I believe.

There is something in my bones that tells me when something is or isn't right, and I only get the feeling every so often but when I do it always follows through. I look at someone or something and I know that things are or aren't going to end in my favor, and to be honest it's usually hell getting there one way or the other, but I'm almost always right on the mark.
This semester, however little of it has happened so far, has been strange. I've barely gone in to work, my apartment complex has been up in arms because of a recent tragedy, and friends are grieving and one of them is gone. Last Saturday I went to a birthday party and this Saturday I went to a funeral. Labor day and Richard's birthday are over now and the world will really start back up tomorrow.
I'm not really sure what point I'm trying to make to be honest. I think a lot of times I start off stories like that and end with some kind of moral, but I really don't have one this time. I guess I just need to type because, don't get me wrong, I've dealt with a lot of change over the years, but this time everything happened so fast and it's a little harder to think on my feet, you know?
Through all of this though, there are a few lights at the end of the tunnel, if you will. I can assure you, I'm sprinting towards them. This week has been exhausting and entirely too void of activity.
Now, just for fun, here is a stupid picture I took God knows when with photo booth. Note the classy ass beer can.

If anything has become distinctly apparent to me in the past three weeks, it is this: when I'm old and drinking a glass of whisky with my cereal when I wake up at three in the afternoon, and when I do book signings and other fancy things, I will most definitely have written something about my time in this particular apartment.

Love you,
Loch.

p.s. for the record, I am not dumb. This is for someone specific. You know who you are, and if you don't then you should.

I think she knows

This morning I woke up happy and in a ridiculous amount of pain. My head has never throbbed so thoroughly.
Things are beginning to clear up and I feel like I'm beginning to really, completely settle into my college life, which is great because I'm happier as of late than I can remember being in a while but unfortunate because in 8 days I'll be shipping off to a month in P-town to a different world and a different life and in many cases, a different Loch. It's an easy place to live so I'm kind of looking forward to it, and plenty of new friends I've made in Austin are people who are from Plano as well that I didn't know in high school so it's not as though I'm leaving completely, but some of the people here who are most important to me are suddenly going to be out of reach and I don't really know how that's going to work. I wish I could pack them in my suitcase and bring them with me to stay in my room and be there for me when I come home from a long day behind pizza counter, but frankly that's not how my life works, as desperately as I would like it to, so I'm curious to see if dynamics will change and, if so, how. 
College loch and P-town loch are the same person living in two different worlds.
Writing has been relatively interesting. The past few days have consisted of a lot of editing and expansion. Not really a lot to say about that, but it's going. 

I wish that when I sing love songs, dolphins would jump across my range of vision. My life should be a movie. I obviously did not take that picture.
P.S. I think I finally set up a four-five year plan. I am beyond excited.


I want to spend my life writing words that you will read,
please let me?
love,
loch.

you can only say yes

Oh, hello. I'm sorry I've been gone for so long :(

This weekend was unexpected and will probably show up in what I write in multiple ways. I feel older than I did when I posted last. I found a few writing spots and cried more than I normally do. This weekend was so, so unexpected, but it was good.

What if you had done something differently? When I walk by people, I wonder, would you impact me if I gave you a chance? Because when you first meet people, they never seem important. When you met your best friend, I bet you didn't think wow, you and I are going to be ridiculously close one day and I'm going to march into your house for no reason and eat all your food without you getting mad at me sort of. Relationships can't be predicted. Imagine how many relationships you've passed up, the different lives you've inadvertently avoided by disregarding someone who you deemed unimportant. Why do things happen the way they do? It's such a strange phenomenon, when a bond forms, because there's really such a small chance that it will simply because our default expectation is to be acquaintances. No one goes out looking for a best friend or an enemy or a mentor or a lover, so isn't it strange that they manage to happen? And what if you had done something differently, who would you be now? What if I had done something differently?

I used to have a pretty good idea of who reads this but now it's much more vague, and some people who I didn't expect have told me that they follow it. When people talk to me about this blog it is literally the most flattering thing in the world. I love you so much if you are scanning these words. 

