The tops again.

As previously lamented, I have not very much enjoyed a lot of the music released this year, most probably, I will admit, out of ignorance. I have been listening to a lot of the recommendations that my friend Brendan has given me over the last week or so, but I don't think I can draw a week of listening into a tops list. As well as this, I have not even seen enough good films released this year to populate a Top 5 list. I've seen how out of touch I have become with popular culture--aside from the inclination to create a tops list, of course--and from this consider myself to have found another New Year's resolution. Though that is doubtful.

So, let's see. Rather than attempt to collate a list from my slim pickings, I'm going to travel a decade backwards (1.21 Gigawatts) and give you my Top of the Tops list of the sweeter days of 1998. It was my transition into baggy jeans, skateboarding, and cutting my own hair. Some photos remain, but we are currentl tracking them down. But let's forget that and get to business.

Top 5 albums:
Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Finger Eleven, Tip
Project 86, Project 86
Pedro The Lion, It's Hard to Find a Friend
Refused, The Shape of Punk To Come

Top 5 Songs:
At The Drive-In, "Napoleon Solo"
Neutral Milk Hotel, "Oh Comely"
Mineral, "Unfinished"
The Gloria Record, "Torch Yourself"
Pedro The Lion, "Secret of the Easy Yoke"

Top 5 movies:
Saving Private Ryan
SLC Punk
The Truman Show
Can't Hardly Wait
The X-Files

Top 5 video games:
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Pokemon
NHL '99
Space Station Silicon Valley
Breath of Fire III

--

Now that was a good year. 2008, though, has been both the longest and the shortest I've had. Hmm. On we go, and into what we soon shall see.

With the wind.

The wind can disregard you, diving through your many layers, through your very bones, and right out the other side. There has been such a wondrous cold of late that it and its factoring chill do so with ease and encouragement, cross your arms about yourself as you like.

During a perfect snowstorm I trudged across the tundra of nearby undeveloped land [you know, 'undeveloped' is an interesting and accurate word in more than the common sense--I remember a time when it was developed, moderately wild, though penned by roads, but has since been un-developed (hyphen, of course) to a vast, craggy wasteland] to purchase supplies. Soup supplies, that is, as in butternut squash and pears, as well as cinnamon sticks, and beneath my knitted hat while walking, I listened to and thought about 'building a still'. Now, still, and still I do. Stillness is a thing that I think can be brought about, but in a way that is not an interference with movement. Hmm.

Yes, then, that is what I will do: paint, write music, write stories. Make things that move by standing still. But we will still just wait for the winds to decompose. We must, for as long as we are walking they will bend us to corners.

--
At times I believe that things are simply clarifying a more valuable vision.

And a very rare species.

It is easiest to be taken away by long winds, down sleek tunnels, into questions of the weight of realness. Such ease there is, in slipping into a lack of light and lightness.

Now that I am (sort of) on holidays I have been, in the midst of organizing my room, my life, and its dark orange walls, flipping through the beginnings of a dozen books throughout the day. I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being a while ago, and flipped back to random passages within that book this afternoon. This, among the Watchmen, Pascal's Pensees, some Steinbeck, and more Levinas than is good for me. But Kundera's title pervades.

Anyhow, now, questions and realness. How interesting it is, that it works so well to imagine words coming from the mouths of others, words that do not yet exist and might not come to be, but will still affect an entire string of actions, paving them out of a striking fear or a slim hope. The weighted impression that the unreal, mere imaginations, such weightless brevity, can have on the real, the day, the things a person walks with. The unreal is keeping the real.

The same is in dreams. A person could wake from a bad dream with a terrible start, furrow their brow, and determine themselves to fall back to sleep and change that dream. Or to have one that is fresh and new from which they may inspire the day's real activities. But that might bring them, in returning to sleep, to a worsened state than was before, in an independent happening.

