Coyote Reveries

As usual, exhaustion has set in.

But this time, it brings a nostalgic blur of happy fatigue.

Most free hours have chosen to remain at school these days. I should be nervous about the play. I've put my all into it. This is my last chance here to place my neck on the stained boards.

I can't wait. Even practices have become an element to look forward to.

I have no idea if I can act. But tonight, I stopped worrying about it for the first time, and the lines consumed me.

And so here I sit, enjoying the pathway the shuffle has chosen to take. The old curiosity and I have struck up a conversation. You can't see the tape holding our friendship back together if you don't scour the days. It took a while, but I'm glad the past has been erased.

Mr. All Around still serves as the daily exhale between 3 and 4 o clock. He seems pointed towards the hills, but I hate how he feels he is settling. He will make wherever he goes his own play list. There's a reason he is the all around kind of guy. He's got it, even if he hasn't realised it yet.

The old Fourth president has no idea what its missing.

The Envy of Icarus

I can't breathe.

Asthma would not exist as such a wall if panic for breath did not serve as it's foundation.

I feel as if I leave small fragments of my mind wherever I go. New medicine has gotten into my veins, and I am a crazy woman.

Crazy. Angry. Crazy.

I can feel it taking control of me and the surges of emotion towards everyone. I'm afraid no friends will be standing by the time the levels reach an acceptable level.

My biggest fear, however, is that I am scaring Mr. All Around. He's noticed a difference. I've noticed the worry in me that carries.

This is a chemical iron elephant following me around.

It's not even a major medicine. But my grades have covered their eyes and jumped off a cliff. Minor infractions against me resign themselves to vicious grudges and repeating nightmares.

The new found laughter that I have been taking for granted has asked for it's due.

I want it back. I don't want to scare Mr. All Around.That wrecks me. I want my grades back. I want to be able to enjoy myself. I don't want to hate everyone for being teenagers and gossiping and picking the better group to eat lunch with.

I crave the thrum of cicadas. I want to lie in a hammock and not have a single vibration of worry or anxiety upon the cerebral web. I want to be there and know where I am going, instead of remaining here and anxiously staring at the mailbox day to day.

I need the numbing rush of summer.

Heaven help me.

The things we do for insurance.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Normally, the comment bar does not catch my attention.

But curiosity reigns over who keeps brightening my day.

Verno brought up this place one day last week, and I asked him what he thought about it. He replied, "well, its really negative."

This keyboard has and continues to serve its purpose in my life. However, in my lack of vigilance, I seem to only let my fingers stray over its letters when a knot has formed inside of me.

Mr. All Around and I laid down on the floor tonight and listened to music. Several times I found myself gasping for air in between laughs.

I sit back and realise that although there always seems to be some form of conflict swirling around the cerebral roller coaster, the overall feeling is

well, appreciation for the small things.

I laugh so often these days. Yes, stress takes me for a ride from the moment it seeps out of the alarm clock to the second it sits and waits for the next day to appear. Yet, this time around in life, I still can jump around in bliss to an Of Montreal song while the thought of Calculus steeps.

Colleges make their final decree in a few weeks. I have absolutely no idea whatsoever concerning where I will end up next year.

But I'm in College of the Atlantic, and I know that worst comes to worse, I will spend the next four years happy.

Heaven forbid. It's a continual loop every time anyone asks where I applied. I rattle off the list, pause, and then quickly throw in the COA name. Therein starts the questioning.

But in the end, I suppose life seems to be working out. Don't be too fazed by the weary posts, they are the only way to get the knots untied. I'm close to where I need to be in school, I'm with who I want to be, friends exist everywhere, and a few good ones show up too.

And, to whoever has been so kind lately, thank you. I suppose I love you too.

Animosity on a School Night

Nothing, nothing beats what happened tonight at dinner as Mother set down her fork, looked me in the eye and said:

"I think I want to get a tattoo like where yours is."

Keith and I both choked.

That's where my more and more evident resentment slipped in. Right where Keith talked about how horrible an idea a tattoo is.

Look asshole. You fell off a cliff, got into a motorcycle accident, pierced your ears, did drugs, crashed your car drunkenly and sit every night listening to Steve miller or grateful dead or ccr or who knows what.

If my mother wants to take herself out of the box and mark herself like her daughter, something which would mean so much to me though I'll never tell her,

Then she can damn well do it.

It would be the closest thing my mother and I would have ever done. It would be our penance for the lack of physical appreciation towards each other.

It would be ours. Hers and mine. Don't ruin that Keith.

I have given you so much these past few years. I have opened up my home, and my heart, and my life to you. I didn't have to. I could have been exceedingly content remaining bitter at you for coming in one step parent too late.

I could have gladly stopped talking to you when you didn't come home that one night because you were stumbling around the city drunk.

Or when you wrecked your car stubbornly trying to come home.

Or maybe when you left the scene of the crime because you were too drunk to know better.

It took a lot of willpower to hear that you drink again now like it's no big deal. Or when you leave me notes when you go away with my mother for the weekend. No drugs, no sex, rock and roll is okay, Keith? Maybe you shouldn't brag to your work buddies about your crazy weekend. Maybe then I wouldn't feel so enraged.

Last week you and mom were talking about getting a small house in the country when I leave. I felt so suffocated knowing that all the aspirations that you two contain reside in a simple house in the country. That you two would be so content with such a thing.

I asked the same question to some at school the other day, in curiosity towards whether I was one of the few who wanted more than a cul de sac life. They looked at me like I was insane. Of course they wanted to live in a place just like this. Of course they wanted a quiet suburban lifestyle. Of course they wanted their children to follow this spiral.

It's just about time for me to leave all of this. Leave the hypocrites, leave the monotony, leave the assumptions towards opinions and the snares towards change.

Perhaps Keith's joke is right. Perhaps Mom should sum up her life on her neck.

"There it went."

There it went, indeed.

Paul Wolf Remembers

It's the kind of virus that crawls down into the depths of your soul and remains there to stay.

The world develops an unusual hue under the guise of a fever. Your mind retreats into itself in confusion.

Sometimes, we all need to be delirious.

The burgeoning flood of papers and due dates threatens to envelop my senses. So my body, in self defiance, unlocks the door for a nasty form of illness to creep in. My government teacher will soon be receiving my opinion of the Patriot Act as thought up by a 100 degree brain.

Mr. All Around inquired as to the lack of written appeals recently. I think many ponder the way in which I write. Contrary to the assumption that I spend moments worrying over metaphors, This writing is how I think. I talk to myself in synedoche and simile, and the sole occasions in which I realise I am different in that approach occurs when others remark on it.

The end of a period of time came knocking today. My involvement in a self written play about the holocaust came to a peak when I stood on that stage this afternoon, sweating with the exertions of the virus. Inga, the dear soul for whom we worked so hard, stood at that microphone and cried. Afterwards, shells of women shuffled up to me in their Chanel No. 5 and orthopedic shoes. In thick accents, they told us how they lived through it. These were the people on the cattle cars. These were the souls bricked up in ghettos.

They told me that each word went straight to the heart. I've never had such an experience. These little old ladies walked through the depths of hell and survived.

The characters in the play were real. However, in those moments, we understood all that they cared for. We knew them as real life.

What happened so many years ago hit home today.

And that will remain when the virus has been conquered.