Shorts

There are ladders growing
from the ground
like telephone poles.
Climb to the sun
Climb to a cloud
Climb to the smog
Climb to nowhere.

*

Music is no longer
a fist
It is an open palm
petting your hair.

*

There are no grails here
Only red plastic cups

Where I Work

It's a long corridor, a hallway to nowhere, with a window at the end facing a wooden fence. Our apartment is a commercial space between a Karate Dojo and a Mercedes Dealership ("Just like us" I tell people, although I'm not exactly sure what that means). It once was a coffee shop, although it was meant to be an art gallery, with lots of wall space and hardwood floors.



I wouldn't write about it otherwise, but I feel that I have an uncommonly good workspace, which, unfortunately, means that isn't usually conducive to work. There's more pressure because I can't make any excuses ("Uh, my roommate wouldn't leave me the fuck alone" "The guy next to me wouldn't turn down his fucking headphones").



I used to write in Coffee Shops (Luck Bros. in Grandview Heights, Ohio is a great one) because as David Mamet brought to my attention, if you sit around the house all day writing people will wonder what the hell you're doing, how come you're not out at a real job, but since my brother was kind enough to let me move in with him and he's never home, I don't really have that problem.



It can be a very lonely place. Sometimes I feel like I'm sitting at the end of a gun barrel. Sometimes a birth canal.

The Wine Key

His desk was an emerald city of empty wine bottles, with one serving as a vase for a long dead rose. All the water had been sucked up or evaporated and the stem was stiff and crooked but still had little pricks and thorns sticking out.

He was not picky about wine and had an unopened bottle of 2005 Australian Shiraz ($6 at the gas station) sitting next to a plaster effigy of a religious figure. He couldn't tell you who exactly, but his Uncle said it was St. Joseph, and people commonly buried his statue in their yard if they wanted to sell their house. He took the bottle into the kitchen but couldn't remember which drawer the wine key was in because it was one of those utensils of very specific purpose, but vague genus and species. He looked in the silverware drawer, but it wouldn't be in the carefully shaped trinity of slots in the tray and he didn't see it in the little trough next to it where the wooden spoons and ice cream scoops and spatulas all ended up. It wasn't lurking underneath with the saw-toothed knives and graters. He looked in the drawer with the utensils made for bigger jobs; ladles, cleavers etc. and amongst the add-on pieces for various electronic apparatus' (beaters, blenders, bowls), but he could not find the key.

Wine Key. What an appropriate name! he thought. It unlocks a whole other world to you; A world of squashed grapes and finely chosen adjectives, of breathy, poorly thought out declarations of love, of headaches; A world of years or centuries of dirt and rot and wisdom.

He didn't know how on earth one would open a wine bottle without a key. It seemed like a fairly dumb business decision, to only sell wine to people who could afford a key, but then he thought the cheaper wines all come with the more user friendly twist off cap. Could he bite the foil seal off? By god, he might have no alternative. He picked up a steak knife and thought about the logistics of prying the cork with it. He figured he could probably push the cork down to bob in the purple sea if he had no other choice. He looked in all the drawers many times hoping the key would appear, even the ones filled with phone books and take out menus and rusted batteries. Maybe he could just break the bottle off at the neck, like they did when they christened a boat, and carefully decant the wine into a separate container, an empty vase or an old milk carton.

Then he spotted his brother's tool box laying on the counter. His brother collected arcade machines and their living room was something of a workshop where he Frankensteined old Ninja Gaiden cabinets to Bad Dudes joysticks and Street Fighter II: Turbo motherboards. The toolbox was open and he saw the spiraled metal probiscis of the drill sticking out.

He grabbed the drill and pumped the trigger. The bit squealed and spun around and he felt joy rush through him. He pressed the tip to the soft cork of the wine bottle and the drill ground through with ease. He popped the cork out with a deeply satisfying "thunk" and took a swig.

