Losing the Game: The Escapades of Behr Sunday, Oct 29 2006

i cupped my hand and pulled the graham cracker crumbs from my bedsheets when i first crawled onto my sloppily made bed, noticed that the noonlight was illuminating my empty lunchable carton in a buttery way, and watched the metal detector man put divots in our front lawn for a while. i have a weird urge to drink coffee with my mother, to shuffle around in jeans and tell watered-down anecdotes from the short eight weeks i’ve had at reed — they will be here soon, and i am ready to walk backwards and say hello to people on the sidewalk. yesterday was shepherdlike: though i do not wish to have hallucinating quadruplets as a permanant addition to my life, i did not mind. i am a bear, after all.
psychonauts and furry ears are mothering no matter how sideways. i remembered the days when parker needed his hand held against the interactive bricks of princeton alleyways. maybe this is my job. watching stephen, papoosed in white and green, hold onto rosie at the end of the afternoon, i finally breathed deeply enough that the autumn air shot down into my lungs. on the way to subway, i found a blood-red leaf.

tonight is pumpkin karving and borderline milky chamomile tea. i will carve a unicorn and feel the reverberations of professional grade scraping tools against my forearm. it is cold outside, enough that the pulp of seeds and pumpkin goo would freeze in a film to my sweatshirt if i were at home on the front patio. keith says it is snowing in new york and rachel says that the boys on third floor richmond have asked after me since i left — i will never stop missing the east, but at least it is a pleasant whir.

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Episcopopoly and Acronyms for Friday Sunday, Oct 22 2006

i saw prospies in a gaggle as they followed a backwards boy down middle path today and smiled while i brushed the sprinkles off the corner of my mouth. i am not there these days, and i should not be any time soon. those tuesday night offhand mutters on the sidewalk cued more revolutions than i’d expected. i cancelled my interview and realized that this should be a far-away nest rather than the means to run-away ends. i have been sleeping backwards on emmet’s bed with my legs pressed to the bite of the broken window, curled under corduroy covers with my feet to his tummy. ohio is cold and crackling.

i went to the wiggins street playground yesterday with andy and we sat in a spiderweb made of waxy rope. one o’clock shadow wars had definite outlines and after the contrast we fell into a soccer net — andy tore the zip ties off of the goal posts. we will never have enough potential energy to bring the swings all the way over the top, but there is a lot to be said for one-on-one and lazy conversation. i felt diffused, ready to lie flat on the concrete and absorb the gathered warmth. this is the ethos of the wilson.

everything in this house: emmet duff, linny the guinea pig, danny prager, ming-ming duckling, katherine watson, turtle tuck, and will wong. everything stolen to upside-down trees: the TV. emmet photographed my media-corrupted shower, and then laser-glasses jordan and his mother (who bought us beer with twist-off caps) helped haul a boxy television three stories up in time for the last of the sunlight. we lifted it into the air above our heads until everyone’s belly was day-glo reflective and emmet found his favorite shot. i have had a few — the yearrgghhbook ship’s wheel at FADC, how the floor of the duplex looks like art by spinning marbles at the adams county fair and the way that the folded blinds in this living room window silhouette in ribbons. less visually: last night, when i was all alone with boo and parking-lot preoccupied, i washed the dishes at midnight and felt again like i had many homes.

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Peanut Butter and Sprinkle-Honey Sandwiches Wednesday, Oct 18 2006

i awoke with my cell phone pressed to my cheek and the adhesive strip of a post-it note stuck halfway into my mouth, three hours late for poli-sci and in dire need of a shower. it is funny to wash my hair in foreign dormitories; all the tile looks the same and when the hot water makes my eyes close halfway i sometimes run into unexpected walls. of course, i then scrub my skin in horror until it is bright pink and certifiably cleansed. after over-salted vegetable lunch with christina, i went to reamer (which comes to my brain as a chubbier lemur) for a classical mythology lecture. “this has taken us through so many not-home places,” pondered the quiet and pitiable professor in the lumberjack shirt: there was an obese man in a plaid patchwork bucket hat listening to his ipod to our left, a row of sports-whisperers muttered behind us, and this was the last thing i heard before i went into trance beneath my floppy bangs. i am in so many not-home places now, i could not help but drift.

this is where i kind of live. the futon is plush and gives me room to drape my limbs, but now i am slouched against a concrete wall. i miss the weird pangs from the molding upstairs and the way they shock the gaps between my vertebrae. i was accosted by an elevator today; its door closed whompingly on my elbow and sent a twenty-ounce ginger ale flying across the carpeted floor. ice cubes scattered across the purple plush and my cup rolled to the corner, straw and lid dislodged and bent to the side. i looked up into the security camera and laughed, and rachel smiled and rolled her eyes. if they knew i was here, i do not think they would let me return. today in lecture i spooned some jimmies into rachel’s mouth and the majority of them landed in her hoodie or fell to the floor. later, we met radhe and eric, my hair was made fun of with halfway glee, and i learned that postponing the bubble-wonder word leak only makes it worse.

lesson of the day, from the two AM perspective: when playing beirut, especially in preliminary forays, do not offer to drink for someone who has glaucoma and a severe disadvantage in the field of depth perception.

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