Unburied Papyrus

Happy Holocaust Remembrance Day

2009-04-20T22:47:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IvPIWzQcUY

Attempt #36 at a Zen Circle

2007-10-23T08:01:00.000-07:00

As Durer or Blake
I would release the line
engraving cedar
with a gryphon's vicious, noble truth
or like Michelangelo
unfurl a spine from stone
giving warmth to the cold.
Achieving no-mind
with conscious intent
I would naturalize my brushstroke
& the immigrant's family---
two girls
chartreuse & robin's egg blue bows in their hair,
Neruda in their future.
My hand wouldn't waver.

Post Tomorrow

2007-05-03T08:04:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this promisory note so that I will follow through with blogging on the morrow.

Epistle to Tacoma

2007-03-29T20:31:00.000-07:00

Tacoma
in your sorry streets
I gave up
on my few remaining scraps
of the commercialized
American Dream.
Tacoma
demonic metal hurdles high
& chemical smell rises
suffusing grey stink.
Asthmatics worsen & eyes puff.
The wheeze of children &
greed of unpolished men.
If only our statesmen read Marcus Aurelius.
Tacoma
how I cried my eyes out
in your basements.
My grief bottomed out
in the folds of your wasted hem.
Your men said I looked
like Christopher Walken.
Your women said I looked
like James Spader.
Some of your women cried at me
telling me 'everything.'
Said how approachable I was.
Stories of former drug addiction,
weight problems, eating disorders,
bad ex's, prostitution,
faulty parenting,
& how they felt about me.
I didn't take advantage of them.
Some glint-stared & giggled.
Tacoma
I didn't have a dime.
It bothered me at the time.
Tacoma
your women are battered then fried.
They improve to despair.
They use sexiness
to invite you to boring churches.
Only one of them I loved
in a special way.
We sat talking in the park
near the greenhouse which boils
& the manuscript museum.
Her fine feet in thong sandles
released to enjoy clovered grass
in the moist shade.
We talked about how we felt.
I was so stilted & philosophical
in the defensive unable to speak.
Tacoma!
The way she moved her hand
to tuck her dress
when she sat down.
We walked to our cafe.
Our bodies close.
Birds & cherry blossoms
played befour our feet.
The sway of her hip,
moles on her arms & light wisps of hair,
the presence of those eyes & lips
that spoke.
Tacoma
it's easy to miss what you never had.
Tacoma
what is the world doing?
When is the capitalist nightmare
going to end?
Tacoma
I moved with a job lined up
that quickly fell through.
The kitchen crew
with their poor English, polite mannerisms,
& mischievous grins were friends
but the owner thought five bucks
was a night's worth of tips.
I fell to questioning nooses on your streets
to find my laugh.
This wasn't what Jefferson had in mind.
The minority in opinion
came here to start a new world.
Peasants & Puritans,
the enslaved & indentured.
Chinese pilgrims track-tied to washing.
Africans turned slave chained to cotton.
Women alotted sufferage.
We had forefathers
that broke the first 398 treaties
with the native peoples.
What sap flowed through their veins?
What a trail of tears.
This wasn't what Jefferson had in mind.
Tacoma
I threw freight in your port.
Thanks for noticing.
What putrid water.
The rusty rail cars pulled scraping up.
Gas fumes & dust hit us.
Our gloved hands jammed fingers
but still we flew in a sweat-haze.
Tacoma
I became a man in your brutal grasp.
Tacoma
I the laborer for minimum wage.
Tacoma
I the basement dweller trying to sleep
three inches above concrete
part dormant, quasi-admiring sorority girls.
Tacoma
standing long in front of each piece
I the art-viewer
spouting mine on streetcorners & stages.
Mayfield riffs delicate & sultry
behind my soul-bothered fountains.
Cigarette butts enshrine your alleyways.
Sad homeless men that can't tend themselves
pick your chipped paint grimy dumpsters
by the highrises of empty agendas.
Yours the chemical plant profusion.
Yours the pulp-rife collusion.
Your antique clocktower can't measure
the drudgery in your districts.
Fine houses rot, sink porches in your destitude.
No historical society unearths much humanity
that's what present moments are for.
Where is art in your malcontent?
Does poverty ever escape the crushing vice?
How much of America is like you?
Tacoma, I loved & despaired in you.
I escaped. I am a better man than that.
I am a better man than I thought I was, then in that place.
Tacoma, the women I loved altared you.
Sacrifice glints on your beers.
Tacoma, the multitude has a potentate heart.
We can reach beyond your machinery.
How your scar lives on is up to us.

Today's Fresh Ink Very Raw/Rough Marcus Fragment

2007-02-12T11:08:00.000-08:00

In case you haven't been paying razor-sharp attention I've been devoting much of my writing time to a play, a very ambitious project with a protagonist named Marcus. The plot is a bit much to rehash here & I hesitate to give away many, if any, of my tricks in a public forum. Nevertheless here is a fragment:

cut due to roughness

Winding Threads

2007-02-01T08:24:00.000-08:00

Who knows where the first thread came from?

Some said a word came forth from the void.

Some say the eveything was balled up in the nothing & boomed forth.

Some says awareness arose in a grassy grove, flowers & nakedness.

Still more claim that all is just an illusion, & that this immaterial is ours to exploit in the temporal.

That a thread emerged is hard to deny. One became many but joined. Awarenesses cropped up & receded. Beauties & ugliness shaded by perception, merging, joining in triumphant dances. Angles bursting, burgeoning. Throats joining & stems twining to bud forth subtle blossoms in canopy.

Many feet padded many ways & hands clutched embracing, archaic & eternal forms with the joyful reverence of childhood first experience & the wisdom of old age which is with us from the start. How to balance the ironies? Juggle & struggle & smile in acceptance. Persevere, plough your land with a reverence that borders on love as religion. Standing, sitting, laying down, feel the threads that bind you from this to this. The names are a reference, the heart of things an enigma that forever spools forth.

Looking down this ravine the creek cuts through with moss & fern draping rock with the dalliance of rich mineral days. Moist air billows & there are the loping flights of insects, dragonflies & horseflies, which many claim are not dragons or horses. Definitive claims are so humorous.

A great psychologist is not just one who is open but one who opens. Analyzing this we do not come to paralysis but to the emerging universe. Healthy through neuroses, alive with dying, full of the resonance of love whispered through the tree limbs of loss.

Taking one side obscure another. Thinking one thing think again. Thinking many things think more. Puncturing with characterless story, reconsider your vulgarity. Lift the mine from the field so that the animal dance of the tribe is not dressed with unnecessary tattoos.

Crossing this line, tripping the wire, so much more is possible. The window falls to open air. Smells of fresh dalliance infiltrate your nostrils as if your mistress was all about you. Busting the busts of heads, representation asks to be represented in the flesh, in the connections we make with the living. Water travels show the wanderer her elusive snaking. As each skin sheds the moon grows brighter in scope. Fluoresence transforms into essence past flora. Essence of dirt in the palm, finger in the petal-center. As the lines prolifigate one shifting line emerges: the ever elusive what-is. The name that is never spoken before what-is changes. We can only keep it in mind for a fragment of a second but the lines play out brilliantly in the one line until the possible lines of what can be begin to dominate our hope: a world of giving that we give back to in harmony that is a tension of song rife with melody of melodious undertakings that don't pound the life from the ground in the name of abstract moneymakers who usurp the world by writ of law. Life is nothing if not the continuance of hope for more, for a better world, for an existence that marries its virtues to greater contexts & actualities.

The book is closed to reach contexts in the hands on the rocks. The heel eases into toes intent on discovering the eagle's perch. Eyes with the water of oceans spill into sightlines reverberating songs span centuries. Ask me this, "What threads have you found that are most worth following?" Injustice rots the links & the understory is too often a hideous subtext of wisdom discarded.

Fellow mendicant let your connections reach you, don't set up barriers, trapdoors & brutal tests in your cooridooring a maze dam the flow of nutrients to the core of song. The ease that sets the sun to joyful work is one thread within your grasp, twinkling a quiver. Grab this lifeline with more than fingers. Reach out for the paradigm that, setting the warheads on edge, sees the forest for the fall which is the inner flight of growth neverending, a waterfall that is more tears than tears. Never ending the instruction of right action. Adapting this end of putting food in the mouths of the hungry, compassionate enough to dodge the destruction of that voice with the facial expression of a saint residing somewhere in the folds. Reasoning without too much hard empiricism, reasoning with the will of a tempest for sheltering the wilted flower clusters of this island in the space sea.

When the threads seek from every pore fill them with light intentions whose weight is peerless, sight beyond sight. As you make grander realities in the name of a higher ground question from the depths & sing a word which forever changes. Winding fingers spreading the earth for a sapling to carry on the legacy of living.

A Festival of Language

2007-01-29T13:40:00.000-08:00

Been readin about Shakespeare. Shakespeare: Invention of the Human and Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare both rereads. Kinda moody with a nasal infection. Once I get paid on Friday I'm gonna get homeopathic nasal spray. Big circles under the eyes. Had strange fever dream the night before last about Coachella out of nowhere. Haven't even thought about going, last year I briefly considered it because Jim James and crew were going to rock but why I dreamt about it in such startling gravity-hurtling psychologically unsettling detail is beyond me.

If I learned anything about the Alicia ordeal it is that there is untapped potential in the human soul. As if I activated the switch that brings about evolutionary adaptations my overwhelming desire in love seemed to catapult me into the stratosphere of consciousness. The leap was a bit much to take and got the backlash of my tarnished imperfection. Every day I answer the question, "Why should I go on a date with you?" The question in my mind past language is more like "Who are you capable of being? Who are you really? What are you doing to change?" Before Rachael I had only known disappointment & frustration. Her coldness & cruelty put me abruptly face to face with anger. In a flood the implications of war, genocide, bystander apathy, & everyday contribution to the socioeconomic nightmare took on a new strata of detail that was impossibly hard to trudge through. Every newspaper headline & girl that I could possibly fall for was like a knife entering, twisting, & pulling out slowly. Time, dedication to achieving at least a semblance of wisdom, & the fire to honor what I can of the childhood dream of heroism has at least patched the wound with an ardour that appreciates the magic all around us, strong in the midst of so much tragedy. I still remember Ahniwa scoffing at Theo who remarked that I could never be a cynic. I am bound by cynicism because I want to believe so much.

Growing older, the specter of responsibilities comes to bear. The only way I'll ever own a car again is if I find the right lady, we marry, and have a child. Every day I long for a job where I help people more, a little more financial return so I can someday have a piece of land where I build a green lifestyle, and I daydream constantly of owning a dog. Funny. This unsettling sadness that has pervaded the last few days is intertwined with my sneaky unconscious finally getting around to accepting that Amy & I are done. That knowledge has been there for a long time but has taken a while to seep in & integrate. Knowing something & knowing are quite different animals. Best not to get trapped in the maze loops of fruitless speculation. Still, my intuition opens up special awareness that I am not allowed to deny. One remove is a thin dividing line that separates the bird in the shell from flight. To develop some awareness of the connections we share with each other & how we damage with, our disconsolate indifference, the import of our actions is a terrible beauty. Righty-O, a right cheerfest this be.

Methinks the sun in the trees deserves a good look-at. Hips that would hover in some hard to decipher level of intentional courting ritual dance. Ah the grace of woman. The dream of love. The dream & the reality. Off the computer back to the page. I'll post a poem soon. Kisses.

Reflections

2007-01-11T08:40:00.000-08:00

Be wary of great expectations.
-Charles Dickens

Forsaking hot cocoa for a giant mocha, the rooftops are dressed fine in the night's white dustings, skiffs of snow. A new year cold in its thousands of troops headed abroad, the impoverished bearing the yoke for the elite, & the continuance of measuring will against fluid realities. That I chip away diligently at aspects that bother me from varying angles doesn't cozen my comfort with who I've become overall. Sure, we're all capable of our moments. Touching phrases, delicious nights, enjoying the presence of fine company & wine, standing around bonfires chatting with interesting strangers as the shadows dance elegantly, dimly on the fir-stand a mere thirty feet away but we all have some sense of what we are capable of inside our own minds. As my age advances & the thin evidence of my impact courts me to greater heights my determination gets more steely & my heart grows warmer. This veracity to reach a level of precision & clarity hammering away at the abstract idea until form is unleashed from the shackles of poor imagination lurches back & forth in me with a lion's impatience before the pounce. My foreseen pounce is not to unleash more pestilence in a world wracked with insecurity, guilt, & goals which don't lead to sustainable happiness but to forge a green sword that cuts away the unnecessary & restores the fertility of behaviour with conscience.

That I might fall in love with a woman who is the right match, raise a family, & have a dog in a home that is off-the-grid, green, & made by my own hands with a writing desk & a fine array of fairy tales for bedtime stories for my child, for my wife, for the little creatures that might be listening through the windows & walls, for the ancestors who wanted nothing more than a fruitful evolution of the heritage they fed into better health.

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Fifteen months into my residence in Portland I am inheriting an open mic, working at a job that frustates me, on the brink of a major health kick, & newly furnished with a clippered head. The strip club across from my bus stop is closed, taking along with it the girl with the Alaskan Husky eyes whom I swapped uncomfortable glaces with. In the afternoon, while I waited for my transfer, once or twice a week I would watch her wait to be let in while men propositioned her as they attempted to be charming or lure her with money she would stare coldly at me with those glacial eyes awaiting judgement fixed on me the regular stranger standing across the street. I never meted out a denouncing expression although my heart hurt & my blood boiled a couple times when assholes overstepped their bounds but she could obviously take care of herself, her refusal to acknowledge them was expert.

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My friend Dave the socialist no longer visits me in my wine department. I must of offended him when I didn't show for a tentative hang-out time for the second turn in a row. Both times he adamantly insisted we meet at seven in the morning when it takes me an hour by bus to get out to the NW. Not only do I not drink corporate coffee (ironic that he does) but when I don't work at the butt crack of dawn I don't want to stand in the cold & run across town hours before my shift. A super nice guy although a tad repetitive. Each time he seemed to forget that he said the same exact thing to me the time before or maybe he thought that I had forgot what he said. Either way, when I finished his recycled statements for him he didn't tend to notice. I learned a fair amount from him about life, about books (altho some of them are muddled in the overly academic nonsense of scholars with inferiority/superiority complexes), & he was nice enough to work on trying to motivate me to seek better employment. Dave, if you're out there be well & play hot licks. Try some different bottles with your lady. Old comfort becomes false comfort if you don't open the mysterious petals.
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The Fountain was different than I expected it to be but still eternal. Syncronicity was in excellent effect even though not quite on the scale that she had when I went to see Before Sunset.
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Haven't been writing many poems as essay-immersion has been swamping the hours with research & free writes, outlining & bibliography-shaping. Still, I love the rough. My favorite Michelangelo sculptures are the ones he left unfinished where the bodies seem to be emerging from the stone.

The essay titles are as follows:

The Brain, Instrument/Repository of Change
Magic: an Essay on Realism
Blindness & Prophecy
Getting Cross: an Exploration of Judaic Traditions
The Fisher King
Eastern Religion Survey
A Refutation of Capitalist Principles
Privilege & Privation
Death & Transfigurations
Tapas: Practice, Prayer, Sacrifice, Living
Ruminations on the Meaning of Place
Formative Music
Play, Play, Play
Bardic Initiation: Lessons Through the Ages
Musings on Time, Space, & Light
Evolutionary Tract
The New Being

These sixteen beasts should keep me plenty busy until I go back to school. The rust has been WD40'd off with an environmentally sound soy solution & like a proud father I have let go at the right moment seeing my rebirth without training wheels. How skilled can I become at essay-writing? That remains to be seen. My general distaste for overly audacious authoritative voice will keep me personal & intimate where many would disapprove. Oh well. The challenge is good for those people. I'd lay down some of the bibliography here but I don't know to start it's so big but feel free to suggest interesting/enlightening books.
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Christmas was great fun. Between my nephew, my cousin's kids, & the kids of my family friends there was lots of laughter & wonder running around.
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Enough little thoughts.

For the Descendants

2006-12-04T13:57:00.000-08:00

Interspersed tangle of treetop twig windings
a subtle fur of nest trestled, bursting
bounds. Burgeoning weight of straws
& strands. A limbic system achieving
linkages that hold, hold firm, through night,
through poundings of weather. Let chicks age
on into an elegance past croaking. Seawind
carries sounds we have to pick through
smelling around salt for the whale's back,
for the jellyfish school, for the driftwood
that looms a traffic of forest in the blue.
That otters shake off the aquatic as we
step down the gnarled, uneven path to another mind
is as easy to forget as dammed beavers.
Tails patchwork quilts of dabbing. Thatching a will,
preservations beyond death's modern grapples,
descendants hear the dance of joy. Rightings of folly.
Laughter in the prairie air.

Book Manuscript

2006-11-29T17:46:00.000-08:00

What the hell? A barista-poet friend of mine is moving. She said we should swap poems. I went to put together some of my best stuff. Then, somehow, instead of compiling a brief best-of I ended up compiling a cohesive book-length manuscript of poems. Why not? I know I should get off my don't-feed-the-ego/fear-of-accomplishment ass & send some poems to magazines. I won't ever publish this without a track record. I have the deadlines all written out for publications I've researched, each little journal has poems carefully chosen for their style. For one so seemingly listless I have a lot of lists. The places that take simultaneous submissions are noted with overlapping submissions all written out & planned. The favorite publishers that are exclusive about their submissions have some of my stronger pieces set to go only to them, those journals I love, where I think they'd fit. I can walk the precipice-brink till doomsday but somehow that doesn't sound a life of mountain-fresh air.

In retrospect, counter to a previous statement, some of the stronger poems do end up on this blog. Hard to tell the gold from the dirt without a little bit of sifting. A few even had there genesis without the favored method, handwritten in a journal, instead getting typed with open-minded freedom here. Mind you, some of my better poems were omitted from the following order because they didn't fit the flow of themes threaded throughout. Whatever. Here's the titles in the tentative order:

Garden Remains
Babies
Her...
On an Afternoon of Indulgence
Castle
Referencing Silence: Three Buddhist Poems
Sitting Cross-legged Before Jackson Pollack's Guardians of the Secret
Liturgy of Murderous Suicide
Forgettable
Lost
War
Fragrant Zone
Energy Strings
The Chord
Sleeping Alone, Reprise
Perimysium Arborealis
Friendly Monk
My Man Near the Park
Love in the Time of Doggerel
At Least We Carpool for Truth
Breakfast in Port Gamble
Clear View
Acceptance
The Tug
Sacred Dance: the King is Dead
Break Bread
What the Farmer Said to Me Near His Homestead
Dirge
Beyond Bosch's Borders
Waking Isn't So
Journey to the Interior
Tracks Under the Stone
Farther to Go
Backtracking
Hidden Waterfall is a Sanctuary
From Hibernation
Another Break from Too Much Fasting
Rainshadows
Give Something Back
Warped Woodgrains Split
Prayer for the Grandmas
Subnotes for the Golden Age
Spitting in the Camel's Eye
White Clouds, White Sheets, White Sails
Lucky Goddess
The Day John Ashcroft Left Town
Tom Fox
Touching
Stolen Cabbage
Let the Feral Keep
Luxurious Squalor
The Far Away Mountaintops of Forgiveness
The Magician Pulls Nothing Out of the Hat
Putting No Fingers On the Source
The Silence Around Owls has Much to Teach You
Drum
I Would You Lay On Many Flowers
Boathouse Run Aground
Indifference
The Found Window
Intangibles
(following one poem)
Tapas: the Blue Shadow with Ash-covered Skin Thinks & Opens as He Listens to One of His Saddest Favorite Albums (Blood On the Tracks) in Preparation for Another Final Transcendence
(preceding one poem)
Oversimplification
Choice Words
Dark Matter Revisioned
Quintessence
This Hand Touches World Tree
Let's Grit Up & Save the Mind(s) One at a Time
A Rest in the Field
Ignorance Means Extinction

Supposed Realities & Sinking Feelings

2006-11-19T09:42:00.000-08:00

Thankful as I remain for my brief but satisfying bout of euphoria over the latest round of elections ... the backlash has occurred. My favorite columnist stated many of the feelings tumbling & gurgling around in my brain http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1117-30.htm. Nice as it is to have a better majority party the state of politics & American culture at large is still shitty. The vast majority still don't care where things come from or where they go. In the type of selfishness that would make any decent social philosopher in history grit his or her teeth people insist on more without regard for waste, economic ruin for others, moral injustice, interconnectedness, & the legacy of living their few years leaves behind for their offspring. For all of our advancements humanity as a whole is still largely clueless, mean, selfish, & seemingly without the fire to improve.

