Not in the features.

"This afternoon some woman, kind of old, was flirting with me. While she was talking, I was thinking, older women just don't seem to sweat the way that I do. We were standing in the middle of the sun, right where its rays point, and I was thinking, and I found myself with some kind of resolve about women like her, women who are a generation, two generations, beyond mine. I thought, all those young women out there, walking around in the summer, they don't deserve admiration the way that this woman does right here. Young women, they get leers that are violent, they get systemically pressed upon by young men, by all men, and they do not deserve that. But in a way they also do not deserve admiration for beauty simply because they are young, in the same sense of systemic violence, because sometimes a desire which simply admires also runs parallel to violent desires. Whatever honest admiration is, it is so often directed towards the same typifications that are directed towards those who have to endure the absurd forms of violence that are cast. And women like this one here who was talking with me, she is beautiful in a way that is excluded from those directions, you know. And it has nothing to do with who she is. But I know that even the way that I'm thinking about it right now doesn't reach the complexities, and is probably wrong and makes more of a mess, but I try and work through that. And I thought, maybe those small looks that one might give, getting off the bus or wandering through produce at the store, or being introduced to someone outside a library, those looks met between two people where one just thinks in a grocery store, bursting in an instant with their brains that you are a beautiful human being, and that for a second, this one second where for the only time in my life I see who you are, I don't care about the price of these avocados or anything, those looks should all go to the women who stopped getting them decades ago. And when I am waiting at the crosswalk next to an older woman who wants to cut her hair or do her god damn nails, or who stands in a way that knows her very own sexuality, I will want her to know that yes, she is beautiful, and let any structural definitions of beauty go to hell. I can't stand how so many movies are about youthful love, or about the taboo of relationships between characters with large gaps between their ages. This woman called herself an empty nester, and that's why she had two pets now, to feel less like one. And she was just beautiful in ways that the world does not let the word to be defined. It drives me crazy. Anyway, she told me that I looked like Robert Redford in one of his old movies, and I didn't even know what to say, I said probably I wouldn't be able to handle a gun in the same way that he is in those old ones, and it made me just want to tell her that yes, in the world, and even despite it, she is incredible."

High enough to lose.

And there is no promise to where wisdom comes from.

My next door neighbour is one of those thousands of people who walk about this city without a shirt. He works out. He is in high school, and I can not remember what his name is, though it is too late to ask again. But I do not think that he remembers mine either, because whenever he sees me he calls me "bro." Hey, what's up, bro. What's going on. Hey man, I say.The other afternoon he saw me leave my house on my bicycle to buy beers, and then saw how messy I was when I returned home. The store is three or four blocks away. Maybe I don't think that people should be walking along the sidewalk without a shirt, but maybe I realize that if anyone is going to do so, it should be someone like him and not me. 

What he seems to think of me is that I must be some smart person because I am always reading and writing on my front porch, sitting in the eye of a stormy spread of papers surrounding me. When inside, though, I am making snacks and watching films. What he does see, perhaps he connects it with a kind of wisdom I must have to share with him about the future. He asks me what I write about. I tell him that I write about questions, inked to understand how I have come to be who I am, to learn about decisions and the mix of personal and political histories and why anyone ever does anything. I tell him that I am writing things for school that are quietly about these things of my own, though for the sake of academics they are dressed in a way that is broadened into the political roles that literature has in history. He asks what my investments are in thinking so hard through everything, and tells me that he could never do that, to spend so much time with books and pens.

He is graduating from high school, and is taking time away to figure out what he wants to do. He wants to know whether this is the right decision, or if he should be going to college like most others he knows will be doing. I tell him that sometimes it can be fine to wait for something you want. Or if you are unsure whether you want it, or whether it is an unconditional desire, find the side to which you are pulled. Other things you want may not stay, but your want may stay with them. And I stop, I take my drink, and I say, well like, anyway, the way they structure school makes it to be important only if you know what you want from it. If you are in school and do not know why, then it may be best to devote some time to other things, or to figuring out why college would be what you want. He listens yet. I tell him that some time away might be very good, to wait, to let some wish scratch up an ache. You can work and make plans, but then if you know what you want then you have to do it. He is young, and maybe these are important things for a person to hear, but I am unsure whether I know how to say them in a way I believe. I tell him the things he probably should hear, things that I am not always able to mean, at least in the sense that they should be a sprout from my own experience. But I tell him, and he receives it like a kind of pearl, impregnable. And I am thinking to myself how all the things I say have a doubled meaning.

He talks to me, and I tell him these things. He leaves, and when I go back into my house I forget it all.

But at night it is another thing.

There are these moments that make all kinds of quiet thought start up all together in a shatter. At three forty-two in the morning, while I was reading and writing, a call buzzed into my phone.The identification said "Blocked." The only person who ever calls me with a blocked identification is my mother, because she uses a pay-as-you-go plan. And my mother would not call me at that time, though she knows I would at least have been awake. I did not answer.

