Saturday, December 31, 2005


Thoughts on Love at 3am

This book (which I first read back in the Summer of 2000, in a sexuality & modern lit. class at UNLV taught by Claudia Keelan) and particularly this section, is how I've best learned to understand relationships:

from The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers

First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons- but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the people involved. There are the lover and the beloved but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that this love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world- a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a weding ring, this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else- but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being be loved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

Thursday, December 29, 2005

The Year That Ended With Sickness

For me it was a sinus infection, a respiratory infection, a headache like a hangover, and a doctor with a grumpy demeanor commanding me to give up cigarettes once and for all.

Surprisingly, it's midnight and I'm nowhere near tired. I guess I'll try to finish reading Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler... which is only the first of four books I planned to read over the break, which is the first book I'll be teaching in my ENG 101 class starting in a couple of weeks. After that, I have to re-read Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, a book that I think is just super lyrically fantastically beautiful. If I can get those two out of the way in the next two weeks (which is hypothetically do-able) then I'll be copping it sweet for at least the first 7 weeks of class.

Sunday, December 25, 2005

Friday, December 23, 2005

with glare in our glasses before watching king kong

mom and dad's puppy, sophie

Welcome to Wonderful Wyoming

To drive the vast nothingness of I80 west across Nebraska, to see the stretches of yellow land so flat the earth's curvature shows prominent; then to snake around Pine Bluffs on the border, zip into the state I spent ten years calling home, and on the radio a soft rendition of Björk.

Sunday, December 18, 2005


It's hard to write a blog. I mean, who's my audience? Who will see this? Am I writing for everyone in my life from my folks to my brother to my friends to my students to my therapist? Am I writing this for strange men in dark rooms to surf upon? For young girls with Brittany Spears posters on their walls? I suppose it's a challenge: to figure out a neutral voice compatible with being as truthful as possible, while at the same time accommodating multiple audiences.

I'm suppose to be working on a christmas present right now involving pictures, but I've been sidetracked by this blog thing. It's like a private diary on public exhibition. I'm three months shy of twenty-eight years old and I've never had a blog. I mean, what am I suppose to use it for? Should I dedicate it to literary studies? Should I make it funny or serious or both? Should I tell secrets? Should I tell stories?

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Post One TEst





















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Picture taken en route to NYC from Philly (Summer 2003)

Chris Higgs - Grad Student Lincoln Nebraska
Columbus Ohio