How dire, then, would the circumstance be if that person is unable even to sleep, prevented from such bad dreams for fear of them--perhaps a benefit, then. But is still stuck with imaginations that, like dreams, follow their own plots, and slip and stick in their muck. Muck, or an electric fence. At least there are plenty of books to read.

The snow goose need not bathe.

The other day I was telling someone I know about a thought I had. A couple Tuesdays or Wednesdays ago there was a really nice snowfall. I was watching it happen and thinking about this clean whiteness that stuck itself, clinging so quietly to the objects that it fell upon. I wondered what it must be like to be an evergreen or a fire hydrant, spending a few months under the mask of beauty. Just standing there, making other peoples' breath catch and slow when they look and notice. But you know, they know that it isn't themselves that is being looked at and admired, but is the glittering blanket that lay over them. Maybe those objects cling back, standing still as they can.

The best deals of the year on all 1985 model Toyotas.

I'm writing things that don't make sense.
Righting things that don't make sense.
Writing things that don't make cents.
Right in, thin, sat down, makes ends.
Write in things a town makes, ants.
Righting things at own expense.
Writing things at own expense.

Plutonium.

Up a storm.

If I read over the last number of entries here, the first thought I have is: This needs to get more serious. So here we go.

When (if) I make it through all of these papers and into the Christmas break, I plan to learn how to cook or bake some wonderful new dishes.

So I am requesting for you to share with me your favourite recipes.

Here's one of mine:

Neiman Marcus Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients

1/2 cup (1 stick) sweet butter
1 cup light brown sugar
1 egg
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons instant espresso coffee powder (or instant coffee ground into fineness)
1-1/2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375 F.
2. Beat the butter and sugar together, and add the egg and vanilla.
3. Sift together the remaining dry ingredients, including the coffee powder. Stir the dry ingredients into the butter mixture and mix in chocolate chips.
4. Roll into balls. use your fingers to flatten onto a non-stick baking sheet. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes.

Makes 2 dozen cookies.

Who even needs meals if these exist?

Lights, he said.

"The joyful will stoop with sorrow, and when you have gone to the earth I will let my hair grow long for your sake, I will wander through the wilderness in the skin of a lion."

The beauty of the myth is that its characters are so large their qualities never change. They are forever illumined and are far enough away that you'll not stoop and your hair will not tangle, for those figures are miles beyond the earth.

But we are right here, you and I, separated from beauty by seeing the other's breath.

The staff of this bruised reed.

There is an old story about a pole, tall and thin--a post, really, made pale with age by the sun. The story is not told often anymore. Or maybe it never has been told often, but, of course, I have not been around long enough to know myself. But it is on my mind and I thought I would tell it. It appears to be quite simple.

The pole was put in place where all people travelled by foot. At the time, no trips were made by vehicle or by horse, not through this area at least. Everyone walked, sometimes with heavy packs sticking rigid to their backs. This pole, then fresh and coloured a soft gold, was planted in the very middle of an area of an unornamented plain, placed for people to lean on and rest awhile amid their lengthy travels. Yes--a leaning post in the midst of a vast emptiness. It did its duty well, helping through the strength of those walking, keeping hope in their eyes.

Time passed and, as we hear, a small community grew around this pole. First a farmer, whose family provided small gifts of meals for those passing by, then a quiet restaurant, a hotel, and on. Things change. The post stayed, but with all these establishments now in place it was no longer found to be needed. A school was established near to it, however, and this old leaning post was turned into a pole for that game called tetherball, also now not often played. What an odd game.

And it is interesting how this tall post, sturdy in young dirt as it aided many trips before, with all passersby leaning close against it, their sweat and scent left on it, was suddenly made into something requiring those around it to remain distanced in a circle, focused not on the post itself, but on this object strung up and dangling from its head. And the back and forth knocking of this object, its rope twisting around the pole, made it loosen in that older dirt, dried and deadened over years. The pole, gaining the same character through age as any living thing would, looked tired of the absurdity of play and wanted once again to be leaned upon, to carry and make sturdy the heaving breaths of those passing by.

