I made out with a drug dealer....

....in a crowded movie theatre...

...in full knowledge of the fact that he was a drug dealer. 

Now, to some or hopefully most of you, this should bespeak some fairly piss-poor decision making on my part, and you level headed and grounded adults would be right: this was atrocious decision making and I am fully aware of the fact that making out with a drug dealer...

...in a…

 He had done it: put the wild beast behind bars of love and commitment, reduced the raging wildfire to a romantic candle flame, and suppressed the tsunami into a quiet little box of "I love you"s and "I'll never leave you"s. When they first met, she was a force of nature, and the men who came across her came away feeling cleansed, in the same way a forest is cleansed by fire, the same way a beach is cleansed by a tsunami, the same way a wild animal makes the wilderness wild simply by being.…

There can be so much expressed in so many phrases, with carefully calculated pauses and detail after detail after meaningless detail ad nauseum until the listener simply quits listening. 

We live in a world full of words and images and information and detail after detail after detail...

its "did you pick up your brother from school and when you get home don't forget the dishwasher is clean please unload it and after that please make sure your sister has had supper you know she…

I crest the almost-last hill, the hill before the one where it all ends, and look behind me at the hills that lay at my back; I am walking into the setting sun or rising sun or maybe I cannot tell here...maybe it is all the same. I feel a vague satisfaction at having come this far, but a rising dread at the last, monstrous hill that lays before me. It is not bigger nor more treacherous than the others, but rather the treachery lies within me, I am the only thing that can trip me up on this…

Steinbeck wrote of the Salinas Valley, and you know it reminds me a lot of the Panhandle; in the good years we tended to forget the bad and in the bad years the good, wet, windy years were a figment of the dreamer's imagination. 

If you were intimate with that wide, flat, lonely country you would know its crevices, those canyons that would sneak up on you and drop the bottom out of the ground, the beauty of a spring morning where the sun has nothing to hide its face behind, and the…

I had a beautiful moment once.

It was a beautifully flawed, wonderfully un-perfect moment...but so beautiful it makes my heart leap and the breath catch in my throat and my eyes glow with remembered beauty.

The moment was laughter and seriousness and a thin sheen of sweat across tan upper bodies as our legs lay tangled in the sheets shoved down to our waists...it was 108 degrees outside but we clung to each other like it was -7; because his arm is draped across my waist with…

You walked away and left me, not even bothering to say goodbye in the early morning hours maybe you knew I would cry and I woke in the silence and looked in the room across from mine but you weren't there anymore it was like you had died. From then on you were like a shadow fading in and out never really there and I get what you were running from but why not take me with you, Brother? Were you as young as I, as helpless, as alone maybe you would have understood and but you just left me to…

"You know you are all grown up when you realize that even with your heart feeling like it has the mother of all hangovers, you are going to love again."

I said I was never going to write about him on here again, and I meant that....

so this is not about him, this is about someone else; his name is Jack Daniels, and we have a rocky relationship:

when I was younger, I knew nothing about him,

when I…

Today I stood back and looked at myself in the mirror....I attempted to be objective about my life. 

I couldn't help but smile at my reflection, because right now, I'm on cloud freaking nine and I wanted to share that with all of you today:

I have A's in not only one but two college courses,

I am tanner than I have ever been before, 

I am more in shape than I have been in a year (blame Cita and the intenseness of Zion Ntl. Park),

I am deeply in like with a…

"My mom is a writer, she lives in Arizona."

"Oh, I guess...that's really cool."

But it's all so much more than "mymomisawritershelivesinarizona"; that simple sentence that is dumbed down to the point of being banal cannot encompass what I would really like to tell you about her:

"My mom is one of my very best and certainly my oldest friends, you see she's a writer and she passed her gift on to me, and I treasure it and sometimes when the words aren't forthcoming I feel…

1. Itchy tags....need I say more?

2. Frankly, It promotes healthy body image...no really if you feel confident to walk around without a shirt on then by God you should be able to!

3. If nobody has shirts on, there would be none of this "judging a book by its cover" thing!

4. If you want to wear a shirt then FINE, wear a shirt, and I won't, and everyone can be happy.

5. No awkward tan lines and no more insecurity at the beach or lake!

I'm not a…

Count the trees on a mountainside.

But first establish in your own mind what constitutes a tree and what doesn't.

Then decide where you're going to start counting, and walk there, no you can't drive or bike or hang-glide (That would be making things too simple). 

Then bitch and moan and complain about having to count them, even though you asked to count them, and waste time wondering how to get out of counting all these damn trees. 

After that, simply be in a bad…

I have an Angel...who doesn't take his job that seriously.

He's young, you see, I am his first assignment and I almost feel bad for my Angel, since I can only imagine he didn't think he signed up for this strenuous of a job.

I've met him several times, twice in one summer, once at a truck stop, and one time he hid in my worst enemy.

Granted, I'm not that easy to watch out for and I can bet his thoughts run somewhere along these lines: 

"A simple assignment, they…

I have to write an outline for a research paper for my Dual-Credit English 1302 class.

AND I HATE THIS FUCKING THING.

Because I hate writing outlines on principle; I hate writing them based on their very nature, their essence, their premise, their existence. 

Its the bare bones, the boring crap, no insight, no analysis, its just the bare quotes, the bare facts, bare everything. 

I like writing the filled-out parts, the sexy curves of a sentence that…

"Forgive me Father for I have sinned...it has been 16 years, 7 months, and 9 days since my last confession....

I don't really know how this works, so I'll just come right on out with it....okay. Lately....I don't know what to do, or who I am, or what to make of life, or my future, anything. I mean I guess that with everything that has happened, I should re-evaluate my life, my choices, and everything; I should probably cut all ties to the things that are hurting me....right? 

I…

It is warm here, comfortable and familiar and cozy. 

I know the boundaries here, I know what is acceptable, and I know that if I stretch my foot out here I will bump up against a barrier and it will hurt me.

But if I stretch a different way, just here, there is an opening...a small one, but a way out, a way up. 

My umbilicus binding me here is  growing weaker and my arms, my legs, my wings are growing, ever upward. 

They are tender,…

Freedom is desert nights and a flowered bikini, climbing mountains on the back of a strong horse, a well-earned sunburn, and the smell of spring break. 

Freedom is the feeling of finishing a paper before its due, cleaning up after doing homework for 6 hours straight, and new pencils. 

Freedom is getting to read the impossibly thick book you've been too busy to read, and freedom is finally being able to sit outside in the evenings. 

Freedom is being able to wear shorts…

I would have bathed naked in the Virgin River and laughed at the irony I was too young to understand, spent less time in the hotel room when we had one, and more time exploring, pushed for the Pig and Clam Roast with the bull rider in Durango, and stated my honest opinion about the jargon-spouting bitch with the crayons. 

I would have flirted with more boys with dreadlocks, drank more wine and whiskey, played more cutthroat poker with my mom that was so loud it drew people for…

She would blame it on PMS, but she checked her calendar, and no, that's not it.....she would blame being sick, but really, that's more of a consequence than a cause.

She would blame him and all his damn mind games and how he's just like all the others, but actually, he doesn't have mind games, and genuinely its her more than him and he's always been up front about his intentions and he told it to her straight so she can't blame his Y-chromosome or penis. 

She would blame her…