well, it's that time again. the point in the year where most americans scratch their heads and say"damn, is it done already?" yes, yes it is. and every year has gone faster than the year before. adults weren't kidding. and so, here i sit on my bed, facing a chilly december 31st morning. if only we were all so reflective for every day of our lives, cherishing it, examining it, being amazed. within the last month much has happened or perhaps i've been hyper aware. it's nice to think that i've made a conscious decision to set goals for myself and resolutions before the accepted jan. 1st deadline. this is a heoring feat for me and i'll bask in it for a moment...ahhh...
so 2010 in a blog-shell
January 2010:
The first of the year began with a hike down into Waipio valley. It was tough work on my recently healed left knee, but the ocean was beautiful. a voice re-emerged in my writing, one of longing and love. this voice made for some strong written pieces that would grace me later in the year. January was also a month of confusion. i worked at the hospital part time as a pharmacy technician. i had discovered a job i really, truly, didn't like. i had no passion for pharmacy work and it was difficult to function in this position without any real prior knowledge of pharamaceuticals. it was a challenge, but it paid well, really well, and i eventually got a system. meanwhile, i felt as though at the end of the day i had nothing more to give. i had reversed the roles; i was living to work.
February 2010:
this month brought a huge change. the pharmacy job was temporary and would only take me to the 5th of Feb. but i had been offered a spot on a six person training crew in southern CA starting Feb 1st. i jumped at the chance. i booked my flight (which i had to pay for up front and was do-able because of the money i made as a pharmacy tech) and left hawaii on jan 31. by the first of feb i was in a high altitude mountain town called idyllwild, just a little ways off the Pacific Crest trail in southern CA. i met up with my friend and fellow bear brooker who was also on the crew and we caught up on the few months that had gone by since Bear Brook. it felt good to wear my warm weather clothes again and to be drinking coffee independently in some place i didn't know. it was a beautiful scene. i felt like me again. the month was rough however. lots of disorganization between our organization and the PCT. we got some good projects done however, and i got in good hiking shape. we got snowed on during our 3 mile pack out of a canyon, but the high i felt after hiking was amazing. i cannot forget, that while i was there, i saw other bear brook alums who were on the PCT work crews. all in all, february consisted of conflicts and beautiful, beautiful scenes in nature. i felt revived. meanwhile i kept in good letter correspondence with someone back home.
March 2010:
the SCA leader program is wrapping up. more beautiful scenes, beer drinking in idyllwild and good music jamming the car. had a rock crush my middle finger. luckily that was the only injury i had from that crew. flew home in mid march. saw people at home. late birthday celebration with a friend. stayed at home for a while, but things weren't really working out. spent a good amount of time staying with a friend and doing her mom's yard for money. a strange time, my fear of fans was exposed and lots of other emotional issues and conflicts came to light. my writing thrived in my turmoil.
April 2010:
still struggling at home, trying to live with my father. comes to the point where i know i'll need to move out. i pack up all my things into boxes hoping to ship it to the mainland one day. meanwhile i am entertaining different jobs for the summer, all conservation crews. i decide to go with the SCA and do 3 crews back to back to back in Virginia. i am not excited about going to virginia. my birthday on the 21st. my friend takes me zip lining. i have a blast. april is still a time of emotional and mental turmoil.
May 2010:
i move in with my grandparents. things are much, much better. i have the space and solitude i need to write and be my own person. a big blow-up between a friend and myself. things are dark for a while, however, my attitude changes, i'm getting more positive and i start to get excited about Virginia. at the end of may i fly out for training in NY. we are at a camp just outside of Albany and it's beautiful up there. i get some good writing done especially because i am given the distance to think about everything that happened in hawaii since january. after the training i catch an amtrak up to vermont to re-unite with my friends from my SIT fiji program. we stay at a friend's ski house, drink wine and remember Fiji. we catch up on each other's very different, but very exciting lives. two live in NY city and one in Boston, the other floats around as much as i do. we spend lots of time talking and eating good food. at one point they want to camp out. i am not thrilled since i just camped out in march and will be living in a tent for 3 months but i go with it. in the end only one of the four come out to sleep in the tent, but i discover in the morning that she left in the night, not able to handle it and she took my shoes!
June 2010:
the beginning of june i was picked up in Vermont by my friends from New Hampshire. i said good-bye to my fiji friends. i probably won't see them for another 2 years. spent some time in burlington then back to bear brook where one of my friends works. beautiful to be back in NH!!! felt so good for my soul. we even had a small writer's bloc and went on a good hike! i was on cloud nine. then off to VA. so hot down there i immediately change into shorts and am taken to Lefty's for a delicious panini. my boses are very nice and very accommodating. i spend the first night at one of my bosses apartment and her fiance works for SCA. we chat a while and they are very cool. i'm feeling at home already. pick up my co-leader the next day. we are a good match for one another and get along nicely. he has good taste in music and experience with high schoolers. i follow his lead. our kids are good and some are very sweet. i really got attached to them (though i was mad when they went the wrong way on the AT and we thought we lost them!). we had lots of fun and i hadn't laughed so much in a while. epic walks back from the worksite chatting with my co-leader...lovely. ps. bob the weasle
July 2010:
another crew and another co-leader. took me a while to adjust to him, but once i did, i fell in love (not actually, but you know). our crew was WONDERFUL! these kids were different from crew one but i loved each one, truly. they did great work, really quality stuff and we had so much fun chatting in the cars at night and contradancing in roanoke or swimming in the new. oh, and i cannot forget all the photos atop mcaffee's knob! what a wonderful crew. i was very sad to see them leave. ps. tie dye!
August 2010:
yet another crew and another co-leader. back country this time so much more planning and things were hectic at first. i loved this crew too! so different from the other two but so wonderful. lots of rock work and they picked up on it right away! the bucking ponies we were called and we were, AWESOME! these kids had so much energy. from rock water bars to hiking to waterfalls, to ice cream in damascus to poison ivy and rubbing alcohol, to night swimming in the new and the 800 steps of the coal mine. these kids were great and i was very very sad to see my summer had ended so quickly. the summer, i can say, was the highlight of my year.
September 2010:
i don't want to fly home. i decide to fly to CA to visit a friend there. it's a fun time, i saw san fran for the first time and experienced some of the beautiful beaches and lighthouses of northern cali. i LOVED the redwoods and just bumming around marin county. long drives in beautiful warm weather and great farmer's markets. then took a train up the coast of CA and OR to visit another friend who was just moving into her new apartment in Portland. great gallery with sorenson's "new westerns" on display. made me cry. lots of good writing done on her stoop. then flew to AK to visit my pregnant and lovely aunty and her family. Alaska was divine!! i really enjoyed myself. took my uncle's mountain bike out almost everyday and rode the rocky road through the huge spruce pines. my soul rekindled again. beautiful month! end of September i left to work on a trail crew in PA. things were rough at first. i didn't like the work or the crew. i wanted to go home. but i didn't want to ruin my ties with SCA.
October 2010:
still in PA with the trail crew. things are better. i really connect with the guys and we go to the bar, drink beers and watch football. i start to really enjoy football. we all deal with our pains together and everyone agrees that some people are just difficult to deal with. in the end i have some pretty fun, pretty cool guy friends. we also get alot of the north country trail built. also i get to re-unite with two highschoolers in the Pittsburgh area. we have a blast!! it was so nice seeing them again! unbelievable. then i go home for 5 days. see my folks. it's relaxing. then i fly out from HI to AZ where my next trail crew is. immediately i like this crew and the desert is way better than i thought it would be.
November 2010:
on trail crew in AZ, getting a really good work out. we hike about 8 miles a day just going to and from work. we see all sorts of wild life and have so much fun with one another. we spend most of our days off in tucson which is a very neat place. go to the all souls parade and it is crazy! and fun! and full of costumes and music and lights and there are fireworks and acrobats doing aerial routines! so many beautiful sun rises and sun sets. i can't even describe. such a high point in the year. also i tried rock climbing for the first time and i am hooked. then flew back to hawaii in time for thanksgiving. my aunt and the new baby were there so i got to see my baby cousin! another highlight! and i moved all my boxes over to my grandparents house at that time. started looking for jobs immediately, just walking into places and inquiring.
December 2010:
went into a book shop, it is also a pride store. dropped off a resume. started talking to the owner and asked if i could help with PFLAG. next thing i know i'm involved with PFLAG and they offered me a part time job in their two stores, the book shop and a scuba and dive shop. i'm thrilled. i went stand up paddle boarding for the first time and have been working there since the middle of the month. i also file for some money on the side and hope to help with some PFLAG grant writing in January. i started "the artist's way" creativity program on the first of dec and have been going strong with that. i'm doing lots of writing and submitted to one competition already. my boss also wants me to start up a creative writing group as well, so hopefully that will happen in the new year!
wow what a year, what a great, great year! happy new year to all my readers...i need to rush off to work now :)
Friday, December 31, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
the sawyer
(a piece found in the rubble of past pieces...circa 2009, NH)
i approach slowly
not to be confused with timidly
but calculated.
i draw in the details,
put the mystery together,
heal to toe, toe to crown.
the weight of my body
measures the terrain between us.
i check the sky,
how much has changed with decreased distance!
i pull myself closer, eyeing all that surrounds you,
my sight open to all the dangers
of those who surround you.
i come close enough to touch you
but pull back my hand
"not yet"
i circle around you
my breath whispering across your core
i admire you from this angle and that
stare at you and ask silent questions:
"will you hurt me?"
"where will you go when you leave?"
"how will this end?"
i put my arms around you to get a better feel
my gaze grows up you,
my thoughts bore into you.
"i'm sorry" i say as i release you.
you buckle and crash,
then lay silent, beautiful, large.
i draw lines across you, weeping
and take you home in pieces.
i approach slowly
not to be confused with timidly
but calculated.
i draw in the details,
put the mystery together,
heal to toe, toe to crown.
the weight of my body
measures the terrain between us.
i check the sky,
how much has changed with decreased distance!
i pull myself closer, eyeing all that surrounds you,
my sight open to all the dangers
of those who surround you.
i come close enough to touch you
but pull back my hand
"not yet"
i circle around you
my breath whispering across your core
i admire you from this angle and that
stare at you and ask silent questions:
"will you hurt me?"
"where will you go when you leave?"
"how will this end?"
i put my arms around you to get a better feel
my gaze grows up you,
my thoughts bore into you.
"i'm sorry" i say as i release you.
you buckle and crash,
then lay silent, beautiful, large.
i draw lines across you, weeping
and take you home in pieces.
Sunday, December 26, 2010
13 rainbows
there is a rainbow kissing the pacific
diving into the pacific
erupting from the pacific
yelling and drowning in the pacific
whispering upward like smoke, from the pacific.
there is a rainbow moored to the center of the universe, waving as a ribbon of light through the fleshy pacific
painted on my window and behind it, is painted the pacific
that has dissolved into the pacific
that translates sky into the pacific.
the result of light and water sex spilling into the pacific.
there a rainbow imagined in the cones and rods of these eyes deeper and more blue than the pacific.
bigger than the pacific
that will swallow the pacific.
diving into the pacific
erupting from the pacific
yelling and drowning in the pacific
whispering upward like smoke, from the pacific.
there is a rainbow moored to the center of the universe, waving as a ribbon of light through the fleshy pacific
painted on my window and behind it, is painted the pacific
that has dissolved into the pacific
that translates sky into the pacific.
the result of light and water sex spilling into the pacific.
there a rainbow imagined in the cones and rods of these eyes deeper and more blue than the pacific.
bigger than the pacific
that will swallow the pacific.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
a morning page
a storm is coming. i can tell you this not because of the heavy grey skies, bellies pregnant and bowing down to me in points, not because of the dense quiet of this morning, whose only interruptions are one solitary voice of a tiny kokee frog and the rush and chug of automobiles. no, i can tell you a storm is coming because i heard it on tv and on the radio and from the neighbors. flooding. that's what they expect. and we've been preparing for it for three days now. not a drop has fallen. yet, it feels as if the world is holding it's breath, waiting, waiting for the deluge.
of course, one could extrapolate and say that this storm is anything representing great change in our environment. there is always the proverbial calm before the storm. i think back to any moment where there was silence, a lull, the wind stops long enough for you to gather up the pieces of yourself and hold on for dear life.
how metaphors are there for living? personally, i think the waiting for the storm might be worse than the actual storm. the thinking about, the wondering, the fantasizing. all the what could bes but nothing that is. perhaps i'm just impatient.
of course, one could extrapolate and say that this storm is anything representing great change in our environment. there is always the proverbial calm before the storm. i think back to any moment where there was silence, a lull, the wind stops long enough for you to gather up the pieces of yourself and hold on for dear life.
how metaphors are there for living? personally, i think the waiting for the storm might be worse than the actual storm. the thinking about, the wondering, the fantasizing. all the what could bes but nothing that is. perhaps i'm just impatient.
Monday, December 20, 2010
the lingering lyric
"tell me someday if we talk, are you afraid of being haunted"
this line is lingering in my low-lighted mind like lost lovers. the repetition, the echo, the ghostly hollow of still-borne affections laying prone in these forgotten hollers, fall into me like shards of snow. i put us here, in this romantic landscape although we've never seen snow. not together. but if there is any place for death, it would be here, in some blissfully noplace vale, and we, two, crouched by an icy river, not feeling the numbing cold, but smiling with chapped lips at the poetry of it all.
that's the problem with poets. all beauty and no sense. it's just a lyric but the words reverberate in my pulse as the only syllables worth living for. how perfectly and poetically dramatic. but there is no us, no icy river, no terrible curse or symphony composed heartbreak. you do not exist. this lost comes from someplace else. i hired you to play in this macabre scene because there is something real here, something i can't touch because i don't want to, perhaps it's too sharp or too vague or too rough or too fragile, perhaps it's too close, too close, even for me. this line drums in my ears constantly. there is something i must set out into the world, over and over again until i have embraced the reality. i want something prettier than myself, i want something darker than my lonliness, i want a scene so steeped in tragedy that the whole world will weep. why? because this is what it feels like, this line, "tell me someday if we talk, are you afraid of being haunted". the reality feels more like the poetry, and the everyday experience of life is deeper than what's in front of us. of course, and so, crouching next to you, you without a face, with cold hands, the eyes of an icy river, being with you in a hushed holler deep within me, is the reality. in this line, i exist in a more full understanding of time. here, typing, here heart pounding, eyes darting, here, holding your hand, here, remembering.
tell me someday if we talk, are you afraid of being haunted. and i'll tell you that i am haunted. i used to think that i spoke this line, this was mine to ask of another. but the more i hear it, the more i know, it's me. this line haunts me. but what am i afraid of?
this line is lingering in my low-lighted mind like lost lovers. the repetition, the echo, the ghostly hollow of still-borne affections laying prone in these forgotten hollers, fall into me like shards of snow. i put us here, in this romantic landscape although we've never seen snow. not together. but if there is any place for death, it would be here, in some blissfully noplace vale, and we, two, crouched by an icy river, not feeling the numbing cold, but smiling with chapped lips at the poetry of it all.
that's the problem with poets. all beauty and no sense. it's just a lyric but the words reverberate in my pulse as the only syllables worth living for. how perfectly and poetically dramatic. but there is no us, no icy river, no terrible curse or symphony composed heartbreak. you do not exist. this lost comes from someplace else. i hired you to play in this macabre scene because there is something real here, something i can't touch because i don't want to, perhaps it's too sharp or too vague or too rough or too fragile, perhaps it's too close, too close, even for me. this line drums in my ears constantly. there is something i must set out into the world, over and over again until i have embraced the reality. i want something prettier than myself, i want something darker than my lonliness, i want a scene so steeped in tragedy that the whole world will weep. why? because this is what it feels like, this line, "tell me someday if we talk, are you afraid of being haunted". the reality feels more like the poetry, and the everyday experience of life is deeper than what's in front of us. of course, and so, crouching next to you, you without a face, with cold hands, the eyes of an icy river, being with you in a hushed holler deep within me, is the reality. in this line, i exist in a more full understanding of time. here, typing, here heart pounding, eyes darting, here, holding your hand, here, remembering.
tell me someday if we talk, are you afraid of being haunted. and i'll tell you that i am haunted. i used to think that i spoke this line, this was mine to ask of another. but the more i hear it, the more i know, it's me. this line haunts me. but what am i afraid of?
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
balance
every morning
i practice:
find the balance
of a cup of coffee on the bed
it's not easy
to find the balance
don't shake too much
don't do anything rash
remain calm
don't lunge for it
coo to it softly
a little pressure from your palm
have it slide down the white sheets
slowly,
into your trembling hands.
there's a fine line between want and need
to balance this cup
is to risk the cleanliness of my white, white sheets
and so it is with people,
a balancing act
don't let the cup spill over
not too much
just enough of this and that
of want and need
and be willing
to risk your white, white composure
for this
love,
for this
balance.
i practice:
find the balance
of a cup of coffee on the bed
it's not easy
to find the balance
don't shake too much
don't do anything rash
remain calm
don't lunge for it
coo to it softly
a little pressure from your palm
have it slide down the white sheets
slowly,
into your trembling hands.
there's a fine line between want and need
to balance this cup
is to risk the cleanliness of my white, white sheets
and so it is with people,
a balancing act
don't let the cup spill over
not too much
just enough of this and that
of want and need
and be willing
to risk your white, white composure
for this
love,
for this
balance.
