Auditory Vestibular

Jewel Pieces of You

Jewel's debut album was almost a socially aware commentary in lyrics and guitar. Who else would cover love in times of disability, for acceptance of homosexuality, and her desire to punch Father in the teeth ala Sylvia Plath's Daddy in a track of the same namesake?


Hansons Middle of Nowhere

Kids capable of such melancholy, on always being on the outside looking in on things.

Radiohead OK Computer

It's Radiohead, it's Thom York. It was partially influenced by Noam Chomsky, one of my favourite academics. Maybe I'm just biased.

Placebo Meds

I have a $45 t-shirt with the album cover to prove that I love Meds. A lot slower, more contemplative than their other works.

Of Meds

I feel Meds was an excellently executed record. It was a really strong album and told a very powerful story. However, there were moments on that record that were perhaps the darkest in our career; it felt claustrophobic and had a suffocating atmosphere - Brian Molko.

Steve Hewitt departed after Meds and was replaced by Steve Forrest.



Placebo Black Market Music

Living up to the album title, it is dangerous, narc induced, sexed up.

Cat Power The Greatest

Chan Marshall worked with the Memphis Rhythm Band on this. It is breezy, jazzy, a little less sad in comparison to her other works. But only a little.

Bellx1 Tour De Flock

Bellx1 is a band I call intelligent, and I don't call many bands intelligent. They are lyrical geniuses, and their works read like a Charles Bukowski poem; bitter and noir humour. I have been surprised, tickled and broken by Tour De Flock.

You weren't so nice last night, you're such an asshole when you're drunk and I said, at least I'm ok in the mornings- from Rocky Took a Lover


Sigur Ros Ágætis byrjun

Sigur Ros. I can't say more. They turn sounds into music. For others who have never heard of them, I sum Sigur Ros's Ágætis byrjun as atmospheric, celestial, spatial.

Drip drip drop drip

Ayers

A gift from my brother that made my day

For Kai

When raindrops fill the sea

Ciao amore

For the woman who calls that out to me before I go to work in the morning

Be my better half

Is death better than despair? The dead won't let us know and the living can't be sure

Kurt Vonnegut - "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."

I love Mr Banhart, but a lot of people can't see why

stippling

Gravity

I like white lace. There is nothing that looks better than white lace... Then I started painting on lace. 

I wish I could remember the artist's name but I can't, except that I was there was with Ajeet on my day off when we visited it. It was an artist from the middle east- Iraq possibly.

The installation in the second picture was completely made of dates in case anyone wonders what they are.

The Giardini where you don't miss your water till your well runs dry

My beads drying in the sun

I was happy when I paid less than 10 bucks for it at the market, then I realised hey, that's not right, it could have been cheaper, even cheap

Because colour swatches are amazing on its own

and it's finally done

I've not been writing for some personal reasons... so I'm just working on my art and painting at the moment. I've been making things- the papier mache bowl is a project that's in the midst of completion.

Mathematics and Myths

In itself (Mathematics), it has taken all possible precautions against interpretation: no parasitical signification can worm itself into it. Mathematical language is a finished language.

Myth on the contrary, is a language that does not want to die: it wrests from the meanings which give it its sustenance an insidious, degraded survival, it provokes in them an artificial reprieve from which it settles comfortably, it turns them into speaking corpses.

-Barthes

Barthes from Mythologies- Myth Today (1957)

The meaning is always there to present the form: the form is always there to outdistance the meaning. And there is never any contradiction, conflict, or split between the meaning and form: they are never at the same place. In the same way, if I am in a car and I look at the scenery through the window, I can at will, focus on the scenery or on the window pane. At one moment, I grasp the presence of the glass and the distance of the landscape; at another,on the contrary, the transparence of the glass and the depth of the landscape; but the result of this alternation is constant:

the glass is at once present and empty to me, and the landscape is unreal and full.

