I wrote an open letter about the harmonica player that sat on the cement wall outside of the UGLi throughout my four years at the University of Michigan. A recent facebook group brought to my attention that he is actually a professor at the U of M, and is not, as I had assumed, homeless. His name is Tom Goss and he’s been playing for nearly 20 years. Chances are that if you took a stroll through the Diag in Ann Arbor you would hear him today. Here’s a Michigan Daily article on him.
Author: Chris
Attorney & Amateur Golfer
Hay
Hay piled high in the fields flowing by the car window, its stalks golden and brown – or are they staffs – bent by the summer wind until the sun shimmers off the flat spot. Looking through the back window wondering what it would be like to swim in the fields, or just to run free. Anything to escape the back seat of a six hour car ride.
Walking Through Walls
Supposedly, if no one is paying attention and I’m passed out and traveling very fast I can pass through walls. Why? Because quantum mechanics says that electrons behave like waves when we’re not looking and we all know that waves can travel through walls. For more info, check out quantum mechanics.
Law School
Kinda like reading a four drafts of a bad novel with no descriptive words, adjectives, or adverbs. Except, then you have to take the relevant facts and divide them amongst the four drafts so that only with all four in front of you do you get a decent idea of what the storyline is. Oh, and each draft has a different narrator, too.
Unknown Nostalgia
Can our memories outpace us? Don’t they already? Isn’t an expectation an unfulfilled memory? A shell waiting to be filled? The future is like reverse memory loss. It’s indefinite as it fades and changes and sometimes disappears altogether. The difference? There’s potential in unknown nostalgia.
When do we become content?
I have this idea of an old man stopping by a coffee shop window and looking in on youth on the inside. He’s cold and shivering because his coat is too thin and his blood doesn’t run fast enough. He’s slowing down, but won’t go inside to warm his chill. Instead, he tolerates the cold.
There is a beautiful girl with smooth skin on the inside. She whispers, “Hello, Sir.”
They never meet. He smiles back, maybe.
There’s youth and age. There’s warmth and cold. There’s a clear window pane that divides the two. But, what is between them other than years?
When did he become content? When does she stop wanting?
Degenerate
We let our guard down and look around wide-eyed and wondering what’s going to get us in the degenerate darkness that we find ourselves stumbling around in. It’s an unfamiliar feeling. Different and distant from what we’ve experienced before. The minutes race by as we look at and past each other and wonder why we ended up where we did.
—
Sit down. Silence. Listen to what the speaker has to say. Those were the rules when I went to church. You could say those were my intentions, as well, for five minutes of the sermon. But inevitably, my thoughts degenerated to musings less pure than the worship of His Holiness. As my pencil drew spirals on the timeline, I closed my eyes and tried to think of the color black. Memory Flashes. Memory frozen. Memory frames.
—
“I want to degenerate you,” he said.
“What does that even mean?” she said.
“Ha.”
“Shut up. You’re being stupid.”
—
Degenerate. Corrupt. Impure. Debased. Degraded. Vitiated.
I’ve never known anything to be absolutely free of these.
Pure. I guess it’s always associated with white. With this innocent glow that knows nothing, but isn’t it easier to conceal and overlook in darkness? I would rather hide in a black room than a white one. In a dark one, not a light one. That’s where I would go. What I would think if I wanted to get away.
—
This man had two hearts and one big smile. At parties his friends would often joke with him about the extra heart. They told him he was a nice guy. That he could love more. That he could run faster than Secretariat. He smiled at these prods, which he had endured for a decade now, and always responded by saying he was waiting to meet the right woman. Then he’d give her his heart. Or both his hearts. He hadn’t really figured out how this joke worked, but he chuckled and everyone around him laughed because they were drunk and the barrier to laughter had long since degenerated.