Bicycle project, South Africa

people doing things,

beautiful people.
please click this link to watch a bicycle photography project from south africa. I'm sick for Cape Town.
mmmm

It is loud here.

I feel easily annoyed lately.
There is a group of three young persons to my immediate right. Their conversation is sharp enough to pervade over the speakers of the cafe and over my little head phones. I tell you this not because you should care, but because the decibel and subject matter of their conversation is making it hard for me not to care.

Yesterday my friend Katty cut my hair.
While we were waiting for our bleach to process we sat on the couch in her living room and ate some cheeses I had brought as a thank you. Hair cutting between friends can be an intimate process. She said to me and to the room, "Sometimes it blows my mind how many people are all living here, on top of each other." I agreed. I feel the same thing sometimes, about this city. I feel it overwhelmingly. 

Today was warm.
Matt, Missy and I found this trail in discovery park that led from the tip of the dunes through a forested path to the brink of a small beach. Not a secret beach, I know, because there were little stacks of rocks and different carvings of names into driftwood -- people must always leave signs of themselves. But it was quiet and lonely and happy enough for us three to believe we were all the world for a few hours. we filmed some scenes for a small movie in Chapel on Tuesday about the end of the book of Joshua. Or at least, the way we feel about the end of it. Its this people, looking for land -- suffering from the sins of their fathers and mothers; learning from the love of their fathers and mothers. Seeking something from a creation that they are holding on to with fists -- though it always seems to be slipping through their hard and earthy palms.

You know, a stone thrown in the water sends ripples in every direction.

Thoughts from El Diablo

my shoulders are sore from pulling so close to my neck today. I've been sitting in this wooden chair for a while, and I've forgotten again to remind my body to not get so tense. When I am thinking, my shoulders pull together and jaw sets and my chin leans down until its intimate nearness to the vicinity of the table I am working on reminds me to pull up, pull up! again before I am unseemly in the public eye: girl, slumped on table, arms outstretched and still typing, drool.

Obviously my goal is to always be attractive.

I'm happily getting lost. In this other world. It's a world where characters have desires and are motivated by them in turn and the movement of words is everything. And it is melding into this world, this one where I lay somewhat prostrate on the cafe table. I am looking around and thinking: what is your desire, and where is your motivation? Is there a motivation?

and then

Oh look, I found it, you just hid it a little deeper here -- lift the covers of a late night text or a casually intimate question and all of a sudden people and characters are sitting maybe too close for comfort. But no no no.
that's not entirely true.

Because something burns brighter than what I am creating. I guess that is the curse/challenge/adventure of writing an art. The thing you love, the thing you chase, to know and to touch, it will always be outpacing you. And that is beautiful.

Just make sure the thing you love can return it somehow too.
A runner needs her water. 

For Fear I've Kept Myself From Posting

Fear is the root of all things.
People say that, don't they.
A rhetorical question, I know -- It's because, frankly, I don't have to ask you -- we all know people say that.

And I guess I believe it too.
For fear I have kept myself from speaking. For fear I have left a question hanging. With fear I've held the quiet parts that would reveal a me
which I fear that I am not ready yet to see.

It's fall in Seattle. I don't know how it is done, but that moment between the 31 of October and the first of November seems to stretch forever. These months are two different worlds. In the cooling blue skies of October I can still remember the summer, but once November opens her eyes I feel unable to look any way but forward.
So I am looking forward.
Two years left of school is a long time.
In twenty years I will be forty.

When I am old, I would like to be happy. I would like to still be able to listen and not just talk. I would like to still be able to eat ice cream and other shit like that, but my grandma had diabetes so we will see.
My mother has pictures of her mother's hands on an old digital camera. It is beautiful: both the pictures and to watch my mother look at them.
I hope you get the chance to someday.

Listen: the way I am going to live is different than what the people say. I am twenty -- I get to believe things like this.
I am going to upheave the gardens of fear patterned into my heart and sew instead the wild seed of love. I am already doing this. Love for myself and for you. For Love I speak and do not speak. For love I question and I seek. With love I hold the quiet parts I'm remembering are me.

Up and down, but our elevation will never be the same.

And loving yourself is one of the most powerful tools on the path toward contentment.

Whose Afraid?

Another imitatio.
I wrote this in the style of much-revered Virginia.
If you are looking for something wise and wonderful, read her "On Being Ill," An essay.


An Ode To the Silent E at the End of Ode:

In regard to the silent O at the beginning of opossum, to the quietest l in the middle of colonel, to the B at the end of lamb, when a group of friends gather upon the deck of a private yacht, mingling in the cool autumn knight, what ideas and concepts are discussed there, with no mention at all of the C that alone holds the entirety of the Y A to the H T, that without it the whole thing could quite possibly fall apart, and does, collapsing upon itself and tumbling into the water where the bourgeois party-goers numb their thumbs in the icy depths and find themselves in debt for the destruction of a rather expensive yacht that is now just a yaht all the while saying ‘I never knew – I mean I never kenew’ because they have finally realized the gravity of their mistake – when we learn of this, that which we can so easily neglect, it is strange indeed that these letters have not yet risen up in rebellion to the abusive authority that has caged them in an iron realm of silence and neglect and solitude since the birth of all spoken languages.

Written in the Style of Kerouac. Forgive Me, Jack.

And in the dark Living Room one lamp is on as I sit on the old couch we found watching the light from the small, single bulb lap at the corners of the room and feeling all that space that rolls immeasurably up and into the mind, all those memories building, but in the future I know it will still be the same mind this mind of mine, though our atoms are always shifting, and don’t you know that for a moment you will be made from the same molecules as Shakespeare? the bulb burns out and leaves a softer, humming darkness than what was just before and I am filled with a brown-black that reminds me of the country, of the creases in your eyes, the smell of leather and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen except that maybe time may hurt to everyone, and I think of being born, the most important beginning that I cannot remember, I think of being born.

