Ink.

Ink
by james bezerra

The ink just beneath your skin
has a constant effect;
it make me grin.
But not a smile upon my face.
No, this grin begins in a much different place.
It begins, this grin, like a hunger,
only … no, it is so much stronger.
It’s a famine in my chest;
a hungry creature that simply won’t rest
until it tastes and devours and sucks from you
the sweet dark ink of that tattoo.

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Oh the Mistakes I Have Made.

Oh the Mistakes I Have Made
by james bezerra

Oh, the mistakes I have made!
There was that poker game I played
with a Nigerian royal prince.
I barely got away fully intact!
But in point of fact,
I was being rather dense
because I forgot I couldn’t play poker!

Then there was my brief marriage
to a koala bear who was quite savage
when it came to matters of sharing food.
But marrying a koala was a mistake solely mine,
given the opportunity again, I would probably decline.
But I will say, all and all, the experience was good
because it taught me to take marriage more seriously.

My worst mistake, however,
was that time I upset your mother.
What happened was that I
answered a bit too honestly
when she asked if I’d give her a grand baby.
To my credit though, when she started to cry
I did stop explaining how rotten I find children.
(They’re always sticky!)

Through it all however
I believe that I am much better
of a person because of these mistakes, no matter how disastrous.
You see, life is a gift that we should strive to enjoy
and sometimes that means we are allowed to employ
judgment that later proves erroneous.
If I had to live life error-free
I imagine it would’ve quite quickly bored me.



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My Foiled Bank Robbery.

My Foiled Bank Robbery
by james bezerra

The other day while at the bank
I decided that I would rob it.
And this was no robbery prank,
no sir, not even a little bit.
Upon reaching the teller
I felt obliged to tell her
she should empty her cash drawer,
otherwise I would make her very sorry.
That is when she alerted security
and they quite promptly
tackled me to the floor of the bank.

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Why We Will Never Have Hologram Phones.

Why We Will Never Have Hologram Phones
by james bezerra

I do not know what you do,
but for me I know it’s true
that when talking on the phone
I’m never doing that activity alone.
I am also doing my checkbook
or having a quick look
at what is on TV.
But it would just mortify me
if you could see
me paying so little attention
to our conversation.

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Hour.

Hour
by james bezerra

With a whole
hour still to go,
I just do not know
if I’ll make it through this workday!

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Past Participle of Eat.

Have you ever been making a list of thing you recently did and did not eat and suddenly been struck by the desire to know the precise definition of the word “eaten”?

Me too!

Here is the one that comes up on Google and the only reason I am bothering to put it up here is because I really thought that it was dead on. So well-written of a definition that there is really very little I could do but simply shrug and go, “Yep, that’s what that means.”

1.Eaten past participle of eat (Verb)
Verb: 1. Put (food) into the mouth and chew and swallow it: "he was eating a hot dog"; "she watched as he ate".

I like to believe that there is a man out there who is considered to be the greatest living writer of definitions. His coworkers and contemporaries secretly hate him. Women (albeit librarians and Sophomore English teachers) want him, and men (albeit librarians and Sophomore English teachers) want to be him. His reputation proceeds him. His services are unreasonably expensive. He only writes by quill and he always has a monocle in his vest pocket but never puts it on.

Anyway, I bet he is the one who wrote that. That’s just how good it is.

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P.S.
It now dawns on me that the definition above does not actually use the word “eaten”, so perhaps he is not as good at his job as we all believed.
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Things Which I Have Personally Eaten.

Things I did not have the chance to eat last weekend even though I was very excited about them:

An ice cream Sundae built out of vanilla ice cream, a glazed donut and covered in crumbled chocolate chip cookies.

Things I happily did not end up eating last weekend:

Frog legs


Things I ate last weekend which I do not entirely remember eating:

Edamame

Things I have very fond memories of eating this last weekend:

In-N-Out

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All The Rowboats.

You’re super cool and hip and with-it and just the right amount indie and pop that you have probably already heard this, but it is Regina Spektor’s new song and I heard it a little while ago by accident, but now feel okay about it and so wanted to share.

Does it get better/stranger than Regina Spektor?! (No offense Bjork.)





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A Half-Hearted Apology.

A Half-Hearted Apology
by james bezerra

Please forgive my many
typos and the how poorly
I spell.
When I write these things I think they’re swell!
It is not until
I read them soberly
that I realize I write so abysmally.

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Amorous Heart.

Unless a woman has an amorous heart, she is a dull companion.
~ Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

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A Very Long Blog Post about A Very Small Thought.

