hiroki epitome of incomprehensibility [A guy from my poetry class wHo wrote lIke thiS] [so that there WeRe two messages Inside whaT he was tryING to say] ...except better than that. The words as a whole had one message, the letters that were capitalized another. The brackets were to mark the boundaries of the words formed by the capital letters. When asked to read his poetry out loud, he brought a distortion mic to class. I'm not sure if that's what you call it. In any case it was connected to a delay pedal (again, terminology?) so that everything came out echoey and garbled. Naturally I loved that. He seemed to want to be badass avant-garde, like heavy-metal Krzysztof Penderecki (only his first name was half vowels, so how could he be quite so zyszty?) ...I loved his stuff, yes, but I think he considered my appreciation misaimed. For instance, he probably didn't expect the line "fetal twins 69ing" to elicit a reaction of "aww, that's kind of adorable." Well, it was! ...I had my own pretensions to grandeur too, but those were coated with the added delusion that my poetry was funny. Pretension coated with delusion makes good candy. Hard on the outside with a chewy filling. One day he emailed me, somewhat out of the blue, to send me a link to music. I wrote back enthusiastically, saying it sounded like Antarctica or piles of snow or wind, and how much I loved all of those things. He didn't write back. He wore black gloves and a grey coat and the one assignment he didn't do (that I remember) was to write a Valentine's Day love sonnet. ...The token bisexual virgin of that time didn't know how to write a love sonnet either, and ended up with something about a desk - a desk with romantic, super-sexy initials carved into it! - and the thing ended: How is a raven like a writing desk? They've both been written on. All right, what's next? 141104 ... e_o_i (Damn it. The first part: "A" should not be capitalized. Good habits die hard.) 141104 ... e_o_i ...so the message is HIS WRITING not AHIS WRITING. 230219 ... tender_square i got in the car with him because i didn't have another way home after the gig. all our other bandmates were in the truck that held the gear and the other car in our convoy. he must've driven 30 over the speed limit as we barrelled in his jetta down 14. his indie rock mix was cranked, and he his cell phone never left his hands as he texted to friends the whole ride. i didn't want to be uptight. i asked if he could put the phone down. "oh, don't worry," he said. "i do this all the time." i wanted to tell him to pull over, to leave me and i'd find another way home. the sun was setting and i didn't have a cell phone then. he wouldn't slow down, the car accelerating as his fingers rapidly typed out final messages no one would ever remember. mgmt sang about living fast and dying young in surround sound. i turned my gaze out the window and watched the landscape blur, breathed deeply, and resigned that i would die as the shade of night drew the sparkling sun below the horizon. 230220 what's it to you? who go blather from