He opened the cabinet to find that all of their glasses were dirty. They didn't have any proper wine glasses, but their commemorative Muppet and Wreslemania cups were all in the sink brimming with a green stew of who-knows-what-refuse amongst the pans and stink of rotten tuna. He looked in another cabinet and found a measuring cup with a stout. He took it down, poured himself 100 mL of wine and went back to his desk.

The Kids

Toby slouched his way upstairs and knocked on his 10 year old brother Felix’ door like he usually did when he got home. He pushed it open and found five 10 year old boys smashing wrestling toys together.

“What up freaks?” Toby said. He pointed at the TV. “What’s this?”

“Wrestlemania,” Alex, a husky voiced kid said.

Johnny, a blond kid with glasses straightened his neck and tried to get in Toby’s face.

“Who you callin’ a freak?” he said.

“You,” Toby said. “Freak.”

Johnny tackled him around the waist. Toby scrunched his arms and knees to his midsection in defense.

“No no no no, get off,” he said.

Johnny jumped up on the bed, which had been stripped of all blankets and pillows to make it a more suitable wrestling ring.

“That’s what I thought,” Johnny said, twisting his neck like a bird.

“Felix, look,” Alex pointed to the TV.

A wrestler with long, multi-colored hair stood on top of a ladder above another lying prone on a wooden table. He came down upon him with a flip and a crack and the kids screamed with delight.

“I hate to break it to you guys,” Toby said, “But this stuff is fake.”

Toby was surprised to see Felix crook his face defensively.

“It’s not fake.” the boys all said.

“I’m not saying I don’t like it, but you’ve got to appreciate it for what it is,”
Toby said.

“So when that guy just jumped off the ladder, that was fake?” Johnny said, “Was there cables strapped to him? Cause I didn’t see no cables.”

“Do you actually think this is a legitimate athletic contest?” Toby said.

“You’re a legitimate athletic contest,” Felix said. The kids all laughed.

“Good one,” Toby mocked. He couldn’t believe his brother was taking sides against him. “Remember when Triple H hit the Undertaker in the face with a sledgehammer?”

“Yeah.”

“That was awesome,” a big kid named Tim said.

“Okay,” Toby said. “Do you think that was a real sledgehammer?”

“Hell yeah,” Johnny said.

“He was bleeding everywhere,” Felix said.

“Okay, well, what do you think would happen if went over to your house and hit your Dad in the face with a sledgehammer?” Toby said to Johnny.

“He’d kick your ass,” Johnny said.

“Maybe. But either way they’d definitely put me in jail. Triple H didn’t go to jail. He was on TV the next night bragging about it.”

“He wouldn’t go to jail. It’s wrestling,” Johnny said.

“Yeah,” Felix said.

“I’m not saying that wrestling sucks because it’s fake. I really like wrestling, but it isn’t real.”

Johnny turned away. “Your brothers an idiot, Felix,” he said.

The other kids all agreed. Toby was stung. He always figured he would be the cool older brother who would awe all of Felix’s friends with his hilarious sense of humor and his ability to bring a different beautiful woman home every weekend, but now they were teaming up on him and would not listen to reason.

A wrestler on TV smacked another with a black folding chair and it bent to the shape of his head.

“What about that, Toby? Was that fake?” Johnny said.

“It’s a real chair but--”

“He’s bleeding!” Alex said.

“It’s probably a blood capsule,” Toby found that he was yelling.

“Don’t get mad just cause you’re wrong.”

“It’s either a blood capsule or he sliced his forehead with a razor blade.”

“He hit him with a chair, Toby. What’s so hard to understand?” Johnny said. He was calm, having proven his point.

“Yeah, what’s so hard to understand,” Felix smiled and laughed with his friends.

“Whatever,” Toby said.

“Not whatever, “Johnny tried to stare Ethan down. “Say it’s real.”

“It’s not real.”

“Say it, punk.”

Toby grabbed the remote control. “You want to see something real?” he said. He changed the channel to an mixed martial arts cage match. One fighter was kneeing the other in the face relentlessly. “This is real.”

