re: blogging.

...as in a phenomenon.

i no longer do it.

i will no longer do it...but i have decided to continue writing here.

there are a number of reasons i haven't been writing -- on this here website and more generally -- but i don't feel like getting into them at the moment, because my point is not to bitch or complain or blame.

there were a number of reasons i used to write on this here website, and as genuine as i was intending to be, there was often just as much exhibitionism involved.

i guess i mean to say this: all the reasons for which i have written, and all the ones which have muted me are beyond me now in the same way in which sometimes the past seems episodic and irrelevent to the present...that is...i peck at this keyboard in hopes of finding something to stand on...in hopes of discovering "whys" and "hows" that are otherwise shapeless unless the right vessel of a phrase is chanced upon to contain it. i want this to be a constructive effort, rather than a starry eyed or theoretical expression.

i am sick of not knowing what i am doing; sick of not examining what i am doing, or attempting to answer the questions about my life that i all to often ignore. i am free to be honest. i want things to stand on, i want to discover the ground i tread and whether or not there is a path there.

i am not tired of the pursuit of beauty or truth or all of those grand ideas, but they mean nothing if they cannot be supported by common life, intimate interests, and earthly concerns; or, rather, beauty and truth cannot be supported unless they are also drawn into those things. they cannot be considered compartmentally, or as separate. its not in human nature to exist unalloyed.....neither is it the nature of the world we live in.

i've had a rough week.
i am tired. i am afraid. i am hungry. i have bills to pay. i have to go to work. i have wet feet. i take the bus. i go to school. i am alone. i am lazy. i am guilty. i am in desperate need of a shower, and the immediate application of deodorant. and i want to cut open the sky, and shake mountains, and shout down the naysayers, reach into the thunder, rattle tombs and pierce souls, and change a thing so that it is never the same again.

these are all things i have to confront, question, resolve, learn how to do; and they are all things i need to make an effort at every day. the one set of priorities does not supercede the other; i have missed out on too much of both already.

today i stop blogging

the case of the desperately interesting job hunt

i keep wondering for how long i will have nothing to say; the fun and creative parts of my brain feel dormant or even comatose, while the boring parts deal with boring matters that are, of course, unavoidable and pressing.

right now i am sitting at a computer in the bedroom of the girl whom i love; she is away at work, and i am resting the pads of my fingers in the divids of the keys in the keyboard. it is the same tired, slightly warm lure of complacency i feel in my body -- like i've been gently pressed into a featherbed and kindly asked not to move very much. but maybe that's just the midday, post-late-lunch nap talking.

as of sunday i have been new york state certified in a responsible alcohol service program which means if i happen to get a job bartending in buffalo, drinking capital of the world, i will know when to cut you off, and how, but will in all likelihood leave you to fend for yourself against the combined forces of erie county sherriffs and their charges of DWI. hey, i was there once too.

as a matter of fact, it was two years and about 18 hours ago that i had my run in with the law, from which i am happy to say i have nearly made a full financial recovery. i still owe the DMV two hundred and fitty dolla.

speaking of financial recovery, i have decided that i need to turn over a new leaf, that being one of fiscal responsibility. i plan on doing this as soon as, or perhaps just a little bit after i have a job. i thought that maybe, after having taken this bartender training course and broadening my skillset, that i'd be a more marketable candidate in the service industry. unfortunately, this is the time of year when nobody quits their jobs and nobody goes out to eat, so however qualified i may be for any given position, there's no telling when it will be available. i am scanning the classifieds for jobs, and the obituaries for dead servers and bartenders, hoping Death has been kind to my employment debacle.

i did have a near miss though, this morning. on friday i was called by the co-owner of Shango, and asked to come in on saturday for an interview. it only took my three separate trips into the place to get them to call me. the lady, whose name is either unpronouncable, or made up of secret letters that only the initiated are able to hear, sat me down with two other people with some other names, and conducted one of the most pleasant interviews i had ever had in my life. it was nothing special, it was just fun; a laidback, conversational, tangent riddled interview. if i'd ever kept track of those things, i'm sure it would land inside the top five best interviews i've given. i won't get into a major set-up for a story that you already know will end anti-climactically and in disappointment, but we chatted it up, and connected over bravo's "top chef," and laughed at corporate restaurants and miserable albany folk, and covered a good chunk of my resume all inside of fifteen minutes. another fifteen and bottle of wine later i'm sure we'd have solved whatever global problem is en vogue to solve during hyperboles these days. they said they'd get back to me today, which they did; to thank me for my resume, which they would keep on hand in case whomever they hired "didn't work out," and also to tell me that i left a "very strong impression." the prompt "thank-you-bye-bye-click" from me stifled the "how do i pay bills with 'very strong impressions?'" that was sure to be followed by the gently worded, sincere hope that their new server ties them up in the night, empties their buisness account, and flies off to vegas to spend it all on slot machines and repeat viewings of the Celine Dion show.

