO THE INFANTILE EGO, BIRTH TO THE MATURE."

 

Charlie has passed the test, he has given back the gift that freely was given to him and, in doing so, he ascends (a la no beer wonkavator) into echelons of greatness he could never before fathom, a place where the pure dalliance and imaginative dance of  his every dream will come true.

 

 

Day 28: *this entry speaks for itself*

 

 

 

 

It started out with a girl as most things do.

                                                                          *


The inward historical weight of Linklater's pending sequel and why I can't stop mentally drooling over it.

                                                                        *

The first time I saw Before Sunrise I was an eighteen year old verbally-effete high school senior who had just returned home from his third European sojourn in as many years. (A blessing I had slaved for financially, which I would later culturally-contort to promote my own self-worth.) I sported a shock of short-slightly gelled nutmeg hair replete with peninsula sideburns flanking a sly-raffish grin; an innocuous white flag hoisted in the center of my youthful visage. In an effort to salvage culture in in a town, that, I was far too keen to point out to the random pedestrian, obviously wasn't "European", I wore charcoal flavor turtlenecks matched with thickly trussed Velvet Doc Martens. I sometimes sloped a beret over my head in tandem with my heavy Berlin-chic trench coat. I smoked cloves and cigars without knowing how to inhale, I swished boxed burgundy fluid around the inside of my cheeks while prematurely chatting about vintages and years. I supercilously felt like I was already an ordained authority on 'modern' poetry and recited T.S. Eliots "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" incessantly to anyone unfortunate enough to possess an earlobe. "Let us go then you and I/ When the evening is spread out agaisnt the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table."

Highschool was one endless elongated blue hallway shepherded by shrilling alarms and social clicks that failed to buckle emotional sanity. My junior year I started scribbling sloppy-inked feeble free-verse in notebooks and by senior year I was obsessed. I scribed only droopy first drafts, penning somewhere between sixty and 100 insufferable angst-laden poems a month. I was arrogant beyond all borders of the definition, all too certain of my destined literary stardom and, rather akin to Eliot's Tarot identified "fool" in the previously mentioned poem, I remained pompously baffled why my peers had failed to recognize my pending literary sainthood.

It's interesting to note that most writers tend to go through this ugly indulgent ego-nourishing period at some point in their careers. Random readers are of course 'privileged' to read their purportedly 'deep' yet shallow canonical metaphors that will inevitably be archived in the British Museum someday b/c (obviously) everything this so--called self-ordained scribe has in print is obviously the greatest thing in scripted ink since the King James edition. Many writers (such as local pretentious fop's conducting college comp. courses) never seem to slough this superior ego-cloak.

(Male writers, I think, are MUCH, MUCH worse at this 'feigned' pretension than female writers...in my experience that is....perhaps innately, females are better dancers, better movers and tend to be more highly literate early in life)

Joseph Campbell calls this ego-gourged individual a dragon. "Dragon's horde things," Notes Campbell. "They horde heaps of gold (unread books that pile up their offices) and beautiful virgins (their students)...and they don't know what to do with either of them.

I feel fortunate that I gradually flaked off these dragon scales over an eight year time span of simply ugly and bad writing where of course, I cared extremely little about the actual labor of the craft and paid scrupulous amounts of attention to my own Jack Kerouac bad-boy literary lifestyle.

Looking back over my early "poe-whims" (always a snooty dual-syllables)all I can say is that they were plastic linguistic Lego’s that I would employ only later to snap the shape of my aesthetic identity.

Okay, no more tangent’s. Back to pangs of high school.

Friday nights were spent at my best friends David Hale's abode in Bartonville. His mother would retire early and then the stash of semi-tepid malt liquor would avail itself from hidden panels in the basement. In those days a forty of Ice House or Mickey's circulated a long way being bartered between teenage boys who vociferously boasted in locker-rooms about the longevity of their livers. White-Trash Pat, Hale, Randall and Goth Dan would drop ten-sided dice and verbally illustrate the next move of their level two dwarf while I, of course the seemingly well-read narcissistic "cultured" one would swig shots in the corner while transpiring meaningless thoughts as they dripped out of my fountain pen.

There was always, of course videos. White-Trash Pat and Hale already possessed a formative heap of permy-haired adult sophisticated visual gumdrops by the age of fifteen. The first "porn" we ever watched together was titled something like Artic Orgy and it was about a group of rather voluptuous polar-nuclear physicits who find themselves stranded in Antartica without any heat and all of a sudden contract a great idea on how to conduct warmth.

