Happy New Year!

Black on White Affair - Auld Lang Syne


Enjoy and let's bring in 2010 safely and soundly.

Cheers !

J. Finds in His Pocket Neither Change nor Small Bills by Jeffrey Schultz

Griffith Park, Los Angeles

Every living heart . . . all over this broad land, will yet swell . . . , when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
—Abraham Lincoln

Because the body now and its organs suggest nothing

but those pathologies in which we’ve been instructed,

Because the gutter’s black as new blood, a Petri dish

of piss and teeth knocked loose at the root,

Because our walking here’s scared up pigeons and the air’s

thick with their disease, because, therefore, we’re holding

Our breath in silent prayer, Good People of Los Angeles,

for our immune systems, for hand sanitizer,

For swift and decisive return of the sun’s irradiating

grace, I can hardly say I even know you much

Beyond the turnstile’s slick in the discount supermarket,

the sidewalk’s chewing gum and tuberculosis.

But I’ve been thinking of you, of your eyes darting behind

the tinted lenses which minimize exposure to UV, to God-

Knows-what, even though it’s dark this morning, cold, cold,

at least, by our way of thinking: frond-tips glimpsed

Through fog-bank, a dew so lightly acidic we’ve forgotten

it’s the cause of these few more leaves dropped

From evergreens, the rasp at the back of the throat.

Members of the Taxpayer’s Association, divorce

Attorneys, Good People of Bel Air, you who keep eyes dead

ahead at the top of freeway off-ramps, who refuse guilt,

That scrap cardboard hungry sign slung over a stack of bones,

entrance within the Town Car’s four doors, the pure, leather-

Scented air there, I’ve been thinking about those

other ones, the thousands of indigents and itinerants,

Formerly among us and suffering the debit card’s curse

on the panhandler, who today, because it is December

And dark, because after cremation they’ve gone so long

unclaimed, will be buried in mass anonymity somewhere

Far from here, Boyle Heights or East LA, somewhere

unremarkable: flatland, barred windows, chain-link.

There’s a minimum of ceremony. A short benediction

and half a handful of city employees. Dogs watch

From a distance. It takes a certain kind of distraction,

a remarkable forgetfulness to not recognize

In those nameless something of that little tyrant, The Self,

to let history and language fail, let the world outside

Dissolve, a mentholated lozenge on the tongue.

The taste it leaves is the inability to taste anything else,

And at bottom of the park’s southern slope, beneath

the Hollywood Hills and their Attendant, Contempt, one

Who’s wandered a few too many blocks from the halfway

house’s steadying three-times-daily belts into Los Feliz

Boulevard’s early rush a few bars of O Lord,

won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? before schizophrenia

Changes key again into abject terror’s primal screech.

What’s remarkable then is the passing jogger’s scandalized

I could just die and the morning’s usual by-the-numbers.

All over the basin pyschotherapists await the DSM-V’s

New-phone-book thud on the doorstep, and grave shift

cryogenicists make the last rounds, check temps, check

The corresponding boxes on log sheets while we continue

in our unrelenting interrogation of the body: Liver!

How do you plot against me today? Brain! you’ve gone soft. As if

deep-within’s crowded tissues could confess the knowledge

We most desire, as if we’d not already allowed our private

pandemic to order our days as on a clear plastic pill case,

As if, I mean, to function were synonymous with to live.

Right down to it, we all know Death’s no more likely

To knock and announce than the LAPD, and though

he may be gentler, he will not, in the end, read perfunctorily

From a list of rights meant to protect us. Everything

we’ve said has always been used against us. Los Feliz:

The Happy Ones. We mispronounce. Force a rhyme

with Felix. Mispronounce and counteract even irony’s

Potential side effects. Los Feliz. The Homeless. The Lesser

and Underprivileged. The Disturbed. May they all someday

Rest in peace. Good night, Sweet Paupers. Abstraction’s

its own little crime against humanity, but euphemism

Is still a lovely word to say aloud. Los Ángeles.

