As an adult, whose life includes experiences, I know perfectly well that there is no stack of letters idyllically accumulating beneath the threshold of my doorway. I know that there is no comforting mid-century stereotype of a mailman, cocking and shaking his head, shoving said letters into the inaugural square foot of my apartment, privately wishing me well. I am well aware that every card I’ve received that’s not from Papyrus was the result of someone who sort of knows me standing in the candy/holiday/clearance aisle of a Safeway and congratulating himself/herself on selecting a card with exactly the right amount of condolences and a trendy-but-muted envelope color without all the cursive and religious stuff for less than $6.95. I am entirely conscious of the fact that their half-baked grievances are stacked and rubber-banded at the Devon Avenue Post Office, waiting to be retrieved by yours truly from an extremely condescending postal clerk at a time and date of my choosing.

But the joke’s on them, because I am not coming. I am halfway down the gangplank of a 747 (or whatever nondescript commercial airliner) and I am knee-deep in Everclear and Welsh Corgi, the two most notable purchases I’ve made in the past six hours. The latter is masquerading as a service dog, although what service an animal with six-inch legs could possibly perform is a glaring mystery, while the former represents a strategy to end my miserable life aboard the aircraft. It bears noting that the former is strapped inside the adorable service vest of the latter, and that sloshing vials of pure alcohol are best transported under the veil of sheer fucking cuteness, which has yet to be corrupted by the assiduity of airport security.

Halfway to my seat, I am presumed to be blind. It’s an incidental but logical development, brought on by a perfect storm of general clumsiness, an indoor animal, and Ray-Bans. I wade through a sea of crime novels embossed with their half-cooked, punny titles, and locate my seat, absolutely no one perplexed that I didn’t need Braille to identify the seat number. They’re too busy congratulating themselves on the idea that they’ll speak elegantly and helpfully hand me something, should the occasion arise.

I open a bottle, cagily unscrewing and sipping, feeling the flashbacky shame of a junior high hayride, wondering if I should have sprung for first class. I find myself desperate to hold something. I pick up my dog, this heavy, warm, shivering creature. Obliviously content, he licks my hand. The damp fur around his neck suggests that I’ve been crying, silently, onto the top of his head for hours. I detach the remainder of the quarter-bottles of Everclear from my little dog’s vest - I have just now decided to name him ‘Yes,’ like the hero of a never-to-be-made festival film - and load them into the seatback pocket like ammunition.

With a rush of acute regret I realize, for the first time and with sinking dread, that someone will be seated next to me. That my endeavor to suck down grain alcohol until I convert to a corpse may not be apropos. On the heels of my anxiety, this someone presents herself in the shape of a modest, earnest-looking brunette who obliquely introduces herself via a pandering hello to my dog. “Small for a guide dog,” she says, to me. This woman - let's call her Elle - is fully on board with the impression that I am completely and definitely blind. I cannot look her in the eye; not doing so is easy - all I can think of sincerely is what happens to a dead body aboard an international flight: whether its seatmate is spared from the carnage via some rare protocol involving a stilted announcement and a well-meaning set of waifish flight attendants demurely hauling the corpse to the rear coffee station beneath a clean white sheet from the forward cabin, striving to conjure some makeshift dignity, scrambling for whatever wisdom the employee handbook might have to offer on the subject - and it is this brutish melange of panic and pity that Elle mistakes for romantic interest.

Yes in my lap, Elle stroking his paws, her fingertips trailing mock-absently to my knee, I look through my purportedly blind eyes to these objects I’ve named, feeling gut-sick. Elle is kind, ripe, oblivious - she is a sudden perfect ten, dripping with the unleashed confidence of a woman addressing a blind man, to whom all women are equally beautiful.

We converse for an hour, of which I remember virtually nothing. I register that she is a real person, obviously – someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, very likely someone’s wife. I memorize everything with rigor and forget it immediately. We are flying to Colombia for our own plausible, unremarkable reasons, which we mutually pretend to find fascinating. For my part, I am a farmer, a sudden and alacritous liar; the season has been favorable; eggplant is tricky, but rewarding.

