far away

It has been a helluva a long time since I've been here, my fingers type nervously, shyly. It is like I have lived lives since then, like I've gone to some place that is not as real as when I wrote here last. I wonder if you are still listening, and that because I have not been talking, telling you abut why I drifted away. I guess, in a way, that makes us both lonely. Can we? Can we get back?

I am in California now. Santa Monica. Where the beach bunnies multiply and the tan-lines resist erosion.

As a sociologist, California provides much fodder for the imagination. I observe the naturalization of the insane here. Wisconsin, the state of, is like a million million miles away. The cold and the snow. The air and steel-gray clouds. The birds that forage for the rare food. The warmth inside beside the hearth. The early dusk. The Christmas light. The tree. The television and the sound behind it. All glowing, all going, caroling, bells, snow falling, the world blowing.

Christmas. In California, you just don't know it.

dragon and saint george

“We find a balance between that which is bad and that which is good. Because if we do not, then the bad will just as soon devour us.”

—John Liptow

still remembering you

My dad with Cory. “We,” meaning my parents, still lived on Walnut Street. This was probably taken on Halloween of 1991. I loved my father. He passed away of Parkinson's Disease in October, 1999. I was in California.

transcendental

“We see those things we choose to be. And then we become those things.”

—John Liptow

daily writing

I am doing it. I’m writing. My fingers hit the keys daily. It is awesome and I am not alone. I have these awesome people: the people of my dreams.

I wrote into Bosom Lies today. I read from “Riding The Thin, White Line.” I opened up “The New Century Disaster,” but wrote nothing. I think “From This Beauty, This Heart” is on hold. Bosom Lies has 1100 words.

If I stop writing, I will start dying.

bosom lies

I was wrong: Bosom Lies is a novel; not “Bosom Lies,” short story. I started it tonight. To be dedicated to the girl whose heart I hurt.

It has very few words: 128. More to come.

Good story, good style, good structure. Good. I’m liking it.

to write honestly...

You cannot begin to write honestly until everything begins to mean something to you. I am in love with everything.

(add text here)

What!?! August 31st! What!?! August 31st!

the nude wedding

Tangible beauty is temporal beauty, while ethereal beauty is eternal beauty. Reach out for the beauty you cannot touch with your fingertips, but only with your soul, and you’ll have touched the face of God.

So I have this novel, The Nude Wedding. You’ll want to read this one.

view from the tree

For as long as I can remember I have wanted to write. Just to put the inner world down on an outer medium accessible to the world. I enjoy the reaction from the recreation.

But I have not known the joy as abundantly as I had when I was younger. She will not save me from my joylessness. I am speaking of the “pen.” She will only observe my melancholy, inadequate and inanimate. I will lay her down on half-filled drafts and she will rest, her eyes dull toward slumber. I can’t enable her and she can’t help me.

Inside me are thoughts darting about like squirting children. They are loose and unfixed. They bound from the meadow to the field, from the topsy to the turvy. I follow them and lose them and find them, but always wonder about them; what shadows do they come from? They are not playing with me, and I know this, because I’ve been here before, long ago, and often begun here, and I was once young here. You have only to breathe, deep inside where the lungs aren’t the force you awake, to find your legs suddenly beside me, moving quicker and better.

I’m asleep now. Someday, I may not be.

forever my heart, john

You cannot take away my soul. That you can’t touch.

I’m feeling the joy now.

sawdust in the hot wind melting, blowing to the forest

“I will keep myself obscure. That way, I will always be more interesting.”

—John Liptow

all the sex and none the love

I realize just now that the most important reason I will never marry is because I cannot provide a girl with what she wants most: security. I am with whom she will have an affair.

Amar,

John

all about a robot that built itself

Computer programming isn’t so much about knowing what to do as it is about creating an algorithm when you don’t. This is very much an analog of life.

long ago, under the sun

so many miles now

“Someday I will marry you, Kate.” It seemed so real then. How can reality delude us? Or was it I who had deluded reality? Maybe reality is thin and without a true form, like shapes in a dark room, or forms on a panelled wall. What is there is only what you want to see there. I miss you so much, Kate.

I've been on Xanga mostly.

don't read everything you see ;-)

When I have Time, I will delete this entry.

John.

for JT

Soon, I hope you are feeling better about things.

“I can reinvent myself as this or that or any other thing. I can be what I’m not and not be what I am.”

We can be the person we most aspire to be, and every year we are the person we’ve discovered. Don’t let the world get you down, because everything is in ceaseless transformation.

This is John.

a whisper to all the dear writers

I really do not have the strength of my confidence to back me as I say, “I am here.” Word-challenged and ego-empty, it is only a vague course in my heart that situates me here. My breath, gulped, explodes from me again. My fingers idle on the keyboard, and my eyes stare at them, and I do not see the words. Still, I nose along.

I have not dreamt of writing far into this night: the evening sun was good to watch, even as my powers for description began to decay; yet, pausing beneath its arc, its warmth is blistering my face still.

I am stopping again and listening to you wait for me to say more. I may run out from here: not from some burst of anxiety, but from a knowledge that “it” isn't here. I come back always; you needn't wait for me here.

You see this muse is not the mischievous elf it’s been accused of being. It does not hit you up for a dollar of perspiration like the street-alcoholic with his boozy words in your way. It does not hobo the steel highways hoping to find the last American savior, hoping to find that you still have the time. The muse is not dropping from the night’s lamp-post, as shadows from a dream, leaping onto your last and next step, lurking near your currents thoughts. The muse is not standing watching you disappear away. Instead, the muse is the furious fingers handling the pencil and splitting the seams of the long, long reams.

And on days like this, I am wondering if it had ever stopped. Or if I had.

uncertain analysis

“Without recognition that these unidentified people had been daughter or son or husband or mother to anyone, they were buried in a 10-by-20-foot grave.”

When one day we greet God, what question are we supposed to ask Him?

tears washing away

Never stop praying for Indonesia and anywhere else hit by an event that is awesome and meaningless.

a very un-Christmas event

Tomorrow is the eve of Christmas. Am I excited? I would be if I could know only one reason to be; I am sweating out my anxiety.

Santa, you can't bring me what it is I want.

a prayer to a mute god

please, God, please...

(i am afraid)

once, when tripping over a rut in the road

I do not envy the person who does not feel life. I do not wish to be the one who's never been challenged or whose life has never been mined with social risks. To speak is to be diligent to the individuality. And to be whoever I am is to not be any- one else.

There is God's beauty in such self-awareness as this.

There is also such enormous confusion in daily checking that I am being true. I am always asking the best questions. I am trying not to faint from the hard answers. I am essentially doing the equivalent of tallying items on the clipboard of my moral inventory.

