Conversation Starter Soul

“She takes immense pride in just being her and bringing herself to the job in all these aspects of what makes Sylvia, Sylvia. ”

Syliva has worked at McDonalds in our town for years. She was immediately my favorite soul. Sometimes I'll drive through just to get a soda and a soul lift.
She takes immense pride in just being her and bringing herself to the job in all these aspects of what makes Sylvia, Sylvia.

She wears these outrageous headbands, flowers, and fascinators in her hair, and I know it's the subject of conversation with so many folks in the drive-through.
One day she told me, "Whenever I see a real frog, I run, they scare me to death. But I just love to collect frogs"

So, I made Sylvia an outrageous little frog fascinator. Today, she'll bring all the joy that is Sylvia to the folks in the drive-through, with yet another interesting conversation starter.

On Languages and Concept

“I suppose if I meditated on it long enough it can mean ‘hell by separation of creation, or creating.’
If separated long enough from creating HOW we were meant to create, we can find ourselves in this darkness. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before the universe steps in.”

Darkness
It got me thinking about dark times in our life, in our world.
In Jewish literature, there are three types of darkness mentioned in the Old Testament or Talmud.

'Alatah' is one, this would be heavy darkness. But the word is used more to describe the coming of dusk or dawn. So it's a meditative kind of darkness. You don't associate evil or demonic presence with this kind of darkness.

'Choshke Aphelah' is a tangible type of darkness, known to incorporate fear. There appears to be an inner darkness, or most closely translated, 'supernatural darkness'

Then there is darkness known as 'Araphel' thick darkness. Almost like being washed in a cloud. Properly translated it just means dark cloud.

Then there is the Aramaic 'Chashuke Bria' In English it means "outer darkness" The Greek call it 'ho skotos ho exoteron' which means separation from light. Separation from that which makes us whole
The Aramaic word for 'outer' is 'Bari'. It can also be translated to mean creation.

So as I'm sitting in a type of Alatah contemplating my experience also with Chashuke Bria. I'm thinking hard about what that term means, and I suppose if meditated on long enough it can mean 'hell by separation of creation, or creating.'
If separated long enough from creating HOW we were meant to create, we can find ourselves in this darkness. I suppose it's only a matter of time before the universe steps in.

The Sound Inside

It started innocently enough. I was tasked with designing a soundproof studio in our new build. After a painstaking three and half months of research, two engineers, and three 'soundproofing' companies, I'd come to learn that it's actually a bit of a science.
I'd finally reached out to Kevin Cradock of Mississippi Studios who put me in touch with his sound build guru Derek. I've learned more about the process of soundproofing than I ever thought I would. Acoustical isolation, velocity observers, the science of sound travel. It's a thing. The whole contrast of making sound and stopping sound.


Conversations with Derek had me thinking about our relationships with sound. Sound as a language, sound as a community. The desperate need for it, it’s design, giving it a form, and our grand efforts to keep it out. I’m now back at my old project of word/language and sound associations.
Mixing and matching word and phrase pieces and finding sounds that tell the story that the language can’t. It’s an interesting process and my experiment is its greater impact on writing itself.

Mississippi Studios

PDX recording studio/venue

Memory Cards

My computer is needing some drive repair, so I transferred everything onto an external hard drive. In doing so, I went through a sort of 'memory lane' and came across this one. This is an extra special one, the talent flanking me on either side is nearly impossible to describe.
In a curation project a few years ago, I stumbled onto the brilliance of what is known as 'Studio M13' (Lisa DeGrace, Stephen Miller.)
I was lucky enough to get Stephen (typically a powerful but behind-the-scenes creator) to go on the radio with me to talk about our art show. This is outside the radio station. One tends to forget how vast our lived experience is until we are reminded. There is a light side to an impromptu review of our past after all.

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This Political Season

I've had some friends ask me lately, "You've been really quiet this midterm season and on Multco chair and Governor's races. I'd expect you to be a lot more talkative-any ideas?"

Well, yes. In years past I would have exercised much the same process of investigating the issues through social service agencies and initiatives I've been a part of, take that information after speaking directly with candidates and making a direct appeal to family and friends on why I think the way I do and why I think one particular vote or another is the right move.