My mind is on white white white white lilies. Beautiful, hackneyed, no-prefix standard fucking lilies. I am wondering whether they’ll use my wife’s flowers for me too, or if the timing will be off. I'm forgivably hazy on the longevity of lilies. I think of wanting to be buried inside her casket, of the way that our bodies fit - do I have any crazy allies on the ground who might pitch this idea? is there a precedent? - and feel a sudden wash of nausea and ridiculousness at being so far away from her. I wonder if I've left anything out of the will, handwritten, on the island table, the way one wonders about leaving the oven on.

Among the bright hollow sound effects communicating the urgency of fastening one’s seatbelt, I hear Elle say, “I'm going to use the ladies’ room,” her mouth fondling the words in a bout of unmistakable over-articulation.

I aurally register the metallic click of her seatbelt, like an actual blind person. Looking out the window, I feel her sympathy warm on the back of my neck, her flushed remorse for the blue sky she thinks I can’t see.

There is no romantic drinking oneself to death, only scientific drinking oneself to death.

Mentally logging my bouncing baby aphorism, I pluck a bottle from the seatback pocket, liberating it from its niche behind a neglected safety manual featuring cartoon people at an airplane crash-themed waterpark. In the 90 seconds I estimate it will take my seatmate to compose herself, I drink the entire bottle. Feeling my esophagus shed its internal fascia like a snake, I appreciate what those fellows at carnivals must feel, swallowing the sword.

With a swift kiss delivered to the top of Yes’s head, the gentle directive to ‘Stay,’ I wade through four meters of air that has become molasses. I wonder (sort of, not caring) whether this inching forward by gripping strangers’ seatbacks, alternating footsteps with the lax confidence of hoping for the best, loosely resembles the behavior of a blind person.

I knock on the bathroom door, like an amateur. And then, by magic, I am inside and hearing the door latch, Elle’s hands guiding mine the way you would pilot a blind man’s hands. Everything is pure, extravagant texture, clawing its way through eviscerating numbness.

I try to remember if this is the first time I’ve ever had sex with sunglasses on, and decide that it probably is. Elle is biting my mouth; grappling with my belt; likening me, for some indiscernible reason, to a bloodhound. I don’t understand what this means, so I stay silent. With the sensation of having swallowed a nail salon, I pick her up and shove her against the mirror, positioning her on the narrow counter beside the sink. I am forgetting everything.

And then, unlocked, she is breathing all the wetness of her lungs into my ear. She is whispering whatever name I told her was mine, her long, slender legs tangled like vines around a condemned building.

She comes in an elaborately silent scream against my neck, and I wonder, fleetingly, how such an indisputably uncomfortable thing has become a cultural phenomenon. I bite her collarbone, lift her gently from the countertop, then come in the sink, like an old pro.

Her kiss lands and evaporates on the corner of my mouth, and I hear the plastic door click open, then shut. I turn and vomit instantly: 600 milliliters of pure alcohol spill over my lips into the most translucent bodily fluid any human has ever produced. A bright, courteous ding requisitions one to return to one’s seat with one’s seatbelt fastened. I finish undoing my suicidal handiwork, flushing the short-lived attempt into oblivion. I wash my hands, shaking, staring into the streaky mirror. The ding, again, the polite command to remain in one’s seat, with one’s seatbelt fastened, until the captain has turned off the Fasten Seatbelt sign.

I take off my sunglasses, rub my temples. I begin to cry violently. My body racks and aches, primally confused. I put the sunglasses back on. To my surprise and disappointment, I look great. I look blind.

I open the door to the little bathroom, stepping back into the stiff, cagey air of the cabin. To the right, toward the coffee station, a pert flight attendant looks back at me in horror. Mentally, I gather the frayed threads of an extemporaneous defense of my bathroom tryst, but soon realize that this is not why she looks horrified. At her feet, near her uniform blue pumps, a body lies covered in a white sheet, stretched out straight, with makeshift dignity, beneath the coffee station.

