Year 27

Twenty Seven
In your twenty seventh year you leave Washington, D.C. in the rear view mirror and head back to CA. You spend the summer driving up and down the beautiful feather river canyon. The scenic highway snakes along the thin gorge carved out by the river passing bridges that you stop and take pictures of, past railroad tracks that weave in and out of mountains. It is good to leave D.C. behind for the brown hills of northern CA that guide you down into the Sacramento Valley.
Unfortunately for the first part of your stint in Quincy you lived in a hovel. A hovel is defined as a pretty crappy place to live by three out of the five leading dictionaries. Somehow the foundation of the house had eroded away enough so that spiders could gain ingress into your house with impunity. Unfortunately, the ingress was apparently right above your bed as between the two of you, you killed no less than ten spiders that had crawled in to sleep with you. The cabin was decorated with a moose theme. I believe the motif of brown was picked up upon because brown hides a lot.
You didn’t have a job that summer. Your job was to beat Dark Wizard and relive your eighth grade years. Your job was to visit your family practically every weekend and to go to the gym. It is good that you spent that summer in Chico. You were there to lay your grandmother’s ashes to rest only an hour away from the town where you lived that summer. A place you’d rarely been. You were glad to have been there, to have seen all that sunlight, all those pine trees, and bits of her ashes floating in the wind, against a clear blue sky.
You took this infamous picture.

Thank goodness only you know that this edition of the photo has been edited to crop out your prominent knee braces.

To reward yourself for a busy summer of not working, except at mom’s house

Working at mom's house. This was also the summer that I decided to do a cowboy theme and use words like britches and spurs frequently.

you take a family vacation to Colorado. Sadly, you didn’t have any near death experiences. You saw a lot of beautiful things but nobody ran around with lightning targeting them or stared down buffalo’s. You just kind of threw around horse shoes, played ping pong, and looked at pretty stuff. Life is not about the good times, it’s about the crazy stuff.

Heaven on Earth. Yankee Boy Basin.
Strangely, the thing you remember the most is Yankee Boy Basin, a place that was only accessible by jeep. You passed a massive white glacier, and sat at the edge of a pure waterfall overlooking untouched nature. You’re still five years old wanting to discover dinosaur bones in the side yard. A place like that reminds you that on earth is a piece of heaven. But you can tell, even now, that you’re not doing it justice. And you remember that when you came back down and tried to share the beauty of that place with those who had been unable to go that an argument ensued. The gist of which was explained long ago by Plato.
That winter you travel to Maine. You discover that Maine has lots of lighthouses. You also discover that Maine is ungodly cold and that lighthouses are best viewed on postcards from people you used to know and not in person. When you are done looking at lighthouses you drive around until you can find more lighthouses. You ask to see a place in Maine that has a lighthouse built inside a lighthouse.

Lighthouses are pretty aren't they.

Then you and T stand on some large rocks and watch the grandeur of waves striking shore while your wives yell about “rogue waves.” By the time you’re twenty seven everyone’s wife starts sounding like your mother.

Rogue Wave=instant death/harpies yelling from above.

This is the first year of the rest of your life. You are going to travel more. You are going to use handrails when going up stairs not because your knees hurt but because it’s safer. You’re going to spread ashes and start things like book clubs. You are not going to be ashamed of things like book clubs because you are no longer afraid of being compared to a middle-aged woman. You are still flawed. This is something that will never change no matter how many years pass. You will go to CA and Maine and Colorado. You will pray in Yankee Boy Basin amazed at God’s grandeur and then you will argue when you leave. T.S. Eliot “Till Human Voices Wake us and we Drown.” You will start to get more comfortable with getting older. You’ll think that if you could just get four months away from the world perhaps you’d write a novel. You’ll dig in the dirt in the backyard of your childhood trying to help your mother put back together her garden. You will begin to age more gracefully.