And I sometimes am afraid; I walk in the dark places, where each falling step, that rises loud in my ear but then fades into the past and away from me, sounds like my heart slamming into my chest. And I sometimes am scorned; my imperfect understanding of who I am and why is so often mistakenly cast alongside a perfect misunderstanding of who I am and why. And I sometimes am elated; the journey that has stolen me from a continent of sameness to the isle of individuality, a decades-long journey over the waves of uncertainty at not knowing anything further than this oceanic ripple, is a relief others will find in the use of drugs or alcohol or something else equally artificial. However — looming overhead like a black cloud that never sends forth its burden of rain — it is mostly about the loneliness: here is the fight that occupies nine-tenths of my life.

Listening to the silence now, regret is nowhere present.

This is my way to breathe, to continue to survive.

This is my fight, my do or perish.

This is all I am and nothing else: every adamant idea, every inconquerable dream.

This is how I insist on being loved, as my love is every bit a part of the quest.

This is my life.

J.

xanga

Find me, my love, on Xanga.

eyes, hair, fingernails

I am crazy about this girl. Does she think similar things about me? Sometimes I think not. But she is like my mirage when I have walked halfway the desert. She comforts me.

I want not to compose a life without her: this ordeal seems a white page gathering lightening-energy to invent the words. There are times that I dream of my old bones waiting for her at the end of this very long journey. And they would. I would stand with my last reserves to meet her.

Then, maybe, she now watches me as actively as I her. And maybe her body also dies a little more, like mine, every time we pass without a "hi."

All this waiting is hardship. And this not-knowing is trauma.

There are things worse than living alone: such as this living apart.

Is there a perfect land, where such things as all this never happen?

John.

voidalism

I am between two places. As I am, I don't see myself going back and there is no certainty of what I reach for ahead. I am between two places: the old and the new. I am in the land of anxiety.

I am teaching myself to hold onto nothing.

inner-sphere

“I know what the silent world riots at. It riots at rejection.”

—John Liptow

a lonely falling tree

Truth exists independent of any human validation of it; just because it isn't seen doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

(I am weak; I am going to sleep now...)

time for the present

Time being irreversible, God can be said to offer us our past and deliver us our future. In The Door to Summer, Robert Heinlein says, “When it is time to railroad, people railroad.” A decade later, Kurt Vonnegut is also issuing a view on this aspect of inflexible time. While the Tralfamadorians are able to comprehensively deconstruct time's fluidity, we lesser souls only glimpse a minute reflection outside the window of “now.” The panhandlers of infinity, we accept graciously the spare change of a Great Master, because our small intellects exclude us from the invention of a Great Plan. There is only tomorrow upon which to pin all our hopes and dreams; even though we are pinned hopelessly and forever to “now.”

John.

To Kill A Mockingbird

Referring to the goodness of people, Atticus Finch remarks to Scout, “Most people are...when you finally see them.” Harper Lee had set out to point at what we neglect in our lives and distangle what is so important that we need to daily practice in our communication with each other. We need to stand for a moment in each other's shoes.

Read To Kill A Mockingbird for the complete instruction.

leaving las vegas

There used to be a party in my soul.

WHERE HAS THE PARTY GONE??

Subsequent:

“I used to be down, but still in: now I'm out.”

Who said that?

J.

an emptied soul

When the words stop, I am left with only me, and I realize then that I am nothing.

And when the words stop and I am left with only me, I realize then I was only dreaming.

I am absolutely the most unloved body the Creator has ever assembled.

Who is this blank blank?

J.

an autumn wind

Is this not an idyllic autumn day, replete with that dullened autumn soul? The cold wind blows away everything, leaves nothing. I should resume "Lightening and the Dragon." Will this thing ever be done? How should I occupy this Saturday night? Maybe I should pray. (And maybe I should—but how often do I feel there is no ear complementing my voice and without that how silly I feel?) I want to escape the bounds of this small loneliness, maybe float high off on the cold autumn wind, float free from myself, and not shackled to the edge of something BIGGER but defining what it IS. This I hope, even as I crawl beneath it, battered by the fierce, the cold autumn wind. You have all of the things you are remembering, like thoughts of loving someone, maybe her love 4 u 2. But only then—only now—do you consider maybe it wasn't fair to lose it, because, you know, you are something BIGGER (thought you were sometimes smaller) and having it is in your nature. Who doesn't? What you want is to get back (or crawl back) to something where—no, it can't be said—but getting back is all that—now—is important to you. Getting back. Getting. Back. Love. Finding. Keeping it. Loving. Getting back to it. That is all there is. Just get it back; and then hold on like hell to it.

Do you get it?

John.

Kristin

Kristin was at the bank. And I have got to say now, she is so very beautiful, one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen. I wasn't confident enough to ask her for any more than some financial transaction, much as my subconscious kept palming the back of my skull, come on and do it, you know you've got to, come on, do it now. I will. That's all I can say.

But I am skeptical that I ever could completely forget about Kate and what, for a brief time, she had meant to me. I don't want to leave her. I don't want to move past the thought that I could have enjoyed a long and happy life with her. There was so much in her for which I yearned and ached and had suffered long and unhappy years. But this becomes not about her now, but about all that is necessary to make my life not something for which I've toiled and regretted.

At this moment, I want only to find enough courage to ask Kristin on a date. But part of me believes I will wait too long, if I ever can do it at all. This is what is so advantageous about online dating. I can write out my solicitations, as that is what I excel at as a writer. But the online recipient will not know what it is like to be near my person. She will not embrace my laughing charm nor my attractive smile nor my gentle eyes that are sharp and not crafty nor my body that knows it is the enclosure for a beautiful heart. These and many things will be opaque to the online recipient. She will see only pretty words.

Nonetheless, with faith in some impossible task and belief in a fate I cannot yet see, I will ask Kristin. She deserves that. Perhaps she has waited as long as me.

John.

moments of fay

I am reading the blog by Twisted Heart, Endless Endeavor. "No Matter How Hard I Try, It All Stays The Same." I can't help notice similarities to Kate. She is a young woman named Fay. She breathes in a place that seems decided upon by other people. She is young and trapped and silently yearning for a self-propelled direction. She is seventeen and I am wondering if Kate was once her, searching and holding on to every small measure of security, depressed over lack of substance, which these capricious loves beget. I am curious where this young woman, Fay, will go, and to what post will she find herself, cornered by confusion as to how this rough draft that is her life never seems to be polished.

my friend Jean

This is my friend, Jean, who lives in California.

