about the walking

Being generally quiet is going generally well. I am cooking for myself, which may sound ridiculous but it is huge for me--I only ever cook for two. Nothing fancy. Tonight was a spinach omelet with a side of sliced apples. I'm getting better at flipping the eggs but it was not agreeing with me today and I had to use the spatula. Shame on me.

Fitness has become a major priority. I am doing two-a-days and biking every day the weather agrees, which has been every day. The weather here has been freaky consistent for nearly a week and a half here. Cloudy and crappy in the morning, sometimes misty or rainy, and in the afternoon, beautiful. In the evening the clouds and some wind roll in. It's nice to have this kind of weather in winter. When I start to miss things in Japan, I remember being a shut-in for nearly five months because I hated the cold, and then I'm okay.

There is remodeling going on in the house, and last night I was emptying a chest so we could move it, and I found a box labeled "Stacy letters," which I assume are letters from family and friends to my parents after my older sister died. I never got to meet her. I opened the box and saw the loose papers and envelopes, if they had been organized, I did not notice how, the smell of old paper, this is a ghost I have felt I have no right to disturb. She was and then was not before I came into the world. If a void exists, I have been maneuvering around it without much notice. But it is a name you do not hear in my family, except on the rare occasion. Then shortly. I closed the box without disturbing.

I play with old love like a loose tooth. But mostly I just take that out to the coffee place (new) and write in a story/film about a woman and a little girl. It is coming slowly, but it is coming. I drink tea these days. And I walk across the parking lot to the bookstore instead of driving a hundred yards like the regular folk do. I miss the walking.

e-lotus eater: how does one enjoy quiet

I'm getting a little tired of the status quo, as is my wont. I'll be checking out for a bit, maybe a week. Quiet still terrifies me after all these years, but I'm going to attempt some. Last time I really got any was back at Craig Place, before I had a bed and was sleeping quietly on the floor. The dreams were insane, and I could swear I heard voices passing through the strands of space and time, brief snippets of telephone conversations, a difficult word between a mother and daughter. Not enough to give me context, but enough to convince me I was going nuts. I had to add noise, and I never really went back. Maybe once or twice, and it doesn't count when someone else is there with you. We'll see how it goes.

circles that make lines

I still wear the braided leather belt I got as a gift that year. It didn't fit me then, but now it is perfect. As if you could purchase what I would become.

I drink my coffee slowly in the morning, and it makes rings around the interior of the cup. Some thin and difficult to distinguish, others dark and rich. Like the rings of a tree, or around one of the gas giants. But we know these to be years, and ice. Mine are merely the amount of time spent with words.

I found the band in the garage, and since then it has moved from the coin pocket of my jeans to the dark, dusty surface of a desk, to the index finger on my right hand, and back again to my pocket. Those things we carry, whether or not we have them, it is so difficult to find their proper place.

I made a line in the dirt around the fire. The salt from the meats would seep into the earth and attract skunks. I didn't know it at the time. I only wanted to cook for you.

We slept among bees and arachnids, insects without proper names, things crawling out of the earth, and in this bed we made love quietly. And when the spider attacked my foot that morning, I waited to see if a red ring would appear on the skin.

We are both of us hurling through space, in orbit around the sun. I wonder if this might give us someplace to begin.

(a valentine)... It is or was a wide world

that, according to Augustine, necessitates the misery of just wars. And spreads our friends so thin upon the face of it that bonds do necessarily break.

But this widening world may also be like a lover, embarrassed over the putting on of a few pounds.

That's just more of you to love, baby.

Here's hoping that the universe just keeps on expanding.

Watch it in... (basketball, baseball, billiards, merging onto a highway, or tossing bicycle cards into hats)

When I was fifteen I took driver's ed at Drive-Right in the Crossroads mall. One of the teachers' was, as I recall, a big outspoken gentleman named Zandavar (sp?). He taught the handbook like he was a life coach. At night, you don't look at the headlights, just like when you get on the highway, you don't look for the cars you need to avoid, you always want to look at the space you want to be in, because wherever it is you're looking, that's where you're going to go.

