Roll in from the whistling buoy.

Only because Bazan says that he does, I listen to those three songs from Time (The Revelator) on repeat for a few hours. Tracks 5, 9, and 10, that last one fourteen minutes and forty seconds, my goodness. "Lord, let me die with a hammer in my hand."

Throughout the fall months you talk to a few strangers every couple of weeks named Rob and Barry, and sometimes named Suzanne and Peter--whoever is home, really, during afternoon drop-ins--who for the last stretch have handed cups of sugar, have offered me a way to gain a long-churning simplicity I have yet to sing out, though it's what I've been building.

And, precipitously, I think of grandparents now. Fear can be everywhere, it can be provided for by all things, but not now when, as that one under his "Pigasus" symbol has said, the world is glassed over.

Always sleep with them out.

Fog shows before your every breath, and you walk for blocks. Miles of air so cold you can't feel your hands or the bend of your cheeks. You can't know where your fingertips end and wind begins. That's your nerves in the air, a burning sufficience, where you walk with hands suspended to indefinition.

Wrapped in piano strings.

Ed turned from his computer and told me that I could conquer mountains, that I could conquer the world. That ten years from now the likes of Donald Trump and Queen Elizabeth will be asking for my audience. And if only he had someone telling him twenty, thirty years ago what he was telling me now...

He said that two years ago his wife divorced him, and he gave her everything. Fourteen million dollars worth, coming from six patents to his name and four PhDs, and he gave it all to her. He told me that he does not regret it a bit, and that he knew that I would do the same. He could see it in my eyes and could tell by my face. I did not respond, but I think I knew my answer. After they divorced, he started having strokes. Now he has cancer, he said, and next week at the doctor he will find out whether he lives or dies.

It is a flattening sense to feel the world change around you and tell you that you may no longer live as the person you had been. That you have to somehow relearn yourself to fit the contorted shape that those around you are giving. The way that you breathe your air is made obsolete, and every word you use it for is elegiac. I left thinking about that next mountain, and supposing it to be unclimbable. Caged as a man who is told that he now lives only in anecdotes and stories, because your whole being, your breathing body's thoughts, have a status that is not situated anywhere else now but within those tellings. A sudden past, since their location no longer exists for you to live in, and since the present one demands of you a new way to walk. What is a person's location, then, when they walk through days though they know nothing of the path of their upward steps.

For a few habit forming years.

Something slurred, of course--through whisky with coffee and dashes of shoplifted maple syrup, cups enough to never see their bottoms. Something of the peculiarity of performing songs about dying and drinking for an optimistic fundraising event and at a faith community, and new songs that carry shapeshifted disguises, but really about the same things as always. Someone I have known had told me that I have predictable ways, as if saying every silent moment now in this room is known, and the fact that it is scrapes rust into the air with any movement. While watching my dog twitch in his sleep, my own knowing and never knowing what goes on over there, worlds away now. Now you can watch the room fill with my own dust.

Into each similar scene.

Hints of an inverse constellation come about to surround, oppressive winking holes upon a thick whiteness, and tell you to take that flask for a walk into the deep night. Anywhere is surrounded by everywhere, so you sink on your back upon the pitch black of park grass. Fog mists the air above your brow and seeps into the creases of your knuckles. As you lie you feel your kneecaps pucker within your skin like the grass that you feel stiffen and frost around you. That sea and its noise surrounds to silence, but never quite for that long enough moment. But then you see the black skeletons of trees, their steady colour against the night's upward progress from lighted hues to blackened blue--skeletal stillness, and when that's all there is, that is all there is.

Once your leaves turn.

Different weather falls down upon people on the single same day, and that's strange. Seasons change faster in some places than with others, and that's strange. That's strange. But what's strangest is that it's all the same; winter is comin'.

--

Reading Aristotle and the end(s) of human nature as social, yet private, beings. It is strange how home means to you when you leave it behind. It continues to exist, maybe glowing a little, in your memory. But when the home left behind no longer houses the ones that made it, it does not seem fit to be called a home any longer for those behind. I don't know if there is a word for that state when one still remains, a kind of complete inverse--nostalgia is always for something that can not be returned to, but what is that, then, for the one that is left, who has not left. Some kind of desert, quaking familiarity.

Anyone who does not / betrays them again.

This is one of the most beautiful, inventive publications I have ever seen. It is filled with an agenda, short stories, to-do lists, party planners, and incredible art--and, holy moly, one of those stories is mine, by the way.

I love this book and want you to love it too. Buy it over here.