“Change it back,” the kids all screamed. They jumped for the remote as Toby held it over his head.

“All right, all right,” Toby said and threw the remote on the bed. Jack, Johnny’s brother, scrambled at it and changed the channel back to wrestling.

Toby went into his own room. He grabbed a book off the shelf and began to sift through the pages. He could hear the kids through the wall jumping off the bed and smacking each other with pillows and fighting heatedly over trivialities and reconciling and patting each other on the back and gossiping like kids do.

A conversation I overheard between a large boy and his teacher

Mrs. Applebaum: Tom, do you have any special plans for the Summer?

Tom: Yes Mrs. Applebaum. Frank and Mike and I are going to take some time and try to build a catapault.

Tom is 11 years old and his body is outgrowing his mind at great speeds.

Eyeshadow

She puts on her eyeshadow.

"I'm too pretty for suicide," she says,
"but I don't know how to live in this world.
When I walk in a room, my friends sneak out."

Her mouth and eyes are wide open
as she applies the shadow to her eyes.
Does anyone look at anything
in a mirror but themselves?

"The one thing I won't do is apologize."

She goes out and dances alone
and when the boys approach her
she twirls away.

Most nights she doesn't say goodbye
she just disappears,
walks 20 blocks home, barging
past 20 blocks of people,
the cold rain smearing her eyeshadow.

"Fuck'em. I don't want to be
a pessimist. I can't change
who I am."

She puts on her eyeshadow.
She slit her wrists once.

"Somebody stole my whole life.
I'm not sure who it was.
It might've been me."

She puts on her eyeshadow.
She never listens.
My words bounce off, sweep around her.

"Sometimes I know I'm the worst person I know.
Other times I think I might be god."

All of her real friends
are dead. That's the only
way it can be.
They sing her lullabyes.

She puts on her eyeshadow.
Some people worship her.

I don't know what I'm doing here.

Ticket Stubs

He knew his childhood was over when he took the ticket stubs out of his wallet and buried them in a drawer underneath love letters and birthday and baseball cards and all the other artifacts of youth. The stubs represented a little under a decade of movie going experience, from Toy Story 2 to Superbad. He'd even transferred them with all his other important pieces of identification from the orange velcro wallet he bought at the Grand Canyon when he was ten to the leather one he got his junior year of high school. Now he needed room for condoms, so the stubs had to go...

Whenever he was bored at work or waiting at the bus stop with nothing to read he would take them out and look through them. He had shuffled them all out of chronological order, but they were conveniently dated and priced and titled and would bring him back instantly to the night (or sometimes afternoon) he saw the movie. He couldn't believe how cheap the movies used to be, or how expensive they'd become. There were tickets that he only bought so he could sneak into other films, R rated films that he and his 12 year old friends had to be protected from. There were movies he saw with girls whose bobby pins were lost under the table next to his bed, musicals and fairy tales. Movies he saw with friends he'd lost touch with, movies about war and loneliness and guys trying to get laid. In high school he and some of those friends had a contest to find out who could be first to see a movie in each of the 24 theaters at the local multiplex. He'd bought tickets to some really awful movies but Charlie Larson still beat him. There were stubs for independent films, for retrospectives, for blockbusters and flops. Stubs from the dollar movies, the drive-in, the multiplex, the drafthouse, the art house and the grand old vaudeville house downtown.

The ticket is a beautiful thing, a symbol of a journey, of transportation emotional and physical. You buy a ticket for a concert, a game, a train ride. You go up to the guy in the glass booth with the microphone and he talks to you through a little speaker. Even though he's two feet away he sounds like he's Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, or maybe, more appropriately, Darth Vader. You slip him the money and he slips you the ticket. You take it 100 feet or so and the usher tears it and puts half in a little box. You keep half and they keep half. You share. They tell you were to go and you walk past all the posters, considering them, checking them for the faces or names of actors or directors or writers you trust, who have proved themselves to you, who have given you some feeling that you wanted. They all live in the same place. Los Angeles: The Angels. There is something angelic about the people up there, the way they drift over your head in that dusty beam of light and pour all over the screen, giant and incandescent. People like Brando and Bogart and Hepburn (both of them). Stars. That's really what they are. We all want to laugh and cry and be scared and thrilled and believe in triumph and accept suffering and they teach us how to do this.

