Best as it is

You consider how she wears dresses and the duration to which she keeps them on her freckled back. The colors of the fabrics on her bedroom floor, how messy and tangled all of her catalogued belongings get depending on the season. Her whereabouts on any given weeknight, and the subsequent stipulations that come with her sitting on a bar stool in hand-me-down blue jeans watching the suicide counter at the bottom of the flat screen.

Does she dazzle potential strangers with opinions on their living rooms, or like Agnes and Edith, is her night better wasted huffing chalky fumes from the newest farm-fresh batch of medications? Is there something worth talking about frozen in place outside sucking down nicotine and indifference for the sake of hooker and humane slacker alike?

You can only soberly chew the fat for so long, crossing arms and shifting your weight so as not to appear out of place, stranded and aloof by the simplistic passing of time. Her scars from mistaken intentions don't seem to bother you nearly as much as the reality encased within such hypotheticals. She can't necessarily be everything: sweet, messy intelligently stifled and long since past her creative years. You can't possibly make that much of an impression: starved for variations of contact and ridden with photographic and fanatical backwash from all the things you've come to buy, love, sell and hate in the past few months.

She would maybe laugh in a room full of people, but out on the sidewalk, there's something empty but potent rising from the gutters. The truth in the shit, and the things that the both of you will eventually choose to ignore.

Pending social obligations and a finely-tuned ability to forget, staring off into hell and forgetting to notice or call ahead. It's a song you want her to not only hear but know on the drive home. You see her in the rear view mirror checking her pupils before the mind sputters forward and you realize that nobody is worth the effort, the subsequent backlash and sugar-less tea parties. You've lost her, but always find your way back again.

stuff happenin'

Jacob, your book is really great/ the reception you had was a great time, people getting together and eating and looking at their lives in a book/ feeling it all right there/ one year, right there/ now TDC is dead and we have to do it ourselves/ what's next, buddy?/ i hope you tell me tomorrow

the show that happened afterward was great, too/ so many bands and acts in one room and all singing with each other/ vibe was killer and the hits kept coming/ beagle club great to see another time like that/ love the bookend feel with hit or miss engines closing/ so intense that band is/ tech ep is real and big/ they are writing and recording their EP right now, actually/ soon that will be on the site, another instance of it all working/ it is working, beautifully/ we, acting as higher fives, played fun and drank beer while we played, because doing that together while we play is part of the fun, matt singing the songs, and ben and myself looking at each other and smiling and then matt will come over to me and laugh and it feels good/ felt good that night, too/ sunflower spec, man, spec'd up/ patrons and fellow collaborators alike looking around and laughing and wow'n/ and cian and his band are always on point/ jacks john and the lot sounding howling through the bar, the man can tingle the keys/ and then there was MFH and the african whippp/ have i seen that man before screaming bout the yochhh/ i don't think so and that is something/ that is something

so that was really fun and now there is the new emmett and mary EP up and the aloha man helped make those songs sound so crisp/ it ushers in the warm weather and the creative juice to flow once again after a winter of shame and hiding/ roll series rolling along with bears and sun and us doing what we are doing/ bikini test finally testin' the waters, the warm island waters transposed into our orange waters/ olivia churning out the hits/ what does this mean to you and what does this mean to her/ it's all making sense/ 1929 giving jtown some juicy edge/ of course it's real/ some poems and stories! great to see/ we never stop with them/ hey dutch when's your book coming out?/ hey tim when are you putting your EP up here?/ those guys are my roommates (jacob now is, too) and every day at some point we are shut up in our holes and we are making things/ i hope that's how it is everywhere, now/ hey matt, when's the loop record coming out?/ when're higher fives recording our record?, let's practice this week/ any other stuff happenin'?/ emily emmy? laura mac? kelly l? what y'all doin'? laci, new painting? bell's probably sitting on some new books, dan anything coming down the pipe? mike mil working on the stories you told me you wanted to do?/ matt, what about that play?/ hope to see it all soon/ i'm doing some stuff, too, slowly, but i'll finish this time, i promise/ so that dangerous ponies show is this week and a lot of us will be on display, so that is next, then another show should happen?/ 709 will be habitable again, so let's use the shit out of that echo chamber/ i miss you ian, john, pat harmony, those who have gone before us/ it's spring, now, today, actually but/ summer's comin', and we're comin'

first time feeling
on coke.
big old things and new things in kitchen.
current seriouslies.
i'm so fucking serious.
i will listen to whatever you have to say.
do you have to say anything real (to me)?
it will be better/blow mind more ruffly.
see you later, laura palmer.
i love you forever

sometimes i make myself
scarce.
it feels how it did when
i used to pretend to sleep
when my mother entered
my bedroom.

i've never really
been one
to harbor any sort of
jealousy
when it came to
girls.
i figured,
go ahead and let them
cheat and pine
over other men.
that keeps me
out of
that horrible condition
we call love
or having to worry
about how
we will collapse
on ourselves
like a
burning barn.

sitting around at work,
stoned.
we already fucked up
one sale.
we were both:
at the register
talking about the same thing
fumbling our way
towards any sort of resolution
with her,
between ourselves.

she took her goods
and bid us good evening
reluctantly.
"what day is the fourth, anyway?"
she called back to us.
"friday
or
saturday?"
"saturday,"
i said.

in my
paranoid brain,
she had just
tested me.

Hey!

Check it out! ...the parade!