I have had something of a strange thought banging around half formed inside of my brain lately. You can tell me, but I think it is symptomatic of this furiously, technologically linked-in world in which we have all found ourselves living.

But let me start at the beginning, you have that kinda time, right? Well don’t worry, you can play Words with Friends while you read this, I won’t be offended.

The Beginning: I have had a couple of nearly picture perfect weekends lately (two out of three and that third one wasn’t too shabby either!) and a couple Monday mornings ago I found myself standing outside of work about twenty minutes early (as is my custom for reasons passing understanding) and so I was going through my phone and deleting spam-flavored emails and checking The Facebook and (pointedly) re-reading texts (I get a smidge obsessive-y, which is no doubt clear to you since I still write a blog [Although come on! If this was 1998 I would be the hippest cat that you know!]).

I am doing a very poor job of writing this blog entry. Let me start again.

The Beginning, Again: So I have had some very good weekends lately and they were really and actually good, not just the kind of good that we content ourselves with when we spend Saturday night lit up all laptop-blue and trying to convince ourselves that Pinterest and Stumbeupon are the same thing as fun. I’m not bragging or anything (look at how cool and awesome and fulfilling my life is!), I'm simply saying that actually participating in the life is sometimes even better than observing it from the bottom of the 4G connection on your phone. But then sadly Monday reared up and I found myself thumbing my way through my own phone before work and I discovered that not only had I not missed anything in the world, but also, that my very wonderful weekend had gone almost entirely undocumented. Can you believe it?! Not a single Facebook post or Tweet or picture or email, nary even a text to record the whole damn thing.

This inspired in me two sudden, simultaneous and conflicting emotions.

The first is relatable to all of us, I think. Mainly that it was so very refreshing and sweet to have had a totally unconnected bit of life. It was like a deep, deep breath taken in Downward-Facing Dog, or something! I felt so off-the-grid awesome! I felt like the good kind of hippie! (The kind that showers, looks like a normal human being, recycles without making a big deal about it, in case you were curious).

It was the sort of free and relaxed and, dare I say, proud feeling I get when I go for a hike and there is no one else around at all. There is something very fortifying and affirming about thinking to yourself, “I am so unconnected right now that if I tripped and fell down this ridge right here, I would pretty much be on my own and would most likely die … because I have Sprint and the service sucks up here on this firebreak … so I had better not fall …”

But I’m digressing again.

So now this is the other thought I had about my undocumented, unconnected weekend and I’m sure that this is relatable to most of us as well: startlingly strong anxiety.

As in: What the hell do you mean there are no texts or pictures or Facebook updates or Tweets or blogs or what the hell ever else? How the hell am I going to REMEMBER this?!

See, I’m one of those people who locks a particularly good (or bad) text message. I save pictures on my phone until the contract is up and then I have those pictures transferred to the next phone, just so that I can have memories locked into pixels riding around in my pocket in case I ever want to remember those things. I mean, this is a fucking blog after all! I have so many tiresomely specific memories encoded here that quite often I feel like it is more just my diary than it is my internet presence as a writer who exists in the world.

But this is all taking a lot of words to explain and you’re very busy and important and probably losing that game of Words with Friends you’re playing with your mom, so let me just get to the point:

The Point: There was a part of me, that Monday morning a couple of weeks ago, that was so very afraid of the fact that I had no memories in digital form. I became suddenly and seriously aware of the limited and unreliable ability of my own brain to remember in detail all of the things that I wanted to remember in warm and pristine clarity. And the realization made me a little sad. All of those blurry pics of my cat in my phone are going to exist into the far reaches of forever, but these nice and sweet and wonderful memories are going to melt away at a rate that would be positively unacceptable if my brain were a Polaroid. It was a little hard to know that those memories might fade out of focus and one day bleed into the confused background of my own memory.

I suppose this is not a new concern. And really, I suppose it is really about the fleetingness of life and not just the fleetingness of memory.

I thought that all of this was rather profound when I sat down to write, but now it feels a little saccharin. But who the hell cares? It isn’t like you’ll remember this post tomorrow anyway.

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My New Charity.

My roommates just decided that they are going to stop showering for good. Please donate to my just-created charity: Save Jamie’s Apartment from The Smells!

We will use your donations to purchase air fresheners, scented candles, lots of Clorox wipes, and enough of those pine-scented Christmas trees to make the apartment look like the place where that sloth-y dude was strapped to the bed in “Se7en”.

Hooray for charity!

Please donate here:
SaveJamiesAprtmentFromTheSmellsDOTorg

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Odd Logic.

The Internet is a weird place. Here are some of the things which come up when one Google Image searches “Seven air freshener scene”







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