Late July, I was walking up the gravel driveway in the middle of the day, ten years old. The driveway followed along a ridge that lined a steep descent into a narrow valley; Christmas trees planted perpendicular to the incline, rows as far down the hill as the tractor could go without tipping. On the other side, across the tiny creek, an opposing hill rose not as steep, but higher, also marked with Christmas trees planted with the grade of the incline; chest high Frasier Firs and six foot Pines. The sky was blue and cloudless, hot and humid. Grasshoppers jumped out the way with each step and there was a perpetual call of insects buzzing and clicking. I looked out from ridge, the view, taking a break from the climb. I thought: "This is beautiful," or at least, I thought, "Folks older than me would probably consider this 'beautiful', but I don't know that word means. Maybe one day I will." I miss the summers on the farm.

The cat basks in the window but is mostly afraid to come out and explore. I bask in the shadows of the surrounding plants, also afraid of what might eat me. We learn from experience, and she was found in an alley. I was found in a family in Wisconsin.

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The blue sky is perfectly clear but it has been windy. Maybe it comes in off the lake or maybe it just makes itself up. In the distance trees bend with unseen forces and I'm forced to figure they're the same forces I feel.

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A phone rings from the inside. As an outdoor patio, I feel it is my responsibility to make it as inviting as possible. Amy walks into the apartment and greets the cat. I hear of all of this through the open window.

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I've been losing my hair lately, or always. The good news is that my older brother is affected by the same spirit, and can see how it will manifest. Then again, maybe my pace of loss will accelerate and lap his. This way I'll be able to claim the loss as a pioneer.

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There are buildings, mostly square, that make the view into a kind of artificial hillside. The patio is a valley, as most of the buildings in the near distance are taller. There are shorter ones, houses just below the view, but can only be seen while standing up.

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I don't know the names of these plants: ficus, palm root, and frilly thing. We've planted tomato and Cale, a Timoteo plant starting to bloom. Most of the plants we've salvaged and assembled from the edges of the patio, the culmination resulting in a faintly glowing cluster of half-dead cast-offs. But they seem happy together now that they're finally getting some light and water, that someone has noticed.

"Your upstairs neighbor is moving back to Indiana", John the property manager said while helping me get rid of the old mattress. The first thing I thought was video games and instant messaging, the two constant sounds we hear coming from the floor above, starting sometime in the evening and lasting until midnight. At eight he wakes up to an alarm clock set not quite on a talk radio station so that we hear blaring words too staticky to make out. He quickly gets up to shut it off. He has an orange cat that looks down from the window above the patio.

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Amy occasionally expresses disdain for his audible hobbies, and I feel, as someone who enjoys video games, that I could relate to him, the sounds of foot steps and a scampering cat adding to the confusion of rumbles and machine gun fire. When Monique had come to visit, she got the floors mixed up on her way down from the roof, and tried to enter his apartment, finding it locked. She knocked and was surprised to see him open the door, a beard and hairy chest. Amy saw him drop his sandwich on his way down the stairs.

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Recently it seems like he's had friends over, maybe a woman. There was a loud thumping sound in the middle of the night, Amy claims, but I didn't wake up to hear it. Going back to Indiana, huh? I might say were I to meet him and be familiar enough to ask meaningfully about his future. I think of him as being lonely but I don't have any idea. I wonder if he hears Amy I calling the cat, or arguing. I wonder if our moving in had any impact on his decision to leave, the before and after contrast a reminder of stagnation. John is moving into his place at the beginning of June. Carolyn might move into John's old place. We're staying here for the time being.

Monday, almost. Sitting and listening to the radio, a program interviewing "Bobby Fisher", the boy chess champion who became a Tai Chi champion. He wrote a book on learning, the creative process as interchangeable between mediums and fields, applying the same self-knowledge in whatever one does. Now it's a pledge drive though. One more week of classes and then a three week break. What I'm gong to do for work is unclear. Always a problem, but always learning. Reading is most important, according to Bobby Fisher. Feeling disconnected from the methods of success and leaving those methods behind as furniture. A long term learning process or reaching out from what you know, a self knowledge as important as anything. And in the study of eastern philosophy one finds the study of eastern philosophy, and are not particularly prone to sharing it. Bits of a day and thoughts about what happened previously, the study of meditation, and aching backs and books of knowledge doesn't make for smart. Chicago carbon climate exchange. These kinds of entries and to focus on the process, to learn the mechanics without a second thought, and to slow it down. When washing the car, the same skills transfer to circular motions. A wealthy old man. Pledge drive. Not a very large bag, but to pick your head up from a certain kind of meditation, one unique to one's self. A page requirement, or here's what I do, practice being a kind of mother. One o'clock. Animal cruelty. And first the news, near the top of the hour. Perhaps it doesn't "do" any good, but that's not the point, a recognition of one's own skills and the careerist path once removed, how to "put together" a life instead of living the one most readily available. Having a neighbor over for dinner. Resisting temptations you've engaged in before. Restrict learning to what you don't know. The basic membership level, the joy of a given. A premium subscription.