i should've had that job all tied up.

tomorrow i'm going to the Saturn Club on Delaware to make someone talk to me about a banquet server and/or bartending position they may have there; the best part is i've got to literally race somebody else who pretty much outqualifies me for the job...
sigh.

somebody please hire me.

i'd love to turn over that new leaf soon...

why the sudden obsession with new leaves? because life could be better. because a certain level of domesticity -- the comfortable level -- can only come if you work toward it as a goal. i have been too used to visiting it on the weekends when i'd come to have dinner at my parent's house. carving out a little nook in the world takes some sponsorship; inside a nook, there might be opportunity to wake up a little and find things in life that are both more important, and more interesting than the boring problems that plague and stupefy a boring brain...

i'd like to take my girl and go live in a nook.

for shame

i am so sorely out of practice when it comes to this, i don't even know why i've tried to start blogging again. its been a little over a half a year since i'd shut down this blog, and i'm not certain that i have anything interesting to say now that i've reopened for buisness; re-reading the bulk of my earlier posts, i'm not sure i had anything interesting to say then either. yet lately i've been feeling a desire to post, that if neglected long enough might have graduated into a need. perhaps something worth the effort of words will fall out in the process. in addition, i can imagine that i've lost any readership i might have had due to my hiatus, but that isn't enough to discourage me now either. i'm compelled to blather.

i quit this thang seven months ago because i couldn't read what i was writing without rolling my eyes. who wants to hear someone take their sad excuse for a life and make it sound even sadder? its embarassing. it is the writing equivalent of a half-hearted suicide attempt; you could practically hear the Cure playing in the next room as it whined "i took all the green ones because you wouldn't love me," between fits of shallow breathing.

ugh. ugly. in fact, this blog is festooned with ugly, and the worst part is its all me, in an unavoidable, non-fictional way. and so bloggy, with its bloggyness. when i shut it down it was out of shame. it didn't feel worthy to be read. i didn't want you to know how pathetic i was anymore. i didn't want to wear it on my sleeve so much, like some sloppy emo panzy. i didn't want to give anyone the opportunity to judge me over what i'd written as harshly as i was judging myself. long story short: i wasn't ready to own the fact that i am the poor sap who's signing his name on those pathetic posts.

sigh.
can't escape it now.
i could hide the posts, tuck them away in a drafts folder, or just plain delete them. but there is something manipulative and shady about that. i shouldn't need to hide. honest writing fosters discovery, and i am just hear to learn. there are parts of this blog, just as there are parts of me, that are tough to look at, or sad, or ridiculous, or just plain wrong. so here is a blog full of my failures; what does running from them do? they don't get better until i recognize them for what they are.

albany confession

i've done well with the things i've set out to do.

when i left buffalo with the objective to minimize the distractions of my life, to run from temptations, and toward simplicity, i never really thought it would work as well as i believed that i wanted it to. i imagined that i'd have the loads of extra time to finish at least a half a draft of a novel that had been fermenting in my brain for the last few years, and get to carve a place in the huge family i barely knew.

life with my sisters in schenectady was an epiphany, in a practical, bold-faced sort of way. and as far as writing went, i did about as well as i can realistically expect of myself, which is to say i made inches of headway towards a mark i fell horribly short of.

the other goals? simpicity? the marathon run away from distraction and temptation? i did amazingly well with. when i moved out to the fairytale kingdom of Albany, NY, i got exactly what i wanted. i wanted to leave behind what i was relying on in buffalo to get me through, and strip everything away to find out what i really am and what i'm made of. i was very much afraid of what i had become in buffalo, but i didn't even really have a true sense of what that was until i'd spent some time away.