But what angel is this? Stretched half across the footpath,

Its body’s a grotesque, everywhere swollen

and withered at once. It’s gone septic, it’s gone

Almost entirely. And what worthless paper is that man

fumbling with as he approaches? A thinning five maybe,

Lincoln’s etched face a gaunt pockmark, beard and ears,

or else the “Elegy for Sky & Gooseflesh” penciled

On an expired bus transfer? It’s a worthless scene:

a man in headphones and an angel which actually appears

To be something much more like a beggar, except

that it’s passed out and so freed of the beggar’s contractual

Obligations. Starved and curled into itself, it looks

freed even of this world, like something almost not

There at all, a fact the man uses as excuse to keep walking,

his step timed to the beat, his eyes scanning ahead

For needles, slivered glass, the more subtle sort of dangers.

What else could he possibly do? Kneel down

And slip stealthily something into the blistered palm

of its hand? Cover its body with the fallen fronds

Which we can’t now help but imagine as resembling wings

because we’re thinking instead of a man slowly dying

In a public park about a real angel and so The Eternal

and so the failing health of our own souls, a disorder

For which the FDA has yet approved no treatment. Disorder,

as if it were simply a matter of finding the right arrangement

Of bodies in space. But what can we do, all exactly mad

with grief for ourselves or hobbled with debt’s deep

Tissue bruise? Because in mourning we are to gather

together, Shoppers of the Miracle Mile, Day Traders,

Night Watchmen, but we’re all just standing here

like fools, unable to look each other in the eyes,

Unable to believe in anything at the unchanging core

of being but a phantom limb’s complete and constant

Wing-ache, because we are what multiplies, the desert

as it reaches towards even you, Citizens of the Once Frozen

North. In mourning we are to remember, but memory’s

emaciated; there was something supposed to become more

Perfect, something else about what always comes of tyrants,

but who knows? In mourning we meet in need,

But here in a circle at last, tell me what ridiculous things

we could possibly ask of each other. Spare a buck?

Sing a little prayer for me? The overcast buckles

under the weight of a singed and empty sky. Because

There’s next to nothing left, America, call our

name; please, won’t you please lay on your hands?

Finally on Flickr

check it out.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/44807086@N03/

Rain Rain Go Away

Raining in LA again...shan't suffer in silence.

http://www.divshare.com/download/9665541-6e8

1. Bob Azzam - Rain Rain Go Away
2. Bora Rokovic - Soft Hands Had The Rain
3. Eddie Kendricks - Date With The Rain
4. Linda Perhacs - Chimacum Rain
5. Jaco Pastorius - Portrait of Tracy
6. The Meters - Stormy
7. Sade - By Your Side (Neptunes Remix)
8. Michael Franks - Rainy Night In Tokyo
9. Leonard Cohen - So Long, Marianne
10. Jorge Ben - Chove Chuva
11. The Third Wave - Stormy
12. Second Direction - Storm Flute
13. The Dramatics - In The Rain
14. Wes Montgomery - Here's That Rainy Day
15. Joni Mitchell - My Old Man
16. Mayer Hawthorne - I Wish It Would Rain
17. D'Angelo - Spanish Joint (Acoustic)
18. Joe Pass - The Gentle Rain
19. Luiz Bonfa - Rain
20. John Coltrane - After The Rain

My lady can sleep by Leonard Cohen

My lady can sleep
Upon a handkerchief
Or if it be Fall
Upon a fallen leaf.

I have seen the hunters
kneel before her hem
Even in her sleep
She turns away from them.

The only gift they offer
Is their abiding grief
I pull out my pockets
For a handkerchief or leaf.

La muerte en la biblioteca

More often than not, death occurs in a library, between books and carpet and dead air and silence, whispering children and a stern atmosphere, the crackling of pages turning, the tapping of keys on a board, the hum of multimedia, the beeping of materials checked out and checked in, the frantic wordless activity of a thousand nerds. Old people and schoolchildren, part-time students, and transplants. These are the tenants of the old public library, and more often it is here we come to die.

(Rain) Song of the Day: Jorge Ben - Chove Chuva

for the LA rain today...

