New York Morning Cat

Here to write. Everything eats and is eaten just played in my mind. Because it’s a line in the new Adrianne Lenker album, super great. Calming. Beautiful, pretty, like a breath.

Adrianne Lenker – two reverse – 4AD

I feel chunky today – a little blocked. Sad as I think a thought; yes, a thought just passed through me – that I always start out all these journal entries the same or at least I’m beginning to; and it always has to do with my physical sensations. I wanted to shove the thought away because it made me feel like I was a failure, the ensuing thought, that I’m just indulging a bad habit. But now I have the thought that my thoughts have no authority, and it’s true. It’s not like my intellect’s idea of what’s good and what’s bad and what’s unique and what’s not is very important. It ain’t the literary critic of the New York Times upstairs. Which doesn’t mean that they (the literary critic of the New York Times, that is) know what they’re talking about anyway.

Thoughts.

I feel soft today though, and there’s a little light inside my chest, a lift of energy. Sometimes the energy, or movement, in my chest registers to me like light inside. I heard Rebecca getting into place for work this morning; she’s been up as well, getting ready to coach a new pupil in Computer Science. But when I leaned back to see if the noise I heard was her, and to find out if she was working in the bedroom area behind the screen, I just saw little Helena (the cat) lying on the corner of the bed. She caught my eye. The kitty has a little, precious face. It actually puts energy and movement into my chest. There’s times the kitty is so cute that I feel it in my sinuses between my ears, or my inner ear. It’s like my ear canals start to pulse and vibrate, an effect of swelling up with how cute that cat is.

But what is the expression on her face? Focused. It’s the face of a kitty who’s…vibing. I really don’t know any other way to put it. She’s very seriously lying there and experiencing the pleasure of lying there. As if it’s a job, or even holy activity. Like she’s a little monk, and the way she worships is to feel comfortable and calm. So she lies there and cultivates comfort and calm and blinks.

But my God if it isn’t awfully cute.

Thoughts have flowed through my head many times throughout this free write. The thought flowed through that I’ll never be able to write non-fiction like Stephen King. I thought of the intros to his various books, and his jocular and comforting tone throughout On Writing. So that thought floated through and, honestly, who cares?

Other thoughts like that flow through. I’m going to stop resisting them. Sometimes I register that a thought is negative and I just shut it down: it’s a thought that scares me too much to consider, so I smash it. But I think this style, this new style, of noticing the thought and letting it float by in the light of day is better. In some way having a negative and paranoid thought and squashing it just gives it more power. But to open a window in the mind and shine some light on it actually takes away its power. It shrivels up in the light of day like a…I don’t have a good simile. Here are a few options: slug with salt on it; bug in the window (?); raisin in the sun (taken); in my mind’s eye as I set myself up for a simile, I imagined a bug that’s not supposed to be out in the day and if you set it out in the sun, it shrinks. But I don’t know if a bug like that exists. Maybe just a slug in the sun. But slugs survive in the sun. They just seem to prefer the shade. So, in conclusion, a slug forced to stay in the sun far longer than a slug might prefer.

Thoughts about my body, my ability to keep thinking through Alexander directions and to let go of areas of holding that are not necessary to keep me up and balanced. Quick thinking through the directions: I give my neck a gentle wish to be free. I sense my head moving up and away. I sense the length, depth, and width of the whole torso. I sense the legs moving away from torso, and the torso following the head up and out. I sense my feet sinking away. I am balanced by shifting energies.

That last one was mine.

This free write’s almost done. I’d like to corral it up to a conclusion. I can allow all the negative and positive thoughts in the world. I can allow them all, and they don’t make me, they don’t define me or my work. They, like I, are allowed to exist. They’re even allowed to die. And the scary or negative thoughts scare and discourage me a lot less when I notice and allow them.

Rebecca just brought me a coffee refill. It was a joy to see her. It was a joy to smile together. And these small things are life: nothing more, nothing less. Nothing better.

