a river's perfect scar

Psyched that my smallish (~50pgs) book of drug poems, E is for Ether, will be published by Leaf Garden Press at some point in the future, if there is a future. Hopefully there is. 

There's a mist hanging over the forest

My story "Bodies" is in the latest issue of Literary Orphans.

no one hears me sing this song

It's kind of crazy to think that Weezer's Blue Album is 20 years old. Still my favorite album hands down, the second CD i ever bought at age 9 (after the seminal Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em) because I'd seen the Buddy Holly music video and I liked the cover and my mom was cool with it because there wasn't a parental advisory sticker. I remember playing it in the living room, developing what would become some formidable air guitar and lip syncing skills, always starting with the opening catchy acoustic guitar jingle of "My Name is Jonas" and ending with "Only in Dream"'s nerdcore bombast. No tracks were ever skipped -- unless I had swim practice or someone was yelling at me because my Legos on the kitchen floor had become hazardous. I was too young to understand Rivers Cuomo's post-adolescent angst but there was an addictive power in the three-power-chord homilies, a seductive rebellion that drove me to learn drums and then guitar, that spurred my first attempts at songwriting and my eventual love of the written word. As I got older, middle school and high school, the lyrics became painfully and beautifully applicable, spoke to me as if in a mirror, because as many friends as I had, as successful as I was in school and sports and extracurriculars, I always felt like that lonely unrequited guy crafting odes to sadness and missed romantic opportunities in his garage, or like Rivers once said in an interview: "I've sold two million records, I've toured around the world singing in front of thousands of people. And there's a girl sitting across from me in English 101, and I just look up at her every once in a while and put my head back down. I'm still a pathetic fool. No matter how many records I sell, I'm never going to be in Kiss." I remember checking weezer.com relentlessly, praying that each subsequently released album would at least approach the Blue Album's perfection, and always being disappointed. Disappointment became acceptance one muggy July night in 2001 at the Meadows in Hartford when during a 20-minute encore performance of "Only In Dreams" I understood, after some beer tears, that nothing would ever be this good and that I needed to be thankful that something so powerful would always be a part of my life, would always remind me of simpler, better times. I didn't need to keep buying Weezer's crappy new albums, hoping in vain for something that would never happen again. Even though I did buy most of them. But in college, when my friend Adam and I would sit in parking lots on campus at night with nothing to do, jamming out to tunes in his car, the Blue Album, the entire Blue Album, was the first and only option. And it still is. Because I'm still a pathetic fool. Because sometimes I still hurt for the old times. Because I can never go home.

a specific number of quartz healing crystals

A story, "Either Way We're All Getting Eaten," is up at WhiskeyPaper.