Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 192

Hi.

Coffee:  Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

My white bones crept out to have a walk around while I was sleeping. I was deflated. They tucked the covers up to my chin.

Outside, in stark moonlight, my white bones walked only the back roads on their way out of the city. They left the comfort of our culdesac and ducked alleys in old neighborhoods. The dogs barked, but no other creature knew me, or had the senses to sniff them out.

At the edge of Wake and Chatham, my white bones licked cold stones below a highway. It was gravel, refuse, dust. They slipped into tall grass where the ticks live, and into dark trees with rough baubles left by some other traveler in the branches.

At the river, cool water stopped them. My white bones found an old dead beaver and finished its work, wrapping its teeth in reeds until the tool could fell a rotting birch. There were no splashes when the tree fell, only whimpers. My white bones had found a route to cross the river, and they did.

It was the swamps they were looking for. An old bog in the forest that’s too crowded in oak groves to be seen during day. But the moonlight had it, and my white bones knew how to seek it out.

Each night, it happens like this: the branches clear. Soft black snakes wreath the space where there used to be arteries. In the Chatham bog at midnight, my white bones sink below the surface. They spend the hours passing into peat and pumice, and just before the sun comes up they surface a little darker, creeping back into me, still wet with what I cannot know.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

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Thank Goodness I have nearly
unlearned
folding my desire into itself
being afraid to claim it.

Yrsa Daley-Ward, bone

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 125

Hi.

Coffee: Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee

A city is only as good as its midnight skyline. Low or high, skyscrapers or endless avenues of two-story stores, the lights at night are proof of something: that it’s worth more to the people here to risk all the dangers of darkness for a few extra seconds of knowing than to sleep soundly on the ground as they were born to do. Whether by fire, wax, or LCD silver, human is the only animal that won’t settle for the setting sun.

I was up at 3am for half an hour. My head was fuzzed with dreams. I walked to the kitchen to pour a glass of water. While I was there, I looked the window. Three streetlights had an angle on the glass. The bridge across the creek was lit, and our sister building had that glow of walkway illumination, crisp and militant. It was no surprise to see so many lights on but it took me by one anyway.

I like the idea of beating back darkness. I like the idea of getting lost in it, too. There’s a surreptitiousness to pulling your curtains on a well-lit city. The world goes on without you in it. Grocery store clerks at the 24hr; midnight highway technicians; someone’s making love in the alley behind your favorite coffee shop; old men die like great trees falling, with or without anyone to watch.

Having peeked out at the ongoing bristling of 3am, I closed the bedroom door and drew the curtains, pulled a comforter up to my nose, and tried to hide from the long city fingers for the bleak back end of night.

Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller

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Night falls – like a fat man tripping over his shoelaces.

Anthony Bourdain, The Layover – Atlanta

Coffee Log, Year 2, Day 97

Hi.

Coffee: Maxwell House Drip, Office Coffee

Friday’s drawn in. The sun’s down, streetlights on, curtains closed. Midnight approaches – a fast black car speeding on the interstate. No matter what you did this week – what things you have or haven’t accomplished – it’ll soon be over. One more hour, not enough time for anything but peace.

My week went by in a blur. The most riveting moment was when I caught my leg on a corner and cut it right open, a quarter sized bit of skin chunked down until it was red and slimy. After it happened, I went to the bathroom and tried to check for damage but found it hard to get off the sock. It was sticking to me. Man and manufacturing combined, I was – for a brief second – the most boring sort of cyborg.

Otherwise, I’ve just been moving along.

This evening R and I went for Chinese. It started raining while we were waiting for our food. The rain turned to hail. The hail was the size of marbles and came beating down on the roof of my car. Driving home sounded like gunfire. It’s been so hot this week that when the hail hit the asphalt, it started to evaporate. A thick white steam. A bright Friday sauna.

As I’m writing, the clock’s just passed 11:00pm. I’m beat. I’ll see you all tomorrow, like I always do, but I wonder who I’ll be come the weekend? We pack our lives in week-sized compartments, like trying on different clothes. Every Saturday morning is a chance to change. That’s a lot of pressure.