I cannot believe it. I was right.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Thank you,” she says.

We look at each other, our eyes glazed with the weirdly mistaken, grateful sadness of not being this fellow beneath the sheet.

I return to my seat, stepping over Elle, making no further pretense of being blind. Yes bounds onto my knees with a kind of blithe, directionless urgency, a history of present moments coiled in his small limbs. My mind is generating names, hundreds of names, none of them permanent, none of them mine. The taste of bile and Everclear fresh in my mouth, I order a cup of coffee and survey the slick blue-green ocean, punctuated by boats like divots in glass. With the bright, doomed hope of a hundred little impending deaths, I begin to wonder what Colombia will look like.

Widely considered to be the “choose-your-own-adventure novel of syntax,” poetry comes from the Greek poiein - “to make” - which is (scholastically speaking) useless. Etymological frustrations aside, poetry is a bit like porn, in that one knows it when one sees it, and also like porn in that almost anyone can make some and post it online.

If words are weapons (as poet Eminem suggests), poetry is an exquisitely complex surgical instrument that can be used to perform exquisitely complex surgeries, or as a doorstop. It is at once less tactically constrained by and more indebted to the power of language, and is, at its best, dialogical (every self-respecting assailant requires a victim).

Of course, poetry needn’t be poetic (and often isn’t). Ultimately, one thing is certain: poetry may not always be better than prose, but that which is poetic is always better than that which is prosaic. 

[Literarily, journals are problematic. Unless you’re an astronaut, a war reporter, or an arctic explorer (and sometimes even then), there are profound limitations on the narrative merit of real life. But what about surreal life? The following is an excerpt from a collection of my dreams, recorded over the course of a year.]

Sight

The first thing is that it’s grey, sloping woods, like in every Russian war movie from the past century – a tangle of thin, gnarled grey trees stretching from grey upward into lighter grey.

The second thing is that everyone is blind.

There’s a room where people go, in ones and twos, to tell one another secrets. To pray. Whatever. It’s a few degrees cooler in this room. I’m not sure whether people take the sacredness of this room seriously, but the fact that almost no one’s ever here, even in the crushing heat, is a good indication. There’s a dartboard along one of the far walls, which seems silly. To get to this room, you cross from a wooden platform via zipline, which is really just a chunky metal chain stretching upward into oblivion, swinging downward like a very unsafe version of a Discovery Zone rope swing. Or you can just stretch and scramble your way upward onto the far platform, but this is frowned upon. The room is long, and very dark, which I suppose doesn’t matter. There’s an off-white box of a vintage PC centered against one wall, near the entrance – one of various instances of obsolesced technology as ignored decor. As I pass it, I think: This is what I’m doing here. We have to write all of this down.

This is where I go to tell Stacy I’m not blind.

“You already know what I’m going to tell you,” I say.

“Say it,” she says.

Stacy has suspected for some time. My not being blind anymore. First when I noticed one of her tattoos. Second, when she was throwing things at me to see if I could see and I sort of forgot she was doing it and dodged a little bit, something sharp probably. Third, when I was getting my own tattoo, and lodged a minor complaint, ostensibly based on having felt the error, but of course Stacy knew that was bullshit.

I didn’t want anyone to know I wasn’t blind, so I started practicing what people call one’s “beggar face.” It just means looking blind. Stacy doesn’t seem to care, but still, I don’t want anyone here to know that I can see. I haven’t been here long enough to know whether or not they kill their gods.

Purportedly, there are two other people who have sight. I haven’t met them yet. Or maybe I have, and they just have better beggar face than I do.

Road Trip/Mayflower/The Squirrels

Thomas Middleditch and I are going to repeat this vaguely coastal road trip as many times as it takes. Which is at least three.

Each time it's only slightly different, like a historical glitch, circling back on itself in fits of interruption and resumption.

