12. 21st Century Lovesick Biologist

During the halfway mark of tonight's jog, some hilarious and enterprising youth screamed Fuck You! from a passing car window.

It's hot, and we're all a little irritated.

New Philosophy is on my mind as we round the corner into the fat concrete slab of Mid-Summer, that meaty chunk of endless daylight where all the pretty girls shed their clothes, all the horny testosterone watches agape, and the sno-cone truck parked at Balcones keeps its flap up and lines long.

My philosophy in question is not new, I suppose, though it's certainly new to me. I speak of a protracted, aggressive, engaged form of Love Apathy. Allow me to explain.

I am a unusually hapless romantic; I jump too early, making mountains of potting soil, and I frighten the little squirrels away with a lot of wild clucking and flapping. Squirrels - at least these 21st century kind - are violently alarmed by enthusiasm. Enthusiasm and sincerity are the tragic enemies of squirrel-baiting, and as such, most of my safaris have ended in anticlimactic fashion, me slumped under a brush tree, sweat dotting the brim of my cabana hat. It's tiresome to leave it out there on the savannah, over and over.

So I will really work hard at not caring. I'm not trying to be cute, and I mean this in earnest - I will be engaged about my apathy. Do not confuse this with apathy of a decidedly passive sort. There is no pride or happiness in that, there is only soft resignation and, probably, mild depression. I speak of actively looking the other way. I'm talking about nothing less than re-engineering my tendency to wear my heart on my sleeve like a pedometer, counting the steps with great care we take to get to Something Real, that place where two souls become monogamous and lovely with one another. That's fine, and, maybe, I'll always be that guy and this Great Experiment will fail operatically and comically.

But maybe - maybe - by fighting my nature, I can learn something new about who I am, what I want, what I need, and where I'm going. Those are four pretty honking questions, the smooth black obelisks of my mind, mysterious and unmoving, ten ton stones. Maybe my fists have been balled up tight for so long, I've forgotten what can happen when we let go, let it out. Casual fun, do what feels good, quit overcaring, oversharing, overanalyzing, overbeing. Quit trying to craft a narrative - never your strong suit - but rather, live like the mellowest bohemian prince of your overheated imagination.

This won't be easy. Our boy JK is anxious in a not always charming way, and he leans towards melancholy. Melancholy is the wading pool for serial monogamists, but that's Old Philosophy. This is New, and different. Better? I suppose that's the toughest sell of all; maybe the differences are all in my mind, and none of it ever mattered in the first place. That's a terrifying thought. We aren't there yet.

So I've got my back turned to all those fickle little squirrels, and it's terribly difficult, and I'll look back a time or two, I know I will. This is where I push on, consummate biologist, looking for a new way to see life. I've got the hat to prove it.

11. My Friend the Black Crow

The trouble with being a romantic is that ugly inclination to wear one's heart on their sleeve - the material of which is already a garish madras pattern.

The trouble with being a romantic in the summertime, that great dream season, the season of my youth and of my electric transformations, is everything - everything - is filled with terrible portent. The smallest details; unreturned text messages, unintended discoveries, a train whistle, a dead crow, they're swept up in the still wet air of a muggy June, July, August night. I am an unabashed armchair symbologist - less Robert Langdon than installation artist - and I see the future in my personal tea leaves.

It's a charming malady, really, an extension of a minor Peter Pan complex, and of the spirituality long suppressed by my rational, agnostic, stomped-grass mind. It's the way I stay hopeful, and maybe even filled with a bursting love. But it comes at a price: namely, it makes me crazy.

One day I will set about to chronicle in lyrical fashion the journey my late-night runs have really taken me on. Several nights ago, running the Duval Road path that I call the Holy Road - 4 churches and one Buddhist temple line a suburban strip less than 2 and a half miles long - I came across a black crow, dead as any black crow has ever been, laying on a discarded mattress in front of a darkened town home. The ants and the flies had yet to feast.

I stopped mid-stride, puffing out a bit, and bent to examine the bird. He was thick and glossy, strangely robust, as if he'd only just begun to sleep. Here is where my fantastical symbologist's brain overclocks and spits out a cloudy stream of nonsense, absolutely credible nonsense.

I am the bird. Or, maybe I am not the bird. The bird is death. He is...rest. He is the rest I deserve, or command, after two years of difficulty. It would be too easy to say a black crow is an enemy - he is my friend. Is the crow warning me? Advising me of my own mortality, pressing me to ease up, to stop overanalyzing every text and every train whistle? I don't know what it says about me that a perfectly undisturbed black crow laying square on a dingy twin mattress is romantic. It is. I don't know that it says anything at all.