This year something different happened. I took on a particular line of study and investigation, which is the study of the socio-political aspects of fanaticism and its sordid cousin extremism.
I took in quite a bit of literature on the subject, your usual suspects like Amos Oz, considered the grandfather of the issue right on down to Purdue University's Zachary R Goldmith. Amos has now passed on, but I'm lucky enough to be able to chat with Zach.
I attended some online symposiums.
It took everything in my years of watching politics and turned it on its head.
I don't know why there is such a fire in me to study this. Someone once asked Stephen King why he wrote horror. Would he excel at some other topic, I'll never forget what he said, he said: "What makes you think I have a choice?"
Ever since watching the decline of the political structure following Trump, I turned to look at these aspects, because I knew that it would infect the world entire of politics like a cancer.

This political season, I've watched candidates make your usual embellished promises, with very little preparation or study, I've watched them make the race about themselves or their opponents and less on the deep-wound issues currently facing our state. After all, themselves and their opponents are what they know best, they are less prepared and edified on the hard issues but they'll try to sell you on them nonetheless. Typically it's because they try to spread themselves thin.

There is one area that is a flashpoint and much-heated debate issue in Oregon. This is homelessness and addiction. Oregon has some of the finest minds gathering together from our large and knowledgeable social service bank to sit on panels and advisory councils. Portland State University's Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative is a national model. The Metro Bond measure for housing is an important tool for us to address the conundrum of community members facing houselessness and addiction, but it has been the crux of poor financial planning and pilfering from some city legislators and groups seated in extremism such as the notorious People For Portland.
The city and state have two groups fighting against one another on this flashpoint bank of issues. The houseless and addiction prevention experts and the politicians who know piss poor little about either advising you that they are about to "end homelessness and clean up this city". We are in this conundrum because our city and our state made a conscious choice to ignore the housing crisis when it started and the subsequent fallout has incorporated infighting versus real strategized approach.
Now that the problem has reached a real crisis point, you have some city leaders and other politicians, both seated and candidate attempting to make the issues go away on a visual level.

There can't be any confusion. Fanaticism and extremism are devices used by politicians among other propagandized tactics. At the city and state level, the behavior hums around the extremism level, moving up the scale to fanaticism once it hits the federal level and beyond. This concept has intensified over the past six years. It was duly noted and broadly accepted at the highest level during the Trump administration's stay in the white house.

This political season requires true research on the issues, and not just the candidates. It is widely known by key social service agencies just how LITTLE the public actually knows about them.

A Home For Everyone ( AHFE )
Joint Office of Homeless Services ( JOHS )
Multnomah County Health Department , including Behavioral Health Division and
Public Health Division
Portland Housing Bureau
City of Portland Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program ( HUCIRP)
Metro

It will take nothing less than really delving into both issues to help direct your choice of candidate.

The Metro Housing Bond Housing Bond - a $652.8 million affordable housing bond measure passed in 2018 to create permanently affordable housing across greater Portland for seniors, working families, veterans and others.

And:

The Metro Supportive Housing Services Measure "Provides for much-needed wraparound services to help reduce homelessness across greater Portland. The program provides services for as many as 5,000 people experiencing prolonged homelessness with complex disabilities, and as many as 10,000 households experiencing short-term homelessness or at risk of homelessness.”

This is important, particularly on a county level. When you review these action items and then take another look at the candidates, it will become clear who the better choice is. Propagandized fear tactics are used primarily by those who exercise extremism and fanaticism as a placeholder for actual solutions.
Knee-jerk stop-gap solutions such as sweeping the visual aspects of a deeply rooted problem are hallmarks of legislators who have all but lost control of their county, city, and state.

This political season, because so MUCH is at stake, literally millions in bond money, please look instead to the issues FIRST, so that you may not become unwittingly maligned by the effects of political devices used to drive your choice. The better bet is always the candidate who does the hard work of studying the issues themselves and can show a record of how to best approach the crisis alongside their constituents. Beware of terms like "ending houselessness" Take for example Drazan, who personifies political devices to get to a particular outcome, particularly in redrawing districts, and has no real base at all in issues. Because she has had zero participation in the communities mentioned above and no real strategies for addressing the flashpoint issues, even the researchers she had hired to market hot-take phrases and words, miss the mark. The only devices she is using now are extremism and opponent bashing, oddly enough, by charging the opponent with extremism. The trouble is? She's in the lead.

Too much is at stake. This time, we ALL must become students of socio-political arena if we are to survive this. Godspeed.

The Generalizing Factor

“This is a different environment altogether. This landscape has changed almost to something unrecognizable in the last four years. It begs us to be cautious and accurate.”

