my neck cracks, but only when i turn my head to the left. and sometimes i'm left wondering if i missed that critical invitation to breakfast -- orange juice, sausages, and pancakes and conversations about john mccain's undying patriotism. americans? we love violence. we love imperialism and fanaticism and super bowlisms. this, i tell you, is fact; enrichment and beautism is wasted on me. i am interested in one thing and one thing only: that which is before me. i'm taking a class on art history and i can tell you this: the most important works of art in the history of man/woman/human are those of which my professor has digital images of from his/her vacation.

this is yet again an un-ending reminder of why finer education is wasted on me.

i cannot help but laugh at the kids who played clarinet in high school who are now nineteen years later playing guitar hero as if pushing buttons in front of seventy eight video prisoners will some how grant them everfuckinglasting musical goodness.

but time is money. i'm in the middle of a refi. i am old and invested and i watch too much hgtv for my own good. i find myself drawn to the shows i used to think were for someone else. that guy, who thought happiness was found in the fascimile of life, the memory of what he was shown. and i realize now, a few years later, i couldn't feel older and whiter than when i am asked, on christmas eve, by my six year-old nephew, to pronounce the word, tienda.

the truth is, i would rather tell you about the places to go in europe. the places to see in brussels, cologne, arezzo, siena, the netherlands, and firenze. i would rather show you pictures but the places i have seen are not private and the thoughts i spread here are not always valid. i write in this empty space with the empty thoughts of different things of different (me)s of distant memories spread across the inevitably vacant spaces of the internet -- hoping for some reason that by placing them here they might mean something. i'm tired of the internet and of messages from my long gone family that this one girl from way back then is using my full name and saying things about me and that goddamn it hurts them. i can control nobody and nothing, i tell them. the attachments to this or that responsible for such a thing have long been severed and now hang like the dead tendrils of love -- rotting and stinking. hanging there like broken arms, nerveless motionless and yet i wish they were all somehow irreverently happy living. but i tell those others, the family, go back to google. go back to your search engines and go back to whatever it is that 55 year-old men do on the internet, i tell them. i'm sorry, i say; i'm horrible, they think; that's okay, i say -- because some sense of irrationality is all there is to keep us going. to keep us all away from the deep dark havens of insanity. but oh, oh! what a crock even that has become! thank you winona ryder, brad pitt, russell crowe and angelina jolie. i cannot help the past, i tell them. i loved and lost, i tell them. so sue me. i am in the process now and hope somehow that everyone everywhere can somewhere somehow find the time the way the somehow the someway to do the same. so weak it seems, so very plain, so very boring to be this way but it isn't, it isn't the same the plain the very basic way we all strive to be. isn't is? but that's for another time another place -- a place for thoughts like these and images of all of all of this i forever want to be seen.

but doctors. ho! whoa! doctors are not afraid to take happiness away. they show no fear in the face of happiness and our foolish little decrees. science and faith mix within them and they spew out realities with a wrathful grin. grimace, they breathe, has nothing on me. examinations x-rays and i'm refusing to vote because i think it'll somehow help my kids. my eyes are splitchy and when i breathe there is no oxygen only horrible sensations of tearing. like glass shards swallowed with gasoline.

when she cries and sobs and falls into my chest and says, what do i do? i'm so afraid. i'm so scared. can they fix it? i don't want to grow through all of this again. can they take away whatever it is that might be gnawing inside me? i say, i don't know, baby. i really don't. and i take her hand and sweat on it. just like i always do.