I was out walking in the rain earlier and found a wet fortune from a fortune cookie on the sidewalk. Strangely, this happens to me more often than seems normal. I mean, I usually don't see people eating Chinese food on the street, especially in winter and the closest Chinese restaurant is 5 blocks away. It could be that people have fortunes in their pockets and when they pull out gloves or keys, the fortunes fall out too and then I find them. That is but one hypothesis among many and probably the most rational. The other guesses have to do with ideas about gigantic invisible fortune cookies that float like blimps in the sky etcetera, etcetera. 
    The fortune today read, "You are a bundle of energy, always on the go." What a shitty fortune. It's not even a fortune. I've noticed a steady decline in fortune cookie fortunes and it's rather unsettling to say the least. Fortune cookie fortunes are supposed to entice the recipient with something that will be, not something that already is unless it is a something one has forgotten and would do well to be reminded of. Here are some good fortunes: "You will receive a wonderful gift in the mail. You have a secret admirer. A great opportunity awaits." I don't even mind the ones that have little instructions often in the form of aphorisms like, "Don't count your chickens before they are hatched." or "Family is life's greatest treasure." Like most of us, there is usually not a time wherein I could not afford to reflect upon some timeless wisdom, but "You are a bundle of energy, always on the go?" Firstly, it wasn't true. I was not a bundle of energy this morning. I hadn't even had coffee yet. Secondly, what's with this "always on the go?" I hate that. I'm not always on the go. I decided that the fortune could use some editing. I crossed out- “a, bundle, of, on, the, and go.” Now my fortune reads, "You are energy, always." I feel much better. 
     There are treasures in the streets my friends, treasures in the streets.

     Will you go to Target for me? They have more than tar there to get. Do you think you could get it there? If you like, you can go to Ikea instead or really wherever you think they might have it. Maybe they have it at Bed, Bath and Beyond? They have so much there- Maybe Best Buy? There’s a hardware store right down the street…
      I just want you to get me the thing that will be the right thing to handle the situation and then I want you to come here with it. But please don't just hand it to me and say, "Here, this will do the trick," because I won't know what to do with it. I don't even know what's wrong, just that something most certainly is and it has to do with me. I'd like you to ascertain what is wrong and apply your purchase to the wrongness. I'm not asking you to be my doctor, more someone who knowing how I usually am and how I could be again, knows what to do about the current situation. That’s why this is a love letter. The love part has to do with my confidence in you being the right person to do this. You won’t say, “Do it yourself. No one can fix anyone else.” That’s not what this is about. You will understand that my allowing you to do it is doing it.
I'm sure opening it will be difficult because the packaging will be complicated and unfair in so many ways, but I just want you to prevail over the packaging and get to the heart of what is inside the packaging. You can use knives to do this. I don't mind. You can even use my knives. My knives are your knives in this love we share. So yes, I'm giving you permission to wield knives. That should give you some indication of how serious I am about this and how necessary I feel it is too. 
And once you do open it, once you get past the packaging to the thing of it even if you have to wrestle and wield and swear and sweat, I want you to be able to unfold and decipher the map that comes with it in order to put it together. Please, saunter around and know what you're talking about. Say, "Right, right we just need to put this here and this here and now hold on, hold on, just hold on." If you like, you can pretend much of this, but try to be a good pretender. Okay? And then please say, "There, it's done. Well now, that was easy. Look, that was all you needed. Everything is assembled and everything is in place. Everything is right again. You're good to go. Now what would you like to do?” It would be especially great it you could smile when you say that last part like you already have all kinds of loverish ideas up your sleeves.

   I’m not any kind of seamstress, but still, even so, I’d like to express my strong and unwavering support for the NRA. I believe the National Ruffle Association’s stance towards the placement of ruffles in every school in America is utterly fabulous and I have no idea what in the world everyone’s getting their feathers so ruffled up about. I have always felt ruffles add a great deal to so many outfits and I believe school principals, teachers, and students would all look so much cuter with as many ruffles as they could manage to bear. 
   Furthermore, think how much happier the cafeteria and janitorial staff would be if only they were adorned daily with ruffles. Ruffle -borders fastened along the perimeter of chalkboards would, no doubt, help render learning an occasion that is both festive and celebratory. Ruffles in gymnasiums would add team spirit and camaraderie among both players and fans. Why use test-scores to stand out when spectacular ruffled displays could so easily be employed instead? Ruffles along corridors in schools could remind everyone that the road to excellence is what we make it and that we should, of course, make it beautifully ruffled. 
     Frankly, I vote for a ruffled world. Think of flamingos and peonies. Think of Flemish paintings. Think of bed skirts, valences and pleats. Yes, NRA, let this begin at once. Wait, what? Guns? Rifles? Well, that’s just plain nuts! More guns don’t keep people from getting killed. The more guns there are, the more potential there is for harm. These people must have been ruffle-starved during childhood. I’ve heard it called flounce-deprivation. We must remind the NRA through our words and through multiple ruffled actions that it is ruffles, not rifles. Ruffles, not rifles, ruffles not rifles- again and again. We must try to be patient. Hopefully, they’ll get it eventually and tiny children will be allowed to grow up, each with his own precious new body, including two whole arms, which he has every right to keep and use and bare and bear.

