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| 07:51pm 06/11/2009 |
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mood:  contemplative
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I believe that everything good in us is always there. Always. Not that it's sitting in the front desk waving its hand for the answer every time, but it never goes away. It's only the not-good parts of us that ebb or rise, that we let loose, contain or tame; I won't even call these "bad" parts of us, because bad is so subjective when it comes to personality, but of course so is good. We know what we embrace in others, but judgment calls only at inopportune moments at times, and sometimes we make barbed wires out of other people's clothes hangers. That's what you get for rummaging around in others' closets, no matter how far they've been opened. Some people make friends with their monsters and it's no business of yours to go messin' with a truce.
But yes, yes, everything good in us remains. Like I wrote a dear friend, everything positive that we are is always there and accessible inside us, no matter how many times you or I or we or us screw up. No matter how many times we make pets of our other parts. No matter how many times we shine the light on other things. No matter how many times we give center stage, or at least the better part of the internal dialogue, over to those characters in our heads and hearts that wouldn't know a center if it sat on them.
Everything good in you always remains. |
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| 09:16am 04/11/2009 |
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mood:  waiting music: Tori Amos - Winter
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It takes an outlaw woodpecker armed with sticks of dynamite to understand the importance of poets and a girl with stolen red hair to sing it straight, when you use funhouse mirrors for reflective purposes.
I could be the butterfly you wished your morning to, if you'd drop your nets you've got me tangled in. The trouble with eyes, is the opening of them. They shutter moments of every minute and if your focus is out, sometimes the picture framed becomes another story altogether.
Is this, then, the plot surrender? The segue into separate sequels? The dock moment where the seagulls sing their soliloquy? (Oh alliteration, you fine friend, you soothe my soul; I feel the womb must be alliterative in its rhythms.)
The minute before you break through the finish line, the moment before the other side shines through, is always the place where you most gasp for air. Consider me the biased cheerleader, but you can do this.
If you decide to quit, I don't know what I'm going to do with these pom-poms. |
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| 09:19am 24/10/2009 |
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mood:  awake
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I'm doing 5-item coherent storyline challenges that were inspired by Abby's first, so if anyone wants to contribute 5 items that I have to write a coherent storyline about, let me know. I've got the stories posted on my facebook site, but I would post them here, of course, if it were your challenge. I like including people in my writing exercises, keeps 'em fresh. |
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| Welcome to Planet Twilight Zone |
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| 01:03pm 09/10/2009 |
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mood:  cynical
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....which has nothing to do with sexy sparkly vampires nor flying frozen turkeys.
I am still laughing and horrified all at once, but I just ran across this comment from John Podhoretz and he sums it up quite nicely:
I can’t agree with my colleagues here on CONTENTIONS that a) Barack Obama should reject the Nobel Peace Prize or b) be embarrassed by it. The Nobel Committee chose him wisely because he does, in fact, represent the organization’s highest ideals.
He is an American president queasy about the projection of American power. He is an American president who rejects the notion of American exceptionalism. He is an American president eagerly in pursuit of legitimacy to be granted him not by those who voted for him but by those who do not cast a vote and who chafe at American leadership. It is his devout wish that America become one of many nations, influencing the world indirectly or not influencing it at all, rather than “the indispensable nation,” as Madeleine Albright characterized it. He is the encapsulation, the representative, the wish fulfillment, the very embodiment, of the multilateralist impulse. He is, almost literally, a dream come true for the sorts of people who treasure and value the Nobel Peace Prize.