I went through a lengthy phase where, much to the chagrin of Hale and White-Trash Pat, everything I viewed was endorsed by Merchant-Ivory. On the night I was trying to explain to them the cultural significance of Remains of the Day the group of sozzled gamers retired early. White Trash Pat and I stayed up and I flipped in Before Sunrise. Though the movie is 100 percent dialogue the flicker of the screen hushed a normally petulant-opinionated Patrick. By the end of the movie, we went outside and hugged each other. It was two in the morning. It was a senior year. When you are in high school you advance a decade in knowledge each year. Patrick and I shared a cigarette and then Patrick opened his woodchip lips and paused slightly before commenting:

"Dude, man. That's us."

                                                 

       

 

 

*

Of course there's more. Of course its about a girl. The girls name is Megan Kristin (I'll omit her last name here in deference towards her own privacy, but for privvy-fingered and omnisicent-eyed Mara-Arya's her maiden name is inserted into the title of this entry and has nothing to do with "osculation")Megan was from the tiny norwegian cheesehead hamlet of Appleton, Wisconsin, of all crazy places to fall in love.

I met Megan about a week after I first saw Linklater's verbal feast and even employed lines from the actual movie on her (smooth-Mistah' V; yeah). The first time we kissed her body squinted like a butterfly in mid-flap before her entire flesh transitioned into spring. Megan could be classified as cuddley and petite (5 ft.2). Her birthday is the first day of spring (Naw Ruz) and with a comfortable six-hours between us we started writing letters. The internet was just starting to wedge it's costipated modemic groan into universal conciousness (e-mail was foreign lexicon and waiting for the damn computer to usher its way into cyberspace seemed to take light-years back then). So Megan and I wrote letters. Huge, inky inky sounvabitches undressed from metered envelopes by itchy fingertips. NOthing beats finding your heart in a mail slot. Her letters were fraught with stickers and hearts; mine were verbose illustrations about everything stuffed with off-metered poems. She'd always smile when she told me that it used to take her forever to read them (smiles).

On October 18th, 1996 (I can still tell you the exact translucent denim sleek autumnnal-blue of the morning sky) I dropped out of my freshman year of college (mainly becasue it was a community college and my parents deemed that there son wasn't worth more than that intellectually) and bought a one way ticket to Appleton, WI of all places, arriving with notebooks and dreams and ambitions. Needless to say my sojourn was terse and our rapport didn't last long. Megan was still in high school her parents seemed rightfully nonplussed by their daughters suitor (although to this day I swear her dad loved it when I referred to him as "Master of the House"). I had written literally symphonies of poems for Megan and read them to her, feeling shunned by the silence of her face afterwards. She was young. I was young. Golden and kalidieoscopic autumn greets the sways and dips of northern Wisconsin in thick strokes of wind gulping down heavily from Canada. I remember seeing Megan through the airplane tint as I arrived on thew runway and I remember her standing next to me in the terminal as I caught my flight home with tear stained chin and cheeks arriving on the runway to an all too dubious future.

I also remember watching Before Sunrise with Megan in her parents basement. It was the only time during my trip we kissed, however tersely.

                                                                      ***

When I arrived back home from my eternal tryst I felt completely worthless, like a crinkled up back pocket receipt dated from a product that no longer worked, only my heart was that aged product. My sisters had very promising careers as musicians and I was, well, the writer, but my parents really didn't seem too keen on anything I did as long as I didn't smoke in the house.

According to Sister A, the miniature slants splintered on the thumbless side of my left palm indicate the number of times I'm suspect to watch my heart slip and shatter in front of me like wet delf China. Sister A looked like she was squinting through magnifying lenses when she deeply perused the inside of the hand (it was a very mystical experience) so I sincerely take to heart her prognostication that I'll have my heart broken four times in my life. Megan was the first time I got my heart broken, Vanessa was the second (can't wait to meet numbers three and four) and here is why Megan matters:

I used to only write in black ink and notebook paper and when I arrived home from my seasonal sojourn with Mara Megan I locked my door and transcribed the scroes (50, 60?) of poems written for Megan into the computer. I slaved relentlessly, pecking the swirls of my aching fingers into the keyboard like a young chick gradually hatching from an egg.