Big Game- David Wagoner

You're feeling pleased with yourself, perhaps even
  Beside yourself as you approach slowly
The big game animal you've shot
  And think is dead. It doesn't move. It's no longer
Far away, out of reach, something painful
  Beautiful and dangerous that wasn't yours
But seemed what you've always wanted
  To be close to. Now you have it, have it right here
Holding still for you. Listen now. Listen.
  Look carefully: if its eyes are wide open
Like yours, if they're fixed and glassy, if the flies
  Have already come to call, then you're home
More or less free and you've done more
   Or less what you thought you'd aimed to do
When you came here with a gun,
  And this is no longer animated body
Is all yours now, a prize to be taken away
  And eaten or otherwise disposed of, to be mounted
And preserved for the benefit of other eyes
  And ears for the rest of your hunting life. But
          remember
As you bend near this creature, smiling,
  Already rehearsing the modest parts you'll play
At your comfortable fireside in the glow
  Of before-and-after-dinner stories, look out
For yourself (it may already be too late,
  But look out anyway) because if its eyelids
Are shut, and if you can't see the light
  Between them, it's still alive. It may be trying
Hard to remain itself, a skill much harder
  To learn than you might imagine, and if your hard
Should touch what's left of it anywhere at all,
  It may suddenly show you something you've neglected
To learn in time: the surprisingly quick, inhuman,
  Deadly, unmanly art of self-defense.

In a Landfill- David Wagoner

Our city fathers and mothers picked this place
To file and forget whatever they don't want
Or can't stand or have no other idea
What to do with. They have it all hauled here
To be mashed and leveled and seeded by the wind
And left to percolate and brew
And settle to what they hope looks natural.

Because I feel obliged to contribute something
And not just stand here, I sit down. And at once,
The old horizon is raked over
By bluegrass and tassels of wild oats and the crowned heads
Of Queen Anne's lace and other tough survivors
And aimless pioneers. Biologists say
You're seldom more than six feet from an ant,

And here they come to analyze my shoes
And the rest of me, which is more than I can do.
The ants and weeds and I have something in common:
We can cast shadows. We can metabolize
For a while. We can reflect daylight just as long
As it lasts. We can persist in the folly of being
Ourselves. We can add and multiply and divide.

We can disobey the laws of vagrancy,
Assembly, and trespass. We can feel inclined
To put our six-or-less, more-or-less best feet
Forward, backward, or deeper into the earth
Briefly before we lie down on our jobs,
Before we decide to lower our expectations
And join the rest, making ourselves scarce.

Date with a Muse- David Wagoner

I smile across the intimate table
 Where the waiter had laid the silver,
   The ingeniously folded napkins,
And the gleaming crystal,
  Where I've set the Tiffany gift-box
    To be opened later. She regards me
Remotely with poise
 Of the queen of a distant country
   Expecting something bizarre
From a savage suitor. I tell her
 She is beautiful. She mutters, That goes
   Without saying. I ask her
Over the open menu whether
 Anything, anything at all tonight
   Seems tempting, and the dim
Romantic light grows dimmer
 As she answers listlessly
    She isn't hungry. Listen then
For a moment please this music,
 I whisper. Shall we dance?
    She smiles vaguely and murmurs,
No thank you, not this evening,
 And the space between us yawns
   As wide as the empty dance floor.

Humpty Dumpty

But I don't want to
be a woman,
                    or,
                         in love with you.

When Humpty Dumpty fell apart,
those who tried to put him together,
did so out of love,
not out of being
in love with the egg who had sat on fences
and walls for too long,
already cracked on the inside
before he finally broke.

I want to be
all the King's horses
and all the King's men,
not just a woman,
to put you back together again.

The Importance of Balance

The first time I meet you after the love has gone
is at a restaurant of your choice.

Noisy, buzzing and fills up
the prolonged vacuum between us.

For once you look happy, rising
up to give me a buddy slap

but the camaraderie ends
when we settle in our seats.

Your replies are weighed,
like a tightrope walker careful

on a slack wire and knows
there are no safety nets below,

only the post-mortem anger below of
similar dinners to remind you the

importance of balance. Did you also predict
this politeness maturing to boredom too quickly?

We take the drinks outside, naïve
that dynamics would do some good.

The night is warm and heavy with our history
dampening the air like humidity.

We are not talking, only attempting to.
I have been wondering for an hour

if something would have changed.
This dinner is my answer.

It represents us, cold,
even before this table was laid

and I am relieved to know the wait is now over.

Dreams

I was running, pounding Reinprechtsdorfer Straße
to your apartment, past the coffeehouse
whose name I can't recall (it begins with the letter "M"),
past the shop displaying pink and white negligee.

The black-blue skies circling my ankles
beginning to feel like weights.
I wasn't too sure if it were night or still day
'tis lack of day
light.

