Nobody blogs on a Friday night

It seems like a miscalculation to work at a college when you are about turn thirty years old.

Co-worker: I thought you were twenty-five?
M: You must not have seen me in direct light.

The beginnings of the essay are rooted in aphorisms about the Spartans. Now, we have bumper stickers.

At night, all the girls in the building are wearing skirts and the boys smell like cologne. When they get off the elevator it smells like a bar: cigarette smoke and cheap booze. I get on with four loads of laundry.

The secret to getting laundry done in a building with college students is to do it on Friday nights.

At parties people tend to laugh more. The music pounds into the walls and reverberates on the ceiling where we lie on the couch passing the time until our eyes shut. A part of me yearns to be upstairs, to be amongst the spilled drinks and haphazard conversations.

Meaning has a lot more to do with our definition than we'd like to admit. Perhaps God miscalculated when he gave us free will.

The cars that pass on the street below make noise like a whirring fan as the rain spins from their tires. The occasional honk rises above the din of voices from the street level below. The kids and those damn parties. Weren't most of us kids once?

In the building across the street all the lights are turned off. It looks abandoned at night, like some ghost ship moored inland. During the day workmen climb around the exterior constantly working on the large balconies that no one ever walks on.

On Saturdays, no one reads blogs. I said something clever earlier tonight that sounded like an aphorism, but it has already slipped my mind.

Most of life is forgotten. If you're lucky, you remember the good things.

Planes coast through the dark blank sky landing at an airport thirty minutes away carrying strangers into this city where we sleep so early.

Outside a few mindless cicadas make noise, uncertain that their season has passed. How do you know when your season has passed? When the music is no longer intended for you?

I don't read on Saturdays either.

I had an incident with wine I'd like to forget. The wine helped.

After midnight the noise begins to ebb. But in the city it is never entirely silenced. A few miles away strangers wipe the drool from their cheeks and awake in a new city. This miracle of flight, imagined by Da Vinci, failed at by Icarus through pride, is just one more way of getting around.

Tomorrow we'll compare paint samples in a store, discuss the difference between hues of blue and green. We won't ask ourselves about the night before. We'll move ahead with our day, and forget about the sirens and the rain and the voices that drift down for the apartment above. Tonight, they were not meant for us.

"Out, Out - "
by: Robert Frost

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behing the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them "Supper." At the word, the saw,
As if it meant to prove saws know what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap -
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all -
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart -
He saw all was spoiled. "Don't let him cut my hand off -
The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!"
So. The hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then - the watcher at his pulse took a fright.
No one believed. They listened to his heart.
Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

Prepping for my November Joe Purdy concert with a clip from season 1 of Lost.