9, 10

What do I have to say about 2009? I don’t know, man, it’s hard to go back to this time a year ago and see things the way I saw them, trace the trajectories through space and draw, with some acumen, anything notable or profound from the differences. It’s ridiculous to try and recall all of the things that shaped the moment I’m suspended in right now, do them the justice they so richly deserve, identify and thank them for delivering me here.

I rang in 2009 black-out smashed in Studio B, my point of recollection ending just before a long-line return to coat check but I have flashes of trying to remove my contact lenses in an abandoned upstairs bedroom of Dan’s Grandmother’s abandoned Staten Island home, fishing until my eyes bled only to realize I had already removed them. The next morning I was awoken by friends bearing a gallon of water and offering me half of their egg sandwich, which I graciously, and likely wordlessly, accepted. Friendship like you can’t put into words. Downstairs a Polish stranger was eating breakfast and drinking vodka at the stripped living room’s only table. We don’t know where he came from but no one seemed to mind. I drove us home and we recounted the night— peeing on some wall outside, expensive drinks, confusing rooms, crazy party people— listening to Abbey Road at a level barely audible.

The cold and white of winter saw me lower than I’d like to admit I go. I made a lot of mistakes and hurt a lot of feelings. I invented a lot of fictions and allowed myself a number of misunderstandings, spent a lot of time in paranoid semi-isolation. But it’s really not as dramatic as it sounds. I developed a bad jetskiing habit and wasn’t the most responsible with alcohol. But despite this, the friends that today I count among the finest anywhere (and I dare you to challenge me on it) provided a cushion of hands, pushing me back up, brushing me off, and shoving me back into the expanding chaos as if to whisper, “you are and will be better, friend.”

As the earth defrosted, I found my feet a cloud that would hold my weight. I did some of my best creative work and conducted some necessary distancing and re-proximation, an exercise, again, in realizing how wonderful the people around me are. It slowly became warm enough to uncocoon and, under a bed and in the morning springblue, tree bark or construction equipment underfoot, I met the most wonderful, beautiful girl by some inexact but, I’m convinced, divine circumstance. I spoke with less pretense and more humanity and began to understand some things.

Overseas, I moved in a surreal multiverse of literature and human interaction. I learned about philosophy and Mixed Martial Arts from intelligent, big-hearted artists and friends. I was cried on. I met a man who knows on Jesus Green and when he asked me who I am— I didn’t know. I had wine with distinguished scholars and waxed Ulysses with a Cambridge fellow whose favorite band is Talking Heads. James Joyce, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus manifested themselves a [new] Trinity within me and made me wonder, then, what constitutes soul. I watched sunrise from both the top of Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh, and on an exhausted hike through a sleeping London. I very foolishly climbed on buildings.

Fall 2009 was, without question, the most difficult and magnificent semester I have had the privilege of enjoying. Academics were tough. But my delightful, wonderful, ever-understanding and hilarious group of friends expanded incredibly— like gravity did some weird vacuum thing and allowed all the awesome in the available universe to collect in late night, bathroom floor conversations, balcony sessions, and beer pong standoffs. Beautiful friends shared their beautiful friends and we all danced under a paper lantern moon with smiles wide enough to sail across, into the alabaster ghostmorning.

So now here we are, I guess. Another year older each but aged so much more, chipped at and built up by the people we’ve bounced off of and into. We’ve moved like tokens on a game board but the stakes feel unimportant. We’ve come to share squares with different pieces and I sure feel all the better for it. We see the game from a perspective we couldn’t have previously and, as we continue into 2010, that much more revealed will, I’m confident, be wonderous and new and exciting. This is a thrilling beginning and a chance to take inventory of that, of those, we’ve been blessed by, carried by, relied on, needed, trusted, been unjustly hurt (because we love them so) by, surprised by, reduced to tears (the laughing ones) by, felt more intimately.

Thank you all, Happy New Year, and all that. Cool, whatever.