I'm going to say this with the kindest of tone.

You will immediately lose credibility when you use broad strokes to apply societal features and broad-based opine shaped or 'dressed' as fact over a large sect, race(s) nation, creed, religion, etc.

Where standard attributes can copy themselves like code over some factions and work to 'group' people or movements together, those are usually smaller cells. So for example, QAnon, Trump Cult, Proud Boys, The New Republic. These are based on belief systems that look almost like the alignment of religion, versus socio-political organization of a more common nature. You are pretty safe to use more generalized description devices. They tell you in a unified front who they are. They align themselves to group think versus an individualized interpersonal code of ethics, which moves wholly independent of the unifying cell.

It is near impossible to successfully use adjectives to qualify X as a singular concept when speaking about massive cross sections of society. Even in religion "animism used merely as a term to show the interconnectedness of the world through its animation by personal will and power, is unobjectionable on the grounds that all religions, may be regarded as animistic."

I've been studying socio-political structures of multiple countries and world religions for a very long time. To test any idea I think I might carry or a view I have, I bounce it off an academic who is a straight-up expert in the field. I've found that the most potent and powerful devices have been propagandized speech, word of mouth and planted idealism which can take on the life of a spore when in the 'right' meaning certain environs. When I say environs, I mean BOTH progressives and alt-right among others.

Just because you may identify as a progressive (I'm with the good guys) does not at all absolve you of the destructive contributions of the above. In most cases, you just don't know enough about a massive cross-section of society to use broad based description devices. I guess a good way to check yourself is to do some reading on what some actual academics who have a solid history in that very subject have to say. I think you'll find pretty quickly, that they don't do that.

For example, I was SHOCKED when an academic I trust, course corrected me on fanaticism. What I thought was attributes of control group fanaticism with Portland politics was actually regarded as another term altogether and he explained why. I was shocked. But it made sense, I'm glad I learned from him.

We can't afford to be fucking around in ideation that can cause long-term irreversible effects. This is a different environment altogether. This landscape has changed almost to something unrecognizable in the last four years. It begs us to be cautious and accurate.

∀merica The Beautiful

This is the face of courage. I see the American flag behind her.

My eyes refocus upon her features. My mind has been made to go a great many strange places these days. The American flag, the flag of the country I was born in, now creates a sense of anxiety and dread in me.
I remember being made to say the 'Pledge of Allegiance' before each class in elementary school. We stood up, placed our hands over our hearts, and said the allegiance. Every day.
Now the flag represents something more nefarious.

Her blond hair, the trademark of the New Republic, it causes a groaning uneasiness in me.
Liz Cheney is one of the last of the Old Republic left. This is a woman whose policies I don't agree with, as she is the Old Republic and I am of the Democracy in the days of sanity, but she is still saying the 'Pledge of Allegiance', she is embodying the last vestiges of the dying relationship between The Old Republic and Democracy which had the ability to come together for the good of the Nation. Like Adam Schiff, let her face go down in history as real bravery and of an era. The Old Republic era had the soul to get Nixon to step down for the good of the country they still believed in.
Country over man.

Loss of Words

Diane Seuss

Pulitzer Prize winner Diane Seuss
frank: sonnets

I recently picked up Renata Adler's works. Specifically what some call one of her more masterful pieces 'Speedboat'.

Adler studied for an M.A. in comparative literature at Harvard under I. A. Richards and Roman Jakobson. She also studied philosophy, linguistics and structuralism at the Sorbonne under mentors Jean Wahl and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

It was her verisimilitude, that strata between film critic and award-winning journalism of politics in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New Yorker that drew me.
She has the bandwidth to contribute 'Speedboat' a fast-moving first-person narrative, that contains some of the most advanced contexture, and structure I've read in a long time, to waxing on Watergate, serving as a film critic and overall critic's critic.

I don't think I'll ever forget her bold and ice-cold takedown of film critic Pauline Kael's 'When The Lights Go Down'. That one made it into the pans hall of fame.

I try to ignore the mean girl side of Adler. Why? because as she proves, broad public consumption journalism doesn't have to be bone dry and a colossal bore. Memorable journalism or even just op-ed writing can leave a mark. You walk away remembering the context, not so much as for line by line contribution of facts, but because of its rhythm and style, the music of it. This writer is one hell of a composer.