After he found a seat he always was careful to put the stub in his wallet. He didn't know why anyone would throw them away. Once you threw them away, the memory would start to vanish. To him the stubs were a catalog of mythic and emotional experience. One reminded him of the time he sat next to two old people who made out all the way from coming attractions to end credits. Another the time an usher caught him and his friends in The Hills Have Eyes when they'd bought tickets to A Prairie Home Companion.

They give the stubs back for a reason.

But it wasn't practical for him to keep them anymore so he put them in his dresser drawer and when he left home for college he dumped the drawer into a box and put it in his parent's attic with the rest of the archive of his youth. He might come back when he bought a house of his own or when his parents died and find the stubs next to the golden souvenir box he got at his senior prom. He might open the box and find his date's corsage, rotten but still fragrant. He might sift through the ticket stubs and remember the movies and the girls and the friends of his adolescence and feel the nostalgia blow through his soul like an autumn breeze.

My baby is blowing away like gold dust

The doctors told her she had the bones of an 80 year old woman. Her beauty might crumble to the ground like a house all chewed up by termites.

She used to eat leaves and nuts and bamboo shoots and chew gum for the calories but now they had to force the food in her veins. She didn't know how to eat a cheeseburger cause she'd whipped her stomach to stop it from begging. She took laxatives to hurry the food through before her body had a chance to steal any of the nutrients. She was my girl. None of us knew how to stop her. She was dead set on beauty and her bones were disintegrating.

I could always tell they were soft. A lot of people think gold is hard, but when you touch the real thing you can bend it like clay. I'd grab her wrist and it would bow slightly. Sometimes we'd be making it and I thought I might just snap her all to pieces. It was almost macabre. The skin, the muscle clung to her bones like a wet t-shirt. All the tissue was being blown right off her frame.

It seems imaginary. It seems like vanity, and maybe it starts there, but it becomes something else. You feel sorry for kids in Africa with no food, but it's harder to sympathize with some pretty rich bitch whose only problem is that she won't eat a hoagie. All her friends were obsessed with their weight, counting the numbers, watching the scale like stockbrokers watching the ticker. Maybe most women are. Maybe I'd just never been around women before. It was kind of amazing, the way they'd support and deceive each other, reporting that one of them had gotten high and ate a whole pint of ice cream. I didn't understand it, but my girl had a real problem. It was not a choice to her.

Now, would I have loved her if she weighed 300 lbs.? Probably not. 120? Sure. Skinny girls can look pretty fucking good, but I've been with skinny girls, real thoroughbreds, and they look a lot better than they feel. It is slightly awesome to touch a firm, beautifully toned ass, but when you can pick up a girl and throw her on the bed, I don't know, it's too easy. I want a girl I've got to fight a little. I don't want to touch a girl whose spine pokes through her back like a fucking stegosaurus.

People are attracted to strength, to rarity. It's easy to eat cheeseburgers and not exercise and that's why nobody wants to fuck those people. It's harder for a girl to be thin, and it's damn near impossible for a girl to be thin and have the fat blubber up in her tits and ass. That's why those chicks are desirable. It's Darwin. It's science. Lydia was becoming too rare. When animals get too rare, they go extinct.

Six word story

Transplant recipient marries widow, kills self

Breath

Love is a claw
shoveling our hearts into
the incinerator.
Our souls rise up
the chimney stacks,
bodies, ash lay
behind on the floor.

The Goddess is a hologram.
There is no authority. Our
emotional machinery was grown
on an assembly line.
We have been programmed
to be hungry.

This pump and valve runs
on beautiful illusion.

Enjoy what you can
while you can
without destroying yourself
or anybody else.

