A Whisper.

I hear the sound,
turning my head
remember this face and look for me
look for me
when I am dead.

I didn't invite you over last night because it just felt like stress. I didn't invite you over last night because you make me forget myself. Can I blame you for that? No, it's a cop out. The overwhelmingness of your petulance. I had a dream that Chuck was in line in some drug store and I was there with you; we left in a haze of weird tension and two hours later I returned alone. Chuck was still in the same spot in line and I made some joke, and he just looked at me with saddness. "He is not right for you," he said with all seriousness. What a strange dream.

It's true; I have been fading. This is what I was getting at when I talked about relationships being the "forgetting." If I'd only waited.

If! If! The word that would nail you in. It's never that dire really, is it?

It's no cause for concern. I don't know what's going to happen, and that's fine. I was thinking last night, about the 500 street fights. Stick up for her, e. That's all.

We Got The

Right on time. Schedule. Oh these miniscule failures, this society teeming with facts.

Anne is gone and I am therefore OCS's caseworker for the week. And in the mornings I'm also the receptionist and CEO and sidewalk shoveller and agency relations specialist. Five clients were in before noon today, and all for food. The warehouse is a mess. There aren't any bags pre-made up! I scramble to fill them, so that I can dart back out front to help the next person. Frozen hams are quite cold to handle and I think I may lose one of the thumbs due to frostbite. There are remnants from the holidays everywhere. Shopping carts full of haphazardly placed canned good donations. Piles of clothes that went out of style or don't fit anymore or choke you with the smell of mothballs or, in many cases, all of the above. Scraps of wrapping paper underfoot. Trash, everywhere, disorder. A swamp I must wade through, beware the leeches!

My brain is spinning. It's three thirty and I am no longer here alone; our receptionist has arrived and has spent the afternoon making phone calls on her cell phone for her side business selling Avon products. More people. More bags of food. Utility assistance. Middle aged woman in tears. Disbelief that I'm the twin of the caseworker. Psych experiment? The guy with the husky dog. Eyes blue like frozen steel. C.P. must have been smoking crack before he came in. Twitching. Not looking me in the eyes. Nervous. Guy who says he knows Slim Pickens. Cheap tobacco smell pinning me against the wall. Tick tock tick tock. "You were supposed to call me back about the Christmas presents and no one ever called me back huffy huffy!" Phone ringing. Ears ringing. More bags to fill. Cars to load. Bills to pay. Mouths to feed. It never ends, it never ends.

In Stone Or Iron.

From my sisters: determination, strength; an unshaking commitment to who and what they are. Ah, I am lost at sea sometimes. So much turbulence and it all comes down to this one solitary moment.

Is it too much to ask, to be respected? And I imagine what AF's husband felt like. Is it really all so surface, then, so transparent? Like a tick tock ticking time bomb, notice me; notice me. What else is there to do? Calm yourself, slow down, look at what's around you. Only the simple minded experience this thing called boredom, of this I am sure. Like a petulant child. NoTiCe mE! In your face. And when you strip away the mask there is this ghastly vacuousness! Make-up on a manican. Divide my ill content by any number; it will go around.

Does life make me happy, or does it bring me down?

This is my favorite picture that I've ever taken. :: snicker :: 

It's alive!!!! 

Look at how cool Anne is. One could say that she's too cool for school. 

Utterly mezmerized. Blinking shiny things. Blink blink. 

My first snowman of the season. He has icicle spikes for hair. FEAR HIM. 

It's hard to eliminate camera shake in macro. But I thought the bluriness added something "neat" to this photo. 

Weird one, eh? 

It Flickers, Comes Back.

We never give up that shiny part -- that green thing on the inside, the thing that makes us who we are. I guess some would call this a core. It obscures so easily, this core, buried by our cravings to be [fill in the blank] enough. Pretty enough. Quick witted enough. Successful enough. And our resultant insecurities [you will never be enough.] prevent us from seeing this core stuff in those around us; we become so preoccupied with how others are perceiving these shiny little icons we project out onto the world that our minds can't focus on anything else. [If I cannot be enough, I will act like I'm enough. It takes so many little grey cells to keep a lie going.] These shiny icons will occupy you for your whole entire life (!) if you so allow. They leave no room for thought or cultivation beyond the singular struggle of self against self. Like the coiled serpent devouring its tail: quod me nutrit me destruit.

This is all so far from what I had wanted to say. I should have started, "It never gives us up -- that shiny part," because it's always there, waiting for our straying to be over, waiting for our focus to return to that which truly matters. So much stuff and nonsense.

