Get some ice in a cup, smash an orange slice, rind and all into the bottom of the glass with my thumb. Really grind it there, sucking the bits of orange clean from my skin afterwards. My friend pours me some vermouth. I had wonderful vermouth the other night. It’s wine, I learn. And I hate sweet, but I liked that vermouth I had that night. The night I’m thinking about.

I’m drinking red vermouth; I like it less. But it goes with this heat, tastes condensed when everything else is drooling itself thickly. Sound is slower.

A woman asks me if I want to do this forever, then invites me to a poetry club. She says they’re brilliant poets. I want to hear them, the acoustics of their feelings.

My friend sent me a poem the other day, and in his lines, poetry made sense to me where it failed to before. A feeling, shedding the sense of its words; transmutation into a feeling again.

This morning. I can’t stop thinking about this morning, what I was reading. Before going mad with this heat, I was going madder with a little blue pen, taking it yawning down page after page.

Thoughts pointed, sailing nowhere. The wind is not wind. It is a room of gusts in my head all blowing against each other. I see all the pieces; attention, meaning, interiors, and dead knowledge; relational existence. They jump at me, yelling with hands raised. But I pick none, choose none to answer. It’s an audience of precision and I despise them all.

The need for surety will lead to self-destruction. My attention has arrived and it is a wide brawling thing, beyond morphemes and finite tinsels of explanation.

[Below is my thinking from august; research, my new writing machine, and some attention to smells.]

Read more

I won’t talk about the girl that’s entire body smells like hot breath next to me, that keeps overflowing the armrest into my side. Or the woman behind me who gets revenge on me for taking the last cheese-plate by digging her heels into my back. They and I are nothing to the rolling white gods below, full of light streaking in roots of hot purple heat. There is no one else that looks. No other cabin window is open. The show of storm below feels like a private symphony. And then, as the plane moves and the clouds shift opposite in their current, their great white curtain pulls across my window and all that’s left are tendrils of wisping rain that unfurl down.

There are things of this world that stir me. Things like this, like the shooting roots of plumb hot under a soot blackened wing.

When I’m home, I check my flight path and compare it to an archival radar site at the time I was flying. There is a little storm body I see floating there, lagging in its dragging, frame-skipping way...

With a red needling head, it flares and pushes through the chest of the country.

I eye the map. And recollect the storm I saw, that I flew above and was inspired by. Struck by awe with. How grand in scale it was to me out that window, then how much of a blip it is on this radar and that awe rises again in my throat. Something funny happens… I don’t lock it away, or let the myth flatten around what I saw. I only see more truth, one that enchants. And I can’t say why.

old ways and pelicans

I have been disappointed in the race, with myself. For confusing explanation with understanding. I think the old ways of explanation broadened them, opened our world.

The current way seems to kill and cauterize; to deaden our understanding. And I’ve been interested in this before…

I like this passage from these midivil bestiaries I found where there is a story about a pelican…

“Physiologus says of the pelican that it is an exceeding lover of its young. If the pelican brings forth young and the little ones grow, they take to striking their parents in the face. The parents, however, hitting back kill their young ones and then, moved by compassion, they weep over them for three days, lamenting over those whom they killed. On the third day, their mother strikes her side and spills her own blood over their dead bodies (that is, of the chicks) and the blood itself awakens them from death.”

Medieval europeans believed they observed this self flagellating rite of the mother pelican, perhaps it was the deep throated feedings that the young and mother would perform beak to beak, that they would then associate with christ, resurrection, parenthood, etc. Webs of meaning springing out from the event, loaded with emotional reason and a depth of narrative that pops up and webs as well. It’s an organic thing, that to me, I can feel swelling up with itself.

There are too many examples, all sorts of animals from the bestiaries, better than this to show known phenomena having wider explanations, but I find truth in this one, the pelicans first reminding me of cranes, and then finally of the cranes needled in my back. Things that happen to me feel more true.

I trust all things personal.

My thinking is the same; explanation used to leave the world open.

Now, it seems to close things too quickly, the beginning and end of the narrative all in one page. A one page book.

We now have the explanations of things or even worse, know the race has the explanation of a thing and that’s enough, individually, for us to dismiss or assume that understanding. Enough to not pursue our own. And I’ve noticed myself, not pursuing... I wonder at what depth I’ve missed, or was discouraged?

Non-teological attention. My time in the rockies, the attention being paid at that site. Knowing what occurs, not pretending to know why. Humility in the face of everything.

My relationship to the storm, to it’s information. An explanation that enchants. It sounds sweet and distant. And drips like sugar water through a sieve just out of reach.

Fuck all the explaining, I think. Part of me is indifferent even to the explanations I’ve given here. Maybe because it’s hot out, because it will be hot again all week. I want to be free of the explanations I’ve been shown of anything and everything. To see again clearly and full of enchantment.

A blue-ish desire. Wanting storms because they don’t come here, to Los Angeles. I’ve picked up my prescription sunglasses, can’t stop wearing them around the house. I love them with their blue lenses; tinted-bruised and glacial. So it feels always like a storm is coming.

I was driving back, deeply, into tunneling alleyways of trees that were hung with moss and some houses too but mostly trailers and the way to them was stretched so that you felt like you could never get back there even if you wanted. Some parts were dark, aching with the pummel of crickets. It went on and on like this until there was a house and it’s where I was going and it’s a child that greeted me; pulling out a water gun, exchanging it for a scooter, rotating his toys proudly, presenting them each to me. I nodded to him my being impressed. Only then he lead me further onto the property.

His father’s sailboat was a new thing; painted all fresh white with pristine sails, small enough to sail alone. A handshake, then a signature, and the boat was mine for the day. When I mentioned to the captain I was looking for birds out there in the tidal marshes, he laughed.

I asked him if he’d ever seen a wood stork. Giant, ancient looking thing. With a black head that looks almost like if whatever youthful thing it was magically feeding on died it would just simply, turn to dust. He calculated with a hand on his chin, then sucking in air getting ready to laugh again, he asked me if that was the bird with its head dunked in shit. I told him, yes.

The wind was hot on the water, but there wasn’t much of it. The beers I brought were cold, bottles painted in moisture, and smelling of banana and cloves. Sour and full of yeast, how beer used to smell. Like the whiff I’d get from some bottle I was running, delivering to some adult at one of my grandfather’s birthday parties by the lake; dodging buckets of cracked lobster and butter bowls.

I threw a rope off the bow and let the wind deflate from the sails. Then I let the boat drag me behind it, through the salt and sting. Dragging, skin lurching through the brackish water eyeing an island there, where thousands of rhesus macaque monkeys were kept, plucked for experimentation. Wired fences with crooked posts, broken in places along the shore. They were dark, those trees - stood like black statues and layering over until there is no difference between any of the trunks in their blackness. I saw them swinging there, the little figures, on the back of a big dead oak and some walking low on their knuckles. What rules must they have made? The governing body of those woods seemed archaic. Surely, a human person would have been ripped limb from limb in the dark of those trees, hearing nothing but cicadas blaring. With all the strength they seemed to have. All muscle so that they swung body weight from branch to branch. I sailed past the island twice before I saw her.

Just flesh. That’s all. Which was different from the backs of all the other hair and small dark leathered bodies. There were signs posted; federal land, no trespassing, under surveillance. But there was flesh in there, I saw it. Flesh like mine.

She was jumping through the trees, swinging and her chest was bouncing around. Her bare skin catching white light, light that only just made its way under the canopies of the trees above. The vine in her hand, it slipped and it sort of looked like a bit of flesh flicked off her hand. But she made no noise. No, only released the vine quick and the pounds of her body thudded down humanly onto a thick branch above me.

I wasn’t supposed to be there. But neither was she. Only monkeys were supposed to be there. And they were, I felt their eyes on me. Through the dark trees, I could hear their hollering over the forests pitching whine.

“You are no boy king.” She decided, looking down at me. “There are no more apples left, none for you.”

“I don’t want… apples.”

Before I could ask her who she was, she plopped onto the ground with a crunch. Stood tall and proudly in front of me, her body on display. And it was a beautiful one, obscured by hair in places.

“How long have you been out here?” I stuttered out to her.

She turned away, giving me no response, and as she did her eyes softened. I saw them soften. And in them I saw that she was curious, too. How odd… and only for a moment, a spec of time and then she vanished into the way back of the forest, to parts I didn’t want to see.

I stomped after her. Little bugs feasting on my salt slicked skin. I was still wet from swimming from the boat and after a mile of walking in wet shorts, my legs started to rub and ache. And I worried about that discolored fungus coming back to my groin.

The trees cleared. There was a lighthouse standing there, right there in the middle of a sea of blue grass. A great big lighthouse, a towering thing belted with black stripes and the white paint of it gleaming. Wind was kicking the trees that rose almost to its neck, giving it an ancient beard. A tall and mighty thing that made every living thing; tree or leaf or bug, the island itself seemed to pulse towards it. The earth of the island could fall away into the deep trenches of the ocean, brown water sloshing and spilling in on top of chunks of rock, creatures swarming it and eating the dirt and yet… the lighthouse would remain. It felt that sure of itself.

Behind the glass of the lantern room, a figure swept across pulling the shutters closed as it did. There she was, I thought. But how did she get up there so quickly? It wasn’t possible. For however much girth the lighthouse had, it was twice as tall.

I walked through the grass, dragging my hands in it. I had been reading a lot about grass like this, looking for grass like this. How it only lives on elevated plots of land, prairies. How it’s been disappearing. Any other time I would have stopped to bask in it, to stand there and let the wind fold over me; be naked in it and feel it tickle my skin all over.

The door to the lighthouse was unlocked but, I hesitated there. I was worried I might be scaring her, the girl. Following her like this. Maybe she loved it here, she seemed to… And so, my hand levitated there at the door, and as it did, I felt a humming. An electric like hum, that pulled the hair on my knuckles towards it.

When I grabbed the handle, nothing happened. I pushed the door open and behind it was black. A glint of a handrail and I reached for it. When it was in my hand, the glint disappeared and I could just see outside that clouds had moved in covering the light of the sun. They looked fat and dark, gorged on the humid air. I should get back to the boat I thought, if there was a storm coming.

Halfway up the stairway I heard the metal door below slam shut and I stopped, dead still. Through a porthole next to me I saw that flesh again. It was her, standing out in the grass naked. She wasn’t paying attention to me. She was… feeling the tall grass lick at her skin.

It was black inside the lighthouse beside the muted light from the foggy round window I watched her from and though she was still out there, below. I kept up the stairs. I’m not sure why I kept going, if not for her.

The hatch was heavy when I pushed it open. It was an old light house and had been out of service as far as I could remember, so I wasn’t ready for it’s light to be on. Let alone, pointed straight down at me. It blinded me and when I put my hands up to shield myself, I let go of the ladder and fell backwards.

When I woke up, I was in the same position. I shook my head, it was pounding, tunneling in on itself; thumping too, drumming against my ears. Until, I realized the sound was rain, beating down heavily on this tin can. I got to my feet and climbed the ladder… opened the hatch slowly… this time there was no light. Well, there was some. A few candles burning around the place, dull and yellow and flicking themselves sloppily over old, aged paper and a bench; rusted tools, and pieces of plywood. There was something else, too, all over the floor. Apple cores were discarded everywhere, dozens of them lazily tossed about the place.

I moved to the shutters, stepping, and crunching wetly over a few of the rotten cores. I pulled the shutters back and they argued and groaned but eventually came back a bit. Enough to see that it was night, that sheets of rain were coming down as if from a balloon full of water poked with a million holes.

I wondered about my boat. If the anchor was secure enough. Most definitely not, not in this… I stepped out onto the gallery balcony, working roughly against the wind to open the door.

A great big stroke of lightning revealed the river to me. And my boat. It was still there, it was… But all I saw was its belly. Hull up, floating there like a white buoy. It couldn’t be... I waited for another bolt of lightning just to be sure, white knuckling the railing. Then… it came. A bolt so bold I ducked, flinching away as it mutilated the darkness and illuminated everything in a purple, gray light.

Only this time I wasn’t looking towards the river. As I crouched there, I saw the field below. And what looked like… the girl. She was still there, standing in the field. Head turned up towards the sky and she was smiling. Hecate incarnate, the black debris in her long hair being rinsed by the rain and golden, stuck to her body and how beautiful she was. An animal, I was an animal too. I had almost forgotten. She made me remember. I wanted to scramble down to her, to proclaim right there, my love for her.

But something stopped me. The grass wasn’t there anymore, no… It was only darkness around her. Nothing but muscle and shoulders and necks, hunched, all of them low to the ground. A sea of hairy backs, soaking wet.

When I looked back to her, I saw she was looking right at me. Then the light flicked off. As sharply as it had come it vanished. Leaving nothing but inky black below.

I scrambled back inside for the hatch in the floor and slammed it. Moving wildly across the candlelit room to the desk and, pulling it with all my strength, I pushed it over the hatch. Pulling a corner of the desk on top of it to keep the thing closed. As I did a drawer slid out. Inside it, an apple rolled from back to front. A spyglass, rolled out too. I took it in my hands, spinning it over to see the name “Theodora” carved into its length, shining in the metallic where it was gouged out. Lightning lit the room up and I slammed the drawer closed, huddling soaking wet against the far wall. Away from the latch and door. Thinking somehow, if they could get up here to me. I would not welcome them. I would bash them away with this spyglass. Only her. I wanted only Theodora. Would let only her inside. But she never came.

Morning did, and bleakly. There was a drizzle outside when I stepped out, apple in hand from that drawer. I was starving, taking bites quietly and looking into the trees. There was a face there, a long face with an even longer neck, a neck that orange diamonds of fur laced up. A giraffe, staring right at me.

It seemed like I was drawing it out from the trees. And it was drawing me too. Until we were both there, in the middle of the field. Or what was left of the trampled stalks. I held what was left of the apple out. The animals sticky tongue slipped out of its angular skull and roughly around my wrist. A few lolling crunches of its jaw then it turned and left me alone there.

The rain started to fall a little harder and that’s when I noticed the ground. Hundreds of prints cratered the land. There was no more grass, all of it flattened. But even more odd, were the cores of apples that were between each pair of tracks… or small bones, a vertebra of a fish or bird. And it wasn’t just the prints of dragging four fingered knuckles… There were little prints too, from birds; paw prints, and deer hooves.

The stamped ground converged on a small mound in the center of the field. But it wasn’t a mound at all. The ground rose, then gave way to a… pool. A small depression hollowed out in the knoll, full of dark water. Slate gray, the color of the lingering sky.

Two black, beady eyes blinked awake at me from just above the water line. A deer’s eyes. Orbs that sat half submerged under the water, letting the water lap against them without flinching. I stepped back, frightened. The eyes blinked, then sank beneath the water... When they surfaced again, they were set in a girl’s skull, Theodora’s, and smaller; the color of brown grass. But it was the warmest of browns, with a strong glow of red in it.

“What happened here?” I asked her. “What is this place?”

She looked down into the water. Rings spread across its surface.

“Here is where your mind was given to you.”

On a frozen morning the next spring, I sowed the field to red clover. Doing it all by hand, without the help of those machines that the manufacturers love to refer to as “monsters” or “acre eaters”. Theodora came to me again then, convinced me to stay. To not be like the “cool season-grasses that were trampled and overrun but to prosper more vigorously in the hot summer months when that fescue and bluegrass were semi-dormant.” she had said. I told her I wasn’t grass. But I stayed anyways.

I climbed the light house only one more time. Sometime in winter when it was very cold outside. When I looked out from the gallery all’s I saw were more islands. Islands that hadn’t been there before. And on each of them, another lighthouse. What looked like hundreds, dotting off into the horizon endlessly.

Theodora was there then, too. Placing a hand on my shaking shoulder as I sobbed, wondering where my old life had gone and wondering even more why I mourned it. She got close to my ear with her lips and whispered to me.

“We came with visions, but not with sight.”

I could taste her breath, smelling hotly of cider.

“It is because we have so insulted and despoiled creation that we need recreation.”