It has come to my attention, almost a year on since I opened JK Loves You, that, while ostensibly about love and lust in a single boy's life, these writings are really about relationships of any stripe - they are about a loner's relentless obsession with making a connection, and his simultaneous rejection of any connection. Eventually, you hope to meet in the middle; some call that happiness, others peace.

I'll be sorting the tea leaves all summer, and it's gonna be a hot one.

10. Battlefield (Love Is A)

Last night I saw Blue Valentine, a small but brilliantly realized little film about the disintegration of a young couple's marriage. The night before, I gave a toast at my sister's wedding, and admired the way she was beginning a road traveling with such positive energy and apparent love for her husband. Somewhere in the middle, I have a friend who is grappling with frustration, disappointment, and a possible pregnancy.

Sometimes it occurs to me that love lives on the head of a pin; it is a precarious speck of a thing, small and teetering, and if we look away, even for a brief instant, any number of variables will knock it down, or change it, or scar it. But for all its beauty in miniature, love is also grossly malformed and unwieldy, it is a terrible, messy lump of antimatter that was never intended to take well to pin-balancing. What a complex irony - this thing we chase, in some way at all moments, is so averse to being bottled or replicated or understood.

As irrational souls a second removed from cave days, humans are destined to live in a Blue Valentine kind of world - a world where love offers increasingly diminishing returns. Love is an ant, and will carry a tremendous load, but even an ant cannot power on forever.

If I sound a bit down on love, you aren't reading the full breadth of my experiences - of the past weekend, yes, but certainly of the roadmap my personal adventures have closely followed. Love is incredible; it is a white hot jolt of ginseng and taurine and propane and combustibles, packed dense and rocketed into space. Love is the daughter of hope and its diaphanous existence allows us to work and thrive in hostile territory. I'm sold on love. It's just, I am positively and equally as sold on the disappointments of love's creeping negative spaces.

I worry. I am a born worrier, and my bouts of intense brow-squeezing are strangely punctuated by languid moments of zen calm. That's the coin, two sides. In Blue Valentine, we see both sides, a relationship formed and then lost. At a wedding, we see the joyous heads over tails, and hope (that eternal Mother) these young people have the strength to not be consumed by those diminishing returns. Some people are so strong, their legs are not swayed by the tide. My friend, his frustrations may subsume him, but he will move, at some point, somewhere, to begin again. To start looking for love, understanding full well that on the battlefield, mines are the tiny moments that pile up over a lifetime.

9. S.Y.B.C.

Forgive me if I keep going back to Spread Your Butt Cheeks. It's all I've got, all I can manage. It is my beginning, my middle, and, yes, jesus, my End. I'll venture into some salty, abstruse corner of my mind like a supermarket Charlie Kaufman, only to find myself back here again. Spread Your Butt Cheeks.

Allow me to explain, Constant Reader, you of unimaginable patience, you Saint, you who allows me these flights of macabre fancy, pretend play, me forgetting I work in a cube. You see, I freestyle rap - almost anywhere really, but mostly in my truck, driving at reasonable speeds to only a handful of places. I rap in funny voices, I rap in that Brooklyn black tilt that all white braggadocios employ. I say obscene, confusing things, to an imaginary beat thumping off in the distance.

All rappers have a Hook - a line that they come back to when drawing a temporary blank, a stutter step, the Um, Like, Ah, and Oh of the battling set. I've heard mixtapes where some enterprising youths will repeat something as inspirational as "Believe that", or something as guttural as "Ah fuck shyeah." What is my drive-time battle rap hook?

Spread Your Butt Cheeks.

Such a satisfying click - everything wonderful rhymes with cheek. Freak, speak, meek, week. Accounting for near-rhymes - and all poets, from John Donne to Big Pun, must - we have teet, repeat, heat, keep. Do you see how the rap writes itself?!

Last week, Austin was hot and the windows were down. They so rarely are. During one particularly monumental session, while shouting something about fucking and bitch and popsicles and stir-fry, I became clouded, and yelled Spread Your Butt Cheeks! like Eminem staring in that bathroom mirror, flame-thrower in hand. I didn't see the biker within earshot, whose mouth fell open. I thought I'd nearly knocked Lance Armstrong from his racer.

If only they could understand an artist at work.

8. Chicken Fried Love

When you've seen every form of pornography perpetrated by man, studied every obscene website, visited every depraved link, when you have toed the imaginary line that separates men of passion and strange temperament from men whose IP addresses are federally known, where do you go? What do you do? When you have exceeded the limits of your own porn addiction, what lies beyond the mist?

Food, glorious food.

