Well I'll skip the biography because February 14, 2007 seems to sum me up pretty well. I am a twenty-something traveler. I like living abroad, and have been doing so since I entered the fair realm of everything. I am likely to continue doing so until something gets pregnant or somebody in the USA decides they want to publish my book or throw money at me for some unconventional reason.

I am a selfish noder.

I come here to post what I write and get feedback. I'm not here for the community or to add to the fountain of knowledge. If the purpose of this place was really to accumulate facts then I have bypassed its prime directive. I love to read fiction, and especially poetry here.

I think of E2 as an anecdotal Wikipedia, and I think that's where its true power lies. I think it's more important to node something you care about or that has touched you, or that you have direct experience with in some way than simply to add pieces of string to tapestry of accumulated human knowledge. When I see a factual with heart - I praise the genius of this site's creators.

Poetry: I have my own thoughts about how poetry should be approached as far as linking go, but more importantly I do not believe in art for art's sake. I think that leads down a long road to wasted time, I personally believe what I write has a purpose and I leave this diatribe with two poems from two of my favorite poets. I feel that my own work revolves around the twin poles of these two pieces, William Mathews meditates slowly and deliberately on a theme and Stephen Dobyns tells stories. The Stephen Dobyns poem is also one of those pieces that people would say is "just a prose piece with lines broken randomly." I disagree with those sentiments as strongly as I can disagree with any about art, just because something is written in sentences does not make it prose. Just because there is no obvious rhyme scheme does not make it prose. I know I have a long way to go, and I can get a lot better at writing both prose and poetry, and I hope that many of you will accompany me on this journey and help pick me up when I fall.

Memory

We're not born knowing how to love the world,
but squalling. The first two years of our lives
crucially form our psyches, but we have
no memory of them. Well, a few shards

perhaps: a ladybug, the gray underside
of a bright leaf, a pixeled mother
murmuring from inside a screen door.
When all we have are fragments, they suffice.

On the debris of rock, on sand, we build
our church, the Little Chapel of the Dunes.
Soon enough it's harder to forget than
to keep track. How steadily the past fills

with that the present could or would not use.
Our silos teem with corn and avid rats.
How will we love the world? We can't forget
what we never knew, we'd better improvise.

"The farther we go, the more we give up,"
we could complain, but there's always more
to lose. The vacuum that dearth abhors
is dearth. We all drink from a leaking cup.

-William Mathews

---

Amazing Story

Disease of the spirit, disease of the mind
a man is bored, terribly bored. All day
he works at a gravel pit separating
white stones from black stones. There are too many
white stones. The man feels ready to explode.
Here a stone, there a stone. One day a kid
rips by on a motorcycle, hits a patch
of oil and flips over right at the man's feet.
The kid is pretty badly smashed. He groans
and rolls around on the ground. He's in
great pain. No one else saw the accident.
The man starts to call an ambulance, then
stops to watch the kid a little longer,
moaning and twisting on the ground. You see,
he was so bored. Help me, says the kid.
In a minute, says the man. He thinks, Here
is a real life-and-death struggle. The kid
is bleeding from a hundred places. The man
has never seen a movie half so interesting.
He drags the kid off the road and goes back
to separating the stones. In just a moment
I'll call an ambulance, he thinks. But he can't
bring himself to do it. This is the real stuff,
he thinks, this is what life is all about.
Time flies. In the evening after work, the man
drags the kid to his house in a wagon.
His wife is shocked. You brute, she says, he's
almost dead. All day she's been painting her nails.
She's nearly crazy with boredom. Don't call
the ambulance just yet, she says, let's see
what he does. They put him on a plastic sheet
on the living room floor. Both legs are broken.
His body's banged up, his face is a wreck,
and he's missing an eye. It's fascinating,
says the wife. She serves dinner and they eat
on little TV trays on either side of the kid.
All evening they watch him bleed. That night
for the first time in months they make love.
In the morning the kid is dead. Oh, damn,
says the wife, just when life was picking up.
The man sticks the kid back in the wagon
and drags him to the gravel pit. He tries
to think of all the interesting things
you can do with a corpse. By now the kid's
stiff as a board and sits straight up in the wagon.
The man thinks and thinks. Just like in the comics
a huge question mark forms above his head.
It looks like half a mushroom shaped cloud.
Although facing each other, he and the kid
resemble bookends--Maybe Rodin's Thinker,
maybe the monkey holding a human skull.
Between them appears the obligatory book.
Let's call it The Amazing Story of Mankind.
Who can guess its meaning? With equal
understanding, the dead kid and the living man
gaze at its covers, wondering what's inside

-Stephen Dobyns