It became sharper in a matter of seconds
why I was running, I was running after you,
because I knew and I had seen you.

You turned left to your apartment,
and with a crisp turn of the key
you were gone.

I don't run after buses so I don't run after people
but I found myself running after you
and now here I am consciously calling
your name to the meaningless wood of a door.

The intercom was a thing I never learned
to conquer like the many others of driving
of Photoshop
of xlsx.

A man was coming out of the apartment,
holding a big bag of laundry.
Balancing his clothes and the heavy door,
he held it open.

Vielen dank, relief swam over me.
Bitte, he replied as he walked away.

I don't speak German.
Even upon T's return from Berlin,
he asked me what the equivalent
for welcome was and I had looked at him
 like he was crazy.

Here I am dreaming in German.
You emerged shortly unfazed unfeeling
in an exhausted green coloured ringer shirt
with a vintage print.

Where are you going? 
You waited twenty seconds to reply
fumbling for an excuse
like searching for keys in your pocket.

Going to meet Andrew, you said.

Where were you before this?
You looked at me and couldn't say anything.
We both knew you didn't have to at 650am in the morning.

Belle and Sebastian- Judy and the dream of horses

The best looking boys are taken
The best looking girls are staying inside
So Judy, where does that leave you?
Walking the street from morning to night
With a star upon your shoulder lighting up the path that you walk
With a parrot on your shoulder, saying everything when you talk
If you're ever feeling blue
Then write another song about your dream of horses
Write a song about your dream of horses
 Call it judy and the dream of horses

we're all secrets on repeat

R: I mean I met her after 2 years then after we met a couple of times and then I didnt wanted to meet her again cause it was going back again to what we had

J: You didnt tell me

R: I didnt tell anyone

J: You didnt tell me.

R: I didnt tell anyone

Didn't I tell you to do all you can to be okay

beautiful and not yet dead, like Ray Lamontagne like Brian Molko (unlike Buckley and Nick Drake and Elliott Smith)

Do not even mention the T word

We are All Equal

I am the son my father made

after breaking canes through me, the girl

my mother wanted me to stay, bartering

hunger for a little more time.  A man I thought

I was, rising up to a punch in the face

because there  is no pain, only
a woman, so I will ask for another

blow and then launch my own

because we are all equal.

Origami of Wrapping

The cake is a strange
ornament on the table,
haloed by candles burning
ridiculous in the day.
The song in the background
by family obligated to
an occasion, not an allegiance
to me and I am amused
at how it is known and unspoken.
I try to be grateful for the parcels, even their
impending disappointments masked
by paper cosmetics and
the origami of wrapping, almost
like my guests enveloped
in their own gift bags to conceal
bad surprises. I am fixated by the quickly
wizening candles. Brittle
black wicks stripping pure
girl pink into irregular puddles
on cream, no past grace
of sculptured spirals and form.
The flames quaver before dying
from my sweep of breath.
I feel the candles’ relief,
extinguished from their duty.
There are cheers as I await
 the largest token slice.
25 crumbling in my mouth,
a new year that tastes tentative,
and everyone’s subsequent departure,
sweet.

Descend-in-reverse

I view descend-in-reverse, aligning
my neck and sight to the building’s height.
I dream better when there are still

gaps to fill in: the trajectory of my flight
before sprawling onto the tarmac.
Dissecting the adage of being broken,

I am actually whole, bones still
fused and a heart beating articulate
against the mind’s silence.

So it is the mind which breaks
from pain, binding to receptors,
tightening their pathways

that escape as topography of my palms
I memorize for ownership, so
the decision after this is mine alone.

Looking for Others

In the mirror, I am looking for others.
The boy my father wanted after I remained
stoic at the number of canes he attempted
to break through me. The girl my mother wanted
me to stay, starving me for a little more time.
I try the lens of my late grandmother, unmoved
but crushed by my betrayal of skin a concentrated
tea wash she could not to hide her disdain from.
I imagine the racist woman from the coffee shop
barking my order back in bad English,
because she hurt to hear
her language misappropriated.
Another woman kindly complimenting
the arcs and tones I manoeuvre
easily because Mandarin can be a feat.
From the words of an ex, I see fetish
and a social ladder, its steps broken .
I hold all of me together in the mirror
and they fit. All colours inside the outline,

not a shard missing. But they crumble
so quickly, my palms unable to stretch enough to
hold these pieces, already broken.