Amy and I bought a new mattress after much debate. The old one sagged dramatically in the middle, bending our bodies in unnatural ways. The new one is flat or "firm", and with the mattress pad it's lovely, a good feeling after waking up sitting up and opening the window. But today after getting out of bed my upper back hurt, between the shoulder blades. I stretched and complained to Amy. She showed me some exercises she had learned from a tall ex-boyfriend, but to no effect. I think about how I slept: maybe it was the angle of the pillow bending my neck and my back, or maybe its the way we sleep together, contorting to match one another even in our unconscious movements. Tonight I'll be mindful of spreading out comfortably, evenly, and keep to my side of the bed.

Getting in the way of one's immediate sense through the elongation of personal style is a problem, something I worry about getting caught up in the echo of memory rather than the actual what is around us now pick you head up and speak look your neighbor directly in the eye and open your jacket offer them a stick of gum get out the right amount of change at the bus stop prepare your day at work get busy fade out come back walk down the street recognize those who commonly ask for change think to yourself that Oakland is a tough town maybe very unlike other places I have lived the easier versions of white liberal cities or fragile utopias like New York or San Francisco where a couple bad days of product supply failures can create major sustainability problems then again who knows people adapt like the rose is a rose is a rose complex take a nap get off work early contemplate never coming back what you would say to your boss if you could the other options we might have the trace of a life through the moods of the weeks and the push against what is working or will not and coming to an awareness and changing like the spehx wasp moving a grub close to the nest but first checking on its young and when it goes back outside to grab the food the scientists have moved it and so it moves the grub back into place by the entrance and goes back inside to check on its babies and then out and the scientists have moved it etc. the man said this is creative process recognizing patterns but who knows I do my best school is coming to a close thankfully only two more weeks and instead of a grand finale its more like a deflating hot air balloon the view was great but how am I going to get to my car from here and where am I anyway?

There is a connection between when I started to write poetry, or at least had come to an awareness that I could wholeheartedly apply myself to writing, and my father's illness. How this connection can be made explicit is difficult to summarize. There were times during my sophomore year of college, before the diagnoses, where he would call to chat at five in the morning, or suddenly appear at my dorm room (a two hour drive into Iowa from Wisconsin) on a Tuesday afternoon with the full expectation of going out to lunch. Later, watching him fold laundry, each item, be it a t-shirt or a pair of socks would be placed into a separate pile, the last pile seemingly forgotten about so that the laundry room was completely covered in a single layer of neatly folded clothes. "That's a good way of explaining it," my mother told me during dinner.

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I signed up for a poetry writing class during the second block of my senior year. At first I was stunned by the idea that you could write whatever you wanted to write. I followed some step by step exercises: a line about a person's hands, what they were doing with their hands, a metaphor involving a place, a question to ask this person and the person's answer. I thought of my friend Aric and our later high school summers spent together in the graveyard, sitting across from each other in a freshly landscaped gully passing a dirty metal pipe and making jokes. The last line of the poem read, "Because I need that as much as you, could I get that back?"

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After the first time I ever wrote a poem, unprompted, from start to finish, I had the most lucid dream I had ever had. It was large and perverse, moving through different places, brick walkways and houses; I saw everyone I ever knew and it went on and on. Eventually I ended up on a darkened suburban street, dark houses and a fear to go inside. I found a friend, Tony, and asked him to let me out of the dream. I grabbed him and shook him, and there I woke myself up. I got up, turned on the light and called Amy. She humored my excitement and listened. The next day I met with Liz, my poetry teacher, and told her that I wanted to be a writer, firmly convinced that the dream was a newly discovered sense exercising itself while I slept. Three years later I took some morphine pills and felt amazingly light, like I was gliding across the ground. A couple weeks after that I dreamt of floating through the rafters of a white adobe dome.