I worked my ass off. Although I was an accomplished vizionary, I was a very young, verbally naive writer. The poems were pretty shitty poems, although their heart was in the right place. I wrote and I wrote and finally, after a week of tears constantly canaling down my cheekbones ( everytime I saw my bluish reflection in the computer screen I thought it was her) BAM...it was done. I watched my newborn take it's first breath as each sheet slowly buzzed and whizzed, slowly exiting the slits of my parents early nineties printer.

I collated the poems and bound them in a notebook, awarding the script with the calligraphic title POEMS OF LOVE AND ARDOR FOR MEGAN KRISTIN.....My first completed book of poems after high school. I didn't care. It wasn't about the writing . It wasn't solely about me. It was trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Where was I? Why am I here? What does it mean to watch your heart droop in front of you like it's taking a bow after the final encore of a tragic Italian Opera. Why did my sisters have promising futures and all I had was the promise of happy hour every friday?

I also bought a video edition of Before Sunrise and kept it unopened and stashed in my closet in the bushel of her letters. I finally watched it drunk, on Valentines Day 1997, dialing up Megan's digits, listening to her answer machine, confessinally still too apprensive to plant a message of my own merit.

I didn't watch the video again for a long-time.

                                                                                *

But this is perhaps what has always allured me to the film. The fact that it was so much like life. The fact that, if ony for a moment, you're embracing this person, your holding that person, this moment in and of itself is an eternity. You don't need to ammend a nuptial contract, to procreate, to budget, to age, to grow infertile together. All you need to do is to have that moment. To hold that person and to know that, for as long as we are here, we are immortal.

                                                                                 *

What I did next was what Megan gave me. I took my newborn manuscript and stuffed it in a shoebox manger for sixteen months. I had read Megan many of her poems tete-a-tete on my visit, but I burrowed my blood sonnets in a Doc Marten shoebox. I refrained from writing or calling her. All the love I had for Megan pulsated and flapped in the beaded lines of my poems, a book of poems I wrote with the intent of having each line reflect the forever smile of her face, the forever scent of her breath, the inside warmth of her mouth.

During those sixteen months I quit writing poems, wrote a HORRIBLE david foster Wallace influenced novel on basketball and Opera (?) dropped out of college to work as a supervisor at Barnes and Nobles, lost (or maybe found) my virgintiy to a rich Bradley girl from the suburbs.

Everything in my life seemed perfect. I had more cash than I had ever had. I wasn't in debt. I was writing a fair amount. I had a beautiful girlfriend named Jana that I took out on lavishing dates every Friday. I had VERY short hair. I wore cool ties. I talked about the books I would write someday.

Even my mom seemed to actually think I had some dormant potential stowed in my skeleton.

On Valentines day '98 I lied to my parents and took the weekend off from work and Jana rented a hotel room in Chicago. She showed me her old high school. Her old house. We attended Mass together Sunday morning. She introduced me to friends that were special to her. We couldn't keep our fingers from snapping towards each others body.

The Sunday night I came home I brewed coffee and decided to reread Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I can't recall the exact time (11:11) but it was close when the phone reverberated and a familair soft velvet-laced voice inquired if I was home.

It was Megan.


Suddenly late winter had transitioned into spring.

                                                                                *

I was dating Jana and I was in love with Megan. I worked all day, made love to Jana, went home and talked with Megan until 4am. I told her from the outset about my situation. Told her that I was already in love with someone. Told her about taking Jana to the Opera. About taking Jana out of town every weekend. About reading Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis and David Foster Wallace. I told Megan all about sexual discovery and finding yourself above and below sweating in the pupil of the person inside of you. I told her all of this and then I told her that I never stopped loving her; that I never stopped loving Megan.

                                                                          *

Earlier that morning, after one of our six-hour conversations, I opened up my closet and sifted through attire and manuscripts until I found the Doc Marten shoebox with the manuscript inside.
I went to the Post office and paid an extra ten bucks to have it federally expressed. When Megan opened the manusript two days later she told me that it was opening up her heart and finding her new born, only to realize that the father was out, caressing someone else becasue he had pledged his love to her first while the mother was out finding herself.

 

 

                                                                             *

 

She came back to me at the most inopportune time in my life, but she came back to me, and I did the only thing I could do. I welcomed her. I sent her the book of poems written sixteen months earlier. She said she was speechless.