Now wasn't that a breath of fresh air!

Whoo!

The bronze bust of Shakespeare shows a man with a balding head, indistinct eyes, & a wrinkled forehead probably meant to emphasize how much thinking he put into his astonishing achievements. Shakespeare lost his son of nine years old & spent years working on his masterpiece whose protagonist's name, Hamlet, was one letter away from the name of his son, Hamnet. The play was largely about--- everything. The state of Denmark. How one generation can be so much less than the previous. How in judgement we can falter & recede seeking safety or ease or delusion. How youth is precocious. How death surrounds us. How politics & war are outward manifestations of our inability to be humane & consider the implications of our actions. How love can be false. How parents can ruin their children. How ancestors can overshadow their descendants. How friendship can be true. How friends can play on our weaknesses. How consciousness can rise above all these traps. How story is all we have. How circumstance paints our story around our choices. Shakespeare, a peasant who thrived before packed theatres of riffraff, peasants, wannabe aristocrats, lords, & the royal family. Shakespeare, a man whose prime years are lost to history a decade blank slate lost just like Jesus before he emerged a complete force. Shakespeare, a man presumable bisexual because his sonnets profess love to a Dark Lady & a mysterious male. Shakespeare, who could write a rogue or a simpleton or an epic king or a murderous villain without broad strokes but stunning detail & complexity. A man who helped forge what it means to be human. Since God none has created more than Shakespeare James Joyce writes in Ulysses. Falstaff for President!

Christopher Cooper, Wendell Berry, Bill Moyers, Jack Gilbert, Dennis Kucinich, Amy Goodman, Saul Williams, Thom Yourke, Ani Difranco, Katell Keineg, & so many more including wonderful characters in your neck of the woods yet we still fall for lesser people too much of the time. I should become a Montessori School Teacher in a progressive setting & teach Heraclitus, Lao-Tzu, Marcus Aurelius, Confucius, Buddha, Joseph Campbell, Ryokan, Sappho, & Jefferson. Humankind is meant to be kind with integrity, working hard with joy, creating, nurturing, strong but gentle, vulnerable but resilient, honorable, charitable, & loving. This bigotry in the name of Christ & Muhammad is killing me as is the quest for the almighty dollar & smart decorating that is so 2006. You know the color coordination that just pops. Every time I see people holding hands warmly I'm thankful. Every time someone pets their dog lovingly: thankful. A well-tended garden ... you get part of the portrait. Brush in those lines with care, this world is hurting.

Grassroots

2006-11-10T10:06:00.000-08:00

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more
than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven.

-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Wow. The Democrats still piss me off but what a wonderful day! You couldn't of whiped the smile off my face with 12 hours of surgery. Headline: Rumsfeld Resigns; Bush Vows to Work with Democratic Majority. Already articles on how the focus of the new house & senate is going to be the end of the war, environmental reform focusing on alternative energy & land-use reform, the return of property rights, & finding better jobs for the 'little' people. Damn. This means no more talk of eliminating the estate tax & less abuse of eminent domain. This means a bridge to end the unnecessarily debilitating situations & results of war. The Dems are still woosies who are roped in towards the 'political center'. The bi-party system is partly to blame. But middle & lower America don't seem as duped. The vast minority who swing the hammer with a pen & burgeoning bank accounts aren't winning the majority of elections on the issues of abortion & lower taxes this time around. Who knew? Maybe people won't let that little percentage of the populace create modern feudalism where the big players control the workers/slaves to do their profit-making. This country is still messed in the head. The web is fragile. We still have a grip of people who believe in 'our' authority over other nations & dismiss the rights of people with other sexual orientations. There are plenty who don't know their own minds. The Supreme Court is still precariously on the edge of being staunchly conservative passing precedents with long-reaching implications. Who remembers the greatness of Hugo Black, Thurgood Marshall, Sandra Day O'Connor, Earl Warren & William Rehnquist? The checks & balances are close to being broken. The executive branch was able to solicit pre-approval for a preemptive attack on a country halfway across the globe based on falsely analyzed information that was organized to mislead but still should've been seen through. Didn't Vietnam & Korea blatantly spell out the foolishness of occupation? The media which is in a way the fourth branch of government has been allowed to fall into the hands of large interest. Who's demanding reform of FCC regulations? Civil War, if it ever comes to that, would be tearfully ugly in a modern age.

Well, I had food-poisoning & threw up three times before 6 in the morning on my way to work two days ago. Due to illness no coffee in the caf, & (much less disappointing) no pinball in smoky bars. My appetite has been precarious due to nausea. At least I haven't just sat around low energy watching movies.

Matt & I have been on the conversation tip. Today I get a check that will finally catch me up to the financial help I've given Aaron & Matt. While decidedly patient & mellow I can't say I've been ecstatic to be so tight with money for the end of summer. Plenty of flashbacks to worse days when Rachael made me feel like shit or Tacoma where I slept in a basement for awhile in despair. Oh well. My infrastructure seems like its made of adamantium compared to olden days.

I did watch Pootie Tang again. Why don't I own that move when I love it so much? With rental & late fees from a couple of occasions I already have shelled out enough to own it two times over. Don't even get me started on Miyazaki... My propensity for late fees has me seriously considering joining Netflix. Big studio movies, great music from major labels, & books from large publishers are my last bastions of monetary support for ruefully capitalist culture. Great art sells. Take the subculture & make it mainstream. If MTV wants to sell Saul Williams & Pootie Tang then okay, I guess. Dissemination of enlightening ideas is okay. My major bank tenure is pretty much over. Hello small community bank. Enough caffeinated leaping.

Nothing much to report in the love department. Everything I express is about love anyway. The last girl I had a semi-crush on ended up being a little too girlish fake, too young at heart, & scared the crap out of me by announcing she's joining the Air Force. Took me two hours of paleness erasure to broach the subject after her announcement. Sure she needs a change & self-discipline but killing from a distance wouldn't be my choice of solution. That early retirement she touted would do me no good I'd spend the rest of my life living out the nightmare of my imagination trying to sort out what I did & might have done. Speaking of, I'm gonna read Truman's memoirs super soon. What did the man (bastard) think of dropping the bombs before & after? The question haunts me.

There is a Socialist in the Senate!!!!

Since my poetry's been shit I'm going back to work on my essay collection. Prose & research are a relief to a mind weary of looking for a new combination of artistic subtleties to meet my own standards of poetic expression. I find relief in the idea that whenever I've felt totally unhappy with my poetry I've risen up to reclaim my place as a conduit & let creation flow through me. Never been too satisfied but I can tell when something has come closer to what's wanting to come out in the moment. We create all the time but I like song best. BTW, poems I put here aren't my best stuff, it's the middle-grade on the borderline of inclusion in collections. The best I save for send-offs. Nothing against the teensy smattering of people who read this.

Alright, I've been at the screen long enough. Had a nightmare recently where Rachael (part Amy) wanted to talk to me to smooth things over but, like my dad, I was engrossed at a slot machine. To be sure I've been caught up in reading at a computer with both Amy & Rachael. Both complained. Attentiveness is muy importante. Goddess knows I acknowledge the homeless & the crazy for that very reason: how very kind it is to recognize someone's existence & their importance in the grand story-scheme. In the nightmare I was all cocooned, oblivious & mindlessly hurtful, ignoring, while a blip of awareness alarmed how I was letting it all happen again. Balance. "What passes for luxury others can keep" starts one of my poems in Subnotes for the Golden Age. My computer sessions are Dionysian bouts since I refuse to have home usage. The public display makes the time seem to stretch. While my vices are few (some sports, some internet, some very occasional recreational but minimal lack of sobriety, a little bit of porn) the after-effects still make me question the validity of indulging in behavior that is retrograde enough I see what seems like little blotches of emptiness. We all deal with the void. The continuing quest to question.

Off to clothes-washing. A nice five block walk in the rain toting three loads. In the possible futures a Golden Age exists. Can people learn to pay attention to their actions, to the implications? Yes. Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." What is knowledge if you do not apply it with proper care? Ironic that an adamant pacifist's explorations into the nature of reality paved the way for others to create atomic & nuclear bombs. A Golden Age awaits. Whether we bring it into being is so in question that each day a fire builds in the thrashing hope of my weathered soul nurturing the roots that seek blossom. The roots are far from perfect or perfect in their own way, I am trying to cleanse my body & my mind so that I can subsume the right details & ingredients for me to function best in the symbiosis. Sometimes I forget. Goddess, kick my ass as often as you deem helpful.

Many Choose the Narrow

2006-10-26T12:40:00.000-07:00

The best seek a name forever honored by the gods while the rest eat their way to sleep like nameless cattle.

-Heraclitus

Everyone is unique while holding many similar characteristics. The basest, vile human being can coo a tone of voice before degrading into a closer semblance of honesty. We can believe anything if we try hard enough. So many illnesses & revelations, dreams of sleep, dreams of waking, walks with women or dogs, cats on the lap, heads on the lap, astonished joy in the honest masks of children. How does a crow sound like an eagle for a split second? How does a person seem like the one for months or years? What is a dream but a landscape furnished by the mind that reality cannot rise up to, or surpasses? Surprises. May they come from every angle. May we adapt with integrity.

The intact pulses in my skin. Washes of sound stand my armhills & sprout goose pimples. Moles conduct misguided searches for vegetation. A voice from a colored set of lips. A lengthy finger so nimble plays around another's chin. Hair is cleaved. The conducts of interrelationship circumspect. This move, that move. Air growing stale. In the human wreckage, past the veils of smoke, past the mangled names, through the tarnished eyes a glint of water plays a healing course.

Claims stamped, the delicate fur slips through the tunnel, into the morning air for a leap. Fingers ply & pick, strum, & slide. Care extended the tribe's story carried on. The kisses not wasted. Even the kisses never placed. One long journey to the mountaintop. Too long the willingness to cage understanding with scraps.

2006-10-21T09:34:00.000-07:00

The powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence & courage the danger fades.

-Joseph Campbell

An update. Where to start picking up the threads? Well, the main thrust of activity hereabouts is that my little abode is awash in mayhem. 1940's brick & hardwood small my little centerpart of a triplex is now populated with both Aaron & Matt with yours all-too-truly. Aaron showed up earlier than anticipated from Canada where he discovered hippies in yurts & Native Americans with sweatlodges willing to spare some wisdom. He's headed off to Delaware soon to visit his Grandma. Matt & I had been developing a groove, as he spun me some of his DJ routines, spending hours together reforging our friendship. You know the usual unusual sharing of stories, books, music, & the innermost. Much as I didn't want to admit it my post break-up depression has kept me from writing both abundantly or with much quality. Ahh, another gestation period. Perhaps my depression is a little more stealthy these days but I'm persistent enough to chase him in the moist cracks of lush jungle ravines in my soul. I turned over plenty of rocks on the Puget Sound as a kid. I'm not about to stop now.

The journal has taken a bare approach. Who knew I'd get so into fragments? It's as if I'd been sitting around reading Holderlin & Michael McClure all day which is just not the case. So much of writing comes down to sound. I consider myself a poet not a writer. My ear may be peculiar, falling for cadences & rhythms that don't meet the taste of many people but as always I just say what I have to say. The subject & the sound are not divorced. In response to blank canvas I've been burnishing a calligraphy pen. Double-sided, the fat end is smooth in arcing lines for spontaneous drawings that emphasize some of the absurd notions my hackneyed readings of physics produce. Still trying to create the solution instead of further elucidating the problem. Somehow too many of the poems come out too hokey. My crit can have a sharpness but my spiritualism can get endowed with a flightiness that is more robin drunk on aged berry crashing into clear-paned windows than athletic hummingbird thriving in clarity & precision & whimsy. If I have time on this earth to heal the many wounds, I'll never tire of working.

Should get on with the day. Sunshine & red leaves to admire. Going on the Amtrak today. Headed north to celebrate a family friend's marriage. His first at forty years of age. Waited awhile. He used to take me on motorcycle rides when I was a kid, including twenty or thirty foot jumps over a gravel pit near the Naches River. In homage I have my tight red Easy Rider shirt on. My sister, about his age, & him may have had an odd flirt relationship but my wee brain was more concerned with Transformers & magic & keeping my eye out for creatures like deer & porcupines back in those days. That, & my own crushes on girls that wouldn't want boy cooties for a number of years, or at least admit to such. Now, I have a better eye for some details while other dreamy synapses have devolved into obscurity. Learning to forget is almost as difficult as learning to remember. Alright. The day is calling. May your occasions be effusive with joy & the gathering weave of wisdom.

Typed Extra Quick for the Waiting Guy

2006-10-09T11:05:00.000-07:00

Prose. What a strange mangling of harmony. Not breaking enough. To show the rhythms. The linebreak, an ingenious not ingenuous invention by someone more than a genie on the genetic scale of action. All this reaction as if playing things over without thinking makes us better. Well, a small update. Matt's moved in. We have a funny humor in our interactions. So much better than interfacing with machines. My armpit gland swelled up. Too many toxins. Just because I'm a wine-steward doesn't mean I'm a lush. On the contrary, I probably just didn't get enough nutrients for a week combined with too much pinball in bars with Meilani. Oh well.

Mortality never ceases to amaze.

Not a significant crush to report. Intelligent & pretty girls abound. Some where we pause at meeting & weigh the cosmic repurcussions. Nothing too right. Excited about the City Repair rave coming soon. Kinnie Starr performing the night after that. Decided not to go to M Ward's show, too big. Reading physics books, following my Einstein obsession. Rereading Dune series as a prelude to the new Sequel based on Frank Herbert's notes found in a lockbox. Cleaned the shit out of my place before Matt's arrival. Still anticipating The Fountain coming out. Great to have Gnarls Barkley in the house again. Reading Carruth & Matthew Zapruder for poetry right now. Both have that humor. Oh, also Ryokan. Ryokan the zen-poet-priest-hermit-jokester. He of the big heart & companion of children. Thank goddess the Yankees eliminated in the first round. Huskies playing much better football. Still dislike the job. Creatures are dear & sometimes dangerous. Danger gives us adaptation galore. Time to trail off. So many trails to take. This was typed extra quick cause there's someone waiting.

The Infinite End of Summer

2006-10-09T10:46:00.000-07:00

Take a coffee pot.
Doesn't matter which color.
Relic, heirloom, or hand-me-down.
Enjoy the morning,
peaceful non-resistance.
Then get to work in concrete fields
cracking slabs back to earth,
sweat molecules sandy seashells of salt.
Take your macular-cleansed glint-eye
into the Art Festival streets.
Prove stone's impermanence.
Pitch your tones, tents tethered to trees,
easing their harmony as close as you can
to wisdom & encompassing love in the trunk-limb.
Admire sexy boot style on the pineneedles
& face bright implications framed with sky.
Joke with your motherly concerned waitress
stacked spoons of comfort. Hold the tea in your palms,
cupping the warmth crisp as her mysterious enflame.
As a lover's breast the sidewalk seated flirt
milk of sustenance drawn forth
by a foreign finger's touch, a changing breath,
nipple at attention in the sway,
a toasty glance in the hazel.
A vanishing night through the streetlamps
of summer's star-edged neverend.

Every Star a Sun

2006-10-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

Headed to the wildwood
side. Got the nalgene
full. Gonna climb a tree
high. Seeking the nest in the
light. Outlying dwarves swallowed
through. This core corral
ocean filanged filia rough
emblazoned with many touches of hands.
Grandstand all you want,
the want always more.
Minding the what. Delineating detail.
Shades into sharpness closing distance.
The gryphon harvesting the hunted truth.
Rave-ballet armswing of sword
another she strikes. Clove-amber musk
sumptuous smell engrosses. Footpound
night-mined dusk. Trusting shards
of mirror linking far. Beware bias of
highness gone royal. Necessity respect
not optional. A fractured story
never the end. Loosing, find freedom
in mycelium binds. Treaure pursuits
so rich in others' throwaways. Dream-actualize.
A cabin homebase. A cottage. Stonework.
A garden alive. Colors. Bees. Small touches.
Awarenesses that opens & opens. Brink
nearby. A grove that smiles back.
A teapot forever whistling. Stars constellating.
Big dipper full with higher lovemaking.

Untitled

2006-09-27T18:22:00.000-07:00

Simplicity
not squalor.
The special spareness.
Breakfast of two eggs & toast.
A little walk.
Leaning sniff of lilac cluster.
Hopping bees.
Swimming ants.
Gazing for shapes in clouds
through sunswept arcing limbs.
A squinting pleasure
the silhouette of a woman.
Her hip swiveled on,
the gentle sculpt of her bare arms.
A spill of hair.
A presence.
The partial is whole.
An uncluttered grin,
muscles at ease.

Indifference

2006-09-27T18:18:00.000-07:00

Scrollwork swings in the silver,
lost love twirling in shells & turquoise.
The pressed form of a female rises
emanating waves that soften blows.
A cool breeze drifts cross misted neck.
To find me use bare feet.
Climb the tallest tree
& gaze over valleys & stream
thru fogbanks past mountains.
Every wear becomes some wear.
Rip thru fabric
cleancutting.
A bandage exults
with a palm of aloe.
Chosen from amongst the wreckage
trinkets to flip around fingers,
an eye that forever holds the storm.
A ravine where paradise encloses
the hard rules of nature.

Personal Culpability

2006-09-23T08:38:00.000-07:00

The practice of scapegoating goes far back into humanity's most distant past. A fair argument can be made that the earliest ritualists identified themselves with their prey. See the wizard-beast image of Lascaux. Inhabitants of geo-spheres decorated themselves with local plant-life in a ceremonial manner &, of course, in a functional manner. Every technological advancement (yes, the ancients had the equivalent of technology) integrated into the life just as today. What we do matters. Some try to blame individualism on the Descartesian declaration that the inner & the outer worlds are separate. Some try to blame the subversion of ideas & principles by the larger power structures. Some try to blame their parents or ex-girlfriends or their bosses or the inherited mess of societal psychodrama.