In the beginning men worshipped stones

He said, "In the beginning men worshipped stones. Then fire. Today we find those practices funny. Wouldn't men tomorrow find the practices of today funny?"
--From V.S. Naipaul's Among The Believers

I Know Why The Caged Bird Loves

"And why does it make you sad to see how everything hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because you're a dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you which cannot die, which even you cannot kill or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds are against its continual burning. In the midst of the foulest decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty, of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love."
- Eldridge Cleaver, Soul On Ice

Summer's Ended

Incognito - Summer's Ended






































































Santa Monica, June 26




















































































































Venice Beach, July 10































































Corona Del Mar, July 29






















El Segundo, August 18





















Santa Monica, September 1

"may my heart always be open" by e.e. cummings

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

An Inconvenient Patriotism

"The Conservatives, who had long claimed a monopoly of patriotism, were thinking of their social and economic privileges, not of the national interest."

This sentence comes from the French history book I'm reading (France: A Modern History by Albert Guérard), concerning the period where Leon Blum was in his first stint as Prime Minister, and defeated (in 1937) by conservative thinking that saw things in terms of communism versus fascism, both on the rise in Europe at the time. The Conservatives unhesitatingly preferred fascism: "Rather Hitler than Blum!"
We see now what a grave mistake, and a grossly immoral stance that was.

Reminds me of what we're going through now, where people making over $250,000 don't want to agree to Obama's plan to give up more of their money to fund healthcare reform, even though these same Republicans claim to love their country above all else. I just thought that was interesting.

Who will remember our time when we are gone

"what are future generations gonna say about us?"
don't ask yourself this question too loud
(they'll say nothing. live for you, live for now)


so many people
are living and burning
but cannot breathe
and cannot livingly
burn like a candle
whose light is perfect
in the darkness of the night

think of
music that hums in a low tone
rumbling - the sound of art and rain
the sound of silence
and love move
back and forth through a tunnel
where we lose control
and are sad
and sorry
for the rain that made us fall.


but
somewhere
there is trust
when your eyes are closed
like lips that kiss in mist
of sprinklers in the park
summer mornings where birds are
white with orange feet

here,
have no illusions
assholes populate every part of this earth
on both sides of this screen
in your home and mine
but sometimes we are good
and graceful and we give
maybe we can remember that time
when it is gone.

Audrey Hepburn

The loveliest lady that ever lived in a set of rare photos by Bob Willoughby (which I found out about via The English Muse)

This one's my favorite of the set, though there are many close contenders.

Einstein's Expanding Darkness

"As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it." -- Albert Einstein

Malibu

some flicks I took up at Malibu last night.




































































George Duke's "Malibu"

"...the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides."

“The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes—ah, that is where the art resides.”--Artur Schnabel, Austrian classical pianist.

You Who Never Arrived by Rainer Maria Rilke

another stolen poem. Great posting by Brian Fellows at Poem of the Week

You Who Never Arrived

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...


--Translated by Stephen Mitchell

The Maltese Falcon: Today's "Did You Know"

"After seven years of moving from place to place in Europe the Knights [Hospitaller] became established in 1530 when Charles V of Spain, as King of Sicily, gave them Malta, Gozo and the North African port of Tripoli in perpetual fiefdom in exchange for an annual fee of a single Maltese falcon, which they were to send on All Souls Day to the King's representative, the Viceroy of Sicily."

Who knew?
Not a fan of the Hammett book or the Bogart/Huston movie (neither of which apparently has anything to do with this falcon), but I still was amused to learn this.

"From our birthday, until we die...

...Is but the winking of an eye" - W.B. Yeats


"Age is a high price to pay for maturity." - Tom Stoppard

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to a hundred. - Woody Allen


Here's to maturity.

I feel, therefore I am

"I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism." - Milan Kundera, Immortality (205)

No wonder its afterglow survived defeat and death:

somnambulating waves caress the face of the moon

catastrophic appendages flounder in the distance

Tetris calculations obscure the vision of curators and ideologues

under the bridge, skirts and hairnets hide true natures to the detriment of the whole


basement ontologist

closed doors that creak

open legs that don't think

vanishing windows

an unearthed passion


producing varying effects
nipples that right off taxes

drunken candles and eaten airships

by the terror stricken vandals and their captors

and if then eyes could neither close nor cry

the end result would be pi times why and divided by the time you sang a Donny Hathaway song to a girl on a rainy summer night in Brooklyn

Wanderer by Antonio Machado

a terrific poem I stole from this fine blog I just discovered. Enjoy.

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road--
Only wakes upon the sea.

"There is no surer method of evading the world than by following Art, and no surer method of linking oneself to it than by Art."