Airy Nothings

I have been recording some music in the attic over the past few weeks. My goal is to have an album featuring between ten and fifteen original songs recorded by the time I graduate (August 24).

I've written the songs over the course of the past few years. Most of them are basically just fragments. I usually get bored with a song and leave it wounded rather than kill it off completely.

I find it really hard to write lyrics. Music is such an ethereal thing, writing lyrics for a melody is like trying to pin a butterfly to the wall while it's alive and fluttering around. Most of the songs are fairly typical love songs, but I think my style is becoming a little more sophisticated. I feel like a lot of music serves to keep us in a kind of permenent adolescence. There's a lot more to write about than holding hands and heartbreak. I guess pop music is particularly effective when dealing with these subjects, but I'm trying to write about something else, not politics, but just anything interesting.

I am using Apple's Garageband and a Blue Snowball microphone for drums, organ, percussion and vocals, as well as an iMic USB input to record the guitars. I think the guitar amplifiers on garageband are basically shit, but I can't seem to get a good sound any other way.



If somehow you manage to find yourself all the way out here on this little internet outpost would you please be so kind as to visit this link to here some of the music.

Here's a tentative track listing:

1. Mushroom Cloud
2. I Like the Way Your Pants Fit
3. Static Electricity
4. Let's Stay Up All Night
5. I Want to Wake Up Next To You
6. Hall of Mirrors
7. Marilu
8. Black Rainbows
9. Tattered, Shattered, Broken and Beat
10.Girl With Her Feet on My Dashboard
11.Supersonic Narcissist

The Stuff That Dreams are Made On

There is something almost holy about a dolly shot, as if the camera were being carried by angels. The viewer floats towards or around a subject as if on a cloud.

A zoom is robotic, mechanical, produced within the technology of the camera. The human eye has no zoom capability. A zoom is almost like a gunshot; The camera is aimed at the subject and the view launched like a bullet towards the target. It creates excitement, and sometimes comedy in films like "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "Kill Bill" where the clumsy showmanship of a quick zoom becomes the cinematic and emotional equivalent of a Magician's "TA-DA!"




The Dolly-Zoom may be the most famous camera technique in film, used probably to the best effect in Vertigo and subsequently in films like Goodfellas and Jaws. A reverse dolly zoom gives the viewer the impression that space is folding in, bearing down on the subject. The world is accordion-ing, shrinking rapidly.

A Pan is almost surveillance. The steady rhythm of the pivot approximates a robot turning its head. The camera is searching. When I think of pans, I think of the end of "The Conversation", where Francis Ford Coppola posts the camera high on the wall in Harry Caul's apartment and pans back and forth as Harry tears up his floors, paranoid that he has been bugged, poetic justice, as Harry makes his living spying on others. In a way, all film is voyeuristic; It is invited or artificial surveillance. The audience spies on the most dramatic moments in the lives of the characters, fictional or not.

And yet the mechanics of the camera can be manipulated to create the most divine effects, can turn men into gods. How magnificent it is to see Jean Taris twisting and falling in slow motion in Jean Vigo's film!

A lap dissolve is a dreamy transition. The screen becomes a pond that ripples, a windshield splashed with rain, an eye full of tears. The eye is wiped clean and we are gently whisked into the new scene, the new time and place as if out onto streets washed clean with rain, as if we were emerging from a car wash. A lap dissolve is a baptism, a cleansing of the informational and emotional residue of the previous scene.

A fade is a descent into sleep, or an awakening. A birth or a death. Shakespeare may well have been talking about movies when he said they "are the stuff that dreams are made on and their little lives are rounded with a sleep". The light rising up from the blackness at the beginning, and falling back into it when the story is over is the most natural, beautiful framing a film could take, a perfect imitation of life, of each day of our lives: A morning, a sunrise, an awakening, a birth; the story of life, the day; the drift back into darkness, nightfall, sleep, death, never knowing the precise cleft between consciousness and unconsciousness. Film has brought us closer than any other medium in history to seeing our dreams made real, to creating a worldwide mythology, to bringing the images that we see in our mind's eye into life, into light. Films are almost tangible, but not quite, like water in a raincloud.

