sharing minds

i don't share with you the times when i am frantic beating against walls and wailing curses and tearing my hair. perhaps i should i don't know. i keep those things as private as i can i don't know why i don't like to show that i don't have control of the things in my mind. i sob and scream and gnash my teeth and bloody my fingers biting the nails. i don't know how to share that with you, i don't know how to share with you my lack of grace i don't know what good it would do, to show you that we have some sort of camaraderie. i am not ashamed of my frenetic moods i just don't know how to share them with you without feeling i have done some disservice to myself and anyhow they end so quickly and when i am in them i don't think to share them because they are all that is real. perhaps someday you will be with me when i lose myself to the frenzy and you will calm and quiet me and you will understand or perhaps i will hide away like i always do or perhaps i don't know.
i should perhaps just let go and lose control but there is always something in the way.

spare thoughts

SIJ is just over six feet tall, has dirty blond hair, scruffy side burns, a scraggly mustache and the beginnings of a goatee that will never become anything more than the beginnings. he has a patch of white in his hair that changes shape gradually throughout the year- somewhat larger in the summer and somewhat smaller in the winter. he has strange protruding bones above his shoulder blades that feel like the remnants of wings. his face is broad and open and dotted with freckles and his chin is strong and his cheekbones high. his eyes are the color of glacier hearts.
i know the contours of him better than i know myself.
i hope that someday i know DEK with the same thoroughness.

disjointed and somewhat uninteresting

i like to watch my dog sleep. once she has found a comfortable position, she closes her eyes and sticks out her tongue and shuts off completely for an hour or two. frequently, her left front paw twitches and she snores softly. i can make any amount of noise, i can call her name and whistle and kiss at her- no reaction. her smooth, shiny black coat invites stroking when she is so calm and still, and often i lay my head on her side and sleep myself.
in other parts of my brain, it is sweater weather again. colorado's sweater season comes on in fits and false starts, so it is possible that it will not be sweater weather for long. but for now, it's chilly when i take the dog out in the morning, and it stays that way for most of the day.
i have had a great many sweaters in my life, but two of my best loved sweaters have gone to two of my most loved people. to sij, a green one surplus from the german army, with german flag details on the shoulders. to dek, a dark blue one surplus from the navy. neither ever fit me that well, and neither was that flattering on me, but i loved both dearly because i have a fondness for surplus military gear and also because i have a fondness for dressing somewhat like a boy.

thing provider

i was dubbed 'thing-provider' years ago because i insist on giving gifts to sij of all sorts. whenever i go somewhere, i find something for him. very rarely is it a useful something, but it is frequently a something that has caught my fancy in the best way. if i find it in a junk shop it is likely that i have carried it delicately about the store and put it down and picked it up and turned it every direction examining it, and sometimes even put it back and then come again for it the next day. if i find it elsewhere, on a beach or in a wood, i have caressed it gently and carried it carefully back to my car or my room and looked at it half awake in the early morning and touched it to my tongue or rubbed it against my cheek.
i love the things i give and think perhaps that passing them on is the only way to spread any of that love. i don't know. perhaps i am fooling myself.

the one on the left

the sky overhead in bands of electric blue and softly scalloped pink glowing clouds, the mountains black with hidden sun. darkness comes swiftly and blue loses the electric, clouds shudder to gray. violet overtakes and then blackness and the shimmering prickling light of stars in a no-moon night. skies pretend to be limitless but are only infinite. magic is pretended well when moons are missing and the coyotes howl at their reflections in the rivers because there is no bowl in the sky.
touching the edges of the earth, where the dead do not dare walk for fear of having to live.

fiendish

for the five of you that read this... i'm working on a second blog, primarily for my own amusement. it is here and it has not much in it yet. but it will.