The woman at the coffee shop looks
at me suspiciously right after I ask
for toast. Is it the minted tan
and kohl bracketed eyes that
have suddenly claimed my right to speak
the language I ordered in?

If I have weapons that threaten her
perception of reality wider than the
one she knows, then these weapons are
my eyes that repeat a skin colour
she cannot understand.

She hands me my bread in
Mandarin, a bullet she fires I must
bite or dodge before I am denied.

My manners debut in English:
since a language cannot bridge,
I speak another to hope it divides us further.

Fertility

I was land, unfed into an arid geography.
Transpired, slowly into long branches hoping to scratch
for something. Cracked into tessellations,
soil hardened into clay. My roots retracted,
free from being weighed to the ground. Now I am
just earth.

Waiting Room

I would light one and start the countdown from the

electric blue burst of gas. This is how brilliance begins

to live. I watch the smoke elope

from my mouth to be with the atmosphere.

*

This is my armor. I am gathering courage in this

gauze of smoke, a permissible vice I authorize,

not that of you to whom I sink or swim at the degree

you let the pendulum fall.

*

My mother never told me to stop, only told me

the waiting room has been crowded yet emptying

faster than ever of late because

cancer is not a question of if.

It is now a question of when, but I

am young and cancer becomes a thought

only after other thoughts are ironed

out by denial and time.

*

On such nights like this,

I divide my breaths, long seconds between each

other, afraid to see the threads of clouds

that exit, making their way to the entrance

of the waiting room, its queue beginning to shorten.

growing up is hard to do II

The Virgin by Erik Barmack is the story of Jeb (Joseph, really) who takes part in a reality show, The Virgin, where contestants vie for the affections of a beautiful female -virginal of course. The prize? Her virginity.

But this is not a book on the world of a reality show. It is not about The Virgin either. It has little to do with sex, it has little to do with love.

What it really is about; a 27 year old man's fears, insecurity, merits and his last ditch attempt to meet the expectations of age.

It is about a story about getting lost, attempting to find the self in things, that makes one sink even deeper than before.

The Virgin is such an underrated book. The beauty of it is in how it forces you to read between the lines and eventually take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror. There's a Jeb, a Joseph in everyone of us.

There's no guarantee of adulthood transforming you into an adult. If being an adult is something by choice or biology. Who says coming of age happens only once?

Some of my favourite parts of the book:

The thing is, I like Allison. I really do, but the older you get the more you realize that sometimes people can like, deflate.

*

Allison has looped her arm through mine, but I can barely feel her. We're aware that we're generally beyond "it", whatever "it" might be. This allows us to be honest with each other, and sometimes we don't need to talk.

*

... I call Jenny, my college sweetheart and ask her on a date. Tonight we're dining at one of the chintzy Indian restaurants on Sixth Street. She's sort of glowing in her baggy blue sweater and I feel stupid because she always makes me happy in a pointless way. It will be good to spend time with her but I'll also be glad when this night is over.

*

Through the light blue tobacco haze, I look back at Jen. She's a good girl. Maybe I realize now, a little too late. What was our life like? You know I really can't remember. If I try hard enough, I remember egg colored sweaters and faded paperbacks- things like that. And I remember the frayed shoelaces on her father's hiking boots, the ones she wore. And I remember leaves falling in her hair and on her shoulders. Nothing important. It's stupid to overthink these things anyway.

*

After we stopped dating, we spent a good deal of time in the East Village. Sometimes we were together, but more often we were apart, on dates. Mostly bad dates. These evenings were unsatisfying, and they made us a little less innocent. We were naive, but it didn't seem that way when we were younger, and maybe it doesn't seem that way now.

what I would do for winter and frozen bones right now

Moments make up all of us.

Like that time, waiting for Nad at the airport in Hong Kong, thinking she'd never arrive.

Like that time in 2007 when I first heard Cat Power's Planets from yourmp3.net.

Like the smell of the freshly tiled toilets in the new campus smelling of muted cement and mild urine, the bright lights burning into my eyes then.

That moment of coldness and mirrors and weight loss and skinny girls.

You see these moments make us the same way we make these moments happen.

Your number that I saved from the last few years
I no longer have them now
but when I did
I realised these eight digits were
a farce
posing as you.