Back in the day every populated continent had practices of human sacrifice. Wotan the King-God progenitor of the Norse pantheon was known to sacrifice himself to himself far before the time of Jesus on Ygrassidil, the World Tree. With one eye open he saw beyond. To purge the community's sins & make oblations to the gods (of fertility, of harvest, of ill-intentions, of luck, of child-rearing) men & women partook of innumerable variations wherein people died in an offering. As mankind beat the complications of nature back this practice grew less common. 'Archaic' dissemination of information via travellers, emissaries that brought about the great, slow rippling waves of cultural diffusion the 'barbarous' or 'uncivilized' act came to be frowned upon. In the growing boundary line between the human & the 'wild' brought about by agriculture, domestication of animals, & a profusion of distancing technologies such as standing walls, metallurgy, & abstract thinking that isolates this from that man found himself more & more alone. Still, this idea of sacrifice to God or the gods was pervasive on select days people would gather to stone a goat & purge the tribe's sins or to slit the throat of a bear & throw the pelt over themselves to act out the mythical round of the tribe's origins. Blood was a fixture in daily life. Red is one of the three principle colors, with black & white. Studies on language worldwide show that only the most advanced cultures create a word for the color blue while only the most primitive tribes with the most limited language do not have a vocabulary that includes a name for red.

This growing aloneness brought with it the story of the individual, the hero. We started to define as a culture who the person could be with a glorious garden of flowers, each orchid distinct & yet so far from the lily of the pond but we narrowed down the 'good' from the 'bad'. This underlying guilt (especially in Catholics) told man that he or she was in some way responsible for the suffering. Proust perhaps put it best when he said, 'the energy that circles the globe the most per second is not love but pain.' When Jesus said, 'give them the coat from your back' he was talking about personal responsibility. This sacrifice meant that in the face of harrowing odds we are meant to rise up & do the human [in the sense of superhuman, godlike, (perhaps even accessing God within ourselves?] act that frees the benevolent energies from the bulk of injustice surrounding situations & their vast satchels of story.

While this 'this not that' identity misses the mark when the 'I' is stressed as separate from the rest, personal culpability is a reintegrator that brings us back to the 'we'. Too often have I destressed my own blame. I would never throw the stone at Magdalene. I am not Zagareus enamored with myself in the mirror wearing the Crown of the Gods. Hard work is joy. Precocious children are worth a careful tending. Intervention is necessary in a world that does not know itself very well. They write now that planting trees is not going to help much with soaking up the harm we have done to the skydome. The Pope in an act of idiocy (O what bitter hilarity!) accuses Muslims of a bloody history. In the midst of cluster bombs, carpet bombs, smart bombs, atomic bombs (anyone remember our saddest day?), & nuclear bombs we must find positive climax. I believe in orgasmic climax, forest climax, & body optimization. Gaia theory is at its best when we study how to best utilize our resources. No longer party to aspects of the atrocity in the direct sense I buy most of my groceries in bulk now, never use paper products except the rare napkin (now that I think of it I should carry a cloth one in my bag), & conceptualize every day how to live better. Once, long ago, I fell in love with a woman while we talked about our favorites. My favorite is the full life wherein I am largely responsible for the part I play, & mind you I will be playful in my playing, conscious of consequences. Harmony is the strain of binding opposites but the dance can be graceful instead of the jagged sound of machinery grating the mind into inhuman consequences. Some may sell the world as done soon but I cannot be party to such foul practices. The sacrifice is clear, I must sacrifice myself to the Self.

Ignorance Means Extinction

2006-09-11T13:33:00.000-07:00

The man
the only known species aware enough
to understand larger implications
of what she does.

Man,
capable of being conscious
of how he interacts
with her environment
chooses to destroy it.

Something higher than man
is out there.

Click

2006-09-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

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.

Dark Matter Revisioned

2006-09-02T09:41:00.000-07:00

Sometimes words kill you.
Death by empalement
or flush cheeks
as the metallurgical spike
hurtling from a burly, invisible hand
meets the unexpecting stubble
of the face inside of the face.
Piked to the other shore.

Sometimes words are the only thing
that save your life.
Them, & the oceans of emotion
chained to them
with tangled clematis.

Then there's the little boy so full of it
who explains to you the adult nonsense
with zeal relaying what he's heard
"the car has a bad carbor-a-tor."
His voice chewing the last syllables
with unreserved excitement
as if he's told you about a dinosaur.

Sometimes
a man knows there is no death
but the death in lesser choices.
This man tries to take sense
& intuit a reasoned path.

Her footfalls his
on into cosmos,
stars ablaze past retinas.
Blackholes
full not empty alone.
A wash of light & occasioned songs.

Sometimes a painting visits,
lines a window to a special time.
But all we seem to get is
more tracts of dark forest etched in
replete with attendant monsters
& there--- that place, that slightest edge
at the path's end
(as if the path could have an end)
a smattering of light.
Magical shapes barely exposed
on into the framed edge of the canvas
(where the darkness parts the field opens)
opening onto the age
we have to create for ourselves.

Amy in Context

2006-08-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

Romance is never easy... except when it is. From the first time I met Amy Ann Krog I loved her & trusted her implicitly. Her energetic bounce, honest face, & blue eyes with blue top. I'm not an adept psychologist-version of Foucalt, I can't trace the intricate sociological threads that piecemeal together my personal maturation (if there is such a thing in the flux) that provided my new & improved feelings of love. The Seattle streets I walked to cafes far away, the interiors of rooms or birch or cedar groves, the effect ceilings of warped natural wood or starry firmamnet have had on me. The friends with witty banter or seemingly indiscriminate abundance of detail. The quest for perspective is often waylaid by the chaos of its never ending. How often have I avoided putting in context what this relationship meant to me here, in this blog, because it seemed an impropriety. Well, for honesty's sake I'll pull back a bit of the veil.

Chemistry in love is even more evasive than me. The seeming components can gather but the whole won't even add up to the sum of its parts the vast majority of the time. People spend so much time with their demons they don't know how to wash their angel's feet. I love Amy. Her parents, grandparents, extended family, friends, & her own willpower did well in raising her to be a fine, multi-layered woman. I love her quirkiness. I'm a sucker for quirkiness but even so I've been especially fond of her particular quirkiness. How do we compare someone's specialness to someone else's? How do frame a context in which so many complexes flare to light? Is the past so irreparably different from the ever-changing present? Where is the constancy? How do we still ourselves & see the lips & hands, hear the voice, & remember the smells mixed in with all the levels of content? That we didn't fit is a disappointment that has been crushingly hard to reconcile. As Jack Gilbert wrote:

Love lasts by not lasting.

It's no secret that I'm hardest on those I love the most. With hours of dedication I've eeked out a few extra lengths of humanity which are still somehow shells of what they should be. What that matters is impossible to weigh. Rachael told me I shouldn't take things so personally. I have worked on taking things transpersonally & this has only served to deepen my conviction that what we do & think matters. Negations, what we don't do & what we don't say, matter as well. I'll admit that I'm an escape artist of sorts, the memory of girls rejected & people circumspect haunts me. I remember so much, even if the details get subsumed here and there into impressions. Those I love I expect more out of. Do unto others as you'd have done unto you. I'd have others be aware of what they do to themselves, to others, & the world. Everyone has their shadows. I'd have them plum those shadows for the gifts of knowledge. I'd have them thrust the unnecessary from the light back into the shadows. Situational choices are such a joy & so often a brutal expose of lessons unintegrated. The vision of betterness lies in wait for the earnest.

So because of one unrevealing sentence in a fragmented context in a blog that maybe half a dozen people read I quote-unquote "Can no longer be trusted." Is this all? Is that the full explanation? Is there ever a full explanation? Part of why Amy & I don't fit is her go-getter action, she is energetic that one. I try to make my actions considered. Sometimes that contemplation bleeds into excess, past the boundary-line of socially accepted timeliness. In the process of trying to think my shit through I err on the Taoist side of not disturbing nature's processes. Everyone else can do whatever they want of course. Judge not lest ye be judged. What a misinterpreted statement! Of course we judge! We must discriminate to make the sacrifice of life headed towards death fuller & more meaningful--- holy. What is spirit but that which underlies our behaviours. If we claim to not be spiritual do we claim not to care? What greater indictment is there? That we care doesn't mean we should flounder & of course we all do to some extent. So many choices.

I have an opinion dammit. If you're my friend you're entitled to that opinion. IfI had my way I'd have things be known in common benefit all like Heraclitus would have but I respect the social pressures of relationships enough to keep much hidden. The exception being to some extent Rachael because her callous, cold behaviour made that option forfeit if I was to survive the damage. I'm not running around detailing my sex-life or Amy's various opines of Jack, Rob, the Marine, her parents, or any other such personage. I simply relayed one incidental scrap of a sentence which I duly noted as paraphrased and followed with qualification. Call-and-response. So many choices.

As ever, I choose to love Amy regardless. To love everyone I've loved regardless. To expect a lot out of them. To be disappointed but okay with that. The human soul has to lift itself up somehow otherwise life on this planet will disappear or surivive by inhumane means. I choose quiet Sunday mornings with coffee staring at the trees & summer dresses, little quests wherein my thoughts dance planting blessings like world-tree seeds in the seams of fabric tangled through the vast weave especially close to the people I love most. I choose little bouts of volunteering that I don't detail to anyone so as to avoid unnecessarily feeding my ego. I choose an increasingly green approach to day-to-day life, rounding my rough edges so that I emulate nature's curves instead of industry's straight lines. Frank Herbert writes that the summons to cooperate identifies the healer. I choose healing. Amy, if you read this, I hope we all heal.

Pygmies in the Background

2006-08-18T09:27:00.000-07:00

When the two become as one, then & only then, will you enter the Kingdom of God.
-Jesus, The Gospel of Thomas

So, I wrote most of a post a couple of days ago that was blatantly unnecessary. Covering emotions. This online blogging thing is odd. You get an audience in your head, an imagined audience. Purely speculative. I feel a responsibility to go against convention. While the phrase what man has not encountered he has not destroyed is true on a certain level, what man has not brought to a conscious level he has not fully integrated into his soul. Journal writing, which I have done sparely, I've always fancied as this romantic, confessional vessel for the underpinnings. The lassoes of threads supporting the obviously viewed fabric. The editor-critic looms of course, everyone needs a functioning bullshit detector. I've kept a lot of my necessitous grime on the wayside, my daily loops with my crushaholic moods, my social anxieties, little joys that I might write in a private journal but that would lose their special flavor if put on display.

Since Amy reads this, I'm aware of her. Mars. Ahniwa. Maybe Alexis. The forest ranger dude who commented but in my hermeticism I didn't respond to, even though his blog is quite nice. Since reading that I've thought I might like to be a forest ranger since I lose my taste for the city the longer I interact with concrete & witness the scarcity of trees. Light looks better in a natural environment. Few things are more basic to a personal existence than a quality of space. The greener I get year by year the more apparent it is that I will have to find a means to own & steward a piece of land. How I dream of owning a dog! One of my prime motivations. Even with this willfulness of purposeful writing I have the responsibility to chronicle some of my shit. The main ticket on the hollywood sign has most often been my dealing with the Rachael debacle. Sometimes I feel chained to that distasteful content, & thus liberate myself with new topics. Grief work is a tricky piece of commerce, you set a treaty with yourself somewhere then act like Andrew Jackson with the Spade of Manifest Destiny in your hands & break with your word. Defining boundaries is ongoing. New information revisions every story that came before, that would come after. Only myth is true.

I seek out the world within the world. The elusive one that I would have be born. The paradise that blossoms with each humane gesture. The funny little authenticities of children, the complex awareness of a measured but still somehow natural multi-layered voice, the syncronicities of thought applied to action. Deep Forest may, as my friend Horatio said, always have pygmies in the background but to get deep in the forest we need to open our eyes to the atrocity & the gift simultaneously. I'm sure I'm a drag & a hoot sometimes. Whatever. I may seem manic. Whatever. I think too much some people say. To paraphrase, Amy said, "You get up on your soapbox too often." I couldn't disagree more. A difference of opinions or dialectic. Personally, the image of the angelic childhood I had, the subsequent adventures with so many wonderful-amazing people, the hours of solitude honing my awareness & trying to shake my inherited mindsets by seeking out the roots & the applications, must be married to an image if not a full realization (a striving towards) aged wisdom. The wise man with the hearthfire whose smile carries experiences & simple kindness, the quietude that allows for listening.

What I'm trying to say in my free write style rambling is I have a lot more that I want to say that I don't say in these entries. The mindset here is to change the approach & cover more of the happenings in the future in a chronicler's fashion with glimpses of past & future interlaced. A context, perpective. The equivalances identified to an extent so that the harmony, the rhythm is partially translated.

Since the aborted entry relayed a version of my last trip to Olywa, I'll probably start from there sometime soon & brush up the faultiness of my last composition.

Love y'all,

Jason

Slow Heal

2006-08-01T14:51:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the healing takes awhile. A wound that seems so vivid in the psyche at its inception gives way over time to layers of experience, changed perspective, & revisioning of moments through each succeeding moment--- in other words we change. How to know when the reverb of a psychical explosion has died down enough that the radioactive material will allow invisible ecosystems to flourish. The brain, is after all, our greatest recycler. Memory is persistent as the moon but is new each time, as Heraclitus' river. How many kisses real or imagined will it take to get the taste of Rachael saying, "Your kisses don't turn me on," & the subsequent billion times she didn't kiss me thereafter to illustrate her point? How many times will some associative thought arise with Amy for me to realize what I already mostly know that we don't belong together? The ache of wanting happiness for those you love & yourself has a miraculous gravitational pull.

A couple of days ago I went on a vision quest. The time had come to shed some barriers & feel the rain on the hides of white horses. I fasted, ate a healthy meal, offered up some requests to the Great Spirit, & waited with intense intention & the ease of someone who has the idea that this is right action, that this is the golden path. When the lights started to come on, & the shapes defined themselves it was as frightening as it ever is. Why is it that what we want most haunts us with the specter of what we could be? All those demon-fears descended on me. How can I keep such purity? The prayers I had murmured in celebration of Daniel's wedding, the well-wishing I had sent Ahniwa's way for his happy relationship & impending travels, the idea of City Repair building a natural sanctuary in the woods with Aaron healed from poison oak & Carisa's weird breaking of his heart, Rachael's whatever path (I figure she's doing something with medicine) that she might find what it is she is looking for & with that a better means of communicating, Amy's continued growth that she might find someone who can offer her what she desires in a healthier modicum than what I was able to offer for a time. The idea of a world in positive relationship to a burgeoning climax of nature teeming with life, the rot giving way to layers of understory in a complex weave of life bursting at the seams thick with giant trees & all manner of ecostructure at elevations & windcurrent. Man in harmony with the hard rule of nature as much as she can be. The vision hunted me & grabbed me.

My first vision that I can recall is a dream I had as a little boy. In the dream there was a little girl my age in a field. We were together, romantically entangled in all the sweet optimism my worldview could encompass at that tender age. The eternal field was tall grass combed by a sea-scented wind. All around a towering forest of majesty enclosed this haven of a sunlit field. I held my blanky & enjoyed time with this wondrous girl. Then, a dragon stormed through the trees & usurped the girl trundling towards the sea through the massive tangle of trees. A moment of fear & doubt overtook me, then I charged after, clarity of purpose having won. Despite whatever odds I had to try & live the dream. I caught up with dragon on the seashore where the infinited waves kissed in choppiness the smooth sand. As his claws sunk into the shallows entering the greater sea I confronted him with such a resounding voice & presence & attacked with my blanky. His enormous face had ancient angry eyes when he turned on me but I was all steel will & determination. He gave way. His massive talon of a claw all dark green sleek with patches of red released the exhausted, relieved girl.

In some way, I am still living out this dream. Not so much that I need to save a particular girl. I am still chasing after my fears & making them release this vision of a fuller life. Courage is needed in every harrowing step. The healing sword is still burnished in my hand as a blanky, as a green blade, or as an old man's weathered staff. I am still a 'seeker' as a lady once called me after seeing my eyes in a cafe. "You must be another seeker?" I'm living into this life, petting the cats in my neighborhood, making faces at people I know, dancing silly, ordering the familiar drink, honing my home life, improving in incremental ways ever-insistent on creating less & less waste. How can we give more than we take? Especially hard when the world gives us so much, even if what it gives largely seems immaterial.

Yesterday I had another nighttime dream. In this one I was an older man with a staff leading a troupe of people through the wilderness we crossed a seatown, a hybrid of Seaside & Port Townsend. There, we stopped in to an arcade joint where a man voiciferously demanded that we come back & accept as a gift a bull pinball game. He explained that the game needed parts from three other machines but the relic was so worth upkeeping. The animal logo on the side had all the bustling life of the image in the caves of Lascaux or the snorting noses of Snohomish's buffalo fields. Wild, misforgotten nature was bristling in this relic of the past that needed reviving. My Grandma was especially meant to be a passer on. We left with this message, scuttling along the fingers of land jutting out into the waters. As we entered the heartland away from the sea, switching back on wild land I informed my clan of natural lore teaching them the ways of life feeding on life & the ecosystems particularities & the metaphorical lessons were teeming all around. A slick dark hole appeared to swallow us in, all mud & quicksand trap as if our fears could materialize & devour us. Then a dark unreal cloud appeared on the horizon where white clouds puffed & seagulls swung in circles. We ran, I lagged behind to take the brunt. Such is my insistence on sacrifice in dreams. We dashed around a switchback lapping unawares path-walkers. A clearcut appeared on our left, highlights of tiny treetops illuminated in the dawnlight. The richness of a fuller forest on our right where the hills inclined upwards. I stopped running & turned around spinning my staff suddenly finding I had the strength to create change, something happened & then the dream ended.

What to make of these turns & upturns, these downslides & evening keels in the spiral? Change is possible. In fact, change is the one constant. Many artists may cease to create, children stop dreaming, idealists degrade into land-rapers. I will not count myself among them in that way. The world must achieve a golden age or perish. With all my heart & adversity-hardened will I choose a greater way of living with harmony & hard lessons.

A Diatribe On My Dislike of Bars

2006-07-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

So many times I have mulled over in my head what I want to say in a forum such as this, or in a memoir (which, thankfully, I have never set out to write), or in zines (many of which I've chosen to go the route of less murky territory than some of my daily recollections). I'm thankful that the sharpness of my recall has dulled in many places. We must make choices. The finite is threaded intricately through the eternal. To dote on the loss of certain goddesses is folly in the old tradition of falling in love with the moon. How implacable & cold it would be to love something one can only touch with the vibrant urgency of imagination! We must have the 'geometry of innocent flesh on the bone' to grip & soothe & stare into.

Partnership, two-as-one, the collective in the individual, the many flowing forth & blossoming through the seeming of a single source--- try & lay that out simply. The fabric twists & splits & rains down & burrows into the most remote cavern with wondrously strange adaptations. To commodify, to suck down a cigarrette as the most acceptable form of suicide, to live off processed, chemical-laden canned food. Fuck that! Touching the life cycle informs a sense of responsibility. Looking in the mirror & tracing the traits passed on from uncountable ancestors is a means to owing up to the stewardship we should all entrust ourselves with. That love holds grief in the folds of its dress, that the alluring creature may have supposedly demonic goat legs is necessary. What matters demands danger & gifts to those with boldness & the humor to combat despair.