yet, as the ancients used to say, when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

i have to include the caveat that there was one noble goal that i did acheive in the course of the move. i left buffalo a physical wreck, because smoking cigarettes is not as good for you as it looks and binge drinking will swallow you up and puke you out. those are bad habits i seem to have wrestled under control, now. and thank God, because it catches up to you.

now, on to answered prayer:

the reasons i give for wanting to leave are at most only half as noble as they sound: in a nutshell, i abandoned buffalo, and everyone in it, because i didn't want to need anyone, and i didn't want anyone to need me. i didn't want people to get in my way, or hold me back, or let me down. and if that meant not having friends, then so be it. and with a violently selfish shove, i landed myself in Albany, where i even ducked out of responsibility to my family there to remain isolated. i might as well have had an off button. i walk around describing Albany as a bad fit for me, but i think in retrospect, i was a bad fit for it -- i never gave it a fair chance. i arrived only half believing that the party, and the fun, and the good times i had in buffalo somehow wouldn't follow me. but in so often i went out of my way to not make friends or connections. i thought i was trying, but it was really only for the purpose of fending off boredom and loneliness.

in albany i had the anonymity and social disconnectedness i thought i'd craved. and then, somehow, what people thought of me became suddenly important. how's that for a big ball of irony? -- i didn't give a fuck what the people who loved me thought, and now i was grovelling for any kind of validation from new peers who didn't give a fuck about me. well served, poetic justice, well served.

and when Bill died this summer, i know it didn't just happen to me, or for me, but damned if it didn't teach me a timely lesson. i deserted my friends in buffalo in pieces before i actually left, and Bill was probably one of the first victims of my ego. i can't think of anyone who deserved it less; Bill began and ended with the love he had for his friends. i hacked him out of my life with animosity i realized was misplaced only with his sudden death. death is so polarizing and stark. everything jumps into relief, everything is black and white. whatever little things i wanted to take as liberties to end our friendship, i realized were shields for my own guilty part in the matter. it was a really shitty thing to do.

i ran off into the world all empowered and invincible, on my own power, at the cost of what brings actual meaning to life. i've come home now, a little broken by it. it turns out i had no idea what i was doing. i find myself at times looking for this ideal life, and i keep trampling over the real life that i should be living that is right under my nose.


i've discovered a few things, about myself, when the rest is stripped away, and i've had excess time to think about it. i'm a selfish bastard. i still am, and i know it, and its a slow and supercomplicated feat of engineering to rewire all the shitty behavioral circuits. i am a work in retarded progress.

along the rollercoaster ride of self discovery over the past few years, i've uncovered all of these drastically differing parts of myself. the adventures of my colossal ego showed me things i wouldn't normally have seen, but i put more faith in that ego than it could ever handle. what was there to topple it but lightning, or to do away with it but some act of God? leave it to my ego to demand that kind of end; God yawned and i simply choked myself out. i am nobody special. my own pride prepared my downfall. it was self contained, an un-event, and i'm really the only that thinks it was important enough to give a damn.

i enabled myself, and i disabled myself.

i'm not sure where that leaves me. i have weird, unmatching pieces. i guess the next question is what can i make out of that? and how do i do it? i don't know if its a matter of taking the good, and tossing the bad, or just gathering it all and adding a grain of salt.

it probably doesn't matter so much as it does that i learn to value the things i've come to know are more important. i've trapsed off to fulfill some ideal life that may or may not exist, trampling over a real life, the fulfillment of which i've neglected for too long.

for as long as i've been someone who's thought for himself, i've always been concerned with determining what was "important" and pursuing it. at different stages, what is important has been different things; when i was young, it was spirituality, and at other times it has been matters of heart, or virtue, or quality. good enough things i suppose, but i wonder if i hadn't gotten it all wrong from the beginning. did i even know what was important? are those things even close? and if i started from some faulty impression of what was important, and since i've landed so far from that even, how far off am i now?

it makes me wonder if i haven't failed at everything i've set out to do...

happy june 22

i can't even go to the bar alone -- i've already established my self as the pathetic lonely drinker in both the bars within walking distance from here.

it occurs to me for the first time ever that today is the approximate date of my conception. the bed i was conceived on is in the next room, currently in use by my sister (not for the purpose of conceiving). they say it belonged to my mum at one point, but since i don't know precisely when, the best i can say is that it is the approximate bed i was made on.