The string broke, the game ended. The post is still there. Leaning out uncomfortably neither looked at nor leaned upon, no one there knows its purpose. But it stays.

That's an old story I know, and I don't know. There might be some sense to it, but maybe not.

...only read the title.

"Well, alright. Okay.

"Enough for now. I'll be real.

"None of those usual written cycles. Instead, the election is finally--wait, but have you ever tried to see your surroundings in only two dimensions? Maybe you should look up for a moment and try. I mean really try, for several minutes straight with unprecedented perseverance, sitting still so your eyes harden. The objects and the walls behind them on the same plane.

"Your facial expression might turn into something buggy and your roommate might walk in on you. Even if such an embarrassment does not happen, which it didn't to me, mind you, no, not at all, you might almost get there but will find it impossible to remove yourself from your three dimensions. (And maybe your fourth, too. Sort of.) Even though I can't remove myself there are still times (like at present) where I feel as though I am sitting upon objects that have been tugged out from a sketchbook, and that I myself have the same pair of flat aspects. If I move it is upon only two axes.

"Now I'll tell you something about myself, something that I have taken the time to decide to give out. All I really want to do is ask people questions. Many times it will be to get to know them but, after a point, many times it will be to try and see a change in how they view their selves or their pasts. Kind of like a work of art will do, just sitting there while your depths talk to it. Inserting my own outlook into your hindsights. Some things, though, I can not inquire. Some art does not present its most desirous questions outright, instead it stays still in the hopes that you will say of your own will to say. It is at times a fortune, at times a misfortune, that not all questions are bound to be asked.

"But these comparisons are dreams of the tartest vanity: to affect an envisioned virtue; to make seeing different and likened to mine; dreams spent out while leaning on my bed as if it were a pad's paper.

"And yet the question is whether some little thing in a sketchbook is really art.

"Oh, whoops."

Only painted fire.

Folks say that you can not, no matter what you do, know what another's experiences are like. Your own experiences are limited to the edges of your fingertips, the drums of your ears, the pupils of your eyes.

And yet, though we can not know another's experience, we can get into them. Our words fall from our flesh and into the bodies of those around us. They tumble in past their drums, into their thoughts. There we can see our words' effects. They mix, and we can see on another's skin, on their faces, the meaning that they take.

We best be careful.

It's a-comin'.

Oh, it's a-comin' alright.

Link to our past, bridge to our future.

The weight of origination falls heavy. As our grandparents and our parents slip out of this life, the shaping history that cradles us, that which we are so pleasantly pushed along by, also disappears. And when that disappearance takes place behind us the forward motion that flows into our own children occurs only from us. The history makers are us, surprised and all angles. No longer can we rely on the strong hands of our ascendents. We have to straighten our own spines. We have to turn ourselves from smoke back into trees.

Just the ash.

I wrote a poem for the first time in a long time. I am unsure of what I wish it to express. A poem like that is for me unprecedented--everything I have ever written has had a very directed meaning, sometimes several meanings, one or several explicit, and one severely implicit. How pretentious it is to admit that aloud. How pretentious it is to point out pretension.

So this poem. I do not know if it is a thought coming from me, a real thought, or if it is me imagining myself as having this thought, but not actually having it. It is somewhat like the way I might travel through a past conversation in my head, but reorder my words and expressions and invent reactions to those parts of the exchanges that never actually happened.

When a person writes, saying "this is coming from me," they might be saying me or they might be expressing an idea through their me, but an idea that exists separate from themselves. And when does anyone ever know? For it is a difficult thing to divide oneself like that, to strip off a piece of being that exists through meaning. It is no comfort to spread out a map of one's self after it has been folded and tucked in their back pocket for ages, to discover that their whole landscape has been creased and separated by the straightest fold lines.

By passing through its opposite.

Now, then, all we are is becoming. It is what we do.

