Golden Light On the Runny Kine

Yesterday I went all apeshit trying to capture every molecule of life in this blog, writing about some elusive emotions. I'm feeling a little more chill today, comfortable with the morning fog. No literary renditions of Loveless today. (if you're a music geek you might get that reference---hint it's the title of an epic rock album) Perhaps I'm a tad self-conscious but we need to be conscious about something. I'll try not to write so much unless it's important.

So I've started taking the vitamins that I took leading up to the Alicia event. The occasional cheese-oriented meal is falling by the wayside hitch-hiking back to Atkin's diet renegades who want to splurge. I've been stretching my budget thin between delicious coffee concoctions and Odwallas (or Naked Juices). Every lunch I like to pick up a piece of organic fruit and sit outside watching the trees as the crunch of the apple booms in my skeletal infrastructure or the moosh of the banana pulps into pudding. With all the walking I'm doing my Scottish Highland calves are well-defined.

Being honest is important (that's why I named this blog like I did) but I don't feel like thinking about Rebecca right now (As a metaphor and or as my favorite living person she still sneaks into my thoughts anyway. Even just her name triggers a swirl of light in my chest.) Sometimes we need to let language fall, a bunch of talk isn't always the way to be honest. Select words can sure eliminate a mess of misinterpretations.

My friend and barista Angela gave me the best hugs last night. The first one she snuck up from behind and rubbed her hand on my shoulder, then threw her arm around my upper frame. Far from close friends and long removed from a love life the physical touch was soothing, and rang out as something I missed. The second time she came by and placed her cheek against mine and squeezed. The third time she was leaving, so I stood up to give her a real hug. After we were done she smiled and looked me in the eyes. She's playing a show on Friday and I told her I'm going to be there. No, I don't feel romantic towards her. Despite my raging hormones that would overrule other feelings there's not enough tide there, with her. She's supercool tho, one of the beacons of my small hippie-ish scene thriving in suburbia.

Carbon Leaf is a rocking band. Bought their new album Indian Summer which I've been waiting for since I heard them at Bumbershoot 2003. Echo Echo rocked but this album is up a notch. Every song hits a soft spot. Barry has really improved as a singer/songwriter even if his lyrics brush against cliche every once in awhile. He really feels the words, those lyrics aren't as pretty as Dylan's but he fills them with meaning in a similar way.

So, I've been thinking a lot about voice lately. My performance skills have eroded in large part because I don't want to be an attention whore. When I was younger I used performance as a springboard to short-lived relationships (more often it was a side-effect). Fiery flings that burned out quick when reality seeped in: logistics, demeanor, different moods. When you're young I guess it's easy to try on different personalities, it's not dishonest to do so during that figuring-out period. Among all the shifting masks it was hard to find two personalities in two different people that were stable enough to make beautiful alchemy.

I used to talk beauty a lot because so many people talk shit. Then I brooded because the world is fucked up. My pretty talk was strong and flowery, my voice acquiring octaves as it filled the sound of 'moon' with the mysterious meanings of 'moon'. (No, I'm not mooning you as I write this.) My darker stuff was angsty full of the nature's ability to overtake with the indiscriminate force of a tidal wave or a hurricane. You know stuff about control, how our psychological fears play out in the dark. As juvenile as those works and performances were they set a precedent, a template from which I would move onwards. My flat out rejection of unemotional jockishness thrust me into a self-conscious reliance on beauty. Combine long hair with my distaste for reticence and my speaking voice had more range than gruff manly men. I condemned their dishonesty and illogical rejection of communication. Still, in my rejection was a willingness to be a bit asexual (in part to relate to the gender I was not and found better because they were less violent than their male counterparts but also to fuck with prudish subarbanites). Looking back, that identifying with the feminine was too stereotypical and led me to be too passive. Perhaps if woman hadn't been so laid back Patriarchy wouldn't have occured.

I had been in acting for years. I wouldn't allow myself to be an exhausting actor-type (I needed a lot of calm and privacy still) but I could animate when I wanted to, tell a story.

Going away to school I met a whole world of artist where I had been isolated before, except for my many forays into Capitol Hill. In Olympia I decided I needed to break the remnants of my homophobia. Old World Christian morals had to be purged. My first year in Olympia I sought true love, an end to my slight homophobia, and some sort of truce with my animosity towards Christianity. For years I had been living too hard too fast. If I wasn't dating a new girl or writing till three in the morning I was in school thinking hard about a subject so that the rest of the room disappeared, going on long walks sorting out history and symbiotic relationships of man and nature, taking psychedelics, laughing. Even when I meditated I had visualizations. There's so much! At TESC I simplified. No more TV, no more newspapers, no more bad food but that can of difference exploded like a batch of locusts. I lost fifty pounds having all this happen with Hepatitis. I was weakened and strengthened.

