it was a tuesday morning in may. it’s tuesday morning, and it’s finally occurred to me that things are accumulating now. this morning i was thinking of silly awards to be distributed at graduation dinner to all the students who’ve made such an impact on my life this last year, and on each other’s lives and on our organization. i’m proud of each them for something and i like these opportunities to put it all together and say so.

excess, acculumation, abundance!

at the end of the month when i gave those awards away, there was a huge, ridiculous water fight, complete with escalation, alliances and betrayals, and tumbling down a hill in the grass. it was great; an awesome way to complete a chapter of making community that has meant so much to me.

the waves collect, overbalance, and fall.

So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying “that is all” more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.

in june we went to los angeles, to covina and to dana point. we stayed in a motel and put googly eyes on things and camped on the beach and ate out of bags. we made a fire and we took photos and we navigated and we visited sarah and met her family of origin. but it's so good to be on vacation with your family of destination. we read on the beach and we drove and drove and drove and we listened to music and we talked all night and when we got back, the arizona moon rose huge and orange, enormous, wild, low in the sky.

i graduated in may, about six times in various states of array, with a rainbow tassel and all kinds of parties and awards. it was actually the last fit of work on this degree, to graduate with it: i was busy and happy and tired. as a graduation gift my brother took me hiking in aravaipa canyon, where we also ate from bags, and where i read nothing and looked at no screens but only drank water cold from the river and burned energy to move and walk and wade and look at everything; only listened to the animals and carried everything i needed and only marvelled at the glorious blue sky. here was everything i loved about the desert, to experience and remember.

in the sweet burn of summer, my people have come laid around all day watching LOST, watching movies, reading books. we've travelled and we've gone for walks and we've had watermelon and cocktails and watermelon cocktails and beer. i joined an online reading group for infinite jest called, aptly, infinite summer. i said goodbye to the trooper, and i got an isuzu rodeo to take me to austin. i gave my dad a book that's actually about family for father's day: flesh and blood. my family. i wanted to have a community: people i could work with and spend time with and fight for and rely on. but what i didn't expect to get and i value more than anything was my family. and i love them and they tear my heart out with their raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. with the exaltation that it is to love them, and be with them.

i really thought it might kill me to do this. and i'm not totally sure it won't. i didn't get everything. i don't know how to hurt right now. i'm in this painful doubly conscious place where i am going but i am also here for this moment. i am doing the best i can but there is all this holding together and i can't really hold it together. i am carrying this pain around and it is not overwhelming so much as imposing, just a fact, undisclosing and persistent. i'm sand and not stone. i keep leaking just in every moment. and it's not enough to be just all messed up myself, because i can do that any time i want. and so i'm not, really. i'm something totally else. you know and you've known for a long time.

well, that is what we do. that is what people do. we stay alive for each other.

march was san francisco and march was austin. i forgot how much i liked to write, and how i've wanted to, and how i've needed it. this is a recursive internet book. this is several days of percolation and this is the canon of arrangement, firing. arrangement is a map of where i am.

“Do you remember the lake?” she said, in an abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said “lake.” For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, “This is what I have made of it! This!” And what had she made of it? What, indeed? sitting there sewing this morning with Peter.

i'm winning an award and i'm presenting a thesis and i want you to come see me but i want you to want to and i want you to ask and i don't want you to say essentially, hey, know something else that's fucking queer?

i can't remember ever saying i'm not okay. i'm always okay and no one gave me another option so that's what i am. i'm fucking fine.

i want to cry and i want to hide and i don't want to come home at the end of the day because there is no home there is no body there is no other the only alterity here is me and i can't stay up anymore.

i watched that become art.

i lied to everybody. i lied and i argued that what i valued was intimacy. i've been lying because i don't like what i really feel, which is that it's just all too intense now. i do not wish to be touched, or spoken softly to, or called by a nickname. i do not wish to be entangled with or passionate for. i don't want gifts, or books, or tears, or private questions. everything i want i have lied about because i'd rather not admit to myself how it would scald.

in a lot of ways i feel like i couldn't handle another disappointment after all. i didn't break apart last time and last time and last time. however i managed to calibrate that i wonder sometimes now if it was right. but then what if there is no not handling?

i want the same thing i did when the autumn caught on fire, on whiskey, and rain.