Of course it wasn't.

Once before falling asleep, I thought of something honest and beautiful, how someone always had you when you didn't have them yet. It always boils down

to the same damn thing

In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
-Albert Camus

If you have always waited to be somebody's without you, I am nothing

cannot lose you to something

as animal

as attraction

Eyeliner

Beautiful but hesitant, you round
yourself off as Dee, one syllabus, a letter for
a name no one can frustrate themselves, or you
over.

I marvel at your eyes. Caves, deep and dark,
underlined in turquoise. You like my black
thinness that extends out like a wave
because in memory, you have seen

bevelled eyes like canvasses,
painted in thick smears of kohl by
girls generous but unknowing. You rationalize
that less needs more.

Standing in the valley of your words we hold
our breaths on the same page, if less
is a territory I will agree with or defend.

I imagine I must deserve this,
at how you became Dee, first tired then familiar
with the four pitched tongues unable
to roll out the waves in your name.

Curriculum

Histopatology
Things we couldn’t see diseased,
under the industrial eye are purple and pink.
Slice thin, tissues in its paraffin coffin.

Laboratory Management
Bhopal and Prypiyat still call on.
Their generation of abstract births and limbs
have only just began.

Anatomy & Physiology
Bolted by joints, my skeleton is
a white roller coaster the heart
rides on.

Pharmacology
Balancing weight, dosage and excretion,
maths in motion.
We measure codeine and alcohol,
wreath our heads in lightness without dying.

Haemotology
Plump the fingertips, just not mine.
Last night, an errant scalpel broke
the red dams beneath the arm’s epidermis,
my potential end an ironic taunt to live.

Convocation
Only in my entrance,

I saw the exit from years before.
Begin with the end in mind,
but those sephia moments did not capture
a curriculum that nourished
disorders in between.

Your art will let you down

Where was it last year I was at... Yes, di Arsenale... I suspect I was by myself on my day off. After the maze of exhibitions, I ended up at the washroom.

Behind the door of the cubicle I was in, I took a second to contemplate the vandalism on it. None of those street techniques, fancy art scribbles. They were short scripts, an assortment of handwriting: cursive, bold, tentative, tiny. I wondered about the life of all the women behind the souvenir of their presence.

Some had political content. A few in Italian, which I didn't understand. Mostly about art.

Art saved me.

Art ruined my life.

Art fuck shit.

I was thinking along the lines of Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart when I took out my pen and etched the following

Your art will let you down.

And today? Don't think I've ever had a day where I felt it any more accurately than I ever had.

Magritte's This is Not a Pipe.

Magritte's point: This is not a pipe, this is a picture of a pipe. Can you stuff it? It is just a representation. If it was written "This is a Pipe", it would be a lie.

This would make a wonderful tattoo. We are hardly who or what people think we are. What they see, is merely a re-presentation.

gravity always wins

Migrants

Under the discerning sun,
we have assigned you great heights,
the labyrinth of scaffolding your career ladder
we wouldn’t imagine climbing.
When the idea of death, or worse,
the half death of paralysis
you have seen other brothers fallen into
seem too much, you lay
another brick with mathematical precision
a few thousand times,
its mechanical repetition to pace fear.

Still you advance
in numbers, increasing by the years
pawning land and adjourning family
until success, which is at best, equivocal.
But a promise is a promise,
the dhobis and rickshaw coolies made good in history,
a blueprint of possibilities.

We make proud
announcements of zero accidents and teach
that your safety comes first,
then the firm’s bankrupting risk penalty.
On bamboo poles you balance
danger with the love of who awaits back home.

In a shelter, I spoke to one of you whose
courage galvanizes, a lesson primed
in hardship.
Later you correct bravery with desperation,
they are not interchangeable.
Nevertheless you are
faithful for the third time.
A femur fracture and a back injury later could not
nail you home too long
before you are straightened,
walking back to something slightly lesser
than a dream.

I am gathering

courage

in the gauze of smoke,

the company of music,

its words and tune only popular.

What matters now

is its next mechanical

palpitation,

predictable and safe enough

to assume a heart

beat that you

failed me.

I am gathering

strength

in the number of men I collect.

They will

have me back all the same, not knowing

I am on my knees,

attraction and attention their hand

outs,

to keep me going.

