Raising our Standards

People take what's given, they eat what's put in front of them and they do what they see being done. People will adapt to their surroundings whether that means lowering their standards and dumbing themselves down or stretching what's possible to meet an expectation that's way above them. People's capabilities are dependent on what's required of them.

Which is why its disappointing that at the women health free teen clinic that Im at right now, the waiting room is piled with Cosmopolitan, Vogue, People, Us and 5 other celebrity gossip crap magazines.

There's not one Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, any of the magazines I'd normally expect to find in a waiting room catering to a wider demographic; magazines that if provided, I guarantee would be read or at least flipped through. If you are waiting in this waiting room, you basically have no choice but to read Cosmo's 20 Tips to Tingling Full-Body Sexy Sex or People's Fashion Face-Off 'Who Wore it Better?' in which two celebrities are pictured wearing the same outfit and you choose which one looks better. Cool. Tell me there's not a single girl in this waiting room who wouldn't look at a Time magazine headline about the oil spill in the gulf and pick it up thinking, 'Hmm I really have no idea what's going on with that but I've heard so much about it that I'd like to know.'

People have to stop underestimating each other and themselves, start doing what they believe in and genuinely enjoy and expect the same in others. People have to stop catering to the lowest common denominator. It stifles the rest of us and holds back those who are being catered to from growing.

You Know the Feeling

If I were in bed staring up into the dark, I would have tossed and turned, mind spinning. But I wasn't. I was in the middle of a pack of intoxicated festivarians, dancing to a trippy tranced-out bluegrass band on the dewy grass under the moon.

Next to me, me mom danced barefoot and next to her, a man passed a joint and took a sloppy gulp of beer out of a plastic cup. To my other side, my friend Peter danced and feigned interest in everything around him as conversation fodder with the teenage girl in front of him. After everything he said, she laughed and flipped her hair back and forth as her head turned from the stage to him and back to the stage.

They danced as close to each other as possible without actually touching. They hovered cautiously along the line between flirtation and platonic indifference, staying safe from exposure. Despite their tunnel-vision one-track minds, it wasn't clear to me whether or not they were just warm bodies to each other, used to alleviate their boredom by playing this little game. They thought, Im sure, that their separate mini romances (having very little to do with the actual guts and brains of the little dream case along side them) were well hidden but, just being aware of it, I could feel every tingle their own bodies must have felt with each flush of warmth and accidental brushing of hands.
And I wished there was someone pushing through the crowd in my direction whose hand tingled as it touched my back, sending waves of chilly heat out from the spot, catching my breath as he looked back, said excuse me and smiled, letting a line fall into the water, disturbing the surface stillness, waiting for a tug.

Turtle Head

This guy who inhabits a cafe that I frequent is the biggest fucking tool I've ever met. For our purposes, and because I don't know his name, we'll call him Turtle Head. He goes to Naropa- the little alternative hippy college that sits like a shining beacon of ill-informed hope at the bottom of the hill to CU Boulder : the top party-ranking ski-bumming college that I go to.
Everyone at Naropa has a Mac and can easily be identified by the yoga mat which has earned a consecrated spot in their thermo-molded, gortex-blend REI day packs, complete with dual drink-tube exit ports for ultimate on-the-go hydration. They adamently deconstruct gender binaries and challenge society's view of beauty with their deliberately indecorous hair choices. Women choose not to shave their legs and arms but make up for it by shaving their heads, ivory spiral earrings wedged into gaged earlobes. Men have ponytails or immense mountain-man facial hair or the especially arogant of the lot just let their hair go wild. Pantene Pro-V, chamomile and shea butter voluminizing product and endless grooming apparently all come together to create the perfected and painfully conscious image which falls somewhere in between ''I just had multiple orgasms'' and ''I don't give a fuck, I'm just beautiful''. Naropa folk live in yoga studios and cafes and subsist mainly on maté, green tea, gluten-free pastries and over-priced salads.
This man in particular used to sport pigtail braids. He's short and slightly chubby but he's perfected the sustained eye contact and soft touch which is supposed to signify his sensitivity. I call it narcicism but whatever. Either way, it does absolutely nothing to get him laid which is undeniably the underlying motivation behind 80 percent of his actions. The remaining 20 percent goes into trying to assert his intellectual dominance to all who become subjected to his presence.
Naropians bloviate to each other about incredibly important things (that everyone should be thinking about) in order to win their comrades' approval. ''We're all one bro,'' says Turtle Head to his equally hairy cafe table-mate. But, as TH has not realized, while he's making transcendently insightful observations about the state of the world, his convo-bud is listening just enough to follow it with a witty and infinitely transcendent-er response.
Turtle Head loses his train of precious thought as he glances up at a bleached-blond boobed-up bimbo in that gorgeous pair of Prana® pilates pants that are supposed to allow for ultimate flexation-action and are made of that one new synthetic that is built to whick any nearby moisture. She sits down next to him, her pants instantly whick away his maté but he doesn't notice. She can sense a kindred spirit. He's entranced in their impromptu convo about her new yoga iphone app. She very conveniently displays her touch screen right below the horizon line of her cleavage and she's flattered by how intently Turtle Head listens.
''He has inner beauty'', she tells her swooning girlfriends which is code for both ''he's kind of ugly'' and ''he is willing to put up with my shit because he is so desperate to fondle my tits'' simultaneously. Insecurities compliment each other in that sad sick way.
These people pity those who value money because ''there are so many more important things in life than a carreer''. But their money conveniently comes in monthly wires from Carmel and is somehow gone at the end of each month, putting them in the lowest tax-bracket and affording them the title of bohemian or ''starving artist'' which they traips around town proudly only because it's not true. Starvation is so flattering when it's voluntary.
My thoughts, these observations. They're so fucking deep. You have no idea. They're unclassifyable. How could they even fit in a square room with your limitations and definitions and. grammar rules don't: APPLY. My words transcend punctuation I refuse your endmarks and a period is not needed here it can't be placed here as if this were a complete thought you don't even know I'm so deep Dont Limit me with your rules and standardizations because I don't apply they don't apply to me to this this is beyond what you know what you understand beyond your rules my thoughts my jots