Friday, December 10, 2010
the mute
"today is the beginning of your new life"
i scoff. what's that supposed to mean? i don't really know, but the words feel good against my body. in the shower i give a speech and the soap, is speechless. it's best to give speeches in the shower because all your mistakes are washed away instantly. too bad all of life weren't like that, or rather, i had the ability to imagine the figurative metaphor. but this isn't me. i feel my way through my living, visualization isn't enough, i must feel the clean, the washing away of unwanted parts, see the dirt running from my body like cockaroaches from the light. you might say i'm a feeler. some people think their way through life. i'll bet the thinkers have a lot less scrapes and scratches and bruises, but then again, they probably have more headaches.
"today is the beginning of your new life". that line is supposed to make me feel better about being here, make me forget that i have absolutely no clue how i got here, or why i am cursed. it's not easy being surrounded by people all day and night, wanting to communicate with them, dying for it. but instead, they ignore you, call you dumb, can barely look at you. i hate people sometimes, i hate people for being so blind and so lazy and so damn afraid of me. afraid of me!? i might be missing a few parts, but i'm in no way missing a heart or a mind. i'm just alive as anyone else. i'm just as present. and perhaps this is the curse.
sometimes i try to hate God because i must live this horrid shred of a life. i try to hate Him because He won't let me die. it's not that uncommon of a wish to die, and it's not that difficult to do, but He won't do it. He tells me i should be thankful i was rescued, thankful that someone forced my catatonic fingers 'round a pen and taught me to write, thankful that i'm here, now, relieving some pressure from my mind. and i am thankful to my teachers, the ones brave enough to touch me, the ones strong enough to move my traumatized body to make words, to give me the ability to communicate. my God, it's a mad house in there, in this highly pressurized chamber of my mind.
but everyone suffers, i know because i feel them. and although i hate people but i can't help getting to know them. people trust you with so many secrets when you're mute. you could never tell, even if your body ached for it. yes, i could write it i suppose, but no one would believe me. i have only one arm and no nose. clearly i am a bad person, clearly i am deformed, clearly i should be avoided. unless of course you are on a bus and you just can't bare to keep it in anymore. you have AIDS. you look at me, now we are in this together. me and my disappearing face and you and your disappearing body.
most times i don't even let on that i can write. there's no point. no one asks me how i am doing, how i am feeling. i am a wall and you throw your sorrows against me. and i think i hate you, but even now, i cannot write it in a convincing stroke. i want to believe it to protect myself. why care for those that do not care for you? i am an outcast, yet i know the most about you. this is my madness. i feel too much. i cannot help it. i would like for someone to utter to me once, "thank you" or even, as impossible as it is, "i love you" and i would like to have the tongue to tell, just once, "you are welcome" and "i love you too".
i scoff. what's that supposed to mean? i don't really know, but the words feel good against my body. in the shower i give a speech and the soap, is speechless. it's best to give speeches in the shower because all your mistakes are washed away instantly. too bad all of life weren't like that, or rather, i had the ability to imagine the figurative metaphor. but this isn't me. i feel my way through my living, visualization isn't enough, i must feel the clean, the washing away of unwanted parts, see the dirt running from my body like cockaroaches from the light. you might say i'm a feeler. some people think their way through life. i'll bet the thinkers have a lot less scrapes and scratches and bruises, but then again, they probably have more headaches.
"today is the beginning of your new life". that line is supposed to make me feel better about being here, make me forget that i have absolutely no clue how i got here, or why i am cursed. it's not easy being surrounded by people all day and night, wanting to communicate with them, dying for it. but instead, they ignore you, call you dumb, can barely look at you. i hate people sometimes, i hate people for being so blind and so lazy and so damn afraid of me. afraid of me!? i might be missing a few parts, but i'm in no way missing a heart or a mind. i'm just alive as anyone else. i'm just as present. and perhaps this is the curse.
sometimes i try to hate God because i must live this horrid shred of a life. i try to hate Him because He won't let me die. it's not that uncommon of a wish to die, and it's not that difficult to do, but He won't do it. He tells me i should be thankful i was rescued, thankful that someone forced my catatonic fingers 'round a pen and taught me to write, thankful that i'm here, now, relieving some pressure from my mind. and i am thankful to my teachers, the ones brave enough to touch me, the ones strong enough to move my traumatized body to make words, to give me the ability to communicate. my God, it's a mad house in there, in this highly pressurized chamber of my mind.
but everyone suffers, i know because i feel them. and although i hate people but i can't help getting to know them. people trust you with so many secrets when you're mute. you could never tell, even if your body ached for it. yes, i could write it i suppose, but no one would believe me. i have only one arm and no nose. clearly i am a bad person, clearly i am deformed, clearly i should be avoided. unless of course you are on a bus and you just can't bare to keep it in anymore. you have AIDS. you look at me, now we are in this together. me and my disappearing face and you and your disappearing body.
most times i don't even let on that i can write. there's no point. no one asks me how i am doing, how i am feeling. i am a wall and you throw your sorrows against me. and i think i hate you, but even now, i cannot write it in a convincing stroke. i want to believe it to protect myself. why care for those that do not care for you? i am an outcast, yet i know the most about you. this is my madness. i feel too much. i cannot help it. i would like for someone to utter to me once, "thank you" or even, as impossible as it is, "i love you" and i would like to have the tongue to tell, just once, "you are welcome" and "i love you too".
Sunday, December 5, 2010
the set-up: a true story
work in progress: this is the story of the day my parents and i were set-up while looking at used car.
we were looking at a mazda four door car. it was about the right price and the gentleman on the phone sounded older and asian. now, i try not to be prejudice but if i'm about to compliment an age group and an ethnicity, then that sort of makes being prejudice okay right? well, deal with it, i'm about to stereotype, (a little foreshadowing, the speaker will get what she deserves in this little tale of stereotyping and karma, so just hang tight). this gentleman had the soft, broken english voice of an older chinese man, which to me translated to: a good driver. let me explain. the elderly are a dicy group. they can either be wonderful drivers in the sense that they move quite slow and often don't leave the house and even when they do leave their homes, it's usually not during rush hour because they don't work. however, on the other hand, some elderly drivers are speeders, unable to properly gage how much pressure they are putting on the pedal (this isn't 'Nam, no one's going to get you if you're a bit slow), or perhaps they move too slow, afraid to be driving in this fast paced, maddening world. in addition, their eyesight is usually poor and their reaction time, well, let's just say a car doesn't turn quite the ol' horse and buggy used to. i was banking on this gentleman being like the former, a cautious, stay-at-home type. what encouraged me to this conclusion was his supposed ethnicity, Chinese. the asians know how to take care of things, i mean look at that rock wall they put up a while ago, the great wall of China, that thing has lasted...not like Berlin...but i digress again. the Chinese take pride in things they own, an ox, a chicken, a wife, a car. therefore, i concluded, this vehicle must be in good shape if a little, old, Chinese man is the owner.
when we arrived in downtown Hilo, the car was parked outside a demolition repair shop which, ironically, was fairly dilapidated. bad sign number one. however, since we drove an hour and a half to see this vehicle, i thought we should at least give it a shot. we walked around the car. it looked a bit run down, grime covering the body of the vehicle, but then again, i expected that from something quoted at under 2000.00. what was definitely more dirty than the vehicle was the suspicious specimen crossing the street next to us. perhaps we would not have noticed him if he wasn't staring so hard at us like some two-bit psychic trying to bend a spoon. furthermore, it appeared that this man hadn't seen a shower in sometime and considering that he came out of the bushes to cross the street only to re-enter into bushes on the other side, i felt like i was living the first couple minutes of a CSI episode. this man would be the harbinger for a set of ever queerer characters to enter this little story.
not more than thirty seconds passed since the bush man crossed the street, when we heard a slurring cry, "eh! eh! car!" except the 'r' wasn't really pronounced so it sounded like some loony bird was on the loose. "eh! eh! cah! cah!" and sure enough, it was one strange bird. a dented and rusted green mini van choked and huffed up to us. this vehicle looked like it had been involved in some extreme mini-van battles, a gladiator of the motor vehicle world, and it had lost, by a lot. the driver was in, if it can be believed, worse condition than the van. she stuck her head out the window, folds of skin cascading down her neck like layers of hot carmel on a carmel apple, and make-up so thick, she looked like a clown with two black eyes. she wore a low cut top that revealed too much of the wrinkled, spot covered pythons one may have called "boobs" about 15 years ago. "eh! you like da cah?" it took me a moment to process what she was saying, perhaps because i felt sucked into the vacuous space that was her wide open mouth. you see, teeth are the polite white picket fence guarding the cavernous opening of the mouth which ultimately leads to your mushy, personal insides. but this woman's fence, that is to say, her teeth, were mostly non-existent. perhaps they were taken by the state, in an effort to reclaim the entire real estate of her face which she had, in her time of obvious hard living, abused and failed to pay the proper taxes of acceptable social hygiene. whatever the case, there was one thing i was certain of, i felt dubious about this entire situation.
she repeated her question, "you like da cah?"
"yes, yes we want to look at the car" all this time i thought, "this woman does not look like what i imagined a little old Chinese man would look like".
"i selling dis cah for my boss".
"okay, well we want to test drive it" my dad chimed in.
"oh you like drive da cah?" i certainly wasn't to pay for something i didn't test drive which i assumed was fairly obvious.
"you follow me to my bosses house and we get da papahs"
"why don't we stay with the car?"
"i gotta get da key dat's why. you follow me to my bosses house. we get key, den drive cah".
i looked down at the woman's hands and she is clutching a bottle of pills. "we'll stay here and wait". bad sign number two.
the woman drove off and my dad turned to my mother and i and told us, "get in our truck, roll up the windows and lock the doors". to be honest, i usually find my dad to be overly paranoid and hostile, however seeing the woman's death grip on that bottle of pills, i could actually understand his concern. we were about to get into the car when we saw a medium sized black man crossing the street. now, let me pause here because i don't want to be conveyed as a racist; i am merely reporting the facts. this was a BLACK man. i know this because in Hawaii, especially on the Big Island, black people are like griffins, you don't see them everyday, and if you do see one, you take notice, it could be ten years before you see a different griffin. so when i say this man was black, i mean, he was black and what makes a black person stick out more than being compared to a griffin? expecting him to be Chinese. yes, this man, we found out was the owner of the elderly, Chinese man voice we heard on the phone a mere two hours ago. all my perceptions raced to me, each one smacking me like a overzealous nun at a Catholic school.
my dad signaled for us to get in the car and drive to a different location. he would stay and test drive the car. we left and parked around the corner. "i think we just got cased" my mother said. "a total set-up" i replied. even ashton kutcher couldn't be that convincing, rather, this was a real life scam. we sat thinking through the whole scene. of course someone would case a used car. people come with cash on hand all the time for these sorts of deals. it's expected. i had cash on hand. i started to wonder about my dad and this man. we had tried to call the seller when we first arrived and he said he would be over in five minutes. only after the woman in the mini-van left did he suddenly come walking across the street from the same area as the gawking man who came out of the bushes.
as i was processing all this, we saw dad walk up to the truck. "let's go" he said.
"so i'm guessing it's a no go with that car"
"that whole thing just really creeped me out"
"yeah, i think it was a set-up"
his voice elevated, "hell yeah it was a set up. i tried to get out of the car and found out that the driver side door was locked. i couldn't unlock it. you can only unlock it from the outside. i was stuck in there. the seller had to get out and unlock the door for me". he paused, "i mean, what kind of car unlocks only from the outside?"
we looked at each other. bad sign number three.
we were looking at a mazda four door car. it was about the right price and the gentleman on the phone sounded older and asian. now, i try not to be prejudice but if i'm about to compliment an age group and an ethnicity, then that sort of makes being prejudice okay right? well, deal with it, i'm about to stereotype, (a little foreshadowing, the speaker will get what she deserves in this little tale of stereotyping and karma, so just hang tight). this gentleman had the soft, broken english voice of an older chinese man, which to me translated to: a good driver. let me explain. the elderly are a dicy group. they can either be wonderful drivers in the sense that they move quite slow and often don't leave the house and even when they do leave their homes, it's usually not during rush hour because they don't work. however, on the other hand, some elderly drivers are speeders, unable to properly gage how much pressure they are putting on the pedal (this isn't 'Nam, no one's going to get you if you're a bit slow), or perhaps they move too slow, afraid to be driving in this fast paced, maddening world. in addition, their eyesight is usually poor and their reaction time, well, let's just say a car doesn't turn quite the ol' horse and buggy used to. i was banking on this gentleman being like the former, a cautious, stay-at-home type. what encouraged me to this conclusion was his supposed ethnicity, Chinese. the asians know how to take care of things, i mean look at that rock wall they put up a while ago, the great wall of China, that thing has lasted...not like Berlin...but i digress again. the Chinese take pride in things they own, an ox, a chicken, a wife, a car. therefore, i concluded, this vehicle must be in good shape if a little, old, Chinese man is the owner.
when we arrived in downtown Hilo, the car was parked outside a demolition repair shop which, ironically, was fairly dilapidated. bad sign number one. however, since we drove an hour and a half to see this vehicle, i thought we should at least give it a shot. we walked around the car. it looked a bit run down, grime covering the body of the vehicle, but then again, i expected that from something quoted at under 2000.00. what was definitely more dirty than the vehicle was the suspicious specimen crossing the street next to us. perhaps we would not have noticed him if he wasn't staring so hard at us like some two-bit psychic trying to bend a spoon. furthermore, it appeared that this man hadn't seen a shower in sometime and considering that he came out of the bushes to cross the street only to re-enter into bushes on the other side, i felt like i was living the first couple minutes of a CSI episode. this man would be the harbinger for a set of ever queerer characters to enter this little story.
not more than thirty seconds passed since the bush man crossed the street, when we heard a slurring cry, "eh! eh! car!" except the 'r' wasn't really pronounced so it sounded like some loony bird was on the loose. "eh! eh! cah! cah!" and sure enough, it was one strange bird. a dented and rusted green mini van choked and huffed up to us. this vehicle looked like it had been involved in some extreme mini-van battles, a gladiator of the motor vehicle world, and it had lost, by a lot. the driver was in, if it can be believed, worse condition than the van. she stuck her head out the window, folds of skin cascading down her neck like layers of hot carmel on a carmel apple, and make-up so thick, she looked like a clown with two black eyes. she wore a low cut top that revealed too much of the wrinkled, spot covered pythons one may have called "boobs" about 15 years ago. "eh! you like da cah?" it took me a moment to process what she was saying, perhaps because i felt sucked into the vacuous space that was her wide open mouth. you see, teeth are the polite white picket fence guarding the cavernous opening of the mouth which ultimately leads to your mushy, personal insides. but this woman's fence, that is to say, her teeth, were mostly non-existent. perhaps they were taken by the state, in an effort to reclaim the entire real estate of her face which she had, in her time of obvious hard living, abused and failed to pay the proper taxes of acceptable social hygiene. whatever the case, there was one thing i was certain of, i felt dubious about this entire situation.
she repeated her question, "you like da cah?"
"yes, yes we want to look at the car" all this time i thought, "this woman does not look like what i imagined a little old Chinese man would look like".
"i selling dis cah for my boss".
"okay, well we want to test drive it" my dad chimed in.
"oh you like drive da cah?" i certainly wasn't to pay for something i didn't test drive which i assumed was fairly obvious.
"you follow me to my bosses house and we get da papahs"
"why don't we stay with the car?"
"i gotta get da key dat's why. you follow me to my bosses house. we get key, den drive cah".
i looked down at the woman's hands and she is clutching a bottle of pills. "we'll stay here and wait". bad sign number two.
the woman drove off and my dad turned to my mother and i and told us, "get in our truck, roll up the windows and lock the doors". to be honest, i usually find my dad to be overly paranoid and hostile, however seeing the woman's death grip on that bottle of pills, i could actually understand his concern. we were about to get into the car when we saw a medium sized black man crossing the street. now, let me pause here because i don't want to be conveyed as a racist; i am merely reporting the facts. this was a BLACK man. i know this because in Hawaii, especially on the Big Island, black people are like griffins, you don't see them everyday, and if you do see one, you take notice, it could be ten years before you see a different griffin. so when i say this man was black, i mean, he was black and what makes a black person stick out more than being compared to a griffin? expecting him to be Chinese. yes, this man, we found out was the owner of the elderly, Chinese man voice we heard on the phone a mere two hours ago. all my perceptions raced to me, each one smacking me like a overzealous nun at a Catholic school.
my dad signaled for us to get in the car and drive to a different location. he would stay and test drive the car. we left and parked around the corner. "i think we just got cased" my mother said. "a total set-up" i replied. even ashton kutcher couldn't be that convincing, rather, this was a real life scam. we sat thinking through the whole scene. of course someone would case a used car. people come with cash on hand all the time for these sorts of deals. it's expected. i had cash on hand. i started to wonder about my dad and this man. we had tried to call the seller when we first arrived and he said he would be over in five minutes. only after the woman in the mini-van left did he suddenly come walking across the street from the same area as the gawking man who came out of the bushes.
as i was processing all this, we saw dad walk up to the truck. "let's go" he said.