Last night I went to a bar. Shit man, I hate those places even when they're seething with James Brown, dim light, old brick, gorgeous wood, & dynamic pinball machines--- not to mention slinky, sexy, smart girls who know how to look you in the face & create moments. People's bullshit falsehood drips from the walls & chandeliers & cue-tips like ectoplasmic goo. Give me coffee & a willow tree in a trellised courtyard anyday. Instead of bad dance music replays on occasion give the me the harmonies & violin & harmonica of Bob Dylan's Desire which always elicits images of sunlit, hand-holding in fields with sun-dappled horses. Megan listened to that album in Ireland on a small island while the old stone hostel was uniquely quiet, give me the memory of someone I care about whose blue eyes are tender with understanding not the swish & miss of sexual balderdash. Foreplay as the misrepresentation of fulfilling desires is so trite. Sigh, I know people have trouble communicating. I certainly have my blind spots. After years of willfullness I still have a paltry pallet of colors to express the formerly incommunicable. Still, to know what one desires, 'to keep things known in common', to have a commons, should be a basic function of human relationships. That we shadowdance & don't know what we want to such an extent that we stab & rape each other in both physical & psychical senses is ---- well you get the point. The true point is that we should try to say what we need to say on this earth & that bars drive me insane because people only say some of that important matter in a half-assed way because they are impaired. Even if their drift is heartfelt in the midst of their stupors they just sound less than who they are, unless they're really fucking cool like my friend Meilani. Whatever. Ahh, rice mocha. Leaves dangling in the wind.

The Imperfect Moment

2006-07-03T12:06:00.000-07:00

Not the best time to write this but the only time I am currently allowed. A little drowsy. Woke up ahead of my way-too-early alarm because I had a work problem to call the opening manager about. Bleh, as in comic book Odie eating something bad---bleh. Anywho, more strange times. Who'd thunk it?

My parents, after thirty-one years, are getting a divorce. Before you lament my situation please reflect upon the changing nature of the universe. Change is the one constant. Objective reality is every possibility of the moment as space playing itself out. To choose a path is an illusion that is as real as we want it to be. Both of my parents have been unhappy with their life for sometime. If this is the catalyst for them to get out there actively seeking what will make them happy then so be it. The way it has gone down is not exactly pretty but a far sight from other debacles.

Life stuff seems a bit trivial right now. Little stories:

Marley, me little nephew, thinks "Uncle Jason is so silly."

Mara, a friend of Mars, thinks, "I'm fun to be around." She was sincere when she said it.

A customer at my work said I was so peaceable I should be a priest. Cough.

How to take compliments?

Been hangin' with Meilani from Olywa. Used to have coffee chats with her outside of Vita but I was eminently distracted by my own moroseness (earlier) or Rebecca (later) during that period, or writing of course. Meilani kicks ass! A poet to the core. Intentional. We swap girl-problem stories, she gives me publishing tips (she works letterpress & makes zines), & we drink my free bottles of wine into the early morning. Hell of a lot of fun.

The art of making anything well these days seems to be a lost art. Who cares about how they make a piece of clothing, a cup of coffee, a dish, a meal, a sentence, a kiss, a step, a childhood these days? A: Not enough of us.

I am in a room with five laptops. Count em' one, two, three, four, five. Monstrous little lapdwellers pulsing over people's crotches, humming with a dull whir of distraction & isolation. No thanks.

Gonna leave for Albina soon where the art of the drink is still alive in constant pursuit.

Biggest personal story besides the divorce: I sent off my first chapbook manuscript. The Underneath, twenty-eight pages of wandering hermit poems where the exterior is sought out as a reflection of the interior & connection with the land is seen as a primary means of healing the relationship with the self. Whatever that means. Hmmm... Well, I suppose I should do an actual round of magazine/press submissions instead of my usual scattershot methods. The turning point can be a small accumulation of unconcsious knowledge summoned from latency by a nice day with sun lilting through the trees. I believe that.

Joseph & Mars are settled in the SE with Takashi. Matt's not mad at me, he called. He's coming to Portland soon. Yoshimi, my God-kitty, was so cute when I got to pet her. Mars & I had a good talk, we needed one. Nature & I spent some quality time too. I've been feeling pretty damn sociable. Who knows, maybe I've followed through on enough of my intentions to get out of the latest rut phase.

Picked up the New York Times Magazine yesterday at the caf only to see the words No ordinary singer-songwriter in the upper left corner. Curiousity sparked, my fingers flipped pages & voila Katell Keineg. The article was about the Breton-Welsh mistress of voice who transcends time & place. The article recounted her relative anonymity after many predictions of fame swirled about her early career. Like Jack Gilbert or Lori Carson (who recently journaled about how she hated the music & was considering not touring and/or recording anymore) she has that innate sense of life being important & worth refining with a little privacy---& that voice! An artist after my own heart.

Saw the Flaming Lips in Bend a few weeks back. Woo! Still have a strand of ribbon that shot over us, orange. Damn good show. There were skunky smells, & photo shots up Wayne's nose, & naked girls writhing in cosmic light on screen, & --------great music. Who knew Bend was so cool? Washington has nary a town in the Cascade half as cool. Leavenworth & Winthrop included.

Music I'm listening to: Richard Ashcroft Keys to the World, Richard Ashcroft Alone with Everybody, Richard Ashcroft Human Conditions, Flaming Lips The WAND, Flaming Lips At War with the Mystics, Kinnie Starr Tidy, Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan Ballad of the Broken Seas, Soup Dragons Lovegod (surprising allowance of self to return to 'Shoegazer' roots, never liked that summation & the supposed slackerhood wallfloweriness that it implied), My Bloody Valentine Loveless (when I bought it again for the third time the guy behind the counter said, "You know this is the greatest album ever made?"), & more.

Books I've read: Real Work by Gary Snyder, A Poet's Work by Sam Hamill, Fragments of Wisdom by Heraclitus, Tao-te-Ching by Lao-Tzu, & Children of Dune by Frank Herbert all rereads. This has been a time of newness in regestation, cultivating those plants that have proved hearty.

An Inconvenient Truth made me cry. Those visions of floods keep piercing me. If it's not the Tsunamis ravaging Asia it's Katrina, if it's not Katrina it's God letting Noah slip away on the ark only to say afterwards "Sorry, sorry. My bad, here's a rainbow. I'll never do it again." Or its the Enuma Elish or Gilgamesh or Global "I don't exist" Warming. How 'bout those unprecedented 100+ degree days in mid-June?

Daniel's getting married. Weird! I don't have the funds to ante up 400 large for a trip to Austin. That sucks but reality is I'll be there in spirit. Love finds so many of us in a great form.

Should stop hogging the computes even if nobody is waiting. People like me tend to be too polite or passive aggressive depending on how you look at it. Too bad my walking shoes are so hard on my feet, otherwise I'd be leaping out the door to greet the day again. C'est la vie for now.

Love you all. You especially Miss Amy Ann. I imagine you're going to get around to reading this. Hopefully, I'll have gotten around to calling you by the time your eyes peruse these strange letter combinations. Love you all. Another poem here soon.

Hidden Waterfall is a Sanctuary

2006-06-10T08:44:00.000-07:00

Hidden waterfall is a sanctuary.
One path beaten by feet
that will blow away.
The crash
is as distant as the kiss.
As near as you want it to be.
This sanctuary has earthenware
& a sad man often happy.
You can't have everything
but you do.
This little cave has art,
draw your breath to enter.
Sweetwater from a deep well.
Using that healing sword
trees grow, moss forms, animals gather.
Empty lives become full.
What is your magic for foolish man?
Lay down your pride
in the scattered remains
of useful but unnecessary things.
A whisper of light
reaches from the living inside.
Pure energy emanates,
has a home everywhere.

Give Something Back

2006-06-05T12:55:00.000-07:00

Blisters on my feet.
Can't sleep again.
Hand fit hers
but now won't rest
on top of the staff.
Is each stride towards
or from something?
Both old fool.
You have spring legs
with lead in their soles.
What you carry light as words
that smack of large matters.
Free them with proper names
gleaned from the cosmic nest.
Wash them in bubbling-forge waters.
Shake them over a small, side-eyed creature.
Offer them purified in a hugging whisper.

And from that Spot a Circle Grew

2006-05-31T17:07:00.000-07:00

Don't know what I'm writing about today. My sleep dep is on the loose. Working till 7:30 Monday night I was unwilling to hand my life over to work & thus stayed up to unwind, relax, etc. ya know the personal time. Naturally, I always have to wake up at 4:30 on Wednesdays & now I'm a bit of a wreck. Worth it.

I should stop reading Amy's blogs for awhile. Each time she talks about love not working out or how people that she's loved let her down I get depressed & hurt in a personal place. I never wanted to hurt her. I can see how it feels like I lied in a sense. That we're not together is certainly not a condemnation of her. In a rosy paradise, love would be a warm breeze that lifts us & only places our feet on the heights of constructive action. Maybe it's all constructive action in the end. What I'm trying to say is, love is never enough. Chemistry is an elusive abstraction that sometimes achieves wondrous form. The chemical half-life of chemistry between two people is a mystery for the ages. To expect me to rise from my ashes & become as social as Amy is ludicrous. Space & silence are worth so much more than their weight. Economy of expression spares us from the extraneous fat that muddles our lives into part of the machinery that is destroying the planet. This supposed fear I have resembles a healthy skepticism much of the time. What am I talking about? What for? Am I helping this other which is self? My indulgences of escapism take on a cast of sharpening my sense for detail & shape. What I'm trying to say is my evasiveness facilitates my ability to love the way I do, deeply. Drastic change is a strange demand & if it's not a demand is still a perverse hope if the circumstances aren't explored & elucidated.

Yes, I didn't visit her as much as she wanted nor did I call as much. The times visited me I spent so much of my money that my ability to visit her was constantly hampered. This reality is clear to me. At first, she didn't even voice this frustration. She kept coming to Portland & I wasn't exactly beating down the doors to visit the Tri Cities. Whatever, I need to just let go. I love her but we didn't manage to communicate in a way that was healthy enough for us to remain in love the way two lovers should be in love IMO. This life can be so frustration but irritation is growth as long as the will responds.

Nietzsche didn't just die a lonely failure but reached depths beyond speaking. The glass empty view is too concise & condemns the other truths in orbit. Nietzsche could have been more & in some ways he was. That he didn't fully integrate his concept of the Superman & find a measure of peace in the neverending fight is a sad note on the end of a valliant struggle. Let us remember how nobly he struggled. The veins in his forehead surged with passionate blood that strove for truth. How many countless souls have walked into their graves with scant glances as to where they were going? How many of our ancestors chose the tidy attitude of the day & refused to earn the hard-fought convictions of their own hearts? How many today ... This world plunges it's savior science & glorious democracy into unspeakable hypocricies of which we must speak.

Love is not an idea but a practice particular to each person. My practice of acceptance is apparent to me & maddening to many people I've been worth. The word & the deed are married in me. The eternal moment makes my voice carry the conviction of truth. A reprisal of doubt makes my moment change. Am I not like any other man? Seeking happiness in the form that will enable whom I love to feel a greater sense of fulfillment? That I'm not with Amy is not merely selfish. She needs something I cannot give her. If we had what each other needs how happy the sun would be. Even when the clouds veil we would live forever aware of its smiling presence.

Enough of that. The complicated nature is too much for my foggy brain. I'm going to watch more of my beloved Miyazaki & let him transport my sleep towards the type of vision I want to have next time. No more dulling my brain with drink, or poisioning my body with gross sugars, cluttering my before sleep thoughts with sports radio commercials. This time my vision won't seem apocalyptic. This time the clouds will shift & the galaxies will fit into a new tapestry waving to some magical purpose. That element is always there but needs to be tapped. The illusion of being able to prevent natural catastrophe via personal animism is pure hubris. Being a vessel for sacred patterns is an established norm. Vitamins, body work, nasal spray for improved sleep, tea for a cozy glow, a return to prayer without the dogmatic bullshit, & the rough as a way to smooth the road for the holy.

Wrestling with Orpheus or Johny's Not a Good Capitalist

2006-05-26T19:06:00.000-07:00

Absolutely devoured Denise Levertov's Selected Poems when I should have been finishing off the Lukacs book I borrowed from a friend. Subject & art. Hard to get intent on study subjects sometimes when the art is keeping you from sleeping. Sure, I lose sleep thinking about how it went down with Amy, or from nightmares about Rachael, or the war, or the commodity-driven consumer culture but the art is my lifeblood. The dream of love is a selfish, personal dream in a way. Yes, I want to make someone happy & be happy, have children & give hope to better future for mankind via that pathway. Still, an element of selfishness is there. The happiness being for the person I come to love most & myself. Poetry I create in the spirit of gift economy that my sweat & blood & tears in finding the right melody with the right message might foster an environment where right action flowers. The giving to all mankind that subtly gives back in stead of love's obvious strokes painted over every fibre of how I look at the day's birds is a startling remove. Hard work. Orpheus runs away, leaps over brooks & rivers. Foolish in hope, determined in the need for positive change, I charge after fashioning my footsteps into a tribal dance of ceremony & respect.

Art Hop was a blast. Five friends & myself had the mainstage in the dead of the afternoon on Saturday. Aaron & Shawn had a 4' x 16' canvas, numerous objects painted white (including TIPOT's teapot), & their own white clothing to attack with paint. Adam, the mad professor, was the turntablist spinning electro-psychedelic hip hop. Jeremy, Rachelle, & myself sang, prayed, & spoke words of poetry over the mad beats as paint flew, children played in the audience, & a stunned crowd stood around wondering what to focus on. Abztract Synergy looks like it could have a revival soon. There were enough confluences everyone involved was stoked.

Went to the doctor today. How's that for a flipside? Got some interesting 'growths' burned off my body with liquid nitrogen. Cool burn. A nice little styrofoam cup & a q-tip with foggy smoke lilting over the rim. All kinds of questions aroaming around my head since the doctor hadn't elucidated on the possible effects of the 'virus'. Damn. At least at the end he said, "It should just go away now. No problems. If any more crop up after two or three weeks we'll burn those off & you should be good to go." He did seem like a hero after that. Hell, he was a hero. Western medicine isn't all bad but man they should get a decorator for that damn reception room. To think they framed those pieces. Liability issues make for tight tongues. Take some responsibility on for Chrissake. Not letting people know what's going on breaks the first rule of medicine: do no harm. Course we all know suffering is inevitable & breeds health, provides the contrast for health, that grief paints the backdrop for peace to arise in response to the human condition.

Feel better after Amy & I talked last night. My catalogue memory retained each sentence of parting & post-parting criticism, many of which seemed far too broad & thereby hurtful. To hear the tone of her voice & go over a few things was a relief. The thunderstrike of love has hit me only a few times in this life, I'm thankful for every scar of light. She's right, I am trapped by my lesser habits which keep me from being who I'd like to be. This shy hermit thing is not just a response to my unwillingness to trust all the way but a means to filter away unwanted interruptions that sap up time. Community is a constant theme & yet where do I leave my community? Past arm's length. & vermillion hell, I believe in hugging.

Hate money. My job is a leach on my soul. Sure, I make people comfortable whether they're sweet & ignorant or snobby know-it-alls but I sell bottles that contain pesticide-grown grapes from unsustainable agricultural practices by companies that use cutthroat marketing techniques in a trillion-some dollar industry all for a corporate company that has me working for under $10 an hour with a boss who is more drill-sergeant than family facilitator (besides scrutinizing with that frustrated, disapproving face we know she watches the cameras). At least I make so little that my gross contribution to the war-machine is not grosser.

Matt hasn't called me back. Did I offend? Guess, I'll have to keep at it till he relents. All in the name of love & kinship.

Jeremy was a great surprise. A talented & sincere human being (a rare treat that I call a homosapien a human being these days). The world-changers are out there. I'm proud to have him as a friend. Hope he moves down here.

The typing for The Underneath is done. So is Subnotes for the Golden Age. Just have to organize the typed files into manuscript form. Too bad the laptop ate the metal panel off the bottom of my disk. No worry, I'm stubborn. I now have 192 pages of material ready to print. After some actual send-offs of poetry I'm gonna attack the minor projects & make them into zines. The afore-mentioned two & Small Talk About the Weather are going to be chapbooks with cardstock covers, the works. At least a couple of venues have offered me featured readings once I get off my ass & publish. Who knew years of resilience would pay off till I at least have something like a voice to show for my years of hearty effort? Youth is still on my side, determination & spirit may still make something useful of words that come through me yet.

On the romance front... no substantial action. Three intelligent, sweet, pretty women have taken a liking to me lately & one more really piqued my interest. Of course I said nary a word to her. All three of the aforementioned are not my type & I am never so lonely to damage someone unnecessarily by wasting their time. One might become a good friend. That'd be nice. I need some more female friends in this town. Rachelle is cool & all but she's married & quite busy. I need a girlish, down-to-earth type to joke around with. So yeah, no going on the romance bent. Besides, it still smarts too tender to know that Amy & I didn't work.

Heraclitus writes, "Things keep their secrets." I'd add, after careful communion things divulge some of their secrets but the enigma at the core of life remains elusive. Einstein said that his religion was that part of existence which defied explanation, the part which through his reverence he tried to elucidate. Our imaginations take us far, too bad they don't reach so far for us to extend a hand to the millions who suffer unnecessary deprivations.

Still working hard to overthrow the capitalist world state,

Jason

Following the White Horse At the End of Time

2006-05-25T14:58:00.000-07:00

A man has two hands
& one head
they say.
That a man does not
have five heads
& eight hands
is perhaps allowable
but insufficient
as a weather report.
In truth
the hand that touches
this girl
is not the hand
that touches
that girl.
Perception is not reality.
Particular niches move,
fragments in the mosaic.
I am no more that person
than a fish is a swimmer
of today's mountaintop.
Best to keep hands aware
& heads open
to many-scented winds.
Wander the backroads.
The common way
has brought the world
to ruin.

Mixed CD

2006-05-15T20:44:00.000-07:00

How modern. For the first time I've worked out a CD mix instead of a mix tape. I already miss the 10 minutes. So here's the recent mood:

1. Liar Built to Spill 5:11
2. Anytime My Morning Jacket 3:56
3. Rhyme Over Tracks Saul Williams 4:32
4. Big Boat M. Ward 2:45
5. Why Do Lovers Richard Ashcroft 4:45
6. (Do You Wanna) Come Walk w/ Me? Isobel Campbell & ML 3:26
7. Strange Religion Mark Lanegan Band 4:07
8. Remember the Mountain Bed Wilco 6:26
9. Crossroads Robert Johnson 2:30
10. Come Down Easy Spacemen 3 5:57
11. Armageddon Days (Are Here Again) the The 5:40
12. Ever Thought of Coming Back Kelly Stoltz 2:58
13. Simple Song Richard Ashcroft 4:05
14. All the Money or the Simple Life... Dandy Warhols 4:29
15. The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song Flaming Lips 4:51
16. Praise Kinnie Starr 6:10
17. Everybody Richard Ashcroft 6:32

Returning to When Civilization Wasn't Civil

2006-05-08T11:23:00.000-07:00

One step.
A clatter disturbs the peace.
What peace?
The one in the cave,
not the possible one in the people.
Stop being sarcastic.
How will you ever get clear?
Silence enhances sound.
Yes, minds are bleeding
without hearts.
Don't just listen to the beatings.

How will you ever get clean?
Listen to the distant water
surrounded by quiet.
The bulk of you is returning.
Breathe.
Circulation attunes body-mind.
Breath is filled
with the invisibility of air.
Free the synapses of tissue.

