after shoe shopping with my brother

1: so, are those shoes still popular now, the checkered vans?

2: the spicollis. man, we started that shit! we saw fast times at ridgemond high, drove to the mall, copped two shoes on a buy 1 get 1 half off sale (which they don't do anymore for classic shoes at vans), rocked them, and now everyone wears them!

1: yeah!

2: everyone's biting us.

1: you know what else we started? the red-white-blue wristbands!

2: yeah! i got them initially because i needed them for when i play tennis, and i was, like, "cool, french colors." and then afterwards, everyone started wearing them too. johnny knoxville, justin timberlake, avril lavigne on rolling stone magazine! now i can't wear them anymore.

1: ridiculous.

2: we run this, man, asian kids run this!

2's girlfriend: can you take me home?



ps:

"you are so young, so before all beginning, and i want to beg you, as much as i can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. do not now seek the answers which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. and the point is, to live everything. live the questions now. perhaps you will them gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

- by ramier rilke, "letters to a young poet."

were scribbled on a letter i received recently, the letter, i think, grew from a patch of earth, like a garden planted fifty years ago and only now sprouting, verbs red as tomatos, commas curled like roots.

got lots to do now... showed to work on wednesday jetlagged and mohawked, and my boss assigns a list of impossible things to do with a smile.

"you want... new skyscraper apartment plans, sections, and area calculations... all by the end of the day?"

"yes."

"wait... all of it???"

"everything."