"so i'm guessing it's a no go with that car"
"that whole thing just really creeped me out"
"yeah, i think it was a set-up"
his voice elevated, "hell yeah it was a set up. i tried to get out of the car and found out that the driver side door was locked. i couldn't unlock it. you can only unlock it from the outside. i was stuck in there. the seller had to get out and unlock the door for me". he paused, "i mean, what kind of car unlocks only from the outside?"
we looked at each other. bad sign number three.
Friday, December 3, 2010
open palm resistance
an open palm resistance
flush to my cheek
do i rejoice or weep?
when you put yourself here
what do you mean?
how do you mean?
this presence on my face
this hand gripped 'round my heart
are you holding
or are you holding?
who can explain
an open palm resistance?
then again,
who can explain you?
flush to my cheek
do i rejoice or weep?
when you put yourself here
what do you mean?
how do you mean?
this presence on my face
this hand gripped 'round my heart
are you holding
or are you holding?
who can explain
an open palm resistance?
then again,
who can explain you?
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
december 1...a proclamation
december is here once again. i find myself, like many others, raising my hands and shoulders asking the timeless question, "where did the time go?" how silly. like i could have conserved it, like i could have shaved a few seconds here and stored up a few seconds there and somehow stopped the rotation of the world and the revolution of our existence. how silly. and yet, i look at the calender, flip up another page to reveal a wintery landscape that has no actual relevance to Hawaii, but whose white symbolism tells me another year is fading out into untraceable light. gone. and how? and how.
i've got plans for december and i am reclaiming the end. i will not wait for january to begin again. it starts today. december 1st. each day, a new blog entry. i feel like a giddy young girl in her first week of her first relationship. isn't it grand? isn't it beautiful? isn't writing perfect? i smile, my metaphorical dimples filling with sunlight steeped in ignorance. but there you have it. i'm admitting it to the world (or, at least, whoever reads this blog) that i am a writer and i will be a better one yet. i'm in this for the long haul. til death do us part.
i've got plans for december and i am reclaiming the end. i will not wait for january to begin again. it starts today. december 1st. each day, a new blog entry. i feel like a giddy young girl in her first week of her first relationship. isn't it grand? isn't it beautiful? isn't writing perfect? i smile, my metaphorical dimples filling with sunlight steeped in ignorance. but there you have it. i'm admitting it to the world (or, at least, whoever reads this blog) that i am a writer and i will be a better one yet. i'm in this for the long haul. til death do us part.
loosening the knot
my finger nails are much too long. i lodge the tip of my tongue underneath one. this comformts me, surrounded in tightness by my own hardened, calcium mass. i feel the pressure of this thin edge confronting the thick and morphing muscle of my tongue. "what does a tongue know about survival?" my finger nail quips. "a tongue which is nothing more than a pompous romeo, making love to language, day in and day out, and calling these flicks and rolls and musclely miming of meaning a purpose!" i meet the pressure of the fingernail with more pressure from my tongue. both have a purpose, though so seemingly different they are in apparence and apparent function. and yet, how nicely they fit, the perfect amount of tension such that the tongue is contained as it ought not to be and the fingernail, lifted up is taken from it's security like it ought not to be. and so, i begin to slowly and deliberately open myself up.
i can parse myself into the tiniest pieces, smaller even than the atom. i can stack my thoughts like the most elegant glass beads, each sphere, cell-like and diaphanous, complicated only by the flush of self consciousness, anger, regret, pride and above all, love. i string myself along a line imperceptible such that when you look at me, truly look at me, you'll think i'm nothing more than a mass of colorful beads, spilling over myself and recollecting as best i can. you might even mistake me for waterdroplets silenced and shaped into a figure somewhat resembling a person. and perhaps you are correct. i am many pieces and yet i am one. how can this be? most days i am one. shedding light as i go, i sweat colors and feelings and impacts that often no one sees, the shine of my beads pass with their reflections. these days i am many pieces but i only notice that i am one. but when i get to thinking about myself, i start to loosen the knot. this awareness is something i like to call the hiccup in the cataclsym. i like staying in this place, turning over each bead of myself and thinking, "now isn't that one exotic?" how strangely magical the self can be.
and in the magical there is the mystery. the mystery for me has always been love. perhaps this is the case for most people but i don't dare speak for the masses. to me, love IS the cataclysm, the powerful surge that sends the beads of my being flying across the vast realm of logic, colors and emotions flung everywhere like the artwork of a toddler. forget the many pieces idea, i am only one. one post waiting for it's bird. forget the calm introspection. surely love is the cataclysm of the heart.
i can parse myself into the tiniest pieces, smaller even than the atom. i can stack my thoughts like the most elegant glass beads, each sphere, cell-like and diaphanous, complicated only by the flush of self consciousness, anger, regret, pride and above all, love. i string myself along a line imperceptible such that when you look at me, truly look at me, you'll think i'm nothing more than a mass of colorful beads, spilling over myself and recollecting as best i can. you might even mistake me for waterdroplets silenced and shaped into a figure somewhat resembling a person. and perhaps you are correct. i am many pieces and yet i am one. how can this be? most days i am one. shedding light as i go, i sweat colors and feelings and impacts that often no one sees, the shine of my beads pass with their reflections. these days i am many pieces but i only notice that i am one. but when i get to thinking about myself, i start to loosen the knot. this awareness is something i like to call the hiccup in the cataclsym. i like staying in this place, turning over each bead of myself and thinking, "now isn't that one exotic?" how strangely magical the self can be.
and in the magical there is the mystery. the mystery for me has always been love. perhaps this is the case for most people but i don't dare speak for the masses. to me, love IS the cataclysm, the powerful surge that sends the beads of my being flying across the vast realm of logic, colors and emotions flung everywhere like the artwork of a toddler. forget the many pieces idea, i am only one. one post waiting for it's bird. forget the calm introspection. surely love is the cataclysm of the heart.
Monday, November 1, 2010
and the desert discussed with me the meaning of such things
the desert is an interesting place that seems to spawn many big questions, the biggest perhaps being, what is life? what is the meaning of all of this? and, of course, why am i here? i'm not sure what exactly about the desert encourages such musings on universal meaning, perhaps its the wide open, vast, omnipresent connection to the sky, no trees to shelter you from the big, unblinking, omnipotent star we call the sun. or perhaps it's the fact that sitting out in the desert so thoroughly fries your skull that your brain is warmed up to a temperature of spiritual seeing, perhaps there's just so much energy coming into you at one time that the intense focus of light unlocks mysteries of the cosmos. then again, it could be heat stroke. whatever the cause, these mountains and chiseled rocks bring forth wonder.
i sat on a large boulder half way up the grisly form of Mount Lemmon. there i watched the sun set. the mountain ranges scooted away further and further into the horizon giving me the allusion that i was out in the middle of the ocean watching waves like mountain ranges, crashing against some foreign shore. will i ever reach beyond those mountains? and if i did, and i looked back, would i remember sitting here? will i ever be able to comprehend space that extends beyond my visual perception? to know, intimately every tract of land that i ever crossed, so should i go blind on3 day, i would have the entire world mapped in first-person picture frames?
i thought about seeing, as i always do, and with that, perception. why was i not happy? how could i look at such beauty, the beige sandstone rocks brought into visual relief by rusted red stone and carved into multi-sensory detail by a blue, blue sky, how could i look at this and not see? i was thinking of something else, responsibilities, friends not present, pain in my knees, letters i should be writing, i was honing in on everything but the gift set in front of me. but the desert is vast, and open, and blaring. it took a few hours, but i felt myself calm down as the sun began to sink. the landscape changed, beige rocks became lilac colored, what a visual feast! it is no wonder artists often paint the desert. no place is as clear or vibrant.
they say that everything in the desert is out to kill you, which is easy enough to see. most things that live in the desert are tough out of necessity, it's a harsh environment everyone knows. thus, most things come with thorns or stingers or razor sharp teeth. to the desert, i am thankful for the wisdoms it has already bestowed upon me. the first realization is the power of the senses. the desert has rekindled my awareness of my connection to the physical world. the beautiful vistas i see, the colors of sand, and mountains and saguaros, the hot, hot sun i feel flooding my being, the smell of plants transpiring in the heat, taste of water more sweet and satisfying than the greatest culinary masterpiece, the sound of the wind rushing round the desert walls. my senses become sharp and penetrating as a desert thorn. the second realization is more metaphysical/spiritual. the desert gives a sense of openness, a touch of being solitary, unique, entire, standing out against dramatic backgrounds. most importantly the desert reminds me to be thankful for what is provided, to learn to do without, to remember that life is not some easy luxury, rather that you are here because you were meant to be. it's harsh out here, in the world, the desert environment is perhaps the most obvious indicator, but here you are, nevertheless, in this strange and beautiful place, living, despite the odds. that's a damn amazing thing isn't it?
i sat on a large boulder half way up the grisly form of Mount Lemmon. there i watched the sun set. the mountain ranges scooted away further and further into the horizon giving me the allusion that i was out in the middle of the ocean watching waves like mountain ranges, crashing against some foreign shore. will i ever reach beyond those mountains? and if i did, and i looked back, would i remember sitting here? will i ever be able to comprehend space that extends beyond my visual perception? to know, intimately every tract of land that i ever crossed, so should i go blind on3 day, i would have the entire world mapped in first-person picture frames?
i thought about seeing, as i always do, and with that, perception. why was i not happy? how could i look at such beauty, the beige sandstone rocks brought into visual relief by rusted red stone and carved into multi-sensory detail by a blue, blue sky, how could i look at this and not see? i was thinking of something else, responsibilities, friends not present, pain in my knees, letters i should be writing, i was honing in on everything but the gift set in front of me. but the desert is vast, and open, and blaring. it took a few hours, but i felt myself calm down as the sun began to sink. the landscape changed, beige rocks became lilac colored, what a visual feast! it is no wonder artists often paint the desert. no place is as clear or vibrant.
they say that everything in the desert is out to kill you, which is easy enough to see. most things that live in the desert are tough out of necessity, it's a harsh environment everyone knows. thus, most things come with thorns or stingers or razor sharp teeth. to the desert, i am thankful for the wisdoms it has already bestowed upon me. the first realization is the power of the senses. the desert has rekindled my awareness of my connection to the physical world. the beautiful vistas i see, the colors of sand, and mountains and saguaros, the hot, hot sun i feel flooding my being, the smell of plants transpiring in the heat, taste of water more sweet and satisfying than the greatest culinary masterpiece, the sound of the wind rushing round the desert walls. my senses become sharp and penetrating as a desert thorn. the second realization is more metaphysical/spiritual. the desert gives a sense of openness, a touch of being solitary, unique, entire, standing out against dramatic backgrounds. most importantly the desert reminds me to be thankful for what is provided, to learn to do without, to remember that life is not some easy luxury, rather that you are here because you were meant to be. it's harsh out here, in the world, the desert environment is perhaps the most obvious indicator, but here you are, nevertheless, in this strange and beautiful place, living, despite the odds. that's a damn amazing thing isn't it?
a rant, is a rant, is a rant
in tucson arizona, in a room that is not mine. i've been discovering lately that very few things are mine. this, of course, upsets me a little, especially when one is desperately looking for a place to call one's own. of course, i'm talking about wolff's astute observation that every writer needs a room of her own. i would also like to add ms. wolff that any human being, not just the writer or the artist, needs a room, concrete or metaphorical, to call one's own.
i have also re-discovered (and i say re-discovered because this is a truth i already know but often times seem to forget) that i am a very fickle little artist. that is to say, my mind is not unlike a sacred budhist temple. this isn't to assume that my thoughts are somewhat holy, so please don't regard me as being so arrogant, rather, like a sacred temple (it doesn't have to be buddhist, i just know they have lots of temples and the asian thing is so in right now) my mind has much going on internally that does not manifest itself in noises, in the gutteral frequencies that we call speech, and it's so very fragile and tenuous really that any clamoring, yipping, yapping or otherwise presence of other human beings (i don't have problems with the other creatures...perhaps because i cannot tune in as easily to their conversations and therefore can often easily filter out their noises) can disrupt the gentle fabric of thoughts and the infrequent and delicate wisps of creativity that somehow drop into my brain.
ah, and so, i am in tucson arizona trying to find the balance between my solitary and somewhat grouchy and socially disagreeable writer self, and my all-observing, socially vibrant writer self (perhaps "socially vibrant" might be a stretch, but you get the picture). and so, like any writer, i'm turning my rant into a blog post, but i must put all revelations (often birthed by rants) onto the page so that i might reference them later. and so here is the bottom line, i am a fickle human being, moreover, i'm an extremely fickle writer. in fact, writing has become a sort of magic that can only be produced under the finest conditions such as having a quiet space with absolutely NO human voices, preferably in the morning with multiple cups of coffee at my disposal. now that i've written it, i realize i'm not really asking for the world. it just seems like it when you are traveling with five other people all the time in a van, going to places you've never been to, with spaces that aren't yours. i sit back and dream of my grandmother's house. how i cannot wait to sit and write in silence and coffee, write, write, write, til death do us part.
i have also re-discovered (and i say re-discovered because this is a truth i already know but often times seem to forget) that i am a very fickle little artist. that is to say, my mind is not unlike a sacred budhist temple. this isn't to assume that my thoughts are somewhat holy, so please don't regard me as being so arrogant, rather, like a sacred temple (it doesn't have to be buddhist, i just know they have lots of temples and the asian thing is so in right now) my mind has much going on internally that does not manifest itself in noises, in the gutteral frequencies that we call speech, and it's so very fragile and tenuous really that any clamoring, yipping, yapping or otherwise presence of other human beings (i don't have problems with the other creatures...perhaps because i cannot tune in as easily to their conversations and therefore can often easily filter out their noises) can disrupt the gentle fabric of thoughts and the infrequent and delicate wisps of creativity that somehow drop into my brain.
ah, and so, i am in tucson arizona trying to find the balance between my solitary and somewhat grouchy and socially disagreeable writer self, and my all-observing, socially vibrant writer self (perhaps "socially vibrant" might be a stretch, but you get the picture). and so, like any writer, i'm turning my rant into a blog post, but i must put all revelations (often birthed by rants) onto the page so that i might reference them later. and so here is the bottom line, i am a fickle human being, moreover, i'm an extremely fickle writer. in fact, writing has become a sort of magic that can only be produced under the finest conditions such as having a quiet space with absolutely NO human voices, preferably in the morning with multiple cups of coffee at my disposal. now that i've written it, i realize i'm not really asking for the world. it just seems like it when you are traveling with five other people all the time in a van, going to places you've never been to, with spaces that aren't yours. i sit back and dream of my grandmother's house. how i cannot wait to sit and write in silence and coffee, write, write, write, til death do us part.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Putting pen to Pennsylvania
(Condition/Place): I’m sitting in a house that I do not belong in. I try to remind myself to be thankful for the shelter because what are houses but glorified shelters, ones we soak with all sorts of symbolism?)
(Summary/Time): So what has happened in my long absence? I have holed myself away in the dense woods of the Allegheny National Forest writing letters, digging, pondering my future, my patience, my presence. Most times I just shoot the breeze with the boys. I sleep atop three sleeping pads, one, my personal deflated pad which acts mostly as a moisture absorber, and two foam pads. The three pad system keeps me barely comfortable. I live alone, which is nice, since I have a very small tolerance for ruckus of any kind until I am sound asleep. My tent is simple and perfectly sized for me. I keep things neat, one has to, especially when the nomadic life is your specialty. The clan will not wait for the slow, rather they’ll leave you to the bears. Ah, but in reality (and facing the obvious lawsuit) they do wait, with the occasional grunts and puffs (blame it on fatigue we say, which is, in a way, true; we’re all tired of one another). And so everything has its place should a sudden wind of restlessness brush my face, my feet moving toward the distant hills before my head has had a chance to swallow the notion let alone process exactly what to “pack”. The layout of my tent is entirely functional, which is to say, I pay absolutely no attention to feng shui, that’s the privilege of the stationary soul. No, my humble abode reflects the practical to the highest degree. It’s glory and a majority of the space is dedicated to a warm slumber nest. An all-down, burnt orange sleeping bag lay in heat giving significance atop my three sleeping pads. I then cover the sleeping bag with another, lighter weight bag that I have on loan. A small fleece that I procured from the Goodwill, is balled up by my feet. Next to my shrine of sleepdom is my pack, resting on its back, head off, my clothes pulled out and stuffed back in like some twisted disemboweling, emboweling ritual. Above the pack and close to my head (and heart) is a small library, a lovely collection of books I brought from home, some that have been sent to me while here and of course, as any addict is expected to do, the ones I bought while in Pennsylvania. (I have no self control). I have even improvised a clothes line (if you can call it that, it’s more like a small slip of string) in my tent to dry out my ever soggy clothes. Outside my tent door, resting beaten and muddy are two boots well past their prime (But don’t we have fun guys? Don’t we have fun?). Inside the right boot, a bottle of Yellow Tail Cabernet wine stands tall and chilled. It’s a small little home, not glorified with indoor plumbing or electricity or heat, but it’s mine, and this fact is perhaps its greatest feature and the most symbolic.
