magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

bean is not actually from antarctica. his heart is covered in paisleys.

he makes tiny little pictures and sometimes writes about his life.

Untitled.

19 May 1999

[  ]
1055a, lincoln, ne

i've actually been here since about 130 last night. a short way into yesterday's drive i figured i might as well just push through and get it done in one day.

i had various observations while driving, but they seem so far away. the road is always very unreal. and that's compounded by the state of being between homes.


after getting up, sonali and i went grocery shopping. came back and had pasta for lunch. sonali had to go pay a few bills. we spent some time in a used bookstore, where i resisted my book buying habit.

then we went to the cheap movie theatre and saw rushmore. really terrific good movie. the sort that inspires me to make movies of my own.

we hung out at her sister's for a while, then came back to her apartment, and i made stir-fry for dinner, which we ate out on the front porch.

earlier sonali had asked how i felt about drugs. she had shown me the three sugar cubes and one little blotter square in a matchbox in her refrigerator and said she thought it would be fun to trip with me.

sonali's one of the few people i know who could convince me (without much convincing really at all) to do just about anything. that's probably not the most healthy state of affairs, but i do trust her.

so she hands me half of a sugar cube, and half the little blotter square. which i take. we watched last night's buffy with her neighbor. between the two of them they have a vcr and tv and had taped it.

after that we went to the mill, a coffee shop that sonali hangs out at. so we talked, and co-authored a poem, and ran into lots of her friends including corey, a boy who "might be becoming more than just friends" and who we'll be returning to later in the narrative.

throughout this whole period i was feeling really giggly. the sort of feeling like when yr in a group of people and they're all laughing, and no one can stop laughing 'cause they'll just look at someone else and start again. except that no one else was laughing.

sonali decided that her mood really called for a cigarette, not exactly a feeling i shared. and so she bummed one off of her sister's boyfriend. and then she decided she'd like to be smoking cloves, so we walked to a tobacco/skate shop where she bought a pack.

i had of course smoked half the marlboro that she bummed, and shared a number of cloves with her over the evening, and i noticed i was really getting quite a buzz off of them, due i believe, to the acid which hadn't really produced any other effects. i assumed that the giggliness earlier had been a similar enhancement of the beer i had with dinner. yes, as i said, sonali could hand me just about anything and i'd take it.

we walked to the sculpture garden on the university campus and sat and talked. we talked about er!n and q. i told her all the stuff that's not on my website.

we came back to her apartment and sat on the porch and talked about love and magic and architecture and theatre and all manner of things.

and then, when we were going to call it a night, it started raining. and so we went for a walk. we went to hazel abel park, a very magical place that had been closed for renovations, and she suspected it still was, but that maybe we could sneak in. but, it was open. so we played in the park in the rain and i took my glasses off and everything was just big fuzzy shapes of wet colour.

we began walking back and sonali was talking about how you could think something, and even write it, but if you said it out loud you had invoked it, and there was no talking it back. i'm not sure i had ever thought about it in quite those terms, but as a poet, i think it's something i've always instinctively known. language is very powerful. speaking something manifests it in a very real way. that's one of the big reasons i'm such a quiet person.

and so sonali worked her way up to saying "i think i'm falling in love with corey." which wasn't a surprise to me. but the physicality of the vocalized thought became immediately apparent. the gears and machinery that make up individual lives, that click together and turn and interact in different ways, shifted. the context changed.

although i'm here, stationary, visiting for a few days, i'm still very much on the road. on the road you are in a bubble of unreality. the past and the future do not exist in the same way that they normally do. they are stories, faerie tales, mythologies. the present moment is something of an eternal now. and in that moment with sonali i wondered if our paths could have intersected at different points, if we could have been different things to each other.

but, with the manifested thought that she is falling in love, those what-ifs became clearly what they truly are: pale apparitions during a very real and very unreal brief interlude in the much larger, but currently shadowed, context of my life.

we stopped and stood on a stone patio behind the nebraska state capitol. we watched birds that looked like "angels, or faeries." sonali said "this is where i imagine the king of nebraska would come and address the people."