Theodora’s golden hair was white in places now. But aged, she had not. She led me inside the tower, where those candles still burned, as if they had never gone out from that night of the storm so long ago. In the glowing light her flesh changed shape in my hands, adjusting and filling out or sucking in. I’d never known warmth. Not like her. Her nails even seemed to grow, to burrow into me so that I might not move to either left nor right. In her skull, those deer’s eyes returned and inside them I saw her, but older and ancient. I wasn’t scared there, underneath her. Her hair all white and skin like a beautiful bag, full of shape underneath. But in my hands, she was tight with that shape. And for a long while afterwards in my mouth that taste of hot apples lingered. I remained hungry for it again, for her. The time between my time with Theodora was empty of meaning, void of life, and all the more scarce. I didn’t see her even on the night I found my child. I only heard his crying, found him naked and floating on a small raft of twine in the pool on the mound.

When my son was born, he was strong. By the time he was nine, it became clear he wouldn’t speak. He’d have spells of affection, eat, and sleep hard. He knew who I was, but not in the way that I’d come to think people know one another. His was a deeper knowing, unlimited by vernacular. And I felt it too, his boundless nature, and I wanted to feel like that, like him. Deeply and from everywhere, not boxed in by language.

Then one night, Theodora came to me again. We destroyed what felt like a mile of the red clovers I had sown into that field, rolling down in the stuff under a swinging hook of a moon.

Sometime after, my daughter came to me to the same way my son did. They were the same in life as they were at birth, the two of them. I didn’t know then, that Theodora had plans for them both.

Clean sheets, very clean. Cleaner than I’m used to. Body is warm, humming electric-like and can hear my heart thumping. Can see it pushing out my ribcage. My headache is slow, head tunneling in on itself. There’s a cardinal outside, bouncing like a graph. I’m not after a cardinal.

I’m thinking about the back of that Chinese man’s head. I’m back in that line. He’s got black hair that turns gray at its ends. He has a skull, not a head. Just flesh, it’s all we are. I’m not sure how we are any other way. Just animals with dents in our skulls, made of flesh and proud of metal. But dying, always dying and I’m seeing faintly through the door of ever having thought I was anything else.

Yanking these rubber boots up. I’m planted in them and then sinking through pluffer mud. Each plunk sends crabs darting through. Hundreds of them scattering. On the backs of each blade of seagrass, flattening the stuff to use like snowshoes. But still, I sink and none of what’s around, what’s crushed underfoot is big bluestem, Indian grass, or side-oats gamma. Prairie grasses noted in this passage from Wendell Berry…

“In the places we visited, we invariably saw the little and big bluestems and Indian grass. At this season they are turning brown, but it is the liveliest, warmest of browns, with a strong glow of red in it. To walk in a stand of big bluestem or Indian grass is to be sub-merged. It is an enclosing element…”

…and so I wanted to stand in it. To know what it means to be submerged by it.

I hose down the boots and get the hose all over myself. Drink some of it, too. Keep drinking it, I like the taste.

Too hot to do anything. To move. And still, I’m eating, this great mess of hot dog, a coke, and beer. My wrist binding to this paper with sweat. Colorful hats dotting brightly on the surface of the pool. Crowded with kids and floats that hoist up old leather skinned and gray people.

I’m happy for the crowd, all the people. I like the noise of it. The trees are speaking sign language with their dry heads of moss. Fingers of branches wiggling at me, curling me towards the pool.

My bellys’ swollen in the water, full. I’ve got my hand on it. Content and floating, hiding under my hat and listening to the chatter. This guy shot his first deer when he was eight years old. “Was it traumatizing?” a woman asks. Crooked, he laughs to her “I wore his balls around my neck.” The bluntness of it. I’m laughing too, bubbling air up from where I slink lowly in the water. People who are so convinced, I love them.

There’s a bug way up. A black thumbtack against the sky. How high does he think he is? Surely if he knew, he would come back down. Up there it’s only what’s right there in front, around, never what’s below or far off. No atmospheric perspective, haze there far off.

Reading this book in the water. Switched from Millers book because kids were pointing at the woman’s nakedness on the cover, whispering to their parents. Rebecca Solnit’s book and there’s a passage inside “the blue of distance” it’s titled. She talks about cherishing the sensation of desire on its own. “For the blue is not in the place all those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains… in this world we actually live in, distance ceases to be distance, and to be blue when we arrive in it. The far becomes the near, and they are not the same place.” That fleck above, only in the near… me too, bug.

Later we’re traipsing around Hunting Island. Jungle all around. I see small beady black eyes and little scale covered tails, waggling through shallow water. I get a map of the place at the visitors center; a legend. I’ve been collecting them. What a grip it makes you think you have on a place. In it, a painted bunting… the bird I’m after.

Collectors, collecting… I’m thinking of this passage from Walter Benjamin:

“Property and possession belong to the tactical sphere. Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationery store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!”

A big lady struggles with her kid on a roller, jamming the wheels through the door of a small shop. There isn’t an ounce of flesh that isn’t dotted with beading sweat. My brother holds the door for her and when she forgets her cigarettes on the counter he runs them to her. Tells her there’s a finder’s fee and she’s laughing in that good way that people who have cried hard before laugh. Where it turns em’ red and laughing too so it’s more wheezing.

Seen it before, that laugh, coming brightly from houses in the dark; where the electricity gets shut off. Where people know the sound of digging through car seats in search of change for gas. And I’m thinking about how I don’t want to laugh that way. Not wanting that way because maybe that way was close to being my way. But then, maybe I’d be laughing, too and splotched red… maybe I’d be happy. She’s still laughing when she hands my brother a cigarette.

I take the kite we got, bring it to the shore and I’m wrestling with the thing in the water pulling at its string. Dancing it and weaving it, sometimes able to dip its wing in the water but there’s really no control. Still I try, enjoying trying to get it as close I can, pulling its length then releasing it before a wave topples us both. I hear cheers coming from a mother and son down the beach, cheering me on championing the kites dry-ness. Hollering whenever it gets close but doesn’t dive beneath. I want to give it to them, let them feel it firsthand. They say no! Don’t want it, prefer to watch. Which I think is odd. I’ll never be that way, preferring to watch. I know the kid isn’t either, I can see it in his eyes. He wants the kite, he’d take it from me.

I roll onto the shore, lolling around in the shallows letting waves come in and jam into me. I’m squinting my eyes closed, they sting, biting.. and no rubbing helps. The line is taught, still that pressure tugging gently at my arm. And so I know my kite is with me. I am shaking hands with the sky.

There are other things too, where I feel this line… Where I can close my eyes, but it’s ok because I feel them there. The rowing pulse of her.. and a line, a string it has two ends. So I wonder if the wondering is done alone. Or if there, at the other end of the string, she is there. Wondering too. Fraying string, nervous system, of pulling and taught-ness without words. Ripples instead beating out like a smashing gong. Like smell on air, it travels.. hating eye contact. Shy is the world where most of it takes place. Then my eyes are open, and my body is my own again in the shallows of the shore and the water does not feel warm, it’s hot.

“Let us love the distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.”1

Suddenly, I am one of the crabs my brother and I have been catching, boiling, eating up. Soon, I will turn red and all that hidden stuff inside me will be made prolapsed. All that red will be made the surface of my skin, already it is as it dumps from me here, in these words.

We started with chicken feet in netting, let them sit out in the sun first to mull in a stink. Then tuna cans, and punching holes in them, we’d get splatted by their juices. We’d pull up a lot of them up this way. Drinking sticky beer shirtless, smelling of tuna, and shoeless together in that hugging heat. Eyes flicking always to the trees for little signs of color…

Today’s different though, there’s a storm blowing in. Sent the birds into hiding. It’s there way out in the marsh; heavy, slouching sky coming towards us.

The egg sized yellow strobe is on over the pool. No swimming. Not under this sky, this rain and thunder.

Laying now, hot pooling ground under my bony blades of shoulder. It’s pouring down and I’m dredging memories from last night…

How my back was melting then too, but to the leather of the car seat, sticking hotly and the top was down. We let it down the whole few hours on the highway where the wind was enough to make you think the sun wasn’t burning you.

There were bubbles rocking out from some machine above, blowing brightly, orbs levitating down. The concierge’s name was giggles. She poured us champaign and, swallowing three glasses quickly, I too felt like a levitating thing. As if my stomach was in a tub of those suds. I want to ride their great shiny backs, their bubbles of dialect. It’s very lonely in a bath drawn for one.

Boot buying and they were pouring us whiskey. Ice jiggling, branding them hotly, burnt leather skin filling my nose and I’m sniffing at it. After that it was game on, lights full up. Until I was learning to walk again at two in the morning, stepping through vomit in the new leather… finally reclining on a sofa three levels up swallowing beer and listening to the music of tall men stretching towards the ceiling like shadows. It was cool in the room, finally, and this is important.

I leave the pool, can’t swim anyways. Theres something about tobacco in this heat. And so I pull of in the golf cart, by the garden under the cover of a live oak. I pass the cigarette to my left hand so I can hold the pen in my right then wedge it in the mirror. Need both hands. Writing. Few of the pack left over from that night of drinking. At the garden there is an electric fence that stops me from waddling it’s aisles for signs of that bird I’m after. So I thank it from afar. For the script it gave me. The organic mass of this entire place, this great organ that there is a nice odor to that I will recognize when I’m with cane.

Dusk, now. Mottled brown cushions and an awning above collecting debris. Wet bottled beer and the storm is flicking the sky on and off. In its middle is heaven it looks like, where it clears. And there is the music of a street performer riding in on the heat that’s leaving to gather above, as heat does. We’re hungover talking of nothing, noises only. And are laughing at the nothing of it. Be like heat. Above the meaning.

Terrible dreams last night. The fear in me, instilled by the dream, the oily wet feeling left behind that I couldn’t clean myself of. It woke me, then stained me and kept me awake.

But in it, this blue of distance, and at the end of the dream... A little bird. A painted bunting. It nestled there, into my shoulder. Stretched its neck and was calm. Gave me some of its peace so that when I woke, I wasn’t all that dispossessed of life.

Laying in bed, cool sheets and I’m hot though. She’s turning over and it’s early but I don’t mind I’m awake too. I’ve been that way.

Putting it together, swelling with the timing of things. Soon writing over the balcony, green down there, all fresh grass. I listen to him, the man down there who’s been mowing it all morning. Don’t mind the noise. Makes me think of a neighborhood, with a lawn to mow, a dog to feed... I do not want the picket fence, I want scalding concrete and a hose to wet it with.

Bikes and breakfast and the coffee is spilling in my basket and she’s laughing, saying she sees me spilling but I’m turning the wheel. Trying to keep it out of her view.

We’re passing a school, the one we rode wet through the sprinklers of last night. The neighborhoods were so dark.. dark like mine used to be.

There’s this kid, he pushed past me last night, on his way to take the microphone. It looked like god had sent him to sing. Explosives loaded into his eyes. He stood up there, and began terribly to cover some song. Shrieking, curdling singing that made us leave.

We pull the bikes over, clicking out the third leg of them, rocking them steady. There’s this woman, in this store, and her dogs dead. But the dogs brother is alive and I’m rubbing his chin. I love the thing, he’s long and thick like a tootsie roll. And at first she uses phrasing, phrasing like “we lost him” I think the old woman said. So we think she’s really just lost him, that he needs to be found, at first… but he’s dead.

I’m listening to all this but I’m naked behind this thin plastic wall the old woman put up for me. Trying on pants without underwear and they’re talking about the dogs brother being dead and how they spent their whole lives together. And the pants don’t fit.

She’s in her bathrobe, the owner, the woman. She lives here, in her shop. She must. A big industrial fan’s blowing me and I don’t want to say I’m not gunna buy the pants but they’re ripped at the leg and tighter than hell. The denim sucks at my thighs and I can barely get out of them and I’m trying to stay out of view because I’m jumping in them now, hopping and apologizing for her dead dog and trying not to be seen naked but she’s also trying to peak and see if they fit.

The bikes need to be checked on we say, left them unlocked. The lady is so sweet and I’m smelling the tips of my fingers and I smell her dog on them. That musky grime, a gamey smell. And I smell it again when I drink my coffee.

Reading Miller by the pool. Skin rubbing off like dried glue. There is a lot I want to read, so I’ve been trying to be faster. I try to look every word in the eye but not sound each of them out, only just see it all; construct the thing from sight, trust my senses to do the scaffolding.

Maybe I would like to not sound out more things, scenes. To not chew on things, but to see only. Let feelings wash over, leave the senses to make sense of it.

I can’t help but think that Miller littering his writing with blood and cum is just for the shock of it. A cheap trick. He admires Van-Goghs letters to his brother, Theo… but those letters don’t kneel to the dirt that Miller seems to bathe in?

Then there’ll be these moments, brilliant parts where for a few pages I’m overwhelmed with how alive he seems and it even makes me feel less alive.

Here, where he writes about losing his Tania…

“When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone for-ever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow; it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.”

Then the next lines are about fucking whores and lice writhing around in his sheets and hair. How bloodied pads are kept under the bed along with orange peels by a Russian princess he lives with… her gonorrhea and how he’s afraid to share the toilet with her. Miller thinks…

“The age demands violence, but we are getting only abortive explosions. Revolutions are nipped in the bud, or else succeed too quickly. Passion is quickly exhausted.

Men fall back on ideas, comme d’habitude. Nothing is proposed that can last more than twenty-four hours. We are living a million lives in the space of a generation. In the study of entomology, or of deep sea life, or cellular activity, we derive more…”

Still, it feels true.. that this is how we are organized. A big sleeping thing, weak in doing anything. A slumber, one that he wants to shake people out of…

“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens…”

In Millers time everybody was told what to be, but it seems now that nobody is told to be anything at all. The first is a circumcision of freedom, the second, our direction. And now we’re writhing around in a soup of corrupted mercury and the compass doesn’t know where to point, where everything is shocking and so nothing is shocking… Why is it so much easier to destroy than create? So we rebel against respectability, and structure.. and we are left where? In Millers carnival, but worse… because at least he knew beautiful things that mattered.

I wonder now what Miller would have written about, now that everybody is up to their ears in blood and cum… if he realized it’s harder to be shocked by goodness.

And maybe I’m hung up, and I need to go back into the water so that it’s all I’m thinking about - being submerged. Because my scripts are done but my time away is over… I want that pregnant belly of the book I’m writing…

“As I say, the day began gloriously. It was only this morning that I became conscious again of this physical Paris of which I have been unaware for weeks. Perhaps it is because the book has begun to grow inside me. I am carrying it around with me everywhere. I walk through the streets big with child and the cops escort me across the street. Women get up to offer me their seats. Nobody pushes me rudely any more. I am pregnant. I waddle awkwardly, my big stomach pressed against the weight of the world.”

insides..

[below is more marginalia on Tropic of Cancer, gold under France, being sick discovering it, and more film]

Read more

The sun does not listen here. To the rules the race has made. No, it rises three hours later than they say it does. Sets, two hours before. The stony shoulders of the range make sure of it. Make sure I’m far from what I know…

The instant-coffee I got in town pile drives me into working right, gives me an empty flutter in the stomach but it doesn’t get rid of the ice from the windshield of the Toyota corolla I rented.

My hands are pink, wrapping a wooden spoon that barely scrapes it off. Behind each drag, a signature of illegible cursive. Until there is enough to see a little out of.

It get’s me where I am but it’s too cold to wait out there. In the belly warmth of the car I turn up the heat and watch the last of the ice melt from the windshield.

Through the porthole of the corolla the sun’s light is crawling down the mountainside. Scorching sunlight wine spilling into an upside-down glass.

The shaded flowers are crusted with a million liquid eyes, furs of ice, it is all changing too fast to be one or the other. My lens gets me close enough to see.

Bodies jet out from cabins below. Deer jump fences with wet smoking backs. Heavy looking packs bobbing off in every direction to conduct what research their after. To observe.