Things that are scary

1. My penultimate semester of college ends tomorrow.
2. My ultimate, final semester as an undergraduate begins shortly thereafter.
3. My graduate school applications have to be done by, like, Wednesday or something.
4. Graduate school applications.
4.5. Inevitable rejection.
5. The very idea of student teaching.
6. The future.
7. What am I doing?
8. That everything lately has been so so good lovely on lovely like peanut butter and jelly in a ziploc made personally, especially-- and I don't know if that I deal pretty well with change carries over into this space I've occupied, nestled into, hibernating.
9. Personal statements-- Who am I and why can't I manage two double-spaced pages on it?
10. The simultaneous inescapability and impossibility of being.
11. Bad habits.
12. Spiders.
13.

You so right

It's hard lately to tell what I am and what I am not doing right. Even harder to tell or even begin to know what I am and what I am not. I want to be everything to everyone but I get all stretched over this impossible surface and start to rip. And I'm not even doing a very good job of it.

I have some bad habits and worse, there are probably some I'm unaware of.

But also, I wouldn't change a thing.

Such brief blogs

I've been writing some songs again. It seems like every year I begin this project right around this time and abandon it just when I shouldn't. Perhaps this time I'll have the constitution. I'd like very much to put some sound in your ears.

Also, tumblr?

Blog more

Give me something interesting to read.

Just some goals

1. Make a concentrated effort not to blog while annoyed.
2. Forgive people for lying. They're probably just in the habit.
3. See more sunlight, do things in morning hours, be more productive, more awake.
4. Be a better friend and a better son.
5. Find a thing to fall in love with every day. Repeating things is okay.
6. Continue to work "I don't know" out of my life.
7. Be a student sometimes.
8. Don't worry so much about spreading myself too thin, I can be elastic if I allow it.
9. Read, write,
10. At the same time, appreciate everything around me that is so so good. I walk through blessed days lately. Maybe spend some time inventing words to share with the people I'm lucky to have arrived here, today, with.

Pisces

& so summer ends.

It's different herenow, but not unfamiliar. Not uncomfortable. Someone changed the water in my tank and meanwhile I particled around the spare, a season without ornamentation, tasting the other side and returning having seen the filter in pieces to be cleaned. We bought it and built it and let it bubble and bubble until it might as easily have been wind. First, see it. Second, the sea. Let's be true communicators this year. We are of the holy.

Tumbling

Some very brief highlights.

Grizzly Bear
Under the nearest lightning bug we pick at blades and speak like there isn't that human distance, like everything is simultaneous and close and these friends we've made are fingers. We fumble against each other as if by accident, but not.

Beastie Boys
I wonder if we're all thinking it when someone says, my god, this is so fucking awesome.

Phoenix
There's sugar in my shoes, or something. Rather than recall dances where my hands grappled themselves like comfortable strangers, I forget to be alone. I move because we all move and when I sing, we sing. The sound rolls and bounces us about, balloons bunched against a windy Sunday, and I consider between hey!s that this could be belonging.

Wilco
It's one of those guilts like, man I hope everyone is half as into this as I am, but when I can steal my face from the fury and chance it around I can't help but appreciate the reflected treetop pink in surrounding sunglasses, the blissful gathering calm and opening organ chords. And I wonder, if only for a moment, if this is back then. But as the clang and glide of guitars slip afternoon into evening our bodies are taken and those brown eyes dream and dream.

Band of Horses
All sun but a sliver cast by a lemonade umbrella, all sound and the dizzy of space, I am a lizard. There is a terrible local band playing a stage behind us, but if I turn my head this way and jab a cartilage earbud in I can just hear a shimmer through the trees. The seagreen is bed enough, the sky an expanse of time, music like its crackling over a homespun cassette and I am an X on a map, found.


Bonnaroo was an indescribable experience, among the greatest I've been blessed to share with beautiful friends ever. Returning is strangely like departing something more intimate than "real life," remembering like reflecting on a dream. I'll be back next year, come hell or adulthood.

My high streak continues into this, the latter weeks of June. Life has cradled me something tender and wonderful. The charge now is to just stay, just keep my head in this place-- this here now today you and me and us together, ethereal.

But I leave for Cambridge July 5. Mixed feelings. But those are for another post.