I am gathering

you

categorized in nominal:

injury,

year,

incident,

framed in the mental gallery,

for reminder

to not surrender

to another collection of you.

Holding back

is hardly

one

of the easiest thing

to carry

The three faces of Pieta

Michaelangelo's Pieta

The unintended Pieta. Samuel Aranda's picture won world press photo of the year 2011.

Contemporary Pieta. I took this picture in Venice last year. The Giardini... or was it in Arsenale... South Korea's pavilion by Lee Yongbaek.

good times, old times

and finally...

how the stems look like

Sometimes, I feel like some parts of my life never happened. Like the fact that I studied science for three years... progressing from a level to another, each class more mystifying than the one before, until the names of the classes were clean forgotten in the difficulty of it, leaving me with the memory of its suffix -ology.

I can easily dismiss the beauty of the places I've lived in, been to. The people I've met- Ana and her poetry she tried so hard to translate, Manuela and her contemplative laughter, Monica's Japanese worthy mannerisms... I can hold on to these imagery of them, but there is no depth, love or loss.

I woke up from a dream about my old housemate last night. I think about her from time to time, modeled a poem after her... but I don't miss her- as lovely as she was, and I suspect, will always be. I saw her being my housemate as a fact I accepted with open arms and mind, out of pragmatism above anything else.

I don't really know how to attach myself to anything.

just so fine

http://www.myspace.com/music/player?sid=21205416&ac=now

Because You Say So

1.
Brittle, I need only another
word from you to break me.
Then comes your dire anguish
to cement my veins with glucose
and lipids to turgidity.
Clean forgotten are
your words to conform
weight to shadow
as you question what
I am doing to myself.


2.
You are criticising my choice
in men once more,
so Type V on the Fitzpatrick,
my date’s swarthiness repels you.
I am made to repent again.
Gratitude and filial piety,
to know shame,
until you become bitter
with love,
Chinese
like ourselves.
Still you stand uncorrected and proud,
stereotypes rightfully assured.

3.
You are nailed to tradition,
its roots deeper with time,
deeper than mine
so I will be the perfect weight,
I will act Chinese and that is
beautiful
because you are correct,
because you say so.

Imagining your own funeral

Chassis and Skin

I see now the men I
never want to see again,
collective in disbelief.
They inhabit a homogenous expression
similar to mine when they left.

On red plastic chairs, they sit
along my timeline,
fiddling with flat top mineral water,
assorted sweets and
talk about me.

One says my restlessness scared him.
Another disagrees; his departure was from my need to own.
The last one who speaks, my first adult love,
only says
we grew out.

Of guilt or its pointlessness,
they agree, they were good men and I,
decent enough.

My best friend, never able
to look the part for mourning
arrives, the lips her signature red.
She whispers me her valediction
borrowed from Bukowski.

My parents are sentenced by embarrassment.
They measure reality with denial and
days on, they faithfully call on me
to awaken.

Before the furnace, I do, vacating
chassis and skin,
my favourite dress.
I am defunct of everything tellurian,
memories: the scalloped lines of my backbone,
quartered sunlight through the window.
My air-con rhythmic at 4am with
the brittle accent at the turn of each page.
Submitting myself, I am lighter
and lighter, now decimating
into the brightest light.

The best anti-Valentine's Day Valentine's Day card

Credit: http://henrytheworst.tumblr.com/tagged/Charles-Bukowski

Tiger Girl

‘86 ( 山 )

Either out
of duty or preference,
my mother wants a
son,
not another daughter
and born
in the year of the tiger.

She worries about
the mismatch,
girl and tiger:
restless and deadly,
overwhelming
my father’s rooster.

Time to time, she
blames
the literomancer.
I am
as untamed
as it is,
yet called
a tigress on the loose,
descending
ascending ascending
the mountain in
my name.

I have no
duty to refute
my mother’s belief.

She already sees
my appetite
to escape,
to hunt
for sustenance outside of family,
ungrateful and carnivorous
like a tiger.

Fifteen minutes later, we finish our drinks and I walk her to the valet. Sometimes, at the end of an evening, I still have feelings for her. It's an old baggage from many previous nights like this one. I consider asking her to say, but that part of us is too far gone. We pulled the ripcord long ago, grabbed silk. Instead I take her in my arms and I kiss Allison, my cocreator, goodbye.

Erik Barmack, The Virgin

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