A letter to the puckerbrush.

Dear Professor Hunting,

Last night, for reasons unknown, I began to search the internet for an email address where I could contact you. It's been six years, and I knew that you'd probably not remember me, but I'd wanted the opportunity to tell you how much you and our Creative Writing class influenced who I am today. I'd wanted to tell you how your wry wit and soft voice captivated me in the classroom and how you'd forced me - and the rest of the students in my class - to look into parts of myself where my basest humanity nests and grows. I'd wanted to say that two of my thesis committee members commented on how well I write and that my thesis was a pleasure to read, and that I feel as though you had a great part in that. I'd wanted to tell you how your offer to accept a poem I'd written for publication in your press made me feel more alive than I'd felt in all of my life up until that point, and how declining your offer is one of my biggest regrets. I'd wanted to tell you that creative writing is what sustains me when little else will.


I'd wanted to say all of these things, but you died last year.


So, instead, I will whisper my thanks to the bitter winds and hope that they carry them to the tattered, late-winter puckerbrush where I know you live still.

With regards and profound gratitude,

Domonic Potorti
UMaine Class of '02

The Five People You Meet in Hell: A Return to the 'Blog.

*and by "Hell" I mean "The Erman-hay Ells-way Library during midterm/finals weeks"

Libraries - once upon a much more innocent [read: naive]time - represented to me everything that was right and beautiful in the world. I can remember how my barely pubescent husk would tap a lively, albeit grim tattoo in my chest cavity when I broached the sacrosanct interior of the library, the high perfume of books causing what was left of my base humanity to quietly rejoice. They were sanctuaries, both in the "maybe if I go in there that young lad with the brass knuckles, poleaxed by his inability to decipher those funny things on those bound pages, won't follow me in to trepanate my skull" as well as the "let's immolate an ungulate carcass on an incensed bier in the presence of a brooding chryselephantine statue" kinds of way. Anything you wanted to know, why, it was there for the borrowing, and the only thing separating you from the ability to reach forth to caress the very countenance of the divine was a little white card. I guarded this card with the kind of rabid fervor that one generally associates with crocodilians holding keep over the putrid mounds of decomposing vegetation that conceal their vile clutches. I would often check out so many books that the librarian would peer over her horn-rims to ask if I planned to carry out human functionality for the next three weeks; a polite young Domonic would usually reply sweetly that, no, he intended to promptly slip into the sweet comfort of some dignity pants and begin a regimen of intervenous nutrition. She'd usually titter nervously then while painfully obviously reaching for a letter opener or, as a last resort, one of those ridiculously tiny golf pencils. But by then I'd have gone, whistling a merry ditty as several discs in my spine telescoped under the weight of dozens of books.

Six years later

Nowadays, I don't ask for much from a library experience. I'd been repeatedly brutalized during my undergraduate career and, more freshly, in my Master's program by endless, Mountain Dew-and-desperation-fueled study sessions under humming flourescent lights that revealed in their blinding harshness only the bitterest truths. You could almost hear them humming out ghastly portents of your academic demise.

yyyyyyooooooouuuuuuuaaaaarrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeggggggggoooooooo
iiiiiiiiinnnnngggggggttttttoooooootttttooooooottttttttaaaaaaaaaaaa
lllllllllllllllllllllllyyyyyyyffffffffaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiillllllll

Gone were the leisurely strolls through the shady stacks in a vain attempt to slake my insatiable thirst for...well, the bizarre and, more frequently, the macabre. Visits to the library became wee-hour death marches in the futile, yet tantalizing hope that someone had flourished a pen to some paper to write a lengthy tome about the very thing I was researching. Failing this, I was often to be found thumbing through volumes I would have assumed would be close to the topic while weeping quietly in a heap on the floor. It wasn't immediate gratification I sought, I will hasten to add; instead, I sought the freedom to read what I wanted, when I wanted. This freedom had been stolen from me by none other than two insidious degree programs which, while lowering me into an early grave wondering about selling my retinas so that I can repay my unrelenting loans, provide me with little but the succor of possessing patently, fantastically useless information.