Sports for me, as a kid, were an excuse for me to focus on my imperfections and internalize everything. My dad sometimes took me to the park with our gloves and a bat. He'd pitch to me and hit me pop-flies to chase down. When you get the bat solidly on the ball when it's right over the plate, it feels great. Your body fits right into the universe, takes its proper place, and it's exhilarating, peaceful, there's a zen about it. But when you don't quite get it, when you swing hard at the ball instead of swinging in time with it, even an ok hit jars your arms, feels wrong, and do it enough times, that's when you and your dad get into shouting matches. There is a wrath felt in a flawed technique.

I could stand by myself at the basketball court and work on my form, but it never seemed to help to put my hands in the right place or put the right arc on the ball, not nearly as much as seeing in my mind that ball going through the hoop. And whenever I'd look at the rim, I'd hit it. Didn't matter what my body was doing.

They say it's a mental game.

Games are supposed to teach us about life. As I sit trying to figure out what to write next, I look back at my previous posts and find myself looking at the rim, swinging too hard, feeling the threat of failure. It's an untenable position and I know it. Even this reflection is problematic. Catch-22 of course-correction: unless you know what you're doing wrong, you can't fix it, but if you look at the mistakes, you're probably just going to repeat them.

Beginning 20 seconds ago or so (see "beginnings") I'm swinging in time with the ball, watching it in the hoop, merging into the spaces between the cars. Hopefully my posts will reflect this, if I keep writing them. Halfway sure I will.

Dishes

How did this start? At the kitchen table in Pico Rivera, whenever one of my brothers or I belched during a meal, instead of "excuse me" we would say "dishes." I recall being there for the inception, and that it was an act both of defiance and compliance, a kind of compromise or recognition of stalemate. I also remember that it was finally accepted as a reasonable entry into the record of corrective manners. But that I can't recall its origins is troubling me. Memory being what it is--I am not a digital recorder--I have the stories I tell myself to comprise a version of reality. I don't have reality in my head. I have known this for some time, but I don't completely believe it.

what covers that terrific silence

It has been some time since I have attempted meditation as an aid to self-centering. I have never gotten too sophisticated with the practice, I have about three different methods I use, and I usually stay with it for no more than a month or two when I am doing really well. Recently feeling rather unfocused, I decided to try again, and found my mind much more resistant than usual. Counting breaths proved an arduous task. A briefly empty mind would be intruded upon with vivid images fraught with intense connections in memory, both wonderful and painful to revisit. I have been able to force myself through these moments into that quiet space, but after my sessions feel no such capacity to get these experiences out of mind. It's led to a kind of intellectual and emotional disengagement. I have not tried to quiet my mind with drinking, as has been one mode of the past, but have allowed myself to vegetate, as with television and chain movie-watching. It has been less an act of laziness than of self-preservation. But my brain feels like mush. I have been keeping with my fitness schedule and am pretty close on my nutritional goals, but it is time to allow some real quiet.

The truth is, I have been more heart-broken than I imagined I would. And I have not understood for years how to engage the world without an "other" with whom to coordinate some shared vision of things. Even in this, there has been intense unfocus and confusion. Whenever there are doldrums, they are always accompanied by ghosts of the woman, the only one who ever really mattered to me, and this has ruined relationships and hindered my ability to process conflict or difficulties. It seemed important to me to face this reality of late, to accept that I may never be done with it. But I have a tendency to wallow. To then become upset by my wallowing, and subsequently to hide from everything.