Welcome Back Front Door Mat

hey yall

Are you still there? Do you remember me? And, how do you do this again? It is my first blog post in oh-so-long. I am afraid I have lost all my readers. I am afraid of this because everything I know about blogging I learned from links in Margaret Atwood's twitter, and she says you should always blog consistently. Readers need consistency. Blogs are habits. Put your habits into a blog. It's a symbiotic relationship, you know? So in light of this, I'm going to open this window again into my life; currently.

I am thirsty. I am in my living room, with good people. I have been with good people all day. I would like to think I am prone to believing that most people are good. But we are all cynics, aren't we? Today Tyler, Ruth, Hailey, James, Tate and I went apple picking at the Jones Creek Farm. I had never been apple picking before, but now I have a box full of them on my kitchen table. I will make sauce. Apple sauce. I would like to make cider as well, but you need a cider press for that. My neighbors have a press, when I lived in Oregon we would help Nancy and Steve, in the fall, press apples into juice. I remember Nancy telling me to throw in all the apples -- even the ones with bugs. Protein, she said. The eternal joke of protein.

Tyler and Ruth are playing scrabble. I was playing with them earlier, but I was the only one keeping score. I gave up because I realized that their only motivation involved how many "pretty" words they could create. I was done once the word tada entered the board. I was done once I realized they weren't playing for points, they were comparing which words would make the best cross streets to live on. I live on Sunlit and Heron. Tada and Saint. What ever guys. I'm motivated by competition.

We do have a great living room, however. We have a great porch as well. If you are ever in the area, Emerson street, please come by. It is full of people, good wood and light.
I am happy, can you tell?
Testify.

I am going to post this without rereading it:

Today was cool and grey. The wind must have blown our hot august days right up and over the cascades. Will they come back for one last visit? No one knows now, not even the weather man.

Yesterday I was laying on my floor with my good friend computer ( no, we're not seeing each other,) and I happened to looked out the window. Along the driveway that leads to my house are maple trees. The farthest one away, I could just make out, had the tint of yellow on the tips of its leaves. Like your best guy friend from 7th grade, the one with the bleach-frosted tips. (cough cough @tyler mccabe,) It was weird to have to accept in that moment that autumn is coming for us. I don't know about you, but I just got my first real sunburn last Saturday.
I guess to see the onslaught of fall means I have to admit the secession of summer. And this summer has been one that I have waited a long time for. I mean, we all grow up dreaming of far away places. It is built into the childhood liturgy, thanks to more than just Disney and Dreamworks. But these last few months I actually got to go far, far away. I saw things that were made of magic, both the fairy-godmother kind and the dark black kind.

But now I have returned. And then it's back to Seattle. I am ready.

Welcome Back to Summer

Run;
Steady movement of hips to thighs to heels to toe.
I will miss the steady rhythm of hamstrings when I'm old.

My friend gave up his smoking during spring in preparation for summer running. Wise man. I too enjoy my breath this evening. The air is heady with august, my body works to filter through the woodsmoke, timothy hay, queen anne's lace, and blackberries turning dark in the road-side ditch. A combine rumbles to life and a bi-plane hangs low over head. What a strange Eden this is; where everything is always green yet I walk through most of it only ever touching a carpet of black tar. I have to remind myself to leave the road. Little girls grow up laughing and the only convenience store on the corner sells gasoline and porn magazines. 

I would like to say I am not an emotional person. Not because I want it to be that way, just that I expect it is true. But this doesn't keep me from being anxious, reminiscent, sentimental. Would it be strange to say that I am led to my emotions fastest through every sense that is not the sense of sight? The nose knows memories and loss. The ears are capable of great desire. But I am afraid of these eyes that are cold and calculating, taught with great care to rationally account for everything being taken in. 


I am still running and there is a man on the side of the road. I can feel him looking at me and I keep running still, because one thing you learn in Europe and South Africa is to not make eye-contact with a single man. In the end I look at him anyways, because I cannot truly forget my small-town-girl sensibilities. He is telling me something. I take out my headphones and listen harder. "Walk over here," 
"What?" I say - 
"Just walk here, please." I run a little faster because I think he is asking me to come over by him, where he is standing just off the road in the timothy hay. But then from the underside of the hay explodes a pit bull. Barking and growling, it charges me and I freeze. It snaps at my left leg and I back up, so it begins to circle me and bite at the air. My heart races and finally the owner coaxes the animal back to the side of the road. "I was asking you to walk slowly," The owner explains, like it is my fault, "She is just a year old and will attack any bikers and runners." Well good to know, and isn't this road public? Yet I walk away slowly and only pick up my original pace when I can't see him or the animal anymore. 


When I saw the pit-bull rushing me, I was afraid. I saw it's glinting eyes and open teeth and felt fear. I laugh a little now because I realize that my eyes are not incapable of emotion, like I first believed. 


My eyes are where I feel my fear. 


I am also laughing because the pit-bull scene has kind of sprung me from my earlier dreamy trance and I feel that my thought pattern was possibly a little too melodramatic. 


But I cannot shake the idea of a connection between my sight and my fears. In that connection I make a little hole and climb back through my memories to South Africa. It is no longer summer but winter and my eyes are overwhelmed with the work of rationally accounting for shack after shack crowded for miles along the busy highway. Too much Too much I think and I feel fear. Then I am walking at night in Cape Town and a black man approaches. I feel fear and then I am overwhelmed as he passes me, I am overwhelmed by shame and confusion and the unreliability of these things that we call eyes, yeux, ojos, so that we may better understand the reality of the world. 

Walking in Cape Millay, Part One

okay.

For those reading, the distance between me and my home has been extended greatly for the next several months. A sea-distance away from three sisters kingdom.