And one last thing that bears noting: the squirrels in this world (Tom explains) are malicious. They're essentially what the birds are to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Later, we will hang glide over the Mayflower, the historical site where it famously crashed off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. After all, Tom remarks, there’s no safer place from squirrels than a hang glider.

Cornfield Cult Film Festival

I sit in the low-topped muscle car, just sweating, for what feels like forever. I am feeling things out, pretending to be her daughter, at this weird, cult-film-inspired festival in the middle of nowhere that appears to 100% share a guest list with the nearest comic-con.

Why her daughter? Am I that much younger looking? No; this is swiftly confirmed by the fact that people start mistaking me for her almost instantly. Is it because I’m embarrassed? Because knowing so little about a full blood sister is head-cockingly weird, whereas being a daughter implies distance, estrangement, adoption, switched babies at birth… any number of good reasons to not have known this person who shares my genes almost exactly? Yes, that’s the one.

I finally do extricate myself from that suffocating little car, picking my way across the defunct cornfield to one of a slew of concrete warehouse buildings, gutted and shelled for this momentous occasion. Inside, throngs of people who parked on the field are milling about – discussing, theorizing, arguing, reliving – this horrible little movie whose tangential excitement should have died down, culturally, about one week after it came out.

Some plaid-clad showrunner arrives and sticks me in a pair of enormous, clunky platform shoes with treaded soles, and I don’t question why (this is not necessarily weirder than other things happening concurrently). The reason becomes clear when I am led out to a slab of wet concrete in the field, evidently to execute some impoverished version of the Mann’s Chinese Theater nonsense. I am flanked by others in weird shoes, apparently from the film, who eye me with a mixture of excitement and suspicion.

The only person who leaves me alone at this thing, who doesn’t buy for a moment that that I am ¡her!, is a gal who turns out to actually be her daughter. She is round and frank and ingenuous, a sharp crop of black hair framing her pale face. She looks exactly like her. Well, like half of her.

The reason this girl (my niece/a stranger) chats me up but never supposes that I am her is because she knows that her mother is dead.

Well, of course she’s dead. I should have known that.

Heroin

Speeding down the side of a forested mountain, I should be questioning the safety of my companions, but mostly I'm kicking myself for not doing heroin before.

Within moments I am an old pro. Toggling back and forth between the two types, ingeniously labeled “brown sugar” and “white sugar,” it becomes clear that we are smuggling this shit. The police arrive, and everyone debates in hushed caws what to do.

But the answer is obvious: more heroin.

Obits

Near the border, a small, bespectacled man makes his way past hot, unruly clusters of people. He is going to the office to meet his partner. Although they could not look more physically dissimilar (the man’s partner is heavy, towering, untucked, shaped as though poured into the warped jug of his button-down shirt), they each look 100% their part. They are obit writers, a task they approach with the wry dedication befitting their profession. Through a clerical error – an intentional one, coming definitely from someone and somewhere – the small man learns that his own mother is dead. That she has been dead for three months.

Tornado Drill

As tornadoes dance in the distance, like so many snakes being charmed, the sky beneath them slurs from a rich peach to a drained antique yellow. This is the color of greyish gold that makes everything around it look greener, and there is plenty of green. For miles around, there is nothing and no one, only my friend and I as we look from newly planted tree to newly planted tree, some roadside project, for the fattest trunk or the deepest roots, something we can hug in a crisis. I am poised to make a very funny tree hugging joke, but she’s busy tugging at thick strands of grass. Thinking? Hard to say. She’s an idiot, but I’m still going to save her life if I can.

The other part of this is that we’re rehearsing a play. Today is our first rehearsal, and it’s a pro bono gig in a ramshackle little cabin, about fourteen meters from where we’re standing now. Totally senseless, no pay, and it’s the middle of nowhere, but we all love the author. You can get people to do just about anything if they love the author.

A spiral of stone-black clouds whirs overhead and moves on. We decide to head into the cabin, to check on the boys and to see if they have a basement.

