Hi Journal, I thought you looked sad, sad and empty. I use you for so much and, yet, I just don't write in you. But I love you. And I'll try to pay more attention to you rather than using you as an anchor point, okay? Okay.

open on a small, cozy therapists office. Therapist is sitting in a chair across from a small couch where a man in his late twenties/early thirties sits, turning a ball over and over again in his hands]

Therapist: How long have you been suffering from writers block?

Mike: [Turning the ball, watching the therapist] Couple weeks.

T: Is there any recent stress that might be the cause?

M: [Laughs] I'm a writer. I work on a deadline for an angry publicist who calls me twice a week to remind me I owe him something I have to create from thin air. It's not an easy job.

T: [a pause] Do you regret becoming a writer?

M: Do you regret becoming a therapist?
[The two pause, looking at each other. The therapist leans back in his seat, tapping his pen against the arm of the chair]
It's a crime novel. A retired BAU agent takes it upon himself to hunt down his neighbors missing daughter. But, I just started writing about my sister and then I couldn't write anymore. I keep going back to this memory I have...

T: You've never talked about having a sister.

M: Well, she died when I was 13 but this memory happened when I was about, uh, 11. She wanted to be an artist so my mom used to buy her all kinds of art supplies, crayons, markers, paints, big buckets of sidewalk chalk. Every summer she would draw flowers and stuff on the sidewalk of our house and the driveway next door. Usually, no one lived there, the house was too old or something. But, uh, this particular summer some middle aged guy moved in. [clears his throat] At first, he didn't seem to really mind her drawing in the driveway but then one day he...

T: What did he do? [Leaning forward again, his pen tapping stilled]

M: [Spins the ball in his hands for a few seconds] He got mad. He came out screaming, just screaming at my kid sister. And he had this wrench, one of those old cartoony monkey wrenches. And he came at her like... [rears back his arm with the ball like he's holding the wrench and then drops his arm]

T: He went to hit her?

M: [Not listening] It was strange. Even with him screaming, she never looked up and for this one really weird second...I could see the way the sun hit her hair and made it look like she had some kind of halo. And how small she was compared to this guy. How....7 years old she was. And, uh, and I wanted to call out to her or run to her but I couldn't. Instead, I just stood there, watching this forty something guy come at her to brain her. I remember thinking how gruesome and....horrible it was.

T: Is that how she died?

M: No. The guy ended up slipping on some chalk she had laying in the driveway and he fell down. She started to cry and ran to my mom. The guy was gone a few days later. [the two sit in silence again] He's going to save her, the, uh, BAU agent.

N: Some nights, we didn't find his Utopia. Some nights we ended up in a bar called "Shepherds" on the outskirts of the Lower End, sipping cheap vodka while Mess played cards with the 'tender and told stories. I always thought that maybe that was his real Utopia, in the end-running up his tab at Shep's and talking that talk, our bellies burning with the drink, our minds quietly molding in the sewage of insomnia. It was at Shepherds that I met the first of many men Mess would call a prophet. His name was unimportant, as names in that walk of life tend to be. Mess said he was-

M: A useless prophet who drinks too much and speaks too highly of the God who lead him to it. Like poets who write sonnets about the blossoms that eventually lead to rotten fruit.

N: And that was enough. It always was. And, like many of the prophets I met during those years, he was a man too old inside for the skin he wore outside and too blinded by himself to see the way the world really was. The man, the prophet, knew enough not to ask for a game of cards the night I met him. Instead he satisfied himself with a few shots of the same cheap belly rot that filled our cups, selling his soul the same way, for the same price, that we did night after night, sliding crumpled bills across the dirty bar to the silent keep. When he spoke, I tasted copper and the idle chatter he and Mess carried on lulled me into a nothing place of unlistening and only when Mess said something I'd heard him say often enough did I listen.

M: Love is a man made thing-made to make lust look charming.

N: Mess's view on love was strange. He only explained it once while in a fit of drunken infatuation with a girl who danced with flicker flash sneakers on her feet and otherworldly precision in her steps. She-The Goddess of Long Legs-had woed his enebriated heart with her connection to his first love-sound.

M: Love isn't what we make it. It is a chemical experience. A hormone keggar combined with an electromagnetic party in your brain. Throw lust and society's ideals about fidelity and 'the one and only' into the mix. Top it off with a rag fuse lined with dysfunction. And you have the dangerously explosive Molotov cocktail that is 'love'.

N: I assumed, armed with this definition, that Mess believed the man was a fool. But assumption leads to ignorance and blindness the same way that wolves lead to stray sheep.

P: Real love is different than lust.

M: Oh?