I am falling in love with South Africa.
Cape Millay is a community on the west side of Capetown. It is tucked away past the Museum Mile, past the wild nights of Long Street, and past Queen Victoria's Botanical Gardens. A few sky scrapers rise from the pavement, but do not dwarf Table Mountain which holds court over the city. The mountain does seem to watch over everything - people refer to Capetown as the Mother City because from a distance the rocky skyline adopts the figure of a reclining woman, cradling the city. It is comforting. What a figure to take shape over a place that has also doubled as the boiling pot for a violent clash of politics, history, and humanity.
Cape Millay is about a ten minute walk from The Backpack - the hostel where I am staying. Row after row of two story cement houses nestle against cobble stone streets that push up against the side of the mountain. (Aproximately the mother's neck.) Each house is painted a bright pastel color that compliments the whole neighborhood ascetic. When I say pastel, do not imagine kitchsy easter-egg adds from Fred Meyer. Instead, these colors adopt a stoic dignity when carefully painted throughout the neighborhood. You can feel the care and time put in to each house. They have stood here for ages, but the pain is as fresh as yesterday. Pinkgreenturquoisepinktanyellowgreen. "This wouldn't work if one house was by itself," Tyler says next to me. "But together, this creates something beautiful." He is right, and we walk further in - entranced by the colors, the linen strung between windows to dry, the dog sleeping in the shady doorway. In the distance the call to prayer is heard from the top of a mint-green mosque.

By the Way, I'm In South Africa.

It is raining. Thick and heavy drops fall as if previously held in some giant's hands. Maybe Gods. We; 16 students, two adults, and a seven year old, run up the stone stairs of the Cape Town art museum. We've escaped the torrential downpour for now.




"Ja, there can be four seasons in one day in South Africa," We are warned by a tour guide.



June means winter for the residents of Capetown, but that doesn't keep the parks from being full of bright, juicy flowers and big game ducks with bright yellow eyes. The interior of the art museum echos the colors of the park outside, except for one exhibit. This section of the museum is dedicated to the black and white photography of Ranjith Kelly, an 85 year old artist from Durban.



In the last 85 years, Kelly has held a lens to the extreme climates of social, political, and economic change in South Africa. One picture in particular caught my attention. It depicted a man and woman, emerging from a public building. You can easily tell they are a couple - frozen in their walk; they lean towards each other. The man is Colored, the woman is White. The implications of this relationship are spelled out in the caption underneath; A couple exiting jailhouse after breaking Immorality Act: 1960.



Immorality act. When I was young, I was taught that being immoral meant stealing, or maybe hiding my little sister's barbies under her bed. As far as I could tell, these two individuals had commited neither attrocities. Wikipedia had the definition: "The Immorality Act (1950–1985) was one of the first apartheid laws in South Africa. It attempted to forbid all sexual relations between whites and non-whites."



In the museum, I sit down on the bench accross from the photograph. "What is morality?' I wonder. The word itself is an abstraction. Purity. an abstraction. There seems to be a strong link drawn between these two words in apartheid days. To be moral is to be pure, and vica versa. Intrinsicly woven together, these terms slip into the political rhetoric of world leaders seeking justify their ethnic cleansing or segregation policies.



Well, what are the consequences when these abstractions are projected onto people? The "Pure" are celebrated and justified. The "Impure" are de-humanized and repressed.



There is an obvious problem with this catagorizing. Human beings can never be fully contained by legislation. It's like trying to hold the whole ocean in your fist; eventually the moon calls it home. The tide ebbs out and over the crevaces, spilling out below. The whole process is impossible and unretainable.



But through the lens of powerful Purity, this is "defilement." Mixing seen as evil. New creations seen as evil. Reconcilliation seen as evil. These absolutists, these purticans, they are blind to the true implications of Imago Dei; In the image of God, Man was created.



Man; a word that isn't an abstraction. The word man is earth, love, hate, and as coloured as the flowers growing in the gardens of Capetown. What a blending of life! Thus South Africa is seeking to reconcile this human combination. However, they are not revenging the violence put upon the coloureds or the blacks through war or more violence. They are not creating a new enemy abroad. The opposite of an evil king is not a different king. It is an entirely different governance altogether; maybe one we have never heard of.



Maybe soon so much of the ocean will leak out of that blind fist. And when nothing is left for it to hold on to, what will happen? Outside of the fist lovers are reunited, families restored under one roof; A father kneels in the dust and holds his daugther again.

A Coffee Heart, and the Plentitude of God

 Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

                               Pied Beauty

    Glory be to God for dappled things—
        For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
            For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
        Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
            And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

    All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
        Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
            With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change: 

                                                Práise hím.

Poetry is a Stubborn Art

The following is a quote from an Edward Hirsch essay. I love the way he teases meaning and connects dots, without forgetting a sense of empirical humaness. His interpretation and explanation of poetry is as clear as William Hazlitt. Mmm A True Critic; every century needs one. 

––––––––

"We live in a superficial, media-driven culture that often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feeling. Indeed, it seems as if our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. We want to divide it into recognizable stages so that grief can be labeled, tamed, and put behind us. But poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions. To grieve is to lament, to mourn, to let sorrow inhabit one's very being.

Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, "leaving poetry free to go its way in tears." Implicit in poetry is the notion that we are deepened by heartbreaks, that we are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish--to let others vanish--without leaving a verbal record. Poetry is a stubborn art. The poet is one who Will not be reconciled, who is determined to leave a trace in words, to transform oceanic depths of feeling into the faithful nuances of art."

––––––––

Tyler Mccabe, what do you think? 

Anyways, I'm sitting here in the library with two essays hanging over my shoulders. I hope and pray I will be able to summon the creativity needed to string a few words together in logical order. logic. My Greatest Struggle. Otherwise I will be packing up and moving out soon. This episode of Seattle is about to end. Up next is South Africa and Other Travels, if you didn't know. But what a year, am I right? My plants on my dresser are dead; I forgot to water them. But my mind is not. My heart is not. I am alive! I am alive with unsounded depths! 