- Goethe
























crazy art work on a door in Barri Gotic, Barcelona
















Paul Gauguin's Arii Matamoe (The Royal End) at The Getty Center in Los Angeles




















Gaudi's Park Guell in Barcelona



















Nice, France



















Marina Del Rey, California



















View of San Francisco from Oakland, CA





















Pinocchio and the Bug in Le Suquet, the old quarter of Cannes, France
























Rogier van Otterloo draped in red on a bench. Haight, San Francisco

Songs: For An Untitled Lady

It's a lil past Valentine's Day but...

1. Shuggie Otis - Inspiration Information
2. Freddie McGregor - Apple Of My Eyes
3. Os Diagonais - Eliana
4. The Guinness Cassanovas - Ain't No Loving
5. Con Funk Shun - (Let Me Put) Love On Your Mind
6. Bobbi Humphrey - You Make Me Feel So Good
7. The Fuzz - I Love You For All Seasons
8. Bill Withers - Let Me Be The One You Need
9. Terry Callier - You And Me (Will Always Be In Love)
10. Conjunto Libre - Risque
11. Donny Hathaway - Misty
12. The Velvet Underground - I Found A Reason
13. The Beach Boys - Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)
14. Joao Gilberto - 's Wonderful
15. Natalie Cole - La Costa
16. John Betsch Society - Song For An Untitled Lady
17. Tim Maia - Contacto com o Mundo Racional
18. Linda Perhacs - Dolphin
19. Love Unlimited Orchestra - Whisper Softly

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QM4JZFO0

"The Mindmeld" and "Building My Own lil' Inferno"

what do you stare out at in midthought?
what tangents does your mind take?
are you more likely to think about sex or food at a random moment?
if you could have sex in huge pot of any food, what dish would you choose?

do you wear contacts?
were you a dorky child? were you popular? a cheerleader?
are you a fashionista, do you own 1000 pair of shoes?
did you get laid last night?
or are you a born again virgin?

how do you like to be touched?
bitten, smacked, licked, loved, massaged, cajoled, nibbled, crawled up slowly by the fingers like a spider

do you love the smell of lavender more than anything?
do you dream in chocolate?
do you tap your foot when you become impatient?
do you wonder how many times, like me, this ceiling fan above us revolves in a minute?

should we count? together?
now



or what if we sat opposite each other reading the same book, the same page, the same words at the same time, laughing at different intervals, turning our bodies, slinking or slouching in the chair like this to make the body comfortable, the mind flexible and free
would our enjoyment intensify, would we become preoccupied, would we fuse and meld together, the text building an ink-stained bridge between two unhappy quiet countries?

would we raise our eyes up from the text at the same time and meet eyes and maybe giggle like schoolchildren or return quickly and clumsily to the page in embarrassment or in the absence of a better idea, in order to escape Intimacy?

maybe our minds would dual, our swords would cross like words on a sunday paper or fingers in prayer or legs in meditation, our lips would meet like hands in applause or in a casual and meaningful embrace that people don't let go of so soon

our eyes would slide all around the dancefloor of each other like feet

it may be that what would make me cry would make you laugh and what would make you strong would make me weak and what would make you die would make me rise and wings would break and light would crack, sound would fold and sun go black
we'd both curse yoko ono and then go back to our separate ways

would i tell you your nose is too small and your hair is too yellow and there is too much gray in this place and that i don't appreciate the contrast it creates in the world (gray that is)?

would you agree, would you not care, would you stand to leave, would you shrink
do i ask too many questions?
people aren't prepared with answers most of the time
and they're afraid of what their spontaneous reactions might be
maybe too shallow and too imperceptive

maybe i don't wanna hear what's going on in you
i don't wanna know a damn thing about your pain or your darkness
maybe if the seal is broken and the gloves go off, and all the preapproved modes of behavior are done away with, things could get too ugly for me and i'd whimper like a dog being hit with a newspaper in the nose before i scamper home, having learned nothing and lost my fantasy for now after attempting to indulge it

did you run track, play volleyball, collect hello kitty memorabilia, watch baseball with your dad in the summer, play with polly pocket, join the chess club, learn card tricks, jump rope all recess long, paint with your fingers, wipe your nose with the back of your hand, smile more than you do now and without shame?