Year 26

You turned twenty-six in the shadow of an endless winter, walked down streets lined with snow and patched with sunlight passing through the wet and empty limbs of trees. You listened to an iPod while you walked. It’s amazing that you can walk through a busy street, walled in by brick buildings, and know nothing about the people you pass. It seems like perhaps God made a mistake with humanity, leaving so much between our minds. Perhaps that is why you will always miss the ocean because it managed to capture that distance, the unknown thoughts that pass between a brown haired woman pushing a stroller in the cold, and a young man walking down the street, shoulders hunched to shield his ears from the stiff breeze.
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You think of moving someplace new and starting your life over, in a new place that didn't already know it was ruined. You are secretly jealous of old time sailors who could just move to a new port.
This is what it means to be twenty six in Ann Arbor. It means that you walk the streets alone and listen to music that makes you dream of being miles and lives away from where you are. Those days you often stare at the sky through bare limbs and reflect on how meager your life is, how you don’t even notice the sky unless the harmonica is being played at just the right moment. You start to confuse this sadness with something else, with unbeing. You think that at twenty-six each person has been given a task in youth and that perhaps you have missed yours.


The best nights are spent with a bottle of red wine and good conversation while playing a game of spades. Some days you walk through the arboretum on winding paths in the understory of trees talking about skunk cabbage and prairie grass. These are also good days. Twenty six is like being unmoored or like being the Essex after the whale has left.
This is also a year that you learn to hate cars. Up until this point in your life cars have been a means of conveying you and some friends from one place to another. This year cars become the bane of your existence. You develop an intimate relationship with each of your vehicle’s problems. You talk to them. You start to understand why people name their cars or boats. You don’t understand why they are ever named anything but expletives. You pretty much switch out one car for the other on a bi-weekly basis, parking it at the mechanic’s shop just down the road. Mornings, the door of the Oldsmobile is often frozen shut and you have to heat water and pour it over the door to open it. On the coldest days, the water doesn’t quite work and immediately freezes at your feet as well.
This is the year that you stop working at the preschool because it is a terrible place to work. Toddlers are as bad as teenagers when served in bulk. You work at the University of Michigan in the office of graduate admissions for the MBA program. You fold and file, and file and fold and mail out packages and receive mail. This is the beginning of the rest of your life!! The rest of your life seems imminently depressing.
In the summer you leave behind the cold of Ann Arbor and head for Ocean City, MD. You share a house with S’s sister and her husband. You remember BBQing at the edge of the bay, watching lightning shows roil the dark water and the swifts that glided down like bullets from the eaves to snag abundant summer insects. You remember your fifth roommate Gary, a blow up doll that the two couples kept exchanging, the best of which was the morning that S was leaving for work only to see Gary in the driver’s seat, smiling his creepy smile.
You had forgotten until just now how fun that summer was, sharing meals and episodes of Arrested Development. You hardly remember that as being part of twenty-six. You got into the MFA program with this story, which to date is the only you’ve managed to get published. The cynic side of you wonders why you spent 48,000 dollars to write stories that you could have written anyway.

Pros-You have not started accruing massive graduate school debt

Cons-The angst. The wondering if you’ve done or are doing enough at the age of twenty-six, wondering if you’re on the right track.

Pros-Leaving twenty-six behind.

Elegy of a Silk Tree
The tree’s first limb is close enough for you to comfortably place your right foot upon it. The limb is bowed like the back of an old woman, like your grandmother, heading towards the dust. The trunk’s smoothness seems to invite you to climb more. Later in life, the sea passing through your open fingers, your open palms, will remind you of this trunk. From there, you use your left hand to pull yourself further up into the tree, leaning your torso into the trunk’s soft embrace, and grasping, with your right hand, a limb, slightly higher. Now you pull both of your feet up onto an extrusion, that must have born limbs once, but now has been worn away by the intrusions of children and bears only you. Your left hand goes blindly upward, trusting the memory of a thousand previous climbs and grabs the joint two limbs bent like an elbow. Your left hand flexes as your left foot climbs the trunk, leaving you almost parallel, until you lift yourself neatly, both feet resting on a colossal limb that can bear your weight, in the sort of way that only a miraculous young body can do, can take for granted, as if this youth is its right, not a privilege. From here, you reach both hands up, grab a branch at shoulder height and lift yourself up to a small cranny in the tree, between limbs, where your bottom fits perfectly. You always stop here, below the crown of the tree, below its long arching branches. You think that if you climbed higher that perhaps you could reach the sky. But it is a thing that is thought of and not done. It is enough to be here, timeless, in the arms of the silk tree, held steady.