A dozen or so of them. Of people I wish I knew better so that maybe I could follow them along. And they could point to things and make them make sense.

I have arrived too early for the hundreds that will be here soon. I hear great things about the mess hall I will never know.

I am glad for it. The place feels all mine after everyone has fettered off into their small entrances into forest or field. And then I fetter into mine.

Metal towers stand like demented basketball hoops, little nodules on their tops whirring and each I have no idea what it does. Only that it looks beyond me. Machinations pointed toward the mountain behind them. To me, it feels a small patch of precious man-made corn. If I stepped inside the cluster of instruments, I have the feeling I would be standing inside a corn maze, hidden, made to look up at it’s important looking stalks.

Past the field station, a tall building. It’s roof angular and long, frowning down at the solar panels that point upwards. It’s the sun they catch, but the ink of their color makes me think they might be after something more. Something in orbit or beyond. Underneath them, a dozen pairs of skii’s… assorted poles… All looking like they’ve seen more of this place than I have.

There’s no door to the house. I circle the it; he knows I’m coming. But… maybe this is the wrong place? I’m trying to knock, but there is nowhere for my knuckles to land. A few hello’s and nothing back. All those instruments out front and not one a cell tower. No service here.

I circle the foliage that walked me there before. There ahead… next to the tall instruments, stands a human man, made of flesh but somehow seeming to belong to those stalks that seem they’d rather be in orbit.

White hair overflows under a cap, a large beard too. Transition lenses make themselves dark over the bright man. Already, I am happy to meet him.

With a finger he points out passes, the dangerous ones. Wrinkles where people have died. And other wrinkles too that are steeper than you’d think. I notice the dozens of skis’ and skins sat against the house, poking from grabbing grass.. I fear to ever know first-hand what steep is to him.

He steps in among the precious machinery, past the sacred line I dared not to cross and divulges their secrets each; this one watches the mountain, the other here (two heavy looking metal plates) measures the pounds of snow that falls, and this spinning one up here, this measures temperatures and collects its own snow.

But all of it; the whirring and ticking expensive looking things, seem to come second to the plain panel of white stood on four wooden legs, a pale, and a tube.

It’s his favorite. With it, he started it all. The measuring of snow melt, the longest study on it in all the world. All because “he was curious.. and bored” he says while this camcorder sweats in my hand, while my eyes keep blinking up at the snow that he seems friendly enough with. It’s the wind he loathes.

I follow him inside, through a door that doesn’t exist. Past two large piles of chopped wood, there is an entrance then a walkway then… a door. I circled this place, molested it with my eyes. It’s as if it spawned when he stepped onto the property.

In the greenhouse, the tomato’s are his favorite. On the back of some asparagus road bugs that will never leave. The leaves, to me, are dense and green; pumping with their arms. In the aisles it’s an effort to twist out of their reach. Each one gets a handshake, and the plants, they bounce, shaking his back.

I struggle with the tripod and the light but decide that the window gives light enough, and we interview.

When we’re done I forget the microphone on his shirt and I’m running back to the door I’m not sure exists without him to open it.

Behind it, he is there, and he’s happy to see me again.

Back at Doctors cabin, I yank a beer from a six packs disposable spinal chord and shuffle in rubber shoes to the showers..

In the morning already my expedition into the mud is cancelled. My chaperones eye-brow piercing has swollen up, they don’t want to be filmed. I wanted that mud bad, caked on my knees, squelching boots. I would feel totaled if not for the rain that has finally come.. It has sent the rivers mad. Perfect for swimming.

Without my shorts I fight slipping over stones, each a different smooth color of gray, each a saucer. I climb down into a deep enough hole carved by the current over the rock in front of it. I hold on and the water propels over my bare skin the whole length of my body and I know each part of the water that touches me from head to toe. Each centimeter, a needle.

Then I am numb and know nothing. Each pinning prick has turned to one warm quilt. The water is colder than freezing but doesn’t know how because it is forced to move. Im churned raw and red and I’m liking it now. That my breathing has stopped hitching.

Above, I can see where the melt must be coming from. The side of the mountain has patches of snow like band aids. I am in that, now.

I dunk my head and suck in a mouthful of the stuff. Swallowing it down. Tasting those peaks that reach themselves out into the atmosphere, hoping there’s nothing dead upriver.

I wish for more deer to come, the moose with its child that I’ve heard about being seen in these woods..

Up on the handrails of my cabin, I dry myself and wait for the sun. Wet skin cooking off and it was too cold to piss in the river…

I love the outhouse. It’s beautiful and it’s insides are stamped with drawings plastered all over and there is a beam of light vommited by a fish to see them by. They tell me layered things, like not to drop condoms down and if it needed a poster then maybe sex happens here often. Which is more than I thought.

That night at a bar in town, I slaughter a meatball sub and a beer, the stuff of both all over my fingers. I churn my fingers through a dozen napkins but can’t get them clean.

A couple next to me tells me moose are mean, and ugly. That I don’t want to meet one. But still, I do.

I order the wrong beer. One that isn’t from here. Blunder. I order another. Hockey is on, I put a little money on the Hurricanes. I don’t know them much, but I’ve got family there now. In Carolina.

Too much gear, too worried about the details. Far too much charging batteries and file transfers. The pressure is invented; I’ve made it up. That sets me free a little, and I listen to the couple tell me about their kids, about the hunting, and the tagged bears. How all the people here refuse to call animal control because a tagged bear is a bear with no more chances. Death for coming too close to the race.

I think of Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant (1936) where he kills an elephant and you want to hate him, to blame him but can’t because it feels too human and would probably do the same. How he uses the death of a man to justify it but really it was the hundreds who wanted to see it killed, the pressure of it and the ego and that dead man that warrants it but more truly, it doesn’t.

“But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him.”

All the details are there in the gruesomeness and the guilt and it is exactly how it would feel but you want there to be a wrong and right; but both exist at the same time. It feels punishment, the telling of it.

I tell the couple about a marmot I saw today, who snuck under the hood of a car and traveled to the home of a woman. Her and the scientist trapped it in the garage.

I was walking by, filming scientists jotting notes and lifting petals, when it was brought back.

Brushing her hair free of her eyes, the woman whispers me the story as I crouch there next to her. The small camera I record her with.. takes her from me. I’m exposing her and something knots all wrong in my stomach. I feel a leper, or a pervert.

The couple makes me try some of their food. I exaggerate how good it is, promise to order it next time I’m here. Then promise it will be soon. I’m hoping it is but there is a some remorse there because a bigger part knows it won’t.

I’m holding myself and growing out of my arms at the same time. I am eating up this making and meeting.. the last of this meatball sub too and my fingers are sticky but I’ve given up on wiping them clean.

After another beer, after the couple has gone, and I’ve eyed the rows of merchandise this restaurant is selling, decided not to buy any. I decide that this, that all of this will find it’s way into the story I’m writing. And how weirdly close it is already..

I’m driving home, with fire inside me. And there it is, the same fire. I share it with what what I see. On either side, thunder and lightning crack against dark but straight away there is sheeting rain that spoils nothing. There’s another guy, he’s pulled over too, staring at it all. Lives here, he says, that he’s never seen anything like it. On my last night too. I can’t even focus on talking to him, my words clip but it doesn’t matter and I don’t think about it. Only what’s left of the leaving sky.

There is a place, deep in the mountains and far from the din of perceivers where scientists gather. They gather in this place to lend it their attention. To devote years of their lives in a stubborn act of humility. It seems to me a faith consumes this place…

That is what I love most! What pulls me towards it. This ever-applicable faith, not limited to religion, but to any thing that we give ourselves to with no end in sight. The place seems a practice of this faith, of humility against the backdrop of time and earth underfoot.

I’ve leapt on the basis of faith before. Faith, that I wasn’t sure where my curiosity would take me, if it would take me. Or the filming, the story making… how I’ve slaved with no promise at the end of it all. And doubted my convictions so that they were not convictions at all… And continued to. Until it was a faith, I realized, that was behind it all and renewed itself inside me. To continue to do what you started out to. Without explanation, or a codified significance. No, just simply to go on existing in a way that exists because it does.

Do not let me ever know myself! I fear that if I do, I will cease to be who I am. Even now, something is fettering into those spots inside me, where doubt holds fast. The carnal mess of all this inky matter, it is telling me something and I am trying to listen past the doubt.

It feels important, these moments when we’re learning something… a secret, that we’re finding to be a truth. That is what I’m after. Truth. And here is a place that all but seems to dwell on truth! Yes, it is the pulse of this place and the scientists in it that my own echoes, draws me there… to the rockies.

Read more

I’ve collected indexes on what there is to be found here. From a temple at the front that needed nine dollars to park and laminated most their wares; bird maps and flora and fauna notations.

“Start here, then follow this path. Dark in places then altogether sunny in others. You’ll see the whole valley if you follow this path.” The woman behind the counter said.

“Damp and mossy?” I asked.

“Very. Banana slugs litter the whole way.”

The whole way is the way she said. Every so often children’s voices vibrate from places unseen, orbiting around the valley floor. When they appear, they’re in short lines behind their teachers, stopping at crosswalks between walls of trees.

A mass of green and tunneling sunlight, a breeze that I felt once when I was thirteen during a locked away summer on the east coast. I feel it there, on that bridge above a stream wrestling with nothing to go nowhere below. These… separate things that altogether stitch a more complete and amalgamous scene.

The catalogues tell me each owns its own explanation. That I am not looking at a single mass but an ensemble. Who knows, it feels this way. Phenomenology tells me that this is enough, this feeling alone that “perhaps all matter and energy are stitched together in mysterious ways.” Is enough to permit its legitimacy.

It’s a short drive back to the ranch. The front desk feels like they’re telling us to fuck off when we ask for bikes. It’s in all the breath between this guy’s words, the slant of his lids. Gives me a code that unlocks nothing and now it’s night. Policy forbids the bikes out after dark. My stomach aches, and hers does too.

Dinner is many courses. The wine kicks my mood around in a great way. We’re celebrating. I got good news I’m afraid to say aloud, so that the world may hold its heel from stomping it into the graveyard of every other promise.

But these people are kind! And each plate they bring is different, but at the end feels like one great thing. One great weight in my stomach.

They ask us outside for dessert, where the deck is ours alone. As has everything else been here; the orchard, and lanes of path to run on in early morning, the pool and the river. Empty and ours, as each place is that we venture to during these odd days of the week.

A spider hangs from a string, I tell her he’s here to bring her the last course. A kiss. She makes a name for him, and we laugh.

In the morning after breakfast I take the meadow to the river. There I step out each leg, careful to mitigate the speed at which I’m stomping out into its current. Lo and behold, a sandbar underfoot… Hello there sand and shallow depth. To be at your ankles sixteen feet from the shore, on a hump of land, it feels like something that should not be allowed. Against the “order” of things, as if to levitate.

I stand there a long while until I hear voices downriver. Another hump of land, pushed up next to a smaller river that cuts inland and feeds the one I’m in. On it, a few kayaks. So, there too are explorers. Parked and on foot they’ve climbed free of the rivers milk. On their own and sure to return. I wonder how far they’ll go, if they’ll make it to the bridge with lights.

After having been in the river, the salt water of the pool feels extraordinarily warm. A beer calls me out from the water and then I am tracing my feet in long, slithering grass. The kind that makes you feel like you need to know its name. So that you may find it again.

And when I stop dragging my feet through it’s dampness, I am doing research. For a documentary. Flipping. I read about how the periodic table is an effort by the race to categorize and slot the building blocks of life, a grasping at wanting to represent the order of the world.

But looking closely you can see that in the first three rows the columns only line up because we’ve added large spaces between the rows. “The sixth and seventh row line up vertically only if we excise fifteen atoms from each. Some elements defy the supposed unifying properties of their columns. Hydrogen is not a metal, for example, and mercury is not a solid.”

Instead, Haskell says “we’ve massaged the data to create a ledger like image. When we look at the periodic table, we’re gazing not at a objectively observed world but at a mirror into our own psyche and culture.”

“An atom comprises a tight cluster of protons surrounded by electrons. For each atom, numbers of protons and electrons are always matched. The electrons arrange themselves in “shells” around the electron… Atoms with full outer shells are inert. Those with partly filled outer shells are reactive. For example, hydrogen has only one electron in its inner shell. Add a whiff of oxygen and a spark: boom!”1

And so, Haskell argues that if we organized the table of elements according to electrons, we would see a not so separate image of the world but one that is more connected, that emphasizes relationship.

One that can only take place of something we cannot see but know is there. He talks of the unseen string that animates all.

“Even when physically separated, electrons can remain united to others, some-how “knowing” what other electrons are doing. What might this “spooky” quantum entanglement teach us if we painted it on every science classroom wall?… The ethical lesson would be very different. If we’re forever and unalterably connected to one another, then belonging, not aloneness, is the foundation of the universe.”2

And I’m left thinking… As I always am about all these unseen things. And that maybe, they are not so unseen.

That perhaps if we do not discount what we know by thinking we fully know it but instead practice humility at the edges of our surety… The race could plunge more truthfully towards a better understanding. Towards better question making.

[Below is a notebook excerpt, editing in a dark hole, and more film]

Read more

What followed was thousands of messages with requests for letters. Thousands of people wanting something real and in their hands. So, I started writing. To all these people I didn’t know.

Prior to the letter projects ignition I was back on the East Coast and had been looking for a typewriter. No ambitions, only wanted something to write small things, maybe try some poetry, or notes to friends.

It wasn’t until returning home to California that I had found one. Except the typewriter I was after was still back east. It took a lot of convincing to get the seller to ship it all that way, but in the end. He did. Luckily so, it has been crucial to this thing of ours. My knuckles would have given out by now if I were using a pen. And I wouldn’t have met Mr. Shultz, the keeper of typewriters, liaison of ink. When the ribbons went.

On the typewriter, I’ve written more than a thousand letters by now.

In the beginning I didn’t have a system yet. It was all sort of this big mess that took hours and hours of going through messages in order to make sure letters were going out. Eventually there was some organization, some iteration of the system I hadn’t expected to need.

Things like a label printer, so I wouldn’t have to hand write dozens of addresses at a time, or even something as simple as a return address stamp later on really helped. And so things became more feasible logistically. While the financial aspect remained disheartening.

It seemed that even though I had forgotten the value of a letter, the United States Post Office had not. Postage isn’t cheap, envelopes, and supplies. It would be impossible to keep the project going. Or at least that was what I had thought.

Then came all of your support.

I was receiving requests to send stamps, to start having you operate mailing satellites where you would help to write the letters, and requests even to send financial support. Requests, that I didn’t feel comfortable accepting unless you were getting something tangible back.

So I created a paid tier on Substack. Where the people who wanted to help keep this thing of ours going, could. Where you could support the project, receive a letter faster and more personalized than the hundreds I was doing for free, and also read everything I’m writing outside the project. Unfettered by paywalls.

It’s moved past that initial letter now. For the people who’ve been sticking around, I’ve started sending out a photo print monthly. You would have gotten it by now and so it’s no surprise to see it again, below. With a letter on it’s back.

It took a while to get the right iteration, and only after visiting several print shops did I find one that could achieve the quality of the print I was after. But I found it.

I’ve asked the photo lab to start scanning the film in TIFF files, so that the next dispatch will be even higher quality.

And so the letters kept going out. In droves I was sending them. Each unique and all their own. I sent a hundred letters before I realized that I very much so wanted to give people the opportunity to respond. It seemed the want was mutual.

That’s when I opened a PO box. And when I did… your stories found me. And they did not disappoint.

Dozens of pages written front to back in endless handwriting. Beautiful envelopes with photographs and encouragements. I even started archiving them all into folders. Suddenly it was becoming clear just how powerful this thing of ours had become.

I was writing second grade classrooms, nursing home residents, authors at the bloom of their careers, and people with months to live. And I hadn’t even known it until I started receiving your letters.

I think part of that helped, though. The not knowing.