Claude Monet – Cat Sleeping on a Bed – circa 1865 – 1870

Whose Hollow Legs Scrape Across the Ground

My jaw is a little tense. I’m sitting here, my brow relaxed, and tears behind my eyes. I want to cry – for some reason there’s the desire to cry inside.

Like a shallow wound.

Strong feelings of backward motion today. Probably to get to the bottom of it (now my eyes are ringed with tears) I’d have to go through last night. Or maybe through the events of the last year and a half. I don’t even know. I’m scared. I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.

Last night, anyway, let’s start there. I had a scene rehearsal with my acting mentor, Natasha, one that was going to be filmed for her website for her online Zoom course. At some point around halfway through, she lays into me. Tells me that she sees that I don’t have any excitement anymore, that I was once brimming with energy, and now I have none. I hate it when directors tell me things like that, as if they’ve been given some carte blanche to see and judge and decide my life. Everyone seems to feel they have carte blanche to see and dominate and tell me what I should be doing with my life.

My one life.

And it doesn’t help that I feel no sureness. I never do. I feel confusion most of the time. Do I really want to direct? Do I really want to write? Do I really want to act? Should I really be best friends with my best friends? Should I really live in New York?

For God’s sake, I’m not sure about any of it…so when Natasha entered my mind and told me I was so utterly dead inside, passionless, it struck a chord. Have I constructed a life around myself that I am placating? Am I some kind of cosmic Poland, taken over and annexed by everyone from Nazis to Commies (sorry, no offense to Poland)? I was weeping openly while writing the paragraph above this one.

Here’s my instincts. It’s my life and my free write and I’m allowed to say what I instinctively feel. I trust that the things I’m passionate about are worthy of being passionate about: writing, storytelling, directing, acting. I just haven’t found myself yet in them. I’m working; and, by God, before the last week I’d been working every day. Writing. Imagining. Preparing. But it’s the business. The business.

I get halfway through a spreadsheet and want to go to sleep. I can’t work with budgets, balance them and so forth. I can barely apply to colleges and submit short stories. And that does take up at least five hours in the day. It ain’t an eight hour workday, but the other stuff around it is important too.

And am I getting defensive, am I simply protecting the scared, lost, lonely part in the middle of me?

Perhaps.

Let me slow down and write some things I know to be true instinctively:

1. Natasha is not always right. She was also trying to bring me alive for the scene.
2. I have more right than Natasha to see my inside self.
3. If I don’t let out my reaction to this, I won’t want to sustain being in Natasha’s class: I will grow resentful.
4. Writing is both fun and progressive. I’m learning, and submitting. And that feels good. And I’m working on stories that matter to me. Natasha knows nothing about that and why should she?
5. I am the only one to tell myself what I’m doing.
6. I can trust myself. 
7. Working with Rebecca and my classmates in Natasha’s on acting is helpful.
8. I’m resentful of the people in my life telling me which direction to go in.
9. I’m also highly self – conscious that I don’t know what I’m doing myself.
10. I love directing. I love writing. I love acting.

I love Sade. I’m listening to Sade.

Jezebel – Sade – 1985

I’m sad, there’s a sucking feeling in my chest and tingles all down my arms and legs as I cry again, because Natasha….she made me feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. And I’m angry about it.

11. I don’t know what I’m doing.

I don’t feel much if any more clear about anything after writing this. I’m hunting for my own path: the roaches, Rebecca, Natasha, schools, writing…that’s all part of it. I’ve lived half or nearly half of my life, maybe more, maybe even less. Could be anything. But it’s my life. MY time. And I want to fill it with what I want.

Natasha wanted to make me feel as passionate about acting as I do about writing and directing. But I do know that something in it backfired, I felt slightly ambushed. Under-rehearsed, and then abused in no uncertain terms about the very core of my life, potentially to make me mad and do the scene better. I like acting, it’s creating art. I would like to keep practicing it and that seems like Natasha’s true intention: to stop me from giving up my passion for acting as well. But I am overwhelmed by my urge to also write, and also direct, and then there’s a deep desire to make money off my own enterprises.

