Well, here goes.

I’m a thirty-something Capricorn (textbook), Christmas Eve baby, six-foot-five, 220-ish pounds, 100-ish kilos, 16-ish stone, if anyone’s counting and measuring, former/current basketball player and perpetual dreamer (aww) with an actual functioning mind and overfunctioning heart. I frequently digress (see everything below), love to travel, although I somehow rarely do, I speak approximately 1.23 languages on any given day, can generally walk and talk simultaneously, tend to consider myself a writer, and own a lot of books, some of which I have been known on occasion to open in order to interpret the little symbols contained therein. I’ve heard this called “reading”—have you? Do you? If you don’t, we might have some trouble—I’ve tried that and we did. Twice last year, in fact. So here I am.

I also have a beard and a blog and stack of unfinished/unpublished stories and I like taking photos and being late to things. I find straight, plain answers to be rather boring but will tell you whatever you want to know, have a tendency to brood, and I sometimes drink too much and get depressed whether I’m drinking or not because I get stuck on my mistakes and losses and start to believe I’ll never have or be everything I believe in.

But I also laugh and smile and joke and write things like this and then I cry when I can’t laugh and smile and joke and write anymore, or when no one’s looking. I’m flawed and contradictory and indecisive and completely assured of four things, one of which is that I don’t at all belong for a second in an ordinary job but instead want to work (write) furiously, love furiously and also tenderly, live furiously and also easily, deeply, fully, slowly, taking my sweet time to smell the sweet flowers and taste your sweet kiss and know sweet love. And wander the globe, or parts of it at least, the sweet parts, writing, reading, looking, loving, thinking, being. Taking my time, taking it right along with me because it’s mine and that’s how it should be, with me.

With the right kind of person my flaws would be strengths. With the wrong kind they just make a mess. Sometimes with the right kind too. Either way, whatever way, I’m sometimes stupid, sometimes not, almost always sensitive and outwardly patient and determined and cautious and industrious and idealistic and stubborn and deceptively intolerant of things I believe to be wrong, including things about me, and completely open, desperately, needfully open to beautiful things, things that tug and pull and strike and jolt and awe and comfort and wrap you up in them because they hold it all and hold it all together. Things which sustain, subliminal things. Things like this: “We should show life neither as it is, nor as it should be, but as we see it in our dreams.”[1] I am those things, in need of those things, but terrible I am not.

What else. I’m kidless, wifeless (now), dogless (now), catless, birdless, shoeless, presently, but I do have shoes, so don’t worry I can afford to take us out to eat at fancy restaurants from time to time to time. You may have to help me keep tabs on the tabs, though, because if not I’ll get all wrapped up in our good time, so caught up in you that I won’t want to care about the money we burn even though I don’t have all that much in the first place. And then I’ll go and buy you a pretty silver bracelet with mother-of-pearl inlays, an only of its kind kind of thing from a one of a kind kind of shop, only to return it a couple weeks later after I broke up with you because in addition to not helping me keep tabs you ceased to care about the ever more frequently quotable “good times” those tabs in effect bought, ceased to care much at all about me, or about much of anything, far as I could tell, too busy as you became—always were—with you and your thoughtless busyness. Oh, wait, sorry, that was someone else, and that was new year’s and she was a dud, please excuse me. But it would be nice if you helped me keep tabs. Anyway, here I am in kid form, with my mom in mom form:

Beautiful, isn’t she? I still make that face for most pictures. And that reminds me: my memory is highly associative and my associations freer than birds can be when I’m at my best, and just as delightfully plumed. Briggs and Myers have dictated that my personality type is IMHOTEP, or something like that, right is my dominant hand but I use my left for driving while I’m texting, and I love autumn most of all. I have a car (for driving and texting) and an apartment (for living, etc) with some furniture, some stuff, some books, as mentioned, and a bed (for sleeping, etc). I have shampoo and toothpaste and a fruit bowl and I know how to cook enough to not die and even enjoy it. You should join me sometime. We could go to a party or a bar and wander around together, apart, together, and then go sneak away to make out and laugh at ourselves, at the people, at life. And we’ll go back to my apartment—or yours, or someone’s, as long as they’re not home—and maybe smoke something or drink something and talk about fears and joys and dreams while you sit close to me on the couch, head against my shoulder, taking our time. Then we’ll go find the bed for etc.

Which reminds me (see above), as my boss said the other day with complete seriousness in the midst of a completely serious meeting, unwittingly, witlessly, “I’m open and easy.” What is it about “professionalism” that makes people lose the ability—or highlights the inability—to find funny shit funny, or that shines stagelights on the phenomenal unfunnyness of unfunny people? I think I just answered my own question. Ah, but what is it about that strange stage that makes mildly funny shit completely hilarious? Oh, and I hate my job, mostly. That’s sometimes funny, but never hilarious. 