If I get out of hand and say "think about right now" it is, as soon as the words are completed, already gone. And if you want to think about that vanished present as something that is past and accepted, such an attempt is over before beginning, for the moment is too busy whirling out and away for you to catch hold of it. We have no choice but to endlessly become. Time turns us into mystical ballistics of a collective transfiguration.

So what should we ask of but how to catch up to ourselves. The moments whistling in my ears are an imagined fabric. How a sudden breeze has moved on as soon as it arrived, and how a thought laughs past before my eyes, I can never speak fast enough. You might say I am warm but once you do I have already grown colder. If you put your hand on me now, I can not present myself as current. All you touch is a shed skin, or a prophet whose words can never come in time.

Limbs knocked off in transit.

I have here, standing in my memory, statues vaunting upon great gleaming podiums. They stand tall in their poses. Immortalized figures cast from pure marble slabs of sweeping whiteness. They are the product of old histories turned to ancient mythology, their stories coalescing into one single stance and one unmoving expression. A stock for those ghosts is for each the selected theme from a brimming array of activities and faces, things organic now not living. I have a collection of all the faces that I know. And those that I have not seen for too long have turned to myths, sculptures curving upwards but caught. Now their shoulders carry stillness, now their clothing resists the winds. With these I hear no voices from their bending mouths and in a met gaze I feel no pulsing thoughts. However bright the beings stay as they gather themselves away from ages, I miss that motion, the dance between tides before things washed away.

Sequestered Nooks.

Those old neighbourhoods, whose buildings are all slotted against one another and are all different, their arms around each other's shoulders like those worldly, cultured, promotional photographs, buildings with balconies out front of the second storeys, whose residents come out on those balconies and stare across the street at each other and down through the tree leaves at the people bicycling past, well, that is the sort of street I am living on right now. There are always alleys that sneak behind places like this, and my bedroom looks out over one of those.

And there is this figure that has moved into a corner, a little nook, where the slotted building next to mine happens to be a bit longer than this one. I have not yet seen him through my window, the angle is too sharp to look right down onto him, unless I put my whole head out there, but I have never much liked heights. He moved in down there beneath me, bums I suppose they call people like him, and he laid one mattress down and propped a second mattress up as a third wall, and draped a sort of canopy above this space to protect from the rain, tucking all his belongings beneath.

He is pretty loud with his rustling, since it is just down on the ground below me, and I hear that sound a lot, the one that people make when they sniff really hard to get all that stuff out of their nose so they can spit it out somewhere. I go to sleep right around when the sun comes up, but it is hard at that time, right when he seems to be rustling around the most.

They call them bums, I guess, because they do not sleep in places like this one, and since their sleep does not happen in a place like this one, they are seen as sort of imposters, sleeping in those nooks, places that are not really used for anything else but are not meant for them anyway. But, really, places like this are more the charlatans, trying to stand taller than the trees, to prove a use, trying to make sure the colour of the city is anything but natural, trying to keep that nature from coming through the cracks, from tucking itself into nooks and persisting just behind us, and because of that, I think, I do not mind the trouble I have in trying to fall asleep during all that rustling and that deep, wet sniffing. No, it is not something that I mind too much, so a little loudly, well, loudly enough at least, I play maybe a Red House Painters album late at night or maybe a mix album I made and I hope that maybe it will help him sleep better.

Breeding lilacs.

I grew up surrounded by fields and forests, with alarm clocks and snooze buttons of birds calling through my always open window. I memorized at what time and angle the sun would grow ready to send its rays into my room. I have been writing a book this summer, on a topic that makes me look back to these things. I had a thick sponge of lawn rolled out wide around my house, where I would lay and listen to my neighbours' horses and children trotting about during summer afternoons. These things made me feel simple.