Allegheny is a place of Faulkner skies, on the verge of something dramatic, always, unexpected always, blue, blue skies exaggerated by yellow beech tree eyeliner, or grey to darker grey storm clouds with rain so thick the whole world looks blurry. This is how I’ve come to know Pennsylvania, rolling hills and unpredictable weather. Perhaps that’s just winter slide tackling fall. Regardless, we receive about as many rainy days as sunny ones which, to anyone who lives and works outside, translates to, we have more rainy days than our drowning morals know what to do with. We are camped off a forest service road on what used to be an old farm. However, it takes a whole lot of squinting and even more imagination to see this place as a farm. Beech trees have all but completely taken over and the hemlock forests on either side of the narrow strip of high grasses clench tightly and possessively at the edges. Sometimes I feel should the wind blow hard enough, the dark pines will topple right over this small open space, engulfing me entirely in wilderness.
There is something highly charged about this forest. It took me over a week to settle into the uneasy feeling that the “farm” gave me at night. It wasn’t bears or killer hawks I was afraid of, though, of course, these spooky creatures did linger menacingly in the back of my consciousness. What really gets to me, what really sends me into hallucinatory, catatonic still framed Dali inscribed fits, are my dreams. I don’t always remember my dreams, in fact, most mornings, it’s as if I had only been staring at dark all night long, nothing interesting to report, make my coffee, eat my cereal, press on with my day. But here, things are different. I awake every morning remembering what I dreamt and furthermore, I believe for a moment (and sometimes for entire days) that what was happening in my sleeping life was actually a part of my waking life. of course, I run this by my crew mates, asking if we discussed this or did that, and always they look at me with a blank stare, like I’m, well, crazy. Sure enough, these things have happened and these people in my subconscious are, in fact, real. (Perhaps that is why I’ve been so numb to my waking existence because my subconscious life seems more plausible, nay, more enticing and exciting. Perhaps this world, of money making, food eating and shelter having is only to support my sleeping habit which, this place has convinced me, might just be my awakening to my true life…). I tried to shrug off these strangely vivid and life-like dreams, but now that I’m well into four weeks, I have a sneaking suspicion that this place vibrates with an energy that is not exactly malicious, but is slightly dangerous. The other night I dreamt I re-injured my knee. There was a bloody hair tie to signify my wound. I was laughed at and left to seek treatment on my own. All my crew mates were there, but they seemed occupied by other things, meanwhile, I could barely walk. I tried to work anyway. I awoke shortly after, inspected my knee and found nothing besides the usual puffiness. I babied it for the rest of the day. I know, deep down, that one of these days, my luck on the trail will run out. I will slip and fall and it’s very likely that I will rip or tear or break something. I proceed cautiously, each downhill step, I focus on my quadriceps and hamstrings and IT band, “cradle that knee”, I say, “like the three wise men would cradle the baby Jesus”. And so I go about my days here in the forest, intensely focused on everything besides the work in front of me. Slogging through mud, I hone in on my muscles, calculate the days and live in the shards of dreams remembered from the previous night.
Work is work. That’s what I tell people who ask me how it’s going on the trail. It’s a job. I’m thankful I have one. It’s not very exciting, but that’s how it goes. I have been jabbing a pick into the rib cage of a forested slope for the last twenty five days. It’s monotonous and back breaking work, not to mention the trail that has been lined out for us, is, in my humble opinion, poorly designed. But what do I know? I just swings my pick and pull out dirt good mastah’, gets me some money, try to make a livin’. But my fantasy prone mind has perhaps gone too far. I’m no sharecropper, though, on the rainy days when it’s too cold and too wet to take breaks, when my pick is slipping under my soil soaked gloves and I’m drenched to the bone, I feel a sense of pseudo-slave labor. Of course, I smile at this thought, myself in tattered clothes, or even better, in black and white stripes chained to the guy next to me. If it’s not my life entirely, that’s okay, I just want to get close enough to feel it, just once, feel sodden existence, for a moment and know, most powerfully, that I can free myself at any moment. My mind is a keeper of many worlds, I go anywhere at anytime. Of course, this is dependent upon comfort. The pick slips again and gets lodged in the mud. It’s tough to extract, cold water drips down the back of my neck carving around the serpentine glaciers of my spine. Suddenly I’m me, again, cold, miserable, focusing on my muscles, one task only, remove the pick, then dig your way out of this dreaded crew.
Then the sun shines. How beautiful that radiant star! Ah, praise the woods I say! Praise the simple life! How fickle I am; an ant has more conviction. And so I oscillate between happiness and depression, my moods following the lumpy rise and fall of the Pennsylvania topography, at night I dream of scarily real situations, in the mornings I wake, completely asleep.
Standing on the horizon of the conclusion of this trip, I try not to reprimand myself for my gloomy outlook, I try to blame my disenchantment on the weather, on the work, on physical fatigue. But as I lay on my back, fighting spasms kicking like little demons in my lower lumbar, I think, what does it take to make me happy? Would I have rather not have done this crew? I can answer immediately, no, I am glad I stayed on with the crew. What then of the darkness, of the frustration, of the muddied metallic taste that lives in my mouth, that plates my face and provokes a false reflection of events? How has this come to be? I look at my hands, fat with muscle, but tired, lines creased deeply. Perhaps that’s just it. Perhaps, I’m starting to take on the weathered look of my body, my heart feeling like my boots. Sometimes I feel my sole wearing thin. I just want to rest, sit a while, maybe even stay…
(Summary/Time): So what has happened in my long absence? I have holed myself away in the dense woods of the Allegheny National Forest writing letters, digging, pondering my future, my patience, my presence. Most times I just shoot the breeze with the boys. I sleep atop three sleeping pads, one, my personal deflated pad which acts mostly as a moisture absorber, and two foam pads. The three pad system keeps me barely comfortable. I live alone, which is nice, since I have a very small tolerance for ruckus of any kind until I am sound asleep. My tent is simple and perfectly sized for me. I keep things neat, one has to, especially when the nomadic life is your specialty. The clan will not wait for the slow, rather they’ll leave you to the bears. Ah, but in reality (and facing the obvious lawsuit) they do wait, with the occasional grunts and puffs (blame it on fatigue we say, which is, in a way, true; we’re all tired of one another). And so everything has its place should a sudden wind of restlessness brush my face, my feet moving toward the distant hills before my head has had a chance to swallow the notion let alone process exactly what to “pack”. The layout of my tent is entirely functional, which is to say, I pay absolutely no attention to feng shui, that’s the privilege of the stationary soul. No, my humble abode reflects the practical to the highest degree. It’s glory and a majority of the space is dedicated to a warm slumber nest. An all-down, burnt orange sleeping bag lay in heat giving significance atop my three sleeping pads. I then cover the sleeping bag with another, lighter weight bag that I have on loan. A small fleece that I procured from the Goodwill, is balled up by my feet. Next to my shrine of sleepdom is my pack, resting on its back, head off, my clothes pulled out and stuffed back in like some twisted disemboweling, emboweling ritual. Above the pack and close to my head (and heart) is a small library, a lovely collection of books I brought from home, some that have been sent to me while here and of course, as any addict is expected to do, the ones I bought while in Pennsylvania. (I have no self control). I have even improvised a clothes line (if you can call it that, it’s more like a small slip of string) in my tent to dry out my ever soggy clothes. Outside my tent door, resting beaten and muddy are two boots well past their prime (But don’t we have fun guys? Don’t we have fun?). Inside the right boot, a bottle of Yellow Tail Cabernet wine stands tall and chilled. It’s a small little home, not glorified with indoor plumbing or electricity or heat, but it’s mine, and this fact is perhaps its greatest feature and the most symbolic.
Allegheny is a place of Faulkner skies, on the verge of something dramatic, always, unexpected always, blue, blue skies exaggerated by yellow beech tree eyeliner, or grey to darker grey storm clouds with rain so thick the whole world looks blurry. This is how I’ve come to know Pennsylvania, rolling hills and unpredictable weather. Perhaps that’s just winter slide tackling fall. Regardless, we receive about as many rainy days as sunny ones which, to anyone who lives and works outside, translates to, we have more rainy days than our drowning morals know what to do with. We are camped off a forest service road on what used to be an old farm. However, it takes a whole lot of squinting and even more imagination to see this place as a farm. Beech trees have all but completely taken over and the hemlock forests on either side of the narrow strip of high grasses clench tightly and possessively at the edges. Sometimes I feel should the wind blow hard enough, the dark pines will topple right over this small open space, engulfing me entirely in wilderness.
There is something highly charged about this forest. It took me over a week to settle into the uneasy feeling that the “farm” gave me at night. It wasn’t bears or killer hawks I was afraid of, though, of course, these spooky creatures did linger menacingly in the back of my consciousness. What really gets to me, what really sends me into hallucinatory, catatonic still framed Dali inscribed fits, are my dreams. I don’t always remember my dreams, in fact, most mornings, it’s as if I had only been staring at dark all night long, nothing interesting to report, make my coffee, eat my cereal, press on with my day. But here, things are different. I awake every morning remembering what I dreamt and furthermore, I believe for a moment (and sometimes for entire days) that what was happening in my sleeping life was actually a part of my waking life. of course, I run this by my crew mates, asking if we discussed this or did that, and always they look at me with a blank stare, like I’m, well, crazy. Sure enough, these things have happened and these people in my subconscious are, in fact, real. (Perhaps that is why I’ve been so numb to my waking existence because my subconscious life seems more plausible, nay, more enticing and exciting. Perhaps this world, of money making, food eating and shelter having is only to support my sleeping habit which, this place has convinced me, might just be my awakening to my true life…). I tried to shrug off these strangely vivid and life-like dreams, but now that I’m well into four weeks, I have a sneaking suspicion that this place vibrates with an energy that is not exactly malicious, but is slightly dangerous. The other night I dreamt I re-injured my knee. There was a bloody hair tie to signify my wound. I was laughed at and left to seek treatment on my own. All my crew mates were there, but they seemed occupied by other things, meanwhile, I could barely walk. I tried to work anyway. I awoke shortly after, inspected my knee and found nothing besides the usual puffiness. I babied it for the rest of the day. I know, deep down, that one of these days, my luck on the trail will run out. I will slip and fall and it’s very likely that I will rip or tear or break something. I proceed cautiously, each downhill step, I focus on my quadriceps and hamstrings and IT band, “cradle that knee”, I say, “like the three wise men would cradle the baby Jesus”. And so I go about my days here in the forest, intensely focused on everything besides the work in front of me. Slogging through mud, I hone in on my muscles, calculate the days and live in the shards of dreams remembered from the previous night.
Work is work. That’s what I tell people who ask me how it’s going on the trail. It’s a job. I’m thankful I have one. It’s not very exciting, but that’s how it goes. I have been jabbing a pick into the rib cage of a forested slope for the last twenty five days. It’s monotonous and back breaking work, not to mention the trail that has been lined out for us, is, in my humble opinion, poorly designed. But what do I know? I just swings my pick and pull out dirt good mastah’, gets me some money, try to make a livin’. But my fantasy prone mind has perhaps gone too far. I’m no sharecropper, though, on the rainy days when it’s too cold and too wet to take breaks, when my pick is slipping under my soil soaked gloves and I’m drenched to the bone, I feel a sense of pseudo-slave labor. Of course, I smile at this thought, myself in tattered clothes, or even better, in black and white stripes chained to the guy next to me. If it’s not my life entirely, that’s okay, I just want to get close enough to feel it, just once, feel sodden existence, for a moment and know, most powerfully, that I can free myself at any moment. My mind is a keeper of many worlds, I go anywhere at anytime. Of course, this is dependent upon comfort. The pick slips again and gets lodged in the mud. It’s tough to extract, cold water drips down the back of my neck carving around the serpentine glaciers of my spine. Suddenly I’m me, again, cold, miserable, focusing on my muscles, one task only, remove the pick, then dig your way out of this dreaded crew.
Then the sun shines. How beautiful that radiant star! Ah, praise the woods I say! Praise the simple life! How fickle I am; an ant has more conviction. And so I oscillate between happiness and depression, my moods following the lumpy rise and fall of the Pennsylvania topography, at night I dream of scarily real situations, in the mornings I wake, completely asleep.
Standing on the horizon of the conclusion of this trip, I try not to reprimand myself for my gloomy outlook, I try to blame my disenchantment on the weather, on the work, on physical fatigue. But as I lay on my back, fighting spasms kicking like little demons in my lower lumbar, I think, what does it take to make me happy? Would I have rather not have done this crew? I can answer immediately, no, I am glad I stayed on with the crew. What then of the darkness, of the frustration, of the muddied metallic taste that lives in my mouth, that plates my face and provokes a false reflection of events? How has this come to be? I look at my hands, fat with muscle, but tired, lines creased deeply. Perhaps that’s just it. Perhaps, I’m starting to take on the weathered look of my body, my heart feeling like my boots. Sometimes I feel my sole wearing thin. I just want to rest, sit a while, maybe even stay…
Saturday, October 2, 2010
haikus
two birch trees are one,
strangling or embracing,
what difference is one?
two birch trees are one,
twins, born of their mother tall,
scabbling siblings
two birch trees are one,
alone i sing solemn song
all's one, i am none
strangling or embracing,
what difference is one?
two birch trees are one,
twins, born of their mother tall,
scabbling siblings
two birch trees are one,
alone i sing solemn song
all's one, i am none
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
alaska
could i tire of waking thus? the sunlight cuts mountains in silohettes of dark green, and grins, unabashed, at temperate sea water that licks at the pelvis of the bay. how could anyone tire of such a scene? hemlock crowds the coast line and a few ceders poke their heads above the masses, the red pines throw their limbs out claiming as much sun as can be taken in such a competitive forest. i am high up in a house made of wood, some ceder, some fir, i gaze out a plane that was once fine rock, this glass eye, and i brush the tops of the trees with my dreams.
few places are as grand as this and those that are may very well lack the magic of this place. i am speaking, of course, about alaska. the great, open, wild, the place of wonder, the last frontier, where people go to remember that they are more than just people, that they are apart of something bigger, that they are small and animal and special and bright. i dream every night. the dreams are clear and real. in fact, i often wake wondering if i had slept at all. people in my past rush up against me with the intensity of the present and i welcome them without question, like no time has passed. perhaps that's why we like to sleep. not only for rest, but for the illusion that time stops. dreams can span years, they progress or regress without consequence, the present is perpetual.
few places are as grand as this and those that are may very well lack the magic of this place. i am speaking, of course, about alaska. the great, open, wild, the place of wonder, the last frontier, where people go to remember that they are more than just people, that they are apart of something bigger, that they are small and animal and special and bright. i dream every night. the dreams are clear and real. in fact, i often wake wondering if i had slept at all. people in my past rush up against me with the intensity of the present and i welcome them without question, like no time has passed. perhaps that's why we like to sleep. not only for rest, but for the illusion that time stops. dreams can span years, they progress or regress without consequence, the present is perpetual.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
scribbles in Oregon
MAX:
"how many of us lie on a day-to-day basis? do you remember your first lie?"
i don't. how did i know i was lying? i must have felt bad, i mean, i had to have or else i wouldn't know, right? did i feel guilty? have you ever? these are questions i ask you on the train to pass time and we both know there's no point in filling your eyes with more non-sense. i get a sneaking suspicion that i'm dying. don't ask me how. it's just the way my bones feel bumping over these uneven rails in this cool, too cool car. yes, i think i'll explode quietly perhaps right here, right now, while we're talking about lying. lying. what a horrible little mess i'd make (i make) they'd never get this car clean before morning. and what about all the other commuters? maybe i'll quietly errupt when we get home, less of a hassel there, just close the blinds, no one else would need to know.
"what do you think people think about on the train?"
you would rather read your book. you shrug your shoulders. do we think at all? or is there just a dull white buzz at the ends of our spines? i can't stop thinking. ah it never feels good in here. slinking on trains, waiting patiently in my insanity. i rub my head, same metal wall, same sore spot. i'll crack my head open soon if i'm not careful.