Oh well – like I said, now’s not the time for heavy thinking, just peace. And maybe a bit of peppermint tea.

Goodnight.

Currently Reading: Have picked a new book but not had the chance to start it yet; more info to come

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On nights like this when the air is so clear, you end up saying things you ordinarily wouldn’t.

Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi

Coffee Log, Day 278

Hi.

Coffee: French Roast, Trader Joe’s Brand

I’ve got this unintentional habit where I wake up about two hours after falling asleep with my heart pounding and a sense that the night is going to swallow me. I have to get up, drink water, turn some lights on, sometimes get dressed. But you see some things in the bleak night.

It’s breathless, the apartment. My roommates have their doors closed. There’s green and blue on the walls from the little lights on our router. It’s the kind of place you’d think a cat could fall in love over but we don’t have a cat.

I let it stay black in the kitchen. I take a glass from memory and pour water. The faucet’s loud. It’s bigger than the stream outside. I take the water to the window while my heart calms down. I look at the blacked-out lots, the cars, the couple windows that are still on. Who else is up? I don’t want to share – it’s a small slice of time.

When you’re back in bed after something like that, the dreams come different: simple and easy and colorful and pleasant, like they’re lying to you.

Novel Count: 14,161 words

Currently Reading: Autumn, Ali Smith; Cherry, Nico Walker

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It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead…

Ray Bradbury


Coffee Log, Day 178

Hi.

Coffee: Cafe Pajaro, Extra Dark Roast, Trader Joe’s Brand

Midnight shows its teeth. Tar-paper, Saturday flies poking out of apartments. L left an hour ago, the place stills smells like him, clothes in the rain. My roommates are up to something – two separate somethings, separate rooms, wind-downs. My new fan takes up all the unwanted space in the room.

A thunderstorm hangs on to the town’s outskirts, wetting the skin of whoever’s dumb or desperate enough to be out in it. It blew over hours ago and washed all the birdshit off the cars. Fertilizer; the green grass gets even greener after the bad stuff sinks down.

Fuzzy – marginal headache, persistent itches, stiff fingers, blender thoughts. A normal bedtime for halfway-through-28, head in arrivals but body inching toward departure, the kind of eminence Caesar saw when he stared at Alexander’s statue.

There are three lost geese stuck on the greenest grass beside our creekbed. Leftovers from a northern migration, they’re waiting it out til Autumn. When the flock comes back, they’ll get to see if they still recognize themselves. Tonight, I hope they’ve found dry branches.

Invisible moon, eyelid stars. Together, anxious morning.

Currently Reading: LaRose, Louise Erdrich

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“The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.” – Andre Breton

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Coffee Log, Day 168

Hi.

Coffee: Fair Trade Five County Espresso Blend, Trader Joe’s Brand

I take the highway at 65 high-school-track-fields per hour, faster than the 8-minute miles I managed fifteen years ago. Things sped up; times changed.

I’m working Raleigh, a branch I haven’t been to. Maps come out the car speaker anticipating twists and turns, turning the music down automatically, red lines for bad traffic, or lines in the eyes where I haven’t been sleeping, supplementing missed midnights with caffeine.

Crickets in the early mornings when I walk the two turnbacks downstairs to the parking lot, reminding me of that one night after high school when we all went to Cedarock Park and built a fire, grilled hot dogs, slept bare-skinned in sleeping bags, made reckless love with ticks and crickets and coal-cracking store-bought branches; or of nights lost to five-more-minutes with the four inches of my iPhone, a spaceship/rocketship sort of life, burning time like jet fuel; or of strawberry-cheeks and IPA lipgloss, the ways I wish I saw you, the ways I wish you saw me, but only the white walls ever see much of anything, even though I haven’t hung them with anything yet.

I’m a bill-payer; news-checker; chatbox stalker; internet lover; a Modern Man.

Currently Reading: LaRose, Louise Erdrich

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“I didn’t need to think of myself as a walleye drifting along in a current somewhere, just waiting for my hook. I was yearning for it.” – Emily Fridlund, A History of Wolves

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