Film is a Frankenstein monster resurrected from limbs of celluloid and charged with the flowing currents of words, emotions, ideas.

Lame White People

Stuff White People Like is a frighteningly accurate website about you and I and all the other progressive middle class white people out there.

I like girls with bangs, Wes Anderson movies and have not one, but TWO arts degrees. I am writing this on a Powerbook. I have a shelf full of New Yorker magazines that I haven't read and a couple copies of "McSweeney's" that I bought simply because they look pretty (I think the writing kind of sucks).

To the list of things White People like I would add:

Vespas
Craigslist
Wine
Audrey Hepburn
Graphic Novels
Messenger Bags
Headbands
Ironic facial hair
Ninjas
LOL Cats

The Quarry

Seymour looked out at the cliffs that had been carved away and the smooth blue water and wondered how deep the lake was and what lay at the bottom.

He had heard that it used to be a quarry until twenty or so years before. Italians had come over to cut the limestone out and make it into gargoyles that they put in the sky.

Supposedly when the quarry was flooded they abandoned all their machinery down there; Machinery that was too big or too old to be worth hauling out.

He thought about diving in with some goggles and seeing if he could swim down far enough to see the rusted old skeletons of cranes and fossilized shells of drills and ancient dulled knives. Probably no one would ever see them again. They would never again breath the air or feel the wind and sun.

He wondered if he dove off the cliff and hit his head on a rock and disappeared down into the dark how long it would take for him to float to the bottom.

He had grown up in a condo nearby and no matter where he went or what he did he felt the quarry was the center of his world, the great drain that he would always swirl back to, the well spring of his life.

He felt that, no matter what crime he committed, these waters would always offer him absolution.

He dove in.

Apathy

On the green the students
circle around a woman who brandishes
the Bible like a gun.

“You will roast!” She decries
pointing her bulky finger.

Students take turns stepping into the
circle. “I can see your panty line, sinner!”
they scream and “Whore! Whore!”

A kid hands one of the screamers a soda and
slams his own soda into it. “Cheers.”
The students laugh.

I am only there to see
the girls lying in the grass,
waiting for the sun to cook them
until they’re succulent.

A foam hot dog with arms
and legs comes around
campaigning
with propaganda
of his own.

An ex-girlfriend, tearing the
blankets and pillows out from
underneath, discarding me
to the floor, told me
my apathy
was astounding.

Sweetheart, nobody knows
that better than I do.

I wish I could fasten myself to the circle,
but, for me, destiny lies stillborn,
like a fortune cookie, shattered before
I could crack it open.

The Soft

We're all so goddamned special aren't we? Everyone I know is an artist, a musician, a philosopher, a writer, an actor, a director, a dancer, and sometimes all of these things at once. Myself included. I'm probably the worst offender of all. It'd be a real shame if we didn't share our unique and profound minds with the world, if we didn't "express ourselves" (probably one of the most vile phrases in the language). I'm not sure, but I suspect that real art isn't about self-expression at all and that self-expression is basically a form of masturbation.

And what will happen to us? Some will be ground up and packaged and earn a lot of money making advertisements. Some will live in once-grand Victorian mansions furnished with soggy old couches and grimacing bookshelves, blocks from the colleges where we teach. Others will vomit up our creativity in the morning with last night's beer and go wait tables. Some will frequent coffee houses and grow so fat in the head with smarm and knowledge that we will barely fit through the holes of our turtlenecks. A handful of us might actually have something brilliant and original to say, and will be completely miserable for it.

I don't know if I could live any other way.

The Porpoise

She danced like a porpoise and her skin was rubbery and smooth and hard and wet like a porpoise's. She took my hand and pulled me out to the floor where she danced twice as fast as everyone else, throwing her head back, wiggling her legs, putting her hands in her hair in a move that looked like it had been choreographed for a six year old by her mother during rehearsals for Star Search.