Oh the power of an exclamation. 

The library is closing, they are flickering the lights, we've got to get out of here. 

I Squint to See Love

Snow happens softly in Oregon. 

We finally know what the cold rain looks like

when the white appears.

Solid.

But so soluble. 

It is a comfort to see the falling of the snow. 

Like so many desires

waking up and finding themselves suddenly tangible. 

Bleary-eyed but here;

present. 

A voice asking you to go on. 

Or the touch of a dreamed-up lover.

When I walk out in the snow

I am among the presence

of fully realized dreams. 

Squinting,

creasing my eyes; 

the only way to look up and see it all.

I am reminded of photographs in the family attic.

Within them all is a small child; a daughter.

In one she is sleeping; her head rests on the belly of a house cat.

In another she pouts with her arms crossed in mock adult-hood.

You get the picture. 

The daughter is the picture

until you squint your eyes.

Only then can you notice a constant companion, 

always a bow in her hair.

Colors combed in with exact precision.

Intentional softness.  

I am reminded of snow when I see her bows;

tangible evidence from the dreams of 

another.

Let the Rhythm of the Snoring Carry You Away

---------

There are surprising positive consequences inherent in being the eldest sister.

For example, I always get the place I want to sleep in the hotel room. Not counting the master bed if the parental units are present, of course. But a pull out trundle? Right side, two pillows. Only a couch? I'll take that. In a family of three sisters one girl is always ousted to the floor, and it is my job to make sure that she is never me. Call me cruel, but I don't need no treaty of Westphalia to practice sovereignty, yo.

Actually don't call me cruel. I've had rough day - insults are not desired here. Another philosophy in how to obtain the best sleeping arrangements is to have a reputation for being the "best sleeper." In other words, I do not kick, bite, steal covers, and/or snore.* Bailey, on the other hand, is violent. If she ever wants to be a pacifist, she will first have to confront her sleep-self. Don't be fooled by the cute button nose - underneath the facade is a dreaming round-house kick to your sleeping face. Coincidentally, she is sleeping next to me right now. Tonight does not promise to be too crazy, but do pray for me. Never let your guard down. Let the rhythm of her snores serve as your reminder. I think I will build a pillow wall for safety.

Maddie, luckily, is not a threat tonight. She was bumped to the couch. At this point a collective sigh of relief is released everywhere. You see, Maddie is a sort of "viscous koala sleeper." It's a real thing. First she takes your covers. Than she wraps her arms and legs around you. Then she sleep talks in your face the rest of the night. This may sound cute to you, but rest assured that I know better. A Posteriori.

Thus, maybe out of pity they allow me to sleep where I want. They are self-aware. They know their powers. Oh the collective force of sisterhood.

---------

In other news, my day has not been rough. That was simply rhetoric I used earlier to illicit pity from my readership. Forgive me for showing you the man behind the curtain, but I wanted to enlighten you a little on my weekend.

I'll make it short and sweet:

Beach.
Sun.
Oregon.
Family.
Coffee.

Notice that essay-composing is not among the list of features present during the weekend. Um. I'll fix that, I promise.

Good thing blog posts like this exist in 198 miles, or people might start to suspect that I have literary intentions.
... But you and I know better.

---------

* comparative to others in my life; They kick, bite, steal covers, and/or snore worse than I do.

Like a Landslide

How do we learn to recognize?

My eyes work over the lines of your face and I immediately know I've seen the grooves of it before. Memory must live in the grooves of life.

Grooves of all sorts; ditches and dimples, cracks and corrugations. 

This weekend I drove over the pass of I-90 into eastern Washington. To a little town of Quincy, if you are familiar with the area. There is a canyon filled with the Columbia river winding its way past the town. It was good to behold so much space in a single landscape. I'm always too tucked away into my corner of Seattle. 

In a poem written from the point of view of a mirror, the great and terribly parlous poet Sylvia writes; 

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

I find that many people are mirrors. And many people are continually frustrated by opposing forces in their attempts to reach out and touch something. In that frustrated distance, however, exists a reflection. Pitching itself and folding in, our parts reflect a landscape. Always. 

As a teenager I would drive a specific route to high school every morning. Many early mornings would see me putting a fleetwood mac tape into my cassette deck and rolling over the Mollala River bridge to Canby High. Every clear morning would reveal Mt. Hood - a white peak set against the rose-tinted clouds of 7 am. 

It was a sort of liturgy for me. I would clear the little hill and immediately the visage of the mountain would be beside me. And in my head, I would repeat; "I have looked at it so long I think it is a part of my heart. I have looked at it

so long

I think it is a part of my heart."

Until it was. It is. 

Whose visage are you seeking, my friend?

Of whom is the reflection in your heart? 

Who Knows What Will Happen Next

I came home to Canby this weekend.
In what might be termed an overdue visit.
I've been crying over phones in the seats of my car
and neglecting the folding of clothes on my floor
my iambic pentameter is poor, no doubt.
but unintentional, so don't fuss or shout.
Most importantly
I can't seem to see
any flashing car lights
or noises from planes;
a simple silence of crickets pervades
I am at peace, I claim it for me -
a small step for mankind, one big step for Lyndsay.

Timshel

My mouth opened with the flare of my nose

My nose closed with the fall of my chest

My chest rose in time with my knee

My knee left a rose on my thigh

Movements may never lie.


My eyes would not believe my bones

My bones disagreed with my skin

My skin fell in love with my hair

But my hair was cut and left in the sink

Whilst I remained on the brink.

A Phone Call After Dinner

I am trying to substitute your face with this phone.
But let us be honest --
No Nokia, no Verizon 3G smart-berry has the capacity to replicate your contours.
Not even the Iphone, with its HD image capture and its smooth and silky touch screen, makes an even veritable trade.
You know, all these letters piled together can be simplified. 3GHDR2D2.... though the acronyms have taken on new meaning through repetitive cultural use, they can still be simplified into single, fully-telling words.