Out of the kind of sheer desperation displayed by rabbits when cornered by slavering canids, I found myself requesting time off of work so that I could, oh, finish writing the thesis I'd started five months earlier. However, because I would be writing on days when I couldn't use my office in the belfry of Franklin Hall, I had but two, harrowing choices:

1) I could remain at home. This has proved, in the past, to be equivalent to moistly extruding time into the Golden Commode of Utter Oblivion.

2) I could [crack of thunder] go to use the Information Commons at the Library.

9: 30 AM Tuesday, 02/20/2007, the Erman-hay Ells-way Library: The Portal to Hell is Opened

Spending more than twenty minutes in the Information Commons - or, for that matter, any open-access computer cluster at IU - reveals that, essentially, five types of people spend any appreciable amount of time there willingly.

1) International students.

2) Surly, goth techies in trenchcoats clutching two-liters of Mountain Dew.

3) Sorostitutes.

4) Ranting, foaming-at-the-maw homeless men.

5) Random people who you hate.

As I blankly beheld the mass of humanity that rankly oozed its way around my workstation while I logged in and took off my coat, I became intensely concerned about my ability to survive the experience. As it was, within ten minutes of my arrival I'd managed to ascertain that nearly all of the 3,600 international students (whose immigration issues are my bread and buttah) were there, and Lord strike me dead if they didn't look edgy. As one of them settled himself into an adjacent workstation, I made a grand showing of lowering a headset onto my skull, proclaiming with impunity that I was, indeed, not approachable.

Twenty minutes later

I stood stock-still in 20 degree February delightfulness as hundreds of students poured out of the bowels of the library in the wake of the - you guessed it - fire drill. I figured: Hey. If you stand really still, maybe the international students won't see you. From within a small group of Parliament-chaining Asian international students near the entrance, a young woman made eye contact with me and detatched from the group, Ugg-ing her way across the courtyard to where I stood mutely horrified by what surely awaited me. I pretended that I was engrossed in watching a kitten-sized squirrel eating what appeared to be a frozen piece of watermelon Bubblicious in the hopes that she would realize that, yes, he's not at work and yes, maybe he's a student too and is just here to get some work done.

Of course, I might as well have wished for Komokwa to fuse my legs into a mer-appendage for all the good it did me. She delicately removed her iPod earbuds and giggled.

Ugg-Clad Asian Woman: Hi!

Me: Hi.

UCAW: I have one question.

Me: Look, I have to level with you; I am here working on getting my Master's thesis done and I am not 'on the clock' right now. I'd be more than happy to talk to you at great length later, but right now I am focused on this work.

UCAW: [giggles but lowers eyes; looks cresfallen]

Me: [sighs] Fine. Whaddya want?

Of course I relented; while I am, indeed, completely dead inside, I didn't want her to think I was a total monster. She did, miraculously, only have one question, and when we reentered the building (after fifteen minutes in the cold), she was smiling. Of course, rather than have her or her friends know the location of my ultimate ensconsement, I hid in the men's room for a few moments as they passed in a largish herd.

[they passed down all the roads long ago and the Red Bull ran close behind them and covered their footprints]

Once safely back at my station, I became aware that the Asian male international student who'd taken the nearest workstation now had a companion, and good Lord were they fixated on whatever was on that screen. Every time someone walked behind them, they both looked up in that "holy shet, that was a close one" kind of way that led me to firmly believe that the young lads were, perchance, up to something. A few minutes later, as one of the gentlemen pulled the cuff of his jeans above his sockline to release pent-up man-heat, I put two and two together: softcore porn must be playing on yonder computer. The reflection off of one of the chap's glasses confirmed this for me, and I spent the rest of the afternoon scaring the dump out of them by unnecessarily getting up and stretching my legs by wandering slowly past their porn-portal.