She Who Works The Earth

Throughout my life, my center and balance have been nature and the animal kingdom.
When it is pure hand against stone, the universe will again point me back to the earth, nature, flora, fauna.
I was blessed with a nature that animals find nonthreatening. I'm usually able to get close enough to observe their majesty, it's truly been one of the greatest blessings of my life.
Be this as it may, it always seems that those moments of hand against stone lead us away from the very thing that heals us. Long hours at work, interpersonal frustrations of the daily that leave us so exhausted that it is any wonder we can perform the basics, and we fall into bed feeling empty, unable to see a future, grieving for broken expectations, or worse, defeated.

It has been my experience that when the Universe sees me straying from True Importance or the right kind of evolution, She will use abstract, and wonderful ways to direct me back to the Way. Now, figuring out exactly what that is, feels so many times to be a fool's errand. I keep thinking that it is a math problem to be solved, rather than an experience. I want to complicate, the Universe wants to simplify.
Well, how can this be a possibility when the very world itself seems to be more complicated as our weary days wear on?

All I have to go on is the memory of the past, where it seems the Universe had done exactly that. Simplified. Torn up the hard clay soil of my stubborn soul and planted a seed. Nothing is quick. It takes seasons.

Right in the middle of this maelstrom, I get a package from Linda Rand, a writer, poet, and a hands to earth wonder. Her eyes like the sea when the sun strikes it, her trademark fire engine red lips and corn silk flaxen hair, she herself is a vision. Her prose and art are an extension of that beauty.
From her apothecary and botanicals garden, she's sent me several little packages of seeds.
Enclosed are two pages of typewritten prose. I'm so thrilled to see this, I'm feeling transported a bit back to the era of Dorothy Parker. I finish reading and decide to plant the seeds.
With each planting, I set an intention. "Let one or more things I do today really matter to the fabric of the Universe." and "Give me the strength to see the process, and not the disruption."
Now I wait for these little seeds, in this garden and the one in the backyard.

The Hours

What did you do to honor your artist’s way?

What did you do to build that all-encompassing life so compressed and deadened by utter unimportant cirucmstance that calls itself the most important narrative? How do you take back the Hours?

Redefine

How do you call the shots? Shoulder-check the disruptors so rudely barging in?
How do you draw the line?
Perhaps with a caligrapher’s pen or architect’s grid paper

The line that draws the space between you
and the Hours

This morning while I was ruminating on two friends whose lives have taken them on some of the most transitional and transformational journeys, through change, loss, and just unexpected veers in the road, one of my Orioles left her feather while picking her breakfast at the feeder.

I thought about these rocking transformative times in our lives that feel like cyclones. I thought about the gold thread of faith, community, and other powers of the universe that remain spun into the cyclone that will be the plumbline in the new milieu at the end of the cyclone.

The Rittenhouse Case is a Symptom

The Rittenhouse case disturbed me as I’m sure it did many Americans. I watched the proceedings nearly every day that they were streamed on PBS. The day the news splashed across my screen ‘Acquitted’, I moved about in a type of rigid angst. Rittenhouse is a symptom of several illnesses befalling America at the moment. The case was a litmus test. Just another esplanade of ugly truth splayed out on a public forum, as so many of us pulled a breath and thought the same disgust, arguments, and last vestiges of fighting only to find a deflated sigh emerged from tired bodies.

Instead of the usual uproar—it was a breathy “I’m not surprised'“ Our friend, author, vet, and journalist Sean Davis posted a smart article on The Big Smoke and I love the sentiment, so I’ll share it here.

I want to mention one thing in particular about this. The anti-intellectualism of America and what that looks like. One such contributor to this symptom is a telling trend of Americans not pursuing education. Not reading, not engaging with current events outside of meme-universe, and opinion shithouse of social media. I’m not talking about degrees here. I’ve seen plenty of brilliant folks and even leaders who never got the piece of paper in hand from a university. But they are self-educated. They read, they are engaged, they are willing to travel to places possibly uncomfortable to them to learn about other cultures, languages, communities. The out of box internetty opinionated faux smarts of the grueling University of Misinformation, Facebook, Fox News, Q bots and even perpetuating family dinner tables have turned the tide. You get graduates like Rittenhouse. Unfortunately, now these Rittenhouses have guns.

The Last Leg of a Critical Race: An Agony in Eight Fits
The Big Smoke

More by Sean Davis

Shattered State

It's taken a couple of days to want to talk about this one. After it happened, I sort of took a short break to recharge.

But the reason I think it's important is because it is microcosm of the great unraveling that I think is taking place.

