i have no conscience to keep clear

I know you've all grown accustom to these daily updates from my little literary world of misunderstood prose and slightly irrelevant banter, but I'm going to have to take a break for a while. The stress is finally getting to me. I need some time off. So to recouperate, I'm heading to the isle of Catalina for a few days. Frolli has been working out there for about a year at the Catalina Island Marine Institute. That's right folks, she graduated college to become a camp counselor. We'll spend a few days exploring the island, surfing, kayaking, diving, and just dicking around. Doing what I do best.

So in my absence, I'll leave you with something from David Berman. I think of this poem when I yearn for the innocence of the past. There were simpler times before all of these complications. In hindsight they seem that way. I hope your weekend travels went well.


Classic Water


I remember Kitty saying we shared a deep longing for
the consolation prize, laughing as we rinsed the stagecoach.


I remember the night we camped out
and I heard her wishper
"think of me as a place" from her sleeping bag
with the centaur print.

I remember being in her father's basement workshop
when we picked up an unknown man sobbing
over the shortwave radio

and the night we got so high we convinced ourselves
that the road was a hologram projected by the headlight beams.

I remember how she would always get everyone to vote
on what we should do next and the time she said
"all water is classic water" and shyly turned her face away.

At volleyball games her parents sat in the bleachers
like ambassadors from Indiana in all their midwestern schmaltz.

She was destroyed when they were busted for operating
a private judicial system within U.S. borders.




Sometimes I'm awakened in the middle of the night
by the clatter of a room service cart and I think back on Kitty.

Thosee summer evenings by the government lake,
talking about the paradox of multiple Santas
or how it felt to have your heart broken.

I still get a hollow feeling on Labor Day when the summer ends

and I remember how I would always refer to her boyfriends
as what's-his-face, which was wrong of me and I'd like
to apologize to those guys right now, wherever they are:

No one deserves to be called what's-his-face.