So she tells me she was talking to her friend one day and he speculates: what if while she was walking along the beach she should stop and talk with a future John Steinbeck. So she tells this friend: "I think I already have." Thank you, my friend Jean.

composing my life

So I sent this woman this email, see, and so she turned me down, see, and so now I am not so optimistic about that, see, and I still can't seem to find my glasses. Anyway, I got my beautiful smile and something charm. I am looking for my humor, though, because I am starting to be unfunny. I got my cold feet in the morning and got my cold hands in the evening. And I got my good body that doesn't slouch like a question but exclaims with a dot at the end. I've got some kind of vision in my head and friends listening to whatever I've said. I got style and I got spontaneity. I got eyes that are always looking and seeing ... I got ears that may not always hear. I got imperfections and I got determination. I got my voice and I got my soul, and with those two, I got everything I need.

What will Kristin say?

I am getting it. Now.

John.

happiness is warm water flowing over my soul

I sent this woman this email, see, and so now I have to wait, see, breathing short and shallow, see, because this woman is gorgeous and maybe I am handsome, see, but just not that handsome and maybe I am a poet but just not that poetic and maybe I love romance but I am just not that romantic. Maybe I think she is perfect, but I am just so imperfect. Maybe I am grasping far beyond my grasp, see.

If she wrote back, I think I could die with a grin on my face and be so ridiculously happy...but then I'd be sad, because I'd realize I was dead and dead men aren't dateable. It would be a mark-the-event-on-your-calender event to hear from her. My thoughts are exploding with pleasant dreams.

Ah...to write, to write. I am going to write about these things that inspire me. Now where are my glasses?

John.

reality shift

If you can imagine it, and if you can believe in it, it can really be; nothing is very far beyond your reach.

John.

wait till tuesday

This is what I've learned. You may be afraid of uncovering a truth that is upsetting to you, but if it ever was worth loving, then the risks are inevitable. Many of us carry the burden of not doing something more than of doing it, because not doing anything is less challenging, albeit more risky. To paraphrase the words of Novalee Nation, the character played by Natalie Portman in Where The Heart Is: "We've all got bad things in us, just as we've all got good, and the only thing worth living for is the good." If the focus is only on the bad, then all that is good escapes. How much will it cost to see the good? How much is love worth? So I've learned this this morning.

In summation: I am going to wait till Tuesday.

Be well, all who love me. And if you do not, why don't you?

John.

the bloggiest blog ever blogged, Blogger?

Last night, I wrote her an email. May she read it or may she not is definitely without my control; now it is with Fate to oversee.

I am moving, albeit slowly, out the door.

But sometimes I get the feeling she is sending me smoke signals. Crazy?

John has blogged/out.

hello

Kate,

It has been nearly two weeks since I last wrote. I hope everything has been well with you since then. I now need to write this email because I have been holding on to the hope that you might write me. I need to let you go and I need to let you know that I am. It is important to me that you know I am profoundly sorry for my actions. Please understand that I wasn't rejecting you as much as I was rejecting myself. I know that is very little comfort, but I do realize that I hurt us both and, as much as I am sorry for that, I have to forgive myself. You were so perfect and I was so intimidated.

When we talked on the phone, you made me to understand that I should not feel responsible for you. I want you to understand that you should never think that you'd have to be responsible for me. I am very much like you. I see the things in me that need improving. I can look at and know what is important. Like you, for instance. I will find a way to be unlike I have been, because there is so much that is good about me. This makes me different from most other people. I can examine myself. I never suggested that I was perfect. I never wanted you to think that. But you did. Or something like. You had this image of me that was unfairly imposed. I am much more than that. I am a man who is capable of tripping over his fears. This is all I mean to say with this: I very much deserve another chance. However, if you don't, please don't ever look over your shoulder and wonder what might have been if you had. I am a man deserving of another chance.

And you deserve to give yourself another chance.

There are other things I want to say, but in this email I won't. I will one day if we ever get that chance we both deserve. But I want you to know this anyway: I never wanted to die. No, Kate, I never wanted that—for so many reasons I never wanted that. It had only been a thought to hold onto, for lack of anything else, if that makes sense.

So if you are reading this, this is goodbye from your friend always.

All my love,
John.

there are spans i tremble to transit

And so I get colder in the area near the heart. My aura fades as I descend into something of vaporous shadow, something thin and translucent like dusk. Is this what waking from a dream is like? Is this the stark eye of reality, my feet like stones of ice from fear too heavy? I want again the dream where I thought her love into reality and myself into the dream I thought could never be real. Maybe dream and reality, here twisted like some knotted rope, are only states of mind and the physical presence is the only thing worth our certainty. Oh, love, if again you could possess me and make me dream you real again.

It has always been my regret that I gave you up because my grasp could not find a way to maintain you. Where are you now?

Love?

John.

read this tonite

Only to you, my dear, faithful, unresponsive Journal, only to you will I set my heart before and therefore rest my eyes easier into sleep. Only to you will I bring deep out of my heart these things I would like to place before the world's love. Only to you am I not able to be silent, because you are all that is left when I am not.

My confession is that honest love comes too few in life to be shrugged away and carries no guarantee of a return. I am a man who has shrugged often. I cannot say that I will never shrug again, but I can say that I will not be looking for love again. You read my thoughts, dear Journal, and you know who it is I want, to whom my heart has drifted. I will not find myself loving anyone who is not Kate, because my heart will never again be sane concerning Kate. Please, tender Journal, communicate my love and send out my heart to Kate and bring hers to me again. Perhaps this makes me a fool, but I am even more foolish to not try.

Love,
John.

explicating the origins

Today, my tank of inspiration runs at empty; if anything gets going at all, it will be through the faith of the fumes alone. This is my life coasting along. (How is that for extending the metaphor? Not exactly a well-tailored fit.)

Prelude to Human Spaces is posted on my website. I am happy with this version. (How could I have expected this back in ’94?) The genesis of this one makes for interesting telling. It is, as often is, the marriage between two inspired origins. In about ’92, I was developing a play about a young man who commits suicide. Post-suicide, this young man wanders through Hell, arriving deeper and deeper into this black terrain, discovering in this journey the worst and most base heart of mankind. Meanwhile, his abandoned and earthly lover begins her own quest to rescue him. I finished only one scene of this play, the remainder to be forever secure in some remote, dusty location of my mind.