You see, I keep a journal, filling it monthly. Nobody sees them, the writing inside. I keep them close. It was even a talking point in my relationship. That she was to never go through my journal, I consider it the highest betrayal. They are sacred things.

So then why do I always seem to write in it like there is somebody over my shoulder, eyeing me as I jot into them? I want to be without this imagined persecution at my thinking that splays itself confined onto those pages.

Then the letters started.

When they did, all of this invisible ‘audience’ seemed to disappear. My writing became untethered and I began to write to all of you like nobody was there, on the other end.

Odd… now that I was writing and it was actually being read, I was writing like it wasn’t.

And so I wrote, and wrote and am still writing. Into each letter I send it’s a sort of confession. Each letter, an emptying of some part of my conscious that is writhing to get out. And you’re reading them. And as you do, I feel lighter and lighter with each letter I send.

This… thing of ours, seems to be a symbiotic relationship. I might even say the scales tip ever more in my favor, for I get far more than you from sending off these letters.

I’ve shared much, it seems. I must’ve, in order to have encouraged the honesty of everything I’m receiving. And so this sort of door has been opened and I’m reading pages in length, scrolls, divulging the cornerstones of the senders lives, of your lives. The plot points that have stung or swaddled you most and reshaped your lives or mutated the clay of them. It’s humbling. As a story teller, there is no greater inspiration. And I thank you, and know that every letter I receive, I read. If I’m able. Some of you write in scrawling, beautiful cursive. I’m unable to read these.

I also have to mention that usually I am in graveyards stealing names for my stories… But now I’ve started stealing yours. So thank you. For this, too. Your names.

Even if you’re just here for a letter. Hope you’ll stay for what’s yet to be said.

The road was clicking under my tires, without pavement and winding. There were three different signs, at all three I was supposed to go right. My four wheel drive was off and so I was dragging tail in small wags at every turn. I liked it. Until up ahead and raising from the horizon, long necks were poking out dotted with the heads of llamas, alpacas, and camels. Behind them, the full span of the place came into view. Three thousand foot elevation, a barnyard in the sky.

i.

I came a long way to find this place, first met by a pack of camels. Big ones, I could tell as I got close staring up at their piping necks. But there was still one in the distance… and he was trotting straight for me. The first thing I noticed as he charged was how with all that mass, he was only going to be able to go straight & and second, as I barely got out of his way, that lazy eye.

Behind that wild eyed hump ridden mountain dweller, came two boys on a four-wheeler. They tell me they’re brothers. That they take care of the ranch. Then they shoot off, the one in the trailer throws his hands up casting a spell of dirt drifting into the mix of clouds that collude between this range and the next.

It’s then that I think of my own brother. So strongly that I lose my breath, but I’m smiling all the while.

My next letter will be to him. And I will tell him of the boys and how they reminded me of us.

ii.

Mosquitos all around. Damn these little bastards. It must be this moon making me translucent. Fuckers can see my blood right through my skin. They’d prefer something sharp to my wrists, that way they could roll around in it. And so we don’t have much time.

I don’t believe in clearing your head. If your head is full of crude oil there’ll be smoke from your ears wherever you go. Yes, I’ve come here to write but the only thing I’ve written is a handful of these letters.

It’s because of you I’ve written anything at all.

Maybe then… the oil is all burned up.

iii.

I’m in a place far away and up above. And without food. I forgot it.

There was stew hiding in my trunk, two cans, and on the grill I heated it last night - joined ringside by a pack of llamas. All fur and eyes, my neighbors.

They watched me sit to write, saw that nothing came. I had a beer instead, in a metal cup I’d found. They liked me better, then. I liked myself better then.

They told me so, I could hear them as I slept. Telling me to forget the book, that people are wrong when they tell you it gets better. They said the best is all you’ve got and the best is right now. I asked them about the hoping, is it better than what you’re hoping for? They almost answered, then I woke up.

I am hoping to see them again, in some dream or another. When I saw them this morning they were empty of answers.

iv.

There is one peacock they seem hesitant to pen up with all the rest. He clucked slow and smart from on top of the enclosure... a mocking thing. We were holding each other’s gaze this morning, he was sizing me up.

It was too early, I could still hear the coffee pot in my cabin hiccuping behind me. I gave him no berth on my way to the sauna, daring the bird to try something.

Up ahead, wood split. Behind the fence, it’s a child’s arms that brought the axe down.

Inside the sauna, there was a fire already set. I sat reading until the pail was empty, rocks were dry.

Outside, the wind was going, tugging at the towel I had wrapped at my waist. After boiling in all those degrees I really stopped to stand in it.

A camel watched me wrench at the spigot.

I dumped the bucket over the rocks and sat again in the dark, firelight punching jabs into the steam. What little light there was, gave me something I’m not sure how to show to you. There is a soul to it. Yes, something is alive with me in there. Sheets of rain thumped at the walls and I knew it was out there too. All around.

Or maybe it’s that damn bird. Maybe he was waiting for me out there. Maybe he waits for me even now.

Guts guts guts…

[Below is a letter project update, camera rigging update, and inside scoop on the film I’ve been shooting]

Read more

At my desk, being swallowed by all that I’ve yet to say. So I will say nothing, I decide, and listen to others for a while.

All day in the writers guild building, sitting in the library. The light feels like it’s coming through the canvas of a hamper. A desk near the back. I check out several scripts that thump healthily as they hit the table. One is signed by its author. I read for hours. One script, in particular, I linger on. It’s that it makes me feel less alone. The story is an old one, part of my lingering is because I’m so far from it… and here I am, not sure if I am understanding the story or the story is understanding me.

I think of other stories that have shared with me their hard won secrets, truths fought for by the lives who wrote them, who came to understand them.

Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being has always been a book I've come back to. While the writing would often dislodge me, feeling stiff. The secret Kundera was empowered to share, was one I found to be extremely valuable.

Yes… we teach each other the secrets we have learned, these truths. But where words fall short, we instead use stories. Stories are the microscope our race uses when we are investigating something we cannot see. Often, I have offered advice to friends or family, although appreciated, never accepted. And at other times I have sought advice too, only to nod and admit that they are right, that yes, it is what I must do. And then I do not! We must learn from our own tragedies, this is truly the only way to understand. But, there is a gift in stories. Your tragedy becomes mine, mine becomes yours, becomes ours. The gift is this being made to understand so that we may shout to one another “Look what I’ve discovered!”

Anyways, I filled pages upon pages trying to dissect the weight of my own life, Kundera’s book a constant companion. My feet would hover from the ground, I was a black balloon and my family, friends, grasping at my ankles! But the book was enough to stay me, keep me tethered deeply to this life, or rather show me that I wanted to be. Not some floating balloon entirely too hard to touch.

Kundera tells a story of a Tomáš and Tereza. Tomáš wants only to be free and goes about his life floating. Nothing weighs anything to him. No, not even his wife Tereza whom he ceaselessly cheats on. Tereza cares immensely. Especially about Tomáš, wanting for meaning and so, she suffers at his hands. Every time her weightless husband cheats.

“The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air… his movements as free as they are insignificant.”

To be unbearably light… or made of meaning? Heavy with it. To that, I say:

The strength one can have, true strength , comes with offering yourself up to the world, allowing it to grind your face to bone on its temporal concrete. There, ground to bone, you can see it better, smell it better. With your face shaved off. To float weightlessly and uncaring comes with its own inevitable pain, I think. For a while you skip like a stone. But all stones sink. Then, at the end of your life you realize you have pulled a great trick on yourself if you are indeed a stone at all.

I resolved a long time ago to run head long into all that there is to feel or into the people that would allow me to feel it. I’m happy to have revisited this idea. For it’s been years… and sometimes it’s easier to think floating is akin to happiness, that maybe the full palette of all there is, is too rich in color or that your iris’s may burn with all the brightness of what there is to feel. My younger self would have lashed me until I shed all this innumerable weight I complain of bearing! Then, protracted in liters of blood, scraping and grasping in puddles of the stuff I would see how much I needed it inside me. The weight of it. And how I’d scrape! Cupping the stuff from where it pooled, desperate for the lifeblood, the stuff that makes me both live and feel alive.

No matter how painful it’s return, I would whimper and ache to put it back inside. I am comforted in the thought. For I know I have not strayed the path that I had set out on as a child. I believe it’s better to live fully even if it crushes you whole. At least you can say “I have tried. I have aspired.”

Underneath the weight you’ll hopefully not turn to stone but something more close to clay. Hopefully, when I’m old and white and not much more than a bag of skin, in spots that ripple from moments I’ve felt, maybe then the clay I am will know of many shapes before being tossed back to the lumping ribbons of the rest.

Dry tinder everywhere. Bristles from towering trees. Trees, that shade us from the last of the sun, daylight that whimpers above. Only their tips are bright where the light catches them. The ground is blurry under our feet, a mess of needles. Though it’s day time still, it seems the sun has forsaken this place under the canopies above. Yes, it is night here already.

The fire is easy to start. It’s propane. A twisting of the knob and you’re off to the races.

Trapped in your mind with no way to decant how you feel. What fresh hell. Words have saved my life. I imagine they have saved us all.

My fingers set out from their starting gate, I am typing at this night derby.

More clear minded, technical and operational during mornings. Can make sense of it all and assemble a thing, an idea more successfully. At night the edges bleed and vagueness whispers to nuance and importance nests in feeling.

I have been, for a while, trying to decipher the mornings against the nights as to which are better to work inside of. My professor says that during nights he is closer to being imaginative, functioning more effectively in not cutting through the muddling of a mind but working hand in hand with the disarray. Using it as compass.

The pulsing of everything, the purpose of it seems to be derived at night, When we are meaning making and warping the stories of our lives. A sentimentality creeps in… The morning then, explain yourself! For organization and navigable skills? The structuring and technical sketching of blueprints for what the night has whispered truths of?

Hekate and Apollo: two different ways of encountering reality. The liminal forest I am in seems to know neither... Or both, unable to give itself wholly to one or the other.

Hekate speaks to what is beneath the carnal mass. Apollo, the solid and visible texture of this life. Both of equal importance. Listening to either will teach a person much, but listen to both and beyond knowing is what you will come to understand.

Both are academies of thought, disciplines of thinking. Fall into one too much and you risk joining the globbing mass of the narrow minded. You lean too much the other way and you risk becoming disembodied.

This… balance, has been neglected in our races keenness to disenfranchise the body from it’s will of heart. Separating them.

A living, raging, tragedy.

In a place like this there is no telling day from night! Forget it all, I will take a shower. Over my shoulder I sling a clean white towel and set off down the narrow road.

There are sturdy tents made from spruce and canvas. They litter the forest floor. Through the trees they glow, like incubators, shadowy organs of people moving like shadow puppets inside them each.

I follow a flowing string of a river, thinking about all the time it took for it to cut itself through this place. Hell, to make this place! A siren call then for the trees to sprout up around it ancient and limb like.

It’s not much more than a trickle. But how it must’ve raged.

The bathrooms tower there suddenly. Looming like great tall eyes. I shower hotly. The door opens, feet shuffle. Hermes maybe, trying to deliver me an answer? Then the door closes. I turn the faucet off, arriving clean again to the air outside.

We have beautiful food. She always makes beautiful food. Dinner is an array of cheeses and meats, fresh tomatoes, olives, hard boiled eggs, and beer.

I’ve got the wood fire going now. It is leaking, yes leaking. Like sap and fast into the woods now and I am still eating and not yet full.

There is a restaurant up the road, dim and expansive with people who wear smiles well. They make me a drink and beyond well it slips, gullet first and the black salt follows. There is the ocean blacker than night past the bar and unseen over the massive ledge that spans as the fortification of this large patio.

They say, the smiling people, that the moon owns the night. That it steals the sun but equally replaces it. That there are great spots to go lobstering out in that blackness, in parts of the coast far below that are hidden by it.

I am without worry and laughing soon. It is easy to smile, to laugh, with people that are ready to laugh with you before they even meet you.

Back down the road and into the forest den we arrive once more. The blankets are heated when we pounce onto them.

Cocktails and heated blankets, beer and food. She lay beside me. I could stay in a place like this a long while, let my brain atrophy and become unthinking. Night and day blurring and a fire always going.

I can feel it now, the night making promises… I could be sure I’ll keep them, but all these nights have given me many mornings.

There is something about this. I reek of fire. The pine needles burn quickly and hotly, then when the fire has nothing to eat it starves it’s plumes of smoke across camp. The wood is more shy than it was last night, burning only it’s back or front then protecting the inverse of itself.

My throat is raw and hurts. My tonsils, I blame them. And I’ve been wrong to. I sucked down too much smoke last night! When will I learn. No, never. This must be hope, then? To continue doing the same thing again and again and expect a different outcome. Insanity, some would say. But, it feels more like hope. Maybe the two are cousins, joining each other during holidays on the coast, tide pooling together and sinking small boats made of shells with rocks from the shore.

My tonsils are the size of mollusks and maybe it’s that when I am in the ocean later, I will have a few gulps and maybe they will shrink back.

The sun still hasn’t found this place.

Then I turn up and realize I am wrong.

Some branches have got light in their mitt, reaching fans of pine. Other light pools on the embankment. We roast bread over the fire. I stop to poke and roll logs onto their unburnt sides for burning. Redwood pine needles mixing their sap to taint the toast with an acrid flavor. I eat it still, it is good.

The rest of our water goes onto the fire with a big moist plume.

We spend the rest of the morning on the patio we visited last night where all is revealed. Fingers claw into an ocean hidden by fog. Birds flock past their forested backdrop, disappearing against the whiteness of sky.

The mysticism of night is not dispelled, no, it is given form. And it is more glorious than I could have dared to imagine.

I had been trying to decide which to work inside, night or day. It seems that the two are not mutually exclusive. Night rewards day and the inverse. Either is fuel for the next that comes. How tragic a story if the moon would stop pulling tides! What anarchy would follow if the sun ceased to rise? Age old symbiosis, no wonder we must live accordingly. I wonder now if this was at all a question or a lack of seeing so plainly what was already there. I am a slow learner it seems, but a vigilant one.

Leave to the morning what the night has given to decipher. Chewing always on the primacy of the immediate body of perception.

guts guts guts…

[Below is a book, notes on my most recent script & how I used day and night as a tool to write it, and some bts notes on what’s written above]

Read more

I am tall. There isn’t a little man punching tickets to see me, but I can see over the tank of most small aquarium exhibits. It is also true I admire baths with a strong reverence. Tragically, most tubs do not fit the length of my outstretched legs. So, I am left with dry knees that often poke from the water and will not submerge unless my back is extended up as if I were bolted to an electric chair. Only then, and with the posture of a thousand generations, do my knees duck under that good hot wet and get to enjoy what the rest of my body revels in.

But tonight, I have found a tub in a most peculiar place... A place charged with history and ancient. A place with windows that open to the ocean, so close is it that even now the clacking of these keys is nearly drowned out by the sound of hammering swell on the shore.

I am by the ocean, but not in it. Though I feel almost, as if I were. The structure of this place and its texture reminds me of being inside the guts of the titanic. Hallways, gothic and decorated with ancient paintings, hung by little tassels to the ceilings so as to not disturb the walls that are made out of horse hair. Layers of trinkets and elegant details on the corners of every piece of furniture. Over it all, gathering in a invisible layer is the oceans brine. No, I am not at sea, though it is right there through the window. I am inside an Inn strewn on the coast of Monterey and not far from it’s Cannery Row.

A recent and overwhelming fascination with this place has taken hold of me. For reasons of inspiration and aquatic fascination not born from by inspired by an author who used to live here. An author that put so plainly many ideas that I had been wrestling with to see clearly.

But in this moment, I am not wrestling. No, only floating in this tub I’ve found where in my room it was waiting for me. A clawfoot tub that demands acknowledgment for it’s long length, long enough to stretch, to kick, and damn near swim if it were only deep enough. Yes, it is a special occasion. Not often is it I find a tub like this. I will fill it again before the night is done and tomorrow after I am in the ocean I will come back to its warmth one last time before I depart this place.