Twenty Five

In your twenty fifth year you are cold. The two you moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan and promptly began to freeze to death. It snowed seventy two inches that winter. And, in every picture taken your shoulders are slightly hunched as you cringe in that damnable wind.

You try and get a real job for two months before settling back into child care. You begin work as a preschool teacher. As it turns out, you don't really care for toddlers en massse. Individually little ones can be quite cute, as a group it's sort of like trying to corral a group of coyotes while riding sidesaddle on a chicken. Which is to say, not easy.

You do things like call this kid named Teddy Eddie. You say it really fast but after a while he starts to catch on and occasionally shouts, (the little hellion had no voice control) "My name not Eddie. It's Teddy." I didn't correct his grammar, rather I quickly told him that I'd been saying Teddy all along. Try it. Say Edddddyyyyy quite loudly and you'll notice that by the end you might as well have said Teddy. So yeah, rough year, I apparently spent it driving four year olds crazy.

I don't really know what else to say. They didn't like me, and I didn't like them.

Pros-Peak of physical attractiveness. (Not for me though). Oh to be twenty-three...

Cons-Pre-school kids. All of them.

Cons-The snow.

Cons-Though it's still true that at twenty-five you're young enough to be working on that career people start to wonder what exactly you're doing teaching preschool or working the late shift in the Chuck E. Cheese outfit. It's a dangerous age. People start to expect things.

Pros-You are still young and living in a culture that values youth and beauty a whole heck of a lot.

Con-Most of your co-workers are angry women in their early thirties.

I hit a rough patch in my mid-twenties. I started to wonder what exactly I was doing with my life. I hadn't pictured myself arguing with screaming naked three year old's for a living, and it began to cause a bit of consternation. I think turning twenty five was probably the most stressful birthday I've ever had.

You remember living below ground level, spinning out in your car on the first big day of snow. You remember falling four times in your parking lot one morning as you attempted to get into your car.

You remember this crazy kid who used to throw cars at the others, who sent one of the teachers to the hospital. You remember thinking even then that he'd probably end up in prison some day. You can't remember being five yourself.

At best you remember playing cards with great friends and sledding down hills in the warmth of a rare sunny day. Mostly what you remember though is the oppressiveness of that year. You remembered walking down the street years before in San Francisco with your mother and having her tell you you could do anything and hearing the same thing from your mentor. At twenty-five you begin to wonder if you can do just one thing. Forget everything. It would be nice to find that one thing.

You listen to this and think that if you ever wrote music the lyrics would be something like this.
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At night you lie awake and think about all the places that your life is not going to. You think and you think, mostly about yourself. Twenty-five is apparently still too young to have learned to look outward in times of trial rather than obsessing over the self. You suppose that's a lesson you'll have to learn at any age.

Elegy for a silk tree

The tree trunk is four hand-widths wide at its base. The bark is smooth, but it has been scored by the beak of a woodpecker that you’ve heard, but never seen. You are not sure if this is even true. Perhaps you have seen him and just forgot. It is easier to remember him in the ghostly marks he leaves, the little holes he drills searching for grubs. The tree bears these scars in silence. Your littlest finger fits perfectly into most of the holes, and you hold it there, imagining in this way, that you can hear the beating heart of the tree. In the early morning, long before you have risen from sleep, you can hear the woodpecker beating out his silent rhythm on the limbs of the tree. And you dream of men hammering on cement, and your father, putting up a picture in the living room, all alone. You imagine that the woodpecker looks something like the woodpecker on television though you know this is not true. He is small, and black and sad. Sometimes, with your fingers still inside the tree you say a small prayer, something you picked up in church. You do not know the term sacrilegious. Last week, you asked your teacher, an old, white haired woman, if trees and woodpecker’s had souls and some of the kids from higher grades laughed. You were very earnest. Your heart was beating its own insane rhythm like the woodpecker, you had to know. “Oh honey,” the teacher said, Don’t ask silly things just to impress these boys,” nodding to the laughing kids who are not your friends. You sat down on the orange rug and watched dust motes fall in the rectangle of light. A spider in the corner spun a web in solitude.

