Anonymous practice tweets:

1. I get insecure when I wear my Queers shirt to the pool. I’m a fan of the band and the demographic, but when I’m around other naked men I only want to make my allegiance with the former known.

2. I didn’t finish reading Revolutionary Road; it was feeding a very pessimistic part of me pure poison.

The pool.

Me and my best bud have been hitting the pool almost daily and boy does it feel hot! I want it to get to the point where I’m slicing thru the water with such precision it feels like I’m skimming across the surface. I wanna swim so fuckin’ fast people give me looks that say, “take it easy bud, you got crazy eye.” I have so much unresolved anger and frustration that I really need to just sweat it all out. And what better place to get real sweaty than the pool; it’s self cooling and self cleaning! I dig the feeling of my arms powering thru the water, while my legs correct for balance by pulsing in perfectly timed intervals; it’s an art I’ve yet to master but it’s important to have dreams.

Response

I've thought about it all evening, and I respectfully disagree. Does our finding interest in few things in the world relative to what there is mean we are rejecting the rest? It's not active rejection, so how can it be a verb? And why should it make us feel better to believe acceptance is a rarity? Acceptance or rejection of people is really the issue, and it's the acceptance of all people that's the catch phrase. I believe I accept and am accepted by most people around me already, and it feels very good to think so.

And I think rejection's personal for both people. It's just hard to remember that we ourselves might like someone we don't want to date, respect someone we don't want to work with, and that people need different things from love; when confronted with throbbing inadequacy, amaranthine loneliness, or having your heart splattered all over the bed.

John Coltrane is buying groceries, a hawk sits on a lamp post over a freeway, four women push baby strollers into a tiny cafe, a man with a fish hook earring pleads his case through the glass at the welfare office, a voice actor specializing in movie trailers steps into the sound booth, a teenager walks to school hiding a rose in his jacket, a baby chews on the corner of a paperback, the driver of a car covered in action figures swerves to hit a cyclist and drops his joint between his legs, sun streams though a barred bedroom window, a fat uncle calls his niece a cunt at a barbecue, a son comes home at sunrise wearing a polka dot diagonal mohawk, someone unpacks their lunch in the parking lot, the tide encroaches on a snowman, someone's mother says, "Be gentle with him", a woman receives her brother's ashes in a plastic bag, a girl un-stitches her fingers from her boyfriend's, no one notices a shy college student enter the party, a tambourine discharges from a third floor apartment window, a reunited couple dances to, "There aint a man today who could tear me away from my guy", a woman trains her dog in the rain, wind leaps into a somber phone conversation, in a bar a man describes the sound of afternoon glaciers shifting on the Himalayas, pedestrians watch a cat chase a crow with a broken wing, someone gets a sliver from a picnic table, a condom floats over a flooded storm drain, a man cuts the cord on his wife's call with a kitchen knife, a kid watches the pulsing guts of a dying mouse, a priest descends from the pulpit laughing, the dawn advances on a frozen horse, strawberry flavored rat medicine is brought up in conversation, a man fancying himself to be an out of work boxer salutes a prostitute, the fist twin is born, the bulb on a taxi burns out, one man says, "We're surrounded," the other one says, "Who's we?", and the lights come up on the only guy left in the theatre.

Just a thought.

Hey Buddy,

You know your theory about there being no real way to botch up your life short of committing some heinous crime? I’ve been trying to get on board with that line of thinking. And, as I mentioned to you earlier today, I think the concept of rejection needs a good overhauling, perhaps as a companion theory. Sure there’s a use for the word rejection in the English language from time to time, but what I’m proposing is that we try our best not to take rejection too personal. Rejection is the world’s default mode, what’s special-and rare- is acceptance.

Yours truly,

Blankity Blank Blank