Twenty two

When you are twenty two years old and about to enter the adult world of water bills and car payments it's important to try and find a soul mate with good earning potential. A lot people are going to say things to you like,"Oh, but you're so young!" Keep in mind that that will change quickly. And, in my case, the peak of my physical attractiveness came at about age 23, so on some level I most have known that sub-consciously and thus made my move.

This is the year when you have to put together everything you've learned during college. You have to tell people, "I've got my resume at x and y." You've got to work at a job but keep telling people that you're bound for better things, that it's just a little stop over on your way to the top. The point is, it's important to be delusional at twenty-two because is will make the rest of your life a lot easier. This is the year to put it all together.

1) When you're wooing someone be sure to write them some poetry. It doesn't matter if the poetry is really awful, no one really knows what good poetry is supposed to sound like at twenty, so you can pretty much get away with anything. Poetry is the sort of thing that makes people, sometimes even you, think that you are deep. Deep is a good thing.

2) When you're giving a toast at your brother's wedding, yes, that same brother who once had a mullet and whom you used to sleep in the same bed with as children, you've learned since that second grade spelling bee disaster (encyclopedia) and all the not talking to girls in junior high, you drink two full glasses of wine in a matter of minutes and grab the mic and deliver a relatively good toast. To wine!

I'm just glad we took all those Eastern European dancing lessons before the wedding or this could have been disastrous.

Me and the moms who loves having her picture taken.


3) In this year you drive out into the hills and watch the most fantastic meteor shower that will ever take place during your lifetime, while sitting on the front seat of your car between two women. The important thing when you're wooing someone is to keep them on their toes, let them know that you're desirable to other people as well, even if this means dressing up a blow up doll and taking a bunch of pictures with it around town and then showing them to that person to make them jealous.
"That's the two of us at a baseball game."
"Is that blow up doll?"
"This is us in..."
At some point you have to show them this picture indicating that things are over between the two of you.

"She jumped. I'll never know why."
In actuality you spent much of your senior year dressing up a blow up doll in baseball outfits and putting him outside to scare passer by's.

You remember pacing the street outside of the house you shared with five other guys in Goleta. You remember talking on the phone for hours, trying to find out everything there was to know about each other. It was a time when their was no end to the way in which she could surprise you.

It's important when you're twenty-two to immediately take your degree in the humanities and start applying to technical schools. Be sure to take this time to regret the large debt you've racked up and lament all the practical skills you've missed out on. Develop a severe hatred for those people who tell you that you got a degree so that you could learn how to think. Dream in dollar bills. Start writing poetry for Donald Trump.

You remember riding in on the long slow waves of the Pacific in the middle of summer, the way your two hands pulled the boards together and you kissed. You knew, even then, that it was just like a movie. Later on that day you realized that you could recreate that moment on almost any decent wave. But knowledge like that is not important when you're twenty-two, you have the rest of your twenties to figure out how things are not like they are in the movies. That kiss, was perfect.

The year that you are twenty two you fall in love from across the ocean. The two of you write letters every night. You work out for two hours a day because you have nothing else to do but wait for the occasional phone call. Sometimes it's hard to imagine that that was ever the two of you. You were both so young. You listened to this song even though you're not a big country music person.
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You know the phrase absence makes the heart grow stronger. Strangely, the two of you really got to know each other through and through by writing letters every day for six months. You can honestly say that you decided that you were going to marry her on the phone in November, four months since you'd last seen her. It's good to be twenty-two because you don't realize how crazy that is yet. It just seems right.

Signs that I'm aging:

B: I think I'm coming to the housewarming. I heard there were going to be some squirrels there.
M: Huh. Will you only come if they are there? I remember a time when people used to ask if a party was going to have hot girls.
B: Are there going to be hot squirrels there?
M: It's just not quite the same thing....or is it?


Yes, if you come to the party, hot squirrels will be in attendance.

Elegy for a silk tree
The tree’s trunk is slate, a color you’ll recognize in the sky year later, at the beach, a day when the clouds are low and the rain is steady. The bark is often tinged with spots of green, soft and mossy. Your fingers slide easily into the flesh, like a catcher’s mitt. The leaves of the tree are fern-like and soft. In mid-summer, the tree’s flowers bloom pink. The flowers resemble little pink pom poms, a tight cluster of stamens standing upright, at attention, around a small green center. The flowers smell good, and you fight over them with bees idling in the air, and monarch butterflies. The limbs of this particular tree begin nearly at ground level, as if its intention was always to be climbed. The long grey arms, bent downward, like the leaves, beckoning you up. The bottom of the tree’s bark is almost pure white as if a gallon of paint has been spilled on it. The trunk of the tree is striped vertically. You do not know why. The limbs of the tree grow at perfect intervals for a child to comfortably climb them. In your small side yard they have grown horizontally, rather than vertically, and the tree is no more than six feet tall. Between the limbs the tree has small abraded portions from which no branches grow, that look like nothing so much as linkin logs, latching the whole tree together. The branches split off at regular intervals, the fine notches look like knuckles, half-bent, as if forming a fist. The tree’s leaves provide dense shade in the heat of winter. In August, the tree grows green seed pods that decay or are taken off with the wind, some fall at the dry dust at the foot of the tree. You never dig at the roots of the tree though you did often in the side yard. You understand, without really knowing, that the tree and the earth hold a secret to which you are not privy, not welcomed. It is what the tree reveals to you that fascinates you, not what it hides. When you climb it, you are never scared.