Only a minute left in this free write. I don’t feel I know much more what’s right or wrong. But I also know that I need to trust myself. Those benchmarks, they’re everywhere. They point me in this direction and that and I’m like a leaf in the wind, or a hollow man whose hollow legs scrape across the ground.

I want to plant my feet.

I can (thirty – three be damned).

I will.

Dear God, a prayer for direction. Dear God. God.

And let Joe Biden win the election.

Joan Miró (1893 – 1983) – Untitled

The Crack in the Wall

Sometimes I treat my routines like a diet. Gonna have to eat something: so eat a little meditation, a little worship, a little creation, a little editing, a little movement, a little research…and what comes out at the end? A healthier and more creative Sam presumably. And some creative output.

That thought was in my head when I sat down, so I had to write it out. It’s like having one’s throat clogged with an apple seed. You gotta spit it out to breathe freely. Or swallow it. I suppose I could have swallowed it.

But here I sit – thought, on the page. Brain a kind of empty, cool place. Coolness running down my arms, tingles around my thighs, and the white of the room padding me, comforting, coolness in the walls. This is the old kids’ bedroom at the Farm. It used to contain three single beds, two bunkbeds and one stand-alone. Matthew slept in the bottom bunk, I was on the top, and Frankie slept over in the standalone. To my recollection we were all very happy with that arrangement. Although there were times my incredibly overactive mind made me fear that the bunk would crack and fall on Matthew – and then my life would be ruined. Imagine sleeping and crushing your brother because of a technical malfunction in the night….

Rebecca just came in and kissed me. She smelled like a new perfume…(the word that comes to mind is “hibiscus.” Whenever I think of perfumes the word that always comes to mind is hibiscus)…(but maybe it was…oh there’s a flower, and I know I could put my finger on it…lilies maybe? Lily of the Valley perfume? Or am I thinking of Breaking Bad now? Jeez, what’s all rattling around up there?)…anyway, she kissed me. She’s driving into town and needed to say goodbye. I was not disturbed by the interruption. It was pleasant, her lips slightly warm, and her face close to mind, and her smile…there are pleasant things that give one a pleasant feelings in a morning, all gold and sunlight draped over the apple blossoms and yellow California grasses. She leaves now, and my breath is shallow…

Yes. This room. When it had three bunks there was, for some reason, a night I was sleeping in here alone. My Dad came in to read me a bedtime story. He happened to read me that chapter of the Hobbit when the dwarves, hobbit, and wizard, Gandalf, find refuge in a cave in the mountains. They all settle down and go to sleep, except for Bilbo, who stays awake and muses. His waking mind melds with his dreams and he sees a huge crack spreading across the wall of the cave. The crack spreads and goblins come in, sneakily, stealing the horses, and laying rough hands on the dwarves. Bilbo calls out, warning them, and is the only reason Gandalf is able to flash a few of them with his hot, hot magic and escape. Gandalf of course saves them later. Without the Hobbit and his shout they might have been doomed.

The Hobbit film – 1977 – Rankin Bass

But what stayed with me that night, after my father finished reading, was the crack. What if a crack formed in my bedroom wall and got wider and wider and unseen goblins stepped through? What if they grabbed me from my bed in my warm, comfy, slightly creepy house, where my parents and other siblings were sleeping just rooms away, and dragged me through their crack into another world? This terrified me.

Once, long ago, I ate something and went out in to the fields. Perhaps this is too fresh – perhaps this is too honest. Perhaps I should strive for opacity and say “one may have eaten something and gone out to the fields, and if they did, this is what may have happened…” But I’m going to be honest with you. The “one” is me. And I ate something and took to the fields with a host of friends.

