Hair Today. Chewed. Sickoes. Nice Ass. X. Profundity.

…I’ve had a good hair day but it wasted on a faculty meeting.
I need some other social interaction to justify it.

…In one of those carts where they put really discounted items at the grocery store, I spot this bottle of pink body wash. What I think is: Son of a bitch, wouldn’t it be cool if that stuff made you smell like bubble gum?

I mean, I knew it wouldn’t. But I bought it. And now, out of the bath, having lathered up with it?

I do. I smell like bubble gum.

This, if nothing else, makes the world feel in order.

…Everybody is sick.
Coughing and sore throating and sniffling and fevering.
Damn it.

Antibiotics.
I’ve taken enough as of late.
Those magic pills.

If I knew how they really worked, I wouldn’t believe in them.

The same way if I were on the telephone with a scientist and he or she explained to me that our voices are not actually being projected these great distances, but that little electronic things are mimicking vibrations that have been mimicked by other little electronic things, I’d not believe in the telephone any longer either.

Because that just doesn’t sound right.
That means when I talk to you on the phone, if I ever do, that’s not really your voice. That’s electricity mimicking your voice.

I can’t believe that.
I’d have to hang up on that scientist.

…In Star or People, whichever of those magazines have the un-airbrushed photos—and that’s a lovely thing, photos which makes you re-remember the cliché that nobody, not even stars, look like stars—there is a picture of Paris Hilton’s ass in a bikini.

Ass is the wrong word, and if you’ve seen the photo, you know what I mean.

…What happens to me, I’m like everybody, show me a face long enough, tell me that she’s hot long enough, give her a lot of attention, and I’ll end up wanting her.

Ashlee Simpson. Paris Hilton. These girls I wouldn’t spend time with in a bar.
But exposure has made them too my taste. Or made my taste to them.
The way you learn to drink beer.

Anyway, this photo of Paris’ butt, it’s awful.

(I think of a girl in LA a long time ago and how after we finally coupled she put on a shirt but no pants and followed me out onto her porch as I was going, and when I turned to look at her waving it seemed almost obscene [that half nudity midnight public] to me and how when she then turned to go in I saw not an ass, but a butt, and how driving away I was haunted by the idea of how small she was, how insubstantial she, it all, seemed)

And there is Paris, her bottom in a bikini, as if she had back all the way to her legs, and somebody had made a small vertical incision, a shallow line, in her back to suggest two halves.

Ugh.

That’s me sitting in the gym reading People or Star or whatever because I forgot to bring a book, thinking, as soon as I turn the page away from that particular photo: Yes, but I want her anyway.

…My son gets sick on the day he is to fly back with his mother. So he and her and me, we had another day together.

And I realized that for some long time, as good as things are between us, my ex wife and me, as well as we get along, as much as we share about our son, she’s shut a part of herself off to me.

This necessary coldness.
A testament to pain.

The trauma we inflicted there, it was lethal.
Or maybe this is just a coma.

…And wandering around the university today, a gray day, a thought comes into my head.

My head, it is stuffy, my chest, it is a coughy, and I slept too much last night, and not at all the night before; my head, it is made strange by the time of day, a sudden burst of aimlessness, the weather.

I’m waling. And it’s coasting, my brain.

Then suddenly it thinks something so loudly that I say it through my mouth.

That’s me waling, talking out loud, not even to myself.

And my brain, it doesn’t know where that something comes from. My brain, it thinks it channeled it or that it was delivered by angels.

My brain in its fatigue so anxious to believe in truth through inspiration.

So this phrase hatches out of my mouth, into the gray air, over the offgreen grass, this phrase, it hatches right out in front of me and comes back into my ears, back into my brain.

And what I think at first, what my brain thinks, it thinks: Jesusgod, that was profound.
It thinks, You’ve come right up against the mysteries of the universe.

Stupid brain.
Like a drunk brain ready to embrace a t-shirt, a bumper sticker, any catch phrase as the sermon on the mount.

What did it make me say?
It made me say: You’d not be here if you hadn’t come.

Read wisdom into that if you can. I can’t.

(…Forgive me for wanting Ashlee Simpson. I mean, I don’t really. I know what a talentless moron she is. It’s just that I’ve seen her pic once to often.)