tide pool

Verbalization is essentially a cheapening of experience. How is it that I am able to take the terrain of existence and tell you about it in any manner that is even worth the time and energy of thought to get across whatever thing I deem worthy of the mockery? You see that, in and of itself, is an example of what I'm saying. Perhaps there's virtue in the saying.

There's nothing wrong, not really. There are concentric circles that are traveled by tiny beads. Sometimes the beads get into some kind of mania and build and build and they garner energy in sheaves and stack it in the barn and burn and shake in anticipation and travel across the circles to end on another circle. And it goes like this. Energy is spent, the barn is burnt and it goes on forever. Just clicking in a microcosm. Concentric circles.

There's a cricket in my window well. I never think about it while I'm fully awake. He plays his black fiddle all night long, usually in two long, histrionic strokes. The song is woven into my sleep, digested by my subconscious and brings me like a sea turtle to the surface of the water intermittenly to breath and truly hear with the part of my brain which would rather not anyway. So back I go. Play on and when I think of you during daylight hours I'll bring The End.

I'm fragmented but united. I once asked a friend if I was supposed to feel that way. He said welcome to the modern mind. I didn't get it. I didn't understand what it meant to be truly fragmented because there was literally no way to view fragments as a fragment. Fragments are incapable of anything holistic. So I spend years fumbling around with shards, with elements and fragility and shake them in a bag and read, like a fortune teller, the outcome of the shaking.

And just who do you think you are?

I couldn't say really

There was a poem building in my head but I didn't want to ruin it by writing it. I was hoping that it would come around later and I'd be in a more, lets say feasible disposition. but it most likely will not. I most likely will have foregone the assault at the door from some lithe muse and missed the beautiful irascibility held in the cup of her hands. And all because of the capacity of the structure of conscience.

Concentric circles.

small, shallow patch of liquid lying on a surface

Minutes end to end teaching only when.

through the woods

It's pretty wild how sometimes one can find himself in a situation, before unimaginable. Or maybe not unimaginable. If it were unimaginable then it wouldn't be nearly as surprising. I think what I mean has something to do with the people I love and care about. Take, for example, Jason Bell.

Jason: I was moving into an apartment and I see this dude with a stache and reddish hair walking towards me. He was also wearing a bandana, flip-flops and one of those quasi-humorous shirts on. How could I have ever thought he would become someone I would confide in and wonder about and care about? He asked me to go to a BBQ that night. I went for a minute with another of my good friends and sat there wondering what I had gotten myself into. The next time I saw him was during a Jazz game in his house. he didn't really know me, I didn't really know him but he offered me pizza and a Mountain Dew and the rest, as they too often say, is history. 

Also Shanetown USA. He was a friend of my brother's all through high school. He was also in my percussion class. I once made him pay me 20 bones for an atari's CD he broke in my bag. I wronged him when he did something that ultimately helped steer me onto the path of good. HE got in a crazy car accident about a year after that happened. I mean serious. He almost died, should have died, but didn't. That's wild. I went to visit him and he was on drugs and I ate popcorn out of a pinata army man's helmet. But now he's one of my best friends. 

Shrivner. she once told me she liked my suit. Then I ran over and invited her to a BBQ once because I saw her going into her apartment. Then I was once at Joders house and saw her and bri-top eating raspberries in her doorway watching the rain. It was great. I ran over and we talked and we've been friends ever since. Now she is taking care of ecuadorphans.

Anyway I don't really have an overarching point to any of this but I like these people a lot and I've been feeling really sentimental lately so whatever. There are about well... twenty five or so other people who I feel the same way about but I don't want to type that much. 

from the minaret

I just read an essay about the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky. There was a story about an experience he had that made me think a few things. The first is where did they find the first hand account of this story and second, is just how it made me feel. 

The story is that Fyodor became something of a socialist for reason's relating to serf liberation. He became involved with a particularly volatile socialist group, the members of which were arrested and sent to a maximum security prison. Some time later, after experiencing something like extended solitary confinement, he and his fellows were taken to a courtyard, tied to stakes, blindfolded. The executioners were told to take aim. Then at the last minute a messenger came and read a pardon for the prisoners. The execution was staged, however the proximity of death was very real for those involved. Two of the prisoners supposedly went completely insane from the psychological stress of the situation. Dostoevsky channeled that stress and used it to construct his belief that the two most important things to develop in life are unconditional love and forgiveness. You ought to read about it. Fyodordostoevsky.com is a great source. 

I have to agree with him. I also have to relate to the fact that people don't give thins like that much weight. He talks about this in a book the idiot. I haven't read it but that's word on the street about it. He's an idiot because he goes about talking to people about love and forgiveness which really are the only important things and is seen as an idiot in the world. They did the same thing with Christ. Interesting how the only things that matter are the things that people want less than anything. 

I had a discussion about something similar on a sailboat in the middle of the night on bear lake almost a week ago. I don't know how we got on the subject but it was something like what was important. I may have commandeered the conversation a bit because I'd wanted to talk to someone about the effects of commodification of everything. So I hijacked the conversation and instead of doing a good job discussing anything I just ended up badgering people. That's only partially true. I didn't have a good enough direction when I started so I was caught between looking like an idiot or just internalizing the fact that I was one.  I chose the later. Eventually once we all got on the same page (with no help from me I might add) it was ultimately decided that there is something wrong with the paradigm of the world, the very truths we attach to life. Personally, I think the problem lies in the media, in the education we receive, in the people we talk to and the very conversations we have. People like things to be convenient. I like them to be convenient. That's why our food is poisoned, our air is filthy and the only arguments we have are about sports and pop-music and which famous person's exterior life we feel we have the right to comment on. 

So I feel frustrated. The only way to fix anything is for people to start looking at the destructive long term effects of convenience, to see what they are missing out on by wanting things more than ideas and insight. It's really terrifying too because its sort of a life or death situation and all anyone wants is walmart and expensive purses. That's bullshit.