#48: the cloud men wield cloud weapons

i know what you're thinking, i think. It's been almost a month and you still haven't written about your AmeriCorps experience.

Like many things the time has come and passed. I am a different person. I love my team. We will never be the same, never truly know each other like we did, and that makes me sad and optimistic. These beautiful people will grow away from me. It really got me the other day when Jamie posted, "I'm tired of not waking up next to nine other people." Toward the end we started calling each other brother, not just Jamie and me, but all the guys on my team. It's funny, I only just realized none of us have blood brothers, but these guys know me better than I know myself and I love them.
I always picked on the girls on my team, just like sisters. I respect them, all of them. I will never forget them.

I've been thinking recently about how we are more than ourselves, and I mean this in a very small scale way. My sense of touch for instance stops not at the skin, but at the tips of my finest arm hairs. This black and whiteness stops with touch, I either feel it or I don't, and even then sometimes its like i almost feel something, like the way you feel when someone is watching you. It's a pressure on my neck that makes me turn.

Smell: there is a cloud of myself hovering around my body. Tiny particles of my sweat and pheremones floating in the air around me, staying on things I have touched. The water in my body flows through the sewers and sticks to the leather sofa.

and so on. i continue to imagine the cloud of myself growing larger, affecting the clouds of those around me, and theirs affecting mine. It's a way to look at the body as part of the soul. There's a line from Nietzche, it goes something like "the 'soul' he says, and the wise man laughs. 'You mean the body' he replies."

i wonder what color my cloud is when you cut it through the middle, how many rings it has, its internal temperature.

Recently i've made a new friend, Andy who is moving to Nashville soon. Because i've given him the link to this page, i won't be talking smack about him, but i will tell you, it excites me to meet someone at this point in my life. Let me explain.

A few days ago i spent some time with Patrick and Dan Smyth, friends of friends who I haven't seen since 2003 when we went to purchase the newly released "Goblet of Fire". These guys are insane geeks who still play MS DOS games, characters. Upon meeting Patrick, who is 22, we asked: "What have you been doing with yourself?" "What did you major in?" introductory questions upon meeting again for the first time. These were immediately followed by "Did you read all the way through the Harry Potter books?" I had reverted to myself at 16, back to a time when i had no idea Albus could... well nevermind. The point is Patrick had that power over me. He did not have the power to control my age at 12, or at 21, only 16 and now. A snapshot in my life.

It excites me that Andy will only have the power to know me after i have gone through this dramatic change, because i've accomplished enough to now be proud of myself, confident. If i die tomorrow, i know someone has gained happiness because of the work i've done. At 16 i wasn't afraid of death, but i wanted to get out of high school. At 21 i feared dying, only because i didn't have a degree, hadn't really accomplished anything. This invitation goes to you man in the shadows, stab me quickly before i grow any older. Kill my younger self and let me be born again in mirrored eyes of friends new and old.