In warm water often you are unthinking. Only thinking about if the water is too hot to get in or cold enough to get out. But many times, and this is not just secular to warm water but all water. You are made to think clearly. Your thoughts take on a flowing sort of state. Tonight, the temperature of the water is pleasant and so I have time instead to think of other things...

I think of Steinbeck and the people who frequented Cannery Row. The artists and scientists and drunks. The fisherman too and their sardine or squid boats. I think of the time they are locked away to and the time I’m locked away in. I am timid of putting into words the discontent I have for my own time. Only because I am not so sure I am so discontent with it. In a dozen or so years it may be that the era I inhabit will be looked upon also with such reverence. I make louder my thoughts of contentedness and practice gratitude for the time that has yet to come, and that it is not here yet. That I precede it and for now, do so with wet knees.

Then I am dry, toweled, and having a beer while Paige dresses for dinner. We were given a hefty iron key for our door and I have lost it. We search for a long while before she hands it to me smiling.

“What would you do without me?” She smiles up at me.

“Would’ve never made it out of the room. The police would find me in the tub after a month… They’d try to pull me from it but I’d just be hard to grab, my skin would just be slipping off.”

The oceans breath punches me as we step outside, laughing as we descend the staircase. It looks much more gentle on her, the air, blowing her hair breezily in it’s weaving.

Several deer pull us to a stop on our way into town. They graze unbothered and we say nothing while we watch them. Only making small clicking noises, trying to lure them closer…

I hold my hand out for the deer and then quickly I am just thinking about my own, suspended, hand. I imagine if you held your hands out long enough, it might take a week, a month, but eventually the weight of them would become heavy. And so I think that, yes, if you held your hands out long enough, you would feel the literal weight of the world in them.

There is wine in our bellies now, when we return. It encourages us through the Inn and into rooms we hadn’t known were there. Dragging fingers loosely alongside a pool table and then into a ping pong chamber where we scramble for paddles to face off. She looks beautiful, dark and inviting and it’s hard to focus and the room echoes loud with each ping. I’m not sure whose won before we’re back sliding through the ancient place until we find our room in the floors below… past all eeriness of the empty halls we find each other and that is a comfort most welcome.

The morning is gentle as we eat. I order more bacon, more orange juice. Plenty of orange juice. Several times the woman plays kind as she brings me another glass. I can’t get enough! She vanishes for the rest of the morning after the sixth glass. We stay long in the dining room, until the other perceivers have gone and left. Leaving in their wake a most uninterrupted view.

Outside of Steinbeck and Ed Rickets laboratory, I feel real in this place, in the shadow of another. Two men, obsessed with understanding. I stop and stare for a while, take a photo. It is the only place like it on the entirety of the row, untouched. Desperately I want to go inside, but I heed Steinbecks words and know in my heart that the invisible feeling of the place that I have must be more grand than any cold and affronting reality of the place.

There is a homage to Ricketts and Steinbeck also, in the aquarium that we fumble into. I spend some time letting my eyes roll through glass jars and down paragraphed blurbs.

“They’re about to feed the seals.” A woman rushes past excitedly.

Between the heads of lolling toddlers is a tank that we angle at for a better look. Seals like to play. It is clear in how they eat. Rolling and jumping, using their bellies as place mats. Porpoises are also playful creatures and thus have earned empathy from those too, who can remember being playful, or those who are still. A child turns from the tank to stare right at me. He waits, as I do too. After a while of this… this staring. I start to feel a seal. Maybe it is I who is behind the glass? Child, throw me a fish! Yes, that is what these seals must think.

Two stories down from the seals, in the lower levels of this great secular auditorium and through its many winding corridors are great gallon tanks that hold creatures with a more serious demeanor. We stand and watch them. My eyes dragging on their every move. Cold calculated depths have robbed them of play. Are we then robbed of play, made hard by whatever depths we’re forced to plunge as adolescents? It’s true, I’ve met many who are this way. The key is to then return to this state, aware.

Into each tank I ascend. Fascination gets the better of my feet and before long they are stepping up alongside a great fish all made of muscle or a jelly that’s seemingly been pulled from a dream. It is naïve to think that the race could dream something so divine. In the aquarium I am reminded that the build of this world and it’s inhabitants is the truest well of inspiration. If one is lost, they need only look to biology, composition, and it’s array against what is around.

At each tank a different docent floats close telling us of why the animal is the way it is. A certain man, Wilfred, finds us on multiple floors. I’m not sure how he keeps appearing. It seems he’s evaporating and reinstalling himself in his flesh in order to meet us at every turn.

“How does he keep beating us?” Paige whispers to me…

In front of the kelp, Wilfred passes us by again.

“I haven’t seen this place this empty in a long time. Maybe ever! You’ve got the whole place to yourselves.” He says before he vanishes again.

It must be true. For ten uninterrupted minutes we watch the suckers of a baby octopus pop along the glass. At the touch tanks we receive the full unadulterated attention also, of the docents that are giving away the secrets of the animals. Before long, the animals are giving away their own secrets and in the palm of her hand.

In tall towers of kelp, we search endlessly for the male companion of a female dogfish. The docent tries to help us find him, he is quite the sight she says. The intercom echoes a warning of the aquariums closing, interrupting the enterprise of our time spent of searching.

Funneled through the gift shop towards the exit, there is a small ornament that brings us to heel. Then at the register, our companion in the search for the dogfish comes spinning around the corner.

“I found him! Come quick.” She says.

Swimming in place in the towering kelp, there, almost at the waters surface is the fish... You do not go up dog fish. No, not even down. You are not like the sardines that swim their endless circles. Those fish who go nowhere fast, who can act because they have no doubts, no, the fish in front of them is the indisputable basis for their doings. But you, dog fish, you are alone. You are not convinced and so you float there…

interior artifacts:

[beneath is a new piece of pottery, planner, original transcript]

Read more

I am on a bus that ferries us to another terminal. Outside the windows, I am unconscious of seeing. Instead I am with the feeling of my plotted life. The sharp point

of it all the others have led to. Even now, the bus feels like a great stage.

I like very much when the plane turns and tilts. It feels like you’ll be dumped from your seat sliding down the wing into the wheat color below.

An unnatural warmth takes hold of these plains. Warm air, sixty degrees warmer than can be expected this time of year. And so in this way, yes, it feels unnatural.

Birds grip the trees in hordes, shaking their wood into moving tendrils. It’s all of their yelling that gets my eyes to haunt their leaden canopies. The air is doing the same thing to them as it is to me. Igniting us all.

On my shoulders is a child and before us both stands a great horse. How long would he have me stay at this fence, him raised and staring? For a long while, I know it.

Time feels like the part of it you’ve given up for what you’ve got. Always, only half here.

This life is full of alright people
and places
and good enough faces.

But what happens
when you look to your heart
and there aren’t any traces?

Can you sleep
with all these beaded black eyes
of countless sheep?

In one day the warmth has left this place. A bloody marry at breakfast, some eggs. Little tornados of debris past my brother and father outside. Leaving me curious and wanting the severity of the real thing, the towering tunnel and eye of vapor. I almost fall asleep in the car but my father and brother are loudly happy. I am laughing behind closed eyes.

My appetite has returned. It’s obvious to me that this is because I’ve not written much since my arrival. So then it seems a trade-off. The sickness of writing seems always to bring these symptoms of anxiety and irritability.

When you have no nourishment from the goings on of a life, the mind and body begin to feed on itself. Throw in an event of relation into your plotted life and your body starts to distill outside the copper tubing of your head.

A final edge throws my heart to the wash cycle and something in me really dies. And in that death I am released. Finally. The phantom wound aches, still. Which drags fear too, behind its lumbering and disappearing gate.

Disappointing race. I am disappointed in the race and our ability to saddle comfort over any other thing there is to be felt. I am disappointed at the platitudes of people that cease to strive, to aspire.

Run to the cattle,
bleed with them
and buy that sinning calf.

Half a dozen days to pasture
and the temperature
has been cut in half.

There is no parking anywhere. Thousands of spaces and and still, not one spot. And we’re running out of time. The others in their cars, they know it too. Leah drives, my brother yelling right turns and spots that open and close before I can turn my neck their direction. We’re almost clipped twice in the madness. The shooters Grace doles out over the missing headrests takes the seriousness from it.

Then, there is a beacon of light. In the middle of the thousands of, already slotted cars, stands a lone diner. It’s washing the dark lot around it in a pulse of yellow light. There’s a few spots there.

I slug my door closed. The others stomp thirty yards ahead and already I’m jogging to gain on them, sucking down the last bit of a nip of whiskey.

A door chimes behind me.

“My managers on the way!”

She’s a small woman. Old. Friendly looking but with a scowl doesn’t fit her.

The others who have swept into the diners lot retreat to their cars. They won’t make it, not now.

I draw near to the gray women.

“What if I bought some pancakes?”

She pauses, then closes the distance between us…

“She’s not really calling the tow trucks.” The woman smiles up at me mischievously. “You’re gunna miss it, you’d better get in there.”

I am on my brother’s shoulders, hundreds of people surround us. I’m over six foot, my brother as well. So when you collapse us together you get almost this demented basketball hoop. My brother beneath like roots of sinew and up top I’m spiraling lanky and extended as if the weave of netting has been cut free to swing and fan out.

Balloons, large and yellow rain from unseen places. We are popping them loudly and yelling louder and laughing. Below my perch Leah and Grace are smiling, laughing with one another amongst the throws of bodies. The stage up front makes a show of the countdown then we are snaking between the crowd and losing money at slot machines, trying to unearth a cigarette from somebody, from somewhere.

In our pursuit we meet two forty year old woman. They’re behind us in line for some hive that has a bar and a dance floor. Their names are Tella and Jess. They show us the souvenir shirts they won during the shirt toss at the ball drop. They are nice, then they are gone and when they reappear it’s when another stranger, a great big woman is ripping one of the shirts from Tella’s hands.

“It won’t fit you anyways!” Jess yells at the assailant.

I can’t make out what the obelisk woman yells back before she’s rolling towards Tella like an avalanche. Security intervenes.

“She stole her shirt.” I offer.

The thief’s boyfriend looks at me, mean… but tired. I would be tired too my friend, I would be tired too. It’s hard to breathe under all that snow.

Soon, Leah starts to dance and my brother is quick to join. It’s not long before all of us are out on the floor, even quicker before we’re being reprimanded for bringing our drinks. So I take the first shift. Looking after my beer and their cocktails, while they dance. And they do dance, hard. Until the drinks are even gone and then I am dancing too. Until the bar is closed and the music pulls to a stop and we all look at one another, then to the strangers, all of us drunk under this sheet of silence that the music has left in its disappearing wake.

There is scotch back at the house, I can hear it now. Whispering it’s warm stench. Then it’s in my hand, and I am home.

Looking at my hand, skin wrought like iron but swollen and clenching at the silver of these rings. This is my hand. My drunken hand… and it could be taken from me. I’m not even sure I want the skin I wear. How far from meaning, it coaxes me.

So obsessed with what makes a human, I’ve no time to be one. I’ve been thinking too much about what I want to be and so I’ve stopped being anything.

I wonder if you tried hard enough to re-plot your life or a scene in it, you could simply will it to take on a different shape, if it is this simple? Without all the narrative collaboration and reassurance of others. One would have to muster such a will… others would say it’s madness.

Sometimes it’s better to not get to the bottoms of things because no bottom exists there. You’ll just fall to pieces trying to piece it together.

I must understand sooner which routes of thinking, what ideas will yield nothing so as to not torture myself as I always do. To instead make room for small but potent and distillable nuances.

I wonder now, what is worth the excavation. Good things, I imagine. Or their symptoms. Or maybe all ugly things should be considered, too. Until you reach a point where you risk becoming an ugly thing yourself. Look a thing in the eyes until your vision blurs or your lids tire. Then close them.

Ah, but a fire has been lit in my belly and the steam pushes up my throat and punches out my open eyelids like a train horn, it is clear that something has been ignited, replacing material hunger. No, there is no time now even to eat.

I will finish this script I’m calling Bugsy and push on with the book I’ve been writing. Yes, it’s time to return to the book. I’ve come so far in it already.

Read more

Years, I have been coupling with all that I pushed wildly against. For some reason it stopped being new, or the scale of what was before me, was too daunting. Like a child with a light, you want to show everybody what you’ve found. Then you realize they just don’t care, or they are too bothered to notice. I want to have that light in my hand… that oil lamp in the dark.

Have I really let my optimism be jumbled by the collective fray? I was wide eyed as an adolescent then dulled by an ever distancing edge. I shrunk for the unsure, reeled back. Gave strangers pieces. But they are not lost, what’s been borrowed. I’ve been infected with doubt. But these people have no clue about anything!

As a child you are ignorant, fearless, then you learn the evils of the world and are faced with having to return to that innocence or risk becoming swallowed by cynicism. And so there is blissful ignorance and cautious optimism. One where you walk through the fear, knowing it’s there and aspire anyways.

“Anyone who does not aspire to greatness of soul is worthless; as insignificant as a field mouse or a fox.”1

Strongly, how I’ve felt this way! Though soon, intoxicated with the ebbing bite of mediocrity and our willingness to encourage each other to sameness; assured by how little we demanded of ourselves. I started to doubt myself, this thinking that so many could be as “insignificant as a field mouse.” Surely, one cannot think this way without risking the poison of pessimism in the mind. But the key word here is “aspire”. And so here I am again! A man returned to his ideals! We can all aspire to something greater than ourselves. In fact, we must.

“How terrible and ignoble to feel that you do not owe anything to anybody. Because that can never be the case. It’s an attitude that can only be adopted with great effort; by shutting your eyes.”2

It is our duty to aspire. To reach at the untouchable, understand that it is far from reach, and continue to reach anyways. Aspiration is a posture not a destination. What hope is there, if there is nothing to hope for? If that horizon is made sterile and laid at your feet? We strive to present something in the guise of the ideal to make it attainable, quantifiable, and in doing so distort it into something hollow and venomous.

There is another echelon of the primacy of ones own life that I do not want to slight or be confused for it having been neglected. We aim to touch and feel and accurately understand what pings against our flesh. This immediate experience is primary and truthful. It’s the narrative bond between the immediacy of the world and ourselves.

“[Man] needed to stitch boots and to plough for quite another reason: in order to experience, with special intensity, his own flesh - that flesh of which he was the singer.”3

In order to act, to plough, one must first be at ease. “[The narrow-minded] take the most immediate and secondary causes for the primary ones, and thus become convinced more quickly and easily than others that they have found an indisputable basis for their doings, and so they feel at ease.”4 From this shadowy ease the race as a whole has been able to act in the absence of doubt, tricked to turn blindly away from its aspiring, in its collective “ploughing”.

“Mankind has hurried to protect the body (perhaps on the strength of that natural and unconscious gesture which served as the beginning of what is called progress) and has given no thought to protecting the soul… In the course of the history of civilization the spiritual half of man has been separated further and further from the animal, the material, and now in an infinite expanse of darkness we can just make out, like the lights of a departing train, the other half of our being as it rushes away, irrevocably and for ever.”5

I am inspired to return to my embryonic vigor. Having shed the ignorance of my initial charge, not much has changed with the defecating primacy of the world, but rather this understanding I’ve come to. When was it that this loss of life and soul became less surprising? That I became poisoned by these others clawing into my temporal demeanor, pursuit?

My refusal at this world and its structures. It’s a symbiotic symptom-maker: sameness, and the orchestrated side effects of loneliness, dread, and the suicide born of believing we’re broken. But what is broken is all around. I don’t say this to remove responsibility, or to shift blame. It is the race as a whole who has let this cynical slop descend upon us. We are too weak, too satiated, too doubtful of ourselves even to be convinced that we should be doing anything at all in retaliation.

It is enticing, spitting in the face of it. All of this infrastructure, that’s breeding sickness. But how it seems I’ve bent the knee! I wouldn’t be so skeptical, if most of the race achieved happiness as it is. But I am looking around and I am seeing that they have not. That my intuition as a child was true.