i wanted to be closer to you. i have feelings for you that lean their weight against the walls of me. they are inarticulate and indecipherable, a bit the way i imagine you. it’s not that they can’t be clear. it is that they are choked with thick kudzu vines of green passion. you know who you are; it’s a privilege when you tell that knowledge... i want your aggression, and i don't know how to get it... i want you to keep tracing me--the lines of my bones and veins... but i don’t want to be special. i need you to want but never be in love with me. i want you to know me as untouchable and not give a damn. i want to give but not need to know. i want to feel entitled to your body. i want you to be entitled to mine, but titles don't seem like the way to go.

i’ve been turning into stone. don't touch--get back. get out of here.

and all the while the weeks of march and the weeks of april have been running through my fingers, because i'm not holding on to anything now. what i need to do is read and what i want to do is read but i don't because there's so much more to juggle in these last few measures. i just have to start; i just have to start again; i just have to start anywhere.

it starts just after the end of january, and it usually surprises me because i'm busy--this year i was preoccupied with turning 22, last year with 21--and i don't really much notice it's february until it's already started. this year, this february of 2009, i didn't know how to remember february. i passed this early middle part of it in a flight and a fever last year. i was in texas; i was in a tesseract; i was down for the count with a pneumonia that pruned my fingers as i lay sweating and in a faint. this year i was in texas, and, a tesseract, though i did everything out of order and without the affective baggage i thought i'd carry. it was the other end of february. i came through on the other side.

i like being 22. i like seeing white hair glint at me in the mirror. i like the feeling of familiarity, as if it were promised by the weezer t-shirt that my brother bought for me when i started high skool, and the feeling of competence, a feeling i can only imagine as if i've earned it but feels more as if it was granted to me slowly and from clouded heavens, like a well filling. and i like the feeling of gratitude, which my yogi tea occasionally reminds me is the open door to abundance, and which lends to me another feeling, of self-regulation, of self-possession without self-containment, and when i think of it, of immense, stretching desire. the air around my finest self crackles with it, electric, alive, even more.

because, at the end of the day (so to speak, but also, really), both sides of february are about this desire. intimacy, i privileged studying desire this semester, and love, translated through power and control as a tortuous mixture of confusion and grief. texture i privileged; time invested, and complexity; but still it's hard for me to say where all this is coming from. it's coming out of discourses, which feels about as clarifying as "out of the ether," but it's the sides and ends and rules that are february that illustrate the system in my mind, webbed and stacked and navigable. now and again i am seized by feelings for someone i have missed, and i say out loud "damn it!"

and laugh. because a flirtational politics would devote itself to affirmative forgetting, because affirmative forgetting is what you do at the other end of february, because getting here wasn't easy and because somewhere in texas there's a book with my tears inside of it and because even understanding so much more of it now has never and will never repair it; it was junked for parts. i like to see them glowing in the golden february light, the same way i like being twenty-two, spelled out and with a hyphen, the way i liked the wheaten color of your hair. what i like about the other end of february is the way it feels when i wake up in the morning. what i don't like about the other end of february is its asymptotal approach to impossible stillness, and the feelings of metal wound in my knees, coiled, waiting.

the other end of february will disappear into a coriander march. and maybe i'm afraid that being 22 will slip away with it into only my memory of this handful of moments, before i've figured out where desire comes from, transpiring as from vents in the crust of the earth, exhaling from the rock of life itself. i want to take all moments like coins, like clean kennedy half-dollars, and press them with barely veiled urgency into another palm. i need a chiral--kairal--reciprocal grip.

i wanted to write about delight in the body. coming home last night in the dark i was seized by a spasm of love remembering the way you spoke of buttocks, once, as hard-working and hypersexualized, and as deserving of some straightforward and apolitical honoring attention. i loved you for that, though it struck me with a draft of humor that made it move from uncomfortable to wholly comfortable in a laugh and sigh. you still had patience for that reconfiguring humor, then, and i hope you knew how it wafted me along like a ship on a wave--and you were the energy of the water.

outside the sky is purple and pink in the east, and it's expiring. this afternoon i laid in the grass on the hill at kiwanis park, overlooking the lake, with the sun at my back as the white light in the blue sky expired and the yellow turned to gold and the air let go of all the heat. i was reading transmission of affect, and drinking full moon, which is seasonal blue moon, and then reading the first two articles of the constitution. i was hoping for something more human, or maybe only more visceral, but now there are some iron bands around the ribs in the sides of my chest, constricting if i should try to expand and reminding me there's no investment yet.

