nightmarish

This week I experienced my first recurring nightmare. Something out of a low-budget horror movie. Every night, I fall asleep and I drift back to high school. It is horrible. I'm not supposed to be there. I'm surrounded by kids ten years younger than me, ditching teachers who will see that I'm wearing a sleeveless shirt, nervous that the principal will see me smoking in the parking lot, that I'll get lost in the hall ways trying to find my next class. I try to beat the bell, even though I don't have anywhere particular to go. Sometimes I get trapped in the stairwell or in a clausterphobic space in the catacombs of the school. Yet the dream is always truly frightful... it feels worse than in if I were naked in public or running from a rabid crocodile, even though my waking years in high school were far from nightmarish.

As a teen, I was able to submit to structure and authority to a degree I can hardly imagine as an independent, obstinant twenty-something . But at the end of the summer I will voluntarily relinquish my transient, layaboutish lifestyle and wager on my ability to cram graduate school, seminary, and gainful employment into a Juliana sandwich, using the muscles of my weak weak will.

boodah

nothing to brag about

i spoke my first words in a language i no longer understand
i still wet my bed in first grade
sometimes i wet my pants during recess
i played doctor
i still played with barbies in junior high
my mom took my barbies away when she discovered that they were having sex
i still played house in junior high
i used to pretend that i had illegitemate children
my first kiss had a girlfriend
i learned about sex from high school biology class
i peed in my pants three times in 2002
i had pinworms
i went to my first bar after college
i had my first beer after college
i had my first hangover after college
i had foot fungus
i owe money to credit card companies
last night i passed out in my back yard

i feel better now

I tried to flick a bug away, to send it off to a life of satisfaction among plants and other bugs and away from my arid lawn chair. But instead of a flick, I accidentally squished it.

I know God is infallible and doesn't make mistakes. But sometimes I wonder...

girl's best friend

Willis is the best dog that has ever existed in the whole history of the world.
She taught me more about love than I ever thought possible.
She is happy. I miss her so much more than she misses me.
Why I love her:

she is so fuzzy
she caught me a jackrabbit
whenever I fed her, she always kissed me before starting to eat
she only has one eye
nobody ever notices that she only has one eye
she is beautiful!
she loves to wrestle
she doesn't bark
she doesn't bite
she will lick you for 10 minutes if you let her
huge tongue
her tail is like another whole animal
she loves making friends
she'll play with anyone, regardless of size or species
she always knows her way home
she once caught her tail on fire
she also jumped out of a moving car (the same day)
she hates hates hates baths
she's good at finding animal carcasses
she's good at disguising herself as an animal carcass
she loves to jump in slimy puddles
she doesn't eat poop
she is independent
she made me laugh every day we had together
she dreams about herding sheep
she can climb rocks
she is bi-lingual
she can run faster than I can bike
you can see how much she loves her life

Guts and gardens

Our backyard is almost totally lacking in normal, suburban, domestic grass. A thousand varieties of weeds carpet the ground in green. Now it's April, and we have our own field of yellow, orange, violet wildflowers.

Last fall, huge man-hole-like tumors infested the tiny yeard. I spent three days with a shovel, digging out palettes of overgrown, monster crab-grass colonies, extracting them like rocky molars. The remaining holes lay fallow all winter and now they teem with soft clover. But in other corners of the yard, the crab-grass is shooting up like wheaty trees, lush and wicked. I don't mind the rest of the ground cover, but the crab grass is ugly and suffocating. It thrives, dies, and leaves the ground dry and hard, resistant to new life.

I don't know what to do. Do I keep fighting a never-ending, losing battle to rid the yard of such a prolific and resiliant cancer, knowing that every dropped seed, any remnant of root, will spring back to punch my wildflowers in the face? Or do i submit the the fertility of such an eager neighbor, let it choke out the yard without reference to its own future? I guess, honestly, it depends on my own sporatic cravings to sweat and toil with the earth. And my own determination not to let my ass get kicked by some seedy grass.
erp.