ah, lucky for me i stashed some high priced bourbon a lost friend bought for me in a pretty little flask some other lost friend gave me as a birthday present.

conceived for what?
not for this pathetic existence, i hope.
i reach new lows.

time to sip.

from the mouth of the Horse's Ass

how are you going to get home? she said

i have two legs, i told her.

i walk home and there is two of every star in the night, and two of every streetlight. two of every star, two of every planet. even this one. i have two eyes. why shouldn't i see two of everything?
i walk home, and round corners, and get to my apartment. it is two apartments.
i live in the upper.
it has its own number; i get my mail at a different address from the landlords, below. but it is the same house. i hear them all the time, the landlords, and all the noise that they make. they hear me. we pay our rent to the two sisters, and their boyfriends.
i live with my sisters. they are twins.

at any different moment, my heart is stretched between two different girls; a blonde one, and a brunette. a brown eyed or a green eyed. this end of the bar, or that.
i have two feet. i walk home alone.
my father never stuck around to make any more like me; my mother dies before she gets the chance to meet me.
my father has green eyes. they go yellow when he angers.
mother was a brunette.
i am sure they would have went well together, if not for all the childhood trauma and the dying.
rafe is a bull. she, some earthly saint.
i live in the dazzling labyrinth of this world
i gallop home, around corners, to the lovely little center of my life, where i use everything until it curling dries up and falls away.
home, all in one piece.
one piece of what? one that is a piece has to be part of something else.
home, all in one, alone, galloping like some beast of two natures.
there are not yet any swords to fall on or skeins of red yarn to choke with. i am home. i wish i could be anywhere else that wasn't a place with just me in it.
send me elsewhere, sword.
send me elsewhere, yarn.
in a parcel, between those two stars, there.
is there such a thing as destiny? and does it clamp me here in the trash town and on the trash sidewalks, walking circuits between trash bars and trash apartments. will it begin and end here, and am i condemned to live a life secreted away from all of the things i want to touch, and see, and taste, and scrape against, and love at, and pray for?
i arrive home, all in one piece. alone.

but, i have two legs...

its easy for me to get to zen

i am up late
late enough for me to be listening to the Fountain soundtrack
and be all f ull of tears and love


ah. God.


?


with apologies to buddhists...

our bones will live a life after we die

fret not that to the grave we are betrothed
our bones will live a life after we die
and peacefully in desert tombs alcoved
we'll honeymoon forever, you and i
no reason will we have to leave our bed
each day we spend together, we'll be smiling
though everyone above us thinks us dead
we pass away the pleasant hours, whiling
our skeletons will make love in the earth
they'll go out drinking, they'll go dancing, dining
and gestate in a womb of pangless birth
our stillborn babies never waking, whining
and then, one day perhaps someone will find us
and some foolish poet's pen will mind us.

the music made of our remains

the grave will not yet mute our bodies' bones
though death may fret the body's muscle-cords
stretch'd over cryptic hollows and Unknowns
and strum away the flesh that we adored
and pluck away our life in quarter-tones,
our sinew clamped to spinal fingerboard
to mocking make a ballad of our moans
at least our love goes not untroubadoured:
here lies the lay of Tristan and Yseult
of married Monatague and Capulet;
Pyramus and Thisbes underscore us
and songs and lays and poems, plays result
arpeggiating lovers down Death's fret
adding measures to our lovesong for us
as if adding verses to our chorus,
epithalamiums to epitaphs
travelling from upper to lower staffs
singing lullabies to their better halves
and other lovers descending in refrains
join in the music made of our remains

strange dream

strange dream that gives a dead man leave to think
strange death that gives him leave to love past life
strange dram that did dispatch him quick as drink
that lately gives him leave to love his wife
and there, where flesh was tanned and lips were pink
since have been flayed off by his happy knife;
where eyes might miss some sight because they blink,
are now unburdened with that lidded strife...
and with the help of power passion-lent
and drugs, such dreams will guide us out from under
the curse of crossing stars and their intent
to short the hours that we came and went,
the turning earth that's turned you a white wonder,
and gives us leave for new love to invent.

strings

we close, like scissors, one though another
so, loosed of limb and our worldly tether
our ligaments under earthly cover
then might bind us closer there together
our bones suffer not to be forgotten
connecting tissues, 'round the world it brings
to life star-cross'd lovers, misbegotten
as at the end of marionette strings
they died with knives in desert Araby,
a pride of midnight lions standing near
and with help from an apothecary,
that exile who lived not too far from here.
we cut one cord together so to find
ourselves well-spliced, new-wrought and better twined.