The other origin for Human Spaces—in fact, the most direct lineage—occurred in ’94. The novel was originally titled Prelude to a Love Scene, which owed its source of inspiration to a John Donne poem, “Love’s Deity.” I began the story: “Behind the downfall of every man is the story of a woman.” I finished several thousand words before placing it in the fabled and metaphorical shoe-box. It would stay there till ’98. I was in California at the time and the whole thing studied on me a bit before it decided it wanted me to pick it back up. I resumed the story, but very little time passed before realizing this was a story altered from the original, in style and in character. I should not have been surprised, as I was a person altered, in style and in character, from the one who began to write it in ’94. The central characters became clearer, their thoughts more intuitive rather than routine. I chiseled out a great deal of that story during late ’98 and much of ’99, figuring out most of the details on the fly. Prelude evolved into Old Lover’s Ghost, a story about a woman who feels cheated in love and commits suicide—perhaps with very little rationale for her irrational act beyond the reader prejudice of love’s hardship. The great boon of this era I am convinced was in finding Jack, my anti-hero, my person on his errant errand to find his meaning, while destructive to other characters of the novel. Lastly, and the most interesting facet of the transformation, the tone of the writing became more metaphysical, more directly tied to the poetic times of John Donne than to our modern. (In the years since then, I would maintain this style as both milestone and millstone in this jungle of my writing.) But Prelude was still a story without a solidified purpose.

What I needed for it was to find its identity. Okay, let’s say, if I had the world’s ear for the length of a book, what did I really to want to talk about? Maybe I had always known. Maybe the idea rose out of some deep, historical part of me. Maybe I had been talking about it all along. I knew what it was, this theme, the message I always had wanted to deliver to people. It was what ever wandered the echoing halls of my mind; it was what had always a strong voice, even if I had a weak ear. I wanted to talk about how we can be so close to one another and yet celestial miles apart. I wanted to get into those human spaces. I wanted to uncover the secret life of intimacy. Do writers write about those things that creep and crawl on their skin? Here is something that always had been crawling on my skin. Here is this thing that always had made me an incomplete person. Here is my opposing pole. So here was born Human Spaces and if it will not make me complete, then at least I will be better informed.

John.

a new Yahoo! profile

I may not add as much to this journal as I would like to for the next few days. I have a health issue to deal with. However, because there is so much I want to put down, I may not be able to keep silent and my fingers, freakishly agile, may keep on tapping.

My heart has settled into a rythmn now. The weekend is behind. Every now and then during the day, Kate comes into mind and I wonder how she is. There is a moment, before I check my email, that some nervous condition races through me and I guess I am wondering if she has sent me anything. Does she think about me at all? I wonder this and then I quit from wondering, because I may never know. Everything will succumb to eventuality. Kate will find hers and I will find mine. And I will live each day to that day. And I will not abide morbidity, as that is a beast that scares away the happy memories. I have begun and posted a new profile. This time I know what to do. This time I will get it right.

I am writing again. I have just revised the opening of Human Spaces. I am almost satisfied and will soon post it on my website. I will finish and I will take a crack at fate.

I am just not going to quit.

John.

Corinthians 12: 4-6

"I was caught up into paradise and heard things so astounding they cannot be told. That experience is something worth boasting about, but I am not going to do it. I am going to boast only about my weaknesses. I have plenty to boast about."

i will live today

Ken arrived this morning as I was showering. He said he would wait, and when I came out fifteen minutes later, we went to church. That was the start. I cannot think of a better one to anyone’s day.

I rode my thoughts as he drove. I thought about the week and all the things lost and this very, even if the most fragile, thing gained. As I type, there are two things taped to my monitor. One tells me not to “curl up with my fear.” Another says that “I will live today.” There is a third at the top of the bathroom mirror: “I am beautiful.” This is not to elevate myself to the pomposity of narcissism, but a devaluation of the fear that would rather assume my identity. As he drove us to church, I wondered how this story I was living might continue. No answers came while enroute to church. It was there I found them, there in church, as ever so is the case.

As soon as I could, before most others arrived, I was on the pew at the front, eyes closed, hands folded. God answers what is not asked. He needs no prompts. But here I was, in genuine silence with him. What was it I would ask? Could ask? Or should? Kate came hurriedly to mind. I hugged that thought. Yes, Kate would be my grace. But if it was her I asked for, then what would that mean for me? No, I should not ask for Kate, because she would not be the holistic wellness that every fiber of my ill soul needs. I would ask for something more lasting. I would ask for … courage. Courage would enable me to anything, any task. If I had courage, then I could … courage to what? I should ask God for courage. The heart is so deep and so uncertain. It needs a light to maintain a balance with the dark. Courage perhaps. But courage would only show me how truly deep this dark heart goes. I would stand and fight but would only be fighting that engulfing dark and might grow strained of it eventually. I would not be unlike the cowardly lion, who, while fighting the shadows, is delaying that moment when he must stand up to an enemy far more consuming. So I would ask God for wisdom, or strength to endure the fight, or temperance. I could ask God for any of these, and he may grant them; but would my soul participate?

What I would ask God for, in this moment of silence with Him, would be His grace to relieve me of my many fears. Grace would be the currency to purchase any of those other things I could have asked for. Because God’s grace endures; its limits are God’s limits, which are endless. In this moment, I asked God to be there and to love me and to always love me. But it is a fascinating request when considering that had I never asked, God would never have failed me in it anyway. I asked, I think, because God wanted me to ask.

And I am a wonderful human being because I can continue. Because I am loved by God and therefore have the courage to love myself. Because I am produced out of God’s care and therefore have the wisdom to discover all the beauty God has planted in this world and in myself. Because I am small and fatigable and God rises to the occasion within me and therefore have strength to overwhelm the fear. Because God endures and therefore I have all the temperance I need to keep me from a consuming dark.

There is an old saying that God hands us no more than we are capable of dealing with. In that moment this theory is most tested, the burden seems significantly overwhelming and our bodies and minds seem to be perishing from the effort. God gives us his grace, and therefore we are capable of what we never guessed we could be.

I will live today and I will not curl up with my fear.

And, because God is, I am beautiful.

John.

my addiction

My heart is still crazy with jitters in my chest. But I can still go on. When I can't breathe, I will stop and gasp but will still go on. This is my life I am talking about here. This is all of it. If I fail, I will not be given a replacement to try again. I will do everything necessary to drive myself, to haul myself, to push or pull or heave myself, out of this rotten place. Here is only where you live to die. I am not going to die here.

I have an addiction. It is not alcohol and it is not drugs. It is very much the same as if it were those things. It will keep me locked in a rotten place. It will keep me safe from happiness. It will keep me miserable and have me justify, falsely, all the causes of this misery. I have an addiction to self-pity. It is an addiction I must fight because, deny or not, it is fighting me.