Year 24

Cons-You don't yet have the satisfaction of knowing that your pest control guy caught his first squirrel today. One down!

Con-Looking back at the pictures from Yellowstone you're wearing a pair of knee braces. The decline really started at 23.

Con-In this year you were about to leave the land of everlasting summer. At least now you know things are going to suck, weather wise, for the foreseeable future. Twenty four year old Andrew doesn't know that. That dumb bastard.

Pro-You still lived for part of the year in the land of everlasting summer.

Pro-You are just starting your mid-twenties (24,25,26 and maybe 27), which makes you infinitely more mature than an uninitiated 21 year old, but hipper than an aging 27er.

Pro-You owned a surfboard. And yeah, you didn't actually ever use it, but you had one and you could have used it.

Pro-You're old enough that people will take you seriously when you talk about your job, but still young enough to believe that some job out there is really going to fulfill you some day!

It's strange to look back on this year. At the time it didn't seem special, just another year. When you flip the pages in an old album you now think of this as the year of leaving. You'd lived in Santa Barbara for six years. You'd been a part nearly every day of all the kids at your daycare.

This is also the year that you had to make your first big decision as a couple. Looking back on that now you probably should have known that buying a house together wouldn't be easy.
This is the place that you left behind.


At some point in your life someone will tell you that the most fun years in their marriage were living in a small apartment and eating pasta every night for dinner. These people are suffering what we call a delusion. It is not easy to go from living in your space to suddenly sharing everything in a 500 square foot studio. Luckily, it's a smaller space so you don't have to fill it with as much love. I was not sorry to say goodbye to our little cold studio and our dog hair filled couch.



However, I was sad to say goodbye to the two block walk to the beach, to the harbor seals that gathered in the early morning, to the bits of tar that bubbled up from the beach, to the brilliant sunsets or the evenings where everything was blue.








In this year you go to Yellowstone National Park. You haven't been on a vacation in years. At some point during the trip a family member reads a statistic (obviously I'm just guessing here as all statistics are made up on the spot) that only 20 percent of people who visit the park actually get out of their cars. You remember all the collective scoffing that you did. Then, you hiked up to Bunsen Peak. Later you learned that people had sighted a Grizzly Bear a couple of miles away. Allegedly of course, people at National Parks are worse than crazy people looking at UFO's.

You listened to this song first in 1997 but in this year you discovered that S loved it as well when it randomly played on the radio.

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Later you take a long hike around a canyon and then back into the woods. There an enormous buffalo bars your trail and you all scramble into the underbrush and hide. Mentally, you're certain that something is wrong with a 24 year old male who can't just grab the nearest rock and brain the buffalo. You love the word brain.

Later you all hike by a picturesque mountain with a lake casting its reflection back at it. On the way back you discover that a black bear was walking down the trail towards your oncoming voices from scared people in locked cars.

And, your closest moment to true danger happened when you were all hiking on a ridge top and noticed that everyone's hair was standing on end and that black clouds were looming.



What you learned at twenty four is that no one should ever get out of their car at Yellowstone. Hell, you're twenty four. You've got too many good years ahead of you to be gored by a bison or eaten by a bear or struck by lightning. Just stay in your car.

The decision is about where S will attend grad school. It's probably best to describe her process as compared to mine via analogy. You think that most of life's problems could be solved if people would just use analogies more frequently.If S was a cougar she'd circle an antelope, then circle it again, then again, and again, and again, and again, and again, until the poor thing finally passed out from heat exhaustion or boredom. In the same situation I'd jump out of the nearest shrubbery and attempt to decapitate it in two seconds. And maybe it would get away but at least it would be over with. And as wise philosophers have always said, "life is about getting it over with."



She finally settles on the University of Michigan after several bouts of crying as you make long drives up the lovely CA coast. You say goodbye to the oil tankers twinkling in the distance, to the dark sea, to the palm trees and sand. You say goodbye to CA, the only state that you've ever lived in. You say goodbye to the tiny cramped studio that the two of you shared for the first year of your marriage. You say goodbye to sunsets and rain falling softly into the sea. You say goodbye to your hair being blond and long. You say goodbye to that solitary tree gnarled tree that stood at the edge of the cliffs peering out over the ocean like some ancient light house. You say goodbye to the harbor seals that you've watched grow from little pups to juveniles. You say goodbye to your wet suits. Goodbye to the place that you met.

