Weather Patterns.

Really, it wasn’t anybody’s fault. People were being blamed for it, because blaming people felt better than having no one to blame at all, but, if you had to blame anyone or any one thing, it should have been the location; but even then it’s hard to place blame. How can you pinpoint a phenomenon?

Her mother placed both parts equal blame. She blamed her daughter for marrying a fulminologist and she blamed her son-in-law for moving her daughter to Florida.

The Son-in-law also blamed the daughter, his wife, for being so God damned stubborn, but he also blamed himself for trying to convince her that it could wait until morning, that they could use cell phones as alarms, that no one needed to get out of bed right this minute to run downstairs to trip the breaker. 

Right before she fell she blamed her husband wholly, though, she might have reconsidered and blamed herself for trying to prove a point, but, after her neck broke, there wasn't any going back on that kind of decision making. 

Her father blamed the carpet company for not pulling the carpet tight enough so that the fall might have been avoided. 

The carpet guy blamed his drug dealer for running out of the regular stuff he smoked and so he had to pay extra for the stonger stuff that made him lose his concentration. 

What’s really amazing about all of this is that during the course of the blaming no one thought to blame the storm that brought the lightning that knocked out the power that angered the wife that stirred the argument between her and the husband that compelled her to get out of bed and march down the stairs and fall to her death because after all -- who can predict a phenomenon?

Hard Skin

The first one she collected came to her; fell into her lap after the man sitting next to her on the subway clipped it off with no regard for where it would land or how far it would go. She looked down at its simple complexity, at its crescent moon shape, at the specks of dirt and dust on its underside and thought to herself: This is the piece of a person. Not wanting to attract attention, she placed her hand over the fingernail that had taken residence in the dip of her dress and waited until the man rose from his seat and shuffled out the double doors. When it was clear she placed the fingernail in her purse where it would remain until she arrived home, where she would place it in a jar and label it with the day's date. This curiosity became an obsession, and after only five months, her apartment was crammed full of jars full of fingernails.

It was on a Friday in November when she learned about the meetings, her co-worker, two cubicles over, a fellow collector, saw her picking a hangnail off the carpet with a pair of tweezers and decided to invite her. "I want to show you something," he said, gesturing for her to follow him to his workspace. He opened a desk drawer, and inside were dozens of eyelashes, pressed between thin sheets of glass, as if he were preparing to view them under a microscope. "They're only ones people have blown away and made wishes on," he said, beaming with pride. "How can you tell?" she asked. He made a face at her that suggested confusion. "It's a very delicate process," he said. "You know that." She didn't, but she nodded regardless and said, "Oh, yes, of course."

At the collector's meetings that met once a month, people pulled out delicate containers and viewing cases, each with only single things inside of them. Her co-worker passed around an eyelash labeled "despair," and explained to everyone that the person who blew on it had wished that their loved one would wake up from a coma. People murmured in approval of his exposition. One man passed around a jar that was empty, but, when she held it it felt like it was full of angry bees. It was labeled "faggot," and he explained to everyone that he collected hateful slurs, and that this one was caught at a baseball game with his gay son.

Several other jars and containers were passed around, and, when it came for her, she pulled out her largest jar of fingernails which was simply labeled "fingernails" and attempted to hand it to the woman sitting next to her. But she didn't move. No one said anything. When she asked if she should pass it around the other way, again no one spoke until the silence became unbearable and someone piped up and said, "No, I think we get the idea." The woman to her right pulled out an empty jar and unscrewed the lid, held it near her face for several seconds, scooping it through the air like she was trying to catch a firefly, before placing the jar in her lap and sealing the lid shut. She taped a label onto it, scribbled the word "embarassment" down and began passing it around the room.

She, the woman with the fingernails, moved to leave. As she made her way out, someone bobbed the jar up and down in their hand. Before the door closed behind her she heard them say to the person sitting next to them: "This is just awful. I'd hate to be whoever this came from."

The Subjectivity of Taste

She was smiling in front of a structure that looked like it was stacked with hard candy, lime greens and lemon yellows, strawberry reds and orange melons, all laid out with concise precision on top of one another, and the bright colors illicited something in him, made his mouth water, made him thirsty for something, though he couldn't tell what, if it was the architecture or the girl, who stood there with her toes pointed inward laughing about something, some secret that he desperately wanted to know, but couldn't, but never would, because it was only a picture, because he didn't really know her, because he never really knew her at all.

To Apprehend Eventuality:

Barreled over myself, in an attempt to stay warm, I am

Complimented on my glasses by a young woman and 

I ask myself:

Who is Robert Kunzig?

Who has had too much to drink tonight?

We are exactly what happens by accident, you know. I can’t

Catch you, or let you know anything about anything at all.

One day we will abandon our children to write poetry.

They will have more character without a mother.

