So Many Foreign Roads

when the time is three in the morning this is all that can reach me

An Unlecture From ee cummings

Every artist's strictly illimitable country is himself.
An artist who plays that country false has committed suicide;and even a good lawyer cannot kill the dead. But a human being who's true to himself — whoever himself may be — is immortal;and all the atomic bombs of all the antiartists in spacetime will never civilize immortality

Daily Exercise In Gratitude

Thank you Friend in the front seat of my car
How to explain the ways I see you;
You compel me to speak things straight and to unwend
The twine of intent/action curling in my brain
I left my glass to you, the Woman Soldier.

Thank you Friend by the living room book shelf
You let me speak and you let me listen-
To real things in the smallest hours of the morning
And frankly, I hadn't had a conversation like that
for a while. I'd say we shared the lightning on our shoulders.



I am awake because I am happy in this moment. I am happy in this moment because i am Awake.

Just Another Sufjan Moment

Scientists and Sufjan Stevens, or Proverbs 23:7

This summer I had a job pulling invasive plants from the ground in Oregon. The work was monotonous and earthy and made an easy way for streaming thoughts and river-like conversations with a group of multiple personalities called "my co-workers." Joe, my boss at that job, was studying psychology at the University of Oregon. One of the dominating personalities, we would listen in interest and sometimes feigned interest to his acquired knowledge and professor-penned beliefs, but one morning our conversation found me in the midst of overgrown ivy. There are small moments where suddenly you see more, where mirrors are violently held up to your awareness and instead of a tree, there is the forest.

Everything that has happened to me is somewhere in me..
"I've always believed that we retain all of our memories, somewhere in us," I said to Joe, "It just seems natural. There are things we forget, but forgetting isn't erasing, is it?"
"But it is," He grabbed an ivy root and pulled, "Our long-term memory inexplicably holds onto some memories for indefinite amounts of time, even an entire life span, but most things it just lets go forever." Look at those big words, you can tell he goes to College.
"So memory is more a process of pencil, then permanent ink?" I live by metaphor.
"Maybe Lyndsay- at least that is what the scientists say."

Yesterday I woke up to a clean house. Caitlin had adjusted it for her (mostly) Canadian friends staying over night with us for the Sufjan Stevens concert that night. So I drew a picture for chapel and ran at the gym. We drove to Fred Meyer to pick out slippers for Tim's mom's birthday. The fuzzy kind. We drove again to Capital Hill to find old friends and secure hot lattes from Roy Street. Britta told Tim and I a story and I teared up a little bit while Tim couldn't get over the neighborhood's reminiscent feel of London. Back at the apartment the friends arrived with laughing and excitement and Canadian pride stamps. We played speed scrabble and it felt like Christmas break. I was more content than usual.
And then it was time for the concert.

Sufjan is a man who I have followed for some time now. I can't remember now who it was that first showed me his music, burned me a CD, scribbled down his lyrics on a piece of paper. Maybe you can? For my whole year of sixteen I fell asleep to his Illinois album; the blue light of my stereo flashing in my bedroom. When its walls were still painted tangerine. His songs transformed before me into anthems attached to the memories of my life. I asked the Canadians where they first heard his pearly voice. In a car, they said. With all the windows rolled down we listened to the Predatory Wasp of the Palisades over and over again.

At the concert I cried and danced and laughed. Sufjan took us on an electro-pop ballad adventure to some place outside of our contexts and our concepts, while still finding us intimately close at our own cores. "These are songs of heartache and mental illness, rendered through the phenomenon of the apocalypse," He explained,"There is no better way to view heartsickness than through the lens of end times. It's a little bit dramatic but it pays the bills." The crowd loved it, such a wonderful man...
During one of these moments Sufjan played his new track "Now That I'm Older," and the background changed into a quiet black screen. As the song moved on, tendrils of beautiful muted colors grew from the bottom left corner. I sat transfixed as the tendrils grew, overlapping each other to reach further up the screen, like an exotic, apocalyptic plant. I sat mesmerized as the trombones cleared the air and the piano dropped thick chords and they sang now. that. Im. Older. over and over again. I promise I couldn't move. Soon the the curling edges of the plant where reaching the edge of the screen and then moving past the screen to places we couldn't see. Each tendril coming from the left-corner-source, blotting out the ones underneath it, leaving a fine edge of green, blue, brown, on either side. The center of the tendril was cleared, a muted black.
"Its different now I think...
....Somewhere I lost what ever else I had
....I see it run inside itself...
..Someone else, can see it for myself
Now that I'm older..."

I sat in my seat and I cried. I wanted to be touched in that moment. I thought about Jesse and wondered if he had a enough time to fill the screen and maybe, maybe his tendrils never had to overlap and erase any of the others. Was there just enough space for all the colors to stay in their places? Before the Fire-lights glimmered and ceased.
Nothing is ever erased.

Okay

I am pleased to inform you that I now have 15 followers on blogspace, USA. Maybe this will be a means to a more consistent routine of blog-expression.

One can hope.

Lets begin with recent happenings: On Sunday, October tenth, in the year of our Lord 2010, a white flash hung in the air of our apartment. Moments afterward a low and progressive rumbling shook the floors of 204 W Emerson. I couldn't move, I was afraid. I've never been around lightning that shoves that much light into a space. The girls and I couldn't see each other for a moment - light filled the air like white paint covering a crack in woodwork.
I couldn't move, I was afraid.
Lightning really isn't the issue. I remember back to long days and nights in the backseat of my dad's pickup. Maddie would have her feet on bailey, her head on me (The perks of the eldest sister?) I remember the dark hanging heavy around us in the middle of no where. I would count the tree shadows as the radio stations fuzzed in and out. Sound is described sometimes as cutting through air, but this noise never did - it seeped through the speakers and sat heavy on my shoulders - John Tesh departing wisdom, Kenny Loggins singing stories. ( Luckily Maddie was asleep at this point. For the first 6 years of her life she would cry at any song in the minor key, a favorite Loggins musical tool.)
On one of these trips, somewhere between Idaho and Colorado, we drove in to a large thunderstorm. Desert hills stretched for miles and my eyes tried to meet the edges of the hemisphere: so much space. Strike after strike of lightning illuminated the hills. A realization that we were watching something otherworldy stopped my sisters and I in our backseat fights and grievances and we sat silently, staring. John Teshed buzzed on, unaware of the new setting to his voice.
And I wasn't afraid either.

Douglas Coupland, in his book "Life After God" says: I believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After
that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't
register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess
of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the
cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade."

It is a really, really good book. One that speaks things now and then five years later you find yourself thinking them all over again. His voices fuzzes through the speaker and sits on your shoulders heavy. It illuminates your surroundings with otherworldly clarity. I read it a while ago, and here I am sitting in my apartment in Seattle, thinking them all over again.

goodness.

How to be a Man according to Brian Field, part deux.

" Make sure you eat healthy. You know, like canned beans and stuff."

Always have a Mt. Dew in hand. Always.