7 VIRTUES:
i. insular. i. insular. i insular here. i feel insular here and the wheels keep moving in this place but i hover above like steam over the rich black expanse of french pressed coffee. this is the experience of newness in a manic dance techno-clubbing skin strip. changing hands, exchanging hands, what's to be dealt next? i calibrate myself to the circadian rhythm of the city, or try to at least, just remember to blink
"how many of us lie on a day-to-day basis? do you remember your first lie?"
i don't. how did i know i was lying? i must have felt bad, i mean, i had to have or else i wouldn't know, right? did i feel guilty? have you ever? these are questions i ask you on the train to pass time and we both know there's no point in filling your eyes with more non-sense. i get a sneaking suspicion that i'm dying. don't ask me how. it's just the way my bones feel bumping over these uneven rails in this cool, too cool car. yes, i think i'll explode quietly perhaps right here, right now, while we're talking about lying. lying. what a horrible little mess i'd make (i make) they'd never get this car clean before morning. and what about all the other commuters? maybe i'll quietly errupt when we get home, less of a hassel there, just close the blinds, no one else would need to know.
"what do you think people think about on the train?"
you would rather read your book. you shrug your shoulders. do we think at all? or is there just a dull white buzz at the ends of our spines? i can't stop thinking. ah it never feels good in here. slinking on trains, waiting patiently in my insanity. i rub my head, same metal wall, same sore spot. i'll crack my head open soon if i'm not careful.
7 VIRTUES:
i. insular. i. insular. i insular here. i feel insular here and the wheels keep moving in this place but i hover above like steam over the rich black expanse of french pressed coffee. this is the experience of newness in a manic dance techno-clubbing skin strip. changing hands, exchanging hands, what's to be dealt next? i calibrate myself to the circadian rhythm of the city, or try to at least, just remember to blink
re-cap of my travels, for those following along
i wake up to a beautiful scene. unzipping the tent that's set up on the second floor of this house, i feel i'm play camping, except this is real, this entire life is so bitingly real. and besides, i've grown accustomed to living in a tent. there is something very comforting about such simple accommadations. the small space a sanctuary from the outside world, small enough to seem inconsequential to most passerby, except for the inhabitant who knows that this is the entirety of the little corner of space she requires. and so, i awake in a tent situated by windows that face El Capitan cove. i stretch out my short body and see a fog caught in the middle of sleeping and waking. it, too, is stretching it's slightly bigger body over this cove. the sunlight is orange as it tends to be when in it first spills over the rounded edge of the earth, the light all new and potent, not yet diffused in the atmosphere. i take the scene in, the little boats lodge themselves down in the corner on a placid, reflective water, furry, bristly pines jut out vertically and meet the horizontal fog to frame this work. i inhale. how lovely. how very lucky i am to be in alaska again.
i was just in portland, Oregon and before that i spent some time in the bay area of California. it's been a strange progression from Virginia to here. in Virginia i became comfortable with the speed of the southern life, with the friendly conversations and the slow step. then off to California where things were faster and bigger and "better". luckily i was staying just outside the metropolis of San Francisco, otherwise i would have probably become so deaf and blind, i'd scarcely be able to fumble around in quiet hushes of the woods. i saw all sorts of people in the city. in fact, one could even say, i was becoming an expert at watching people, so, so, so many people in one place and so different, yet so similar. onto berkeley and a different pace, still a city but with a friend who equally enjoyed sitting on benches watching life zoom by. on a train 17 hours north along the coast of California and Oregon. Portland and shopping late into the evening. my first brush with IKEA the swedish furniture company. showrooms and feeling lost, or more accurately, disconnected from my life. too much business, too much impressions and hopeful illusions of permanence. the closing of doors and putting together of beds and tables. yet my writing flourished here, thanks in great part to a lovely porch. good coffee and a very different and cool vibe. and finally here. float planes and good food. family and comfort. waiting for the poop to burn, picking snap peas, canning halibut. then rolling a rock up hill and making a muddy mess in the front yard. cursing the rock, pleading with the rock, cursing again, then retiring for a tub bath.
my life seems so unreal sometimes. i've seen so many things and experienced so many things. i can only feel very fortunate and thankful to all those who have taken me in, spent time with me, talked with me, in essence, shared their lives with me. it has been truly an awesome trip.
i was just in portland, Oregon and before that i spent some time in the bay area of California. it's been a strange progression from Virginia to here. in Virginia i became comfortable with the speed of the southern life, with the friendly conversations and the slow step. then off to California where things were faster and bigger and "better". luckily i was staying just outside the metropolis of San Francisco, otherwise i would have probably become so deaf and blind, i'd scarcely be able to fumble around in quiet hushes of the woods. i saw all sorts of people in the city. in fact, one could even say, i was becoming an expert at watching people, so, so, so many people in one place and so different, yet so similar. onto berkeley and a different pace, still a city but with a friend who equally enjoyed sitting on benches watching life zoom by. on a train 17 hours north along the coast of California and Oregon. Portland and shopping late into the evening. my first brush with IKEA the swedish furniture company. showrooms and feeling lost, or more accurately, disconnected from my life. too much business, too much impressions and hopeful illusions of permanence. the closing of doors and putting together of beds and tables. yet my writing flourished here, thanks in great part to a lovely porch. good coffee and a very different and cool vibe. and finally here. float planes and good food. family and comfort. waiting for the poop to burn, picking snap peas, canning halibut. then rolling a rock up hill and making a muddy mess in the front yard. cursing the rock, pleading with the rock, cursing again, then retiring for a tub bath.
my life seems so unreal sometimes. i've seen so many things and experienced so many things. i can only feel very fortunate and thankful to all those who have taken me in, spent time with me, talked with me, in essence, shared their lives with me. it has been truly an awesome trip.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
enter ellipses
we are strangers again, known to one another as drifting. we are strangers re-meeting, fumbling introductions, but knowing, we are strangers closing in on the same glances and steps, dispersing. we are strangers who never forgot. we are known strangers.
redirecting
flashing, flashing, the air is cool, quite a bit cooler than the bay area of california, but then again, that's no surprise. the sky is grey giving it that melancholy look to inspire close introspection if for nothing more than the elation of feeling one with the masses of dramatists who in looking so deeply within themselves happened upon great universal truths. or so they thought, and so, absolutely, you thought. i see a clearing in a hemlock grove, a clearing, i am certain no one else truly knows or understands, save maybe the native americans because, they, after all, were a spiritually enlightened bunch. i laugh at my romantic infatuation with a gloomy sky. how is it that on the clouded days, i feel i can see more clearly? what a mixed up bumble bee i am.
still. i'm on a porch typing. a black and white cat gently and sleekly ascends three concrete steps across the street. surely this is how any great artist starts, watching cats on the street...hell, we have to start somewhere.
so what am i doing here in portland? redirecting. and recollecting. cashing in the check of my experiences and trying to get these fat and feeble fingers to feel their way through the eons of life that i have been observing. i feel i've been underwater. it's the only way i can describe it because when one is underwater, one feels weightless, motions slow and language, verbal language is halted. there is only sight and touch, a bit of sound. taste is strange. i've observed people like a diver observes the underwater creatures. i record it all in my memory, if only i had a pen that could write under water!
and so, an older gentleman in his late fourties, balding, his hair receding as quickly as his figure, crosses the street wearing a pair of converses with tie dye socks. a squirrel collects nuts. i feel the urge to smoke a cigarette, not because i like them, but because the tone of this scene would comply, encourage it, i dare say. the squirrels here are bold. a beautiful red head, hair long, eyes icy blue but gentle, joins me on the step. i want to touch her but that could come across as a bit rash, a bit too forward. she settles and watches the street. you look so soft, could i, could i offer you a bite to eat? but i dare not disturb. i will accept this distance. just as every orbiting creature touches, not all paths are destined to trace the same pace. it's a difficult concept to understand and yet, it's probably the simplest. we are funny little creatures, making things always more complicated than it ought to be. the cute little red head understands it no doubt but she's a cat after all and as such has always had more sense than people.
still. i'm on a porch typing. a black and white cat gently and sleekly ascends three concrete steps across the street. surely this is how any great artist starts, watching cats on the street...hell, we have to start somewhere.
so what am i doing here in portland? redirecting. and recollecting. cashing in the check of my experiences and trying to get these fat and feeble fingers to feel their way through the eons of life that i have been observing. i feel i've been underwater. it's the only way i can describe it because when one is underwater, one feels weightless, motions slow and language, verbal language is halted. there is only sight and touch, a bit of sound. taste is strange. i've observed people like a diver observes the underwater creatures. i record it all in my memory, if only i had a pen that could write under water!
and so, an older gentleman in his late fourties, balding, his hair receding as quickly as his figure, crosses the street wearing a pair of converses with tie dye socks. a squirrel collects nuts. i feel the urge to smoke a cigarette, not because i like them, but because the tone of this scene would comply, encourage it, i dare say. the squirrels here are bold. a beautiful red head, hair long, eyes icy blue but gentle, joins me on the step. i want to touch her but that could come across as a bit rash, a bit too forward. she settles and watches the street. you look so soft, could i, could i offer you a bite to eat? but i dare not disturb. i will accept this distance. just as every orbiting creature touches, not all paths are destined to trace the same pace. it's a difficult concept to understand and yet, it's probably the simplest. we are funny little creatures, making things always more complicated than it ought to be. the cute little red head understands it no doubt but she's a cat after all and as such has always had more sense than people.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
mutter, mutter
the majesty of the redwoods is probably too great for my words and how they inspire so many aspiring poets. my head swims in all the light infused images i've seen over the past week. how to transcribe them into black and white, little, uniformed letters? ah.
i don't have a camera save for the one on my cell phone. i'm not sure if i would want one. i have a video camera, but i rarely use it. how come? i fear i will lose all the images i've accumulated in these several splendid months. how long can my memory hold them? but they are so delicate and so utterly amazing that i am afraid to even attempt fixing them to something as prosaic as this virtual page. hrm...maybe i should have taken pictures. i have so many experiences and i should be writing them all. a guilt overwhelms me. but alas, here i am, stalling. my only hope is that someday these varied experiences will manifest themselves into some story, that i will unravel a tear jerking metaphor about everlasting beauty and the Muir woods, or uncontrollable laughter and blasting absurd rap music in a rental car.
why don't i take pictures? is it a mistake? similar to my silly refusal to sign up for airline miles? how long will my memory last?
it's difficult to strike a balance between writing over the experience and not logging the experience at all. i remember when i was younger i wrote in my journal quite often. i catalogued most things, and sometimes i was so busy trying to capture the moment with my writing that i often missed it. i would envy those that could sit and stare at a beautiful scene and let the whole splendid thing wash over them without trying to capture it. now here i am, one of those people and i'm wondering why i'm not recording any of this. i just can't seem to make up my mind.
perhaps it's discipline i lack. i remember i once kept a daily journal for someone. i would collect little snippets from my day and detail them in a small moleskine notebook. i wrote every night. dedication. discipline. of course, i gave this journal away. i wasn't keeping it for me. but i should have. my days recorded. i would have enjoyed re-reading that. remembering the nuances of my days. alas, i lack that discipline for myself.
september 2. that's good enough. today. i'll start keeping a journal today. i chuckle. i've made this promise before. i should really try to keep it.
i don't have a camera save for the one on my cell phone. i'm not sure if i would want one. i have a video camera, but i rarely use it. how come? i fear i will lose all the images i've accumulated in these several splendid months. how long can my memory hold them? but they are so delicate and so utterly amazing that i am afraid to even attempt fixing them to something as prosaic as this virtual page. hrm...maybe i should have taken pictures. i have so many experiences and i should be writing them all. a guilt overwhelms me. but alas, here i am, stalling. my only hope is that someday these varied experiences will manifest themselves into some story, that i will unravel a tear jerking metaphor about everlasting beauty and the Muir woods, or uncontrollable laughter and blasting absurd rap music in a rental car.
why don't i take pictures? is it a mistake? similar to my silly refusal to sign up for airline miles? how long will my memory last?
it's difficult to strike a balance between writing over the experience and not logging the experience at all. i remember when i was younger i wrote in my journal quite often. i catalogued most things, and sometimes i was so busy trying to capture the moment with my writing that i often missed it. i would envy those that could sit and stare at a beautiful scene and let the whole splendid thing wash over them without trying to capture it. now here i am, one of those people and i'm wondering why i'm not recording any of this. i just can't seem to make up my mind.
perhaps it's discipline i lack. i remember i once kept a daily journal for someone. i would collect little snippets from my day and detail them in a small moleskine notebook. i wrote every night. dedication. discipline. of course, i gave this journal away. i wasn't keeping it for me. but i should have. my days recorded. i would have enjoyed re-reading that. remembering the nuances of my days. alas, i lack that discipline for myself.
september 2. that's good enough. today. i'll start keeping a journal today. i chuckle. i've made this promise before. i should really try to keep it.
a time for rest
i'm still vibrating too quickly, the quiver of caffeine or the twitch of intensity, i cannot decide, either way i'm moving much too fast. how do i know? my body. i should be thankful it's only a little cold, a small act of defiance that tells me "today you will rest" despite what your mind says you should do. this is a time for rest.
it's difficult to come down after spending three months running, running, running on the high winds of new experiences, new people, new places, revelations. it all came crashing into me at once and i'm still running, hoping to forcefully and aggressively charge into more change. but my body says enough, enough, enough. it's been a tough three months, going up and down mountains, digging holes, moving rocks, learning about new people, attaching yourself then having to detach so quickly. suddenly i had become responsible for someone besides myself. it was a scary and difficult concept for me to fully comprehend. but now, three months later, i know more acutely the joy of being responsible for just myself again. where once i thought i was limited, i realize i am free. i am free.
but not too free, this body says. don't get carried away, this body says. and so i'm taking the day off. i'm writing again. maybe i'll go for a walk later. but mostly i am enjoying simply passing time. i cannot say when i did that last.
as so i thank my body for gently reminding me that we cannot be all speed, all the time. there must be pause, there must be contemplation, there must be time to let the significance of everything that has been and everything that is sink into you and be known, be known and appreciated.
it's difficult to come down after spending three months running, running, running on the high winds of new experiences, new people, new places, revelations. it all came crashing into me at once and i'm still running, hoping to forcefully and aggressively charge into more change. but my body says enough, enough, enough. it's been a tough three months, going up and down mountains, digging holes, moving rocks, learning about new people, attaching yourself then having to detach so quickly. suddenly i had become responsible for someone besides myself. it was a scary and difficult concept for me to fully comprehend. but now, three months later, i know more acutely the joy of being responsible for just myself again. where once i thought i was limited, i realize i am free. i am free.
but not too free, this body says. don't get carried away, this body says. and so i'm taking the day off. i'm writing again. maybe i'll go for a walk later. but mostly i am enjoying simply passing time. i cannot say when i did that last.
as so i thank my body for gently reminding me that we cannot be all speed, all the time. there must be pause, there must be contemplation, there must be time to let the significance of everything that has been and everything that is sink into you and be known, be known and appreciated.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
VA Life Summer 2010
I.
it's strange trying to figure out time. there never seems to be quite enough or perhaps there's way too much. lately, i feel as if there is a shortage of time. my first crew has come and gone and i look back and think, all we had was time. where did it go? it's not fair that time should move so fast as you grow older; you're not equipped to keep up.
where should i take you? should i recount time? i spent a month camped out on a forest service road named Pocahontas. we named our place camp Taiwan on a night of bleary-eyed sleep deprivation. we felt we were in another place altogether, half-magical, half-far, far, far off. the beaten path was laid down into this place well before our arrival. we were second rate settlers, though i doubt that Pocahontas was the first. the road meanders for about 3 miles, gravel and dust that illuminates sun rays which are otherwise much too shy to reveal themselves. the heart of camp Taiwan was open and large as it needed to be to direct the coursing of a curiously crafted collective. we strung up a tarp in this center area and deemed it a kitchen. bulky Rubbermaid tubs stuffed with food and supplies squatted under the plastic shelter like big league catchers. the propane stove sat on the earth like a primitive robot and our cardboard boxes full of miscellaneous materials tried their best to look contained and collected in the corner. my co-leader and i sat in the back of our shiny red Ford SUV rental and looked at the home we created. our little red wagon was hitched to a star and all we could do was hold our breath and hope we wouldn't fall out of the sky.
the kids arrived at the airport on time. we split the group such that i took the first 3 kids to arrive and we hung out in the college town of Blacksburg. my co-leader took the other 3 kids and met us later.
it had been a little while since high school and i wasn't sure what to say. i was sure lots had changed since my time amongst the upper echelon of teen years. the girl from France sat up front. i studied French in high school but i was in no way prepared to speak French. forget it. i turned on the radio. country music. forget it. the drive was a blur and i looped and loped and lost myself in these brand new creatures. they were silent, a moment. i felt myself sweating. perhaps i'm not fit to handle such fragile beings. we talked in the way that one does when moving your face around and making sounds is nothing more than an attempt to achieve comfort. i couldn't explain to you what was said. i don't think i made much sense of it. i might as well have been speaking French.
i got cold feet that night. i felt like throwing down my apron and kicking off my cute little house slippers and running full tilt for the hills. no way, no how, was i going to make it out of this alive. perhaps i dreamed right through my teenage years and now that i was faced with real, breathing adolescence, i had no bearings. i felt lost.
work. can be a saving grace. i awoke the next morning in my tent, somehow resisting the urge to take flight in the night. things look different in the morning light. the kids rubbed their eager but shy little eyes and looked at me, looked into me. the look of a teenager can be empowering. i felt in that morning, sitting around the big bag of granola, that they needed me and i knew full well that everything is a balance, a give and take, high tide, low tide, ebb and flow, wax and wane, and therefore just as they had made a plea to me, i was making one to them. we needed each other and furthermore we agreed that we wanted to need each other. in their silence i heard the truest words. this was going to be something special.
we hiked up the trail and i felt instantly better. i told them about rock work and trail design. this was familiar ground, this had the sturdy sound of the known, this was teaching. i saw, in part, why i had come all the way to Virginia. we were going to change each other's lives. it was a scary thought and i ruminated on it a while as we advanced further and further into the woods.
