Click

So, two days ago I went to see Click. One of my bosses told me it was a worthwhile flick. Since Aaron's been in BC I've been a little on the lone wolf side & poor as dirt since he left the rent & bills all in the hands of yours truly. Kennedy School is a fab place, the kind of hub that can revitalize a neighborhood by restoring the past integrating green technology & a variety of activities. I love the vibe of the place even if they do sometimes split the cheese half of the pizza with pepperoni on the other side so that the nasty meat grease spills over to the other side of the pizza which I would otherwise consume. Click was unexpectedly great. The kind of "It's a Wonderful Life" redemption story with more humor that makes me laugh & cry & most importantly reconceptualize my life.

When Robert Johnson sang about the crossroads he poured out his soul for examination. Every crux in the space-time continuum has that choice of a multiplex of folds of realities blossoming into being. We pop the seeds into our mouth without too much consideration, perhaps out of necessity, as our biological needs take primacy as the specie's key to survival. Yet, we have survived in large part to our brain's faculties & our heart-soul expressions. Every expression can be no more than an oversimplification but art is a means to hint at the more that has to be left largely behind, around, within, above, & past the words/sounds/images. The worry that furrows my brow in sleep at our impending ecocide & fraticide, the natural world that instructs me in patience & balance (in rot & flowering) chases me around town releasing my refining behaviors with an ever finer wash of resiliency. Adversity makes me laugh. "More adversity" I say & move forward like a river surging to the primordial ocean. I think of the stray bullets that come from our soldiers & they haunt my sleep. I think of the slums in the mansions & the holy places in the shantey tin-roof sprawls. Faces imagined & thereby real play out the beautiful & sad round of life with all of its moments captured & refiltered time & again. I think of women I've loved. Some only vaguely know, ah, but who I am to judge the official depth of my perception. Women I've never kissed I know better than many of their lovers. The subtle movements, the tone of their faces' resonance, the oscillations of their voices. I remember how Amy's voice changed when she was all charged with love, how she got that funny almost Southern drawl to her phrasings. My nerves are still charge by memory involuntarily sometimes with the pulses they recall of how Rachael's cheek felt in my hand & the outpouring of my heart in response to the treasure I felt there, in that placing.

There's reasons why I chose to go into the woods & find a quiet, peaceful place with trees all autumnal leaves shed on the ground back when I was going to pierce my heart. Until my break up with Rachael I could never figure out what anger was. I knew frustration, fear, & disappointment but had never been riled enough that aggression could turn devastatingly harmful. To offer myself to a woman through love after seven years of chosen cellibacy was a big deal to me, an uncommon situation I created to distance myself from the myriad replay of love & lose & forget & detail-bypass from fear of attachment we all witness in so many shades of story. Returning to that wonderland of nature my boyhood had sworn to praise & defend I was going to pierce my heart that felt like an overused pin cushion or a recipient of a brutal mexican hat dance, with a gurgling creek to purify my travel to the next shore & an open field to keep the likelihood of the stray bullet striking a creature to the bare minimum. How many soldiers have sweated sleep with the thought of a bullet, arrow, or swordblow striking the unknown person with a possibly tender & upright life, the cutting down of the possible greatness inherent in the soul? I think of my dad in Vietnam, I think of my ancestors, I think of the everyone everywhere. I still feel the glacial cold of the stream I trudged through knee deep to find that place.

The resolve I confront every day is still subverted by my fears. The poverty I felt throwing freight, hauling pipe, wheelbarrowing construction offal, shoveling gravel pit silt from under conveyor belts, stacking massive amounts of bricks with jammed fingers. The cold mornings. The damaged men with their lessons, & their speaking with actions. The tears I held back in my beaten confidence, in my lack of food, in my inability to buy dinner for girls enamored with me that scared the shit out of me. The past is present, but so is the future. It is not in vain that I seek a better future: a bridge to better fatherhood, to higher lovemaking, to chosen songs for whomever might chance upon them, to the golden age I hope to help nudge into existence. The resolve I chose in place of my resonant death in that field lives in me every day. Imposed silences & stale bitterness aside, there is always work to do.

