For lunch I am eating canned peas. The rim of this particular brand is substantially beaten, because until today I didn't have a can opener. Picture this: me hammering the generic sweet-pea tin with my African bush knife, unsuccessfully.

I've been thinking about all the trouble I go through for definition. If I really am part of a whole, why do I Need to set myself apart? Above my laptop (Mac, of course) is a line of old books. Each title, Dumas, Tennyson, Keats, cummings, Dostoyevsky...chosen for their 19th century spines and relevance to Me. My movie collection: Gladiator (I appreciate a good epic), Amelie (key words: fate, feel-good), Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (universal appeal, pretty colors), Family Guy (I can appreciate college humor! I'm more than just the books!), Meet Joe Black (fine acting. fine actors.). Everything is egocentric. The sepia globe, the Indonesian fan, the Dahli postcards, the shelf of tea, the guitar in the corner. Music: indie and artsy. Wine stashed in the fridge. Vanilla perfumes. The room in resume fragments.

Can you perceive the unsullied, undecorated portion of a person, beyond shelves and words and mannerisms? Would you want to find the elusive middle that may not offer you anything? No cleverness, no invitation, no finely steeped mystery. Every morning, dressing in shams that find their way to my bedroom floor. Are you the same? Making us strange comrades in the egoism smoothed like a cityscape between my Self and your Self. Eventually, the only thing we can understand is our winter clothes, never put back in the closet.

And when Adam bit the fruit, opening another white gap against the skin, did it happen then? We became ashamed of our natures, and covered them up? Perhaps that's why we love art, the ghostly familiarity, "I know this place" bringing us back to the River Lethe. On canvas and metal and ink we find humanity, blindly reaching into the sack of our unconscious and pulling something moving out. It moves you, because it's in you?


"Who can see a stranger's wrist and not have regrets?"

"What child hasn't practiced dying under the water / listening to the waves against the bathtub's smooth sides"

"we trace our own suppleness and try to forget"

-Malinda Markham