II.
Anthropologist in the Field
Under the kitchen tarp, I live in a fragmented world. Most lines of thought are jumbled and snipped too soon like flowers stolen from bloom. But this is the life of teenage madness, a life in which I brace myself, wondering if my adult knees, beaten in with rationality and relativity, will be able to hold my weight. I am an anthropologist who has somehow managed to sneak inside. There is a red light around me and glossy pictographs of googly-eye inducing guy glam hanging from clothes pins. There’s a complex equation being figured and personalities being pieced together. Who are we? Only the pop magazines know. People with marshmallow peep voices mumble and suddenly there is a violently ecstatic outcry; there is a discrepancy in the calculation. Wake in another dawn and you are a new creature. This place is an etch-a-sketch, each day a tabula rasa, the lines shaky, barely permanent, fluttering inattentively like an acid tripped butterfly. “shorty got low, low, low” they chant. I’m in a primitive dance club, an open heart spasm consecrated by stobe-matic head lamps. Where am I? These are graffiti artists, Jackson Pollacks on this tabula rasa, manic smatterings of self proclamation. My mind is reeling and the ears shrug; what can they do? They’re only delivering the message.
All she can draw are flowers and pine trees and people. What more would you need to know? Flowers and pines and people. No more, no less. Flowers illuminate the pines and the pines draw down the spines of people—all needle-like and fine, all needle-like in a line. There are more words spoken to the points beyond flowers and pines and people and, in fact, it’s probably safe to say that most people think the entirety of existence is perhaps more complex than her drawing of flowers and pines and people. However, most people are wrong. The flowers portray beauty and desire, the exotic, the dreamy. The pine is the fuel, the means, the upstanding continuum, the ever-growing, mutable and yet romantically static concentric rings of the reverberating pulse of the world. Then there are people, agents of light and dark, unpredictable little swaths of fright that could uproot the oldest pine or pluck the most sacred flower.
So all she draws are flowers and pines and people. No more, no less. What’s the point of drawing anything else? The entire lovely mess is scrawled so perfectly on your Tupperware. I wonder if you know that? How else can we tell this story? The first drawings were found in a cave. The subject the same. Time barely moves when you take a moment and think about it.
III.
Virginia and Wristbands
it's difficult to say what has happened in the past two months, to convey the meaning behind the motions, but i'll put these memories before you, let you feel them, maneuver around their soft silky bones, grip their long and uneven edges, let the symbolism slip through your fingers like water. we are all blind once past the present and so let us fumble through the dark and uncertain corridors of memory.
observation:
people put on symbols to express concretely the intangibility of emotional connections.
explanation:
imagine your wrist, imagine every fine hair blooming from your pores, imagine the roughness of this landscape, observe every wrinkle and depression, listen to the echo of light as it penetrates your skin, listen to it bellow in the shadowy hallows where veins dive like dikes and tendons carve out valleys. imagine your wrist is bare, no jewelry, no restrictions, no watch and therefore you have no sense of time. imagine your life as timeless just for this moment. you enter with a wrist that is wholly yours, yours by birthright, a naked entirely known living piece, you uninterrupted. now imagine the world in its varied hues of emotion, imagine a beat, a pulse if you will, felt, rarely seen, but omnipresent circulating all around you. this is meaning, this is emotion, this is spirituality carried through tunnels of symbolism. feel your pulse. alive. feel another's pulse. alive. known but not seen.
we were strangers all wearing the same blue shirt all touting the same phrase, "conservation begins here". nothing else was known but a connection was made immediately through the visual recognition of identical objects. we became a crew suddenly, thrown together like atoms colliding. would this be disastrous? no one could say and either way, we could not stop the momentum, we had been spinning in one another's direction for centuries. in a small airport in virginia we finally met. in a small airport in virginia we unconsciously agreed to change one anothers' lives.
you can spend a lifetime with a person and they will still be strange to you. of course, you know better than most, the intricacies of their being, working your way from the outside to the center. you unravel their physical body, learn the texture of their lips, the angulation of their teeth, map the constellations of their moles and scars, learn the length and loss of their hair. you memorize the iridescence of the iris, the chameleon changes they undergo when in cahoots with the sea during a storm or the gentle, whimsical fall of the first snow or the amber light of a sunset sliding down the trunks of ancient oaks. those eyes are changing all the time and you catalogue these changes and you know just which shirt to pick out at the department store to compliment their eyes. but what do you really know? the slope of their back and the inward turn of their feet, a bum knee that makes them limp. you know the body, whether it tends to chill or overheat, to be sluggish or to run itself ragged. the body then begins to reveal the inner layers of the person. tough little nails that have been gnawed on all their life makes you think of their nervousness, tight muscles, aching bones, migraines all bare witness to the conspirators inside. but what do you really know? the further you get inside the harder it is to define what you know, like traveling to the center of the earth logical thought disintegrates and a glorious entropy of rationality takes over.
which brings me back to wrists and wristbands. in the past two months i have met fourteen very unique, very complex individuals. in the span of twenty days i forged strong bonds with these people and yet they are still very strange to me. i look for reminders of our relationship and find my wrist, once bare, wrapped in symbolism. what do i really know? i have willingly put something on, something that has changed my appearance in the most explicit sense as well as changed my thoughts and who i am. i have worked from the outside to the center, my body has changed, this is seen and known, my perceptions and thoughts, the amorphous parts of myself have also changed, this is not seen but known. my wrists are wrapped in warbling memories to tie down the tenuous ties to these two transient groups. i remember in june, pink flagging holding fast to my arm. we bound our wrists to bond with one another. in july a tie dye silly band, vibrant and verifying. how long can we hold onto a symbol? surely the symbolism outlasts the concrete entity that carries it. i imagine this band five years from now in a box with all my letters. i'll shake it out, it's tired wiggle bringing me peace.
IV.
Ode to the Appalachian Mountains
you roll you appalachian mountains. you roll, steady, calm, mystically in misty eyed remembrance over these palms. appalachian mountain memories hardening under my skin erupt as calluses at the base of my well worn fingers. how many times did i brush across new life? how deep did i dig under the soil of my own mysterious existence? how far did i extend into the suns of other universes held gently, timidly in the solar plexus of strangers? my hands hang loose bowed with the weight of my new self, a self stretched over a blue ridge landscape, a self jutting out in open plain excitement, a self light and a heart roaming childishly in the lilting chords of a sweet tea imbibed harmonica solo. what an Odyssey.
you lope in the forefront of my mind like lazy ponies in summertime, you appalachian mountains. the sky dances above stubby pines and long lines of grass lands. i watch my shadow sail in a reflected sky birthed by a mother of muddy water, breaking me apart and setting out silt struck rays of light from my eyes. my pack is heavy, perhaps heavier than it should be and my knee throbs, but for this sight i'd walk myself into the ground, you appalachian mountains, i'd walk myself into the ground, just to keep tracking along the gentle curves of your smokey silhouettes.
atop a ridge the clouds tell stories like grandfather clocks, ticking away in the wind and rocking me to sleep with the whispers of why i am here and why you are here
and why this,
and why that,
peace breathe peace breathe peace breathe
on and on these clouds whisper, cooing their song down into the valleys and around the crowns of these appalachian mountains.
during the day we re-set the bones of these mountains, pull rocks from their slumber and place them in our paths so we might climb these mountains like nerves along a spine. you sweat you appalachian mountains all over my body leaving me soiled. i feel cleansed in a way that only the harmonious understand. i don't quite get it, but i'm beginning to understand. i am slow and you appalachian mountains are kind.
i close my eyes and see the sunsets of appalachian mountains. the wind crashes continuously against the ridge. i hug my knees, i'm in a perpetual state of re-birth. every thought conceived, revealed, then whisked away, perpetual state of newness, perpetual state of now. i feel the stubbornness being knocked out of me, the sense of control lifted from my heavy brow. i am simply a life at the edge of a perfectly designed rock outcropping, watching the world turn. you roll, you appalachian mountains and i think of everything and nothing. you pose, you appalachian mountains like waves caught in a freeze frame and i am everything and nothing. i am forever changed because of you appalachian mountains.
it's strange trying to figure out time. there never seems to be quite enough or perhaps there's way too much. lately, i feel as if there is a shortage of time. my first crew has come and gone and i look back and think, all we had was time. where did it go? it's not fair that time should move so fast as you grow older; you're not equipped to keep up.
where should i take you? should i recount time? i spent a month camped out on a forest service road named Pocahontas. we named our place camp Taiwan on a night of bleary-eyed sleep deprivation. we felt we were in another place altogether, half-magical, half-far, far, far off. the beaten path was laid down into this place well before our arrival. we were second rate settlers, though i doubt that Pocahontas was the first. the road meanders for about 3 miles, gravel and dust that illuminates sun rays which are otherwise much too shy to reveal themselves. the heart of camp Taiwan was open and large as it needed to be to direct the coursing of a curiously crafted collective. we strung up a tarp in this center area and deemed it a kitchen. bulky Rubbermaid tubs stuffed with food and supplies squatted under the plastic shelter like big league catchers. the propane stove sat on the earth like a primitive robot and our cardboard boxes full of miscellaneous materials tried their best to look contained and collected in the corner. my co-leader and i sat in the back of our shiny red Ford SUV rental and looked at the home we created. our little red wagon was hitched to a star and all we could do was hold our breath and hope we wouldn't fall out of the sky.
the kids arrived at the airport on time. we split the group such that i took the first 3 kids to arrive and we hung out in the college town of Blacksburg. my co-leader took the other 3 kids and met us later.
it had been a little while since high school and i wasn't sure what to say. i was sure lots had changed since my time amongst the upper echelon of teen years. the girl from France sat up front. i studied French in high school but i was in no way prepared to speak French. forget it. i turned on the radio. country music. forget it. the drive was a blur and i looped and loped and lost myself in these brand new creatures. they were silent, a moment. i felt myself sweating. perhaps i'm not fit to handle such fragile beings. we talked in the way that one does when moving your face around and making sounds is nothing more than an attempt to achieve comfort. i couldn't explain to you what was said. i don't think i made much sense of it. i might as well have been speaking French.
i got cold feet that night. i felt like throwing down my apron and kicking off my cute little house slippers and running full tilt for the hills. no way, no how, was i going to make it out of this alive. perhaps i dreamed right through my teenage years and now that i was faced with real, breathing adolescence, i had no bearings. i felt lost.
work. can be a saving grace. i awoke the next morning in my tent, somehow resisting the urge to take flight in the night. things look different in the morning light. the kids rubbed their eager but shy little eyes and looked at me, looked into me. the look of a teenager can be empowering. i felt in that morning, sitting around the big bag of granola, that they needed me and i knew full well that everything is a balance, a give and take, high tide, low tide, ebb and flow, wax and wane, and therefore just as they had made a plea to me, i was making one to them. we needed each other and furthermore we agreed that we wanted to need each other. in their silence i heard the truest words. this was going to be something special.
we hiked up the trail and i felt instantly better. i told them about rock work and trail design. this was familiar ground, this had the sturdy sound of the known, this was teaching. i saw, in part, why i had come all the way to Virginia. we were going to change each other's lives. it was a scary thought and i ruminated on it a while as we advanced further and further into the woods.
II.
Anthropologist in the Field
Under the kitchen tarp, I live in a fragmented world. Most lines of thought are jumbled and snipped too soon like flowers stolen from bloom. But this is the life of teenage madness, a life in which I brace myself, wondering if my adult knees, beaten in with rationality and relativity, will be able to hold my weight. I am an anthropologist who has somehow managed to sneak inside. There is a red light around me and glossy pictographs of googly-eye inducing guy glam hanging from clothes pins. There’s a complex equation being figured and personalities being pieced together. Who are we? Only the pop magazines know. People with marshmallow peep voices mumble and suddenly there is a violently ecstatic outcry; there is a discrepancy in the calculation. Wake in another dawn and you are a new creature. This place is an etch-a-sketch, each day a tabula rasa, the lines shaky, barely permanent, fluttering inattentively like an acid tripped butterfly. “shorty got low, low, low” they chant. I’m in a primitive dance club, an open heart spasm consecrated by stobe-matic head lamps. Where am I? These are graffiti artists, Jackson Pollacks on this tabula rasa, manic smatterings of self proclamation. My mind is reeling and the ears shrug; what can they do? They’re only delivering the message.
All she can draw are flowers and pine trees and people. What more would you need to know? Flowers and pines and people. No more, no less. Flowers illuminate the pines and the pines draw down the spines of people—all needle-like and fine, all needle-like in a line. There are more words spoken to the points beyond flowers and pines and people and, in fact, it’s probably safe to say that most people think the entirety of existence is perhaps more complex than her drawing of flowers and pines and people. However, most people are wrong. The flowers portray beauty and desire, the exotic, the dreamy. The pine is the fuel, the means, the upstanding continuum, the ever-growing, mutable and yet romantically static concentric rings of the reverberating pulse of the world. Then there are people, agents of light and dark, unpredictable little swaths of fright that could uproot the oldest pine or pluck the most sacred flower.
So all she draws are flowers and pines and people. No more, no less. What’s the point of drawing anything else? The entire lovely mess is scrawled so perfectly on your Tupperware. I wonder if you know that? How else can we tell this story? The first drawings were found in a cave. The subject the same. Time barely moves when you take a moment and think about it.
III.
Virginia and Wristbands
it's difficult to say what has happened in the past two months, to convey the meaning behind the motions, but i'll put these memories before you, let you feel them, maneuver around their soft silky bones, grip their long and uneven edges, let the symbolism slip through your fingers like water. we are all blind once past the present and so let us fumble through the dark and uncertain corridors of memory.
observation:
people put on symbols to express concretely the intangibility of emotional connections.
explanation:
imagine your wrist, imagine every fine hair blooming from your pores, imagine the roughness of this landscape, observe every wrinkle and depression, listen to the echo of light as it penetrates your skin, listen to it bellow in the shadowy hallows where veins dive like dikes and tendons carve out valleys. imagine your wrist is bare, no jewelry, no restrictions, no watch and therefore you have no sense of time. imagine your life as timeless just for this moment. you enter with a wrist that is wholly yours, yours by birthright, a naked entirely known living piece, you uninterrupted. now imagine the world in its varied hues of emotion, imagine a beat, a pulse if you will, felt, rarely seen, but omnipresent circulating all around you. this is meaning, this is emotion, this is spirituality carried through tunnels of symbolism. feel your pulse. alive. feel another's pulse. alive. known but not seen.
we were strangers all wearing the same blue shirt all touting the same phrase, "conservation begins here". nothing else was known but a connection was made immediately through the visual recognition of identical objects. we became a crew suddenly, thrown together like atoms colliding. would this be disastrous? no one could say and either way, we could not stop the momentum, we had been spinning in one another's direction for centuries. in a small airport in virginia we finally met. in a small airport in virginia we unconsciously agreed to change one anothers' lives.
you can spend a lifetime with a person and they will still be strange to you. of course, you know better than most, the intricacies of their being, working your way from the outside to the center. you unravel their physical body, learn the texture of their lips, the angulation of their teeth, map the constellations of their moles and scars, learn the length and loss of their hair. you memorize the iridescence of the iris, the chameleon changes they undergo when in cahoots with the sea during a storm or the gentle, whimsical fall of the first snow or the amber light of a sunset sliding down the trunks of ancient oaks. those eyes are changing all the time and you catalogue these changes and you know just which shirt to pick out at the department store to compliment their eyes. but what do you really know? the slope of their back and the inward turn of their feet, a bum knee that makes them limp. you know the body, whether it tends to chill or overheat, to be sluggish or to run itself ragged. the body then begins to reveal the inner layers of the person. tough little nails that have been gnawed on all their life makes you think of their nervousness, tight muscles, aching bones, migraines all bare witness to the conspirators inside. but what do you really know? the further you get inside the harder it is to define what you know, like traveling to the center of the earth logical thought disintegrates and a glorious entropy of rationality takes over.
which brings me back to wrists and wristbands. in the past two months i have met fourteen very unique, very complex individuals. in the span of twenty days i forged strong bonds with these people and yet they are still very strange to me. i look for reminders of our relationship and find my wrist, once bare, wrapped in symbolism. what do i really know? i have willingly put something on, something that has changed my appearance in the most explicit sense as well as changed my thoughts and who i am. i have worked from the outside to the center, my body has changed, this is seen and known, my perceptions and thoughts, the amorphous parts of myself have also changed, this is not seen but known. my wrists are wrapped in warbling memories to tie down the tenuous ties to these two transient groups. i remember in june, pink flagging holding fast to my arm. we bound our wrists to bond with one another. in july a tie dye silly band, vibrant and verifying. how long can we hold onto a symbol? surely the symbolism outlasts the concrete entity that carries it. i imagine this band five years from now in a box with all my letters. i'll shake it out, it's tired wiggle bringing me peace.