no investment--no tender observations about the humanizing force of bared rears, no powerful and practiced trace along the body contours your thoughts would reinforce. just me, with a pocketwatch and a kennedy half-dollar, just me, with an opening the size of the desert sky spreading in my heart, happy yesterday on a train with a hundred pantsless strangers, because, i knew when i'd come home, of the sheer delight of the body we'd worked together to co-create. all those naked legs ending in funny socks or serious socks or regular socks and shoes. all those innocent bottoms: celebrated: some straightforward and apolitical inattention.

it was a spasm of love, visceral and human. i was in love with the sliver missing from the moon and the sliver missing from my thigh and the feeling of moonlight filtering over an orchid and through your curtain and colliding with the lamplight inside, and i was in love with the energy in your hands and the energy in the park and the energy in the world. i remember you with such guileless, unguarded enthusiasm that her throat constricts in a spasm of love.

the fourth of december was the end of the semester for the coalition, sort of. it was our last meeting. and on the fourth of december, a sundog pierced the cloud cover, barking for my attention. and when i looked for one on the opposite side, i noticed a huge sweeping arc, like a foxtail trailing around the reach of the sun's light. and then it echoed, overhead. it was sort of mysterious and bright and it was beautiful.

in his poem "halos", mason williams writes,

sun dogs lay
around the sun
and bark in rhymes and runes
rhymes are fair
runes are rain

the meeting was a summit. i've been summiting, now. like phaedrus again. i looked around the big stupid conference room and realized when kyle reminded me that the semester was ending, and here were thirty or forty people at my meeting. they came here for themselves and for one another and to act and to belong. they came here for friends and family and for no clear reason at all. they sat around the conference table and they watched and listened to me. it was the end of my semester, this fall, that somehow didn't belong to me much at all.

for two hours there was an executive board meeting. we ordered food and watched a few music videos and then settled in and went through every office and officer. i called on them, and they answered my questions. i steer, though i am not direct enough. i ask, i ask, what's next?

what's next?

i'm the captain. the next tuesday we got together to finish the center proposal, and we finished it. i operate on a principle of invitation, because i don't like to and can't wait around to solicit. so somehow i got all my dark horses together and they pulled the text up past the tree line. chris laid it out; max and i had it printed and bound. and on thursday december eleven it was submitted. i'm at the top of the summit. i drove around the entire city with james, and i tried not to feel so alone. i am lonely in a way i can't explain, even to myself, now. i passed the tree line hours ago and i don't know what to do by myself at the top. you can't live up here; you'd die if you tried.

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow.

if you tried, you'd go mad.

I remember to have climed the slopes of the Swiss Alps, up beyond the point where vegetation ceases, and the stunted conifers no longer struggle against the unfeeling blasts. Around me lay a huge confusion of rocks, out of which the gigantic ice peaks show into the measureless blue of the heavens; and again my only feeling was the awful solitude.

i have no idea. one night it was the thirtieth of november, and i didn't spend any time remembering. at first i thought that was for the best, but part of me feels like anniversaries are what you get to keep. it was raining and there was a concert and everything was sharp. it was philip glass--the kronos quartet, string quartet no. 5: 5 - v. and then it was raining still and you wanted to go for a drive and we listened to hallelujah, and lifted our voices through the clouds.

at the end of november i took four steps around the edge of the pool: emotion, feeling, affect, and pathos.  here's how i explained it in ancient rhetorics: Brennan is careful to delineate between an emotion, the feeling or perception of that emotion, and the affective bodily response that accompanies, attends, initiates, or results from that emotion. Pathos, perhaps, is the persuasive exercise of these. and i feel like i've been saying that i feel like an awful lot, not out of any being non-committal or any being uncertain, both of which i'm cool with now, but out only of need to have this part of me be heard, like a wolf, like phaedrus, but also like a pack, coyotes, like a carnival of voices, polyphonic and howling at the moon. howling. someone must hear.

i've been feeling like fighting. i made the muscles in my back protest batting out my problems yesterday. it's never good enough. i was just thinking that i was twenty-one years old when you told me that just because it was hard doesn't mean it wasn't a fairy tale; that it was real, and real meant it would be difficult and painful. i listened at your side and i believed you.

but now i've been feeling like fighting. i understand you more sometimes i think, now. and it scares me, and wears me out, and makes me so goddamn angry. i want to cut somebody up and leave the pieces behind.

i can't be without you, my perfect little punching bag

i don't know if this isn't really about you. i feel like there's just one way of feeling available to me for all the emotions, in any particular affect. and in fact when affect changes and i feel less angry lately, i feel like i'm losing my footing. i need to feel this way right now, and i can't explain why and i can't figure out how to access more feelings. i know there's a whole acquifer of emotions. i guess what i'm worried about is that i can't possibly get down there alone.