It may very well be too late to restore the damage I have caused between Kate and I. I must accept that as fact. What I will not accept is living to allow any sort of damage as that to happen again to anyone. I am a person capable of being loved. That is to say, I have very often made it easy to love me. I am beautiful; I am love. My heart has been molded by God. And that makes me also a person capable of giving love. I have shown this heart to the world too many times to doubt that. In my writing, I have shown it. I will not be crushed under the rule of despotic fear. This is my chant now. This is what I will inversely pencil across my forehead so that every time I look in the mirror I will see it again: "I have a capacity for love and will love and will not be ruled by fear."

I resume my therapy with Tom this Friday. We will begin to peel away the layers that hide the core of this disorder. It will be found to be something psychological or physiological, or some combination of both, but whatever it is I will not be daunted by what I may find. The remainder of my life hangs in the balance here. If I fail, I fail because I was afraid to succeed.

This is for the next Kate who walks into my life. Had I been quicker, this Kate would have found a much different John, more like the one she thought I was. But that is the past now. And this is what I now know from that experience: I am a person deserving of another chance. Although everyone deserves to be given this, this has less to do with the chance being given than what is done with it once it is given. I will find my Kate somewhere out there in the world. Everything I do now I am doing for her.

John.

have a good birthday, kate

Kate,

Have a very wonderful birthday, okay? With all my heart, I hope you find the joy you've spoken about. You are indeed something wonderful and deserve to be blessed by a full life of happiness. I've reread your emails and it just can't seem possible that all this has happened in a week. My heart is faint with distress now because I know, I absolutely know, how sad you must be right now. I cannot take past mistakes back. If only I could, but it's a quest that's not realistic.

I wish I could put all the thoughts I've had down here and I wish that you would be reading them and I wish that you would feel those same things you had felt for me and say—that you do know John and now you understand John and the John you know and understand deserves to be given a second chance, because I do, Kate, I do deserve to show that I am more than my fears. You are right. I am a self-fulfilling prophecy. But then all I need to do is change the prophecy, right?

I was seeing a therapist back in spring. I had been seeing him for a long time, but it seemed like we never achieved anything constructive. Certainly, we had interesting conversations. He even said he looked forward to our sessions. Well, Monday I called him up. I said I would like to continue with him. He was pleased. The reason I called him is because I was afraid of injuring this possibility of a relationship with you. I needed to find my way. Other people can walk this way with seeming ease, but I knew I needed guidance. I am still going to see him. Yes, I suppose now more than ever.

Kate, I don't want you to give up on me. We can look on this as a good thing, not as a bad thing. Now you know more about me. You understand me. I am more than just pretty words on a page. Don't think I wanted to hurt you. I could never want that. Please read this. Please read those words. It is so important to me that you do. It is the most important. I don't think it is possible for you to meet someone else like me. I know I am the most unique in all this that I do. I feel the deepest. I feel the most sincere. And I would like to talk to you about all these things that hide inside of me. I would not want to hold anything back. You are still my answer, Kate. You are still the one I've been looking for. I don't want you to be sad anymore. I don't want you to look for joy and not find it. I am here for you, Kate. I am here. Always.

Love,
John

thinking of you again

Kate,

I don't want to stop thinking about you. I've been reading over your emails. No one who loves only half-way could have written half the sentiments you had. Not even half of half. You love me and I ought to stop talking and let you. Only in the silence can I remember what you've said without actually reading it. Only when I close my eyes and listen to my heart. I want you to continue to love me, to breathe in my love, to tousle my hair with your excitement of my being there. These are things I don't know other people would understand. But I know you do.

You left your signature on my life. I am totally John Handcocked by you now. Your flourish of hand is no small notation, so that a world can see it without glasses. I may not be charming and beautiful, as the world gives us charm and beauty, but I am your handsome letter. Oh, Kate, I hold in the pages of this letter your pain, your fear, your wants and your needs. I am an open letter all the time. I do not tire upon reread. The words only become stronger, a defense against paralyzing illiteracy. Here is where you may always safely return. Take up the page again and write furiously more. The page listens. It feels the sadness or the joy, the meaningful or the trivial. I am your letter to the world.

And when there are those who may pick up that letter and reduce it to corncob prose. When they may remark you are sincere, but deluded. When they would rein you in to their deafening noise of reality. When all this, listen to the wind high above that shakes the boughs a moment before it eases out over the prairie, because the wind is honest and probably more right than they.

Your thoughts flow over me now.

You are the extra step in my feet these days. I want to adore you till I die. I want to take you to a far place that only you and I can find our way back from. I want to paddle out onto the ocean with you and drift on the waves into a setting sun. I want to place my love in your heart for safe-keeping. I want to know no other perfect joy but from you. I want to be everything in the flesh the dream can produce.

Kate, I want to continue being loved by you, because the extraordinary appeal of that is immeasurable. Your every sentence coils my body and brings new waves of ecstasy. I am stung by your passionate poet's heart. There are claws of predawn love that tenderly snag in my beating breast. My mind is stirred by thoughts of you and lifts purposefully off on hummingbird wings. We might say the world lacks in virtue, but it would only be because a tremendous amount has landed with you.

There are so many uncertainties in this world, but there is no uncertainty here: someday I will marry you, Kate.

Love you always,
John

anum kara: a poem for kate

Anum Cara

If our two hearts were to become jealous of a mad world,
then neither would discover the truth
of the other,
nor apart become wholesome,
nor together, sane.
My heart would become lesser without yours.

Then could we breathe the warm breath
of desire
without smothering within the salty smoke
of narcissism
nor choking within the hard ashes
of nihilism.
Could we become exhilarated by such lie
soft-spoken to us, as to billions?
Could we alone stand aghast
in front of that great wall?

Only now can we remove this yoke of time,
wrench ourselves free and run unencumbered
across the flowered fields.
Only now can our hearts run wild.
Our silly, beating hearts—

sleep well tonite, kate

Kate,

I have sent so many emails and continue to out of love. I want each email to arrive like a rose on the pillow. Honey, I know you are working so hard and each night must find an exhausted Kate opening her apartment door to expectant Atticus and Calpurnia. "We've had a fun day, how was yours? You look beat." I can see you picking up Calpurnia or Atticus and the other following you into bed and lying there as the two purr into your neck and comfort you with their delicate breath and you falling into sleep. I cannot stop thinking that someday I could also be in that picture.