Nearing thirty I watch this film & another mirror crops up to help me see past myself, at the possibilities; & sight opens. I don't like my job, I toil for under $10 an hour in some false security since my situation is certainly better than my previously known half-homeless heartbreak. My recent ex-girlfriend whom I still have strong feelings for has told me she will call me at a certain time, says she's meeting someone for work-talk at 10PM, is probably upset at me for reasons beyond me that yet again won't be explained. Okay, whatever. I still can't hit a curveball. At least I try to learn the movement of the pitcher's hand, the rotation of the ball, to visualize the seams. My best friend is in Canada & now presumably going to stay there. He is constantly restless, has seemingly kept himself from considered art forsaking that approach for Bacchanalian release in 'action painting' sort of like his smorgasborg cooking, everything-at-once. He's left me with the rent. Instead of asking nicely he has said, "You're good for it, right." As a person who believes in sacrifice, as someone who has let his broken wrist heal & his hepatatis sort itself out in discipline, in process, who gives away his last five dollars before the paycheck to charity when someone comes knocking at the door, who believes in tapas, in sacrificing to the gods, intention in action--- I couldn't very well say no to my best friend's pursuit of love with a travelling girl in his late-twenties center-of-prime dreamseeking. So, zen monkish with a half smile I live in poverty. No eating out, no new books, no new music, only occasional coffee, bare basic groceries. Still Teapot in name I put the teapot on the stove, brew up the old Yogi green tea with Kombucha, warm my hands, admire the morning. Wonder at my silences, at my distances. Relive the days of my torment, & wonder at the fear. Envision the present in its glory & seek the finest path up the mountain of the future. We all fall back into the something even if we can conceive a nothing. What matters the sequence or the story, if the attempt is made heartily in the free will?

So what if the woman you've loved most kicked you with sly slips in her youth about kissing theories, porn theories, that she had held many people, that ... Nevermind, enough. I'd rather admire sunlight casting shadows in fine design, ask children about their favorite animals, & befriend all the tabby cats in the neighborhood so that they follow me down the street in indignant cat style demanding my affection. Nearing thirty I have to put myself out there & pursue a job that better befits my abilities & morals that can help me get a piece of land to steward where I might raise a family with a woman that fits me. I have to let myself publish the three manuscripts I've finished & work every day in ardor for the combinations that make a song sing more to the inner conception. I believe in divine birth. Haven't you hear the funny tones of small children's voices? Has your girlfriend ever sung Bob Marley to you early in the morning? Have you ever camped in the songbird's favorite grove?

Communing with my personal pantheon I conduct roundtables & clank imaginal cups of mead, we climb Cold Mountain & are warmed by the moon's cycle. The needle hits the record & the handdrum redoubles with hands. The ink flashes on the page & it's as if the person has left something of themself their, as if Sappho left her passion there to enrich that part of us that is Sappho. Jack Gilbert is probably in his small apartment in New England "writing abundantly but not easily." He has to feed the White Elephant that is poetry, the emperor's gift which cannot be refused. The mystical beast that feeding takes all you have, who if you chose not to feed would make for an intolerable existence, an untenable moral & spiritual debacle.

I do not call my sister. I call few of my friends, & those rarely. It's been a long while since I've handwritten a letter. I perform little, sneaking into small open mics without entourage to speak to small rooms with small crowds. Similarly I sneak into volunteer, not wanting too much attention, avoiding ego. I act like a zen monk who has not properly digested his koan. I am Ryokan without the full array of joy. I am the Baal Shem Taav with the scantest steps in the magical dancing. In fewer words, I do not meet the potential I am so much more able to see these days. I am nearing thirty, I have to get over it.

So, I saw this film. My adrenaline pumped. I walked home the thirty blocks on a Friday night. I thought of Rachael & Amy as the two women I've lived out some conception of love with who no longer talk to me. I thought of Alicia, Jen, & Rebecca: women I've loved that I didn't know very well, who were my animas, my abstract truths (shadows & lights) whom I never kissed or made love to who effect me every day just the same. I thought of my sister whom I don't talk to, whom I've treated badly a few times (out of undealt with resentment?). I thought of my parents, & their troubled life. I examined my life into the starlight, how it can shape & better & smooth over some of the faults that will remain but can be revisioned through the filter of what I do with my time & space. A girl got up from her front stoop, offered me crack, rubbed my crotch through my pants & offered me a blow job for five bucks. I went home & listened to some music & fell asleep. I had to work the next morning.