handle with care

i enjoy examining hands. my own, of course, are most frequently subjected to scrutiny; but those of others are fair game as well. my left hand is more interesting than my right, at the moment. it is graced with, beyond its usual collection of scars and freckles, the following: the digits 4322, a band-aid on the first finger (covering a paper cut - well, a mat board cut), a small oval stain of black ink just below the first knuckle of the first finger on the palm side, a small stain of blue ink at the base of the middle finger on the palm side, a small round bruise at the base of the thumb on the back side, a nearly microscopic scab in the first knuckle of the first finger on the back side, an almost-healed burn at the base of the small finger on the back side, a short vertical incision in the first knuckle of the ring finger on the back side, and a small cut that travels lengthwise down the middle of the ring finger.
my hands have never been delicate. they are tools, and ones that i use constantly. i don't believe in keeping my hands clean. my hands know things that even my brain is not privy to. they can work on their own.
i can tell you about the hands of my favorite people, in great detail. how they feel, how they look, what they know. I's hands are large, broad and square. his fingertips are smooth but his palms are rough and calloused. he has a scar on his left ring finger that feels like it was made from some other person's skin. D's hands are long and thin, his fingers are smooth and feel delicate; their strength is surprising, and astounding. they dance, quickly and elegantly, about whatever task he sets them to, dexterous and agile.
someone told me once that the eyes may be the window to the soul, but hands are the mirror of the heart. perhaps this is true. perhaps this is why i look.

backwoods voodoo

there is no magic in wild places. nothing supernatural or sorcerous. there is only honesty. but it is honesty so strong, so forceful, as to be mistaken for enchantment. it beguiles some and terrifies others; and a few it drives to utter madness. this kind of honesty is difficult to find in the civilized world, where mere survival is not enough. hiding becomes second nature, deception becomes rote, in the pursuit of civility. certainly creatures hide, but only in pursuit of survival. in nature all things are laid bare, beauty and ugliness, fear and love. in the wilds, where furred creatures far outnumber hairless apes, there is nowhere to hide.
art, i think, or the best of it at least, tries to reach at that honesty we are missing- tries to tap in to the root of things, the place where all things are apparent.
to be bewitched by nature; to believe that it holds some magic, some power, that we do not also hold; is to be sorely mistaken. search deeply and you will find it, if you want to.

place memory

memory is a curious thing. the twists and turns of free-association taken by the active mind are at once entirely illogical and perfectly rational. thinking of, of all things, Mahayana Buddhism leads me to a certain stretch of highway in western Oregon, on the way to Newport. fog leads me to a stretch of Kansas road at three in the morning, my lights barely cutting through the crowding mist. and the poem This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams sends me to the dirt road through the desert that runs to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.
an eerie place, the great salt lake. we walked in the heat under cloudless rain-coloured skies to the place where white crusted black rock curves out into rusting water. the silence was heavy as the heat and our footsteps were gunshots; a lonesome raven cried out and overhead flocks of pelicans, antediluvian and massive, shuddered noisily on their way from nowhere and to it.
in and above and through all of these things, he is present. the smell of his sweat and the feel of his skin. he is only the second person whose scent i can recall without some external prompt. he escapes the loop of associations, he is his own entity.

xacto knives are not ergonomic

the first finger on my right hand is swollen to twice its normal girth and i cannot bend it easily. the first knuckle is red and taut and warm to the touch. on the palm side of the finger, all of the blue veins are clearly visible.
i am not even halfway through cutting matboard.
on nights like this, i don't know what it is that is preventing me from going to some commercial production house and shooting and editing commercials. even now, with my hands stiff and my arms weary and my fingers filled with miniscule cuts that i know will hurt later, the thought of editing commercials turns my stomach. it is enough to give me pause, to make me realize that i have to find some other way. my standards aren't for sale, even when i desperately wish they would be.

frost on leaf litter

the spring has an excess of color and the summer an excess of heat, the fall is indecisive and trips over its feet. winter i can rely on. winter decorates the ground each morning in extravagant diamonds shining in thin sunlight, winter blanches the color out of everything until there is naught but essence left. winter makes the hidden visible- breath and branch and earth- and blankets the seen in snow and wool. winter comes, sometimes smiling and sometimes baring teeth. but winter comes faithfully. when all the perishable green is gone from the world the everlasting green takes on new and radiating splendor, its dull darkness assuming the forsaken role of 'colorful'.
the mice move indoors and the spiders curl their legs and sleep and the dogs glare baleful at the open door.