Inside, the mood is best described as picnic-like, and the director is keen on rehearsing lines. The stage manager is tossing me my lines, handwritten, one at a time on ripped fragments of notebook paper. The director, lying on his side, propped on one elbow, looking like an embarrassing antique doll, questions my lack of commitment to the production. I assure him of it.

Once the director has stormed off or supernaturally vanished (who cares which), I wander to the porch and look out over this great idyllic nowhere paradise. The danger seems to have retreated, reduced to an overdramatic wind with harmless tendrils of tornadoes in the deep background. My friend suggests “running lines” but really taking cover in the closet – which she assures me is the safest place during a storm (it is not) – to make out with the boys. She’s making sense, and anyway, she likes the one I’m not crazy about, so I figure what the hell.

As we head back inside, someone announces that the storm has so completely cleared, the danger so completely passed, that there is no need to take shelter in the closet at all. Everyone is laidback and bored, passively resentful but accepting of having their time so elaborately wasted. I am quietly angry. No one is making out.

I bitterly gather my scraps of lines from the wood floor and listlessly put them in order. This tornado was a total fucking wash.

Apartment Hunting/Tree of Life

Looking from the windows to the north and south, there’s nothing but interstate wasteland, grey on grey, billboards for hundred-year-old products. But to the east and west, the windows reveal an exotic playground of green and tangled trees. Returning with the landlord to the courtyard of the apartment complex, apparently located along I-95, south of some dystopian future New York, there grows a giant, gnarled tree. Low-hanging elements that can’t quite be called fruit dip low and at odd angles. It looks as though it would be fun to climb, but you find yourself wondering: would the tree like to be climbed? I try to choose between the superior view of the second floor and the convenience of the first, for when the baby comes.

Some time later and for no reason, we cut the tree open, and inside is a gnarled wilderness of cerulean blue and vivid green, a little liquid civilization. People talk about the sensation of peaceful, maddening irrelevance beneath a star-filled sky, the individual against the universe. But they have it backward. Staring into the colorful veins of this tree, descending into some better, smaller universe, how much closer it must be to the perfection of the atom.

Capture the Flag

There’s a kind of dead that’s almost dead, but not quite. That’s the kind of dead I am when the boys come running up the hill, playing some soon-to-be-abandoned variation of Capture the Flag.

They are covering me, a noble investment in my modesty, but in covering me, they are burying me.

Shoe Shopping

We go “shoe shopping,” my new friend and I, which means filching the shoes from beneath the racks on the upper level of this nightclub in Paris. Why so many people have chosen to take their shoes off is beyond me.

I select a pair of seafoam green ankle booties, calfskin etched with delicate flowers. “You don’t know if it’s calfskin,” my friend says.

At dawn, I walk through the gardens with a small, glorified paper dixie cup of beer. We go into the museum, but there is nothing to see, except for a beautiful, subservient academic type standing watch. She doesn’t give me any trouble about the beer.

There are so many things I’ve forgotten, still knocking around just beneath the skin.

The water. The ocean or something.

     Rome. 2016, March. Hadn't seen him since the '90s. Drunk on being away from the States, drunk on red and white wine, and a stomach gorged with in-house pasta, bread, and anything else I could get my hands on. Alley, restaurant. Trevi fountain checked off. Young Italian girls waving Americans in to their restaurants. A brothel feel. I want to go into the story about the two Italians fighting over the check. The owner and a drunk patron. I want to go into the gelato after, the air of Rome, the bricks of the alleys. But I can't. Rare to see this profile written in first person, but this is different. Like Rome is different. Lost there. Must gaze upon the Pantheon during the first rays of moonlight. 

Lost there. Around a blind corner I nearly walked into Cornell. The man was tall. I'm 6'1 and he loomed over me. We glanced at each other, I registered the situation, and kept moving. GPS called me a moron in code, so I followed Cornell and his wife, and their little girl. I wasn't listening but I was. He was telling his girl about how life is in Italy. I heard, "In Italy..." then the crowd around us absorbed the rest. A few people took fast second looks, and then went back to their tables, their drinks, their own trips and lives.