Accompanying your face is a name, but your name will never be able to fully tell the story of your face.
To know this story you must experience it - like one of the Spanish words for knowing. They say conocer. To know. To experience. The Spanish always understood the multiplicities of knowing far better than we.
So in the spirit of the conquistador I have held the smooth ridge of your cheek to my palm, I have wiped away tears from your eyes. As the eldest, I admit I am protective. There are pores in your cheek that I can see when I have sat across from you in the past- it reminds me that you are human and open to the world. (Though your 15 years of life would like to close itself off from everything, at times.)
I miss you, more than midnight poetry can suppose.

And for those that insist that cell phone vocabulary will never pass as poetry, my only reply is: The things you spend the most time with become part of your heart. And our heart, friends, is the only example of living poetry that we have.

Tonight my heart reflects only the screen of an Iphone, as your voice travels one hundred and ninety eight miles to fade quickly in my ear. I can't grasp it; sound has no pores. Tonight my heart reflects only a screen; smooth and without any opening to the world. It does not open to me.

There is a word in this post that isn't real

Oh girl imbued with a volatile nature!
Why do you neglect your little blog?

Some questions, dear friends, can not (or refuse to) be answered here on this 2 x 4 of internet space.
My little stake of cyber space, etched out here. 23 followers. 23 followers who subscribe to the jibbering foggy notions of a 3 am brain. March came and went, I thought it would make more of an impact this year. But I thought wrong; March is always surprisingly quick. What irony, when March finds its namesake in Mars, the god of War. Wars always take a long time. (You can argue that sentiment if you want. I admit there are loop holes. Loop holes everywhere, and I am overwhelmed with them!)

The twin's recently married friend is here, sitting on our living room couch. He is finishing out his bachelors at some  university here in Seattle, I forget which. He is a nice guy, I saw him drum in a band once in Canby before I knew him. That's when I first met the twins as well, though we would forget about that meeting (embarrassing for me) until three years later during a conversation in their house in Seattle.

I bring the married friend, Tommy, into this post because his conversation has inspired me into a bit of transparency. But, being a girl of volatile nature, that moment of inspiration is already passing. Basically I will summarize: He mentioned his new wife with such sweetness, respect, and consideration that it jolted me, for a moment, out of my stolid insistence on independence.

I would like to be considered deeply. Does that make sense? I would like some one to ask me questions and actually want an answer. So many people, and I am guilty of this too, flush out so much information via the web and life in general. Tumblr, Tweets, whatever. It's the mating call of the 21st century. Look at this video, look at this picture, look at this thought I'm thinking. Cute, right? Date me.

Goodness I have been going over this thought a lot lately. I want to keep going, but I'm going to let it alone for now because I have an 8:00 tomorrow. It is possible that I have been conceptualizing a lot lately, and am just realizing it. Maybe thats why I haven't been posting. Too much time has been going into generating thoughts, very little into writing them down.

But who cares about this, right? Whenever I tell people that I blog, (There I go, flushing out information again.) the response is always, "Oh I could never blog - no one would want to read what I'm thinking or doing - how boring for them!" Then we chuckle and I insist it isn't true and life goes on. But really those instances are always downers. What did I say in this post? What have you gained from this? 23 readers, forced to tag their names onto a mass of ever-evolving, well-intentioned bullshit.

But I love it. I won't stop. This is for me, not you. Get over it.

Oh lonely girl in your Seattle apartment,
Your getting lazy and translucent in your blog writing.

Dance 4 Lyfe

I always miss the exit to Interstate 205 when I'm driving home from Seattle alone. I delve into my own private world and once there it's hard to recall me from it. It's especially hard when your a voiceless sign alongside the highway. I wonder if road signs ever get lonely.

Which reminds me of an idea I had once. Dancing is a powerful medium of expression, yes? Only robots don't like dancing. Regardless, it would be wonderful set up people at a sequence of light posts down a main interstate. You know, those giant light posts that jut out besides the big roads of america like nerve endings from a spinal cord. They turn black night to orange puff. Magic.

At each light post a person would be dancing. Really getting into their jam. Smooth moves galore. Then maybe at the front of the sequence a sign would be placed, saying something along the lines of "tune your radio to 98.6, por favor!" And then the nice compliant driver would comply, and something along the lines of Green Onions by Booker T and the MG's would drift out of their car speakers, and the people standing by the roadside and the light poles would be dancing to the same song, and everything would feel really nice.

Yeah, I would really like that.

To tell you the truth, there are a lot of thingsss I am feeling right now. Or avoiding feeling. Among them, my Grandpa is here and tomorrow him and I drive down to Medford to meet my family there. But that means it is just him and I in the big Lone Elder house. And who isn't nervous staying by themselves in their parents house?

I am.

I anticipate a lot of good writing material in the wake of all this driving and relational time with relatives. Activities as liturgical as driving awake my brain. Or at least, I wake up enough to miss the exit signs for subsequent interstates.
Hopefully I will scope out a few new spots to implement my dancing plans. I love public space, and I love seeing it filled by the public. Next time your driving and Green Onions blares over the car radio, watch out. A revolution might be taking place outside your car window.

The Thinnest Gold (a revised story)

There is a memory I am told often. I was too fresh in the world then to remember it now, so my mothers voice fills the colors in for me instead. She sits in one of our old kitchen chairs and begins with Grandma and Grampa, with their driving hats and wide smiles. Almost every year, when my sisters and I were young, they would drive their old Buick across the country to our home in Oregon. We loved it when they came to visit. My sisters and I would wait patiently on the porch in the spring, or behind our big living room window in the winter. The gravel of our driveway would crunch and suddenly all the waiting was over: They were here. Then my father would open the door and his three girls would flood out; surrounding the weary travelers, taking them by the hand, hugging their knees.

