Now THIS motherfucker can write. I'm floored and flittering about. I skated as fast as I could down to Bi-Rite for a sandwich so I could get back and write about this writing. As I was eating my food in the 70+ degree heat on my front stoop, a mural tour operator pointed out that someone had vandalized the women’s building recently and I’ll take a photo of that after I’m done with this.

I didn’t know what it was when I followed the link from Ftrain and I’ve only read 5 posts but, damn. Damn. The Men was the first thing I read and since one of my first hobbies was cross-stitching and crocheting when I was in fifth grade I read some more. “Pet Ownership” was the tip-off that something deeper was going on:

He was really better off in a cage in the shelter than home with me. And later I realized that even when you and I were together, I still always felt like I was coming home to an empty house.

A failed relationship. In “Crocheting” it comes back, “Knots. I just sit and tie knots, over and over and over again.” And I think I’m going to like this....guy? Is it a guy? Maybe not? (I still hadn’t figured out that it was Joshua Allen writing this stuff.) The parallels are building faster than I can handle. I’m listening to “The Doctor Came at Dawn” by Smog and “Television Bingo” is basically a Smog song that’s not afraid to be funny.

So it’s on to Shinkicker and now I’m not sure if this is fiction or what. Can this kid really be real? She’s so perfect. So beautiful.  “My daughter, shinkicker is what her business cards say, so cute, made with the ditto machine on the back porch.” And he’s so proud of her. And I think of having children: can I make something that beautiful? And of Marcie and her biological clock. Sending her a link to this story is sweet punishment. “I told her she couldn’t put our phone number on the cards so she used our Thomas Guide coordinates instead.”  While I paste a url into my mail software I notice that it’s /box/000482.html and that’s got to be the cutest web address I’ve ever seen. He’s using post office box addressing. I’m crushing.

I’m starting to get giddy at this point and I try Voigt-Kampff on for size. And now we have the best yet. Maybe there’s hope around the corner for this guy. He seems to attract and appreciate fine individuals:

She returns a few hours later, somehow carrying four cocktails, each one the color and consistency of a sleet-packed cumulus cloud. She says something along the lines of: “You’re going to have to help me get my arms in the holes of that jacket,” except it sounded practically obscene the way she said it.

The guy knows what I like.

Back home, it takes three mirrors to make it out: KLondike 3-5652. Ma says I should act now before she passes out, I argue that she seems like the type of girl who would stay up late with a bottle of white wine, scrawling poems on her wallpaper with bloodied fingernails. She needs to simmer.

KLondike 3-5652 sends me running for my phone to try and figure out if I can change my number to those digits I used to find in my mother’s address book from the fifties. Hmm, AL 2-8041. Alaska 2? I was BA 6-1336 as a kid. I now have huge amounts of admiration for this writer. I don’t care if it’s true or not. Then he proceeds to have a, what should I say, “high fantasy” conversation that reminds me of Anne, who could burn up the email like this guy, and then it all comes slamming down. Like it is a fantasy dreamt up by a guy who’s relationship is described in The Gel:

Those days have been gutted and buried in burlap sacks. Those days knock on the floorboards late at night with rotting hands, bony knuckles. We can still be friends, they say in that awful zombie voice, the vowels drawn out way too long, the dry coughing spells, and I have to turn up my white noise maker so the house shudders under the weight of chirping crickets and burbling brooks.

Remember folks, this is only the first four posts I’ve read. He’s already mentioned dendrites and killing with coffee spoons. So finally I follow Poem Tag to its rightful end.

He put my love in clear perspective.