This summer I'm living in a big city. I have always found a honeyed novelty to places like this, where bricks and pavement scab the dirt, the real earth. When I was young my family went to Disneyworld for a vacation, and padding along the theme park street was not unlike my daily wanderings here. There are candy shops and silly trinket shops. There was a magical precipitation while standing on the sidewalk there on Main Street, USA. Here it rains for perhaps twenty minutes every day, and those minutes, like magic, tend to be the ones where I am out for my walk. The rain quiets the sharp buzz of these buildings, and softens the grate of old memories against brinking horizons. The rain makes this all simple, all the same.

The stream I go a-fishing in.

How often it is that we speak with ghosts. Quarreling over regrets and, to overcome them, inventing past conversations so that we might replace the words that spurred regret's feet to dig into our present thoughts. Remembering a past happiness so that it will spread a smile across our faces again. We interact with those soft figures of our memory, and with a clasp of much closer import than the opaque faces before us as if they are blotting out the glow we wish to cast upon the past. But those ghosts are the ones that brought us here, after all. They are the ones that gave all of our parts their shape. Perhaps we owe it to them to search them out through the mists, to correct or to relive. Perhaps we do not want to admit its impossibility.

A fabric huge rose, like an exhalation.

There is a mountain here, a bursting scape of defiant nature that rises up through the concrete at the center of the city. Though countered with superficially sliced walking trails, the fingers of its trees yet stretch over to either side. It is a bastion.

Though, compared to others, it isn't as much a mountain as it is a very large hill. Most say that you can reach the top in a half hour's walk. Still, like so many other things, I insist upon turning its climb into a metaphor. So I tell myself that I need to prepare, that I need to climb it only when I'm ready and have the right shoes. When saying this, I heard "You could just do it now," and, "You don't need any shoes other than what you already have."

Nothing subliminal was in those statements but, like ascension, I ran away with them to grow even more metaphors. There are two very separate appeals in making a climb. One is the excitement of going as you are and seeing what happens, an appeal of uncertainty. The other is the excitement of knowing what you are about to do, an appeal of having made proper preparations. Wonderful things can happen out of either method if the circumstances allow. But is one better than the other in all instances? Or, can one plan to be sporadic? Whatever the case, the benefits are never known until you are standing on that mountaintop. And once you are there, the method never matters.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

A personal tidbit, rather than an extradited contemplation:

I've moved to a new city for the summer. I spend most of my time walking around, looking up at the different/same sky, and the people and buildings that have set themselves up to surround me. This is an entirely different place from where I regularly reside, and that is what I enjoy most.

However, it seems as though people commonly notice those things that remind them of where they've come from. The favourite cafe I've discovered reminds me of one from my town. One of my roommates is the doppelganger of my friend Sam Rodgers. As a matter of fact, I am seeing doppelgangers on every street corner, ghostlike renditions of friends from other places. It is at once both familiarizing and estranging.

Perhaps I am one among very few who imperceptibly search for those things known in what is unknown. But, still, one then wonders how an embrace can be shaped that includes only the wonder of all things unrecognized.

Lying in separateness.

Popular emo songs of the 1990s sing of distance and a desire to collapse that gap, most commonly (since they're emo songs) between a romantic couple, or some ideal childhood circumstance. Closure is such a desire to sing about, distance is such an obstacle to defeat.

There is nothing more valuating, though, than the noticeable correlary posted concerning such a distance and how much it concerns you. This, called misery. Perhaps you might not realize just how much a person means to you until you are no longer allowed the luxury of their presence. So you yearn for that presence to come back.

But I wonder, when that presence is again presented, at how quickly the hollow ache of misery, one that resides so low in a person's abdomen, simply dissipates, hastily replaced by relief and elation. Yet how valuable is misery, then; for elation would not occur if it were not for the emptiness preceding it. This, an appreciation for misery sometimes called masochism, is sometimes for one to allow it value and graduating appreciation through its perpetuation. But some say, in response to such accusations of an addiction to misery, that they will allow it to perpetuate as long as it must, for the fortune that follows will be all the greater.

Upon my breath.