Anybody have anything they want me to write about? This felt good.

photos by Mike Locke

No, don't warn me

I'm finding it difficult to look back on a time when I was this happy. Perhaps in the wonder of childhood, when everything was new. There are things to be said about this happiness, the circumstance and perspective, but this is summer. Hardly a time for retrospect.

I'm here, now. And part of the pleasure is refusing the times I wasn't here, now, intrusion into my head. Certainly, I flit from memory to memory like a bird between branches just like you do. But these days I'm noticing the time I'm wasting somewhere, some astral plane if I may, other than the momentous and beautiful present. And I'm really trying to quit it, the bounding from guilt to worry and back, because it doesn't mean anything real to me anymore. We have, perhaps, learned to live in this impossible multi-temporal state of "where will I be next year?" when honestly-- we'll be right here, in the forever-present, as we were. And this journey our minds make is a distraction from everything that is lovely and going on currently. "Currently." Like the river we move with.

All this time talk, so to foil myself: Bonnaroo in less than a week and I am excited.

It's familiar, lying here while the morning blue peeks in, bird chirps between distant rolls of thunder-- and you, a fogless dream or a lucid memory, lovely as the sound that words make when we mean them.

Your Fictional Space 1

Nightly

You wake to rain like a rhinocrash over a glass pane savannah, all river and dust, and the trees outside whistle and howl like great hairy creatures-- dancing in the discomoon night. Maybe this is the apocalypse, you, squinting so your eyes now full of crust whir like camera lenses, hope as you pull your knees far as they'll draw to your chest and twirl your feet to gather loosened covers. Loverless arms, fetal, Tyrannosaurus, cramp from an awkward hour or more's unsleep so you stretch them away, realizing only now how your fingers have tangled the sheets beneath your chin, dreamkneading like with dough or a knot worked out of the shoulder of an invisible someone. You clutch at a pillow that's fallen and pull it in to be surrogate. This is the sleeping hour and you are a stranger here, pulled from a life next to someone. If you try, you can run your fingers through that someone's hair and breathe in to try and name the shampoo it last used or the ocean into which it last plunged, laughing. You invent a color for it, and a texture. American Black Walnut, and the silkslip of a memory passing.

In the quiet desk lamplight, all ten fourth-grade fingers work the ragged spiral notebook edge from the letter, careful so only the perferated paper tears. And in deliberate print you skip lines so your reader can make no mistakes. You steal an envelope from your father's office, journeying the midnight halls in sockshuffles-- the ancient creaking panels unaroused by your weight. You need to stand on a chair to reach and stretch your naked arms up, balanced half by your toes on a quivering armrest and half by your hands in the stationary box. When you fold the letter you run first one than three fingers to crease it, pausing a wink's time to feel if it will shiver. And when its tucked in a textbook and backpacked for the following morning, its reader's name looped across the front, you wonder if you'll be the man tomorrow who'll leave it to be found. Or if you'll find it some time later, crumpled and ashamed, go momentarily blank and whisper

"Impossible."

You surprise yourself by speaking. The rhinos and creatures rage on but there are ghosts in the room. Squeezing your lover close, you hum against the panerattle and wind, braving your hands along an imaginary skin and feeling it rise and fall with life. You invent a name for the neck you lie your face against, wondering it crass to risk your mouth an invader of the thousand little neckhairs but imagining them twitching at your kiss, the shudder and sigh of reception.

Under a blanket not for warmth so much as sanctuary you drag the pad side of your toes along the ankles you're entwined with. The ocean breathes in and the seagull sky calls in stereo, birds catching thermal rushes up and squawking with delight before swooping low to pick dinner from the sand. All a rush of feather and beak, naturally survivalist-- and your hands are not slaves any longer. They draw runes on sandysmooth hipbones with imagination of their own, no art beyond the memory that yes, you were here and ah, how could I ever forget it? The ocean breathes out and someone stirs, turning toward you and drawing the blanket round both your shoulders with the gentle firmness of a wheel-work potter and you form to the touch. Grace, it speaks and the voice is at once the oceanflow nearing, is easy. Water laps over your toes and the whole beach slides microscopically inward, sinking-- as it does-- to the middle. And you wonder, chancing a glance to the north where the rhinoceros wait, if anything is ever a dream.