But it is the misplacement of this struggle that has caused the most mischief, I think. It does not belong at the center of things. It holds far too much sway with me. This along with my loss of religion in my early twenties--this is becoming more interesting to me. Having spent my youth believing that I was engaged in a meaningful narrative with a glorious conclusion, and later having come to the conclusion that this was a ridiculous thing, my lack of a clear narrative now renders a lot I do or strive for meaningless. It is less a flaw in my philosophy, I think, than a byproduct of yet another great loss. It would seem no greater loss could exist than the loss of one's god. Even if there were no real thing to lose, the thing certainly seemed real, for all purposes was real inasmuch as it effected thought and action.

So I find myself swimming around in an abstract fish bowl. I have an intellectual attachment to individual meaning and morality, but long for those youthful days of deity-dictated absolutes. Perhaps this is the usual dilemma--that struggle between childhood simplicity and adult ambiguity--but I sense it very sharply. It is sometimes debilitating.

Even so, there must be some way of continuing on path (as I have previously defined or left undefined in parts) while honestly and forthrightly admitting these struggles, but also placing them properly on their right shelves. Letting the things in that deserve to be there as well. Not allowing things to inflate beyond reason and distract from the good parts, favorite kinds of silence. A concept once more of what I am seeking for its own sake, rather than for the sake of sharing with an "other."

We'll see.

Journaling at ghosts is fun sometimes.

Green Bay Wins Super Bowl, Millions Aware of Fact

I think Kevin best summed up my feelings on this year's result:

Thank you, team I don't really care about, for preventing a team I kind of didn't want to win the super bowl from winning it.

and that will be the end of that

with the last post, I've reached a limit, I think. fret not.

(Orange Dots On Electronic Maps) a Geography of Reliving

After a month
it is the sifting through old boxes, wiping dust, the coastal outline he draws on large white sheets of 32 point, a titanium band upon which he intends to fasten a compass

when in the course of automobiles
the grease of fingers on side and rear view mirrors form the ridges of two converging mountain ranges, above the treeline appears uniform and rigid from this height, but upon closer examination we find a pile of rubble, still jagged as tongues are often jagged, but he will clear his mind in order to plot his path to the inland city

where the skin makes a crust
they were thought to be the coagulating platelets near the corner of the mouth, peeling whenever he would speak a name, but they were small orange representations of a destination, she would sit quietly in bed, rocking with the ocean, receding

among the questions posed by a mirror
the interior landscapes are varied, the north bearing freckles about the nose, the southern regions were the beginnings of callouses, a lip upon the eastern shoulder, that city, we hear its pulsing, but are not meant to enter, if he was intended to hide from such thoughts, it was not made clear to him in the academy


that recalled places are neither living nor ghost
walk up the street and face in the direction of the italian restaurant, you will see a marquis on your left, a university to your right, the ocean is behind you, breaking on the rocks of Norman coasts, it is obvious that you have been here before, you are supposed to grieve for it, but it has been too long, and so you take photos of seals, bloated and beached, and grieve for them instead, it is an incessant narrative, and so you are less sad than annoyed

it is all right, there is nothing even here
she spends the morning sitting in the lagoon collecting smooth stones to line up on the towel, and afterward vanishes, at first it seems we are meant to hate her, next that we must mourn her, and finally that we must pretend to have forgotten her, now it seems fitting to admit that she was loved, and that he had played an assistant's role in the disappearing act,

and lamps are dim beneath hotels
he tips a martini glass in the cuban club, spilling a line of shattered ice onto the table, of course it is these familiar surroundings that have caught him looking elsewhere, if he is lost, then the best thing to do is to admit it,

though by the foundation a promise we will find no wisdom but this

The TV news man cracks his breath and says, We're moving into the unknown. I press a thumbnail into the cube of red clay and pivot my wrist to make a quarter-spiral. Where else would we be moving?

being and non-being horseshit

She is both a physicality and a sentience. A kiss and a memory of a kiss. And she is neither, and I am neither.

She is a dream and a cloud in the consciousness, and she is drunk on the sofa, rough green upholstery making lines on her cheek.