maybe the hardest part is feeling like i can't take anyone down there with me, now. there's just this constant circling, these four steps around the edge of the pool, and this howling in the desert. and i hate missing you, and hate that you would get it. i don't know if you would get it, but it seems like you might at least fucking care. i hate that i think you would be interested and i hate that i can't tell. i hate that it's december and i am furious and flushed that i ever thought it would be anything different than this.

the words were:
The look you gave me might have been one part mischief, one part joy, and two parts desire. And it was awesome.
I saw it, and you rolled it up and sat up so I could come sit with you. And that look is still resonating.
You didn't really give it to me at all; you were watching me at the water cooler. I just turned and saw it in your eyes.
I think it made my ears blush. =)

you responded:
I don't know how you managed to describe something I felt so precisely when I was the one feeling it.

i remember the night of the concert and how electric i felt, and the way the sky felt sifted or scooped over the top of a great glass bowl, clouds and stars littering the skyscape like a rock garden arrangement. it was how i felt, the moon illuminating everything; everything transparent and light. i don't imagine now you felt a scrap of that, and a part of me feels heavy about that and sad. i want to wonder whether it has anything to do with me but a piece of me inhales.

i'm flying so high, high off the ground when you're around
and i can feel your high rocking me inside, and it's too hard to hide

i've been capable of saying to the mountain, move. you i took to the top of the mountain when i needed it the most. it wasn't perfect--maybe we never should have kissed. you could have linked your arm through mine and settled up against my side and shoulder, and i could have looked for an answer down into my beer and then watched the lights and the horizon and let my heartache leak down back into this city of ashes. i didn't need you that night and i don't know why you came with me. i'm curious about you but maybe i should have showed you stone and left it all up to you whether you wanted to give a damn.

but instead i was a bell. you looked, striking. but the whole thing feels more like clumbsiness than passion.

mine would say: Sorry I involved you in the emotional vacuum created by my overly enmeshed but politely dis-intimate family of origin.

and i would send it to my exes. and actually, a handful of friends. and scholars.

i'm mad because i feel like i don't know any other way of being in the world. i'm reluctant to look at (instead of, i can't see) why i can't just want what i want and get on with it.

sarah asked me what i was going to do to keep it from getting intense this time, and i told her i didn't know. i said busyness might just take care of that on its own, or at least it was doing it at the time. and then as i thought about it later i wondered if i wanted it to not get intense.

i never resolved that question, so there's a little visceral rebellion going on, demanding, why isn't it intense yet? and like any good frustrated iteration of kendall-in-leadership, my mind just answers back "fucking shut up and do what i say. just shut up right now; i need some time to think." my mind punctuates thoughts with semicolons sometimes.

right now i just feel like i can't hardly handle any more disappointments. i don't know why i would feel so raw about that. i think that i've handled a lot of disappointments in my life; i've never thought of myself as having some kind of upper threshold. so i guess part of me feels like i know i can in fact handle a lot more disappointments.

whatever it is, it's blank inside. maybe i didn't want someone to turn the light on, someone to decorate. maybe what i wanted was some to write on the walls with a thick black sharpie, to paint my skin turquoise and indigo and red. but i didn't want to be wrong all the time, and afraid, and ashamed. how can it still arrest my affect, demanding a chemical and emotional reaction? and why am i still shadowboxing, or who's behind that shadow?

maybe what i want now is someone to ask, "what happened here?" and keep asking, and keep happening. is it unfair?

i liked the way the sun hit the gentle curve in the muscle of my arm this morning, and i imagined that i draped my arm over your back. i haven't seen your back, bared, with my eyes, but i felt the sweat standing out on your skin and told you to lay down and relax now. just breathe. and i stroked that part of your back exposed to the air until the heat had dissipated, my other hand buried in your hair, my body at ease under your contented form.

i told you that i loved the big strong muscles in the planes of your back; they were like planks in a deck, but sinuous, many-sided, and turned. this already is how i think of your body.

once i tried to render the light of your eyes in ink. once in words. some part of me is a renderer; is in love with variations on a theme. i'm happy as a student, making studies of my interests, but i'm also suspicious of self/other, and i want you to show me not just yourself but your curiousity. lonely as it may seem no scholarship happens in isolation. even we are intertextual, and though my desire to trace the web of your histories like so many strokes across your back is great, you must inform this exploration by making up a map of your own.