For now, they are my confessors. There is peace in front of this screen. I know they are also there, reaching to find someone to absolve them. A yes yes that matches souls. But we're gluttons for more and we wouldn't ever repent of that.

He chuckled real big and his ears flapped slightly. Cowboys ears, though I wouldn't have thought that if he hadn't told me he use to ride the rodeo circuit. He told me about meeting Dolly Parton, hoping to surprise me by telling of her pious heart and witty self deprecations. "It costs a lot to look this cheap." He described his planed road trip this summer from AZ to CO to MT to WA, thousands of miles of good open road. He's just itchin' to hit those old cowboy shows and traditional churchs. He gloats over church's recent aquisition of the city's best organist from the Lutherans down the road who decided to go "contemporary." He surprises me with his love of everything from Beastie Boys to Blue Grass (he also use to do promo work for record labels), and he has too much fun regailing me with the times he has pretended to be the nasty city inspector when he is only the surveyor for the county commissioner's office.

He's about 65 with an oozing little red spot where the docs recently drilled a hole into his mostly bald head. It makes him look a lot more fragile than his spirit will allow.

He's my new priest.

The kid looked at me for a moment and said, "If you feel like stretching your legs you can walk over there and see the grave of Freddy Krueger."

All this looks too pritty in Times but I can't figure out the html. Someone please help.

The stale smell of dragons met me at the door. My hope rose, maybe this was it. No windows, the distinct unwelcomness of a NO SOLICITORS sign, dark dingy corners where I could read by neon, and old british rock. The place was good. Then the regulars came in and ignored me and I thought "perfect".

SMOKESCREEN INC.
The kind of dives we only dream about.

Do you prefer to celebrate life with coffee or champagne?

Waits pacifier.

Maybe you should quit.

Hey, I ain't no fucking quitter.

And the pavement had eyes tonight.

The sobs wracked the room and threatened the house.
I knew them/I know them.
Her's/Mine.
Hating the pride, the power, the force, the anger, the indecency of it. The yelling turns him to defiance, and others to dispare. The cycle remains even though we have already lost one.

The method proven faulty.

The sobs remain. And she hates what she is here.

Vanity... pure vanity. Googling your own name.

She has my name...

How can my name go with that face?

Jesus doesn't have the conversion paradigm.
He sure doesn't live up to being a good evangelical.

"I would rather live one story than write a thousand."
Who do you remember more, the author or the character?

Because a bird pooped through the open window and I wear grease under my nails as a badge of honor.

I snubbed all those perfect bodies on parade at Starbucks and paid tribute to the grunting, slopping, dirtiness of life.

Relieved that the seduction of car washing was perfected for Luke and cliched by Playboy so I can think of it as dirty hard work.

Wax on... Wax off...
I never saw the movie, but it still ruins my mental rest.

"...my favorite line from St. Augustine, love and do what you will, dilige et quod vis fac, a line which is so powerful that we can readily forgive Augustine for having invented original sin, which is an other we did not need invented.

Go and invent sin no more; invent no more sin; come and invent something other than sin."

Laughter and Children
Geez, Jamie it's freezing in here.

"It's warm over here... or maybe that's just pee."

"The ash tray said we'd been up all night."
We agreed it had to have been nine days.

"Salsa dancing with my confusion."

I had an affair with modernism these last few months. I am not a happy post modern. I want to be able to say, "but nothing is so much cooler!" Instead I still lament the passage of coherence.

I don't like my schizophrenia. I would prefer a self-integration. I am afraid of regret. Afraid that one schizo self will make a choice the others won't want to live with, but then I'll be stuck.

I want to break free of seeing my life irrevocably determined by any one choice. Sure, there are thinks we have to see through to the end of our days, but that doesn't mean the quality of them must remain stagnate, trapping. Multiple self-images don't have to do battle. Instead they can keep life interesting.

Wanting cohesion but unable to demand it. Doubting its existence.

Here in America When I close me eyes I can see the streets of Kampala imaged over the ones of this quaint and swanky Philadelphian suburb. It’s like laying a transparency over the top of what I am seeing now or like the little white spots you see when you blink. When I blink I see Uganda on these streets.

African Talk
Every time I try to say it I fail and come closer at the same time. But I'm sick of talking about it now, and so on Saturday night I sat and watched the party move around me.


A One Exit Town
Anne Davies dropped me off in White Haven Penn., a one exit town without a motel or a McDonald. The gas station was what I had imagined Daniel worked in, old, the kind that serviced travelers, instead of the up scale suburban clientele and the bright feeling of his actual place of employment. Anne dropped me with my 140 lbs of luggage beside the ash tray and trash can and took off for Jersey. I waited for Peter, but he didn't show, not for 3 and a half hours. So I watched the mixture of townies, homeward bound college students, and too rich Asian businessmen. Reaculturating myself.

It turns out Peter was in town. When there was no Micky-Ds, where we had planed to meet, he went to the place he thought I would most logically wait at, the Powerhouse Restaurant, the only eating place in town and relatively up scale. I went to the first place I thought he would look, the gas station nearest the freeway off-ramp. Besides, I liked the pace of sitting at a gas station bordering the freeway and an old cemetery better than the mother's day crowds at a restaurant. I felt like I belonged at the gas station.
Peter says he drove by, recognized the cloths but not the hair and figured it wasn't me. Thankfully, after his nap in his car over by the Powerhouse, he came back to the gas station for a coke.

Clean and Boring
Gas station toilets are no big deal.

I think long drops are more sanitary than toilet seats.

Even the "slum" suburbs where Dan lives feels too sanitized. I don't mind littering a bit to help make the place more interesting.

It feels dangerous to drink the tap water in my glass. My eyes are suspicious, its cleanliness seems deceitful.

College Affiliation

I am now an official Oxford student with membership at Christ Church College. I feel instantly too snobby.

Response to Getting Snail Mail in Africa

You have done more than anything else to help me be excited about coming
state side. I got your letters today and it was perfect timing. If I had
read them somewhere in the middle of my stay here I would have been
hopelessly homesick, but now they help me tear myself from this world and
prepare for that one.

I expect I will still need your help. I will probably be talking about this
place and people for months, sorting through impressions and trying to help
myself cope with the drastically different and very similar things between
Africa and the West. I will probably tell you more then you want to know.
You will ask me a simple question and find me rambling to answer it. Just
warning you.

I am thankful I had the chance to be here. I know that many of my posts
don't reflect that fact. I think that has something to do with feeling like
depression is more profound, or at least I think I am more profound when I
am sad. Besides, when I am fully living here, I don't want to write I just
keep moving, laughing, and learning in this world. Its only when the
melancholy sets in that I write. Its my writing mood. I don't think I
would be writing this letter without a tinge of sweet sadness that comes
from realising the love of friends who are unavailable for a midnight
ramble.

At least I know that if we were together we'd stay up late say things worth
saying.

Africa has been good to me and I have a love for it that might bring me
back. I am waiting to see where the wind blows.