--YOU PROBABLY THINK THIS SONG IS ABOUT YOU, DON’T YOU, DON’T YOU?

There are three of me in this picture.
No, wait. There are more.
There are four. Four or five of me in this photo.
We are all very bright, very slick, but also slight and sick. We blend into nothing but the wind.
That’s one of the problems—me not knowing me as well as I should.
Other people don’t seem to have this issue. Other people are more self-aware. They have their stuff together, their shit together. They are Get-up-and-go, Take-it-or-leave-it, Read-email-on-their-cell-phones-all-the-way-to-work types, just because they’re that fully-formed.
And isn’t it beautiful.
So what’s a boy to do?
Most boys can see a lot farther than me. They see the sail boats on Lake Washington and the lingering ash/smoke/haze from Mount St. Helens. Still, I’m the one who sees the laugh lines and the faint mole southeast of the lower lip, the lips themselves looking like pulpy fruit. I’m the one who sees beside the moon, how the clouds resemble a sheer sheath Marilyn Monroe once wore in a photo.
But what good does that do me?
Red is red and red is not blue.
We all know this is true.
Colors have boundaries just as we do, and each one designates something in particular.
A person can see red and feel blue. A person can paint either color separate or blend the two.
Last night I watched two girls (who were high on some kind of drug) sink their hands into a can of blood red paint. They talked about how silky it felt. They didn’t really need to say anything, though. It could have been a Show-Don’t-Tell moment and that would have worked perfectly.
You read this and say: “WTF? What the hell does this mean?”
And I answer: “Exactly.”