OUT.

Namaste bitch.

Something about his small sharp eyes, the way he throws his head back and laughs a deep belly laugh. Just out of delight. Makes me want to dig into him. Excavate. The sky could be purple outside and I wouldn't see it if I walked out under it. My focus lies pinpointed, in him, whether it's favorable, charmed or unsure. Yet this is not a love story. He entices me, catches a corner as I pull away, longing. I know this game, and I'll pull away further. After maybe just one night.

The sky it turns out, the color it turns as day fades and sets, light skewed through atmosphere to create my spectacle, is the connection I can't sacrifice. I have before, gone for months on end, unable to see the stars, forgetting entirely that they were there, on our ceiling that is, not just transposed onto his body, constellations of freckles as my north star. Unable to feel the grass beneath my bare feet, fingers hungrily running instead through hair, my seasons ebbed and flowed between haircuts and postures, the sun setting as I mourned his momentary losses: leaving for work as I went to hibernate, fall asleep quickly and the sooner you'll wake.

I forgot entirely the majesty of a darkened sky. How, out underneath it, walking alone, how bright it actually is still. I've walked before at night, picking out shapes, navigating perfectly and fully embraced alone in that vaccuous womb, my trust realigning, expanding, wiggle-room forged between my subsets, the value to hold it all in place collapsing sweetly, and thinking "is it really in fact night? Where is this light coming from? Who, now, is illuminating my path?"

I'll never again return indoors or flick on an artificial light, squinting over text obscured by barriers when it's provided for, and in such abundance, just two feet away, just one window pane's separation. I might dream of you, but I can't return. You must understand, you hold yourself elsewhere, too deeply hidden, that to conjoin, I'd have to journey inwards and forego the changing sky I've become so attached to. And which asks for nothing in return. No door can be closed in my face, no corridors blocked from my view and footprints where there is no plaster and frames.

My home, where things make the only sense to me, is in the expanse. This I can navigate, here I can see where abandoned bones go and how roots grow. This I can navigate. But I will come in if you invite me. For a night. Because warmth, even from a furnace, still heats my skin.

This cycle ends, as others do, as a welcome respite and a clean slate. My chalice tips and spills its wine, a reminder to let down the weights loosen my grip and loosen my tights. To lose hold of the responsibility to uphold life. This I can witness, these cycles I can witness not as deaths and births, losses and burdens but as cycles, a mere rotation. And far from the last or the only, although a different meaning can be derived from saturation, a subsuming more tangible, so a pruning of the fingers can be seen and felt more clearly. Diving into a pool that can be dried to echo a pool larger it's easier to forget. This cycle ends, as the others do, to expose itself as just that. A reminder that I can partake without generating, live exist and feel without producing, speaking and creating. My contribution is irrevocable. In my anatomy and my potential is the sole purpose to create, at some point to say something, inevitable day light allowing me to bask and languish in the dark. Expand, exhale. And drain.

Saudade

Midnight. Two hours ago is when I planned to go to sleep. My heart is pounding though and keeping me from it. From sugar. Two pieces of left over birthday cake. But for romance's sake we can leave that out maybe. Ah romance. Something I've lost a good deal of. I'm rebounding. I've dipped so heavily into that pool and have retracted so far from it. But in both extremes, I lose myself. My balance of encompassing them both.