We have spent so much time apart, our lives independent and yet joined by hope of something beyond the struggle. I still often fail to believe that this is real. But your words were not dreamt across these insane miles to me, whether by the voice on the phone or the letters on the screen. "Your words were amazing. I would like to learn more about you." You inspire me also to great things. You are the muse I will chase to the moon, race around the stars, leaping from galaxy to galaxy. I am not the doubter I was. I have your words to comfort me. "(I) am anticipating what I will read." I can never tire of you, Kate. My passion will never dwindle. There are roads we will take and roads we will not but whatever our choice on the map will be, we will have our adventure. And, someday as it winds down, we will have our beautiful and amazing memories. "My stomach will not stop doing those flip flops." This is a disorder that cannot be cured. It must be nourished by bountiful amounts of love. "Drawing your name on random pieces of paper scattered across my desk." This is when I realized I was being pulled toward you and my heart gave up wanting to run. You are the only person in the history of the world ever to draw my name on random pieces of paper. I look into the future and think of all the pleasant things I might do for you. This is your time, Kate. This is our time.

"You are the most incredible man I have ever met." Thank you, Kate. Good night.

Love,
John

there is an 8th wonder named kate

Kate,

You are the joy that translates my confusion of this world. From you, I see everything more clearly. You are my prescription lens. I smile more meaningfully because you exist.

I don't want to be the buyer of this great portrait called Kate. I don't want to remove it from the wall and carry it home and hang it on my own. I don't want to own it. Instead, I want to look at it long enough that it enters my soul and I can carry it home there and would never be without it. You are transforming me into someone who finally realizes he is allowed to live.

My mind is filled with you all day. You are never away from me. I love you.

Many hugs & kisses,
John

you are beautiful

Kate-love,

My friend and I just went out to a Thai restaurant, where we sometimes hang out, and drank tea and talked. I just got back and my mind wandered to you. You may not read this tonight, but I wanted to give you the pleasure of knowing that your smiling face always lives in my mind. Saturday seems like an eternity away.

My love across the miles,
John

i am crazy about you, honey

Kate,

My heart is always yours. I want to place it in your hands and lift up your hands so that it is closer to where you can see and know that all it says is true. I wanted to be reassured that you still want to see me this weekend, but that reassurance would be redundant. I feel in this heart that you still do: I believe with everything that you understand how, by my anticipation of reading more of your words, I was blinded yesterday to what you had told me. I am so in love with you and won't let these antagonistic fears keep me from you. My love for you makes me want to be better.

God provides us with our enigmas. The energy of our lives, therefore, becomes spent in pursuit of the answers to the puzzle. My life has long been spent understanding these "mysteries of God." I wished to believe as they believed and bow down in a simple understanding as they seemed easily to do. Everyone but me seemed to glow with the evidence of God's love. My relationship has been for many years love/hate. With the grand scale of the universe, I was in awe. With the ability to love again, always transcending the pain, I was moved. With His encyclopedic knowledge of who we are, I was always reinvigorated, wanting to go and make such explorations into the Human state myself. But with constantly observing how He has planned happiness to be brief and sadness to be long-lived, I was disillusioned. Why fold into the arms of foiled love again to find, again, it is transient? Where was my happy ending? How could I possibly biography this while it lacks an uplifting message? Other people knew what I agonizingly pursued. There was no scheme to this puzzle. There was no way of resolving it. There was only mysteries and enigmas. Until one day while not expecting the answer to arrive, it did. You unraveled the mysteries for me. The enigma became toyish, less threatening. You became the answer I was always looking for.

Now I cannot stop thinking about you.

Forever my love,
John

you are amazing

Kate, I am on my way out the door now; just wanted to drop you a quick note. How are you? I will write a longer email later. I would like to explain more about me, if you wanted. I am not more amazing than you are, Kate. Love, John.

you are something great

Kate,

I am awake now and the night seems like something I had dreamt. Which part was the actual dream and which part did you play in that made my heart beat as it never had before, the part where you said you loved me. I didn't dream that, but my mind isn't sure it can separate the two. It needs to hear your voice again, and read your heart, and feel your skin. It shouldn't need to have this material evidence, but it thinks it does. Perhaps it is greedy and just needs to drink up more of your physical reality. Love me, Kate; that's what it wants. It doesn't want to let you leave me alone. I need you in my heart.

I opened my eyes this morning and for the longest moment I wanted to think that you were here, and if I opened them again, maybe you would be. So, in your absence, I comforted myself with the passionate possibility of your someday being. Oh, how I yearn for Kate. She is the blood that makes my body animate. She gives me reason to survive. I want to hold her warmth next to mine and exchange my breath with hers. I want to mend the wounds that have existed privately with her. I want to give her my eyes, my smile, my energy to the dark canvas of her thoughts. I want to watch as she paints myself into her life. I want to be with you always, Kate.

I think most people may view what we are going through and say, they are going too fast, speed bumps, speed bumps. They would have us believe we should slow. But what do you think? I know what I feel and it feels right. Undoubtedly, everything won't always go perfect. I can't even guess what those things will be. But we will face them and we will grow through them. I need to think that we know what we are doing. I've trusted my heart all my life. I need to trust it here. I won't abandon you. I won't ever make you regret loving me. Yes, those are awfully big words, but for me it's like a contract I've signed: what kind of Liptow would I be to reneg? I love you as if I've never really known how to love. I want to love you for the rest of my life. Let us quietly slip away from the nay-sayers and smile with a secret understanding only we have. They wouldn't understand.

All my love,
John

re: a not so quick note

Kate,

I keep thinking there must be a catch here, something I'm missing. God has left me stranded in life for so many years. Has He made me wait till this moment? Now, when I can truly appreciate it? You are so very beautiful in every way one can be beautiful. You are more than an artist: you are your own art. Have you been created for me to desire?

Love,
John

re: a not so quick note

Kate,

Are you there? Please be there if you are there. Please write back. You sent me this only fifteen minutes ago. Please be there.

Love,
John

re: a quick note

Kate,

Just wanted to say 'Hi.' I called and talked to your cats. They didn't say much, but I guessed they were probably listening.

