If you’ve spoken with me at length, you may have heard me say that the weather doesn’t affect my mood; it’s the other way around. That warped outlook is my way of taking control over my environment.

It might be because of my narcissistic tendency to personify every damn thing, but it seems that lately, the world is in tune with my dumb sense of biding my time. There’s much transition, but no conclusion.

In the first stage of the storm, you are pelted by splots of frigid rain. You want to get the hell out.

Then the rain crystallizes into snowflakes, and while it’s much prettier and more picturesque, staying on your nose and eyelashes and whatever, it’s still nestling, unwelcome, into the crooks of your elbows. It still soaks through your coat as your hands plunge desperately into your inadequate pockets. It still plinks into puddles you don’t see as you trudge home in the darkness. While it might seem prettier and more auspicious during its descent, it’s still frigid, the flakes are still splots, and you still want to get the hell out.

Well, shit.

I’ve mentioned the trees that populate a cemetery I see from the train every day. The gigantic, spastic ones with the flails and the grimaces, so overcompensating in their desperation to be powerful and frightening that they end up coming across as comic and endearing.

Those trees are how I gauge the change in the seasons. I watch their green spring buds turn into fully blossomed leaves, big as hands. I watch the leaves change color, and have their moments of resplendence. I watch them fall, leaving the trees naked but for the frost and snow.

Not this year.

This year, the trees lost their leaves all at once. One day they were bedecked in golden foliage, and then? “ACHOO!”

The next morning they were standing, naked, in pretty pools of death.

It was so abrupt, as if those trees were having some kind of horrid acid flash-back and had to strip immediately to rid themselves of an imagined parasite. Not healthy. Quite surreal, actually.

Still worse, there were other trees to whom fully green leaves still clung. After yesterday’s snowfall, the living leaves and tree were together fossilized before either had a chance to adjust, change pigment, and die. God, what a gyp. I’m afraid that what saved those leaves was hubris, and they’ll awaken in spring thinking they hold the secret of how to escape change, when in fact, they’ve been denied the wisdom of deciduous transformation.

As I observe these things, the train lurches toward the Sheridan stop on the red line. That lurching, when the train inches towards its obligatory destination but has not yet committed to stopping, is one of my least favorite sensations in the world. Not going, not stopping, just reaching and screeching.

My jaw tightens at the approach to each station. Why? It’s simple Newtonian physics; there’s nothing to dispute. Sometimes, though, I’d be more satisfied if the damned train levitated and flew away. I think the train would prefer it, too.

It’s similar, I think, to my irrationally severe aversion to audible chewing. Oh, GOD, just fuckin’ SWALLOW it, already. Makes me think, there’s a reason why “mastication” and “masturbation” sound so similar. There’s enjoyment and release, but nothing nearly as satisfying as actual consumption. Um.

Even my dreams are inconclusive. By nature, a dream has neither a beginning nor an end. But my periods of sleep, lately, have just been elbows where consciousness briefly bends. Forgive the mixed metaphors, but these bends merely provide pockets of rest where I squat, competing for comfortable space with teasing images that promise interesting vistas but just result in frustration.

In my dreams, I’ve lunched with a very distraught Michael Jackson who was just on the brink of confessing something when the check arrived.

I’ve watched joyful, innocent home-videos of my parents as domestic newlyweds, when I know that in reality, they’ve never owned a movie recording device.

I’ve nibbled on unidentifiable earlobes surrounded by dark, curly hair.

In all of these instances, the alarm, the sun, or my cat has jolted me awake before the dreams could reach any kind of conclusion.

I’m sick of it.

I’m incapable of stringing together any cohesive series of thoughts. See, even this entry, I thought, would be much more stirring and maudlin.

As it is, I’m left with mixed metaphors and run-on sentences, tripped-out trees ejaculating over cemeteries while Michael Jackson pays for my lunch and I grasp at snowstorms, or some shit.

I want to get the hell out.

~ Last Five Entries ~

Arm-in-Arm Down Burgundy - 09.05.05

Motivated! - 08.25.05

Moths, and Relative Nonsense - 08.18.05

I Finally Have Internet Access in my Bedroom. But, No Ashtray. - 08.09.05

Here I Am - 08.02.05

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BUY JEN'S BOOK! BUY IT! DO IT!

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BUY DEAN'S BOOK, TOO! YOU KNOW YOU WANNA! SERIOUSLY.

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