I like movies, though, and books, music, plays, paintings, architecture, history, philosophy, peach cobbler, sunsets, beaches, the sky, the rain, the moon, the stars, the sea, deep breaths, language, quiet, loneliness, electricity (not the kind that lights our lights, but that too, I guess), magic (that kind of electricity), eyes, necks, wrists, hands, stomachs, sidelong glances, breakfast, brunch, cafes, museums, libraries, bookstores, kisses, dark corners, dogs, daydreams, fresh-cut grass, worn book pages, forests, mountains, wide open spaces, memories, made up words, your laugh (I hope), watching people be people, and long walks on the moonlight under the beach. It’s crazy; you should try it.

I also have a genetic precondition which renders me almost completely incapable of putting clean laundry away in a timely manner, and I don’t do online dating, preferring to meet all the wrong people in other places instead. My friend thinks I’m a bit of a Luddite in this, as do many other people who are not my friends. He has a point, though, always does; I do too and mine is that I don’t like the idea of shopping for a woman the way I might shop for an apartment. I don’t want to shop at all. And then there’s the whole unexpected magical electric romantic encounter thing. I’d like to be knocked off my feet, blown away, earthquaked, dumbfounded, and stunned because someone’s soul shone through in some ordinarily extraordinary, un-prefabricated moment of complete expectationlessness, not because our keywords and credentials got matchified, or whatever it is that happens. I don’t do online dating, and maybe this is why. My profile would be an essay, full of made up words.

Speaking of profile, here’s a pic of me in me form looking all lost and melancholic in a dark corner (Capricorn, told you). I’m still trying to turn sadness into a superpower, but the going is slow because I’m sad all the time. Or some of the time. Or some of the time I’m sad all the time. That’s it.

Would you be my dream, all tied up in knots down in stomach pits? Uh, I mean date-fuck-love me? I would. In person. Look at that physique. And these words. And that beard. I’ve had the beard since I was… hmm… probably seven (not pictured). A manly boy I was, out felling trees and hewing stone and forging sharp and/or heavy objects in my kid smithy just cuz. I now operate out of a grown man-sized smithy, and craft weights which I then pick up and put back down in controlled, regular intervals, at various angles and in various bodily arrangements. Hence the physique. Oh and I’m super well-educated, but also quite down to earth, hence “hence” in the previous sentence and “super” in this one.

By super I mean I’ve got two master’s degrees but no PhD (yet, always a yet, that one is), so you might want to go find yourself a guy with a terminal degree who you can call “doctor” and show off to your judgy parents because my stuff’s all open-ended, perpetual potential, unfinished, you could say. Someone did say that, but about youthful characters in Dostoevsky, not about me. It’s one of my favoritestest quotes of all and it goes like this: “For Dostoevsky, it is not the finished man, sculpted by the hand of destiny, who embodies the highest human truth, but the unfinished man, who remains open to what can only ever be freely and unexpectedly given.”[2] I’m the unfinished man, looking for the unfinished woman. Again. It remains to be seen if I’ll be able to remain open to what can only ever be freely and unexpectedly given. By her or anyone or anything. I’ll try, though, I promise.

And I can tell you this much: if you give it freely and unexpectedly, and if you’re open to the same, and if you want nothing more than to live in accordance with this subliminalism, to be accomplices, us against and with the whole fucking beautiful, terrible world, then yes, my love and person and being and beard and whatever else I’ve got is yours, all yours, as long as you love it as mine, freely given. I’ve given it like that before, and she deserved it, even though she always said love isn’t a matter of deserving, it just is. She taught me everything I know about love, or the best of it at least, or I learned the best of it through and around and after her, being the best of me, and the worst. Before her, love was mostly just excitement, up in the clouds. She brought it everywhere, through everything, blue skies and storms, dark nights and lonely mornings, overcast, downcast, miscast, backcast, forecast, and simulcast. I have no idea what that means but you get the point. I think I finally did, but I have a lot more to learn, elsewhere, wherever becomes somewhere.

What else would you like to know? Favorite books, authors, songs, ideas, foods, people, places, mistakes? Ask me anything, and I’ll do one of the things I do best and answer you with some magnificently detailed vagueness. Till then, I’ll leave you with this—well, not leave you, jesus, I hope not. It’s by another friend of mine, lately:

Give me darkness when I’m dreaming, give me moonlight when I’m leaving
Give me mustang horse and muscle, oh, I won’t be going gently
Give me slandered looks when I’m lying, give me fingers when I’m crying
I ain’t out there to cheat you, see I killed that damn coyote in me.[3]

I think that pretty well covers it, covers me, even though I had something else in mind a moment ago and it just won’t come back so here we are, awkward ending, ugh. Hmm, something clever, think of something clever, clever and honest… I know: I want this more than life, as the song goes, a different song, and a pretty song it is.[4] I’ll let you guess what “this” is.

I can be reached at a phone number and an email and an address. Send a pigeon.

 

[1] Chekhov, The Seagull, page unknown and I don’t feel like looking it up.

[2] From Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s intro to their translation of Dostoevsky’s The Double and The Gambler, page something or other—it’s the last sentence of the introduction. Pevear and Volokhonsky are wonderful, by the way.

[3] Gregory Alan Isakov, “3 A.M.,” on That Sea, The Gambler.

[4] Fine, I’ll tell you the song. That’s from Whitley, “More Than Life,” on The Submarine. Listen and you’ll find out what “this” is.