beardlessness & catshit

Put conjugation tables away with a pink notebook bang, a beardless young man attempts a biological and genetic experiment using his own face as the parameters, so if shaven clean daily, will other buried hairs be given chance to grow, a clean playing field, a forest with the undergrowth removed, the pinecones left in dollops beneath the always green shade, forever and ever grey and green, then when he shocks his perpetually cut-at-youth hairs with a razor negligence, his theory is that the sprouts will sprout, the beard will grow, and he can be a public Seattle citizen again. Otherwise, no, nothing of the sort. Stay indoors. Watch the underside of the chin closely in the mirror for saplings to dredge up and out. Wait for the right time and then wait for the right time and then wait.

Meanwhile, as he pseudoscientifically experiments with the manipulation of masculinity in a minor sense, the constant unburied surfacing of a million dead and dehydrated hairs, he swoops the top hair behind his ear and wonders if there is a rubber band in the world that could alleviate the slothly drunken mop of skull warmth-covering into a more correct, symmetrical, geometric, clean, organized, shape. Shape shape shape. As he does this, expecting results, I clog the toilet with cat shit. I left town for a night to speak at a rotarian conference on behalf of my father, and as you can imagine, it was a strange experience. To accept through vicarious means. More on that later. When I’m gone for too long my 8 year old adopted cat gets nervous he will be abandoned again and marks his territory again (or some neurotic behavior hard to fathom as anything but genuine mean-spiritedness… shat under my pillow!)

Beardless man notices ex-girlfriends lipstick and tries it out. Okay let’s make a trend. I’ll get buff and wear make up and a purse and confuse the world.

I’ll get trashed and make a girl friend look out for my safety. Wouldn’t want any predation from predatory women to occur, like hawks swooping out the vanguard, out of the battlements, and looking at me like I’m too old for this kind of dare, this kind of truth is obviated, lost to science, kept skeptical until I know I need a loveless life, a monk’s life, something in the mountain ranges of wayward self and there, roosting, escaping, helping backpackers choose good books to burn for the remainder of their trips, their trips where they took over the streets near Green Lake for frisbee golf tournaments, where the putters came out and smashed through windows in lower Queen Anne. Who is she? What does she look like? She is one of seven hills. She is hill number seven. She is a landslide.

I can no longer live my life in the conditional tense.

I should be more like Kerouac “in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, sing-ing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running-that’s the way to live. All alone and free in the soft sands of the beach by the sigh of the sea out there..”

I should. I could. I would.

Should’ve. Could’ve. Would’ve.


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