My mother listens even when she speaks, and her smell is clean and lipstick.

She tells me my grandparents would take me on long walks when they came to visit. She would stand behind the living room window and watch me toddling between the both of them. I would stop soon after we passed the mailbox. There was a grassy ditch there, paralleling the road that lead to my house. I would stop there and squat down, with feet firmly planted and bottom brushing the ground, in that child’s pose that comes so easily to kids. Examining the ground, I would tenderly sort the grass and pick out a dandelion, a rock, the dying stalk of Queen Anne’s Lace. I wanted my grandparents to see, and I was fascinated with the tiny organisms.

My mom usually ends here, but then my dad picks up the story. He holds his hands up with the tips of all his fingers touching. He moves them softly, rubbing them over each other like a jewelry man sorting the thinnest gold – memorizing its veins and malleability.

“This is what you would do,” He says, “I saw you do that a hundred times.”

        

My dad is the subtle thespian of the family.

It feels nice to hold a collected memory like that, all curled up and tucked inside of you. It’s nice to hold a moment like that with my grandparents, who lived far away then and are separated now by opaque time and the curtain of life. But what tethers me to that memory is the moment I lean down to study the small weed. I am trying to understand my steady fascination with the dandelion things, small worlds that we barely even see.

         Eventually I started coloring in my own memories. I remember sitting in the old kitchen chairs at that house on Black Bear Drive. They where a scratchy 70's beige: if I had known other kitchen chairs during that time I probably would have been more skeptical of their dated yellow texture. But these were our chairs, they belonged to my world. Ten years later the padding sewn inside would start to creep out the stitches after ten thousand games of pretend. My dad would plead and cajole us to fix them up with sewing needle and thread. But my sisters and I had been to other kitchens by that point. Staunch in our consumer training we smugly thought: just buy new ones.

My dad is the subtly sentimental one of the family.

When we were young, though, these chairs where the objects of our affections, the foundation of our games of pretend. The rules to these games were adjustable and were most often adjusted by me, the eldest. The plot of these games, however original or inspired they began, always turned out to be some sort of escape. Escape from The Sea Monster, from The Abominable Snow Man, from Mom With the Vacuum.

We always made it. (Though there were times that the latter prevailed and we were banned to the out of doors to make way for the cleaning rumble of vacuuming monsters.) Still- my sister Bailey and I were quite the heroines. We would dangle on the precipice of make-believe danger until our littlest sibling, Maddie, would be close to tears in fear and angst over our make-believe safety.

But I made it through, all pretend appendages still intact....

The question that haunts me still, however, is what if Maddie was right? At that age she was still examining her own dandelion worlds. She was privy to sensitive information that Bailey and I must have exchanged for faster reflexes and video game systems long ago. I find myself wondering sometimes if I were ever truly at risk, of losing something. She was always so scared for us during the cliff-hanging climax of our adventures; so breathless and teary-eyed.

There are those nervous dreams where you try with all your might to get a message across, your mouths opening and closing like unsatisfied goldfish. No sound escapes.

Our old chairs now sit in the kitchen of our new house, faithful runes remaining from the earliest years of the family. Our own little Easter Island. The rules of the games they played their parts in are long since mist among the runes - fuzzy memories we bring out and polish with talk until a film covers the clearest parts. We laugh at ourselves. We have lost nothing, we think.

But maybe we are wrong.

         These two memories fit snug in the cavity near my heart. They have been there so long they are a part of it now. I would feel their absence if I granted them worlds of their own. But if you were to tease them out of me, I think they would open up like a set of Matryoshka dolls, like the painted collection my aunt brought us back from Russia. Opening to reveal until all you have is a last true remaining essence. And when that world within worlds is held in your palm, I hope you would hold it like the thinnest of gold.

Lately...

...I'm spending my time thinking about the weight of life and the change of light. 

More posts after finals, I promise.

Twas a good night.

candle light-like voices in a cafe on the Ave. Spending time with people who are real and are really my friends. There is a weight to friendship that can go unrealized. I circle and settle. I struggle to finish my papers on the state of society in Emerson's Self-Reliance. But than I do; and make the people around me listen to a hundred Emersonian references I manage to make at any given moment.
Breakfast at midnight is always a good idea.
Don't regret the way the hashbrowns make you feel later.
Jump into Greenlake if you get the chance. I promise I will.
Clark and Lucas and I play music on the balcony. And for our friends. However flat my french horn sounds, it still was a right thing. a good thing.

Twas a good night.

Noodles, Basements and Lead Paint

Tate the roomate licked the wall tonight. Be careful, I replied. There be lead in them walls.
The university warned us, I said
But the realization comes too late:
we be rebels in this house.

She does enough yoga to survive one wall lick here and there, I decide. And I don't want to be the one to suppress her proclivities. Not to mention we both took a shot of apple cider vinegar earlier this evening. We've got crazy things moving through our systems. Rioters in an empty street.
I took that line from a Kings of Convenience song. Or maybe an entire album.

I started my blog this earlier this evening by writing about feminism and the words of Kalide Edib and Benazir Bhutto, but I realized in the process that these are subjects that my mind doesn't fully contain, and so a post-midnight blog on the subject might lead me to make suggestions or allusions that don't fully add up or give insight into my honest situation/set of beliefs. blah blah blah. Basically I must not be a genuine woman-of-the-blog yet, because I can't properly sift my thoughts into word form at a moments notice. Somewhere along the line I have developed the conclusion that good blogresses are efficient, clairvoyant, and exceedingly charming. (The last one is more of a rhetorical/inception statement, where I fish for your thoughts to retaliate against my self doubt and mentally assure me of my aforementioned efficiency, perspicacity, and good looks/charm/general wit. I can already feel your inceptioned {not a real word yet but lets be honest it will be} vibes coming my direction, and I thank you. Internet vibes!)

