Sunday, August 21, 2011

To be thoroughly conversant.

A video tutorial series on how to stay standing.

Walk it out in search of shadow giants.


Take a swim with your dog. Wake up in the sun from that soaking dog as he protects you from bugs.


Watch your nephew see himself on the phone screen, and then give kisses.


Sunday, August 14, 2011

This rusty car creaking along the highway.

So the other night a motorcyclist draws up from behind. His single, steady light does so gradually while I'm driving in the car towards home after wandering lonely inside the drowning noise of rubber on highway, and of wind sneaking through shuttling crevices. The blank noise of a car late at night has been written about, and has been sung about. All kinds of lines that welcome the way it smothers the incessant haunting of one's inability for understanding, or worse actually, the unnegotiable despair of having understanding. These combined with something lit in hand and something liquid under the seat, it's a convention.

The trouble, the truth, is that when you drive long enough, the dull pulse of fear that lay in those thoughts becomes amplified. You flail about in wonder at how a thing--something shared and held, something communed--can be made to vaporize, and how it does in a joyful white flash so that what you still have within you is as if a careful delusion. After a while all that a person sees is the cycling of their mind around images on fire, about an impossible confusion. But then a motorcyclist drew up, and once it was close it turned off its headlight. Now all that could be seen of it was a floating nickel in my tail lights, too near my car as it sailed along behind me. When that happens the first fear, the one that loudens in every crawling day, is suddenly flattened by the anxiety of whether you should speed up or slow down, and how quickly you should make either of those transitions. But then a few minutes later, because somehow this is how it is, they weave into each other. And mortality and fear become the same thing, these two vehicles in the dark.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Out to meet you.

This one, this is one of those days. One where the yellow of wheat fields being cut folds into the air with the smell of forests. A cicada somewhere nearby wiggles its weightless ribs together. And even though you feel the weighty heat of the sun brightening your hair, you catch the spare, strange drop of rain on your arm. Within it all, your walking feet landing upon the open world, you feel you just don't know at all. And you can't tell whether it's coming from all that out there, or from all this in here. And then you feel another drop fall onto your swinging arm.