Yes, bombs sound.
Recall the silence of no bombs.
Return to the land footsteps hadn't stamped.
Live the symbiotic.

Let go of dalliance,
ornament, & excess.
These meditations
that invite ego.
Take your gifts
in a wrap of leaves
gone transparent
where they cannot lift them,
in the otherworld
that is here.

Return to the people.
Play Socrates.
Help particular faces
with particular hearts
live their dream of a better world.
Then disappear,
as if one has a choice.

The Ghost Learns How to Speak

2006-04-29T08:04:00.000-07:00

There is special providence in the falling of a sparrow.
-Shakespeare

So, here I stand another victim of my own willingness to neglect. That is to say a little lonely and a less fulfilled than I would be if I allowed myself more human contact. Though I rarely if ever contact any of you, if you listen to how I speak to you when I do you know how much I care. Many of you well know Amy and I broke up. Sad as it is, this was necessary. For reasons I don't need to dip into in this arena I couldn't see us working in the long run. Do I love her? Yes. The onus is on me. If I felt differently I do believe she would allow us to be together. Chemistry, compatibility, happiness in so many variable forms ... What I'm trying to say is that I couldn't have answered her needs enough, nor she mine.

At least this time the woman I loved didn't lay there like a corpse after asking me to "turn her on." I remember struggling through my revulsion at Rachael's cruelty---for love, trying. Pain, making the empathic exchange impossible. Rachael felt like the moist slats of wood on the boardwalk when I was a kid. On a cold, rainy northwest day the saltwater Sound smelled fetid. My small bare feet padded the damp but not slick boards as I tried to shake off the cold, and my own cold, on the way to a fuller view of the day's majesty but the gray pall hung over the mountains and the birds weren't pealing cries of joy.

This time a war didn't follow quick on the break-ups heels but another martyr went to rest in the name of peace. http://cpt.org/memorial/tomfox/eulogies.htm Last time it was Rachel Corrie, whom my most vivid memory of is the time she took our couch.

Helping her carry it out (she was pretty buff for being as thin as she was) I was doing my best not to notice that she wasn't wearing a bra and I could see down her shirt every time she went to set the beast of a couch down. She was so kind, when pried at she showed a remarkable mind capable of compassion and communicating. I was too immature then to really connect with her. Sure we got along fine and had some nice fireside conversations at potlucks laughing and ruminating but Justin had a huge crush on her so I was wary of getting too close. A couple of times I had gotten along well with Justin's love-interests and it seemed to be bothersome. After the way Annie acted towards me post breaking up with Aaron there was no way I was going to get very close to one of my good roommate/friend's ladyfriends.

Well, I suppose I should wrap up. No gargantuan spilling forth from me today. If I have skipped out on you lately when I was supposed to call or attend a show or whatever. Sorry. I've been in a weird way. Almost at peace for me in that relative way, thinking about moral relativism and buying local and the capitalist economy as the fireseed of all this commodified bloodshed and ignorant vanity. Still, the spring is enchanting. Birds and trees and lilacs. The writing's been good. Aaron is thick with ladyfriend. The Flaming Lips have been on constant spin in my house. Everyday I walk and walk strengthening those old walking bones like a mountain pilgrim going to rest in a cave or see a temple emerge around the bend of a pass. I have a songlist mixtape of what my current mood is that I'll post soon along with an excerpt from my play.

Love you all. For all of us, work with joy on eliminating the dehumanizing aspects of the collective we.

Listening to the Quiet

2006-04-15T08:44:00.000-07:00

Soil grows warmer.
Seed splits.
Beneath the surface
green climbs.
Before an expression forms
muscles fire.
Harmonize.
What climbs forth
forges subtle
& ongoing
changes.

Chronicles of Sicky

2006-01-18T15:03:00.000-08:00

No Sunday philosophy blog this week. Instead I watched enough movies to look like the donkey in Un Chien Andalou. Yes, there's a movie screen for viewing in my household. Aaron asked for one for Xmas. Thank Goddess we don't have normal TV. Poor Amy put up with me being a snotty, coughy, layabout. Amazingly enough she thinks I'm cute when I'm loopy sick. We had a lot of fun snuggling & being goofy.

Missed work for being sick for the first time in two years. Grinding the day out is my modus operandi when I'm sick as a dog who ate chocolate, but this time I was a complete mess. This thing's been hanging around for too long. Finally, the bugaboo wanted to act like a nasal infection. I wasn't going for that. Went to get some homeopathic nasal spray, went on a strict no dairy diet, drank Yogi teas made for cold season, ate really well, & (after years of existing on my want list) a Neti pot now rests on a shelf in my abode with a bottle of grapefruit seed extract.

Two best movies I saw which I haven't seen before: Spirited Away & Grizzly Man. Miyazaki has long been one of my favorite filmmakers. Spirited Away has always evaded me. I'm not much of a film pursuer anymore unless I know a certain film is going to move me in the right way or be a surprise. It was in the arthous during a tumultuous time in my life, the library had a waiting list two miles long, & then the videostores have been out of it a couple of times. I search out movies like I do any story, I'm a mood-feeler. Always been too empathic for my own good altho my emotional maturity level's finally catching up. This empathic ability gleams on my face for some people, lots of stories are told in my direction. Even without saying the words there is an implicit acceptance in my presence that one can say whatever they need to, or maybe I just like silences & eye contact too much. After Rachael I tend to drop my eyes a lot more, we must all take appropriate evasive action for self-protection (esp. in big cities) tho some choose the inappropriate for morbid curiousity & self-imolation. As Heraclitus says, "Wisdom is to speak the truth & act in keeping with its nature." Spirited Away is the mystical type of film that should be cherished wherein the dark side of nature finds harmony in the willfulness of human consciousness evolving to adapt to wildly different needs. The human quest is not the straight & narrow, but a veritable twisty maze of mountain paths & internal struggles sloped though seasons & weathersystems of mood & place. There is no end. World without end. Reality is not a fixed quantity to be summed up in some unified theory but something that flowers everywhere all the time, changing past & future in all the minutiae of eternity. Before this sounds like hogwash, I would like to commend Spinoza & Einstein for spending so much time on determinism. Profound work. Even Einstein knew its limitations. He proclaimed his belief in God as the pursuit of the mystery that lies outside of human understanding. The complexes of consciousness & the animate nature of matter are not mere blips but the flowering of something so big & complex that can burgeon & burst into an infinity of differences that are not merely predicated on a gigantic formula of stimuli & response. The enigma is in consciousness itself. The gradation of choice & degree of choice is whimsical because creative & that artistic willfulness that arises again & again whisks away so much of the tide of expectation that Apollo seems to dim in the light of Dionysus. Natural laws apply but bend under this will. Beware, if you dream harder, you may be spirited away.

Grizzly Man was a little more troubling. Werner Herzog is a talented filmmaker but I've always tended towards his friend Errol Morris. Herzog put together a moving & subtle biopic using his own cutting of Treadwell's film, interviews of Treadwell's friends & family, & his own succinct commentary. This connection between a strong/weak dead man who never met his vastly different biographer is moving in the compassion & fire for understanding. Personally, Treadwell's freakouts reminded me a bit too much of my most emotionally troubled times when my voice sounded weak like that. His hackneyed new-agey spirit contrasted with his solid insights reminds me far too much of me during that time in my life. How thankful I am for renewal even if the changes inside seem to be more inhibited where love is concerned. My 'kind warrior' can be quite a bastard utilizing the sharp tool of tough love. Moments arise where I cease to care about what people want me to say, instead I say what I feel needs to be said. Less decorum, more directness. Precision & clarity towardslend weight to the ambiguous net, while the wishy-washiness of a too tidy vision that excludes all-too-apparent relationships in a dulling chorus of delusion makes a partial truth wreak of absurdity. Felt weird watching it with Amy, later that night she said she has an 'irrational draw' towards me by which she meant she might love me too much. When she drifts out of sleep enough for a glint of consciousness she sings my praises in little phrases replete with varying tones. I find in this unnerving & wonder just how much steel I'll have to melt to properly accept such kindness. My work is meant as a means for people to obliterate such barriers in themselves, whether they know they exist or not but I have question reflux now when the romantic rears its head. Do I love her? Without reservation, yes. Do I love her in the right way? Will I love her in the right way? Not quite as sure. I do know this, I can make a girl happy & I do this with healthy portions of tenderness. I make Amy happy & this is a joy. I too, am happy but more reserved. I've seen the primordial waters asking for my skin, I mete out my own portions with a great deal of care now. I don't expect myself to be tender as veal under the rubric of some halo but I leave so much of what I am capable of on the wayside as I seek the strength of a complete vision. Indeed, the poet's work has always competed with girls' requested attentions from that first kiss. As for the complete vision: what that is, I'll be damned if I know. But then we're all damned to the bliss of loss & gain being the same thing in the distant end which is no end at all.

Not bad for a loop-loop-loopy looper.

Back to Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. I can't wait until I can drink the toddy in my fridge with some Dagoba Hot Chocolate mix. Thanks for not commenting on the kleenax that was shoved into my nostril.

Philosophy Sundays

2006-01-10T14:53:00.000-08:00

All this first person writing is making me antsy. On occasion it feels if I masturbate any more intently I may just poke my eye out. How does Linklater phrase the condition in Before Sunrise? "There's nothing I've ever done without being there. There's never been a girl I've kissed where I wasn't there kissing her. No wonder I'm sick of myself." To remedy this potentially cycloptic future a new biweekly philosophy blog is being instituted. Alternating with the Sundays that are now to be taken up with the new Naked Poetry class I'll be running in Portland I propose a brief overview of some important, & often revelatory, subjects with favorite quotes on the topics highlighted with interesting viewpoints from throughout history contrasted by my personal takes. Yes, we all love to get wrapped up in human drama, & what a shanty of a shell we'd be without our wondrous emotions, but there's no sound reason we can't experience the other we're connected to without some sense of self. Life, death, love, truth--- the Victorians may have reduced these words to caricatures but the fey aren't just wee folk putting their cutesy faces into flowers & we aren't meant to exist without exploring the higher realms of possibility. We assume so much & follow the human blueprint for bludgeoning, blundering, & skate away with our prejudicial right in the name of Jesus, flag, & might-is-right. Were there not so much to this being human I'd be downright ashamed for what people do. Frank Herbert may have been right when he wrote, "There are no innocents." but I won't dismiss the elements of right action in the human spirit & the potential for realizing more. Sure, there are days when I want to piss on a Mickey-D, accost every Starbucks patron, & set fire to images of Jesus in front of Walmart. The economic model is a reflection of the time's weakened thought. Justification is far too easy. Freedom to spontaneity is one thing, but freedom to desecrate a whole chain of people with a purchase is a little-imagined fact. The Gospel of Thomas says we must know the inside as the outside, & the outside as the inside, above as below; only then can we reach paradise. Everyday actions from soap-type to greeting a stranger question me. I get so in-drawn sometimes that I'm not flexible to accomodating the person who sits next to me. That's a crime, weigh it how you like, that's a crime. Also a crime are the 24 double rolls of toilet paper the dutchman bought for my household. I smirk every time I wipe my ass with non-recycled not-eco-conscious bleached sheets. And I usually revel in the privacy of bathroom time. Dark clouds do damper my mood. I'm going for a walk. Anyways, Sunday philosophy blogs. If anybody reads this comment, suggest, etc. We can forum & what-not. The first subject will be war.

I Dream of Tom Fox

2006-01-07T11:53:00.000-08:00

I dream of Tom Fox.
In the carbon sweat of my night.
I dream of Tom Fox
phrasing words
he would goodbye to his daughter
rail thin with compassionate weariness
behind bars called 'righteous.'
I dream of Tom Fox,
the faces streaked with explosion dirt & fear
he encountered in Iraq & the
thoughts that burned behind intense stares. Tears,
bloodshed, & the night's liquid quench all sloshed
in with shaking & resilience.
I dream of Tom Fox,
how he climbed into people's eyes
to help them knock down barriers,
opening garden gates where people can look
at each other.
How does a state
enact misery without the will of its people
using the young men again?
Light shifts & the deathlengths
ask to transform into a flowering zone
can take the burned wreckage & seed hope
where bread reaches all mouths, youthful hands grip elder hands,
& man does unto man as He would be done.
I dream of Tom Fox
who said, "Too few are willing to die for peace."
And I try to make the hearth in my chest warm
a brother lost in the distance we create
who would have us love God quite another way.

Thirteen Days is Soon.,

2005-12-18T09:04:00.000-08:00

So, I've been walking around town enduring the cold wind humming 'Where is my mind?' (an old favorite) and singing whole verses from 'Science of Silence' by Richard Ashcroft (possibly my new favorite song). I was such a Spiritualized fan that I didn't let myself connect to the Verve for a few years Then I did so strongly in passing. I mean Jason Pierce shares my first name and my mom's maiden name, maybe he takes too many drugs. But when I loved that band even more than I do now he made some epic music and when Richard Ashcroft 'stole' Jason Pierce's girlfriend I was prepared to not spend time with Ashcroft's music no matter how cool I thought Bittersweet Symphony was or how shitty what the Rolling Stones did was. Things are never that simple. Are they? I''l tell you about Ashcroft, the man has a SOUL unlike many eyes I meet. If anything I respect people like Ashcroft who are willing to be human in the higher sense of the word. The automaton Xmas crowd has me thinking about Patchen's New Being a lot:

Your problem is that you have betrayed your animal
Into hands as cruel and bloody as your own.
Man is dead.
I don't know what kind of thing you are.

Santacon (www.santacon.com) was a relief.

As I put it in a recent poem:

Wander the backroads.
The common way
has brought the world
to ruin.

Anyway, I should write something about Amy (blogsite). Theo put it well, he said we're the two craziest people he knows. She's a supersmart, emotional, pretty TESC grad who works for the Red Cross. She has a healthy obsession with sensual experience, esp playing with her cat Hunter, eating desert foods, and kissing me. She's crazy. I don't even smell good but I am smart enough to love her.

I have yet to see my niece because I am a vehicleless man. That's right, every day I go to work without the unnecessary, burdensome guilt of driving an ozone killing giant hunk of metal that hurdles itself violently along at unnatural speeds. I take the bus. Cute girls fight in the aisles to sit next to me. Homeless people that lost a few marbles (they chose not to keep so much stuff) supply me with life advice, rambling one-sided stories, and, recently, a discomforting bite of a cookie. The busdrivers like me because I occasionally make a little conversation and always thank them. What a strange life. Spy-approving presidents, busdrivers, artists, poets, troglodytes, Buddhist physicists, 80's legwarmer-wearing baristas, Bob Dylan, mycorrizah fungi, heartache, goldleaf for Jesus, redemption, and my little niece.

That's it, I'm done. Aaron's sick and I should check on him. The absolute luney Dutchman we were hosting this week (now at Aaron's father's house) has called the computer twice via Skype while I've been typing. We should make arrangements to hang with him before he leaves on the morrow if Aaron isn't too brutalized by the weather. Love you all. Thanks for putting up with so much of my shit. Happy Holidays. Give real hugs. Look people in the faces. We're all gonna die someday and that's alright. We live on through our actions, through the permeations of our thoughts in glorious complexities with fruit tones of resonant simplicities straining through the binding harmony. What the hell was that shit? Blah blah blah. Stick a pitchfork in me. Peace.

Anathema or A Different Place

2005-12-05T18:46:00.000-08:00

How to start. The world was created by syllables or thought or from the something that magically arose out of the nothing. Like a thunderbolt I would reemerge in your lives to harken you back to your greatest dreams but alas I am a wanderer whose staff has more miles to cross.

I am in love again. I live in Portland. I have a new job position that involves the word steward (tasty word). The girl I am in love with is great but a tad emotional at our distance right now. This new play that has been coming through me is kicking my ass right now. As of yesterday, I have a little niece named Indrea. The neighborhood I live in has a main street full of small businesses with nary a large corporation. Yay!

I was gonna get all eloquent and talk about how one's character shapes one's fate but I need to get back to work on reading Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. I'll post again soon.

Fricking Breakdowns

2005-06-01T16:19:00.000-07:00

Here I am goddamned crying again. Should be in Olympia visiting friends but oh no I have to wait until it's late in the day then edit myself out of the situation because I could only be there for 2 and a half hours before leaping onto the bus going back. 2 and a half hours with five hours of bus-riding sandwhiched around it. Truth be told, I dread going there. Iremember moments with Rachael on sidewalks, in restaurants, the way she worried about how we held hands, the moments I wished she'd have just verbalized what she wanted. Fuck, it's years later and I'm still a wreck.

I hate the bullshit insecurities around half-assed romance. The one time I was fully in love the girl has to go and shit on my dream of being a writer--- the one thing I would never give up. Whatever life philosophy I build around myself I still choose to remain detached. I'd rather risk my sanity by daring some internal metamorphosis than hand too much of my heart over to friends because I've seen my greatest trust turn into poison.

Aaron, I barely keep in touch with the man, and he's my soul brother! Ahniwa, love the guy. He has devilish grins, many thoughts, and he's always considerate about personal matters. Theo. Who's more honest? The man wears his heart on his sleave and it's a big sleave. Rebecca? Fuck, I was honest when I said I wanted to keep in touch with that girl for the rest of my life and I just let it slip away because of fear. Matt, Onyx, Daniel. Nope, nope, nope.

No more Catholic fear of pleasure as a source of guilt, of pleasure being sin. I shed that skin a ways back. No, this is pure fear of betrayal. Betrayal of the other. Instead I betray myself everyday with my reluctance to engage even as I often do it mightily, I still revert back to my shells. http://www.arlindo-correia.com/200305.html#DESPISALS Why can't I break through my despisals!?

Why!?!? This life is so full of talents. I can see myself harnessing so many of them, that I could be a formiddable healing presence indeed. Yet, within that knowledge is the seed of a doubt. I felt it at my grandfather's funeral, an unworthy boy. Unworthy of pouring the holy water on his grave because I couldn't cry. All of these people, faces with lines and textures and stories, experiences that reach into the very depths of what we can all be about--- I fear that they are incapable of love. Jack Gilbert says in an interview, "The best thing I've ever known is to be with somebody, someone who is capable of love--- second to that is to be alone." Yes, solititude is a prime ingredient to a healthy life but all those people out there they can say the word love all they want to. But can they live it? Will they just play it casual, play it cool, be dismissive, generalize under the surface in that place beyone words where the soul is weighed, where feeling in all its complexity counts?

I'm just not over her. If I had let myself pursue Rebecca I would be, I would've stood a chance. If that girl called me up tomorrow and said I've found an old abandoned church in Mississippi that I want us to live in and turn into a home, I'd be smiling every hour of overtime to see that dream into fruition.

Heraclitus says, "The known way is an impasse." Enough of these prescient visions. Since the tsunami I've had only the vaguest trails, and dreams too dissembled to interpret. I don't want the cultural catastrophes, what I want is those little personal triumphs. With whatever will I can muster I will burn them into being with the heat of my desire. If intenstion sets reality into motion I am getting ready to flare with the magical heat of creation.

The Three Brides http://www.oilpaintingshop.com/ma151.jpg is a painting I look at from time to time. Rachael used to say she saw nothing spiritual about marriage, and sometimes I wondered if she said that to me just to hurt me. Then we had stupid conversations about her hair when she wanted to cut it near the end. I'd tell her she could do what she wanted with it but if she cut it short she would look younger (in my tone there was a starker sense of disapproval). Did I want control? Did I want power? I don't know. Deep down I wanted balance. She disarmed me of my power by not wanting to hear my poetry, by not wanting to be spontaneous (walk? but it's raining outside!), by riding me into the ground when I was hurting, by constantly being drawn to other men, by not wanting to kiss. I was devastated for months before we broke up even tho I was too proud to show it by that point.