I am so disgusted. |
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| 08:19am 09/10/2009 |
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mood: awake
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Last night I had a dream that I was living on a hill, surrounded by houses that were all each on their separate hill. Like candles on mountaintops. They dressed like a mix of medieval and now, rags and jeans, lace and sneakers, flowers in their hair and black fingernails. They smiled all the time. I was new and they were having a festival. They told me a name, it started with an "E" but I can't remember, it was in a different language. They told me that I needed an apple of some sort on me. The little girl had an autistic brother who had a felt apple pinned to him. He gave me a ring that was silver with a golden apple in the center of it. There was a huge fire burning in the fireplace in the living room and everything was made of brick and wood. We went outside and there were huge bonfires lit on the top of every hill and the stars and the moon still outshone them. The girl wove wildflowers in my hair and we joined hands and went dancing down the hills and up the hills and around the hills and around every bonfire, and as we went more people joined in. The night deepened and the people's shadows began to look like animals dancing alongside them. Then people began to dance off in pairs; they put on animal masks that matched their shadows and began undressing each other. I wandered back off to the girls house and stood in the doorway of the living room, watching the giant fire burn with a red red heart with the autistic brother. The girl came back all flushed with heat and asked if I had found a mate. I told her no, that I didn't know I was supposed to. She said that wouldn't be a problem, that tonight the women had all the power and could have any man they wanted, as many men as they wanted, as they were drawn to them. Then she asked if I had burned my apple. I said no, I didn't know I was supposed to do that either, why would I do that? Then she told me I should throw the ring in the fire right away and burn everything else I was wearing and touched that day, it was the ritual. I told her that I wouldn't, and that in fact, I would have my own ritual wherein I would construct the means to keep the spirit of the night in the ring. I said it was all about asking. She got very excited at this, and said she'd never heard of such a thing but it sounded lovely. She still said I needed a mate while the fires burned, and she said I could share hers, that he was a lovely wolf. We went over to her mate's house with two other women, who promptly fell asleep in the man's bed, with their arms wrapped around each other and their foreheads touching. The girl told me I should be ready to step in front of him once he came up from the basement and out the door, as if I didn't he would walk into the bedroom and become involved with the two women in there instead. I had to pee really badly, so I used this odd porcelain toilet that was placed against the far stone wall of his living room. I heard him coming up the stairs so I stood up without flushing and pulled my jeans up, and the girl said he wouldn't mind that I was urinating, that animals naturally use that for attraction. I was topless and my hair was falling down over my breasts and brushing against my back and I had pulled my jeans up but they weren't zipped. Her mate came up from the basement and out the door and looked at me wide-eyed and then zipped my jeans' zipper up and walked to the girl and asked why I was here. She looked curious and slightly confused and said she had come to share him with me and how did he not pull to me as to the others. He was watching me with these dark eyes and said there was something different about me, that I was holding my power in and he didn't understand how. Then the little autistic brother appeared and he said I was a sorceress, and I threw my head back and laughed and laughed because I understood that I had contained the night within myself and was a whole different ritual. The little autistic boy said I wouldn't mate until I had found a wolverine because I had a darker, more violent need to absorb, that I had to match my gold fire with a dark red shadow so that the heart could be reached. Then the dream switched and we were all in some sort of lab facility with cream walls and caged door elevators that resembled freight lifters. There were armed security officers everywhere. I asked the girl's mate what we were doing here and he said this was where they held the wolverines. We split up then, and as I was going up in the elevator, it opened, and I was facing a female officer with her gun drawn. I put my hand out and grasped her gun, smiled, looked at her and said "No." and she blinked at me and then gave a small smile and holstered her weapon and stepped back. I continued up a floor. I realized I was a sorceress and hugged my night to me, feeling my power grow with the passage of hours. The elevator opened again and the girl was there, and her features had an animalistic overlay to them, like a dream over reality, as though she too were growing in her power through the evening. I told her I knew where to go and she said we must be careful as the elevators had someone waiting at every door. I shook my head at her and smiled and said we were climbing. Then I went to the back of the elevator and grasped the wire mesh in my hands and began scrambling up it with the ease of walking. The girl looked at me for a moment, then began to climb after me, and after a few feet she was laughing silently, gleeful at the freedom of movement. She said I was pulling her in my wake, she could feel it. We skipped our hands up until we reached the top of the elevator shaft and then swung ourselves up and over and out through a work tube onto the roof. Her mate was there, looking confused, saying he didn't know how he got there. One minute he was in the basement, the next on the roof. He seemed afraid of me, while the girl was smiling so big the moon reflected off her teeth. She danced around me in little circles and clapped her hands and asked what now. I told her we would wait, that the wolverine was coming. The female guard I had talked to would bring him. Then we all sat down with our knees together on the roof, under the moon, and waited.
I woke up at 748am from this; it took me forever to fall asleep last night, it was so hot, I was sweating and my hair and the sheets were sticking to me. I don't know why I didn't get up and turn the air on, but instead I lay there, turning my head on the pillow, listening to the sounds of the night life outside my window, trying to identify animals and insects and the random passing automobile from far down the road. I will probably need a nap today at some point...and some Debussy. |
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| 07:34pm 07/10/2009 |
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mood:  accomplished
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I have, indeed, ruined myself with this bread baking business. I made one sandwich after eating the last of My First Loaf Ever, and I put it on the normal Honey Wheat I would get at the store, and it was so....whatever. There was no romance to that sandwich; its baked DNA and my tongue DNA did not happily waltz together whispering sweet nothings. It was like having a dinner with an old flame and feeling all awkward because, really, it wasn't them, they were still the same, but you couldn't keep the thought and sensory input of the feel and taste of the other out of your mind all evening. When this happens, it's best to just call the whole thing off and relegate them to fond memories.