I was delighted by her style and tried to take her hand but our rhythms were too different and the puzzle pieces of our knees and thighs and crotches would not fit together.

I leaned in. "You dance like a maniac," I said, "I like it."

I did like it, but I was apologetically uninterested in her.

My own style of dancing is a hybrid of Michael Jackson bopping around to "Rockin' Robin" and Bruce Springsteen clodhopping like Frankenstein in the "Dancing in the Dark" video. I can't dance without snapping my fingers or clapping my hands or thumping the bassline against my chest. I usually end up alone on the floor at the end of the night, cutting back and forth through the crowd like a shark looking for the last beautiful wounded girl.

At the end of the night the porpoise girl pulled me out to the front of the club where it was quiet.

"Since I'm probably never going to see you again," she said, sounding like the preamble to the declaration of a crush. I scrambled to figure out how I would gently put her down. "...I just want you to know that you can feel free to contact me if you ever want to get coffee or anything."

"Oh yeah, definitely, definitely, sure," I was relieved. She had been in one of my classes and I was very fond of her as a person, I just didn't want to have to be cruel. I don't think anybody does.

Communion

Everybody else in the yard sings Don’t Stop Believin’
though they don’t know the words.

They are looking for the magic.
We are all looking for the magic.

Some find it through drugs, or religion,
some through art, some
sports or music.
Some through love.

Wings aflutter, alone or together,
we are all beating
our way up to God.

The Summer air is charged
with static electricity
or maybe it’s streaming
through my veins.
Touch ignites my skin.

I can never tell if the spark
comes from me or the girl.
I guess we made it together.

A flower petal drops into
my glass of water and
I drink it up.

Up to My Ass in Daisies

I first saw Rita at a bohemian coffee shop where a mutual friend was performing a magic show. She had a blond, beehive hairdo, eyes that could read every thought you were trying to hide and lips soft and plump as strawberry taffy. I drunkenly searched the Facebook guest list for her later that night and recognized her by the honeycomb on top of her head. I sent her a message and, to my surprise, she gave me her phone number. I called many times, but never got past the voicemail. "Hi, this is Rita, leave a message." I memorized the timber of her voice, the little girl panicking over whether she should get the raspberry sorbet or the peanut butter brickle. I was in love with her for a few weeks but gradually gave up on the idea that she was going to save my life.

Six months later I was in an arty dive bar (the kind where you can't tell the difference between the scruffy hipsters wearing the carefully frayed 200 dollar jeans and ironic trucker hats and the scruffy people who are actually poor wearing frayed jeans and trucker hats) when I saw her for the second time.

"Oh shit," I said to my friend Oscar, "I think I know that girl."

"Which?" he stood on his toes and craned his neck.

Oscar is, as he is proud to admit, a huge smartass. He goes by the creed "It's better to be a smartass than a dumbass," although I would argue that this isn't always true, that sometimes your mouth can get you into situations that your body can't get you safely out of.

"With the hair," I indicated.

"Go talk to her."

He pushed me out onto the dance floor and I dawdled over to her, half nodding my head to the music, which was nearly unlistenable. There was a band onstage playing noise rock with a golf club, a filing cabinet and an electronic sample of frogs croaking.

She was swirling her drink around with a blue straw. I tapped her on the shoulder and when she turned around I was taken aback to see how much more beautiful she was in person.

"Hey!" She said and gave me a hug as if we were old friends.

"You have more freckles than I imagined," I said.

"Thanks," She said, smiling.

Our conversation was going well and she traveled with me to a booth by the pool table where Oscar and I were playing against two lesbians. We were down five balls and I got up to hit a difficult bank shot. I am a fair pool player at best, but I sunk it right in the pocket. Rita held up her drink and raised her eyebrow at me. I sunk another one across the table into the corner pocket, cutting it gingerly and putting the english on it necessary to keep the cue from going into the opposite pocket. I didn't look at Rita, as I was "in the zone" and I knew how cool I looked and I wanted to show her how casual I was about the whole thing. I sank another one in the side pocket and slicked my hair back like Tom Cruise in "The Color of Money." I could see out of the corner of my eye that Oscar had sat next to Rita, and I figured that they were probably talking about what a great guy I was.