By 2:30, I'd just begun to really feel that I had finally boarded the ass-reeking Greyhound bus to Accomplishment City when a new group of people began to settle into the workstation directly across from me. Rhinestones glinted cruelly off nearly every surface of their bodies and tiny babydoll clothing revealed carefully tanned and pampered midriffs adorned with tiny belly-button piercings. Hair that could easily deflect small caliber weaponry reached high into the heavens, becoming perilous for low-flying craft. Designer perfumes mixed together into a nearly visible toxic fog of fashionability.

So, like, ohmigod. Real, honest-to-goodness sorostitutes, and there they were in what I'd previously assumed would be their anti-habitat: a place with knowledge.

While fascinating in their own right, sorostitutes are - and I will be brutally frank - so fecking annoying that it isn't really clear to me why I haven't relinquished my pathetic Judeo-Christian upbringing simply for the pleasure of betch-slapping one so hard that her brain reboots. As they began to settle in - and, by this time, there were at least six of them - I became aware that I would need sedation if I was to remain in this particular workstation. Peeping like alligator whelps that have begun pushing out of their leathery eggshells, they began a grueling process to determine the most important part of what I assumed was a business-school project: whose name should be first on the front? Should it be, um, like, alphabetical? Or, like, by age?

After ten minutes of this, a largish vein in my temple began to swell to become approximately the width of a carrot. The song of my pumping blood carried clarion instructions to my awaiting ears:

slapthemslapthemslapthemslapthemslapthemslapthemslapthemslapthemslapthemall

Enter Stage Right: Homeless man with obvious erection.

Simultaneously, the homeless man realizes that the sorostitutes know of his presence and they narcissistically assume that, eww and ohmigod, he's boned up, and probably by thinking about us! Like, for eww! Now, you and I know that the wretched vagrant may have been thinking of anything - like a wheel of brie, for example - or nothing at all, as, in general, peties do not often obey mental commands when they are being naughty. However, before the drooling hobo could lope towards the dumbstruck whores, a greasy trenchcoat-clad IT techie dude stepped in and politely escorted the man outside, gently provided him with a Camel Light and bid him a fond farewell before returning to an evening wherein he could play all 998 levels of Doom on the University dime. Thanking the sweet Jesus-man for their fortune, the she-skanks gathered their goods and departed for locales unknown to lesser mortals, their hideous pink boots clopping like Clydesdale hooves over the unanticipated still created upon their abrupt departure.

Several productive hours later, I happen to glance up momentarily while pausing between two thoughts. A man was gimping towards me and, in the waning natural light from the window behind me I could clearly make out that it was

[bwamp]

You all have a person in your life who, when s/he speaks to you, all you really want to do is scream and scream until your throat shreds itself into gory filaments resembling angel-hair pasta covered in Prince spaghetti sauce. A person who, when you see him/her, you scuttle like a roach under the fridge when the lights come on for a hiding place - any hiding place! - so that you don't get forced to interact with him/her. No, you want to shriek, I don't want to hear about the sundry Eastern European Jewesses you've seduced into almost schtupping you! No, you cry, I don't want to hear about how you got US government funding to spend the summer in Poland in language training, where you proceeded to not learn the language at all and, instead, stalked an Aryan star-fecking lesbian for three months! And, least of all, I don't want to be reminded of how you earned a Master's degree from Berkeley by, basically, extorting a degree from exhausted faculty members who graduated you out of sheer pity!

Maybe I am being too specific here.

Anyway, I hide like no other. He lurches past and, recognizing a slower and perhaps less visually acute victim, he descends upon her like a hagfish on a bloated whale-shark carcass and begins to feast. By the time he started saying things like "hump" and "Gdansk" and "novacaine", I'd become slowly aware that I was

finished

writing

my

thesis

and, with little hesitation, I saved to my little datastick thingy, collected my detritus and, fairly skipping, I departed into the start of a new life.

I remain, as always,

Domonic (soyes,thismeansIwillbeabletoblogseveraltimesaweekagain) Potorti