Green world

Mark brings up a great point. If semester had ended a week ago, like I really really wanted it to, things would be awfully different. It's with a certain bitterness that I pack my odds and ends into boxes. A haphazard impatience like I'd be consciously anywhere but here because of what it means.

There's a lot to consider as the mornings become bearable and blue, as we pass on into summer and everything is soft and warm and strangely foreign.

Never before have I felt so like Lear.

Wheels

I try to avoid narcissistic writing. I feel like I've been down that road before, perhaps a few too many times. The charged posts, the reflective and emotional ones, are always the most embarrassing to look back on. Like whatever I was feeling at the time seems so ludicrous now, insignificant. But that's the nature of context, and if we don't write it who's to say we'll remember? And I think it entirely possible that the ability to relate to the various incarnations of oneself is as important as the gift of relating to other people.

It's a part of a writer's condition, I think, feeling drawn to immortalizing a gesture or moment to compile something of a self-portrait. People say writing is therapeutic and I don't disagree. We're all fishes glittering about without a clue who we are or what's going on or how we can establish a benchmark of normality to mark ourselves against-- so we write to enact this journey of self-identification. But it seems to me like the whole thing is largely masturbatory. Look at Bloom and Zeno, two of our favorite journeyers. Look even at Odysseus. Nobody really ends up anywhere. It's tragedy. Then, however, I think that maybe it's the craft-- the process-- of writing that defines the journey as much if not more so than its actual history. There's something to be said about the fiction in nonfiction, also. How we say and what we choose not to. And how it relates and interacts so violently with the cerebral practice of putting words to paper.

But anyway, I try to avoid narcissism. I try to avoid the livejournal voice. But without it all I've got are ideas, and what's the value in those? There's a void in my blog writing where I think voice belongs, but we're talking about quite a monster here. What voice does in writing, to me, is give a personality and chronology (humanity) to the text. Good fiction establishes persona with a compelling voice (through word choice, sentence construction, syntax, form, etc. etc. etc..) but personal essay, and let's be real-- that's what this is-- when it has a voice that is honest and endearing it requires a substantial sacrafice on the part of the essaysit. For a voice to be tangible and relatable and real there's some required vulnerability, some terrifying risk.

So if I am to write about my life, like I've done before, from a place of truth... well

it's going to take some work.

Also: everyone should read xkcd. Check it and feel some good vibes to start this week with.

Heaven is a truck

You ever have an impossible feeling?

Like, this bit of pressure-- a surge or a pulse in the brain or the heart against the skull or ribcage when something that so desperately wants resolution can't possibly find it? A tic in every happy thought, a clause that despite your best intentions the thing you're after is just outside the realm of possibility?

Someone talk to me about reality.

About the fact that you'll never see me the way I see me. And maybe that's the best thing. That there are infinite incarnations of a personality that ebb and flux with the subjectivity of perception. Or about how when I say, "hey"-- you hear, "I'm judging," and what I really mean is "I love you. I would like nothing better than to love you." Because there isn't a truth we're working towards. Not in this lifetime. No collective can reach a universal truth, an objective conclusion about a personality or a sentiment or a sound or a feeling. We all move in different orbits, see things in slightly different shades. And the magical thing about that, about the 21st century human condition, is that none of us can possibly be wrong.

But then there are moments. Occasions of incredible consequence and potential in which whatever is going on up there suspends momentarily and allows a fleeting clarity. I don't what people call this-- but I think it friendship. And that there are people in this world I can share this with, I mean, it really qualifies everything, you know? It's the rarity that brings about the doubt and dark.

I wrote some poems today.

