Bad

Pink

Two large standard camellia bushes that reach the second story of a nice light blue house. The pink blossoms on the bushes are just so much. The camellias are just heaving with pretty blossoms. Together, the two tree-like bushes frame the doorway of the nice light blue house, and are themselves framed by two more camellia bushes of similar tree-like size, one with white blossoms, and one with red. The whole scene of the four bosoming blossoming camillia trees, and the nice light blue house, in the nice neighborhood, with the nice evening light, and the smell of moisture, and of the blossoms, and the fresh cut grass, and all my dreams and excitement around it all, all go together to create ‘a world of imagination’ in me as I walk:

A girl’s breasts. Her bra.

Laura Ashley.

Ribbons.

True love.

The 1970’s and 1980’s.

That iconic white underwear with little flowers that all the girls wore when I was little…

When I was little…

When I was little I had a crush on my wonderful, wonderful older cousin Lucy. Lucy would sing. Lucy would dance. Lucy would play the piano, and get excited. Lucy would play you at backgammon. Lucy lived in this beautiful, big old country house on all this land, with my aunt Margaret and uncle Christopher, and her brother and sisters. We would go there for parties. Every Christmas Day we would go there. There would be ice and snow outside. We would start the evening off in the livingroom. There would be a fire, and our parents would drink and eat cheese. Early Beatles would thump out the speakers of my uncle Christopher’s hi-fi. The fire would crackle. The smell of the scotch and the fire. The smell of perfume. The ice in the glasses was so wet, and so cold to the touch. And the regular basslines of ‘Love, love me do’ and ‘I wanna hold your hand’, they would just make my heart swell and swell, and swell with crushiness for my cousin Lucy. Minutes would go by. I’d just feel it more and more, and more. I would sit on the velvet couch, in my thin gray wool pants, with my skinny wrists, and my dress-up shoes, and the butterflies in my stomach, just trembling with love, love for Lucy, and love for the one other girl I knew from dancing school.. Later Lucy would stand near me and tell me how to play chopsticks on the piano. We would play together for a minute. And I would simultaneously soar with the thrill of her company, and plummet with the end-game of my total and complete embarrassment. I would blush, I would get hard-ons, I would suddenly leave her company for no apparent reason whatsoever… After diner we would sit in the tv room and watch ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ or ‘Oliver’, or maybe, ‘The Sound of Music’.

I remember being even younger and in the summers having these wonderful, evening outdoor parties at their house. I would be drinking my Canada Dry ginger ale, eating peanuts, and running loops around the tulip trees, and around my uncles and their tall plaid pants, ‘conversation’, and tumblers of scotch.. Sometimes we’d play baseball, and there would be goose shit to watch out for.. Or sometimes we’d play tag. Sometimes we’d even play hide n’ go seek, all the way out in the woods. And I’d find Lucy, finally, in like, a ray of sunlight and a fairy costume. Whatever we did at those parties we’d get totally bleeding-lung winded and grass-stained knee-ed. Everything would smell so great, because it was summer, and we were in Ohio. As the evening got nearer, there would be the sound of crickets and then eventually lightning bugs. I remember we would go and play out in the canoe, in the last rays of sunshine, still drinking our ginger ale, and somehow my dyslexic cousin, Dave, would manage to fall overboard, completely in. He’d be laughing hysterically and shouting shit, his wet curly head all tangled in pond plants. My other cousin Philip would be looking down on him from the canoe. He’d call him an idiot and bounce his head with his paddle. We loved Dave, he was probably my best friend, but seriously, he got a little crazy.. But I always appreciated how Lucy would never be mean to him, when he started all spazzing out..

I really loved Lucy. She was so awesome. All strong, and nice. All older than us, with her nice skin, and her dirty blond hair. I can remember her running, and smiling, spinning even, all barefoot, and out of breath with excitement, in her white pretty dress, flowers and grass all smooshed in her hair… Lucy would make up her own skits, and sing, and dance for us. And play the piano. Seriously. And then one summer suddenly she had this, like, heaving bosom, and she just kept on going. All spinning and dancing, all talking and growing up.. 

Reading is nice..

I’m looking for book recommendations..

Please.., please help..

I like..

Old, rich hearty things, like fallow fields, crunchy gravel, ‘having a fire’, Heathcliff, walking between towns.. Think Dutch realistic painting meets pretty girls meets a storyline. All on the ground. Not too much murder, supernatural elements, or abstraction, let me do all that in my own mind. Faulkner and Toni Morrison are not linear enough for me. I love the simple cornbread and slave labor of Zora Neale Hurston. I love the detail of Raymond Carver, but he can be a little on the emotionally always-harsh side for me.

I love F. Scott Fitzgerald’s world, the way he describes girls, and drinking, and dancing, and swimming, winning and losing, what we want so bad, or what I want so bad. 

I love the modern, psychedelic, fruit-of-the-fruit-of-the-fruit realism of Bret Easton Ellis and Tamra Janowitz, ie- we’re so fucking rich. We go to boarding school, we shop in London, our dad’s the president, we take mushrooms and have sex, on our boats, or maybe we just walk around Manhattan, tortured, listening to our I-Pod’s, thinking about about the pretty girl in the wool coat, with the chestnut brown hair, who doesn’t like us the way we want; noticing the brilliance in every detail in the world..

Give me my modern day Holden Caulfield, or something..

I love outdoor stories, travel writing about hitchhiking, hut life in the 3rd world. I love hut life!! Give me half dressed boys in canoes in Brazil who hunt for their food everyday, and when it rains.., well.., they just get wet…

I love all the rungs and corners of the socio-demographic planet, Richard Scarry on acid.

Give me all that attention to detail, close-up, and realistic.

Don’t be shy, tell me some titles, even possible matches, maybe I’ve read them and maybe I haven’t. Maybe you know something that I absulotely have to read that doesn’t even fit my bill.

Thank you so much!!!!!!!!!

     -Chris   

I was watching discovery science. They now think every galaxy has a black hole in the center of it. These holes suck nearby matter into them.  When the matter gets close it spins around, faster and faster, until it heats up to this, like, super hot temperature. As it spins it gets so extra hot that it effects itself: It globs together, forming planets, stars, communities, relationships. This is called a quasar.  They say it is how new things are made. They say a lot of these new bodies just form and exist, blooming and all that, and they don’t actually get sucked down into the black hole, not any time too soon. And I try to believe them. I try to believe..

But as a lot of the close, fast matter spins, it actually falls in, and down, on itself, in the funnel, of bent physics, that is the maelstrom, that is the black hole itself. And once this matter is in, it’s in. It’s a shut in. There’s no getting out. They call this the downward spiral, hard times, hard knocks, depression, end game, the blues… And the matter just keeps gathering tighter and tighter and tighter into itself, all gravity and no action, Jesus on the cross, until it becomes: The Singularity. The point. God.., damn.  What is the point?

They say that it is this process of hard times that can make stuff, that can make up stuff, that can make stuff into stuff into stuff that can one day grow to come to recognize and know itself, and cry out in protest as it swirls, against the physics and universe that is pulling it to it’s end:  "We are all going to die!".