    I had a horrible dream about you! In it, you told me you were moving to Paris. That wasn't the horrible part though. The horrible part was that you were moving there exclusively to do heroin! Yes, that's right. You weren't going there to travel or look at art or teach or write or study, or even to just sit around eating delicious things made with large quantities of butter. You weren't interested in any of those things at all. And worse, it sounded like you'd just lost any kind of connection to a meaningful life- interior or exterior. It was like the you-ness of you had just disappeared. I was absolutely furious at you. I shouted, "Heroin? Paris? What? " I could not believe it. "Oh, you! How could you?" I paced around and waved my arms in a jazz of shock and dismay. I wept bitterly. I pounded the floor with my fists. "Why? Why?" I cried. 
     And you said, "Oh come on, don't you think you are being a bit dramatic?" You stood and opened a drawer on your nightstand and pulled out a guide to doing heroin in Paris book. You'd underlined many passages and had made multiple notes in the margins. On the inside front cover there was even a convenient pocket for needles that you proudly pointed out to me. You insisted that I had no idea what I was talking about. You said I was misinformed completely. You'd done research and I hadn't. "You know nothing about heroin in Paris," you said. "Nothing at all." 
     Then, I was somewhere else, maybe in Wisconsin,in someone's backyard, reading a postcard. It was from you, from Paris. Printed on one side was a drawing of a fountain. I turned the postcard over and you'd written something illegible about children, only you'd spelled children, "chilled wren," which made no kind of sense at all. I called my friend M. about it and straight away, she said, "Classic addict behavior." 
     "But, it was a dream," I said.
     "Still, she said.
     So anyway, you're not going to Paris in real life are you? And if you are, it's not for you to go do heroin right? Because if you did do that, I would think about you and worry about you so much and I would curse that dumb heroin book and the dumbshit moron who wrote it and I'd curse the empty demon that built a nest in your brain to live in and ruin you. And if you never came back, eventually I'd have to let go of you and I don't want to- I don't want to because you are so delicious and these sentences between us form a shape that I just never want to stop making.

     I seem to possess an unreasonable feeling of personal gladness about your existence. It's similar to the way I've felt about kitchen matches, the wooden ones that come in the cardboard box and which open like a drawer. Kitchen matches thrill me because they are more or less a fire-kit inside a coffin. And how many coffins have striking panels on both sides? An argument could be made that all matches are humble spectacles, even the flimsy ones that come in books are books of fire. I have also at times had to restrain myself from tasting paint-chips, but that is beside the point. The point is, that if I even remotely liked the expression, "You pull at my heart strings," that is what I would say to you, but I have never liked the idea of strings attached to anyone's heart, as if the heart were a marionette or worse, a tampon. I like to imagine hearts without strings. I do however think it is lovely that hearts have chambers like bed and breakfasts in England. I've never been to England so I don't really know what I'm talking about, but you do occupy some little part of my heart, some room. You don't live there, but my feeling for you has redecorated a little alcove and I sense an improvement; as if someone came in and made up the bed or swept. In any case, what I'm trying to tell you and what I should have said at the beginning of this letter, is that I spent some time, some hours, making you a wikipedia page. I listed your accomplishments and some of your happy features and I left out any unfortunate details because no matter what anyone says, I still believe there is such a thing as privacy. Since you don't have a name I simply listed you as Beloved. Unfortunately, the people at Wikipedia felt you weren't famous enough to merit a Wikipedia page, so they took the entry down. I received a confusing e-mail from them, which I answered and which was returned undeliverable in which, I tried to clarify that I was not in any way writing about Toni Morrison's excellent novel which coincidentally shares your name -Beloved, that I was indeed aware that there already were pages for both Toni Morrison and her book, nor was I trying to make light of the information super-highway or abuse wikis or pedias of any kind. I tried to explain that I just wanted you to be googleable so that you would come up, as you should come up, as a flower or vine, as an elevator, a ladder, stairs, a morning, a bird, a subject...