It's funny- I often read over past writings of mine and think- Fuck, that was so good! That's so clearly expressed and pure. And what I've gotten since then is a good beating. A good dose of reality and experience that has eroded my rough edges smooth. And who has time for poetry and words to play with then there's a car to register and rent to pay and an article to write?

My mind hops around frantically- looking for something that will catch its attention. My attention so unrooted and free-floating. Reeling in outer space after having detached from the gravitational field of my love. Funny that term, "my love". The love being truly mine. And how true. Thinking back, hearing his voice or reading something he wrote to me, he is objectively unremarkable. And certainly embodies very few of the qualities that I would list as being things I seek out. Values we share. Yet, with all of my heart, I adored him. Maybe just because he let me and so few do. And that feeling- that- that is a feeling unlike any other.

For every electron in my body, normally stretching and pulling me in multiple directions at once, to stop. Align. And all move together in one. I had found direction, a purpose, and it took me off into the woods on a path I didn't expect. And ran me eventually into a brick wall over and over again until, through sheer will, I stepped back, looked up at the stars and wandered off into the darkness in hope of once again finding light.

I want something. So badly I yearn, I long, I grieve for something. But I have no idea what. Finding a treasure trove, I'm convinced, in which one is stocked with enough mystery to last a lifetime. Little pockets of unknown that can be unwrapped and discovered, a source to which any yearning can be attributed and thought to be tangible, is the key. To delude oneself, to mask oneself in a dillusion so grand and beautiful that incompletion becomes romance and failure becomes an art. A world in which every stroke plays into a picture, messy up close but grand from far away. That's the picture I want to paint. The bridge I want to look at.

In the face of the massive expanse of this crazy crazy world, every longing looks silly and every concern and excitement, insignificant and petty. So, in the name of beauty, in the name of romance, for god's sake, make your world a litte smaller. Put blinders on yoursef so, like a horse, you can rule out fear and keep onward.

The biggest heartbreak, the biggest source of emptiness and frustration, is not knowing what to long for. The longing will always be there. My longing however has no direction. I'm turning in circles trying to find a worthy cause, a green light, disoriented without it. Installing tangibles just to give myself a north star. Reeling and wallowing in my completion, desiring desire itself.

Here's the bottom line. You find meaning, everyone does, I certainly do, through love. Through lov-ing, the act of it. So never, at any turn, deprive yourself.

Time Bomb

I remember the first week we spent together. You dropped me off back at my house after and I remember walking up the stairs, returning to something without you, after having found you, and I felt, walking away, very distincty feeling like the root system, the pulp, had been pulled out from my form, leaving just the shell. The marrow had been pulled from my bones.

When I met you, over that first week or two we spent together, all the pieces came together in a way that made sense to me. My world glowed with life, I could see the stars during the day and the sun shone at night. My life had found a meaning so unbelievaby fulfilling and so effortlessly simple.

I'm still not sure what happend. I melted is the best way I can describe it. I fell to pieces and fell apart. Something which I still haven't recovered from fully. I'm fragmented. I can't quite see the things around me, as if, without you, without my vision imbued with that love I found for you, things are no longer worth seeing.

The strange thing is that I don't miss you. I don't want to go back, I don't want to share a bed with you, I don't miss your kiss. Although I remember the fullness of it so distinctly. With such relinquish and devotion you kissed me- like you were handing your soul and your spirit and your purpose over to me. Houdini's kiss-passed key, you treated me to life over and over. And I wanted it. So badly. I wanted to make a life with you. I wanted to make life with you. And you handed it all over to me so readily. I guess I couldn't hold it. I wasn't strong enough. And I fell apart under the weight of it. Maybe I didn't know how heavy it would be. Exactly what I was giving you permission to do.

It was never a matter of love. My love was never a question. I loved and still do love, absolutely every piece of you. I loved you with a mix of utter and unconditional adoration, comfort, desire and completion. You had held all of my softest parts. You completed and supported parts of me that I didn't even know were there. You introduced me to a love I never knew was possible, one I had longed for and seen in the distance but didn't know it was possible to attain. To be fully engulfed in. To swim in for months on end.

And now returning alone, my darling, I never thought I would be returning alone. My sweetheart. That word even is indelibly connected to you. How could I call you anything but? And doing so- returning alone- is like coming back to a shadow world.

This is all right. It's all the best and it's good to be here now and here alone, to be coming back around and painting color again between the outlines. Our timebomb expired, leaving nothing to return to. Life just breaks your heart in these ways, lessons coming in such compelling wrapping, interlaced with such beauty. It's time to move forward, and I'm happy to do so. But it will take someone big, my sweetheart, to fill your lovely shoes.