I will write more later, as now I really ought to eat something. I went something of 24 hours without eating, from Sunday noon to Monday noon. I did not sleep much last night, as I went to bed after 3 in the morning and woke again at about 8. So I am running real exhausted. It doesn't bother me much, as I'll eat when I eat and sleep when I sleep. I hope you don't think I am an idiot for this nonchalance regarding my physical and mental health. I have done a lot of unorthodox things. I once stayed awake for over 3 days and if the weekend hadn't come, it would have been more. I couldn't stop writing. I would write for a long stretch that I knew if I did go to bed at that hour, I might oversleep. There was a period, '89 or '90, when I would write many thousands of words over a weekend and hated when the weekend ended, but counted the days till the next one. My mind just never shuts down. I used to ramble all over the country, walking from state to state, and sometimes walked several days before I came to a place I could rest. But out there walking, I would write my novels (in my head) but lost them to the frailty of memory. Not long ago, I woke into a day unexpected. Before noon, I had the framework for a story. By evening, I stitched elements of some past ideas and some new ideas, and by midnight I began to write. I wrote till 7 am and had the full story and went to bed. It was an unorthodox time. Perhaps I have been making up for a childhood in which I hardly spoke. I left all and found something unique: me. Except for when my 3 sisters where there, I was my only playmate. I made up worlds and populated them. They were likely the people I wished were there to love me and to know me. I became a man not knowing I had these original ideas. I started to write even more and saw everything I was. So I was not afraid to stand before the public and say, I have a voice and it can speak. However, I would stand behind my manuscripts, as if the stories and poems were my protector, my talisman. I would think: if she could just see, through my words, that I am not nobody and can be loved. I wish to believe that I can be loved not because my words create me, but because I create my words. Or maybe loved anyway just because I am.

Now I am less hungry and want to write and write all this to you. I want to show you a heart on the verge of transcending to some place it has never before been.

It is possible to remake the world out of the image we have in our minds. If you truly believe something extraordinary is about to happen, then you only need to give it the time and it will happen. I know how this all seems like a dream; however, what I don't know is how you dream; I know so little about you; I want to fade into your dream with you.

There is nothing false here. You can never be hurt by me, because I have to allow it before it can happen. There may times, in the beginning, I run away from you, hide. I can see myself doing it but having little strength in stopping it. Know this now and know it then: it will be nothing I am saying about you. Don't let me run. I am asking you to communicate with me and recognize the fears within me. I don't want you to be someone I have to get over because I was afraid to let you love me. Let us always regain the will to talk with each other. I would like nothing better than to watch time age you into the more wonderful person you will be. You will never be without me, if this is what you want.

I once wrote in my journal that I see myself at the top of a tall mountain and no one is there to share with me the view, and then I am drowning and no one throws me a line. I want to show you what I see and what I've been seeing all my life. I don't want to sit at the top of a tall mountain alone. I want to take you there.

Someday I want to embrace you and kiss you. Reality is how you create it: it can be everything or nothing. You are my lifeline. You are my Duchess in shining armor. Can I turn away from that?

Love,
John

delirious with kate

hold your arms out
breathing you in
that's it
out
in
hold your arms out

the hat

For the curious set: the hat is not mine; it belongs
to the photographer, but I think I wear it better :)

re: a quick note

Kate: “Do you like me?”

Kate,

Yes. I wonder why you would even wonder. I should wonder why you are so eagerly waiting upon me. I am no catch and you are...well, unbelievably beautiful. You should look for someone more equal to you. I am convincing myself that you will wake from this fugue right soon and be grateful that I have steered you away from being bored to tears by me.

But if you never do—and my heart is crossed on this—then I will do my ever best to maintain that level of faith you have placed in me. But, Kate, honey, did you not read my admission of never having been with anybody. I've never been kissed and I'm still a virgin and I haven't the least idea on how to proceed with something like this. Why did I place my profile? I don't know; maybe I was fugued.

Here is something you must know: I am torn between not doing anything and doing everything. Do you know what I mean? It would probably be better to leave fate in someone else's more experienced hands. I couldn't sleep last night because of this conflict. Only utter weariness will take me there tonight, else I may not sleep again. I could write all night long to you and pretend that you are there and are not yet getting bored. It would be like missing something I've not even had. I miss you already.

Isn't it strange how we can arrive at someplace we've never been and look around and think certainly I've been here before, have I? I want to look in your hazel eyes and believe that they had been there all along, in every day I had been making my way to this one. And if I didn't know it, it was only because I was too busy and not focusing. I can't focus on anything else now.

My fear is that this is the dream and the reality is my erstwhile preoccupation.

But my heart will not beat this rhythm in a dream. I will not love with this abandon in a dream. I will not hope the thing that should not be hoped in a dream. But in a dream you will seem so far away, as you are now, and I may start to understand the dream-language: the dream will never allow these two fires to meet.

I've spoken my heart's truth so far, Kate, but I've given you very little about me. Isn't that the test, after all? "A best friend is someone who knows everything about you and still is your friend." I read that a long time ago in a school counselor's office.

I've been on the go most of today and have not stopped to eat. I've been something delirious and I suppose meals were the furthest from my mind. I do this a lot, Kate. You might have guessed but I live 99 percent of my life in my mind. I am an introvert-transient, or, that is to say, "a mental vagabond." I adopted that phrase for myself a long time ago. I worked for this guy I developed quite a relationship with. In fact, he only hired me because I was a writer. And this was to wash dishes! We'd sit and talk for a bit after work. I would be all jabber-jabber and he would listen. I think I fascinated him. Well, we were talking one time and he stopped me. He effected some thought that what I had just said was a terrific concept. I had referred to myself as a mental vagabond. I would have not given it much reconsideration if he had not stopped me and pointed it out. I have not seen him for years but I wish I could return to that booth and we could have our conversations. I will dedicate a book to him. In the future there will be a collection of me entitled Mental Vagabondage. (Do you see how the end of that short phrase is pointing out that I am a slave to my introversion?)

I talk too much, Kate, and I have not given you the chance to say anything. So...oh, yeah, this is a letter. But I want to talk to you and I want to know you and I want you to know all about me and think I am not so bad and I want to know all about you and reassure you always that you are tops to me. You can never be less in my view than you are now, but only more. Only be who you are.

I am so scared that I am going way over my head. I have never been there before.

I want to believe that something extraordinary is possible.

I want to believe every day up to this day has been the dream.

I want to uncage my ability to love: to love deeply and without fear.

I want to go back to the place I began and know it as if for the first time.

Is this the God who has planned my destiny, any of our destinies?

Please don't hurt me.

John.

breathing alone...still breathing...

Sometimes it seems this is the life I was meant to acquire. A life without a body to crawl up next to nor the warmth of her flesh nor her cheek that finds mine in the night nor our lips that meet. Not even the ache of a heart when fate throws us miles apart. Not beautiful memories. Not rest from arid life. Not. No, not that. Are lips there to dry and crack and turn salt-white as a vast ocean of dust? Are lips there to sleep alone? The breathing weakens as night turns into deep sleep.

I have met someone, her face angelic and refined as honesty more than ancestry will create it. I have met someone who lives this parallel world next door, and you would not believe this stranger is familiar and essential and so me if I was not and so good and responsive and so listening and needing more because there is always more and so memorable and wondering those same things I do. I have met someone. Has she met me?

And still the heart sleeps.

And still it sleeps.