IV.
Ode to the Appalachian Mountains
you roll you appalachian mountains. you roll, steady, calm, mystically in misty eyed remembrance over these palms. appalachian mountain memories hardening under my skin erupt as calluses at the base of my well worn fingers. how many times did i brush across new life? how deep did i dig under the soil of my own mysterious existence? how far did i extend into the suns of other universes held gently, timidly in the solar plexus of strangers? my hands hang loose bowed with the weight of my new self, a self stretched over a blue ridge landscape, a self jutting out in open plain excitement, a self light and a heart roaming childishly in the lilting chords of a sweet tea imbibed harmonica solo. what an Odyssey.
you lope in the forefront of my mind like lazy ponies in summertime, you appalachian mountains. the sky dances above stubby pines and long lines of grass lands. i watch my shadow sail in a reflected sky birthed by a mother of muddy water, breaking me apart and setting out silt struck rays of light from my eyes. my pack is heavy, perhaps heavier than it should be and my knee throbs, but for this sight i'd walk myself into the ground, you appalachian mountains, i'd walk myself into the ground, just to keep tracking along the gentle curves of your smokey silhouettes.
atop a ridge the clouds tell stories like grandfather clocks, ticking away in the wind and rocking me to sleep with the whispers of why i am here and why you are here
and why this,
and why that,
peace breathe peace breathe peace breathe
on and on these clouds whisper, cooing their song down into the valleys and around the crowns of these appalachian mountains.
during the day we re-set the bones of these mountains, pull rocks from their slumber and place them in our paths so we might climb these mountains like nerves along a spine. you sweat you appalachian mountains all over my body leaving me soiled. i feel cleansed in a way that only the harmonious understand. i don't quite get it, but i'm beginning to understand. i am slow and you appalachian mountains are kind.
i close my eyes and see the sunsets of appalachian mountains. the wind crashes continuously against the ridge. i hug my knees, i'm in a perpetual state of re-birth. every thought conceived, revealed, then whisked away, perpetual state of newness, perpetual state of now. i feel the stubbornness being knocked out of me, the sense of control lifted from my heavy brow. i am simply a life at the edge of a perfectly designed rock outcropping, watching the world turn. you roll, you appalachian mountains and i think of everything and nothing. you pose, you appalachian mountains like waves caught in a freeze frame and i am everything and nothing. i am forever changed because of you appalachian mountains.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
the nomadic life: side b
on another coast in another time zone, i feel the rush of newness. perhaps i'm too much of a sensationalist, careening from one experience to another. but why not indulge the senses? i have to know, i have to know, show me, show me. then i calmly sit at my computer, a cup of coffee by my side and report the wilderness of my current state. the metaphor of an amusement park comes to mind. so many faces and lights and sounds and life. i pick out pieces and pin them to this paper canvas. this is what i've seen, have you noticed? and in my report i aim to find truth, to present others with a story.
i am a happy nomad today, feeling thankful for all i know and have experienced. i try to conjure up my summer but it flickers in front of my mind like a flirtatious fire. when i'm ready, it seems to say, i will show you. my logical self balks. it demands a list. for twenty two days, it wants a list. i think of indulging it, but how horribly boring. rather than the fluid spontaneity of my creative mind, this list loving logical self demands the mechanical facts. less like love making more like text book discussions of sex. either way, it should be done and so, a list:
1. "wild" ponies, jesus and allah
2. hikers and thank yous
3. rain and shelter under a tarp
4. a stolen tarp, regained and placed in girls' tent
5. big rocks--big buck and the last of the Mahicans
6. rotting flies
7. sunsets atop the ridge
8. lord of the rings landscape
9. presidents card game
10. lunch under a shaded tree
11. cobra and the waterfall
12. epic drives with old crow medicine show
13. poison ivy, rubbing alcohol and doughnuts in parking lot
14. vermonster
15. waterfall
16. nightswimming in the new river
17. down pour on pack out day and the trail that was a river
18. ice cream brought by other crew
19. tie dye shirts
20. wild and wonderful state fair, dancing and bull riding
21. arnold palmer and pickles
22. mexican food and the whipped cream incident.
portland, Or. it's beginning to drizzle. a pigeon feather cuts through the air like a ninja star. portland is so edgy. they can't just have leaves dancing in the sky, they throw feathers like weapons, a complicated juxtaposition. but that's what edgy people in an edgy city do. i can see myself becoming cynical here. maybe it's the weather. maybe it's the stoop i'm sitting on. gasp, maybe it's me? i laugh, ha, what a hypochondriac i am, a disease of the writer. in wanting to experience it all, i feel i must have it all. well, not all of it. i amend my statement, i'm a selective hypochondriac. ha, how silly. if anyone else where to put such a label on me i would deny it straight away, but self-labeling, well that's like playing dress-up, and who doesn't want to laugh and pretend they're someone else for a while?
i took a 17 hour train from Berkeley, CA to Portland, OR. the train was fairly comfortable and there were some truly heart aching moments. in fact, the few hours spent outside the entirely green corridor made the entire trip worth it. i wish only that i was a little more awake so i could have written. and yet, i'm beginning to accept that i'm an after-the-fact writer. being in the midst of something, especially something as heart tightening as a coastal view from a train, i cannot write. i must observe it clearly. one of these days (i say that a lot) i will buckle down and write what i've seen. one of these days.
i am a happy nomad today, feeling thankful for all i know and have experienced. i try to conjure up my summer but it flickers in front of my mind like a flirtatious fire. when i'm ready, it seems to say, i will show you. my logical self balks. it demands a list. for twenty two days, it wants a list. i think of indulging it, but how horribly boring. rather than the fluid spontaneity of my creative mind, this list loving logical self demands the mechanical facts. less like love making more like text book discussions of sex. either way, it should be done and so, a list:
1. "wild" ponies, jesus and allah
2. hikers and thank yous
3. rain and shelter under a tarp
4. a stolen tarp, regained and placed in girls' tent
5. big rocks--big buck and the last of the Mahicans
6. rotting flies
7. sunsets atop the ridge
8. lord of the rings landscape
9. presidents card game
10. lunch under a shaded tree
11. cobra and the waterfall
12. epic drives with old crow medicine show
13. poison ivy, rubbing alcohol and doughnuts in parking lot
14. vermonster
15. waterfall
16. nightswimming in the new river
17. down pour on pack out day and the trail that was a river
18. ice cream brought by other crew
19. tie dye shirts
20. wild and wonderful state fair, dancing and bull riding
21. arnold palmer and pickles
22. mexican food and the whipped cream incident.
portland, Or. it's beginning to drizzle. a pigeon feather cuts through the air like a ninja star. portland is so edgy. they can't just have leaves dancing in the sky, they throw feathers like weapons, a complicated juxtaposition. but that's what edgy people in an edgy city do. i can see myself becoming cynical here. maybe it's the weather. maybe it's the stoop i'm sitting on. gasp, maybe it's me? i laugh, ha, what a hypochondriac i am, a disease of the writer. in wanting to experience it all, i feel i must have it all. well, not all of it. i amend my statement, i'm a selective hypochondriac. ha, how silly. if anyone else where to put such a label on me i would deny it straight away, but self-labeling, well that's like playing dress-up, and who doesn't want to laugh and pretend they're someone else for a while?
i took a 17 hour train from Berkeley, CA to Portland, OR. the train was fairly comfortable and there were some truly heart aching moments. in fact, the few hours spent outside the entirely green corridor made the entire trip worth it. i wish only that i was a little more awake so i could have written. and yet, i'm beginning to accept that i'm an after-the-fact writer. being in the midst of something, especially something as heart tightening as a coastal view from a train, i cannot write. i must observe it clearly. one of these days (i say that a lot) i will buckle down and write what i've seen. one of these days.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
ode to the appalachian mountains
you roll you appalachian mountains. you roll, steady, calm, mystically in misty eyed remembrance over these palms. appalachian mountain memories hardening under my skin erupt as calluses at the base of my well worn fingers. how many times did i brush across new life? how deep did i dig under the soil of my own mysterious existence? how far did i extend into the suns of other universes held gently, timidly in the solar plexus of strangers? my hands hang loose bowed with the weight of my new self, a self stretched over a blue ridge landscape, a self jutting out in open plain excitement, a self light and a heart roaming childishly in the lilting chords of a sweet tea imbibed harmonica solo. what an Odyssey.
you lope in the forefront of my mind like lazy ponies in summertime, you appalachian mountains. the sky dances above stubby pines and long lines of grass lands. i watch my shadow sail in a reflected sky birthed by a mother of muddy water, breaking me apart and setting out silt struck rays of light from my eyes. my pack is heavy, perhaps heavier than it should be and my knee throbs, but for this sight i'd walk myself into the ground, you appalachian mountains, i'd walk myself into the ground, just to keep tracking along the gentle curves of your smokey silhouettes.
atop a ridge the clouds tell stories like grandfather clocks, ticking away in the wind and rocking me to sleep with the whispers of why i am here and why you are here
and why this,
and why that,
peace breathe peace breathe peace breathe
on and on these clouds whisper, cooing their song down into the valleys and around the crowns of these appalachian mountains.
during the day we re-set the bones of these mountains, pull rocks from their slumber and place them in our paths so we might climb these mountains like nerves along a spine. you sweat you appalachian mountains all over my body leaving me soiled. i feel cleansed in a way that only the harmonious understand. i don't quite get it, but i'm beginning to understand. i am slow and you appalachian mountains are kind.
i close my eyes and see the sunsets of appalachian mountains. the wind crashes continuously against the ridge. i hug my knees, i'm in a perpetual state of re-birth. every thought conceived, revealed, then whisked away, perpetual state of newness, perpetual state of now. i feel the stubbornness being knocked out of me, the sense of control lifted from my heavy brow. i am simply a life at the edge of a perfectly designed rock outcropping, watching the world turn. you roll, you appalachian mountains and i think of everything and nothing. you pose, you appalachian mountains like waves caught in a freeze frame and i am everything and nothing. i am forever changed because of you appalachian mountains.
you lope in the forefront of my mind like lazy ponies in summertime, you appalachian mountains. the sky dances above stubby pines and long lines of grass lands. i watch my shadow sail in a reflected sky birthed by a mother of muddy water, breaking me apart and setting out silt struck rays of light from my eyes. my pack is heavy, perhaps heavier than it should be and my knee throbs, but for this sight i'd walk myself into the ground, you appalachian mountains, i'd walk myself into the ground, just to keep tracking along the gentle curves of your smokey silhouettes.
atop a ridge the clouds tell stories like grandfather clocks, ticking away in the wind and rocking me to sleep with the whispers of why i am here and why you are here
and why this,
and why that,
peace breathe peace breathe peace breathe
on and on these clouds whisper, cooing their song down into the valleys and around the crowns of these appalachian mountains.
during the day we re-set the bones of these mountains, pull rocks from their slumber and place them in our paths so we might climb these mountains like nerves along a spine. you sweat you appalachian mountains all over my body leaving me soiled. i feel cleansed in a way that only the harmonious understand. i don't quite get it, but i'm beginning to understand. i am slow and you appalachian mountains are kind.
i close my eyes and see the sunsets of appalachian mountains. the wind crashes continuously against the ridge. i hug my knees, i'm in a perpetual state of re-birth. every thought conceived, revealed, then whisked away, perpetual state of newness, perpetual state of now. i feel the stubbornness being knocked out of me, the sense of control lifted from my heavy brow. i am simply a life at the edge of a perfectly designed rock outcropping, watching the world turn. you roll, you appalachian mountains and i think of everything and nothing. you pose, you appalachian mountains like waves caught in a freeze frame and i am everything and nothing. i am forever changed because of you appalachian mountains.
Friday, July 30, 2010
night sweat
shake off the night sweat. there are so many things i must do and so little time to do them. i feel overwhelmed to say the least. i'm such a little dreamer. i have a few days to try and find an apartment and to apply for jobs and instead i am here, in this little room, waxing poetically about love. i am truly hopeless. i remember this line from my freshmen year in college "shake off the night sweat". i imagined myself a tired race horse, overwhelmed and falling behind, sweating in the dark hours of night, trying the whole time to get ahead, trying to shake off the night sweat.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
virginia and wristbands
it's difficult to say what has happened in the past two months, to convey the meaning behind the motions, but i'll put these memories before you, let you feel them, maneuver around their soft silky bones, grip their long and uneven edges, let the symbolism slip through your fingers like water. we are all blind once past the present and so let us fumble through the dark and uncertain corridors of memory.
observation:
people put on symbols to express concretely the intangibility of emotional connections.
explanation:
imagine your wrist, imagine every fine hair blooming from your pores, imagine the roughness of this landscape, observe every wrinkle and depression, listen to the echo of light as it penetrates your skin, listen to it bellow in the shadowy hallows where veins dive like dikes and tendons carve out valleys. imagine your wrist is bare, no jewelry, no restrictions, no watch and therefore you have no sense of time. imagine your life as timeless just for this moment. you enter with a wrist that is wholly yours, yours by birthright, a naked entirely known living piece, you uninterrupted. now imagine the world in its varied hues of emotion, imagine a beat, a pulse if you will, felt, rarely seen, but omnipresent circulating all around you. this is meaning, this is emotion, this is spirituality carried through tunnels of symbolism. feel your pulse. alive. feel another's pulse. alive. known but not seen.
we were strangers all wearing the same blue shirt all touting the same phrase, "conservation begins here". nothing else was known but a connection was made immediately through the visual recognition of identical objects. we became a crew suddenly, thrown together like atoms colliding. would this be disastrous? no one could say and either way, we could not stop the momentum, we had been spinning in one another's direction for centuries. in a small airport in virginia we finally met. in a small airport in virginia we unconsciously agreed to change one anothers' lives.
you can spend a lifetime with a person and they will still be strange to you. of course, you know better than most, the intricacies of their being, working your way from the outside to the center. you unravel their physical body, learn the texture of their lips, the angulation of their teeth, map the constellations of their moles and scars, learn the length and loss of their hair. you memorize the iridescence of the iris, the chameleon changes they undergo when in cahoots with the sea during a storm or the gentle, whimsical fall of the first snow or the amber light of a sunset sliding down the trunks of ancient oaks. those eyes are changing all the time and you catalogue these changes and you know just which shirt to pick out at the department store to compliment their eyes. but what do you really know? the slope of their back and the inward turn of their feet, a bum knee that makes them limp. you know the body, whether it tends to chill or overheat, to be sluggish or to run itself ragged. the body then begins to reveal the inner layers of the person. tough little nails that have been gnawed on all their life makes you think of their nervousness, tight muscles, aching bones, migraines all bare witness to the conspirators inside. but what do you really know? the further you get inside the harder it is to define what you know, like traveling to the center of the earth logical thought disintegrates and a glorious entropy of rationality takes over.
which brings me back to wrists and wristbands. in the past two months i have met fourteen very unique, very complex individuals. in the span of twenty days i forged strong bonds with these people and yet they are still very strange to me. i look for reminders of our relationship and find my wrist, once bare, wrapped in symbolism. what do i really know? i have willingly put something on, something that has changed my appearance in the most explicit sense as well as changed my thoughts and who i am. i have worked from the outside to the center, my body has changed, this is seen and known, my perceptions and thoughts, the amorphous parts of myself have also changed, this is not seen but known. my wrists are wrapped in warbling memories to tie down the tenuous ties to these two transient groups. i remember in june, pink flagging holding fast to my arm. we bound our wrists to bond with one another. in july a tie dye silly band, vibrant and verifying. how long can we hold onto a symbol? surely the symbolism outlasts the concrete entity that carries it. i imagine this band five years from now in a box with all my letters. i'll shake it out, it's tired wiggle bringing me peace.
a final note: if you are one of the fourteen people who either wear a piece of pink flagging or a tie dye silly band, thank you for sharing your life with me, it has been an unforgettable experience.
observation:
people put on symbols to express concretely the intangibility of emotional connections.