There is a clearness coming to me, above this local cycle. Or it’s the time I’ve been away from my work. Distance has removed gravity. To show the fractures of what I was so appalled by as a child. Come back to what I know is true, past what I’ve nearly been convinced of. We are all leaking realities, and the one we share is not protected from the unintelligible, the narrow-minded.

“Man has simply been corrupted. Or rather, little by little people have corrupted each other. And all through the centuries, right up to the present day, those who thought about the soul have been-and are still being-physically eliminated.”6

If you are lucky enough to feel a purpose at the start of your life, this world will make you live to regret it. On my way to the rot and vinegar, I will struggle to understand. I will bath, in my final departure, in the blood of this understanding.

The biologist quenches their hunger to know under a microscope. The artist, on canvas. But we are all the same, after the same questions. The greatest discoveries only beg greater questions. And so in the asking is where there must exist peace. Therein lies the opportunity, not to know, but to understand.

This moon is full, this moon has no mercy. Part of me feels barren, unable to absorb any longer, matters of the heart. Magnified focus tells me to go on, my life demands it. Because it is my life and I must stop robbing myself of it. Aspire hugely and if not for inventions sake then out of revolution. Revolt because it is demanded of you and because you must. You absolutely must aspire and trust yourself to. Or don’t trust yourself and do it anyways because we are fucked either way! Just don’t be the one fucking yourself. Rise and take your life back. Do not be polite in how you then hold it close.

As soon as you let go, people seem to fall in line. To be who you are is a permission slip for those around you to do the same. I have gone wayward from my adolescent charge. Now I must learn not to be a child again, but to listen to what that child was saying. To understand once more, the importance of it. To carry that fervor and replace dread and nonchalance with institutions of blind hope. Because I look around and see the institutions that were set upon us and I see their product; liminal people with liminal lives. So fight and make new what grey there is. Turn it to goodness and color.

Our spirits are collectively turning to rubble. Being replaced with a manufactured prowess that often elevates one’s chin when talking about their superior abdication or their being “realistic”. Where has our reason got us when it is our purpose that our reason subverts?

We get these awful buildings, cacophonies of suicide, annihilated community, stale architecture, moral ambiguity, soulless films, and a widespread vernacular that strips us all of individualism, congealing into one another but hating each other also. We are our own reflections of mediocrity. We are sick with reason and these are the symptoms. Our personal oceans stop pulling tides and in each of us, we die, we stop seeing how much we are alike. We are sick on the elixir of reason, dulled with comfort and ease of access. We are at a banquet during a plague and blind to the nuance of life where most of it, in fact, takes place.

The word soulfulness itself has even been mutilated with such dogma that when used, its cauterized stump is enough to make any person dismiss what follows entirely. And this, is the antithesis of a soulfully flaccid race.

You don’t want to drag the carcass of your youth with you through life. I say “you” here but understand I am talking to myself. It is easier to write this way, and without the expectation of an audience. In fact, all this might simply remain buried in on the page. It is not fair to either party; the living-self or dead. And there is a peace to burying parts of you, composting them into the soil of who you are, who you’ve yet to become.

Don’t die, dragging your body behind. Like a suit of skin until eventually and not being washed it is a bag instead. Aspire beyond what you’re told is true, towards what you know is there. Even if it cannot be named. Struggle to name it. Or get extremely talented at ignoring the race. So that you might find some truth to return to us all.

end notes & reading highlights

My script Bugsy feels unworthy now of illumination. I am trying to dispose of reason, move past it and come to terms with a greater truthfulness. I do not know what it is and so as you see here, I’ve been at arms against myself.

If at all this seems jumbled and without cohesion, then so be it. These paragraphs are purged from my notebooks, and here I’ve tried to assemble it for you and also in doing so I’ve tried to make more sense of it all to myself. If you want cohesion, a book is sure to come and in it, a final distillation. With all the reason I’ve only just pledged to dissolve.

Double down in your rebellion against the world that almost stole you from yourself.

It’s wet on everything, the marsh getting wetter. It’s all expanding out there and every night the sun evaporates itself from the horizon. A horizon that shares a small airport with a single bleeding light. There is a fire to warm by, and into notebooks I scrawl my aching.

From a map, this place looks like upside down giants, their heels poking from deeper earth below, making the land we walk on.

Night comes and there is rain everywhere and tunnels of trees. We have dinner by the river and I have many beers. The terror weeps and is replaced instead with a knowing of what to write. And I am eager to get home. Eager to begin.

Under a dark canopy of trees my godmother walks by my side. I crane my neck down at her, and she up at me. We must look a peculiar pair. Her being far shorter than I. She tells me about my late godfather. The kind of man he was. I tell her I am lucky to have known him. The next morning we will have the same conversation.

In the gaps between one telling of him and the next, she whispers knowing things to me, meant for me alone. Loss all around has made us closer, close enough that I can tell she is younger than I. The proof is in all that she says when others’ ears are turned.

It’s interesting to me how we can be haunted by those we’ve lost, a lifetime over. Even more so interesting is how we can be haunted by those who are still alive.

“We all love one another and are shy, afraid of one another.”1

A life haunted by someone is soiled. A black spot on an otherwise unscathed thing. To love is to bite the apple, to lose is to be cast from Eden. But what treasure there is here, beneath, with all these sinners and lives worthy of death. Not soiled but soil.

Her recalling of his life comes as a warning to me. Gripped by memory, you become confined to a silhouette that time only makes taller. An eclipse that will wash the color away.

Look at the clouds that have come to visit. I am on a beach made from threading, the stuff of dreams. The water burns to air and fogs the forest down the beach, stumps protruding sharply and scattered.

There are these orbs of sea foam dotting the shore. The stuff is slick in your hands and not the clouds I thought they would be. Out of their dimension, they’ve rolled far up onto the sand.

Jetties made of metal and past them are kids hunched and building structures in the sand. At first they look like penguins. Digging sandcastles and trenches that will protect them from the tide. Then I am digging too, instead for clams. Futile, are our efforts both.

I’m up to my bicep in a hole and my finger is wiggling in a vane past the one I’ve dug, inching farther into this pre-made colander of a cavity, and I’m waiting for the feel of an edge of a shell, anything to send me recoiling or grasping harder. But there is nothing and I can dig this cauldron no further. The soup turns to clay as I pull from it. It requires some strength to take my arm back.

Back where I’m staying, the loft is scattered with notebooks and pens. In each notebook is a piece here or there of the greater means to which I aspire. Rewriting is tedious. I’ve been busy.

With every section you abandon you leave behind a piece of yourself and always it seems to come at a price. You find yourself hesitant to abandon sections that you’ve written because a part of you trusts them. But another part of you knows they need to die in order so that the ultimate thing can become itself. And so I am obliterating pieces of the script. Abandoning a lot of myself that I’ve put inside it. And it’s making it better. While the story becomes itself, those parts of myself recede. This is somewhat depressing. The fact it feels that I am ridding the script of all that made me write it. But those things gave the story breath, maybe it’s that that is all they were supposed to do.

I am writing again, the air conditioner has invigorated me. I am conquering a passage far from linear and shaped like a puzzle piece with awkward limbs. I wonder if what I have replaced it with was too easy to come to. That it might not be worth saying. Anything worth saying is hard to come to. The secrets of a life that are worth fingertips ground down in their dissection, tend to be the most interesting to me, at least.

I must work on saying what needs to be said, more plainly. I do wonder if there are glimmers of greatness hidden in those first drafts or if they were just incoherent and without their primary substance.

Every waking moment should be writing. But what, then would go unnoticed? Just as I returned last night and saw clearly what had been muddled because of the time between writing it.

It’s early, I’m shaking from cold. Out on the pier I’ve walked onto it’s all wind and sheer chill. The sun rises, briefly cleaving the clouds apart so that it seems a holy light across the river brine that I extend into. It is all especially holy looking when two great herons decide to lift from their hiding places in the marsh grass, tall and into the sky. I’m glad I woke up today, that this was waiting for me when I did.

Los Angeles has places to disappear too, but few that are far from those other perceivers. I am wanting deeply of a place that is quiet and an enabler of my solitude with the world.

The indoor pool that we have found, my godmother and I, and my step brother too. Can only be described as a liminal one. A perfect place to stew in the water and listen to one another, unable to hear truly what we are saying because of the loudness of the jets. And we laugh anyways with secret looks at the others that were prescribed to this place before our arrival.

On our way here, dotted whitely in the trees were hundreds of birds. They would look far better flocking the interior of this place. I take the image and work it into a scene of something else I’ve yet to write.

I am half asleep when I wake to a phone call. A moment on the line, a few words. In them I am assured that I am loved, and missed. I am thinking of the script again all too soon.

No time to read lately, only write. My appetite has left me. This is nothing new.

What’s this weighted thing, this x-ray leaded shawl, unmovable in my lap? It feels like a body made of sand and there are two carts pulling separately at my legs and arms. Wait to split, splitting, finally dead. Good. Let’s move on.

Turn the fire on in the organs of your chest, if you are unbearably light then go die. You are dead already. We want new things and gods to speak through us, to be forgiven and then to want again. Some days I think we’re disgusting. Others, I am the ambrosia of mankind, and usually after part of me dies.

We want beautiful things that always come wearing socks weighted down with heaping grime and stomping on your sternum. That heel feels hard, but it is there. Inventing rules to exit liminal places.

It’s two in the morning by the time I finish the script. The golf cart waits for me, a beer too, and I take both, speeding into the night.

The dock is lonely and empty of other perceivers. That moon above is hailing me and it doesn’t make sense how bright it is. I keep checking my watch to make sure it’s not sunrise. Then it is gone and the world is truly void of shadows.

The dock creaks, hulls rock lazily, and something moves. A great mass and my heart jumps to meet the blur. A heron, five feet standing, spreads it’s great wingspan and departs from where it was sleeping on the deck of boat.

Farther down the dock is a boat whose cabin emits blue light, music thumping hollowly against the interior. Bottles of wine and beer strewn about. A party, then. I wonder if my presence will wake them as well.

At the end of the dock I’m surrounded by wine dark brine. And I think of another moon that haunts me. A moon I saw years ago in Mexico. One that moved out from behind the clouds and that inspired me to write Last Harvest in the first place. At a time where I thought my sanity was at stake, when I’d thought I misplaced myself and wanted reassurance that I was still there. I wanted to convince myself that I was that very version of myself I loved most but the truth came years later. That part of me is dead. I’d been dragging his corpse around for years. Stunting growth. Never who you were, always dying with these small deaths. Always who you are, if there is room enough left to become it.

Throwing the curtains wide to our room, hundreds of other windows stare back. Eyes, each with the brains of whoever occupies them and the will of the blinds at each their own fingertips. The streets are piping with steam below. We do not stay long before lobotomizing our room, taking from it our conscious to the lobby.

Past the reception I hear music down a hall. I cannot see it’s orchestrators. This is why I hunt it.

Tables of lobed heads are clustered and organized, dining under candlelight. Each table congregated by white haired or hairless and sophisticated looking people who seem each like they make many decisions of weight. Heavier decisions still, are being made by the music makers. Each note warping the texture, the backdrop of each conversation.

A saxophone and dark piano are set on a small stage. The saxophone winks at us all. If there are those that do not see it, they are liars. The piano swallows what little light finds it.

Past all of this dining there is the maw of an elevator that swallows and takes gulps of laughing people. A group exits all made of laughter and I hope we have as much fun. We ascend stories and then darkly and without heading we are spilled into tributaries of hallways with the goal of finding what’s hidden up here.

Nested on high and lit dimly is a restaurant. Through high reaching buildings sprawling before us is the highest- a needle against the rest. It is clear what sewing it has done. To either side is stretching cityscape, stitched and punching brightly upwards into the night, silhouetted puppets against the glow of further, unseen, lights. It is wonderful to see the entirety of a place before being ingested by it.

I settle this city closely to what others I know. Cities invented with brick and binded by boroughs made of age with infinite doors, floors, ballrooms, and bedrooms: all factors unknown to me here. But I would like, to try if I can, to understand this place more immediately so that I may relate it to other places as I have to it. It is this desire that has called also to these other diners of the race.

There is a store nearby with over the counter sleep meds. The freezing air has turned my lips into a dry puzzle. We leave the store also with chapstick.

Our tilted walking and laughing pulls the strings of this place, sitting it up right or sending it kicking how a marionette would. Each city we visit becomes our own in this way.

Tonight, it feels like the city is dancing slow and blind. Each step perfect without having seen it.

It is morning but the curtains are heavy and refuse what light there might be outside. On the bedside table is a half full beer bottle. A reading light shines through the greenish of the bottle, allowing me to write.

Suddenly, she is pulling the curtains and a dry light blinds me, spots my vision. Dozens of windows stare into our own. I am naked and do not care to move. Only that she joins me again.

My feet adjust on the window sill, a corner of this city playing out in front of me and I think about all the fictitious things I want to be true. I am reminded how all about there are things that would seem like fiction. Yes, there are real things that carry with them the splendor of unreal things. The wobble of this crane as it pivots to do and build more. How it seems that any wind would wobble it to smithereens. The squirrels too that are black and look like limbed ravens. Almost anything dredged from the ocean, or excavated bones.

Her grandmother is showing me paintings and wooden mallard ducks inside her home. I have a glass of water, she shows a small golden acorn that protects her while she travels. Another unreal thing. But here it is. The balcony outside is far too high to wrap my head around. Through my eyes my stomach pounces. My feet do not. The dog has one eye, petting her absconds my vertigo.

In a shop there are pages ripped from their bindings, plastered to the walls. I’m reading them each and stealing their names into a notebook so that I may return to them.

Thin houses with sharp roofs press together tightly outside. Yards out front with odd looking sculptures or instead there are racks of old clothes. Two black squirrels chase each other viscously through the racks with lust or sickness. It’s impossible to tell when a squirrel is horny or wracked with fever.

My own belt is deteriorating, a matter of time before I’m caught with my pants down. So it is a saintly thing when I come up for air from a rack, belt in hand and this one with a heavy buckle.

In a taproom I drown a beer. A dog goes by all made of breed I’ve never seen. I shove out from my seat to chase him.

Loose curls of blond hair, fifties and clutched inside a blue coat, it seems at first that the dogs owner truly does not want to speak to me, annoyed in my having stopped her or maybe that as a full grown man I have chased her.

She gives me the dogs name once she knows it’s him I’m after, tells me that he is made of other strange breeds. Hand under his chin, scruffing the gray beard he has threading my fingers through grey strands of poking whiskers. She asks if I have a dog. I tell her I did, that she is dead. This dog is only seven, he’s got more time. I tell her so, that he’s got a lifetime to live. Then she is gone and I am walking back to the restaurant wondering if it might have been better to have left the dog unassembled.

I should’ve worn gloves. My legs are out, thin long sleeve shirt bunched into my hands to protect them from the wind. My body pumps hotly through the streets and suddenly I am not so cold. Signs for shows blur in cold that bites at my watering eyes and I wonder what they’re showing. What more there is beyond their flimsy signs. A great hanging flag displaying massive prehistoric skeletons decides in me that I will find out.

We leave our jackets at the hotel. It is cold but the museum is not very far. It’s raining back home. I would be sorry to miss it had it not been raining here too.

She stops, turning to me in the street and confides in me that she likes how everything feels. The haze descending upon the city descends upon our awareness as well.

A women stops us before the ticketing booth and explains in broken English that her daughters were supposed to meet her here. We do not know why they haven’t, only that their mother wishes to give us their tickets. The women sees to it that the tickets she gives us scan and we are let through. Then the stranger smiles, bows, and disappears.

Past security a great skeletal mouth greets us. Beyond the mouth is a chamber and it’s hard not to imagine that we’ve somehow entered the womb of the beasts jowl that greeted us.

People mill and touch buttons that change displays, learning about things pulled to the surface. Things locked away and in their surfacing have removed from our perception the parts of them unseen.