I got drunk and wrote Megan's name all over my body with different colored markers. I wanted her to reclaim old territory. My girlfriend Jana figured that something was going on when she saw looped smudges somersaulting across my body. I had to tell her the truth.

Someday maybe I'll blogg about the next four months that followed. I had a timeless afternoon with Megan watching RENT in Chicago and I can still show you the corner of State and Adams where last we kissed. Jana was rightfully furious and rightfully fooled around with people to make me envious. A lot of it's a blur. It ended with me going back to Jana, partly because she was here, partly because I wasn't even twenty-one and, as is typical with males, my brain was located beneath my navel, partly because no one can really know for certain what they really want, no one can tell you from the outset how things will work out in the beginning of any relationship; all we have to follow is an inexplicable tug orchestrated by the fingertips of invisible angels.

 

 

There was about six months of exorbitant four-hundred dollar phone bills. Jana and I would fight and hurtle furniture and end up going at it afterwards. Megan and I would discuss harvesting a family together. I saw Megan just once during those crazy months (another blog indelible details) and still cringe out a cry of nostalgia when I think about Megan's blue skirt and white shawl and the Chicago corner we concecrated with kisses.

There were lies and duplicitous emotions. Megan would tell me that she possibly couldn't consider dating me long term becasue of how I treated Jana, even though Megan herself was the catalyst for most of Jana's anger. The whole situation was just a mess.

                                                                               *

It ended with Before Sunrise. It was late May and Megan and I were once again talking. I had wrapt up my copy of Before Sunrise to offically sned to Megan as a gift. The casette was tightly wrapt in Renoir Country Dance/City Dance wrapping paper. Jana found and told me that I would never hear fom her again if I continued to my liason.

She then pointed out that she dated a poet who never wrote her a poem.

*

For two years the video remained gift-wrapt, waiting for me to give it to Megan. eventually, I watched it with a girl named Jasna who had, for a while, been to Vienna. I gave it to Jasna after we watched it.

 

 She sprinkled smiles across the room.

                                                                *

That's the Before Sunrise antcis. In a weird way Megan was there when my dad died and the last time I saw Megan it was in Madison Wisconin, with uncle Mike. I sipped Knob's Creek and she told me about her pending engagement. I walked her out to the mini-van she bought from her dad "for a dollar". We embraced and in my typical fashion I hoisted her in the air and spun her around like a carousel.

"You're always so romantic David." She said to me. "When are you going to learn how just to say goodbye."

The next day I went to Greenlake and saw you-know-who presenting a formidable lecture on mysticism.

                                                                       *

Even more so ironic was that the date, October 18th, the date I initially abandoned the port in search of my cheesehead bleoved, on that same date, six years later, I officially declared.

                                                                           *

Life is good. Even if we don't have the girl of our dreams, we still have our dreams and that fifty percent is simply worth dying for.

 

 

But what Megan gave me was the fullfillment of Walt Whitman's proveb:

O ME! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.


Blogging's a lot like putting your heart into an empty gin bottle and then tossing it out as far as you possibly can into the ocean of cyberspace. You never know whose shore the bottle is going to brush up on. You never know who's going to uncork the capsule of your life's story. Never know who's going to be moved by it. You never know (i.e., Joe Propinka) what literary genius is going to stalk you.

 

 

I have no plans on future correspondence with Megan. The last two times I've wandered around Madison I didn't even bother to look her up (She would probably hang up anyway). I contacted her on 9-11 and when my father died three years ago, she was the only voice I needed to hear. We talked for a long time the Saturday following his funeral and we both cried. I don't know how it's possible to hold people over the computer screen or to hold people over the wireless warble of a cell phone, but I held her that day, on the phone and we drained tears from one emotionally fatigued socket.

The greatest gift that Megan gave me was just the ability to write. I'm still developing it (when I get a rejection letter I take it way too much to heart)... I've opted to forge a career that pays in a foreign currency. What I learned from Megan was that, even if I write something and put it in a shoebox for sixteen months (or don't hear from anyone in over a year) that that wordy "something" still has the possibility of growing and I have the simple duty of giving or at least trying to give as much of myself as the concourse will perhaps allow.