So...I baked a loaf of Whole Wheat today...and put some butter on that first slice (after the first pure bite, of course)...and I feel like I could argue the "man can not live on bread alone" maxim, at least for the life of a loaf. So now I can make sandwiches again! Hurray!
I also made some pumpkin bread sprinkled with walnuts and almonds this past weekend, and then last night I made some hodgepodge sort-of casserole-type dish from a pack of bowtie pasta, some steamed broccoli, some broccoli&cheese soup w/ 1/3 cup of milk, 2 grilled chicken breasts chopped up, some breadcrumbs I made by bashing up some organic whole wheat mini-toasts with my hands and some organic shredded mild cheddar cheese - I had no idea what I was doing but it actually turned out delicious.
I think I'm getting the hang of this...I knew there was kitchen witchery in my blood. Tomorrow, I am attempting my first steaks...sirloin marinated in coffee, that's right, with homemade garlic mashed potatoes with a coffee dressing. I love how those little cozies put recipes in the back of them, tasty! Steaks are intimidating to me, because if there's anything you always hear people bitch about, it's someone fucking their steak up. So I've got my fingers crossed. |
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| 08:48am 04/10/2009 |
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mood: cranky
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Last night, drunk on red wine and chocolate and letters and slinking off to sleep when my grandmother tells me at half a sneeze to midnight, that she wants to go to church the next morning and pressures me to come with her. I barely refrained from snarling as I've told her I don't do church, especially when notified at the end of evening, (actually especially ever never), but that I would gladly take her.
Then I fell asleep and dreamed I was stuck in a closet battling an anaconda with a nun's face that was trying to swallow the world. I kept tripping over toys on the floor. Then I woke up at around 4am and couldn't get back to sleep and tossed and turned, so now I am up and cranky.
It is a full harvest moon today, though, and maybe I can run outside at 1am and see it at its fullest. I can get some coffee while she's in church and sit under the rain-dripping eaves and soothe my hackles. |
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| 09:46pm 03/10/2009 |
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mood:  tipsy
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I am in love with the written word again, meaning, I am in love with my hands full of instruments of writing. Maybe it's all this fresh air or the red wine I've smuggled into the house and hidden away. A heathen among the baptists I am full of confession. I write letters to people who can not write back, my sweetheart girls, those kiddos. (I would write to you, but I do not ever know when you will be home. And how shall I address you?) I save things in my head to give away through my fingers. Bone kite tails and squirrels bordering the edge of sunlight survival. I am smaller and bigger than I began and I am still turning under the wheel of the sky.
I do not want to type. I want to draw. But I love you. So hello. |
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| 01:58pm 29/09/2009 |
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mood: calm
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I am to be free tomorrow from about 8am to 12pm, as my aunt is coming over with my cousin for him to mow this football field they call a yard. It's supposed to be beautiful autumn weather with a high in the 70s and lots of sunshine so I think I'm going to pack myself a simple lunch in my cooler and go find somewhere in the sun to write, after I run a few errands. It'll be nice to be alone and anonymous; I can't stand it when people are tracking my whereabouts at all times. I will have to get up much earlier tomorrow morning in order to get my stretches done in peace and to get my run in before my free time arrives, especially since the remainder of the day when I get back is going to consist of me waiting on my grandmother's beauty shop appointment and then us going to the grocery store, if she feels up to it. I would rather take her home first and go myself as that's the only way I can guarantee we get quality food in the house, rather than nasty crap food that I can't bear to eat, and I need to be able to eat comfortably or I just won't eat at all. I am armed with ingredient lists for pumpkin bread and homemade spicy oven fries and will plan out some other meals for the remainder of the week so we don't get too far off course. I am glad she's making an effort to drink more water and calculate her sodium, though. She was being quite obstinate and in denial about things for a while there. I think she gets scared and defensive when she can't remember or recall events regarding herself that I bring up the happenings of. She's also reading more, now, rather than zoning out on the tv all day, which is good for her brain and good for my sanity, as I cannot stand the constant drone and shrieking of that chatterbox in the background all day. I finally found the cord for my camera so I have pictures to show and tell at some point this week. The freezer is finally cleaned out and Mammaw has promised not to keep freezing enough food for an army, since it just inevitably ends up in the trash. Next project is to go through all of my great-aunt's possessions and sort out the "for family" items from the "give away" items, and to finish straightening up the garage. I'm still a little teeter-totter right now, but after a month and a half I'm much more centered and feeling more grounded again. It's all about testing new ground to find your foundation. Cheers. |
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| 09:35am 28/09/2009 |
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mood: cheerful
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I made my first loaf of handmade, homemade bread last night...I think I may never buy bread, again....I can't promise that I won't buy bread again for the purpose of convenience, but I'm in love with my bread and the making of it. It's so damn rewarding!
