072618 Fuck the legionairres, i’m doing this shirtless. with my tits and my crumpled belly. but at least I don’t have quite as round and shiny a tits and belly as that guy I saw last night, walking across from Scaffidi’s Hideout. Being Milwaukee, naturally I smelled wafts of weed already twice before i had walked even three blocks. The gentle old blokes and serrated-faced smoker ladies sitting in front of Scaffidi’s were grinning about something, so maybe it was them. It just seems like weed is everywhere these days—I guess that’s why they call it a weed. It’s as common now as garlic mustard was in the 90’s. I guess that’s a good thing, but sometimes I wonder. It seems to kind of devalue it a little bit. If weed is as common as an empty 20-ounce plastic soda bottle rolling into the gutter and mixing with flecks of trees and butts and the generalized non-magic grime of the city, then what’s left to be secretly grinning about? If we can all feel anyhow we want at any time, then what of the circle in the alleyway? I dunno, maybe I’m just clinging to my old ways because I’m old. We’ll see. Maybe we just need to play more instruments and have more real conversations without trying too hard. Maybe we just need to sit on the sidewalk in front of Scaffidi’s and watch the whole east side honk and burn like thin hot tungsten in bulbs of gossamer clear glass, strung up across any patio or space between two crumbling buildings. Who knows. Honk and burn like tungsten. Anyway, so there I was crossing Humboldt and there was this guy walking down the hill toward that overpriced taco place. He had a white T-shirt on that fit him like a nitrile glove, and his belly and tits were sleek as a seal. You could see his nipples, poking downward at about thirty degrees off horizontal. It was like a smooth roller coaster ride from his chest, over the hummocks of thoses tits, through a little slough and then cruising over the main hill of that watermelon-taut round belly. At the time I thought, damn, at least I don’t look like that *yet*—wait, *do* I look like that? Oh god! And I looked down at my own t-shirt, which was of course the kind that hitches a ride off the protuberance of your tits and falls down like a christmas tree skirt, obscuring rather than obtruding the rest of the evidence of tacos and premium mediocre beer and corn syrup and the cruel joke of early onset middle age. But now, now, now that I’m thinking back, running my eyes over those wetsuit curves, I don’t know... I kinda want to touch it. Them. Him. I kinda want to hold him in my arms, and feel those breasts press into mine, feel that give, that hot sweet improbability. To be the one who gives way, and falls back in slow motion into the roughness of the couch, let that couch cushion make a gridwork in my slick bare back, feel the edge of the next couch cushion pushing into the astonished nakedness of where my back gives up and becomes that extra fat around my belly, feel that muskmelon of his pushing into mine, how both spheres become oblate and fluid together, stretched skin against stretched skin, his weight just enough more than mine to hold me down, his smile snough more wicked than mine to hold me transfixed, gaining courage finally to exhale and when I do to surprise myself by sounding like a flushed, hot-faced little girl on the cusp of learning what it means to come—but there’s still a long slow hot climb up that hill, over those hills, feel those insouciant hot little nipples pressing into mine, run my hands along that figure-hugging T, slick now with sweat, under the run-run-run-run of the ceiling fan, and he starts to move like a boat on warm, swelling waves, and I start to move along and my cock is hard and pushing into both our bellies. So maybe I’m not completely laid out straight in my coffin just yet. OK. OK. OK. That’s cool. He was walking next to a german short-haired girl. She had glasses and looked like a rough cut-out of a wry girl who probably does something with words or magazines during the day. Were they roommates? He was carrying a little paper sack, the kind with two arched stiff twine handles. Were there leftovers inside? Had they been at one of those overpriced eateries on Brady Street? Will he take me to one of those? Will we eat almost but not quite all the white wine and white flour carbs we want? I mean, we can’t just completely abandon the pretense of eating healthy. We don’t want to be fucking walruses, after all—yet—we gotta fight back for a few more decades yet—we just want to be seals. Hot, happy, full seals, arcing away into the black water beyond the docks. But we’ll be back. We got stuff to do and work on and talk about in the daytime. We got other people to see and walk with and be normal with. We gotta be apart for a while so that when we see each other again we can have a secret, a hot, slippery, warm, wet, hot-breathed secret of too much flesh and not enough time. And did I mention, I finally saw CV (in my dream)? He was grown up of course, although for some reason he only looked about 23 or 25 or so at the most. Someone said something about gay, someone in the room, there was a TV going and a lot of conversation; I think it was a bunch of his relatives in there coincidentally for a visit. Same house. I didn’t even remember parts of it because apparently I’d never gone in those parts. He was sitting in a plush rocking chair like a middle aged patriarch, but like I said, he still looked like a flip-flop wearing young doofus. He seemed glad to see me. I was elated that someone said something about him being gay—finally!—except they also said the name of some guy he was supposedly in love with, and also there was no sexual charge to that part of the dream at all. Made it past a thousand. My WASD’s space bar has a hollow rattle to it. Going to stop here for the morning. See you at noon.