Adolescence is only sociology, and childhood is overrated.

You wouldn’t have been a good role model, anyway.

You are not trying to look stylish, you think. You are 

Just trying to see.

Who’s writing this garbage anyway? Whose idea was it

To have a shift in perspective in the middle of a stanza?

I can’t believe I’m responsible for this. He’s a very sad young man.

It’s unhealthy to live the way he does. I’m alone in all of this, I say

In the dark.

It’s sad, you think.

The Argument

When you ended things I needed to rationalize things. I looked up and tried to reconcile. I needed things to make sense, and so I craned my neck towards the sky. The sky was blue. This was my anchor. This was my constant. I am alone now. And the sky is blue. It's over, and the sky is blue. This is the end and the sky is blue.

But this cannot be the end. Thus, the sky cannot be blue.

Because the sky changes colors it is not a single shade so much as it is an occurrence.

Because to the south of me exists molten rock and eventually the surface of the continent of Asia, and because to the east and west of me are horizon, the sky isn't so much a color as it is a direction, and just like Heisenberg says: precise inequalities that constrain certain pairs of physical properties, such as measuring the present position while determining future momentum; both cannot be simultaneously done to arbitrarily high precision. How can the sky be blue if it is also above me?

It is subjective. To a colorblind person the sky is actually a sea-foam green, or a sad, dull gray.

The sky is no more blue than it is black at night, a sheet punctured by the stars, a thin sheen that reminds us that in the grand scheme of things, nothing will remember who we are.

The sky is not blue because colors are not inherently dangerous, and the sky is not a color but a womb, a place where tornadoes and lighting are born, there, in that cold apple skin of atmosphere.

The sky has been a god, in the past, an ambiguous deity, and so, according to the Christian doctrine, the sky is not a color so much as it is an abomination.

The sky is not blue but instead the sky is chromatics, physics, electromagnetic radiation; more than anything the sky is really just light, which is not color but energy.

The color blue is really just a measurement of wavelengths and therefore not the sky but a series of numbers. 470, 638, 2.13, 2.64, 254. I could associate these numbers with the number of times I've thought about you since I began to de-rationalize the existence of the sky as a set function of everyone's everyday everything. Why should they get the sky if I get nothing?

The sky is only a unit of infinitesimal particles, not a color but a collection of layers, an atmosphere.

The sky, as far as I'm concerned, is not blue, but an opinion.

The sky is upside down. Cognitive perception flips the images we see right side up, and so if the sky is really inverted than we are underwater, at the bottom of the ocean, and so who can say what color the sky really is, if none of us have been there? And, if this is the case, and we are really underneath the surface, then, just I suspected, I can't breathe, and I am drowning. I am drowning. We all are.

Hello lovely, hello lovely, hello, was how he referred to them, all of the women, which were many, because he was consistently confused and madly in love with every woman in the world, always. He often felt like Irwin Shaw and Woody Allen only in the absence of eloquence or good humor, and though he was clever, he was not intelligent, and it was easy for women to see through his intentions, or at least what they thought were his intentions, because his love for them was genuine, just not focal.

My first day as a substitute I went to the wrong school. I remember my hands slipping off of my steering wheel as I turned into the parking lot next to the tall brick building. I slunk in through the side door because I was late to my first class, scouring the empty halls for the classroom that matched the numbers on the napkin I had used to write down my instructions. I remember my footsteps sounding like gunshots with all of the bodies in the classrooms, nothing to absorb the sound of my heel bouncing off the tile floor. Just black, metal lockers. When I finally found the room I thought I was looking for I walked through and loudly announced that I was sorry I was late, and found myself in the middle of a woodshop class. An older gentlemen, a Ghallager look alike at the front of the room, pulled his safety goggles off and balanced them atop his bald head. Can I help you? he asked. And I felt my phone buzzing in my pocket — in contrast with the spinning saw — and knew it was the administration of P.S. 111 wondering where I was.

I missed first period and made in time for the last half of second. In the desk I found the regular teachers instructions. My students are to take a test today. No talking. If they do, don’t hesitate to take the test away. I have preemptively written John Henderson of my fifth period class a referral for disrespect. He will earn it without fail. Just a forewarning. When the third period class filed in I handed them the tests and wrote the answers to the test on the chalkboard. I said, No talking, and watched. The class suspiciously copied down what I had written, even though most of my answers were wrong, and some of the smarter kids knew that, but it didn’t stop me from collecting their sheets and filing them into the teacher’s manila folder.

When the last test was handed in I opened my briefcase and pulled out a VHS of the 1930′s “King Kong” and then told everyone to take notes. One of the kids in the back said, smartly, Shouldn’t you be teaching us something? I wrote him a referral and laid it on his desk. I didn’t get this job to teach, I said. I’m just here to watch movies. I took a seat behind the teacher’s desk and did just that. I watched.