do your socks match your shoes and your pants and your panties do your pictureframes match your candlesticks and your coffeetable
how many times a week do you wish aloud things were less complicated?

i wish too, and i wish sensation were enough
i wish emptiness of the mind were a crime
and you were taxed if you had more money than books
penalized if you had more false self confidence than you groped for wisdom
more balls than common sense
more determination than talent

Happy Thedayafter Valentine's Day

"He ended up recommending to all of them . . . that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end." - Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

If I Were A Painter I Would Paint This:

i stare out at the open psychotic abyss of the past.
i feel no fear, nothing inside me will allow me to tremble
i approach the guillotine stoically with a clear mind
every moment i have ever experienced before this is rolled out flat like an eternal pancake immeasurable and indistinguishable
the naked invisible casing and skeleton of this time
soon this moment's carcass too will fuse itself to that wall and become empty and hollow

for now i forget every face that ever stared back at me
they are as familiar to me as so many cloud formations that have floated overhead unnoticed, unspecial.

anywhere in the world i have been, i've found myself dreaming, doubted myself, fell in love, felt hatred, been wet and cold, and swam through the warmest waters, waving out to sea, stretching for the horizon that implies the ends of the world.

i am here ten years ago, but i am not. there is a different smell in the air, a different shade of light cast down by the sun. there are different voices, whinnying in a different timbre. the atmosphere is different. everything is eternally optimistic, but damnable. Passing by the local church, awe still fills me. Something sacred lingers. I feel lucky to be alive, at least I think that. I don't think i ever felt that. I was too young, but I knew that moment was special somehow. I'd walk those streets and breathe deep that heavy warm wet misty air and see the entire world out before me, ready for me to shape it to my will. I was ready to grow and seize every opportunity which would befall me. In comparison to that, now I am broken, hardened, still a dreamer, but my time is less. My zeal and excitement are tempered. I am fat with living, and yet have not lived enough. Where will i find room for the rest?

In this alternate past, I am on a rooftop drinking a red wine, with a woman in my arms. We make love, she pleasures me on that roof as the sun sets and we look down on the city. I feel the perfection of this moment. I feel we two are really shaping this moment in life to our satisfaction, letting go of everything else. I feel champion of the world, for a second.Here too, so many years later the sky is different, the colors of life are different, the bulidings, the air and the body that breathes it in through its nostrils and mouth. this new old body carries the weight. It carries the dream of a younger me, idealistic and pure, walking through empty streets in a land far east of here, when time was never my enemy, but still somehow solitude some times was. Time maybe first showed itself to be my terrible adversary when i was forced to leave that place. I knew then that the two years I had spent there would never be again, that those moments were frozen for me and I must remember them, because that was a capsule of my youth, my inimitable experience, my triumphs and failures, back when they didn't cost or win me so much.

Now i suppose things taste sweeter. the moments are shaped more to my liking. I am the one making the choices. Making the mistakes too. I can blame others less and less the older I get. I still sit alone in the dark in the wee hours of the morning. No one knows me now. I wait for the sun to make me his companion. Let him warm this little room up. I do not dream of riding on a beam of light, but i have dreamt about how when you put your flat closed-fingered palm up in the air covering the sun, it turns red and even as tightly as you can shut it, hundreds of little particles can be seen slipping through, reflecting off the light, and I wonder how I have caught the sun, mostly. I used to dream that when I was a kid. I haven't done that in years. The sun isn't up yet, but I think I'll dream it now anyway. The sun feels different to me now than when I was that age, trying to catch and stop the sun with my hands. Trying to hold a delicate yet breadthless warmth flatly on my hand, holding it back like a tiny brick in an everlasting wall of heat, balancing it against all other forces.

I yawn more now. I'm tired more now. I sleep different. Maybe more plagues my mind and I can't just rest through these thoughts anymore. Maybe more things are in me waiting to get out and now they know time is the enemy we must defeat.