Day 27: Angels wear halos to keep their chins up…

 

 

Not having a beer on a day like today is being lost in a dithering lumber as you trundle down the parallel arteries of the neighborhood where you live wondering which hurts more, your heart (which resembles a nest of used tampons after Lilith fair) or your finances (how the phuck can you be this broke, you work all the time? All you do is work…) a still-life stagger swilled into the kilter and stride of your gait as you smoke,  as you walk, as the clouds slop into  a bulbous dirty parking lot ache overhead, a chandelier made out of used earl-grey tea bags, the vernal quilt of the golf course skiing into optical periphery like freshly snapped leprechaun linen— 

Not having a beer on a day like today is getting pissed off when you notice used syringes on the side of the street (This is West Peoria for fuck’s sake) right next to a SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY sign sprouting out of the earth  like a willowed husk of corn in late-March.

Not having a beer on a day like today is feeling lonely on a moss-flavored day that looks like you are fumbling across the  optical periphery of time through goggles constructed out of old 7-up bottles.

Not having a beer on a day like today is thinking about the scene in Infinite Jest where David Foster Wallace pontificates, “Sometimes human beings just have to stay in one place and, like, hurt.”

Not having a beer on a day like today is getting a letter from a family member who misread something you composed nine years ago and hurting because you made someone you love and care about hurt.

Not having a beer on a day like today is when she tells you not to publically kiss her forehead on the distilled blankness of her facebook profile page because she has a boyfriend, but you kiss it anyway, a child pirouetting into the stream of a park faucet using only the tips of his toes for the first time.

Not having a beer is having I.M. text-sex with someone you just met, your fingers unbuttoning the powdery clasps of her corset in a snap of alphabetical thumbs and coital vowels.

Not having beer on a day like today is realizing you are out of smokes and that you don’t want to go get more because (for a terse moment) you say to hell with the voluntary 40-day drought  and feel that, since you’ve worked sixteen hours and are going back to work in another four, you more than entitled to    purchase a cheap  $1.29  24 oz. PBR and cracking it open and noticing how the fizz blossoms into a sudsy ovation before pressing the cylinder to your lips only you refrain because part of you knew from the outset that there would be days like this when you would have to refrain from chugging an emotionally  savior-sating beer on a day like today.

Not having a beer on a day like today is hearing her voice for the first time in eight months, calling her because you can feel her somehow and thinking how her voice sounds like a glass whisper kissing the back of your neck when you are asleep.

The sleep of childhood.

You ask if you can give her a hug over the phone.

Not having a beer on a day like today is getting into the company car and blasting out into the country,  even though you are supposed to drive only on work related assignments, you motor into the  gravel veins of desolate country roads,  the sight of a  bruised silo or a hunched over barn somehow giving you hope, barbed wire fences flanked on the side of the road reminiscent of  ledger lines on sheet music  void of notes, awaiting for music to be filled.

Not having a beer on a day like today is realizing that beer would save you. That it would make you feel very happy and relaxed. It would make you feel special and loved.

Not having a beer on a day like today is pulling your car to the side of the road somewhere outside Hanna City and just sitting on the hood and feeling hurt. Wishing there was some metaphysical epoxy you could apply to the metaphysical fissures of lost inside your chest so you don’t fucking hurt all the time.  

Not having a beer on a day like today is listening to the sprinkled gridlock-honk of geese nasally-harmonizing in the next  pasture over.

Not having a beer on a day like today is wishing you could cry because it feels like you’ve failed in every facet of your life. 

Not having a beer like today is looking down and noticing a feather planted near your feet  that you can almost swear wasn’t there when you were pensively staring down at the ground two minutes earlier.  The molted quill taupe-colored with shades of gray, almost the exact same color of the coffee cups they used to have a LUMS back in the day.

Not having a beer on a day like today is picking up the feather like an orchestral conductor and a wand and gently caressing the  stem of the quill where a talisman and somehow (even though it is bleak and grisly and wind-thrashing sullen outside) somehow for a moment, finding hope when you think about the article your read last week in a self-help book  about Psycho-Cybernetics which you wouldn’t be caught dead reading in public because fellow writers’ who recognize you would think you were intellectually flaccid and not well read. Not having a beer on a day like today is remembering the passage you read last week while holding the feather in front of you is remembering the passage you read last week about how a century ago, when the first aeronautical vessels were being created it was always thought that they needed to be build with wings that would flap, when the truth is an airplane doesn’t require wings to fly.

A vessel blasting and ricocheting through chasms of stratospheric arroyos and turbulent ravines of aerie nothingness does not require wings to transport and soar.

Angels don’t need wings to fly.