Today Volumes III and IV of Thrice's Alchemy Index were released upon this needy world. Or, in the least, upon me, in need. Its timing is welcome.

There might be words that exist with which I might explain how incredible their artistry is in The Alchemy Index albums, how brilliant Dustin Kensrue's lyrics are, connecting words and music to present listeners with a very real internal image of the classical elements, how you can hear them in the songs, spanning full genres with ease. There are words but I do not have them.

The title of this (online journal) is taken from the English sonnet track from the Air album. It suits. I thought I might reproduce.

Silver Wings

From tender years you took me for granted,
But still I deigned to wander through your lungs.
While you were sleeping soundly in your bed,
(Your drapes were silver wings, your shutters flung)
I drew the poison from the summer's sting,
And eased the fire out of your fevered skin.
I moved in you and stirred your soul to sing;
And if you'd let me I would move again.
I've danced 'tween sunlit strands of lover's hair;
Helped form the final words before your death.
I've pitied you and plied your sails with air;
Gave blessing when you rose upon my breath.
And after all of this I am amazed,
That I am cursed far more than I am praised.

The I as a Fish Enlivened and Upstream.

An individual is made up of one's many encounters with others. The relationships gained throughout life are not a slicing away of individuality, but a sprouting out of branches and the ability to grow and flower. Through them one may gain strength and stretch higher.

There is a chronological flow to this. Connections are first gained through your parents and your other family members, whose own individual traits are added to yours, however few there are. Perhaps at first there is a near-blankness, but even that is still allowed as some characteristic of an individual. And when you leave your house, as time passes and relationships connect, your sense of self expands to the point where you are enabled to share that selfhood and strengthen it through a blending with others.

Relationships flow upwards like vines skyward, the more gained, the better one's self, one's house and bare brick, is covered by soft leaves. The value of an individual is stagnated when cut away from others. It is increased when engaged.

The I as a Dead Fish in the Sea.

We are people so we are individuals. I wonder if it is safe to say that. And in the word individual, there seems to be a certain heraldry, something so purposive in proclaiming not only who you are, but that you exist to state who you are, and to do so through a relation of difference between others. This is a good thing, it seems.

But a person is expected not to do this. Yes, a person may feel great cause to define their individual political stance in opposition to an oppressive one, but that is a political field and not an interpersonal one. The strength of being an individual for self is taken apart because of an expectation to divide yourself for others. In entering relationships with others you are expected to provide out of yourself a certain divisiveness, to slice a few parts of your individual person away so that what you are now defined to be, as it is, is through those very relations with others. You, an individual person, are defined through however many ways you divide yourself for the pieces of others to fit in your stead. You are defined by the things you are not.

So if this is some false kind of individuality, a shadowing form of strength of 'person', where is the real person's strength and truth? It seems that, if this definition through division is what is preferred, then one is disallowed from searching out where and who that is, kept away from coming alive.

Knowledge.

When are you able to say that you really know something? To say that you 'know' connotes a complete meaning that has been found. Otherwise you would only be able to say that you 'know something about something' rather than that you 'know something.' The last step to 'knowing' is a finalizing, puzzle piecing together of evidences that you may have gathered. Until then you can only know parts and, though you might know many of them, you do not have a glimpse of the whole.

This is why movies are so frightening when the antagonist is some shapeshifter, changing forms to what suits its needs. Real people, though, are shapeshifters too. Maybe they should also be frightening, then, but in fact that is their allure. A few years spent with someone in a relationship of any sort will allow you to look back on who they were when you first came to know things about them and notice how differently those two personas compare. At least, that is a hope. A person ought to always be changing as a result of learning and experience rather than sit in any dusty stillness.

The best we know of a person is what was. We can know the whole of another's past persona because it is no longer changing, it hardens in time's coldness. But those past personas, however many, are only parts of what is now, they are only a handful of evidences, and so the only firm item of knowledge we may have of another person is that they are changing. They are not the whole. Not yet.