Just: I worry so much about how all of this will end up. No more of the stuff and nonsense. How I waver. A fronte praecipitum a tergo lupi.

My Waking Life still. 

This is my favorite picture. Ever. 

Chess for Beginners.

Trying so hard to pull yourself out of that paradigm when all that's arrived at is just another fractal, an arm of the self replicating beast that you try so doggedly to run from. Different in position and this is where the differences end. How do we get around the bonds of being "right"? This interminable pursuit would claim your life if you weren't watchful. [The conversation with the woman who had never once entertained the idea that she might be wrong about everything.] This idea, this thing labelled "right," (it wears so many masks) will sneak in through the back even, and tell you that what you're actually fighting for is justice, and truth.

Or some other noble virtue.

Examine; examine. Drawing a line around yourself necessarily puts others outside; alienates and chastises. How are we any different from the people who slap yellow magnetic ribbons on their cars, do their christmas shopping in a haze of color and fury and blinking shiny things at Target? What really makes us any different?

Just:
The ability to judge, be pushy, force our beliefs and ideas on everyone we deem divergent, view ourselves as right and everyone else as wrong and ignorant, be loud and antagonistic and bullheaded when met with adversity, push ever closer towards the highest ground on all these islands of ourselves -- the ability to do these things, and then choosing not to.

Birmingham.

The dark night encompasses me, surrounds the truck cab with a blanket of heaviness. Aside from the occasional glint of a watchful deer's eyes to the side of the road, only two headlights cut through the sea of midnight. Not even the farmers send out their late night trawlers any longer; winter has come, and Ohio has begun its hibernation.

A quiet moment -- the smile as bright as my headlights, the smile that cuts through any uncertainty. "Well," she thinks as she peeks out of the corner of her eye, "I shall have my slice of hibernation this night, too."

I am not sure yet, how to bridge the here to there.
I am certain that it's worth a try.

Shut That Shit Up.

A note from outer-space:

In search of: a tender moment, the fleeting beast. If you are looking to invoke the furies, your strategy is aces. I don't think that this petulant chiding thing is cute, or funny. I don't think that it adds to any level of bonding because, quite simply, I can't get a straight answer in the first place. So there is no foundation upon which to stack this triteness. I have consorted with wicked women who gnash their teeth and claw at themselves until blood is shed. I have known women with mannish features, serpents growing in their hair, thick jungles of fur taking up residence in their armpits, and more to say about freedom and fear and pedagogical refinement than you would have attention span for. And I have counted them among my kinsmen! So take your scathing jocularity and throw it on that raft that makes its hourly trips to that uncharted territory within. There is no place for it here.

And the weekend contained as well two sincere compliments that cut to the core: "Your sketchbook is so beautiful," "He doesn't have the mind to match yours." Just. Remember what Mixmaster Mike would tell you: It take a second to wreck it. It takes time to build! [You gots to chill.]

Just.

Sometimes it feels as though I spin out of control. This is how it happens; this is exactly how it happens. You get caught up in these ideas of necessity, your life inflates, you get so far away from the simplicity that leads to the real understanding. Necessity! Such a tenuous word, a Pandora's Box that will suck you dry if you aren't vigilant. But we open it, time and again. We must be brave warriors for ourselves. We must be very selfish indeed! You just start piling so much crap filler stuff and nonsense, anything to obscure the real work that waits to be undertaken. Listen:

Those sankharas are still there, you don't just put on a new life like a winter coat when it gets colder; you can't run from yourself.

These ripples that you observe through your sense-perception are transitory. All of this falls away. What is your anchor rooted in?

I had to find you; to tell you I need you, tell you I set you apart. I stopped before I got there, I saw myself falling into something that was false. Nobody said it was easy. C'est une telle honte pour que nous séparent. I'm going back to the start.

The River Churns Momentarily.

His spirit is a muted sore, and I amble around it – afraid to cause aggravation by coming too close to the parts that have been rubbed raw. At times I feel myself playing limbo under the shallow stick of his practiced standoffishness – there exists a break wall that I can’t see around, that I can’t figure out how to scale. Petulantly I attempt to conjure the words behind his eyes; I am in search of the frightful and timid ones that haven’t yet made their way to verbalization. I lay awake in my bed at night thinking about it, and in the morning I ask myself: when will the break wall be obliterated? The question never finds itself an answer, and at dawn I had a spirit so dead that the people passing on the street took no notice of me.

Shortly: An understanding. Or an ending.