After hitting it in the side pocket I left the cue in a bad position and my only shot was an attempt at the corner which I had to jump over a stripe to make. I slid the cue smoothly between my fingers and chipped briskly at the point where the ball met the felt. It jumped, arched over the edge of the table and clacked against the concrete floor. One of the lesbians caught it and her friend handed her a cue. I shrugged my shoulders as she set the ball back down on the table. I sat next to Oscar and tapped him on the shoulder but he didn't turn around. He was gesturing aggressively at Rita.

"That's bullshit," he said belligerently, "You're full of shit."

Alarmed, I butted my way between them.

"What's bullshit?" I said. "What're you talking about?"

"You know this girl?" he said, pointing at her with his beer.

"Yeah. Sort of." I smiled at her. She was searching the room for her friends.

"She doesn't believe in relationships."

"What do you mean?"

"She doesn't believe that a man and a woman, or two woman, or two men should be in a monogamous or open relationship. Ever."

"Why's that?" I said. Oscar started to answer. I cut him off. "I'm asking her. It's your shot." I handed him the cue. He pounded the rubber end softly on the floor. I tried to catch her attention. "I think that's really interesting. Why do you believe that?"

She espoused a lazy explanation of her philosophy. "I just think that you should experience everything and committing to another person like that really limits what you can experience. It's like you're betrothed to that one person."

Betrothed. I remembered how, when I used to correspond with her on Facebook, her messages were grammatically fairly incoherent, but she would throw in a five dollar word every once in a while, one she had clearly learned from a "Word-A-Day" calendar or the like.

"Mutual romantic love is the ultimate thing you can experience in this universe," Oscar yelled, cutting her short. She smiled curtly.

"It's your turn, Oscar." I tried to push him off the seat.

"You can be in love," she said. "I didn't say you couldn't fall in love."

"How're you going to fall in love with someone if you're not in a relationship with them?" Oscar said. I leaned so far off the seat trying to see around him that I almost fell off. I was in disbelief. He was murdering my chances with this girl. He knew how lonely and pathetic I was and he was killing me.

"I fall in love all the time," she said. "Love is transitory. It's not something you're meant to hold onto. It flows."

He mimed jerking off, "Give me a fuckin' break."

She stood up. "I'm gonna go find my friends. 'Bye Pete." She waved a small wave to me while looking around the room and walked away.

I took Oscar by the shoulder. "What the fuck are you doing?"

He went to hit a shot. "That chick was fucking crazy."

"So what? She's gorgeous. You just killed my chances with her."

Oscar rammed a ball off the rail and missed the side pocket. "You never had a chance. You heard her. She doesn't believe in relationships."

I could see her across the room standing in a loose circle with her friends. They were all wearing colorful summer dresses and when they went out the front door I felt like beating Oscar to death with the thick end of the pool cue. Why would he torpedo me like that? He had a girlfriend. He wasn't trying to meet girls, but he was the only friend I had who liked to go out. I went out with him three nights a week, salivating at every attractive girl in every bar we went to, too timid to approach them. We usually ended each night drunkenly barking into the speaker at McDonald's and pathetically nibbling at McChicken sandwiches. I didn't want to end up at the drive-thru that night.

I walked over to the door. I pushed it open, surprised by how cool the air was for June. Rita and her friends were trying to hail a cab. I ran to her and grabbed her by the elbow.

"Hey, Rita," I said, "I just wanted to apologize for my friend. He's kind of an asshole when he's drunk."

"It's fine, don't worry about it," She looked completely unconcerned about Oscar's opinions on anything. She got into the cab and it pulled away.

"You ready to fucking go, man?" Oscar appeared behind me, lighting a cigarette.

"Let's go get a fucking McChicken sandwich," I said, and we went home in Oscar's parent's mini-van.