     Considering the word "spell" and how it means putting the right letters in the right order and also means putting ideas in a particular order which can be comprehended by another party as in, "Let me spell it out for you."
      Alternatively, one could have a spell, which is either a flexible segment of time- "Let us sit for a spell." or something like a condition which overtakes a person, also for a flexible segment of time-"She had another headache spell."
      It is also possible to be put in a spell by a specific thing or experience- either in nature or art thereby rendering a person " a spell-recipient," a condition in which one is captivated or enchanted beyond everyday experience.
    There are also of course spells in the realm of the occult; the utterance of some words, which perhaps rhyme or are musical in some other distinctive way that make them magical and call out unseen forces as intercessors for the purpose of causing another to experience, feel, or do something that is the will of the spell-caster.
      I think that whenever one is inside one of these meanings the other meanings are there too, but in a subtle way, a little like backup singers. When one of my kids asks me how to spell "phenomenal" they are asking for the correct order of letters, but there is also, inside that, the desire for the whole idea of of the word to be felt and the desire to communicate it to another in a meaningful way. The urge to have the right order of letters is also the desire to have whatever magic or power contained in the word, live up to its full potential; the odds of which are improved if the letters are in the right order, perhaps this is something like the fung shui of words. I think that is why an intentional new spelling of a word, if effective, can add meaning to a word or call attention to the fact that a word is a word and not simply automatic or invisible. Abbreviations and phonetic spellings can do this too. Sometimes intentionally spelling a word in a non-conventional way can be a way to claim ownership of that word and to reveal that you own it, to expose the plasticity of language, to play with the materials of language, and also as a way to attach one word to another word to expose or attach more layers of meaning.
   If I spell the word daughter, dawter in a piece about oceans, dawter becomes connected with water beyond the rhyme. A daughter is a daughter and is also water when a daughter is a dawter. Similarly, if I write my son a letter and begin with, "Dear Sun," I communicate to him that he is bigger to me than "son." 
     Speaking of letters, I have always loved that the kind of letters that are sent in the mail are called such because they are made from the letters of the alphabet. And I love how pieces of paper can be called sheets or leaves. I do not like the word email very much, so usually I say letters when I refer to emails, even though a great majority of the emails I both write and receive are not really letters in the way that letters are traditionally thought of, but more like notes. 
     And now I am thinking of music and how notes comprise music and also have the names of letters and how one can hit a wrong note, which in a way is a misspelling and doing this intentionally can do precisely what I was getting at before, only with music instead. Strange how one cannot send a chord which could be something between a note and a letter, but one can strike a chord. I like how people say, "drop me a line". It took me years and years to realize that that expression originated from fishing and did not mean to drop a sentence vertically from a high-up place like clouds do with rain."

Love Letter #4 to No One in Particular
So I was thinking today about whether I would rather conduct or be conducted- not in an electrical way like with copper, but in an orchestral way, like with those batons. Come to think of it, the electrical and the musical do have quite a bit to do with one another- though I'm not sure about train conductors... Either way, my gut feeling, is that I'd rather be conducted than conduct, but only if you were a good conductor, and by good I don't necessarily mean musically proficient. Instead, I mean that you would exercise a great deal of joy and fanfare in your conduction of me. I'd want you to bob your head significantly and wave your arms wildly. I'd want you to sway in a mesmerizing way as well, a little like a flamingo on a day with a breeze. Wow, as a side note, I just realized I've never used the word conduction before. I think it sounds very serious. In any case, if you did conduct me in such a way, I believe I would like it. I think there are probably some youtube videos you could watch in advance to increase your gestural repertoire- that is, if you really had within you the intention to go for this thing I'm suggesting full-throttle. I'm sorry to say this, but I just don't know if you're brave enough to really commit to something so daring and so, come to think of it, perhaps it would make more sense if I were the one to conduct. This is my idea after all. As a child, I pretended to be a conductor quite often, employing pencils from my desk drawer or twigs I found in the forest preserve across the street from the house I grew up in, as batons. I think what was so appealing about doing this was that it was, more or less, a sanctioned way of participating in classical music without having to be a ballerina or having to put in the time and effort required to learn to play an actual musical instrument. I could just put Beethoven's 5th or 9th on the record player or hear it in my head and conduct away. I felt a little suspicious back then about whether actual conductors really knew that much about music or if, like me, they only were pretending to know, only they were pretending better and they had those nice tuxedos and authentic batons to pull it off. I thought at any point they could have, if they'd wanted to, just turned around, faced the audience and yelled out "Suckers!" I'm really sorry to be doubting your ability in a similar way, as I know you have the capacity for great feeling. Perhaps it is me unwilling to take a risk, the risk of being willing to let you conduct me in whatever way you choose to or are inspired to do. It is a little humbling to see that my issues with control and trust are so very far-reaching. And what would I do while you were conducting? How does one behave as they are in the act of being conducted? Would I automatically know what to do? Somehow I doubt air viola or air tuba would be the way to go with this. Maybe I could somehow just embody a whole orchestra inside me and believe that you had all the training necessary to bring something out of me that had never been brought out before,something strange perhaps and a little beautiful- like something presented in one of those TED talks, only more private and sillier. I've decided I'm going to just let you do it and see what happens. I'm going to follow your lead Conductor. I'm capitalizing Conductor on purpose to show you my respectful regard. I'm going to look up at you and follow all your cues. And during it-our symphony or experiment or conversation or whatever it could possibly be called by you or I or anyone; everyone else will see only the back of you. Only I will have the lucky full view of you in all your electric, sweet, and risky glory.