Years later I realize I gave in to that more passive existence. My so-called focus on 'restraint' was a retreat from the change I wanted to see happen but feared I couldn't help accomplish. I didn't like the authoritative voice of history and academics. I wanted to be great but didn't want to suffer hubris to achieve greatness. Adopting passivity in any form can get you in trouble. I didn't speak up against oppression often enough. Thoughtfulness filled my opinions but the force of direct actions was rarely in my voice. Connected but too far on the fringes, I was decidedly inward. Habit is an evil stepsister with enough torture tools to make the Inquisition envious, I tried often to get out of the hole slick as it was with obstacles of fear.

Ironically, I had an obsession for messiah-hood. Many of my dreams filled with heroic physical actions as if my subconscious wanted to make up for my daily retreat into the mind. Long walks bedamned I didn't run, physical passion was getting snuffed out. I was celibate and history's death count consumed me. I flirted like mad but it was more mental stimulation. Passion burned in my eyes when the girls couldn't see them. Heartbreak and nuclear holocaust were hard truths only the foolhardy dreamed against. I was foolhardy a lot of the time but not active. I thought I was so daring with my big dreaming while in reality I was safe from risking physical involvement.

Rachael changed so much of this. I had started growing out of the silliness before I met her, even if I hadn't found a voice up to the new challenges I was waking up too. Physically active with performing plays and poetry when I met her and fell in love, I felt complete. The happiest days of my life were those days. I made a spectacular woman happy ... what better vocation or accomplishment is there? I was a raving success.

Later, successive blows to my confidence deteriorated my voice. I ceased speaking out, I didn't call her on her shit and didn't call myself on my shit. Brilliant communicator my ass. I was a diplomat in the country of the damned. Now I know why so many early Christians, back when the ideology wasn't heaped with hypocritical creeds and killings in the name of Christ, insisted on the physical martyrdom of hanging on the cross in defying the Romans. I'd willingly offer up life and limb to impel a coliseum of giraffe-slaughterers to change their ways. In a way, our unpublicized slaughter of wildlife (hpph.. New Rome) mirrors my past passivity. We don't have to descry or denounce what we won't admit is there. Having my worst nightmares behind me the new nightmares seem less daunting. I call them out more often. I still have fears but they pale to the ones that were realized. The sweet naivety that amazingly lived in me as long as it did is forever scarred but flowers grow over where earthquakes have rent the earth. Someday I'll walk around St. Helens and enjoy the metaphor.

My voice has certainty in it these days. Perhaps too much bile at times but I will build more acceptance of horror (while still working to overthrow it) before I die. The seeds of genocide were in the woman I loved most. I learned to identify with those parts of history that I couldn't fathom before, through the actions and interpreted feelings of the woman I loved. Angry at circumstance and miscommunication and ill will I raged in my cage of distance. Never did I concede to wanting to cause her physical harm, I identified with the detachment that breeds genocide as much as I could stand crying as an afterthought, somewhere in the background. People commit their atrocities, I try my best to forgive them but I never support them in their downturns. My near-suicide came about when I realized I didn't want this knowledge that love could turn into 'this', that two atomic bombs could be dropped and hardly anyone would admit to the giant laceration to human history. Part of my solitude has been to find the words for these emotions so that I wouldn't be as misunderstood, I still have far to go and more ground to cover. I suppose there isn't one coherent message to understand.

If there is any one rubric I would place over the path I want my new voice to travel: I would name it the Path of Seeking a Life Well-Lived. Strong and soft, sweet and indignant, confident but not cocky, hungry but not ravenous, passionate but not burning out, loving just short of hoakiness, raw with the refinement of thoughtfulness, active to the pursuit of balance as if running could quicken the pulse into equilibrium, angry at the anger that allows violence to destroy not violence to re-create, forgiving for mistakes that resonate but not forgiving of the attitudes that lead to those mistakes getting acted out. A voice that has the universe in it, something of life, and the sweet scent of death following a life that was more than worthwhile. And love ... love despite what love can become, love because love become so surprising and insurpassable. A simple cheek placement, a few words spoken offhand, the sound of a voice over the phone, a tangle of limbs, a lick from a dog, recognition nodded at a tree, a hand that you've held so many times.

The moon eclipse must still be in my head, more light from darkness.