Before us hang the likenesses of sharks and the other deepwater things, caught in motion and suspended and still. The ocean cannot be fenced or named in full. It is the last place that refuses us, an unmappable expanse that keeps its secrets by force. And so we construct these mirages, testimonies to our awe. We do not know it. And so its creatures are granted a rare mercy, real enough to kill us, and distant enough to remain vast, uncontained in the races mind.

Things are not interesting to me how they happen. How they are felt to happen is far more interesting. And with each pull of a drawer filled with stiff butterfly’s or insects stapled plainly to sheets I play along, pretending to know them. Void of their life I situate their final state against the momentum of my own, knowing that I cannot truly understand their makings without knowing the habitat they were pulled from, the diet they ingested, or how they may have reacted to the rain. And so their displays feel like half truths.

In a cave all filled with the amplified sounds of water and dark, we shuffle to spot little fake bats gathered in its corners. Sets, constructed to quench our thirst for phenomenological truth. Attempts to braid our narrative experience with that of the creatures said to live here. It doesn’t feel flat. But, instead stirs something dimensional, a depth suggested.

As children, my brother and I would have climbed past the shit-eating ropes. We would have ducked under the construction, slipped through the scaffolding, just to move beyond the preserved thing. Even if there was nothing there but beams and dust, it would have been true.

Our lives have been dedicated to what is past the ropes. Seeking this truth has been the great engine of our lives. My brother pushes the bounds of existence still, and at the ends of the world. He is there waiting for the world to push back. And I will tell you something… It has not.

My own pursuit of truth has been more internal compared to my brothers most literal world building. I leave behind a trail of paper, the breadcrumbs of a madman, vomiting conscious. And always I find that what is past what you’re told is true, is knowing you were lied to.

An aviary surrounds me with taxidermy birds, wings spanning far over my head and longer than my arms if I were to try to flap them. My feet drag in this place, animating in my head their flight paths.

In my hovering about this exhibit my curiosity is encouraged, unlike the other stapled animals these birds seem to exist outside of their display. The knowing of them does not close anything. It opens. Their bodies, strung up and still, refuse to be finished by explanation. While the others feel flattened by their being named.

I do not know why it’s the birds that teach me this. That the understanding of a thing doesn’t cease because it is organized, or that because it is cauterized with formaldehyde we arrive at it’s ending.

Down the hall, a king crab, begins quietly, also to transcend its case.

I am seeing all of evolution laid out, from a single cell into legged things, and then into upright legged things. Anticipation builds toward the prehistoric skeletons, the reason we came here in the first place. The true monsters of the past. Things we know existed, but which time has partially taken back. Unlike the creatures of the ocean, time works also in their favor. It widens the distance, freeing them from accuracy, and allowing the kindness of inventing their magnitude and ferocity without correction.

The exhibit is locked away behind a door that does not pull, does not push. Through the window of the door I can glimpse the great figures shrouded in protective sheets of plastic and I think how it is almost better this way. Their mystery preserved. I can go on building them up.

We live between two places, the physical and the felt, and spend our lives reaching at the seam that binds them. We uncover meaning and string it into narrative, laying it over the world until it becomes the way we move through it. These plot points keep the interior world from collapsing into what can be verified. If everything could be named, settled, and set in its place - absolute. Then we would suffocate, a living death. No private understanding to arrive at.

We don’t need the sea monsters of the world because we don’t understand it. We need sea monsters because we understand it incompletely and always will.

Aperture. Curiosity. No. 211. New York: Aperture Foundation, 2013.

Reading Aperture magazine, something caught my eye.

“Let a cannon-bullet pass through a room, and in its way take with it any limb or fleshy part of man.” - Enlightenment thinker John Locke, 1689.

The passage continues to explain that “…the action would happen so instantaneously that no one would be able to “perceive any succession, either in the pain or sound of so swift a stroke.” Our rational minds tell us what rapid events occur in a certain order even though this order cannot be perceived.”

Locke was testing the boundary between knowing and perceiving. Even if we understood the mechanics, the event itself would remain unavailable to us.

That was until “with the help of electronic flash, photographers were able to arrest Locke’s imagined projectile in midair: in the 1930s, Harold E. “Doc” Edgerton, working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, captured a rifle’s bullet flying at the vertiginous speed of 2,700 feet per second.”

The action of the bullet ceased to be inferred. No longer filled in by reason. It hangs there instead, midair, stripped of its velocity and violence, stalled in the middle of what was once a transcendent demonstration of cause and effect.

No longer about speed, the capturing of the bullet became about power, our power to interrupt continuity.

Discovery gives us orientation. The narrative of that discovery, the mystery that survives it, gives depth. We settle what we find so we can place ourselves against it. Just as a moment is experienced, and through its taxonomy within the narrative of one’s life, a sense of depth emerges in tandem with how it was perceived. The best of discoveries don’t answer questions, they create better ones. Just as the most potent events in life, hunger along for others.

The saunas steam punches me in the throat, making it hard to breath in here and how long has it been? There is a bucket of ice water and I scoop it - bringing it carefully back inside. I turn the scoop over onto my face and gasp at the cold of the water. It feels damn good. I can’t tell what’s sweat or moisture from the air, then decide it doesn’t matter. I get a glass of water and guzzle. Too much at once and my stomach sort of tumbles.

The dry sauna is dim and hot looking with ember lights under each set of benches. Inside I notice an hourglass filled with sand. I turn it and sit, noticing too a panic button. I wonder if I’d reach it if my head were to continue getting as light as it feels. Five minutes, says the sand and I see my body sprawled crooked between the glass door. I would probably make it that far at least. Ten minutes and I’m starting to enjoy lasting so long.

I will have to get terrific at what not to say, what not to show. For this is more powerful than whatever I could write or say; what plays in the theater of the mind because of what exists between the words.

The showers cold as ice. I make it so. I plunge for more ice. There are shaving kits and so I get to raking. Not cuts, no blood, but a phone call with family that hurts. I’m late to watch my dog buried through a screen, she is already buried. Under upturned earth and still she feels alive to me.

There is no one else in the locker room but a single man who works here. He keeps reappearing from seemingly nowhere and often. I decide it’s best not to know how he spawns in around me.

I’ve been researching rites of passage and understand how important it is to mark time. You mark it to avoid an unbearable lightness. To acknowledge is to push towards escaping liminality.

There is a church nearby, big and beautiful and I have not yet gotten to say goodbye to my dog. Nor have I been inside the church. Tomorrow I will see the church, say goodbye to my dog.

I clamber from the car and hold the door in the rain. She runs out past and continues inside the hotel through revolving gold doors. The Fairmont Royal York looms overhead, a triptych poking holes in the low hanging bellies of clouds above.

The bridal halls windows are without curtains and though the rain barrages the panes, I can only hear the hym of violin, see only wisps of the blue dying light outside. In the ballroom, she is a beacon of red and my eyes swim to follow her as she dances.

The next day my car comes too soon, I never go inside the church, never get to say goodbye to my dog hunched and on the pews how I had imagined.

I can’t shake this exhaustion. Four days of packing to unpack. My eyelids are heavy and the wine is making them heavier. The bottle is shrouded in a label I love, a whale sinking darkly under the water, half submerged and a lighthouse on its back. She is shrouded too, in a blue dress, sweeping past and cooking. The cabin dumps out its stuffiness through an open door, outside there are many pines stretching thinly above and they breathe back in cool air. Music is playing, humping itself threading from one open door to the other.

We eat by candlelight, between the trees. There is the clinking of silverware and the sound of big swallows of wine. We sit on the couch afterwards, spilling honesty into one another.

A strong dinner is heavy in my chest when I fall finally to sleep. I would think the prize of sleep would be more rewarding for how packed up my stomach is with good food, for how exhausted I am. But when I wake up I can think only of how tired I still am.

In the morning there is a path in the woods that leads to a jacuzzi, its water is hot and surrounded by more pines with birds on their tops that stare down. The steam fogs my glasses, they get a lick, and a wipe and noticeably my vision is still this wine tinted thing- still fuzzy. My head doesn’t hurt and I know now the wine was as good as it tasted last night.

I am in this hot tub, water all churning around and the air cold only on my face and on the back of my neck. Pines, think pines, this is the place I’m in and it’s important. But in these pages I’m flipping through I am in the Sea of Cortez. My good friend and writer, A.H. Johnson recommended I read Steinbecks, The Log From the Sea of Cortez.

I’m reading it now and dawning on me all at once are parallels to all that I’ve been interested in recently. The first and the most visceral of the parallels is the fact that Steinbecks sardine boat left from the bay of Monterey, down the west coast to the Gulf of California, meaning that he passed, on his trip, the Channel Islands, where I had only just been and the reason for my current fatigue. The kinship of setting opening the door for me, to receive plainly and meaningfully what Steinbeck writes first: “The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer”1 and I am made immediately to think how the design of a life is the pattern of a narrative controlled and shaped by the individual living it. How I’ve been tirelessly researching this way of thinking, using it to re-structure the narrative of my own life and to see what’s already there, clearly.

Further down the page he continues “the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send another man into the tide pools and force him to try to report what he finds there.”2 Both are ways of responding to mystery, of uncovering meaning. The mystery of meaning, while it is inherently lacking, reveals itself through engagement. I imagine this is why each of us, decided in the first place, to board the vessel that took us across the channel.

“We were curious. Our curiosity was not limited, but was as wide and horizonless as that of Darwin or Agassiz or Linnaeus or Pliny. We wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality.”3

I hold the book carefully above the simmering tub before standing out of the water, trying to organize what I’ve read in my thoughts. It doesn’t take long to feel the chill of the air. I let myself get cold, ideas sifting, before dropping back down into the warmth. I turn eagerly to the next page and on it, I am affirmed further in the direction of my questioning when Steinbeck writes:

“We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped, as all knowledge patterns are warped, first, by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities. But knowing this, we might not fall into too many holes- we might maintain some balance between our warp and the separate thing, the external reality. The oneness of these two might take its contribution from both.”4

Truth isn’t found alone in the “external reality” or the “subjective self” - it’s the oneness formed when they meet, Mark Johnson calls this embodiment theory in The Meaning of The Body, Aesthetics of Human Understanding. It’s not about pretending to be neutral, but about engaging with each individual’s own lived experience and the phenomenological truth that all things are subjective to these very unique “warps”.

The page after continues to spill into me, telling that any encounter is when perception becomes event and I realize that I am standing again. That this moment now, standing wet and cold and learning, is an event of perception. I see all that I’ve been circling laid floating at my feet and there is a semblance of understanding that I am being rewarded with for having asked in the first place!

In only a few pages I have stumbled upon things that matter and I feel like I am on the cusp of making sense of something great; of understanding a little more of all that I’ve been researching and writing or at least I am being assured in my direction, that my aim is true. All this, in the three pages of introduction.

All of this to say that I think it is better to texture that which you think matters in a context that can be digested. Things are best understood this way, as narrative, it is how we all make sense of anything. I could plainly tell you what it is I want to say but I think it will be better understood if there is a story that brings us to that understanding. I can explain the ingredients but you will not know how the food tastes until it is organized into a recipe. Yes, this is what I’m trying to say. So I will tell about the Channel Islands. My face is still scorched red, stinging in the vapors of the tub as if it were being freshly burned under the sun of the passage and it is not hard to imagine that I am still there.

The fish didn’t know we were coming. There was an oil rig deep in the channel, with lights so bright they shone despite the day. Dolphins charged below the boat making it hard not to imagine that they were cheering us along, excited to show us something. Then they were gone and the islands were raising into view.

Read more

FROM MY HOUSE I RAN HOME

The airport is purgatory. Outward from the gate flows a chain of real looking faces, in many I see the quiet stature of the east from which they’ve come, to which I am returning. It’s easy to laugh with these people, these people who tell you the way things are, partly because of what it is they know to be true, partly because they’re so convinced any of us know anything at all. I am reminded that I am cut from the same cloth, and I am made to stand as if there is a string being pulled taught from my head. I embed into the gut from which they’ve emptied and outward a small table folds to meet me. A vague promise, a nod in the exit doors direction, and my legs stretch out.

In those people, those real looking people, with their faces all saturated with seasons, I am convinced of their conviction. There are things I am, I do not know what they are. That is how I continue being them.

There is a pair of ancients next to me; an old woman and man. The only thing separating them is the space between these words. They are each other’s stitching and within their seams something extraordinary is harbored, a thing locked away to me. That only a lifetime could reveal, that only many deaths together over a long life bind.

The ceiling rattles in our descent. Into the fields of a most dark milk. Bright emblems of light gather in fists that punch through the sediment of haze that scrapes over the world below. There are other singular lights, lights that fizz haphazardly on the rolling backs of dense forests separated by rivulets of pacific. Forests fitted to the world like garments, that give breath sometimes to pyramids of shingled rooftops. Rooftops aligned all in rows, but not all the same. A colonial chessboard of architecture raking the encroaching ground. Abandoning the lightless gray above for the dark of the tarmac, I am welcomed to the loins of autumn. The body of fog has gone but leaves wet everywhere on the ground, a snail of a cloud dragging and leaving its trail shining. I stare at nothing but the drivel of rain, tiniest amoebas of the body only moments before I’d moved through above, now pelting puddles in dance. The rain gives the light flesh, gives it body. And it’s that body that I have come far to embed with, the body of Autumn.

Outside this pizza shop, there is a white house, stout and old. The air between the house and I is heavy, carrying echoes of music from its open screen door. A few street lights lazily light the house against the dark of night, and I can see only more darkness behind the open screen door to the house and it is at once haunting and comforting. The wet tires on the street between us are louder than the music and I’m getting back in the car.

I throw my bedroom windows wide, and it’s clear from my bed that outside there are crowds of frogs, thousands of them made bold by the rainfall. But there is a lull above and now the only rain that falls is from the canopies of trees forced to shake hands with the wind as it comes.

There is much sadnesss around, in peoples lives and the ways they live. I think again back to the airport. There are real looking people around, you can see their sadness, gross feelings, and shadowy and wine dark textures. Overwhelming dread and everything is colored poorly. And maybe to see it in them is to understand it’s inside you. Here in New England, the graveyards are different. They actually feel like people are buried in them. I tare from this thinking, an infectiously pawing and wounding thing. There is barely light from the sickly orange street lamp below my window, and where there is it mocks me. Maybe it’s late and maybe it’s that my lens needs a new morning to digest because I know there is happiness too, in equal parts. The frogs tempo under the rain, at times hard to hear but never gone. It is wet out there, and they are having a great time. Their chorus will marry me to sleep, as it did when I was a child. It’s night now, and the last light of day has left me with its utterances, left them for me to swallow and taste, and mull. Tomorrow I will join the frogs in the forest, and I will be told more, as I am every day, as we all are. And I’m hoping I will listen.

The next day the forest is green and dark and every new tunnel of green, promises a new and unique darkness. Into each I ascend, noticing turtles that fall over one another. The bigger ones unable to eat quick enough the bread that I lob to them from this ancient stone bridge. The same bridge that as a child, in the dead of winter when the pond was frozen, I would light fires underneath to warm by between sessions of pond hockey. Now, the pond is still as ice but couldn’t be farther from frozen. The only disturbance, is from this transaction of bread. On the opposite bank a tree stands alone and it moves in a wind I’ve yet to feel, when it hits, the air feels like it was sent from those days in winter, cold and ushering out the life of the forest. On the back of the winds of that memory comes a new life for the forest, one that will be met with both enthusiasm and decay.

A large branch breaks through the trees, it comes crashing down to earth in a a blur of mass, landing in a clearing that makes me wonder how it had fallen from anywhere at all. In the clearing there is a single tree, its leaves red and orange, the only one to have changed. I’ve been away and dropped in amidst a season that seemingly hasn’t promised anything to the next. Crickets and their high wines sterilize the air. All bodies of water are warm to swim in. But far in the woods are the loyalists to the season coming, the ones who have promised themselves and have already turned to orange, I stare at one now. A beacon, shrouded in the green of the unwilling. A signal, most literally. The forest is alive and it is dumping its skeleton, it is signaling its body to change, and it seems that the forest resists itself. You go without seasons for long and the months will blink your time away from you. But amongst them again I am made acutely aware of their happenings.