So I tried to call you today and you weren't there, but I got the voice of you instructing me to do the usual, so I did. I didn't leave my number because you have my number. Mostly I asked you about whether you thought the music of head-rubbing was interesting music, because one's ears are so close to the fingers moving upon one's head that it sounds a little sea-shellish. I asked too if you thought it was appropriate to call that music or if you would just call it noise? I said something about music being in the eye of the beholder, but then I corrected myself and said ear of the beholder. Then I laughed a little. I said something about Susan Sontag too and how I'd read this piece of hers about the differences between art and nature and how she said something about how no one describes a sunset as interesting and so I asked you if you'd ever seen an interesting sunset? I have seen some, but only after reading that thing by Susan Sontag. Then I asked you if you thought there were any positive aspects to shyness because I couldn't think of one. Then I said in this very serious voice, "Shyness is the enemy of the human." Then I asked if you could think of any positive things at all about shyness. I said if you could, to please e-mail the things to me because I'd been beating myself up a little for my own shyness problems. Then I practiced eye-contact with an invisible you, the kind of eye-contact where you are not boring a hole into the person's eyes, but more of a pleasant gazing kind and I completely forgot I was on the phone. Then the recording came on and asked me if I was satisfied with my message. I didn't know if I was or not. There wasn't an in-between choice. There was however an option to listen to the whole thing, so I chose that just to buy some time. In the end I chose to re-record, and started telling you about the eye-contact thing, but truthfully that sounded insane. Then I wondered exactly how much a telephone is really like an ear and if it were possible to convey the head-rub sound through the phone. I held my phone to my head and then realized it wouldn't work if it wasn't your head and it wouldn't work anyway. I got a little confused about what was possible in the whole regard of hearing. I thought then that there should be phones that looked like ears and felt like ears so one could talk on an ear. The possibilities of shapes and colors were stunning to me at that moment. Then I tried to say something slightly erotic, but realized there wasn't really a lead-in after the ears so it could have been slightly jarring. So, I just chose to re-record again and that is the message you finally got, the one that said, "Hi, it's me. Call me back." But it occurred to me later, because you hadn't called me back yet, that maybe you did hear the other two messages. Maybe you even heard them as I was leaving them? Maybe I pressed the wrong buttons? Come to think of it, there may have been three messages. I decided then though, that if you did hear them you listened to them in this very compassionate way and with the deep enjoyment of someone who loves me in return and appreciates all I comprise.

I bought you these chestnuts from the Japanese grocery store. As you can see on the package, they are organic and they have been roasted. Do you like the package? I think the Japanese writing on it looks a little graffiti-ish and I like the cartoon chestnut guy. He looks fairly happy in his cannibalistic chestnut life. I know it is really not chestnut season, being July and all, but what can you do? Okay, so to confess, one of the reasons I bought these for you is because of the word "chestnuts," because see, inside human chests are hearts. And sometimes inside the shell of a nut, the edible part is called the meat, and so the chestnut is both a chest and a heart. I'm probably taking all this too far and now I see that the chestnut resembles more of a wooden chest of drawers than a human chest, but I wanted you to understand my initial thinking about it and what I had in mind because I bought a bag for myself too and I have to tell you that these chestnuts from Japan are really not very nice tasting at all, so I am really just giving you an idea more than anything else, which is probably not good enough. Is anything good enough though, in love and what is enough anyway? Enough is hard to pin down. I'm thinking now of that Janis Joplin song, the one about taking a little piece of her heart. She sounds a little sarcastic and angry in her offering of the pieces. It almost sounds like with every verse, she is dying more and more and might even need a heart transplant if she keeps telling whomever she's singing to to take more and more. The pieces I'm offering though come from a different place. Now that you've read this though, you can probably throw the chestnuts out. They were just a visual aid that you could hold while you read this and probably not necessary.