It's all been mixed up lately. I've been thinking so much about how to improve this thing, what to offer, how to be topical, how to design, and if there's a way to build up a following so that this can fulfill my need to be read, fill that hole in my life that's currently clogged with loose sesame seeds and the crust of old mayonaise. And now-- exactly now, not for twenty seconds now, not in ten minutes when I'll be regretting every word of this post as I go to publish-- now I don't care. I am listening to Damien Rice, and this CD is perhaps the most emotive of any I own, and this song (Older Chests) is perhaps the most motivational. So I will just write. Me.

I have been thinking about places, people. Mostly people. Zack a lot, about our past, our future, this weekend, the celebration of our one year, how long that is. But he is not what I want to write about right now. And right now is what I am living in forever, and right now will have all of my attention, for the moment.

Casey, the way the best thing for us would be if we could just have one of those brick walls like they do in the peanuts cartoons, where Charlie Brown will just be sitting there, with one tear-shaped arm supporting his head and the other bent underneath, and Linus will come by and ask what he's thinking about. They'll have casual conversation-- simple and philosophical, maybe every day, evidence of much deeper bond but never hinting at anything complicated. They never look right at each other, always forward, they never touch, it's all just this idle conversation. And comfortable silence. This, I have decided, is at the heart of male/male friendships. With women, it's crying and touching and hugging. It's more Luann or Rose is Rose. But with guys, no. That wall, those undramatic moments in the silent suburbs of the mind.

I want to expound infinitely on Casey, because he likes seeing his name in type, and because I feel I should have a lot more to say. But Casey is a concise person, in every way: his expression is concise, his emotions are concise, even our friendship seems that it would be concise, were it up to him. I never quite got the whole "brevity is the soul of wit" thing, but it seems an insult to him that I want to write pages of the details of what we do when we're together (a subject on which there are no details) or the moments where I look up at him and my thought just stops dead, and he knows what it is and so do I, but maybe this time we're too smart to acknowledge, or maybe it's just that we've gotten that far. It's a brand-new kind of (platonic) intimacy, and bittersweet seems the best way to describe it.

I wrote far too much on that last piece (a subject on which the details are imagined.) I've gone and insulted him, us, the world as I know it, again.

They never do look up at each other at that damn fence.

On with it.