The English Student Apologist.

Many students enter university wanting to study some thing in particular they had determined is worth spending four years exploring, but part way through decide to choose some other area of study they hadn't yet discovered until they had already entered. I think there was an episode of The Cosby Show about this, probably concerning Denise.

Anyway. Ignore the fact that I love the Huxtable's. What I want to focus on is that discovery of a new fascination.

I have always loved reading, and, though university English courses can get burdensome with that activity, there aren't many things I would rather do than sit around and talk about books with other people who enjoy sitting around and talking about books. My splitting decision, however, did arrive, though it took form in a desire to travel and wander rather than switch degree programs. I am, after all, a vagabond at heart. We know this. But today, while anchored in the library, I received a most freshening dose of literature that reinvigorated my convictions. I had to immediately share it with one whom I knew (assumed?) would also appreciate it. But I think I might document how beautifully blistering this is, a single page out of Michael Ondaatje's novel, Coming Through Slaughter:

You didn't know me for instance when I was with the Brewitts, without Nora. Three of us played cards all evening and then Jaelin would stay downstairs and Robin and I would go to bed, me with his wife. He would be alone and silent downstairs. Then eventually he would sit down and press into the teeth of the piano. His practice reached us upstairs, each note a finger on our flesh. The unheard tap of his calloused fingers and the muscle reaching into the machine and plucking the note, the sound travelling up the stairs and through the door, touching her on the shoulder. The music was his dance in the auditorium of enemies. But I loved him downstairs as much as she loved the man downstairs. God, to sit down and play, to tip it over into music! To remove the anger and stuff it down the piano fresh every night. He would wait for half an hour as dogs wait for masters to go to sleep before they move into the garbage of the kitchen. The music was so uncertain it was heartbreaking and beautiful. Coming through the walls. The lost anger at her or me or himself. Bullets of music delivered onto the bed we were on.

Everybody's love in the air.

--

This single page turned every recent thought about. Literature has the ability to make fictions more beautiful than reality. That feeling a book gives you, the way it cups around your heart, is one I don't suppose any textbook could ever give. As a result, my argument is not for Economics, but for English.

Levers and Pulleys

I have been thinking about coincidences. And not in the theological sense, where questions as to how an all-knowing deity could allow us room for things such as coincidence and free will, questions that are unanswerable and at a level almost blasphemous to be asking in an (online journal)--although that might have been something of a spark.

What I am thinking of is how our bodies move. We awake, we lift ourselves up and set ourselves off to spin, swirling around one another throughout our every day. We might choose obliviousness to some and attend others. But what is this choice; or, is it choice?

There has been an instance several years ago where I sat in the same room as another, probably even whisked directly past each other, but was entirely unaware of that person. But only at that time, for that whisking, that swirling, eventually spins you right back through a pair of doors to a position where, odd--you do interact.

There is this dance we play out during the day with others, and it might be best to welcome them to your dance floor, rather than stiffen at their stepping on your toes.

A tangle of mysterious prejudices.

We stumble into our homes in a humbled haze late at night and in despair cut off our hair. We want a new outlook through a new body.

We finish and look upon ourselves in the glass. We nod, approve, but we only see a half. Another appears behind and fixes the parts we can not see. This one sees it all, trims to form, approves. A friend will have our back.

"brightness falls from the air"

It is late in the evening. I am sitting in my orange coloured room after a day of motionlessness and contemplation. What I am wondering at this small moment is about what makes people happiest. The borders in this house are thin, so I am listening to a group of friends playing Jenga in my kitchen overhead.

Last night I was upstairs with my friends in my roommate's purple room and, though having such a desire to write, could think of nothing existing of which to write about.

Right now, however, I listen to my friends and know, of course, that having these people I care about is quite a brightness. But it is odd, I think, to not have this at the front of a person's mind when surrounded by them and to instead realize this only when separated and sitting in a dim and empty room.