She is quiet in the car, but she boils. She asks questions, and in them are hidden the answers.

(Beginnings)

Said tells us that in order to classify a beginning, we must view it retrospectively, placing our perspective in both the present--after a thing has taken shape--and the past--the moment we later mark as a beginning. I cannot know I have begun until after I have already begun. Of course the phrase, "I will begin..." belies this notion a bit, but still a useful way of looking at path.

I might have said that the beginning of my journey occurred on the plane, or at the airport, or sitting at the bar at Mon. Or else with the end of the long living arrangement, or with my desire to travel and teach English, the germ of which sent me to France to study that Summer. Or the tour I took with my grandfather, the decision in high school to resist Spanish in favor of French. The early resistance to common paths... and so on into the oblivion of discerning what might be my earliest memory, what factors conspired to give me that faculty, all the way back to the evolution of life on earth; the moment of creation; beyond.

Sitting with coffee in a delicate white cup, ceramic butterfly, a fiction of lessons learned on the tips of my fingers, such reductions seem as if they might have moved forward a thousand million different ways, and could not constitute a consistent explanation for a present state of things. How many reasons have I listed, depending on the time of day, for speaking harshly to you? Never lying, but also never quite correct. There is a cognitive dissonance in my understanding of motivation. Would I prefer just to say that I am sorry? To try not to do it again.

My desk needs dusting. I found under it a journal, misplaced, in which I located the process of a song I wrote about a year. I had sworn I'd written it earlier. And in which the daily struggle of relating to myself after I have been altered, even smothered, by a loss, seem not too different from those I faced this morning. Do I always wake and think of such things, or am I capable of distracting myself for periods?

And it is cold enough for snow. It makes San Antonio quiet. Sleepy. It makes me into silences. I found an echo of that time, and it carried all the way through. I was left in the end, empty and tired. I no longer wish to pretend that forward is a place I am moving. Because if I don't know where I began, the course is almost impossible to plot.

And for all of this I am truly grateful. How's that for dissonance.

bubble boy genius

I was sitting with my coffee this morning, and had taken of the shelf a red paperback edition of The Upanishads, when the neighborhood lost power, due to an ice storm somewhat north of us. Rolling blackouts. It's been cold for two days, and we're resorting to emergency procedures. Texas is not well equipped for winter conditions, if that's truly what these are. We were without light or heat for about 45 minutes, and in this time there was much pacing about, wondering what use we might make of ourselves. A fire was built out back. I walked around closing off parts of the house that were not in use. My morning workout kept me warm. But I was immediately aware of how ill prepared I am to deal with suddenly elemental conditions. I give no thought to the light in my world, but when it is taken from me, I find I have been utterly dependent on it. It has been this way for me with such luxuries, language, relationships, transportation, the technologies of communication. What a delicate and spoiled nature I have developed. I have only passing notions of the harshness of this world.

Of course the lights popped back on and the sounds of clocks and motion-sensors resetting, the heater restarting, the buzz of my speakers suddenly coursing with juice again. This modern life restored. 45 minutes. That's all it was.

And the periodic shaking of the bubble is enough to remind me that I am alive.

Wrap Part 1 and The Routine of Routine

Part one of the documentary wrapped yesterday. Afterwards I met with our principle "character" for a beer. I had been concerned that the major reason I had wanted to be involved in the project had gotten lost in the shoot. And so had he, really. We discussed deeper motivations and then veered off course, talking about old times, eventually coming to a better understanding of what we were doing amid all the pseudodrama. The film currently lacks a clear vision, but I do not. The struggle is getting the two in line with one another. And the director.

I slept in today, rising around 9:00, and getting to my new routine a little late, the one I had no plan for last week. I can already see it working its way on me. But my brain lags.

Meeting for the new project tonight, and my spirits are high, though the piece still feels a little schizophrenic at the moment. I'm off to the store for some good food, then it's to the books and the page. Something will hit. I know it will.