This weekend amid my regular activities I'm driving down my town's little Main Street. A street where nothing happens but curbside burgershop dining and window shopping.

At the one bus top we have by the tracks I see a commotion. It's a woman wearing partial fatigues who is attacking an elderly couple at the bus stop. I would learn later that she hit the man in the face and was throwing some type of liquid on them by the time I got there and screaming. It doesn't take it long at all to register this was most likely a vet.
She was first trailing away from them yelling when I parked my vehicle next to them and assisted them. I checked them for injuries, asked where they needed to go. There was a language barrier. I'm absolutely embarrassed to say that along with the other language I'm learning, I hadn't completed Spanish. All I could get from her was 'hit' 'husband' and 'liquid'. Then I look up. The assailant was coming back. Her arms were open, no weapons, but she was yelling. I in turn, yelled at the couple to get in my car for protection but my spanish is for shit and they looked so shocked they could barely move. The whole thing was happening too fast.

I had one choice, I was going to have to keep her away from them myself. I scanned her for weapons saw none, I walked outward toward the street and backward, she beelined for me, it's what I wanted, I wanted her moving away from the couple, as they made their way across the street. I stopped and took that same pose she had, arms stretched out. She could see I also had nothing on me. She was screaming at me, something about 'making us go home' 'you think I'm unfit' She called me by another woman's name in a barrage of cusswords.

I said absolutely nothing. it would do no good to speak to a delusional mind. She didn't 'see' me, she wouldn't have 'heard' me. She only saw the figure in her mind. That figure was most likely an authority in whatever armed services she was enlisted in at one point. Shit got tense when she picked up speed and suddenly made it so close to my face I could feel her breath. Now, we all say, right? that we know exactly what we'd do in situations in theory, when we play them out in conversation or our minds. If I were to play this out in my mind, I would've said something like, "I'd make short work of her ass and call it good"
It would've taken a minute, she was tall and built like me. But, no, that isn't what happened...

It's when the other person gets so close, you see their eyes, feel their aura. What this woman had done was against the law. But her eyes said, "I'm scared here. I can see myself reeling out of control and I can't stop it...I can SEE everything has gone to shit..."

It was as if some kind of force kept both our arms locked in non position. She also, never moved her arms, just got nose to nose, eye to eye. It was then we heard the sirens. Her face melted into another look and she walked into middle of road and waited. She'd been here before, she knew what this was about.
In a city like Portland one cop car comes if at all, in a small town where nothing ever happens, and it's a call about an elderly couple getting their ass kicked, THEY ALL show up. Soon the vet, the couple and I were awash in flashing lights and cruisers. They were trying to find an officer who spoke Spanish. I walked near the officers who detained the vet, I made a 'calm down' hands motion to them, even after all of this shit, I didn't want needless harm to come to her. Isn't that strange, not wanting the assailant to suffer?

The cops in our town are just our town's residents, so I believe they were familiar with her. They were respectful and well mannered with her. When she maneuvered a foot behind one of the officers to get him off balance, and to keep her from screaming without a mask in his face, he did slam her head down on the cruiser hood until she agreed to gain control. She calmed down after that and was let up.

The elderly couple refused to press charges, due to the language barrier, for some reason they didn't want to bring 'undue' attention to their family. I thought about that, I thought about how much injustice happens due to language barriers, and recent immigration friction our nation faces.

The police ended up not booking the vet, which I'm actually grateful for. This may sound strange, yes I do think violence needs a few hours in the klink, but there was something about her situation that made me not want to see her booked. I think someone got ahold of one of her contacts that may dispense her medication. She came back a few hours to the same place where it all happened, the bus stop. I saw her as I drove by that day. She was only one there, and she 'looked' medically restrained. I wonder if she returned to try to relive what had happened.
The next day I drove by to find the bus stop enclosure shattered. The enclosure reminded me of our Nation's state at present. How many of our crisis can converge at one time?
Bouncing off one another. One victim of one circumstance, attacking another victim of another circumstance and all the dirty glass walls are closing in until someone puts their foot through one.

Yes I'd say the unraveling has begun. Whether we want to face it or not.. it's here. It's not something you can turn your head away from any longer. It's in your backyard. It's knocking on your back door and it's telling you to do something about it.