That painting has all the trappings of symbols for my associative agony. The woman in the middle is radiant, she's naked beyond her skin there's something in her presnce that says she is what she is. I can't pin my finger on it, nor would I necessarily want to. It's not the pallor or the raiment it's the harmony that resides in abundance despite the strain around her. She is the true bride whom nymph & sylph alike bow to. On the right is a cruel one, with a haughty kiss coming from a nymph. On the left is a cold one, with the most distant restrained of kisses forthcoming. Hair oozes out of bells, looks like waves, like garland, like greenery, like a ceiling to the earth. Beneath all these women worms or maggots crawl. Depending on your perspective these make you want to wretch or you see their regenerative quality. Le Chateux des Femmes is one of my favorite motifs wherein the hero must stay true to adventure and identify what is needed if anything. If he is with a lover he honors her by not giving into temptation. If he is without he strives to identify who has real human qualities. Really, it's just a boiled down version of the mating pool. The kind of convergence we all encounter, when we are pursued or pursuing on all sides. This painting, as a man, has me gazing right at the women alone. It represents a spectrum and a harsh reality. Purity is nothing without extremes and there is no purity without extremes inside it. My friend Becky has told many times she needs a man who's a bad boy. I myself seem to fall in with kinky girls. I can't help it they're more alive. Yet, I still return to the way Rebecca walked the way she could be in glasses and a less glamorous outfit, away from her skirts and sexy boots, and just breathe in what was around her. Some people just reach you like that and you're sympatico.

I'm too confused about my mantle of responsibility to wear it at all times but it hangs like an albatross nevertheless. The gravity of the situation pulls me down and up and in. Out into the world. The toothless bastard gets my time when the high class broads won't even look over. Why? Because somebody has to be human. Someone has to make existence redemptive. Who are we if we don't care that even one man is out there suffering? One girl is crying rape and if we don't wrestle her oppressor off of her she's more likely to give in to the futility and the hatred. Corporate sponsored consilience is raping our connection to everyone else out in the "primitive" world but very few seem to give a shit. Who stands up for the heartbroken, the war torn, the abandoned friend, the homeless, the beaten, the orphaned, the exiled? Us, if we have the guts, the gusto, and the grinding joy of work that makes communication not only possible but fulfilling. The real isn't only what knocks you out in a rear-end collision, it's what flies through your head when you are buzzing with twitterpation. To identify the bliss, the real that you want to cultivate, the garden of earthly delights that doesn't hold back the devastating violence or the appalling indifference as necessary counterpoints as part of the joyful participation is each person's duty. Without such dedication each person becomes a parasite, an elusive part of the problem. To quote Elliott Smith:

So I guess you'll be leaving me
You're heading off with the enemy
A little less than a human being
A little less that a happy high
A little less than a suicide

Well, I've wound down. Stopped crying awhile ago. I'll make it to Olympia next week. Maybe I'll even make plans ahead of time. I psych myself out as if I don't have to face my fears on a daily basis. There's no end to the mixing. Markale's take on Druidic monism has been in my thoughts a lot lately as well. We must seek out the masterplan believing in responsibility and justice while not putting too much weight on things being sacred or profane. The truth is things are both. The sooner we realize this and still choose more joy, the sooner we achieve higher being as a species.

Underneath

2005-05-29T22:07:00.000-07:00

The Underneath is the name of the new MS I've been working on. It's nice, happier than the invective sarcasm my work was invested with post-Rachael. These days I look at the problems of the world with less rancor & with a bigger eye towards solutions. Still, an idealist like me is prone to bouts of staggering cynicism. At least I have that black Jewish humor.

The most recent health kick has me mostly vegan, yet I have given into the coffee gods. My creative space & community revolves around the caf.

Romantic intrigues have been odd. Brittney, this cool cute chick that goes to my caf occasionally, & I have kicked it a few times (no, that doesn't mean we've knocked boots). I even went to meet her dad, a musically proficient gay man who lives on Capitol Hill. As much as I dig her vivacious femininity & spunk I think I'd scare her if I espoused some of my radical ideas. Besides she talks me into going & smoking hookas at this Falafel House...

Megan the nice girl whom I did an injustice to when I inadequately wrote about her on this blog was at Hugo House when I randomly poked my head in there recently. My eyes are soft right now. She's pretty damn amazing. I eternally question chemistry tho. Trust, love, sharing, growth these are big words. I don't want someone to commit to me again like Rachael did only to show how flexible the human mind is when it comes to backtracking. Justification performs miracles. Witness nearly a hundred wars world wide & the multitudes of struggles we wage in our own heads.

Music lately Josh Clayton-Felt (http://www.joshclayton.com/intro.html), Ben Harper, Postal Service, Velvet Underground, Spiritualized, & the Flaming Lips. Just finished The Last Temptation of Christ & Stranger in a Strange Land on the same day. My head has been buzzing ever since. Messiah tales are some of my favorites. For a good read here's a brief biopic of St. Francis (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06221a.htm). Heinlein disappointed me with the ending right when I was really getting into the book.

My bohemian nature has been evolving lately with my newfound directness, my subtlety is now saying what I mean without doublespeak. I invest what I say with enough intonation & facial expression that the sincerity is disarming & there is little confusion about interpretation. I say what needs to be said, my philosophies built upon the strong premise that people should care about where things come from & where they go, that right action is born from thoughtfulness in the adventure of living intentionally, that we are connected whether we like it or not & that respecting the "other" which is really ourself is not an obligation so much as it is a matter of self-respect.

The third noble truth is by far my favorite. There is a means to ending worldly suffering: the pursuit of ultimate reality. That's a pretty sharp sentence. I still favor Heraclitus over Buddha. (http://www.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/heraclitus.html)

Anywho, gotta go so I can sleep before work & Folklife tomorrow.

Reasons for Moving

2005-05-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

So ... four months, or five. Been awhile. Well, um, yeah. Yeah. (looking you in the eye) Yeah. Yeah! Yes. Very good. And the lord said, "Behold it is good." And believe you me, yes, oh yes, it was/is GOOD.

Forget the daily chronicles of Yarnia. No daily biopic here. Only a smidge of sad-bastarderism. No balderdash too ragamuffin for these hootenannies. This here summation is yet another reference point in a universes so full of centers my midsection is pregnant with song. But I do declare darling that no dress can be too tight if you can move in it, and no look pure enough if you have the love of life, of the little things. And I do declare gent that the bonds of friendship know no bounds except the ones we choose to set and those guidelines flexible as agile minds. Yeah, the spirit of peace is in me today thick like the mist around the treetops. An evangelical Happy Harry Hardon is in my soul. Me, a man with simple stories and complex backdrops of story that don't exactly fasten my pajama strings. Lounging here as I do in the morning with a sleeping dog nestled near, dreaming of seashores, what difference do I notice?

Where the grass has grown in between the paving stones? Where the blossoms have dried from early spring? How the coriolis storm of night has freshened the mountains we climb? Do I live in absences or presences? Is there much difference? What choices have I made? This much I know, I live; and effect people. Sometimes my bitter disdain for inhumanity scalds peops, other times my willingness for forgiveness draws a woman near. There's still distances. Some to surpass, some to enjoy the view from this angle. Horizons honey-dew to dappled oranges lit with apples of red squished like delicate cherries within full lips. Some divides dwell out there whose harshness we don't yet have the tools to dissemble... and that's alright, except when it isn't. A climber knows when a rock has his name.

So many rejuvenations, infancies, intimacies, and backtracks. Who hides his tracks better than the fool who doesn't realize he's already found? That's the truth. All angels and monsters, too often too interested in the stew to stew. We feast and forget, love and grow lukewarm to sow our sacred fires in other passions of the forest or desert or sea. Should I write a letter to a friend leagues away? Do I salve the impulse to explore and find the peace of nature by tossing on a pair of socks and moving towards the door. Here in the imagined interstitial everything is a door. Mine are usually wood no longer seen, instead of opalescent silver or hollow particle board. Big carved beasts. Heavy, knotted, with symbols and words encrypted with personal and ancestral meaning. The song, the dance, the late night conversation where the other's breath resides near and beloved. The occasional missed note, stumble, or mumble no misstep at all but a giant leap to the eternal moment.

Hey Cat, I'm patching my Daddy's best jeans. There's a lot of patching to be done but I don't believe in throwing away a perfectly good crucible such as lungs filled with the blood, sweat, tears, and amniotic fluids of linear convergence. To rise we place our wings on the wind. Wherever we fall we land. Wherever we call is home. Our aches lend themselves to cures. Ultimate reality cries out in every tainted news service and bullshit conversation uttered with a cigarrette and overindulgent self-importance. Something alive in the human soul is always asking to get unleashed. No matter if it is a display of miracle, terrestrial or domestic. The morning cup and a tale of dreams or the hand moving what shouldn't be moved according to someone with a PHD and too many fallacies, among their phalluses.

Today I'm off to volunteer yet again. What should I do? Who should I help? What bitch-ass needs to get slapped upside the head with words? Does the corner even know it's cornered? Do the rows know they're rowing? Does she know she's mine and somebody elses and that I have given myself to everyone too many times? And when the net falls around you and you get pissed cause it came with sequins do you squeeze out your Hollywood fear and break free or do you let wolves hunt you cause they know their own scent and what it feeds on? Can the interlocking peaks key the sky open? Wait and see.

Ask me this. Do I remember? How?

(writing exercise over)

Don't know what comes over me. I go to type an account of something and the pounding of the keys gets in my ears. I'll write something more practical for reals soon. For reals.

Back from Beautiful Nowhere

2004-12-12T05:59:00.000-08:00

Went to see Gary Snyder a little over a week ago. Matt met up with me in Seattle. It was a crazy long adventure. Bus rides, sold out tickets, a trip to Elliott Bay Bookstore. Sitting down there eating vegan chili below street level with the brick up against my shoulder, seeming philanthropists and intrigued glance-stealing girls. My eyes wild like a mountain hermit's from touching god. That darn writing bug has burrowed its way into my center lately. Another guy walked by, met him a long time ago, I think he was in a band. Anyway, we exchanged a look as he walked by with his coffee that only comrades in the fire of art can share. Matt was going to meet me in the bookstore. I was buying a little time to relax and engage myself in reading/writing. This girl that seemed interested in me kept looking over at me, and she was in my peripheal vision so I couldn't help but notice. When she started to vocally formulate her plans with her friend it sounded so caddish and planned to impress. I downed my fifth cup of water and left.

Love the creek of those stairs. Messed around their literary journals, they didn't have a copy of Cranky, guess I'll have to buy the back issues. Looked thru the staff picks stopping at Grenblatt's new book on Shakespeare, shit it was expensive. Eased past the $40 Neruda book I covet to find CCP's collection of Rolf Jacobsen. Taking a seat on the floor, I started perusing and images started arising in my mind: vast plains and community. My Celtic heritage and bonds of cultural responsibility receiving new life in gorgeous words of this long dead, personable Scandinavian man. The sights of hot women kept distracting me, women dressed up to make a night of going out. One particualry attractive one wanted to put her book away behind where my back rested, problem was her book's destination was really in front of me. I know the author whose book she had in hand, had the alphabet layout fresh in mind, and pointed directly to the open spot. She mouthed the name of the author "Ruth Stone" as if to initiate conversation as I placed my finger directly in the open spot she wanted. In surprise at my awareness, my quietude, and the awkwardness of having unnecessarily moved me she slotted the book in, shyly wavered her intelligent eyes, turned away, and took her sophisticated classy solid-brown stocking legged self away.

Earlier, I went out into the cold to make a call on street bordering the downstairs cafe. Calling the event organizers' # in the Stranger. Found the event was sold out. They said they hadn't ever had a poetry reading sold out at this large of a venue and were surprised. Standing there asking about my slim chances of getting in streetpeople checked me out, eyeing my flipphone pressed to ear, peacoat wearing appearance. I'm leery of the wrong symbols but damn a cell phone is handy when someone rambles around as much as I do. As for the peacoat, I think of Gogol when I wear it and it certainly isn't black leather late twenties, early thirties asserting materialistic personality fare. How many people wear a peacoat with a Native American necklace?

Matt hadn't arrived early enough for me to feel good about our chances to get seats.

Walked north a few blocks then east up First Hill via Seneca. Steep hill, and my post-cold walking legs felt a little rubbery. Had to take my wool gloves and wool hat off, unbutton my coat. I do get hot in any weather, especially when the blood gets going. Waited first in line. Talked with a poet-girl who works fishing boats in a Alaska and a pearl necklaced nice, in a WASP-y sort of way, lady who had read Turtle Island and was also at Wendell Berry.

Doors finally opened. I waited forever. A Copper Canyon girl I had talked to earlier walked by and gave me a free ticket. One ticket down, and one to go. I waited. Eventually a guy sold me a spare ticket. Then I had to wait for Matt.

Meanwhile--- Sky, Stephanie, David, and the twin infants came in. Sky looked thin as a scarecrow. If it weren't for his eyes I'd be worried about his health. Hadn't seen Stephanie in a while. Love that girl. I feel an affinty for her that most people would confuse for romantic feelings. Which is natural cause most guys with a pulse want to feel that way towards Stephanie. I sorta felt that way long ago, when we were both available more or less. What happened between me and Emma (her best friend) and my scaterbrained healing process that had a tinge of desparation were wrenches in anything occuring. Her "I'm going to go travel" wackiness then not travelling, insistence on not using birth control, and how she let Wes treat her troubled me. She was still a bit too wild and I was in no place to have a relationship especially when I didn't feel passionate enough to overcome obstacles. Mars kind of made matters worse when she joked about us (Steph and I) having kids someday when we were eating Indian food one afternoon. I don't know, when you care about someone of the opposite gender who is your friend with proximity attraction getting in the way I guess there is always potential for something to happen but I rarely have felt that way towards Stephanie. I'm always aware that I care for her and that I find her attractive but I've never run around with the distinct impression that I'm the one for her. I've never talked to Sky about this for there hasn't been a need, I'm not gunning to raise potentially touchy subjects that are almost non-subjects in my book without impetus.

Sky and I get along super-well. If he weren't such a busy man, I'd make him go camping with me and fortify our friendship. I am a tad self-conscious around the man because in the past I've made blanket statements around him I'm not proud of. Out of nervousness, I sometimes haphazardly oversimplify. Last time, at Last Word I said something about SSO Press that seemed like badmouthing. In reality I just don't like a lot of their poetry because I'm a picky writer who doesn't feel touched by their willingness to detach, their experiementation that often mutes emotion, and their frequent forays into disjointed melody. Cole especially can be very good, but all of them seem to publish poems that I would consider toss aways. I'm a particularly prickly editor tho, because I'm picky about seeking out dynamic consciousness.

Was going to say something to David about his recent get-to-know-you session with Alexis but didn't have the chance.

Matt showed up. Sweaty and smoking a cigarette. When he finally came inside I got one of those guttural "How ya doing brother?" Mattisms and a hug, his lumberjack platte that reminds me of grunge-wear in tow. Matt and I get along real good. We speak a lot of the same language. Some people you can adapt to and manage to eek out a shared vocabulary, other people you can say just about anything to and see it understood in their eyes. Matt and I get along well enough we can say those hard things without worrying about harsh judgement. This is not to say I agree with him on all fronts. I understand enough of his story from him, and his story within context of my story, that I mostly understand where he's coming from.

Gary made me laugh and think but his poetry wasn't mind-blowing. I went away thinking about what he's done in his 74 years and realized that the story of his life is more important to me than his poetry. His better works are damn good but the issues and ideas he stands for are significantly better than his body of work. The Real Work, a collection of his interviews, is a book I will return to again and again over the years.

Followed Matt to Tacoma. Slept on his mom's couch. Watched the Animatrix in awe. Had some good talks and breki. Went down to the Kickstand to talk to Dawn about the open mic but she wasn't there. Instead, ran into Daniel Blue. Was disappointed Daniel forgot Matt last time and I had cooled on our friendship. But we had some good talks about our roles in the world and what can be done to rectify injustice. Looks like he's gonna make some money off of designing clothes. We went down to Panamonica's cause I wanted to talk to Rob about the books of mine he has since he hasn't called me back. Chrissy was there but I didn't want to bother her about it. Took the long busride home, memories of where I had walked with Rebecca fresh in my head but I was more concerned with the economic disparity of my country and the world.

*******************

Erin ran up to me in Victor's and gave me a big ole hug. Been a long time since a beautiful woman I was intrigued by ran up to embrace me. Made me happy, and kinda sad at the realization of how much I need that physical contact.

*******************

Won the RASP slam. Here's how it worked. Each contestant was given three words. Mine were morbid, quaint, and supple. Having received their words the contestants were then given 25 minutes to write an original piece. Then we each performed twice with judges judging us on poem, performance, and use of the words. I wrote a piece weaving together the themes of fighting inhumanity, corporate injustice, and rock music. I won $10. Leanne and Megan were there. Those crazy girls and I went to PCC (a natural food co-op) to celebrate with some dessert. I get along with them both, Leanne better because I know her better. I get the occasional feeling that Leanne could have serious feelings about me and I just don't feel that way about her. Later, they teased me that I should marry a Swedish princess (a passive aggressive jab professing some belief that I prefer pretty women ie the classic stereotype of the Swedish swimsuit model?). I kept acting like they were talking about a Swiss princess making jokes about there never being such a thing as neutrality, cracking jokes about laundered money there, about how the princess would love me because I am a revolutionary (used Leguizamo's voice from Moulin Rouge) who wouldn't go along with the dependency there on time and the corruption of big banks. Went back to Victor's. Leah (another barista there) and I sometimes have a little conversation, and I get the sneaking feeling she thinks I am trying to attract her. (sigh) I am not. Dana (her boyfriend, a co-worker and friend of mine) seems a bit insecure about her. I represent some of what he is not (he started to diss on an author he assumed I hadn't read when in fact I have read every single book by that author, I didn't tell him that but he got the idea that I know and like the author) because I can be bookish, and I'm not a guy-guy who can't talk about my feelings, plus I go into subjects most people don't have the guts to touch. Apparently (forgot this in Olympia), I can really stand out talking the way I can.

******************

Onyx called me. I need to call her back.

******************

I'm going to see a reading of Robert Sund's collected poems tonight and maybe catch the Iron and Wine show with Ahniwa. Kelly Stoltz is also going to be playing and he is someone I've wanted to hear for some time.

*******************

Give me your adresses peoples, I have the most kick-ass Cristmas cards and they're asking to be sent your way.

******************

Books: Heraclitus Fragments of Wisdom
Wendell Berry Life is a Miracle
Kenneth Patchen What Shall We Do Without Us?
Everrett True Live Through This: Rock Music in the Nineties
Phil Cousineau Hero's Journey

Music: Elliott Smith From a Basement on a Hill
Radiohead Kid A
Flaming Lips Soft Bulletin
Billy Bragg & Wilco Mermaid Avenue II
Blackalicious AG

Movies: Matrix Revolutions
Iron-Jawed Angels
Martin Luther King: A Documentary (name?)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
The Animatrix

*************************

Had a dream where people were drving down torn up streets. The roads were designed so that people had to use little turn outs. Road was too small so people had to trade off going down the crumbling blacktop grooved underbelly mess. A lot of my dreams have to do with a lack of completion lately. I need to put it all together. Finally, taking my vitamins every day and not giving into the fear of another vision. Visions are going to come anyway. I can either accept them or reject them offhand and not understand them well due to resistance. Might as well enjoy every place you are, so long as where you are isn't injustice. Will contact Rebecca again soon. She and Dean are probably a bit more sorted out, I can be her friend now. My little nephew loves sharing laughs with his uncle. Cute little monster!