Had a conversation with a non-English speaking Italian poet about how we have simultaneous timelines, each of us. At any given moment, besides the "reality" I'm living in, I'm playing through thousands upon thousands of parallel, equally plausible, existences. There's a temporal thing that happens when we think like this, when we leave earth for split seconds to explore the universe like it can't be seen here, now. I enjoy the escape, the search,

the knowledge that I will come to no conclusion. I am, we are, Joycian. The lifetime of no 21st century intellect or poet or scholar will result in any conclusion beyond that we aren't quite there yet. There's a lot of ground for humanity to cover before the period of self-realization, before we as Arhants walk together. But of you, reader, I'll see you when we get there. The universe has a funny way of carrying the one.

Someone, please, let's talk about reality.

"Maybe it's just the nature of people having a little faith"

It's another good day in a relatively good week. The window's open and I'm listening to this, smiling and warm. That link there is over a year old, but totally refreshing and wonderful to revisit.

It's the first midafternoon post from me in quite a while, and there isn't a whole lot to say other than that I like the shape things are taking. Everything the psuedopsychologists have to say about Spring and what it does has been pretty spot for me, far as I can tell. And it is quite possible that I couldn't ask for anything better right now. Sun and trees, pretty girls and happy faces.

Short post, this. More to establish a pace for getting this thing written on more frequenly than anything. You'll be hearing from me.

Noise

I think it fine to say I've been hibernating.

Happy Easter, first of all. It was just before Christmas that we last spoke, dear internet, and the months between have had their share of ups and downs. The winter was dark and cold, and so perhaps was I. It was the best and worst of times.

I've been doing a lot of reading and a lot of thinking. Don't you wish you could sometimes just get a transcript of what's going on in your brain, the opposing voices with their commentary and song? It's possible that this is madness, but I believe it equally possible that this is simply the postmodern human condition: this obsession with place, placelessness and rejection of place as a reality at all. Because I'm living this life, right?, and I feel like there is somewhere a moment for me to arrive where I say, "Ah, here I am, isn't it beautiful." We think in context of this moment which may or may not exist (in the trajectory of time or whatever) but consider its subjectivity and instability of location. I mean, what kind of reference point is the present? Show me a guy who can say, "I just have to hold out 'til this moment and everything will make all kinds of sense." Seriously, show me. Maybe aging is just figuring out, "shit, I guess I'm where I'm gonna be. Might as well take a look around."

But I don't know about this postmodern brain'a mine. Of ours. We've got the immediate thoughts. The it is a beautiful day today thoughts. On top of that we have the internal monologue, the my it's a beautiful day today, just like on my seventh birthday when we had a dinosaur theme and a scavenger hunt that everyone won thoughts. This is all well and good. We should be able to think in different time streams, travel momentarily to other points in our chronology and return having retrieved information without being loosed from the concept of present.

Then there's this other track playing, and I don't know if generations before ours really had it. We've got this metanarrative thing that pans in and out sometimes. I don't really know how to write about it, but it's that chime that reminds you that you're leaving earth for a second, whether zoning out or remembering something or whatever, an acknowledgement of disconnect and a question of what it means that you're where you are mentally at this particular moment. Right NOW. It's a small feeling, this.

Society exists for very specific reasons I think. It gives us something to cling to, compare ourselves with. Normality is a relative point of reference that provides context to our selves, allowing an easy construction of self. It keeps us self-satisfied and, perhaps more importantly, busy considering the aethetics of everything. Qualifying in terms of amount or duration or size or achievement or title. This isn't bitterness, I think the purpose is of quite some substance.

But, really, fuck all that.

Maybe we're all particles bouncing off each other and very subtley altering by scientific variable the course of whatever, the universe or something, I don't know. Maybe we live and die and nobody gives a fuck. Maybe our collective mind is driving the species and there's something very terrible about what that says of us, and something amazing about what we can do. Maybe it's all bullshit. Maybe life renews or maybe it doesn't and it's all meaningless. Regardless, I think we're missing the damn point.

What I'm talking about is that when I touch you, and you're beautiful, and in that moment we're something, I feel this incredible electric calm.

And maybe that's the fucking point.

Perhaps heavy on the psuedo-philosophy, this feels good. This moment we're having now. Start a blog. I want to read it. This is an exciting time and somebody has to write it. Might as well be us, yes?


All my love,
Mike