my summer with hot jesus

Check on your friends who can’t finish what they’ve started.

Not me though. Aren’t you proud?

Let’s get into it:

[surface tension]

She dated a guy whose best friend looked like hot jesus,
but his name was boring and he couldn’t even save himself.
We spent the summer finding excuses to show shoulders and touch thighs,
convinced we’d never burn skin with anybody else.

They jumped in.

I took off my shoes to feel the crunch of grass beneath my weight,
but it was somehow much harder than the blades were back home.
And I never could bring myself to touch bottom,
The water felt unfamiliar and was always a little too warm.

I held on.

My hands made friends with the wharf through waves of laughter,
my fingers molded to the fibers and the grains.
Hot jesus, his friend, and mine dropped below the surface.
As if, somehow, disappearing was a game.

No one tells you how
to be the only head above water.
I needed grounding so fucking badly.
She held her breath to escape.

No one tells you how to be the only head above water.
I still catch myself waiting for the surface tension to break.

Stamina Check

At the risk of sounding cool and hip and super fucking rad, I started playing a new video game this month that’s closely based off of Starship Troopers.

And while it’s fun, it’s also been pissing me off. There’s way too many things out to steal your attention at all times. And most of my time is spent running away¹ from death.

But you can only sprint for so long before you run out of stamina.

It soon becomes very evident that if you’re going to succeed, you have to take some time to slow down. You’ve got to catch your breath.

Things I’ve learned from this bug/robot/spaceship shooty-pew-pew video game:

• Though it feels counter intuitive, you have to slow down to speed up.

• There’s a limit to your capacity for sprinting from one place to the next.

• The limit is inescapable.

Woops… I don’t think I’m talking about a video game after all.

^{1 cursing and screaming}

Steeeam
Shelly

Here’s a track from 2020 that feels a lot like 2002.

Check your stamina bar. Please.

until next time. - cd