That is the closest adult sensation I can relate to the crack in the wall. I felt as though that crack in “the wall” could exist anywhere, opening on another plain of existence. A deeper plain. These edible things were fun: they made the trees swirl and the bushes dance, they made the blue sky shimmer, they made distant people appear small and very close. They put one in touch with the waves that organize all matter, growing and shrinking like the waves of the sea, and the waves of energy that flow through ones buoy bones, waves that could grow from the inside out or outside in and almost overwhelm. They turned a trek through a field into a trek through a mind into a trek through an imaginative world, painted by the media consumed in the past, the color of the clouds, the thoughts in one’s head, the memories, and the imaginings of the future. They made the mud of the fields turn springy.

But that crack: I had it as a child, and I had it as an adult again who had eaten a strange pizza and wandered out into a field of amber with sailing, granite rocks; the crack could open, and then the goblins could grab me, and pull me through the wall of existence, and take me somewhere…else. Somewhere that is both elsewhere and the foundational material of the current place. A place, as they say in a terrible Indiana Jones cash grab (with aliens!), that is the SPACE between SPACES. But for real.

Lying in bed after my Dad left, the lights off except for the nightlight, I was sure it was only a matter of time…that perhaps a crack was growing wider in the dark at that very moment. That any second I would feel rough hands grab me and pull me through.

It could happen.

And it makes life exciting.

“Le Pays des Miracles” – Rene Magritte – 1964

Rarified

I feel poised between utter relaxation, relaxation as a quiet, almost holy experience, and obligation. Stress and worry and planning. I know there’s a way to plan and still be relaxed…

STOP

Just wanted to say I’m listening to Smooth Operator by Sade and this seems to be hitting the right spot.

Sade – Smooth Operator – Balm for 2020

Smooth Operator. How did I avoid Sade for so long? It’s just like Richard and Linda Thompson I want to see the Bright Lights Tonight: an album that is absolutely a Sam Gibbs classic and never passed through my ears before this year.

GO

Let’s look at the morning around me. It’s cool and warm – a contradiction that nevertheless feels true. It’s a brisk 9 AM and people are out there cleaning up the little pond that appeared in front of the driveway.

A couple days ago Rebecca and I drove up, coming back from a run. The people were outside our place dressed in their orange vests. I was thinking of the polite way to ask them to move out of the way but Rebecca leaned out the window and said, “This is us!” The people moved aside briskly. But then I slowed down and said “Are you working on the pond over there?” And they looked at me like a true weirdo, not part of their covenant of road workers. One of them smiled and said they’re making a new pond in our land…or something like that. I couldn’t tell if they were actually giving me the skinny or teasing me with false information. Even if so it was in good fun. But they could also have been telling the truth.

There is a copse of trees just past the driveway, behind the newly renovated barn. A small stream runs through it. My Dad used to take me there when I was very little to splash through that stream in galoshes. Back then the stream and the surrounding Eucalyptus trees were proof that the grounds of the Farm were endless; that there were other worlds enfolded into the land around the house. That if you walked past the driveway, you entered a magic land of a deep stream bed, with water skeeters and mole holes in the banks, if not gnome holes. No. The gnomes lived under the caps of mushrooms, especially where the fungi formed a ring. That’s how you knew faeries lived there. I’d seen it in a computer game, Quest for Glory 1: So You Want To Be A Hero, if you must know.

Quest for Glory 1: So You Want to be a Hero – Sierra – these games shaped my very personality

I remember my Dad as a big kindly presence leading me through the woods. There were times this big peach blob of Dad would make me scared or get very mad at me, which to me, reflected my own debased and monstrous behavior. But when we went on our own missions, he was my amazing mission commander. He was my private Davey Crockett leading me through the frontier, able to rise to any challenge, fight off any beast, even forage for food and water, if need be.

So when he took me to that magical stream through the trees behind the barn I felt that, should we slip through a portal into another world, I would be in good hands. We would find our way back to our land and to Mom and all of my siblings. Of course we would both wield swords. But Dad’s would be far larger, and perhaps magical. Maybe I would wield a wizard’s staff anyway. That was always my jam.

But, as Terry Pratchett says, a Wizard’s Staff has a Knob on the End. Anyway, that’s just a song from Discworld. But ignore the strange sexual double entendres from the preceding paragraph. They are certainly not my intent.

