REAL PEOPLE
Common
Be
Geffen : 2005
[Buy It]

THE OTHER SIDE
Dismemberment Plan
Change
DeSoto: 2001
[Buy It]

PEOPLE
El Perro Del Mar
El Perro Del Mar
Control Group : 2006
[Buy It]

People I Know

Some of us stagger through slanting rain, leaning into the wind. We run into walls and closed doors, stubbing toes and fingers. Some of us glide through curtains of sun like kites, limbs strong and smooth in concert, taking us wherever we want to go. Strangers smile at us and wonder why they did, and no doors bar our way. Some of us lurk in between, sometimes glowing, others guttering, and over all we do okay for ourselves, but still. We want to know why this is, and if it's fair. And if it is fair, then by whose standard? And if it isn't, by what oversight?

Sometimes we feel like our steps turn the earth, that when we appear to turn a corner we actually continue straight while the universe swivels ninety degrees against the angle of our footfall. Sometimes we feel like we walk and walk and the universe won't move; behind us our prints fill with snow. Some of us spend a lot of time trying to be something we're not, and slowly become that thing. We regard self as autonomously created, and are unsympathetic toward cultivators of incomplete or undesirable identities. Some of us want to find out exactly who we are, and never do. We feel uncomfortable in our skin and covet others'. Some of us know just who we are and live inside that person, and are still unsatisfied. We regard self as innate, immutable, and curse the one with which we were born. Resignation brings peace; struggle breakage. Some of us don't believe in self, and wind up locating ourselves in that disbelief. Some of us just are.

Some of us believe in love and some of us don't, and we can trade places in the most remarkable ways. Some of us spend our lives looking for love and never find it, and we wonder if it wasn't out there or if we were never in the right place at the right time. Some of us find love, but then decide that we enjoyed the looking, and turn our backs on it. Some of us find love, then lose it, and sometimes we pretend it isn't lost because we fear that we'll never find it again, and hope that it will return, and sometimes, it does. Some of us never even think to look for love, and we find it or we don't, and life goes on either way. We all live.

We run, sometimes. We walk. We scream and sing and laugh and moan. We itch and scratch and cry and smile. We spill hot coffee all over ourselves. We watch movies and make movies and imagine movies. We eat and cough and swear and lift incredibly heavy objects clear over our heads, legs trembling like plucked strings, only to put them back down. We wink and wash and belch and sleep. Before we say things we know are cruel, we say I'm not trying to be mean but. We sneeze messily into our hands, glance around furtively, and wipe them on our seat's undercarriage. We chew gum and fingernails and remove hair from some parts of our bodies, cultivate it on others. We fake smiles. We question the reality of things we can put our hands on and feel. We hurtle through the sky in machines, skipping over clouds like a flat stone, and don't feel as if we've moved. We run down a barren stip of dirt in an amber late-afternoon light, feeling the textures of flexion and release, and we go very far.

We speak. We speak with clicks and grunts and glottal stops and trilled R's and sibilant coos and firm trochees and soft glides. We string chains of polysyllables peppered with Latin and French into a cultivated stutter. We speak in ellipses and generalizations, half-truths and barbs, riddles and allusions and cliches. We speak to fill empty space, to assign value, to affirm presence. We speak to large crowds, gesturing expansively, saying nothing. We use language as a wedge to penetrate the world, and as a shield to fend it off, and as a thin dark line to divide it into things. As children, with cartoons and drawings and maps, we learn to regard the world as a field of burning color demarcated by hard boundaries, and we learn to use speech to define the spaces between the boundaries. This makes things easier and we feel comfortable, until eventually, we try to name the edges. We name all things that exist and many that don't.

We dream. We dream of invisible time travelers watching our lives like television programs, of dead relatives returning alive (but radiating a palpable menace), of being attacked by balloons, of our teeth and hair falling out, of going to school without pants. We dream of falling great distances but never rememeber the impact, of a parking lot filled with red sedans glinting dully on an overcast day, of breathing underwater. We dream of a clock with its hands frozen at 11:10, pendulum idly swinging. We dream of attending parties where everyone knows something we don't. We dream of coming undone from the earth and vanishing into the sun.

We find shapes in the clouds and force the stars into improbable constellations. We view the sky as a mystery, and an omen. We sit by foggy windows watching wet leaves fall and spin on the ground. We have strong opinions on topics we know little about, equivocal ones on topics we know well. We dress up as anthropomorphic animals and have sex with each other, and we don't understand why anyone finds this stranger than wearing a tie or playing golf. We hide keys under mats even though we all know the keys are under the mats. We gingerly avoid stepping on cracks, or we march down the sidewalk stomping on every crack we see. We only tread upon tiles of a certain color in malls, thrilling ourselves with visions of a fiery demise if we misstep. We count our steps in our heads, starting over whenever the terrain changes, looking for a rhythm or pattern. We do whatever we can to fragment the world into digestible bits, even if the divisions seem haphazard as a book's pages.