explanation:
imagine your wrist, imagine every fine hair blooming from your pores, imagine the roughness of this landscape, observe every wrinkle and depression, listen to the echo of light as it penetrates your skin, listen to it bellow in the shadowy hallows where veins dive like dikes and tendons carve out valleys. imagine your wrist is bare, no jewelry, no restrictions, no watch and therefore you have no sense of time. imagine your life as timeless just for this moment. you enter with a wrist that is wholly yours, yours by birthright, a naked entirely known living piece, you uninterrupted. now imagine the world in its varied hues of emotion, imagine a beat, a pulse if you will, felt, rarely seen, but omnipresent circulating all around you. this is meaning, this is emotion, this is spirituality carried through tunnels of symbolism. feel your pulse. alive. feel another's pulse. alive. known but not seen.
we were strangers all wearing the same blue shirt all touting the same phrase, "conservation begins here". nothing else was known but a connection was made immediately through the visual recognition of identical objects. we became a crew suddenly, thrown together like atoms colliding. would this be disastrous? no one could say and either way, we could not stop the momentum, we had been spinning in one another's direction for centuries. in a small airport in virginia we finally met. in a small airport in virginia we unconsciously agreed to change one anothers' lives.
you can spend a lifetime with a person and they will still be strange to you. of course, you know better than most, the intricacies of their being, working your way from the outside to the center. you unravel their physical body, learn the texture of their lips, the angulation of their teeth, map the constellations of their moles and scars, learn the length and loss of their hair. you memorize the iridescence of the iris, the chameleon changes they undergo when in cahoots with the sea during a storm or the gentle, whimsical fall of the first snow or the amber light of a sunset sliding down the trunks of ancient oaks. those eyes are changing all the time and you catalogue these changes and you know just which shirt to pick out at the department store to compliment their eyes. but what do you really know? the slope of their back and the inward turn of their feet, a bum knee that makes them limp. you know the body, whether it tends to chill or overheat, to be sluggish or to run itself ragged. the body then begins to reveal the inner layers of the person. tough little nails that have been gnawed on all their life makes you think of their nervousness, tight muscles, aching bones, migraines all bare witness to the conspirators inside. but what do you really know? the further you get inside the harder it is to define what you know, like traveling to the center of the earth logical thought disintegrates and a glorious entropy of rationality takes over.
which brings me back to wrists and wristbands. in the past two months i have met fourteen very unique, very complex individuals. in the span of twenty days i forged strong bonds with these people and yet they are still very strange to me. i look for reminders of our relationship and find my wrist, once bare, wrapped in symbolism. what do i really know? i have willingly put something on, something that has changed my appearance in the most explicit sense as well as changed my thoughts and who i am. i have worked from the outside to the center, my body has changed, this is seen and known, my perceptions and thoughts, the amorphous parts of myself have also changed, this is not seen but known. my wrists are wrapped in warbling memories to tie down the tenuous ties to these two transient groups. i remember in june, pink flagging holding fast to my arm. we bound our wrists to bond with one another. in july a tie dye silly band, vibrant and verifying. how long can we hold onto a symbol? surely the symbolism outlasts the concrete entity that carries it. i imagine this band five years from now in a box with all my letters. i'll shake it out, it's tired wiggle bringing me peace.
a final note: if you are one of the fourteen people who either wear a piece of pink flagging or a tie dye silly band, thank you for sharing your life with me, it has been an unforgettable experience.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
one sixty-sixth of a second
i close myself off in an austere and sterile room so that i might tell you a story. i want nothing to distract from the image in my mind. i paint the picture here, for you, to explain this, all this, you and me and us. i am at the bottom of a waterfall. it is sixty-six feet; i measure the collapse of hydrogen and oxygen molecules with my shutter-speed eyes and in one sixty-sixth of a second the whole grand spectacle, the flying leap of life crashes with infinitesimal sound. i cannot move that fast, but i know that's how quick the current kicks and who am i to fight it? i trace it with my senses, soak in the text of the world. i am talking of course about a waterfall. i am at it's base, i am the deep pool, i am the swirling eddies of blue sky and my white foam are the aquatic clouds. i am a deep pool looking up and out from the bottom. i watch the stupendously swift spitting and spewing life-saturated force stampeding in perfect speed over an edge then falling off, gracefully, violently, passionately in sacred prisms of liquid light that can only be described as miraculous. continuous fall, forever. i watch the sky grow foul and grey. a large bird struggles against the wind putting up just enough resistance to remain still. leaves pour down from the sky like ash from burning buildings. i watch them pirouette with a carelessness and glee given to those who are departing in their proper time. in a sixty-sixth of a second i know a storm is coming. i let the movement of water drum in my body, the vibrations chilling my skin. the smell of change is so strong i can scarcely focus. i keep my eyes locked on the bird. he glides left and it begins to rain.
i get the notion that everything is a waterfall to some degree. all is given a moment of miraculous flight that is, at the same time, the descent as well as the re-collection of parts. from whole to part to whole. i think about people, naturally, and i think about you and me. are we waterfalls? are we falling water? little hydrogen's clinging to our oxygen, trying desperately to keep it together, moving fast, so fast, so very fast. and you are one sixty-sixth of a second and i am one sixty-sixth of a second and together we are one sixty-sixth of the same second, flowing continuously in and out of one another. i am a deep pool and i am a waterfall, you are a bird in a ominous sky. you veer right and i cry. how quickly everything changes, how very far the distance of one sixty-sixth of a second.
i get the notion that everything is a waterfall to some degree. all is given a moment of miraculous flight that is, at the same time, the descent as well as the re-collection of parts. from whole to part to whole. i think about people, naturally, and i think about you and me. are we waterfalls? are we falling water? little hydrogen's clinging to our oxygen, trying desperately to keep it together, moving fast, so fast, so very fast. and you are one sixty-sixth of a second and i am one sixty-sixth of a second and together we are one sixty-sixth of the same second, flowing continuously in and out of one another. i am a deep pool and i am a waterfall, you are a bird in a ominous sky. you veer right and i cry. how quickly everything changes, how very far the distance of one sixty-sixth of a second.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
anthropologist in the field
Under the kitchen tarp, I live in a fragmented world. Most lines of thought are jumbled and snipped too soon like flowers stolen from bloom. But this is the life of teenage madness, a life in which I brace myself, wondering if my adult knees, beaten in with rationality and relativity, will be able to hold my weight. I am an anthropologist who has somehow managed to sneak inside. There is a red light around me and glossy pictographs of googly-eye inducing guy glam hanging from clothes pins. There’s a complex equation being figured and personalities being pieced together. Who are we? Only the pop magazines know. People with marshmallow peep voices mumble and suddenly there is a violently ecstatic outcry; there is a discrepancy in the calculation. Wake in another dawn and you are a new creature. This place is an etch-a-sketch, each day a tabla rasa, the lines shaky, barely permanent, fluttering inattentively like an acid tripped butterfly. “shorty got low, low, low” they chant. I’m in a primitive dance club, an open heart spasm consecrated by stobe-matic head lamps. Where am I? These are graffiti artists, Jackson Pollacks on this tabla rasa, manic smatterings of self proclamation. My mind is reeling and the ears shrug; what can they do? They’re only delivering the message.
All she can draw are flowers and pine trees and people. What more would you need to know? Flowers and pines and people. No more, no less. Flowers illuminate the pines and the pines draw down the spines of people—all needle-like and fine, all needle-like in a line. There are more words spoken to the points beyond flowers and pines and people and, in fact, it’s probably safe to say that most people think the entirety of existence is perhaps more complex than her drawing of flowers and pines and people. However, most people are wrong. The flowers portray beauty and desire, the exotic, the dreamy. The pine is the fuel, the means, the upstanding continuum, the ever-growing, mutable and yet romantically static concentric rings of the reverberating pulse of the world. Then there are people, agents of light and dark, unpredictable little swaths of fright that could uproot the oldest pine or pluck the most sacred flower.
So all she draws are flowers and pines and people. No more, no less. What’s the point of drawing anything else? The entire lovely mess is scrawled so perfectly on your Tupperware. I wonder if you know that? How else can we tell this story? The first drawings were found in a cave. The subject the same. Time barely moves when you take a moment and think about it.
All she can draw are flowers and pine trees and people. What more would you need to know? Flowers and pines and people. No more, no less. Flowers illuminate the pines and the pines draw down the spines of people—all needle-like and fine, all needle-like in a line. There are more words spoken to the points beyond flowers and pines and people and, in fact, it’s probably safe to say that most people think the entirety of existence is perhaps more complex than her drawing of flowers and pines and people. However, most people are wrong. The flowers portray beauty and desire, the exotic, the dreamy. The pine is the fuel, the means, the upstanding continuum, the ever-growing, mutable and yet romantically static concentric rings of the reverberating pulse of the world. Then there are people, agents of light and dark, unpredictable little swaths of fright that could uproot the oldest pine or pluck the most sacred flower.
So all she draws are flowers and pines and people. No more, no less. What’s the point of drawing anything else? The entire lovely mess is scrawled so perfectly on your Tupperware. I wonder if you know that? How else can we tell this story? The first drawings were found in a cave. The subject the same. Time barely moves when you take a moment and think about it.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Virginia Life
it's been a long time since this blog has seen any attention. and so i timidly approach it. so much has happened since i last wrote. i met many people and got to know at least seven folks. it's strange trying to figure out time. there never seems to be enough or perhaps there's way too much. lately, i feel as if there is a shortage of time. my first crew has come and gone and i look back and think, all we had was time. where did it go? it's not fair that time should move so fast as you grow older; you're not equipped to keep up.
my writing is wild, i feel it. i can barely get a grip on it. it wants to run, run, run, until it's burned itself up into ether. i cannot harness this language.
it will take some time to calm myself down into the bed of a story. after all it feels as if i've just woken up. and so, where should i take you? should i recount time? i spent a month camped out on a forest service road named Pocahontas. we named our place camp Taiwan on a night of bleary-eyed sleep deprivation. we felt we were in another place altogether, half-magical, half-far, far, far off. the beaten path was laid down into this place well before our arrival. we were second rate settlers, though i doubt that Pocahontas was the first. the road meanders for about 3 miles, gravel and dust that illuminates sun rays which are otherwise much too shy to reveal themselves. the heart of camp Taiwan was open and large as it needed to be to direct the coursing of a curiously crafted collective. we strung up a tarp in this center area and deemed it a kitchen. bulky Rubbermaid tubs stuffed with food and supplies squatted under the plastic shelter like big league catchers. the propane stove sat on the earth like a primitive robot and our cardboard boxes full of miscellaneous materials tried their best to look classy in the corner. my co-leader and i sat in the back of our shiny red Ford SUV rental and looked at the home we created. our little red wagon was hitched to a star and all we could do was hold our breath and hope we wouldn't fall out of the sky.
the kids arrived at the airport on time. we split the group such that i took the first 3 kids to arrive and we hung out in the college town of Blacksburg. my co-leader took the other 3 kids and met us later.
it had been a little while since high school and i wasn't sure what to say. i was sure lots had changed since my time amongst the upper echelon of teen years. the girl from France sat up front. i studied french in high school but i was in no way prepared to speak french. forget it. i turned on the radio. country music. forget it. the drive was a blur and i looped and loped and lost myself in these brand new creatures. they were silent, a moment. i felt myself sweating. perhaps i'm not fit to handle such fragile beings. we talked in the way that one does when moving your face around and making sounds is nothing more than an attempt to achieve comfort. i couldn't explain to you what was said. i don't think i made much sense of it. i might as well have been speaking french.
i got cold feet that night. i felt like throwing down my apron and kicking off my cute little house slippers and running full tilt for the hills. no way, no how, was i going to make it out of this alive. perhaps i dreamed right through my teenage years and now that i was faced with real, breathing adolescence, i had no bearings. i felt lost.
work. can be a saving grace. i awoke the next morning in my tent, somehow resisting the urge to take flight in the night. things look different in the morning light. the kids rubbed their eager but shy little eyes and looked at me, looked into me. the look of a teenager can be empowering. i felt in that morning, sitting around the big bag of granola, that they needed me and i knew full well that everything is a balance, a give and take, high tide, low tide, ebb and flow, wax and wane, and therefore just as they had made a plea to me, i was making one to them. we needed each other and furthermore we agreed that we wanted to need each other. in their silence i heard the truest words. this was going to be something special.
we hiked up the trail and i felt instantly better. i told them about rock work and trail design. this was familiar ground, this had the sturdy sound of the known, this was teaching. i saw, in part, why i had come all the way to Virginia. we were going to change each other's lives. it was a scary thought and i ruminated on it a while as we advanced further and further into the woods.
my writing is wild, i feel it. i can barely get a grip on it. it wants to run, run, run, until it's burned itself up into ether. i cannot harness this language.
it will take some time to calm myself down into the bed of a story. after all it feels as if i've just woken up. and so, where should i take you? should i recount time? i spent a month camped out on a forest service road named Pocahontas. we named our place camp Taiwan on a night of bleary-eyed sleep deprivation. we felt we were in another place altogether, half-magical, half-far, far, far off. the beaten path was laid down into this place well before our arrival. we were second rate settlers, though i doubt that Pocahontas was the first. the road meanders for about 3 miles, gravel and dust that illuminates sun rays which are otherwise much too shy to reveal themselves. the heart of camp Taiwan was open and large as it needed to be to direct the coursing of a curiously crafted collective. we strung up a tarp in this center area and deemed it a kitchen. bulky Rubbermaid tubs stuffed with food and supplies squatted under the plastic shelter like big league catchers. the propane stove sat on the earth like a primitive robot and our cardboard boxes full of miscellaneous materials tried their best to look classy in the corner. my co-leader and i sat in the back of our shiny red Ford SUV rental and looked at the home we created. our little red wagon was hitched to a star and all we could do was hold our breath and hope we wouldn't fall out of the sky.
the kids arrived at the airport on time. we split the group such that i took the first 3 kids to arrive and we hung out in the college town of Blacksburg. my co-leader took the other 3 kids and met us later.
it had been a little while since high school and i wasn't sure what to say. i was sure lots had changed since my time amongst the upper echelon of teen years. the girl from France sat up front. i studied french in high school but i was in no way prepared to speak french. forget it. i turned on the radio. country music. forget it. the drive was a blur and i looped and loped and lost myself in these brand new creatures. they were silent, a moment. i felt myself sweating. perhaps i'm not fit to handle such fragile beings. we talked in the way that one does when moving your face around and making sounds is nothing more than an attempt to achieve comfort. i couldn't explain to you what was said. i don't think i made much sense of it. i might as well have been speaking french.
i got cold feet that night. i felt like throwing down my apron and kicking off my cute little house slippers and running full tilt for the hills. no way, no how, was i going to make it out of this alive. perhaps i dreamed right through my teenage years and now that i was faced with real, breathing adolescence, i had no bearings. i felt lost.
work. can be a saving grace. i awoke the next morning in my tent, somehow resisting the urge to take flight in the night. things look different in the morning light. the kids rubbed their eager but shy little eyes and looked at me, looked into me. the look of a teenager can be empowering. i felt in that morning, sitting around the big bag of granola, that they needed me and i knew full well that everything is a balance, a give and take, high tide, low tide, ebb and flow, wax and wane, and therefore just as they had made a plea to me, i was making one to them. we needed each other and furthermore we agreed that we wanted to need each other. in their silence i heard the truest words. this was going to be something special.
we hiked up the trail and i felt instantly better. i told them about rock work and trail design. this was familiar ground, this had the sturdy sound of the known, this was teaching. i saw, in part, why i had come all the way to Virginia. we were going to change each other's lives. it was a scary thought and i ruminated on it a while as we advanced further and further into the woods.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Oh Banana on My Window Sill
Oh banana on my window sill
How you tempt me
Looking like Uma Thurman
in your taught yellow body suit
Laying there waiting, waiting
For something to begin
Oh banana on my window sill
How you tempt me
Smooth hairless body
Firm and youthful
Green top blending into
Bodacious, bang-a-rang
Send me back to my knees
Yowling no yielding please
Yellow.
Oh banana on my window sill
How you tempt me
Composed, relaxed
You do not flinch an inch
Under my gawking gaze
Oh, oh, oh no banana on my window sill
Oh banana on my window sill
How you tempted me
With promises of passionate potassium
With scrumptious sugary sweet
stomach swelling
satisfying stop, stop, stomp, stomp, chomp, chomp—
Oh my!
We’re not in Kansas anymore
Oh, oh, b, b
A
Na
Na
Oh f-abulous fruit
Oh banana on my window sill.
How you tempt me
Looking like Uma Thurman
in your taught yellow body suit
Laying there waiting, waiting
For something to begin
Oh banana on my window sill
How you tempt me
Smooth hairless body
Firm and youthful
Green top blending into
Bodacious, bang-a-rang
Send me back to my knees
Yowling no yielding please
Yellow.
Oh banana on my window sill
How you tempt me
Composed, relaxed
You do not flinch an inch
Under my gawking gaze
Oh, oh, oh no banana on my window sill
Oh banana on my window sill
How you tempted me
With promises of passionate potassium
With scrumptious sugary sweet
stomach swelling
satisfying stop, stop, stomp, stomp, chomp, chomp—
Oh my!
We’re not in Kansas anymore
Oh, oh, b, b
A
Na
Na
Oh f-abulous fruit
Oh banana on my window sill.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