I ask you to imagine a woman in a kitchen. She is making noodles. The long and beautiful Italian kind. The dough is being fed through a device that strains the noodles into the long and beautiful whole grain figures that you will eventually see on your plate. Before this process the dough is just regular dough. indelicate, hardy, might make an okay pancake or something.

Metaphor Alert.

My mind is like the pre-noodled dough. A Real Blogger can and will use her mind to write a blog like noodle dough through a noodle device. At any time - day or night.
Can you see it? Eh I'm not Italian anyways...

What I am, however, is a musician. But only just. And I admit this now only to transition you from noodles to a memory from my day. Sitting in the Ballard basement of J,S,T,P, and D, I had a really good moment. We had set up all the gear and passed out a few lyric sheets. Taylor had divulged his intricate but well working melody and subsequent harmonies. I sat on the couch and did my part. While we were bringing his piece to life, in a jazzy key of c, Sirens pervaded from 15th street. Something about the feeling of being tucked away in a cold subterranean nook, crowded with dear people, a single heater, amps and a couch caught my heart for a moment. The safety of that environment juxtaposed the invading sirens and caught me off guard. Tilted me out of my natural course just long enough to allow me to notice the contentedness of my situation, the happiness to be there creating with friends. Internal instead of external, with fresh cold and crazy march raging all around us.

Sometimes we are pitched from the ruts we dig.

And it is a breath of cool basement air, for a moment.

How To Be A Man According to Brian Field, Part Tres.

"Be careful driving home this weekend, okay?
   Your grown and in college now but you still take
    my heart and mind with you every time you cross the street."

He hangs up the phone.

-- I don't know a time where we have been in the car together and my dad hasn't found a way to comment on how to brake in snow, or when to turn at a four-way-stop, or how good it is to hear the Eagles playing over the car stereo on the drive home from work. 

I Heard Titles Were Important

I have not written a poem
for a long time.

A real poem, mind you - with stark enjambment and dripping metaphors that spill over
and flood the living room floor.
I've started several, recently.
But I keep stalling at the first stanza.
Right when I shift into second gear my engine sputters and I quite the cresting hill.

sputtering engines
crestfallen

A resilient ambiguity attends me whence ever I go. It covers my tracks like Pongo in 101 Dalmations. (Rachel that simile is for you.) Pine branches sweeping my little footprints back into the slate of snow.

I was never there.

I forgot I was here until a girl in class today stood. Quivering, she read her poem about earthworms.
"I'm a little passionate about them." She ends, with a shy smile.
My foot presses through the crust of of ice that always covers
snowfall in Oregon.
And then I remember the words I love,
The way reading fills my belly with a warmth that
could replace food.

I write down "little passions" on a piece of paper as the girl sits back down (did you know words only last as long as it takes to say them?) and the ambiguity settles like dinner: filling up my corners.

Spring crashes through my window and melts winter into pools on my living room floor.

I'm Not a "Little Kids" Person, But...

There are a few moments were I entertain a flash forward of sorts.

Someday, I might have a family. And that family might, at some point, include babies and/or small children. And with those babies and/or small children, I intend to have daily dance parties in our family living room. And they will have to like it. They will have to like Sasha Fierce.

Not a lack of things to say, just a feeling of inadequacy accompanied with the things I want to say.

If only one could give the world

I would like the internet to know: how how how much I love and appreciate this woman:

My teenage dream is over, Katy Perry. Thanks for reminding me

It is fitting that this is my 100th blog post as well as my last post before I join the ranks of individuals everywhere who have lived 2+ decades upon this sweet earth. That change happens in t minus 30 minutes as I write these words.

     On my couch this evening I sit in quiet being and do not think about it and then I am twenty. The 15th is a day that I am always writing down on applications and receipts and verification processes so that it has come to associate itself with a specific familiarity.
     A specific familiar feeling like that of winter jacket in the summer - you see it hanging in your closet and you remember that a time will come when you will take it up again but now you are bare shouldered and blue-sky eyed.

     Does that make sense?

      Because I take up this day, and gladly, but there is a sentiment of despair that accompanies it. Is despair too harsh a word? I am sorry. I welcome time. (Or at least, I believe in welcoming time) But while my contemporaries,
counterparts,
and I suck greedily from the cup of years, our ploys and decisive lives are shown for what they really are.
     Narratives that will never be stopped of our own accord. Because while the power feels tangible, as Mother Society and Father Government divide and subdivide our rations of political freedoms and civil liberties, (I'm sixteen so I drive; I'm eighteen so I smoke and vote; I'm twenty-one so I'll drink to that) We can't ever choose when to be these things and when to receive. In my nineteenth year I was given experiences based upon my age and everything I had known prior to that. So I ended my first year of college, packing up my things and driving home alone except for a sense of identity and exhaustion. The return of summer showed me forty hour work weeks and how to touch the earth every day. Weddings and sisters. In my nineteenth year I drove to Chicago and became acquainted with my own road. I peed in Lake Michigan and on a rocky beach before the Grand Tetons and inside a Crater of the Moon.
     Yes I count those things as achievements.
In my nineteenth year I learned that I will always be arriving and emerging and I don't always have to love the feel of that. But just to love, I think, is what is to be had. Though I've felt my heart turn quiet in a way that makes me scared, I know to seek a murmuring spirit that I suspect might reside inside everyone.
     No I do not suspect it; I imagine.
And to imagine is where I've found a sense of peculiar identity. I've found it in my feeling soul, in the roots of the people from whom I come, and a devil's advocate who I know has taken up forever residency within me. If he left now I would feel different. I've found a mole on my cheek, messy hair, and small hands, (Though I don't prescribe to physiognomy).
    Despair can only lift once you have named it. With that in mind I feel different as I close this thing and go to sleep. Adam himself must have held the deepest emotions before he started through the line of animals, gently calling: "lion, monkey, hare." But on this couch I sit, and I've let time take its toll from me once again, though I did not choose this bridge. Though something about it all has equalized in the moments between start and finish. So in peace and quiet being once again I listen to the rain etching declivities down my apartment's cheap window panes.