We aren't perfect, but we try. We kick sand castles. We wash our hands exactly seven times per hour. We knock down mailboxes with bats, just to hear the clang and feel the shock waves in our arms. We lock car doors when people walk by. We roll our eyes and make impatient gestures while pretending to listen to whoever's on the phone. We urinate in showers and pools. We go to great lengths to see each other naked, and some of us enjoy it more if the naked person doesn't know they're being seen, or pretends not to know. We shoplift out of necessity, idealism, or for no reason at all. We don't call our parents for weeks at a time. We don't recycle, or we do because we're afraid of appearing ignorant. We make decisions that change our lives forever, and decisions that don't change a thing. We wear mismatched socks on purpose. We dislike television yet watch it for hours. We write because it's possible to do so. We peer into reflective surfaces at every opportunity. We count the seconds between the flash of lightning and the rumble of thunder, mentally converting time into distance, and for some reason are not amazed that we can do this. We put our lips on each others' stomachs and blow. We drink liquor until we are violently ill, and we do it again. We can't remember much about our first year of college, but we never forget how someone looked tucking a lock of hair behind their ear in front of some water and a bridge. We compose long, florid letters and throw them away, to yellow and shed lilac into the dump. We invest some naturally occuring substances with great value, others with none. We tell each other we need haircuts, then compliment each other on them. We hate tourists, and are forced to stay home and abide them, or travel and join their ranks. We part our hair on one side all our lives, then suddenly spend months training it toward the other. If we hold a pen, we doodle idly on whatever's at hand. We think a lot about where we go when we die, though we rarely consider where we were before we were born. We sit by our grandfather's bedside wanting to ask him if life wound up feeling okay, but we don't, because we're afraid he'll answer.

We disregard warning labels. We loop rubber bands around our fingers until the tips swell up like sausages, just to get a rise. We run with scissors and play with matches and burn ants with magnifying glasses in dry straw fields. We take cold medicine and operate heavy machines. We hurl ourselves from bridges with cords strapped to our ankles just to feel the air move. We stand by caged propane tanks, blithely smoking. We eat ice cream so fast our heads feel like they'll burst. We keep guns under our pillows. We tumble over waterfalls in barrels. We tie blades to our feet and go sliding across plains of ice, but we hold hands while we do it. We inhale smoke even though it will kill us, and pretend we have no choice. We use needles, and share them. We do things requiring pads and helmets. We fly on trapeezes and wrestle alligators. We drive off overpasses and swallow bottles of pills and crash in planes and grab live wires and sink in the sea and contract cancer and have heart attacks and tumble down stairs and plummet from windows and ingest poison and starve and blacken in flames and are torn asunder by bombs falling from the sky and open our veins into alabaster tubs. We trust that others will deal with what remains. We shoot people to death in public places so that we may not be forgotten. We tattoo our skin to make it ours. We write symbols on bathroom walls before we know what they mean. We build monuments and tombs. We love to see our names in print. We scrawl graffiti on trains. We break windows and open hydrants and burn down houses. We splatter mud onto clean laundry flapping on lines. We spend hours grooming lawns and hedges. We flock in droves to ancient castles, making sure to take something away or leave something behind. We dye our hair unnatural colors. We choose art over life because art lasts.

We bloom into warm wet darkness and squeeze through a tunnel toward a pinprick of light. We burst into the world amid shimmering waves of chaos and color and pure sensation. We blink and wail and become the absolute center of any room we're in. We put on clothes and learn where to pee and how to walk instead of crawl and we grow. We learn to make the same sounds with our mouths that everyone else makes with theirs, and in what order to make them. We get bigger and get braces and get them off and figure stuff out, then figure out that we were wrong and start over. We go to school and graduate or drop out and get jobs and get fired or quit and get new jobs and fall in love and get married and fall out of love and get divorced or stay married. We never try to kiss someone and wish we had, or kiss them a couple times and regret it. We are frightened and depressed. We are pissed and apathetic. We are anxious and malign. We are floored and ecstatic. We say things like butterflies, and mean them. We extend to our maximum length and then recede from the space we filled. We wrinkle and fade and wither and dim. We get glasses and lose them all the time. Sometimes we find them right on top of our heads. We retire and move someplace warm and sunny, where the weather stays in the skin, not the bones. We sweat and clutch at the sheets and gasp and shudder and divide and return to the warm wet darkness from which we sprang and never really find out why.