things, things, things, a preliminary, a LIST:

____- Brown Eyes Girl is what i listen to when i'm happy (wanna be happy) (can't help being happy) (don't need to explain it) (it can be everyanything)
____- California is the lastest place i've left my heart. previous lastest places include: lying on your chest in silence on my yellow couch; my sister shaking her head and saying "and people say I'm a retard!" (and us all cracking up); Haifa walking along the white rocks at 8pm with you; on your doorsteps out the front of your house looking at the nothing of night thinking about nothing and us wrapped in blankets and me chewing an apple and you drifting into and out of the smoke you were either smoking or dreaming or conjuring from the spells only you can cast; when you picked me up at LAX and I thought, 'oh thankgod. at least Monz is here. at least she's here'; stranded with Richard in Prague with no where to sleep and no way to get anywhere else, he made calls. i sat on the sidewalk, crushing the snow as i shuffled me feet back and forth and thought 'thankgod. i can hide here forever'
____- of all the books i have read in my life, i have only ever read 2 cover-to-cover in one single sitting. the second of them happened two nights ago from 10pm-4am. The Road by Cormac McCarthy deserves all the praise it's gotten. It is brutal, harrowing, redemptive, terse, magnificently written, and i am unquestionably more human for having read it (and what more can we ask for from our arts?)
____- it's been 8 years since i've been inside the Adelaide Central Railway Station. i walked down the alley and slowly retraced my youthful steps. For a decade, everywhere i went passed through this building. eventually i made my way to the platforms and watched and listened to the trains come in and out. i thought about catching one back to Hallett Cove and taking a walk... maybe i will before i leave at the end of the week. maybe i never will. something's i can't face ever changing.
____- "One of the many ways that life is an odd proposition is that some people you know you continue to bump into at various junctures again and again. Others, never again. The entire course of your relationship is arrested after that initial experience, delegated to occasional email 'how are you?' status. Considering the extent and frequency of our travels, and my every honest hope to bump into you again somewhere somehow, it seems our relationship is of the second category: Delegated. Nonetheless: Hello. How are you? You are still my friend, in my mind i mean. In my mind you are still my friend. (Did you know that? or suspect it?)"
____- Flying Without Wings by Westlife is one of my guilty pop-song loves. Also: Girlfriend by NSync. And I'll Do Anything For Love by Meatloaf is perhaps the most embarrassing. Your song is Drive by Bic Runga. Your (another Your) song is Gravity by Bic Runga (i find that rather coincidental and odd).
____- he believes in hope incarnated, as though a genetic certainty, or a gospel promise, within life, inside its every happening and event, and believes it so certainly that his often gloomy countenance is read immediately by those who know him best not as pessimism, but a conscious effort at preparedness. He was not an optimist. not a realist, not a pessemist. He was a preparedist. He clenched his jaws and was prepared.
____- outside of California i continue to feel uncomfortable about the signs, symptoms and experience of summer
____- i have a secret belief, that when i'm done (with life), God- or at very least, a white-bearded old man with blue eyes and an infinitely reassuring smile will sit me on his lap, and read me my whole life back to me as a picture book. the two of us laughing at all my mistakes, my failures, my victories- like a coach, or a piano teacher commenting on my recital, and we'd be happy. and i'd feel it was ok. it always takes place under a tree. on a hill.
____- it's not about discovering truth, it's about personifying sincerity.
____- you once said to me: it's so sad we can't marry everyone we love. i've thought about it for 9 years now. it's not a sad thing you know, it's the saddest thing.
____- would it really be a disappointment to anyone if i just stopped writing altogether? i don't think so. i received another batch of rejection notifications from publishers. on the one hand: i sense even in my own work a distinct feeling of unfinishedness. a lack of gloss or shine, that amateur feel of construction- where things hang together not-just-right. It's in the novel. it's in the short-stories. it's in the poetry. it's in everything. this always constant feeling of not-good-enough-yet-ness. (and that means they really are just not that good (enough) (yet)). On the other hand... it is competitive. it is a world dominated by lazy readers and excessive commonisms. and my work is odd. that makes it doubly difficult. blah.
____- It's not a perfect stanza of text i admit. but this bridge (coupled with the music) always almost makes me cry. even when i first this song when i was 12, even then, pre-love, i sensed a sadness about, a sadness i knew it was inevitable i'd come to know. so i felt sad then too- sad in anticipation for what would later come. and has come. and will perhaps come again. and there's no two ways about it.

____And there's no way home- when it's late at night and you're all alone.
____Are there things that you wanted to say?
____And do you feel me beside you in your bed,
____there beside you, where I used to lay?

(it's from Sometimes Love Just Aint Enough by Patti Smyth & Don Henley)
____- you really need to see Rembrandt in life. it's not all brown and boring- i promise.
____- when did i become a person who was soo involved with space- i mean with place?
____- i am racing something. always have been. don't know what. don't know where it came from, or what the consequences of second-place are. or if victory is worse. but it's there. a buzz in the silence. a palpitation of the heart when everything else is easy-going. there's something in the water friends. something suspicious. you can see grey outlines moving under the boat. the shadows are tilting the wrong way. people mouth it to me in trains- perfect strangers. it's all happening. all the time. yup. you betchya it is.
____- i could make an argument that every story written ever ever is a version of the Odyssey, the Orestia or the Oedipal Trilogy- or related to. (just on a side note to this, i can't ever really fathom just how incredible the Epic of Gilgamesh is)
____- he doesn't know the rest. or the beginning. he has trouble chewing just even the present. inputs and outputs. causal associations. relationships, inverse, proportional or not at all. peace and war, and every other dichotomy, bipolar mode (coordinate or otherwise). otherwise and wiser than others. goals and aims and plans and routes and routs and terminology and jargon and labels and taxonomy and all that. (just add spice he says to me and keeps chewing, mixing his plate all together). i worry about this meal. perhaps unnecessarily, afterall- it's just life. and we all know how easy it is to start, and how easy it is to end. and everything in the middle just is. planned. hoped for. (hoped against). willed. dreamed. earned. stolen, lost, found, gleaned. decried. philosophized. theorized. colonized. deconstructuralized. laughed about. made a joke of. enjoyed. giggled through. walked out of. scorned. canonized. all that jazz. all those white horses in the night. all those cafes and baggage carousels and genuine last (honest) goodbyes. (do you ever know which is going to be the last?) (no, of course you don't). (see, hope. hiding in the bookends between time) (nods) (nods) (smiles) (smiles) (c'mon buddy. you really think too much about all this crap. whatdoya say we play video games?) (i... don't know... it's been years since i have) (good. lose yourself mate. it's all it's about).

it's all it's about

(something like that anyway)