Pulled into the music I’m nodding my head, noticing the resemblance to Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean.

Sade – Hang on to Your Love – 1984

I’m grooving, it put a worm in my middle, a wiggle in the worm and a piggy in the wiggle.

Just words that are fun to say.

So where was I in this nesting doll? Yes. My Dad could lead me into another world, a fantasy world, and I would be safe in the face of danger.

And in a way, going into the trees and investigating that stream was like going into another world. Even if we didn’t definitively pass through a portal, we passed through an invisible one. One in my imagination. On the other side the stream was huge, gnomes were hiding just out of sight, and I was in, pardon the unfortunate Disney reference, a whole new World.

Of course I walk over there now and see it’s only a few square feet of trees. There’s not much space. They’ve grown close over the river, or so I think, and it is not a whole new world, just a tiny pocket of the world we are normally in. Now I’m far taller than the stream banks. And for some reason I make the assumption that I know everything I would find in there. That there is no longer a magical portal.

Is that necessary? Isn’t it possible to be so curious about a stream bed in a small patch of woods in another world, even as a thirty-three year old man? There are certainly enough amazing details to that landscape to warrant curiosity. The amount of small critters that live in the stream bed alone warrant wonder.

As I said, the road workers are working out there now. They’re redirecting that stream because in some time in the past ten years it overflowed its banks and wandered across the road, creating a roadpond. The city would just redirect the water with a culvert but they can’t do anything so drastic: there’s a small, endangered, green frog in that stream and those woods. Rebecca and I saw one yesterday up in the barn where we went to rehearse. It was sitting on the bars of the old, abandoned motorcycle, as if it was about to ride the damn thing. As if it had heard that Crazy Frog ringtone one too many times.

Crazy frog – 2007 – watch if ye dare

(That Crazy Frog ringtone was absolutely one of the harbingers of our current apocalypse. Who knew? And if you don’t understand that don’t worry because I’m not sure I do either but I’d be more than happy to discuss it with you.)

The workers didn’t seem interested in chatting with us about their progress on redirecting the unruly stream. They didn’t mention finding any gnomes in their work. They don’t seem like the type to look for gnomes. They’re just doing the job.

We came into the house and the house was peace. The house is peace. The mist that surrounds the house as night falls and the owls swoop is peace. The morning air is peace.

The word of the week is rarified.

And yet, my phone beckons. The people I love need things and I need things too. I’m poised between utter calm and juts of pressure.

And that’s life.

I have no problem with that.

Now listen to Frankie’s First Affair.

Peace.

Granville Redmond – Sand Dunes – n.d. (1871-1935)

So this all flowed through my head this morning…

And I plod onward.

Or not plod. Skip. I do feel as though I’m skipping through the fields to be back here at the Farm. My coffee is lukewarm. But it tastes good, and I want to have another sip right now: so I will.

Yes. Creamy and smooth and righteous. Coffee. What else would get me to the desk to write? Or even to a rehearsal for that matter? What would drag me out of bed without it?

There’s some kind of obstruction on one of my keys. I tap it with my pinky and it sticks out, like a crumb. But I think it was a splash or smear of some kind. A little bit of food. When did that get on the computer? I’d guess last night as I was starting up episodes of Hell’s Kitchen around 11:15PM. Last night, let’s nail this down, I had a boozy kombucha around 5. Then I had a “Blue Ruin” or actually a blue kombucha (blue with naturally occurring algae) with Maker’s Mark. It was delicious. That while I was cooking. Then I had a small glass of white wine with dinner. Then I had a Descheut’s (sp?) dark beer.

Al Green just came on. A song that puts a little warmth in my hip flexers. It makes me want to move.

Al Green – Here I Am (Come And Take Me)

So I’m moving a little bit as I write: I know it’s you and me baby, that make the world go round…And my jaw is a little tense and my back is curved and a little sore. Here I am baby come and take me. The left earpiece of my headphones is tinny and thin, it might be broken. Or is that the way the music has always sounded? And my breath is up in my ribs and chest. And I couldn’t quite remember what my clock said when I began this free write so I’m trying to arbitrarily decide what minute I will end on.