But then I wondered if it could have been her. If it were my mother she would call a second time, and while I was waiting for that phone call to repeat I wondered about the emergencies that could be happening right then in the night. There could not be many accidents available for invention, when they would always have been asleep for hours. But there could have been some other kind of accident, maybe with my brother or my sister or her family.

It didn't ring twice, and so I wondered about who else might have been calling me. Perhaps it was one I was with earlier in the night watching fireworks and lending bike locks, calling now to give a voice. Perhaps it was one who does not talk with me. It could have been one far from this city, walking home after some bottles just to say, I do not know. Dozens of faces flashed in possibility, people whose phone calls sent would abruptly rearrange my posture in all ways, but to which I would have listened. Night carves out the very real parts of a person. When numbers are dialed in the deep moments of the night, it is most often to say some things that should be heard.

Maybe it was a mistaken call. Maybe it was meant, but when I didn't answer that made the other person feel it was mistaken.

Like that is what I always say.

At a red light, I was in my car and singing, "The sun shines, leaves blow." The vehicle I pulled up next to was signalling to turn left. In it were a man and woman who I have not spoken to in a very long time. And when I noticed I stopped my car short. I was behind them enough that they could not see me. I wonder now if they would still have recognized me.

Some people are encased with fortune, where they spend their whole lives surrounded by a closeness shared with a few friends or family members or a lover. These are the ones that are cherished against all others they have met, while those others all pass along to gradually fade into the colour of past horizons. There are so many more people, countless ones, that have put their hands into your world, who have affected your days and decisions and your outlook, but whose direct participation in your history, their press upon the way your body shapes, becomes flattened out as you make new skin.

Most often the departures that occur between people are not coincident. The spirit of one still holds or builds while the other walks, perhaps down some path, perhaps in the midst of an enormous garden of trees between the mountains and the sea. Oppositely, maybe you are that figure that no longer occupies the moments of another, a statue landed among statues in the dark of an ocean. And now, you know, you have to learn to know that they do not spend any part of their days with any thought of their part of your history, or your part of theirs. All these figures in piles underwater, and by the time their decay floats upward they are specks without taste in your drink.

The last expression I shared with those two sitting beside me again, though in their own lane now, was a note placed at their door left shortly before dawn. It was a mixed thank you powdered with grievance, and tucked within the return of something borrowed.

They did not see me, I did not ask them to.

Given in its place.

Something amazing is how people can traverse the same spaces, but on completely separate planes of existence. This is a string of sunny afternoons, and I have been sitting on the porch with coffee, Pascal, and some books. And past my porch on this quiet street, a woman, tweaking, scurried along the sidewalk. She was sobbing into her cellphone and frantically twitching as if some ants were crawling all over her limbs. Separated by some number of feet were panic and peace.

Spaces evaporate for a moment when your eyes meet another's. They melt into the one small place outlined by your faces, the point of your shoes, the occasional movement between a hand and an arm. And you can share in a conversation, where you speak and hear all the very same words as another, but the flow and drift of those words in your place may not be the same as the person with whom you're sharing them. One may be speaking with a nervous admiration while the other listens, deep and warm but tired. Everyone may take the same walk through streets, but through the objects that make up its place they will spot and think of their own losses or hopes, pasts and futures. In everything, and from everything, there is mood and history that are not a part of spaces and words, but which can always arrive out of those things. This is that separation which bears the kinds of loneliness or security that people feel about themselves. To know someone is to feel in the objects around you the ways of meaning that another would impress upon them or derive from them. But, then, to know is only to wonder--whether that one also sees you in those things too, where knowledge and imagination carry each other.

Water wed with wine and ghost.

Tonight I watched Thrice play, for probably the last time ever.

Nothing but this slow trek.

I write songs, but they arrive upon me in ways that don't feel like writing. I suppose my writing works in a similar way. I've started working on a new album this week, after being delayed by a hand injury coming from either a serious brawl or a window frame dropping on my fingers, followed by the demands of coursework, which were then followed by a period of doing nothing but sleeping and watching every film. Now, to start, I have been collecting all the song ideas I will use, separating them from the ideas that will be saved for the next one to be made later this year. But this collection is out of little voice memos I have left to myself. When I start a song, it arrives upon me, most often when I do not even have an instrument near by. It comes as fragments sometimes, but with a full sense of instrumentation and atmosphere. And I sing all these parts into my memos before I lose them again, my voice making up for lacking the lushness that sounds in my mind. This is how my stories come out as well. With these songs, though, as I listen back to them in the sun of my front porch, I hear all the things in the background that return me to those moments. Driving in my car towards home as the sun was setting orange this last autumn. My shower still springing after I skipped out of it. The crack of my parent's fireplace late at night after Christmas, while the good Jimmy Stewart despairs in the background through It's a Wonderful Life. Some birds, some dog, some engines. On one, I am walking the sidewalk, and I briefly run into someone I know, interrupt myself to say hello, then restart. Then I pass a group of elegantly graying women in hairspray and heels and pretend a conversation with someone at the other end. There is a kind of magic in the way a song can fall upon you, like how Michael felt "Billie Jean" drop on his dashboard while driving his car, but the real moments are in this string of days along which these songs have been lit.