Feeling Great About Not Letting Words Escape

2004-11-20T23:24:00.000-08:00

Housessitting at my sister's place, formerly my grandma's house. When I was 9 I apparently ran into the fire here in the bathroom where I communed with the wee folk, I don't remember any such incident of bolting crying into the flames but I've heard tell. The ghost of my teeny blind grandma and my tall thin extremely gentle grandfather still reside here, at least in the form of relevant memories.

My little nephew is adorable. I've shed my more hippy-dippy terminolgy (I used to call special children star children). He truly is a sweet kid when he says my name he looks at me and glows. He looks in my eyes, he is naming more than an archetype. He is not simplifying he is intoning. Watching him take on attributes and become a complete person is an eventful process I cherish.

I always return to this concept of being a complete person. For me lately, being a complete person means indulging my mystical side only so much. Nietzsche was embarassed by The Birth of Tragedy for its excesses and lack of clarity. These days I often chuckle as I compare my reactions to situations now, compared to my reactions of yore. Whether out of eagerness towards a preconceived ends or fear that made me recoil from certain outcomes I no longer so amply feed mass-energy explosion then dissipating mindplay. While this may sound as if I'm going more static this is not true. Stasis is not a state I aspire to but rather I aim to achieve a state of simulflow, like the figure in the Corpus Christi Carol or the scene on the back panel, The Last Judgement, of the Sistine Chapel. In both examples something flows to and something flows from and they seem opposed to the untrained eye. Where things come from and where they go... we need to be local and global. To have both in view and that something more...

Every point is a point of confluence. Whether Rebecca doesn't sense my ability to commit fully or whether I reject someone on grounds of certain factors that I fail to explain to them because the explanation seems as if it would be too abstract for them and therefore hurtful, decisions are not end-all decisions. Every moment is an echo of the eternal moment. The trick is to let the possibilities become actualities without fervent rejection or zealous gluttony. Rather let your little nephew throw himself over the couch at you so he can flop and laugh as he lands across where you lay, when his eyes meet yours let them look in the core not at some surface figuring.

Heraclitus says, "All those seeking wisdom ... inquire within." Art is the enigmatic expression of that which is inexpressible. Art is a dynamic reference to something much bigger. A collection of sounds woven together, a moment with clattering cups and snippets of conversation lilting over the milk-steaming wands whir and the doorbells welcoming clang, combines with the smell of the girl in the dress who turns her shoulder just so, six inches behind you to the left, so that you can each glimpse each other in snatches. Harmony.

And there is harmony in dischord. Right as we are to reject inhumanity in the form of verbal deadening or internment camps or massacred ecosystems the sounds of Sonic Youth are poignant. We need startling examples to react against both within ourselves and from our environment. The Pixies rear back and distortion fuzzes into our ears. Jesus and Mary Chain scrape our scalp with feedback and we are fed back to the possible causes of such an anguish. Lyrics paint the picture of comforts that are lies, and phobias that are really boundaries thrust up to keep us safe from the great gains of risk build in the songwriter's tapestry. Who are we if not protagonists prepared to play important roles in other people's stories? To ask, "How does it feel?"

So much character is necessary to achieve simulflow. To be and not be, to experience and not be passive in the stillness, to react but not reach too hard within the summoned emotions, to learn with hard work the appropriate emotions and behaviors to the crossroads of so many factors. To have a personal stamp that allows for the other person's bud to flourish into bloom. To put one's hand over one's mouth, onto one's neck, onto another's hand.

I love my sister's dog. It's a Shit Zoo. The dog's favorite toy is a Mounty at which it growls in the most vicious growl you've ever heard from a ten pound dog. Okay, maybe it's not vicious if you see the source. Man this tap water is just not tasty. The first big frost up here was this morning. I skipped out on a co-worker's party tonight. Plans were just too hectic. I can't neglect the dog, after all. I think I'll become better friends with Erin, she has an uncanny down-to-earthness in her wacky presence. Absenteeism is not as fascinating as absentee ballots, I need to call some people and ink up some snail mail. Love you all, I'm going to nod off now and let the dog sleep on me making my stomach (where he lays) absurdly warm. If I don't look you in the eyes the next time we meet then you don't see me.

Perhaps I'll dream of heroism with green swords and maidens who are strong enough to ford the river to my arms.

Three Girls - Girl One - Megan

2004-11-13T06:22:00.000-08:00

I don't know what I'm doing. Something is escaping me. I've become such an expert at elusiveness the mirror is slippery in my sight. I can push women away with the vacancy of an abandoned hotel.

I'm not blaming Rachael for this, my faults run deeper than that atrocity. No, I'm not blaming her. The overcoming is my own responsibility.

Three Girls

Megan

Megan is a redhead. Vivacious and positive she is always ready for a smile. Her gorgeous cheeks accomodate those beaming smiles as if she were Audrey Hepburn. I was volunteering at a joint where she worked the front desk as an intern. Somehow I would straggle in the lobby having long conversations with her. Never underestimate proximity attraction. She was highly intelligent but not bookbent out of shape (ie too intellectual). She had an adorable affection for sports. We went to the same high school. She went there after me. We ended up having coffee and dinner-dates a few times. Since my break-up with Rachael was fresher back then, I was an even bigger mess regarding relationships when I knew her. Still heartbroken, even this sweet girl seemed a threat to my person. I had all these feelings for this girl but my stereotypes and fears kept me from really getting to know her.

From what I did see, she could be so conventional. I was still radical to the core after the outbreak of war and Rachael's desolation. The very thought of spending my existence misunderstood at the breakfast table or when the lights turn out at night is still a very real fear for me (I still have nightmares where the kids love me more because I let them us their imaginations and Rachael scowls at me, the difference in their faces ... shake of head). Megan, so far as I know, doesn't have an artistic outlet which is a huge demerit in my book. The fire to communicate the incommunicable is an indespensible ingredient in the recipe. We hint at the depths making them known in some form, we experiment to awaken ground and the gratitude we shoulder for the expression is worth its weight in heartbeats. It takes work to get through the necessitous grime that clogs the arteries of artistic sensibility.

Well, I took her out a few times painfully aware of the outline of her body in her clothes, charmed by her buoyant sweetness that had so much emotion stirring beneath. Her eyes could almost quiver with emotion (I associate that with female hormonal craziness, when girls do that stuff I'm way more attracted to them). I'm not looking for weakness, sensitivity has inestimable strength in my book and I work hard not to exploit people. I just want them to let themselves feel. A Carbon Leaf song goes:

Without a heart to recall
A memory's just a memory after all

Whoever I'm with has to know who they're kissing because I'm damn-well going to know who I'm kissing. If both people believe in the possibilities of the kiss---whew!

I want to believe in everyone's inner artist but I'm not committing until they've activated that higher self to the mysterious proportion that makes things right between us. I'm willing to adjust too. Everyone makes the right sound, the right movement sometimes if they let themselves. It's night a game of rigid choices but an allowance of naturalness, conscious naturalness. But I feared that Megan had strong repressions. There were a few instances that I won't recount here where I raised an eyebrow or two. Despite my misgivings, I felt initially right with her in a mysterious way and our conversation veered into the topic of marriage early on.

Her mom wanted a Catholic wedding. I knew what that meant. I would have to convert to be eligible to have a Catholic wedding. I'd have to lie to marry this girl. "I believe that God is the one and only God ... Jesus died for all our sins." I struggled with that one for days-- Could I lie for love? I've obscured and withheld for love, sometimes just out of fear or because explanation would be too exhausting but I've never really outright lied for love. I've failed to come back with a revision of a story that was true at the time I felt it only to find that version go away massively altered by new information or revised by new experiences, but I've never lied in the moment in front of a room full of people while talking about divinity so that I can hold a woman I love in my arms every night.

Anyway, I like this girl. She was young and figuring life out but that made me feel less threatened. She had a big heart, that goes a long way. But I feared a too conventional life. I'm not rural or urban I'm both, I don't want the TV on every night, I don't want kids for quite a few more years, I want political corruption and everyday reticence to end. I'm the wild card in the deck that doesn't like the cardholder to carry out the plan to preordained specifications, I like the chaos of an unexpected turn of events. I hop like a mad Kerowackian when the filter becomes a funnel. I want someone who is willing to go for a walk in the rain, or ask me to do something even more sensuous. I was afraid I'd scare this girl half to death. Maybe I didn't give her enough credit.

She was going to Scotland and I wasn't going to fall in love with her for two reasons. 1) She might get some hare-brained idea that she would have to stay faithful to me over the course of her year-long adventure . She was young, I wasn't going to stand in the way of her figuring herself out. 2) I would miss her too much if I let myself feel what wanted to arise in me. Unnatural I know but maybe for the better.

My misgivings in part grew from parallels between her and Rachael.

She couldn't make it to see me the day before she left (she left early the next morning) because the co-op I designed for Bumbershoot (where I had to be) was a bit too much to get into when she needed to spend time with family. She cancelled her phone before she left. You see, I used smoke and mirrors to make myself vague before she left I was disappearing like a ghost again, a fabrication in the fog. (In my slight defense Bumbershoot was the culmination of what I had worked diligently a few months for and it demanded almost all of my time in those few days.) I knew where her parents lived but had never met them. If I had a sudden change of heart where I wanted to open communicae with this girl while she was overseas it was unlikely I'd be dropping in to visit her Catholic mother. By this time, my volunteering project had ended and I was worn out on the place a bit. I loved the people I worked with but since their job was to work with writers I felt uncomfortable with the idea that they might believe I had underlying motives to promote my work via friendships. My paranoia against falsehood after Rachael was something I had yet to shake off.

My dear friend Alissa who worked at the said establishment had a going away party a few months later. I went and was hassled by the other folks who worked there. Why hadn't I visited more (I had stopped in once or twice)? When I had stopped in I wanted to ask them about them, not ask them about Megan. Any memory of love or love's starting shoots still felt like a stab in the chest. I didn't want to go there and question myself too often. While hassling me lovingly two or three of the people there mentioned that there was a mystery package waiting for me at the house. It took me awhile but I finally staggered in to pick up the trail of that mystery. I figured somebody I had met while organizing had sent me some wacky gift of writing or art. Instead, I found a note and some CD's I had loaned to Megan tucked into a little manilla envelope. (sigh) She used the word great multiple times, told me to keep writing great poetry and listening to great music. I hadn't thought she understood how important writing is to me. She gave me her e-mail address, ended the note with Love Megan (I can't remember now if it was a heart or just fancy cursive). Still have the note, proof I didn't go off and have a Wizard of Oz dream. By the time I finally got the package she was 3 or 4 months into living in Scotland. I figured she had given up on me by now, if I e-mailed I might be upsetting her balance right as she was settling into some mode of existence there. While I like my balance upset because I now meet the challenge of adaptation well (unless the moist girl I love most in the world goes unbearably dry) (I sometimes fancy myself as a grizzled veteran mountain tracker ready for a storm or any other change in conditions, equipped with the knowledge that I can turn to innovation if necessary), I figured with somehwhat circumspect logic, that she needed stability not another curveball to make her weak in the knees. Letters from me across an ocean ... come on, I couldn't have helped but be terribly romantic. Truth be known, romantics make the best cynics but I am such a sap that I should be working a syrup farm.

It's been awhile since I visited the house altho I have gone there for a few events. She's back from Scotland. Working as an intern again, I imagine. Living on one of my seminal streets. Our roads will intersect again but I question the spark. I want to be understood in the dark, to have someone who knows the dark is light and vice versa. I hold deep affection for this girl. Maybe it's unfair that I've dated her so much in my head but I still feel like being cautious as a cat around a pack of wolves unless the prize is clearly worth the risk. Can I be friends with her? I suppose I'll have to try someday soon.

The Day John Ashcroft Finally Went Away

2004-11-11T09:38:00.000-08:00

The day John Ashcroft finally went away troops from America conducted the largest ground assault since the Vietnam War and there was nary a buzz in the shopping aisles. The day John Ashcroft went away people in America with standing walls nibbled on their toast, ingested their morning news vacantly, and headed off to their jobs which they don't really like. They were sorry to leave their dogs behind.

The day John Ashcroft finally left office he pronounced the world safer. The day John Ashcroft finally went away 300,000 civilians not involved in the 'incursion' remained in Fallujah, approximately one-third of the normal population there. Children were developing nervous disorders from the loud bangs of bombs and traded gunfire. Nutrition lacking, the mouths were hungry for song, prayers were murmured, few said them loud enough to seem indignant. Still, general anger persisted at circumstance and the disappointing circumspection of the human disposition. Hope was still on the lips of the gifted, innocents who had seen too much to remain so pure in the essential places in their taut chests. Children who had risen in their pajamas doe-eyed to see flashes of light in the night, stayed inside. Their mothers eyed them with a mixture of emotion we can only marvel at. 'Good' and 'bad' actions were being planned in standing buildings and ruins. Another round of horror and rebuilding was being instituted the day John Ashcroft left town. He didn't ride into the sunset and nobody wept a tear, except maybe a few of joy. The horizon was burning oil.

Halliburton was ready for a clean-up.

Richard Ashcroft sang a song and laughed a pain-ridden laugh, thankful that the bastard with his last name was finally retiring into history's backpages. If you chance upon those backpages feel free to curse at the son-of-a-bitch who thought he knew so much that unilateral, unprovoked war was within his destiny to carry out. Beware the mechanical mind in all its forms of deduction and reduction. Pretty soon a life is just a life, or a commodity to exploit. We should remember the scientific method of the internment camp showers. To give up on life like that is to give up on the miracle. Don't try to tell that to John Ashcroft if you chance upon him in some mansion or tropical resort or in a town near you on the circuit when he's speaking at high-falutin' conventions---we have more important things to do if humanity is to survive with any sense of self-respect.

Long Road Home

2004-11-08T21:58:00.000-08:00

Looks like I got all the mess about the election out in my lost post, that is not to say I won't refer often to my resolve in the coming eternity.

Went to the Wendell Berry reading at Seattle First Baptist a couple of days ago. Berry is a 70 year old wonder, a man who graduated from the Ivy League but rejected academia for his old hometown farm in rural Kentucky. Fighting for conscious living, he has written against industrial farming and for personal responsibility. Essays, novels, poetry, and speaking engagements all over. He is as considered as anybody I have heard. I loves me some good riproaring passion but I like a man who can pause and put weight into his words without rushing them. He is the wise old elder.

Some of the things he said:

"How I've furthered issues is presenting them in their complexity, not oversimplifying them, not giving in to stereotypes."

"We need enough thinkers to have a cultural tendency. You're going to have to have a big breakfast."

"Blake said, "We mustn't hate the sinners but the sin." I don't think we have much to gain by saying awful things. When you read the newspaper awful things occur to you."

"People with courage will think and learn to speak about these things (the issues) and raise the political dialogue."

I lone-wolfed it as I like to do and sat in the balcony like a hawk in a tall tree. Seems like I walked half of Seattle with my symbolic purple hat, breath steaming, ambling down concrete streets that bent with hills, various grays entering my eyes as I considered what America can justify.

Coming from rich land suburbia part of me has always felt like a failure for rejecting the path of respectable breadwinning economic security. For some reason I can't justify too many dollars of taxes issuing forth from me into bombs. Besides, I don't want a lover to be drawn to me for superficial reasons. Security is overrated in my book, the abyss is always present. Death is a hard-fixed rule but so is the eternal soul. Abstract as that may seem to other people, experience makes certain matters real to the beneficient mind. We hold life in our hands. The abyss is not something to get lost in but something to step into in times of crisis so we can find our higher selves. Chaos to find a better mixture of a different order with disorder. When in the maze find your own steps of courage, I say. Some people's eyes seem like prisons, and some people condemn you with their voice. We are weighed and tested and judged and yet the ultimate circumstance is the one we decide upon for ourselves.

Returning to art can be an arduous project. I let myself decide on unfavorable realities during my time with Rachael. My big dream of love could've dragged me much further down than I went. No matter how pronounced my loneliness, I mitigate expectations. Pleasant surprises abound when you don't preset parameters. Seeing a pattern doesn't mean the pattern is bound to continue.

I return often to the peasant wisdom of folk ballads. While dreaming of better realities they told of emotions in parable-story songs, pratfalls of greed or selfishness, worthiness of love and the need of risk, the sad beauty of achieving something unforeseeable only to see death in any number of circumstances claim that relationship and how something untranslatable survives that illusion of loss. Lovers against odds claimed by the sea or a baron. So much is illusion, Rachael widowed me but the memory of special moments endures albeit in a hazy afterthought now, even if the occasional nightmare throws me into a couple day funk.

Touching the chaos of giving up when free will has so many routes to overcoming challenges I am happy to say that the outcome of this election is a blip while yet another strong call to awakening. Much hard work has to be done. Perhaps our culture has tried to settle on easy comfort but anyone can look back on their greatest accomplishments and realize that those moments are the culmination of many hard won experiences. The contrast and the lessons provide a platform for our greatest leaps. Behind this, hard work is soooooooooo underrated. Fuck cold comfort, this so-called leisure. Zen-calm if you like, but a determined seizing of the higher mind is needed for us to be sharp enough to handle the forbidding factors pummeling our potential down into a neater praxis where our defenses are weak enough to soak in the propaganda. We are lined with the gold of alchemical chariots. We don't need the poisoned parts of the ground to fly.

So easy to toss garbage into the landfill. So easy to dismiss a loved one as this or that. So easy to return to outworn habits. How many crutches do we need? How many dry tits do we need to suckle? Climbing a mountain is worth the revelation of a widespread view. Sometimes, a late night run to the grocery store when the limbs are tired is worth the prize of ice cream. A walk in the rain, confronted with the weather that our ancestors lived in can trigger instincts dormant for far too long. Exercise is often worth improved heartrate, for moments when the body and mind need to be attuned--- a special someone calls us to our best attentions. Obstacles and challenges threaten us with our measure always being taken. So what!? We NEED to expose ourselves for the possible gain. The naturals often just look as if they are naturals, hard work made their abilities blossom. It's not all down to genes, it's the genes we awaken in our personal codes.

We aren't just what we are, we are what we become.

Been buying lots of books and music in a mad digestion. What a fine madness! Finished Bob Dylan's Chronicles. A labyrinth of fear and much hard work, that's what Bobby went through. Before the fear took hold he was among the bravest. Inspired me to go out and buy the 2nd Mermaid Avenue disc of Billy Bragg and Wilco putting Woody Guthrie lyrics, archived by the Smithsonian, to music. "Lay my head on my mountain bed/ Where I smell your hair again. ... My loneliness healed,/ My emptiness spilled,/ I walk above all pain/ Back to my woman and child/ To spread my seeds again."

I try not to dream of Rebecca too much. Girls are chasing after me a bit. Also, attached guys I know get nervous when their girls like me too much (in their eyes). The whole runaround is hilarious. I honestly don't have much of a hankering for the subtle politics and am generally generous to everyone without ulterior motive. I get enough attention without asking for attention, to even think of pushing matters. If no one is speaking to the better parts of me, I don't need the bullshit.