Lots of thinking there. Lots of sensing. That’s okay (see the thing about my own mind is I have to include lots of little “that’s okay”s or “it’s alright my friend”s in order to not punish myself for something I’m noticing). Nevertheless, I can notice it and tell myself it’s okay and I feel like it is allowed. I am allowed. There are feelings of warmth in my chest today, rolling through me like low banks of clouds. Warm clouds. Or rather a bank of warm air rolling through the desert and up the foothills of the mountains.

Rebecca and I went walking yesterday and the fields were yellow straw. There were cows on the horizon line, and sheep, lying down in rivers of hay. I remarked that it looked like “a Bible painting.” It brought to mind the phrase that the wolf and the lamb will lie down together in the Promised Land. It felt like walking through the Promised Land.

And Rebecca and I like Hansel and Gretel trying to find our way through the woods to get to the fields. Me leading her, grinning, to dead ends and cul-de-sacs of sharp branches. Her wondering aloud when we’re going to find the right spot. Helping each other jump off posts.

And all the while, in the distance those Rocks. They stand up tall, like elephants as always, in the mist. We couldn’t see them from our place skirting the edges of the fields, but I had seen them the morning before from the bathroom window, looming in the mist. And I saw them on my run. And we saw them coming back from our run in Mom’s old Lexus.

The Lexus: blue-purple, deep wine colored. It’s been around for decades, decades. I believe she got it in 2008 or 9, I vaguely recall having it down in Los Angeles at some point to help me with a quarter at UCLA when I had to do lots of moving, and lots of props schlepping; the last quarter, it seems to me, when I was working on Henry and still going to school and still HATING MY LIFE.

The music, Jason Forrest, just got jaunty and driving.

Jason Forrest – 10 Amazing Years – this isn’t the one but it’s close

I like it. A breakbeat. And then on comes the Flaming Lips. Summertime.

The Flaming Lips – It’s Summertime

This one harkens me back all the way to the summer I’m talking about, actually probably 2010. After Midsummer. After Titus. After a rarified (that’s the word of the moment for me) period when I felt like I could harness the momentum of group creativity and drive my big wheel onto the airport tarmac and fly. What a metaphor / not metaphor(??)

But this song also reminds me of sitting in the basement at Cornelia, folding clothes and listening to this mix I was making for Jac. I wanted to find songs to comfort her; to softly deprecate myself; to express the truly mellow feeling of good will, and sadness. And I guess to tell us that both of our emotions were okay.

I made that mix but I don’t think she ever listened to it. What can you truly say to someone once you’ve broken their heart? “Hey, it goes both ways – my heart is broken too.” But who cares when you’re actively breaking theirs? Yours is a self-warranted casualty. And that’s the way it is, and that’s why you have to let them float on down the river by themself. You have to let them process – and hate you a bit, and learn to love themselves again. The same thing, incidentally, you have to do.

So. That all flowed through my head this morning.

William Blake – Dante Running from the Three Beasts – 1824-7

Prophecies of the Past

Listening Then – Bob Dylan – Political World

Bob  Dylan is not wrong. We live in a political world. My meditation app (Headspace) has suggested I look at rhythm and flow today (rhythm + flo), in the interest of being mindful of what I do. Not to leap through it and get to the next thing. Nor to dither and avoid the next thing. What am I doing here? I am crafting a sacred creation ceremony. Today I listen to Bob Dylan as I write. Every morning I do a dance to unlock my creativity. Then I place an image in my mind from the Farm or the surrounding environs and bow to the Lord, to God, whoever They are, and thank Them and worship Them. That means that I am both in awe of Them and thankful for Them.

That is my morning.

