a quantum love story

last night,

we watched quarks falling in love with neutrinos, dancing in and out of existence in the skies over Miami, talking about love in the bed with the lights on. i drove home alone - with my shirt smelling like her - and i went to sleep.

i dreamed of my first true love. she told me to remember 1994, and how she had left her smell on me as she stuffed my clothes back in my suitcase. i woke up at 5:27am.

i do not know the meaning of these things.

tonight:

there are Russians slipping notes under doormats and i am walking the line between homage and plagiarism, stuffing letters into self-addressed and stamped envelopes marked return to sender. i am trading for sonnets with Renaissance women and theorizing about the homogenization of experience in parking lots. there is mattar panir in my refrigerator, and police tape holding together Mardou's apartment.

tomorrow: i hope to midwife a manifesto.

i have lust in my heart...

for my friend's new computer.

i have had Mac envy since the late Nineties, and over the past decade every time i've stood at the precipice of taking the plunge i've pulled back, afraid that it just wouldn't be there for me in the future.

things started to change this past December.

i downloaded iTunes on my PC, but it sat on my desktop uninstalled for more than a month. i didn't want to convert file formats. i didn't want to be stuck with a software i didn't like. i didn't want to be that guy. so i made duplicate copies of every mp3 on my computer - thousands and thousands of songs. but eventually i mustered the moxy...

it changed my life.

i bought an iPod, i started visiting the Mac website, i started thinking about buying a computer even though it wasn't time yet. worst of all, people started coming into my life who were Mac users. but these were not the emotional, PC-bashing, militant Macophytes from college. they were level-headed adults who spoke of their MacBooks with the same quiet confidence i use when speaking of my favorite pen (Pilot Precise V5). and then my friend - the one whose computer i covet - made the switch. she had been a PC girl all her life, and now her transition could serve as an experiment to see what happens.

now i find myself, blogging in one tab, pricing Macs in the other...

i woke up this morning...

with the unwritten poem of a dead man stuck in my head, and i am left wondering which is more odd:

1) that i thus woke.

or

2) that i no longer consider this odd.

last week...

i decided to spice up my reading list, which typically consists of the writings and rantings of degenerates and madmen. i figured Wuthering Heights would be a nice transition. i remembered enjoying it in college, and i took comfort in knowing that Bronte died when she was barely 30 years old from consumption. but all this is besides the point.

the point is that i have been in something of a funk since Friday the 4th. i initially blamed it on the jingoism, but my melancholy has outlasted the celebration. i now think maybe it's the novel that has me down. so i am faced with two options:

1) continue on to the bitter end, and find what humor i can in picturing Heathcliff not as an "imp of Satan" (p. 43), but rather as a fat, orange cat.

2) abandon this experiment, and return to the familiarity of self-absorbed post-modernity.

time will tell...

in an act of super-genius...

i dropped last night my phone precisely into a glass of water as i finished watching a documentary on Jeff Tweedy. i immediately pulled it out, turned it off, and spent the next hour in triage. i left it at work, under the watchful gaze of a fan.

i knew i would know nothing 'til the morrow, and i watched my reaction that night - how much emotion i have invested in that tiny little plastic rectangle. i imagined turning it on and finding it alive, but much like a stroke victim or head trauma survivor. whereby the 4, 6, 8 and 9 survived, but the 2, 3, 5 and 7 were only quasi-functional. all my beautiful prime numbers diminished into a the uncertainty of Heisenberg. and the 1 entering as 0, 0 as 1 - a binary Bizarro world where digital determinism is turned on its head.

the phone returned to life today at 10am, uninjured.

as ever,

i just finished As Ever, the collected correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. the first letter is dated January 1947 and the last April 1967. this is what i think:

twenty years of letters, lust, Zen and prison.
how long can we hold onto our youth?

until we let it go?

or

until we realize that nothing important
ever grows old or changes.

(i'm going to meet a one-shoed Moldovan
who cried last night over the death of her friend's cat,
declined credit cards and graves
in lieu of cremation)
she asked me why i read the book.

i said:

for fun,
because it's there,
because it's a testament
to the endurance of friendship,
how lovers of youth
can age with grace,

and not go fleeing
from amphetamine-stained sheets
into the San Francisco night.

how to let go of those that leave us,
and love them just the same.