Well, I think I'll go read Gary Snyder's new book, take a break to chew some blackjack gum and swear good-naturedly at the news with a wry grin, laughing at myself. Hydrate and prepare for a long forest walk tomorrow, let the liquid flow like a waterfall down my throat. Play with drying flower petals in my fingers enjoying their remnants of moisture. Wash the dishes from my previous meals today. Cut some banana into my rice-milked cereal. Breathe and breathe. Try to shake off this nervous energy from wanting to get something done. Forget often that in the doing the done manifests.

Who knows tho? Something entirely else might come up.

Lost my best post, for real this time.

2004-11-04T10:55:00.000-08:00

Oh well. Tried to save the draft too. That's how I lost it (that and maybe taking too long in writing it, altho the I said no to disconnecting). From now on I'm printing the damn things straight from the screen before I post.

Love y'all,

Jason

The Elevated World of Chairs

2004-11-01T10:46:00.001-08:00

Getting down on the floor to play with children is a treasure. The elevated world of chairs where adults sit in despondent affairs is so far away. With your legs tucked underneath you on the earth flopping around, loping, crawling, growling like an animal a whole vista of senses opens.

Chairs have their place but sitting in them should take a good reason, or a few. Forget the birds and who are you but a miser with a busy schedule. To die without the memory of a long walk with a beautiful woman is downright irresponsible.

Pinecone fights are advisable given that those involved don't have the best arms. Walking is spectacular but runs are exuberant. Nature isn't all charm she has a lot of fuss, has foul moods like windstorms. Barefooted seastrand strolls can lead the beach to deliver glassy reminders of mankind's foibles to your achilles heel.

A generator without a battery, perform geriatrics. Energy and matter are at your disposal. Splashy spashy in the claw-footed bathtub of a sudded bareback. Hug. Purple, magenta, orange. Animal eyes observant. What you put in is what you take. The psychology is often yours. Other is none other than isness. Point the finger out it comes back in.

Going to the library to type some poetry. Work is getting to me lately. When I move it'll be easier without the big commute. I'll get to your e-mails tonight after I watch the first episode of Carnivale's second season. By then I should be limber enough to lucidly answer whatever questions you slid my way under the virtual table. For some reason I respond to snail mail better than e-mails now. I think my brain just wants to limit my screen-time. I'd rather get under the blankets, under the stars, or under illuminating pages-- or under the cafe veranda's canvas.

I seem to have an obsession with the underneath. Heraclitus says that the hidden connections are the strongest ones. Many have proclaimed this the age of information, but what are we informing ourselves with? What is pertinent? Why one path and not another to the center? Intuition and experience constantly tell me that logic is overbearing. Often have I outsmarted myself into carrying out an outdated plan. Fluidity needed to adapt to change is constant in the variables. Forgiveness, love, and action all within the convergence of so many factors.

The aquafirs and gravitational shifts of luminary bodies, the pillow-wept tears and morning smiles done quietly before the mirror at a funny thought emanating from the ethers of lowered-inhibition morning calm--- all are energized by the same informing enigma. Today, I go forth in determination not unlike any other day except there is always difference. Today my feet plant kisses and my eyes look for people as they really are inside. Frank Herbert says the real universe is always one step ahead. The real universe is in me. Today, my feet are one step ahead.

Forget today, there is only right now.

Also today, finishing touches on the Kenneth Patchen workshop flyer. Tomorrow getting the bike fixed. Speed sometimes seems unnatural but the occasional strange situation awakens the genes. Man, I do carry on. Katell Keineg is a goddess. Going to see the stage version of Rhinoceros by Ionesco soon. Random and metaphysical this morning. Maybe I'll settle "down" after a hearty Indian lunch buffet. Waddling instead of running is good when vitamins send your metabolism through the roof. Man my fingers move fast. I love being on the brink of a breakthrough, it took a lot of sludge to get this far. Love you all. Until tomorrow, may daylight stars be with you. You can all take your costumes off now.

When Faced with a Pillow Fight

2004-10-31T08:53:00.000-08:00

Ahhh ... childhood. Exuberance and wonder and little things we forget.

Saw Jason Webley last night with Ahniwa and Alexis. Man is that Webley guy a great nut. A mad scientist with sad ballads and sudden turns into ecstatic energy of not losing childhood. There are few endeavors in the world better than the theme of not losing your childhood. Wonder at little things would keep people from being materialist, waste-spewing pricks.

"Memory Lane" from Elliott and "Gray Sky Eyes" by Carbon Leaf have been my re-run songs the last day or two. Last night was memory lane for all intensive purposes. We gallavanted a procession of tribes to see Webley die his symbolic winter death (he revives on May Day to start performing again) up and around my old haunts. Parks I used to sit in with girls, streets I've driven up for years but rarely, if ever, walked. I remember the night madness of those streets post-rave and the daylight collegiate and business(wo)man downtown bustle. Went up to Bauhaus they were playing Nosferatu the old, silent version on the bookwall with a small projected upon screen. Last call had already rang.

Went down to Cafe Minnie's, damn. The only girls I've been really into have all gone there except for Rebecca and Jen. I know the bump and changeing tunes in that joint. The post 2 AM crowd stumbling in. The swanky Belltown yuppy-ites, the punks, the skanky young girls with half-vacant searching for acceptance in their eyes. I'm not judging so much folks, that is what these people tend to project surface-wise. There's more behind the individuals of course, and those stories cut me to the deep or flower in me like some wild arrangement on a rotting log. The beauty and the sadness, so many people not finding positive avenues, so they end up on 1st Ave dissatisfied. I go there almost as a stark reminder of the appreciation I hold for my own choices. I don't bask in vanity very often, don't care much about the wad in my pocket (altho thinking of having kids is shifting my thinking a bit there, guess that'd be saving account instead of pocket), don't need any audience but the trees and the skies and if I can help it a cool animal compatriot.

Alexis is a goof and Ahniwa is great as her wacky straight man. Their chemistry does seem to balance them. Odd alchemy I never saw coming but my big eye doesn't focus on their love lives, I'm not worried about kindred souls like theirs.

"King's Crossing" by Elliott is also getting to me, was my initial favorite. A soaring wall of sound song that punches with gorgeous lyrical intensity, smooth and poppy escalating on the surface, penetrating images and brutal self-evaluation if you listen just a bit harder to the being said.

Well, gotta head to work. "Every wave is tidal. If you hang around you're going to get wet."

"I've got a heavy metal mouth/ ...I get my check from the trash treasury/ Because I took my own insides out."

Half-truth can be so poignant. If I don't meet you soon for a cup of liquid, be sure to see you on those dream-paths.

Bits and Pieces

2004-10-29T08:52:00.000-07:00

So, blogger.com had some problems yesterday they said in an e-mail to me. Don't know what's up with retrieving my posts.

Anyways, going to Oly today. Should put up some fliers about my Kenneth Patchen class. Need to call Matt says he has something important to tell me. Damn poets and their secrets. My friend Angela has a concert tonight (in the post that didn't go up yesterday I told about her great hugs). Jason Webely the next night. Haven't written a poem in a little while. Sorry I have to miss Alissa's b-day party because of work. Alissa if you're reading this you're a rockstar. I'll visit you and Elijah, and K(C)ora and Aaron and Nat(ur)e and Kimmy and Tak soon. Land of Poert here I come.

Some of the funny foreign people that come in to my work smell like dill.

Zine stuff getting there, Pan Notes will be done!

I do have a teensy crush on a girl named Erin but I have had extra weird relationships with girls named Erin. They tell me heart-driven stuff, pour their souls out to me, bring their big troubles to me. I let them talk, I toss in a bit of life-philosophy, they come to their conclusions. Them the protagonist trying to exit the maze, me the guide trying to offer a sage ear. This one seems like she has it figured out tho, even if she does insist on bad coffee.

Whew that Bob Dylan got caught in all kinds of mindtraps trying to make art post-fame. He's dynamic as a thinker but afraid of his own thoughts from what I can tell. We all are but there are only so many people you go out and say that about. Post-fear he still made Blood On the Tracks, Desire, and Time Out of Mind. Never underestimate great men, even after they seem down and out.

Well, gotta get a move on. There's a lot of life to live and tasty cereal waiting for my tummy.

A Huge Post Just Lost

2004-10-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

Glad I wrote it. Sorry you didn't get to read it. Two hours spent. Gotta go to work. No regrets. Save draft is an important feature.

Golden Light On the Runny Kine

2004-10-28T07:43:00.000-07:00

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.

Stepping into the Same River

2004-10-27T08:31:00.000-07:00

Nietzsche's Superman, the poet's humanness and active feeling, the charisma of Kesey, the long Judaic wait for the messiah, the return of Arthur, the return of Quetzoquatl, the Kwisatz Hadderach, Jung's theory of individuation, Buddhist concepts of mindfulness, Campbell's portrayal of the hero-quest we are all on--- these have fed my character lust. For you and for those after us I have wanted to be a human being. Everywhere I go I see falseness mixed in with divinity. To cultivate the giant tree takes effort, care, dedication, allowance, and stubborn belief in what one feels, in-the-gut, is right.

Twenty-six years old I'm in my pajamas before a screen in the morning writing to a small selection of people, figuring that maybe if I elevate myself out of my self-imposed chains that I will have a greater impact on the world.

Yesterday a woman came into my place of work. She had been in before. Like some medicine woman crazy in the dark forest her eyes seemed to hide under hat. She knows angles so well that your eyes never meet hers unless she chooses to let them graze you or if you decide to force the issue. She dresses like someone who has been on the road and needs to stay warm. A refugee from the sixties without some of the accommodating warmth I like to associate with the era. To the chagrin of my bosses she totes a large black backpack into the store and never buys anything. Instead she walks around and looks at things, handling them, reading them, perusing the aisles, lifting things and putting them back on the shelves. I return continually to a Muriel Rukeyser poem as a prayer of sorts:

In the bodys ghetto
never to go despising the asshole
nor the useful shit that is our clean clue
to what we need. Never to despise
the clitoris in her last speech.

Never to despise in myself what I have been taught
to despise. Nor to despise the other.
Not to despise the it. To make this relation
with the it : to know that I am it.

"To know that I am it." All of my anger, my frustration, my longing, my want to stop a person and reach out to them and say, "How can I help?" is a lot of hogwash if I don't let myself change inside. It's not about sensing all the time, it's about accepting knowledge as wisdom. We have to let ourselves know some of the important ideas or we're just wasting our potential. Should one settle, identifying with scraps of other or delve further into the mystery? To me the answer is simple.

I call bullshit when people say, "You don't know racism" as if I could have no clue. I have been oppressed motherfuckers. I have worn the mantle of needless shame. I've been interrogated, overlooked, desecrated, betrayed. We have all been oppressed even if we weren't paying any attention.

I see this woman come into the store and I try to think her mystery. If there is anything I fail to do enough of, I don't dream into your mysteries enough my friends. Self-concern with the subjective 'I' is a common plague. One that rings shallow through the annals of history, one that also rings with atomic bombs and petty disputes turned into massacres of blood and shit and neighbor turning on neighbor turning on neighboring country turning on country across the ocean turning on the natural conditions that allowed life to occur in the first place. The personal is always transpersonal even if people aren't always good at listening or translating for themselves.

What I'm trying to say is... I've been a little like an Ayn Rand character too wrapped up in my own happinesses or unhapinesses to share well in the happinesses of those I love. For all my ability to express I don't express well. When Rebecca says to me, "I want security." I understand her hesitation regarding a potential relationship to me. I live far away, I "make (her) feel like she has to be more conscious around (me)", I burn inside but that burning is what gives me a strong measure of peace.

Something wild broke into me after Rachael. Rachael was scared around me after the break-up, after she obliterated me. In a sense she was looking at her own picture of Dorian Gray, as I repeated the horrible things she did and said to me back at her in my voice of agony. I don't expect people to be strong enough to accept what they fear. Cold comfort, false serenity : the order of the day. The ecstatic simple life is not contrary to complex aspects of life.

Forgive me for launching straight into romantic drama in this blog arena. I'm sorting something out that is hugely important to me. Reclamation project #1 is getting my life back together. That means finding the right paths. That means reconnecting with friends. That means dealing appropriately with romance, never an easy thing to do. (sigh)

Consider the title of this entry. The old Heraclitus quote goes, "You can never step into the same river twice." Brilliant in its irony. Of course we step into the "same" river, the river has the same name, the familiar setting fills our senses if we come back to it in a decent amount of time, it's near our town, down the same trail. Change is the one constant tho, we return years later with nostalgia thick in our eyes and the river is not the same. Our memory has tainted it, our psychological associations have transformed, floods have moved the banks, the island in the fork has eroded, even the echoing sounds of the birds seem foreign as if the acoustics are incredibly different even tho the treestand nearby hasn't been cleared.

Every situation is what it is, and is what it is is not. This conundrum is not worth exhausting. Conditions change and we must not expect them to be the same. I can laugh now at the idea that Rebecca may have been swayed by my verbalization of wanting an "open relationship". Hell, Rachael devastated me with how she brought up the idea. The idea itself wasn't abhorrent to me (altho I didn't like it very much) it was how she communicated with me that drove the stake into my heart. I have not been open with Rebecca even when I've talked a flood. I am scared shitless by what I feel. By open I meant that I didn't want her to feel chained to me. In the extremely odd chance that I would meet someone else who blew me away I wanted to be able to tell her and go through the process of figuring out what we should do. If she hadn't decided on somebody else already I'd take all these issues up with her. I guess it was close tho, she was "tempted" by me and had "thought about it a lot" and "wanted to hold my hand."

Someday I'll make a woman very happy, happy in ways she never dreamed of. In the meantime, I'm going to figure out how to communicate well enough so that girls don't misunderstand my intentions. I'm going to figure out how to communicate so that my loved ones know that they are loved and that future generations may have a chance to enjoy such happy circumstances.

A Tapestry to Pierce a Veil

2004-10-25T07:00:00.000-07:00

So, I've been sitting here in front of the screen staring at the blank box. A lot of my life seems like it has been spent in front of empty canvas waiting for inspiration. Hesitation before response: cute barista, homeless person, waiter, friend, lover, even animals. I'm not really shy in a traditional sense, I just am always seeking out the right actions and am often surprised at how my heart and mind choose to respond. How do I or my gene-fired, circumstance-effected self come up with this stuff?

Hell, I believed in magic so much as a kid that I would run my hand over the candy bars and look into them by making my eyes distant. I would imagine the wafers, the milk chocolate I knew had been poured over them. Visualizing the little pock marks of Kit Kat wafer I would search out the piles stacked in small display boxes running my mind down every cooridor of delicious matter till light poured out in my head. Sometimes I'd open myself to future possibilities and pick the candy bar that had the best future possibilities in store for me. Then I'd let those thoughts drop away and run off to enjoy the candy bar. That freedom to explore and feel is a necessary ingredient to a human existence.

Now the future is here, far from candy bar days. I'm watching the sky lighten at 7 in the morning. The day before last a dream-girl told me she had meditated on the subject and that it (us) was not to be. Being around her has been an exercise in restraint. Painful residue from the Rachael ordeal has not worn off. Having been through so many fires I am a much stronger man. After all, wearing the vulnerability of love in this world cannot help but toughen you up. A big part of the human mystery is that we tranform so many times, wearing and shedding so many experiences developing wilded revised personas and beliefs. Having been flayed and disgusted in so many moments, at so many situations, and the reverb of their implications--here I am. Having been encompassed with so many rounds of nature with so many bees kissing the inner folds of flowers-- here I am. Having thrown freight, and labored with words, and going on long walks to the interior-- here we are.

Seeing Rebecca, hearing her voice, hearing what she says, the way she holds her legs, all the little things I could bore you all with that fascinate me I feel with a tenor I thought I would never feel again. Out of respect for her wishes, and my own fear, I have held back. I don't want to scare her, let alone make her uncomfortable, even if giving expression to what I feel is my only chance to be with her in a romantic sense. I've never liked plugging up anything that feels like truth. And we go farther when we're motivated. Around Rebecca I'm prepared to accept the most startling turns, and they are startling because they mean so much. How do I temper this heightened response? Love, fear, and respect. I hold back. I don't need to be romantic with her. I'm sold, she exists. She is excessively human, imperfectly perfect and all that elated stuff. She is not necessarily for me, nor would I expect her to be without her heart and mind pointing her my direction. I can count on one hand how many times she has called me first. Don't ask me what can cause the chemistry of one person to go hog wild while the other person is merely intrigued. Factoring in my past character judgement (I thought Rachael was an authentic, caring human being who knew all those private, special moments meant something), I accept that my willingness for love may taint my perception of the present. Even tho she doesn't call me I know she authentically cares. We share meals, coffee, tea, picnics, walks, and conversations-- even dreams. I could go on forever romantic rambling and lose you in the process. Time to skip to another subject.

The sunrise sky is reflected clearly in the clean windows of the house across the way. Orange and magenta chunks with pine limbs draped in. This is a hot chocolate morning, finally getting crisp cold. I've been listening to Kid A a lot lately. "Idioteque" is officially a mix-tape song. Got my Blackjack Gum and "Idioteque" running into my ears. And I'm as horny as a ten-peckered owl (sly grin), just kidding ... sorta ... no, I'm really kidding (nod of head). Also picked up From a Basement on a Hill by that greasy haired guy who stabbed himself twice in the heart after wearing a tux to the Grammies. How can a man have so much talent and still off himself? Hey, I can relate. We can all see our inner potential but only some of us have the guts to face the hard truths about aspects of human nature. You've got to understand suicide isn't about rejecting the beauty in life it's about not being able to tolerate the unforgivable cruelty that all-too-human inhumans and circumstance throw at a one, especially what we have chosen to throw at ourselves. I personally have decided not to forgive but to find something approximating acceptance while tirelessly working to overthrow the baser parts of human nature (and no I'm not talking about supporting Christian cellibacy, sex is good). Even with my past spat with suicidal tendencies in tow I can still write: Elliott you sonofabitch how come you didn't believe in the turn-it-around story?

(I'm gonna call it a day after this next paragraph.)

I've tried to keep journals in the past but always turned back to poetry. Dear friends, I'm in this for the long run. Just because some of ya'll are gonna be out there glancing at what I have to say/write doesn't mean I'm gonna be holding back the brutal honensty angle. If you hang with me I may get around to making you laugh. I hope to high constellations that I can help you appreciate the sensuous juggernaut that is life. If you cry at some point so much the better. My prose isn't as sharp as my conversational English or my poetic alchemy but I'll work on it. My personal life isn't sparkling ... but it's mine. My social and personal philosophies are sometimes a bit thick and they integrate and like to climb like morning glory on a dilapidated fence but hey these are wonders of creation/evolution. Consider this a starting point to bridge-building towards those of you who have been perturbed at my evasive ghostliness (a lack of connection is just a modern illusion anyways ... right?). I hope you're smart enough to know that I still care. I will keep finding enough Goliath in my David to keep coming out from under my rock with what I find to be treasures. In case I don't get to say it again in the public domain because I could be killed an infinite amount of ways before I get back to a computer tomorrow morning: I do love you.

Jason

P.S. I'm gonna use the title of this blog as the title of something else ... one of my many literary projects I'll tell you more about later.