I marvel at how one can look at a photograph and be transported back into that moment. I can see myself with this blue and red striped long sleeve shirt, baritone horn in hand. My parents both at my side, as proud as they ever might have looked. I remember that day, waiting for the concert to start. We all stood in line, we were going to play in the high school auditorium (we were in 6th or 7th grade). The kid in front of me played tuba, this Canadian kid. I remember him dropping his mouthpiece. It was a crisis. We stood outside waiting our turn, in the heat, for what seemed like hours. I remember now sitting on the stage, with my mouth poised, my lungs steady, eyes first on the sheet music, then out at the crowd. The lights reflecting off all the shiny brass of our instruments. I remembered the little excitement dwelling within me on this little special night in my little life, that I lived for a while on this little island in Southeast Asia, what should've been a completely alien place, but in a matter of years had become a new sort of home. The people I knew and loved and saw day after day, the streets, and buildings, the faces, the smells, the trees, the air, the things I knew most now were here. So now it was home. My family, the friends and people and things I knew for my first 8 years were somewhere else. But they were not as immediate as all this. As the sticky Singaporean heat that made one's glasses fog up when you walked out of the comfort of an air conditioned building.

So we played that concert and it went along smoothly, without incident. I remember my parents and my little brother outside waiting for me, their faces full of smiles. It felt like a family moment, one I will never forget, the sort of feeling we'll now never repeat. It was a moment, I feel sappy and cheesy to say, I felt pride. I don't even play anymore, it wasn't my choice to play baritone horn, and I wasnt that keen on the music we played. Hell, I wasnt even that good of a player. But I do remember feeling pride then. Looking back, I suppose I was justified in doing so. For even now, its one of the few actual accomplishments I've had in this life. I would've thought that by 26, I would've done so much more for myself, my life would've been figured out to a much greater degree. I would've assumed an adult "normality" , as it were. This is nothing like the way I assumed adulthood would be. Nothing. I imagined I would never spend a sunny, warm weekend at home alone. I would've been in a room full of friends, drinking beers, watching football and cracking jokes. I would never be bored, or confused, or alone. None of that is real. Maybe in the 80s that's what a 26 year old me would've lived. But in 2009, the world has changed, and things have happened to change me from the sort of guy who would be hanging out at a friend's place on Sunday, drinking beer, having fun, watching football, taking up my place in the American pastime of a 20something. Maybe i never was that sort. Maybe i was always an oddball destined to strike out on a different sort of path, and leave that quaint and happy, familiar early adulthood behind. I don't go to work all day and then go to softball practice and have games on the weekdays. I dont go to bars and talk to girls and make lots of small talk and have lots of friends. I don't know someone in every neighborhood I drive through. Not like the adults I knew when I was growing up here. Maybe because I wasnt allowed to really fully grow up here. Maybe because my home is spread across the globe a bit, or doesn't exist.

I had a flashback to another time a few minutes ago, but that moment is passed. I don't know whether to talk more about that familial feeling, the loss of an adulthood I'll never know, or making one's home in a different place for a moment at a time. These are themes I'll pick up again. I'll delve deeper into the places I've known as home for a while at a time. I'll think more about people I knew and things I remember. Riding a bike down this street and seeing this happen. Walking alone somewhere and what I was contemplating then. And how I contemplate it now. The way the sun feels at any given time in my life. It's so hard to imagine that it's always been the same sun, or has it? The sun, in its seemingly ageless enormity, still has aged along with me. And at every moment when I closed everything in me except my acknowledgment of the sun, wherever I was, at whatever age, that sun was different. As different as I was at each stage. Slightly different. It certainly meant something slightly different, but it's almost always meant something magical. I always hold onto that feeling of the sun in those special moments that I know I want to remember. I look all around me and say to myself that I want to remember how the light shone down on this place in this way at this moment. I tell myself I have to remember it. It's precious. the sun's light is always precious. No matter where you are, how old you are. Being alive is special. That's something often hard to really grasp, hard to remember.

being alive is special even when it sucks
when you're sick tired lonely and cold. when you're broke down and out lost or grief stricken. sad, angry, filled with rage, regret, felt betrayed, abandoned, unloved. still we are lucky, maybe especially in those times, consumed by the most terrible, forlorn feelings. feeling alienation, negation, nausea. This is what it means to be alive, to be human, to struggle and feel. feel anything, be it pain and these less than desirable states of being. it's all miraculous.

at this moment i want knowledge more than anything. I want to understand a thing, any thing completely. To know its secrets and hidden truth.

there's a pallid yellow light creeping up out of the horizon beneath a wall of pale blue clouds that encompasses the rest of the sky. if i were a painter i would paint this.