Goodbye to that old blue car who's windshield you cracked with your useless surfboard. You say goodbye to the place where you had your first fight as a married couple, goodbye to that overpriced 30 dollar couch. You say goodbye to year round sandals. You say goodbye to so many things that you will never get back. You say goodbye to the children, some of whom you almost consider your own.


You say goodbye to Riley, the little boy who you hoped your child would one day look like.

You say goodbye to Katie (left) a little girl who you exchanged letters with for the next four years.


You said goodbye to the first year of marriage and everlasting blue skies. You said goodbye to another year and headed on towards twenty five in a cold place where the snow piled high.

Elegy for a silk tree

Afterward, you drive to the mall with your girlfriend. The sun is low and the buildings by the freeway are flat and grey. Birds dot telephone wires along the way, waiting for something to get run over. The mall’s shops all looked analogous to one another, box shaped stores with different letters on the faux terra cotta exteriors. The parking lot seems to stretch on for miles without any discernible use, a stray white cup, a gum wrapper, a depression that collects water. Every so often, one of the spots has a cement planter in front of it, and a small tree, skeletal and bare, held up it seems by a thin green post, planted and yet looking almost dead. You park in a spot close to the entrance. The weather is biting and cold. You have a hand on the creamy thigh of your first girlfriend. As you slide your hand up, the hem of her dress lifts, you see the color of her underwear and are nearly overcome with lust. You cannot imagine ever being alone.

Year 23

In your twenty third year of life you get married. People will always tell you that you got married young, but you don't know what you're supposed to do when you meet the person you want to marry when you're young. Kick em to the curb and tell them to wait until you've had some fun? Assume that you'll meet someone equally as great when you're ready for it? Develop an elaborate maze, trap them in it, and then force them to escape in order to prove their love, obviously using a design that allows them to escape at the exact right moment. Actually that's kind of a great idea. Obviously this guy would guard the exit to the maze.

You remember everything about your wedding day. Okay, you don't. But, you do have a wonderful video that you watch on every anniversary....this may not be true. It's a little slow at the beginning. I'd suggest to anyone getting married soon that fire eaters and a magician are probably a good idea. Not so much for that day, but for the later one when your wife is trying to get you to watch the video. You're going to love it more if someone is sawed in half or married or whatever. ">

What's that glow you ask? That's youth baby. No substitute for it. We also lived in CA where the sun actually shows up fairly consistently.


And oh yeah that's love as well.
For my Bachelor peeps. "Why would you ever write this song and then share it with world."
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By the time you're twenty three you should have started working on your career. Instead you spend mornings helping ESL kids with reading and afternoons with little girls who put flowers in your hair. You've always thought of yourself as a good person but some days the kids wear you out. You find yourself just wanting the reading session to end, not giving a damn if they've learned a thing, just wanting them to read quietly. They never do. These kids constantly poke fun at each other, and it is so hard for you to remember back to your own fourth grade classroom. And when you do, you remember being quiet unless called upon. You remember winning at times test. You remember very little.

You remember Katie, the little six-year old girl you befriended that first year at the daycare. Her parents had abandoned her and she lived with her grandmother. On warm days you'd toss the basketball back and forth with her and listen to her talk about her hopes and dreams and how she was doing in school. It's amazing how resilent a child can be, against all odds, you hardly remember being six, it seemed like forever ago.

Years later when you are moving to Ann Arbor she says, "You won't forget me will you?" And you know that it is you who will be forgotten.

Twenty three is not a year for being sad.

Pro-You're old enough to know your limits and still young/stupid enough to enjoy them.

Pro-When you say something like, "I'm in love!" Their is a remarkable lack of jadedness that characterizes a word like "love" years later. You don't feel the need to dissect the difference between "in love" and "love." This is how I'll always feel you think.