P: Real love lives not in the body but in the Feeling Heart. It stirs the poetic mind and irrationalizes the rational. It puts color to the gray and makes fools out of even the least foolish. It begins not with lust but with the feeling of centered wholeness that feels the equivalent of a holy mans prayer.

N: And Mess was quiet for some time, shuffling those cards with that far away look in his eyes, sipping his drink-unphased by its bitter taste. I began to believe that perhaps he had left again, leaving that strange shell of himself, hollowed out by thought, that could drink and play cards and lie with the best of them. The prophet made no acknowledgment that he had even spoke, matching Mess's strange detatchment. And then-

M: Maybe. But every holy man pays hommage to a false idol in someones eyes.

The door, replaced last fall but improperly, creaked open, sending a line of the hall light creeping across the dark bleu carpet, up her desk and into her much too green eyes. She looked up quickly, sheilding her eyes as best she could, and watched the double doors, the gates that kept her hell in her office, as a dark figure peeked in.
"Brookie?" The voice soinded like old jazz music, cheerful in its right, dusty, and rythmic, rolling out of this figure unheeded. The man, standing tall and moving in a laid back, unhurried gate, dashed in and spread his arms wide. "Prince Charming has arrived. Let's do that sexy dramatic thing and trhow everything on the floor and do the dirty on the desk." he said, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively.
"Damien, what?" Brooke lowered her hand and looked disdainfully at his tacky hawaiian shirt and kahki shorts. She loved him dearly but his fashion sense horrible and he didn't know how to hold his tongue.
Damien dropped his arms and looked around, his brown hair falling in his eyes. "Damn baby, you keep dark as a horror movie in here." He brightened and leaned over her desk. "I neve thought you'd try to set the mood in here. Kinky."
Brooke shooed at him. "I've just got a headache. What do you want?"
"Me? You in a thong." Damien crossed the room and felt across teh smooth wooden panneled wall. He found the switch and flipped on the light, the room brightened noticeably but it still held the dim, darkened feel. "No, but seriously," he hed up a manilla envelope and shook it like a child shakes a birthday present. "The Peace Alliance sent you a present!"
Brooke scowled and felt annoyance ripple trhough her head as Damien walked to her, grinning like an idiot.
"Oo, oo! I'll bet it's papers. You know, the ones that call for 'sign here' and the X where you put your name." He shook it one more time for good measure and slammed it on her desk.
Brooke's scowl deepened. "Damien, you know I-"
"That's why I told them you were out of the office." He tapped the envelope quickly andleaned easily against her desk. "This is one of those survey things. You know, sign here and blah blah blah." He sounded amused and Brooke couldn't help but smile when he clapped his hands together. "Ooo! Maybe we'll get self-sealing cookware!"
"Sure Dami. If you really want it." She said as she picked up the envelope. "I'll see you on lunch break."
Damien smiled, not the "I'm and idiot but im a CUTE idiot" smile, but rather the relaxed, tired smile he saved only for her. "sure." He reached out, patter her cheek, and turned to leave.

N: Some nights, we didn't find his Utopia. Some nights we ended up in a bar called "Shepherds" on the outskirts of the Lower End, sipping cheap vodka while Mess played cards with the 'tender and told stories. I always thought that maybe that was his real Utopia, in the end-running up his tab at Shep's and talking that talk, our bellies burning with the drink, our minds quietly molding in the sewage of insomnia. It was at Shepherds that I met the first of many men Mess would call a prophet. His name was unimportant, as names in that walk of life tend to be. Mess said he was-

M: A useless prophet who drinks too much and speaks too highly of the God who lead him to the drink like poets who write sonnets about the blossoms that eventually lead to rotten fruit.

N: And that was enough. It always was. And, like many of the prophets I met during those years, he was a man too old inside for the skin he wore outside and too blinded by himself to see the way the world really was. The man, the prophet, knew enough not to ask for a game of cards the night I met him. Instead he satisfied himself with a few shots of the same cheap belly rot that filled our cups, selling his soul the same way, for the same price, that we did night after night, sliding crumpled bills across the dirty bar to the silent keep. When he spoke, I tasted copper and the idle chatter he and Mess carried on lulled me into a nothing place of unlistening and only when Mess grabbed my arm and repeated himself did I listen.

M: Says he's in love.

N: Mess's view on love was strange. He only explained it once while in a fit of drunken infatuation with a girl who danced with flicker flash sneakers on her feet.

M: Love isn't what we make it. It is a chemical experience. A hormone keggar combined with an electromagnetic party in your brain. Throw lust and society's ideals about fidelity and 'the one and only' into the mix. Top it off with a rag fuse lined with dysfunction. And you have the dangerously explosive Molotov cocktail that is 'love'.

N: I assumed, armed with this definition, that Mess believed the man was a fool.