I made white bread with unbleached bread flour and organic sugar and milk and butter so it's all wonderful goodness and deliciousness; I can't wait for My Heart to show me how to make homemade butter because that will just be the tops for it. Next I am going to make wheat bread and pumpkin bread. Oh! and when I can get to can and preserve my own fruits too, ohhh that will be the life!
Between Ruth, the pomegranate seeds and the country I feel like I'm slipping into being a writer housewife...I can only laugh at it all. I will be going back to school for genetics & psychology, though, hopefully by end of next year. Got to get my debt down a little as I never like to get up into double-digits of debt, really, so I won't add school-debt until this lease-break is paid off. In the interim, I'm going back over basics, like math 'n biology 'n chemistry 'n such, so that when I get back in the class I'll be on top of things.
And you know what I'm going to make after some more bread successes....a pie! A pie with handmade, homemade crust, yessirree. Barefoot and in the kitchen, that's right. |
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| 06:53am 25/09/2009 |
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mood: excited
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It's official, tickets are purchased - on June 08th, 2010 I leave for Anchorage, Alaska and don't return until June 15th. :) Part of the trip will be spent camping out in Denali National Park.
Freaking awesome! |
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| Spiders and Silverfish |
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| 01:06pm 23/09/2009 |
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mood: calm music: Charlie Parker - A Night in Tunisia
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If I'm not sharing my sheets with one I'm shaking the other out of my shoes, here's some countryland blues. I have my wolf band design almost completed and I'll be getting that with some wreck money whenever it comes around (it'll go around). I have wild horses and glaciers and frontier land on next year's agenda, and one never knows what other countries may dance on the horizon. I am borderline and growing and I've been set loose in the kitchen so there will be homemade, handmade bread next week and Favors will be leaving the desert. I had a pomegranate ceremony last night for the first day of the falling season, because we should always be thankful for the shadows that teach us the surety of our own steps. Sight is not the only way to see where you are going. |
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| The end of Madness and Soft Light |
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| 09:45pm 20/09/2009 |
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mood: contemplative
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It's the capitalization that makes the character. I seem to always forget that the stories I carry in my back pockets will sneak into my sleep and turn my vision into paintings if I neglect them. You should see the tree of life in your lap when you're sitting. I'll show you.
I also forget how much pain is mixed with the pleasure of pulling words. Every syllable sparking some reality, no matter how brief, and in complete disregard of what dimension it forms into. Art as science, language as math and space as architecture. The man in black says it's all about size (oh how big of you) and truly we are all, at some point, the measure of what we hold in our hearts/hands/minds/eyes. The desert don said that fear, clarity and pride are the first three natural enemies, each slaying the other in order until you learn to surrender without surrendering - acceptance without being burdened, is another way of looking at it, I suppose. Or maybe learning how to swallow the fire without being burned.
Either way, growth begins with scars and ends with a dusting off and new steps; it is only painful because we are awakening that which has been asleep. |
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| 06:06pm 19/09/2009 |
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Some months, the pain of giving birth to nothing almost feels like an illness. |
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| 11:38pm 18/09/2009 |
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To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle. - Walt.Whitman |
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| 11:13pm 18/09/2009 |
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mood: drifting music: Angelo Badalamenti - The Edge of Love Soundtrack
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It's amazing how stringed things seem almost to speak a language we could understand with words, rather than with ears and hearts. I was thinking today, on the way home to drugged napping, that roads always lead to someplace if you're looking, don't they? I think perhaps it is crucial to split the ideal away to the human core as swiftly as possible, if one is truly searching for truth. How can we have any freedom if we don't carve out the room to grow? Khalil Gibran said that all of our pain was just the physician inside us healing our sick selves, or something of the sort. I have a hard time loving the humanity of you, because it is what I find so heartbreakingly, breathtakingly beautiful at all times. Those flawed moments of lurching about on the deck of resolve and reason. I think poets, artists, those souls that spend their breath freely on the stormy seas and rolling hills of sunshine alike, often forget that others mostly travel flat. We hang onto the ropes as the waves roll over our little life ship, swinging in the lurches, sometimes half-drowning, sometimes half-blind with the salt crystallizing in our lashes, sometimes terrified and bitter yet always exhilarated at the moment. We see the moment and cannot help but be enthralled, just as we cannot help but to be overwhelmed and sometimes distracted by the way each moment mirrors every other moment that was, is or will be. I would argue that, really, if you looked hard enough, there are no perfect reflections.