Texas Trash

It’s interesting to me that so many Republi-can’ts incite the name of God in their useless, time-wasting, money-wasting, power-grab legislature motions. So many times when the sword is raised to an opponent and the war cry goes out for God to take the stand in battle, a silence ensues followed by a few simple words;
“You are lacking information.”

I'm pro-Becky who found out at her 20 week anatomy scan that the infant she had been so excited to bring into this world had developed without life sustaining organs.

I'm pro-Susan who was sexually assaulted on her way home from work, only to come to the horrific realization that her assailant planted his seed in her when she got a positive pregnancy test result a month later.

I'm pro-Theresa who hemorrhaged due to a placental abruption, causing her parents, spouse, and children to have to make the impossible decision on whether to save her or her unborn child.

I'm pro-little Cathy who had her innocence ripped away from her by someone she should have been able to trust and her 11 year old body isn't mature enough to bear the consequence of that betrayal.

I'm pro-Melissa who's working two jobs just to make ends meet and has to choose between bringing another child into poverty or feeding the children she already has because her spouse walked out on her.

I'm pro-Brittany who realizes that she is in no way financially, emotionally, or physically able to raise a child.

I'm pro-Emily who went through IVF, ending up with SIX viable implanted eggs requiring selective reduction in order to ensure the safety of her and a SAFE amount of fetuses.

I'm pro-Jessica who is FINALLY getting the strength to get away from her physically abusive spouse only to find out that she is carrying the monster's child.

I'm pro-Vanessa who went into her confirmation appointment after YEARS of trying to conceive only to hear silence where there should be a heartbeat.

I'm pro-Lindsay who lost her virginity in her sophomore year with a broken condom and now has to choose whether to be a teenage mom or just a teenager.

I'm pro-Courtney who just found out she's already 13 weeks along, but the egg never made it out of her fallopian tube so either she terminates the pregnancy or risks dying from internal bleeding.

I truly wonder what the ‘women’ in G Abbott’s photo thought they were accomplishing here.

Carried

The bottle wasn't supposed to make it in the shopping basket. I felt strange, like some other woman putting it in there.

The bottle wasn't supposed to make it home

The bottle wasn't supposed to be uncorked with a glass sitting next to it. I laughed, all those times I never bothered with a glass.

It wasn't supposed to make it up to my mouth where it's full bodied sweet-sour aroma, immediately twinged something in my brain, like my brain was already gearing up for show down migraine hangover. Breathing in what started to smell like toxic fumes, my arm started to twitch from holding the position too long.

A voice said, "Jennifer, pour it down the drain. The whole $16 bottle, pour it out now. You are in this place because you've forgotten that small simple adage of turning it over. That ole' give you the grace to handle what you can, realize what you can't, and the smarts to know the difference? Yeah, that one. This is what happens when you start bearing up arms and readying yourself for a battle that is too big for you. Now, pour it out, or I will kick your ass with a migraine that will send you to ER. I've done it before, I'll do it again."

$16 bucks literally, down the drain. The stench of a too-big-for-its britches Cabernet filled my nostrils and made by stomach hitch. How the fuck was I able to drink turpentine all those years? I stood there at the kitchen sink. I was worried, not because alcohol almost made it down my gullet. But because of what transpired to get me there.

What is so hard about all of this, is that we can't really name it. It's a big game of who can handle the apocalypse better? Who looks the best on FB? Who's killing it in their career? Who's excelling? Who is not doubting? Who's taking up the bullshit marketing of their brand and using it as their calling card in society, when really it would just be more helpful if they told the truth about themselves?

To someone like me, it wasn't just a bottle of wine. For someone like me that could have been a loaded gun or a butcher knife. It simply said, "I don't want to play this game anymore. I'm tired of feeling like one half of my life is inhabited by A Great Gadsby-esque group of people who dance as the world burns and the other half, frozen in fear, trying to figure out how to feel, let alone what to do."

This is not to become anyone's burden here. People don't have the bandwidth for that shit. I will just say that honesty is probably a helpful component now. If I needed to be reminded to turn it over, then there may be others as well.

I laid down last night sans a migraine, but something else happened. It was astounding. It was a flush of the most astonishing neurochemicals I so rarely experience. It washed over my brain and untied my muscles, I started to feel almost like I could float. Then, off into twilight and off into dreamland. I felt carried by something, covered and protected. Maybe this was all I was looking for.

The rising sun hangs a blood-orange fire in a pink haze. What once presented a beautiful sight causes a low-level knot in the bottom of my stomach. Almost threatening.

I wonder what today will bring.