And it sleeps.

John.

re: hello

Kate,

I am blushing head to toe, now the floor's turning red. I thank you so much for being so open to me and assuring me of my reciprocation. There is nothing about me that I have the least inclination to flee from—except my abysmal shyness. However, just to guarantee there has been no mistake, I urge you to borrow somebody's glasses and look again at my picture—gulp! painful as it is for me. You do realize there are billions of men who would like to be talking right now with you.

You want to read about me? Well, first, right now my heart is going very fast, faster than even my fingertips. Other things—that can be skipped over hurriedly to get to the more important things, and before you know it, 'Sincerely, John,' lol—I am writing a novel (amongst many) that is the one I would like to be remembered most for. It is called Human Spaces. It is about the divisions human beings put around themselves and block any real human contact. This is something I know a great deal about. I am 37 and have never kissed a woman nor been involved in a relationship nor even dated. I can tell you, Kate, as I remember it, the first time it occurred to me I had a real problem. Her name was Tania and I was 17 and her and I and another fellow, a mutual friend, went that night to her house. Tania was my best friend in high school; she stood up for me as no one else ever had. I remember that she asked Karl (mutual friend) if I could sit in the middle when she drove us home. So she dropped me off after Karl and her and I sat and talked outside my mom's house. Naturally, I don't know what we talked about, but it was personal and meaningful. Before I left her, she wanted me to give her a hug. I realized as I hugged her that it was something that made me uncomfortable. It was something about the intimacy. Don't misunderstand, I would have liked to have held her as though it was the most important thing to me. I would have liked to have experienced that moment rather than to have just acted. I often wish I could return to that moment and do what I should have done and held her as I should have held her, because in a real sense that moment has guided my life and left me stranded from intimacy. We must all have those moments that seem to be crossroads.

I might have really said too much.

I hope this is ok.

John

re: hello

Kate,

Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you for getting back. I can't imagine anything better than discussing—well, discussing whatever two people discuss when they really don't know each other. That definitely would be tops.

So you're a writer. That's cool. So you like to read a lot. Cool, too. So you've read To Kill a Mockingbird. Too truly cool! (Interestingly, I am a member of several book clubs and I recently ordered To Kill a Mockingbird. I have read it before and just wanted a nice edition of it. Say, have you read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter? I LOVE Carson McCullers. Only 23 when she published that!)

This is such an event meeting you. However, it's imperative that you know I'm a pretty dull bird in person: I don't think writing very equals talking. Maybe not. But I look forward to talking (writing ) with you.

BTW, you are beautiful and it confuses me how you can be divorced. Was that ok to say?

Stay happy.

John.

sweet kitty cuddles

Hello [Kate]. So you read my profile, huh? I figured someone had to eventually, but I am not really as unintelligent as all that. I am most awesomely shy and so I struggle here thinking of what to say. I apologize for waiting so long to reply. You have a gorgeous profile, but I didn't think I could reply: I was thrown back someone actually responded. By now I must sound reasonably pathetic. I am really like someone who stumbles out on the dance floor and thinks he had it pretty good along the wall. Thank you very much for answering. I hope we have an opportunity to talk. I am on MSN at kingdom_eternal@hotmail.com. And I have my own website, still being constructed, at www.johnliptow.com. That is all, good night. John.

re: the writer

The writer is challenged to write what is difficult to make it what is easy, and to write what is impossible to make it what is merely difficult.

John.

literary ant in a land of giants

Mozart could have written the music he wrote even if he had never heard a single note from another's music. You aren't supposed to understand it. Perhaps it is our Cro Magnon brains; I can't begin to fill in the gaps. Why do some aspire to create and others create to inspire? I am not going to tell you: it would come from the foreign tongue of jibberish if I tried.

So: tell me, when I rest my head toward slumber, do these words cease dreaming of me?

John.

to a mirror reviewed

I've lost nearly all faith in every one of my character virtues, save this one: I am without doubt the greatest writer of my generation.

I am quietly drunk on this thought all day; I am reflective of those I encounter in my daily journey, how he or she had just met somebody phenominal and did not know it. I sit high in the mountain and look down upon an ordinary world and wonder who is my peer in this mountain retreat. Indeed, it would seem my cup runneth over with Ego. But the question possesses my mind nonetheless: who am I?

My quest is to become whole, this Pinocchio-like fixation, and to know love when I am loved and to be loved when giving it. All the talent one acquires in life does not prepare an individual for the fair comprehension of love—of sighting it on the beach or splashing in the waves with it or sitting still and thoughtful of the gulls that dip down to the surf to retrieve it from the mysteries of the sea, or walking along and trailing its long shadow of dismay. I wonder when or if the reach of love might find me. Now, when I pause for a second from being the great writer, I nose into the perhaps of an unknown future. If God had made light from dark, then I must consider He may choose to do the same for me; and (an irony a god might favor) I may be waiting on a god who may be waiting on me.

My failure may be in this waiting. What I could do is begin to write from my inspired waters...or what I could do is begin a journey that would take me through the better part of an eternity. Floating in such ambivalence has the disadvantage of gradually losing the will to live for anything. I float; and I know what death feels like. For love, I would commit myself to ten-thousand deaths, each death producing courage enough to face the next, for love itself is courage by another name.

But now—lacking love—I drop to my knees of futility, my body pulling into a ball of loneliness.

Who am I? Who is the darkness? I question again and again and again.

John.

beauty refined

This is beauty then: when you measure your joy against your despair and treasure the joy when it is there.

John.

reunion today

That's right. Today I get to refresh myself with old familiar faces. The reunion will be at Palmer Park. There are actually two reunions, one on my mother's side, the other on my dad's side. I will be going to the Liptow reunion.

Before I go to the reunion, I will stop at the printers to get a few copies produced of This is My Life, This is My Voice. This is a collection of some of my short stories, which keeps expanding as I keep writing more stories. This month alone I have written two stories. I hope to do a couple more at least before the month is over. I have got a few beautiful ones.

Here is one: "Lonely Man." It is about a New York prostitute just before her wedding and a relationship with an elderly man. Another is "The Room." It starts like this: "The old man poured into the room, all ears and gossip." I can't wait to be in that room. I hope to also finish "Lightening and the Dragon" this month, but I have had that on my desktop for some time now. So that's the wrap. It's reunion time! Ciao!

John.

after midnight

I finished designing my homepage today, and linking it to my writing page. This has been like some mad occupation to get this website going. I need to get out of it now and get some writing done, which is what I really want to do. I am hoping to get cracking on "Lightening and the Dragon" and "Can Dead Hearts Weep?" soon.
http://www.johnliptow.com