These markers of time, beacons, are important I think. They hardwire you to the earth. We do not have beacons any longer, not as we used to. We are struck into this world and its seasons but we are not prepared, nor told. We celebrate years gone by, but not the themes within a life. We don’t acknowledge our changing lives and we don’t acknowledge each others. We have abandoned the structure and have been subjected to our transformations alone, confused, and without context. We are not prepared and we do not let go. This has been something I’ve felt and something I’ve gone looking for, it is now something I’m finding- something the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep came to define as rites of passage.

The van Gennep triptych describes a rite as firstly, a separation. The individual is taken from their bearings, experiencing a change either internal or external. Then you enter the liminal phase, and here you are - no longer what you were and not what you’ve yet to become. It seems the world over is caught in this webbing of liminality, perpetually in transition. Unable to mark the advent of the final phase: reincorporation. To reincorporate is to come back to community, to be witnessed after having changed or undergone a re-narration of identity.

Each season of rite at times feels ever keeling, but understanding their inner workings is to understand also how we metabolize change. It’s the difference between being paralyzed by a momentary scene of chaos or drawing breath in the face of it, recognizing the shift as initiation instead of crisis. It could even help pull those of us who are caught in the liminal webbing from this stagnant undercurrent and fetch for us instead a life of renewed motion.

“Ancient peoples invented rites of passage in part to break the spell of childhood and move the initiate from the mother’s lap to the lap of the world. To this day, a person must dismantle the spell of childhood or fail to find their place in life.”1

The initiation into adulthood is an important rite of passage, but in no way the only one. A rite becomes necessary when the old story of your life dies, when there’s no container for that death, or when meaning itself collapses and has to be reorganized. I have been interested in these rites of passage, how we lack these containers. Most of all, how we invent them ourselves, and often without even paying attention.

THE LIMINAL MARSH

I’ve got a map in front of me and nothing else but winding marsh. The brine of the realm rests at my feet. The wind catches under my jean’d legs and infiltrates my pants, I’m made a wind flag of the bow. On either bank are tall and bending grass, green and pale and leaning in for a drink. They bend further as I take the boat deeper into the marsh, a trick of the speed I keep throttling forward. The clouds usher me along and only the air tells you you’re moving, underneath your feet you’re on springs. No stepping weight on your knees, only the bouncing from the belly of this tin garden shovel humping its rhythm. Then there are deer, jumping, poking from the tallest flanges of grass. And we are pointing, and knowing somewhere out there and inside us each that they are already gone.

An aching threatening bridge, old and resilient against its death looms ahead covered in a silt of rust. A gap underneath it looks just tall enough for us to float under. The shallow clearance is risked. The engine is cut, the water funnels strong below carrying us on its current. It takes hunching into my knees, nearly kissing my toes but the boat makes it through and gliding out. It’s clear now that if the tide comes in any further, we’ll be stuck on this side of the bridge until it goes out again. So it’s back under the bridge, back the way we came, and back to what I think I know.

Somewhere down river we anker to its side. Then it’s into the drink and I am holding a rope off the stern while vainly the current tugs at my legs. I float there for a while, letting the river tug at me, cool and all consuming. By the time I’m back on board, we’re eating turkey sandwiches and chips. Between bites I let the marsh show me itself and I see wind is coming, I see it across the water and when it lands it’s slight and not nearly as troubling as I thought it’d be.

There is another bridge ahead, arching over the river with a double spine of rails. A train hauls itself over the river along the vertebrae of this concrete slab. I recall waiting for that train, starring it down until its iron might dwarfed my own fierceness and I would jump into the water below. The bridge is an old friend, a dog eared sight that aches my heart and sends blood to my temples, a sacred place, locked away and brought forth after all these years. I hear the soles of my friend’s bare feet slapping wet on its concrete but I am alone and it’s only the ache of their memory. The time between makes me sick and my stomach turns, then I am in the air and it is turning more as I tumble back down to the water.

I don’t park the boat well, but I’m able to. The dock man is nice enough and I ask him about the tides. The new moon has brought them in four feet higher than normal. With all the extra water, he says that people fly on the river, never worried about running aground. He warns of the bridge that gave us pause, warns us that people have gotten stuck on the other side. Trapped in the marsh, held captive by the tides, and at their whim.

This great pulse of a tide pushes itself spilling onto the roads above the marsh. There’s this crystal water above the brownish brine of itself and I’m attracted to it. It’s clear beneath my feet and gives a churn with every step. In it I glimpse a fraction of what I am sure about, and that is enough for now - to know I like this water for its being clear.

ROT & RENEWAL IN THE LIMINAL ORCHARD

A women’s voice, a women’s singing voice and it can be heard the orchard over. Piano too, and sometimes only by itself. But I am by the chickens, they are singing also. Warbling and clucking low and voices small. But there are many and I love their eyes and they are telling jokes. Big brown and healthy birds! Soft looking. I could sit here longer with them, but I don’t. No matter how great a place to sit, to watch, something makes me stand. Stay a place too long and it will die within.

Every sign says there are peaches around the corner, and there are many, but seemingly never around the corner. Then I reach their fruitless trees and yet another sign points me onward. Tell me where these peaches are? I finally reach them rows all slender and with fruit, and then there is another sign. This one promises the best of them. That they are around yet another corner of this ever-planing orchard. We have already come far so we will go farther. And by the time we reach the treasure of the orchard it is clear why we had to transcend a labyrinth to find them, shaking hands with each mediocre peach that came before the ones we look at now. These peaches, hidden away in the back of the orchard, they glow in the sun. Glowing orbs of fur, I hold one high and in the light. Biting the fruit is like kissing an elegant insect, all fuzz and juice, until I am sucking at the cork of it.

The success at the end of the peach hunt slates my thirst and only then do I notice the apples. There are Jonaprince apples and Macintosh apples, Macoun apples and there are dead apples. The dead ones gather in mass graves at the torso of each tree and as I go I add to them, discarding the rinds of each I try. I’ve had many apples. The Macoun tastes best. Its skin fights my teeth a bit more than the others, white under-flesh sweet and tasting faintly of tree. There is a spot that opens and from the hillside we are made able to stare at everywhere we’d walked through, the aisles of orchard below and the beating barn, with its arteries of orchards all extending out life.

My mother and I sit and talk about all the hauntings of a life. What it means to come with caring, and to be with those you love and bear their weight and be made aware of your own. I see magic in the orchard. Something transforms before my eyes and I am changed forever. A thing I’d thought I’d known is nothing as I’d known it and only in my suffering was I made aware.

THE LIMINAL RIVER

I will tell about the river. The river took me far and showed me many things.

In the river it’s quiet, nothing but the lap against this plastic hull. The water starts all made of murk, Lilly pads in bloom in some places. We pass under train tracks, train tracks I think are old and unused but further down and through the trees, I hear a train before I see it and when I turn to look it takes up all my focus, my paddle unmoving. Train hounding through the dense trees and over the river. Then it is still again and if you didn’t see it you would doubt it had been there at all, most of all doubted that dilapidated bridge could have sustained such an iron whale. And if you only heard it’s sound of ripping loud and rumbling through the trees, it would be enough to inspire anyone that there is something in this forest, something great and monstrous that is the keeper of this liminal place. For there is no other effect of the train than it’s laid tracks. When it passes it takes itself completely with it, leaving me here, and remembering an apple that I have from the orchard.

Shortly, the water gets low, and I run aground. It’s then that I notice the girders of the river bank on either side, that the water level is usually much higher, dark marking shadows on either side having told me so. I am made to think of the moon tide. How it pushes but it also pulls and here I am in the scarcity of its pull and forced to turn around again because of it, because I am at the waters whim.

The other end of the river is wide enough for fields of Lilly pads and great herons with thin legs to poke down between them. With three hammered strokes of the paddle I charge into a crowd of lilies and am made instantly to regret it. At once, there are thousands of water striders jumping into my kayak, sticking to my bare legs and crawling into my shorts. The boat retains its momentum from my initial thrusts and I am too busy swatting the nymphs to stop it. The black dots pour in until I surge backwards and spit them from my mouth. I’m on shore flipping the boat and fumbling handfuls of water into my shorts.

All my life this river has done it’s sinking and rising practically in my backyard. I’ve never noticed it before today. I wish I had. My uncle tells me stories about the river. I guess now, I have my own.

INTERLUDE

Six birds to one feeder. They are too quick to see the frames between their movements. There are more above in the trees that yell down. At the feeder they only whisper. The squirrels say nothing at all but their bodies are loud as they tumble through the branches with one another. And if you see them, watch their hind legs, they look like ours. The one I’m watching now looks like he could use those legs to walk right into a meeting.

Rain has already made me wet but the pool chews on me and when I surface there is a cat made of stone, and I stare at him and he at me. Cold is the water around me but not cold enough to draw my breath from me, although it’s close and far colder than it had been when I’d arrived only several days ago. I’m enjoying it, the water and the time away from thinking. There are a hundred bright stones of light behind a small disk of glass that lights the pool, I hold onto the stone, body in the water, and the light plays across my stomach- even now, even during the day. The great clouds above have made it dim outside and I think they will bring rain. I am treading water then standing wet and my body feels strong under the rolling grey above.

I pass neighborhoods turning over, living & dying. Generations of resupply. There are fields, rolling and multiple. There is a fox there, he skirts a mound. He is old and gray and brown and I’m not sure how quick he is. But he doesn’t have to be. The badger doesn’t know he’s there. A badger, equally wise and fat with age. They are symbiotic, but mutually exclusive. The coyote is fast enough and the badger doesn’t yell. The badger doesn’t dance despite hanging from the coyotes jowl, it is the coyote that dances, through the scorched field under the last of the sun and with a wagging tail.

I arrive at the monastery. The place is expansive and shrouded in a part of town that seems misplaced. There are no monks about, only stillness and the sounds of a forest that is all around and yelling with what’s within. But there are fields too, and through the forest and over the fields there is blue ocean. That brine winks between trees and brings me to its hips where I hang my arms over the side of its belted bridge. The river runs narrow below and on the oceans side there is a crane, singular and postured. He does not flinch as I peer closer, nor as I spin behind to see two swans buried in the greater, darker length of the same river. This section runs into the forest pillared by massive green and overhanging trees along either side. Bridge belted earthly hips and long slender river legs that turn salted and run out on either side. The chest of the ocean is the bosom, the crane sifting as its belly button and the swans intertwined as ovaries below. All around is the body of this place and I have stopped to notice it. I have arrived at noticing and been pulled from a webbing most bound for having even recognized my arrival at all.

BIG CONCRETE & RE INTEGRATION

I am in a basket. Center stage on the handlebars of a bike, legs dangling and wind whistling past my laces. A silver car passes, seemingly through us and I’m not sure how this bike is not destroyed, how we have not been obliterated by traffic. My friend pedals and it’s his support-beam legs that have ran far and wide in many a marathon that power this bike, turning it into a mechanical grizzly. Through intersection after intersection and red lights all abound, we don’t ever come close to stopping. Until in Chinatown we’re all having tea and beer. The place is yellow, the curtains, the tablecloths, decor is gold. It’s a cheap palace but the beer makes it a grand thing, yellow glowing hotter with every gulp, gold shoving itself congealing into my vision. The food is filling. The skirt of the table rests on my lap, heavy as an x-ray leaded shawl. With the glowing of the yellow and the beer, I forget its weight. It’s not long before we’re drunk and taking turns on the slide in the park. The kids have been scared away, gathered by their parents, corralled away from the drunks all stuffed with Xiao long bao.

Every pub after comes with its windows fogged, there is cold outside and always firetrucks that race by. A man with a violin plays it like a guitar and the other man sings loud and Irish. People are dancing and glasses break. Then we break a glass and then we are dancing. There is a weird man, all bent and bald who cranes his neck onto the shoulders of others. He looks like Icahbod Crane and prays on girls who don’t know how to respond. He grabs my shoulders along with the music and I let him think we’re friends. Soon his hands find my friend’s throat and my own find Ichabod’s. He is brought away, leaving behind a friend who has just reappeared, having missed Ichabod’s expulsion. It is a sad sight - the man looks wounded and seems to move in slow motion while all around him people and lights move fast. Then, he too is gone. No doubt in search of Ichabod, and I am hoping he finds him.

There is a woman with short black hair, she is a lawyer she tells my friend as she thanks him. The conversation drags and it’s all I can do to shake her hand and say goodbye, there’s no time to tell her I’m in love and all the time not saying it feels like a betrayal although we talk of nothing. To the women I love and to this stranger. Alone, I laugh aloud. If my love was here, these streets would break and cave and all the rest would pour into their graves. A city like this would not know what to do with a woman like her. I’m smiling, my teeth are showing. I am full of Chinese food and beer and I am in love with a city breaker and sink hole maker, she, a shepherd of my ambition. She, who hacks the fat off lies and untruth from my recollection. She wants real things and in her wants I am made aware of my embellishments. She is true and real and makes me proud to know.

In the park the next morning I am having cake for breakfast. It’s my favorite, a double chocolate mousse. A sandwich too, orange juice, and coffee - but these things matter less than the cake. The sun is as bright as the night promised us it would be and the fountain past the grass we sit in looks nice to swim in. But my shirt and shoes are off and that is enough for now.

Change is uncomfortable and I know there is great change in me for I am learning much and painfully so. Home is teacher. I am shifting like the undecided air that I am in and I am asking and understanding why. And there are too many things to list and too delicate, too nuanced. So I will write in a thousand words so I can come to understand in a single feeling.

COMPASS TO COMPOST

There is a blue candle that burns and like the clear water of the rising marsh, I am attracted to it. Moments ago I passed lobsters drowning in the same blue light, climbing over one another as the turtles did under that ancient bridge in the forest. It is all truly beautiful. But I have been wrought with dread and desperate for the world to explain itself to me. I am ricocheting and fumbling into the ends of rivers, out of the ways of trains, searching always for the treasure of the orchard, and held always at the whims of the tide.

In my desperation, I have seen my need to pretend, predict, or project what’s coming next, all in vain to remove the wound or avoid the next. But, there is meaning in the wound and there will always be a fresh one.

“In the old way of imagining, the wound is also a womb.”2

In the years since I’ve left my childhood home, there’s a disorientation that has come with every visit. It has built upon itself like an accretive architectural feat until finally the rubble of the thing is all in my hands and working itself gnawing into my stomach. My childhood home is being packed up. My dog will be gone by tomorrow, and buried with her and in our yard a piece of my heart that humans could never reach, who would never know how. Pieces dying, being hacked off and I am at odds with what I was, with what I’ve yet to become. There’s a character of myself protected and deep there in my heart somewhere or it’s in the current that’s jolting this pen around and I ache to protect it for it has protected me. But it’s that same part of me that is yelling silently into the drums of my ears to let it go.

How does one do that? Kill the part of themselves they are most proud of, the part that has been a compass their entire life over? Something to point to and be sure that they are good, proof even.

I think of the apples, and they're rotting. There is no killing of the self, only its surrender to the soil of your life. There it becomes compost, an alchemical transition from one thing to another, where the old self is not lost but becomes feed for the new. Laid to rest with care instead of being kept on life support because you’re too fucking scared to find out what you’ve yet to become. I am fearful of what I’ve yet to become. But, I am also lucky to become it. The candle before me flickers and it’s light bullies back the dark. It is night now, but the mourning has just begun.

There is a heaping feeling of texture in all that’s around. Our response to the stimuli of nature or recently, I bought a used book that came with the marginalia of another; I felt it there too. Again, in the pens that I use to write. Thoughts and setting threading together under the carnal narrative we prescribe our lives. Nothing is without its own embedded texture it seems. No dawn or dusk, moment in between, escapes its thematic texture; for better or worse.

I see the link in the chain, I am looking at it but feeling the many links before it and always.

Read more