Then I sit at the computer and I do one of these free writes. All of this coming after my morning meditation. So now I sit here. And I’m reminded that yesterday I had a thought about writing and creation. It’s not independent from my life, there’s another word I’m looking for, not distinct, it’s not…self-contained (I suppose works well enough). It’s just a chance for me to slip out some words as I live, as I continue to live, as I always do. The technique of writing is practicing how thoughts go from my head out of my fingertips and onto the page. It is a technique, it is a craft, and it is an Act. It’s not a standalone Act however, where the rest of my life disappears and it’s – DISCREET! yes – that’s the word I was looking for – it is not discreet from what came before it and what comes afterwords. It is simply the me who is transitioning, changing, from thing to thing practicing the craft of letting some words out. And part of that is storytelling. And storytelling performs a function. Storytelling is an act of transference, the story starts in one human (though it belongs to far more than that, perhaps the whole human race no matter how you slice it) and is transferred to another. So the craft of writing, creating, and storytelling is in service of transference, from the author or creator to an audience or listener or receiver. And how the story gets from point A to point B…the methods are as infinite as there are combinations and groups of people. Even if I were telling myself the story, the technique would be as infinitely varied as I have moods and states, which is infinite.

So Bob Dylan (Bod Dylan) is singing Ring them Bells. But that is the Bob Dylan who just came from Knocked out Loaded or Down in the Groove or maybe even Empire Burlesque (I can’t remember) and the Bob Dylan (Baby Dylan) going towards Under the Red Sky. Or even more genuinely, the Bob Dylan going from whatever was happening to him at the end of the eighties, what he was doing, and what will happen to him and what he will do in the nineties. This is a divorcee. This is a man who was the spirit and hope of Folk. This is the man who betrayed them all, called Judas on stage. And now he’s what in his early to late forties? And he’s releasing the energy he has in a recording session, both speaking from something that he wrote beforehand, or will shape afterwards in post, but is also raw material coming out of wherever and however he is in that moment. And it’s all important.

Where was I going with that? Where am I going? What am I trying to say?

Well, that I’m sitting here channeling raw existence into words, experience, process into words. I’m coming from the patio by the pool where I was just waiting to pour boiling water, painstakingly, over a coffee filter stuffed with ground Peets coffee, black as night soil. And there was a low hanging roof of fumes from the nearby fires hanging over me. The self that sat here meditating and pulled himself from the moment into thought and then noticed the moment again and then wondered if he was doing it wrong. The me that noticed the strange chugging sound from outside and let it in and wondered what it was and then brought my awareness back to how my body feels lower on the left side than the right side. The me who stood up and danced to Political World and did little tiny steps, and enjoyed the energy that burst up through me, joyful. The me that heard Bob Dylan’s voice and remembered how it was getting so smoky at this phase. The me who is now letting out my experience, trying to capture this context, also trying to tell the story of my morning to myself, as I listen to Bob Dylan’s Man in the Long Black Coat. The me that reflects that it reminds me of Tom Waits. The me that likes Bob Dylan’s cigarette tray voice. The me that likes the curling guitar and the mystery and oomph of this song. And the me who will soon go to look for Rebecca, wondering if we will continue to get along as we have, a little trepidatious that I will create pain and strife. The me that will eat outside and perhaps who will have had too much coffee and feel his head thick and fuzzy and sharp and the man that has too much energy. Currently the man looking at the party glass lamp by me with a vaguely Aztec pattern and a glass surface like folded, aquamarine skin. The me that wonders if my Mom brought this lamp down here. That thinks the aquamarine glass looks like swords and likes it and who is reminded of the dagger by my old bed with the naked woman enfolded in a dragon, the dagger I’m too afraid to bring out to the Farm in case anyone ever has the chance to use it. Long ago driving roads with Ryan around the curve of the Marin Headlands thinking the road is like a roller coaster and listening to Fleet Foxes, high. The me that one day will be in a room with papers and cigar smoke sitting in a reddish armchair. The me that will meet one of my heroes and shake his hand and look into his eyes and smile and feel like a true human.

Prophecies of the Past.

Marc Chagall – The Painter and his Double – 1981