A Corvette blasts past me on the near-empty freeway, tipping 100mph toward the ball of fire in the sky. I laugh and think to myself, 'Yes! race into the apocalypse, It waits for no man!'

The punishing heat and dead air sky have caused, like the moon, a crazy aesthetic in people. Anxiety so thick, like breathing hot steam.

Customers at check-out counters, screaming
Erratic driving
Psyches morphing, twisting, assuming startling forms on social media
Lost, drifting souls on the streets. Faces have set jaws and lips pursed into hyphens.
Nervous

On the way home I watch out the window at a humanity that has slowed its activity in the impossible heat. I drive over the overpass and a pigeon flies off of the freeway sign directly into the street.

Her strength sapped, she banks recklessly, she tries.

I suck in a startled breath. She slams into the grill of my car and becomes a lump in the rearview mirror, smaller and smaller.

The knot in the pit of my stomach rises. I grip the steering column until my knuckles turn sheet white. Her sudden violent death seemed an omen.

The omen of a new day. A Nervous new day. I wonder if I will ever again see the cool, scented sanity of the Harvest Season.

A Damn Good Read

I'm in the middle of three memoirs right now. I gotta tell ya this one is one of the most comedic rides I've taken in a long, long time. For all I thought I knew about one of my favorite horror and sci-fi writers, this book proves otherwise.

For example, I didn't know the guy was a professor of creative writing at a university. I didn't know he was in a rock band with six other headlining world-class writers, (you will NEVER guess who they are) I didn't know the extent of his history in underground indie mag culture.

Where it was a definite release to laugh until I cried at the revelation that he had a 200-pound teenaged babysitter who used to sit on him and fire off toxic farts, yelling "POW!!" and the memory of wiping his ass with poison Ivy after taking a dump in the woods, I also found some absolutely incredible finds of wisdom on the journey of becoming a writer, the hardship of the early days and fighting the dark inner voices. On his more instructional prose, he revisits quite a bit of the basics, what most of us covered years ago:

Tom Wolfe
John Steinbeck
Jane Austen
Charles Dickens
Hemingway
Cormac McCarthy
George Orwell

But to go back and re-read these with a critical eye in composition is worth it! Although I find sitting through Hemingway nearly unbearable.

One of the biggest surprises of all in this read; was discovering just how talented his wife Tabitha King is as a classically trained poet. Her poem 'A Gradual Canticle For Augustine' will straight-up surprise you.

This is just a good read.

The Beauty of the handmade with author beth Kephart

I smiled wide and bright at the sight of the blue little package in the mailbox. It had come, something I'd been waiting for, that was so vastly different from what I usually pluck out of the box. I realized that this very emotion was part of it, part of the magic of the handmade. It's a feeling that is broad and sweeping each time I receive a package from a beloved soul. I noticed the carefully handwritten envelope and the signature sticker.
I opened the envelope to find another lovely layer to protect the treasure inside. All part of the art presentation. I opened the second layer to find a gorgeous journal. Carefully assembled by the hands of talented author Beth Kephart. She'd recently begun to explore visual art assembly in the ancient practice of making paper. I'd seen the unique process only a handful of times previously and it struck me that it truly was one of the most process and involved art practices among the writing sciences. Parts of Beth's writing came to me as I took in the treasure she sent me. Beth teaches her students to be so very present in their practices of investigating context of the physical world along with the ephemeral world of writing. I could imagine her expert deployment of these skills as she made the piece.

Recently in my own life, I'd begun to change my relationship with Time and how Time was treated in daily life of working, learning, reading, and making art. As our world becomes increasingly digital and separated, I find myself wanting to slow, to return to core of the handmade. Handwriting becomes a more important practice to me. I'd recently purchased a set of calligraphy pens both standard and those made to write Arabic, Aramaic and Hebrew languages. I myself am exploring a new practice, as I learn to speak these languages, I also learn how to write them. This is all very new to me, and I'm not sure how it will inform the other investigations of art practices but I am assured that it must be something I should be doing.

This particular piece is a journal, but it is now framed and hangs in my writing space. It is precisely this journal, this piece by Beth, that I will write down the day and time that my first novel is published. Those that I love will sign the piece and it will be reframed and put back on the wall. Significance in art practice is such a powerful thing. We look back on sentiment and realize that it is truly a part of our journey that needed to take place. So very grateful to the wise and lovely teacher, artist, writer and light Beth Kephart.