let us not dare not

darling, we had beautiful bodies once.
remember? how quickly you forget it
and quicker still death resolutely blunts
everlasting love-vows if you let it.
its true that love has led us here to death
in to the arms of each other, dying
cruelly cutting loose our cords of breath
and our knotted bodies limbs untieing
but love and death and life and limb are one
and only are they in our bodies known
let us not end without having begun
or not dare not, do not, and die, alone
darling we are young and beautiful yet
oh, but still how quickly you do forget

...to the houses of the dead

make for us no tombs nor houses cryptic.
should i fail, then bury me inside her.
should i stumble down long Death's ecliptic,
never rising, let me rest beside her.
there is no terror left within my blood,
and no life left in Death's old mysteries;
the grave will either close us both in mud
or harrow hell, i, mystic Hercules.
perform no rites, nor pay my two-pence fare
(for Death is not so easily impressed)
should shadow join with night and breath with air,
our better parts at least will find their rest
if souls regard their homes with little worth,
we'll house each other underneath the earth.

i make you sonnets

now bury us inside a lover's grave
and let us clasp and kiss each other's bones.
beneath the overwhelming earthen wave
we'll measure out our love with littles stones.
our spoiling flesh will rot itself away,
staining nearby earth in underplaces,
where love-in-little-stones about us play
spilling through our skulls and out our faces.
sternum to sternum, our ribs entwining,
still, we dance through sunset color'd soil;
touch in places flesh was never finding.
and shuffle in each other's mortal coil.
for us a fading dawn will never break
the earthen lovely slumber that we make.

how to find your one true love

darling, we'll find our true love in the sky
in the fevers of the year
we will run away on the open road
we can take your car
i'll drive with my knees
so i can hold your hand across the shifter
while we hang our arms out of the open windows.
feathers will cover us
boy, girl, hands, arms, car and all
and we will lift into the yawning blue dawn
engine, hearts, arms pumping
a bird that knows the secrets that souls keep
finding its way back to the unfinished nest
it started building a century before we were born
that we will land in and finish forever
in the centuries after we die.
or, if not
and feathers do not cover us
and you do not hang your arm from the window
and we do not become a bird
and we do not find our true love
i will drive you back home
and give you your keys
and think of you, every time i fry an egg,
or arrive home without remembering how i got there

i am unwilling...

...to return to the real world today.

paradise by the refridgerator light...

...or something like it.

its pretty late. i've been working on a few beers (not simultaneously) to little effect (forcing me to rethink my method of alcohol intake), and smoking cigarattes that each make me feel a little bit shittier, a little bit closer to swollen glands than the last. if i haven't mentioned what a delicate boy i am on this blog yet, allow me to do so now: i have the constitution of equatorial vegetable life when transplanted beyond the tropics of cancer or capricorn.

luckily i've discovered the miracles that a daily dose of "airborn" can produce. and no, i'm not a compensated endorser. i go very uncompensated, financially. that's ok. i'd endorse airborn at a financial loss. it is just that good. only vitamins, you say? ah ha! with fizz! and a gritty, waxy scum that coats whichever glass it is contained in. no, sir. no, madam. much, much more than vitamins. it is nothing short of an ol' timey health tonic. you can heal palsy, and cast demons into swineheards with it, i swear. and call down fire from heaven. it will perform both old and new testament miracles.

i should be...any number of things that i have been too scrubbed thin by working to be. asleep might be one of those things. less satisfied with not really writing at all lately could be another. worried, about things i am too ashamed to admit i'm not all that worried about is definately another.

i think i don't really have anything of substance to say, today. i am reduced to talking about the weather, like this: it is getting nicer out, and that bodes well for me. in an "either i'll start being productive/or i'll start having more fun" kind of way. and speaking of things to say, i have been reduced to a wit that just barely scrapes by with my tables at work...you know...the kind that is like a gradeschool verbal spat...where you say something reasonable good though not necessarily a coup de grace, and turn around to think of something really skewering to say about thirty seconds after you should've said it. i've been getting by at work though; when the precision of wit fails, the double barrel of a smile and feigned sincerity get the job done. tonight was definately a 20% night for me. but i was lucky.

