Please review this helpful assessment of your faults & transgressions at your leisure. Smile. Click. Sell.

I'm so very over people who say I'm being 100% with you & then spew spiteful news dressed up as good advice, & a hammer. I prefer hazy distance insults myself. 

Feeling trapped, quivering smile, imagining prison-yard spotlights,  you will reluctantly begin to abide by the wrong-headed rules only to have the very people who created them mock your complicity. 
If you choose to share your lowest & most private moments, with tears burning just behind your eyes too long, I promise to never use any of it as a weapon against you.  I'm not a school principal or a credentialed expert, & I actually realize that.

Venture off the sanctity of the accepted.
When your fatigue & shame war with your needs, as I feel your rapid thready pulse vibrating, I'll not shatter the thin defenses you have left.  I won't try out positive observations with branching subplots. Cheerleader voice will be left at home.  I'll just listen. Hard.

I have them too. We are not pet projects for aspiring social workers.
I won't call you out on telling omissions, aimlessly disjointed guilts, or bright nervous smiles. But I will occasionally express indignation on your behalf.

Mental floodwater's rise over the carefully placed sandbags.
As your head is filled with the rushing echo of your own tight-drawn fear & your hand reaches to lock & hold, my aversion to touching will fade.

Who needs Aristotle, Plato, or Sophocles when we have Touched by an Angel reruns.  But no.
If, while obsessively dissecting yourself, your shallow breath is caressing my lips as you spill imperfections all over , I'll not pretend this will morph from frightening into freeing if only you'd believe.

Because ambiguously fake-European artistes are people too.
Your quick-stepped-up counterculture chaos~ complete with black turtleneck, existential crisis, & razor blades~does seem like a steely gaze(but with barely detectable tremor-flinch) misguided attempt at antagonizing me into showing my concern for you.  So I'll do just that.  And yes, forgive me, I will laugh at your contention that monogamy is authoritarian.  And I will drink all your Badoit.  So there.

Your descent will be accessorized.
And if, on the back of your proof sheet, you wrote Why can't I ever get it right? even though each shot is maddeningly, keenly, delicately right, I'll cry just a little for you, though I've never met you & I never will. Contagious symmetry isn't my version of right. I relish bizarre splendor. 



Blogging CliffsNotes. Since, often, a couple of readers email to tell me that  they don't really know what I am talking about, this was mainly(& in no particular order):

1)Kar(aka High Heeled Boy) received a supposed "reality check" letter from his grandmother. (on the upside, I've almost talked Boss into giving him a job) 

2)A relatively new friend has been feeling limp & exhausted by the deceptions of pretending to be normal & happy. I actually prefer friends who are not cheerfully obliviously homogenized.

3)Working on the project with Boss, all the prettiest smiles in all the best pictures seem to correlate with the backstories of the people masking the most pain & self-reproach.

4)Jack has been trying to mix at least mild optimism with life as a homicide detective(so far, it ain't working).

5)Not Maugham is adjusting to the pragmatic realization that the words workplace & honesty often belong in separate categories. 





 Some of the strangest & most troubling characteristics & emotions ~ not a sequence, not a shape, no magic incantation, but mixed with translucent vulnerability ~ ultimately serve as conduits for inner beauty.