Recently I have taken to staring at food websites and imagining myself eating the hi-res goodness bursting forth. It's an erotic pursuit of a decidedly mental nature. Take the ButterBurger, Culver's love song to obesity, an offensively gluttonous burger that is literally slathered in butter (cheese optional, but I'd say yes to that one.) This is the food equivalent of snorting MDMA out of a strippers asshole - we know it's a bad idea, but the ingredients look so wonderful, and we only live once, right?

Food and sex as natural bedfellows is of course an idea as old as food and sex themselves; make no mistake, friends, your boy JK is no proponent of food as sexual play. Chicken fingers are rarely close to my penis, mashed potatoes are simply not in the conversation when my scrotum and I are having words. Long ago, a lady-friend attempted to introduce whipped cream into the equation (a calculus I will save for a later date); I said, can we just eat the whipped cream and then get to it?

My point is, this isn't about sex. It's about surpassing sexual expectation and entering in to a new contract with life, the kind that involves a painfully single young boy who is a foolish clown for love and who consumes avocados and honey mustard. This is about masturbating to photos of macaroni and cheese. It's about Panko breadcrumbs tumbling off of my very pale chest, and the women who may find that sexually interesting. It's about the hours (days?) I have spent looking at taco websites - god, the taco websites - envisioning myself in their various booths, chairs, side tables and grimy coves, taco in my right hand, mouth agape, eyes glassy, trembling with the anticipation of a gustatory climax that will peak, fall, and then crescendo again when the umami bite hits the roof of my mouth. It's about love.

So when I begin to feel a bit sorry for myself that, at the very peak of my sexual energies, I have not had relations in an embarrassingly long time, I simply fire up the trusty Macbook Pro and get down to some picture peeping. Skin? No, that's for amateurs, hobbyists.

I'm looking at you, ButterBurger.

7. Dated

I haven't been on a date in ages. I wouldn't know where to begin. Do people still go to Red Lobster and order Cheddar Bay biscuits? Because that sounds just fine.

You can't go on a date anymore because you can't do something that doesn't exist. The Internet, Generation Y, text messaging, Justin Bieber - we can play the blame game all night long (god knows I have, often under duress of Ambien and whiskey), but the truth is, "dating" is a muddled mess that often lurches uncomfortably between coffee - which isn't a date - to drunk fondling - also not a date - to anything and everything in between (which may be a date but also may not.) It's enough to make you give the whole thing up, which apparently I did last summer and am still doing.

Take an informal poll of your young-ish single friends, and they might tell you they don't WANT to call it a date. The word today seems to carry the dusty green patina of your grandpa's shaving bowl, only grandpa is still going on dates, lots of them, with all the assisted living ass he can find. The Twitterati (yeah I wish I didn't have to use that word too) don't say "date", because it implies undue pressure or expectation, and god forbid we expect anything of our gentle digital babies. Today's "hook-up" culture has been well documented, where the hot horny kids do things to/inside each other without the confines of a suffocating "relationship hierarchy."

Frankly, it's all a bit confusing for JK, not so young anymore, his soft brain beholden to comforting social strictures. Admittedly, I'd feel foolish asking a girl out on a date - and I have enough rejections under my belt by now to know all too well that sweet breeze that is foolishness - not because a date wouldn't be fun, but because I've no desire to look or sound like a grandpa. The Cheddar Bay biscuits I wrap in a napkin to take home do that work for me.

6. Another Sign From Heaven

What does this say? What can it mean?

I think it says 'Believer.' Or Bieber? I came across the graffiti while walking a 4 mile leg home from work, as the transmission of my truck is being rebuilt. The truck and I are one; former titans of prosperity and willful optimism whose recent bodies of work have been disastrous, and who are being rebuilt.

So, Believer. I mean, there it is, plain as the receding daylight that was guiding me over the rocky sides of Parmer Lane. Honeycomb scrawled, away from prying eyes, by some tough kid who perhaps was also looking to get his mojo back.

I don't believe in much, which is, I guess, part of the problem. Constantly riding the middle line, I'm never enough of a cynical wreck to be a disaster, and therefore interesting, but I'm never enough of a believer to be willfully optimistic, and therefore consistently happy. Happiness and Belief are intertwined in surprising ways - how many studies have been done that show the religious to be among the happiest souls?

I don't think that belief and doubt are mutually exclusive, because when I speak of belief, I speak in terms of this graffiti scrawl. I'm talking about, and looking for, the puzzling bits of ephemera that appear to us all and quietly shape what we eventually become. I'd like to think, walking home, deeply buried in the foggy rebuilding process of my very being, that I happened upon another sign from Heaven - Believer. Things get better, things get worse - but things get better.

Of course it might say Bieber. Or it might be some gangland murder code. For right now, Believer suits me fine.