I need so desperately for everything to just stop right now so I can go somewhere alone and write with a pen and a pad of paper instead of typing virtual words. I want solid thoughts that I can scratch out with a pen and see and breathe and smell. I want time.

You are everything inside of me that I wish I could be,

Loch.

Ps. Here is a blackout poem I did in poetry today. I thought it would be a more interesting visual. It's a scan but I wrote out the text underneath in case it's difficult to read. Underneath it is the best picture I could find of the painting I did my ekphrastic poem on, and the poem beneath that. The online picture really doesn't do the painting justice, if you go to UT you should go by the Blanton and see it. It's in the modern art section, and I could stare at it for hours. The Dallas Chaos poem has been edited a little bit, but not as much as it needs to be, and the blackout poem has not been edited at all. The picture of Dallas Chaos II is not mine, the painting itself is done by Peter Dean.

(if you click on the picture, a larger version will show up that is easier to read.)

Berl feels

detatched and fatalistic

his life disintegrates. 

Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana,

and he is a blue ribbon, bull goose freak.

Berl's considered medical opinion is that

it will provide a comprehensible shape to his life.

He's the only one who can tell us that,

but I believe him.

Dallas Chaos II by Peter Dean

Dallas Chaos

It is sunny on a saturday. 

I am splayed out across the backseat 

hot leather on my back,

watching Dallas through the windows.

Sky scrapers, horrific traffic,

a city formed from grit and sweat

that makes the South

out of hospitality and smoke ridden skies.

We are out of the car and onto this knoll,

green and bright, unblocked

from the city, but somehow more still.

Here old women cried for a man they hadn't met,

and Jackie took the news that

shook Pennsylvania Avenue like meteors.

Conspiracies circle these skies like vultures,

and John cannot find peace while his name rests on our lips.

But chaos came from down the road,

the police station where a soul's explosion 

broke masks of flesh and bone and blood

revealing a face as ugly as

dogs like pigs that snarl and spit

masked police with hard blue eyes

and media who care for naught but

cold hard facts and hard evening news.

Ruby eyes pierce a soul that breaks

and the solar system circling his head

protects this man in glittered pants and pinstriped suit

who avenged a life and forgot his own.

We stroll sixth floors and grassy knolls,

museums that miss the blue of his beard.

The Ruby red that flooded skies when Oswald died,

Where has it gone?

please tell me that you're alright.

I'm starting this post before I go get free drinks for some friends at my job, but they're coming to get me soon so I probably won't finish it until after my shift. I wanted to let you guys know that I think the ball might be rolling again, maybe.
Last night I was lying in bed, trying desperately to STOP thinking about why I was so bothered and START thinking of little sheep to count, when suddenly something hit me, and I rolled over and wrote for a good ten minutes, and frankly, it was not at all what I was expecting. I mean, I knew an epiphany would come around one way or another, but I was pretty much channeling the lovechild of Edgar Allen Poe and Shel Silverstein. Fuhreaky. But maybe it'll go somewhere. Poetrys been happening a lot lately? And I hadn't realized until the other night when I was explaining it to someone, and I was like, oh. I haven't written a lot of prose in a while. But I'm taking a poetry class first semester, so maybe this is a good thing?
PS, I move on the 21st. I quit work in ten days. :( but soon I'll be in college! :D

I lied, I'm not finishing this post until right now. Which is the next day, by the way. This girl from work I've bonded with super quickly spent the night at my house last night and we basically laughed hysterically for hours on end. Today I cut allllll of my hair off. And by all I mean over ten inches. The before and after pictures are above. Guess which one is which!
This has been the craziest summer of my life. If I'm doing everything else, I guess I might as well do my hair.
So much love, I'll come back later, I swear. I'm preoccupied. LOVE LOVE LOVE always,
Loch.

P.S. exactly two weeks until I'm officially living the dorm life.