Con-Unless you're a marine biologist or world explorer (not a real job) then you're probably working at a job that you don't love. You're starting to wonder if you should go back to school if this is all the "real world" has to offer. You hate terms like the "real world," primarily because the difference is so stark between college and work. You see a long line of blank years ahead of you. The time for waves and change seems gone. You are wrong of course, things will always change.

Pro-You are the best looking you will ever be. (This may not hold true across the board). Your mother once told you that the traditional peak was 25, but you think that 23 probably did it for you. It is a long and slow decline from here but you've conned someone into marrying you, so it doesn't really matter.

A long aside greatly abbreviated. I was going to whine about beauty and our complex relationship to it, primarily as consumers, but I decided not to. Instead I participated in the doppleganger thing that I'd avoided on facebook. Ergo; I proudly loaded in a picture of me from my younger days and was only too happy to discover the person who I most resembled was Dakota Fanning. I concluded that the face recognition software had made an obvious error and decided to try again with a more manly picture, shirt off, booze in my hand. And the computer came back with this:





Granted I've always thought of myself as a bit more masculine than myheritage.com, but what I mainly learned is that I'd have made a good looking women. Unfortunately, according to my h, I don't make the best looking man. I believe the low point was seeing Steve Buscemi gazing back at me with a 64 percent match. Really? So, as a dude I'm Stevie B. but as a woman I'm Veronica? Clearly, my life could have been easier with a little chromosome change.

Con-A couple of days before you are married you get your hair cut. This is like Samson and Delilah. Your power is gone. Soon you'll be up to your elbows in the sink and making pancakes on Saturdays.

Pro-You've still got seven years to write the great American novel even though you don't know you want to write yet.

Con-Time gets faster each year that you're on the earth. You imagine that at ninety you'll blink and suddenly you'll be ninety one.

Pro-You're not turning off the fan and trying to listen to the squirrels in your attic perhaps giving birth. "Is that the wind? I don't think that's the wind. I think that squirrel is giving birth."
"Then they'll have to cut a hole in our roof, which is going to get real expensive."
"Maybe they're fighting?"
"Maybe I should turn the fan back on."

At twenty three you are young and smart, a pretty decent driver, you still have flexible viewpoints about things and can actually be influenced by things like facts and science. The world is not yet a snow globe.

You remember having a horrible fight about the cost of a car repair. You remember walking two blocks to the ocean and sitting on a bluff above the dark sea, listening to the waves crash. These walks down to the ocean soothed you. It was good to be alone in the dark in front of infinity. It reminds you of your place in the world.

This is the actual first dance song. (Sorry wings of love).
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Elegy for a Silk Tree (Fiction)

Sometime, while you are away at college, three states away, your mother takes a lover. “She’s screwing some guy at her work,” your father says, directing it not so much to you, as to the clock on the microwave keeping silent time. You still haven’t adjusted to this new adult version of your father. You keep silent, study the soft insides of your palms. The tablecloth between you is white, and patterned repetitiously. Every other square is adorned with a yellow basket, bearing overripe apples. A girl bends in the distance, far away, small in comparison to many of the apples, to pick a tiny speck of an apple up. You trace the outline of her pig tails while your father cries to himself at the kitchen table, his beer, half-full, sitting between you, the amber liquid collecting light, looking like apple cider. You turn away from the beer, from your father. You look out the window at a small oak tree in the front of your parent’s yard. The tree’s leaves are turning bright red and pale yellow, falling when the wind changes speeds. This is not the sort of thing that men share. Your father taught you that.

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.

year 21

I didn't get to fully hit on this last night but the greatest thing about being 21 is that you can finally drink. All of the best decisions of my life have happened after at least three shots. Note: The sarcasm is being applied rather heavily here. But, let's be honest, drinking is cool because it helps people to accept and love you for who you really are: a lush.

This was my senior year in college. When you're a senior in college you're ready to head out into world having learned everything that there is to know about it during the course of your undergraduate education. Plus, people are standing in lines to hire you because you've got a degree from a small liberal arts college. The business world is all abuzz about people graduating with Literature degrees. I turned down multiple offers to join lucrative banks and chose to go into child care instead because I'm a good person.

