Christmas Trees in July

i did not go to Honest Tom's on thursday. i barely slept the night before, and had a little trouble getting to the office with time to spare.

two years ago Beatrice and I resolved to start a band. it was a practical gesture: Beatrice is generally the dull sort who fancies the attention and wealth of an exotic profession, the likes of which a playboy writer or rock god might satisfy his yearning. Beatrice, however, is a mediocre wordsmith with a weak work ethic, and has barely learned a guitar scale in the two years since he's constructed our first riff (with, of all things, a computer program).

Beatrice has read book on god-forsaken book, has learned the rules of touring and all the studio etiquette, has nuzzled away fun and helpful anecdotes from the world's most successful musicians and rock acts--and is no closer to attaining their status than, um, that guy over there. While my own guitarering comes along slowly, any bar chord I play puts him in a place--he claims that bar chords hurt his fingers so, and subsequently has not bothered with them. my exposition should sharpen to a point, so bear with me.

We decided to title the riff, as if it belonged to a longer song. "Christmas Trees in July" was the christening biproduct of yours truly, and absolutely no progress has been made on it since. A driving, overdriven computer effect (I've never tried to learn this piece on a real guitar), a curious name, and a trippy concept is all that's left of our abandoned, anticipatory project.

"The things we want are what's tearing us apart."

Beatrice has become a source of constant irritation, much like a tick bite I've been scratching at for the last two weeks, except that you can flush a tick away and in time the poisons dissipate. Beatrice stays, sucking similarly imperceptible; and then you realize he's a parasite, disguised as a boy. It takes a surgery to rid one of a tapeworm, and those grow to immense sizes when left unchecked. Beatrice stands about five-eleven.

But I'm not here, entirely, to wail on my roommate's shortcomings. No, I had the revelation two nights ago as I lay next to Lovely, on what may be our final sleep together for at least some time. We've had problems the last year, but more specifically, in the latest months, with the needs, wants, and expectations we nurse as two individuals in a young and vigorous relationship. It's finally clear, as we shake for fear of the words that balance on the broad of our dampened lips, that our paths are increasingly divergent ones, that our singing is off key--the harmony not forgotten, but rather, impossible to recapture.

I've swallowed a Skittle whole.

"The things we want are what's tearing us apart." Lovely wants to live together. I did, too, before I thought about it. And, once I did, I decided I wanted to live on my own first. She would have been fine with this, but I resigned the lease here with Karfilov and Beatrice regardless. I don't have the time, right now, to get away from this life and start the next, let alone the exclusive one we'd share, no matter how much I Love her. And please, don't think any less of me. I Love this woman. I'm not ready to trade old circumstances for familiar ones, however, without trying on a few of my own first. Call it selfish, if that's the way you see it. There's more to this story, however, and you cannot possibly be in any high place to judge.

Lovely...she's impossible to describe. I lack the simple words and sensual grace of my friends Homer and Ovid, the only poets who could justly immortalize this woman.

Christmas Trees In July--the song one day will be about the lives we live in ignorance, the lives we live when we forsake our souls' most basic nourishments. These are miserable lives. If you dream a glamor dream that's out of reach you're keeping a Christmas Tree in July. If love is the reason you linger, and not the passion of the present but the cherished memories of happier times, you're keeping a Christmas Tree in July. They're beautiful to gaze on, these douglas firs and pines, but they're impossible to water, and the gifts that ring the treestand have either been too long gone to remember or are too distant-off to look forward to.