I wonder what it must be, as a person, to not see the diamonds in the death of drowning. I wonder if my dissection might not seem too distant. I wonder...it is almost like I cannot love the you being human while I am being human myself. As though, my beingness contains too much to let yours fully in, so for a moment I empty my cells of their soul and try to feel all your mirrors reflecting through me. I can love you as a poet, the human in me is too terribly afraid; yet the human would stay and the poet may never remain.
I belong to no continent, so who will settle me...and where shall my hands go without flying... |
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| 11:10pm 15/09/2009 |
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mood: contemplative
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Lately, I've been holding Persephone's hand a lot. |
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| 10:10am 07/09/2009 |
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mood: awake music: Sonja Sohn - The Agony and Ecstasy of Divine Discontent
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“It is wrong to think that love comes from long companionship and persevering courtship. Love is the offspring of spiritual affinity and unless that affinity is created in a moment, it will not be created for years or even generations.” - Khalil.Gibran |
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| 06:41pm 06/09/2009 |
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mood:  blank
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Watching the rain come down has been the highlight of my day, and it continues to stay, so what better time to tell a story...
Once upon a time there was a little girl who could feel what anything was feeling, even if it wasn't supposed to have feelings, as some people would say. She kicked rocks on her way home, and when she was tired of kicking them, she put them in her pocket until she could give them a home in her own yard. It was the least she could do, having stolen them so violently from home to begin with. She did this for years, and the rocks not only forgave her, they nestled in her palms and sung building songs as she built bridges and streets, moats and towers, walls and rooms, all for herself. As she got older, the rocks slipped into her language and became stones for throwing; they encrusted themselves in the folds of her fingers and formed fists. Her thoughts became filled with the unwanted opinions of pebbles which oftentimes caused avalanches when she wasn't in agreeance with them, and she would lay on the floor in the dark until the rattling had ceased. One day, she noticed she couldn't see the sun. Over the years she had gathered so many rocks around her that she was shelled in herself. She walked to the walls and placed her hands and lips upon them and whispered for release, but the rocks wouldn't let her go. They said the least they could do, after removing her so violently from her home in the sun, was to give her a place in their own land. The girl wept as she realized that she had been foolish to believe replacement homes can take the place of one's own. She told the rocks they were unfeeling, after all, and they agreed and turned deaf, so that she hadn't even their cold company anymore. Tired of crying for crying's sake, she wiped her eyes and shook her tears off onto the rocky foundation upon which she stood. At that moment, a trickle of water began to well and seep up through the cracks, and little by little, the earth relinquished its part in the conspiracy, and the rocks began to tumble apart from each other, until finally the sun shone through to touch her face. Grateful and wiser, the little girl stumbled, stubbing her toes over her broken home and emerged onto the grass. Sinking down to sleep in the sun, she realized that it had only been a hall of echoes, after all, and as she slept, tiny pebbles fell from her mouth with every breath, until her throat and her head and her hands were clear. She woke up the next morning, feeling lighter than ever before, and went back home. Sometimes, she still kicks a rock as she walks, just to test herself, but she no longer puts them in her pockets and they no longer speak to her. She no longer borrows other homes to build her own.
The end. |
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| 08:42pm 30/08/2009 |
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mood: tipsy music: Massive Attack - Angel
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Truth be told, or already known, I'm far greedier when it comes to girls. Everything about movement reminds me of them - the curves I round on the road, the wind across my skin that feels like whispering lips, the scent of shampoo that I have buried my face in. I miss My Heart like crazy, and I miss everything about his touch, but as time passes a subtle urge for hands up skirts and kisses on pulse lines creeps in. The same curve My Heart loves on me is also one my hands wish to slide themselves around and over on you. I want to dance with you in underground basement clubs in Athens, where I smile and you tell me I'm a dangerous woman and our hips figure eternity's mark. I like the easy way I make you blush but we never do anything about it. When I get back...when I get back we may have to do something about that. |
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