Being twenty one is great because everyone else around you is so happy that you're twenty one. It's your last birthday of any significance. And no, I don't include twenty five because of your ability to rent a car at a cheaper rate. It's not quite as exciting. Note: Obviously as I'm nearing thirty I realize that 25 is probably the most exciting for this very reason. Why? Because nothing makes me happier than saving money. Okay, Michigan football makes me happier, but that's it!

In this year you met your wife. You remember throwing a football in the quad with your friends and her asking you guys to stop. Little did you know that this early interaction was just her first attempt to 1) boss you around 2) throw out the proverbial no throwing the ball in the house! that you grew up with. Aside: I think that baseballs and basketballs should be routinely thrown about the house, and I'm going to encourage our unborn children to do it. In fact, I'll start right now. Hey, unborn children, toss me that soccer ball!

You remember almost breaking up with her after you'd been dating for a couple of weeks because she wasn't paying enough attention to you. Classic youngest child behavior, needing to be the center of attention.

Now, approaching thirty things have changed.
S still claims that acts of service is her love language. However, you've revised your love language and now claim that it is being left alone. You're fairly certain that being left alone was number six and just didn't make the cut because it's not as pithy as the five love languages.

You remember sitting on an old stone wall in the dark. The sky was blanketed by stars, and the ocean was beating its slow rhythm on the shore in front of you. But more than that you remember sitting in the backseat (don't worry the blog is rated G) on a drive home from a dance before either one of you were sure about anything. You remember reaching across the backseat of the car and gently massaging her shoulders. The memory of that touch, the surprise you felt in even doing it, give you goose bumps even now.

So, obviously the exciting thing about being twenty-one is the bar hopping but the downside is the imminent soul crushing doom of the working world. Did you know that Germans get six weeks of vacation each year? Yeah, I know, everybody knows that, but every time I hear it it pisses me off even more. And, further proof that I'm aging.


Positives-Drinking.

Negatives-Every bad decision that comes along with drinking.

Positive-Still in college.

Negatives-Leaving college soon.

Positive-You don't sit around in the middle of the night trying to calculate if you can afford to take six days off work for a vaction.

Negative-People always asking you what kind of a job you'll be getting with your lit. degree. To which you respond, "Job, what the heck's a job? Master's degree here I come!" No one is amused.

Positive-You're not paying rent yet. You don't know or don't care about words like grout, home equity, renter's insurance, transmission failure et al.

S: You looked good in that picture on your blog last night.
M: Thanks. I think it was the tan.
S: But do you know what I think? I think you look exactly the same right now.
M: I'm so happy that your eyesight is already failing.

Aside: My brother claims that I libeled him when claiming that he had the single of Strawberry Wine. In fact, he claims, and this is classic old people stuff, that he actually taped the song off the radio. That's right kids. Before you had the interwebs and iTunes you just had to wait for hours and hours with your finger poised over the radio in order to tape the song that you loved. I think the best music is the kind that's awkwardly taped from the radio with the D.J. talking over the back end of the song. It just doesn't get any better.

You listened to this song for the thousandth time fairly certain that it would always be your favorite. The sort of song that you would have as the years went by, ones that seemed to define you. Hell, maybe it still is your favorite song. So go ahead, even if you're at work and crank the volume on your computer speakers and remember what it was like to be twenty one. It's not such a bad thing.
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But this has not happened, not yet. The reticulate branches of the silk tree are raking gently along the white stucco walls of your childhood house. It is only your house in thought, in memory. You think of it still as home, despite the fact that your parents rented it for only four years, a small and quiet place in the sea of there memories. But time does not really exist for the young. You are aware, without knowing, that it contains multitudes. You know that an afternoon can be stretched out into an eternity, and that a hunt for a mosquito can last for a decade. Time is lazy when you are young, a thing that you can control. Some mornings, in the dead of winter, you lie on top of a warm heater, let the blanket unfurl around you, and find in this solitude, a piece of time that you want to hold forever. Your mother’s cold hands pull you up. “You’ll ruin the heat for the rest of the house that way,” she says. Time is a sleeping snake that remains coiled. And you find it suddenly, sitting at an old desk, your butt uncomfortably squished, the light coming through in diamond shapes through the lined windows as your teacher drones on about clocks while you wait for it be over.