Where I Want To Be.

At times he talks about death, how it makes us repent, and how surely there are miserable people in the world, about exhausting work, and about saying goodbye and how it tears your heart.

But the marvellous thing is that you get on with it. This whole process, this thing that I haven't gone through for four years, it at times fills me with terror and self-doubt. The rain falls torrentially onto the ambivilent asphalt of the parking lot, but the blue sky above will not be dissuaded. This is not quite so tangential. I only stopped yesterday because of the alarm clock pointing to one entire month! My life is an island upon which time is irrelevant, nonsensical. I am a character in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. But this one entire month; this, for me, is something to marvel at.

And so I saw myself going more and more to pieces -- something was done about it. Can I exclaim this loudly enough? There was action! And much prodding and pushing, to be sure, but the point is that we can come out of any situation -- however painful -- and rise; rise. This gift of the Russians: forward. What is the point of all of this nonsense? A simple telegram to my friends, allow me to decode from Morse. That this going to pieces has been overcome fills me with an awareness that prevents the probability of going through this [forgetting] again. I am not always an open book; don't mistake this for being obtuse.

Just For A Minute.

Because we take our defeats, and stack them up like cord wood, one on top of the other, until the only existent entity is this self-inflicted labyrinth. We cavort wildly against ourselves on the inside, like Catholics standing behind closed doors in burlap sacks, whipping themselves with birch branches. I listen to the pulsing music, “was an honest man…” envisioning the halls of honor, great and white, marble, another time and place. The many lives that we lead. My heart has closed itself, it will never fall in love! My eyes will appear slate grey to you any time that I am not wearing blue, the chameleons. I am far too old; too old.

Today my bones are weary, and even the sunshine burning through the clouds to the south does not invigorate. It is stormy to the north; a tumultuous sky full of gun metal sprawls like a leviathan staking its claim above the rows of so many sleepy houses, and it does little but inspire wickedness. My brow is furrowed, there is no touch that would satiate; my muscles churn with lactic acid. Tonight I will retreat into a fortress, whose walls will echo with the self-conscious laughter of an idiot. O humans! Intellect! How you revile us, assail us with a barrage of second guessing, mental clue finding, schizophrenia. I have beached myself upon the shores of these flights of fancy; the waves of carrion no longer reach even my toes, and these are hardly suggestions.

The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter: sharp love has swollen me up with heady langours.

A Thief Of Culture.

A small amount of that robber baron blood mingling with the calm today; just enough to make me feel alive in my bones, not enough to induce the fight or flight mechanism. [And I hope that I have gotten beyond that type of capriciousness.]

Ah! J'en ai trop!

I find my inspiration this morning in the brown and black streaks of the leafless branches, cracking through the unusually blue autumn sky like finger bones, reaching out. Cette inspiration prouve que j'ai rêvé! Driving home last night I was struck by the wisdom contained within Thom Yorke's lyrics. Perhaps I am tired this morning, and my writing does not convey the proper amount of magic, the elusive pulsing, the nacreous something that reminds you what it is to be alive. This I feel deeply within me.

For rumination: Anne is one of the hardest working people I know. I hope against hope that one day this crazy boss-lady will give her the props she deserves. Mon innocence m'inciterait à pleurer. As for me, I most of the time have no idea what I'm doing here. So I do what I can. A lesson to be carried into other aspects of life, as well, I think.

Asanas Daily So I'm Very Flexible.

A rainy night, piano tinkling in the background like the din of Miles Davis’ tin trumpet, Kind of Blue, reverberating off of the passing neon signs and drip drop of a winter rain storm in the city. People walking quickly, here to there, Christmas decorations adorn the otherwise bleak cityscape. So many street lights just to illuminate this cutting world. The artifices that we create. I am digging up that amber light, so that it beams like a beacon out of my solar plexus. My hope is that other like-minded individuals will be attracted to it like a moth to a flame [though I promise not to burn you!], and we’ll start our haven arm in arm. There are three. These vibes are like seeds, and they multiply!

Forget the second-guessing. Forget the indecision. The feeling like you don’t fit. You do; you always have.

You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though the melancholy
was terrible.

Today is international AIDS/HIV awareness day. Donate some money towards researching a cure. 95% of those infected live in developing countries. As if they don't have enough to worry about! Ship a carton of condoms to the Cote D'Ivoire. Our resources... so scattered. So ineffectual. Here is to hoping that this decade brings medical breakthroughs, and not just war and political malfeasance. (Ukraine, I'm looking in your direction.)