     In Rome no one cares who you are. 

     Quite a beautiful feeling.    

     Rome is different.

    Crossing back toward where I had to go. Losing light. The Sun becoming the Moon, and I'm standing there then, staring at the street that I would cross to my hotel, to give up, but I'm feeling too fine, and I'm in Rome. I'm in fucking ROME. Not to sound incredulous. I put my phone to my ear to hear the directions, looked down the street. Cornell. Giving me a skeptical but not-so-sure stare, a sideways check. It would appear I was following them, but I wasn't. It didn't bother me. I laughed ahead. Rome is different. He disappeared down the street with his family, and I realized I'd been going the right way the whole time. Turned back, walked and thought about it. I could have had a conversation with him, I could have dropped one name. His parents lived next door to my friend's parents here in West Seattle. He'd skated with Cornell, and once told me he and his parents would watch Cornell mowing his parents' lawn from upstairs, even after Soundgarden took off. We could have had a conversation away from the music, the words, just two dudes from here laughing about the suddenness of meeting in Rome with such far-reaching connections to the past. What stopped me from shaking his hand? I would like to fall back on ego, but it was only ego in the sense that I didn't want to be a fan, a number, even with a rare connection. 

     But the truth is I am a fan. And though I don't believe in regretting something you've already done, I should have shaken his hand. I didn't have to tell him that his lyrics were brilliant, his voice one of the most distinctive in all remembered time, or any of that bullshit people like him, the few of them, hear and have to deflect or appropriate when they're out in the world. I also simply didn't want to interrupt him or his family while they walked in peace as the Moon rose over Rome. 

     I found the Pantheon, young moonlight. Breath stolen. 

     This morning I awoke to a text from my buddy, Dave. Four words and an abbreviation: Dude, Chris Cornell died. WTF?

     Tap google. 52. Suspected suicide. No matter, he's gone. They all go, they don't live long enough to see themselves shine like the rest see them. And they don't care. Sitting here now, blasting Louder Than Love, and sending my best thoughts to his family. 

     Bukowski once said in a letter, "Death isn't a problem for the deceased, it's a problem for the living." Or something like that. Looking back on the dead artists of the last few years, Cornell hits pretty hard. 52 years old.

     Much love to his people. Hands All Over just started. I need more coffee, and to kiss my dogs. 

     Outside it's grey and bright and warm. 

      Austin, 2014. An idea was born into the streets. Two men walking, teeth dry from the ways of liquor. One stares in front. Downtown festival. Talks to the city ahead, but to the one walking next to him.

     I have an idea for an app. 

    Small city, the grey heat. Overcast no match. No hope to burn off the film from the damage last night. Hotel lounge, hair of the dog. The city had grown, and they were strangers now, each waiting to leave there, one by plane, one by car and dog. Talks of Prose., the font. Talks of why it would work, a family the size of a world. Strangers yet not quite. Revolt against apathy. Earned things, lost in paces too fast to retain soul, to keep their light. Drinks and words, the lobby bar turned museum for the old death of the words eaten by technology. A way out through a way back in. 

     We are all here now. 

     Thank you for being here with us. 

     Thank you.  

     It’s true. 

     Shots of bourbon in our coffee lead to reverence for you in the voice of Neruda.

     Where to begin? Does anyone who asks that question not know where to begin?

     We’ll start.

     Swift but graceful changes here at Prose. Our coder, while also knee-deep in slaying dragons and winning digital hills on rendered battlefields, is working on new features as this is being typed. Keep your eyes peeled. In another change, call it a red sun rising, we’re taking the app to 18 and over after the next update. Any young guns existing won’t need to worry, and should anyone under 18 sneak past the doorman and smooth-talk the bartender into a drink with no ID then you probably belong here, anyway. 

     Many more things to appear on the horizon.

     Stay tuned. Stay hungry.