Hi everyone! Hope you had a good and relaxing and productive 4th of July weekend. Mine wasn't quite as productive as I'd hoped (alas!), but, as I noted previously, I did get this blog nice 'n' tweaked and the Scary-Crayon blog online (finally!), so that's something. Naturally, I often feel like a writer or an editor or a graphic artist or, heaven forbid, a blogger, when working on my various 'net projects, but this past weekend I actually felt like a webmaster again. 'Twas nice. Oh, and in case you didn't see it (it was mentioned in the SC blog!), I put up a July 4th Foodstuffs article last night. If you've got comments about it, voice 'em over there. 🙂

Anyway, to make up for the more/less technical posts of the past few days, here's something I stumbled across in my old folders over the weekend and am quite frankly a little embarrassed to share (but not entirely so; otherwise I wouldn't do it) -- a short tribute of sorts that I wrote for a crush of mine way back in summer 2001. I have, naturally, removed the woman's name from the piece (though the few readers who've known me for a while will probably remember with ease, given the way I gushed about her back then), and the central portion of the piece, which actually contained a legitimate dictionary definition of her name (copied from The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus; in the original document, the reprinted text, which I added, constituted the final "listing" under the definition), has been considerably shortened so as not to give the name away. And regarding the entry categories -- it's not fiction, per se, but since I don't have a prose category I went ahead and ticked it. And I definitely think it's worthy of being called art; at the very least, it gives you a glimpse of the Wes in his more romantic days. And... oh hell, just read it.

"Sometimes hitting it works," I say, shifting in my blanket to avoid collapsing onto R-----'s seat and curling up in the heat she abandoned on the couch as she rose. She stands motionless before the television, tall and silhouetted in its glow as the woman behind the static veil says something very funny, that is, if the audience's laughter is genuine. I'm too tired to appreciate Saturday Night Live right now, and even if I were wide-awake I probably wouldn't laugh at the show. R----- too remains silent; she seems, for the moment, more concerned with fixing the picture than anything else. As I succumb to the temptation to embrace the shampoo-scented warmth of her blanketed space I spy diagonal lines of grey and black running frenzied down the length of the screen, twisting and zigzagging like a mass of zebra-striped ants on speed. R----- frowns, raises a delicate hand (but her handshake is so firm -- I'll never understand it) and reluctantly smacks the television set. I sit upright as she reclaims her place next to me on the couch and snuggles back inside the sanctuary of her blanket.

"Strange how that works," R----- remarks as I press play on the VCR remote and lean against her body with cautious reservation, awkwardly placing my cheek on that softness that lies between shoulder and elbow, the cushion of arm hidden by short sleeves even when the bicep is exposed.

*     *     *

R----- S----- (with ref. to the only woman yet fitting this description) any woman possessing extremely good taste in music, clothing, television shows, and film, an insatiable literary appetite, impressive skill at writing, a voice more beautiful than that of the ----- whose name she shares, exquisite delicacy of motion, a wealth of other virtues too numerous to list in any single entry, and also exhibiting a curious hostility towards "anorexic bitches."

*     *     *

R----- said they treated her horribly, and I believe her, but I can't understand why she would have been so teased in school. I can't understand why she would have been anything less than beloved by all, if not even worshipped by a few overzealous admirers. But even loss of all restraint in her presence would not be blameworthy; intoxication inhibits inhibitions, and her beauty, once drunk through open eyes and imagination unchecked, is both undeniable and enchanting -- inebriating, to complete the analogy. But perhaps one must possess a certain perspicacity (to use a word first heard, in some form, from her very lips) to appreciate the charms and riches within her temple. Admittedly, upon first glance she was not pretty, nor was she ugly. She was tall, and red-headed, and had I only been exposed to her radiance for a short while (not long enough to tan, let alone burn) I should not have been so affected by her sweet toxins or so swayed by her cardial rhythms as they spirited me into the abyss of her cerebral deep. R----- was simply tall, and redheaded, and unless I were to speak of the strength of her grip I should have had no more to say about the woman.

Her hair falls in limp, uninspiring curls (though pretty enough to move noble princes to song), her nose rolls out and slants down and curves under like a complicated fishhook, and her forehead rounds too early for modern foreheads, if the cosmetics of evolution are fixed in linear fashion. But stare at R----- longer and she takes on the picturesque look of an art museum portrait -- imagine her adorned in lace and puffy sleeves and gemstones, smiling coyly with her thin lips and hints of natural rouge upon her otherwise pale face, and with a throne at her back she might be crowned sovereign of all England. Or, brighten her dress, keeping the frills and lace, mind you, and sail her forward two hundred years and across the Atlantic. Replace her crown with a bonnet, trade her throne for an oversized umbrella, and now she's Williamsburg's belle fair, with suitors enough to marry every miss in the colonies stumbling over one another simply to catch sight of her.

And though visits to the gallery are always great fun, one needn't seek such cultured surroundings to appreciate Nature's gift (or one of them, at any rate; our goddess is a generous one). The adventurer might take hold of those uninspiring tresses -- O Rapunzel, Rapunzel! -- and climb skyward, or scale the strange curvature of Mt. S----- to her peak, setting up camp on the rift where the lava-locks part and flow in waves down the snowy mountainside. There the perspicacious adventurer might peer into the chasm and, surrendering to the unfathomable depths, plunge headlong into the volcano as dulcet tones lend eccentric substance to the descent. Deeper, the adventurer falls under the soothing gaze of blue serenity shocked 'round by the incandescence of the inner cone, burning with a wealth of alien vocabulary and literary knowledge and universal insights encompassed in its brightness. Blink once for no, twice for yes, flash the meaning of life in Morse code. The abyss -- make no mistake -- is inescapable. But this is Heaven, not Alcatraz.

So there it is. Hey, you know something? Looking over this, yes, it's embarrassing -- and, though it does nothing to alter their color, causes my cheeks to flush with blood -- but there's also something kind of sweet about it. The old Wes (though back then, most people knew me by my first name) might have been slightly creepy, given to excessive displays of passion, and fond of stealing kisses from hands and fleshy arms alike, but he felt -- not merely with his lips, but with his heart. I can't remember the last time I got this worked up over a girl! Well, I can -- and it was probably over the girl for whom I wrote this so long ago! -- but I don't remember exactly what it felt like. I remember that it felt good, though. I remember that I felt alive -- even when she eventually and firmly told me that she wanted no further contact with me. Even that pain sustained me, and in the days that followed I paced the stone tiles of my dormitory room floor and played out a number of imaginary conversations in my head and wrote several letters to the girl that I never intended to send, just trying to get to the bottom of her cruel dismissal and hash out my feelings and better express my feelings for her, because if she didn't recognize the depth of my passion and at least respond with a certain kindness, the fault must somehow have been mine; an error of communication. But as I said, the old Wes felt -- he had a beating heart and a living soul.

But these days I feel nothing. Emptiness. Life isn't wonderful or wonderfully tragic; it's dull, disappointing, dead. And so I long for death as well.

For all of his glaring and obvious faults, I think I miss that crazed romantic.