i suppose i could talk about my forays into the digit snatching game, in which i've had some recent victories, but that would just sound like bragging, and they probably won't pan out anyway. i find a lot of expectation comes along with this face, and the boldness of my charm that i can't really back up the way anyone wants me to. believe me, i'd like to be more than just disappointing, but i'm not at that stage in my life yet, and we're all just going to have to accept the possibility that i may never get there.

its not that things don't happen; its not that there's nothing big to talk about. i'm just...apathetic about it all at the moment. though i guess not so apathetic as to avoid feeling guilt over it. i guess that says something. (perhaps that want a little more credit than is actually due?)

anyway.
i have been seared closed by this apathetic streak. in some respects, i have been amputated by circumstance (i.e., work, spilling rum and coke on my laptop, not paying my phone bill), but i also haven't fought it quite as hard as maybe i should have. i guess what this post comes down to is this:

i owe a lot of people a lot of things -- phone calls, e-mail, general love. expressions of gratitude. i plan on making good.

..but right now, i choose pasta salad.

in the 80's...

apoptosis/apotheosis

outside, there is a bird singing three notes from the movie music soundtrack i am playing in the house, as i have coffee on the front porch. i wonder if the squirrels that live in our crestfallen front yard tree have realized the old landlords, who used to fill the birdfeeder with seed, have moved; i wonder if the squirrels will move too, or just go on living in that same hollow branch, a little less fat than they used to be?

can that bird possibly appreciate this song as much as i do? i think maybe he is more capable; he speaks in music, and he is, after all, singing along. i've heard that man started playing instruments in imitation of birdsongs. funny, when you see a moment where things come full circle. this bird is chatting up my iTunes. he likes Clint Mansell, apparently. i like this bird.

outside, it is like the old poems say; spring is here, but not yet on its way. the ground is so frostbitten, it hasn't yet recovered enough to melt the last few dirt-scorched patches of ice and snow; hasn't yet been able to make the grass look like grass, or bring the trees back to life.

i learned a new word, the other day; a neologism from Greek, that means "to fall away." let me load the phrase with the not-entirely-fabricated implication that it is a falling away with purpose; a self sacrifice, a shedding of the heavy mortal weight to enable...something else. survival. life. paying out a portion to eternity. like insurance.

the insurance of trees is: the souls of fallen leaves come back as spring rain.

when the blind recover sight, ask them what it was they saw first. they inevitably reply: "i saw trees, walking around like people."

sometimes, when i think about why i left buffalo, i have trouble deciding whether i am the tree that shed the crispy leaf of my hometown? or am i the leaf who let go, whose weight is still spiraling towards some unseen floor? it is only half the question: you can't talk about going without conspicuously ignoring the coming, and perhaps in considering the dual nature of all such questions, we can synthesize an answer: i left my hometown to come to my birthplace. i shed a husk of an old life, hoping that the lighter parts might ascend, that the truer parts might become more refined. that i might be distilled; sharp spirits from a dull malt, rain out of escaping vapor, stronger life out of life, to penetrate and cultivate the unyielding earth.

i was a leaf, i like to think.

i looked, and i thought i saw my life, spiralling out of control. it was the husk of a leaf, exhaling its living parts. and if something spirals, it is never out of control. life is subject to seasons, and somehow we fool ourselves into using terms like "beginning" and "ending." life is a perpetual motion machine. the spiral is only a circle subject to time. what goes around, does, in fact, come back around. if all were chaos, there would be no reaction for every action.

so, this life is a loop; a rolling hula-hoop, or a tire like the ones third world children chase down streets with sticks.

if i am spiralling, it is not out of control.
it is no coincidence the bird outside of my window is listening to my music.
the squirrels? they have no seed? let them eat cake. or shed a pound or two. or find out where my old landlords live now.

i have recovered a little bit of sight.

i am a tree, also: walking back to my roots. letting go of my tarnished leaves, and reaching, even through the winter, towards the sky, towards spring...clutching at the skirts of a thoroughfaring God, in the wake of His green glory.

yes, a little bit of glory is what i'm reaching for. it is not as stupid as it sounds.
i give up life to gain life.

mens sana in corpore sano

"a sound mind in a sound body?"

i'll take a different sounding mind
and
you can keep the body