The Cob and Log Hampster Wheel

It was all so gorgeous, it really was.  I didn’t know how I was going to explain it to anybody else. I guess I could have kept the feelings hidden away, relegating that type of beauty to a sort of vacation, a dream, a scrapbook.  I could have written a travelogue, perhaps; I could have written letters home, from “there,”  and we all would sit around some day when we’re old around reminisce about the trip we took together. When we went there together.    

But sometimes I can’t explain to anyone outside of Boston what this loneliness feels like. My days are spent knee-deep in dayplanners, study carrels, lesson plans, highlighters: none of it is unenjoyable to me, and certainly it is part of a larger goal that is attainable not too distant.  But it feels so boring when I explain it to anyone else.   I end up turning pages on photo albums, squinting into the dusty, creased, laminated pages.  Did that all really happen?

Do you remember when we rode trains down the west coast together? Do you remember drinking whiskey with our legs dangling out of a boxcar in hot July stillness on a siding in Montana?   Do you remember biking up great altitudes with me, and then coasting down hills with our mouths open wide with glee, the cold wind whistling at the enamel of our teeth?    Do you remember making out with me on newspaper boxes in the San Francisco Dyke March, or running naked through the shockingly cold Pacific Ocean with me? Farming topless?    Running with llamas?  If I say the word “prusicking” and “fanny pack” will you laugh in the same way that I do?

Did you ever go see Ramsey Gulch after the cut?  Would you want to?  Do you have any of my old zines? Did this all really happen?   

Because I live in Boston now. It is wicked cold and I go to bed mad early compared to my days on the west coast frantically scribbling Geraldine Fibber’s lyrics by candlelight and smoking cigarettes out the window with girls with deep throaty laughs.

And, yes, there are things here that I like. But they never seem to make it into my journals.    There is so much to say, also.  A partial list of topics that I have been tossing over in my mind: a creative writing professor at my school wrote a novel about treesitters with an unfactual ending;  the “situation” with the ports and the company in Dubai and that old spectre called the WTO (which did not, apparently, get shut down yet);   a Supreme Court case called Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer (1952);   the feelings of my hamstrings, generally; varieties of apples and the beauty of barren branches against crisp blue skies;  the stress of pondering genderqueerness while in a heavily mainstreamed environment like graduate school at BC and teaching at Dedham High School. 

Somehow I feel that there are secrets that we are holding onto like birds with broken wings, and I want to cradle the bird in my cardigan and rush towards the fireside to nurse it back to health.  Yes! All of it really will happen; and I am certain that it will happen again.

The world seems horrifyingly gorgeous from my perch in the O’Neill Library, and I guess I’ve had too much coffee again.

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