And God willing, here's to the twentieth year.
    

Pride

okay.

First order of business;
Will someone please tell me where this expansively flat and lulling American accent came from? Maybe this is a testament to Western arrogance but I never really questioned the odorless sound of my American voice until earlier this week. The question occurred to me while I was sitting in class, History 3770: The Modern Middle East. The sweet professor with the shaking hands and a beautiful sense of both narrative and time was speakung about the British occupation of Egypt during the late 19th century. And then my mind began to move. It swept through colonizations of countries to linguistics, surprisingly, until the two trains of thought married on the Atlantic shores of the New World.

If you type in British occupation of into your Google bar, location upon location fills up the trending list. That's really interesting.

Anyways whatever triggered in my brain triggered and I found myself forming a new question. We speak a language derived from Britain, the country with the deepest colonizing roots in American history. Currently the two countries have very different dialects. So, my dearest friends, where did this freaking American accent come from? Did it serve as a planned political negation of the rolling vowels of monarchy, or was it simply the watery distance that consequently bred a new form of the "English" language? Maybe it was immaculately concepted; a virgin birth that would spawn the Midwesterner, the Southern Bell, the Bostonian.

The used-to-be English from South Africa sound almost British. Not almost American.

Obviously I don't know. I'm sure the answer is waiting for me on Wikipedia right now, but at this point I'd rather let the it ferment for a while. The best wine takes time. The best answers are the ones that make chardonnay. Or are answered by a friend. Or something.
In your defense, Oh Fearless Reader, you are probably way beyond my measly intellectual chicken scratches at this point. You probably already covered this concept in your head, somewhere in between eighth grade algebra and ninth grade biology. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt. Feel free to fill my comment board with proof.

I've been excited and ashamed these last two years at the limits of my garnered knowledge and thought processes. Excited for the doors that are opening, the holes that are sewn up and patched. Ashamed because I thought I knew everything when I was 16, and 17, and 18 and 19.
My poor parents.

At this point I could move into a second order of business. I could relate back to Britain, colonization, and how that whole process has set the stage for the arrogance that I apply in my everyday life. Down to the subtle unquestioned dominance and proliferation of my American accent.
Or I could talk about Bob and his comment on the proliferation of capitalization in christian writing at chapel earlier this week. Too little adherence to grammar, too much obsession with highlighting the nature of God in every word used on a worship powerpoint. Though in all honesty I've been capitalizing in this blog post like an 18th century Brit capitalized on the world's natural resources via colonization.

But really my capitalization has been done in pure respect of the name and sovereign power of nation states. Britain, America, Egypt, Boston.
My dad became frustrated with me once when I failed to capitalize America on a white-board comment I made in our garage. His frustration was fascinating to me. "But why Dad, why?" I asked him as he re-wrote the little swoop into three dignified straight lines.
"Because, daughter, this is our country. We're proud to be Americans. That word represents us, and our pride." I'm paraphrasing him now, we had this conversation in the summer. Lend me a little slack. Because I know above many things my father is proud to be an American. Its right up there with proud to be a father of three crazy girls, and also proud to be a fervent driver of Ford vehicles. (F350, standard shifting.) I didn't push the conversation further, I wasn't particularly emotionally attached to a sentiment in either direction.
Later on I brought up the conversation with Joe. And that was that, until a while later when I received a postcard from Joe at my apartment back in Seattle. My dad's sentiments had struck him deeper than I thought, and in the letter he recapitulated and resumed the conversation. I looked for the letter just now to recount to you the words he used:
"I think your dad has a deeper connection with American than we understand. He has a relationship with it. They have confronted each other, and he has looked America in the eyes. Our generation doesn't have that kind of relationship with this country. At all."

I thought the point extremely prolific. A form of identity emerges and at once is at stake. My dad's identity is married into the word and this emotional adherence to capitalization emerges as a form of pride. Pride in one's existence and one's character. And thats not bad or good. I don't know what to feel, myself. Nationalism is this big scary machine that doesn't seem like it should feel real. But it's seeped into everything about me.
It's been betrothed to my identity on the Pacific Coast of an Old World. And because of this, it has influenced my opinions on most everything. (If I know it. If I don't know it.) It has influenced what I see, it has influenced what I believe, it has sunk into the sound of my voice.

And I haven't looked into the eyes of America.

Yet.

A Very Short Story - by Ernest Hemmingway

One hot evening in Padua they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Luz could hear them below on the balcony. Luz sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot night.
Luz stayed on night duty for three months. They were glad to let her. When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table; and they had a joke about friend or enema. He went under the anaesthetic holding tight on to himself so he would not blab about anything during the silly, talky time. After he got on crutches he used to take the temperatures so Luz would not have to get up from the bed. There were only a few patients, and they all knew about it. They all liked Luz. As he walked back along the halls he thought of Luz in his bed.
Before he went back to the front they went into the Duomo and prayed. It was dim and quiet, and there were other people praying. They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates. They felt as though they were married, but they wanted everyone to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it.
Luz wrote him many letters that he never got until after the armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch to the front and he sorted them by the dates and read them all straight through. They were all about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at night.
After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married. Luz would not come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or anyone in the States. Only to get a job and be married. On the train from Padua to Milan they quarreled about her not being willing to come home at once. When they had to say good-bye, in the station at Milan, they kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel. He felt sick about saying good-bye like that.
He went to America on a boat from Genoa. Luz went back to Pordonone to open a hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living in the muddy, rainy town in the winter, the major of the battalion made love to Luz, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote to the States that theirs had only been a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best.
The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.