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.